THERE'S NO AFTERLIFE LIKE THE LIFE I'M LIVING

59. THERE'S NO AFTERLIFE LIKE THE LIFE I'M LIVING:

I was born on a hopeless train the hazards of anyone's guess and I managed to ride the rails for a rather long time - sometimes confused disheveled and sad but always listening and watching what went by and whatever went as it was going I witnessed what it was showing : declaiming nothing no dimension no contention commenting only on the silence and all the dark (sometimes the awesome sometimes the meek - the doctor walked in my mother went weak) and one day I watched two girls looking at pictures all the way to Cleveland - five albums of incredible shit - they never looked up or seldom and stayed immersed within themselves the two in conversation as every picture - reviewed - was talked about endlessly and I never did see the pictures but I heard the chatter - babies baseball weddings and the rest - an incredible array of normal life while all around them rushed the innumerable exceptions to everything AND they could have LIVED those two but chose instead the diabolical pursuit of ennui and banter - the kind of high-school stuff that keeps kids going and makes them weak and wince at anything not considered normal or to be expected but that's why football fields are filled with dreck - the passable living of the passable wreck - and I finally did put a towel on my head and fell asleep trying to think of where to go : but I could not sleep nor go anywhere not pre-determined (this was after all a train) thus I stayed awake trying to reach a sleeve of light to hide in but instead ALL I GOT WAS Melville's 'white' : ''for all the associations the color white has with whatever is sweet and honorable and sublime there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood' and that was the fog-mind-blanketed-whiteness into which I was headlong falling - crazily askew and driven forward by the energy elixir of this train on rails I was forced into some whiteness just SOILED by girls - and they did go on yet I stayed my course and when we docked at Cleveland's tempting station I did what only was left to do - let the drained train turn me around and head me right back home (another ticket enhanced by desire one more fare for nothing and paid for by fire) the conductor said "aren't you getting off?" and I replied "not on your life - give me another" and it all took place in the space of some lethal ten hours (as I recall it) the return trip much nicer than the one out - I watched the business folk perambulate the car water elixir again magazine book newspaper and briefcase EVERY one a simple gem unto itself and then it hit me : 'if this world is an abstract place drawn like water and some ink into a runny scene of passing moments then I'd better learn to read inscriptions wherever they may be and if I can read them then is it not also incumbent upon me to decipher for other men just what it is I see and read and understand BACK to tell them too?' but such questions cause no answers from other people (settled in as they may be on other chores and small concerns) but AT THE LEAST the twiggish girls were gone and I'd need not be concerned with that again and for such small blessings we wash our hands of blood in pools of holy water.
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"People are amazed / to see / a frog / in an office" it sounded like some strange poetry to me but was two guys mumbling something back and forth about the place they worked - a going concern of environmental bounty or whatever connected to wholesome endeavor and evidently the office had a grand lobby in the building and in that lobby was a veritable Amazonian rainforest of dimensions deep and filled with pooled water ferns and trees koi and carp and FROGS too - which caused that enticing comment I'd heard - but all I did was worry about warts on the secretaries' hands but for what it was worth NONE of that was ever mentioned.
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"Are you OK ? you fell down like a wayward thump and we all saw your head snap back as if your very neck had broken ARE YOU SURE you're OK?" someone said that to me right square into my face beefsteak breath alcohol stink and tobacco smoke all mixed together in one distasteful blend of human animal and pushy ogre (for I could care less whatever would happen to him) but for some reason 'concerned' they all were and I said 'I'm fine I'd just fallen asleep and I guess I fell from the chair" for lack of anything better to say for in actuality it was in my dream that I was flying too and with a broadened thump I did hit something but it was some sort of evil wall around a Heaven of my imagining and that TRULY YES THAT had been enough to wake me up and APPARENTLY TOO enough to heave me right out of the chair I'd been in which coincided alright with our arrival back into Pennsylvania Station or whatever was the last stop on this detestable journey - dreamtime realtime imaginarytime I'd never know again - and I just got up and shook a few hands and said "thank you for your concern and worry" and all of that and walked away with some sort of limp I was sure they'd notice (my stupid leg had fallen asleep in a very big-time way).
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There's usually a way to salvage everything.

I KNOW I HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR

58. I KNOW I HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR:

So by my own comparison I sit here wayward and derelict thinking about everything old and how it comports with the modern day and I realize I'm out of it and lost to the ages anyway and most of my mind is spattered and spent amidst the danky gray smokes of another time and place - Hans Hoffmann and Philip Guston come to mind right off and then Jean Arp DeKooning Reinhardt and everyone else in that smaller enclave of old wealth and wisdom where I once happily found that metaphorical bottle I drink from and drink from still and to hell with all the rest - for my modernism now has taken the curve and headed out and anything left is a shambles of pieces and broken shards of litmus and loyalty broken on the back of some pig in a Joe McCarthy mask and the essence of everything else is of laughing gas and not much else ('over the river and thru the woods' so to speak) but I live by choice in the darker realm where nothing adds to nothing and makes no sense anyway and the cloak of the mist is the same cloak in its fogginess that brings clarity to all that it touches - I outrace ny headlights so I simply turn them off - and some second floor window balcony just above the street gives me the place I need to sit and so sit I do and even with the occasional rain sputtering down as if my own spit I gaze down to the place below and KNOW IT only as some marketplace of filth or some agora of lies wherein everyone passing has two feet in the mud and nothing to show for it except a whistle and a dread as they pass and piled behind me are canvases high with the mighty paints of some other days and mightiest reasons of all - BE THEY art and creative spirit and urge and the written will of WANDER and the flux of all that is - and standing athwart all that I KNOW I HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR and fear not anyway while the biblical page of the ark is moving before me and I sense - though I do not hear - some creator's words passing through me and SOME COVENANT like this is all I was meant to have and where they park the covenant is the Park of the Covenant and when the lights go out it is the Dark of the Covenant and the noise that HOLY DOG makes is the Bark of the Covenant and on and on it goes in some ridiculous Talmudic joke of words and letters and endings and ages and I but a witness witness nothing but ALL THAT IS.
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And what did the penitential white collar crook say in his confessional ? 'Bless me father for I have skimmed.'

THE GUY WITH THE BLUE COAT

57. THE GUY WITH THE BLUE COAT:

The guy with the blue coat said he was going to send me something but I always knew him to be a liar so I never expected much and he'd once told me he lived 'by the water with the blue spruce on the shoreline' and that sounded too pat for me to believe for I knew him to live adjacent to the canal where all the junk lumber had been dumped and where people dropped off washers and bicycles and other crap they didn't want and if he thought that was any sort of paradaisical existence for anyone he was surely nuts (the old tan-stucco boarding house was still standing but ready to fall in and had been vacant except for him for at least thirty years and it once held the canal workers who hauled the cargo which passed through from Philadelphia to Manhattan or wherever that stuff ended up and it all went in either direction anyway and they were all gone now and if he had any neighbors at all they were sure to be rats or rodents) and just over the hill from him in Liberty or whatever they called it now was the slimy graveyard where they buried all these people - old tottering stones from the 1800's and then the latest ones the newest or the most recent anyway - cut from a different stone entirely and bereft of anything cool to say - all the etchings of the latest ones being nothing but boring dates and names and such while the old ones with their cherubs and willow trees and angels adorning names and dates often too were held in groups with interesting sayings and slogans and epithet's that were fun to read but "you're supposed to be sad in a graveyard not happy" was what he said to me when I mentioned this to him and now there's nothing there anyway except for some stupid farmer who has hours on Saturdays from 10AM to 4PM when he sells 'small dogs and puppies' whatever that exactly means - and I always wanted to get there and see for myself and maybe get a dog or a small dog at least or a puppy if they're not the same thing but his sign was always confusing to me and it never mentioned price so I never went - dogs being quite plentiful it seemed anywhere else you could look and I'd rather they were free anyway (that's a double meaning too FREE for me - as it were - and free for themselves to wander to roam and to run around unfettered) but the guy with the blue coat played the harmonica too and the dulcimer or zither or one of those old instruments that no one understands anymore and I'd see him sometimes a little farther off at the edge of the parkland by the water-bridge playing some soulful sad tune to himself - since no one else was ever around - and I'd figure right then that LIAR OR NOT he really was probably right about the graveyard.
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And then like some unsought-for pterodactyl he would suddenly seem to come to life and be around everywhere I went - like some hillbilly in disguise with a flannel shirt for parents and two mud-boots for twin sisters he'd just be there hanging around listening and misunderstanding and then misrepresenting things and talking out of turn and he'd never read a newspaper - he said - that he could believe and even the 'car ads were mostly wrong' but he'd sit around eating candy and hard rolls whenever he found them to be available and the crusty old people at the general store down the patch by the riverbend started taking to him and letting him in on rainy days and the like and he'd become a fixture at Busby's General that no one ever flinched anymore even if he came in covered in concrete and cement dust and with big patches of dried stucco and paste stuck onto his shirt - as long as he could still talk he would - and then he started smelling as bad as he looked but no one would ever tell him but there WERE people (it was said - after a while) who wanted him dead and who'd talked about shooting him during hunting season or mistaking him for a deer or whatever (but I said 'whoever saw a deer with a fluorescent-orange farmer's cap on?') and then they'd argue over where to put the body or how to dump his remains (and I'd say 'take him back home in your wagon and dump his dead ass in the corner of that shit-shack he's living in and leave him there covered with leaves for a month or two until some bear or animal gets him and then blame that - NO ONE ever convicts Mother Nature!' and they laughed me off and said 'shut up or there'll be two to kill') so I did and - maimed stupid or dead or not - I began seeing much less of him after this sort of talk got around.

MY LITHSOME PRAYER OF ENDINGS

56. MY LITHSOME PRAYER OF ENDINGS:

I turned away to look back and realized how I DID NOT want to see anything after all - low smoke from some factory chimney the old screech of a thirty-year-old sound bad memory of a torrid event piles and piles of people walking across some stupid high-school lawn and NO MATTER the reasonings of the crowd the cheers still went up and in the narrow darkness I saw the dead - I saw how so many of them from the past years had passed onto another world of living and growing - spirits in some delicious night of abstraction stellar attractions beaming back like starlight on some carousel filled with giddy children screaming forth about TRAVEL! and where they're going while in reality they're going nowhere and every horse is tethered to a pole which rides them up and down and round and round : what better way (I told the doctor) what better way is there to decay ? and he smiled back and lit a pipe and inhaled deeply some florid smoke which wreathed his face and I swear I swear I saw his spirit try to choke but he held it in check and kept on smiling instead - the forced smile of the Parson at the pulpit the forced smile of the prisoner in the dock the forced smile of some tired groom at yet another wedding - and everything I saw was senseless and fake at the same time but as I delved into it more and more I saw its reality just as much - the antique store with one hundred ancient doorknobs made of glass the chipped mirrors holding blue reflections the crooked old ceiling lamp made with flat steel and textured metal and a wiring harness covered in woven-cord insulation I saw the wardrobe and the chifferobe and the dressers and the bench EVERYTHING taken on faith from a million miles away - Chinese tiles red-glass globes candle-holders with the faces of angels cherubs and saints old bannisters worn down from peoples' hands going up and down for two hundred years window hardware that fit nothing any longer and ten or more men's tophats with nary a head to be found to wear them - silk and satin leather and lace glass and wood porcelain and paste - no mistaking the envy of the new as it gazes back wistfully on the old the old the oh so very old.

THE BELGIAN GIRL AT THE OLDE VILLAGE CAFE

55. THE BELGIAN GIRL AT THE OLDE VILLAGE CAFE:

"That's what you get for sleeping in your clothes but you know it's been said new clothes make a new man but whoever said that was never I don't think heard from again and so if any disposition is to come of such a posture it would have to be like ME at Hamlet's Castle or something smoking a twisted out-of-shape cigarette of some long langorous shape the kind the drugstore does not make - but anyway one time we were up for three days straight playing around with stuff and we ended up somehow there exiting from a long black limousine driven by a guy named Ferdie from Macantire Mews whose father was a constable in Terflie-Shire Way or something and who never really spoke but just drove us to wherever we wished to go - and somehow it seemed he knew - except that maybe I myself wasn't really in control and someone else was actually doing all the decision-making but be that as it may that was like so far long ago as to be silly - like 1966 - I think and we all were part of a traveling troupe of jerky-cat musicians playing guild halls and merchant palaces for whoever would come out or show up but as it turned out so many people right then were on vacations or holidays that all we got really were the unemployed the down-and-out or the 'redundant' as they were being called in England at that time - tweedy miserable ho-hum and just actually on the cusp of coming alive - Carnaby Street and all that having just recently blown London wide open - Mary Quant Twiggy The Kinks and all everyone else and all we really had meant to do was ride into town on some of that and make some English money in American clothes or the other way around I don't know any more - and it was mostly the twisted black nightmare of a drugfest-bested mind that I came away with as night after night we jelly-rolled and smoked and popped pills with whoever was around or giving them to us and everyone it seemed had some connection to film or music and all that - no one really mindful or intelligent of anything mind you - but the girls and the sex were good ILLOGICAL but good and they'd gladly throw that goo around and let you slip it in whenever because to them all NOTHING really mattered (which was considered good and high philosophy though a bit 'easy' and French for that day) and then they'd happily roll right over and let you do it again with no mind - as long as so long as the music blared the drugs were there the booze prospered and they were treated IN THE LEAST at least as someone or someone special and I guess they've by now all disappeared and grown into old Mums with grandkids all their own or whatever and some are dead and some are living ('in my-ey-y life I've known them all') and the way I ever saw it was if that's what it took to make them happy then so be it and I love them still as special as they are and wish to be forever and ever amen! I say" - the fellow was toasted for sure and his fierce marmalade smile was making me scared and I only knew him as Old Johnny but he dated back from the ancient of days which SOMEHOW had now come to be seen as the mid-1960's if you can figure that out but whatever the concotions were that he was still taking they were working for him and his stories and he just never shut up ever but I sat down next to him in Henetty's WigWam House where they served ale and lamb stew and they let people linger ESPECIALLY people with the British accent of Coral-land or something like that - some place I never got - but I was never sure of this guy's game anyway and the American in Paris type stories were really wearing thin and everything sometimes seemed all mixed up too but WHENEVER something untoward occurred he went running for the exit until they brought him back.
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And all he wanted to keep taking about was Scottish folklore and the aforementioned castles and battlements - he said he'd gotten a 'particular' interest in such things by reading 'Jane's' annuals - which covered such things as ships helicopters and the weaponry of war worldwide and then he brought up a guy in film he knew named Haskell Wexler - which name sounded at least familiar enough - but I didn't follow his logic and wound up actually daydreaming as he was talking and I watched the waitress nearby instead as she worked the counter and I could swear she was Belgian but I didn't know why or what was key to me thinking that - no evidence or knowledge to think of - and I started wondering then if something in one's mind or 'bigger' self could take over and know these things and intuit them while sending the impulse to the brain which would account for the sudden glint I'd get that she was Belgian (something I'd not normally think of) and I supposed I really could ask her but I didn't wish to - not knowing what even would begin such a conversation - and if she was Belgian so what ? never seen one before and it made no difference but she was curious to look at and attractive to me too but for reasons I couldn't place - existential European reasons short stumpy powerful reasons facial construct reasons and SOMETHING and something more revealing to me anyway than was this guy's rant and I never knew if he was saying HE was in this English group touring the land or if he'd simply been PARTY to hearing of the party - on and on - and I let it drop but then I started wondering if maybe I'd mixed up Bulgaria with Belgium because - Bulgaria - that was the place all the girls were coming from nowadays and they sort of looked the same too but I decided it had to be Belgium because that's where the exoticism was for me (the idea of 'Old Europe' be damned) but when you cut the cake open and see what's inside sometimes the filling is more a surprise than the icing outside so I let it go while listening to the underground roar beneath us of the subway running by (and I imagined the people bunched up and riding in silence - conversations short words cut suspicions a'foul and everywhere somewhere worrying about something).