opulent taxidermy made by idiots

            We have received permission for liftoff. Common standards bear the weight of readmission into the coyly kneaded dough of habitual entries. There will not be a lark on standby. A herd of nyalas stump for the undecided. A dissected papier-mâché fish lies on a blue ruby-topped table. Sand is being churned into paper at all the mills. Nothing is overhead forever.   

            -- (1) Try to be craved for in the substitute wishes of what’re not ever coming around. (2) Again? No once? (3) Tagged with mystery and moreover inept in cravings, as it were, as see-above types would mention, again. (4-7) Dropped pennies never picked up (8) Stacks untouched by smoke. (9) Sort of playful beyond a stir of a doubt.

            What’s been known to have been said without ever having been heard: “I love wasting time too much to stop and think about it.”

            Lesson #43: Ignoring the sterile confines of antiseptic spaces, and instead opting to set off metal detectors, one must once in a while survive solely on penguin steaks.

            Peachy but not so keen begat a line of order that split chaos into pulverized tomatoes. The Alsatians were amassing. Sayings were botched. The word “rad” was used to describe chemical weapons. Drug takers were left to the devices of automatic computing systems and unplugged extension cords. Nobody who was anybody was ratted out by somebody.

            (all championship knife fights have been put on hold for the duration of irregularities of promotional material in the regularly scheduled program)

            Needy, greedy and incessantly cruel, I stalked off in the meadow grass in an attempt to lure incarcerated lovers out of birdhouse cells, and then screamed, “Who can I fall in love with forever in this world?” And then I put another dime in the jukebox. Nothing happened.

            I am not a shadow to haul around. Leave the muck of rain scarred in tackling far-from-home-on-the-range-or-roaming-buffalo matters. Averse to calm’s headless heart, I will sing something like, “The worst picture of me taken ever lies in a drawer in the bedside table where it most likely stays the same while the rest of me rots.” Shuttling forthwith and back to complications, I should know what everybody else does about me, but I do not. 

            To opt for better conditions in which to shout safe epithets from, or (unnumbered) get rate quotes on lumber. A guy named Frank Muggs is steaming my mail open. Let the semi-operational counters of domestic foreign-sponsored catering forfeit proper dietary restrictions, at least. And then some dance numbers with lawnmowers on display, or taxis with diamond-studded steering wheels. The telephone has decomposed. We are alert and just move on, dangerous and potato-sacked. Using Hutier tactics to get back behind it all.

            An old timer was stooped at the piano, getting hammered on Jewish coffee, making what’d been stolen from him long ago his again:

            “Back when Shoeless Joe was just a Pelican in New Orleans. We were all balancing (or at least acting as if we were) back then. Nineteen and ten. That right? The lights were graying. The best team ever to play on the bayou. Most folks knew it even then that Shoeless Joe was destined for brighter lights than the ones at Pelican Park. They tried to sway him to stay, knowing he was a tad on the superstitious side, and a loner who distrusted most of the confines of society. Something about him was always unhooked, at odds with the world around him. Some of us were real adept at abating his fears, abetting him to keep his wares just right where they were, so as to keep that big old dangerous corrupt world out there from harming him, as it should’ve been easy to convince him it would. Though, somehow, in that Triassic era of discontentment and tomorrow’s bounding promise, well, it just didn’t work. We lost Shoeless Joe to the world, and soon, well, the world would go ahead and take him in and spit him right back out with the Black Sox just nine long years later. Those years saw a lot for all of us. And in seventeen, you know, God hurt us, we ran headlong and righteously into The Great War. Bad bones and all, you see, this barroom sucker went toad over stool to get as far as hell from the whole shebang. But Shoeless Joe. Where’d he go? Don’t rightly know.

            “There’d be a few more myths around it then. Things some plucky shyster dreamt up over burnt toast one late morning. You know, like that he was working in a liquor store or something. He was, though. But it was his store, you see. He owned it. And, hell, it was more of a General Store type place anyways. Oh, well, he went off and barnstormed around for a bit after that damn finicky Kenesaw banned all them eight guys from his league. Played on a bunch of bush league teams, taking the bus from small town to small town, impressing everybody with his glove and batting average for a year or so and then moving on. America’s a big place. You can get lost in it if you’re not careful. Find your heart on your wrist one night in a coldwater flat. Rust ringed around the tub, where you’re lying half submerged in brown-tinged water, the other half gone already to a bottle of bootleg hooch, the tap’s drip the only thing keeping you from dunking that head under for good. It gets hard. Yep. I know it too. But, well, somehow the light from a taxi beaming in the window saves you, and then maybe a cat crawls in and whines at you for no reason. Also, maybe you feel ashamed of hard water, the music it doesn’t make. No. No. That’s not it at all. It’s…well, I don’t know. It’s something though.

            “I am not a user of good silverware. I wait until garbage day to do my bidding. I do not trust violins at all.

            “Everybody here trusts rats and canaries. I think it’s the colors that do it.

            “There! I spotted an owl. Finally I can go home.

            “Nobody hates you when you’re up and in. But I’m just a boring old man, and nobody’s listening.”                 

            An insurance adjuster, conspicuous, and harder to spell too, bossing around the mill runners who come crumbling down from pricey cars to sell used office fish tanks and leashes for squirrels. Leaner chunks, a court order to call back the nicest ways to name kids, second-of-alls chambered for a dog race or two while the exhausted bait-and-switch burglars lock the suicide doors to their hearts. It was time to have the worst and best of lobster broth while bibbed with quiet furor. A scoffing went along without saying much except, “She wasn’t as small-town as a girl from a Journey song, but she’d do. But I do not, ever, digress.”

            A Franz Liszt impersonator was robbing the bows from union boys. There were conflagrations and upstart allies who pretended that swiped cards did the trick, when placed properly and in the correct fashion in the swiper. Everyone at some point began to swoon with Hungarian rhapsody. It was mentionable in the papers, but that’s about all. No pianos remained after the fire.           

            Villains slept it off, measly, under the shrouded hangdog shapes of away. Torn-mattress laziness swamped through, and a few miners flew above the freeways on an Afghan rug. A stoker spoke through cupped hand to his mistress’s brother: “I had a dream I was lying in a sanatorium built into the slope of a giant beach. It wasn’t terrible at all.”   

            We are seen oft in aptly wry episodes, darker near temps of hidden cool, so cropped and picked under, well for the ways to see other people, and it is a you that is everywhere. A marvelous, violent paradise. Paradoxical, a man of all symbols, confusion’s clowning. Forced control, away from freedom, technology’s flux easy to access, utilitarian, rigidly antiseptic, void of all abstract imagination. Enamored at the till of directing a wild, lunatic fringe of letter writers to understand intrusions of judgment. Products place themselves, harrumphing, “Big deal,” while smoking meek conformist cigarettes, while controversy sings The Ballets Russes in the gutter. We clip curt corners, raunchy and acceptable, and younger age cashes out, lukewarm cool, a composite of phony just stakes forever ringing without phones.         

              (This is not a test) 1. Life’s prayed away from stamens for petals, in a flush and bloom of moonlight? 2. Answered already. 3. Given the place that blames nobody, if shying away from scrap-iron fumes, detailed receipts for insurance purposes only, or subspecies of rodents, there will be another fill-in-the-blank to be true or false about in essay form. 4. Pass. 5. Erasable ink and permanent pencil acceptable, to what certain point?

            Those who only use products not tested on humans gathered in the gyroscope’s pitch, roll, and yaw attitude to discuss the whereabouts of new frontiers: places where Clark Gable is not. Thinner mustaches; thicker eyebrows. An impresario of self-impressions, a régisseur of a faulty reality. The king of peasant town, down on Rainy Avenue, feeding salt and vinegar chips to the pigeons, he told them all what wasn’t what:     

            “Rain in headlights glinting opalescent, the gears of night caught red handed. Man, getting all tangled up with this girl I used to know sort of real well. Touring bouts of insomnia placing blame on a supposedly sure thing that just never gets around to happening. Right of ways gone wrong, you know. Love me, love me not, love me a little, and then it’s well you see I’ve just gone off to love somebody else. Right about not time to please the court, wearing Methodist bells to a choir practice, all set on being around for a bit, or not at all, maybe. Like this girl I used to see a fiscal year or so ago. She was a real cold fish, you know. Had to put her in the oven to get her hot. Well, you know, things get bad and then they get worse. But then there’s that 14-1 horse picking up the pace around the bend, and you’ve got Girly Dan circled on your racing form and the moon in your back pocket. It’s a paycheck waiting to happen. Oh, but then, you know, it peters out just before the finish line. Girly Dan’s got a gimp leg and he’s bucking, and then he gets tripped up by some upstart gelding 3-year-old never-been-to-the-derby who goes by Pancho’s Lament. Man. And you’re left wiping with some pages you tore out of a Sears Roebuck catalogue. You see, there’s nothing in my stocking this year except a cold, and the tree’s hung with barbwire and bologna. I’m more inclined to believe in less-than-better things to come, and there ain’t a smile left in these shoes. So, go on and run off with that insurance adjuster, baby. There’s less to me than you could ever imagine. Stay up all night listening to Le Sacre Du Printemps and The Cannonball Addereley Sextet, waiting for the rain to letup, planning a coup of the bus lines. This weather brings out the boots in us. Ah, man, well, I’m always just one bad joke away from being alone. There are hot-air balloons in The Guggenheim. Nobody’s getting out of class early. And the nights are all crumbled crackers, and the movie shows have all gone dark. And, well, you know, being in public gets to be a drag, so you knuckle down and steel yourself for happier days up ahead. Guess I should’ve shooed that fly away from me, you know, but, hell, I guess it’s here to stay. It snores the rain to sleep. It pummels the newspaper sleeping-bagged lying fitful on park benches. It crushes bones and breaks aluminum cans. A hobo tie, a veer towards uptown, a range and a pull that’ll do for a subway ride. Ah, man, a delicate and angular way to go insane. Well, times were when I had me a girl too. And I’d take my girl out to all the top-of the-line dining establishments, you know: El Farolito, Taqueria Cancun, Little Henry’s. Man, I’d get her chips and extra salsa and everything, you know. I wasn’t cheap about it. Then I’d buy her a transfer and take her out for a little sightseeing on the 14-Mission, show her where all the pigeons sleep on the eaves of the Old Mint. We’d catch a drink at a high-class joint, you know. Somewhere like Jonell’s or Sutter Station or Jack’s on 7^th Street. Nothing but the classiest cocktails and company. Sometimes we’d get to strolling out down Market, taking in the sights. You know, we’d dance around the fine upstanding individuals lying on the sidewalk and huddling in the doorways. ‘Hey, buddy. Got a smoke?’ You know the type. And we were generous about it, you know. I’d hand out Lucky Strikes and American Spirits, for Christ’s sake. The good stuff. And, you know, it’d start getting later, and we’d somehow find ourselves back at my place. Hell, I don’t know how these things happen, you know. Um, so, well, soon it’s well-you-know-it’s-getting-rather-late time, and well-I’ve-got-to-get-up-in-the-morning, and pretty soon it’s the-hell-with-you-I-want-to-see-other-people. Yep. Well, you know what, baby? Why don’t you just open up your eyes then. Other people? They’re everywhere. You know how it goes after that. Yeah. All the cussing and rending of garments-- mine. And then the lamp goes crashing into the wall, and the TV’s decapitated, and the walls get a mural of spaghetti sauce splashed on ‘em like a Jackson Pollock. Yep. The door slams. She’s gone off. You know, off to marry that insurance adjuster at last. Taking the long ride to Reno in a piece-of-shit Cadillac with a headlight out and a terrible gasket and a leak in the gas tank. Keeping up appearances for imperfect strangers. Well, you know what? Let her. Who needs her, right? Shit. Throw a rock and hit another one just like her. A dime-a-hundred, dames like that. They’ve all got chrome-tinted umbrellas and dreams made out of smashed rhubarb pies, if you ask me about it. But who’s asking?”

             Those who weren’t listening asked all the wrong questions. A stable gut-punched sensibility overcame the scarier of them. People pounded on the wood planks beneath the gallows and got wasted on helium punch. Bugs were reported in the swaying of trees. And, in the dark, somebody was dancing slow.       

            Comments, criticisms, compliments, or complaints: a difference of a hug’s silence, a kiss’s drop of poison, a mistake in the recommendations of affable court reporters, where the sidewalk starts, a smear of ashes on the windshield, clouds gone purple and gray, a million to a million, the bulldozers crush whatever chance is left after that, and the banana trees only go where coffee grows, and there’s cold in those hills, and the longest light in town changes its colors for the night, and my sentiments have been air-balled into the seats for the remainder of the evening.   

all self-evidence aside

-- Excuse me, would you like to talk to me?

-- Depends. What’re we talking about?

-- Nothing. Life in general. Death in the abstract.

-- Okay. Like using a Synclavier to capture our chatter, the differences it’d make, okay. Okay?

-- That’s proper and at the disposal of the awns of grains and grasses.

-- Wait a sec while I yawn and check my wrist for the time. Hold on. Just a moment here. There. Now, where were we?

-- Hurtling through space on the densest planet in the solar system, tilted at a 23.4-degree angle from the perpendicular of its orbital plane, sucking up sunlight and water and air as we go. Terra, Gaia…home.

-- As the parking police dawdle, as the soda-pressed depress the rest of the wine back into grapes. We are the hobblers of justice, right?

-- Listen up. Hear, hear. Do not ask inappropriate questions. Do not remain calm. There are pine-tree needles in the coffee grounds.

-- Something to admit to over breakfast. I am sure of it. Certain. Just as Pepsi-Cola and Episcopal spell each other out. Don’t you go giving me that toothy smile. I’m overly cerebrated enough as it is.

-- Do I know you?

-- Yes and maybe, but almost not at all. Wait. I stopped to think, and then forgot to start again. We must be kin, or akin to it.

-- Rain-glazed wheelbarrows overflowing with worthless coins.  

  

-- Sure. Yep. Right on. If we stand upright, sit well with others, play moronic games of jawing with those we claim to love. There is a deepness in the slouch we stagger along with towards some boring recitation of Death Of A Salesman by a potpie vender in a small, crowded room. Let’s see. Something like…just the willingness to love and the ability to be loved; and then there’s the scrumbled scuff of sun gold-flaking bricks; the massive abrupt, lunged sway of tall buildings that dizzies sidewalk-bound starers; a clutch of shadows speckling a whitewashed wall like polka-dot wishes gone to underwater graves; the shrugs of grid wandering monks and the glint of gold off a motorbike cop’s sunglasses; care that wimps out as the streetlights wake up with a notched click and a lonely hum. There, of course, is much and a little too.

-- Talking to or at?

-- We’ve done more in discomfort than in the euphony of cellar doors. Order the marchers to save face and rid themselves of smiles.

-- Okay. At.

-- Who were we in the first? When one of us was invited to chat, was it not I? The track’s been skewed and, well, the world…it keeps turning.

-- As the world turns, as the commercial break begins, as the delighted take apart the motorcycles of their most desperate whims. And you find yourself just sitting there, singing along perhaps, immobile and in the trenches of an indefinite, indefatigable rut. Who are you to stray and fold photographs into the hat of a scarecrow in a windstorm?

-- I absolutely and pervasively have no goshing idea. Certain questions just stop getting asked.

-- Ever since I dwelt such a scream to happen ever such a tarpapered thing to happen ever and some more so intentionally so…

-- Gray honeybirds and hairstyle mistakes dream the shame from box office duds, just as I used to deal in apposite forms of retribution for crank 911 callers.

-- Well, milli my vanilli. It’s get-going time for the tracheophyte loving, for the darned minglers and space cadets of the unshakeable juries in our conscience. And now, a little cruciverbalist rapture: “Crosswords aren’t so different from life. You start out floundering in a void, plagued by questions. And then, little by little, you begin to find answers. You build gradually on your knowledge, or make mistakes and double back, and pretty soon you find that everything is connected to everything else.” 

-- Quote the glossy magazines. Go ahead, quote ‘em like you read ‘em. I don’t give a damn. I just don’t.

-- How are we speaking? And to whom?

-- The off is ripped from the whole ordeal of our tiny roofless lives. When in agreement with the masses I always feel I must be mistaken. Something like, “Me too! Me too!”

-- I can hear your voice in my head even when you’re not around. Declaring genius at customs. It’s a prize to be alone, the cost of which is a Lamourette’s Kiss of so-so detachment with just some strained baggy overhead to scrap with on sedentary Thursday evenings.

-- When it rains it rains.

-- Talk to me.

-- Love is bound and cagey. Not so tough. Lean and found out. Elvis in his favorite red shirt. A necktie on a bowling lane. Hamburgers set free of buns. A brainy way to not behave. Beer foam on the horizon. A lesson never taught. Bowties and uppercuts. A rangy horticulturist out for blood. Diving that does its own deeper damage in the shallow end. A seagull asleep on a rail. A century of stop and go. Not enough and too much. Sipping when you should gulp until you drown. A rap song about rocks. A never-heard-of-you cut with a touch of could-care-more. The work of bees spliced with the barking of dogs. A last cigarette crumpled to the floor. Ampersands eloping with commas. There, there we do, or don’t, go.

-- Sure, like when somebody hangs up on me I always catch myself looking at the phone before I hang it up. There are more whys in me than will ever come close to knowing a because. We’re just hangdog cheats looking for a difficult in. It gets colder all the time.

-- But we have conversations. We set our sights in concrete. Most of what’s going on, every moment all over this big blue world, well, it’s just unimaginable to us here trapped in the little cubicle of our lives. What’s some guy’s bad luck with wild apple trees in Kazakhstan got to do with me? The connections we make are feeble and sorely lacking in scope. Every second a hundred people die, and more than that are born. There’s nothing beyond this eternity we fashion out of our being alive. Death is not the end. Nothing starts or ends. This is it. Our lives. We can never know anything beyond this.

-- Bizarre. Just this space to exist in. It is all there ever is for us, right? Without space there isn’t even nothing. It is beyond nothing. Nothing? That we can comprehend. It is definable. But from birth to death, well, there is just this.

-- We know too much and never enough. And between you and me…

-- Yes.

-- There’s more commotion and pith in the boredom of number-crunching CPAs than in all of your philosophies.

-- We all save our good underwear for special occasions.

-- Okay. You’ve got me there. Some ethereal scammony as a purge for my weary aching head, perhaps?

-- If you could bet on such a thing, well, I’d hold onto that bottom dollar for a bit. 

-- So you act out by a window filled with rain. All those plops out there plunking away. The sensual drip and smack of it all. The sides are chosen and we pick the losers, right? The rain’s always out there, soaking somebody else. Then it’s a barrage more than a patter, then a deluge, a mad drumming symphony that’s bubbling up like boiling water on the streets, the slap and thwack of it flooding up to the curb tops. In the meantime, well, it’s turn up the heater and play the records a bit louder. I want payphones and postcards, and a girl who doesn’t need a computer’s brain to survive. What do I get? So little. Just a respite from lapses in judgment and impaired misgivings, with a touch of loneliness and a side of mashed pride.

-- What we do with what we got, what we’re given and what we take away? Bogus charm that only ends us up as spent geezers with half-off prices to the moon, doleful misled codgers on a train headed north by no south, wielding AARP cards and a lifetime of now useless wisdom and a thousand plus stories that nobody wants to hear. It’s creep obscurely towards the grave without anybody noticing, without attracting any attention, and then everybody’ll stand around on well-groomed grass in black formal wear and say nice things about you when you’re not around to hear, while they lower what used to be your body into the earth and your former possessions scatter amongst them.

-- You can’t take it with you.

-- That’s not it. You’re answering the wrong questions. You aren’t “going” anywhere. All going has stopped. For that matter, all stopping is done too. There is not even nothing, remember? We have to believe in this life we are living. It is all we have.

-- If a life is led and nobody is around to notice it…

-- Same old drink.

-- Sure. Same old drink.

-- Fuck it. I have proclamation to make! I oppugn the whereabouts of fiscal doomsday devices. I stand starkly in indirect contrast with mother nature’s curse of nobody knowing you when you’re down and out. We are shots never fired under the bright lights of persuasive lawmakers. Our courage is smelt out of us by the dim mechanization of hope. But…hell, bring me my shotgun. I’ve got the cemetery blues again. 

-- Declare yourself sane and get a one-way ticket to a shoeshine stand for your soul.

-- A shine for your soul. Like that. Just add a little luster to it, not too much. Just enough to feel alright, so others will notice and not worry about the condition of your…shit. I don’t know. Life?

-- No. I hate cereal, even if Mikey likes it.

-- We come and go, and nobody…nobody knows. I’m going to bowl my voice down a gutterless lane and pray for small animals to keep it sheltered from the rain after it crashes into the pins of my dissipation. I am friendly, damn it! Right?

-- The town’s empty. Even the ghosts have gone. Leave me alone with my Paris in a bottle and a six-shooter on the windowsill. I am cloudy with dark’s disposition, and even the gnats and the flies ignore what remains of me. Patching up today with the impure products of tomorrow. There is no crazy to go.

-- Would you like to listen to me?

-- That tears it.

-- I have measured out my life with toilet paper tubes.

-- Yes. Suffering from a mild case of anhedonia, and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to fall in love. It’s a fight against the logistics of an algorithmically inclined world, one where everything is solvable and safe and where the only crops harvested are corporately owned, and they bear the fruit of advertisements and vicarious living for the almighty tax-sheltered to reap of the blood-stained benefits. Shuttling off from one barely legible scrawl of disaffection to an incessant scroll of pictures: a ferret eating its own tail in the latent crepuscular light gone too bright under the kliegs of quaint modernity. The circle is complete. We go eternally from useless information to distraction to overloaded stimulus to simulations of being alive, and then we behave in the most rational terms we can come to terms with in the rubbish heap’s scraps and flecks of the entitled warp-speed blur of it all. Everything constantly coming and going faster and faster all the time. Nothing stays. And, well, this is as it should be, right?

-- All we are is motion. The plunge and swash of parturient bombardment. Ideas? We’ve had them all. A dime a thousand, I say. Tell me something old. Something soiled and ripe with age. Something rotting with the rind and the pulp still hanging in there, the dust and the rich dirt of what it means to have lived through things.

-- The trenches are splattered with ads for aftershave and the latest electronic gizmo. We are inherently in search of acceptance, of being part of something more than just ourselves. What’s our teeny-weeny singular ado got to do with the devaluation of the dollar versus the yen?

-- We fall in love over catchy slogans and jingles for breakfast cereal or new cars. We fall in love with our desires and go nuts in our inability to choose any one thing out of a perpetually growing list of options for ways to add things to the bounty of our lives.

-- As a great man once said, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”

-- Something new comes along, and then something newer. The gap closing between the two exponentially faster all the time. Soon we’ll reach that point of singularity in the accelerating returns of it, and there will truly be no difference twixt what’s new and what’s next. It’ll all be one whoosh, a steady stream instead of a rung-by-rung climb. Your days will be filled with electronic birdcall and flurries of mechanosynthesis flicking the molecular switch of your dreams on and off, on and off. Your impulse control gets outsourced to the highest bidding handheld device. All your moments coalesce into one uniform moment, and perhaps you might find yourself rocked to sleep by a sheep-counting machine.

-- Lock the doors for me so I never have to leave. 

-- All we are is the garbage we make and leave behind. The commensurate decisions of a dashed-off morality one must make in a money-as-purpose culture. The expediency of the moment becomes all there is. And so everything gets swept under the proverbial rug of distraction so as to retain the ability to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world. Let’s make babies and prove a few TV pundits wrong under the holy kinetic strobe of redundancy.

-- Can’t consider it. Sorry. Too busy even for myself. 

-- Well, then. Night, have a good one.

-- Night.

homemade inklings

“When I was a child I thought as a child, and when I became a man I still thought as a child. I was very unhappy and lonely as a child. And the only way I thought that I could stop being lonely and unhappy was to become something like an artist who would be so creative and so beautiful that everybody would say wow. And I remember the loneliness of holding my pillow and thinking it’s Elizabeth Taylor or thinking it’s Leslie Caron. And not being able to tell anyone. And having to leave the room at school because you were so in love with Leslie Caron that you had to go to the bathroom and cry for a while. The artist has to be alone. And in the end you still end up with your pillow. It’s a long way home.” --Dennis Hopper    

(Prelude To Anathema)

the poet sits in the coffee shop with a pencil writing his name over and over on a sheet of blue-lined white paper spelling it in various ways to see if it works better as an anagram or something or if a difference gives matter to it therein or ergo he thinks it might spell-check itself or wrangle the contraption of his thoughts in a bashed direction maybe or was it to not be towed to wed an idea to sparse space jangled burned beyond doubt where or if the story had any vitality of its own the story he’d been telling himself he was putting onto the paper with the hapless disorganized letters of his name as he sits the poet does by the large plate-glass window at a table alone in the coffee shop without coffee the poet memorizes nothing now only seeks herons where the sun don’t shine and paints blue jays gray in and off coats of dawn come lately with a side of potatoes the poet sits and stares somewhat dazed and worries if maybe the world doesn’t need him and is in fact better off without him being around so it goes in the grainy blur of winding down hours and the stolid face of afternoon strains for less of tomorrow’s too much or even more or even maybe just nothing at all too

*

(Spurious Starts…)

            The pear waited on the most beautiful tangerine it ever saw. The tangerine was spoiled and it had a temper. When pushed to beautiful the tangerine would sing Tuesdays to the trees. The pear was in love. That matter was settled.

             

            On a seesaw sat a chubby child named Harl. Harl had been given a caramel and olive sucker. His mouth dripped an oily brown liquid onto the hard sand below him. Nobody was on the other seat of the seesaw. The sun smashed its graying shades through some pouty clouds. Harl sat there and sucked and drooled, and sucked and drooled.

           

            The landlord’s daughter roller-skated in the lobby of the building most afternoons. She rarely smiled while doing so, instead opting for a more taciturn and downtrodden appearance, saying things like, “Don’t marry my loose change to your racket,” when I passed her in the hall. “We are weeded, never wedded, and I won’t have my butter delivered, thank you.” The sound of her skates going around and around on the hardwood floor is not something I can imagine ever forgetting.

*

             

(A Dalton Of Harm, Chapterless) 

            Your bread was always less than buttered. Spackling up the walls of your heart, whispered out of outer garments, in the breadth of lengthy diatribes, tried and legitimately false, it radios a cyst to a pearl in the ears of hesitation’s SOS. So we saw these things out, inside, insulated, and our plate-glass gaze grew unsustainable. Logging the less transit savvy into the meritorious class undid the job, though, and we had to re-convince the To-Elsie loving among us of our previously substandard convictions. Flaxseed oil was spilled in the brewer’s yeast. We had our hands soiled by just a bit of it. Lumps of ennui gone the way of rotten oatmeal. I am shadowing bathroom stall dividers for now.

            Slurps of autumn nosedive for rake-scraped sidewalk. A top-to-middle whirl and a barge-slow wait. We ransacked petal pushers, those who borrowed trash bags from movers to store the plucked love-me-love-me-nots of others: something to carry the banner of wedding-bell courage to the plink of spitting alpaca. There? There’s plenty more where that there never came from. So just don’t act too natural and get along with yourself.

            A few haircuts later, after nine or so lapses in judgment, there comes a moment where all is freeway lights, where all is when-was-that, where all is cowboy hats and silverfish medallions on lapels. I’m not calling all obstacles. I’m going to Maine. I’m headed through deserts and champagne rivers and boarded-up bowling alleys. A carousel of criminals waiting for a standoff with the balloon men and the swiftest beard growers in Donutville. “Chop! Chop!” Sing the criminals. “We want claw feet and dewlap rucksacks. We are stable here going up and down without any help from mattress-tag cheats or number-two hurlers. Fuck the investors and the universities and the audience who’d rather be watching a Big Ten football scrimmage or a Taco Bell commercial. We drink cactus tea.”

            The mixed-media junkies were declaring peace on the click of cameras and digitally remastered acoustic guitar solos. The classic American concept of living took a dreamy beating, a semblance of cutting-room sensitivity, and goaded on privately with an exhibitionist’s zeal. Another side of the same side. A leery yes to a made-up no. Radicals never had it so good. Stills of partly dressed referees had the say-so and said it all.

            A final evolution of charisma for the rocking-chair bound. A carnivorous harp sponge for your thoughts. A dollop of good intentions for the rest. Only the “how” escapes unmarred. The asphalt of oblivion is potholed. A cooling spree is set upon, ankusing the opal-tinted mirage-inclined to rehearse weekend shopping tournaments. It is a poor-to-do champion who clings to the coattails of remembrance. A maybe is substituted for a hello, in the meantime, and a locker-room attendant whispers, “yes,” and, “no,” at once. All is happening as it shouldn’t.                          

            And then some advice offered from a beret salesman: “Don’t grease the pan of your good deeds with insecurity or disbelief. You’ve got the rights to a cardboard bicycle patent; use them. Kings get beheaded over less. Trust no one.”

            The canopy of pleases defers to brushed hair in the deeper dark of mirrors. Push where from when. Get behind an ahead. There are trains in the underbrush. The brandy’s getting cold. Bet the warm touch of sleeping in on falling asleep later than that. Notches above the frivolous, in a curt slap or a bored wish, it’ll all overcome a spoon’s rhythm on a tabletop. Tuba the rest.

            Fritz Lang told Henry Fonda to go fuck himself over breakfast. Fonda told him to go YOLO the fuck out of himself. It was a fucking bullshit movie anyway. His eyes went to Spain. Everyone started digging for China, all the way, all the way to China and back again. We are not underbrush, is what Fonda was thinking as he dug. Mr. Lang got rather shit-faced on oyster juice cocktails later that afternoon, and so was no good to anybody except himself. There was nothing left to do.

            Free clods of dirt were being offered by the Systematic Sisters of Discord. Frustration was spewed like car exhaust. Tubocurarine for the needy, by the bucketful. Handling without care. Those were some signs. There might have been others. Armadillos cooking in a wood oven. Octopus and sea urchin salad. Snacking on live jumiles. Popcorn lightly salted with mosquito eggs.  

           

*

(An Aside) 

DYLAN THOMAS-- Totally titular.             

EDITOR-- Yes.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Like saying, “My genitals are groovy.” Sort of.

EDITOR-- Yes.            

DYLAN THOMAS-- So you agree?

EDITOR-- I concur.

DYLAN THOMAS-- But you have sunglasses on. That seems, well…unfair, right?

EDITOR-- Apparently and absolutely.

DYLAN THOMAS-- So. Let’s see here. Well, a name is a title, right?

EDITOR-- Too many questions.

DYLAN THOMAS-- What? I mean, huh?

EDITOR-- You ask too many goddamn questions.

DYLAN THOMAS-- That may well be. But my name is Dylan Thomas! Dylan Thomas, I say!

EDITOR-- So it is. That’s nothing, really, if you think about it.

DYLAN THOMAS-- But I’m not thinking about it. I’m saying it. 

EDITOR-- Spraying it too. Let us not forget about going all gentle into…what was it again?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Oh, why don’t you go screw a pooch, or hump a hound, or shag a sheep or something.

EDITOR-- Something?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Oh. Okay. It’s the night. The fucking night. The good fucking night.

EDITOR-- No. That’s not it.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Yes it is. I am Dylan motherfucking Thomas.

EDITOR-- Yeah. I know. I get it. You know what I say to that? I say big fucking deal.

DYLAN THOMAS-- All I need is a title. I come to you asking for a title, and this is what I get? This irritating irrational rubbish?

EDITOR-- Wait a sec. Hey, are you raging against the dying of the light? Or is this just your craft and sullen art speaking?           

DYLAN THOMAS-- Yep. That’s good. Go ahead and rip on the poor poet. That’s very mature.

EDITOR-- My personality is like kryptonite to ironic attacks on my character. I take that as a compliment.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Dear lord. I don’t go in for all that folderol.

EDITOR-- Empty calories for thought.

DYLAN THOMAS-- And we invest in better window wipers after the rainy season has gone.

EDITOR-- There’s always another season up ahead though, right? To…what was it? Oh yeah, to broadly take a shower all-the-day-long in.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Suppose so.

EDITOR-- There you go. See? You didn’t need me after all. I’m otiose.

DYLAN THOMAS-- What? Where do I go? What the bloody handbasket are you talking about?

EDITOR-- Titles.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Oh. I mean…what?

EDITOR-- Suppose So. That’s a good solid title.

DYLAN THOMAS-- It is?

EDITOR-- Yes. You make a supposition. You go ahead and lead, or lure as it were, the reader into the beefy terrain.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Beefy?

EDITOR-- The muscle of your stance. The stance you are taking. The way you move through things: hips first.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Suppose So. Suppose So. Yes. I like it. It works. Suppose So.

EDITOR-- Told you.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Damn you are good. Damn good. A real titular professional. Suppose So. It’s wonderful. Out of this world. By Jove, I think we have a winner!

EDITOR-- Suppose So.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Uh huh. Right on. So much better than, “Riffling Through The Duffel Bag Of Discontent.”

EDITOR-- Yeah. That was bogus.

DYLAN THOMAS-- I…had...the time of my life…and I’ve never felt this way before.

EDITOR-- Never realized your vocal stylings were so primo.

DYLAN THOMAS-- I sing when I drink and drink makes me sing and I drink more than a lot so I sing more than most.

EDITOR-- You’re a sot? A dipso poet? Had no idea.

DYLAN THOMAS-- I am Dylan fucking Thomas!

EDITOR--Yes. You’ve mentioned this before.

DYLAN THOMAS-- My reputation’s lagging behind me I guess.

EDITOR-- Suppose So.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Hey. That’s my title now. Back off it, buddy.

EDITOR-- Sorry to inform you of this, but titles cannot be copyrighted. You can’t own that. It don’t belong to you. Plus, I get my ten percent, Shit For Brains, and that cozies up with a free usage fee.

DYLAN THOMAS-- A fee for free? A free fee?

EDITOR-- Shit stacks. See here, my lily-livered pal, the phrase “Suppose So” shall be used by this here guy any so time as he sees fit to use it at no monetary cost whatsoever to yours truly, and that therein is my “fee”. Get it?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Suppose so. Wow, it really sings itself to life, don’t it? Suppose So. It rises into the ether. Suppose So. It quivers. It cures the broken hearted. It saves the lovelorn. It kisses everything in sight!

EDITOR-- Right on man! Ooh…ah…I took my troubles down to Madam Rue.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Who?

EDITOR-- That gypsy with the gold-capped tooth. What are you, a flop with chicks?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Since well ere ’66. Oh, bloody shit-brown trades. Do I wake or sleep?

EDITOR-- Good question.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Thanks.

EDITOR-- You bet. Okay, listen. It goes like this: Hold your nose. Close your eyes. Take a drink.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Ah, the head-high comfort of a drink’s dream. Now there’s a title for you.

EDITOR-- No. That’s no good.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Why?

EDITOR--I’m the expert. Leave the titling up to me.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Holy smokes.

EDITOR-- Divine cigarettes, per chance?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Suppose so. Like inhaling the breath of Jesus.

EDITOR-- Wonder what that’d taste like?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Peppermint Dentyne.

EDITOR-- Always liked that old portmanteau of dental and hygiene.

DYLAN THOMAS-- So, shall we draw up a contract?

EDITOR-- Yes. But let’s give the contract a title first. Let me see here. Okay. Here we go. Let’s call it, “A Bus Driver Sings Out The Stops.”

DYLAN THOMAS-- Sounds familiar.

EDITOR-- Don’t know why. Hey, by the way, have you ever thought about your initials and their relation to the common term for delirium tremens?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Sounds familiar.

EDITOR-- It should be to you, Mr. Bibulous.

DYLAN THOMAS-- I prefer Tippler myself.

EDITOR-- How dare you impugn my titling abilities! I am a master of titling! My titling is world-renowned!

DYLAN THOMAS-- A thousand apologies, my good sir.

EDITOR-- Accepted. So, Mr. DT, just going to need your handcock right on this line here where my thumb is pointing.

DYLAN THOMAS-- That’s not the right phrase. It’s Hancock. John Hancock. And, by the way, don’t point with your thumb. Men have had their glasses broken over less. 

EDITOR-- Are you sure? What’s a handcock then?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Not sure I even want to think about the answer to that question.

EDITOR-- Oh, why don’t you go pour yourself another glass of whisky, why don’t you?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Finally the man speaks sense.

EDITOR-- Just sign here, okay?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Okay. Oh well. Here goes everything. Great is the man who holds dominion over another with a scribbled name.

EDITOR-- That sounds like something that you’d say.

DYLAN THOMAS-- It was. I mean…it is. Whatever. Stop bothering me.

EDITOR-- A bit ungrateful, are ye? And this after I offered you great succor with my wondrous and magnificent title.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Somebody’s boring me.

EDITOR-- Oh, why don’t you go drink 18 straight whiskies or something equally worthwhile?

DYLAN THOMAS-- Suppose I could.

EDITOR-- Suppose so.

DYLAN THOMAS-- Brilliant.

*

(There’s A Place In The Sidewalk Where I Wrote Her Name Next To Mine)

            The retired milliner was moaning:

            “My days they are numbered; my friends they are few. So much is wasted on so little. I’d trade all of my yesterdays for one more today with her. Bury me alive beneath coffee beans; and love, here is my hat.

            “The wind’s chill’s daggering all comers, and I ain’t taking any chances with trouble this time around. What I don’t remember’s telling on what I’m trying to forget. The earthquake-cracked wood steps where we used to sit together smoking against the cold have disappeared. I’m all out of mysteries. The newspaper’s gone to pot. There’s nothing left to say. Boo the water snakes as the rivers all dry up for good. There’s a little whisky in the coffee still.

            “My moments have all come and gone. The stay's gone from put. Pour it out. Dive into the swale. Touch up nothing. It’s all the pits and a sham too. Up until then or now it’ll have to never do.

            “I’ve got my tie on and my dictionary open. There’s nothing that’ll do. Cigarettes in the pillowcase. There’s something in the arc of the flight I never took that mistakes rue for awe. I take it all apart just to give it away. Unkind enough for now. It’s burrowing through. It’s clever and joked around. It’s a mad guess left terribly felled in the shadow of the moon. It’s rare and uneven and lucky too. It’s stopped at a yellow light. It’s passed on the right. And if it marries a care to a wish, then it’ll do, for now.

            “Trash the gullies. Dip sentient past a wish. Even in the there and then of it. I’m hanging from the window with a beer and a cigarette, sleeves rolled up and head in the devil’s hands. Bad news arriving from Tel Aviv. A spindly table leg left to hold up a few stray thoughts. I’m all moats without the castle. You’ve got to rise up to have a chance to fall. Over steak and eggs, all over the way I fell for her, all over, and again too. It matters, or it doesn’t, of course.

            “Gulp so you remember the pond where The Guppies grew wild into hooligans on their BMXs. I turned so happy into nothing. The honks of jammed buses. The drone of helicopters. The hood dents banged out of your dreams. Super K-Mart sprees late at night, in the worn blue paint of a ’72 Pontiac, in the yellow creep of a pickup leaking gas, in crushed Nerds and shattered Blow Pops, and in the smack of baseball-card gum. A smoky restitution of a soft spot on a high hill even later than late at night. The snaking roads, the dirt-bike courage of it all, and a smattering of stars that’ll never let us sleep. Wasted goodbyes and scotch rich on my breath. Just another copout to line up with the stalled lanes of traffic. And nobody can find the place where I do my living. Even the overflowing gutters aren’t enough. I slept through the war, and the peace is too quiet to take. Loneliness is my only highway.

            “Bad moods come and stay like dried bacon grease left in the pan. At least the toilet still flushes, and there’s still beer and hardboiled eggs in the fridge, for now. I praise the lord while taking a shit, giving thanks for this holy excrement I’ve been granted. Dangling from life’s edges is an art form I’ve been practicing for way too long. It suits and it doesn’t.              

            “The deranged cops spill Manischewitz all over the pavement. From above I hover and sit still and try not to notice. I am not William Faulkner. I am looking for an in to fall out of. I am horrible at the game of pool. I sit. I wait. There’s room for it, here. One-room walkup with spackled walls and a hot plate, sharing a bathroom with an entire floor of lunatics. Open the window. Listen to the sound of car tires on the street, car alarms, people pleading with stop signs, and not a single waterfall. Toss my dead cigarettes at pigeons. I always miss. It’s all ruins and debilitating bad luck. Just the way it stops and goes.

            “Just a hearse away from low. I cuss out the toaster. I spill my guts to the coffee maker. A dismantled way of seeing gets in my way. No work to accomplish. Nothing left to do. Just a minor adjustment in the fine-tuning of the world. Blander than ever, junked to gold. Just where everyone else wants me. Cordoned off and cut less than free. Only the dregs get what’s best. Only the clam-juice lees. And I’m left never being able to say what I most wanted to say.”

           

*

(“You Can’t Use A Bulldozer To Study Orchids”)

           

            drooping leaves drip rain

the swoosh of traffic on the wet macadam

           the crepitation of garage doors shutting

  headlights and the patter of footsteps over puddles

            duct-tape shoes

   snub-nosed fashion tips

              and trails of laundry detergent deaths 

                             the rain drizzles away

                         and the piano creeks

                                                and we all make supper from armadillo broth.

you almost had my attention.          it’s all over and dressed to go and stay away.

                          kindly the swoon of cars plunges and smatters around.

                                                                                                                                          the end spools by.

a toroidal grasp at holding onto severance gets smashed by the wayside.

a copasetic ripple in woodwork.

                                                  some chatoyancy

                                                                                                from the street lamps.

           

*

(Retired Milliner, Postscript)

             “What’re the tips you keep hauling in for the record just incase for the memories or just to show off in the despicable light of another less-than-happy hour to hang your head down in?

            “Get it crooked. I mistook my time. Down stuck cold in Buffalo at a listless train station. I am not what you’d call together. Not even close. My shoestrings are a tangle of misunderstood cares. My undershirt’s gone AWOL. I am not attracting the opposite gender at all.

            “Vanishing takes its cue from action’s lobs against the current condition of my beer-battered brain. I am not resorting to unfulfilled ambition here in the scattered happenstance of common occurrences. Pleading for a better way to behave. Tamed and beyond any curfew I’ve ever known. All the girls around here end up on fire escapes. I smoke less distressed in the shoeshine booth’s shadow. The lampposts all know my name. Everything stinks of burnt marshmallows. 

            “I’ve gone crazy so many times that I forget what it’s like to be sane, or sober too, for that matter. The squalor of my situation is not lost on me. Holding up traffic without even a Peabody to my name.  

            “She’s a satellite to my every thought. But her finger wears the ring of another. The room here’s only above. The makings of another garbage man. I still sleep in the sloop, through all sorts of weather, through a dizzy motel TV screen and a temerarious joke on everybody but me. The sky is no longer blue until further notice.

              “How I remember you. How I slam shut the door and burn all of my toast. How the ripped envelope of my life spills my guts into junk mail. How I’m not listening to the phone ring or the bath drain. How dreams splash other dreams with brushstrokes of black. I am all filled-in, and failure’s swabbed on the moutaintips and the fingertops. Forget it. Feeling’s for the birds.”  

Woody Guthrie’s Last Love Letter From The Insane Asylum

                             

            I spend too much time staring at the damn tree outside my window. I should get a cat or something. But I don’t. Can’t, of course. I’m mired with insignificant ways to go through my life. You are almost my only sunshine. Marjorie. I am almost if not wholly not insane at all. This here land of starched white linens is not my own.

            Marjorie, the sound your name makes soothes and slides sticky like jam on my tongue. Trembling’s about all I’m good for these days. A refugee, finally, at last, if the dust of my past still can’t get me. Maybe? Lord, lord, lord…knows? Maybe.

            The slowest rolling trains, out of time or mind, blow smoke into my weary head, here as I get couch cushions and soft pillows for my troubles from the too-kind nurses. Kindly. I must put that in for them. Nicer than ever watching my train go by. Go by. And get gone at last, here, soon, perhaps, some old freight carrying nothing but empty cars, like some Danville girl, right? Maybe. Hat on the back of her head, you know? Marjorie. You do. You just do.

            My mind is not right. Whatever devils wrestle inside me, whatever they’ve done to what I was, it streaks the glory from my veins, and at last, at last, I am toppled by lonesome valleys and bedridden with sooty ghosts. The river’s moan is too far gone. I watch the tree-branch shadows dance their leaves along the wall like some outlandish cartoon and try not to pray.

            I’m dragged between drowning in hate for you and floating mindless on the sea of your love. I’m punched restless. Are you sad at all to not have my hobo ways as part of your life now? Have I train-hopped my way too lonely and far away from your station? Well, me? Got no home in this world. You know me. Maybe we all just end up going down the road feeling bad. Feeling so bad, they used to call it the blues. Now? I just don’t know. I just don’t.

            A worse world coming, and I keep asking, asking why. Over and over. Never been so chained to being free. This here nerve-jangling machine kills what’s left of me. Not fire. Not automobiles. Maybe a curse broken, then, at least. Bigger things on the horizon? Nope. I’m digging my own grave, downright resplendent in a white flannel suit. The stew of me has got so thin that even a senator could see through it.

            The other folks here who’ve been committed and the likes, they lie and weep and howl all the daylong and nights too. Some are strapped to their beds. Me? I miss my sweet Marjorie and try to behave, whispering red-river lullabies to the way you used to wrinkle your eyes in the mirror.            

            Yesterday I swung my arm and punched a nun who’d come by to bring me some comfort. It was unfortunate. My limbs twirl about on their own. There’s nothing I can do about it. I flail away. I mumble. I drool. Most times are gray at best here, and dusty too. And there isn’t even a cigarette or any coffee around for miles. The wind blows cold.

            I’m going to end up, and, you know, maybe I already have, just like mom. Oil? Nope. Just the grease. You know how that goes. They here think I’m all filled up with delusions. Grand ones at that. I’m lonesome for my harmonica, playing it upside down as always, the crunch of gravel under my boots, the sound of a railroad whistle, campfire smoke and a little dancing late at night. My tongue that used to lick and lock and roll every last syllable around like a polished marble, even sitting in the back of a pickup, well, now it’s no longer strong enough to fight its way out of a lunch sack. Gone. Everything just goes. That’s all it does.

            Are you sad with what these autumn days bring? The raked dirt, the burning piles of dead leaves. And my hours now are so much less than golden, like cracked concrete stairs leading nowhere, and a smile doing much the same. The splash and lapping of waves, hillsides ravaged by sunset’s red and orange fire, the stink of vinegar. I am nowhere near anywhere.
            Your footsteps. I miss your footsteps on the dirt floor, on the ceramic tiles of my dreams, and the way your voice would sing, “I love you, just a little bit,” in the dark. And how much I hate you for being everywhere except here. And for the best? Whose? Hell, if you were here I’d only choke you or throw you from a high window. Mistakes mount, and I’m leveled with regret, and what’ve we got but this tiny pinch of hope? I am forgetful and too angry to speak, mostly.

            I love you, dearly.

            How’s Arlo and the rest of the brood? Don’t let that kid’s hair get too long and scraggly. Please. People might stare.

            My hobbies here are odd. I wish airplanes to curious overtures while the pimpled clouds hang like laundry and drift on. The windows get stained with my spit as I sit and stare out and out. My penmanship’s sinking, crashing too, and bent and scratchy, and what’ve I got left but when my fingers so smooth then when they slept through what I remember of your hair? And I find the vibrato music of saws in the middle of the night calling me away, and I am not so strange in broken mirrors now. I won’t hurt you, at least. I won’t hurt anymore here in some land that’s no longer my own. And, and…well, America’s anything but blessed by God, right? The nurses please with tiny white pills to ease me away from what my heart’s now too afraid to sing. I am sick with blessings. I am worn by too many and loved by too few. I am sick of the tremors and the hollow screech of my whining voice. I miss you terribly. Your little body leaning into mine. The lilting halt and plush wonder of your voice. Swimming blind in the nape of your neck. The way I used to hold your bad-luck hand and cross your delicate fingers. I cannot stand the thought of you.

            I am classier than you’d ever believe. I still have that flashy silverfish stickpin you gave me. It resides regally in the lapel of my best suit. Well, well, look at me here on the other side of private property, digging up pastures of plenty, and worried about some gal named Gas Ilene. But, you know me, still filthy and revolting as ever underneath. 

            Dear Marjorie. My Trinket. Did I start this right? Is it some farewell gone wrong before it’s begun? The road, you and I, lost and stranded on some godforsaken highway in all that dust, in all that barren country that just goes and goes. Me? The loneliest hard-traveling hunter around, and nobody here cares about the moon’s waning shapes. The dark creeps all over, and you know what? I’d give anything and everything just to listen to you whistle or laugh again. So, there. Take that.

            Sincerely.

            Fondest misgivings.

            The saddest music strums through me. I can’t stay awake for much now. The twinkle of some tacky lights and tinsel strung around the banisters keeps me safe as I struggle down rickety stairs in the dimness that is here, and that is becoming who I am too. Dim. Lumpy. Off key. Done for. And now somebody’s gone and stole my hat.

            Forgive me. Forgive yourself. All I can do now is flutter and shake. The bottom of the world is calling my name. My rambling’s all over. Tie my horse to the cemetery gates, well beyond the West Texas plains. So, so long, and good to know you, too. My soul. My soul. My soul, it just never gets its rest.

                 

            Yours for never and then some, and ever, and then a whole lot more too,

            Woody

Parallel To The Sky

            There were shipments. Nobody was receiving them, but there were shipments. That was certain. In the sea’s glittering flashbulb-pops of light, in billboards advertising smiles, in old people dancing at weddings, in the swallowed gray of coined afternoons. Shipments. They were arriving. Nobody was arguing that. Why people argue with inevitable catastrophes is inefficiently documented, but if it were there’d be-- gladly beyond any notice-- a portending of why-nots cluttered by the wayside. Shipments. It was all shipments. There was nothing to be done.

            The sound of machines, the one’s shutting down, those that writhe with credit-card clunks and cranks of a listing clatter. Awake to them, plus a dive and minus a shower, a loose-knit exchange precludes greater favors. Masking the sureness of arrival. To achieve potent techniques of circular breathing. The fracas of basing human exchange on a devalued currency of commonness.

             Growers got wild with machete schemes. Farmers misled their rebel connivers into day-labor disputes over ashes and cigarette butts thrown from cars. Born-first kids were the first to catch onto it, and “We’ve got liars too,” they said, “in the dice.” For the frontier abandoned, for the yolk-busted car-exhaust fiends, for the churlish ton-of-feathers recruiters in the bayside melee, there were handouts to step on and greasy gasoline junkies to depend on. The golden arches shone in the distance.

            The Acting Ringleader of Shipments was haranguing a large group of middleman receivers, using soapbox-serenade techniques and a slip-trigger bolt-action MegaphoneRifle to aid him. Through a slit in the knotty pine wall a thin streak of copper light sliced diagonally through the deck-chair bound audience.                 

            “So, to be fair, there were others insistent upon ordering, and we chopped along with the trend as it best suited us. To each his each, you know?

            “So, let’s outline it like it isn’t, in or out. Swanned to follow the ugly, as it were. And we made a botched recovery for appearances. Upkeep? Never thought of it. Just an unwholesome reminder of decked out loyalty way past the nines. Every local event spaced way past letters and decent numerations of oh-there-I’d-rather-be lunkheads. Perform your own equations. Take a trilby-shaped ride through dog races. Cut out all the pacing and the apprehending, the jilt and the jaw, and become figured out in all of your solutions. Dance to the mishaps of organ grinders. Paperboard your delusions. It gets sappier to be hard up almost all the time.”

            The middlemen clapped softly and grumbled. Guarantees were expiring. They had to get back to their mopish affairs.

            Keeping tabs on the middlemen was becoming a rueful worry for The Acting Ringleader. He wanted to lie around and suck on de-skinned white grapes, roll the tiny gelatinous balls around on his tongue and tuck them in his cheek. This business of being in charge was for the swallows. He went out looking for a bar he could sit around in until night came.

            The bar, it seems, was, almost certainly, called Little Richard’s Recovery Room. It was more than a bit dim, lit by soft red lamplight for the most, and The Acting Ringleader sat down and spent a good while drinking beer on a three-legged stool at the bar.

            To be in good standing with The Archers Of Brows required constant overlaps with chartering blank coasts to ride through, on or in, swept rightly and demanding less attention in the midst of trepidation’s nerve, causing some clear-cut losers to say things like, “You don’t have to be a goober about it, well now do you?” This was true of most receivers as well. Though where and when these receivers actually existed was a point of contention as far as this Archers Of Brows business was concerned. Pushing a Barmaid of Wonder for an answer to this existence vs. nonexistence stuff would often elicit a reply of, “Sooty chumps.” And nothing more. It was the gruel and flack of being alive at this particular junction in the history of the previously unknown world. You put up with it. You did what you couldn’t.

            Tara The Laminated was right in the middle of not-talking when she said, “We had to be intimidated. They forced us,” at the Stand Upright And Be Social Club’s 2^nd-stage event. Rightly, near to Who’s Who Corner, the speckled death of detachment came soldering through the fear of life, and in a snap everything rumpled back to a laugh. Concurrence was no longer an issue.

             At Little Richard’s Recovery Room the jarring evolution of hurt stamped the purest pull of redressed hunger in marmalade-colored doom. The Acting Ringleader was in the midst of patting himself down while seated precariously on his barstool. He had no time to own, no rest to be assured of, no luck to be out of, and no way to mischievously disengage with the moderately happy aspects of tumbling better than ever forward slower than he’d ever known how. The aura of it all, with its misnomer of qualifying glances and the likes, staunched better opportunities for his escape. It would, he thought, be better to rant than rave. It would, but, somehow, it wasn’t. The Acting Ringleader sat and sought vainly for the creation of other avenues of shipment.

            In the plantain-colored dust there were stipends of rights gone amiss. A limousine had been welded to another limousine. Nobody was taking pictures. Shipments came but they never went. There was nowhere for them to go. Life became something that was lived by others, or something done to them. In the thwarted calm of idling curbside shuttles a Hairy-tailed Mole raised its paw in the manner of a student who wishes to either ask or answer a question. Nobody called on it, and the Hairy-tailed Mole went back to scouring the landscape for earthworms and slugs, though to an acute observer it might seem that the Hairy-tailed Mole was merely going through the motions of its ritualized life, as if it were perhaps holding back tears.    

            “The ways one can hide unhappiness or disappointment come to form an aegis against emotional turbulence, top-thudded, sandstoned to a squeaky clean finish, of a sort, not to counterbalance graver options that implore one to bear witness at almost all extraordinary/ordinary times. Also, you have a message waiting at the Paging Assistance System Headquarters. Thank you.”

            It was an overhead disembodied voice, and its matriculation was complete throughout all shipping and receiving stations. There were tidal flats of hunches to overlook, and most did, though a strange chipotle-tang essence hung cheaply in the windowless-unventilated-room stale air, causing most mid-to-middle level sightseers to gaze upward and askance. Many articles were left unguarded.

            The Acting Ringleader came to the conclusion, after many frothy beers and handfuls of roasted almonds, that the shipments must be stopped. Possibly this was just a delusion brought on by the absence of reality, or the sour pangs of a bitter stomach with much enmity towards its maker. The idea had just come upon him. He had no idea of how the idea had come to him or where it came from. All he knew was that it was there now, and it would not go away. He stood up, quickly drank off the rest of his frothy beer, wiped his face, briskly, of course, and started towards Shipment Central Supply.

            The Shipment Central Supply Coordinator emerged from the deep cover of shipment shadows to meet and greet him.

            “Nobody scurries like you scurry.”

            “Stop it.”

            “Oh, well, you know, just as your Ringleading time was coming to an end too. So unfortunate really. There was so much hope and fear going around. People were really primed to poke around for answers.”

            “And?”

            “What’s all this got to do with little old you? Ha. I’m closer to my freezing point than boiling at all times. You, of all former shippers should know at least this much. Ha. Wait. I mean, ha ha. There.”

            “Got it.”

            “Not so good. Not so good at all.”

            “And so, I scream, ‘Elect me!’ while the stouter curriers sweat to the clunk-and-crank machine noise. It’s all I cannot do, and most of what I can.”

            “I am rewriting all of your data. STAT and ASAP too. But don’t worry, nobody listens to chickens who’ve lost their heads. Get thee to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport! Recite their terms of use! Pronto and on the triple!”

            “I ship, therefore I am.” 

            “Oh, shipping peanuts. Good enough.”

            “It always is, isn’t it? Good enough?”

            “Never. I admit to everything-- by which I mean nothing.”

            “Shipper’s honor?”

            “Gobbledygook. Tell me your story, charmer. How’d it all end? Come on. I got oodles of bundled time for it. But keep it short and shipper shaped. I’m elderberried by nature.”

            “Well. So. Cough. Clear throat. Cough. Ahem. It was like this…

             “With a katabatic wind at my back and a shoddy two-for-one compass in my hip pocket, I galloped due east towards the National Imprecision Zone, stomping shards of crushed pelican beaks under my arapaima-scale boots. Nowhere were there helicopters to bring a calming drone to my affairs from above. A low-way patrol officer halted me at the corner of Slop and Weston. I told him,  ‘Even the brave get desperate sometimes. I’m only talking to plants from here on out.’ He let me pass.

            “I found a nook between two crevices that was covered with Guinea Turaco feathers and lay down to sleep. When I woke it was evening, and it seemed I’d punched myself in the nose while I slept. Gazing in my bottle-glass mirror, I discovered I was the proud owner of two black eyes; some dried bloody snot was crusted under both nares. I got up, gathered my meager belongings, and made haste towards the sound of a sistrum in the distance.

            “I passed fields of bailed hay and came to a designer courtyard with an arctic motif. An albino penguin was resting on an ice-shelf planter while a concrete narwhal spit algae-tinged water from a fountain. After attempting to cross the courtyard I noticed my brain-tanned leather jacket was covered with dandelion fuzz. A solider of the lower-medium middle class appeared and asked after my business. I told him I was in the midst of a sabbatical from mismanaging my own personal garden of Eden. His face blanched, and then it blushed. I wanted to be as bright as that someday. I told him as much. He managed to offer me some advice before self-immolating: ‘Take the long way home.’

            “A purple spotted cow sighed. I ran as fast as my boots would let me to a tarpaulin-covered hillock. I wanted some restitution for my troubles when I got there; none were awaiting me. Instead I got a hand-me-down remote-control pigeon. I attempted to crash it into a rusted-shut mailbox, but it missed, and instead flew willy-nilly into a medium-sized anthill. Nobody consoled me. The scent of laundry was consolidated with some whiffs of manure and Doritos. I stood there and didn’t cry at all.”