The Narcisstic Flaneur #1

Ever wonder what happens to words in emails? It's just bits and bytes. Turn the power off and they're all gone, right? How do you put this stuff in museums? What happens when your whole world streams to you through a screen and the only way you can interact with it is a keyboard, maybe a digital camera?

None of this is real and you can't touch any of it. You can be whoever you want to be with a keyboard in hand.

I was sifting through some old stuff- I often like to pull out my writings and see what I wrote a year ago today, two years ago, etc... Most days, I don't have much. But today I stumbled across something from our Europe trip last year. It's not a year ago today, more like a year and four weeks. Let me share, verbatim.
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Interlude 2

Praha. Praha. In many ways, a dead end. 15 years after the revolution, beggars everywhere, pissing in corners, bars overrun by loud Americans. Here I find a shot of absinthe and a reasonably local place. And a one-eyed bartender. Jesus. Isn't there supposed to be something symbolic about that? There's a parachute here in a bar that seems to be called The Crow. I'm smoking, drinking, and looking like some sort of German tourist idiot here. Ahh, the crazy twists of the travelling life. I don't even know what to believe anymore. I wonder why it is that men presented with a strange situation, in a foreign bar, figure that drink and cigarettes will ensure some sense of seclusion.
To the people in this bar, the two bartenders and the two kids here at the bar, the language barrier makes me look like an idiot- but the pen! The paper! I'm taking pictures of them and they know it, and they are as mystified by what I write as I am by what they speak. So this, at the end of the day, is what it means to be a foreigner. Far out of my element- even my rudimentary German is hardly sufficient to survive here. At least I can order a beer, an absinthe, a pack of the same Lucky Strikes that killed my grandfather. But I still wonder- what does it mean to find a one-eyed bartender in a bar called The Crow (U Kozel)?
Czech is a mystery- a cloaked language. The barrier is high. I hardly even understand the looks, the expressions. This is truly the other side of the world- though not as far out as Jay, who at this moment wanders the mountains of Romania.
And Jesus! I sit here and watch a music video, Rage Against The Machine, that points out the absurdity of the American situation! Fuck it. Fuck this world and all it contains. And, Mr. Kafka, what's next? Will I become a cockroach?
Am I doing anything, anything at all, other than rapidly speeding my slide to death? What the hell is this life? Why does it all come to pieces here in Praha? I hardly even know what my eyes see here. Here, truly, I feel the language barrier, the tremendous foreign-ness of a city where every step threatens to dump me lost in a maze-like alley going nowhere. God, I feel so fucking alive and so fucking dead at the same time! I feel the throbbing pain of my predecessors- Sterne, Wilde, Ginsberg- always Ginsberg- and I throm my hands up at it all. I see a model of a '57 Chevy. And I can't even tell the people here that I took my driving test in a '55 Bel-Air, that my dad loved Chevys and that he died broken and disappointed. Fuck fuck fuck. Reno means nothing to these people. For that matter, Sweden means nothing. I'm losing my mind again. It feels great.
The beer here is shit. Pure shit. I'd love to drink up and leave, but I can't explain to the bartender that the beer tastes like crap and I'm losing my mind. What would I say? "Ja. Guten Tag. Mein Vogel ist sehr gross, und deine Birre schmeckt als Scheiss." They'd hardly understand. A bartender in a Czech bar where beer is less than a dollar a pint doesn't need to speak any language other than Czech, and a fucked-up drunk who is neither an author nor an artist nor a musician doesn't need to say anything other than "another". Don't even need to say that- they'll refill my beer before it's empty. An endless loop.
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I saw a lot of mixed up poems about the elections in 2004. They need a few more years to breathe.

From November 14-15, 2004

The last dark clouds pass over leaving behind
patches of blue, yet
Lightning over ozone-smelling hills cleansed by
tremendous showers we thought would never
calm, so loud that the cats hid under
curtains
Like steam billowing from a laboring engine, new
clouds collect themselves from the damp
ruin of the last storm
And wearied by fear that the rain would
never stop, we pretend that the blue sky
will spread and dissolve the next storm
Even though we know that it will rain just
as hard as the last thunder,
And we won't have time to clean the gutters
or dry the patio chairs before it comes
down harder, rushing off the eaves
Trying to clean this Earth once again, trying
to flush us all away with the dirt, the
leaves, and everyone else who can't hold on
to the last trees as the wall of water
carries us out to the ocean and
drowns us in the weight of every last failure.
-----

Every eye on a Berlin sidewalk tones
its vision of architectural mishmashes of
communist block apartments and 20th century
ripoffs of classicism
With the color of a jackbooted soldier stepping
on the head of a young socialist until
the jaw cracks and the gutter water
runs a sweet thick crimson
All in that street, they stopped and
knew since they were still walking and
chanting, it wasn't real and that
boy lying purple on the sidewalk
was just that, something other.
But every eye knows that too many bodies
laying on streets dead for faith in
humanity, means that
If I want to keep complaining about
the graffiti and the discordant
structures, it's best if I just
walk on and hope that
No one sees the vicious thought I
have of tearing it all to pieces
with my bare hands and
taking it all back for my
family, blood-stained and dead.
-----------------

And then, November 14, 2005

Fourth grade, Mr. Davis' class, on the edge of
the playground, we fantasized about Dungeons
and Dragons, invented tall tales to elevate
imagined figures, based on old mythologies.
I knew nothing of Chinese religion, but a
drawing of a hobbled old man leaning on a
cane brought back visions of Yoda, and
I guess I idolized that sage wisdom
they embodied, the idea of never saying
the wrong thing in public, always knowing the
right words, the right manners....
That's why I must have always acted
the part of the ancient Chinese god.
So, I wonder what my friends, both Chinese,
aspired to when they modelled the wild
Anglo figures of Odin and Loki, those
masters of war, chaos, death...?
These thoughts don't occur to a nine-year-old
boy who calls his teacher a communist.
But they surface now, as if I'm still
there amidst icy pools, the portable classroom, and...
----------------------

And two from the last few weeks....

Armageddon again always on the horizon,
always today's red scare marching over the border,
across the sky, through your bedroom window.
TONIGHT, they say!
Trouble, I tell you, trouble I am! You won't believe
the magic tricks lurking
under this sorcerer's hat
Don't say hi, walk on by, pretend
nothing's going on here
this is a waking abyss
just look at it the wrong way
just ask a couple questions
and BOOM! You're there, wake up
three weeks later on a drug-filled
yellow train somewhere in a flat country
where fantasies don't lie and
work doesn't get in the way,
you may be face down in the pasture,
when you finally come 'round,
and the dawn
as quiet as Glacier Point, Yosemite,
5 AM, and you didn't know where you
were going then, either.
---------------

Rise and find the new directive!
Rise and find the new perspective!
Hallucinate! Infuriate!
Dive in to the shambles!
Don't deteriorate!
Invigorate!
Eliminate hate! Berate!
Jazz like folds marijuana skies
countdown to electronic takeoff
land crash reassess recalibrate
piss all over Persian rugs
rewrite the rules, obey none other
come back to where
you recognize the disease,
now find the cure,
find the vaccine,
find the people who deserve to take it,
find the rest who deserve to rot away.

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Enough madness to get through the season. Next stop, hopefully, is print. Looking to print photos, random musings, cultural observations, and LETTERS! Yes, letters! But only mailed, written letters. Real stuff, something we can touch, something that feels like more than just poking at keys when you write it. I'm not saying that we won't type it and print it that way, but I want to hold on to anything that goes in.

Don't know what the title will be, don't know whether or how we'll sell it, don't know if it'll ever even happen. But you gotta have dreams.

Should you want to send a letter,

The Narcissistic Flaneur
xxxx SE xxst Ave
Portland, OR 97215

Don't let anyone else tell you what your eyes see.

Dispatched from the Skylounge- special caffeinated edition

Hello all,

I just spent the weekend taking in the Northwest Regionla Barista Competition here in good ol' P-town. Barista competition? Trust me, these people are going to become rock stars. Food celebrities. This was high-quality entertainment.

Here's a smattering of pictures from the event:
http://web.mac.com/michaelvk/iWeb/Site/NWRBC.html

I'm working on integrating more photography into my work... and yes, I'm starting to think about putting a book together. For no one's satisfaction but my own.

To set the tone, here's a poem I whipped out at the competition.

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My girl rides her espresso machine
like a Harley hawg,
ooo ooo ooo I see her tattoed neck
and bobbed hair
as she pounds on the coffee grinder
uhh uhh uhh it groans,
tamps down the shot,
and cranks the steam handle hard,
her body jammed against the machine,
she screws the portafilter in,
a tight fit,
a perfect espresso soul
she grunts out the seconds,
1, 2, 3, 20 the magic number
when it's just right, the
nectar trickles down,
every drop into the cup,
every succulent bit,
she throws everything into that shot,
cuts a heart into the milk foam
wipes her hands on the coffee-stained towel,
and she's ready for another ride.

Dispatched from the SkyLounge #2

It's an eyedrop Sunday night here somewhere deep in the Portland sky, just landed back home after a two week sojourn, saw the ocean, saw Andromeda, slept in a hotel room once frequented by Ginsberg, swam in more neon than anyone could have possibly conceived of on this planet and in the mundane states of standard psychology, paid homage to the bard, fondled human remains unintentionally, bathed in friendship and hospitality, ate In-N-Out burgers, saw pictures of the Bhagwan in the former Rajneeshpuram, and realized exactly how Democrats can regain the political upper hand in this fouled state. It's all composting now in this dungeon head that needs a good cleaning and some general reorganization, but that work doesn't pay the bills, so it's back to software.

Has anyone else noticed the resurgence in interest in Marie Antoinette? Does this presage the return of the guillotine? I'm suddenly drawn to the history of the French Revolution.

Anyhow, enough of the babble and on to the point.
----------------------

Bicycle, bicycle
two wheels down the first LSD highway
around and above Dutch canals and a pocket full of hash
a half-pound tea in panniers on the Portland waterfront
not a pipe bomb but an explosion of the mind
neighborhood streets regain their hearing under these wheels
we all love bicycles when we're young
bicycle to the library and a crate full of books
bicycle to grandma's house Friday afternoon
bicycle across campus after another death-inducing party
bicycle everywhere
bicycle bicycle bicycle
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Drone drone drone you do not see what you see
this is what's really happening nothing you see
stand back and let's get away again
more death more demolition more pages turned
away horror shrieks a head rolls
out the door bloody across the highway
no looking here, you see, nothing there
move right on doesn't matter to you
you just laugh along and forget you
didn't really see that those weren't real
ashes in the crook of a redwood tree
spilling down thousand years sides standing
long after the devil sulfur smell
washes away under the green heavy
forest ahh.... ahh..... just let the
ocean roll back and over back and off
what's that three star band over the world
again, I think I've lost my stars and
don't know don't recognize the sign anymore
no planet no asteroid no hyperspace just
feet on a brass bar rail and two
hundred years old messages fading because
we can't find the hashish key anymore.
-----------------------------------------------------


Ages of concentration, hallucination, pressed down
deep under the skin
Michelangelo saw pieces of fingers
long before he realized David,
every piece a hungry labor,
artists don't rush it,
and then there's Pollock,
and then Picasso
the poet is simply lazy, rushing through
another piece before the whiskey evaporates
getting the word down before taking
one more smoke,
poetry is just a fast-food art,
a modern convenience on
an inter-sane highway,
the flashy billboard, the flashing hitchhiker
damn the pieces! we'll duct-tape it together
throw in some cliches, some stereotypes,
just enough to fill up a page,
and then we say we've done something.
YES, we say! Genius, yes! And oh
so quick! What wit! What absurdity!
What the fuck?!? I just don't
get it, you say
But what is there to get these days,
but a few bullets and a bad case
of phobia?

Disptached from the Skylounge #1

The Skylounge is perched atop an 80-year old house in SE Portland. It's an Emily Dickinson attic, but with skylights. With a properly stocked mini-fridge, soon to be added, I could hide up here for 40 years and die among piles of notebooks. But there's too many bars nearby to make that an attractive option.

I am considering writing a number of odes to the local watering holes. That may be a lifetime project.

Anyhow, the sunlight flows and the SkyLounge opens...
------------------------

And so it goes, visions of white walls and refrigerated air
give way to sky views, trees, wood floors,
you don't escape the heat here, you just live with it,
every room another adventure, every wall has seen
eighty years of humanity pass by,
where did Henry Wyld spend his time?
The floors creak and dive and slant, but they're
always there, the fireplace waits for winter,
the windows don't stay open anymore,
and there's eighty years underneath it all
but it's our blank canvas,
it's our invitation to life,
eventually the newness wears off and
eventually we'll start to ignore the noises,
eventually we'll get to know the crawlspace,
nothing there but dirt and spiders,
what lives in these walls?
I haven't seen a ghost yet, but
I haven't slept a night, either
Here we go, we leave the sterility behind,
we walk out of cleanliness,
we emerge into the city that's always been there
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One journey down, and the road calls again,
only three months later, months where the
world turned upside-down, months where
I did it.
I closed the book, slaughtered the demons
and now life comes back, every word new,
every page fresh,
the blue sky overhead,
I even looked at the sun today,
I walked under trees,
I bought a pastry,
and it's still not 11 AM.
Every book waits to be opened,
every idea thought once again.
It's all new, it all starts over,
and this time, it's not a rehearsal,
no practice, no redoing it,
this is life, ahh, life, and it is
to be lived and loved and savored
and sauntered
and it boils through sidewalk cracks,
rolls down bike paths,
carries today on the backs of a
hundred years,
Welcome to the greener pasture.
Welcome to the better life.
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And... what was the escape from?
----------------------------------------------------

We're always waiting for you when you need us,
we've been down there, hidden from everyone,
Cassady taking care of business on the SP 1950's,
didn't watch out, got caught in the idiot web,
lost his mind in jail,
so remember who's around, remember to watch out,
and remember to recognize when it's the
suburban junk talking,
and when it's the tomorrow vision, the
eyes on a new promised land,
and will we be out of the idiot web?
because it's dangerous in here, no matter
how sweet the candy-coating
tastes, nibbles of a lifestyle I
need to run from.
There's no way to walk out the doors here
without risking it all, and that's the
fate I'm running from.
So now the fundamentals fall into place, and
I can come back out of it for a
bit, return to the ones waiting
once again on the bookshelf....
-------------------------------------------------------

Two crazy months and we wind up here. Looking back, it's hard to believe just how many messages came through in April, how many people made it clear that this had to happen. Now, we reach the promised land.

Dispatched from the Lounge #7

Work kills the muse. I've spent the last several weeks buried in a blizzard of code, tired of looking at computers. You never know what can break you out of that, but over the weekend I found a copy of the selected letters of Gregory Corso, a book I devoured in January when I got it from the library, and I brought it home and put it on the table in the lounge, next to four other books of letters I'm glancing through- Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady (which I'm reading for a second time as well), HST, and Lew Welch. That whole world had gone dead to me over the last few weeks. Thank the rain that it's back.

Now I've got to go rediscover that ol' sense of humor. The six year American war on laughter and irony has left millions of casualties. I'm in life support, myself. Yesterday morning, driving to the Farmer's Market, I saw a young man, maybe 25, walking across the street wearing a T-shirt that I'd worn through back in the late 80's. The shirt had a picture of Fundamentally Oral Bill, Bill the Cat's (from Berke Breathed's tremendously accurate and now so prescient comic strip 'Blooom County') late-80's resurrection as a televangelist, surrounded by the phrase- "$aved by Fundamentally Oral Bill". On a Sunday in Portland. I was amused. History repeats itself in ever-shortening increments. And Portland clearly stands on some sort of cosmic ley line, maybe on another plane from the baseline stupidity that infects the USA and takes over the nation like a virus. Remember when we all used to scoff at those reports talking about how far behind American education is? Just go look at some of the empty faces around you these days, young people who hardly realize what's being done in their name, idiots who chant "USA! USA!" at a show in Phoenix by pissed-off English punk legends The Fall while lead singer Mark E. Smith, a true asshole who's never claimed to be anything else, is assaulted by the lead singer of the opening band armed with a rotten banana. You can't make this stuff up.Even the best fiction writers can't make up a world where our inner cities and suburbs are patrolled a military assault vehicles, not driven by soldiers but by soccer moms and people made fat on a steady diet of television and greed, purchased with credit on top of credit, who are so far from the road that they don't even see bicyclists...

Wait a minute. Humor! We need humor! Thurber, where are you?!?

I present for your enjoyment three poems today, all about place, all written January 28-29, when work was just a mirage.


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She dances tiptoed across flooded green fields
north of Liverpool, that land of mystery
monsters once secured by Hadrian's Wall,
she revels in the incessant rain, bathed in its
chill and dried by the blustery Atlantic wind,
and she is old, older than the peat-moss land
and the hard rock shores, older than the
hidden hill lakes and pagan kings
buried in perfect earthen mounds that leave
the believers gasping for heavy air.
She travels on the waves of the Aurora
Borealis, across lands of no land where people
not people invent sounds to call the blinding
solid cold that seals the planet like
a straitjacket
She arrives on no schedule and leaves with
no message, and she travels light,
she knows that any man will offer her a
warm bed, a bottle of fine liquor, and any
drugs she needs,
and she takes it all and celebrates and
fakes the wild passions of love,
and runs back to the cold, leaving her
temporary lovers freezing in their pages.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

For Gary Snyder
When this was a tree-filled bottomland, a marshy
swamp full of deer and beaver and the
occasional wandering forager, looking for a pelt
or a quick meal,
it rained all winter, gray forever, a thick
mist running over the muddy marsh and
hiding moccasined feet smelling the year-round
decay, moss beards from thin branches older
than all visitors,
and the bounty of berries, fungus, animal
growing without man's help.
When this was a farm, the trains ran
back and forth all day long, carrying
dandy-dressed couples to the valley, to
Eugene, back to Portland,
the silent creek plain interrupted only by
the electric whizzing of the interurban,
and still winter never ended, frost
covering the fields and the rain giving
all, but resented by the pioneer settlers,
And today it's just a neighborhood, the moss
never died but killed by mechanical construction,
the rain's gifts forgotten as we curse
the cold gray and blame our awful
condition on the skies, even as we
murder the land below.

------------------------------------------------
Amsterdam Club Paradiso a converted church big
windows high ceiling balconies men tall as
me drinking Heineken
I said goodbye to summer, goodbye to the
USA that night, goodbye to Wilco going
back on that long flight the next day,
a band of wandering Americans with unkempt
beards and eyes deep with dread and fear,
faraway from crowds that they no longer
understood, people who stand on the pool's
edge and look in at drowning Americans
who just want air again, just want
back to the surface one more time, just
one drink in the sunshine,
I'd made it up from there and wouldn't
take a real breath until after the
guitar-fueled atomic waves destroyed
every last tie I had to that America
How could I ever return? Europe laid open
and bare, 47 days of safety and strangeness,
I shared a joint there on the floor where
no religion remained, none but rock and roll,
where grandparents remembered the Germans
took the bikes and never returned them,
I don't know if I even felt the mushrooms
but I cried like a teenager and the band
didn't even talk to the crowd, didn't need to,
maybe the Dutch didn't understand what we're
all running from, or maybe they know
better than we ever will, almost as well as
our possible, doubtful grandchildren.

Dispatched from the Lounge #6

Just when you think the barrage has stopped, just when you think the muse has vanished, just when you think I've retreated back into a quiet domain of normalcy and complacency in the face of a world gone mad, I reappear, if only for a moment. No ongoing rants this time- the weather's too nice for that- but here's a couple of Portland snapshots written in the last few weeks, one about the area around our house (which is going up for sale and we are going to make it to SE Portland this time!!!) and one about Old Town, and a little portrait.

All of this is fiction, of course, and any resemblance to characters real or imaginary is pure coincidence. Of course.
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Maybe there's something in the middle of
the duck-filled pond, or maybe it's washed
downstream into Fanno Creek,
or maybe there's nothing but earnest imaginings
and someone who desperately wants to see
his own reflection
even as he runs past every mirror
and only fakes every emotion that
ever peeks out from eyes he
hardly uses anymore, anyhow,
but someone blew their own brains out
on the shores near that pond
just a few years ago
and a cokehead lawyer tried to run
from fire-grilled neighborhoods late
1970's Detroit,
and lost his mind anyway, became
nothing but a howling womanizing devil,
didn't even recognize it,
I thought he was reaching to me for
a line, maybe I tried to pull him up,
but I'm the one getting dragged
into this dead spiritual sinkhole,
barely holding on to the edge,
and I think there's a black hole
out in the nighttime, back there,
and the frogs scream out
trying to tell us all to stay away,
but at the same time,
their constant call hypnotizes
the seekers into tripping deep down a forever void.
------------------------------------------

Skid row junkies don't even get high anymore,
don't even look for another fix,
united only in their cowardice, afraid to end
it all with one overloaded blast
of whatever it is that got them there in
the first place.
They've spent all the excitement, fed their
minds to bursting with crazy utopian fantasies
and the narcotic spell of stopped time and fuck-all,
and now it's just day after day of the
same sidewalks, the same shit smells,
the same rat hair and
it just doesn't fucking matter anymore, does it?
It's the same gutter trap in Portland, Manchester,
Sheffield, Berlin, the final ash piles of
burned out lives and sick exhaustion
of the same dry fantasies,
dreams that they've all learned aren't
that good anyway, aren't what you'd
want to live in,
with shithead idiots following, looking for
a bit crumb of the genius
that they wouldn't know
how to handle
anyhow.
-------------------------------

And one more portrait....

------------------------

That was the spirit of Neal Cassady in the
lounge last Saturday night- what road
was he talking about,
ranting about the slow obstacles on the
highway, down to LA, maybe down
to a death beyond nothing,
"You gotta get out of the way!"
"You gotta keep moving!", "It's the
fucking highway!", "You gotta keep up!"
all the while his eyes start burning
the same way they did when we
crossed the top of Tejon Pass,
dropping into LA 95 miles an hour,
through a construction zone, dancing
by trucks and drivers who aren't
even in their cars, not even in their
bodies anymore,
already left for somewhere else, maybe
they're all just dead,
because I feel so fucking alive,
I felt every terror bump on that
road, saw every blocked car stopping
the highway
and I'll always trust the driver,
or at least I'll pretend to,
but I wonder if I'm just a gawker
stopped on some crazy overpass
because everyone else is going over
the unfinished end
and dying in flames at the bottom.

Dispatched From The Lounge #5

It's a Raymond Carver evening, my friends. One of those nights when you stare down a glass of booze and hope the reflection isn't as ugly as you suspect it's going to be. Damn it!

I just got back from a week in the desert- seems like I've been going to the desert every spring since I was 18. Used to be for spring training baseball (I still love my A's and even wrote a poem about them on the way home), then it was Vegas, then Coachella, and this year, helping friends move. I both love and hate it. I could never, ever live in it. Ever. Unless I wanted to become dead to myself. Which, on a Raymond Carver evening, sounds pretty attractive. But you all know that I'm not really like that. Am I?

Enough babble. Tonight, I present to you a few musings fromthe desert. I'll start with a few poems written in HelLA, mayne throw in one or two from New Mexico, and I'll wrap up with a bit from Gregory Corso. I met Neeli Cherkovski, a long-time friend of Corso, at City Lights in January, underneath a large picture of Corso, and I will never forget his impression of Corso. That's burned in this little mind forever. Part of me would love to be Corso, a vagabond, a man who lived for the thrill of it all. But I think I'm better off without the smack habit.

Maybe.

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I wrote the first two poems on Venice Beach. The second is an attempt to capture a dream I had at my friend's old house in Venice. I don't like to criticize myself, but I know these aren't that good. They're what came to mind in LA. I'm capable of better, but LA ruins everyone. Just look at what became of Elliott Smith. I think I was even happier than my friends that they got out of there. I'll find a better muse again. Treat these as examples of what happens when you rot in the asshole of the USA. I almost got in a fight with some 5' 7" tweaker meth head fucker, and anyone who knows anything about me knows I'm all about peace. That's fucking LA for you.
---------------------------------------

This is the lowest common denominator,
what it's all reduced to as the
no-longer-humans packed into LA lose
everything under the constant assault,
money, advertising, crowds, crowds, crowds,
everyone reduced to crawling through piles
of rotting humanity to find food sex shit,
there's no love here, no romance possible
when survival itself is a full time job
and everyone here devolves into
money processing machines, it's all that
matters, everyone trying to look like
the king bee in a filthy smoggy hive,
only a few ever realize that
their act that's no longer an act anyway
won't matter when their dead, any day
now choked by the shit air and smashed
by each other, everyone holding on
to their last little plot, preparing
to be buried, burned, and left
to rot eternally
in this basin at the sewage point
of a nation gone rotten.
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(and this one is the dream- I apologize for the crap level, but it's what came naturally in LA)

I saw a hijacked plane sitting on
the runway at Portland International
Airport, and this was the final blow,
the veil of misunderstood people lifted
to show the puppetmasters that
have seized our nation
standing at the controls
ready to kill a few hundred more
just to buttress their power
just to wield that fear weapon again,
but this time the power's all gone,
and we all took to the streets,
Portland, Oregon,
thousands marching on the square,
federal buildings in flames,
the last vestiges of the
faked power drama turning to ash
and the Founding Fathers smiled,
the US Constitution held high and proud,
once again,
and even inside that plane,
cleared to stand alone like a leper,
the passengers all knew that
they were taking the USA back,
the revolution starting again,
this time washing fromthe Northwest,
and the world's billions smiled,
hope was restored,
and we all shared the liberty dream
one more time.
----------------------------------
OK, enough garbage. Here's one I wrote a few days later, on a hike in New Mexico. Not much better, but again, it is what it is, and it's the best I could do at the time.

The best you can hope for in this desert
is a flat rock and a few minutes
before the flies find you,
their buzzing the only sound cutting through
a silence so loud that your ears ring
I look for snakes at every step
when I saw a small horned lizard,
he froze on a nearby rock, same color
as his scales, he seemed to be
submitting,
but when I reached for my camera, my eyes
off for no more than a second,
he vanished again into the mass anonymity of
the desert,
the desert amplifies all those trapped voices,
they're all you hear after years in
this land, you'll go insane out here,
there's some things you should never
know about yourself,
you can never hide on land where the
only sound is your heart beating
and the unnatural growls of far off
machinery where another generation of
men come to fight the desert,
and they'll lose it all someday, too.
-------------------------------------------------
And since I'm on such a happy roll today, I'll give you one I wrote yesterday, at XV, listening to the Arctic Monkeys on the jukebox. They're from Sheffield, and Sheffield's not so different from Portland, you know. It's all fiction, of course.

Aha! The secret to being insane, to keeping
your insanity, to savoring every moment
of this fucked up roller coaster mess
that only genuine lunacy can nurture,
is to act like you've got it all
together, convince faceless masses
that a college degree, a house, and all
of the successful stereotype bullshit
means you've made it, you're
somehow above the lunatic beggars on every
block who'd tell you a story for
just two bits
and you'd stay awake all night
wondering if there's any way it could be
true,
wondering if somehow there were a few people
before you on these same shithole sewer streets
who chased the last fading drops of their minds
down to the Willamette River,
and really didn't lose anything anyway
but you only get those crazy nowhere visions
in dungeon bars and wild young music
still breathing transatlantic fire in your head,
just like 16 years old 1989,
if you can pretend, just a bit,
that you've passed their Scantron society test,
then you can fuck off to
your heart's content
and they'll all just copy it.
------------------------------------------------

I'm getting carried away tonight. Booze'll do that. You keep talking and don't know when to stop. Is anyone listening? Do I even care? Probably not. Here's a poem from Gregory Corso, entitled, "Hello....", from his book Gasoline, #8 in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. I've collected 42 of the 56. They're the most treasured books in my lounge. Those of you here this Saturday night can flip through them and find your own gems. Books aren't to be collected, they're to be read.

It is disastrous to be a wounded deer.
I'm the most wounded, wolves stalk,
and I have my failures, too.
My flesh is caught on the Invisible Hook!
As a child I saw many things I did not want to be.
Am I the person I did not want to be?
That talks-to-himself person?
That neighbors-make-fun-of person?
Am I he who, on museum steps, sleeps on his side?
Do I wear the cloth of a man who has failed?
Am I the looney man?
In the great serenade of things,
am I the most cancelled passage?
----------------------------------------------------

Enough, I say. Enough of this mess. Back to Carver, back to reading his collected poetry, back to the wallow. I'm getting it all out before Saturday. I'll find some humor by then, and I'll cower in embarrassment if you mention this drunken ramble...

Dispatched From The Lounge #4

The days go by far too fast when you let them, and the next thing you know, the muse has abandoned you and left you. In my case, I'm not sure who looked the other way first, but the muse is gone and replaced profanely, yet oh so seductively, by a new MacBook Pro laptop. It's deadly. I sound like a consumerist fool when I write that, and I make a dear offering to you, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, although HST always understood the joy of well-made explosives, and this thing is a fire in my lap. Literally and figuratively.

Bah. Anyhow, if you want to know where I'm coming from these days, get Ferlinghetti's "How To Paint Sunlight" and read it closely and carefully. Especially the first poem. And read this interview with the man: http://www.sanfranciscoreader.com/interviews/ferlinghetti%20interview.html
Yes, I am little more than an overgrown fanboy. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has platted one of the most beautiful roads to old age that any of us can imagine walking. I need that map. I think I have it.

Anyway... interesting events afoot in Portland and the Northwest... stay tuned... the revolution stirs in unlikely places....

One day I will get a few more pages into Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe". I began reading it two years ago, and I'm now roughly 210 pages in. You read a few pages, digest them, make it part of your life, and move on to the next few. Physics is best taken in slow, delicate bites.

Two selections today- one from a week ago, when I was still possessed; and the second is my second-ever poem, rediscovered a week ago as previously explained.

-------------------------------------------

You write so much that you no longer
live in your mind or your soul
or any of those imaginary places
where things have no weight and
time never has to be so certain
instead, you start to live here, in these
books and pages, and just like Portland,
you show up alone, naked, poor, and cold,
but you spend enough time there, and you
start to see that between letters and
on hundred year old tree broken sidewalks,
you're not so alone even though you're
more alone than ever, you feel the
rain and eventually you just don't
care anymore,
you wander through the middle of sentences
like a party with old friends,
you meet the same memories again and
again, it's never as exciting as
that first year,
when you figure there's magic in every
door and depth in every word,
eventually you learn to dissolve into
it, to love the comfort, to
pretend that rain makes you smile
when all it does is wash more
words off these slowing years,
and that's when all the real surprises,
realized dreams and dead underground nightmares,
that's when they all tear you to moss,
stale cigarette butts, and too many empty coffee cups.

(written 3/27/2006)
-----------------------------------------------------
(and now, back to a much different life, the second poem I wrote on 10/16/1990...)

It is a long, dark path
On which the men of words walk
No, they tread lightly,
For they shall not harm
Nature's gifts, laid out before them
Dry, as the sun bakes the earth
And the men of words
And they sweat

-----------------------------------------

Peace to all of you from the lounge, where the iPod's been playing prehistoric music for me- The Smiths and Aztec Camera. Well, maybe not prehistoric, but certainly pre-Revolutionary, before I sold my soul to pop in 1986 at the altar of Howard Jones. That's for another time and a story only a true connoisseur could enjoy.

Where's the poetry in your Poetry Month? Ted Kooser, Robert Pinsky, and Billy Collins are Bush stooges who took money from this administration and pretended to be "poets". These soldiers of Bush's anti-human army are true terrorists of the mind. Demand apologies! And then remember, 'tis better to forgive than to seek revenge. Sometimes. But would you rather be in Inferno or Paradiso, especially now that Purgatorio has been rendered fiction?

Dispatched From The Lounge #3

I'd like to start this dispatch by commemorating my personal hero and idol, Lawrence Ferlighetti, who turns 87 today. Ferlinghetti recently advised an interviewer to be ready for when the electricity goes out, and that now may be the time to stock up on pot cookies. Sage advice indeed. I saw the man once (in physical form, though I've seen him in my mind a million times), and simply lost my voice as he walked by en route to his office through the poetry room at City Lights. I'll never forget what it was like to be in the presence of Him, truly with the capital H. I didn't know then what to say, and wouldn't know now. All that comes to mind is 'thank you'. I recommend "A Coney Island of the Mind" for everyone, and if you've already read it, read it again. It's a true portrait of a (the) human condition.

Inspired by Ferlinghetti, as always, I'm starting to think about doing some translations of Italian poetry.

------------------

The difference between sanity and schizophrenia is self-awareness.

Remember, you know something that no one else does. It may be a deep secret, something that happened, it may be a way of looking at the world, it may be a connection you've seen and never told anyone about. You, and everyone else, knows one or many things that nobody else knows. That knowledge is always in your eyes, but does anyone else ever see it?

------------------

Enough amateur philosophizing. On to the main event. The first poem came from a chance meeting last week. The second one was written exactly two years earlier, and started off a journal that I just filled up last week and I don't understand it the way I must have when I wrote it. I always get the insatiable urge to fry in the desert this time of year.
--------------------
3/23/2006

Good afternoon, miss. This is my card.
Yes, I'm in the destruction business.
The mind-blowing business, that is.
I sneak into your little hidden homes all
over the towns and cities and forests
of this world and worlds like it,
and I set off explosives in your walls,
and I run away wild as you realize
what's starting to happen.
No, it certainly doesn't pay much. In fact,
like any business, it's been tough
to get it started,
and you end up doing the first handful
for free anyhow
But I'm in this for the long haul.
It could be quite profitable, once
I've done enough of them,
you'll all be running around happy naked
singing forgetting you lived in those death-traps
and who'll need your movies, who'll need
internet and television and the rest of the
mind-junk you eat and vomit today,
when you'll be so exposed amused by
each other, by the millions of
mysteries everyone secretly unknowingly shares,
and while you won't find any true answers,
you'll pay me again and again
with more questions.

-----------------------------------

3/23/2004

Vegas

Las Vegas is the beautifully disgusting
heartcenter of whatever there exists
of 21st century American art
as it is only in the commercial
absurdity where excess has destroyed
the decaying mind that the true
center can shine through in all
its depraved unnatural misguided
sensation as only in Las Vegas
does the person cease to be
and only in Las Vegas does
the universal guilt ignore itself
in a microcosm of excitement pretended
sin and it is here that we
so love and loathe ourselves
and what we dream of never becoming
that all that is human can once
again thaw like iced cave
paintings and fossils of those
before us who know much more
than we ever will.

-----------------------------------------

Free your mind, as in free beer and freedom.

I lie. This isn't from the lounge today. Conceived there, born elsewhere in Portland.

And welcome to any new passengers on this ride. Those of you who'd like, feel free to throw open the exit door here at cruising altitude and step out quietly. I'll tell the pilot, if he ever comes aboard.

Dispatched From The Lounge #2

As my first dispatch seemed to float off into the ether without making a sound or an imprint, I'll blow some more hot air into the atmosphere and proudly contribute to the global warming of the shared consciousness.

As anyone who has spent much time with me knows, I seem to have a divining rod for finding coincidences. I therefore was not too startled when, the morning after sending the last dispatch, my long-lost first page of written poetry, from 10/16/1990, appeared in a binder I was throwing out. This page had fallen off the spiral notebook many, many years ago, and I'd assumed it was lost. Should my lifelong dream of being van Gogh or Dickinson pan out, perhaps that piece of paper will end up somewhere. More likely, it'll just be thrown away with the rest of my possessions upon my death. More proof that there's more than money to this life.

Vitamin D + St. John's Wort may be the best cure for that uniquely Portland affliction, Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Poetry is the real news. I think we should start a poetry daily to be sold alongside The Times, The Post, and the Weekly World News as a source of real and authentic information about the world around us.

On to the main event. One random poem from my recent scribbles, and then at the end, I will print my re-discovered first poem.

----------------------------------------

I don't know what it would be like
to be a victim of this, bombarded by
strange thoughts and a phantasm of a man
who slithers by on the edge of your dreams,
but he's not as sly as he thinks, you know
him every time he peeks, every time he pretends
to pass you by anonymously,
and I don't know what it would be like
to be simultaneously fascinated and scared,
to feel this pouring out of someone
who can't be everything he pretends to
be but he certainly believes that he is
and you don't know if you're a fantasy,
a game, a coveted object of desire. the
first, the last, the only, the primary,
you're not sure you even want to know
(the truth is you are all and none and neither)
I've always been the author of these strange
books where the ending is never anything
but a bizarre awkward drop
I've never read one of those books,
never been a real character, just a
delusional omniscient narrator
who ends up not knowing what you
ever thought at all.

--------------------------------------------------

Below is the first poem, from a sheet out of a notebook I carried with me to the Stanford Coffee House on October 16, 1990, and wrote poetry with Melind John. The next day would be the one-year anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I'm sure that was on my mind at least as much as the Sappho and Lao Tzu that I was reading for the first time.




The wise man said to me,
"Why?"
And I replied,
"O Wise Man,
I do not know."

--------------------------------------------------

I encourage you to rediscover the physical feeling of ink on paper. When was the last time you wrote a real letter? And I encourage you to rediscover the value of eye contact, of looking into people's eyes and seeing windows into universes existing only in other minds. We've become too trained too the rapid-eye darting of a world we see through video screens. Slow your eyes down and look at your world, and look at each other. You're missing a lot of the tricky and inspiring details of the world.

Dispatched From The Lounge #1

Many of you receiving this email know that I sometimes mumble something in passing about poetry. Consider this my little flash to you of what goes on under the overcoat. Hide your eyes and look away, or stare and enjoy. If it doesn't affect me noticeably, I might write another of these. I'll just be picking random selections and passing them on.

That's enough introduction. Just like Mayor Bud many years ago, I'm exposing myself for art's sake.

-MVK

---------------------------------------------------
You got there too late, and the town
had gone, the bar closed, the last
failed settlers moved on in their
tattered wagons, with so much left
behind,
baby pictures left on the muddy floor of
the shed, baby pictures taken when there was
a dream, an idea about how life
slowly gets better over the years,
But you've learned better, and they've
all gone, and you're there to find
a ticket back to the stomach-turning
hopes shattered in younger years,
you thought this all would grow into
a real home, a place both comfortable
and crazy, a place where you
could drink like mad and howl at
a blind moon, then wake up and
slowly warm in the autumn sun.
But you got impatient. You left it when
you thought you knew every board,
every pothole, every face.
You went away- you'd lied to yourself
and the now-impossible truth leaves
you lonelier than ever, choking on
the dust of a summer wind.

(written 12/11/2005)

----------------------------------------------

This giant steam locomotive gasped its last
oil-powered breath nearly fifty years
ago, its brute strength inert against
the will of industry and the crushing
assault of soulless technology,
And yet it still smells of oil, the
strong, sweet, acrid smell of a steam-driven
monster, lying dead in the museum,
scaring children in its immobility,
children who have no sensation of
what the heat in the firebox felt like,
the small earthquakes at each pounding of
the cylinders, the shrill whistle piercing
the snowbound silence of the Sierra
Nevada mountains.
The black metal beast slumbers, history
travels by outside the museum
and it still smells of oil.

(written at the California State RR Museum, 8/5/2005)