The O'Hara Christmas

Gabcast! Coldest Eel #2

Snow Stories

Gabcast! Coldest Eel #1

On Sweetgum And Faith

I hold my faith in my hands. Steady, they clip the straps that hold the sweetgum straight against its stake. Now, it bows only to drop seed to fertile earth. An ovenbird cocks her tail, watches me from her canopy perch, close and unimpressed. I spread my fingers, let thin rawhides fly; morning will find them bunting for her bed. Tiny scars cross the backs of my hands, their fretwork remembers years long buried. I trace them in the dusk of memory. I open my palms; gods that never answered drift through the cracks, ashes on a scant breeze. Behind me, the ovenbird trundles her nest. Quiet. The dead are tolling their bells.

Canadian Club And End Results

Down my road a piece or three lived an ex-pat named George, who worked the CSX freighters after he washed up in Charleston where he discovered his age was measured in gypsum and sweat, and his trouble with money lost its punch somewhere around the sixth double of Canadian Club. He had a woman called Mac, a blousy low-lander with a gift for gab who washed his clothes and sometimes floated his rent; but he put up with her lip, he said, "because she's a fair throw for a broke horse" and then he would laugh open-mouthed, his teeth as yellow as his skin. and he had a fascination with guns that he showed me when I happened by; an old Enfield a 45 Magnum and a Colt a semi-carbine with a strap and boxes and cartons full of ammunition "in case those mushrooms ever bloom" he would say, his eyes wild and glaring while he sipped his Club and misfortune like ladies sip tea on hot afternoons. It all resulted in a shot one morning that pierced the still of the March air and made the barn swallows fly off towards the Atlantic ports where he had been young once.

On The Way

Hot and humid day, a twelve pack of Red Seal pulses my veins as I take photos of weary Mexicans at the bus stop and a dead end road that runs into fallen arches with painted signs that say 'lomas del Pacifico', a stop off Hwy 200 on the way to Mismaloya. Drinks at a bar in La Jolla with sweaty european tourists sad to see the beach has eroded almost to nothing when just 3 years ago I played volleyball there with some Argentinians and rode a slow boat to Yelapa for cold cervezas then lunched in a place without electricity. Climb out on the rocks, take a seat on the ocean floor and drink another beer. Rain salt-smooth stones into the calm mouth of God. I think to myself too often, when do I leave? How long do I sit here, directionless breeze on my nape? Until I move on, driving with the windows down.

Corte Madera

Summer has fried California, and the permanent tourists beachside realize their faults caught up with them years ago. Old men consider old habits through dark glasses rimmed with lime. A two hundred dollar skirt looks twice as rich on a fifteen-year-old Brazilian girl. On rented porticoes overlooking stones and drying grass they sun themselves, smoking. These delicacies stream the shoreline more than recurring ocean currents; the smell of kiwi and coconut oil the shortening shadows. Bay flags twitch on the wind, each piece of the puzzle dim behind the screen has long since been fitted perfectly.

Look Back In Longing

I wait inside while strangers cart boxes through depleted rooms; my mother's house empty now in fact instead of theory. Thumbed to the inside of a pantry door, a calender dated 1961 holds watch. Here is the transience of x'ed out days; I've come to name the ghosts in this sudden unhinging of air. It's '61 again, and Eddie loses his footing on a low stool while crepe myrtles bob purple heads outside the window, leaving a silence, an absence of light beneath a door. Mother listens to Debussy, La danse de Puck, and does not cry; I watch the weight draw lazy circles in the dusk of day. It will be spring in a while; I never wanted to go to Paris. This is the summer Joan found the husk and bark of Dylan, threatened to move to Greenwich Village, get a job pouring coffee at Gerde's Folk City. She named a took-up sooner Woody, got caught behind Conner's Feed 'n Seed with a boy who looked a lot like Bob. She disappeared that summer, "away with an aunt", they said; returned before fall set in, the arc of EST still visible in the fine hair at her temples. Afterwards, she was always barefoot, humming behind a frozen smile. Autumn has come, wind scares up old leaves that tick down in spirals. "Take a picture of this" says my father; now he hides in the slump of a stranger photographed beside a pearl-gray sedan, his face too far away to see the set of his mouth; tight-lipped until he drank it loose. I smell rain in the swelling dearth of sky. I am not like him, all flesh and hollow bone. He speaks in loud tones of the nigger allowed on his crosstown bus, reason enough, he says, for the Buick. The camera doesn't record the stink of his breath. It is winter. I have carried the cold in from the outside. The movers are done, their trucks packed and idling at the curb; exhaust curls from their pipes and dissolves as I watch them pull away. I think of whatever it is that looks back in longing, how the hibiscus still blooms in February and my God, it's been years since I've seen snow.

Therapy Session At The Circle K (For Calicoe)

Don't tell me where I'm going; you think I'm alone but you can't know that from time to time, I sleep side by side with beautiful girls who are afraid of the dark. Slivers of shine beneath our random doors are never enough, so we let up the shades of rented rooms, flood the dead space with the dead glow of commerce. Tonight it's the Circle K, happy round pearl ringed in red, looming foot upon foot above the asphalt of south avenue; everything caught within its ovum glitters. Whores pass back and forth, showcased at its base; tiny statues of saints hang from their lobes, depend on ribbons from their necks; they shimmer like shattered glass. Beside me balls some beautiful girl, asleep outside her shadow. Her skin is olive and damp; I think of angels with emerald lips. It seems just yesterday, I carried tricks in a tin box covered with rock-star-hip-cats strumming their air guitars in primary colors. My smile was brilliant, I alone invented the high gloss of good veneer. In some city somewhere, buzzcut ladies dance naked in glass boxes, bodies like suede cages. In my city, dumpsters brood behind the open-all-nights, shelter refuse from a foregone rain. No one ever told me not to spill the milk, no one ever said that fight holds consequence too large to recall. I never knew I was a sinner until the magic failed. So you guessed it, Doc, I'm bothered by a little thing or two; I don't sleep like I should, and I've got a lily busy dying on my ktchen table. It doesn't seem to matter how I'm aware of how selfish I can be, no one noticed when I ceased to care. I appreciate your time, but time is a measurement of thought, and I think too much. Logic is a beautiful girl locked against my dark, mouth parted in the pretense of sleep; she knows, they know, I know that I never really loved myself.

Yardbird

Buddha Theory

Charleston, 1959

Charleston, 1959

We are no longer children to look back on, our faces turned back in elegant black and white, hands raised towards some forgotten goodbye. I have iced water in a blue glass and miss the ocean. You, the younger one, grip time in your fist, lifted in a toast to our father, who still fishes summers off Charleston. Here is the set of things. To tell you the Sunday after David died, daddy pulled his lips, folded them into the sands of his face and ceased to speak. A stoney silence; the rock crags of a seawall. To tell you months after he closed himself, he opened again; put his hand inside his other hand, brought them to his salted heart, rubbed them across his driftwood mouth. "My son David was dragging net for prawns, in Calabash, where it gets dark early. My boy is sun and water and blue." His hands opened; what was held there swelled, broke apart like whitecaps to a shore. I placed my fist in his and to my briny lips.

Buddha Theory

Asked what he was, Buddha replied "I am awake." I sleep, I don't sleep. This morning, I search for a headache because that pain would be an equalizer. I watch cigarettes, I smoke the weather; Sidharta watches from his shelf, a cold ceramic face that never moves. He oversees the pull of necessity, then the slow push of nirvana. I know that all night, he has watched the water trouble and turn. Once, in a physics class, I explained to a professor, in his language, that G times EM into I was theoretically nothing to a theoretic me; that I was just a microbe whose outcome was probable- a vibration through fluid, a string of membrane stretched across the light of everything. The professor had tapped his meerschaum against his heel and told me that the space for my grade was to small for him to identify. This afternoon, I lay on a plush red divan in the back room of a store-front posed as a fish market and let a vietnamese woman massage my thighs; she pressed her breasts against my theoretical knees with each fluid stroke of her hands. I watched in a mirror hung above our spot, tried to convince myself of its reflective nature. I turned my head to avoid myself, but Buddha was there, perched on the sill, his gold face painted with a smile. I just settled back into red, a constant relative in my fixed background, and wondered if he smirks like that while the water rushes its angry banks.

Yardbird

When I was young, my mother had a cat she called yardbird, because, she said, the ripples his shanks made as he strolled our street reminded her of a night in Tunisia; a place that waited for her most evenings beneath a diamond wieghted with nickles, under shades draped in faded red. Bird would follow her there, a slink of sinew and strut around shadow. Sphinx-posed on her lap, she would offer him dips in a glass of warm Dewars, run rough hands through his black coat and whisper "I would wear you like a skin, heat-heavy in alleys and jazz dives, my tongue tight for the taste of something more than this." When he died, alone while the house slept, she buried him by the back steps; his cool bones left to dust themselves in a shoebox laced with shots of scotch, shards of pressed wax. She never went back to Tunisia; sat instead, when the weather was good, on the last rise of a low stoop, and watched the paper mill stacks flick their soot tails against the smooth night sky.

Miles, Millenniums

I tell my father "On our way to the lake, Uncle John stopped and bought lightning in a jar from a colored man in Opalaca" and when he tells me "Alright, then" his face folds in and tightens and I see him under the bowed silver birch with leaders in his hands, their transparent ends knotted with tiny brass hooks and bright blue and yellow feathers; the brim of his Redman hat hiding his brow from the high August sun. He looks like a photograph I saw once of a man tying flies beneath the lace-hung arms of river cypress; but I took no photograph, because on this day, under that tree, beneath that sun and in these bones my hands would not have known where to point or what to take for the sake of memory; in this place I am twelve. There is a dog at my feet, or asleep on the steps, two gunmetal cats watch a family of robins preen in the shade of eaves; their heads sway in a strange, imperfect rhythm. The women behind the screened door, lovely in waisted aprons, are from another time; a disconnected past that doesn't belong here. I would give it up to the fireflies, to the cicadas that sang beneath the bark of digger pines, leaving shells of themselves behind for fall to find. I have left it to the black-hulled pecans, to blackberries strung along a border fence, to the big stones braced at the bend of the river where beavers built dams large enough to widen the turn a little every year; both grown so much smaller now. I remember, him and I, collapsing here; once upon a summer knee to knee, a stolen blanket, a rainbow-heavy creel set to soak against a bank. Beyond sloped banks, years away, ladies sit behind screens and fan themselves with their hems, dogs nap, cats court the notice of birds long flown to dust. These cypress dripping moss, this river, those voiceless days with nothing left unsaid. On this day, in this skin, I am twelve, and you a shadow beneath the brim of a hat; a foreknowledge of flyting days, a fretwork caught in the blue of our viens. Miles, millenniums, lightning in a jar.

Surrender

I remember smoking joints with you, stained fingers twisting our hair in tangled knots, eyes closed, Hendrix hanging somewhere above low-slung clouds circling our skulls. Your body pressed against the wall nearer the window than mine, you pull your lips and fire erupts- your chest struggles, deflates, surrenders God from your lungs in drifts that scatter the clouds to ribbon. I've been cold before, I know my gooseflesh well. Trading breaths with you beneath the cracked window, its panes jitter like loose teeth every time Jimmy walks his watchtower. I will sleep in shifts and tonight I'll sleep without touching you- already miles between us, a pushing distance that marks itself in hardwood beneath a braided rug that smells of ruin. I watch you, asleep on your back, knees bent up and ankles in; pidgeon-toed. Your breath volcanoes up, visable in the chill, then disappears as if it never was at all.

After Gods, The Floods

In the hour that I first knew Jesus built new and improved voids to measure his levels of devotion, I called him and we got high in ways our bodies couldn’t atone. A portent pressed so close to the backs of our eyes all we could see spilled out, trickled down to our toes buried in saw-grass swaying like prayer-fans stapled to popsicle sticks. I made him black coffee before noon, Jamaican Blue Mountain, 8.95 a pound at the strip mall on South Avenue. His upper lip tried not to crimp, his hands tried not to shake and I smiled because my days are cherry days, mostly. He called me apathetic, said I drank through a war and slept through a revolution once. I know it must be true, I know there was one because when I wake up after drinking it feels the same as when I don’t. He said that he wakes up every morning and throbs and sometimes, so do I; but I know they are not the same aches, so when he said that I set my face and pretended to look empathetic when all I really want is winter- the time back spent in an unfinished attic with Rachel, our lips ringed with her mother's kosher salt and drinking margaritas; our grace unlaced, a white flag shaped like a pillowcase defining our surrender, our silhouettes blushed behind the pulled shade.

Words

Transition

Five Days (Compilation)

Prolouge: A view from my flying jimmy. Listen: hounds loose their run trill reveille behind the lines of white pine and cedar and elm that guard my seclusion. I pretend I'm dreaming-then I am-waltzing with Jane barefoot and ballgowned through a wood: music howls somewhere beyond the grey, somewhere in the black. So I oversleep and wonder when I wake why my feet are ice. I fly to work down backroads that turn suddenly into streets miles from my driveway graveled and tucked between menacing rows of black-hulled pecans: they bear on the third year and I keep their fallen ancestors packed naked in blue tupperware tubs stacked in my freezer. The cockpit of my jimmy is strewn with dead coffee cups. Jack-in-the-boxes lay discarded and dying on the floorboards -similar slaughters of necessity-ketchup clotted to their sides. Last month's cable bill flaps under the visor like a battleflag. Tobacco whips by on the left and on the right so fast each leaf on every stalk stands out in surreal base-relief. I taste the sharp and bitter tang of suckering plants: it reminds me of my father's pall malls and politics and the smell of money seeded from blood. Barn swallows rise-in lazy tourbillions-from the fields their beaks and bellies full of yellow and green hornworms. I wing past Buck's BBQ Pit (You Can't Beat Our Meat)-past Lucy's Do-Lounge where the girls serve more than shots -past Big Jim's Quick Mart: the stoner kid who pumps gas raises a hand in reflex. I don't wave back in sympathetic apathy. Most mornings I stop to kill coffee cups but today I'm late. Tenant houses rush by on either side, their concrete blocks painted with Kudzu and mildew: I think of abattoirs and oubliettes and other inevitable exits. Children and dogs and cheap molded toys from the plastic plant over in Elroy dot the tiny dirt yards-little boys and little girls stand in stagnant ditches chunking rocks at death while their mamas are inside fucking the mailman or watching General Hospital on TV. I see slideshow flashes of their faces and I hope I don't have to come back out this way: scrape them up, heads cracked open, futures frying on asphalt like so many eggs. I pass the city limit sign-some of the holes are mine-ringed in rust and canted to one side. Courthouse looms right, county buildings lurch left and blocks ahead day meets night where tracks split the city: segregation in iron ties old as time. I pull into my lot-number six, section twelve-filled with cars and trucks and bikes but I am the only flying jimmy. Everything ticks: engine, watch, pulse-alpha papa charlie- the people that mill outside my windshield tick with tension. I want to turn the key, turn around, turn into my driveway where squirrels sit stuffing my sweet meats in their jaws: instead I clinch mine-name rank serial number-open the door and step out. Listen: animals sprung their cages snarl in angry unavoce behind walls of brick and steel and glass that guard nothing. Day One. Today I reached a milestone; no morphine. It's now been almost 24 hours since my last hit, and it's got me a bit...well... strange. A good friend I've never had the pleasure of meeting suggested I try Ketamine as a weener for the opiate, and for awhile, it worked. But it made me nervous. I don't like nervous. So I've just been backing it down and yesterday, 5 mg. Today, zero. Considering that 6 months ago it was at least 60 mics a day, I think I'm doing OK. Circa 6 months ago Day breaks (how cliched is THAT) over some North Carolina backwater mosquitoes dance in pulsed pockets above stagnant runs that glimmer with rainbowed slicks across the surface and in the arc of a dirty pane (it looks out at an equally dirty alley that leads to some inconsequential river) an 18 guage cath will glimmer as soon as it unsheaths it's equally 18 guaged needle loaded (HAHA! What a LOADED word) with a loading dose- best painkillers deft fingers can cop when no one is watching where the latexed hand went after the sting is gone comes the calm that stays awhile awhile awhile before going back home with all its little perks packed on its glass back but there's always more more more where that came from- it lurks and smiles (make that GRINS, it grins with metered teeth) among versed and valium (those paens of blessed slumber) tossed in with toredal and sucs...sucs rocks! (I'll bet Calicoe knows what sucs is) on such a permanent level maybe that's the level I need to sink to. I find I miss the ritual almost as much as the calm. Drawing up my morning fix, opening the alchohol prep, carefully swabbing the spot on my thigh that has grown a little thick with scar tissue. The thin needle resembles the probiscus of an insistent mosquito, intent on the sting. I miss that sting, too. I've been a junkie since 'Nam, where smack was so plentiful it practically fell from every duffle. It was a necessary thing, a thing to be done so things could be done. Once the body becomes aclimated to the opiate, the 'high' subsides and only that strange and languid calm remains. It enabled you to wade through endless days of mindless horror with blinders on. I was there four years, and by the first 8 months it all seemed surreal; a vampire flick where all the bloodsuckers were named Charlie, wore black pajamas and paper slippers...hello, Harold and Jim. Harold and Jim. The people who people my town wear paper shoes, a lot like charlie did in days of yore, slipping through fields of gore with barely a bone to rattle their prescence; nothing to signify sound or fury and it was just so today in the Piggly Wiggly; 10:30 of a bright blue Monday with a hand basket sporting the latest in milk and brown eggs, at the end of aisle 6 where they (they?) keep canned peaches im attractive stacks of green and orange cans I hear this: "...only a nigger kid, who gives a rightous fuck? Held me up for two hours because the little coon didn't have enough sense to cross on the light; now I ask you, Jim, what's a law abiding white man to do when the po-lice officer's a nigger too?" Never heard them come up the peach aisle, Jim and his good buddy Harold (because it said so in neat red stitch above the pocket of his blue chambrey workshirt) the paper shoes that covered their approach looked a lot like Redwing boots that I know Jim and Harold valued almost as much as the 410's that surely hung against the back glass of their F150 Fords and when they started noticing my not noticing I moved on around the corner to aisle 8 (isn't that strange) where all the things I'll never need like Pampers and Gerber and Bottle (warmers?) are kept and through the open shelves that line all the aisles in the nieghborly Piggly Wiggly the conversation continues and from behind strained bananas I hear this: "...that dyke who works for the Rescue squad that's who, some of us went to the county meeting about those types picking up our wives and such, having to touch 'em and all and sometimes even taking off their clothes but it didn't do no good and now I just take my women to town myself if they need hospital help..." But I've picked up your wife, Jim, and your sister too, both of them too drunk to have sense enough to not drive home and if you knew what all they promised the nigger cops we called if only they wouldn't tell you where they were or what they had been doing, why, you would just SHIT Jim, I swear- On those same paper feet two little old ladies who favored my forgotten ma had sidled up beside me and I realized that I was giggling to myself, probably looked like I was drunk myself so I walked away to aisle 10 (?) and as I tried to look oh-so-interested in pickled okra and sweet rind pickles some kid without any paper shoes (just keds with dirty laces) walked right up and asked me straight-out in a too-loud little kid voice why my hair was cut just like a boy's and why was I wearing Dickies just like his dad's- dontcha know your'e a girl- says he and I never heard his mama (paper shoes) come out of nowhere to grab him up and whisk him off like I might be catching. So I add a jar of those sweet rinds to my milk and eggs, find myself seven aisles later standing in the checkout behind Jim and Harold and their suitcase of after-work Schlitz, in front of the ladies with their ensure and wild rice, and I looked for the kid, but I guess his mama was busy somewhere in the back teaching him not to talk to strangers with boy-hair and I wondered if she remembered that it was me who came to her assistance the night her lawyer husband decided that she might look better with bruises- but then I decided we all must look alike with hats on. All around me paper shoes shuffled and Jim and Harold snickered and the older ladies read the labels on their ensure like it was the Sunday times; their lips drawn into tight lines. Behind all those tight lips that never moved (except for Jim and Harold's, who did'nt give a rightous fuck), I could hear this and this and some more of this: niggers and dykes and faggots- OH MY! And I wondered if they could hear what I was thinking above the silence of their paper shoes. Circa 1973: Two klics outside the port city, thick underbrush hid clusters of olive clad kids, bellies flat against slick earth wet with mud and blood. Days here went fast into night, and when dark came, you prayed for light. Nights were bad, you listened with strained ears through a din of strange sounds, for sounds that were stranger still. Most times, constant fear kept you awake in apprehension, like the mummy did in the fifth grade; trembling in your G.I. Joe sleeping bag on Timmy McPherson's living room floor. None of us knew scared like that, but we all caught on real quick. Our backyard battle plans and monster movie anecdotes didn't apply in this show. By the second night in the bush, we had all lost faith in Hollywood. Somebody forgot to yell cut so the stand-ins could take our places. It all made you wonder what Audie was singing about. Sometimes, you imagined that you smelled fish sauce, heavy, oily; the sour odor of charlies with full bellies. Ready to hunt all night on papered feet, mute yellow draculas with a taste for cold blood. Every now and then we got lucky, and the point man would hear the low squeak of black silk bat wings in time to thwart the midnight buffet. But most times we weren't lucky, and some of us joined the army of the undead; coming back to feast within the nightmares of the rest of us. And we wondered what G.I. Joe might do on a bad night in Haiphong, where the matinee horrors were real, and none of us could find the zippers down the backs of the monster suits. At times I feel like what I write about this period of my life is just so much cliched hack; a lot of it is old, some of it the new stuff of resurfaced memory. My partner at work, Henry, is constantly questioning my decision to become a trauma queen; says my life as a ditch doc was a poor life choice. He doesn't know that I need the adrenelin as much as I need the calm to face it. What an odd conundrum; a labryinth of my own design. Mostly, it's days full of nothing special; parade after parade of the sick, the dying, the dead. You have to find a way to black out the faces; for me, it's morphine. I can wander through blood, guts, and puke all day without a flinch. It's only late at night, when I'm alone with myself that the black peels away and the faces float to the surface. But every once in awhile, in the bright light of day, something will come along and hit me behind the knees, make me lose my balance and when it comes, it lingers. Circa 1987: "Edgecombe County unit 268 to Heritage ED on 340, I need an MICN or physician to the mic, come back-" -quick come back quick talk to me talk to me hurry goddamnit hurry hurry hurry- "This is Heritage, 268, physician standing by, go ahead with your traffic" "10-4, Heritage, wer'e en-route to your facility with an approximately eight year old female-" -six seven eight who knows there's no pubes not even shadow only blood and blue and motherfucker tach it out come on come on come on- "-found in a field this AM, bound, gagged, patient does show evidence of extensive trauma, numerous lacerations and abrasions to the head and neck and-" -fields narrow fields of napalm-charred children limbs like struck matches raped first gutted second dead but still running running running- "-upper extremities show defensive wounds with left shoulder dislocation, lower extremities present bilateral femur fractures with the left compound in nature and-" -butts they break legs and skulls with butts because the sharp cracks make thier dicks hard bayonets only make sibilant sounds machetes go whicka whicka whicka- "-pelvis is unstable on side-to-side rock, abdomen shows obvious distention with rigidity, genitals present evidence of forced penetration with intestinal protrusion and-" -the smell is wrong no kerosene no fish copper minus sulpher ozone missing smoke make this fucker smoke I'm losing pressure DRIVE goddamnit goddamnit- "-B/P is 70/40 and falling, respirations at 6 per and shallow, pupils equal but non-reactive and-" -focus focus focus this ain't Dragon valley or Tam Ky or even Phu Bai where Medi-vacs couldn't fly it's just another day another dollar another kid another- "-I have two 16 guage lines of LR going at WO rates, tubation is precluded due to facial trauma however patient has an oropharyengeal in place and is being bagged with 100% supplemental o2, patient showing junctional brady on 12 leads and I have administered 5 of morphine and-" -day in a field, narrow fields of dead men wearing their gods on their faces but there are no gods is no god only purple and silver and green and- "-Heritage be advised we have a 9 minute ETA, prepare for trauma code, patient is bradying down to unnacceptable levels, CPR begun due to age with one atropine push in at this time come back-" -sounds, sounds that lose rhythm and order become wails become sobs and to cry is to realize and I won't I won't I- "-10-4, 268, we copy your traffic, continue CPR and give one Epi push, we are awaiting your arrival in room three; see you in nine, Heritage is clear on 340." But I've discovered that the mind is a powerful entity all by itself. When this episode in the day in the life of Blue, Paramedic-addict extrodinare occured, I clocked out early... went home, gathered up my 22 and went out into the woods I live in and stayed there for two days, drawing beads on anything that moved. I killed 8 or 9 sqirrels and all memory of that little girl; she resurfaced three years later when I happened to be the medic on duty the night her mother died. I went home and spilled it out on a yellow legal pad admist a flirry of mescal shooters and sweat. Now I can't forget her, no matter how many squirrels I off in the pursuit of sanity. Boy, I can RAMBLE, can't I? I started out at my keyboard, trying to shake off that nagging itch, that almighty yearning for my mosquito, and now here I am walking backwards again; only this time the colors have lost their primaries. I guess I need to stop before I bore the hell out of everyone who might be reading this long-winded trip down memory lane. But it was good in a self-searching way that I wasn't prepared for or aware of until my skin was already peeling away in painful strips, bloodless yet weeping- I feel them fall, drifting in dry and dusty piles beneath my anonymous desk somewhere in a river town and I want to gather them up, stick them back to my naked self, shivering and unprotected, weak and wanting. My idle words bare me like a lover couldn't, like a confessor might like a surgeon skilled at the craft; and voices scream from these opened wounds, voices with names that can't be counted, faces that won't be gone. Their tongues scrape my edges,dig furrows through the boneyards that carry my weight- and I stumble,I tire, I wonder will it always be the same. Dismal rain feeds a restless mind. Before the world went red, I would watch it from the windows of my life; its sound as soothing as Coltrain on a weary night. Now it leaves me caught, a lightning bug in a sealed jar; it dampens my skin with an ill-defined apprehension, and on the chill of its breath rides the scent of fear. It distills geographies, turns dirt to mud. My temples hold its hum verbatim. Today finds Dismal gray beneath a laden sky. She welcomes it, adds its wieght to her mire; continuance ensured. She has not changed; the passage of centuries add nothing but knots to cypress and take away nothing but legend. I am the one who cowers within my walls, trapped by a past I cannot forget, teased by a god I cannot forgive. A dead god, shopping for attention, selling tickets for bone and dust. I want to put in a box those things that went different- a sturdy box made of what is left after the battle is done, before war becomes epitaph. But there is so little left, the box is just a ramshackle thing held together by spit and blood- and all that was turned is too heavy for its spit-licked sides to hold. Rain makes me drag it out, sends me on a mad search for reasons that were never there; and I know when Dismal has her fill and the sky becomes the slate-blue color of empty, I'll walk for miles in the company of water-shed ghosts. They rise as the mist lifts, unnamed graves that surface and lay scattered across fresh-wet earth; the bones within clatter and clack against their crumbling lids. I listen as the bones grow flesh, feel years shift their weight beneath my feet; and I am in another place- a parrallel plane that mirrors my memory, reflects against my mind's eye, casts shadow without sun. Familiar voices whisper from the other side of time; they ask how do I see my dreams behind closed eyes? What about the other side? The difference between here and there is logistics; countless miles that separate then and now. Three times I went, three times I came back; decades since spent filling the void left by what I left behind. I count backwards, wait for bruises to fade. Yes, time passes; but not much changes. Memory is like water in my clenched fist; it runs out, heads to earth- everywhere, earth; the odor of turned ground. And the distance is but the sharp crack of a branch- a second of sound that blurs into the hard snap of butt against bone, blends into the soft whicka whicka of machetes through razor grass, becomes the deafening silence of the lull between what was and what will always be. The soft kiss of moments turn today to yesterday, brush back years with lips so gentle the seduction is barely felt; a rape of will that has no defense. Quick glints of mica shoot through underbrush and fall; instinct ducks my head, bends my knees low against an unseen aim. A rush of wing sends startled swallows upwards in a sudden spiral; in their shadow medivacs pitch and vie for space. Somewhere behind me, hounds howl for their dinner, the wails desolate, forlorn- and in their voices I see black-haired women kneeling in tank ruts, children cradled to their chests like bundled sticks. The difference is that, the distance is this; this that, that this. Now means sometimes and other times. Whatever it is that looks back is without longing, does not lose itself in the tremble and click of limbs caught in a heavy wind. Tangles of cypress root grip river rock like ribs grip lung, like I grip the visceral strings that connect what was and what will never be. All night, the hounds will keen lament for the rain, and bullrushes, fragile as burnt matches, will break in the breeze. The rain is back. It hammers the tin roof, tiny spears like bullets. I feel the muscle rise in my throat, a knot I try to drink clear. My fourth shot finds me here, stiff in front of a ghost-blue screen. I write; etch words against white that have no meaning, make no sense. In a far corner, the dead pile up, get ripe where they lay; I can smell their insistence move from breath to breath. The present is etherous, a documentary of spring in a jungle; olive-clad boys with terror on their faces search through thatch while I struggle to remember the alphabet doesn't string along a keyboard in sing-song harmony. I don't know where they went, wrapped in black and flown home in the cold bellies of planes. On my best nights, I pretend that none of them fell past my fingers on their journey there. Dismal is like that; a wet spring in another jungle, a place that has never heard of me or my abscence. I try for balance, some equal ground where the great Axis Mundi never slips her spokes and lets the green world turn red; but in the end, I'm not much different now from the girl who crawled through mud and guts, an aid-bag clutched in her hand. I still carry that bag, only now I walk instead of crawl and I don't bother to dodge the fire anymore. My vision is a relentless understanding, no longer able to look away, obligated by depth and a yolk of light. In its field, a universe; an eye engulfed by the far-gone tides of what holds it there. I watch the cieling fan turn in my kitchen, I try to blink and can't. The whickering blades converge, intrude on each other in endless repitition. I sit in my chair, this necessity of skin, and strip myself to bone. Day Two. It's 2 AM here in dismal swamp, the bottom end of the second day of my idiotic cleansing process. It's been a real pisser most of the day. Off work with nothing but time on my hands and mosquitoes on my mind. I think it's only because I have removed my remaining vials that I haven't given in. I clearly didn't remember the nightmare of withdrawal, and I wish I had thought about it a while longer before making this impulsive leap towards a non-existent light. I itch. I've itched all day; there are millions of ants (that's as close a thing as I can relate it to, having been stung by the fire ants that build condos in my back forty) beneath my skin trying to find a way out. It's maddening, nothing stops it and I keep thinking about what I know will. But I haven't caved, ladies and gents, not YET. I hate admitting defeat, even when it's a sure winner. I went hunting. Packed a sandwhich and a legal pad or two (because I take them everywhere; yellow paper flutters about my house like giant moths) and cruised my land for a couple of hours or three. I have 72 acres of woods with a four room house (cabin, actually) planted in a small clearing in the middle. Today, it seemed like 72 feet. The more I walked the smaller those familiar tracts became. The squirrels were laughing at me; I couldn't draw a good bead on the broadside of a barn. They chittered in the tops of the Pines like gossiping women, tossed pine nuts from their roofs in obvious derision. I went in a little deeper until I found a nice copse of magnolia; grand old things whose umbrella branches full of heavy, waxy leaves formed a dense wall at least 20 feet around. I dug out a pad and wrote...and wrote and wrote and wrote and none of it made any sense at all. Disconnected spurts of recall and regret. I thought about Calicoe and her saying that my writing was so much better on the ween...but it's not. It just isn't and then I thought about her question; what does Blue love most? The thinking on this quelled the itch, pushed it back a bit and after giving it a few minutes, I could tell her this: I love the smell of Magnolia on the bloom. Sweet, thick; it's heady scent brings Jessie back from the dead on a waft of recollect so sudden it left gooseflesh in it's wake. Jessie was my first sexual experience. I was fourteen, she was a year older; beautiful in the way that young foals are...all long limbs and awkward grace. I didn't know I was gay then, it was a term still undefined in those days, but I knew I was different; the tone my mother employed when she called me a tomboy was my first dim clue. Jessie went on to become the epitome of small-town girlhood; cheerleader, prom queen, tobacco rose in the fall parade...clap as the floats pass, dear; show some respect for the real girls. Jessie caught pregnant in our senior year, and like all good southern girls who daddy's aren't white trash, she married the guy and had two more babies before she was thirty. Every now and then, I'll see her in town somewhere, her coltish legs grown thick at the ankles, her beautiful face now a ghost in the mirror. Circa 1978: It was summer when I first tasted a girl- and I can't stop remembering bare feet on asphalt, hot; sweat popping above our lips as we walked through empty lots, past houses that watched behind pulled blinds and barking dogs, beyond the school where the next year we would not know ourselves. You look like a boy, she said (her daddy wouldn't let her out with boys) and the smile that tilted her face tugged all my muscles at once I can't forget a junked Dodge half-buried in the woods off Cypress street, its inside smelling of burnt oil and smoke and how she felt like wet suede stretched across the seat; whispers salt-glazed- our mouths like wind on open wounds. I put Jessie away, and not wanting the itch back so soon, I kept thinking...thank you, Calicoe...my thoughts breaking apart, flying down different paths in search of elusive love. I never cared for the word itself; I find it overused and overwrought and the subject of countless tomes of bad poetry and Harlequin romances. Never been in love, either; at least not what I percieve love to be. I've been in lust, swam in infatuation until the waters grew cold, dipped my toe a couple of times in actual relationships. But those are not for me, the constant loner. I'm not an easy person to know, much less get along with...I have my ways and I'm set in them like stone. The last woman that lived with me (and that was 15 years past) was named Billie. She was a real stunner; red hair and gray eyes and possessed of a fair amount of guile. She was great in bed, better in the kitchen and she didn't seem to mind that I spent most of my free time either in the woods with my (much beloved) hounds or scribbling furiously on all that yellow paper. The problems started with all these bottles of lotion and little tins of make-up she sat all over the countertops in my bathroom. It took about three months of pantyhose hanging across my shower bar and lipstick love notes on my mirrors to realize the true meaning of the word MISTAKE. It took just a little longer to figure out that she loved my money way more than she professed to love me. It finally sunk into my perfume-fogged brain that snakes with pretty, colorful markings are still snakes. Billie was the last reptile that I didn't aim a 22 at. Circa 1989: "She walked in beauty like the night" and all that bullshit. If she had a name I can't recall it; and it never mattered anyway, all she ever wanted she got from me; great head and greater circumstance. All I ever wanted I got from her, devotion, emotion, even a decent tear or two, as long as my wallet fell open whenever her whims got hungry; and boy,could that bitch eat. But it ended one cold November, when I read somewhere that if the greed outwieghed the need, the harmonious balance of things was interrupted. So we came to an agreeable settlement, she and I, and she left before I killed her. So, from all that rambling train of thought I can surmise that I love my privacy. I like being alone, I tolerate my own company well. I love bare bathroom countertops and naked shower rods. I love red-headed women and red-bone hounds. I love a good squirrel stew with lots of onions...Boy, Calicoe, youv'e really started a roll; and I thank you from the bottom of my barely-there heart. That itch stayed away for a good while, and as I thought a little longer on the subject of love and where to find it I discovered, buried under several layers of hard, blue slate; this: I love the feel of the weights; the tension of muscle against bone. It helps me to remember that certain pains bring perspective. I love the dip at the base of a woman's spine, and the way it curves inward if the stroke is just so. I love Harlan Ellison and Jerzy Kosinski and James Dickey. I love Lady Day and Sarah Vaughn and Gerry Mulligan. I love Lenny Bruce I love the smell of woodsmoke on winter nights, the way Silver Birch cups its leaves before a rain, and the graceful fall of spanish moss from the cypress trees along the river. I love chocolate Necco Wafers. All the other colors suck like an electrolux. But Calicoe, my friend, my hand-up, my unlikely Gibralter (Oh, how I wish I could meet you in the flesh!)...you were right. The thing I love most are those damned yellow legal pads. Without them, I would be a dead thing; a shell of bone and blood. It's close to 4 AM now. The itch grows worse, the thinking done, the things I love lost beneath the rise of demons and dawn. Having held it so long in my hands, seen too often the set of its jaw, I think of death; the sweet release of poets and pawns. Do not go gently. Do NOT go gently... Do not... In the tick-down of days, in barely an open and close of years, I choose not to die, but to cheat death; slow the wind of anatomy that is no more than body, take back from the gods what was never theirs. To remain here forever, a single voice in the silence of time, a shadow above the soil of the dead. I will not die denied, next to an unknown madness, but wait the birth of each mute hour, and know the past was never better than in small seconds. Day Three. I started the day with hands. The first thing I saw when waking, they seemed to glow in the half-light that slid through the blind slats...eerie ghost-hands that were seperate from the rest of everything, still and quiet on the red plaid comforter. They looked blue, like corpse hands. I began to think of them as entities of their own, even though they behaved normally and went through the usual morning rituals just as they always did...they showered, brushed teeth, ran their cool fingers through my hair; they even selected the cracked mug with the faded smiley face when the coffee was ready. The cup barely shook; a minor miracle. Maybe they weren't my hands after all, because my hands were always trembling long before the coffee was done, and never failed to spill a fair amount across the table as I read yesterday's paper. Yet on the surface of this strange morning, calm. A natural calm that came all alone (On little cat feet, ha ha) without the benefit of narcotics. Amazed at my new hands, I took off to work. They gripped the wheel with confidence, seemed to know the way just like my old hands...they even waved at Mrs. Campos when we passed the Shop 'N Save. She stared and didn't wave back; I don't think she recognized the hands. Once at work, the hands revealed themselves as imposters. My partner Henry knew at once that they were replicants, a duo far different from my original pair. They were helpful...cleaned our rig, checked our equipment, turned our radio to country music; and this was the REAL betrayal, my true hands would have cut themselves off before performing that blasphemy. Henry kept looking at me sideways, but didn't say much. I think he was scared of the hands. Our first call was a crackhead frequent flyer named Aaron. He called 911 at least twice a week, complaining of nausea, of vomiting, of explosive diarreah. We hated Aaron; he always puked in the rig, spit on the foor, shit on our clean sheets. The real hands would have accidentally hit him up side his pea-head with the O2 tank...but not these hands. These hands helped him to the rig, gave him an emesis basin, started an IV and pushed phenergan to ease his nausea; they even placed Aaron on the defib to access his heart rhythm. They seemed to actually care. Aaron watched them do all of this with gaurded eyes, he flinched at each procedure. It was clear that even Aaron knew these hands were faux...he kept his eyes on them like a mouse keeps his eye on the snake. Henry was silent, but obviously siding with Aaron. And that's how it went all day...the hands did it all. They attended every patient as if every patient was really in need of their expertise. They patted brows, pushed meds, administered painkillers like candy. They changed stretcher sheets, asissted the astounded nurses in the ER, filled out forms in a timely manner, never flipped one doctor the bird. They left the radio alone the whole shift. When our shift was over, they clocked out on time. They waved goodbye to Henry, to the Chief...they didn't wave back, either. Then we were home, them and I. They opened the door, turned on the light, ran their fingers through my hair...and stopped. I could feel my scalp pulsing beneath, felt the blood pushing past the roots. The mirror by my bed showed a face that looked like me, hands trapped in a short tangle of black and gray...shaking. My hands, my true pair. I wondered where they had been, I knew where they were going. Opening a small drawer in the bedstand, they took up a leather pouch, took out a familiar friend; slender, sharp, 20 CC. Somewhere in the dark, the replicants died. Day Four. A lot of my time is spent contemplating purpose, how it does or doesn't apply to my life. I never thought I had one, not really...for so many years now, the only issue has been survival; learning to wake successfully to another sorry dawn seemed purpose enough. Three tours worth of years before that were spent the same way; in that endless quest for survival. The only difference was the dawn...to wake to it then was a rush I have yet to equal; the particular and peculiar thrill of realizing that yes, you breathe on for a while lomger...no one is sweeping you into an anonymous rubber bag as the sun rises over mountains at once beautiful and deadly; their backs packed with their own purpose. My days come and go like gray shifts of inconsequence, spills of time that run unnoticed into more of the same. Days spent as a mannequin of the self I once was; the shell is there but the turtle moved out long before Saigon fell...now the face that looks into mine from the peeled-back silver of passing mirrors is unfamiliar; and it is only recently that I find myself wondering where I went, what happened to that fearless girl who pretended not to care and did...when did the pretense become the fact? I could blame it all on Nam, I suppose, as so many do...pile the great non-purpose on the dead heads of all those soldier-boys that poured their lives across the toes of my boots, spilled their thoughts into my waiting hands and lost any memory of those ladies who were lovely once. But to lay it on that lap would be a lie, because it was just a place, a span of miles I ran through when I was young, chased by tigers let loose from someone else' nightmare. Nam didn't mold me; I molded it...shaped it into a bullet that I would never chamber, never fire. That gun doesn't belong to me, the tigers that creep down it's barrel were never mine. Instead, I pulled from it a profession; skills I learned then I use now, the waiting hands are now replicants that act as if they give a damn when all they really give is time. So I sit and I wonder, why do it? What purpose do I serve spending hour after hour trying to fix people who care even less than I? Most of them addicts, criminals, would-be suicides, drunks...very few runs turn out to be actual accidents or of a natural cause. And then I remember...who am I to judge, an addict myself? Dependent on Heroin as I ran those long ago miles; my own dragon set to fend off tigers. Then later, morphine; another dragon for another generation of nightmares...only this time, the guns are mine; their barrels sleek, disposable stainless steel. I seek the same calm they all do, it's just that my search is private, not left lying in the street or in some seedy by-the-hour room...the difference is really only one of logistics. It doesn't make me better, just better-off...I think my actual purpose all along has been to bury the details, throw everyone's dirt on my truth. I try to remember why it was once worthwhile...why the effort mattered; why it might matter still. I recall faces, write down names, sort it out on paper as if the words are purpose enough. I think of an old man, dead ten years or more; but it's his wife that I still see, pacing the floors of my memory...countless shots of mescal and morphine won't wash away her face; so I write this: They lived in a perpetual past, three dim and heat-heavy rooms encased them in the crumbling husk of a brownstone on a forgotten side of the city. We ran suicide shifts down dead streets, and some midnights found our pulsing red and white outside their stoop, spinning strobes slapping brick with bright kisses. He was the Phantom of the Opera, she was his Christine. She would rush us in, blue eyes wide in a thin plane. Her scent reminded me of tabbouleh, scallion sweet. He was ancient, breath like smegma, face like a leather mask. Cirrhosis ate his body, drank his mind; accompanied by strains of Wagner in unrelenting drones. While we worked, she hovered- frail wasp patting his brow, humming. I saw her hug herself, fingers dripping panic down her back like slow sweat. He was a wicked Raoul, hateful in his extremis. He struck at her, called her a brainless zygote, rotten whore. She gave him the radius of her smile and crooned "Papa, papa," in dulcet tones. We lifted him to the stretcher- she cried when we strapped the belts and clutched our sleeves in nervous desperation. She made quiet, pleading noises in a strange tongue. They had been someone once; he a producer of this, she an actress in that. She had worn diaphanous gowns that clung to her mons veneris, danced in hot abandon for his pleasure. We left her standing in the doorway on that last night of our aquaintance, calling papa in a pitiful litany that was at once beautiful and sad. Once out, put down on my blank sheets like the scattered rows in an untended cemetary, I find the ghosts remain. Face upon face, they bob the surface of my mind and break the black water pooled there with an uncomfortable ease. I think of dragons, of tigers chasing miles into decades; their purpose leaps from my pen, ink like blood across the page. I entertain the demons that follow me from room to room. Vague shifts of space direct me here to here; they follow on the cat's feet of some other time poet my fogged mind cannot name. We have surely danced, them and I; they have led me, I have led them...we have chased each the other across spans of lost years. Now I pirouette alone, spin without brakes into varying shades of black; they seem content to watch. Sometimes, I notice the tightness in the air as they clap. I find myself at my kitchen table, elbows set on an oilcloth that I must have purchased; I struggle to catch the memory of when. My oilcloth is singular in its ugliness, blocks of blue and white connected by tiny sunflowers that resemble flies cocooned in perfect symmetry within a square web. Burn marks track the path of the spider. I light a cigarette with my Zippo, its pewter body as battered as my own. The thumb wheel is loose; three strikes to fire and I wonder if the snipers are watching alongside my snickering demons. The itch between my shoulders has grown numb, a disabled target. I smell the bite of ozone, and beneath that, copper; always the copper, heavy and sweet. The floor under my feet peels and fades; its pattern lost to countless steps. Once blue or rose or green, it now lays gray and dead across boards gone soft with rot. There's a hole to the left of my right foot, neither small or large and shaped like a grin, it yawns a welcome; the demons at my back nudge against my ear. I inch my toes through the smile, feel the air of the cellar below, cold, damp. I wonder if any corpses before me have found this hole, slid though it to rest at last nestled in rat shit and dirt. I try to force my foot past the limits of the hole; the edges give without complaint. I take a long drag and wait for the dark below to yank me in; the air clutches my ovation. Dusk drawing from the blinds finds me on my knees with butter knife and bleeding fingers; splinters pile up on either side like dead soldiers. I think of foxholes and fire pits and the blackened maws of buried screams that have found breath beneath the give of my floorboards. The smile has widened into a laugh; its cool trill dries my efforts to salt. Behind me, whispers of applause pull past my shoulders and fall between my hands; I can hear it echo somewhere in the black. Demons sleep by daylight. I wake with cheek pressed against a table leg, fingers sore and curled under my chin. For a moment, I can't remember; my eyes, sideways at floor level, pick out shards of wood, a settled haze of smoke, spatters of tacky blood. I smell dirt and damp and the sour odor of spoil; again I think of foxholes, I wonder where the sniper is perched. A ringing phone startles me to my feet, the steady thump thump of the Evacs melt into morning traffic that hums from the streets below my window. Shadows of sun shaft through my cracked blinds; the hole reveals itself...only a hole. Jagged at its edges, bigger, empty. I dump the ashtray over its lip; scatter my night cremations and watch as ash sifts into nothing. Day Five. Someone asked me today what 'Blue Tattoo' meant and why I chose it as a tag name. Well, for millions it means identification; stamped on wrists and forearms by some long-ago hatred. It's countless bad images and forgotten names forever etched onto skins by home-made artists; they fade and warp as time goes by. It's a book of poems by Lynn Lifshin...'The Blue Tattoo'. Pretty good ones, too. But for me, it's a cool image of a tattoo parlor that I found...I just like the sound of it. It's a start-over, a second chance, it's the wrinkle that my time can't forget. It's my own warp 'n fade, my personal two-step, my sideways shuffle. It's what my life FEELS like most days...a faded, homemade tattoo that isn't quite what it used to be; isn't the beautiful thing it looked like thirty years ago under bad flourescent lights. It's just a few crooked lines wrapped around a foolish idiom that no longer rings true. But it's mine, and I love it, in the twisted way you love the scar you got in some bar fight back in the day; the way you love a bad toothache because it reminds you that you can still feel...even if it's only pain. I love it because it won't go away, it's as faithful as a whipped puppy. Every now and then I trace it's face with my finger and wonder where the cobalt went, wonder when the ink clouded into slate...was it the year mama died, or did it happen somewhere in Haiphong while I was busy looking for trip wires? Maybe it was a gradual thing, and I only noticed when someone pointed it out. Maybe it's MY identification, a symbol of self-hatred that I'm not qualified or ready to sort out, that I'm not ready to forget. So I'll stay up late tonight and find tattoo flash on the net. I'll stare at all the skin art and prehaps pick out a new one to grace my falling flesh...something to remember me by. A vivid dust of color to cover my own faded shade of pale. It'll make me feel young again; bring back memories of when I didn't care and thought I never would. A celtic cross, a rose dagger, a sacred heart with my name across it's apex...or maybe just a zipper down my chest to remind me how easily some things open. But I'll probably just get drunk, instead. I read an interview recently where a good man said: "Blue whacks hard, hits 'em where it hurts; but a little of that can go a long way..." and of course it got me thinking, sent me off on a backwards journey that went and came such a long way that I wonder if I'll recognize the end when it nears. I thought of my brother Eddie; 10 years older and dead by 1970, hanging from the chandelier in my mother's great room because he wanted to run off to Paris or some gay somewhere to sling paint against curling canvas and that just wasn't done; could'nt happen said dear old dad; it's a doctorate for you... So there hung Eddie on a crisp May morning, sneakered feet drawing lazy circles in shadows on the black and white parquet. And I remember how my mother didn't scream; or cry or even drop her bone cup but instead instructed (now there's a word) the housekeeper to "send for the authorities, Helen", and instruct (there it is again) them to come quietly, please. When they cut Eddie down a crystal was somehow broken in the process and as I watched the fine glass shimmer to the floor I thought now there's beauty; such a beautiful irony... Eddie has broken mother's chandelier but he'll never get to see the distaste that bent her mouth downwards beyond the borders allotted to his death. At dinner, my father remarked on the high cost of a replacement. (not Eddie; the crystal) So there it is; a little that went a long way. Everytime I see wisteria I remember, it blossomed early that year and framed the windows of the great room where Eddie dangled in defiance... I associate it's heavy, purple scent with that final up yours. Soon after I ran away, joined the army...thus fucking my mother and my father in the best three-way ever; I was supposed to be a lawyer and carry on tradition in the time-honored manner. All the years inbetween then and now lay markers for that backwards journey; and today I find myself stumbling upon them, fascinated that with each mile back the colors still remain vivid and true; even if most of it is red and black. So along my reverse search I look for blue, yellow, green, orange; bright bits that I bury because the dark seems easiest to cover... but looking down at the buckled road I find this: A girl named Grace in 1973, just after Saigon fell, living in a Charlotte loft decorated with prints of Dali and Pollack that made you dizzy but she said they freed her mind, made her think and she liked Brautigan because he understood love, she said; she read to me "The Wait' and later, as we made love on a sprung sofa she cried and called me by a name that wasn't mine...I color her blue and sometimes when it rains so light you can't see it I remember how her hair stuck to her cheeks after the sweat was dry. And this: A man who said his name was Jerry gave me a ride one cold afternoon just outside of Chesterfield; and seeing I had no money and no motive took me to his apartment, fed me soup and pimento cheese sandwiches that were very near how manna must have tasted. We talked for hours sitting at his kitchen table; and at some point he showed me his collection of jazz wax that had to be priceless and just before I left he played Betty Roche and the Savoy Sultans...I can still hear the soul inflection of that voice. Color Jerry orange; and now whenever I eat pimento cheese I think of him and his 33's. And This: A small boy and his sister who found their way onto my property not too long ago. Out with my squirrel gun, looking for snakes, I come upon the two of them sitting on the bank of the Tar river that borders my land on the north side. They never heard my approach, being apt at walking the woods line in near silence, but my red-bone Millie startled the shit out of them with a high-pitched howl that set my teeth on edge. They jumped as if shot, and the girl (probably all of sis or seven) screamed and then began to cry miserably. "Don't shoot us, mister", said the boy, who was not much older than the girl, "we was only digging nightcrawlers..." (I guess I looked like a mister in camoflauge; it made me smile) They calmed down when they saw I was no boogeyman, I gave them some of the kisses I always carry in one pocket or another and we spent a pleasant hour or so pulling worms out of the rich river earth and talking about things like why the river runs just one way and why coon dogs are always so skinny. After they left, I sat awhile on the bank and thought of how everything goes a long way, but none of it ever seems to go on long enough. I'll color these two green, for growth... maybe they'll come back; I'll remember to haul extra kisses. I'm still looking for yellow. But on a clear day, You can see through sclera, past the color-wheel of iris, into the natural lens. If your'e quick enough, or good enough, you can watch bright fade to dull, see what was drift into what could have been. It's said that the last image percieved is reflected in the corneal eye; but that's bullshit. The only thing left is an eclipse too dim to cast back. Like the shut of a door against a heated room, what remains is cold. I've watched more doors close than I care to count, seen so much of what could have been...now I wear that cold, an unseen insulation keeping heat at mind's length. To remember warmth is to recall faces, names, the end of every story. Cold is better; numb and hard. I need the feel of the shell. Then today, a kid grabbed my arm. A hopeless kid with a hopeless wound, face-up in the middle of State street, the familiar aftermath of a common war. No fix here, no TV save. His eyes were green and deep; bending close, I watched frost rise in them like water...and through the fingers that circled my skin, I felt the heat slide away, felt the slam of the door. Hours later, I heard the click of the latch. Isn't it funny how we return to the places where things happened, old soldiers drawn to land consecrated by battle and cross...just as I sit here tonight, swallowing warmth shot after shot. I remember faces, write down names, turn the pages of an unfinished book and wonder if the story ever really ends. I feel the air thicken, I know that what I've come to find has not dimmed, or waned away. And in the back of my mind, nightstorms gather dust. Epilouge: Dismal sleeps. The Dismal is quiet in that hour before dawn, when the sun is not here or there but suspended; a faint breath of light caught on the edge of nothing. In that hour she sleeps, and tucked within her gnarled arms sleep all that name her mother; otter and coon, bear and bobcat- gray fox, red fox, white-tail deer; mink nestle their pelts deep into moss beds spread like comfort along bank and bough. Even the cottonmouth lie still beneath rock and log, copperheads lie above; their night-damp skins shimmer like new pennies. I alone am awake, but I am not awake alone. In the Dismal silence ride the voices of time; they travel years in a whisper, hiss at my ear in the low tones of the damned. They speak with dead tongues, spin memory from dust and it settles- kisses my sweat-wet cheeks and drapes my conciousness in webs of what was. Outside my window, swamp bleeds into delta as night becomes day. Listen: Cicadas, slow to wake, rub their legs together and I hear clackers popping through razor grass; my fists clinch, I wait for the dull thud of claymores to follow the din. I can see foxfire blooms in the peat, but my mind sees arc light through the trees; airbursts over Albany- and the voices hiss "run, run..." I reach for an aid kit that's never there. A Pileated woodpecker drills his perch and M-60's rattle my teeth in mad minutes without end. Tracers fire above the ledge of my sill, their red tails trail smoke like drifts of fog. Along the rim of reason, concertinas trip with pings and snaps that nails my flesh to sheet. The Dismal comes alive by degrees; her children wear paper shoes that slide through brush and leaf with deadly ease. Squirrels rustle their nests, warblers call for their mates, and somewhere inbetween the voices pull away- threads of their goodbyes knit tight stitches down my spine. Morning brings life. Otters slap the river in search of brim, they break surface in pairs. Coons scuttle the deadfall in search of snakes, snakes take to the flats in search of sun. Deer circle the cypress, stretch long and lovely necks to prune moss from their canopies; black bears sing to their cubs. My hounds edge their run on anxious feet, their hungry howls echo in the trees. Somewhere in the swamp's heart, mink skirt my traps with skilled indifference- their pelts stained moss green. When the wind is low I can hear them laugh. And I am awake, alone.

World Without End, Amen.

Part One: And In The Beginning, Lava Lamps When I was seventeen, the world was a psychedelic oyster...everything flung color; bright, boisterous shades of flourescent orange and scream green, purple haze (Ha Ha) and sunshine yellow. Nothing was dull, and nothing was still. It all twirled and swirled and sprung in twisting masses from our every object; even our T-shirts seemed to move. I like to think that the person who invented all that ass-kicker acid was just looking for some way to quiet it all down and it back-fired...we used to drop window-pane at Andy's house because he had blacklights in his garage; we would pour Tide washing powder on the floor and trip over its phosphorous contents twinkling through our little piles of detergent...it would be a couple of years before I would learn a few other uses for phosphorous. Yeah, those were simple times; I should have paid more attention to them, I should have ate all that color so I could've spit it up later when it would have really meant something. Lava lamps were the shit; you were nobody unless you had one in your room...and the cool moms had them in their dens. Joplin and Hendrix ruled the world, the Dead guarded the gates. The Stones had just hit the states and everyone hitched to all the best concerts...all the girls wanted to blow all the bands, all the guys wanted to be roadies. Nobody ever did, of course...that was for the kids from California who were lucky enough to get backstage passes; the closest our little southern contingent ever got was sixth-row center at a very memorable Joe Cocker gig...we knew all the words to 'Bathroom Window' and never missed a beat. We thought we were so cool. Just as good as those west coast kids. Plus, our pot was better, we were certain of that; we grew it ourselves...no infra-copters back in the day. Fifteen bucks bought a five-finger bag of prime red-bud; ten more got you a sole of hash to wrap it with. I miss that stuff. Nothing beats a good hash milkshake...and later on, nothing would beat a good dose of smack; pot would become just foreplay, just something to keep the jungle bugs at bay while we sat and waited for the movie to start...and that was the thing; if the horse was hot enough, you could get away with pretending it was all a Fellini flick...for a few moments, anyway. And sometimes that was enough to get you to the next day. It's a good thing we didn't know what was coming, I think most of us wouldn't have believed it if we had. The summer of sixty-six was winding down, the acid was turning into to mescaline, and Janis still had four years to live...longer than a lot of my friends. Nam was just a blurb on the TV news, the body counts during dinner were still a year or more away, and body bags were for the bad endings on Dr. Kildair. Some of us had brothers or cousins or uncles and dads pulling their time already, but nobody we knew up close and personal had gotten killed or even shot...not then. No one was protesting in earnest, not in our little corner of the planet, and all our teachers were talking about how it wasn't even a war, for christ' sake. Nobody seemed too fuckin' concerned...not then. Only our mothers looked worried; but they always did, so we never really noticed. And when we did, it was too late...High School was over, no money for college; all of us country boys had gotten our invitations by the time the spring of sixty-eight rolled around. Only Andy made it out; his dad had an aunt in Winnipeg and the next time I saw Andy he had three kids and a suit...he acted uncomfortable when he shook my hand; but it was OK, it was his folks that made him go. I guess. It WAS your folks, right, Andy? Part Two: Can You Hear Him Now? Been thinking about Andy again, he's starting to come and go like a cliched ghost; and I seem to be sittin' up with the dead. I haven't seen him since his dad died twelve years back, and we all went home to Catawba county to say goodbye...all of us that were left, anyway. We made a pitiful bunch, actually; hand-me-down suits and thrift store ties. All of us but Andy, who had done well in Winnipeg and wore a three-piece like an honest-to-God businessman. He had spit in his hand and passed it through his hair while we stood around the casket talking about how good his dad looked. Some things never change. That's funny, isn't it...how everyone always seems to think folks look so damned good when they're dead. I'll bet the dead ones don't think so...I'm willing to put a few bucks on the fact that they would probably rather look like shit and be able to tell you about it. I know for sure that I want to look terrible when I get to lay on my satin; and I hope all the people that come to stare at my corpse have the good grace to say so. I don't want to die handsome; it seems like such a waste. And I don't want to be laid out all dressed up...I've left word that I'll haunt anyone that tries to pin those fuckin' medals on me. I really don't believe a whole lot in God or Heaven or everafters; but whatever is waiting for me is just gonna have to take me like I want to come...wearing Levi's and Hane's cotten. And no socks, please; it's a thing with me. Had a lot of jumpers here lately; maybe that's why I've been thinking so much about Andy. You know, him jumping the draft and all. Word association and such...I've heard it can work like that. Anyway, four jumpers just this month; two off the Tar River bridge down at the rocks and two more off the I-95 overpass. The last two were a real fuckin' mess...shit everywhere. It took us the better part of a morning to get all the bits into our little red bio-bags...every scrap or the state boys get pissed. Can't leave anything for the public to see, when wer'e done, the Fire-house pumpers come in and hose away the spots. And these two had took their dive together, holding hands like goddamned love birds, said the bewildered witness who had called 911 to report the incredible event on his cell phone. Can you hear him now? Hardy fuckin' har har. By the time we got to the scene, he (The witness) was talking to the cops with his attitude showing...he had done his duty and now they were going to make him late for his tee time; he didn't PUSH them, for christ sake. It would have been more interesting if he had...nothing new about suicides. All I ask is that they get it right the first time so I don't have to work so hard...it's way harder to try and fix them than it is to just scrape them up. One thing is certain...no one will be standing around these two caskets speculating on how good the deceased look; these two are gonna fit in a shoebox. And I say bury them in the same one, size seven ought to cover it. After all, it seems they wanted it that way...just ask the pissed-off golfer who saw it all. I can hear him now. I love my job.

Transition

This is how it happened: It's 1964, John F. Kennedy has been dead a year and two weeks come Monday and here I am, laid up in some bar so dive I'm shooting mescal in dixie cups listening to Clifford Brown blow his brilliant trumpet through speakers that crack and bleed and now there's a girl on the stool next to mine; she wears a flesh-colored sweater like it's skin, tells me she's from downstate somewhere without me asking and now she's brushing her tits against my arm, talking about jazz and Benny Waters and don't I just love a good sax when it rains; then we're outside, steam lifting from the concrete because it has rained, been raining all day and next thing I know, she's peeling off the skin-toned sweater in a ten dollar room while I untie my shoes, wonder if she's going to taste like the Camels she's been burning all night and she does; but it's alright, it's ok, because it might not be good sax but it's a decent lay for a thursday night and somewhere between the push and the grind and the sweat-wet valleys I am transformed; jolted out of time, yanked up and carried away just like that magic bullet yanked JFK from his black continental, his ideas strewn across a pink chenille suit- no transition, no time to bide, no reflections in a half-shut eye; just the taste of smoke then I am here. Someplace else. Dislocated. It's 1966, John F. Kennedy has been dead forever, fucked over by a Texan and here I am; sacked out in some bamboo bar, drinking ruou from a tin cup while women shred dog meat in a back room.

Canning Lessons, 1961 (Audio)

Canning Lessons, 1961

There was a colored woman who came most summer days to help my old mam shell peas or shuck corn or snap beans for canning. Every third tuesday they washed sheets in big tubs, then hung them to dry on twine strung between canted poles; the flat smacks of their hands carried staccato across the fields. She had a niece named Sookie that came along those days; we would play until our bones hurt in the fields where old pa's colored men walked endless rows of tobacco, popping bright yellow flowers from each plant with fingers always sticky, always sore and when the field boss looked away, they would turn up water from jute jugs suspended on straps at their waists. Sookie and me plucked fat tobacco worms from their leaves, saved them in jars with punctured lids; old pa gave us a nickle for each full jar because there was nothing like a greenhorn worm to attract big cats cruising the river bottom while the sun beat its surface until you saw the heat waver and roll. We spent our nickles on RC colas and moonpies, side by side and knee to knee eating them in the shade of a high row. The woman never came when the days turned short. Summer would end, school start and Sookie sat in a different classroom at the end of the hall. When lunch came, she stood against a back wall with the colored kids and the white trash and they all wore bright yellow tags pinned to their shirts that said FREE LUNCH in big letters; they always ate last because that's the way things were when seasons changed worm money and moonpies into days sealed like summer jars.

Where The Songs Are Sad

The ghost of a savage is born full-blown in a dim study redolent of oiled leather and smoke; where Spanish sonatas play on an old victrola and Contino goes down straight from the bottle. Dali fades into the walls, faint behind glass clouded like tintypes. Larrea and Lorca sit on chairs, lie well-thumbed and opened across bed and sheet; lost voices rise from their pages to drift and scuttle in the comfortable dark. Like the shoemaker, the savage has a wife; angry on the other side of a door, loud knocks from another world where supper cools and ice melts in tall glasses like clocks against a Catalan landscape. In a dim study, a man digs his grave where crickets sing in shadows without light to give them birth and all the songs are sad.

Two Sevenlings

I. Late peach pies dress sills, whistle-thin voices gather in empty rooms and whisper beneath doors, around corners, behind the cool of cracked windows. The dead have come to reminisce; they tell stories of our futures, pat our heads while we sleep sepia-hued. Outside, broad-crested elms click near-nude limbs. II. In the long hall, dark descends on sock feet, beyond the past where everything is perfect, where time does not fall from trembled nightstands to shatter-stop against a perfect hardwood floor; where a cat does not roll, or purr recognition because everything is as it should be, nothing has changed, and hushed sounds behind doors ajar are always there.

Greetings, Readers & Friends...

I now have an actual book out, titled 'Blue On Blue', beautifully and thoughtfully published by OWL OAK PRESS. It's a publication that would not have been possible without the love, faith, and dedication of my friends Joe Green and Tim Smith; or without the support of family like Calicoe, Dale, Fred, and Don...Thanks, you guys. It's a volume that I think contains some of my best work, all lovingly hand-picked by the sad yet merry denizens who run the wonderful House of Owl Oak. Anyone who wishes to obtain a copy can E-Mail me at bluetattoo@cox.net and I'll be glad to send one your way for the paltry sum of $15.00, or you can visit my home board,

The Forbidden Story

, and leave a post there with your request... We'll be sure you get one. A HUGE thank you to everyone who visits here; I appreciate it!! Love Ya'll, Blue

If It's The Faith That's Important...

let there be fight. Send a prayer up for the hunted, prey for the predator; all mass to the enemy, amen. Will you offer your boys to the clergy? Light a candle, confessions feed flame. Wafers, wine, penitential suits; dinner for two behind stained glass curtains. Hail Mary, full of grace let us blow this goddamned place your money in a tin plate. Increase the tithe until sin ceases, Sunday mothers iron perfect creases, all god's chillums' wear Baptist blue. Songs sung blue, everybody knows one hallelujah chorus sing it for us while we burn crosses, burn Jews, burn the bush; soldiers of Golgotha in faceless diorama. Dead deities shop for attention, sell lightning rods door to door; frightened neighbors at the blinds sneak peeks for celestial signs and wonder why martyrs make mistakes of sacrifice over and over.

Words

Intent on a clutter of college ruled, absorbed in ink and smudges of thought, I never noticed her in the doorway, hopeful in a hopeless red dress- write this down, she said; write this down so you'll listen, so you'll hear what I got to say the same way I hear you when you put in words the flat of this dismal sky; it makes me feel damp on my skin, taste lonely at the back of my throat and I know you think I don't know much about words, or just how them words make you happy when nothing else can, but I understand well enough, I get it when I read "nothing grows here but water" so write this down, and listen: I want to live out loud; I want to be more than what I am, I want to sit in one of them outside cafe's sipping mint juleps like ladies do in Atlanta; I want to wear my hair up in curls, silk on my back, smell anything besides magnolia and tobacco and dirt- I need to tell my daddy that the best look at God is from hell, not a pulpit and I need to let my momma see what she closed her eyes to at night; I need to learn how to cry and remember that tears is just so much salty water. I have to chip out what's been covered in stone. I want to read on them pages someday that maybe I was special; that you noticed how I held you, your sap still on my hands, while you twisted uneasy in sleep. Let me see it put down that you thought I was pretty, hair the color of honey off the comb, skin like butter. Paint me in a poem that will find its way out of here- She caught her breath with a hitch, a sound so small that I bent to catch it. Her fingers fluttered, familiar against her neck; she turned, walked away without another word- her gardenia talc lingered long after she'd gone.

Acts Of Diffusion

I. Half-light scatters through sundowned trees, their leaves turned against the cusp of night. It silvers itself across a deadfall floor, casts long reflections from the rough surface that reach up, sweep back in particled waves to dust the saw palmettos like crushed glass. II. Warblers throw their voices along nodding banks, the sound spans the gaps between day and dusk. Fog and branch catch notes full-throated in webs of mist, scarves of bark until their range is sieved; becomes shadow song that sifts down on winter's chill, a fallen silence translucent as frost on a breath. III. Across the scope of night, little deaths count time on the faces of fawn, fox, red-tipped squirrel. The dark primeval eats its heart, follows its cycle through copse and covert by motion, by memory; seasons imbrue lineage in dispassionate blood, seed their continuance on a vanishing pulse.

The O'Hara Christmas

I was 11 the Christmas my father sat in a cracked wingback reading John O'Hara under bourboned breath, straining the words through his teeth, stowing their hard stone centers like ball-shot in his reddened cheeks while my mother listened to Ramsey Lewis sing about the sounds of the season as she downed nog after nog minus the egg and cream, heavy on the Wild Turkey and shelled fall pecans for winter pies into a bowl decorated with festive silver bells every now and then she flicked a nut-meat at father, bounced it off his head just like Gordie Howe bounced pucks off the net and she'd sing Goddamn ye mirthless gemmamin and laugh and flick and flick and laugh until he smiled at her over his page, rolling the stones in his cheek with his tongue, so careful not to let them fly and my brother, who was 9 that year, without my 2 extra terms of smart, looked up from his Etch-A-Sketch long enough to ask what was so funny about getting pelted with pecans and being forced to listen to the Ramsey Lewis Trio when we should be tapping our feet to the holiday stylings of Dave Seville and his Chipmunks but my father just kept his smile and said it’s for ourselves to know, son, it’s for ourselves to know- 10 Christmases and an American Lit course later, I realized why he was so good at tonguing stones.

Wars And Rumors Of (Revised)

Hunched like dogs mid-shit, faces flooded contusion blue, we quiver before the corpse-lights; slaver over designer drones whose digital tongues flap static louder than our intellects- they spew sang-froid emesis across the collective floor, stroke our heads, pat our asses by invitation; they sing us lies and lullabies but we know the ice age cometh: it taps a salvo against the convex eye, puts an antedate ear to our bowels and listens to the rumblings within.

Encounter

I picked her up at a bar on southside; lipstick lez with hair the color of cardboard and cinnabar stilettos that matched her scent but didn't suit her Tanqueray stride. She stripped while I watched, the detached observer- her breasts were not like melons only half globes of flesh and fat and failing musculature; nipples that were not the pert red of Bing cherries but puckered and flat across their tops, angled slightly towards the blue cut-pile of a motel 6 floor- They look like Devils Tower and the thought was as sudden as a spilled shot; close encounters of the desperate kind and the laughter was as quick as the process She was angry, the observer unrepentent; what we made was not love but raw, real in the way of imperfections, everything and nothing at once. After, I read her poetry she didn't understand while she drank gin from a plastic glass and listened; watched the words fall like minutes, like years.

Incident

He was a small man made to seem tall by a two button pinstripe and a chevron tie, all in muted shades of classic grey; bottom button undone of course- reclined against the polished pearl door of a buisnessman's sedan, he tapped a black Bostonian against the curb with an impatient rhythm and his socks were ribbed, certainly- he drew two cards from a leather tri-fold, passed them with manicured hands to a big man in a cheap suit and wondered loudly what the matter was; it was clearly not his fault how could it be when anyone with a good eye that happened to be on the corner of South and Main at the particular moment of the incident could see that the signal was, of course it was in his favor and he wanted to know why yellow tape was being strung, why photos were being taken and why weren't the medics allowed to bag it up, get it off the street before it offended the ladies who lunched al fresco after all it was only a little nigger that thought he could break the law, beat the light anytime he wanted because everyone knows that they think they own the road and besides, he would only have grown up to be a Democrat.

Emergence

I used to be a closet case, hid among the bows and lace; never really saw my face then I found that mirror. I took a good long look at me, handsome girl of Twenty-three; I didn't like what I could see caught within that mirror. I saw a lie reflected there, curls and ribbons in my hair; trappings of the Lady Fair cast back in that mirror. It really wasn't me at all, hanging up there on the wall; I heard a voice begin to call from somewhere in that mirror. I cocked my head and listened well, to what my silver self would tell; I truly could climb out of Hell if I believed that mirror. I took a scissor, cut the curls, they fell away in tawny swirls, I left them there for other girls- then I broke that mirror. -Tattoo The Face In The Mirror Paavo of Saarijärvi is the celebrated subject of a poem by J.L. Runeberg, whose bicentenary is celebrated this year. Although the circumstances of its writing are outmoded and its image idealised, the upright God-fearing peasant who courageously struggled against poverty and the forces of nature remains part of the Finnish national canon. Elina Sana’s historical study of Finland’s extraditions to Nazi Germany during the Second World War (see page 63) is not a holocaust story of any scale, and although the information it contains is not entirely new, we would perhaps have preferred to turn our eyes away from the details and the moral reality of which Sana’s work so vividly reminds us. Idealised images crumble, the facts remain, and it is the author’s intention to study them further. Faster than scholarly research, poetry and the arts, the electronic media today convey images of ourselves and others. When the mirror image is more beautiful than the face, the result is confusion. A couple of recent examples: Finnish television showed a Canadian documentary about judgements of criminal cases and prison conditions in different parts of the world. Axe executions and stonings from Asia and Africa, a hard-line punishment prison in Arizona in which discipline was in the hands of an almost sick-minded sheriff. One of his methods was humiliation. Male prisoners were forced to wear women’s underwear. The scene shifted to Finland, where the sun shone throughout the item and nature was at its greenest. A women’s prison in an old wooden house in the country was shown. Everyone had comfortable rooms; there was a communal kitchen, and the prisoners’ children played in the yard. Male prisoners were filmed working on the restoration of the 18th-century fortifications of Suomenlinna in Helsinki harbour. There were no guards, and the prisoners were paid for their work. The documentary’s image of Finland was so touching that I could imagine criminals rushing to Finland just to get into our jails. A week later a newspaper item reported that our prisons are suffering from overcrowding. There are too few staff, and violence and drugs problems are on the increase. Another documentary interviewed a Japanese working woman who said that in Japan neither employers nor husbands approved of working mothers. The woman described Finland as a ‘paradise of equality’. We women here know that equality has not been achieved either in jobs or pay, and that even housework is not evenly divided within families. In a way it is a pleasure to see images of ourselves when we see ourselves in a good light, even when we know the image is distorted. National smugness was also at issue when a radio newsreader from the Finnish Broadcasting Company let slip, after bellicose and violent items from abroad: ‘And now to peace at home.’ What has been done cannot be undone, but looking into the mirror of recent history is a necessity. Even in fitting rooms in shops there are two mirrors, one of them swivelling, so that we can also see ourselves from in front and behind. Kristina Carlson Editor-in-Chief Books From Finland 2004

What Kind Of PostModernist Are You?

You are a Gender Nazi. Your boundary-crossing
lifestyle inspires awe in your friends and
colleagues. Or maybe they're just scared you
will kick their asses for using gender-specific
language. Either way, the wife-beater helps.

What kind of postmodernist are you!?
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Fade

I lie on my back where the land draws up, forced into bank by a river that has its way; I listen to water trouble and turn, a slow diminuendo like the fading of old scars. Movement in the shelf of sky is only a loss of light- a bone moon reveals its face along a scarf of cloud. Heat bears the night electric; chalks tree against slate in skeletal bas-relief. I watch the set of day cast valley into flame; it leaves a silence of sheathed wings and the stir of italic rain.

Smoke Break At County

I. Packed after midnight, the county ER hangs thick with the sour aroma of blood, puke, sweat, shit. I grab a smoke between calls and watch while the regular patrons huddle under florescent bars dressed in familiarity and futility- sick crackheads and stoned cabbies, screaming babies, shady ladies; they dig change for the coke machine from pocket and purse, pick at scabs, noses, lice- all ignore the upscale magazines scattered about, coffee-table literature donated by Docs who wonder out loud to nurses who roll their eyes why Yachting World and Modern Architecture and GQ never seem to get dog-eared like the worn out copies of Weekly World News. A tweaker known as Blowfly to his compadres and Gomer to the staff...get out of my emergency room... picks up a copy of Yachting World and chatters with profound clarity about the the America's Cup to the empty chair across the aisle; when the triage nurse calls his number, he falls silent, green eyes gone as vacant as the south china sea. II. Two girls with bad complexions and pierced eyebrows sit side by side on the tiled floor, heads bent over a spread of fritos and a ham sandwich that had the crusts cut off- Did a mother do this, or was it some nostalgic reflex that rose up and bumped its unconscious head against the fog? They picked at it with slender fingers that made me think of concert pianists; their giggles burst from teeth yellowed like old ivory keys. III. The sound has no volume control. New conversations up their decibels in a struggle to be heard, old ones rise to the challenge; The registrar pulls down his Plexiglas window, a scratched and filmy shield against the din. A woman and four kids like stair steps occupy a row of dirty plastic chairs lining the back wall. she holds a baby in her ample lap in the same way you would hold a bag of groceries on the bus ride home, or a basket of towels while you wait at the Laundromat for a machine to free up. The baby cries in a continuous drone punctuated every little while with weary hitches for breath, its eyes dry and drooped; the resignation already learned clear in its monotonous song. Two chairs down the same row, a hooker named Davita gives a hand-job to a skinny black man in a Denny's uniform and a blood-soaked rag around his wrist; he tries to hide his pride behind Modern Architecture. The tallest stair step watches in silence, his steady gaze empty of curiosity. A group of boys argue by the door, their voices loud and huge; their jackets decorated with turf colors. A small boy screams over and over for his mother while a girl with red hair and a tear tattooed beneath an eye tells him to shut the fuck up in a tone that escalates in repetition. A man in a business suit, his cheeks red and his forehead glistening with rage yells at the registrar through the hole in the Plexiglas shield; he doesn't give a happy rat's ass about pacemakers, he needs to use his goddamed cell- I can't help but smile when the wino in line behind him leans forward and vomits quietly down the back of his coat. IV. In the middle of the room, a couple sit together, each tight against the other. They stick out, the two of them, washed out figures silent in a loud sea of life. Their pale faces are immobile a patina of sweat. The man is about fifty, his face lined by time and circumstance. His shirt is buttoned wrong, one side of his collar turns up and brushes his ear; his sockless feet cased in worn house slippers. The woman is about the same age, but whatever brought her here has added twenty years. She wears a housecoat that hangs loose to show a flannel gown bedecked with tiny red flowers; her left hand rolls a rosary between fingers whose nails are bitten to the quick. He holds the other in a clinch tight enough to drain his knuckles to a cold, bloodless white. Fear and hope passed messages between them like familiar rivals. I'd seen them before, and before and before- Alone and in pairs, sometimes in groups; these people who come to sit and stare in county, their faces different but wearing the same anxious mask. The end of it is always the same, nothing is ever good because that's just the way it is when the shields are pulled down and the flags have gone up. And when some demi-god in a dirty lab coat comes to hit them behind the knees, all that's left will be gathered into purses and bags and buttoned-wrong shirts and spilled out like rancid wine behind other doors, in other rooms.

Theory Of Relaxation

Chest deep in bramble and bog, pre-dawn chill rubs my shoulders, kisses the back of my neck where collar parts company with hair. Fingers shoved in my pocket fondle rounds stored there; loose extras in case the three slips in my pack are not enough to piss off Pan. Core-Lokt soft-point, "The deadliest mushroom in the woods", or so says Remington on the back of their olive green box. It's here I flirt with madness- watch day lift above a night of sweats and rapid-fire recall; not the hunter but the hunted, bound to the now by thread, by thorn. Dali has brushed me onto yesteryears' canvas, a warped study in camouflaged oils, crossing Thai Binh on a sampan heavy with mortars and babies dressed in drab rolling weed in yellow papers that taste of banana. Cramped joints bid my mind relax; relax, for you have seen mushrooms in the bush with nary a round to finger, no thirty-ought-six nestled against your crotch like salvation's erection- just a clap bag full of mud and morphine. Dismal smells like Haiphong. Dank peat, moldered moss; the sulpher taint of swamp milkweed lines nostrils with a burn of memory. Fog-hung lowlands shine silver and purple and green; the dead men beneath those canopies grow bulrushes from their bones that sing in the breeze. Crouched deep in last year's deadfall, marsh sucks my boots with hungry insistence, holds the hunter's pose with rooted grip. My chest rises, falls; cold exhalations alone mark my presence. Whitetail watch from the woodline. when they move, I will not hear it; no crack of twig or rustle of leaf to signify their range. Soon, the bucks will forage the ground cover for fall bulbs, their racks dipped towards papered hooves- And I will fire into the wakening sky, round after round until muscles are loosed; until my tight canvas relaxes its stretch and spills a voice into the empty air- sharp retorts that hold no echo.

Green Girl

Green girl shook looks across shoulders dressed in whispering silk, honeyed fibers spun from the looms of envious Gods.

Jump

I press between the weight of day and push of night; a quilt of skin sewn sinew to bone. Scars trace my surface, map the past in keloid and curve; I rub but cannot scatter the years. A girl once drew her palm down my laddered back, not asking what raised the rungs beneath her touch; lucky, she said, to know where the ledge stops- the falling off is to know where it begins.

Song

She had always wanted to open her mouth- let truths spill out in rainbow spirals like Dorothy did once under a Kansas sky, hugging toto to her chest and twirling, circling... She opens a vein instead; pulls a ruby thread with an exacto knife almost all the way to the bend where so long fluttered at the distal end and someone sang in a distant somewhere while the fade out washed in- she bought a ticket from oz down a brick road painted safety yellow, guarded at stubborn points by scarecrows with struck matches and tin men holding empty cans; they tied yesterday's noose across rust that spreads but never spills- afloat beneath a warm surface, she worships lost idols in a cracked clawfoot, swims with lions along an emerald coast as her breasts rise like gods from the murk- her heels tap ripples that fan out in fragile rings; they break apart in the heavy air. She twirls in a black mirror, a dripping reflection twists through gray funnels, rides the hues of her voice, rushes up behind battened eyes- they've come to tuck her in, the woman who spins and spins; following rainbow spirals that spill out in sudden tides.

The Listening

Up the road a piece from here, a mile, maybe two- an old black man lives in a ramshackle house made of clapboard gripped together by kudzu that's older still. Sometimes, I pass it on walks, most days I pass by on drives to town and back- ten trips out of twelve finds it as a dead thing, bereft of life except for the kudzu and a slat-sided tom always stretched along the crumbling concrete stoop. But tonight on the drive home, my beams pick him out of the dusk- a bent figure seated in a shadow of oak, hands busy at some task I can't discern in the low shaft of light. I pull into the dirt-pack yard and step out, hand him a beer from my pack with only a nod because that is our way- I squat on my haunches, sip my beer as the skinny tom watches from its step while I wait for him to speak; if he does, I'll listen. I can now see that he's shelling corn- his thumbs run the cobs in quick rows, the kernels fall into a tin tub between his bare feet. I know that when they dry, he'll crack them; and by the first frost his potent mash will be sealed neatly in Ball masons tucked beneath the cellar stairs. Every Christmas, one finds its way to my porch- its wide mouth tied with red yarn, the glass jar wiped clean. After a time, he talks in tight whispers so low that I dip my head to hear- he spins cobs in his palms as he remembers a sister, a young girl with plaits in her hair and scars across her back; she runs through his memory and he laughs as she laughs, a sound that is at once weightless and heavy as stone. Years fall backward in his voice- they catch in his throat, become slender brown limbs sprawled beside a long gone road, become scars broken open and left to seep dry beneath a moonless drape; residue on soil prepared for those born into the grave. With kernal and cob between his hands, he grinds his words; they spill from his fingers- a cadence that stops when he can't go back anymore to that place where ghosts rattle their bones. What he can't say sits piled in his tub. After a while, I help him gather the naked cobs; we throw them in a rusted barrel, it's sides vented with punch holes. He sets them to fire with a match culled from nowhere- and when the flames grow high enough to lick the rim, we lean into its heat like people who end up in someplace familiar.

At The Fruit Stand

I stop by the roadside, lured by bushel baskets angled seductively towards traffic; their depths filled with color. I lift an apple here, prod a cantelope there; my hands heft a honeydew up so I can see if too many hands have bruised its yellow skin. A misspelled sign that reads "Hep Yoursef" waves above a flat of summer plums gone too soft to sell. A cardboard box of peaches sits by itself at the end of the basket row, the scent of it wafts thick on a scant breeze. The vendor, a young boy, motions that I take one- "Try 'er, mister; there's none sweeter..." So I pick one, its soft fur tickles my palm. Yellow gone to orange gone to red, ripe for the eating, it holds the shape of my fingers in its flesh the way heat-reddened skin holds the blanch. I bring it to my mouth, feel the soft shell of it pop under my teeth, a surrender of warm meat and pit. I bend forward, fruit cupped in my hand- its juice runs between my fingers, lays like honey on my chin. I lick them clean, my tongue sweet against my skin. Should I ever love a woman, it will taste like this.

Dismal Rain, Chapter Two

I. Dismal rain feeds a restless mind. Before the world went red, I would watch it from the windows of my life; its sound as soothing as Coltrain on a weary night. Now it leaves me caught, a lightning bug in a sealed jar; it dampens my skin with an ill-defined apprehension, and on the chill of its breath rides the scent of fear. It distills geographies, turns dirt to mud. My temples hold its hum verbatim. Today finds Dismal gray beneath a laden sky. She welcomes it, adds its wieght to her mire; continuance ensured. She has not changed; the passage of centuries add nothing but knots to cypress and take away nothing but legend. I am the one who cowers within my walls, trapped by a past I cannot forget, teased by a god I cannot forgive. A dead god, shopping for attention, selling tickets for bone and dust. I want to put in a box those things that went different- a sturdy box made of what is left after the battle is done, before war becomes epitaph. But there is so little left, the box is just a ramshackle thing held together by spit and blood- and all that was turned is too heavy for its spit-licked sides to hold. Rain makes me drag it out, sends me on a mad search for reasons that were never there; and I know when Dismal has her fill and the sky becomes the slate-blue color of empty, I'll walk for miles in the company of water-shed ghosts. They rise as the mist lifts, unnamed graves that surface and lay scattered across fresh-wet earth; the bones within clatter and clack against their crumbling lids. I listen as the bones grow flesh, feel years shift their weight beneath my feet; and I am in another place- a parrallel plane that mirrors my memory, reflects against my mind's eye, casts shadow without sun. Familiar voices whisper from the other side of time; they ask how do I see my dreams behind closed eyes? II. What about the other side? The difference between here and there is logistics; countless miles that separate then and now. Three times I went, three times I came back; decades since spent filling the void left by what I left behind. I count backwards, wait for bruises to fade. Yes, time passes; but not much changes. Memory is like water in my clenched fist; it runs out, heads to earth- everywhere, earth; the odor of turned ground. And the distance is but the sharp crack of a branch- a second of sound that blurs into the hard snap of butt against bone, blends into the soft whicka whicka of machetes through razor grass, becomes the deafening silence of the lull between what was and what will always be. The soft kiss of moments turn today to yesterday, brush back years with lips so gentle the seduction is barely felt; a rape of will that has no defense. Quick glints of mica shoot through underbrush and fall; instinct ducks my head, bends my knees low against an unseen aim. A rush of wing sends startled swallows upwards in a sudden spiral; in their shadow medivacs pitch and vie for space. Somewhere behind me, hounds howl for their dinner, the wails desolate, forlorn- and in their voices I see black-haired women kneeling in tank ruts, children cradled to their chests like bundled sticks. The difference is that, the distance is this; this that, that this. Now means sometimes and other times. Whatever it is that looks back is without longing, does not lose itself in the tremble and click of limbs caught in a heavy wind. Tangles of cypress root grip river rock like ribs grip lung, like I grip the visceral strings that connect what was and what will never be. All night, the hounds will keen lament for the rain, and bullrushes, fragile as burnt matches, will break in the breeze. III. The rain is back. It hammers the tin roof, tiny spears like bullets. I feel the muscle rise in my throat, a knot I try to drink clear. My fourth shot finds me here, stiff in front of a ghost-blue screen. I write; etch words against white that have no meaning, make no sense. In a far corner, the dead pile up, get ripe where they lay; I can smell their insistence move from breath to breath. The present is etherous, a documentary of spring in a jungle; olive-clad boys with terror on their faces search through thatch while I struggle to remember the alphabet doesn't string along a keyboard in sing-song harmony. I don't know where they went, wrapped in black and flown home in the cold bellies of planes. On my best nights, I pretend that none of them fell past my fingers on their journey there. Dismal is like that; a wet spring in another jungle, a place that has never heard of me or my abscence. I try for balance, some equal ground where the great Axis Mundi never slips her spokes and lets the green world turn red; but in the end, I'm not much different now from the girl who crawled through mud and guts, an aid-bag clutched in her hand. I still carry that bag, only now I walk instead of crawl and I don't bother to dodge the fire anymore. My vision is a relentless understanding, no longer able to look away, obligated by depth and a yolk of light. In its field, a universe; an eye engulfed by the far-gone tides of what holds it there. I watch the cieling fan turn in my kitchen, I try to blink and can't. The whickering blades converge, intrude on each other in endless repitition. I sit in my chair, this necessity of skin, and strip myself to bone.

Dismal Sleeps, Chapter One

The Dismal is quiet in that hour before dawn, when the sun is not here or there but suspended; a faint breath of light caught on the edge of nothing. In that hour she sleeps, and tucked within her gnarled arms sleep all that name her mother; otter and coon, bear and bobcat- gray fox, red fox, white-tail deer; mink nestle their pelts deep into moss beds spread like comfort along bank and bough. Even the cottonmouth lie still beneath rock and log, copperheads lie above; their night-damp skins shimmer like new pennies. I alone am awake, but I am not awake alone. In the Dismal silence ride the voices of time; they travel years in a whisper, hiss at my ear in the low tones of the damned. They speak with dead tongues, spin memory from dust and it settles- kisses my sweat-wet cheeks and drapes my conciousness in webs of what was. Outside my window, swamp bleeds into delta as night becomes day. Listen: Cicadas, slow to wake, rub their legs together and I hear clackers popping through razor grass; my fists clinch, I wait for the dull thud of claymores to follow the din. I can see foxfire blooms in the peat, but my mind sees arc light through the trees; airbursts over Albany- and the voices hiss "run, run..." I reach for an aid kit that's never there. A Pileated woodpecker drills his perch and M-60's rattle my teeth in mad minutes without end. Tracers fire above the ledge of my sill, their red tails trail smoke like drifts of fog. Along the rim of reason, concertinas trip with pings and snaps that nails my flesh to sheet. The Dismal comes alive by degrees; her children wear paper shoes that slide through brush and leaf with deadly ease. Squirrels rustle their nests, warblers call for their mates, and somewhere inbetween the voices pull away- threads of their goodbyes knit tight stitches down my spine. Morning brings life. Otters slap the river in search of brim, they break surface in pairs. Coons scuttle the deadfall in search of snakes, snakes take to the flats in search of sun. Deer circle the cypress, stretch long and lovely necks to prune moss from their canopies; black bears sing to their cubs. My hounds edge their run on anxious feet, their hungry howls echo in the trees. Somewhere in the swamp's heart, mink skirt my traps with skilled indifference- their pelts stained moss green. When the wind is low I can hear them laugh. And I am awake, alone.

The JD CD...A Comprehensive Review

I have listened to the CD numerous times now, even took it to work with me today much to the dismay of my country-music lovin' partner; and I forced two ER docs to listen to it in staggered portions between an amputated thumb and a GI bleed. They insisted that they loved it; but I suspect they were equally glad to see me leave with my walkman tucked happily in my pocket. All the nurses were mysteriously unavailable for comment. The vasty Deep introduction was ghostly and glorious. The sounds of it are at once eerie and ethereal. I got goosebumps on my duckpimples. You guys have such big, vibrant pipes. The "All Souls" piece was almost Shakespearian...just too cool for this inept reviewer to properly praise. I loved "At Con Nach Naugh"; the scottish accents were so well done, and the bagpipes were absolutely lovely...I've never heard Amazing Grace sound so haunting. It all put me right on the moors looking at castles on the distant rise. Just what do scotsmen wear under their kilts? Then came Chris...what can one say? His voice is richly textured and full of innotation; it reminded me so much of the old radio theatres. I turned the volume on my Sony up to 5. They were all marvelous, but I particularly like 'The Monkey On The Terracotta Patio"..."The scent of gardenias plays in his nostrils"...how wonderful is that? "Flashbulb" brought me right back to Elmore Leonard and all those old detective mags; remember them? I kept seeing some crime scene photog with his press card in his hatband. Stellar. "Cousin Frank"...a perfect poem, to me. I can recall days spent much like these apple tree raiders; only mine were sawhorse ponies and tobacco sticks for guns. "Queer Street" simply can't be reviewed...perfection as far as I can see. AH, BISTO! AH, YESSSSS...! "60's Poster Boy" is another fave...very nostalgic to me. I was so enamored of Fonda and her fur bikini. Thanks, Chris, for that fond memory. The musical interlude following Chris was great; it made me think of "A Clockwork Orange". I kept expecting someone in a bowler and bad eyeliner to hit me from behind with a bat. Loved it; every note. "I Am The Tate-Polanski Fetus"...has to be one of the best opening lines EVER. "I woke dying" is just a great line, period. I really, really enjoyed that entire piece. Awesome stuff. delightful to listen to. The content for this piece is incomparable...a great mind at play. I thought "Moss Landing" was so beautiful; hauntingly so. "Transvestite Moon" and "Whorehouse Wind" are two of the best phrases I've ever heard...just great. "Pickles In New York" was super cool...I felt like I needed to order cheesecake for dessert. I did tip the waitress the obigilatory %15. I LOVED 'Tourjours Gai', it was forceful and just right. The guitar performance was a brilliant accompaniment. I had a guinness with this one. "Ezra Pound" and his seraphims led quite nicely into the bongos...I went from cathedral to coffehouse in a seamless stream. Great slide.... Then I went Buffaloe hunting; I've never been before, and I had a great time. It certainly didn't leave me as cold as the hearts of the damned; instead it left me warmed by a western wind. Loved the pickin'...great stuff. Back at the coffehouse with my beatnik self. The Nieman Marcus piece is my very favorite one by you, Joe; and you do it so well. "Never murdered a baby who didn't desrve it"...wonderful. "...Angel guts and bearded fetus'..." who could ask for anything better than that? Fuckin' awesome read. Then the whole thing was interrupted by the mumblings of some poor mad woman whose accent was so thick, I couldn't understand a damned word she said. Might I suggest you leave her out of the next one. The chimes are beautiful. The church here in town has a Sunday corrillion, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as pleasing as this one. I'll bet it's a wonderful thing to hear in person. Makes me want to visit, even if it is north of the mason-dixon. I thouroughly enjoyed 'A Masonic Funeral'...another exceptional bit of stuff done just right. No one could have been a better closer than Orson. Chalk one up to RKO; they sure knew a star when they saw one. Thank you, Joe and Samson and Chris and everyone involved with the production of this CD...I'll treasure it. ****Anyone wishing to order a copy of this fantastically original CD featuring the wonderful stylings of Chris George and Company for just ONE DOLLAR (or anything you might care to trade, such as chickens or copies of Wierd Tales), can visit here

The Forbidden Story

and ask for Joe. I'm sure he would be pleased to burn one off for you!

A Dream After Reading Don's Altered State

Someone drew a ring in the earth shallow trough unbroken by the shift of days- it's center a bare nothing, nothing it's center could not bear and angels drag bare feet through the middle, scored channels to mark their passage bound backwards to a night blue sky angels catch rings in their hands- toss them to the circled wind and laughter rings unbroken through rifts of time, mark the channels back to nothing, nothing circles the earth unbroken by the shift of years; laughter, shallow and bare, fills the center- angels with bare feet pull rings from cobalt, drag them down in dying circles of white; their passage channels wind through a circle of days.

Dog Story

There's a three-legged dog that roams the back alleys of town. Some days find him brave along main street, dodging traffic on three scarred pads and a counter-wieght shaped like a thigh. He has no name that I ever knew, but I call him untitled; a shambling draft filled with page after page of stories no one will ever hear, or get to read within the bindings of a worn and dusty book. He doesn't eat well but he eats- a scrap here and a morsel there, sometimes I see the butcher's boy lay bones unwrapped outside the rear door; strings of meat and sinew reflect an act of grace beneath the sheen of summer blowflies. I often wonder if he dreams of Rin Tin Tin, if he envies the great shepard and his celluloid flock; or if he knows that had fate only made him asthetic and born him in a different circumstance, that it might have been him poised stalwart on a Hollywood cliff? I know that one day I'll come into town, find him bloated beside some curb; sides fat at last. And when the road crews shovel him up, he'll spill volumes across their boots; an untitled tide of words riding gutter-waves to an nameless sea.

Untitled

Rain for days. It's rained for days, and what is left soaks slow and silent into ground and green; thin fog hovers above dips and hollows in ghostly drifts. Last month's pollen floats atop puddles, skims of yellow that will birth nothing but mosquitoes. Young crocus struggle to keep their water-limp heads erect on slender stems. The hounds, lured from their runs, lie slack in the grass and glean their hides for tics with tongues patched black by bloodline. They watch passing clouds with hooded eyes. The river is troubled; mud-stirred and thick with deadfall loosed by the storms' hectic dance. Two men sit the bank and bait hooks with shrimp; they tap it along the bottom, music for blind bass. It's rained for days. Days of rain and somewhere beyond the wood's edge, stands of birch unfold silver leaves against a lifting fog, their opened canopies throw shadows beneath a promised sun.

My Interview With Orson (Thank You, Joe Green)

Orson: “No one in film has ever had such talent, such energy, such innate depth. But he had made a film that ensured his career’s end, and he had done it all so that the films grim portrait of solitude would be fulfilled.” Hello, this is Orson Welles. I was just reading one of my many biographies. Really… I don’t know if I believe that last sentence. In any case… (MUSIC: SPANISH THEME SONG ["NO MORE," A TANGO]... FADES) Orson: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small, spinning fragment of solar driftwood which, by chance or design, man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Which reminds me that we are here tonight to discuss poetry. Blue Tattoo, welcome. Blue Tattoo (BT): Thank you, Mr. Welles. It's my great pleasure to be here. Orson: Let me start with this poem. What Frank Knew She pauses on the rim of the sleeping desert, lights a sweet caporal with a boot-struck match, shadowed face floating behind the arc of a blue diamond and suddenly she's Ava, backwoods beauty stolen from an old movie, playing a sultry scene in sweat-wet khaki beneath a California moon, swaying to forgotten strains of silent music that tickles my memory, tighten my senses and now she turns- turning to smile at me dark-haired and dangerous and all at once I recognize the pull, fall under the hard draw of a sucking tide and I am swallowed, sluiced down a perfect throat like the perfect shot and I understand, same as Frank did, the nature of certain addictions. Let me tell you – this is perfect of its kind. Wonderful. How did you come to write it? BT: Well, Mr. Welles, this poem is actually rooted in fact. Even though I reside nowhere near a desert, sleeping or otherwise, there IS a vacant lot behind the hospital I frequent that could pass for a desert; especially now that the streetlights that face it have been broken out and it's been put in the dark. Unless, of course, there's a moon hanging around...but, back to the facts. There's this ER doc that I was spooning a while ago, even though such pairings are strictly frowned upon (I'm a Paramedic, and we are NOT supposed to fraternize with the higher-ups), but I became enamored, actually, addicted is a much more apt term, and I managed to talk her into a couple or three smoke breaks in the aforementioned vacant lot. She carried pack matches from the commissary, and smoked Luckies, but the Blue Diamonds were easy enough to imagine...and my pop smoked Sweet Caporals; I still remember the heavy smell of them. This particular doc had long, very brunette hair and hooded eyes, and being from Mississippi, a drawl that could melt butter. Being a HUGE Ava fan (those lips, those ELBOWS), all it took was a strike and a turn. Orson: I knew Ava, of course. Did you know that Rita Hayworth and I planned to build right there at Nepenthe down Highway 1 from Carmel? I mention this because, under the aspect of Eternity I saw, perhaps two of your mortal years ago, two of the fellows who are here at the Jeunesse Doree as they sat on the deck of the restaurant “Nepenthe” sipping fine ale and always reflecting on that name as great crows or ravens harried them trying to catch their attention just long enough to signify something. The crows or ravens failed. Instead they persisted in laughing over their own limericks. They were the Lonliest Ranger and Samson Shillitoe and Mr. Shillitoe, when you posted this poem a few days ago, gave the right and inevitable reaction. I couldn’t have said it better. But (and I hope you agree with what Samson wrote) and looking at poem yourself…how do you think it works in this way, what happens in the poem to do just what Samson says it does? And please remember to not let modesty restrain you. The poem is there. BT: Nepenthe...I know it well. The opiate's dream, Homer's remedy for grief; mecca of poets, artists, and vagabonds. Carved right out of the cliffs, isn't it? Lovely place, smelling of salt and redwood and oak. I have a friend who lives in Esalen; I visited the Henry Miller museum once. And of course, there is Big Sur; which I think has become woefully...well, commercialized. Full of re-habitants. I agree that the restaurant is a wonder; I had an ambrosia burger there in '74, back when I was younger and had a little change to spend. Their merlot is excellent, if I recall correctly. But I do run on...back to your question. I was honored by Mr. Shilitoe's response, thrilled, actually. For me, it was that turning...it really DID push the sun away (had there been one; there wasn't). When she turned, her hands cupped around her match, it lit her face from beneath her chin; it pulled her aspect into something breathtaking...I hate that word, but in this case, it's apropos...and pulled me with it. That's the moment that my 'addiction' to this woman began; I could'nt get enough. Ava came almost immediately to mind; particularly Mogambo, which I had seen just the night before. What I think happens in this poem is strictly animal; that guttural attraction that can occur at certain moments, welcome or no. It's sensory, olfactory, visceral. Ask Frank, he'll tell you. Orson: Look at the transition from the first to the second verse: She pauses on the rim of the sleeping desert, lights a sweet caporal with a boot-struck match, shadowed face floating behind the arc of a blue diamond and suddenly she's Ava, What a wonderful effect. Of a sudden the flame..and what I love about it is just how cinematic it is. The poem is incredibly visual with of course just what is also there in my movies: light and shadow and then blue diamond which is hot damn just what is needed as a star is born. What I mean is… you have a scene and somehow there is so much more there: the fineness of, of course, just that sort of cigarette, the scene sketched as if seen from some starry perspective as she pauses on the rim of the desert, the close up of the “boot-struck” match, the exact sense of the shadow with all of its implications and then that blue diamond (Blue Diamond matches, of course but the twin senses of star) and then the poem illuminated by a suddenness as the unnamed “she” becomes Ava – the humor and the throat catching revelation of the goddess all at once. Yes. If you can… would you tell us what you think was happening just then when you wrote those lines? BT: I can tell you exactly what was happening; again with the turning, the hooding of that face that by now, wasn't the doc's face at all...it was Ava. It physically tugged the muscles in my belly, made me as light-headed as a good dose of opium. I was literally 'rendered speechless'...I remember dropping my own smoke and how throaty her laughter was when she noticed my awkward behavior. I was instantly in love...an emotion uncommon to me...and though it faded as soon as the sodium lights of the parking lot hit us; l can still remember that turning.... I could spend the rest of our interview on this poem. Look …just this: …I am swallowed, sluiced down a perfect throat like the perfect shot with its perfect use of “sluiced with the exact shadowings and then the startling effect of “perfect” throat and the hammering of perfect yet again… So, it’s inevitable… I want to know who you are. Who are you? Please feel free to make anything up. I did. It’s a mark of greatness. Although at times it did seem as if I really had been a bullfighter in Spain at 15. BT: Who am I? Now there's a question. I guess, to quote a sailor man, I am what I am. I'm female, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool dyke, I abhor all those 'lipstick lezzies' that always smell like bubblegum. I ran away from my oh-so-genteel southern folks at 15 and joined the armed forces as a medic; in those days, women stayed pretty much in the MASH tents with little sight of actual combat...but I managed to land a gig on a medivac as a flight nurse. I miss it. My family disowned me when they found out I was gay; I was likewise excommunicated from their Catholic church; a thing I find really amusing in light of today's rampant collarly pedophilia. I became a paramedic because I'm a trauma junkie; I live in a redneck, backwards town in the dismal swamps of Carolina, and I own three blue-tic hounds and a red-bone yard dog. I live alone, I hunt to relax, and I find censorship a crime punishable by death. My favorite album (yes, album) is Holiday's 'Jazz 'round midnight', and I'm secretly in love with Lenny Bruce. I'm a morphine junkie but I'm trying to quit...and I love chocolate necco wafers. And I write because I can't NOT write...if that makes sense to anyone but me. Orson: May we discuss this poem? Blue on Blue 3:16 AM, emergency entrance, county general- I was propped against the rear doors of a rig parked in Bay 5, close to where the docs smoke with cigarettes tucked behind their palms, furtive anarchists flicking ash at the don't-do-that sign while people shift back and forth around them and I was thinking about this tweaker kid we brought in on a dead run; skull a cracked vault, his secrets betrayed on the floor beneath my boots I was thinking about how he wouldn't stop breathing; how the noise of anatomy dogged collapsed lines in fibrillating waves I was thinking about a girl in a dirty blue skirt sitting on a curb with his blood on her knees, how her face pulled away in the rear-view like a scream I was thinking about how an intern with two silver loops in his ear hummed 'Blue on Blue' under his breath as we gave our report to a nurse I thought about these things I watched the guards watch me I didn't clean any secrets from the rig I did sit down on the step plate I picked at the wick of my zippo I whistled the intern's song somewhere behind me a girl with bloody knees sits on a curb pulling threads from the hem of a cheap skirt. Orson: So, I’m thinking that this poem is a poem about something that actually happened, or something written from this and that that actually happened. True? Can you tell us about it? And what is a “tweaker?” BT: Yes, it's true...this was an actual event. Just one of the many tweakers I pick up in the course of a shift; a tweaker being a methamphetamine addict. Meth labs are a HUGE problem in my area. This particular kid was about seventeen; he was cranked up on his buy and got himself run over by a car while attempting to cross a major highway. He was a mess, never had a chance; but we worked out on him anyway. The memory of that scene that is most clear was the girl; I happened to look up as my partner pulled away and she was sitting just like that on the curb. It struck me as inevitably sad. He would'nt die, never lost his rhythm while I had him...and he should have. He died later in the OR. The nurse whistled the entire time I was trying to give my report; he really did'nt give a shit and I was bothered that I did. I can't listen to 'Blue on Blue' anymore without thinking about that girl sitting on that curb; and sometimes I find myself humming it at inopportune moments. Funny, the things that stick. Orson: It’s a fine poem. May we, for an instant, move away from the poem just there to where the poem came from? What I mean is this…every time I read poems by a certain sort of true poet (more or less every poet who remains somewhat within my ken…unlike Shakespeare or Dante for example who seem to create as God and who am I to try to describe the universe?) I feel there are certain pressures or let’s say wants behind the poem…and I wish I could name them. What do you want your poems to do? What yearning is behind them? Or…what dark materials? BT: I guess, Mr. Welles, I just want my poems to remember, to serve as some sort of marker for a whole lot of things I can't forget. It's nothing I can really pin down, and after all my years of sitting up with the dead, I find myself mostly numb. But every once in a while, a thing will jar me...like the girl on the curb. She was nothing; just another crack ho who's probably dead now herself, but in that frozen instant she was something indefinable, something incredibly important if only to me and the dead boy; something worthy of note. So I did, note it, that is...and I guess that's all I want my poems to do, just remember what most folks forget. The materials are nothing more than my life...I write only what I know. Orson: Maybe this is the same as the question I just asked. What would you want your poetry to do that it doesn’t do? Which of your poems come closest to doing what you would like? BT: Lets see...I would like my poems to be taken seriously. Let me explain that; almost everyone who reads my stuff dismisses it as 'shock' trash, poetry that's meant to awe people simply by way of the language I use and the subject matter entailed. But I don't do it on purpose; what most people never take the time to find out is that the language is MY language; the subjects are MY experiences; and it is troublesome to me when it's dismissed as nothing more than words meant to elicit response by some deliberate use of certain words and scenes. Maybe that's sort of vain, but it's a worry spot. My very favorite poem of my own (and I don't have many) has to be 'View From A Flying Jimmy'. It's the one that outlines the start of my every workday in precise and exact detail. It's almost like a diary entry...and because of that, I like it best. Orson: Here’s another fine poem: Olongapo Night She lay still, taut on the bed, and watched as a fat spider with spindly legs like eyelashes, danced at the end of an unseen line. It hung from a topmost corner of the raftered ceiling, its slight, somehow lewd sway cast eerie marionette shadows that grew long and slunk away along the muted eggshell walls. She pulled the thin cover to her chin, stared at it frightened, yet seduced. A chill like a creeping fog spread through the walls of her belly in thick layers. The spider swung itself upon a beam, and perched in an awful, knowing attitude. It regarded her in silent anticipation, seemed to wave in secret conspiracy. It skittered in sudden decision across the wood, then vanished off the edge of her perception. She thought without effort of the Buso, Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares, and waited in puddles of cold sweat for the sweet feast to begin. Dear God, don’t you wish that the hypothetical intelligent reader were not hypothetical?. Who has read this – did anyone ever tell you that they knew where Olongapo is or what the Buso or “Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares,” are? BT: HaHa!! Almost everyone who has ever commented on this poem hates it. I've been told it doesn't ring true, that it's a made-up place, that it's all just fairy tale bullshit. One guy over at PFFA told me that it was long on adjectives and horribly short on form, whatever the hell THAT meant. The actual root of this piece is simple: my father was in the navy during WWII, and fought in the pacific theatre during the battle of Leyte. He was there when Mac Arthur announced "All the phillipines are now liberated". He spent many nights in the city of olongapo. He fell quite in love with the country as well as a Filipina girl named Corazon. When I became an adult and could wrap an adult's mind around his stories that I remembered from my childhood, I understood that had he been born in today's time, he would have left his family for his 'heart'; the phillipines and his much-lamented Corazon. It was from him that I learned of these quite nasty Filipino folk tales, he liked to scare the shit out of me with horrible visions of this flesh-eating monster when I was around eight...and this poem is kind of autobiographical; the girl in the piece is me. Orson: Olongapo: “They were the clubs and various entertainment-oriented businesses which welcomed American sailors and Marines to Olongapo City, Philippines. Despite the Navy's dire attempts at "OPSEC," every Filipina in every club and bar knew just when American naval vessels were due to arrive at the adjacent Subic Bay Naval Base. Banners hung over every club entrance with such greetings as "Welcome USS Pelilieu," "Welcome sailors and Marines, USS Blue Ridge." A visit to Olongapo was special in many ways. To the sailors and Marines not stationed at Subic, it was a chance to get the hell off a ship, into some civies, and into the most exciting town in the Orient. For newbies, this was their chance to experience what had become legendary - a night in Olongapo. For returnees, it was an opportunity to visit old haunts and look for old friends (yes, usually Filipinas). For the bar owners it meant money, and lots of it. And for the Filipinas employed at the various clubs it meant not only income, but often the chance to meet the right guy and, if they were so disposed, to start the move eastward. There was nothing quite like the excitement servicemen felt at liberty call the first night in Subic. While a few unlucky guys got stuck with Shore Patrol or some other duty, most of the sailors and Marines waited anxiously in line aboard ship for liberty to be sounded. When it happened, hundreds of hungry, thirsty, and incredibly bored men shot off the ship and toward the main gate. Even before the servicemen made it off the base, Olongapo made its presence known by booming rock music over the gates. Even those new to the base were able to find the front gate by following the thunderous bass radiated by the nearby Playboy and Hot Lips clubs. Once you made it past the guards at the front gate, you crossed a bridge which spanned a river known simply as the "Shit River." Not a pleasant name, but fairly appropriate given that raw sewage from the town was often dumped into it. Boys in little, flimsy boats beckoned from below the bridge, telling passers-by to throw pesos or centavos into the river. When a coin did get thrown, the boys would dive into the filth and somehow retrieve the coin. The navy eventually tried to discourage this practice by putting a fence along one side of the bridge.” Does this sort of thing never end? Now let’s see what else: “Mananangal – The most feared Filipino creature; also known as wak-wak in the Bisayan dialect. Common people believe the wak-wak is always a woman. Between six or seven o’clock at night this creature finds a secret place near her home. She bends her body down while her legs remain rigid and straight; her hair becomes stiff and nails turn into long sharp claws; her eyes grow bigger and eerily glows; while large bat-like wings protrude from her body echoing the sound “wak-wak-wak” as it flies along. It preys on the livers of the sick and disobedient children who refuse to come indoors at twilight. They are especially fond of developing babies in their mother’s womb; whose blood is sucked by using its tongue as a threadlike proboscis which enters through the mother’s navel. Vigilant eyes, garlic and a pair of scissors or thorny branches should be kept beside a pregnant woman at all times. “ and the Buso another kind of monster. I love this poem and now it might be illuminated somewhat. The girl waits for the monsters – who is she…just that Filipina who will be used in the usual ways by the usual monsters.. Did you ever explain this poem to anyone? BT: I tried to explain to the idiot at PFFA, but he was'nt listening. No one else has ever asked for explanation; they have all simply dismissed it as a worthless crock of over-done imagery. I am very pleased, Mr. Welles, that you know of such places and things. Orson: Damn that was fun. And what a poem…really. The descriptions exact and, again, shadowing so much. So, let me close with this. Last of all, is there anything you would like to add? BT: Yes, Mr. Welles, as a matter of fact there is. I would like to add that I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with you, and it has been my honor to have been the subject of your interest. May I request a tune of the orchestra? Please have them play 'La Comparista'...it reminds me of the wonderful Meridian Room where I first tasted champagne. Good night and adieu, Mr. Welles; and thank you for our time together. Orson: And now this. As an immortal spirit I charge you to keep writing. Starry night and you alive alive oh. Until we meet again. Goodnight America. In a few moments we will take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey. We return you until then to the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra. (MUSIC: "STARDUST" PLAYS FOR A WHILE, THEN QUICKLY FADES OUT ) We are ready now to take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton where Carl Phillips, our commentator, will interview Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer. We take you now to Princeton, New Jersey. (ECHO CHAMBER. SOUND OF TICKING CLOCK.)

Alice Found Mitchum

in a noir house downtown, with maroon walls and sprung seats and a projectionist named Mick who spilled Captain Walker from his window on Wednesday nights, pinned him to a hillside with Warnicki and Ay-Rab and the weight of dead men hooding his face; their shadows bone-deep behind his brow.

Lili Marlene Wore Red

fishnets and meted out blowjobs to guys in soldat suits on a screen ripped in the wrong places while secret gentlemen sat scattered beneath the grainy show- their names tucked behind faded faces, ladies who laughed behind clouded plastic panes and Lili had top bill above the Angelica, where goodtime gals with cherry lips circled outside under streetlamps like things lost- waiting for exodus.

To Dream Of Byzantine

She admired Byzantine architecture, having studied it one long ago summer under a young professor whose ancestors lived and died in Crete; he had carried in his suit pocket a Justinian coin that he claimed was real though it bore no date. She bends brass and copper wire into facsimiles of the Hippodrome, of Hagia Sophia; when time allows she sculpts the Theodosian Walls from toothpicks and hides her face behind their structure. On days when clouds bank the sun, she fashions a toga from a lilac sheet and dances circles around the courtyard; the empress Theodora in scuffed sneakers and a wreath of yellow pansies for a crown. Neighborhood boys sometimes toss tomatoes plucked from their mother's gardens- those that do not burst into ripe flowers across lilac and brick she gathers up; leaves them in a woven basket outside the gate for the mailman or the milkman to enjoy. She kneels every night on her polished floor, carefully glues colored glass and stone and tile into complex patterns that grow from the baseboards in widening arcs. She has a cat named Constantinople who watches the process with calm indifference. When she sleeps she dreams of San Vitale, of mosaics and obelisks and reflected light.

My Little Vacation

Well, after much cajoling, I went to the coast for a small holiday. Here is the evidence that I actually WENT. It was relaxing, it was fun; I dug sand out of my ass for four days. I caught a few groupers and hogfish and one suprised hammerhead shark. What I learned on my trip: Shrimp will really smell up the back of your vehicle if you forget it's in there for a while, and Emerald Isle did NOT remind me at all of China beach. These are some cool gulls I was feeding bait-shrimp to. This is the view from the balcony of my way-too-fuckin'-expensive hotel room at the Crystal Coast Resort. (That's my flying jimmy in the lot with the bike on the back) Here I am NOT wanting my picture taken. Thank God my considerable ass is not visible behind my linebacker shoulders. My favorite tattoo, up close and personal. (it says 'MEDIC' in fancy script, if anyone's wondering.)

Day 5 Becomes Blue

What Frank Knew

The Night

My Aunt Lucy

Thoughts While Reading The Obits

Olongapo Night

Lasting Effects Of A Catholic Boyhood

The Anti-Che

View From A Flying Jimmy

Nothing Political

Blue On Blue

Return

Chronology

I. Day fades out, folds in- minutes run their hands through the hours, tangle themselves in weeks and months like the slow grip of Kudzu twines the passing of time around the river cypress. Barn swallows raise their wings against a sky angry with the roil of early rain. They dance spirals on a gray backdrop- ballerinas dressed in browns and russett, their choreography follows remembered winds. The river kisses its banks with slow pleasure. It slides against stone and branch like the track of a blacksnake through warm rows; only shadows mark their passage. II. Colored women form a ribbon on the shelved bank- their hands fly in rhythm as they clean fish. Irridescent scales shimmer the earth at their feet, float atop dark water like bits of prism. They slip entrails beneath the surface to feed continuance. Children pop-the-whip through young corn. They rustle the stalks with a breeze of laughter, frighten the snake from its basking row. In the near distance, a dog howls his exclusion- swallows in their cribs dip towards the sound. An old man naps in the shade of an oak, back pillowed against its kudzu-wrapped trunk. Clover bees churr their approval at the still of sleep; they waft in drifting circles around his shoulders. III. Night draws in, pulls out- it recedes across fields and canopies in spectrums of blue. Swallows wake in the eaves, barn cats stretch in the slow rift of day; their backs bowed in tight arcs. Along ditch and fence, queen anne lifts her lacy heads. Migrants jump from flatbeds onto acres of disced earth. They glean until dusk, carry baskets balanced on their heads. At noon they squat in bright groups among the rows, eat cold rice and pork from paper sacks. Afterwards, they tuck the folded bags under their hats. A woman in a red kerchief pins sheets to a line strung between the span of two young oaks. She slaps them smooth with the flats of her hands, their sharp cracks scatter squirrels from branch to branch. IV. Day ends, night begins- The river calls turtles from rock cooled with dusk. Swallows tuck beaks to breast, the silver spruce curls its leaves against the moon. Beneath a porch, a dog chases rabbits through the twitch of dreams. Mothers smoke at open windows and watch while children follow fireflies on their uneven dance, capture the glow in jars with punctured lids. Their laughter bells beyond where wood meets bank, its whisper rides ripples across the black water. Old men sit under cypress canopies at river's edge, their faces dim in the spill of lanterns. Empty milk jugs tied to cane-lines bob the surface; they pass bottles and wait for time to pull them under.

And In The Beginning; Lava Lamps

When I was seventeen, the world was a psychedelic oyster...everything flung color; bright, boisterous shades of flourescent orange and scream green, purple haze (Ha Ha) and sunshine yellow. Nothing was dull, and nothing was still. It all twirled and swirled and sprung in twisting masses from our every object; even our T-shirts seemed to move. I like to think that the person who invented all that ass-kicker acid was just looking for some way to quiet it all down and it back-fired...we used to drop window-pane at Andy's house because he had blacklights in his garage; we would pour Tide washing powder on the floor and trip over its phosphorous contents twinkling through our little piles of detergent...it would be a couple of years before I would learn a few other uses for phosphorous. Yeah, those were simple times; I should have paid more attention to them, I should have ate all that color so I could've spit it up later when it would have really meant something. Lava lamps were the shit; you were nobody unless you had one in your room...and the cool moms had them in their dens. Joplin and Hendrix ruled the world, the Dead guarded the gates. The Stones had just hit the states and everyone hitched to all the best concerts...all the girls wanted to blow all the bands, all the guys wanted to be roadies. Nobody ever did, of course...that was for the kids from California who were lucky enough to get backstage passes; the closest our little southern contingent ever got was sixth-row center at a very memorable Joe Cocker gig...we knew all the words to 'Bathroom Window' and never missed a beat. We thought we were so cool. Just as good as those west coast kids. Plus, our pot was better, we were certain of that; we grew it ourselves...no infra-copters back in the day. Fifteen bucks bought a five-finger bag of prime red-bud; ten more got you a sole of hash to wrap it with. I miss that stuff. Nothing beats a good hash milkshake...and later on, nothing would beat a good dose of smack; pot would become just foreplay, just something to keep the jungle bugs at bay while we sat and waited for the movie to start...and that was the thing; if the horse was hot enough, you could get away with pretending it was all a Fellini flick...for a few moments, anyway. And sometimes that was enough to get you to the next day. It's a good thing we didn't know what was coming, I think most of us wouldn't have believed it if we had. The summer of sixty-six was winding down, the acid was turning into to mescaline, and Janis still had four years to live...longer than a lot of my friends. Nam was just a blurb on the TV news, the body counts during dinner were still a year or more away, and body bags were for the bad endings on Dr. Kildair. Some of us had brothers or cousins or uncles and dads pulling their time already, but nobody we knew up close and personal had gotten killed or even shot...not then. No one was protesting in earnest, not in our little corner of the planet, and all our teachers were talking about how it wasn't even a war, for christ' sake. Nobody seemed too fuckin' concerned...not then. Only our mothers looked worried; but they always did, so we never really noticed. And when we did, it was too late...High School was over, no money for college; all of us country boys had gotten our invitations by the time the spring of sixty-eight rolled around. Only Andy made it out; his dad had an aunt in Winnipeg and the next time I saw Andy he had three kids and a suit...he acted uncomfortable when he shook my hand; but it was OK, it was his folks that made him go. I guess. It WAS your folks, right, Andy?

Can You Hear Him Now?

Been thinking about Andy again, he's starting to come and go like a cliched ghost; and I seem to be sittin' up with the dead. I haven't seen him since his dad died twelve years back, and we all went home to Catawba county to say goodbye...all of us that were left, anyway. We made a pitiful bunch, actually; hand-me-down suits and thrift store ties. All of us but Andy, who had done well in Winnipeg and wore a three-piece like an honest-to-God businessman. He had spit in his hand and passed it through his hair while we stood around the casket talking about how good his dad looked. Some things never change. That's funny, isn't it...how everyone always seems to think folks look so damned good when they're dead. I'll bet the dead ones don't think so...I'm willing to put a few bucks on the fact that they would probably rather look like shit and be able to tell you about it. I know for sure that I want to look terrible when I get to lay on my satin; and I hope all the people that come to stare at my corpse have the good grace to say so. I don't want to die handsome; it seems like such a waste. And I don't want to be laid out all dressed up...I've left word that I'll haunt anyone that tries to pin those fuckin' medals on me. I really don't believe a whole lot in God or Heaven or everafters; but whatever is waiting for me is just gonna have to take me like I want to come...wearing Levi's and Hane's cotten. And no socks, please; it's a thing with me. Had a lot of jumpers here lately; maybe that's why I've been thinking so much about Andy. You know, him jumping the draft and all. Word association and such...I've heard it can work like that. Anyway, four jumpers just this month; two off the Tar River bridge down at the rocks and two more off the I-95 overpass. The last two were a real fuckin' mess...shit everywhere. It took us the better part of a morning to get all the bits into our little red bio-bags...every scrap or the state boys get pissed. Can't leave anything for the public to see, when wer'e done, the Fire-house pumpers come in and hose away the spots. And these two had took their dive together, holding hands like goddamned love birds, said the bewildered witness who had called 911 to report the incredible event on his cell phone. Can you hear him now? Hardy fuckin' har har. By the time we got to the scene, he (The witness) was talking to the cops with his attitude showing...he had done his duty and now they were going to make him late for his tee time; he didn't PUSH them, for christ sake. It would have been more interesting if he had...nothing new about suicides. All I ask is that they get it right the first time so I don't have to work so hard...it's way harder to try and fix them than it is to just scrape them up. One thing is certain...no one will be standing around these two caskets speculating on how good the deceased look; these two are gonna fit in a shoebox. And I say bury them in the same one, size seven ought to cover it. After all, it seems they wanted it that way...just ask the pissed-off golfer who saw it all. I can hear him now. I love my job.

Hours Before Morning

It's 2 AM here in dismal swamp, the bottom end of the second day of my idiotic cleansing process. It's been a real pisser most of the day. Off work with nothing but time on my hands and mosquitoes on my mind. I think it's only because I have removed my remaining vials that I haven't given in. I clearly didn't remember the nightmare of withdrawal, and I wish I had thought about it a while longer before making this impulsive leap towards a non-existent light. I itch. I've itched all day; there are millions of ants (that's as close a thing as I can relate it to, having been stung by the fire ants that build condos in my back forty) beneath my skin trying to find a way out. It's maddening, nothing stops it and I keep thinking about what I know will. But I haven't caved, ladies and gents, not YET. I hate admitting defeat, even when it's a sure winner. I went hunting. Packed a sandwhich and a legal pad or two (because I take them everywhere; yellow paper flutters about my house like giant moths) and cruised my land for a couple of hours or three. I have 72 acres of woods with a four room house (cabin, actually) planted in a small clearing in the middle. Today, it seemed like 72 feet. The more I walked the smaller those familiar tracts became. The squirrels were laughing at me; I couldn't draw a good bead on the broadside of a barn. They chittered in the tops of the Pines like gossiping women, tossed pine nuts from their roofs in obvious derision. I went in a little deeper until I found a nice copse of magnolia; grand old things whose umbrella branches full of heavy, waxy leaves formed a dense wall at least 20 feet around. I dug out a pad and wrote...and wrote and wrote and wrote and none of it made any sense at all. Disconnected spurts of recall and regret. I thought about Calicoe and her saying that my writing was so much better on the ween...but it's not. It just isn't and then I thought about her question; what does Blue love most? The thinking on this quelled the itch, pushed it back a bit and after giving it a few minutes, I could tell her this: I love the smell of Magnolia on the bloom. Sweet, thick; it's heady scent brings Jessie back from the dead on a waft of recollect so sudden it left gooseflesh in it's wake. Jessie was my first sexual experience. I was fourteen, she was a year older; beautiful in the way that young foals are...all long limbs and awkward grace. I didn't know I was gay then, it was a term still undefined in those days, but I knew I was different; the tone my mother employed when she called me a tomboy was my first dim clue. Jessie went on to become the epitome of small-town girlhood; cheerleader, prom queen, tobacco rose in the fall parade...clap as the floats pass, dear; show some respect for the real girls. Jessie caught pregnant in our senior year, and like all good southern girls who daddy's aren't white trash, she married the guy and had two more babies before she was thirty. Every now and then, I'll see her in town somewhere, her coltish legs grown thick at the ankles, her beautiful face now a ghost in the mirror. Circa 1978: It was summer when I first tasted a girl- and I can't stop remembering bare feet on asphalt, hot; sweat popping above our lips as we walked through empty lots, past houses that watched behind pulled blinds and barking dogs, beyond the school where the next year we would not know ourselves. You look like a boy, she said (her daddy wouldn't let her out with boys) and the smile that tilted her face tugged all my muscles at once I can't forget a junked Dodge half-buried in the woods off Cypress street, its inside smelling of burnt oil and smoke and how she felt like wet suede stretched across the seat; whispers salt-glazed- our mouths like wind on open wounds. I put Jessie away, and not wanting the itch back so soon, I kept thinking...thank you, Calicoe...my thoughts breaking apart, flying down different paths in search of elusive love. I never cared for the word itself; I find it overused and overwrought and the subject of countless tomes of bad poetry and Harlequin romances. Never been in love, either; at least not what I percieve love to be. I've been in lust, swam in infatuation until the waters grew cold, dipped my toe a couple of times in actual relationships. But those are not for me, the constant loner. I'm not an easy person to know, much less get along with...I have my ways and I'm set in them like stone. The last woman that lived with me (and that was 15 years past) was named Billie. She was a real stunner; red hair and gray eyes and possessed of a fair amount of guile. She was great in bed, better in the kitchen and she didn't seem to mind that I spent most of my free time either in the woods with my (much beloved) hounds or scribbling furiously on all that yellow paper. The problems started with all these bottles of lotion and little tins of make-up she sat all over the countertops in my bathroom. It took about three months of pantyhose hanging across my shower bar and lipstick love notes on my mirrors to realize the true meaning of the word MISTAKE. It took just a little longer to figure out that she loved my money way more than she professed to love me. It finally sunk into my perfume-fogged brain that snakes with pretty, colorful markings are still snakes. Billie was the last reptile that I didn't aim a 22 at. Circa 1989: "She walked in beauty like the night" and all that bullshit. If she had a name I can't recall it; and it never mattered anyway, all she ever wanted she got from me; great head and greater circumstance. All I ever wanted I got from her, devotion, emotion, even a decent tear or two, as long as my wallet fell open whenever her whims got hungry; and boy,could that bitch eat. But it ended one cold November, when I read somewhere that if the greed outwieghed the need, the harmonious balance of things was interrupted. So we came to an agreeable settlement, she and I, and she left before I killed her. So, from all that rambling train of thought I can surmise that I love my privacy. I like being alone, I tolerate my own company well. I love bare bathroom countertops and naked shower rods. I love red-headed women and red-bone hounds. I love a good squirrel stew with lots of onions...Boy, Calicoe, youv'e really started a roll; and I thank you from the bottom of my barely-there heart. That itch stayed away for a good while, and as I thought a little longer on the subject of love and where to find it I discovered, buried under several layers of hard, blue slate; this: I love the feel of the weights; the tension of muscle against bone. It helps me to remember that certain pains bring perspective. I love the dip at the base of a woman's spine, and the way it curves inward if the stroke is just so. I love Harlan Ellison and Jerzy Kosinski and James Dickey. I love Lady Day and Sarah Vaughn and Gerry Mulligan. I love Lenny Bruce I love the smell of woodsmoke on winter nights, the way Silver Birch cups its leaves before a rain, and the graceful fall of spanish moss from the cypress trees along the river. I love chocolate Necco Wafers. All the other colors suck like an electrolux. But Calicoe, my friend, my hand-up, my unlikely Gibralter (Oh, how I wish I could meet you in the flesh!)...you were right. The thing I love most are those damned yellow legal pads. Without them, I would be a dead thing; a shell of bone and blood. It's close to 4 AM now. The itch grows worse, the thinking done, the things I love lost beneath the rise of demons and dawn. Having held it so long in my hands, seen too often the set of its jaw, I think of death; the sweet release of poets and pawns. Do not go gently. Do NOT go gently... Do not... In the tick-down of days, in barely an open and close of years, I choose not to die, but to cheat death; slow the wind of anatomy that is no more than body, take back from the gods what was never theirs. To remain here forever, a single voice in the silence of time, a shadow above the soil of the dead. I will not die denied, next to an unknown madness, but wait the birth of each mute hour, and know the past was never better than in small seconds.

A Series Of Janes

I. Once Upon A Time Just middle class Jane, a little on the upperside of an old story, hanging by her french tips from the high end of daddy's pedestal, she slips and chips a perfect tooth on the silent slide down an ivory prick, pedicured toes pointed towards pale redemption. Finding her feet on shattered streets, far below the way above, daddy's princess splits the past, present now in another place. She chews her nails, paints them silver to cover the scars. Wears a jagged smile slapped on by secret hands that itches her dreams while she sleeps, sips slow gin from coke cans and strips at a juke joint on sixty-third to pay the rent, pay the piper. And after, she walks home, counting stars in the way above, flirting with the man in the moon. II. Part-Time Feeds The Kitty She racks nine-ball mornings at Bobby's Blue Tip; just another strip bar, just another street- current pit in a series of stops and she's got a loft, top of the stairs, over the stage- where she shakes tit nights on the ten to four; shimmies for the jimmies in business suits- they buy rounds in applause, light cigarettes and check their reflections on the backs of zippos always the same faces, always the same song- and in the morning she'll rack balls, while the old men match each other drink for shot; they move lips that never speak, their silence reminds her of home. III. Full-Time Pays The Rent The graveyard shift rocks at Master Jack's Porno Emporium, a blocked concrete coffin that bleeds florescent sun through cracks in the green glass front. Tongues of it lick the sidewalk, cold trails that shine them in after dark settles. Vacuous vampires on a senseless search for something to suckle, they flutter the aisles; aimless bats with track marks and dirty nails that chitter against the shelves. Freaks and loners, fags and heads, even the worn whores with their nobody's businessmen- they all see the light and remember warmth. A blue-black babe with a tit tag that reads JANE in red letters works the cash box. She has a vicious pink scar that puckers her face from eyebrow to chin. It dances when she talks, a lurid hoochie-coochie in sync with her words. But she plays those suckers like a sideshow susie, selling hard anal to dykes, straight to the packers and anything to the Priest who left his collar in the vestry. They stare at the floor while she rings them out, scared to look up and see the stunner she must have been before somebody pulled the sharp end of mean past her smile. When she hands me my change, the scar starts to dance, a slow strip across a scarred counter. It always follows me home, waltzing with my silhouette through the streets. IV. Down-Time Cleans The Shell Past a shadowed eye stands Jane, one-legged. Foot propped on porcelain ledge, muscles tight along knuckled curve. She proffers a spread like a tangled wound, defiled flesh fills a bone cup. Hands flutter in ritual circles beneath the arc, they pull and twist and now the scourge begins- cold fingers bury themselves, beaks of carrion birds at a living thing, gaining strength on what's left behind. Lather builds thick; gathers where skin becomes savage, secret eater of the dead. Memory hangs heavy, falls to spatter on broken tile, spat wads of rage and reverence. Jane shifts ruined eyes over a dark shoulder, black stare of a baleful goddess. The scar that splits her face burns, spills fire across an ancient altar- ignites the feast of continuance.

At Work With Enid

I have a friend named Enid, a lovely redhead who should have been born in that era of noir and dahlias; she has a regal bearing that never suited this backwater river town; she even wears her lab coats as if they were sable instead of cotten twill. She scoffs at this every time I say it, but it's true. She works the zombie shift at the county morgue, a twenty drawer cell bursting with the dead. It's a place I frequent on an almost daily basis, a place I find comforting in the same way a dark, quiet house is comforting. Sometimes, the drawers are overrun with business and we stack our offerings like cordwood in a designated spot by the heavy steel doors that signal the entrance into the bowels of the forensics storage rooms. The air of this stainless domain hangs heavy with the presence of chemical composition and natural decomposition. Enid tells me that she loves the aroma because of it's finality, says that the smell lets her remember that all things end and no one is exempt from its perfume; that death is but a counter-girl at some ritzy store, spritzing the public with tiny bulbed atomizers when they least expect it, told me to think about it...after a while, I realized that yes, it's a damned fine analogy; no one is ever quick enough to duck the unwanted spray, no matter how fast you sail by that counter-girl. They always seem to have such deadly aim... (Hardy Har Har). Most nights, Enid's domain is glutted with end results, all laid out in various displays of violence and disease. She records the data the dead offer up, probing their wounds and telling tissue, listening with an ear attuned to their whispers. She says she loves the job because of its continuance, and she always gives me this smile as she says it like she's divulged something secret and sweet...and that I need to just think about it. Enid is right, of course; her spread sheets and jotted notes detail each finished life in a way that adds links in the chain of continuity, each blue corpse lives on in the pages of her files; kept alive with black ink and post-its, paper-clips and sweat. She labels every file folder by hand, a testament, she explains, to the worthiness of the labor. On the upper corner of each, she affixes a tiny silver star so that no one rests in their paper beds without a beacon to light their way. She hums show tunes as she works, Rodgers and Hammerstien, Lerner and Loewe, the entire score of Les Miserables; each in near-perfect pitch. It echoes against the walls, bounces back and forth between her sleeping company like belled laughter; if she leaves the door ajar, we can hear it beckoning as we wheel our stretchers down the tiled halls that lead us to her cells. Soft and lulling, it pulls us in as the sirens lured the ships, and entertains the ghosts that sit in silent witness to the proof of what has been.

Blue's Mood

Today I reached a milestone; no morphine. It's now been almost 24 hours since my last hit, and it's got me a bit...well... strange. A good friend I've never had the pleasure of meeting suggested I try Ketamine as a weener for the opiate, and for awhile, it worked. But it made me nervous. I don't like nervous. So I've just been backing it down and yesterday, 5 mg. Today, zero. Considering that 6 months ago it was at least 60 mics a day, I think I'm doing OK. Circa 6 months ago Day breaks (how cliched is THAT) over some North Carolina backwater mosquitoes dance in pulsed pockets above stagnant runs that glimmer with rainbowed slicks across the surface and in the arc of a dirty pane (it looks out at an equally dirty alley that leads to some inconsequential river) an 18 guage cath will glimmer as soon as it unsheaths it's equally 18 guaged needle loaded (HAHA! What a LOADED word) with a loading dose- best painkillers deft fingers can cop when no one is watching where the latexed hand went after the sting is gone comes the calm that stays awhile awhile awhile before going back home with all its little perks packed on its glass back but there's always more more more where that came from- it lurks and smiles (make that GRINS, it grins with metered teeth) among versed and valium (those paens of blessed slumber) tossed in with toredal and sucs...sucs rocks! (I'll bet Calicoe knows what sucs is) on such a permanent level maybe that's the level I need to sink to. I find I miss the ritual almost as much as the calm. Drawing up my morning fix, opening the alchohol prep, carefully swabbing the spot on my thigh that has grown a little thick with scar tissue. The thin needle resembles the probiscus of an insistent mosquito, intent on the sting. I miss that sting, too. I've been a junkie since 'Nam, where smack was so plentiful it practically fell from every duffle. It was a necessary thing, a thing to be done so things could be done. Once the body becomes aclimated to the opiate, the 'high' subsides and only that strange and languid calm remains. It enabled you to wade through endless days of mindless horror with blinders on. I was there four years, and by the first 8 months it all seemed surreal; a vampire flick where all the bloodsuckers were named Charlie, wore black pajamas and paper slippers...hello, Harold and Jim. Circa 1973: Two klics outside the port city, thick underbrush hid clusters of olive clad kids, bellies flat against slick earth wet with mud and blood. Days here went fast into night, and when dark came, you prayed for light. Nights were bad, you listened with strained ears through a din of strange sounds, for sounds that were stranger still. Most times, constant fear kept you awake in apprehension, like the mummy did in the fifth grade; trembling in your G.I. Joe sleeping bag on Timmy McPherson's living room floor. None of us knew scared like that, but we all caught on real quick. Our backyard battle plans and monster movie anecdotes didn't apply in this show. By the second night in the bush, we had all lost faith in Hollywood. Somebody forgot to yell cut so the stand-ins could take our places. It all made you wonder what Audie was singing about. Sometimes, you imagined that you smelled fish sauce, heavy, oily; the sour odor of charlies with full bellies. Ready to hunt all night on papered feet, mute yellow draculas with a taste for cold blood. Every now and then we got lucky, and the point man would hear the low squeak of black silk bat wings in time to thwart the midnight buffet. But most times we weren't lucky, and some of us joined the army of the undead; coming back to feast within the nightmares of the rest of us. And we wondered what G.I. Joe might do on a bad night in Haiphong, where the matinee horrors were real, and none of us could find the zippers down the backs of the monster suits. At times I feel like what I write about this period of my life is just so much cliched hack; a lot of it is old, some of it the new stuff of resurfaced memory. My partner at work, Henry, is constantly questioning my decision to become a trauma queen; says my life as a ditch doc was a poor life choice. He doesn't know that I need the adrenelin as much as I need the calm to face it. What an odd conundrum; a labryinth of my own design. Mostly, it's days full of nothing special; parade after parade of the sick, the dying, the dead. You have to find a way to black out the faces; for me, it's morphine. I can wander through blood, guts, and puke all day without a flinch. It's only late at night, when I'm alone with myself that the black peels away and the faces float to the surface. But every once in awhile, in the bright light of day, something will come along and hit me behind the knees, make me lose my balance and when it comes, it lingers. Circa 1987: "Edgecombe County unit 268 to Heritage ED on 340, I need an MICN or physician to the mic, come back-" -quick come back quick talk to me talk to me hurry goddamnit hurry hurry hurry- "This is Heritage, 268, physician standing by, go ahead with your traffic" "10-4, Heritage, wer'e en-route to your facility with an approximately eight year old female-" -six seven eight who knows there's no pubes not even shadow only blood and blue and motherfucker tach it out come on come on come on- "-found in a field this AM, bound, gagged, patient does show evidence of extensive trauma, numerous lacerations and abrasions to the head and neck and-" -fields narrow fields of napalm-charred children limbs like struck matches raped first gutted second dead but still running running running- "-upper extremities show defensive wounds with left shoulder dislocation, lower extremities present bilateral femur fractures with the left compound in nature and-" -butts they break legs and skulls with butts because the sharp cracks make thier dicks hard bayonets only make sibilant sounds machetes go whicka whicka whicka- "-pelvis is unstable on side-to-side rock, abdomen shows obvious distention with rigidity, genitals present evidence of forced penetration with intestinal protrusion and-" -the smell is wrong no kerosene no fish copper minus sulpher ozone missing smoke make this fucker smoke I'm losing pressure DRIVE goddamnit goddamnit- "-B/P is 70/40 and falling, respirations at 6 per and shallow, pupils equal but non-reactive and-" -focus focus focus this ain't Dragon valley or Tam Ky or even Phu Bai where Medi-vacs couldn't fly it's just another day another dollar another kid another- "-I have two 16 guage lines of LR going at WO rates, tubation is precluded due to facial trauma however patient has an oropharyengeal in place and is being bagged with 100% supplemental o2, patient showing junctional brady on 12 leads and I have administered 5 of morphine and-" -day in a field, narrow fields of dead men wearing their gods on their faces but there are no gods is no god only purple and silver and green and- "-Heritage be advised we have a 9 minute ETA, prepare for trauma code, patient is bradying down to unnacceptable levels, CPR begun due to age with one atropine push in at this time come back-" -sounds, sounds that lose rhythm and order become wails become sobs and to cry is to realize and I won't I won't I- "-10-4, 268, we copy your traffic, continue CPR and give one Epi push, we are awaiting your arrival in room three; see you in nine, Heritage is clear on 340." But I've discovered that the mind is a powerful entity all by itself. When this episode in the day in the life of Blue, Paramedic-addict extrodinare occured, I clocked out early... went home, gathered up my 22 and went out into the woods I live in and stayed there for two days, drawing beads on anything that moved. I killed 8 or 9 sqirrels and all memory of that little girl; she resurfaced three years later when I happened to be the medic on duty the night her mother died. I went home and spilled it out on a yellow legal pad admist a flirry of mescal shooters and sweat. Now I can't forget her, no matter how many squirrels I off in the pursuit of sanity. Boy, I can RAMBLE, can't I? I started out at my keyboard, trying to shake off that nagging itch, that almighty yearning for my mosquito, and now here I am walking backwards again; only this time the colors have lost their primaries. I guess I need to stop before I bore the hell out of everyone who might be reading this long-winded trip down memory lane. But it was good in a self-searching way that I wasn't prepared for or aware of until my skin was already peeling away in painful strips, bloodless yet weeping- I feel them fall, drifting in dry and dusty piles beneath my anonymous desk somewhere in a river town and I want to gather them up, stick them back to my naked self, shivering and unprotected, weak and wanting. My idle words bare me like a lover couldn't, like a confessor might like a surgeon skilled at the craft; and voices scream from these opened wounds, voices with names that can't be counted, faces that won't be gone. Their tongues scrape my edges,dig furrows through the boneyards that carry my weight- and I stumble,I tire, I wonder will it always be the same. Thanks for listenening.

The Replicants

I started the day with hands. The first thing I saw when waking, they seemed to glow in the half-light that slid through the blind slats...eerie ghost-hands that were seperate from the rest of everything, still and quiet on the red plaid comforter. They looked blue, like corpse hands. I began to think of them as entities of their own, even though they behaved normally and went through the usual morning rituals just as they always did...they showered, brushed teeth, ran their cool fingers through my hair; they even selected the cracked mug with the faded smiley face when the coffee was ready. The cup barely shook; a minor miracle. Maybe they weren't my hands after all, because my hands were always trembling long before the coffee was done, and never failed to spill a fair amount across the table as I read yesterday's paper. Yet on the surface of this strange morning, calm. A natural calm that came all alone (On little cat feet, ha ha) without the benefit of narcotics. Amazed at my new hands, I took off to work. They gripped the wheel with confidence, seemed to know the way just like my old hands...they even waved at Mrs. Campos when we passed the Shop 'N Save. She stared and didn't wave back; I don't think she recognized the hands. Once at work, the hands revealed themselves as imposters. My partner Henry knew at once that they were replicants, a duo far different from my original pair. They were helpful...cleaned our rig, checked our equipment, turned our radio to country music; and this was the REAL betrayal, my true hands would have cut themselves off before performing that blasphemy. Henry kept looking at me sideways, but didn't say much. I think he was scared of the hands. Our first call was a crackhead frequent flyer named Aaron. He called 911 at least twice a week, complaining of nausea, of vomiting, of explosive diarreah. We hated Aaron; he always puked in the rig, spit on the foor, shit on our clean sheets. The real hands would have accidentally hit him up side his pea-head with the O2 tank...but not these hands. These hands helped him to the rig, gave him an emesis basin, started an IV and pushed phenergan to ease his nausea; they even placed Aaron on the defib to access his heart rhythm. They seemed to actually care. Aaron watched them do all of this with gaurded eyes, he flinched at each procedure. It was clear that even Aaron knew these hands were faux...he kept his eyes on them like a mouse keeps his eye on the snake. Henry was silent, but obviously siding with Aaron. And that's how it went all day...the hands did it all. They attended every patient as if every patient was really in need of their expertise. They patted brows, pushed meds, administered painkillers like candy. They changed stretcher sheets, asissted the astounded nurses in the ER, filled out forms in a timely manner, never flipped one doctor the bird. They left the radio alone the whole shift. When our shift was over, they clocked out on time. They waved goodbye to Henry, to the Chief...they didn't wave back, either. Then we were home, them and I. They opened the door, turned on the light, ran their fingers through my hair...and stopped. I could feel my scalp pulsing beneath, felt the blood pushing past the roots. The mirror by my bed showed a face that looked like me, hands trapped in a short tangle of black and gray...shaking. My hands, my true pair. I wondered where they had been, I knew where they were going. Opening a small drawer in the bedstand, they took up a leather pouch, took out a familiar friend; slender, sharp, 20 CC. Somewhere in the dark, the replicants died.

Tattooed Thoughts

Someone asked me today what 'Blue Tattoo' meant and why I chose it as a tag name for my poetry blog. Well, for millions it means identification; stamped on wrists and forearms by some long-ago hatred. It's countless bad images and forgotten names forever etched onto skins by home-made artists; they fade and warp as time goes by. It's a book of poems by Lynn Lifshin...'The Blue Tattoo'. Pretty good ones, too. But for me, it's a cool image of a tattoo parlor that I found...I just like the sound of it. It's a start-over, a second chance, it's the wrinkle that my time can't forget. It's my own warp 'n fade, my personal two-step, my sideways shuffle. It's what my life FEELS like most days...a faded, homemade tattoo that isn't quite what it used to be; isn't the beautiful thing it looked like thirty years ago under bad flourescent lights. It's just a few crooked lines wrapped around a foolish idiom that no longer rings true. But it's mine, and I love it, in the twisted way you love the scar you got in some bar fight back in the day; the way you love a bad toothache because it reminds you that you can still feel...even if it's only pain. I love it because it won't go away, it's as faithful as a whipped puppy. Every now and then I trace it's face with my finger and wonder where the cobalt went, wonder when the ink clouded into slate...was it the year mama died, or did it happen somewhere in Haiphong while I was busy looking for trip wires? Maybe it was a gradual thing, and I only noticed when someone pointed it out. Maybe it's MY identification, a symbol of self-hatred that I'm not qualified or ready to sort out, that I'm not ready to forget. So I'll stay up late tonight and find tattoo flash on the net. I'll stare at all the skin art and prehaps pick out a new one to grace my falling flesh...something to remember me by. A vivid dust of color to cover my own faded shade of pale. It'll make me feel young again; bring back memories of when I didn't care and thought I never would. A celtic cross, a rose dagger, a sacred heart with my name across it's apex...or maybe just a zipper down my chest to remind me how easily some things open. But I'll probably just get drunk, instead.

On A Clear Day

You can see through sclera, past the color-wheel of iris, into the natural lens. If your'e quick enough, or good enough, you can watch bright fade to dull, see what was drift into what could have been. It's said that the last image percieved is reflected in the corneal eye; but that's bullshit. The only thing left is an eclipse too dim to cast back. Like the shut of a door against a heated room, what remains is cold. I've watched more doors close than I care to count, seen so much of what could have been...now I wear that cold, an unseen insulation keeping heat at mind's length. To remember warmth is to recall faces, names, the end of every story. Cold is better; numb and hard. I need the feel of the shell. Then today, a kid grabbed my arm. A hopeless kid with a hopeless wound, face-up in the middle of State street, the familiar aftermath of a common war. No fix here, no TV save. His eyes were green and deep; bending close, I watched frost rise in them like water...and through the fingers that circled my skin, I felt the heat slide away, felt the slam of the door. Hours later, I heard the click of the latch. Isn't it funny how we return to the places where things happened, old soldiers drawn to land consecrated by battle and cross...just as I sit here tonight, swallowing warmth shot after shot. I remember faces, write down names, turn the pages of an unfinished book and wonder if the story ever really ends. I feel the air thicken, I know that what I've come to find has not dimmed, or waned away. And in the back of my mind, nightstorms gather dust.

Dig

I entertain the demons that follow me from room to room. Vague shifts of space direct me here to here; they follow on the cat's feet of some other time poet my fogged mind cannot name. We have surely danced, them and I; they have led me, I have led them...we have chased each the other across spans of lost years. Now I pirouette alone, spin without brakes into varying shades of black; they seem content to watch. Sometimes, I notice the tightness in the air as they clap. I find myself at my kitchen table, elbows set on an oilcloth that I must have purchased; I struggle to catch the memory of when. My oilcloth is singular in its ugliness, blocks of blue and white connected by tiny sunflowers that resemble flies cocooned in perfect symmetry within a square web. Burn marks track the path of the spider. I light a cigarette with my Zippo, its pewter body as battered as my own. The thumb wheel is loose; three strikes to fire and I wonder if the snipers are watching alongside my snickering demons. The itch between my shoulders has grown numb, a disabled target. I smell the bite of ozone, and beneath that, copper; always the copper, heavy and sweet. The floor under my feet peels and fades; its pattern lost to countless steps. Once blue or rose or green, it now lays gray and dead across boards gone soft with rot. There's a hole to the left of my right foot, neither small or large and shaped like a grin, it yawns a welcome; the demons at my back nudge against my ear. I inch my toes through the smile, feel the air of the cellar below, cold, damp. I wonder if any corpses before me have found this hole, slid though it to rest at last nestled in rat shit and dirt. I try to force my foot past the limits of the hole; the edges give without complaint. I take a long drag and wait for the dark below to yank me in; the air clutches my ovation. Dusk drawing from the blinds finds me on my knees with butter knife and bleeding fingers; splinters pile up on either side like dead soldiers. I think of foxholes and fire pits and the blackened maws of buried screams that have found breath beneath the give of my floorboards. The smile has widened into a laugh; its cool trill dries my efforts to salt. Behind me, whispers of applause pull past my shoulders and fall between my hands; I can hear it echo somewhere in the black. Demons sleep by daylight. I wake with cheek pressed against a table leg, fingers sore and curled under my chin. For a moment, I can't remember; my eyes, sideways at floor level, pick out shards of wood, a settled haze of smoke, spatters of tacky blood. I smell dirt and damp and the sour odor of spoil; again I think of foxholes, I wonder where the sniper is perched. A ringing phone startles me to my feet, the steady thump thump of the Evacs melt into morning traffic that hums from the streets below my window. Shadows of sun shaft through my cracked blinds; the hole reveals itself...only a hole. Jagged at its edges, bigger, empty. I dump the ashtray over its lip; scatter my night cremations and watch as ash sifts into nothing.

Purpose

A lot of my time is spent contemplating purpose, how it does or doesn't apply to my life. I never thought I had one, not really...for so many years now, the only issue has been survival; learning to wake successfully to another sorry dawn seemed purpose enough. Three tours worth of years before that were spent the same way; in that endless quest for survival. The only difference was the dawn...to wake to it then was a rush I have yet to equal; the particular and peculiar thrill of realizing that yes, you breathe on for a while lomger...no one is sweeping you into an anonymous rubber bag as the sun rises over mountains at once beautiful and deadly; their backs packed with their own purpose. My days come and go like gray shifts of inconsequence, spills of time that run unnoticed into more of the same. Days spent as a mannequin of the self I once was; the shell is there but the turtle moved out long before Saigon fell...now the face that looks into mine from the peeled-back silver of passing mirrors is unfamiliar; and it is only recently that I find myself wondering where I went, what happened to that fearless girl who pretended not to care and did...when did the pretense become the fact? I could blame it all on Nam, I suppose, as so many do...pile the great non-purpose on the dead heads of all those soldier-boys that poured their lives across the toes of my boots, spilled their thoughts into my waiting hands and lost any memory of those ladies who were lovely once. But to lay it on that lap would be a lie, because it was just a place, a span of miles I ran through when I was young, chased by tigers let loose from someone else' nightmare. Nam didn't mold me; I molded it...shaped it into a bullet that I would never chamber, never fire. That gun doesn't belong to me, the tigers that creep down it's barrel were never mine. Instead, I pulled from it a profession; skills I learned then I use now, the waiting hands are now replicants that act as if they give a damn when all they really give is time. So I sit and I wonder, why do it? What purpose do I serve spending hour after hour trying to fix people who care even less than I? Most of them addicts, criminals, would-be suicides, drunks...very few runs turn out to be actual accidents or of a natural cause. And then I remember...who am I to judge, an addict myself? Dependent on Heroin as I ran those long ago miles; my own dragon set to fend off tigers. Then later, morphine; another dragon for another generation of nightmares...only this time, the guns are mine; their barrels sleek, disposable stainless steel. I seek the same calm they all do, it's just that my search is private, not left lying in the street or in some seedy by-the-hour room...the difference is really only one of logistics. It doesn't make me better, just better-off...I think my actual purpose all along has been to bury the details, throw everyone's dirt on my truth. I try to remember why it was once worthwhile...why the effort mattered; why it might matter still. I recall faces, write down names, sort it out on paper as if the words are purpose enough. I think of an old man, dead ten years or more; but it's his wife that I still see, pacing the floors of my memory...countless shots of mescal and morphine won't wash away her face; so I write this: They lived in a perpetual past, three dim and heat-heavy rooms encased them in the crumbling husk of a brownstone on a forgotten side of the city. We ran suicide shifts down dead streets, and some midnights found our pulsing red and white outside their stoop, spinning strobes slapping brick with bright kisses. He was the Phantom of the Opera, she was his Christine. She would rush us in, blue eyes wide in a thin plane. Her scent reminded me of tabbouleh, scallion sweet. He was ancient, breath like smegma, face like a leather mask. Cirrhosis ate his body, drank his mind; accompanied by strains of Wagner in unrelenting drones. While we worked, she hovered- frail wasp patting his brow, humming. I saw her hug herself, fingers dripping panic down her back like slow sweat. He was a wicked Raoul, hateful in his extremis. He struck at her, called her a brainless zygote, rotten whore. She gave him the radius of her smile and crooned "Papa, papa," in dulcet tones. We lifted him to the stretcher- she cried when we strapped the belts and clutched our sleeves in nervous desperation. She made quiet, pleading noises in a strange tongue. They had been someone once; he a producer of this, she an actress in that. She had worn diaphanous gowns that clung to her mons veneris, danced in hot abandon for his pleasure. We left her standing in the doorway on that last night of our aquaintance, calling papa in a pitiful litany that was at once beautiful and sad. Once out, put down on my blank sheets like the scattered rows in an untended cemetary, I find the ghosts remain. Face upon face, they bob the surface of my mind and break the black water pooled there with an uncomfortable ease. I think of dragons, of tigers chasing miles into decades; their purpose leaps from my pen, ink like blood across the page.

As I Read Ed Dorn (Purpose, Part Deux)

I wonder why I never read him before, find myself glad that the friend I do not know sent me on the search for this work. But then, I don't read much poetry; the 'classical' poets seem full of cliche, so overrun with old-world sentimentality that to read them is like wading through vats of stale and sticky syrup. I do read some; I enjoy Williams and Thomas, and feel a strange kinship with Plath...though I find Sexton menepausal and sexually restrained; a lonely masturbator in search of why. I think the carbon monoxide might have been ultimately orgasmic in that lull before the dark. So I find Dorn and I read; and in that consumption I began to think that the critical eye is a marvelous thing, a holy thing that bares the bones of the low and the high; that nothing is without its skeletal core. I read that Dorn said "I puke on greatness"...and in this I agree; for isn't greatness just an enlargement of some tiny core, a miniscule beginning common to all? Nothing is so great that it can't be drug down, nothing so small that it can't catch some bottom rung and climb. I have felt that urge to vomit, void hot chunks of dissillusionment and despair squarely on the shoulders of those who flaunt their largesse for the masses to stroke....that's really the rub of it; most want to stroke the robe, kiss the ring, lick the cliched boots...and for what? A crumb of recognition? A crust of lauded pie thick with bullshit and back pats? So I found this, and as I read it I realized that I am not alone, not the only someone to feel the tightening of an unseen rope: House Arrest By Ed Dorn From now on, I'm under House Arrest-- I only get out for the job: Then, Death--the ultimate House Arrest, the ultimate duree-- But it was worth it. Original version-- From now on, I'm under house arrest-- I only get out for the job; Then Death--the ultimate House Arrest. And there it is, that thing that I do...I only get out for the job. Were it not for a forced need of income, I would sit forever, not in the comfort, but the consolation of my house...arrested there, suspended in the web of ago like some ancient, arthritic spider feeding on the raveling cocoons of dead things; all the while spinning my own tightly-wound shroud with acidic strands of myself. I am left to wonder, is this all I am meant to do? Wait to die, become a dead thing in someone's web, a face bobbing to the surface of another's memory pool? So I write this: In the tick-down of days, in barely an open and close of years, I choose not to die, but to cheat death; slow the wind of anatomy that is no more than body, take back from the gods what was never theirs. To remain here forever, a single voice in the silence of time, a shadow above the soil of the dead. I will not die denied, next to an unknown madness, but wait the birth of each mute hour, and know the past was never better than in small seconds. I turn it over and over in my mind, all this that has come from the reading of a poet at the behast of a masked mind...spinning and spinning those bitter threads about the great and vomitous non-purpose; and finally comes a cocoon of reason, a small insect of comprehension that my stagnant, narc-calmed id wraps around as if the bug is a bit of manna cast down from pissed and dubious gods: I think, prehaps memory is not purpose, but the remembering is...the log of ends to stories without the necessary voice, without the hand needed to record the what-could-have-beens attached to every bobbing face; each pulsed rhythm that ceased in gutters, in alleys, in back rooms...without a voice to mourn their end, without an eye to remember. So with purpose, I write this: This mind turns on its axis. Continuous thought uninterrupted by the vicious sleep of reason, breeding Goya's monsters in ground fertile with preconceived knowledge. The grease of time speeds the spin. disoriented, weak against the chain. links held true by solid welds fused from assimilated concepts, layered like brick. The wild whirl of intellect births ideas. Intrinsic contemplations on a mental screen, infallible doctrines flung into speculation on suspicions whispered to living rock. This mind trips on unearthed reality. Forgotten voices speak for themselves, startled hands bring pen to paper, validation stains the page with creation's mistakes. And I hear the scream as I write the words.

Walking Backwards

I read an interview recently where a good man said: "Blue whacks hard, hits 'em where it hurts; but a little of that can go a long way..." and of course it got me thinking, sent me off on a backwards journey that went and came such a long way that I wonder if I'll recognize the end when it nears. I thought of my brother Eddie; 10 years older and dead by 1970, hanging from the chandelier in my mother's great room because he wanted to run off to Paris or some gay somewhere to sling paint against curling canvas and that just wasn't done; could'nt happen said dear old dad; it's a doctorate for you... So there hung Eddie on a crisp May morning, sneakered feet drawing lazy circles in shadows on the black and white parquet. And I remember how my mother didn't scream; or cry or even drop her bone cup but instead instructed (now there's a word) the housekeeper to "send for the authorities, Helen", and instruct (there it is again) them to come quietly, please. When they cut Eddie down a crystal was somehow broken in the process and as I watched the fine glass shimmer to the floor I thought now there's beauty; such a beautiful irony... Eddie has broken mother's chandelier but he'll never get to see the distaste that bent her mouth downwards beyond the borders allotted to his death. At dinner, my father remarked on the high cost of a replacement. (not Eddie; the crystal) So there it is; a little that went a long way. Everytime I see wisteria I remember, it blossomed early that year and framed the windows of the great room where Eddie dangled in defiance... I associate it's heavy, purple scent with that final up yours. Soon after I ran away, joined the army...thus fucking my mother and my father in the best three-way ever; I was supposed to be a lawyer and carry on tradition in the time-honored manner. All the years inbetween then and now lay markers for that backwards journey; and today I find myself stumbling upon them, fascinated that with each mile back the colors still remain vivid and true; even if most of it is red and black. So along my reverse search I look for blue, yellow, green, orange; bright bits that I bury because the dark seems easiest to cover... but looking down at the buckled road I find this: A girl named Grace in 1973, just after Saigon fell, living in a Charlotte loft decorated with prints of Dali and Pollack that made you dizzy but she said they freed her mind, made her think and she liked Brautigan because he understood love, she said; she read to me "The Wait' and later, as we made love on a sprung sofa she cried and called me by a name that wasn't mine...I color her blue and sometimes when it rains so light you can't see it I remember how her hair stuck to her cheeks after the sweat was dry. And this: A man who said his name was Jerry gave me a ride one cold afternoon just outside of Chesterfield; and seeing I had no money and no motive took me to his apartment, fed me soup and pimento cheese sandwiches that were very near how manna must have tasted. We talked for hours sitting at his kitchen table; and at some point he showed me his collection of jazz wax that had to be priceless and just before I left he played Betty Roche and the Savoy Sultans...I can still hear the soul inflection of that voice. Color Jerry orange; and now whenever I eat pimento cheese I think of him and his 33's. And This: A small boy and his sister who found their way onto my property not too long ago. Out with my squirrel gun, looking for snakes, I come upon the two of them sitting on the bank of the Tar river that borders my land on the north side. They never heard my approach, being apt at walking the woods line in near silence, but my red-bone Millie startled the shit out of them with a high-pitched howl that set my teeth on edge. They jumped as if shot, and the girl (probably all of sis or seven) screamed and then began to cry miserably. "Don't shoot us, mister", said the boy, who was not much older than the girl, "we was only digging nightcrawlers..." (I guess I looked like a mister in camoflauge; it made me smile) They calmed down when they saw I was no boogeyman, I gave them some of the kisses I always carry in one pocket or another and we spent a pleasant hour or so pulling worms out of the rich river earth and talking about things like why the river runs just one way and why coon dogs are always so skinny. After they left, I sat awhile on the bank and thought of how everything goes a long way, but none of it ever seems to go on long enough. I'll color these two green, for growth... maybe they'll come back; I'll remember to haul extra kisses. I'm still looking for yellow.

Paper Shoes In The Piggly Wiggly

The people who people my town wear paper shoes, a lot like charlie did in days of yore, slipping through fields of gore with barely a bone to rattle their prescence; nothing to signify sound or fury and it was just so today in the Piggly Wiggly; 10:30 of a bright blue Monday with a hand basket sporting the latest in milk and brown eggs, at the end of aisle 6 where they (they?) keep canned peaches im attractive stacks of green and orange cans I hear this: "...only a nigger kid, who gives a rightous fuck? Held me up for two hours because the little coon didn't have enough sense to cross on the light; now I ask you, Jim, what's a law abiding white man to do when the po-lice officer's a nigger too?" Never heard them come up the peach aisle, Jim and his good buddy Harold (because it said so in neat red stitch above the pocket of his blue chambrey workshirt) the paper shoes that covered their approach looked a lot like Redwing boots that I know Jim and Harold valued almost as much as the 410's that surely hung against the back glass of their F150 Fords and when they started noticing my not noticing I moved on around the corner to aisle 8 (isn't that strange) where all the things I'll never need like Pampers and Gerber and Bottle (warmers?) are kept and through the open shelves that line all the aisles in the nieghborly Piggly Wiggly the conversation continues and from behind strained bananas I hear this: "...that dyke who works for the Rescue squad that's who, some of us went to the county meeting about those types picking up our wives and such, having to touch 'em and all and sometimes even taking off their clothes but it didn't do no good and now I just take my women to town myself if they need hospital help..." But I've picked up your wife, Jim, and your sister too, both of them too drunk to have sense enough to not drive home and if you knew what all they promised the nigger cops we called if only they wouldn't tell you where they were or what they had been doing, why, you would just SHIT Jim, I swear- On those same paper feet two little old ladies who favored my forgotten ma had sidled up beside me and I realized that I was giggling to myself, probably looked like I was drunk myself so I walked away to aisle 10 (?) and as I tried to look oh-so-interested in pickled okra and sweet rind pickles some kid without any paper shoes (just keds with dirty laces) walked right up and asked me straight-out in a too-loud little kid voice why my hair was cut just like a boy's and why was I wearing Dickies just like his dad's- dontcha know your'e a girl- says he and I never heard his mama (paper shoes) come out of nowhere to grab him up and whisk him off like I might be catching. So I add a jar of those sweet rinds to my milk and eggs, find myself seven aisles later standing in the checkout behind Jim and Harold and their suitcase of after-work Schlitz, in front of the ladies with their ensure and wild rice, and I looked for the kid, but I guess his mama was busy somewhere in the back teaching him not to talk to strangers with boy-hair and I wondered if she remembered that it was me who came to her assistance the night her lawyer husband decided that she might look better with bruises- but then I decided we all must look alike with hats on. All around me paper shoes shuffled and Jim and Harold snickered and the older ladies read the labels on their ensure like it was the Sunday times; their lips drawn into tight lines. Behind all those tight lips that never moved (except for Jim and Harold's, who did'nt give a rightous fuck), I could hear this and this and some more of this: niggers and dykes and faggots- OH MY! And I wondered if they could hear what I was thinking above the silence of their paper shoes.

Day 5 Becomes Blue

I. On a clear day, you can hear forever. Architect birds, tucked beneath eaves, dismantle their winter homes. Each tugged twig, every plucked leaf resounds against the still of morning. The Crepe Myrtles drop finished blossoms on the tin roof of a tumbled shed. Their blood escapes, a whispered hiss, indigo stains mark rites of passage. A limb falls somewhere in the tree line, it whistles its descent through tangled teeth; the dive of a god jumping for pleasure into drifts of deadwood. II. Angles of perception shift with the fog. A strange sun cuts unfamiliar paths through the Iris banked beside the fence rail. It prisms between lavender, pink, yellow; cups fragile petals with a lover's hands. June bugs, early for their season, move in perfect tracks of two across river stone, the hard shells of their backs glisten; iridescent oil slicks dancing on granite. The face of dusk becomes blue. Pulls its shade in time-lapsed seconds across the dimming panes of day, a draw that deepens cobalt to navy to black. III. The heart of night is a lonely hunter. Black-hulled pecans tap their nails on cedar planks that guard the walls; they beg invite, hide calling cards in shadowed piles beneath the whip-grass. Wood gods play tag along sleep's perimeter. They rustle through Pine, Elm, and Oak on feet sprung from root, branch, and bark; their laughter sings under sills on a mid-spring's dream. A mosquito dips and darts in darkened rooms, hovers above the sweat of an uneasy sleep. It hums accompaniment with staccato pulses, persistent scratch stalking this restless itch.

Deconstructing Mother

I. Beginning She shook off Perihelion one strangled afternoon in a perfect gnash of gears; a dirt burg south of Bakersfield so hot Hell shunned membership and so did she; flipped a fed-up finger at the Mediterranean Cafe, dried-out dive where simple sallies ply pussy for promises and warm mescal; they snickered behind spidery hands as she played her crafty ass flush on that final fuck-all score and when the heat rose like fetid smog she yanked it loose; scorched sand with a stripped-down skyline painted horizon blue and raced the devil to Babylon in a fifty-nine Ford. II. Middle Mama got implants the year the Sox traded that lousy southpaw, because she wanted her audience of one sorry son-of-a-bitchin' bricklayer to pay more attention but it only made him tease- he said they made her teeter worse than those jade-colored juleps she was constantly sipping because she thought they were so couth, so uptown Savannah but mama always did wear her avarice on her pink velour sleeves; even bought parquet-patterned linoleum for our rented kitchen floor and when the son-of-a-bitch caught that last caboose to Birmingham one hot July night she woke us all up; put Percy on the box- slow-dragged us around the black and white, her breath like mint against our upturned faces. III. Near The End When mother fucked the mechanic, years after accusations fell and nestled into pastel carpets, along eggshell baseboards, she led him in with coffee in a bone cup- took his coat, his hat, his hands; laid him down on pink nap beside a cracked leather sofa that stank of rum, of shalimar and hip on hip they rocked; wrung doubt from shadows watching behind papered walls while we watched Peyton Place upstairs, while the calico in the window watched rain patter against a pearl-gray sedan- its hood up, opened like a secret. IV. Last Look She takes martinis in the morning, three jiggers to a pilsner glass; spoon-stirred because shaking bruises good London gin, every Barton's baby knows that and then she eddies angostura down the crystalline well, arid as a nun's glove because vermouth is only wine, never was anyone's secret recipe and besides, she's been to Trinidad; danced slick-skinned on Tobago sand while island boys watched behind hidden eyes, swinging promises between twitching flanks and now her days are dry, the nights dusty- so she drinks martinis in the morning, three decades to a pilsner glass.

The Bullshit Chronicles, Chapter 1

Still-black dawn cracks over dove country- staccato shots rip me from sleep as they rip breath from flight; rude alarms without faces. Light brings the neighbors' girl to roost in a fall field- arms full of the plastic lives of several dolls with neoprene skin. Her tinny voice trills across my coffee, the forgotten words of some long ago song- "On the wings of a snow white dove-" It shudders behind my eyes, the goose-fleshed imprints linger all day. End of day finds her at the edge of my yard; scuffed hands cupped around a dead bird. She offers it like truth- quick, free of fanfare. "Bullshit," she says, nodding her head to some secret agreement. "The wings are just grey, after all."

Blue On Blue

3:16 AM, emergency entrance, county general- I was propped against the rear doors of a rig parked in Bay 5, close to where the docs smoke with cigarettes tucked behind their palms, furtive anarchists flicking ash at the don't-do-that sign while people shift back and forth around them and I was thinking about this tweaker kid we brought in on a dead run; skull a cracked vault, his secrets betrayed on the floor beneath my boots I was thinking about how he wouldn't stop breathing; how the noise of anatomy dogged collapsed lines in fibrillating waves I was thinking about a girl in a dirty blue skirt sitting on a curb with his blood on her knees, how her face pulled away in the rear-view like a scream I was thinking about how an intern with two silver loops in his ear hummed 'Blue on Blue' under his breath as we gave our report to a nurse I thought about these things I watched the guards watch me I didn't clean any secrets from the rig I did sit down on the step plate I picked at the wick of my zippo I whistled the intern's song somewhere behind me a girl with bloody knees sits on a curb pulling threads from the hem of a cheap skirt.

My Afternoon With Sarah

Her name had been Sarah something, said the red-headed cop as he picked through a tote plucked from a ditch festive with Phlox and Anemone and sweet Valeriana tall enough to sweep our knees. Down the sloped bank strolled two laughing men dressed in train authority gray that matched the gravel bedding the tracks for miles north and south. Every few feet they stooped and stood, stooped and stood- red plastic flags remembered the path of their ritual. Yards beyond a bicycle twisted into a U smiled, spoke teeth jutted in unfamilar angles from rim sockets. Its chrome caught the Tuesday sun and spit it back in darts that skittered across the blue hoods of idling state cruisers parked along an access road grown thick with the curious- they hung in knots behind troopers whose bored stance belied grim faces, their chitters slung as low as the sam browne belts strung out like a black-patent fence. Avid eyes jockeyed for chinks in a chino wall. Books scattered between beginning and end, chemistry, calculus, english and french- lofty subjects lifting pages to an eastern breeze. A volume of Frost trapped itself in Hummingbird Vines that grew in pink perfusion around the crossing posts. No one saw me slip it in the pocket of my turn-out coat. No one knows that I'll come back on days when the weather is fine, sit cross-legged on a bank with Phlox and Anemone and sweet Valeriana brushing my back while I read each poem out loud-

The Night

ends in layers on her kitchen floor; jackets, boots and kitten heels form conclusions on stained tile. I wasn't in her apartment five minutes before the phone rang; low talk in another room that meant nothing. Later, in bed, she explained the call as a boyfriend, suspicious; we both pretended that it might matter. She was the first woman to acknowledge the scars laddered from my shoulder to my hip; she walked her fingers down the raised rungs without asking why. On the bedside stand, familar icons: Schnapps, seconal, lamp with a pink ruffled shade. Somewhere in the room, a cat growled its disapproval. After, she slept- on her side, a locked blade. I sat on the edge, tried but couldn't remember her name. The cat appeared, wound between my feet, its censure forgotten. I stroked its fur, felt flesh shiver over bone. "Your'e a good cat," I said. "A good cat."

View From A Flying Jimmy

Listen: hounds loose their run trill reveille behind the lines of white pine and cedar and elm that guard my seclusion. I pretend I'm dreaming-then I am-waltzing with Jane barefoot and ballgowned through a wood: music howls somewhere beyond the grey, somewhere in the black. So I oversleep and wonder when I wake why my feet are ice. I fly to work down backroads that turn suddenly into streets miles from my driveway graveled and tucked between menacing rows of black-hulled pecans: they bear on the third year and I keep their fallen ancestors packed naked in blue tupperware tubs stacked in my freezer. The cockpit of my jimmy is strewn with dead coffee cups. Jack-in-the-boxes lay discarded and dying on the floorboards -similar slaughters of necessity-ketchup clotted to their sides. Last month's cable bill flaps under the visor like a battleflag. Tobacco whips by on the left and on the right so fast each leaf on every stalk stands out in surreal base-relief. I taste the sharp and bitter tang of suckering plants: it reminds me of my father's pall malls and politics and the smell of money seeded from blood. Barn swallows rise-in lazy tourbillions-from the fields their beaks and bellies full of yellow and green hornworms. I wing past Buck's BBQ Pit (You Can't Beat Our Meat)-past Lucy's Do-Lounge where the girls serve more than shots -past Big Jim's Quick Mart: the stoner kid who pumps gas raises a hand in reflex. I don't wave back in sympathetic apathy. Most mornings I stop to kill coffee cups but today I'm late. Tenant houses rush by on either side, their concrete blocks painted with Kudzu and mildew: I think of abattoirs and oubliettes and other inevitable exits. Children and dogs and cheap molded toys from the plastic plant over in Elroy dot the tiny dirt yards-little boys and little girls stand in stagnant ditches chunking rocks at death while their mamas are inside fucking the mailman or watching General Hospital on TV. I see slideshow flashes of their faces and I hope I don't have to come back out this way: scrape them up, heads cracked open, futures frying on asphalt like so many eggs. I pass the city limit sign-some of the holes are mine-ringed in rust and canted to one side. Courthouse looms right, county buildings lurch left and blocks ahead day meets night where tracks split the city: segregation in iron ties old as time. I pull into my lot-number six, section twelve-filled with cars and trucks and bikes but I am the only flying jimmy. Everything ticks: engine, watch, pulse-alpha papa charlie- the people that mill outside my windshield tick with tension. I want to turn the key, turn around, turn into my driveway where squirrels sit stuffing my sweet meats in their jaws: instead I clinch mine-name rank serial number-open the door and step out. Listen: animals sprung their cages snarl in angry unavoce behind walls of brick and steel and glass that guard nothing.

Wars And Rumors Of

Hunched like dogs mid-shit, faces flooded contusion blue, we quiver before the corpse-lights; slaver over designer drones whose digital tongues flap static louder than our intellects- they spew sang-froid emesis across the collective floor, stroke our heads, pat our asses by invitation; they sing us lies and lullabies but we know the ice age cometh: it taps a salvo against the convex eye, puts an antedate ear to our bowels and listens to the rumblings within.

Notes To Rachel

1 You gave me bunny slippers for Easter, and a copy of Watership Down; it earned you the benefit of a doubt. I wonder how long before you are gone, after youv'e vanished. 2 This morning the refridgerator dumped cold on my bare feet; I thought about the way your back arched around my toes. 3 Estelle came today with a shoebox of photographs you had taken on our trip to Vermont; you scribbled notes on the back of every one. 4 When she was gone, I read the words on each photo over and over. 5 I walked to the mailbox four times ahead of the mailman. Mrs. Campos next door thinks I'm going insane. Maybe she's right. 6 This afternoon I sat and watched the wallpaper peel from the corner where the glue never took; after a while it looked like a time-lapse film of rotting fruit. I decided to get the TV fixed. 7 Estelle came by again- this time with a girl who looked a lot like you used to, before those I-want lines furrowed your forehead. You named them all after me. 8 Estelle left and she stayed; we drank Tanqueray with no ice until you disappeared. Afterwards, she slept naked on the blue couch downstairs. 9 She was gone this morning, left a note under your smiley magnet. I didn't read it. It wasn't from you. 10 I went to Delmar's for breakfast, but negatives of you live there, the leatherette booths mocked me. I snuck out before my order was up; I can't go back. 11 Going home, I thought I saw your head above a clutch of backpacks on sixth street; but it turned out to be just another blurred ghost. 12 Mrs. Campos watches me walk up the drive; I grin and wave like a lunatic- as if I never saw the falling, as if I don't know it will be years before I feel the crash.

Outside The Angelica Theatre

There's a dead girl splayed out on South street; the slit-tit-to-twat reflex of some human situation left to gel on the drag- filleted in fuck-me rags with scream-pink thongs yanked to dangle from an ankle like the sex-crime victim in a Russ Meyer flick but that's not Shari Eubank face-up in technicolor, mudhoney hair clotted to a curb; just another vixen caught without her bad-bitch suit when something smiled too long, stood too close- kissed and told us all what really happens when the movie's over.

While The Movie Played

Watch. Closer than this; lash to lid- questions bead on skin and something answers: nothing personal. Just circumstance caught without pomp outside the angelica- no resistance, no matter. Listen. Harder than that; lip to lobe- something sniggers it's all going to end, nothing's everafter- nothing personal.

Bored With Pink

she wears black everyday, widows herself from the Ivory girls, scrubs the scalloped parts until they've lost their seashell hue- At night she sheds, sits cross-legged in blue shag and draws scarlet bracelets from her wrists, exacto circlets around her throat in crimson beads.

Talking To Walls

She was a big, bottle-blonde kissing the backside of forty, looking like Mansfield might if she hadn't blown Biloxi in the rain; cartoon tits packing Lana Turner sweaters, checkerberry breath clinging to tacky lips like the promise of something sweet. Flashing teeth and thigh six nights out of seven, she works counter down at the Angelica Theatre on fifty-third, selling zabars and popcorn in greasy sacks to strangers sweating behind familiar features; they count their change as they walk away. She shares time and a three-room walk-up with a dyke she met in Jersey city, creole stripper half her age who calls her doll and doesn't know that mama named her Gravis, reminder of days grown heavy, nights gone hard; the chance missed to die without scars. She's never talked of how she split at fifteen, another ant struggling from someone else's afterbirth, never telling how it felt when the cord snapped somewhere east of Idaho; the severed end drags behind her, erasing the ways back. She doesn't speak of lying belly-flat on a sheet-draped table while a man she didn't know inked his thoughts beneath her skin; he hung a new moon off the base of her spine, indigo stain posed like an unfinished question. In her dreams, faceless people hide answers under the impossible designs; they leave clues in concatenate patterns behind her eyes. Sometimes late at night, she puts Holiday on the box, sips cold duck from a tea glass and listens to a closed throat croon about how things get lost, how turns go wrong. She watches the girl sleep, her still-firm flesh the color of peppered honey; and she wonders will years stretch it slack, or will it ride off into some sunset in a pink Electra, wind up on a sheet-covered stretcher, face-up to the dead. But mostly, she thinks of voices and young girls, how they last while they last; everything is only until. She pours herself a kill-shot, rubs absently at the nag buried in the small of her back, fingers moving in concentric circles; their remembered rhythms shushing the tell-tale moon.

Milk And Chapstick

She used to be Viola, farmbred, cornfed daughter of dirt. Baby fat blonde jumped the nowhere bus with a bootlace flapping, gritty chapstick in her pocket and pasteurized milk in her daddy's scotch thermos. Fate est. 1977, she walked away on rooted feet and now she shakes a disillusioned ass at a southbeach titty palace called the Maraschino Cherry, screaming red walls hung full of glaring Warhol and Dali blacklights, polite bouncers in business suits. The clientele speaks of Paris, of summers spent at Archipalego de Colon in knowing voices. It brags like a regular Studio 54, but it's just another downtown hard bar, with the same coke zombies and drag queen disciples all licking Kismet off squares of colored cellophane, thier faces pulled in grotesque passion. The stage pops and snaps with faulty neon, the constant crackle on charged air makes her think of the spark chamber she saw once at a county science fair, when she was still Viola, baby fat blonde the crowds called Sapphire, because it was spelled out behind her on a black velvet backdrop in sputtering tubes of violent blue. It spits static at her bare back, bites at her skin with electric teeth, drawing sweat that smells of blood and friction. She sways, seductive on rooted feet, runs a dry tongue over nervous lips and thinks of chapstick, of warm milk in a plaid thermos.

Talking To Jack

I can't call it chat; seems to light, too free- and it wasn't but it was good in a self-searching way that I wasn't prepared for or aware of until skin was already peeling away in painful strips, bloodless yet weeping- I felt them fall, drifting in dry and dusty piles beneath my anonymous desk somewhere in river town and I wanted to gather them up- stick them back to my naked self, shivering and unprotected, weak and wanting. idle words bared me like a lover couldn't like a confessor might like a surgeon skilled at the craft- and voices screamed from the opened wounds voices with names that can't be counted, faces that won't be gone. Their tongues scrape my edges, dig furrows through the boneyards that carry my weight- and I stumble, I tire, I wonder will it always be the same.

Hunger

She takes the six-forty everyday, a real zaftig mama running register at the Slavic Grill; slack tits and hair and broad, flat teeth that stick perpetually to cracked lips like the biting aroma of onions and cabbages sticks forever to her skin and it floods the bus with sudden clarity, passengers think of home, of sweet sausage for supper and tired wives with tight asses, angry husbands with hard hands and nobody knows her name is Zinnia; sour old maid but somebody's flower and no one will guess she takes the six-forty everyday on a three stop ride to see her daddy-man, fat black butcher who strokes her heavy head, kisses dry lips slick as they slap needy meat together until thier pores spit vinegar, until the starving empty tastes onions, cabbages.

Ceremony

The colored cemetery perched on slanted ground at the far edge of the county line; the back rows of plots shared borders with our high school, and any ball thrown too long was a dead ball. Ancient willows stood weeping guard along the invisible boundary, their burdened branches dripped moss the color and texture of elderly lace. The only visitors there were as ancient as the willow guards, but not as weepy. Several venerable black ladies of the old order, all wearing the bright reds and dull greens of the matriarchal aged. They spent whole days when they came, intent on their solemn rite of service, pruning and weeding, polishing stone with handfuls of red clay. We would see them when we played out our own rites of service in frequent summer practice games; and though we never spoke, or waved a hand in friendly respect, they always brought our footballs back; placed in orderly piles at the feet of the willow guards.

Walk Away

The carpets are skin-thin, threads lace the holes like stitches. The sun recedes behind the wrong window, and scars mar sinks in nicotined inches. The rooms want to collapse on the phantom inspirations of ladies whose magnolia talc still hangs in the brocade drapes and peeling silk. I think about the coloreds here before us- how one winter the foreman came, whipped that buck Sampson until blood muddied clay and how he was a tribal prince. I can see this war, every war- deconstruction and reconstruction blend like the burning, the building of continents and I watch people drift in boats, starve in holds, continue from cells without bars, without keys- their ashes silt rivers, their bones lay paths for those who stumble after. The earth tilts its head and I am watching through the walls as people roam the yard, on into the streets, the cities, the world- some are planting rows, blisters on their palms, or stirring pots with peeled sticks or drinking shine from brown jugs while they lean back to back under elm, under oak, under pine- I watch mothers who beat their children and fathers who turn away; the brims of their hats broken above their brows. I hear lovers whispering and old men rocking in cane-backed chairs that creak regret, old women shelling peas, stripping corn, pouring tomorrows into jars gone as cloudy as their eyes. Young girls in pleated skirts cha cha to 45's, and a cowboy rolls his own by an embered circle. Boys in sailor suits wave from distant bows while others kiss strangers beneath confetti storms- victories caught on paper, on film, in concrete and stone. If I had me some sugar, I could make us a fair cake, says the woman in the empty kitchen. The faded sheers stir as if by breath. Beyond the rooms, through the walls and frame and rotting insulation- past the yard and streets and cities and fields and valleys and seas are days that come and go without delineation; shifts of gray to black marked only by the ones who walk away.

Where The Road Runs

He drove himself down every road. In a plymouth with tires balder than his head, slicker than onions growing wild in the ditch. Does he see the feral cats race his shadow as it whips through the rabbit grass? Can he hear the cicadas whirr in the Digger pines? He claimed he saw a coyote chasing its tail through fields white with bolls, never admitting that coyotes ain't common around cotton; then he would laugh like chuckles were dollars. His opinions meant everything; his weight pulled carts filled with sand down at the cement yard until his yield grew so slack the big boss noticed; let his time go with a watch and a gold smile- he had grinned, said it was just another bone for the archeology folks up state way to dig up one fine afternoon, to study over like he studied roads- everyday, a different road. He always said he heard his oasis calling, heard the slip of streams, smelled suckle dripping from the vine somewhere out past the end of the Butternut groves. Take me back, he'd say- lead me where the roads run to earth; leave me drink from the slipping streams, let me draw communion from its song; bring me grapes that hang from strapped stakes, feed me honeysuckle sweet as time- wash away years like the river smooths stone. Those blacktops earned his admiration, hugged his glass tires, pushed his days forward. He said his satisfaction was always just ahead- lurking in the sawgrass, swimming with water striders across the flat planes of Gardner's pond, caught on a high soar with the morning doves throwing shadows like bullets on the two-lane; their flight cutting delicate arcs through thoughts. He paid attention to clouds, drew their chaos in the dust on his hood. He chewed sour-thorne as he drove, said its tang called memories of a girl he once kissed beneath a fingernail moon. He collected thistle from bullrushes, strew it out his windows for the architect birds building homes in the Silver Birch stands. He carried a trowel in his trunk for small burials. He couldn't remember his children's names. He died on a Saturday. Parked his Plymouth on a slow rise out where split-rails lean against the sky. He opened his arms to a fading sun, lent his voice to a slipping stream- Take me! Lead me where the road runs to earth! They found an old man on Monday, the papers said; pillowed on piles of thistle miles from the rush thickets, his eyes full of dew, his pockets full of grapes.

That's What I Think

While out cruising the net in my brand new 40.0GB SuperSport, I read on a board, in reply to some thread, (that had started life as as a poem, lovely of itself) one poet tell another, "Get a life, there's a REAL world out there" Bub But that made me think, not really. Not when you really look at it from certain perspectives, because I can sit, (and if I can, others are) in fact, am sitting here now, before a 17 inch box that holds the world; the world out there. I can stroll naked, swilling a bud, straight through the Louve, (if I choose) and jack off at Mona Lisa's non-existent feet without worrying about guards. Or I can take a tour of famous Louisiana graves while I kinda sorta watch the Braves play the Yankees on T.V., and listen to a neighbor's kid cut grass outside. Or I can meet up with you (at least who I think is you and who you think is me) at some cool cafe on a fast superhighway, and we'll talk @#%$ sublime about everybody we know, because we can. So If I can do anything, anywhere, (and most of it better than I really would out there in the big world) then why would I or anyone else ever care to listen to the advice offered within the thread that started the thought? Wouldn't all of us just sit and know instead of live and learn? But What I figured out (and maybe others will agree) is even though I can watch all the Porn-4-free I can stand, buck naked, lubed up, popcorn in hand; its not really the same, not really when you think about it, without the heady smell of passion, a bittersweet lick of sweat, that grimacing look of love; (Ok, let's face it, lust, but you know what I mean) the soft sounds of a held heart. But anyway, that's what I think.

Taste Of Summer

It was summer when I first tasted a girl- and I can't stop remembering bare feet on asphalt, hot; sweat popping above our lips as we walked through empty lots, past houses that watched behind pulled blinds and barking dogs, beyond the school where the next year we would not know ourselves. You look like a boy, she said (her daddy wouldn't let her out with boys) and the smile that tilted her face tugged all my muscles at once I can't forget a junked Dodge half-buried in the woods off Cypress street, its inside smelling of burnt oil and smoke and how she felt like wet suede stretched across the seat; whispers salt-glazed- our mouths like wind on open wounds.

From My Window

A girl sits everyday on the 10th floor ledge of a building that faces mine. From my window I look down; watch as she contemplates something or nothing- feet angled towards our street, ankles crossed above heads that never look up. Her name could be Jenny, Alice or Ruth; but I name her Jane under breath that catches each positional shift, anonymous doe caught between ricochets of afternoon glare; its whisper-licks blend gray shadows into ghosts against the stone. I wonder if she reads confessional poets- lonely masturbator waking in the blue, looking for Bedlam with a howl picking locks in her throat or does she want to eat the world like Plath ate her daddy; in sucking gulps of tasteless oblivion and I wonder if she knows I'm here, does she know I see everyday the bow of head, the shape of hands folded in a spare lap; will she sense my regret should the hands snap and plummet, grabbing for rungs on rising air while currents turn the pages backward- does she know they will leave no riddle exposed; only hair and bone and the ache at the root of my tongue Nods to Sexton, Lowell, Ginsburg and Plath.

When It Rained

I was fourteen, she was twenty something. She called herself Zza Zza most nights, a big blonde with Vargas tits and a bad complexion that began at the bone. She had a one room walk-up off Sunset strip, the only window looked out at a billboard for Evian water. She said it was as close to the Hollywoodland sign as she would ever get. Her hair was dyed the color of champagne clouds, and she wore a tight black tee that read "You must have been a beautiful baby" in warped block letters across her chest. She would snort giggles and say all the swingers were just dads in plaid suits, looking for lost years under strange petticoats, warming cold regret with Mastercard and Jack. She knew things that were cool, like Saki was born in Burma, if you could make a saxaphone cry you would never be alone, and you can roll a decent joint in Tampax sleeves. And on rainy nights when business was bad, she would invite me home like company, give me whiskey and head while Gillespie played his trumpet in perfect sync.

This Is How We Do It

We should lie down, stripped on the floor of your father's study; except for our little girl panties, which we pull aside at the crotches with deliberate fingers, our tongues at search in slow circles of motion- because this is how we do it; this is what he sees when he closes his eyes and plays at sleep, behind us in his lazy-boy, while we sit hip to hip, lip to ear in front of laugh-in; arms about our waists like the oldest of friends: our nipples like rocks beneath his twitching lids.

Saints

When air hangs in august trees like phlegm to dying lungs, sticky skins thread sullen streets sweating Red Dog Rye; old men, young sons piss out thier purpose in vespine knots, mouths full of shit and speculations: thier spittle leaves pocks in the dirt. Venerable interceders for God passing bottles and judgements behind taprooms festooned with pellitory- Sunday tongues hum around residual teeth, hackles rise above the somebody's fault line and the saints lay down thier good books; gather up tindered principles, traditions like light-wood: They bank them at the feet of crosses set to burn in thier nieghbor's yards.

Concert

Rachmaninoff winds reel-to-reel, Opus 1, First Piano Concerto- chords dip from atop my desk, slide down its veneered cheeks to swim in shadow around my feet. I sit, hands above a keyboard, fingers poised to tap the notes- precision strikes each letter as though this balanced type could arrange my words in unbound sheets and bestow me the name composer.

Oletta

She is always Oletta, ejected misconception of a white trash traveling man, trading bibles and bastards at another highway diner some thirty-odd ago and now she works the same table where mama bought a good book and a good time; serving eggs, pouring joe for the good ol' boys who snigger behind stained cups, they snicker hey bright nigger; high-yeller piece with a white gal's face. Their eyes finger her wet-suede skin, curl themselves in umber coils springing from her head; her shoulders itch as they watch the rounds but she is still Oletta, goes home nights, room 12 at Queen's motel; she signs the slips in pencil, pays rent by the week because things change, don't they; maybe she'll pack it up, move to London or Paris where skin like wet suede buys you benedict and latte served on silver trays, houseboys in black-tie draw baths laced with Vouvray and now the tub is full; good ol' thoughts float, shed layers below her breasts. She thinks of traveling men, sees faces without features beneath her lids and wonders where the names went; what happened to the traces left behind? She listens to a TV preacher saving souls through the walls, glory halleleujah, the refills aren't really free. Time leaves footprints in rings, dead trails growing cold with the water and she remembers she is always Oletta.

Sestina Burlesque

It has been said solid alliteration must not disturb the musical modulation, and that a sure, set iambic meter should syllabic two-step with rhyme, providing that the connotation does not interfere with denotation. One could look at strong denotation as supportive of subtle alliteration, and concentrate the connotation to amplify the import of modulation; arranging stanzas to satisfy rhyme with flagrant disregard to meter. To use iambic panti in the meter could elevate the cadence denotation until it becomes unstable structured rhyme. Utilize finer points of alliteration to help emphasize tone of modulation and try not to alter connotation. But to rely heavily on conotation could cause noticeable errors in meter, not to mention lesson stressed modulation. And assonance lends flow to denotation as consonants do alliteration, swaying the internal, external, substernal rhyme. And should a showpiece refuse to rhyme, will the strophes lose positive connotation or gain distracting alliteration? If the perfectly marching meter declines to keep time with denotation, will the whole thing rest on modulation? One could selectively scansion modulation irregardless of unsteady rhyme, and place the denotation squarely on the shoulders of connotation, possibly pull the panti from the meter, and upset the consistent alliteration. So one could hope that connotation will dance in rhythm with meter, stressing unstrained sounds of alliteration.

Sestina Critique

There sat a critic of sharpened tongue among a quorum peopled by weary peers, nimble mind quick with arrogance. Positioned before proffered thought, pen dipped in acerbic contempt, slashing concepts with smug sarcasm. To question the tone by sarcasm of your own takes a sugar-coated tongue. Cover deep cuts in like contempt, attempts to defend clipped peers, will raise the wells of caustic thought until the replies spit arrogance. But what is this bitter arrogance if not rancid fodder for sarcasm? Can the sanctum of written thought be licked raw by the taunting tongue? Or will seats filled with censured peers critique the critic by his own contempt? If every quorum bore contempt slicing ideas with razored arrogance, would there be left the Stepford peers, identical mocking sarcasm, dripping scorn from identical tongues, united by identical thought? Minds harbor conceptual thought unburdened by superior contempt, seeking expression past the honed tongue. Naked intellect stabbed by arrogance, hard wrought work riddled by sarcasm, the sharp tongued critic fences his peers. Holding court over weary peers, the self-important sits alone in thought, nimble mind mossed with sarcasm, pen loaded with sour contempt. He fills his mouth with hawked arrogance, unending spittle from his tongue. Will the thought sink beneath contempt, melt in acrid puddles of arrogance, or lie silent on the severed tongue?

Stains

His head will grow to the pillow, she thought; then she thinks about fingers, raw from the board and about stains, rust rosettes sprouting on sheets, on slips; they faded but stayed and it fed his ire, fired his cock to see stains blooming proof across starched fronts, church dresses folded warm on the table, smelling like greasy soap and she thinks about scrubbing, ceaseless scrapes, split nails digging roses up from muddy water that stings flesh red, red as primroses and she thinks about flowers after that, of seeds strewn, how they take and grow just anywhere, how they seemed to spring now, wild from his pillow, speading past its plump edge, running trailers down the wall, flowing out to root in the carpet and his head will grow there, she thought.

Just Another Jane

She racks nine-ball mornings at Bobby's Blue Tip; just another strip bar, just another street... current pit in a series of stops and she's got a loft, top of the stairs, over the stage where she shakes tit nights on the ten to four; shimmies for the jimmies in business suits, they buy rounds in applause, light cigarettes and check thier reflections on the backs of zippos always the same faces, always the same song... and in the morning she'll rack balls, while the old men match each other drink for shot; they move lips that never speak, thier silence reminds her of home.

Sanctified Jane

Past a shadowed eye stands Jane, one-legged. Foot propped on porcelain ledge, muscles tight along knuckled curve. She proffers a spread like a tangled wound, defiled flesh fills a bone cup. Hands flutter in ritual circles beneath the arc, they pull and twist and now the scourge begins, cold fingers bury themselves, the beaks of carrion birds at a living thing, gaining strength on what's left behind. Lather builds thick, angry; gathers where skin becomes savage, secret eater of the dead. Memory hangs heavy, falls to spatter on broken tile, spat wads of rage and reverence. Jane shifts ruined eyes over a dark shoulder, hot black stare of a baleful goddess. The scar that splits her face burns, spills fire across an ancient altar, igniting the feast of continuance.

Jane's Scar

The graveyard shift rocks at Master Jack's Porno Emporium, a blocked concrete coffin that bleeds florescent sun through cracks in the green glass front. Tongues of it lick the sidewalk, cold trails that shine them in after dark settles. Vacuous vampires on a senseless search for something to suckle, they flutter the aisles; aimless bats with track marks and dirty nails that chitter against the shelves. Freaks and loners, fags and heads, even the worn whores with their nobody's businessmen- they all see the light and remember warmth. A blue-black babe with a tit tag that reads JANE in red letters works the cash box. She has a vicious pink scar that puckers her face from eyebrow to chin. It dances when she talks, a lurid hoochie-coochie in sync with her words. But she plays those suckers like a sideshow susie, selling hard anal to dykes, straight to the packers and anything to the Priest who left his collar in the vestry. They stare at the floor while she rings them out, scared to look up and see the stunner she must have been before somebody pulled the sharp end of mean past her smile. When she hands me my change, the scar starts to dance, a slow strip across the scarred counter. And it always follows me home, waltzing with my silhouette through the streets.

Stand (9-11)

Enter the unhallowed age. Life's hands mold humanity but the strokes are no longer gentle. Shoulder shruggers blind eye viral advocates of like disguise, a little dead in thier concern. Ancient, abhorrent creatures play within skins of normalcy, and share the secrets of madness. Deus ex flying machinas caught the corner of a collective eye, ripped it down in jagged flaps to hang across flaming cheeks of disbelief. Countless selves form single sensation, mothlike horror of free-floating fear batting frantic wings against a shattered globe, choked by the dust of reality. Sacrifice shapes continuance. Blood-stained breasts succor the unsurrendered, spills strength down spines bent, but unbowed. They stand sustained, united under autumn rain, raising flags to the beckoning storm.

Judas

From Tamiscal to Taliban, San Anselmo transplant, little Silver Spring baby grew tin wings and fell. American model mom, as catholic as apple pie, Buddah baked her a layer cake and now the gold-plated kid is a real son of a liberal, kissing Islam for alternatives. Malcolm X muslim molds a dead man's convert, book a flight towards mecca, Yemen rents mosques with a complimentary Koran on deposit. Please check your kalashnikov at the front desk. Holy language, Batman! Powerful Pietism! Look at our ivory boy now; bearded, faceless, signing Hamid on his al-Queda camp pass. And when Jihad called collect, every mother's son answered on the first ring, accepted the charges with a Platinum card.

Jockey's Ridge, 1976

There came a quickening storm, one that bought conversation with the drop of a clap. Thunder clouds rolled and swelled along the crests of Jockey's Ridge, capping the ancient dunes with an eerie copper glaze. It moved at a leisurely drift; surf-fishers, suntanners, salt spray all scattered before it's track. The gathered head paused at odd intervals,and lightning would implode within the turbid roil, snapping pictures for God with muted flashes of illume.

The Calling

He heard the calling the year he turned twelve. It came a low whickering through desolate fields, the whispered insistence of a thousand tongues raged like wasps behind his eyes, filled his skull with a vicious hum. It slid beneath sills, snaked under sweaty sheets, a strange miasma kissing his thoughts with a lover's skill. It drooled a cold and secret language in his ear, ancient conversations that sucked at his bowels and ran his veins with pitch. His sister died hard when he was almost thirteen. Seven won't see eight, alone in a cotten field, dirt in her mouth and knees pulled wide. Bolls sat on her open eyes, broken orphan annie in torn bib-alls, staring up from the rustling rows. He walked away the year he turned fourteen. Unnoticed; a memory kept forever in a dead girl's room. His feet made a low whickering sound as he passed through desolate fields, singing to himself in a cold and secret language the forgotten words to ancient songs.

Riki Tiki Tavi, Redux

I lie drained on a strange bed, usefullness dead on my belly, a clubbed snake. It leaked milky venom as an afterthought. Riki Tiki Tavi in a mid-town bar, invited back to tussel in her sack, a pitch-dark lair with fake satin sheets that scratched the skin like bristled burlap. Slinking need proved no match for the pointed teeth of her hunger- chewed up and spat out in a wad, my ego bled sweat that smelled of fear. I could see her at the sink in Samurai stance, busily lathering soap between slick thighs, the loud sound of wet suction nauseous within the rough confines of silence. She looked over her shoulder, smiled at me with rows of bad teeth. The dripping suds made tiny splats on the tile, rabid foam from a mad mongoose.

Olongapo Night

She lay still, taut on the bed, and watched as a fat spider with spindly legs like eyelashes, danced at the end of an unseen line. It hung from a topmost corner of the raftered cieling, its slight, somehow lewd sway cast eerie marionette shadows that grew long and slunk away along the muted eggshell walls. She pulled the thin cover to her chin, stared at it frightened, yet seduced. A chill like a creeping fog spread through the walls of her belly in thick layers. The spider swung itself upon a beam, and perched in an awful, knowing attitude. It regarded her in silent anticipation, seemed to wave in secret conspiracy. It skittered in sudden decision across the wood, then vanished off the edge of her perception. She thought without effort of the Buso, Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares, and waited in puddles of cold sweat for the sweet feast to begin.

It Comes Down To Beans

I sip my joe, -not french roast- now it's columbian blends with my freedom toast; then I recall that Juan sells more than beans- futility smells like coffee. I spread my toast while I watch CNN, or the local news-MSNBC if it's LIVE- everyone accounts a common story with alternate takes on the end. Inbetween bites, over sips I learn the world has turned orange as I slept; lines have been dug in sand, last cards dealt in dead-men's hands- unconcious notes on my sports page make me wonder who will be left to want the memoirs of a post-humous poet.

Monster

People call me a freak, but I got a beauty of my own. It's in the spray of scars across my cheek, it flaps tattooed wings around my wrist; it drops stares at a glance. It's in the way I slide my eyes beneath the gut, caressing the decay within. Nothing of them is intrinsic to me. The face that passes with mine along rippled street windows reflects itself in the crowd, bright monster constrained to flesh. I lick at sores that never heal, I carry my chaos on my skin. It lies damp in the folds; sweet sweat of my birth. The hands that hold mine dance hidden in my pockets, fingers loosed by the titters of the crowd. Me, myself, and I bitches tease the disease, insensate tongues kiss my rings- lips like prayers, breath like wine. They swallow my spit in gagging gulps. People call me sick, but I got a cure of my own. It's in the fear I suck from venomous minds, it's in the pulse that bubbles under my prick as I probe their daughters with deep indifference. It's in screams that razor through dead throats, drained in complex puddles on the floor of my concrete sarcophagus. I walk these streets on silent feet, my wake remembered on the faces of the crowd. Their instincts recoil, thrum my bones on ancient currents. I got my own beauty. I got my own cure.

Silverfish

Hot savannah summer, bright afternoon- almost incandescent. Still river waiting, promise of cool ministrations, liquid balm just below a warm countenance. You stand silent, perfectly balanced; perched atop rolling crags Of river rock slick with time, tinted moss green for effect. Suddenly you throw your arms up together, your head dipped in supplication. Your sleek, silver aspect seems to thrum- your leap poetic, smooth and sharp. Your back curves taut into the sinuous arc of a diver, and you split the heat without a sound- leaving only brilliant ripples Of sparkling reflection in your wake.

Evolution

She stopped in her steps, wide-eyed, five years old, posed in a doorway. Pale hair, paler skin, clutched in rigid shock. Mother danced slowly at the end of her favorite rope; framed by a backdrop of dazzling white tiles, a lazy ballerina twirling irregular pirouettes above a polished kitchen floor. She stopped in her steps, solitary girl of fifteen, tucked into a doorway. Pale hair, paler skin, uncomfortable in her life. Her friends swayed in slow motion to the end of the last dance, framed by a backdrop of flickering strobes and stars; languid balloons waltzed indiscriminate patterns through an undulating gym floor. She stopped in her steps, tall woman,twenty-six, nervous, tensed at a stage entrance. Pale hair, paler skin, seized in silent remembrance. Mother danced slowly at the end of the second act, framed by a backdrop of brilliant white floodlights; a lonely ballerina twirling irregular pirouettes in the dust of a theater floor.

Weight

In the summer of my thirtieth year, I discovered a sickness past its cure. Hidden all this time beneath shadows puddled at my feet, dark sloughs of denial. My version of the tale, stripped of truth, turned its back, heavy with tatooed secrets like scars. And since I am the one not dead, I carry the weight, and the weight is always the same.

After The Soup Kitchen Closed

I am the substance of primordial fear, the left hand of my own God. I crouch, stiff in cold bellies, hunted by fate, dead by faith. Tonight, I ladle Bean soup into plastic bowls, because I am also the meat of my community, trusted, respected. I shine, unrecognized for myself. I work twice a week at Father Donelley's free kitchen, and now I smile with sheathed teeth while I serve steaming redemption to repulsive streams of walking filth, loud and thankless masses of human maggots. They know me, call me by forgotten names and ask for crackers in tones that threaten, words that coax. I watch them through hooded eye, they bite at each other, snap sharp jaws filled ichor, black maws of fetid decay. They push and shove, and now the soup is gone, so I slip out onto the dead street, my own appetite a razor's edge, stripping my thoughts with persistent licks, slicing my bowels with gnawing need. And then I see him, leaned into the cool recesses of an alley, worthless wine-sucker watching the gilded whores that work the corner, thier faces masked by sodium shadows and indifference. And he says, to no one in particular, "Lookit dat bitch, shake her flat ass down our block, she walk away like she comin' back, @#%$-up bitch can't even hook a straight line. Crack skull ho, man, lookit da bitch. Nuthin' but skank meat on sucked bones, she stink from here, man. Smell like @#%$ funk, rot. She swallow for five, man, take ten to score. Broke tooth bitch, lucky your wank make it, man, wid da nasty mouf on dat bitch. She infected man, she sick...oughta crack dat skull, man, huh? Whadda ya tink, man, oughta crack dat fuckin' skull...." I felt the Four Roses grin freeze on his festered lips as I touched his sleeve and whispered "Yes, lets," He jerked as if burnt, and I slid on sure feet towards the laughing girls under a dim streetlight. I smile as I approach. I am the substance of primordial fear, the left hand of my own God. I bare my teeth and feed what I destroy.

Sunday In Brooklyn

Sung Mass at St. Vincent's, scrubbed-necked herds crowding up Third Avenue, we migrated towards salvation, mindless birds fed on fat sweet seeds that tasted of guilt. Wops, Spics, dreamy Micks, we knew the responses better than Faddah. Blessing and kneeling, signing the cross in synchronization, confirmed automatons dressed in shiny suits and cheap skirts. Every son's mother wants an altarboy, swinging strings of ritual through the throng. Sharp smoke cut the stench of sweat and sin, stung eyes leaked forced tears of retribution. A mortal sin to miss Eucharist, we all feared death outside a State of Grace. Last night's drunks and paid-for pieces drank communion wine like shots, singing "Mea culpa, mea culpa" as a consecration toast. We sat in squirming silence, contrite sinners praying to the Blessed Mother that Faddah put his effort where is Dogma was, listening with hot impatience for the final sanctus to sing our release. Ite missa est, ite missa est, contio. The exodus exploded the sanctum in a sudden flood of repented relief, and tomorrow our compulsive confessions would sound like so much weary brag.

Lasting Effects Of A Catholic Boyhood

The bathroom of our rented bungalow was laid with dark pink Italian tile, each trimmed with lavender, bordered all around with alternating squares; yellow, blue, occasional red, like arched Cathedral mosaics. It boasted a naked door at the south end, comprised of rippled glass and clear veiws. The sun spilled it's warmth through the panes bright and unencumbered until well past noon; and the tiles would sweat their sympathy for the summer day. An ancient tub with balled claw feet crouched huge and gleaming opposite the door, it supported a rack of circular brass, and from it hung a curtain shiny mesh. When the afternoon sun gave it face, it glowed as if gilded. On the last morning of our rented summer, I happened past the door, just as she stood from a bath. Her body was clouded by steam that rose in smoky tendrils and curled around the room like incense at mass. She raised her arms to part the curtain, a slender span of sable wings, her head haloed by dripping ringlets; and when the gilding rays found the sparkling crown, She became the Angel Of Annunciation, bearer of Blessed Bliss, stained glass seraphim of my youth.

Hail Mary

How's your faith these days Father... Does it lie dead, forgotten, dismembered; the masticated pieces spat at the feet of your stained glass Gods, choking your private sanctuary with the stench of decaying hope and rotting promises? How's your faith these days Father... Does it hang heavy, cold against the collar, a bloodstone Rosary strung on veins of attrition; confessions sold in confidence to cast the Judas cross in tarnished silver, buffed in repentence. How's your faith these days Father... Does it have the sweet persuasion it once had, or has the hypnotic drone of the comforting doggerel lost its melodic allure? Or is it all finally a figment of the contrite collective masses, blind moths drawn to fat candles, lit by weary wanderers here to illuminate the path to salvation. How's your faith these days Father...

Nothing Political

Fuck your pretense, call a spade a spade- just don't name it nigger or cracker or honky or tom no matter how colored the ignorance and shake the sugar from your coat, call that cunt a cunt- but not if it shops uptown or sticks itself to a sunday pew or gives the best blow-jobs around don't pull the punc