Wednesday, December 27, 2023

We Pick Up Inflection All the Time, dammit!

 
    I think it’s possible to be a visionary and to see what I’m supposed to see, if I am open to it. Early this morning, say 315 am, I was seeing how alienated I am from myself. Why else would it be so hard to go to a simple Christmas party and relax. Then Charlene just opens up the whole atmosphere for me. Because really, I’m mostly not in myself. I’m in the carpentry, at best. Or I’m talking to ghosts (like Jeb). (And Richard and Grandma Margaret.)
    Because all talking is talking from someone to someone else, isn’t it? Didn’t someone talk to us as babies and so we picked up complete volumes of inflection before actual meaning, so maybe this is why I was so attracted towards my Grandfather Willard, who was a frustrated poet and college professor down in Florida, but passed away at the end of my Dad’s own college years right when he went into the world. Supposed to be evidently another Black Mountain College, Rollin’s College was a playboy’s college by the time I went to visit in 1980 or so. A lot of water skiing going on. But the house I visited, my Grandmother Mary being in her early 90’s, was full of books, Willard’s books, he could’t go into a bookstore without coming out with two or three she had complained to my Dad. Not that I was very attracted to his poetry: rhyming, Christian, something about the Garden of Gesthemane. Someone I know told me they’d seen me at the crucifixion of Jesus and somehow they might be right, or right enough anyway. Which is part of why I’m wondering about this feeling of being alienated from myself, both in the Marxian (martian) sense and in the bodily sense, having done enough psychedelics but not too much, and as well, while down in Florida, Woodrose seeds, which gave me - after the complete nausea, a floaty flying feeling and a radiant power locus in my solar plexus. With the proper tutelage, what could I have learned on that trip, at that overgrown garden and slightly dusty home in central Florida amongst the tall thick trees, the Spanish moss hanging, the luxuriant flowers everywhere, the moist fragrant nights. The screaming blue jays during the day as I read Walt Whitman.
    And then a friend of my Grandma Mary’s got me a grunt job at a construction site, deep down in the ground building a bank, the walls were to be like 2 foot thick, as we tied the rods into grids with this little twisting wire tool, twin circles and a twist. I invited a new friend from the job site over to the house in the evening, a short black man, stout, and with a lazy luxuriant smile thiiiiiiis wide. He strummed a guitar and we shared a joint, but as it got dark he said he had to go, he couldn’t be seen after dark in the neighborhood and I felt that little shock again, the one i’d felt at age 5 or 6 when Vernon Johnson down the street had told me he was different (somehow) because of his skin color ( he must of just had ‘the talk’ with his mother I realized only a couple years ago) and he showed me his hand and I didn’t say anything, I was stumped and have been ever since, it’s a shame, a shame shame shame.
    The electricity is now doing strange things, I have the electric heater on in here and the Beethoven string quartets are going up and down. Very modern and intense these songs, they have the vibe of a chant, and maybe the loudness is supposed to go up and down. I don’t know. They have signs for that kind of thing in the score, but I can’t see the score right along with the music.
    If I write the wrong thing then I forget what I was going to say, or going to write, one or the other. Which might be why I am attracted to script writing right now, using the journaling to find out what is going on in there, and combining that with some reading of Zizek, and last night stunningly, some Neal Cassidy letters from the so interesting Ann Charter’s beat anthology, her almost unobtrusive comments (was that her doing that?) pulling the whole story of Neal, Jack, Allen, and of course unnamed numbers of women, probably named somewhere, but their quest to be able to talk, to write, to be in their bodies most of all, instead of being talked out of their bodies, which I think is their great great great realization, that they, when going to Columbia University or in just day to day life here and there were getting talked out of their lives by whomever but often ‘The Man’, and so if they talked to one another firstly, becoming friends and lovers, gay, bi, whatnot, and but talking talking talking thinking reading plays aloud discussing ideas, perhaps they could somehow get back into their bodies, own yourself, be yourself, have your own future, you you you.
    And of course that is what I’d like to do in a movie, if I could, establish the other leap frogging kinds of communications possible, a message for today, seeing how Jarmusch amazingly pulled it off, or Hogg more contemporaneously, and Rejtman in Argentina - but maybe I ought to stick with this journalistic path and make some kind of auto-fiction movie out of it like the movie I saw last night, ‘Unknown Country’, by Morrisa Maltz, evidently a Native American woman who had a n actress stand in for her, she sort of looked Native, as she goes back to her relatives near ‘the res’ and visits a wedding then reconnects with her great uncle and finds final beautiful mourning for her Grandmother in a pic and at Great Bend Texas, so she is there. And she is there. And of course I could feel the presence of my Grandmother who wished all of that for me, for me to not be alienated and for me to be in my body, which now I know I am not really that much, as of 315 am last night. [I definitely am when I’m with Jessie, haha.] Isn’t that what old age could be for then, to finally make peace with yourself, or at least be in your body halfway enough to be comfortable with friends and relatives. Make new friends, like Charlene down the street, something about her experience as a Black American meant she knew how to talk and connect with me at that damned Christmas party at which after all I had a very nice time. But also it could have had to do with her having been adopted which after all might mean a child of everyone.

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

The Name of My Next Band

 The Name of My Next Band

The Meant To Dos is going to be
the name of my next band. The one
where I’m lead singer and I tell
it all. I’ll really lay it down
like I’ve never done before,
my inner truth and all those
raw experiences. The ones
I’ve never talked about,
or cried over, because I
don’t cry, I just tear up
occasionally, anyways though
I know I should cry more because
I feel as if I’m splitting in two
like at my birthday party
last night I both couldn’t believe they,
my daughter and her boyfriend and my girlfriend,
had given me a cake
with two candles and yet I
also felt so far away like
someone else’s voice was saying
‘thank you!’ … It really is
just like the Beatles song
that used to play on the radio
all the time,
“When I’m 64…”

Learning To Talk will be
the name of the next band
after that one fails because
I feel like I’m dumb so much
of the time and there must be
something to say
to connect with you.
I hate to see
anyone sad.

And the band after that one fails,
because really I’m too old
now to be staying up late at
basement shows, I’d call
Babylon Quakers because
I woke up this morning missing
my Friendly roots, going to meeting
every week, the silence was golden.
But I lost the thread when
I went out into the world
of Babylon and no one knew
my name. There’s a guy at work,
working class from Fishtown, who has
perfected the art of talking
to anyone (without needing names),
we were discussing
potato chips yesterday
and junk food.

Sunday, October 22, 2023

All Roads

 The next day in a hell of my own allowing.
Hanging out with the smiley crowd
but I haven’t got a smile.
It dropped on the street
out on the way to horizons of steel on rubber
all roads lead to Rome
tweak that til it rhymes but not evenly.

It must be poetry
the only place that slides right
everyone talking at the same time
don’t gun it for the shadows
if you haven’t heard yet
about the real world.

I don’t know what I’m saying
about the real world
which is unforgetable usually.
Not a story unless you’re into it.
What is your story?

I met the person
I needed to meet once but
didn’t realize it. At least I never forgot.
I remember them now in a blur
of 20th Century cliffhangers.
Relax, relax! be yourself
right before the execution of
the right paperwork.
That’s all I got
riding the wave.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Thank You Jon Fosse


 

 

     Fascinated with Jon Fosse and what his writing may be like. I may like it and sink into it & may not. But either way, it's scarily inspiring reading about him, as if I could do that also. Sink into writing experimental fiction. Or experimental theater that would be filmed into small vignettes. Why, I don’t know but I even could let go of music for it. I feel. And sell the house too, if I could really get myself to do it.
    So, as soon as I write this down however I recoil from it all. Acknowledging this desire evaporates it, makes it feel impossible. or possibly the only solution is to go be with and talk to others about this, other writers of lititature (!! tit to Tera: literature!? is that it? I don’t even know) -thus bringing up the truth that for me writing is as close as possible to returning to the infant stage of life. Just a big head that receives nourishment from the white stuff and that to go and join anything else at all is to fall into shit, the earth is shit is everything, with a few stars twinkling through the darkness, or perhaps the golden moon, a breast of light liquid elixir. And the sun then is an eye, the eye of a vengeful God, judging, holding to account. I’m nearly dead in the eyes of this heat throwing God, a charnel reality. Lava sings down volcano mountainsides in response, and hell is brought down upon this fertile green fecund Earth. The little brown birds sing with futility and never ending assault.

    Chirp! Chirp!

    Chirp! Chirp!

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Flat Earth Edginess

     As we stretch away from Jeb’s death day and towards Oct. 10th, Jessie’s tagged first kiss day, will she happily remind me this year, I hope so. A log to leap over on the path of life, we hardly know where the other is in the wilds, the pricker bush thickets, of this haunted house. Without some way to make new, I feel stuck in metamorphosis-interruptus, my feathers out and ready to fly but probably like that bird on the end of the fishing pole that the cats like to chase, as I flick it over the carpet, so they can get a good grip and tear at 50 mph for a few minutes. Then they just roll over and wait for it to come within leisurely clawing distance.
    Because selling the house has a melancholy like an anchor dragging across the ocean floor, an anchor as large as one of those useless skyscrapers downtown that spell life backwards and require formal attire, even if that’s all white. Who would ever want to spend a minute there unless they were mesmerized by money, watching it pass before their eyes like so many donut shaped life preservers, with the name of the ship stamped on there in red: Going Down Slow”. Home ownership is key to the American Dream, which is what I must have been choosing when I let Jeb slip away. He was ready to try the world again and he slipped through my hug on Powelton Ave as his ancient Volvo was at the ready, he’d got it from some Rainbow Family guy I never met who later fell off the top of a ladder and was paralyzed for years. He’d put up these crushingly dynamic posters around town, that I’d been excited to notice, my friend Tim may have some still in his basement except he’s lost his mind too and walks by my house sometimes, joyfully single minded. Free, from burdens and too many thoughts. His wife though is a bit stern and scares me, so I don’t help as I should. The stern judicious women need kid gloves on me which I can’t always find. The good boy.
    I know I have a gigantic pair of soft velvety kid gloves, somewhere, but I haven’t seen them, under all the hoarding in my house. It’s not over the top hoarding, I hasten to add, it’s only a little bit everywhere, the hall mostly. And mostly media: records, books, some DVD’s some VHS. And I don’t really have anything else but these pixels in the mind. Part of the past mashed into mind pixels and ear suet. The birds of self pecking away at a swinging bird feeder, the suet is greasy and looks good, a little old newspaper headline in every peck. Peck peck peck, ‘take anooother little piece of my heaart now baby! You know you willl!’ I relish the day.
    I think I might just get someone else to do everything for me remote control. That’s what money can buy you, as the drops fall from the window screen to the sill from yet another stormy weather day. We seem to either get a heat wave or an entire country’s worth of a storm or hurricane. The entire Caribbean lays down on the entire east coast. This drop of water was breathed in and out thoroughly by a Great White a mile off of Barbados -where Ebby Hinds lives, the most beautiful fine goddess of my junior high years, regal and churchy. She lived with us so she could go to high school in Connecticut, of all places, and she was also kind and benevolent. I was mostly playing with my French Canadian buds who greased their hair back. We invaded a milk packing plant by climbing the up ramp and then got chased out, just as we opened some quarts from one of the thousands of milk crates piled up (like those skyscrapers) and bunched together with dark shadowy spaces behind. We were just quietly sipping the milk, chocolate milk! Strawberry milk! Milk! So what milk! Fortunately one worker guy must have been sympathetic in his coveralls and he motioned towards the loading dock. You know how fast kids can run and we barreled out of there leaping free from the pressurized work zone into the beautiful clean blue sky air of the parking lot, and then out the gate. Happy moments, then into the bushes, is anyone following us? I heard somehow later Richard became a rock n roller, but we always moved away, letting go of houses as if that would change things, but really this family unit was headed for the end of this flat earth. The edge and we made it there and fell off. Is there an American music for this, white boy blues or something?

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Auction house

     It helped to go into J.’s bed at 2 am for a bit. some of the soothing electricity passes between or goes somewhere, into the blankets. We will be ok. Couple little smooches. But go back to my bed after a bit. Sleep more. Dreams reaching. Kind of like this choral singing from The Early Music Collection. Reaching to encompass the whole story. I get to an early morning moment where usually I would’ve arisen but today I try for more sleep, stretch to new parts of body and it works, I connect in to more sleep, the sleep of more and more connection to the whole story, all the way back to Jeb and I'm standing next to me whilst our Mother-screams-at-sky, and how we took a fork in the road from that moment on, all of us, Miriam too, and Kirk wasn’t there, is that it? No. Wider than that and not so articulate. Having similarities to that movie __________ the other evening, where the 11 yr old English girl has a visit at a resort in Turkey with her divorced Dad, who is loving but distant, holding hands but conflicted, and then the few flash forwards tell you in a few frames that it was a last visit, as he disappears up a corridor, freeze frame on her waving at him goodbye. That movie making! Still flooring me days later. How a movie camera can take you into a person’s experience, a young girl. Saying goodbye forever. And me. Mee. The dad button pressing and the distant Mom & Dad, who are still alive, fought through the lack, the incredible LACK-a-FLACK, but I didn’t learn, you never learn until later I suppose, how its all connected, until trying to let go, the muscles holding the gun, the death tool, is there always a death tool or machine in the background (life is a machine of life). But I had a better grasp of it earlier, the gestalt feeling as I slept further & further, want to go back for more of THIS sleep, and hitting various buttons back in time: the 2 weeks carrying, canoeing the Algonquin Lakes all in one button of many, carrying those heavy canoes between lakes, maybe that was the back break for me, YES, I carried the weight for Cindy and Jay so they could find love for each other while Dad was excluded, sometimes he slept in their tent, sometimes he slept in my tent. And then they argue about what weight of patriarchy that I then put on a hinge pin (where is a forked tree so I can emerge for a moment?) that hinge pin that unloaded broken that Trump election week for 2 years or more of back pain, still it’s in the neck, am I sturdier than ever?
    Back to age 14 in those blank woods, a bear crossing the road unconcerned 50 yards up and I wanted to go closer, and my Mother yelled quick, No! Don’t go up there Hugh!
It’s hard to describe the feeling of letting go of the house and my roots letting go of the pieces of the rock, and my brother who wandered the land restlessly and drew pictures sublime of campfires, and his trucks and the sky, starry, Celtic knots and in a couple there’s a cabin nestled back beyond, with smoke emerging, going up to the sky. Aren’t we all going up to the sky, at least in the morning when we first put feet down on the ground, the smooth wood floor with splinters occasionally and a few nails sticking up. I’ve learned to walk in this house a little less carelessly, snake bitey areas where the boards were taken up in the early days of electric install and the wound to house is as yet not healed. I have done that, in Paul’s house, a road straight through the 2nd floor hall, past each living bedroom.
    And I managed to tell P. and K., at their ten room mansion which can’t quite find the light yet, at the end of the tunnel, when they came in midday, a little bit suddenly (but it always feels that way) and they said ‘We’re getting out of the office, We were getting yelled at’ -as if they needed to explain to me, so yes it’s personal for them, their project to put lawyer’s offices and their own kindly lawyer’s offices into the old English style mansion with wainscoting up to here and a room with gargoyles, a niche -  it’s called the niche, with four lions overhead and that's where the morning light comes splendid (the only morning light in the house like some kind of magnifying glass) and I managed to think like a lightning bolt and say ‘Naw, naw heck with them yelling at you! You guys have good intentions! Forget about them!’ And we hee hawed for a minute on that while my ‘Honky Tonk Radio Girl podcast blares a bit in the background. So then I show them the 9 foot pocket door set and how it rolls a little bumpy even though I fixed the one hanger and that’s fine with Pete, he caresses the door a little as it rolls in and out, that’s how I know it's his old money.
    How electricity jumps so suddenly sometimes, in just a moment an entire memory can be made, a place and arm movement, a face or two, a talking into the air, a sound wave exclaiming.
    And I’m taking the day today and that does worry me a bit, shall I do it and I know I shall. SELL echoing like at an auction house, the farmer’s auction house in Barnesville near my Quaker boarding school. Have you ever been around those rooted farmers, the smell of the floor is rich soil, manure, mature, life and death in a mini heart beat, and growing, everything is always growing. The working farmhouse Mom feeling the opposite end to the auction house with it’s barn doors wide open and suspenders and overalls everywhere. Makes you feel small, but in a good way.

SELL the other house?

 Could it be that I am sliding into deciding to SELL? Inevitability reigns over me like a fog. Desire to make little movies of reflection, like all this writing. Little nothings that don’t really add up because it’s not done yet. While listening to pulsations of Purcell. How nice and quiet this pre-dawn joy can be. gee Gee lying on my customary seat. The wonderful Indian guy at the takeout, explaining the possibilities of the dishes. Chili Garden, the Chinese place Jessie had ordered from on Grub-hub, had a gigantic iron steel gate over the entire store front, a tidal wave of nobody home and the aroma from Mood Cafe, was just so pleasant, for Jessie and I, holding hands on Rosh a Shana. She says she’s a bad Jew right as a family, also looking Jewish but a tad more middle class walks by, four abreast, the young man holding a child, the wife pushing a stroller, so they can’t really scrunch down very well on the sidewalk. Do I love this neighborhood, the same as ever. Since 1977, oh my goddess, lay me down to die! Whatever happens next. I WANT so much.
Just need to admit that amazingly this relationship is working out very well, after so many years of wandering in the desert, like Moses and company. Me, a lost Christian finding a lost Jew perhaps, in the post modern world of bigger than ever forces washing over and around. Can I say these things out loud, lost Judeo-Christian children feeling Anarchist-loneliness, where we could sing the song without any misspeaking ‘By the Waters of Babylon’, we laid down and cried, and cried, and cried for thee Zion. Except it should be known that the supposed ‘real’ land of Zion, Israel is turning into an apartheid state before the eyes of the entire world. People weren’t able to see S. Africa so well back in the 1940’s, pre TV, even if they were predisposed to do something about it. So it’s pomo all over again then now, lostness and repetition pounding like the saddles on the four horsemen’s steeds. Good thing for me the real Zion is here in America, the real real (idea) of Zion. If I was interested in that being true …. In passing through I suppose. Looking for the Goddess behind it all, perhaps, and before that the way way back (900,000 years ago!) a tribe of 1,280 who lasted for 10,000 years in some portion of Africa, with as Jessie pointed out a wider gene pool than probably any random 1,280 people you pick out of, say, a stadium of football fans, or at the theater watching ‘Hamlet’ or any one neighborhood in any city in the world, or any Amazon tribal gathering. Perhaps tribes don’t gather to the size of 1,280 people though, so scratch that one. The point is the amazing lost tribe phenomenon of 1,280 people, average, for about 10,000 years are everyone’s literal ancestors, and wouldn’t you like to meet one or more of them to say hello, how are you?! Thanks, good should, for whatever and how much of whoever you may be, you gave to it, for it, from it, for me, in the end. The very end. Thanks! Zardoz laughing in the sky. Schedule that Zardoz viewing with Chris for next week sometime, will ya? I’ve got to get this movie making weirdness, that eats at me, onto the ground somehow, step by grueling step. Like facing myself into a hall of mirrors. Aaaah! That could be the first shot of my narcissistic disemboweling John Wilson/Sherman’s March type movie. The one that’s supposedly about: can I make a short movie cuz I’m turning into an old man before my very eyes and thank god I’m settling down with a beloved, even whilst weeping inside about all those left behind, who already went to join the great behind, the one with the lost tribe in the sky. Jeb most of all, my brother, with Richard right next to him. The main thing to think about is how we are all interchangeable parts on this human scale march through time, a thought around which so many have tried to put their hearts and minds. And so many haven’t, the lead procrastinator in chief being ol’ Trump-head himself, the proverbial turd on a stick if there ever was one. I’ve been known to lay a ripe one often enough, but that guy! He needs an exorcist, basically, on a different scale. Could it be on the scale of the media, of the movies and the music and internet? Perhaps. We shall see.
On the topic of said culture war: I’m intrigued by the word/concept ‘thirst trap’ and I think its probably women or men dressing in very revealing clothes, like the two at Stupid Baby’s. Prancing about, I looked and didn’t look. I suppose I wanted eyes, really, so thats the point, like daggers to the heart, where does the soul lie? Mine is with Jessie, right? Yes, my soul is with Jessie and I’m a whore of Babylon, in my way, proudly. I like to dress the way I dress and I’m sure, like Naas said “You’re a hot Dad” in a text. She wants to find a ‘hot Dad’ or somebody! of her own she goes on to explain. These endless texts she leaves for me sometimes with occasionally Colin or Zack chiming in with their remarks. And today might get together with her at the Rittenhouse Art Fest, a harmless moment I’m sure.

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

where is the leader?

     Can anyone be a leader in this? Waiting for love and the Goddess? They said they'd be right around but the boys are trying to waylay them. Its a set up but don't fall for it. Just let em rip, rock n roll. Growl if you have to. Take it back then and throw three pinches over yer shoulder.

    Counting money is the worst. Trying to get my other self, the hiding self, to do it is wack. Need to get fascistic about it, extreme, worse than a king, a boot heel, a driftable. That's right a 'drift-a-ble', which can take off at any second, run away, corrode, fall off or even surge. Like a tidal wave and a South Jersey beach, or better yet a rocky cliff, the ocean and a lighthouse.

    Emanations. Microscopic galaxies, novas and many black holes, the drivers for all of this, our earth but a temporary illusion of space-time, a heaven of our own creation. Yes we need a creed emerging from dynamics beyond our control. Embrace the creed as it embraces you, a movie, a song, a drift-a-ble.

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Truth Teller

 Truth teller I may not be

but occasional insights I get

and then I work very hard

in between. Cover me with sensation

and there may be hope emerging

from that turgid swamp.

The fact of my kids' teacher

telling my ex that the kids

shouldn't stay with me

(and her dad had been alcoholic too

so of course she knew)

this breaks my heart

even still. I'd quit by then.

Not to mention

the story of my younger brother

and the ways it's beyond

comprehension to people

of another era, which is almost

everyone by now - many have

died already from my own

little nugget of truth: four kids

born like a litter of shaggy pups

between '56 and '61, before

the Cuban missile crisis and

JFK getting shot dead but

during McCarthyism and of course

'On The Road' getting published,

that guy's got a beat and 

he doesn't really know it.

But all the little people heard it

and got the beat too

and suddenly could talk about Art

and learn something about America.


I guess my Mom didn't mean

it, to scream like that, at the sky

and at us, like there never would

be an answer (and there

never was) but for Hartford

Connecticut, they know about

insurance, big squat buildings,

and Mark Twain with

two chimneys going round

the window so he could watch

the snow fall outside

with his fireplace below.


My sister went to her,

a certain configuration, but

I was frozen in boyish guilt,

younger brother a little off to the side.

I could and can feel the memory

being made the way

a typewriter key slams

on a page of nothing

and then the next key

if I learn to just put

my fingers on the right spots

and then return to rest

for a sec between words.

Texting vaguely brings this

back every time.

Talking is mostly painful

so I've decided to memorize

some Dylan Thomas and

Diane DiPrima tho Diane's 'Rant'

is a bit long for me:

"You cannot  write a single line

without a cosmology,

a cosmogeny."


And my sister hugged her

like water on a campfire,

when you're ready to 

throw your backpacks on

and get down the trail.

And now I kiss her on the lips

when entering her 92 yr old

abode, some cheap though tidy

apartment in small town

Western Mass, with an old

fashioned work wear store

up the street that calls

quietly to me, at least I can

build something nice, a home

for someone, if I've got some

Carhartts on. And wool sox

in winter, the real wool kind.

What my brother, the younger one,

needed or he wouldn't have built

a campfire in the abandoned frat

with Guitar Dave in Austin, Texas

near U of T and got thrown in jail

and died, yes these are the stories

the desparate tell, once clouded

in that skin, can we ever stop

explaining about America, X,

mental health and whiteness

and addiction and 'Death don't

have no mercy, in this land',

once we get past Barbie

and 'Over the Rainbow'?

Hourglass figures and mushroom

clouds. Mount Blue and

all the colorful mushrooms

on that steep and rocky trail

last week. Jessie and I

just knew we had to do it,

once we figured out, halfway

up how hard it was.

So many places to which

I can never go back

but a few

I'd like to.




 

 

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

To be blessed by the world


 

To be blessed by the world!

During the start of the apocalypse. The slow one.

The One.

The very slow one.

Maybe I can slow it down by ignoring it. But I can't stop it, the dripping ooze.

One slow drop at a time. It hurts to watch it. One drop of glacier ice water at a time,

the antarctic melts out of sight. One deathly drop at a time.

I'm just in too much of a hurry, I suppose. We should sit and play some cards.

Watch for kings, queens and aces. Try to win something.

Maybe it's time for a return to Da Da, or pub rock. The senseless but at least exteriorizing.

When words don't matter, any words will do.

Because, does anyone want to know what's happening at ground level?

A few perhaps. The friends know, because they hear it in my voice.

The strangers don't know. Will they stick around long enough to find out?

The creakings and farts and sighs, the envy and drilling and recesses, the drippings,

the boiling, the occassional success story of a lifetime. The proud father.

I only want singular relationships, I've decided. That's it. Since I've fallen in love, and its worked out, I'm seeing the advantages of not being single anymore but singular relations.

One person at a time.

Which is how death sneaks in. Death is

the bones of all, our bones are the rock

formations of our bodies,

the crust of the planet. The minerals feed

everything, life is energized by the sun to work the minerals

into new forms. And our bones dance

us through time in similar fashion until

they can't any longer.

When death has become singularly all,

but before then attention is always singular.

A detail here, a detail there, it only adds up by accident

or accidently on purpose, no one knows what they really mean,

when life is but a dream.

Row row row your boat gently down the stream,

merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a D.R.E.A.M.

But fortunately or unfortunately

we don't meet in a dream, we meet in R.E.A.L.I.T.Y.

Where there are singularly two elements only it seems

at times: pain & pleasure.

And numbness. So bring on

the numbness, the emptiness, the nihilism,

the big clampdown. I once fought back against

the big clampdown but I'm tired and old now.

My bones are old, I need new marrow.

One person at a time, dance with me.




Monday, April 17, 2023

Finger Bone

     Putting little balls of ink

down, one after another.

    The shards develop in the

dark room, if we have faith.

    We see growth in the light

when people gather.

    Talking wasn't easy and

then it got harder.


    Take a breath, do some

reading, even Dracula had to talk.

    A travelogue, a map,

a diagram, trigonometry nerds.

    They gather together by

feel without need for faith.

    But light erupts along

with cool rain, rivers, delight.

 

    So yes I stopped answering

phone calls and taking deliveries.

    They all dropped such weight

like likes and other samenesses.

    The boring vision of death

a skeleton with it's hand out.

    Each finger bone a knotted

    dream.

Thursday, April 6, 2023

Thumbsucker

    Even the role of parent is a performance. A game of pretend. Try to make it til you can retire before sorting it all out, if you can. Because it’ll take you down, if you’re trying to focus on work. Or trying to focus on a primary relationship. Trying to be in love, feel the love. Is it possible to feel the love whilst maintaining composure in the face of chaos?
    I think it’s possible that my fall from grace was quite early and caused the thumb sucking. The thumb sucking, an oral fixation, started before I have any memories, and continued til I was 6 or 7. My father, a social worker in the sixties, in Mantua, the black neighborhood next to ours, had hired a housecleaner and she was the one who told me to stop. He’d not wanted to hire a house cleaner because he thought perhaps it was demeaning (somehow I’d heard the conversation and it stuck with me), but she needed the money to raise her family. Like any kid, I could tell when someone is a mother and she was definitely checking me out. She said to me straight to my face one day, in the living room near the stairs, that I needed to stop sucking my thumb. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I got the distinct impression as children do that she could see plainly that my parents did not care enough about us kids, and she was going to be the firm mother raising the bar of expectations for me. Its almost as if I could see through her eyes for a split second down a long corridor that stretched fore and back and she saw my mother struggling to raise us four kids, the youngest a runt and yet ignored. As I felt also ignored, thus the thumb. So she was being a mother of all time, so to speak, and actually was quite concerned about my future. She wanted me to know that I could be someone someday. She saw me for real like no one else saw me and I was flattered. I heard all that, what she saw, in the tone of her voice, like kids can do, and I stopped sucking that beloved phallus, in psycho-analytic jargon, instantly. It’s as if the momentary feeling of comfort in suck suck sucking fell away, melted and went down a piss hole into the earth, swirling like a toilet as it went.
    Though, as Buddhist’s know as well as Lacanians, the cravings always return in multiple and different forms, like a monster under the bed, or the perfect shirt to wear on the Amazon website. Or another story from the Guardian to read while doom scrolling about how glaciers in the past can recede from the land much faster than expected: up to 2,000 feet a day which must be loud as Christ on a stick. Evidently there’s ripples in the rock beneath the ocean that satellites can photograph and as a glacier as big as the UK moves, it leaves tracks, ripples in the rock. How ingenious these scientists.


    But just like that Christ nailed down finally, us people nowadays can also learn to channel, it’s just a matter of what you do with it. It can drive you literally crazy, partly crazy, a little bit crazed and slobbery, or one can learn to talk with others and share the insights. Everybody channels, sees the past and future and hears the voices traveling back and forth. What do you think music is, why a hook is so frucking grabby? Or a movie made from a comic based on a story in someone’s head, the superheroes could be archetypes.

 


Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Discussion, negotiation with the Ancestors

The weight we carry is

like ghosts of the past.

Me: my mother screaming

to the sky

consolidated it all for me:

her grandmother knew she 

couldn't have another kid, no money

(my mother told me recently)

and died terribly in that illegal abortion, 1906,

she wanted everything

for my grandmother and her sister.

But my mother thought she could do it 

but was wrong, she couldn't

handle it without the village,

the village we never had growning up, or we had

but kept leaving it all behind.

My Dad carrying the weight,

the Kansas sun where everything grows so tall,

born to devout parents also both footloose

but settled in Florida, another tropical country,

so far away from Greenich Village,

though Carl Sandberg did come to visit

Winter Park once and sang songs all night long.

A justice warrior, the town of Eakinsville a few miles

away (the only African American incorporated town

in America) my grandmother campaigned against

the KKK (remembering bloody Kansas?)

and her sister Theresa was a missionary in Africa.

So my father became a civil rights worker

at Quaker work camps. His father

an unknown poet & teacher,

(rhyming was out of style)

must of felt anger caged in,

he says they didn't get along

and he ran away a few times

to Uncle Warren's (who became a corporate

lawyer in DC later and gave me 10 dollars

in a wallet, but I didn't keep it).

The intensity glowing I picked up on it somehow,

went to Fla to live at 20 years, to live in that house,

all the books and orange trees,

my Grandmother like an angel combing

long grey hair 100 times every morning.

A little log cabin out back

where I'd read my Whitman.

I wanted to breathe the air

in that haunted house but went crazy

from Woodrose seeds in my belly, floating,

and just had to come back to Philly.

To Richard and Maria and our nothing to do

life but carry that unknown weight.


'Change the world' means nothing comparitively.

Am I seeing already in only a few pages

of the Murakami book 'Dance, Dance, Dance"

what he means?

Everyone is born into the weight they carry

choosing rightly or wrongly,

smelling it out at a young age.

And then later, looking back

can discern that weight

and how they chose to carry it.

Its not about being someone at all.

Its about carrying well.

That moment in a backyard cemented a deal

between the sky and me, my little brother

I now see, watching me watch my sister

go to mother screaming and comfort her.

This is the last piece in the puzzle:

my mother relating to me recently,

oh about a year ago, that

her father and mother fought a lot,

terrible fights i discerned from between

her words.

I don't think she reconciled with her father

(a terrible bone cancer, painful, during

the end of her college years), because

she doesn't see she might

reconcile with me about the weight.

Doesn't notice within my words.

Reconciliation Needed should be

the title of this poem.

That's my family for you,

holding the weight 

UP.

My father perhaps the best

with deep prayer. But he's the least

with connected thoughts, or ideas. The best way

to think of it is as

if every family is haunted

by the past decisions of the ancestors.

Not a bad thing if there's some conversation there

that holds water.

Anger as daggers growing

in my feet, claws that want to propel

me for miles, spring loaded calves

good for my tai chi floating. 

I float to dream.

Like our cats have claws

in all four limbs

I've been having a cat fight with the living Earth

for too many years, I want to ride here on out

like Sumi rides on my shoulders, she's queen

of me when she's riding my horse.

We float together from room to room.

Looking for the weight of purpose,

the kitchen holds it all, my appetite

is too much, especially when I'm in the rocker,

watching tv, commenting on the plot,

detective series, not sure how many episodes

are left. The cleanest ones start with

a dead body and the detective is interrupted

from their daily mundane,

or perhaps from sleep.

But at least perhaps the horrible violence

has already been done, but perhaps not.

and so the weight like a point in time

and a wave form perhaps seemingly from nowhere.

And some say that tragedy is how humans learn,

always the wound, someone's opening another

Pandora's box right now.

The lesson of not getting along.

I was a long distance runner

as a kid training for this.

Large heart capacity to span

the generations of faces.


And so when I look into Jessie's face

I see her seeing depths

she doesn't know yet.

No one knows their own face,

what it holds, the people they've seen

who've seen beloved faces who've seen

faces.

Fooled by motion pictures to think

that person knows, we watch them endlessly

NOT know yet what they know.

We wish to help them hold it all and should be

helping ourselves. I help Jessie, she already helps me hold

it all and put it down, a stone bench

in the back yard for Jeb, my younger brother

who has passed on.

Weight and purpose, my brother

and her husband, seriously.

We can say the words 'death' or 'passing',

'left us', the 'great beyond'. I saw

how light hearted Richard was

before going on, the day before

the day before the morning of. His 

last words something like

'That Sue, she's a good one.' to the nurse,

and no we're not afraid

of talking about the ancestors

looking down over us,

the only ones who have earned their opinions.

The most difficult task to discern and

then to talk about, the ancestor's commands

on a sunny day in Hartford.

I should change the name of this

long form poem then.


Wednesday, January 25, 2023

What Kids Do

 Feels like forever is settling down.
The cold has a hard edge to it.
The Good Son is angry and cold.
Like a fist of ice. The Good Son tried so hard.
He was spanked and his mouth was washed out with soap
for saying 'motherfucker'. And my hair gets cut so I look like
a marine. Flat top, the machine mowing its way up the back
of my neck. Then my friend tells me he is different because
of the color of his skin while he shows me his hand,
his brown hand. I don't know what to say, I feel shocked.
And still don't except 'motherfucker'. I still see Vernon's face
looking at me. My parents are standing over me, before,
and their legs are so long. I know they are the power.
And I am not, or am I?
 
We don't see our cat Kitty, for a few months and
in the spring I'm crawling under the front porch
on Baring Street and find Kitty, stiff, leaning
against the house and I know she was trying
to get warm in her last long moments.
I got my little brother and some friends and 
we did a burial in the backyard, because I 
knew that's what kids do.

I went back to that backyard a couple years ago
because my friend was renovating the house,
and he needed some help carrying a gigantic
I-beam from the truck. We stood around
waiting for the truck, it was stuck in traffic
for a while.