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.