I don’t tour anymore. The days of arenas crammed with razzed-up howlers horny for bludgeoning riffs and solos to dazzle them dizzy are gone forever. Kids don’t dig that now. They don’t respect dexterity. Their god is ingenuity. I’m a relic. An irrelevancy.
I still play though. Once a week I sit in with a blues band in a bar in the city. This is my heavy metal penance—after flying so high on the Wagnerian wings of hard rock, the dust of what’s left of me is cursed to regress into blues. And be rendered even more irrelevant. What could be further from today’s test tube curlicues than the bogtrotting muck of the blues? But this is my effluvium. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never played better than when I’m breathing that gloom through the gills and pouring it back in a flurry of notes that strike at what all of us seem to endure there in the free-floating murk of the bar. And it translates: people seem aware of it too, the musicians respond with a swell and the music lunges like something alive, with hisses leaking off its edges, an ooze in the curl of its glide.
One night a while back was a particularly good gig. The guitar felt like a dream version of itself in my hands. My every intention emerged instantly in a crisp burst of notes, a continuous cascade, one passage pouring into the next and the right choice for each gambit occurring to me in the instant I needed to choose it. (I’d been playing a lot of chess and maybe that helped.)
In the midst of this I noticed a kid—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—sitting at a table in front of the bandstand. The look in his eyes didn’t reach me at first, but eventually I could see that he had it in for me. There was something defiant and unblinking in the way he watched me, and his stare didn’t waver through the entire set. It irked me a little, but I was feeling too good to be bothered by some punk with a green streak staring me down. If I had to I’d deal with him after the set.
Then I saw it. Shadowed under his table was a guitar case. The kid wanted to sit in. Now, I’m of two minds about this. Thankfully it rarely happens, and I don’t encourage it, because this is my time to stretch out and I don’t want some egomaniac hack hemming me in. But there is also a spirit of generosity among musicians without which nothing magical ever happens. And playing as good as I was I couldn’t help feeling generous.
I left it up to him. When the set ended and the rest of the band left the stand to get drinks or use the john or make phonecalls or whatever the hell else musicians do during breaks I set my guitar down and fiddled around with my amp. My back was to the tables but I could still feel the kid’s gaze weighing on me. When I turned around there he was, standing at the edge of the bandstand, guitar case in hand.
He must have been the thinnest human being I’d ever seen. He obviously didn’t spend much time outside—his skin was unnaturally white and his dishwater blond hair might have been spiky if it wasn’t so greasy. He didn’t seem to have any tattoos—a rarity among kids these days—but maybe there wasn’t enough room on him to fit them.
I just looked at him. He looked back at me with that keen level stare of his. Then he nodded slightly with an upturned tilt of his head. “Is it alright if I jam with you guys?” he said.
I just looked at him. A minuet of musicanly macho to make him doubt himself a little bit. Then I said “You know ‘The Barrelhouse?’”
He said he did. The other musicians were coming back to the bandstand. I told him to come on up and plug in.
“The Barrelhouse” isn’t easy to play. It has a skittering riff that runs up and down variations on a melody that has to be played deftly or else you’ll lag behind and muddle it up. The kind of piece that keeps the rookies humble, because it’s obvious and hard to recover if you flub. The kid would know where he stood as soon as we started it.
When everyone was ready I counted off slightly faster than usual. The kid met me note for note through the first chorus, staring at my guitar the entire time while we played. At the end of the second chorus we traded brief four-bar solos, just enough to make it interesting without any lingering.
I started off, let loose a low rumble that rose and spilled a quivering trickle at the top of the fretboard. The kid started with a quivering trickle and tumbled down to a rumble on his low E-string. Had wit, this kid. On the next run I flung a crackle of sparks high on the fretboard, then did an inverted echo of them down low, making the notes loose where they’d been tight up high, and quick and flickering where they’d been thicker and slow. The kid responded with a roiling hive of notes that swarmed narrow, then wide, like the flux of an hourglass. I churned out a sputtering cloud that hovered at the bottom of the fretboard like a gaggle of thunder. The kid supplied the lightning—slashing bursts up high, jolting at jagged angles.
This was fun. The kid was a rare bird, one that had done some real woodshedding in a shadowy room somewhere, the probable source of his platinum tan and monomaniacal eyes. But after a while I sensed that he was mocking me. Whenever I held out a long note he would mimic it on his own run, making it shimmy and stutter, and then he would bend any blue notes I’d made into a kind of weeping parody. I felt myself losing ground. He must have sensed it too, because then he started replicating my runs note-for-note, but speeded up, so that at the end of them he would whang out some wizardly flurries that said “I’ll do whatever you do and then some.”
Then he got bolder. On his next run he took two full choruses all for himself and it was as if he’d seized a livewire and was weaving it in wild arcs, snapping out jabs that splashed crackling ebbs in their wake, bending his phrases so they curled on themselves and then burst in a blur of bright notes.
He was looking right at me now. He must have thought he had me on the ropes, so I did a whipstitch jig with hopskip cross-steps stretched over two choruses, and then I played it all over again. It was a prosody, you see, and I knew he couldn’t repeat it.
But I knew he wasn’t beaten either. The crowd was responding to him more eagerly than to me, he was increasing with each turn he took, and he was the one who was raising the stakes, not me. I was definitely on the defensive, reacting to his runs, struggling to regain the ground he was stealing from me.
Then he unleashed a torrent of all the tricks he’d ever taught himself in his woodshed, piling flail upon zing in a whirling vortex, ushering hissing gusts that slithered from one edge of the whirlpool, only to be countered with a coil of staccato on the other side of the swirl. The band had become part of the air, rising to meet him at the peak of his jags, a thick chugging throb that widened the width of his grasp as he grabbed eeks and shurls from the air and steered each shriek of feedback into an intricate shape for chorus after chorus; the band was his, and while they wailed a great gutpit yowl of ecstasy sprung from the back of the bar.
I’d been dealt a deathblow. But I didn’t die. Instead I felt myself standing in a kind of breathing emptiness. I felt forgotten by gravity and weirdly free. They were expecting a surrender. Instead I hurled a last gasp across everything I could remember, chasing an unbroken line wherever it carried me and not retreating, however hard it got, however horrible, whatever faces found me in my memories, whatever shame I’d known, whatever failure, whatever pits of fear and weakness, I had to continue, unblinking, and forge toward wherever I was meant to arrive. I felt stillness, almost silence, as I played, and the gulf between me and everyone there, even the kid, seemed to open and pour into me.
Something occurred to me then. After the orgy. When I was touring and recording years ago, the tide of the times, the zeitgeist, was pouring through me, as if I were an artery, on its way to its next transformation, to inhabit the next generation, and the next, and eventually this kid’s. It had abandoned me as it abandons everybody eventually and this song of loss was my blues, something I’d lived through, something larger than me that had nothing to do with fast fingers or arsenals of technique and was complete and couldn’t be defeated. A tickertape of dry fireworks thinned to thrum on my low E-string.
Maybe the kid couldn’t understand all this, but I saw something gentle, even admiring, in his eyes. The battle was over. He smiled slightly, nodded with a brief duck of his head, and we went back to trading short four-bar runs.
It was like playing catch with a breath of air, drawing it in, letting it spread inside us and then breathing it out again with a spin different than the one just flung at us. At the end of the set we shook hands. The crowd was loud. I asked him if he had a band. He told me no. I announced his name to the crowd.
He packed his guitar and told me he’d see me around. Watching people giving him high fives and peace signs and slapping his back as he left I wondered what awaited this weirdo, this freakshow geek, this virtuoso who’d grown in the shadow of the end of the world. Was his orgy only lonely? Would some boolean thread of the zeitgeist ever bless him with its kiss?
.
Moonshine
4 big armed boys
in a big black truck
chug
chug
through the dark
to a far
off grove
and what's that
chug
chug
in the back?
Not some
coal kissin
cork screw
jeeeeeew york
laaaaawwyer
and
rope!
Nope! just
some home
brew
to
chug
chug
in the moon
shine: cool
white
eye
staring down
from the crown
of our sky.
Nuthins
secret. Alls
sacred. All
chug
chug
haw hee
haw haw!
.
in a big black truck
chug
chug
through the dark
to a far
off grove
and what's that
chug
chug
in the back?
Not some
coal kissin
cork screw
jeeeeeew york
laaaaawwyer
and
rope!
Nope! just
some home
brew
to
chug
chug
in the moon
shine: cool
white
eye
staring down
from the crown
of our sky.
Nuthins
secret. Alls
sacred. All
chug
chug
haw hee
haw haw!
.
Flashes
We are here
to get it right
one last time
Release this bird
into the sky—
let it fly
You’re just a husk:
a vessel at best
for God
An afternoon
of gazing at faces
in the sky
For conversation
he recites
the noise in his brain
The closest we come
to utopia may be
a great night in a dance hall
The sky
through the wires
so blue
*
A middle-aged man
on a bus after work
reads the biography of a tycoon
Twirt! Twirt!
chirps the traffic
cross-signal
A gang of cops board the bus
and make passengers show
proof of payment
*
Weather
like a hovering
pregnancy
On her black shoes
white-winged
hearts
Kerouac to an audience: “You’re not listening!”
(If you were you’d be cheering!
For human hope and salvation!)
*
as if there is
nothing sacred
The look
of someone
genuinely gentle
How often
we forget
we’re breathing
Everyone here
is equally
present
The air
is thick
with souls
Who got sucked
down another
bad path
I just need
to breathe
among you
*
A sip
of water and a breath
of air
Summer afternoon:
long shaking shadow of a tree,
breeze on a glowing lawn
Trying to
remember a bad
dream
He stalked
out of the office
in a gale of expletives
Every damned place we’ve lived
was made without a thought
for our lives
*
Watching Las Vegas
from an airplane at night:
a forest of lights
Nice nipples
on that
mannequin
Latin trumpet blare:
raucous, raw
and sad
The kee-TOK kee-TOK
kee-TOK syncopation
of a pingpong ball in play
*
A bird
like a bee—
tiny whirling blur
Summer’s start:
each day less
snow on the mountain
Heaven
in the scent
of wild strawberries
A face
muscular
from smiling
Long eucalyptus leaves
shivering
in cold wind
Made up face
gazing
at a magazine
Mechanical wind
from an underground
train
Shopping mall:
alone
among products
An integrity down to
what you do
with your eyes
Happiness is
a full-time, all-the-time, lifetime
job
*
Almost always
the answer
is you
That child
can go in so
many directions
These rotten old
husks of houses
—like toothaches
On the dunes
two human silhouettes
against an orange sky
*
A wide-winged hawk
gliding
on the wind
Salt clouds
in churned
sea water
A morning spent
gazing
at captive animals
Slim young mom
with metallic
nasal voice
Youngsters
streaking by
on skateboards
I asked myself
does grass
mind being walked on?
Swirling clouds
of slim silver
anchovies
A child’s
apocalyptic
tantrum
Some freak daisy
lies down
with the lions
After the meeting
I felt like I had
a hangover
*
Christmas: crushed
candy cane on the floor
of a bus
Cold burning
dry ice shriek
of police sirens
His white head droops
like a broken bloom
when he remembers what he said
An old apple tree
rotting on the frozen lawn
of an old mansion
Vision is revealed
to us gradually,
in glints and flashes
Days when
not one face
holds any gentleness
Willowy delicate
girl with heaving
pregnant belly
*
City:
not a tree
in sight
We all fall
like leaves
soon
A bird circles
over low rows
of white waves
Our lives
speed by—
enjoy the ride!
A blue fish
with a face
of a puppy
Gate after
gate after
gate
*
Stranded
in the middle
of the street
I killed a fly
when I waved it
outside
We all wore plastic
identification tags
at our waists and necks
Humiliating your reality
with an ideality
dreamed in art
The calm beyond
that first flash of flesh,
the hum behind the noise
*
Dead flesh on your plate
inconveniencing you
with its bones
A cat
a rose
of an animal
Every one at the party
acting
like a television set
Breathing
with flittering birds
over a trickling stream
This sad business,
he thought,
and parked the car
Gossips jitter right
out of him;
he’s like a glass of ice
*
The Great Human Party!
(his eyes smiled)
You Are Invited!
Only those whose
lives are lies
laugh like that
From finished product
to work-in-progress
in a crash of a flash
Stern faces
waiting for a train
to take them to work
A mother-to-be
self-importantly
wielding her pregnancy
A guy
who closed his eyes
among us and breathed
*
The sad
planet of his
head
Black cat
huddled like a
shadow on the floor
A car
a rolling
bubble
Lush white
bird on a wet
black branch
Breathing with the
awareness of being
surrounded by gases
Poor people
turned into billboards
by free clothing
Her brilliant
healthy snow white
moon tan
Trees snowing white
petals on the green
park lawn
*
Ellipses
in parentheses:
"me"
Youth: an anxious constant
preparing for something
that doesn't exactly arrive
A gull
combing the wind
with its wings
His face
before he was born
is the sky
Their old ways,
their distances
measured in days
The train’s steel wheels
scrape steel rails
like screaming skeletons
Just another person
going through her day
buying more milk and toilet paper
A cat
purring like
a teapot
To through
yoga know
cosmic consciousness
All the old truths apply:
Stand up straight!
Suck in your gut!
A jetplane chasing
the sinking red sun
across a massive continent
Message of soul:
life is sad
but that's all right
A cat
vigilant
with its ears
A graveyard
bathed in early
morning sunlight
The breathing tide
of a distant
highway
More complications
= more possible
soul
*
Sprawl of a city
at night: flowering
field of light
Almost getting a
hard-on from greasy bikini
beer ads in the liquor store
Evening sky:
grey death
with a wisp of rose
City:
the sadness of
a million lives
The tide sliding
on the floor of the shore,
reaching the weeds at the sand's end
The goal the need the dream:
to recognize that sad aching nerve
at the soul of everything
*
A cat
like a drop
of ink on a stoop
The wind wanes:
a STOP sign
stops shaking
A lonely woman's
pregnant belly:
sad progress of the world
Ah,
life:
berries
The chingle chingle chingle
of keys
in a jogger’s pocket
Whisky:
proof that life
is tragic
The blurred wall
of another train
passing your passing train
The incomprehensible
architecture of a lighted
superhighway at night
A television newscaster’s
mywholelifeisalie
voice
A little white sprinting red
tongue panting dog with
splashing tassle tail
The sour powdery
smell of an old
person
Sushi:
food
jewelry
Here the clocks
have gears:
are mechanical
The sting of the
sun on your skin
by the sea
The newly built
buildings block
the mountains
People’s hateful appraisals
of other people’s
clothes
Roses like an election:
hollering red faces splayed
in different directions
Thinking
through scraps of a
beer-bombed brain
The wet hiss
of rubber wheels
on asphalt
The hollering
sex of a
flower
Wind
like a wall
of water
Mafia wives
chained
in gold
The cat sits
like a fact
on the couch
Shlapping
around in the rain
in sandals
He grins through
a jagged fence
of tombstone teeth
A twilit
sky of
flaming foil
Air Force:
fill the sky with
grinding noise
I stood
and stared
at a star
These thoughts are
just a hum
behind my eyes
A loose power wire
wags in the wind
at head height
His eyes
like a leering
lion’s
A thermal-suited
dude on the beach
thumbing a digital device
.
Bob Dylan's Angel
Author’s note: In April of 2004, Bob Dylan appeared in a television advertisement for Victoria’s Secret lingerie. A song of his called “Lovesick” served as the soundtrack.
I know you are angry at me for leering at an angel in a lingerie ad. But you don’t understand me. You mistake me for someone righteous. Some of my best songs are righteous, but I have never really been righteous. Mostly I was just pissed off. I hated injustice. I hated that so many people who didn’t deserve it were forced to suffer while so many others who caused them to suffer were allowed to live like lords. Knowing that someone who wasn’t anything but lucky could toddle whistling to work while someone else groaned in an alley alone, this scorched my guts with rage, and I howled with rage like no other songwriter before me.
I’d never had a hard life, materially speaking. But I knew that misery was real. And seeing people drift through the horrors of life in cloud of stupid unearned affluence made me want to shove their faces in the fire of what was really happening, to show them what their ignorance denied, and make them feel ashamed. My songs were acts of revenge. I made Queen Jane walk the plank, with flames of failure and humiliation lapping all around her—or at least I taunted her with terrors her arrogance was intent on forgetting, with truths she aloofly insulted with the blatant lie of her style.
But even if Queen Jane had walked the plank it wouldn’t have been good enough for me. I would have let her roast in her loneliness and sneer How does it feeeel? like I did to Mr. Jones or the intellectuals who wept for Hattie Carroll. I sided with the underdog, but mostly to make the smug ones squirm. I paraded the castoffs of Desolation Row past their faces, showed them the botched, the mangled, the wretched, the torn—the people for whom the world doesn’t work—and portrayed these misfits with enough dignity to make them glow with poetry.
I was an artist, but I also wanted to be famous and rich and get laid. By the time you’d heard about me I had already sold out. I had troops of fat suited gross men battling for proper product placement in record stores and hustling for the highest price for my performances on television. I was heralded as an avatar, a phenomenon. Artistically I was the leader. The toppermost of the poppermost admired me as a genius. Everybody covered me, but I was the best performer of my own songs. I was proclaimed the voice of my generation, and at the height of my hype I squeezed out a double album that nearly everyone hailed as a masterpiece. But it was really only exhaustion amplified into urgency by amphetamine, husks and shadows of songs crammed with some of the clumsiest rhymes of my career, like the one about the shattered little rich girl who takes/makes/aches just like a woman, who was just too pitiful to be hated like Queen Jane or the girl on Fourth Street who I positively loathed.
I wrote that song to get laid. I’ve never tried to disguise how much I needed women. I needed women so much I avenged myself against my dependence on them again and again in my songs. I had a furious envy of their elegance. It seemed in the end we could never agree on anything. Whenever I was in love I was always afraid I’d wind up peeking through a keyhole down upon my knees. And I was always in love. That’s why I chased fame so voraciously. Being admired so widely allowed me to be big enough to love on a scale impossible for someone of smaller stature. Being seen by so many allowed me to be seen by a few who could really see me. Those were the ones I loved and who loved me. The scope of my embrace was amazing. I can never adequately describe how hugely loved I felt sometimes. This filled me with a force that fueled so many songs I would never have otherwise written. It’s one thing to be talented; it’s quite another to have a river of power flowing through you as easy as breathing.
Women were my muse in the most classical sense. Even after a crackup that caused me to realize I was being eaten alive by the machinery of celebrity, I always chased the angel. Any bitterness I expressed toward women was that of a man who could never be free of them. And it is impossible not to be bitter when you know you are trapped by fame as badly as Elvis. When you see that you are not seen by a public that celebrates you for something you can no longer sustain and which was only a fraction of what you were in the first place. When you repeatedly realize that so many women you’d hoped you could love could only see you in the shadow of an idol that has nothing to do with you.
This is a loneliness with which no ordinary person can sympathize. And this alienated me even more. I still dredged up some righteousness in later songs, but now my martyrs were bigger fish: a railroaded middleweight prizefighter, a rouge millionaire, a gunned down Mafioso, Lenny Bruce. I vilified political leaders like a watcher of television news. Gradually I retired toward the periphery, where a role was conceived for me: moral murmur in the shadows of the cultural unconscious, grizzled hippie snarling in the fringes of a world gone wrong.
I’ve seen this all from a vantage where few ever stand. And now I doubt that it makes any difference in the end. I’m stranded. I even agreed to entertain at a catered corporate party during the dot com boom. And when a posh lingerie company called me one day to offer to buy one of my songs for a commercial I knew it didn’t matter. I said yes. Then they raised the stakes: would I appear in the ad? With a beautiful young model in nothing but underwear? I know what it is to be pornography—I performed in a sparkling Elvis outfit a quarter century ago and I knew what I was doing. I said yes. Hell, a free trip to Italy, a nice party, a few hours’ work, a big paycheck—maybe I’d even get laid. I went. It was easy; the producers made everything smooth. I didn’t even look at the playbacks when we were done. I didn’t get laid. When I left it was easy to forget.
But I know you won’t forget it. You’re obsessed with the evidence. But the evidence is a lie. When you see me leering at that doe-eyed nymph in the angel’s wings and blue bra, you don’t notice that I’m really glaring with bright mean eyes. You don’t know that I wasn’t even watching her when my close-up was shot. And when you look at her you don’t see what I see: an exotic animal who would crumble under my stare if we ever really looked at each other. She is an empty, lovely fawn. I don’t need her. I need the angel.
.
I know you are angry at me for leering at an angel in a lingerie ad. But you don’t understand me. You mistake me for someone righteous. Some of my best songs are righteous, but I have never really been righteous. Mostly I was just pissed off. I hated injustice. I hated that so many people who didn’t deserve it were forced to suffer while so many others who caused them to suffer were allowed to live like lords. Knowing that someone who wasn’t anything but lucky could toddle whistling to work while someone else groaned in an alley alone, this scorched my guts with rage, and I howled with rage like no other songwriter before me.
I’d never had a hard life, materially speaking. But I knew that misery was real. And seeing people drift through the horrors of life in cloud of stupid unearned affluence made me want to shove their faces in the fire of what was really happening, to show them what their ignorance denied, and make them feel ashamed. My songs were acts of revenge. I made Queen Jane walk the plank, with flames of failure and humiliation lapping all around her—or at least I taunted her with terrors her arrogance was intent on forgetting, with truths she aloofly insulted with the blatant lie of her style.
But even if Queen Jane had walked the plank it wouldn’t have been good enough for me. I would have let her roast in her loneliness and sneer How does it feeeel? like I did to Mr. Jones or the intellectuals who wept for Hattie Carroll. I sided with the underdog, but mostly to make the smug ones squirm. I paraded the castoffs of Desolation Row past their faces, showed them the botched, the mangled, the wretched, the torn—the people for whom the world doesn’t work—and portrayed these misfits with enough dignity to make them glow with poetry.
I was an artist, but I also wanted to be famous and rich and get laid. By the time you’d heard about me I had already sold out. I had troops of fat suited gross men battling for proper product placement in record stores and hustling for the highest price for my performances on television. I was heralded as an avatar, a phenomenon. Artistically I was the leader. The toppermost of the poppermost admired me as a genius. Everybody covered me, but I was the best performer of my own songs. I was proclaimed the voice of my generation, and at the height of my hype I squeezed out a double album that nearly everyone hailed as a masterpiece. But it was really only exhaustion amplified into urgency by amphetamine, husks and shadows of songs crammed with some of the clumsiest rhymes of my career, like the one about the shattered little rich girl who takes/makes/aches just like a woman, who was just too pitiful to be hated like Queen Jane or the girl on Fourth Street who I positively loathed.
I wrote that song to get laid. I’ve never tried to disguise how much I needed women. I needed women so much I avenged myself against my dependence on them again and again in my songs. I had a furious envy of their elegance. It seemed in the end we could never agree on anything. Whenever I was in love I was always afraid I’d wind up peeking through a keyhole down upon my knees. And I was always in love. That’s why I chased fame so voraciously. Being admired so widely allowed me to be big enough to love on a scale impossible for someone of smaller stature. Being seen by so many allowed me to be seen by a few who could really see me. Those were the ones I loved and who loved me. The scope of my embrace was amazing. I can never adequately describe how hugely loved I felt sometimes. This filled me with a force that fueled so many songs I would never have otherwise written. It’s one thing to be talented; it’s quite another to have a river of power flowing through you as easy as breathing.
Women were my muse in the most classical sense. Even after a crackup that caused me to realize I was being eaten alive by the machinery of celebrity, I always chased the angel. Any bitterness I expressed toward women was that of a man who could never be free of them. And it is impossible not to be bitter when you know you are trapped by fame as badly as Elvis. When you see that you are not seen by a public that celebrates you for something you can no longer sustain and which was only a fraction of what you were in the first place. When you repeatedly realize that so many women you’d hoped you could love could only see you in the shadow of an idol that has nothing to do with you.
This is a loneliness with which no ordinary person can sympathize. And this alienated me even more. I still dredged up some righteousness in later songs, but now my martyrs were bigger fish: a railroaded middleweight prizefighter, a rouge millionaire, a gunned down Mafioso, Lenny Bruce. I vilified political leaders like a watcher of television news. Gradually I retired toward the periphery, where a role was conceived for me: moral murmur in the shadows of the cultural unconscious, grizzled hippie snarling in the fringes of a world gone wrong.
I’ve seen this all from a vantage where few ever stand. And now I doubt that it makes any difference in the end. I’m stranded. I even agreed to entertain at a catered corporate party during the dot com boom. And when a posh lingerie company called me one day to offer to buy one of my songs for a commercial I knew it didn’t matter. I said yes. Then they raised the stakes: would I appear in the ad? With a beautiful young model in nothing but underwear? I know what it is to be pornography—I performed in a sparkling Elvis outfit a quarter century ago and I knew what I was doing. I said yes. Hell, a free trip to Italy, a nice party, a few hours’ work, a big paycheck—maybe I’d even get laid. I went. It was easy; the producers made everything smooth. I didn’t even look at the playbacks when we were done. I didn’t get laid. When I left it was easy to forget.
But I know you won’t forget it. You’re obsessed with the evidence. But the evidence is a lie. When you see me leering at that doe-eyed nymph in the angel’s wings and blue bra, you don’t notice that I’m really glaring with bright mean eyes. You don’t know that I wasn’t even watching her when my close-up was shot. And when you look at her you don’t see what I see: an exotic animal who would crumble under my stare if we ever really looked at each other. She is an empty, lovely fawn. I don’t need her. I need the angel.
.
Now We Sneer Ourselves to Sleep
Please, hear me out…
Amid coldwar American business cigarette masculinity
a pyrotechnic technicolor cyclone hatched at the Pandemonium Farm
—a far-off strand of a dream stung the scene like gibberish lightning
whose flash was glimpsed not in oddball dustbowl solitude
but en silversizzling rocketpopping rapidblasting masse.
Performances of innocence erupted over the earth
so fragile you could hear a flea fart through the circus circuits
of ceremonial Yes! Yes! sex whose erections were antennas
tuned to vulval flowers whose primordial power shook
and rocked fear down to its last trembling wall
with plunging tides of crashing flesh so desperate with loneliness
no one could ever forget the urgency of their birth
which was death blotting everything everywhere
with nightmare catatonic catastrophic despair
hissing through the atomic air on a cold raw coil
that burrowed into the nerves and haunted even the most quiet
wiring of the mind and presided like a sky over the Party raging below
punching radiant dents in the deadening air with foolish judo
fueled by voodoo: blues, booze, vats of acid, stunning smoke,
any gambler’s trick to lift life from its crypt in the grip of reckless ecstasy
and BLAM! that kamikaze jackpot in a flashing crash went bust
in a burst of authoritarian assassination hardass madness
that chased us into our caves where we wallowed in shadows
and followed occasional flickering strands of scattered sun
that faded fast and we slunk back to our lairs to sneer
that nothing lasts and we’re no fools and we’ll soon be through
with this gyp of a life so why try too hard if we’re fated to fail
—we’ll just hide inside ourselves with pills to still our nerves
and kill our dreams. And the sun dies in our sleep.
.
Amid coldwar American business cigarette masculinity
a pyrotechnic technicolor cyclone hatched at the Pandemonium Farm
—a far-off strand of a dream stung the scene like gibberish lightning
whose flash was glimpsed not in oddball dustbowl solitude
but en silversizzling rocketpopping rapidblasting masse.
Performances of innocence erupted over the earth
so fragile you could hear a flea fart through the circus circuits
of ceremonial Yes! Yes! sex whose erections were antennas
tuned to vulval flowers whose primordial power shook
and rocked fear down to its last trembling wall
with plunging tides of crashing flesh so desperate with loneliness
no one could ever forget the urgency of their birth
which was death blotting everything everywhere
with nightmare catatonic catastrophic despair
hissing through the atomic air on a cold raw coil
that burrowed into the nerves and haunted even the most quiet
wiring of the mind and presided like a sky over the Party raging below
punching radiant dents in the deadening air with foolish judo
fueled by voodoo: blues, booze, vats of acid, stunning smoke,
any gambler’s trick to lift life from its crypt in the grip of reckless ecstasy
and BLAM! that kamikaze jackpot in a flashing crash went bust
in a burst of authoritarian assassination hardass madness
that chased us into our caves where we wallowed in shadows
and followed occasional flickering strands of scattered sun
that faded fast and we slunk back to our lairs to sneer
that nothing lasts and we’re no fools and we’ll soon be through
with this gyp of a life so why try too hard if we’re fated to fail
—we’ll just hide inside ourselves with pills to still our nerves
and kill our dreams. And the sun dies in our sleep.
.
The Legend of "Cope With Cops"
By that time Krupp had “trained” his band
to react absolutely to his solo blowings
with lush shifting impressionistic soundscapes
swept by the gusts of his horn.
He would sculpt their vaporous atmospheres
with a velvety groan blown with the band
behind him tracing his trails, steering them
through seas of mesmerizing smoke.
Fatherproud, he invited other bigshots to “try them out.”
Most were amazed by the way
the band bent to their phrases,
and tended to blow slowly,
savoring the billowy twilit fogs
that curled to the command of their cries.
The exception was Cope. He blew fast gasps
at the band (he faced them when he played)
and forced them to guess his next gambit
in a whirling vertigo that shuddered
and shrieked like a train in an underground tunnel
beneath the black waters of the bay—the same train
they rode home every night after they played. The subway.
To Cope it felt ultimate, like a last music,
and he asked Krupp if he could “borrow” the band
to record a disc that after his last drug bust
he wanted to call Cope With Cops.
(He had a vision for the cover already:
the band trapped in cop clothes and Cope
up front fingering his horn in handcuffs.)
But Krupp sniffed doom and said nix.
And never again spoke with Cope.
Then the band blamed Krupp for stealing their spark
and left him, each down his own lone road.
The experiment was never attempted again.
By any of them.
.
to react absolutely to his solo blowings
with lush shifting impressionistic soundscapes
swept by the gusts of his horn.
He would sculpt their vaporous atmospheres
with a velvety groan blown with the band
behind him tracing his trails, steering them
through seas of mesmerizing smoke.
Fatherproud, he invited other bigshots to “try them out.”
Most were amazed by the way
the band bent to their phrases,
and tended to blow slowly,
savoring the billowy twilit fogs
that curled to the command of their cries.
The exception was Cope. He blew fast gasps
at the band (he faced them when he played)
and forced them to guess his next gambit
in a whirling vertigo that shuddered
and shrieked like a train in an underground tunnel
beneath the black waters of the bay—the same train
they rode home every night after they played. The subway.
To Cope it felt ultimate, like a last music,
and he asked Krupp if he could “borrow” the band
to record a disc that after his last drug bust
he wanted to call Cope With Cops.
(He had a vision for the cover already:
the band trapped in cop clothes and Cope
up front fingering his horn in handcuffs.)
But Krupp sniffed doom and said nix.
And never again spoke with Cope.
Then the band blamed Krupp for stealing their spark
and left him, each down his own lone road.
The experiment was never attempted again.
By any of them.
.
Mega Go
I am an American. I awaken to applause.
And flashes. And cartoon spring boing!
My chosen name is Mega(n) Go(rdon).
A motivated seller of what you seem to need to own.
Blank houses. White pages. Black holes.
But I have lived in another land
where the air was full of scowling winds
and the smell of roasting peppers.
People there were sober. Serious. Somber. Surly.
They had gravity. Not velocity. This frightened me.
So I got my ass back to the whirling world I’d known.
And got busy. Scattering sparks in a sky
of champagne twilight hollering like a billboard Hi! Hi! Hi!
The hollow behind the hullabaloo had chased me from its sight;
now I choose to drown in noise for all my blinding life.
And who knows? I may be right.
.
And flashes. And cartoon spring boing!
My chosen name is Mega(n) Go(rdon).
A motivated seller of what you seem to need to own.
Blank houses. White pages. Black holes.
But I have lived in another land
where the air was full of scowling winds
and the smell of roasting peppers.
People there were sober. Serious. Somber. Surly.
They had gravity. Not velocity. This frightened me.
So I got my ass back to the whirling world I’d known.
And got busy. Scattering sparks in a sky
of champagne twilight hollering like a billboard Hi! Hi! Hi!
The hollow behind the hullabaloo had chased me from its sight;
now I choose to drown in noise for all my blinding life.
And who knows? I may be right.
.
The People Versus Me
The judge in her black
robe strode in,
the big cop said rise
and we rose.
She sat down and so did we.
The People Versus Me.
I'd already confessed
that I did it,
but they had to decide
if I planned it.
My lawyer's strategy
was that I shouldn't speak,
so I watched him and his enemy
reconstruct reality
with bored cops and botched geeks
telling tales about me
for a voyeur jury.
I was like a celebrity.
But the State was really the star.
It marched through its Method
and my flesh
hung at the end
of an equation.
I'd wait on a verdict.
I'd wait in a cell.
I'd wait for a chance
to feel like a man again
with sun on my skin by the sea.
.
robe strode in,
the big cop said rise
and we rose.
She sat down and so did we.
The People Versus Me.
I'd already confessed
that I did it,
but they had to decide
if I planned it.
My lawyer's strategy
was that I shouldn't speak,
so I watched him and his enemy
reconstruct reality
with bored cops and botched geeks
telling tales about me
for a voyeur jury.
I was like a celebrity.
But the State was really the star.
It marched through its Method
and my flesh
hung at the end
of an equation.
I'd wait on a verdict.
I'd wait in a cell.
I'd wait for a chance
to feel like a man again
with sun on my skin by the sea.
.
From "The Last Testament of Melvin O’Toole"
I
I came here when I decided I was tired. I no longer wanted to cook, clean, shop, wash myself or deal with other people. I wanted to bask in the luxury of stillness and wait for death to come.
II
Several times a day I am visited by a woman with a face like a thumb who variously changes my bedpan, plies me with baby food, and washes me with a sponge. We never speak and I generally dread her visits.
III
The only other person I see is a bespectacled man who visits me occasionally. He is some sort of counselor. He is trying to redeem his life by assisting people with their deaths, and it seems to me that he succeeds at neither. He is a failure and that is why I like him. His name is Abernathy.
IV
Abernathy is autumnal. He is greying around the temples. He has a blasted look in his eyes. He doesn’t glow. He is about the age I was when I realized everything was over.
V
I tried to explain this to Abernathy once. Half my life ago I was paused in a car at an intersection in a prosperous American suburb, waiting for the light to change. I saw a man in an enormous vehicle roll by among all of the other enormous vehicles rolling by. He had a long black cigar in his mouth. The cigar looked virginal; I could tell that this man held in his mind an image of being cigar smoker more intently than he was actually smoking a cigar. Through him yawned the vast gleaming emptiness of a sunlit desert, the same vast gleaming emptiness that yawns through everything in the American suburbs.
VI
This man thought that he was free. He didn’t see himself as a product, sold with all his other fellow consumers to advertisers by broadcasters and publishers who didn’t give a damn about him beyond where he steered his eyeballs. Even after he rolled out of sight, I couldn’t shake from my mind the image of this ghost with a symbolic cigar jutting out of its face steering an enormous vehicle in pursuit of other empty symbols.
VII
It was then that I saw all of the masks that comprised my negotiations with the world scattered in a rubble at my feet. I no longer believed my own bluff. I didn’t evaporate in that instant, as would have been merciful, nor did my heart explode in my chest. Instead I felt struck to my core by a blow that winded me of my buoyancy. I persisted under this heaviness, still wielding bluffs I didn’t believe in, until several months ago when I came here, where I am ridding myself of the final bluff of being alive.
VIII
When I told this to Abernathy he smiled dimly and coughed once like shooting himself in the foot. “Yes,” he said, appraising his shoe, “I know what you mean about not believing your own bluff. I’ll see you next time.” He closed the door behind him. The nurse with a face like a thumb does too. The door only opens when they come in or go out.
IX
Abernathy is a decent sort, but he has everything upside down. He thinks the world is bad because people in power are bad, when it is power that tends to bring out the worst in people. "The problem," he once told me, "is that people keep asking 'What should we do?' It's a luxury to ask 'What should we do?' People in poor countries don't ask what to do—they rally themselves against their oppressors." I told him that Americans don't know what to do because of their luxuries; if they weren't so materially contented they'd be brimming with revolt and revenge—until their struggles yielded nothing sustaining and they became tired, too tired to try anything new, and they found themselves lapsing and waiting and bursting into occasional fits of violence that in the end only fortified their torpor. Abernathy understands poverty as love and blood and righteousness in a noble struggle for a new world order no longer ruled by the most brutal and greedy of our fine fellow men. He doesn't see the leaders of a successful revolution as the same men freed from their cages.
X
A big part of my crisis was my realizing that I wasn't one of these men. In my prime, at whose height I was poised when I struck by the apparition of my fellow man as a product reifying itself with the continuous acquisition of other products, I fancied myself as I kind of minor devil. I was fond of my wickedness. I was cunning and I had carved a neat little niche for myself in the fold of the world I'd inherited. According to my internal economy, I was maximizing my opportunities. I was a salesman who rolled from product to product with the tides of the times and was very good at what I did. People seemed to like me and, because I liked myself, I liked them. My wife was good-looking and we got along well, and together we'd made a daughter to whom I admittedly had trouble relating, but I made sure she was well provided for, and figured that the rest was up to her and her mother.
XI
I was loose and carefree, to the point of seeming sloppy to myself now, but even then I comported myself within the stricture of certain disciplines which fortified a necessary degree of self-righteousness. I may have flirted openly with women when I was away from my wife, but I never came close to having a full-blown affair. Such an enterprise requires real willfulness, and even then I knew there were limits to my wickedness. What I liked was staring into the swirling mirror that was the world of women to me. To be smiled at with knowing eyes was enough to assure me of whatever I believed myself to be, and that was enough for me, because as I soon realized, I was I creature nourished on fantasies that had no correspondence with reality, with what finally was.
XII
After I cracked I became quiet. I knew at last I was alone. Part of me considered abandoning what had been a lie of a life—to leave my wife, quit my job, and live like something other than the jolly-go-happy slob I had been until then. But I didn't. I wasn't wicked enough. Instead I plodded through my plotted course, a hollow man, a pair of eyes whose intensities where absolutely elsewhere. A dozen practiced gestures got me through the day. To others I was an echo of what I once was, and I deployed all of my cunning to keep that echo alive, which, knowing what I knew, was a torture that almost permanently mangled me. I am amazed that I don’t have cancer.
XIII
For the first time I saw how lonely my wife was, that she related to our camaraderie sadly, as a slender solace from her loneliness. In photographs of the two of us I saw our separateness: I self-satisfied, beaming broadly, almost lizardly, aloft on a gust of pleasure that was almost wholly my own; my wife serious, stern, sadly smiling, clinging to vapors that allegedly held us together. I was tempted to strand her in her loneliness then, to set her adrift in her separateness, but I couldn’t—seeing her so sad was unbearable, and after standing still and staring at her so surgically for months I suddenly seized her in an embrace with all the love I could summon shuddering through me, and she held me with all of her might, squeezing me so fiercely that she passed something quivering from her core into mine. I never pitied her again. We didn’t deign to pal around like in the dim days of yore, but we lived in quiet closeness until she died five years ago.
XIV
I cannot say the same for my daughter. She clearly hated me, and any attempt I made to narrow the gulf between us only exaggerated how impossibly apart we were. I hadn’t taken any real interest in her life until then, when she was a college freshman, and my clumsy overtures to try only insulted her. She quickly distanced herself from my wife and I after graduating, attaining, eventually, some managerial rank as a chemist for a dermatological medications corporation, married late, had a son. They live on the other end of the continent. She attended her mother’s funeral alone.
I came here when I decided I was tired. I no longer wanted to cook, clean, shop, wash myself or deal with other people. I wanted to bask in the luxury of stillness and wait for death to come.
II
Several times a day I am visited by a woman with a face like a thumb who variously changes my bedpan, plies me with baby food, and washes me with a sponge. We never speak and I generally dread her visits.
III
The only other person I see is a bespectacled man who visits me occasionally. He is some sort of counselor. He is trying to redeem his life by assisting people with their deaths, and it seems to me that he succeeds at neither. He is a failure and that is why I like him. His name is Abernathy.
IV
Abernathy is autumnal. He is greying around the temples. He has a blasted look in his eyes. He doesn’t glow. He is about the age I was when I realized everything was over.
V
I tried to explain this to Abernathy once. Half my life ago I was paused in a car at an intersection in a prosperous American suburb, waiting for the light to change. I saw a man in an enormous vehicle roll by among all of the other enormous vehicles rolling by. He had a long black cigar in his mouth. The cigar looked virginal; I could tell that this man held in his mind an image of being cigar smoker more intently than he was actually smoking a cigar. Through him yawned the vast gleaming emptiness of a sunlit desert, the same vast gleaming emptiness that yawns through everything in the American suburbs.
VI
This man thought that he was free. He didn’t see himself as a product, sold with all his other fellow consumers to advertisers by broadcasters and publishers who didn’t give a damn about him beyond where he steered his eyeballs. Even after he rolled out of sight, I couldn’t shake from my mind the image of this ghost with a symbolic cigar jutting out of its face steering an enormous vehicle in pursuit of other empty symbols.
VII
It was then that I saw all of the masks that comprised my negotiations with the world scattered in a rubble at my feet. I no longer believed my own bluff. I didn’t evaporate in that instant, as would have been merciful, nor did my heart explode in my chest. Instead I felt struck to my core by a blow that winded me of my buoyancy. I persisted under this heaviness, still wielding bluffs I didn’t believe in, until several months ago when I came here, where I am ridding myself of the final bluff of being alive.
VIII
When I told this to Abernathy he smiled dimly and coughed once like shooting himself in the foot. “Yes,” he said, appraising his shoe, “I know what you mean about not believing your own bluff. I’ll see you next time.” He closed the door behind him. The nurse with a face like a thumb does too. The door only opens when they come in or go out.
IX
Abernathy is a decent sort, but he has everything upside down. He thinks the world is bad because people in power are bad, when it is power that tends to bring out the worst in people. "The problem," he once told me, "is that people keep asking 'What should we do?' It's a luxury to ask 'What should we do?' People in poor countries don't ask what to do—they rally themselves against their oppressors." I told him that Americans don't know what to do because of their luxuries; if they weren't so materially contented they'd be brimming with revolt and revenge—until their struggles yielded nothing sustaining and they became tired, too tired to try anything new, and they found themselves lapsing and waiting and bursting into occasional fits of violence that in the end only fortified their torpor. Abernathy understands poverty as love and blood and righteousness in a noble struggle for a new world order no longer ruled by the most brutal and greedy of our fine fellow men. He doesn't see the leaders of a successful revolution as the same men freed from their cages.
X
A big part of my crisis was my realizing that I wasn't one of these men. In my prime, at whose height I was poised when I struck by the apparition of my fellow man as a product reifying itself with the continuous acquisition of other products, I fancied myself as I kind of minor devil. I was fond of my wickedness. I was cunning and I had carved a neat little niche for myself in the fold of the world I'd inherited. According to my internal economy, I was maximizing my opportunities. I was a salesman who rolled from product to product with the tides of the times and was very good at what I did. People seemed to like me and, because I liked myself, I liked them. My wife was good-looking and we got along well, and together we'd made a daughter to whom I admittedly had trouble relating, but I made sure she was well provided for, and figured that the rest was up to her and her mother.
XI
I was loose and carefree, to the point of seeming sloppy to myself now, but even then I comported myself within the stricture of certain disciplines which fortified a necessary degree of self-righteousness. I may have flirted openly with women when I was away from my wife, but I never came close to having a full-blown affair. Such an enterprise requires real willfulness, and even then I knew there were limits to my wickedness. What I liked was staring into the swirling mirror that was the world of women to me. To be smiled at with knowing eyes was enough to assure me of whatever I believed myself to be, and that was enough for me, because as I soon realized, I was I creature nourished on fantasies that had no correspondence with reality, with what finally was.
XII
After I cracked I became quiet. I knew at last I was alone. Part of me considered abandoning what had been a lie of a life—to leave my wife, quit my job, and live like something other than the jolly-go-happy slob I had been until then. But I didn't. I wasn't wicked enough. Instead I plodded through my plotted course, a hollow man, a pair of eyes whose intensities where absolutely elsewhere. A dozen practiced gestures got me through the day. To others I was an echo of what I once was, and I deployed all of my cunning to keep that echo alive, which, knowing what I knew, was a torture that almost permanently mangled me. I am amazed that I don’t have cancer.
XIII
For the first time I saw how lonely my wife was, that she related to our camaraderie sadly, as a slender solace from her loneliness. In photographs of the two of us I saw our separateness: I self-satisfied, beaming broadly, almost lizardly, aloft on a gust of pleasure that was almost wholly my own; my wife serious, stern, sadly smiling, clinging to vapors that allegedly held us together. I was tempted to strand her in her loneliness then, to set her adrift in her separateness, but I couldn’t—seeing her so sad was unbearable, and after standing still and staring at her so surgically for months I suddenly seized her in an embrace with all the love I could summon shuddering through me, and she held me with all of her might, squeezing me so fiercely that she passed something quivering from her core into mine. I never pitied her again. We didn’t deign to pal around like in the dim days of yore, but we lived in quiet closeness until she died five years ago.
XIV
I cannot say the same for my daughter. She clearly hated me, and any attempt I made to narrow the gulf between us only exaggerated how impossibly apart we were. I hadn’t taken any real interest in her life until then, when she was a college freshman, and my clumsy overtures to try only insulted her. She quickly distanced herself from my wife and I after graduating, attaining, eventually, some managerial rank as a chemist for a dermatological medications corporation, married late, had a son. They live on the other end of the continent. She attended her mother’s funeral alone.
XV
I came here to lie and to wait. To stare at my life unflinchingly and to live according to what I saw. To endure without distraction whatever visited me, be it physical indignity, obliterating sickness, loathsome shame, mortal fear, abysmal loneliness, Abernathy, or the nurse with a face like a thumb. I don’t keep track of days or hours, but I get a sense of their passing from the visits of the nurse and Abernathy. He seems to come weekly. Once I was particularly eager to see him, the time felt ripe for his arrival, but he didn’t come. I spent endless days and nights stranded on the edge of my ephemera, adrift in a horrible twilight flickering before a darkness so swallowing that when she came in to bathe me one day I spoke to the nurse for the first time. I asked her with a gasp where was Abernathy. “He’s been on vacation,” she told me, her face the clay of benignity. “You’ll see him tomorrow.”
Never have I felt so grateful.
.
Laugh Like a Hiss of Gas
Shit, Schmidt! Don't try and jince out of this one!
Your life is a mad dream in the drunken brain of a god!
But that won't relieve you of anything!
Take that bunch of blooms like a burst of music
beside a lonesome guitar
—you didn't contrive it: you recognized it
as a sudden symbol of song!
Divinity is in the details!
Like the way the crack in the Liberty Bell
makes a mental map of America
or that tobacco executives look like snuffed cigarettes
—it all makes fantastic terrible sense!
No grace is painless: a smile is the gnashing of teeth!
There are those who would eat the sun if they could!
With a blank blink! So let them swallow Obliterol
and laugh like a hiss of gas at life’s last gasp!
As vague and dazed as your days may be, the ache that slurs
within you flickers in eternity with a glorious dignity!
Take this ache! Waltz with it! Shit, Schmidt! You’re in this for life!
.
Your life is a mad dream in the drunken brain of a god!
But that won't relieve you of anything!
Take that bunch of blooms like a burst of music
beside a lonesome guitar
—you didn't contrive it: you recognized it
as a sudden symbol of song!
Divinity is in the details!
Like the way the crack in the Liberty Bell
makes a mental map of America
or that tobacco executives look like snuffed cigarettes
—it all makes fantastic terrible sense!
No grace is painless: a smile is the gnashing of teeth!
There are those who would eat the sun if they could!
With a blank blink! So let them swallow Obliterol
and laugh like a hiss of gas at life’s last gasp!
As vague and dazed as your days may be, the ache that slurs
within you flickers in eternity with a glorious dignity!
Take this ache! Waltz with it! Shit, Schmidt! You’re in this for life!
.
I Could Still Play
My heart should have burst in my chest when she left.
But it didn't. Instead I was stranded in whys,
withering in raw light, starving to hide
in some slash in the sky, in a dent in a pillow of wind.
I blurred myself with venom. Stabbed a fang in my arm
and sailed in the siren silence of anesthetic twilight,
drifting into the shimmering lamps
of her magnetizing eyes: eyes
that seemed to see you: you
wanted to plunge in those flares
and bask forever there.
Anywhere else was a tundra.
I'd wake shivering burning sick and alone.
She smoked in another world,
aloof as a flash in the desert
shadowing everything.
I rarely bathed or ate
—but I could still play.
Weeping stinging stuff on guitar,
with weird warped latenight highway
bluenotes bending into the tailend
of a drunken wedding at the “Morpheus
Hawaiian Hotel”—so I called the mood
I’d find when I twanged those strings alone.
I decided to stay there, although I was eager to go:
it was better than letting my manhood
fade like the kite of her ghost.
So for three shivering burning sunsets
I prayed in that place, slashing the strings
with the raw of my might from the pit of my life,
not stopping until screams of impossible need
and sinister glittering promises
howled themselves down to a hiss
and I stood thin and calm
in a rusty warm dawn,
a scar of a smile
beneath keen glowing eyes,
and hungry to offer
bellowing roses
to the terrible glory of love.
.
But it didn't. Instead I was stranded in whys,
withering in raw light, starving to hide
in some slash in the sky, in a dent in a pillow of wind.
I blurred myself with venom. Stabbed a fang in my arm
and sailed in the siren silence of anesthetic twilight,
drifting into the shimmering lamps
of her magnetizing eyes: eyes
that seemed to see you: you
wanted to plunge in those flares
and bask forever there.
Anywhere else was a tundra.
I'd wake shivering burning sick and alone.
She smoked in another world,
aloof as a flash in the desert
shadowing everything.
I rarely bathed or ate
—but I could still play.
Weeping stinging stuff on guitar,
with weird warped latenight highway
bluenotes bending into the tailend
of a drunken wedding at the “Morpheus
Hawaiian Hotel”—so I called the mood
I’d find when I twanged those strings alone.
I decided to stay there, although I was eager to go:
it was better than letting my manhood
fade like the kite of her ghost.
So for three shivering burning sunsets
I prayed in that place, slashing the strings
with the raw of my might from the pit of my life,
not stopping until screams of impossible need
and sinister glittering promises
howled themselves down to a hiss
and I stood thin and calm
in a rusty warm dawn,
a scar of a smile
beneath keen glowing eyes,
and hungry to offer
bellowing roses
to the terrible glory of love.
.
News from Pluto
This was when he learned that Pluto
had lost its planet status.
Imagine:
The furthest coldest globe dubbed a god
had been severed from the sun,
cast out of the kingdom,
reduced to a rock
like some forgotten land of the dead.
Pluto, his former metaphorical residence
and stone solace of his loneliness,
had dignified his plight:
far-gone but still upon a sacred arc
he'd spun around a star,
tethered to its center
by a grim divinity.
But his pariah's refuge
was now a refugee
and strewn in this erased
oblivion he pondered options.
Neptune? A fat place to party.
Uranus? Too much of a bad joke.
Top hat Saturn? Cyclopean Jupiter?
Red worn Mars? No. At that world
that winked like a jewel and drove
him drunk with dreams that drove
him to strand himself stunned on a
stone he'd stop and start again.
.
The furthest coldest globe dubbed a god
had been severed from the sun,
cast out of the kingdom,
reduced to a rock
like some forgotten land of the dead.
Pluto, his former metaphorical residence
and stone solace of his loneliness,
had dignified his plight:
far-gone but still upon a sacred arc
he'd spun around a star,
tethered to its center
by a grim divinity.
But his pariah's refuge
was now a refugee
and strewn in this erased
oblivion he pondered options.
Neptune? A fat place to party.
Uranus? Too much of a bad joke.
Top hat Saturn? Cyclopean Jupiter?
Red worn Mars? No. At that world
that winked like a jewel and drove
him drunk with dreams that drove
him to strand himself stunned on a
stone he'd stop and start again.
.
A Crack in the Ceiling
Where I’m from lanes of grubby brick houses
tilt downhill toward smoking factories.
I wasn’t sure what went on when people worked
but I knew it wasn’t good. My parents
owned a pub. People staggered in stunned,
worse than weary, as if something inside them
was finally tired. They drank
and drink did different things to them.
Some got sad and sulked in themselves
so the world wouldn’t reach them.
Others argued, a battle to be big
that forced them to fight sometimes
(the winners got more loud and wide).
Most of the rest of them laughed:
sparks of jittery tittering that shivered
on the brink of real merriment,
or raw bleak whisky laughter
from an absolute absence of happiness
that said hell is my habitat,
or laughter like a crumbling ceiling,
bright and keen and full of heat,
fierce and clear as breathing.
This sang like the singing
on Saturday nights when bands played
and the music made a wave
that lifted us higher than laughter
and when I sang along it felt like flying.
I knew this was important.
My mates and I made a band.
The blues were like a blessing for me,
a halo of serenity. When
I sang I felt utterly unlonely. When
we were done I felt like no one.
Even when we left school and played clubs
in London I never got blessed with a kiss.
It was like being smacked by my dad
when he’d catch me daydreaming as a lad.
Singing was breathing and the rest
was crashing into ceilings. Working
like a dolt in a clanging din that mocked
my hope of being more than a bloke
dimming himself with whisky night after night.
Cross-eyed and fat. Waiting to die.
Still I sang. And answered an ad
in a music mag: superstars seeking
a singer. A prayer of a longshot
but amazingly they called me.
Gnashing smiles and baleful eyes
at the audition. My right eye
kept sliding to the side
but I sang from my belly
solid and loud and during a blues
a spell spread through the room
and we throbbed in a groove that was
bigger than us and I wailed
and felt like their peer.
A shimmering crash at the end
of the tune and a keen eager gleam
in their eyes. They told me to sign
on the line—and get on a diet.
One night we recorded a song
that started with a stinging slow riff
over the thud of a dry bass drum,
a trudging heavy threnody
with shocks of organ chords
spiking the path. I sailed over this
ragged stomp with a gutpit howl
dredged from the muck of the pub,
the gouged and laughing faces desperate for ecstasy,
choking on smoke that clouded their curse,
my fear of this mirror, trying to fly,
grazing the lid of the sky only to find
myself stranded in silence,
the music suddenly gone, and I wailed
with the ache of Saturday nights
and the band charged from its hush,
the guitarist dazzling the air with shivering bursts
of furious notes, fleeing a nightmare, chasing a dream,
and I shrieked and growled in the surge as it churned
and it stamped and at the height of its stride stopped
dead—and drifted away with a groan.
That night I chased the promise
of a kiss that lurked in the air
just ahead of me and got freight
train drunk in a pub and grinned
at women in a glimmer of openness
until I fell wunk! on the floor knowing
I’d never escape what I know but now
I might ride it rather be crushed by it
and by the time they dragged me away
I was laughing at a crack in the ceiling.
.
tilt downhill toward smoking factories.
I wasn’t sure what went on when people worked
but I knew it wasn’t good. My parents
owned a pub. People staggered in stunned,
worse than weary, as if something inside them
was finally tired. They drank
and drink did different things to them.
Some got sad and sulked in themselves
so the world wouldn’t reach them.
Others argued, a battle to be big
that forced them to fight sometimes
(the winners got more loud and wide).
Most of the rest of them laughed:
sparks of jittery tittering that shivered
on the brink of real merriment,
or raw bleak whisky laughter
from an absolute absence of happiness
that said hell is my habitat,
or laughter like a crumbling ceiling,
bright and keen and full of heat,
fierce and clear as breathing.
This sang like the singing
on Saturday nights when bands played
and the music made a wave
that lifted us higher than laughter
and when I sang along it felt like flying.
I knew this was important.
My mates and I made a band.
The blues were like a blessing for me,
a halo of serenity. When
I sang I felt utterly unlonely. When
we were done I felt like no one.
Even when we left school and played clubs
in London I never got blessed with a kiss.
It was like being smacked by my dad
when he’d catch me daydreaming as a lad.
Singing was breathing and the rest
was crashing into ceilings. Working
like a dolt in a clanging din that mocked
my hope of being more than a bloke
dimming himself with whisky night after night.
Cross-eyed and fat. Waiting to die.
Still I sang. And answered an ad
in a music mag: superstars seeking
a singer. A prayer of a longshot
but amazingly they called me.
Gnashing smiles and baleful eyes
at the audition. My right eye
kept sliding to the side
but I sang from my belly
solid and loud and during a blues
a spell spread through the room
and we throbbed in a groove that was
bigger than us and I wailed
and felt like their peer.
A shimmering crash at the end
of the tune and a keen eager gleam
in their eyes. They told me to sign
on the line—and get on a diet.
One night we recorded a song
that started with a stinging slow riff
over the thud of a dry bass drum,
a trudging heavy threnody
with shocks of organ chords
spiking the path. I sailed over this
ragged stomp with a gutpit howl
dredged from the muck of the pub,
the gouged and laughing faces desperate for ecstasy,
choking on smoke that clouded their curse,
my fear of this mirror, trying to fly,
grazing the lid of the sky only to find
myself stranded in silence,
the music suddenly gone, and I wailed
with the ache of Saturday nights
and the band charged from its hush,
the guitarist dazzling the air with shivering bursts
of furious notes, fleeing a nightmare, chasing a dream,
and I shrieked and growled in the surge as it churned
and it stamped and at the height of its stride stopped
dead—and drifted away with a groan.
That night I chased the promise
of a kiss that lurked in the air
just ahead of me and got freight
train drunk in a pub and grinned
at women in a glimmer of openness
until I fell wunk! on the floor knowing
I’d never escape what I know but now
I might ride it rather be crushed by it
and by the time they dragged me away
I was laughing at a crack in the ceiling.
.
Onion Sermon
“Yeah man. Bo called.
Wants whisky to loosen
the lightning inside him. Hell.”
(Flips two pucks of meat in a pan.)
“That won't work but once. He's done
his kingkong stomp in the street
set to punch a hole in the sky. Could burn
through a wall with his eyes. No.”
(Sniffs a whiff of thin steam.)
“He needs to sit still in silence awhile.
Meditate. Concentrate past the cracks
jangling everyone around here.
But where could he find his own space?
Peace has a price in this place. And a private
quiet room is way past his reach. Damn.”
(Snows salt on the sizzling meat.)
“He needs a shack on the beach.
But then he’d need to work
all the time just to keep it. Shit.
Welfare should build a colony
of shacks on the shore for poor monks.
Call it Lost Coast Estates. Wouldn’t solve
society but maybe save some souls. So.”
(Snaps off the flame on the stove.)
“You want onions on yours?”
.
Wants whisky to loosen
the lightning inside him. Hell.”
(Flips two pucks of meat in a pan.)
“That won't work but once. He's done
his kingkong stomp in the street
set to punch a hole in the sky. Could burn
through a wall with his eyes. No.”
(Sniffs a whiff of thin steam.)
“He needs to sit still in silence awhile.
Meditate. Concentrate past the cracks
jangling everyone around here.
But where could he find his own space?
Peace has a price in this place. And a private
quiet room is way past his reach. Damn.”
(Snows salt on the sizzling meat.)
“He needs a shack on the beach.
But then he’d need to work
all the time just to keep it. Shit.
Welfare should build a colony
of shacks on the shore for poor monks.
Call it Lost Coast Estates. Wouldn’t solve
society but maybe save some souls. So.”
(Snaps off the flame on the stove.)
“You want onions on yours?”
.
Nomad's Land
What I reached through, really,
was a wrinkle, a ripple of wind,
a hiss of a far-fetched cry.
Which sent me wandering
with a curse nagging my mind,
a spy with dazed eyes
drunk with clues.
I paused in flotsam villages
where shadow people gazed
at fields of far-off light.
And guided by their eyes
I reached an electrical mecca
that hissed in its sleep
and raved like a crackpot god
shocked from a terrible dream—
a shivering scream whose clarity
offered me a home:
Find thy grace in this lost bog
is all ye need to know.
.
was a wrinkle, a ripple of wind,
a hiss of a far-fetched cry.
Which sent me wandering
with a curse nagging my mind,
a spy with dazed eyes
drunk with clues.
I paused in flotsam villages
where shadow people gazed
at fields of far-off light.
And guided by their eyes
I reached an electrical mecca
that hissed in its sleep
and raved like a crackpot god
shocked from a terrible dream—
a shivering scream whose clarity
offered me a home:
Find thy grace in this lost bog
is all ye need to know.
.
What Then?
In the ragged brush by a footpath
we heard a big beast breathe.
We stopped. Nothing stirred in the brush.
Now what? hissed a friend. What now?
We wouldn’t run. Why?
We were circumscribed by an island.
Then what? hissed the friend. What then?
We’d walk. We’d work and wait—with weapons—
while that big beast breathed.
.
we heard a big beast breathe.
We stopped. Nothing stirred in the brush.
Now what? hissed a friend. What now?
We wouldn’t run. Why?
We were circumscribed by an island.
Then what? hissed the friend. What then?
We’d walk. We’d work and wait—with weapons—
while that big beast breathed.
.
Flag of a Man
Bells struck me.
My eyes flashed wide.
A clang burst from my mouth
and I sang like a star.
Touched by the tongue
of an odd god
my thoughts rang with rhymes
and my blood hummed
in a fit of citizenship.
That a flag of a man
could flail so fiercely
with winds from a far-off war
was almost fathomable:
I was a sail
in a howling gale
of what I could not know.
.
My eyes flashed wide.
A clang burst from my mouth
and I sang like a star.
Touched by the tongue
of an odd god
my thoughts rang with rhymes
and my blood hummed
in a fit of citizenship.
That a flag of a man
could flail so fiercely
with winds from a far-off war
was almost fathomable:
I was a sail
in a howling gale
of what I could not know.
.
Hummm
Mister Max Kwondo
eyes glowing stones
drinkie yum yum soda
through stitch of smile
know no god yoga
avoid broadcast voice
batsquawk radar broke
blasting crazy mess!
Mind hum highway
behind eyes gaze glass
see me see face of lady
instead she me!
Off bus
on street one thought
puff air sky stare
down I see eye
up there I stare
it stare no scare no
voice just this
!
.
eyes glowing stones
drinkie yum yum soda
through stitch of smile
know no god yoga
avoid broadcast voice
batsquawk radar broke
blasting crazy mess!
Mind hum highway
behind eyes gaze glass
see me see face of lady
instead she me!
Off bus
on street one thought
puff air sky stare
down I see eye
up there I stare
it stare no scare no
voice just this
!
.
Fear in a Coffee Mug
With gulping eyes
rat-tat-tat heart
pinprick belly
and celebration groin
he tottered on twiglegs
into the jagged geometry
of a megabusiness metropolis
where the authority of money
flashed through gnashing
smiles and whirlpool eyes
whose weather warned
of crashes, losses, storms.
There was fear in a coffee mug.
Whispers in a drawer.
A pinball jing! jing! gleam
that screamed everything was GREAT!
that made him want to rave naked
through the canyons under the skyscrapers
until he crashed into something ultimate.
But he chooses instead to stand still
and stare at the sky
each evening as a prayer.
Something there in the upper air
makes worry seem silly,
and stones like breath,
and the strivings of his fretful fellow workers
worthy at least of a smile
that strains to embrace all of this
in the circumference of his loneliness.
Let tears fall to quench us.
.
rat-tat-tat heart
pinprick belly
and celebration groin
he tottered on twiglegs
into the jagged geometry
of a megabusiness metropolis
where the authority of money
flashed through gnashing
smiles and whirlpool eyes
whose weather warned
of crashes, losses, storms.
There was fear in a coffee mug.
Whispers in a drawer.
A pinball jing! jing! gleam
that screamed everything was GREAT!
that made him want to rave naked
through the canyons under the skyscrapers
until he crashed into something ultimate.
But he chooses instead to stand still
and stare at the sky
each evening as a prayer.
Something there in the upper air
makes worry seem silly,
and stones like breath,
and the strivings of his fretful fellow workers
worthy at least of a smile
that strains to embrace all of this
in the circumference of his loneliness.
Let tears fall to quench us.
.
San Francisco
I live in a last-gasp haven for misfits
at the end of America.
With a few streets and some sand
between my home and the ocean.
Now there’s nowhere else to go.
Except back into the heart of the nation
and my god I don’t want that!
I’m fleeing a smiling suburban banality
that is the sickest lie I know.
Now there’s nowhere else to go.
At the edge of this ocean I make my stand
against the killing sterility of a desperate land.
With the rest of the freaks and dreamers.
Drown us if you can.
.
at the end of America.
With a few streets and some sand
between my home and the ocean.
Now there’s nowhere else to go.
Except back into the heart of the nation
and my god I don’t want that!
I’m fleeing a smiling suburban banality
that is the sickest lie I know.
Now there’s nowhere else to go.
At the edge of this ocean I make my stand
against the killing sterility of a desperate land.
With the rest of the freaks and dreamers.
Drown us if you can.
.
Glimpse of Grace
I was in such a good mood
that when the sound of the son of a popstar
shrieked through the speakers of the supermarket
I didn’t even want to punch him!
.
that when the sound of the son of a popstar
shrieked through the speakers of the supermarket
I didn’t even want to punch him!
.
Let It Begin Again
A bong of bells.
Let it begin again.
Let a grizzled drunk jerk
and his fat blasted wife
taunt sidewalk café patrons
with a ragged dance that sneers
Fuck you! We’re creeps
but at least we boogie!
Let them stop soon,
exhausted and unrevolutionary.
Let a glowing woman pass
in the phenomenal grace of her
unselfconscious loveliness.
Let her not be razzed by lusts
from chumps who’d love to plug her.
Let a red-suspendered businessman,
his face a map of fights for money,
meet cherubic humptydumpty altruists
in a cheap Chinese joint for lunch.
Let them hatch collaborative strategies
for phantasmagorical philanthropies.
Let a huge tanker crash into the base of a bridge,
blackening the bay with raw oil
that kills the fish and dirties the birds
and gluts the beach with thick sheets
of gobby tar that smears the sand like phlegm.
Let this stoke the fury of surfers
who in state-issued spacesuits clean the beach.
Let a vivid crisis visit
the vapid happiness
of Born Again! Christian bankers
foreclosing on a home.
Let their horror be soothed
in the hollow of Buddha.
Let the man who frees himself
from the fear of his own mind
inherit the kingdom of philosophy.
Let the sun wink down on him like an eye
as he gazes at a tree in the park.
Let that same man in the prime of his life
realize that breathing is laughter
and everything ends up a tie.
Let him know he is a being among beings
until one day he dies.
Let this be not an end nor beginning of anything.
A bong of bells.
Let it begin again.
Let a grizzled drunk jerk
and his fat blasted wife
taunt sidewalk café patrons
with a ragged dance that sneers
Fuck you! We’re creeps
but at least we boogie!
Let them stop soon,
exhausted and unrevolutionary.
Let a glowing woman pass
in the phenomenal grace of her
unselfconscious loveliness.
Let her not be razzed by lusts
from chumps who’d love to plug her.
Let a red-suspendered businessman,
his face a map of fights for money,
meet cherubic humptydumpty altruists
in a cheap Chinese joint for lunch.
Let them hatch collaborative strategies
for phantasmagorical philanthropies.
Let a huge tanker crash into the base of a bridge,
blackening the bay with raw oil
that kills the fish and dirties the birds
and gluts the beach with thick sheets
of gobby tar that smears the sand like phlegm.
Let this stoke the fury of surfers
who in state-issued spacesuits clean the beach.
Let a vivid crisis visit
the vapid happiness
of Born Again! Christian bankers
foreclosing on a home.
Let their horror be soothed
in the hollow of Buddha.
Let the man who frees himself
from the fear of his own mind
inherit the kingdom of philosophy.
Let the sun wink down on him like an eye
as he gazes at a tree in the park.
Let that same man in the prime of his life
realize that breathing is laughter
and everything ends up a tie.
Let him know he is a being among beings
until one day he dies.
Let this be not an end nor beginning of anything.
A bong of bells.
.
"Success"
Last night I dreamed I was going to marry
the prettiest girl in town—a kind of high school princess
with a pale smooth oval face and big cool grey
selfsatified eyes. Her hair was wheaty blonde:
she looked wholesome. I wandered through a postcommunist American
totalitarian Darth Vadar university building to find her.
She was sitting chatting with a gaggle of friends of both sexes
in a dim vaguely flourescent blacktile-floored cafeteria.
Call out to her! I thought. Take her away from these people!
Don’t let them keep her like you did with the two-day girlfriend
you had when you were fifteen! Don’t be a coward!
I leaned over the back of one of the group and said her name
across the black institutional table. I nodded upward when our eyes met.
She got up and walked toward the nearest end of the long table.
As I walked over to her I noticed I was wearing a puffy tan suit
and a splotchy floral tie. Our kiss was calm and cool. We kissed like
teammates. Then we began walking arm-in-arm toward the other end
of the long black table. I had the feeling of marching on a pre-plotted path,
to a rhythm of something expected not my own. When she spoke she voiced
my formulaic thoughts: “After today you’ll be married to the prettiest girl in town!”
There was nothing else for me to say.
I don’t remember the rest. My God! I hope I ran away!
.
the prettiest girl in town—a kind of high school princess
with a pale smooth oval face and big cool grey
selfsatified eyes. Her hair was wheaty blonde:
she looked wholesome. I wandered through a postcommunist American
totalitarian Darth Vadar university building to find her.
She was sitting chatting with a gaggle of friends of both sexes
in a dim vaguely flourescent blacktile-floored cafeteria.
Call out to her! I thought. Take her away from these people!
Don’t let them keep her like you did with the two-day girlfriend
you had when you were fifteen! Don’t be a coward!
I leaned over the back of one of the group and said her name
across the black institutional table. I nodded upward when our eyes met.
She got up and walked toward the nearest end of the long table.
As I walked over to her I noticed I was wearing a puffy tan suit
and a splotchy floral tie. Our kiss was calm and cool. We kissed like
teammates. Then we began walking arm-in-arm toward the other end
of the long black table. I had the feeling of marching on a pre-plotted path,
to a rhythm of something expected not my own. When she spoke she voiced
my formulaic thoughts: “After today you’ll be married to the prettiest girl in town!”
There was nothing else for me to say.
I don’t remember the rest. My God! I hope I ran away!
.
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