The Staten Island Requiem

for Nancy

INTRODUCTION

This rather lengthy prose poem was written in the months just prior to and following 9/11. I make no excuses for its somewhat fragmented and miasmic form. I have found no way since the time of its composition to get it into a shape more congenial, even to such readers as it will find. I have excised a few passages, abbreviated others, but added nothing since the date posted at the end.

BP

NOTE: I am republishing this piece here again which, in the light of recent events, seems apropos. Again, I have made no further revisions but certainly intend to. It is very difficult to go near this material with a blue pencil due to the nature of inspiration: one feels the removal of one little piece will bring down the whole edifice. For this I make no apology.

BP 5/2/11



I.
LACRIMOSA
(Remembrance, Prophesy, Purple Prose, Kvetching)


Who Goes

People are dying, people are dying. No. Dead. Some, anyway, a recent. Then two in progress. One going now slowly, or rather in little bursts of incremental decay. Goes to the hospital. Returns. Goes back. Comes home. Refuses to return, then must at some point if it progresses too far. Reasonably young for so much disintegration. Another is simply old and flying apart like an exploding planet in slow motion. Bits of memory go. They fly off slowly into space, never to return. Where does all this stuff finally stick? I mean, is there a ceiling to it at last where the bits come to rest, sort of squashed like gum under seats to be scraped off later by the janitors who redeem them at anthropology stations, where men of science access it all somehow, employing scanners and other expensive looking instruments? What? Does anyone know? Doctors? All they do is test and prescribe. Poisonous drugs which either send you to zoom land or make you throw up. Then too all the support systems of surrounding responsibility junkies. (That's a great term invented by a religious friend.) What to do? What to do? There is so much potential for death. Then the actual event and cleaning up after it. Everyone exhausted, dysfunctional (why is that allowed to be a word?), much time spent just lying in bed staring at the ceiling, maybe looking at the pieces of gum. That's all. Just pieces of gum to them now. Meaningful to anthropologists, but only later, as I say. Did I say that? Later? Maybe. Doesn't matter. We should stop. Time bought is at an end. Remember to take your meds.



Who Remains

All she wants is a time of deep sleep,
a time of not knowing she is there
because while she is awake
she is sick.
That's all she knows then,
except for memories.
That's what she talks about with people.
Well, too,
a decision she says she has to make
to either let herself just die
or stay alive
(she says)
for others.
To undo herself from her feeder
so that she can die in peace.
Either that
or go on in an agony of fevers,
not even knowing who is there or not there
while she yet remains.

. . . and yet as she dies
she so much more gravely lives.
Brave sister,
brave, brave kindred,
Warrior,
Mother,
Maid.




the piece formerly known as
"Peace in the Valley"

. . . midsummer, 2001


-1-

The golf course is empty. The gophers have inherited the golf course, hopefully the earth as well. See that one out there, poking around? He's unafraid, he's taking the air like some former jogger, now a guy carrying around a breathing apparatus and using a walker. Gopher's here, though. The guy with the oxygen tank is, alas, mixed up with all the rest of the meltdown . . . No, it wasn't the famous nuclear holocaust once feared; things just got so disgusting they simply popped in various ways, caved in, you know, crashed and burned, drowned in their own vile secretions. The world ended, not because of war or the burden of peace but just because it came to term. A Spenglerian demise, if you will. This is what I mean by Peace in the Valley here. Life without US. Life without THEM. The Valley I refer to specifically is the one we used to call the Silicon. No one lives there now. (Hey. No one ever lived there. They just went through the motions very quickly in a kind of pixilated insect dance, you wanna call them steps dancing). Anyways, they are gone now, and their works slowly perish. The black glass slides down into the ground and becomes a smooth, reflective surface, a hard black lake nothing swims in. The birds come down and skate along like those fool surfers of yore. They give up on such lakes. No fishing here, guys, only our own reflections against a backdrop of sleazy looking clouds. Gone, all gone. Just wasn't a need for it any more. The universe got tired of it. So, arrangements were made somehow so that people went away. Birds remained, and dogs -- hell, fish and fowl, fools of all species, but no more the Wise Monkey . . . You know, the dinosaurs were used up and so they went down, leaving interesting bones behind (fuel, too, quite useful in the war effort). Us, we left mostly crap: wrappers, plastic containers, PCs and TVs and Video players. The stars shine on a junk yard which one day will be pretty, a sort of variegated mess of fusing and defusing chemical compounds and alloys and miraculous plastics, and the sea shall wash up on all this, over the centuries fabricating of it strange new shapes and poetic, mirage-like fantasies, and avians will fly by, as stated, they'll shit upon it because that's all it's good for; I mean, it won't yield up any provender, won't provide a bath, the surfing sucks, maybe it's art but what do birds need with art? and even these birds will say "Fuck you!" to the stingy little shits who didn't leave em diddly. Then still the malevolent graffiti getting vaguer all the time, the fancy spray painted expletives and gang icons all flowing into abstract arabesques of receding definition . . . A mess, huh? And yet poetry of sorts, impressionist they call it, only they forgot just what it was they were looking at when they got started to blurring words together in a droopy, soft focus scan dance . . . Hey, you get this flash, dig? drunken steppers in a smoke filled room, they sort of drape over each other and move in a kind of fuckaduck way to droop tunes, funky-groovy whore house piano, repetitious twelve bar blues you can't get out of your head, it from the stone bummer times, bro, you member? Kiss em off and gladly. Hey, kvetching? Who cares enough to kvetch? This is fantasy, and maybe even wishful thinking of a kind . . . But listen. The phone won't ring again. No. Not ever. Still you get an answering machine going off at random, maybe having acquired sentience enough to experience longing, for longing is IT. Buddhist construction, but fuck you, you can't take a joke. That's gone, too, by the way. The Buddha of our era, long dead, cannot pass on his lineage of the Truth of Suffering and Impermanence. Ppppppt! Raspberry! No longer needed. Check it out. It is empty. Luminous and empty. Better than ever, the best yet, thou world without end.

But let me tell you something. It's an idea I have (yeah, uh-oh!). You got your empty, right? The world is without form and void. Or the other way around. No matter. Heh heh. So, you've got the world which is void and without form, and then -- AND THEN:


-2-

. . .well, I was a guy sitting on a little terrace out on Staten Island. A summer day, mild for late July, don't you think? I hear birds, and I see a church tower, trees, back yards and the roofs of houses, a squirrel furtively crosses the street below, sniffing. Somebody's got a hot tub down there, just like back home in Californee. Starting to relax here. The universe begins to set, the drugs kick in, ho, whoopee! Soon I'll be ready to begin life as another guy in another time, lost to the former dream which drifts away and away and away, maybe it further pollutes that harbor out there on the other side of the flat. A new day, a new sadness. Folks are still dying, a man sleeps a troubled sleep in the next room over. But there is, briefly, peace. In this Valley, too. Peace. Have you ever loved, have you ever lived, have you ever died? Oh, you will some day, bubber. For now, though, rest, for it is the seventh day. The sixth, really, however the Jewish Sabbath and therefore the Seventh, so there, wise ass. There. Or:



Dawn. New York Harbor, looking out from the west side terrace of the same flat in Staten Island. Hell, maybe I live here, I don't know. There's Brooklyn, where my father was born, and majestic Manhattan, asserting itself slowly out of the haze. A lone fishing boat motors merrily before three snoozing ships, it's close in to the shore by the Coast Guard base. Yonder, I can just see Liberty herself, barely differentiated from the nest of skyscrapers behind her . . . and smaller. A gull squawks. Radio blares as a car sweeps by on the street eight floors below. Now some other sad bird wails and seems to wake all the rest, the twittering ones, the chippers and squeekers and squalling sportsfishers . . .

I never really hated America, although I pretended to. I've come to admit that I love her even, over the years, as I've gawked in awe at her imperious mountains -- the Sierras, the Rockies . . . Rivers, too: the Hudson, and of course the mighty Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico, where it is a wide and gently flowing thing, then up further, approaching Chicago, where from a plane you'd swear you were looking down at one of the Great Lakes, maybe even some undiscovered sea. Finally, crossing a bridge from greater Minneapolis into what the students at the U call Dinky Town, it's barely a creek at times. I have seen dawn at Marpa point, high up in Colorado; seen Moby Dick's open in the morning from a cheap hotel in downtown Minneapolis, taking note of the huge billboard way the hell across town mounted above some vast drug emporium announcing: WE WILL FILL ANY PRESCRIPTION FROM ANYWHERE, ANYTIME . . . hmmm . . . digging out my empty codeine bottle . . . I've seen a world destroying desert from a leaning porch in Bishop, California, seen lakes by turns like turquoise and gold as the day progressed, seen the Atlantic and the Pacific and the dead sea of Utah. I've watched over the years as Hollywood Boulevard was transformed from a street of dreams to the main drag of the skids. There was a theatre called the Egyptian, where I first saw Ben Hur. Last time I rode past it in a bus full of burnouts it was showing a couple of skin flicks. America. It moves on, mutates. Much of it is owned by faceless Mabuses who show no allegiance to any nation state. In California, where I usually live, people of color outnumber the whites, even though us Caucasians still pretend that we are the People.




And yet another dawn. The neighbors all dead asleep or dead or asleep, the tugboat crawls and smokes, is emblazoned with lights like brass buttons, and a bird repeats the same zither whistle, another chips, another flutes, and the dawn of the work week rattles in -- well, not quite rattles; it makes the sound of a pressurized airliner cabin in flight . . . Then a car starts and heroically -- no, not heroically, nice but wrong -- , noisily creeps, another grinds up to a start, oinks off, one goes skulking below and turns away, and the tugboat still approaches with its black plume, its burnished lights, now turns slowly left, goes, goes away, good, fuck off. Some kind of electric saw or generator kicks up a ruckus. Birds say Hey, go for it, good morning, schmuck! And the zither slides and narrows to a squeal, a pelican pukes, a poor boy hovers at the door to some dumb charity, while the smooth harbor waters are not quite smooth but like some taut foil reflecting light of a color almost blue yet bronze, also, blue and gray and gold and with patient hatch marks of ripples and that sort of pre-boil motion of all waters, even at rest. Sad, sad, sad. My wife had said, "It's too hard." And I could not relieve her of the burden no one should carry. No one can. No matter what her dreary Buddhist friends told her, no one, no one should carry nor even try to lift such a burden from another. They had come in with their dirty cushions and candles, their bells and beads and drums, looking all tired and pious. I ran out of there as if they were a crew of fumigators or rug cleaners. Went to the maritime park with my brother-in-law, whom I plied with Valium and told him to get laid. "Let's both get laid, in fact," I says. "Let's approach that young lady over there and ask her if she would suffer two entries simultaneous like." He laughed, "Come on!" dismissing me for the old joker that I am.

. . . no one should put up with it. That's not bravery or nobility or some Roman kind of virtue but sort of the flip side of our general solipsism, another expression of me-ness and mine only, the rest n'exist pa.


But look. A ship with a saint on top, or even Jesus, his arms spread wide in benediction. Who asked him? Really.



* * *


I said, -- out loud -- "I'm so tired of all this dreary dying I could die for you all myself! "


* * *


All the boats out there look like the Statue of Liberty, somehow. When I was a kid I used to say, "Let's play Statue of Liberty!" I don't know what I meant. I don't know what the point of the game was, and I couldn't tell them when they'd ask how you played it. I just raised my arm and held out my torch, thinking they should understand. Now the Statue of Liberty is the last thing you see as the fog rises these mornings. First comes the big tall towers of the . . . what's it? Taller than the Empire State where old King Kong got his. Taller than the tallest. Not even Superman can jump over these two strutting symbols . . .




II.
DIES IRAE


The Friday Night Fights

We had this fight there in the pizza place on McArthur Blvd. in Oakland, CA, my brother-in-law and me. It was a Friday night, I remember, but a long time ago, around 1976, I think. Yeah, right, the Bicentennial Year. Another life, another wife, another brother-in-law. And he kept telling everyone, "Sorry, we were having this fight. We didn't mean to disturb you."

And later, back at the apartment, the law student came down. Why, I don't know. Perhaps to bear witness to the Law, to affirm it as meaningful, even in this instance.


"We just had a fight, you see," my brother-in-law told him. It seemed important to him that everyone should know. Somehow that settled it, to tell about it, to say that it happened. He too was bearing witness. He too was a law student, although not attending such a fine school as our neighbor because, as he would have it, he was not a nigger. I did not mention that Mr. Bolt from upstairs would never suffer a racial slur of this kind, being very pale. Also fat and with rather peachy cheeks when he smiled, which was often.

OK. So we had this fight in the pizza place. We were just drunk and I said the Law won't help us in our difficulty with my wife's, my then wife's, being fired from her job. I said the Law is a Mafia. It pissed him off. Disproportionately, I felt. He grabbed me by the shirt and began to speak in some strange current argot, calling me names in it. People all over the room looked at us. Finally I began to eat his hands, or rather pretend to. I just grabbed them and dipped them in the sauce still left on my plate and before he could even think to resist I began to sort of gnaw on his hands, and with apparent gusto. This was the only way I felt that I could stop him from talking like that because he wouldn't when I just asked him. Then I began to laugh when he yanked his hands away from me, and in doing that he splattered someone's nice dress with the sauce, I remember. She pretended not to notice. Her date ignored it, too. Then he bashed me one. Because I was laughing about it, I guess. And there was silence. Even the music stopped. That bubble-gum rock music they played in some pizza places then. No, wait; it was the Strauss fanfare that Kubrick used in that movie, the one with the slabs that changed everything. The bubble gum was before and after, as per, as with everything, History. So that's when he began telling all the people that we were having a fight. He wanted them to know it . . . The evening settled into a blur after that. I know we went back to the apartment. The law student came down and visited awhile, listened to the story about the fight, then went back up stairs -- to get his Koran or something; he never came back. Meantime my brother-in-law fell asleep on the couch.

"That was a shitty thing you did," my wife said, and she huffed away into our bedroom.

I went out on the porch and smoked. I took my glass of wine with me, too, even though I knew that I was going to have a hangover from what I'd drunk already that night. What's more, my wife had put away the pain pills. She'd hidden them from me so that I would suffer.


None of this mattered, though, because it would just keep on happening, things like this. Until they stopped and something else went on and on. I smoked and drank my wine. My jaw would hurt in the morning, even though he hadn't hit me very hard. Right now, though, I was feeling no pain. Could be it was one of the better moments of my whole life. Because something was over with and nothing else had begun yet.



Where You Shine

There's this guy used to be a friend of mine,
nice to everyone he knows.
He loves his wife and his mom and is dad and his dog,
helps out the neighbors, too.
He's good for a touch,
he'll spot you to a beer.
A mensch, right?
He pays his bills,
comes to work on time,
all that,
maybe more.

****

But you know,
you got some little thing you're hiding;
some sheltered light,
or even a darkness you must enshrine . . .

****

Well, a guy's a guy.
We all have teeth --
and we're raised to keep an edge.
So what's to make this one unique?
is my point here.

****

And so he gets a look at what you got.
Maybe you even let him in on it:
You say, I've got this thing, or
Take a look, OK?
Am I a fool for love or what?

****

Or you don't even show it.
You keep it to yourself.
But he suspects you're on to something fine --
Juicy, fragile, silent,
Whatever --

****

And he takes a bite out of it;
tastes,
considers,
chews some and spits it out.

****

That's what he does to you.

****

And he says, Come on, I'll spot you to a beer.

****

OK.
He's just a guy.
I guess I should forgive him.
Wouldn't I do the same?
Haven't I?

****

I guess he's just a guy.
But is that nice?
Getting you where you shine?

****

Even so,
you forget it.
You have a beer with him,
several over the years,
and with guys just like him,
who do the same thing.

****

You keep forgiving,
Forget about it, you remind yourself.
Maybe you do the same thing.
You get them where they shine.

****

But these things mount up.
They keep accumulating.
You lose a little each time,
and gain something you don't want.
Maybe it is only the darkness you enshrine.


****


After the Peace

Trapped in here, counting my blessings while I wait. There's been something, a noise then a falling, but we don't have earthquakes. Dust in the nose, dust in the eyes, light but it's only a blur and unspecific in its source. Almost no sound, none, maybe coughing. What fell? Is anyone on top of me? It doesn't feel like a person. Mainly no pain. That's one. Two, I can breath. I think I can see but who could tell in this? Third, I'm where I belong. I could barely stand up when this happened. Two days without pills and I was so tired that I could do almost nothing but huddle up in a chair, maybe look at some TV. All I did was sit, anyway, admit people in through the gate. Occasionally answer the phone and hear a recording. At the best of times I did almost nothing but at least there was that sense of well being that comes with three pink capsules and the tiny yellow pill with a good tall kaffelate chaser. But that's gone, too, now. And well being with it. Still a chance. This could end, as all things must, but there are different sorts of time, geologic for instance. Of course I could masturbate, I can reach it. Another blessing. I don't know why we used to count them, certainly not now -- in the geolsogic sense the meaning has eroded so, been washed over by waters so long it's lost its vigorous contours and we just slip over it like the water ourselves, counting nothing, just counting, perhaps to ten in the Zen style then back again to one. So ten blessings allowed, masturbation being number -- turn back -- can't find it -- four, maybe. Reach down and grab the boy, rub gently and imagine various dirty girls, brunettes who roll their eyes and smile while they suck it, or tits wagging under you, a mouth wide, gasping, screaming finally, it makes you come, too. In the debris somewhere. There's so much to clean up who's gonna worry about a little slime? There's an example of an extended blessing. You can prolong these things until you're screaming for mercy. I haven't before because I am prudish. Self release is somehow -- I don't know -- not right -- you could get to like it (going in unto thy brother's wife and spilling it on the ground, lest that you should give seed to thy brother . . . ) so that you no longer belong to the shared life of the tribe, or even just one other. You're trapped inside yourself like here, which is the perfect symbol for masturbation. No contact, stuck, no one to love, nothing left, nowhere to go except you can build up an enormous repertoire of stimulating acts with the fingers in the way they go about playing with the boy and after a while finding that so pleasurable in itself that you don't have to imagine a woman or any kind of mutuality. Before I got down here I was already passive. I'd touch the woman, or lick her till she came, usually without too much enthusiasm, then let her give me a nice long blow job, instructing her as she went along. I found that more satisfying than a good long pumping. Getting old, you see. So there is that. More or less my condition anyway now made perfectly solid in life (still alive), by means of some misunderstood calamity, some would say Apocalypse but that's misused and romantic, also a worn stone. So many things are ruined and made meaningless by using the wrong word . . . Even so, this is perfect. There is symmetry. It's what you've always seen before you in a comfortably symbolic way now made objective; why, it's been "concretized", is what. Love that word. It's a college sort of term, English majorish. In fact I got it from an English prof, and even he used it with a certain irony. The perfect word at last, though, or rather a found situation it awaited and now perfectly fits. My thoughts thingafied. Put outside myself so they look back at me as things seen and seeing, I suppose, and I hope so, for then they too will get a laugh out of all this -- fuck them. "Fuck you, too!" they reply. Maybe with energetic gestures, the Italian one, or just the plain old American flip off. Imagine broken chairs and smashed lamp fixtures, copy machines, PCs, cash registers, all these thingafied things happily flipping you off. I mean, you've been running into them all these years and saying son of a bitch bastard fuck you and now they do it back. Not the point, really, but sort of a sub point, right? Or subsidiary theme. Point being, baby, I'm where I oughta be. Or need. Need to be. I said that to a friend once during my metaphysical days and he flew back at me with, "Ah, come on!" Never forgave me for it. Every time we talk on the phone (he lives in a distant city now, I think it's even still there) he reminds me, I mean when I complain about what this place has become. "Well, you know," he says wryly, "you are where you need to be." I can't blame him. Only now it's true, as I say. There are problems of course. Elimination is painful, and you must dwell in it. And food is out of the question. So far I'm not hungry and it's been hours -- perhaps a whole day. I suppose I could be dead. No, I am masturbating, also eliminating in a small way. I should have mentioned earlier that these two functions conjoined make my fear of -- what? -- narcissism? -- whatever -- less of a problem than I made it out to be. Need I say more?



* * *


Some hours later, I don't know, I'm out, anyway. Someone lifted something, some single piece, and there it was, sky, gray of course, either from smoke or my ruined eyes, because it is warm, I think, there are people, voices, a sort of bow-wow and clamor, much scraping of metal, huey blades, jack hammers jacking off and sirens, shit, what would we do without em? Someone is asking me, I don't know, a newscaster, no doubt cute, she sounds cute, I just can't understand her, I shake my head and then just let go with the peepee, (I can't do it very well in an inclined position, also forgot to mention that, didn't I?) and it goes down my front and warms it, then chills like a bastard. As if by angels a blanket is offered. I am where I need to be, I mouth, sniggering as best I can. The angel smiles, this I do know, for his teeth are vast as love, for love is, at least briefly, especially on days like this when you were sure it was the end, the last, what is prophesied and even believed by overeducated clerics who teach at prestigious universities. (The last days, he says, checking out the wine's bouquet, smoothing his Ralph Laurens.) But I believe it too at times, even less spectacular times. Amazing what crap we keep. Somewhere in the darkest corner of your mind lies poor old Santa Clause, all curled up and weeping.



* * *



Now what was is gone.

The corpses gather in the harbor, face up as if to say goodbye to the sun. Strange craft mull or meander while the subtly misshapen skyline lurks like a pile -- and when the bells come they linger, too. This is both exhaustion and expectation. There is only a vague wind. No surfin today, no fishin. The Coast Guard rides out like a knighthood while a big lubber of a ship with a stogey like stack leans slowly in towards the island here, getting a wave from the ghost of the house, maybe, if she's not gone on.
I certainly have, more and more of a ghost myself -- always somewhere else aloft or just left or on the opposite shore. Always just missing or just nearing the calamity already past when I get there. Not of life, barely in it any more. Away, absent, AWOL. Goodbye as I'm coming in. Sit down, we're just leaving.

Lonely?

Yes, but that's not always such a bad thing compared to what one must be in order to stay affiliated.

Even when death comes, wouldn't I rather have a of view of silent waters, a blasted city full of others gathered while I keep my own watch?

Or perhaps one with me.

One who knows.

Who is always here anyway and so one must be, as always, integral, solitary and unknown only to the Unknown.




* * *



abazabazabazaba

abazabazabazaba

We talk, communicate, share food, bananas, good thing, shameless and shocking, death in the same mouthful with chocolate chips as we face the windmills, the most dangerous game, yet the clouds above them say more. In a few deft knells the rain and the wind shall loose all fury of wind chimes, or our thespian sickups and threat of further lightning flashes over ever more involving hills (I say involving for their mystery, for what shouts, what lights up only reveals how cheap it all is, really, all our grand cancer, all our moments and cricket gasps). Gonnagonnagonna! Gonna do it, dude! Yaketty yak! We'll getcha back! Tear out my patch. Shut up the trenches one by one like mouths shutting their yaps at last

(under orders).

Shut up the doors, the coffins, the chapels to admit and release further marriages, to inflict hateful youth upon itself and then upon the youth of other nations when there is a wanted detumescence of a war at last,

a banner here,

a banner there.

What's it all about?

Well, whadaya got, charlie?

We'll crawl right under it and shoot from there until we knit some other up out of first philosophies, ideologies, idiot banners ready at last again for yet another end to be fought for . . .

O Aton, shine for us,

O Atom, shatter us.

I say shake, rattle and roll

sweet Jesus!

I say slay, Allah!

I say avenge me, O ye Tetragramaton.

You needn't introduce yourself,

who are forever nameless.

We know you by your blasts and ravishings and fallen angels who

tear down our infidel towers

which were raised in your honor at last,

a rubble of money stacked high to heaven,

then tipped over by a few trained dogs,

or by idiot ants dancing over dead ant bridges,

monkeys from heaven

denying it could be such as they

I compare these to.

Deny on, Nay Sayer.

Hurray! Hurray!

Hurray for Shiva,

Hurray!



* * *



Now you can't even see the goddamned thing, the one they struck -- or two, was it? -- seeing double monoliths, called a Center, not your famous Still Point but, well, Yin and Yang, baby, that's good enough for government work (what government?). It used to be the first to come out of the fog and say nothing, then the rest followed, nothing to say, just day, while the birds celebrated like all things living and the tugs howled and then all the rest joined in. To be alive is to shout. We blast dumb lumps to give them symbolic life, and this is the first act of war. It wears a veil to conceal hot lips, aims an UZI in your smug face, babe. It gives life, and conceals it. For war is yet another veil concealing others and yet others still requiring further obscuration. A flag is a veil, just as the warship is that raises it. A prophetic beard hides a mystery so dark we'll never see it, yet we'll prattle on and prophesy as if we hid a secret back of our own hot lips that ain't even good enough for kisses.




III.
OFFERTORIUM




Father and Son

-How's your peace of mind? my father asked. (This, too, from long ago.)

-I stay with the sun, I said, move west as all things must of necessity. The west is home at last, and there I leave off. That's the end, when it falls behind something westward: a tree, the spire of some church that stands night watch. The muddlers quibble where she rises nether side of the house. Fuck em. Those of the east and those who ape after them like Quixotic monkeys, for the east is a bejeweled jungle of entangling magics . . . Or a desert. Some of us even wanted to be mullahs or militant fools in white robes and turbans who carried religious rifles . . . and maybe we were bored when we began our great quest; more bored than angry with what we felt had betrayed us.

Ho! Lofty prose, and spoken just so back then, if you can believe it. Sometimes I composed my sentences carefully beforehand in a studied metric which brought irritated and confused expressions to my father's hangdog face. But sometimes a dismissive slap to my own. I was a young man, a boy, really. A boy with ideas. That's even worse than a man of that sort these days. That I can still write in a high fallutin manner is a bad sign.





Can This be Deadly?

But hey, you wanna fuck?

The woman does,

even if she doesn't say so.

("Does she need to?" quoth the Joker)

And I'll take her out for pizza, then I'll touch her hand too long or even her tit when we get back in the car later and she's collapsing into my loving sorrowful mournful arms, maybe even crying, sincerely even, tongues me on the cheek and reaches down for my johnson.

Sure we'll fuck

We'll watch the doors fall down and the tower struck by lightning.

It's on TV.

So we'll fuck while they do all that on TV.

We'll fuck in the car.

We'll fuck on the roof.

We'll fuck right there at the viewing,

With the cop's and fireman's wives and their chilluns watching, it's like a combination policeman's and fireman's ball in reverse, you might say


They'll watch it all burn while we fuckyduckydoo.

While the in-laws worry and wonder where we are

(well, fuck them, too, where do they think?)

While the jewels ashore rattle and crack,

twitter and twinkle,

Hey, Requiem aeternam

Just aporkin away while the old moon pelts us with his old joke light,

red sometimes even as he sinks in the dawn,

cussed thing.

It's even there in the daytime, just to muddle us and make faces.

Fuck him, too,

Man in the Moon.

He's another little tin god thought he made things up until he saw himself in a brighter mirror.

But arms, darling,

your sweaty arms,

your tits at my lips,

and a stubble I lick in your pits and a navel I swab out with a finger soaked in whiskey or a tongue and a cunt I lick then enter with my dick,

and I stay;

stay buried.

Dead.

Trying to pull a cross out of a rock,

I who am myself rock and what was a cock, wasn't it?

Didn't it start out like that?

As a cock?

Something.

I'm going.

I'm doing a last finish up.

Mop the cum from the floor and ceiling,

if you please, Felix.

Lick up my thoughts from the floor and ceiling and please

O swallow

swallow

swallow.



****



Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini






IV.
REQUIEM AND RECONCILIATION



Setting Slowly
(son to mother, mother to . . . )


-Mother, look at this, there's a plane just . . .

Well I'm a goner for sure. And good riddance, I say.

I set the house on fire. Not intentionally, mind you, I was just emptying some papers and the ashtray too which was full and I never do put my butts out right, I just sort of break the head off them and let it perish of itself. Sometimes though it just don't, it stays lit for a longer time than you'd think. So I did that. The whole house, which is wood. All of it. Riley built that house. Every day he was putting it together after he got home from the machine shop, and then his weekends too, which was sometimes only Sunday due to the war. My hair was burnt off during it. Somehow that's all. There was no blisters nor burns anywhere else. And that took it out of me first. I was obliged to live with Eula for a time and you know how she always hated me. All day long playing solitaire with that smug look. "You dumb old biddy. You was too stupid to smoke, I told you that when you begun. When you was twenty-nine years old! Hell of a time to start smoking, I says. What a dumb old useless biddy. And you never would love him any, neither. Your damn old mother took care of that for you when you was brought up so pure you couldn't even climax . . ." On and on and on like that all day long and playing solitaire. She thinks she's just queen shit. You want to know about dumb old biddies, well there you go. Giddy up!

-Looks like a war.

Her own husband left her for this skinny little bimbo from back east. Didn't even have no tits. When she got sloshed, sometimes she'd stand out on the porch, calling to him like he was a dog wouldn't come home for his supper. "Here, Max! Here, Max. Got your favorite fixins in the dish!" She'll end up like Mildred two houses down, eatin out of a doggie bowl, right there on the floor.

-Mom, it's a war. Another war.




Strategy such and such

And now I'll do it.

Yes I will.

Yes

I

will.



****


There is no choice there is no choice there is no choice


****

Face the strangers neat,

only dread on your breath.

Touch of the flu, you tell em.

Nothin to worry about, there's work to do.

We've got Mom to move

(talk her into it first

who's already unable to parse a straight imperative for long --

I see her sitting in a Captain's chair,

clutching at the arms like a strung out idol, saying,

Hell, no, I won't go!

I tell her, Well you've gotta.

There is no choice.)

-- gonnagonnagonna --

for this is all imagined.

It could be worse or better.

It could be nothing.

Just a room full of people,

making their sad plans.

An uncertain future of some pain for sure.

Yet once again

it will move from the corner of your eye

into the broad daylight of center stage to say,

"Surprise!"


****


Got you again, they did,

or they will.

They always do.




Closure

Strapped to a bed,

screaming.

That's how she said it.

Her second or third sighting,

the first of up front hell:

as a gap full of screams

--widening now--

so she too must scream.

Go on then, I told her,

go on and scream.

Join in,

as angels had in chorus

(she'd heard them the night before;

they'd actually harmonized impromptu).

Like that, I told her.

That's how screaming's done.

And later a friend said,

Now let the door close,

But visit from time to time

-- and briefly! --

so a scream won't sneak in

and steal a note or two,

reshape and falsify

the hymns you sing

to those hard of hearing,

those legion on line

and on the phone

fearing ends

even nearing.

Let them wait

until you are done screaming.





Amen
(with a sax solo after the Heart Sutra)


The first president of my generation was representative, maybe the top of our class, some might say. He just softened the focus a little to get into office -- didn't inhale, took the moral high ground at times when he didn't have a leg to stand on, cherished all the right (whoops! left) opinions, but he spoke softly -- and we didn't know he had a big dick I mean stick until later. But, also like many of us, he tried to come out for a little less self interest, keep us looking out for the other guy, moved weakly and shyly in place. But even to stay in place was a task -- maybe even a victory. I think a good man finally . . . basically, as we all are.


Yet we kept limping forward in our suicidal hubris, a pride resting on the big K, with all the patient little Joseph Ks (they are less nervous now, thanks to jogging and Prozak), inadvertently holding it all up . . .

But I'm babbling, not even blogging properly. This is a middle bar rap over a mid priced Chardonnay that I can only handle a couple of stemmed glasses full of these days because it doesn't mix well with my meds. But it is also the obligatory Amen we must say to end a Requiem.

I put my mother in a house (not a "home") with the help of two uncelebrated saints who, if I named them, would deny they were doing anything out of the ordinary. And my mother is at home, I think, for the first time in years.

The dead have moved on, one of them very quickly, for she had already been constrained by the small, frail machine of human emanation -- so she could keep whatever promise she made at the beginning of beginningless time to return again and again until all the others are as large as they already are and don't know it. A Buddhist view again. You want to give it a plaque for the door or to place on the desk where I put my feet while I'm doing business on the phone and nibbling at my slab of pizza (I remove the feet and unzip my pants for the rest of my winnings) . . . These high houses were put up by Ozymandias, the King of Kings, and we do look upon these mighty ruins and whimper.

Oh, there's more and more. I could say more. I am not finished (still above ground, at least, there's still a chance). But I'm one little voice in a big long argument, and this is when I go home and sleep it off, prepare for the next one, wake with a vague dread of further reprisals (for it is all reprisal, it goes back and back, Hatfields and McCoys, even unto the first sibling rivalry, although there can be no first when the snake's got his tail in his mouth, eh?), waiting for the roar of warplanes or the first symptoms or a big bang of some sort.

We must rest.

Rest now.

Lower the flag to half mast and leave it there.

To remember.

Hamlet, remember me,

yet do ye not avenge me.

Forgive.

Rest in your true nature

and go

go on

on beyond

and beyond the beyond

and the beyond.

Amen.


Last edited on 3/31/03