Category Archives: shards

June 23, 2018 · 9:44 am

rocking out in the ukraine

ROCKING OUT IN THE UKRAINE

Down they came from the Ukraine on their way to some place south, a drug-crazed heavy-metal band. When they took off their shoes at the loading gate, they all had blisters on their feet.

Blisters on their feet, blisters on their fingers, what could it mean? A paramedic pulling a double shift lanced each and every one, looking for drugs,contraband, an embryonic plastic bomb–one can’t be too careful in the war against. He found nothing except remnants of a life of pain, and the customs guard with a tunic loaded down with dated cold-war medals waved them through.

They were 26 in number, including three female vocalists and an oboe player. They sat at the back of the plane where in backward parts of the world smoking was still allowed. They lit up, inhaled, exhaled and hoped that when they landed their luck would change.

They were young.

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· 9:40 am

the proof is in the pudding

THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING

Along with other unsavory ingredients: shriveled tsetse flies and gray unseeing eyeballs; slivers of glass and shards of memory; fragments of morgue imagination that perished in a waking nightmare; salt, pepper, dried tomatoes; a liberal sprinkling of worm-infested love.
I gag on the pudding and run out behind the garage where under a sky full of stars, I vomit it up.

An isolation-clad self-knowledge came to me at the age of seven while swaying the day away high in a maple tree. It vanished again when I climbed down and resumed pretending.

A taste of love is all it takes to bring it back home again.

I reach out and my hand vanishes.

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June 20, 2018 · 4:35 pm

the summer of love

THE SUMMER OF LOVE

Wolfgang stepped onto the sidewalk to begin his night shift barking rubes into the strip joint, and at the same time a mixed bag of Mexicans and Vietnamese tumbled out of the disco joint next door and began slashing at each other with knives. There were twice as many Vietnamese as Mexicans, and pretty soon the Mexicans were down on the pavement and the Vietnamese kept kicking them in the face until they heard the sirens. Then they went back inside.

The police scooped up the Mexicans and hauled them off. There was so much blood on the sidewalk people were turning and going back in the direction they came from. It was the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and across town on Haight Street high-school dropouts were looking for Nirvana on LSD. Wolfgang went back inside the strip joint and talked the bartender into giving him a triple-shot rum and Coke. He lit a cigarette and stepped back outside.

A special police unit had arrived and began hosing down the sidewalk. Inside the strip joint Carol Doda came out on stage with two male accomplices and began shaking those monstrous boobs and singing a song. People began crossing the fight zone again now that the blood was gone, and three college boys hesitated in front of the strip joint, drawn to the large glassed-in poster of Carol.

“For five bucks you’ll have an experience inside that will change your lives,” Wolfgang said.

Across town on Haight, a pusher was saying the same thing to a boy and a girl who’d run away from home in Burlington, Vermont, and they all reached for their wallets.

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June 19, 2018 · 3:48 pm

running out of idiom

RUNNING OUT OF IDIOM

Some people run out of gas, motivation, purpose; I’m running out of idiom that people can relate to. The cow jumped over the moon doesn’t ring too many bells these days. A stitch in time leaves most people scratching their heads. For lack of a nail, etc. (the shoe was lost, the horse, the war, the kingdom) might make some sense to the last living cowboy, but it goes right over Trump’s head, just like a penny saved is a penny earned.

I’m the Pied Piper, waltzing Matilda through the scrap heap of the Industrial Revolution, longing for one more night in my 40 Ford, making love to the American Dream.

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· 9:49 am

roots

Roots

Ramifications, indications, implications, supplications, pep pills for laggards, razors for the suicide prone, notes that say more from the dearly departed, notes that you left behind when you went out for cigarettes.

Stimulus package, stimulated package, nerve endings in the tip of your you-know-what.

Institutions too big to fail, the worn nub of the rank-and-file.

Ray Charles and William Burroughs sharing a needle. You first; no please, you…

Did you wash your hands, sign your life away, give it that old college try before you slipped into oblivion?

The first human who went down on his haunches on a moonlit savanna and sensing something laced through the night sky other than what his eyes had been telling him, began to moan, the first notes of jazz.

Where have we gone since then?

What does a felled tree say to its roots?

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June 12, 2018 · 4:28 pm

some random questions that add up to a hill of beans

SOME RANDOM QUESTIONS THAT ADD UP TO A HILL OF BEANS

Ignorance may be bliss but is bliss ignorance? Does the converse equal the inverse, and why did Kenneth Patchen make Henry Miller uneasy?

What is Fascism? Is it just another word for nothing left to lose? Did the CIA poison Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and brutally murder JFK and Martin Luther King? The NSA then? The Cosa Nostra? A deranged alchemist and a lone gunman with a sordid sex life?

Is “All Hail the Chief” a code phrase that triggered 9-11, a sign from god, or the theme song of the Chattanooga Fire Department?

Does complicit equal illicit or just mask conspiracy? Does the rule of law bring peace and prosperity to the disenfranchised? Who does the franchising to begin with? What’s the price of the buy-in?

Am I here all alone? Are you? Shall we put our heads together and look for the loopholes, the booby traps, the glimmer of hope?

Do you see what I’m getting at? Do you want to go there? Why does the king have a new set of clothes while the lone wolf goes naked?

Where did the line get crossed where learning became conditioning, no exception, starting with conception? Is it really that bad? Do you think I’ve gone overboard? Will you throw me a life line? Drag me through the wake of it all until my lungs fill with small white lies?

Why has everything profound been leeched dry? What sucked the life blood out of Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, Bill Moyers, the Dali Lama and James Dean?

Words attached to meaning no longer have meaning. Hush now, begin to sing. Hit a high C that will explode this ceramic world into a billion crystals.

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