Growl, Growl Growl
Cambridge
fat
(untitled 1)
(untitled 2)
Adam, your memory
Something to Music playing somewhere, again.. (untitled3)
Ah, the Contemplative Life
Desdemona, Gregory & Alexandra
Sonnet on the American People
Salvo
Hypothetical Speculation
(untitled 4)
. . .
. . .
Ideas and Mike
Resting his left shoulder on the wall outside the pizza awning, using its shade from the decreasing summer heat in September, there's this kid in jeans and interesting shoes. Just a kid, like some pool hustler waiting to con his next patsy, but that would be another time from now. And then a competing herd of driving taxicabs races unchained by the green light, he looks over the other way, he's seen this excitement before, so it doesn't impress him. A woman carrying many bags of groceries: you can see right through the thin and ripping plastic: she has bought the store-brand cola and saved twenty-five cents: she has bought the unscented detergent in a strangely-shaped bottle: her apples are being crushed by the milk. Is she hobbling slightly, only in her fifties? She might be in her sixties, her pace slows. What this place does to humans, she thinks, she knows she has many blocks to go before she sleeps. Think if everyone floated like ice-skaters, and this cool kid lifts the burden. But they don't meet actually; his eyes only turn to her after she has passed him, and she looks in the window of the shoe-store. That's the problem with suede; one stain and you might as well give it to the Salvation Army. You'd laugh, too, if you saw what happened next: a boy in a Michael Jordan T-shirt dropping his dripping slice of pizza right face down on the filthy sidewalk--forget it, it's ruined. The kid, still leaning, snarls. The boy's about to cry but he's with his friends, the traffic light turns green again and buses roar with fumes, the degradation of this little kid with the Michael Jordan t-shirt-- he's had enough already. Aw, Mike, when you go next time, stay away. We can't have any more heroes here, not today. The boy looks up and curses -- that's the right response to have -- the woman she's past the record store and halfway home, but the kid under the awning is a different story, he knows there just ain't no justice in this world. He's fixing his eyes at a miniskirt across the street, he smiles and looks down at his fingernails and sees the light of the sky reflected in them: haven't they all heard? Ha, forget about it. . . .
. . .
Growl, growl, growl
"I want to have more stemware," she said, immaculately, to her strange husband of fourteen years. She had in her mind something delicate like the giblet of a turkey. She said, immaculately, "And I want an eight-pronged fork to serve my lox." The day trampled on, an elephant in Africa, slowly becoming dead. She was so clean as the said it, her nails polished to the quick, plastic red diamonds, pattering on the lucite. Clickatak, clickatak, clikatakakatak, as the rope which trails behind a speedboat slapping against the skin of water like so many paddles with a cane, or like the clicks of a woodpecker, in whose body lies the reincarnated antisoul of Avalokitesvara, mightily upset about the mix-up in Tibet, trying to peck out his grievances in morse code, but remembering that he was an alinguistic creature. No one home but the breeze. She would get her stemware from Luria's, service for ten, suitable for mediocre chardonnay, with prices rolled back to make room for the new merchandise. Here is your receipt, here it is, dear, he said as he reconciled his checkbook with the figures. . . .
. . .
Cambridge
I read from our mutual friend that you've given up on politics, and moved on to a new set of friends in merchant banking. There is construction about to start outside my apartment window now; the air is hanging there. I can't believe how I looked in that photo, grinning stupidly, tie crooked, and I have to find out secondhand, from our mutual friend, in the letter she sent to this center of the globe. But I look around and see inanimate objects I've attached myself to-- you're going into moving money, so much the better. I know so little left about you, we had a nice few talks when I was in last, now if I go back it'll be awkward for us both. I won't come back. With this wintry dawn, and the scaffolding ready for the workers, I'm fine with the clean memory of it, the ageless wood that's seen a hundred sets of us kids come in, and change, and end up bankers, it's immune enough to our bustling around. The plants are still tended carefully by the same oblivious gardeners, and it doesn't matter to them or their keep who once went where with whom, and how little they have together travelled since. . . .
. . .
fat
The pig, she eats and eats the chocolate pudding, she covers her face in it, yum yum it's good it's good, she slurps the parts she can reach with her tongue, she wipes her cheeks on her sleeves. . . .
. . .
(untitled 1)
Everything worth noting is beyond belief: the realm of reason is like Europe without colonies. If you listen to the corny hearts of animals, you have to work to be surprised by what you find, but if you look at the works of the smiling idealess, it will be charred and black and terrifying. Imagine Heidegger the collaborator wearing a dark knit skiing cap, and being apprehended by the constable. So thought offers no refuge from the infant's heart. We come into this world crying, demanding to be returned, not thinking of anyone else, barely knowing they exist and that's how we leave it, at the last moment-- why should we expect the interim to be so radically different? . . .
. . .
(untitled 2)
The music ended, and I let my hands fall to my sides, resting on the blanket, as the night slopes coolly towards the wintry dawn. There is movement outside, the construction will start in four hours. The air hangs here, in mock expectation. That's how I read it late at night after the music ends but I'm too far from the radio to put on something new. I could pretend to listen to the silence of the incandescent bulbs, but that wouldn't be too true, as I'm just sitting and ready to sleep. . . .
. . .
Adam, your memory
Your simple venom, your pleasant indignation, I love your grand sense of injustice, the mopping up of your venom off the linoleum, the signatories to your statement of indignation, the helium balloons you attach to the scales of injustice. An adorable lack of memory, a young sense of the sublime, I like to slake your thirst for poetry, the natural way your memory erases itself after a day, your timing, your unwittingly submitting the sublime to be ridiculed: I remember when you said that the world is a beautiful work of poetry. A nice aquisitive greed, a very inastute way of desiring, I have to say I admire this unabashed animal riding the crestfallen waves of the nation of greed, its whole life--yours--a neverending turn of desiring, sneakers and records and accoutrements of the rational animal. It's always a curious feeling when I think I must take my leave of your passion, foolishness, and pride, when I think that it's something I must be feeling that I must have left behind my trappings of evaluation, a similar obvious pride in watching you grow so identically old. . . .
. . .
Something to Music playing somewhere, again..
I open my mouth to the dust of city sidewalks that haven't been swept since before
World War II,
lick up with relish every last crumb of dirt that remains
unkicked by the pathologically-primped teenage boys,
their hair up in a whirling mass of chemicals,
their arms around their dates playing the floozy,
trying desperately to appear bereft of a thought,
shouting on pedestrian malls,
playing around the closed windows of another crafts store
and a different place, somewhere lost, somewhere,
in between carrot juice and pizzarias and verdant oases of
wholegrain rolls, and I grab with delight a baker's dozen of them,
and chew them greedily, a little drooling out the edges
of my mouth, and I eat them and eat them and eat them
here in the city at the edge of the center of the world.
Another pleasant fucker who's the most important chosen pisshead
in the universe, he's sweating through his hair-wax,
his combover is coming undone,
his ambience gives me this sense of dread,
and I pass the savings along to you.
The man is full of reasons not to live, and what would you do
if you had everything in the world to choose from?
I tell you, I'd light up with despair,
I'd want to meet someone in a bar and talk away the time--
When is it that there's next something going on--
those teenage pistols have gone off somewhere to copulate,
or die trying: valiant salmon in black and white Eurotrash.
What was it that was interesting here? Oh yes, but that's not
around anymore, there's just something that I might as well
do since I have the time, something, somewhere.
.
.
.
. . .
(untitled 3)
A hundred different characters, as if scratches in cuneiform, leave a brief impression of themselves as the sun debates whether to rise or to set and another day takes its place in line, your eyes, I'm afraid, are what I remember: I've tried for longer to keep a more, somehow to keep a more, a real impression of your face, or an idea of what your body used to feel like, a scratch on my memory, this time like a quickly recorded LP from the nineteen seventies, playing itself over once more, but I only know the words to the chorus, I've tried line by line to remember, but days fold into one another, and soon it's months gone by, and no postage stamps from your country, and more, more than I feel suitable to say, I had something I had wanted to say, I used to always have something important for you, that's something I remember, now I just shuffle through the poorly-drawn characters, flat like the waddling scrawl of someone new to this language, and the suns are above and below us again, and I sort of remember the impression your shoulders left on me when I saw your body first, shrouded in play, believe me I have tried line by line to remember. . . .
. . .
Ah, the contemplative life
I'm not always in a haze like this, he said through the mirrors of his tweed, turning something herringbone into a lame sequin Carol Channing sort of thing, with broche and smits, and he said, hey you know, I'm not always full of dazed amazement, and I imagined his spectacles momentarily clean of the roundabout psychedelic waves of look at this, and some sort of nearly warm methodology of fascination, more than measly yet slightly less than a real slice, and warming itself happily in the dripping oven. I'm not always full of the stuff of life, he was about to say, I'm not always ecks why and zed, he was thinking, and the words just filled themselves in, like an orchestra tuning up for the Eroica, and a timpanist who misses his note. I'm not always baroque and bedreamed and belly-up to the nonsense of fickle races, you know, you know, you know, and I had an idea that I did, but lost it somewhere in the Miso soup, and thought of Corned Beef and France, and papillons and Babylon and scientific fruit, and idolmans and Lenny fans and pieces of conceit. Who was all lost that time, I later wondered when I returned to my favorite position, seated as it were in the center of a large optical array, thinking let this soak through me, I in the middle of this ocean, I a ray in the sunlight, let me just sit here and soak it up, and progress in elucidation and never have to leave the position of bathing in footcandles of C, the linkage and the key, the first ray then created, warmed by radiation and tanning myself silly. . . .
. . .
Desdemona, Gregory & Alexandra
1. Desdemona, you delicious idea, you charming long-armed scion of vanity, something like a curved oak footstand is what you remind me of. I'll love you forever if you'll love me back, Desdemona, my footsoldier of the country life, you belong with a squire, an earl or a thief, and Desdemona you've always been true to your ideals. Musing on you is like sitting quietly. I wonder if I likened you to a flavour of crushed-ice drink, as a Slurpee, which it would be. Perhaps you would be Papaya, or maybe Cola. But most certainly you would be like a daquiri, without a silly parasol, Desdemona, because you've got class. Desdemona, you penguin, you've got a ring of amethyst and something in emerald, you have something in you, that perhaps is mineral. 2. Gregory, a chanteuse by night, layers on his pancake makeup, to greet the salacious customers, who have paid dearly for the privilege. Washed clean in the cold shower, his skin moistly takes the cream readily, and he is ready to greet the massed, sweating humanity outside. Alexandra, dripping with jewels, steps into the glistening rain outside her limosine, but of course she is dreadfully unhappy, and with good reason: her life is an empty charade of a nineteenth-century pipe dream. She mimics the mannerisms of people long decayed, in the name of ideals she does not understand. It is the life she knows, and someday I'm sure she'll find love. In the maze of fornications that is our city, that crosstitch of misery and perversion, drained together in peace like penne in a colander, Gregory and Alexandra met earlier this day outside the cafe called 'Maestro,' decorated with vintage instruments. Alexandra had eaten there a pastry for a pretty penny; Gregory was just passing by en route to the drugstore, to buy himself some medication. 3. The world is one kind of a place. . . .
. . .
Sonnet on the American People
November 10, 1994
Hooray for the American People, they are so intelligent because they watch much TV-news. They have spoken, we respect their word, even though it's misspelled, the fuckers. They have endorsed hatred and fear and poverty of spirit, they have swept in catastrophe, callousness, and greed, they have lurched from their tv-chairs long enough to grab a beer and destroy the environment, you gotta love them, you gotta love them. Hooray for you, the American People, you made unfocused, inarticulate rage a virtue. You have made reflective thought a weakness, you stand for nothing. Worse yet, the greed-shit, toady Americans, they invoke words like freedom, liberty, and so on, and use them at their disposal like ridiculous plastic forks. . . .
. . .
Salvo
Hornrimmed glasses and all, Jerome was a man destined to write love poetry, in the grand tradition, the tradition of Shakespeace, Byron, and Auden, pederasts the lot of em, Jerome in his tweed, Jerome going from place to place, talking of Michelangelo's great works in marble, the nudie David, symbol of a dead city-state, crowded with uffizis and jewelries, delicate save the explosions by the mad bomber, destroying a botticelli for your trouble. Jerome was a man who didn't know it, he was a man who tried in vain to love, but only loved the idea. Nothing beside remains there, nothing but remains, the half-cannibalized corpse of a dead race, the worship of some shells or other, Jerome in his costume arrayed in laurels, like an oily, naked, dripping Greek youth, his uncircumcised prick the ogle of eons, laurels, and wrestling. . . .
. . .
Hypothetical Speculation
Shares in dreams like shares in stock rise and fall with the yen and the wanting. Nothing causes nothing to indent itself or space itself alone, differently, like a poem. We say to ourselves 'I am satisfied,' at radically different occasions. I generalize less and less these days, quietly despairing of.. I structure myself, not my lines, myself, in a way that I think will be pleasing. But beauty's in the eye, of whom in this case, that's the dilemma, and boring. Waiting for drama, costumed, scored, subtle power, emotion, and volume. Now we clear it in ways of profit, transmuting our grief into work. I, just I. Realizing gain, adjusting basis into loss: Rimbaud's last writing, a list. Requests from malarial Aden, like laundry, and my just imagined Verlaine. An imagined Charleville, Paris, and jail, a dreamed never realized season in hell. It's all(:) as if it happened, what would it be like then. It's all(:) as if it happened, what would it be like then. . . .
. . .
(untitled 4)
Rememberance of things past is for me like a box of chocolates, you never know what's going to be full of bullshit.
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