Hoops billyroved my targrave steed & nestled plump round a tingloss window. Weather incensed & multi-coloured poured over the sheep coats, the head-down grazers & anxious swallows & squirrels. Up again & rested as the sun falls, the river rolls, time drips & drops, I’m myself & who else? Recuperation is daily, we’re all on a very short rope & it’s nailed to our hearts. Books are comfort. A warm, well lit lonely & carpeted room, between the beds, on the floor, the drawers are breathing, friendly, the bath a casket, sleep a death & now I’m reborn clean, on another highway.
I was nailed to a stick & lifted above the crowd, a clown among clowns, an inflatable fool, nose glowing like a painful red pepper & cheeks rouged- the orchestra played & I was forced to dance: no one fired bullets at my feet—the stage was simply heated & I jumped: the ceiling ripped open by a magic hook on a chain, which was passed through my solar plexus & I was lifted out, to the great relief of all.
It’s a long story of minerals, diamonds of flesh, midnight armies and vegetables at dawn moving in opposites, a chalice of froth & bile. “Froth & bile, bile & froth, turn your heard to the right and cough” –“Bile & froth, froth and bile, some got money & some got style.’ Anyways, it’s a long story. I’m made out of cannonballs & curly hairs, the nights remain vast, Summer crept away somehow, then Winter & Spring. Days fell like cards on a line, years immolated. A yellowing tale? Some kind of classic? Yeah, crossing a bridge & a banjo.
One life ain’t long enough, especially the way I go. North Dakota, I takes my time, slow boats & overcoats. I’m up in a balloon, running towards another mangler, a windmill, & beware the wall of splat. My heart ain’t big enough. Long story for my friends, too. The boy who married her twice. The won who quit & quit & finally got over. My friends, greying, still laughing. Meanwhile the cities change, records disappear, the lights on the ground multiply, and a big guy’s cryin’.
I’m thinking about the butterflies, the money owed/ the time elapsed & the time to go/ anger in a face/ beetles and celler mold/ big plans not quite/ enough to launch/ a rocket or a row boat? pursued across the ice flow/ tortured with telephones/ threatened with lunch, lawyers & long distance calls/ why should I care?
What kind of questions do you ask on a day like this? What’s the message? I’m on a train, trying to stay awake. Green pastures, Summer winds, blue & cloudy skies, so far from home. Connections to make, retreat from engagement into head leaning? What town is this, anyway? “I have arrived, only to leave again in the morning.”
The children are tiny & the wind is lost. They dance to trance & prance seaward, leeward, dodging elements of the spider cleave. I’m in pieces, after midlife, as football players burst in & vomit, at a loss for air, tossed, enraged, seasoned, shrill. “Open the window & let me dive” said Abraham. It was a long way to the lobby & he had to pee… Booth kept staring & stealing the moment, afraid to calm. The heaters claw, the clocks chaw, the night is raw & chafed, the beach was pinned down, littered with abode & the world war black.
I need help & get it. Over & over I’d fall then fly then flee & free all of mine. Over the tundras, the clandestine filaments, primrose, pecked in ordure. Galivant, supreme monochrome, devious & sprouting, troubled & wry, amid soft downpours & other silkings of the nude, the neo-meyer, the closure of the Clancy’s modern, and spic & span as an old General.
Here it comes: “O Death pass me over for another year.'”A sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach,”where I live.” Previous obsessions were a six week bout with moral paranoia. I feel dead already, the fear of cancer got me to the doctor in the first place. ‘”Here it comes, hits me where I live” & that way I’m dead already, lying in the dark, waiting for sleep to come.
Red blinking light/ exhausted sentinel’s voice like a river/ a radio, a ribbon & a road. Help me, clownman. I’m delayed by a spastic ponce, dogs in devilment, crows. I’m mud, silting to the bottom. The bed remains. A board of raftdom, a rack, a vacation in Barbezonian splendour. Help me, Mick-ite, ok? I’m dyin’ over here. I need a hit more than Queenie needs a jukebox dime.
Connected in the weary ways & twisted too, like a country boy in trouble, but far & far, over Alamain trusted by deceitists, governed by blue clouds, and crushed in general by scotch work misdemeanors. Call me keen at sobbing, a spin merchant of my own gale, word mischief & battered by misconnects, in the wary weeze of simulacrum, soledad.
In the beach side room with the pom girl/ the flag used me for a blanket/ the myriad overhead & the poverty within/ the pseudo cowboy’s voice on the sound system/ onions & garlic.Smooth & long creamy & rolls compliant. The radio drone the palm frond rustle. The dinner bell. The time like a razor wound. The end of the good life was a long time ago. A fish jumps a mile outside, it’s a marlin, a young fish, an impossible force. Garlic & onions. Celery.
It’s been a week now of automatic doors, stale odors, trains & plains, skytoppers, faces in front & waters in back. Anxiety balances on a nail, the whole dark brick night set to topple & scream, collapsed to room size & a bare ceiling bulb, but I’m protected by the power of prayer, and by you, love.
My mind wanders & some nights never comes home. The heat shuts down & the bodies go cold. Stadiums are no place for pearl divers fog lamps. Gasoline flows in the gutter, sandwiches go on strike. Paralyzed faces & fingers on fruit loops, piles of dollars on airplane wings giggle & shout, court the teens, bless the frozen bones, the rising pleas, the toxic touch of a foreign prince, O suffer these tears, your quagmire & coolant required.
It hurt but now it’s over: the lights on plasticine/ skin stretched on wires, flood lights & heats trained on powder puffs, midgets & trance doctors. The train pulled out & it was the whole world disappearing across the universe & I get on board. A Kodak moment/ before & after the Grail. El Destructo/ fleas in a corporeal sunset & sacrifice to the god –the trophies were passed to the front & tossed into the hole, right before we all jumped.
The only thing I tried to steal was a picture of myself. Said goodbye to the countryside, also to the village, the town & the city, and heard NADA in reply. Feverish, thirsty. A bit anxious. Awaiting my beverage. No sign of green, no foretaste of April. And I’m in my Autumn? I’m looking forward to another Summer, fatal.
