Jeet Kun Do



Never had a bloody nose: you

never did. The world's a big

playground, yours, huh?

No difference in the poe moe



you fuckin hoe moe. Boy: see?

Who else would call you that?

Your Dad might not. I see:

Each now. Paralyzed. Join



the club. Walk on. Digital

itch. For fucking sure,

fella. Call me Bud. They

know me everywhere. I got



new form and no one gives a fuck.

So: form. Fuck bitterness.

Unfettered

mind. Hah. This isn't the poem I meant



to write, but it is. Sieved through

winter hands, not so broken. Anymore

Ask any stranger.

Tight, my page, I'll show you sometime:





for you,

yours, erstwhile sins,



mine:









Admit.





I say it to me,



I say it to





you.





You think I'm joking, and always







have

They Know Me Everywhere



5.



The first thing Billy thought he'd better do was calm the fuck down but that only took about a minute. Then he went and got a glass and drank 2 big glasses of water. Then he went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, showered. Got dressed. He swept the broken glass from his bed and from the floor around his bed and dumped it in the trash. He stripped the blankets and sheets from his bed and balled them into the laundry hamper. Then he went under the sink, found a roll of duct tape and two heavy-duty black plastic garbage bags. He removed the broken pane from the window, lowered the screen, and patched back the cold with the bag and and the tape. He hoped for no more break-ins.



He carried the broken window outside around in back of the trailer and leaned it against his shed. There he observed the shallow imprints of his brother's boots, filling with falling snow, leading back through the other yards and into the tree line.



Fine.



He went back inside and filled the tea-kettle, turned on the stove, made a cup of instant coffee. He left it black. He stood at the kitchen window sipping it, gazing out into the falling snow at Buddy's diminishing boot-track, feeling terribly calm, wanting a cigarette badly. He'd have to buy a pack. He'd picked the wrong lifetime to quit. Everything was so fucked up. He felt himself beginning to cut loose from caring.



He picked up the phone and started to call in sick for work, then thought: Fuck it. They were going to fire him anyway. He'd better find Buddy quick though. His brother was crazy but not stupid. Well, he couldn't even call Buddy crazy anymore. He knew people thought he, Billy, was crazy. Crazy was an inaccurate description: they'd had a bad upbringing. They'd both almost turned out OK. Maybe all this was just a phase they were going through.



Fuck it.



He felt himself again cutting loose from it all. Emily. Those kids. Buddy. Emily. Emily



He finished his coffee, went in and took a seat on the couch. All was silent. He engaged his thoughts of suicide again, left them. He thought about Emily, about the times, years ago, before any pregnancy, when she'd bring home another girl. Images of that naked past warped like a hunger now in his mind: sounds and smells and feelings, girls' names, candles burning, girls' hair moving beneath him, across him, too much of it. All of that dead ambigous past with its dead hopes and dead promises came warping back through his blood now. He could feel his heart beating.



He lowered his jeans, masturbated, ended up coming all over the fresh flannel shirt he'd put on. There was a lot. He'd have to change the shirt now. He sat there with his shrinking dick in his hand wondering if this tendency toward ruination of his might be genetic.



What a fucking cop-out.



As he cleaned up and put himself back together he could feel himself again cutting loose from everything and dropping from society, becoming his brother, essentially. He felt no anger. This scared him, because ordinarily, if he were right, he'd have wanted to kill Buddy - not be him. He'd never looked up to his older brother. Quite the contrary.



An image came into his mind of himself in his truck with Led Zeppelin on the radio and him on the hunt for weed, pussy, and alcohol: it seemed real palatable. They were going to fire him anyway. Maybe even prosecute.



Maybe he'd run into Buddy and kill him and then himself.



I better go get me some smokes, he thought, before I really do lose my fucking mind and do something else stupid...



and to think, I'm a father? A cop?



With bare realization he cut loose from it right then, finally, because it was all so ridiculous. Before he'd become an affront, last of all, to himself, he'd cut loose. Whatever he was, he was not to be taken lightly.



He stepped out of the trailer into the rest of his days.

Cryptic Alone In A Sad White Room



A long time or what seems like a long time ago I used to want nothing more than to sit and sing songs for you all night till daybreak



But that’s over forever. All I want to do now is sit with you all night beneath



the red moon bipolar

the flecked spill of eternity

red green and purple



the black stars waiting as do we

for the gods to sing, for the Aliens to come, for

the imprint in your blood when I touch you,



for the imprint in mine

when yours

sings into



mine



(no daybreak required)



To see you once is to love you once maybe twice but then to never see you again



Just like the Aliens when they come with their gifts of strange human longevity and then



I end up the world’s oldest man still in his thirties riding a gray horse, winding up into the dark cold and snow-streaked hills away from the killing sea



With the Internet and this dysfunctional parent age long gone and dead, I think aboriginally:

I wonder where she is now



(this is all pretty junior high school but I swear:

if I ever see you, I’ll kiss you, sure,

you know who you are



and I bet you

let me

They Know Me Everywhere



4.



He trudged up the steep bank of the river and across a short stand of woods, crunching through the frozen snow, crunching over sticks and small frozen trees and plants. He stepped out finally onto the frozen dirt path which was actually two narrow paths worn down to dirt and rocks by years and years of rolling tire treads. The sleet had shifted into a fine fast moving veil of snow, and it was so cold the snow seemed to shimmer like flecks of mica in the pale light of noon. The sky was a sheet of white.



He felt with his cut and and bruised right hand into the pocket of his corduroys to withdraw Billy's credit card. His hand stung in the cold light wind and snow. His blood had crusted dark red over a pair of short, deep, gashes in his knuckles. His right hand hurt like hell, his wrist was beginning to throb with a deep, ringing intensity. Pausing by the side of the path he sucked on the knuckles for a few seconds to get the taste of his own blood in his mouth, the warm coppery taste of it which somehow served to hearten him. When he removed his hand from his mouth the cold snow immediately pricked hard and bright at wound and it was a clean feeling, the cleanest he'd had in a while, in fact. He looked down at Billy's credit card, flipped it over, contemplated his brother's tightly scrawled signature on the back.



He would have to move quickly. Now there's a thought. For a dead man I've suddenly got a strange sense of urgency.



But I guess you're not dead till you're dead and till then you're still alive and living



He wondered if Billy was out and hunting for him yet because sooner or later he would be and he, Buddy, again surprised himself by feeling a deep abdominal flutter of fear at the terrible, perhaps mortal, beating or worse that he'd let himself in for now at the hands of his brother as a result of his actions of last night. As a result, in fact, his actions of now. For the first time since the end of the last long cold sleeting night of misery had passed he considered now the legal ramifications of what he’d done: breaking and entering, felony theft, and who knows what else in the book they'd throw at someone reckless enough to have absconded with a state trooper's, even a soon to be ex-state trooper's, service weapon.



fuck man I am fucked



and then he got a whiff of smoke odor off of someone's camp fire tracing out through the fine crystalline mist of the increasing snow and with that whiff the cold fear in the pit of his belly merged with another sensation now emerging from the back of his skull, from (it felt like) the base of his brain: a shivering, warm, creeping feeling like slender electrical fingers massaging his skull, filling him now with the old familiar upswinging feelings of strength and euphoria, of loquaciousness and capability. He knew what this was and what it meant and it did not matter because he would be a dead man soon but he was still a bit away from it, after all. And maybe, just maybe, there was a chance.



And then before the mask of the feeling could lead him to thoughts of the boy and of Emily he better get on my horse now began to walk quick now down the bipartite path of the frozen dirt tracks and toward where he thought he could see now the thin white smoke drifting from whosever fire it was. Yes, the smoke was coming from the old railroad bridge abutment down the road about 300 yards. He meant to see who and what it might be and he had the feeling now he used to get so long ago after he'd ditched school and had smoked out and gotten high, a centered feeling where only the present mattered, where all hopes and all dreams and all contentment resided in the present, in the right here, right now, the right exactly now



He knew he had to move fast though. He'd have to keep to the woods as much as possible. He'd have to think about borrowing a vehicle. And first and foremost he'd have to take care of his hand - as he trudged along down the track it began to throb mightily in the cold air. There was the drugstore and gas station nearby. He’d pick himself up a knit hat and some mittens. Then he'd go have himself some drinks and a meal and a cigarette afterwards before they'd get him. Or before Billy got to him. It was all the same now. No, he'd have himself a laugh or two and he'd maybe find someone at some bar to hear him out a bit and of course he already had his motel room, the gun in the drawer next to the bed where he planned to end it himself if someone didn't end it for him first. But never mind that for now. He'd have his drinks and his meal and his smoke, and who knows, maybe even -



He stepped up the three enormous, riven, snow-covered granite steps of the bridge abutment which was to their boy's minds when they'd played there as kids like some sort of barbarian fortress and there she sat in front of the small fire she'd built with sticks and some bunched up newsprint.



She sat with her knees close together, warming her dark thin hands. In the white snowing air the paint on her bitten fingernails he could see had faded to a coral color, pinkish, still faintly iridescent. She wore a gold turtleneck sweater under a short, brown leather coat. She wore what appeared be a man's khaki casual pants and they were filthy and noticably ripped at the pocket and rolled at the cuffs. Her purse, large and shapeless and of a nondescript navy blue color, sat on its side at her feet, leaning casually against the stone as though she were a woman waiting at a bus station. He observed the black patent leather tips of her boots which she warmed very close to the small guttering flames and the sharp, thin, scuffed down heels grinding into the stone below the bottom of the trousers.



She wore a maroon beret-style cap pulled down over her ears. Oily, velveteen black locks of hair peeked out from beneath the beret to brush against her the tight, faintly rouged skin of her high cheekbones. The cold seemed to put upon her tawny skin a gray veneer and she was shivering. Her full, symmetrical lips were dry and flaking beneath the faintest plum hue of lipstick mostly long gone, but her green eyes were hard and resplendent and glaring from within their artfully drawn edging of mascara and beneath her immaculately arched eyebrows. He could see, even beneath the beret, that she possessed one of the most intricately lined and complex foreheads he'd ever observed on a woman.



He stood there at the top of the steps, aware that he gaped, quickly trying to compose his features.



"Hi," he said.



She glared at him. She began to shiver. Her breath plumed thinly.



"Your hand..." she said, gesturing. Her voice was a low rasp.



He saw that his blood was streaming openly now down across his fingers and that it had stained his corduroys and their gray cuffs and in fact that it had seeped very slightly into the thin snow scrim covering the rock beneath his feet.



"I know," he said, "I cut it last night. I was,” He took a breath, forced himself to speak slowly and evenly, “I was at my brother's place when I cut it."



She did something with her mouth that caused her eyes to flatten out. The tense, hunted quality of her expression leaked away in that instant leaving only flat boredom in her eyes now and a dreadful weariness. Her eyes slid to the left and she looked balefully out at the brown cold slow-moving river which was just beginning to freeze.



"Oh. Well." She sighed. "That's too bad. You should be more careful"



Use your head, he thought, yeah right, he thought, Use your head, use your head, use your god damned head



"Listen," he said, "If you don't mind my taking a seat here for a bit, I'll help build that fire up for you."



She said nothing. She continued to look out at the river. With the cold now, seated on the bare stone as she was, her shivering was making a fast progression into shuddering.



"It's cold," he said, "I wouldn't mind sitting here with you and getting warm for a bit."



Her hard green eyes quickly came back to his.



"What are you going to, gather more sticks or something?" Her teeth chattered. She softened her tone slightly. "I think I can gather more sticks myself. It is cold, but I think you'd better not. I think you'd better," and she paused now, gesturing again with one long index finger, "I think you'd better worry about giving some attention to that hand instead. You're really bleeding. You're going to get an infection."



He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. "Yeah, well, you're right. But that's exactly what I'm going to do. Look, I'm just on my way up to the gas station now to wash up and then to the drugstore to get some stuff to clean and bandage this thing. Then I thought I could get us a little food and something to drink and if I can get my hands on a bottle of lighter fluid, then we can build this thing up a bit and really get warm here for a minute."



She stared at him.



"Don’t worry, I've got the money.”



"Do you smoke?" she said, speaking up fully for the first time. Her raspy voice was deep for a woman's and there was a strange, bluesy warmth at its edge.



He laughed suddenly, quick and low, four or five chuckles, and for the first time in a long, long time he felt and sounded to himself like the old Buddy. Yes, for one split second there he felt his life creeping back to him. I better not think about it



"Right- or left-handed?"



He thought she almost smiled.



"Well," she said, "This is a very generous offer."



"Alright, then." He blew into his hands. The snow was falling softly now in large flakes and there was no wind. The sky had darkened to a light, pigeon gray. "I'll head out. What do you smoke?"



"Salem Lights if they have them. But anything will do. This is really nice of you. You don't have to do this."



"I want to. Like I said, it'd be nice to sit and get warm for a bit. What would you like to drink?"



"Since you're asking, I would just about kill for a beer right about now."



"Any particular kind?"



"Bud is fine."



No, not quite, he thought. But shit, they know me everywhere



"Sounds good," he said. "I'll see if they have some wine too. I could really go for a nice bit of red wine."



"Mmmm," she purred. "You're reading my mind." She smiled at him now, full on. She really let him have it with the high beams. It was glorious. Heavenly. To be smiled at in such a way, by a beautiful stranger. It was better than any sex.



Don’t think about it!



"I'll be right back," he said.



Walking up the road in the falling snow, he wondered if she'd be there when he returned.



He hoped she would be.



He felt like his luck might be turning.



don't kid yourself



Then there was a commotion of footsteps in the woods just to his right and the cold blue fear came back rippling out from his belly, an electrical current into his spine



not yet now Billy you bastard not yet I'll kill you if you fuck this one up for me again you fucking cunt bastard



He cut quick to the right, out of view, and crouched behind the thick trunk of a pine, waiting to see who or what it was coming toward him.

They Know Me Everywhere



3.



Emily:

Try not to hate. Hating him won't help me. But I wish this anger



would subside



seated in rented townhouse condominium with cup of black tea and Camel cigarattes (for outside use only and remember smoke only seldom) seated in a beat up third hand chair (one of three) before a beat up third hand kitchen table procured at dump swap shop, seated with cup of black instant tea gazing out sliding glass door, gazing, wiped out tired, zoning out gazing at the snow and sleet mixture falling on the white ledge embankment that sloped down before and into oak and pine woods. Her 2 boys Nate and Mike aged 6 and 8 seated on the couch in the living room beyond watching a kid show on a color TV that has followed her everywhere now since her first, Mike, was born.



Nate with his once flaxen red hair now shading to a darker auburn hue, his bright hazel eyes and his father's curious monkey mouth. And sweet Mike with his secret black eyes and Billy's pale skin and Billy's sinewy catlike lanky coiled way too. Yes, she could see that



stealing an afternoon in the snow here because she can't reach Billy doesn't really care either this time really because of this angry (hateful) feeling that creeps in now creeps in always there some days more than others but especially now because Billy had come to her club last night and he was drinking and lurking and his black eyes had that flashing scaly look and as she finished one dance she quickly put her things back on and stepped quickly saying nothing to anyone, yes, she just about raced back to the DJ booth and said very seriously to Big Chuck who was yukking it up back there with Kris the DJ over their smokes and black coffees, she said to Big Chuck quickly and very seriously grabbing his big forearm and looking straight in his blue eyes, Chuck, Billy is here and I don't like how he looks. You better watch it.



And Chuck nodded now, not grinning through his huge wiry beard and she saw in his watery blue eyes that he understood her and she was glad that he was a good guy and not stupid because, of course, there had been a last time, and a time before that with old Billy Buck, who was tougher to tangle with because he was after all The Law, but also and more importantly a good and trusted friend to some



but then when she came out of the booth Billy was gone and it was just the darkened room with its colored lights and shadows and the endless thumping rap music and rock music and the drab guys with their drinks and their stares and their hairdos, cigarettes, egos, guilt, decadency, and their laughs a minute and in many cases their tawdry hopes, their lusting and their desire for her, toward her, near her, for what they thought she could do or worse should do for them with them to them



she had had her bright day full of hope and danger and lust and alcohol and drugs and it was gone. things had shaded blackly and she wished and dreamed sometimes that her life and her pain were melodrama, fire and blood, instead of this constant aching of quiet gray picayune tragedy, the mundane gritting machination of her own private pain all shot through this smallish city, taken hold and not letting go



The boys had been wanting a dog lately. And she wants to get them one. But how can they make that work? How could she make it work, fogged in as she was by the quiet, persistent madness of others so often thrust upon her – but oh and by whom? Or did she do it to herself, mainly, as she sometimes believed? Was there a ratio to whose fault it all was?



She could honestly say she wished she'd never known either of them. Never met them. She could remember the days before she'd ever heard of this used up dishwater town, ever knew of it, when her life was different her own fate still open. But those days were long gone now. But who I am isn't



the angry hating feeling had waned and now suddenly surged into wringing painful tears and she sat weeping, straining to be quiet about it, there at the table. I don't want them to see me, she thought, swallowing, suppressing any sniveling, peeking toward the couch where the boys sat in front of their shows inert, transfixed. still innocent.



She got herself under control. There were a lot of ways she knew how to be and one of the more useful ones was to be fucking tough as nails



She would have to call her mother to see if her mother could take the boys tonight. Clearly Billy was off now too. She reflected that there was really no difference between the two them, Billy and Buddy, despite what you saw on the outside.



She then thought that she could really use a drink and that she just might have one tonight. Then she thought



but I better not because then in that case I am just like them too



That is what she thought, and she saw that it was so.



She thought that she could really use a drink and then she thought that she just might have one tonight, just one, and of course she knew that she wouldn't because the two young ones were hers and hers only and they were innocent and she wanted them to be so. She was hanging on to herself now for them alone and only for them.



She knew Big Chuck had dogs.



Turning a page in her mind, she thought she’d have to have a conversation with him about that tonight.

It was good bye but



I was immediately reincarnated

as a virus

that wiped out half the species



and too as a radio wave in the resultant mass slaughter



straight cutting. fresh game.

face shots

on every fiend.



Hands black,

blasted.

Where’s my chrysalis world now?



tell me quick before the bilious shattering rain

dissolves my

anthill

away side



he left the game

misunderstood



what else could he do?



so he warped back feral:

red eyes,

glinting canine

night mouth



and a few years passed.

enough time for them old lives

to pass till some new

nightmare dropped fallow.



of his, into hers.



My courtesan



I have the gift of gab &

mad intercalary hands



glad sad mad bad:

mainly,

had to have



I aint never lose the taste of gash

when it runs so innocent

and has



up till now.



Right?

They Know Me Everywhere



2.



cold cold in the feet a creeping cold cold creeping feeling in his feet sneaking up his leg cold

and wet a hard cold sleet like tiny arrows ringing and zinging



Billy Tate woke and opened his eyes. His hangover was a Newton's Cradle with 80 lb. lead

spheres smashing against his temples, his head comprising the central globe.



He was lying at a skewed angle upon his bed clad only his briefs and a thin flannel shirt with

2 buttons remaining. The window, smashed, had arranged itself into a blanket of shards

strewn across his bare legs. The thin white drapes billowed out toward him with the wind,

which gusted at intervals to rattle the aluminium sides of the trailer.



The sky was white iron and sleeting upon his lower extremity.



He felt or tried to feel with his mind backwards along the tether of the recent past leading back to last night beyond the whiteout blizzard of alcohol that had finally put him down.



ah shit Buddy what did you do?



Then catapaulting himself in a panic up off the bed unconsciously brushing with both his hands the window shards from his thighs and splintering his palms with glass needles in the process no matter he stepped then ran in his bare feet across the broken glass and into the front room where the TV played and blared incomprehensibly bright images and loud screaming and laughing and his things had been turned over and stomped on. furniture had been toppled: newspapers magazines and bottles and clothes littered the floor as did his greens and grays his shoes his hat his belt his badge his holster



oh fuck



what Buddy had done was break in and ransack and where the fuck is my gun?



blind panic now on his knees sifting through the wreck of his things. he had lost a lot this past year: lost Emily, lost the boys,



and now he was going to lose his mind



because what Buddy had done was break in and steal his service revolver while he, Billy, lay passed out blacked out drunk on the bed



oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck



a whole universe of new possibilities opened up now and not one of them didn't seem like black and killing disaster, not a one



he thought: this is gonna end like Cain and fucking Abel. I wonder: which one am I?

They Know Me Everywhere



1.



the unerring brittle snow falling

away and down, the mass of it, fractious

cilia from a wavering, autistic God



It wasn't always this way



bipolar weather patterns, too much

warmth of winter makes for sickness. a suitcase waits

in a motel drawer. Bud Tate stands among the ruined oaks and pines in his Goodwill

Nikes and grey corduroys too small. Him: lingering by the frozen scrim of stream,

watching the clear water percolate

beneath brittle ice blue and viscous



the water flowing around and by the small hillock island with its frozen ruined trees and passing out into the river at large



medium sized river

named for some Indians



all the lives spent in this valley

all the hundreds and hundreds of years gone by

with another hundred or perhaps 2 to come



Bud picks a Basic one of 3 remaining from the soft pack in his pocket and lights it and there is ice on his beard and his heart is empty

I make some obvious remarks



autobiographical

confessional

but half made up



or else you make it all up



it don't matter



just dream your dream

so others can dream it again too

with their own visuals



it's been said before

over and over and over again



because it's true, and it's also

all you have to do

I come back



the hardened hand my

hardened hand: where did I

put it? I put it in the freezer

where it froze on the Stoli. I

put it in a hole up on Naticook

Pond where a scrim froze

around it. broke my skin

and drew blood as I drew out

a Perch



every road in this town: a

cooling board for dreams

put to rest. yet all ghosts remain.

they live and breathe and walk

like me. I can't stop listening

nor doing their bidding



the Chinese bartender

slipped the info to me, scrawled on a

square napkin: all gone friends

were imaginary and

New York City

is Hell



I said OK young fella

now fire me up another Fogcutter:



I got miles more to go

and it's a far cry

till dark