Category Archives: shards

November 9, 2017 · 10:57 am

conducting symphonies across the scarred face of time

CONDUCTING SYMPHONIES ACROSS THE SCARRED FACE OF TIME

There are times to stand and fight. There are times to roll over and play dead. There are times to make speeches and times to mumble into the shadows. There are times to hang glide, drive fast cars, zing around Rome on a moped looking for easy sex. There are times to drown your sorrows.

I’m as happy as a beached whale. A toothless alligator. A severed finger in an ant hill. I have blisters where the sun don’t shine. I have a memory bank that tells me things are apt to get worse. I have séances in bed at night with the covers pulled over my head. In the morning I get up and make coffee as if nothing has happened. I grab Tuesday’s mask off its hook and head out the door. Bring on the day.

Punch-drunk, I raise my baton and conduct symphonies across the scarred face of time.

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November 8, 2017 · 8:54 am

another way to look at things

Another Way to Look at Things

Here’s another way to look at things: you’re a four-year-old kid playing on the wet sand at Rockaway Beach, and an especially large wave comes crashing over you. You struggle to your feet after the wave has receded, but before you regain your balance, another wave comes down. When the third wave hits you’re on your back in two feet of salty water. After that the waves toss you up and suck you under, but your feet never touch sand again.

From far off in a strange world that only moments earlier was yours, you hear muffled laughter. Then, abruptly, your Uncle Richie appears out of nowhere, yanks you to the surface, wraps an arm around you and swims for shore.

You’re lying on a blanket on your back, and someone is pressing down on your chest. Salty water trickles out of your mouth, and turning your head to one side, you see from ground level the swelling gray waves.

For weeks after that you speak to no one, and every chance you get, you go off by yourself.

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November 7, 2017 · 10:51 am

comets of ice

COMETS OF ICE

Looking for words in a Fool’s Paradise. A bush full of thorns that I choose to call roses. It’s as arbitrary as a drunk sailor in a rain forest.

Mixed metaphors. Confused intentions. The hounds of hell barking up the wrong tree, the coon escaping downstream in the creek.

High in the night sky, comets of ice. Come join us, they whisper, and swoop away again.

There’s no room left for discussion. No advice to seek out. I carry this puzzle in my pocket like a worry stone that longs to be skipped over water.

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November 6, 2017 · 10:01 am

consider this

Consider This

Henry Miller said the novel is dead. He said the country was dead and the world was a basket case. He said give up the ghost and all else follows. He said always merry and bright.

Henry was right about the world, and we hadn’t even managed the Second World War yet.

When it came to the novel, Henry was talking for himself. Once he saw that the sky was falling, fictions like the novel fell away. He began writing down his life as it happened.

The novel is dead for me too, and so is writing down life as it happens. In the 21st Century, life as it happens is instantaneously consumed. To capture that transformation in writing requires hyper vigilance, non-stop spontaneity and unbridled discipline, and what gets captured isn’t what appears to be happening.

Consider this a message from a galaxy many light years away. Focus not on the message but on the red shifts and blue shifts and worlds of warped space that it’s passed thru to reach you. Consider that in its original form it would have burned your eyes out of their sockets and turned your body to ash.

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November 4, 2017 · 2:55 pm

confessing the unmentionable

Confessing the Unmentionable

I’m tongue-tied and flabbergasted. Swift of foot and agile of mind. I’m feigning nonchalance and lying thru my teeth. I stumble over my own shadow and eat my words. I’m under siege and sore afraid. There’s a buzzing in my head that may or may not be fatal. I no longer want to make new friends.

I spend most of my time covering my tracks with garlic and pepper spray. People chip away at my sanity like deranged stone masons. I’d like nothing better than to play harp in a washboard band.

I’m not used to writing while thinking. The idiot savant, gleefully slamming words into the blackness.

One pinhole gesture of good will and the Huns thunder thru the breech.

If you don’t get my drift, you may not have a life worth living. But that’s a dull form of bliss in its own right, so who am I to talk, chatter box slashed with longing?

My resolve to not act unkindly is shot thru with fissures.

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· 2:52 pm

cool hand luke & the system

Cool Hand Luke & the System

The System will crush you. The System will smash you like a bug.

Wipe that smirk off your face, I’m not talking to you, pruning roses in your well-kept garden and living off your stock options. And not to the poseurs who play out a bogus rebellion with the help of toys the System affords them, smoke-screens for the System’s soul-dead brutality. I’m talking to Cool Hand Luke and his myriad incarnations, mostly the young who play out their defiance on intuition and then vanish, either smashed or dead.

The System has a washed-out substitute for everything that’s beautiful. The System is a virus in the blood stream of the primal force of life, and the Cool Hand Lukes are the healthiest cells in that blood stream, attacking the virus.

The other night, reeling from a particularly hard day in the System’s ongoing assault, I put a System DVD into a System DVD player and watched as Leonard Cohen and a troupe of Cool-Hand-Luke musicians unfurled their magic on a London stage–Cohen himself, Sharon Robinson and the Webb sisters, Neil Larsen on organ, Dino Soldo on instruments of wind, a drummer, a bassist, a guitar player, and Javier Mas, seasoned Spanish Gypsy, leaning into his bandurria, his face a chiseled map of pain and beauty as he pushed back the all-consuming System with the beauty of his music and ignited a packed stadium, thousands of souls roaring to their feet in primal recognition, while I sat transfixed in my darkened cottage, my eyes, even after all these years, capable of tears.

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