For about three months I've committed to push ups and crunches and hard walking just about every day and now I can feel myself becoming a fucking rock. For 2007 it's going to be push ups and crunches and hard walking and write 500 words of fiction (minimum) every day. No, not on this blog. This blog is finished but there is another. But not on that one either. I win out, that's what this is all about. I win out. I win out. I win out. To where it will be clear to all of them that they truly did not know exactly with whom they were dealing.

visualization------->self-awareness------>self-denial/self-discipline------->self-control------>self-mastery------>actualization

are words like diligence

tenacity
methodical
discipline
organization
mettle

too composed of sub-sub-sub-atomic particles spanning infinity entire
why,

yes
they are

Audio books from the public library are my new watchword and key. They seem to help.

You get older, I reckon you begin to see a need to smooth out the rage.

Too bad, killing this blog. Or reducing it to a vegetative blip.

Or maybe its for the best. A need to go underground. Do something real.

Mercygraft, however, still lives.

He's still out there.

cryptic filler now for the rest of the page
maybe for the rest of blog indeed

faaack it

Valery:

My mind is broken
broken open
desperate flood water, blood water;
my time is slash and burn, mash and churn

My days are numbered,
unencumbered

So this is the end of Earth and me?
what a ripoff apocalypse, what a gyp, what shit
you'd think the Universe could do better

slash and burn, mash and churn, churn and burn, days numbered,
unencumbered

Trips, they need trips,
more trips for dicks,
more chicks for trips,

blueballs breaking, blood streams
from her nips
and lips; open my veins,

the blood
drip
drip
drips

(red girl blue girl white girl green
horrorshow bitches
like you've never seen)

bright red blood
on white skin, then
unto to darkness again

I don't know where I've been
(I don't know)
I don't care where I've been
(I don't know)

I will make him use the Device
to fill my veins
with ice

then please bury me in
the snow
in the dead Earth's deepest glacier

I'm begging you

I so
want

to be

gone

*

M.

Highway side. Rocks. Gray rocks and black. Cement pipe. Gray and white. Water in there. I sleep in there. I sleep all day
and night. The trucks rumble by. Trash rains down. Bottles, butts, gas. My beard is all lice. I smell like death. How'd I get here

The men in the room is how. After I left the tavern. Long time after. I left the old man and the horse, to tend to the crop and to tend to the liquor. Soon as I left, I spun the Device without knowing what it was or why. For the first time I spun it, and my eyes became as torches, and all the world did I see.

So then I went north. Far, far north. Past the northern schools and the hunting clans, the last places for true men (so they think, the fools). Far north as I could go,
on out into the snow land. And the lands of ice. I fell, I made myself feel to die up there by the green sea, beneath the swirling eye of Aurora Borealis.
So bright now since the death of the moon.

I made myself die, that was how they could find me.

Then I was in the room with the men of the castle. Exceptionally clean men, and tall, if they are men at all. A drawing room in the castle. Exceptional men, men of the salon, with their girls of red, girls of blue, girls of green and magenta and orange, girls of hues never known or seen, more

hues than men would ever dream. Except for these men, these terrible beings. What are you, is what I asked of them. Why have you brought me here. They said they had become gods,
this was said in their minds. Tut to me with their mouths they said
we want to observe you with these girls.

This is what the others like you have dreamed. Somehow you're immune to their feminine charms. We have accounted for no existence like yours.
We have the nano and we have the bio, is what they said in their minds.
We want to see the machines of your cells.

We have made ourselves like you but we did not make you. I said, What have you done to humanity? In their minds, the masters said, we don't understand
you, we don't understand the way you think, how you can possibly ask such questions. We did not account for one such as you. With your knowledge of things forbidden, from earlier times,

knowledge forbidden to men like you.
You can not be, is what they said in their minds.
I said, fuck you guys.
Then I spun the Device.

A bunch of them then exploded dying
as their minds screamed we can not die and then all the girls in the room under the chandeliers, with the string music playing, and the elegant wines, the girls all laughing screaming crying one of them sat in the center of ballroom elegantly twirling

strands of one of the exploded ones' marrow plasma and blood
over her bare, green bosom

This cannot be!, the masters yelled in the mind. We can't be killed. You aint my master.

I blew them up, then they left. Retreat and defeat was what I sensed in their minds. Then they sent in just girls but that didn't matter.
When I am in the Device,
I am outside of time

We have the micro and we have the nano:
they put something in me and and I couldn't move.
That was how they got me in the chair.
The micro and the nano. Both came from the white girl.

The only girl for me.

She put them in me, the micro and the nano. Then I couldn't move because I was in the chair. Stuck in the chair.
Fiery strands,
threads and filaments,

volcano strands in the ceiling. Fractal millions, fiery galaxies. A room of full of sun, thermonuclear glaze. They put me in that chair. They could do it. The micro and the nano. Somehow I let them do it. I couldn't move.

A room full of sun.
Thermonuclear glaze.
Too bright.
And then I was gone

And then I was back,
naked, freezing, out in the snow. I didn't know.
I walked back to the castle again.
That mountainous building, shining.

When the masters saw me anew, their minds were screaming.

The girls were killing them too now. As I had killed them

And so they sent to me again the solitary white girl
dressed inher own blood, they sent her out to me
there in the snow and again we made love

In the blood and the snow.
The micro and the nano.

Then she was gone,

then I was by the highway side. Rocks. Gray rocks and black. Cement pipe. Gray and white. Water in there. I sleep in there. I sleep all day
and night. The trucks rumble by. Trash rains down. Bottles, butts, gas. My beard is all lice. I smell like death. How'd I get here?

Mercygraft:

I knew M. before his discovery of the Device. Back when he was still a man among men, such as we are. Back when he was a walker - like me.

Like I used to be.

Of course, when M. found me, he and January were already a team, which by and large took M. out of the ranks of the true walkers. But that's another story.

I don't know where M. came from, but I have an idea. I think he came from the same place as them cloner girls. How else to explain all the maddening shit he do now? All his luck, all his abilities?

Of course, I might be wrong. I've been wrong before.

I'm old enough to remember the time before the cloner girls. The time of the moon. Since the moon went away, the world's gone wrong.

January asks me sometimes, in his fashion, about the old times, the days of sun and moon. He claims to remember them too, only vaguely, in pictures. Like remembering a dream.

He says he had another life then, one he can't rightly recall. Going around and around. And around and around. Pounding in the mud. Going. Going. Going around and around in the sunlight, and in the sounds of men cheering.

So many things gone wrong in this world. January and his kind, they seem never to age. They heal now, they run and they heal and they speak in the mind. Why not ever the same fate for men?

It would be question for God. Or the President. Same difference, I suppose.

I aint a walker no more. I had to give that up after the accident. After them truckers ran me down, like they like to do to our ilk. The other walkers, my selfsame brothers, oh, when it happened, they ran away. Lying there in the ditch, I saw them running. I don't know if they thought I was dead yet or if they could just see my shins and feet all twisted, broken, bloody. Bones sticking out. A broken arm, a bleeding face.

After the truckers pissed on me, after that formality, I just lay by the side of the highway, waiting to die.

And die I would have, except for M.

He came riding up the center of the southbound lanes going north, him and January, the two of them headed north. Now, as I said, that's another story. At the time, I didn't shit know about the horses, hadn't ever seen a horse up close, let alone a black behemoth like January, and I didn't know shit about going north.

January keeps telling me the time is coming soon when he's going to have go. God, I want to go with him, but I can't see how.

Except.

But never mind.

No. I won't hope.

I keep a tavern. Up here in the woods. I built it in the side of a hillside. M. helped me build it, him and January. They rode far and wide, days and nights, scavenging the boards, the shingles, the mirrors, the tables, the chairs, the jukebox, the generators, everything. January hauled the paving stones for the foundation from up to town, and M. and I placed them by hand. Oh, I can move around a little. I can hold my own, I can still stand. I always did have a strong back and strong arms.

I suppose now, since he found the Device, M. could just. But no.

Never mind.

No. I won't hope.

Farther back in the woods from the tavern, I mean way far back, back up over the rock hills and beyond the swamps, in fact, is where I maintain the distillery, and the crop. No one knows where this is, not even M., to the best of my knowledge. Shit, if I had to walk out there, I'm not sure if I could even find it. And if I could, I sure God couldn't make it over that terrain. Not with no feet and a half-busted back.

Only January really knows the way out there, and he aint telling.

The truckers don't know about the horses, you know. They don't have an idea in the world. January won't even address the issue. When the truckers go by, he goes just as dumb as a stone, deaf as a haddock, and it's like a great light being extinguished in the center of my mind.

The tavern, not everyone knows about it either. But plenty do. Walkers mostly. Some truckers. A select group. I don't like it, but it has to be that way. Without them, no juice for the generator. And no filthy lucre for an old man.

could get me some new bionic feet and maybe even legs, I could be a new man, and then I could go north with

You ever seen a horse laugh? It aint right. I like to deny these thoughts, but that fucking glue factory is all over my thoughts, all over them. It aint right.

You idiot, he says to me, Can't you see him? Aint you watching it?

Then I'll get a vision of M. He's with a white girl and they're standing in the middle of a river. The beasts of men are closing in on them, coming for them.

Then he's spinning the Device.

Then the sky's on fire, and the stars rain blood.

He'll heal you, says the horse. You idiot. Aint you watching it?

I'm afraid. I'm an old man, just an old broken down old walker.

Never mind.

I won't hope won't hope mustn't hope musn't I musn't hope

The white girl's name was Valery and she wanted to die because of what she knew of men, and of what she knew was her portent in their future.

Men were doomed; this she knew. Since the day of the massacre at the Falls, she knew with utter certainty that she'd been conceived and sent into the world as the agent of men's doom.

All of her breed shared similar tales. Many were defined by them.

when that bitch gets in heat, boys, you better watch out. I'm telling you, she was killing them. killing them. them boys was slaughterin each other so bad, the Falls foamed red with blood. using anything they could get their hands on to kill each other, they were. rocks. logs. tire irons. they own hands and teeth, tearing at each other like rabid dogs. finally slaying each other up with the bones of the fallen, I shit you not

Valery and her kind were known amongst all men, largely through the medium of the Airwaves, the vestige of an ancient (or at least poorly remembered) medium of mass electronic communications, now held by most men to be the mouthpiece and repository and vehicle for communicating oratory and intent of the President, and of God (as was said among men, same difference). As agents of the War, all of the truckers had broadcast radios and many of them had TVs and some had obtained even more sophisticated receivers, usually acquired either through trade or treachery in the course of their travels to the north.

"Fear of Moans." I was on a run once, I heard it called by some of them booksmart sissy boys up the north country the time of they "Fear of Moans." I guess it's cause when you get to fuckin em, if it's they time, and they get to moanin, that's when you're gonna get whacked. By me or whoever's there

Valery was one of the last girls on Earth, each genetically identical member of her breed intentionally designed and grown and propagated as the last remaining representatives of the female species left on the planet. And in their genes was written men's apocalypse, and in their fertile wombs was planted the seeds of men's destruction. She and her ilk were not the progeny of women, and from their wombs would not come men, but the destroyers of men, and this according to the plans of their creators.

I heard it told once, these two old boys had one of em, red bitch I think it was (they say they're the horniest, the mean-fuckingest) in a spit roast and didn't hardly have time to even spurt before they was set to killin each other, screaming and snarling and clawin at each other's eyes and throats. And kill each other they did, right there with the red bitch still moanin and suckin in between em. No, I never heard what came of it, if it resulted in a Birth or no

Valery wanted to die because she loved men and she hated them. In many ways had she loved the men who created her, with her mind and with her body, and with that which was neither mind nor body, and now she hated them.

First, she'd wanted them dead; then, herself. But she had been afraid to die, afraid to kill herself.

The day by the Falls had changed that.

And now, here in this diner truck stop, here she'd finally, on the spur of a pure and deadly whim, accomplished this goal, and here comes this idiot waggling his fingers and here I am alive again and did I dream what I just did or did I really do it I did not dream I did I do it I don't care whatever I still want to kill kill kill kill kill myself and him too, why the fuck not, my time is coming around again, should be any day now, so what the fuck, one last roll in the hay for you buddy boy, and you got any buddies you know want to get fucked real good? not all us white girls are so pure, it's all myths, you know, what they say about us, why, the dirtiest, fuckingest, suckingest cunt I ever saw was just as blue as they come, blue as the ocean. Her name was Mandy

***

The white girl looked blankly up at M. He seemed to see something warm, something of red pass beneath the grey irises of her eyes.

Suddenly, through the tears, she smiled up at him.

He sat down heavily across from her in the booth.

***

Anxiety in the trees, the bare winter trees, the spindly, spidery filaments of their branches. a solitary house in a barren field. This is where we must go; this is where I must take her. snow falling, softly plummetting from a hard white sky, the same color as the white girl's hair, her skin the exact shade of the gently falling snow, a dry, papery snow softly filling in the barren field's yellow scrub

He swung open the heavy glass door and stepped into the shabby truck stop diner just as the white girl seated in the booth directly in front of him was jamming a steak knife into her milky throat, her streaking right hand jamming it hard.

M's vision traced the silvery flash and he saw the point of the short, serrated blade passing fast and burying deeply into the girl's thin, corded neck. Then the first terrible spurt and shock of bright blood spurting thin and spindly, frenetic; the sudden initial spiderweb-thin strands of blood looping and splattering and quickly billowing into sodden dots falling heavily on the crushed paper napkins, the crusts of wheat toast, the mucous remnants of egg, a bright glistening globe of blood splattering heavily on the chipped dingy plate there before her on the booth's table.

M. froze in the doorway. Without thinking, he made a move for the Device. He felt a rapid shifting and a swirling pause to his right; the fingers of his right hand snapped out straight and rigid from a rapid cracking movement of his right wrist. His extended fingers pointed through the restaurant's long wall of plate glass windows, pointing out into the night, toward the trucks lined up at the pumps of the fueling station.

The heavy glass door of the restaurant in its closing motion fell into him, banging into his backside, forcing him stumbling toward the girl in the booth, where the scene had changed. The white girl now sat, softly crying, tears streaming down from the dark circles under her pale gray eyes staring into the plate. He focused on the tears, the clear fluid consistency of them, and as he did so, her tears grew in volume, but she did not utter a sound. Not a sob or even a sniffle. The knife was not there.

***

Outside by the filling station where the big trucks sat idling, a scream pierced the night. One of the truckers, a dingy, heavy man with frizzy black hair and enormous black mustaches, fell wailing from his perch in his cab, dumping heavily from behind the wheel to kibbey and claw on the battered concrete fueling platform, his pudgy hands scrabbling at the black plastic handle of the steak knife he'd just jammed through his government-issue olive drab wool dickey collar and directly into his carotid artery for no reason he could think of. His blood making a purple sponge of the dickey under dun-colored lights of the station.

The other truckers howled at the spectacle. A tall one with waxy yellow skin and a wild yellow shock of hair ran over from where he'd stood smoking and gamboling by the pumps, double-stepping fast in a wide capering gait, to the unbridled vocal delight of his now rapidly assembling colleagues. Unbuttoning his fly as he did so, he pissed on the dying man as he died. One by one, the rest of the truckers open their flies to follow in suit, to take part in the hallowed ritual.

***

Anxiety in the trees, the bare winter trees, the spindly, spidery filaments of their branches. A solitary house in a barren field. This is where we must go, thought M., this is where I must take her. Snow falling, softly plummetting from a hard white sky, the same color as the white girl's hair, her white skin the exact hue of the gently falling snow, a dry, papery snow softly filling in the barren field's yellow scrub.

The darkened highway, dark, dark, no moon, no moon for a month now, and none evermore. The moon was gone.

Now the wind was a ceaseless, howling, desperado beast with long legs marching forever down and out from the hills. And the 18-wheel trucks with their trailers and payloads now forever pounding down the lanes of the Interstates were howling, desperate beasts; and so too were the truck's drivers howling, desperate, lonely, lesser creatures, desperate for want of anything save for what their world had become.

The ghosts of murderers slunk just beyond the gray lights of the truck stops, few and far between. M. could feel them all and hear them. Ghosts of vermin, roadkill, wastrels, felons. Chittering, snarling, lurking by the guardrails and the Port-o-sans and the gas pumps.

Kill and be killed, kill kill kill kill. Feeling the ghosts was worse than seeing them, much worse, much much much worse. And what was worse, he was hungry. He felt guilt for his appetite.

He stepped into the diner just as the white girl was

Mercygraft:

By assessing the tone, form, color and content of his mustaches, his beard: this was one of the only known surefire ways to determine a motherfucker's basic whim, zeal, and veracity; the vital stuff, the core, mean intensity, the trustworthiness of any motherfucker you might happen to chance upon up in the bad streets, the ones where most of the people left still lived, such as they could.

The smooth faced, scaly, empty-eyed motherfuckers were the ones you had watch out for. In them (or with them) they carried something of the snake, the serpent. And I don't have to tell you what that means.

Of course this is all just bullshit, pure and total bullshit. You really had to be a mind reader. If you weren't, you were in trouble. Deep shit.

I knew M before he found his Device. I knew him when he was still just a man. Which in itself was something, given the times.

My mind kisses like a kumquat, the fucker. I want a replacement.

he walked up the Interstate to Exit 19, which wound down into a curb bordering manicured grass and box shrubs and miniature maple trees. the landscaping of a fast food restaurant. he could smell the burgers and fries, rich smells, and he'd never felt so hungry in his life.

won't be able to eat like this everyday but how long has it been since I been alive?

what am I?

am I human?

he approached the door of the place. a short, soft-looking man wearing square steel glasses and carrying a tiny, pudgy blond girl on his arm saw him and drew back, changed direction, slowly backed away toward his car where it was parked in the lot, a newer model, shiny, pale blue.

M got a good look at himself in his reflection. Tall. Straggly. Thin. Yellow. they must think I'm insane. I think I must smell

he was simply too hungry not to go in and eat something. he paused. he took a seat on a stone bench by a round stone table by the outsized, brightly colored shapes of the restaurant's outdoor playground. he pulled the wallet from his right side pocket, looked at its soft, round shape, its brown leather, he opened it, pulled out a single twenty dollar bill. closed it. my magic wallet, he mused, must not flaunt

inside standing before the plastic counter he looked up at the menu choice as the staff of corpulent young men and women looked lightly at him in minor key horror, major key distaste, contempt.

"I'd like a Number 4 please." Number 4 included a giant cheeseburger with three patties of beef covered in cheese and bacon and double portion of fries.

a cell phone began to loudly ring and he felt a buzzing on his chest. he jumped. he was the only person standing at the counter. the cell phone rang and rang and buzzed against his skin. it was in his shirt pocket. he did not know how it got there. he fumbled it out and opened it with fumbling fingers. he brought it to his ear.

"Hello?" he croaked.

"What you are about to eat is very bad for your corporeal health," said a Voice. "We understand that you're ravenous, so go on ahead, but after you get yourself together, you might want to think about eating other things instead. We know you know this; this is just a friendly reminder. You know, the call is yours. You always have the option to turn off the phone if you don't want to hear from us?"

The corpulent bepimpled fellow behind the register was holding a hand full of bills and coins out at him. Without quite thinking about it, M motioned for him to put the change down on the counter. The fat boy gaped up at him.

"Your change, sir."

"Keep it," said M.

"Take the change," said the Voice on the phone. "This is neither the time nor the place. Get a hold of yourself, for crying out loud."

"Can I call you back?" asked M. "I'm pretty hungry..."

His mind and perception frozen as a winter pond at midnight, with black clouds racing overhead beneath an incandescent moon.

he straggled out from the highway side the rain

the big trucks and the smaller vehicles wooshing by

cold

cold

ok, I'll need 10 thousand dollars to start, small bills

Nothing.

But 7 hours later, walking in the breakdown lane, there was the wallet, lying by the guardrail

a brand new credit card inside, with his name on it

and also with a pile of 20s in the flap

and also with a drivers license from the city and state he was born in

I'm going to need a phone

This was the device. Magic amenities for a wastrel.

I wonder how old I am? How long I been out here?

the device came to him first as a notion, a possibility, a wish

the device first came to him in a dream

(when he was 12 years old)

It was nothing he could build, only something he along with others of his kind could endeavor to elicit

and even then, it was only something he could find.

also, it was a device that only he could find

that was the the power of the device, that was what made is so special

and so powerful

what he did not realize when the dream of the device first came to him was that he'd have to decend into human wreckage, human refuse, a pariah in society, before he would be able to employ the device

before he would truly understand the device and the nature of the device

sleeping bundled in a filthy pallet quilt
snatched from a loading dock

sleeping filthy bundled in old leaves,
concealed by the tight brush and steep embankment

at the side of an Interstate. Sleeping behind drugstore
glasses picked from a dumpster,

thick plastic frames hued like earwax,
plastic lenses streaked with mud, grit,

mud caked in his long sallow beard.
his boots, fit for a corpse, bound together with gray tape.

sleeping. finally the night passes off, leaving a dark
cold heavy sky now leaking a cold drizzle,

as he awakens it is raining on his face. alright, he thinks, it's time.
I'' wait no more. I'll use

the device

Alarm it out: Synergy, Wineman.

Call it out with callow rage

for glory: The Cards' ace is our

homeboy. Glory, better

 

face it. Let the Mets'

team fail anew. One selfsame crock

of callow; the canyons

held my sway once

 

too. what

a shit drunk poem.

9/11 is a cheap card

to

 

pull in the face

of baseball;

in the face of a

very slimly read slice of Internet written while drunk

 

saddest thing is

the Mets look like

they're gonna pull

it out and force game 7

 

But fuck it. As always,

anything could happen.

All this poem is really about is hope,

thinking about the past,

 

pipe dreams,

useful rage,

wishing beggars.

And of course their horses

 

Prince: I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behaviour I throw off,
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering over my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.


**

"What worries me, Billy," she said - I could hear the change in her voice - "is how your mother is going to take this."

up

in the four oh nine of the ahem
I'm gonna be tired tomorrow
I couldn't sleep
fear and digestive malady
thought too I could feel my mind changing
the script shuffling
new proof emerging
interior
metamorphosis here we
go

probably just jonesing nicotine
from those few butts I smoked
Friday night standing by a bulkhead
in Pinardville. not too bright

call me literalissimo, addled. son,
sometimes you gotta wake up at four
and invite the

verbal cliches buck up the fuckup (so what)

how I used to be
is how I still am oh yes
but better; is what we have
to tell ourselves, oh yes, and I aint written
the book yet, not even one,
but I still might, I'm telling you,
it all starts tonight, and I'll tell you why:
yes, I understand that North Korea
has evidently detonated a nuclear
bomb, but Buffalo is buried under
more than a foot of snow and that
bodes well for a motherfucker
like me. you know, there really is no spoon
and there realy is no why it just is what it is
and all we really have is what we do
and I got no problem lining up the cliches
and knocking them back like brews
because its pretty fucking
decent typing practice
and practice is what matters

I'm sitting here in my briefs
pouring coffee on a hangover
and it's a hard frost
out there but we're playing golf later anyway
as one more means of holding ourselves together
while secretly praying
each unto another
the eternal prayers of men; that we're one
and all going to make it through
to the best possible end,
one and all

it just seems like
an impossible dream to me, but once I write the first book I reckon then I'll have one to grow on and after I write the second I'll surely have one to sell and I'm telling you, I reckon I'll have to forge my own sword and selfsame shield
and then I'll be good for the gladiator yeah (but

just killing time here now, off the top of me head now, showing you my ass a bit, charming, hey? as I practice typing and here starteth the lesson this kind of shit is 1) better done and just deleted? yes or 2) ok for here. yes. I used to

brag to anonymous girls in bars that they didn't know who they were dealing with, charming, hey? How'd that work out for you, Mott? but you know, here endeth the lesson. no I mean, here it beginneth, here it all is here it all is here I all am waiting for nothing no, I know: one image, the

earliest measurable snowball
ever
in Chicago

right here on my plate

Bailey

I'm a beggar with a broken gaze,
a broken
mind, a broken
soul

This blue city is a concrete chute
An elevator shaft you
can't not fall
down

Look at you people
Look at you walking
Look at you going
Where you going to go

The cold days is coming
I didn't used to be like this
I used to be a person
The cold days is coming

The snow clarion beast
won't go away from
me now; I see him wielding his frozen chains
in the smoke

rising on the river. He got
roadkill for eyes, he got
me in his eyes, no mercy
for a stranger here, this side of

the road. Look
at you
people. Where
you

walking.
Look at you. Where
you going. Where you going
to go?

in spiritus ambergris

Driven southbound on the Everett Turnpike
Over the rivers, first the Souhegan, then the Nashua,
This fall’s foliage is the deal.

Magisterial red, orange and gold,
In gauzy trees, along brown water,
The white roadway still wants sunlight:

Shimmering red, orange and gold, white gold certainty.
Within human range, within sight. Well then, fuck
the Fermi paradox. And be, be.

Frost

Peering out from an upstairs window
In a spare room mainly owned by three cats
I spied the year's first frost,

A pale frost powdering
The short-cropped yellowy grass,
The newly cold air of the spare room

Mingling in my perception of the frost,
The organization of the frost.
Later that morning I entered

The watery chill of the October air;
Its chill seemed to me a breathing
Entity composed by some watchful

Sense of the long precise and cloudless expanse
Of the day's magnetic, somehow softly metallic sky,
The color of wild blue lupines or the

Common skull cap, or your American brooklime,
Your simple corn
Speedwell

I entered the lake of air
Trailing behind my black shepherd,
The frost now absent,

Dispersed,
But soon again to emerge
In the grass,

No doubt about that
(This year at least), so
Why ever risk becoming

A morose animal
Who lives only by feeling
Doomed and alone?

ideas you gotta listen to them

broken chords for a grain of consciousness
cry out for chronic
crib sheet laconic
melancholy mole, way down
deep in the ground. privation
be normal. have ratio

clutter all around here, clean it up
mutter, think, why envy? chance
springs eternal, one meaning, then another
words like infinity, Mammon, skin, tone, drum
slip back in just like October and the good months

call out for music the music and the music
may come

do I make myself clear yes
but how

in photo effluvia interferon soul in the foamy green
of the sea, the October sky's late and radiant
issue

I look at that guy lilting down the stairs
on lubricious knees and think
what he got that I don't got

besides
lubricious knees

get busy

Ideas mean nothing; all that counts is sentences. And I mean good ones, ones with light in them. Verses, if you're so inclined: same deal. Either/or, then piling them up. That's it, that's all. Sit down and write one, then another, taking notes on the scenes and the sense of the scenes as they unfurl in your mind. Correction: not taking notes. Making the scenes as they unfurl in our mind. That's what guys like Ernest Hemingway knew, that's in fact how he said to do it, and that's your key. For results, your only possible expectation is a pile of pages for you to re-write. That's it, that's all. Religiously commit to your most serious effort and with any luck the trick will work and someone else will be able to see and feel the dream as you've seen it and felt it. But never mind. Get to it: write the sentences. Every day. There's no other way. I'm sorry, but you're screwed, so at least try have fun.

I'm in a phase now where I'm not even trying to be a writer except for what I'm writing right now. This document is an excuse to write and nothing more. What I hate is when I read an article where the author plays the Disclosure: card. Here's my disclosure: I'm too paranoid (in a non-clinical sense) to really disclose anything. Even to the four or five or six of you reading. And how lame is that?

And so I write about not writing. And how lame is that. Or from behind a beer like now. I think what I better do is make another more anonymous blog and notify people on an individual basis. That brings me to my next point. People who are like, I can't blog about this, it's too juicy, I'll put it in the book, and you'll just have to read it. That's not what's going on here. What's going on here is that this blog is like your vehicle that you never have maintenanced because you don't give a shit; you actually hope it dies; because you really just want a new one, even though you know you can't afford it; and what is going to happen is that you're going to end up riding the bus or worse a bike like the guys who've lost thier licenses.

Today is a beautiful early fall day in the northeastern United States, with a sky as clear as the one on 9/11; this world is yet a strange and passing beautiful one if you're lucky. this planet Earth that human beings are most likely destroying

you can't say this has always been the case. it wasn't so a thousand years ago - technically. as they say. but what was so even as far as back then and as far back as ever there was, truly, was the certainty of human beings now and then destroying each other whether brutally or in subtlety, and so destroying the world one by one. and also the certainty of human beings living, and living well. and also the certainty of [pick any human emotion]

my emotions are of the canine. I just find it easier this way, more clear, better

thoughts like these and also other thoughts of what might be termed the beatiful i.e. love of what is loved and when what is loved is human (and I think dogs and cats at this point too can be admitted to the human race if they're part of your family, because dogs and cats and especially dogs can have the sterling yet fallible character and humans are too amount to the best/worst sort of saints/scum on a daily basis. do you see why I can't write? because I am a fool)

it's good to take a day and to have a day

one other thing that keeps me purporting this document is the 2002 in the archives. and one other reason I have no blog traffic besides me rarely commenting on other blogs or otherwise trying to Fit In is that most of your blogs these days are fairly disposable. including this one.

(but not yours...and you know who you are...)

I got to change the format on this fucking blog to black as black can be because we are truly whistling in the dark here well on second thought fuck it you derivative never said anything original fuck (this is what I yell into the valley of echoes in my dream) I'm poaching from myself here, can you tell? no I'm not yes I am. fuck it, can I get another beer? yes, that I can do

this blog actually ended earlier this year. it dropped me like a bad habit. the problem now is, I can't stop going over to the building where it lives and lurking around outside its door. I think I hear it in there moving around. I think I hear someone in there with it. what I'm telling you is that I suspect this blog is cheating on me, fucking around with someone else. it's "cheating" because when we broke it off it told me that it didn't think it'd be seeing anyone else for a long time. I used to love this blog, but now I regard it with something very close to horror. it told me once a long time ago while we were driving in my vehicle (while we were still together) that it needed some space and that I was being a little "smothery," but I didn't take these words to heart. for months after we ended it it would allow me the benefit of a pity fuck now and then but now I see those for what they were and now look what's happened. I'm standing outside its door listening and I think I just heard someone make a noise in there. I saw the blog walking up the street the other day, pensively reading what looked like a letter. I never should have followed this blog all the way out here, many thousands of miles from my home and my people, but now it's become an obsession and I can't let it go. after that one time it told me if I ever did that again and busted up its room all drunk and in drunken glossolalia it was going to call the cops on me. god help me, I think I'm going to call its bluff this time. I'm out here, drinking Jim Beam direct from an 8 oz. flask which I used my laundry money (my last) to buy and I wonder what would happen if I knocked on this door right now. or called the blog on my cellphone right now while I'm standing out here. I swear to god if I find someone in there with it, I don't know what I'll do but I bet it won't be good. there, I just called it and there's nothing ringing. it's either gotten rid of its phone or unplugged it. Now I just called it on its cellphone which I think I now hear vibrating on the floor. now it's still ringing but the vibrating has stopped. what does that mean? I am right now feeling a terrible pang of conviction, of absolute certainty that that blog is in there right now, naked and in bed with someone not me, and that they're in there waiting quietly until they hear me go away. well, I'm not going away. that's it, I'm knocking. in a minute. what if I scream something. what if I scream right now that I can hear them fucking in there. I don't know how it ever got to this. this blog is driving me crazy. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to continue to stalk it. I hope it does take out a restraining order on me. bring it on, is what I say. If I can't have this blog, then I'm going to scare the shit out of it with disturbing and emotionally abusive behavior. On a daily basis. I'm going to become this blog's worst nightmare; I'm going to make this blog pay for what it's done to me, for what I've become. For real

it's not worth saying until it's worth saying in disguise

head cold but will still drink beer fresh back from a notable sink of humanity

I realize now that what I should be reading or at least investigating are works by authors in the cyberpunk/postcyberpunk genres of science fiction; why, anyone reading a lot of what I've written here might deduce that, hey, here's a guy not so nimbly wheedling along wholly oblivious to the vast and emerging bibliography of speculative fiction. I wouldn't say I've been wholly oblivious but by no means either have I delved deep. And you know and I know that the obvious book to start with is William Gibson's Neuromancer (how lame to admit that I haven't even read even that seminal title) and subsequent Sprawl trilogy. (Jules turns to Mr. Brand Spankin New and says, OK, but you are aware that there is an invention called "the Internet," and that on this invention are things called "sites" that people go to to learn about things, right?) Then again, for my purposes, it's probably (although probably not really) enough to delve through the Wikipedia entries for the aforementioned terms and titles (as I've been doing today), while checking out the associated embedded links for terms including posthuman, transhumanism, mind transfer, etc.

Not that it matters, but I'm disturbingly low-tech when it comes to getting all excited about (or even adequately comprehending) certain systems, technologies, gadgets, etc. I'm also fundamentally apathetic toward any subject involving math, logic, hard science, elaborately explicated philosophies, etc. Ergo (and I'm not proud of this), fictional worlds involving a level of detail and complexity as can be found in, say, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or (I imagine) something like Stephen R. Donaldson's the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, have always uniformly bored the crap out of me. I didn't even finish The Hobbit. I always figured all such crap must have bored the crap out of guys like Ray Carver too, and, you know, look where it got him                (could that be less funny?)

Who the FFFF cares. All I might have going for me in this brave new world is a seriously dirty mind.

Last night in a maze of honest physical exhaustion and beer buzz it occurred to me that

maybe what this blog should be all about is cranking out daily windbaggardly commentary and opinionated aghast exposition re: the evidently perpetually incipient and insidious corruption of the evidently perpetually incumbent U.S. governmental regime, sadistically manipulative mass media machine, diabolically troubled not to say defenestrated sociopolitical condition, and then I wind up by sizing up and prizing up the tenets of me own devoutly what I'm gonna term because I saw it termed thusly on another blog just like mine, my own private cybercolloquiagism of of neo-progressive tenet and structure of god damned righteous beliefs rah RAH!! (again, I joke…a real laugh riot, haarnh?)

No, what occurred to me and it was in a hazy dazy sort of walking outdoors with a beer mindset but the thought involved: this blog being herewith held by me as sort of a serious non-consideration vis a vis my new idea which is - what they like to call pre-writing essentially being the mother of all decent writing anyway - that into this endeavor is where I should really be dumping the better part of my written efforts since it's basically the only game in town for me anyway at this point (by which I mean a point of alternating frustration, rage, despair, and abject fear of wasting it all.) Eventually if you just let it, er, alt/go/flow and if you know what you're doing (or are anyway at least trying to keep in mind what you should be doing in terms of technique) the writing slips over into something like credible fiction and then it's all just a matter of capturing that momentum for later revision. and re-shaping and putting back together. I'm pretty reluctant to explicate ideas of process for fear of jinxing them but it nonetheless strikes me that the method I personally have been seeking in terms of maintaining a sustainable habit of writing has been pretty much sitting here staring me in the face or more accurately ringing in my head all day and night long and WTF that means is something only I can know and/or feel and am often loath to bring to terms which of course is the core of the dilemma but suffice to say when broken down it basically involves periods of nearly non-stop typing, eventually shaking out into a loose hierarchy of files whereby actual finished work is eventually extracted

it's easily what I could be doing all the time because this is approximately what I've kindly trained myself to do in composing civilian writing projects for me day job by which I mean to say my one and only job because I almost never write at home these days which is a tough admission for an often aimlessly angry, sporadically lazy, quasi-alcoholic creep who really wants to have written to be making, but there it is

so, to summarize: what it comes down to is writing three to five pages a day about the lepers in my head. and with that I leave you, signing off from the big underwater deafmute navel gazing gazeatron that is this here URL, whyever not?

 (and though I don't care much for U2 I always loved that song)

 <I hate what I've written here></I hate what I've written here>

Habit, routine. The momentum of habits. The momentum of personal routines. Territorial beings caught in the tidewater, the current rush, of mental and corporeal routines.

Endeavor then to perpetually initiate a kinetic and tangible shifting from static mental into the concrete physical, activity, actualizing, cutting through the currents, the tidewater, the slipstream; your mind is the rudder, your soul the propeller, or is it truly the moon and sun that controls these rhythms?

***

On a crowded afternoon, in the street, I cried out to whomever might listen, What language is spoken here? A man lying bleeding near the edge of a curb screamed, throat in tatters, Pisces!

***

Why is dream imagery, i.e. internal emotional imagery derived from one's own subconscious, e.g. necessarily informed by a personal history and present cast of subjectively intimate nightmares, fantasies, abhorrencies, desires…why is this so crucial? Because the images, regardless of subliminal origin, come from your interior spaces, places deep within your hull where the ballast is your uh what we essentially like to call your souuuuuuuuuuul

Yesterday, couldn't get it done. Couldn't get writing done in the face of little personal necessary and domestic impediments. Had to walk the dog, that also for exercise, left work too late yesterday anyway, frankly, considering what time I had arrived. Then that damn old and compromised laptop takes so loooooooong to turn on, I'm not talking for online, I'm talking for ON, for typing purposes. I need a new computer, for explicit personal use, whatever. Yesterday upon home arrival, pent up in the head, I was. Head ablaze inside. I need to write fast. Big deal, this always happens, the feeling will fade, NO, need to let it not fade, need to not waver. Be a patient mental patient. Padded room, unwavering synapsoglossolalia. Fuck. Silly, with nothing to show for it today. Except, here. With some aplomb. That's something. Anyway, yesterday, really wanted to write, psyched self out of it. Waiting for slow PC, decided to empty dishwasher, opened a Coors Light bottle to accompany this task. Needed to be online because figured if do write will just do so in body of an email and send to self to work on later. Knew just the same would be any minute into suppertime domestic stuff. As happened directly. No big deal, drink another beer, and so on into the evening. Instead of writing, I took the bedroom A/C unit out and lugged it down to the basement as we are thankfully and luckily into the cool cool coooooool weather. While downstairs, took the opportunity to fire up the downstairs PC and at least move me MottC_salvaged_work file from gmail to desktop. Didn't go online too too long however as virus protection has expired and need to renew soon but don't want to charge it, nope. Hey man, I don't need your Internets, yeah, right, fuck it

Then I was 3-4 beers in and feeling not so apt to write. I could have used a cigarette but …NO MORE. Decided to read, which I figure to be just as important as writing at my stage of the game, by which I mean a stage foreshortened, reduced, retarded. No. NO. Anyway, I read "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" by Flannery O'Connor, then started "The River" by FO again, from Collected Stories. Good move. Got me thinking about "influences," the writers I've instinctively and habitually and always turned to over the last 12 – 15 years whose work has appealed to me as the way to do it. The list needs conscious expansion, but as it stands, includes: Hemingway. Steinbeck. Flannery O'Connor. Cormac McCarthy. Andre Dubus. Stephen King. John Irving. Raymond Carver. John Updike. Bukowski. Kafka. Faulkner…? I need to read more, more widely. MFA people must certainly laugh at me all day and night long up in they campuses and I don't care. I'm past the point of lying about shit. I'm way out of MFA range now and could never go back….would never go back….

***

Intelligence by which I mean the mental faculty involved in perceiving what is  subjectively essential seemingly wanes and waxes like the lunar phases. This need not be so; unwavering persistence of attention equals mental toughness i.e. focus.

Rambling Blues  you are my unequivocal self-preservative agent sub rosa….be all that you can be; muthafuckas, be your own deus ex machina

 

 

I remember it being said to me once by a creative writing instructor who shall remain unnamed because I'm kindly and cringingly embarrassed that earlier this year I actually sent him an email kind of sort of and obsequiously and toadyishly alerting him to Mott Cromby i.e. my weirdly still persistent writing activity, this back in March when I was all excited about that fable surrounding Jacob Beizart etc. buried back in this blog's archives. Impulsive move, ridiculous move, this note, this consideration, such is my intermittent and pathetic craving for some kind any kind of slim encouragement after many years of dogged and self-defeating writing behaviors; anyway I hope now somehow this jejune communiqué, this adolescent dispatch somehow mercifully eluded this dude's attention since it was an evidently (devoutly hoped) moldy university email address I sent it to, I think an old one yes or else I think the dude was on some kind of hiatus or academic sabbatical; regardless, and to the point: his line to me in terms of writing advice way back in Indiana days of yore was something akin to recognizing your weaknesses and turning them into strengths. Which to me, considering my case, must certainly mean subverting or subjugating or countermining or counteracting or refracting or recasting or reforging or in any event excogitating my obsessive compulsive proclivity toward anxiety nervosa neurosis into what? Sentences badly imitative of baaaaaaaad Jack Kerouacesqueatureizzleidolatry?????? Fuck it. I too was born in Lowell motherfuckin Massachusetts by the muddy banks of the Merrimack, a name believed to have been adopted by early European settlers from the Native America Merruasquamack,  meaning swift water place.

 

 

what I mean to say of course is that Mott Cromby comes honestly by his self-predilection as a half-assed wannabe Beat progenitor. That's my story and I'm sticking by it

 

 

If I could hold on to just one thought
For long enough to know
Why my mind is moving so fast
And the conversation is slow.

Burn off all the fog
And let the sun through to the snow;
Let me see your face again
Before I have to go.

I have seen you in the movies
And in those magazines at night;
I saw you on the barstool when
You held that glass so tight.

And I saw you in my nightmares,
But I'll see you in my dreams.
And I might live a thousand years
Before I know what that means.

Once there was a friend of mine
Who died a thousand deaths;
His life was filled with parasites
And countless idle threats.

He trusted in a woman
And on her he made his bets;
Once there was a friend of mine
Who died a thousand deaths.

 -- Neil Young, "Barstool Blues"

 

Mercygraft of course being a ruse brought in as a catalyst to shock shake shuffle my ability to write anything

Yesterday sitting at the dining room table while drinking a few beers (a Mich Light can and a Coors Light bottle and a Sam Adams Oktoberfest bottle) and with a football game playing quietly and mainly ignored on the TV in the kitchen and with Jackson my black German Shepherd dog sprawled on the wood floor on his green dog bed just to my left I sat at the IBM laptop PC (at only 256MB so slooooow to boot up) and went through every page of this blog via its archives, copying and pasting out the bits and chunks and fits and starts and sketches of narrative. (Tent Trailer and They Know Me Everywhere and Jacob Beizart and others. I'd link to them but the hell with it) anyway I pasted them into Word files, the job now of course being to go back, flesh them out, develop them further, finish them

why bother to relate all this in this manner. I don't know. I feel awkward telling it. this blog has over the past few years been kind of a put on, kind of a tribute to just how juvenile I can be, trying to convince myself that I'm cool, so maybe I'm just trying to push it more toward something more of a bullshit exemption zone and a daily excuse to get started writing

note to self: what might work is to use Page 313 to capture random phrases and bits of imagery and character sketches and whatnot. like I did on this blog at the first part of this year.

the real key however is to do the real writing offline so that I might develop it in a secure environment. maybe post an excerpt or two here and there, somewhere in here.

(I find it hard exposing these dull thoughts here in such dullardly fashion but fuck it. but wouldn't you know after all this now I'm starting to feel like wishing to really bust out some lines about the pink gold glow of the brightening sky this morning walking down in the chilly morning the slope of long private driveway of the rehabilitation center where the sky opens up, walking past the 19th century post lanterns which I said reminded me of some old park like in Paris [I was thinking of A Moveable Feast] and J. said that they reminder her of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, which I thought was great)

Mercygraft:

and this is easy cheese. Cromby's problem is that he has a hard time distinguishing his emotional problems from his emotional abilities. the kid is easily distracted. six months whirls past him like bats whirling overhead in summer twilight, look, there they go

I had to put my boot to his ass as he slept in bed this morning. think in pictures I yelled. type first, think later, I implored him.

mental backwash, mental backwaters. he's gone back to phobic. compulsive fear. I'm like, put it in the work. forget about yesterday

This is a good room here. Wide open and empty. A man could fill it up. Fuck, Cromby, take another beer, but then write it

John Loane:

The day Cromby kicked me out of his apartment, I didn't know what to do. But I had an idea. You see, I'd nipped his ATM card out of his wallet while he was passed out earlier that morning. And I knew the PIN number because I'd watched him punch it many, many times. Cromby aint the most perspicacious drunk, you know. You wanna kick me out on the street, Cromb? So I figured: fuck him. And walked up to the bank on Seneca Ave. and withdrew $600, as much as I could. Then I said, I should go get me a bus ticket and hie my ass out of here before he gets wise. And that's exactly what I did. I decided to head south.

Mercygraft:

the jejune ramblings of an anxious, neurotic dude. he should've turned this bitch over to me long ago. well now.

Cromby needs to lose a little weight in more ways than one. his brain is overcrowded like a mediocre ballroom in a mediocre city. bad air, mediocre air, and it's all in his head. Cromby you could say has been on a bit of a losing streak. That's where I come in. Because, you know, I've always been there, but he aint always been so good about calling for my assistance.

Cromby won't tell you but I might about some of them bitter days in New York. The air in the fall there was gray and kind. He could never deny that the East River to him always felt like home and the hardscrabble pavement running all along the north Brooklyn waterfront like his skin. The day he sold his Marshall amp with 2 twin 12-inch speakers for less than half what he paid for it new. I think he got $350 back. It went for rent, beer, and food. That was a different New York, but to Cromby it'll always be a soulwrecker. He don't need to ever go back. He says if he writes about it he aint gonna call it New York. One component of what he wants to do is to change all the names to protect the guilty: himself

Cromby don't know if he's a hell of a lot of fun anymore. He has a laugh at the way he used to fetishize drinking and rambling poor and desperate through the streets and bars like that was credibility, like that was poetry. What it was was a waste of time and money. And yet he's tipping a beer right now. Beer is empty calories and so is the past. Cooler times is coming though and then too maybe he can draw himself out like wine.

Cromby's weak unsure of himself and scared he's wasting all his days, but I aint like that. I'll tell you fuckers straight: I come from the road, and for the road I'm bound.

Now listen:

thought about it everyday even though it did him no good and indeed served only to drain his and the day's good feeling

*

the auditory and pixillated forms of media fomenting a never-ending blizzard and tsunami of base human stupidity, ignorance, bigotry, bullshit, and hypocrisy, American-style. And you are the prey. In mindless seeming perpetuity and all according to a certain plan: more power more wealth more control for your rulers, more more more for your rulers. Your rulers.

*

what to do? can't ignore, can't deny, can't convince anyone around here of anything either these days really since rational argument long ago left the building and opinions being like assholes, etc.

only thing you might do is try to tell it in a different way so that people might see it first and foremost but also in a way that might cause them to feel something moral or decent. that of course is the power of any kind of narrative art: the ability to move an audience toward a certain singularity of human emotion

the non-plussinator

had a secret invisible surgery performed in

a. an unmarked van
b. another dimension separate from earthly reality
c. absentia

whereby to

a. remove
b. enhance
c. jar
d. euthanize
e. identify

his

a. imagination
b. conscience
c. perspicacity
d. next drink

this blog is so done

you're typing in cube. could be worse. you've yet to accomplish much. meanwhile, there's
creatures like him and him out there walking the Earth.
there's a lot going on out there. (always has been.)
some people are minding it.
others, eating shit. others, in between. what a
mindfuck. it only counts later
if it's written down though is what I'm
feeling. sorry, I
can't help
it. I'm an
idiot

Mind paralysis denied in
backyard symposium

as the running dog
ropes his long muscles skyward

unto air and gravity.

A certain quality of September light
starting today around 4 p.m. means

blue and gold and red
my heart, my soul, my head.

Mine every dream and hold.
Mine and hold.

Mind,
hold.

[don't think I don't know]

From the mall parking lot he jumped the iron guardrail and ran crashing through the heavy brush down the steep bank to the river's edge. The blue sphere followed him, casting the leaves, the crumbling earth, and finally the low dark water in its luminescent glow. A dark narrow shape like a curving blade swirled within center of the sphere, apparently controlling the vehicle's trajectory and momentum.

3 Bass Ales and 2 shots of Cuervo
rounded out his fee at the bar. The month
was November. It was Thursday night, after a bleak
day full of cold drizzle.

The shoe trade that day
was slow. Or maybe it had picked up. He didn't know
and didn't care. He left the bar only because it would be wrong
to become truly drunk at work. He stepped outside the mall entrance
and smoked a cigarette. It tasted terrible, wrong. Huffing dry and hot,
toxic lint.

On TVs everywhere all over the world that night,
the ultimate surreal impossibility of their arrival
had finally come true
and was being broadcast.
Just like in the movies. Yeh.
The aliens had arrived. Undeniably.

he stands
feeling a sheet of invisible frost on his face
emanating from his eyes

I make a certain gesture of the hand
and the mall parking lot transforms into a moat
of wine

is what he said to her as they stood
smoking outside

she gave him a narrow look
(she worked in perfumes)

then he said,
few turn to a seller of shoes for answers
that's why he sits baked in the back
among the boxes and shelves

you don't have to try so hard to creep me out,
was her rejoinder

when it comes to you so naturally

he blurted

what time you get off you wanna get a drink after work?

she flicked her butt the white filter of which was plum with lipstick
away toward the curb

weird is what she then said and went back inside

he then flashed to a vision of him stalking
the shoe floor with a
katana

blank I drew upon rituals scorched of meaning
rare my methodologies and so backward
did I rule

I drew blanks upon scorched rituals, meanings
so rare and so backward that this methodology
became my rule

I got nowhere to go but here
I got nowhere
I got nowhere to go

swirling white and grey in the sky
beaten white and grey of the road

the weariness of self

3 a.m. awake wondering why didn't I back then and if I had would it have and
would she have

cool late August morning

burned car on a flatbed trailer in the northbound lanes,
cops and fire engines strewn all along,
miles of traffic waiting behind

coffee
white lights in a drop ceiling

resisting emptiness of spirit

the problem is not one of no purpose
or no sense of urgency
the problem is one of discipline
and persistence

meta-cognition. fine

feels a lot better when it comes from the

bowl

here's one key: when you finally get low enough and in the dark enough in the dark dark in the gloom in the crusty gloom at the bottom of the sty and you are groping, scrabbling, splitting your knuckles and shredding your nails against the splintery of the bottom, when you get down there, finally, you finally find the fuse, the thread of it, you best fuckin light it

sparing no moment for patience or reflection in this instance

*

grab hold of your most canine soul

gazed upon them with mingled pity, horror, and excitement

whip out the sophistry module
it's all I got in my satchel besides
your old flask, which lately
has stopped murmuring to me

yeah, baby. you're killing them
whirling through the room like a tardy
ballon, low and tired. I can't
tell you what I want to say

but I'll buy you the words. five, say.
line 'em up. you flay them too much
I know, it's what makes the drinks
go down so clear. fear and sex played

out on a screen is what makes
this country go.
don't get petulant about it.
now smarten up

hangover exegesis;
pound out the flame
as it was meant
to be written

termite brains chittering
need is a bannister
maybe it's enough

*

silently comparing
hangovers at the water
cooler. yeh buddy

I see you

desolate champ
furniture
face

four levels, dollhouse head.
images in the brainpan. well
is down, well is way down,
you can make it

on Tuesday

a vase half full of mnemonics
a wraith reading his intensity
in the breakdown lane, the big
trucks bombing past

Maggie, bring me an egg plate
and my viewfinder and get that
scrawny dog out there a steak
on my tab

Note to self:

Process is what sets you free.

Time comes around and so do people. Like the ballplayers say, you should never get too high or too low. You've got to maintain an even keel.

The time eventually comes to reel in with the mind the thread of the conversation you should be having with yourself, the story you should be telling yourself.

Last night lying in the flat pungent heat I started writing in my mind, a mental activity that rarely amounts to much. But images at least retain possibilities.

Truth is the main concern these days, the main concern.

The only thing a person working alone can really effect.

Now everyone in America draw a picture using their own blood of a suicidal cauldron of war and suffering in the Middle East egged on internationally by all manner of lunatics in high places and threatening to envelop the entire world.

I’ll sing you the life song and I’ll sing you the death song
of Kirby, Allen Kirby. Kirby played
guitar. First the life song:

In the high school’s library
when he was fifteen and failing out
he found an old Library of Congress album
with Leadbelly playing and singing.
That night walking back home to the Children’s
Home he couldn’t get the scratching
sound of the big man’s guitar
out of his head

At the time he had just about decided to quit school.
But that night, walking home, and then the next
day again sitting hunched at the library’s turntable
wearing the ancient, faintly smelly headphones,
he decided not to quit (yet) because school was
where these records were. In the record bin
he found more recordings by people like
Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Son House,
Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, B.B. King, others.
He started cutting
class to go sit in the library and listen.

He found this picture

in a book about the blues and would gaze at it while he listened.

He was able to get a job as a stockboy at a local
pool and garden supplies store and after a few months he
saved up enough money to buy a Yamaha 12-string acoustic
guitar. After he bought the guitar he never went back to the job.
Instead he’d sit on the long concrete steps
at the back of the Home
next to a dumpster, a parking lot,
a cruddy picnic table, and play the guitar.

He’d checked out a library book with lists of chords
and songs to play such as “Amazing Grace”
and “Sloop John B.” and
“House of the Rising Sun.” He learned
all the chords and all the songs
in the book, fretting and strumming
till his fingers bled.
When they bled too bad he’d bind
them with clear tape and play
some more. When he broke a string he’d
take the guitar up to his bed and change
the string on the bed.
He found in the high school library
a tape describing how to tune a guitar
and so was able to do this
(after some confusion owing to
the guitar’s second,
thinner set of strings).

Here’s a couple of things you need to know about Kirby:
His Mom dropped him off in front of the children’s home when he
was five years old and drove off with her boyfriend in the boyfriend’s
green Ford Pinto which she and the boyfriend used to call “the Peashooter.”

He never saw his Mom again.
After she dropped him off he cried for three days
straight until the ladies who ran the Home were worried
that he might not stop and discussed taking him
to the hospital which they eventually did where
the boy underwent sedation, after three days
of which he woke up and then cried not again

until a day many years later when he’d learn,
finally, that the woman he’d loved more
than any other, and who’d given birth
to (as eventually became undeniably apparent)
a retarded son, and who’d run off when
she realized this state of affairs (after staging
an ugly, drunken episode on the front lawn
of the Home with declamations
and recriminations screamed at the ladies who’d raised Kirby,
and who'd come to think of themselves as his aunts),

sure, Kirby began to cry when he finally learned
(via the Internet) that Becky was a whore
who (he'd heard it said) made the son retarded
by drinking and fucking through the pregnancy
while Kirby was off on the road
in futility trying to achieve some kind of minor
celebrity or at least financial solvency as an
earnest whiteboy bluesman closing in on his
thirtieth year. When he came back and found out
how Becky had run off and how she’d been a prostitute
and about the retarded boy, perhaps his and certainly
his now, then he sure did cry some bitter tears,
standing there on the back steps of that same house
where he grew up,
those tears rolling behind dark
sunglasses and rolling down
into a wispy brown
beard with 4 or 5 gray hairs. From inside
he could hear the boy beginning to bray
again but his aunts were there to attend.

So there you have it. The beginning
of Kirby’s love song and the beginning
of his death song. The bridge to the tunes?
His hate song and his insanity song,
threading counterpoint, all sung
unto her, his whore, his Magdelene.

Then I'm standing in a long green corridor, smooth concrete walls painted pale green, like seaweed.
The floor is sand.
Nothing but sand and pale green expanse stretching for miles, apparently in both directions.
Nothing but a square shaft of white light shining thru a window apparently miles from where I stand.
This soft sand is going to be a bitch to trudge through and it is a bitch, keeps giving way and is hot, painfully hot and sinking, just like walking on a beach.

I walk for so long and so far, for a year, for miles, but there's nothing else to do.
No sleep, no eat, no drinking, nothing to do but plod along, pausing to scream occasionally;
the white square of light never getting any closer, until one day I pause to scream and, looking up,
there it is: a mirror
with a red creature inside screaming,

clawing at its face
and dissolving into
pink mist

Here's what I can tell you. The night was shading toward late, the June air outside my screen door was blue-black and humid and the grey grass beneath that night was long, moist tendrils because I aint cut it and it was late. I was watching a cowboy film and then I just sat there drinking Dos Equis and feeling kind of arid.

Tell us about the android and the mutant some more Mott and the magic guitar player headed for the mountains. If it takes place 3 hundred years from now how can there still be an America. Oh there can be, fucker, there can be

for anyone wondering what the aliens might look like

Monday morning and blank as a sheet of Xerox. As antiseptically oriented as a store bed on display. Droning on and out like the voice of an announcer on NPR. Nasal People Reciting. Yeh. A human in one moment wholly defined by a sensation of having to urinate, but not wanting to bother. Sitting before a computer in an air conditioned business environment and therefore in better straits than the vast statistical majority of other humans on the planet, on the continent, in the country, in this very zip code. 26th of jejune. Ice. Huck.

rapid jacket stripping

landed sentient bile migration
get away from the cities get away from
the humans they are
insane

did the android think it or did
the alien. (I'll tell you
later)

he plays, you go into a trance

lyrics from old songs writ by Cromb

I got bitter bones inside my skeleton...
I got a taste for pain that's licking up my life...
Bring out your dead and cry these tears no more...

*

I'm a cannibal, an unhealthy animal
Who yearns to die on his own damn time
You're head's out of reach, baby,
So is mine

I don't want to frighten you
but it's something that I'll do
It'd be easier not to try
But I like to see you cry

I wanna spend the night with you
You are many, I am few
You are like two thousand strong
Why can't we just get along

I'm a bucket
You used to fill me with your rain
I gladly would be filled again, but that's understood
Since you slipped away, I feel like I'm no good

I don't want to frighten you, etc....

*

Last time I saw you was an ember August night
And you were riding down toward the mall on your bike...
They say it takes all this time to find yourself
I don't believe it. I want you more, I want you more

*

Child, who are you?
Child, who are you?
Child, who are you?
Child...

You carry too much
You carry too much
You carry too much
In your ocean's shell

You leave too much
You bleed too much
You need too much
In your ocean of self

*

You're walking away, turning back
What am I supposed to say?
I feel your love stealing away
But who's the thief? It's not easy to say

who knew

back in the day I could easily have written some crap about an empty cage but then I have to pause and think about what that image might mean and why it has cropped up on a morning that's otherwise fairly bland, no hangover whatsoever, no thoughts really to speak of, just feeling jealous at life because I'm not out on the river at this moment and fishing. or at home playing that 12-string Yamaha acoustic I bought 3 weeks ago when I decided that guitar playing etc. is it turns out the linch pin for me, the thing that holds it all together. You can get awfully negative thinking that something has passed you by and that ain't the Way, not at all, not at all. Nothing has passed by except what has passed. 34 is supposed to be a hella year though man; 7 is one of my luckiest numbers uh huh uh huh an empty cage what it means is that some wild entity has been let to creep free.  and sure, the world's going to hell too. that's part of it