Great big airplane in the great big sky | higher than the highest high |
Come swing down and pick me up | up and out of this lonesome cup |
I drink my whiskey and I drink my wine | I drink my rotgut old moonshine |
I swears I seen it rise and shine | the great big airplane in the great big sky
Saw St. Francis today, painted on the wall of a beatup lonesome lost twin rowhouse — surrounded by endless shining brightest sunlight —
And so we go again, always reducing, never seeing the whole picture, constrained by the parallaxical view, the limited perspective of only being able to see 2 twelve billionths of the whole damn thing, the great big mitdasein wherewithall socialgrouphug — and take bath of music, and cleanse your soul — clear your eyes, no mistake, and whatever you do, don’t run away from love, accept it, because we’re breaking down and breaking off as we speak, static gathering like free radicals in our bloodstream, but love, love is real and amazing and without explanation or cause or reason and real true love, that’s the infinite, that’s the whole thing, that’s irreducible, the whole picture, the panorama, four corners, Western skies, and word puzzles don’t tell it, and riddles won’t show it, and you can’t out-think, you just got to live it, accept it, surrender, mullah, mullah, omar, open yourself up to it, and doubt it, rock on through, but love comes first, loves comes first, love comes first, love comes first.
0. T.S., born backwards
1. Jesu Jackson, Hill-Sitter, still hanging
2. St. Euphony Eustacia, Princess Peepling of Earthbit-New
3. Lover Two, NaNa Na NaNaNa
4. Brother Wolfbear
5. Sister Moonlake
6. Skotos the Darkness
7. The Nornmaids of Necessity
8. Wayland Smith
9. Lady Jezz
10. Laughing Traveler
11. Graymane Wilkins
12. Clay Kent the Holy Jester
13. The Hierophant
14. The Duke
15. The High Priestess
16. Walking Death
17. Pusher Jim
Circumlocutions of thought / dodges to keep myself entertained / I write to delight my self /
transcend get beyond the self / but these are the eyes of the world / and other eyes will come after /
seeing the same things and different things / and I think they will love themselves like I love myself /
We dream of apocalypse, as the barbarians bang spears against the Bronze doors / see with sharper eyes / today what did I see / a vast expanse from a fourteenth floor / a book of laws to kill with / children with puppies / walking / picking cotton /
Got off work at 3 o’clock / night-classes/ half-heard eavesdropping / jumphopping / over the undertow / in through the outdoor / Child Rowland to the dark tower came / Tom O’Bedlam sings a song / Old Tom is cold is cold is cold /
The Kenning / Gunner’s Mount / Son of Loki / Californian Empire / ‘This is our time’ / Jimmy Carter George Bush John McCain Barack Obama / Wretching lurching into the the Underveld / woldwalkers / break wind against this beaten brow / the young man feeling cold whispers / ungodly heat / in two more days it will kill / spot the jew, my mother plays / good enough for government work / “the trick,” my father says, “is to get as most money for as little work as possible” / Berlin Alexanderplatz / my mother sees anti-semites everywhichwere / the meat turned foul / massive foreclosures /
I bear the scars of my slavery in my genepool / they bear the scars of their slavery in theirs / I am truly exceedingly clever, as I was bred for / the chosen whites, less clever, some, none so clever as me / darkness stress of undone labors, whispering maddening murmurs in the corners of my brain / I have no room / pent-up in a nutshell / white privilege / love of money / are you out of your fucking mind? / mostly really great / could have been shorter / just repeating my mother’s phone conversations now / Arthur Ashe Tennis Co. / Education Directors / wonderful feedback / boardmembers, boardsurfers / is this writing / secret eyes / taking notes with their eyes / his son raved about how wonderful it was / wonderful wonderful /
fucked up dinner, but we’ll still be fed / God Bless America and God Bless the Dead.
The valleys of California, and their mountain waters, wind their way from the heights and empty through the Golden Gate into the Pacific Ocean — while driving over the long red bridge spanning that gap, moments flitted in and out — just a bridge, not a bridge, just a bridge, not a bridge — like the moments in life that come, shine for a moment, and then fade away into the out of focus background.
Went down to Big Sur, and saw the Sister Ocean, the Otherworld across a Continent, peaceful, pacific century, hope of future, hope of dawn, went into bookstores, citylights, others, the Haight, made the sacred pilgrimage to Jerry’s old house, 710, walked with my lover up and down hills, rode into wine country, where the soil is so rich it bears fruit three times a year —
Journeys, odysseys, and I have been, been to the other side, Californian exceptionalism, seems like the only place to live, really, why not, the world needs your code, young Skywalker, all of it, the Apple Computer in a San Fran garage — (maybe a different one, I don’t know) — the only place for any of us all of us, future home, golden gate, transamerica, parrot city, telegraph hill, land of ruddy poetry and long views, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
Your patron saint, Francis Birdtalker, does he walk your streets, talking to the parrots and the sealions and the squirrels and the egrets, rummaging through trash for a half-eaten loaf of sougdough bread, left by some tourist kid from way out East, some bankrobbing Billy, who sailed through Magellan’s Passage to come to this Other City, waiting to catch a lift on a steamship to Vladivostok or Edo Bay or further still –
Spanish sailors came three centuries ago, give, take, and set up your mission, in the same year that on the other coast, America was rumbling to life —
By 1969 the gig was up, King and Kennedy, Kerouac and Cassidy were dead, Nixon was President, Hunter S. Thompson knew what was up (people congregating to Hashbury to score dope instead of ending the war), and Tom Wolfe in his white suit was writing books about it —
It’s been downhill ever since, the last great clarion call, and Haight Street is a pedestrian mall, everyone feels the slimy tentacles of greenbacked monsters probing at our orifices like Japanese tentacle-porn (that’s a commodity too) everything reaching growing sliding in, sliding out but look what’s it got me, an up-down trip to the other-side fifty years later —
child of the matrix, it is no wonder the world is fallen, we live in a democracy and there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes — freedom and equality and license, and we all forget the face of our father, Arthuru the Eld, I am well read, 1001 nights, 100 pages a day, these things cannot be got back, the light of the sun on my face, the photographs of my girlfriend Nina, sitting at her desk, typing typing typing away, words words words.
St. Francis, I commit myself to you.
pulling stuff off the internets as I begin my jobsearch:
guess I can put it on here, nevertellanyone my real name, this is my supermanpage, hidden, locked away —
Hobbies and Interests: sleeping and dreaming, walking and talking, surprising myself, mind-altering amounts of television, chemicals, hanging with the cool kids in the contemporary art exhibits at major national museums, handicapping horse races, pondering possible alternate realities (where Clinton is a Dictator), the quest for the fountain of youth, the quest for the holy grail, the quest for a better mouse-trap, mouse-traps in general, the mad ones who burn like Roman Candles, Indie Rock Chicks, Hippie Chicks, Beautiful Women, Smart Women, good jokes, good stories, good books, something I haven’t seen before, forgetfulness
Favorite Books: Salinger, Kerouac, Joyce, Pynchon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Calvino, John Barth, Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S., Ginsberg, Brautigan, Bukowski
Favorite Movies: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Fight Club, Life of Brian, Bananas, Clockwork Orange, High Fidelity, Swingers, Zoolander, the Graduate, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, Chinatown, Lost in Translation
About me: the writer who does not write, guitar player, book reader, here he stands (he cannot do otherwise) a wanderer with a way, journeyman without a destination, storyteller, sage, webcrawler, websurfer, mediaeater – nicest guy at the party, no really, I am – if I would I could – wanna write stories but I don’t even know any jokes, other than that one – no, I can’t even remember. I’ve lived just long enough that when I conjure up old memories they’re already tinged and played in this strange orange color that must the color of nostalgia, which is actually a word no one understands but means the strangeness of memory, that I once was there, but now am not, and that the me in the memory is the same me that remembers (perhaps – the jury is out, waiting in the wings, on that one); Dilemma – write now and live later? Live now and write later? Live now, write now, and die later? Everybody wants to live forever; I just wanna burn out fast and bright; Ryan Adams said that. Hack. My uncle once said “Don’t ever forget who you are or how you got here.” That’s not true. He never said anything like that.
Who I want to meet: Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Jerry Garcia, Bill Clinton, Sofia Coppola, Scarlett Johanssen, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Helen of Troy, Odysseus, Moses, David, Jesus, Caesar, Pollock, Warhol, E.T., dinosaurs, the Universal Being at the Center of All Things, Mr. Hooper, He-Man, Optimus Prime, beautiful women, smart women, beautiful and smart women, jet-setters, a-listers, high-rollers, train-spotters, train-hoppers, gang-bangers, folk-singers, pill-poppers & needle-pushers (maybe not, maybe not) pot-smokers, gun-runners, moon-shiners, dolls and molls AND pole-vaulters, joy-riders, dope pushers, spin doctors, astronauts, dolphins, my great-great grandfather, my great-great grandchild, myself in a dark alley, the anima to my animus, crazy happy sad animals with thumbs, God on a down-town bus, the Flying Famous Mockingbird, the Ghost of Christmas Past.
(( and look at that — when it was written, our hero and Messiah, BHO, was not yet even born — hurrah, hurrah, for the unexpected surprises of the unknown tomorrows.))
A valid argument cannot lead to a false conclusion.
Three dead poems, great and wondrous, their apprehension beyond my reach, but ne’ertheless, they are dead poems, their bones long since picked clean, wormfood — from the days before Clean White B.N.W. Cremation, Inc. — let nothing touch my body (sterilize it, cellophanewrapped food, but still — hospitals smell like –)
I, Ai, Eyely, trying to learn poetic form and meter, in this age of Broken Form, Revanchism, Unending Historical Nightmares, Cannot Wake; But be ironical about it, it is not so tragical, life is magical, trip the light fantastic, Holly, Go Holly Go Lightly, dance back and forth, shake that thing, that beautiful bulb that moves me so —
Smutpeddlers, Broken America, postracial, miscegenation, love, and free love, and love that isn’t free, and sex without love, hot wriggling on rayon sheets, fetishization of our culture of commodity, true information age, everything wrapped in invisible leylines of data, information, tying us all together in tighter and closer meshes.
Neo-Luddites fear for privacy, but blind the Panopticon with mirrors and light and you can hide here too, in the Great Zoo Menagerie, depends on how Eso Teric, Intramural, Youza care to be’a.
Thieves Cant, Griot, Creole, big bad Project Finance goes to trace out Fairytales in Deserts, then nine months tear it down, digitize it, ship it by truck or satellite to two thousand ten thousand fifty thousand darkrooms, where popcornedpreterite can watch the brennschluss and inevitable descent —
Listen to the breakbeat — most sampled, most played, what’s it called, the Amen Break, omphalos of dance music, and stare at our alienpipescar, our matrixpiece, we are all starchildren, uniqueus, ubiquitous, wonderboys and wondergirls, popping and laughing and joying and sicking and dying, others taking our place in the Great Circle Game — at the end of time, when all breaks down, the Young will Eat Their Parents — The World is getting crowded, People are meaner, but we kill less and less —
After the Great War Sequel (Return of the Son of the Great War, Part II, Godzilla vs. Megatron the Rematch) Governators steal the people’s guns in dead of night (like a thief I come) to preserve the monopoly of violence. But opensource beats closed universe, and the AK47 spreads like deathflowers, like the pop’pea fields, redblood, before the Emerald City — if I only had a brain, our Scarecrow President thinks, four miles from me in Barney’s White Castle — why are the burgers so small?
— Apocalyptic meme, darkdream, running strong these days, appearing in many different manifestations — Fall of Towers in Towered Manhattan, Prez’Go’Bushki dreams of tall bearded arabs, pulling down his pants and making him a woman, Prezgobushki wakes in night, Lady Laura sucking on his ding dong, he pushes her away, slaps the bitch, goes and grabs a secretdrink, and declares war on all the desertdwellers
Let God sort them out, he says dismissing reports of collateral damages — madness madness tapping at the window — I must go, says Madness, but try to clean up before Ma and Pa get home. Okay Madness, says I the Child, Thing One and Thing Two did this but I’ll clean it up. I’LL CLEAN IT UP. Dingdong. Dingdong. Dingdong.
Almost over now.
1.
Who will go with Fergus now
And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea,
And all disheveled wandering stars.
2.
Fergus. This whole day have I followed in the rocks,
And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape,
First as a raven on whose ancient wings
Scarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed
A weasel moving on from stone to stone,
And now at last you wear a human shape,
A thin grey man half lost in gathering night.
Druid. What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?
Fergus. This would I say, most wise of living souls:
Young subtle Conchubar sat close by me
When I gave judgment, and his words were wise,
And what to me was burden without end,
To him seemed easy, so I laid the crown
Upon his head to cast away my sorrow.
Druid. What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?
Fergus. A king and proud! and that is my despair.
I feast amid my people on the hill,
And pace the woods, and drive my chariot-wheels
In the white border of the murmuring sea;
And still I feel the crown upon my head
Druid. What would you, Fergus?
Fergus. Be no more a king
But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.
Druid. Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift the sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman’s loved me, no man sought my help.
Fergus. A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream.
Druid. Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams;
Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
Fergus. I see my life go drifting like a river
From change to change; I have been many things –
A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light
Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,
An old slave grinding at a heavy quern,
A king sitting upon a chair of gold –
And all these things were wonderful and great;
But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.
Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow
Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees 