Obviously there is something hallucinatory in the hammering of caskets. —Jack Spicer
“Oh, Goddess of San Francisco,” I begin, and then I pause just a bit to wonder who that might be (I have some ideas). I say pay a lot of lip service to the recently de-
parted; actually, I would intervene here to supercede the recently deceased with the cumulative dead, in general. I say pay a lot of lip service to the success-
fully superceded intervention. Humans shouldn’t have expiration dates, either, being people and all. Do I hear no ap- plause from the goddesses’ gods? They
(we) should come and go as we please. Well, it must be relayed, as of course we all know, that they (we) do. Have expiration dates. Which (and here the audience lauds thunder-
ously) “ARE A BIT TO THE RIGHT AND DOWN A TIDGE FROM THE BOT- TOM OF THE BARCODE (THEIR B...s, OUR B....s). At any random moment
there are always a few gods on teevee, watching over us for a few seasons. We know which because they are usually the ones that are uncharac-
teristically mild (nothing but a bow- ling ball in tornado alley, that one tsunami in the little fish pond in the pasture, the heatwave that hits the
beehive...and only the beehive, etc.). They each (these gods) take an extra long spring break that often lasts through at least the summer, if not infinity. At
least this used to be the case. Omni- potence has its own downsides (it is here that I become hungry and think instead its own drumsticks;
it being omnipotence and all). I.e., try attempting to visit this life in an unusually concealed godlike manner. This trick makes any concealer’s eye-
wear much less blatant (just ask the eyewear, the most vaudevillian of the accoutrements). And speak- ing of pizzazz, I’m a HUGE fan!
What I do is split it into 10ths (no matter the original size, although it turns out to most often be personal), give or take, and split the glorious gore
with my pals down the sidewalk. My sidewalk pals occasionally sleep in con- cerned tents. But lately there’s been a lot of tentlessness down the sidewalk. Oh,
and there’s also the pizza problem, and the various skirmishes that ensue. I’ve seen some doozies, let me tell you! And, lest any of you forget,
I am telling you. Or am I? Anyway, a- mongst my pals down the sidewalk, there is of course Hammock Man, who always gets the fir (or maybe it is a furry cedar, or, as we call it,
“That Christmas Tree Most Prickly and Most Dense!”) all to himself, and there’s the one or two who get the fire for the night (varying pals, each of whom, on their fire night,
we call “The Nesters”), there’s those who pre- fer to get caught quickest by the rising sun (and we call this rather elite crew “Morning People”). Hammock Man has it best.
He’s always hidden from reality during each segue between a pair of days (at least those with some semblance of sunlight throughout, I should clarify). Hammock Man loves it up there. He calls
his gigantic cedar or fir tree “Christmas.” Houdini, he most definitely is not, as the falls from such heights have been the catalyst for at least three broken toes (never adjusted),
his right leg popping right out of his pelvis (we, neither of us, yet know the technical term for this, but it has got to be the most painful thing I have ever personally witnessed anyone endure, for sure). And
there was one fall after which an urgent surgery en- sued (something about a few of the tree’s needles stuck clean through his spine, which makes his cedar seem more of a pine, if you ask me). Ever since that
particular incident, Ol’ Hammock’s been severely in love with the word coccyx; so much so that the tentants and the tentless have become a little bit annoyed by the man whose every day is Christmas.
This same crew, nevertheless, manage the appear-
ance (at least) of a genuine laugh every single time
Hammock utters the word coccyx. “Coccyx [laughter]!”
I presume you get the picture. But Hammock Man, at least
by our calculations, has never even emitted as much as a chuckle (when it comes to laughter and its kin, that is). And you can be fairly assured that he has led quite the extensive existence, too. But he does have those lovely
and perpetual rose-red cheeks, which always convey a kind of laughter. They also, I’d say, convey em- barrassment, shyness, and just maybe a bit of a crush in the near vicinity (or perhaps perpetually some-
where in his meaty head). Or Christmas, I suppose. And what is Christmas but a reminder of Easter. Which is but a reminder (for me, at least) of the oft-performed ritual amongst my pals down the
sidewalk which some call “The Coffin Tent,” some “The Old Tentament,” and others, simply, “Oh, Body Bag!” And this group will often sing it as a song to the tune of O Tannenbaum (replacing the
title of the song with their phrase for the ritual). Sure, it’s a ritual that verges on the grotesque, perhaps, given the morbidity and all, but what’s death but a natural event we each get to experience
in one way or the other (be that the experience to end all experiences is grotesque and beautiful—that precious beauty that is in the eye of the beholder; that beauty that can turn the grotesque into, well,
beauty itself, or be it anywhere in between)—so I say why not celebrate in some way or another, no matter how often the occasion; I’ve rarely ever had the notion to look for any excuse for a bit of a celebration, after all,
no matter how it might be partaken. Plus, a coffin made of tent is so less problematic than the hollowed out trunk of a tree. especially as there’s not a single nail or hammer to worry about.
And, think about it: the “life” of the party, so to speak, in certain inclement weather (that which is particularly wet) is easily slid by the pallbearing facsimile (or two) with a fair bit of ease, all the
way down to the bay (which isn’t as far away as one would likely imagine), and even when it’s a dry day, it’s not such a struggle to drag down the sidewalk, or the avenue, depending on the
time of death, given rush hour and all (or, rather, given the time of the discovery of the corpse, I interventionally supersede, caught up in my own little moment, as it were...)—although on
these days the comfy casket will likely encounter a snag or two, inevitably gathering a few fairly gaping holes on its sleep-bottom; but no one seems to mind, or even notice much. Once at the bay we each
do our thing (we are a diverse crew, for certain, so there is quite an assortment of things that might be done at the tail end of this path that be- comes the besotted burial of the tented carcass).
But soon after arrival at the bay’s edge, the tented body gets clumsily tossed into the metallic- colored waters of the bay and then it half-floats away, often in the direction, as it turns out, of that spot
directly behind “The Tentament,” as we call it. Or that’s what Herman always calls it, anyway.
No more wor rying or pussy footing around. No muss no f uss no eggs hells. You th ink I’m sad? W ell, of course, said the horse. It’s a curse to be cl ung to by naught but
a broad with a string
bikini or an equator
the size of a speedo.
It wouldn’t even
matter if my
quicksand brain knew the quagmire it was in (with me). It’s a good day to boo gie. Cuz it’s a good day. Right? Your kimono’s ask ance like your (I wan na say face, but) com mon sense. Since who wants to be a millionaire? Not me. It’s more the being with the one that gas ps that automatic ga sp (that one in a million). Yr gash & the electric gas oo zes in slimy little streamlets down your chin. With y ou, it’s urchin on ev ery menu. Uni, yo u say like correct ive tape for the ty pewriter. The non electric kind of type writer. Like the one you always use whi lst riding on your uni cycle like an urchin.
Fast, furious, never having met. Just dat ed, night after night (your days). These days the TNT explodes, coming out of the web’s holes like smoke ris- ing from ears. Y our ears, too sweet to smoke. There’s no soul anyway, as you like to say. Or is that all in my head? We con quered each o ther, ch ained our selves to gether th rough that hole in the center of the earth. They dug all the way through it, you know. I didn’t believe it either, how magma cures all ills. In fact, I think, as I chase the ch ain, my attempt to find our end of this world, until I can s ee my toes melt, I did not be lieve in anything but you.
The usual definition of fun is: quite comfortable when they are. —John Ashbery
Where there is food to be had there is food to be eaten, di- gested, bowed down to with smallish scythe. It is possible that seeds or seedlings dropped accidentally between the front door and the kitchen might take hold and root within this home of solitude, where once the tears of heartache or tears of laughter from the children, the mother, the decades-gone father might have made it seem as if the Great Power brought life a- fresh into this dank abode. Life can get lost. What of the aftermath of such a loss. Depending on the loss, she mutters as she sinks deeply into the cupboard to pull out a forgotten biscuit stick. The jackpot of the year, she goes on about the unopened crack- ers. Salt on the wound. Salt on the sea. Salt on the chops and, if lucky, a winter cube for the battle-ax, dry of but a trickle of milk for over a year now, which she still sees through her cataracts as The Heifer, a gift from a long-gone pastor of a now non-existent church (unless the husks of corn steaming through a long- forgotten purgatory be a congregation; an existence in search of the next set of poor souls that trudge through the hollow and ascend onto this lost stretch of flat, ex- pansive scalp of land, with its thinning, dun- colored, gently-swaying, uncut stubble). That hag of a heifer who’d given but that trickle for over a year now. Ah, but she had her golden years—her udder swollen, butter and milk for the ages—even a few delicate cheeses, she al- most grins, almost cries, her five grown children (there were two addition- al that were still-born and one dead of the can- cer, not even a toddler) now somewhere out on the Great Frontier: for gold, for dreams of a less dank existence, for anything but this. She looks askance toward the bolted door, never knowing anything but the dank and, there- fore, knowing nothing of dank, the odor of its mildew and mold a sour luster with which she has aways inhabited without judgment. She walks the distance between kitchen and door, toenails hitting the dirt floor of her home where she’s lived alone for some eleven years now, her toes so curled from the years spent threshing for ex- istence, for subsistence. She bends down after brushing the wealthiest of the middling splashes of green on the floor of her home with the nails of her feet. The shock of coolness that instantly flows upward, from the bottom of her feet to her breast, has her breath momentarily caught in a brief but clear encounter with feeling— that elusive desire so easy to for- get when a life has long seen nothing save the depravity of a steadfast home and the wild prairie that envelops it. The devil you know, she sud- denly says, as if the phrase were something of a delightful exple- tive. And she plucks the green from the floor and she takes it into her mouth, all but the dry-caked root, which she holds at her lips as she lets the babes of leaf sit up- on her tongue and wid- en her cheeks for a few seconds, savoring, more of an abrupt in- halation than a swal- lowing, of that shal- low sweetness that is is the brief vapor that the leaves give as they wilt enough to gain a bit of traction to- ward inevitability.
any spin gets red uced to suspen se. cliff side full of gossi p from which t o hang over. I crave truth hopin g it’s much more. comp lain of the inv estiga tion of the fire crack er’s sen se of self. and you’ll smoke; you’ll find the mirrors.
remember: we place top priorities at the top of the list
it’s Dharmail Glockwood (get email addy)
Nelly Tinfoily Tolbert (note to self: new character’s name)
replace lost friends with real ones
same goes for preoccupation of dodo exes (replace, replace, then place dodos out of mind/out of sight) (note: can check off; but leave on list as reminder; keep up the good work!!)
pat self on back on occasion
Email Blur B (note to self: new title; found on Worksmack’s website)
One of these things is not like the other, she sings, putting on her mismatched pair of socks, which she thoroughly believes, thanks to the fact that he had, she now remembers, just recently been informed of the fact that she had recently performed a few spon- taneous acts that could quite well be interpreted (or as she tends to think in such cases, could be debated) as being questionable; such as the old monogamy argument or, as he would put it, the old marr- iage-in/appropriate quandary. As her guilt built within, she knew this was why she, ob- sessive compulsive to the core, had been dealt the pair of mismatched socks to begin with. He was the launderer, after all (to her credit, she most often did the cooking and the dog- walking, while the two of them “equally shared” the housecleaning, although even she knew that the word “equally,” if not also the word “shared,” did not fit justly into the vicinity of reality. As for the mismatched sock, and whether this was yet another example of his passive- aggressive method of seeking revenge, which he would always grinningly call justice, to which she’d always zing him back with the cliché, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind!! ... Well, although it was next to imposs- ible for her to spend her ent- ire workday wearing socks that didn’t match (in this par- ticular case, not even slightly), she could not help but to titter a bit and the pair of unmatched revenge. One might say she even glowed with obvious joy during and after her initial reaction to his joke (during which there may have been a swear word or two involved). it was, after all, he who’d (just like every weekday morn- ing handed her the paper bag filled with her dinner and her pair (or un-pair today) of work- socks, as she walked out the door and into the day. And even though it was a funny little titter, it was also the same sound she always made when she laughed in earnest—mean- ing it was her real laugh; some- thing her three (or, at times, four) best friends would heartily verify (quite often along with some untittering, more quantifiably genuine laughter of their own). This wacky laugh of hers, which to her was not wacky at all, of course, quite often had a way to make strangers, new acquaint- ances, quite uncomfortable upon hearing the first few times (espec- ially when it was unusually protract- ed; or multiply repeated within a relatively short duration). Never- theless, the tittering had ironically enough been a significant ingre- dient of the circumstances of their very first meeting (the meeting of her and him, that is). It was in that cliché of environs in which we certainly assume a fairly high percentage of lovebirds wind up, well, being lovebirds (with varying durations ranging from cliché’d—she really loved that word, she thought—singu- lar night to the very long-term en- gagement; a word which had her tittering again for a moment). And, these thoughts were, in actuality, buzzing around in her skull at the time, she just could not release her mind of a bombardment of happy and nostalgic thoughts from the past twenty years that had taken residence in “the attic’ (his phrase) for a few days now. For in a matter of days, roughly equivalent to the days in which her mind had been thusly preoccupied, the two of them would see the twentieth anniversary of the night in which they had their wedding vows, which transpired deep in the entrails of a gorgeous cathedral in the middle of nowhere, Vermont, where she was now picturing as if a camera in the cathedral on that very day, the two of them and the officiary standing the deep- est within, in front of a modest-sized group of their respective family members and close friends. They had, in in fact, met only a few weeks before in a bar that was somewhat local to the two of them, although neither had ever been there before, and had certainly never met the other until that day when she’d barely noticed (at first) a rather nervous gentleman take an ex- tended amount of time seating himself at the empty (except for her, and now him) long bar— upon the top of a barstool that was, with respect to her, directly to her right. She had already given the bartender her card to close out the tab, and the last remnant of the order for which she was pay- ing sat at her right elbow, practically filled, since it had only as of yet been given a singular sip. The man at last situated his butt some- what solidly upon the tall stool, when she felt him tap at her (and rather loudly) upon her elbow. Or she thought he’d tapped. She quickly turned her head to the right, head down- ward, eyes upward, aiming directly into his, and with a clear, ready-to- tell-this-end-of-the-night rapscallion-what-was-what look (which had become a rote performance which generally began with how happily single she presently was—how much, in fact, that she absolutely adored being single—and which ended with something akin to ...so ya might as well give it up now, fella!). But. Just as she caught his eyes in the gaze of hers, she understood that this guy had decid- edly NOT been vying for her attention, at least not in any way that seemed (she had suddenly deemed) inappropriate (and she was very perceptive). She was momentarily mystified, and remained frozen in that missile-precise gaze of hers for what would’ve been, from any objective perspective within the nearly empty bar, an awkwardly long time. So, rather than pay at- tention to what he had actually done (which was an extension of the awk- ward duration of situating himself on the barstool, ex- cept but slightly more potent- ially catastrophic): which was that he had managed to tip her last drink, which had been a tumbler almost entirely filled with Bloody Mary, which was (and still is; she is one of those rare folks who understand the drink to be undeniably non-spec- ific with respect to the app- ropriate time of day to im- bibe) her favorite cocktail (and, it had to be admitted, she got a very specific kind of joy from ordering one at one—or even half- past one—right before a local bar or restaurant stopped serving any alcohol-instilled drink whatsoever, the law being the law, as it were). So, not only was the thin sleeve of her blouse drenched by the veritable blood of Mary, but so was the general vicinity (or, more truthfully, the entire vicinity) of the section of that same thin blouse which covered her right breast. In fact, there were even a few splashes that made their individual ways upon her slightly-rounded, and completely unadulterated (until now, of course, but in particular without even a swath of make-up) and by now giddily- flushed cheeks; glimmer- ing red splotches on both the left and the right, thanks to her swift turn of intended reproach. This hap- pened in a much more drawn out time in the minds of the both of them than could have literaly been pos- sible, as they would later, and often, recount it. It would be told in the company of friends, per- haps after a long and hearty meal or in front of a Christmas tree. It would sometimes occur as what would seem an anecdotal segue from whatever came directly be- fore it, or as an almost comed- ically staged performance that would seem to spontaneously erupt. And their audience was always rapt, amused, admiring and envious (often all at once), even though most had already heard it, had seen its half- reenactment/half fantastical- performance-piece, at least once or twice before. This bit would also occur routinely with no one else present, just the two of them, sometimes in quite the intimate manner, and just as often at a seeming- ly random time as it happened at times that might seem less arbitrary, such as after watching a particularly sweet sitcom at home on the living room sofa together, or while driving (which would most often occur with her behind the wheel, him in the passenger seat—unless they were in a group of some sort, in which case he would usually drive while she sat in the middle of the back seat, the “life of the party,” as always, their somewhat dinged Pontiac either up or down the Pacific Coast Highway). On some occ- asions their performance came out in sultry whispers, filled with innuendo, as they were lying, side-by- side at bedtime, both of them in an almost dream-state trance, directly before the two fell deeply and almost simultaneously into sleep for the night (or it might begin in the same type of dream-state, before they decidely did not fall asleep for the night), after the lights were finally turned out. Sometimes it began early of a morning, one of them trying to wake the other so as not to have either of them oversleep for work, or whatever the day held in store for each of them, whether it would transpire with them together
or whether they’d go their separate ways for the duration of the day. This routine of theirs might take on new and exaggerated changes, or witty, more subtle ones, but it always ended, in that infinitely- envied way wherein not one soul would have ever disbelieved that a fragment of what they told was the least bit untrue and, whether cognizant or not by either member of this dynamic duo, spoke in absolute unison, with: And it was love at first sight. To which she would add that she had never even paused, not for one tiny moment, until well after they walked out of that bar (emptying it together newly emboldened, their insides buzzing with the giddiness of youth) to see the mess he and the Bloody Mary had made of her and her blouse. After which he’d add something like how he had been such an awkward fellow until he had met her.
We had a farm in Arkansas, I picture myself as Meryl Streep almost whispering (except still in that Out of Africa Dutch/ African accent). I am a couple of miles from being a true hillbilly (and while I have The Ballad of Jed Clampett play- ing full volume in my head I am seeing Eva Gabor, or a much more modern Paris Hilton; in other words, The Beverly Hill- billies in rev- erse. Why is that? I wonder.)
Anyway, I am an Arkansan in San Francisco. And, while I have had my ups and downs, at least I still have my humor about me. And my pride. An am- algamation (truth be told) of humor and pride of South- ern, Midwestern, Northeastern and, most assuredly, Western, from the good old USA.
