lover of the black rose; unfettered and alive; chief archivist of the western slopes; another of Yemaya's babes in the world; Joachim's distant star; boring stories of - glory daze
Saturday, May 26, 2012
poem: lidhje gjaku
shell casings in the bubble, demographic pylons - is it any wonder - nashville cheesy grits all on they gold-toothed display - the lone Stetson - belly girls dance they belly ways down the belly aisles, come hither / hithercome organic the inorganic knot in the basal climes, your nougaty despair gives way to totem animals, sampling the crackling curls waiting at the 5 & Dime, solicitous affairs of the stony hearts, stony fields strewn with delicious rubble consanguinity abides in moocows of the delectably elegant: prop your ways, prop your days: let the perils linger, flash-bellied thistle peril worth waiting for, in your teensy-weensy limestone cottage of the savoir-faire.
thinnest rations thin to finest gossamer ghost shadows of missing scree fools, the ambiguity falls on deaf ears, the timbrels measure the loss of density the dance of fire in the nostrils, the passion that weighs heavily, sampling fates, delegating the weary taxes, the many ways I made another & another & far too many to mention. I whisper, Yemaya sounds the alarms, Mary takes one step farther, the serpent down my spine shudders at her touch: there is a willingness to convey a willingness to pray, mercies untold at the fingertips, the web of inner worry worries the worry alleys & I am home, I am wakened in the rising flood of blue mercy, inside out, the "rigid" search points down the Sabinal corridors, blue country filigree, thread not, want not, it was a nod to the sad pages, the rising towers of Santa Elena a fading dream, a song of return wolf mothers gated striations of the orphan moon & once more I gather my spoon my thinnest thinnings my gossamer friend my gossamer addictions my friendless womb time in a dance with fervent glory time in a dance with all you can muster time in a dance with your ageless story.
overstuff them yammy taters, boy: you runnin' on thin gruel, thin rations; the feast is cheap nothing less than all: heart, bones, marrow (marrow bone) heaven worn heaven bone a miscalculated heart the dyscalculia of pain & inventory, inventories lost to the thin waves anatomical displays of the soul's dis- array: she carries home the bait, and leaves you wondering you wander down that long road gathering up your thinnest spaces the feast may roll - you're nearer - the feast may call you home - near . . . er - spawnburgers on the home stretch - near . . . er . . . - isometrics of the western slopes, the fine thin brigade of your wayfare, played cross- ways, cross- roads, cross- ing to the other side the ladies of sorrow, the ladies of the canyons, the ladies of pain, the ladies of less than never, the ladies of grace, the ladies of the finest grain.
The
eighth day. Yes, the eighth day. God had his vaunted day off, bored out of his
skull, a serious dose of divine caffeinated withdrawal, temples knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door,
the lapsang souchong pounding the beat, Sonny and Cher enneagrams blissfully
arrayed on the mantel, cobbling fate, cracklins in the vestibules, acolytes doseydoe-ing in the barrel races . . . His Divine Hisness took one look
at them boys in white and thought Why
not? and Whither? and Wherefore? and before you could say
Guadalupanita that was one, two, three little aco-piggies—Arturo, Banda, and
Calabrese—plunk! down in the
celestial bowlful, those shifty cottas (traditional square yoke, natch) whirling
dandy dan in the missional mayhem, cohorts ablaze, couscous congealed, candied
yams commingling, carioca in the plim plam plum of danse tropicale—salsa
portoricaine, chacha, kizomba, samba, danse
africaine, merengue, and bachata. Them poor boys was just wantin’a helpin’
hand, lift they papalated lil limbs on out the sugary whirlpools, cosmos fatale, and the Wichita Lineman and all
the rest of the Hasidic liturgy, complete with non-dairy cannonade, expiration
dates, and the 1974 Derby winner himself.
“Getting
ahead of yourself, ain’t ya?” The Utter Hisness complined straight from the
1928 Prayer Bib, loose fingers wiping that North Carolina Tarheel old rickety
shack cayenne pepper throb, caramel tease, octogenarian open sesame, if this be the way to San Jose there are better ways
to annotate the Hausa-Fulani of Guinea-Bissau,
the Big Bib always calls down the gypsum NASDAQ, calculating, fulminating,
escalating, salivating as only Mr. Big Bib can.
The Non-Dairy portion of the Mass, of course, is still
the subject of considerable debate—not to mention squalor. Unintentional
squalor, of course, ham hock sensibilities notwithstanding. Go figure:
non-dairy is already an intimation of immortality: creamer simply baffles all,
baffling as only a 1972 Trinidad waterbed can baffle, sheer terror in the
shadow of the Dunster House clock tower, ghosts of Tommie Lee and you can call me Al, well, the derivative
portion of the program failed to list all the communicants, failed—ignobly, I
might had—to make a dent in any thing even faintly resembling Sara Lee and all
her sugarsweet minions.
Let’s dispense with the digressive balance and cut
to the chase . . .
The
Laws of the Theory of Non-Dairy Creamer:
1. Cesar Flebótomo is to N-DC as Eric Clapton is to
the unplugged version of “Layla.”
2. Amplitude rests upon the gospel of N-DC, not the
reverse.
3. East of N-DC is not, contrary to popular
delusion, west of the moon.
4. Nor is Diana Krall.
5. (Nor is her hubby, of course.)
6. The Dow Jones Average of N-DC wears its pants—and
its heart—on its sleeves.
7. Nebula lost her way in the N-DC constellation;
she ain’t been heard from since.
8. If there is an 8th Law of the Theory
of Non-Dairy Creamer, I ain’t been told.
9. Shoot to win, not to play.
10. Do not judge a theory by its cover. Nothing
surreal about the Theory of Non-Dairy Creamer in the least. Just ask Breton.
Dog and Cat.
Coffee and Tea. Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. Everyone knows there are
two types of people in the world. What are they?—
The plaid and the beleaguered. Rotarians,
mind your plaid, mind your fairways, mind your S&H stamped portholes. We
knew ye when: when plaid was not yet a physical manifestation of your
wafflemind, but your bottles were full of plaid milk (never a plaid breast
against that nuzzling cheek), plaid was your Gerber-fave, plaid the Melba,
plaid those purple Rotarian dinosaurs, plaid your Duplo megamind, plaid your
rulers, your Elmer’s, your bean and cheese tacos, your Chef Boyardee, your
cinnamon toast, your Underwood’s deviled ham, your spam and jamalot, your High
Rotarian pizza rolls, your chicken fried chicken fingers, your Notarian
underpants. The Captain calls you by your middle name, the High Priest coos in
your wet behind the ears, drools just a tad down the front of your Big Bib’s
Bar-B-Q big bib, and the Svengali of your plaid dreams has plans for you and
Susan Boyle that would make even Casey Kasem blush and swoon.
Such
are your plaid American dreams.
The
plaid Rotarian lit out for the plaid Nebraskan territories in the plaid days of
the plaid supermoon, plaid Four Freshman in his plaid Walkman, plaid fields of
plaid wheat swaying in the plaid breeze. For one nanosecond of his Itchycoo
adolescence, in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, stealthstalking the swarthy Hughen
coo-baby twins down the hall of Hopkinsville High, he strayed from his plaid
Optimist Oratorical Contest doom into the waystations of the beleaguered, the
infernal victims of his endless and sycophantic pabulum (no Cthulhu on that flagpole), the nodding-off to his
clanging oratory, straying for that mighty nanosecond into an almost nether,
Excalibur’d finesse almost at his fingertips, neon-flavored filter tips at his
disposal, he was for that moment almost a multitude unto himself, a Whitman
Sampler of fireballs, nursemaid to the blimey boys, wee Camden aristocrat
picnicking with his Widow Hudson, nursing fantasies of her as his empyreal
Dorian, call it the park, call it the trampoline, call it the coffee-colored
kisses, call it the last train, the don’t
know what / it’s all about . . .
whatever it was, it came this close to
the final abduction and not invite
Christian . . .
Dark
shadows all about. Plaid recedes, satori advances. If not satori, then at the
very least, B-side Steely Dan, pre-Aja,
without all that post-Aja, Wayne
Shorter faux-fusion crap. Gravely Phil Donahue Ronald McDonald: OUT. Beleaguered, folks. Post-SD is just
another excuse for plaid with chocolate nibs. Ronald McDonald is to SD as
Lindsey Buckingham is to Fleetwood Mac, as pretty boy is to real, only in
Ronald’s case, it ain’t pretty, it’s just boy.
Cancel
the night, cancel las palapas, cancel
the night train to Georgia, the godspell of Kerouac’s tombstone in the Lowell
rain, what a pitiful sight, Campbell’s pork and bean can in a blue flame, blue
flame down the Bastrop Highway, blue flame and six-pack of ice cold ice
cold“Slitz” (ice .
. . cold) on summery sunny pine-baked—no—pine-scathed holocaust of a Centex dog day afternoon, scathing
interrogation of the minions, the high school hall of famers’ danse macabre as
they jettison all hopes and dreams, facile beliefs, and the entire ouvre of the
Rotarian slipstream, to take on the dark night of the soul, the dark night of
the senses, the Jim Beam Oaxacan song
and dance (dark, or at the very least, dark
amber), as the plaid pixilates into oblivion and the beleaguered rises,
Borg-like, queen’s head settling nicely about the shoulders.
“Don’t
play what’s there, play what’s not there.”—Miles Davis
Here’s what’s not there:
The rest of your umbrage,
jettisoned in a peak fury, fueled by legustrum worry, the last time you saw her
was on a street that bore your name though none of your resemblance. She’d
abandoned you in a crescent dream, that dream that rounded your last corner,
your last ration, your last nerve. Siggy granted you amnesty from your war
crimes, your lassitude, your ambiguity, your adolescent fervor as an
undisciplined disciple of the Disciples of Christos. Christos Gallivosi, folks,
so don’t get your inflated carping hackles up.
Christos Gallivosi was your
road, tolled your road, hacked into your road with a pickaxe vengeance that
bore no resemblance to any bane you’d previously endured. She called to you in
your dark nights, completely off-road, sardonic calculus distilled through a
past life’s worth of diligent asphyxiation. Tij is finished cooking the
chickens, his fez firmly in place, hair coiffed in a fine variegated display,
Ahmad Jamal banging on his keys in the background. The Blue Village was calling
that night, a blue night of blue notes, blue coffee in your mug as the night
blued into indigo and on down to the pot of gold at the end of the whole bivvy
rainbow.
Ahmad. Still craving, after all
these years, still an infinite flame, still beguiled by the bippy gods vaulting
in his vaunted mind, diamond swordmind, flamestruck musemilk. His fingers are
the keys at his disposal, his eyes the nightmind at his beck and
call—beckoning, beguiling, bedeviled, befriended, beclouded, bedecked,
besmirched. I cry into all my nights, until the cooing starts, the diamond
coos, the virgin coos, the last of the damsel coos in her darkest darkest
tower.
Galliovosi Moses’d himself out
of a job, his Red Sea gig a fading memory: he stood on his own little dunghill,
this side of the milk and honey lands all the fools fa-la-la’d into, poor boy
on this side salivating and calling down hell fury for what in his heart of
hearts he knew was a clammy attempt at bathysphering him out of what was
rightfully his, a note of regret buried somewhere under all that smoldering
wrath—I mean, really, can you fault the lad?—call him simply a mourning lad, a
grieving lad, an inconsolable, brokenhearted, sad lad. And that was just
Gallivosi. God forbid, we go back and claim Miles or Ahmad or Tij or, most
especially, that lissome unnamed She.
We tried to name her,
desperately tried. Called up the Holy Roller Rolodex, checked the K’s and Q’s
especially, hoping beyond hope for a sobriquet worthy of her attention, worthy
of those Mother of God qualities, that backstage sensibility that wore out the
brighter lights among us and silenced the rhythms of all the rest. “She were
what it is,” was T-Bone’s answer at the census office; he’d worn himself out on
ginger beer and back-to-back viewings of “There Will Be Blood,” the first time
in a transported two days in Junior English, a propos of nothing but an art far
surpassing the on printed page leftover oatmeal of Steinbeck and the lunatic
fisherman lost at sea. Heartbreak skedaddled through that comely oasis and
celebrated twice over.
We were on the hill—the
mountain, if you will. Nebo, shining peak of victory and shame, all rolled into
one.
“Son, that ain’t for you,” said
Bib Yahweh.
“I can see that, Bib,” said Big
Mo. “You wanna insult me one more time with the whys and wherefores?”
“It’s on account of you—”
“I got the point, Bib.”
“You just said—”
“I know what I said, Bib. Ole
Bloom was right. You ain’t got shit for irony, Bib.”
“Hell you say? Why, you
little—”
“Don’t go all Stooges on me,
Bib. You got an image to uphold.”
“Come here, porcupine.”
“Exactly.”
She stopped just short of the
corner bakery, shouted out a few of the names in her sleep, names that rang
through the streets like nighttime delirium. She cod-fished three or four of
her new identities, fingers splayed and nibbling, jacked half a dozen of her credit
cards into the foggy bloom of day, complete with Ganges ablutions, half a
cantaloupe, and a bucket and a half of recidivist lemonade.
You can’t get her out of your
mind, can you?
You want to claim immunity. You
want to run down to the corner store and beg for asylum, but the denizens of
this burgh know nothing of political causes and sno-cone flavors: they’re all
about the 28-day lunar cycle of oblivion.
She can’t return.
She voided the sequence.
She ceded the rest.
He fell not once, not twice,
but three times: she blended all the flavors of his mind, ate all the muffins
fouled in his brain stem, asked the gooey gods for deliverance and shimmied on
out—
FIND IT: The Memoirs of Minnie Khlaetsch Resolutely NOT to observe, not to wonder, not to test, and assuredly NOT to analyze and conclude. Where’s the gleam in that? X meanders as X will, never a nod to the infantile, never a shoe for the elfin sock, never a sore loser to the claim that fame was your errant child lost in the fig newtons of the apple-eyed drone that questioned authority down the fifth avenue of Dante’s oblivion. X is a mean—shut your mouth. Seventeenth century mentality is one hell of a way to garnish your wages, tithe your churchy felicitations, unnerve your mummy, and visibly caffeinate your virtues whilst two-stepping around the cantina with the babes of Eglantine. Time OUT of mind, if you ask me, essays like a Viking funeral, scats like Ella Baby Girl Fitzgerald, and purloins like a bebopping lil’ E-Poe on the fly. In truth, X did want finding, but she wanted wooing, not titration, not Bunsen immolation, and not a science fair distillation of fodder on black foam core. She had in mind an afternoon of sultry eye-bashing at the Saturn Bar down in the greeny humid quads of the Ninth Ward, barfly miseries, barfly causalities, barfly mezzanine fury. Consider it’s—let’s call her X—modest beginnings. Waif in the streets of Milwaukee, ex-Packer fan, renegade debutante, cotillion flame-out, Rainbow Girl, Enya background singer—these were her dreams, folks, not her actuality. In truth, it was not Milwaukee, it was Joliet; it was not ex-Packers, it was not ex-anything; no debutante, no flame-out, no Rainbows, no Celtic nuthin’: Eliza Doolittle, if anything, but not even that. More than anything, she longed to be the silly Barbie doll dreams of Minnie Khlaetsch, Minnie the Mooch, Minnie the Mouse, Minnie the ex post facto Modulator. Minnie’s bod may have been Joliet-bound, but her mind grew up on the streets of Brechtian Berlin, she Mack’d her knife, Mack’d her life, Mack’d the living cheese out of the nougat holes in her voodoo donuts. Cream cheese . . . better yet, Boursin cheese, Krakatoa-erupting into the gullets of the narrow-minded, the grilled cheese-hefted, the chipped beef on toasted, cracked wheat infested Minnie-grams of the Minneapolis elite. Minnie so lacked for knowledge, but what she lacked for in knowledge, she more than made up for in eyelash-fluttering, Tinkerbell-tinkering, heartfelt dissipation. She longed into the night, like Laura Nyro’s ballad dressing, like “You see, this guy, this guy’s in love with you,”—yes, Minnie was the next Dionne Warwickian warbler, warbling into the heart of Burt Bee, sans her psychic Mama Margies, sans her Herb Alpert, sans her Margot Kidder Lois Lane, hirsute in her dark chocolate lederhosen, her distaff manicotti fur balls, an all-out monogrammed nightmare of Mardi Gras . . . poo. Ask yourself: is this a fate worthy of Minnie? Is this a fate worthy of anyone of your acquaintance? Dig deep, mes amis, and find the Samaritan lurking in your fuzzy wuzzy bearishness. Ask around. Ask in. Ask why. Ask how. Ms Minnie, she gottta thang for the esses—Singapore, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sergio Leone. Eli Wallach em-poncho’d and sombrero’d made her swoon, in a postmodern Bieberswooning kind of way, a provocation of the senses, a derivation of the candid, a consolidation of the slithy toves. See the girl: see her shadow in the waiting moments. See the GDP of her rising temps. See the ambidexterity of her cumulonimbus mammatus. Frogspent, she withered after the dimes, her per diem canceling out her carpe, her silent trout amplifying her Kilgores, her Brautigans, her postulant matrix. You canceled the debt, you say? Guess again: she raised you: she hammered you: she angled in for lost time, a merengue that out-Tito Puentes the varicose veins of your channeled avatar. Call her to the veil. Silence all cell phones. Scale the Bastille. Amortize all mortgages. Catch her before she—
Vachon Island the gris-gris mess of fits and starts dancing the fine line tightrope of vagrant minutiae. ask yourself for the time of day, calibrate your soul sisters' temperance dance cards, see can she simplify your quadratics, your acrobatics, your differentials even if the toast don't be toasty. toast that little gal, see can she dance your finite rhythms, or if it gon' be a fiery mess: it's a simple two-step if you wanna keep it simple, or if you 'blige, you can go all stephen hawking on the whole damn thing, ventura highway, muss-gon'-be-jump, and the files just keep on follicatin' they satrap funky eyes down the sally alleys: this distillation titrates the very last cold cold bone of your casual dressy shaman being: seek & the dressy dress comes down the holy mountain big mama avalanche of billy idol time, dancin' with self & all them blimey elves: sample the nines, my pretty babes, the weather's turning, the fives are yearning, the tantric lil gams be your final burnin'.
