DEEP
IN HERE
Deep in here the sun won’t shine
before the day is ended.
Hammering the fog, your time
is forged upon a coin to spend it.
We move through the concrete zones
ghosting form, apeing sound, making movies.
Tails tell of an earlier foam
being light, being waves moving through me.
Fall down, stand up and cross the I-beam,
buildings and satellites.
Too long in flight before a day-dream,
our heads have arrived tonight.
"PSALM
58".
give upright teeth their own grist,
secure in the strength of acclaim.
they will make music for you.
they will stand-to as mote the Zephyrs eye
crossing moon-stricken black grass,
to howl through houses’ children lying low
between backyards of impermanent memories.
split-finger tennis balls unleashed
at your helmet and you have already forgotten
about your visor. vision obscured.
we shot the president 17 times of an afternoon
with one stinking cap gun. to the hospital
with Life Savers. everything checks out
O.K.
next patient. send in the girl with the developing
problem nurse. us kids have run all the tests
and studied all the charts, miss Jody and we think
you should wear this cinder block next to your
buttocks for 5 minutes. if you follow our orders
you will remain a young girl in our care
forever. next patient.
you are found guilty, Roddy of
lawnmower wheelies, bb gun birdies,
insect genocide, chinese demolition,
frank discussion of female activities,
shutting up your mother
and making off with father’s tools.
all this without a college degree.
us kids find you guilty as so charged, Roddy
and hereby do sentence you to a
job and alimony for life.
amen.
with
a start, francis realized he had been daydreaming about midget dwarf-tossing
long enough for several irregular donuts to escape his scrutiny. he
checked the clock and saw it was only 7:30am and he looked back down
at the donut-lined conveyor in time to snag an oily specimen without
a hole.
francis let go a heavy sigh and thought about the television program
he had watched the night before. it concerned a group of very real people
which had been carefully chosen by the television network to live in
a cave without any resources until the participants were finally forced
to eat each other for food. every week, they would vote out the ‘most
annoying’ or ‘biggest jerk’ and then that person would
be whisked immediately to a meat packing plant and processed into enough
sausages for the next week. they started with equal numbers of males
and females and they had to alternate each week in voting to eat first
one male, then one female, then one male, and so on. at the end of the
show, the last man and woman left alive got married in a grand romantic
ceremony on the beautiful island of Oahu.
“did you see that beautiful wedding last night for Tim and Katie?”
people had said, “you know, i thought they had a thing for each
other right from the start -- i think they made a secret pact to try
to eat all of the others first. THAT’S teamwork!! THAT’S
LOVE!”
francis wasn’t so sure if it was love or not, but he had enjoyed
the suspense of tuning in each week to find out who was next to become
victuals. it gave his life a small sense of purpose.
“Hey -- Bob Marley !! Hey, Francis -- are you high in here or
what?”
Shit. He must’ve let a few bad donuts go by while he was philosophizing.
Here came Mr. Pilate -- arms akimbo, propelling his lithe and graceful
form across the floor directly at Francis. Mr. Pilate was Francis’
immediate supervisor at the Wheeler’s ‘Nut ‘n Hole
donut factory -- where the Wheeler family had been “using the
finest ingredients and a craftsman’s special care to produce quality
‘Nuts and Holes since 1982.”
Mr. Pilate’s voice resided in a slightly upper-register. It was soft and came from the sinus and always made Francis think of hair salons and interior decorators. “you’re letting bad donuts through that we can’t use,” said Mr. Pilate
“sorry.”
“you look kind of run-down -- you sick or something?”
“no -- just a little tired. i’ll be fine now.”
Mr. Pilate relaxed his stance and moved in a little closer until Francis thought Pilate might kiss him.
“You know, Francis, you shouldn’t waste all your evenings watching television. You should get out -- maybe go out with a girl -- do something creative.”
“yeah, maybe you’re right,” said Francis, turning his head away. Pilate’s after-shave was creating a foul mix with the smell of glazing and chocolate frosting.
“you should try to improve yourself, is all.” he moved in even closer to Francis. “i’ve been thinking of a new business opportunity, Bob Marley.”
Francis turned his head a little bit further away and coughed, “oh, yeah?”
“yeah. give me your opinion about what you think of this . . . suppose there’s a way to purify air -- you know, like make it so there’s more breathable oxygen in it? what would you say to that?”
francis looked intently at Mr. Pilate. he was trying to follow -- he wanted to understand.
“well, there is a way. i saw about it on television last night. so i’m thinking that all one needs to do is establish a base somewhere and begin pumping outside air into their manufacturing factory, and putting it through the process of making it more pure -- you see? then you put the pure air into bottles and sell it!” Mr. Pilate punctuated this last remark with an ejaculation of his arms, palms outspread, while his eyeballs rolled heavenward. He looked like nothing at all in the world so much as a tulip with an ascot.
francis continued staring into Mr. Pilate’s small brown eyes. he didn’t get it.
“do you really suppose people will buy bottled air?”
“well, they buy bottled water, don’t they Bob Marley?”
==============================================
i
had a terrible nightmare once. i was taken to a dimly-lit room and placed
on a shit-brown sofa. accross from me were three cages and inside each
cage was an evil clown. i was given a remote control with illustrations
of each of the three evil clowns on it. beside each illustration was
a button to push. there was a handful of other buttons of various colors,
as well.
there was a long low coffee table in front of me and on the coffee table
there was a fish bowl filled with what looked like rubber balls about
the size of jaw-breakers. i noticed that the colors of the rubber balls
matched precisely the colors of the various buttons on the remote control.
this was some sort of game. i had to guess correctly how to release
each clown while at the same time appeasing them so they wouldn’t.
. . so that they wouldn’t . . . .
what ?. . . . . . . . . .
i had to act. i understood that if i didn’t act quickly, something
far worse than even the evil clowns would descend on me from the rear
-- would creep up the back of my neck and do something terrible to my
head -- would eat my soul . . . make me see things that would change
who i am. if this happened i might no longer fit into my world.
Dear
Evie:
I like it a lot here in the Garden of Boron -- nobody expects me to
be very useful and I only hafta work when I want to eat. some of what
you told me about sounds real innerestin. money sounds like a marvelous
thing. money sounds so popular, i wish i was some !! well, would write
a lot more to ya, but the firing squad has already been rained out
once an theyre gonna get real sore if i make em wait. besides, you
never could tell the difference between good and bad, anyway.
love and spare ribs,
One Adam Twelve.
================================
they always say that you should believe in your dreams, so i guess
i haveta believe that i called the San Francisco Giants’ clubhouse
the other day and asked for Barry Bonds. “This is Barry Bonds.”
I told him that I just wanted to tell him that he was a really great
baseball player and that I know the Giants aren’t winning enough
right now, and he’s had his ups and downs and sideways and frustrations
and the fight with Kent and all, but he should keep his chin up, hold
his head high and know that he was giving it his all and that I KNEW
for certain that he was one with the universe and that he had a wise
elder spirit that was present at the beginning of all time, so hang
in there and keep swingin’, Barry.
Then I realized that he had hung up on me.
The last thing I remember, I was standing there with the phone in
my stupid hand thinking I should call him back and tell him what an
asshole he was.
==================================
when keith the Class C football hero and his Betty Donna discover
that they really like doin’ it on parked cars during pep rallies,
you’d think they were the first to discover oral sex. they think
they invented all the normal perversions they run through. so they
go to Vargas Pizza Palladium and act nervously cool for the benefit
of some fat ugly drunks in greasy sailor caps, and a few other types
who might actually leave town. Later, keith puts a baby inside Mrs.
Schaum, the sheriffs wife, and is chased out of the county on a football
scholarship, and Betty Donna becomes Mrs. Betty Doormat, heiress to
the vast Doormat fortune. film at eleven
===================================
violent episodes of salivation are occurring inside the Swill Bin.
enter Kooky Lenny. know him by his breath. he smells of failing SAT
scores and magnesium milk. later on in the parking lot he vomits out
a pristine buffet & Charlemagne in a zoot soot. you can tell he’s
a poet because he’s got an orange door hinge. he says he tries
to write the best stuff he can because he hopes one day to get put
in a cannon. damned if i know. all i know is any girl named Louisa
Anna ought to have her parents committed. that’s Kooky Lenny’s
girl. they go on double dates with her brother Marty Graw and his
girl Rouge. she’s a baton twirler. Baton Rouge they call her.
she won so many trophies for doing ungodly things with a baton that
her father had to put an addition on the house just to keep them in.
eventually, he moved into the crawl space and left her mother to deal
with it all.
then the house gets invaded by relatives. they have about a hundred
Irish relations who come to America about once a year and all they
do is eat non-stop at Ponderosa for a solid week. you never saw so
many deep-fried button mushrooms go into one face in your life. last
year they didn’t come ‘cause the whole family got German
measles and decided to retaliate with an invasion of Normandy. it
took months to sort out the whole mess, and when all of the treaties
were finally signed, a little piece of Ireland became the property
of Bonanza -- all of which got denounced in the Irish press and caused
a lot of global embarrassment.
so anyway Kooky Lenny and his girl Louisa Anna and her brother Marty
Graw and his gal Baton Rouge, they all go to the drive-in because
Kooky Lenny really really likes to have things put into his car windows.
it’s a double-header, and the first movie is called,
“ # “ and it’s all about these two anthropomorphic
donuts (Keanu Reeves and Julia Roberts) who live directly beneath
an anvil which is suspended twenty feet in the air and held by a piece
of dental floss. they go through all the normal trials of life --
they laugh together, cry together, get frosting all over each other
-- just like all sentient beings on earth, and every Sunday they worship
the anvil and beseech it to be good to them even though they deserve,
by virtue of being lowly baked goods, to be pulverized into the very
flour from whence they were created.
when the anvil finally drops, Louisa Anna and Baton Rouge cry like
little girls and Marty Graw and Kooky Lenny laugh and guffaw and tease
their dates, which really pisses the girls off and they get all petulant
and storm out of the car, leaving Kooky and Marty by themselves for
the second feature.
“they sank the Bismarck!!” hollers Marty Graw after them.
“i don’t get the big deal. it’s just a couple of
stupid donuts,” says Kooky Lenny.
“this scene stinks,” says Marty Graw, “i just wanted
to get my polly wolly doodled. i’ll never understand chicks!
what’s the next movie?”
the next movie is called, “ ^ “, and it’s all about
this guy named Raul Britannica (Lassie) who has a mental disease making
him obsessed with climbing things. he’ll climb anything -- water
coolers, foothills, ladders, basketballs, grandma -- you name it.
but mostly he climbs barstools and finds solace from his grief in
the form of sweet intoxicating booze.
it is a touching and personal film which draws the audience in and
allows each individual to identify with their universally shared commonness.
even Kooky Lenny and Marty Graw have to chew their cud for awhile.
on their way out of the drive-in, they stop to pick up the girls who
have been eagerly engaged in a game of strip-yahtzee with some bikers,
and together they hit the highway. two miles out, they pass a roadsign
which reads, “oblivion -- 85 miles,” and they all become
determined to make it.
slapstick
attempting a smoothness
born of intuition,
an affectation of instinct, and,
the naturalism of
handsome naked babies
and Thoroeau,
he
became the killer of the charade. . .
the tell-tale pinky of insignificance.
a man at obvious odds with the ordinary accoutrements of his environs.
all
the world calls
for a two-bit charlatan
to strut the role of God.
or
else
one good juicy sacrifice,
through a well-timed plate-glass window
by an
obvious
genius.
================================
litany of banalaties
the
killer wants ice-cream,
before he is killed, O Lord. . .
by what will i know your sign?
masses
of yipping barbarians
use crude oil
to force money into their ears, O Lord. . .
by what will i know your sign?
the
marketplace is overrun
with children who cannot
count back change, O Lord. . .
by what will i know your sign?
I
put that screwdriver in that
exact spot only yesterday and
now cannot find the bloody thing, O Lord . . .
by what will i know your sign?
=============
boy inventor to tinker yet again !!
long
did he waft amidst the clouds,
hoping for discovery
whilst swallowing his very navel.
to
make brief reply,
he settled some old scores
and made polite requests for Spain
to entrust Nancy to his immediate
priestly allure.
henceforth,
he shall be clothed
in unnecessary complexities
and given to nagging
the wives of sailors.
