Jesus dreams of Martell's Liquors on 20th & Geary, lottery tickets, and racing forms

My girl, she wears a Stetson hat. And I’m a sucker for accordion music. That explains the gist of it, for mostly intents and some surprising purpose. Tell me I’m barreling it for a tater? Not unless I’m catching Lou Gehrig’s disease or clod hopping o’er fields of mauve. I’m not predisposed to prefer PEZ over Tic Tacs, but don’t leave me alone over it enough and I’ll preach high windy drafts of sustainability. And roosters be damned, I’m almost plucky when it comes to categorizing empty-bus ineptitude. Officially it’s not over. Lord’s wearing blue and gold this winter, and the chic look backwards to move ahead. Well, shit. That’s garbled longing at its finest finesse, if, for instance, you’re a asking for it. Gobstoppers and broken teeth, we’ll shit before we flush from now on, right? Sure. That’s a plain enough plan. Me? Now I got hearts on my wrists instead of razor blade scars. That’ll do. Music that’s surprising. Pictures of photographs. Parking spots that always go empty. So long. Nobody’s as popular as they think. That’ll never be the ticket. So long. Write my epitaph in red felt and glitter. I’m pushing on. I’m throwing my sunglasses into the ocean. Make me a loan to catch a crashed plane. Opt out. I’m lucky in my lurching, enough so that I make wings from smashed glass. Nobody aboard. Kiss off. Leap for it from the emergency entrance. Coats optional. I’m making up for lost haste. The nunneries have all closed for good, but the junk shops are selling pancakes for dinner. We all talk and scram. My girl, she’s got blue-suede eyes and a Roosevelt tattoo. Takes me to Timbuktu and back with a gleam of nickel in her smile. My girl, she cracks beer cans and spills jokes. She finds herself getting lost going home. A bad case of sunstroke wearing Michigan colors in the meadows of fall. Bashful hardhatted grumbling. I’m more likely piping down in the thin of it, just blendered to floor crumbs to feed the mice. Now it’s cover-the-carotid-artery-and-squat-away-from-view time for me. Rascals, stevedores, grooms, fletchers, shoeshine boys, and the mighty few who run the show. A few blondes dancing around in the kitchen to the sound of running water. There just isn’t a map left that’ll lead me where I’ve never been. Sure, maybe there’s a place for us, somewhere, me and my girl. Maybe. But the air’s not giving out any tickets, and the moon’s a death sentence, and we’ve got trades pending, and the soup’s never up. I’m wine-splashed and spluttering. My girl? She’s taking pictures with other guys. She’s wearing somebody else’s ring. And me? I’m late for dinner, again and again, while the snitchers take phone numbers hostage and all the garbage men are tugging on their gloves. But, you know, there’s still some lavender stuck in the buttonhole of my favorite suit’s lapel. And I can still look in my wallet and find her there. And, you see, I’ve got Tuesday’s off. The music’s got its own belly fat. Forlorn alligators sneak peanuts from wish-takers. Safety movies are dangerously lent to weeping gondoliers. Normal doesn’t happen. In ellipses you’ll find me, commas behind me. The clatter of caskets. The clubbing of bugs. Dingy cupolas deteriorating and birthrights swiped like credit cards through the clarified emptiness I call my life. I tell myself certain things. Stay up past moonlight. Get under the bed. Sweat and suffer. Two-face the credits when only a suggestion of a wink will drink you back to life or kiss you back to drinking. Sons of bitches always Goreying up the good stuff. Well, eligible enough when seen through sunglasses, at least while vindictiveness wears a veil. I’m falling for a neurosis or two, something that’ll stay. Staying under the weather on purpose. Meteskying up things real bad. Vermouthing through the olives of gin-wet days. Perspired and out-of-this-world. So I say, stay happy for as long as it lasts. Because one day, it won’t.  

what good's grief?

            I can’t help being canned in wonder when cramming long days into shorter ones. Wispy in the throes of the shoehorned side-saddling of it all, there would I be, a la carte and steadfast enough, attempting to thrust a just into a maybe’s so. If anything else, only some guy sweeping up the dead leaves from his little patch of sidewalk squares. It’s inevitable that we end up needful of certain things.   

            George bills himself as stolen property. It’s not a gag. The cops don’t believe him yet, but it seems likely that two or three of these days they will. You know, angels do disregard their own mischief. That’s one of those things that’ll make you smile if you’re not careful about it. The dangers of a little rat-poison tang on the tongue. Only this guy George knows the sulking way into the lungs of the matter. Well, only he and I.

            There’s some scruffy roly-poly of a guy matching wits with a traffic cop. It’s just around the corner from me, so I go ahead and notice it --more because I feel I’ve got to than anything. I do it an a jiffy and it’s over with. The cop’s showing his badge off; the tubby guy’s bending his piddling life out of shape over it too. It’s a pity. Vying for a tie; that’s about all it is. Up against it? Fatter chances than the thin ones I’ve grown so accustomed to suckering myself to, that’s for sure. And that’s it. No more gawking at the circumstances of dopes who can’t tell a cop from a police officer. I’m moving along. Don’t worry. I didn’t see nothing.

            I meet George at ten or eleven at night. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t have the wherewithal to be somebody else. So, I keep moving. George is whistling about the misery of the world. I can’t change his tune. It’s bad, meaning terrible, and I can’t Heimlich it out of him. Sometimes there is just no stopping misery. The lord just ain’t always on one’s side, it seems. Off-and-on we surely might come to terms with this. We don’t. But, you know, we could.

            There are these girls I know; we’re always getting into fistfights. Not me against them. More like them against each other and me. George likes one of them more than just a “like”-- more of a “like-like” sort of thing. He wants to grouse about it. I offer my condolences as best I’m able. I tell him you can’t go around liking girls who get into fistfights. It’s unconstitutional, or at least not good for his constitution. This doesn’t make sense to him, and, I have to admit, it doesn’t make much to me either. But, well, what else are you going to do? Tell the guy he’s no chick magnet and make a break for the cold Kentucky rain? Not this here hand stamper. I tell you something though, it’d do him some good to hear the truth of it. But, ah, he won’t listen. George’d rather talk.

            So, after this whole ado with Georgie Boy, I fan out and bleach my temperament with a few cold ones at Hank’s. It’s a grimy, dark hole-in-a-hole place, and there are only a few retired cowboys and out-of-work machinists in there, so it’s not too bad of a place to duck away in. For the lovelorn bastard in all of us, I put a few George Jones whiners on the juke and mostly just sit there and take good care of my bottle of beer. I pretend that I’ve got a cat at home who misses me. Nobody there seems to like me. I down my beer to the lees and shove off.

            I’m killing bees when I’m not murdering flies. That’s something to say to strangers. It gets far from the point right away. I find it works well at sewing factories and apple farms. People might not respect you for it, but at least they’ll know you’ve got them covered, in case they are one of those who attract bees or get them stuck in their hair. It’s more of a neighborly thing to say than you’d think-- something full of goodwill and courtesy. Sure, I look the other way too, but that’s meaner, if you think about it.

            I’d almost forgotten about old George when the nails of disaster hammered through to me, and this is way past midnight by this point. This is the shriek of wee-hour death that I’m echoing. Not cool enough for school and up for the count. That’s all. So, old Georgie boy is plummeting, and it catches me off guard, scraping along like a hangnail, rotting, as it were, into my vicinity with a reek that could only be described as Lysoling mildew. He’s scrabbling by, or along, and almost runs smack backfirst into me. Pushing back’s about all I can do, and he goes marshmallow-over-cracker into a stack of orange traffic cones. Being attached to the things of this world comes with a price. That’s what I want to growl at him at least. But I don’t. I just glower at him a bit-- that and stand there and try to look shocked and dismayed. It’s about all I’m good for in these non-trying times. Lack is what I’ve got to grow old with.

            It seems Georgie’s been gulping warm mineral water again. He’s belching i.o.u.’s to the saints. I’m a stickler for details when the moon’s spotlight beams through tree branches and yellows a scabby halo in clouds; and it turns out that maybe we need to hear other people’s stories to remind us that our own story isn’t so grand after all. So, here goes everything:

            “I’m forgetful of my pants. I scour the city’s red-lit stretches, near to never wandering, vainly in pursuance of my pants. The plaids are gone from them, in the later stages of night-- if they ever were there to begin this thing. Perhaps a blueberry striped pair of red slacks with yellow polka dots running from cuffs to waistband. We give up (for the strife of converting singularia tantum to pluralia tantum is not recommended for the faint of heart), and we walk culinary mambos between curious bowling pins. Do I blame fabric? Could I blame those heavy situational directions that the most adipose of sense makes? Fatter chances. That’s what I’d tell you about it. But I can’t relate this. It weighs on me. I am useless when it comes to spreading (even lightly) information and ducking the law.”                    

            “Frog get it, Georgie Boy. You make monk meat out of tattered robes. Ribbit. That’s all.”

            “Been futured to the past for the eons of cockroaches, as a defeatist? Sure. That pleases the littlest of gifts I’ve got. Volumes of misunderstood help cold-plate the present. Remember when the hills were so green? All sorts of green, too. Every single kind you could think of.”                                                          

            “I’m leaving.”

            “Could’ve handled that.”

            “I bet.”

            It turns out the world’s not even close to enough with us. That’s what happened.

            After that? Well, we went our separate and unequal ways, long in the tooth enough to know what the deal was. All the way back to the barracks of sloth, that’s where we were trudging off to. Laughing stocks who don’t contribute to God.

            Another little phrase from the mouth of that Georgie Boy: “Don’t harangue me while the coal’s burning in the basement. It is so ‘sunderful’ out.” That’s Georgie’s need for shade talking, there. I get my mortician’s parasol out. The strolling I do comes unnaturally at long last. It is top notch, almost unlike passing bad checks but not at all like getting away with it. Disorientation comes. Exhilaration goes. All of our inside jokes are for naught.

            The shuck of a bus charging uphill unhinges an updraft of joy. Fire escapes shine egg-white slick. Overall there’s not much trudge left in it for me, this halt to wandering that’s just sort of come upon me out of the grand thin blues. Temper’s no longer an option. I’m flush with pink-petal wonder, and it’s only time, after all, that I’m wasting. Good thing, too. It’s almost raspberry-picking season. A barrel of stems, or just the late fermented juice of elation, and now, curses, I’m back to dragging my torn net through the mulch and paw of still waters. But everything’s in bloom, and there’s plenty of tread left on these here tires, so what’ll pass for salvation gets handpicked for getting by, through or with it, just the same.

            Shelving my instincts for perpetual motion, I distinctly hobble on with a stylish limp, sort of nosing towards away, and the serendipity of changing colors collates my perspective for me. Georgie’s a found cause. I’m lost in procedural stifling, and, p.s.-- no longer seeking adventure. Is there another p.s. left that screams, “I want to go home!”? I am picky about what I hope for, and this seems a longer shot in hope’s array. Sprinkled on the air is that curious waiting-room drone: a buzz that’s not staticky at all. It’s pure brain rot, endless repetition of a singular sound, something so cloying and upsettingly subtle that it cranks your mind in the same direction over and over until nothing is different. Nothing is the same. Pear trees slump through another off season, consumed with jealousy, missed flights, and stunted ambition. I think I’ll just collect myself and mosey on towards the next bottle of scotch.

           

            

the richard nixon library incident

          Bundy was the King Of Tapping. This is when you take a bolt and scotch-tape it to some unsuspecting suburbanites front door so it hangs down a few inches on the slack of a piece of fishing wire. Then you let the wire out and go hide behind some bushes across the street. The string, when pulled, makes the bolt tap against the door, like somebody’s knocking; but when the person opens their door nobody is there. And because the string is attached to the door they’re pulling open (and fishing wire being pretty near invisible) they don’t see anything. They close the door. Then you yank the string a few more times, the scene repeats itself, and you sit cracking up in the bushes watching the homeowner grow increasingly frustrated. In a pinch you can pull really hard and take the whole bolt with the string, if you need to. Bundy had great touch when it came to this. He could lightly brush the bolt against the door from 20 yards away with a mere lithe tweak of his wrist, creating just a subtle grating sound, if need be. Conversely, he could thwack the thing so hard against the door (without tearing the bolt off) that a few homeowners probably thought they were being attacked by a medium-sized wild boar. He was the king, and, well, the rest of us troublemakers deferred to him in all matters of Tapping. And this made him almost sage-like to us in all areas of teenage public nuisance.     

            I grew up in a small Orange County town called Placentia. Orange County is divided into North and South, the south being the ritzy, mansion-strewn, beach-living sort of place you see on reality TV shows: Dana Point, Laguna Beach, etc. The north is the towns around Disneyland. No beaches. No mansions. Just places where orange trees used to grow. And, in a city called Yorba Linda (which bills itself as “The City Of Gracious Living”), The Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace.

            Placentia’s squashed between Yorba Linda and Anaheim like a dead ant. As teenagers we’d often grow bored and restless, and would go out in my friend Matt’s 1974 Imperial LeBaron looking for adventure. This car was going to pot: what was left of the ceiling hung down and got in your hair; there were no windshield wipers; rolling the windows up with the hand lever was a challenge; and the gas tank leaked. But we never drove it too far. Matt was very particular about driving very slow around the suburban neighborhoods. For fun he’d keep the thing below 10 mph, and would blast classical music with all the windows down. This wasn’t always appreciated by our cadre of punk-loving passengers, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. After all, it was his car.

            One of our favorite things to do was to pile into the LeBaron and drive out to the Richard Nixon library late at night-- well after business hours. There was a fountain there in the parking lot, and Matt would start circling around it, slowly at first, while blasting the classical music. As we circled, the car would pick up speed, and soon we’d be flying around the thing like we were on a carnival ride: all of us being thrown against the far door by the centrifugal force, the wind slashing in through the rolled-down windows. Around and around we’d go, faster and faster, with all the windows down and the classical music blaring.

            Matt was really pushing it one night. There were five of us in the car: Matt, Mason, Lowell, myself, and, of course, Bundy. Matt was really flooring it around the fountain, and we were all having a great time trying to lean towards the middle while being pushed towards the outer window. Matt was circling counterclockwise, in adherence with what he believed was the law: driving on the right side of the fountain.

            As we reached an obscene speed (Matt was really having a hard time keeping the car on track, and was starting to drift a bit) we saw flashing lights. It seemed the Nixon Library security officers had come to pay us a visit. They were barking something at us through their patrol car’s PA system, but we couldn’t hear over all the wind and classical music. Matt kept circling. The lights kept flashing.

            Soon we could hear some of what they were shouting at us, and it basically boiled down to: “Stop circling that fountain!”

            Well, Matt soon got tired of holding the car steady, and slowed down, and then pulled the car away from the fountain. The security officers were pissed. They tried to follow us, but Matt started weaving around the parking lot, maneuvering the LeBaron between parking blocks, and the poor security guards couldn’t keep up. So, we sped off out of the grounds of the Nixon Library and pulled the car over in an empty public parking garage across the street.

            There were cement walls separating the different sections in the garage, and Matt had pulled the LeBaron over right next to one. We all sat on the hood and smoked cigarettes under the garage’s sodium-yellow lights. We were feeling triumphant: we’d escaped the long-arm of the Nixon Library security forces unscathed. Or so we thought.

            We’d just finished our cigarettes when we saw the flashing lights of a police car around the corner in another part of the garage. We scattered like cockroaches and tried to hide. I lay down and hid behind the car. I wasn’t sure where everybody else had gone. Soon the lights came closer, and over the police car’s PA came a voice: “Come out from behind there. We see you. Keep your hands were we can see them.” I didn’t move. There was no way they could see me. I was well hidden behind the LeBaron’s immense backside. They must’ve been talking to somebody else.                

            There was some general commotion and some scuffling sounds. I heard Bundy yell, “Run you idiot! Run!” That’s when I knew we were done for. I peered out over the car’s trunk. It seems that Matt, that good noble citizen, had come out with his hands raised. The cops, half-hidden behind their car and leaning over the hood, had their guns drawn on him. It was a scary moment to say the least. But Bundy wasn’t scared at all. He was screaming at Matt to run. It didn’t seem like a great idea to me, and, luckily, Matt didn’t listen. Soon we all came out from our various hiding places, and the cops gathered us up for questioning.

            Bundy was pissed at us for being such wimps, but came out to join us, as he saw that we were defeated and that it’d be better to give up at this point.

            We were all 16, and had never been to jail before, and didn’t want to start now. There were two cops, and they were extremely angry. They kept treating us like terrorists.

            “You boys having some fun down the Nixon Library tonight, huh? You think that’s funny?”

            Bundy was laughing. “It wasn’t that fun. It was okay, I guess.”

            “Son, where do you live?”

            Bundy pointed in the general direction of Placentia. “Over there.”

            The cop didn’t like that. “Okay son, where’s over there?”

            “Son?” This was cracking Bundy up. “If I’m your son shouldn’t you know where I live?”

            This made us all laugh a bit.

            “Okay you bunch of jokers.” The cop’s mustache was quivering. “That’s enough. Do any of you have any idea of how much trouble you’re going to be in? That’s federal government property you’ve been goofing around on.”

            We all tried to look appropriately scared. I was uncertain if this were true. Could the birthplace of an ex-president who was impeached really be owned by the US government? It didn’t seem likely, but thought it wise not to question it at the current time.

            “Messing around with government security forces is not a good idea, okay? You get it?”

            It turns out the security officers had phoned the cops and given them the LeBaron’s plates. I guess we hadn’t been too hard to find, parked across the street like that in a deserted parking garage, though I’m still curious how they’d found us so quickly.

            The cop continued: “Now. I’m going to need all of your phone numbers. How old are you?”

            Bundy quickly replied, “Not old enough. Sorry. I don’t give out my number to…”

            “That’s just about enough out of you, son!” The cop screamed at Bundy. He took out his handcuffs. I sensed this wasn’t going to be end well.

            Soon Bundy was cuffed, and they were giving him a pat down. It was absurd, and Bundy kept giggling the whole while they searched him. When they were done, they put Bundy in the back of their car, and then came back to chat with us.

            “Okay boys. See what happens when you don’t follow orders? Now, I’m going to need all of your phone numbers. We’ll be calling your parents to come pick you up.” It was after midnight. All of our parents were asleep by now. And, to a 16-year-old kid, the thought of a cop calling one’s parents was extremely frightening. The cop took out a pad of paper, and one-by-one we all gave him our names and phone numbers.

            Bundy screamed from inside the car, “Don’t give him your phone numbers, you idiots!”

            The cop screamed back, “Hold it down in there, son. Don’t get yourself in any deeper. We ain’t done with you yet.”

            Soon the cop was calling in all of our numbers on his CB. The only person who picked up was Mason’s mom, who was not happy at all about it. She’d freaked and thought Mason had been nabbed for grand larceny or something. She arrived in her bathrobe, and took Mason by the scruff and dragged him screaming and yelling into her car. After a bit more waiting around, amazingly, the cops released Bundy to us, as it seems they couldn’t really hold him, as he hadn’t done anything besides mouth off. The rest of us were given a stiff warning that we were on their “list” of persons to watch, and were told to behave ourselves. They also did a search of the LeBaron, but didn’t find much besides fast-food wrappers and smashed BigGulp cups. We drove off in the LeBaron, sulking and downtrodden, but still sort of marveling at the whole ridiculousness of it all. In the end, the cops probably had better things to be doing that night than harassing a bunch of teenagers, at least we hoped; trying as they were to keep Yorba Linda-- the land of gracious living-- safe. 

whisky in the sky with diamonds

Dock Boggs: You’ve got to draw the reader in.

Carl Perkins: But where’s the father in this story? Where’s he been?           

Dock Boggs: Up and down shit creek and all over Pissville. I want whatever love is falling out of, not some flimsy excuse for it.

Carl Perkins: In the mood for some genuine human interaction, I see.

Dock Boggs: Very the same as much so, really.

Carl Perkins: And the reader don’t care. She don’t care at all.

Dock Boggs: Precisely.

Carl Perkins: The Collected Works of Elvis Precisely, and all that, and et al, and those other etceteras to jumble around, but who’s reading?

Dock Boggs: Nobody. Nobody reads. The Dewey Decimal System’s gone out of style. I watch the porch for signs of light. Nothing. Just a big empty rattrap of nothing.

Carl Perkins: We can say whatever we want. Nobody’s listening.

Dock Boggs: If only we could sing. That’d be something. People would pay attention. People like music.

Carl Perkins: Sure. But I doubt it. You’ve got to win a couple popularity contests to even have a chance. And we are not so hip or cool, are we?

Dock Boggs: Not by a sword’s throw.

Carl Perkins: It’s shit like that that’s getting in the way. A bunch of self-absorbed assholes ain’t going to be looking to us for help.

Dock Boggs: If a voice cries in the wilderness and nobody is around to hear it cry, does that voice really cry?

Carl Perkins: More like whines in the wilderness. Creepy, huh?

Dock Boggs: Block it out. Keep trickling by unnoticed.

Carl Perkins: Lost in the alleyway, shuffled behind the cards, flummoxed with Cream-Of-Wheat sadness, we go angling dull hooks through the pawnshop window.

Dock Boggs: My tie’s been clipped!

Carl Perkins: Don’t worry. Nobody’ll notice. Nobody cares.

Dock Boggs: Now that I believe.

Carl Perkins: The moon’s slicing shiny streaks through the blinds. A grand old laugh sinks in. We are buried. We are chumps. 

Dock Boggs: I don’t believe it.

Carl Perkins: I’ll have to make you, then.

Dock Boggs: Just foam in my beer, my friend. Break a few legs trying, though.

Carl Perkins: Hold on. My theme song’s playing. I gotta go. Be back momentarily.

Dock Boggs: Lord.

Carl Perkins: You really are an ass-face Kimberly. Really.

Dock Boggs: Somebody opened up the sardines, spilled sardine juice all over the bathroom floor. The place, the whole place, it reeks like sardines. 

Carl Perkins: Five chilled-vodka shots, for your medicine. Likelihoods arising from unlikely emissaries, as these, aren’t potty trained enough to be left to their own devices. Not yet. Pyrcoslastic flow achieves the meanest of ends, for them, these, and those, or somebody’s other.

Dock Boggs: I must have been happy once, but I don’t remember it. Maybe it was on the 3^rd Tuesday of the month, or something. It is difficult to say. A lot of lolling between things. Substantial, yet meager.

Carl Perkins: It’s getting late. Do the dishes. The weather’s fair enough for enemies to pick sides.

Dock Boggs: Lowed and beholden to the sticky side of this Jack-Benny-heavy mess while the one-liners take cover-- or take off on a long vacation. I have a fear of never flying.

Carl Perkins: The reader’s bored. The reader’s dead. The reader’s out to brunch.

Dock Boggs: And yet we keep her in mind, always. We need her. We have to court her with our quirky, interesting little tale. Entertain her with our witty and caustic sense of humor. Woo her over and into the midst of our soundless fury.

Carl Perkins: She’s not listening. She’s off buying cosmetics and raffle tickets and an iPad. She’s talking back to the television. She’s microwaving popcorn. She’s falling in and out of love. Her status is forever neutral and indifferent. 

Dock Boggs: She’s drawn in by pictures, explosions, fart jokes, and cat memes. She’s only got like fifteen seconds to spare-- between the jumbled mesh of this barrage of distractions and spam-ideation-- to be serious about the way in which she’s living her life, or to be at least partially concerned with having to, what, sit down and really, well, think about it.

Carl Perkins: To be waited on by the union-backed figures of beauty, fixed out-of-time, socked in the jaw by life’s jest and fluff and jiving around.

Dock Boggs: And here, where the mockingbirds shoot themselves, the reader’s in too much company. The reader’s alone, lost in the crowd; that’s the long and short of it, really.    

Carl Perkins: Scattered over too many razed landscapes. There is not much hope, for her, is there?

Dock Boggs: Drawn away. Not even cognizant that there is a touch to be in.

Carl Perkins: But who are we to…to say what the proverbial reader needs, cares about, or should care about?

Dock Boggs: Nobody. We gripe. We don’t read. We don’t partake in the greasy handouts of life’s soup kitchen.

Carl Perkins: We must matter, right? Matter to somebody?

Dock Boggs: But who? The nights play havoc with these wishy-washy aspirations, these delusional waking dreams, and we wake or sleep, just the same, don’t we?

Carl Perkins: Stumbling through it all, falling in love with the wrong people. Yep. I guess so. Leading toilet-paper lives, to be used and flushed away.

Dock Boggs: And the music. It’s like Stephen Foster meets Stephen Hawking, or…sort of.

Carl Perkins: And the music. Oh yes. And then there’s the music. Ah, let’s forget it. I’m not dreaming well. They’re all about cocaine, sometimes with orange feathers growing in it, and, also, I seem to be writing suicide notes on a nightly basis.

Dock Boggs: Paced with a spell-- no a potion-- to crack rarely on the freezing sidewalk of the world.

Carl Perkins: If I (she or he, who cares?) could ever figure out stuff like this stuff.

Dock Boggs: Oh, it’s just that old, “Johnny, can I borrow that ring?” sort of stuff. You know, that kind of thing. That kind of stuff.

Carl Perkins: Pop the champagne for all of us. Me, you, her, him, them, and all the rest who read what’s not here nor there, but all over the place-- every-damn-where you could dream of.

Dock Boggs: The moon ain’t hitting my eye, though, is it?

Carl Perkins: Hell, how the fuck should I know?

Dock Boggs: We get crabby over petty differences in the circumspect bits of our cowardly nature. The reader’s not going to gamble away her time for something so lacking in pith. Grips should be gotten on ways to not only attract, but to keep attention.

Carl Perkins: We could hunt musquash in the perfumed sanity of it all. 

Dock Boggs: Sure, decreeing it a lost cause, and we make up usefulness to get by. 

Carl Perkins: Sure. Like Mel Blanc’s, “Sí.” Something that goes all kinds of further than it should. But that damn pesky reader. Shit. We’ve got to keep her with us, tagging along, giving up her free time for a trek into…into…

Dock Boggs: Yep. That’s what it comes down to. A journey that just don’t go nowhere. You buy the ticket, think you’re taking a ride, but instead get taken, get jumped by some derelict thugs who just see you as another obstacle to acquiring goods, to bettering themselves, and you are squashed, stepped on and over.

Carl Perkins: I, I, I, I, I’m not your stepping stone!

Dock Boggs: Walking around like you’re front-page news. Yep.

Carl Perkins: Whatever. It’s just psychotic hipness, the passé coming back into style.

Dock Boggs: Lord help us.

Carl Perkins: Don’t count on it. She’s busy. Just like the reader. Kind of has a lot going on. She’s consanguineous with the Hi-Def patter, the UltraMo splices, the pop-up-ad attitude, and the curvilinear structure of throwaway regularly scheduled programming. We are abandoned, left out here all on our own, craving salad dressing without even the hope of a salad.   

Dock Boggs: I’m disqualifying myself from any discussion of right or wrong. I’m all voilà without any of the razzle or the dazzle.

Carl Perkins: And we seem constant only when looked at over the long haul, maybe on a flow chart spanning thousands of years where the itsy-bitsy nature of our entire existence is but a single lure baited on one of billions upon billions of time’s hooks. Everything’s already occurred, buddy, long ere your grandsires had nails on their toes.

Dock Boggs: Ah. Oh. Gimme, gimme shock treatment. Pretty please?

Carl Perkins: Might as well not. It’s not like we’re the architects of our own spirit. What doesn’t count about nothing is all that nothing is-- something we can’t know because it is not-knowing in its purest form, and we are only creatures of substance, not the lack of it.

Dock Boggs: A mere pittance smeared on the glass slide of memory’s avalanche.

Carl Perkins: These pretzels are making me thirsty.

Dock Boggs: Yep. That’s the stuff. American Bandstanding. Sweetening the purse. Getting along properly with a reasonable amount of others. Never rocking when all the rest of them roll.

Carl Perkins: Based on my mercurial findings there is just not enough miner music playing in the hard heart of it all, and spanked awake, lumped into a sum that nothing adds up to. Um, thanks, Lord. A lot. Really.

Dock Boggs: But the pink flowers are back in bloom on the thorny far-away-eyes of sticks without stones. We take it. We spark a bloom’s last cramped blush. We inch away and away from it all. I am movement redefined inside of everybody else’s out.

Carl Perkins: The train is at the station. That’s all I’ve got to say.

Dock Boggs: But no one boards.

Carl Perkins: And, well, that’s as it should be. No father. No reader. Just the two of us counting invisible cars on a turnpike that’s a million miles from New Jersey.  

Dock Boggs: Grounds in my coffee. Grounds in my coffee.

Carl Perkins: Details, hunched over less-than-serious business, gamey and never quite hungry enough. Falling for the same tricks, buying into sanity for a chance at mediocrity, and we make plans, and if the best laid don’t pan out? Well, throw a candy bar in the dryer. Repeat, repeat, repeat, then repeat until desired results are unattainable, and then all worry goes the way of landlines.

Dock Boggs: We are the result of never being drawn in or swept away or beatified to the nth degree of impossible streamlined fittings-- um, things called, maybe, a soufflé of auscultation in the dust-mite infested realms of what borders the troposphere of all possible thought, which, of course, is limitless. Shouldn’t we be listening back?

Carl Perkins: Arranged, patterned, Montenegrin stitched into the same-old, same-old. So, what we’ve got here is, wait…just standing single-file in a corrupt line that weeds out the extraordinary? Is that all there is?

Dock Boggs: Skipping the proverbial stones of peace over war-torn lakes of fire. Nothing much, really. Necessity’s become abstract. We’ve lost more attention than we’ll ever have chance to gain.

Carl Perkins: I’m taking a leave of absence from my life. I’m putting my duty and my ambition on hold. I’m taking out a loan of risk-free loafing, and am quitting all of this dumb settling and ordering that bogs and clutters and scars.         

Dock Boggs: But the reader? Haven’t we forgotten her?

Carl Perkins: As long as I can spell my own name. As long as I…can…

Dock Boggs: It seems to me that she’s maybe gone out for cigarettes, and that it is surely possible that she’s never coming back home.

Carl Perkins: That’s more like it.

klugman’s plea (with a hair in the gate)

 in praise of pip...

The air raid siren’s playing a Tony Bennett tune. We’re all heaped in yellow, washed brutally in gold, and stabbed brushing into a stale copper that’s jerry-rigging havoc from the street’s steely skin. The ambulances are in a trance, and I’m making hay with a gentleman’s magazine. Lowly and rising. There’s a sticker price of 99 cents on most of my ideas, and the garbage sure ain’t taking itself out, but the sky’s lapping up the lazuli out of an opening-day sale, and the cards have lost their faces and their shine, and for the moment there’s no real way to tell if the weather’s going to take off its hat and stick around a while. The Senators are all dead. The sky’s pitching for its life. And I’m just one of those heels with a Robin-Hood complex, gone from auburn to a streaky gray. It’s to laugh. No more bets. No more bottle. No more plying blue for the dirt. The carousel’s piping Gloria and spitting rain-slick neon, and the shooting gallery’s all ducks and squashed hope. A shill ducking for cover in a rooming house dreams big and loses the same way. The sodden carcass of an aging, weak idiot in exchange for a little kid’s shoebox soul. The nature of reality’s becoming unraveled. Stuffy and refined, going out for a beer run and forgetting to buy beer. Geezer plates and teeth like a rabid hound, and all inroads are leading out to the pastures of hell. Locks change. Doors get blown. Strays’ chains rattle the kennels. A place where there’s not even supposed to be a war on, and the kid lies dying, for an hour or so. Low-balling chances of making it out to brighter lights, to the peppered squeaks and thwacks of a pickup game. An hour. An hour. Nobody’s stuffing three hundred in an envelope. Nobody’s drinking light beer. Making movies from scraps and leftovers, worn-down resentment, out-classed pizzazz. Tax me, then. The rum’s been stirred to life. The spaghetti’s gone to mush. A bible’s ripped to shreds on the bed. Hang on. Get yourself a stool’s worth. We’ll meet back at a quarter ‘til doomsday. The strings are gone from the piñata. The milk’s drained from the livestock. Catch the last bus to Norfolk. We’ll find others to hang for our crimes. We’ll don paraffin wings and gorilla-glue felt hearts to our wrists. Don’t you know, the moon’s made of squash and eucalyptus bark? Cash on the barrelhead, it’s only cashed-in losses now. Bet the book and throw silver dollars at the band when they’re finally done for good. Our song’s been out of tune for so long now that we don’t even notice. A couple broken mirrors and your picture fallen frameless to the concrete, a widow’s weeping caught in the slivers and shards. Hokey-Pokey’d to a dream while home’s just one last losing streak away. It’s to laugh. That’s what it’s always been. To laugh. So, steal the smoke from all the fires, and curl, soft and happy and lost, into the curve of the world. We’ll send out for the clowns to take care of the rest.    

  

the weary and conflicted kindness of shy strangers

            Sometimes it’s like you’ve either got too much salsa or too many chips. Let me tell you, it’s a gamble, and every so often you’ve got to run with the mustard and take cover when the hotdog buns come for you. Trust me. I’ve lived through enough barbeques and picnics to know better. Bring some snacks. Take an umbrella. Smoke armadillo-skin cigars. Tie my spikes together and chuck ‘em up over the telephone wire. Dog-tired? I’m taking the kids out to breakfast. It’s a sure thing. Wrapped up. Boy, these broken heels are killing me.

            Crabapple jelly on dark Russian rye. That’s what I’m talking about. Here, there, we’ve got pounds of sugar to dump. The comic strips tell the future while I go around closing windows and, when the mood strikes me, bark at the television. Warming up but never sleeping, it’s ornaments of rust and gold that keep the eyes half-shut all the time. Reused elements of cocoa powder and stylish hope, the dreams I can’t make out are off to keep pace without even a hat to their name, and the high-pressure zones, and the bottle-cap patched pants, and the yellowing tape marks on the balding shoulders of a thrill-seeking jacket, and, and, and, that’ll have to do. It’s a Henson Stitch: something you’ll never see but that’s there just the same anyhow.

            Atypical romantic schemes, dialing up the wrong sort, pay saved up until it’s spent, and the old and staying-put dawdle in the pool-hall light. Wedged and insufferable, the table’s been set but nobody’s eating dinner. Devil my eggs and roll that old tire down the driveway with me inside of it. Please stand clear of the closing doors while I’m up on the roof with my vacuum cleaner and box of dominoes. And a Bronx Cheer goes out to the Appomattox-soured cads among us. Where does this escalator let off? Under the river or into the doctored night’s teeth? I’m willing to put up with off days midweek and the Coeur d'Alene sliced heaven of it all, if need be, but there’ll be no gimmicks in the hollow of a dying cedar, if you’re floating with this buzzard’s drift. After all, I’m no Trimalchio in West Egg; rather, just a gouache of a guy splattering his way through the headlands with a dyed-blue heart dripping from his sleeve to his jacket’s elbow patch. Nobody’s offering me a ride.

            So, as accidents happen (and we’re all to blame here, really) there’s little indication that I’ll take my Kangaroo stew recipe with me to Harlem. The supports for such an effort were pretty damn small, if truth tells on itself about it. Certain spices, well, you just can’t go lugging them around. And when it comes down to grit and the richness of sauced pride, well, there are moons we’ve yet to land on still, and it’ll keep us lucky and grounded wherever we go, which, of course, is nowhere but here where the stalls reek of pissed-on dandelions. For this here being’s time, I’ve been nicknamed to death, and there’s a real way not quite out of staying the course, but that’s a long-gone decision that pretty much all takers around here and there are almost too brave to make. That’s really getting your mayonnaise in your mustard, if you’re in the business of asking. I can hardly bother the diced tomatoes to stay put, myself; and if you’re planning a coup in the sauerkraut it’d serve the needs of most better to just lie lazy in the bouillabaisse until the crops pick themselves for the remainder of the summer’s blackbirding.

            The captain’s one-eyed dwarf sings, “I would like to be in love, in love, in love, in love,” almost every evening. This is not the land of the blind, apparently, and he will have to be satisfied with his cravings alone. I suspect that he’s waning gibbous in his moods, especially late at night when I’ve spied him dipping his stubby toes into the pool’s icy waters and epode-ing to the dismay of the sleepy and harassed charter-club members, most of whom don’t give a rattle about this particular asp’s melodies. The boiler room’s becoming more crowded than they’d like to admit. It’s enough, I figure at least, to permanently etch a five-dollar bill into the pockets of unsuspecting visitors. They don’t know what's there, right in their pocket, and it doesn’t matter because we’ve too little faith in what somebody else might bestow into the fold of our lives to even check things like jacket linings for clues to a better way to get help, to heal, or to set up shop on a banana tree farm and stay open all through the night. It’s more or less what we give that matters, not whom we give it to or what we take from it. There are stars closer than the distance it takes to muster a simple hello from time to time. Remember, oleander kills.

            The brunt of what I say is lost in the soft cushion of my surrender. Do not mistake my lavish appetites for greed. It’ll be a frank goodbye that gets mileage out of all this, and the artichoke leaves have all been brushed with kerosene, and I’ve donned my crepe myrtle sombrero. It’s in the misty hindsight of liking’s look that we’ve stabbed all the champs-- in the midst of it. And there is still very little now in the force-fed hunger of missing, in the lonely eyes of dry-iced laughter; and we’re not taking care; and we’re a pound over the limit by now, very little left hiding below the stairs, or on a barstool sad with bad meatloaf and worse beer. 

            So now it’s almost when we lived (or could live) on dream’s smoke and the love of cats, when we hung (or were hung) around drugstores and pool halls, when the cops never came-- very little now-- while the snowy speeches still could wreck, while the whores slip (or slipped off) down the stairs, or now while the sneaks fluster and hurry sugar away from the coffee-loaded grandstanders. And it is all as it were, where we happen and were happened upon, and I still slice my pie with a stiletto, if you really want to know. The lie is that we are all bona fide citizens of our own subconscious realms. Here? Well, we climb back, the radio tuned to static, a violin in the trunk, waiting around to start having a good time, letting the statute of limitations on prayers elapse. And then, the lent of love’s like gives a wink backwards, and there is a sprinkling of sun after the hail’s let up, and there is hell to never pay, and there is the sound of that old gypsy saying my name. Do not forget what I gave and never asked for back-- it is legendary. And, as I arrive home from Hushpuckena, watering the fake dirt of plastic plants with real water, well, it has become all that I own.  

smoky joe wood’s burgundy period

            Even the rain’s clatter was less than the boys raising Cain upstairs last night. And now I’m the one all done in, and ere this I’d wandered crutched by doubt by the corner market where, boozy and theatrical as always, the old man who works behind the counter screamed across the street, “Janet! Do you remember Alabama and The Forty Thieves? Alabama!” I got squeamish and hobbled away to the park.            

            I’m benched, cranky in the sun, watching glossy leaves on some shrub bush shine with it, and the smell of cut grass from the mower just about bowls me over, and I’m shivering. At a sidewalk café, some kid’s dad is commanding him to dip his bread in the sauce spilled on his plate. There’s a song that goes, “Land of plenty’s got nothing for me.” Well, it’s a start. One cloudy guy up there by a high-rise’s top. Grooming’s done for. Very much, Sam, played out. There’s probably some cool place to be, with drink in hand, right about now, but I’m far from it.

            Really there are only shuttled grunts heaving over the power lines, and I’m a stand-in for myself, regaling lunch dates with not very mesmerizing stories of life gone awry. A heavy lifter’s thawing, and it’s emphysemaville for this lemon picker, if you want to know the truth of it, how and by, cured as cheap bacon, suffering mild tantrums here or nearly there. Gut’s panicky and feral. Delirious is more than I can say for how I’m looking to see these things. Minor adjustments in temperament, I’m crusty with glory and defection. Every last hard-to-call pitch breaks in the dirt, and I’m shaking off signs for the rest of the afternoon’s season. Off-speed stuff, mostly. Nothing catching much of the plate, though. Lack is gnawing away at what’s not hustling down the line-- basically just me and my A-less-than-one motivation. Really, it’s all about as exciting as an intentional walk. It’s like tailing Herkie Styles and Mary Hatcher, and I’m making reservations for an encore, or at least staying put ‘til the bottom of the frame.            

            Holy Moses and Christy Mathewson too. It’s a stylized affectation of who I might’ve been, formerly, in a life less drab, and you know last night, well, a telephone pole I usually lean on while I’m waiting for the bus gets a car wrapped around it about 5 minutes before I get there. Seems luck’s shunting with a swilled crick just in time for extras. Barnstorming with Bloomer Girls in Ouray, let me see, that’d be about when it started. You go from Albuquerque to Des Moines, by way of a bus with a transmission that’s about to drop out and die in the road, and you’ve got yourself a head that’s liable to explode any minute, and there are no charter flights around these parts, so it’s a five a.m. wakeup call that gets your day started. Then, well, maybe you go into your mind’s windup, lollygagging back to Ness County, limbered up with much earlier episodes of how the Old Man tried to pickup on this chick by telling her that she could pour more sugar in her coffee if it were hotter, that it’d absorb better---um, something about supersaturation, or the density of a liquid, or something that’d rubbed off on his still nimble noggin in chemistry. And it almost worked, so, well, there’s where you get that first inkling of a kid, i.e., yours truly, coming up and into the picture’s focus. And it’s a bloop and a blast to this here now-- just a sagging, woebegone catcher’s mitt and a few broken toes to show for it. Boston’s snowed in. And, too, the grocery store’s always a tad far away. But, in some parts they deliver Mexican, so survival doesn’t go quite out of style. So, the sentence carries itself out, and you’re twixt the devil’s twin and a few shallow wine-dark seas in the meanest of times, in the dourest of hours of loss. A thousand or so stadiums away from thirty wins. And lord hurt us with slippery grass. 

           Chippy birds perch on bench rails. French kids skip-run, circle, and dart in a game of tag. The reek of homelessness; a ragged man asleep in his boots on the fountain’s concrete ledge. Wind’s scattering white petals of the trees’ flowers. My shoes scrape against the rough wood of the bench, and, shit, I’d spike any damn shortstop around these parts for a chance at The Bigs. Low-down, Rookie-League crap, if you’re wondering. Just a gimmick, see? In the way we’re built to ape the appearances of those we try not to get nabbed peeking at. From Topps to Donruss to Fleer, all the way through to a hundred and sixty-two, we’re sunk thrum-clacked to the cable cars’ mumbled moan-- a party of one, if you please. Left hubba-hubbaing at church bells, greater but smoked out, and clearly Wabashed in flowery mountains through cannons of love.

            The doormen flick their cigarette butts directly into the sewer grates, while I flop myself down here, taking my warm-up swings far enough away from the on-deck circle-- by gum-- for a chance at taking the next one deep. Lord, I’m like an old duffer with two canes who climbs these hills herky-jerky, up and down, back and forth, and now there’s only the return trip to look forward to, and, well, back at, too. Closing in on depth, a certain cling left whiffing at 3-0 junk, I spend my luck on flops and reruns. A stubbly hobo Judy Garland, thrown exhausted on some backstage stairs, humming herself back under the rainbow again…why oh why can’t I?             

            Shunned, budded, and nulled like an egg cracked over the void left when my playing days got through with me. Bloated and sarcastic, shaving corners, cooled to an ice-water sangfroid in the bottom of the ninth with two on and two out, down by one. Upbraided by no clock’s chime, all filled-up with labor-less folly, and so it goes, well, quitting time in the soul’s factory, I guess, from here on out. Toeing the rubber and tipping pitches. Smart enough to play the dumb ass. Shit. Where’s Jason Robards when you need him? Where’s Iron Man McGinnity? Hell, just a nuanced pick of the nose in the wriggled gist of eternity’s crop dusting, maybe, and we’re playing a-whole-nother ballgame, shirts and skins on the asphalt, and we need an impartial observer to, at most, say grace before all of this batting-cage supper’s substance is lost in the ephemeral fields of cowtowns and palookavilles: rubbed-out places on the map where the crack of the bat’s been replaced with pasteurized charm. There's nothing left to do here but spell my name and spit seeds, and, of course, gripe my way through this horrid slump. Time to relocate, to pull up roots and soak in somewhere else’s shine, and I’ll take the rain and the white-flowered trees along with me. Wracked and tortured with missing, I’ll make friends with a suitcase and a bottle of scotch. And, well, you see, the broken maples, they follow me wherever I go. 

              

the death of longitude

“I don’t care about your happenstances. There’s work to be done. Do it.”

“You’re believable.”

“Try it sometime, huh?”

“The trains run. Not timely, but they run.”

“Battle the youth. They’ll get old too, and while we fight the…”

“Heart attacks accrue, right?”

“Well, Miss Lily’s gone shooting the moon. We’re bastards for being here. We’re not making it okay. We are not too thirsty for it.”

“Devils above. Angels few and far between. Very kind, the ways of man.”

“Sneaky, at least. The best I can’t do. We shift our means to the names of love. All that we’ve got. All that.”

“Worms get more, for the bites they don’t take, while we eat circling meals and try God’s eyes on for size.”

“Abalone for sale! Get your hot-buttered abalone today!”

“I’m sick like a sneezing popcorn vender. I’m healthy like a fatally wounded racing horse.”

“Give away your bullets but keep your gun, you know?”

“Kind of.”

“If it pleases the court…”

“It would.”

“I might present here a gracefully stitched star to the temple, hung like an earlobe.”

“Get me under a cover. Get me up and over another hill. Cast me off, all the way, pouting, to the root of liveliness.”

“The best dreams and better wake-up calls. I know what’s not what. Patsy Cline, beer, three cigarettes in an ashtray. Leave me alone. I’m in love.”

“Is it wonderful?”

“No. Not at all. It is pieces of this and a whole lot of that.”

“Do monks know about this? Friars?”

“It’s not in my jurisdiction.”

“Just music to play while driving, to sing along to with the windows up, to recommend to strangers.”

“We are not the world. We are not like little children.”

“Sure. That’s more like it. Blued to death. Beaten to life.”

“A voluptuous tick of the clock, gone for longer than a while.”

“Reason wins! I knew it!”

“Blame the cheerleaders. Blame the stray dogs. Blame the newscasters.”

“If sleep’d only stay.”

“Mesmerizing, I bet. Let’s accomplish something. Why not?”

“Too realistic. No. Let’s set no goals. Let’s snap small change at parked cars. Let’s make up songs for crickets to sing.”

“Gone. Again.”

“Yep. But who’s going to be left to care?”

“Not this. Not again.”

“A fever that never rises, that never goes, that frisks suckers for a good time.”

“Easy. Easy. Easy. There’ll be heaven to give away, for a price.”

“Of course. We pay upfront for our salvation. There’s a dignified grace in the gestures of a liquor store clerk.”

“Been that a’way for a long way of ways. Privateers invest haphazardly in the cracks between our smiles.”

“What?”

“Just a little figurine of oration, pal. Okay? So, get a move on it. On the quadruple.”

“But I’m plucking out a solo on a standup bass.”

“Don’t matter. Don’t matter, son. Nothing you do will ever matter.”

“You. You! You! You who talk in such a structured…fuck. Whatever.”

“Rest can become too much. See?”

“No! I do not see. I do not ever see. Up around the moon and back again. Never. Never.”

“See?”

“Joyful, as it were. Bibled to what’s never been what, first and last off, now.”

“No. No. See? See?”

“Seen or being seen, it all subtracts down.”

“Never did take, did it?”

“The news never tells enough. We are trapped, shimmering more than any star would.”

“I ain’t ever, ever going on my way all the way back to rivers redder than all my valleys.”

“Good for them.”

“Cheated on chances I’ll wage might make me a better, how-do-you-say, gambler.”

“Assassinate all question marks. I will say amen before it’s all done gone.”

“Curses!”

“Yep. That is how it’ll end.”

“Whimperer.”

“You go it!”

“He’s cradling his bottle of brandy like a baby, boys. Watch out. Here comes no trouble at all. Not at all.”

“What becomes of all the winos, the ones who always say their prayers?”

“They do chin-ups in rented rooms and leave a little bit of glitter in the floor’s grime.”

“Still, there ain’t nobody left to do any booing about it. Still.”

“Skin like iron? Breath like…um, I forget. Linoleum?”

“No. But let me get my tuba out and play you a little something.”

“What? Me not worry? Fuck it. Seriously. Fuck it. I’m going to go out and get me a pigeon, put it in an silver cage and teach it to sing the blues, like we used to, like we…used to. Fuck…”

“Don’t mind me. Cleveland’s cold this time of day.”

“The gray’s grown long in my eyebrows. I am unwilling to exchange glances with the gals across the room. We have reached a point of misunderstanding. Tearing up and all that shit’s been left behind for the geese and the olive harvesters. Build me a raft. Go ahead. I still won’t ever go rowing back to shore. The big wide empty is all I need.”

“Go foraging on, son. Go blacklisted into the terrible daylight. Be not a wincer in the face of failure. I am working on something and, boy, when I’m all done it’s gonna blow the whole gosh-to-the-darn roof off all of this, all this we’ve tried and known so well for so long. We will be smaller than life, and therefore, well, we’ll have at least a chance.”

“A bottle of good scotch in the broom closet. A wig and a drum. A degenerate breeze to drift us off to nothing’s somewhere.”

“I believe in the rough stuff, the pulp and the brine and the seeds, stuff caught in the mesh and wire of the thing, nothing thrown away.”

“Used and bought off, boozed and caught, and it’s up to people like us to not just follow their stuffy noses towards the fading scent of robbed banks.”

“My head’s a few continents away, laurelling in a delusional haze of palms and bored pirates who wink at me while I throw tiny umbrellas from my drinks into the pool. There is no map. There is no treasure. All we’ve got are chairs rearranged.”

“Polly doesn’t want anymore crackers, please.”

“Something like that.”

“You know? You’re not really as lousy of a guy as you make yourself out to be.”

“Yeah? Well, shit. Don’t go telling on me, okay?”

“Got it. Your shiftiness, your lying sensibility, your forged identity, your lonesome brand of self-help courage. It’s all secret and safe with me.”

“Well, well, well. I guess it’s approaching that time again. So, well, thanks for nothing’s everything. Drinking off the shakes, again, we’ll get by, right?”

“And, yep, all the people say, just another guy on the lost highway.

“They do, do they?”

“And we are not stationary objects to be fixed in time and place. Bush-league satisfaction’s about all we can muster, and then it’s quitting time again, so we go out and battle dumpster divers for goods in the cool hindsight of drugged compassion. An arranged marriage between opposing forces functions outside our insides. We believe in the existence of others. But fuck it, you know? I’m hard of listening. How’s the lady?”

“Oh, this one? Shit, she’s got me doing my dishes, buying expensive coffee, brushing my teeth, folding laundry and everything. And I’m the one who comes home to find her double-parked in somebody else’s red zone. And soon she’s hanging another’s laundry on her line, and nobody’s saving me a place at the table. I got myself gone, long and gone, and I’m real low and sad now, but it’ll pass. I don’t know why I keep not bringing my happiness over here to where I am. It’s probably not a mistake though.”

“Likely it’ll stay raw in your gut, like having your insides plunged, perhaps. The ones who stay hooded in the windy sun, they’ll let on that we’re picked before we’re locked. Now? Well, there’s just nothing left to shout.”

“Yep. And what’ve we got?”

“The loudness of parallel parking. A sob story that you can’t relate to titled The Hobo Clown’s Worn-Out Frown.”

“Shit. Might as well make the most of what we’ve got while we’re on this side of the dirt, you know, before we’re under it for longer than forever.”

“That makes me gladder than I’ve ever been for just right now at this very moment.”

“Glad about that. Really. I am.”

“Certainly we retain the rights to be left alone at all times, to do whatever it is that we do when we’re alone, these things people wonder about us, the time we spend idling, stuck in neutral, or merely unable to heel-and-toe our way into the bends of the space we occupy in the world. Nobody knows who you are when you are all alone.”  

“The best secret you’ll ever have, something that’s prayed back to life, softly heavy, years away from the horizon’s dust. And when you settle in for the great double clutch of your spent time, well, it’s just some bashful stuttering that gets noticed.”

“And it’s late at night during a storm’s heckling-- while the tree outside my window waves its long leafy tendrils that once every-so-often crack like whips against the glass, and I am more alone than I’ve ever been, lying prone in bed, naked, exposed, twirled in a fit of frustrated anxiety-- when I fear losing that old distinction of joys that’s kept me just cranky enough to push on, and I find myself preparing a muddled exit while the enemy flees.”

“Place advertisement here.”

“Exactly.”

oneirica

The drab gray carpet of the BART train with its worn former-sparkles and chaffed-to-slick patches. A high-pitch squealing marimba shriek wakes me up through the Transbay tube. I’m dreaming of power saws and a version of Escape played on an old Casio that goes: “If you like huevos rancheros…” It’s exciting stuff. The seat next to me is scarred with a few jagged tears, maybe from a knife, or more likely just the sharp parts of somebody’s belt. I’m delirious. Nothing matters. A crinkle of static blurbs from the speakers overhead, speaking of delays and blood on the tracks, or something of the sort. My head’s a can of refried beans. My heart’s just a fading temporary tattoo on my wrist where razor scars used to be. Bleariness is the most of what’s capsizing me, that and what feels like a hole being drilled in my stomach with a 6-inch bit. A rumble stirs and plops through the car. People stand and sit with headphones on, giving their attention to a made-up empty square of public space that stares back at them like a reflection in the window, the silver grab rails the only thing that seem to be holding the standing ones up. I am slouched. I am dismissive of everything going on around me. We are all underwater, way below it, rocketing through a tunnel cut far below the surface of the world. There are pink dots in the carpet, which are better than elephants. I close my eyes and rest my weary head against the dark window.   

            I am growing tired of my whole Jekyll-and-Hyde act, just like trash accumulates in street-side shrubbery. FDR on mailboxes, too. Pickle factories that aren’t hiring. Halfway through with giving up, one person this night and another sucker in the morning, just a peripheral character in my own life, dusting the lazy work of spotty clouds. Face it; the sun’s too bright most of the time anyway.        

            Primordial sap gets its due. Homage paid to grits and sausage. Xeroxed happy-birthday cards. We can do better than worse.          
            Coffin Joe’s on the make. He’s banking ‘em in like Sam Jones, hanging around in Lucky Penny territory late at night, and prowling moon-faced through rain in swaying dooms of love. The affectations of a dead dog with the manners of a chauffeur on a break, he’s coming to terms with a sartorial crisis. Courtesy’s like a cousin he’s never met, and just keep off the grass, okay? About a snowball’s chance in hell that his kids will grow up normal.

            I’ve started splurging on toilet paper, purchasing the good stuff: blue-label Charmin brand. I now look forward to my bowel movements, reveling in my time spent not only on the pot, but wiping afterwards. No more strands of thin-plied sheets stuck deep in the crack. No more itching in the ass crags. Just soft and smooth wiping from here on out. I’m settling in for the long haul, and nothing about my days is done.

            This kid? Well, he’s shot dead with a pack of Skittles and an Ice Tea. The sound of helicopters above is worse than a symphony. We trade sleep for twelve-hour shifts, and it comes to this. Well, this is really the mashed liver of things. Let’s not chop onions over it, though. We’re not through with putting bullet holes in innocent people. Rough stuff. Get the news from the classifieds. Take the city’s temperature at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday. We’re meddling with sociopaths in riot gear. The goon squad’s on the mend. We’re only not taking prisoners, and if people get grouchy there are peanuts to pay. It all reeks of bad Chinese food. We’re speaking into the mic but the thing’s gone dead, like the kid-- the one with the Skittles and the Ice Tea.   

            Strumming lines, sunk worried, bested at being wounded, creamed, and it’s like toast that’ll never burn all the way through. Dented pillows. Passed to the war-old years. Chomp--suit, dog leash, stubble-- we run. Shapes that’ll never take. Cleaned ovens shuttled through delinquency, half alone, half unmindful. The rain wakes you up without much trouble.

            Get the storms gone from drains, pluck a rued note from Gore-Tex. We’ve got missionaries out in thunderous regions where closed-casket faces that’ll never stare again lie prone and don’t age. We aren’t hasty in undue diligence. We are commonplace. Over the bucket, plug the hole, and the flow of money will flush out the rest, senders cut unreturned. Vast, the massacre makes promises we can’t keep from keeping. Faring well enough, plowed to nuisances, the bugs imitate the window’s slashed shadows. There’s a gone here that’ll always be a stay.

            Everyone gets to be a rose picker. On a day like tomorrow we’ll plan what today’s done doing. Vines clipped and curtailed, sweltering, and there’s a crunchy loss there that goes stopped until it screams, “Potatoes!” Don’t worry about honeycombs, lobbed grenades, or the sweaty crunch of berry weather. The usual is unheard of. Cooling it does the job of working out, unless you count the tired squandering of slashed tires and boysenberry stains. Vats of courage dump on the famished, and we walk with limps until the stars count us.

            Fans of liking, it’s a fad that’ll always mistake itself for an important step in the domination of our instincts, but, just as well, we can take tests that show the reaches of bellowed sorrow. Fill in the bubble completely, though, so they won’t mistake your tears for resentful rage. Shakes of what was her, she’s not slobbering through the alleys anymore, disrupted, jostled to life’s merchandising, and she don’t do what she ought to, not now, not anymore. The bird’s been flipped. Over your time’s a bent rail, and being nice wears on and off all the time. Machines do not dream.

            I can’t shake it off, wonderful enough to be forgetful of who it was I was the night before, or playing roundup with telephone calls, drenched shoes evidence of wandering in the rain, mostly dressed still in bed, mostly splotchy and cotton-mouthed. We miss each other and stay away, filled with bees, and the way it wasn’t and the lasting goes. Find a new day to be somebody in. A hollow thing emptied of burnt straw, a derby hat squashed by a cement truck, a nap that washes the spin from staying. We strain and striptease sadness, and it’s a blue-red mark in the bottom of a foot’s arch, and peddling, and ants taking shelter from the rain, and a fortune cookie’s fortune cut in three. I can’t dance it away.              

            Broken doorbells, people who never answer, and the newspapers pile up, and the weeds take over the lawn. Somehow praying is optional. Leaving absence behind, though, is not. Busking dopes with aerophones, shirtless organ grinders, capuchin bottlers juggling avocadoes, charros riding high on somebody else’s charm, and one last white-coated pitch for all the fallen angels. Judy’s been punched, and the suckers are left pleated and soaked. Resting takes the care from what’s well. Kimper all of my drapes, please. The coffee’s on the stove, eggshell weak, and the valves of nuisance are jammed with wonder. “Have at it,” was what the grocer said to the mustachioed emperor tamarin, adding, “We are strong with harvested dandelions.” There is no coat of winter left to cover the shivering arms of summer. Great grays and watery silvers leak through. I am going in through the window.

            A flounce, a stab at it, a jab thrown lazily, and the lamplighter moans through a bullhorn, “Don’t worry about better or worse, grazed, looked over, it’ll be so can-openerly, proper and stalled. Disguised in all of the above. Nourishing so copasetic, just here, gloves we wear, just there, eyes closed on the age, brush your teeth with soda water, oh sweet canopy, nature’s left us, do, do, do, do make it bussing me off the table, saltwater dreaming of taffy, bad as blunted, it’s to see, short but not stunted, don’t yes your cares, don’t heart-heart the urgency, belong, you can dry all of your walls, stand behind two-foot tall, in the yellow of the shadows that’ve come and gone before, red makes blue in your eyes, match my drifting ways with a bottle of kerosene, let’s set our socks on fire, make the centipedes roll back up in a ball, and then the you that sees me makes all the fish drown, frittering on and away.”  

            Sizing me down, street slopes, swamped lulls of curve, gowns of gardens gone, plumped and pillowed, where the rattlesnakes are herded, in a troubled couplet of sun and glow, slimming the fits that get old-soda flat and tired, bounced to backwards stations that roll and fuzz, hand-delivered bubbles, scratched-felt specialty stores, a fly’s piss worth of hope and a cranky mallard blocking foot traffic along the winding way, rolled chumped and chucked to a changeless curb, it’s sort of under the dirt, here where beauty’s animals are chowing down half-past sundown, and trespassing comes and goes with the territory, scapegraces prowling loose, and it is we who check the sidewalk’s cross-lying strain relief grooves for cracks with empty unlocked treasure chests where our hearts should be, adapted to corruption, satori-like, Blaked, and pounced on by paradise’s hounds, in the burden of a doubted life accepted, glummy, bent over to wheeze abstractedly, plastic and porcelain, bopped to the inscrutable to combust, a prescription for a sad marrying, equanimity touching on a cackle, interesting to a blamed minimum of a crawl, foured and squared in a round, round, round, round world.            

            Sallow, caught in the end, typing trouble through heavy crossfire, it is something that dunks and is uninteresting, and it is pleasing to the ear, and it is cool to the thought. It is sorrow. It is rich with belly. It clams up with a crammed nuisance. It bites. It won’t heal well. And so, go over, tone by tone, the way inscribed words take a left at the intersection of comfort and boredom. It lures and tacks the walls. Behind the pictures go the words.

            For now I’ll guess dough back to flour and water. Traced into a trance. Ever to let, ever to stay vacant. Where the will goes. Where the heart strays. How the razor scars. It’s the dark’s blessing. Caved in and free. Scooped out and flipped over and out. Outwardly kind. When we had longer smiles. While we were as young as that. Added down. Seventeen’s gone. All along, just a grip to go, gone. The scrubbed rough face of a bell that’ll never ring again. Time’s spent. Get down without it. Get down up past crowded freeways. Gunning for another road to fall all the way down.

                       

walking russian

I saw a guy carrying a giant seashell down the street. Where was he going with that seashell? Was it for his fish tank? Was he walking all the way to the ocean? This isn’t a suspicious attitude you’re witnessing. This is mesmerized swooping. This is a gainfully understated lurk below the awnings. Admitting what’s virtually lost, a stream of photographed carnival rides. This guy wasn’t running any lights, still warm to the touch after hosing off his memories with a snootful of today’s worst news, he was making it, I guess, in his own way-- or making it up. Probably had too much of dashing off his life, trying to keep the score of things close to tied. ‘The pond’s muddy with regret,’ I can see him thinking. ‘No way out now.’ There are spills up ahead, and maybe they’ll catch him on his guard. And he’s the one leaving behind all of his clothes, the ones he wore when he was with her. And, of course, by x-mas there’ll be somebody else to hold her, as he feels his way down the hall, backache and all. He’s got a giant seashell, so who cares? Me? I get kicked out of bars at 2 pm for being too drunk. Shit. What the hell do I know? I’m not careful, but at least I’m cheerful. That’s about it. I’m following long hauls. I’m gripping the ways I’m scared to be to death. Skipped in and over before I’m out. Very soon there’ll be trees on the horizon. And the beaches will all be drowning. Over here there’s music. We’re closer to it. Consider me admonished. I’m all braved out. In painful recrimination of the bad times I’ve had. It’s sorrow flashflooding the gutters. You mourn the hawked nature of my ways. I get better and a little worse most of the time. Gape. Go on. Discredit my credit. A tiny bit in Milan, we strike while the iron cools. Vultures are getting the best of me. Scrawl along the lines. Scoop the glitter from my eyes. I am a communist. Too damn soft. Scratching for more. Looped and raw. Shaped to ship out. I do not need to wake up to somebody screaming through the wish-thin walls. I do not need to be rumbled awake by horrible music. The schematics, musically speaking, were, like me, used to being unusual, and attempting to be witty and caustic at once.

Us? We were walking Russian down Mission at approximately 12:22 a.m. Kindly, there you get bent out of shape, cigarettes too long between ashing, that stuff. Cruel’s what gets lopped off. Honest and charmless. We whistle against the wind. Sad and in the midst of leveled playing fields, night’s just night. Feigning a flop, yep. Just a block starring in traffic’s latest blockbuster. We get sidled by strange ladies, holy women perhaps, from beyond long legs and eagled sight. Not so noble in the mind anyway, you know? We can’t divide our sorrows, dole ‘em out like puppies. I’m wrong. I’m loaded. Vanity is all there is. Boozy, as it were, we clink glasses and unmake a few wishes. Grabbed to dance? Likely enough. But us? We were just taking a stroll. Running smashed into folks mostly whom I hadn’t seen since a few New Year’s ago. Plump and worried. A not-so-old dog you call mule. An incriminating photograph of a leap-year baby. Us? Yep. Still walking Russian. But we at some point, ah, well, you know, we got to planting ideas in flower vender’s heads. We got to walky-talkying our sentiments to a Bluto-like gentleman with spats and a bowler. I gave up wrong numbers years ago, you see, and ever since I’ve been taking my trash out to the curb just like everyone else. My ribcage being out-of-whack, as it were, at the time, still walking Russian as much as possible, I got to hailing cabs with a hockey stick. It worked about as well as you might imagine. Ta-dah, and we’ll all get back to the Great Mother someday, but not at 12:22 in the a.m. It’ll have to wait. Crawl back up to the crow’s nest and have a quick peek at the blood-red horizon, whisky-happy and lulled to wake. I’m chippy and my kilter is lining up tin cans on a two-by-four, if anybody clucks about it. Walking Russian down towards the Ferry Building. It would be, let’s see, almost one. Good-mouthing and applauding pigeons. The west is lost. Globs of sunshine smash some vanity in the mirror. I keep taking off. Water that’s worth it, we walk along, and Hail Mary our pennies into it. Voluble and then we’re doubting it all too. Clatter that creeps with out a cling. We are stymied by deteriorating boards. Somebody lies, “Let’s shout!” It’s worth a cherub’s piss. Walking Russian for the peasants. Walking Russian for the Czars. More blooms to set aside for next spring or the next or the one before or after that. Walking Russian for the middle class. We have given up cars and motorboats. We have traded in our bank accounts. If it gets past one. If it gets later. Let’s march. Us? We make compensation seem like a bored kid eating soggy cereal. We’re just walking Russian on a pier, out where the water stirs itself. Blankets wailing. A horse that’s lost its voice. Pawed grave, we get better tastes of being that or this, a broomstick serenade, a binged “of course” that walks a little honeysuckle into the room. I get a few ideas about hope, but my stomach contradicts them, adamantly. Wished unfulfilled. We were walking, yep, Russian through the closed gas stations, through the YMCA building, through the theatre and the church. It is all me. We were walking Russian, and nobody is going to care, ever. Got the tug back in your stride? I’m openly pulling up roots of missing things. Grimly grinning at the tacky x-mas lights twisting around a felled tree. Organ music waving us goodbye. We over and over take our time, and it flops away without us. It is no longer just one time or another. Shadows fall longer than this. Couple the breaks it takes to get under it all. Dirt topples us. And us? We walk Russian with whatever’s around and carry seashells all the way back to the ocean.

from the lost letters of general William Tecumseh Sherman The Sixth

It’s slathering Tuesday afternoon on the slats of Wednesday morning. That’s all. Pretending to be adults. Groveling. There’s a certain brattiness there that pricks tempers and morphs into an undone bad side, which is all that’s left of what we’ve become. Vast shipments of bubblegum go northeast for the spring. I am calling all takers to the pool to play Marco Polo with high heels on. I’ve been making up my mind to take my time. All this business we’re always putting on the street; it’s all takers getting refurbished into mind readers. Loom.

Very soon there will be children on the way, on their way to cultures of smog, wearing frocks and leading marvelous, sweat-free lives. Breeding season is compensated with lush grounds of meadows waxing towards moist, Lucite-like, see-through masks. Prospects, hooked with a good song to wake up to, make beds and coffee, but not sense. Very soon we’ll have supper calling through the drainpipes. Very soon we’ll have sleet instead of hail. There is no cake left for the ones who hammer and chisel their way through the ice of walls like these. It’s okay. Everybody around here hates cake. We prefer pie.

I am not talking. There’s nothing left that’ll hold my voice. A job that’s gone. A kitchen that’s home to a few families of mice. Mistreated prisoners of a war that was over before it ever started. I could listen. I could run for mayor. There’s a whisper between the stories, between the floors and ceilings, crushed into the carpet, and taken out with the trash. Ashes fly. Freeways get mean. Bigger plans make great leaps off the stage, plowing over an audience of one.

Willa Cather started a riot with flashbulbs and manure, just as thunder’s crackle fumbles with the gilded charm of sunset’s ocean. I am unlike all the things I’ve ever been.

The earth’s coldest there, in the fall, when summer’s dying all around. Poured thick, the night shakes off another attacker, and we march for November’s shores. It’s lately best to attempt springing out of action. We weren’t raised right. Clothes tatter off, minds make wind, a crucified scarecrow is drenched with muddy guilt. The trees are tallest there. The moon’s gone. We have taken all of our rights back, except the last. Remove my picture from all of your frames.

Way back when, wherever you’ve been, I’m churning all these copper souls into firewood. Trust gives me a hip check. I shoulder the load. Even in this lousy train wreck of a march my pipe’s still smoking. The ballet’s come back to town. The hills trade bronze back for gold.

The canned food in my heart is going bad. Gravelly roads veer, go mushy, and lament the tires they’ve known and lost. Hoist me up over the fire. Get the thorns from love’s wilt, stow them back where nobody lives. Finely good. Pet the shag from the slack; and me, I’ll tie most of the knots you’ve got left, gutless, sapped, and mostly just hurt. All bowed out, I am made of similar stuff as the rest. Sometimes even skeletons feel like dancing. Sameness splashes through the rest of me. Go ahead. Go get it. Suit whatever it is you consider yourself to be. I carry tissues with me wherever I go.

I am all not yours,

WTS VI