Birds, more than a score of them perched in collective along a low-strung power line, erupted into flight seemingly the instant he awoke.

He'd passed out underneath a poplar tree in the field behind the school, his back lying against the smooth trunk of the tree. He'd spent the better part of the past day drinking any number of beers while playing his guitar in one corner of the studio while Marshall, also drinking, worked his clay in the room's opposite corner. The sculptor's girl Maxine had come over at sunset and the three of them smoked and ended up killing most of a pint of Kentucky bourbon that she'd brought.

He watched the birds whirl against the wan backdrop of the white morning sky. In their circular motion he saw shapes on a fretboard. He began to play in his head. The shapes and trajectories and inclinations and patterns of the birds' wheeling flight did not alter. The birds flew out of sight as one. Beizart closed his eyes.

The sound of one of the school's heavy windows creaking and thunking open wakened him again. He opened his eyes. The sun by now was well up in a clear blue sky. The seat of his jeans had soaked through with dew.

He sat breathing in the smell of the grass, never once cut since the onset of spring. It never would be, either. He breathed in its odor with the other morning smells. Behind his eyes a line of ascending minor sixths, starting at the top of the fretboard in lower E, bloomed upward into their major intervals. He wasn't sure if it was a phrase Hendrix had played at Woodstock or not.

Up the hill he heard from within the studio Maxine now gently strumming chords on her acoustic. The tenor inflection of her voice with its terrifying and beautiful clarity nearly whispering then ebbing then starting to rush then ebbing again alongside and on top of the harmony like icy water tumbling in a brook somewhere up in the mountains.

Up in the mountains, where he knew he must go. He knew not why, wasn't sure this mattered. But soon.

*

In loco obscurantis.

is it a sign of weakness to not want to pollute the page

if the page is public by nature

no

this is Friday night writing

cue the American Spirit

cue the Cutty Sark

cue you

my watchword and key

yeah, you

and whatever's behind your eyes

and whatever's behind mine

my watchword and

key

(this aint poetry

this is

me)

Look at the sky turn a hellfire red.
Somebody's house is burning.
Down, down. Down, down.
Down, down, down.

Well, I asked my friend,
Where is that black smoke coming from ?
He just coughed and changed the subject,
And said oh, uh, I think it might snow some…
So I left him sipping his tea,
And I jumped in my chariot
And rode off to see
Just why and who could it be this time.

Sisters and brothers,
Daddies, mothers,
Standing 'round crying.
When I reached the scene
The flames were making a ghostly whine.
So I stood on my horse's back.
And I screamed without a crack,
I said, oh baby, why'd you burn
Your brother's house down?

Look at the sky turn a hellfire red, Lord.
Somebody's house is burning.
Down, down. Down, down.
Look at the sky turn a hellfire red, Lord.
Somebody's house is burning.
Down, down.
Down, down, down.

Well, someone stepped from the crowd,
He was nineteen miles high.
He shouts, “We’re and disgusted,
So we paint red through the sky!”
I said, “The truth is straight ahead—
So don't burn yourself instead—
Try to learn instead of burn,
Hear what I say.”

So I finally rode away
But I'll never forget that day.
'Cause when I reached the valley,
I looked way down across the way:
A giant boat from space,
Landing with eerie grace,
Had came and taken
All the dead away.

Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
What'd I say?
Look at the sky turn a hellfire red, Lord
Somebody's house is burning.
Down, down. Down, down.
Look at the sky turn a hellfire red, Lord.
Somebody's house is burning.
Down, down. Down, down.

Look at the sky, look at the sky.

-- Jimi Hendrix, House Burning Down, from the album Electric Ladyland

The billboard was a bright beacon in the clear noon distance, a smooth palm raised upright and alone as in benediction far up along the highway in the long yellow air among the dormant fields and ruined homesteads. When they reached it, Legerdemain steered to the right side of the road and stopped the car.

He stepped out to perambulate a long loop across the road's wide center lane, weaving his steps among the broken white lines, then strolled back toward the vehicle with his arms raised skyward, pulling his triceps with each opposing hand, one then the other, hands lolling to either side of his sleek head, each biceps in turn compressing the head's shock of black cowlicks. Just as he reached the vehicle's driver's side door he stopped and flung himself forward from his waist, swinging both arms down to touch with his fingertips upon the surface of the cracked, grey asphalt in front of his alloy-tipped boots. Then he stood upright.

The troll had awakend from a sprawling slumber across the vehicle's back seats to unfurl himself from the rear passenger's side door and shuffle off toward the ditch, where he loosened his trousers and opened them to execute a piss of great volume and duration before shambling back to stand alongside the vehicle.

The troll and the cyborg stood for a moment in the warm sunlight, regarding each other lightly over the blue convertible's black canvas roof before each turning his eyes upward to the sheer white expanse of the billboard with its message inscribed in black.

In giant lettering, the sign read:

FAST IS SLOW, SLOW IS FAST

"Bullshit," said the cyborg Legerdemain.

Nipwilliger stood pulling his beard, his eyes lingering upon the massive words. "I don't know," he said slowly. "I mean, I can see what they mean, but what's the point?"

"Fuckin' animals," muttered the cyborg.

The bartender spoke. "What is this, a nerd convention? You guys need to start drinking. I need to make some money."

Legerdemian had to notice how relaxed the Californians were in their manner of speech. They seemed to think before speaking. Whereas on the East coast, the people seemed to think as they spoke, often illustrating this ungainly process by gesturing with their hands.

Negotiating the afternoon traffic in July on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, his internal audio subsystem thoroughly fried, the cyborg judged this a gloomy reckoning.

He watched in his center rearview mirror as a young blonde woman driving a blue convertible and wearing sunglasses jammed her brakes to avoid smashing into rapidly decelerating vehicles in the suddenly ebbing right lane. Seeing an opening, she yanked left to cut in front of the cyborg's vehicle by a margin of inches.

Legerdemain in one motion unholstered the weapon beneath his left armpit, then hammered the weapon and his right fist holding it through the windshield in front of him, bashing the tinted glass until the afternoon's hot white light and air poured in widely enough for him to queue up a clean shot at her.

They sold his car for wood.

Could it be that the story of Jacob Beizart might engender and require sporadic intercalary quasi-exegesis of music played by James Marshall Hendrix across (roughly) his last four years of earthly life? Yes.

After listening to parts of Jimi's Woodstock performance in the truck this morning, and thinking now about his "Rainbow Bridge" performance in 1970 in Maui, it seems to me that he did some of his best playing outdoors. Something about the sky, the influence of the sky.

Fritz

You need more midnight in your descriptions;
In the tales you would tell
More tales you would never  
And to wax a shade cryptic

Just a shade, shadowy
As the Macadamia bruise  
On her sand hue hip
Moving crescentwise, low across your thigh

I said to my boy Nami
This chick can fuckin dance
Look at her: up there
Figuring it out, beat by beat

He had to laugh

Later, sitting close
On the long banquette  
I said never change
What God gave you

She was about 5 feet eleven inches tall
With breasts small and high
And had moved fluid mantis
On that lambent stage

Her black eyes glittering in her dopamine

deconstructing the jinxonomy of his days

travel sense nixing home myopia

Roses and guillotines. What could it mean?

*

yieldzilla on the highway

native extrusion;
a German Shepherd sensibility;
hands not askew,
but fixed like a mind

worth it, say. yeah:
study the dialogue,
champ; it is,
it surely is

my travel hand has waxed a bit callow

Left Atlanta practically in rags, walking north along the breakdown lane in the pale winter sun
Will be briefly returning in a Macy's sportcoat, shoes freshly shined
Still though will be looking out for what
Master Shin Yan Ming calls the special water

got no time for bad poetry this morning yet here I am
because I when I creeps to the coffee machine I creeps
alone and today there's a crowd

of normal people and that aint me

got to get back to this page tonite I hope
so I can tell you what happens in our tale's latest episode
or fill in what has happened

Sometimes --

ah, fuck it. more later