Oakie doakie

There are only big words
describing small things
when the vapor clears,

like, does it really matter
who left their
styrofoam coffee cup
in the microwave,

who is suffering because
my belt came from  a cow
on the wrong side of the planet,

does your bank      account
actually throb with desire
when you shop online for
midget harmonicas
like they used to
play in  movies
you watched when young
late night
in the basement
of a Michigan home?

?
?

I kissed you thirty years ago
before the music stopped
and I've been dancing   ever since
although
decades and many miles
keep us apart,

I remember every punch line
but forget the jokes they go to,
your dog
in the photos you mailed me
is beautiful
and missing all the same.

No, I   will not die my hair,
please
leave  your chin as it is,

let us use knives to cut out our food
and live
a little longer
in the playground.

Marilyn and Tru sitting in a tree...

"Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote Dance" By Patrick Ryan Frank. - Slate Magazine:

This is intended to be a lyric of sweet imagining, a tale of what if the tragic likes of Monroe and Capote solace, at least briefly, in each other's arms. Of course it would during a dance, a room full of sweeping music, the senses lulled , seduced and distracted from the grimmer things that lurk for both of them outside the room, with one of the two speaking that now is the moment to be in, that nothing else really matters nor should bother them, not as long as one of them leads and the other follows in time to the music. 

Just a dance— just sweet, like everybody sweetly else, a man and woman sweetly moved. I know no one forgets the ugly things they’ve known, and yes, I know that love, for us, is sweat and panic and some cameras, but it’s still love, and we’ve done nothing wrong. So let them laugh and then forget it all: those drinks and pills, hands wet, that man who, grinning, made us dance so here we are, we’re dancing. Let’s just pretend that one of us—who would remember who?— slipped through the grand and glittered dark and said, Hello, fella. Hello and take my hand. 

 
Poet Patrick Ryan Frank does a fine of sustaining a tone that keeps the poem's speaker anonymous--it appears that neither the personas of Monroe or Capote are speaking, issues of gender and sexuality are handily avoided, or at least obscured to the extent that it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that both dancers are speaking as one. Still, this is something you find in a paperback novel that purports to reveal some inside secrets of the famous, powerful and tragic that reduces their stature to the mere sentimentality . The references to drugs, to media, to a world in general that seeks them out and in order to both adore and destroy them , are to be expected in a piece that cannot re-imagine these iconic figures beyond an interesting premise.


 This fails both as poetry and barely qualifies as gossip, albeit a well-intentioned gossip. This might have been a poem that speculated about a what sort of plausible but unexpected set of things these two might have discussed in such close embrace,the irony and tension might have been subtly and intensely expressed without reference to their real world celebrity, but Frank has done otherwise. Rather than imagine what was inside the magic space between them, that mutual private time where titles, professions and other signifieds fell from them, it becomes merely tacky, an episode of "Dallas". Why would be interested with such trivia this poem offers? 

Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 review by Matt Taibbi. - Slate Magazine

Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 review by Matt Taibbi. - Slate Magazine:

In celebration of the  40th Anniversary edition of Hunter Thompson's gonzo masterpiece of political writing "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail", Slate writer Matt Taibbi writes an extensive essay on  why  HST still matters in our  current climate of  dread and drudgery.It is a nice commemoration, but I'm not persuaded that we could have learned anything more than      we already have from the late writer; what newer readers would learn is what we did, after time, that HST  could be wildly entertaining and then dependably repetitive in his subjects, his insults, his tone.  Truthfully, Thompson's reputation as a writer is based on a very small body of quality  work. I am willing to cede that Hunter Thompson succeeded , momentarily, at being a Great Writer for a couple of books, but the bitter truth was that while he was long on rage , he was short on other elements that keep a writer interesting over a career. Those qualities are insight, nuance, a curiosity about people and their circumstances beyond what mere appearances. 

Mere appearence, though, sufficed too often for Thompson, as his conceit, dove-tailing tellingly with his appetite for high powered stimulants, was that he could walk into the room full of characters and size the situation quickly. His concern was pacing over all, the attempt to simulate the down hill careen of a waiter carrying too many hot dishes from the kitchen. For all the energy and paranoid genius Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and his Campaign Trail book contained, it amounted to the best expression of the limited set of riffs Thompson. 

He was not especially engrossing as a political thinker--we read him for his vitriol. His attraction for invective , I imagine, was because it was easy and that it was a convenient means to get to the bottom of one typewritten page after another; the rhythm of the constructed persona of being the most wasted man alive bravely inveighing against the stupidities and inequities and the  utter  mendacity of the world in which he finds himself would go into hyperdrive. 

For some this suggested automatic writing, the idea that HST  was channeling some Truth hidden behind the barriers of bullshit and pretense, a voice greater than his own. Perhaps, but for me it was the writing of someone who was working what became a tired set of rhetorical ploys. Thompson plainly never had the chance to transcend his moment of transcendent genius, as had, say, Norman Mailer, himself an egotist with a certainity that only he could get to the disguised truth of things. Mailer settled in for the long haul, abandoned much of his writerly eccentricity and produced a series of brilliant books of fiction and nonfiction in his late career; there are other things to discuss about Mailer than his antics.

There are many who would like to consider Thompson our generations H.L.Mencken, but I would say the departed Hunter comes up short: even a writer as caustic as Mencken would , often enough, vary his tone and write about matters that didn't need to be vilified, crucified or witlessly mocked. Thompson never had the chance to try anything truly different.

HOSPITAL by Charles Webb

The poem "Hospital " by Charles Webb is a perfected bit of crafted babble, a three note mantra spoken and sung by someone doped up and being wheeled through institution corridors, from one room to the other, meeting employees in variations of the same work clothes running tests, taking samples, adjusting lights and dials on machines, writing items on clipboards and inputting data into computer stations, smiling, whistling pop tunes under their shallow breathing. It is a delirium and the mind, of course, is not out to lunch but aware of and making note of everything that is going on--the curse of it all is that the mind cannot finish a sentence, complete a thought, find a frame or a metaphor to contextualize an experience that is sufficiently unreal and dreamlike. The mind, though, can sustain a rhyming, punning set of extrapolations on what the deeper mind registers and finds dreadful.

Charles Webb manages to maintain that balance between an indecipherable cleverness, nearly falling with great weight and speed into resolute incoherence, but this, as I take it, being the record of a drugged up mind or perhaps a mind suffering an organic derangement, this is the struggle to remain at or near the surface of consciousness. This made me think of those many times I had in the hospital while younger, about to go under the knife, after the needles and the ether had been applied--the world was recast as one fish eyed lens and the soundtrack was such that it reminded me of slowing down a turntable and then increasing the speed again quickly.

“ Hospital “ as a swaying, visceral rhythm that is not always pleasant--panic, giddiness, elation, more panic follow one another quickly, seamlessly, without pause or explanation. This poem is an achievement, a successful evocation of sensory overload.

The Supreme Court surprised everyone by upholding most of the  contentious Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and needlessly to say Democrats are ecstatic and harshly conservative Republicans are  popping their veins and turning red in the face with the kind of raging mania you thought only comic book villians could muster. It is a lot of work to stay that angry and so blind sightedly dedicated to depriving millions to affordable health care as matter of dubious principle.  That dedication suggests mental illness more than rationally applied principles; I never thought it made economic sense to to allow people to get sick and land in emergency rooms where the rest of us have to pay  for their visit with higher insurance premiums. I would guess that  conservatives, at least those who  know have the natioanl megaphone,  consider Meaness as a sport they excel at.  My hope, our collective hope, is that voters see through all the malarkey and smoke that is being blown our way and that we deprive them of their arena.

Fiction for fugitives

"Looking at this thing makes my neck hurt" Bonerface said, looking up

to the top of the Watertower he was standing under with his friends, a loose conferderation of high school buddies, musicians and other semi-employed types who were now in their early forties, years from their graduation date and year boo predictions, standing under a Watertower in the middle of a public park, a spot that had become a hang out for no other reason other than convience to homes and jobs , basic, bonehead familiarity, and the fact that few of these guys ever gave up the idea of being on some kind of cutting edge where street credibility was everything. Middle aged men with nothing else to do but wait out the duration of their drug of choice before they could go home, or to work, which ever they individually remembered they were in line for.





Bonerface rubbed is neck and took a long toke of a joint of skunk weed  that was being passed around. Ferg took the joint as he looked up as well, studying the underside of this huge Watertower, a large vat supported by six supporting legs that were as wide as small houses on chopped up lots of land. An ache developed in his neck, and staring at the criss-cross pattern of beams, joists and joints in a murky , rain-drenched dark made Ferg feel profoundly powerless in the center of his stomach. The earth seemed to move away from his feet;gravity seemed suspended. He passed the joint along without taking a hit and looked at Bonerface, who was now playing an invisible guitar. Fingers scurried along unseen frets, notes plucked out the air with a sound that came up from under the street, the mission of the muse to make this park electric, electric,



Bonerface sang something to ease the pain in his neck

"dDEedeeeeeeeeediddly GREUndelliddlybomp!bomp!Bomp! wheeddly wadiddddddddddddididididididididily WHAmzitridddddddddley wheedlyWHammylidlle dlalotta BOMP BOMP!!!"


"Nice power chords" said Grelb, a friend who actually finished a year of college who made a half a living selling record reviews to dozens of adult magazines , titty mags and fast beats, he liked to joke, "nice runs and scat shattering sonics there, and the chords come nicely placed, "BOMBgoddamnedBOMP, and that opens up the rest of the night, the stars above to a terrifying extreme of get down…"


Bonerface shrugged , sang more riffs, this time something that resembled Hendrix , if Hendrix played marches.

"Good for the pain the neck" said Ferg.



"Whatever" said Grelb" because you know one of these days one of us is gonna get married, get a real job, or just die from so much hanging around doing nothing but living on little else but minimum wage and alcohol, and wher will that leave the rest of us, under this Watertower…."



"Beats the willies outta me" said Ferg, "You move on, I guess, you see better movies. Better yet, you become a movie yourself. You may still die at the end, but at least it's a death that means something, hokey though the moral may be…"



"You shoulda been a film critic" said Grelb, "you have a way of filling the air with sentences that evaporate quickly after sounding so pleasant after you said them…"



"Anymore whiskey?"



"Yeah" said Grelb, producing a bottle from the picnic table where the small felllowship did their weekend drinking. He handed it to Ferg.



"My neck still hurts" said Bonerface,"I mean shit, that thing is tall…"



"You need to stop looking up like that" Ferg muttered, "we been coming here since we graduated, off and on, and you still have to stare up at this thing the minute you take your first punch offa bomber?"



"My neck hurts".

"I'm gonna be sick" said Grelb.

"Pussy" said Ferg, " call yourself a son of Irish pride? Go ahead , be sick…"
"Cut some slack, her, Ferg" said Bonerface, "it's not as if you haven't been the one broadcasting their lunch recently."

Ferg rubbed his jaw, reached into his pocked and fished out a smashed back of Camels. He took one out of the creased pack , jabbed it between his lips and lit it with the last dry match he had, cupping the flame as it seared the cigarette tip. The burning end glowed in the dark, highlighting the counters and lines of his palms. The smoke felt good as it seared his throat. A good burn, he thought, burn away this bullshit.

Complainer

The Guardian on Facebook:

Brilliant as she has been , Joni Mitchell has also had made nearly as much music that is, shall we say, in equal measures underwritten, bombastic, pretentious, just plain pretentious. She coveted the sobriquet "genius" more conspicuously than any pop star I can remember--even self mythologizer Dylan rejects the
application of the word to his name and has suggested , in a sense, that his
most arde 

Mitchell is an intelligent artist, but she is sorely lacking at times in subtler ways of looking at things; there are some things that are obvious to others that simply hasn't the humility to make note of. She complains of Dylan's lack of authenticity when the whole notion of art and being an artist is based in large part on creating things that are inauthentic; the very words "art" and "artist" are intrinsically linked with the word artificer, a term that means, in general, some designed, made by hand, an unnatural addition to what is already in place. She bemoans the lack of authenticity and forgets, perhaps, that she, Simon, Dylan and Leonard Cohen, poet-songwriters of the Sixties, were storytellers more than anything, fictionalizing their feelings, their politics, their biographies in the interest of a good yard, a good line, a good insight. Authenticity , I would argue , has more to do with feeling that a writer succeeds in creating, not the emotion he or she in fact feels. She is grumpy, to be sure, but this will not suffice as a justification for her ire. She is famous and cranky and frankly it's a tedious dirge she replays every chance she gets.

nt fans should get lives beyond their record collection--and she has produced albums that have tried to force the issue. Her stabs at art song, serial music , jazz material , and feminist surrealist have given us mixed results at best. The fatal flaw in these ambitious efforts were that the worst elements of them were so impossibly precious and self important that they summarily dwarfed what fresh ideas she might have had at the time. Her on going arrogance and bitterness leaves a bad taste.