Books Arrived Recently

Some recent arrivals which I have been enjoying immensely:


The Book of Questions, Neruda
Copper Canyon Press (1991)

I used to read this in the university library and for some reason never actually picked up a copy of the book.

Great poems to memorize in Spanish, since they are so diminutive.


Haiku in English, The First Hundred Years, eds. Kacian, Rowland, Burns
Norton (2013)

Kacian's "An Overview of Haiku in English" is a locus classicus now. I was surprised to recall I had actually published in one of the haiku magazines he mentions in his catalog of notables (a rather Gendai journal). I noticed that Kacian didn't mention Brautigan at all when he limned the American history of haiku. Not that Brautigan was hardcore. But then Billy Collins mentioned R.B. in his introduction to the volume, so his ghost sneaked in. (I read closing essay and introduction in reverse order.) It seems appropriate, glossing Brautigan, considering the latitude given by the editors as to what constitutes an "ELH" (English language haiku). Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" opens the volume, so...  The anthology was chock-a-block with fabulous poets new to me. One wishes for several lifetimes to read everyone's books.


I Live, I See, Vsevolod Nekrasov
Ugly Duckling Presse (2013)


The Rooster's Wife, Russell Edson
BOA Editions (2005)

I think it's sort of criminal that Edson was excised from the latest volume of the Norton anthology dedicated to surveying postmodern American poetry. But then I think I get it. Bukowski was also chucked and neither of those poets are going to lose any readers anytime soon. One could argue (much easier with Bukowski than Edson) that neither of those poets really reified the postmodern tendencies in American poetry. Really, one wonders by what stretch of the imagination Bukowski could have been seen to fit into the first anthology. He was intransigently vernacular/demotic and pretty much despised the airs taken on by experimental poets of any stripe. One wonders if he was included merely to help move copies, increase sales. That the man can do, dead or alive. Edson certainly worked with many of the prevalent ideas elevated in postmodernism. However, when it comes to facture, perhaps Edson doesn't appear to be "all that postmodern." He is not superficially postmodern. So I think that's the reason he was jettisoned. It's pretty much a structuralist anthology.

In any case, he's a fabulous writer and many of these poems are stellar. It's a dark collection. It's end of life darkness. The humor is rich but in the way that the darkest paintings of German expressionism are rich in humor. He's such an inimitable stylist in the metaphysical vein that some of the poems are almost hopelessly eccentric. He loves turning the language, turning the ideas, turning the poems against themselves. I think the Ouroboros should be on Edson's family escutcheon. But the strongest poems all seem to cry out to be anthologized, shared widely. I wonder if James Tate was a devotee. Because those two poets seem to speak back and forth (unless I hallucinate that).

I say Edson isn't going to lose any readers anytime soon, but you know that might not be exactly true. He might suffer some for a while for having published slightly off the beaten track. I mean those are good presses, but he seems to have been a bit reclusive and not to have worked hard at creating inertia with his career. He seems to have receded in the public sense near the end, even as his work continued to evolve and deepen, even as he decocted finer and finer essences. Maybe the (slightly tempered) nihilism at the center of his poetry told him that was an okay stance to adopt. I think Edson is eminently translatable. That's not true of all that many poets. I do see interest in his work around the world and so I think if he flags in one language, one culture, he might pick up in another and then come around again to a larger appreciation in his native land.

Decent Grief

Decent Grief  is a very small zine (eight pages, I believe) but it looks like fun and some of that design work in there is to-die-for. Google it and you will be transported to the page on Etsy where three issues are available.

Somebody (or several somebodies) are on their way somewhere.

Two bucks and I think postage is miraculously waived if you're in the United States.

Haiku & Holga

I was perusing the Etsy offerings of poetry and art zines and serendipitously found Haiku & Holga.

Haiku and lomography just seem a perfect pairing to me and you can see this is well-executed.

There are numerous issues available on Etsy and the same artist/seller has a book of New York Haiku (the images below showing densely serried haiku with those beautiful weights holding the book open are from that collection).

The polyartist behind these works is Michelle Spadafore.

Outsider Artists

Here is a list of outsider artists, many of them lesser-known for now, whose work wowed me recently when I began researching this subject.  Many of these are working artists. Several have passed away within the past few years.

Annette Labedzki (see previous post)

Andrew Mass

Chuckie Johnson

E 9

Edward Goss

Harold Plople

Hazel Kinney

Jean-Louis Moray (sells on EBAY)

Jeff Hughart (sells on EBAY)

John Goo-Goo Binn

Jon Strattan

Joyce Cairo

Justin Aerni

Karen Terry

Lee Van Gelder (Wally)

Mary Proctor

Melissa Monroe

Noel Hatfield

Patrick O'Brien

Purvis Young (pretty well-known)

Rick Borg

Steve Martinez

Steven Chandler (who feels like the rebirth of another, dead outsider artist! you'll probably recognize..bit spooky)

Steven Chesley

T-Marie Noland

William Washburn

Zebedee B. Armstrong

Obviously, this is just a cursory list of artists who happened to take my fancy. These are the artists whose work really impacted me on first encounter.

(little painting by Annette Labedzki)

Here is a little painting by Canadian artist Annette Labedzki.

I bought this because it felt like a magic little talisman (could use an apotropaic talisman right now) and because it was so affordable. Also, I wanted it because it is buoyant and beautiful to me.

The artist sells her work on EBAY and I recommend you check her out. You could own an original painting or mixed media work for a price that is sure to surprise you. The artist is very prolific and there is a really wide range of styles from which to choose.

I first discovered her work on a site dedicated to surveying American outsider art. Labedzki actually resides in Canada, so maybe the site is Pan-American in focus despite its stated intention.  I was surprised how many of the artists on that site regularly sell their work on EBAY. Most of these artists seem to be very prolific, which I suppose is in keeping with the archetype of the outsider artist.

This piece is in a style I think of as "shoegaze abstraction." (I love painting in that modality.) The work by which she was represented on the outsider art site was more art brut magical realism with a figurative base. The figures themselves are not always strictly human. Other creatures abound and the therianthropic is a recurring motif in this artist's work. The artist seems to favor creating a very energetic field. The works often feel jazzy, almost intoxicated.

This piece feels much more zen to me. But this is that "shoegaze abstraction." I'm guessing this style might be her yin to balance out her yang. We all need a good yang balancer.

(grain grain grain)

Haiku

lifting my left arm
to soap it, a difference:
mother dying


        *

I comb my hair
in fogged mirror
imagining the lines

        *

fingerprints on art,
a glass over it:
it's only the frame

        *

you're not dying
you're just going
into the alphabet

(haiku)

wondering if Pearl Harbor

was actually revenge

for haiku like this

Shop Talk

the clock
read
BROTHER

     *

the sewing machine
read
BROTHER

      *

the word processor
read
BROTHER

      *

everywhere I looked
I was among
dutiful friends

string

over the hill
and under
its way

        *

rake dead
set against
the moon

        *

an asterisk
that's alive
stuck to his jacket

        *

the difference
between signal
and meaning

        *

or look at the ocean
of grass blows
it walks atop

         *

door set in the field
not even leaning:
no house to harm

string

the shapes
algae makes
on aluminum siding

      *

of a house
the writing
asemic squiggles

    *

from the asemic
factory you come
at evening

      *

nobody home
and gesticulating
wildly

Wet

leaf print
blot
of street
mono-
lingual

conversation,
no, mono-
logue,
mono-

print

"It ennobles by revealing you to be a shithead
for having dwelled overmuch on your aloneness,
your schism with the world."

The Anesthesiologist

The anesthesiologist is perhaps the seminal problem of our time. Are we able to note the presence of the anesthesiologist? The answer, obviously, is no. Because the anesthesiologist has been among us for so long now, an era. It is the Era of the Anesthesiologist. Many of you are holding the anesthesiologist's hand, counting backwards from ten, not making it very far at all. The anesthesiologist is an expert at self-erasure. It's like seeing a lens flare and thinking it is the fingerprint of light. For a millisecond you remember that you are a lens. And then you are only the flare of the lens, a fingerprint of light, and you are out. Gone, here. Language must be something made in the anesthesiologist's image. The anesthesiologist enters the room and there is no longer a room.

Book Recommendation

    Nigel Nicolson's unflinching examination of his parents' marriage is probably sui generis. It's hard for me to imagine another son writing with as much candor, maturity and objectivity about the most intimate details of the lives of his parents, especially when the amours of those parents were so complicated. You see, Nigel's parents were Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. It would be a slight to call theirs a "marriage of convenience," but it was certainly an unorthodox marriage. If you want to see how an open marriage between bisexual partners could be negotiated in the last century, then here is your case study. And yet there was a little something more here, a different sort of love. There was an abiding between these two spirits even as they traveled so far from one another. They were rather like John Donne's compass. If you want to see very deeply into the Bloomsbury Group and its convoluted psychology, this is your book. Romantic life among the Bloomsburians almost invariably conformed to the old Facebook bromide: "It's complicated."  There's ample first person narration in the form of correspondence and other more diaristic documentation throughout this book. Portrait of a Marriage was first published in 1973, but the edition I have was brought out by Atheneum in 1980.

A Pretty Fabulous French Photographer and Author of Books on Outsider Art

A pretty fabulous French photographer and author of books on outsider art acquired six of my recent productions today.

I don't know the artist.

His work is so delicious.

(Happy.)

soap in the pupal phase
I picked up and held
in the strange house
     strange base
a few pubic hairs

yours,


         *

soap melting
                from the branch
                        oh likely
            you beguile
                       as the walker
          left out
                         in the rain

                   
                      what kind

                          of walker

      the trees
                destroy
      densely
                     each other

                   so   slowly
 
              wetly




                it's almost
                               erotic

                really,
 
                      how
                         wetness
             
                      brings
       everything
                     
                               down

     fabric   lilac  tulips
        purple   tulips   fabric
           plasticky   KY    stems
   green  fabric
                  spear leaves
         lit by nightdrop
                          small
                                   corsairs

Amulet

   Conscious living
      in a wave
         Put your hand here
      I don't know how
         to cut out
     around this shape

                but no worries
             I do not believe

                  it is your true shape

Little Statuettes of the Night

The shadow of a paper airplane

      at 2 a.m.

         its lost pilot

  

  I am so freaking tired

     of street minstrels

           at 3 a.m.

  The cats and the deer

      and the moon

         stare at each other

             round 4 a.m.

      Comes traipsing

          toward the first 

                  cold bus

                at 5 a.m.

          a diva

              telemarketer

       

        sad as a rain divinity

    

Are

Are the abstractions that surround death friendly abstractions?

The Poetics

The Poetics of Surveillance vs. The Poetics of Immanence.

Ancient Greece

In ancient Greece, they threw imperfectly-formed tanning machines off cliffs into the sea. This is why their men in marble, their few women in the febrile stone, are so pale. They had such very high standards.

Okay

It is okay to be the night. It is okay to be a shopping cart stolen and ridden by teenagers miles from its strip mall of residence. Left in a small rural tunnel cars drive through one at a time. It's always cooler under there and there's a dripping from the highway above that grows algae on the walls. A lovely, pale Matisse green. It smells like the wet of ancient mosaic. Algae skin that gets so little light, you are pretty. Wall, I like that sound you make with your mouth. Little shopping cart, come with me. I will take you to your mother. She is probably frantic.

The Difference

Now I watch my bipolar traits from a safe distance. I observe their strangeness. I keep the vagaries and velleities immured.  Strange to write, "from a safe distance" when I am inside that bipolar brain. But there is a distance of reflection now.  So much of this is the four years of solid recovery. I have such incredibly good periods. I look to the future. And yet I am a guard. I am my own guard. Constantly. I have stellar periods when I need to police myself so much less. And then I still have periods when I mandate hypervigilance for myself. But the important thing is, it works. Nobody knows this process but me. I really don't need to put anyone on notice but myself. That's real progress. But it's there. Always. Because through no fault of my own, I was born to this. I have the cognitive dysfunction which is sometimes downplayed in descriptions of bipolar disorder. I think ultimately this is the real culprit when it comes to emotional distortion and dysfunction, and what always ended up causing the social dysfunction in the past. I really try to be as careful of others' feelings as I am with my own. Sometimes I think I'm even more careful with their feelings than my own.  Because I am generally okay. But what lurks beneath must be acknowledged and greeted each day with a tiny dose of healthy terror.It's not self-pity or puling or even moroseness to say I understand with complete empathy V. Woolf's stones in the pockets. I understand the words she wrote, understand them in a visceral sense: "I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times." I think now and then, too, of Philip Seymour Hoffman's death, and how quickly it followed upon a single relapse after years of sobriety. I have much gratitude, but I have even more wariness. A house divided can indeed stand. And virtually all houses are divided up into rooms. Some of the bipolar rooms are just a little more haunted than those you find in more "ordinary" houses.

(little joke for dyspeptics)

Q: How do you know if your acid-blocker is working?
A: If you forgot to take it, it's working. Because you now have dementia.

Every Rational Person

Every rational person has approximately twelve irrational people living inside his or her skin, sharing organs with him or her.

For example, today I met "Robert" downtown for lunch in the food court at Strawberry Square.

I say the "food court," but we sat at one of those small tables set in the elevated walkway which connects this downtown mall to a decent hotel. We sat about twenty feet above a city street and enjoyed the traffic whizzing under our sneakers, watching it through the bowed glass of this tunnel so like a Habitrail tube for hamsters.

It wasn't long until the twelve inside Robert began to emerge.

We were having a normal conversation, but I sensed the twelve pushing at Robert's face and innards, like Freddy Krueger with his nightmarish plasticity.

Who were these people inside Robert? I named them arbitrarily as I sensed them.

Mariah wanted to dance with me. I believe a tango she had learned in her college days and had never again gotten a chance to show off.

Jude, I am fairly certain, wanted to slay me very slowly with a rusty can opener.

Robert drank his diet soda and prattled on about perfectly ordinary and depressing things in the news and in the art world.

He smiled nicely, a smile like a well-made sandwich.

Sam, I am fairly certain, wanted to sleep with me.

Or did he merely want to seduce me? Yes. It was horrible Julietta who wanted to sleep with me. She was in her nightgown. In a food court. She was always that way. He hair had her children's lollipops stuck throughout.

Rani was feeding the imaginary sparrows which flocked the food court. A true nature spirit. Barefoot at all times, even when she married.

Poor Gus was mentally challenged but a delight to behold should we decide to play the game "What Does That Cloud Resemble?"

Odile and Odette only had eyes for each other. They wanted to weight Robert down with stones and just throw him in the river. I sensed him watching them at their caustic flirtation even as he talked. They don't think of themselves as lesbians. They think of themselves as swans.

Rod was doing things with a protractor and French curve and his mustache that he hoped would win the attention of the attractive young woman passing us just then. It didn't.

Salvia was contemplating what song should be playing during her suicide, which is all she ever does.

Alice, despite the name, is a boy and a spiteful one in a dress.

Albert, despite the name, is a girl and a spiteful one in no dress.

I enjoyed my visit with Robert but I couldn't help scribbling down notes to some of his various resident personages and I even penned poems to two of them.

Of course, I was too afraid to show these to Robert or his "inner friends," so I just surreptitiously slipped these notes into a trash can as we exited the food court, hoping Robert's bodily cellmates would not notice.

Westron

Winter winds go forcibly through a landscape. The palette changes as you watch. Going through a field of this and the forest at the edge. Do you only imagine this lavendar light? It is like a dry washing machine, a washing machine of air. And you are in the middle of its violence, like a garment trying to escape but following the rhythms of the machine. Trying to think less while walking in heavy winds won't work. Winds, especially these winter winds, have mastered reverse psychology. They know you will try to retreat to silence. They are like the pressers of old. They put the stones of winds on your mind and force all your silence out.

It may be their unfairness you come to love.

Drawing

The distance is in the wings. We say, no, the wings are in the distance. But we know we have reversed it. The way we have with ink. It is the same stubborn idea, the same stubborn wing.

A Piece of Paper

A piece of paper blows through an empty park. And you stand there, this is what you watch. Is it transparent, translucent, is it opaque? It skips the air like a child's knees. Though it is tiny, though it is nothing. You realize the word empty is loaded. The way you stand and wait for an "all clear" from yourself. The tree branches bend down to the earth in heavy wind then. You know then what it is like. It is like dolls with diamonds in their wooden knees.

String Ten

the wasp's nest
of value
plagues an artist

        *

winter pipes sometimes
just start hammering
when you turn the tap

        *

if you could
be an art
and not an artist

        *

stars converse
in that window:
there's no sum

        *

you could learn
you lie
to the wasp's nest

       *

it just builds up
in the old pipes:
the indignant air

A Cat With a Concussion

The cat with a concussion runs through the Snipers Market, formerly the Flower Market. She can no longer do the things she loved to do. She cannot toy with a dictator's laptop mouse, mischievously. This cat with pure white fur, who has been blinded and deafened by a bomb falling through the roof of a room where she had been pleasantly sunning by a window, dashes madly now into walls and the legs of running children fleeing other explosions. The bullet that enters her brain had a prayer scratched on its shell by a young man who died Tuesday. The child soldier who shoots the cat is severely reprimanded for wasting a bullet. This stern rebuke comes from another child soldier who had been one school grade above him a few months ago.

I Have Work in the Latest Issue of Zeitzoo (Vienna, AU)

And I'm happy to be in the company of friends and fellow creatives like Grzegorz Kielawski and Michael Lippmann.

It's times like this I rue my lack of proficiency in German.

There's a link over at the right to the magazine and its other cultural manifestations, which are many and varied.

That

That there is motion at all in the world, which is a kind of haunting.

Sweater

The child's sweater left in the park. Taken off like protection, forgotten. A color that glows at twilight. You imagine the color. An antique mother sitting in a thrift store window.

A Piece of Paper

The piece of paper with a child's crayon drawing on it goes blowing down a winter street. It cannot decide whether its drawing, the child's world, is on it or in it. The landscape with periwinkle wraps and rouge people. American Indians doing their laundry in the sky. Some such. Oh, and chimney smoke. Always that. Blue grey squiggles of autumn rising over the simple house. This landscape with lightweight people wraps around your ankle a moment, not long enough to bend down and take it, not long enough to have it, and then it continues skipping the air down the street. Strange that the trees you see lining this long street at such correct intervals are all anonymous but not random. The branches of these trees are the secret home of this drawing.

The Returns

A man walked into a sterilized room and noticed it was filled with a bunch of returned suicides. They had been arranged in a rough circle (which primitive superstition asserts is the opposite, talismanic shape to suicide's unbounded anti-circle). They were all sitting on fold-out metal chairs. All the chairs were one-size-fits-all. That is how suicide is, thought the man. The chairs looked as provisional as life felt to the returned suicides. The returns were all ages, all sizes, all colors and creeds. They had all tried to buy the farm, but their eternal mortgage had fallen through. They were here to explain but not apologize, a tightrope act. Now it was going to be something like credit counseling. There would be condescension masquerading as love or at least civility. Some would later decide to save themselves or others. They would become bankers of life. Others would bide their time, visualizing isolated tree branches the way some have porn films playing in their heads all day. No sooner had the man entered the room than he announced himself as conductor. He showed the returned suicides a small baton. He smiled at the string section and they all jumped out the nearest window, en masse. 

The Pingers

A father is pinging his daughter because he fears his death. A teenager is pinging the cell tower above her naked body, which shares a wild, untilled field with another naked, pinging body which shares itself with her slightly older lover who is also pinging. Something is pinging on the floor of the Arctic Ocean right now, a mystery ping, and nobody on earth knows what it is. Arctic animals are scattering from this sea zone of pinging mystery. I feel the dead pinging me when I read poems. Phone calls are being thinned out, attenuated to mere texts. Screaming is texting now. The universe is sliding towards less and less human words. There is much less blood in our language. Something is being quietly strangled to death. I want to escape the pinging, so I run out the back door of my house at evening and race towards the dark woods. It may still be legal to scream there. The trees might be protecting screams. They have for thousands of years. On my way there, some contemporary bats fly over my head, scoffing at my retrograde screams, pinging every solid object in their blind sights.

Story at Eleven

     There was a bridge that crossed nothing.
     A crowd of people arrived at this bridge and were afraid to cross.
     "Why are we afraid to cross this bridge which crosses absolutely nothing?"
one of the terrified assembly asked her terrified traveling companions.
     "Perhaps it is because some idiot called this a bridge," one of the other
petrified travelers ventured.
      And no one was willing to set one goddamned foot on the thing.
     So they remained camped there for years, waiting to see if something
would rise from below and swallow the structure, or whether it would sink
into something below itself, either way proving it truly had been a bridge they had
been facing all along.
      The journey itself was forgotten in favor of the terror of the bridge
(or whatever it was).
   

Sun Drain

Every day, the old man sits high in a dour, tall building. He sits at a window. He watches a train that contains all the loved and loveless dead ones whizz down the oldest railroad tracks in the world. Always there are more and darker commuters. From his side, they look like the ghosts of jazz singers, with their dark hands and faces pressed to the morning-frosted glass of the train. From their side, he is a slight imperfection in the ice.

Five of My Poems Will Be Included in the Anthology The Collected Explosive Magazine

This is cool and I am really grateful to the editor(s).

I remember really loving the magazine and the great design of the issues that often (always?) had these tactile covers.

I remember dealing with Katy Lederer exclusively, but I'm guessing there were other editors. But then maybe I'm wrong. It's been a few years.  I'm not near my copies right now.  Katy is a wonderful writer in the fullest sense of that word, but I know her best as a poet. Her books are never hard to find in this house, because I make sure they stay in the "old reliable" section of my bookshelves for when I want something inspiring to read that I know is always going to do the trick. Lovely. Lyric. Spirit.

Jeff Clark will be designing the anthology, so you know it's going to be a physically beautiful specimen as well as a good read.

This is great because I bet I missed an issue here or there with various changes of domicile and it will just be nice to catch up with everyone and look back at a really interesting magazine that I suspect will hold up very well with the years and all the rest that has come with the years.

Prints of My Work are Now Available through Dan Skjæveland Gallery (Norway)

I'm quite happy to be represented by Dan and I love the company.

Please check out the work of my fellow gallerians Bill Dane, Sotiris Lamprou and Dan Skjæveland.

We are planning an exhibition as well.

I'll add a link at right.

In other news, I have discovered a new printmaking process. Actually, it's a print "unmaking" process, and it's all about dissolving the pigments in photographs to turn those photographs into paintings. I just made a new set and loved the results on a few of them.

I ordered boatloads of antique/vintage photos on Ebay to work with now that I have the chemical process doing what I wanted it to do.

Endre Tót: I´m going nowhere... (Oxford, 1991)

Really, Isn't There Only One Core Economic Question?

When we're talking about the economy, doesn't the difference between Republicans, Democrats and independents really come down to how much the party or individual is willing to re-allocate wealth through the taxation system. I realize there are other "controls," but that's the massive driver of the economy. Always.

It's interesting that many economists say peak social performance can really only be gained if the top marginal tax rate is somewhere between eighty-five and ninety percent.

I'm sure that sounds horrific to the rich.

F.D.R. wanted more. He wanted to cap incomes at 25k (350K or so, adjusted for today).

I remember when Reagan took the top marginal tax rate from 70 percent down to 28 percent. No wonder the one percent idolize that truly horrible man, that abysmally awful "leader" with astrological stars in his eyes and Book of Revelation prophecies determining his foreign policy.

You can find these figures thrown around again and again. I don't think it's always on partisan sites like this article here at Huffpo.

Happy/Flummoxed

When several pieces of your artwork sell at once and you have absolutely no idea where they are in your house. And it's always just the ones that have somehow gone off the radar.

Clarification

bird chatter / at morning / is not song / is need / processing / need / evaluative being / not romanticism

Even Though Daniil

Even though Daniil Kharms died, horribly, in 1942, his favorite book is Cruel Shoes (1977) by Steve Martin.

Gutai Feels So Liberating

Nightmares of the Future

A high-tech, self-cleaning litter box of the next century that does not merely dispose of your pet's waste, but also, should euthanasia be warranted due to a terminal condition or "extreme old age," disposes of your beloved pet. So one morning you might see two packages next to this high-tech, high-end, very clean machine: one would be kitty's waste and the other would be kitty himself, baled for easy and "emotionally tidy" removal. Also, a little red-orange light on the litter box would be flashing, indicating "Time to Get a New Cat." 

Black Velvet Karma Painting

I gave a local homeless guy $20 and now he asks for more every time he sees me. What do I do?

How many ants can a person kill before it becomes illegal?



Who is Gary Indiana and what is the joke surrounding him?

Skin

I found a young man's jacket / deep in the woods / on duvet of duff under pines / a type of pretend blue satin / its arms thrown back / as if in ecstasy / as if to channel this surge / some burrs / proudly attached at collar and cuffs / he was on his back / everything had been given up / and I believe he wanted me to see / his shed skin / in a holy place / you, weird blue skin / want weirdly / whether man or boy / lives or not / to play it forward

When I Walk

it is mostly to encounter branches
to believe the sentences of air
to walk into winter winds
which pack a grammar
and stare at who water has done
but does not remember
her library of stones
serves me in good stead
sometimes there is a canal
thin as fate, long poisoned
where golden carp spam their lives nevertheless
silt their whiskers in heavy metals
from a mill's century of overtime

Hate

That thing is blue / and up early in the morning / before the morning / nodding as Lucifer's bored star descends / as the moon too sets at this hour / going to an old station just to miss the train / and miss it all day

but

I tell you that station is closed / all these iron years / lockstep behind me/ I go to the station to see the wildflowers win / to see the scrub take over / they are not hate they are not even spite / they are the ocean / what people mow and sit and spit on / what nobody gathers up into bouquets / the real gist of years / the pretty brothers you have forgotten

Infinite Wick

Something tired is wrapped around
something not tired at all
infinitely awake
fat of a dead animal
carnal as fate
a flame
smacking its lips
sometimes
ridiculously scented

Leaf

the leaf
the orange leaf
and the hand
placed against the cold

leaf against space
orange against leaf
underhanded
a wind against the hand

it falls to rest
on the roof of the house
the rest
it is like a cut into looking

the leaf
its orange
something is invisible
it falls to rest

Small Painting

Beasts that exist outside of any air,
I suppose the stars are innocent monsters
who open and close their mouths

made of light and anything not made of air

is innocent.  but creatures made of air

they devour it and never have enough

unlike others are gaping like these fish in oil

Envoy

My eyes have changed shape
Less round more tortoise-shaped
Or so I believe on faith
As you believe many things

I am still making shadow animals
On my walls in the night
Childishly, but these are in my head
These are gods, and now, other placeholders

My fear even has become a wild horse
I grab its electric mane and take off
What point to lash reins to it?
It knows where I must be

Creed

I believe in the ordinary blue
that is here at this monument and is me

I do not see it guessing its own way
and I never saw how it became me

it pretends beyond whatever I say
things I know and all the reel of history

it is the merely pleasant that it wears away
when it has done what it has done

there is no peace I know outside today
except for the unconscious all around me

the only patience that appeals to stay
everywhere that I fall, mine it is mine

even the way that I relive the day
for as long as it is a shore and is me

Plant

This cat reminds me
when it wants
to eat,

a drink
the poor plant
cannot beseech,

brought inside
a human world
the way memory's

turned beggar,
called parasite
when it would prefer

to live outside

The Plant

     My mother's closest relationship when she died was with a plant.

     What can I say? She was a weird woman. And she was old. Old enough to have crotchets, eccentric ideas. I urged her to explore the possibility of a pet, the warmth and personality such a spirit might bring to her apartment and her life. But she insisted the plant was better than any cat or dog. And it was much less work. I say "plant," because when I first saw the green tropical thing in her digs, it wasn't even as tall as I am. It barely came up to my waist.

       Over the years, it grew much larger. Maybe I shouldn't say "plant." Perhaps I should call it what it is: a tree. Some sort of exotic palm tree. It did cut a somewhat different silhouette. If I speak candidly, there was always something about it that I found a little unsavory. I almost used the word "uncanny." What was I thinking? How can a tree be uncanny?  But if you had seen some of the things I had seen! The way she would throw her arms around that tree and whisper in the place where you might expect there to be ears. The way I would see her tip her drinks (Mother loved alcohol) into the plant's pot, as if she were sharing sips with a lover.

        "Won't that kill your beloved?" I would ask.

           "Hardly! She drinks more than I do, the lush," she giggled.

            Crazy old women. You just don't argue with them.

        My mother and I had our difficulties. She thought I didn't see her enough. She called fairly constantly, sometimes several times a day and even at night. I always reminded myself that a widow's lot can be hard. This wasn't easy on Natasha. Natasha is much younger than I am. Perhaps that is what is responsible for the imbalance of power in our relationship. Or maybe it is just N.'s somewhat overpowering spirit.

      Initially, N. played polite during these barrages of calls and exchanged a few perfunctory sentences with Mother before handing me the phone. But it wasn't long until she was answering the phone without saying a word, marching it directly to me, letting Mother guess correctly on the other end at what was happening: a freeze-out. But this was fine with Mother, since there was no love lost on her end for N., whom she considered a gold-digging (silver-digging? aluminum-digging?) wastrel.

         When Mother died suddenly, I was saddened, of course, but I would be lying if I said I didn't anticipate a warming between N. and me, a renaissance of increased goodwill and more charitable feelings, if you will.

            But there was a hitch.

            Mother's estate was rather hefty and she had been quite generous with me, her favorite son (if I am allowed to speak candidly). There was a proviso in her will, a ridiculous proviso, that I must "adopt" her beloved plant. Not legally adopt it. Nothing that crazy. But I must take it. Her tree, which had occupied the very center of her living room, like a performer in a nightclub, was now to be, perforce, relocated to our apartment.

           I looked at the attorney and said, "You're joking, of course."

       He explained that it was no joke. He was required to visit my dwelling to make sure the plant had indeed been relocated before the arrangements could be finalized for the disbursement of assets.

             N. sighed heavily at the news but we did what was required of us. We hired a moving company and soon Mother's beloved palm tree was ensconced in our living room. Its top fronds found themselves crowding up into our much lower ceiling. N. suggested we pick up some shears and "hack the shit out of it."

              So this is what we planned to do.

              Unfortunately, this is where the story takes a strange turn.

               While we were cruising with our shopping cart down the ridiculously wide aisles of the hardware warehouse where we hoped to find shears, a ridiculously handsome, ridiculously young man accosted us. He looked like the sort of chap you'd see on an afternoon soap, dark featured and oh-so-poised.

                He asserted that he was N.'s lover (he had actually followed us to the store in his hybrid, imagine!) and that they were to begin a life together anew. She had promised him. I laughed in his face. Then I saw N's sheepish face.

                She left HOMEWORLD with the twenty-five year old that night, climbed into his hybrid like a tall, displaced princess in a very poorly-written fairy tale, and I rarely saw her again after that.

                 I might have thought briefly about killing myself, but I no longer was in the mood to kill mother's beloved friend.

                                                    *

              I was alone for a few weeks, drinking again. But only for a few weeks, I promised myself. I remembered to share my screwdrivers and other cocktails with Mother's alcoholic tree. It did seem to perk up her leaves even more.

              Why did I say her leaves just now?

                Well, it's hard to tell you this part. It's hard to tell you that I began to see shadows around the tree when the room was dark, when I sat there all alone, sinking into the ugly black couch whose upholstery was always too much like melting butter for my taste. No support at all for a man. That was N.'s choice.

                 True, I was drunk. But I began to see feminine forms, voluptuous shapes, shadow breasts and legs turning. Dark legs, dark arms. Never did I see a face. Just this....woman shape.

                   Whenever I would jump up and switch on the light suddenly, trying to catch her, I would just laugh.

                It was nothing more than a palm tree. And I was a pitiful drunk.

                    I drank on. Once I went over and hugged her in the darkness. I pressed my body against her. I was hard. I heard a moaning. A satisfaction coming from her. My lips slobbered on her trunk. My hand found a wetness. A sort of wet bole. You've surely seen a bole on a tree before that looked like a woman's secret source. You've had to have wondered. When you were a young man. I didn't understand it. Not one bit.

                      And then Natasha came back.

                                                         *


            Natasha came home one night and just flipped on the light switch in my bedroom, found me passed-out drunk. She threw the bottle off our balcony. I heard the crash. She was shameless. She wanted to be taken back with absolute impunity. She took on the role of my savior. With a straight-face. I agreed immediately.

                 She looked at the tree with even more disdain now. She gave me to understand right away that the tree had to go. The lawyer was not going to come back and "check up" on us. He had as much as winked at us and said, "What you do later with that tree is your own business." Natasha had flashed him a grateful smile then. She really hated Mother.

                     So I came home from work one day soon after that and the palm had been lugged out onto the balcony. It was snowing out there. I came in carrying the groceries and set them down where I stood, just inside the front door. Somehow it bothered me so much. And how had she gotten that heavy pot out there? No way on earth she had done it by herself. Could it have been a strapping twenty-five-year-old who had given her the necessary assistance?

                    And there was the matter of my new inheritance. Was it really the fact that her young lover was "impossible" (her word) or was it that he was "practical" (my word)?

                     As the snow continued to become denser and denser throughout that evening, as Natasha and I sat there watching television together like two pilots on a long distance flight, I couldn't help stealing glances at her. By her, I mean the palm. She was barely visible in the white-out now as a squall whipped through our city.

                      Natasha grew furious at me for stealing glances at the plant, for making comments about the brutal weather.

                     "Don't you realize that tree is your Mother? She's in there, somehow. It's the last stranglehold she has on you. And you're...tree-whipped! It's me or her!"

                       People who look like models can generally get away with murder. But I had had a bad feeling, a hunch about Natasha for months now, and our breakup-makeup thing had not done the work of breaking a bad union and then resoldering it. I tersely explained that we were through.

                            N. packed what little of her things she had brought back to our apartment and left within the hour. She showed her usual degree of emotion. Think negative numbers.

                              My first act was to go out on the balcony and drag the palm back into the center of the living room. My living room now. Or should I say our living room still. The tree had been good company in N's absence.

                                                               *

                        I did go on one more brief bender. I did take a few days of vacation from work. But I told myself I was grieving the real loss of Natasha this time. The final goodbye.


                                                             *

                         One morning, after a night of heavy indulgence, I did wake up with that tree in bed with me. I was naked. Was the tree naked too? Aren't trees always naked? I didn't even open my eyes. I was listening to the whisper coming from her leaves. I remained pleasantly blind as a newborn kitten. I told her I wish I could take her to a tropical island, that we could have a getaway vacation together. But I just couldn't see her getting on a plane. We had a special kind of love, one that would work best on a desert isle, perhaps. I stuck my naked feet in her pot of soil and dug my toes in. It made me giggle like a schoolboy who has finally bedded his first crush in her parents' house. The humus was wet and gave nicely. I had nowhere to be for days and it was so comfortable, so real. So real. The earth is one sexy mother, isn't it? 

Plus

      For honesty's sake, it is better to tell your life story when you are tired.

      For the ultimate in honesty, it is best to tell your life story when you are dead.

                                                 *

      Leon was finishing up in hospice. He was not afraid to die, for he was tired beyond fear. He was obscenely old. He was alone in the world. He had, in fact, detached himself from the existence of his large, globous body entirely, except for when this corpus-soon-to-be-corpse managed to sneak a pointlessly punitive message of pain, a sort of ridiculous holler, an idiotic yahoo, through his pharmacological defense shields, which were tended not quite assiduously enough  by the not quite beneficent but nevertheless smiling and amiable nurses. The chief weapon in that arsenal, the one which deployed the shield, which protected  floating being from actually being here, was morphine. Morphine, that king of drugs, the king of no fucks given today, Ma'am.

      Leon stared at a little bouquet of flowers that had appeared while he was sleeping, which had suddenly materialized on what he liked to think of as the "floating table," that little service station on casters. The table floated like a ballerina. It was Ginger Rogers to any nurse's Fred Astaire. This bouquet came from nobody he knew. It wasn't for Leon. Rather it had been purloined, Leon intuited, from a nearby room in the hospice where someone had just checked out in that final way. Someone had checked out to go check into that dark hotel below our feet. The hotel of infinite capacity.  Some nurse, probably Jim, had rehomed these flowers. Probably the nurse thought he had repurposed kindness. But the flowers had merely moved from a room of the dead to a room of the dying. To say what, really? What is it that we imagine a gift of flowers says to the moribund or the dead? Leon remembered archeologists giving accounts of finding flowers (ancient pollen) in Paleolithic graves. So when we brought flowers into hospice rooms, when we decorated our funerals with them, we were being Neanderthals? We had come so far? Not at all in these moments. We had put no distance at all between us and that aporia the Neanderthals felt in the face of death. You might as well shoot Silly String as place a bouquet on a grave. It made Leon smile, despite his muzzy hopelessness.

      The man tried to hump himself up a little on his pillows and told himself he knew who it was that went this time. That silver-haired little smiling gamine across the hall. It must have been. He seemed to remember hearing a quiet commotion across the way in her room that morning. Asleep, he had known what it was and had known it was not worth rousing himself up into full consciousness. But now the memory returned. The sounds which had tweaked his consciousness. It had been nothing as loud as a resuscitation. What was her name? Oh yes, Barbara. How he hated when she hummed her way down the hall with her walker. And hummed her way back. But she was a nice little woman. No use denying that. He was sure he could remember the exact moment when she received the flowers, that cooing and excitement. A grandson had brought those, Leon knew, because the oversize adolescent had turned into his room by mistake at first, with the little bouquet in its vase palmed in one if his huge hands. He had redirected the peach-fuzz giant across the hall.

      Leon knew he was missing a clue here about the fragile woman. But it was irretrievable. It was meant to be irretrievable. Something about empathy, something about grieving even strangers. The morphine put the kibosh to that. Good.  It was good it was that way. Sleep in being awake and the sort of jigsaw sort of holds together.

      Leon stared at the flowers. Merciless beings. They were merciless because they were a puzzle. They were merciless because they were ferociously alive and determined to give meaning to color and form. In this late hour. Their own color and form. Or so they thought. Bother, bother, bother.. But they had already been snipped. They were in a plastic vase drinking water. They were in a hospice themselves. There were orange cups and cusps, pink labials and little dry white antennae. What a load of shit, to feel the vibrance and the engagement these things wanted with the man lying in the bed, waiting his turn. The vibrations they gave off.  But they wanted that engagement with anyone. They needed attention. They wanted a painter to see them. Obnoxious things. As bad as people, Leon thought. Or as good as them. Same difference. Bloom, attention.

       They were careful about  mirrors in the hospice. The staff discreetly hid them. There had to be full length ones, but they hung and hid on the dark sides of doors turned to walls. Leon knew the patients, clients, inmates--whatever the polite term was these days, he had forgotten--usually wanted to control the reckoning of their own reflection and all that it implied. One hobbled, one fell, one was often stooped if one was ambulatory at all. But then there were the funny cases. The ones who could have danced a jitterbug right up to the moment they went dark. Some were even young. Better not touch that with the mind. Isn't it funny how a thing like than can happen, Leon wondered. That sudden precipice. How you can think you're fine but be moments away? Then Leon giggled and suddenly died.

     A cerebral event. The nurse actually did nothing. She watched quietly from the doorway, calling no one. Though the machines were sounding a surprisingly polite alarm. There was no family to summon. No real alarm. She bit her thumb. At the nail.

      Leon didn't know she was there. She saw the man rolling over into it. She did the human thing then, approached and took his hand. His big hand covered in seborrheic keratoses, glued-down disgusting chocolate chips. Did he know she took his hand?

       No.

     

                                                                    *

     Suddenly, all the time in the world was there. It emerged from a beatific doorway that was somehow insanely wet.

      Leon lay on a large bed in a high-ceiling bedroom. A shadowy room protecting itself from a sunny afternoon. Dark blankets over long curtains over the tall windows. A vague insinuation of a city out there. So vague.

     Leon lay back and admired his voluptuous breasts.

     I am this way forever, Leon knew. He was right.

      His lover entered the room then. It was the male corollary of the tigress Leon had become. Everything was to be given. There was fruit in the bed.

       He entered the lovemaking from the other side. He realized instantly he had missed out his entire life. That he could not be entered in this way. It was criminal but he had not known.  But now it was here. Searing pleasure.

         The man making love to him did not look like him. But he knew it was him inside there. They must be the same.

          Here, here, here, his body said. Her body said. There, there, yes there, his body said.

          They were enfolded in a swath of light, for that is what this sort of living is.

            The tongue of flame is what he would remember and remembering, Leon knew, was now forever.

                                    *

         He was a dog in the night. Leon was on all fours, a black dog, trotting through the darkness, drinking from puddles. He drank the moon from puddles. It tasted so good.

        What is there in a dog's mind that is wrong?

        Well, there were shadows that teased, and the smells were infinite! There were threats and promises and worries. He noticed he still had his breasts. His voluptuous human breasts somehow seemed natural on the underside of his dog body.

           He would deliver them somewhere.

          His lover was far behind him now, Leon knew, down at the end of the longest street ever. It was the man in the apartment who had just taught him everything there is within his body, the power of surrender.

           Leon ran forward. The man would remain forever at the end of the long street, running towards the black dog. The distance between them would elongate infinitely. It was a beautiful thing. It was like a violin string that could go around the circumference of the world while being played. No worries.

           Leon arrived at an opening in the earth. It was like a cave but it went down.

            He wagged his thick black tail.

             He went down.

     
                                   *

        Going down the slope of the cave, Leon realized how much smaller he had become. He had six legs, not four. He was small but he was immense within himself. He was still the exact size of the universe, whether he was a voluptuous woman, a black dog or the thing he was now.  He was inside the mind of an ant. It was all armor, that head. He had mandibles and a skull of some strange shell. But it was comfortable. Designed for comfort. Ergonomic. Home.  It was like waking up as the moon and knowing you were the moon.

             Leon was slowing down. His body had antifreeze in it. Some ants behind him were closing the entrance to the cave (or anthill) now. Closing the cold out. They were doing such a great job. He felt the tender ministrations as if they were hands touching his body, setting it aright. As if it were a mother tucking him in.

              He approached a group of brethren ants. They were all touching their antennae to each other, slowly. They were closing in a circle. The antifreeze was doing its work. The bodies were sealing up from the inside. Winter was moving over the anthill. He knew he was safe though he heard the wind. He felt so lucky.

             What if some of us were left outside, Leon worried. He asked the other ants in ant language (he was quite fluent) whether they should form a rescue party, unseal the cave, the anthill, and search for any stragglers.

           Stragglers will be fine, the other ants said in ant unison.

           This could be translated, Leon knew, as ant death is not real; only ant language is real. Do not betray this moment.

             Leon had to agree with this sentiment. He realized his empathy for the earth outside and the stragglers left for the winter blades of ice to shear away was a primitive holdover from the time before ant-consciousness had made everything all right again. Evolution had been running backwards all this time. It was the higher-ups, the ones who stepped on us, who had it all wrong. To pity them, Leon thought, is useless.

      So he slept instead in the bosom of his siblings, who had been waiting for him.

The Sound of a Cat Getting Shot

The sound of a cat getting shot before morning. Let me give you a paragraph on that. I will need thousands of baths and it won't be enough. See, it cried out. As if the death was not instantaneous, no, not as if, the death was not instantaneous. Somehow (the bullet must have entered the hindquarters) the body could be a vortex of consciousness, so the pain was allowed to enter the universe. The pain beat the annihilation, the void, not only to the nerves but the neurons. And I hear all these things as living textures, as if this were my own skin grown in a Petri dish, somehow still a phantom limbness in a little glass vessel. The space tumbles over and over itself. The horror. Though I know he had a gun, I ran out into the night of the morning. I stood there in my pajama bottoms and accused in my blindness. I wanted the fucker to know there had been a witness. The witness was an ear. I wished him dead so bad. The cat lived out there and was harmless. But the cat also belonged to some kids. He hid, the fucker. Somewhere in the green that sheltered in darkness, he pulled back. I couldn't find the animal. The horror if it lived. This is all paper, see, everything alive becomes paper. I went back in and murdered him. Over and over I murder him. Then I heard the car start up. The awful sounds of that engine that's nearly dead. It sounds like a car engine made out of tin foil. He drove off way too fast. He shot the cat because of the sound his car engine makes. Also, he's white and they're black, the kids, the cat is black. I will do drawing after drawing, the sound of the cat getting shot.  As I draw, I will relish the murder, his scrawny neck crushed between my two hands like melting tangerines.

Confess

The egomaniacs in art are as the salt in the sea. But we are the waves. As the waves. That strikes me now as an egomaniacal thing to say. For the sun is shining.  But we must speak as the ocean. We do as the waves, putting salt in touch with other salt. Such friction. It is funny work. I was walking along the ocean one morning this October and a rose had washed up in the night. It was bedraggled from the waves, all that travel. Her terrible, lovely hair. Entwined in a white grosgrain bit of string. There must have been a wedding party at sea. I visualized them barefoot. I visualize you barefoot. Always. This tells you more than I wish to confess.

That Was the Year

That was the winter I went around making false graves. I would tie sticks together into crosses with twine and plant them in the earth in the middle of a forest where few would pass. I was often on all fours clearing snow and leaves with my hands, which were like paws in my big gloves. The gloves were ancient. They were so ancient, they remembered you.  Or I would erect little cairns with white stones. Once, I made a memorial cross using an old bear trap I had found. Such a horrible mouth to think of there in the darkness. In the night. Often, I wrote first names on these monuments, Christian names mostly, but sometimes I chose names that used symbols from other alphabets or languages that are ideograms. Google would help me make the graves. Sometimes I used the names of characters from novels who had meant something to me. I laid these beloved characters in the earth, on which they had never truly lived. For instance, I made a grave for Bartleby. Sometimes I would want the people who would stumble upon one of these hallucinations to think it was an animal's grave rather than a human's. Or I would want them not to be sure. Many names have this ambiguity. The important thing is the feeling the person would have and how the grave might change the person for an instant or longer. I don't think these made people afraid, although it probably did make them wonder. And fear is leaven, anyway. This had nothing to do with art and everything to do with being a person. This is, I suppose, a failing. The thing I didn't want to tell you is that you have to actually dig a grave for this to be convincing. Even if there is no one, no animal, no human within it. But this is good exercise. My blood pressure came down that year.


--after a photograph by Walter Stoltz

Levi's Photo Workshop (18 Wooster St.)

was such a cool idea.

Way to go, Soho!

R.I.P.

Yes, I realize you can rent high-end vintage cameras, have them shipped to you and then return them after a certain number of days of use. But I love the way this was there on the street and community-based and meant to foster creativity.

I Wonder

I wonder if there are people who intend to vote for Trump who don't realize that if he gets elected the National Guard will be in so many major cities at once, until it is overtaxed and overwhelmed and the barricades all fall. Many of these cities will be shut down for long periods of time.

People who look at these Trump rallies and are not disturbed that it is only a sea of white faces (and mostly old white faces) and that so many of our neighbors and fellow Americans are not represented there at all, are sad cases. They are really not good countrymen, not good Americans. They don't believe in unification. These are the believers in an American caste system.

You don't have to worry about Trump's finger on The Button. You have to worry about Trump's ability to abuse power and the police state which he will attempt to institute. He will fail, but it will be after so much bloodshed. If you think life is difficult now, take 1968 and multiply it by a hundred.

I know we should be reassured that he's down in virtually all the polls. But I have this horrible, sinking feeling that his brand of demagoguery might work on the uneducated and those who will accept a Pyrrhic victory if it means their racism can be reflected down upon America from the White House.

It's just unfathomable that so many poor and middle class people are cutting their own economic throats by voting for a man who has made it abundantly clear he intends to defend the interests of the one percent and corporate America. He is repulsed by the people who adore him most.

(don't forget to vote)

In the Future

     A man had killed his wife and her lover. He had done it in the classic style, right there in the matrimonial bed where he had discovered them enjoying their blood sport. The case was not adjudicated in the usual manner, for it was discovered that the man had complete belief in his innocence, indeed he was innocent, as he had used neurotech to excise not only all memory of the murder, but all memories of his wife involving her lover. He had curtailed the story, substituting a narrative which ended the day before he had discovered his wife had a lover (the day he had murdered them).  He had used a bootleg Chinese program. So he knew nothing of his wife's murder. Such innocence is a social problem. Forensic neurologists testified that they had discovered the tell-tale signs of erasure throughout the man's brain. At that point in history, such erasures were not yet done in a seamless manner, neurologically speaking. For those who specialized in such work, there would be traces they could search for and find. The technology used left its own little markers and such bootleg technology rarely came without some largely harmless spam serving the political agenda of the country which had manufactured it. You might see some political shifts in the individual as well. They might be a walking billboard defending that foreign country's interests. That part of the investigation sometimes yielded very funny stories. There was even a television program about that. It was a humorous show. You had to be careful with what you bought on the street and used on your brain. Murderer X had actually moved to a new city, started a new job, deliberately lost most of his friends and acquaintances. He didn't like the feelings they aroused in him, how they looked at him as a guilty man and attempted to make him feel like a guilty man. Because most of them knew he was guilty; the facts were pretty bald. He had established a new life and it wasn't a bad one. He had just distanced himself from his family and friends because he didn't like the cognitive dissonance that came with this set of people. In due course, he was found guilty and sentenced to have his memory restored. The false end of the narrative he had contrived was removed and the truth was re-ingrained. He would be tested for cognitive revisitations of the murder while in prison. If the process (call it guilt or self-punishment) showed signs of lessening over the years (and this often happened with inmates) his mind would be wiped, retooled, and the memories of his love for his wife would be "freshened" to bring a new and revitalized sense of loss much closer to the surface. If the murderer in question lacked guilt, there was a special process whereby it could be successfully simulated. So even sociopaths were no longer immune from corrosive regret. Also, the diminishing pain of the punitive sense of being imprisoned (after five years or so, the mind adjusts) would be "fixed," refreshed at the same time. In the future, one could not "get used" to prison. Prison did not allow this to happen. The way some might touch up the grey in their hair, the State could now touch up the pain in the conscience of its prisoners.. It was a great help and a great pleasure to those involved in doing the work of the fatherland, with the rare exception of those few nervous nellies who suffered pangs of conscience, who might still believe the rank doctrine of the autonomy of the human mind. But these were soon themselves corrected through the miracle of neurotech, if they wished to remain in their well-paying jobs. Most exercised this option and were fine literally overnight.



---after Foucault

If

If the shadows of trees are upon me, if the shadows of the leaves of trees and the shadows of the needles of conifers are dappling my face, the shadows of humans are probably not upon my face. If this condition is true, there is probably less, possibly nothing, to explain. But the thought occurs to me that there is nothing to explain. And I have just put this thought down in words like green leaves in shadow. Why does the thought occur to me? To exonerate myself?  It is a parasite like a caterpillar. The trees themselves do not care for solitude. After all, they are all together. But we believe it is solitude. Probably they are communicating, possibly they even comment on my passing through their shadows. They look down on me in the literal sense. Possibly they do in the other sense too. But I don't worry about it, since they are sworn to their green silence. They talk when the wind picks up, they sound disturbed, but possibly this is an erotic moment for them. Though they lose the most leaves then, in wind, you always lose something in erotic moments, don't you? That's largely the point. Now I feel I have intruded into their secret lives, even if only at the level of speculation. Speculation is an intrusion. I look up and shadows pour down on my face. It is the money shot of darkness. It is cool and smells like nothing. Shadows are the money of the forest. Shadows are the money of trees. I come here to steal and pretend I do not steal.




---after a photograph by Marta Bevacqua

There is No Pain

There is no pain you can inflict on the past versions of myself. Not even the "me" that was here yesterday. I have slipped it as perfectly as the insect that molts. It is an outfit removed and left on a bed by an open window. Eventually, this is what the name entire becomes.

Nevertheless, it can rise and return to you, if you wish.

Somehow (still) it can embrace you, this emptiness like clothes.

It has such a primitive heart.

Maybe

Maybe you are strong and already know your way. But I have put these magic gloves on the street for you to find. Just in case. They are not mine. Actually, they are not "gloves." They are mittens. They are a child's mittens. I figure you will find them since you are a creature of wandering. Although this is an empty street with no houses and only trees are watching here. The symmetrical spiderweb patterns with the eyes on them is for you to appreciate the starkness of such childish beauty. Childish beauty, like what quantum mechanics is doing down under the day. All day today.  Didn't you fall in love in childish beauty, with it all your life?  I have placed them, the foundlings, as they would appear in the "natural world," i.e. left on the left, right at right. Although the universe has other symmetries. They are not to keep you warm, but they might. It is bald winter, after all. You may have to stretch them to fit your hands. As you are not a child, except in matters of total darkness. You are totally dark. So you stumble towards a woman's body. Another one then. In a closet you take her. The women's bodies are as illuminated, lit up, x-rayed. They have dark grammar. You should pick up the mittens. The gloves. Call them gloves if you must. You are on your way there. To the place where there are no children. Where the closets are no longer filled with women facing into darkness, but actual brooms and true darkness.


--after a photograph by Atsushi Ito

She was embarrassed to have to go into the street with the three boys who had all known her. Well, they hadn't known her, but they had known her. The crazy way her mother talked.

She thought of the movie Carrie.

So she stood around in the street while her mother watched from the picture window. The girl was picking some peeling rubber off her mint Converse she had drawn on with a pen, running her fingers through her...stop watching me, she grimaced at the window. The curtains banged shut like an impossible old maid, muted.

Rach smelled two of his fingers and then crossed himself nervously, not even realizing he did it.

"What food do you smell?" Nial asked. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Bananas? Do you smell bananas?"

"No," she said.

He had been practicing to be a hypnotist using YouTube. Which she figured meant he was practicing to be a rapist.

(He had to be buying those ugly clothes for something.)

"Barbush barbush barbush barbush barbush" practically hummed someone in stoner monotone.

What she had been doing before her mother chased her from the house:

She had been dissolving various colored dyes in glasses of water in the kitchen. Peering at them like a Russian scientist. She was conscious of the soft fact that she liked the high ceiling in that room and how it was always deserted in there since her mother was useless. Psychic. Useless. The sound of colors dissolving in water was no sound at all. The air was cleared of some sort of static by this process.

It was as though she were holding the hand of water like a mermaid.

She had been watching the colors plume out into phantasmagoria, vivid arabesques and serpentines. Sea serpents and orgasms. She was a girl, after all. She was these essences, she knew. Was she any good? If she just listened, she knew it would be the way she wanted in life somehow. If she just listened. So she stood on the street with the three boys who had all known her and wanted to know her again and she wondered. Was she really any good? And what good were these boys with her mother behind the curtains she was holding in both  hands now, unsubtle. Her so-called psychic mother who fought and pleaded and fought again with banks like lovers. Her bankrupt psychic mother. Who could not cook or suck a man's cock to save her life. And that was the woe of both of them, wasn't it?

She chased off a perfectly good trucker, a perfectly good idiot, this summer. And he worked ridiculous overtime. Solvent and invisible. What an idiot her mother was.

If she could just haul off and hit her in the face. She knew the feeling but couldn't quite own it, tame it. Punch her. But through that iron curtain. While she cowered in her pusher manners behind the walls of the house they would eventually lose. Let it just happen. Let them ride the wind. Maybe she could pare off from her then. On the wind of shared failure, the way people do. The way people divorce reasons. Or promises. There is beauty in such errors. Such fuck-ups.

"What do you smell now?"

It was Andy, mocking the august mannerisms of the junior rapist-hypnotist.

She was inside the color blue. It could not touch her if she remained inside the walls of the color blue This was an actual place like a prison, the color blue, but with this difference: the rest of the world was looked out and that externality was the prison. Blue means within. This shade of blue was a vivid sapphire. It was a roaming spirit condensed in a still person. It was what gave water its sexual prowess. The sexual powers that water has at night, all night. Wild water. Even the water in a night bathtub has a shade of this.

Neon has nothing on water, except when neon reflects in it. Then it might win. Like a serpent against a mongoose. The mongoose has nasty powers. You know Riki Tiki Tavi. She let the smoke out slowly from her nostrils. She did it right under her mother's glass nose. Let her press behind the curtains into the glass of street looking. Fairy pimp-mother. Let her fuck off, let her hear this thought, psychic bitch.

So her mind wondered and the boys touched each other. Their hands covered each other's hands like lovers. They pushed. They walked backwards. Their language skipped beats like hearts will do when the closeness is all anticipation. The boys. Nervous coiled springs in them like you see in hunting dogs. She noticed how they were doing this over and over. Unconscious, since they were boys. Boys are unconsciousness, she thought. She figured there must be exceptions. But they were lovers in this way. These three in the street. Dancing into each other. Giddy not awkward. They were like Three Graces. Maybe a little homely but still.

Three Graces. With a basketball under the arm of one.

"That must smell like your body odor," she said. But she said it soft, so friendly. So that it was a tease. A sexual poke. A sexual poke given out of boredom, acedia. The sexiest kind of flirtation. The insincere kind with nuance.

She wondered if she would be sentenced to be the insincere flirt (the word is cocktease, she knew) all her life?

Why was it a question? Why was she sentenced to asking questions instead of making declarative statements like the idiots do?

"Do you want to play basketball?"

"No. Kerry." She had to make it clear she understood the real beg there.

"Behind the 7-11..."

"I know behind the 7-11, Kerry." She was forced to be stern with this horny boy nostalgic already for what had happened over and over in his mind.

Did he really not wash his hand for days? You hear the thing.

The dog on the carpet with his belly upturned. (Look at my yummy, well-behaved balls.)

Just imagine the power, she thought. Why am I not abusing the power? She thought she must be crazy like her mother. Was she merely "psychic" too? To call oneself a psychic was to confess one saw oneself as passive before and within the universe. It was not a magical power. It was a form of usual victimhood. There was a sisterhood. A weakness. It was to believe in feeling over knowledge over feeling. Folding over knowledge over feeling. Like laundry.  How did she know this when she was just fifteen? She just did. A puppet. If you sit on playground swings alone, you will eventually become a philosopher. Everything's eventual. She was a girl philosopher. She had spilled her essence but not her thoughts all over the crooks of these boys who believed that brown longnecks behind the 7-11 were magic talismans on a road somewhere.

She was told that she was prettier than the prettiest girl in the best magazine inside the 7-11..With her legs pinned back like a Japanese butterfly.

She should know.