Selections from: Light blue notebook • I’ve left some things until Monday • You damned ox • They were right • Spumoni four stars • Feels fine • I kept you out too long • February third • Light blue notebook • Am I a gem in the rough • Stuff • Inclement weather • This old desk • You funny apple • Last after the platypus • I am blue
Have to say one thing or the other. This is the
great confusion. For example I have to choose to say I’m happy or sad when
really I’m both. Or is it neither?
Branches sway and twist in the accelerating
current. Crayfish taverns are down in the brown century moon fields. Pandas
greet me with waffles pasta and toasted marshmallows. Great train whistles in
the lonely night. And words fail.
Hollering with a hoarse voice,
Crayfish lays down
his trolley. Leaves spin and caress his sore tiled throat.
I’m just transparent now, that’s why no meaning emerges.
From "I’ve left some things until Monday":
I’ve left some things until Monday. Various
things which I’m expected to do.
I’m gasping. Crests of foamy waves. My neck feels
a little twisty.
Afloat without a breeze, I’m sneezing through the
seas, fixing the time, waking in the pool. I sit quizzically and wonder which
way is backwards and forwards.
Soaking in alphabets, squandering resources, I pull
a salamander from my lung. There was a boat casting beans and flowers into the
night. It’s colder now, or was it colder then? Kelp tracks lead straight to
the assembly line.
Trade off for a time, fishing warily for effective
speech, feeling old and warty, licking butter running down the curb. The kind
elevator man gave me balloons when I was four.
It’s a fortune of cops and billiards. Can’t you
go any faster you damned ox? Work and work and work.
Barbecues start calling in the fuzzy time right
after sunset: the barbecue is softer than anything, it slides through the cracks
of time into the timeless gooey center of the world. Canopies cover dark wombats
from the rays of the parching sun. Goombas and gumdrops circulate communist
leaflets to battered old women. Time flies.
Ants groan and splinter in the weird heap.
Kicked out into the cold, worse than ever in the
dirty street.
Cans of punch and bean soup glued to the mantle
radiate heat. Caught without salad, sick without a bath, alone in the rooftop,
bathing in silence, worse than the outcome, first and last.
The only one who I ever loved in the green sky
parting waves. I came up the stairs with a tender regret, already forgetting the
first step and the room before that. I tore through the window stinking of
clouds and gasoline, worse off than I had ever been I tumbled in the night like
in a drier without walls or floors.
Kids are cruel, I know. I went up through that hall
and sat without anything to do, like a block or a stone without any purpose.
Fantasy meets reality with a funny clash, shaking the pavement and the old
chatty daylit bus station.
I bought an old yellow brown cabbage from a crazy
guy on the street. It was genetically engineered to make me fly hallucinating
through the haunted house somewhere on the upper west side.
Cops and robbers chase balloons through the bloody
streets at dawn. Greasy-eyed clones fasten their seatbelts for the octopus
patrol. Beneath the city there’s a bunch of candy-eyed robots, belching in
neon glowing stadiums.
Half-unknown to the rest of us, I am undertaking a
secret plan. Fast asleep in my cot I dream of the day when there is no more fear
but only an intense and consuming love. The intensity of my blank-eyed desire
throws me into a studied panic, undergoing cereal box misfortunes and bellyflop
exteriors.
People can only see a little bit because time
revolves too fast for any knowledge to take hold. And anyway, the laws of
causality and distance are persistent: love is limited in this world.
I am thinking maybe of changing back into my
sweatpants for comfort. Damn me and my life, I love it. This was a night to
remember, a red day on my holiday map, grown in splendor.
They were all wrong when they said I was a wolf or
a munchkin: I was neither, I was an overgrown walrus balloon, sandspinning my
way to Barcelona on a broken trolley. Now that I’ve finally gotten to
Barcelona, everything is different and boring. I curse every fish toilet and
milk fountain with the sunny marker stains chirping and barking.
Ah, I am so full of sadness. My insides are like a
big ball of sadness. Sometimes I even enjoy my sadness. But I don’t want to
try to force myself to enjoy it. Like a big old ball of clay venereal pasta.
Bites of rye, fine to walk across the giddy marshes. A splinter in the eye of
the bird. This is the dawning of the age of fantastic nastiness.
Brief bursts of speed and completeness bounce
around like palace banjos.
old feather bed wonder, dreaming in the old country
bed, scared of the dark.
Crying and sweaty in another bed, a happy grub.
Blurred
along lines, a ghost of the trail, faltering and quiet. Hopeful redfaced
ignorant polite, a bright burning star in an ashtray by an elevator, felt about
the same, quieter now and not so, doesn’t hurt so much, but ahh, still got
some kind of hope you know, why not, there’s no reason at all not to have
hope, why, anything might happen next, even though it feels about the same, the
sameness could twist and twirl, leap and dive through an alligators throat, come
out on the other side frozen in ether…
From
"I kept you out too long":
I kept you out too long, didn’t I? It’s a long
road at night anyway, the kids were rotten and greedy, sand in their eyes. Hold
me please, now that the day is already over.
Figs and fortunes, bets and sofas, I live in the
swamp. White foam filling my socks, I’m filling and full, and a foolish grin,
toothless.
I’m all bent over like an old bean, soaked with
water from the rain on the window sill. It’s afternoon, a long afternoon and
everything is dark from the rain. Dark but awake, alive, day.
Now it’s later and everything is silent, black,
electric night of 2:49AM, a consistent time of painless electricity. A time to
be alone, spinning in my sad plastic.
Time fathers a zebra, caught alone in the storm, a secret smile behind the confused eyes. Catch me. It happens. It happens this way and I’m happening with it too. Being separate is funny and serious, but I chuckle in the night under the eyes of the raptor.
Worse for a long time, dragging and coughing. Now
its all better and fine. Painful absence of all these holy things makes me all
sad and bored sometimes. I am a fountain of lukewarm genius these days, calm and
halfway boring sad. I cry in my weirdo dream of someday soon a happy boat and
floating toast without the slightest hint of remorse: Who am I kidding?
Fierce goblins with parched anemones grapple with
tawny spiders creeping backwards down the drainpipe. Whores and pewter skeletons
battle fandango lizards hopping blindly and with a goofy calm grin.
The worst Saturday on the record books might have
been that other time or something. This one is in-between y’hear? Not so great
but hey everything’s FINE!!
I don’t know which thing to do. But hey I
don’t need to make an error to have everything come crashing down. I might as
well try to get what I can.
Belts and nail files are covering the Christmas
tree, working all the way down, feeling dead, kidding around, hoping for
nothing, all drawn together,
feeling down, feeling that old pain, working in the
show, all bedecked in roses, I walk down to the broadway arcade.
They were all set, going to France beaches on a
sunny teenage day. Cancel the frostbite seminar, my goggles feel gritty and
yellow. Cones of asparagus twist and shout in the afterglow.
Following
your heart, you will come to the volcano where the salamanders swim. Bestial
frowning grocers weigh electronic pillows. Cold ghosts waver uncertainly,
pausing crossly to examine their parsnip control, wary of the spoon tiger. The
tiger prowls quietly in the moonlit forest.
Locks and bankers threaten fine gooey organs. Some
of the organs struggle to revolt. First off, the mangy banker prayed to
collarbone metal deskchairs, bracing evil fashion trends in redeyed VCR’s.
Far
to go. Nowhere to go. I don’t know.
From
"Am I a gem in the rough":
Am I a gem in the rough? A tragic old plaster cast writing greedily on the dusty tile ammonia? Cardboard cutouts of my head circle and swim as they groan and dribble. Why won’t that girl come and make me happy? What the heck. Hey yer haw.
This is some type of a thing, this here life. So I
mean what the heck.
Leeks and potatoes growing by the road. Colors of
lime and gypsy froth, baking and burning in the country night. Warm dancing
windows cry freedom to the slow and bulgy bear. Glowing green hope is sliding
around in cottony hopelessness. Forget and go back to your work.
It’s like hey baby, is this the unfulfilled
existence or something?
Pasta nights and spaceship rock days, it’s been
better and worse but I don’t see how any of it matters. Noodles flip around
this morning, sausages cook in the nice pan with onions. In the glass towers,
weasels and goons are joking scary plans.
This old desk. I parted from my sweet girl after
the train factory. Forget me, I’ve got nothing to offer. My throne is a pile
of socks.
I’m crying, distressed and homely, pale beyond
the sight of the gummy beans. Panting and yelping I touch her, she spins and
spasms across a red sea, stars above.
Find me moping down here in the dark by the pool.
Don’t you know I’m waiting for you?
Cold benches swim and slide on the summer pond. The
raft is scratchy and green. Cotton dancers reenact the festive burglary of the
sapphire tomb, clad in blue-black robes and stoned.
Forget me, because I have nothing to offer you. I
wish, I wish I had something to offer you, so that you wouldn’t forget me. But
right now I can’t think of anything. I’m a neck huddling in a blanket. I’m
rid of all my worries and cares. I’ve been wandering around in the mist for
years and now I’m just sad and impatient. Forget me.
Plastic chimes whistle over the desolate garage,
calling in the empty dusk. Plastic butter seeps through my veins, tickling and
burning my throat. Covered in a veil she walks quickly across the tile, arm in
arm with some other guy. I’m embarrassed and dumb, like a dog or a rock,
yellow and creepy like a furtive turtle. Climb down, carry me away. I’m baking
in the sun here, bent and stupid.
You funny apple, I like your belly. Fortunes and
diners. Butter candy and ice cream sundaes. I’m loving you till the day I die.
Memories come without obvious cause. But evil music makes me spit and curse.
From
"Last after the platypus":
They were all wrong when they said all that mean
stuff: just forget about them and be happy.
Fantastic memories, colliding with the erasing
power of time. I am old enough to know my fate now, colored in the coloring
books of the grim and greasy Lord. Fast and mental, sifting bored through old
papers. I wonder and poke up through the sand, quavering and hot.
You can see me right here in front of you, hoping
against hope. I’m all alone and filled with toboggans. The burning memory of
my lost tooth covers me like a gold dust. I’m a bursting parcel, longing for
my milky bubble to be popped.
Remember me for a second please, I was here for a
certain length of time although there was nothing special about me. I worked in
the zoo among a pile of gloves and kettles, begging angry orangutans for
company.
Here I am, cold and naked, shivering with the old
nothingness. A pen pops through the eye of a squid, shooting sparks of memory
and notebooks. Fingers are bursting with red. My eyes are made out of squish.
I am blue. As blue as a shoe. Blue blue shoe.
It’s autumn. Fantastic pigeons duck through the lake. A mantle of blossoms.
It’s circumstance that does me in. Bloody
circumstance.