OH BADGER MY CONTINGENT

311. OH BADGER MY CONTINGENT:

The collected works of everyone are sold by the pound – for if you can do nothing wrong you can do no good – and wagers placed at windows of solace never come due and ALL BETS ARE OFF as the end of this labored world approaches so soon and (“Hey! Charley! you left your napkin behind!) and the words of the long lost explorers are just now found in the Central Park caves and all they translate as is ‘Misunderstanding and all the cars are violet’ and of course no one of the modern era can figure that out so two guys in grass jump from the roof of the glass-tomb of Dendur and they shatter on the icy ground below but high in the sky above us runs the spacecraft crying and lowering itself down with twisted arcs askew it roars out a warning ‘ALL BETS ARE DUE!’ and with that the whole world screams but the screaming makes no sense at all and the doors and windows of everything I see are slightly askew and yes really there is the man in black holding a bible aloft and screaming out : 'repent now for the hour is at hand and God himself returns in a chariot to take away all good men' and then the man sits down and hangs his head and I realize the life has gone out of him and he has turned to nothing but a presence a Being of no substance and knowing I had heard him I at least felt better and across the way two men come out of the doorway talking intensely as they get into a car and the bigger one of the two motions to someone else who then comes over and gets in to drive and they drive away - some late model oversized chariot of their own never knowing where they're headed but heading nonetheless and as the car drives off it is leaking something or leaving anyway a trail of liquid behind and I feel for a moment as in some fairy tale where Hansel and Gretel or someone leaves a trail through the deep forest so to retrace their steps and return but of course that never happens and just like that I realize too that for myself any trail I would leave would lead right back here no matter what else or where I went so why bother and something like a disappearing snow would cover over all my trails and tracks anyway and the enfolding and folding over of time and matter for me always does bring its own singular and far-different results so that by the end my equation is different than all the other equations and my personal math as well - new numbers never learned and colors never seen - but anyway that's how it has always been all this never knowing from where nor from when.
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It was William Blake who said 'I must create my own system or be enslaved by that of another' - and I guess that's true as far as it goes but enslavement wears many faces and if you think too much about that stuff you're only going to get hurt : spacemen intruders visitors aliens and all that I mean who can speak for what's really going on and memory impaired is most likely the best way to half-remember those things which would be only too startling to realize fully anyway if we could for what really shatters things is the harshness of knowing you are pretty helpless on a stupid clod of rock.
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I woke up dreaming it had rained and was raining everywhere and every window in the entire realm was open everywhere and no one made a move - there was no one that I saw actually - and all these open windows took in all the rain ever and always and whatever rain fell wound up soaking nothing at all just entering and flooding and overwhelming all the barren and bare and open windows the world over and no matter I thought nothing of it nothing of any of it and just went about my ways as if all was normal and the rain kept falling and that same rain kept coming in and seeping over everything but the world was its own place : all the usual automatic cunning and rotation and moving and marking of things time and place and objects and huge boulders and slabs of minerals and large beautiful crazy gemstones everywhere and all of them suddenly in the rain suddenly having absolutely somehow no value at all : and I looked up skyward and all I saw arrayed silently too was a long line of objects hovering - spacecraft boulders rocks asteroids vehicles whatever - just hovering in place slow lights silently blinking as through all this the rain fell and nothing moved and nothing seemed to care nor any others either and all these objects high and silent in the sky in lines and lines and rows and rows were up there simply and silent just waiting.
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And from that point it seemed nothing mattered anymore as I walked through the elevated rampway by the porno-pit at the end of Christopher Street some God-awful shithole of a place covered over with XXX graffiti and offers by men to men and women to women and vice versa and the PATH hole for the old Hudson Tubes was spitting out people in groups - all those crazed Jerseyans out for barter and barrage seeking escape on city streets puking over Hudson swarming towards the Village dens of Sheridan and Bleecker and MacDougal and all the rest of the shit and I never knew why any one of them would ever come here and then once they did why they would ever leave but it didn't make a difference they came anyway and it was like an open invitation to something unknown and I'd not know anyway and the filthy sleazeholes of this part of the Village were filled with nothing so much as the mobs of gay and close-to-that the masses of those who clung to each other and boldly tried re-defining the cultural gap as if it mattered but it never did and there was never any gap anyway one is what one is and the rest be damned and that's where pride comes in truly - someone proud enough to keep living is proud enough for pride and the innate good sense and the beauty and poise of any gay man's musculature speaks enough for itself anyway - Christopher Isherwood to Hart Crane to Auden and Ginsberg too and shit I knew them all or feared enough to and kept on my own way : horses like silver and gold and the grand steed of the vegetable man whose cart was pulled slowly by one massive horse the guy with piles of coal on the flat shaped wagon behind him all that I witnessed as they each died away - a time was passing and I knew it I sensed its way : my time once spent doing old things no was good no more for those old things were all gone away and the only thing one could do was learn new things or forget about movement at all : everything I ever did citywise had become outmoded and grown into death : but once all that was over what good was anything left ? all that metal and steel and gold and iron turned to plastic and junk and outlasted crap gone already before it began.