Category Archives: shards

April 1, 2018 · 6:17 pm

something the size of a neutrino

Something the Size of a Neutrino

He was the last poet to be set free in the East Block, long after the East Block had come down like a house of cards.

They found him huddled in the rubble of an abandoned Siberian gulag, surviving on crow meat. “I have eaten much crow,” he said in surprisingly good English shortly after they found him. This was in May of 2008. He knew nothing of 9-11 or that the Berlin Wall had toppled. He thought the Cold War was still on, and he had it out for Stalin. They flew him to D.C. on Air Force One.

He claimed he had no say in what he wrote, that it was driven out of him, which was an oxymoron, a teenage prodigy with a MacArthur Genius Grant under his belt sitting next to him on PBS’s Meet the Poet opined, rather inaccurately.

He stood up straight as a ramrod and slapped the kid right out of his chair. He said he had no time for morons, that inside his tortured brain there was something the size of a neutrino squeezed into a space half the size of a neutrino (a tiny space indeed), and that’s where the words were forged that people took for poetry. He also said, referring to the kid: “Remove this elfin fool from my sight!” After that all the late-night talk-show hosts were falling all over each other to get him on their show.

But his act was limited to political diatribes and physical attacks. He had no sense of humor, and he soon fell into obscurity. He was last seen sitting across the table from Barack Obama in a south-side Chicago all-night diner,and there was speculation that they were planning to start a new political party. But that was years ago, nothing ever came of it, and the last Cold War poet vanished.

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March 29, 2018 · 7:30 am

sticks & stones

Sticks & Stones

I had a talking stick that appeared in a recurring dream, and at the age of five it materialized at the foot of my bed. An ordinary stick, except it could talk.

“Pick me up,” it said, “and use me to draw a circle around you in the sand of your pain. Then make a line inside the circle. Now sit down in the circle with your legs crossed and close your eyes. This is how I’ll take you through life. There will be those who will enter the circle with war clubs, but no one will cross the line. Do you get my drift?”

Of course I didn’t. I was only five. But it was the first time I’d ever felt recognized, so I did it.

It was a long time before the stick spoke again. “Are you awake?” it said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” said the stick. “Now open your eyes and step out of the circle. There are stones to turn over.”

I used the stick to turn over the stones, and out would spring coral snakes and scorpions. I’d twirl the coral snakes in the air with the stick until they grew dizzy, and then I’d lay them gently back down and say, “There now.” The scorpions were a different matter. They’d try to dart up my pants leg and I’d have to step on them. It never made me feel good, stepping on the scorpions, but the stick would sing lullabies as we lay under the stars at night, and that helped some. Nevertheless, my eyes grew sad.

And then came the dark holes. I noticed that people who railed against me for turning over stones, when they thought no one was watching, would stick their hands in dark holes. Their eyes would glaze over with pleasure, and they’d moan. After some time it was all I could think about. I wanted to do it too. I took to leaving the stick out of earshot when I slept, and then one day I did it.

There was something warm and fuzzy inside the hole. It sucked my fingers and sent sensual waves through my body. When I finally broke free, I felt something was missing in my life. I stopped turning over stones and had a hard time sleeping.

And then one night as I lay under the stars tossing and turning, the stick appeared and began beating me mercilessly. “Shame!” said the stick. “Shame!”

For thirty days the stick held me under its spell without food or drink. During this time I had visions, and it was revealed to me that the warm fuzzy things in the holes were nocturnal. They came out at night and ravaged children. By sunrise they were gone again, waiting in their holes for someone to stick his hand in.

The stick drew a new circle around me. It was much larger, and more a trench than a circle. There was no longer a need for a line.

“These are my last words,” said the stick, “and then I must leave you. Listen well:

“Under stones you’ll find labels like kike, nigger and wop. In the black holes are defoliation and ethnic cleansing. One group sounds worse than it is. The other is worse than it sounds. Now go forth.” And with that the stick vanished.

I wrote these strange events down as a children’s story and called it Sticks and Stones, but no one would publish it.

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March 26, 2018 · 12:00 pm

snapshots from a world gone wrong

SNAPSHOTS FROM A WORLD GONE WRONG

 

* South African diamonds on white-girl fingers. They live happily ever after.

* Feathers and bird bones in a dice cup. Shake it close to your ear and hear the echo chirp. Roll snake eyes.

* Tattered flags hang limp over a blown-out democracy.

* A plastic Jesus. A magnetic St. Christopher.

* Full-grown men paid six million dollars to chase balls on a green field. My dog does for free.

* Empty picnic tables in a once bustling park, slashed up with graffiti.

* Grants and stipends for the technologically adept–a crystal ball for the future.

* An all-volunteer army — a legalized street gang.

* Guns don’t kill people, people do, so why give them guns? The right to bear arms. Minute Men mutation.

* Thirty people shot dead here, fifty over there. Just another day in a Baghdad market.

* Sex is mindless. So is violence. A self-appointed inquisition to determine how much of it we can bear up under on the silver screen. The rating game.

* Our leaders are but mistrusted servants. They do not govern.

* “We’re finished, the world is coming to an end,” Kurt Vonnegut said lovingly, and it made people feel good.

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March 24, 2018 · 2:51 pm

something is happening

Something Is Happening

The folk singers and protest marchers who drifted around the edges in the Sixties thought they were heralding a revolution, thought they were the cutting edge of a grand tradition, but they were the death throes of that tradition, Woody Guthrie’s stillborn children, their peaceful revolution was a last fling before the global corporation’s final lock down.

That’s why they went up in arms when Dylan went electric and began writing songs like Desolation Row and Ballad of a Thin Man. They knew something was happening, but they didn’t know what it was, shaking tambourines at the sky and singing we shall overcome in the fast-approaching darkness.

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March 22, 2018 · 3:45 pm

shame & ignorance in an election year

Shame & Ignorance in an Election Year

Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is holy. Ignorance wins the day. Ignorance seizes the moment–by the throat, by the gonads, by its spindly arm. Twist and snap and still no recognition. Ignorance buries its head so deep in the sand it bursts out in China.

China was not down under until the world went global. Some disgruntled Italian pulled that one off–he died with a diseased cock and a sick brain at a Caribbean resort…drinking rum and Coca-cola…working for the Yankee dollar…

Another Italian said the sun circles the earth and got blacklisted from the Science Academy and thrown out of the Church by the Holy Inquisition that really wanted to cut off his balls. But he was a prudent man, knew about discretion and valor, and so he said:

“I see your point, get your drift. The human spirit is flat as a pancake and everything full and upturned like a young girl’s breast dances circles around it. The earth is our hostage, our pack mule, our midnight cowboy. Mea culpa, boys, pass the altar wine, let me kiss the hem of your cassock…”

His wife left him and his children ran off with the circus–the three-ring circus, revolving around an under-fed lion in a cage with a man with a whip.

***

It’s a hard world to get a break in. Doctors with dirty hands. Midwives with warts. Babies birthing like banshees. Italians selling ice cream on the street corners of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.

This is a confession. I don’t know which way is up. When the world was flat, pizza made more sense. When gunpowder existed before guns, all life was a celebration. When my mind was in Buddha’s limbo, there was no discernible problem. And then this harsh incarnation.

Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is trance. Ignorance is organic absorption into primary color. Turn color into flags and you’ve got a fight on your hands.

There is no big picture. There’s a war on as galactic as pinpoints of light. As universal as a gene, as a genre, as a beef-jerky dream. The Italian and the Chinese connection, networking for freedom. Pizza and gunpowder. The Pope and the Buddha. Invention and convention. The news was made to be censored. Smile for the camera. Wink at the giant mouse. Don’t even try to understand.

Bear with me. I’m coming around about as fast as I can. It ain’t so easy, this confession thing. To leave anything out puts you back where you started.

The show’s been cancelled due to protests. Inch into the labyrinth. Negation is the path to Ground Zero. Sail into the harbor on the Santa Maria with your cannons blazing. A concept can beat you down like a club.

***

This is a confession. I don’t know. I am afraid.

***

A man sat down on my porch this morning. “In Philadelphia,” he said, “they had a convention.”

(Kenneth Patchen sits bolt upright in bed, awake from a horrible dream. “Bring me my chalks and my ink well!” he calls to his wife who is asleep on the sofa not ten feet away. She stirs and then drifts back into dream. Kenneth is bed-ridden with no place to go.)

A boy came along and sat down. “I got me a new video game,” he said. “It’s rad. Hey dude, are you listening?” He turned his baseball cap around backwards.

“In Philadelphia they had a convention,” the man repeated, ignoring the boy. He took a deep breath. “The Italians broke heads,” he said. “The Chinese came out from down under. The sun began spinning in tight circles. The police filled the jails. They carted off everyone. They dragged them naked thru urine and excrement. They broke their balls and denied them their phone call. They set bail at one million dollars. Jesus! And then they established Free Speech Zones!”

“China’s a long way off,” I said. “And the Mafia didn’t come out of nowhere.”

“Jesus!” said the man. “Are you insane? “

“What?” said the boy. “Has something gone wrong?”

“Total mainstream blackout, but it’s on the Net,” said the man. “Mussolini and Hitler all over again. Third World gestapo. Death Squads. Don’t you see? How can you sit there talking in tongues? There’s work to be done! A stand that needs taking…”

“What’s going on?” said the boy.

***

My head began spinning. Slowly at first, creaking on its rusty axis, sending shock waves out into space.

“I know,” I said. But I didn’t.

Facts have stampeded my dreams. Fantasy has gone down on the master. I long to confess. I sense conspiracy everywhere.

***

Anyway you cut it, it has little to do with the statue of Ben Franklin looking down from high atop Constitution Hall. Little to do with the cracked Liberty Bell.

I know a little something. It’s not like I’ve never been touched or like I don’t long to be happy. It’s not like I don’t cradle love like a premature baby. It’s not like I’ve never raised my hand in salute.

***

Outside the door, tanks rumble by. Planes fly overhead and pamphlets fall from the sky. An anthem blares from loud speakers, and my neighbors step cautiously into the street and look up.

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March 19, 2018 · 10:15 am

shooting down the duke

Shooting Down the Duke

He was precocious and perceptive and so did poorly in school. He was good at sports but didn’t play on teams so he got into rock climbing, skate boarding and flying kites. He tried the Ben Franklin thing with the key in a lightning storm when he was five and his parents put him on psych meds. He flushed them down the toilet.

He began looking elsewhere for books besides the public library so that by the time they asked him on a tenth-grade history test what started World War I, instead of answering the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria like they’d taught him, he wrote a full-page essay on the transition from coal to oil as a major fuel, German technical and military superiority, and railroad lines to the oil fields. He received and F on the test and dropped out of school.

He ran away from home shortly after and hitched from Des Moines to Los Angeles. He forged papers and joined the Merchant Marines. In time he became a self-taught computer programmer and freelanced for Apple and Microsoft and a wide range of renegade operations. It was all done on line and he was always on the move, waking up in Calcutta and bedding down in Cancun, slipping out of Moscow on the night train and watching the sun rise in Berlin. He learned six languages fluently and rarely had sex.

One day his rent-a-car broke down in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico. He took a room in a modest bed-and-breakfast and while looking through the local paper the next morning over coffee he saw a help-wanted ad for a drawbridge attendant. He went in for the interview and made a favorable impression with his extensive knowledge of ships and drawbridges. He got the job.

He’s there to this day, an old man with a Methuselah beard, doing portrait sketches of tourists in the local square and raising and lowering his drawbridge, raising and lowering it for ships sailing off with their holes full of machinery and cotton and ships sailing in with their cargo of tea, coffee, garments and oil, the root cause of every war since they shot down the Duke.

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