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

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

Ulrich Schnauss - Suddenly the trees are giving

fact

the back of no one's head is wise

Erik Satie

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

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!

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

Koln & Paris

<--- 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

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

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

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