down
this winding road from the abandoned restaurant in the foothills where I used
to work, I feel and smell the same night wind off the desert plants, see the
same quiet land, the lights of Tucson still boiling in a stillness down in the
valley, and remember how I walked this road on The Ladybug Man’s Walk Across
Tucson, 10 days, 114 miles under the same moon, the same stars, the same
merciless sun, giving away wild flower seed and Mesquite seeds to gardeners and
gifts from The Invisible Community, the community of people who may never see
each other but care about the same things, the earth, and walking in balance
between the human and the natural community.
I
feel and sense the same messages coming off the soil, the plants and animals,
the same huge unspoken, unspeakable thought it all somehow adds up to. But how
remote and unreal it seems now as I search madly for ways to get back to that
place. A black woman I visited in her wonderful store called THE REALM in
downtown before the gentrification steamroller ran over it, always says hello.
“It’s
been over sixteen years. I’m surprised you still recognize me.” I say, aged and
without makeup or costume or props, and she says,
“I
will remember you forever.”
Funny,
I think I’ve forgotten myself more than she has. But after seeing her, I do
remember the proposition: to measure the sprawl of this little jerkwater berg
with my body, and what I found, facing the traffic on foot, day after day,
hearing that constant, unforgiving whoosh and roar, wearied from the insistent
sameness of the shapes of cars, I began to understand that the quiet
desperation Thoreau spoke of had grown to silent screams of people on the edge,
too terrified to be able to think about anything except getting through another
day. Now I’m right in there with them, my nights just aren’t long enough....the
dawns are cruel....I can’t go on....I’ve GOT TO...
There are messages in the night wind and there are ghosts,
ghosts who blacklisted me and sneered at me on the street, because my performances
were too undignified for their wars of conquest, their courts presided over by
a pompous sense of justice and money, money that can’t stop talking, and never
says anything. Late at night and late in life we start to get visitors, ghosts,
that have no place to be, no lives to live. They can’t die because they can’t
live, and they can’t stop haunting us because something about their and our
past is incomplete and inconsolable. But by that same proposition, that what
might have been can never die, The Ladybug Man is still walking, still talking,
beating his altruistic head against the wall of the world, the wall of the neurotic
spawn of the selfish gene. He walks into Casa Goofy International every day
pleading silently for all that is slit eyed and incestuous about human values
to for godsake just look OUTWARD once in a while. He walks into a spiteful
little man’s office at the Daily Star, he says please, write an article so the
people of Tucson can know this
piece is by, for and about them. We’re killing the earth, we’re dying because
we’re disconnected from the natural community. No, he says,
“You’ve become a media pig.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”
“Try the bulletin boards. And just go take a hike, you were
going there anyway.”
“Right on, Bob, why don’tcha tell us all what art’s all
about?”
And then there’s nobody there, the chair is empty, all the
chairs are empty, there was never anybody there.
“...and so I entered
the broken world...”
And his dad asks,
“How come you were such a coward you didn’t join the army?
(I was 4-F, I had a letter from a psychiatrist and a bad back.) Do you suppose
you’re ever going to amount to anything?” and he says,
“Not in your terms.”
WAIT! Wrong conversation, wrong world, wrong universe, this
isn’t about ME, this is about why YOU need to use ME for a dirty mirror don’t
you understand both you idiots, everybody is insane, it’s all process, there’s
nobody there, and what was there ever in this broken world to amount to?
And a friend asks,
“Your father didn’t like you very much did he?”
“Not until he lost his mind.”
“So what do you make of that?”
“Just be kind.”
and his wife’s boss asks,
“Are you jealous?”(because I kissed your wife on the lips at
the welcome line to the party) and in the past he says,
“Sure, I’m human.”
And in the present he says,
Thank you for relieving me of my burdens, of respect for the
judgment of others, which you have squandered with this raw demonstration which
isn’t about sex it’s about flaunting power, so now I owe nothing to law and the
court, social norms, and honors, the injustice of money, power and
influence...because your favorite word is “asshole” because that’s where you’re
fixated in the sickness that is part and parcel of mother’s love, the brokenness
we inherit with every advance in transportation and communication because it
means we live in more and more times and places and faces, the floodwaters in
which everything we try to call home drifts, it means....
...there is nothing and nobody, to hold on to....
anymore
and he walks out and just keeps on walking but he can’t stop
saying
Stanley why
don’t you just go fuck yourself?
to someone who was never “THERE” in the first place,
depended for his identity on an abstraction called money, another abstraction
called time, another called law, but you can’t fight those abstractions,
because too many broken pieces of people believe in them...and the defeated
ghost, like all the other ghosts, reconstitutes himself and comes back for
another and another round....
so that makes them real?
No, that makes the world broken...
and his parents say,
“We wish you’d come home, you’re not doing any good up there
in that city, we wish you’d stop demonstrating, you’re putting yourself in
danger and nobody is listening.”
And another voice, deeper inside asks,
“So why ARE you still walking, asshole? Nobody liked the
shrines you left at the four corners of the city to measure the sprawl of Tucson,
somebody misunderstood “the open doors of our wounds” and wrecked and stomped
it out. Nobody made the decisions you asked them to make as with the rabbits,
to destroy (and destruction/creation are one process) to save and keep (what
can never be really kept. Nobody. Nobody there. Never nobody there. WHY are you
still walking?”
“...into the broken world...”
“to
walk and keep on walking until I can find that distance that can see us
whole...to measure the human stupidity that’s destroying its own habitat, to
make the most absurd gesture I can at the absurdity...”
“Why
on earth?’ and he,
‘Where
else?’
‘OK,
fair enough, but what’s with the dummies you’re carrying, the one on top looks
kinda gruesome.”
‘That’s
‘The Crying Child’ her head came from a resuscitation dummy called
‘Resuscitation Annie’. Her father donated the mold from her face to that cause
saying,‘If it can save one child’s life...’ so I was hoping it could save a
whole lot of children’s lives by waking up some adults.’
‘And
how’s that working out for you?’
‘People
get upset and that’s the message, but explaining how that relates to the
fragility of the human and natural community is another deal. And the other
dummy is ‘The Child Of The Land’ made from papers, old audio and video tape,
scraps of cloth, cigarette butts, just things I picked up along the way...’
‘The
Invisible Community?!”
‘Yes,
the community of people who care about the earth but never see each other. If
you want to find it just look at the ground beneath your feet.’
‘O
sure, I know that one, to be universal, you have to be totally local, see the
world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, be global think local,
right?’
‘Because
there are subatomic particles that dance with each other across untold
distances of time and space, because the community doesn’t end at the city
limit sign, because the rest of the world is the rest of you...’
‘O
man, you’re really nowhere, aren’t you?’
‘Anything
you say, you people who know everything are very irritating to those of us who
do.’
‘But
WHY?’
‘Why
do eagles circle the medicine man’s spirit pole, why do physicists say reality
is just information, why when coming back to your home town is there this bunch
of numbness called numbers, because if LOCAL doesn’t look OUTWARD it becomes
slit eyed and incestuous, like any group of people left alone to decide their
own significance for themselves...and because artists have to live with
contradictions.’
‘Dude,
like, what EVERRR.’
“Because what might have been never dies...and so ghosts are
born” at this late date....
and with so much of my work and life behind me, littered
with the horrible empty places, art and documentary photos left out in the
rain, becoming part of the nature I’m trying to learn to live with , poems and
stories stored in crashed hard drives, audio and video tapes lost or
disintegrated in the sun, photos lost on my lost cell phones,
at this late date
in the late afternoon shadows of this darkening here and now
in a sleepy little town out west, a man is grabbing my ladder like a parent
with a problem child as if he could help. I don’t want any help, I want for him
to stop talking and being so full of monetary angst and let me just put a
little piece of my work back together again. His neurotic presence is sending
out shock waves, standing waves of confusion. I want him to disappear. NOW. I
can’t stand him. But he can’t disappear, he is a ghost. Over and over he says,
“I can’t have you working here anymore, my tenants lost a
client because of you..,..” he says I have
“....a professionalism that just isn’t there...’” he says,
“...there are so many things...”
each of which he could have analyzed thoroughly each and any
time over the years I lost my art and brain cells working on his crap on the
roof until now I am crap, boxed, wrapped and so labeled, could have dealt in
particulars and looked at both sides of the story, had he cared, if he ever
even thought there might be more than one game going on....
but it’s late, too late for that, come to this sad point
he had to hurt me at the end. I knew there was an anger in his perfectionism, and now here at the end of the world, I really do, an angry disappointment, as in all human relationships when we’re just
not good enough for each other and there are no answers, just shadows, just the bare bones of the unforgiving material world
and night falls too swiftly. The Stirling engines in the Sandia mountains
overlooking Albuquerque are turning their giant mirrors, like sleepy eyelids,
down toward the earth, in Altamira Spain similar mechanical eyes are slowly
opening to salute the morning sun, 90 mi north of Dallas near a little town
called St. Jo, wind turbines, a hundred feet tall, are revolving their slow tai
chi semaphore., 90 miles south west of Phoenix the world’s largest solar
electric plant has stored in liquid salt, enough heat to make enough
electricity to throw enough swift lightning judgment to wipe out my misery a
thousand times over. It is so peaceful and whole in those places, because “so
many things” are put back into process....
but what is there to say, and who’s to say it? I can’t say
anything about “so many things”. I can’t say they didn’t lose a client because
of me. I can only stare at the black hole of his mouth while he lectures, remembering
the picture that got me so upset earlier in the day when I was stressed to
begin with: a grinning, overweight bride trailing a long veil behind her in
front of a painted backdrop of distant mountains at night, surrounded by the
smell of cheap perfumed curtains, the values by which he proposed to bring up
the neighborhood, the shop owners prancing around me in tight jeans and high
heels telling me, loud and angry, that
my work truck was in the way of their customer after I’d gone out of my way,
done my best to direct her cute little Porsche into a very large parking space,
but she didn’t want to fix the problem, she just wanted to pitch a bitch. My
truck HAD to be SOMEWHERE. I would have moved it a half block away had they
just asked, but they didn’t want to solve the problem, either, they wanted to
get mad, throw their weight around, be somebody.
If only I had that time back when I thought there was
somebody to be, when I believed in service, but now no matter what I do or say
they and he will always be right and I will always be wrong. The honor is too
great but nobody asked because nobody cares what I think.
Suddenly one moment, I am a moment taken out of context,
stripped naked before the almighty judge of all judges. Wait! I’m starting to
see a pattern. Now I remember ANYTHING bad that ever happened there was always
my fault. I was so important I was responsible for the world situation. A
century ago my helper brushed by the cheapest board in the world which was
leaning against a truss (a MO MENT beam at that) in a dark attic in the annex
and it fell (had to fall) on the most expensive table in the world. Any court
in the world would have said it was the landlord and commercial tenant’s
responsibility not to have debris like that lying around where it could fall on
somebody’s head and make them a lot stupider than they already were. And HE
said,
“What the fuck are you doing, Dennis?!” and I was thinking,
What the fuck was I doing THERE. I told him early on, his
perfect furniture scared the crap outa me and he just said, with a sly grin
that presaged a thickening plot,
“O it’s not REALLY perfect, just looks that way.”
So gradually I began to understand it was no accident I got
blamed for every accident. I always knew there was an anger in those smooth,
tight assed lines and that perfect shine thru which I saw the griefs of the
ages, the slow rot of invested ego, the nothing from which everything comes
screaming. I look and bony fingers clutch my throat.
It
had been a bad day sorting through messes of wires with a phone company toner
to find the one some Doofus had broke into and transferred from the Evaporative
Cooler on the roof to a radio controlled light, I asked myself: do I mess with
another man’s work and try to hook it back up, or just leave the circuit the
way it was originally supposed to be?
This unexpected chore had taken too much time from other jobs. I decided
to leave things the way they were before he started. It was a bad call. I
didn’t realize how upset I was.
But
it’s not about that. It’s not about him, it’s not about me. It’s about fear of
death creating moments.
In one of which I’m one of those street people who bother
him, who he, so appalled from his high and perfect chair, lectures to get a job
and do something, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, be more than they can
be as the sad result of the preciousness of the filthy rich New Yorkers his
business appeals to.
O so you’re saying people don’t have a right to have
beautiful things?
The trial is over, Mr. Prosecutor, you can stop putting
words in my mouth. I’m saying there’s a
problem with that beauty. It only works
in a little room closed off from the rest of the world and universe, with the
hungry eyes of the poor looking in the windows...
O so you’re a Marxist?
No more than you’re an objective observer. I’m just saying this is all EGO, a time based
concept with nothing real to hold on to, a thing of the MOMENT, a greedy,
frightened little figment of the imagination, holding on with white knuckles to
the time that is its life....MO MENTS here with us again and death and fear of
death, always with us, that breaks the MO MENTS off from the stream, moments
bringing us faster and faster to the end of the world because you can’t figure
them back into the dynamic...the incompleted gesture can’t die. The unsexy
tight jeans and high heels still prance and the harpy voices still beg for
importance. Their self important screech takes me back to when I was Self
Appointed Artist In Residence To The A Mountan Homeless Encampment, had a free
store and library made of pallets, a librarian, even, did concerts with my one
man band and conversational portraits of the residents, for almost a
year...until somebody shit in an alley behind one of the neighbors’yards and
then all hell broke loose and there was a lynch mob of people also trying to
make themselves feel important by pointing fingers and hollering, and a giant
city councilperson joined in the puffery and said “The people of Menlo Park are
entitled to immediate relief.” What about the guy who took a shit? Maybe he
thought, at the time that he was entitled to immediate relief? He was wrong so
maybe other people could be wrong about that. What about the A Mountain Homeless Community, what
happened to their entitlement? I knew
those bums, I knew each one had some talents that could have contributed had we
not isolated them, boxed them out, drew lines between us and them to please our
own insecure egos. I knew they weren’t smart or cruel enough to measure up to
business standards, but their days were full of the hours we had lost forever,
their time was one with process from which all our profitability was divorced,
theirs was the ragged symmetry of old trees that offended him.
I came back to the encampment, one last time, dressed as a
clown, because clowns know all about death and moving on, and left a shrine
there, an offering to the bulldozer and the gentrification steamroller, moving
us all on, through thousands of years of daily dread.
Wrong
conversation. Wrong universe. It’s not about me and him or you and whoever.
It’s about THIS: contrary to F. H. Bradley, time is NOT moments OR a stream,
moments are a fabrication, and for me there would NOT ever anymore BE MOMENTS,
except as fantasy to which I’m vulnerable, but nothing real, anymore than any
other lines and boxes and teseracts drawn, DRAGGED, kicking and screaming, into
space. Moments are just mental furniture, full of dead bodies and broken dreams
that cry at night, moments are a flawed concept, like particles, lines on a
map, solid objects, personalities, boxes of data, a fatal grasp at a straw
poll. In an effort to save time as moments we are losing the world as process.
In an effort to measure global warming as this chemical, that methane farting
microbe, and that forest fire and that hurricane and that THIS and that THAT we
come up with an underestimate of global temperature rise and every other factor
by over a hundred percent every year. We try to talk about CO2 as if it meant
anything by itself, we have a desperate need to make “things” and take “things”
out of context and process, and we are more concerned with counting sheep than
the fact that our ability to see the world is WRONG, WRONG, ALL
WRONG!!
NO
moments, no baseball cards to collect, no little monsters peering out of
scrapbooks, no happy bride and groom trailing streamers, tin cans and good
wishes, like the chorus in Oedipus said, call no man happy until he is dead, no
NOWs no THENs no WHENs, no IFs ANDs or BUTs, there is only process, moments
don’t work philosophically, psychologically, scientifically, ecologically,
personally, spiritually, physically, militarily, politically, no moments,
moments are just gift wrapped fear of death
Building
boxes
Boxes
to put data in it, put it in the mainframe, telling it to add the boxes while
in process they multiply themselves and each other by exponents,
Boxes,
so called houses, to put people in and take them out of time, and the natural
community so ghosts damn well WILL hide in the corners and chatter and giggle
on the radio about sports and fashions and holiday recipes while unnatural
natural disasters multiply themselves and each other.
So
Casa Goofy International has to be about making a home for travelers, a home
where all spaces flow into all other spaces and the outside and inside are only
zones of a habitat with no lines between the human and the natural community, no
lines made of ink or giant cement walls
or the eight foot high rusty corrugated sheet metal fences at La Frontera in
Nogalles, sagging with the weight of the hundreds of crude white crosses spay
painted on it and the weight of the misery on either side. Casa Goofy International has to become the community
of those few humans who understand their anatomy has evolved over hundreds of
thousands of years, hundreds of arches, springs and whips just to conceive the
proposition that walking is letting go to go on (and on)
Falling
Forward
Across
border and boundary
Into
the stream where no one casts him
self
up
on
the waters with
out
drifting a
way
and
there is no
place
like
home
so
when I when can put a tiny bit of the web of life back together, then a little
bit of “us” goes back together. Like in the performance in which I asked people
how they felt about global warming, before and after putting flowers in their
hands, they almost always nonverbally understood the connection, that death and
life were one process and the self itself is a political construct, a legal
fiction, like a bad marriage based on lies and family money stolen at great
effort, has to implode like a house made of bodies (on our backs)...that was a
performance called “HOUSE”
Done
at the old blood bank next to the Rialto, where I and a partner danced, with
bodies on our backs, exchanged them during the dance, made a HOUSE of them,
that fell of its own weight, waiting in winter night for the TIME to come....ah
god, I’m sorry, sorry I can’t talk because for so long nobody could listen...
Sorry
about getting blood on the floor when Flower The Clown met the artists’
planning committee, cut his arm, got blood on the book about St. Lucy and
crossing the river of blood, and said,
“Every
road is a wound.” And some ran out of the room and vomited, sorry, how else do
you explain we’re killing the earth? They liked it as a poem, but what did they
think the word, “blood”meant? But I lost that too, now only the silence
understands, at 2:30 in the morning when I wake up and souls fly and unborn
ghosts cry, and nothing of love remains... the only way I could have saved it
was to give it to someone else, and I failed, nothing we can keep except what
we gave,
Unhappy
mind please stop thinking, unhappy ghosts please find a home in motion,
or
as I wrote in the dedication to the house I built,
Not
insulation but inspire
Ation,
the breathing
Shell
of us intereacting
Earth,
air, fire and water to raise
The
sap from
Hell
to
Heaven
because
Event
Uallly
we will need
Everything
We
left out even
The
lies we told to save
Our
structure
Of
care
And
so it goes, and so soon gone, count your fingers, count your toes, count your
blessings count your woes, your moments, your tragedies woven into a wedding
VEIL, scripted or improvised, but always going going gone.
“But you SAID, there’s nobody there.”
“Then tell HIM to SHUT UP then!...but he CAN’T, he has to attack
me because of “so many things” here at the end of so many things, because he’s
afraid he’s nobody, he WON’T because what might have been never dies...’
“...and so I entered
the broken world...”
the world of broken time, broken egos, broken people trying
to put the pieces of themselves and their time back together, all your friends
and lovers flying apart forever after the big bang....
“But why were you walking in your sleep through all that,
why didn’t you know what those people’s anger was all about THEN!? Why didn’t
you say or DO SOMETHING?!”
“If I knew that, I’d know enough to live....but it was kind
of like the Turtle when the detectives asked him how he could let a bunch of
adolescent snails mug him. He said,
“I dunno, it all happened so FAST!”
fast the way the road goes HERE now HERE now now now HERE
going going GONE the road goes HERE NOW past the broken Sajuaro where there was
a LONG object lesson called,
SECRET
IDENTITY (personal and mathematical) which set out to prove that nature has
that intelligence we lack but shit just happened like déjà vu all over again.
It was an outdoor gallery on the same road I travel now and then up to the
restaurant that ambition ruined. The gallery started as a trail of flood light
bulbs screwed into the ground to reflect messages from the stars leading to…
a
five gallon bucket buried in the ground, and the instructions that you got from
a sheet stuffed in a hole in a Sajuaro at the trailhead. It says dig the dirt
off and lift the lid and look down. There’s a mirror in the earth in the bottom
of the bucket, so who are you now,
Who
IS it now? And where is the love?
And
look up from where you are kneeling and there’s a ragged poster, Einstein’s
face in a greasewood bush. Einstein came from dirt, words came from dirt, NOW
do you believe in the intelligence of nature? NOW, beaten up as I am and still
struggling, NOW DO I BELIEVE? In “Teleos” the end seeking thinking, presence of
all things in one, in “Logos” the making manifest…or was it all just an amazing
sci fi accident? As you go on down the trail and find rabbits in a cage with a
note that says,
“You
can feed us and leave us in the cage, or let us go free where we’ll surely die,
it’s come to this…” Come to this for you and me too. And you go on down the trail
to suddenly find a dead dog surrounded by flowers under a sign that has a quote
from Samson Et Delilah,
“C’est
Beau, Ne Ce Pas, Le Fin Du Monde?”
Beautiful
is it not, the end of the world?
Well,
is it or isn’t it? Hurry up and decide, there isn’t much time left. Hurry up
and appreciate the beauty in the horror that’s killing us with fast food and
smart bombs. What consciousness, what movies do we need for the end of the
world? And who do we want to watch them with? It was just a nice, silent scream,
to say,
“L
O O K !”
a
nice quiet little ritual for me and a few friends, one of whom came, one cold
sunset afternoon, found me lying on the ground in a little arroyo, took me, as
I hoped she would, for dead, and screamed…and then said, “THIS PART WAS OVERDONE!!!”
See,
anonymous as I am, everybody’s a critic and an expert, everybody wants to get
in on the act.
Then
she laughed and led me, cold and shivering, to her car, gave me some warm
clothes, but never the place in her arms I so desperately wanted, though she
wrote articles about me for High Performance Magazine and other journals that
were like being made love to in public. We had dinner one perfect night at Tia
Elena restaurant and then she disappeared into the ozone and the lights of Topanga Canyon in LA…
“You
loved her, didn’t you?” a girlfriend said,
suddenly,
over supper.
If
you can love a bird that leaves its shadow on the floor as it flies across your
window, yes. But those passions and sometime loves are gone now, remain only in
memory, only as ghosts and problems of perception…which all boils down to one
problem…
the problem of representation, not just the one Freud
mentions in his journal: the dream censor edits all dream content to
consciousness so then all decisions become political, all character becomes an
expedient including which self we are at what time and in whose company. In
whose company you’d want to live in a safe static world, made of a piece of
time broken off from the whole non linear process and in whose company you’d
want to watch those movies about the end of the world as process…
“SO
YOU’RE SAYING...
‘I’m
an artist, so I can do anything I want, even if it’s breaking the law.’” The
prosecutor said, and I said,
“No
I’m saying Webster defines littering as the random scattering of garbage, and
my piece, (SECRET IDENTITY) had order, intent and coherence so it doesn’t fit
that definition.”
And
he said,
“So
you’re saying, ‘I’m an artist, so I can do anything I want…”’ and the court, to
save its legal fictions and the entire lie, the premise on which its stone
faced legal logic is based, bought, swallowed HIS argument, hook, line and
group ego, also a figment of NOW but LATER, he said....
And
I asked one of the cops in court, after explaining the piece to him,
“So,
you understand now that I’m not a Satanist?”
And
he said no, he didn’t understand that. Because two hysterical teenage girls saw
the rabbits and imagined ritual sacrifices
“He
KILLED those rabbits!” they said, “in a SATANIC ritual, there was blood and
guts all over the place! It was horrible! We SAW it!”
They SAW it in their minds, and their hysteria planted that one still image in
the cop’s mind and in all the other minds that day in court…you see the human
mind…(HEY WAIT! Is this some kind of JOKE?)
just
the same way as the image of my friends pouring gasoline on me after I set
myself on fire in front of the federal building, was planted into all the
brains in court by this retired fire dept. widget counter coming down the hill
seeing them throwing water on me after I gave the signal that it was getting
too hot underneath those burning newspapers about the first Gulf War,
underneath all those frag meants of collective bargaining called NEWS.
A fireman described
in intimate detail a gasoline can that my friends used, the description was
perfect, but no such can was ever there. So much for eyewitness testimony, so
much for the law as a search for the truth instead of an arbitration of
collective illusions.
Like the illusions of logic, scientists use to separate C02
from methane from loss of reflectance from the death of coral from forest fires
from rising heat that makes people turn up the thermostat that causes blackouts
(for drunks too) and THAT’S why their predictions of ice melt, ocean level
rise, deaths of coral and threatened species are consistently under estimates
by over 100%? WHAT!? You’re saying scientists could be WRONG?! Then YOU are
CRAZY. And all I can say, is, that is EXZACKLY why Dianne Keaton’s....
“Well! La De Dah!”
is a very SERIOUS philosophy. It’s what you say to a falling
ice shelf, a burning forest, a nuclear plant going underwater during a tsunami,
another nuclear plant accident exhausting all the bone marrow supplies in the
world, a hurricane a world wide heat wave where the hotter it gets the faster
it gets to be the big NOTHING from which it all came, screaming, crying in
birth and death in everything that all rolls in at once to THE GREAT UNDOING...
“Well! La De Dah!”
because what else can an all too human human say? Since when
did we know enough to say anything more cogent...
it’s gonna have to happen just like everything else that
happened before I KNEW before my mind learned to put it in the REAL file, and
THEN I COULDA said, yeah, things really are that bad, people really are that
corrupted, scared and selfish. But I needed a special kind of awareness, like a
Samurai, an awareness that wasn’t there, I needed an all wise mentor who was
always there for me, but still sometimes I’d lose, there’s just too much grief
in the world, because it was never “me” or “you” or “them”, it was a million
years...
of moments broken from the stream
“...and so I entered
the broken world.”
But shitty as life with others gets sometimes, and for all
that was taken without asking, this much is given, that we can hold dirt and
water and seeds in our hands and look up at the stars.
And just once, one MOMENT if you’ll give me that, I was
lucky enough to make enough money to go back to NYC to create an object lesson
about how the world of process got broken up into moments and separate motions.
My friend’s kid said,
“You gonna be the oldest guy I know to tag up.”
I put five gallons of paint and some rollers in a back pack
and took them out to the Coney Island layup yards at 2:30 a.m. and painted a
series of “NOW”s and “THEN”s, across the QB VIA BRIGHTON, each“now” and “then”
as tall and long as the car it was on, and a small series of“NOW THIS NOW THAT
NOW THIS NOW THAT THEN THIS JOY THAT GRIEF THIS ONE THAT ONE NOW…” ran in small
print through the big words. Then I went, with my photographer friend, Masca,
who kept muttering,
“I
can’t believe this trip.”
to
take pictures of people getting into a “NOW” riding away in it until it became
a “THEN”,arriving at the station in a “NOW” and walking out into a stream of
motion, but more importantly, I wanted their REACTIONS to the discovery of the
play and all its propositions which they were acting out in real time, real
life…
What
I didn’t figure on was New Yorkers don’t react to anything. They didn’t even
notice, that their whole world had become a stage, they couldn’t hear me
screaming “theater” in a crowded fire where the hotter it gets the faster it
gets hotter.
And
they can’t hear me screaming at the speaker of the radio in this service truck
at talk shows, so called because the hosts don’t know how to listen, when
scientists, even on NPR, analyze global warming factors as if they weren’t
IMAGINARY parts of giant feedback loops that are themselves only imaginary
parts of a whole we, obviously, CAN’T imagine..
“OK so how DO you
figure it? And what’s that got to do with the price of eggs in China?
I thought I was just explaining that, Joe. Or what part of
the word“international” don’t you understand in the name “Casa Goofy
International”,and what part of the joke of time implied in it don’t you
get?...
as my service truck
slides across the curving white lines on I-10 as if it was a giant skating rink
and the lights of vehicles string out into the desert darkness between here and
El Paso and Mexico City and out to other nowheres in our scattered to
everywhere existence and time comes back together somewhere out there in those
distances all the arguments boil down to WORDS versus SILENCE...and guess who
wins....
It was always Ladybug Man even when he was a nameless “Dead
Baby Janitor”man carrying burdens, dead relatives on his back, into the dark of
Congress Street, into the broken night of the living dead the neon NOW, NOW,
NOW, NOW....and when he was that nameless hulk, Colosal Man, in Colossal Man Blues
at CRASH Gallery in Phoenix, ego as a time based concept....NOW I.....(STEP,
STEP, (BEAT) NOW I THIS I ((BEAT) STEP, STEP) NOW I THIS I (STEP, STEP, (BEAT))
NOW I THIS I (PAUSE, LOOK BACK (BEAT)) WHICH I? (GOING BACK METHODICALLY OVER
THE SAME STEPS, BEATS & STATIONS) NOTHING YOU CAN SAY ((BEAT) STEP STEP)
NOTHING YOU CAN SAY (STEP, STEP, (BEAT) NOTHING YOU CAN SAY etc. etc. and THEN)
(let’s try to put it all together...) NOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW (but it’s still
broken into FRAG MEANTS (because with every increase in transportation,
communication, & innovation we live in more times and places and faces...
And so I entered the broken
And so you said....and I said
Colossal Man, the man who is all and none of us, moves with
a will that comes from all and none of us like this TRAFFIC that just can’t go
to HELL fast enough and all this desperate machinery that memory by memory,
empty hurting hole escalating want and need by missing child BECOMES us, and so
it all goes...
to romance a constant pleading that time itself be healed,
made whole, like victims in a car wreck or the train that stopped suddenly on
our way to snowy Kansas one Christmas to see the relatives...a man thrown from
his car lying, face turned up to the light falling through the falling snow, turning
blue as I feel sometimes, the passengers couldn’t stop talking, trying to put
it together, ‘I dunno, it all happened so fast’, unhappy mind can’t stop
thinking...
Like a flock of birds in a haystack in a field of harvested
corn, some birds come, some birds go but the song goes on through Facts Of Our
Lives F.O.O.L. at the old Rialto Theatre when the stage was still full of
concrete rubble and twisted rebar from a boiler explosion, objects people gave
me, with stories attached, hung around the room on photo backdrop paper, taken
down, made into books, given to other people, all the sad, true stories, all
that pain, taken down given to other people, met, made whole, for about a split
second and then life and death goes on, with those little black patches of
nothing that land on the world in a dying Brownian movement, making holes in
everything...
Missing children. Dead languages. Extinct species. Lost
poems. Don’t you understand what’s happening here?
“Death ain’t nothing, Dennis. I seen it in the war, in the
hospital, and it’s nothing.”
It’s too much nothing, photos, audio and video tapes left
out in the rain, sad true stories like gold lost in a black patch of physical
Alzheimer’s, like the blank spaces in DeKooning’s later paintings. You see, the
human mind Hey! Wait! This is all some kind of joke, right?
So Flower The Clown took all the karma of Tucson,
AZ and floated it up into the sky in a
giant bananna.
As I take the rent sometimes heart aching for them...woman
deserted, pregnant, ekeing out a living bartending, voice hoarse, cracking from
second and first hand cigarette smoke, alcohol fumes & drinking. And with
this evidence of their own folly & misapprehension of what it’s all about
standing there before them, men will still slap the bar, one coarse, stupid
joke after another, and I’m right in there with them because I hurt like they
do, and you? You who think you know
enough, ever swift to judge and find wanting, you who get off on legal
punishment, you with little black legal holes in your own brain that keep you
from understanding the billions of years that made them, made those awful
people what they are...what YOU are...
That tell me, the traffic will not allow it, listen to it
howl like the third ring of hell, telling me,
I can’t DO this! The broken world will not have it, it will
tease me with false hopes and minor successes and try to break me with reality.
Sometimes...
Sometimes I fall asleep at the wheel and see and hear my
dead father who never liked me until he got old and crazy, inviting me over to
the other side, I catch myself and jerk the wheel back, correct the descent
into a hell full of GHOSTS.. Ghosts who always told me I could NOT do this!
Ghosts howling in the wind past my windshield on the road to
the Third World Gallery Circuit where we might get out of the local rut where
the infighting is so bitter because the stakes are so small, might escape the
broken value system made of TIME and SPACE torn apart by dollars floating on
Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, codifying,
COMMODIFYING, COMMODE....I......FY....ING
And destroying the spirit, the SKY can’t stop crying,
unhappy mind can’t stop thinking, DRIVE, he said, FOR GOD’S SAKE
Watch
the derelect moments, drift like leaves and garbage
across the street in the wind.
But
I still remember, and I still know things, I always knew things that other
people didn’t know or denied knowing, and a lot of other people know them too
but can’t cop to them, or for whatever reason, like me, sat forever in a chair
in the corner, with a rag stuffed in their mouth and were invited to s peak.
“So
you’re saying everything is totally fucked!!”
a
young, grungy punk woman screamed at The Ladybug Man as he carried his
“children” past her one night from where she sat and sulked under a bridge.
I
didn’t say, and I hadn’t said, one god damned thing. I was nothing but an
image, but you get an image past the platform of lies we call character in the
front brain into the back brain, past the lies of the dream censor, and then
the argument is over---no matter how many words come out as cover up... (which
we all know by now is worse than the crime)...
Cover
up that we’re adding the heat of suns of centuries past to a global situation
where the computer adds the boxes of data while the world of process where all
ego dreads to tread is multiplying it by strange attractor factors....for which
we have no calculus...what with time broken into moments and process broken
into categories and space broken into countries, states, towns....you see the
human mind...hey WAIT! I always THOUGHT it was some kind of joke...but if you
have to explain them it’s like trying to make a live bird out of spare
parts...some kind of joke like time, like when
I
was being cited for,
“Unlicensed
bar b que pit, burning with dense smoke and odor.” For setting myself on fire in
front of The Federal Building, the firemen who got there in time to put out my
ashes, asked me what it meant and I said,
“The
hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter.”
And
they laughed at me and said,
“Why
do you guys always pick such negative ways of saying things?”
They
didn’t understand. The fire was already burning when I got there. All I did was
make it visible.
“...and so I entered
the broken world...”
where the Docs gave my sister electro shock, drug shock, and
drugged her the rest of her life, shrunk her brain, that had to be some kind of
joke...that black patch of nothing where there was a little girl I used to play
hide and seek with in and out of a stack of old tires at an abandoned WW II
airbase, haunted by ghosts that spoke to me out of trunks full of soldier’s
letters,
“Dear Mary, my leg is almost healed...”
and a piper cub cropduster made of canvas and aluminum
tubing droned through the hot New Mexico
afternoon full of nothing you could touch and hold...
my sister was always almost
a whole person, because the banks tell the drug companies
the areas they can do research in because like Willie Sutton the actor said,
that’s where the money is, and the drug companies tell the docs how to practice
medicine so they can pay off the student loans and the overhead and the
mortgages and the traffic flows up the highway over the bones of the Indians
and the bones of the buffalo and what the hell am I doing here too busy
chopping wood to build a better stove, working on machinery that never really
worked in the first place?
Not much to talk about in the engine room of the Titanic
where you always knew too much
And too little
What the fuck are you doing, Dennis?
Stomping around in this body that thinks it’s doing
something, breaking things and damn proud of it by day and cries at night for
love
And so I entered the dark of Texas....
In 1986
I took the audience into a boarded up, abandoned theater,
(the Fox). It would have been breaking
and entering except nobody gave a shit, sat on the dusty, pigeon shitted stage
and talked about “the tallgrass prairie , birds and crickets singing loud
enough to make the heart break pondering its own smallness, hushed voices down
by the river, and I talked to grandfather about having to leave the old farm
and led him and the audience outside into the futures, stock futures, human
figures flying across dead TV sets, then suddenly under the streamers going up
to the big dark transformers on telelphone poles at the alley exit, my naked
body revolved on a gravity machine like it was being ground up in the machinery
of the city.
Still walking
Trying to find a distance where I can see us all whole
Someplace where those black patches of death those holes in
people, that horrible flat dull nothing can be at least enough something to
grieve over
And
what IS left, after the leaving?
Do
I still believe? That Wordsworth’s “primal sympathy” still runs through all
things, after the things we’ve done? Broke and beaten by the stupid all too
human system, do I still believe in the intelligence of nature, the healing
sympathy of the natural community? It was a lot easier to believe a long time
ago, before divorce taught me that words don’t mean anything, that life and
shit just happens and I never could hold on to
One
damn thing.
and so, on the sidewalk just outside The Rialto, I had a
stew pot and a sign that said
“Come In. Sit down. Have something to eat. Tell me a story.”
and one guy came in in the middle of the process and said,
I feel a lot of pain here
I’d been carrying a lot of pain in the two dummies in the
back room with no place to call home....carrying a lot of pain also for
assholes in high places who, to maintain their abstract self respect, had to
call other people assholes, people I’d looked up to automatically like saluting
the flag or the kiss of habit, they dominated and beat me down, I guess they
had to, all broken and jacked up like they were on artificial foods, legal and
illegal drugs and values, the sanctimonious self congratulatory tone in yoga
class, the sneers at expensive parties when it was my duty to go to them,
lawyers and judges, who thought they knew enough, who thought they had a
license to judge your heart and soul, and never no PLACE left.
Though there SEEMS to be one where I can still sit at sunset
under the shade in the combination outdoor kitchen and potting shed, listen to
crickets and frogs and feel like maybe one small piece of the broken world is
OK. It’s cleaning up the mess of my fucked up life, putting a few broken pieces
together to see if they can remember when they were part of the whole, and it
SHOULD concern you because it’s cleaning up your mess too.
It’s spiritual, physical and cultural survival at The Great
Undoing time, its making inspirational spaces from which to see yourself whole,
it’s....not finished...is it even feasible? But now, when I lie down and lean
over to unstop a siphon, there’s an old man looking up at me from the pond water,
and there’s something dark in his eyes, a shadow hanging over him, something he
needs to get done before it’s time to go...
and the pond water flows in his mind into Arroyo Chico years
ago where the wind ripples its ever changing sunset colors under overhanging
mesquites and tamarisks
and I stand there, dressed as a Groucho Marx type clown, in
the middle, water up to my pants legs, a cigar in my mouth, Groucho Marx
glasses on, letting go of the strings to a bundle of helium balloons in one
hand, pulling an all white boat I made out of cardboard, full of bones and lit
candles in the other, “crossing over to the other side”, where there was a
little island full of trees,
where, as the night settled in, I set up a giant cardboard
hand and set fire to it...
it was an homage to a dead child. The balloons were carrying
notes from the audience to him.
He was a resident plumber who used to sit in the basement of
the doomed International Arts Center playing with his incredible art machines,
that somehow, along with a lot of self medication, never replaced his first
dad, anymore than the four other stepdads his mother found for him in her
pursuit of happiness in the coarse course of human events. His friends found
him either high as a kite or too depressed to move and one day the executive
secretary found him
in his room, dead for a day or two, she screamed and walked
out...
The Arts Center was like him, going from one stupid,
bumbling, self absorbed step parent to another, while I worked, desperately
trying to make the Air Conditioning system use less and less energy with every
trick I knew and always falling short of my goal, for lack of money and help
and brains, while meanwhile back in the jungle of commerce the gentrification
steamroller full of heavy dirty politics and the griefs of the ages was heading
straight for us. At the end I set fire to a giant cardboard bird and sailed it
across a guerilla mural I made of COLOSSAL MAN, to take The International Arts
Center also, to the other side, with the words...
D E S T R O Y A
R T
Running across it
And I crawled from the wreckage but I didn’t get the message
because for ever after I’ve wanted revenge,
for CRIMES AGAINST CONSCIOUSNESS, like those committed by
the doctors who gave my sister electro shock and drug shock and shrunk her
brain leaving those horrible voids, those pieces of NOTHING too much nothing,
like photographs left out in the rain, to even have the memory to grieve over,
and CRIMES AGAINST CONSCIOUSNESS perpetrated by the city fathers and mothers,
the movers and shakers who (and you and I will have to know this in secret) are
all actually controlled by
THE BANALITY GANG
it’s made up of spiteful little people who don’t want to
look beyond the city limit sign, don’t want anybody else looking either, don’t
want anything positive happening to ruin their grumps, just try to do one good
thing and they’ll find a way to shoot you down and maintain the status quid pro
quo...
Old man’s face in the water...
This is the universe trying to be self reflective?
This has got to be some kind of joke.
And the NOWs on the train and the NOWs in the neon night
slide over into the dance of NOWs at CRASH gallery in Phoenixwhere COLOSSAL MAN
, man made of (his need to possess, hold on to) MOMENTS MO MENTS (turn ings)
make him
LOCO MOTO VA CA SHUN MAN
MO MENTS, partial partially kept becomeS a colossal ego
called COLOSSAL MAN the Colossus of Self made, self destructive self important
broken therefore arrogant MIND
He denies process its due he dances
NOW THIS NOW THAT NOW THIS
Addresses his beloved dead moment in a chicken carcass
“Cherie, Jesus is down at the electric plant counting his
money, his eyes his sometime loves
CHERIE something is missing from our relationship, you have
grown cold....
He puts his shoulder to the floor & revolves around it
his feet walking in orbit around that pointless point in time his self
Puts on motorcycle helmet , swim goggles, plays keyboard and
sings
Colossal Man, Colossal Man
You got some colossal blues
You can’t stop walking
wearin out my mortal shoes
Drops to the floor, the drum machine thumping slowly, crawls
from the wreckage
(you’d think he’d get the message)
crawls up to his CHERIE lights candle on her bare breast ,
toots a whistle just once, falls on the candle
dies
Colosal Man RIP but the moments go on separating frag
meenting into eternity...
AND IN OTHER LOCAL NEWS TODAY
OLD MAN’S FACE IN THE WATER GOING BACK TO THE BIG NOTHING
My slit eyed little town
Man carrying dummies, a janitor
Carrying a dead baby in TOTALLY CONCEPTUALIZED SANITATION
DEAD BABY JANITOR
Man carrying dead relatives, man with bodies on his back
Setting them down to dig a grave picking them up again
walking walking, “NEVER AGAIN WILL I GO WALKING....” it said in the Tohono O’odham
book of rituals that we were using for an I Ching just before the journey.,...”NEVER
AGAIN LIKE A HO-OPOOO WILL I GO WALKING....”
Trying to find that distance that could make my sorry ass
whole
Lonely walking phantom little boy seeing the blackness Jack
Kerouac looked into looking for the father we never knew his lost dad and lost
bro unable to love his lost suicidal daughter drinking himself to death
throwing that last chance at parent child love away
Into the NOWS
That broken cannot find each other
Never see each other, and so never know, there’s more than
one game going on
The NOWS in the neon night he crawled out into, the neon
night he created
Crawled up the street almost naked untying bound &
gagged people
What was binding in relationships in man-on-the-street
interviews playing on the loudspeakers
And the rock musicians complained & the authorities
complied, GET THAT ART OUT OF THE ARTS DISTRICT! WE’RE TRYING TO MAKE A LITTLE
MONEY AROUND HERE, REVITALIZE THE INNER CITY, HAVEN’T YOU HEARD!?
Yeah I heard that, said the man with bodies on his back, so
what else is new?
Dancing with woman with bodies on her back the cha cha the
fox trot, the lindy the waltz the dance of time as we know it
Bodies exchanged during love making piled up to make a HOUSE
that falls of its own weight wait waiting in winter nite
For the time to be right
The audience files out thru the wreckage the wet paint flung
at each other files out thru the arch of the couple’s two loving arms raised to
hold a single candle above their heads walks a half block to the bus depot to
sit in the waiting room watching the directions depart into the night, all the
distances of night across America
And the spiteful little man watched and said,
To leave the storefront and walk thru chaos and wet paint
and down the street to the bus depot is a very silly ending
Sorry Bob, sorry you got your shoes wet
But I was glad he got to act out that universal arrogance of
judgment of dad and all the guys who worked at the Caverns
Your dad sure wasted a lot of money on you didn’t he?
(I worked my way thru college, but I don’t think that would
help his motives.)
And my dad said,
I wouldn’t’ claim kin to him
And all those others who knew everything so they could judge
your heart and soul like a preacher, like a judge, like proud man dressed in a
little brief authority, they all jumped in, and an old man’s face in the mirror
in the café where he washes up after fixing the ridiculous walk-in cooler,
ASKS...
“Can I do this? Can I get revenge in the best sense of the
word, by living well, and (a small boy’s notion of) doing good, I know they say
you don’t leave until you finished what you came here to do, but I had friends
who were beaten or killed before they could say anything who left a big fat
stupid NOTHING behind, flatter and duller, than any grief could ever fill and
it feels like life IS the All-You-Can-Eat Restaurant where the guy comes around
saying,
“That’s all you can eat, now get out.”
Sometimes it feels like I COULD live long enough, when I can
never find anything that fits me in a thrift store, other times that seems to
mean people my size just didn’t have anything to leave behind. Except maybe a
lot of pain with no place to set it down and walk on.
So let us all rise and sing, let us all rise and pray, let
us all say, along with Dianne Keaton and Flower The Clown...
“WELL! LA! DE! DAH!” and let Flower and let us all take all
the Karma of Tucson and float it up into the night sky in a banana shaped hot
air balloon.
I wouldn’t do that again. This time I’d plant it somewhere
to give it roots & return it to the earth from which it came, got more and
more abstracted until nobody could deal with it.
Seeing the green water flowing from one pond into a stock
tank and from there through a sluice full of planting boxes & into another
pond I get excited. Seeing the shadows on the mountain, feeling the shadows on
my mind from past traumas, and seeing that stupid old man looking up at me from
the pond I wonder what I can do, nobody gets to do all that they want and I’ve
already had more chances than most., how many more days left? It seems such an
insurmountable reach.
And you can grow food to eat in the process, you can grow
food and art in small raised beds. You can make ART in water powered Ferris
Wheels and in algae used like grain in a photographic negative, you can give
plants WHEELS in shrines to go, shrines for a fast movin world in SHRINES A GO
GO...you can make CARS into SHRINES A GO GO, there could be an “Injustice Car”
with a vanity plate that says, “JUST IS”, where people get their pictures taken
and record their stories, there could be a lotta things...
But the broken world and the broken people won’t let you do
it.
Because driving past the cemetery I feel in my bones how
final some things like car wrecks and sudden strokes are, how dumb and
miserably banal the silences are afterwards. Like when I hear a program about
torture through the ages on NPR and feel in my bones how there is nothing one
human being will not do to another if they are scared and angry and empty
enough, and there are people born without arms and legs or have had them
removed by war or accident....but I just wish someone had told me early on, how
everything human is war and politics and just how dangerous that can be…without
scaring me to death I mean…
…you see the human brai…..HEY! WAIT! I feel a SONG coming
ON!
If enough people learned to grow food intensively, or just
learned to live within their means, we could save the world from global warming
but enough people never want to do anything, but if a few people grew their own
food they could survive culturally and spiritually...but a few people rarely
have the guts and the time at the same time...
Much less the old guy I suddenly notice looking across two
lanes of traffic from the cement divider. He bends over his bag of papers full
of bits and pieces of the real story about global warming, which if people
could actually put them together would add up to a terror that would be totally
immobilizing, it takes so little to destroy the social fabric. He looks back at
me I look back at him. I want to help him but my jeans are tight, I can’t get
into my pockets, the light’s about to change, I feel something like tears
welling up in my throat, I throw him the thumbs up sign, he throws it back, the
rat race moves on. Go Dogs Go as Dr. Seus says, So WHY
do I keep on doing what I do, growing things, searching for
poetry and renaissance in the dirt? I’m reminded of St. Francis being asked
what he’d do if the world were to end tomorrow. He said he’d just keep on
hoeing his garden. AWWRITE! RIGHT ON, ST FRANCIS, MY MAIN MAN! Once you’re down
on the ground, you’re where it’s at, you got no place to fall. I’m also
reminded, every time I fall in love or otherwise see any other process in
nature or human nature that breaks my heart or self….I’m reminded of these
burly, gnarly dudes---totally another species than my own---catching and
surfing giant waves off the coast of Hawaii, waves larger than ever before
seen, waves created by global warming, waves chasing tiny particles of humanity
on nano specs called surfboards…waves sometimes cresting over and pulling those
specs in, in the undertow. And yet they go on, facing the waves, riding them
high, riding them low, again and again….it reminded me of the challenge to
consciousness in these times….
Just to be here. Just to bear witness. Just to catch the
next wave, even if it’s about to explode over and drown us, just to keep on
running scared and grab for the gusto, the stream of nothing we call
moments….suddenly…that’s the same damn dumb chance we’ve always had…
and the only something I know. And I’m still here, still
walking, still talking, still clowning around, I mean,
SERIOUSLY!!! as the highway curves
into nowheres dotted here and there with mesquite and
chaparral and memories of times I thought knowing more people would relieve the
loneliness, that all too human politics would bear out what my grade school
teacher taught me, that there’s a little good in everyone, before I knew the
slime of self absorption built into the bone, before I knew people who know
everything, and know that others should want what they want, like Catholic
Priests, judges, rapists and child molesters thinking they’re giving their
victims a special treat, nasty little creeps that take up all the wild and wide
open spaces I can find, spoil the trees and tumbleweeds the highway winding up
into sky and distant mountains, stab and twist, nasty little backbiting
gossipers, I’m sorry God, I failed to love them, failed to forgive the
unforgiving, failed to understand how they are me.
And the landscape also is infused with the irony of times I
sat at the dark old table, soft moan of country and western music on the radio,
writing a letter to someone I thought I knew, and so suddenly, like a mugging,
they all leave....and just that suddenly a Harley rider pulls out from the on
ramp onto the fast lane, tall young girlfriend yellow pony tail flashing rows
of ripe wheat in the morning sun, he’s got his boots on and his hard on, lifts
his feet to the front pegs, leans back into her tits and arms, everything a man
needs for a fast sweet ride to a nowhere full of mistaken identities.
And the tires whine into the exit ramp, and the traffic
backs up and swirls and eddies in mini malls, auto dealerships and grocery
store filling station combinations. I’m coming home late, tired of being a
machine working on other machines, tired of beating my head against the wall of
the world, but tired mostly of all the baby ca ca in property management
relationships, it’s too much like home so all the shit from home comes out in
them. And as if in a vision of my inner life right at that MOMENT, I see
a woman kneeling on the dirty cement at an abandoned service
station, Advantage Auto And Transmission Repair, arms stretched out to the
traffic and the night sky. And say to myself nobody takes that position unless
they’re really in trouble. I didn’t know the half of it. I stopped, came back,
stayed in my truck watching her a long time, finally said hey, asked if she
needed anything
She came over, opened a cavernous mouth and in that over
sedated, mournful, dying howl that only drunks can make, asked where a street
corner was that was only a block away. Her breath was so bad the cab stank for
several blocks down the street and she never even got in
And I roll in to the driveway at home, remembering the cry
of a gang leader in Brooklyn where I was a Street Club
Worker for The New York City Youth Board. His name was Jimmy De Jesus and he
said,
“You get out of jail and nobody knows your name.” I’m tired
of people.
But Ladybug Man Home, home to the birds he raised from
babies, the Native American angels, the Ongwehongwe, and the web of life, and
clown home, home to his clown collection, male and female, ripped and torn with
galaxies and volcanoes and birds and animals showing through, and the clown who
came up out of a commode eating an apple for the arts district planning
committee that never got the joke, who came up out of the coffin over and over
and got pushed back in, in Facts Of Our Lives, the clown who waded across the
flooded wash at sunset for the plumber without a mother or father who ODed on
Heroin, pulling a cardboard boat full of bones and candles, holding balloons in
his hand with messages to the dead, set fire to a cardboard hand on the other
side as darkness fell....
Ladybug Man Home. Clown home.
The people across from my place are having a BIRTH day
party, new cars are double parked for half a block up and down the street and
the Chicanas are showing off their legs with shorts so clean and white they
cause temporary blindness. And they’re having a bar B Q party next door. I hear
the cries of insecure little egos, pleading for completion of their mission
that everything should be them, and every head should bow before their vicious
self absorbed gossip, that never fills anything so it has to go on and on,
little bat canines flashing semaphore, what for? Anymore? ME ME ME ME MORE MORE
MORE MORE what I want, what I think is true just keep talking until that makes
it real Why is everything so stupid, why do people have to keep talking, making
judgments, condemning, pointing fingers, blaming, whining and moaning? I can’t
leave the earth this way, broken, full of holes, incomplete, unfulfilled, in
debt to their silly system, the bargaining that begins at birth and continues
with the dream censor
Their laughter echoes seagull cries over miles of shit
strewn rocks overlooking the Arctic Ocean where methane bubbles up like
champagne (because the ocean has changed from carbon sink to emitter)...so
here’s to the god of clowns...please watch over all our absurd silliness until
we all collapse into our holes and wander the earth haunting haunted, hurt
bleeding to death and unable to die
Ladybug Man home, Clown home, but I am still homeless. I
need to go back there to my real home in motion, and OWN my homelessness in the
river of traffic, the only place where you can cast yourself up on the waters
without drifting a way, and in that mystic aimless stupidity, I need to
dedicate one of my SHRINES A GO GO to Advantage Auto and kneel with that drunk
woman’s ghost where she knelt, arms outstretched in an act of final desperation
to the hopeless traffic that can’t yield the right of way to anything so
pitiful, so close to what it actually is.
