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.

---------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------
(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?