Everything that makes it onto TV is part of the scenario. There is only one scenario–wealth and poverty, war and peace, cowboys and Indians, Blacks, Latinos and Asians, Episcopalians and Druids, G.I. Joe and Godzilla are all sub-plots. What is never spoken of because there is no name for it is the swift brutal current of voracious decay that underlies everything.
The whole world is tossing expired values out the window like Confederate currency.
Filed under shards
This is not me. That’s me over there, in that chair, picking nits from my lover’s hair.
That’s not me in the chair. That’s me thundering by on the “A” Train, years ago, on my way to learn Yiddish.
You might try some research. Just last week on Death Row the guard said I was all over Facebook. Try cutting the comments into a word collage. Put them in a wicker basket and shake it. Stick your hand in and pull one out. Just don’t blame me if something gnaws off your fingers.
You might take a look at my birth certificate, if you can track down my place of birth. You might look for a genetic thumb print.
You may not believe this, but I support your snoopy endeavor. I’m as curious as the next man to nail down my identity.
(Look! Up here! Beating myself to death against a 40-watt ceiling bulb! That’s me, or will be in some future incarnation.)
There’s a glue that holds the whole thing together, a unified theory that would make Einstein coo like a morning dove.
The one thing I know for sure is that when I put the pen down, I shatter into a million pieces.
Filed under shards
At least they call it concern. Maybe worry is more like it. Uneasiness. All those restless feelings people get when something makes them dizzy. Disoriented. Unsure.
“What are you doing?” they say. When he says, “What do you mean?” they say, “You know.”
“Not when you come right down to it,” he says.
“What about standards?” they say.
He hoists a flag made of burlap with Jerry Lewis and Ray Charles doing the high-five on it.
“Right there is a good example!” they say.
He lowers the flag to half mast and blows taps on a penny whistle that an old drunk down on First Avenue in Seattle gave him for wine money.
They throw their hands in the air, something they do quite often when they don’t know which way to turn. “You used to be a serious writer,” they say and scrutinize him for cracks.
He wonders if “serious” is a bad thing or a poor word choice. Not knowing and not caring to know, he hoists the flag high again.
They pull back for a conference.
“He’s lost his frame-of-reference,” one says.
“He’s probably got a disease,” says another.
“A mental disease,” says a third.
Off the top they make a list with little lines for checking in front of each disease:
___ Bi-polar
___ Manic-depressive
___ ADD
___ ADHD
___ HIV positive
___ Schizophrenic
___ Anorexic
___ Alcoholic
___ Sexually repressed
___ Sexually promiscuous
___ Ex-Catholic
___ Ego Maniac
___ Sociopath
___ Psychopath
___ Alzheimer’s prone
___ Superiority Complex
___ Inferiority Complex
___ Illusions of Grandeur
___ Under Achiever
___ Over Achiever
___ Workaholic
___ OTHER (please specify)They hand him the list. “Check what applies,” they say.
He checks “Other” and hands the list back.
“You didn’t specify!” one of them says.
“What’s to specify?” he says.
One of them loses his cool and crumples the paper, throws it down hard; as hard as a piece of paper can be thrown down.
“Right there’s the answer to all your questions,” he says.
“You know what your problem is?” one of them says. “Your problem is you won’t let anyone reach out to you.”
“Get to me,” he says.
“What’s the difference?” one of them says.
He picks up the crumpled list and let’s it float to the ground. “There’s the difference,” he says.
Back at the Institute, Inc., they resolve to tighten the screws. Total blackout on every word he writes. They’ll smoke him out.
***
Home again he watches a video of Buddhist monks creating an intricate and colorful Mandala out of millions of grains of sand. It takes them weeks working around the clock, and when they’re done they sweep the whole thing into a brass urn and empty it into a river. Then they make tea in an iron cauldron over a fire of dried Yak dung and drink the tea from plain clay cups. When they’ve finished their tea, they pack up and head into the mountains.
He turns off the set and sits still on a straight-back chair until the sun sets and the room grows dark. After awhile the sun rises again. He picks up a yellow pad and jots down his thoughts.
Filed under shards
People are mesmerized by the rug under which we sweep the unsavory. By the roaring silence of the unspeakables in our brains. By the sum total on Lady Death’s abacus.
Choice is illusion, free choice oxymoronic.
Fate is euphemistic inevitability.
You don’t hear life’s drum roll until the drumming stops.
***
A Trappist monk, longing in sandals.
A flower child, longing with a fist full of rose petals.
The longing of Saint John the Baptist with his eyes rolled back in his head.
Thimbles of poison, passed off as altar wine.
Quick-fix salvation.
***
What gets discovered was already there–the permanence of the calcified dream; the rigid skin around movement.
Your toenails continue to grow.
Praise the Arabs for giving us zero.
***
After each journey, the return to Sodom.
After every vision, the slide into sin.
Pick up your cross and get on with it, God has no use for whiners.
This is where amen comes in.
Filed under shards
There is no present. There is no past. There is no forgiveness or Christian charity. No burlesque shows or re-run TV. No afterthought, foreplay or middle ground. No left-wing salvation, no right-wing austerity. There is no history, no days to remember, no Charlie Sheen, no Marlon Brando, no Brigid Bardot, no Dostoevsky, no Ghandi, no Einstein. No third-movement crescendo in a Florentine symphony. No Leonardo, no Van Gogh. There’s only the ferocious furnace of the future with a mindset of its own.
We’re talking the Black Hole of consequence from which there is no escape.
We’re talking the backdraft of finality.
We’re talking one step over the line where the dancing stops.
Filed under shards
Imagine the surprise on his face when the pain let up. Imagine his delight when the number ten kept appearing like a secret message from God. Imagine his confusion when the checks stopped coming and they reclaimed the house. Imagine how sidetracked he got thinking on the word “reclaim” when it was theirs all along, just like the car and the wife who left when the checks stopped.
He thought about how the pain letting up tied in with the number ten, and beyond that how both had nothing to do with the house and the wife and the rest of it, but he drew blanks when he tried to reach a final solution. It was the brain damage–his two-faced aunty when he was a small child who was all smiles and honey around his parents but a banshee when she had him alone, wrapping him naked in duct tape and squeezing his little cock and balls while slamming him alongside the head with a frying pan.
They concluded he was born that way but they worked hard and got him smart enough to send to Iraq where a road mine blew him out of his Hummer and gave him a walloping concussion, and that’s where the checks came from, from the government.
Then they said he wasn’t that bad off, he could get out there and work like the rest of us. He couldn’t of course, so there he is at the age of 23, wearing strange clothes and packing a begging bowl, in line to get on a Greyhound to Florida because he heard it was warm there.
The other monks give him wide berth.
Filed under shards
