MOST PROVOCATIVELY MISS HENRY

39. MOST PROVOCATIVELY MISS HENRY - (Woodrow Wilson Sends His Regrets):

Speaking of all that sometimes myself I get so lonely I want to scream so solitary it's like I was somehow left behind on that fucked up continent of the Moon all saddled and heavy with my connections and ship-to-shore radio never had nothing like this to go by and anything I might have done has been never done before for right here where I am is the first place for any man and unique has always been my sadness - for NO ONE wants the ONE who stands alone and outside of my own circle of kin there is none and no noise makes an echo if there are no ears to hear what's made (Kincaid Marmalade Cavalcade) - a brand-new language for the world - ("Hey! didj'a ever hear the one about the two-fisted sloganeer?") - the drunken guy was trying to talk but could hardly get the words out and the answer had something to do with - I think - ('the sloganeer did it in his ear')...and then it all rhymed with beer and furthermore had something to do with some woman's something or other but BY THAT TIME even I had stopped listening and was fixated instead on the pearly white cleavage of some girl in the corner poring over a magazine made of metal and she wore clothing fit for a royal daughter of the ages and I found myself wondering whatever I wanted to wonder about her but the little bastard loud-mouthed drunk guy kept going on and all he was doing was 'infracting the silence' like the police report says and on the television too some fat fat weather guy in a yellow rain slicker was going on about a hurricane and the force of the storm because of not just the rain but the 'wind content' and I found myself shudderinig to think of the stupidity of that bastardized line "what the fuck is 'wind content' will someone tell me ? and YOU little guy shut the hell up you're boring me!" and I couldn't tell if there was like wind with particulates in it getting blown about or if the fat guy merely wanted to sound suddenly important and the passive use of terminology - as he was doing - seemed to him to be the most effective way of sounding important : like 'the victim died because of bullet content in his god-damned stomach ventricle loaded as it was with perpertrator's shreds of lead and the presence of serious blood efflugent led us to believe that a shooting event had taken place in the realms of Vicarious County West Virginia or wherever the fuck this is' and if I imagined that I could just as well imagine me and the pearly white bitch together on the moon if I had to but instead all I was getting was Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins - the Three Horsemen of the Acropolis or whatever that is - and I was AFTER ALL more familiar I thought with the three oarsmen of the Metropolis who could either have been Clark Kent Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane or three jerks named Nasty Brutish and Short but NONE of that does a thing about the overwhelming presence of Perry White - who of course owned everything and commanded every scene - SUPERMAN notwithstanding.
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And I turned to the little drunk bastard and said "speaking of Superman (which no one was) did you know what the address of the Daily Planet was?" and he looked at me in a grossly stupid way and said "no - what was it?" and I said simply "69 Lois Lane".

DIVERSION: THE TRUE STORY OF ONE 'TELEMARQUE' DENMARK VESEY

38. DIVERSION - THE TRUE STORY OF ONE 'TELEMARQUE' DENMARK VESEY:

"There are myriad levels to the things which make up an everyday life – slate gray sky towards evening with car exhaust and buses running along Fifth and the yellow lights of nighttime just coming on forming their ridge of illumination along the edges of the park and that bleak broad cityscape rising high one huge form of buildings windows and reflected lights with other things thrusting in shadows to any here or there in any direction the shallow shoal of escaping daylight still pierced between great darkening clouds something rolling in from the west – a huge form of weather or darkness and clouds or both and all at rest for everything tired of form and work once the shimmering brown echo of words and sentences jagged and hung in the air suspended faces between people those passing and those addressing each other the forms of late business still being done the doubters the sharpies those happy and those sad to or from or on their meager way to something – some grace of evening respite and all among this deep within it are first people then their minds all together as one making this world up as they go along each one a distinct personality ! THOUGH what is personality (you maybe asked?) well the answer turns out to be NOT specific for the newer sciences of human nature proclaim their discoveries that personality as we know it has exactly five dimensions : people are - in varying degrees - either open to experience or incurious or conscientious or undirected or extroverted or introverted agreeable or antagonistic or neurotic or stable and this is today known as in the literature as the FIVE-FACTOR MODEL or ‘FFM’ and these five dimensions are referred to as OCEAN and all five attributes are partly inheritable and they are too what behavioral geneticists look to for a definition of personality and it seems there is no need for finer tuning for OCEAN accounts for everything and most of the 18,000 adjectives for personality traits can be tied to one of these dimensions and parents cannot therefore make a ‘fretful’ child into a ‘serene’ adult and it is irrelevant that they can make their children perhaps into opera buffs water-skiers food connoisseurs bilingual speakers trumpet players and churchgoers for science cannot comprehend what it cannot measure and what cannot be measured I guess I cannot speak of here nor even describe Science can however measure anxiety can measure atrocity cannot measure hate or anger can measure trepidation cannot measure rage and these are all things for which the sweat machine the lie detector the pulsemeter can accomplish - nothing really other than pallid poor measures
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And we move forward on the suppositions of these correct accomplishments which are in reality NOTHING so then : be what you are whatever you are whatever it is regale yourself with the blue sky as you walk up the ramp observe the grandeur of simple ‘things’ as you pass them by read yourself like you would a book or a code and be simply satisfied with that" and that was the end of the entire scene the end of the room and the shingle on the outside wall and the imagined or real slights and flights of imagination – rueful real doubtful or shady whatever no money changed hands and anyone who watched was welcomed to look and much later it was as I was down along Vesey Street
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searching out something that I thought about Denmark Vesey and who or what he was and why a place like this bore such a name and found that those old New Yorkers were a difficult lot – supporting evidently only losers not winners for old Denmark Vesey or a namesake from 1822 or thereabouts was a sorrowful scene to behold but his story still rang true and I guess New Yorkers in those days valued something even though it’s always seemed that all they valued was good grub and money and the making of both together and in actuality even Denmark Vesey wasn’t Denmark Vesey but Telemarque and Denmark Vesey was the captain who had the ownership oddly enough but I’d be guessing that Telemarque somehow took the name or became branded or stuck with it and all this time later that’s how we know him oddly enough too but whatever the case may be there I was finding myself walking upward from the area which used to be the Westside docks where nothing is today except endless money and people on the make and a crowd of incessant mourners at all times of course gawking at only what used to be there - HOWEVER - it goes that they’re pining for what used to be there only back to the WTC days while I’ve for sure long got them beat on that count as I try to look back a hundred years or more looking past whatever crap they’d seen or imagined they’d seen wanting more as usual more than I could ever get and the markings on the rib of Adam are merely markings by the hand of God some say but to myself I mutter something far different
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‘Denmark Vesey whose real name was Telemarque and is only known to HISTORY as Denmark Vesey is a person who has made it into history for his hopes and not his deeds for he did in fact die on the gallows as a failure and is but popularly known as a leader of a slave revolt in Charleston South Carolina a ‘revolt’ however which never got beyond the planning stage and for his plan and his ideas Telemarque and thirty-four other Negroes were hanged and his life was filled with a melancholy irony for as a slave for over twenty years he sailed with his master one Captain Vesey to the Virgin Islands and Haiti which was then ruled by free black men and Telemarque was Captain Vesey’s property but moved about the streets of Charleston like a free man and he secured his own freedom oddly enough by winning a 1500 dollar lottery of which he used 600 dollars to buy his freedom from his master - has also tried to purchase his children but was unable to do so - Telemarque was born in 1767 and sold at an early age by Captain Vesey but later re-purchased because he suffered from epilepsy and as Captain Vesey’s constant companion he learned much about the nature of freedom and of business so that when he did become free he applied his experience and knowledge to his own business ventures and soon prospered yet he wanted more than anything to secure the freedom of his own people and partly because he could read and write and partly because the church was the one place he could speak to large numbers of Negroes without questioning by whites he became a Methodist minister and in short order his home was made a regular meeting place and money was collected to buy arms and he had a blacksmith make a large number of daggers and bayonets and a white barber sympathetic to his plans was engaged to fashion wigs and whiskers out of European hair so that his mulatto conspirators could penetrate the heart of the city and seize control when the time came and Zero Hour was set for the second Sunday in July of 1822 (‘Denmark Vesey Day’ somewhere) and as everything was in readiness the whole scheme had suddenly to be advanced to June 16 (‘Denmark Vesey Day’ somewhere too) but the plans which had been in the making for two years had been revealed to the whites by a Negro whom Telemarque felt he could trust and in a twinkling Charleston was an armed camp and the whites rounded up hundreds of Negroes believed to be involved in the plot and Telemarque went into hiding but after two days was discovered and taken captive after which a local tribunal was set up and operated as judge and jury hearing condemning testimony from scores of witnesses and even with a fine defense Telemarque was shown to be in no doubt of planning the overthrow of the city and for this he was sentenced to be hanged along with thirty-four other Negroes while four whites who had aided them were merely fined and imprisoned and two days before Independence day in 1822 Denmark Vesey died on the gallows (‘Denmark Vesey Day’ in South Carolina)’ and I realized that all Civil War sympathies and sides put aside probably the real reason for Denmark Vesey’s honor here was because of his industrious endeavor towards business and using his knowledge of business to push and prod himself and others along for by whatever other means early New Yorkers honored people that surely was among the first one or two and good for that all I guess but what’s an anti-slavery insurrectionist in today’s light anyway but a boor a nuisance and a sideshow surreal distraction but here we are LEFT with a street so named in honor and even if no one else knows that I do and I hereby perpetrate the concept oh DOCTOR HORATIO SWANN Doctor Jerome Nessler and anyone else seeking to typecast the soliloquy they may seek to have heard (‘for whom the rising light entails their own eclipse brightening as they fail OH brightening as they fail!’)

THE OLD WORLD WAS REALLY GONE

37. THE OLD WORLD WAS REALLY GONE:

From every corner it seemed something seeped - vicious words exchanged by strangers and the humid loves between two people exchanging summations of all times and places - and the newspaper before me had just run a story - yet again - of Canal Street and its westside end - a terminus I'd written about before and remembered well - but they'd left off so much about everything that it was hardly worth reading and I sat there perplexed and wondering WHY do people excise so much of everything in order to make a simple point about the modern day and they never admit to having changed anything they just fall right into place believing and thinking that what they'd just made was always true and HAD BEEN SO forever and I was reminded of the old Russian guy who when asked if it was possible to foretell the future replied : 'yes - no problem with the future we know exactly what it will bring BUT our problem is with the past -- THAT keeps changing' and I realized what he meant but it wasn't supposed to happen here yet it was and it was that kind of coarsely ladled opinion which colored the old world and it seemed had now all but disappeared as today people had somehow arrived at some crazed gentleness some kid-glove softness of opinion and bearing NO ONE wanting to hurt anyone else but just to grab a profit off them that's fine and all of the old world really was gone the BRUTAL one the one forgotten the world wherein people took responsibility for whatever it was they did and dealt with it (no screaming Mimi's for help aid assistance and recompense no hands-out demands for sustenance and gain) and I remembered another old guy who'd once convinced me of the correctness of his lethal opinion that the word 'husband' was merely a misinterpreted and mis-spelled derivation over the years of the word 'housebound' from which it had come and although I THINK I knew he was incorrect somewhere he brought me to the point of harboring a doubt - but it was all in the way he said it and in the sterness of his old conviction while he said it (things are funny like that sometimes) and I realize for certain too that NOW I'm not really sure about anything not certain that anything makes sense or carries truth and the entire topsy-turvy world now bears ALONE the print of the cloven hoof of the great god Pan and that is what rules the world - excursions and pleasure and dance and diversion - and like the 'War to End All Wars' NO SUCH THING ever existed.

THE CRYING FOR A VISION TEA PARLOR

36. THE CRYING FOR A VISION TEA PARLOR - (Also known as 'Tuku's' to those in the know):

"The largest of the Great Lakes is probably smaller than the smallest of the great oceans yet in some regard they are both the same just as the Great Wall of China is very breakable and a bull in that wall of China would probably do some damage but for that to happen we’d have to see it for what is there to hear if there is no one there to hear it and that sound of silence I would bet is very relaxed but even more importantly remember this: ‘limitation is a creation of the mind’ and once you get that understood so much else flows from it for restrictions are merely middle men to satisfaction and a dream but then again I’ve probably already said too much and will say no more" the guy saying all that was known as Chaghad Tuku Amar Iyoti and he kept a sort of tea parlor along 11th street near the double parking garage which once was a carriage barn and a stable and now shared space with some fifteen guys with pretzel carts and their inventories of pretzels and sodas and the occasional hot dog and mustard overflow and each morning and other times of the day too they’d wrestle between cars coming and going to fill their carts with water and load the propane for the hot water and boil hot dogs and heat pretzels and everything else that goes with it and they’d be off on foot for points assorted around 14th Street for the day and night and in this way some money was turned about as much money as were the ideas turned in Tuku’s tea place next door and even though it did have a real name ‘Crying For a Vision Tea Parlor’ it was called no one called it that and it was known instead simply as ‘Tuku’s for whatever and he made some money by donations and twenty-cent tea I suppose but nobody cared for he was more known as the wise man of the area who would just hang there and dispense ideas tidbits advice whatever and even if any of it was no good nobody knew the difference or cared EXCEPT the times when big-deal types from uptown would come by or the camera-crew types for CBS Sunday Morning which was a sort of catch-all morning show of oddities and stupidities and they came by once to record Tuku and film the place but it never really captured what was there even though they did air it and wax poetic about it and it brought down the obligatory silly nitwits who followed things like the CBS show to get their ideas and advice and it was a real mess but he made some money and he started babbling things then too like ‘when we try to quiet the mind we end up doing the opposite’ and then of course his famed soliloquy on relaxation or something which went like this (still always amazing to hear) "relaxing the mind is this: Just Relax! Not in order to overcome anything - RELAX period! And this does not require effort for on the contrary it is effortless and by it everything else will follow nicely and beautifully and ask yourself if you are relaxed if you have peace for if you are still struggling that is proof that you have not found peace but you may wish for peace and hope for peace and you may be trying for it but the very fact that you are trying is contrary to peace and I would humbly say that there is no need to try and you should ‘Give it Up!’ and it is because you have been trying to have peace that you are not getting peace and I would humbly say to you that there is NO NEED to try ‘GIVE IT UP!’ for it is because you have been trying to have peace that you are not getting peace and if you would just give it up and let go it will come for Wisdom is not a thing of learning and it springs forth or awakens within us and it is a kind of light and you cannot teach light you cannot teach love you cannot teach peace joy or freedom for these awaken within us only if and as we create the right conditions so LET GO and relax - not in order to overcome something else for if you have that thought even subconsciously you are perpetuating it so DO NOT try to win over your enemy but instead love that enemy for there is a vast difference between the two – one is a mental exercise and the other is clearing and all that springs from the Light is automatic while all that springs from darkness involves efforts and trying…" and this all went on but at one point right here the cameraman is heard in the background to exclaim how he’d thought that Tuku had just said instead of ‘vast difference’ vas deferens (‘there is a vas deferens between the two’) and it caused Tuku to break out in uncontrollable laughter and smiling and as he bobbed his head he exclaimed something like "Yes! YES! that is it indeed SUCH is the key a great humor and happiness a certain LIGHTNESS to all creation! YOU HAVE SOLVED IT!! and he ran off laughing and only later did someone look it up for not everyone knew immediately what had transpired and the definition of vas deferens turned out to be…well you go look it up yourself for CBS never aired that part.

McCLATHCHY'S MOTIVES

35. McCLATHCHY’S MOTIVES (the Spindle of Necessity):

"In Plato’s Republic there is an explanation of this : twelve days after his death in battle the body of Er – son of Armenius – a hero of legend in far Pamphylia as torches were readied CAME TO LIFE AGAIN on his funeral pyre and told what he had seen of the other world : that his soul in a crush of companions had journeyed to a mysterious place of two openings it seemed in the earth with two others above and between them the seats of judges who bound men to their sentences that they should climb or descend with the symbols of their deeds fastened to their backs – but Er was told only to watch and bear the message back to men the message that he had seen the dead arrive dusty with their travel and the souls of those already saved step down into a meadow to meet them and those who knew one another embraced and wept at the tales of what they had endured and seen while those above told of the delights yet to come and of injustices reversed and of tyrants cast into terrors worse than they themselves had inflicted and Er then looked up at a column of light to which the chains of heaven were attached that held the spindle of Necessity with its eight hollowed whorls broadening into spangled ranks of wheeling planetary orbits moving as they must and each sounding a note of harmony with the rest and the fates adding their overtones with their hands touching turning and guiding the spindle through its past present and future and as Er looked on each mortal soul was asked to choose its genius and the first were told not to be careless and the last not to despair for each would have the lot of his desire and the length of a new life and Er stood in astonishment as one after another men and women because the memory of their previous life was still so strong asked to be animals in the next – whether bird or beast – a blameless unknowing being not in love with death - and the soul that once had been Orpheus chose the life of a swan because of not wanting to be born of a woman and hating the race of women who had murdered him and others chose sparrow or horse or – remembering their pain – an eagle that could circle the slain in their bloody armor and slowly circle high over what men do to themselves and then EACH was given a cup of Unmindfullness from which some carelessly drank too much and some too little so that the past would haunt them and Er himself was kept from drinking (and how his body was returned to Earth he never could say) but as the others were driven like stars shooting up to their births in the world torches were lit and Er suddenly woke and found himself lying on a pyre – his old parents in tears" and I thought to myself ‘what a nice recitation is that and not all filled with the vile claptrap of modern day religion and all its effects and vagaries about intent and retribution and account-keeping or at least not in the vastly usual way of catechism and rant’ and I did guess it sounded like someplace I’d be willing to go to whatever it be but I left off soon enough all thought of that for I realized that in every manifestation of the human condition it is only and alone mythology and the splendor of personal belief which gets us through the morning noon and afternoon of our lives - and all other discussion of the point is useless and moot - and my single mind turned back instead to the embroiled hot and sweaty streets of Newark around me and as Don DeLillo said (to me – just the other day) "I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread."
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"Let me believe in it all – infinity pain and the things we see in mirrors in dark rooms at night; the moon hermetic and shifting."
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But to Hell with all that : all I could think of was "Where do we go when we die ? What are our lives without the possibility of a Heaven ? What makes the short-lived beautiful?"

TWICE DECIDING WHAT TO IGNORE

34. TWICE DECIDING WHAT TO IGNORE:

And I am lost between the losing and the getting with no recompense of time or place so that in my every jointed move there is nothing but loss or thoughts of loss and the passing of time time not utilized and therefore ended and the effect of one life is the effect of one accumulation the idle and the hours all together but to make amends somehow I grope the world back as it gropes me and walking darkened nighttime streets see people and watch their faces and find their glints of hope and happiness - those stuffed like cargo on a train as they sit between sitting and talk to each other with nothing amiss or the ones who alone stare straight out or with suspicion eye the equally wary all around them and of no particular concern are the hands and eyes of people together the conductors and the travelers the lovers and the infirm the single old abandoned lonely troubled the happy who sing those reading newspapers and others watching what passes – staring bereft out solid windows to featureless liquid vistas of swamp and factory river and bridge and the buoyant silence of the solitude itself staggers like some lummox floating dead bouncing and weaving in secreted currents as marsh-grass passes and the man-made hills of delusion and the rising and falling of old soil and rock or new homes and even newer debris for that ALL OF THAT is our scenery today and that which passes by us is all that we have made as nameless and forgotten some glimmer of the older natural world is ignored or blemished or nearly forgotten entirely - dead cars in fetid swamps ten kids on mini-bikes ripping the landscape two guys in four-wheel-drive trucks pestering the brooks and glens where the rabbits live and watching the local birds fly even I can understand their aerobic fear of their moment here the bow and arrow of chance today the force and storm of anything that can kill them and I listen for the accents of two hundred people as each talking all talk differently past and to each other in newsflash TV words of glamour and game and only that and the dark-haired one the beauty with the golden watch and blue-brushed and painted eyes in her tailored coat and boots stares back at me not once but twice deciding what to ignore and what to entice and even that moment like some fearsome train in the other direction passes blazing past all sound and no fury causing lights to flicker and dim and then come on again as all the calm once more returns to haunt us back within.

BEN BERKLEE'S HIGH FIVE NIGHTSPOT

33. BEN BERKLE’S HIGH FIVE NIGHTSPOT:

I met Sergeant Schroeder at Ben Berkle’s High Five a nightspot on 5th Street one night way after the moon had gone down way before sunlight arrives and kind of right in the middle of the two spaces that night fills up and we sat there exchanging tales and comments he looking over at each and every female that walked in or by and for sure commenting precisely and discreetly on each of their attributes most of which I heartily agreed with for unlike me this guy was or seemed completely comfortable with sex and could undress a woman verbally in ten seconds while all I could do was sort of look or stare and imagine or something far more inconsequential than he did and for him so many times the opening exchange whatever it was took him with ease to the next step past pleasantries which was often a sequence of more and more intense exchanges ribald riotous and raw shall we say and it always amazed me the way - no matter what kind of stuff you hear about women being diffident or awkward and shy or easily embarrassed - these females always went whole hog into it with him no holds barred jokes and asides and comments about everything from sexual positions to swallowing cum to fucking up the ass finger licking dick sucking there was no limit to the happiness and fun he brought out and it always seemed not only he but everyone was amazingly and completely comfortable talking about sex pecker size tits fucking you name it a completely easy and joyous way with all of that (something I never had for sure something I always ran from afraid of or whatever but something lost and frozen deep inside me which this guy seemed to have thawed out by the time he was 3) and it went that way all the time except now if you want an example I can’t really give one because it was all the same nothing precise just the usual filth and I guess for sure he got laid a lot because he seemed to always leave with someone someone of the ‘female persuasion’ let’s say and we never really talked about what went on we just went on the next time we saw each other kind of right where we left off and this day he had something to say : "You know what you know what I can’t stand it’s the beaver-assed pussies who come waddling in here and these are guys mind you they come waddling in here all sensitive and nervous-like over things over wildlife and the atmosphere or the environment or cruelty to animals and all that shit and I do not want to hear about it and these guys are always the same head up their ass face in a book theory and literal and usually queer as all get-out too and they just burn me up so I sit here in a fog getting angry and having encounters and ideas that jog my memory (which ain’t always good to jog) and then I get all worked up and start getting loud and mean but whatever then they go away and the ladies come over and sometimes there’s girls here that I can’t exactly place but know I’ve seen before and liked and it’s from that point I start working for what the hell else I got to do – you follow me? – so it just becomes fun sleaze and wry jokes at their expense or at least at the expense of their tits or asses you know and then late at night you get the big girls in here the really crazy ones with names like Tyfanee or Bambee strippers or night-club girls and they really have no limits let me tell you no limits and by that time of night they don’t even care about the money although let me tell you if they were really any good by that time of night they’d be bedded down with some millionaire sugar-daddy already playing his cards for all they were worth however NOT these girls these are a different type but they start telling me their stories and problems and we just play it off like a joke or something and hey the next thing you know I’m their taster for the night I’m their social-worker cause and the next day what the hell I buy ‘em a breakfast and they’re happy can’t beat that can you?" so anyway he finally stopped talking and we had another drink and I bought him a bag of pretzels if you can call what they put in there for a buck fifty a bag of pretzels for it’s more like crumbs but you know New York prices and all and we’re sitting there across from the old Merchant’s Exchange building and there’s a few old pictures in older frames in the window that have been slowly water-stained and curled over the years but they bring back a great portrait of the old days barrel-fires bricked streets square old cars and lonely old men and everything and I realized that probably at one time this barroom was packed each moment with traders and banana merchants and auction contractors and foodstuffs brokers and all that and in the real heyday of the 1920’s for that stuff this was probably quite the booming joint and it sadly but proudly had apparently lived on its own all past that for even now Chanterelle or something was the name of the restaurant high-assed-end eating establishment now closed up which once last graced the ground floor of the beautiful merchant’s building and those people there who had to look out at this place here across the narrow street as they ate probably lost the entire picture missed the whole point and wound up just disliking this place as a leftover nasty and dirty shot and drink joint for wasted dirty old tired drinkers and if that’s the truth than fuck’em all as I would say because the grand tradition here is still somehow present in the high ceiling with its visual and proud demeanor and the wonderful back of the bar area and the little ante-room off the end and the tables and glass and stuff pretty much left as it was from some 1945 idealized version of movie alcoholism BE THAT FINE BY ME and then he said to me "you know I once heard of a guy and this was a true story who was 70 years old and living in Paterson New Jersey on the fading tail-end of an old music career in orchestral music that seemed to have gone nowhere and this was a long time ago mind you and the poverty and depression finally got to him so he wrote a farewell note to his wife "why should or how can a man exist and be powerless to earn means for his family?" and then he gave his daughter a last music lesson and swallowed a lethal dose of morphine now ain’t that a sad story?"

PEASANT UNDER GLASS

32. PEASANT UNDER GLASS:

And in such situations as these I would expect to hear things and read things read headlines like "Thousands Starve as Lightning Strikes" or "Mr. Walon Takes Predominant Motives" but instead all there are are noises various noises and not all interesting and they just go on and on around me as I sit negotiating entryways or looking at mirrors or revolving doors and in an insane simulacrum of fortitude and interest I find lonely variations on information and knowledge - things which I find should take precedence over listening to the guy with the race cars talk about his restorations or the girl with horses writing notes about her barn and gazebo and it all grates it grates on me like the sound of an afternoon’s circular saw cutting through wood at an annoying pace of some ten or fifteen seconds per cut followed by silence followed by another cut of seven or ten seconds followed by more silence (the kind of silence that isn’t really silence because it is continually broken and one’s learned expectations of it therefore include further noise) and far lost north within all of that are the people and issues which go with it all of them things making me nervous - the hallowed power light about to go out or the ring-necked pheasant landing on a run or the ancient sickening old joke of Zero Mostel serving ‘peasant under glass’ to startled restaurant guests at The Russian Tea Room with Mostel wearing an apron as if that made all the difference in his stupid flim-flam of a joke or how it is we all read history wrongly even as the light quickly goes down around us and diminishes in our faces as we talk until of a sudden we are facing complete darkness between us and find ourselves talking back to only a dark and shadowed hole from where a voice just came (blind ineptitude two strangers in the dark) and a sickening feeling deep in the stomach which never leaves or the stupid-looking kid in the ice-cream store the kind of kid who appears to be fifteen but in reality is a 35 year old man slightly retarded in loose denim shorts and glasses that enlarge his eyes grotesquely and just to hear his voice is nauseating because he talks like a trumpet swan or like a brain that should have no voice and he’s out on the fringes of Morristown New Jersey somewhere in the richlands of horse-country where people sit about at leisure enjoying their time off and endless white fences are painted and repainted almost constantly so that the wood density and coloration remains perfect slat after slat as the fences perfectly follow the wooded and pastured landscape and cars and carriages are still thrown about and it’s right here where this manchild is let loose and he’s on his own alone in the world and ending up famished at an ice cream store rattling off the flavor combinations he wants to try all piled up on one cone and the guy behind the counter is laughing and building a five-stacked ice cream cone just for the kid every scoop something different and the kid-man-child becomes delirious with joy and expectation immediately ripping into the topmost scoop with his large and over-active teeth and he’s off to see the world ‘Moon River I’m off to see the world there’s such a lot of world to see I taking that last rainbow’s bend my Huckleberry friend Moon River and me…’ and I remember the tall thin man the other one who walked into the corner coffee shop in Denville after parking his new motorcycle outside parking it perfectly just so first and then turning back from a short distance to again stare at it before entering the store and then getting in the line to order and never looking back or out again through the plate glass window instead standing archly straight and stiff and looking only forward and next to him the young staff-girl chatters away on a telephone while she’s on her break in a Starbucks shirt and she’s got her feet up on the table like it was her very own home and no one cares or says a word for the whole world right then is one delicious morsel he waiting and she sitting and the roadway running with cars and shoppers and the police car idling and nothing it seems could go wrong and YES! perfectly relaxed feet belong up on a table I can see the point and there’s something on the wall some quiz-question of the day about Vincent Price in the movie The Tingler and three choices are written for the answer but I knew not any of them so passed on that (I hate movie questions anyway) never having seen any of what it is they’re ever asking about anyway and so out of the loop then I go on and start reading "Ahmedabad India here in the adopted hometown of Mohandas K. Gandhi the great apostle of non-violence Hindu mobs committed acts of unspeakable savagery against Muslims this spring as mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched and young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight then doused with kerosene and set on fire and a pregnant woman’s belly was slit open and her fetus was raised skyward on the tip of a sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city and the violence raged for days and persisted for more than two months and claimed almost one thousand lives and it was driven by hatred and sparked by a terrible crime : a Muslim mob stoned a train car loaded with activists from the World Hindu Council on Feb. 27 and then set it afire killing 59 people mostly women and children" so that’s the carnage that ends the world that’s the ulterior motive of all religions which is JUSTICE and EQUALITY for all our kind and it engenders so much pride and wonder and fierce nobility that things done in the NAME OF THE LORD whatever Lord it is take on a greater reality than the reality itself it serves so for these reasons and outside of these constraints we must go on.

BAD DRIVES OUT GOOD

31. BAD DRIVES OUT GOOD :

---THE KILLING -
And if bad drives out good which it surely does than we’re really in trouble deep (‘do not move let the wind speak THAT is Paradise’) or as Hemingway his’self said : "Posterity can take care of herself or FUCK Herself" but why the little plane overhead was dragging that along as a banner in flight was beyond me low flying plane in beleaguered airspace and all that and then I remembered again something old Ted Meaning had said to me that night after we ran from the pier where there had been a killing he’d turned to me I remembered out of breath and all as we had just sat down on a park bench along the Hudson River there somewhere towards downtown sweating and nervous and all and he simply turned and said (and I remember it reminded me of Nick Tosches a kid from Blair Road out by the Jersey junkyards I used to know) he said : "I was eleven years old the first time I killed somebody and I remember it like yesterday and it’s never left me little fucking dumb bastard that I was and the kid was maybe two years older than me and on a rainy and overcast afternoon I was walking near the glass factory on a deserted street but the old factory was more like a glass dump with high rusted corrugated tin fences swelling and sagging from the big heaps of shattered glass that had long ago burst and overflowed from them and no one ever seemed to work there and there were no signs of industry just the endless slag heaps of waste and abandonment and the windy and driven junk that got blown around and twisted and left wherever it ended up until that next time it was blown around or twisted even tighter onto poles and objects and everything had lost its color and shape as I guess sunlight fades even glass over time amberyellowbluegreen like some apothecary nightmare of the mind but we always called it like everybody else still ‘the Glass Factory’ and those were the good old days too when you could look downtown to the farthest ends and see nothing but open sky and the grand old buildings of another age when urban blight was as romantic and magical as any enchanted woods in a picture-book and that blight consisted happily of abandoned or bustling warehouses with trucks coming or going or left there leaning on broken chassis and flattened tires and decrepit looking busted-out windshields and broken doors and vacant lots and decaying piers and alleys and the endless treasure-trove of everything but now that whole downtown vista idea has been destroyed and dominated by immense structures and buildings and spires of absolute corporate ugliness or bureaucratic blandness and that mediocrity rises upon landfills and the abandoned or bustling warehouses and factories either way have become luxury properties with 'living spaces' and the vacant lots have been filled with more of the same and the alleys have been blocked off and the piers and waterfront decay have vanished and been replaced by 'friendly recreational spaces' and dismal 'esplanades' and even the children are no longer children but blobs of New York Times 'Living' section papier-mâché cut-outs a mush-product of 'parenting' amidst 'living spaces' all leashed and tethered for 'quality time' in 'correctly structured activities' and there’s nowhere to prowl nowhere to run no imagination to do any of it with anyway and no freedom certainly a lifeless sterility straight from a fit and proper womb so anyway this kid came up to me and took out a knife and put it towards my face as he said "hey kid wanna’ die?" and I could tell he meant it so in my own way answering that taunt I’d decided maybe NO I didn’t right then care to and only having memories of uncles and brothers with stories of thuggery and pay-backs in the family-way of doing business as such I lunged at the kid knocking him over and grabbed the knife from him and plunged it deep twice into his chest and as he fell screaming and bleeding to die I ran like the Devil myself and threw the knife into a nearby sewer and ran home to my uncle’s butcher shop and never said a word again even after hearing of the dead kid they found down along Walston Street by the big gate and I’ve found over time these many years now that you really can bury things deep inside and put them out of mind and even though they’re always there as a ghost of memory or some engrained reference the rest of your life CAN go on all around it silent and strong and aware" and that’s what he told me as I remember it all and it didn’t make much sense to me then and makes only a little more now and I really didn’t know whether to believe him or not but it reminds me of something else I myself did.

---I ASK YOU NOW (Poetic License) -
‘I think I am therefore I am’ it was something close to what Descartes said but it wasn’t for sure exact however it made good sense and I’d always wanted to DO a mercy killing that is a KILLING with a better reason or a killing wherein like in old Hebrew law a man was allowed to take vengeance upon anyone under his own roof and that included killing the ‘other’ in your own house which is the point of view I’d taken with Aryundhati Roy who was an Indian writer of some note with very pronounced left-wing leanings who went about spouting various anti-American vocal sanitations and intonations and prevarications and whatever else you want to call them NOW none of that stuff normally bothers me since as I am already being one of those who harbors vast and varied suspicions myself about the treacly tendentiousness of this vaguely myopic Amerikan experiment founded as it is on the THREE L’s they being lucre lies and deceit and I know that’s not three L’s but I can’t very well use something that doesn’t make any sense merely because it begins with an L for it would have to have some bearing and meaning on the concept and I ASK YOU NOW of the following do any ? longevity latitude lamenting lounging lugubriousness lying (of course a repeat) lamentations liberty (which doesn’t here fit) and anyway if I looked upon this entire thing as a nation and viewed it as my ‘roof’ then I was entitled to take action in my way against someone who offends or defames or declaims against it RIGHT so I did but the story is much longer than that and has to do with the United Nations and the headquarters building at east 42nd Street and a conference at which she was speaking and the comments which she there spoke and the walkway I got her at and the ‘Swords into Plowshares’ sculpture across the street at Dag Hammersjkold Plaza and the elevated stairway right there and the open expanse of sight which I utilized etc. and let us not forget my fleet and swift escape running carefully along and through the area along Tudor City to make my getaway and the means by which I re-integrated myself into the crowds in midtown and slowly and gently made my way back towards Union Square along its upper end and the way in which I found the empty loft to be still empty and which thereby allowed me entry into it and a place to lay low and hide out right afterwards BUT I’LL GET INTO ALL THAT soon enough if you just listen up and let me first do my open-air homework for if all of this is a confession than I might as well confess and liberally apply quotations and stories along the way so as to keep this interesting and intelligent and uplifting at the same time RIGHT! and if as I said before the BAD DRIVES OUT THE GOOD as it always does than it is all the more certain that I must tell you and share with you all these activities and imaginings which have made up my latter life and another thing about that bad driving out good is that like the least common denominator of anything it always happens that way and it does most certainly destroy the life we lead or try to and the certainty of a ruined and fallen culture with but so little time left is and can be seen at every juncture we go for there is nothing left of any value and even the good is no longer good but soured by rage and I attest hereto that had Mr. George Washington ever lately returned he’d most probably fight for the other side and had Mr. Abraham Lincoln ever returned he’d restore some form of the Indian Nation instead of ripping it up and over in his native Kentucky thought of even though he is as an Illinoisian which only came later WOODSMAN INDIAN SLAYER and everything else (but not against Aryundhati Roy for that’s another kind of Indian you see) and I stand up whenever I can for Amerika for this is the land where it all happens and even the land of the free gets the KGB when they flee (poetic license).

YOU CAN SUIT YOURSELF

30. YOU CAN SUIT YOURSELF -
(Too Much Like Life):

The man said "I'm turning green I can't see and my body won't sleep - what should I do?" as the doctor before him bent down to check out his feet and then the doctor said "it looks as though your feet are quite swollen in fact they've swelled over the tops of your shoes - when did you last have them off your feet?" and the man said "I never remove my shoes for I might have somewhere to go you never know at any time" and the doctor said "well you won't get there if you're blind will you?" and then he had the aides take the man away and said "remove all his clothing put him in a bed and sedate him considerably or at least enough so that we can give him a complete going over without any resistance" and then there was no one left and before he too finally exited I said to the doctor "what will you do bind him in stitches?" and the doctor replied "he doesn't need a stitch he needs a switch" and he left me a paper with directions on it for Montefiore Medical Center where he said they were giving out free anal retinascopes with refreshments for people on isolated relief - and I said "not for me - if it's a medical program run by the government I want nothing to do with it - it reeks of eugenics and nazi-type programmatic selective removal of class and social enemies" at which he laughed and said "suit yourself" and left the room.

JUST ENOUGH FOR VISUAL PARITY

29. JUST ENOUGH FOR VISUAL PARITY:

"You're never going to know you're not gonna' know and because of that everyone practically always tries to figure out their destiny or their reason for being here and all the rest of that type of stuff and maybe there are entire philosophies built around this or that idea of being but in the end it's all no matter because every answer by the search itself eludes an answer and any conclusion would be anti-climactic anyway because you still have to go on living - and if you believe in miracles then go ahead and do so or if on the other hand you want for and wish for nothing then OK too - be the stay-at-home recluse you've always wanted to be - in the total end IT'S ALL FOR NOTHING."

THE PROMISE SO REMOTE

28. THE PROMISE SO REMOTE
(The Notion of Something Natural):

'Old Gods are terrible to look at when they weep - all bloated like boiled fish - and one wonders if they ever understand that they have caused their grief' : when looked at that way we are ALL Gods wouldn't you say? - for unalterably sorrow is a handbag into which we stuff ourselves and so many I see with bulging bags and straps about to burst and they themselves almost cannot cope with even the struggle of carrying that bag through the streets - yeah sadness and a gnashing of teeth is all I hear for as Eliot said 'Unreal city/under the brown fog of a winter dawn/a crowd flowed over London Bridge so many/I had not thought death had undone so many/sighs short and infrequent were exhaled/and each man fixed his eyes before his feet' and no matter where that all may have been it is present now too and right before us are the bent and staggered lessees of a doomed time and many wasted lives seeking solace in the comfort of their own communal oneness - battered bent and broken - and the systems which drive them through tunnels are the quite same systems which enclose them in at each end again for they have nowhere to go and nothing to see - having shuttered and blinded everything of possibility ('I see them so alone and helpless/who will be kind to them?') and even right now they have slathered Brooklyn with a bloody brush and closed Manhattan with its foils of stupidity from Newark Bay to Harlem Heights and left in charge the anarchy of pestilence and the looseness of despair and there is nothing more to talk of nor anyone to see for spectral presences stand at each corner and we shake the dust off our horrid feet lest we dare divulge where we've been - ('I wander through each chart'd street/near where the chartered Thames does flow/and mark in every face I meet/marks of weakness marks of woe') - Can we return to Nature ?('No...Enkidu cried/it is a journey that will take away our life!' and then I heard 'why are you worried about death ? only the Gods are immortal anyway and what men do is nothing/so fear is never justified') - ...As when one comes upon a path in woods unvisited by men/one is drawn near the lost and undiscovered in himself... - 'There's always something there and it's either in one hand or the other - just like a clown magician to be hiding everything vital from sight' were the words I remembered Steve Krantz saying and he was an old-time showman with an interest in all things God except that his version of God was Trickster pure and simple and nothing else - every other word out of his mouth was about some way or other that we've been snookered or led into various states of disbelief by different 'Credos' and bodies of religious doctrine and one of his last things was how 'the weather people too are in on the deal' and it's now their part in the scheme to keep people down and disturbed all the time about 'upcoming' storms and weathers which never materialize and in the meantime all of the people with events or parties or picnics or something scheduled for the upcoming weekend or whatever with the predicted bad weather all begin praying and asking God for good weather - which eventually comes when the forecasted junk-weather peters out - and then the stock of 'God' goes way up as a form of trickery really when it is seen merely as a means of affecting the weather with prayer - totally useless foul and stupid motivation but the level to which people have sunk in this regard and then he'd say - 'no matter what you say this whole God thing is a weird sham because if He's really perfect he'd already know everything and how it was going to turn out and that in turn would probably lead to a disinterest in human affairs (which is pretty obvious right now) but if NOT then the infallibility which comes from the factor of chance kind of disengages the idea of God and the 'Perfection' of same from the concept and leaves one with an accidental universe instead - one in which people and events are random and constantly shifting and one day something can be this and another day it can be something else - and that's certainly not a scientific factor nor a confidence-building one and that to me goes on to prove in the long run the variability of whatever this 'God' is and shows a reticence and reservation on this 'God's' part to show itself or make manifest its presence or even consciousness in the world around us - which is NOT to say of course that that presence and consciousness is NOT present (paradoxically) in each and every ONE of us differently and separately yet NOT manifest in the workings of the world itself at-large and therein lies the dilemma of those intent on living a 'GOOD' life - that is : who is watching and how and if not then WHO really cares?' - and upon hearing this even I was silenced into some confused form of confusion - not because of the depth or profundity of what I'd just heard but rather because of some factor of confusion within it - which is I guess a sort-of definition of the word 'befuddlement' - but it made me want to go on nonetheless and so I watched him and started thinking of something some lady writer once said about writing and it too was so vapid even I was surprised to remember it but it went like 'just start out with something even one sentence that's true and that's real and go on from there' and of course I'm sure she wasn't speaking of God when she said this but I was putting the two together now as I watched Krantz (who had once told me his mother was a butcher's daughter who hated meat and that his father was for a time a sparring partner of Tommy Olivia - some third rate middleweight from the 1940's whom I'd never heard of) but I thought of these things in an offhand manner while thinking of what it could possibly mean to a 'God' and why to take either an interest or disinterest in 'human' affairs - the whole subject being so entirely salacious and stupid as to not be worth a dime but it seemed easy within these four walls of stupidity to let Krantz take his shot at glory (or rather his own shot at some middleweight affectation of glory) while pontificating about things we neither should know nor care of - to wit what God has for habits or for breakfast and most especially what HE thinks of anything : He who made storm drains and curbing I suppose and umbrellas and canoes and everything else which started out ONCE as a concept and which mankind has now whittled into some reality or some density within a material world but even I couldn't get up to address this crowd or ask Krantz where he was at mentally mainly because it wasn't my style and who'd a'cared anyway - it was like asking 'where was God on the morning of Hiroshima?' and getting 20 different responses about the 'secret good' of saving so many lives by unleashing fury and killing so many others but 'ending' a war - such conundrums bore me and do seem to go on forever and the prattle I hear sometimes makes me whoozy with shame or doubtful of continued living but HEY WHAT! the world's a place of scoundrels and let's leave it at that.