HEAVEN HAD A PASS-KEY

8. THIS HEAVEN HAD A PASS-KEY

The metaphysical preacher was holding my hand and he said something like 'he leadeth me to lie down in still waters' but I can't remember and for all I know it could have been 'he leadeth me down to the waters of his still' a country boy backwoods drinking joke if I ever heard one OR he could have just been taking me to Stillwater's - some bar/pub frequented by those fey religious types who haunted the shoddy waterfronts of any city - the Edgar Allen Poe's of overtime so to speak - but I told him instead of that let's read the racing form and settle down together but he laughed and said 'Hoagy Carmichal could make a song of anything you say my boy my boy my lovely lovely boy' (I was fourteen and had just invented jetting) : so anyway I got the fuck out of there and enlisted in the Salvation Army and was never heard from again but the things I learned in that service still hold me in good stead - things like the Empire State Building has 721,000 rivets and only two were done incorrectly and the subway series is really just a line of railroad cars underground the Queen of Sheba was a man the spot where Broadway meets 12th is holy and there are men REALLY REALLY men who survived World War I still living in the off-limits caves of Central Park but this was back in 1968 I was living in a hellhole at 509 e.11th Street stealing military vehicles and putting people up in my safe-house of draft-resisters on their way to Canada three apartments on the second floor where nobody idly played but everyone was nervous and it was right next to Paradise Alley on the corner (I've written about this all before so read backwards if you can) the government cars were sanded and painted across the street and we got 2 hundred bucks a pop from the Puerto Rican body-shop bastards who took the cars uptown (way) for resale to the masses and people died so what - Groovy and his girlfriend and then Billy Jo and Holly somehow ended up together chopped up like meat in my mother's old steamer trunk from 1923 that had crossed the ocean in 1898 with my criminally insane and now long dead grandfather pulling in from Greece and Italy or Albania or somesuch cranky bullshit - I couldn't never care about the past but it somehow always seemed to either show up uninvited or to be gaining on me nonetheless - and this Heaven had a pass-key but one I never could find (and this shit's all true you just can't make it up).

TAKE WHAT THE TOLL-MAN GIVES YOU

7. TAKE WHAT THE TOLL-MAN GIVES YOU:

Just just look look just look at all this - take the token that the toll-man gives you and ride ride out ride along the edges the edge where the roadway bends to the valley where the trees are hugging the edging where the branches of great arched elms slip slippingly and seriously down looming large as they shade the road the road and make they make no noise look look back even as you pass them - it is all quiet and majestic.

SOME KIND OF APRIL SOME KIND OF MAY

6. SOME KIND OF APRIL SOME KIND OF MAY:

It was some kind of April some kind of May and the flowers were growing on the lawn and the trees had already brought forth the leaves of Summer as the boys in the charthouse band had taken the stage in the little Victorian Park bullshit bandshell the town had erected for parties and parades and two guys I watched came out with a barrel and fireworks and the brass band playing Sousa marches was tuning up from what sounded like Hell itself while the crippled mayor and his pablum steeds spouted bromides and platitudes blarney and greed - a good speech it is said has them all mixed in one - but no one was listening as some human cannonball was brought out in E-flat and stuffed into the tube and they lit the fuse as a loud crash ensued - the guy went flying while all in flames and landed thirty yards away dead like a brick and fired up too and they tried to revive him but all the rescue guys were either drunk or in the band - the ribbons came down and the last I'd heard it was some Memorial Day for the record-books : three dead fourteen burned and one retarded kid suddenly brought back to full and clear and precisely-perfect mental health - which I guess wasn't saying much for anyone else.

'IF YOU'RE A FOX'

5. 'IF YOU'RE A FOX' - COLLEGE KIDS ARE LIKE THAT THESE DAYS:

'Women should be obscene and not heard' said the markings on the wall by the grinding edge of the yellowed bridge which somehow took people over the little dam which collected water for the ducks and geese - yet no one appreciated a God-damned thing in retrospect and everyone kept clapping for something but all I heard was the Funeral March played in double-time too fast for slow walking but too slow to hum and the table-top gumbo was being served to the crowd by elves in tophats with white aprons that read 'Show-Pan Brothers Catering - from our kitchen for you're bitchin' GOOD TIME!' and the entire thing was so stupid even I couldn't believe my eyes BUT college kids these days are like that aren't they and this was some form of revelry with kid-glove girls looking to score and high-fivin' guys on the make and the everyday ordinary blandness of the scene made me wonder why life went on in such a way as to make a thirty-thousand dollar school-year attractive for anyone and I understood at that moment that like hounds at the chase it's all only valuable IF YOU'RE A FOX in which case getting captured or not you're still having fun.

-I can't toot your horn so I'll have to toot mine.

IT WAS PRETTY OBVIOUS AND SO WAS I

4. IT WAS PRETTY OBVIOUS AND SO WAS I:

Well I needed you to be my talk show host while holding a strand of your hair in my hand "pure protein" I said to the guy in the band and his tin-type hat and the scenes of the land - "I want tits and I wish to drink gasoline" - he said that while hunched over the metal table with two other people looking on all bunched together like a tribe of heads and though everyone laughed there was no one really listening and back and forth like this it went - the kite the fuhrer the talk of the rent the matrix the money and time well spent - but everyone knew there was a difference between style and time as the words people spin lose their power as dominance fades and some horoscope-reader with a libby for lenses came down from the mount wearing shades and proceeded to read what he thought were signs and portents but turned out to be the hands of the maid (her name was Clarita and she came by each morning) and History tells us that eventually nothing matters ice will melt and all glass shatters but so much of that was known already that nothing caused much of a start..."that's a sharp outfit" Henry said "you look like an asset to the DMV" and the girl with the make-up case had come over speaking back to Henry and she said (as I remember) "sometimes there were really bad things too like the time two Christmases ago when I slept with a guy named Arthur he was seventeen but he told me twenty-five but I knew the truth all along and he lived with his uncle in a houseboat and there were stick-figure men in karate poses on the shelves in the bedroom and Polaroids of teen-age girls at pool parties with wet limp pig-tails pulled back from their heads and he fucked like a sergeant-major - I mean I didn't mind a thing - but him and his uncle too were Civil War buffs and they had to leave the next day for an encampment somewhere and I said 'ain't you gonna' freeze your asses off?' and he smiled back and said 'not now but that's all part of the fun anyway' and I think he meant me with that 'not now' stuff but I never found out for sure and since then I haven't seen him again" and as she walked away everyone was checking her out (it was pretty obvious and so was I) but what is it anyway about girls who tell people about their sex life ? you know they must want the attention and so looking at their asses as they walk away and slithery and curved must all be part of what they want - otherwise why bother and who cares? - and then two skinny kids with sideburns came in asking for Martin Arnold (he was the guy who lived two doors away) and I said "not sure if he's here or not it's Oscar night you know and all he cares about is movie-stars" and they said "yeah we know that's why we're here he wanted us to fix his wall-sized TV" and I said "hmmm didn't know he had one is it a big wall?" and they laughed "it don't matter the size of the wall it's just something they call it" and only later did we find out he was not at home anyway having stayed two days over in Nantock waiting for the next lottery day to arrive and when he did get back I told him what had happened and he shrugged and said "no I was gonna' get one but them TV's ain't cheap and I had no winnings" and that was the end of that - the two kids having been long forgotten even though one had left his bike behind "what have they been eating?" Martin asked "Cornish game hens" I replied.

I WAS THE ONE THAT WASN'T

3. I WAS THE ONE THAT WASN’T:

It never came as a surprise to me that leftover people gravitated to each other – thus the clutches of bums and cripples the indigent and unwanted the criminal and the piker all hanging together at streets’ ends and grassy parks along roadways or under abutements – for a singular language of sameness and a shared sense of love and lost-love and bad opportunity and missed fortunes all come to one piece as around each other they shelter and harbor whatever left there may be and it’s heard in their words and seen in their eyes how they each clamor to share in the solace which each somehow affords the other – the man with the one bad eye and disfigured face meets the one with the withered hand (and together they enter grace)...

SO THEN WORSHIP THE SUN....

2. 'SO THEN WORSHIP THE SUN YOU MINDLESS IDIOTS' [Dan Chiasson] - and the rest of the world shalle know ye for the cracker-barrel creaytures ye really are.

The SunThere is one mind in all of us, one soul,
who parches the soil in some nations
but in others hides perpetually behind a veil;
he spills light everywhere, here he spilled
some on my tie, but it dried before dinner ended.
He is in charge of darkness also, also
in charge of crime, in charge of the imagination.
People fucking flick him off and on,
off and on, with their eyelids as they ascertain
with their eyes their love's sincerity.
He makes the stars disappear, but he makes
small stars everywhere, on the hoods of cars,
in the compound eyes of skyscrapers or in the eyes
of sighing lovers bored with one another.
Onto the surface of the world he stamps
all plants and animals. They are not gods
but he made us worshippers of every
bramble toad, black chive, we find.
In Idaho there is a desert cricket that makes
a clocklike tick-tick when he flies, but he
is not a god. The only god is the sun,
our mind—master of all crickets and clocks.

dan chiasson