the lost potential of tapped resources

Laurel: I am the Gary Busey of poetry.

Hardy: No. More like the Mo Howard.

Laurel: Rang like silver?

Hardy: No. It shone, though.

Laurel: Now there’s a way I know where I could put in a swimming pool.

Hardy: The call of the domesticated?

Laurel: Shake it.

Hardy: Done. Oh. Yeah. Done.

Laurel: Fed Cassius Clay his first beer, for 25 cents.

Hardy: And in less time than it took Andy Granatelli to fix a flat.

Laurel: He knocked me out.

Hardy: Yep. Cold.

Laurel: Nice to toast in the winter’s first chill. Nice to be craving fantastic limits. Nice to choo before a haw.

Hardy: Yep. For nubbers like us. We smoke ourselves down to nothing.

Laurel: Leave it to the grail diggers and the gravest of holies.

Hardy: Smell ‘em going and leaving.

Laurel: I’ll never forget the stink of certain lurid things. I won’t go into it. I won’t. It doesn’t do.

Hardy: Forgetting? Hell, creeks do minor damage to major players in this, you know, in this, you know, in this, you know, game we play.

Laurel: I know?

Hardy: A game.

Laurel: We play?

Hardy: We play! We play. We play, we play, we play, we play, we play.

Laurel: Seriously?

Hardy: Never!

Laurel: Give me the words. Put down a fight. Get it. Get it. Get it. Down.

Hardy: How am I going to go? Down, down, down, down, down.

Laurel: Match my sticks, you gunner of love. Belated, as you would. You would! Belated, you come. Finally! You would.

Hardy: Worried?

Laurel: Me? Nah. Too much bossa nova going on beforehand.

Hardy: That?

Laurel: Yes. That. And also being blinded by a tuxedo moon.

Hardy: People used to do cool things around here. People don’t do cool things anymore. Why don’t people do cool things anymore?

Laurel: Technological savvy.

Hardy: Ah. Shit.

Laurel: Playing around is frowned upon if it’s too original, or too old fashion, or might make somebody somewhere feel that special joy that comes from being alive.

Hardy: Loudness. That’s all that counts. Separation. Cutting one’s self off from all those other selves out there making their little noise. Zoning out in this personal space we carve out, this tiny nook of uncreative drool space. I am punctuating. You. I. Fuck. I cannot be. Know. Together.

Laurel: Hyphenated tempers. Spare colons lacking in, commas, that do without inside brackets. Between exclamation points. Never to be trapped in the belly of a paragraph.

Hardy: Trying. It’s not. It is an end result without going through all the trouble of getting there. Nothing to do with natural rhythms.

Laurel: Finding new ones?

Hardy: It’s poorly structured. But who are we?

Laurel: Just a couple of poor nubbers. That’s all. Smoking our brains down past the filter.

Hardy: Young is up for what’s never coming. What it doesn’t want to or can’t imagine. Youth values its own futureless participle of being young. On and on. The eternal, “What now?”

Laurel: Breath used for using breath.

Hardy: Vampires are chasing our shadows and they’re missing teeth and we strut by and they say, “Hey! Who is that who goes there?” And we play smart and act dumb. It’s another show we’re missing out on. The vampires are no longer thirsty. Our blood is worthless.

Laurel: It’s not the time now. It’s never the time now. It’s not what you ought to think about.

Hardy: Stretched over bamboo. Bahing badly, but at least not booing.

Laurel: Humming over the sound bugs make.

Hardy: Like that?

Laurel: Sorting it out. Sort of.

Hardy: Houses built. A swell joint swelling with overconsumption. Grade me.

Laurel: Straight seas.

Hardy: Half pointy. Right arm’s for rubbering. There’s a hunting I’m sure we’ll never get around to. But haunting? That’s reading a pulse by Braille.

Laurel: You shout, shout, shout, and shout while I’ve been keeping quiet.

Hardy: You’re the James Cagney of keeping your trap shut.

Laurel: No. The Forrest Gump of being cool.

Hardy: Born out of this, the way we are, or were, if we could be, then, what we’d like to be, some one day.

Laurel: Bruised and brought back, less weary and more aware.

Hardy: If.

Laurel: If.

Hardy: Shortly sold.

Laurel: No. Borrowed to steal.

Hardy: The slender ladies of the dance.

Laurel: More mothballs for sale. More lonely nights to not have to spend. Traditions tossed to the desensitized scrum.

Hardy: Voracious. These are the kids who steal from themselves to turn somebody else a profit.

Laurel: I’m the Archie Bunker of love.

Hardy: No. More like the Flipper of off.

Laurel: Not what I am, but what I mean, or meant, to be.

Hardy: Lap it up. I’m getting back what I never had.

Laurel: Bundle me up and take the wings from my ways. What we found in the barn. What they trounced. Give this away from what’s become of us.

Hardy: Lots of going. On. What’s to bust or take? What’s meant.

Laurel: Noises in a noisy hotel. We lobby for more. But who? But, I say, asking, who?

Hardy: You put the ass in ask.

Laurel: Placebo, please.

Hardy: Have you ever caught yourself wide-awake?

Laurel: With it. Man. I am. That’s real. With it.

Hardy: I listen at night only.

Laurel: Last night I had the strangest dream about Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Hardy: Did you believe it?

Laurel: Believed it. Legs and thighs and breasts and all.

Hardy: And the train runs through it.

Laurel: Around it too.

Hardy: Ends are given to the lined up. Begin. Again. Begin.

Laurel: Party hats on.

Hardy: An aura of expectations is created. I’m tired of funny people. Could I get a little seriousness up in here?

Laurel: Course it follows. No ransacking allowed. And Caruso was bigger than Jesus.

Hardy: I’m the Caruso of lap dances.

Laurel: Not something to brag about, I’d think.

Hardy: Depends what you mean.

Laurel: Lapping it up? You mean?

Hardy: Surnaming pets. Getting to be cranky. Up by default. Try me. Go ahead. Try. Try. Try.

Laurel: You mean?

Hardy: Pianos that rollick more than they bounce.

Laurel: You mean?

Hardy: Mean. Mean. I’m tired of looking like me.

Laurel: That’s something like this, “There’s a wife to look after, or to look after you, and we don’t turn our backs on family. We’re good.” Something like that. Or, “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone away.” Something, anyway.

Hardy: Gaps in all I’ve got. Photographs of trembling out of work. Eyes white to the bluest black. Focus. Remain neutral.

Laurel: Patrolling. Hell. Rock me like a chair. That’s out of my jurisdiction. After you, the genuine article goes putt, putt, putt, putt.

Hardy: A Bud Light truck backing up down a hill. A very distinct way of telling unimportant things. It’s useful to be useless.

Laurel: I read the future in last night’s graffiti. It usually conveys a sense of malaise and dread mixed with a whiff of saffron.

Hardy: Our world? Laxatives chased with Imodium.

Laurel: Or, “Sitting in this old jailhouse, I know it ain’t nothing but a waste of my bodily dimensions.”

Hardy: Space without. Space within.

Laurel: Or, “Brother, how much I’ll do to you anyhow.”

Hardy: Grow your own vegetables. Raise other folks’ kids. Snoop. Get a line to dry your personal effects with. It’s not, nothing is, demanding enough. Of us? For us? Well, we ameliorate our video game collection and get over it.

Laurel: Chain us to the miles we’ve never had to walk.

Hardy: Nope. It inhibits growth. Sullies the prefect ironic wink. Fast only loses to faster, and nothing gains. It’s only what is lost. Everything. And how sad how little it is, what is lost. So little. Nothing really. Can’t take it with you. Just move on. See a movie.

Laurel: Comfort wears time up its sleeve. Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored.

Hardy: Boring.

Laurel: What am I concerned with?

Hardy: Boredom?

Laurel: Yes. Exactly.

Hardy: And so they win, right?

Laurel: Every time.

Hardy: Who?

Laurel: Exactly.

saponification

scuffed blues

the written sky claims

to be marred topless

we spot

longshots & popcorn tails

selling good’s buys

before tulips close

so intuition’s counterfeits

can destroy pluck

hardly telling

curtains grime showers

old as stone

our devils descend

moded out of clutches

slightly blown on

off our veering trails

we

as they say

miss mights

wrong new’s rights

and snip cruddy hours

from the day’s flowers

but who finds its own how

gardening over breakfast

we take tea’s time and

fit propellers to our pith

don’t ask what’s a drop

to a spilled ocean

if regret’s water

and fish fly backwards

or a breath’s air swims in silt

as it smiles for decoration

then surely hands are not dishes

but

also

like sure’s glad almost tells

we argue

they just might

be spoons

cymbal man with flat feet

Sword-billed Hummingbirds for sale. Pricey. I’d rather buy a vending machine filled with parasols and plastic rings. Curtis. Jamal. Could I get an usher in here to fill out my blank spaces? That’s all. Boon. Vance. Let’s get a double move-on on it. Federal law requires these things, you know? Give that remote control a whack on its back. Go ahead, like you’re burping the damn thing. That’s it. Easy now. Don’t want to thrash the vile contraption so it won’t work like it used to. Come on, Krissy, get the kinks out. Let’s take the garbage out now while we can. Rather have a smudge here than a smudge later, you know? Forward. Progress. Intelligent go-ahead runs at authority. Yes. We do what we can, and maybe what we thought we couldn’t. Level the heads. Vast. I mean, really? I’m gunning for an out, likely enough where there’s no hope of a gun or a hard-to-swallow theory. Stop. I’m going to ruin this. Evelyn. Greta. Sammy. Run or get ready. The bear robot’s making martinis. Untie the soldier’s shoes. Wash. My habits are becoming nasty. Be groomed. Be kind. Be hale and graced with filling. Stuffing. Other wah-wah yelps. Daggers I might hurl at walls. Vroom. Bill. Oran. Vanessa. Chad. Remember, what we’ve got here is a victory over communication. An opuscule for sale. All of my works for some doll’s shiny button eye. The rigors of motion stopping in for business. Kurt. Wilma. Paddington. Over here. I’m looking at you. Now, let’s stick around. Let’s. Hush up, Kermit. I’m not playing with any of you anymore. Klaus. Spare me a nickel? Brenda. Mama. Vigo? Pat my back. I’m making it up. Never mind what I’m saying. It’s what you’re hearing. Clear space. X out the needy. Everything you want becomes what you need. Morgan. Sherry. Dress your kids in lavender. I’m making myself up. Henry? Get me a rough cut. It’s a steal. Barnaby. Larissa. Mess up my hair. I’m in the butcher’s union for life. Always scrambling marinara into the clouds. Roll. Stay unfit. I’m plussed just so you can be minus. Clear the ends of my zone. It’s Billy. He’s in the game for life. You have no idea what I could accomplish in pants like this. Loop or dissect. Let’s make a decision. Holly! Get on it. I want a fresh-out-of-the-dryer towel, pronto. Stop being a waste of space. Hubert! Get the lead in. Arf. Arf. Goobers are plopping all around. It’s me. Alaska’s out of Ranch dressing. Either that or they’ve hidden it all in the basement. Cash out. All in. Let’s get a bird’s-eye view. Let’s bench press paperbacks. Don’t go for it. Alice. I’m mistaken. Only it’s now that we deal in artificial artifacts of newness. Over all the Suzies of whatever Lionel ignored. Dreams time talk by the strongest divisible decibel. Let’s make paper out of airplanes. My mercy machine’s on empty. Gloria! And damn you, Herman! Or maybe that’s just you, Wyatt. Could revenge be a dish best never served? I’m my own evil twin. Last month griping was becoming my favorite hobby. Now? Now nothing’s new. Angels have grown small. Victor. My, my, my, my. I’m stolid in my regards to what you disassociate from. Attacked by two-headed tulips. I eat all of my buttered bread upside down. Cast me as a roll player. Topple dimness. Return my soul to sender. Address never to be known. Jeremy. Susan. Wesley. I am leaving. I am nothing but a backache waiting to happen. I’m shunning sunshine. Courtney. Don’t yank your hair out over it. Penelope. Clyde. Let’s cut this shit in. A bustling dimension. A dancing asterisk. Devon? I’m closed most mornings. Farewell to our grenade days. A cooper’s been cross-country skiing past here lately. Figures. My barrels are all chested. The undiscoverable world of hairnet fishing is finally off my mind. Frederica. Bob. Hester. Bid a bit to go clear into that heap of crushed soda cans. We are sensible. Varnish the rats with mean streaks. Veronica. Babushka. Tell the time! Vince. Ned. Pamela. Sleep sincerely in fields of crumbled muffins. Curtis. That’s the way to stop on a penny. There are no shoes to tell my story like these shoes tell it. Mary. Alan. Icarus. Vanish this landscape into thick water. It’s lately that men sewer for likely stories. Depends on what you’ll never mean to be. Gregory. All credentials accepted. The torturous and painfully cruel history of us disrupts the normal activity of our lives. Back by nightfall. Miloš. Victor. I have the rugged, worn, scratchy face of an old criminal. Don’t be pristine. Nothing’s a harder tic to banish. Astrid. At last. We seem to have reached a disagreement. Carousel the deviants. I’m all for spotting land. Bridgette. Mairead. Boris. And you, Timmy. Burn the piano to keep us warm. Don’t be too serious with your food. Plan to never attack. The bells are all blue around these harbors. Lois. Source me. Look it up and down. I’m finding it out this side or in the other. Late is to run back. Michael. Gina. Xavier. To whom it does not concern. Look dull. Bob. Groom before you preen. It’s not that I don’t like water. I just hate when it falls. Allan. It’s going around. It’s the latest way to say goodbye. It’s lipstick on a straw. Polly. They’re before you. Question the door. Don’t barf after tea. Get after those slippers. Marie. Don’t be early. I’m operating on disconnected phones. Don’t miss the sights. And let’s challenge the holding capacity of cylinders of ethanol. Be rushed. Solfeggio me until the farmhands rid the barn of the tiniest bales of hay in the world. Stu. Doc. Chick. Rest in war. I’m bashed by laziness. Zip away. No. On fourth thought we’ll save it for recess. I am energy divided by the sum of motivation. Enrico. Jerry. Gain hair. Create unimportant benefits for freshly dead beneficiaries. Hawaii is drifting. I have seen the sea’s dominion over creeps let go jailers to swim free. I have known obstacles such as brass hooligans and torch-bearing bandicoots flaring the dark like radioactive jewels. I have matched the sun with stares. Winifred. Turn off the solar panels. I’m shimmering to death. Caspering along as we were it was only a matter of immaterial resources shrinking to a diminished popped bulb in a smoky TV. Orson. You are less than well. Fight your cards wrong. Quiz the stumped. Pigtail cranky ruffians until their skin screams for honeysuckle and white toast. Benjie. Heloise. Read letters by moonlight. I am squatting short. I am stuffed empty. Furbish my heavy-metal renditions of Brahms’ sonatas until they dully shine more than waxed-paper leaves. Heracles. Mandy. Let’s make ice out of creamlessness. Nobody’s old anymore. La lured dee to the dah until doe rayed me. Nachos for the plebeians. Amen to the alignment of curfew with yawns. Vladimir. Don’t label me eristic. I’m mostly more artisan than bricklayer. Next stop’s busy-as-potential. Francis. Step off it. Dang if I’ll be blasted. Want to serve me crashes while I deliver cars to all the girls next door? Sheena. Get me some potential. Don’t lose it in a dazey blunder over cold spaghetti. Okay? No more sprawling blight. It’s gotten so that garbage dumps have got their own zip codes now. Pink drowning the depths of gray. Pinstripe the opposition. Put ‘em in rags of rage. I’m often lumped in with radio listeners and pinochle champions. Earl. Etta. Byron. Over my live mind. Fans of very little put up a fight. Tell them all that I’m in the stars but I’m gazing towards the gutter.

that's the way the market crashes

I'm an American, once removed. Don’t rely on me to tell you when it’s time to task-complete. I mean when it comes to collapsing, when it comes down…what I mean is, when it comes to being unimpressed, but not showing that you’re unimpressed-- when it comes down to that, well you don’t got to go around and change the light bulbs about it. Gas it. Cover the once of it with over. Done. That’s all I’m saying. It’s grok between you and them, and your urge to create and your urge to destroy get tangled up, and your pins are quaking, yo. That’s a fair assessment. Don’t be so damn scared. Shit. Get the with-of-it the hell out of your system. Get the laugh, then jet. What’s to know about it? Edification. That’s not a secret any of them will fall for. I’ve been living with cats for too long; they crinkle my broadsides, or’ve come to. Do this; don’t do that; fit in; die. That’s what they spit on about. Tromboning on through the cummerbund of seasonal maladies. I’m looking. I’m almost aware-- unreliable too. Just in case you didn’t notice the first time through. Getting through with waiting around, with loitering in the shadows, with Krazy-Glue sunsets and glow-in-the-dark on/off switches. And crawl (bent like knees) through, through, through the badly timed jokes, nifty piebalds and mares, geldings and jennies gone to pasture, and keep crawling (evenly on all fours, no matter how odd), as it’ll be older here by now’s then. Big kids take the bus; you know that, at least; don’t got to feel it too. And sure, Avogadro’s number ain’t as constant as it used to be, but I spindle my brains over the feasibility of that damn Hadron Collider making any shit-stain of a difference in why my kids are all bothering to ape TV characters over Fruity Pebbles in the morning. Vapid, it all takes shape, and we shoot out the color from traffic signals, and our eyes adjust, and the scramble for justice rings itself up as free. I’m only spreading a truth that rings rumorish. Don’t believe in me. Go about your glib saucy way. I’ll be hiding in the medicine chest, behind the Vicks Vapor Rub and the mineral oil. All the newcomers are growing old, wildly. I’ve got the grace I’ve got, hidden there, beneath the broken flowerpot; it doesn’t show. Hydrangeas are my oldest pals. My pride? Riata it in, banged up as ever. Man oh man, am I going stuffed and underused. I sing like Dean Martin and get all the laughs of Jerry Lewis, too. So, give up. Pay the bills. Offer a few tads, there and here mainly, of flavor to the world’s boiling smorgasbord. You need the courage that comes with the companionship of others to combat the loneliness that’s life’s dripping faucet. Reliance. It’s a gamble. What seems an easy exchange from hand to glove gets kicked around more than a rodeo clown. The strangeness of trying too hard to forget what went wrong and kiltered, kinked and warped, off to avert truth-be-untold differings of trauma: so this is how it’s going to be, huh? Mainly, man’s done for. Stack a couple of Big Macs on my grave and toss the wrapper in the grass. Shit. I mean, where’s the where of here? I’m not there. Fuck it, man. I’m here. For fuck’s sake. I’m here. Hear me? Not there. Here! Here! Ah, shit. Well, what’s a single meaning of it all anyways? Beat yourself up about it and go straight to hell. Crowds of cowards gathering. I sense an unmonumental shift in how things will never get finished. I’m talking packaging: Styrofoam containers, cigarette packs, lost wallets, basil, mischievous underpinnings unique only as imperious items in a display case warning of illicit housewarming gestures that everyone wasn’t scared enough not to make. Importance fallows on away. We are thumb-based creatures of uneven psychotic apparatus who stumble post-id into filling-station ideas without caring or knowing why or how, or mostly who too, really, and then lying down comes around to coddle the insecurities that come along with a poor-credit rating for your soul. Don’t believe me. I’m out of sorts. Grumpy and jilted and appraising a slump’s last confetti toss, scrounging through lost pieces of evidence before a jury weighs in. A bad bet to make against the nature of capitalism, something that outlasts us, up-down haywire shiftings in a loose network of economic transactions that’ll become your life’s Richter scale if you’re not careful, or too careful for that matter, about it. Don’t take my rice-futures word for it though. I’m not going to go ahead and blame myself for hedging and leveraging derivatives like a ninny. Many’s the deep-in-the-dollar-signs, in-the-buff calls I never made. Got me? Bluffing was never my forte, though I did gamble without a clearing-house’s chance to insure against-- what they say? You know: inclement weather. But that’s just stringing diamonds behind a trash truck. Sometimes the smell of it gets to you. Sometimes you’re free enough, if you can afford the market price of freedom. From? Of? Do we even know how to be free? Sometimes I wonder. In more than a while's once, we all need to do stupid, reckless things. Unfortunately there's a certain joy in being held captive: never having to make a decision; the convenience of being caged. Maybe you pay somebody to be free for you. That’s a one-way ticket to the kind of thralldom where the one locked up doesn’t even know she’s enslaved. Like the prisoner who’s asked by the guard, “So, how do you like being kept here in this prison?” and in turn asks the guard, “What’s a prison?” The large notional value of your life keeps growing as the reality of your worth remains hidden smugly beneath an arbitrage-free personality, a lady who smirks and winks brazenly through the variegation summing up the barrage of what’s persistently being lost and gained without much notice from those attempting to ogle into the machinery of the not-so-free market. Risk it none. Accept what’s commonplace as a lost cause. There’s a clatter in the basement of the stock exchange. We’re scrambling to make ends never meet. Bilateral netting gone to the cats. Lipless OTCs and ETDs playing dangerous with expensive lipstick. Swap me a few ounces of equity for a few pounds of moral fiber. I’m making planes from faulty parts and selling to an over-paying Uncle Sam, and all for the sake of a greasy buck. Maybe you lose a few fighter pilots here and there, but there’ll always be innocent casualties to get blown to flower fertilizer by the wayside. Can’t worry yourself to death over the lives of others. And then you glance around. You give the thrice-over to lapses in somebody’s idea of good judgment while hedge funds are quick to rally with much pluck and myopic, foreshortened foresight to take advantage of the tiniest moment of hysteria and slight panic. A bell tolls? Maybe. But who’s listening? We rush through the throngs, the clamber of shifting variables that’ll puncture those delicate speculative bubbles, those soapsuds of no intrinsic value, checking our pockets constantly for signs of a past we’re unable to keep up with or feel we’ve ever known properly, while paperless worries cast ominous shadows that we grow so accustom to that we no longer realize that we’re in the dark. And the cost of war rises as the price of life drops. I spill a few tankers of oil on the sand, and somebody screams, “Blood!” It’s all a wash. Get yourself a dollar’s worth and heave away. This ship’s sinking and sailing at the same time, and there’ll surely be more shores than we know what to do with soon. Soon. That’s the marvelous stink of my own marginal profit. Richly poor. Always just on the cusp of it all, but never there. Or here, for that matter. Yep. Ask for me in the morning, and I’ll be gone-- even if this is the morning already, and we’ve always only known fixed interest rates that stay up dancing all through the night. Because, you know, we’ve all been doing the dead cat bounce for the eternity it takes for the present to occur. And this, in the beginning, middle, or end, is what’s keeping the most of what’s really us just passing for what we currently call being alive. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Shit. No. But hell, nobody’s looking. And, as far as this here proverbial bed-wetter is concerned, there isn’t even a tunnel. Say goodbye to all of your tomorrows. I’m checking in late and staying until the bulls make a break for it. A hopeless case? Sure, but listen: there’s a hell of a party going on next door; let’s go.

east of east st louis

Hello. My name is Clarence Plum, and I’m going to take a hard right across America. Hope the burned blush of it doesn’t get to me, but I’m riveted, and it’s needless to say that I’m pretty dog tired of the murder of days rolling along here, getting nowhere and nothing. I used to say, “Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be litterbugs.” I’m not sure it mattered. Everybody scatters their trash. It’s a private nuisance of mine. Got to go around slopping it all back up. But them’s the breaks of it. I mostly say that now. Drink fire instead of wine. That gets me through most of it. West is only water. East is sunset. I get more out of the cold weather than most. Maybe I’ll head north. Anything to get a where that’s not here. Nobody enjoys the present enough, and it don’t last. I grab a handful of yours and…well, it’s bourbon and soda in times like these. I see things blotchy sometimes. It’s okay. My head stays a mess for the worst of it. Give me a pair of Babe Ruth’s bowling shoes and I’ll flee to other shores. A feeling’s humming through me that I’m missing out on things, always missing the best of things, the good stuff. Run a comb through the sludge of my hair. I’ve got my unguarded moments. Got to go through hell sometimes to catch a glimpse of heaven. Prayers all corroborating my alibis. Old judge Masters, that stinker, chucked the Book Of Sam at me. Then Evelyn left me for a bible thumper. Let him have her. Who needs her? But I tell you, I’m still looking for her in some other girl’s eyes. Every other girl. Even or odd, just roll right along through the muck like always. One sapropelic motherfucker, I am. Always deserting on the detritus of situations that I keep getting tangled and thrashed about into.

I start to think of my drunk aunt whom we always had to move. Her waterbed that finally popped and gushed out to soak the carpet as we waded away. I start to…“i was nine and was walking on the beach and my aunt who was a floozy and a drunk was lighting a cigarette cupping her hands over it in the wind and i thought she might be a scarecrow but then didn’t know if scarecrows could be women and why anyway would my aunt be a scarecrow though crows would certainly be scared of her she had a face like a frying pan with day-old bacon grease in it but i was nine and impossible things hadn’t started to seem as unlikely yet as they one day would because being nine you know enough about stuff but not enough to really know about stuff and that was me then feeling as old as i’d ever felt feeling my age nine and it was something wonderful with my bare feet on the warm sand and the wind splattered at me and the sky so big it was like it would never end and i wanted to go dive into the ocean and tumble around in the waves and be lost and i was nine and it felt like something important to be that age then walking on the beach and my aunt lit her smoke and laughed her raspy laugh and coughed her hacking cough and winced and squinted and mussed my hair and i ran and i ran on ahead and she called to me but i didn’t hear her i had more pertinent matters to attend to and i was off kicking up sand behind me as the beach seemed like it would never end and i knew the ocean would go on and on and i’d never get to the end of it no matter what and i knew that it didn’t matter anyway because i was nine and my life was my own and there was a whole world going on around me that wouldn’t care if i disappeared and i wanted to be gone and the ocean was calling me by name and i ran and ran and ran and when i hit the hard wet sand by the water i hardly knew where i was and it didn’t matter because the water was cold enough and i was nine and i’ll never forget how it felt”

Alkaline hell and high winds are the vade mecum of my traipsing. Listen well or know where we are. The sewers and oceans. The jungles and slums. Clean air and a diesel dreaming smoke. Families race in squares about the rattle of vacuum cleaners. Roam as the road’s cleared. Just thinking of you. It’s not jumbo. It’s not as magnificent as Ambersons. Talking less than keeping quiet. Sludge of wet grounds left at a coffee cup’s bottom. Used. Burlap and Kevlar and ruminating from the clack of bones and the gnash of broken teeth. Spooning time into paper cups. Let’s let the road clear itself. Order. Order. Ordering the important of what’s what of the who. Like that. Getting back to the you in you. And then. And then? Yes. Sure.

And then you get to thinking about how that rent check’s burning a hole in your pocket, and a blazer of whisky’d be a good companion for the night. Maybe a pack of Luckies and a record player. A few dances that won’t ever wear themselves out. Cents you make instead of dollars in exchange for what’s left of your brain. There’s a pale wish skipping over the moon, and tonight’s just an empty pocket to shove a cold hand into. Strut around in a shabby suit long enough and the world gets to forgetting you long before you’ve forgotten all about it. Gray tidings and square-shouldered applause and a fortune of subway tokens. Making up excuses for falling back out of love again. Radio’s shot. The dark’s got the only light around. Tonic water mixed with whatever’ll fire it down to the gut. Hung with a dead man’s tie. The beams break with the sound you scream. Nothing’s got enough weight to hold whatever’s keeping you down, and saxophones’ve been broken over less. And you don’t even own a piano. Maybe you say to yourself, “Don’t mock me out there or forget me out there with the blown leaves and the runway fur coats. Let me stick around for a while.” There you go holing up instead of holding up better. The sky’s your only better half. A ruined hack skirting his ambitions until another spring comes around to kill them permanently, again. Half of you’s dead, and the other half’s not making up for it. It’s cocktail weather. A friend forgets you and you turn up half your collar. Fireworks pay attention to whatever’s left. Take the elevator to the roof. The noise you make’s just a minor catastrophe. The cabs will all pass you by. The bars’ll all close on your nose. The gallows don’t need a ladder to get you to them.

Bland. Calling it like I ain’t used to seeing it. Fats breaks. There goes the eight ball. You know how it goes. Those things. It’s not that I don’t got class. I’ve just dismissed it. Early. A boon to the famished instincts hunting all over for a way to not have to go again. Phone calls gone MIA. I got a girl who ties my shoes for me. I’m not disturbed by any of it. Let her pass spelling on to the golf prose. Who needs her? Full of grouching and bemoaning and hustling me out of my own apartment. A cat’s crawled into the alley. Time to let it go. Extremely perishable at all times. Pinned. Counted out. I’m putting the punch back in Hawaiian. All the crowd wants is more noise. The lights are always so insecure, going around begging for a smoke. Broke the shade. Misunderstood the robbers. Went holy-over-holly to get back to the crooked and wide. Bundle my head up with cigar smoke. I’m all shook up.

As the afternoon goes calling for beer I go scouting familiar things: playing cards, gum and glue, tinsel, a dusty necktie, badly dented cymbals, laceless Vans, bad manners, a cold half-cup of coffee, cigarette ash on an old movie poster for Dance Hall Racket, gray boxing gloves, bank receipts curling in a pile, toast crumbs and toothpaste stains. There’s no bottom to this. I put in a little time swaying towards Bethlehem. It’s redemption’s plight. Sorry, so-so, or a big fat pink slip from directly up above. That’s how much we’ll get done caring about the condition of the economy’s jugular. In general, by the time I get back to the bottle it’ll be time the bottle’s had just a bit more than enough of me. I can cope. It’s legitimate. Performing CPR on the city’s punctured ego. Clattered. Buddying up. Valor buys itself another lady for the night, and I’m stuck lurking in the lesser-known side streets of ways I used to know so well. Get a lunch special of whatever it is that’s driving distraction around. Really not the strangest route if you start to think about stopping to think about it. Tariffs paid by skid row’s finest. Bused to the delivery section of Go Thou Across The Land. Raincoating your dreams. Cut in of or out for whatever it is that arrives later than night. Buying less of what’s in store for the damaged. Fleeing four-wheeled terror. Vast and ill-tempered. Burnt out on being good. But my dreams ain’t good enough. Not no more. Wrecked in the blessed I go forth and do as I must.

Taking no for a question. There’re places to get to. Lots of down-and-out to climb over. I make speeches in strange voices I’ve never known to crowds of paramilitarians and earless boxes of musty clothes. Never to be squeezed safely home again. Pour me a drink of moonlight, forget the ice. Pass me that hat that’s going around. Surely as two right feet left. The road screams Clarence. I forget the sound my name makes. Sarah Bernhardt’s calling, calling. Dear, dear. I’m on the roof with somebody else’s wife. Oh lord. Tell her. Leave my nightmares in her name. But tell her, please, tell her I’m done.

wristbandpincushion

a some that’s not a where

i’ve gone ever

after

or a you

that’s a kiss’s soft

turned moonsilver

before spilt drinks die

for the ice of another

we’ve

at least

got dancing’s long

with a sleepless here

to bring lost blooms to

openended petals

as feet march spring’s song

and toes twist fall’s gone

we’re still

slightly silently

back when hands hold

and shades draw

so no worry ever slowly

grows like nails

to win

this side of

will be

or were’s are

until then spells now

and i is assured

an us

to travel with

more than gladly

over any under

and never

glued beyond our’s this

or born at most

as lost as also’s too

xerxes in arrears

Dear Esther,

I have no interest in big stupid oafs who sleep well at night. You who know me so well should know this well. It’s an echo of snores, of blubbering burps, the stink of cheese, rotten chard from the flatus of fools. Don’t you worry though; corrosion is a principle I’m well aware of. You can’t keep blinding me with science and expect me to just gung-ho go along with whatever it is you’re using to stave off being tired. The wiles of musclemen and the ruses of muscleheads lead one nowhere except to the brink of undone chores. The pomes of cotoneasters tell us more about quick fixes in the grout of things, things being the instrumentation of your life’s music. Contentment comes at a price. Sleep comes sometimes, but not rest. Never rest. You’ve got to beat the tiredness somehow. Strangle it to the floor, suffocate it, grind it down to dust and powder. Grain alcohol and soda water. Maple syrup and barley wine. A concoction of pulverized dandelions, the juice of a dozen Sour Patch Kids, a thimbleful of meatloaf grease, 4 ounces of Diet Rite, a squirt of lemon juice, 2 teaspoons of liquid pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, a splash of crushed quartz, and a few sprigs of watercress floated on top. As always, I ideate in the slow hours of sleepless dawns these recipes. What the Q-tip-inclined among us might come to think of as the tip of a pinky finger quickly plugging then just as quickly unplugging the ear.

Essentially I’m hog tired, which is a fatter and even lazier sort of tired than dog tired. A term that suits its owner well. Nothing blaring but those essentials, essentially. Put forth your bravest hand and the foot will dodge out of the way. Other than that it’s keeping time to mental balancing acts, or screaming, “Over and out!” over and over. Me? I’m more interested in the quality of observed holidays. The spiritual nature of them, what will surely out-and-out come to pass while we all dance around playing hopscotch, or drinking scotch, or wrapping scotch tape around our heads, or scotching plans to be more prudent in our foresight.

It’s silly to be realistic when it comes to people. Trust me. I know people; I know what they like. People like ribs. Hickory-smoked baby-back racks of ribs with honey mesquite sauce slathered on them. Spare ribs. St. Louis Style. Country-style. Button ribs, rib roasts, rib chops, riblets. You give them ribs and they’ll be happy. Baked, smoked, grilled. It don’t matter. They will say, “Give me ribs or give me death.” Well, that and maybe a bowling ball. I know people. Yep. Have them eating out of the palm of my hand if I wanted. Don’t want it though. Not now. Hands are too delicate for such things. I’ve got motions so fluent they’ll put the socks back on you. Trouble is, I don’t wake up to it fast enough, and spearheading another wince-able castoff into the parsed plien-air of it is making goop and flavorless dog food for jeerers and flouters.

The city sweeps at you, coins phrases with windy gestures as plastic soda-cup lids and leaves twirl in the same jumble, and you step over street-sleepers and slap your hands on lampposts and jump at yellow lights. It’s manageable. Access dismembers partners of double takes. I order takeout whenever possible. My sensibilities are constantly being baffled. And you take your blue periods, more or less, and spread them out over a fire-splotched lake of maybe a few years more. And you take them as they go, each one a deeper and less refined blue than the one before. But your best shades were never much anyway. Hopes get dashed, or dotted, and then some guy with a bad haircut and sandals on comes by and tells you to knock it off just when you thought you were really getting started on something. Cashed out before you even knew you were in. Think of it: normal people in their normal clothes. Jeans, flowy button-ups tucked in, too-big t-shirts, white socks, combed hair, flab and filler, locked up and empty. Sometimes I shout, “The clouds are pink! Look up! Look up!” but nobody listens or looks.

A mustache is painted on a marble lion. A rooftop antenna sprouts like a miracle above, and I stare at it, so arrow-like with its almost ornate metal fletchings, and I think about human beings in a very odd way. Busy things waddling about in these bodies: hairy, flabby, awkward, lumbering, skin-covered creatures who breathe and eat and lounge and defecate. Personalities are diminishing. It’s like wandering around on another planet, or more like in a wild animal park where the animals are not so wild nor are they really that animal, really. Humans seem unnatural, as if they’ve forgotten how to live in the world they’ve been brought into, if they’d ever known, and now are just finding more ways to avoid that world, to build their own out of cement and radio waves and fabricated reality. It’s a triple standard, maybe quadruple even. I sidearm pennies into traffic.

The best thing to do sometimes is just wonder about the quality of tree leaves that get in the wind’s way. The redolence of dead grass (as the wind in this season blows from the land to the sea) keeps you guessing. There’s always the past. And it’s always gaining on us.

But get this: the clock above my head said, “I miss you,” as I waited at the terminal’s entrance for the deboarders to go by, then you reminded me that every first last is timed effort strained without deliberateness. I told you that seas don’t become rivers. That was a time when we could still laugh. Before we made history inside our History Factory. Before I was so casual with my I-love-yous. Before you had somebody in line who was waiting to take my place. Thieves of discontent rattle the bars of my sanity’s silence. I am quiet, quiet. You had candy-bar lips and root-beer hair, and the place where our eyes met was corduroy on a tarantula’s silk footprints. The bathroom was always a little too far away. A Quonset hut of emotional repair work kept us warm on cooler nights, that and a temporary disregard for temporal satisfaction.

I dream of terraces and plum blossoms, crocodile clips holding love letters intact. And then some white sedan drives by with “Don’t Believe Everything You Think” stenciled in black on the side door. Gushing, the plain-clothed haberdasher says, “Those palm trees on the roof of the building, look at them, think about looking at them, what it means to look at them, for them to be seen.” And I listen to it, mostly. I only know space and time autonomously. Already, there isn’t too much to see, and it is only getting darker. The spiders are barking. The buses are all going the other way. Even the lunatics agree; it’s time to spatter the gist of who we are onto to-morrow's windows. I’m baking a canna pie that won’t be eaten before it cools. It’s a shame, really, as there were always a few spots of gold in the oil in the old days. The neighbors are teaching me French.

Au revoir.

The Circumstantial Plight Of Binary Stars

Sneezy: How many trips to the Laundromat?

Dopey: Don’t know. It’s nothing I want to count, to even think it over at all, at all.

Sneezy: But it’s gaining on you, maybe?

Dopey: Look. I don’t care about it. Leave it alone.

Sneezy: I’m rubbing my feet against something soft. It helps me relax.

Dopey: That’s more like it.

Sneezy: I know. More of that, right?

Dopey: That’s the stuff.

Sneezy: Soft stuff.

Dopey: It’s worth more, and we plan for retirement while thinking these things.

Sneezy: Sure. But wait. What about at the bar that night?

Dopey: That night? Well, you see…

Sneezy: I do.

Dopey: I was trying to talk about The Deer Hunter in a way that’d bring a reconciliation to what happened to me in my own life and it was horrible to try to impart this in a bar also to somebody else there who wasn’t a sharp listener at all really and who didn’t owe me a thing.

Sneezy: But you talked about moving, well….I guess it’s always away, right? When you move it’s always moving away from something, even if it’s moving towards something else. The way you move is right in line with…

Dopey: The way we all move, right?

Sneezy: I’m no good at fact checking. It depletes my frontal lobe of its cleverer treats. Yes. I guess. The way we all move is away.

Dopey: Moving back?

Sneezy: Away also. Away from something, right?

Dopey: Or the bringing of inside things to the outside, or putting outside things back where they once belonged: on the inside.

Sneezy: Jumbling.

Dopey: Whatever difference in the sig or quantity of the thing, it merely amounts to a Hobble Skirt of misunderstanding, the way I look at it.

Sneezy: The way you look at it.

Dopey: Softly.

Sneezy: The way I feel it.

Dopey: A Linus-blanket of the senses. I talk to people, but I rarely listen to anything that I’m saying.

Sneezy: I’m going on strike.

Dopey: I’m retiring.

Sneezy: You? You hardly work as it is.

Dopey: I know. It’ll be an easy transition for me.

Sneezy: But just think. It’s a loophole of taste and tradition. Something lost because something’s always got to be gained. I want to fall awake and stay that way until they invent a new way to manufacture dreams.

Dopey: Don’t get carried away. I’m less of a winner than you might think. Maybe I’m more of a dyer than a liver, too.

Sneezy: Liver? Would that be chopped or diced?

Dopey: Bah blah bah blah bah. There. That works. That’s what I meant.

Sneezy: Perfection is achieved. The smell of a day off on a workday is always different than a weekend scent.

Dopey: A pairing of bland couscous and ground salmon bones.

Sneezy: That reminds me, my refrigerator’s been talking to me.

Dopey: What’s it got to say?

Sneezy: Not much. Mostly just the weather report. It’s not too accurate either.

Dopey: My knee’s pretty good at that. Knows when cold’s coming.

Sneezy: Joints ache. Arthritic. Where the bones are scared to tread no one goes.

Dopey: It’s a jocose result from awkward ministrations. I condemn myself so you won’t.

Sneezy: That’s the kind’a talk that’ll get us all killed, or badly maimed at least.

Dopey: And when your foot, or your shoe I should say, hits the pavement, is it really the pavement down there? Is it really there at all? Is that you putting your foot down there? What’s pavement? Did I mention concrete, tarmac, asphalt, brick, stone? Or Portland cement: flyash, blastfurnace, pozzolan, silica fume? Slag-lime, supersulfated, calcium aluminate? And what about tile? Ceramic, porcelain, glazed limestone, mosaics in rubber and glass, granite, marble. Need I go on?

Sneezy: Please stop.

Dopey: Just trying to help. We’ve got to learn, or stop learning, at some point, that who we are can be, might be, maybe, even if it’s not an of course or a should, could be, possibly, not dictated by what we do. Because really, those feet down there pounding the pavement might not really be there at all. There might not even be a world.

Sneezy: And we under-sleep our way out through it, attempting the “into” part of it but lacking the requisite guts.

Dopey: But am I the only me I’ll ever know?

Sneezy: You the only you? That’s more than enough.

Dopey: This is me biting what’s not a fat lip.

Sneezy: Not yet.

Dopey: Shorely, shorely, it is not so. I think it wise to brave the woe with tortures few and worries no.

Sneezy: What the fuck?

Dopey: Oh, just some slop and creamed mush I picked up in juvie. Nothing to juice carrots about.

Sneezy: Somebody’s doing too many loads of laundry at once these days.

Dopey: I opine more than I pine. Shrug. There. Go ahead. It’s mordant at best, and we’ve smiled without laughing too often already, and I’m cheapest with my time in the present. He who animadverts on the past is lucky to get a chance to weld himself to the future.

Sneezy: I’m gassy.

Dopey: You consume an inordinate amount of polysaccharides. I pity your poor wife, stunk out from under the tight wrap of matrimonial sheets.

Sneezy: She should be so lucky to be downwind from the likes of me.

Dopey: Or the hates of you. Also, getting all worked up about the oddest of things, do you find yourself?

Sneezy: More lost than ever. Laundry comes and laundry goes. Clothes won’t clean themselves. I rely on the spin cycle, the rinse, the tumble dry.

Dopey: Pray for sunshine; get splashed with rain.

Sneezy: And then we get soaked with trying without putting forth any real effort. A patchwork of cindery attempts to futilely stop where no woman has stopped before. It’s uncommon nonsense. Strike blame through it, here and there, and before you know it things’ll just cross themselves out on accident, deliberately.

Dopey: It’s not such a wrong thing to lose when winning’s what’s making a mess of your sense of your own enjoying of whatever’s there to lose for you.

Sneezy: Blah? Or would that be blah blah blah?

Dopey: The only thing left that makes any sense…

Sneezy: Let’s not blow it.

Dopey: Right. Because we dig our own trenches, specially and specifically made for anyone else but us.

Sneezy: Making up our minds to be serious, to be lucky, to pattern our lives after the lives of clouds.

Dopey: That’s good enough for me.

Sneezy: Drones taking lives as the city’s buried in my i.o.u.’s. It’s patterns of this and patterns of more of this. The enemy is never ours. We only know of them through statistics buried in the newspaper’s back pages. Civilians are not real; they’re numbers to be counted and ignored: the price of leading these lazy and self-indulgent lives free of remorse, guilt, or any real empathy for anything outside the safe bubble of our personal sphere.

Dopey: A lot a’ medium-cool air, my fellow.

Sneezy: The All-Thumbs Generation hunches their collective shoulders, yawns, and gives up.

Dopey: An alligator chasing its own tail.

Sneezy: I ride the subway alone, look out the windows at the bacon-colored rust marbling the rails, at the fog-licked hills, the houses lined up in neat rows, the misery of immobile pumpjacks and derricks, endless lines of traffic-snarled cars, big rigs belching exhaust, people singing inside closed windows. There are no movies playing in America. And I’m lonely. No matter what. That’s what I’m left stuck with.

Dopey: Cartesian dualism will get you nowhere. Not in pants like those.

Sneezy: Fast, for a change of pace, pull away, zipperless, double-knit reversible trouser darlings, skin-tight, pegged, button-fly, gone trout fishing.

Dopey: Boy, the cases of The Borings have increased exponentially over the course of all these supper-less bedtimes.

Sneezy: Raise your right hand…

Dopey: No. The left. I swear.

Sneezy: We are awful tacticians when it comes to solemnity.

Dopey: It’s more to the center, the humor we stumble on, or craft out of art cartels. It’s piecework, yes?

Sneezy: Boy o’ woman. I’m low-nosing out of here if the air pressure stays steady.

Dopey: But the Laundromat’s still open for beeswax.

Sneezy: Too hot for coffee.

Dopey: The trips add up, but they don’t. Not really. It’s all the same journey, going nowhere, getting nothing, achieving small gains on emptiness. Rolling that same boulder up the hill, over and over. Clean to dirty. Dirty back to clean. Upkeep. It goes on and on, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

Sneezy: The downside of upkeep. I don’t know. It’s slim. Tiny SOS’s slipping through the cracks, messages we send out hoping somebody somewhere might accidentally read them, might notice, might return something of ourselves back to us.

Dopey: Yes. These throwaway lives that we lead. Nothing stays. Nothing matters.

Sneezy: Wash. Dry. Fold. Wear out. The accumulation of always scattering dust, it’s what makes us who we are. Or, well, more like who we are not.

Dopey: But what about fabric softener?

Sneezy: Don’t use it. It’s pointless. My clothes are soft enough as it is. Maybe I need the grit, some sort of an edge to things, a hardness, a little hunger in my gut to remind me that I’m alive.

Dopey: In the striving for high ideals we get permanent-pressed into ordinary constraints instead of insisting on being dry-cleaned to a crisp, tidy finish.

Sneezy: I’m the sudsy water leaking from the machine’s bottom, pooling on the floor’s tile, soaking shoes, making the world happen to whoever happens to be around.

Dopey: Irons steaming out the wrinkles in the way we were.

Sneezy: It’s a copout. Folding techniques tell their owner’s story all too well. I’m brisk. I flourish a wild hand at times. The sky reminds me of the sound of my own name.

Dopey: Bed sheets and comforters. Towels. Low-heat-only linens. Bath mats. Rain-soaked shoes rattling around in a dryer. Liquid or powder detergent. Choices, things to ponder over. Magazines and newspapers and romance novels. Crossword puzzles. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting in plastic low-backed, bucket-seat chairs. Waiting while the world turns.

Sneezy: Scraps of sunlight painting accordion shadows on the opposite wall from where you sit and wield a pen like a dagger.

Dopey: Back and forth we go, laundry in tow, never ourselves to ever know.

Sneezy: Unliked?

Dopey: Perhaps. As if that were a curse and not a blessing.

Sneezy: Perhaps both, if there really is a difference. Existence proceeding essence.

Dopey: Fuck it. I’m getting a cat.

the stilted situations of traveling salesmen

tip me over with

she didn’t say

newspaper clipping of a Picasso

cat eating bird

raggedly triangle-pupiled

messed up over a chase

it wasn’t dig

ripped now flimsy

hip pocketed

it oughta be drugged

out

for the blocks it takes away

dimpled traces of hands

with fingertips sprouting flowers

at very last

goofy

vested with uninteresting earlobes

rattles back to fine

cries don’t suit

up

to gill-breathe forgives

lawn insects their splats

clogging the drains

never make it

to the ocean

your hat

please

jerk

the infinite vs. the unknowable

The rain wasn’t helping things. The dugout steps were slippery enough where you could’ve slid on your spikes and blew out an ankle, or at least turned it some. Maybe your glove gets so it’s a bit waterlogged too, and so that could’ve been what the catcher’s saying out there, you know, when the ball slipped through and skittered away to the backstop. There’s, too, a record that not everybody’s going to know about, being that it don’t happen much, and that’s where the pitcher gets four Ks in one inning. Think old Cannonball Crane was the first, a way back in 1880 or something. It’s a strange rule that allows it. The catcher’s got to actually catch the ball after a strikeout for it to be official. If he drops it or lets the thing squib away behind him, well, then the batter can run on down to first and try to get there before the catcher finds that ball and fires it over to first before the batter gets there. There’s another thing though that makes this a bit less likely. There’s got to be less than two outs and first base can’t be already occupied. This, I guess, is because the catcher could drop the thing on purpose right there in front of him and then fire it to second, and maybe have a double play on his hands. Kind of like the infield fly rule. Catcher’s mostly hate 2-strike splitters for this reason, or any kind of junk pitch that might bounce or rattle around, or if they get crossed up. It might be a shit rule, but it makes for some excitement.

Anyways, the 4-strikeout inning is a record held by all kinds of people, but 5? That hasn’t happened in the Bigs, well, except for knuckling Joe Niekro who did it in Spring Training, so it doesn’t count. So, well, on the rainy days when the ump won’t call the thing off, well, you get to thinking, chewing sunflower seeds and staying dry in the home-half on the bench, maybe, with a strikeout guy on the bump, just maybe today’s the day for a fiver.

On this particular rainy day we were playing the Cubs, who most folks don’t recall were labeled the Chicago Orphans for the 1898 season because Cap Anson left ‘em high and dry after becoming the first in baseball history to amass 3,000 hits. We had a day game there at Wrigley, which, by the way, is all they used to have there, day games that is, up until the mid eighties when they finally went ahead and modernized and installed lights so they could play at night, and it was drizzly that day but not enough to get the game delayed. Guys were wiping their bats off on their unies between pitches. The outfield was a bit mushy, and you’d get some grass and mud caught up in your spikes out there. It wasn’t anything to go bellyaching about. You played through it and didn’t whine because the other guys were playing on the same field, you know? You think it’s maybe the roughest on the two guys in the squat though, because being a catcher’s already doing the grunt work, and you’ve got to slosh around behind the plate and try to catch a wet ball. The conditions were pretty damn okay for dropped third strikes, that’s for sure. You get to thinking though, how about it if the catcher keeps dropping those third strikes? And what if the guy keeps making it to first afterwards? How many strikeouts could a guy get in an inning? There’s really no limit to it, if you think about it. But there is, too, a limit, because the inning’s got to end at some point. It’s just impossible to really know when. It’s not like it could go on forever. The final out would have to be made at some point, even if it’s way on down the line. There must be a third out. Just like the game must end at some point. It can’t go on forever. There’s just no way to know for sure when that point is going to come. You could estimate about it, sure, but there’s really no way to know for certain when it’s going to happen.

So, anyways, I’m spitting out sunflower seeds on the bench, and I’m noodling about such things, you know, how things have to end. Nothing lasts forever. Just simple stuff that everybody knows. But it just occurred to me, well, what if an inning never ended? But isn’t it the nature of an inning to end? It has to. A game’s got nine of them to get through. It can’t just go on an on. So, also, there’s really no limit to the number of k’s a guy could have in an inning. My head didn’t like that though. There’s got to be an end point. Swimming around in eternity can get a bit iffy, you know? So, it’s like the Fresno Raisin Eaters of 1906: it doesn’t last. And then you go on wondering whatever happened to that record you used to own called Double Play! that had the wonderful risqué picture of the quite possibly topless blonde in the Hollywood Stars hat on the cover. My mind’s off wondering, to the races, and I’m likely mumbling to myself too. Dragging the infield of my thoughts, you know, and it’ll take a dinger to knock me out of my gooey trance, I kept stumbling over this apparent antinomy of endless k’s. To my mind it’s that whole if-there’s-a-barber-who-shaves-only-and-all-who-don’t-shave-themselves-then-who-shaves-the-barber thing, and I can’t dance my bean around to the paradox of its music.

Sure enough, though, by the time I’m pondering the bench pressing of these rather heavy things, the ump calls a guy out on a close play at the plate, and we’re headed back out to the rainy field for the bottom of the current inning. I grab my glove and start padding back out into the wet. It’s getting worse, the rain, and some of us are starting to think the game’s going to get called. But it’s only the third, and they like to get the game official most times if they can by giving it the old four-and-a-half, so we’re prepared to slosh through it. I’m out at short. There’s a lot of debris and mud holes out there. The seagulls are swarming a bit, maybe thrown off by the low attendance because of the inclement weather, and the day game’s atmosphere in general that just feels odd, especially when you’re out there on the not-so-well-groomed sienna, chucking away pebbles and fielding bad-hop grounders and basically just feeling lazy and worn and cold. The wind was doing little tornadoes here and there, picking up trash and dust in foul territory and in the outfield too, and it was fun to watch between batters or during huddles on the mound or when guy’s’d take their time between pitches.

My head goes from overflowing to empty pretty damn quick, and it was like that out there on the field, and I’d stopped thinking about the Eternal Inning for the time I was out there scratching doodles into the dirt with my cleats. Anyway, the Friendly Confines, in all of its brick and ivy glory, is getting soppy, and a lot of people have cleared out already, leaving a good amount of empty seats, as both teams we’re already mathematically eliminated, as they say, from post season at this point. The hush and steady murmur of the crowd’s a strange thing when the stadium’s kind of emptied out like that. It’s like you can hear individual shouts and distinct noises coming from the stands better. Sometimes I swear I catch little snatches of conversation going on out there. It’s strange. I don’t really know how to explain it right. It’s like the less people who are out there, well, sometimes it just seems louder for some reason. Like this one time at Fenway a few years back, when it was in the 14^th inning and almost 2 in the morning, and cold and windy and awful out, and there were only a handful of diehard Sox fans left in the stands, I swear I could hear every word of a group of guys in the upper deck singing Neil Diamond’s Cherry Cherry. It’s those types of things that make me scratch my bean and yawn because there’s no good that’s going to come from noodling all the whys of it. Life’s just a messy blur of crazed stitches sewn haphazardly into Time’s jersey. It’s better just to yawn about it all sometimes.

Anyways, I’m out at short, getting kind of drenched out there too by this point, and it’s starting to get swampy around the bag at second, so I’m playing pretty far back, almost to the grass, to the third-base side of things in general. Sure, I was giving away a lot up the middle, but the guy on the hill for us was a real Jim Kaat, and so I wasn’t too worried, and besides, I’ve always moved well to my left and was never afraid to get some dirt on my uni. Our guy toeing the slab had pretty good stuff that day. He was pounding the zone pretty good and was working quick, so there really wasn’t a whole lot of downtime to contemplate the mysteries of the universe, at least not too profoundly. He had a good sinker, and it was really on that day, so you had to be on your toes for grounders, which I was, and couldn’t let myself get too distracted by hypothetical conundrums or a group of fans shouting all in unison: “What’s the matter with Keller? He’s a bum!” Carney Keller was on the hot corner and was getting quite an earful from some rowdy fans in the seats above our dugout. It made me laugh, hearing stuff like this, but I didn’t want to laugh about it and have Keller see me so I hid my face in my glove, pretending like I was coughing into it. It’s not that Keller would’ve cared, but still, you’ve got to show team unity and all that, and it wouldn’t’ve looked so swell if the fans were riding the third baseman and the shortstop’s laughing at it. The skip would’ve had me carrying luggage for that one for sure, and hell, I’d probably ended up in Kangaroo Court over it too.

So, I was keeping my game face on, you know, because I know how fragile people are when it comes down to it, even big-shot Major Leaguers like Carney Keller, and even if they don’t wear their frowns on the outside, well, I don’t like hurting people’s feelings, even if it’s just in fun. So, I was kind of keeping my full attention plate-wards, trying to keep my cleats from the muddier spots, and brushing my wet glove off on my pants so I wouldn’t have a gloveful of wet when I went to scoop up a grounder, or at least not as soaked of a glove. I’m a stickler for keeping to old habits, of which I’ve got a plenty, as most of us old ballplayers do, being such creatures of routine, always finding things that’ll keep us going through those consistent motions that make us successful over the course of a hundred and sixty two. It’s just a matter of finding a way to be good at something and then perfecting the art of doing that thing over and over until it’s really hard to do that thing any other way. This is especially true of ballplayers, you know us athletic sorts who’ve got to “go with the bones” without thinking at all about what we’re doing. It all has to be instinctual, something you learn to do from doing it so much that it becomes natural, like you’re teaching yourself new instincts, which I know sound like a bunch of hooey, you know, because instincts are supposed to be things you’re born with so how can you learn them, right? But it’s the way it is. At least I think so. Besides, the world we live in, you know, is changing so speedy, well, maybe our instincts for it have to be learned. Maybe after thousands of years we’ll be born with a whole new set of instincts that react to computers the same ways our ancestors reacted to, I don’t know, being attacked by saber-tooths. I don’t know. Anyway, all of this stuff makes us ballplayers a bit more susceptible to magical thinking and superstition. We had a leftfielder once who wouldn’t change his socks during a hitting streak. Luckily for us it only lasted 15 games, but let’s just say that during those weeks there weren’t many guys who wanted to get too close to his locker. We were all a bit thankful when he finally tossed those stinkers out, though we did appreciate the effort. Get good results. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat until the results are always the same. A mantra, or at least the hope, for a ballplayer. This is probably why a lot of guys chew tobacco. Something about the constant rhythm of it, a steadying kind of thing, a constant motion. Me? Well, I’m partial to gum myself. But that day at Wrigley, you know, well, that’s a kind of gum I don’t really much care for, if truth be known, Wrigley’s that is. Just something thin and weak about it. Doesn’t go for long before you’ve got to shove another stick in there for flavor. I’m more of a Trident man myself. A stick of that stuff, peppermint’s tops to me, will get me through more innings than most middle relievers before it’s time for a change. But the stadium was named after the man, not the gum, so.

Any old way, I’m out there at short just biding time until what I think’s looking to be more and more like a rain-delay situation on the horizon. So, well, a lot of buzzing’s going on up in my dome, and I keep getting sidetracked by this question of the never-ending inning. But then a slow roller’s heading my way, and so I go a charging after it, as it just skips past the pitcher and is a bit easier for me to nab than Keller coming in from third. I get to it quick enough. The throw though is going to be a tough one, as I’m in an odd position there, and with the field being in anything but prime condition and the ball being at least somewhat slippery, well, there’s a lot there that can go wrong. I had sure hands and was good about getting in front of the ball. A real slick fielder for the most part, and I trusted my glove. I opt to not go with the barehand just for this reason, and I actually get a decent toss off to first, maybe not as much on it as I would’ve liked, but considering the circumstances, well, it should’ve been enough to get the guy, who wasn’t the fleetest of foot, as I remember it. That is if the throw had been on line. But it wasn’t. I pulled our first baseman Harlan off the bag. Give him credit though. He just about did the splits trying to get the out. I was pissed. I knew I should’ve had the guy. There’s just that part of you that’ll be critical over every little thing, and that was the part that was pissed. I had a bit more time than I’d figured. Should’ve got a more accurate throw off. But oh well, you know? What can you do. Just hobble back to your position and get ‘em next time. But then I start thinking, ‘How many more next times could there be? Could this keep happening over and over.’ I mean, well, because really in baseball there’s really no time limit to the game. Guys could keep getting on base. We could never get another out. This game could go on and on. But also, well, the game had to end. It had to. It boggled my head up pretty good. The uncertainty of it. Nothing was going to happen for sure. We’d all just have to wait and see, even though we knew it had to end, well, there was no way to know absolutely for sure. That didn’t sit well with me. I shook my head and doodled in the dirt with my cleats. All I wanted right then was a weak little popup, a can of corn to sit under, waiting for it to come down and plop into my glove with that reassuring sound, making me feel like everything was okay, that all of this would end, at some point, and we’d all move on, grow older, and get on with our lives. I don’t know why this made me feel good. It gave me hope. Maybe things are all pointless without an end to them? And maybe a person’s life is like that. Sort of like, what’s the meaning of all this if it just goes on and on? It’s got to stop. And with that thought in mind, well, that’s what makes it all worth it. The fact that there is an end out there, a finale, a time when all of this who that we’ve always known and always been will simply cease to be, and somehow that makes life seem more significant, like what we do matters more because one day we won’t ever be able to do it again.

Well, anyway, it made me feel pretty damn wonderful, and I stopped worrying about one long continuous inning that would just keep lasting and lasting eternally, and we got a guy looking, called out on strikes for the third out. Our catcher didn’t drop it, and the ump wound up and made a big theatrical deal about it, and we bounced from our positions and almost skipped back into the dugout where it was dry and warm, and where we knew we couldn’t stay for long, but for the while that we were there, well, we sat around and spit seeds and chewed gum and heckled the ump, shouting out things like, “You’re missing a great game, Blue!” And, well, in the short while that we were there we enjoyed it all as much as we could.

charlamagnetalksagoodgame

This girl had powerful legs, man. It was like she was a shot put champion or something. But I liked the shade that the tree was making over there, where she was, and so I walked myself on over there. I was tired of being maybe’ed, singing I Am The Walrus striped in neon, sweating it out, and, of course, back in too. Won’t leave that out. Bad for the complexion. A claim at whatever cook’s-hat shit is being labeled all-joked-out when you’re really just kicking over bowling pins without a lane. She was hamming it up, literally, with those thunder thighs pumping in place, with the kind of energy that could blast a locomotive through a mountain of thick basalt. I’m sobering up by this point. It was what they call a sobering sight, I guess. I got all awful and pathetic, and nearly left my place-in-time noticing habits in the gutter there, but I swooped them up and didn’t lose them. Careered towards nothing-better-to-do, particularly there and then, I had a new-carpet stink to me, a pristine smell in my stride, and it was keeping my focus estranged, at least a little, from whatever it was that was really meow-lingering, for a spell, in motivating my motor over that-a-way where she was doing those air step-aerobics. I was punchy with something, that’s for sure. Fast enough, eventually, for grip or gripe, I was able to entertain almost all my thoughts at once, and this had never happened in quite this way before, at least that I could remember. It was easy. It’s like a she-was-just-seventeen sort of thing. The way she looked? Well, I guess I could’ve went ahead and compared it with something, but it was a no-can-do issue with my head all strung, bright and bulby, with ideas like stars, thousands there that I could gaze at and see all of, and all at the same time. Terpsichore moved through me as the gush of thoughts sang, “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely you can always go…” We all want to be rock stars, sing and live and die, all together now. Held in check, though, there I was being ambushed by my lunge towards this lower-body heifer in the style of Carnegie-Hall wannabes. Wonderbreading, as I was, there wasn’t a loaf left in me to pony up anything other than my whole cat-litter soul for all takers to take apart and never put back together ever again, at least not the way it was. It’s all unfair competition at a certain point. I broke for it. I booked past the shade trees and made my living up from pills and this guy keeps saying, “Potions. Potions for sale,” over and over. But he wasn’t just saying it to me. Mother Superior’d gone and jumped the gun. His frown was gone. I got over it. The deep-knee bending chick with shot-putting legs was glorious. She was like a god, or would that be goddess? Hey, Bungalow Bill, you know? Artemis of the concrete. There’s no name for things like that. More to the point would be to say that it’s neither the method of Spencerian or Palmer that matters, but more that there is a method there, and that method is, well, unquantifiable, and, of course, well, ineffable. That’s more to it. Not it. More to it, though. An enfilade of the senses, if you will. Or, hell, even if you won’t. A phalanx of scruffy types were perpetrating crimes against man-made devices, and there I go and get somehow suckered into mumbo-jumboing with the worst of them, ones let’s say who were clothed in the rattier and more flea-infested sort of rags that often times smell of cheesy rot and sun-baked wine. There’s this other guy who’s ranting, “Don’t gotta be so damn cute all the time. Take me back to the wild, to the wild-wild west, why do not cha?” I’m popping in here and there, but not scoping too much. Just Rita-Hayworthing in the mortar of the lord, daubing my jokes on serious walls, jiving around with a Ballet Mecanique clenched in my fist. The squatting-and-rising Lady of The Thick Legs had her eyes closed. I noticed this after sweeping some lint from my eyebrows. I could only get in a peripheral glance, but it was enough. A freshly cool ingot of surprise tumbled and then somehow rolled away from me, and I slid across the heated surface of oh-hell-here-goes-nothing and tried to make it all of heaven’s something. The sky wasn’t at all deeper than I could be, and the equations of star-hopping were not as far out-of-reach and unsolvable as they should’ve been. A pother of distraction emerged from a pendent tailpipe that was almost scraping the street as a pea-green Plymouth clanked and clattered by, and I rushed through fluttering intimacies that were almost the whipping crackle of flags in a great wind. It was too hot and too cold. This deep-knee-bending girl wasn’t giving her attention away for a thing. A surgeon’s concentration. A point she could just stare and stare at like an ice skater spinning. Attached a trifle to everything except herself. God was snoozing through this one. I heard things commuting from lips to ear: “The infinite consists of vowels alone.” Things were getting too easy for the likes of, well, a person like the one I was passing for being then. Badly, sacked when I could’ve been doing so much more, revolving around other lives, but instead just grouchy in the shade. The trapeze of my head was swinging, but back and forth wasn’t ringing the bell backwards like it should’ve been. I wasn’t in the mood to be embarrassed. Then the wind said, “White curtains hang like ghosts in the windows of that building asking if it’s tuesday yet when it won’t be any day now any time soon if weeks stack up and blow by it gets serious if the sun changes expressions over old victorian stick that’s almost worried to rhubarb and mussed cloudy if it sinks to lift if whatever gold doesn’t stay and the longest day of the year is on the wane please be my baby tonight.”

(insert your own punctuation)

money we all need to be alive

well

that and phones

what little remains

and

oh the tv too

we’ve had strokes over less

that’s lost

on everyone

food is consumed over and

over

headsmelt and there are wars to not

lose or win

but have

like a heart or a

wait a sec

what’s a bluff

right

whose now is this

to have

over

for brunches

of bottomless mournings

laugh

that too

til old grows young

and

murder is born

back to the fanciest

ordered to give

altering matters

of the earth’s surface

work

ousted or

piped down if they were killing

themselves

it’d not be trenches

but beaches with only sand

and no

water in any or

every

waste of

where

ever

de novo

Man, that guy was just giving a Dirty Sanchez to the Mona Lisa. That’s fronting on a level that’s like way too specious to even begin to like go barking about, at least with the cred and essentials I’m given here, like this, well, you know. God’s playing hooky. Here’s a lopsided set of surroundings that replaces the usual. It’s like equating killing household bugs with homicide, or mass murder for that matter, and it’s things we don’t like thinking about, you know, tiny lives like that. They don’t mean anything to us. Just another squash mark on the wall, a spot of blood on the palm. Holy lord, fixtures in the environment look better, stiller I mean, when fanned with the so-called Winds Of Same. This guy, well he gets nervous, you see? Like without-an-appetite nervous, and this hankering comes along to do good; so this guy makes it his like whole bounty, at the current time, to, at least to all appearances, give something good back to the world he’d swiped so much from. Taking was getting to him. It cramped him, made him feel cornered and unsafe, and he’d get to guitaring with his mouth, almost motorboat-like, and, well, you just had to will it all away, really. It was like ecdysis or something-- only a shedding of layers of personality. And he’s the one carving bad words into glass panels with diamonds? Shit. Sure, something stinks, but it ain’t ruled straight. Even dance halls hold more secrets than....but that only fathers Not Much and Just Barely. Man, that guy? You hear me talking? Well, that guy, he does his best to do good unto others and all that smegma, but it doesn’t get him far enough. He can’t hold his cards so they face just him, you know? It’s holding out and it’s not. Badly aligned or mismanaged constellations of ideas. There’s no telling where he slept at night, or if he even did. Nobody was going to go decapitating him over it or anything, but it still kept this here hunk of crud up at night. Valium doesn’t always cut it. Sometimes you go around just dowsing your sorrows a bit instead of drowning them, spend too much time inside, waiting, trying to get good at doing nothing. Hell, there’ll always be more laundry to do and dishes to wash. We spend too much time between things. But, man, that guy was going at it all wrong, and I won’t be one to shut up about it. Get me stumping and, well, it’ll just never do. That’s all. I’ll barnstorm until the cows come home. It’s a no-win cause. Shit. Some people get pissed off at some small thing that gets done to them, and they stay that way their whole lives, and it’s really miserable, if you ask this chunk of change about it. All this do-gooder foppery is just causing a cathexis, and things build, all that holding inside or whatever you want to call it, well, it balloons, it fills the volcano of you until the top smokes, you know, steam headed, blowing your top, that sort of thing, and then it’s double-bogeying until the cows of your past line up of their own that-there volition to be slaughtered. That’s rough stuff. Don’t I know it. Bust me out of this here cage and I’ll just find another one to trap myself inside of. The real hurt of it, all this guy’s do-gooding that is, was that he was doing it all for his own satisfaction. And, well, go shit in a paint can and call it a fresh coat, that’s not really giving in a way that’s more self-less than selfish, is it? He’s really just looking out for bad old numero uno. That’s what his concern is, there, in that ordered scheme of events. In the end though, is doing good always better than doing, well, bad? I mean, you take a little something, you give something else, and maybe you end up richer for it…or, well, then maybe poorer too, in the end. That’s what gets pinned to your tail after so much “trying” and such. It’s like chopping an onion to get the waterworks going. I’m more likely to shoot myself in the toe if I’m aiming away from others, you know? Maybe that’s a mincing touch on a result-ended gather, but we’re cheap in our expenditures of timely frustration, more than sometimes. Very compact, this guy, in his themes. I could throw a dart with my eyes closed and snag at least a folded corner of the notepaper of his results, well, if he’d kept notes on things as such. Monumental? It’s pawnshopping. That’s the news from the front. He’s got pull though, and when there’s a strength, not that I’m that forgiving or anything, there seems to be more than an uplifting of personal gain at stake. Why can’t I get back to the ocean? Why can’t I get pulled away with the tide? It all stems from some boring self-defeating streak that wins over the humbler and more realistic aspects of your appearance. Doing this or that for appearances only. That’s a loser’s claim at pyrite. Well, well. There’s a little more than sidewalk etiquette involved here, and once in a paper moon you see some guy putting a cigarette out on the armrest of his wheelchair, and then maybe you think to yourself, ‘That couldn’t be me, could it?’ Willing it so, with a headful of cork, you get to paddling in the rapids of the life you’ve suddenly been dumped into living. This guy was never one to go in for something as treacherous as all that though. He could’ve knocked off early after littering the neighborhood with save-the-earth type fliers all afternoon, but this guy didn’t think “quit” should apply to him, or, more importantly, didn’t want it to seem as if he did. It was all about how he was perceived. That which should’ve mattered least in this particular instance came to be what mattered most. But I’m just a hack looking for attention. Who isn’t sometimes? So now, well, everywhere I go the dogs bark at me, and I can’t seem to get a good shave. My will’s shot full of holes. Nobody’ll ever go around making these days up to me. That guy wasn’t up to nothing but no good. And that’s all you need to know about that. The only reason that we’re alive, besides to breed and carry on our species, is to get along in a society, to be social, to be a part of others’ lives and have them be a part of ours. That’s the creek’s-dry meaning of life. If we were seagulls it’d be different, or ants. But we’re not. Like it or piss all over it, we’re humans. And being human we’ve got to find a way to exist with other humans as best we can. There’s really no other reason for us being alive. Those who tend to dwell in solitude are really just living for themselves, performing a sort of escape act from life, from what they should be doing as a social animal: existing and, in some way, communicating with, or to, others. Shit nuggets. What else is there? Well, well. And the world keeps turning. Days blacken to nights and light back to days again, over and over and then some, while we hobble around and mope in the junkyards of our past. It’s nothing. Forget it. Go out into the world and live.

leftovers

we’ve got blue suede and high tides

and whisky to keep us warm

we’ve got hospital stays

and worries at bay

and hearts shaped like mules

the ocean’s a drop in the pail

of trashy good looks

and runaway heads or hearts on the lam

who could stand

just ground worm meat

and a fan-less tail

not sleepers like us

not for banana peels

not for cigarettes

we’ve got splashed eyes

and soda water

we’ve got harm to hot-wire

we’ve got shady sides of the street

a pigeon named dove

a smoker you love

and a bad time

that’s all good all around

when it’s getting later than it should

when crying laughs like it could

then we’ll paint trash cans

moon colors à la mode

while waiting

for mailboxes like also-rans

to give up

and just explode