THE ROSE AND THE BLOOM

68. THE ROSE AND THE BLOOM - (Outside the Gates of Eden):

Not too far away the rose and the bloom seemed to be coming together and the smaller crowd although still active was far more relaxed as Pinkerton and I slowly walked along the tree-lined street of old – the old Washington Square of Henry James and Mark Twain and all the other personages who may have once walked these paths now filled with colorful people and the stretch of awed faces reacting to something anything and probably because of that I simply started talking : "what does it mean anyway that people are in a rush to verbalize and spill and spout about things anything in which they decide momentarily that they are experts enough for themselves that they can become expert enough for any other person to listen when all the while really the only issue around them is power and nothing else and the one or the many who have the power basically rules the day while the others ‘rue’ the day but anyway it all comes out equal when you start yelling and screaming but what can you deploy if you can’t deploy your opinion and attitude inasmuch as you have nothing else to regard or to be seen with so to me it all eventually works out and what is the truth anyway but some mad jumble of definitions and issues all of which are self-created you see there’s nothing scientific or even pseudo-scientific about it about any of it it’s all the same crap as people of old sailing the oceans to escape hardship only to end up with worse hardship in a complete other place and the great gruesome wheel of anything keeps turning over upon itself wheeling and wheeling over and taking on anyone in its path - it’s always a hugely different cast on the same old stage – and I get tired of talking and tired of listening as all this goes on in fact I consider the earliest cave-man to have been probably more focused and pointed in his thinking than any one of these jerks are or ever can be and put all together they’re nothing else than one huge distracted distraction and life as we knew it before is over – shot to Hell and gone – because of the distraction of the modern day just as it was in any olden day except for the color and the movement and wasn’t it Ecclesiastes who said ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ and if maybe that was to be said nowadays it would most certainly need a question mark because in our postmodern terms of thinking NOTHING is definite and we are allowed to doubt and criticize to postulate and to question absolutely ANYTHING (and the more it sells the better) ‘NOTHING new under the sun?’ really I say really but if WAR is found to sell then WAR it shall be and if instead PEACE is suddenly found to sell then PEACE it will be and (if you may want to remember again) EDEN had no gates ! it simply let any old bastard in or out at will and THE KEY was that there were far fewer bastards back then but the ones who were most definitely took sides."

IF WHEN AND MAYBE

67. IF WHEN AND MAYBE:

‘Went down to the wire went down to the south just to be able to say something different and motion to a new arrival and as it turned out ‘Andy Griffith’ really did suck was probably the worst you could ever see but everyone saw it anyway and that was just the way it was and just today I was looking at a photo once more of the balcony shot where Martin Luther King’s death scene was photographed and the rooming house across the way people pointing and all that and I noticed the big ’57 DeSoto there in the parking lot and it took me back a bit because probably only in the south was that car still an issue in those days April 4 1968 or whatever it was when he was killed and around here that model was long gone and forgotten and it reminded me too of being in like third or fourth grade as I recall it well and maybe School 5 about 1959 or so when DeSoto was put out of its misery it was ended as a nameplate and production stopped much like Packard at about the same time and this sort of thing sticks to the mind Dodge Edsel Chevy Ford Buick Oldsmobile and all the rest and it’s just that simple and easy how things change all about us and die off or are removed without any logic or mention on our part and some other guy I heard was saying ‘I’m not really sure if this is war or just the beginning’ and I wasn’t able to determine what it was he meant by that but to me it didn’t really matter ENERGY and all being what it is and the body goes on even in pain and all its thudding bereavment as we move along and the bed-ridden ones eventually grow silent for there’s a time when everyone sort of knows there’s not much more to say and having said that I go about hoping it’s not that time for me and people in the next room are watching pictures ‘the dustbowl they’re in’ as the lady said but rows and rows of people caught on camera show their anguish and hatred and probably their need and desire too and their hunger for real fool and for ideas too and what’s it all about (if only anyone would say) except for enlightenment but ‘puffery ain’t enlightenment’ and that’s for sure and even that DeSoto when you think about it wasn’t really that old and even today people drive around in 11 or 12 year old cars no problem but it seems for that time and place the fashion was so different and startlingly so that it really stood out and yet today it really bears no importance for dead is dead and the ‘King is Dead’ shall we say and even now already there are people scurrying around searching for ‘criminals’ and people guilty of ‘war crimes’ as they put it as if the whole thing wasn’t already a blot on our conscience a crime but against what I can’t specify for life is jagged and life too ends just as quickly as a tear rolls down the face and sometimes turning around to look back is like trying to peer through a hole in one’s heart - difficult to achieve but a truly worthwhile endeavor - and without missing a beat the movie posters are up everywhere and all I see advertised are the death and destruction of magical cinema WAR and if movies revel in death and destruction and entire entertainment operations rotate around it than how is it not right and normal that the fire and flux of war becomes acclimated into the hearts and souls and minds of people who then actualize the reality of the man-caused death and destruction they bring upon each other and in addition to that one sits back – as I do – and recalls the past and remembers many things and realizes like myself that ‘I have no hurts’ and that no one has ever left me or betrayed me or injured me or left me in a bad way and so probably pretty fortunate I do go on and live the life I live and before that nothing else matters and all else pales and fades away to nothing and everything non-descript and purposeless is just as well gone but echoes sound like memory and there really is a secret behind oh so many things but it’s so hard not to get normal and gloss it all over but the secret language and the un-noted maneuvers of things are the little marks that matter and alter the world and yeah maybe so the trucks still run and the river flows and the jaded attributes of time and place seem to change and some people there are EVEN who never stay in one place but I find myself the opposite I NEVER MOVE and probably never will because for me it’s all one and it’s important too to remain and stay settled and the appropriate reaction to anything is more reaction or perhaps more candor but I often find the best is not caring either way and just letting the silence and the reverie take their own course like some old wood on a building or a regretted jumble of words thrown out and never retracted IF WHEN AND MAYBE they should have been but memories are jars on the face of a wall and when no one is looking someone steals something away and takes one down (but I’m a forceful man and come to tame the unruly and
re-number the dead) and before you know it all of everything is gone but just like that whatever comes to be faces its own extinction in just as much an instant as not…."

THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM WAS MY BROTHER

66. THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM WAS MY BROTHER:

I can't ever say why but something was calming me down in the middle of all the world's grief - oil-soaked penguins dead birds along the reef wildcats prowling in pits of poison gas-attacks in the open-air markets of Kabul - endless horrible things bespeaking mankind's dead brutishness one towards the other and all I could do was look away or shudder to a halt and I went speechless in the middle of LIFE life itself being a quandary of which I found nothing or very little to salvage : some guy named George walking along the canal in Frenchtown with some wicked crazy babe in tow and talking a mile a minute until the moment he saw me and we met and started the usual stuff about both where we'd been and how in the intervening two years and another guy walking his dog across a soon-to-be-graded field where a new plan for houses was already waiting and set and in place - sadness in every window and eave - and I could say nothing at all and the waterway was silent in the crisp Fall air - each boat having stayed in place and the slow rocking of the river-water around the bend led my eyes to Pennsylvania and something else far away (tho' I get home how late - how late / so I get home -'twill compensate / better will be the ecstasy / that they have done expecting me) and that fair triumphal regal music that I hear starts itself annoying me (the bandstand is a copy of something in Rome or so it was said when I later got home) and all I see HERE are scant'-clad girls in bodices and sheer tops with tight clothing clutching their rears and I wonder in such a place as this how anything became so risque and burlesque (or is it the tone of the times and the temper when no one now cares or notices the flesh?) and I know so many who've made love to a log or reciprocated feelings with stone and I know they're still pining for something other than all that emptiness - that which comes with empathy and all their stupid caring - and even that DOG was now sniffing the air or searching for clues or finding a care and AS IT IS it's always NOTHING or all of nothing or EVERYTHING and nothing at all - and in some tawdry finish it all evens out in the end and they build twenty buildings where before there was one and someone pipes up and says 'how beautiful everything is' and just like that ALL'S forgotten (and we've already moved on YES we've already moved on) yet if the LORD is my shepherd and I shall want for nothing then by the same token if all the wealth and riches of the world amount to NOTHING in the eyes of this God - is that what I'm really wanting this NOTHING that always shall come to be nothing? - and really 'restoring' the soul just sounds like SO MUCH WORK.

MANY LIMBS MANY BRANCHES

65. MANY LIMBS MANY BRANCHES:

Despite their prosperity they prosper not - and wanting to do many things they do nothing : and I'm thinking of what any of it means as I dwell on Matthew 25:14- 30 about 'Talents' and I wonder the convoluted stretching of that scene and what such 'talents' really mean to be and are and if not for this moment then for what moment am I born and how to walk about and not squander and how is it distant that such closeness seems to be afar - and if not the Promised Land than what land is this (and yea I am weary unto death with this weariness inside me - and yet I grow tireder still).
-
..."[I've got mud for a memory and way too many things and yet I cannot find a thing but just pile up more and the papers which are falling are papers I couldn't locate before and the collected works of whomever it may be aren't much more than supports for what's atop the pile and all of this makes me itchy and mad so I shut the door and walk away muttering something to myself about patience and tact and the last time I was ready to clean this place up I got sick and everything had to wait and then snow came in through the window pane and the old door fell off the hinge (yes HINGE singular) and I started falling asleep right where I sat and the rest is AS THEY SAY history - or at least a history of the dispossessed and those bought by landowners and used as mules and beasts of burden : fixing fences laying concrete hauling lumber chopping trees shedding timber and barking bees and painting barns and houses and sheds and baking the farmer's wife's beans and sleeping in her bed (cheap rhyme that is) and instead of all that I return to Tristram Shandy and reading books and writing ideas and leaving scheduled memos on the tables of yellow stone I'd found but still I'm crowded and doubtful and the only out I see is to go on doing what I'm doing and making sure it's free enough for something to prosper and if it isn't me then may it be YOU for the best part of chivalry is charity and goodness (and mercy) shall follow me DESTITUTE all the DAYS of my life.]..."
-
I wasn't real sure of any alliance I should make but I knew I shouldered a burden here that at least had to be examined and just in front of me two horsemen were coming up and through the trees they looked like errant knights on horseback but they turned out instead to be just two people who'd rented the horses at the riding stables adjacent to the park by the west 60's somewhere and I envied them their free-time and their attire and their money too - enough all of that to give them this privileged air of carefree-ness as they proudly rode right across Central Park as if it was their own truly theirs back yard expanse of playful land and greenery and rock and water and what a regal duo they made the two prancing across the grass and dirt oblivious to everything else and me - who'd just as recently been sitting on a simple bench thinking of what to do cashless and stupid in my way in the same vast place as they were but the difference was rank class position and privilege and all THAT in such a classless place as NYC AMERICA ! and I wondered how that came to be but I didn't wonder too much because I knew it wouldn't matter whatever conclusion I came with and whichever path you take it's usually the path you were born to anyway so not too often can you jump declensions so to speak and if you understand that and don't let it bother you it all comes out all right so for me the sunlight and the moon was free (or at least I hoped) and the charge for speaking was mostly non-existent too so I just sat there and watched them fade away across the mesa (or so I was pretending) and for myself my path was pretty plain - find another way to survive or perish.

PRETTY OBVIOUS AND SO WAS I

64. PRETTY OBVIOUS AND SO WAS I (Lydia Copeland):

Well I needed you to be my talk show host while holding a strand of your hair in my hand "pure protein" I said to the guy in the band and his tin-type hat and the scenes of the land - "I want tits and I wish to drink gasoline" - he said that while hunched over the metal table with two other people looking on all bunched together like a tribe of heads and though everyone laughed there was no one really listening and back and forth like this it went - the kite the fuhrer the talk of the rent the matrix the money and time well spent - but everyone knew there was a difference between style and time as the words people spin lose their power as dominance fades and some horoscope-reader with a libby for lenses came down from the mount wearing shades and proceeded to read what he thought were signs and portents but turned out to be the hands of the maid (her name was Clarita and she came by each morning) and History tells us that eventually nothing matters ice will melt and all glass shatters but so much of that was known already that nothing caused much of a start..."that's a sharp outfit" Henry said "you look like an asset to the DMV" and the girl with the make-up case had come over speaking back to Henry and she said (as I remember) "sometimes there were really bad things too like the time two Christmases ago when I slept with a guy named Arthur he was seventeen but he told me twenty-five but I knew the truth all along and he lived with his uncle in a houseboat and there were stick-figure men in karate poses on the shelves in the bedroom and Polaroids of teen-age girls at pool parties with wet limp pig-tails pulled back from their heads and he fucked like a sergeant-major - I mean I didn't mind a thing - but him and his uncle too were Civil War buffs and they had to leave the next day for an encampment somewhere and I said 'ain't you gonna' freeze your asses off?' and he smiled back and said 'not now but that's all part of the fun anyway' and I think he meant me with that 'not now' stuff but I never found out for sure and since then I haven't seen him again" and as she walked away everyone was checking her out (it was pretty obvious and so was I) but what is it anyway about girls who tell people about their sex life ? you know they must want the attention and so looking at their asses as they walk away all slithery and curved must all be part of what they want - otherwise why bother and who cares? - and then two skinny kids with sideburns came in asking for Martin Arnold (he was the guy who lived two doors away) and I said "not sure if he's here or not it's Oscar night you know and all he cares about is movie-stars" and they said "yeah we know that's why we're here he wanted us to fix his wall-sized TV" and I said "hmmm didn't know he had one is it a big wall?" and they laughed "it don't matter the size of the wall it's just something they call it" and only later did we find out he was not at home anyway having stayed two days over in Nantock waiting for the next lottery day to arrive and when he did get back I told him what had happened and he shrugged and said "no I was gonna' get one but them TV's ain't cheap and I had no winnings" and that was the end of that - the two kids having been long forgotten even though one had left his bike behind "what have they been eating?" Martin asked "Cornish game hens" I replied.