SO MUCH FOR YOUR BUSBY BERKELEY MOMENT

90. SO MUCH FOR YOUR BUSBY BERKELEY MOMENT:

And then just like that it was a zillion degrees it seemed forever and the table-tops were wilting and trees were falling and the streets were bubbling up houses melted and every room was like a furnace no matter where one went - even the 'air-conditioned nightmares' of every other story no longer held much sway - being seen by others as foul egregious and inefficiently wasteful of a scarcer than ever resource (to wit : money) and even though most people actually did remember a time when it was and seemed OK to waste resources and electricity it was now just too expensive for anyone to do and even the big stores and markets - wasteful as they were - were held accountable for squandering if they too did so : as in the past when they'd prop doors open and you'd feel the escaping cold air drape the sidewalk as if there was NO care in the world more pleasureable than pleasure but that was ALL OVER NOW and instead some choreographed strange nightmare of time and circumstance had taken over everything else - fear-mongering deceit and mis-representation too - so that the millions of moving parts needed to make up any scene within the world simply began breaking down and everyone was fraught with fear and anxiety and all they spoke of was pain and misgiving and no one wanted to move in conjunction with anyone else instead they each just wanted to go on their own way unbothered and unfettered by anyone else and that - being really the END of ideology - pretty much spelled disaster for the rest of the world as vanity egotism and brute strength became the powers of the day and took over and bombs began falling everywhere and disasters and terrors and killings invasions murders and suicides overcame everything else as churches in vain stayed put and then just closed their doors and every padre worth his salt took a lethal dose for the Lord and vagrants stole the gold and brass and every chalice in between and any treasure was smelted for cash with rubies and diamonds wherever they were found carted away and sold for loot and nightmare-littered trucks and barrels were hijacked from every lot NOTHING was sacred any more : girls fell down while crying in fear for sex and favor while the wildest geranium men took what they wanted from everyone MOTHERS and DAUGHTERS too ('Spring Adams was a 13-year-old sixth grader from Idaho who was impregnated by her father and on the morning she was to have an abortion he came into her room and shot her' they somehow managed to call it simply LOVE - blinding misguided LOVE - 'Becky Bell died of an illegal abortion because she was too ashamed to comply with Indiana's requirement that she notify her parents of her intent to end her pregnancy' LOVE - blinding misguided LOVE again - 'in 2004 there was the instance of the teenage girl in Michigan who so desperate to avoid telling her parents that she needed an abortion allowed her boyfriend to beat her belly with a baseball bat until she miscarried - she was six months pregnant') and so if everyone is an instrument of their solitary quest then NO ONE comes together to make a way for anyone else - no ethos no tradition no regard for being of another and the world is falling hard then in an agonizing spectacle of race - running towards an unloosed anarchy and totally bereft of grace and the people who built the built stopped caring of what they did and gardeners stopped gardening while teachers ceased to teach and caseworkers littered with files and forms were found hanging from lamp-posts along the streets and cars were left in jumbled heaps with no fuel to fuel them on and grocers went broke from no groceries sold and doctors gave prescriptions for nothing away : the old dead walked and the new dead died and everything else was quiet and solitary and missing and the world had become a deadly place : flying planes crashed upon the ground and spilled fuels turned to flames as the intensities of fires left cinders upon the ground - littered now with burned corpses and dead bodies.

THE ARCHIVE IS EVERYDAY LIFE

89. THE ARCHIVE IS EVERYDAY LIFE:

I once was pretty sorry about a hundred things but now I'm sorry about nothing and in many ways they're both the same and I was reading John Gardner Nickel Mountain that is but all I could remember was October Light or November I forget and in the past that sort of thing would have sent me scurrying for reference books so as to look it up but now I really couldn't have cared less and the same went for Bobby Trenery's burned-down house - which burned last Friday and is now just a heap of timber and ash - there was a time when I'd wanted to have gone right over checked it out found him made sure he was OK and all of that but these days the fact that his house burned down concerns me little and probably good for him - cigarettes kerosene open stove or arson - any one of those options might have done him in and I just don't care - so it's like that now and because of it everything looks different CERTAINLY the present day for whereas before there seemed interesting things on every corner now it is all a blandishment of stupidity and rank foil and I can't understand anyone anyway or even be sure if they're talking to me - as it seems everyone now walks around talking to someone else unseen at the end of their arm and I recall a time in the 1970's for instance when the only madmen you'd see would be walking the streets along here talking to themselves or to a spectre whether wildly or calmly and they'd clearly be mad - flailing wildly on 23rd or shouting aloud on 14th - but now it seems everywhere I go everyone is doing that and no one is considered crazy anymore so perhaps society has progressed or perhaps it has not BUT in either case I'm on the outside looking out if you know what I mean - and I don't want membership even if it's offered I don't want to be part of that club for the world is a sadly human place and that's too much for me to take and - as Marx once said - I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that'd have me anyway.

YOU ONLY HAVE TO TELL ME ONCE

88. YOU ONLY HAVE TO TELL ME ONCE:

And one day I awoke and went outside at 7am and I saw the usual scurrying of workaday things - the trucks and cars and carts and people in each direction headed to something - a promise of fault or a fault of a promise and the dreary expectation - though seemingly a contradiction - was all it seemed that gave life to people and they all had already sacrificed so much for so little that my own paint-stained rags for clothes and carriage seemed to mean nothing in the early light and I mentioned to myself that the very idea of continuing seemed useless and I at once decided to head for the bridge nearby which would allow me both company and a jump and then I thought better of it along my way - for why should I be bothered to cancel a scene for which all the sets hadn't yet even been constructed and why - in the same sense - would I volunteer to be a footnote to something never read anyway so I continued and as I passed the buildings of the Supreme Court and the Metropolitan Council and all the rest (great chambered nautilus that too) I saw the rising ruins not yet built to completion of everything coming - the new Police Headquarters replacing the old and with it the end of a quaint and much more sensible form of living and the beauty and architecture which once went with it : but we were now amidst a much coarser age where nothing meant much and much for little and cadavers washed ashore were still singing some prolix song with broken hands or feet still bound in sailing cloth and rope with fiber and the Davy Jones locker I sensed creeping up was present to witness DEATH itself creeping up from the shoreline while at this edge - of time and place and money and story - ancient derelict sailors still stood with mouths agape and with wonder in their rotted eye-sockets calling back some oath while learning to master the craft of the new - but even THEY knew then it was hopeless and so did I so although I passed upon that jump from the bridge this time I decided anew to go forth and proclaim what I saw - and it's never easy doing that and it's never simple either - and I found myself enraptured once and once again as I walked along the oldest wharfside Manhattan buildings there were - rats scurrying too dog-fights and gambling hoodlums in the cellar-pits of every building while on the third flood ledge and window where I looked I saw perhaps the most beautiful something I'd ever seen - a girl of indeterminate grace and origin ruing her place and decrying her fate but it was not mine to mind nor mend for all life goes on and each person's got their role to play and winnow and alter and correct until some certain moment when a glorious appearing occurs and Paradise is seen - tha's what I would wait for I told myself - so I sat down on the rocks beneath the bridge and watched the river traffic passing by - eastriver cargo tugboats and steam Brooklyn Bridge overhead with its weird roadtop roar - some sort of hum from Hell - and sitting there I knew I'd live forever somewhere yet with or without a future message I'd be here in this place FOREVER too.
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So any good times JUST LIKE any bad times just passed away disappeared and were so soon forgotten (this here reminds me to remind you of some 1996 Ginsberg stuff I found amusingly right - 'Don't get angry with me / you might die tomorrow / I'm an empty ghost / any spare change I can borrow? / don't get angry with me / full of God tomorrow / could get sorry you got mad / wanna be the God of sorrow?' - of course I didn't know that then in fact it even then didn't exist yet and I knew Ginsberg for a few fleeting short times on the next block over the Peace Eye Bookstore and the place he lived and Tompkins Square Park and then that weird and odd conversation later in 1982 in the restroom at Rutger's University while I was pissing at the urinal and he was in the near stall shitting and he'd just arrived from NYC for a reading and performance on the stage at the Rutgers Student Center and what he'd said at first was 'hi hi everything's fine but all I gotta' do right now is shit really bad' and I ALWAYS watched for but never saw that those words ever became poetry anywhere somewhere else).

TRIPTYCH THE RHINE MAIDEN

87. TRIPTYCH THE RHINE MAIDEN:

Another time like rain came back again and with it thunder and lightning AND smoke too and I sat in one place for the entire day thinking - thinking of marks and marksmanship too - and I saw pictures Andrea Merkel for instance Angela DeMeens Theolonious Monk and even Ishmael Reed whom I'd liked to have met on a perpendicular writer's cruise or some cross-town taxi interloper's interference but there was no chance of that since we're all sworn to silence now and juxtaposed jaggedly to Jughead and JarJar Minx or whatever his name was we cannot even deign to TRY to speak to one another because the languages no longer overlap but there's no meaning to the means and no endsite for the convention to be held and we're all alone or raging in crowds and swooning in herds and reading asides we shouldn't have overheard : the world's newest photographer shoots 8-hour exposures of Fifty-ninth and Fifth just watching whatever goes by go by but it's all a blur anyway when it's all one and THE ONLY THINGS you really see are the firm fixed footings of the buildings stern and bold and completely unmoving by that scale anyway - geology has a way with time that has NOTHING to do with any of this - and people pass Pippa passes too Bunyon would know but someone asks me anyway 'what is it you're trying to do or say anyway and why is it so difficult for anything to come from you straight?' and I laughed back and said 'if I was the martyr you'd been looking for you'd never ask me that' and some errant form of lowlife sizzles by with his arm up some poor girl's dress but he's smiling like Bugger Brown or somebody famous and she too grins and keeps passing on her way and for one quick moment I wished it was me but couldn't decide why and off they went - laughing all the way a tisket a tasket and the rest blew a gasket and anyway if ANYONE keeps a lens open and in one spot for that long there's no telling WHAT you'll see - people passing by dogs and animals too and yellow cabs and buses and vans and livery things and bicycle messengers and cake-walkers and sidewalk salesmen and three-card monte bums and jugglers too but the only thing I'd want to see is some few violinists walking by crouched for fun under a broad Vivaldi awning somewhere near the millionaires' club and meanwhile the small group of schoolchildren was listening to the classical music lesson but not understanding a word and looking otherwise for the constant split-ear crescendo boom-beat three-minute blast of overdone ballast instead from their ghetto block radio-faced DJ factotum but getting only pause and staccato and crescendo and then another change of theme and intermixed music overlapping the seams and NO FALSE ENDING in sight - but they knew not what to say and the teacher had run out of words so they all had instead some fresh salami sandwiches made by hand and a few very large Cokes to wash it all down - you know how frazzled summertime kids can be - and everyone breathed a sigh of relief for FINALLY those annoying and crazy kids were going home and the teacher I noted stayed behind ALONE but she was looking for love in all the wrong places and the next thing I knew she was GONE too with no T R A C E S!!! (but I stayed there myself arm-in-arm with my lovely new Spanish girlfriend) but her name turned out to be Helga or Heide or Heggers or something I'll never remember so I figured she wasn't really Spanish - just wanted to be.

SOME OTHER KIND OF PLACE

86. SOME OTHER KIND OF PLACE:

You are in (I am in) some kind of other land which stands nowhere - incomplete and between things and it affords you only one choice (which is 'one' being NO choice at all) and that is to stay low remain invisible (as much as possible) and with some stealth go between things until all this passes (if that sounds mysterious WELL then it is) : let me begin here by saying any number of things which are on my mind : I have posted a dream or two by turning each into a more-normal language than that of dream-language so as to make it recognizable and just as naturally now Summer has arisen and already moved on and the lights in the daybreak sky are moving swiftly towards something anything else and anyway a 'Dream' is not made of words but some short form of fleeting picture and it's all in the attempt of regaling that passing picture with words that we go wrong for there really ARE certain things to be sure that cannot be written or committed to memory or re-created no matter how much we try and for all its difficulty nothing more comes and once we've exhausted that idea everything else too stops - we find ourselves tired frozen dead or maimed and worthy of nothing except bad maintenance by the Devil itself and if there really ever IS something anything pursuing us (you OR me) it is some form of unfinished and incomplete emanation of another realm just beyond recognition and awakening - something we maybe know by outline or shadow and by mimicry or imitation but are never really completely SURE of having seen or met with or caught up to OR EVEN RECOGNIZED for that matter (it is the non-recognition which eventually gets to us the most) and these misses are referred to as 'bad timing' or 'bad luck' or 'missed opportunities' or whatever other word-concoction is ascribed to a loss or a miss or something we did not do and tried instead to cover over by some technological fix or stopgap measure or some other stumbling means of cover-up and distortion ALL so as to hide the truth and shield us from the truth.