Bent and Beat

i am trying to get home

his is a tragedy

a year after the great blizzard and that corner waiting day

it is too warm outside tonight

she was a child

change comes around

the light was smoky

thin clouds pull into thin gauzy shapes as they drag across the south side of Pilot Butte

the wind and rain put me in the mind of old songs about

the night was crawling toward dawn

we are not literati

things are pushing, moving us toward that strange crossworlds
songs and situations and the urgings of close advisors
photographs that have found us
photographs of ourselves that we know nothing of, that linger and fade in the albums of friends long forgotten

woodruff place, out by the fountains that haven't seen more than rain water in sixty years, round from where my father rented a a guesthouse that was once a servant's quarters after he left my mother, to where my mother's grandmother once lived across the street from a sandy brick grocery store

but really, what could wait there in yesterday and dead places where the high priestess of gentrification starbucks has exorcised the restless native ghosts and spirits of individuality?

and neither my hat nor my coats fit the city nor the weather
(maybe my habits are in the twilight area somewhere between)
but home is never a fixed fucking point
just a set of ever shifting variables in an equation that describe a fleeting and relative position
sitting on the side of a mountain
dreaming
staring eastward and trying to decide what to decide upon

yesterday is wrapped in crushed velvet and snakeskin
dirty guitars and grungy hair
and the wrong streets on the right nights
what did we know of rolling stones and gathering moss and clouds gathering in darkness?
hayseed city gawkers sore necked in the windswept leaf littered autumn of a sleepy city
smoking, leaning against an old chevy in the lit circle center of the universe
wondering about things which, 20 years later, we still can't understand
those 20 years slipped by and gone, like a fuzzed out arpeggio issuing from german speakers mounted in 
budweiser longneck boxes, notes and moments indiscernibly blending with distortion

antique shop graveyard memories of yesterday dead and sold and slipped away from the boxes we sealed and hid carefully in musty old attics among bare copper wire and motes in the sun beams like stars in the sky
stray pieces of carnival glass and thrift store paintings and boxes of toys long gone and forgotten now filled with holiday decorations, nativity and comical ghosts and silver rings for sacred eggs
and other things that songs and beards and thick southern accents bring to mind
just echoes of faded memories of the past long dead 

there was nothing but darkness on the island that winter
the shore froze and nothing useful washed up
we had an old JVC turntable, bought second hand from a synagogue junk sale
and the set procession of the handful of irreplaceable yesterdays that were etched in vinyl that we played each night
in suitable order
to keep the beasts that stalked the shadow edges of our gas furnace fire at bay

-she seeds the sidewalk cracks with kentucky bluegrass
-she seeds the courthouse planters with poppies and kush
-she sits in rush hour traffic, tits goose pimpled and nipple hard in the autumn wind, in the middle of meridian street in her grandfather's campaign chair
-she drinks champagne and fingers herself in late night bank lobbies for atm cameras
-she reads emma goldman and mother jones
-she skateboards to her book shop barista part time gig
-she was a mid 90's adbusters centerfold, on all fours obscenely stuffed with a ronald mcdonald butt plug
-she drives drunkenly from grocery store to grocery store, leaving quarters on the carousels to be found by morning children
-she hates panties, wants to Hearst a few banks, and kill a pig or a Polanski
-she abhors food made in labs, but love the drugs that are
-she has ink and plugs and beeswax dreads and an old bus that daddy's checks pay the insurance on (as well as the stomach pumpings)
-she offers a sly fuck you to the passing ski patrol

i am trying to listen
and you are screaming
screaming in gray clouds
and bright and clean ribbons of green silk in the dirt
and tara in ink
and sons of buk
and sons of escoffier
your speech is pastiche
a language unheard for many years
in an accent i don't recognize


so i sit and smoke and mumble to myself
trying to force your syllables into some sensible pattern
trying to coax the crux of your meaning from the few words i can translate
but my work is sloppy and the meaning i infer is unintended 

fletcher cherry stumble dreams
are just down the street
from water bowls and strawberry jam altars
vans driven through front windows
down the street from a hundred year old church
with a forty year old flickering neon sign
and a congregation that come across the border in the last couple of years
they meet for barbacoa and beer in the restaurant on the square after sunday service
on the opposite end of the block from the chinese restaurant
across from the egyptian place
the null space of gentrification
between a working class past
and borderland yesterday
a ripple of homes on the very edge of the ever ebb flow of the city's edifices
money mingles with poverty
a stalemate of the classes, an uneasy peace
between the vegan urbs
and the budweiser bumpy face inheritors

gray in your brown hair
your beauty framed in silver
love is fall again

kermit the frog

rectangles are trying to eat me

the air grows colder

what becomes of the hero that lives beyond his glory

they tore down that old pink house by the side of the interstate

native flora

she is best remembered:

i am sorry

there's a fire burning in the mountains

let's celebrate today
as the day that tomorrow was born
many years ago
even though
i have no car at all
let alone one that flies
but we have traffic ringing in our heads like rain and sparks
like a yesterday from an incense filled house on a dark and curved road
what is the half life of sentiment, radiating throughout weak moments and poisoning us slow and unnoticeable?

you invented a new sort of dreaming
thinking
creating and playing
pondering of what might become
what the crops we have sown might look like come their reaping
nightmares come true much more often then dreams
i have learned

we float between the harvest moon
a full and bright target
and the cold and colorless autumn desert landscape
heads high and filled with cavorite
we wonder which is more barren and lifeless

satanslayers and devil orbs
strange doctors ride with the valkyries
in my mind's crimson eyes of an orb
fruit loops and the late show
cowboy detectives in muscle cars
cops with chops
and witches hung with care

roots from a limestone cellar
vegetables from the begging bowl
peasant's pot of beans
wino's empty bottles

she smokes a lonely cigarette
in the four o'clock chill before the sunlight has cracked the egg of the night sky
the boys still deep in northern dreams
and her mother wheezing from the open window above
the same prayer each morning
and she is off into the darkness
her hands stiff and tired before the dawn cares to notice
to pay for water the kids can't drink
and the clean air they leave in jugs every monday morning
each dawn is a last chance ignored
ya' know?

bone rattling and rain soaked dogs
gleaming in the twilight under the post office flag
blind grandmother porch song beneath a harvest moon
mustang lean and mother's loamy flesh
caked underneath father's dirty fingernails
an auctioneers gavel stalks grandfather's dreams
with the seed of debt stitched upon their brows
the town circles around them

the scenery only changes from soy to corn
and back again
another endless circle

story book incense, milwaukee gutter spill, and some girls from easyville
jubilant and lonesome
and more than a little ignorant
of what a whole life is
indignation is a ghost
hypocrisy is an uneasy ally
middle town adventures in a small age
(still)
there are somethings we never outgrow
or is it that our cage is too narrow to allow us?
maker's glove box mark mutes the need for an answer.

tomorrow will be sunday
god and the corn will be forgotten
drunken dreams in barnyard shadows
woken by a blind dog barking at the september wind
heaven and voids swallowed and forgotten with burnt black coffee
dinner for breakfast
today
tomorrow
yesterday
this is home

some people treasure the act of writing
as if it were a joy
like smoking pot
but for some of us it's like breathing
a necessity that is more pressing at times than others

We tried to explain to her that we didn't want to do it, we simply had to. We had little choice. She never once looked up, just lay there sobbing into her pillow's goose down. The snow was getting deeper we told her and there was no telling how long it would be before the road out was clear.

“While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”
-Eugene V. Debs

when i was five my mother took me to the circus. It was a rainy august night and the thunder spooked the monkeys. They stampeded, leaving their little fezs and vests crushed in the mud alongside the trampled corpse of my mother. All the while the
Leipzigs stood watching with bared teeth, flinging their feces at the crowd.

my mother will tell you this is not what happened at all. i guess it's just one of those rashomon things.

late night or early morn
the wind blows hard, breaking like a wave across the butte
and cascading across my house, bearing the smell of changing seasons
my television is playing 26 years ago
those images of my past chronicled for all to see
a train rumbling through town
past decaying and abandoned grain silos
three grey fingers behind the IGA
the balding derelict winos in the derelict hotel smoking and passing their brown bags, nodding sloppily as you ride, careful to avoid the broken glass that litters the corner
the trailer park where my father's friend lived on the outskirts of town,
a huge lumbering man, bearded, backwoods, and brilliant
rolling his joints in the wood stove heated living room of his mobile home
and his daughter who wrote fantasy stores
a quietly intelligent poorly dressed princess
in her aluminum capsule at the edge of an ancient forest
and it's there, lacking the detail,
a departure point for a tired and restless mind
think of trains and home
and you shall get trains and home
i wonder which came first
and of course it is the trains
and home
the derelict covered bridge, new highway built parallel to it
decaying but standing, century old timbers covered with last weekends graffiti
red paint peeling in the summer humidity
the green brown river deep and surging in the gaps beneath your feet
seemingly far and removed yet ever just a fall away
and perhaps i've achieved escape velocity
but have forgotten to account for orbital decay

you talk so much about change
how about you spare some for your brother
but you pass him head down on the streets
every day
i have struck that right check enough
turn your left upon me
you sniveling blue mongrels and bitches
you think it's a game because you are tired of the killing
now
and your wallets are empty
but change doesn't come easy
fucking fools
it doesn't come from a magical machine and the lever you pull
once the landslide begins, it's to late for the pebbles to vote
and you are pebbles casting stones for pebbles
perhaps smoother but still pebbles
your statesmen are as limp and useless as your sense of justice and fairness
we march in empty streets and preach in empty churches
even if our brothers speak the truth
you'll never listen
you say you are one of us
but you don't' know anything about
selma
freeman field
emma goldman
mother jones
rigoberta menchu
das kapital
subcomandante marcos
you say you are of the american people
yet you know nothing of its history
of the culture that has created and subdued you
and you know nothing of those of us who work our fingers
cracked and bloody to eke out a living
and struggle to pay the rent
who go for days with emptying cupboards
like sand in an hourglass, morsel by morsel until payday
or the old man in the electric wheelchair checking his mail
by the bustling street in a small town
where jobs are dying as quickly as dreams
you who think rise up is some catchy line in a song
we should drive the empty slogans from your voices by shoving our raised fists down your throats

all of these things, like the sun
fade away and grow more distant as the seasons pass
and the longwalker sparks up his arrow point
and aims eastward at my heart
at the soft and green grass

all of these things, like the moon
come out at night
cast their glow on unlikely places
and obey a cycle beyond my ken
just beyond my porch

bluegrass notes and homespun phrases ease the chill in the air
chanting the litany of things unforgivable,
even in the name of pilgrimage
sins of a father

if only our memories were like an old wool hat
that we could pull them out and wear them in comfort
when the need arise
or otherwise fold them roughly and tuck them into our back pockets
until the climate better suits them

nothing spreads out in every direction
all of the giants are dead and gone
their home left to decay and blow away across the scrub
tumbleweed debris in the texas desert
the night is cold and the rest stop is empty
the coin-op binoculars steal my quarters
and there aren't any lights for miles around

lately i find myself longing for

the loamy soil of home
that soft clay under your feet as you walk
dark and rich as my grandfather's black coffee
as cool and distant as my mother's gaze

the smell of summer rain upon furrowed fields
the sound of the drops upon the leaves of corn
the drone of cicadas, steady and constant
the communal rise and fall of bullfrog songs
the trees hung with the lights of thousands of fireflies

most of all i think of a particularly sweet scent
that always seems to rise out of the trees
as i child i learned it was honeysuckle
and we would pull the long stamens from the flowers
to enjoy the dripping nectar
as i grew older, i learned the vines were not native
introduced a century before and our forests were choking upon them
their pervasive perfume was the smell of one species
destroying another
just like this evasive nostalgia, choking the potential out of the present moment
sweet and thick, like wild honey
but dangerously misplaced

so fade off into the distance, eastbound train
racing headlong into the dawn
to the green grass, across the muddy rivers
through the oaks, birch, and sycamore
crickets and lightning bugs
and bear along with you
these honeysuckle dreams of yesterday

i play the same song twice
while watching a shooting star herald the dawn
the sleeping town doesn't notice, just rolling over and blindly groping for the tranquility called "snooze"

what yesterdays are hidden in songs so old, popping vinyl memories of childhood?
old songs, songs you've not heard since you were so very young are so much deja vu, strange familiarity
the meaning of the sounds of things we knew before we understand meaning
and the chain of memories they evoke
her face, her face, and your face

perhaps we are nothing more than experiencers of songs, the places where they live and grow

i play the some song three times, three dozen years
a song that reminds me of the same street
and the same porch, peeling red paint, wrought iron rust

and this all mostly goes nowhere, just like listening to old songs
random flicker of yesterday and today, impression and repressions
and like the songs, it will come to pass quicker than not
that i will forget all about this
and perhaps come to find it again some distant day

she asked why?
and what do i say, what answer can i have that she could understand and that would justify the guilt?
so many little words that mean nothing strung together in response
someday, i promise to explain
someday has probably come and gone and i have nothing better
and for us, tomorrow might as well be yesterday
for all of the closer it brings her to me
which brings us to where?
a place we have never been i say
which is no answer
but mostly it is there
in that is is not here
she tries not to cry and asks when?
we know the answer is now
a now that has come and gone and a now that has yet to be
but a now that never was then
and we are both crying
she comes back to why
children ask circular questions and adults respond with circular logic
she seeks to understand and i seek to evade

on the telephone, her voice sounds older and stronger
but it's a facade she and time put on for my benefit
and i wonder if she can her in my voice
how old and weak i feel?

we suffer through common themes
drawn from separate perspectives
with years and miles between them
the plot line though was conceived by my hand
and these characters that i've created
you and me
they feel the pain that is upon the pages
they have paper hearts that bleed in the rain
and though we may pretend to use it to suit our moods
the rain comes and goes of it's own will
some wounds never heal
just allow the paper to cut more deeply

have you ever seen
been to a place
where it seems that fall has slipped in a bit too early?
green and brown
jade and decomposition
the river in white and blue strums a tune
waterfall arpeggios,
a bobbing lodgepole keeps time
in a grove, between four pine spires
near a grey picnic table covered with a tablecloth of moss
the four of us seem suddenly so young
small
and even more
a part of everything
and each other

yesterday is a stone that floats
solid and porous
unchangeable and movable
it is buried in the soil, beneath the stream of thoughts
loosened by tumid waters, it floats back to the surface
its buoyancy is resonance

as she falls under the fever and darkness
she sees him
standing upon a floating slab of earth (that is not of this earth)
in a place that is not at all (more aptly, a nonplace)
a nearly infinite blackness, spreading
punctuated by swimming energies and swirling lights
he stands upon a path like a ribbon of crimson light
hair blown by perfumed winds of distant origin
flames crackling around him
hands in a threatening mudra, mind struck tight upon its object
feeling for the unseen
seeing the veiled
keeping the undying things lurking in the darkness at bay
a quiet war for the human soul waged unnoticed
hidden in the cracks between realities

the girl on the horse reads my future with a deck of bicycle cards
the wind through the pines and
across the rocks drifts into white noise, becomes electronic feedback
in an empty place
between stations
the lake is shallow, a mirror in the fading summer sun
surface broken by a few monolithic boulders, stones fallen from Her crown
She casts no reflection and i fear to see my own
her domain,dominion, and thrall

memphis came back around when i least expected her
a voice from the past, a temporal echo
a thing imbued over time with a significance it always held
but i never truly understood
when we were younger, when we didn't know any better
we used to ride around together, the two of us in that red chevy
singing with a lack of abandon that only the young can muster
like glad and sorry, there is little space between then and now
only these few truths, certain relative levels of truth
outweighing the absolute in the drunken dawn
leading us back slowly by fractal resonations to particular places
much like the arms of memphis
in a different city with eyes lined deeply and scored by weariness and time
but her voice is the same it was before, in the backseat of that 77
and the words are more surgical than ever
we all get what we need in time
or at least what we deserve
and some of us get just what we wish for
to be as jaded and star crossed as our little shakespearean daydream headplays had wanted us to be
she reminds me
on the telephone unanswered, on the radio nearly forgotten, and hidden among the pirated digital copies of youth's out of print yesterdays

Our last night in that trench, we got drunk on the wine we took from the dead italians. We laughed as hard as we could in the face of death, inevitable and delayed, knowing in the morning the kraut line would push lethally past us.

I told the boys all I loved them and joey told me he loved me too. I told joey that I didn't love him like that and no one laughed, because we all know joey did love me like that.

the road is tucked into cliffs massive and broad and ringed in high places with white mineral deposits

the fountain is still there

all night

Wanna know how convincing that costume was? I pissed my pants. I'm serious as hell, i saw him standing there and he looked right into my eyes and his eyes looked so, well goddamned human. I actually pissed in my jeans.

the trail is lost in the snow

our family history is alive and well

and Northwest Romance

really, she is. she killed seven orphans last night, her and her goddamned molten chocolate cake.

that impose names upon me

i am in the dreams of other people

on my porch/perch
on the hillside
birds warble just before the dawn's crest
struggling to rise above the drunken cacophony of arguing neighbors
distant parking lot lights flare in the yet night
the silhouette of a cell phone tower
jutting from the butte to the west
is the devil's pitchfork
painted upon a white cloud canvas

i sing
from a nest
at 3700 feet
built of wire and paper, bits and sheets
scraps gathered from all about

tired desert dawn
formerly caught between the cross and flag
now just her(e)
trying to sleep cross legged in a ragged e.r. chair
murmuring voices rise in pitch from down the hall
just enough to catch a random word or phrase
and fall back into that buzzing lull of white noise
like a siren luring me to sleep
to sleep and rest and dream uncoming

reading of fires i should have known about
places i know but have never seen
reduced to ash and cinder
and so many insurance forms

the rain is a tease
she licks at the city
lightning tongues
then lets loose a moan
thunder tremble
her breath is cool upon my skin
as she hovers weightlessly above
her passion withheld
drifting on by

the dying light upon a dead man's bridge
a world of brown things named for white
rock and dirt and scraps they found
the leftovers
they tossed to those they
chased and trampled
into the desert scrub
of their barren culture
and now the children sing
tribal songs
about looney tunes
nasal call and response
set to a primordial rhythm
that sweeps my heartbeat along with it
across the dusty canyon floor
and carves deep scarifying gorges into my mind

a holy day in a nowhere place
a place between places that matter
motor saints in an oval coliseum, third turn lions,
a city awash in high test fuel, cheap booze
and
ignorance of a world crashing outside the Speedway
Around the track
I met my father after thirteen years
then brought my daughter, and found I didn't care
and put illegal poker machines in windowless taverns in time for the race fans

Subtle little fractal crackfingers, seemingly random chaos coalesecing into form, patterns, and circumstance.

I woke up on the wrong side of today, yesterday.
Which is, extraordinarily, becoming the norm.

We are stuck
upon the wet pane
under a yellow umbrella
the pouring sky and amber headlights wash over us

I know this old test pilot
as tall and lean as a Saturn V
and just as obsolete
he pumps himself full of 80 proof fuel
sitting on an aged, cracked vinyl launchpad
elbows against the stained gantry
escaping the gravity of sobriety
orbiting the failures of his life, trying to get a better view
until mission control passes over the avocado phone call from his wife
the receiver crashes loudly
and he staggers to my end of the bar, smoking upon
re-entry
he calls me Ace and asks for a ride home
as always, i oblige
i drive him out towards his mobile home in the desert
on the edge of town
for the first half of the recovery he brags
about earthrise, meeting the president
about dehydrated meatloaf and of all of the Tang he used to get
but then he falls silent, eyes on the clear blue sky overhead
watching the wispy contrails of passing jets fade into nothingness
I pull into the long and dusty driveway
and his wife waits there, pacing in front of their aluminum capsule
and with relief in her eyes she escorts him to his bed
followed by their cats and dogs, a fallen hero's parade.

There is a merchant downtown who has, after carefully scanning to make sure that we were alone in his shop, twice offered to sell me a ray gun. Twice, perhaps three times. And on another occasion, has attempted to sell me a massive tome bound in the skin of an eighteenth century harlequin.

Sometimes, when you are the only person in the house who is not Asian, you get tired of noodles.

We found a scrawny black dog, or he found us, came wagging up to us, perhaps lured by the smell of simmering pork escaping the open door. I called him Taco. He came inside as I counted the till, left as i locked the door, and hurried off into the night as a faraway voice shouted his true name.

I dream of India so much lately, i have begun to fear that my dreams are being outsourced to a more receptive mind.

Even the moon falls, she said and looked away. He had no idea what she meant, and went back to sleep.

She said take three weeks
And fifteen hundred dollars
And don't let the door hit you in the ass.
And I am getting that Uncle Ronnie feeling again
Shit, Old Hoss, I thought i'd grown well past all of that.
But our circumstances are like echoes that sound and reverberate throughout our lives, and reality can repeat itself like dreams.
And as in dreams at times there is nothing we can change.
We have but to endure it.
Again.

i lay in the darkness of nothing to say
listening to the tick of running out
touched only by the dying scent of your perfume

Lost:
One well used and worn self.
Last seen somwhere between Highway 65 and Higway 97.
Warning: may be confused, hostile.
Please contact poster if found.

Even though his mother was an actual whore, the boy never once heard nor saw her getting fucked, by anyone. Which says a hell of a lot, really, I mean, can many people say that they have never had to suffer either laying in our chilhood beds and hearing our fathers do ungodly things to our mothers or, worse yet, walking in on her straddling him? And for the son of a working girl? That is pretty upright parenting, I should say.

She handed me brushes and palette
and said
"Paint me a rainbow"
so i painted a picture of every day i had ever known her
She crinkled her nose up at it, squinted her eyes to investigate
at last, her face drew into a wide smile, giggling
"Oh, i get it."

I am neither the sum nor the singular. I am nothing(ness). I am space and void and empty.

Spring in the high desert is a thing spread carelessly about, cast and hidden among the rocks and snow along the river's banks and mountain streams.

My appliances are beginning to know more people than me.

How I wish I were Romeo under your window, Rather than just me, cold and foolish, watching the moon slowly drop across the pane, seeing your face only in my imagination.

Her eyes are the deep brown of an exotic hardwood, a rare tree upon the rockiest shore of a distant land

Five minutes and fifty two seconds in the Leaf House make me think of her, there alone

Our ego based perception is a prism that bends the infinitude of reality into a more comforting spectrum...

We were waiting on snow that never came. And you? What were you waiting for?