(This is an extra-long edition. You might need some time to digest it, perhaps when you'd be watching yet another summer rerun of 'Lost' or 'Star Trek' or whatever passes for novocaine TV these days. Take the time, it'll be worth it.)
So when I first conceived of this email, maybe in a John Day motel room or maybe in a Paris bar, I thought I'd be leading you around the world with me, but the world's not such a big place and there's hardly room for more than me on these trips, and I've not seen all that much, really. Now, home for two weeks and these blackberry roots grow quick and deep in this city, this Portland, I look around here and realize I've been here a long, long time, and I'm probably not moving anywhere. At least not today.
Portland's Broken Word open mic, which may well be the most talented single gathering of poets held on this continent since prehistoric times, has moved from the NoPo war zone to God's own Garden of Eden, Southeast Portland, where, starting this Tuesday at 7:30 PM and continuing every Tuesday night going forward (forever and ever and ever), the voices of the city will converge on the Blue Monk bar/ jazz club at SE 34th and Belmont. Do come. If there is literary history being made in this city, you'll see it there. You might even see me.
Two months on the road and you didn't even get a postcard. All you get is this.
--------------------
I-5 really is no more than a north-south
speed burn out of nowhere,
a necklace of pearled motor courts, the kind
that went out of fashion in the 70's,
I slept in a cheap motel last night and
today I feel like a white trash refugee,
running from nothing though I'm really
not running at all,
here crowded against the Pacific on some
awful peninsula facing an abandoned prison,
no more poetry in this San Francisco than
in Mount Shasta City or Dunnigan or
Oakridge where the only lasting memory
is a woman and her out-of-control son
just seeing what he could get away with,
A&W drive-in where the waitress still comes
to your car, no roller skates or go-go boots though,
Is this the Soviet Union or the USA?
It took me 30 hours from home to get
the first words down in this notebook
smuggled from Pendleton, Oregon cowboys
meet San Francisco women with brand name badges
on their boots and just say "yes'm",
I don't have a home here anymore, I
don't recognize a Bay Area where every town
but my hometown is bounded by the
Wal-Mart- Hayward's too backward
even for that, 1980's gang wars all
over again, Portland had better
be my home, because it's
the only one left.
------------------------------
You've been here before, maybe not the Miner's Cafe
in Sierra spring Sonora,
but the formica countertops, the swiveling chairs,
old wooden walls and AM country music,
you've been here before,
where you don't order the chicken fried steak
because it's probably frozen,
but nobody sells a prepped and frozen
Denver Omelette,
even if they keep white toast under heat lamps,
Farmer Brothers coffee tastes like home, not
Stumptown Coffee Portland, but the home
of us highwaymen, every truck stop oasis
on the interstate would throw its new
Pilot-TA-Petro truck stop, with its
canned heat lamp fast food and discount CB radios
(and 'wifi' in these never disconnected times),
under a smoked brake rig gargling rocks
down the runaway truck ramps backside Siskiyous,
for one old breakfast place where
everyone's a regular even
when they're just passing through.
------------------------------
The soundtrack of my life entered the public domain last month when the Jesus and Mary Chain reformed for a show at Coachella. And then they did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
I will rent a party suite in Cleveland when they are inevitably inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and will incite the riot such an occasion will demand.
------------------------------
I was born and it was bliss, I died and
came back like Jesus in the desert,
old man Scotland and the runaway in California
no bridge left between two men far too
close for far too long
no man should ever know another too well,
always keep a piece for yourself
the faceless hordes of Southern Californians
slaves to cars and traffic and chain stores,
and Jesus sang in their midst last night,
maybe saved a few, maybe washed away
the smog stink chokehold that
baptizes soulless children the instant
they're conceived in this hell,
I came to the desert a lost believer
always looking for the next direction,
now I'm born again and the red shark
points its convertible nose north, I can't get away
fast enough, and I kidnap these
noisy rock and roll incantations to
another state, another life,
the desert stays the same, the
heat slows everything except the
influx of Los Angeles assholes,
but I leave them behind to rot
in the foul smell of one another,
and I may not almost be gold,
but I'm certainly happy when it rains.
------------------------------
Blank pages, ink, an airplane wobbling a bit through
turbulent North American skies and there's not much
to say in an aluminum can world,
flight magazines suggest some sort of community
with thousands of other fliers thousands of
feet above a world that hardly notes our absence,
same men running sheep in Great Basin desert lands
and in Pyrenees mountain valleys,
same men gambling their last paychecks in
Nevada border casinos and Cambodian
corner dice games,
same women lost in midlife in Oregon valley homes
and in European metropolitan flats,
for a few eternal hours the traveling classes,
families, businessmen, tourists, vagabonds,
suspended above these mundane cycles,
not immune from the days, just encapsulated
in this metal cylinders one careless spark
away from newscast dictated oblivion.
------------------------------
(this poem dedicated to Paris' own Voltaire and to Portland's own Mattress)
When I find that city, golden valleys with
sands of gold and fountains of youth,
when I climb to that city, every woman stuck
on nineteen and every man lost in the psychosis
we're all born with and sentenced to,
when I find that city, mountain air and messages
thousands of years gone by every one in
the language best suited, every one a clear
reflection of the human that discovered
the perfect raptured revelation words,
when I find that city, will I let myself stay
in freelove utopian paradise close the Garden gates,
or will I care only to cry the news out from hometown
Portland streetcorners, my people back home
who can't begin to comprehend half a state, much
less half the world, come home to
sing inscrutable songs of wherever
El Dorado might be, it's not El Dorado
county California once the never-
attained promised land of my
station wagon childhood but El
Dorado the mystic wherever I can
let myself believe I've found that city
will I find it, El Dorado?
------------------------------
Dante, did Corso come to Ravenna and piss
on your grave or maybe shoot some horse
sitting here leaning against the same brick
wall where I just smoked some Maastricht
weed, doing my best Dutch trader impersonation,
thinking that I'm only here because
I'm not too certain where Petrarch's buried,
at least you had excellent taste in
cities of exile, I'd live here if not
Bellinzona, I like that Swiss independence,
the best of all worlds and enough order
to bounce around, travel is never the
tale of counterculture and you, Signor
Dante, as mainstream as any, now all
the Catholics fight over your wet dust remains,
and only you know whether God punched
your ticket or the saint left you
alone at the gate.
------------------------------
The road novel is always written at home, the
road's too busy chewing up your time finding
food, a bed, some space to breathe,
you start to wonder if you'll ever find
a place to write again, wonder if you'll
ever strike that jeweled vein of poetry
again, the gold rushes come by surprise
the Comstock went away just as everyone
arrived and here in Holland the only gold
is land hard-won against the water of
the northern seas, everything grows so easy
on the polder meadows that there's not
enough misery to spark songs, not
enough struggle to crack the human
riddle, here the biggest risk is
eternal boredom and the impossible
marijuana overdose.
------------------------------
These back-alley bars, smoke-filled and dirty, students
left and right and French means nothing to me
but liquor helps me pretend to understand and
even to be a bit more American where
it's still not a sin but a bit of an
embarassment to be from the land of wasted
opportunites, Statue of Liberty like a goldrush
and now the spent grandchildren of the dream
miners don't know whether to look back or
ahead but the crushing tailings of those
failed fantasy vein diggings bury us, choke us
in the toxic waters left after the quick fix
wore off, nothing left there, not that
the Europeans can find, but the last wave
of Chinese immigrants made good money on
the dropped pennies of American hopes
while the piss-drunk leftover workers
failed and died, choked on five-dollar
eggs and forgotten songs, dust bowl
towns and boarded-up railroad hotels
and now there's no map ahead and
I can't bring myself to ask
the guide where it is I got lost.
------------------------------
No new stories to tell, Europe's history is
on display as a parade of wealth, royalty,
let's all bow down to the thirty-third
vial of Christ's blood, I may not amount
to much in this life but I can bury
a little jar of Kool-Aid and maybe label
it 'blood of the martyr' and watch my
descendants make just enough money from the
tourist parade to keep themselves permanently
fucked up, did I just fly halfway around
the world to trap myself in sardine tin
Europe for a month, I can get high
just as easily at home where it's only
slightly less legal but watch the
weather forecasts, there's a heavy
covering of fear clouds ahead of a
violent summer, I don't know what news
I've gathered in California deserts and
European cafes this spring but I still
don't have a map and this journey's
getting to be a bit long, I wonder
if I'll be awake at the next station,
over there I might be a leader or
just a thorn and here I'm not
even worthy of a grave at Pere
Lachaise, certainly not the Pantheon.
Worn down to a whining stub of a man,
nothing but complaints and miseries and
I'm trapped here in my head and bombarded
by shit-pop versions of Gordon Lightfoot in
a canalside coffeeshop in Utrecht where that
Catholic stink has mostly dissolved in
the algae green canals, I've let whatever
muse I had slip away and the cracks
between words that don't fit together are
deep enough to lose every bit of
sanity I might still have, I've
always been obsessed with safety
and I never let go of the rope,
especially when I'm halfway to the
bottomlands where even the fish
have headlights, maybe I should just drop in
and figure that we've all got a
floating instinct when we need it,
but you know that's nothing more than
a lie when musicians can walk into
rivers and drown, and while it might
be nice to be able to call shit
by both its look and smell, the
true secret gift is being able to
make your own gold, not bitch about
how much better Midas' life might be.
------------------------------
Last time I heard 'The Passenger' I was back in
Amiens, France, watching some Frence 40-something
indie punk named Laurent Margarin struggling to
wrap his fluid French lips around our brutally
exact American, got a word for every emotion
so we don't need to act them out anymore,
poetry's not a guessing game in a language
with a million words, Laurent hitched a ride
on the back of my neon mushroom elephants
and landed here alongside me at Stumptown
Portland, this place becomes a rough flower
in the million people paving the streets of
the Rose Festival, and you know I could
never catch a real buzz in Europe with
3.5% beer that's more of a water substitute
than an intoxicant and greenhouse-grown weed
that you've gotta mix with tobacco to
feel, I had a good time but it's not Portland,
Laurent and his compatriots can lay around
every green day in their park-cafe city center
and drink cheap delicious wine but they're
still under that long Catholic shadow, they
beheaded a king but still haven't neutered
the loudest dog of a 2000 year epoch,
no one will remember Laurent Margarin
yet the Popes' names are eched in
rotten marble and blood.
------------------------------
And these straight line selfish dialogues are nothing more
than dust and faded lives, fifty years on, the
words sleep in the same clouds as Elliott Smith
drifts among now, lost behind the straight line
thrust, pen on paper, speed up to get to
the noon bell and then let it slide across
the page, can't complain about your health because
you've never felt so good, sometimes you've
gotta build a fence around yourself so
you can play without limits, then the
D'Achouffe gnome looks out at you, same
as the one in the Heineken bar in Amsterdam
where you led the mushroomed masses to
drink off evening events that you'll never
need to understand, the gnome chuckled then
and it laughs now, you saw Elliott
Smith window displays in Utrecht and now
his songs drift past cemetery gates in Portland
and it's like you never left, hard to tell
exactly which walls these words are bound to,
there's as little of the Netherlands here as
there is of Portland there, here you're the
producer, over there you're the collector, you
brought home a sack full of relics
a head about to explode and no skills
to build words that don't fall down
around shifting piers barely supporting
these imaginary canal houses.
------------------------------
Well, that's my sldeshow! Hope to see you some Tuesday at the Broken Word, or maybe at the Say When casino, McDermitt, Nevada, or maybe riding neon red and green elephants in central Asia.
-Mikey Golightly
