ALL THE BAGGAGE OF ABSALOM IS USELESS

23. ALL THE BAGGAGE OF ABSALOM IS USELESS:

"I don't eat tomatoes I never did I hate trains and they never run on time anyway and anywhere ten people are gathered they're not gathered in my name you can be sure of that and there's no fool like an old fool but chimneys gather no moss and a rocking horse is as good as an elephant to a blind man on a galloping horse or is that in a galloping hearse I really do forget but NO MATTER for fourteen siblings in one big cradle are all I've ever lost and today's posts are piled to drive into the quaggy past on which impermanent palaces balance and if God were an angel I'd be the head of a pin and all matter is only that - things left over from Day One and never corrected : clods clover marble iron rat bull bird and all the rest YOU can have the lot of them and I bet - sexually speaking - that Adam never made an Eve that wouldn't make an Adam - and there's Theology for you buster but if the word GOD is to have any use it must include everything and so I feel we all must have in our bones at least a bit of some kind of Pantheism and a reverence for all of creation - for if any one part of it THEN the whole and the only thing we can do is to keep on finding out as much carefully controlled common sense about the world as we can NO MORE OR NO LESS but not for profit or gain GOOD GOD not for profit or gain for therein lies the Devil and DID YOU KNOW that 'Then is Now and the star you steer by is gone - its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane as spider floss on my cheek and a light from the zenith spun when the slowworm lay in her lap fifty years back' and wheat lies in excrement while seeds thrive in the corruption of their flowers and the poet Aneurin counted men slain by Northumbria's conquerors several hundred years ago as if it were a simple yet doleful task and the moon shone over the corpses for nothing while he tallied and the restlessness of the imagination is such that it lies with one to dream of another ! and it was William James who said:

'Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at a definite point in time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a seagull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France.'

and he said it all for good luck and not much more but for every set of ears which hears ten million more hear nothing of it and waltz away in their own drunken haze - stupidity flounders no parson and idiocy never really sunk a ship but the greatest stars in he Heavens are the ones not yet charted and the telescope to show us PARADISE and all its minions has not yet been made but the man who grinds the glass to level all the Heaven's refracted and grandiloquent angles will surely bring us God in a jar to show as proof of where he has been and FINALLY my brothers (please listen up) :
'Look how clouds dance,
under the wind's wing,
and leaves delight
in transcience.'
and I have NO MORE to say."

TINY MONTGOMERY STREET

22. TINY MONTGOMERY STREET (Sometimes Sad Whatever Else):

There was a time mind you when we all lived together on Tiny Montgomery Street thinking we were alone and sometimes we'd make fun of the street name which was really Montgomery Street in Jersey City but the situation was so dire we called it Tiny Montgomery Street after a song or something Emil talked about and then he used to joke about whether he'd rather live on Jones Street or Great Jones Street when he got back to New York City same stuff like that kind of joking thing but nobody ever really followed it so we moved on and once we stole an old Buick that was down on its last legs sinking pretty low to the ground but just as it sat in some yard with a key in it that's just how we stole it and rode off and it worked for about 3 days as we rode around here and there and even got back into New York City with it three bucks for the Tunnel and then we abandoned it when it finally needed gas left it on the West Side Highway just off to the side and walked away with our stuff but it was pretty fun for the time we had it cars are interesting like that you can get around with them but sometimes you can't and everything stops and even though you're in a car you're going nowhere and all around you in the city the people walking are getting more places than you so we didn't miss it much for sure but there's nothing like the air and the windows down and the feeling you get passing by places you know as you drive along as if you owned the street and everything and the passing portraiture can sometimes astound as you see the tall buildings from street level all twisted and crazy or the monumental scale of steel and glass and stone and brick and the enormous entryways with their big numbers and frontages where people enter and leave in clumps and the third or fourth floor windows you can see from street-level all cluttered with papers and desk and busy-work stuff and the signs in the windows above the street 'Conde Nast Rothfell Brokers Granite City Lenders Abacus Decorations Pummelio Draperies and Fabrics National Time-Keeping Company Florimund Travel Argosy Books Trendy Costume Company Network Medical Systems Inc. On-Line Solutions The Mad Hatter' it all goes by in a rush and blur too fast to even talk about and just by listening you learn so much (like the guy talking about the wartime photographs of Vietnam just found taken by North Vietnamese photographers themselves neglected all these years stuffed in boxes and many many negatives just found wrapped in cardboard and placed in a box lined with kernels of rice to keep out moisture and all the men who once took these propaganda and wartime photographs from the North's perspective for once not the American or the South's are now all in their late seventies and eighties and are barely reminiscent of what they did back then but some can remember easily the tiniest detail of some of the pictures things like the hundreds of boots cast-off on the last day of the war by the fleeing North Vietnamese soldiers who in their haste to flee took off their uniforms and boots and clothing and wanted desperately to mingle and mix in with the peasants they returned to immediately so as not to be seen as having been soldiers just the morning before and the roadway in the photo is littered quite literally with a thousand boots and the fleeing cars and buses are just running over them and a few people on motorbike are seen heading in the other direction) and everywhere you go people are talking about something and you're walking along to just take it all in and without the car then you realize you are really part of a big middle-mass of life and activity all amidst the lunge and poke of sound and emphasis and meaning and emotion up and down every street and corner and block and avenue the attitude and the circumstance of living is worked out hundreds lunching hundreds for coffee hundreds at the curb hundreds on their way and so "hey forget the car" you wind up saying glad to see it's dead and gone and it's cheaper too to walk away and I remember once there was this girl with him Tea was her name (she called it 'Tay ya' I guess it sounded better) and she stayed with us for some time a couple of months anyway and her and Emil got pretty tight with each other even though it was difficult in our situations to move in on anyone he wasn't stopped no-how by that anyway Tea stayed along with us for a while doing pretty much whatever we did she was a nice girl about thirty maybe straggly hair sort of blond attractive and interesting too and Emil he used to say "You've got to remain interesting in this life for it to be worth anything the last thing I want to see is a boring bunch of pricks who can't do anything differently or fresher than the next so no matter what format we have to do it in we've got to remain interesting and even startling to ourselves to give life that little kick that keeps it from being tiresome and the kind of thing that brings you down so let's go" he'd talk like that a lot a pep-talk to nobody in particular but that's what kept him bringing people around himself he was like the leader in charisma of any of the homeless and low-life's we ever were with he could get people to do just about anything for him if maybe not with him it was funny that whole scene was funny and it was different then too because a lot of what today is considered important and valuable areas were then just ruination I remember seeing boarded up doors and piles of cast-off vegetables and foods along the curbs and broken bags of garbage and debris windows gone doorways boarded the very streets that today draw thousands then were derelict places where'd you'd sometimes be afraid to be seen for fear of your life or getting beat up or stabbed or anything like that the old broken storefronts out of business from twelve years before the broken bannisters and porches and stoops on the houses the one after the other horrible junked cars broken twisted abandoned left there the dogs the kids the old people just staring off into some space it was like some tired old war zone of rubble and destruction being passed off as a city but that's where we lived that's the stuff we walked in it was an entire under-culture of people with no meaning or nothing and so much of that is gone now it's all so different but hey this is memory speaking remember and memory gets its privileges and I spoke to Tea once myself as she was simply and quietly sitting amongst the trees and greenery of a park bench across from the old pet store with all the birds in the window and we'd just the night before been playing off this blues crowd that had gathered outside one of those Bleecker Street clubs grubbing dollars and drinks and whatever we could from the gathered kids and it worked pretty well and she turned to me that day and said "you know I could have been into California by now probably all settled and with a place to live and everything only if I'd done what my people wanted me to do back then which was just simply straighten up and take some schooling and they would support me wherever I wanted to go or do and I did at one time want to be in Hollywood just to be around the stars and all and maybe get picked up by some talent scout or something working tables at a cafe or bar and then I coulda' played myself well and gotten a few roles and things and become a star like on TV and the movies people like Goldie Hawn or Lee Remick or Michelle Pfeiffer or any of them they ain't got nothing on me not looks not talent it's all a matter of luck yet here I am walking around for hunger and want driving all those old thoughts out of my head because they still hurt you know I remember back in '67 when they was casting right over there for Hair and I passed on that and Sam Shepherd was around then too and a lot of the guys now that you see getting older they were just starting and were young too back then taking their chances Hoffman and Pacino and a lot of others but what did I know I just wanted something right then and there because at that time you know tomorrow was a long way off and now I'm in it and here it is like they say you don't miss your water till your well runs dry and now I got nobody anywhere nobody left I'm all alone and that's sometimes sad whatever else" but that was all back when there was changes everywhere and we were just poor slobs but they always listened to Emil even when he'd be gone and now hell the millennium itself has changed around us and whenever I look up I see but a swarm of new modern young faces peering back at me from some stupid place like bars now that have their own brews and copper kettles suspended from the ceiling and they call themselves 'Harvest' or whatever and kids flock to them fill them up drinking and laughing and the old workmen's bars they're all gone I can't even remember where half of them was anymore because all the work that used to go with them is gone too and the old guys are all died off and we bury their memories with them too that's how the old world passes the old ways disappear and everywhere there's gawky kids in strange pants and they laugh and it seems like that's all they do sitting at these places eating food like it was always there but we have to and had to work for it so it meant something first but never for them and they don't understand what's been lost or removed they just play on and sometimes now as I remember even Tea wasn't nothing but a stupid kid at times or at least that's the way it seemed - you can tell people by what they talk about and their references and things and the thing I hate the most is being naive and innocent because my God that's got to go away immediately it's of no value at all once you're an adult and so those are the people who really get me going the ones who fall for shit and take on a story and run with it the kids are like that it's always a cause or a reason or a mission until they weary and get tired of it and then suddenly they can rationalize a way out of the situation that had just been consuming them.

SO MUCH FOR THAT

21. SO MUCH FOR THAT (the 'Year of Best Intentions'):

OK then I'm not sure where any of that came from but looking at the paper on the wall I'm thinking pure chance - an old barn pattern with little chickens and a rooster and a weathervane and a red barn and barnyard repeated ad infinitum in some older format of what once somehow was bleakly called 'early American' and which style graced many a 1960's kitchen and kitchenette (two more words gone by the wayside) and which is now probably all gone (yet here still holding the connections to food - pig-out country dining in a most happy fashion) and a calendar on the wall proclaims the 'year of best intentions' but it's inconsequential for sure since it's for a tire company so I cannot make out any connection there - except for tires on vehicles which take people to endless eateries along the highway but...OH NO!!...not that again! - and the Michelin Man was a fat tire pig and they're round and filled up and roly-poly too but who knew that back in the old days anyway when starch and food and all that could very well get you through the bleakest of the cold winter months when you most needed some fat to work off to make the needed body heat to survive the frost and work of the lesser-food season which came upon you - and I never knew a fat farmer an obese dairyman and I never saw one who couldn't work off a meal baling hay or throwing a few milk cans around and year after year of best intentions shall make Jack a thin boy 'see saw Marjory Daw Jack shall have a NEW master and he shall make but a penny a day because he can't work any faster' I thought I'd heard that not so long ago and if that too was early American then call me late for supper (yum yum I can't wait to eat again and 'the smell of pig meat warmed my heart' said Anthony Victor Lavalle 'the pleasures of food were stolen from me in the interest of being svelte/but now it's over I'm done with that/I'm letting out my belt') and opposite to that actually I'm thinking of that skinny dark guy Franz Kafka brooding on and on about starvation and lack in his story 'The Hunger Artist' the premise of which goes something like this - some strange solitary and reflective type guy a dark character a loner a brooder goes into a zoo over to the panther's cage and watches the panther as it paces back and forth in its beauty and form devouring flesh and feed as it is thrown to him and the admiring eyes of all those who have paid to see it are gaping and gawking at the live beauty of what they see and what they're witnessing and this guy too is fascinated and still and fixated by the sight but in his mind he wishes to do the opposite and somehow convinces a zoo guard to give him a cage and he goes in and has people pay admission to watch him STARVE waste away simply wither from no food and this is his wish his ideal the prime goal of his life and he gets thinner and thinner and withers to nothing and the crowd - whatever there was - dwindles too and fewer and fewer people until none at all visit him in his cage to watch and he eventually withers and dies emaciated and skeletal in front of NO ONE in particular - a sad sideshow to a sideshow an abandoned forgotten cage tucked away in a corner and eventually covered with a tarp beneath which our hero - lone stark thin and silent - dies a lonely slow death - as was his wish : his very own 'Year of Best Intentions'.

I COULDN'T SET YOU FREE

20. I COULDN'T SET YOU FREE (Yukio Mishima and me):

And it was never like I had a choice anyway : nightlight broadlight streetlight camping out you rolled the dice over my fading solace and I remember we spoke pretty much of nothing at all you balancing as you could something on your head as I watched and it was a pile of books or something and I thought of your African curls and how well you looked just then of any of this pictures I used to see of African women walking great distances with jugs on their head balanced and steady or the other pictures I'd seen and even that guy in Plainfield walking the streets with a pile of laundry in a big sack set steady atop his head or their heads and whatever and I knew you were tribal I knew you'd come from someplace else and far off distant and you just kept walking past and showing me and my eyes were locked and I couldn't set you free even had I wished to wanted to cared enough to to do so : it was all like a fine country caper and up on some knoll or fading bluff somewhere over the carnivorous sea - eating men eating dreams eating sailors eating me - and then we both took candles to the dark and went up the thin staircase to the top that small narrow room with but one crooked window overlooking the water and as we watched nothing moved nothing outside except the black the black of you and the black of me pounding rough and hard like surf like something we served on a platter as the candles wore down and turned oily and knotted into sad lumps and you talked you talked going on about the faded American dreams of a busted revolution and a society sick and rotten and how all you wanted was a knife to go home with but you knew you could never return and you said 'if my land was like my country that would be one thing but they are both so very different and I have nowhere to call now home and I only have you to love me once and a million times more can you will you and then I'll stay if I only know this' and I said I understood but it meant nothing because I didn't understand the longing and I had none never did never had anything to wish for never 'pined' for those pines of Rome and I wasn't no Ceasar and so didn't care 'my Rome to your Carthage' was the joke of our day and we settled back and then and listened to the sounds that ocean waves and water made and too the sounds of love were heard in the never-fading air until you stayed no more and then you were gone and I was left holding nothing at all (like that sailor who fell from grace with the sea).

GIVE ME PAUSE

19. GIVE ME PAUSE:

“A mentally challenged man named Sam strolled right in said ‘strike up the band’ and the crowd went wild or so it seemed as stagelights flickered and the piano man preened” but that was all I heard of the story because they were passing the hat and I hadn’t any unnecessary money to give them so I moved on but kept wondering on the rest of that story or at least what it could have been and it MUST GIVE ME PAUSE to even stop to think what I might have missed but oh well anyway now it’s over and done so when I saw the stone roses on that churchyard wall I stopped just a moment to stare and my mind RUMINATING upon itself said to me wordlessly ‘I could have lied but who would save the world?’

A NEW AND DIFFERENT WORLD

18. A NEW AND DIFFERENT WORLD:

If there were ever a brain-spot for tracing delusions I’d have been covered with them - easy to see and simple to find - as after a few years I was simply dog-crazed with the usual battery of events and situations but all compounded by my intense desire to keep going and the ephemeral sensation of success and achievement that kept passing through me like a cloud-mist over and over and I was sometimes elated and other times just drawn and quartered to death but I remained with it at whatever cost : painting gallery walls for twenty-five dollar days when I could – the same crisp but flat white paint almost gesso-like which went into the cover-up of anything beneath it the same scant but totally distant skinny girls behind the front desks of a hundred galleries one alike to the other so that anyone coming in immediately felt as if they were already in an alien place where they didn’t belong or that they’d entered the central headquarters of some bizarre cult of ‘we’re certainly too good for you’ aliens and these girls remained that way forever - most exquisite in their designer tight outfits and blossoming-beautiful too but seditiously dangerous in their manners (always making me think some ‘I wouldn’t want to be the one to fuck her’ but knowing I ‘would’ if I had to) and in these places I always seemed incorrect in whatever assumption I made – because they weren’t certainly about ART at all even though that’s what supposedly hung on the walls – they were instead about money and valuation and profit and gain and insider status and all the rest be damned - these people inhabited a small little club of coterie of wealth which had spread its dastardly and sticky fingers all over the ‘art-world’ as they declaimed it for their purposes of lucre and if they’d not imprimatured it yet well then it didn’t exist - but if it suddenly did and they had why then it could soon be worth a cool million so ‘stand by’ and all that - ‘but first please repaint these white walls white again’ and that sort of thing rang like a Sousaphone inside my head because I knew THAT wasn’t the New York City I’d sought to inhabit even though it probably had always been like that too - even in the gay 1890’s and all that gilded age stuff with pearls and jewels pouring off wealthy people in their gardens and drawing rooms of facetious value while an entirely NEW and DIFFERENT world – unbeknownst to them – was about to come crashing down on them and NO ONE knew a thing (as an aside for partially that reason I always got a kick out of an old film called ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ precisely because it sets up an old world still bumbling in the face of its own creation of the new world about to subsume and smother it - all grace and gentility soon to be gone) so while I stayed there and walked all those incredible streets just looking for rhymes in the cast-offs and magic in the misery I found it was actually always there – just had to be located – and it all became my sole reason of staying and doing : study work art paint structure light form texture density photography storyline and all the rest : I was always able to love it and stay atop it so that MISERY and squalor meant nothing SEX and sensuality meant nothing and DEATH and venom too could simply be passed over and as to invite my fear away I took on roles all my own and played them well : in that I dwarfed the midgets (at least some form of achievement) and I towered over the giants too (a more stunning achievement to be sure).

AS LARGE AS IT IS

17. -AS LARGE AS IT IS-

INCIDENTAL MUSICS:
_______________

Sadness Comes in Three Sizes:
‘Wind in the pines.
Tears on my sleeve.
Spaghetti.’
_________________

The Buddha’s body cannot be measured. This is truly miraculous.

_______

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion instead raging in the dark and morality is made by humans - not found in the world - and a man must have an intellectual temperment with a delight in muscular language and the power to shock and the idea although a bit banal is that a person is responsible for his own life and external forces and events are just the raw materials out of which we make a life and we therefore have no right to blame anyone else for the result because it was ours to make or muff and this is a philosophy or psychology which is basically optimistic cheerful and a forward looking one of self-assertion of liberation from oppressive frameworks such as that created by religions or other dogmas.

Esta buchiamento elanastero tria
enomble telerado myanaro dustimistus
aeroda mueya riligant et yatdo
bosta bosta tiriamis trex no ! no
ah dey waymo lagdo tipes
ayvama ayvama norta !

That strange foreign man he is measuring the sky he is lighting rages of fire and distorting the horizon far awkward already by refraction and stealth he walks without limbs and covets whatever he wishes and in strictures so defined he widely carries forth along and over as people listen and so I wonder from what is gathering strength and why them as at that moment something flutters along past me and I see it is merely old newsprint the same old print which is covering the park with debris as papers flown around lose meaning so too I cannot hardly now read anything ands the hour though late is still enough for watching the morning light take far away the fading moon so fat still fat and settling as it sinks in whatever horizon is left for we are all different now so far from any place we’ve lived before OH DELICATE FLOWER wither not now but stay until the Spring and let me known you are there once more ‘I love the laughing vale I love the echoing hill I love the oaken seat beneath the oaken tree where all the villagers meet and laugh our sports to see’ and sitting here myself I am awed too by age and its distance of soldiers in a field schooners on the water whale masters trodding the old waterfront the sheds and shanty rank and filled with all the debris of watery ages the spars and ropes and hooks and containers and the seaman’s salty cry for food and drink that knife slammed flat or thrown hard down into a tabletop and the people straining to see out far to the watery horizon what sails approach and whose flag whose endeavor what journey closes for AS LARGE AS IT IS IT’S A SMALLER WORLD and one marked by the craft and the line the maps of men and maiden and calendars are scrawled : “Father my father you have brought forth a northern God to protect us yet he will do not good here for there are not enough vessels to contain him and ‘ere long enough we must go anayway to places his hand can protect us from the evils and travails of wicked men with messengers of gold and iron and tongues of magical weaving ad flames of light and falshood flaming and they too shall bow down before that as quickly as you have gone from sight and your words will be forgotten even less heard and it shall be as if you never appeared never lived or never brought Him here!’ and so they built three churches on the hills around so as the landed people traveled wherever they went there would be someplace for them to enter and think of that God or at the least consider His ways as they passed on their earthly missions and these churches yet stand if only their gravelly foundations and the holes they once covered for on this earth the light is as darkness and the shadows are dense and the winged butterfly alighting stays not long or withers in the heat and fire and windward yonder blows sea breezes where all men pine to go each and every seeks to leave but those who stay by force remain unhappy in their lot but steady THUS THUS THAT IS OUR LAND TODAY for even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space…even as we have conquered the moon we stumble over space.

_____________

- THE DIVINE IMAGE -
by William Blake

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is God our father dear:
And mercy pity peace and love
Is Man his child dear.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
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