by Tomorrow's Man
At least it's Friday. At least January's over. At least the Government is distracted. At least the weather's broken for a bit. At least my legs are working, mostly. At least celibacy and non-smoking seem to give me energy. At least angst is still in, always in. At least Summer's another slash on the calendar closer. At least no one's pulled out a gun here today, at least I can still see the bright side of a black hole in the dead of winter.
Another month run away, 2003 dissipating, entropy dissolving time in the pass from pasture to party along a swelling sea, devour the coast with the sand and the tide, grab up a spoon and eat with me, Frbruary's just as hungry as me and you too, and soon enough it will be devoured, making way for another month that can die as silently as the endless before.
Pain in the arms, the elbows, the neck, then ripping across the sides of the head, arthritic tension feeding from the low barometer, curling me into an existentialist mess of overcooked bacon, why, why move, why move at all when it hurts so terribly just to create a smile....
Didja miss me? You know, like you'd miss something you realized seven years after last you saw it that it was more vital to you then than anything you possess now. Didja miss me like that?
I've always wanted to be missed like that.
she was created from ash, the extra cooling regret of a death's breath...she climbed from the lake and lay waste to the land though she never killed a living thing...she brutally slaughtered everything they thought they knew...she grabbed their preconceptions by the throat, flashed her hazel eyes and overbitten smile, and slashed their assumption's wrists...then like a vampire she sucked the death from them...she laughed them into knowledge...she smirked them out of bias...she winked them from fear...she squinted them into honesty...
...now she walks among them partially hidden and shaming God, showing Him up...she's the second coming, she's coming, oh how beautifully she's coming, God child, timeless daughter, worship her
"These thoughts...pin me to the wall."
These words pin me to the song. The song, it pins me to the cold wind that freezes tears to my corneas, my tears and those that fall from the seagulls starving in the sky.
"These thoughts...pin me to the wall."
These words, they staple me right to the ice that chokes the sand suffocating under the tide. That sand beneath that tide above, me the pale cheese in between. Chew chew chew goes the saltwater, wash away goes my protein.
"These thoughts...pin me to the wall."
These thoughts. They pin me to the wall.
"Ouvrir, Ovaltine!"
Why is she saying that?
Try to get a drink. Try to sit in a bar. Try to smoke a cigarette. Try to understand the war. Try to quell or foment the hatred. Try not to slow. Try not to claw. Try not to chew. Try to drink, drink, drink, swallow, puff, puff, puff, inhale. Try to read, no, too much blood, too many tears, too much Christ in my soup. Try to not cry. Try to not break. Try to not kill. Try to not cry.
"Ouvrir, Ovaltine!," She shouts again.
Try to fogive hair and digestion and knee-jerk smiles and thank yous and the highway and wrong numbers and deadbeat dads and alcohol and drugs and torture and love try to forgive but she keeps screaming,
"Ouvrir, Ovaltine!"
so instead just let out the sharp nails, the sharp nails, the sharp nails and the wail and the bible and the bile and the tears the tears and the tears didn't try not to try not to despise.
Apple Anybody
Apple Anybody, in 20 sentences he'll be a fable.
He was born and raised in the middle of the tracks. With sky-high rails to his left and right he said, This place is low and fine. Apple, he stayed there for 33 years until he had every black oak-tie worm for miles around eating toward his core. Apple Anybody, at 33, with his meat going and brown at the holes realized, I've still got my seeds.
Apple Anybody, then, he threw the trainbed rocks, those ragged hunks of gray, oily granite, up against the left-hand rail. The first few made ominous bonging sounds as they hit the metal, funeral sounds; then the sounds became irregular scrapes of rock on rock and the bonging echoes died away. But as Apple built, something else was happening -- sure enough, as he pulled the stones from beneath his feet the rails, they got even higher.
But so did Apple's cairn, it rose, too. (A cairn, indeed, for those stones were the ground beneath Apple's feet, his very foundation, and now they were forming a monument that was being erected to themselves.) The stones piling up, they were everything Apple had ever held safe, and close, and warm. And as the cairn grew, it got colder. And colder.
Apple Anybody, now he's standing on soil, soil so cold that nothing in it could ever heal or grow. And the thing is, now Apple can't see the top of the left-hand rail; or even the top of his cairn.
Apple, he has no idea if he's built high enough, strong enough, sturdy enough. But you know what? Those sounds you can hear now, that muffled pat of leather on stone, and that gaspy hum of a young man's voice? That's Apple; and he's climbing.
He's humming, and he's smiling, too;
and he's climbing.
"Ultraviolet Underworld!" The man cried out. "Small beings, they go there, from your wombs, then from their cribs, when you're not peeping! Lies are what you teach them, and lies are what they learn -- and ecstasy! But the UU's got plans otherwise, hey.
"Do you want to raise your children this way? I hope you do! Let them learn from your lies, your fears, your hang-ups and hand-me-down stilted ideals! You are not education! Tolerance! Enlightmenment! You are a filter! You are CENSORSHIP! You birth them to become God in their eyes; you birth them to become religion and smothering. You birth them, because then you can say you are right, always.
"Of course you deserve congratulations. For becoming God. By becoming this, a withering God, you guarantee the sins of your children. You guarantee their guilt at your hands. You guarantee your power, now don't you yes you do.
"Punish them.
"Enjoy your time as their God.
"Some of them, some of your children will tear through your filters, hey. They will fight off your fears. They will absorb your punishment and eschew your censorship with violence and pride. Some of them, your children, will think for themselves one day, hey! And they, they will pity you.
"Gasp! My baby! My baby's, baby's seen the Ultraviolet Underground! Do I kill it? Do I shun it? Do I teach it lies, slap its hands, throttle its neck, or just love it less?
"What would you do, smother of God?"
I bought him another drink.
Aw hey, brown frown now, circus clown? Is it the eyes of the freaks and their freaky feets and fingers and all their freaky parts that got your nose pointed to the cold cold ground? Tap it, tap tap! Tap it, tap TAP!
We radiate. We climb walls. We piss on tundra, throw wicker into forest fires. We're freaky, and no matter where you move, hey baby clown, we're already plus two steps and knocking them back in your favorite bar of your favorite town.
Oval face and beauty mask slivers pink and earth-tone crackle in the crisp - too crisp, eh? It bites into that facade and we're just far too cold to give it hell, now, aren't we.
We are.
Three days and a long weekend's wait for ink to take its leisure to dry dry dry, sigh, Monday even when on pause splays its gross ennui all over our nice clean sleeves.
Guesticity #3
I attached my rent check to the refrigerator with three poetry magnets. Had I chosen longer words, I might have made do with two, but I unerringly reached for whisper, dream, and sleep. I could have used Venus’ boxer shorts, but that seemed wrong somehow. I’m sure you’ve seen the magnet set I’m talking about: the Venus de Milo and her magnetic wardrobe including everything from a motorcycle jacket to a set of frilly underthings and a rhinestone tiara. God knows what possessed her to buy these. I should have thought that she would have rejected this sort of accoutrement on general principle, due to the kitsch quotient. Jane is full of surprises. This is but one of them.
She came in from outside with boots full of snow and a strong aura of stale Players. I bought her some cigarettes in the duty-free once, and we joked about the Canadian packaging scheme that demanded a graphic disclosure of the consequences of smoking. Depending on the brand you choose, you can have blackened lungs, traumatized children, or a pregnant woman endangering her fetus. The text is invariably discouraging. I suggested that, the smoking culture being what it was, Canadian smokers have probably devised an entire language based on cigarette packet health warnings. Perhaps brand names are abandoned altogether in favor of familiar (if not reassuring) symbols. “Can you spare a couple of Lungs?” one smoker might ask another, only to have his friend reply, “Sorry. I’ve only got unfiltered Trach Tubes.” I myself had stubbed out a Suffering Second-Hander that very morning.
Guesticity courtesy: brenna.
Steal yourself back from those nightmares, repossess your wink and your smile, garner the praise hidden behind their dry frowns, parade and party across log, lilypad, dented jet-wing and dais, bow, bow sweet child, this applause is all for you.
I walk a path paved in gold. I see this path as a glittering ribbon, stretching west. There is nothing more luminous in my sights. I don't know exactly what lies at the other end. I do not know if there is an end.
I have detractors. There are those of you who thwart me, criticize, question my attitudes, ethics, sanity. But you, you...I would bet the closest hard-boiled egg that you, Detractor, have never set foot on a gilded path that may never let you get home again. I bet you, Detractor, have never felt that swell of courage in your breast, causing your heart to pound like a mating drum. I bet you have never felt the rush of throwing your life to the mercy of a walk to the sun.
I walk a path paved in gold. My steps are firm and fast. My chin is high. My smile is wide. My erection is large. My hair is swept back in the cold wind. My eyes glitter like amulets in the sunset as I stare West.
Walk with me, or accept a bitter kiss as I pass you, roaring.
Roaring!
It is the atmosphere. Tonight, 12 degrees in Boston, 9 in Madison, 3 in Minneapolis. Farenheit. Windchills to frost up Satan's nuts like billiards' balls.
It's in the atmosphere.
Less heat. More space. Gies me room for thoughts, great ideas. Gimmies me space for expansion, where my breaths had been. Gimmies me the roam of a kite with the down of a dove.
But, but --
-- but please, let me have the room, before I freeze to death.
Can't think with music. Don't thump where madness playing. First time in my plays. Finally totrture inner madness, life. This is in code. I lad. This is inner code. Inner am afraid. This is not armies arrive. This is never the real person I thought those rotten perishables I thankfully I was, not the human I imagined wasted, nor those hateful images claim to be. This clamoring through being. There is hope -- this convinces is hope -- there conceives me that if nothing is real, major thoughts, irked nature issuing then it is all a matter of release, there it is always a of dancing to the manner, oh, dreaming the thought, right rules, reversing reality.
SOS and big boom waiting in the pink room Morrison and Mickey Mouse pinochle in Daffy Duck's cOOKoo-cLock clUCk house climb the cow to chomp the moon spit up chEEse go to your rOOm! groove gruuve like sugar kane stick of gun deep in my brainblacklodged deep in my brain you taste like cinnamin or mon or spicy hot and not legume gently jumps the man who climbs in the back of Big Bird's suit was never green like Streisand's snoot wOTTERstory! to shout and sing this song why can't birds and bugs just get along parking ticket and third place prize you do NOT have my fathers eyes (not in that basket of mice or bucket of chum) nor his grin for his rhyth-ITH-ithm died in a dodo bongo played to a gal named Joanna Luongo Ferminstile whose smile made me look up up high at stars that stick like zits to sky and I stare and wink and wonder why I'm still only just this height, and inch shorter than God, good night.
Quick question from an Asian girl and I stare at her left shoulder, then her right palm, then her red notebook--
It was her face, alien and pure.
I've seen oval faces, I've seen almond eyes, I've seen opal irises, too.
This woman. If we believe six degrees of separation, some of you out there have passed by her. I could pick you, you passers-by, out of a crowd. You would be the ones who have seen something so human, so alien, so ineffably designed, that you will always wear a scar of wonder in the creases of your brow.
Now, I've seen her. Oval face, praying. Almond eyes asking to cry, crystals. Opal irises black-hole wide and just as powerfully drawing in. I've seen her, and I'll happily wear her scar in a new crease upon my brow.
Beauty.
Guesticity #2
"The other day I was in Nevada eating eels when out of nowhere came this brilliant guy. I could tell he had serious problems from the get-go. His toe was all rotten and stank like Jesus. A horse was hanging out of his pants. He fell down in a puddle of coke. I laughed my eye off."
courtesy Brenna and Strongbad Mad Libs
The balloons might be dirty and depressed and losing girth, and the party might even seem to've wound down, but don't you fret my hot universe, I'm the trick candle on your cake out there, and I have only just been lit -- I'm ready to begin burning on forever.
Just when I begin to bid Boston adieu, it begins its farewell performance by pulling the freakshow from the sewers for my edification.
The woman who passed us on the Green Line trolly platform in the Park Street MBTA Station of the Boston transit system's underground commuter railroad had a light-flow Tampax tampon plugged approximately one-third of the way into her right nostril.
Nevermind her shoes. Nevermind her layers of coats and tee-shirts and scarves. Nevermind her impressive girth. Nevermind the Bowery night-club of a crow's nest atop her head. Nevermind her shorts. Nevermind that she may have smelled slightly stronger than rancid maple syrup.
She had a tampon up her nose.
There's really nothing else to say. Boston; I feel loved like a Burgundy ocelot.
Happy Friday.
I walked right into the blades. Saw them there churning and chewing ice and earth to hard hamburger and I kept walking, right on into them.
Earth and ice ripped a map of red from my face as I throttled on in, eyelids ripped and corneas and all. The chewing came on, and I walked in.
The chewing then -- it ceased. The blades and the blades' block of controlling device, human interred, turned, and I walked on, right through mortal X, marking the spot of my death. I walked in, and by, and through X and out the other slushy side.
Shouts from the blades' block aside, I made it to tonight.
WATCH THIS SPACE
Some people carry change in their pocket.
I carry change in my pocket. But there is no metal. No tin. No copper.
No silver.
No gold.
I carry change in my pocket.
Wait and see what I pull out.
WATCH THIS SPACE
I checked, I'm not sure, it's possible, the results are not yet in, I am having the results tested at a lab and expertly diagnosed, there is a chance, signs point to yes, yet I do want to reiterate that I am not quite sure, but I may have just licked a rabbit.
Set the cart before the horse, set the horse before the force, set the force in your pocket, Luke, go get Duke he's got the Lurker, peeping Bob's behind a bush, Gavin's hidden in a wail, Moby Grape's on Ahab's tail, Bugs Bunny waggles a tuft of fluff, peanut butter goes good with stuff, I ate a blob that ate me back, Zebras go grey when Alps attack, moutain Mohammed Yoda came yes, back to the plains to play some chess, check that origami parasail, it gets wet you fall, you know, right into the Belly of Whale.
He's All Charm
I went to the men's room during lunch with a friend this afternoon and got pissy because they had taken out the urinals and put in a baby changing station. So I huffed, peed in one of the two stalls, washed my hands, then dried them. While I was drying them, the guy in the other stall came out. Except it wasn't a guy. And I wasn't in the men's room.
I looked up at the woman, looked down, and slowly looked up at her again. She smiled and said all-too-matter-of-factly, "Um, you're in the women's room." I slowly looked over my shoulder at the letters on the frosted glass of the door, the letters that sure enough spelled out LADIES, backwards.
She was an employee and seemed more amused than ruffled, so I finished drying my hands, winked, and said, "I was wondering what had happened to the urinals." And as if I had solved a great mystery with the style of James Bond himself, I left the Ladies Room to many curious stares from the packed bar that I took in as waves of silent applause.
It was all I could do not to bow.
Today I was told to my face, quote unquote:
"You do nothing positive."
I plan to debunk that in 2003.
6:34 A.M.
Before my eyes are all the way open, before I've had my first ping for how far away my first cup of coffee is going to be in time and space as well as before I have relieved myself of my overnight bladder pressure I have this thought:
What came first, the Punch Buggy Game, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?
I may never know, but that's no reason for me not to smile at the thought of my first cup of morning coffee, brewing somewhere.
Oooh. Hi! Where was I? I swear I was a year behind until just moments ago, har har. Opened my eyes, and what do you know -- there's a saddle. Nice saddle, I reckon, though I don't know much from saddles. Guess what? I fit in it, though. Right like I'd always been a-sat here. This must've been my saddle all along. Damn what them New Year's parties can do to the mind.
But it's all coming back to me, I reckon. Yes, yes indeed. I'm gonna be soon ridin' toward the sunset, just like any good cowboy. Headin' West, the Prodigal Son, the Fortunate One.
You know, I have no idea where my horse's got to. I'm not moving along quite yet, then. But indeed, I am back in the saddle. And pointed West. And smiling big, right into that wide orange sun.