I THOUGHT I HEARD SOME LAST WORDS - I THOUGHT I WAS MOVING OUT

202. 'I THOUGHT I HEARD SOME LAST WORDS - I THOUGHT I WAS MOVING OUT':

Poets in their youth begin in gladness Wordsworth said and as if on some cosmological couch where there's maybe much ado about something and a gender holocaust and all the laws of nature and Mozart's happy minerals too I found myself discovering new forms of constitution which became unconsciously unconvincing if studied too harshly - the curse of the unknown God (or the 'course of an unknown God' I forget which) magic flute or magic by the lake (forget that too) all and every of that kept me busy for days as I lived in an abstraction of mirth and desire and went about my ways with an unbending hostility to routine and schedules 'I will NOT live any other way!' I said to myself over and over and more : one day I was sitting down at the Battery wistfully looking out towards the broad harbor and the sea I knew was out there - watching varied craft come slowly rolling in tankers and cargo ships from places I'd not known before Dubai and Arabia Scotland and Liverpool strange ships with German names and oriental signs on their sides and things I did not know and I was reading Moby Dick too for perhaps the fourth time when I got to that small chapter again about the pipe the pipe scene or whatever name is used and thought to myself again how unconvincing that scene was for some reason it always rang false in my mind and I didn't know why nor why it was included but the small detail always jumped out at me when the pipe is thrown overboard and the writer gives details of the sound and the sizzle of the lit pipe hitting the water and I couldn't ever truly realize that as right - on some broad wild sea which even if calm was overwhelming and far below the deck of the mighty whaling ship why would one 'hear' the sizzle of the lit tobacco going out as it hit the water and it was as if in defiance of all logic Melville was perhaps trying to show the mighty attempt the futile flame-out of one meager man against the great fates of nature and the world some allegorical reference some anomaly of time and occurrence but I never knew and it wasn't me and looking out the waters before me I wanted more but could never get it I wanted to walk those waters and carry the seas and lift up the world and find my voice and find my words but instead from Enoch all I could say was : 'blessed is the judgment of righteousness and blessed are you oh Lord of majesty and righteousness who are Lord of eternity' and that was always enough for me and I never wanted for more - I thought of Dante and tried to figure his words : 'in the middle of the road of my life I recovered and found myself in a dark wood with the right road being lost and it's so hard to describe that wood so savage so dense and harsh and just thinking of it renews my fear' and the words somehow rang right so that (just as) every time I read Dante in old stilted translations in order to make them work for me I changed them to my own diction (which would have been his wont) and it all made an easy and even sense to me that way alone - and I knew I either had not yet reached that woods or had put it behind me way too early already and then I feared perhaps for that or for what was yet ahead of me for somehow I felt again that wood still out in front of me somewhere and not yet met but I went on and divulged nothing of what I felt unto others : 'if you write well God-damn you must have fun doing it and enjoy yourself writing it' that was an old pearl someone once told me and I went on from that often playfully adding things into my words (the unto's and the whilst's) and like Dante's grand opening of the Inferno mine too was all stage-set and bluster and a darkness of shined and polished wood and I knew there was music still playing somewhere and so as to be able to do something I decided I ALONE would sing my Passion Sayonara and move along my way - and just like long ago on the Tuscan plain the turbid ebb and flow of life and of an especial midlife misery ends up with nothing to say but 'life is to die' and we then leave it alone : 'I don't relish having to make plans to die - and I don't look forward to experiencing death either' I said that (unbelievably) to myself forty years later forty years past the point of this writing and it stunned me to have the recall and the essential monstrosity of time and all its continuance and cleavage by which to keep me going I'd done everything and I'd done nothing - T. S. Eliot put it best when he wrote 'we shall not cease from exploring and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.' and I found that was it in a nutshell Amen.

GOD MOUNTAIN - SUN STREET (nyc, 1967)

201. GOD MOUNTAIN - SUN STREET (nyc, 1967):

As if not to be it all comes shuddering down drum circles and tourettic jazz drummers together swirling about like eddies of wind and swift shafts of light breaking through a cloud bank and the wildest people I ever saw were just standing around waiting for something to happen : beatniks in drag broken down hippies on crutches and wagons pulling dogs and monkeys who sang for a dime and the long lines of aspects and angles - every lawyer's biggest dream - made everything valid as the girls were eating music and two guys with hats were beating on bongoes while standing on a pallet made of bread and the trucks rolled by from Chambers Street stopping each moment to try for a turn but the bridge was always in the way and only birds flew this low while Chinese dreams and old Italian mothers fought fiercely on the hanging lawn - Benedict Arnold Tom Paine and Nathan Hale himself had all come out for the tragic display and they all were singing Shakespeare from drainpipes at the stove but marigolds and other souls had spent their last demise and the only things left were pieces of papers and pieces of eight : everyone it seemed had already left and I was left alone just looking at today : and I started watching this girl nearby who seemed all activity and no rest and she was fraught with some sort of anxiety or tension and I couldn't tell from what it came : sex fashion beauty or art : it was unidentifiable to me yet I watched - and it all had to do more with her carriage than with her character as there was really nothing other than that being displayed and to dispel any notions of depth from setting in she wore frivolity like a scarf - it flashed and flew around her like birds to a lovely tree and words meant nothing - so of course they were spoken quickly and flatteringly about anything and about all things - not stopping not even for a respite of air or breath - in the window's reflection apparently once more looking at herself she applied red lipstick a too strong red at that and - incredibly to me - while still talking with those lips in motion being stalked and stabbed at with a red lipstick stub she went on as if nothing else was occuring and it was a steady display of a ragged aplomb which I found startling and calming at once : her boots were of black leather and had a harsh heel but the look was good and the sweep of her jacket and dress both worked together nicely to signal some higher fashion and a form of style unknown to me : and I thought to myself 'being bored' doesn't mean 'nothing to do' as children imprecisely complain to their parents on a rainy day while dragging their feet and tugging and kicking on the sofa but it does mean rather that something BIG - whether it's rain other people or hot-to-the-touch fears - is keeping us from doing what we want to do - from playing outside from experiencing ourselves or just from moving forward - and then I wondered if she'd know any of that and I watched her light a cigarette with the all the grace of a lamb as the slow steady wind thrice blew out the match but she persevered and found the charm at last.

THE MOON IS ANOTHER PLANET

200. THE MOON IS ANOTHER PLANET:

Old hands hold secrets and the moon is another planet and I once knew some new-age creepy girl from western Pennsylvania who thought she had the world but all it was was her own most-lame magic and a not very insightful fantasy of mind-playing-games and interpretive fluff based on immense self-absorption but whatever with that she played a bar-bass riff with faux wisdom and taste so I let it be and I walked away not the worse for wear and over that for sure ('seems like there's some girls you just gotta' have you can hear the tune of their panties for sure and others you wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole' Ricky Shendowa said that to me one afternoon at Patrick's another place where the fishmongers ate and we were just watching the girls going by from the window with a beer in each of our hands) and I even forgot her name before it was over but some poster on the back-end wall reminded me of what I'd missed (they were playing the following night for the minions of bar-mooching fans - not listeners just fans) but I really hated that kind of music so made sure not to go yet the faint memory lingered of something I may have missed and then I realized if it was ahead of me - the music date - and hadn't happened yet then how could I have missed it and how could a 'memory' of something be in my mind - something that hadn't yet happened - but that's the way this life goes with the mind playing tricks and us all re-interpreting by degree whatever we want and by that defining our own lives and reality in any way we choose to do so : it's like that over and over so that if you dig down really really deep (deep enough to get to the essence of everything) you see that nothing really exists at all and life itself is a fragmented illusion and no material splendor has any basis in reality and it's all in what we imagine so I walked around and around for days after that point CERTAIN that nothing existed and all life was an illusion running slowly through time (which itself didn't exist).

EYES (nyc, 8th Street at Broadway, 1967)

199. EYES (nyc, 8th Street at Broadway, 1967):

...But all that was then and long ago and this is the now and no one ever talks to me or seeks me out so all of this life is an intense monkish study for me still to this day but tough as it sometimes is I get by and get by with my own thinking too and just as Andre Breton used to say that surrealism would someday abolish the barriers between sleeping and being awake I think I've at least achieved that for myself and if my life sometimes approaches a 'watercolor in tones of gray' it's always more than that too as it's been always about displacement and observation and Walter Benjamin-like discoveries of detail but I'd always harbored a need to delve deeper and deeper into everything and that over-the-top frenzy of excess was always my undoing too because I always went too far and never knew to stop and maybe something like that after time really does twist up your head and make you something else and IF that was the case and I say IF as a conditional than I was able nevertheless to get by and find my way : but anyway at this particular time the snow was piling up and I could see it from below as I peered from the low sidewalk window in my basement Studio School room and watched once more feet pass by as they each left their own little pigeon-like markings in the falling snow upon the whitened sidewalk - Eighth Street in all its glory back then somehow took hundreds of people to and fro somewhere and back each day - briefcases and boots scarves and hats everything all at once - and I noticed the cars which had slowed down to a crawl beeping and honking in a certain impatience as the new snow held them up a minute or so at the intersection : District 65 delivery trucks and union-labor warehouse workers in their ghostly garb and whited-out jackets and hats (I'd gone outside by this time to watch the real-world proceedings) and the girl came up to me just like that and said 'can you help me cross?' so I did and we walked slowly across the avenue past the little piles of scraped snow which already had been dumped and she said 'thank you' as I let go of her arm and replied 'no problem Ok again my pleasure' feeling stupid but complete and knowing I'd never see her again but feeling princely - she had on a magnificent long tweed coat in black and white squares and her hair was perfect and crested with new snow around a small hat of some sort and mostly but MOSTLY it was her eyes that did it that did me in and it's said when asked what drives people to people that some say face some say personality some say body some say hands and all that but I say 'eyes' point-of-fact and simply 'eyes' - corridors to something transferers to another place communicators of transcendance and understanding unifiers and that-which-draws-one-in and so it was here that we said single goodbyes and inconsequentially walked away from each other in the newly fallen snow.