ARIZONA HIGHWAYS
Noems from a nobody. Poetry from a pancake person. To be updated whenever the hell I shit out stanzas. If you don't like it, don't like it. Never said I was Mary Oliver or Wallace Stevens.
1. that far greater bay
tumbling mirth up above
a conspiracy of clouds
a blood red shelf
purple mushrooms driven upward to the edge of the Earth
& your distant face smiles at me thru cracked screens
nascent gatherings
upper atmosphere
& anarchy of weather
down here below the wandering ways of what we were
with no practical parlance
no feelings for forward movement
just the constant singing wind of each personal past
nah never alone
nope never together
once wild wanderers wondering
now we wend toward bells that clang for home
dolente, dolore…
the spinning backward wheel of night
hidden geometries
cloaked intentions
secret contexts
mental handshakes
invisible hugs
I’m no party to secret signals
I like to speak plain
…still up above the silent ascent of that long gold tumbling
the constant upheaval and shovelling up of gathered dreams
dreams unfurled like years across inner American oceans
hovering helicopters
a desert of meaning
& a city of words
the wasted whens and whys
names for tools forgotten
& fools begotten
in the name of my…
the nickname of an old bully springs to mind
a tormentor
terse and taloned
& now a long march of losers parade back
into the high bleached sepia of my memory
flakes of nostalgia
shards of youth
down strange highways I walked
to arrive this morning & say I wanna stay with you
streets that narrow
& ways that maze
the forking maybes of long-gone chance
aggregate regret
no Saturday for slumber
no morning for madness
just the cats I came to see
the cats of you and me
one lunar, one biblical, and my cookie that won’t crumble
the mine of us
the you of me
just the cats I came to see
2. ha ha high
we seek oblivion
& nights of white powder
we shirk our duties
for the kinder beauties of a buzz you’ll never know again
let’s surf this sun-soaked city, grand and windswept, on shrieking streetcars
but it’s raining right now
wet leaves gather in gutters
all around that old emergency aura of sudden rainstorm
scurrying people hold newspapers above their heads
nobody reads ‘em anymore
if they ever did
now they are the lost temp umbrellas of the Print Era
someone is screeching (no words, all obscene vowels)
someone else sloshes in the street, stomping clear sheets of rain water from pothole puddles
meanwhile a pair plays poker in the back of the bus
King or Queen, card or street, makes a big difference
since you know about the cards I’ll tell you ‘bout the streets
King Street sees both sides of life
it’s state is Kingly
and thousands at his bidding speed post on sad streetcars
while Queen tends toward the queenly blue
the camphor nights & naphtha winters
methadone clinics out near Dundas West Station
where on smoking sidewalks we wait to feel better
heading southbound you will notice failing organic produce marts
struggling in quiet dignity like the rest of us
to your right at Queen you will see a McDonald’s where I smoked crack in the bathroom
but there is nothing unusual about that
it is that kind of McDonald’s
you won’t find Ronald at this location
waltzing in with red coiffed afro to frolic with kids in PlayPlace
approaching Shaw Street look left and you will see a big rooming house on the north side, a place where divorced and injured construction workers go to die on mattresses (mattressi?) on floors…a sordid place to be for su-
wait…what? it’s been torn down?
fuck.
well now I can name it, I guess.
but I don’t like to speak ill of the dead & gone
so forget what I said earlier.
the Palace Arms was a wonderful hotel with lovely staff and semen-stain-free pillow cases.
hey! ever go into someone’s house and see lines on the wall marking the ever-raising height of the children who lived there? I think people with walls like that should get to take that chunk with them when they leave.
It’s only right and proper
bcuz there are two kindza nostalgia.
there’s the living kind, where one or some or all involved are still alive from the time period, event, or moment being remembered.
and then there is dead nostalgia. Custer’s slaughtered men who fought to the death and died where they stood, fell where they fought and became relics of the past, a colonial history, a war against those who got here first.
See them now, Custer’s troops, all consigned to the dusty trophy room of military history. No one gives a shit about them. I sure don’t. But I do give a shit that no one cares about them, if that makes sense.
Dead nostalgia is always more poignant and always more dead.
Sliding down King Street haltingly.
Like Hemingway’s prose.
Wait, go slowly, wait some more. Eventually you will reach the end of the line and will rarely feel worth it.
Then you remember you left a can of beer on the streetcar which is now pulling away at a glacial pace but still won’t stop even though the driver clearly sees you.
I killed a man who looks like you, you tell me, while we rock gently past side streets, passing a bottle back and forth
riding on King like a pair of kings
Potentates dispensing wisdom. Too bad if nobody asked for our thoughts.
How can they not see our brilliance?
While years accumulate, we wait for our subjects to bend the knee.
You killed a man who looks like me? I said.
Well I got hours to kill
& minutes to fill
& nothing to smoke/read/do
& nobody to hate but you.
We are only friends because we seek the unanimous high
a kindred experience in the Great Night
We seek the one who won’t fade
We seek oblivion
& nights of white powder
3. pancake people
On slabs of sidewalk
trudge feet toward drudgery
We are walking to work
not talking, just walking
Trying to prepare ourselves for the great flattening
God’s rolling pin
The enormous steamroller that rumbles over all
& makes us work
& work
& work
for some asshole we’ll never know
& never meet
or if we do meet him we fucking hate him for stealing our lives from us
for taking our time & bodies
stealing the prime of our days
the bloom of our youth
wringing us out like sponges
& throwing us away
I am certain that I hate him
and I encourage you to hate him
bcuz he is so fucking hateable
he deserves our hatred
he has earned our hatred
he deserves your hatred
he has earned your hatred
pssst…pass it on
our lives are gone
more gone than the front lawn in February
by all means and manners hate the honcho
but don’t hate yourself for being a pancake person
cuz we’ve all been flattened out here
we never had a chance
Our solid selves got vaporized the instant we stepped into this empire
& now we are prairie people
Pancake people
People only in the past
no longer people of the present
I can’t even remember what a moment feels like
what’s its duration
how soon is now?
how long is when?
rooted in/remembered for only what we do or did or are doing
never by what we wanted to do but couldn’t
bcuz we were doing something else
for that asshole we’ll never meet
4. forks of February
I’m a stranger to spaces
I’m a runner of races
with a pair of pollutants
& a lair for the mutants
& my heritage due
& flowers for you
our mayor a merchant
a basket to glue
a somebody somewhere
a never we knew
once we wondered where we’d go
among munchkins & huns
of recess & lungs
There are Bryans and Ryans in line
There’s a Sarah and Sandra
but I’m tired of whining “I’m behind on my courses of course.”
there are lines for the longers
& twine for the goners
I keep my cat cute & cuddly
I cater to whims
I set out his supper
& watch his mouth grin
The forks of February
The daze of our lives
The force is a scary
& terrible guise
the tyrants of spring
& a gaggle of guys
the minds you could bring
a pair of pears for our eyes
The tolling of autumn
The butts of a bummer
The sound of the bottom
& a scorching hot summer
When worn winter wanes
I will give you a hug
and drink summer rains
& lie like a rug
Deliver us schemes
& a season for bread
the rivers of dreams
dream themselves til we’re dead
5. city of words
sunlight mutters through finger-thin branches
I am lost in a city of words
a Cyprean curse and a coast for the birdsembiggened & smallened
avoided and placed
shitty and fallen
cold like the lake
one inner Siberia
Moosonee makes
the Irish don’t notice
the tailor’s mistakesMexican mallards & mines of the men
Arm me in armies
& kill me for Lent
Palm trees like towers
& ballads of song
Long island hours
the pallid pale throngpall bearers bearing my box to its place
a virus comparing itself to the raceilluminations
emanations
invocations
postwar nationsbricks bomb-smacked with craters
& holes in the wall
sidewalks & gators
a meal at the mallfrigid fine fugitives
midgets of mind
fields curl and golden
no storm is confinedBed bound here baby
your spirit I hold
I’m from where we want all
the tears of the boldFlorida Man [something] scream headlines at night
while mangled Marinos are wheeled out sight
6. Street Fighting, Man
we all have nights
we all have phases
but could night be kindred
while we stare out of our faces
unless uttered all together
a union in unison
our alma mater mutter
Gregorian chanting
& Geordian smiles
Spanish City of England
for pork smitten styles
while mysteries deepen
it’s a pity I’m a whore
still & laden with the lie
tis a shame you own a store
some sustain supper belied
a phantom meal for man
killed by the COVID cure
on a stairway to the stars so we can say we know the lure
incunable by hand
& street fighting, man
lighters shine on skin we scarred
& years defined by chiseled bars
a Vegas for the dreaming thousands on Main
driving down Major Street, America
on merit au demain
a palace for the parlance
of youth and yonder age
a mile for middle madness
three-five the new five-eight
some sing for summers raging
neath the ringing bloody bars
“It’s different now I’m poor and aging”
said a cocaine addled star
7. Americansomiacs
Americansomniacs
To thar great eastern highways
like stitches across this land
Or our far greater bays
canyons and rivers and beaches of sand
I race you back home
From here we watch it go
Americandependence
Americandispensible
A place and a taste and a something somewhere
Even if all I mean is to be not obscene
But be seen deep within sleep
“Down in the other world of childhood and dreams…”
Where the ghosts of Galveston and
The Josh’s of Jeshimon
Gather here like a late aughts folk band
Fifteen members if you count the tambourine
And he’s just here to be in a scene
An easier beer and a sleazier fear
Another way to play a face
Against the day of sour disgrace
From these subaltern heights to the last of slow weekends
For he assaulted Christ in The Last of the Mohicans
And you took my Moon from me
Like 1-2 ABC
You stole so naturally
You said I could see her annually
You’d send me one photo a year
but my moon ain’t coming home sincere
just blind hope and a lotta rope in here
and I know the colours of the year…
And now my life is like waiting for a bus that won’t come
You have to be very careful with your home
Don’t give it up so easily
Your front door holds back the tide
People can’t wait to bust in & blurt things
& burst this fragile notion of permanence & place
Because you don’t live there anymore
& if you don’t live somewhere soon
You won’t live anywhere at all
8. Interstate 8
The beckoning bigness of the worldThe capricious thisness of the girl
The biggest bigness of all
the bigness of the world
that hums out my window
when I can’t sleep
& I wish far away could charge so close
The ways of Vellejo
The poet of the prairie
Songs of the screaming sky
The weepings of the world
where you found that mysterious girl
who stared back at you from the brink
of the vast Sargasso Sea
of the vast swirling dark drink
like the last picture show in small town Texas
like the black & white dreams of what they take from us
Would these hot yellow days of death valleys
Ride herd on my thoughts?
In retired contra supine glow
& shimmering machines vending in the desert
Coke machine glow
in Baudrillard’s America
Ow what waits here?
Out where movies make themselves?
& an old man plays piano & turns when it’s over
To say “Madagascar” & nod & fall asleep
Would a canary-yellow 1969 Corvette Stingray
Ride her hips on up to me
Kicking up dust up & down the Oregon or American?
“All along the Navajo trail,” Neil Young sang in ‘75
“You’re all just pissing in the wind. You don’t know it but you are.”
What else did Young say? What else could he sing?Could I be there your new young man
Out there in frontier times?
Times gone from this world
like old train bridges thatched into yawning canyons of the West
Way out there beyond the Mississippi
Where the evening star sheds her sparkler dims
And don’t you know that God is pooh bear?
And don’t you know you’ve shown? Over & over?
Don’t you know? Stones from the sky
Screaming from the sky
Signs from this guy
From Maine to Bisbee, AZ
A strange suicide at Stanhope’s house
You can read about on the internet[8]
Maybe the West got into them
In a way it couldn’t get out
Strange gun clubs out in the desert
The mongoose flies…removed from the times
Out there in the never of the night
Where inky black holds dominion over all
Where somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city
the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night
& never did far away
charge so close
9. American Zeroes
C’mon down to me & mine
& I’ll (fuck you) show you & them what the FUCK it’s like
cuz you don’t know, do you?
& you don’t want to
Just so long as you can do
whatever it is you do
So FUCK you
& fuck what you do
& fuck what I owe you
This anger is not cleansing
This bitterness not free
& you could never know
what it’s like to be me
But I can guess at your smugness
& hate your hale hearty heroes
Your American zeroes
& the free of your fun
& the nothing of none
burned clear through my mind
my Burned Mind by Wolf Eyes
In dreams I’m holdinga colander for time
& our years fall through flailing
While you hold onto them wailing
I never knew the past mattered to you like that
I thought each day was your future, each now your next step
Nobody seemed so unburdened as you
by past choices or voices or cleats in the dew
or soccer game Sundays
or fleece in the pew
a Church for your mirthless
your miffed & meek
but I don’t give a fuck
& I’m not here to speak
I just want to sleep
in some motel out on the fringes of life
Where I’m at my most beautiful
& comfortable
Belle of the ball
All hell in this scrawl
When writing keeps biting through the blandness of all
& a good book your hero
Not the writer who wrote it
In all their flawed glory
But life’s in the story
Not in he/she who penned it
A good story’s worth reading for, bleeding, not eating for
& I’m needing one
No company, son
To learn that you look back
was shocking & cruel
Why break my silence?
Why love a fool?
Why come after me?
I wasn’t happy
but my unhappiness was mine
Now my misery is tied up with you
Intertwined
I didn’t want that & I still don’t
so get the fuck out of my head & the fuck down the road
Oh for a place in the Maine woods
a shotgun & outhouse
I’d write books like The Beans of Egypt
& Country Mouse, City Mouse
Books about towers & powers & truth
Nothing like the book I wrote about youth
all fleeting impressions
& lines in the sand
@ bleeding discretion
from my dirty hands…