The Christmas Train
(or not so free association)
I figure I may never die
because I can never find anything that fits me
in a thrift store
the drunk Tohono O’odham at the door
begs for change
I give it him as I‘d give it you
if you were begging for chocolate
but nothing is what it seems
I can’t fix this mess with my bad dreams
and everything lost
is found again
and goes round and round
in my poor old echoing brain
Bing Crosby’s everywhere these days
Selling pretty faces and happy families
Except at the world trade center
The Vietnam war memorial
The border fence
And Auschwitz and Berkenwald
But I’d like to hear white Christmas there
Just to richen up the egg nogg
And the irony
He was always such a grouch
And he beat his children
And he’s been dead fifty years
And he still owns more Christmas
Than Jesus
And it only hurts if you know too much
Like the guy in the detective novel
Who gets a pair of cement shoes
Or a really bad case of the
Christmas blues
All this and more than mortal tongue can tell
Goes round and round a crazy carousel
Whose merry tunes can’t drown out the rain
That pounds and pounds
On my poor old echoing brain
Christmas wrappings and toys and TV sounds
Screams and loud talk are thrown over the fence
By my section 8 neighbors
Trash all over the street when the garbage truck comes
I love it
The way they slop all over lurching like drunken
Dancers so real so much the way
It is what it is
And that’s show biz
But gee whiz
Does it have to be so stupid
And especially in the rain?
O babe it ain’t no thang
Just some messed up music
From my poor old echoing brain
At New Years there’s always a party
Where we have the appliance toss and the baby
Toss and toss
Back a few
For all those who fell in love
With blue
On that wild roller coaster ride
Down the mental drain
To suicide
Sylvia Plath and Curt Cobain
Jim Jones and Hart Crane
Ray Johnson and all the lesser knowns
Who were just as insane whose bones
Pile up like all the sad old trains
Echoing down the distances
of the morning rain
I asked my shrink time and again
How do you stop a train
That just keeps on going round
And round
In your poor old echoing brain?
--------She said,
each self is locked in its own personal narrative
Each ego fed according to the politics of the dream censor
Each representative lost in its own representations
Each brain echoing the particular wounds and triumphs of its animal body
(equals ego equals a dog’s legs kicking in its sleep)
(and the memory of old nights in the rain
just goes around and around in my poor old echoing brain)
each bio a fabrication and worn like a medal of honor
given by one’s own personal government
each of us damaged and still surviving the disaster of being
thrown into the world crying and gasping for breath
(and the cold drizzly rain
that just keeps on pounding
on my poor old echoing brain.)
I met a National Guardsman
Who’s been in Kosovo and Iraq
And is getting called up again
So proud of his competence
So careful and concerned for his men
Good soldiers in a bad war
They’re always with us
Never asking what they’re really
Fighting for
All because the world is so poor
When their soldier patients die the medics
Stand at attention as the broken body
Is carried out
We must all answer the call
These holiday sentiments can be recycled
Tsunami and Katrina victims and all
Just throw them out in the cold freezing rain
To go round and round
In my poor old echoing brain.
private investigations
a log of private investigations into loss, absurdity, and death as a part of life, as seen from the big time and the big self of childhood, before we knew so much we stopped wondering, before the banality gang got to us and told us how to be chained to our daily selves. The investigations are conducted by Joe Potatoes because he has a lot of private eyes and they’re all on the ground.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Cannon on the conservative mine
The conservative mind gives me indigestion
with the insanity & inanity (& Rush & Combs & Hannety)
of processed good and food
whose very ingestion
Begs the question
Of geometry of laws & santa claus & all other image without substance
personified in the pres
against all odds & the constitution
thou shalt not impugn the motives nor impinge the pocket puppet of the profit
nor blame the mainframe market game linesdrawn fairnsquare
unaware just like city blocks in a bucket of rocks
o thou logic based life form
shalt not argue vs the economics that support & transport you
nor go where others fear to break their daily dread
even microbial communication est verboten
in the expanding universe of supersized brains
whose balloon people with the little dots zoomin away at C squared
are automatically unawared
until the poison gas of processed food escapes
allowing them to return to normal non entropic non segregated
non aparteid wide neuron size wide eyes terror I-zed
legitimized
be in
the world as the law says it is
give in
man
what a way to make a
live in
the conservative mind the conservative mind
its silence runs deep
disturbs my sleep
hold on it says hold on
to every loan and line and lawn and yawn drawn
with all due respect sir, my friend
while meaning just the opposite
(as one Bob Dylan
said O so much
bullshit!)
in our rules for fools private club dues
gas guzzlers & all too inhuman Bar Bie
ques o be silent
if thou canst not be joyful poet at least somebody
thinks they’re having fun
with Blair & Bush’s snotty
VAL
YOUS their knotty naughty CIVIL
LIE
ZA
SHUN
O government of conservative intent
Why dost so irritate me
When pitchin thy bitchin abstract tent
Over our decalogues, gas logs, yappy little dogs
Ice cream dreams with unconscious screams
Of perfect harmony
don't be rude eatcher poison high tech food
Allow us this quarterly earnings report, a little
Sport, and every abstract quantity
Come to comprise everything meant
By the word ME
& all that is cute
that makes the enemy want to puke
allow us to safely age & turn the page
and the corner from seekers to
dogmatists who make lists
and trysts, clench minds & fists, speak
like fate in simple twists, let us
forget us enough to draw the line
as the line draws us, when expedient throw
parties or our erstwhile
political cronies under the bus
from that first kiss the broken ness
justice clashes to ashes to
de gustibus
The conservative mine the conservative mine
Which season nor reason hath yet to confine
So many nites
The red lites of the radio towers
See how they go neither fast nor slow
Outside my bedroom window
For twenty years
Of uncried tears
Of winken blinken & nod
Indecipherable messages from a mechanical god
A silent drum
The same dumb
Aortic rhythm
O isn’t it time
We broke the code of MINE
Looked aft down the shaft
For smatterins of patterins
You will fit the old mold or be destroyed
Or terminally annoyed
Blink blink blink
I lie here hypnotized
By my metronome shrink
Turning magma to the fog of dogma
Watching each mind and its peculiar ways
Jealousies and fallacies
days and days
Of holding on to MINE
Just draw the line
And so long mom
I’m off to the war
With my guitar
Everything’s excused analogized unpathologized sanitized
Torture is just college hazing
Wink wink wink
The red lights blink
I think I need a drink
Something to curb the aggressive urge
which reason nor season hath yet confined
O it’s dark as the dungeon
Way down in our conservative MINE
o poet bleat not beat not
thy bloody head against the bloody wall
of idiots she loves me nots
and uptight snots
But the conservative mind torments me
Still against my will
With its holdings of squares unawares
with every law & lawn always good
for an impoundment
or confoundment
in its nice warm
abstract tent
With every line & loan & lawn & yawn drawn
Against nature and the night
Which comes anyway with its own dark ideas
Of right & might
Whose holes & absences
Are the only places
We have ever seen the light
:
The Male Conundrum
“Sir! We have penetrated DEEP into enemy territory.”
“Good! Excellent!”
“There is just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re surrounded.”
After the journey in, there is the journey
Out, after he had to conquer like Napoleon she had to surrender
Like Russia, with winter
With unfamiliar and unfriendly and punishing
Territory, non negotiable
Needs that must be precisely
Met for constant
Attention and simultaneously being
Left alone. He wanted
The separation he was tired of being
Domesticated and feminized with all truth
Covered like the commode seat in
Terry cloth, he just suddenly after 30 odd
Years blurted out that he wasn’t happy
And it hurt her but she knew
He was right that they had gone so far into
What each had become to the other
That only distance could heal the silence
Between them, but then he missed
The misery, he missed being told
What to do and never having
To think too much. He got his self back but
It was so damaged he didn’t want to accept it even
If the customer had a receipt as long as his
Middle leg. A concerned friend suggested
The Marital Transitions Study at the U
But that turned out to be
Filling out clinical forms
Getting your blood tested
Being treated like a lab rat, actually
That might have been better
Than putting the experience in a
Meaningful context, ask any successful American
Businessman to do that you might as well
Ask him to smear his face with shit and go sit
In the middle of the freeway during rush hour
By day it was back to the atoms, molecules and
Random quarks of adolescence and by night back
To being a baby in an old person’s
Body and surrounded by traumatic
Memories, the disintegration of
Community, boredom mixed with
Terror, the cries
Of dead selves you
Saw you conquered you
Came and something was supposed to
Happen and now the kid’s been raised
Your purpose gone
What’s left except the leaving
And leave whatever’s left as
Meaning
Be my
Me be your I
You are my
Give me just
The one that cannot be
Two the two that cannot be
One
One, two, three
Start over
The I of me the we of you of they
The it without
the arm around
Anything
That stayed became
Staid
Messages in the old cold wind
maybe you
Could go back and
No
You’re on a highway with no
Exits
Eat
Gas
Motel
Last chance
Take
Have
Hold
Held
Hell connect the
Dots between
Stars
And
Towns rivulets
Of rain running down the badlands of
Your
Face no
Ghost of a kid in the
Backseat still asking
“Are we there yet?
How much longer?” so you
Have to have to
follow
The feeling in and
Out like the first
Sphincter dividing space from
Space from
Space, he decided to just go
On a trip see some
Country, just be
Watch
Ing The thin round
Tire of his bicycle turn
Ing A
circle into a
straight
Line however
Twisted over and
over until you get
To
Something as much
Like
A Place as we
Can
Imagine.
Hotmail erased my email to you. I just don’t get David Aguirre or Linda Haworth, somehow they seem like two of a kind…..David’s magical mystery tour Unitarian wafty wafty fluffy puffy philosophical meanderings on KXCI, Linda’s leave it to the universe, feel sorry for me even tho I sit on my ass & do nothing to help other victims when I could….Jesus I was wondering about that all day today, while having a headache from indigestion from eating a Mango that had turned a little too close to wine, while installing a shower diverter for a gay guy……the first job he gave me was working on a bidet. Now I can’t go over there without thinking about love and shit (W.B Yeats: “for love hath fixed her mansion in the seat of excrement” ….jillions of tiny parts to solder together in tension and they have to be exactly straight and hold water pressure….I was thinking why have I become such a bitter disappointed old curmudgeon? Why can’t I just do my work & let sleepy little towns lie (and lie and lie and lie thru their teeth & their botox) why can’t I just let shit stink and lie there, why do I have to kick it every time I go past it? Maybe it reminds me of me & my lack of investment in my own art? O well a curse on all heir houses (Jesus what a bitter disappointed old fart I’ve become) Here’s something I been working on. A friend & his wife separated recently & prompted this:
The Male Conundrum
“Sir! We have penetrated DEEP into enemy territory.”
“Good! Excellent!”
“There is just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re surrounded.”
After the journey in, there is the journey
Out, after he had to conquer like Napoleon she had to conquer
Like Russia, with winter
With unfamiliar and unfriendly and punishing
Territory, non negotiable
Needs that must be precisely
Met for constant
Attention and simultaneously being
Left alone. He wanted
The separation he was tired of being
Domesticated and feminized with all truth
Covered like the commode seat in
Terry cloth, he just suddenly after 30 odd
Years blurted out that he wasn’t happy
And it hurt her but she knew
He was right that they had gone so far into
What each had become to the other
That only distance could heal the silence
Between them, but then he missed
The misery, he missed being told
What to do and never having
To think too much. He got his self back but
It was so damaged he didn’t want to accept it even
If the customer had a receipt as long as his
Middle leg. A concerned friend suggested
The Marital Transitions Study at the U
But that turned out to be
Filling out clinical forms
Getting your blood tested
Being treated like a lab rat, actually
That might have been better
Than putting the experience in a
Meaningful context, ask any successful American
Businessman to do that you might as well
Ask him to smear his face with shit and go sit
In the middle of the freeway during rush hour
By day it was back to the atoms, molecules and
Random quarks of adolescence and by night back
To being a baby in an old person’s
Body and surrounded by traumatic
Memories, the disintegration of
Community, boredom mixed with
Terror, the cries
Of dead selves you
Saw you conquered you
Came and something was supposed to
Happen and now the kid’s been raised
Your purpose gone
What’s left except the leaving
And leave whatever’s left as
Meaning
Be my
Me be your I
You are my
Give me just
The one that cannot be
Two the two that cannot be
One
One, two, three
Start over
Without the arm around
Anything
That stayed became
Staid
Have
Hold
Held
Connect the
Dots between
Stars
And
Towns rivulets
Of rain running down the badlands of
Your
Face no
Ghost of a kid in the
Backseat still asking
“Are we there yet?
How much longer?” so you
Have to be him decide to just go
On a trip see some
Country, just be
Watch
Ing The thin round
Tire of his bicycle turn
Ing A
circle into a
more or less
straight
Line Over and
over until you get
To
Something as much
Like
A
Place as
We
Can
Imagine.
We
Can
Imagine.
Trapped In Old Time Radio
Damn, I wish they’d fix that stinkin time machine and come get me outa this. At first it was a trip bein stuck here in the 40’s but the banality is getting on my nerves…. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Red Skelton, Dennis Day, Jack Benny Jesus, yeah Jesus, him too I guess, why’s everything have to be so prettied up with ribbons and bows and all that urban ego bluster, buster, but isn’t that the way it is anyway? Specially in the arts? I like the shows where somebody gets killed and you gotta find out who dunnit. We all know who dunnit. It’s the listener f’r Chrissakes but
don’t it just make it that much easier to see the joke of time, the corny crap they feed us selling cigarettes and lipstick, muscle cars and floor wax and so called enriched bread over the radio. What a sick sad joke, all those big deep voices of gutless irritable old men crackling thru all that static which they say is an echo from the Big Bang. Big Deal I call it, sounds like mauve (which rhymes with love) which they also say is the color scheme for the whole damn dumb universe BUTTT….
here WE are… and it’s all photographic grain in this cheap movie we’re making, me’n my baby in our little bitty apartment with the tiny Frigidaire the dining room set built like a Sherman tank with formica for armor, and my little Willys Overland and my 78s (and here’s to you, Bix Beiderbecke, and here’s to you, Eddie South, Paris, 1927, love ya madly, baby!)….all of which I chose because I don’t buy ANY of their run of the ad mill crap. Me’n my baby. Hah! I used to wonder why Bob just laughed when I stole her away from him and told him we were gonna get married, but now I know. TOO MUCH like they say in the detective novels when somebody’s about to get shot.
I’ve seen her make women cry just by talking about how dirty their houses are. She makes ME cry! I think she always thinks the room is dirty because her mom told her her womb was dirty. I thought she’d be a nice kind wife cause she’s a nurse, cause she gives money to bums, but she votes Republican and never lets you forget about it
No wonder my face looks like a road map and I got this feeling like I’m weaving a rug with a rope and a bucket of sand, and the road splays out in the headlights like an unsolved crime
It’s so damn dark out there and everybody asleep even when they’re awake and I know wer’e not getting outa this mess alive…ah but she’s a sweet little thing, alright, my baby, got me working night and day at the stupid job down at the power plant. And relaxing by playing scrabble badly. Kinda poeticly ya know? Cept she don’t like it, nor the times when I’m laughin so hard, especially at the politicians up there on the high stage in three piece suits but naked I mean BUTT naked from the waist down.
She sent me outa the house this evening cause she’s cleaning again and I’m laughing uncontrollably again, and I’m sittin out here on the back porch watching the fireflies and the leaves fluttering in the wind
And I can see now how without doing anything wrong it’s possible to get trapped in a miserable situation for the rest of your life. I got a sinking sensation that time machine can’t be fixed because I think it violates some physical law or something.
Or maybe the future’s been annihilated. I told them the feedback loops were capable of infinite and increasingly rapid acceleration without human contribution and they just laughed at me. “Do Something.” Was the last communication I got. How’m I supposed to do something with a broken universal hub frequency transmitter and no parts? And who’d believe me here even if I got it working? I’ve seen the letters from the doctor at the psych ward at her hospital piling up. I think she’s planning on having me committed.
And it’s getting dark out there. Really dark. If you know what I mean.
Honor
In a small room smells
Like vomit justice
Without context
has the stench
Of self
Righteousness
Cowards need
Company and lots
Of words to cover
Their lies, ever
see the eyes
Of people at a
Lynching how
Intentionally
Dull they are
always
The most twisted
And meanest
spirited
Among them found
Someone who made
Them feel small found
the fault real or
imagined egged
Them all
On started a war
By the most ancient
Of excuses saying
They’d been attacked
Stuffed
All the shame of their
Fabricated
Victimhood
Down the hanging
Man’s throat and invited
Him to defend
himself
smallness
makes my soul
hurt and I wander
outside look up at the
stars until their
distances make me
realize how small
I am how much I need
Those awful
people
dear judgement jones
ENOUGH
Faces turning
Blue in the snow
Light of small town
Intersections red signal
Light flashing
NOBODY
NOWHERE
NOTHING
Brains
Splattered against
The dirty mauve
Walls of lonely apartment
World red
Blue, yellow
Ambulance and cop car
Lights
Flashing
Across the family
Photo
Graph the purely
semantic
Problem of personal
Worth
Taken
down far
Too many dark alley
Roller coaster
Suicide
Rides razor
Blades and
Pills and bills slipping
Silently like
shamed
Lovers into the dumb
Weeping
night
Within where
The anger
Goes
Clenched
Fingers stiff
Tagged toes dead as
Mom n Pop’s
giant neon
Teeth grinding
exceeding
Ly small the insane
mess
Of family
Stress
Enough GOD
damit we’re
Full up with red
ego
Mangled
Meat here
At the morgue it says
Even less
Than Rush Limbaugh
If that’s
Possible
But he’s OUT
Of the
Picture. I
Declare
MY
self
your new self
appointed King of
Asshole World I’M
also declaring
Assholey
sanctuary from
Sanctimony of over
Compensating crusaders of
Self
Righteousness I
have met the other Buddha
On the road and I
KILLED HIM, I welcomed
The baby
Jesus into my heart not as a
Savior but out of compassion
For a fellow
BUM, I killed
Krishna and every other
Addictive type
Media hype
Success story
In the Cosmic
Comic
Books
I told Dr. Laura and
All the other wounded
Sadistic moralizers
To stick their personal
Vengeance up their
darkness, I told them
YOUR’RE already
Dead and don’t
Know it, parental
Advice IS
Vice your Dads’ feet
Show it they’re
trying
To kill us
All also
I broke
And entered the
Asylum blew up
The echo chamber,
Took the tape off the
UP button on the
Elevator, switched the
Freight train of associations
To the other track
Jack
And FINALLY
I burned down
The Department of Justice
You’ve used it
and abused it
Long enough for your personal
Spite and self
Indulgent sermonizing
You’ll just have to get by
By sitting on the ground
In regular clothes like a
Regular person and
looking the defendant
In the eye
and walking
A mile in his
heart and soul from
Now on by
the way it was
A beautiful
Fire.