All Paths Take Me To Just Beyond Where I Can See From Here Before A Blockade Is Reached
Yes, I keep saying quartets when I mean quatrains. I’m going through my photo graphs, something I do in between bouts of being actually busy, putting in proper
dates, tagging names to faces, deleting duplicate files. I’ve been doing this for years but now I’m up to March of 2015, and while I never used to give away dates
this easily, I’m concerned that, since it was soon thereafter that, let’s say, all of my big troubles began, I’m now worried that going through the remaining 11 years
might get a bit depressing. But so much time has passed, it’ll probably be more, oh, I don’t know, I don’t like to think I’m that nostalgic, have gotten some criticism from people that
know me that maybe I should find a new hobby since, well, the past. And I had one. And it was pretty good up until, well, around the middle of 2015. Hell broke loose slowly after that, and in
evitably I wind up here, typing you this short means of an escape from what that same past has now, inevitably gotten me into. So what, I might just learn something about myself,
I think, in rebuke of the criticism, a suggestion clearly made by the few who know me and do actually care about my well-being. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that almost
no one I’m in contact with these days, especially locally, knows me from before that year. Who I was pre-2015. And that year was pretty fun, on the whole. To pinpoint a moment where things
fell apart, still, would be toward the end of that year, or it could go back to the previous one. When did the good times end? What do I call good times since? What are the reasons that
those seem to be so significantly rarer these past few years? Anyone might say that it does not have to be this way. But my focus has been so significantly on bringing myself back to a
contentment, a happiness replete with pleasure, that existed before then. But did it? As those years and the one I exist in grow further apart, am I losing objectivity about such things? As
an artist, I’ve adversely always been more left- brained than I have been right-brained. And I can see the formula that I followed for years that seemed to work so wonderfully. But is that
just a fantasy or a mirage that my supposedly analytical brain is giving me. False memories or a false sense of whatever I was feeling and whatever stress I went through back then as
opposed to that which I go through these days? I stare at these pictures from 2015, an overly abundant amount of pictures of me, often just my face, selfies, and wonder, but cannot look
inside each photograph’s face to be able to more scientifically analyze the differences that exist due to the passing of this growing percentage of my life’s duration. Perhaps its
time to shake up all of my routines and hobbies, like this photograph cataloging, which I believe eases my mind so. If it were so easy as up being down and vice versa. I want to live that formula
again, with the edits that come from having lived through and within it over and over. But with what means? How can I shorten those old long-term goals to fit within my lifetime? Is the key to feeling
like I hve it all just a mind-trick? Do I need a new pair of glasses? What can I dredge up in order to make any kind of substantial breakfast. How do I get over this one last hump? I keep asking myself.
Perhaps I should be sleeping. Instead, my mind is racing at a dizzying speed, so much
so that I cannot stop it to focus on a damned
thing, nor sleep. And there’s much too much
that needs to be done. Yet (and for example)
I’ve no money. There are a few pennies in a
plastic tub in my closet, but didn’t we stop
making pennies – can we use them anymore?
So, the persistence of being so broke. Which indeed I am, and most especially am now. My weekly box of food did not arrive – it usually arrives on Monday, every once in a while on
Tuesday, but it’s now Wednesday. I’m sitting here in the dark, and I don’t want to write on this subject any more – even though swim ming through my head are a million pieces of
the story of what I have already begun and want now to end. I’m missing any sense of ________ [insert humor, taste, smell, sight, direction, camaraderie, belonging, self, even?].
I have lived in this city for over twenty-five years now. I’ve grown to loathe conveying these feelings of depression, mixed always (or most always) with some positivity, some
I can do this attitude. While the notion that I might not be able to grows within me. It’s that clock ticking, the fact of my age; deadlines, which are what I’ve built a career around making
with flair, keep moving to a later date. Plans get swept under a rug in hopes they are for gotten. This just isn’t me. I look to my left, searching for a good way to transition into a
better life, a way to finish what I’m saying without having stepped backwards. Nothing like that exists that I can see, either left, right, directly in front of me, or (and my neck hurts
as it always does these days) when I crane my pained neck around to the wall behind me. I so want to laugh. I think of turning on the tele vision, but something had caught my eye when
I first looked left to the wall beside my bed. I look again. It’s a book’s cover art (of course it’s a book). There’s a cigarette hanging from a dog’s
mouth. The book, portrait of the artist as a young
dog, stories by the the poet Dylan Thomas. I
can’t recall having ever read any poetry by him,
but it’s something that’s on my list (when I’d
picked this up from some Free: Take One box,
I had assumed that is what it was, poetry. It’s
the bottom half of the over of the book, the dog seemingly mimicking the author (I assume) whose picture at the top with a cigarette poked
at an odd angle into his mouth. A dog with a cigarette dangling from the side of this mouth. Well. I suppose that I will go with that. And a
hopefully somewhat redeeming word of apology
to you. Now, have I done anything at all here? Has my dignity been regained, in the very least? I sit a moment and make the assumption that it has not. So uphill I must go. Or else, right?
(This one is after Diane di Prima’s “Prevailing Foods at Times” from her book Dinner and Nightmares.)
Mom gave birth to four children in three years. It might take a beat for you to realize, then, that there were twins, who were two years
younger than me. Then, a year later, came my sister. I had the place and all of the family’s att ention to myself for nearly two
years, that’s it. All this is to say that when it came time for supper (which, in Arkansas, is what other
folks call dinner), it was every
kid to him or herself. After first help ings were served, there were rarely seconds for anyone. And there were only a few regular suppertime meals
that my mother would prepare for us for our family evening meals. They were something like this:
Hamburgers (my dad raised a few cattle, so we always had a freezer full of beef) and French fries (from frozen sometimes, but most often from our garden’s potatoes)
Tuna casserole (this was my least favorite of regular meals – it had cream of mushroom soup in it – Campbell’s condensed, of course)
Fish sticks (frozen) with French fries (see above) or macaroni and cheese (Kraft from the blue box) and probably some green beans – I think these came from cans, but they could have been from either our garden or my paternal grandparents’ garden
Beef stew that sat in the Crockpot all day with potatoes and carrots
Fried catfish and hush puppies – this was one of my favorites, but it would require that someone went fishing and had some luck that day, and I despised fishing, a common pastime of my dad’s and his parents on weekends.
Breakfast for dinner – fried or scrambled eggs, toast, milk, maybe a hashbrown (from frozen) and bacon or ham. (It’s possible I’m misremembering this one, but I’ve always loved breakfast for dinner.
Sandwiches (usually baloney, sometimes cold ham) and potato chips (usually Lay’s regular)
Sloppy Joe’s – which was also one of my least favorite regular meals.
Chili with beef (or sometimes deer) and beans with saltine crackers.
Pizza from a frozen box
Pork chops or pork steaks of some sort, pan fried, usually with macaroni and cheese and green beans.
Salmon patties - made from canned salmon with added saltine crumbs and egg, fried in a pan.
Type 2 diabetes. How many of you in here have type 2 diabetes, show of hands? Did you know that you can be diabetic for years and then one day, poof!, you’re no longer
diabetic? How about that? Oh, I have a walk-in
closet at my new apartment. How many of you,
you know, as a child....? How many of you dreamt of
having a walk-in closet? I know I didn’t. But boy,
was that ever a sort of merit badge of wealth we
were taught by the sitcoms in the days of our youth,
am I right? I now can say, proudly and loudly, that I have a second bedroom in the lovely apartment
in which I live. Crazy! That’s crazy y’all. And pimp daddies! Pimp! Daddies! Now don’t you have it made in the shade? You know I’m not kidding! Let’s hear it for all of you pimps out there,
show of hands, we’re all friends, now come on, seriously, raise ’em up you fabulous pimps. We
can complain about each day until our mouths bleed, can we not? I mean, there’s an immeasurable
amount of bitching we can do. But God is most definitely
watching over us, is he not? And that is no laughing matter,
Or that’s what I’ve dubbed it. My Great Idea. It might sound like a scheme, but I don’t do schemes. Maybe you know what I mean,
but what a truly pandora’s box of a sentence that was. Anyway, already I want to change the subject. Mostly because sud
denly I am having a run with the nausea. I almost said the trots, instead, as that is what my Grandma Hazel
would have said to anyone within listening distance and without a seeming care in the world what anyone might think
of her, all six foot two of her (she didn’t just have a command ing presence, she demanded it). Not that anyone would have
looked down upon her for announcing so boldly her bout with diarrhea. It would have been quite difficult to criticize anything she’d say as
she spoke with such a wry sense of humor and with never even an extraneous syllable (but she’d make two out of every normally singular
syllable being from the part of the South in which she resided at the beginning and end of her life). So, the runs. And I’ve now accomplished
changing the subject and the tone of what began as an optimistic and enth usiastic cabin made of words. I mean, it began that way and now wants to
make its final thoughts heading in exactly the opposite direction. So if it grabbed you by the get-go, you’re no doubt a bit turned off
by how things seem to be winding down. If so, I’m very sorry about that. If it makes you feel any better (and do you have Pepto Bismol handy,
by chance?) that initial fantastic idea remains not only doable by all perpsec tives that I can muster, but it is a plan
that I intend to implement. And so
if I say stay tuned for further information, I’d surely mean it, as the plan is an idea most relevant to such pedantic, low-brow activities as the one in which both you and
I are currently no doubt voluntarily choosing to activitely participate. So. I would welcome it if you to stay tuned to these pages for further information on this thing that I call a Great Idea.
Did anyone hear that? It’s not so much that it was the deepest dip my psyche has ever taken, nor that I felt suddenly as if I’d been had—and in such a way that
there’d be no more had left to have (all of my have being so thoroughly, severely and singularly had)—which would be a bad enough sensation to endure without the
act of opening one’s dry, tomorrow-less eyes to the world that’s so swiftly disap pearing, at which I’ve given nothing worth
while, never, not ever, not even in the least,
most certainly nothing to which any of the
remaining inhabitants would want to cling,
might they even have (had) the ability to
fill an ungodly sandwich neatly with a bit
of what of me remains, a smidgeon of tough purple sinew that, once eaten, has the bells of the cathedral clapping so happily that an entire countryside awakens, filled with the
steam and the stink of a passionate and enduring swarm of quivering earthquakes,
metaphorical bellies each and all, aquiver
in their attempts to fill the chin to chop
once-livered soul of a life lived ever dully and with neon representations of what within my last thoughts (they exist!) were of what
the world needs now. surely not something
somebody dug up to smugly and mind-
erasingly protect the liberties of an already
forgotten tender-bun to unschool us all
with what nobody’d ever have known were
the nag-didactic foreshortened swipes of forgetfulness. at this point several drown,
beings agape at such melodramatic spectacle.
each of these winter-watered souls now real deal
gone, soupy human dinner sans dessert for the
deep blue highway’s top-heavy bottom-dwellers,
who’ve managed to evolve enough to belch any
remaining reminder of such talentless taste-free
fricasee, which are forgotten before being gone a
mere minute or two by earth’s entire slew. No
body’s last day’s for naught? For whom, you say?
Those gone so fast I’d forgotten to say. [Now
sounding a bit smitten] But isn’t everybody’s
everything gone? I’m so damned sorry that I
vanished, say the slither-slimed paper planes,
those voiceless anti-legacies. Whilst the motion
of this ocean pays tribute to nonexistence by
chewing up a charcoaled chicken leg so deep-sea
out of sight that it’s henceforth totally out of mind.
What happens next? Well, just imagine a fleet
of chameloenesque lizards running like hell to catch
up with any of that tremendous yet unaccounted
for loss, but directly before their big boss (that
conglomerate of lizard-head) dismisses them one
and all for the remains of the weekend. (Each poor dotty
puff of scaly slough knowing they’ll be let go at the
shittiest minute of the wee-est hour of a miraculously
unmemorable and yet imminently up and coming Monday.)
A million leaves’ kimonos disrobing —Ange Mlinko (from The Blind See Only This World: Poems for John Wieners)
The Anti-Dumdum protest was meant to be exclusionary, exclusive. Sometimes class dis tinctions are full of classlessness, and some times they’re downright classy. But such dys
function is nothing upon which to dwell, surmises Del, this morning’s despondent correspondent. The current miniature word berg of relevance was on the subject
of a group in the East Bay who threw a sex party that somehow acted as a vehement (and, of course, non-violent, except for those in the dungeon, who never voted and were just
there for show, as it were) protest against the hordes of recent horrid government goings-on.
The Rats Were Rodents, Suspense & Suspicions Notwithstanding
The purported murder of Punxsutawney Phil was a red herring, a mere MacGuffin. Long- dead Hollywood citizens (all things being equal,
e.g., sound designers, assistant directors, ingenues, the extras from a nearly infinite variety of madcap scenes, the original novel’s author, authors of novels adapted from movies, Pedro Almodovar, etc.) rolled over beneath their respective [concretized handprints, side walk footprints, looped advertisements of sway
ing breasts found from the tawdriest alleyways
to the most commercial of the high-end drives, tombstones, even the ones with the most inaccurate, most illegible quotes (carved or imprinted in fonts that can be distinguished by a few of the most naked eyes and audibly repeated through mouths that in the most seemingly asymmetrical ways hang below the egg-shapes of such alertly nude eyeballs),
et ceteras]. So, whodunnit? By the time each attendee exits the low-marquee’d
Things That Turn Mornings Into No Sleep the Night Before
Out dancing at the End-up for around 30 minutes. 10:45pm to about 11:45pm. Worried all night about enjambment. Gotcha! Do I look like a poem would dis
tract my evening so intently that it would provide me with
a night of insomnia? Mom calls, ~2am. I’m headed to the corner store up Hyde for the 2nd time in 20 minutes; the first time I couldn’t remember my PIN number on my EBT card, and this particular stroke of midnight had been the 1st
of February. And on the 1st, the poor earthlings get $236 worth of extra food. Or I do. Which sounds like a lot until it is revealed
that what took two trips up Hyde was nearly $60 worth of snack items (if you include mostly non-alcoholic beverages as snack
items). I call Mom back when I’m back home the second (third,
if you count getting home after dancing) time. Wearing the head
phones, I still can’t quite understand her. And she’s memorably
wearing a big fluffy neck brace (so not a metallic brace, but what
are those things called that look like they’re the inflated neck portions of turtle-neck tops that folks wear after having automobile
or ski accidents? A big inflated turtle-neck top – just the portion that
covers the neck without going all the way to the chin). It’s as if she’s
hopping up and down making decorations, but this has to be imagined?
I blather loudly and surely annoyingly about my financial woes. And I’m not even bringing up the guy with what has to be a multiply broken nose bridge, just bitching about money. To mom. Who
matter-of-factly, once a break is found in the airwaves, counters her hyperactive decorating for a party in the kitchen (did she say it was for Mikayla?), lets out an eye-rolling “Haven’t we all been
there?” Totally dry. Not sardonic, even. Like she is telling me to
give up my pedantic woes. But I cannot, because I have such
important goals these next few years, which I do plan to live out.
I mean we all plan to persuasively live out our last years, do we not?
Even if we’ve had that serious conversation with a medical professional
about whatever time might actually (not) be left. Which I haven’t.
But Mom has. And yet experiencing the two of us together in this
moment, despite her clamorings on for well over a decade and a
half now over such possibilities, it doesn’t seem any more or less
ripe on her side for such nonsense than it does o her son’s, who
continues to blather on about the unfairness of his last decade or so.
Finally, I tell her I’ll call her back tomorrow (meaning later today, which
is Sunday). After which I finish doing some filing. Then I think
irritatedly about getting back to the Microsoft and the Google issues.
So basic. So time-consuming. Such an affront to the notion of customer
loyalty and also another knife into the heart of general customer service.
During which I finish one book of poetry (Corbett & gang’s Wieners
anthology) by starting another one (di Prima’s Dinners and Nightmares).
Typing somewhere near the top of my head, almost not thinking of what
I’m even conveying, just doing it sort of as an aside. Still fine with not
An Anthology In Honor Of: Fleshing out the Tenor to Determine the Venerate vs. the Hoggy Submissions, Particularly Among Those Expected to Have Renown of Any Kind (As Can Potentially or Possibly or Maybe Be Pretended to Exist Among such Big Crowded Fishes)
Boy, you can learn a lot by what a revered or venerable (and these words I use lightly, as in the part icular poets could only dream of such things or one might from the outside looking in see so much that can be determined about how each poet, the subject and the writer of
the accolade, or whatever each
deciees to inclue. Should each of
been included. Does each contributor,
does the showcased poet, the subject,
deserve or not deserve such reverence,
or does there become the quick and
bland building of a quickly-assumed pedestal-building stance so as to most often make a fool out of the acolyte and often their meat-hogger.
First one must attempt to begin to set aside all judgment. Second, is there any relation whatsoever between said poet's poem and the poet the anthology is showcasing.
Surely, dear reader of this detour can
begin see what I will be and am getting at
perhaps already. No matter. One should
dig deeply, or at least begin to pick up on
various high-falutin’ poetasters in such
sitches, as we, they, oh especially they
would find themselves numerously seeking
relevance within the pairing. The combinations.
Who agrees? Who are always missing, no matter the closeness or affiliations with the showcased author? Who (oh, check out the poets of the female per suasion) really makes that effort to connect, to poignantly reflect on the connection their poem or their person has with the subject of the anthology
What does the hunting stories tell, that
these ladies could not (or did the ladies
hunt bisexually? multi-sexually?). And
what of those who relay the carousing,
infantile or more mature, should that be
a word that works in what might often
be nothing but brags or something to
elicit laughter by a common sex, particularly?
Of course, because oh the men, so often, and this is just the first fall-back, the easiest. Just throw something out that I just wrote, he must think. And I have done my duty and given the world what they want. A taste of me and my work.
Don’t be led down labyrinths with spite ful or seemingly derogatory or very familiar and vague – with regard to how positive or
negative passages – these may be done in the act of who these two literally did,
poet and (potentially great friend, or long-standing points of irritiation, one to the other), but are more likely to be REAL. Dig deeper, ask questions, figure out the stories that AREN’T told by those that ARE.
In this way, one can begin to learn who best to ask when put in charge or putting oneself in charge of the next great anthology, the end-all, be-all send-up to the next subject of the next anthology showcased and edited meticulously in hopes of building the best capsule of who each of these were to the other and, most particularly, to the anthologied author. Find many examples and tabulate the flim-flam from the heartfelt and perhaps obscure but metaphorically representative of the actual relationship or better still to splice good stuff with something seemingly odd or off-putting which, when studied, becomes the story of one of the most solid friendships and collaborations among human writers, a goldmine, something never known, how coy the writers seem to toy with one another, as if lovers, once or always. A true science lies among the arts, as sciences do, each elevating the other, if the editor has done his job well. This, a job, a taly of infinite
Sounds like a murder mystery with racy overtones. Leading to undertones. An under-ing. I mean this isn’t about the
death of kink, it’s about how I’ve
come to believe that the elevated
significance of kink in the general
hook-up, dating, are we vibing so
can we get down to the business of
doing what people people do thing is,
well, I would love to argue it’s a rele
vant contributing factor to all the stats
about how the kids aren’t having sex anymore. But what do I know (except 48 years of living queer)?
Am I too biased (given when all
boils down I’m surprisingly vanilla trad – I use surprising as it both stuns me at times to realize, and not simply catches anyone who might think
they know how I am (The nerve! I mean,
truly, I wish!) should there be any of those folks out there anymore). Even as un-single as I am, no matter the continually isolating
circumstances of that singularity, it’s just
an exhausting subject to consider with any
severity, and so, I’ll cool it down. It was,
after all, just a hypothesis that’s been swirling
around in my can’t quite stop being the social
anthropologist headspace that is whatever there is of my attic these days. Just a notion to pass along without sounding terribly
old-fashioned (surely I do, but am I?) or over it. Two phrases representative of me that I can never wear well enough. Maybe I should just go back to busting out my
old school controversial notions I’d shrug off as if they were tiny appetizers just to rile people up, like monogamy is a ludicrious construct (that would get everyone going!)
Nobody actually said that. It was barely a misreading. But that night my bones were bored of feisty, fun falls by the wayside (where seashells
are sold). Be bold, I thought. I could see the light. And it was past seven thirty in the evening. We would have just called this night were it not the
middle of summer, and the mos quitoes were hanging low (we al ways think we can hear the whine of their buzz) with the humidity
that’s stuffed into the hot bubble that sits upon the earth and is as tall as we are (maybe five feet three, at best?). We don’t think
much of brides. Well, I certainly don’t. Perhaps the twins do. For all I know, Ginger does. Being one, taking one, how would I have
known the difference, even as the oldest? I was reading of the dream-colored sex of Robert Heinlein’s blob-creatures. Or
were they asexual? Those were definitely orgasms that were happening, rest assured. That’s my recollection, and how
could one forget? My book was lying on my bed, the one that if you peeked over the vinyl off-colored white headboard through the window-
screen you’d see the leaves of the back yard sycamore—the biggest branch of which
I was currently swinging beneath—they’d flap a bit and staer into my face as if they
were reading my mind, should the wind not be blowing them all silly. Sometimes at two or three in the morning, a few might be scritching upon the screen just loud
enough to wake me up, in which case I’d hop upon my knees and stare out over that dirty white headboard checking to make sure the outline of a tornado wasn’t headed directly
toward us from Potato Hill (I’d imagine the ominous shadow one would leave in the light of one of Chaffee’s flares, which were flung into the sky at all hours of the night during
the hottest parts of the summer). Once assured, I’d gather my covers and the Afghan Mom made us each of our fav orite colors (mine had a purple theme),
curl up into it and sleep until it was time
to get up and get ready for school. No
dreams of future families, much less any brides, at least for me, as there
would be Civics and Algebra and Phys ics and Geometry and Band and my new favorite subject, which I would scribble in the journal my granny had
gotten me for Christmas and that I’d eventually fill from cover to cover with it. They didn’t have classes specifically for it, but sometimes it would be covered
watching my future dissolve this morning i take an alternative tack, i dissolve into the beauty of the city that has, what, taken so much from me? has given me such treasure? how else could it be to be here for twenty-five years? on the parchment be tween the greenery of trees, a heckuva frame, i see the outline of the golden gate bridge. it is a view i can own, as if i could pluck and plink it as if it were a miniature harp. what would it sound like, san francisco? i have ideas, but cannot truly know unless i try. and if i were to succeed that is the
moment i’d finally let
go. of reality. of this life.
without even hurling my self off the distinct and recognizable structure
so far in the distance from where i sit on this russian hill bench. should i do it? i think i could. per haps, perhaps, but i will wait until tomorrow, i think, when my head is clearer and my nose a bit warmer.
