nancy you must never let me but oh that thing I once must wrote

and here I fall to your defense but never exterior-strate but yet

why yes all the time I am a performer but no not

of your nefarious type



type sexy

or just

hammer to the head



well



hammered I am

and also such

a head yeh you



give it good

I will but you can't make me



in slow motion here now level son my blood feels the look of things here lately on the inside more expertly than me excursive skin yeh lately this blood has been cooling



which is where you need to keep it, in the cooler in the crisper mami, I know whereof I speak, mami, I'm a man of pride



out walking alongside this one particularly muscular and true black herding dog this morning I told myself to look at distance, look at the details of the trees, many many trees wet on the hill I live by and many of them old, old pines and oaks older than you mamimissymy sister



fear not what comes fear not fear not



I told myself look at the distance and the grey morning seemed much of potential and scene fore and aft, both biblical



and pagan aftermath

self-portrait

evaluation of the damp half-thawed

ground scored with diminishing snow grain

was overwhelmingly floaty green; this property

was hastened or fomented by a pair

of gin-and-tonics or gee and tees as I overwhemingly

prefer to think of that specialty twig borne water



before it was all through (by it

I mean the moment) I would hear a

high keening noise from the road or from

beyond the road; I thought could it be from a

truck or trailer? or could it be from the universe

sounding commendation



and scoring 1 true thought for me

because the 1 thought I was thinking was that

poetry really was one of the first and as such

one of the greatest forms of art, most essential

in cause for humanity: after all, look at Lao-Tzu

Aesop, Homer and Anonymous Ballads



Shakespeare, Lazarus and

so, that was the thought. then my munificent

black dog stood and rounded to attention when

the keening noise came and then too came the second thought

which was: well in that case I'm free

to write a really crappy novel now



because great art or not most people care not a crap

for poems but man will they never not shut up

about what polluting dumbass movies they've just seen

and how you've got to see them

too ah fuck it just send me

the jackpot Kafka and I'll mount the psychic blanket party

against all your foes



then now and to come

cagey



another snow-blasted March

I'm out in my writing shed

chucking another wedge of oak

into that woodstove we bought

at the flea market last year,

then back to bang on the manual.

My burden is to be the transmitter



for whatever chords of memory

or nightmare chance to band

down and through. the green

magnetic vertigo of the frequency

is something I never question.

Neither ever did you. You're tearing up



Texas again now and I'm still here.

You call some nights from some bar

or some new guy's place. The price

of transmission is how cold-blooded

you've made me become. The long

distance helps to chill the platelets. At night I sit



on the roof here and sip cheap

brandy from the bottle, smoke cigarettes

I roll myself. Damn you, God, I think.

All the ponds are still capped with ice.

The table is buried in white pages covered



in letters like mites, skin fleas, all

the insanity of the transmission. You

wondered that half-year you were here

how we'd ever get rich. I said it'll be

no sweat for you once you get shut



of me. You just hunkered down into

that Martin dreadnought and scratched

out the transmission. No brains in it either.

Just blood and heart. You the purer cipher

but then here I am, yet plugged into the wavelength

albeit by a cheap brown extension cord.



Tomorrow I'm going to wake up on the floor

out here freezing, step out, piss on the cinderblocks,

and then make my way back to the black and white kitchen

with that creepy Crazy Kat clock you gave me

that Christmas. Fucker. He's in the transmission.



Bigger wavelength than ours too.

There's going to be a message on the machine.

It's going to be you and you're going to be in some

horrible trouble. I'm going to have to spend the afternoon

tuning up the '82 Ranger God help me and then hit the road.

I'm going to incur a huge credit debt just getting down there.



When I get down there I'm going to get into a fight with a boy in a bar

and crack his head with an ashtray and fuck up my right wrist all

to hell. There's going to be a gun at some point.

I'll be like, I just want to write.

It'll be just like a movie.



Nah. Fuck it. You go to hell. Fuck all of Texas,

get strung out and die. I'm throwing another oak in the stove.

Sing a pretty little tune.

Send it out there. I'll pick it up in the transmission.

I don't have time for this bullshit I have work to do

perihelion: the behavior

I make a quarter turn and gesture with a cigarette



I turn one-eighth and am handed a Cross pen



I rotate half again and am handed a receipt



I slide back once and am reminded of transgressions



I am test wheel

And answer wheel



Alone in the peristyle

climbing up the hill

toward the smoke

of the cookfire



the full moon alarming

past fractious

cloud scuttle



I am too few

bootmarks in the blue

shadow snowdrift

all I need at intervals is a hill

bright sunlight

pines



a German Shepherd

a pond or stream

tackle, truck



beer,

occasional smoke



then after all this,

a clear head and 3 hours

per night



with which to exercise it



after that,

everything that's ever happened to me,

every action I've ever witnessed,

every emotion I've ever felt,



should do to make

for the rest of it.



nomads I guess hear

just the other nomads



while territorial beings

fixate

on the big



dark music

between the moon

and here

don't go around it,

go through it

oh and these are the worst of times when images are all blunted nullified and the word abhors oh



and of course these are not the worst of times why look

at this paradise of opportunity and all you bring to it



is you're bored? you're tired of some shit? you wish something was some other way?



yeah but it's these surroundings and yeah well tell that to

the person in jail the person in the desert the person with no car the person with no job the person with no food the person with no mind tell that



to the dead person with no one more time

to give pause

to take pause



to not spend a lot of time wondering

why can't it all be happening

in a funky colonial style house

with 4 guitars no cares

acclaim, a cooler head

and me some much cooler stereotype, well



you take what you have

you just have to take it

---

then something happened

and then I started

anew

again

I don't believe in astrology except as a guide and where it seems to apply

two fish two fish two fish two fish

uh gee uh



the thing about her is that she's doing it all yeh

but ok what about what G. Flaubert famously said

about the ideal writer's ideally boring habits contrasted

with his so not boring imagination I guess



I epitomize that idea. well in fact minus any glib

shit a big part of this shit is feeling nostalgia for five

minutes ago or else 20 years ago passed in an instant

but anyway it's a new world these days, and a dangerous one



and forbidding. to a point. they say we're up here a small state

and yet outpeople up north get lost every day. traditional

lines of the American geography are bullshit. this can be

taken literally and/or as metaphor. equal application



tangentially I'll tell you I do have perverse thoughts about

certain ordinary young corporately held women seen daily and regard these

thoughts as little brothers, too dumb to know what

they're about. sex is so overrated. so not worth bothering



of course you need an outlet for sex to see this.

I never had one for years but feel so sanguine

now it gives me hope about myself.

men care about men things.



sex trouble is the trouble of boys.

no time for that now:

my anger is what troubles me. note I don't say "scares"

I don't feature any more personal apocalypes for me



unless of course I reserve one more of the deep Jungian type

but conditionally on the deep DL and no one knows. I might take one more

of those. but poetry. you can do one a day:

fiction is so much harder and I motherfuckers need to pare out



a space to write. around here I mean. Because I will not let cheesy New York

new uh huh uh huh motherfuckers win. my goal is to make my old

teacher Tony Ardizzone shocked and proud. Look What That One Did

sort of thing. I'm only half doing it now not even half



I got so many fists and barely one face to put them in except this one

right here



right here

Here's this to make you sick at heart.



And here's this to make you sick at heart.



And Paul Krugman better stay on the ground and out of small airplanes before someone makes a phone call and he gets the Wellstone treatment

The criminals in Washington

are worse than they've ever been.



Ever.



This is not an opinion.



I'd never send a son

to die

in the oil wars

and neither should you.



Evil, stupidity, cravenness

is rampant now

at a pitch never before

possible.



It's all because of someone's ATM card.

It's what the computer says.

It's what the TV says.



The tree of liberty has died.

So keep your blood inside.



You will need it in the end

The November sun rose firing the mist ascendant upon the Piedmont. I awoke in my faded red '87 Nova feeling sick from drinking. I was parked in the narrow, hardscrabble parking lot of Black Stump Studios, the rehearsal space.



It was my ninth night sleeping in my car's reclined bucket seat and two months since I'd left my old life.



I viewed my breath rising toward the pilly gray upholstery of the vehicle's ceiling. The gold sunlight streamed through the smudged side windows and over my battered jeans jacket.



I reclined the bucket seat upward and drew in toward myself, burying my nose beneath the smoke-smelling the found green flannel shirt I'd begun wearing as liner since the weather had broken cold, smelling my filthy blue undershirt.



I had a wool overcoat stored at the self-storage cubicle I shared in Sandy Springs, and I'd go dig it out today. First I'd have to get gasoline for the car.



Before that I'd need coffee.



I wondered how much money I had left on me.