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

feeling vs. thinking

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

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)