little Boy was quite lost. He had no idea who he was or where he had come from. He was with Aunt Emilie whom he loved very much. She had taken him in swaddling clothes from his mother who already had four sons and could not handle a fifth born a few months after his father died of a heart attack. His brother Harry aged twelve found their father dead on the back cellar steps of their little house just north of Van Cortlandt Park, Manhattan. “Poor Mom, no money, Pop dead,” wrote Harry years later. His mother, Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Sephardic parents who had immigrated from Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, where the family had been established for a very long time as wealthy planters until a collapse of the sugar market in the late 1890s impoverished them. The family had originally fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal but didn’t arrive in the New World in steerage with nothing but their clothes. They arrived with all their possessions in steamer trunks, including candelabras, gold, and jewels, and thus were able to set up as merchants and planters in Saint Thomas where they soon had a great house on a hill with wide verandas looking down on the center of the town, and a family album showed them in broad-brimmed hats and black string ties. Saint Thomas was a Danish crown colony until America snatched it early in the twentieth century, and the Monsantos had intermarried with the Danes as well as with French settlers, and there were many French relatives who visited and were visited in France. Clemence Albertine had a French mother of vague aristocratic origins, and she still spoke French. So it went that Clemence Albertine’s uncle married Emilie from northern France, and thus it was that Emilie who had always wanted a child came and took the newborn Laurent from his distraught mother and bore him off to France by herself. Little Boy surmised many years later that her husband, Ludwig Monsanto, a professor of languages, and quite a bit older than Emilie, did not at his advanced age want to adopt a son, and thus left Emilie with little Laurent. And so it was that Tante Emilie took him back to her hometown near Strasbourg (the town near where the famous Captain Dreyfus was from) when he was perhaps two years old, and there they lived long enough for him to speak French before English, and his very first memory of existence was being held on a balcony above the boulevard where a parade was going by, and someone was waving his hand at the great parade with band music wafting up and strains of the “Marseillaise” echoing. And the next thing he remembered was that they were back in New York in a big high-ceilinged apartment on the Upper West Side overlooking the Hudson and the Palisades across the great river and steamboats hooting their whistles and Aunt Emilie and Ludwig somehow back together again. He had a prickly beard when he embraced Little Boy, and the sun shone on them for a brief time until suddenly Uncle Ludwig was not there anymore, and this time for good. So then again it was himself and Aunt Emilie in the big elegant flat, but not for long, because she had no money, and soon a Health Department man came and took him away to an orphanage in Chappaqua, New York, because she had no money to buy him milk and the man said Little Boy would develop rickets. And there was much weeping when they took him away from Emilie, and so it was he stayed in that orphanage, and years later the only memory he had of it was having to eat undercooked tapioca pudding the kids called Cat’s Eyes. Oh the time lost and no other memory of it, until a year later Aunt Emilie came and got him, and it was still the 1920s in America. And how he remembered her back then. She wore cloche hats and had her hair cut short like Louise Brooks and wore always the same elegant dress in the 1920s style, with low-cut bosom and a long string of beads, and scent of eau-de-cologne always about her. And of course it was not “always,” except in Little Boy’s memory, but it must have been her thread-bare elegance (well hidden in her elegant spoken French) that got her a position as French governess to the eighteen-year-old daughter of Anna Lawrence Bisland and Presley Eugene Bisland in Bronxville, New York, where they lived in an ivy-covered mansion not far from Sarah Lawrence College founded by Anna Lawrence’s father. And so Aunt Emilie came and got him, and so began their life in a third-floor room near the attic where steamer trunks with Cunard Line stickers on them shared space with old saddles and ancient bric-a-brac. But Little Boy remembered especially the dinners every night in the formal dining room with the big-boned Dutch butler who also served as chauffeur and was not used to butlering and juggled the serving dishes, while Tante Emilie conversed in French with beautiful daughter Sally, and the parents at opposite ends of the long table chiming in from time to time, or at least Madame Bisland did, for it was stylish back then to speak French and make grand tours of the Continent, especially Paris, and Aunt Emilie no doubt charmed them until a few months later she must have charmed Presley Bisland a little too much for Madame Bisland, and suddenly Aunt Emilie was gone from that house, and they told Little Boy that Emilie had gone away on her day off and had just never come back. Now, inasmuch as the Bislands had had a baby boy named Lawrence who died in infancy, it seemed an act of divine providence that they had now been provided with another Lawrence. And so it went, and Little Boy went on with them in the late 1920s in that fine mansion in Lawrence Park West, Bronxville. But he was of school age by then and they first sent him off to boarding school at Riverdale Country School at Riverdale-on-Hudson of which Little Boy remembers nothing but a kind headmaster looking after him, the youngest boy in the school, and they had a summer camp in the Adirondacks where Little Boy learned to swim and tie knots and saw for the first time the great woods, the huge straight pines, the shimmering lakes, the hidden streams, and the light shining down on them, as in the first morning of the world. But this was all a brief idyll he would long remember, while between camp and school back at the mansion in Bronxville it was a very lonely life for Little Boy, with the nearest neighbor out of sight and no children of any age to play with, and there were only the grown-up Bislands who to Little Boy seemed very old, though perhaps they were only in their fifties, and he had a room in a wing of the house where great oaks leaned their branches over his windows, and the wind howled against the stone walls of the great house, but the wind was his companion in that room that seemed so distant from the rest of the house. It was only at mealtime when a dinner bell sounded that he descended to the family table to sit between Presley and Anna Bisland who talked to each other as if at a great distance. Now to describe each of them was a task for a writer like Charles Dickens, for indeed they were like Victorians in every way, each such a unique character of another age, at least to Little Boy. And Presley Eugene Bisland had been born into a noble but impoverished family in Natchez, Mississippi, a couple of decades after the American Civil War in which they had lost all but their great old mansion Mount Repose. And Presley was the last son in a large family, and there was no inheritance for him. So at age fifteen he took off to the West, hoping to strike it rich in Gold Rush California. He rode the Chisholm Trail on cattle drives, learned to break horses, and worked his way west as a cowboy. Somewhere in northern California he put his stake into a promising gold mine, only to lose every cent of it as the mine failed to pan out. Broke but still only twenty, he made it to New York City where—through his family’s connections—he was soon hobnobbing with rich distant cousins (everyone in the Old South being related to everyone else) and was invited to many parties on upper Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue. A handsome man he was indeed, and although he had only a lowly job in the Abbot Coin Counter Company, he was much in demand among the debutantes of that period, including the young Anna Lawrence whose family had a mansion on upper Fifth Avenue. It was there that a marriage was arranged (with or without love one never knew) between the very handsome well-spoken Presley and the plain but demure Anna Lawrence. So then after a grand marriage they settled in Bronxville, some twenty miles from the city. At that time, Bronxville was little more than open country, and Anna’s father had bought up most of the acreage, planning a model town, with fine houses designed for artists and writers, its own water and electrical systems, etc, all owned originally by the Lawrence family. Into this fair enclave moved Presley and Anna early in the twentieth century, and by the time Little Boy showed up they were already along in years. To Little Boy they were always very very old, too old in fact for a young child to make any kind of contact. But Little Boy did love Presley Bisland. He had a wit about him that sparkled through the courtly conversations with his wife, the stately old lady who wore black Victorian gowns, always with a diamond choker around her neck. Years later, when Little Boy came to know the writings of Mark Twain, he realized that Presley Bisland was cut out of the same cloth, with the same satiric humor as Twain, the same southern background, even the same way of dressing. Presley had grown up in a household steeped in the classics, and had learned Latin at an early age. His library at Plashbourne (as their house was called) was full of Greek and Roman classics, as well as more modern writers like Lafcadio Hearn. The library was a small comfortable room just off the dining room paneled in dark oak, with heavy easy chairs and nooks for reading. At the dinner table, Presley would address Little Boy with questions like “Young man, you’ve been to school—who was Telemachus?” or he would recite old chestnuts like “Horatius at the Bridge,” thundering out the rhymes, or “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” making Little Boy feel the flames of the battle with “Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred…Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them,” and the great phrase “Someone had blundered!” rang through the dinner-table air. Or he would give Little Boy silver dollars to recite some chestnut by heart at the table. And Anna Bisland would fade from their presence and there was only the gracious witty old man challenging the world. (Little Boy didn’t know but perhaps she was pure Republican and he was Mark Twain), and if things ever seemed to be headed toward an argument, he usually answered, “Right or wrong, madam, you’re right.” She perhaps believed in God, and he didn’t. And when he was dying he forbid any kind of clergy to enter the house, but she snuck one in anyway, having a priest in an adjoining room mumble the last rites and then being spirited out the kitchen entrance. While all that Presley said was “Out of the house tonight, dead or alive!” Years later, reading Tolstoy, the Grown Boy imagined Presley like Tolstoy leaving his death-bed for the train station…And many years later, Grown Boy realized how much he loved that man, and knew not how to express it. But he remembered how once in deep winter, with snow blanketing the formal gardens around the mansion, he happened to see the old man in his pajamas in the middle of the night stumbling out the front door into the deep snow and starting to stumble into the storm, and Little Boy running after him and bringing him back into the house, and the dear old man would have frozen to death out there if it hadn’t been for Little Boy.

AND Grown Boy in later years would never forget how when he was barely six years old his own mother, Clemence Albertine, and two of his brothers, Harry and Clement, came to the Bisland house one summer afternoon but were not invited into the house itself but stood on the great lawn in front, while armchairs were brought out for Presley and Anna Bisland while Little Boy stood sort of between them all, and the question was put straight to Little Boy, which way did he want to go, stay with the Bislands or go with his own mother and his own brothers, and there was a great and timorous silence in the summer air between them, and Little Boy was totally at a loss as to what to say or do, since no one had discussed this with him before and he did not remember ever having seen these strangers who were his mother and brothers, and he finally stuttered out, “Stay here,” and that was it, as his true mother and brothers just went away, and he only half realizing at all what he had done, his whole life decided in an instant, and he stayed on there, as it were, “forever,” and he never saw them again until he was grown, oh, what could the little kid know, what could the little kid know about “class” or “class distinctions” in the 1920s in Bronxville, New York, when his mother and brothers were not invited into the big house, although many years later he did remember being very shocked by that…And life went on, and there were no children to play with in the great mansion, the nearest house being a quarter mile away, and his best friends were the old Italian hunchback gardener who lived in a shack behind the garage and smelled of garlic—and the Irish housekeeper Delia Devine who had a sharp wit and a sharp tongue in her head with an Irish brogue that could cut butter—and the young Dutch chauffeur who drove the big Cadillac and doubled as butler with his big rawboned hands clumsy with the serving dishes—and the Swedish cook Annie who didn’t stomach any frivolity in her domain….And the house and all its inhabitants never faded away in his memory…The moving finger wrote and, having writ, moved on.

AND the time came when they decided Little Boy did need some company his own age and that he should go to the Bronxville Public School which was several miles away in the center of Bronxville, so that Little Boy would have to be farmed out with someone in town so that he could attend the public school. And so it was arranged that he would be boarded with a certain Zilla Larned Wilson, a widow with one son of fifteen, who lived down by the railroad tracks on Parkway Road (the only “poor” street in town). And it was a shock for Little Boy to be suddenly transplanted to a totally different level of life, from the rich house to what seemed a poor house with its back porch backed up fifteen feet from the track where the New York Central Railroad thundered by in the night, rattling the windows. And so began some seven or eight years with the cold Widow Wilson and her son Bill who became a big brother to Little Boy, and there was also a ragged gang of kids to play or battle with. And Little Boy had one fistfight with a kid known as “snot-nosed Red Neer,” and then there formed a small gang of kids with whom Little Boy played Robin Hood and his Merry Men in the wooded park by the Bronx River Parkway, and they fished for crayfish in the little Bronx River in the park, and Little Boy wanted more than anything a buckskin suit like Robin Hood’s, and would have robbed a traveler to get it (that’s how rebels are born). While back at the house on Parkway Road he slept on a cot on the back porch with the trains rumbling by, and he got up every morning at five to run a paper route with Bill, and it took until seven to finish delivering the papers, and then he had to tend a newsstand at the train station, selling the New York Herald Trib and the Times to the well-heeled commuters heading for the City in their Chesterfield topcoats and fedoras or derbies on their way to Wall Street. And then there was just time to rush home, change clothes, eat a muffin, and take off for school by 9 a.m. And life went on like that for a full seven years, except that when he got to twelve years old he was able to go to Boy Scout camp for a month in upstate New York somewhere. And all that time he never heard from the Bislands (although they must have been paying his board). But by the time he was going on fifteen, he was beginning to get into trouble after school, running around with small hoodlums shoplifting stuff and stashing it in a cellar behind the stores, and Little Boy was caught stealing pencils from the five-and-ten-cent store the same week he made Eagle Scout, and the scoutmaster had to come and get him and take him home for a spanking, after which the cold widow decided he had become too much for her to handle and called the Bislands to come and get him, which they did, and so began another totally different life in the saga of Boy who was no longer little. Lonely was the word, and looking back years later he realized that neither the Widow Wilson nor the Bislands had ever given him a hug or a kiss. Now school was out and summer came on, with the Bislands taking him with them to their summer lodge on Big Wolf Lake in the Adirondacks where he did the chores and chopped wood and dug in the sawdust of the icehouse for huge blocks of ice that he split and carried into the kitchen icebox. And there was a boathouse with rowboats and a sailing canoe which he was allowed to take out by himself on the lake, and many were the sunny hours he spent learning to sail by himself, and it was the best summer he ever had. In the main lodge there were birchbark signs that read things like “Come when you wish, go when you will, and do what you damn please” though he knew quite well that he could not do what he damn pleased, but another birchbark sign proclaimed “Behold the Fisherman. He ariseth at dawn and disturbeth the whole household and goes forth full of hope and returneth late at night smelling of strong drink and the truth is not in him,” and he was allowed to be a fisherman and caught lake trout as the summer passed away and then the Bislands sent him away to Mount Hermon School on the Connecticut River one hundred miles west of Boston, where for the first time he experienced real camaraderie with other boys in the dorms. His first year he had a roommate on the ground floor of an old dorm, and this roommate was a senior and was from India. His name was Jim, son of missionaries in India, born in India, and he became big brother to the boy, and one day something happened that awakened the boy to consciousness. In old age he still remembered it. Jim had Small Boy down on the floor, sitting on him astraddle. He was gentle but he would not let Small Boy up until he would admit that he could not prove he was alive and that he was not dreaming, and Small Boy kept crying “But I am alive, I am alive!” and Jim kept saying how can you prove it, and Small Boy was crying and Jim just kept sitting on him until he let him up. And life went on in his first year at Mount Hermon School on the Connecticut River, due west of Boston, and almost three years later he did graduate and went on to Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina and graduated from journalism school and went straight into the U.S. Navy at the beginning of World War Two, and commanded a navy subchaser in the Normandy landings and went to the Pacific as navigator on an attack transport and saw Nagasaki seven weeks after the second bomb was dropped and saw the landscape of hell and became an instant pacifist and was discharged from the navy in Portland, Oregon, in the fall of that year, and got his first job in NYC in the mail room of Time magazine in the basement of the Time-Life Building, Rockefeller Center, and quit after three months and went to Columbia University graduate school and got an MA in lit and went to the University of Paris on the G.I. Bill and after three and a half years got a doctorate and split for the States and “home.”

AND Little Boy, grown up after an endless series of confusions transplantations transformations instigations fornications confessions prognostications hallucinations consternations confabulations collaborations revelations recognitions restitutions reverberations misconceptions clarifications elucidations simplifications idealizations aspirations circumnavigations realizations radicalizations and liberations, as Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-hoard pent up within him:

IN this existential café on the left coast of this country, watching reality pass by with a wild eye to inscribe on my brainpan a tale of sound and fury signifying everything beginning with Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and our world lost in the last movement before the final thundering crash of creation the last thunderous gasp and our civilization passed down from the Greeks really all gone now down the drain And shall we tally it up now and see what’s left after capitalism hits the fan But in any case now it’s time it’s high tide time to try to make some sense or cents of our little life on earth and is it not all a dumb show a mummery a blindman’s bluff a buffoon’s antic asininities with clowns in masks jumping over the moon as in a Chagall painting or as if we each were dropped out of a womb onto this earth so naked and alone we come into this world and blind in our courses, where do we wander and know not where we go nor what we do, with no assigned destinies except to transmit our elements into other forms, yes just put our parts back into the pot and stir to keep the old pot-au-feu going on the back of the stove of the sun…

LIKE that pot I kept going in that two-room cave I had as a student in Paris 89 rue de Vaugirard in Montparnasse where I painted on the wall a line from Edgar Allan Poe Thy naiad airs thy hyacinth hair hath brought me home and that was my first place all to myself and never mind it was a cave for twenty-nine dollars a month or was it a year with a stand-up john up a winding stair halfway to the first floor with footprints in the concrete where you squatted and pulled the chain and leaped out into the stairway before the water came rushing down to flood the floor, and my front room had one tiny window like a slot in the wall of the Bastille looking out to a stone courtyard and I had a single cold-water spigot over an ancient hollowed-out brown stone probably there since the Middle Ages, and there did I meet myself as if I were some sort of stranger just come in off the still street lonesome traveler with no naiad at all to keep me company oh what a romantic illusion all that was but I loved it I flung out into the grey light of Paris every day with a hunger in my step down along the quays thinking I was some sort of wild poet or artist, and I was Apollinaire and I was Rimbaud and I was Baudelaire and all the damned poets, the mad ones with the rage to live, my collar turned up in the fall wind that swept along the quays, I swept along too in the hordes of brown brittle leaves (pestilence-stricken multitudes!) as winter came down

BORN into that generation that came of age during World War Two and fought it, the “greatest generation,” as it came to be dubbed, as it came to be remembered, creating its own new world, and memory an hourglass when you turn it over and all the sands of past life flow down through it mixing recent grains of time with earlier grains all haphazard together in the mix And it’s Rockabye Baby all the way down and on and on Yes the “greatest generation” coming of age with the absolute freedom and exhilaration of youth before life’s entanglements free to be a free spirit or a drudge an angel or a demon a conformist or rebel

AND I was never much of a rebel back then or now but I was a part of that war generation born in 1919 just in time to join the navy just before Pearl Harbor happened yes that was its birthing day December 7 1941 the “greatest generation” indeed born, they told us, to make the world safe for democracy ha-ha but that was no cynical slogan back then because we actually believed it believed we were fighting the Good War for an America that was full of hope full of amiable optimism in a wide-open land still not all bought-and-sold the last frontier still full of promiscuous promise where the pursuit of happiness had not yet turned into a rat race to corner the gelt of the world yes and in 1945 when the war ended it was as if the whole continent tilted westward and the whole population of men and women who had been uprooted by the war slid westward and the cry was still “Go West, young man” as millions heeded the blind siren call unlimited in a new age in which America and Americans were triumphant so that so many people thought life was so good in these States that there was no need for anyone to rebel against anything which today would seem impossible as when I asked a lefty radio host “Can you imagine a time in this country when you would no longer have to be a dissident?” and got no answer but a wise smile

AND so where do we go from here, we of the greatest genesis and wherein lies our greatness today and are we all ingested by our omnivorous consumer society our dominant TV military-industrial perplex sometimes tending toward corporate fascism and devil take the hind half of the world even though even though the People (as in Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes) still have not lost all of their hopefulness, even though lost Jack Kerouac returning dissolute or disillusioned from Mexico at the end of his Road lost heart, and all the sociologists saying his tale was the end of American innocence

SO did I come upon this earth with the astonished eye of an awakened owl to speak my piece, while a destiny that led the Italian and Portuguese to the Americas is strange enough but one that leads from Portugal to the Virgin Islands to Westchester County New York and finally to San Francisco is touched by the dark miracle of chance And let the dice fall where they may as the seed of my mother’s family blew away from the rocky Monsanto mountains of Portugal in some dark century out of the Inquisition and landed in Saint Thomas, and all went down into the twentieth century with some of the family migrating to Providence Rhode Island a main Portuguese port where my mother’s parents put down roots and then she herself Albertine later born in Bath Beach by Coney Island New York toward the end of the nineteenth century

O can you imagine Bath Beach way back then on that sandy spot or island of American land before Irish Coney Island became Coney Island with its Ferris wheels and vaudeville hawkers and painted dames astride tigers and other unrealities O say can you see by the dawn’s early blight And is our antihero to be a luckless fellow and a superfluous man in the New World or is he to lead a revolution indeed the revolution of the downtrodden of the world against his own country which was on the wrong side of the people’s demotic revolution or will he end with a lovely wife with almond-butter smile and be beloved by all or will he end in dark prisons despised by all who hate revolution that might interrupt their hot pursuits of happiness while we go on flittering away our lives in our city existence on pavements far from the earth beneath us and we on it oblivious of its turning

AND the small boy knows nothing, he is just a part of it, unconscious in his little existence on the turning earth in some town or city or yes and so he’s later handed off to a distant relative by an exhausted bereaved mother who could not take on one more child with her growing brood just after their father my father had died And so was he bundled off in swaddling clothes to a rural small town in northern France and so did he see the great plough horses in the rutted fields the hidden crickets singing and the birds crying in the gathering dusk calling to each other or to the unknown and the huge cows coming home late from the fields herded by ancient warders with wooden crooks the huge ancient cows lowing in some medieval time with huge old cowbells each echoing their hollow sound as distinctive as a brand upon them and the ancient gnarled herders prodding the ancient beasts with bestial cries as the red sun set withering among the treetops and just before the light of the sky winked out guardian angels spreading their wings from horizon to horizon and night fell as if forever and stars lit up one by one in the deep distances And so now where away little American boy growing up speaking French and what would he ever say to the world in what language and to whom would he say it if indeed he had anything to say or would he just sing it out to the great unknown or might Little Boy be like a match struck across a night sky lighting up the universe with his laughter and genius or he could just be an echo chamber an echo of everything that was ever writ or said or sung still hanging in the eternal air the eternal dialogue of philosophers fools and lovers and losers the very tongue of the soul sounding through time And is every newborn creature born pure and innocent or a carrier of everything including all evil and so will my little man be a born sinner or a radiant innocent happy from birth an ecstatic singing creature oh will he be the morning sun slanting through the trees or just a new moon over Coney Island where his mother met his Italian immigrant father driving a cardboard automobile without a license in a bumper car on a fun ride when their bumper cars ran into each other long time ago oh yes it was a crash of at least two…civilizations his mother a Sephardic-Portuguese-French-American and his father a Lombard Italian immigrant looking for a lady to have five sons oh Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto purely appeared in a vision before him by Bath Beach Coney Island in the French boardinghouse where she lived with relatives The seabirds cried and cawed under cirrus skies wild in the gloaming And then years later baby cries like mantras in unknown languages in South Yonkers a mile north of Van Cortlandt Park yes there in a small back bedroom his brother heard his first cry like a seabird maybe or a wailing, an ecstatic sound of surprise to awake upon the bright earth in New York, and what a scene it must have been indeed this beginning in 1919 America as in Dos Passos’ 1919 or some other deconstruction or reconstruction of history and kids in the dusk playing baseball in the still country fields before the Manhattan skyline grew up and the far shouts in the still air still echoing in his ear when he was handed off in swaddling clothes to Tante Emilie and carried off by her over the sea to Normandie and then on into the heart of France saved from the Krauts as they were called back then over there over there and the Yanks coming and all that But in the backward mirror he remembered Strasbourg in the autumn of that year with the brittle leaves falling from the chestnut trees along the boulevard with the white mountains of Alsace in the far distance and a military parade going by below the fifth-floor running balcony of their apartment and someone holding him in her arms and waving his hand for him at the passing parade yes that was the snapshot he remembered and then the shutter went off and there was dark again in his memory and nothing more could he remember of France and that far time except the sound of tu and a woman’s voice calling him Lu-lu-Lulu où est-tu? and he was playing hide-and-seek under a chair and he was Baby Lulu in a patch of sunlight under a table with the wind outside blowing the leaves swept along the street each a dead life in the autumn of that year And the years like receding figures disappearing down a long tunnel far ago and birds of memory cawing and cawing against the coming night And then much later along Riverside Drive with the Palisades across the broad river in another year returned to New York with Tante Emilie who had returned to her man with Little Boy now speaking French but in America again and her man was tall and dark and had a prickly beard and was a professor of Hispanic languages somewhere a shadowy figure who came and went and then disappeared again for good from that big flat with the high ceilings and the view of Riverside Drive and the river with tugboats pushing barges and couples strolling along a riverbank and a slow ship hooting its horn in the channel below the Palisades and it seemed to be always autumn although he and Tante Emilie didn’t stay there long after her man left for good Oh the crying and the sobbing and the bathetic fallen handkerchiefs and night coming then alone with Tante Emilie and in the night every cat was black and he was afraid of ants in the cupboard and ants grew wings and flew in his face And there are ants even under the Bodhi Tree with Siddhartha seeking light in which he discovers the radiant spark at the center of Nothingness

BUT I keep having the same dream over and over always the same with a disembodied me wandering around some huge city which after a few dreams I recognize as Manhattan, yes, it’s always Lower Manhattan and I’m always trying to get back to somewhere uptown or just north of the city like Van Cortlandt Park over toward the Hudson and it’s getting later all the time and there seem to be fewer and fewer buses or taxis or people on the streets as I keep walking uptown through the gathering dusk hoping to come across some subway station or bus stop or taxi stand but I don’t seem to be advancing anywhere as if I’m on a moving treadmill always carrying me away as the night keeps closing in on me far from some home place

WHILE that swart Bard of Avon summoned up remembrance of things past and was echoed by Marcel Proust in a triumph of backward thinking yes yes the think-pad makes cowards of us all and time a river we swim in freestyle and the past all mirage and the future still to be dreamed up yes and longtemps, je me suis couché à la bonne heure and yes I still go to bed early and think think think mostly of myself the center of my universe around which all constellations wing and so am I just an old guy singing “Auld Lang Syne” in a high drunken voice and reliving all his lives on earth like Krapp in his Last Tape recording everything he remembers or in the end Nothing because the older he gets the more he forgets until in the end it’s all amnesia and he can remember nothing at all of vast spaces of time and he’s left only with his present moment or everybody’s present moment the great terrible moving moment of Now alone with himself and his lonely consciousness alone on his own little island of me, and so is that it? Oh no not at all I’m no old geezer with a squeaky voice I’m still a kid with his memory intact projecting into the bright infinite future growing up in the darkest and lightest of times on his little island of Me yes Me-Me-Me that’s all it is on and on the consciousness of me of man on earth and it’s the Great Memory no end to it the silent dead march the live march of time in consciousness Oh yes je me souviens of course I remember I remember everything about me-me-me and the rest of the world does not exist Oh it’s time it’s time and time again And do we have a plot does anyone does someone or everyone have a plot if not a plot then a story line yes that’s it everybody every body has a line of me-me-me on and on but this singular somebody is special yes most special But anyway this is her story his story history in a single individual a microcosm a solo being solo shot one-of-a-kind here today gone tamale oh how the mind raves on in its sensorium Scratch out not a line Once it’s said or thought it echoes in the air forever in eternal limbo echoing on and on whatever Plato said whatever Dante said whatever the guy-in-the-catbird-seat said I heard it I hear it echoing down through time corridors of time the eternal dialogue Yes Hello hello Here we are again mamma mia the past still with us still echoing and the future not futureless but ordained by the wheeling Vico cycle of time and free will nothing but a pollywog willing to lose its tail and so with the arrival of the future each day each moment newborn and not on a cycle yeah let me tell you Time marches on in magazines and movies and you are swept along in everybody’s consciousness and I am trying to put it to you straight in this precious moment which is now the only now we know and as soon as we know it it is gone into the great void past all things and beings yes and is it paradise on earth or is hell other people or does it matter what you call it Yes indeed it does Your consciousness of it of him of her is all that counts and you always wanting to feel your way into her consciousness or his consciousness so that the two shall be one the two consciousnesses merged together and I am you oh yes that’s it except what’s this loneliness that in the end always creeps in as if it was indeed impossible to merge with another person impossible to ever know that person from the inside or to fulfill the other half of that person Plato’s half absurdly searching for its Other oh no It cannot be done say the shrinks and yet and yet Do I not love thee as myself phantom voyageur errant wanderer flâneur des deux rives…mon semblable, —mon frère…but still let us proceed as if we were still aboveground and I am not Samuel Beckett nor was meant to be headed always underground and his voice getting smaller and smaller and more and more inaudible from Murphy to Malone to the Unnamable gone mute gone deaf underground Only one syllable left to utter and that one unnamable unutterable final syllable the final secret of existence of why we are here on earth or in space in interspace lost afloat in the Internet or wherever Only the music of the spheres in the end and the rest is silence as Ham said over and over I am not Prince Ham nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord of the flies and I fly in the face of fate and why did she cut the crotch off of all his underwears if not to de-ball him It wasn’t pretty that story in all the papers and the helicopter flying over the scene of the crime along the riverbank in the dark dusk by the Seine in another century or early twentieth century when the Pathé News cameraman caught the man in tails wearing wings with a champagne glass in hand on the Tour Eiffel and all his invited guests watching he had to go they were all waiting for him to do it and he plummeted straight down his wings catching no air and plunk there he was a blotch on the sere ground Lord save me I have only one life to live save me from such vanity pull down pull down thy vanity old man young man Let it all hang out but there are medieval battlements in the way guarding the ramparts of self yeah yeah loneliness where is thy sting I love to be alone with my own thoughts my own filter that is my own strainer to filter so-called reality that is what’s passing by the window as Creeley said about poetry you should report more than what’s passing by the window said he meaning don’t be so superficial dear poet you’ve got eternity to dig among other profundities or irrelevancies so I’ll put another filter on my camera-eye another lens for cinema verité up close and penetrate the surface the surface nothing but ephemera froth on the waves the sea’s lips kissing the shore the sea’s tongues licking the shore panic ephemera and people part of it and she let it all hang out and elle avait des tout petits tétons sang collaborator Maurice Chevalier during the Nazi occupation or was it someone singing “Abie’s Irish Rose” it’s time gentlemen please hurry up please it’s time cyclical time on a bicycle or a velocipede Let me not impede the cross-word traffic of consciousness echoing around the world in a thousand tongues and English the Latin of our days le Latin de nos jours baby baby the language of the conquerors just call it Globish and the World Bank running the whole show into the ground Third World countries beat down by loans by vulture capitalism masquerading as democracy babybaby put your faith in us stick with U.S. you’ll be wearing diamonds six feet underground De Beers on top of you in the deep shit mamma mia and Thorstein Veblen drank the bitter drink alright and have I not seen it all the long and the short and the tall the dead and the beautiful over and over Oh the mind of man and womban is a marvelous thing and spring is like a perhaps hand stroking the landscape of flesh and fowl and fauna funicular oh yeah and everyman out for hisself and sal si puedes everyman in his own auto everyman in his castle on wheels autodidact who knows everything and his name is Barney Google yeah lock him up Google him or her or it and don’t tell me all I read isn’t true I saw it on Facebook and the World Wide Web I saw it in the paper I saw it on TV it must be true Don’t call me Wiki Wikipedia or Wikileakia I’m not wicked I’m innocent I only want what I want so give me a good five-cent cigar give me my sex-toy oh boy on and on will it ever end endless the mad pursuit ah yes mad indeed of me-me-me turtle-head turning every way and blinking while the marble maidens on the Grecian urn pursue each other still night and day my Anna Livia twinkle toes But now we come to the broken sentences the plot thickens and thins on earth or in the seventh ward in Kearson Street or wherever she lies in bed with no one or anyone Here is your plot your story line and I knew her when she was Extra Virgin so the story goes Gaudeamus igitur pull my daisy and I’ll be born again a new beginning sinning and singing trailing clouds of glory do we come and paradise lies about us in our infancy infantile as it may seem to Sartre and sister Simone ask Algren what he sed about her a dirty thing to say And I am obliged to lie down with fools said another French dame giving head over heart and not at all like you know who Miss Round Heels they called her before she lost her looks and drowned in Gloucester Harbor a long way from Beacon Hill but she was fast on the uptake not for her to be ground down by life no sir mister shrink she’d laugh you off the stage this ain’t vaudeville anymore we’re into real life and like with that other skittish Scottish-Irish lass with the big eyes did I not stroke her hair one night and much later she telling me I didn’t know what was real always looking over my shoulder for the greener fields and the longer hair and the bigger tits my god it’s true every word of it in my auto in my Autogeddon speeding headlong into the final endgame call it chaos

BORN into such a world balbutiant haletant aspirant espérant Where now Boy with your Tante Emilie in her cloche hat a true 1920s flapper with the long dress very décolleté on the fifth-floor running balcony one morning the mountains the white mountains of Alsace in the far distance Where now ghost come back to your early beginnings the first touchings in the first light the first imprints early footprints handprints on the sands of me-me-me je me souviens and I was hiding under a pillow and she calling Lu-Lu-Lulu où est-tu? and she bent over me décolleté Did I not glimpse full happiness then never again the sun just turning the far corner beyond the boulevard the sun shone in the chestnut trees the breeze stirred them though all was silent Nothing stirred the universe holding its breath the eternal morning the first morning of the world in my little crib on the French balcony when she bent over me her hair straight like Louise Brooks curved around the ear Did they call it a bob was it bobbed hair what did I know primary imprint the sun echoing in the chestnut trees les marroniers a voice beyond all time was calling

Aie! Aie!

A far cry a distant singing down to today echoing do I not hear it still I hear Ti Jean Jack Kerouac singing drunk Ti Jean whom Ginzy always tried to make into a gay whereas Ti Jean was straight as they come always chasing skirts before alcohol replaced them Ti Jean built like a lumberjack in plaid shirts and baseball cap you have seen the photos when later he was blotto and bloated a sad story indeed and Ginzy always going for straights whom he loved to convert or at least tried and succeeded sometime suck-seeded at least part-time with for instance Neal Cocksman and Adonis poor sweet Allen not always so sweet yet compassion his great thing he found in Buddhist consciousness lovely Allen always falling in love with straights like Peter whom he converted most of the time at least oh what a tale signifying something by the River Liffey and onward into the sea the sea the great maw the final maw mother of us all father of us all where we come from where we go from Sea sea lapping forever on our shores on its shores lent to us by the sea for this fleeting moment in eternity these fair beaches those far reaches we roost upon but the sea soon will take them back the icebergs melting and all that and humankind the temporary tenant floating toward the precipice unable to stop itself and its self-destruction yes a civilization incapable of solving its problems that are killing it is a decadent civilization sed Aimé Césaire a civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a moribund civilization a civilization that lives by cunning and fraud is a gone civilization or so you would think if you thought at all if I thought at all I might get a glimpse of it la chute the fall the failing the exhaustion of the life force that makes the world go round and round one civilization épuisée foutue and au revoir mes enfants the dusk is coming the dark descending but all is not lost no never all lost as long as Buck can get his pecker up and eat his Mulligan stew no matter what with a pint or two me dandies here’s to you and here’s to all of us including me-me-me I’m still breathing I’m still thinking tick-tick there’s no blood running out not yet at least while I can still put together a consciousness of sorts becoming dumber and dumber day by day Will I never learn the ways of the heart the ways of the mind and which one leads the other oh I see said the blind man who didn’t see at all didn’t see the sea And a river ran through his life through my life a river runs through it mysterious and wisterias while baboons make good bedfellows and tante-pis Les Soldats de l’Éternité now marching around the world through various museums Londres Rome Vienna Paris copies in bronze pants the original clay not fit to travel from eleventh-century China and the great emperor Cin who gave his name to China and began to build the Great Wall in his free time which was infinite having a million slaves to wash his undies with sperm spent on a thousand courtesans and he Cin building his vast tomb a microcosm of his vast kingdom complete with thousands of soldiers and slaves cast in clay plus courtiers and functionaries and servants and peasants and commanders so that he Cin could rule forever over his kingdom after he died aha alas all in vain! his great tomb discovered by a dirt farmer in the twentieth century and all then fallen under the rule of Mao Tse-tung mouse-say-tongue and the Chinese Revolution Mao say tongue-in-cheek ah yes many a year ago and où sont les neiges d’antan? Romanticism is dead or is it and I’m not one to tell in Hell there are no Frigidaires and everyone laid out horizontal unable to climb out Dante’s fire escape with the tour guide Virgil And the whole myth of Heaven and Hell a medieval superstition an ignorant aboriginal construction inventing out of whole cloth a hierarchy a kingdom of a make-believe God invented to escape death-death-death imagining an immortality a transmigration of souls and soul itself an invention to perpetuate me-me-me And I saw God and she was pissed by the Nazi Pope’s fabrications O Lord who told you you have a kingdom anyway for the only Kingdom you have is the Kingdom of the Great Unknown and all we really have is just you and me-me-me in eternity as if eternity itself really existed oh I resisted all that along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Being and Nothingness take your choice How can you prove you’re alive how can you prove it’s not all a dream that everything you are being is not really dreaming as Edgar Poe said it? just like that time when I was fifteen and my first roommate at Mount Hermon School west of Boston an older boy had me down on a rug in our room and would not let me up until I admitted I couldn’t prove I wasn’t dreaming everything and me-me-me crying no no I’m real and you’re real I’m real but he wouldn’t let me up he was big but he was gentle he was Aristotle and Descartes he was a senior and I’d still be lying there if he hadn’t relented like a big brother and not Little Brother Orwell for I was free in the land of the pilgrims’ pride America America before nations were overrun with faceless hordes in search of food and shelter circa 2184 A.D. in another age beyond ours après le déluge where once the sweet birds sang and may or may not sing again and Subcomandante Marcos saying Please excuse the inconvenience but this is a revolution

BUT that old dream keeps coming back at me and finds me always still walking in the great cement city where now and then suddenly some stranger shows up right in front of me like a guy with a flatbed truck who is headed uptown and seems like he’s willing to give me a ride but just as sudden he vanishes in the dusk and again there is no one in the street except me and I keep walking and then just as suddenly a hay wagon appears in front of me with a hayseed driver exhorting his horses to move on but they won’t move as he yells to me to “hop on!” but the horses still don’t move and the whole scene fades away with me still on the pavement, looking for home…

GOD whose invisible proof may possibly exist controls everything through the gates of the sun, all life on earth day and night, night and day, light and shadow, light and total darkness, And wasn’t it clever the way humans have dreamed up gods who can’t be seen invisible gods who hang out in some high place Valhalla or Heaven and have strange names or Greek names or no name at all but in any case can’t be seen or unseen and therefore can’t be proved to not exist yes indeed what a tall tale to tell over and over in temples churches or sin-agogs or other far-out agogs or pulpits made of metaphysics or Pataphysics or psychosomatic syllogistics Lord Lord am I not my brother’s keeper

DON’T hand me that all that blarney about we’re all in the same boat or the same bathtub and don’t throw out the baby with the bathing beauty hubba-hubba so let’s all now together stroke-stroke-stroke I’m the cockswain and you’re the peon rowing for your life while the bare truth is that there ain’t enuf life jackets to go around especially since nobody will stop having babies and it’s every man for himself sal si puedes over and over blam-blam and set ’em up in the other alley and let’s fuck fuck fuck for to fuck is to love again but maybe we can go to the other side of the sun someplace and start a new life a planetary civilization a greater empire of a new benevolent colonialism with us the benefactor spreading capitalism masquerading as Christianity oh man beam me up Scotty there ain’t no intelligent life down here just millions of scrawny humanoids like ayrabs or other assholes out to kill us but we could use their mineral deposits gold in their closets oil from the lamps of China or anywhere we can get it steal it to keep our cozy cars rolling to keep Autogeddon going and I ain’t gonna get out of my auto for anyone not even you dear god my car is my castle and fuck you peasants the earth is flat in cyberspace and we got the most powerful computers and most overpowering armies so what’s to stop us from conquering the whole world flat or round We’re the victors we set the exchange rates the laws the treaties not worth the paper they are printed on ha-ha we’ll tell you how to breathe all you fuckers trying to destroy us bombing the Twin Towers you little creeps with your pajama clothes and weird religions and who the hell was Mohammed Zoroaster Sufi Buddha-boy Omar Khayyam Rumi smoking hookahs and kicking back we’ll take care of you buddy after the Twin Towers we’ll generate this huge national paranoia allowing our guv to abolish liberty in the land of the free with panic legislation It’s called shock treatment after any disaster we move in and take over and South of the Border is where we’d like to go with every dame every señora that comes along with her promised land the vulva O lay me down I love it aye mates to the breach the dawn is coming and your señorita won’t be blooming forever So now where was I the original mail chauvinist pig dancing on the rim of the world on the first and the last frontier and all that Onward Christian Soldiers and Love Thy Nabor only it’s tough-love tough-tiddy and I do love tiddies give me to suck and fuck I love you oh yes and how many times in your life have you said I love you how many times to how many people have you said it how many times did Mister Proust say it when they were doing their cattleya A voice beyond the earth was calling and did the earth move for you whispered that lover in the sack for whom the bell tolled as if eternal love were only while the earth shook eternal love only for a day and how long is eternity anyway if you can see it in a grain of sand and it’s always two people in a pod and that’s our story And I’ll never forget I’ll never forget…what’s-her-name what’s-his-name light of my life gay or straight oh how I loved that asshole have I anything more to say I’m getting dumber and dumber every day and when at last I attain enlightenment I will know Nothing which is the ultimate asininity while light is what it’s all about light makes Mary-go-round and all you can do is reach for the brass ring as you whirl about around and around ta-ta Don’t tell me this is a wooden horse I’m on in a circle of golden chariots with gilt horses caparisoned with golden reins and riders leaning out to catch the golden faux-golden ring and if someone catches one another at once pops up to replace it just like consumer society, vero? and I’m whirling about and the world whirls with me the round earth that is not the faux flat one on the world wide web yeah so is it the real round man or the faux flat man who will rule the world in the future in any future if there is one? oh what a question as if there could be an answer and the dawn coming up like thunder out of China ’cross the bay on the road to Mandalay or Nirvana or samsara or paradise in a spaghetti Western and John Wayne on his real horse leading the charge over the far horizon over the last frontier to the final shore and the white sand beaches and the immigrants’ dream come too true and lost among the consumer-gatherers And everything’s gone straight to Hell since Sinatra played Juarez

BUT seize the night, she said, carpe diem carpe notte, Lay down lie down with me she said and it was a womb lost in time it’s time for us to lie down together now you and me as if we were the first two people the first lovers the first man and woman or woman and woman or man and man for the first time in the dawn of the world and we’re the first beasts the first humans to conceive of love beyond sex Yes she said first we must get beyond sex we must go through it yes and not because it is a chore no indeed it is a lovely thing a joy the first joy of all the ecstasy sweet singer hear my song and it is not a sin to lie nude together in innocence and ecstasy before the first preacher pasted the fig leaves on us although not upon all the other beasts of the forest the silent savages still on four legs oh no we were singled out to lose our innocence while the rest of the animal world was left to roam free of guilt free of gelt which soon crept into our special picture ah so here we are and let us lie down again as in the first light bend down bend down and kiss my body everywhere kiss my breasts my vulva kiss my penis over and over for I am you and I am every sex at once one on one the two of us are one sex one breathing body breathing love without even knowing what love is as if love were only bodies stuck together fill me with your love of me my body your body in me oh I am you indeed I feel it I am all of you and you are all of me and our eyes have it our eyes in each other’s eyes as if to tell all to reveal all as if two beings could ever be one could ever really melt into each other absorbing all of the other and becoming the Other and is that love is that the ultimate lure only reached through the portal of bodies afire only reached through those portals of desire fellaheen barbare hairy beast I take you into me and the earth shakes in me in us and this the male fantasy and the female fantasy something else perhaps a final charade between two bodies hungry for love beyond bodies and Drive she said into the heart of being Drive she said and be happy oh happy he or she who sights the light of day dear light sweet light light of your eyes light of my eyes Is there anything else that counts light of our days the morning light early morning light that pours in over the rooftops through the leaves of trees through their lovely branches stretched to the rising sun ah love let us be true to one another let us love one another lover and lover brother and brother sister and sister are we not all one in the early morn are we not part of the landscape bathed by the sun of all our days that falls equally on all yet as it falls creates its own inequalities light and shade light and shadow ombre and lumière deep shadow casting all in doubt casting half of us into darkness making us dark making us part of night the shadow of a man his negative a photo-negative to develop in the photo-developer the ambient solution of air and everything that surrounds us war and peace holocausts and winds seas lapping at the shores of our lives breathe in breathe out with the universe the world turns breathing in the cosmos green planet seen from space turning and turning brown with the bad breath of machines Am I repeating myself while with our computers we turn into plastic machines of flesh and bone and how will the flat earth look from outer space a round orb turning into noir and us on it as on a lost ship in a Bermuda Triangle all sails set and a smoking pipe on the captain’s table a half a bottle of cognac and the chronometer still ticking tick-tick Let us go then you and me-me-me the heroes and the heroines of this endless tale about to end but I haven’t even gotten into the story yet the story of he-he she-she he-she-she-he me-me hidden among the rest of humanity as if we were humane whereas and wherefore we are maybe all insane and the whole world a madhouse the earth the place the rest of the universe has decided to put all the nutcases that ever existed so that so that they would be isolated and not spread their madness like a virus to all other creatures sentient or not all over the rest of the cosmos our crazy strain of genes propagating its own mad life on earth

AND are we really following some great unconscious dictation a hidden force a life force driving us all and not just us but all being sentient or not and just what is it then this life force that drives everything that leads everything and everyone and if it leads then we must follow so that this leader is a kind of tour director a dictator then but then who or what’s directing Him or Her and we’re left looking through the wrong end of the telescope with one leader pointing to another leader diminishing in the distance into infinity like the figure on the Quaker Oats box showing a figure holding up a box upon which is a figure holding up a box and so on over the horizon with stick figures gesturing in the dusk and us still back here on earth wondering what’s driving us if not this life force making every creature propagate and propagate and reproduce himself or herself so that so that we’re back with me-me-me and are we free or aren’t we to fuck or not to fuck aye that’s the rub the eternal conundrum with or without a condom aye that’s the rubba-dub-dub and two in a tub floating out to sea and yet and yet it’s more than sex leading the tune leading the dance it’s not just ants-in-his-pants because there’s plants and other living things without sex-toys who also all have the blind urge our blind urge even when sex’s saxophone is not playing there’s an urge to reach to grow to some light the light that is the voice of the fourth person singular the voice that light raises to express itself through the darkest ages shining transcendent

AND so into the crystal night of time, and the most advanced astronomy, the most advanced science is the most poetic, the very burning heart of poetry as in Olbers’ Paradox claiming that there might be a place where all is light for with the naked eye we all can see a few stars close up and the further away and the deeper we look the more of them there are So that in the deepest distances we see clusters and clusters and whirling nebulae each one made of millions or billions of stars so that in the infinite distances there must be a place where all is light and the reason why we still have night is that the light from that far place where all is light simply hasn’t got here yet and when it does we’ll have white nights with little black holes where once were stars So that so that we ourselves will be transformed into pure creatures of light whom darkness could kill even as now I see a face that darkness could kill in an instant a face as easily hurt by laughter or light each a separate consciousness a separate body whirling through air as the earth whirls around and around each an isolate identity an isolate inconsolable spirit body made of sea salt and water and a beating heart and beating brain in each in every body in our infinite courses stick figures on the horizon a massed humanity of loneliness Oh I would not want to dissect anyone as Flaubert did Madame Bovary baring the very bones of her oh no I’d rather keep the whole of her the pure person the pure unbroken being oh such romanticism such romantic illusion in an age of steel and smog and plastic and what could I know of her in her bottega oscura oh the dark workshops the bottega oscura in each of us where poetry of self is born where heart’s poetry first generates in the hidden caves the dark bodegas of self of me-me-me and you might remember the Roman street named Botteghe Oscure where the Italian Commie Party had its headquarters in Rome and a famous lit mag was named after the street but not the Party a great great mag financed by one Contessa Caetani publishing far-out texts in many languages a true international or supranational project And that via was also the place where humpty-dumpty Commie fell apart and destroyed the Revolution of the Sixties not so long ago in Paris too where the CP barred the gates of the car factory to the students writers anarchists dope smokers psychedelic dreamers with love and flowers oh yeah that was a laugh to the old Commies we’ll have none of that none of these sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie looking for a new world ha-ha and it’s good night sweet prince all over again where all is confusing and no one knows the answer to anything or anyone for god’s sake don’t give me that again the same old story of Adam biting Eve and down down fall the apples of joy and no more amore pane e vino and so begin again the broken sentences the stillborn words the labyrinths and labyrêves of daily existence and the parturition of the senses So sic transit over the transom what-ho me hearties and where away now to the four winds cast and a nor’easter blowing that time in Gloucester in an imperfect storm So go below lay down below batten down the hatches and let ’er blow we’ll be in Snug Harbor tight and dry and the mainsail stowed we’ll be in the firelit Amen Corner by the great potbellied stove or in the swaying sack with me lady ah laddie that’s the way to lay low with language a medium for communicating thought even on the high seas of love Oh the world lies about us late and soon like an endless ocean upon which ships flit like fireflies and kingfishers dive and die and him with a stiff prick all the time O lord teach us to sit still cried the Buddha who had sat still on a mountaintop for a thousand years holding a Vajra Lotus the very pulsing heart of life And do I not hear the endless singing the music of the spheres as some Greek poet heard it by the Aegean long ago the high music of being the ecstatic music of being and fuck the shrinks with their endless nattering of malaise their endless digging up of buried bones man do I need it do I have to exist side by side with all these sickies telling me I am really sick etc etc I’ll call on those jerks when I need them maybe tomorrow and in the meantime it’s amore pane e vino back in the Old Country where joy still lived and even ecstasy maybe yes ecstasy and the sensual phosphorescence of youth

DID I say sensual or sexual no matter Aren’t the two the same only a difference of degree depending on the temperature centigrade or Fahrenheit baby baby keep your pecker in your pants stop panting and you’ll live longer and outlive your peenie-weenie that’s what the clap-doctor told Adam after a big night with Eve back where they’d have us believe it all began ha-ha I’m telling you it all began much earlier and Adam and Eve were really bleached-out blacks where it all began down there around the equator or below and so heave away me hearties we’re heading back to the tropics the Tropics of Cancer or Capricorn or below so let her blow we’ll scud before the wind into our origins into our destiny in the Third World War that is the War with the Third World oh baby think that over and let out your spinnaker and many the lad blown overboard in the winds of sex and ecstasy into salt seas of tears the wine-dark incarnadined seas as in that Turner painting of the burning Temeraire and the world turning noiseless on and on forever into eternity

BUT that old awful dream keeps haunting me and coming back with me in the city streets walking and walking with my collar turned up, except I have no collar and no coat, as the winter dusk always keeps falling in the cold cement city where lighted houses whirl away over skyscrapers and disappear in Siberia to the sound of sirens and it’s like I’m that lone woodblock figure in that black-and-white picture-novel by Frans Masereel with its stark figure in blackest city night, limbs lost among skyscrapers…

HUNG up on the cross the poor bastid just hanging there on some rusty nails through the centuries an orphan more or less his Father nowhere in sight and his Mother a Virgin or an Extra Virgin as they say on the olive oil labels a single mother for sure and the sundown kid born in a manger rock-a-bye-baby and how He happened to be born by Immaculate Conception a tall tale if I ever hoid one oh Mary Mother of God living in a convent somewhere or maybe a serving maid in some monastery and when she somehow got knocked up the monks or ordinary guys or camel drivers one after another sed “Don’t blame me” and so then since no one would own up to it the chief of the clan says Well then it musta been some kinda immaculate conception or deception Yeah man that musta been it And so it went into the books into the holy books that is into the scriptures and scrolls you betta believe it read it and weep and there ain’t no paintings or sculptures of a woman strung up on a cross in the whole history of art there ain’t none except in the background of one hellish scene by HerAnonymous Bosch and everyone knows he was the leader of that secret sect of the cult of the Virgin and a sex nut at that probably a whips-and-chains cocksman who liked his women or men hung up if not well hung And so maybe it shoulda been Mary hung up instead of J.C. and Mary Magdalene in the wings also catching hell from the sacred fathers for daring to dream of being a liberated woman and so why not hang her up too with the rest of the uppity dames but never mind all that and we end up instead with the Son of God on the Cross and so good night, sweet prince, into the dark night of the soul climbing Mount Carmel with Saint John of the Cross telling T. S. Eliot that in order to arrive where you are you must go by a way you have never been and arrive at last where you started and recognize yourself for the first time And so with goofy Vico we circle back to arrive at our own beginnings and each of us not recognizing ourselves as a fourth person singular or is it just another Protestant or fish-eater mouthing the same old worn-out myths the happy delusions with a made-up God who will save us from total obliteration from absolute death on earth the final annihilation of our little egos the total end of our consciousness as we know it and consciousness itself the only real god for all of us Yeah just think of it isn’t consciousness itself the ultimate god of all of us for as long as consciousness lives we live and the only other god that rules everything is great god Sun who governs all life on earth so give great god Sun his due and worship him as so many civilizations before us did yes Sun is God and enough of that so let’s forge on through the night-mazes singing or coughing but at the same time the ghost of the Holy Ghost still remains the mystery the Holy Ghost that woozy dreamy third leg of the tripartite government set up in the Kingdom of God the Holy Ghost a weird mystical even non-Christian member of that holy gang yeah that Holy Ghost what is he or she doing in there with those old Christies and where did he or she come from anyway well look it up in your wicked wikipedias and you’ll get all sort of learned lunacies of where that mystic ghost came from He or she comes out of the very roots of existence He/She existed even before light yeah yeah for in the beginning was the Holy Ghost and He/She or It gave birth to our first light and so the Holy Ghost is rather a nameless disembodied spirit an epiphany upon the face of darkness and what is that or who is that if it ain’t none other than the Other that famous Other that people like Antonin Artaud in Rodez madhouses have been known to conceive shouting to their jailors “I am the Other” and not just meaning the other person in their cell considering themselves the sane ones and everyone outside the asylum the really crazy crazies and was it not Jean-Paul Sartre hisself who had an epiphany and saw hisself as the Other and started mumbling Je est l’autre or was it Rimbaud the original true madman and some kind of junkie telling us all we were the crazy ones and he the King of Hearts so everybody else is the Other and all those foreigners who don’t speak our language all become the Other and since they are totally different from us and therefore unknowable they become the incarnate enemy since the fear of the unknown creates enemies everywhere and whole religions become enemies not to mention nations or other nationalistic chimeras dreamed up by nineteenth-century imperialists to divide the world against itself for the profit of me-me-me and the population of every tribe is swept by a universal paranoia of fear of the Other man o man you have it there in a nutshell or nuthouse and so on and on and the good Knight of the Sad Face becomes your enemy if not your enema to flush out evil or to flush out good and so it’s one two three what are we fighting for? Lord save us and throw us a lifesaver from the sinking ship of love

AND it’s our Last Hurrah and keep your pecker up for if you outlive your pecker where does that leave you like Henry from Brooklyn with the great gift of gab who all his life kept it up and wrote great books with it but then kept writing when his pecker couldn’t write anymore like an old fountain pen run dry oh daddy call me a cab the dusk is yawning and field mice squawk and run and hide from the rising tide the icecaps melting and me-me-me in my kayak trying to paddle over the horizon or maybe sailing into the wind and blow blow thy winter wind mankind is so unkind and manunkind populating the world while the kingdom of beasts may or may not be different with Rousseau painting The Dream a jungle scene with no computers and no monkeys on cell phones typing like mad and press the Save button to save us all on the last frontier or the last island like Gauguin on Tahiti having escaped civilization still trying to find the final island because so far there had always been an island further out in the archipelago as in Tahiti today you’re staying in the Tahiti Hilton and studying the charts and thinking there must be an island further out and so you go to Moorea which is further out but there’s a Club Med with golfing and tennis and fatsos putting their balls even as you remember Mark Twain or Mencken or someone said Anyone caught playing golf should be banned from government yack-yack-yack and there ain’t no Jack in the Cracker Jackbox anymore with Dylan singing the Jack of Hearts oh happy days happy daze indeed so jump on your steed and fly over the horizon And whatever you first see over the horizon when at last you get there will be what you want and long to love like Don Quixote yes he of La Mancha on his faithful steed Rocinante as he saw a highborn lady damsel who was in fact a whore in the door of a hovel and not a fair lady in a great castle yes Don Quixote saw a host of armed knights marching toward him when in reality they were a herd of sheep So you will see a splendorous Tree before thee yes the very Tree of Laugh I mean the Tree of Life as it is called in holy scriptures yes the very tree at the heart of that famous garden where Adam and Eve did eat much to their mutual indigestion yes the famous tree whose leaves are tears or pearls depending on how you look at them and the leaves dropping on you like tears or tiny bursts of laughter while birds cry out oh yes Let us prey or pray let us sing and dance about that tree or lie down and lament beneath it as the tears or pearls fall where you must watch out for the serpent that snakes around the tree and whose scales are separate sins and this snake none other than your own sly pecker who hides his head most of the time but sometimes when you least expect it rises up with his one blind eye and straightens up and becomes like an arrow ready to shoot into any flesh it sights oh yes and off it shoots at whomever or whatever into the unknown great darkness with the Knight of the Sad Face and The Divine Comedy ain’t no comedy even though the soundtrack of the show has both a laugh-track and a cry-track in the background and the volume control in the hands of the producer but who knows who he or she or it is or where hiding

Where in the pluriverse or in any other great verse in which the where and why of the heart is in question the location and state of the heart at the heart of every other question the light that shines into the dark abyss amen and awomen and ain’t that the limit I’ll do a mudra to the Sun God the fourth person singular personified in pure light and the Sun Word is light itself as set forth by Sri Aurobindo himself or herself if you believe in the transmigration of sexes for ain’t we all one as rabbits run and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are all one and the same person but in order to arrive where you started you must still go by a way you have never been So I’m a broken record or a human tape-loop returning and returning with the same yearning to be one with the Mother so sit still and receive Her full in the face or in your tummy tucked in and back straight in the full lotus position ha-ha as if I’d ever waste my time like a leisure-class kid sitting all day facing a wall and trying not to think and who has the time or money to do that day after day and your mantra is Let go Let go Let go of your ego Let go Let go of desire Let go of your most precious possessions or your dear sex organs nested together ready for the next sex-drive an endless voyage to the lighthouse every night

AND so sitting in the Caffe Trieste San Francisco where nothing ever changes decade after decade, the faces change but it’s the same characters drawn from the population of the world, and where am I with my constant companion my lonely self and the only plot of this book of my life being my constant aging, even as Pirate Jenny keeps singing I tell you I tell you you must die you must die, and it’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop It’s like waiting for God or Godot who will never come but is bound to come don’t yawn I know you’re still young and easy under the apple boughs and it’s a fine sunny day on earth so why worry about who’s making it spin and what do I need a God for anyway when I’ve got me-me-me who’ll never die or like Beckett am I entering my monologue stage like George Whitman in Paris aged almost a hundred and the Last Time I Saw Paris I was with Giacometti who made all those skinny anonymous sculptures everyone called Universal when they were really only anonymous and why didn’t he do squishy figures like Gert-rude Stein for aren’t there just as many fat men as skinny women etc etc but the fact is most artists do figures most resembling their own and you can imagine Giacometti never ate he was too busy recreating himself in stick figures and Beckett had a skinny consciousness too just like his writing very skinny and shorn of accoutrements like flesh of words writing just the bare bones as I saw him once in the back of the Café Select 1948 bundled up in a thin topcoat shivering in the Montparnasse winter and himself looking like he hadn’t eaten in a week like he was still in the Resistance since this was before he started Waiting for Godot and before it got famous at the Théâtre de Poche or somewhere like that and Beckett always like a shadow of himself like Giacometti and T. S. Eliot in his wasted land as thin as Prufrock with his trousers rolled and come to think of it like William Seward Burroughs another Thin Man el hombre invisible as he was called the old hip hustler always ready to disappear should the fuzz show up He was there but not there even when signing his books in City Lights bookstore the original genius con-man even later when he didn’t need to be and was Clean if you know what I mean He’d cleaned up as they say and leading a straight life in Lawrence Kansas except for what he might have been growing on “the back forty” yeah he was clean as a shotgun barrel if you know what I mean and you might say he wrote all of Naked Lunch years before without ever eating it or breakfast on the grass for that matter while shooting up in a narrow room in that fleabag hotel in the Latin Quarter and skinny Dr. Benway somewhere else also cooking it up Sabbah Sabbah Sabbah Latah and that’s the skinny of it, the syllabus of the Skinny Lit tradition for professors to micturate over with Don Quixote skinny as his horse lost in the Sierra Morena lit up in a flash of lightning in black of night

BUT how now I remember a love as when I saw her in Jermyn Street that time eating an apple and striding along in a full flowered skirt, was it not a sight for wide eyes to see and my eyes soared if not my heart oh what a day it was the white clouds scudding in a deep sky like sailboats or lost souls looking for a harbor and later on the beach lying on the hot sand and the tide rising, salt brine upon our lips, the dusk falling and the gulls calling A cry beyond the world and long long we lay in the sands, with lanterns on the waters far out but then the final dense dark with no lyric escape and the dawn never coming and nothing but night night endless night the night of the great void in which the world spins and we upon it waiting for a strike of light to light us up

INDEED indeed I say mumbling to myself in the Caffe Trieste San Francisco, and is not capitalism the very enemy of democracy if you think about it or even if you don’t think for the aims of one are the destroyers of the other and vice versa Oh but let’s indulge in the Lyric Escape again and orgasms aren’t necessary for ecstasy when there are myriad other highs to take us higher than parachutes as for instance as I remember Paris 1948 and the snow falling as I strode along through the Tuileries with my seabag over my shoulder looking a little like Conrad carrying Coleridge’s albatross and the albatross my past I was eager to drown in this first time in Paris since childhood my second home come back again I felt like kissing the ground as when I landed in Normandy June 1944 but never made it to Paris until years later the sun shimmered on the chestnut trees and the snow falling silently silently on the tranced statues and the formal gardens and my life as a Sorbonne student stretched out before me and what is the plot of this novel if not the remembrance of things still not past for the past is but a cautious counselor of what has yet to come what has yet to transpire or expire so farewell final albatross as time ticks on and all of us like insects in an anthill seen from space all nebulous figures dancing in a tropic night through the night-mazes singing a lyric escape again then and why not Are we to live in despair all the time thinking only of our certain deaths so why not live the highs and ignore the lows Let blasphemies rain down let tragedies and cataclysms rain down upon us but we are not so easy to melt down as even in death clowns laugh in our theaters of the absurd in which a turd may turn into a toothsome trollop male or female and what’s to say you’re wrong except the medieval man in the round collar Amen oh man om om as in the Buddhist chant the sound of the universe turning yes the music of the spheres the sightless singing a voice beyond the world the voice of consciousness itself that higher or lower consciousness they say that humans have and where did they get it where did it come from if not from the great beyond yes yes the voice of consciousness setting us apart from other animals the disembodied voice of the fourth person so singular the ventriloquized voice of some god or goddess sounding in us And so faced into the future or faced with the future my country tears of thee Sweet Land of demi-democracy or plutocracy or whatever you want to call it and will it continue as is into the future or morph into something better or worse in the course of inhuman events oh man Is Rome burning Is Paris burning and am I signaling you through the flames So Quo Vadis baby and where do we go from here oh man and oh woman the two of you will decide everything including your own ecological meltdown as if mankind or manunkind were too stupid and too greedy to save itself from melt-down eco-disaster and so bye-bye civilization as we know it and should I just let everybody else die as long as I got my piece of prime cheese oh man it’s all beyond me-me-me and I’m resigning from the government to return to private life and the Little Woman and kids as they say You’ve heard the politicos mouth those phrases after conning everybody around them So here we are again dreaming of love in a hot climate Ah well am I raving yes indeed I am It’s the rage to live It’s a rave a huge high known as living a rave of living and breathing a rave of loving and breathing and flying on Ecstasy that drug of being of simply being alive It’s a kind of madness and am I mad or just crazy as Don Quixote de la Mancha the chivalrous knight caught up in his own illusions of saving ladies with his lance and unhorsing rampant knights in iron suits with Brooks labels and Yale locks upon the pants and with penis erectus for spear he slays all old ladies making them young again with a touch of his swaying sword retrouving them their maidenhoods and -heads ah yes and why am I still in this squirrel cage going round and round when I want to be out in the green fields or on the high seas with Greenpeace or Chris Columbus discovering a symbolic India we have yet to find or even envision a river still to be found in the heart of America with Jack Kerouac and his merry band and not so merry as all that in fact quite the opposite in their imagined quest for you name it an America that no longer existed even as he embarked to find it with his crazy crew oh and it wasn’t just America they were looking for driven as they were by testosterone and the rage of living personified by one Neal Cassady the driven driver of their beat jalopy Cocksman and Adonis American antihero outlaw cowboy who would stop to do brave deeds and rescue a beautiful maiden as in all those old cowboy shoot-’em-up Westerns only with Cassady his hotrod was his horse and he gunned it over the horizon but the only brave deeds he did were stealing cars in which to screw the maidens etc etc his tale of testosterone and a roving phallus goes on until he ends high on uppers and down on downers walking along a railroad track in the dark dawn of San Miguel de Allende a lone lonely figure lying stretched on a railroad trestle as anonymous as a stray dog in death a fourth person singular and the Road ending with the end of their crazy youth or the end of American innocence as some weeping sociologists claimed oh yeah wasn’t that a sad story and Let It Come Down on us yeah everything that the wiggy prophets prophesied about what would come down on us in the last half of the twentieth century when Moloch and Mammon would take over totally and the Youth Revolt of the 1960s would be buried in the general conflagration of greed greed greed and politicos selling us down the river Lord Lord and yet new generations yet to spring up to save us oh for sure let us dream For youth forever sets forth again for the far shore to forge a new conscience a new consciousness to become mariners of love or avatars of love like certain gurus who love to sleep with their acolytes or students and indeed why not Isn’t that the best way to transmit love pure or impure or are those gurus just lecherous old cons or whatever Oh no Everybody has his own calling and some are called to Make Out as much as possible with every possible Other and if I am an Other half forever longing for the Other half of self to make my self whole and why not spread Love instead of hate as if Gandhi could stop Hitler oh don’t give me that old saw haw-haw but all I know is that Mount Analogue is a symbolic mountain that doesn’t exist on any map or chart and yet exists for all of us to find and climb and is it a mountain of love or a hill of hate and it’s up to you to decide and guide your life thereby or maybe it isn’t a fount of love or hate but rather just a metaphor for absolute beauty or absolute truth or some other absolute that exists though not on any map yes the idea of truth and the idea of beauty still exist even if all the beauty in the world has been destroyed the idea of truth exists even if truth everywhere has been destroyed as if there was not a single beautiful thing left in a destroyed world old Plato said in his Republic a platonic ideal as I knew it that time in Jermyn Street or another time on the beach in Provincetown that endless summer when the tide was out and along the far strand there came toward me in the gloaming a tan beauty with straight hair shining like a weapon in the late sun and the sound of small waves lapping filled the universe of sand and sky even as the rest of the world was about to blow up or perhaps already had and this moment on this strand was all that was left of being on earth oh such romanticism you haven’t heard in an age but maybe isn’t it about time for it For is science and objective rational reason to rule unopposed forever while poets and painters are all still trying to create pure light the ultimate source and the first source of life so why not a little bald romanticism in the face of the dark cruel world in the face of the blind unfeeling unthinking universe and blind fate with its scissors cutting up all life including yours snip snip and you’re finished so lie down and die the earth turns on and you are but an ash upon its wind so now flay me down to sleep I pray my Lord my soul to keep which is the grandest science fiction with Mozart’s Requiem echoing in Gothic vaults and Dies Irae descending like fate itself upon us And all the time the Ouroboros serpent eating its tail like life itself and by a process of concatenous circumnavigation do we wind around to our beginnings and recognize ourselves for the first time like Ulysses returning home or Stephen Dedalus turned into Finnagain where the iffey River Liffey flows back to its beginnings only we do not begin again our lives do not begin again but rather once flowed into the sea there’s no returning the all-engulfing sea where we all began but even there we do go around eaten by plankton digested by never-seen monsters of the dark deep and then on and on eventually rising to the surface of the seas in amphibious creepy-crawlers and so creep up the beaches into the sunlight and raise up new cities and new utopias with perfected humans singing Happy Days Are Here Again and let the good times roll over looking backward with Edward Bellamy to our present day with all our fatal flaws in the Shakespearean sense forcing us to fatal ends as life itself cannot stop eating its tail Oh man can’t I get off this spinning meat-wheel animal kingdom oh man stop the bus I want to get off And this the lament of the disconsolate chimera in the wasted land of the world unable to see beyond its dark horizon where light still sings in the high voice of the fourth person singular And yet we still have Night because the light from that far place where all is light hasn’t got here yet and we can’t go on like this but we do and there is no plot there is only me-me-me and my Others and if Hell is other people then that leaves me alone in Paradiso and am I an angel or a devil dancing on the head of a penis or a pin

WHILE King Arthur turned into a crow croaked in my window from his high perch telling me of the endless life of the world as seen through his own endless life and he cawed the great caw of it all even as the universe remained a vast wheeling unknowable thing with everything made up of identical particles or seeds and some seeds were made of love and some seeds made of hate and nobody yet could tell which seed would in the end dominate the pluriverse especially not in old-timey cities filled with fishermen boozers layabouts dreamers liars seamstresses salesmen con men porters politicians panhandlers laundresses carpenters sausage-makers blacksmiths wheelwrights and water sellers who went barefoot and lived largely on bread and figs but also not in megalopolises in future worlds in which nations as we know them would no longer exist and the world swept with multiethnic hordes seeking food and shelter While still endless life goes on and will go on even in the worst adversity and will go on with so many human emotions so many lovers pining for each other so many tears and so much singing and sighing so much fighting and killing and so many flights of fancy and flights of fear and so much camaraderie and solidarity in spite of all in the face of total annihilation while all the while in spite of all the slaying there are more and more people overcrowding the earth because in spite of all there is the chronic habit the chronic unstoppable ungovernable urge to propagate with or without love yes indeed it’s the chronic problem of fornication that rules over all governments as soon as night falls and we are alone with each other in tight embrace ah yes in tight embrace and here begins the real narrative of me and you Tell me tell me before the dawn before and before and before we were born before I was born before the brave alliteration of language invaded my brain I knew without words the rage to live the hunger for living and the narrative of it still to be discovered and articulated the narrative of living if not its meaning since perhaps there is no meaning there is only existing just as a poem or a painting does not mean but Is and there are only episodes that don’t add up to any meaning but exert in themselves the pith of living like that time when I was walking down a path and met a shining someone or did not meet anyone or was not walking but driving or flying and the earth my oyster still as Our gang goes on killing the Other gang on and on the rivers of blood still running and where does all this end if not in our beginning over and over Oh for a little erectile dysfunction before the earth bursts its latitudinals with overpopulation the spaceship earth overloaded and no end to the eternal rutting and breeding a primeval instinct that will not be denied and no politician dare touch it and don’t tell me I can’t have a baby! is the universal cry and the world a grand hotel where the lights are always on and still every baby born between urine and feces and every life an aperture through which the light of the universe shines and every eye a precious lens saying what can only be said in the voice of the fourth person singular the wordless telling of the real lowdown on life and what else is there to say what else am I to mumble inside my monkey mind and so I’m still here in this cave recording the shadows on the wall yes recording all these reflections of reality or whatever is going on and everything reflecting light and not-light or life and not-life but who am I and what am I doing here in the light and dark of the world and what do I want in this world and if I can’t answer such questions could I just pack up and take off for some other world where I would have to face the same conundrums as if I had a bus transfer saying “Use for travel in any direction until time expires” oh yeah as if I had a choice and could go someplace else and keep avoiding the basic question of what do I really want because obviously I must want something am I not eternally hungry for something like everybody else and mayhap there are three kinds of desire not necessarily in this order and not necessarily leading to each other and they are the Desire to Possess and the Desire to Merge and then the Desire to Withdraw and so then where am I in all this desire and what did I ever really want or what did I first want when I started off on my endless adventures like what did the Man of La Mancha want what did Ophelia want or Ulysses or Tristram Shandy or King Arthur or the Rose of Tralee oh what did they all want as I go on evading the question of what I wanted when I first sprang up and I could just say like Gregory Corso that I became a poet so that I could get girls and maybe that’s it after all and so then what is the plot of this mellow-drama this melo-declamation of my desire on earth and is it all a dumb play where every character speaks and acts for no other reason than to get what he wants and some hide it better than others but it all boils down to no one but Me and so Billy Boy here we are again and no matter where you go there you are

YES yes and he had lived and loved and won or lost and he had wanted her and wanted her with her high breasts and wild hair like a sibyl rising from the sea in his illusion of her in her bathing trunks and bra that time at that lake resort midsummer in the Catskills and the heat upon them desire and flesh upon flesh in the throbbing sun yet she still would not be possessed and so on and on with desire and despair seated on a bench in Central Park or under the linden trees in Boston Common and the leaves falling that autumn in the sea wind the brittle leaves swept along the brown ground and our little hero is pure desire while despair his other half is seated next to him in the fall of that year when he was working as a waiter in Durgin Park and hanging out in Jack Powers’ Stone Soup Bookstore and pursuing some other image of beauty and love as he imagined it and there was the mad pursuit and even then the possession on the backseat of a car but then the withdrawal and the distancing and back he was again seated on a bench and what is to be done about it except to stride along the strand back in Gloucester with The Sun Also Rises in one pocket and Look Homeward, Angel in the other but his mind not on books as the sun rises over the Three Pound Light, and Vincent Ferrini the poetic conscience of Gloucester comes sailing along with the wind blowing his cape like a sail his wide hat held on with a string and Vincent famous for his eternal flight and pursuit of the eternal feminine looking always forward to new conquests with greater sightings of truth beauty goodness in a panting bosom and promises of pneumatic bliss And he an orphan left without a tit as a baby on a doorstep sprung up and ran into the world chasing shadows of Mom and Pop in the suburbs oh it’s a breathless story told over and over in the history of man and woman or woman and beast and the sun setting on far pampas as animals stalk each other including humans man after woman and vice versa or twice worser or gender seeking gender tender in the twilight and it’s pretty basic ain’t it if you know what I mean and tender is the night or not so tender depending on the avariciousness of hungers my god do you have to lay that on me again yeah yeah well I’m just reciting to you the story of me-me-me and my early orphanhood and my life growing up not to mention the inner terror of the worm in the bottle mamma mia the worm in the bottle of tequila reposada a proof of its 100-proof power to turn you into a lusting lover lost staggering-blind in the Mexican night or stoned on mescal in a Mexican cantina like the consul in Under the Volcano and mescal Aficionados laid out in dark corners of the café called the Place Where You Lose Your Soul where swinging doors let in nothing but night and the horrors of the turning worm Aye but was I not speaking of love as seen by Freud and his discontents as if all comes down to sex as with our little teenager chasing a girl under bleachers at the high-school ball game and feeling for the first time a certain surge in his body if not in his pants and her elusiveness ending in nothing and the home team routed to come another day boy oh boy the American boy become a Boy Scout in the suburbs with merit badges attesting to his expertise in knot-tying or kindling a roaring fire by rubbing two sticks together or two scouts together and hitchhiking his fourteen-mile hike to win the country trophy for Scout Troop 2 and so on after living in an orphanage in Chappaqua New York and forced to eat undercooked Cat’s Eyes tapioca It’s good for your eyes they told him but didn’t tell him much else except brush your teeth and eat your spinach and think of the starving Armenians and it was the Great Depression and he delivering newspapers at five in the morning to pay for his fodder as well as peeping in early bedroom windows to glimpse flesh on flesh in the dawn and sex the savior of the working class strung out in bread lines until at last when FDR and World War II bailed us out and he set out to work himself through some provincial college and henceforth emerged as a reasonably miseducated product of high culture and not all so irrelevant as rebels might imagine as if he knew any rebels anyway since everyone really seemed to be in mad pursuit of the same instant gratification and never mind rebellion or the starving masses and so on with this abortive attempt to find a plot in my life or in his life or anybody’s life as if there could possibly be any plot in all of life as if anyone or any genius or any god or goddess who had invented life could possibly have had any plot in mind when he/she invented it what with the blind force of physics ruling everything unthinkingly unmorally nonethically Ah yes indeed I must revert instead to the recounting and accounting of my own fantasies my ideas and agitations and dumb contemplations of the workings of the mind and heart and as some love poet long ago said the heart has its reasons the mind never comprehends oh yes indeed but what is this organ of flesh known as the heart that pumps blood with only so many beats for any one life why is this involuntary muscle considered a guiding force in the conduct of personal affairs while it is known that the heart does not neurologically think like the brain and so where does that leave me-me-me filled with melancholy and confused imaginings in a novel landscape filled with tragicomic adventures as great as any in all the picaresque on-the-road novels of the world with their heroes of sorrowful faces and mad minds and hearts inflated with the rage to live And so do I return to the monologue of my life seen as an endless novel simply because I don’t know how to end any life So where away again my hearties once again into the breach with breach buoys and breech cloths covering groins male and female and we are not born with road maps in the palms of our hands with Heart lines and Life lines and direction signs at intersections to tell us which way to direct our lives nor is there any road map in the night skies or in the night heavens with its Greek mythologies and pagan gods warring with each other every night for our total mystification and no one to tell us how to avoid black holes and other life disasters even though navigators used to use stars to steer by on the surface of the sea but not how to navigate below the surface of living and how to steer me down the street to a warm lover or other object of my desire but listen let’s not fall deep into romanticism again for the warming world is too much with us late and soon with the ongoing result of pure rampant capitalism being the universal dispossession of whole populations whose lands and natural resources are taken from them by a new world elite a class above the rule of nations blah blah blah but the tide is turning and maybe some form of humanitarian socialism for the dispossessed will eventually emerge but unfortunately it might very well turn out to be a kind of state fascism oh yeah you bettah believe it brother yack yack yack do I have to listen to all this doomsday scenario by a bunch of weirdos and leftist creeps here in my cave with only the fourth person singular for company oh sure I know loneliness is my own fault and all I have to do is fling out to the nearest café or bookstore or movie house and mingle with the Jack and Jills who inhabit those places like they’re all spin-offs from the 1960s when everyone was liberated to love it up with anybody and isn’t that what everybody still wants and all of this would lead to universal peace where we could all lie around in saffron saris smoking aphrodisiacs stretched out with fetching beauties all of whom would be disposed to love me-me-me oh man do you dig it now or should we get lost in the unconscious machinery of the Oedipal conflict as it works itself out in me-me-me but why should I be afraid of Freud just because I was always in search of my father jousting through the world to find him while all the while unrequited passion unfulfilled longing drove others on including Sappho and Dante and Yeats and even he whose lady lamented his penis was too small Lord save us is that all that counts the erect phallus still ruling all and the search for the father nothing but a treasure hunt for Big Daddy with the biggest bat in the lineup the kingpin in the bowling alley of life so set ’em up in the other alley and have another beer on the house great father great artificer stand by me now in good stead as I set out now to meet my fate in the forge of the world where the plumber with the right joint wins the golden shower oh fer Christ’s sake what kind of highfalutin talk is that let’s get down to the mean streets again where my rebel side starts showing up my shadow self my bad half my dark self my wild half a real asshole my Other who keeps on butting in on my life as if I needed him to fulfill me oh sure and why not so let’s get down to tin tacks with this Other who is always acting up and doing what I sometimes wanted to do but didn’t have the chops to do like he’s some kind of swinging cat as they used to say when it was hip to swing and hip to rebel against everything O what a satire of himself was he acting out his frustrations or convictions always Out There doing what I could never do like getting drunk and standing up in a bus and telling everybody to “wake up and pee the world’s on fire” etc etc a kind of antihero I guess whom I could never be yet wanted to be at least some of the time oh I’m sure you know the type like Gregory Corso the poet always the crazy rebel with his wild words which were right on the mark pinning people down or destroying them with some cruel truth so witty at the same time and Shelley his hero oh I really admired him oh what is all this about alienation from society or whatever and do we still have to be alienated these days and isn’t it possible to create a society in which one would no longer have to be dissident? Oh yeah well put that in your sebsi and smoke it haven’t I got better things to do being a big pain in the butt always questioning everything and disturbing everybody in their pursuit of property which is what the founding fathers really had in mind oh man give me a break just leave me alone to lead my own private life but then other people come back at me and say oh you and your ilk and your pursuit of happiness intent on your own private gratifications in spite of everything like even though there’s always this bully with his fascist mentality loping alongside of you and if you just ignore this goon he will grow larger and larger and take over while you’re fucking around so you have to turn aside from your private obsessions and give this lout a few clouts to cut him down to size or else or else and so on and so forth into the boring workaday existence where everything is button-down biz-biz-biz and no futzing around and no wild imagination of another way to live or anything like that yeah yeah am I still my brother’s keeper and since I have a lot of brothers am I to be the keeper of all of them of all men and women Brother I ain’t got a dime And Brando on the take in The Wild One saying Well whaddya got?

AND am I some ape sitting under a spare tree waiting for the end or the beginning of the world in some café still inscribing the amiable history of self with mumblings and mouthings of various personal assininities irrelevancies obscenities and obsessions on and on to find the fucking universal in the particular as they say as if the universe cared a damn what any one atom thought or felt or spouted out of its mouth or aperture front end or rear end like Paddy in a corner in a pub babbling to himself or a fellow tippler in the west of Ireland where Yeats is buried with his outworn heart Under Ben Bulben and Maud Gonne gone long ago after the Easter Rebellion alas poor Yeats whose antique speech brash Ezra Pound tried to make over much to the detriment of the Irisher’s lovely cadences as if all that had anything to do with us that is you and me-me-me as we go on living and breathing as if we would live forever as if time would not kill us all in the end including our little ego which we absolutely will not let die before us even though Buddhists say we must let go of it if we are to reach any sort of enlightenment oh sure Let it go Let it go you don’t need it and if everyone could kill their egos there would be no need to kill each other and there would be universal peace on earth yes indeed brother blessed be the peacemakers and let us all chant om om om instead of me-me-me if only we could if only we would Let Go Let Go but I ain’t going to let go with Buddha and I ain’t going to let go with no god either even though the pope himself speaking Romano with a German accent comes out on his high balcony and urges me to Go with God since I ain’t going no place but right here on earth or in earth’s sea and not floating around on a cloud by the gates of some heaven the exact location of which is ever more difficult to find and the ultimate mysteries can never be discovered or dissected or subjected to reason or to computer Twitter which would ruin all the divine arguments and leave only me to face only myself and look into the abyss and hear in death the lyric voice of the fourth person singular the voice of the lyric escape in which spring every year travels north at fifteen miles per day and wildflowers spring up in a wave across the landscape at the same speed silently sending their crocus calls for us passing in cars trains or buses at a much faster speed in the wrong direction a blind life force driving all of us animals and flowers reaching for the light and birds calling in the chilly air a lyric escape the air is bright with their calling as crimson sun cracks the night and all is not lost though tempest-tossed and the birds telling it over and over singing it to us as if the world still belonged to them not us and there is always and forever nothing but Now and past and future but fantasies and the past a foreign country where they did things differently but we are not sailors anymore not able-bodied seamen anymore as we zoom across the land enclosed in painted metal cans or fly through the air in winged metal tubes totally disconnected from nature as she used to be called but time that reviews all things will certainly bring all down to earth again for no one has yet been able to repeal the law of gravity and even time must be subject to it as it is sucked down the final funnel black hole even as earth the spinning world itself in some not-so-distant future will be sucked into the yawning maw of the universe even as the pluriverse will be sucked down or up into some infinite oblivion and so let us sing and dance on our tick of eternity and its surreal narrative in which is embedded the biography of bad boy me the would-be antihero the virtual bullyboy born full of desire the omnivorous hunger for life when he sprang up out of sperm into endless adventures in that wilderness of being on earth where there is only me-me-me in spite of billions of other sentient beings four-legged or wingéd flying or walking or swimming or crawling in sun or shadow and prairie dogs sitting up and putting their paws together facing the setting sun every day tomorrow and tomorrow And there are no birds in yesterday’s nests and life goes on in that orphan’s home at age six and so began life with the dispossessed but still how did Little Boy become so alienated in this endless tale of endless thought and he always taking the outsider’s view when he grew up like he was Eugene Debs saying while there is a soul in prison I am not free whereas the straight me was like Little Lord Fauntleroy living a straight life in luxurious settings etc etc with nary a thought for his own unknown mother lost in transit such a mixed-up story as is everybody’s life And so it was Little Lord Fauntleroy adopted out of that orphan’s home and no one throwing rose petals on him oh does not everyone see life through a scrim a screen between oneself and reality so that for instance being an orphan boy still at ten years old our little hero sees a Christmas pageant reenacted in a little town square in suburban New York with Christmas carols oozing through the snowy air and the Wise Guys coming onto the scene in the make-believe manger and everyone singing Christmas tunes and Baby Jesus in the manger crying and wondering what is going on while all he wants is his Mama and a warm tit and all he feels is an immense lonesomeness on earth where he has just arrived and which of us shall know his brother etc etc and he alone in the empty universe empty of love and warmth so that so that forever after he hated the sound of Christmas carols “Joy to the World” and all that Oh lonesome is a bad place to be crowded into with only yourself And later he would wander in a wooded park with his little band of school buddies seeing themselves as Robin Hood’s Merry Men and what he wanted more than anything was a buckskin suit like Robin Hood oh he would have robbed a traveler to get it yes and that’s how rebels are fomented.

YET even with such a fucked-up beginning, it was still “Welcome oh Life and let the dice fall where they may” as the seed of my mother’s family blew away from the rocky mountains of Portugal in some dark century And I always dreaming a wanderer in some city an exile in my own land always struggling to get somewhere else to meet someone some shadowy nurturing being and always awakening without finding whoever yes this curious Little Boy who didn’t know who he was or where he came from a kind of tabula rasa in a way and Tante Emilie had no money for milk and the Health Department came and took him away to the orphanage but after a very long year Tante Emilie came back for him for she had gotten a job as a French governess in a mansion in the suburbs on a hill in Lawrence Park west of Bronxville and they began living in a little room two floors up under the eaves of the grey stone house covered in ivy and surrounded by formal gardens and ate dinner in the formal dining room served by a Dutch butler who was also the chauffeur and Tante Emilie spoke only French to the eighteen-year-old daughter and this was in the 1920s before the Big Crash and in the summer of that year up under the eaves they slept side by side where a great oak tree leaned its branches over the gable of their room and the wind swept the leaves against the window at night but they were cozy inside and happy then for a time a too-short time perhaps a half a year but then the landscape grew darker the picture darkened the film of her life went dark when Tante Emilie disappeared overnight and just wasn’t there anymore and they told him she had gone out on her day off and just never returned and must have been (they said) a victim of amnesia and what else was he to think or know the poor kid you’d say but ain’t there been plenty of other poor kids abandoned by mothers or otherwise cast up alone someplace like Little Lord Fauntleroy for instance which was indeed a book that his Aunt Emily left with him in which a little American boy inherits a fortune and a grand estate in England and is spirited away by a “solicitor” for his Lordship who wants the boy as his heir but doesn’t want the non-English mother whom his son had married against his Lordship’s will and so after the son’s untimely death the Lord sort of kidnapped Little Lord Fauntleroy and the mother was not allowed to come along and so the little tyke lonely by himself in a great mansion like little me then proceeded to grow up bereft of his dear aunt and how is it then that this lonely lad grew up to be a part-time rebel Aye that’s the question for some shrink to explore or some behavioral psychologist or barroom philosopher and it’s two steps forward and one step back to recover the past of anyone as if anything could be recovered at all once the moment of living is gone into the ravenous maw of eternity even if you misspend a lifetime doing it like poor Proust in search of lost time and what good did it do him in the end in his cork-lined room in old Paris breathing his last breath with a slight frown on his face as if he had just missed recapturing his earliest moment of waking life love lost and forlorn in the end having never quite captured the love he’d imagined and so into the great dark dark dark the interstellar spaces where our dust blows we all go into it and who’s to say if we’ll come out on the other side hardly the Christians with their big book of fairy tales and is a whole society to be founded on such fantasies such visions but then why not? A vision is not to be disregarded for without a vision to live by where are we after all and so and so by all means let us have visions and you have a vision and I have a vision and even though all visions are myopic let us praise visions like visions of a desert isle where there is absolutely no hate or sin or violence and everyone’s a lover male or female and nobody has to work ’cause all the food is hanging from the trees ready to eat or sprouting out of the ground and all they have to do is make love all the time if they can find it and there’s the rub because it doesn’t grow on every bush like fruit no sirree you don’t find love just anywhere even in a perfect society which is so perfect that dissidents don’t any longer have to be dissident and what are they all to do then to occupy their lives and the consumer demand for love is so great the consumption of love is so great that there develops a great scarcity of it and what then what then what with the population exploding as a result of all that fertilization of love and it’s an inborn instinct to propagate the species it’s a primal urge and every one and every animal has this urge to do it over and over and over with babies tumbling out of wombs or pouches everywhere to satisfy that blind urge with or without love and so there we are again with all the others hunting love all the hunter-gatherers turned into consumer-gatherers in a consumer society consumed with consuming yeah turn on the TV and git more out of it yeah git the baby outa the wombat and plunk him/her in front of it in front of the big TV and hook him/her into it for life so he/she will buy buy buy and the boy growing up in such a society with nothing to do but consume and be consumed by it wow is that the end of it is that all there is to living on earth but then again don’t we run into that scarcity of love in a world fighting for it and killing each other for it over and over in endless wars oh ain’t it about time to put an end to it and find some other way to live on earth yeah yeah some way between fascism and anarchism oh man I’m tired of thinking about it so let’s go out into the fair fields and smell the flowers like Ferdinand the Bull refusing to fight yes Ferdinand the true pacifist the sacred bull with Buddha on his back and everyone chanting om om om even with fear and trembling and we can’t go on but we do go on waiting for some savior or destroyer or propagator or supreme fucker beyond imagination and every sentence the last sentence I’ll ever write but then there’s always another thought to be spoken or written and we can’t go on but I do and I see I see cries the blind man who couldn’t see at all because he is seeing with his mind oh the mind and its fascinations endless in its lonely imagining and then also the fear and trembling yes back to that every time between the laughter and the high jinks and the singing into the night in drunken taverns Oh we are poor little lambs who have lost our way Bah-bah-bah Gentleman songsters off on a spree gone from here to eterniteee and so on into the dark night of the so-called soul with Saint John of the Cross or whoever And Everyman I will go with thee and be thy guide In thy most need to go by thy side to search to find thine own true self and as Jorge Borges said Whatever the destiny of man it in reality consists of a single moment the solitary moment when man wakes up to know forever who he is Ha-ha as if that were ever possible for are we not each like an onion to be peeled down to nothingness and what’s to be found in anyone’s nothingness except Nothing like an empty paper lantern hung in a leafless tree and all of nothingness a big empty mirror capable of drawing everything into itself like a vacuum and thus capturing and containing everything that stands before it an infinitely empty mirror this nothingness that takes fleeting photos of everyone and everything passing by so that so that we are all mirrors standing or hanging around full of the echoes of each other reflected in each other with distortions And so is not everything that he writes here just scribblings on our own mirror the mirror that each of us is and we cannot dictate who will confront us and be absorbed into the mirror of ourselves but what could a wandering lad on the landscape of America know of all that as the many yesterdays of history each a mirror lying horizontal in graveyards, the Recoleta of race memory with marble inscriptions in the certainties of dust and all our mirror images withering away in a wind full of birds in a lost El Dorado up an Amazon beyond which there is no alphabet as still we go on searching like René Daumal for a Mount Analogue not on any map and no man is an Atlantis entire unto himself but today here and now are we not farther from any paradise on earth than ever before and has not the soul gone out of our civilization with its electronic heart its very soul lost in its electric pulse lost in the trash of its computer and not a search engine that can find it and should we not now rejoice over the coming end of industrial civilization which is bad for earth and man yes indeed the bad breath of machines is killing us even as we speak and yes industrial civilization must go with all its junk poisoning the earth and the Futurists were so wrong imagining a paradiso on earth as a result of wondrous machines early in the twentieth century when they all began to hum almost as it were in unison

AND looking back over the lost terrain, the great misrememberer with myopic vision sees only himself in the shorn landscape of half-overturned vehicles of desire and misread signs at country crossroads pointing different directions like Kerouac in Brittany looking for his lost family with wooden signposts pointing to tiny hamlets all beginning with KER- and him getting drunker and drunker on native calvados that Yanks used in their cigarette lighters in World War Two oh poor Karook believing in Baby Jesus drunk or sobered up wandering errant among the tangled branches of his family tree like our boy looking for his roots aye what a far-out search it was looking for lost hearts and You Can’t Go Home Again and all that no matter how many roots you dig up no matter how much he unearthed trying to reassemble it or piece together some mute Stone Angel in his own Recoleta oh what’s to be salvaged from the shards and broken pieces of marble with illegible inscriptions and a detached hand pointing skyward while all the while he’s growing up into a culture of consumer-gatherers motivated mostly by pure greed and why would he be attracted by the ideal of an anarchist society with no place to call home or wouldn’t he have been better off seeking humanity in new forms of art and so become a great artist and the mind of man and the brute instinct mingled in him ludic and ludicrous little man But the boy begins with feelings and emotions and the mind weaves them into his story his narrative and as we grow older our softer parts grow harder and our hard parts softer and our Inner Fish has the skeleton of a fish gasping on the beach listening to Benny Goodman blowing on his licorice stick in a big band and D. H. Lawrence holding Aaron’s phallic rod in his hand all reflected in the boy growing up in old Manhattan full of all the adolescent hungers and obsessions including the urge to waylay the buxom wife next door thrice his age no matter a breast is a breast wherever imagined in the mind of an urchin on the night streets the heartless streets the stone canyons with flashback memories cast upon the mind-screen of the fourth person singular who is your Other your inexpressible You who cannot be put into words And so am I here regurgitating the sound memory of my race my mind an echo chamber of everything ever said or sung in the history of man and/or woman or womban the incubator of mammal life sweet singer in my ear echoing all sentient beings in every tongue and tone while the Moving Finger writes and having writ erases all of it with the blackboard eraser of failing memory in an empty house at nightfall by an abandoned pumping station on a dry delta where still in the distance can be seen the bright pulsing lights of a riverboat casino with its steamboat whistle sending out cries of promised riches and naked nudes wailing with lust calling out to a solitary figure in the gloaming aye but still there must be in spite of all a way forward through the morass of life and who am I to say Pi is not God oh man just give us the dear flesh to live and breathe in forever aye mates too long at sea too long starved without the all-embracing blind heat of warm flesh pulsing in the deep night the libido itch in the crotch of love

BUT far far from all that were we the night before D-Day the night before that great assault on the beaches of Normandy by the Allied forces yes the night before at Plymouth with the deep country lanes between hedgerows clogged with transport and troops and loaded weapons carriers and thousands and thousands of soldiers in battle gear all blacked out and silent And in the whispering fields all around were great encampments and whole armies bivouacked in tents with small hooded cooking fires And it was the night before Agincourt with the king visiting his men around campfires in the muffled dark and then before dawn the great movement started like a great beast moving stealthily in the dark the loaded ships began to move and to move out into the English Channel And we were so young but didn’t know it and we were running a ship yes Executive Officer Lt. Eugene Feinblatt USNR age twenty-four or -five was running it and it was a great sea boat and could go through anything before dawn June 6 1944 and we were blacked out as part of a convoy-escort anti-submarine screen steaming in formation east northeast in the English Channel toward the beaches of Normandy and we were thirty-three men and three officers on a 110-foot diesel-powered wooden-hulled subchaser at 5 a.m. on the blacked-out bridge of our little ship the first light just cracking the black eastern horizon the whole crew on deck at battle stations And in the very first light on the horizon we were just beginning to see a forest of masts rising up from below the horizon with first just the tops of the masts and then the hulls—a huge armada of thousands of great ships and troop transports and escort vessels steaming together from many separate ports converging with the first light off the Normandy coast as we could hear waves of Allied bombers going high over toward Utah and Omaha Beaches shrouded in darkness and then the distant explosions on the coast becoming a roar in the darkness as we stood at our stations binoculars trained on the French coast just coming into range in the dawn light the armada steaming full speed dead ahead for the beaches now And fair stood the wind for France…Aye mates it’s a far cry today from when we sailed the high seas before the mast beating past Cape Hatteras convoying ten-knot merchant ships in violent storms and me in the crow’s nest trying to see through the whirling fog or crossing the Pacific on an attack transport with ten thousand troops bound for Japan or zigzagging across the Atlantic in a convoy of rusty buckets and tin cans in a convoy of eighty-nine ships only sixty-three reaching Murmansk yes the Murmansk run in the dead of winter 1942–43 and the German wolf-pack subs shadowing us for the kill Aye mi boy it was a fine war I fought since I never fired a gun except one burst of an antiaircraft Bofors at unseen planes lost in the clouds ten thousand feet above the Normandy beaches and later some depth charges that went off too soon and cracked all the heads on our own ship And that’s it mates the greatest generation fighting the Good War with the best of it spent on land in London pubs during the buzz-bomb blackouts or chasing the Scottish lassies around Loch Lomond after grange hall dances while we was in dry dock up some lock near Glasgow Rosneath it was and that’s the way it went and me enjoying every minute of it on sea or land with the big war going bang-bang over the horizon yeah and it’s all legalized murder or state-sponsored terrorism you better believe it Yet to tell the truth of what really happened to meself on the high and low seas I would just be peeling an onion to get down to zero tolerance or the final skin of truth and then you’d see me anew the true-blue me the eye at the center of our little disturbance on earth the eye at the center of consciousness and “the fly is where the eye was” as Erik Bauersfeld’s childhood friend said when he came upon a fly eating out the eye of a dead fish cast up upon a beach at night Oh the words that come at midnight the night-soil of living and dying the sound of the heart beating its thumping heard through flesh as with an ear to the ground the sound of breathing heard through a stethoscope the hope that all is eternal and we’ll live forever and ever if we are clever enough to outwit somehow the grinning reaper with the scythe ha-ha what an illusion what a farce when we know for certain all the time that time will tell and time will toll us under earth and the dearth and death of all we love etc etc while we go astray in the hay and what are ye going to do about it twisting and turning to get off the hook and the tick-tock of time louder and louder yes and so no help for it so why not have a gud time instead with the Stoics and the Epicureans and Lucretius and some Buddhists yes take off your skin and dance around in your bones until you lease a place forever in the sod of the turning world where landlord never dies they say

WHEREAS to gather from the air a live tradition as Old Ez sed (and thereby promoted grave robbery as an art form) a poetic technique upon which he jerry-built his Cantos that couldn’t possibly be sung And isn’t it all another way of listening for the eternal Ur-voice the voice behind the voice of the race the voice of the fourth person singular inexpressible ecstatic at once coherent and incoherent sighing or babbling the voice of all of us heard and unheard loud and soft just as if there are only two kinds of poetry loud and soft and two kinds of people hard and soft and some have hard shells and some soft inside while the leaden wheel of time measures out our lives in ticks as it whirs inside its intricate watchworks with digital springs tick-tick-tick around and around we go with Vico or Grandma or little John or Baby Blue, and the glue sticking us all together might be love or lust or hate or blood or you name it whatever sticks you to your brother or lover or Significant Other And so here we are again ok save us from the Other, yet still I and my father are One son-of-a-gun on the run along a riverbank along a riverrun in sun or in deep shade under a bridge on the River Liffey where I once slept a broke student imagining myself Stephen Dedalus or mad Rimbaud and I was Apollinaire and I was Baudelaire and I was Villon and I was all the mad wandering tattered poets rolled into one sleeping under the bridges of the world and later as I was walking down Sackville Street or reading my way through bookstores I met all the other great writers and poets and great articulators of consciousness the great grey Whitman arm in arm with Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg and Djuna Barnes crossing paths with Shakespeare and Chekhov and Tolstoy and sexy tragi-romantic Vincent Millay and Dylan Thomas sweet singer of Swansea Dylan of all my days

SO that measure of madness that moves life in wild ways moved Little Boy away from couch-potato ease and political somnolence inhabited by Mencken’s booboisie, for there are some people who just can’t stand normal life (but why be normal when you can be happy?) and must always be itching to take off somewhere or blow off somewhere and can’t stand still mentally or otherwise like as if they had an ant up their blasthole or somewhere or they just have wild imaginations that can’t be tied up by conventions or Ten Commandments so that so that the status quo has always to be questioned and shook up or otherwise disturbed in pursuit of happiness and property and I was one of them, so ladies and gentlemen if you don’t want to be disturbed in such pursuits then you wouldn’t like my dear young upstart rebel or would-be rebel or possible revolutionaire my shadow self but who knows how he will turn out and will he ascend Mount Olympus or Mount Disillusion or Mount Monologue or Mount Analogue, and that’s the question for any young kid with his whole life laid out before him a bright young kid with a great head on him and he could become anything a president a great scientist or a great holy man or a druggie or a bum or a great rebel for there have been many heroes who were rebels yes so many and bravo to all of them viva to all of them all those who overturned the apple cart to find the rotten apple before it spoiled the whole harvest and found the golden apples of Apuleius yes and there was a talking dog whose owner sold it because it wasn’t saying what he wanted to hear and Italian papers reported their primal minister had a rectal dysfunction oh do they call that anal retentive and do they call him il cavaliere coglione and is not all of history a single parade with buffoons masquerading as statesmen and lamebrains and convenient idiots running the parade from beautiful capitol buildings and most all of them bought off by lobbyists before their first vote So what do you expect but universal fuckups and man too stupid and greedy to save himself from eco-catastrophe as the deep dusk falls Oh man there must be a better way to live and love and breathe Let’s strike out for the future with fife and drum as in this poster by Levi’s on street corners in San Francisco in the summer of 2009 that said “I am the new American pioneer looking forward never back No longer content to wait for better times…I will work for better times ’cause no one built this country in suits All I need is all I got Bruises heal Stink is good And apathy is death So with Old Walt I strike up for the New World A newer mightier world The one I will make to my liking For after the darkness comes the dawn There is a better tomorrow Look across the plains and mountains and see America’s eternal promise A promise of progress Go forth with me Go forth” And who was that speaking if not Whitman or every common man on earth or elsewhere who else if not an American certainly not a European with all his baggage of centuries like Pasolini said when he came to New York in the 1960s and met the New Left rads and wrote that he envied these Americans who could act without first having to wade through thirty centuries of intellectual baggage like what would Heidegger do or what would Descartes do or what would Plato say or Plutarch or Herodotus or Gramsci or some other great looming intellect haunting their old Euro heads yeah you can imagine what with the European Communist parties tied up in knots and eventually destroying the student revolution or revelation of 1968 And what Tarquin said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger and so today the messenger embodied now as the media spreads confusion and doubt as to any eternal verity as indeed so do the philosophers or other heavy-headed thinkers who spread doubt in every direction even as Socrates did So that so that today there is a veritable clearance sale of ideas strained through the semiliterate media which ends up giving us a kind of Gazpacho Expressionism or cut-up consciousness as in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or in John Cage’s cut-up of any classic text as he did Finnegans Wake annihilating the beautiful hushed talk of Irish washerwomen gossiping in the gloaming while doing their washing on a riverbank where field mice squawk and dusk falling and night descending into doubt and despair and fear and trembling O lord save us Blind in our courses we know not what we do or where we go O the semiconscious existential despair of not knowing who we are and the boy all his life looking for himself and for where he came from Father lost Mother in a madhouse and he the little kid wandering around knowing nothing having been told nothing of where he came from and who was to tell him the little kid plunked down on earth somewhere alone like a stray cat or pup without a collar or name tag and how was he to find himself in this twirling world spinning to the music of the spheres which is the sound of Om in which all sound is absorbed in which all thought all feeling all senses are absorbed yes and Om the sound of living itself the great Om of all our breathing the voice of life the voice of our buried life the voice of the voice of the blood then coursing through us through even the penis that strange appendage a peninsula of sorts a third arm or leg that so imperiously asserts its authority and inopportunely rises up and inserts itself into affairs personal or worldly and then so arrogantly lets us down at critical moments at the very gates of paradise or Nirvana or hell and refuses all our incitements “of mind and hand” as some Frenchie philosophe said even as he let down his pants in the queen’s chamber indeed indeed and we are left with the perpetual astonishment of man on earth when confronted with himself or his penis indeed what a piece of work is man and this his daybook his nightbook and I am not writing some kind of Notes from the Underground as if I had any idea where any underground is these days if I ever knew since I’ve always been off in my own burb in some suburb of consciousness dreaming away or otherwise goofing off or picking my nose in hopeless cellars with fellow travelers or their ilk imagining I’m going to change the world or something and so I’m just some kind of literary freak and my mind the constipated thought of the race all too shallow to be called nihilism while all the while all I want to do is walk around the earth cooking the Joy soup What else is there to do with the rest of eternity and would you tell me what it is we’re all supposed to do on earth anyway I mean truly just sit right down and think of an answer to all that while there’s still time just give me a concrete answer as to what humans are supposed to do with all our time what on earth that is are we just to sit around like blobs of perspiring protoplasm or like chimps in trees scratching our fleas or whatever I mean maybe in fact it’s just dreaming that we’re supposed to do after everyone is fed after all is said and done oh no that’s just a big evasion of the basic burning question What I want to know is what in hell are we here on earth for anyway baby baby Am I your bedroom philosopher or Doctor of Alienation Am I a willing well-fed participant and protagonist in our consumer society a consumer-gatherer or a rebel antagonist revolutionary an enemy of the state or something in between neither fish nor fouling-piece Tell me tell me the night is young and you’re so beautiful pardon me if I am overdutiful Babeee and that’s what he was asking himself as he grew up into something new and strange at least in the eyes of some totally objective journalist sent down here to earth by some managing editor with a low tolerance for malarkey who wants the truth and nothing but the truth so let ’em have it tell us what is what and who we are and what we are doing down here anyway The top-dog editor wants to know the straight story and are you man enough to tell it or are you brain enough to tell it and are you man enough to say I love you man

EGAD me hearties has it all come down to this, sitting in some café (and cafés the habitation of all lonely people) while most of the country is imbeciles in neckties and I wuz one of them it’s obvious or else who would blather like this mindless as a mule with a sense of humor or a donkey that brays every time he opens his big mouth and out comes a bellow of a laugh very derisive of everything on earth Yahoo! like he finds existence a big hoot and a puzzlement to all especially himself but after all he’s somebody and was on the Ark and all that which was like the first Mayflower landing on our shores Well it all ain’t that funny this long mad history of man and mule on earth the flip-flops of minds and behinds intertwined and how long can this go on and is there a big ball of fire headed this way And so it’s Gertie on the grass alas and all of us sitting there with our bare faces hanging out revealing all of us as we truly are naked bodies and souls in the paved-over garden of the world So take a close look at us humans and humanoids chimps and chumps and champs in a Saint Vitus Dance oh it’s a samba a cucaracha a mad waltz a taxi dance in the Roseland Ballroom a madcap celebration of the coming end of industrial civilization which is bad for earth and man with the bad breath of machines inhaled by all and the halitosis of greed perfuming our breath and Homo Sap too stupid and too greedy to save himself from eco-oblivion oh man ain’t it Awesome! Oh so you think so, you creep you asshole-first-class another one of those crazies always against everything Well let me tell you we’ve got you on our special list of suspects don’t worry we’ll take care of you Better that you just stick to your knitting or whatever you do to diddle yourself if you know what I mean bye now and Have a Nice Day as the San Francisco figurative school of painters used to say blowing booze in jam sessions up around the Art Institute while down Columbus Avenue just a few blocks away a pickup band of grungy wild-ass poets was fomenting a new counterculture a true critique of Moloch American consumer capitalism while the figurative painters kept fiddling their bourgeois tunes oh boy have you heard this before It’s an old story Let’s move on Don’t we have better fish to frig Am I my brother’s keeper still or was I ever my brother’s subconscious which is a city built upon another city built upon another buried city back through unrecorded time city upon city buried layers of thinking and only the top level visible or audible so that so that history becomes a mirror with infinite depth layer upon layer of buried cities of consciousness and you and your consciousness just the surface image in front of a quicksilver mirror a Memory Chalet or is it just drifting water over the mirror of the past Cityful passing away Pyramids in sand Houses streets lampposts terminals tunnels blocks of apartments Landlord never dies sed Jimmy Joyce And our minds drifting away in dreams hallucinations visions of lovers on riverbanks man on woman man on man woman on woman on and on and all their voices commingling sounds of humanity echoing down through the centuries yes yes visions omens ecstasies and Allen Ginzy wailing “gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!” Skin books Parchment bodies Palimpsests of consciousness Continuous epiphanies and moments of nudity when the red sun sets on us stripped naked on the beach waving genitals and manuscripts disappearing over the horizon Goodbye! Goodbye! our minds blink shut but consciousness continues echoing forever through time though all bodies be gone And every word my last word Nothing resolved Nothing brought to any conclusion the plot left hanging the hero left longing for some way up or out for some resolution revelation revolution So where away then out of the playpen to the final calamitous enunciation annunciation denunciation in the Womb of the Unknown Word the baby’s rattle in this mumble And this ain’t no novel but a kind of extended epiphany to pin down extempore thinking like a butterfly pinned on a board a hoard a treasure trove of words spread out like wings aflutter in the eternal breeze the sneeze of time the wind of consciousness filling the sail the spinnaker ballooning and there is no plot as there is none in life there is only the stutter of wording between waking and sleeping, the little cicada of consciousness singing with its legs in Provence summer heat the bleat of sheep under the hill the mistral wind in the lavender carrying the scent of the race oh what a spurious fabrication so let’s return to the real world down to earth in a tram in the South Bronx and somebody reading the daily blatt on the way to perform in the Yiddish theatre Lower East Side or are we riding the Staten Island Ferry during the Second World War or landing in San Francisco on a ferry from Oakland oh all the same tick of time in a clock tower and eternal spring coming ever returning but for how much longer Aye mates tell me that in the morning blatt will I find our fate written there or in any ledger or Bible tell me that Tell me tell me the moon in the Hebrides and the fog falling down like a scrim in London and sister in the street her brassiere backward ain’t that a pretty picture of this life on earth and all tears are the same and yet we go on living because we love it love it love it yes and some of this country founded by slave owners who wanted to be free oh yeah it’s the American dream but you have to be asleep to believe it and so what else is new and where do we go from here Are we back at Square One with the newborn babe carrying with him all the genes of the race and what a race it is A foot race a camel race a horse derby with all the bets on unknown ponies on an Ellis Island merry-go-round with all the riders reaching out for the brass ring and where do we get on or off Ah none of that I am merely speaking my mind such as it is and that’s all there is to it this long blab on Blabbermouth Night the endless night filled with the rabble babble of a billion tongues all wagging at once in falsetto, boisterous polyphoboisterous panhandlers all drunk on street corners Brother can you spare a dame or how about carrying me for a block and have you seen the Rose of Tralee who is pining away for me somewhere over the sea Blarney be Oh it’s just my seabag full of memories and I am a tear of the sun I am a hill where poets run I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes who made letters with their legs I am a word in a tree I am a hall of poetry I am a raid on the inarticulate I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale I am a hill of poetry I am a bank of song I am a player piano in an abandoned casino on a seaside esplanade in a dense fog still playing, I am an American I was an American boy I read the American Boy magazine and became a Boy Scout in the suburbs I thought I was Tom Sawyer catching crayfish in the Bronx River and imagining the Mississippi, I had a baseball mitt and an American Flyer bike, I delivered the Woman’s Home Companion at five in the afternoon and the Herald Trib at five in the morning, I still can hear the paper thump on lost porches, I saw Lindbergh land, I looked homeward and saw no angel, I got caught stealing pencils in the five-and-ten-cent store the same month I made Eagle Scout, I chopped trees for the CCC and sat on them, I landed in Normandy in a rowboat that turned over, I have seen the educated armies on the beach at Dover, I have seen the garbagemen parade in the Columbus Day Parade behind the fat farting trumpeters, I have eaten potato salad and dandelions at anarchist picnics, I have eaten hot dogs in ballparks, I have ridden boxcars boxcars boxcars, I have traveled among unknown men, I was with Noah in the Ark, I was in India when Rome was built, I was in the manger with an ass, I have seen the Laughing Woman in Luna Park outside the Fun House in a great rainstorm still laughing, I have heard the sound of revelry by night, I have wandered lonely as a crowd, I have engaged in silent exile and cunning, I flew too near the sun and my wax wings fell off, I am looking for my Old Man whom I never knew, I am looking for the Lost Leader with whom I flew. Young men should be explorers. Home is where one starts from. Womb-weary I rest I have traveled, I have seen goof city, I have heard Kid Ory cry, I have heard a trombone preach, I have heard Debussy strained thru a sheet, I have slept on a hundred islands where books were trees, I have heard the birds that sound like bells I have worn grey flannel trousers and sold what sells I have dwelt in a hundred cities where trees were books. What subways What taxis What cafés! What women with blind breasts limbs lost among skyscrapers, I have seen the statues of heroes at carrefours, Danton weeping at a Metro entrance, Columbus in Barcelona pointing westward up the Ramblas toward the American Express, Lincoln in his stony chair and a great Stone Face in North Dakota. I read the want ads daily looking for a stone a leaf an unfound door. I hear America singing in the Yellow Pages. One could never tell the soul has its rages. It is long since I was a herdsman, oh I went to the city and I did weep, out of touch with nature in a megalopolis maybe with the human crowd about to wander off a cliff somewhere yes that same bunch that grew up from apes after dinosaurs became birds and elephants grew trunks by the banks of the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River long ago in a universe that is not conscious but is rather a blind creature a blind creation by a blind creator motivated by a blind life force unconscious of itself the goddess Ka in Egyptian mythology and all we can do is adopt a Stoic philosophy as Buddhists do to recognize our blind fate and yet to enjoy the journey and even laugh aloud as Zen fools do in their craaazy wisdom to think of the absolute absurdity of it all after all for are we not all clowns doing our cartwheels around the earth and the sun setting in all its burning glory And the life of the mind connecting to the struggle for justice is a way of life but what did I know about all that when I was growing up in that small suburb when all I knew to begin with was the barbaric heart in the geography of nowhere before I discovered the fruit on the tree of sex but what do you mean sex is ruining everything You must be a kook or something Well so let me tell you I mean that the single root problem in the whole world the problem of problems underlying all the ills of the world can be traced back to overpopulation like why is there so much pollution because there are too many cars and too many coal-burning plants because too many people want cars and heat etc etc and why are they cutting down the rain forests because they need the wood to build more houses for more and more people and so on and on all because people won’t stop making love or just fucking They just won’t stop it or even cut down on their amorous or orgiastic activity like Man you can’t tell me how many lovers I can have or how many babies I make you fascist you’re taking away my basic freedoms my basic human rights and ain’t this a free country so go fuck yerself komrad and on and on so that the earth is overflowing with two-legged creatures and nothing to do about it because to propagate is a basic undeniable instinct yes we have a blind instinctual primeval urge to propagate and reproduce ourselves and we’re going to do it no matter what and we’re never never going to stop fucking and so cover her head with an American flag and fuck for Old Glory oh it’s a long night that ends in day and it’s the short happy life of Francis Macomber and the long unhappy life of John Doe-re-me-me-me oh where to begin and where to end Mother mine what have we here a bit of protoplasm grown into a boy or man or woman and what is it this strange creation never before seen in eternity Love’s Labor’s Lost and all that Tell me tell me a tale of me-me-me or he-he-he the sound of laughter interspersed with tears and if I weren’t laughing I’d be crying or vice versa or twice worser So that so that life is a short day’s journey and Blimey if it ain’t dark in here I can’t see beyond my nose if that far if at all and that’s the long and the short of it after all as my monkey mind raves on But did I not lift my lamp or did she lift her lamp beside the golden door Ah yes but now who’s closing the door and scratching out the stone inscription so that it reads Don’t send me your poor your whatever yearning to be free Don’t give me that I’ve had enuf of all that and I have my own pursuit of happiness to pursue and don’t disturb me in that happy pursuit and there are other kinds of doors smaller and smaller doors or lead doors instead of gold doors and the hinges may get changed anyway to swing both ways or not at all and the whole idea of doors is hilarious as when I engaged in a long discussion on the phone with poet Philip Lamantia when he was expositing on L’Âge d’Or and I was raving about starting a literary magazine called Large Door and the two of us went on and on enthusing about our two subjects and both thinking we were talking about the same thing on and on until we were disconnected and in fact he died Gone gone into the great dark brother Let there be light while the rest of us go on living on the spinning earth and the truth will out as long as there is light the light of night and the light of day so let’s just say that if we live forever in the light the truth will out and justice will reign or rain down on us like manna or bananas from heaven as if such a high place ever existed and L’Âge d’Or will return again when we will all be beautiful creatures naked in sun and happy as the day is long loving each other without envy or hate all open-armed and openhearted to each other without fear and trembling or paranoia all the while striving to piece together the past and the future to make some sense of it and in the end to try to fathom man’s fate the aim of all art painted or written in hieroglyphs or computer code with ciphers for eternity and infinity the Pi of our lives on earth or elsewhere for what else have we to do on earth but figure out how and why we’re here and will we all ever meet again in darkness or in light the moon is rising and shadows bound about the landscape like svelte ghosts smoking hookahs in our dreams and all is mystery and we are all mysterious even to each other stick figures on the far horizon dancing on the edge of the world signaling to us Hello! Hello! are we not all brothers man and dame are we not all one and I am you passing thru the ultimate Golden Door to fall through space forever organic tossed upon the solar wind our winding sheet forever unwinding Let us pray or prey upon each other like wild beasts or wilderbeasts upon a plain where humanoids first emerged from apes in the heart of darkest Africa the nameless night shattered with light and my real brother heard my first cry in a small back bedroom in Yonkers New York and I sprang up and ran off into the jungles of the world through thickets of feeling dense woods of emotion forests of fast friends and enemies swamps of paranoia sloughs of despond high hills of happiness breakthroughs of mind and imaginary adventures of the imaginary soul

WITH the mind still raving away on its own and poetry not an expression of emotion but an escape from it said old Tea Ass Eliot he of Saint Louey posing as a perfect British gentleman with his tragic wife Vivienne with her menstrocity and poor Tom letting it all out finally in his Four Quartets with all his pain well hidden in its lovely prose poetry the year before she died in a private asylum but nevermind all that and let’s just dance instead and “Have a nice day” says the rear-guard painter while buttering his toast with dollars but you can’t have a nice day when it’s night and we spend half our lives in darkness and so bless Mr. Edison for bringing us out of the great dark yes the great dark comes upon us every twelve hours and we must all sleep through at least half of it every night or we’ll all croak yes we are required to sleep and to dream yes we absolutely must dream and we are such stuff as dreams are made into We are the great dreamers although maybe not so great as other animals like dogs and cats and other animals that hibernate whole winters Can you imagine what they could all be dreaming and dreaming all that time and isn’t it strange how every night when we lie down our brains are put into a coma and our muscles are incapacitated and we cannot move or run when a monster or phantom appears on our dream-screen and we cannot swim when in our dreams we are thrown from a sinking ship into the sea and all we can do is lie there with mouths agape awaiting the next apocalypse or revelation and it better be Sweet Dreams or else we end up moaning or weeping so where does it all leave us back here on earth on a pillow with weak echoes or flashbacks of scenes we have just dreamed yes flashbacks of some lost existence in some forgotten world or landscape over the horizon never seen when waking so here we are just you and just me sitting on our zafu cushions or at bars in happy hours or working or playing or fucking or laughing or crying and sighing or otherwise living it up in our casino Land of the Brave and Holy Smokes ain’t it cool to be alive ain’t it awesome yeah and I am American or a space traveler just touched down here for a few millennia before taking off for new virgin undespoiled planets or pieces of stardust for are we not all pure stardust adrift in endless space in a dream within a dream in which texts in our consciousness are jumbled together with the Bible and cut-ups from Naked Lunch or want ads mixed with highway signs in North Dakota advertising Unisex Hair Saloons etc etc And “It’s been a long day already, I’ve been up all night” said the Ohlone Indian occupying Alcatraz on Thanksgiving and the Feds moved in and you know the drill but the braves come back anyway every Thanksgiving beating their drums against the Pilgrims in riot gear who in New England in an incredible act of mercy had decided to eat turkey instead of Indians indeed indeed but wasn’t Mr. Edison’s little light really no more than an artificial spark whereas it was really Gautama Buddha who showed us the true way out of the great dark so that if we chant the Great Paramita Sutra or Mantra of Compassion we just might attain enlightenment yes if we chant the six syllables of Om Mani Padme Hum then our Pride Jealousy Desire Ignorance Greed and Anger might be transformed into pure light even in the midst of our avaricious industrial uncivilization with its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions oh yes our great consumer society a fanatical religion with its omnivorous consumer machine devouring us and its vampire electronics sucking our lifeblood while I am just a Zen fop with the Humbug wandered abroad and all this my boozy wisdom but my idol all the time is Siddhartha under the Bodhi Tree seeking enlightenment but then again there are all sorts of other ways to try to seek enlightenment and peeling a potato to find the real potato could possibly be enlightening or you could just maybe pay some taxi driver to let you get in the trunk of his cab while he drives around for a certain amount of time all the while trusting he won’t forget about you and leave you in there until you get enlightened by dying when you will no doubt see some eternal light and hear the voice of the fourth person singular directing you which way to walk And it’s Om Om Om all the way into eternity Oh so I am just an onion peeling myself down to the core to find there is nothing there at all and thus attaining the same end as the most advanced guru and ain’t that funny but is it funny-ha-ha or funny-pathetic that’s what I want to know yes like they say life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel or is it the other way around take your choice and roll your dice oh it’s nice to think of yourself as having free will but all water is not tears and who knows if the cries of birds are cries of ecstasy or cries of despair and all is not lost when the sun goes down when red sky at night is the sailor’s delight and the dark side of the moon holds many mysteries which light will never reveal yes the moon after much reflection says “Sun is God” and standing still the river rushes forward (carrying a leaf upon which we are stranded passengers)

AND so then into the void in our Ark or Crystal Palace whose foundations founder in water yes the great construct of our electronic civilization built of crystal chips invulnerable except to the slightest drop of water striking it dead in the coming floods And the kid in the basement not the underground man but the underwater man babbling incoherent imbecilities ha-ha don’t you believe it for he wasn’t born a mindless rebel and didn’t become one by joining some bomb-throwing idiots in some sweet act of violence no sir it was no doubt all because of a lack of love at a tender age yes sir let me tell you it had nothing to do with a fanatical urge to fight injustice everywhere and change the world oh no none of that it was rather that this kid started out deprived of a mother or father and had no family of his own and if he had had a real one he wouldn’t have turned out the way he is today no sir a life among strangers at an early age is a life without love and the kid grows up unfeeling yes that’s it the kid who never got an embrace or a kiss until he grew up and met a warm woman his age this little kid’s youth was a trauma of loneliness and unfeeling yes he was a stranger among strangers and a stranger to himself full of longing for he knew not For what could he know since there was no one to tell him anything and he could not even know that what he was longing for was love Oh how would he know that who knew only kind strangers or not-so-kind strangers and so whom does he turn to when he grows up and shakes his trauma or tries to find some feeling with others and to whom does he naturally fall in with if not with other lost souls or alienated bodies and thereby hangs the tale of alienation from all the Others the regular people of normal life and normal society yes the tale of the haves and have-nots those who had love or had it not And so life groped on in darkness and light oh it’s an old story isn’t it and you can read about it in endless novels and endless poems of alienation and despair and who the hell wants to hear about it again except if the poor author can come up with some new exciting twist worthy of a production on reality TV and people who have real families are incapable of understanding the loneliness on earth felt by orphans from birth especially at holiday times when families gather as he remembered one snowy Christmas in that suburban village where there was a hotel on a hill all covered with snow and there was a Christmas pageant scene going on with a baby in a manger and the Wise Men approaching the manger bearing gifts from Saks Fifth Avenue and Mary in the manger and all that while the snow is falling on everything on the village main street where he was standing looking up and the air oozing with Christmas carols like “Joy to the World the Lord has come” and everyone hurrying by with presents or packages of things for home and “Joy to the World” ringing out and maybe kids going by on sleds pulled by their fathers etc etc you get the scene like you’ve seen it a million times reenacted over and over the Babe in the manger because they claim there was no room in the inn yeah yeah Oh happy day with this little kid standing there on the frozen corner Oh man Look homeward angel now and melt with wrath

AS “In sorrow I gaze upon my generation” wrote Lermontov in a poem a couple of hundred years ago way off over there in Russia while here and now someone has discovered a new alkaloid in the brain called idiotine presumably the ingredient that makes idiots and there’s a lot of it to go around oh these are wintry thoughts and there are terrible nights of lightning and thunder and rain as if the sun or moon would never come back again as one night when I could not feel my heartbeat and could not find my pulse on my wrist but found it in my watch on my other wrist tick-tick the tolling of eternity oh what unending nights but summer comes and life changes and I still can enjoy a laugh that sounds like an accordion yes after all there still are things that make life worth living or wasting yes plenty of them in fact yes oh white nights and mouths of desire and what of the hidden call of the morning dove mourning his love what of the sun streaming down in meshes of morning high tide and the heron’s call and figures on the beach running into the sea laughing heads thrown back long hair streaming forever young ah life goes on with the cries of boat-tailed grackles in the tops of jacaranda trees in the setting sun at San Miguel de Allende but still in sorrow I gaze upon our twenty-first-century civilization with its casino culture its electronic pulse its stone heart its brain dumbed-down and let the bad times roll But now a dead silence rings in my ears and life seems to have come to a standstill and I don’t know which way to go from here as if there were only one way to go as if all were ordained ahead of time the first step of the baby out of the crib determining his whole itinerary but what am I to do just sit here dribbling words on a page as if that were the most important thing in life as if it could amount to anything or give anyone an inspiration on how to live or die or whatever indeed let us spray said one skunk to another in the church So here we go and keep going on and on with our crazy thoughts round and round in the squirrel’s cage in the mandala maze in the endless spinning of the skein of living and the river rushes forward with us on it as on a tossing raft floating down the great flood with Jim and Huck into the heartland oh brother can you spare your cornball comments on my way of life and where I came from and where I’m going and what’s it to anybody if I’m an Okie who fled the dust bowl to Californiay in the 1930s or a sexy French-Swiss hosiery salesman pushing silk stockings on Barbary Coast ladies of the night Man oh man if I could enumerate all the men and women and dogs and cats of the world and describe each of them in great detail with all their tails and tics and passions Well then would I have given you even the slightest inkling of what makes life tick what makes the world clock go round It’s a hopeless task and even Shakespeare or Chekhov couldn’t begin to articulate what Sophocles heard by the Aegean long ago or what Shiva heard dancing on many legs in the dawn of time and if one man cries out then another hears it and he cries out and his woman cries out and their dog picks it up and starts howling and when one dog barks the whole pack picks it up and starts howling their muzzles to the sky but all it takes is for one big hyena to start laughing and then the whole world rocks with laughter the laughter of the mock Absurd the whole world a Theatre of the Absurd—oh so that’s your way out of the big dilemma You think that’s some kind of solution man that’s just another evasion don’t give me that Absurd bullshit and don’t give me all those other Absurd answers to fathom our fate on earth even as the curtain comes down on the last act Wow did I say our last act and après nous le déluge? and there’s an ex–Lutheran minister telling me “We ain’t coming back We believe in resurrection not in reincarnation like the Buddhists” which explains why he was stretched out on a lounge chair in the lobby outside of where his Jewish-Buddhist girlfriend was meditating with her Tibetan guru and “Yeah” he sed “she’s a Ju-Bu” and so then when they were all thru meditating for the day I’m introduced to the big chief guru who says “You from around here?” like I was from Squaw Valley or Tahoe where the retreat was happening and I says “Yes I’m from the universe” thinking I was being real clever and real mystic at the same time only he just gives me a funny look thinking Who is this creep? and shakes my hand hard and smiles his love at me, saying “I’ll see ya again” “Yes yes” I say as he turns away and I’m thinking Does he mean he’ll see me on earth or someplace else and so off we went on our own separate paths around the universe and that’s the-he-and-the-she of it bye-bye blackbird and may the good Lord save us if He really exists with all the odds against Him yeah yeah put that in your sebsi and smoke it and thus deprive yourselves of the comfort of great religions dreamed up by the wisest men and women thru thousands of years and giving you something to live by yes some gods to live by for every great people needs them and what great myths do we have today to live by (go read Joseph Campbell and weep) and who are our idols except football or baseball or rock stars or military heroes yeah tell me tell me why not instead wake up each morning with a great Hooray! leading of course to a Last Hurrah! and each day a new invention a new form of living just like picking up a new pen every morning and reinventing an alphabet and inventing a new genre neither a novel nor a memoir nor a form of documentary but an unnamable piece of day and night spoken or sung by the voice of the fourth person singular and what is that voice if it is not the very voice that is doing the thinking when we meditate yes just ask yourself who is thinking when you are meditating or just ruminating half awake at four in the morning when that dark dove with flickering tongue passes below the horizon of our living—or fully awake at midday yes whose is that voice whispering to your mind when you are silent and alone Oh is it not the voice of consciousness itself and consciousness itself a single ludic voice inside each of us the voice for magical thinking

AS if I had such a voice or verse sitting in some café where you’d think nothing never happens but let me tell you plenty goes down in the back rooms of the mind and heart at the back tables while some hairy dude is playing a mandolin with its sweet sad sound the very soul of old Italy as at the beginning of Godfather II but then this dame comes prancing up to me and Oh, she sez, I’m only trying to keep in shape, and I say Right on but when do I get to see your shape Yeah yeah, she says, so come up and see me some other time, but somehow it never happens, one of those dopey dreams if you know what I mean And so is sex still driving everything or isn’t it Oh samsara is good for you and to deprive us of all the pleasures of our sensorium may be to die Oh I was zaptized by the fish-eaters when I was a helpless babe but somehow escaped thank you very much so don’t attempt to dip me again in that holy puddle man oh man the direct or alternating current of my consciousness does not desire to be short-circuited with any kind of liquid except the ilk of human kindness a different kind of liquid whose genetic code has still to be cracked and how lonely is Christ these days like this noon as I was passing the church of Saint Peter and Paul and the big sad synthetic bell was tolling twelve strokes very slow and no one inside at all not a soul in sight not even a priest oy vey…while in spring the earth sings as if it knew love songs by heart while a sense of loss still pervades poetry past and present oh what is it in us that prefers singing of loss instead of present ecstasies and why are we always trying to stamp out the burning fires of samsara whereas we could just be lying back to hear the primordial sound of the universe the subdued murmur of the sea-tide setting inward as Rinpoche wrote while living and dying while chanting the great mantra om mani padme hum that transforms pride jealousy desire ignorance greed and anger into something nude and strange while our consumer machine goes on brilliantly selling “samsara and its barren distractions” yeah oh modern industrial society is a fanatical religion all the while killing everywhere the natural bardo of life so do I instead go not with the Poets of Loss but with the great yea-sayers the great yes-sayers like Whitman and Henry Miller yes why lie down with the dead ahead of time Life can turn on a dime and the next thing you know you’re king or married to a Queen of Hearts or playing darts with death on some foreign battlefield like Ulysses or lost in a labyrinth of your own making with only a Minotaur for a friend And so and so be sure to meditate with your eyes open yes your eyes the jewels of your head while I unlock my word-hoard of ruminations meditations exhortations celebrations condemnations excitations lamentations liberations and ecstasies plotless as a life that is to say like a life whose plot is only discovered after it is lived oh blimey ain’t that a mouthful but speaking of yea-sayers there’s a species of ape who never make war and spend all their time making love with whoever comes to hand and there are no social prohibitions restricting their lovemaking with whoever suits their fancy and they never make war with foreign tribes but peacefully join them and make love with them too so that they are always sexually satisfied and are drained of all primordial bestial bloodlust or imperatives to kill even as human hunters came after them for their meat in the deep African forests which are now being cut down and thus pass the glories of the world the bestial kingdom destroyed And what are you going to do about it my dear friend just what’s to be done is the whole world population a dysfunctional family on a boat heading for the falls and how steep the drop into oblivion and what does American Legion Post 101 have to say about it You’re on Nickelodeon TV so say something intelligent tell us who we are and where we’re going and if you’re an artist well then say something important in your art Man oh man speak up and tell us something true and how are we to proceed to find the lost city and stop mumbling and enlighten us and just don’t sit there rocking on your wooden horse Daddy Daddy I am looking for my father whom I never knew I am looking for the Lost Leader with whom I flew but perhaps we should suffer a real cultural revolution and transform our society into that of the apes who make love all the time with anyone and everyone yes what if we just abolished all the prohibitions and inhibitions in our religious and moral codes and just let loose all our suppressed desires and hungers oh what then with our sexual lava flowing freely and no longer seething under the surface of polite society yes what then if not paradiso? yes yes except except what of the resulting surge of population on an earth already groaning with overpopulation to the extent that all of our most fatal world problems are directly traceable back to it? Enough! Enough! Lower your penis, you rapacious dog, down, Rover, down! Sing hallelujah and life goes on and it’s poids net nowhere and the jury is still out at the World Court trying the case of the Lord and is He/She guilty of crimes against humanity? what an obscene question what a blasphemous idea to be bringing God to judgment as if He/She or It could be tried and found guilty or innocent but in fact the case before the court is still in the discovery stage trying to uncover the facts so that both the prosecutor representing the Establishment and the Defender of the People will know all the facts of the case which so far has proved impossible since all have bathed in the River of Forgetfulness and the River of Hypnos yet still the future is always with us as is the present and the past but when the future becomes the present does it lose its lustre if not its mystery yet we still recapture that lustre by involuntary memory or would you just call it nostalgia the past revisited as if by a ghost of ourselves and my mind a labyrinth trying to find the way out speaking with all the voices of l’homme moyen sensuel telling all his stories sounding all his cries and laughter and Everyman’s mind and tongue are mine my consciousness my unbound tongue let loose wandering through all our lives thinking together in the night of magical thinking to find the Sibyl with arms upraised and holding up that Golden Bough in a painting by Turner as the sun rises hidden in mists of morning with our collective consciousness a butterfly flittering over the landscape of living and all that sexual lava seething beneath the surface of polite society

AND a coracle upon the sea a fisherman in it drawing his nets and a high voice calling as dusk falls and the light drops suddenly into night oh is that then all there is to life a little light and then night again over and over Oh I had my hour my one fat fierce sweet hour There was a shout about my ears There was something in the air that night the stars were bright but then the day came which made absolutely no sense at all but if you don’t stir up your mind all the time it will become clear like a pool of water, said the Buddha, even as the past recedes at an ever-increasing pace and civilization as we know it going down the drain faster and faster as “Man with his burning soul has but an hour of breath to build a ship of Truth in which his soul may sail—sail on the sea of death for death takes toll of beauty, courage, youth, of all but Truth” and it’s three strikes and you’re out at the Old Ball Game as a red ant walks with its many legs along an ochre wall above the sea its round eye seeing everything including Odysseus passing by in the Strait of Messina at Scylla far off a voice is calling in the dawn wind and the swart ship with rowers at the locks the pilot casting his plumb line sounding the depths of the straits with its rocky shoals its treacherous shallows its rude winds gusting and Odysseus the chief pirate hovering over the helmsman the battered hull thumping against the running sea but Odysseus steers apart he knows the sound he knows the apparition when in a dense fog strange alluring shapes loom of a sudden before him and it’s La Lupa the Wolf the fog that eats ships and men far from home far from home with Scylla and Charybdis to sail through and the sirens calling And it’s the portrait of the artist as an old man and it’s still the same old story of the young buck who leaves his home and his mother and father and brothers and sisters to find his own solitary way in a world of his own imagining which is not necessarily the real world as it exists and so off into the wild blue yonder to find oneself with pants down at the Folies Bergère or by the door of a church whose name he’d rather not remember Ah yes and my mind my constant companion through the archipelagos and uplands of thinking where I love to roam and stumble or swim with or against any current as wild winds blow our arks made of thoughts Blimey me if it ain’t the usual illusions when in dead of night we hear the far sounds that only night can produce hark hark the field mice stir and birds in the bush converse before dawn as we turn and turn in bed our eyes still fed with darkness and it is the time of final reckoning of the never-ending end of night the time to get real after a lifetime of illusion and evasion yes now is the hour to let it all loose and let it come down to the real to the way life really is the bones of reality of the here and now I hear the muezzin calling from his tower Brother observe the time and repent! brother brother and where now in the dense fog that drifts along pavements and wraps around lampposts and tin figures lost in it fleeing and Big Ben sounds through it all as if all empires had not already crumbled Night night and where is my lover mother sister mister and who shall show us the way show me the way oh brother oh sister let’s go down down to the river to pray if not to prey upon each other the end is just beginning and we’ll to the woods no more to snore upon others’ dreams and hear the ladies gossiping about who slept with whom and what the parrot said and thereafter never spoke again and ain’t it a sin the way men and women carry on thru the centuries on and on demoiselles and handymen hunkered down in their hovels or palazzos peasants all! whites bleached out from blacks out of Africa in the beginning before it all began oh shall we cruise awhile with Odysseus through the strait once more or cast ashore in some sunny isle for good and forever and hark hark the lark at heaven’s gate sings? Oh is that any way to come at the Real and my mind still stuck in its own mire of desire and giving my body its misdirections nude erections rude exorcisms ejaculations epiphanies and revelations and aperçus all masturbations of the mind and the boat never beaches in the reaches of night night But I must arise and go now to the Isle of Manisfree where there are no beds with memory-mattresses that remember and record everyone who ever slept there and with whom or without whom they slept man or woman or a third sex of which there are many yes but do I have to go via the Rome airport Fiumicino named after some crooked river and thousands of joyless travelers laden with huge bags all on the life journeys or already passed through Dante’s gates that tell you to “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” and you’re now in one of The Divine Comedy’s crude nude circles descending toward Hell or ascending to Paradiso the light at the end of the tunnel mamma mia well it’s evident that I am not capable of seeing the world for Real since I keep drifting off into these fantasies or pipe dreams or other evasions etc etc and where’s the reality of it all ha-ha well if you think for one moment that I’m going to reveal to you any unvarnished unadorned naked truth If you think you’re going to learn from me any secrets of the universe or of the human heart well then you’re a bigger idiot than I supposed so you might as well stop reading this drivel in the middle of the night so bye-bye baby just leave me to my mutterings because I can’t go on but I go on with the bleached-out memoirs torn poems fished out of wastebaskets full of ordinary platitudes and all the brilliant things I was going to say at lunch mixed with secrets of the universe gone down the drain or misplaced in psychedelic hallucinations but what’s below the drain may turn out to be the most interesting to keep you awake in the general slaughter of life as she is lived today when it is dawn and the world goes forth to murder dreams And is not life in general a great battle eternal between optimism and pessimism between yea-sayers and nay-sayers between the naïve and the cynical between joy and joy-killers between lovers and weepers between joie de vivre and nausea in the Sartrean sense or between light and dark between blinding light and deep darkness and all existence a struggle between the bearable lightness of Good and dark dark Evil even here in Paris in the spring with pure light filtering through the marronniers and the sunlight flooding my mind with the lyricism that kills all laments even as a huge black crow flies across my path in the park of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre And close by I hear twelve slow strokes of an iron bell

AND a young stud at the next table typing on his laptop, both ears stopped with earphones. A flock of birds wheels by in the sky. One of them falls to the pavement right in front of us. A black car, a farting bus, a bicycle go by. So does a blond with a baby and a dog barking furiously. I’m just five feet from the guy. Finally I say in a friendly voice, “You from around here? Haven’t seen you before in the neighborhood.” No answer. He continues typing, staring at the laptop. He heard nothing? Is this body alive? I’m alarmed. I call 911. After some time a cop car arrives and he’s arrested for “nonparticipation in humanity.” They haul the corpse away.

SO then “dancing on the edge of the world” sang some Indian on the far shore of San Francisco before it became a Pale Face city and Indians danced on Alcatraz before Pale Face made Alcatraz into a prison to jail all the outcasts and halfcasts on a stolen continent where Pale Face taught us to drink hot brown water in the morning and cold brown water at night firewater in bottles on street corners on lost reservations in indigenous chaos And ain’t that the long and the short of it the life and death of the Indian Nation while the rest of us were spooning along hot on the trail of instant gratification or not so instant maybe but get your own and devil take the rear quarters of the beast of life but the old Indian myth of San Francisco once being an island still persisted among the Pale Face who took over several centuries ago and the myth persisted as late as the middle of the twentieth century when still on the streets of San Francisco you could encounter citizens who thought of San Francisco as a kind of offshore republic not really a part of the greater United States yes indeed San Franciscans then still had a kind of insular island mentality and all descended from the first nonbourgeois settlers of San Francisco wildcat gold seekers layabouts gamblers whores drifters con men card sharks and rogue cowboys from the open range before the West was fenced and Civil War draft evaders and ladies of easy virtue as they was called yeah man the first settlers of San Francisco a veritable rogues gallery with sailors and seafarers from all over the world and robber barons and well you name it It was a fine scurvy crew ready for anything including the earthquake and fire of 1906 yeah yeah and that the beginning for a whole new ball game a whole new city rising from the ashes “like a phoenix” they said and it was true that is if you had hit gold or a rich widow or a jackpot somewhere And our hero almost al verde as they say in italiano walking up Market Street after crossing Oakland ferry like Whitman Crossing Brooklyn Ferry or so he thought with his seabag still with him slung over his shoulder but no albatross still in it since he had shuffled it off in Paris and so into the new world and the last frontier as if it still existed in the Wild West of our imagination where the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco later performed Waiting for Godot before the waiting inmates in San Quentin Prison those specialists in waiting who do nothing but wait for some unimaginable liberator and so left it up to us the inmates of the world all of us spinning through space on the surface of this turning place from which we cannot escape at least not most of us except for those privileged to catch a seat in some future spacecraft heading for some other star ha-ha as if they could actually live on it once they got there disembarked into the ultimate unimaginable oh man Do you dig? the days spin past and we are but birds upon some divine vine the grapes of some ecstatic vino we hope to drink and why not just press the grapes of wrath rather than all the other varietals of grapes and other psychedelics oh peel me a grape Cleopatra and turn me on yes the days are endless on this drifting barge on the Nile of our dreams oh what an illusion but what’s wrong with illusions for if you take away a man’s illusions he will die as in some play like The Iceman Cometh or The Time of Your Life waiting in a bar for illusions to materialize or in San Quentin or in other places where everybody’s waiting for something or someone and so make up your own illusion by looking at yourself in any mirror on the wall of your dreams or in any still pool where fireflies wink And our hero having read Saroyan’s My Name Is Aram when he was fifteen 1930s with crazy Indian chiefs riding around in limousines “feet up and smoking wild cigars” or like Jack London’s Frisco long ago when “Don’t Call It Frisco” became the cry of the nabobs living on Nob Hill who didn’t like drunken riffraff sailors down on the waterfront singing “Frisco”

AND the mind winging away on its own even before it sees the light of day or even after its body can no longer function tick-tick the brain mumbles on or sings on according to its predilections tragic or lyric comic or curioso on and on into the night and every thought I think is my last thought and my first thought just born into the sentient world oh if I could find and think my first thought again what a revelation what a sense-ation what a watta in first light upon earth O Paradiso or disheveled landscape Dante be damned we’re out in the dear daylight winging away and our life on earth a rave a raving in pure light shining in all things and creations and so on and so forth or dreaming away like gents old and full of sleep yeah yeah that’s another way to go when I have nothing more to say but keep on saying it over and over Shall I say it again Well then say something new for a change instead of same old tired mythologies of the past as time with its feather still strolls lines in everybody’s faces while sometimes in darkness and thunder miracles light up the land like the beauty of human figures male and female in all those cheesecake magazines at checkout counters all across America yes those checkout counters the very concrete gates of reality through which we all have passed into the very panorama of America where every bush burns when the TV lights are turned up and life still stirs in the underbrush while everything is recorded by Google in a Recorded Future in which Peak Empire the peak of American Empire has been passed and said Empire has indeed collapsed while its successor the American Republic (based strictly upon the boundaries of North America) is flourishing and a happy breed of men in this little New World is free in our beautiful land in which the past remains eternally unchangeable and real while the present is always changeable and surreal and you should still never play cards with a man called Doc while the world spins on and it ain’t never oveh until it’s oveh…And so out here on the late last frontier, it turns out I am no fucking genius but just another version of the Middle Mind of America and so don’t expect any great breakthroughs from me as to the nature of consciousness or any great aperçus of any kind or any Unified Theory of Relative Reality for our little consciousness is just a candle between two eternal darknesses yes our little conscious moment is just a little searchlight trying to pierce the great dark And I am just waking in the vortex of past time, as if it were a kind of Nocturama, a structure for animals that are awake only at night, or this vortex of time thus becomes a poem with an invisible subject like a novel that has no plot but wanders around, in which its characters wander around through life in what would appear to be an aimless fashion, or at least with no steady intention or aim, and in the end even the author has no idea where his back is headed or will end up, just like life itself, and if art is really supposed to imitate life we are left with a masterpiece the past a heap of broken images and the future an infinite no-man’s-land where virgin visions are born out of pure anarchy while the Buddhists hold that suffering is the grand end of all being and they devote themselves to getting through the night of suffering by attaining enlightenment, that is, the attainment of light, whereas whereas may not we begin with light as the grand end of all being and then proceed at last into blue death? Yes it was the Greeks who said death is blue and I’ll go with that which is much better than considering death as total darkness made of the Sirocco of Madness and this my Underground Oratorio But the author goes right on talking with a kind of insane loquacity no matter what is happening to the world around him which is a sure sign of his looniness as can be seen in mental wards where men sit mumbling to themselves carrying on serious conversations with themselves as if everything were sane and rational Oh perhaps you have seen them as you passed by with firm tread and it’s all like that old film The King of Hearts in which the inmates of an asylum consider themselves the only sane people in the world while the people outside go forth every day to murder their dreams and ecstasies in the general conflagration of everyday life in the twenty-first century even here on the late frontier San Francisco which is still an island in the eyes of the natives indeed indeed when I arrived in time to witness the end of civilization as we know it in the final eco-catastrophe and the riven seas come in to cover us And so is this your AHA moment and am I the consciousness of a generation or just some old fool sounding off and trying to escape the dominant materialist avaricious consciousness of America today yes escaping into mysticism or enlightenment or escaping into dope or psychedelics or into pure lyricism in paint or words yes the lyric escape I am always indulging in whether in writing or painting or pure sex as the world turns on driven by testosterone even in women yes it’s still the raised pecker the joystick that drives the hot car of life O man as I was pondering our unrelenting destinies as I was thinking on the good old ways Oh brother let’s go down down to the river to pray Oh yes by god or whoever all you trans-Americans such as myself Let’s go down to the river to pray Yes trans-Americans indeed for are we not all from Someplace Else and does it still matter where we came from and our children not caring where we came from like passengers on some subway all from everywhere and all going different places yet all going where the train is taking them No way to get off between stops if there are any yes all of us still in transit so that we must constantly change the idea of who we are as we go on living in the end-times the end-times of man on earth while newspapers are reporting not only that the glaciers are melting and earth warming but also that the past is receding faster and faster, like the track behind a speeding-up train Yes and the train of my life rocking along on these fictional documentary tracks with no way of telling what’s truly fiction or what’s truly documentary (as in films by Werner Herzog like Lessons of Darkness in which false fantasies and truths are interchangeable) so that so that who can tell if this tale is a tragicomedy or a comi-tragedy but in the end I don’t go for fatal endings especially not my own and so and so let’s just say I’ve summarized my past by theft and allusion and all I know is that I’ll be taking an escalator soon to the next level of existence or nonexistence and will it be the down-escalator or the up-escalator and thereby hangs the tail of this mutt and he still wagging it And how did he go from a youthful anarchism to humanitarian socialism as a creed to live by And how did he end up a painter and a poet always alienated in one way or another and still claiming that he was never ingested by the dominant culture that ingests so many rebels before they croak and he still living in his own illusion that he’s never been ingested as a poet oh yeah Ah poetry Ain’t it all just a lyric escape from rocky reality but him claiming all the time that poetry is in fact reality itself the very bedrock essence which should always be presented without introductions or prefaces yes just hit them full in the face with the piths of reality and let there be a sharp intake of air.

AND so the other day I am reading another handwrit letter from this old girlfriend of mine talking to me like we never split and so she says: HA! I found the “old poem” I wrote years ago - it predicted the present…………and funnier than I remembered. I can’t wait for the biography - and the movie. Life is ironic - if you can keep your sense of humor and lose your ego (not yours - mine) or rather, and I like this better, life is absurd - especially how it turns around. Duchamp, where are you? I should have kept writing poetry - or become a psychic. If I didn’t think you would collapse laughing I would send you the poem but I am afraid to. I will wait until you are feeling better - which will be soon. Remember Kahlil’s friend Dante (love the names) fell off the couch laughing at Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke and hurt himself. I don’t want that to happen to you. Keep your chins up - everything will be fine. It is the waiting that is the worst. Get out of the hospital as quickly as possible so you don’t get an infraction. Let people take care of you. Be pampered…….and do not do too much. Don’t push yourself. I am thinking of you - I gave hundreds of heart milagros to the priests to pray over - if you believe in that sort of thing - can’t hurt and supports big business (the Catholic Choich). At least you didn’t start your email “……..unfortunately for your vacation plans, etc etc” so the blow was softened. It is amazing how calluses grow - what would have laid me low a few years ago is just regular now. I guess that is what life is also - the inside gets harder and the outside gets softer (that is an important insight - and a frightening one). None of this has anything to do with you - this is all about me so don’t take anything personally or get upset. It’s late and I am rambling - and it is not meant that way, and you told me once to take everything with a touch of salt and I am not telling you with a pound of sugar, for I’ve had so much sugar I am practically diabetic and I told you I see the world as a bestiary now - wish that had happened years ago but if wishes were knishes I’d open a deli - or something like that. (I’d love a hot pastrami right now - maybe I am becoming bipolar - see how my mind works - or doesn’t.) I think I am living Edna St. Vincent Millay’s life - or else I’ve just read her too much. You are the only one I know who appreciated her poetry. Everyone else thought she was too sappy. She had a sonnet for everything - and survived. She needed what she needed. I see her as a fox with the heart of a rabbit. I am glad I am a romantic and not a realist - that would be boring and no fun - just the little bit of realism I let in is a drag. I avoid it at all costs. A quote I like is (not from Edna) “never give up and never, under any circumstances, face the facts.” That’s me……………and, if I can’t talk to you - my oldest dearest longest love, who can I talk to? We didn’t talk enough - about important things - us, for instance. I was always too scared (see above). I’ll see you again - in my dreams until then. And so how is E. doing? Let me know. He admires you very much - and loves you - but we don’t talk about you. We talk about books, ideas, and movies. It is difficult for me to tell - his voice sounds the same. I send him warm clothes and sardines. Chris was here - can’t get HIS voice out of my head. The hurricane/storm is frightening - maybe that is what has brought on this mood. I found out who my real father was - took l5 minutes on the computer and cost less than $10……….a little bit of realism almost crept in but I held it at bay. The 1940s census was recently released with all the info - it is a relief of a sort but doesn’t really make any difference I am thinking of you….“If in the years to come you should remember…” etc…and today I remembered a trip to Gloucester with you and that ain’t all but just go ahead and fill in the missing parts and you’ll see what you shoulda done with your/our life, honeybun…..

AND what am I to do with the rest of my life or your life as the days rave on, the nights too the long nights as the daze goes on and where are we anyway on the face of existence in the race for existence and which way are we facing with our bullyboy consciousness But is not laughter the sublime expression of consciousness which can go from extreme depression to ecstasy and the final ecstasy nothing but pure silent laughter Oh the sublimity of it and if I weren’t laughing I’d be dying I’d be crying with Samuel Beckett and Jimmy Joyce the master laugher behind the sublime babble of Finnegan yeah yeah I have read it all heard it all heard the falcon in its dying fall Oh white nights and mouths of desire and the cry of the mourning dove at dawn and the laughter of the universe behind closed shutters late at night when all the world goes sleeping and sleep the suicide of consciousness and I am entering my silent stage and no more regurgitation of everything seen or heard or said over the past century no more of that thank ye and this no Portrait of the Autist as an Old Man although this might be my hundredth year to heaven when summer passed me by and every season became the same season in my high flat and no one noticed the leaves coming and going and falling to the cry of flutes and the dog slept by the TV unaware of spring at the door leaves in her hair flowered with petals and an ancient voice in the air singing Primavera! Primavera! And the wind sprang up at four o’clock that day as it had every day for a long time a steady wind a great wind sweeping the universe never ceasing during the late afternoons and it stirred the leaves of the great laurel tree outside my window ceaselessly lashing them and it was like the mistral in southern France except this wind came from the far far north and still it blows and blows and blows every day lashing the leaves And the only sound a high laughter the laughter of the marvelous the laughter of the invisible the laughter of the absurd Oh i had not known life had undone so many so many of my friends on earth all gone and myself shrunk to an i left with Samuel Beckett the Unnamable almost underground but still thinking and what does the spinning spindrift pluriverse care even if it is a kind of verse for are we all blank verse to the blind cosmos with its overwhelming indifference to our fate and our little universe not lyric and good and harmonious but rather made of total chaos hostility and murder as Werner Herzog said observing the Grizzly Man being eaten alive by his favorite grizzly and it’s eat or be eaten all the way down Oh man turn me over i’m done on this side but nevertheless on the other hand (and how many hands do we have) perhaps in nature after all there is a secret innocence hidden beyond the last savanna deep in some sacred wood wherein I read the carbon-copy history of creepy man and his far-out destiny forever shrouded And the real tall-tale story of your life/my life yet to be told unwinding like a thread through a labyrinth a labyrêve or an onion peeled down to its core of Nothingness aha don’t you believe it for there must be more than nothing especially if you listen to the latest quantum activists telling you that the cosmos has its own consciousness beyond the collective consciousness of individuals animal vegetable or mineral (and this a quantum leap of aha! insight, sayeth Dr. Goswami) oh man but suppose on the other hand on the nether hand this cosmos is nothing but one huge computer in which we are all micro pixels and everyone knows a computer has no consciousness of its own but is made up of nothing but “other” consciousnesses and yet and yet even if all that is true there might still be a real prophet a bullyboy or dame a fair-haired one a dark seer or some other form of conscious talking protoplasm or ecoplasm to light our way to the final ha-ha! the final aha! the final ah! which is the final rebellion, and every act of rebellion expressing a nostalgia for innocence

OH ain’t that going a bit too far with all your misty mysticism and your ah ah ahs Egad am I supposed to swallow all that bullshit while I’m trying to drink my espresso, yeah man as if all this time I was doing nothing but trying to reach the highest level of consciousness by emptying my mind of everything Om Om and the Empty Mind being the end of everything Nirvana itself so lie back and enjoy ah men and I was born the same year as Pete Seeger along with Jackie Robinson Nat King Cole Eva Peron J. D. Salinger Sir Edmund Hillary who scaled the heights if not the depths where some so-called heavy thinkers might have decided that there are Known Knowns and there are Unknown Knowns and there are also Unknown Unknowns which are the things we don’t know we don’t know since they are beyond our imagination to imagine And the Unknown Unknowns are where “god” is or what “god” is “behind the brain” and “behind the eyes” where all is darkness where all all is light and does all this mean that I am about to “die” Well that’s a distant possibility although I doubt it since I of course am an American and Americans don’t die and so I am not about to croak oh no baby not me not not

SO why does the world, why does the cosmos exist at all while all the advanced cosmologists have no answer nor anything but guesses as to which came first, the Void or the Universe which is like asking which came first the chick or the egg while we know all the time it was the cock came first, and so which came first, Being or Nothingness, and the existentialists posited that Being (or Existence) came first, Essentia before Esse, but no matter which we are definitely here spinning around on our own little globe of Earth, and it’s Wow! all over again every time we open our eyes every morning, the sun the sun, great god sun rising every morn to strike the towers with a shaft of light even as we sit in cafés endlessly wasting the time we have to waste time while we hear manuscripts murmuring like Marcel Proust’s endless sentences simulating endless time in his “involuntary memory” wherein he found happiness yes the memory involuntarily thrust upon him by the sound of a distant bell recalling a bell struck in his childhood in a moment of happiness or the taste of that famous madeleine dipped in tea evoking a fleeting moment with his dear mother yes not the moment when she refused him the cherished Good-Night Kiss yes and then there was Tony Judt the intellectual’s intellectual who when he was old and dying and had lost power of speech he kept thinking back and back to his childhood and to his Memory Chalet the place in his early childhood a little inn a pensione in French speaking Switzerland where his family went on vacation a small cozy inn still there in his old-age memory where people loved and were loved or felt fraternity Ah the fate of fraternity in an age of egoism in which Auguste Comte would brave despair with his belief that we have an ingrained desire to further the well-being of others oh what an absurd assumption And President Obama saying we are all responsible for each other Ha-ha-ha good luck with your good intentions in this world where evil really does exist and functions daily a veritable horned devil with a pitchfork Evil Evil Evil peeking through the daredevil fetching smile of a shy instructor or a pleasant lady with a dog ready to eat you alive And until I was ninety years old, I never had time to stop and think of where I was in life while now I look back and see it all too clearly. I think of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” and of Yeats and the woods of Arcady being dead, of old the world on dreaming fed, now Grey Truth her painted toy! Life is still a freakin’ mystery but all that’s left now is bare reality the animals in their field configured grazing on their reality dreamers all to the end of time

AT the corner of Francisco and Powell the soundless cars creep by An average Chinese gent wheels his wobbly bike across the intersection He’s wearing a Mao jacket and leans forward into the steady north wind as two tourists with tiny backpacks stride by looking exactly the same dressed the same which is the man which is the woman There may be only unisex people left in the world But here are two ladies at the next table refilling their wineglasses and laughing and each has a hilarious story to tell they’re whooping it up and one lady says “And what’s the opposite of ‘booby’?” and the other says “Two boobies!” and they both haw-haw and almost fall off their chairs here on the edge of the world and of existence While a girl in a dirndl skirt lilts by licking an ice-cream cone While a couple holding hands crosses in front of a delivery truck which swerves to miss them The two ladies are still dying laughing as one shouts “Get outa here, I’m Jewish!” As the Middle Eastern owner of the café comes by and graces me with a beer While a postman with empty bag limps across to the PO. The too-hot sun beats down and the wind continues its flapping of awnings as four young guys with backpacks stride by each on his cell phone talking to someone else somewhere else and instead of Be Here Now it’s Be Somewhere Else Now and I am witnessing Thank God It’s Friday on earth As a Japanese woman in a long skirt comes out of the Hokkaido studio down the block As a young husband pushing a stroller sits down at the café table as the baby bawls and the wife shows up as the baby continues bawling and the two ladies have quit laughing and gathered themselves together and got up saying between laughs “Hope we didn’t bother you! We don’t get out much!” And the sun falls down out of sight on the far horizon

SO watching animals in clothes on downtown streets and where is everyone going? It’s a short story and a long story of greed in the face of Gandhi Yes well that’s pushing it but why is everybody rushing around like bandits looking for a deal Why is this guy on a street corner begging for a buck Why this aged lady on another corner hawking flowers to save herself And this funny fellow with buttons all over him proclaiming the end of the world and nobody acting like they notice as they rush by And it’s a script for a Pixar animated film in which every character is totally motivated by what he wants And it’s I want I want but they don’t say it Why say it when it’s so obvious Yeah all over America everybody is running around intent on their own instant gratification and why not? What else is there to live for I gotta get mine I wanna I wanna I wanna Make a million overnight Git rich quick & git out and have a mistress never mind the global warming fuck all that I got to get to Fat City and I mean soon Don’t tell me Jim reaching for the moon Just git out my way and fuck the nation of poor assholes on the street I am an American I deserve everything Me-Me-Me Nevermind what the scientists are saying the human race might not make it to the end of this here century but life goes on and on like a roller coaster in an amusement park ZOOM ZOOM and we’re up and over and over

MEMORY all gone into reveries the cherry time over and what remains? oh I remain with Beckett and Proust in the Amen Corner and will aureate dawn ever come again? Will I survive will you survive even as drones the size of hummingbirds can kill you or your brother ten thousand miles away I shudder to think…said the dame from South Side Boston but stopped short without finishing her sentence as the light dimmed in the Caffé Paradiso after they’d thrown out Jack Powers black Irish and the last great poetry spouter on the Near North Side Lord save us we all cry together as if we all believed together that there was such a thing as a God that metes out justice like executing Whitey Bulger or whoever ran the mob and there’s no turning back when you do enough dumb things to screw up the country and everybody knowing what should be done but they don’t do it and everybody knows what shouldn’t be done but they do it anyway and bang goes the ball game and there ain’t no joy in Mudville even though there indeed are many enlightened people on earth and I am tempted to say that so-and-so living almost exclusively with animals made her a truly enlightened being “Oh I must turn and live with animals” said a famous poet and he did he did oh are there not so many ways to live so many ways to die and how many lives do each of us live in one lifetime so many lives subsumed in one voice like a flight of birds with a single consciousness and the consciousness expressed in one cry in animals and in one voice in man or woman as I myself lived more than one life growing up yes and I’ll get back to that if I live long enough but for now I’m too busy living in here and now in the vast marvel of being alive as part of creation as part of the earth and sea and my blood is part of the sea And then there are the two fish swimming in tandem in one consciousness like the body and the mind vibrating together and unable to live without the other, the two fish of our body with one fate which is what that hatha yoga feller told me one day at the Tassajara Zen Center in Big Sur mountains Yeah he said Fix your mind and fix your body with my repair kit heal one and heal the other Yeah and if you believe that you’ll believe anything without a computer Google or Wikipedia to tell you right or wrong and No you can’t bring your iPhone into the yoga room You’re on your own with only yourself and the hell with that house of cards the electronic universe which in an instant will collapse and disappear whenever the electricity goes off with a zizzle and a pop and you are left with nothing but yourself and no one to Twitter with Baby baby you’ve come a long way only to fall on your face with your Facebook and if you believe that you’ll believe anything but you gotta believe in something Baby you gotta believe And ain’t that the crisis of modern ape and especially the American North American variety with no myths of our own to believe in We landed here with the old European the old Greek myths the old myths like Christianity in our baggage and if we believe if we still believe all those fairy tales we’ll believe anything which leaves us exactly where we are naked under the apple tree with each other Oh so you think this is all pop religion since I’m no enlightened being and who am I to destroy your gods or whatever you live by? Well, I won’t argue with that, I’ve got other fires to start with other fish to fry as for instance can anyone imagine what the world would be like if life on earth reaches a condition in which there would be no further need for the left to continually dissent, when there would be no further need to dissent And one swallow does not make a spring but two swallows winging together with one consciousness make a full summer so that if enough people could wing together with one consciousness—and that consciousness being truly enlightened—would we not then bring peace and social justice to all the world? indeed indeed And is all that a crock of merde? indeed indeed Shall we just persist in our cynical stance our genial cynicism as heard up and down the alleys of Silicon Valley or Wall Street yeah yeah business as usual Don’t give me all that Man oh man and “When you’re up to your neck in merde there’s nothing to do but sing” quoth Samuel Beckett in one of his more optimistic moods and and “Let us spray” said the skunks in church Oh man shall I go on and what else can I do but go on Is there no end to it the voiceless wailing while members of the Pussy Riot go on wailing in jail in Mother Russia and are denied parole by the paternalistic court in Saransk on the grounds that they had not sufficiently repented their obscene acts in the Mother Church What next are we to be denied sacrament in Sacramento since we did not do right with our do-do And what am I to think if I don’t toe the line and my toe-jam gets me in trouble for offending the noses of the High-Ups and they may not approve of the too-strong smell of the rot of civilization and its discontents oh yes and the dark knight rises also yes it’s upon us the final darkest night brandishing a carbon sword and shall the world as we know it just simply come to an end but what do we know what our end really is or could be Well it’s just like our government to keep common ignorant people from getting their just desserts or even just main courses in the food-stamp dining halls of the greatest nation on earth where everybody eats plenty and all the cars look new what with the auto industry pumping out a million new cars a year and where are they to go except to your nearest stoplight or parking lot or ten-lane freeway or autobahn like in the goody Godard movie where the traffic jam is so bad the people in the cars start erecting tents and camping out along the highway waiting for the end of the jam and it all grows into a vast encampment which eventually turns into another city and where do we go from here sitting here on the thruway waiting for liberation from pathogenic industrial civilization until it becomes time to actually dismantle this civilization but somehow without throwing out the baby with the bathwater ha-ha Aye there’s the rub-a-dub as I circumnavigate the world looking for an angry truth or falsehood Oh I should turn and live with animals like Rima in Green Mansions in a dream of green oh no none of that turning my back on the world as it exists in turbulent cities groaning with machines yes I have seen the expatriates in places like Oaxaca or Katmandu or Fiji fiddling with their mustaches and kicking back like natives but the slow rot of being disconnected from their own culture invisibly sinks them into insomnia and boredom their brains rotted away like overage cheese with the mold that grows in lotuslands and their eyes get a faraway look and that ain’t for me I have to stay connected with the whole hairy mess and the glory of it or the vainglory of life as she is lived in our America god bless our hairy souls the sun is at the meridian and anything can happen while the government is going into mushroom cultivation growing mushrooms in the traditional manner you know the way it is done You keep the mushrooms in the dark and you feed them merde yessir that is how it is done Just keep the people in the dark and you can do anything and everything and you don’t even need the Supreme Court to help you like letting Big Money rule in a new corporate fascism Oh boy and what’s next just set ’em up in the other alley where the bowling pins are all lined up and all you have to do is knock ’em down and you’re king of the mountain and not even a nail of thought in the plank of stupidity can stop you And ain’t that the sum of it And so why am I watching baseball to escape the pain or ecstasy of existence and the Reds are beating the Yankees and should I be happy It’s all relative and life depends on the simplest things to yield a crop of happiness as if it were something you could harvest like corn or clover Oh roll me over in the clover Do it again Do I feel pain when a thousand innocents die in an air raid but you know who at the same moment I am having an orgasm as big as any imagined by Henry Miller that is Henry Miller from Brooklyn all or most all of his writing is inspired by the raised phallus or the raising phallus and then when he gets to be so old that he cannot get it up anymore and then what does that do to his writing which may or may not be out of juice if you know what I mean like as if it isn’t the same problem with for instance D. H. Lawrence who died at forty-five or hereabouts and thus never had to experience the fading of the phallus and who would ever know if his phallus-based writing would ever suffer the same wilted fate as Henry from Brooklyn Yeah Yeah and so why not believe in a meaty interpretation of literature or lit as they dub it in the universities since what is all our writing about male or female if it is not based on that life force rooted in the heart of desire or in that nest of flesh from which all life springs Oh endless the splendid life of the world Endless its lovely living and breathing its lovely sentient beings seeing and hearing feeling and thinking laughing and dancing sighing and crying through endless afternoons endless nights drinking and doping talking and singing with endless lively conversations over endless cups of coffee in literary cafés on rainy mornings Endless street movies passing in cars and trams of desire on the endless tracks of light And endless longhair dancing to airless punk rock and airhead disco through Milky Way midnights to the Paradisos of dawn talking and smoking and thinking of everything endless at night in the white of night the light of night Ah yes oh yes the endless living and loving hating and loving kissing and killing Endless the ticking breathing breeding meat-wheel of life turning on and on through time Endless life and endless death Endless air and endless breath Endless worlds without end of days in autumn capitals their avenues of leaves ablaze Endless dreams and sleep unraveling the knitted sleeves of care the labyrinths of thought the labyrêves of love the coils of desire and longing myriad endgames of the unnamable Endless the heavens on fire Endless universe spun out World upon a mushroom pyre Endless the fire that breathes in us tattooed fire-eaters dancing in plazas swallowing flaming gasoline air Brave the beating heart of flaming life its beating and pulsings and flameouts Endless the open fields of the senses the smell of lust and love the calling and calling of cats in heat their scent of must of musk No end to the sound of the making of love to the sound of bedsprings creaking to the moan of lovers making it heard through the wall at night No end to their groans of ecstasy moans of the last lost climax the sound of jukebox jumping the flow of jass and gyzm jived in Paradiso And then the endless attempts to escape the nausée of Sartre the bald hills of burned-out sensation joie de vivre in despair boatloads of enlightenment ships of merde afloat by Charon’s moat, greeds hysterias paranoias pollutions and perversions Endless l’homme revolté in the anonymous face of death in the tracks of the monster state Endless his anarchist visions Endless his alienation Endless his alienated poetry Gadfly of the state Bearer of Eros Endless the sound of the life of man on earth his endless radio broadcasts and TV transmissions newspapers rolling off endless rolls on rotary presses the flow of his words and images on endless typewriter ribbons and tapes automatic writings and scrawlings endless poèmes dictés by the unknown Endless the calling on or dangling dick and then telephones to ends of earth the waiting of lovers on station platforms the crying of birds on hills and rooftops the cawing and cawing of crows in the sky the myriad churning of crickets the running seas the crying waters rising and falling on far shingles the lapping of tides in the ides of autumn salt kiss of creation No end to the sea bells tolling beyond the dams and dykes of life and the calling and calling of bells in empty churches and towers of time No end to the calamitous enunciation of hairy holy man Endless the ever-unwinding watch spring heart of the world shimmering in time shining through space Endless the tourist-boats through it bateaux mouches in endless canals millions of windows aflame in sunset the city burns with leftover light and red-light districts rock and glow with endless porn and neon cocks and vibrators vibrating endlessly in lonely topfloor rooms of leaning houses Endless the munching on the meat-sandwiches of lust the juicy steaks of love endless dreams and orgasms fertility rites and rites of passage and flights of fertile birds over rooftops and the dropping of eggs in nests and wombs the tempts and attempts of the flesh in furnished rooms of love where sings the stricken dove No end to the birthing of babies where love or lust has lain No end to the sweet birth of consciousness No end to the bitter deaths of it in vain No end no end to the withering of fur and fruit and flesh so passing fair and the neon mermaids singing each to each somewhere Endless the slight variations of the utterly familiar the fires of youth the embers of age the rage of the poet born again No end no end to any and all creation in the mute dance of molecules All is transmuted All is muted and all cries out again again Endless the waiting for God and Godot the absurd actions absurd plans and plays dilemmas and delays Absurd the waiting without action for the withering away of war and the withering away of the state Insane the waiting without action for the insane ending! Endless the wars of good and evil the flips of fate the trips of hate endless nukes and faults all failing-safe in endless chain reactions of the final flash while the White Bicycles of protest still circle round it For there will be an end to the dogfaced gods in wingtip shoes in Gucci slippers in Texas boots and tin hats in bunkers pressing buttons For there is no end to the hopeful choices still to be chosen the dark minds lighted the green giants of chance the fishhooks of hope in the sloughs of despond the hills in the distance the birds in the bush hidden streams of light and unheard melodies sessions of sweet silent thought stately pleasure domes decreed and the happy deaths of the heart every day the cocks of clay the feet in running shoes upon the quay And there is no end to the doors of perception still to be opened and the jet streams of light in the upper air of the spirit of man in the outer space inside us Endless rubaiyats and endless beatitudes endless shangri-las endless nirvanas sutras and mantras satoris and sensaras Bodhiramas and Boddhisatvas karmas and karmapas! Endless singing Shivas dancing on the smoking wombs of ecstasy! Shining! Transcendent! into the crystal night of time in the endless silence of the soul in the long loud tale of man in his endless sound and fury signifying everything with his endless hallucinations adorations annihilations illuminations erections and exhibitions fascismo and machismo circuses of the soul astray merrygorounds of the imagination coney island of the mindless endless poem dictated by the uncollected voice of the collective unconscious blear upon the tracks of time! The dancing continues There is a sound of revelry by night

AND Ignorance hung on a blind crab clinging to a net blinkered by centuries of darkness but if you want sex don’t go to Henry Miller don’t go to Proust try out The Story of O and you’ll live longer with a raised clitoris I mean what to do I know Is not love what makes the world go round and round and yet no one really knows anything about it except that it works Oh Mother Teresa what is your secret Is the Mona Lisa really winking at me at us as if a nod from her meant eternal love Oh baby baby and the Man without Shoulders who can’t lift his weight in butterflies is now in charge of the world And is there any reason to watch the World Series on TV while this is going on as if the fate of the world were on the Men with Shoulders out there on the Field of Dreams as if a bases-loaded home run could change the fate of the spinning world spinning with a curveball or one-hundred-mile-an-hour fastball to wipe out our enemies and save the world from whatever Yeah play the “Star-Spangled Banner” and sing about “bombs bursting in air” to show “our flag was still there” Yeah Yeah ain’t it the truth boo-boo boo-boo who will save us from total obliteration if not the Men with Big Shoulders carrying big bats phalluses dominoes over all Oh exquisite corpus feet of clay! but this is no zibaldone summarizing the ultimate incoherence of life on earth as she is lived by us but in that very incoherence we can discover those happy errors or illusions that give life meaning, for it is in the physical and instinctual, not in the mental and rational, wherein complicity with illusion-happiness lies—and so and so, take that you hairy old philosopher in your cubicle and let us be off to the lands of the living and breathing and loving! And yet and yet it could be said that there will never be heroic generous and sublime action, or high thoughts and feelings, that are anything other than real and genuine illusions, and whose price must fall as the empire of reason increases Oh yes oh yes indeed how true, how true! but the World Series is on TV and the Boys of October are swinging their phalli bats and the lovely blonds are laughing in the bandstands the lovely blonds with perfect teeth are holding out their arms to someone the sun is bright upon them one and all fifty thousand humans on a sunny Sunday in Fenway Park in Boston where the bums still sleep under the linden trees in Boston Common Ah yes the greatest generation so dubbed by a journalist speaking of those born 1919 or thereabouts like John F Kennedy and others like meself yes indeed what a group and did they not fight the good war and did they not etc etc Yes World War Two it was and they in the flower & flour of manhood not to slight the ladies me lad like on a sunny morn when I saw a fine one with her skin like peaches and cream singing to herself in an open window a voice so pure a lilting voice the voice of her race when predatory capitalism hits the fan! Oh that was a moment of light in the universe but then comes the darkness as our country turned to a Stark Time of Haves and Have-Nots in a fractured land while at the same time astronomers are reporting that their Dark Matter probe has detected absolutely Nothing.

AND was it Lyndon Johnson who said “Ah never trust a man until I got his pecker in my pocket” oh man Didn’t he have the skeleton key to everything right there when he put his finger on the pecker in the pocket yeah for the Pecker is indeed the Fourth Person Singular and the vagina is also a Person speaking out and the Voice of the Vagina is heard throughout the land in vagina monologues while where the pecker heads go ye shall follow and look how it led to the ruin of many a president and many a king Pecker rose and made its irresistible demands and bang goes the egg money Wow and Woe Woe! Woe!

SO I am a man of a certain age And old memory all gone and twisted into reveries like Krapp recording his Last Tape and I’ll have none of that Let the doomsayers be doomed and my mind warring with everything Life & Death and the older one gets the more the mind wars with All while I am trying to discover the plot of my life and can’t be bothered trying to find the plot of life on earth and the only part of my plot I have discovered so far is that I am growing older by the split nanosecond night and day and all grows and grows to its fruition my fruition and even my nose grows when I’m asleep (the historic fact of noses growing while everyone sleeps discovered by the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky and revealed in a poem whereas it should have been published in a scientific journal) and anyway I simply can’t stop growing up and over and I shall wear and I shall wear the bottoms of my Levi’s rolled and walk and walk upon the beach and hear the mermaids singing each to each whilst still I know those ladies with flippers for legs are in fact still singing to me Ah yes je me souviens and you were wearing high heels and sheer stockings that day in Ojo Caliente and nothing then to do but loudly sing Gaudeamus Igitur as if the whole aim of life on earth were to find pure love and me hiding in plain sight for all to see Oh blind man’s bluff…

AND so the end of all my traveling toward the sun great god sun in charge of all And the isles of Greece which I never reached, nor landed on, ah the isles of Greece the isles of Greece the Delphic mysteries the Golden Fleece The light upon the seat eternal The horses of Achilles weeping for Achilles The loves of Sappho in the night The songs and cries of Sappho The Delphic prophecies The Eleusinian mysteries The sound of revelry by night on Mount Olympus The orgasmic cries of Dionysus The high breasts of Helen The long fair hair of Helen Her darkened eyes The longing eyes of Penelope Aie! Aie! Ulysse! And “Audiart Audiart where thy bodice laces start.” “There is none like thee among the dancers.” And then the cawing of crows mixed with the cry of nightingales at the Fountain of Castalia And then the anger of the gods And then the dire prophecies The wailing of sibyls and sirens The cries of the vestal virgins The cries of Icarus falling from the sky The foundering of ships at sea The cries of the blinded Cyclops in his cave And the sun the setting sun over the isles of Greece And the sound of axes in the wood in the sacred grove And the Golden Bough unfound beyond us still The dancers gone under the hill Ah let the Golden Age return before all ages end And we must burn!

AH “Memory Foam” which remembers too much including dreaming for we remember snatches of our dreams while we are returning to consciousness yes snatches of our former or future lives, real or imagined, and my head made of Memory Foam remembering everything as for instance that time in Avignon when a fair woman got off the local train her arms full of lavande the lavender flower of Provence that is in its glory everywhere in late summer and it seemed she headed straight for me and offered lavande and herself to me and it turned out that she was an existential editor’s wife getting away from existentialism as far as possible but back in Paris she embraced existentialism while embracing me that is to say she used existential arguments to disabuse me of my youthful romanticism and time flew by and then one day she moved with her husband to teach in a French colony and I never saw her again but existentialism was still with me like that time I spied Jean-Paul Sartre with Beauvoir in the Brasserie Lipp in Saint-Germain and me living on sixty-five dollars a month on the G.I. Bill and could never afford to even sit down in the Brasserie Lipp and so what am I to do, go right up and greet the great Sartre and the great Beauvoir and join easily in their conversation as if I had the slightest idea what they were talking about Oh yeah sure Bonsoir, M’ssieur Sartre etc etc ha-ha before he signals the waiter and I am evicted and I’m back on the street heading for my hole-in-the-wall in Montparnasse where a cold pot-au-feu awaits me for dinner as I imagine Monsieur Sartre staring after me thru those thick lenses which I always suspected prevented him from seeing anything at all in the real world ha-ha and me still a romantic in spite of it all my Memory Foam full of romantic failures but enough not-failures which kept my romantic self alive Ah me the treasure hunt for love never ends and always begins again and then when you find it again ain’t it sweet as apple pie made with spring apples and the sap rising in your blood?

BUT now that I have heard everything that I have to say about everything it is high time for a great epiphany or for the Alpha Mom or the Alpha Dad to appear and enlighten us as to why exactly we are here on earth and what is our hidden destiny and so in the beginning was the word and the word was Godot and the world was coming to an end even in the beginning every moment a new beginning and the way forward is the way back and in order to arrive where you are not you must go by a way you have never been and oh nevermind those fine old phrases Let’s get back to the present where the world is coming to an end for the millionth time but this time it’s for real yes sir I’m not giving you some Old Wives’ Tales by Irish washerwomen gossiping in the dusk while washing their clothes in the River Liffey while night birds twitter and far-off field mice twit

WHILE I’m now sitting near this guy who keeps taking off his sweatshirt or sweater and turning it inside out and putting it on again and then after a while he takes it off again and turns it inside out and puts it on again and what else have I got to do but watch this guy doing the same thing for a couple of hours while all the clean guys and dames on computers are totally absorbed in their little handheld gadgets and never a one casting even a glance at the guy changing his sweater inside out as if he actually didn’t exist in their world at all and I am imagining maybe several hundred thousand computer persons all over the city totally entranced by the moving words and images on their little gadgets can you imagine millions of them a whole new zombie generation on earth computing their lives in pixels or whatever they are and the guy changing sweaters all the time like he’s trying to change his identity maybe and become like the nice guys all around him but, no matter how many times he does his act, he never changes and will always be the outsider trying to get in even though he can plainly see that all these guys and dames are obviously not very happy doing what they’re doing because of a huge void in their lives when they are constantly trying to fill by constant contact online with others trying to fill their own vast void of loneliness on earth in their own brave worlds and so they’re meeting all kinds of strangers online and even actually meeting some of them in person and now and then actually marrying one or two of them and the café fills anew with them every day and every day there are the outsiders changing their sweaters or their pants or suits or sexes to become one of the Happy Many and where will it all end with a nation of this new unnamed twenty-first-century breed of humans oh boy am I so totally demented in my later years that I see the whole of existence with a totally jaundiced eye in which everything is turning into the worst possible world in the worst possible universe and when you are up to your neck in merde is there truly nothing to do but sing? Or laugh as I did when I read that Flaubert’s wife or Stendhal’s wife complained in a letter to a bosom friend that her husband’s penis was too small or was too large I forget but in any case you can imagine the embarrassment of her bosom friend upon receiving this complaint for as it happens she too etc etc And all café sitters waiting for who knows what like Lady Godiva to ride by on a white horse shedding her underwear as she passes and causing universal joy and the stock market zooming up up up while the poor get poorer and the rich get filthy richer while I’m still waiting with Godot and a little guy goes by in a sampan hat pushing a stroller and here comes a small band of Indios playing their bamboo flutes and beating small drums as if they as if we were in the Andes and I am wondering what’s happening to my fair city It’s a flat earth now and we’re all in the new electronic Flat Earth Society and on a clear day you can see almost forever.

AND every day in this grand little café of life I sit waiting to see how our little civilization develops, not to mention how our little consciousness might develop (Oh what ecstasies, what despair!), and there’s a sign outside the café that says HAPPY HOUR EVERY DAY 4–7 It’s only 10 a.m. and no one is Happy yet A thin young mother enters pushing a stroller in which sits a little fucker and you can tell he’s plotting something. She goes over to the cold drink cabinet and picks out a diet soda and then of a sudden the little feller starts laughing for no apparent reason. It’s already Happy Hour for him, if laughter is a sign of it. I decide to join him and then someone in the back breaks a laugh and then pretty soon everyone in the café is infected with laughing happiness and they’re all laughing their heads off like as if a day of universal happiness had just been declared but now just as suddenly the little brat starts crying and the party is all over and no one feels like joining him in his lament and the mother wheels him out of the café in a hurry as if she had forgotten what laughing happiness is, while in front of my local post office three mailmen are talking Cantonese and laughing and after I mail some stuff I join in laughing my head off and of course they are totally surprised since white White Ghosts don’t usually know Chinese and they have no idea who I am, but I am the universal man and I know Cantonese the way I know which way is Up the way I know all languages spoken or silent and as such I know everything and nothing I am your universal wise man and your universal fool I am your wise guy from Brooklyn and I am your Buddhist guru in a saffron robe with supreme knowledge as to how to exist on earth and elsewhere even as I stand laughing with the Cantonese postmen and a dog walks by leading his master on a leash and the dog lets out one loud bark as he passes the postmen who continue talking and laughing as if the dog didn’t exist and the dog is of course baffled by the Cantonese speech but also by the speech in English by other humans who sound all the same to him They just sound like other dogs going woof-woof or bow-wow which is all very baffling since he and other dogs, and perhaps all other animals except humans, have no memory of their own individual pasts, not really “remembering” anything such as when and where they were born, and isn’t that strange that maybe we humanoids are the only animals who have historical memory of their existence on earth or elsewhere and not one animal expert has any memory of when for instance the ancient Egyptians existed except perhaps cats, those sphinxes, those mysterious anachronisms who may or may not remember when they were deities to the ancient Egyptians, for who can tell what’s going on in any cat’s mind or psyche when they don’t give us any sign that they know or remember anything about everything much less the sacred rituals of deified cats by the River Nile a long time ago And we with all our Prousts remembering everything and every little thing with our omnivorous memories retrouving the past in sessions of sweet silent thought, while I see faces in the leaves of trees embedded in the masses of leaves, and often I discern a face a profile a pair of eyes or a protruding nose and those are never faces I know never familiar faces family faces or anything like that These are strangers’ faces some as ancient as days But who are they and where do they come from in most any tree I come upon are they all mementos of all the people who have ever lived on earth Are they Mother Earth’s memory set forth here to remind the living of all who have passed this way or any way oh boy they are always all silent though they shake with any wind shake their heads so to speak but all remains silent except for a certain rustling a certain light breathing as if about to speak but never do although they may grimace or seem to laugh or weep or cry out yet never do as if all the secrets of earth are hoarded in those faces those heads shaking or still and awaiting the next good or ill wind to agitate them again to set them trembling with some new news of earth and womban. As when for instance when Him shows up more than thirty years before his own death on a cross and when he grows up and Mary Magdalene becomes his wife and bears his children then the apostles and other Wise Guys get very upset because it was supposed to be some sort of celibate bad boys’ club with no begetting of children and they forthwith ran off with Mary’s babes and nowhere were they to be found in the Holy Land and so it went down thru the centuries that Jesus was celibate and Mary merely a camp follower or a prostitute as pictured fifteen hundred years later in Renaissance paintings with Mary Magdalene hanging onto Jesus’s hand like a cast-off fan of Jesus Christ Superstar whereas the truth was that she was hanging onto Jesus and beseeching him to give her back their children to bring back the very fruits of her womb and hung-up Jesus paying her no nevermind, ah men, Amen.

AND so one day it’s the song of the sad café all around me with everyone on their portable universes their handheld computers and nobody talking to anyone else and after a while I can’t stand the deafening silence any longer and so I up and speak to the solemn guy at the next table like I say “I can’t resist asking what book you are reading” and he hands me the book and it’s Advanced Astrology and we exchange looks and I blurt out “Ya know the Greeks made it all up you know it’s all their fantasy spun out in the stars” etc etc and the guy gives me a strange look and grabs the book back, not that I was trying to hold on to it or anything since I gave up astrology about the same time I wet my pants for the first time and anyway the café returned to its total silence with everyone screwed to their little computers as if life depended on them which in truth is the case if they sit there long enough glued to the little robots directing their lives etc etc yessir you don’t need to know anything anymore all you have to do is turn on your robot machine and it will tell you anything you didn’t know like when was Troy destroyed and whose face was it that sank a thousand ships etc etc anything that you want to know at your fingertips ain’t it the truth and me just sitting there looking around at all the closed silent faces none of whom could sink a thousand ships like Helen of Troy who could have sunk the whole fleet but all that was then and this is now and how shall I escape this boatload of somnolent café sailors on a cruise? Let me tell you a thing or two about the spinning world before it spins off its axis. The world’s an ice cream melting down and we are tiny animals sprinkled on it, little animals with brains yeah the only animalcules that recognize themselves in mirrors and go wow! And Pope Francis a pope with a brain, can you imagine a pope with a brain mamma mia ain’t it so but even he with his direct connection to Heaven can’t tell us why we are here and what is it we are supposed to be doing here on earth, oh we weren’t set down here to play tennis and kill each other on pro-football fields or in kickboxing rings, we weren’t set down here or set up here to be bowled over by the roller-balls of world wars oh no we must have some higher or lower purpose than that but what could it be except 23andMe yes me and all my progenitors for I have weathered the storm all the storms I have beaten them all I am the man I was there when Rome was built I was with Noah in the Ark I was in the manger with an ass I am the man and I was there I have seen the mass mess but I am the victor of my own life I am the conqueror of it my own mock hero yes and am the captain of my soul ha-ha yes indeed and everything is just fine everything is wonderful except our little tribe is headed for the big falls, our little world is coming to the end of the wick woe woe woe Yes right now is the beginning of the end and you ain’t seen the half of it yet no sir the final crystal night is approaching and what are you going to do about it except sit upon the ground and weep and gnash your teeth and cry but don’t do that yet don’t leave the theatre yet there’s still a lot to come still a lot to see as for instance Holy Smoke! As we used to say Holy Smoke is arising around us descending on us and all comes down to Holy Smoke and all our life dissolved in it and you and me with it Holy Holy Holy “tongue and teeth and asshole holy” in the Amen Corner with us backed into it woe woe alack so let us pray to each other finding ourselves up shit creek without a paddle with the latest scientific evidence proving we are all in the Sixth Extinction yes there having been five other extinctions of life on earth before our own and ours only a few hundred thousand years old and already we are on the way out what a story woe woe all is lost the ship is sinking although nobody even notices a tale of sound and furry animals about to perish feet first into the final zero oblivion and Love and Hate the viruses that eat us up like cannibals insatiable woe woe and we are the tragic heroes of the Sixth Extinction and our fatal flaws are Love and Hate and so Ainsi soit-il so be it baby baby roll me over in the clover roll me over on the grill I’m done on this side turn me over to eternity O father Our father whose art’s in heaven Hollow be thy name Thy Kingdom come and gone Thy will will be undone on earth as it isn’t heaven in the throes of ecosystem collapse or relapse don’t call me I’ll call you Be lazy Go crazy Join the movement Don’t take medicine Eat the garden Ignore government Disband the military Join the pacifists Discover anarchism Resist and Disobey!

AND so then what am I doing in Saint Stupid’s Parade? Would you call the First Church of the Last Laugh to be an act of disobedience or just plain inflammatory insults to the status quo and praising instead the Stations of Stupidity and the Tomb of Saint Stupid and the Statue of the Bare Butt and God’s Cock?! Oh you contribute to the martyrdom of the bishop, make your own bare-ass parade? But Saint Stupid is so stupid that he/she continues to have his parades on April Fool’s Day every year and who’s to say it doesn’t change the world at all as it goes on spinning around mindlessly or mindfully? Am I so stupid that I don’t recognize a true prophet when I see one? So why should I want to go on living if the whole world is so stupid? But Saint Stupid no doubt has an answer to all my doubts as for instance “we have nothing to fear except fear ourselves!” And is this April Fool’s Day going to go on forever even after the last parade has passed and we are forever the Fool in the Tarot pack or are we all the Hanged Man in the pack forever lost dangling in space? Or should we all join the newest school of Buddhism in America in which instead of Hinayana Buddhism we have the “cosmic oneness” of all phenomena expressed in the new Hahayana Buddhism which aims “to transcend the inexplicable nonsense of human existence” as articulated by Hahayana’s chief guru Scoopa-do Nisker who hopes to die laughing after persuading us all to laugh our heads off too while all the while thinking of dying and every third thought is Death.

BUT I am not the Hanged Man in the Tarot pack hung out to dry and twisting in the wind, for I still feel like an all-seeing all-hearing observer of everything going on down here on this earth, and here’s a couple with knapsacks near me, and he’s reading a mag and she’s got her head down on the table, seeming to sleep. What’s happening in this moment of their lives? He goes to the counter and comes back with a glass of red wine. Silence descends in the café, Sunday mid-afternoon. She raises her head for a moment to face the world then puts it down again. She’s Asian, he’s white and probably American. He’s reading The New Yorker. He must have a brain or is just pretending. Perhaps they are just a happy couple, and she exhausted from making love all night or all day, and so Now what? Will the skies open and a golden horse appear to carry them away to some undiscovered paradiso? Is their destiny written in the dregs of their wine, here where life once-upon-a-time went on so unterribly that we could not write the Great Russian Novel? I think of greeting the guy cheerfully and striking up a bright conversation. But what is there to say to passing strangers lost in their own worlds and looking at you as if you came from Mars or were a character in Star Wars or some other escape fiction? Oh who knows who knows and who cares, and in the end I get up and go, leaving them to their inscrutable destinies, for the witching hour is upon us, and it is high time to save this world from itself, high time to transform the world into democratic open-society socialism, to share all the world’s wealth with all the Wretched of the Earth, while still the only God for all beings is consciousness itself.

WHILE in my homely little neighborhood café, a homely little neighborhood fly lights on my table. This fly was once on the wall in a position to hear everything said in the café. But he was totally bored by the chatter and decided to fly down and light upon bare heads and hear the murmuring of their minds. But I could not hear what the fly heard with his inner ear—our unspoken stream of consciousness.

WHILE dreams too are part of our consciousness, our shadow consciousness, our first life, dreamt before leaving the womb, and it continues on after birth, absorbed in our consciousness, so that it’s my old dream of always trying to reach back, to find that place where I was born but then in actual life going there and finding it…The birth certificate says 106 Saratoga Avenue Yonkers…I take the A train to 168th Street, transfer to the number 1, and continue on the Elevated to Van Cortlandt Park, then catch a bus north to South Yonkers. It’s only a mile or more along the west edge of the park to Carroll Avenue. I get off here on the vague advice of the old black bus driver who waves in the direction he thinks Saratoga Avenue might be…And so uphill half a mile on foot past blocks of dark brick apartment houses their better days behind them. And there’s the end of Saratoga Avenue with a mom-and-pop grocery. An old white man comes out carrying a quart in a paper sack. He looks through me as if I were part of the street and had been there forever (Perhaps I have)…I have no memory of the house or its location. It is as if I am looking for someone else’s birthplace (Perhaps I am). I pick up my pace, hurrying along maybe three short blocks to 106 where in a small back bedroom my brother heard my first cry (it echoes now as if I myself had heard it). The little house almost to the crest of the low hill, a gabled wood-frame house, two stories with an attic, detached from close-by houses, a yard with old cars on one side, and a steep drop in back to a gully with a few tall trees, great old barren oaks and elms—bare ruined choirs! The house itself run down now. Asbestos siding over the old wood. And a small screened-in front porch. Inside the flimsy screen door there’s a once-handsome oak door with worn brass doorknob and bevelled glass upon which gold-leaf numerals still show 106 (with half the 1 missing). Three doorbells (three apartments now?). I ring them all with no answer. No one in sight anywhere inside. No sign of life in nearby houses. A kind of country slum but still a quiet family neighborhood. Across the little street some Latinos with boom box turned down are hanging out. I walk around back by the old cars and the bare trees and look up at the silent house, looking for that small back bedroom. Kikiriki goes a bird, just once, like an echo of light. All at once, an incredible overflowing feeling of happiness surges up from nowhere. Born here!…some three hundred yards north of the northwest corner of Van Cortlandt Park. It must have been all country back then. The kids must have played ball in this green park with its worn diamond and its ancient rusted screen behind the batter’s box. I can hear the bat hit the ball (perhaps pitched by Pop). And my brother running for first base ended up in Baltimore forty years later…Shouts and laughter tears and whispers fill the air.

OH I miss the Hudson, not far from where my consciousness was born, the great Hudson of my childhood, the Hudson my Mississippi, when I was a stripling lad on a Sea Scout canoe trip in the fall of that year, with the yellow-red leaves falling on the coursing water, the great trees hanging over the water by Saugerties and Coxsackie, and my stripling mind far away, so that unthinking I lost my balance and tumbled into the rushing cold water, to be rescued by Sea Scout hands, and then sat shivering on a riverbank, but I was Tom Sawyer and I was Huck Finn, and I was Injun Joe, the falling leaves blown about us in Indian autumn, and I now one of them, falling, fallen into loam of dark

BUT there are crystal moments in time, crystal moments in all our lives, fleeting past, whether it’s sunlight on a face or fog in a fir tree, a flash, a moment in time, yes, such as when I was three or four and playing hide-and-seek with my Aunt Emilie somewhere in France, and I crouched down behind a wicker sofa on a porch in sunlight, and Tante Emilie calling over and over Lu-Lu-Lulu où est-tu? or such as that moment in Paris yesterday or long ago when I met my Nadja, my new illusion to live by, looking like a normal person, a normal woman, but as soon as she opens her mouth you know she is special, and she has a laugh sometimes as if she were perpetually surprised by life and the absurdity of it. Imagine, good looking, speaking what she calls her Hollywood French. I imagine all the things I don’t know about her, and I know practically nothing, except that she reminded me of my dear aunt Emilie when I was a child in France with her in her cloche hat and her hair cut like Louise Brooks, and I do remember how often when I was with her alone or in company she would burst forth “Oh, je t’adore, je t’adore” and me only three or four years old and not realizing “I adore you” is what most everyone longs to hear all his or her life, yes, “Je t’adore” is enough for a lifetime of living and dying. And now we are separately staying in the Hotel Esmerelda on the Left Bank around a corner from Shakespeare & Co. bookstore and Nadja has gone off somewhere, who knows where, while I sit in the window of this little old hotel which seems to be listing a little like an old wooden ship at anchor, which of course it is, with no elevator and a narrow winding staircase and rooms not much wider than the French windows, and so here I am indulging in the real fantasy that I am still a young student in Paris, yes, and why not, won’t I come back another year and find Nadja still here, crying or laughing or talking brightly, and is she not a little like having a gentle wild animal in the house, and she could go off in wild laughter most any time, or talk crazily on any curious subject, and whoever was with her might say “Can’t you just make regular conversation?” She is like the flight of a bird on the wing, aware of the air about her, when I’m with her my time seems to stand still, time is on the wing with her, and I sometimes think we would never die as long as we were in sight of each other, or die together sometime tomorrow, and perhaps Proust has a name for this strange effect when les temps perdus are never lost, and those lost times just stay in a memory bank and accumulate interest or lose interest, like a bank account, and so it is with Nadja and me. She is an enfant du Paradis, a bird of paradise in the topmost balcony of the world, while I remain here on earth, and I am still a student at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill, 1947, a little long in the whiskers for a student, though I remember a student with a long white beard at an advanced age coming into the Salle Richelieu to defend his thesis on Flaubert’s wife who wrote a woman friend complaining about her husband’s penis being too small, and our scholar claiming he had the documentation to prove it, and also stating that he knew for a fact that Madame Flaubert was “a hot tomato.” But this all a long way from the Hotel Esmerelda where it’s been raining lightly, but now the sun bursts through over the Ile de France in which Paris nestles like a grey dove, and Nadja has been doing laundry and now appears in a long white dress perhaps of calico, and floats out front to the little parc of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre in midafternoon, and there is a stillness in the air, as if the turning earth stood still, a breathlessness, as sun floods down upon the park benches where I now sit with Nadja, a stillness in the world enclosing us, with no need for words, for what is there to say anyway except that we are all here under the dreaming trees, faced only with ourselves.

AN ant crawls across a table, falls off of it, onto the cobblestones. A gardener in baggy pants shows up with a garden hose and attaches it, and magically water spouts up onto a wilted flower bed, and the hushed silence continues in this little enclave of life, as I imagine it is the silence of happiness, Nadja too engulfed in it. No shadows here, no chiaroscuro, just us in sunlight. Paris may explode, the world may explode, but not here, not here. Life goes on, and us with it, and there is no end of it, eternal creation, birthing and dying, dust into dust, as my fantasy dies, as this present fantasy fades, in this eternal moment, realizing that Nadja is in her own world, in her own illusion of the moment, and does not share my fantasy of here and now, and she was never my lover nor would ever be, and perhaps her consciousness was all chiaroscuro, all shadow, though with her you could never tell where shadows began or ended—a fleeting darkness sometime flashing across her face, as a shadow from a passing bird or a driven cloud, to vanish in an instant from her face Yet at other times she would be totally with you, as that late afternoon strolling through the Luxembourg Gardens, the late sun slanting through the high trees by the Fountain of the Medicis, as then we are sitting by the long pool in front of the classic statues that spout water into the still pool, and we sit still on the wrought-iron chairs by the still water, as small birds dip by, half in sun, half in shade, under the tall trees, and the water dappled with shadows of leaves, in the late afternoon of that year, and she exclaiming “Oh, I’m never going to leave here ever, I’m going to write everyone we’re staying forever!”

YES, forever, and Little Boy grown up dissident romantic or romantic dissident has his youthful vision of living forever, immortal as every youth is, believing his own special identity would never, could never, perish, yes, believing all that, in the face of the unrushing fate of the whole human race which scientists predict will very soon totally perish, in the Sixth Extinction of life on this earth.

AND that is why the cries of birds now are not cries of ecstasy but cries of despair.