The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

I know how to decorate my room with art and posters, how to hang a picture frame
I know how to go in a bookstore and browse through the racks come out richer
I know what’s good and I know what isn’t
I know beauty when I see it and I know goodness and I know strength
I can tell the difference between medicine and the drug
I can tell the difference between the waking and the dreaming
I know a song when I hear one, yeah I do
I know when I’m being lied to, and I know when I’m lying
I know what it’s like to leave and be left
I know death, I tasted it

one thousand pictures and one million words aren’t worth a secret

can’t buy me love

there are streets out there where no one speaks the language

take me, Kagan, to the spaces between

Math equations of the heart — Newtown scrowls his brow and and unoutravels the mathstuff from the spacestuff — there is nothing new under the sun but think of the world that everything is forever falling down into the heart of it until out of that falling and banging around magic popping starts and hyrodgen slips into helium and helium into lithium and beryllium (shine on you crazy) and boron and magical carbon, we’re just real big pencils aren’t we, and strange dark oxygen, that’s a sharp one —

so falling together, into each other’s arms, into the centers of suns and black holes, and then exploding out again, god laser light shows, we’re just little people aren’t we, fleas on dust floating in the darkness — tahu v’bahu, and this beautiful world belonging to us —

passover is over, god’s passed on over us, breath upon the waters, toilsome, fastsome, haply God-Dad heard our sissy crying, but kept on going, not wanting to disturb the learning process, eh, eh, up, u.p, you fearful fearsome jesuit, Telemachus, 22 when I read it, 25 now, soon to be 26, inauspicious, double trouble, twice over since I’ve been brought within the Secret Covenant, and joined the Nation of Priesthood, in the past, I’d be barren, a Generation of Apikorsim Epicureans failing to procreate.

I worked six days, then rested in the garden, and the next day had to fire the help for stealing some fruit, damn slithery, ahh, but who can blame them, little kiddies, curiosity kittens, oh singingglass oh singingglass.

Old John Wesley Harding, in his high-up mountain canyon, but get mighty lonely sometime, especially these days, doesn’t get too many visitors, for surely not, hey not even sure if he’s up there anymore, yeah, we tell stories of him with fondness and smiles, only smiles for dear Old Missing, but who has time to stop in and share a cup of coffee —

I love life. I love it.

few words – spareness – flarg thatone, odesong to maximums, pushing the limits, white rooms are so nineties trash — braindead slugworth gilded age — assholes in polo shirts with their heads in the sand — trust me with your money, I say, trust me with your life — G O D, we are the ostrichmen, we are the hello men, I would not be such a nothing my head all full of stuffing, stovetop stuffing makes you want to two dinners — just plug me into the matrix man, foodpipe on one end, pooppipe on the other — filth nasty dirty filth, I have to shower twice a day just to avoid it, and also stop eating, I’ve stopped eating, here I am my every second costing my future self thousands of dollars, pieces of eight pirates treasure — go sail the seven seas, to sail beyond the sunset, sing the song of sweet ulysses et cetera cetera cetacean watch, Old White Death Whale, my father tells the tale of floating in the ocean and feeling seeing watching the great dark something swim by below — isn’t that not death – “it took my leg” says Ahab “you’re a whiner,” says Ahab’s wife — stream of conciousness, literary hepzigon, jasper john’s this is not a flag hanging off my wall, next to allmanbrothersdreamsbox — saw old Hawva at an Almond Joy year or so ago — life is a series of french scenes, people walking on and people walking off, and jesus I said it’d take four years, and by golly it took four years, I’m so old and so young and so old and so young, Be a MAn, Be a Soldier, there’s a kid who knows how to take a needle, no no needles, no puncture wounds, ingresses and egresses, in throught the outdoors, Robert Plant goes from joke to god in twenty five years of increasing ignorance, aww hell, who cares if its fake, the kid can sing, sold their souls to fake satans on the side of the road forty years ago, who cares now, big deal then — oh my oh my oh my

Semele, Polly, looks up to see man open the door to the coffee shop and walk in — the first thing she grasps is his hair, a long wild bobdylan birdsnest, and then the next thing she notices is his height and general build and age — 5’7″, thin, same age as me — and she feels her everythings tense, like a magnet across a wooly willy drawing toy, all the iron flakes rising to meet the —

this is life, she thinks, thoughts disturbed by instincts, and she doesn’t know why she has focused on him, but she knows it, and he stands in line, slouching, hardly handsome, certainly not beautiful, but there it is, there it is, and art and thought and smartness fails — she has been alone awhile, and has forgotten how to talk to people, and so she sits and watches, and writes stories of love affairs and engagements and vacations to California and afternoons at zoos naming animals —

He is up, it’s his turn, he fumbles into blue jeans for wrinkled dollars, she can see, she can imagine it, what is he, is he a writer, is he a musician, or maybe something else, a banker or a teacher, or a bus driver — what does he do in this strange weird world —

She is a woman, she thinks, and interested, but shy, both the cultivated coyness of the mysterious woman, the ones who’ve grown beautiful, I know, I know I am beautiful, I was not always but I am now, and if I catch his eye – and catch his eye she does, as he turns with his coffee and looks at her, his own eyes quickly sharpen into pinpoints in that same magnetic way – instinct, instinct singing softly – and in their gaze the history of life is played out and a thousand quantum universes are born and die worlds of new life blink in and blink out — every gaze we ever share is just the same — and then she looks away and he looks away because this is a cold civilized world and civilization is walls — my city has a wall in its heart, she thinks —

BREAK BREAK zero xero one, intrusion from the demiurge, copper-silver bellybutton phonecord, what the what is a phone chord, kids ‘il say, sune enuffstuff  — — Semele is in love, and not in love, alone and not alone, sitting, standing, waiting watching, and the boy the man the slouchy sloppy man stands before her for a second and then breaks gaze and goes to sit down to drink his coffee — do I ever wonder if I am but a figment in the mind’s eye, someone else’s imagination? she asks herself, but looking over her shoulder to the curtained booth where she can just sort of see my feet poking out from underneath the curtain, pushing and working mysterious pedals — yes, I know, she is talking about me, but just because she does not live, just because I have to guess and fill in her bubblethoughts for her, that doesn’t mean she’s not real, or couldn’t be, of course she’s real, I’m real aren’t I, it’s just a masque, a ball, a story told from the other side — see you real soon, friends, freres, see you real soonlike 

pill box, change, and lighter; dog-chewed wallet, little ittle lightbulb shining, big black screens, all these ultramodern screens, the federal rules of civil procedure, my phone so you can call me, more pills, notebooks, pencils and pens, double-A batteries, gluten free granola I am eating for my dinner, little black speakers singing bob dylan songs to me, this black laptop-tabletop walking talking calculator-thingamajig, glowing, movie ticket from the winter, staples and stapler, ten thousand receipts, and other pieces of paper, my fingers typing, books, keys, bootleg Dylan cds, checkbook, iron man sports watch that’s been to Europe — these are things on my desk at 9 pm on a saturday, these are the things on my desk

The poor forgotten prostitute who plays a harp and sings – http://expectingrain.com/dok/atlas/watchtower.html – who will sing a song for me? the sailors tight’ the rigging, the stars are in their eyes — aspied in the great distance, a raven with a sprig — does it come or does it come ago — on my chair behind my head is a sun half-hidden below the horizon — does it rise or does it set? Yet, I think it rises — darkness ending — with a little latin and less greek, William Shakespeare takes the stage, and does a dance for tenpence — Juliet and Romeo, waiting by the hour — line slips into line like day slips into years — and every time I make the journey home up and back the northeast corridor, my father’s bear gets a little grayer — one day you’ll be a whitebeard, and I’ll be the father — oh time real or illusion, to sit above the galaxy and watch it all go by, my feeting dangling in the milky way like Huck Finn on his raft — here I am dancing, tumbling, playing seventeen intruments with my fingers and thumbs — dance for me, time, dance for me shiva, destroy the world, renew it, sing me to sleep — eternity, says he, to frankie lee, you might call it paradise — I don’t call it anything, says frankie lee with a smile – the two witnesses riding on their horses —

I shall make you a holy nation, a nation of priest-kings — Priest-King and Philosopher-King, wrestling with each other as they fall into the Great Abyss — whoever lets go first loses all, for all eternity — what’s it all mean, Quinn, what’s it all mean — it’s not a house, it’s a home — glosses on what came before, cutting up newspaper and making poems out of it, like Stephanie, like Burroughs — cut-up, foul-up, throw-down at the hoe-down, President McCallister and the Parade of Horribles Jug Band, you ain’t my president, you ain’t my king, This ain’t a Western — Greek Tragedy — Aeschelus, Kaak Kaak Karaak Kaak — Jimmy Juiceman, write a riff for me, what’s the moral of this story, tale, song, one should never be where one does not belong, i want to be the New Bob Dylan, I want to shine like Aldebaran, You Great Blue Giant, Ancient Star, First and Last, Watcher of the East — Watchers of the East, Watchers of the North, who look down on women bathing and have fire in their hearts — I love you like I love me, and I love my lady too –sit with me awhile and all will be well — St. Agatha, St. Agatha, love me like you loved my mother — lovefeast of ancient oilheaded fishbearers, dripping oil on each other — I adopt you, says Old Father, I adopt you all, all may sit at my lovely table — set a table for me, keep a place for me, I may be gone but I won’t be long and I’m coming home, I’m coming home to you — I’m coming home to you

Poor Polly Parallax in the Empty Cup Cafe

here I sit, thinks Miss Semele, Poor Polly Parallax, sitting at a round table in a coffee shop in a small city hanging off the edge of the North American continent, here I sit, thinks she, and I have been alone so long I need and love my loneliness, I wear it like an old sweatshirt, like this old sweatshirt i’m wearing now, and these people walk through those doors, line up for their coffeebean dripwater, and out they go again, none the wiser to my watching glancing –  

she takes a sip of her own coffeebean dripwater, and looks at a middle aged woman, with yellow but graying hair, and her young boychild, awkard and anxious next to her, fidgeting as his mother looks up at the great big board with her fifty different choices.

Who is that mother, and who is that son, and is it the son she expected she would? Does she look at him, sometimes, and remember the bulgebelly he oncewas? Is it not passing strange, and is that parturition, that severance, that fundamental bloody yucky popping-out life-creation, is it not the beginning of some passing for her?  Semele touched a hand to her own stomach, reaching underneath the sweatshirt and feeling the soft flesh beneath – how does a lover feel my skin – her normal little stomach, sometimes, like now, fatter than she would like – is that why the don’t like me, she often wonders, and wonders now – and thinks about fishes swimming in dark oceans, growing hands and feets, of silent strangeness, of a science-fiction movie and gross popping –

Semele watches the mother get her coffee, and tell her son to follow her out. Semele watches them get into the car and drive away. She thinks of her own mother, who she talked to a week ago, should talk to her more, but the silence of mother’s imagined unasked questions, of knowing stories of mother’s own youth, how she had many boyfriends, until Semele’s Daddy-O had swept old Mrs. Semele off her feet and planted her bellystuff with three strapping babydolls – O Mother, you stifle me with your wrinkled face, Semele wanly smiles, why do you have to look like me? But Semele smiles at her own lie, a secret smile — her mother was beautiful and Semele had been an ugly child and thus loved that now, in her lately twenties, was beginning to look a bit more like the Mrs. — there’s hope for me yet, Ma —

sat in a bookstore today, surrounded by commoditized thought (did not have the book I was looking for, on the social transformation of American medicine) writing on a yellow legal pad and reading Adbusters, craziness, unemployed now so I can be wellemployed later, what is with my discontents? I don’t want to work, I just want to bang on the drums all day – who would know that the future would be cheap Korean cars turned to classic rock radio stations, listening to Steely Dan ad nauseum as everything falls apart like so much crap — that’s the future, breakdown palace, with nanojunk and plastic packaging piling up in being shitmountains —- what is this craziness, what is this craziness, a Professor said to keep a journal to keep track of the changes (law school teaches you how to be an asshole, then you wake up forty years later and you don’t want to be an asshole any more) they are zionists, they are occupiers, the cool cold easy sleep of many dreams dream my way to life and then exhale like a popping bubble — institutionalized and occupied and concentrated in our systems of control, valuing restraint and order and smoothness — only way to live in this crowded vertical heteroglopopoly of a megacity — nine million in Lagos (maybe, could be more, could be twenty) — Dharavi City — Night City, across the bay from Tokio —- cities of the future, maglev train, the Forbidden City as omphalos, center of the world, spindle of necessity, with Europe on her left and America on her right, go, I go, to wash my feet in the Pacific Ocean and find the tranquil eastern zen, the happy little toasterpart, Matrix was a fable, both true and untrue, and can the system speak to itself, can the inmate-prisoners of Great Fat Mother Capitalo-Imperialism seize the instrumentalities of the system and twist it against it to its own ending — creative destruction, in the ruins of the old world, green grass sprouts, rose in a field surrounded by purple grass, these are images I have inherited from the Vast Culturemachine which is just one more factory, this one a factory of dreampops that serves and creates the Vast Mass Populace that is both Beginning and End — WHO DOES THE GRAIL SERVE? —- that is the question —- raise your voices and prase Jehovah, the Jehovah that Passed Away —- God is Dead, Nietzche cried and smiled, not knowing the Terrible Horribles unleashed by that cry —– do you everything think a great big meteor will just come on down and wipe the whole thing out? sometimes I pray for Apocalypse, I don’t want to be a FACTOR OF PRODUCTION, GI BILL, service to the country, followed by our country’s service to us — ask not, ask — The Brothers Kennedy, murdered by the Good Men in the Roman Forum, their bodies thrown into the Tiber until they drifted downstream, were caught in the nets of Ostian Fishermen, and ground up and mixed up into the pasty formula served to young babies hiccupping bubbles, gassy-gassy smiles —- lost, we are lost, one beautiful science fictional fable which we all touch and love — the island, who does the island serve — / dashes and breaks — i’m not learning civil procedure as I type word after word but I could type forever is this just this excercise, deep unbroken sleep, haven’t learned nothing about nothing, where am I where am I going what am I doing am I trying to run a law firm why for what who cares about the Fortune 1000 families are always rising and falling in America who said that Hawthorne snippet of Scorsese great artist he I can type a little faster than I can write in longhand, yes the typing moves almost as fast as my thoughts its a true record almsot but not really forcing myself to think forcing the thought to take form as language as words as this and that and I’ve lost th te thread it hurts my eye hurts I’m a real live existent sitting here typing this is the real real record of consciousness I could pass a turing test, mostly with this allergic bleary eye I think I think I am deny me other solipsist unimaginable sitting across a void a gap a chasm life is a narrow bridge – I disagree I refuse to beleive it life is boundless and boundless infinite and transcending – -he who has a son does not die — beauty and love we shall dedicate ourselves to its realization and truth — peacefulness blindsided by terror and spectacle we rushed in on the day of wrath I went looking to give blood but no, everyone was dead, nobody needed blood nobody ‘cept the normal dying — learned over the telephone that my uncle was dying and –pop– six months later DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD oh and it will happen to my mother and it will happen to my father and it will happen to my lover (and my other) and it will happen to me and in that danse do I really wish to outlast a single one or prefer to close my eyes with my heart unbroken the world in its beauty forever affixed I cannot stand that I will lose them I cannot stand that I will lose them what is wrong with me what is wrong with me —- —– fall back on literature? why is it so peculiar with you? HAMLET, HAMLET is my favorite play, STARES DEATH STRAIGHT IN THE FUCKING FACE, more than we can say for anyone, CAN TWO PEOPLE TOGETHER SIT AND STARE DEATH STRAIGHT IN THE FACE, happens everyday we say, THAT IS WHAT THIS IS ABOUT, THIS ENDLESS NIGHT-HORROR I am screaming I am screaming make it stop hold me hold me hold me hold me hold me 

C.S. Lewis describes the medieval view of the stars as magical places —

they are magical to us as well, in their awesome reality, but so magical that the human mind, fearing its irrelvance and fastly ending doom, necessarily shrinks away from it and builds up conceptual armor that insulates the human soul from the endless awesome emptiness, vastness and ancientness of the Universe as it is.

the remedy is simple — one clear night, go out and look at a single star — and consider how far away it is, how endlessly impossibly far — and yet, it shines so bright, you can see it from here.

orange in your hand — what is it? first — there is both a sign and a signifier, the orange and the orangeness — but where did it come from? what comes before precedes what comes after — where was it grown? the orange is the tail end of an agricultural industrial behemoth manufacturing and distributing, employing laborers, subject to regulations and marketing — supply chains — the orange — stand-in for this networked life, everything connected, plugged into the system, and though the world is not beamed straight into our heads matrix-style, it may as well be, since our entire existences are subjected to systems of control — not unitary totalitarian, but emergent totalitarian, as market instincts and global networks knit everything together into a tight mesh.

Our system does however allow for individual choice on any number of things — which multinational to buy from, which multinational to sell our daily bread to — and perhaps it is these choices, this illusion of control, that provide the safety valve, that protects us from the uncomfortable truth that we are now an inevitable piece of the machine, a factor of production, a thing to be controlled —

Marx’ diagnosis was right, but his cure was wrong — and he never saw the effect of late-state hypercapitalism, or offered a viable alternative — but the way in must necessarily also be the way out — and hypercapitalism will not be destroyed (and how could we want it to be, its destruction would necessitate and require unimaginable suffering and loss of life) but its ravages might be mitigated, its edges softened, its deadening effects transcended.

The first step may be to bite into the orange, and taste the fruit. To understand that wealth and its creation is not the only value we strive for. That sustainability and balance are the true hallmarks of a healthy system — to understand that human dignity, shared endeavor, shared sacrifice, are values that ennoble us and enable us to build our golden cities on the hill — that happy heterotopia’s are not impossible, that we must strive to make our society good again —

America was born a virgin and can be again — and the rest of the world can follow — after long journeys, it is sweet to return home, and to slip into our own bed —