here to go

oh yes

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.

-hank


there's nothing worse than too late.

That line I forgot, from the film: I got it back tonight.

"- Where is she?

- Gone. All are gone.
Removed by an operation, Professor.
A surgical masterpiece. No pain.
Nothing that bleeds or trembles.

-...How silent it is."

Wild Strawberries

the same

in the window the woman
with legs like fish drifting against the cool rocks.

the ballerina, alone, en pointe, examining herself in the mirror.

pills tapping the linoleum of the pharmacy
like 
pearls from a broken necklace,

the druggist on hands and knees in the dark

groping the floor.


the chicken bone, eaten by the dog.

or the girl falling into my arms,
a small plane

drifting quietly into a building at night.

the sun obscured by clouds for most of the day.

milk in a jug. ice. comatose, free to think

forever of her skirts brushing lightly against

her knees as she went from one end of 
the room to the other.
lit from behind,
the silhouette of her thighs visible

through the fabric.

blue light from the opposite window. potted
tree on the fire escape. smoking with one arm
out the window: for her, who does not like
the smell and fears the property manager.
poor her, her with her gnawing fear, but it could be worse. look,
everything hush to see what she does next.

oh, she cuts flowers. smells the stems, their
sweet and fibrous bright milk dripping into the clear water
in the kitchen sink.
now she takes down her long hair. now she
opens her hand as though dispelling a dream
and flings the cut ends out the kitchen window.

she peels a lime with her fingernail. she leaves a note
pinned to my jacket before leaving which says
“wish you were here.”
it is hard come by these days,
the sense that we are here by our own choice.
that we’d come here again if we were or wish we were.

above! the iron trellis shuddering under a passing train.
flies bathing in the cool tea. vines hanging over the balcony from
the apartment upstairs. not much in the refrigerator: eggs
lettuce, tomatoes, beer, cheese. dormant lunch.

dream that night: nighttime. a houseboat burning
on a lake. badlands stretch around in every direction.
scrub plants adapted to seasonal death.
far off, an owl sings to its dinner. stay still.
on the shore, a figure,
pulling its hair, watching the houseboat burn.
the sky is eel-slick and eel-gray,
its eye the eye of a dead man. there
jawbone, there pelvis, here backbone,
cooling in the long dull shadow of the figure,
now kneeling, improvising
a rite to mourn by in the wet red clay.

petroglyphs: some carved in leather, some
drawn in chalk dust, in salt. a business suit. two shoes anda belt.
a pocketful of change. housekeys.
bus tokens. toothpicks. a credit card. two
credit cards. a paperback. mints. a
length of string and the laundry. the shopping. car payments.
tooth repair. a wedding ring. two wedding rings.
the television booming a continual elegy.
eyeglasses. muggings. old age. some
papers, old issues. her note,

and the flowers that now bend towards the floor.
trumpet honeysuckles playing the song down into the ground,
against the sun. in the heat, the cold glass sweating.
her old shoes still there by the door. her new ones missing.
the dripping faucet a leisurely second hand.
birds roosting in the dying tree outside. a woman undresses
in the window opposite, behind a curtain, the light: blue.
that sense, like a thumb pressing the top of the spine
and the bottom of the spine, the knowledge
of something that is always drawing nearer.
neither vengeful nor angry. just there
in me the same as in anything else.

the guilty as in the innocent.
the rich as in the wretched.
the blest as in the blasted
the strong as in the weak.

she steps out of her skirt, and out of view.
the curved light of the quarter-moon, part of the reflected sun.
last glimpse of a calf and foot rising and vanishing,
becoming shadows cast on the visible wall from a hidden place.
last glimpse of a match falling from above, and going out, and falling further,
of blue sky reflected in a windowpane as it is shut,
drops of water wrung by a wind from a clothesline laden–
baby clothes, undergarments, bed sheets, suit shirts–
for the relentlessly coming day whose first blues,
captured in the wrung-out spray,
are carried down to where the headlights
splash the walls below in brief instants.

stop sweating and keep your head in
bloodletters and quaalude dicethrowers climb up
hummama mumminama hominids upright
up the walls growing taller and looking down at me
garlands of holiday lights
as I go away along upon the rounded-way

this day, a car wreck. car wreck vision: metal aneurysm one knife many knives divide a soft body. like deep ocean submersible, the pressure outside crushes everything inside.

to want to not want. to not want to want. hard fucking luck. hurts in a ghostly way. being haunted but not possessed.

in a dream, flicked a black knife open and closed. why so many knives? searched for the big secret. found a house which was unlocked and empty. lied to a bad friend and he vanished forever.

stop turning.

sad and dangerous on a sad and dangerous day.

Skipped class, spent three hours indulging my favorite manias of random data mining on millenarian religion/ancient dieties/conspiracy theories to fuel my Main Mania and write my paper.

Roughly speaking my thesis is on the secret ideological superstructures of oppression and reified social control by way of ethical artifice in government and religion. On crime, the Holy Trangression against corruption that runs so deep we can't even see it until we have gone "insane", on the necessity of destroying the artificial barriers we have made for ourselves, dispelling the Gods and jailors and Jailor-Gods we invented for ourselves (The Grand Inquisitor) to produce Civilization, which is, you guessed it, the Sickness we have suffered since agriculture.

I'm writing about Crime & Punishment through the lens of On The Genealogy Of Morals.

To produce a polemic against the badness of this bad world, because it is a good world sometimes and it crushes my heart in a cold fist to think how unfair it is that we choose not make it Good, or even to make it better. Who knows if it will change anything - probably not. Almost definitely not. But if I didn't try, I'd be no better than the rest of us cunts too passive and fearful to say anything. It's our fault, and it's our responsibility now to repair the damage we've done to ourselves. "The sentence is up," it must be. There is no Oppressor who is not Us. Cultures of victimization only proclaim their impotence––wrongfully and irresponsibly. To be a victim means to have no power. Nice one: "I dont have to make hard decisions because I'm too small to decide. Let them decide for me." No more fatalism. Quench your mind of it. If you are not Here for this reason, you are here for no reason, and you may as well not have been born. That is the truth of this.

Maybe it sounds ludicrous and dark and cynical and impractical, but it is born of utopianism. Optimism.

So three hours of berserking my mind up into the Pure Monomania of Ahab to grind a fine edge on my tongue. They have guns, truncheons, nuclear warhead. We fight with empty hands, and can only win with empty hands. They themselves have emptied them. They themselves produce us, produce us bitter and fed-up and with nothing more to lose. Which is to say, we do.

We. We. We are all guilty before all. We produced this. We have made ourselves. And we have to end this malignant growth in ourselves, of ourselves.

"Art thou doing the right thing?"

I really really hope everything will be ok.
I really really hope everything will be ok.

An abutment made of round stones cobbled with degrading lime. Sun. Rain that makes the mushrooms rise and the unseen birds sing out of the very rain it seems. Joyous, in praise of the sacred thing.

And I, who think only in pornography, what place in the world? What age of end-times is this? I want only to feel and be felt, and run my hand along hips and say things which improve the world -- for whom? Even this honesty is disrespectful, and hurts needlessly those who feel they are halfway swallowed-up already by the cruelty of a hard life or an easy life in a hard world. a "borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it." Borrowed time.

No molly bloom coming. No heart in throat trembling.

Time is left only to get loaded and be unburdened by the arms I've borne. Hatred like hammers of a piston howling in the heart. How dared we to be born?

Let us die or be changed as death before we are taken.

I remember now, reading about peruvian ayahuasca medicine, the time i dreamt that i passed the traps leading to the spirit world. There waiting for me was the embodiment of my fears, an older man in a gray suit, chosen representative of the huge war wheels that spin on earth and in the heavens and put in place by man to crush man.

I arrived at that threshold, and nothing was there but the Man, incarnation of cruelty and despotism. he had been trying to solve the puzzle, but could not, and hated and feared my presence there. I experienced a horrible fear of him. It made me still.

He came at me, to destroy me where I stood and then I experienced the understanding. I laughed at him as he approached, and laughed as he tore all the flesh from my body, pulling my organs out and slicing me with his knife while I laughed at him.

Then I was above him, not laughing. I was beyond him, beyond my carved-up body which lay before him. He looked up at me without seeing me well. I pointed at the hand of my body which lay in a pool of blood, and he saw there, in my palm, the swirling concentric vortices, heading down infinitely. Then it was gone to him, and he sat there in my body, weeping.

He did not learn the lesson I had tried to teach him then, the lesson he had taught me without understanding it himself.

Then I awoke.

cookies are a sometimes food:

http://iceraft.livejournal.com/

all future entries will now go public.

1.
See the parents parent badly
in the grocery stores
and leave their children
in the shopping cart beside
the fruit mounded like mud bricks
in the pyramids
like the lost recipe for concrete
that was found again
letting in light through the sweet-smelling
granny smith gaps
like the dome of the Hagia Sophia
screaming in the words of
the sunrise See how I float
float as if not bound to the earth
by concrete by the arch and the
buttress and the bullustrade
see my minarets rise like
asparagus spears
spearing towards heaven
like the canine tooth of
a dead dog
dead face-up
on its back

Like a ziggurat of orangepeels
dwarfed by the child
who wants only
for the words of her parents
to be soft and be lovely
like the sunlight through
the blinds
when they are still
sleeping


2.
That girls mouth opened wide
like she was deep-throating the Washington Monument
and like a pillar of fire using
tumbleweeds as fuel
it is this place that they
pilgrimage towards
rolling east from their
birthplace in the
sands

3.
In the dream of the fisherman’s wife
there are the two octopi
and they have very big eyes
and one is kissing her
and the other has its beak
on her
Well, You Know
and behind her an oriental
language showers from the heavens
littering the ground
with brush strokes
and intersecting create
a new way to speak
that shall only be spoken
when in the dream of the fisherman’s wife
two tentacled things from the depths of the sea
are loving her are her husband
as her husband
has never been her husband

4.
He could not believe that
he was shrouded in the darkness any longer
and when he shook it shook off of him like
a coat made of flies
and his eyes were quite wide
and his son the son born
that morning
was like a hand fisting
and like a hand lashing out madly
like all his pride
had left him
when he had climaxed inside his wife
and was now caught in the body of this
newborn
lashing out madly to grow
into his big name
while his big name lashed out
to grow into that boy

4.
The doctors clustered like
bees watching the dance of first one then
the next
and all nodding and bzzzing
and conferring about the most
succulent flowers
in beetalk
which spun out of their mouths in cursive
like endless illegible signatures
like cassette tapes spitting up onto the floor
and swamping their feet
at which lay the patient

5.
In the end the couple had met when
she fell from the roof gripping the umbrella
swinging from side to side
like a thick pair of hips in the sky
like a pinion-feather
or an onionskin
dropped from a height
of some feet.

6.
Those first months they made love
with the punk rock up high
to muffle the sounds
which they made all the
creaking and
crooning and
those sounds
which they made all were
eaten up by reverb
and screaming
and her parents were
for awhile longer
allowed to pretend she was
still young
still as young as she was
when she would yell
from the produce aisle
from the fruit which loomed over
like imperialist cloudbanks
of gothic cathedrals the pillars of god
yell for help from that place
for their bodies to be close to her body
because no other way meant a thing to her then
and now he was the body which found her
and when her parents rushed in
with the word of restriction
they taught him

7.
how to get through their backyard in the darkness
how to climb blind through her window
how to take off his shoes
how to crouch
be concealed
how to bribe the watchdogs with biscuits
during which season the dry leaves littered the concrete
and how not to crush them
he learned the topography of that particular love song
and it ended with the feeling
that the language of the sunlight in
the gaps between leaves in the canopy
was writing the lost recipe of a powerful romance
resembling Arabic
the lingua organica invented so man could
find meaning in the left-behind post-its of god
in the fins of the fish and
the line of high tide
and the wrinkles of dates
and in the spiraling maps of the foot-paths and tradewinds
and the prophetic strata of the labia majora
and the unpredictable skyline of the vans deferens
and so that in all things
god might speak
and it ended
that the language of the sunlight
which is both particle and wave
with both wavelength and orbit
sang like a horn through his spine
beating his heart with its palm like
a fist
lashing out madly
screaming hot words
which are
the hot words of love
This is my birthplace
This is my birthplace
This is my birthplace.

If anybody needs me I will be in my room listening to Minor Threat and Fugazi for the next thirty days.

the woman with legs like fish drifting against the cool rocks.
the ballerina, en pointe in the mirror.
pills striking the linoleum of the drugstore like a
broken pearl necklace.
the druggist on his hands and knees in the dark
groping the floor for them.

the chicken bone, eaten by the dog.
the girl falling into my arms like a small aircraft,
drifting into a building at night.
the sun obscured by clouds for large portions of the day.

a handful of yogurt.
shore leave.
1000 cc's of penicillin.
fat man in a tight shirt.

Letting the water run and the bathtub overflow,
making love in the house of a stranger.
Palestinian girl with hair that is the total absence of light.
the explosion which charred the pattern of the woman's clothes onto the skin of her back.
Semen ribboning out the window into the night air.

A sod of peat, the hay hook.
Flailing for a foothold in the attic.
total silence: I hear footsteps.

LEF
Alexander Blok
Osip Brik & Anna Akhmatova
the discovery of fire
culinary fire
eating gold
eating pearls
pac-man
sleeping together

Captain Wonderful's return trip from the Land in the Grips of a Terrible Curse was very beautiful. He flew over many beautiful places in his Wonderjet, which was double invisible and had lots of weapons.

When he landed in America there were lots of reporters who wanted to ask him questions. They held microphones in his face. Everybody was very quiet and wanted to know all about him.

"Captain Wonderful, will you ever take a wife?" asked one reporter.

"No," said Captain Wonderful.

"Captain Wonderful, where is your Super Secret Outer Space Gadget Laboratory?" asked another.

"It is a super secret, ho ho ho!" chuckled Captain Wonderful.

"Captain Wonderful, what happened in the Land in the Grips of a Terrible Curse?" asked yet another reporter.

"I will never speak of what happened there to anyone. I will bring it to the grave with me," he replied, suddenly very serious. His eyes steamed a little because of his heat vision.

Suddenly he shot upwards, because he could fly and just took the Wonderjet to relax sometimes. The reporters wandered off to go write newspaper articles.

It is a large question
like whether the name your parents gave you when you were born
grows into you or you into it

like the history of Greece, the history of endless war
and love affair after love affair
and everyone racing to die or racing
towards each other
it is sex as a sudden collision of the bodies
as though falling from a great height into the ground

it is the lonesome palm tree like the spiked club of a giant, stood up in the earth
as a grave marker

it is a coconut in which the milk is hot, and is thirsty, like ourselves, for more heat always

It is a tube, that is, a vein, through which the blood rushes to be pumped and pumped again

It is Cleavage Cleavage Cleavage, Ladies! and it is applauding madly for tits

It's the thing you told your father the day he died

It is fireworks, but mostly it is the long minute of ascent when it seems like nothing will happen

it is the last toot and sparkle of sunlight in the nighttime

it is a long finger, bending many times, encircling you.

it is a beard which caught fire in the restaurant

it is the woman who kept canaries like god gave the color yellow two wings and a song

it is spandex on the fat women

It is the disease that makes you look like a sack of Wonder Bread

It's the thing you won't even say out loud when you're alone
won't even think about unless you have to

it's the suicide note that slid under the refridgerator and wasn't found until the move years later, when they'd almost forgotten

it's a boy, congratulations

you
are
never
going
to
stop
me
I will lash out if I want to I will rush towards the ocean
and maybe I'll swim but maybe I won't maybe the women that pretend to choke themselves
and hang their tongues out of their mouths like birds shaking a worm to death will scream for
encore as I descend from the roof
will rip off their clothes
will die with my name on their lips
kissing the air and rolling their eyes
as I run from them at top speed at a speed beyond the
ability of any
regular human
it is all madness
and I will make it my madness

we have spent twenty years trying to solve this very problem
and are left with no recourse but to mix ourselves together
I guess
well
maybe it is the best choice for us because love is a thing that
cannot possibly smother a man in large quantities
and it is a hard lesson to learn that i am a Regular Man
and sometimes a regular man makes a regular decision
and sometimes he may make a decision he'll regret
but he has regretted enough things in his lifetime to know
that it is always alright to regret a little more
but then he stops thinking and he begins to curse
the world out of
joy
because every day the world doesnt kill you
is a notch in your belt and every notch on the bedpost
is a kick at the world, aimed a little low intentionally to break
the thick bones of the chest

in time we will begin to ask ourselves a few questions TO
WHAT END
AT WHAT COST AND
SO WHAT
and I will reply with my fingertips tracing the borders of a new
and uncharted continent on the vast expanse of the skin of your back
where you're dark the one place you can't see in the mirror and
therefore the one part of your body you dont think isn't beautiful enough
and you will reply with your tongue you will taste my ear like a dried bitter apricot
and polish my eardrums until they sparkle
and I will reply with my nose, drink you up with my nose as if you were a
pillar of sweet mist with no voice with no body I will smell you as deeply
and voraciously as if it were the only way I could have you
and you will reply with your eyes you will lay your eyes upon me
all over
as if memorizing me in case to identify my body someday you will
have only the kneecap
have only wrist
have only the neck
to know that it's me

so long to the days when we knew how it is to be good to each other

I am driving through Long Beach where it turns from ritzy hotels into ten story cranes, lining the quays, flashing red lights so small aircraft don't drift into them at night. I remember.

You were wearing red, too. I could tell by the way you walked down the stairs to me that you'd seen too many old movies where well-dressed women descend to the ballroom and pretend not to notice that every man in the room has a sudden erection. You know, back in the fifties when men never left the house in anything but a suit and tie and wore their deep, sophisticated voices at a rakish angle. When women in the movies were peppered with diamonds as though they'd been blasted with rock salt.

You know, all that stuff. It seemed pretty Aryan.

I drove. You wearing red, me wearing shorts. You had dragged me out of bed with a phone call. You wanted me to drive you to some douchebag's house out in San Pedro. You were crying to me, telling me about the thing your father said that hurt you. We were driving to San Pedro so you could be comforted. I didn't look over at you, but imagined you licking your lips.

Driving back, it was just getting light. The red lights on the docks began to go dim in the sun. Men wearing eight layers of coats sprung up from behind shipping crates and electrical sheds, like time lapse video of flowers blooming. They shrugged off their blankets and started shifting en masse towards the strip, or across the tracks, places which are uninhabitable when police cruisers or knife gangs can hide in the dark.

Some, lying at the foot of the 200 ton crane like birds fried off of power lines, slept in.

Now I am driving to San Pedro again, the long way. The radio man says that it is Rock and Roll Time on The Early Bird Block Party, and you can tell from his voice that he has stepped out of an age where you could still smoke indoors in California. It drips with bourbon and Catholic Mass. The clock spins over to 230. In the distance, Los Angeles shines like a dirt star. The landfill of light, irradiating the sky with the sin and the obscurity of easy skin everywhere, rich women and the small dogs of rich women, rich women who have polluted their ovaries every day for the past thirty years, the waiters toss hors d'ouerves to the birds and they have got the Hollywood Is Not The Land of Bounty I Was Led to Believe It Would Be Blues, and the bad men drink and the good men drink and most of the women drink and you could be shot just because it is so simple to shoot a person here, and the dirt star keeps spinning, turning them up like bad soil, recycling them and spitting them back up Welcome to Los Angeles sing the angels and you reply Thank You Angels, Make It A Double.