Made For TV Movie (Part I)

(Cue the saxophone. Fade in.)

Gargle tap water and go home hungry. Thousands of hands writing rent checks. Millions of mouths to feed. Four more hands tying knots in ties. Delinquently insolvent and busting at the seams. In the bight of life’s rope. This guy on the radio says, “I don’t want to tell you a story that you know already. I want to say something that will make a difference in who you are as a person. I want to sing. There is too much emptiness out there already. I don’t want to add to it. Sometimes I know that I am not fit for this world. That is okay.” There is a pause here. The pause ends. Then, on the 34-inch plasma screen of a hi-def television, a medium-to-small-sized elf, who has just finished chewing a Chips ahoy! chocolate chip cookie while nodding his football-shaped head to the song 88 Lines about 44 women, says, “So don’t send me away to a nuclear war. Don’t press my suits or darn my socks or mend the frayed ends of my days. Don’t tell me to just settle down.”

(Fade out. Drums. Banjo. Fade in. Then silence for a little bit.)

When the farms are all gone and the fields are bare and the creeks are all dry except that part right over there where the fish have all gone belly-up before the sun has even gone down and the world is a ball of twine.
Wake to an asphalt milling machine on a rampage grinding up the street outside my window.
Laughing House. Looney Bin. Luna. The moon. Selenology. Light shining in darkness.
Nuthouse. Bedlamite. Pandemonium. The capital of Milton’s hell.
Cracking up. Bats in the belfry. A few French fries short of a Happy Meal. Mad. Insane. Batty. Chiroptology.
Nut job. Wacko. Maniac.

(A little zither music. Julie Andrews spinning on a hilltop. Pan the skies.)

We stride through sanity with another Monday in our collective back pocket, lying their steady like a one-eyed jack, or maybe we’re all waiting for Friday’s ace in the hole to come by and sweep us away with a dusty broom towards the weekend, and, like a suicide king abdicating his lonely throne, we are unnerved, and lack the perseverance to chance a glimpse that far ahead at ourselves being the way we will be then.
Cutthroat delinquents, between episodes of spray painting and homicide, stave off boredom by smoking pot and watching old jazzercise videos from the 80s that they acquired dumpster diving.
Diaries are selfish. Dairies are selfishly galactopoietic.
Mood music doesn’t always help your mood. High strung and elusive and making a speedy getaway. Flutes help, but not the sound they make. Flossing with mint-flavored dental floss helps. Jumping over hurdles may not be helpful.
Golden Gate Street isn’t always as pretty as it sounds. Fashionable pessimism is almost as petty as fashionable melancholy, but not quite as seductive. Gutter water comes flowing in all colors. Sleeping in the gutter is rarely meant literally.

(Cut to a random fast-moving splice of unrelated images, like pigs farting and lawyers crying and waves crashing against large rocks. Play the second movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, but not too loud. In fact, just make it barely audible in the background. Cut to a cat sleeping all curled up on a couch.)

Romance is something that happens in movies.
Darts make a lot of holes in the wall where the dartboard, which is their target, hangs.
Making a living robbing banks is a risky business. Tom Cruise is a scientologist.
Technicolor is a cop out, but it is nice to look at.
I am stupid. Don’t believe me.
There is a crack at the end of the sidewalk. It trips people. They fall over the edge of the world. Some of them have bow ties on. Some are eating marigolds. Most are not willing to jump.
In the movies John Cassavetes punches Ronald Reagan, and Marlon Brando beats up and kills Timothy Carey.
A killdeer is a bird, not an abridged order.
I am fond of fronds but not always ponds, though lakes can be nice when not covered with ice, and oceans are wry compared to the sky, but the wind still hangs on a careless depend.
Homeostasis can seem unnatural at times. Lockjaw can be detected by a spatula test, and can be cured by a tetanus shot. Getting “back to normal” can often be quite an ordeal. My soul weighs less than a feather but more than a wink.
In the future sleep will no longer be necessary. Eating will be a luxury. Water will be expensive. The world will be as one.
Hoodlums still tend to “huddle up,” though they don’t shout, “huddle ‘em” anymore, which is how they got their name.
Giants would be uncomfortable on earth.
Pin monkeys are a dying breed. People used to win a turkey for getting three strikes in a row at bowling alleys during Thanksgiving. Four strikes in a row is called a hambone.
Soon the days will seem to be getting longer, but really they’ll just be starting earlier. Over the course of their lives it is probably safe to assume that people see more sunsets than sunrises.
Playing fetch is pretty farfetched for somebody who’s never owned a dog.
There are many different ways to say, “okay.”

(Fade out. Put the camera down, but leave it on. Record yourself falling on the floor and making cooing sounds while rubbing your head and patting your belly and kicking your legs up in the air as fast as you can, kind of like you’re riding a bicycle upside down. Do this for about 5 minutes. Get up and grab the camera. Fade back in.)

The middle-aged chain-smoking bookie with the red beret on sat hunched over his pot stickers at the counter of the Chinese café. Some steam was rising in a clumpy mist from the pot stickers and it was getting in his eyes, well, you know, because of the way his face was right over them, because of the way he was leaning over there, like I said, all hunched over on a barstool at the counter, and his dad was dead and his dad’s dad was dead, and his dad’s dad’s dad was dead too, but he was still alive, for now.
A clown named Mr. Lampshade was staring in the window of Bloomingdales when he noticed that his nose had turned red in the cold wind.
Things never seem quite as tempting in retrospect.
Mobile homes rarely ever go anywhere.
When you’re down for the count that means they’ve stopped counting. Science isn’t always so sweet as that.
Push can come to shove, but shoving rarely ever leads to pushing.
It is debatable whether whistling can be taught.
The first broom was called a besom. It was just some twigs tied to a handle. After using it, the floor wasn’t much cleaner than before.

rebellion

The Decembrists were,

at random, 

(tall they stood) 

shot at     &

--God--    they stood still 

.                                              

handsome        (taller still)

                                    ,

willing                                  

     -ly

obliged,

still

,            always caring           .

(near                                 

-er             

to 

death                             

  

                         somehow still 

un-                                  

willing         

                           to dance …)

  someofthemstillshiveringofcoursebecauseitwasdamncoldoutinrussiaduringdecemberyouknow

Halo Sims' Late Night King Kong Radio Hour (PART 4)

Yeah, that’s right Steve, there’s a halo around the moon. Steve Earle there clawing away at you. And there’s a halo around here too, around whatever it is you might be thinking about right now. A halo to make you suddenly realize that you’ve got better things to do with your life than rot away in that shithole where you were, up until now, so gainfully employed. Walk on the phone lines like they’re high wires. Spit on a rat, and break a cop’s back. Become the mascot of a minor league team. Walk to the beach and sit in the sand watching the waves splash and crash around out there in the soupy, foam-filled, viridian sea. There are more somersaults to turn and more garbage cans to empty and there will always be one more dish in the sink. Futzing around can become a ritualized habit, an inveterate necessity in this world of things, and nothing stays clean forever. So don’t go scrunching up your mashed countenance, fretting over the thousands of insignificant movements you make every day of the week. Halo’s got you covered. Disco dancing is against the law. The nights keep starting earlier and earlier. I’m making my way haphazardly through an obstacle course of distractions, but I’m jumping and thumping along to my own internal rhythms, keeping my poise too, because like Walter Taylor says, I’ve been all around this whole round world and anywhere I hang my head is home sweet home to me. Whisky town is never more than a hop, skip, and a leap away. Come roll your bones with Halo. It’s going to be a long nights dudes and dudettes. But when it’s all over it’ll be just as long as last night was, and all the other nights before that one too. Somebody called up and said that I’m just a cheap motel with a burnt out sign. Not sure who. Hung up without giving their name. The sounds we make when we try to keep quiet. It’s all a cop-out folks. It’s all a forgery. It’s more plastic than protean, more of the same changes made for the same reasons leading back to the same changes that were already never going to really change in the first place. Roy Orbison says dreaming is the thing to do, you know, watch the smoke rings rise in the air and all that. Dream when the day is through, etcetera, etcetera. Dream. Dream. Dream. You know the drill. Line up. Put your back to the wall. Head up, chin out, eyes staring blankly straight ahead. Dream. But don’t go losing your head over it. How about playing a harmonica instead? Huh? How about teaching a thousand pigeons how to dance the polka? Never mind. Nothing that won’t keep you up all night. But, hey, you’re up all night anyway, right? Keep it on. Keep Halo blasting as loud as that radio of yours will go. Keep those demons at bay. Keep those nightmares away. Stay safe in the womb, in the rich, oil-slick timbre of my bellowing voice, this clarion call ringing in your ears to not give up, to not just lie down and let the world do with you what it will, because it will, it most surely will. There must be some fight left down in you somewhere. Maybe Halo can give you a hint as to where the map you might use to find it is. Sure, from the dirty old mess hall you still might march to the brick wall. But it’ll be a different wall every time. Here’s one from a guy who used to go by Zimmerman. He called it Walls of Red Wing, but you can call it whatever you want, whatever keeps you alive and free tonight, whatever you need…


Ah. That’s right. Don’t let those blues run the game. That was a few kids named Paul and Art sending out for room service to bring a little whisky and gin. Can’t say I don’t envy that. Morally and gracefully living that life of sin. Decadence and bravery. A little gained and a whole lot to lose. And those blues always, always on the gain. Oh. But there might be another way around the block than just this stumbling we’ve all been doing around here for so long. Mr. Van Zandt once told me that everything is not enough, and nothing is too much to bear; and that where you been is good and gone, all you keep is the getting there. Hope he’s still shaking the dust off his wings somewhere up there above us. As I sit here blabbering on and running my fingers over the Braille of my existence, well, who really knows what may be happening out there tonight. A pool sharp might be drunk in a bathroom stall wishing he were in the back of car with his girl again, off the highway under the stars, far away from the bright lights of the city. A bank teller might be up wandering the streets looking for a way to tell his wife that he no longer has a bank to go to every day. Lot’s of folks might be up and up to no good, like some kid rummaging through a garbage bin in search of a clarinet, or a cabbie honking his horn at a peanut vendor. But most people are trying to do something helpful, something good, trying to make an honest buck, looking out for each other, making the world spin around a little more smoothly. I sometimes even find myself scuttling around, scratching at my scruff with a mangy, nail-begrimed paw, checking out the dives that open up at 6 a.m.—nothing but cops and drunks and youngsters who’ve been up all night sucking up white powder through their nares. And the bartender is all surly and looks like a sleep-deprived Jackie Mason, and he’s got the last half of a week-old cigar sticking out from his blubbery lips like the thick, stubby tail of some mutated rodent that he’s just swallowed hole. Yeah, Halo sticks his head in joints like that sometimes. Sometimes I stay in places like that for days, listening to the jukebox kick music around and slowly getting drunk while the sun comes up, and the traffic going by sounds like a river, and the newspapers start walking around and selling themselves cheap to anybody with a couple of quarters they’re looking to get rid of, and the subway rumbles to life, and jackhammers come out to tear up the street making the ceiling fan kind of tremble, and the barstools all do a short rumba, and I’ve got to hold onto my glass to save it from tipping over and spilling somewhere that isn’t my mouth. Ah. To go outside to smoke a cigarette in that early morning hush, in that special way the sunrise has of blasting away the shadows and the fog, the way it streaks like golden lava and gets all over the buildings, painting them all highlighter-yellow and silvery. The way those thousands of windows in the skyscrapers downtown opalesce all together and reflect your delirious and misconstrued drunken misconceptions about the way it feels to be alive in this so precarious position that you find yourself holding up in. Holding on. Holding out. Getting older every day. Sometimes you’ve just got to plant yourself on that barstool for a little while and get some perspective, some real gen-you-wine self-reflection, and maybe do a little retrofitting of your soul there too while you’re at it. Ah. To de drunk in the afternoon. As that sorrowful sap Bow-Dee-Lar once put it, “Be always drunken. Nothing else matters.” Ah, to be drunk in the afternoon. To be surrounded by roseate hues and bottles glinting specks of sunlight, beholden to nothing, and to nobody. A beer stein holding your anticipation back like a dam. Waiting to flow free in a nut-brown river of nonattachment. A rising fist bringing drink to mouth. Life standing tall and good at last. A little generosity in the end. With just a beer-bottle lighter and a beer sweating by your side. With a cigarette smoldering on the sidewalk, the smoke curling up in long lazy circles like a caduceus, like an old friend come back to bring comfort. As I am wasted and wounded too. Just like you. Just like you. But for a moment there, just maybe, you can be free. Don’t worry about wearing a Mae West out into the world’s churning rapids tonight. You’ll stay afloat. Halo will keep your head above water. And so will this. Johnny Cash doing The Cocaine Blues. Feel free to scream along and run for your life…


Quick as a wink. Lingering like a bad case of hemorrhoids. And many suppositories later we have lift off. Breaker. Breaker. Come in. I am lost. I am far from home. Come in. Are you out there? Is anybody listening? So, it’s the movements of lesser-known symphonies written by a clown sitting in an outhouse. It’s handcuffed kids getting dragged through the streets by taser-wielding cops in riot gear. It’s crowds forming and dispersing. It is sweet sweetback’s baadasssss song. It’s a croissant going stale in a dumpster. It’s a rodeo of broken hearts. It’s the cacophony of a million butterflies caught in a circus tent-sized net. It’s that crushing low-down way you feel when you’ve been hacked away at for so long by the treacherous knives of the world that it just seems normal to go to bed bloody and sore. It’s grape jelly. It’s moon pies. It’s the ache in your gut and the pain in your head and the snap of the whip across your back. It’s just a passing fad. It’s a stertorous tussis caught deep down in some place at the back of your throat. It’s an itch you can’t scratch. It’s a pause, a rose, something on paper. It’s the shy trilling of a lark in a leafless tree. It’s a hydrogen bomb lost in the Wassaw Sound. It is H.R. Giger’s birthday. And now it is time to send you all off to bed, or off to wherever it is this early morning fog is taking you away to. So, it’s sayonara sucker and see you later alligator and bye bye birdie and adieu to you Mr. Magoo and fare thee well and arrivederci and au revoir and auf Wiedersehen and adios muchachos and that’s all folks and so long and goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, at long last, but not least, this is Halo Sims signing off and saying goodbye to you.

Halo Sims' Late Night King Kong Radio Hour (PART 3)

Hello. Hello again. Hello. Halo Sims back again to keep sharing part of the night with you. Hugo Junker’s Sheetmetal Donkey is flying low in the sky, humming just above the rooftops. And the rooftops are all smoking in the buildings downtown, and the mayor just gave himself a raise. Verily the day will come to an end, so we can start all of this all over again. Well it looks like swell weather up ahead. Remember what good old Leo Tolstoy said, “All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.” Keep the vultures at bay. I know I’d rather not die today. No. It’s not such a grand night to die out there on the moon-drenched concrete. You’ve got to keep moving. You’ve got to keep that blood circulating. Dance. Throw a fit. Hail down a taxi in your underwear. What the hell’s a taxi doing in your underwear? I surely do not know. No way, no how. And my raspy cluttering gasps for breath, like an angry sea lion choking on a cough drop, come out in a cranium-splitting roar over your speakers. While the flies enjoy a sumptuous feast dining on the remains of your last couple of meals and the trash scattered all over your living room. You maybe start to think about the best times you almost never had, and you also, just maybe, start wondering if they’re ever coming back. It’s okay. There’ll be world enough and time to do all those things you’re always telling yourself you’re dreaming of doing. Lie back. Take a load off. Everyday it’s a getting closer, going faster than a rollercoaster. Yep. It’s not like you can do anything about the deracination of culture, the vapid, mood-swinging histrionics of television shows, the less than stalwart condition of your soul, or people who for the life of them cannot parallel park waking you up with the conniption fit of their automobiles at three in the morning. These are things that you’re just going to have to try to overlook and ignore and get beyond, because the only life you have is the life of your mind. It’s yours. It’s all you’ve got. So go ahead and lose it. It’ll be good for you. Anything worth having is worth giving away. Speaking of that, let’s put on some more music to get that mind of yours concatenating, to stir around all the goo and muck that’s stuck up there like melted gummy bears. This here is the oldest of the old, Robert Johnson, doing Come On In My Kitchen.


Ah. All right. That was The Orange Juice Blues from Bd and The Band's Basement Tapes, and I’m looking forward to some OJ myself sometime soon when I finally get around to eating some breakfast. Before that I played you some John Hammond singing about how free a little bird can be. And right after Mr. Johnson who started it all off was Mattie May Thomas bellowing out Workhouse Blues. There’s a gal who could really belt out a tune. What a pair of lungs she must’ve had. Wouldn’t want to be around when she sneezed. No boy. Well, now, I got something here stuck in my craw. Now don’t go beg, borrowing, or stealing away my thoughts before I think them. Let ‘em germinate, let those weaselly suckers come to a ripe fruition before putting any kind of crimped preconceptions about what you think those selfsame thoughts just might be. All in due time my brethren. Let us take a rather circuitous route in our trot across the landscape of my mentation. Maybe we’ll start out with a few police sirens wailing away down in Chinatown, and then mosey our way down some soot-stained brick alleys, climb the rusted rungs of a few fire escapes, while car alarms blare like castratos and chimneys blow gray smoke and old men in fusty suits stumble around lost in a daze. Let’s get our bearings straight here. Let me get down off of this soapbox for a bit and spell it right out for you. It doesn’t get any lonelier than this. Being up late at night, so late it’s early. Watching the street lights blink out and the sun starting to inch its way up over the other side of the world. Bluer than any of you’ll ever know. As the sky twists from purple into a bruised kind of blue, a muddled and murky way to shape the way you’re going to end up feeling today. It all ends up the same my friends. From the duskiest roseate hues of sunrise to the plunging bowling-ball black of midnight. Day in and day out. Scooping up your cereal with a spoonful of dreams. Sticking a fork in the over-cooked steak of your pride. Slicing the discontent of your soul into bit-sized pieces with a dull butter knife. And you’re screaming like Moses Mason preaching a whirlwind sermon, out of breath, wheezing, ecstatic, alive. You’re a bell pepper roasting on a stovetop, smoking with the windows closed. Everything is foreign. We are all one. Get up and down, up and down off of that cross, because there’s a city built of mansions, and nobody is ever going to clip your damn wings. Listen. Fall down. You don’t have to pray, but it might give you something to do while you’re down there…Hey there, let’s let the plucking guitar strings of Bayless Rose take it away…

Louis Armstrong suckerpunching you there and knocking your block off I’m sure with Weary Blues. Got to love that tuba thumping in the background. Had a bit of a thump on this old head of mine here too while you were gone. Halo’s got a few odd ideas splashing around in his lopsided head. Summer’s an ocean away, and the cold is already receding faster than your hairline, like a lost soldier trying to find his way back home too soon. Keep counting up the change in your pocket at the end of the day so you can make it last, so you can give a little to every beggar you pass by. Take that old ragged, dog-eared copy of the King James bible down off the shelf. Pour a little whiskey in your coffee. Shove your fists a little farther down into your coat pockets. Yawn and make believe you’re a prince. I’m going to spin you a dusty tune called Last Kind Word Blues sung by a little lady named Geeshie Wiley. Listen closely. She knew a few things about living, and dying too…

Halo Sims' Late Night King Kong Radio Hour (PART 2)

All gristle and gumption, the sky was shedding its black skin as day burned it blue, cattle prattling, counting streetlights, and then there is that way the fog finally burns off and leaves you wearing a jacket and suddenly not shivering so much. Yes, as you walk off and worry about keeping your job, ‘cept it ain’t up to me, you see? Well, see here. It isn’t always all too much. Take a swipe at your brow, kick off your shoes, make a wish and trip on a dream. Get it all over with. Halo knows what it’s like. Say, maybe you walk on down to Tommy’s Joynt, without any pigeons attacking your head even, and you get some beef brisket, think about that old sycamore across the street from your now repossessed house, and you think about the house you grew up in, and what it really means to be home. I’ve got a tall glass of dandelion wine. This is Halo Sims. Halo Sims coming at you with the purring softness of a kitten. Around here where the trees are all bare and the fortune tellers have all lost their marbles and the moon don’t quite shine the way it used to. I know your pockets are a getting bare. I know the world is pounding away at you, and time is most definitely not on your side anymore, because, you know, you’ve got so damn much of it nowadays. Got a dime, got a quarter, got a dollar and thirty-five cents? Then you maybe get a parking ticket, and you’re thinking, damn, how do things keep going down and out like this? How much worse can this get? But if you yearn to turn up that there drooping chin of yours, well, Halo Sims has just the thing for you. This here is the rollicking rolling paino keys of one mister Thelonious Monk plunking and pounding away, sent here by way of a tugboat to reengage and scramble up your brains and take those mediocre and miserable thoughts away from your so woebegone head. So, listen up. Straight, No Chaser...

The streets are bone-dry. No rain clouds in sight. Things are getting pretty damn friable and dust is settling in for the long haul. Feel that scratch in your throat? Don’t flush your toilet too much. Let it mellow and stew. Walk the streets. Walk the streets. Walk the streets. In the streets are the heartbroken outcasts, the miserable, the losers, the lost, the rambling gun-toting poets, mastiffs that have been put out of business running amok, beat cops with bad mustaches, bored ex-businessmen, old ladies with no teeth, the battered remains of a few drunks, flat basketballs, goons without guns, jaywalking jesters without any gestures left in the their tattered bag of tricks, bullies, doughboys, failed dissidents, dour malignant creatures of unknown origin, the sound of words without any breath behind them. And your standing there staring into the fogged-up bathroom mirror, trying to squeeze the last of the toothpaste out of the flattened tube. I’m gargling turpentine. I’m breathing kerosene. I am the last lees of whiskey in the bottle, and I sure as hell ain’t housebroken. So, walk the streets. Walk these arid streets with a knife of disenchantment. Hold up traffic by blowing your nose in a crosswalk. Halo Sims here. Cops bust heads; I blow minds. If I sound like I’m shouting myself hoarse then, well, maybe that’s just the way I talk when I don’t even got the water to wash my hands. Let’s see. Here. Yes. We are in a drought. They say it’ll rain someday. Nobody’s sure when. Could be before my grandkids are in retirement homes. Can’t really say for sure just when. But for now things aren’t precipitating any precipitation, if you catch my drift. Lo and behold my faithful compatriots, this thing’s only going to get worse before we get any succor to ameliorate our current desiccated and perilous situation. This is just to say. Walk the streets. Walk them at night with a head full of dreams and a pocketful of plugged nickels. Use parking meters as walking sticks. Make small talk with fire hydrants. Catch a few dollops of moonlight in your eye. Cry in the gutter. Stare up at that big old obelisk that is the Transamerica Pyramid until you get dizzy and fall over and dive out into the street screaming, “The horror. The horror.” It’ll be good for your constitution. Trust me. Would I steer you wrong? Nah. Not Halo Sims. I am here for you, most magnanimously and irrevocably generous as could be, to give you the chutzpah to do whatever it is that you have to do. The battle is raging. We have nothing to lose but our minds. Walk the streets. Take them back. Take them back from those who would rather you stayed inside and watched TV, from those who think in terms of profit margins and building codes and cheap labor, from those who would rather you didn’t make any waves in their pool of moneymaking, form those who want you to be just like everybody else and to be a good little soldier and to wag your tail and fall in line and follow along with the herd and consume and finally to be consumed. Life is more in all of its myriad jewel boxes than any corporation’s pipsqueak, tiny, clean cut, box-of-a-mind could ever imagine. Rage on against the dying of the light. Put on your walking shoes, and get yourself out into the bathtub of the world. But just for now, I’m going to get your blood a boiling with Mister Howling Wolf pining away You’ll Be Mine. Oh yes you will…

Downcast, defeated, draining the last small change from your savings account, scratching your initials into the façade of a brick building while you smoke the last drag from a cigarette nub you found in the crack in the sidewalk, and some guy’s blinding you with his headlights, idling there at the curb down the street, making you kind of, well, suspicious of his intentions sitting there for some reason shining his damn headlights in your eyes. Life is absurd. Don’t worry about it. Things tend to work out in the end. Those bacteria swimming around in your gut don’t give a damn about your personality. Move on. It’ll be okay. Now Halo’s going to give you the inimitable and shrieking bark of Alfred Lewis screeching out the Mississippi Swamp Moan. Feel free to moan along…

Halo Sims' Late Night King Kong Radio Hour (PART 1)

Hello out there. This is Halo Sims coming at you over the airwaves like a broken beer bottle smashed on your head. This is Halo Sims and I’m careening through the time space continuum with the tenacity and delirious backbreaking fury of a Chihuahua attacking a burglar. Hello out there you pedestrian dabblers in high-frequency modulation, you hunks of mutton, you red-eyed and weary-souled night owls and spelunkers of the Walpurgisnacht. I, Halo Sims, the most can-openeristic, belt-it-out-of-the-park, Sodapopinski, flag-chewing son of a bitch that any of you Twinkie-munchers will ever come across, do hereby declare that I now, until further notice, am assuming complete and absolute control of your feeble, herd-concerned minds. So, take that volume control knob and turn it all the way up past eleven, pour out an extra cup of coffee, grab the person next to you and do-si-do to the sound of the cockroaches rooting around in your kitchen, and hold on to your hats and glasses because this here is the wildest ride in the urban-ness.

Well, so, hello out there. Halo Sims would like to welcome you critters and poetasters, all of you 24-hour diner patrons and moon watchers and Owl-line bus riders and throwers of rocks at lampposts to a most Grand Guignol feast of aural bacchanalian revelry. Your intrepid host and master of transubstantiation, Halo Sims, is here to reassure you that he will be up, up, up late and all through the windy squeals of night with you. I know times are rough out there. I know it’s getting harder and harder to make it. Heard a marsupial croaking in the gutter right on the corner of Post and Jones. Saw the shredded guts of an accountant on the sidewalk over on 5th Street. Cars with their batteries stolen. Potholes all over the place like divots on a golf course. Manhole covers gone and sold for scrap. The lines for the homeless shelters and the soup kitchens snaking around the block. Panhandlers outnumbering the tourists downtown. Cable Cars going off the tracks and careening into pedestrians and dogs. Murderers roaming the streets. Thieves. Sad-eyed mules of men wearing rags soaked in Crisco carrying empty bottles of champagne. Not a sign of rain. Nope. No precipitation in sight, and the stock market crashes and sinks and bottoms out lower and lower each day, and people are losing their homes, and people are losing their jobs, and people are losing their minds. I know it’s bad all over. And you’ve got haircuts to get and bills to pay. It’s not easy. No, no. It is not easy. And you hear things like economic downturn, knee-deep recession, not-so-great depression, a bad patch, and you hang your head a little lower and think that, no, things can’t get any worse. But they do. I know. I know it’s rough out there. But perk up your ears for a Qoheletic minute, take some time out of your busy-ness and running around, whether it’s inside your own skull or not, and listen up, okay? Because Halo Sims is going to take all of your pain and suffering and shove it down, down, down, and away for a while. You won’t have to think about making it through another day just yet. Not tonight. No. Not here. Not now. Not on my watch. Halo Sims is going to put your minds at ease. Yes siree bob. No more worrying about how you’re going to afford that Hungry Man Salisbury Steak dinner, or even that Top Ramen lunch, if that’s what floats your proverbial boat these days. No more wondering about how those bills are going to just get up and pay themselves, or flipping through the Classifieds every morning trying to find a job of work. Just let it all go and settle in, get down with it, crack your knuckles and hunker down, because Halo Sims is going to take you places that’ll make all your troubles seem like nothing more than a few cracked eggs, and we’ve all got to break a few eggs sometimes to get things done, ain’t that the way it is? Yeah. Halo Sims is here for you, as sacerdotal witness, as professor and madman, as garbage collector and boogey man and CEO and violinist and lawyer and groom, as the fly on your window or in your soup. It’d be small of me to commit bigamy, and there is always another dish to wash. So sit tight and turn it up. Halo Sims is in control, and I’m taking all your cares away with me, and putting them back where they belong.

I’ve got worries, oh lord, I’ve got more worries than you’d ever know. My worries weary me something awful. I wish my baby was here, wish she was calling my name. But I’m too busy worrying all my time away, to even care about what she has to say. Because I’ve got worries, my lord, I’ve got such a worried soul. I’m even worried about saving what’s left of that. No savings account can hold what I've got No it can’t. I’ve got more worries than a worms got holes to go crawling in. I’ve been down and out so long I’ve forgotten how to look up. Oh lord. I’ve got worries. Oh lord. And those worries won’t just worry themselves away.


the taste of blood in the mouth


So, sure, it isn’t always sunny weather, and the even when it is, the sunny side of the street might not always seem like such a bright idea. When Dave Loggins is imploring you to come to Boston or Denver or home, and that’s the last place you’d want to ramble on off to, well, yeah, things don’t always work out for the best. But, you know, that’s okay. Halo Sims will be with you tonight, singing and ranting and howling at the moon along with you. So hush…hush, sweet Charlotte. Things are bound to turn back around someday. But for now the world is upside down. So put your halo on, and come along with Halo Sims. It’s about surviving, about crawling around in the muck and the filth and the shit, and coming up with your hands clasped, with a little trash and truth shining through in your smile. It’s a lonely world out there when you go about it all alone. So take out that harmonica, swing that guitar around to your belly, look out for that orange blossom special that’ll be bringing your baby back. Come on along for the ride. Here we go. This is Halo Sims…


This is a breezy but predictable yarn about a wayward young fellow, a gleeman and warbling bard of a sort, named Chester Mayflower, whose wild woodnotes soared throughout the highlands, gathering the dust from berries and piping loud as a lute. Chester was a gas station attendant. Yeah. He sat around nights watching the pumps glow red and white in the lights of semis rolling in off the interstate. When it rained he shoved a nickel in his hat brim to make it shine. Nobody knew Chester. Nobody cared. He rolled his own cigarettes, Old Gold. There were holes in his shoes to match the holes in his head, and it just so seemed that he’d leak out his story to anybody who happened to be passing by. Chester filled up gas tanks and washed windshields and spit on the concrete and watched the night sky for any signs of a change. He wasn’t the fastest train on the track...

Sprinklers & Sparrows

I get my gum from Parsippany, New Jersey

Chewing gum reduces stress

(The trouble with breathing is That you always have to keep at it Again and again Like your heart beating And thinking about it doesn’t do any good It only makes it worse One time you might step off of a curb And down and out Into the street Right in front of a bus That might be it for you)

You can’t bribe somebody with an IOU

Saying have a good day a hundred times a day

But never meaning it even once

Serves its own purpose

My gum contains sorbitol, maltitol, mannitol,

acacia, acesulfame potassium, aspartame,

BHT,

candelilla wax,

glycerin, sodium stearate,

soy lecithin and titanium dioxide.

It is made by Cadbury Adams,

Whom I imagine to be a robust, hearty and hale man,

with a wispy shock of auburn hair.

A guy who bales hay and wakes up at the crack of dawn,

Who maybe smokes a pipe on his porch while the cicadas sing in the twilight,

And whose gum factory

In Parsippany, New Jersey

Churns out tiny square pieces of gum by the thousands

All the live long day.

White letters

on the

gum packaging 

proclaim

that my 

gum has been

CLINICALLY

shown to 

WHITEN 

teeth

(I rest reassured)

He Who Laughs Last Laughs His Last Laugh

**Listen to this first before reading**


Wanting more shared experiences, though only those that would be as rich as those he had when alone, cognizant of the fact that his inferiority complex was making him overcompensate, thinking now that maybe he was borderline schizotypal, though leaning towards the leaner side of it, at least not yet believing in magical thinking and ESP or putting all of his faith unwillingly into a fortune cookie, though he did find himself staring at the winning lottery numbers from time to time and daydreaming about the numbers coming to him in an epiphanic flash, and also sometimes when sitting or standing close to an attractive girl he sometimes felt himself concentrating all of his energy, you could almost call it praying really hard, to try to make the girl somehow “pick up on” these vibrations emanating from him, and turn and smile at him and start talking, which would lead, in his head, to a long imaginary conversation in which he said all of the right things, as did she, and by the time she was gone, having got off the bus or left the café she had been sitting in, he would have already imagined their whole prefabricated life together, maybe even all the way to both of their deaths, depending on who had died first, as sometimes it was he who bit the big one before she did and this of course would preclude any further imaginings, and he would probably go on staring at a lamppost or a sign in a shop window or a crunchy, brittle, curled up leaf on the sidewalk or whatever tiny, insignificant thing he could concentrate on to make the world seem smaller and more manageable until something else came along for him to prevaricate along with, but for now his subconscious yearnings had not reached a level where they could sway his conscious thoughts to be willing participants in this charade, this “dream world” he found that he was carefully crafting with his thoughts when he was unoccupied with the actual physical world, and this in turn would lead his “normal-everyday-mundane” thoughts around delirious corners, speeding off to those blissful realms where tit was not for tat and here was never there and wormholes seemed like ice cream cones compared to the psychedelic landscapes over which these visions propelled themselves like mice shot out of block-long slingshots into an ocean of marmalade and meringue.

His thoughts were becoming odd. Strange things occurred to him constantly. As he drove by houses he found himself staring at their lawns. He saw the grass and his mind became replete with all the living organisms on the planet. This was not something that he could express to other people. He became very quiet at these times, or he talked a lot, wildly and in disconnected fragments, about some other thing, anything else, and whatever it was, it was always dull and vapid, and it felt dead and sour on his tongue. What was in his mind seemed incomprehensible, inexpressible, stupid. He couldn’t even explain it to himself. Being alone was becoming more and more what he wanted. Nervousness roiled around in his gut with an unsteady churning, a plopping, a slow ache and whine that made him wince and grab at his side. The sound of his phone ringing made his heart jump and beat wildly, and his face would flush over and over again, embarrassed of something that he couldn’t explain, always feeling ashamed of something, though what it was seemed unimportant, or too difficult to try contemplating. Going outside, even just to cross the street, seemed like some kind of otherworldly miracle, and he would find himself wandering around in his apartment, knocking on the walls as if wanting somebody to answer, to let him out, whatever that would mean. Something was building up inside of him. Some type of indistinct rage, an uncanny sensation that made him feel like a water balloon slowly being filled at the tap. If bursting were an option, he’d take it. There must be limits, even to this. There must be an end. He was becoming bitter and angry and other people were drifting further and further outside of the equations of his life. Doing the cultural cringe was taking up more and more of his time.

He finds himself feeling constricted, hemmed in, fettered and tied down to things he can’t name. But the thought of future days, days when he imagines himself free, gives him an incredible feeling of hope. Those days are easy for him to imagine. Those days never actually come. Time is always pushing down on him, holding him prisoner, never letting him just relax and enjoy things.

Cantaloupe soup. An obelisk. 

Chester comes home and is upset at himself for being there. It isn’t a very comfortable situation. Not for Chester. He doesn’t want to have to be around himself, not all the time at least. There’s nothing to be done about it. Grin and bear it. Until the eagle grins. Chester is never alone. Nothing matters. Nobody cares about him. He cannot escape. Look. There he is. Right, there…He is laughing.

Good God.

The Drugstore Delivery Boy

Lot’s of time you spend just looking in the rearview. It’s a habit you get into. Sometimes you’re just looking at yourself, your face up close, maybe trying to pop a zit, or see if you missed a hair shaving that morning, or if there are boogers in your nose, or you’re just looking to see if you’re still the same person you’ve always seen in mirrors. The same asshole doing the same stupid shit you’ve always done. Yeah. It’s hard to keep steering straight while you’re doing this, but you learn. You push hard against the wheel with your hands to keep it steady. You learn to do three or four things at once. Multi-tasking I’ve heard it called. Something a delivery guy’s got to do a lot of. You learn to get all the brown paper bags in order on the seat next to you. To kind of hold them there with your right arm when you stop suddenly or take a turn too hard. To keep sneaking glances over at them to make sure they haven’t tipped over and spilled their meds out onto the floor, where it’ll be hell trying to find them, because you know they’ve probably rolled all the way under the seat or disappeared like that kid in the Twilight Zone who accidentally rolled into the fifth dimension. Lots of stuff gets lost in the truck. Who knows where the hell it goes. And then one day, like when you are getting off work and you’ve parked the truck for the night, a bottle of meds will fall out onto the cement when you close the door. One time I found a bottle dated four years before. Who knows?

So, yeah, you get really busy, and you start driving like a maniac, weaving in and out of traffic, getting on and off the freeway for short stretches to try to make good time, and all the while trying to keep the bags in order and steady on the passenger’s seat, and also trying to read the clipboard with all the delivery addresses and names listed on it, where you keep trying to check things off with a pencil that is attached to the clipboard with a long thin chain-thing, like they have on pens at banks, that keeps getting all tangled up in itself. It’s not easy. It can be damn stressful. I got to the point where I could plan out my trips way ahead of time in my head. I knew every damn shortcut and back alley in the city. I knew the timing of the lights, when to make three right turns instead of waiting at a soft green to make a left. I knew where all the houses were, and in what order I’d go to them, and the paths to take between them to cut down on backtracking. My head would be abuzz with all of these things, and I’d drive on instinct, without ever thinking about it. The radio would be blaring some classic rock station and I’d have all the windows rolled down and would be singing along, weaving through traffic and screaming at other cars. Shit, I’d be four or five streets ahead of myself in my mind. And I’d grab the bags and sometimes leave the truck running in the driveway, and I’d sprint to the door and knock and ring the damn doorbell like a madman. Sometimes these damn people would take fucking forever to come to the door. And I’d be shitting bricks, hopping up and down and trying to look in the little window in the front door, sometimes calling out, “Anybody home! Delivery! Drugs on the steps!” and other shit like that. If nobody answered after a while I just left a note, in my horrible chicken-scratch, that I’d tried to deliver the medications but that nobody was home, and I’d put the pharmacy’s phone number on the bottom, and I’d stick the note in the crack in the door and hope for the best. Sometimes someone would come running after my truck as I pulled away. I usually pretended not to notice them. I was already gone to the next place in my mind.

So, like I was telling you, you do happen to look into that rearview a lot when you’re driving around all day like that. Hell, I like looking at myself. Is that so wrong? And this brings me to, well, that’s kind of what caused most of the crashes I got into with that truck. There were a couple that were really bad. The last one totally ruined that piece-of-shit 1989 Toyota pickup. I was rolling off the freeway off ramp at a pretty good clip. It was at a place where there a like five or six lanes merging into three lanes, and it was downhill, so I’m flying, just fucking flying through all this, all these cars trying to merge, and I’m changing lanes back and forth like a motherfucker trying to pass people, like I was playing Frogger at superspeed. It was like the Blitzkrieg was after me. I was jamming. Gunning it. Pedal to the metal and all that crap. Yeah. I was really motoring. And so, I look up in the rearview to do a quick check of my booger situation, and then blam, just like that, I go ramming into the rear end of some dumbfuck. And that’s that. The truck is fucked. I slow it down and slam it up against a curb. The thing is smoking like a chimney, and the hood is all bent up, and I just know I am like totally fucked. You know that feeling in your gut that like everything is just wrong and that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it? It was like my whole world just sort of collapsed. I sat there in the truck and kind of put my head in my hands and leaned against the steering wheel. Some jerkoff comes knocking on my window, and he’s like all fucking P.O.’d and shit, and he’s yelling at me, and saying stuff like, “Didn’t you see my brake lights?” and other stupid crap like that. I’m just kind of dazed. The seat belt held me in, so I wasn’t hurt or anything, but I was feeling really awful. The guy was really being an asshole, so I just kind of turned to him and said, “Hey buddy. Why don’t you take a flying fuck and get the hell out of my face.” And then I rolled the window all the way up. He got real pissed then. Man. He was fucking livid. Started screaming all kinds of shit and pounding on the glass. I flipped him off and put my head in my arms, leaning on the steering wheel again. It was kind of fun. I kind of just kept ignoring him and eventually he went away. I remember sitting there thinking about how tough my life was going to be from there on out. How bad things were going to be. Nothing was ever going to be good again, to be easy, and I’d have to suffer. I knew I’d have to suffer, and that I’d have to keep paying for my mistakes over and over again.

I decided suddenly to drive the truck back to the pharmacy. It wasn’t a short drive, probably about five miles. I just turned the keys, the thing jangled and sputtered to life like a wrecked lawnmower, and I got the hell out of there lickity-fucking-split. The guy whose car I’d rammed into was screaming at me and trying to come after me, but I jumped the center divider and flipped a bitch pretty damn quick, heading back towards the freeway onramp. The hood of the trunk was bent up, kind of crumpled too, and there was all kinds of steam coming from the engine, but I made it back on the freeway, though I did stay in the slow lane. The front bumper was hanging off, barely there, and I think one of the headlights was cracked. The truck was doing a lot of lunging and making some damn strange sounds, like banging and popping kind of sounds, and I could tell all of the water and many of the vital fluids had drained out of the thing. It was slow going. People were honking at me, flipping me off, and yelling at me to get the fuck off of the road, but I kept at it. It seemed really important that I get back to the pharmacy. I didn’t know what else to do. I was a long way from home. My car was back in the pharmacy parking lot. The stores around there had all closed, and I was sure my boss had gone home.

I often ended up being out on deliveries when the place closed. I’d usually get back late, park the truck in the lot, and slide my delivery log, the keys, the cash bag, and whatever brown bags of drugs I had left over through the mail slot in the side of the front door. It was funny seeing all that stuff lying there on the floor like that. That’s what the boss wanted me to do. I didn’t argue.

It was getting late, getting to that point when the day starts thinking about turning into night. I had one headlight on the truck that was working. It would have to do. I drove that beat-up piece-of-shit truck all the way back, smoking and dripping and clanking, the steering wheel shaking so bad I felt like I was having a epileptic fit, but I made it into the parking lot. I slammed the damn truck into a parking block and turned off the engine. Smoke was still bellowing from it. The thing was in bad shape. I knew it was wrecked. There was nothing I could do about it. I took a walk around to the back of the building. There were some dumpsters back there and it stunk bad. I threw the keys into some bushes, and heaved the clipboard onto the roof of the building. I put the cash bag in one of the dumpsters, and walked away back to my car, doing nothing but thinking about how hard my life was going to be from then on.

PIRATE RADIO BROADCAST #1

(The inside jokes and the misbehaving ways and the worst of it like a pie in the face when you wake up hungover again and the gray day is a little grayer sweeping away the ways you move underneath its weight dragging you down and the world will be a little lighter without you around to step all over it)


Grandiloquent and shabby and dull, before next Wednesday we’ll have some peace around here, graphs show where the pointer points, falling out of bed, functioning is optional, lastly erstwhile nothing changes, bummering and lost, stamped and unlicked and somehow ready, watching Abel Gance movies in the dark, contumacious and silently screaming while that scream is still looking for a mouth, back-seat driving and beleaguered, there are more isolationists in the hills, welcome the little runts dancing in the brick dust, deceive the defeated into smiling, cook a steak, there are more millionaires in the hairs of a rat than in all the beautiful singing children’s hearts, we cannot motor on this river no more with this rudderless boat, carrying Nebraska was enough to make the hard hearted farmers march in the dirt roads with pitchforks raised high to raze the world, cauliflower grows in the boxer’s ear, the devil shaved yesterday and looks a little younger but not any more healthy, watch all the different ways of driving that we do, bocce balls were not meant to be thrown like baseballs at things like walls or people’s heads, there are more than 883 different ways of being distracted by a fly, willpower makes itself up all the time without making any sense or money, furthermore is rarely used in conversation, a spellchecker didn’t invent spelling, winning isn’t always the best way to win, defying to defy gravity is mostly what we do here on the ground, the Wizard of Oz is not so wonderful, putting pants on can be done both legs at a time, personalities are personal, there are words and there are worlds and there is autopoiesis, the sound of a cap gun, the sound of a cannon, the sound of a cicada in the grass, the sound of the moon, the sound of a small child crying, the sound of shoes on linoleum, the sound of rain, the sound of shit plopping into toilet water, the sound of grass growing, the sound of jumper cables, the sound of swimming pools, the sound of soup, the sound of tires on wet cement, the sound of refrigerators, the sound of aerosol, the sound of a violin drifting from an open window across the street on a quiet night, the sound of machines, the sound of bracelets, the sound of Emmy Lou Harris, the sound of computer keys, the sound of marching soldiers, the sound of presidents, the sound of death…

Varly Frank Rides The Bus

The moon was low and big in the sky, huge, much larger than I’d ever remembered it being, and it was hanging there like a shield right next to the Transamerica building. The sun was washing the buildings in pink. I was riding the bus and this girl in very tight pants was standing, and let me tell you there were plenty of seats available, and she is standing there with her ass, which was nice and firm, jutting out into the aisle right next to my head. I know, right? And she starts doing these kind of maybe yoga-type stretching exercises there while she’s grabbing onto the handrail and her ass is going really close to my face, and it is one very nice ass. I feel like she’s smiling into the window, which is starting to darken with the evening and reflect some things, like her face kind of, and I really think she is smiling a little at me, but I really can’t be sure because I am like really trying to pretend that I am looking out the window and that I am very interested in the scenery or whatever. It was that time of day when the sun is just going down and the moon is starting to rise on the other side of the horizon, and, like I said, the moon was low and big and the sun was painting all the buildings in coats of gold and yellow, and the beige bricks of buildings were starting to fade into the pastel colors common to that crepuscular time of day. It was nice out. Picture fucking perfect. So, this lady has her posterior, which like I said was very firm and tight in those pants and doing all kinds of shaking and gyrating, right there next to my head, and I am just sitting there, towards the back of an almost empty bus with like plenty of fucking seating room, and I’m trying to pretend that I am like totally not at all interested in anything Ms. Ass-shaker is doing, but also at the same time not being able to help myself from glancing over from time to time, taking these flitting peaks at her performance. She would put a foot up on one of the plastic bucket seats, slightly bend over, and do this arabesque kind of thing, with her ass, yep, going out and banging around like a speed bag bumping along there, uh huh, right by my motherfucking head. I know. It was nuts. You can’t make shit like this up. So, this firecracker yoga chick is doing all these bends and…ow…shit. Sorry. I cut my fucking thumb on my shampoo bottle this morning and it hurts like a motherfucker. I think I need to change this Band-Aid or something. It’s getting kind of frayed there, look. Yeah. That’s some nasty shit. Aw. Fuck, that fucking stings. Shit. Okay. So, anyway, this freaky yoga chick is like really getting my prurience up, you know, and so I’m sitting there doing my best Mr. Disinterested/Oblivious impersonation, trying to be as surreptitious as possible, and this chick starts like rubbing up against one of the metal poles. I swear. I am not bullshitting you one finger-licking-good iota. This is not fucking speculative. I am not some fictional avatar, some goddamn fallible narrator invented merely to give you this slice-of-life anecdote so you can make your judgments and form your opinions and make yourselves all feel better about being the morally impeccable people that you can now imagine yourselves to be. No. This is just something that happened to me. This is not realism. This is not someone trying to carefully craft a make-believe world out of reality. I am not trying to control events. So, just listen. Okay? Damn. My finger’s killing me. So, so, so, so…Um. Where was I? Oh yeah. This girl is rubbing her luscious bod on the pole, not so much like a stripper really, I know that’s what you’re thinking. It’s more just like this subtly sensual motion, kind of sinuous and lithe, and she seems to be really lost in her own little space, like she doesn’t even know where she is really, as if she’s existing somewhere else and that none of us are around, that the bus itself may not even be there as far as she’s concerned. It’s kind of like she’s a mime performing a dumbshow in front of a mirror for nobody but herself. So I, of course, start to check her out a bit more. You know, I’m casting my eyes over there, looking at her in the window’s reflections. The windows by this point are starting to fill up more with darkness, and the lights outside are coming on, and this bus’s interior lights are starting to seem brighter, shining this very glaring white fluorescence all over stuff. It was harder to see things outside, but it was much easier to see people’s reflections in the windows. I saw an old man picking his nose. That wasn’t interesting to me. But, I have to admit, I saw it. It happened. I ain’t going to be bullshitting you about stuff. See? So. So. So. The bus was starting to feel somehow smaller, more of a world unto itself. There didn’t seem to be room for anything else in the world. I know. That seems odd. So. Anyway. This chick is getting real into her slithering dance there, holding onto the pole, sliding up and down and shaking that ass, and shit, I mean, shit, I know how that sounds, but really, really shaking that ass. What else can I say? There must’ve been music playing in her mind or something, because she was really rocking out, very rhythmically too, like she was moving to a beat, and her hands would slide up and down the pole and her mouth would be very close to the pole too as her whole body moved up and down and her ass shook, shook, and shook. You know, the pole, it was one of those metal grab rail poles they have on buses. It was pretty shiny too. Her head was kind of shaking around and I could see her lips puckering some when I looked at her reflection in the mirror. I felt like a damn voyeur, but I couldn’t stop myself from staring. And I was also starting to feel like she either (a) didn’t care, (b) couldn’t tell I was watching her, or (c) wanted me to be watching her, you know, like she was doing the whole thing just for my benefit. I know how that must sound, like I’m some real conceited son-of-a-bitch or something, or that I have, what, if not a, um, solipsistic view of things, you know, that I think I am the fucking center of the whole entire universe and that everything on this oblate spheroid only happens because of me, for my benefit, that it is I who am the one sole focal point of all the world’s eyes. But, let me promise you, this most assuredly is not the case. I won’t go into it here, but let’s just not take it for granted that I am a very un-egotistic individual, very munificent and kind to my fellow humans, almost completely unattached from this mortal coil that contains me, just a spectating specter drifting haplessly around the fringes of things, a silent impartial observer of the mundane and ordinary. Generally I don’t go in for such forays into the realms of logic and philosophical speculation, but maybe there is no precedent for this type of thing and I don’t want to get pigeon-holed into being something that I am not. I am not a bad person. Now, that doesn’t mean, you know, it’s not like I said that I am a good person. That would be something different all together. Just being not bad doesn’t make you good, per se. Um. But, there is probably something significant in the difference betwixt them. What that is, well, I just can’t quite understand it enough yet to be able to relate it to you in any kind of clear or understandable way. So my staring at her was something that was happening. It just was. That’s that. Sure, I would dart my eyes hither and thither, taking in the sights—the silvery sandpaper-like floor, the felt-pen graffiti all over the orange plastic coating of the bucket seats, the tiny letters etched into the windows reading, “Acrylic Plexiglas, Polymer Dot Shapes,” and the dual-purpose safety vent in the ceiling that was closed down and latched tight, thank God, shit, it was cold, you know. I was also doing a lot of yawning and sighing, and also this thing where I would close my eyes as if I were suffering some kind of sudden twinge of pain, a headache or something, and would rub my temples with my index fingers for a few seconds. It was all subterfuge, a distraction to take some perceived person’s attention away from me, or from the fact that I was so slyly checking out this yoga-bending-pole-dancing chick whose ass, let me remind you, was right in my fucking face. But who was this “perceived person”? Who was this outsider whom I somehow figured to be watching me? Was it her? Nah. I don’t think that was it. It was like I was performing for a camera, like I was trapped inside a part I had to play on a movie set and I couldn’t get out of it no matter what I did, it was all just a performance for somebody else’s benefit, and, yeah, it was the same with her too, shit, it was like we were both picking up on some a priori mode of existing, some fucking rubicund of the mind that once we crossed we couldn’t ever get back over again, back to the other side of perceiving things, and it was a place where we were both the observing other and the one caught in the gaze at the same time. It was a real motherfucking byzantine conundrum. There was nowhere to go with it. So I just sat there doing all of these things, making these motions to draw attention away from the fact that my attention was like really fucking glued on this chick, who was really not noticing, at least as far as I could tell, anything besides herself. I started to feel real stymied, like I couldn’t get out of this mold, this set-in-stone way of being. As for getting up and moving to another seat, or pretending that I was going to be getting off at the next stop and getting up to stand by the door, shit, forget about it. I was fucking buried in this moment. And nothing I could do seemed like it would ever exhume me from the moment that I was ensnared in. It was a lost cause. I just decided to try and wait it out, to see what would happen next. On the floor by my feet there was some gummy substance, kind of mucilaginous, you know, sticky, like somebody had spilled a coke on the floor, or something with a lot of high fructose corn syrup in it, and I started rubbing my shoes on it, and then scraping them against the seat in front of me to try to get the sticky shit off. It was stupid. I’d slide my feet over the stickum, and then try to scrape it off. I’d keep doing this, over and over. There was something very satisfactory about it, like I was performing some ablutionary act, some kind of cleansing going on. I don’t know. It was odd. But I kept doing it. It passed the time. It kept me busy. It kept my mind off the girl’s ass that was wriggling around by my head. The bus? Oh. You know. It was a newer bus. One of those one’s that are much narrower than the older ones. They don’t have as much aisle room for people to stand in. It’s hard to get by people who are standing when the bus starts to get crowded. You have to say excuse me under your breath and try to squeeze by without putting any of your body parts against the body parts of another person. It takes a good deal of contorting sometimes to negotiate the small spaces and finagle your way through. The end result is a lot of physical contact with strangers, much getting into other people’s personal space, and usually a pulled muscle or two. So, yeah, this chick’s ass was in close proximity to my face. And she wasn’t doing anything to put any extra distance between us. Me? Oh, well, I’m looking up at the vapid advertisements lining the bent space over the bus’s windows, you know, those long curved things that are kind of like gutters at a bowling alley, you know, where they slide all of those cardboard signs along? The ads just hook in and kind of bend inward in the middle, like what happens to a playing card when you palm it. It was just all of these insipid beguilements trying to tell me what to buy and what to wear and how to feel about things, trying to blarney me into doing something. It made me feel pretty damn miserable, let me tell you. I read all the words, as is my wont, and said them a few times in my head. Things like, “Text 566 to this number and get free games for your phone!” or, “Not everyone is lucky enough to have a companion. Help out a senior citizen or disabled person in need.” Just the kind of things they write on those bus advertisements. Nothing important. I kept reading. It’s hard to stop once you get started with something like this. There were these red stickers in the shape of arrows that said things like, “Please Move Back,” “Enter through front door only, Do Not Stand In Stepwell.” I started noticing a lot more of these stickers now that I was looking for them. Most of them were red with white letters. One of them said, “Emergency Exit. Pull red handle down and hold while pushing window out at bottom.” The red handle was right there and I found myself wanting desperately to pull it down for some reason. It was like having an itch you can’t scratch. But I restrained myself from doing that. I mean, it would do nothing but draw attention to me, and that was antithetical to what I wanted. Or would that be anathema? Um. Hell. Who knows? Anyways, there was another sign that said, “PLEASE HOLD ON. Sudden stops are sometimes necessary,” and another one I saw towards the front of the bus, which was blue with white letters, that read, “These seats must be vacated when wheelchair users need this space.” It had a white silhouette of a person on a wheelchair above the words. I liked that one a lot. It was unique. Oh, and, shit, there was this other sticker up by the driver that said, “Information gladly given but safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation.” That was my favorite one. I liked how it said, “gladly given.” It was a very euphonic phrase. It made me think of cellar doors, and about all things alliterative, things that kept rolling through my mind and building on each other, one word piggy-backing on the next, and then a whole line of the them that just ended me up in this whole she-sells-sea-shells miry hodgepodge of gobbledygook mucking up my mind. It think I coughed into my hand at some point, I don’t know, some kind of tussive things to snap me back out of this trance I was putting myself in, and kind of, as they say, snapped myself back to reality, whatever the fuck reality is. So, well, um, really I guess I just didn’t want people to notice me noticing this girl. I was afraid of being looked at while I was looking at her. I know. It’s an idiotic way to be acting, but I was doing it. Shit. It was completely illogical, patently dumb and wrongheaded and preposterous. But I couldn’t stop it. I tried to think my way out of it, you know, by trying to reason with myself. But I was in an unreasonable state of consciousness at the time and wouldn’t listen to any explanatory rationality for why I was doing what I was doing, even if it was coming from myself. I decided instead to start to just think some odd thoughts, some things that would take my attention away from the shaking-ass-show for a bit. So I started contemplating things like the ephemerality of beauty, and how this ass being shaken in my face was one day no longer going to be so copaseticaly firm and taut, that eventually it too would go the way of all flesh, it would sag and loose its shape, droop, become wrinkled and padded with cellulite, and things would never be this way again. All would be lost. This moment would be nothing. All of these things would one day be gone. None of it mattered. We’d all be dust eventually. That ass would be part of a dead person some day. And then it would rot and decay, and worms would eat it, and soon it’d putrefy and shrivel up and probably become nothing but dirt in the ground. I didn’t like this line of thinking. It wasn’t getting me anywhere. I began to realize that all of this mental convolving was just another distraction, just another goldbricking attempt to avoid the situation that I was finding myself stuck in. I mean, what the fuck was I doing? Shit sticks. I was just trying to feebly, if not coyly, crawl out and away from what was happening not two fucking feet from my head. It’s absurd. I’m absurd. I’m a goddamn idiot. Why can’t I just enjoy things while they’re happening? Huh? Come on. Don’t just sit there looking so unattached, so prudent, all fucking circumspect like you’re some goddamn Penelope or something. I’m just asking you to care. Is that too much to ask? To ask you to care about me? To care about the life I’m leading and the way I see things? Isn’t this important? Stop looking at me like that. I can feel your rancor and your fucking do-gooder, holier-than-thou, righteousness, and your I’ve-heard-this-all-before, god-this-is-all-so-boring-and-meaningless, I’d-rather-be-watching-TV bullshit attitude. Come on. For fuck’s sake. This is all there is. This is all we have in this world. These things. Just like Walt Whitman, I have these things. No. No. Don’t go. Come back. I’m just kidding. Really. I’ve never even ridden on a bus in my life. It’s nothing. Come back. Like me. Like me. Please like me. I am a good person. Like me. I’m alone here. Please……hello?

Not Another Word

Two viewers sit watching a television set on which a very old man with over-sized John-Denver glasses on is talking into the camera, looking a bit to the left of the viewers’ gaze, as if he himself is gazing at something too, maybe a clown doll tied to the top of the camera. The old man’s eyes are distorted and enlarged by the thick glass in his frames, and his mouth is slightly drooping to one side. From time to time a thin line of spittle collects and hangs and then drops from his mouth. His ears are large and stick out like wings. The viewers are watching the video and sometimes one of them makes some comments on it, but mostly they just watch. They are both sitting on fold-up chairs and are sitting very close to the television set, which is small, probably about the size of a microwave. The camera doesn’t move off of the old man’s face. It doesn’t go in for a close up. It doesn’t pan out to show a wider view of the room. There is nothing else on the screen but the man’s face. The viewers can see every wen and bleb and stray facial hair, every last wrinkle and scar and skin defect of his face. His eyebrows are thick and bristly. There is something malformed about his nose. It is bent to the side, incredibly crooked, and seems to be pockmarked with hundreds of tiny craters. Thin strands of long white hair are brushed back from his large, protrudent forehead. His eyes tend to blink a lot. The viewers watch and listen.




There is something arcane about this willingness to love, the ability to love itself has become old-fashioned, and to make oneself vulnerable in a public place is a sin, as the goldening tree leaves fall in a picric heap on the sidewalk and get trampled underfoot, rived and shredded and mashed into dust.

VIEWER 1—Listen. This guy sure says some odd things. It’s, kind of, well, eldritch at least. Listen.

We are often caught up in blandishments, suckered or drawn in, inveigled by the “good deal” or the “bargain buy” and it is all only our loneliness and thanatophobia that is driving us to search out for these things, these desires ruled by the market place, dictated to us by the all-puissant driving force of the economy. Buy, buy, buy. That is all there is to know. Then, and only then, do we not have to worry ourselves with these picayune concerns, these thoughts of death and fear, um, I may as well throw in trembling too. Ahem. So, here there is a chance, sometimes, um, here…well as in here…I mean to say, in the here and now we can always choose to be present, to be awake, to be, what? To be, roused, lifted in our spirits, winking like Groucho Marx behind a dumpster, it is, or would be, at these times that we can take lightly, or not at all, or extremely seriously, the impression made on us by the soft ululating glow of an old neon hotel sign’s letters blinking down the side of a rotting wrought iron fire escape, um, let’s see, the flickering light casting coalfrescent shadows on the mood-swinging bricks, and one thinks of choppy waters and the foam on the crests of waves, and life is tall and free again.

VIEWER 2—A neon sign cannot howl. And Coalfrescent? He doesn’t always make sense, does he?

But this feeling, this, shall I say, unadulterated blessing that seems to strike one down to one’s very core being, that kernel of truth hiding away buried so deep, so lost, gone, gone away, yes…ahem. Anyhow, this feeling is not something that can be described, no matter what one’s chosen mode of expression is, playing cards, creating limericks, tossing magazines into a fireplace, writing songs, playing a lute, driving a diesel-spewing 16-wheeler across this oh-so-capacious continent, or even filming the event, with just the right technique, with all of the latest and most advanced audio and visual equipment at one’s fingertips, cannot even come close to the real-life way of experiencing the event. One cannot smell quite the same scents in the same way that were drifting through the cool breeze then. And one will never know in just the same way the feeling of that breeze brushing against one’s visage, spoiling one’s hairdo, blowing a lapel of one’s dinner jacket up against the chin. It will never be the same. Nothing describing the event will ever touch the actual thing itself. This is the true artist’s constant struggle. Looking with another pair of eyes is no good. The camera cannot see anything the way one’s eye actually saw it. And any other pair of eyes looking upon that same scene, through the filter of the camera, will be again further removed from the event, and will only see what they desire to see, or what they are told to see, and nothing...ahem…I say nothing will ever be the same again. We must learn to give our gifts freely. There is not room for the buy-and-sell attitude of the marketplace in true art. The gift we give, love, must be given freely, unabashedly, without hope of being loved in return. We must learn to become generous, thoughtful of others…um, magnanimous even, and still beholden to our ideals we can turn the gift, the art’s heart’s purpose at last, into a blessing.


VIEWER 1—He talks in a gallimaufry. Confusing, but maybe you’re right. Maybe there is something there.

The gift is hanging. The gift is hung-up. The gift is fragile, and it will not stand up to the barbs of the world of commerce. We must learn to protect the gift. It is a prayer for the non-believers, a coupe for the downtrodden and belittled and heartbroken, a little less than the lees of a rugged faith that has gotten to be so routine, so blandly quotidian, that it is no good anymore, and that things tend to shrivel up and die at this point too, don’t forget. But the strength of the absurd still holds up, it still puckers its labia superfluos entafada and labium inferius, scrunching up its ergotrid, squeezing the philtrum into a thin rivulet. Yes, in the face of doom the absurd still holds sway, the irrational can still make good on the seemingly slipshod promises of yesterday’s prayers. Incorporeal things showing some truculence in the face of the mind-boggling nothingness of eternity, we are daffodils waiting out the clouds for a chance at sun.

VIEWER 1—Something about this makes sense. I’m just not sure what it is. Why does he have to talk like that? It’s like it’s all some riddle or something. Who speaks Latin anyway? What the hell?

VIEWER 2—It doesn’t matter. At least I don’t think it does. There is something very intriguing about this old guy. He seems very genuine.

VIEWER 1—Seems? Well, anyone can seem genuine.

VIEWER 2—No. It’s different with him. I don’t know what it is.

VIEWER 1—I know. I think I know. No. I know. I know that I know. That’s true. I think.


We all need to feel this connection, this binding of the flimsy stuff of ourselves with others, this bonding with other souls like our own. But this reaching-out cannot come from a selfish urge. It must come free of restraint, without any expectations, and it must be given without regard for personal welfare or gain. One must not feel compelled out of guilt, nor be afraid of being duped out of something by a conniving other. It is always better to err on the side of generosity. There will always be those who take advantage of these gestures of kindness. Let us not become one of them. Give freely or not at all.

VIEWER 1—Do you want half of my sandwich?

VIEWER 2—What kind?

VIEWER 1—Roast Beef on Rye.

VIEWER 2—What’s on it?

VIEWER 1—Pickles, onion, asparagus, regetabes. Some crude oil I think. Just a hint.

VIEWER 2—Nah. I Can’t stand regetabes. Thanks though.

VIEWER 1—You are very welcome. Very welcome. Wow. That felt good.

VIEWER 2—You’re just relieved that I didn’t take any of your sandwich. You didn’t really want to give it to me, did you? Weren’t you secretly hoping that I would refuse your offer? Come on.

VIEWER 1—No. I don’t think so. But one never knows, now does one?


Self-worship is the most detrimental piece of hysteria one could ever perform on one’s own psyche. It comes from that part of us that is wanting to be loved, the self-centered ego-driven appendage of our emotional makeup, and it leads towards nothing except forever insatiable desires and emptiness. We have to become more than this. One must take a chance, put oneself out there, quite literally in medias res, into the middle of things, the things of the world, with all of its shame and drudgery and broken dreams…um, ahem…and beauty too, yes…one must strive to put oneself in a position to give the gift of love with no thought of a return on their investment. It is the absurdity of this that is important. It is the ridiculousness of this that makes it worthwhile.

VIEWER 2—This is getting boring. And kind of redundant too. Hey, maybe I will have some of that sandwich.

VIEWER 1—Sorry. Too late. It’s gone. I fed it to a crocodile.

VIEWER 2—Damn. I guess I missed my chance.

VIEWER 1—Yep. Too bad. It was good too.

VIEWER 2—I bet.

Two Pulled From The Typer's Teeth

Billy The Kid’s Lament In Wintertime

going south faster than the Rio Grande
I fall asleep to the sound of old Chinese women screaming
on the street outside
while the sun glints off windows and spills
like golden lava onto my floor
my horse has strayed and lost his way
my aim’s a little off
and my hand shakes like a guy with Parkinson’s

but I can still hold a tune
and enjoy the way
the small moths flutter across my room

some things don’t change too much with time
and sometimes
like say on a rainy afternoon with nothing to do but smile
they just keep on getting better


OBDURATE

we live in small rooms & go unpublished
our lives are squalid and dull
we make music with typewriter keys and
go days without eating
our clothes are held together with safety pins
and our hair is almost always unwashed

we have holes in our shoes & holes in our teeth & giant gaping holes in our souls

we spend days memorizing long passages from Paradise Lost
and nights drinking whiskey until we black out

this is the life we lead
as invisible scratches in the surface of the world
those of us who don’t give a damn
about dollars and success

we live quiet lives of solitude 

and just maybe
at certain times
a little desperation too

One For The Wastrels, The Drunkards, and The Lechers

                                      (A Summer and Smoke pastiche)

So Tennessee thought of you, with a drawl and a yawn, on some July afternoon, a dashing cavalier at work on a Model-T, sweeping sweet ladies off of their feet, un-fit pieces of a puzzle on a TV tray, strangers and kindness and just surviving, drenchings with a hose held over one’s head, long hot afternoons, patience, castigations and customs and calling on neighbors, the last flickering spark of civilization, readings and refreshments, a bottle of apricot brandy. Anything goes on Moon Lake. Everything reaches up, straining for something out of the reach of human fingers. Look up. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Chasing the bluebird of satisfaction. Traveling salesmen playing poker. The facts of life. A doctor would know. Spying, standing behind a curtain, in love with some trembling tacky thing with a Z in her name. She and God punishing the devil in you. No cigarettes, bad manners and self-indulgence. Tied down. Old maids who are still young. Unkind. Spreading out one’s life like a rug for her to step all over. A catfight broken up by a preacher. A hat torn from its plumage. A couple of white tablets dissolved in water. Trust. Heart like a drum, that little red fist that keeps knocking on that little black door, unable to sleep or get through the summer, one day after the other, a deep breath, another, soon you will be much better. Time is only one side of a tesseract. Pearl buttons on her blouse. Breathe. Breathe. Hold your breath. The soul is not on an anatomy chart. Love is what you bring to it. A little voice saying, “How does your blue space in running clouds go, Mr. Williams?”

A Verbatim Excerpt From The Deliriously Drunk Man's Speech On The Subway

…when we get back to my house I’m going to show you a couple of things that I never told you about before, I’m going to go back home and get a loan on a cheap car like maybe an ’88 Mercury station wagon, only a couple hundred of bucks I bet will get me through the winter because it’ll have to somehow, until I get back to thinking about just where it is I really want to go, where I want to go from here, until I start a new life where my floor isn’t covered with old books and broken glass and dead dreams and years of dust and beer stains, when we get back, when I go back, when everything is just the way it should be and we steal our electricity, I want cloudless lazulite skies and whiskey in my coffee and an alarm clock that never wakes me up and calendar pages that never turn, but in the meantime there are bad haircuts to get and days to wade through like bath water, always moving just to go nowhere once again, I just want to walk in the June afternoon, want to feel free, sing, laugh, maybe even dance a little, throw all my possessions into a bonfire, run naked on the beach, be happy too...