Sunday, August 18, 2024

Free, until we die so soon



Why for the terrible

and loathsome burden

of  freedom        Gummed

movements in amber    are

rubbed upon a thick blue erection 

Stands a building         a dwelling-in that

is teaching us how to be  upright 

against a horizon within a ground


A blue    so blue     and a black

like the strings   unraveled

from a blanket’s weft re-homed in my mouth

and whistled over the jug of time

An imperfect rhythm     empty of space

these words lacking wave     are

loping into the breach on a stiff decline

Spilt drawers unzipped, upended


particles unpocketed and 

pushing paint into the corners

behind my teeth

Savoring the colors   my tongue darts

to track the guts of books

belayed round the split text-block 

The actual words in their thingness

hued and unbroken by prism


A piece of trapped lunch worried at

until freed    my voice finds a rush

over a swirl of color         while flattened paint

is dragged crying from the corner

onto a caboose of other end-things

With a perfect pulse and a shelf of fingers

in seance and glued tip to song tip

caught as catch can, that is


loping round a circle in decline

It steps upon itself       in overstuffed hymns

forgetting our births

in human ignorance 

This facticity of incompleteness 

a vector of things possible 

yet undone        and tasking

our tongues to find choice

Saturday, December 30, 2023

Riding the Rails with Grandpa (excerpt from a joint effort)

      

    Back on the highway I had pretty good luck thumbing and eventually arrived in El Paso. I took  a cheap room for the night, intending to spend the next evening in Juárez. I had never been outside the States so I had been excited to go, but I had also heard from a fairly reliable source that I should exhibit caution by not missing the last tram back that night, or it would be likely be a long night in a Mexican jail for me. Hobo legend had it that a night in the tank in Mexico will leave you shirtless, penniless, and without shoes…at best.  Plenty of these old tall-tale tellers had already found themselves in local bastiles, American and otherwise, so I was inclined to believe their stories and triple checked the trolley schedule before continuing. Risking offense to our southern neighbors, I must tell you dear reader, that in 1931 Juarez was a filthy town. A filthy town with legion ears tuned to the jingle of American coin. Yours truly wasn’t about to be lured into any drunken folly tonight.

     I had guessed that every imaginable vice was available south of the border and as I decanted from the trolley I was approached by a young native who I consider to have been the youngest procurer I have ever witnessed. He looked to be about eight years old and gave me a start when he approached me to solicit business with the local ladies. Knowing zero Spanish I shook my head and continued on. I traveled along the main drag, an almost uninterrupted row of saloons, many of which bore American names. Slot machines were everywhere. Even out on the sidewalk one-armed bandits stalked prey with their flashy lures… and I was stupid enough to think that I could possibly leave Juarez with a net gain. It was not to be of course, and after losing about three of my few precious remaining dollars, I came to the conclusion that all of these machines were rigged. So I quit before I was completely broke. I cursed my own stupidity and punished myself by refraining from buying so much as a single cerveza. I suppose the lesson I learned was worth something… but not more than what I had in my own pocket, and I wasn’t going to risk these precious last three bucks, which in 1931 was substantial. All of my worldly wealth. 


     He is uniquely cold in the worst way and wears long johns October through May. Everybody gets shivery, but he gets it from the inside out at the same time as outside in.  He wears fingerless gloves so the world is still knowable. Because he likes to touch. With his fingers, his eyes (down as they are), and his ears.  Clipped and jaded, grit in the clefts, crusty, ill. Highway forehead rolls off between the skin of his pate and his fingers, then rolls that into his palms. Small beads darkest salt molting. 

     He hasn’t had a seizure in weeks now so he’s all cocky.  He eats that cereal with the cold milk as heat drains from his base, bite by wet, crunchy, bite.  Going nowhere, yet it’s gone. He can feel it coming and if he stops now he’s pretty sure it’ll stop also.  But he can’t leave the bowl uneaten. His blood is near ice. He then convulses for several minutes. His teeth chattering and his muscles are absolutely rigid. He somehow gets himself to a blanket and seals himself in against the cool and painful air.


     

     When I got back to my room in El Paso I checked on those last three dollars and stashed them in my belt.  A few coins I put in my pocket. My room was paid for but only for that night, which i spent much of nervously calculating my next move. I certainly didn’t want to return home licked. Besides I didn’t think I could stretch my money far enough to make it back.  California was at least as close as Chicago and I figured I’d have a better chance in the land of golden opportunity to replenish my finances. And California had seaports and I was still thinking about intercontinental travel.  South America was still beckoning. 



This print of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, bluing through time, reaching…        

the modulation of the exposure makes it breathe

a black and white John Wayne ends up on the wrong end of a Benjamin Tyler Henry patented lever-action rifle, held by a man of color. 

Blanks. 

Horses dying. Real horses dying. 

Blanks.  If only….     

Hollywood used real Indians in the background, injuns, real Native Americans. 

Blanks.  If only….  

John Wayne doesn’t know it but this red man is abusing him verbally, having quite the time, positioning him in native space, libertine in nature. Ah, and there’s the rub. 

John Wayne sitting smug atop a doomed prop horse




     After I had sufficiently done the math and decided on my next path, I managed to get enough good sleep to get off on a good early morning start. From now on I’d have one main meal a day along with pancakes (or doughnuts) with coffee in the morning. A breakfast like that would cost a guy fifteen cents at most. I also decided to not squander money on the luxury of sleeping in a bed. It was my thought that I could clean myself up and occasionally sleep in railway stations. My tobacco pouch for a pillow. 



Vision in shards, and the vacancy sign glows. The world loses pieces of itself. I’m simply not of this world. I’m not even a headache. My truth is what blurs my outline.



     What is an old man to do after decades of being absolutely sure of himself?

That smug cockiness turns into a nervous chuckle when he tells everyone that he’s doing great. But he had fallen that last summer. For all he was worth. 

It mustn’t feel great to fall off your horse. Even worse if while you were down, someone nicked the saddle and greased the steed. 

He is deflated and feeling small. His voice is thin paper and has lost the bravura which has been until now his mask of arrogance. Now that arrogance is propped up by a weathered mythological truth, which itself is propped up by a loose pile of hopeful nonsense, doubling down, doubling down, doubling. Down. Down. 



     Brando refuses the Oscar and an otherwise well intentioned woman identifying as Sioux, pink with red stripes, kicks Hollywood in the balls and became that day a pariah on his behalf.  John Wayne had to be held back by a team of bodyguards who had been paid to hold him back. A speech balloon inflates out of John Wayne’s mouth and accuses Brando of beating up this poor young woman in drag.  If only it was okay to hit a girl, John thought, show her, because it’s Brando’s fault.



reel Cowboys like George W and John Wayne

in method, stylized whimper



     For $15 a day he empties the trash and cleans the toilets of a used car lot. He drives to the job in a car that he can’t get insured, at 88, but is buying with the daily $15 sweat equity he receives, from the very same lot. His friend, the owner of the lot, feels good about giving him a job.  Warm. Of course it’s crossed his mind that he may never even have to actually hand over the deed if it’s not paid off by check-out time. (Deep down time. (Deep down high-grav time.))



     (And there’s the rub. (One doesn’t feel in the subverse.) One only thinks the unknowable because they are no space, only location.) Best to sleep, or blink off…as the saying goes. Blink off into deep time. Crawling back through, one becomes multiple, as the verse recognizes you, (pinched), draws you out as if it had always been intended. A composite.  A legion of (transparencies very slightly (hued) (then multiplied) until nearly opaque). Very nearly.)


pinkish and modulated, blue as blood, brownish black and red over all.



     The old man had had a falling out with his friend the lot owner….over an insult….classicist, or possibly racial/cultural in nature, some misunderstanding involving money I’m sure. Neither had forgotten about it even though it happened years ago, but now it’s good to see them make up. TOM (the old man) never liked to work for anybody else. Never. And he had gifted that proudful stance to his children, who in turn rode their own cars to the rodeo uninsured, and ate quickly so as not to risk losing kibble to the competition.



     One morning while having my hotcakes and coffee I talked with another vagrant who advised me to under no circumstances hitchhike further west. Traffic was to be much lighter and the expanse of desert would be my undoing, arid and merciless. But if I must journey westward by all means ride the freights. 

     This was a bit of a shock because I had never truly considered hopping trains.  I certainly didn’t know how and if I were to be honest, I was definitely resistant to the idea of becoming a true hobo. A tramp…a bum. But somehow I thought this guy was telling the truth so I eventually came around and took him on his word.  Once I had crossed that mental threshold I was all in.




     (He stepped off the landing module into the low-grav flaked sand of Gaston, wee bits of glass that flow like water but look like kitty litter. Gray like dinner. His gloved hand pressed onto the shuttle railing, he enjoyed pushing a foot down through the loose grav dust bin of this world. From here it felt like he could almost lift the module itself, but all things being equal, an equal amount of resistance forces his feet into the soft ground past the meniscus created by the shuttle’s pontoons.   He weighs so much less here and it gives him a feeling of queezy narcotic floatation.  He was a rigid thing floating and bobbing above sense. 


     His stomach was all acid and empty save the coffee paste festering in his gut. He now wished he had sucked down a tube of cheese, but he just wasn’t hungry when he woke from deep time. His stomach floated in his body barely suspended between the interstitial muck and it’s neighboring organs. His body rocked back and forth, swaying to the music of cosmic catch-up. A warm blanket of velvet frequency, the parts of music that slide off easily.)




Wednesday, October 4, 2023

Bluets by Maggie Nelson, a book report



Maggie Nelson confesses on the first page of her book Bluets that she had fallen in love with a color. The color blue. It is my recent pleasure of discovering for myself this lovely title. I already loved the color myself…but then again I’m rather polyamorous and insatiable when it comes to color. 


Unassuming at less than a hundred pages, this book resists classification. In it Nelson describes what her relationship is like with the color, and what it is not. It is prose, poetry, social commentary, memoir of loss, and a treatise on desire both explicit and productive. It’s this last one that intrigues me the most as I believe it does for the author.  After all, in her second statement she tells us not to “make the mistake that all desire is yearning”.


Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari had decades ago made seemless the link between desire and production.   Desire being an dress of creation that hangs on the somatic rack.  I particularly liked this aspect of their work. Dispensing with the old notion of desire as a matter of yearning for what you lack, they set desire up as a necessity between our basic humanities, which is the need to create. To produce. In other words, meaning and worth are derived from the intimate connections of our hands being in the thick of it.  I for one get a satisfying kick from kneading dough.  I definitely can imagine a potter thinking the same about throwing clay. For how many academics have called the text a body and the body a book to be written upon? And really, how many chefs wouldn’t relish the opportunity to create something so sublime that people want to put in their mouth?

I suspect not many. 


But aren’t we already in the thick of it?   Are we not in the forest and we just need to see the trees with our own hands. Wood. Wood to build with. To fuck with.


At 57 I still get hard thinking on certain turns of phrase, passages of modulated color, and happy accidents of sound. I lick my lips yearning for the right combination between composition and color. Between substance and matter, the worm of thought loitering around my hands, arthritic as they are….and yet I still have a most private moment therewith. 


But Nelson takes us way past mere surface appearances. She takes us into the substance, about three feet down the rabbit hole from where we all sprang from sin, oh Mother Mary, that is…Jesus in a blue robe.  And more frankly, she points out that Jesus in the mandorla (an almond shaped patch of blue) is most certainly standing in for the vagina.  “Blue pussy” is her word from her mischievous mind. She drops it there for us then backs away as if it’s a hot potato. Allowing the teenager in us to smirk and giggle. 


I can lick my lips in anticipation for the moments in my life when work and play are indistinguishable from one another.  Isn’t that what I desire?


For Maggie Nelson it also seems to be so, that sweet spot, that art into life nexus. A sexy nexus with only just enough matter omitted so the reader spackles the gaps and crevices for themselves. For instance, I’ve never really thought of the blue veins on a cock as anything other than an unfortunate side effect of an erection, a obscene protrusion not unlike a bodybuilder’s stretched skin over rigid gangways of blood. But her reverence for the color makes it seem almost that which makes the penis beautiful. And according to her, she unapologetically wants it inside of her. 


So is it the cock or the blue of the vein that she desires? The color that is the seed or the timber of an oak? Or maybe she experiences the muscle memory of being fucked. Or maybe these are not unique dynamics, but rather all adjacent and multiple facets of desire and production.  Maybe her act of creation is the remembering and not even necessarily the fucking. But then again, it is Maggie Nelson the writer, writing as an act of creation, after and beyond the fact of fucking. 


You see, Nelson repeatedly sets us up for what seems like clever answers, but then turns us around with a reassessment, creating a fugue of observations, only after having just the possibility of finding what it is she wants  From perspective to perspective. For example. She lets us know that staring at blue, ever deeper, one eventually comes to indigo, then further still into true darkness. However, elsewhere she reminds us that screwing up your closed eyes with your fists brings light and colored shapes, from the lidded darkness to the light. In fact she ends the book stating she must have always been looking for the light. But I find her confidence in that statement less than absolute, which is where I think she wants us to land. Snatching away the quandary, owning it, then proposing it is in fact the journey. 



Blue Balls
Tempera
Circa 2000

                                                                           

Thursday, September 28, 2023

Who hates poetry but still fucking writes it?




I admit it. I don’t really read poetry very often. And ironically I also admit to being a poet.  It’s hard to own. You know? To fess up. To tell folks that you are that which is useless, poverty stricken, and particularly impractical.

It’s also hard to admit to being a texter. Especially at my age it is most unhip to choose to use your device for the written word over the spoken. As if the text was degenerate, a sacrilege! In fact I’ve been accused and taken to the mat over texting. Taken to task because my texting is somehow too verbose, a substandard mode of communication,…an annoyance at best and a bona fide wrong turn for our humanity at worst.  Ignorant and deviant.

Meanwhile…

There are so many people that just love to talk on their phones. It seems to be a dynamic of the FOMO, to feel the ever immanent nervous urge to call or receive. To happily give over actual minutes of your life,  I commend these people who just aren’t as stingy as myself and find themselves with quanta of time they’re ready to void.

But it’s still not for me  

Nevermind that these same folks wouldn’t make the same virtue signaling parallels between a book and downloadable spoken media, AKA books-on-tape. People tend not to see the irony in favoring aural over written communication.

I get it. The cradle of the tech world of cell phones played to youth over the aged. Of course the children went for it.  After all, it was easy, and more importantly, immediate. So we got imojis along with lots of shortcuts like IDK, FWIW, WTF, and my personal fave, IRL. 

On dating apps (at least for my age and gender) I hear a lot of “let’s not waste time texting” and “we should go straight to talking on the phone”, as if hearing a voice is going to tell you more than a carefully constructed paragraph. I don’t know about you but I’d rather go from the text (which is a body of work) to the pheromonal experience of two bodies in the same room hotboxing each other, even texting each other…and altogether skipping the digital image, which is, BTW, nonsensically unscented and unpoetic.  

😉

Now when I text I almost always stop to correct my grammar and my punctuation.  But more importantly, and I say this in earnest, I always want to write my message with words that will stick to your ribs, become puns, turns of phrases,…poetics.  Bodies/texts.  Words thick and of substance.

Thick. Substance. Bodies. Smells. Sexting. Desire meeting production on desire’s terms. Doing it on the piano.

At this point if you have come to the conclusion that most of my poems are about sex or the sex adjacent, then you would be correct.

Here are some to poke at. Even if you’re not excited about poetry, I do hope you’re excited. 

————————————————————————————————-

Owning It


a terrible gaze

blushes my mask

because I was caught

looking 

to see         you        but I want

to see         into you


my boy eyes fixed

to the ground             seeking

your bodied mind        the thing

of thingness 

chaste    and misshapen 


sheepish foot searching out

a pebble amongst stone   with

my hands crowding my back pockets 

scar the line            this

view and no further 


I say     I want to see 

inside you               and are you

the skin I blow upon

or    but the hairs of your 

borders facing all directions

 

may that I kiss it          I would

set to a redefinition          a

raiment of little wood

carved from desire 


so          don’t spare me

the reveal of your breath 

a penny thrown and returned 

as boulder 


placed boldly where

the dancing headless scheme

in the periphery            I want

to see you

but still need mystery to

wrestle

———————————————————————————————

untitled 


dove-tailed hiccup in

time between my head

and my feet

which are too fast

to know 


___________________________________________________________________________________________


The New Aural 



erect clunk of chopstick 

on tin can


ghosts gather this sound

collecting pieces of non math 


arithmetic stomping 

guttering and sputtering 


two whistles versus 

two whistles struck 


glides as reeds buzz

and scream            the largest 


instrument          the quietest

a flutter of hands and hips


to imply a decoration in

time                or something 

less solid


__________________________________________________________________________________________


untitled 


whispers across hairs

in collusion with Eros 

daring flights and rations 

upon a dimpled beach

steeling up for  launch

scheming       thieving 

the many singular holes   breached 

on a wet day’s  dark  thought 

stealing toward dusky sand

ablaze and quiet for the 

neighbors 


___________________________________________________________________________________________



September third twenty twenty three



I think

I saw you on the sidewalk 

moving happy like

a cat

tuxedo styled and vamping 

and then like smoke you weren’t there

I was late for work

so I booked it

wordless 


________________________________________________________________________________________


Who’d You Think I Am


you left me with 

me and my old hands

spooning the dog

in your dank silence

yawning at 5:00 am 

and I’m wondering where to wash

see     you’ve seen my rage 

the one you invented 

I’m tattooed over with man

mistakes       disbelieving

my ally status   just you    just

wait to see the summer me

you said    I won’t    so go

I wouldn’t     because I’m 

bathing in the summer ash

of the ol’ swim hole


_____________________________________________________________

untitled 

I half hear Blueberry    panting in

   wet earth as I nap      his nails click

I draw up     a paperboy satchel 

with the Sunday burden 


the real reason I was

                told to dig         wasn’t 

the ditch            but the shovel         so


I resolved to be           you see

come a painter            my onus

                            was punted 

for the safe point

since I couldn’t         read music 


Coyote          eats my ego in 

                  the aerosol          night 

     keeping my rabble occupied 

      and          under-aroused


_________________________________________________________________________________________


Don’t Lock the Door



i’m surprised you remember that

night you took forever to cum

in Seattle after Paul and his balloon

trick after all you 

said you were too high

but thankfully I jerked myself off

and you said that was pretty hot


_________________________________________________________________________________________


Climbing the Loop


it starts along

my sewing machine leg

in fits wrapped around 

a cheap prosthetic  betrayed

a taut rope’s 

cracked whisper 

as it approaches the limit

hefting me          the burden thing

alighting upon a shelf

this stone vessel on stone tongue 

vast and granite and tome 

I graffiti with a stone blade

carving desire-a tinted 

faint tear          warp

coal colored hairs

wormed cypher under

the skin of all things

I blow the chiseled crumbs

over the edge as dust

beckons in spooled light 

I puff up again


______________________________________________________________

…and two untitled haikus 



you were seen on fire

so furry and oh so wet

fumbling with matches 







resting lens is off

watching my dog dig and twirl

crevice filled with tongue 





__________________________________________________________________________________end.






Free, until we die so soon

Why for the terrible and loathsome burden of  freedom        Gummed movements in amber    are rubbed upon a thick blue erection  Stand...