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

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 —