Nightlife
Dear whoever you are,
I’m writing this letter because . . .
I really just don’t know anymore,
maybe I just shouldn’t get up in the middle of the night
and sit back on my recliner in total darkness
not watching but listening
to things going on on my porch, to noises outside my house.
It all starts out very quiet, and it really is late,
but with time things start happening,
poppings and crackings and a scratching and muffled voices
from the dark bedrooms of neighbors.
I imagine I know what they look like inside, those bedrooms.
They are all red, I’m sure—
red velvet drapes
deep violent red carpets.
I don’t know,
the children must have awakened them.
Those children.
All day I’ll sit on my porch
and the children are misbehaving,
have found something sharp and are cutting things—
furniture in the house or the curtains or bed sheets or something,
cutting into tree trunks, into table legs, into door jambs . . .
always the act of cutting engineering itself
into a mind inside the mind.
Those children won’t be good.
I’ve been living alone for a while now,
I don’t know.
All day I’ll sit on my porch in my chair and my hands
must have something,
something to clutch or tap fingers on . . .
or else I can’t be out there.
Dear acquaintance,
I don’t know how you’ve been, but as for me,
well, things here are the same.
I can’t seem to get going—
so what else is new?
At night I sit in my chair most of the time,
it’s a recliner, I got it used and put it by the front window
where all the light comes in in the morning.
Recently I went to a flea market and got an old straight-edged razor for two bucks.
Just to hold one of those things,
I don’t know.
It seems sinister in a weird way.
What if I’m holding a murder weapon?
For that and for other reasons
I haven’t been able to put it down.
I feel compelled, mysteriously,
to keep my eye on it.
If a razor has a mind it has a purpose.
Such things need someone to watch over them.
Sharp things have a way of vanishing.
Dear concerned listener,
Please rest assured,
immediately after this letter is finished
it will all be over, and then we can simply go back home.
I feel like I’m not making sense. I feel . . .
is that difficult for you? It seems to me somehow sinister.
I don’t know.
Out on the porch, out there, and something is scratching
out there, out there on the porch with my razor.
I believe I left it there, purely by accident, all through the night.
It’s been sitting there on the arm of the chair on the porch waiting,
the night, I’m afraid, will not be good, it won’t be good,
has been known to use it to cut things, the night
has been misbehaving, won’t be good,
is a wicked child, cuts things . . .
put it away!
And really, when you look into it, deep into the blade,
there it is, the night, already cutting—
and children harm things with sharp blades
children know better than we do that sharp things cut
and do not just lie around.
Things that just lie around have a way of vanishing.
Dear friend,
Do not be alarmed,
I have borrowed your razor.
I say borrowed, but it seemed . . . I do not wish
to be presumptuous . . .
that it was left there for me,
that you wished me to have it.
If I am mistaken
just please tell me
and I will return it to you
with my sincerest apologies.
Love, me
PS
The thing you said was missing has been found.
Go back to bed now,
we’ll discuss this in the morning.
Featherhorse
You’re just a featherhorse—
you’re no “Pegasus”.
I can see the paste slopping out at the creases,
wings that don’t lift or flap,
and if I’m wrong—
leap off that precipice
and fly.
I hope your feathers have dried!
Or that some swooping fart of Zeus
will catch you in its craw
and steal you off to heaven.
Goldenboy is long gone
with that hideous head—
but the blood still gnashes
at the earth like a cicada brood.
The monstrous corpse,
crocodile torso
quivering anciently—
looks almost human,
almost a goddess . . .
or maybe a dead-papped whore.
May the gods bless her—
holy muse and mother to us both.
You. For all your plumes—
there’ll be hard-heeled riders,
horesetraders jabbering of shanks and sheen,
grimy palms assaying your balls,
twitching to nail iron to your soles,
spurs for those wings wanting to be windspun souvenirs,
a succession of hands at your nape
tugging you toward the next glorious
“Arising”.
You would be better off
fat and hairy like me,
big footsteps, broad hands—
free to drink at leisure from the clean rivers,
recline against the green of the hillsides
where the winds sit,
free to watch the dawn rise up
and forget it as soon as day.
Huge and free—
no heroes, no breakers, tamers, or golden bridles,
too giant, too wild for the wants of men,
useless, utterly useless
and invisible to them all.
Everything I am will end up on some stump of an island
pinned beneath a volcano or left
miscellaneously where some asshole
can forget his murders into it.
Memories will die in me,
die around me.
Memories cannot survive the ones like me
(there are such ones . . . but you wouldn’t know).
No eternities.
You can have your eternities.
They’re just another leather throne
with straps for equestrian fingers only.
You
can grasp nothing.
Blow off then—
but when you’re done stomping and braying,
try to tell somebody my name,
try to tell them,
if they come upon me in the woods asleep
to go and roll a mountain over me . . .
if they think they can.
You’ll see what use you really are.
Your oblivion is your voicelessness.
Mothers and muses . . .
Just another encumbered atmosphere bearing down,
and below it, not even an Atlas,
but a railroad spike, flat-headed for the hammer,
I will sink each year
three more inches through the bloody clay.
When I am swallowed
absolutely into the belly of this damnable world . . .
Vicious Old Fossilmaker . . .
you won’t even remember
I was born your brother.
Thief
I have stolen everything about you.
When I set my ear up to your chest
I hear a bog filled with phantoms.
I steal your diamond ring
to cut the glass
to rob you blind.
In the mud
in the mire
rushes fidget.
I have folded into my trench coat
your missing pigtail
and concealed myself between your empty ecstasies.
All the passings by
limping on your heron legs
leaving crooked footprints
dusting the weeds with the dander
of your ghost skin
falling apart gradually
into delicate petals.
Here with me
are those indecent longings
that I have snatched
from your trunk
still as ragged as crows,
delighting me
with their scratchy claws.
I have watched all the while . . .
closer than you might imagine,
patting my pocket,
sinking like a golden moth
beneath the horizon of the earth.
Scapegoat
I fell
or was pushed
from a seat
among angels
and landed
like an armful of kindling
in a place
where the footsteps
of my father
were deafening.
I broke
or was drowned
in a river
among men
and sank
like a pair of spectacles
in a current
where the hands
of my father
were baptizing.
I shouted
or was blamed
for the waste
of passions
and froze
like grass beneath the snow
in a wilderness
where the breath
of my father
was stilled.
I wept
or was buried
near the mountains
by devils
and dreamt
like the nets of fishermen
in the cradle
that the might
of my father
had toppled.
(take one goat of white
one of black
drive them over the cliff
with your sins
Rite of Passage
A messenger arrived at my doorstep
with a message for me.
“Hold out your hand,” he said.
I held out my hand and he withdrew
a small arrowhead dripping with poison from his bag
and stabbed it into my palm.
700 things rushed through my head:
to crumple to my knees,
to choke him until either he or I breathed his last,
to scream at the heavens,
to run down the street shedding my clothes,
700 things, and he stared into my eyes curiously
and noticed all 700 floating by.
I looked down at my wound and then back at the messenger.
“Is this all there is?” I asked.
“No,” he replied,
“an old man sends this message to you,
an old man who shares your name
and claims he has grown old with your years.”
I looked down at my wound and then back at the messenger.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied,
“the old man received this message from a young boy,
a young boy who shares your name and claimed the old man
had hoarded all of the years
that were rightfully his.”
I looked down at my wound and then back to the messenger and smiled.
“I have grown immune to this poison,” I said.
The messenger tipped his hat and left.
I continued to stand on my doorstep smiling,
sucking at my hand.
Dream of the Thousand Men
I dreamed I was
a red-haired girl who fell
into a lake of semen.
I locked my strong thighs together like
holding a gulp of air.
Strange things moved in the thick milk.
A hand fell under my arm,
dragged me out.
I coughed on the shore,
the bearded lips of Dionysus
kissed me.
I dreamed the Thousand Men hanging.
You, as tall as a father, whispered,
“They are the year gods of all the years.”
A moth wove past your ankle.
Disgusted with myself
I gave birth to the head of a donkey.
You held it up, dirtied with my blood,
bright as a Christchild.
I dreamed of my naked body on the ground
knocked down by the snowchild women with their heavy masks.
The sound of drums.
From behind the mask
once again you touch me.
All night long warm
beneath a shadow of you the fire has designed
I beat on the earth.
The song we sing tells me
when I awake
your name will continue to dance away from my tongue.
Faith Fictions
Faith Fictions
“Be turned to me with all your heart and do not cast me aside because I am black and swarthy, because the sun hath changed my colour and the waters have covered my face and the earth hath been polluted and defiled in my works, for there was darkness over it because I stick fast in the mire of the deep and my substance is not disclosed. Wherefore out of the depths have I cried and from the abyss of the earth with my voice to all you that pass by the way. Attend and see me, if any shall find one like unto me, I will give into his hand the morning star.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas (attributed), from Aurora Consurgens
A man said to the universe:
‘Sir, I exist!’
‘However,’ replied the universe,
‘The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.’”
Stephen Crane, “A man said to the universe”
“A rat is not a rat unless a rat climbs out of itself and sees a rat. And even then a rat might say: I’m a Maryanne, the daughter of man.
A rat has no chance of being a rat, until the great God says, arise rat, thou art a rat; thou art come to be that which thou namest thyself after the name I give thee . . .”
Russell Edson, “Rat”
“But it seems there will be no journey since we have gotten the captain used to a good thing. And so we must spend the rest of our days throwing the captain overboard.”
Russell Edson, “Paying the Captain”
“The man said, I will write God bless everyone on God”
Russell Edson, “A Man Who Writes”
Downtime for the Goldenboys
Downtime for the Goldenboys
“A pianist dreams that he’s hired by a wrecking company to ruin a piano with his fingers . . .”
Russell Edson, “The Marionettes of Distant Masters”
“Lo, the ship, at this opportunity, slipped slyly,
Making cunning noiseless travel down the ways.
So that, forever rudderless, it went upon the seas
Going ridiculous voyages,
Making quaint progress,
Turning as with serious purpose
Before stupid winds.
And there were many in the sky
Who laughed at this thing.”
Stephen Crane, “God Fashioned the Ship of the World Carefully”
“. . . Yet, I thought to give the factory a motif closer to the popular taste; and by this means prove myself worthy of executive station. I created a suicide motif: a chain of paper-doll factory workers attached elbow to elbow, cutting their wrists.
An inferior foreman merely said, you are well on the way to the misuse of your tools, which may well involve your monkey.
. . . My monkey? I screamed.
. . . Of course the mind is a desert; one grows used to the simplicity of thirst.”
Russell Edson, “The Mental Desert”
“. . . And he, little sprite,
Came to watch with me,
And at midnight
We were like two creatures by a dead camp-fire”
Stephen Crane, “I heard thee laugh”
Creation Myth
I. When We Were Angels
M
aybe God died.
And a little bubble of spit began to rise from his cold lips.
And that was the world.
And we grew in a most scientifically viable way, as something like bacteria, on the ductile globe of film.
And we sensed, as we began to measure curvatures and things, that there was something beyond our bubble.
And some looked upward and outward into empty limitless space and imagined an empty limitless God, which is to say, no God, or if that strange finger of faith needs to quiver, a dead God.
And others looked inward and downward and thought they saw the vacuum of a huge throat not breathing, vague, refracted through the bubble, but there in the same sense that something is definitely something.
II. The Danger of Technology Is Proportional To the Danger of Ideas
T
ime passes.
And certain technologies allow us to leave God’s gravity and soar out into the expanse.
And certain other technologies allow us to penetrate, dissect, dismember with a pathologist’s skill.
And then, three geniuses come along and have between them a theory, a process, a harnessing of storm grief, which they say can reanimate the corpse of God.
Half the world says this is the best thing to do.
The other half says that as soon as God comes back to life, he will suck in a breath and the whole bubble will implode and burst.
The debate rages and dangerous technologies are stockpiled—every faction has its own Frankenstein machine.
And it is said that buttons could even accidentally be pushed.
III. The Writing Down In Words Makes It True
T
hen they who had gone off into limitless space return.
And they have found a diary (painstakingly interpreted from the hieroglyphics of some nebulae).
And although the pathologists grumble, it is read by everybody, and it appears that God, in utter, utter loneliness and no hope, no hope at all, swallowed some grim belladonna, some quiet gulp of hemlock to cure his case of suffering.
Because, as we understand all too well, a dream of belonging is like a tumor grown to behemoth proportions which we drag behind us.
An instinct for death that slows and slows us.
And these tumors, enormous and callused on the bottoms, dream of being cut free.
And we dream of being cut free. And we dream of freeing them.
Because what grew without our will, will continue to grow without us when we are stilled, and will continue to drag itself when our dragging days are done and our cosmically insignificant libido has gone under.
At this time cosmic insignificance becomes quite popular.
And all out of sympathy with the book, that diary.
How noble that being, and as for us, how sad that we continue on, persist parasitically as the gooey side reaction of the tragedy of a genius.
Something about diaries has always been utterly convincing.
And enough button pushers are convinced of a version of salvation, an honorable redemption through audience participation.
And they push those buttons, and the buttons have been pushed.
And the storms are broken like rude but beautiful stallions, and their dangers milked by the breast pumps of our ingenuity.
IV. Science and Religion Unite: The Fall of Man
A
shiver buzzes through God’s body
like a slender current.
And his mind feebly capsizes into life.
And the fatal breath is drawn.
And the bubble pops insignificantly like a thought vanishing from above the head of a cartoon character to designate to the audience an idea up in smoke, or maybe a lack of attention span, or a passing from the world of daydreams to a world of inevitable conclusions, inevitably disappointing.
We plummet into the mouth and are swallowed—all is moist, long-dead darkness.
V. Finally, a Justification for Literary Theory
W
hile falling or sliding along
on rivers of mucus, it occurs to someone that the diary could have been a concoction (although it was legitimated as God’s own work) not of a being pure, and out of simple innocence, simply honest.
But of a rather demented fabulist, a maker of fictions, a kind of avant-garde prankster pulling the wool over the eyes of the logically trusting.
An intellectual huckster, a traveling tent preacher-auteur who had a terrible way of saying, “The moral of the story is . . .” and bringing about a bitter enlightenment to the human condition.
The kind that makes us spit and disagree frantically while we know it’s really too late, too late . . . and we’ve been made.
And then it all becomes so obvious that existence has always been founded on fictions, models, what-ifs.
That story has always clothed the naked ape of reality, evolved to fit into its suit.
VI. Or—Willful Suspension of Disbelief
I
n this story it is too late, of course, but—
God rises up pristinely, Christ-like.
He has executed through, not so much trickery, but, let’s call it, utter faith—luminescent, unbelievable faith in the impossible occurrence of mankind—the serendipitous blooming—the miracle of resurrection in grand Houdinian fashion.
Were we all dupes?
All victims of our perspective to a sleight of hand?
Were we glued to our chairs in the audience precisely where we were supposed to be?
Are we so predictable, even to a God who didn’t know we existed?
To some vague formulaic rhythm of the universal round?
As though we have no free will whatsoever, no choice to choose or not to choose?
We ask ourselves this as we are passing through the intestines, and we seethe with bile and are passed on and passed and excreted.
Fate now seems to be like the sensation of suspense afforded by a good tale.
Irrepressible, even if it is predictable.
VII. Humans and Their Nagging Suspicion of the Divine
A
nd now this is the creation story.
Because only now is the lump we’re living on the earth.
Only now are we human beings.
It took all this just to get here.
And now we look out into that distance and see . . . or we see inside ourselves, but only as one sees inside oneself as he is separated from that which is his tower of perception, his footstone, his basis for a sense of himself as an individual—
The back of a tall chair and the back of the head of God (the hair thinning somewhat) and hear the clicking of the typewriter as he composes his next demise.
We are all anxious where we sit to contribute our own chapters to the anthology.
A ruse must grow exponentially though.
And there is a cleverness so immense and far beyond our understanding.
A hook-handed devilishness that knows so well the most ancient craft of misdirection, pinning us between illusion and entertainment like a butterfly in a display case.
The furry worm trapped between the bedazzlement of its wings, which it toiled so hard in the darkness to grow.
VIII. The Scribe’s Prologue (Inspired by a Vision
of St. George Hull Conceiving the Cardiff Giant)
M
y hunch—
is that the way we turn our noses up and cast our eyeballs away is quietly burrowing a hole in us like the spiraling bit of a hand drill sneaking up through the floor of a bank vault in an old cinematic heist.
We are still the fools of the language, queuing up at the pronged tongue of the barker for the latest Bird Girl of salvation . . .
Come hoax or revelation.
And we’ll fall again hook, line, and sinker.
And pay our dollar at the door.
And everyone will shout amen.
And there will be much laying on of hands.
For there is a sucker born every minute to turn the page and believe the tale is true.
And Halleluiah to that!
Halleluiah, and sign me up!
And take my money.
And take my life.
And call me Adam if you like.
Or Mister. Or Buddy. Or Pal. Or Joe. Or Bub. Or Slim. Or Dude.
Or, simply, Man.
Or even, Son.
I’m your everloving Mark.
Forty Days And Forty Nights
I woke up like a fawn in the rain
wishing to be Forty Days And Forty Nights,
but an ark was in me.
“I am Forty Days And Forty Nights!” I thundered,
and a small, stubborn voice answered back from within me,
“But I have all the animals of the world, here, together,
and we float.”
I sucked out all the moisture from my belly in a great wind
and tore all the fruit off every tree and yelled,
“I am Forty Days And Forty Nights!”
and another tiny voice called out
from the dishevelment and the wilds inside me,
“But I am here to listen, oh Forty Days And Forty Nights,
I have come to learn your song.”
What could I do but grumble and growl
and groan and howl and beat bruises into my chest?
Then a third voice, a tired rock of a voice, called out from inside me,
“I am but a mountain, oh Forty Days And Forty Nights,
and what I say means nothing, but why do you punish this man
who, broken, clings to my peaks like a suckling lamb?”
“I am Forty Days And Forty Nights!” I screamed.
Then the tiny voice, the man: “Please, mountain,
do not throw your wing over me.
I have come to learn the song of Forty Days And Forty Nights,
and I have heard it, and its verses were as sweet as kisses in my ears.”
And with that the man walked down the mountain
beating at his chest, stamping his feet, shouting,
“I am Forty Days And Forty Nights!”
I dashed out on my slender legs to weep
below the opening leaves of the trees,
turned like saucers of spilling milk.
The thousand nipples of the forest budding above me,
white fingers of the ash drizzled me with water.
What I had broken has redeemed me.