THE OPPOSITE OF FATE
292. THE OPPOSITE OF FATE:
All I can say is don't go racing for conclusions before all the information is in - you'll be fooled like a fool and look like one too - and there's a supple movement within the mind which knows just what's about to come and come it does - one way or the other down up or over sideways or frontal silent or loud : step aside or it shall run you down : and in his book entitled Social Contract it was Rousseau who stated 'man is born free but everywhere he is in chains' and so is his language and all his deeds and words too for the reflection of one thing strong is in everything else and what is it that keeps MANKIND shouldered with the yoke of burden and responsibility THESE CHAINS so beforehand mentioned ? one is not fit to know but the soul sacred within the place would attest and know distinctly 'these chains are the heart and the heart of toil and sweat as we strain beyond compare in attempting to see all of that which we cannot see' - such a quandary within a paradox of time and material energy perhaps it is THAT which keeps men working - pouring the concrete for bridges and roadways building schools and enforcing their rules erecting to the sky the structured heights of room and office where others so glibly fit in and take their place nodding beneath the lights of some broken-spaced and artificial nonetheless GLOOM - 'but this can't last can it - it all must he dissolved away' (some guy said that falling forward from the roof nearby) and the tin-can collector man alongside me too had just uttered this exchange : "Mister whatever can ya' spare me some change?" and he said that with a nodding head to me of course unknown to him and I whipped out a twenty and put it at his nose and said "see what this is it's yours if you just tell me you believe in something" and he smiled like a slave right back to me and said "yes sir well right now I do believe in you quite well" and I gave him the note and said "be careful with this it might be your last" and he smiled and sauntered away and I figured why not what else should I tell him who wants to hear my fraggy story of woe - no mother no father a life like a horse two trips 'round the world and a passel of learning of this and of that - why begrudge the man his simple pleasures and don't I know I've got the money to expend so IF I DO what of it now and then? (but a part of me wants to say right back 'then why not die while the living's good why just stay and waste it away?' but I shrug and find a stairway to hide in).
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537 Park Avenue : this doctor had a catharsis and was taken from his office on a stretcher being rolled by two men while a female EMT with a plasma bottle held high walked alongside them and they were all chattering strange numbers and words I could not understand nor recognize but I knew the situation as well as any other for it isn't always that the 'Doctor' of the house goes down as the patient and gets taken away by the ambulance himself and (I wondered) 'where to?' does one go in such a case - the light blue flicker of a computer screen illumined the interior rear of the medical wagon as someone else was crouched at a keyboard plotting in numbers and information and - I'd supposed - awaiting results or instructions back and all this even before they entered the flow of auto traffic which whizzed the street and not knowing where they'd be headed I understood all too well the haste but the same would be said for anything along Park Ave's majestically reputationed denizens and doctor's offices and psychiatric couches and chairs : everything medical was here pronounced real and sure and true and actual while to so many others everywhere else in the city it remained a distant fantasy a glimmer of something else a chimera one hoped never to need to face - that chasm that yawping hole that gaping wide-eyed destination DEATH that which slaughters us all - and with no one speaking I kept a watch at the least at what I saw (the languorous rump of the female assistant held the allure of assertion that - to me at least - proved still I was alive!) and they entered their wagon and slammed shut the doors and a siren pronounced its intention to garner attention and away OFF! they sped (sprinkling in between some cars and a lone workman's truck) while faces looked up - that old gent by the median's flowers the woman in a gaudy hat punishing her dog with a leash while looking back to what had occurred - but they all still passed as moments and people do : some tidy assertion of sidewalk and premise or occurrence and chance or doubt and dishonor and 'there but for fortune' go you or go I.
-
Whatever that all was SOMETHING I knew wasn't right and it seems that - in spite of everything - I've become a man somehow that even I wouldn't like (and this is myself I'm talking about after all) for the lot of other men is beyond me and I therefore remain alone and aloof : I couldn't care less if someone died or was run down by a truck nor would it matter to me if some pernicious plague at this moment came through and wiped out an immediate sixty percent of the world's population especially including all those around me - it simply couldn't matter : for I refuse to believe in the material of this world and the sights and sounds which come with it nor the flagging annoying flapping and cloying tongues of those fellow creatures ceaselessly yowling around me and I read the signs as best I can IN FACT I read everything - William Carlos Williams and his stupid red wagon to his stupid cold plums and Blake and his idiot 'tyger' and Poe and his stupid bird to Whitman with his everyman vague banter and homo-erotic elan FOR NONE OF IT STANDS and it's all filled with crap and perdition and calculated stance and raw ambition - nothing graceful nor meaningful in any of that Emperor of Ice Cream included (and those who insure it too) and just like every koala bear is a girl's cartoon of gentle ease and every pirate or star-warrior marks an aggressive boy's future - so too (for myself) I mark the pages with bookmarks of blood and spots of bile and spittle that dry yellow on the tendentious pages I've read - pencils and pens and the desperations of men - AMERIKA! : for that's what the supermarkets sell and that's what the idiots buy.
-
Sometimes I've got nothing to say and other times I do - not much of a position and pretty useless too.
-
I juggled moments like circus guys did bowling pins and the same clowns who ride the old cars there are the same clowns walking the street with me : there is no generosity in falsehood and deceit - no grace in dancing nor sadness in tears (it's all for nothing everywhere) but like they say at the gravesite 'he WAS a good man' it only makes you wonder why the past tense ('it is all imperceptible - who made him my enemy?') and nonetheless we walk on encircling the wagons while flames lick the wheels and every story (I find) is the same old story of the wise-eyed old person thinking wisdom is cheap and knowing it all then imparting to others all that was missed the first time around "listen fellow - if I had it to do again I'd head out from the very first I don't know how you live in the northeast anyway - mosquitos and swampland Italians and beggars humidity and cold - I'd go somewhere else where the living is GOLD like gold anyway and find me a lassie to SWEEP me off my feet - love her and love her and make babies complete and there's a million ways to do anything but it seems we always pick the way that's the worst" - that's the kind of crap I'd hear but no one realized who I was and I'd walk around the New York streets pretty much like I pleased bumming and drinking or just sitting about watching and nothing came of it - towncars and expensive dinners if I wished but I never wished - I'd just as soon have some cheap sandwich at some Grand Central concourse sit-down and drink coffee while the niggers passed and I'd watch their bad behavior and the old women with bags the suburban freak with Yankee shirts and names and numbers the Rangers or the Mets and all the rest - car names auto shows sneaker brands PEOPLE really ARE idiots you know and they'd walk around in a daze unknown and then I'd found it's the very same daze no matter where KANSAS TO FRESNO to Memphis to Maine and New York City's just the collection point for that drain - no matter what else - and things always ran through my head things I liked important things I wanted to keep 'but they pulled me out of the sack and they held me together with glue and then I knew what to do....I made a model of you a man in black with a Mein Kampf look and a love of the rack and the screw....so daddy I'm finally through - the black telephone's off at the root the voices just can't worm through' and this suicide rap was always without fail so perfect and I want to print here the diatribe all of it and someday I will 'daddy daddy you bastard I'm through' and this old life's but a theater and I have walk-on roles whenever I want but no contract and no lead and the stage is falling through and the kleig lights dangle and the ceiling crumbles down and people in the audience are bleeding and dying screaming through their pain and I throw daggers to land where they will - in hearts and minds and palms and brains - and I delight in the scream as paroxysm of success cheap and tawdry but success nonetheless and we wander far from home but to find home again and the saddle of every horse is made of thin paper where the sweat breaks through - wet crotch dripping back rollicking good time no money no fees just mad mad love and abandoned love ABSOLUTELY like a martyr and it's that KIND OF CRAP one hears at every turn ('...and the heart gets harder...') Arab Jew Chinaman Pole Frenchman African Indian Mexican Mayan and Troll - every nation known to man every station in the land 'turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer - things fall apart the center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.'
-
So the more you live the less you know - so what : I looked at a star map today - I know where Jupiter is in the night sky now SO WHAT I know where Mars and Cygnus are not SO WHAT I looked at a star map today to see how close is the most distant galaxy SO WHAT!! I know no more than that I be SO WHAT!! (all men are idiots and bastards and slaves).
-
537 Park Avenue : this doctor had a catharsis and was taken from his office on a stretcher being rolled by two men while a female EMT with a plasma bottle held high walked alongside them and they were all chattering strange numbers and words I could not understand nor recognize but I knew the situation as well as any other for it isn't always that the 'Doctor' of the house goes down as the patient and gets taken away by the ambulance himself and (I wondered) 'where to?' does one go in such a case - the light blue flicker of a computer screen illumined the interior rear of the medical wagon as someone else was crouched at a keyboard plotting in numbers and information and - I'd supposed - awaiting results or instructions back and all this even before they entered the flow of auto traffic which whizzed the street and not knowing where they'd be headed I understood all too well the haste but the same would be said for anything along Park Ave's majestically reputationed denizens and doctor's offices and psychiatric couches and chairs : everything medical was here pronounced real and sure and true and actual while to so many others everywhere else in the city it remained a distant fantasy a glimmer of something else a chimera one hoped never to need to face - that chasm that yawping hole that gaping wide-eyed destination DEATH that which slaughters us all - and with no one speaking I kept a watch at the least at what I saw (the languorous rump of the female assistant held the allure of assertion that - to me at least - proved still I was alive!) and they entered their wagon and slammed shut the doors and a siren pronounced its intention to garner attention and away OFF! they sped (sprinkling in between some cars and a lone workman's truck) while faces looked up - that old gent by the median's flowers the woman in a gaudy hat punishing her dog with a leash while looking back to what had occurred - but they all still passed as moments and people do : some tidy assertion of sidewalk and premise or occurrence and chance or doubt and dishonor and 'there but for fortune' go you or go I.
-
Whatever that all was SOMETHING I knew wasn't right and it seems that - in spite of everything - I've become a man somehow that even I wouldn't like (and this is myself I'm talking about after all) for the lot of other men is beyond me and I therefore remain alone and aloof : I couldn't care less if someone died or was run down by a truck nor would it matter to me if some pernicious plague at this moment came through and wiped out an immediate sixty percent of the world's population especially including all those around me - it simply couldn't matter : for I refuse to believe in the material of this world and the sights and sounds which come with it nor the flagging annoying flapping and cloying tongues of those fellow creatures ceaselessly yowling around me and I read the signs as best I can IN FACT I read everything - William Carlos Williams and his stupid red wagon to his stupid cold plums and Blake and his idiot 'tyger' and Poe and his stupid bird to Whitman with his everyman vague banter and homo-erotic elan FOR NONE OF IT STANDS and it's all filled with crap and perdition and calculated stance and raw ambition - nothing graceful nor meaningful in any of that Emperor of Ice Cream included (and those who insure it too) and just like every koala bear is a girl's cartoon of gentle ease and every pirate or star-warrior marks an aggressive boy's future - so too (for myself) I mark the pages with bookmarks of blood and spots of bile and spittle that dry yellow on the tendentious pages I've read - pencils and pens and the desperations of men - AMERIKA! : for that's what the supermarkets sell and that's what the idiots buy.
-
Sometimes I've got nothing to say and other times I do - not much of a position and pretty useless too.
-
I juggled moments like circus guys did bowling pins and the same clowns who ride the old cars there are the same clowns walking the street with me : there is no generosity in falsehood and deceit - no grace in dancing nor sadness in tears (it's all for nothing everywhere) but like they say at the gravesite 'he WAS a good man' it only makes you wonder why the past tense ('it is all imperceptible - who made him my enemy?') and nonetheless we walk on encircling the wagons while flames lick the wheels and every story (I find) is the same old story of the wise-eyed old person thinking wisdom is cheap and knowing it all then imparting to others all that was missed the first time around "listen fellow - if I had it to do again I'd head out from the very first I don't know how you live in the northeast anyway - mosquitos and swampland Italians and beggars humidity and cold - I'd go somewhere else where the living is GOLD like gold anyway and find me a lassie to SWEEP me off my feet - love her and love her and make babies complete and there's a million ways to do anything but it seems we always pick the way that's the worst" - that's the kind of crap I'd hear but no one realized who I was and I'd walk around the New York streets pretty much like I pleased bumming and drinking or just sitting about watching and nothing came of it - towncars and expensive dinners if I wished but I never wished - I'd just as soon have some cheap sandwich at some Grand Central concourse sit-down and drink coffee while the niggers passed and I'd watch their bad behavior and the old women with bags the suburban freak with Yankee shirts and names and numbers the Rangers or the Mets and all the rest - car names auto shows sneaker brands PEOPLE really ARE idiots you know and they'd walk around in a daze unknown and then I'd found it's the very same daze no matter where KANSAS TO FRESNO to Memphis to Maine and New York City's just the collection point for that drain - no matter what else - and things always ran through my head things I liked important things I wanted to keep 'but they pulled me out of the sack and they held me together with glue and then I knew what to do....I made a model of you a man in black with a Mein Kampf look and a love of the rack and the screw....so daddy I'm finally through - the black telephone's off at the root the voices just can't worm through' and this suicide rap was always without fail so perfect and I want to print here the diatribe all of it and someday I will 'daddy daddy you bastard I'm through' and this old life's but a theater and I have walk-on roles whenever I want but no contract and no lead and the stage is falling through and the kleig lights dangle and the ceiling crumbles down and people in the audience are bleeding and dying screaming through their pain and I throw daggers to land where they will - in hearts and minds and palms and brains - and I delight in the scream as paroxysm of success cheap and tawdry but success nonetheless and we wander far from home but to find home again and the saddle of every horse is made of thin paper where the sweat breaks through - wet crotch dripping back rollicking good time no money no fees just mad mad love and abandoned love ABSOLUTELY like a martyr and it's that KIND OF CRAP one hears at every turn ('...and the heart gets harder...') Arab Jew Chinaman Pole Frenchman African Indian Mexican Mayan and Troll - every nation known to man every station in the land 'turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer - things fall apart the center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.'
-
So the more you live the less you know - so what : I looked at a star map today - I know where Jupiter is in the night sky now SO WHAT I know where Mars and Cygnus are not SO WHAT I looked at a star map today to see how close is the most distant galaxy SO WHAT!! I know no more than that I be SO WHAT!! (all men are idiots and bastards and slaves).
'I celebrate myself and sing myself,
and what I assume you shall assume,
for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.'
---
posted by gary j. introne @ 5:25 PM
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