I think I'm too serious sometimes. I have a little girl named Sydney. She is the cutest you will ever see. She is growing so big before my very eyes, I can't even believe that she's over 10lbs. already. She's a boxer/ shepard mix and very rambunctious. i write alot, but not as much as I would like. I work alot. I bartend at Transmetropolitan usually two or three nights a week. Come see me. I just finished making up three new shots/ drinks that'll impress you. Seriously. there's that over serious thing again. I watch alot of movies. I read a good deal. um, yea.
The world is headed for a disaster that, though many try to assume a ready position, is unavoidable and all-encompassing. It's evident in the way people speak. When talking even of common things such as media, the arts, politics, religion, all the way to the most mundane of topics; most describe by using the most catastrophic star flash their minds can conjure. Most of these metaphors are simple retellings of a horrific image or grotesque passage, but since the words uttered are grand scenes of decay and doom, one must only infer that our minds have us bent to some grand Apocalypse. Moreover, everything is in danger. all knowledge of our way of life is on the brink of a snap collapse and shattering change that will alter our status forever, never to return to the former. You could call this a voyage of history into legend- a new day turning the yester into bedtime stories and accounts of a different time as if the former has already shaken hands with eternity, kissed her on the cheek, and walked hand in hand with perfect serenity into the swaying field where fables grow wild and unashamed.
Anastasia & Sandman
by Larry Levis
The brow of a horse in that moment when
The horse is drinking water so deeply from a trough
It seems to inhale the water, is holy.
I refuse to explain.
When the horse had gone the water in the trough,
All through the empty summer,
Went on reflecting clouds & stars.
The horse cropping grass in a field,
And the fly buzzing around its eyes, are more real
Than the mist in one corner of the field.
Or the angel hidden in the mist, for that matter.
Members of the Committee on the Ineffable,
Let me illustrate this with a story, & ask you all
To rest your heads on the table, cushioned,
If you wish, in your hands, &, if you want,
Comforted by a small carton of milk
To drink from, as you once did, long ago,
When there was only a curriculum of beach grass,
When the University of Flies was only a distant humming.
In Romania, after the war, Stalin confiscated
The horses that had been used to work the fields.
"You won't need horses now," Stalin said, cupping
His hand to his ear, "Can't you hear the tractors
Coming in the distance? I hear them already."
The crowd in the Callea Victoria listened closely
But no one heard anything. In the distance
There was only the faint glow of a few clouds.
And the horses were led into boxcars & emerged
As the dimly remembered meals of flesh
That fed the starving Poles
During that famine, & part of the next one--
In which even words grew thin & transparent,
Like the pale wings of ants that flew
Out of the oldest houses, & slowly
What had been real in words began to be replaced
By what was not real, by the not exactly real.
"Well, not exactly, but. . ." became the preferred
Administrative phrasing so that the man
Standing with his hat in his hands would not guess
That the phrasing of a few words had already swept
The earth from beneath his feet. "That horse I had,
He was more real than any angel,
The housefly, when I had a house, was real too,"
Is what the man thought.
Yet it wasn't more than a few months
Before the man began to wonder, talking
To himself out loud before the others,
"Was the horse real? Was the house real?"
An angel flew in and out of the high window
In the factory where the man worked, his hands
Numb with cold. He hated the window & the light
Entering the window & he hated the angel.
Because the angel could not be carved into meat
Or dumped into the ossuary & become part
Of the landfill at the edge of town,
It therefore could not acquire a soul,
And resembled in significance nothing more
Than a light summer dress when the body has gone.
The man survived because, after a while,
He shut up about it.
Stalin had a deep understanding of the kulaks,
Their sense of marginalization & belief in the land;
That is why he killed them all.
Members of the Committee on Solitude, consider
Our own impoverishment & the progress of that famine,
In which, now, it is becoming impossible
To feel anything when we contemplate the burial,
Alive, in a two-hour period, of hundreds of people.
Who were not clichés, who did not know they would be
The illegible blank of the past that lives in each
Of us, even in some guy watering his lawn
On a summer night. Consider
The death of Stalin & the slow, uninterrupted
Evolution of the horse, a species no one,
Not even Stalin, could extinguish, almost as if
What could not be altered was something
Noble in the look of its face, something
Incapable of treachery.
Then imagine, in your planning proposals,
The exact moment in the future when an angel
Might alight & crawl like a fly into the ear of a horse,
And then, eventually, into the brain of a horse,
And imagine further that the angel in the brain
Of this horse is, for the horse cropping grass
In the field, largely irrelevant, a mist in the corner
Of the field, something that disappears,
The horse thinks, when weight is passed through it,
Something that will not even carry the weight
Of its own father
On its back, the horse decides, & so demonstrates
This by swishing at a fly with its tail, by continuing
To graze as the dusk comes on & almost until it is night.
Old contrivers, daydreamers, walking chemistry sets,
Exhausted chimneysweeps of the spaces
Between words, where the Holy Ghost tastes just
Like the dust it is made of,
Let's tear up our lecture notes & throw them out
The window.
Let's do it right now before wisdom descends upon us
Like a spiderweb over a burned-out theater marquee,
Because what's the use?
I keep going to meetings where no one's there,
And contributing to the discussion;
And besides, behind the angel hissing in its mist
Is a gate that leads only into another field,
Another outcropping of stones & withered grass, where
A horse named Sandman & a horse named Anastasia
Used to stand at the fence & watch the traffic pass.
Where there were outdoor concerts once, in summer,
Under the missing & innumerable stars.
A Song for Occupations, Part 1
A song for occupations!
In the labor of engines and trades, and the labor of
fields, I find the developments,
And find the eternal meanings.
Workmen and Workwomen!
Were all educations, practical and ornamental, well
display'd out of me, what would it amount to?
Were I as the head teacher, charitable proprietor, wise
statesman, what would it amount to?
Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would
that satisfy you?
The learn'd, virtuous, benevolent, and the usual
terms;
A man like me, and never the usual terms.
Neither a servant nor a master am I;
I take no sooner a large price than a small price—I will
have my own, whoever enjoys me;
I will be even with you, and you shall be even with
me.
If you stand at work in a shop, I stand as nigh as the
nighest in the same shop;
If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend, I
demand as good as your brother or dearest
friend;
If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night,
I must be personally as welcome;
If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so
for your sake;
If you remember your foolish and outlaw'd deeds, do you
think I cannot remember my own foolish and
outlaw'd deeds?
If you carouse at the table, I carouse at the opposite
side of the table;
If you meet some stranger in the streets, and love him or
her—why I often meet strangers in the street, and
love them.
Why, what have you thought of yourself?
Is it you then that thought yourself less? Is it you
that thought the President greater than you?
Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser
than you?
Because you are greasy or pimpled, or that you were once
drunk, or a thief,
Or diseas'd, or rheumatic, or a prostitute—or are so
now;
Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no
scholar, and never saw your name in print,
Do you give in that you are any less immortal?
Walt Whitman
Sunflower Sutra by Allen Ginsberg
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific
locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole,
companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak
and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel
roots of trees of machinery.
The only water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank
on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no
hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and
hung-over like old bums on the riverbank,
tired and wily.
br
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of
a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless
tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank,
condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the
dank muck and the
razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly
bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden
locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a
battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from
the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the
black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul,
I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that
sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial
worse-than-dirt--industrial--modern--all that civilization
spotting your crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes
and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand
and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the
guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty
lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more
could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the
cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars,
wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all
these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you standing before me
in the sunset, all your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely
sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip
moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset
shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime,
while you cursed the heavens of your railroad and your
flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower?
when did you look at your skin and decide you were an
impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive?
the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American
locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it
at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and
anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak
dusty imageless locomotive, we're all golden sunflowers
inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal
sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the
shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly
tincan evening sitdown vision.
Keep working hard...and find, through knowledge, strength in solitude instead of despair."-- Neal Cassidy in a Letter to Jack Kerouac
