Haunted Amerigone

     Every house is haunted and it isn't a joke. My family moved three or four times within Philly before I was 8 and then 3 times to different locales in the NE by the time I graduated high school. And by now I've realized that all those houses were haunted. And not just by previous tenants, they are haunted by 'America'. And the earth. This would ultimately be a materialist theory of life on earth, that everything that happens here happens in a material way and the concepts of god, money, goddess, prison, law, precocity, even language are all systems of abstract thought that conquer humans instead of the other way around. And invade our houses like spirits that need influence over us. We are weak spirits of human flesh, and this is dark Deleuze indeed...

4721 Baltimore Ave

S. 46th 

(Florida--)

chester ave

49th St

3820 Spring Garden       [bot]

Killtime warehouse        [fav]

Fakehaus

Powelton Ave                 [bot]

Budd St                           [bot]

Kingsessing                    [bot]

St Bernard                      [trade]

Kingsessing                    [rtn]

    Thus the Buddhist monks wear orange to house themselves in a color instead of a house. And thus the Communist Manifesto invaded Congress to a degree of paranoia called the Red Scare or McCarthyism. And thus poets go on and on in obscure language with one cute phrase after another, healing themselves one word at a time--if no one else. Or Stephen Foster, if no one else... The face of Frederick Douglas. Where do we American's live?

    I'm beginning to see why some Native American tribes lived in teepees and roamed the plains. And what kind of non-linear time machine sense it makes that an entire city block was burned down in 1985 in a beautiful black working class neighborhood in West Philly, by the authorities -the first act of war and beaurocratic control by FEMA? They dropped a military explosive, C4, from a helicopter and children were burned alive. I watched this smoke, not another smoke, rise from on top of my own roof a mile away. "They" let the fire burn. Some hip hop song had been playing the streets (people used to drive around every day playing songs REAL loud) "The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don't care, let the motherfucker burn..." How was that sychronicity created?

    Aaah yes, but how mundane. We know that time, per se, doesn't exist at this level. Back and forth, no problem, old hat. One verse of 'Oh! Susanna' and we're right there, like a ghost, a flying Harry Potteresque ______________ wispy fast thing w ______________ threatening.

Cue the ominous music manipulating you to believe. It wasn't the Spector of Communism (or Corporate Capitalism) that killed God, it was the Spector of the spectors of Harry Potter, it was industrialization and the refined injection system of images known as movies. Even the name is so creepy easy ghostlike: movies: move-ease; the moving is so easy that moving moves. When nothing stays the same, even moving, then we're all ghosts. You're a ghost & I'm a ghost, & the & sign looks like a Dementor, & we're all struggling to get a name. If you're struggling to have a name, then you're a ghost. Ah yes, this is easiest of all to say, on the day after Christmas during Covid 19.

Well, I come from Alabama
With my banjo on my knee
And I'm bound for Louisiana
My own true love for to see
It did rain all night the day I left
The weather was bone dry
The sun was so hot I froze myself
Susanne, don't you go on and cry
I said, oh, Susannah
Now, don't you cry for me
As I come from Alabama
With this banjo on my knee
Well, I had myself a dream the other night
When everything was still
I dreamed that I saw my girl Susanne
She was coming around the hill
Now, the buckwheat cake was in her mouth
A tear was in her eye
I said, that I come from Dixie land
Susanne, don't you break down and cry
I said, oh, Susannah
Now, don't you cry for me
'Cause I come from Alabama
With my banjo on my knee

Flatness vs How Deep?

I was flatness as a kid, with the pals playing half ball (so it wouldn't go so far). About ten years ago I saw Billy Brennan, who was older than the rest of us and organized the ball games, at the Home Depot out near the Blue Route. He looked embarrassed to be working there but remembered me. I remember breaking a window with that wobbley rubber thing, the house next door. Give me 15 mns, we could drive over there and I'll point it out to you.

Then flatly I am hearing my friend from the corner house, Vernon Johnson, tell me that he's different because his skin is black, to which I felt stumped and speechless. I think he showed me his hand, or something like that? No, I don't really remember looking at anything but his face. Maybe I'm only imaging looking at his hand. The funny thing about faces in memory is that they are ageless and his face looked to me to be middle aged. Around 35. Old age is another face then, isn't it, a mask that goes over top of the ageless face? A mask that is like camoflage to the younger peeps. Don't you turn into a ghost, basically, if that ageless face--the one that youths see in each other--if the ageless face is like an angel? Faces = angels and ghosts.

I realized a couple years ago that Vernon must have got "the talk" that day cuz kids don't normally relay info from an earlier day, not when they are about 6 years old. But then again, kids normally are pretty uncensored, they don't care about talking. Say whatever. Whenever. The beginnings of philosophy, if not squashed by adult faces.

Then even more flatly, 16 year old me is up on a tree limb 30 feet or so above a pond and me and Paul Schneider chicken out from jumping. I think I was in front of him on the limb. How deep is that water after all, hard to tell from up there. We lost track of each other after that.

There are no essays for flatness, no poems, no logic, no words. The textures change slightly, allowing for love, I suppose. History and time fall away. Memories... Mother forgot, Father leads the way across a desert. At 90, he's doing pretty well though he lost his pot belly in the last couple years and I gained it. I've started eating more meat and he stopped eating much at all. I need bigger pants, it's a size/personality crisis. Size vs flatness. Laughing Schumann mutters in the morning behind his piano. But John Coltrane isn't laughing. Not yet anyways.

And so I enter the cave of love, heading towards grounding as flatness envelopes both color and size, freedom only plays with texture when the stranger feels welcome. And please don't actually say "welcome", in order to make that happen. I didn't know until recently that anyone could really want me and that politics hardly matters. I feel sadness occasionally. "Love before Politics" is the new motto.

 

 

The Lamb Lies Down

 

The key

is to leave me out or

to take you in.

Mirroring the dream,

dream in the space between.

Some pay money for this

and so I collected it. I wish

I could wear sneakers but I

can't. I'm always working working

like a dull boy. No running,

no jumping, leave and the prodigal

son returns without someone's

daughter, flowers in his hair,

dreams in her eyes, and a dog

by her side. The lamb lies down,

which part is extra? None,

no car parts are extra in

the fall of American idealism.

News Fast

 

Each moment

everything looks different

the movie doesn't

agree with itself

depending on how long it is

anything matters

in and out of focus

depending on the camera

history is boring

remembering dates so

lets have a backwards date

fuck upside down

kiss the brain or

the sky

i'm not clear on this

time for a news fast

at least one day.

Thus Mearthoon

 

The word community as a way to discover where the disease is located. So lets assume that each of these is a community. Where is the disease located (hint: may be a trick question):

-in the cell.

-in the organ.

-in the body.

-in the family.

-in the clan/small group/team.

-in the neighborhood.

-in the institution/large group.

-in the city.

-in the megalopolis.

-in the watershed/drainage basin.

-in the island/penninsula/archipelago.

-in the continent.

-in the planet/earth.

-in the universe/mass. (...oh we better put the Solar System 1st or maybe 1ster then that should be the Earth/Moon duo, which does not actually have a name! But wouldn't that be a personality all of its own, in some order of magnitude or other? Yes, we are looking for the identity, personality of disease itself, so let us consider:

-earthmoon

or perhaps better named:

-Mearthoon

(Sounds goofy I know, but what else? And actually, would there be life on earth without the tides causing (or at least contributing to) the form of those grey zones between water and land such as marshes, clouds, rain, snow, glaciers, ice caps? Yes, we discover that the moon itself is materially speaking a cause-out of many-of formation of identity. And in this way, could we say that the Earth resides within the Moon? Thus M'earth'oon.)

 When everyone was speaking in tongues, together, at the same time-not one at a time, they could only be speaking of love. It sounded like a river, the river of humanity and it made some want to be ruthless dictators, some want to be mothers and some want to run and hide under a volcano across the high seas. And some wanted to form armies of it, claymation, that would roll into the great Goddess's womb, through that singular canyon of delight, not stopping to tarry but hurrying along, their blood boiling.

Put it all back, put it back! I yelled, startled and not yet involved.