by Tomorrow's Man
I said this today: "Can you me the HUD-1 on Mishkie for the HELOC transmittal?"
I didn't laugh, but just barely.
Tomorrow, when I have to say that, I plan to sing an Irish folk song instead, or, maybe, act like a chicken gargling God.
I'm shelled in a snakeskin corona of copper smooth and I slink when I smile, when I weep and wink, when I touch it there, I only hiss when without kisses and wait with a bodylong wiggle to leak like warmest marshmallow, slinky smooth and oh so sweet.
I have nothing but this forced compliance. My brain's gone impotent when all I want to do is write. At least when I want to fuck and can't I can attribute it to a lack of a commiserate source. But with this situation everything in here is working -- all the pipes and wires and lights -- but there's no progress, no data, no insight; my brain reads like a blue screen flatline, a single-bit map of forced compliance that makes my pen a whore as it capitulates to my hand's need to convince my brain that something, anything, is going on.
Zoll zigga zuzz zuzz ziggedy zag, inspiration in hard rock tasties, sunshine, inferno-hot friends and tundricold beer, what a day, what wonder, what potential for joy exists here, all these drugs of mine on their two feet legs to hips up to pretty smiles and eyes that get me flying high high high as forever.
Dedicated to the 'Dane on Sundays.
It's a landslide, a connection, a collection, a drymouth, smile too dessicated to bleed, a blunt introduction to a painful rash, a too-tight collar under a too-tight squeezing grip, it's metal not armor, shards of conversation not looking glass, it's the march up Testament Hill in felt sandals on broken ankles to read the daily news -- dire of course -- from the leaves browning despite the Spring: warmed zephyrs, it's a woman worth a million dollars and penniless in her soul, it's these marks from neuron to muscle to ink to pen to page to screen telling you what it is, it is a circle, endless, Moebius, a spiral kite in the sky above the browning leaves, in the sky above, where you are not looking.
Wasps are allowed to fly and sting, and I am allowed to worry about my meals, my decaying body, brutal chemicals taken in hedonistically and those that rape me, sleeping alone, and the right jabs, cuts, bites and parries I need to learn just for a chance to make it to my next birthday.
Darwin was far too ironic for tea brewed for three hours by the sun, far to ascetic to lie when he needed to, and the most ironic man of our time.
When did you first know your life was in flames? I mean, it had to have started somewhere. Everything but the Apple of god has a beginning. Have you burned and itched, scratched and shed tears for always? Or was there an event? Perhaps the first time you saw a dress for more than just an article of dangling clothing? Perhaps the death of a pet when you were an adult.... Perhaps when you gave up on being able to fly, or bend steel, or see through non-dangling dresses. What are you missing?
the opposite of energy
Ah, the question that slaps god with a baby g in my book. What is it we are missing? Love? Peace? A smile for the leading hand of death? Maybe just sugar, maybe just spice, maybe All of the Above. Maybe it isn't what we are missing, but that we are -- maybe we burn because we are so empty.
I press time. Right up against my scruffy chin. My bald spot. My crooked toe. My left buttock, then my right. I press time against my teeth. Then against the tip of my tongue, teasing. I press time to my belly. I press it to my neck, so time can feel my gentle pulse moving like a raga. Then I press it to my forehead, and stare it in the eye. With a wink, I send time running along, now. There must be someone out there pressed for time.
Magicians go, usually after stepping their bare feet onto a fantastical ground. They walk for years in one place, wearing warm the grooves that shape their feet in the loam, the sand, the concrete. They stroke the air above their hair for years, reaching for an invisible piano wire that thrums with a one-way pull elsewhere. When they find it there between their short, sensitive fingers, the power of its headlong desire shortening their breath to smoke, they go. It is when they don't go that their magic decays in a bag of fear, and they become not simply human, but a broken human. The decision is an ultimatum, the choice irreparable.
There are forms of suicide that involve no more than a quiet sigh, putting your soft hands back in your pockets, and walking, still, in the warm grooves that shape your feet.
I made these changes to avoid my homogenization, but every shot that is this gunpowdered has its share of curdle; sure, the belly is a mess, and the mind has followed a bit, but I can learn to love cordite on my clothes, and I can try loving coffee creamer or clotted cream; can you learn to love me loving what is new?
Easter Sunday
oh My head shrinks, I can feel it dessicate as the density of the food in my stomach causes a reaction above my esophagus that has the potential to stimulate a white dwarf imploding atop itself, creating a great void of gravity due to the immense amount of cheese, potatoes, ham, potatoes, beer, cheese, potatoes, beer, potatoes, and cheese that I know totaled more than my body weight by the time my jaw had locked closed from over-chewing, causing the chocolate pudding pie to dribble down my body.
Welcome back, Jesus!!
Thanks for the ham!!!
and happy birthday, my truer god(dess).
13 days. fifteen ways. fate waves. karma weighs. 13 days. sense frays. truth flays. hope fries. 13 days. slaughter brays. a tear boils. a bastard prays. 13 days. honesty pays. honesty cries. honesty flails. 13 days. one-act plays. faith prevails. full moon wanes. thirteen days.
The planking beneath my feet is warm, sun warm, and I can almost hear a real ocean sussurus around the boat. This is not a boat, but just aplank, but my toes on the warm wood hear sea gulls, I smell brine, and if I squint high I can imagine a crow's nest. There is lava here where the boat should be, around the plank, and the hot smolder of wood reaching its flashpoint gives me a strange, quick memory of a fireplace full of my poems, blazing.
Despite the heat and flickering wood, I squint high and smile at the crow's nest, thinking of land ho.
The lyrics I wrote for David Bowie began with the line, "Dragonflies swarm the beaches...," and they were good, good enough to save his letter of apology that he'd not be using them.
Now, years later, they swim up in my mind, spiraling to be sung, and just like that I am filled with music again, my pupils dilating and growing wide in an unseen flicker that you could know as epiphany.
I once had a telephone stuck in my vagina. It was one of those sturdy old Bell rotary models. Whenever the cord would pop out, like while shopping or pumping gas, I would bend down to re-ravel it up and the rotary dial would turn, making it sound like I was sharpening pencils with my cervix. I've since learned to use a garbage bag twist-tie to keep the cord secured. Now I only worry when I go out dancing.
My face is buzzed gently by the Monarch butterfly that almost touches my nose before the swooping robin arches it's blood breast in and makes the Monarch a meal, all this orange and red dance just inches from my eyes, and with a smile I light my cigarette tip orange and chew a finger tip, letting just a tiny drop of red free, becoming an integral part of this tight, new spectrum.
I dreamed this dream out loud. I marked it on a calendar: This day, my dream will come true.
I became my own hand of fate, slipping with style through every possibility's grasp that did not interest me. I had a dream, I wanted it made real, I dreamed that dream aloud.
I've awakened, having this power.
I'll never stop dreaming.
Wig Out #1
My first official wigout last night. I knew it would come, but was five days too soon? Or did I hold up pretty well for someone going through all this?
The feeling I've pushed everything away. The feeling of loss due to lack of control. The feeling of damage.
I feel damaged, and damaging.
I can wonder what there is to love about me, or I can stop wondering. I can't shake the sinking feeling.
My New Neighborhood, Pt. 1
There is a liquor store 33 steps from my door; it is across four lanes of traffic, but just four, good odds for a fellow with balance like me.
The guy who runs the place wears his soiled shirt half unbuttoned, and is more than comfortable with his heart surgery scar showing, that lippy, pink keloid fault line pocked by equidistant stitch-craters from diaphragm to sternum that Krusty the Clown also displays, though Krusty's are of course drawn on.
After two visits, this zipper-chested chap knows what I like (spiced rum and soda) and is hurt when I walk over to buy only Pepsi. When he smiles, he smiles left to right, and up and down, his moustache and chest a happy crossword, two seven letter words for 'vivid.'
I could wave to him from my patio, but I don't.
Not yet.
The sliding patio doors are open, letting cool air into my small, empty apartment, the drips outside from the porch above are hitting the gound and dancing into the air again like party aphids as the water steams off of the ground, and springtime and I are engaged in a slow dance that's got us both hard, wet and hoping the feeling never ends.
Cheese, gotta buy cheese, and beer, no got beer, plenty of beer though there's never plenty of beer always there's just enough, and meat, should buy some chicken or try to enjoy venison maybe, and need a pan for now and some tin foil for now and should ask about the tap water I've been drinking, but these things are exciting, the baby's cries of birth, joy and happy noise, the snow will give way to sunshine and I'm happy for now and now is as wide as my tight embrace waiting to hold every conversation and wondrous glance in thrall.
I am going to spend the next year of my life molesting performance art.
I know. Spectacular.
Today, exhausted from 44 hours awake and little sleep since, much tequila and nicotene, and the most spectacular chage I've ever committed, I looked in the mirror at my sunken face, my scruff of beard, and my shocked hair and thought for the first time in my life, damn, I am sexy.
Road Notes: Indiana Again
Why did I stop in this Dunkin' Donuts again, this time after having been awake for 30 hours already with a thousand miles chewed beneath my cramping fingers, this Dunkin' Donuts where, the last time I was here, I could feel my IQ draining away through the concrete as the feeb behind the counter wrestled with the concept I'd presented, i.e., the idea of sugar and what it meant to something as complex as a sealed, pre-mixed bottle of Snapple iced tea? (You want sweetied or unsweetied, she'd asked after pausing long enough to consult the bible.) Why would I risk stopping here again? Because this Dunkin' Donuts is the Dunkin' Donuts on the Edge of Forever, that's why, the last garish orange-and-fuschia coffehouse before the great midwest swallows all normal coffee in a great scoured throat of brackish French roast.
I thought I could handle whatever this Dunkies could throw at me, this Vortex of Dumb sucking me in with the promise of East coast coffee. Even after I had a seven-minute challenge explaining the elaborate concept of the 'ice' in an 'iced coffee' (she had to consult with the manager of the Arby's, Mr. Dim, no kidding, before she was confident with filling the cup with ice from the soda machine) I figured I had come out unscathed; I still had not yet forgotten, say, how to work my anus. But Indiana was not done with me.
I had to urinate, a complication of increasing frequency as I remained awake, stressed, and speeding (MPH and drug-wise) for dozens of hours on end. The men's room was thankfully unoccupied. I positioned myself at a center urinal and let the hot yellow flow, enjoying the quiet expanse of no one around me.
I wil call him Bubba. I was, after all, in Indiana, and the monikers Cletus or Joe Bob seemed to high-brow. Bubba picked to use the urinal next to mine. This has to be purposeful, I thought, what with forty other choices stretching along every wall of the lavatory. I seethed through several hard bladder-pushes, but my stream was maxed out and could not be rushed. After a minute I had to glare at this space invader.
Cutting my eyes to lazers I twisted my head to my left, hoping the sound of the tendons screeching in my neck would at least make his ears bleed. By the look of the droolingly wide grin on Bubba's face he'd heard my tendons not at all. He was preoccupied. It was not with urinating. Not only were the motions his hands were making at his crotch all wrong for keeping a pee-stream straight, but his filthy gym pants -- which were bundled at his ankles -- suggested he was thinking about more than bladder relief.
Was he pulling (so to speak) a George Michael for my benefit, was this what I had heard of, the subtle public restroom homosexual come-on perfected by Captain Wham? Or was jerking off bare-bottomed in highway restrooms neighborly behavior in Indiana? I suspected both and zipped up, literally backing out of the bathroom, giving him a fantasy target of nothing more than a rictus of clenched teeth.
I finished peeing in Chicago. The next time I take the Madison-Boston trip, I'll swim the lake.
The Phoenix Arisen
12:00 AM
Just me and gold. No salt, in me or on the glass. Everything hurts, a good hurt, the pain of working 11 and 12 hours a day and dancing in between. It's the pain of birth and change; of abandon and discipline.
With the body tired, the mind can relax; the brain must work on healing sore, torn muscles. I'm left to think about: Washington's cherry trees, blooming; the new Radiohead album and the good, old ones; the crispness of this dollar bill next to this new pad of yellow, blue-lined paper; the crispness of the air outside on this March evening dressing up Boston in a gown of late October. I think that the slice of lime in my drink could be bigger but the amount of tequila could be lower, so it isn't a bad trade. I think: could Heather Graham find me adorable? I think about the rumble in my empty belly, and the tightness of my abdomen lately. That thought deserves a sip and a smile. I sip and smile.
Hunger. I think, this is what has driven me; I am always hungry. It is why I fast, why I dance, why I write, why I love fully, why I fight for life to be kinetic, why I drive myself toward an extreme abandon of fear.
Without hunger, apathy sets in. So much of America sits sated on Doritos and fast food, lugubrious, complacent, sloths in their chairs and beds, too full of the calories dancing in pretty colors on the televisions to move. I sit beside them, my balding head and crooked teeth as hungry as my belly, my legs scissoring.
If life, living it, is what feeds this hunger, what is love? Perhaps as Bryan Ferry crooned, it is indeed the drug. Luckily for me and you I'm too sore to think about it right now. Too tired, very hungry, famished and happy.
Every day of my life, despite my often cynical, sad views, is a success. A feast. I live like every day is a steak, a box of Godiva chocolates, a loaf of warm bread and a plate of melted Brie. And what I've been doing all these years is turning myself into just such a feast: I am about to become an indefatigable source of nourishment to others. My presence is becoming a bacchanalia for the senses of those around me.
Taste, touch, smell.
There is a bounty cookin' up the likes of which the world has never seen, and the fire that wafts its scent across this country and makes saliva coat the throats of all who smell it is burning hot and steady, right here, in my hungry belly.
11:59 PM
ACROPOLIS NOW!
Look at the vale of my belly, smell Pan rutting in my pits, hear this Lokian laughter rumble out of my lungs, the drums build, the faeries dance and fuck and the pipes blow blow blow
and the
time
has come
to
CROSS THIS LAND
in this body, with this energy, this Son of Pan.
Can I get a hallelujah?
Deliver me with sugar, sugar, pop me in your over let me rise up in your heat and coat me with your frosting quick! while I'm hot too hot to eat, coat me and watch me melt all down your sides.
April's Fool Day
Yesterday, the universe was a seed at my feet. At midnight, I knelt and lifted it to my eyes. They crinkled. The left winked, the eye that is more blue than the other. I warmed the seed in my palm while my mouth filled with saliva.
Hungry as I have ever been, I smiled, kissed the seed, and swallowed it whole, as I do most things.
The sun rose, later.
This is not the end.
This is Day One.
I have created Myself.