Dead Girls

The playing field is silent and all the dead girls are lying around in the playing field. The grass is so green it looks painted. There should be a sign that says WET GREEN PAINT. 

All the dead boys have left the playing field, left it smooth and green and empty except for the dead girls who sing:

Hearts of stone

doo-da-wop, doo-da-wop

They sing with their eyes closed and their mouths are shut tight as jars, jelly in the jars by God, strawberry jelly. What could be worse than strawberry jelly, you may ask, and I am telling you: go on and ask it: what could be worse than strawberry jelly?

And dead girls will answer; they will answer.

Dead girls are the answer to somebody's prayer. 

Maybe it's a dead boy who prayed. 

Or his dog named April the Dancer.

Maybe there never was a boy or a dog or any dead girls or even girls alive in the playing field.

Only prayers. Only prayers unanswered. 

Then again, maybe nothing at all. A bark without a dog, without a boy. Death without girls.

All, all, all and all is abstract, deathly algorithmic and at odds with life. 

And so good night. Been trying to say it all along.

Good night.

Good night. 

All I've been trying to say all along. 

And all the dead girls mist over, they mist over. As the dawn comes up all ruby and bruised, all the dead gils, they melt and sing:

Hearts of stone

doo-da wop

doo-da wop

Hearts of stone

doo-da wop

And all the dead girls resolve themselves into a dew upon the grass which makes the grass look painted, like wet green paint, and there is a sign posted there. WET PAINT, it says. So no one will walk upon the grass, upon the memory of dead girls; no one will walk the halls, looking for evidence, and as they do so lay tracks with logos at their centers, heavily scored logos with the words of a song inscribed. Perhaps it is the song  that the girls, the once dead girls now vaporous and gone to wet green paint, resolved into the dew of some morning, yet another morning, the song the dead girls were singing:

Hearts of stone

doo-da wop

doo-da wop

Hearts of stone

doo-da wop.

Still Waiting for Brain Death

When I came into the court my neighbor greeted me from the laundry room. She was always friendly, even though I didn’t encourage her.  Things happen, though. 

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said.  “Tired.” 

I stopped and looked at her. OK, she was a babe, I could dig her.  She dug me, too.

“I see you are doing your laundry,” I said.

She smiled and bit her tongue and looked all smoldering.  “Yeah.  Laundry.”

“I’m going to drink this wine,” I said.  I proudly held up the liter bottle I’d gotten on my way home from work, thinking to get blasted all by myself.  But now, you know . . . I said, “Do you want some?”

“Where’s your wife?” she asked coyly.

“Don’t have one," I admitted ...

Now I’m kissing her, I’m kissing her, the rest is erased.  She’s up in my apartment, she’s all over me. Her heavy thighs press against my ears. She screams when she comes. I enter her then.  What is her name? Maja? Majolie? She won’t tell me.  Before I come she takes me into her mouth.  She looks up at me when I finally do climax, making little bird sounds to the rhythm of my ejaculation, which is a jungle rhythm, make no mistake, it is joyous and bloody, and she says, “I just took some of your intelligence. Whenever I do that, you lose a little.  It’s why they call it a perversion.”

  

She was putting on her lipstick. “I feel disgusted with myself,” she said. She paused briefly to consider her words, then: “Perhaps that’s a good emotion for us to separate on.”  

She left.

*    *    *

We go to the beach.  She wears almost nothing.  You can see pubic hair sprouting out of her loose bikini bottom. Her breasts barely fill the top.  She is happy with them, though.  They form perfect cones and the nipples are hairy.  I like that very much, I find it sexy.  I like to lick them, even bite them.  She likes it, too.

She throws the towel over me and reaches inside my trunks. She laughs when I rise under the towel.  “Reminds me of my tent out in the Mojave,” she observes.

The life guard is watching us, his arms spread wide, as if to block those who would pass, who would arrest or interrupt.

The sky goes pink with the dusk.

*    *    *

Everything’s gone to hell at work.  I no longer attend to my patients, I let them slide into apathy, and they just go right on aslippin and aslidin along from there into the country of strokes and seizures, in some instances to be finally embraced by dirty old Death himself, with his razorblade smile and smack pinned eyes . . . I’ve stopped feeding the experimental fish, also.  They’ve risen to the surface of their tanks, bloated and unresponsive. I never did like those fish.  They gave me sour looks, or exhibited the sort of attention-getting behaviors which are lab fish giveaways every time: this renders them entirely unsuitable for deployment at sea. While the birds we keep, for which I am also responsible for reasons I’m still unable to fathom, have grown metallic sheathes, the lips of losers, guilty expressions and painted fingernails – these in place of their formerly militant beaks and fulsome foliage of feathers, so useful in the making of quill pens – hence they will swoon away with the East Wind, which blasts through the dining room window as if to liberate them, even though it is a non-ideological type wind, not symbolic; neither a religious wind, nor a wind inimical to religiosity but . . . look, just a wind, OK? And it blows like a motherfucker.  I like it, I’m digging on it.  Even so, the birds are not prepared for freedom and so must perish, but it’s good to see them acting like real birds for a change (already they’re starting to shed some of that neurotically adaptive growth . . .), even if it is only for an instant, because in no time at all, I fear, some murderous blue jay will make fast food of them.  And I ask, were I to release the fish upon the wind also, would they in turn discover it to be their true element?  Yea, would they grow wings, to wheel and gyre upon it, lose their gills and fishy eyes and learn to fly like a man?  Well, no . . . The fish are dead, of course. And when the wind dies down the stupid birds sit on the window ledges and mope like metaphysicians. I call in Garcia from Maintenance and have them whacked. So much for the dream of freedom . . . But there are other dreams . . . those of an old man, for instance, who now must soar in love, drop  all exoskeletal adaptations and go naked in the world, for this is what love demands, O fool who would attain to Her.  Not just a stiff cock but a stiff heart, O fool, and, worse, a stiff heart with a soft gooey center.   Fool, who can say what love will ask of you now? . . . Well, for one thing, shitcan  that dead end job of yours.

-Yet if I’m to woo her – in the style to which she is accustomed, I mean – a  guy needs some change in his pocket.

-She shows every symptom of being a cockhappy cooze.

-Yet also a  goddess . . .

-Well, goddesses . . .  Easy come, easy go.  She’s not worried about money, anyway.  Let her foot the bill.  You just keep her wet and wild, toots.

*    *    *

I had to consider all this.  A guy can’t ignore such invasions from the unconscious.  You do and they’ll get you. Know what I’m saying?  Monsters from the Id?  That’s what I’m talking here. Is there still such a thing as I’m talking? Who cares?

I went out on the roof and paced.  That’s the thing to do in a situation like this.  First of course I rubbed myself all over with sunguard. A guy should be prepared.

The woman, then.  What? Madge?  Margorie?  I don’t know.  It never became clear.  This was an adventure and it couldn’t go on for long.  It would be fast and furious as all such things must be.  Don’t kid yourself.  Love is for chumps.  You gotta fuck ‘em and forget em, that’s the old philosophy, but does it still obtain?  Dunno. We’ll see.  Meanwhile, let’s just play it by ear.  That can be a trustworthy instrument sometimes and, in my case, the only instrument.

These were my thoughts as I paced, and when I concluded I snapped my fingers happily and ran back inside.

“Hello Hello Hello hello!” I sang as I skipped down the halls.  I kissed a nurse, rubbed a CNA.  She went “Mmmmmmmmmmm.” (I know I could make it with her anytime, but she’s not my type. Only when I’m real, real horny will I go against type preference.  It too often leads to unwelcome involvements. Get the picture?  She once even said to me, “When I’m not in love and you’re not in love maybe we can get together sometime, but, you know, not now . . .”  I told her to blow it out her asshole, and she didn’t speak to me for awhile after that but  then one day we found ourselves alone together in the elevator and she asked why I no longer groped her when she walked by my work station. I promised to resume the practice.)

*    *    *

But she’s gone.  Where can she be?  For days I’ve watched her apartment, hoping for a sign, a light, her shadow moving behind the dancing, diaphanous drapes. (Like that? “Dancing”?  “Diaphanous”?)

The first rain is coming, I can feel it.  The air smells of ferment.  The others here stay inside now.  That’s good. I hate it when they stand out by the pool and gawk at me.

But where is she?  She told me she had friends, many friends, friends from all over. Men.  Before we started fucking I’d watch her stroll out with them arm in arm, and she was always wearing some stupid skimpy thing. I wasn’t interested at the time.  Yeah, cute, Ok, but . . .  Then I saw her in a dream one night.  She was undressing in front of a mirror.  Images of old and young men, helpless before her as she played with herself, put a finger to her mouth and wet it, brought it down and slid it gently over her labia . . . Suddenly she was pushing me to the floor, moaning, swallowing my head. Was this true prophesy?  Your intelligence. It’s mine now. That’s when I knew I wanted her, when I awoke from that dream, remembering orgasm, feeling the wet sheets.

*    *    *

She came to me.

My joy was complete. I went “Whoo-ee, baby!” and instantly  flushed.

I lit a cigarette to cover my embarrassment. I fought it off, and presently lost it all in my intent concentration on the love act of the present moment in which I was presently engaged, presenting for her delectation my fully engorged member to enjoy, first of all as an art object (note how she looks both ways over her shoulders to see if anyone is watching, for instance a museum guard, as if she were actually in an art museum where such guards are likely to be employed, and letting her fingers play over the surface of a lovely, monumental sculpture with a sign above it reading, “Please Do Not Touch”), then moving on from there into a sort of totemism and finally to the point where she is helpless to prevent herself from the actual licking of the worshipful object, the taking and placing of it finally, accepting its forceful thrusts into her increasingly juicy vagina and, to enhance her enjoyment, allowing her finger to lightly rub her clitoris, or, for his pleasure in turn, letting it slide under his scrotum and stroke this with equal skill.  When it was finally done, she lay silent in the throbbing darkness, her eyes darting this way and that as if in an effort to detect the cause of such a throbbing.  Had bats been allowed in, for example, or some other pulsing, avian form? I of course knew them to be the ghosts of those birds I had released come back to haunt me, but I didn't want to get into it with her. So much to explain, so little time. Also, I remembered . . . 

I asked, “Where were you?”

She looked away.  “Oh.  Business,” she said.

“You . . . work?”

“Of course,” she laughed.  By now I had blown several smoke rings in her direction, so that what she said seemed to labor towards me through tunnels, and the tortured nature of her communications awakened jealousy again . . . As with the following, which I heard as: “I like to get laid . . . as a means to an end (I cannot speak its name), the which is always compromised in any monogamous relationship . . . at best a makeshift, a falsification . . .”

“You were with a man, weren’t you?” I said, stoppering the smoking flow.

She bit her lip.  Looked away.

“Were you with a man?”

She takes the glass out of my hand and drinks deeply, runs her tongue over glistening lips. Then she says something which I hear as, “Do you want to punish me?”

She’s on the couch, legs spread, touching herself.

“Well?” she says.

I put my head under her dress.

“How will you punish me? Do you hope to find the answer down there?”

I’m biting her thighs, taking her underwear in my teeth and then letting them snap back against her tender flesh. I always thought this was a fun thing to do when I was a boy.

“Why don’t you punish me? Don’t you want to punish me for what I did?”

She spoke in such an unusual tone, her manner suddenly serious . . . it brought to mind those first sweet days of our affair, and the expectation that maybe that delightful lightning would strike again. For, as Gregary Peck has so wisely observed, it strikes rarely. And when it does, trees are lost.

Somehow this thought inflamed me further.

So finally I hit her with a sledge hammer (Used to work the streets, making little ones out of big ones, by God).  Then I hit her again, harder.

“Oh yeah?  Oh yeah?” she challenged.  “That’s interesting.  Do that.  Go on, do it.  Are you afraid?”

I gave her what she wanted.

“Like that?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she moaned.  “Do it.  Go on. Oh!”

I hit her, hit her, hit her.

  

“How’s that?” I said breathlessly.  “Do you like that?"

“Oh, yes.  Oh, please.  Oh, please.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked.  I may have betrayed the genuine concern I felt.

“Please go on,” she begged.  “Are you afraid?  Oh, please. Oh, please.”

“Oh, yeah?  Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah yeah yeah!”

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, God, yes! Don’t stop.  Oh, God!”

“What do you like about it?”

“Oh, it’s … Oh, it’s …”

“Yeah?  Yeah?  You want more?  You’re a mess, you know.  Hey.  Just one more, all right?  Maybe two.  You want two? Where do you want them?  How about there?  And there.  And there and there and there.”

After much of this action – more than I am happy to confess – I busted her wide open and party favors shot forth.  Little kids ran in and started yelling, “I want the red one,” – “Fuck off, you like the blue,” – “The red, I want the red, I shall have the red,” – “No, the blue, you are allergic to the red, see, already you’re breaking out, but here’s a striped, trade you a striped for a red one,” – “Get your own red one, I already wet on it.”  Shit like that, the expected urban conflict . . . Still quarrelling, they ran out, evaporating as they did so.

Her mouth is bloody.  She’s leaving a red slick along my inner thigh.  One of her teeth has fallen on my belly.  It dances like a hailstone.   She has this dizziness that is troublesome.

The ambulance comes.  The attendants are drooling with excitement.  The doctor can hardly speak from his rising tumescence.

“We’re here to collect her electrolytes,” he says.

This is too much. I’ve got to get out of here.

She reaches for my hand as they carry her out.

“Wait for me,” she says. “You have more to give.  Much, much more.”

She still feels dizzy, somewhat sleepy, not confused, and I think it is on a basis of her treatment under my  vigorous love because she is alert and oriented to time, place and person.  She answers questions in an intelligent, proper manner, VIZ.:

-Are you John Lennon?

-No.

-Do you feel that he is dead?

-He will never die.

-How can you say that?  All of us must die.

-He will not die because of his music.

-His music, too, is dead. It has been superceded.  We have advanced a great deal since then.

-How?

-By means of downsampling, attenuation, failure of nerve.

-How sad. What a pisser.

-Perhaps.  Can you handle more questions?

-Shoot.

-What do you think about Jesus?

-He’s all right.

-And Mary?

-She’s all right, too, but less so, somehow.

-But your name is Mary?

-No, it is not.

-Do you dislike the name?

-I dislike all names. 

She remains afebrile.  Her heart tones are fair, blurry, irregular, betraying a French influence. There is no trace of John Lennon’s forthright rhythms. What more can I say?  This is a dysfunctional relationship, characterized by enabling, co-dependency and the entire complex in which such pathologies subsist, sometimes among an entire society of other pathologies which must be treated in contradictory ways.  You kick one, you kiss another.  You shoot a guy full of uppers, his significant other needs downs.  If you don’t get it just right, shit happens. Know what I’m saying?

*    *    *

But she has another man in.  When will she learn?  She even leaves the curtain open a crack so I can see.  She’s going down on him, taking him.  He’s nearly comatose when he leaves.  I jump the fucker while he’s trying to find his way to his car.  He doesn’t even resist when I cut him open. He laughs when he sees his own guts tumble out.  I put my ear to the smoking ruins and receive the following:

“What’s in the box, whadaya think, whadaya think? I’m in the box, whadaya think, whadaya think? I remain in the box forever.  Even when I’m outta the box, I’m still really in there.  Like now. Ripped me out, ya think?  Wrong. O wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, you are.  We do not die. Cannot. Cannot.  We are men of steel, you dizzy fuck.  Yet some parts are pliable, and then obviously the outer sheath, of course, which is little better than hard rubber such as you would find concealing the empty nature of dolls . . . So why not just fuck off and let me pretend to die.  Give me that small moment alone to look at the promise of a consummation devoutly to be wished – and always withheld at last from my kind, like a carrot withdrawn from the aspiring teeth gnashing of a donkey.  For when we die there isn’t even a moment of the vaunted In-Between-State before we are reborn.  And as the same damn thing again.  The same insufferable person.  Can you yourself imagine how you would feel if you yourself were condemned to be you?  Yourself? Always and forever, ever echoing down the bloodlit halls of Time . . . Hey.  Are you listening, dude?   I guess you didn’t hear me or something.  Leave the parking lot.  Go home and pull your pud.  Let me be a man for once and go out whistling Dixie.”

“Please don’t whistle in here,” I warn him, shaking his shifting, shapeless mess of a body by grasping the corny large lapels or his Hawaiian shirt.  “You’ll wake the Super, who used to be a cop, by the way, and he’ll be out here with all the blame of Heaven in his eyes.  And when he casts that blame upon the rays which issue from those same eyes, it is not landing on me, you get the picture, Tex?  I won’t be zapped like a droid.  I was born free and well favored in the Human Realm, while you, you conceited, clonable clot, are mere working garbage.  Even while you were porking my woman you were simply being worked by her.  You were merely a substitute finger, or a vibrator – maybe even a dildo, for all I know from her masturbatory methods. For all I care, slave.”

“Hey.  I’m a sex toy,” he protested.  “She called me, you dig?  My service had me paged while I was trying to finish off Marie a la Versace-Lorraine, who takes forever.    And . . . you’ll like this part . . . She confesses to yours truly that she actually prefers our service, in fact, to yours.  She complains that humans display tremendous theoretical passion (and  you know what that means, buster; it’s why you’re getting all that swell head, heh heh, get it? get it?), yet it is short lived, sort of a cocaine high, it just don’t stay with you long, and nothing sticks when it goes.”

“I am not serving her, Tex,” I insist.  “I’m riding her ass on the wind, I’m boinking her to Heaven, thou steeping pool of swoozy chemicals, batardo of unnatural matings betwixt the unliving and the undead.  While you sit somewhere getting charged, to all intents and purposes non-existent, I’m dinging all her endorphins like the goddamned Hunchback of Notre Dame.  So just abort that last statement, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury.  And as for you, Oh son of Fictitious Being and Wrong Ideas About Reality, exit my Universe of Discourse at once.  I say, 'Poof!' therefore, and snap my fingers.  And vye-ola.  You are gone.  You n’exist pa, motherfucker.  Stay that way.”

*    *    *

The police arrive.  She tells them everything.  They don’t understand, this is entirely outside the narrow purview of their expertise.  I’ve got to get out of here.  My attention wanders. At work they’ve put me on probation again.  The lab fish swim away with my thoughts, the birds will compromise them.  The wind thrills and scatters.  Gotta watch out for that wind. Belongs to Charlie.  She tries to get me at the hospital.  I undo her IV.  I can’t find my house.  My house is in a thicket somewhere, among the standing stones, overlooking moors and heathcliffs, a lake so smooth that I must call it the Great Mirror. The stones rule. Break up the stones, making little ones out of big ones until they are merely pebbles to be tossed into the lake so that concentric circles of the watery element spread outward and inward at once; and toss the remaining stones at the passers-by. “Ouch!” they must cry.  The fog moves in timelapse,  so now the fog rules.  (Fog is better than love, no?) Anything but love.  A woman keeps bothering me, actually taking bites out of my arm.  I don’t know this woman for shit.  I don’t know anybody here.  What gives her the right to take bites out of me?  The others all turn their faces to the wall.  Their mouths are filled in.  They have bright holes in their faces, the light is showing through. They’re going fast, yet still they manage to attract the attention of our boys in white, who run in on tracks (guilty, narrow gauge), and toot their whistles.  That failing, they stick tubes in my arm.  Who is she? What does she want? What does she want now?  She’s biting my tube.  She’s sucking up the clear fluid.

“Your intelligence,” she says.

She is laughing.

The Valley of the Kings

I trudged through the blasting sand all swaddled up like a mummy, even had my face covered but what’s to see out here? From an approaching shadow I knew I was coming upon one of the lesser tombs, those thrown up by the poor from stones that had been rejected by the quarry bosses. Scratching about with the hands of the blind I found an entry facing away from the storm and pushed my way down the  ramp. 

Unwrapping my head at last I was surprised to find it dark, and when I torched up I saw that it hadn’t been used. Someone had been preparing it, though. It was already fitted with lighting fixtures. There was even a generator. Again I was surprised when the thing just ripped into action when I gave the starter a pull. There was the expected shrill of a motor laboring against a buildup of sand. 

I didn’t bother lighting the place. I’d explore it all tomorrow. Just now I fell down in a dead faint right then and there and finally slept after several days, I don’t know how many, several though, several. I heard things, saw things. There were dreams of my dead wife wailing over the pieces of our children, hands and feet hidden in cupboards, of the Japanese who’d been caught out and quickly jumped up from the couch and shot everyone down, just like that, it was amazing. The whole meeting falling down dead. Why did he spare me? I really had no sense of it. I was just as guilty …

Then there was a sound. Someone … perhaps mine host. 

He came forward quickly, leaping for me. I simply rolled away and the idiot bashed against the wall. It was Ed. Of course it was Ed.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I’m here for my revenge,” he said matter of factly – well, everything he said was rather matter of fact through his vox. Ed was as mad as the desert. He’d followed me for years.

“You’re always here for your revenge,” I told him. I was tired of telling him this. How many times did I have to remind him?  I’d rehearse our story again and again, sometimes adding needless details, which he enjoyed; he always clapped his hands at these little bits of new furniture to our tawdry little scene together back in Cairo. The woman. He called her his wife. She wasn’t. In fact she’d been mine for quite a while, years. I finally got rid of her by making such a case of myself that she asked me to leave. That was my first experience of finding my own way without resources. I pushed a shopping cart around and stopped off at various friends’. Most of them told me to jolly well fuck off, they’d had enough. Leonard finally took me in. He was my last resort. I hated him; everybody hated his ass, he was going to die, and he was making a great fuss of it. He had his TV blasting, as usual. Without even a greeting he told me that great Alviso was dead. He’d been discovered in his bath, head back, eyes burnt out from looking at the sun, yet he was smiling, smiling. I can see the plush lips, the way they crooked up to one side when he smiled, something of a snarl to it, nasty, conceited and feral. I’d gotten bored with the man long ago. But it’s not necessary to tell all this. It is Ed we’re considering here. Just now he was standing up and dusting off his foolish clothes, leather from head to foot, and I bet he still wore a dozen fragile gold chains around his neck, and of course the ever present motorbike helmet, and his lower face was veiled to cover his blasted jaw.  

“Ed,” I sighed. “I had hoped to find a friend here.”

His vox whizzed out what remained of a programmed laugh. Obviously not his choice; it was the only one remaining. He’d been out here a long time. 

I sat down against the opposite wall. The lights were up now. He’d turned them on when he came in, I suppose. 

“I broke into your gallery,” he said. “I saw your girls, your trophies. Penelope was there, too.”

“She wanted it,” I told him. Told him for the nth time. “Would you like to hear an account of this?”

“Please.”

“Ed. This is a desperate land, Ed. Boys like you … how can there be boys like you still after all this?”

“I’m older than you are.”

“No one is older than I am.” 

“She came to you,” he urged me. “Let’s have it. Let’s have it.”

Again I told him. It was before the plague, before everything, the old world in all its stinking, brazen glory. She’d come to me in high Renaissance drag. Even had her hair colored, and the cosmetic surgery had completely healed so that she now appeared even younger than she’d been when I last saw her  … that was … well, in Nova Burbank, I think, where we’d met in the first place … Ah, those nights of love, her easy Levantine residence in flesh, nay, she was one with it, she was flesh all through and she dripped with sex. If only she weren’t so mad. At the  end there she was thoroughly gone. She knew it. That’s why she came to me. 

“Make me like her,” she said, stroking the marble flesh of my Cosima, the one commissioned by the Great Man himself. Her hand played over the small breasts, the coils of hair I’d wrought so lovingly and left off polishing sooner than the rest so they’d retain the look of my model’s own course tresses. She really wasn’t so much lovely as … Oh, striking, I suppose. That’s how you describe a woman who would be ugly if she weren’t so magnetic. True of Penelope as well. Can you imagine her with Ed, though? A force like that made to fit his bricked in religion. His little house must fall at last, as I’m sure it did. She’d run out on the fool  and he blamed me. “You ruined her. You ruin everyone with your sorcery.”

I had her undress and marveled again at her body. 

“What was her body like?” Ed pressed.

“Oh, you missed something there, Ed. You were such a poor, wasted looking animal beside her. Even in that sackcloth you all wore she was still a beauty. Your Priest saw it. The way the pig watched her, the way his eyes always slid away after her when she passed by his dais. You say he married you.”

“We were married!” his vox crazed. 

“So he could have at her, you poor fish!”

“It is the Law.”

“How convenient the Law is for priests.”

“Shut up!” he slapped at his thighs, raising dust.

I leaned my head back against the ancient stone. Yes, that day, that last day. As I raised up the Circling Fire and let it race through me, empowering my hands finally, as I touched her heat once more, one last time, her hair, her throat, her breasts even smaller than Cosima’s yet with more prominent nipples, and a stubble from the hair she must wax off each day. I’d love to run my tongue over it when we were younger, loved the feel of her nipples firming up against my lips, her belly, soft and warm and full of her (she was firmly centered there as one should be), and there was the plunge of the flesh into her deep navel, hair surrounding that as well, or it had then, and her bush, her opening thighs, ah! I loved the way her thighs locked around my head when I kissed her in the secret place, and later pressed against my own and pushed rhythmically as I plunged into her … My hands remembered her warmth even as it slowly fled, as her soft, rose and olive toned flesh went blue white, went hard and chill to the touch, died slowly under the Fire. Strange that the Fire would make such a cold thing of a woman, of anyone who wanted the cold for the sake of … of what? What?

I Shot Santa Clause

Running. What else can I do? What can you do when you shoot somebody, and not just anybody but a myth? Ever shot a myth? Well, I have. So, I’m running along here, kids are giving chase, parents giving chase to the kids, everybody’s after somebody else it seems, big ones eat the little ones. But look. I shot Santa Clause. That’s the story.

So, go back. I’ve had a problem with this guy for years, maybe all my life, I don’t know. He’s a fat fool with whiskey breath who guilts the shit out of you. “ You been good this year? You eat your peas and carrots and things? You fuck up the way you did all them other years?” So, who’s he, Mister Clean? Son of a bitch goes home to a one room flop and watches the Weather Channel. No Mrs. Clause, no reindeers, no nothing. This is one big loser here, lemme tell you. So, I should be letting him put me down so I can get what I ask for? You know what? Fuck him, that’s what.

Next time I see him I says, “What do you mean by all that crap yesterday?”

“What crap is that, son?” he asks mildly.

“All that guilt crap? Who do you think you are, laying that crap on me? So then you expect me to ask you nicely for what I want. Well, dig, fat boy. I want you in an icebox with the power turned up all the way. I want you sitting on tacks in a world of tacks that extend all the way to the horizon. I want your beard on fire, your stupid red suit run through the wrong cycle and come out looking like its made of crinkle chips, you crapulous crud.”

“Son, why don’t you buzz off or something. You could buzz off. That’s a good thing for you to do.”

I pointed the Finger of Doom at him. It is a long finger, an adamantine finger, this Finger of Doom of mine. It is a finger that you cannot fly from into a land of homegrown tomatoes or thoughts of thy neighbor’s ass. No, no. You’re doomed, daddy-O, when that one casts its long shadow over your smug face, saying, “Hey! Kingfish. Tonight you sleep alone.”

Yeah, so I tell him, “OK. OK, big guy. I’ll buzz off for you. But I’ll be back. This ain’t over yet. Just you wait and see.”

That’s when I know that Fate has me by the balls. It’s helping me along, I can feel it. A big warm breath of Fate gently pushes me along, pushes me right into the door of a gun shop. Oh, yes. A gun shop, whoopy! Wall to wall guns. Rifles, cannon, bazookas, Uzis. Then a long glass case with the lovely killer pistolas, Mister, the BANG BANG guns you want from a man. Oh, and holsters, god damn it. The tooled leather, studded and beaded and bedazzled, place for a monogram, even a name if it’s a short one, Tex or something, maybe just “Kid”. I like that. Kid. Gun first, though. Let’s see, let’s see. There’s gangster models, little chickenshit Derringers, big ole Magnums I figure for stupid, but then, but then … well, dang it all if it ain’t the venerable cattleman’s friend, the 44.40 of yore, which is class, Jack, I ain’t bullshittin.

Espying me, the proprietor says, “You look like man knows his ordnance.”

“I am a man of purpose,” I told him.

“A tall man.”

“Lean and mean.”

“Not bad looking.”

“Rugged more than handsome, wouldn’t you say?”

“I can go with that. Yeah. Rugged.”

“And I have the look of a stranger in town.”

“Yeah. That, too.”

“OK, ring ‘er up. And that holster there. Cut me a moniker on it. I want “Kid” there on it.”

“Well, my K knife’s busted. Can you think of something else. Initials? What’s your name.”

“Dunno,” I told him.

“So you’re the famous Man Who Don’t Know His Name.”

“Yeah. That’s me. How ‘bout it? What can you do with that?”

“Well, simple. Put a X there? How are you for an X in that place?”

“Nope. Rings false. Has implications I can’t live up to.”

“Well. Maybe just leave it blank, then. Folks’ll get the point. They see a guy, he’s tall and lean and mean and more rugged than handsome, they figure, Why that must be The Man Don’t Know His Name.”

“Sure looks like him,” I go along.

“Has the walk.”

“The talk.”

“He don’t say much. Leave out that talk stuff. He don’t say much. That’s how it should be.”

“How it is, Mister. Like you say. Just like you say.”

“Well, how ‘bout you just put an O there. Got an O knife?”

“I surely do.”

“That can be for Zero, dig? It can be interpreted that way.”

“Some would agree. I would. Others, maybe they sort of scratch their heads and wonder, ‘Is that an O or a Zero? What do you think, Clarence?’ ‘I figure it for an O.’ ‘Just an O? What’s that stand for?’ ‘Well, maybe for something unsayable.’ ‘Unspeakable.’ ‘Filthy dirty.’ ‘Vile, fetichistic, the stuff of dreams in a low bar at the end of the universe.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Yeah. I’m agreein with ya.’ It could be like that, am I right?”

“Could be. Figure it’ll work?”

“I figure. Them as don’t get it, well, all the worse for them. For they don’t know they are looking upon the Man Who Don’t Know His Name and might misspeak themselves. You know how people are. ‘Hey dude, where you get them artificial shoes?’ So you have to turn to them and give your enigmatic smile, and either they trifle with you further or they get it who you are. But this here?”

He withdraws the venerable pistol and holds it up before me. “This is what awaits triflers,” he says. “Do I not speak the truth here?”

“I feel that you do. I sense that about you.”

“Well, then. Let’s outfit you in a suitable way and get you stalking the streets of this one Wi-Fi town, seeking Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

“What’s all that?”

“All what?”

“All that you just said.”

“Dunno. It’s a cowboy thing. Long time ago thing. Nobody rightly remembers.”

“Well. I’ll remember.”

“Good for you, son.”



* * *



So I shot the son of a bitch.

I stood in line with the gun concealed in my duster. The others paid me little notice. Figured me for a store detective, possibly a kid from another planet. “Nah, that ain’t from no other planet, dude,” one of them said. “That’s what you call bad news wearing artificial shoes.” “Got a point,” said another. “Could account for his unnatural height. Kids don’t get that high around here. Mom says it’s all the sushi. Sitting across from her my father, who is short and fat, sings, ‘Show me the way to the next sushi bar!’ and they both laugh a great deal about that, slobber all over the food. I don’t get it. I don’t understand them half the time. Anybody’s from another planet it’s my parents.” “Yeh, well my parents are from hell, so there. Ever read that Cocteau shit? Les Parents Terribles? Yeah, so that’s my parents.” “So, maybe this kid’s from hell, too.” “Don’t think so. Heaven is in his eyes. You don’t get that effect when you’re from hell. That’s a known thing in science.” “You believe in science? What an asshole. You know how many cool points you just lost? Science. What are you, a particle weighing boy? Peekaboo universes jumping in and out of existence through black holes? Up from apes? Shit, man, anybody’s looking knows apes are better. What an asshole.”

But there is a low rumbling of an approaching elevated train. That’s my signal. When the big old thing comes thundering overhead I rush forward, gun drawn, pushing everybody aside.

“You’re not supposed to butt in line,” someone reminds me.

I stand before him. Santa Clause. He has just let a girl down off his lap, which is wet, and is about to take a quick little snort when he gets it. What’s happening here. Who I am and what I’m going to do.

“Didn’t I take your order a while back there, squirt?” he says. His eyes start from their spheres and roll like roulette wheels. “Think you can pull a fast one on old Santa? Well, let me tell you …”

“No, no,” I says. “I’ll do the telling. I’m here to do the telling. And this is what I must say. You, Santa, are a responsible Myth, the Stuff of Legend, That Which Keeps a Boy Marching to the Same Old Drummer. But you think it’s OK to just guilt a guy like that, to put him through all that police procedural crap. Wants to know if on the night of such and such you finished your peas and carrots, did the dishes as required, folded all the newspapers into paper airplanes just the way Dad wants ‘em so he can play war with the fireplace. You do your homework? The one with all the mix and match – the Meter Reader’s job description is? The official duties of a Cockroach Wrangler are? When you have a wife, will you stop beating her? You mow the lawn? Take out the trash? You collect your cool points, call em in to Number Crunch, win a free prize? I doubt that. Can’t say I believe that. You don’t look like the right kind of kid to me. Something all sideways about you. Something all mislabeled and poisoning the old Populusque. Problem boy. Boy with funny ideas rolling around loose in his head and making him hear things … Have I covered it? Isn’t that one of your standard raps? Boy goes away from you feeling so worthless he don’t deserve nothing but a day fulla Rossini overtures played on a million hurdy-gurdies, or Miss Black’s long vampire nails run down the blackboard as she says, ‘Thus we see how Pythagoras imposed the Harmonic upon a delinquent Universe.’”

“Look, son,” he says, “look here, now. I got business here. So you … well, you just go on. You just go fishing. Ever think of that? You go on and go fishing. That’s a good thing to do, isn’t it? What I always do when I’m upset. I just grab me a quart a whiskey and a dozen baloney sandwiches and I just … well, I just go fishing, is what. That’ll straighten you out. Now you get along now, you hear?”

“Smile when you say that,” I told him, and let her rip. Several holes appeared. Then
he busted wide open and party favors shot forth. Little kids ran up and started yelling, “I want the red one,” – “Fuck off, you like the blue,” – “The red, I want the red, I shall have the red,” – “No, the blue, you are allergic to the red, see, already you’re breaking out, but here’s a striped, trade you a striped for a red one,” – “Get your own red one, I already wet on it.”

But I was already running. And I’ll keep on running, run all down the days and all the years, finding no resting place, no food or shelter within the borders of the Empire. I bear the mark. It showed up on my forehead moments afterwards. It is a sort of hoof print, cloven, with the brand name of the Demiurge, owner and maker of all things, the whole works, the mess in your room, your smelly wife, the drifting dogs, wens, fogs, dirigibles. You must take care not to let it show. Do not go bareheaded in the sight of God. Pass swiftly, in a cloak and flat top hat. Keep that gun loaded, always. Be ready to fire upon all those who would show you kindness. All those who would smile and lick your nose. All cab drivers, desperate pilgrims yearning for Happy Hour, the Dogs of War, the Wings of Song. Beware, O Son of the Morning, always beware.

(This story first appeared in The Blotter)

Within Hearing

It's rather like wandering down and down from the dreadful highest into some endless unknown city …. lost up there among the quarriers and shark hunters and fighters without reason, taking a job amongst them really, even though they realize you could be somewhere else ."You look like ... You could be better off. That hair. What are you doing amongst us?" Yet soon enough you're running a gang on a stolen train, shooting people at random just because you can. And finally free of that you tell your new apprentice if we are to get out of here we must work, climb, climb very high, even though you realize that your own hated yet more proper city is far below, way way down there among the lubbers and cocksmen, auto workers so dear. This is mad work that we are about here among the twisted boards and leanto dwellings which hold the Secret Word in a burning jar.


"Don't take that way sir, the tracks are about to turn!" I am warned, and yet I go on. Down now, properly down. This is a terrible place, yet venerable. It is where Melville was, and Hawthorne and the like. So here we go, here we go. Come along, Ned. If we are going to get us home we must travel far … yet who can hear my song now? Who will listen? I sing and sing. Haha. Don't talk about your novels, Ra, sing them right here where no one will listen, but at least they will listen ha ha!

You begin to slide. Where there had been stairs now there is ice, a wind and a desert. There are friendlies. Some ancient houses. A fog comes and mists it all away. There sir. Fire. Find your way to it. What are they talking about? Nothing. I will sing and make all ordered and comprehensible in a tale of our tribe. Now I'll do it pat. Get it right at last. They will know me at last and call me Him. Prophet, fool. Also he juggles ha.

But you know it's over, you fair haired fool, grizzled and limping and bereft of a banjo. Need'st thou proof of it say thy name to the stars. Wink, wink. Why Who? Yoohoo, Yehuda most high beard? Do you not remember me who made the wind and all the whales?

Rest now we must. Here there is water and some sherry. The sea is visible now. Home sea full of tall swans. Your famous writing, your philosophy, a darkness upon the face of the waters, yet there is popcorn, little white boats of popcorn floating and these are your words. Pretty. Not so? Pretty? Please sir, if you'd only give me this brief hearing.

THE PREQUAL

But wait. Get on back. First there was old Valderon, old friend. I had come up the hill to find my girl. She was trapped up there in snare and delusion. A large apartment actually which she felt she could not leave. I was there to deliver her and Valderon had given me horse in his big blue car. The motor idling, Val just sitting there in both innocence and self importance, singing along to Wagner on the pod.

I ran in. She was there but she hid. I went from room to room. There were shops, wineries, all the goods you don't need and yet you must. She is there. I smell sandalwood. Sandalwood and myre: these are the mixings of Silk Rout miscegenations, mutant loves. I hear her running. Her clogs, clop clop clop. She is a nanny goatfoot, also a mermaid, yet another mermaid. Finally Valadaron needs join me in the hunt across the crooked floors. We too make clopping sounds. We are horses now. We've always been horses in our own way, or wannabes with our high manes. Dig the Pompadours and pomp. At last we find her, hiding among her paints in the closet. She is crying for shame of herself, for letting me touch her, even though it was long ago.

Val must lift her up. He carries her in his brown arms and I run ahead scout. By this time she has fallen in love with him I'm sure. They all fall for him, for he is Valderon and I am only a geezer of Ling. Valderon, ah Valderon. You were even better at that! Yet I can build a fire and see to your torn lips, eh? When you are sodden and needs fall upon the rocks, going OOK! OOK!

We rest. We lie there in one large sleeping bag with you in the middle. "I love you," she whispers in your old goat's ear and you mutter an acknowledgement. You don't care about love at all, never have. You are a posturing Romantic. You don't even have the Certificate. Fool without honor, let me go. I must go. Fly on down now. All else is prelude. Prelude, my fat dead friend.

Qaf Qaf Qa

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