.

By the time the siphon fuse

Hits one centimeter of his build
And the wind insists
That the world turned on a dime of his mill,
He’s already
Once again a regular person,
Looking logically and in rote gait
For a safe domicile in which to
Arrange the municipal foliage twigs
In aboriginal, muted plexus.

In

Tones, the pocket of favoring
Harpsichords with lashes a new melody
Which will overtake billy goat
Sermon hustlers amidst valleys of cattle
.
The New Testament over,
Though for me the entrance
Into that last moment
And the next moment I’ll feel is the challenge,
Equipped with the ability to negate
The very concept of breathing.

Our shop (and I called it a shop) overlooked a vacuum repair joint and a lens fitters. Sure, it was sort of a regret of mine. If it had been my choice… I always liked houses — the personal aspects of looking in and seeing people nuking frozen lasagna. With the commercial zone being the case, I’d taken it upon myself to garner a certain artificial endearment from the surroundings.

“There it is,” I’d say, as a little trademark comment to Lux, my assistant, “the harbingers of commerce greet us once again. You can tell a lot about a people by its businesses.”
I said this as I was opening the blinds one day. I knew I was boring the hell out of him, but that’s the way I liked it. It kept things static, ensured that the days would be predictable. We’d marry a few couples, Kay would come in and take some photos between taking calls, Lux and I would go grab a meatball grinder and a Dr. Pepper, or maybe Chinese takeout on some days, and somehow, the clock always rolled on down to five, and we once again drifted alone into our own minds for the waning of the day.
I’d majored in English in college, pretty much knowing the whole time that I’d be inheriting my Dad’s business and so not even needing to take the practical classes. But all along, that itch had been manifesting in me — regarding the dearth of self-expression rampant in the technology-driven, TV-sodden American culture we lived in, and one day I just thought, Hey, all the couples should write poems when they get married. The poems will be about playful things — about the things they like, about their love for each other (all heterosexual conjunctions heretofore), about their impressions of the future — excitements, fears, objectives. If the couples wanted, they could retain the poems for their own exclusive viewing, but they were strongly encouraged to pen SOMETHING.
Partly, I was curious. I MYSELF wasn’t married, being somewhat prone to things like shaking bouts and alcoholism, but like I said, I was a reader, a veritable voyeur. You would just see it in people’s eyes sometimes, it’s that thing we can’t explain — that realization we get that nothing could possibly outweigh that great ubiquitous present moment in which we find ourselves, a moment which is invariably such a confluence of past and future — of impossibility and reality. The decision to get married is a big one, usually a pipe dream on the lad’s part come temporarily true, and then, sometimes, permanently true, or etched in quasi-permanence, as it were. What is the impetus, then, where is the grounding? Is it all just carnal, I mean are we just like computer chips which lunge at that biological “opposite”? What is love, truly?
Logically, if we could define what love is at this concentrated level, at the arena in which people are so willing to give up their freedom to spend their lives rapt (or just wrapped) in union — on a terminal leash. I had to have it… I had to have love. In every situation, I walked on eggshells, and the sun only sped faster, the waves only crashed more gushingly in, sending my life hurling through space and racing forever toward its end. I felt the hardness of our eyeglasses, of our social security numbers, and how such things could lend themselves to general motifs that life is nothing but a struggle, and we’re nothing but animals fighting with each other, but then, Why language, why opposable thumbs?
“Whadyu think?” I asked to Lux one day. “I’m gonna have every couple, from now on, write a poem. The poem will encapsulate their ideals — an acute representation of their strongest emotions and fantasies.”
“Huh-huh-huh,” he laughed. He liked when I was psychotic, that’s why we made good business partners. I made sure to be psychotic as often as I could. “I like it. Have you run it by Kay?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “That’s how I know it’s a good idea.”
“Huh-huh-huh-huh! I think you might be on to something!”
“Good. Now I need a cigarette.”
I walked outside, lit up, and started thinking of my mother. She was dead now. Not much to say about that, I guess. I just got to thinking of this one quote I heard one time, I think it was Bukowski, he said that he’d hear one time, that All whom God intends to kill, he first makes angry. That had been it. My mom had been angry at my dad. I didn’t want to know why. I walked back in to the shop, and wondered what the hell I was doing.

I love getting a list of like “The 75 Best Books of All Time.” It’s like great, now all I have to do is read 75 books. That doesn’t sound that hard.

Ya know, I hate to be a “killjoy,” but the whole thing does reek a bit of “name-dropping.” And of course, all of this wouldn’t be half so inexcusable, in my big clustered mind in which one person is responsible for all the evil in the world, if our public library still carried Bukowski in the fiction section.
And yes, they do still have his poetry, something like five titles or so around the 813 mark, but I looked in the Classics (presumptive? no?) and also the general fiction, and couldn’t find my old favorite, Tales of Ordinary Madness, one I’ve reviewed already on goodreads.com. But for evidence that his fiction is better than his poetry, I think you only need note that in his poetry he praises Carson McCullers. Whereas those fiction blurbs, they were just so funny: like one of them ends with the passage “I picked up War and Peace. Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book.” And then there’s one where he’s “trying to read Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence,” but this lamp keeps falling on him and the bulb keeps burning his arm or something like that. See, it had everything: bloopers, other people’s misfortune… it was just right as rain, in a general sort of way. Plus it had this hilarious story about when he went to stay in the “poet’s cottage” in Tuscon, AZ in the middle of summer and about how miserable of an experience it was, with no one around and, and this is one of the full sentences: “nothing to do but drink beer.” And then there were other stories about a dude cutting a dude to death in the shower. And they have that brief, declarative syntactical essence which I just exhibited there.
I mean, where is THAT? Who the hell is gonna display THAT? Half these liberal yuppies these days don’t have the balls to say anything at all. Prose, as much as we hate to admit it, is all about spiritual experiences. I mean hell, it’s hard to even cram 75 of those things in your head at a time, even on the off chance that they DO exist (and I’m not betting on it).

Would I narrow to a mania of fellows

When constantly upon every thought
The way I’m made is that my mind
Is trodden by the bellowing smoke
Of unexplainable quarries,
.
And if the time for the rocks to shine
Should revolve back to prominence,
It will as always have been a foolish game of shifting
Realities to observe like bite size raspberry cheese cakes
Brought from helter skelter brown knaves, and gone.

The ill fever so clean,

Like woodland graces besets you
With starlight mints for your flank sides
And tunics behind your nostrils
.
While for every disarray
Which is to some a stasis,
You will capture a hook in hand,
Being ignited and not knowing you are
.
For having subsisted on your own vibes,
Counting cash tolls poker faced.

So now as I sit here

In the cabaret,
.
I wonder at the sentimental rudiments
Of that man who holds the pipe,
Of the man who wolds the lute,
Who’s spinning that wool of sound
And who will take what he can,
Will plunder celestial harkings,
.
As to if those harkings
Come smoldering
As fires do to keep us warm in winter
But also to appease and amend,
Damning the gods and warming us earthlings.

Stories of tragedy gain

In my mind valence
Gradually and increasingly
As they in semantic relevance
To my own life
Pronounce themselves.

I still remember literary theory class in college. Hell, no I don’t. That was the class with the paper I missed for massive inebriation at the GZA concert the night before.

You’re welcome, literary theory. It saved you the facial expression I was going to make to you. My apathy was a gift.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re backtracking. Nay, devolving. We pay Donald Trump attention, make women’s outfits skimpier and skimpier, and write words about words. It’s like something that just had to exist, like a pile of dust in an attic, or an electrical wire basement dripping with sticky resin where no one’s been in 10 years. Something just appeals to us so much about that sticky resin. We rape language, we handcuff it and drive it around in our new foreign cars, and pass it off as education, while somewhere off Papua New Guinea an Aborigine is spearing a fish from 20 feet away, is predicting a tsunami hours before it happens. We, in America, with our test tubes and our timetables, can’t even truly know our own language.
It’s like we’re jealous of the person who invented language or something, we have to find fault in it. It’s just so sleek, all those consonants and vowels, maybe we’re like what’s the catch? Like when a person smiles at your when you weren’t expecting to, you’re like, what’s the catch? Do we feel defeated? And if we somehow find language itself to be inherently flawed, are we going to find something so infallible with which to replace it, something so immune to the degradation of human nature as to always administer unquestionable justice, like some divine arbiter?
Jimi Hendrix once said, “If 6 was 9,” I won’t mind. Some people seem even to mind when 6 is 6.

Those girls from around the way,

They’re not perfect —
.
They’re from this town where people lie,
Where businesses board up,
A town of all these charities
That will be dead next year,
Some fat guy putting more $ in his trust fund —
.
They were meant not to have their thoughts furnished for them,
But to think —
To analyze, meditate on the homo sapien (like Mr. Del).
They do standup comedy,
Or they support standup comedy,
Sitting there smiling,
Motionless, reality on melded plaster
Like the breath you took in yesterday
That forgot to be anything but one of
Those girls from around the way.