"ROOTS" OF CASA GOOFY

D R I V I N G

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.