DORCHESTER AND AERIE

43. DORCHESTER AND AERIE:

Isn't there room for me in your random dream ? can there be anything unsaid ? I walk along these pitter-patter streets where once Joan Mitchell walked paintbox cardbox stretcher bars and cloth and she was crying in her way just trying as wihtin every weathered surface she'd find something to make better and color and line and she'd stay late at places where the sad men cavorted drunk and talk back to them : 'stop it you cock-whacking infantile deadmen you all talk to much and all your infested imported daredevil dreams seem nothing now until you do them : Franz Kline the beast in his black and white dreams Hans Hoffman who jumps from his push/pull mantle all listening to the sounds of old Europe ripping itself to shreds piecing the shrieking past back together again as best as can be : blood-dramas and Armegeddon playlists in the backrooms of Dorchester and Aerie but for us here instead wicked 17th street dreams dying whimpers the flaccid hand and the dead embers of all these dying days : rouse up oh men of this new age ! your sons and your daughters shall all efface time and make everything disappear and your own disgruntled words shall make me sick!'

JUST LIKE THE GUY FROM THE CIRCUS

42. JUST LIKE THE GUY FROM THE CIRCUS (the Puck Building, nyc, 1988):

Here we go just like the guy from the circus had said - I knew him only a little and his name was Alan and he smoked pot like most people drank water - on again and off again but always and wherever and this particular day he'd been out in his mother's convertible K-Car with fake wood siding and it was a real joke a crazy junk car of any but his mother had recently died and willed it to him and he figured so why not I'll take it and run it out for a drive and he hardly really ever drove anyway although he'd gotten a license from when he was in the military in Kansas or somewhere - he'd say he was some stupid military police guy or something who never really ever had left the base except to chase AWOL runaways and petty crooks sex thieves and things like that - never had to do any real action or go overseas or anything and the boredom he said the military-base boredom is what drove him to smoke almost lethal amounts of marijuana and he'd said how it was almost currency on the base - used about and moved about like small change in a pinball arcade - just all over the place and once the habit had gotten into him it never left and now he just liked it and it took constant efforts on his parts to stay high all the time and that's all he wanted : circus life regular life and the rest be damned and that day he'd taken the car with some girl he knew and they'd driven out to the Jersey shore to see what the ocean thereabouts was really like and instead of that mostly he said they'd just ended up in the worst places and never really had much to do with the ocean though they had seen it and they smoked and stayed as high as they could the entire day : which day he said meant first a trip to the Sandy Hook lighthouse and the old officer's homes along the bay side of the post and along the ocean side he said there were these major big time old battery emplacements which once had great guns and cannons and stuff on them in the old days when they actually guarded the harbor and the entryways to NYC but now that was all over and everything there was abandoned and they were able to get into a few of the empty gun emplacements and of course all they did was fuck and he said it was a few times anyway even if he was usually gay and sought only guys she was pretty cool and she liked a good slamming and they had gotten high enough where nothing mattered anyway and it was all fun - she enjoyed it and he was just practicing was how he'd put it - and to Alan anyway nothing much ever mattered and he once told me the sign of a true friend was in how that purported friend reacted when asked to 'go out back and have a smoke' and that's how he judged people - no matter what else the trust-factor of a good friendship or any friendship meant not saying no - however let me point out that pretty much probably sealed my fate (and I never did much see him after that and now not for years) for the one time I said a simple 'no' to him was I suppose the one-time that was all he need but the fact of the matter was that I couldn't particularly stand this person and the less I was around him the better it was for me and my 'no' was more the result of simply not wishing his sole and undiluted company 'out back' for even a minute but of course he misconstrued it all as a refusal to smoke with him - which was a secondary matter to me for sure and screw him then I didn't care he just really bugged me and I found him annoying and one who really really just talked too much never shutting his trap just flapping on and on about this and that and he had this very annoying flippant character-quality which drove me nuts and it was like 'why don't you just shut the mother-fuckin' up once in a while because I don't want to hear you' and he was all fake and stupid anyway - all caught up in those stupid cultural things of the moment the stuff I hated and the stuff I sure as hell didn't care about nor have a opinion of and anyway even his fucking Jew-frizz black-haired Israeli sometimes girlfriend named 'Ruda' or something like that well even she got on my nerves and her manners were nasty and cloying and I don't think she ever laughed or even cracked a smile it was all business business and serious and dour all that black dark existential New York City Israeli east European dank dark philosophy-in-action bullshit which was really an excuse for doing no fucking thing at all except fucking and nothing together which to my mind amounted to fucking nothing and I was glad to be rid of them : the funny thing was they'd ended up at a 'beachfront' sports bar in a certain hell-hole known as Keansburg NJ which isn't even on the freaking ocean but instead fronts some stupid rank bay Raritan Bay or something and the only wave that water ever sees is when boats distant go by or fat people jump into the water and I'd bet money the fat people do a lot more jumping in than the boats do the passing by - the place is rank and foul and infantile and disgusting yet there they stayed an entire afternoon and into the late evening drinking and smoking and staying high around some gross outdoor bar cabana-type thing with big TV screens blaring and bunched of knot-faced and probably inebriated locals from the town staggered stupidly along and by and in : the bar itself I forget the name but it's still there and still seems as foul as ever but I don't think Alan and Ruta or whatever her name was have ever gone back but then again I don't know either if he's still with that NYC Big Apple Circus back routine he was with back then (back when the Big Apple Circus was still out on the old dunes and sand-holes where the lower westside lingered and now all that wild-west desolation stuff is gone and it's all fancy housing and condos and all that stuff with every little hole filled in by rich-ass stockbroker and rich-ass little family types living in a golden land of their own devise and now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall or something like that) - but bullshit I don't care about and really don't wish to know about either : one of the troubles I've noticed with people like this who talk endlessly and prattle on so much is that they never really even understand what it's like and why other people hate it so much because they really just never shut up even to let other people do it to them - so they never experience what it's like and it's a form of total self-centeredness and a purely controlling tactic to stay on top of other people and I'd bet it probably was rooted in a complete lack of self-regard as odd as that seems in fact as paradoxical and backwards as that seems that's probably what it comes down to - if they ever shut up they'd have to have others see exactly how feeble they were and how little real estate their mind really takes up and anyway having an absolute opinion on everything and then feeling that one has to glibly talk about it and talk about everything that comes to mind even in the most random manner is just stupid and annoying behavior but this was Alan's forte and probably Ruda's too or Ruta whatever it was except she never even liked anyone enough it seemed to even give that a try - everything was so alienating of course that that had become her equivalent to talking - complete and utter distance and disdain - so as you can see they'd both achieved the same ends but from two complete and different angles and I was glad when I finally had no more dealings with them let alone that they had dealings with each other (for all I know they still do if one or another isn't already dead) and if you think about it it's seems like there are always certain people who can keep themselves at one remove from things so as to smirk and nothing much better than that it's the wicked pose of irony and it ruins everything and these same people - just like Alan - seem to think the world exists merely for their commentary and judgment and even if that is at some level OK or the way things are this person much fabulously go on and on about everything to others : things and words which after a while just grate - the massive annoyance of interacting with all this and anyway that's what finally drove me crazy about Alan Carabal and I tolerated some of it for a some-time brief episodic friendship but I knew it couldn't last and it wasn't just this it was Ruda and that whole day I had to go through it was his crazy ideas and opinions upon everything of no substance - all that moving diorama of crap and bullshit with which he commingled : he was a writer for the NewYork Press also with a maybe weekly or sometimes every other week column in this little paper - one of those New York City rags which purport to cover everything hip by covering nothing at all except the snide and the stupid - it's given out for free at newsboxes and manages somehow and did then as well to outflank or at least equal the Village Voice which still (they both do) does the very same thing - movie listings sexual ads by the ton escort whores massage real estate crap reviews parties clubs bands and all that in the back half of the paper and a few lead-in articles of some particular local interest in the front and on the cover - that's where Alan came in - he'd write articles about this or that which weren't really too bad always interesting and informative and colorful but never really pertaining to anything of value - but whatever - one time he took me to a staff party a sort of inter-paper awards dinner with speakers and fancy food and all that and the entire time was mostly spent up on the roof smoking or drinking while down below in the main Puck Ballroom the neorific band just went on and the tight people mingled and talkers talked and on the whole it was quite and unusually uptown for this rat-infested downtown crowd of hipsters (the Puck Building itself wasn't so bad - a leftover relic from the live-newspaper days like the old DeVinne Press Building a bit farther uptown and it had as its claim to fame that big old fat golden statue of the top-hatted Puck himself atop the frontspiece and a mighty and grand elevator within as well but whatever use it once had was long ago superseded by these sorts of ad hoc uses by paragons of efficiency and style representing the paltry present - too bad but there I was atop something unknown and mysterious) - and anyway all that's pretty much how things go all filled with spirits and whirling globes of the past spinning right around our (mostly unknowing) heads and it's only when we can tap into that or when exceptional souls find a means of tapping into that and then writing or painting or perhaps even singing about it that it comes forth - which is what creativity and the muse and erato and all that ancient crap is anyway but no one ever really knows and they skirt around the issue almost out of fear and they do all these distracting things essentially to keep away from it - things much like this : the self-congratulatory and self-absorbed forms of partying and patting on the back which goes into much of this exemplification : localized mostly Jew boy scribblers writing about fashion and gay tides and trims and theater and style in a cheesy little weekly rag desperate to keep itself going - so there I was stuck on an outpost of a roof with this craze pothead down my sleeve all night good for nothing and nothing for the good.

THE ARCHED BACK

41. THE ARCHED BACK:

Growing old is a real pain in the ass and over the years I've found that out for myself but it's not because of the usual foibles and pitfalls you hear about it's merely because of the after-sound and the echoes which - for me - continue to resound and as they rattle and smash into each other they slowly change each other's coloration and reference so that after a while none of the memories any longer have any true 'surety' or certainty of their own worth or truth - in that it all may be a disguise a trick played by oneself upon one's own continuing reality and some (physician types rational beings clinicians and the rest of those mawkish dopes) go about calling it this or than dementia alzheimers even whatever they may and whatever they choose but for me is isn't that at all - it's instead the changeable fabric of a real existence : in and out of reality with so many things and the way memory works is weird always weird : like the guy at 'Point 'A' Countertop' - a sleazy restaurant/bar along Clinton Street where I sometimes went the guy said to me once (I didn't know what he meant or how much he'd imbibed already before this began) : 'The trouble now is I forget things I can't remember for sure what I even ate yesterday - I can't remember if my father was Dick Nixon or if he just called his dick Nixon - it was that long ago?' which actually I thought was hilariously funny and thanked him for and then he said 'that's nothing - I think of funny shit all the time the jokes and puns and one-liners just keep coming and FUCK ME! is all I've got left - like the other day I told the wife : 'honey we're both pretty old I think it's time for extra-marital sex' and she said 'I gave it to you all you wanted all these years and now you want extra! haven't I given you enough?' and I had to tell her of course that 'that's not what I mean by 'extra' you silly fop'' and then we both just stared laughing or at least I did - I guess she was too stunned and confused to understand.

THE LEGIONS OF THE CONVINCED

40. THE LEGIONS OF THE CONVINCED:

They all wear the same scratchy sweaters they all walk alike and no hunched-over shoulders are allowed and all they can read is what they read together and yes yes I see them passing me by right along the old wall at St. Luke's where this crazy flower garden on the right days is open to walk through and I do but always in silence in some form of reverential silence the likes of which I can often even enough think about and it has something to do with the particular silence of time and place and the science that keeps things alive and living and going on and I see the people those girls with the gentle faces and exquisite eyes and the men with their calloused hands and broken hearts or so it all seems and I wonder of sadness and why and what it is any of it anyway and the silence wraps me in another silence of its own but what does any of it mean what does anything mean - flowers grow out of garbage cans and tall buildings fall after being meant to stand for ages and window boxes filled with pretty flowers sag and tumble down while both the rich and the poor alike DIE together though in so their different ways - so even in the middle ring of the middle ring of the middle circus tent there is loss and sadness and the awareness of death (a DEATH by the way even Gilgamesh himself could not avert and OH if the works of man could talk!) and if you want to sing of the song ON HIGH then go right ahead (I’ll let you) and prattle every verse you wish but WATCH watch the middle prairie ladies in their denim and gingham and floral-print dresses watch them gather for praise and with their praise condemn everything they find not praiseworthy SO perhaps the senseless rule the day the ones without thought seek to control the thought and the vast myriad allegiances of the many are in hock to the EVIL and the dead and the forsakers of all things righteous YET STILL THEY GO ON like gangs of blood-letting minions of darkness and drinkers of spirits and those who spit wine back into the cup after tasting its flavor for blood for the world the world is RULED (the crippled preacher man was saying from his chair) “by evidences of evil at every turn and by the legions of the convinced who worship at his altar” and then the kid the guy with the violin case is returning from his small recital where he played some Sunday Bach for the assembled and he stops to talk and he says 'yes it's me again seems like we see each other often enough in this very situation but unlike me you're always on the outside and just once I do wish I could be with you instead of inside insufferably playing righteous music for the righteous souls and I really wonder why they're there even before they think about it I wonder - they already think themselves perfect and Heaven-bound so why oh why do they matter and why expend the Sunday morning energy for this when all they need to do is stay out here and look?' and I said 'yeah but too they're glad they have ears to listen to the likes of what you do for them I bet' and he smiled and said 'thanks I hope that's right' and we parted and from that point each time I saw him in the same scene it went between unremarked but understood how Heaven is a place that - if you're not already there - there's really no getting to it you remain unaware.

AND YOU TOO SHALL SEE WHAT IS THERE

39. AND YOU TOO SHALL SEE WHAT IS THERE:

It was once then I said to God "tell me why is that mountain there?" and AMAZINGLY I received a quite unlikely answer in power and smoke to the effect that ‘in ways it is there so are there ways it is not there’ and saying nothing back I merely looked skyward to see everything else disappear except the moment we shared and laughter shook the heavens while all sound ceased and I came back alone without ever retelling the story I’d heard - and then commingled with situation and essence I lived out the rest of my days remembering the fountain and the square and the inner light and the awful mathematics of what we live and the INESSENTIAL motivation became the magic of my life while Winter slowly settled in as I witnessed - trees changing leaf light switching colors nature flung backwards fires on the waters and spiritual beings paddling sideways through our forms and NOTHING ever answered me again like that but still I was happy in my own singular way - and NOW I can verily say back to you ‘take up the time you live make master and control of everything you do stay far outside the ken of man remove yourself from motivation and logic and reason combine your own energy to power a dynamo unknown AND THEN everything will become clear to you AND YOU TOO SHALL SEE WHAT IS THERE!’ and I never did attain the heights I expected but found a comfort instead in the simple ‘where I am’ and without effort I comported my words to bring others to some form of fruition and I walked white bridges across paddling brooks and I talked with ghosts in graveyards of fern-leaf and moss and I read the old names on the crumbling stones and felt bricks from eras ago and every wall fell as my own feet surpassed them ‘I never thought there would come a time like this when my own testament made more sense than anything around me did and all through the earlier years as I walked with people now gone I once thought of truth as now what is falsehood and lies but they THEY are all gone and I can recite names as they passed and legions of stalwarts and shadows whose faces yet linger like smoke at some tomb but it is as if (climbing that bier) I can see everything that ever was’ – those words were written while once climbing the hill to the top where the old mill was seen in the distance but its water wheel gone was merely idea and the 140 year old iron bridge flaked parts of its rust to the waters below and it shook as it creaked and I stayed with my feet in the spot where the most treachery was and I realized (like life on a boxtop of nothing) that everything had its value and everything had its worth but MOST IMPORTANTLY everything had its meaning for being but the ideal state is a moment too late to have any sense in the living.
"But what do you wait for?"
"I wait for nothing."

MY RITUAL PAYMENT ('so that I may be')

38. SO THAT I MAY BE:

My ritual payment is something inexplicable - it hangs down from trees and runs with the water in gutters and eaves - and there are no words about it which would do justice to what it brings forth - today I went to Stephen Crane's gravesite (the 'fifth' stone) a simple grave and an almost afterthought as of someone added in uncomfortably at the last moment of need - no applause no mourning no special place for a simple dead writer beneath the Reverend's obelisk at the family site but it brought me feelings of true worth and value - near to Parkhurst and Trehune and Ebelong simple neighbors each and I recalled reading the Crane biography by John Berryman which spoke of the gravesite on the border of Elizabeth and Newark and the way the family plot with its obelisk and inscriptions had almost simply excluded Stephen who was rather later added in place as the 'fifth stone' which is essentially all it is - a small block set in the ground as the fifth and last block and it bears the inscription SFC with periods for punctuation and by it at least he's included in the family site but the entire graveyard there called 'Evergreen Cemetery' and still active in its way has lost a lot of the 19th century appointments like the metal-post fencing which once went around many of the family sites - these are all gone now and only the holes or some posts here and there still remain - much of the grandeur thereby of the more 'august' look and feel of the old cemetery is gone and at the other end too the place is filled up with Gypsy graves in all their ostentatious decoration and bravado-of-inscription with all the odd Romany names and the ubiquitous Miller names they often adopted here and Evergreen Cemetery with only a moment's concentration can still be seen and felt as it once was and the presence of Stephen Crane's bones there too only adds joyously to this wild delirium of death whether old or crazed or famed as it may be and it was and always has been all enough to comfort me as I think and walk the paths and odd also it is that right there within three miles of each other are cemeteries holding the remains of writers of whom I've become over time endeared - here Stephen Crane and his family and story together and just a bit up the road also at Newark's edge and just beneath the old Anheuser-Busch brewery and sign are the remains of Allen Ginsberg too - in his family plot of sorts - a much different place and environment but the same in the end - and these two places hold for me the simple keys to search and finish to the working ends of all things for here were men of words ensconced in their tired places and at ease at least within their own deaths - having done their works and having left their words behind them - they live on and these are but their bones and these their places all of which I can accept and revel in and visit and muse on whenever I like - and I guess that's all that matters as for me these little sleeves of place and time are perfectly suitable for the way I wish to continue living as I simply WALK amidst things - going on my ways singularly and silently too - mainly because no other people matter : the ancient Sanskrit simply refer to 'God' (as we now know it) as 'THAT' in their attempt at referencing an all-inclusive and unspeakable entity but I must admit to the awkwardness of 'THAT' as a reference - instead as I walk and proceed I like to thing of the way the Gnostics made the same reference : 'The Shadow of the Turning' - a much better attempt (I've also seen 'The Great Void/The Force/The Supreme Self/The Whole/The Creator/The Light/TheHigher Power/Jehovah/Allah/Shiva/Brahma/Vishnu and Zeus) but in trying to reach for an adequate response to 'naming' such a thing I also realize ALL inadequacies in trying to describe something indescribable and - more importantly - I recognize too (and obviously) that it is most certainly OUR NEED along which forces this situation - for certainly there would be NO NEED on this 'God's' part for a name to possess or refer or properly 'hold' Him - so I don't spend any inordinate amount of time dwelling upon nomenclature and instead I just look up or around and about me to see the real world as vibrant and unspeakable too and vibrating lively with whatever possibility and promise any idea of NAMING could have - no comparison for sure - and really I don't need this 'entity' to possess much of anything now as I seek not POWER or FORCE or MIRACLE or REGULARITY in any of the sense familiar to Mankind in the old whirlwind God in a burning bush fiery-force sort of thing as it seems in these days and ages all of that is gone and long vacant and any premise-of-a-promise of a GOD working VISIBLY within the world is over as a concept - otherwise I WOULD EXPECT a fiery cloud this day right now indeed - but OH HOW that would screw things up for so many people and therefore (maybe) a 'kind' God deigns not to step in and upset so many : in fact TRUE WISDOM gives the only possible answer and says only one thing - 'do nothing' - (or perhaps in the prescient words of an old song - 'do nothing 'till you hear from me') - BUT DON'T stay up waiting...and for that matter I don't actually know why it is I'm thinking of these things in such a world as we have here - things ringed with roads and highways and cars and trucks and the most un-natural of houses homes and living conditions and everything made paltry by poor-quality people and a life-speed of no sense at all and amidst all of that here I am sensing something ancient and old and ragged and towering slow and trees and high grasses with monuments and markers where horse-paths used to be and old wagons pulling dumpy freight and boxes and lumber - and even the dead in those same wagons - the horse-drawn dead the famed and the fabulous who wouldn't know a thing about it and it's all together about me at all times and making me think and appreciate and enter other realms and ideas of places and time AS IF just as if I could travel at-will anywhere I want but anyway MAYBE it's something else entirely within me - 'Om Namah Shivaya' meaning (in silence) 'I honor the divinity that resides within me'.

FAT FAT FAT FAT SEX

37. FAT FAT FAT FAT SEX:

'I can't control what I eat' he tells his therapist the day after he encourages a struggling dieter to 'enjoy the meal' and then he says 'in the end she was looking at me as though I'd raped her' and the possibilities herein for slutty behavior in the fat community (otherwise known as the 'refuse heap') are endless - jokes about oral fixations ('would you like to eat my hot dog') jokes about 'sauces' and 'drippings' elegant meals which require 'consent' and 'mastication fantasies' and things wherein the body is most easily violated by the mouth and there's always a very certain richness about things which comes through as we wallow in the despoliations of eating - grease fat toppings and all that - and the gleeful chewing and attentive dining of fixated and oh-so-carefully dining people for supplanting sex is a food-faddist's delight and the less you can get the more you cover it with eating which translates the sex-urge the squirm of semen-collecting into instead some shitty fatty noisy farty sloppy slimy debris 'what a whopper PLOPPED on us!' and all down the highways of some weirdly sexually-complicit America are one after the other after another places to EAT - food dine drink slobber stuff - every sort of mouth-stuff existent can be found and second only to the laughing vibration of good-old crazy sex is America sated by good-old crazy food FOOD food one stop after another stop after another WORLD without END amen!!

HEREAFTER THE HEREAFTER SHALL BE BEHIND US

36. HEREAFTER THE HEREAFTER SHALL BE BEHIND US (nyc, august, 1967):

Just like Telemachius just like Valens just like Valentinian and Gratian and all those Hadrian-type guys on a big cheesy throne that wouldn't stay still my achievements had rattled my soul had kept me on edge had kept me moving and every shop-worn turn of events by people from Thrace or those varied Germanic nutty tribes bugging my borders I walked with suspicion and carried knives and featured arms everywhere I went : the dope-sacked dowagers of night and morning the criminal minds who had infested the grottoes the tankmen and the voyagers of time there was nowhere I could really sit and all that was within my mind began to matter little : I'd come into the city on a hot August morning rolling in like my own brushfire on a bus-full of wheels and I was completely unaware and not knowing a thing except where I'd always been and the new task was to sort out for myself where I was and why I was entering - almost like another time zone - a new place with new shackles that claimed to be no shackles at all wide streets filled with people teeming lightwaves stacked with scientific movement and I walked to park to talk to the dark sat myself down on a rock to watch all the matters while right near me these New York children played and scampered and their ringleader mothers pushed wagons and carriages with even younger kids and all along the way their were aimless city people tough kids too-wise-for-the-moment types way ahead of themselves already in flowers and wearing odd hats and open to opinions and proclaiming loudly the natural love of the life they lived all the while seeking the green grass freedoms of a thousand tribal years before - their entire civilization was laid out neatly for them and each step along the way offered a period from which to copy : the flute the guitar the peacock feathers the hair the boots the leather sandals the sheer tops the dance and the forms and the fringe and I looked around and said simply : 'this is human but is all this me?' : and I realized I just wasn't sure yet had never before faced off these sorts of questions and for whatever form the moment took I determined that I had to live through them but upon leaving this again I took to the streets and felt a senseless and complete alienation the sort one experiences upon realizing the complete nothingness in which one's being is wrapped I had nowhere to go I had nothing I had maybe twenty dollars forever and the old aimless field of everything before me was ready like a huge yawning void to just pull me in and see me destroyed but it's funny in a way how the body recovers and the spirit takes over one learns how to talk and acceded what questions to ask and what portents to read : storefronts and parking lots the sweaty emergences of buses and trains in a hundred degree heat wherein the streets seem fluid and beginning to melt and the reflections of buildings in the awful hot air seem to move and waver with every other motion as the harsh sunlight beats and settles down onto every item before you and in looking for somewhere to be or just somewhere to sit everything has to be weighted in first for everything starting from zero alike has its repercussions and later results - things which could come back to haunt or things could could help and I sought only for what I could seek and what I did need and - at that fine little August moment all of my own - I knew it was the beginning the starting point the very day one of a fiery new life for myself.

COLD THIS WAY

35. COLD THIS WAY:

‘Create a sandy frontier’

Televised time is the only unrealized dimension left and that is true on all counts for outside of it we have exhausted all time and we’ve already had to think of it false tribes hoarding over the deserts they claim bombing to glass the sands they walk on immensely building high the towers and structures they decide to and thus alienating and dissuading others or those native to areas current into staying there with them by placating the evil dwarfs and extinguishing all hope and this is all televised this is made flesh by today’s standards in the work of the world we now live within light and all its attractions branches after branches of benjamins begetting abrahams and leos and rashids whatever as I watch the policeman stop someone from selling AA batteries from a suitcase on wheels threatening to confiscate inventory if he didn’t move along and for sure one needs to ask oneself a few questions in such a place as this Newark’s Penn Station underneath the elevated tracks beneath the faintly granite eagles the only thing left perhaps today of the old Newark soon to be but camera after camera in these parts take batteries like that and discman CD players music set-ups any kind of electronic Newark equipment like the whole entire international world now feeds upon and “I’ve seen that nigger in Ghana in and right there he does the same thing too as he’s doing here selling any old shit in the street but soon there will be a wonderful documentary on TV on just this matter that great life of the streets in Ghana oh the place to be but for now ‘you move your ass this minute or we take it all in’ and even the bridge abutments hereabouts are washed over with slogans of death or hatred or the self-aggrandized advertisements of hip names for gun-slingers wishing to be someone other than who they are ghetto names with colors blaring frontier voices with anger screaming the crowd on the corner watching traffic the few men left in the ancient pool parlor lit low with bluish lights and sad in its own way long after midnight when only a sorrowful rabble of low itinerants stop by to talk and find no one there to play while right across the street kids in droves congregate and stand to music and lights and sports and dance their time away talking and back and forth back and forth the only old ones go until slowly they discover as dead as dying ever was and slowly over time then everything changes time and space beside itself moving but what we wish for tomorrow is sometimes here today already maybe we just don’t know it and like I told the guy in the waiting room ‘I’d love to go back to high school today just as I was then but with today’s mind just to hear what concepts they talked about then no cell phones no computers no games no cassette or CD shit no nothing out of the very ordinary and coarse antennae that so once dotted all this land but where has all that future gone – into our past - so it is that anything imagined has once had its antecedents in dreaming whether paradise or hell whether settlement or compost heap we’re in someone’s way so alleviate the pain and end the suspense and I see the blue and white and bulbous camper riding the streets dodging anything near it a gigantic single vehicle with two men inside and both are as brawny as dereliction and strong probably as oxen too and they drive this thing absconded and alone through the city streets wide and wider and right nearby is the Amato Opera something special and the three girls singing on the curb remind me of the days when I’d spend all night here listening to harpsichord music or great organ fugues of Bach and Morton Feldman himself would come by to lecture on what he claimed to be music or anyway what it all was about and it was too but so many so much time all has passed that I am nothing if not dead or washed away and the sorry fabric which is my life should really be over but there is no one to clean the mess should I go that way no one to whitewash the paint that any ghost would leave behind and who thought of all that and when and where before me ? or in front…?.

“Sometimes I still dream about the feeling of helplessness when my knowledge seems useless against the implacable approach of death the description of frostbitten cattle way out on a Montana ranch with the slow approach of a blizzard the most terrifying portrait of nature’s power their ears and their testicles and tails turned black around the edges as if scorched by fire and their eyes sealed under an inch of milky ice I have had illusions or perhaps you’d call them delusions of grandeur and they have driven me for I see only now that the time is ripe for a conceptual framework to be developed which covers all things and which is in turn based on our fallibility (the web of connections and relationships in turn based and delineated by that fallibility and accounting for success as much as talent or money or anything else) and here right here the apartment holds it seems the entire cold of the night yet we sit here and shiver thinking of warmth and awaiting it too and the next morning you just out of the shower you dry off oblivious while talking to me about whatever some problem perceived or misunderstood some latest absurdity of life or matter something perhaps which hit you in your sleep and you withhold any shiver and slight stammer of flesh as if perhaps to show me that tenderness means nothing to you but YET I do not look away seeking therefrom perhaps a lesson for me for you for which of us ? with songs playing in the background and everything yet still cold the water which beads on your breasts and stomach says nothing back to me nothing and steam on the windows alone makes an opaque stammer my chilled mind too tries to understand – some untranslatable hum of whine and water and doubt and persistence for I know that behind that all somewhere lurks the lurid light of one clear blue day and we are cold yet we are cold this way.”

HEROIN

34. HEROIN (1968):

And that ain’t that never was water in my veins that was what you call heroin line-marks needle pathways connect the dots the march of living over and over something that’s what that was and every dark and dreary day that drove me by was meaningless and infested with filth the stench the swill the smell of pus and gore and vile matter and from one drug to the next like phone-banking the enemy it all went together aside into one as once united into a hoarse debacle of freedom’s notice skimming the tide slipping like a stone on the dead very weight the dead weight of water and that dead weight being enough to pull down a big ship it probably does did and will over and over like the habit itself for nothing changes in the land of the dead and only KINGSHIP is a given so walk with me along this ratty old street looking over 14th like it all just landed and there’s oh so much difference everywhere even though people say it’s all the same it’s not the guy with the flower shop at the useless bar down the western end of the street sitting there talking with tables and wine and the old game goes on he shows cards and business pictures and starts describing weddings and floral portraits and banquets and all that he’s had to decorate with his vast floral talents only problem is NO STORY JIVES every drive to Buffalo seems to make it back too fast or not in time and a wedding in a distant town means he’s not doing business in New York City so what’s he telling me anyway and why am I listening merlot cabernet sauvignon rot gut anything to blame he’s just another drunk talker who knows the woman behind the bar SO WHAT get away from me that’s what and instead of reciprocating I leave it all to others and take away my solitary confinement to a nearby table where I start reading the paper and no one bothers me no one and right outside there are benches too and the Spanish food truck selling right there on the street and silence rules the day FINALLY there’s no one to talk to except listen to the passing parade part-time losers seekers weepers and creepers they all pass by but the silencio is just right and I start looking at the second and third floor windows of all the buildings across the street and some of them roll out sideways and others open up and these are old buildings with windows that still work and glass that ripples light in the daytime afternoon air and I’m just staring at them with their lettering on glass and etched panes and wooden frames and I seem to lose time and bearing and focus just lost like that thinking instead of space and distant light the long throw from the far planets and stars like a planetary Columbus out at sea distant and detached as I can be humming tunes and aware of everything and the Indian music a tabla sitar sound combined the strange rhythm of another place and in that sound that drifts from across the way it seems the entire movement of the wind and air catches every leaf on every tree and all that moves and I am small as small as everything else is big and large and vivid and still and the angled panes of wood and brick and concrete glass wood each loving building partaking of itself and sharing time and place and the faint breeze between things echoing of time and the light like the element the fluid between the air wavers as the music and sound revolves around and over and lights like a carnival wither and fade and arise and strengthen and the sound is woven into everything and all that is has slowed down to nothing and the low light comes up from the river the moistened air the rolling water mist favoring presence favoring what’s real but I dream and pass and dream back and return and studying faces I notice everything and everyone seems so different from another place and the circles around them sing of where and when and how and everyone presents themselves without comment to the air and sky and sound and to me unmoving unknowing unwavering and aware so much of every momentary thing.

NEVER YOU MIND THE REASONS

33. NEVER YOU MIND THE REASONS (I Write This From Memory):

When I was in second grade a teacher wrote on my report card - in the comments section - that I had 'trouble with question marks' which was and still is a comment I never can fully understand - I found it only many many years later in an old box of childhood things my mother had put aside and to be honest I really don't remember it from the time when it was done and neither do I remember any reaction to it or comment on it by my parents - so I guess mostly it went un-noticed but I still chuckle a bit as I think back on that second grade teacher writing that comment about me and I'm not sure if she was referring to my grammar or my writing or comprehension or whatever but the curious way it was phrased and the mere fact of it being noticed must have meant something - so I guess I've ALWAYS had a hard time with question marks whatever that may mean - but I've survived and I still question lots of things but I'm not sure if that's what she meant and everyone who could have possibly known or had an answer for me is long gone and passed from this scene (I hope they've at least attained THEIR answers) so it will just have to be but I often think could she have instead written 'never achieves satisfaction' or 'can not ever come to comfortable conclusions' or even 'has constant trouble with reality' - would any of those things have been applicable ? and would they have been accepted as report card comment material and anyway isn't it said that the great philosophers have always had a 'time' with questions so maybe I'm in good company anyway but I MUST ASK is there a difference between questions and a question mark ?
-
Someone once killed a man and was running from it forever or so it seemed and everything he said referred back to that occurrence but everyone always thought he was making stuff up and so ignored it - funny thing that was - because I knew that man and spent lots of time with him and never figured one way or the other anything about his past because I really didn't care and wasn't one to be in a position of listening carefully and tracing clues to truth or falsity about any of it - and then he was gone and I don't know where he went or how but I never saw him again SO if you ever see him he looks like this - 35 years old long black hair very dark Mexican-featured face stocky about 5 feet 10 inches broad and muscular with dark eyes : if you ever meet someone like that watch our because he's a killer - SO NOW I ask you does it make any difference to you ? no of course not so why should it have ever mattered to me and besides by now he's about 70 and certainly no longer 35 so the whole thing is moot so I'm out and about myself walking in the rain and the water is soaking me - right through my clothes - and the rain in droplets is just dropping off my head and rolling down my face and I feel I really know what those old songs meant about 'walking in the rain' so as to conceal the fact of your own crying - tears and rain all mixing together so know one knows and as cliched and quaint as that tired old reference is it makes a little sense when you see it in operation except that I'm not blue and not crying over anything but instead just walking along and someone once told me (just recently) that the difference between a million and a billion (as if I needed to know) was - if measured in seconds - that a million seconds would be something like a year and a half and a billion seconds would be like 32 years or something like that I really do forget but the very concept of a great gulf of time and nomenclature difference stayed with me anyway and put into me some fear and awareness of time-passage as it occurred and since that time rather than waste anything I try to just put each moment to use some sort of use even if it's just walking about thinking of something and I feel too that such a thing is what I see in people's eyes as I see them - every moment - people seemed always vaguely distant and vaguely distracted as if they are 'here' in presence but their mind is actually going onto somewhere else and other places - which of course it always actually is - one of the crazier attributes of human life is how many layers and facets of experience we each experience at once - the physical here the place the sense the location the tangible and the eyes and the mind doing both the realization and the focus of the instantaneous here and now while at the same time in a multi-layered format racing to other places through thought and image connecting things to memory realizing connections and bringing forth other things holding at the same time tunes and sounds and light and movement being registered each of which in turn clicks a daydream or a thought or a memory forward while we at the same time think of tomorrow and a future tense to things and review at the same time a history of things as we leave them behind - it's all wonderfully bizarre and affords no speech (which when we do (the speaking) allows us another entire level of operation AS we speak too while doing all these other things) - and this entire mighty and forceful mental edifice becomes our make-up and our presence and tonal reality the WE of US the who we are the vast and great DISSOLVE of all our moments so that we SIMPLY MUST REALIZE that in reality in the instant NOTHING really exists at all and it's all made-up on the run and figured into each new equation of time and moment as they are happening and as quickly as they happen they grow out of happening and disappear and dissolve forever into the complete illogic of all the rest of reality : SO THAT'S WHY today when I saw that 1952 Cadillac parked in that old Pennsylvania driveway - the beautiful perfect shiny and bright Cadillac I wanted to touch it and lay hand on it just to prove the existence of presence and some profusion of time and reality too.
-
Sometimes I just said to myself 'what the fuck are you doing?' or I looked deep into some mirror somewhere just to see what I really looked like and if it was me but all that was long ago and now I'm old enough not to care and never look and even that old soft and smooth face itself has turned perhaps harsh and old and coarser and wrinkled but who knows - I don't and I never try - as I co-exist now amidst everything else anywhere and there are myriads of faces and forms and types and qualities everywhere around me know of which I partake them all : bathing beauties and ribald queenies fat and robust pigs with spirit and dark wiry doubters too girls with hair under their arms and smooth girls all perfect and shorn and made-up girls and plain girls and coiffed and dressed girls or the sluggos in khaki and cammo - I've seen them all and everyday too - outside of the Strand looking like thugs or looking like dancers and it's never really mattered to me and it's the same with guys too - disheveled or broken violent or coarse they all look like something else something other than what they are and without any lineage except the modern day and between them and all that I see there's nothing left to do or say and now they all hang around Union Square without a care n the world and once right where there used to be ideology cause faction and venom now there's nothing but stylists and posers and people hawking vegetables and bread - the usual allotment of idiotic causes and trends and it just all makes me sick to heart to see the play-gyms for kids armed to the teeth with mothers and fathers on the margins of dread and with a certain vague pulchritude of the moment which makes them like all the rest - it's a sad and sorry spectacle which is supposed to comfort and maybe to some it does but I see it really as the END to meaning but life goes on and long-time-no-see it's all done without me.

EPIPHANY

32. EPIPHANY:

And it's been like that a million times for me too and it always seems that people pass out of your life as quickly as they enter it but this time it's me doing the entering - as I walked right into St. Francis Xavier Church on 16th Street and 6th Avenue or something - right over by the big corner with the Foundling Hospital on it and the old row of ladies' shopping emporiums called 'Ladies' Mile' from way back when shopping in all-one place was a big thing and they used to erect these massive temple-like edifices all along the street right here and these (for their day) vast shopping stores held department after department of everything one would like to buy and that was back in the day of course when still everything was new and women themselves hadn't a clue about cosmetics and jewelry and carpeting and such and all appointments and all accessories and everything like them was considered vast and exotic and distant and strange and these big stores all of a sudden huddled along Sixth Avenue or wherever would get the ladies all decked out in their big dresses and hats and they'd be carriage'd in from wherever they lived or perhaps they'd walk over from Gramercy or Washington Square or whatever and they'd regale themselves with a thrill of big-deal shopping like it was some world's fair for themselves and the remnants of this whatever they be - at least the strange buildings of worshipful temples of commerce and greed and finery and money which are left behind in a row of granite marble and stone - still somehow sing of the olden days around the old Madison Square and the Flatiron District and all that - but it's a new silence now in a different world but this time I crawl into St. Francis and the sexton is there in the lobby and he's thinking I guess I want something else so he puts all the lights on for me in that lobby - which was otherwise dank and gray - but I pretend then to be reading the little scrolls on the wall and I enter the sanctuary and then the church and as quickly as I make a right turn in I'm face to face with some street person huddled down on the floor in a crouch with his two canvas bags and some possessions and he's staring straight out into the church space vacantly and his white beard and dirty clothes catch me and I wonder for a second if he's a prop or something some feast-day ribaldry to stop the visitor from passing the collection boxes and candle-offering payment slots which are everywhere but I realize he's for real and not knowing what to do I glumly walk right past him and start right away feeling strange about that thinking it was a test or something and what was one supposed to do anyway - he'd come to the church for aid not to me - and the Jesuits who ran this place should have taken it on themselves to carry that burden feed the guy fill his pockets give him room and rent whatever but he doesn't seem to care anyway so I walk on in and sit down towards the front all the while checking out the amazingly rich and ostentatious (though beautiful) surroundings and carvings and stonework and art along the walls where twelve grand paintings of the Stations of the Cross bleakly portray a fate I'd shared I thought a million times too but 'Jesus meets his Mother' and 'Simon Peter greets Jesus' all of that meant little to me right now and I really only wanted to shake that guy's hand and whisper to him something uplifting or a friendly word but I didn't even do that and my head anyway was spinning as I realized that the same ostentation that had brought the Ladies' Mile all that stuff I'd just seen was the same ostentation somehow that had brought the Jesuits to this pass and all their power and possession and might and right really meant little other than this edifice and in today's latter world even the most simple captions atop the Stations of the Cross bore no relevance to anything and any firestorm of any Jesuit when set up against the firestorm of the commerce and might of the entire free city striving to be was over and finished before it started and TODAY by contrast the trash and filth and garbage and crap of the world had taken over and ram-rodded everything wrong and broken down the throats of the entire scene and this church in its way meant nothing but refuge for some broken lost soul staring out blankly and someone like myself in turn a reformed loser in once the same situation working backwards from memory and rewalking every foul step I'd once taken even that bad reflection was a reflection of the world a'borning once a long long time ago and now dead shot certain stillborn for sure but the only epiphany that I'd get on this Feast of the Epiphany in some rugged old proud defiled and tortured church (beset now with crumbled brick broken scaffolding and entire sections of huge granite steps twisted and chipped) the only one I'd get is some message marked 'return to sender' or something because it's one man by himself against every other rotten man right now and ever as it is that prayer is only for the deaf even that doesn't stop nor start what's needed in the world and that's one-by-one singular solitary and winning redemption conversion and repudiation from the Fifth Avenue Library steps to Ladies' Mile to the broken Foundling Home steps of St. Francis Xavier itself - and here I was and here that other fellow was and here we all are and maybe some greater-than-us cosmic Sexton of the stars and the solar system can really help us anew by turning on the lights one more time for us all the lights of the world itself and everything else that ever was and will ever be.

ABYSS

31. ABYSS - World Trade Center collapse, 9/11/01:

Sweaty palms in the halo factory where the McAllister Brothers had set up shop two points foreword leaning towards nothing the neon-glo globe planet shone through the gloom BLACKDUST DARKFOG EVIL INTENT OH! - weimereiner bulldog shetland corgi shepherd collie retriever hound - whatever it was had SCRAMBLED through the dirt to get here and whatever then did I miss ? no mother no father no sister Lil just fifteen orphans all coming still "I miss what I miss" I said "no other way no other meaning no nothing to say I am guilty for living for now" I have never spoken and never will I have instead re-written a Bible of 700,000 words and still reeling still counting still evaluating like Nathan like Darrin like Smothers Brothers like Dom DeLuise whatever like James Dean Nairobi Keruoac Dylan themselves human-laden beveled topsy-turvy enactors makers doing workers thinkers with no value no accumulated intent just the happiness talcum-scented of sick success twentieth-century fag America success CRUMBLED NOW like weeds in the wind Isaiah's Towers themselves beleaguered shattered and broken pyramid Sphinx-like along some mental Nile of occlusion and wealth too good too good are the armies of this world for death but nonetheless there they are ! but they must go on but they must go on "I hear the circled bells tinkling and behind them the vast and greater alarm of gongs and the sounds of bells the great tubular sounds of panic ringing through streets left until now unattended and the great graveyard splattered with blood and dust and steel iron carnage with Christopher Wren himself represented by the little lamb embedded atop the stairway iron door along the bottom street AND EVEN AS WE STAND we are standing below the dead and above us twelve feet high the dead are buried yet in their ashen gray complexion dirt and stone and rock and monuments fallen shattered with the huge great black wrought iron fence twisted and tilted and among them SPEAKING sayeth the Lord are the many many tongues engathered ONE WORD ONE WORLD ONE VAST ENTANGLED web too which we nod and to which we must forever HUMBLE ourselves at once and now and nigh and nightly."

* for any notes about this, references or annotation, contact me directly, njabate@aol.com

WALKING WITH MR. EDISON

30. WALKING WITH MR. EDISON:

Being the man who visited with Edison and walked the fragrant hills of Menlo Park and Llewellyn Park together in transient time at one and the same with leaves falling and tannin-scented Fall air around us walking stick by stick two by two alone the gruff and the direct the vague and the gentle making sense of something nothing whatever by 1887 these were days of the future past like an old book upon a tired shelf the phonograph the incandescent lamp - which is what people called it in those days - a phrase we now cannot recognize as it is no longer part of the current language the modern day L'air de temps' like the French guy said the air of the times got no time no air no more and then Thomas himself pipes up looking me face front with the gnarled stick in his hand the stick of which we had just picked up beneath the sycamore tree along the border "This is where Mina and I will be buried according to our plans right here on this property and I don't think anyone will mind and if they do we will anyway you know these manager types who run this park thing trying to keep but the exclusives in they try to tell me in a roundabout way that I can be buried here but they don't know if it isn't here then it will be here right into my carriage house with Alton my footman helping I'll show them these types who go about declaiming that I've only invented the first 'practical' incandescent lamp and its accompanying electrical distribution system they actually say that these pointy-heads with so severe an outlook that they have to list and limit - do you know that very much of my work with electrical current of which they know nothing has been involved actually with listing ad limiting flow and push of current and power which is yet a very mysterious thing that the average man has no can have none idea of it being to foreign in the mind the only thing I can connect it to for a concept is water for it is much like the flow if water this electrical yet at the same time the idea of water must remain foreign too in people's minds to what electrical current is about so I cannot make much on that idea cannot put out to people the notion of thinking of electricity as water it wouldn't work but now these writer type executive managers think they can limit what it is I've been doing by sub-clause and footnote for what I've done - I should have stayed in Menlo where things were smaller and quieter and I could keep more to myself the rooming house the drawing room the study the little railroad in the woods the shed the row-house the storage room the hilltop now instead they have given me a biography which states that I wanted this factory this huge undertaking this industrial mass of brick and men foraging for work a place devoted to the rapid and cheap development of inventions allowing us to invent to order any of the useful things that every man woman and child wants at a price they can afford to pay what a crock of bile what a foolish man's purse of bad coin what crap they say the damn industrialists just want to make money and more money off of everything I do they have me captive they have me Barnum'ed in this mansion chained and enslaved to this rambling factory wherein I only seek escape now the movies the Black Maria anything like that will do I've been quoted wrong so many times wrongly they say I say that the new lab can build anything from a lady's watch to a locomotive but they're wrong their motive which they wish I could invent anew is greed poor bastards that they are all are all I am stuck here I am a museum piece now to these bastards I just want to sleep and hide and stay within the library the only damn good place in this whole pile of rubble I'm no clerk I'm no accounter I'm no executive I'm anarchy and they try to channel me where I should go but it's not like that only electrics do that I want the world free and lit and wild and wide I want New York City I want it all for everyone without definition and without endings and so I work within forms that and only that I invent voices and pictures things these little folk have never seen nor heard poor bastards that they are being pushed about and around by the monsters in their drawing rooms and counting rooms and big desks they hide behind in groups you never see one of them alone they conspire to kill they want war they push me ever and ever further along my search they say now is for synthetics they want rubber they push me about synthetic rubber will make our world work they plead there's money there Tom fella’ a whole industry waiting to be born so I go to Florida I search and I stay deep in the everglades the swamps the places where they can't reach now I'm here again and they say 'I only invent to obtain money to go on inventing' how cozy and how comfortable - they can say what they want New York City I want it all for everyone without definition and without endings and so I work within forms that and only that I invent voices and pictures things these little folk have never seen nor heard poor bastards that they are being pushed about and around by the monsters in their drawing rooms and counting rooms and big desks they hide behind in groups you never see one of them alone they conspire to kill they want war they push me ever and ever further along my search they say now is for synthetics they want rubber they push me about synthetic rubber will make our world work they plead there's money there Tom fella a whole industry waiting to be born so I go to Florida I search and I stay deep in the everglades the swamps the places where they can't reach now I'm here again and they say 'I only invent to obtain money to go on inventing' how cozy and how comfortable - they can say what they want I'll never do for them what they seek to do for themselves and I know I'll be dead long before their mechanizations bring the war they want but I do begrudge them their self-satisfied rubbish and their glee now that I have 200 plus men working for me under threat of sentence like a slave camp I feel so bad that I even I make sure I punch each day the same punch clock they must these poor soup bastards lined up each morning with their bread and coffee in a row waiting to punch in to hit that time clock which as I now remember it was a broad tall big wooden thing almost alike to a mantle clock which we hung on the facing wall to the plant entry and as they passed the general office they filed by and sullenly punched as the big clock clicked and the stern thud of time was heard for these men two or four times a day I don't even know but I myself would punch in and out daily even though I never left or almost never anyway it was my show sham for the academics the bastards who tried to run me I shoulda' let them all go blind the scientists and the engineers the chemists and the physicists all those with education vast and such learning that could put out a sun and not get burned they thought and the mathematicians always trying to work something out of numbers to find a gain more like an evil alchemist from the back-lot outhouse to make gold from shit all of them my men the real men are muckers and I am but the chief mucker the bigwigs sit there and figure and calculate and I can guess better than any of them and my guesses come up right every time as they claim they are 'surprised by the accuracy of my guesses' no problems are unsolvable even when theoreticians say otherwise - they forget I lit up New York City against everything every one of them ever said - it's only a matter of intense application to bring out the secrets of nature and apply them for the happiness of man - that's another quote I've heard they strung me with - the list to them is lucre alone: phonographs cameras storage batteries fluoroscopes rubber but here's a quote I'll give you right now: "Hell they're ain't no rules around here we're trying to accomplish something" I'm fighting them everyday they want nothing more than to make a manager of me three stories high this brick building 250 feet long machine shops engine rooms glass-blowing rooms heaters generators pumping rooms chemical departments photograph studios electrical testing stock rooms my only haven a 10,000 book library each volume with no price for the bastards to account for priceless with four one-story labs stocked with every substance for experimentation from horse-hair to raw silk "everything from an elephant's hide to the eyeballs of a United States Senator" - there's another quote for you - and then I remember well when it all burned just like that poof I was sixty-seven and what to do the assorted bastards and number pushers were still around – even them getting older - and they realized that to exist for them I had to rebuild they had lives and families and monies on the line so I was old but not too old to make a fresh start and I did.

DUNSTON THE BASEBALL DRIVER

29. DUNSTON THE BASEBALL DRIVER:

‘I drive the team around’ was all he’d said (I overheard him say) and he certainly looked retarded to me but in this squalid stupid driver’s get-up if he wished to drive the baseball bus I assumed I’d let him - for I had no care for him nor for what he does and the fine baseball fellows I saw were having breakfast at a nearby door - and they were all burly and gelled and nattily dressed as they’d wish I supposed - but there was nothing except the lettering upon the door of the bus which really told me anything about them - may as well have been to me the ‘Natty Bumpos’ training team’ for all I cared and baseball was never a suede set with me and these minor league teams seem to go on forever with one small town after another placing a claim on someone and fans and farmers both packed in the stands neither one knowing a damned thing about the game itself just cheering some event they’ve brought themselves to and I said “how long they in town for?’ and he said “they’re not – I’m just driving them through to the Binghamton Braves there’s a game tonight and they have to be there by about 1pm the latest so my work’s cut out but all they want to do is eat and stop and stop and eat and hit every flea-back morsel of a bathroom and lunch counter along the way and Goddamn if they don’t all have pens – as if someone’s gonna’ recognize them somewhere and want them to sign - they’re so full shit it runs out their ears but a great bunch of guys too stupid but great” and I wondered how often this guy had rehearsed all this spiel and what had – by the way – given him the right to exclude his selfhood from their fine ‘dumb’ company – as if he was the driving and the resident genius on board so I laughed and said “you know 6 years of that and a few beanballs to the head and what the hell else can you expect ? Einstein again?’” and he laughed and said “that’s funny but the one on the left – shit his name IS really Einstein but they call him Heinie it started out from shortening Einstein to Steinie but Heinie stuck instead” and I said “I'm afraid to say this but – ‘beats my ass’ – you get it?” and he did but right then he started the bus and yelled out “Come on you bunch of swampweeds – get your nasty twisted asses in here we gotta’ go!” but no one really seemed to care.

PART OF THE REASON I DID THIS IS YOU

28. PART OF THE REASON I DID THIS IS YOU:

There's always talk of sovereign this or sovereign that as if a nation or a group of people has some real means of defining itself and making itself what it wants to seem - whereas in reality the only essential thing is the individual existence of each member of that seeming colossus individually and seen only through their own eyes - everything else is a figment and an agreed-upon artificial membrane by which the alternate reality breaths and casts its lot with 'affairs' of the world and such constructions are always feeble incorrect evil and active - which accounts for the mess of the world the wars of border religion tribe area and all that rest of that - and the people who rise to the operative top of these events are bloodlines and infiltrators of the basest sort - the field operatives of the usual alien crowd infiltrating DNA histories and engorging themselves on the enticements and codifications of the world as we are led to see it : EVIL pure and simple and no matter what else is said and 'MANKIND' here WAS crucified upon a cross of humanity of gold of sin and extirpation of whatever you'd wish to call it and the ongoing sufficiency of redemption and salvation which is always underway is at war constantly with these forces of darkness aspiring to remain atop the rubble-heap of definition and reality as they've described it.
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I can't really go on any more about this stuff because people think I'm obtuse stupid and crazy by it - which is OK with me for my own story line has nothing to do with them and is completely separate and probably to them completely false too and I make this up as I go along (it's been said) yet I can tell you exactly the delineations of deep space the angles of declension of the cosmos planets and stars the extensions of vibration and matter well past this engathered solar system the collected realities of actualized domains put together in this one small vibrational field by which we assume to see it as a group in the alloted travel-time and sphere our minds agree upon AND the vibrational energies too which go into the picture-fields we see : SO EXCUSE ME IF I BOW DOWN TO NOTHING.

BARNEY AND THE GREAT VOID

27. BARNEY AND THE GREAT VOID:

I never would have missed you Barney had I not the edging of the tablecloth to hold me - the way I thought it would end was anything but how it really ended and when the sunlight broke its battered beam of the cornice of the day WELL then it was that my curtain flew : I scrambled to try and a something anything effort came forth from me regretting right then everything I'd never done but only wished I'd done before - like visit Ausable Chasm which name which sound I'd always loved but never visited : sounding like 'audible' as in an 'audible chasm' which is a great void so vast you can hear it a GREAT void so VAST you can hear it, and maybe its echo too.

SPOONING

26. SPOONING:

I wouldn’t be spooning you huddling me as we stretched between fabrics of lightness and glee to find the gauze and the businessman wise - with his silver delivery bringing forth the book with the answers and all of the notes that he took but his presentation WE FIND lacks something special so there’s nothing unique and ‘we can buy windows anywhere’ we reply sounding sleek and so with that he leaves and we’re left feeling meek.
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And they then come forward with stories of (these old men) TV and drama and episodes of every sort - the type made on the producer's floor the cutting-room couch the chambered alley of corpses and death : 'when you come from a long old decline you can never go up from there - you're caught within your own degeneracy' and then he said - 'that's the reason we do this stuff - we can only portray the downside to ridicule the good and we hae nothing more to live for' and I walked away muttering (myself) 'yes yes it's an old disease your tribal God is a very old disease.'
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I wasn't born for anything at all I didn't make a mark on my way in and I won't leave a mark on my way out and I'm quite settled with that and vastly OK.

HONG KONG SINGLE - GREENER THAN GRASS

25. HONG KONG SINGLE - GREENER THAN GRASS:

“Great comedy insightful decadence he writes with a cigar in his mouth and both hands on the easel he looks straight ahead while turning to watch the purple martins at the feeder follow his every move he makes entire beings drool the end is always near when he’s around he makes me proud to be alive he’s a man’s man in a world of women it’s a shame they have to cut him down but never is there justice beneath the sun and just thinking of alternatives can break the bank” as the man in the tent nearby is watching the sidelines for the shadows of girls and some distant silhouette which moves across a screen but donkeys bray and horses are laughing and some clown I SWEAR turns back and says “if not – Winter” as if it were an alternative or some sort of choice we get to make and the campfires bellowed back “you aching fool you come from nothing and go to nowhere” and just as simple as all that Mrs. Waldron was on the phone to the senator from Commingulatus singing “you gather what glittering sunrise is scattered far the ewe to fold the kid and nanny home but the daughter you sent wandering from her mother” and when she was done I walked over and asked her what she meant and she lit a cigarette and put up her legs and said “it’s an ancient farming song by nomads who roamed the plains and it manages in a few verses to capture the idea of wandering and loss and farm animals and family and the loss of a daughter to some other tribe yet even though that is it I can never get it right for it’s supposed to end with everyone coming home again but it never works that way for me” and she said that swiveling her wonderful hips to the tiger in the cage (and for once even I wanted to bite) and before I knew it she too was gone and all I was left with was scheduled appearance of the Katzenjammer Kidz in Western Grove and the sound of a lonesome hammer doing something wild but no matter how much he hammered THAT MAN never built anything to completion and before long the ‘rosy-fingered moon’ was at the backstop again crying plaintively for someone to listen and DAMNED if it wasn’t me again but all I heard was “fire is racing under the skin and in the eyes no sight and drumming fills the ears but in the hearing no sound and the light had no goodness and nothing – as usual – was what it seemed and GREENER THAN GRASS I am and dead – or almost I seem to me” and with that it was over the night-gauze vision of all that was had left me and tinkered by chance was only a ringing bell at the ninth-out moment of end (‘this would be hard for you if you were weak but you’re not weak’) and dissembling left the gruff man wild and a posse of fumes struck the sky and the land together at once and I started talking back “I’ve got nothing but the memories of lime and lemura and the manifest is finished wherefrom I’d come before but I never had a mother and the father was revoked and the sister less benign than what before was running so if you ask me the last demon on the riverbank was the one who did it all” but before I could finish really finish I thought again of what was spread before me and where I was (oh say Washington and 13th or over by Canal under the wheels of a truck ON CANAL STREET) and the old subway tubes the Beach Street entrance the Ericsson Dam the electrical generator with big baffles to the wind and the awkward astrolabe upon the roof they ALL confused me each for (listen) this is where cars crashed before me and the train hit the wall and three horses pulled a carriage filled with mail and (‘Station to Station they left NOTHING to chance’) kids had lined up at the doorway wanting tickets to something or other BUT I TOOK OUT my steed and wrote them a pen and checked with myself in the mirror (at this point the Hong Kong Station was iced over Archibald MacLeish was no help at all and even Carl Jung was as helpless again as a baby).

MAKE THE OBVIOUS LESS OBVIOUS...

24. MAKE THE OBVIOUS LESS OBVIOUS - BRING WHAT’S HIDDEN TO THE FORE:

The Sandra Sullivan Foundation wants you Steamboat Willie drowning in your own IDOLATRY reading about Marsden Hartley writing notes on the thinnest rebar building towers to God and Mammon always in competition and the discussion arose about ‘stairs’ versus ‘risers’ and even though they do the same thing they are different implementations it was decided - the ‘riser’ is the section with the cut-outs onto which the ‘stairs’ are placed and to get upward anywhere you need both at least in the CONTRACTING world and we then DECIDED TOO that we knew all that and what did it matter anyway who cared ? nobody did ? and with that the eight forty-four left the station with us in tow wrinkle-levio old man’s fodder darning needle in the haystack OH and I SILENTLY began watching the little man who always comes by as he stood at the fiction stacks and slowly and precipitously paged a book page by page reading surreptitiously it would seem whatever he could garner from some old man’s fiction – little man skittle man the one who knows it all – and the exercise of this life is perhaps to get a wife or chase a wife your choice at this point and after the end there are no sacraments left and nobody to come to the games where they’re held Poughkeepsie or Tabernacle Grove with the apple and juice stand on the right (‘now all hold hands let’s take a stand NO WAR no war no more today’) and many many volunteers it seemed showed up for that one and the young kids the ones who once went south deep south in their ’59 Chevies leaning on one side now take part in their three-year-old cars made in a foreign land or even here with a foreign name no difference for all that counts is where the money goes and the factor of design alas has so been lost it is unspeakable interchangeable pudding pie Georgia High and do they even KNOW what they’re fighting for ALL GALORE and hasn’t grief had enough already ? and ‘Susan’s Cover Is Gone’ was as I recall seeing the title of the orange colored book the other guy was reading at Lyndhurst on the seeded park bench by the railroad tracks but ‘MARSDEN HARTLEY’ was called ‘the searcher’ too – a ‘great’ artist whose greatness is of a piece with the provincial clumsiness of American high culture in the early twentieth century – a Yankee Modernist – who stands in the history of modern art like an increasingly unavoidable bumpy detour and at different points in his career (he died in 1943 at age 66) he was inspired by French masters Cezanne German Expressionists Blue Rider Group Wassily Kandinsky and he adored Germany and had extended stays in Berlin and participated as well in the fast-track salons of his day (Gertrude Stein’s in Paris Alfred Steiglitz’s in New York Eugene O’Neill’s in Provincetown and Mabel Dodge Luhan’s in New Mexico) and as a ‘secret’ homosexual he was in his later years part of an elegant gay scene that formed around the photographer George Platt Lynes in New York and he fit in nowhere and SOLITUDE owned him - it is seen now that in retrospect his best art was made in Berlin from 1913 to 1915 and especially in Maine starting in the mid-nineteen-thirties and that art looms so far above the works of celebrated contemporaries as Georgia O’Keefe Charles Demuth Arthur Dove and John Marin that it poses the question of how such achievement was possible and like Edward Hopper – a very different painter but Hartley’s only equal in their generation – he possessed a self-reliant temperament that pitted gritty American resources against the intimidating authority of European art and even as he is an aesthetic and ethical hero in his work beauty still comes and goes in it and intuitions of truth are constant even as all of his work itself presents the viewer with one constant question : ‘do you live in a way commensurate with such honesty?’ and with that I continued my escape Marsden Hartley this and Marsden Hartley that but in such a world as this is it becomes heartily difficult to formulate precise movements by which to inhabit and locate (first) the productive urges and meanings which make up what we strive to achieve as a ‘correct’ life : two guys living in the woods hiding out from the law in Trumansburg NY after ransacking a church or two other guys stripping a car on the Westside Wharf after jimmying the locks and jumping the ignition after punching out the owner and leaving him behind and IT”S ALL THE SAME for you either love your brother and fellow man everywhere or you love no one anywhere and only an artist has the sensitive eye and hand needed to calmly and slowly negotiate the perils of this land - and art is all art - the writing and coloring and lining and drawing and sounding out of that all-other-world which the low-brained and stupid among us can only bray at complaining whining and grimacing at what they do not understand AND that is the punishment of caprice and uselessness that is the TRAP of life itself and everyone one of them apart from each other is nothing Stan Lease to Fred Keiser to Charley Fucking Eisenstein and his humbled wife himself – AND SPEAKING OF DOGS – let’s just think like this ‘what do you hear my dog ? you will tell me if I should worry’ let us do primal justice to the history of dogs those which sat around the campfires in our distant private and primal scenes so long ago as we sat clothed in skins huddled by the fire with a dog with tiny pointed ears next to us ears pricked for the sound of danger SOUNDS TOO FAINT FOR MAN TO HEAR so can there be a history without a dog ? ‘take Columbus for instance – he believed that for fighting Indians one dog was worth fifty soldiers so as he advanced into America he took a pack of two-hundred-and-fifty-pound mastiffs with him and in one industrious battle in 1495 these mastiffs leaped upon and disemboweled more than a hundred Indians apiece as reported by an observer of the battle one Bartolome de las Casas who realized that it was hard to credit such an event and went on to explain that the dogs were used to disemboweling deer and boars and so found the soft and hairless skin of Indians quite easy to bite into’ and yet for all the human lives that dogs have saved – and among those rescued from certain death are Lewis and Clark (charging buffalo Newfoundland) Alexander the Great (charging elephant Greyhound) Napoleon (stormy sea Newfoundland) Abraham Lincoln (dark cave Mutt) – the history of the species has been a history of oppression BUT SO MUCH FOR DOGS they will all die soon and it just goes to show ‘keep your mind where it should be fella’ it’s always worth more that way’ said to me by the fat bellowing cigar-chomping truck loader on the slim side of 22nd Street pushing cargo like it was silk flowers along some grimy edge of bright morning with a whistle and a bob in his step ‘it’s better this way I act like Springtime is coming and everything feels better as I remember day after day of brighter and brighter mornings still chilly each of them but with a better light and brighter spirit and somehow in a moment I try to capture that and get it down and replay each moment in my head so as to make my dreary work more fun to do and these streets they don’t leave a man alone no how and you know how some people thrill to visit New York City well for me it’s just the opposite I see it every damned morning just like this the cold the air the traffic the lights and congestion the sense of not getting anywhere for hours and I fight and struggle on these local streets delivering everyday stuff and when I don’t have to believe you me I don’t ever want to SEE this place again’ and so I’m thinking magic I’m thinking art’s touch and the classy side of things and what do you know here comes my own personal culmination right at me - two or three people walking like Gods holding leashes with great dogs on the ends and carrying paints and notebooks and drawing pads and all the rest and I know it just then I realize it at that instance ‘this really is a Paradise of sorts’ no matter what the truckman says (for he only wears the shirt of life and never the great broad overcoat of all blessed Creation itself but HIS LOSS CAN BE MY GAIN) and that takes me back to Hartley again HARTLEY WAS FABULOUSLY UGLY in an Abraham Lincoln way – a big man a long face that joined a high dome deep-set eyes under slipping brows a huge nose and over all the look of an extraordinary intelligent hound dog and in photographs his gaze is often worried but firm HE STOOD HIS GROUND born Edmund Hartley in Lewiston Maine the youngest of eight children of English immigrants whose father worked in the cotton mills and whose mother died when he was eight and his father then remarried and moved the family to Cleveland where Hartley studied at the Cleveland School of Art and became devoted to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (an early brooding painting is of a 1905 rendering of Walt Whitman’s house in Camden NJ) and in 1899 he came to New York and worked his way through Impressionist and Fauvist styles (‘Stormclouds Maine 1906’) and he imbibed spiritualist ideas and met and was influenced by Albert Pinkham Ryder (and he took on his mother’s maiden name ‘Marsden’) and left for Europe in 1912 where in Berlin he began making his heraldic semi-abstractions in the years before and after the onset of the First World War – they were a conjunction of jazzy Cubist compositions and rough Expressionist handling and sometimes have the air of textbook demonstrations performed with forced high spirits.

Take the high seas to the high seas or don’t you understand what I’m saying as the clock runs out on mankind’s handle and all the Heavens are broken and blown to red bits ‘London Bridge is Falling Down Falling Down’ and someone is singing in the background about the old aqua sea and all its fine attributes and the places they’ve jolly been BUT let’s get serious here once more - ‘in 1915 the political pressures of the war forced Hartley to return to New York where because of the apparently ‘pro-German’ nature of his previous paintings with their military symbols and designs his reception in artistic circles was chilly so he entered upon nearly two decades of wandering – both geographically and artistically and a certain layer of uncertainty thus pervades his ‘lovely but brittle’ Cubist still-lifes his Cezannesque landscapes and here and there in different genres a cultivation of bulky forms outlined in black that steer increasingly close to the style of Max Beckmann and then sojourns in Mexico and the Bavarian Alps further attributed to the full maturation pof Hartley’s work and talent as he developed a sense of mystical immanence in desert landscapes and a tactile appreciation of he contours of rocks and mountains and he once said ‘as a painter I HAVE to have a mountain’ – and so he did and it was a hamlet called Dogtown inland from Gloucester Massachusetts and he painted it over and over various scenes and locales within it as he visited it many times and produced works that distilled lonesome ecstasies of communion with subjects that he had all to himself if only because NO ONE ELSE WOULD HAVE NOTICED THEM!’ and all that talking to myself went on for a long time by the vestibule in the vast hall where I’d slipped in for a chance to get warm and finding it filled with instead people of the Jeremey Bentham Society Northeast Chapter who evidently had just finished their weekend convention after hearing a few talks and seminars and such and I asked the fellow in the dark blue suit what was next and he said “why nothing we’ve just finished our last speaker and had our farewell and awards presentations so now I guess all the people left here are just milling around as they prepare to leave WHY do you ask?” which question of course sort of baffled me because I figured that any question like that was fairly self-explanatory so I replied “you really have to know why I asked something how silly is that?” and he turned to reply and said “no no not at all I merely thought you had a specific need or request and now that all of our scheduled operations are over I really didn’t want you to be disappointed you see I was only being polite really” and I said “yes I guess” and we parted but at that instant too I realized the propriety of approach and demeanor of that guy was probably characteristic of the whole bunch at the convention so I expected none but the best if anyone else spoke to me and settling down I bought a coffee at the concession and took a seat in a wonderfully padded chair nearby and watched as people passed along some with bags and baggage and others merely with a smile and nothing else and occasionally I did see someone quite interesting to look at but for the most part everything was proper and dignified and quite serious this Jeremy Bentham crowd whose furtherance and reason for being I made a note to check out later and as I did get up to leave a very gracious woman came towards me and said “excuse me but are Winton Bennett” and of course I replied “no ma’am I’m not” and apologetically she replied “oh dear I’m so sorry but you do look so much like him and I really was rather hoping you were him it all seemed so right at that moment” and puzzled still I asked “why do you want to meet him?” and she said “well perhaps you’re not aware but to us here he’s almost a master theologist and I’d heard he was coming by but he did never show and now the entire weekend is over and we’d never even heard from him or seen him and oh so many of us were truly awaiting his presence and are so disappointed” and I nodded and said “well yes I guess I can understand all that but really sorry I am not him” and she smiled and turned and left but I kept my head and let it go and so there I was in the strange middle of both watching all this unfold and still mentally going through the exercise of Hartley whose biography and work was still running through my mind but that’s characteristic too of an art education which builds upon itself and then goes nowhere – instead ending up in the closing end of a Jeremy Bentham convention but I guess stranger things have happened and LIKE WAS SAID ABOUT HARTLEY – ‘no one else would have noticed’ and sorting through my sidebag (filled as usual with papers and end-papers and pamphlets and various tracts postcards and catalogues picked up while walking or stopping at various places) I did finally come up with the Hartley paragraphs which had been bugging me and started reading again – ‘he made what I regard as the world’s best bad painting “Eight Bells Folly - Memorial For Hart Crane” (1933) a farrago of crude private symbols jammed together as if their shelf life was about to expire and Crane the seraphic desperately ambitious miserable homosexual poet who committed suicide in 1932 by throwing himself off a ship in the Caribbean was a natural subject for Hartley whose description of his own painting is worth quoting as it exemplifies his odd spirit of soberly deliberated abandon : ‘there is a ship foundering and a sun a moon two triangles clouds a shark pushing up out of the mad waters and at the right corner a belt with an ‘8’ on it symbolizing eight bells or noon when he jumped off and around the bell are a lot of men’s eyes that look up from below to see who the new lodger is to be’.