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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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...