Toccata & Fugues

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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

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...

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

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