Tails of Brave Ulysses

Number nine, number nine, number nine . . .

Claritas With A Splash

a man puts down his drink, reaches into a sack, withdraws a painting: young woman, fading colors, turn-of-the-century, and another man, ugly, lifts a glass to the woman's painted lips. she is baptized red in the redly pigmentation of cheap wine. immediately, her clarity works through my dirtiness. then the choir walks onstage, orderly, songbooks crooked in arms. i grow full. purrmutation. hushed choir "amen-ing."

i see myself, "tomorrow." the violin section leans in, turns pages while the magnificent mezzo-soprano is pressed in and down by militaristic drumming until
her voice is the only ringed route of escape. one baggy-faced violinist and another paunch-cheeked clarinetist argue accompanied by a wide-legged woman who bows on cello-strings. the room is no longer made of wood, not the hue of a red baptism, but cast in golden light. a child turns and asks, "who gave out the stars tonight?"

the stage is full. black sequins on velvets and silks. huge boulder buried beneath. above it all, wisps of white and balding pate; one man's back, two black buttons mark the split-seam of his long-tailed coat. from behind he resembles a night-locust conferring music on the world, and then a swan. he is too small for his wrinkled coat. symmetrically, he battens up deaf magnetudes in playfulness-and-sorrow. his is a song carried in the hands of a very old man, all the beauty of this one old man.

the very long-lipped bassist with thick glasses, the bony-faced chinese violinist, both look lost, serious. none of the women look as sad as the dogfaced men. still, they can't be thinking of each other--only their parts in the magnificent--only that. only fingers plucking strings, bouncing bows, every boundary locked in sound, closed in with wood and reed, parried by oboe and bassoon, shattered out of complacency by rising brass. how does one indicate the rising pluck from the descending rub? in that space, reverent stillness falls on everything. in that moment i too fall, back to earth. sitting in a barroom with a fading pink woman who's dressed in the color of something she drinks, i hear the refrain, the counterpoint, all. i hear nature and the star-child, the untenable, "play on."

I got blisters on my fingers

Velvet Overlay for an
Addict Named Derrick In a
Discordant Downword Direction

banging on a piano with fingers blistered by hot grease at my job as the cook in a local barroom is not rare the way late roses are rare (early roses rarer still)—in just the same way walking streets at night is always suspect, so they did not expect me at all, ever.

no other comprehensible course than sleep, because I don’t have trouble sleeping, it’s the waking up that’s hard, like being a killer cop in the fuzzillo 88. it was not that he said he did not give a shit, it was the way he said it that troubled us, it sounded like many men's choirs gathered together, chanting penitential psalms licensed to the local cemetery where your forebears may or may not have happened on a strange peacefulness they remain too eager to share with you.

every time the phone rings my stomach curls in knots. i do not want to answer another call for help. isn’t it plain that I’ve been thrown to earth, a cancerous lech, a carnivorous apocalyptic riding out a rainstorm before the hunt resumes: isn’t it? I am nature’s thwarted rhythm, a green field of time that prays to be written. call on me, lour eed, oh lordee ooh lord.

comparative polarities deuced up with diplomas, stark and savage, like lurid men and women peeing in public lots, peeing, lots, all recorded by the police and pbs, so people can discourse openly about the constitution in a way that is at once enervated and annulled. did newton live quietly, or was he fitfully rendered in
fatalistic laws of motion, mellifluous cog of masculinity raised over the heads of unblinking roman regiments searching for the unceasing body of christ?

still, too early for roses. mid-april. trees are white and yellow puffs, insubstantial as bad marriages. even as a child I heard the loneliest of sounds, a piano never played, fingers never marked red by a heat that bubbles surfaces before it bores downword and whose oceans of blood and salt remain nearby vistas never
traversed, all dead seeds of a latinate urania, every one a maternal minuet, and nothing’s petrichorial prospects borne again and always on the unceasing rains of sameness and defeat.

What's going on . . .?

This picture was taken in Ecuador (I think) and posted at: http://www.amnestyusa.org/business/sharepower/chevron.html


I know that I am privileged to have been born in the United States of America, but sometimes I wonder what's going on. I'm sure the child in the picture, if still alive, will wonder the same thing one day. Is this craziness surrounding oil an expediency of survival? Sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in one of Kafka's stories. Where is science when it comes to energy alternatives? Why haven't we tapped that nuclear reactor we call the sun? It's good for about 5 billion more years.

Skating away, on the thin ice . . .

School's almost over.
I'm exhausted.
And not a creative bone left in my body.