M.P. Powers

My New Blog Addy

2011-09-27T13:59:00.002-04:00

On May 15th, 2011, I moved to Berlin, Germany. Info about that and other things is on my new wordpress blog. The addy is here: http://mppowers.wordpress.com/ -- It's also on the right. Come on over & check it out.

Vielen Dank!

Dufunct

2010-06-16T12:04:00.006-04:00

This blog is pretty much defunct, but I'm going to leave it up for the hell of it. There are some decent postings in here, I think, but most of it was written hastily (off the cuff or on the wine) and should definitely not be taken too seriously. The best place to find me (for the threemenandamidget interested) is the the NYQ link to the right, where my new poems are always listed.

Thanks, and feel free to browse
this dump
at your unleisure.

MP Powers (powersUNDERSCOREmpATyahooDOTcom)

Ulrich Schnauss - Monday Paracetamol

2010-04-30T22:22:00.000-04:00

Ulrich Schnauss - Between Us And Them (Far Away Trains Passing By LP)

2010-04-30T21:29:00.005-04:00

I predict the next Beethoven/Bach is gonna be a German of the Schnauss variety...

Ulrich Schnauss - Suddenly the trees are giving

2010-04-30T21:20:00.000-04:00

fact

2010-04-24T14:40:00.001-04:00

the back of no one's head is wise

Erik Satie

2010-04-22T19:35:00.016-04:00

Listening to Erik Satie's Gymnopedie, which is (almost) every bit as brilliant as Moonlight Sonata, I have a bottle of Spanish wine beside me, and I'm feeling a little flowereaten - my skin itches a little bit. I take a sip of the red, go back to the first song, which is really the soul singing, or speaking, as dusk takes the streets and the trees outside my window, and another radio plays in the other room. The voices of people drift up from downstairs, someone is standing in the hallway, a telephone rings. There's an immense weight pressing down on me, and I don't expect it will ever go away, the smuttiness of things past, regret, the people -- why is it suffering always seems to involve someone else? and joy? joy is best when it's shared, of course. Joy and suffering - borne of the people... and the sound of Gymnopedie, borne of a piano, and of the soul, and when I listen to it I know, the soul is sad, and beautiful in its sadness, and it will keep going on that way, beautifully. Sad.

(the above is a pic i took from a dock in key west, nov '09 - i've decided to put more pics in here because i think the artwork ran its course, for now, and sometimes tends to bore more than real life scenes - still haven't figured out how to get the comments right... one of these days i will have comments, i swear... anyway, back to crying in my wine -- "no tears for the writer, no tears for the reader...")

Beelzebubstomp

2010-04-21T14:32:00.003-04:00

Above is Miami on a cloudy Saturday afternoon (photo taken on the Julia Tuttle Causeway @ 70mph), and below is something that was published in A Cappella Zoo (April 2010)

Beelzebubstomp

In rosedusk, when the sky is littered with crows; when all the world's mad and mulish brutalities abound and you've scrapheaped hope and your soul's hiding somewhere in the cracks of your sofa; if your mirror makes rank complaints about the face in it, and you feel like every crumpled lottery ticket in the world, hang your name on a cliché. It's not a question of whichwhat or rightwrong, whywhere or whether the rightbrain seizes what the lefthand knows. The elephant will never shuffle out of the room for you, and wounded is the color of its languor. For this unspooling, precisely not improbable lie, which is life, it's a question of posies and perpetual changelings. Blueruin and a borrowed dialect, the drowsy rings of Lethe. It's not a question of whether or why the ghosts grieve in trees of the evening. The cruel ornaments of Spring; bells, halls, mills, hells, lovers frisking up the peachblue cobblestones of Montmartre. Occidental neopreacher's goatfooted rooftopspeeches warmed with the bluidtinged fruitwine of hate. Nightornoonday, spirits in graveyards coalesce, polliwogs girdlehurtle. Is that a merely man or mostly a noun? It's not a question answerable by the mouth of any cyberterranean quasidemocracy, or that which sells off its own superficial "ideals" as if they were a bundle of flameretardant socks. Simply yes certainly quite commonly understood, the wherefores and the ways the world suffers under the weight of the same old unrealities. Down at the heel and up against the wall, over the hill and under the gun. The lusty living things, lovethighs and paltryprinces, blind matter whirling chaotic. It's not the answer, but the question eternal: when your nightdreams lose their dances, will the djinns still sing for you?

Happy 2010!

2010-01-18T19:20:00.008-05:00

Everybody wants to live high up in the music. ~ Various

Koln & Paris

2009-11-08T10:17:00.024-05:00

<--- Here's Montmartre, and here's a poem derived from my ill-famed trip to Europe. So far I have gotten four poems out of the trip, but I have several others in me. I have to have them in me. The vacation cost me about $3000... that's $750/poem. Ridiculousness. Esp. b/c I am going bankrupt.

1.)

Nightmusic (1st Published in Rusty Truck -- June 2010)

On a dingy corner across from the Moulin Rouge, this little beautiful madam takes my hand and draws me into the sadistic darkness of her strange ambrosial cave. S’asseoir.” I sit down on a fat sofa. “Something to drink, monsieur?” “Heineken, please…” Smoke tingles in a soft blaze of soiled lights, walls aquiver. A big, buxom African whore in clinging semitransparent lingerie moves under the chanting red globes. Something begins to diminish. The decomposing dribble of a moment jiggles via the infallible hands of timelessness, perhaps?

Here, the dead have dressed up in their oral traditions, god plays grim his violin, light fails, and the prostitutes hit the floor, shoving precisely though the pushandpull of orchestral despair, their bounding feet transfigured on a steep current of swollen logic. It sits at the end of some foreign tongue, volumes of dirty eroticism slowly expanding until the keen queen-of-all-kings coyly emerges. She hurls a handful of lilacs on the floor, spits, and as she begins pouncing on them with her happy jouncing feet, I observe the glad awful screaming of her profane flesh; the sweaty waves of palpitating flab among whose largeness even oblivion would be feign to blush. My beer arrives, green and glowing. It’s handed to me by some Turkish pimp of the dime-a-dozen kind, donned in large white collars and a black bullying blazer stuffed with shoulders, his gold tooth and earrings emitting sharp glints from the hellish neon, his face a dull retching of perfect
evil, like a serpent, or a toadstool. His loafer slightly pronounces itself, he pirouettes, one arm does a fat sweeping gesture, and the big African whore descends upon me, pink drink in hand. The pimp nods, nods again. “For the lady,” he says. “Merci…” she says. “On me?” I ask.

But he’s gone.

A cloud of silence covers her face. Immense, beautiful, perfectly insipid. She takes a sip from the straw. Two hungry thighs squirm before me and she unleashes her top. She cups the roundness of her heaving breasts and gives them a good upward squeeze, lets go. Plunk. Then her fingers find my thighs and I feel like all the others, hooked in the gill, waiting to be dragged along the wake and then eaten. The room spins its fuzzy red syllables. A purple curtain parts. A man in a cape begins to sob. Or sing. Or something. And I am the man in the cape. I have no home. Just this perverse little cave of a room, in my soul, or across from the Moulin Rouge, where a purple curtain closes, and gods play grim their violins.

Retrospect

2009-10-08T19:37:00.004-04:00

I am back from my journey, and as I predicted, I didn't get around to blogging anything when I was over there. The reason is because I had to pay for internet service wherever I went and I truly didn't have the time.

I do have stories though.

I hung out with a rogue outfit of buskers (street-performers) in Cologne, got into a scuffle with some Turks in a whorehouse in Paris, and Amsterdam was everything I thought it would be, and not half as bad as the Bill O'Rielly's of the world want you to believe.

Not much writing was done, however. I did take a lot of notes and there were a lot of moments that were really deep and poetic (for me).

I mean, I spent much time in the cafes, alone, drinking beers and roaming around the streets of those three towns, going in and out of the cathedrals, on the trains and along the rivers, watching the people...

I'm still trying to figure out what happened.

But then, that's what being a writer is all about, isn't it?

Tempering the flame?

It's definitely a fool's game.

Oktoberfest

2009-09-16T13:03:00.010-04:00

Ten days from now I will be on a plane bound for Dusseldorf. I'm staying in Cologne for the first three nights, then Paris (Montmartre) for three, Amsterdam for four and back to Dusseldorf for one. This is going to be the first time I've ever been abroad, and I'm going it alone w/o too many German/French-speaking abilities. I haven't studied any French. I have been studying German. I downloaded 6 CDs onto my ipod, and while I'm at work, delivering construction equipment around the Miami area, I listen: Wo auch immer er auftauchen mag, man wird ihnerkennen. Which is a little strange, esp. when you ease into a convenience store/cafe/place on Jose Marti Blvd., and get accosted by some Cuban-Chinese muttering Spanish & selling key limes out of a duffel bag. I mean, it's a little strange to hear "Entschuldigung, wo ist die Kaiserstrasse, bitte?" in your ear when that happens.

But... that's just the way it goes. Hopefully my trip will bear some stories and some poetry. I already have some ideas for both and I can't even pronounce Hauts-de-Seine yet.

2 Poems

2009-08-23T21:45:00.006-04:00

Here are two poems. The second one is in Calliope Nerve.

*****

1.)

Antique

Through the red window, smokestacks
gurgle in the rain. Trees lay their sobbing

shadows all around. "No vacancy in the world," says the sign.

I sit up in bed, a homemade knife
taped to the bottom

of my shoe. Across the room, the hood
of the executioner

falls off, reveals the face of a beautiful woman,

or is that a clock?

Is that a hearse
driving the wet streets backwards?

I rub my eyes.

My mind feels itself up
for thoughts.

Poetry is a wonderful old keepsake left on the side of the road
that no on else
wants.

2.)

the neighborhood watch

there he goes again, backing the ass
of his big diesel pickup truck
into his driveway
parking so the nose juts out just a little
past the holly bushes,
so its headlights peer out like eyes
of a rat that's just crawled back
in its hole...
i bet it makes him feel safe
i bet he thinks he's in complete command
of the game
letting us all know his jumbo-sized tonka
truck is out there
eyeing us, gazing into the very depths
of our souls, passing moral and definitive
judgments on us...
i bet it makes him feel superior
and a tad macho
climbing down out of his eddie bauer cab
striding up through his lawn
in his ill-fitting boilersuit
and all his
small-minded pride
he stomps his boots on the stoop, opens the screen
door and
scoots inside
leaving his truck in the driveway
to off-gas the egotistical facets of his personality
the world must learn to adapt
itself to. in a word,
i'm thinking about slashing
all his tires

feeling vs. thinking

2009-07-20T18:19:00.016-04:00

It's been a couple months, but here I am, and without much to say. I'm thinking instead about what Hemingway said about Dostoyevsky in A Moveable Feast. Something along the lines of "how can a person write so poorly and make you feel so deeply?"

This is a beautiful question, and it only goes to show you how much more important the feeling part of writing is than the intellect part. Of course they join somewhere, but the best writing is felt; when you have to climb up into your brain (even momentarily) and think about what you're reading, the dream has been accosted and something's been lost in translation.

This is especially true in poetry and fiction. I'm not talking about anything else. I bring this up is because I consider myself a feeling (maybe overly-feeling?) person, yet for years I wrote for the mind when I should've been writing for the senses.

A terrible mistake.

Nothing ever translated
except a lot of bird-dung;
promise
I won't do it again.

Toccata & Fugues

2009-05-19T17:37:00.007-04:00

I have found the lorazazzezzzz my lady has taken to hiding from me and I have taken them and I have drunk the wine today. Chianti (Gabbiano), and the bottle's almost empty, and the cup is to the left of me (left to me). It's like the blood of a sacrificial bull when I pour it in me, warm, dark red, flowing. Sometimes it's as good as beer. Sometimes it's better. Like now... sitting in my swivel chair, listening to the rain coming down and Bach's Organ Music. The house is dark, even though it's still daylight, and the wind outside blowing the palms around.

I take a sip of red... I'm in no rush to do anything, no one's waiting on me and I'm not dreading or expecting anything.

(shut that door)

Of course, this isn't going to last.

I'm just temporarily in abeyance.

Is that the right word?

And temporary like John the Baptist.

Anyway, bliss like this is always fleeting because it has to be.

Bliss has no memory.

Friction makes most.

blind, deaf, dumb

2009-04-09T20:44:00.005-04:00

the
best
revenge
is
often
just
avoidance
and
forgetfulness

no
one
needs
to
be
taught
anything

let
daisies
be
thy
dream

if feeling fails you, vain will be your course...

2009-04-05T15:40:00.010-04:00

when I look back on some of the stuff i've written in the past (i.e. before 2005), it makes me really happy that none of it ever got published. it didn't deserve to get published. i didn't either. "man, was i misguided... what wasn't i thinking?"

the stuff i'm writing now, on the other hand, i think is fairly durable. when i say that, i mean durable to me, as in something i can read more than once (long after the fact), and without cringing, without feeling like i was duped.

"for man must strive, and striving he must err" -- goethe

so, here's what i keep reminding myself:

*sarcasm/flippancy doesn't stand the test of time.
*humor does as long as it's natural and not forced.
my proof: caddyshack vs. knocked up, zoolander, wedding crashers, et al.
*you might regret never having written from the heart (in tongue and w/o commonplaces). "it is always a mistake to be plain-spoken." -- g. stein
*editors are often right. and form letters are often nourishment for the brain (as long as they don't come from some fee-simple jackass with a personal agenda, which occasionally happens).
*get used to being a lousy public-servant because you'll never make any money writing poetry.
*work on your soul as much as you work on your poetry.
it's your only chance, and it's a good back-up plan too.
*refer again (and again) to Ez:

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

*and then refer to the top of this page:

i.e.:

And should the thing be wanting in fire or taste
Blow into flame your little heap of ashes

after reading meister eckhart...

2009-03-29T20:42:00.001-04:00

if your mind
is a great sunflower
hunched over on its stem
just remember
what seneca said: "that man or
woman is wretched who does not
transcend
their humanity." and to this i would
like to add: self-love is the
fleetest animal that bears
you to
mediocrity.

(the spiders they
sleep on sunday)

thanksgiving, 1986

2009-03-22T11:52:00.009-04:00

After watching myself last night in an old home video, circa 1986, I am left feeling totally disgusted and ashamed of who I was at age 15. Talk about a person with an identity crisis. I was a mock-person, a mimic and a fraud with a bad temper, terrible acne and on top of that I thought I was funny, but my humor was only a cheap form of escapism & a tool used to hide my true feelings. Well, I guess some things never change.

"You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back" -- Horace.

But at least now my acne is gone, and I don't think I'm so much of a fraud. One thing I can say for myself is that at least I've always been willing to step outside of myself and form an semi-objective critique. Some people never truly see themselves, but I've always seen myself perhaps a little too deeply, and a little too self-consciously, which is probably why I drink and why I write and why I feel the horrors of life so much that I'm not afraid of dying. I am afraid of death though. Which was pretty much me back in 1986, when all of the forces of the world were just beginning to align themselves against me, and me just laughing (at everything and everyone but myself). I still do that sometimes, but at least now I know the final joke will always be the one that's on myself. The one that no one else tells better than me & which trumps death (and sorrow) (and you) (and me) every time.

Taz...

2009-03-21T10:01:00.014-04:00

Last night, my good friend J..., who's also the co-owner of an Irish bar I sometimes frequent, starts buying the whole table Jagerbombs, one after the other, and then when happy hour ends, he dumps me on these three Studs Turkel (Turds Stuckel) characters I don't know from Adam (or Eve), and disappears. Then the napoleonic generalissimo comes forth. He of the angry aging face on which has migrated two thirdrate pieces of struggling mustachio, and his shirt decorated with flying marlins and thrust open to the sternum as to expose the four gold chains nestled comfortably in his silvery chest hair, his jeans being these loosefitting preshrunk Wranglers, and he's wearing steeltipped cowboy boots, the kind you find at that one boot depot off Yeehaw Junction, back behind the stand where they sell plastic alligators and bags of grapefruit and oranges.

At any rate, he befriends me, which is only natural, since I attract almost nothing but his kind. e.g. mutinous bottom-dwellers looking for someone who will listen. I will always listen. At first anyway. It went something like this:

"Hey buddy... c'mon over with us...
we're all friendly at this bar, ya see...
we're like family here...

What do I do? I move dirt for a living.
I'm a heavy equipment operator.
Dozers, rollers, backhoes...

Hey, buy this guy a beer!...

I was running Cats when they were still green.

I AM reality!... What's your name again?...

I'll drink anyone here under the table...
I'll drink YOU under the table...
Do you like stone crab?
I get the best stone crab known to man...

Oh yeah, that's my wife right there.
Look how pretty she is...
I got a pretty wife.
She's the first woman I've ever had who's free.
All the others I had to buy.
Know what I mean?...
You don't?
Think about
it.

Suicide? I never thought about suicide. This is the real shit right HERE baby! HAHAHA!

...and then I grabbed him by the shorthairs and jammed my .380 in his goddamned frog face and said "Don't you ever take a KNIFE to a GUNFIGHT!"...

But we're all family here...

Call me Taz... Pleasure to meet you.

Hey, tonight I'm going to go home and fuck my wife, then I'm gonna meet this guy for a load of stone
crab at three in the
morning... I'm meeting him down at the docks when he comes in with his shipment. He's my connection...

LOOK into MY EYES when I'm talking to you!

What's so funny?

I call everyone who's younger than me a punk-
ass.

Punk-ass. Punk. Ass.

I SaiD To thE GuY, DOn'T YoU EveR TaKe a KniFE To a GUNfiGht!

GET THIS GUY ANOTHER BEER!
Dontcha see? I take care of my people.

I used to smuggle dope through the blackwaters just south of the Bahamas. Back in the
70s.

Yeah I ran grass.

Hey listen, I AM THE TRUTH!

Ya always gotta be protected. That's why I never go anywhere without my .380. I keep in my
cowboy boot. Right here. Here's
where it
is.

Whaddya mean SCARED? Hell, I ain't SCARED!

I push dirt for a living. I don't got no employees. I'm self-employed.

Hey punk-ass!

GET THIS GUY ANOTHER BEER! ON ME!

Would you like
to be a part of the
FaMILy?

Huh,
wouldya
punk-ass?

velazquez, bacon, matilda & you

2009-03-01T11:20:00.010-05:00

Waltzing Matilda

So I'm at this waterside saloon yesterday sitting between a Romanian exboxer (who stands about 4 feet tall), and a Turkish usedcarsalesman. Across the bar, there's a couple in their fifties. The lady keeps straddling the guy, but the guy's playing it slo-mo & cool, fidgeting with his Blueblockers and grinning around a cigar in all his omnivorous buckteeth. She touches his (makebelieve) hairstyle, nudges his crotch with her knee, and I'm beginning to think I'm watching a Levitra infomercial until the band starts to play. It's a ragtag agglomeration of yokel huckleberries. The pivotman is this seething hump of whaleshit in leathers, a pissmop of yellow pseudowig flaring out from beneath the skullandcrossbones bandanna precariously unbalancing itself upon his tete. He keeps placing his Stratocaster up against his ear, strumming the chords and winking at the drummer and I'm like oh god oh please not again... not this... again. The harmonica player I do believe I know from somewhere. He's this washedup partially exhumed pile o' phytoplankton the Tet offensive neglected & Nixon left for dead because, apparently, when the shit hit the fan, he was out smoking from a RubeGoldberg-shaped hookah on a sunken ricepaddy somewhere around Hill 55 (without even knowing it). I watch, as his boots measure the sound. and this is all I need, I think... Jesus, this is all I need... but he actually surprises me. And the rest of the band does too. And when they finish their first song, the old man next to me says, "Play it again, Sam!" "They don't do that," says the even older man sitting next to him. "You watch..." says some thirdwheel in a shirt upon which swims several seacows. He yanks a fin from his billfold, waves it, then quickly stuffs it down his own pants and all is forgotten except for the Levitra couple dryhumping on the other side (over bud lights & against the leg of one strategically placed busboy). "Get a room!" someone yells & all our Blueblockers lothario can do is blow cigarsmoke on his knuckles like he knows something no one else does, except perhaps for the band, which plays Waltzing Matilda as if they all had her once.

if every fool held a bauble, fuel would be dear

2009-02-19T21:29:00.013-05:00

writing in the morning with tobacco & a cup of coffee is good, but it's not great. it's better to write in the night, with the night spirits guiding you. i write best after i've had a couple of lorazepams and several glasses of either chianti or german wine. heinekens help too, and maybe a tall glass of strong drink, like rum and coke or wild turkey.

anyway, the above mentioned concoctions i consider my muses. hemingway said he never wrote drunk, but for me it seems best this way... too much consciousness has always been the bane of my verse(s). it's better to write w/o thinking too much. in other words, semi-consciousness is the way. or one way. it's best to go back and forth. that way you have two minds instead of just one. both of which speak to each other.

bourbon and coke

out of the hustling hours and
into the ripe delicious languor
of my room i collapse upon
my couch, in a perfume of
frankincense and huddled
between these sumptuously
gasping walls, obscene flowers
of pinkish light spout from a
tiny lamp... the air is bathed
in damp indolence as the
voice of the city washes over
me its vague drooling waves
of purple thought... to which
i am wholly indifferent, and
wholly drunk, having come
here again, away from all the
dire pleasure beasts... away
from my hatreds, fears &
daily agonies, i fall deep into
the warmth of this solitude...
where deities mostly
dance, and night spirits open
unto me
the rare doors of perfect bliss

See ~ Underground Voices April '09

morning revision...

2009-02-10T20:25:00.029-05:00

Here's the cleaned up version of whatever it was (?) I posted last night...

I started late at the literature game. I never read any fiction until I was about 22. And I didn't begin writing until I was 25. And I didn't take my writing seriously until several years after that. I graduated from Florida State with a Business Marketing degree. I majored in business because I wasn't interested in anything else & and it seemed like an easy enough degree to slide my way through. One of my mistakes was that I listened to what my parents said: "You need to have a degree... even if you don't plan on using it, you'll always have something to fall back on." It seemed like good advice at the time, but of course I didn't know myself back then. If I did I would've been more skeptical about my guidance counselors, and especially about my dad when he said "there's no money in an English degree!" He was right of course, but money's a fool's game when it takes the place of what truly interests you. And if I had lived by that "maxim" (e.g. fifteen yrs. ago) I wouldn't be thinking about this one now:

"You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived." ~ Gertrude Stein

Sandwich Board

2009-02-07T18:27:00.015-05:00

i was talking to my mom today, and she told me she had this great idea for me. she said some guy wrote some songs about the economy & a few other current events and received a huge response when he put his garble on you tube... she said i should do the same thing with my poetry/writing.

"people would probably love it," she said, "especially when they see your goodlooking face...etc., etc..."(a face only a mother could love???)
"it doesn't sound like a bad idea," i said. "the only thing is, it sounds like a lot of shameless selfpromotion, which i hate."
"well everything's about shameless selfpromotion these days... you have to put yourself out there... get people to notice you... that's the only way you'll ever make any $$..."
"mom," i said. "if i was in it for the money, i would've gone out long ago and bought a sandwich board and stood out in traffic on biscayne blvd to promote my 'works.' trust me...art for money's sake = art beshitting itself, every time."

anyway, that's what I'm up against where my family is concerned. my dad's always wanted me to be the next Mickey Spillane (who once wrote a novel in what two days i'm told?), and my brother's first question when i told him i have some stuff being published in some pretty good mags pretty soon was how much
(did you
pay
them?)

"I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends." ~ M. Spillane

here's (1) poem...

Don't Call Me Frisco

See: Underground Voices ~ April '09

neither quixote nor taras bulba

2009-01-14T17:32:00.020-05:00

I've developed this terrible habit lately of buying books, reading about half of them, putting them aside and then buying more books. Books and music are really my only extravagance, by the way. It's the wisest way to spend $$. And so, I have about twenty half-finished books sitting around my house. Some of them I put aside, never to be touched again (see: Blake, The Complete Poems - which pretty much soiled itself after The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). But there are others that I plan on getting back to. One being Faust Part 2 (I think this tale should've been the theme of this blog since I mention it so much). I read half of it in September, then moved onto Jung, E.E., Meister Eckhart, Amy Lowell, and a few others. I picked it up today again and perused it a little more patiently, and though it's a little slow-going and confusing at times, there's some really brilliant lines for the discovering. Here's one from Meph:

"To gain your end, the act must be your own."

And another, which I aim towards all children of loving and/or overprotective parents:

"For say, what guide of youth, will really tell us, face to face, the truth? Each will enlarge or trim with hardihood, now grave now gay, to keep the children good."

And finally this last, which I aim at myself, especially when I was younger, and my delusions of grandeur (which I blame on any and all of my German forebearers - I'm 1/3 kraut, and DofG is a wholly krautian trait...)

BACCALAUREUS:

This is the noblest call for a youthful soul!
The world was not, until I made it whole;
I raised the sun from the ocean where it lay;
(etc...etc...)
And who but me your liberation wrought
From bonds of philistines that fettered thought?
But I, a soul inspired by freedom's might,
Pursue with joy my star of inner light,
And swiftly, in rapture of my mind,
I speed to glory, darkness left behind.

MEPH:

Go, my original, your glorious way! -
How truth would irk you if you really sought it:
For who can think of truth or trash to say,
But someone in the ancient world has thought it?
And yet this fellow puts us in no danger,
For wait a few more years and things will mend:
The vat may hold a ferment strange and stranger,
There'll be some wine in the bottle in the end.

And so I say:

Soliloquy

is it not enough knowing
even genius is ill-spoken, and that the mind
will eat itself like a morning
cloud

is it not enough knowing
every loving relationship ends in tragedy

that there's no accomplishment
greater than death?

nothing's enough, of course.

but as for you, for whom the gods
make dying real
if you must sacrifice your life for anything
let there be this: grace

and remember the matadors
those noble falcons, remember Socrates
drinking hemlock and falling to one
knee

it's the ultimate rhythm of things
the dance and breath

to finally understand,
and afterwards, to understand deeply

a life given up like this
was never a life lost

and to turn away from man
the sun and self-love,

without holding on, finally -

that's best.

Crocodile Boozehound

2009-01-01T14:11:00.010-05:00

Merry New Year! Here's the more than less final version of my Boozehound story. I think it's pretty good the whole way through, but that's for you to judge.

If you haven't read it since my original posting, you may want to read it again, as things have changed.

(1)

I first heard about him in the Spring of 1992. I was living in a shack in Tallahassee and hooking up with Cathie. We used to lie in bed in the afternoons (I didn't wake up until the afternoons back then) watching movies and trading war stories. I had some pretty good ones. I liked hers too, but they always seemed to involve cow-tipping, the picking of mushrooms, or some mythical creature who called himself Boozehound.

"Who the fuck is this Boozehound?" I finally asked.

She didn't have an answer. She didn't really know him, she said, only the stories she knew. And a few of them I still remember. One especially. It was about Mardi Gras. There was a discrepancy over a bill at a bar on Canal Street, and later on a patrol officer discovered him in an alleyway, passed out drunk in back of a stolen ambulance, with a dead deer lying beside him. It was a six-point buck, and no one knew how it got in there, not even him. He didn't even know how he got in there.

They were both wearing beads though.

Anyhow, a couple years after Cathie I became a fixture at a pub on Tennessee Street called The Higgledy-Piggledy. I went there for the beer specials. Every Wednesday and Saturday it was $4, all you could (should or will) swill. Thursdays it was $5. I used to go in there with about $8 or $10 and space out the tips. $1 for every five or six rounds. It wasn't much, but being in and out of college and on financial aid at the time, without too many pots to piss in, and living in an apartment whose most elaborate furnishings consisted of a fleabag mattress and a third of a worm-eaten sectional couch, it was enough. Maybe not for the keeps, but for the soul of the bar, it was enough. I was one of the most consistent drunks in that dump. Another constant being the guy who inhabited the barstool by the taps. He was there more than I was. He looked like a Ponzi schemer or a coffin salesman. Dark hair, delicate hands and always impeccably groomed, always adorned in his scientifically pressed button-down Polos, pleated slacks and sleek loafers that clicked faintly when he minced around the bar.

It turned out this was Boozehound.

I talked to him a few times, and I remember sitting next to him once. There was something about the burbling of a hurdy-gurdy though, and a white string of drool which left an impression on me. It spilled out of his mouth when he was flagging down the keeps and I wondered if he was as good as his moniker (and legend) implied. I had my doubts.

1998

I left Tallahassee and forgot about my lovely days with Cathie, and $4 drink specials, and all about the Boozehound too. But my brother was still there, and I suppose he and Boozer hung out once or twice. Then they graduated in the Spring, Boozer from graduate school, and when they moved back to South Florida, they exchanged phone numbers or something and somehow I got involved.

It happened on a Friday. At first I thought it was a joke. I lived in a tiny apartment in one of those crappy gated communities South Florida teems with. When I got home from work that night I looked at my caller ID and there were seven missed calls from the guardshack, plus three from the payphone outside 7-11. The last was only a couple minutes before I checked it. I thought about it for a moment, then opened the fridge and got a beer out. I got a bottle-opener out of the drawer which was right under the window and that's when I saw it. I saw a dark bag topple over the concrete wall bordering the complex (the compound rather - gated communities are more like compounds). It rolled into the mangrove trees, and then another one landed and a man nimbly followed, hurtling himself over the wall and snatching up the two bags. He slung them over his shoulders and darted down through the gully and up the street. I watched as he dodged between two cars in the parking lot and disappeared behind a van. Then he emerged, still sprinting, bags swinging at his sides. He scampered all the way down the sidewalk and disappeared again behind a row of shrubs. I looked to the other end of the parking lot and there they were, two rent-a-cops in golf carts veering around the bend. The Gestapo.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

My whole apartment squirmed. I went to the front door and looked through the peephole. Nothing. "Boom! Boom! Boom!" A face quickly rose up and as it drew close, the nose grew larger and the eyes narrowed. Boozehound. He looked the same as I remembered except for his hairstyle, which had reduced itself to a combover (fit for a politician). I opened the door and he bowled past me with his bags.

"Shut the door! Shut the door!"

I shut it.

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked.

"Hold on," he said, panting. He set his bags on the floor and put his hands on his knees, then looked up at me. "Didn't your brother... tell you... I was coming?"

"What?"

"Yeah, we talked about it last weekend..."

"Huh?"

I found out later they did talk about it the prior weekend, but there were never any plans made. Anyway, that was all moot now. Boozehound had come all the way up from Miami and needed a place to crash for the night. That was alright with me. It was just... "Who is this desperado?"

The Gestapo never found out either.

(2)

We drank at my apartment for a while, and ended up going to this dingy little honky-tonk in Davie (because it was cheap, one of Boozehound's themes). We drove his BMW there and parked in the gravel lot. It was dusty and full of pick-up trucks, motorcycles, RV's. When we got out of his car, he wiped his fingers on the hood and showed me the dust.

"I just waxed this thing," he said with a wry grin.

"Oh yeah?"

We went inside. We sat beneath the big American flag at the horseshoe bar and waited around for the barmaid. Finally this burly-looking biker-broad in stretchpants and a lime-green tube-top appeared.

"What'll it be sweetheart?"

"Two Turkey and Cokes," I said. "Doubles."

We waited some more. She was fumbling with some glasses in the sink. Then someone else got her attention and she sucked a heavy drag from her slender Menthol and started talking to him. I got up, checked the juke - Merle Haggard, Tex Ritter, more Tex Ritter. Hank Snow. The machine presently shook a little and the lights on it went out. A skinny redneck wearing a t-shirt with Dale Earnhardt's face jumping out of the front had the cord in his hand. He grinned.

"Band's about to play," he said.

I sat back down and the drinks were there. But I think the barmaid forgot to put Coke in them. It seemed like it anyway. Fire water. We started off slow and worked up the pace.

"Ya think I'm overdressed?" asked Boozehound, adjusting his collar. He was all pleated and pressed, looking every bit the errant tax-accountant. Everyone else in the place was dressed casually - shorts, torn jeans, rags, including me.

"Nah..." I said. "They'll never know."

He nodded, peered around cynically. He gulped his drink. Then he went into this long spiel about his wife. He told me all about their storybook wedding, all about the idyllic honeymoon in Cancun, and the father-in-law who hated him and how the marriage quickly devolved. He was in Tallahassee and she in Miami when it happened. "The coup de gras," he said. He'd gotten a rotten hunch in his gut and suspected something, so he spent an afternoon or two guessing passwords. Finally he figured it out. Something about FSU, Chief Osceola, and a birth date. He clicked through her emails and there it was: "Oh Max, I can't wait for you to hold me in your arms. Our bodies are so perfect together. As soon as I get out of this fool marriage of mine, I promise you..."

"It's over now," he said. "I'm just waiting for the papers to go through. Here she is..." He dug his fingers into his wallet and pulled out her photo.

"What do you think?"

"She's pretty," I said.

"She's alright," he countered. "She looks a lot better in real life. She never takes good pictures. It must be that her soul comes out in photographs. The camera must somehow capture her soul."

Next to Boozehound sat a brutish-looking oaf with a head like an hog. He kept peering over at us and twisting up his lips, his big lantern-jaw pummeling a tiny wad of chewing gum.

"What's up?" I said.

He chomped. "I've had this gum in my mouth for two days straight, huh."

Boozer and I laughed.

"I'm serious," he said. "Longest I ever went was four days..."

Just then, the bar dimmed and red and green footlights lit up the stage. The band, which was a ragtag trio of yokels, had a lead singer who looked like a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Don Knotts. In basketball shoes.

"Y'all like David Allen Coe?" he shouted.

"Raaaawwwwwwooooorawww"

He strummed his guitar and the drums pounded and the sounds whirled. The dance floor quickly filled up with bodies. They leaped and swayed and pranced around, any number of fairies, gargoyles, carnies, yetis. It was as if the soul of the bar had suddenly expressed itself in a throbbing ring of half-lit subhumanity.

But the hogshead had its mucous-colored eyes affixed on Boozehound. He jabbed his own chest with his thumb. "I used to be a pro-am boxer in my twenties," he said. "Name's Guy... Bogart."

Boozer smiled politely and looked away.

"Hey! I'm talking to you, huh! Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

Boozer looked.

"Watch this..." Guy wrapped his big meatfist around his mug and chugged his whole beer... Only a small streamlet of froth dribbled onto his shirt. "Huh?"

I congratulated him for his "feat" and offered to buy the next round. It came pretty fast, this time. The three of us toasted and again he rested its eyes on Boozehound.

"Like I was saying... I boxed pro-am. I could rearrange that whole face of yours if you wanted me to..."

"No thanks."

"Ya think I'm lyin?"

"I never said that, I just said no thanks..."

Guy reached up and wrapped his large mitt around the upper portions of Boozer's face and a good part of his combover. He jiggled it slightly. "All this?" he said. "Nothin." Then he let go and stuck out his thick index finger. He pushed it deep into Boozer's chin. "But this?" he said, tapping sharply. "This here's nothin but glass, ya see."

A couple minutes later the two of them were standing up in the corner and Guy was giving Boozer a boxing tutorial. It looked more like tai chi though, or libido-charged grappling. It went on and on.

"There ya go... now bend your knees a little, huh... ya know what a rope-a-dope is?"

"It's you," I said.

I got up and went off to the bathroom. There was a long line at the urinal and some guy was crapping in the stall, which had no door. When I finally came out, there was a small stampede rushing towards the corner and a ring around Boozehound and his tutor. Guy, whose loose large mouth had blood leaking from it, rolled up his sleeves and was setting up. He took a heavy swing and missed. Then he came back with two swift uppercuts and Boozer, whose drunken feet seemed rooted in the floor, whose expression was utterly dead-pan, gyrated his torso about and in one fluid motion, dodged both shots. It couldn't have been choreographed any better.

"I'll kill you, you sonofabitch!" shouted Guy. "Huh!" His entire being oozed with fury. He came back with a straight jab and another uppercut. Boozer ducked both and spun around. He slipped through a hole in the crowd behind him, and I plowed my way around the horseshoe and wrapped my arm around his neck.

"He's really drunk," I announced. "I'll get him out of here."

We waded through the people and got in his Beamer and skidded out of there. Apparently Boozer had accidentally landed a shot during his "lesson."

"I think you're my hero," I said.

I was finally beginning to understand. Something.

(3)

Boozehound hung around at my place that whole first weekend, sponging beers and playing poker, and then he disappeared for a couple of years, mostly. I think I saw him maybe two or three times. In the meantime, I met Shannon, and she and I moved into a little 1950's Florida home in a little waterjerk town that called itself Boynton Beach. I liked it much better than living in a gated compound, but there was one thing I did miss - the gate - which, with the exception of desperados like Boozehound, was pretty good at staving off not so much criminals (I had nothing for them), but rather The Unwanted, Unannounced Visitor.

It became a problem.

I was an unabashed lover of solitude, and often, when I was alone, I would shut all the blinds, turn off the phone and escape into my own faraway thoughts or those of my favorite scribes - Seneca, Montaigne, Goethe, Schopenhauer, etc... It was wonderful when it lasted, but alas, there was always and invariably and to-be-sure the inevitable jackass who'd come along and murder the dream. And since this person (whoever it was) couldn't climb through the phone and get at me that way - sometimes for several days - he would take it into his head that my love of solitude was really loneliness, and that I was somehow craving his companionship, that I'd benefit from it even, whether I knew it or not. The truth is he didn't give a good goddamn what I knew. The truth is he was just bored with himself and needed someone to offgas his deathly inertia upon.

The real problem was my carport. If I had a garage, my vehicle would've been hidden away, and he never would've known my whereabouts. But he always seemed to know. And for some reason - at first anyway - when he came knocking on my door I felt strangely obligated to answer him. I'd invite him in for beers sometimes.

It was my fault. I was too accommodating at first, and didn't quite understand the mind-set of the pest. I didn't understand that if you give him something which appeals to his senses (beer) you will never get rid of him.

He will keep coming back again and again, like an invasive species.

In the end I just played dead in my room and stopped coming to the door. That pretty much solved it.

(4)

It was a Friday afternoon, and I'd gotten home early from work. I pulled the blinds, turned my house into a cave. Then I went deeper into my cave. I climbed into bed and threw the sheets over me. I tried to sleep. I couldn't. I couldn't write either (sometimes I wrote in bed). So I grabbed a tome off the dresser - Schopenhauer's masterpiece and my sort of bible, The World as Will and Representation - and thumbed leisurely through some of the finer passages...

Then it happened. There was a knock on the door and I ignored it. Then there was more knocking and nothing and then a loud bang resounded from the kitchen and the jalousies rattled.

"Hello?"

The voice was in the house. I heard crisp footsteps clicking across the terrazzo floor. They got closer, and then my bedroom door flew open. Boozehound had the knob in his hand.

"Que tal...?" he said.

He dropped his bag (his anchor), and there was nothing I could do.

We drank beers in front of the TV for a while, and a little later, when Shannon came home, we decided we'd all go out for dinner and drinks. First she had to get ready though, and while we waited, Boozehound, who had been telling me all about how his latest relationship folded, discovered a slight crease on the front of his shirt. He tried to smooth it out with his hand, and when that didn't work he requested an ironing board. We didn't have one.

"I don't believe in them," I said.

"Then how do you iron your clothes?"

"I don't do those kinds of things."

"Iron?"

"No."

"What?"

Shannon eventually scrounged him up a little traveling iron and he took off his shirt and as he went to work on the kitchen table, I came to understand that ironing was a magical and sacred pastime for him. It was full of gamble, and all sorts of glorious half-hidden horizons. It made him feel like he was truly in charge of the game, laying it on just right, giving every last uppity crease its proper dressing-down...

When he finally finished, he slung the shirt over a chair and let it cure.

Then he strode through the house in his wife-beater, his big swishing bags of immaculate slack, and these thin blue socks.

"You look really fit Boozehound," Shannon said.

She was sitting with me on the sofa and we were waiting for him to finish up. He grinned and thanked her, then grabbed a comb out of his bag and went for the bathroom. When he came out he did a running slide across the terrazzo, ala Tom Cruise. He did it three more times, each one less necessary the last, and then he threw on his shirt and we left.

(5)

We went to a seafood restaurant at the marina, and sat where we could watch boats as they twinkled up and down the intracoastal. Some of them glittered with Christmas lights and garlands and wreaths and the people all waving as they passed by.
We ordered conch stew and king crab and beers, and Boozehound regaled us with tales about his latest girlfriend, a school teacher. He spoke of their arguments and her idiosyncrasies, like how she collected coasters and snow globes and dragged him to yard sales every weekend. And there was a problem with her grammar. She often said "me and my friends," for instance, instead of "my friends and I," and he embarrassed her once by correcting at dinner-date with some friends, telling her, "mistakes like that are impermissible for a school teacher."

But she was the one who ended it, it seemed.

Something about vanity and the sex wasn't very good. He just wasn't that attracted to her, he said. She had a really pretty face, but this outsized rump he just couldn't get behind. And then the minute little blond hairs striding across her upper lip and how once when they were kissing, he felt a slight prickling sensation and made too much of it when he couldn't make it work.

Still, he considered himself a perfectly marvelous lover, what with his big uncircumcised crank, but he could only maintain these partial erections, he admitted, and that was part of his appeal: "I'm one of those guys," he said, "who can go all night long... without so much as coming."

Shannon seemed a little put-off by that comment, and I knew what she was thinking, but she liked at least one thing about Boozer - that he could open up about the minutia and goings-on in his relationships. Most men couldn't. I couldn't. I was never any good at that. I preferred thinking about other things, and letting my relationships slide. I was selfish like that, but I couldn't help it. I wasn't interested in matters of fact. I found them depressing. It was much easier playing the writer and hiding in my vices and artistic pursuits. That's why Shannon was good for me. She understood, and wasn't too demanding. She was also ultra-independent.

Anyhow...

Later that night, when the restaurant started clearing out, the bill came and Boozehound, who'd also been telling us about his job with the state and how profitable his rental properties were, offered to pay. But when he pulled out his wallet, he saw there was no cash in any of his secret nooks and crannies and asked if an ATM was nearby.

"Don't worry about it," said Shannon. "We'll get it."

"You sure?"

We were sure.

"Just on thing," I said. "You might wake up tomorrow morning in a stolen ambulance next to a dead deer..."

The legend of Boozehound.

He'd never live it down, he said, and to prove it, he snagged the Santa hat off the waitress's head and waved it around. Then he sweetly crooned to her:

"Maybe it's the clothes she wears
Or the way she combs her hair
Oh that makes me want to tell her that I care
Don'tcha know that she's just my style?
Ev'rything about her drives me wild..."

(6)

I saw Boozehound only sparingly in the following weeks and months. We had a minor falling out and it happened like this:

I saw him out at a bar in Ft. Lauderdale one night and we were both drunk and he needed a ride home. He didn't want to spend the money on a cab, so we piled into my car and as we drove down Federal Highway, I mentioned something about philosophy. I tended to philosophize sometimes when I was drunk - a bad habit by almost anyone's standards - but I had this theory about possessions and clinging to things... that there was death in that, and he didn't agree.

"The most important thing in life," he said, "is comfort."

"Comfort's overrated," I said. Then I gave him a few undeniable examples, and he kept playing the role of the devil's advocate and trying to berate me, which was alright, but his motives were obvious.

"I know you're just a country-clubber at heart," I said.

He didn't agree with that one either, and eventually he tried to turn the whole thing into an argument. An angry one. Finally I said, "Just forget about it... I was only throwing something out there... let it go..."

But in the Taco Bell Drive-thru, it only got worse. I pulled up to the menu-board and ordered my regular soft taco, chicken Chalupa and beef Meximelt. Then Boozehound began placing his order. I say "began" intentionally. For him, there was a beginning, a middle and an end to the placing of any order. It was a never-ending process: "I'd like a chicken Gordita, but if you could hold the peco... no wait, hold the lettuce... you people always put too much lettuce on your stuff. Oh, and... I'd also like a taco supreme, uh, no sour cream on that... extra... peco, uh, and...could you please...?"

I couldn't take it anymore. "That's good enough!" I said. I jumped on the pedal. "No Mike! Nooooooooooo!" I slammed on the break and skidded up to the window. Then he brutally shoved me aside, cursing, and ordered everything again just the way he liked it.

But after we left, there was a problem with hot sauce - his little delicate cakehole couldn't endure the treacheries of hot sauce - so I grabbed all the mild and opened up the window.

"Nooooooooo!"

I let it fly.

(7)

2007

I ran into Boozehound several times over the next few years. Once at the Hollywood Casino, once outside an Ethiopian diner in Miami Beach, and I saw him at a few different bars a few different times too. He was going through some kind of personal crisis. I heard about it from a mutual friend of ours. It had to do with his vanity. He was turning forty and having a really hard time with it. He kept getting into petty disputes with people in public places, and one of his former colleagues tried to choke him at a city commission meeting. Also, he'd become somewhat of a serial internet dater. He had his bio and a few photos of himself smiling out of a heavenly backdrop (they were taken in a portrait studio), plastered up on various websites and he was trying his hand that way.

The last time I saw him was at a Saint Patrick's Day celebration in Delray Beach. I was in a little Irish bar a couple blocks from the parade, when I noticed him tooling through the parking lot in a new candy-apple red ragtop Jeep. A few minutes later, he strolled into the bar. He was all got up in safari clothing, pockets and strings hanging everywhere, wide, bullying waterproof pants, his feet shod in a pair of big golliwog jungle boots. Gone were the days of pleated trousers and Polo shirts, replaced by what appeared to be his newfound admiration for fur trappers and the bludgeoners of game.

"If it isn't Crocodile Boozehound," I said.

He smiled at that one and sat down beside me. But when I introduced him to the barmaid as Boozehound, he corrected me, saying he preferred to be called Matthew now. The Boozehound thing was passé, he said.

"An old college nickname," he told the barmaid.

Then he ordered a chicken potpie and a draft. We drank several drafts throughout that afternoon, and our conversation was mostly amicable at first, but eventually it turned speculative and something turned on itself. It began when he said that people are going to keep getting smarter as time goes on.

"How do you figure?" I asked.

"Because there's gonna be more to know. More history, more technological innovations. More information for the mind to acclimate itself to."

"And distract itself with," I said. "Too much information can be distracting."

"How so?"

"If it's not processed correctly, and used wisely, it's useless and distracting. Wisdom is more important than knowledge."

"Yeah, but who says you can't have both?"

"You can," I said, "but most people don't. Most people would rather know how many poisonous snakes there are in North America, than understand what Pascal had to say about salvation. It's just the way it is. People don't want to think. They want to know. They want diversions too. And the more accessible they are, the dumber people will get.

He didn't agree. He said his theory was more in line with Darwinian thinking,
and mine was only "half-baked," and didn't hold water.

"Have you read Darwin?" he asked. "Well I have! I've read Darwin!"

"The people will get smarter as time goes on!" he insisted.

When happy hour was over, the barmaid, who had bought us a couple rounds, tallied up our final bill. She gave it to me and I showed it to Boozehound and he gave me a twenty, which covered his entire tab plus roughly five percent for a tip. Normally I wouldn't have said anything. Normally I would've paid the difference without even thinking about it, but I could see Boozehound was trying to slip one in, and I was sick of his penchant for chintzing out on bills.

"I think you owe a little more," I said. "When you're adding up your share, you can't forget about the taxes. As it is you're only giving her five percent... and she bought us a few rounds..."

"Oh c'mon..." he said. "You're gonna sit here and itemize the bill? Just pay it and lets get on with it."

"Listen, Boozehound..."

"It's Matthew. Call me Matthew."

"Listen Matt..."

"No you listen!" he said. He leapt off his barstool and shoved his wallet into his pocket. "I'm out of here." He pivoted around and stormed out the front doors. Then he barreled through the crowd and shouldered out into the opening. And when he crossed the walkway, he came out into the lights of the street and a heavy wind ruffled his combover, his hugely voluminous corn sack pants dancing with anger.

"Call me Matthew!" they seemed to scream.

End of legend.

intermission...

2008-12-19T19:16:00.012-05:00

(``) I just got news that Raymond Hammond, that keen-sighted visionary & editor of the New York Quarterly, has accepted two of my poems for publication. I also have poems coming out in Slipstream, Main Street Rag & I think I'm in the latest print edition of Underground Voices...

These are all great mags (with great, hard-working editors) and I feel truly honored to be in them.

(#) My Boozehound story's coming along pretty nicely, but I wasted two of my days off being hungover... so I haven't gotten too far. Here's some Chianti-sopped maxims & scribblings in the meantime.

*the soul refines itself through suffering
(happiness therefore is
mostly counter-productive...
in the eyes of any god)
*every family is cursed
*it's easier to make sense than poetry
*only the living dead fear death
*our thoughts are organic
little dying creatures
*perhaps is only a so-called soul
*genius is mostly subaquatic
*most people are only as smart as they can feel
(and as dumb as they do know)
*courage fumbles lovingly death's trouserfly
*all that is earthly is a lie
*exceptions matter more than the rule
*a pastor is a portojuan with wings
*cellphone's defunct

2008-12-02T19:10:00.048-05:00

time leaves its sordid tales behind

2008-11-27T08:52:00.010-05:00

i'm planning on writing some stories for this blog, but i just haven't gotten around to it yet. i've got some pretty good ones though. Like the time i tore down an ex-roommate's front door because i was drunk on vodka and couldn't find my checkbook anywhere, or doing thirty hours worth of sheriff's work days on two hours of sleep and listening to the cop talk pyramids so i didn't have to go back out on the highway and spear trash anymore. I could also mention (or at least allude to) the time i tackled the old lady in the patio furniture store, or the month i spent riding the rails, sitting higgledy-piggledy with three barrel stiffs plus one coach jawrower and a gravedigger named slick fulwood, the five of us in glad rags listening to a hallelujah peddler before hopping off in winnemucca to score a spot in a globe-trotting samba troop, and then the car-salesman who sidelined as a stage prop (in another life) telling me, "you have to be qualified to drive a ferrari."
"qualified? i'm paying cash! what do you want a bag of money?"
"Step into my office."

i will get around to writing some stories, but for now, here's another poem:

Ship It

~ see: Oak Bend Review April '09

life is good, but contempt is better

2008-11-19T15:14:00.019-05:00

(~) here's the scrubbed and disinfected version of the poem down below. i think this one is much better. i thought the other one was really good too when i first posted it, but then i came back to it a day after i wrote the thing and realized where i went wrong, which was pretty much everywhere... what a turkey (vulture). i don't know what i was thinking.

"i was probably drunk" ~ don imus
--

pre-socratic

how you tame a lion is with a chair
and whip, but with a man it's best to grab
a bible and beat him over the head
with it singing god and country
and man oh my... praise be to america's wet-nurses
vibratingbedsalesmen mudbug-
harvesters undertakers failed honkytonk
coverbands anyone who's anyone
whose half-a-mind believes
in the voice of a mob
and the pursuit of life liberty and
that which is wholly
purchasable with a preferred line of credit
at jose's flower boutique & whackshack
back behind that truckstop
off yeehaw junction where the nuns all disguise
themselves as french-
tickler dispensers
and the feeling one gets
having been raised irish-catholic
when your final thought
always involves a line of priests
jockeying for hand-me-downs
outside the xxx goat-foot-emporium and how
did you say
philosophy was
born?

the absinthe drinker

2008-10-29T19:19:00.034-04:00

here's another picasso. he's my favorite painter by far. "picasso gives you things which bulge:grunting lungs pumped full of sharp thick mind" -- ee cummings

my writing leans much onto his painting. and it's still learning "to break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories which it contains." he was one of the few painters who used humor too.

but the whore in this painting... there's something strangely sexy about her. she's got madness in her eyes. something completely sick, like an open nerve ending touched by a slight breeze (slighted by a touched breeze). i understand how she feels. and that's where picasso's genius comes in.
-----

Night Shift

see: decomP ~ April '09

ri-tooral-ooral-addy

2008-10-24T18:46:00.010-04:00

i don't think i have what it takes to be an official blogger yet. i just don't have the ambition or self-love or whatever it is. something about there being precisely twomenandamidget reading this doesn't help much either... but i will try to dredge up my voice. drinking beers (or blue nun qualitatswein-kudos-bottle cost $4.50) helps. the fact that i'm a slow typist (and reader and talker) doesn't.

**** by the way, i heard kerouac was an incredibly fast and proficient typer. that's great. what a gift the sonofabitch had to be able to do that. some people are just marvelously gifted and ya know...,THE STUPIDASS SHOULD'VE BEEN A GODDAMNEDSECRETARY... HE COULDN'T WRITE HIS WAY OUT OF A PROPER

nut(sac)k

here's a political conversation i overheard today:

person #1. "i just have a problem with people who are so adamant about saving the life of a two week young fetus (which is basically almost a tadpole), but don't give a shit about a twentyyearold vet who is maimed for life, or the family of any dead soldier... don't give a shit... yet the same fuckers have the gall to traipse around in camouflage hunter's garb, because they think there's nothing wrong with murdering animals (or wounding them for life) because it's a socalled known fact animals have neither feelings nor souls..."
person#2: "i know, i hate christians.
#1: i was actually talking about republicans.
#2: there's a difference?
#1: there's republicans who aren't christians, but not the other way around.
#2: well the christians are the worst of the bunch. the born agains.
1: i call 'em born again phonies..hypocrites.introduce me to one who isn't and we'll talk.
2: forget the hypocrite thing. they're sociopaths. they just know how to hide their monstrous souls well. with them, everything's about them & feeding the goat within.don't be misguided.
1: i won't

Alone in a Libyan desert...

2008-10-16T20:45:00.020-04:00

i have a hard time keeping up a blog. i am not interested in telling people about the mundane things that happen in my life, and i don't think they are interested in them either. i write one or two peoms a week. i am not writing any stories anymore. i will write a novel in about 7-11 years (after i come back from germany, where I plan on going in about 1.5-2 years). and switch gears. until then it's drinking and poetry. and working. and trying to be by myself as much as I can. i don't take too many phone calls anymore. i don't have too many friends, and i want to keep it that way. to be an artist, to truly harness your genius (if you have it...or think you do) is a sad and painful thing. and oh so lonely. and oh so maddening. and I can tell you it has nothing to do with happiness, that's for sure. except when the magic comes, then it's real. and life doesn't seem like such torment. but the magic only comes to go, like everything else in the world. And then you're left living some more. your 3rd rate life. is it worth it? it's probably not, but for me... there's someone out there i'm trying to impress. another me. who probably hasn't even been born yet, but needs me the same way I needed... dostoyevsky, turgenev, e.e. cummings, bukowski, montaigne, schopenhauer, voltaire, jeffers... the ones who put the line down with blood. i am putting my whole life on the line (in unseen ways) for this... the trial muse, and the wine of my incantations. for the next line that may come to me, as i walk out into death any evening. i'm dead serious about this, and it all makes perfect sense to me.

you can't fake madness & time is the monster lurking behind all earth's horrors

2008-09-23T21:03:00.034-04:00

Here's a question that's always bothered me: I'm not sure whether I'm entirely 100% sane or not. I suspect I am, but you never know for sure. I think I'm just touched at times. It's really easy for me to ACT sane though. Does it take being sane to act? I don't think so - see: Artaud. Anyway, here it is tuesday evening in the world and I am drinking a budweiser (my last, my next is a Chelado -Budweiser & Clamato - I don't know what the hell that's doing in my fridge, it's hangover beer) and I've scarfed down some Lorazapams and I'm waiting for the muses to come into this room and caress my eyelids and whisper something in my ear. Something I haven't heard before, which draws the curtains of my thinking down and reveals the hounds and fairies dancing around backstage.

Nothing's. Happening. But. Time. This time.
------------
At any rate...

Or shall a poet be content to languish
In the degradation of what heaven gave
To be his right? the highest human power
Frittered away to serve your little hour?

Faust Pt. 1

I love that line, because I am tormented by certain people and their little hours... especially when they come and try to murder yours (which you consider precious)... Most people can't survive their own minds, which is the problem. When they get bored and have to climb back into themselves for a moment... they look around, see the desolate wasteland, the thick slime-deposits outgassing... and then an image invariably bubbles up... your face rises out of the dung. it floats above. they must make it real to escape themselves... they pick up the phone... you don't answer (they're calling air)... it doesn't matter. They know where to find you. It's your day off (they know all your days off, by the way) and you are at home and they know how to get there. You might have even forgotten to lock the door.

---
Charmin

See ~ Zygote in My Coffee 3-16-09

In the beginning was the Deed

2008-08-06T09:39:00.018-04:00

I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago, and got a relatively cheap room ($105/night) at the historic Ambassador East. It's a pretty okay place, although the Pump Room isn't what it once was, and the walls in the rooms are so thin you almost have to whisper so your neighbor doesn't hear you. One morning I woke up and my woman was singing and laughing when suddenly we heard a loud bang on the wall. "It's 6:00 in the goddamn morning!" someone yelled. It was a woman's voice, husky and unpleasant. "Where'd that come from?" I asked. The voice heard me. The walls got beaten again. "Shut up! Shut up! We're fucking sleeping!"

I rolled over in bed. "Exactly what kind of beast is this?" I wondered.

I never found out. We let the creature sleep and never heard from it again.
--
Later that morning, I walked along Lakeshore Dr., and around and about all the way to Wrigley Field. It had been about thirty years since the last time I was there. I remember watching the Pirates & Cubs play. This is when the Pirates had Dave Parker and Willie Stargell & the Cubs' great jewel was their catcher Barry Foote. He was a heel though. And so were the Cubs. They still are. I always preferred the Sox (White or Black).

Anyway, I lapped Wrigley and ended up at a used bookstore on N. Clark. I perused the place. Couldn't find anything worthwhile, but just before I left one of the employees was carting a stack of books and as she moved past me one book fell off the shelf and landed on my foot (my barry foote). It was Faust Part 1, by Goethe, Penguin Classics 1949.

I opened it:

"Well, well, keep at it: ply the shears and paste
Concoct from feasts of other men your hashes
And should the thing be wanting in fire or taste
Blow into flame your little heap of ashes:"

The exact book I was looking for. I just didn't know it yet. I bought it and went back to my hotel, which happened to be on Goethe St.
--

twentytwelve prophesy

2008-07-09T09:53:00.023-04:00

Prophesy for 2012

Humanity won't be very humane in 2012. They won't bother to change their whims or ways. They will see red and feel blue, and green will be the color of their envy, and their cowardice yellow and they will tell each other white lies. They will devour everything and desire even more, yet nothing will satisfy them, and they will die for nothing too.

Mankind will never change, no matter what the pastors and prognosticators may preach. They will murder virtue for vice, and God for money. They will make gods out of knaves, rogues and thieves. They will edify lotharios, together with mobsters, sharpsters, harpies, bunglers, bucklers-of-swash, butchhaired mopes & rope-a-dopefiends.

Expect more of the same in twentytwelve.

Winter

Fools will rule in the first month, particularly when Capricorn holds sway. Men with misshapen skulls, underslung jaws and penguinfeet will emerge from their subterranean stumbling grounds and clamber up the ranks. They will obtain positions they'd been quietly eyeing all along. Some will become bigwigs and head cheeses in the corporate belly; others will carve out niches for themselves as mouthpieces for shitmerchants. All will be highly in vogue.

January 31st: As Eros glides past Earth, electromagnetic radiation combined with sleet & low atmospheric pressure will cause several different species to crossbreed. Polar bears and elk will copulate, possums and ground squirrels occasionally rendezvous & in Wood Buffalo, Alberta, an ape with messed up biorhythms will slip on a banana peal (his trainer's excuse) and rape a drunken rent-a-cop.

Spring

Springtime will bring crime levels to new highs in the lower fortyeight. Pursesnatchers & pocketpicks will be in season in most metropolitan areas. They will blame the gas prices for their desperation, as well as pawnshops & their henpecking wives. In Miami, three underhanded Overtown men will pilfer an outsized Virgin Mary statue and get arrested selling the copper for scrap - a sign of the times. I recommend paying it no mind, but instead preoccupying yourself with lighthearted diversions. Play the sludge pump on your front stoop. Keelhaul a deadbeat dad. Kill your first bear. Wear stretchpants and moonboots & go potato sack racing in the night. And in the daytime, read the ancients - Xenophon, Aristophanes, Seneca, etcetera. And remember what Horace once wisely said:

"Well-timed folly has a sweet relish"

And Lucretius too:

"Eject the gathered sperm in anything at all"

...But for Christ sakes, do stop draining your balls in front of your computer. It will ruin your sex life, and besides, someone's liable to find the evidence you leave behind.

Summer

The summer of 2012 will be presaged by several oracles & omens. In Gemini, just after Venus passes by, crows and bulls will be particularly loud and unruly, and an eagle will drop a clump of earth on a tyrant's head. I'm not sure what this means in the scheme of things, but I do suggest keeping an eye out for signs like these, and also for unlicensed soothsayers, keeping in mind all the while what Pacuvius said:

"For those who understand the speech of birds,
and learn from others' inwards more than from their own
We may well hear, but not attend, their words."

Too much superstition, after all, is what drove Alexander the Great mad. It did in & did away with whole armies, ages, factions and nations. And I foresee that come midsummer, on the Rue Saint-Cyr in Port-au-Prince, it will induce a befuddled midget to shit his pants and walk crabwise.

Expect flash floods, mudslides, wildfires & thunder storms in August. Bird flu, killer bees, ozone depletion and human stampedes should also be expected, along with meteorites & dead flowers. All of these things coupled with cost-push inflation will pervade the collective unconscious on deeper levels, giving rise to spiritual & climatic discontent among the populous, and causing many to suffer under the weight of their most nagging neuroses.

I recommend as a remedy taking a reprieve from all the world's affairs. Get yourself in a dark room, and get drunk often on Irish whiskey & Riesling Kabinett. It will chase away your blues, and get you in the habit of comparing your life not with the lives of other women and men, but with marigolds and hummingbirds, with moon and star and any creature or thing uninhibited by self-consciousness. For they are the best exemplars of living correctly. They show us the way. They regret & dread nothing.

You'll understand this best in your cups.

September 5th-20th: As the Fall Equinox approaches, Muslims will be at odds with Jews, Christians will claim superiority over Hindus, and angels will avoid any dogooder whose deeds are stained by self-interest, i.e. by ego - every devil's plaything & the speaking thing for those who claim to know:

"The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider or some loathsome Insect over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as Worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the Fire..."
--Jonathan Edwards, 1741

Yet rolling holy slimedeposits like him will be all the rage in 2012, especially when Libra finds its stride. Be ready for them. Beware of the branding irons they stash behind their pulpits. Beware of their lies. And be leery especially of the love they have for themselves. It is the most destructive force within them. It keeps them dangerous and makes them death to the Divine.

Autumn

Spinsters and frogprinces will crawl out of their personal ads & retreat back to the forests. They will hide high in poplar trees until the leaves begin to fall. Then they will come down and climb into spiraling gopherholes in the underworld, all leading to a desert plain from which will ascend a towering hourglass teetering on a cross full of eyes. It will morph into a mandolin sundial inscribed with Sanskrit numerals. Then it will whirl backwards & become a celestial waterwheel pushed by a bungling pair of conjoined harlequins. They will heave it wholly over a dune & argue it down a long highway whose floor is a fun house mirror. A mirage then will swallow them piecemeal, and a chrysalis will appear, inverting its wings & changing its form into a floating door that opens to reveal a spatial dimension where amputees, giantesses, and bandylegged elves are all entangled in a Bacchanal. All of this will be presided over by a carnival yodeler in women's underthings, and the following sages: Descartes & Kierkegaard.

Look for our newcomers to stay here for awhile.

October 5th-31st: Pay careful attention to the dreams your days are rounded by around this time. If they are vivid and involve the dancing of pagans, vegans, or the bathing rituals of he-goats & spiny primordial creatures you must remember the psyche's intent - it doesn't undress itself in vain. Yin & yang. Ebb & flow. Second sight is clearest in the night. Dreams best dreamt are meant to restore balance in your mind.

November 11th: Unless it's absolutely necessary, avoid cow-tipping on this day.

As the Christmas season approaches, global consumer confidence will trend upwards, unemployment will trend downwards, and the old pastime of attaching highsounding epithets to dull and ordinary things will evolve into a mania. Just as now the garbageman has been renamed sanitation engineer, as the plaquescraper is better known as the dental hygienist, and as the lounge chair is called a chaise lounge, so new names will be created in order to confound the public & conceal from them the contemptible reality of so many cheerless commonplaces.

Hence the cockroach, I predict, will become the jaunty blatta; the Dumpster will be renamed a fortified refuse thingamabob; the small-engine mechanic will insist on being called an internal combustion specialist; and all plumbers will presently refer to themselves as crapologists.

"We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one." - Pascal

Winter

The Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar will complete its 13th Baktun cycle on December 21st, as the solstice sun reaches the southern terminus of the Milky Way's Dark Rift. The ancient Mayans considered this point the Tree of Life, the symbolic axis-mundi which joins the Underworld with the terrestrial realm and the sky. According to them the creation lord Bolon Yokte K'u will descend from the sky-earth cleft, and a Cosmo genesis will occur. The world will be reborn & transformed.

Some take this to mean mankind will undergo a great metamorphosis; that we will be spiritually enlightened & morally superior to what we are now.

I take this to mean the galaxy may alter its old ways, and exchange its primal mask & cape, but mankind won't change a thing (about itself).

Where the Tree of Life engenders the will-to-survive, the devil does play. The Absurd is the order of the day, and sorrow, always,
prevails.

when the hookers keep getting better looking you know you're in a recession

2008-04-30T08:10:00.008-04:00

I first of all want to say I think the woman to my left is the most beautiful I've ever seen in a painting. Nothing quite like the good old fashioned ever-elusive giantess.

Secondly, I wanted to mention how bad things are, economically speaking, in the US of A right now. We're in a recession (and have been since about May of last year) no matter what anyone says. I know this for one reason and one reason only: because that's when the prostitutes started getting better looking.

Maxims & Reflections

2008-02-29T19:25:00.010-05:00

^^^^ Here's some winesoaked maxims & reflections:

Never trust a man named
Bobby or Billy or Ricky

The weak will remain weak and the
strong will only appear that way

Fools are often better
educators than wisemen

It's better to compete with birds
and beasts and flowers than with men

Most men bloom swift, (somewhere between
ages 16-22) then spend the
rest of their lives
wilting

Consciousness is the shit-rift
between dream & death

Life is for the most part biding
your time being in time and
waiting

Wait until your dreams are as
ready for you as you are for
them; dreamchasing is a tender
act & cannot be forced

When dreams begin to write themselves
in legalese I will commit hari-kari

Putrid egos bulge
and pander for popular
approval

Egos eat themselves like second growths

Any dolt can (and does) have a
conviction regarding politics

The whisper of
oblivion is the breath eternal

Man plants his germs in the machinery
of the universe

Some hells are worse for their
plausibility

You must wear the
albatross of the people

Spirit & Body will never
find
one another
if they go looking

God made man on a Friday
his failures are ours
to
fix

(he had the courage of matzo balls)

I'm So Fucking ~~~~ kunk

2008-02-15T19:12:00.015-05:00

If you have a problem with the latest school shooting (shoal scooting) at NIU, blame the fucking media. They're the ones who propagate this trundling mess. If you're angry about this don't blame shooter's parents or his upbringing. Don't even think about blaming him. All he is is a fleck of phenomenon misguided by his messiah ego and a couple three malfunctioning neurons. It doesn't matter. Blame the fucking media.

Blame Katie Couric.

Blame Brian Williams.

Blame every snootfute who's a mouthpiece or delving behind the scenes looking for answers to his fucking douchedick histrionics.

They're the answer. And they know it.

Any victim's loved one should be so offended.

Blame money, ultimatel7y. $$$$

But don't think about blaming the pig who did this.

These liverlillyed cocksuckers who publicize....

i know it's a futile request, but...
leave massmurderer's identities
anonymous

Schultze Gets the Blues

2008-01-19T07:29:00.000-05:00

I just saw the best movie I've seen in about ten years. It's a German film with English subtitles called Schultze Gets the Blues (2003). The main character is the biggest hump of an accordion player & hardly says anything throughout the movie, but he doesn't need to. He plays his part of the froghuman perfectly without even trying.

The only other movies I can think of that compare are Sideways (Paul Giamatti = best actor of our time), and maybe Napoleon Dynamite, which it's similar to at least from a directorial standpoint.

The Three Musicians

2007-10-06T16:45:00.001-04:00

<-- Picasso - The Three Musicians - The more you look at it the better and funnier Picasso gets. This is what I want my poems to read like.

(^^) Below is a sonnet about my great-grandpa Rudy. I don't know much about him - he died in 1936-7? I know this:
He lived near Frankfurt in Germany. He was a butcher. When my grandma was about 2-3 he cheated on his wife with the housekeeper at the hotel/butcher shop his father owned. He stood to inherit the hotel. When he found out the housekeeper was pregnant he trashed his inheritance stole money from the cash register and fled for America (Chicago) to avoid what if any scandals?

In Chicago he opened a butcher shop somewhere & sold Oscar Meyer wieners on the side.

W/in a year he paid back the money he stole from the cash register + interest.

He had the 1st motor-car in Oswego. A couple years later when everyone had one he had three.

He weighed 300lbs.

When he went back to Germany in the 30s (to visit) Hitler was in power and you weren't supposed to buy from Jewish merchants. He thought that was bullshit and bought from them anyway. He did what he wanted, hated rules. Here's the rest of him/his story:

Rudolph Knapp

(see: Slipstream Aug. '09)

God's Mills

2007-09-28T18:23:00.000-04:00

I just found out my (2nd or 3rd or 4th?) cousin Lilo Beil is now (this week) a best selling author in Germany. Her book is called Gottes Muhlen, i.e. God's Mills, i.e. "The mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small" - also one of my favorite ancient (Greek?) quotations.

Here is her book description half-translated from German by computer:

Friedrich Gontard, young, well looking, melancholischem view, is Kriminalkommissar and the clearing-up of a child murder in the südpfälzischen province is assigned. It is the year 1957. The Gontard still traumatisierte by the war dips into Pfaffenbronn into a Mikrokosmos, which seems to lag behind as in a time journey ten years. The young man from education-civil Frankfurt house here everything is not free and open enough. The tendency in the village brews itself together. The murder the outsider Otto Straub is suspected. More is here not betrayed

hurray

hurrah

for lilo beil
my 2nd or 3rd or 4th cousin
everyone should go out and get
Gottes Muhlen
it reads in German
but it reads
well

lilo also wrote a story
about my great-
grandpa
he
was a butcher hawked
wieners in Chicago
& fled Germany w/ wife & kid
after sticking his
in the maid
- how
could you not wanna write
something about a guy
such as
him.

hiphip
hurray
for lilo & my fodder's mutters fodder
great-grandpa Rudy Knapp
300lb.
wiener-broker, Chicago's finest.

* I saw the above Picasso in MOMA (NYC) last week. One of my all time faves. It's called Harlequin.

Captain Tony's

2007-09-15T21:19:00.001-04:00

I was in Key West not long ago, and I began drinking at the Green Parrot. It's a blues bar and the jukebox is full of blues songs, and I'm not really a blues fan - some of it's alright, but it gets old pretty fast. Anyway, I'm in there alone and I'm drinking Heinekens as fast as I can because I don't know anyone and I figure if I drink fast enough someone will get interesting or I will get interesting, and my mind will wander away from the blues - I was feeling a little depressed at the time, but more than that I was feeling edgy - don't ask, I made a mistake. So I'm gunning these beers back to get my mind off everything and it's starting to work and I order another and the waitress finally says, "Hey, where you putting these?" "I'm dumping them out in the toilet," I say. She gives me a hard look. "Carry on..."

A while later I'm at the Half-Shell on the wharf. I'm feasting on conch soup and oysters, sitting amidst license plates. The walls there are full of license plates, i.e. specialty tags, with clever witticisms and innuendos on them. This to me is if not the height, at least a tall mogul of dumb-shit American diversionary indulgence. I scanned the plates for the best/worst one. I decided I would never wanna be a passenger in a car with Ohio plates that said "HOP IN." But it was right over my head. It was just plumb
wrong.

Here's a poem I got out of that night. I ended up at Captain Tony's Saloon - the original Sloppy Joe's, where Hemingway used to mill about. I ended up drinking rum with Robert Frost's great-nephew (he's a kayak-outfitter in Key Largo, soft-spoken, funny, egoless, one of the better ones - never even bothered reading his uncle's stuff - says it just doesn't interest him - me neither - Frost can pound sand for all I care - I can't think of anyone who I don't like better than him), and his jail-bound buddy who wound up balls-naked in the Garden of Eden later that night and got thrown out by the scowling tarbender for continually forgetting to put the complimentary washrag under his ass when he sat on his bar stool - it was more than a little disturbing - he was the only nude in the (clothing optional) bar, too drunk to remember the washrag.

(+) 428 Greene Street ~ see: Underground Voices Poetry

Killing the Eagle

2007-09-03T15:05:00.000-04:00

I wrote a story called Killing the Eagle. It was published in Underground Voices a few months ago. But there's a strange story/coincidence behind it.

I wrote the thing in December of 2005. Two weeks after I finished, the real Road Dog - the symbolized eagle in the story - Road Dog died in his sleep I think on his sofa. He was only forty. No one saw it coming. Not even his girlfriend who (I heard) just sat there running her fingers through his long hair and weeping while she waited for the medics to come and whisk him away.

There's a whole page and DVD and pics dedicated to him on the website of the bar where my story actually happened.

Here's the link. http://www.natsden.com/

Killing the Eagle you can find here. http://www.undergroundvoices.com/UVPowersMP2.htm

Red Wraith

2007-08-25T03:50:00.001-04:00

First of all, I wanna thank Big One of Bukowski fame for posting this link... the reason I got rid of it is because I equate the below poem to a pair of cokeheads spending their night doing lines together and coming up with a business idea/stratagem they believe is genius, only to wake up the next day w/ the realization that patenting zero gravity oven mittens and warehousing them in Manchurian brothels wasn't such a good idea after all. In fact it was dumb
as shit.

Somewhere between dawn and dusk,
between dreams of cathedrals
and crematoriums I am
awakened
in my motel room my roll
by bells tolling Easter Sunday.

I have only dirty sheets to veil
the dirty sounds. They are draped over
the windows like animal hides
butchers
hang to dry,
dripping slowly still the blood
of Christ what was last
night? Was the mile I walked on Mayan
time? I remember graffiti
on a bathroom wall -
something about last-ditch dreams
on this last-ditch isle.

Is this where failed men come after
failing love and war? Are my six
dead soldiers gleaming from
the shelves turning
coke remnants on the cover
of The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell?

It's not the Arab
with the bulletproof pants,
yet I am no closer to the infinite
than the scrubwoman downstairs
cleansing doors with her
with her clunky
cart.

Physiognomy

2007-07-12T05:39:00.000-04:00

{!!} A person's character is often revealed less by what he says than by the subtleties he unknowingly exudes. There is almost nothing that a person does that doesn't in some way betray him - his gait, his gaze, the inflections of his voice, his posture, laugh, every mannerism, the clothes he wears, a sigh, a grunt, a belch - everything is telling, everything pronounces something.

A person's physical traits too have a voice of their own. There is much that speaks of a man by the symmetry of his ears or eyes, or by the shape & contours of his skull. Even his rump is a novel of its own, and I can usually learn more about someone by what I see in him than by what is spoken of him or by what he propounds.

"The tongue expresses only the thoughts of one man, but the face expresses a thought of nature herself." - Schopenhauer

I think Velazquez was following my same train of thought when he decided to depict the hump in the smock in the painting above. Not only does his face "discover" him, but also his pregnant posture, his hands, and particularly his outspread legs. If you cdn't slide a sofa-bed through them without him knowing, you couldn't slide anything through, and for this I do not believe I wd've liked him. I can only imagine what self-indulgent atrocities this charlatan committed during his lifetime. I can only imagine what rings of hell his monstrous prancing feet led his people through.

Wholly Crustacean

2007-07-08T13:55:00.000-04:00

[?] When I am drinking heroically, or thinking about booze (as is my wont wnever I'm sober); when I am reading Sterne, or Swift, or Joyce or Burroughs; when I listen to the strains of the Irish fiddle and they lift me through the chimney to the rooftops then sink me into such a dark depression that even plastic bags become a threat; when I think about my furies, my hatreds, my loves, & the seesaw of emotions that fill my soul every day, I know I am Irish through and through.

But when I read the works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heine, and even more than that when I listen to Bach and Beethoven as I always do; when I want nothing more than to write & work, and work & write and when I don't such a deep feeling of listlessness/ogida comes over me that I can hardly handle myself, let alone others (having been cursed w/ the inability to make small talk, I am wholly crustacean, and avoid my neighbors in the most shameful ways for fear of being pried out of the glory of my shell), I know my German ancestors have their hands in my soul, and are turning my inward glance towards them.

But when I am transposed by the paintings of Edvard Munch; when I am reading Hamsun; when I am overtaken by a feeling of wanderlust and lusting for the ocean, or want to go fishing in a crab boat on the Bering Sea - this last hardly ever happens -

"never having had a fondness for catching fish" -- Turgenev

But when it does I know I am more Norwegian than anything.

I am 2/3rds Irish and German, parts Norwegian, and am just beginning to figure on what came from where, & who is responsible for my particularly sad form of madness.

It was probably the English. I have some of that in me too.

“It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.” -- D.H. Lawrence

On Welts Wanting One More Seasoning

2007-07-08T08:29:00.001-04:00

(--.) The farther we are from our hometowns, and from those who know all our faults and that which makes us both slavish and mortal, the better we are perceived. Most people aren't aware of this, but I actually have somewhat of a cult following in a small village in Madagascar. They are promulgating my legend among their people and several neighboring communities as we speak, they tell me, but they need more donations. Apparently there's traveling expenses and printing costs I didn't foresee when I became involved with them. But their accountant has been both accurate and thorough w/ the statements he has sent me, and I believe in the urgency of this cause, so my money has been well spent.

"If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it." -- Author Unknown

('') Death needs nothing but its own dark humor; death is stuffing turkeys and wearing latex gloves tonight; death will assail the boudoir in grandmother's bloomers
come midnight.

(*) Ya ever notice that the more you try to cure someone of the character flaws that most become them, the more you actually drive them back into themselves, thus enhancing what you wished most to eradicate in the first place?

In other words, "You can drive out nature w/ a pitchfork, but she always returns." -- Horace

And when she does return she returns in full fury.

Observation Makes Art Real

2007-07-07T16:12:00.000-04:00

(/\.) The paintings I post in here relate either subtly, obviously, or in no way at all to what I write, but I like looking at them more than I do photos (especially of myself - there's nothing more crass and vain than filling your blog up w/ pics of yourself - writing about yourself is vain enough).

"We speak little if not egged on by vanity." ~François de la Rochefoucauld

Anyway, I spent about five hours last summer at the Art Institute of Chicago looking at Picassos, Toulouse-Lautrecs, Van Goghs, etc., and it wasn't enough. My girlfriend had to drag me out of the place.

"Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." -- Burroughs

our culture is an arm in the crapper reaching for a baby wipe that never should've been flushed in the first place

2007-07-06T17:34:00.000-04:00

#(1) Intro
(b.) intermezzo stomp

#(2) Here's a quote from today's paper: "The little lickspittle wasn't satirizing, he really thought his pimps, buggers and opulent idiots were important, instead of the last mold on the dying cheese." And this is so true. If you lived with them, you'd wish you didn't. And if you never did you'd romanticize them. I was chased yesterday by a guy with a hammer. He hurled it at a rack of pumps behind me. I told him next time that happens you better kill me, because if you don't I'm gonna get that fucking thing somehow and beat the fuck out of you with it. I don't believe Proust ever had a hammer-wielding idiot moving towards him. Because if he did, it would've helped. It would've stripped the tinsel from his dark clouds.

#(~) Predators accused in periwigs and clown suit trappings 'midst bitter root and tangled bougainvillea. Eating fried pork and conch stew on the courthouse corner of Quadrille and Olive under a sign that says,
"I used a P.D." and Salt Chunk Mary too.

And somehow I knew this time is closer
The burn of tobacco in my throat
Everyday offering something you should take
Everyone something you should learn

They're there for that.

And I keep clearing my throat.

#(3) Humberto Checklick vs. Mohan Pickholtz in the blue tint twilight.
Laundry strung across Brooklyn tenements
Crescent moon coming up over them
Men with heads filled with small-time schemes
rummaging through their pockets for receipts
Checklick sparring a horsefly on a fish hook
Checklick strong of back and weak of mind
Pickholtz sawing a violin for low foreheads
Checklick's double-fisted pigeon-toed passion
Mohan pleading for a fifth
The sixth chapter wearing like an old pair of pants
Schopenhauer throwing old ladies down flights of stairs
Humanity's victorious pumping fist
The crowd a sea of tiny beetle grins
Zweiter Teil, Erster Tiel!
A couple of corn-fed oafs in the knoll
Christians in blaze-orange hunting gear
because they know
And Wilma Pug in a Buick,
her wagging pink tongue slapped down her
throat like a wax seal on a fat envelope
As graveyards grow more teeth
And we forget to remember what's worst.

#(4) CAIRO, Illinois -- MISSING MARINE CAUGHT IN SPIDERHOLE WEARING GUNITE AND ASS-SHOT TROUSERS. Yea big midget unaccounted for. (( )) <-- wholly bandy.

#(5) Good's the best form of cowardice,
and Evil's best when you're willing to die
one death or a thousand continuous
ones

# 6.) But goodness is not cowardice. Good is letting someone in the culture you've created know. Them. It's not about you. The truest cliche. Someday I'll do more than spout. We don't sacrifice lambs anymore. Our time is the only thing on the alter. And it's usually just
useless time anyway, but we don't know it yet.

#(^^). SUGARKANE -- Sturm und Drang, like Siegfried & Roy
Horn, but the lion is me
walking with fools and sleeping with sorrow
and the dream:
her ass crack slowly swallowing her sweat pants
munching a pair of ELECTIVE INFIRMITIES
and Claribel
tall enough to hunt geese with a rake
a bingo parlor of embittered old comedians
catering to bones but not heart
and Steve Allen's dead gams
using a jockstrap for an oxygen mask
and the way he sidelines in locker rooms
disguised as a bar of soap
while squirting blue dye
in crappers
as though it's the height
of class
to have blue water
shot through
crappers.

My co-worker trumping every story with one more wild and far-reaching (reaching something other than truth, always) which is the quickest way to kill a conversation and inspire hate.

#(*) G.W. Bush harvesting daggers under a dove-white kerchief folded neatly on his lap, his strategy session consisting of sumo wrestling with (pompous) blowhards
Commodore Nutt playing "The Vulture Hustle" on a sludge pump
Bill 0. fielding circus peanuts lobbed across a Romper Room bounce house.

Each session consisting especially of diapers
(soiled) in the middle of the ring.

#(::) HURLO-THRUMBO -- And it's so much like that lately, trading hyperbolic tooth for the direct look in the eye from a dog (human or otherwise), and I remember our hugger-mugger salutations so long ago Jesus windblown on a skiff doing hack squats with a masthead (because he looked like a crucifix) the tarpon even parting his wake
and I remember when she said she hardly knew me
drunk on the prow with a dinky crossbones flag violently hoisted
my composure more of Buford T. Justice
than of any Redbeard you could drum up
and if you wanna know where my dignity is I'll dig that up too
and I don't drink anymore
unless the hands of the clock are on a time
and she could've been rude
ambling under there overseas
A cripple in a Turkish trench coat
Peering through shop windows with her submarine
periscope.

In a silvery lean to (pup).

Tugboats passing in the night, and the tolling of bells
and then darkness
and then silence.

Forgive me for my misdeeds and that place in my heart where you are.

But I hope you get better too.

#(4) Instrumental

#) Wine is better the longer it observes from the shelves. I'm more wine than I am heliotrope.

#(7 The shelves at my house filled with Emmett Kelly Jr., W.C. Fields figurines where the head was a cork for a drink never drunk. My dad was an S & L kinda guy. Something happened. My mom taught Spanish and English. Money eludes them still like water parting a jutting rock. Though they still believe in it (even if it were a hobby). They never stopped doing that, despite all it's done for them (in the way of nothing). Of course it has a purpose. I'm not talking about that. Most
people just never can step back from the thing. Even for a moment. It's why most men in America who retire after 65 die within two years. What else is there, for them? All there is is the thing. And insurance too.

Death Brokers with ice picks at their immediate disposal. As feral hogs charge with their eyes closed.

#(V.) CALYPSO -- Beethoven Sym. #9., Choral Fantasy, Bach, Shosta. #15,
Van Morrison.

But modern music is time; classical is eternity.

#(11). And it's never too late to Mendelssohn. But it doesn't mean I
like him.