Wrong Side of Indifference
Painfully fucking drab,
this place -
With Sky flat-ironed and stretched over everything like an old dirty sheet - a faded out milkblue and yellowed at the edges and in corners. The whiskey and the sunlight - it's all watered down and gritty, like you took a long drink of day from a dirty glass.
It gets in your eyes, this place. A slow burnt in film till the world begins to tarnish - like the old folks and their kitchen walls all stained up in cigarette smoke and grease....Godluvem.
And the trees here, they don't know what to do. They're all just waitin, mindlessly, like the line at the Methadone clinic leaned up on the sky bare skinned and crooked, one after the other after the other after the other. The business is conducted at the obligatory minimum, with menial half-hearted gestures that, somehow, hurry you along from nowhere to no thing.
Everything in this place, everything, it all seems to pour itself out so quickly, too quickly, moving in nervous quaking motions like Embarrassments rush-away to forget himself, or slinking around corners with eyes weighted down to floor by Regret, and her hoping she won't be recognized.
And the taste of this place. The taste, its so thin -
So thin I'm afraid
i wont ever remember you at all.
Sun Never Learns
Its leaving me
again,
this Wounded Old Sun
to die in his copper guilded Fury -
Bled-out and failed-wide
against
smeared canvas
dried in streaks of Crimson
deep embered Orange
trumpet fashes of Gold -
And all of this raging like a
Lunatics Brush
on the western wall of the world
You -
OldBoneWarmer
your belly full-up with AztecHeart
You sank with the weight of
your own brilliance
Didn’t you?
Old fool
Pierced through the heart with
mountain tips
to drown
again
in this damp solemn Earth.
Even now
look at you -
Just a dull brass curl of yourself
sinking furiously behind the far edge of No-Where
With MoonSister snickering quietly
behind her grainy blue veil -
And still
Like some defiant child
you cast the last of your
impotent fire
at the metal bellies
of these dumb lumbering clouds
Id almost
feel sorry for you
if you didn’t pull this shit
every single day of your Life
Enforced Consent - More notes on a Generation
This American Truth of ours
we prefer both named and evaded
A holographic ambiguity
where depth depends
entirely
on the angle one has purchased
Even Christ Himself
stepped out empty from his metaphor
and now lingers forlorn and
restless at the edge of town -
Points an anguished
finger towards
Truth
he’d be happy to sell you
if you could spare a little change
Conversations I Never Had #6
We sat there on the bench beneath a streetlamp that hummed and spat in a steady electric drone. The little puddle of light at our feet that’d been flickering dim since we first sat down, now finally gave in and buzz and puddle both were swallowed instantly by the outer dark.
‘Look’ she said finally ‘its like this...the conciousness of a leaf has a sacred urge to be just that - a leaf. Right?’.
‘Sure’ i said, sounding as prickish as possible. I could just barely make her face out in the dark but could tell from her voice she’d had enough of my sullen company.
’Yes its simple. Yes its very direct.
But its not so much different from yours or mine. It’s a sense really - all this business of conciousness, like sight or sound.We see and hear just enough - just exactly what we need to to get by in our own skins. Thats how life learns itself. Its taken millions of years, but all the conciousness spread out over all the world, every bit of it, it all hatched from the urge of one single solitary cell. There may have been others before it, but that one was the only one that listened. And definitely the only one that answered'.
I didn’t respond. The puddle appeared again at our feet just as suddenly as it’d left and the streetlamp resumed its buzzing.
‘Anyhow’ she said ‘one things for goddamn sure’ she took a long drag from her cigarette and stared out at some unknown point in deep of night. ‘If we all started out the same... if everything was born from some singularity sat way back there in the beginning - then its likely enough we’ll finish out that way too.’
She stood up to leave then, but just before walking off she turned back and stared at me hard for a minute.
‘I suppose thats exactly why my dear boy,’ she said, and slapped the boot dangled across my knee ‘your isolation is so fucking absurd.’
Notes from a Generation #3
They tore it down i guess
it was
73 maybe
Or 4 - don’t know for sure
I was only a boy then
and hadn’t yet learned to
scratch out life
in these deep etched years.
But
America
was big in those days -
Grown-full with herself and
propped up there
fresh on the worldhead like an
Iron Crown -
Big enough she could take GodSteps
backwards and
from the shallow end of
Nothing
clear a live earth to a dead moon
in
OneGreatLeap
That’s why I’d say -
If i had to give some account of it
Why they’d have rubbed it out from skyline entirely
without so much as a
streetlamp or hitching post left
to say it was there -
As though the town itself had been
born directly to that
slate-grey drab modernity -
Born and then served back
to itself
in hard blank cubes -
Because everything back then
American
had to be as big as the
idea of itself -
Everything charged through
with our own
arrogance
In that sense
you could say it was a matter
of destiny -
that the very nature of our
national identity
would’ve
necessitated the need to
wipe the old world
out clean
to make way for the
NewComingBIG -
The Big industry
The Big bombs
The Big cars -
Even the towns couldn’t
bare the thought of
small
especially the small ones -
and the smallest thing in
a small town was
anything
Old
But who could’ve known
in those days?
Who could’ve
possibly?
Before the interstate
rolled its slick tounge out
over Appalachia -
Before The Walmart clawed
itself
up from the dirt like
a newborn antichrist-
Before the tobacco and cotton was
ripped from the earth-scalp
by the roots
and the fields laid back
thick
with rolling oceans of corn
and soybean
Before the TV screens filled our
homes and closed our doors
shut
Before the Internet rendered
knowledge
arbitrary
Before we were all reduced
to inventory
Before we were Big
when we still
free
to...
A Word Smoked god and
...because god and love are words
and I don’t believe in any
word
I’ve thought myself through
this living enough to know that -
that all the words
I weave into
thoughts are just
pale smokes from dim flames -
impalpable
indicative of nothing
but the idea of some thing
At best
Dumb hints of
possibility
Words claw deep -
They strangleout mind
and suffocate all they would
Attempt to invoke -
So ive learned to stand clear
of them who’d believe
in the smoke they speak
and breathe
or blow
in tiny boxes
to assign the world -
I give a broad passage
to them who’d
see shapes in smoke
for which to issue edicts -
or declare truth of the clouds
to raise
Up crusades-
Ive learned now
that smoke does not stick
or stand still anywhere in this place -
and the boxes
are always empty
when you bring them down -
Id as soon
shut my mouth entirely
of this sooty filth
Sweep my mind out blank
till the Fire i believe in
so Religiously
Rages
Generation X’d
“I was born there sunk
back deep
in the
hollow
of great things
torn away”
(holds near to him still these dim embers - the only heat he’s not yet exhausted - the living memory he cradles through the cold like religion and is certain cannot pass beyond)
“I was spat out
in the deadstone air
of worlds
split
open
like continents”
(the emmence blankness rolling out in sheets of ocean void from the what Was to the what Is - blankness lapping up time like a dog - leaving what existed between Now and Then as though never there at all)
“I was dropped like
lead
shot
between the wax
and wane
where no drift flowed
to catch”
(would’ve gladly set himself ablaze to light the new nations cold with Memorys old heat- if he’d only been built of something more substantive -like tar - or as alive as straw)
“I grew here
in a watery sun on this
bare rock
grew and nurtured
with the old production
prepping its
close”
(though he feels himself, in fact, both the empty space between two edges, and the unmet potential of that same space filled, where might no edge have ever been between their birth and death)
“And I bore
WITNESS
to an altogether
different rendering
of
American
Ill be goddamned
if i did not
bare that witness”
(Who’s to say? How should we know such a weight? Or been pulled down towards earth with such)
“I watched and
my
heARTBLED”
(notions of failure? or such loss - even perceived? We don’t lest we’d seen what light has touched his eyes)
“this stoneyhEART BLED
as they
poured
themselves out of this”
(and from what angle it touched them from- We’ve seen from the lofty heights of)
“land just as they’d
filled it-
Slow and
A t t e n t i v e”
(the destructors - them who come and broke it up for fun of it - for souvenirs - and we’ve seen from the)
“with Convictions
Proud Hand
THEY
POURED themselves
out
of this world”
(vast distance of these blank eyed inheritors of this impostor country we call a nation - but)
“one precious
vessel”
(to see from there with him - there amidst the dust and the rubble)
“by one precious vessel”
(from his childseyeview)
“leaving now”
(holding his grandfather’s)
“where they once filled”
(weakening)
“only”
(hand)
Always (until) Empty (gone)
Forever