Pacific Wonderland

So in hindsight everything was cool, or just about close enough. Took that kid a while to figure things  out— which he eventually did, or just about close enough on that account too. Well not really but hey. Then started writing of himself in the 3rd person but whoa look at that sunset over the pine trees...

Checkpoint

This is just so as to see if I still recall that darn password. Yep, still good.

And I've also read Ulysses, too. Six weeks flat, cover to cover. So there's that, too.

Test for echo... one two three quatro....

Hey old password still works what do you know.

Walpurgis Night, 2013

Then in a damn-the-torpedoes kind of way, sort of planning ahead but not really looking that way, most certainly not forward, Cybill and I take some time off our respective jobs and get to hop a plane on Walpurgis Night, 2013, to sunny Orlando, FL and if you ask me, to hell with whatever happens sixteen days from now. I just wanna ride the Space Mountain, buddy, and let go of the whole damned rest of the world while at it.

Cute

Q: What do you get when you cross the Brocken spectre with a fata morgana?

A: A hypothetical question.

And screwdrivers from Latvia (a poem)

Back then making the scene

jaded but never bored,

kowtowing to the beat,

contrite in acquiescence

detached often aloof

yet so cool

in those threadbare black denims

and screwdrivers from Latvia.

Outer Dark '13 (a poem)

Here on tomorrow’s shorelines
by oily breakers taken,
the self wanderlusts, sets sails
from naught to none, from dreams
awakened—

Then just as for all the games since
forfeited and they’ll still remember,
for every restless Summer night
there will always dawn a gray
September—

Still, on tomorrow’s shorelines
by gale and hurricane shaken,
you close your eyes, look back
and all that you see, well, just you try
not to hate ‘em—

For behind a pantomime of cinders
there might reign one last scorching ember,
and in the end there is no race,
but a downhill slalom straight into
the gas chamber—

Hence to the victor, the spoils,
but those bittersweet, unearned,
uncalled for and unavoidable,
just like a soul-searing  kiss
from Satan.

"Busy, busy, busy", ´13

Many years in the future, more than a decade after graduation, I’m 33 years old and the iPod which has long since replaced the CD player I kind of stole from Kay after he moved out of the old apartment downtown has begun to feel like an honest to god antique. Cybill and Bryce, comrades-in-arms for the fourth yuga, will rant and rave incessantly during the Sunday luncheons about the fifth version of the iPhone. To me, to whom the touchscreen is still something out of Epcot Center.

It’s close to two in the morning and I’m sipping from Cybill’s diet ice tea but without my usual late-night, all-by-myself cocktail party mixture of Stolichnaya and the anxiolytics. I’d probably also murder for a bottle of red wine right now, name the grape, come what might, and the refrigerator’s actually filled to the brim this time around but alas, no alcohol and no chocolate.

I have been working twelve, fourteen hours a day and barely getting any sleep at night. So I kind of get tanked instead of having dinner most nights and barely get any sleep. Still I make it to the office at eight and things sort of work out all right in the end. We grow old and what do you know, there’s some actual solace from recreational drug use.  Some local B-list singer was found dead the other day and the word Cocaine sort of popped up on the newspapers more often than Hugo Chávez.

But still…

But still, I have recently taken to going back the stacks upon stacks of books I keep at my place, you know, all those old books back from my College days and the gloomy, dark years that ensued and it’s like meeting up with old friends as I wait for the sleeping pills to work their magic. They are all there, see, Vonnegut and Salinger and Ellis and Kerouac, like guards mounting the ramparts and turrets at a garrison outside of time, waiting for us refugees from the twentieth century. And once we make it to the gates we are asked to provide a password, some key word od coded cypher so as to be allowed inside and tucked in for safety— such as the forgotten phone numbers we find inscribed in our own handwriting on the inside of a book’s cover, or a phantasmagoric slip of paper from an organ grinder that slips from in-between pages and falls to the ground, with the promise of a prophecy or the enchantment of a prayer.

Books I`m currently reading, late November 2012

Ok, just because I haven`t listed those in a while, and for the sake of what-the-fuck-ness, here`s my current reading (or re-reading) list:


'American Pastoral' by Phillip Roth (1997);

'A Swiftly Tilting Planet' by Madeleine L'Engle (1978),

'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath' by Sylvia Plath and Karen V. Kukil (2000);

'Elektra Assassin' by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz, Marvel Comics (1986);

'V for Vendetta'  by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, DC Comics/Vertigo (1988).

A manifesto (in transit)

These blank spaces of paper, Lyla, see?,  they`re starting to feel like those endless long stretches of road rolling up ahead when you`re 18 & driving from in-between towns late at night, all by yourself, Bruce Springsteen blasting from the tape deck and emptiness riding shotgun, nowhere else really to go but home when the fuel gauge drops to rock bottom plus no one else to see, everybody`s silhouettes moonlit as if burned out for the duration of the remainder of their ‘teen years.

Then we get into College, in, out, through just like that, our philosophies a speck of dust, a footnote somewhere of no importance, and we get jobs, hop from job to job sort of pretending corporate life doesn`t really suck that bad, that it`s in fact slightly bearable, etc but it`s not, and we lose our hair, stop running, grow a potbelly, get a girlfriend, grow a beard, buy a washing machine, ponder of pets, lose a coupla magic words, get a life, the comic books all laid out for the perusal of dust mites or somesuch. I wish I could still fly but those poems, Lyla, man, all of them, they`re all gone, see? They`re all gone and sometimes it`s late at night and I`m all by myself and I swear to god, the falcon cannot, will not hear the falconer.

And when I finally call it quits on trying to get some sleep I trudge on flip-flops towards the kitchen and open the oven, maybe looking for the ghost of Sylvia Plath but it`s a microwave, fuck, and all I get is the spirit of the twentieth century instead, like a political refugee seeking asylum from the current zeitgeist.

It`s late November, 2012, this close to the world`s end if you`re to believe the History Channel and I so dearly want to burn my Smartphone on that microwave oven, Lyla…

Storm Warning (a poem)

Control is a four-headed hydra
covered in scales, covered in scabs,
to blame
for the loosening of the grip
and the tightening of the noose,
or was it just chemistry gone awry,
some random faulty wiring?

Stay, you say but you`re too
far
your voice does not carry
across that big divide:
It falls short
and so do I,
hence my sweet, swift
r.b. lullaby:

Full Fathom Five, one
Full Fathom Five, two
Full Fathom Five, three
Full Fathom Five, four
Oh fuck so close so close this time.

Gothic

I see the shadows from your dreaming coming unstuck, ripped from their seams at the heels, like Peter Pan`s but iridescent in cobalt, a neutron star, the blues, the forgiveness that comes with that which is not accomplished.

A thousand archetypes came in for drinks last night. They arrived at midnight and were greeted with pills. There were warnings on their smiles, portents foreshadowing something... else. A missive from a thousand nightmares, received unstamped, unstuck, sidereal.

I went to bed with spiders crawling on the inside of my eyelids, sticky gossamer webbing pinch-hitting for slumber. We pierced through night`s hymen and broke into daylight with irrelevant effort, and without too much expectation.

500 posts!

Mark asked me the other day about Cat`s Cradle and I had to actually Google for my own comments, my own post on this very blog from a few years back: Man my writing sucked a frog`s ass. It has, thank gawd, somewhat improved since then. From a literary… bookshelf-y perspective I`ve taken that natural leap from Vonnegut to Pynchon, from Salinger to Kerouac, from Batman to, um, Sylvia Plath, somehow. Then straight into the oven with that punchline.

I remember feeling old when people started calling Ben Kenobi, Obi-Wan, by the vending machine. I remember sipping from a vaguely coconut-flavored McDonald’s shake in Salvador, Bahia as tiny, frail wooden fishing ships bobbed up and down by the horizon line far in the distance and there were coconut shavings bobbing up and down in the glass in my hand like plastic chips in a cheap Christmas ornament. I remember forgetting the cookies I`d bought for my grandmother back aboard the airplane as I boarded off and got into a taxi, then entered my very own apartment for the first time, and late at night and it felt quite, quite what the fuck-ey. I remember girls, and the discarded hearts and condoms that inevitably ensued, though not necessarily in that order. I remember when I woke up one morning and when I looked down past my knee I smiled such an open pearly white smile when I noticed the ‘37’ I`d had tattooed to my calf the night before to remind myself I`m supposed to be the good guy because the world`s just filled to the brim with the opposition. I remember the champagne and the nightclubs and the endless piles of comic books as a panacea of little value against being bored to death at the office. I remember the Springsteen concert in New York City, 2009, Madison Square Garden and thinking I was coming back to next day`s gig as well and it felt like my Life had peaked at that exact moment. I still like to think it did as I forcefully ponder the mystery of the empty seat next to me.
Also of writing about Cybill a couple of years ago and then, fast forward two years into the future, and what do you know.

The typing now stops for a couple of minutes, though, in trying to come up with some real clever metaphor for Time but by the time these words hit the paper they will have all melted into something else entirely. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers are playing Free-Falling in the radio right now and I`m thinking of this one time back in my hometown, early 1998, just before I got into College, driving back from Gwen`s stepmother`s in my father`s car, when the stepmother was away…

(Am I really attempting to suppress a smile from myself?) -- The aftertaste of eating up a river, I guess. Or the choking from the gorging with the sand and the broken glass.

All in all... I wish I could write better poetry. I wish I would write a short story and get published. I wish I`d finish at least one goddamn screenplay for crying out loud.

I wish this blog to go on forever.

Sea (a poem for Cybill)

‘Sea’


Like a sailor, you have tattoos
though you choose to wear yours
as scars.
Those are medals.
But you`ll never understand that,
princess,
because the port
you want to reach is like
the sunset by the sea.

And you`ve sailed under
stormy skies, riding
the maelstroms, the
ill-winds, clinging to
that masthead of your dreams
for dear life, for tomorrow,
while lightning bolts zigzag
down all around, alongside
your imperatives and
recommendations,
those written down
in bold typeface--
--a Sphinx,
to save face--

Its figurehead perched from
high above the rostrum of
your aggression,
aimed at the halo of my digression,
from atop your
naked shoulder blades, with all
its secrets to keep but a few
to betray, a telltale from
your big brown eyes,
pleadingly so,
in the bedroom`s half-light.

You do not daydream of flying,
but you do not believe in mermaids
either. That leaves me in
a very difficult position:
You`re much stronger than you`ll
ever take the credit for, but far
more fragile that you`re willing
to accept.

Your presence makes waves.
Your absence has the gravity pull
of a star.