IT'S REALLY THAT SCREWED UP

54. IT'S REALLY THAT SCREWED UP:

And then one day I simply decided I'd had enough and walked away - away from all the preening and pretension of being somewhere other than where I really was - realizing the city was no more what it once was and that the ones still there had segmented and broken apart into fragmented loops of wealth of poverty assistance or struggle comfort or hurt and in every window where I looked there was nothing being sold but some stupid frivolity which referred to nothing and I found myself unable to speak and no one to speak to : lining up for endless pizza slices wasn't the key nor were the old museum entrances or cafes of university courtyards - everything was being closed off with ID cards and guards and passage and the same people therein were the same people I could meet anywhere else and I knew just knew I had to broaden my horizons or risk a life lived amongst the weak and the failing - endless Columbians Mexicans Pakis and Indian subcontinent types had infiltrated the fabric and done so without any recourse to the past or the heritage of that which all once was and to which I was still connected and everywhere around me (as the century turned as the whole world winced) was speaking a dialect I could no longer understand and no one it seemed (suddenly) knew anything 'if I say Sartre they think I've meant Satire and simply spelled it wrong if I write irony they think I mean the quality of hard steel' - it's really that screwed up - and I've spoken to a million but loved only one and I've nodded to the crowd around me but only picked out special eyes : there are nitwits in the rafters there are doubters at the church and nothing REALLY matters (all over again) and EVERYTHING'S been left - as it were - in the lurch.

'BUT IT'S TOO FAT YOUR HONOR'

53. 'BUT IT'S TOO FAT YOUR HONOR'

If I ever did have to testify I'd probably come up with some really stupid things to say - like the time long long ago when the stupid guy asked me something at the draft board in a mental examination they decided to give me what I would do if someone taught me how to shoot a firearm and I said "I'd turn it on the persons who taught me how to use it" and they dropped me like a hot potato although I never did understand why because if you think about it that's the kind of dolt they're seemingly looking for - automated moron killer machine but then whatever they wanted I never understood anyway and the army of any nation never made any sense to me except that they never probably actually WANT anyone who would admit to the game - regimentation in the service of death and following orders in order to defend 'Freedom' (what a concept) while in a situation of complete servitude and slavery to a regimented and structured machine-politic rigidly enforcing death and punishment as a tactic which is all the opposite of Freedom I'm sure - go figure that one out for it certainly beats my ass and besides if they weren't so guilty over it why would they offer for the rest of one's life the veteran with complete medical benefits and pension money and preferred discounts and all that other enticing which goes into the career-soldier ethos like living LIFE so as to bring DEATH to others and they used to say 'better dead than red' but as it turns out they're all a bunch of 'REDS' now themselves - fuck 'em all I say and if the judge did ever start entertaining me with questions of indererminate nature I'd sure as hell have a real go of it bringing some strange new structure to his or her forlorn and fucked-over life because living 'by the rule of law' is no living at all I'd say - red yellow green or cotton for that matter ASK ANY SLAVE YOU KNOW and see what they say.
-
In response the Judge said : "a simple statistic / numbers don't lie / you are what you are / WHY even try?"

CHINESE LADY SELLING ROSES

52. CHINESE LADY SELLING ROSES:

Be a writer be - 'every moment of your life you're writing even in your dreams you're writing when you walk the halls you meet various people and you write furiously in your head you see someone you like and you say hi in a warm melting way a hi that conjures up the splash of oars soaring violins eyes shining in the moonlight and there are so many ways of saying hi - hiss it trill it bark it sing it bellow it laugh it cough it - a simple stroll anywhere calls for paragraphs and sentences in your head' - probably a bit too much happy drivel for me but there it is nonetheless. - and the way I see it is if somebody wants to write they write they suture reality like a bad wound they spout effusive melodies to mostly the lame who cannot hear anyway and if they do are tone-deaf and disasterously stupid but all of that itself means nothing much (hospital doors corridors of stealth facades of banks and corporate hollows the needy outstretched hand of the door-to-door beggar and the Chinese lady selling roses) EVERYTHING in and of itself bears a witness to the flood of whatever it is that comes back to us and forces our achievement in spite of our efforts to allay all fears and stop productive moments from being - just look at the taverns and bars where elbow after elbow the drunks and the drinkers sidle up to empty places seeking bottled dreams and manifest energies of envy or doubt to be spoken in slurred speech from one old mouth to the next - piled on effusive young and piled on the dainty old both of whom stare straight ahead and look sad enough to cry and just today in Kearney New Jersey I'm in some truck-stop tiny little beat-to-shit diner somewhere along truck-route US Highway 1 and I'm sitting there and watching the local populace do their thing - the tired-looking and wasted waitress some Hispanic babe about 25 years old bedraggled dry-skin smoker's face big hoop earring tight-fitting jeans cigarette-smoke wreathing her head jabbering away on a cell phone to someone about something way too long and way too loud for my taste but no matter and the three or four Spanish and Mexican workers scurrying around the cook the washers the cleaners - all doing some little tidy work of their own but what most surprises me are the truck drivers themselves sitting around finishing up their lunches or meals and they get up one at a time or in two's and three's and some of them know each other enough to talk by name and their rigs are outside waiting and - WITHOUT fail - they each leave the diner with their purchase of beer in this case all Budweiser - one guy with a bottle another with two or three bottles and I swear two guys with six-packs of bottles in brown paper bags and into their trucks they go and ZIP off they are to America's great highways - across NJ across NYState to Albany or across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and beyond the nearby NJ Turnpike calls them and they go - beers in hand - and that I say surprised me - the beer-filled journeys and the lonely highway jaunts to somewhere but it's probably always been that way and even in this oh-so-correct day and age what truck-drivers really care about that and this wizened guy next to me says to the cook who's sitting nearby staring out the window (this guys has three empties in front of him and is working on his fourth) says "hey! c'mere! I'll talk to you if your lonely!" and the cook slides over and sits next to him and they start chatting and the drinking guy I hear says "you got your Chef apron on y'know - that means you're a Chef!" and the cook he just smiles and says "yes and I put it on myself" and they start laughing and then the cook says "I just now put it on because before I wasn't a Chef I was the diswasher - but now I'm a Chef again!" and they start laughing and the drinking guy reaches for his cigarettes but says they're missing he can't find them he thought they were right there and then he finds them in his top shirt pocket and they laugh again and the guy says "oh now look at this - you got everybody thinking I'm some kind of strange one but all I was doing was trying to find my smokes" and they chuckle again and before long nobody's listening anymore let alone me and the people coming and going pass in and out and the whole place is like some little transitory way-station on some truck-driving version of the passage to Paradise or something like it - and the I pay the girl my eight dollars and forty-five cents and leave her a two dollar tip for some reason and walk out to the cold NJ highway air.

CHANTS OF A LIFETIME : My My the Lines Don't Lie

51. CHANTS OF A LIFETIME:

1. MY MY THE LINES DON’T LIE-
I can’t walk a straight line although I’m learning I can’t speak a straight speech although I’m training I can’t understand a plumb nickel plug-ugly thing about circumstance and all the rest although every minute I go on I’m trying - reading Ann Sexton’s Poems of Love and Jingle Bell Jammies whenever they show I’m standing on a high hill at the apple orchard underneath a stormy sky black with lightning flashing but no rain to come or even in sight just the petrified darkness of the windy current that blows between ancient hills dotted with timbered houses and broken barns water-streams and golden icicle hedges swarming o’er the grass and the old old man who just sits there in his lawnside chair like some Adirondack God just a’looking out and he never says a word while I read and walk and sit about to read some more and WHATEVER I FIND I give back to him : "yet the Walsingham brothers are listening too and whatever it seems they can learn or at least understand they take with them and one way or another it’s their own cross to bear sluggards that they both are with two fathers in prison and a mother dead of poison potion somehow some kind of distillation no one ever know’d and anyway they both never was much good and ‘not being much good’ I guess is MOST CERTAINLY the opposite of good which is in the way I meant it you see – and you well what do you see yourself as anyway POET MAUDITE ? Ur Bad Boy Sir Egg ? with tales of sordid habits and defiant ‘epater les bourgeois’ gestures swirling around you brutish little bandit making yourself at home in the murkiest parts of the human mind AH WHAT! so you say I’ve heard ‘morality is a weakness of the brain’ AH WHAT! wouldn’t you just rather take up arms and fight the awful A-rabs anyway ? you mouth of darkness you" he finally says all that – it seems – to me while spitting his personal froth of tobacco juice down a certainly stained bib of overhauls and khaki JUST LIKE THAT and I’m certainly surprised and all EVEN QUITE GLAD to see him talk like this for it’s been so long and most of the time he just sits there as if forgetting but now it’s all rushing out of him at double-warp life speed the old guy’s making up for lost time and taking it out on me "cold and raw the north winds blow bleak in the morning early all the hills are covered with snow and winter’s now come fairly and the room is full of shadow I vaguely hear two children whispering sadly softly as heavy with sleep their heads are bowed beneath the long white curtain that trembles and rises together as one and these are the little ones the two I remember maybe me and my brother and give me a house at the side of the road and I’ll be a friend to all and other…" he’s (I notice) nodded off no worse for wear perhaps just tired and I bet he’s a’dreamin’ of his own drunken boat taking part in some distant and marathon float YET I LOOK ONWARD and forward ahead to see what some future betokens (or maybe I figure he’s really gone dead or maybe I’m really just hopin’) - and two days later I’m back in my cell in the little old jailhouse in some Hoboken or some other place where the harbor hasn’t been taken over by wild careening ferryboats filled with sportsmen and fishers of the deep running home to eat and where lines of children ribbed with sore eyes mean nothing more than great wild sessions of glee-club restorations and swimming-pool antics and the tall sheriff comes back to me and asks why I’m so belligerent and why I willingly work for the enemy and if I ‘ain’t still a Christian and God-fearing man like I shoulda’ stayed’ and if I’d rather remain an intellectual anarchist throwing daggers at the heart of the pope and his mother and I just hold out my hand and nod back as if I knew in a way what he was trying to say and instead I start telling him again about the old guy in the hills sitting on that chair and suddenly talking to me a blue streak but he doesn’t believe me that sheriff don’t - being so plain and poorly-spoken as to give himself away right off as some career lawman with a streak of luck and nothing more and running around as he was with badge #777 all to himself and if that was supposed to mean anything to me it didn’t and could he spare – I asked – "could he spare me some denatured alcohol?" and he said "nope just got instead some disarmored vehicle for you to ride in" and that’s the way things went which is for sure why I’d much rather had been right then in some classroom on the edge of town sitting down with some Nabakov frown or whatever came past the corner but instead I’m back at the apple orchard farmhand oasis where the two girls from the hilltop look down and the storm still rages and the sky still sets up dark and furious and she says "we’ve got nothing right now and we’re not really open again until next September 3rd when the apples are in and we’d welcome you back then" and I realize it’s apple-orchard time again every September and it’s their big break for the season to re-open when all the apples are ready - which orchard I see on yonder hillside some thirty acres of nothing but fat heavy trees doused plumb with nearly finished apples - and come ripe and fill bushels and baskets and are sauced and spiced and toasted in pastries for sale and the lowland folk from all around come crawling up to pay their money for the apples the apple paradise ORCHARD IN BLOOM and it’s probably just like some olden-days festival in every farm-town after farm-town with people and wagons and pumpkins and apples and all the fall season stuff piled up as high as it all can go and MY MY THE LINES DON’T LIE the cars are lined up for miles high and that old man in his wooden chair I’D BET just sits there looking out and reciting and telling peoples’ fortunes whether they’d asked or not and as daft as he is or as daft as he may be he’s never interfered with anything crucial and maybe that’s why THAT’S WHY people love him so "gentle old man so funny sometimes can’t remember a thing correctly but goes on all the time if he once gets started there’s no shutting him off but I really think he’s around the bend now these last seven or eight months have made a real difference but hey ! we just still call him Dad and talk back to him when and as we can but we keep him away from cars and we keep him away from money - (‘cause he’s toasted like an apple in honey)."

HARBOR IN THE SHED OF THIS WORLD

50. HARBOR IN THE SHED OF THIS WORLD:

A. No More Is Asked of Any Man -
You may have no market value you may mean nothing to anyone else BUT TO YOU it is all that matters - all your terms and conditions are nothing to the great ONE within you still and fighting hard so as not to be buried and if you can just live your life and experience all that comes your way SO MUCH CAN BE DIFFERENT : ride that train and wonder and observe everything passing by and watch what alters see what changes and how it goes and let it pass by you watching while you surmise meanings and images and the renderings of time and energy and all its make-up of site and place and the tall buildings which rise and fall will call your name running and the sunlight will cleanse and the rainwater will drench and the words will echo over block and brick and glass and steel and the elongated smokes of moment and time will rise and twist and swirl across the waters while you watch the river bend and whirl and the ferries atop the waves and within the waves and through the waves will swaddle dream and expectation but whatever comes will come to be that which was coming and NO MORE IS ASKED OF ANY MAN ! do you see? - [‘And leaning in together we each beheld so much and understood much more in some vague shading of light and object where everything – it seemed – melded together.’]

B. What Conniver Was This? -
We are falling spinning twirling expanding rotating turning racing out all at the same time - we are growing within the within we are one spot doing all of this in a myriad of spots all soundless and swift constant and steady unceasing and without fail AND each going about its work without thought just evolving momentarily into time into a time and place which just appears to be and all this swirling meandering falling and speeding gas and fire and light and object produces its own effluence and the gravities of force and speed bend the outer into the inner and make the inners writhe to the outers in great swirling spirals and eddies of light and shape and form and gaseous throws of design and motion and that idea of momentary movement is appreciated by eternity and everything together breaks for nothing but grows to decay and from the decay grows again into its own absence its own negation and its oneness grows dual and works anew to form another and somewhere within what we inhabit we MAY ONLY glimpse that which we think we see or that which we only surmise the evidences of and in that darkened light of blindness at our core we move forward to produce from energies and winds those worlds we wish to have and hold and inhabit and ALL THE SAME ALL DIFFERENT FOR EACH we swarm like light ourselves like distant matter converging and our ‘SYSTEM’ we call a solar system based on this light and growth and energy but unrecognizable as it is we name it and claim to recognize it anyway and within it move about and our solar system becomes our galaxy becomes one cosmos fraught with constants and erratics and other things we decode wrongly or wrongly decode into something other than what is into which that which is then transforms itself into a confirmation of our assumption - by which we go on and on and on unceasing and all that is ruling that picture is moment and the error of the moment which changes constantly and in that change reinterprets all around it which in turn over OUR time evolves our ethos of place and habit and by such magic of turning we grow societies and their stories and the tales of history and mirth and murder and sorrow and huge lines of wars and famines and subjective alterations each connected with stories and myths of their own and in so singing the ONE VOICE of us all goes on until the net comes in and that goes on and we talk and die and talk and reappear and suddenly symbols and objects and worries and things pop up anew and begin another turn and the great swirling which inhabits us is the eternal swirling which inhabits nothing and which IS us and which we attach labels and meanings to and over time everything that changes comes back to itself again HOMO HABILES HOMO FABER handy man man the maker the one with the tools the shaper of rock the walker of earth the silent fellow who moves the loud fellow who demands change the sad one who retreats and the one who says : ‘all and every object Michael has harbor in the shed of this world’.

THIS HERE PLACE GOES

49. THIS HERE PLACE GOES:

I have colored the tabernacle and it is purple I have shaded the curtains and they are red silk and damask and the massive pullstrings woven of gold and hung with precision conceal the ark and the treasures within and I send back messages to the men of the Bible and the Hammurabic scribes etching letters in stone or baking the clay as WE READ without ceasing and translate the damages in the prisons of other minds with Gavin Evans and any of his brothers Bernard Meisel Henry Schneider and - lest we forget the fairer sex among us -Linda Slocum of Dubrovsky Prefect Sullivan Arts at 34 E11th Street (ALL once patients of ours) and through this MY CONSCIOUSNESS IS AN EVERYDAY ORDEAL and that is the one paradox of my life that I cannot solve nor fathom – HOW I GOT THIS WAY – and just as I say that I present myself at the same time outside of the McCauley Mission on White Street and I enter the lobby where four guys are sitting around quite happily and with glee talking to one another and I notice that glee to be a SIMPLE glee - one I’ve never attained - a simple glee of men talking and trading their simple informations between themselves and it’s probably been this way JUST AS IT SAYS since 1827 right here or if not here then nearby and I walk in among the enamel and the polished walls and the entryway desk where the white man sits with paper and pencil and the cook comes out laughing and comments on the simplicitude of everything old and the new and he smiles and walks me out as we talk and trade messages to the traffic passing by in the deep horrid cold of real life - ALL DOORS SHUTTERED ALL BUSINESSES SHUT all time stopped everything without motion and without commotion too and in that stable environment I see men work and stay and prosper but BUT IT IS NOT MINE so I must move on and simply laugh back thinking of Ezekiel which is all I ever think of - the vast man prophet of old standing before the visiting Gods and their crafts roaring and he writhed twisting back to establish something JUST SOMETHING TO RECOGNIZE and all that’s left is a meager description of majesty and power and might and the vast roaring roving spacecraft from stars and places unseen lands him down takes him back enters him away and in that flash of smoke and fire I REALIZE I STILL LIVE and within and among that are no voices to hear no words no language for all is greater than all and everything is more than everything and more than everything ever was for ‘BEFORE ALL LIMITS SO WAS I’ and it was only restless man who set the terms and made the limits and now professes to live amongst what he has made and in that FALL we so exist amidst so many things (OH OH let me list) : the severed garden the broken sky the wearying weathers the toil of work and labor the settings of the sun and moons the turnings of all things the reasonings and the openings and closings of our simple logics and countings the very makings of our place and forms and Earth itself among us for ONCE WE WERE MORE and once we were free but now sundered and broken we exist among our own rubble turning and deciding and separating and breaking forth from terms and conditions without sense or ending and in that morass we try to stay alive and live and prosper by whatever terms we make for the conditions we take and IT IS HARD THIS SIMPLE LABOR of mind and hand and matter and place but no map exists except for the one we’ve made and somehow somehow in the eyes of all men I see that weary toil over and over again.

TRUMPETS - BLARING WHERE THEY WANTED

48. TRUMPETS - BLARING WHERE THEY WANTED:

Through the trumpets blaring and the sounds of everything else happening all at once I sat there entranced holding the paper but signing nothing and only for an instant I recognized that it was my face in the reflection of the glass even as cars and people passed by with each passing motion being recorded in some background light on the same glass and the entire wavy scene – with its motion and liquid manner – swept and spread as if in another universe trying to break through as I witnessed some apparition without name or reason and the endless array of color and light right then and there reminded me of some CHEAP kaleidoscope the sort I hadn’t seen since childhood itself and like a cigar-store Indian gazing out and the broad array looking back the silence was as deafening as the death-knell of a pirate ship (but instead of all that there was nothing) and so of course the fast keys went to the ends of the music and everyone it seemed was trying or wanting to sing along but wherever two hands were gathered there more were so I stayed to watch and realized (anew at least) that I was indeed holding the documents in my hands and wandering with the others I passed right into the reflections on the glass and entered the ‘oh so many things’ of another lifetime and before I knew it I’d been transported BOSNIA HERZOGOVINA EVERYTHING ELSE and the dim morning light with the sun crawling up broke the sky wide open as gray and darkness both ran and pink and blue light broke over the horizon where two bicycles left on someone’s porch reflected the light as glittering spots of brilliant paint and I saw them glittering by the old tobacco mill the abandoned sheds and garages of days past where the two Italian kids played monkey games outside the ancient pizzeria while firetrucks and a police car sat idly in the sun - misted with the morning papers and the dewy glare of trumpet and hound while no one spoke a word and everything in a reverie of time and place with no limits just seemed to swim between things passing broadly over into something else ! and I knew at the moment that life was continual and without meanings and edgings and everything together ran into everything else wordlessly alive but kept apart by the square roundness of reason and thought and the UNIVERSE around us was also within us and we were as much a part of the light as the light was us so NO ONE uttered one beleaguered sound because QUITE SIMPLY no one knew enough to say ! and anything was wide enough to fit everywhere – ‘I’ve seen him eat dirt like it was sugar!’ ‘yes he doesn’t yet know any better’ – words crossed like wires on tap-poles of the overhead and I recalled Carl Sandburg himself singing out "all across the middle of the nation – the dream of rural electrification’. [So this little dream this moment of time this place this space – remembered now for oh so little.]