all American poetry

relationship  stars  junkie  love dream  lonely  money

luminous suicide  mother  father  cocksucker

names of greek deities shadow

wound  deep  rich  names

of european poets tender

lather  seaweed  moon

names of  european

cities

straw  drunk

bird  resonate  brother

names  of european  painters  resonant  sister

snow  falling  cedars  Paris  human world heart boundary

numinous nightmare diaphanous  tide  ghetto  panties  oppression

Untitled

O ebony world

how you love to set me desiring

such opposite flowers

like the nimble skipping moon

now nestled in the groin of a tree

now in the bath of your hair

now spreads that white canopy

that beautiful smile of death

The Frenchman

He’s seen it all by the age of three.

He’s got the book on you and me.

But of course! Mon Dieu!

(we come into view)

“Il est tre evident!”

his encantory refrain.

His eyes follow his nez:

Voila! Dedain, dedain.

My Friend Fred

(Who Looks Like the Philosopher)

He’s handsome, the eyes gleam

His hair’s even combed volcanically

So why don’t he think like Nietzsche?

He’s got the look can’t you see?

Even his mustache droops walrusly;

So why don’t he think like Nietzsche?

Tokyo at Night & Kanji

busted cart wheels

twisted umbrella ribs

cracks in the sidewalk

electric fishhooks

brush smash to paper

collided coathangers

hang blue and red giant

hologrammic dye

at night in Tokyo

TP

24 rolls of tp on sale a mini wall of pale pink

sorry we don’t have bags that big says the

winking checker so out goes the poet where

she must walk a block downtown during the

busiest time of day she must cross Madison

everyone in the world  watching her tp wall

together she and it get their attention and

before she can make it to her apartment door

the viewing public has her bent over trying

out a fresh roll she knows she feels them imaging

her trying all bent over her anklecuff pants

and now their eyes up her eyelet and the pressure

she applies they apply to their eyes to blot out

that too vivid reminder of where we’re all joined

Venus rises from the parking lot

is there no end to this river

I see you cross the parking lot

red miniskirt, minding the sun

mocha ice cream scoop shoulders

generous shadows across your chest

the sun so melting on you

so action full of summer roundness

your legs get me like the white parts of a river

my limbs feel cartwheeled

a spoke of your fragrance

halves my head at the core

the ache to swim in your dreams

throws me down this endless river

Two bathroom poems

 Ode to the faucet

My galaxy, my tender lover

My bringer of life and form

My improviser steady as a bank

Why not an ocean a river a bay a lake

determined and cooperative with the lay

of the land or the engineer’s torques

screws gaskets and pressure

bring me your gleaming noise

fountain cousins parcel delivery

Stand and serve and obey yet

you know your power

you own us and

we ignore you in return

Ode to the toilet

white empty may you always be

A clean throat of many favors

a courier not unpleasing in shape

(like an elephant embryo)

You let us decide anytime your hospitality

Firm or choked your gargle your flush

Recedes all from the surface

how you welcome our hugs when at our lowest

we give back to you our blasphemed essences

Without reproach blameless dutiful

with such joyful sush and rush

you force on us the celebration

of commodious internal wash

Lazy Poem, summer 2000

I just love sitting around being American and lazy

Nothing is required of me

Only that I let the blue sky rain down on my crown

I can sleep in the park I can smoke I can be stupid

sitting around being American and lazy

A bit puzzled because every beautiful girl I see

doesn’t want to get laid by me

So I’m sitting around being American and lazy

And looking at American leaves and lazy American trees

Thinking about our lazy food our lazy seasons

our lazy sports like golf and baseball

(don’t worry, it’s only one game; it’s a long season)

our lazy minds that swirl like lazy bottomfish

I love our lazy birds and our lazy suspicion

I love our lazy greetings Hey-ho-hi-sup

I love our lazy shrewdness and our lazy honesty

which astounds the world

I love our lazy jazz and rock and blues

I love our big lazy guts and our jelly donut hearts

that make us cry at ball games,

anthems, sunsets and dog rescue stories

hail lazy dragonflies who raze the man in the lazy hammock twirling his lazy bar-b-q fork

hail summer sun lazy as a slow twirling cement truck

pouring dopey lazy light everywhere and too lazy to really set

hail lazy poets who walk their words ten twelve twenty! to a leash

(so fucking lazy!)

where like curs they nip the barefoot feet of lazy neighbor kids

hail lazy brother, lazy sister hail your dandelion minds fly-blown

borne on lazy winds this lazy American summer

Two Stations

Spring

winter swaddling just drops

red tips sprout from buds and dogs

the smell of cooking greens and clay

small busts rounding on fruit trees

boys hook and girls arch and

from a nest with Christmas tinsel

I swear I heard a robin chirp “batter up!”

there is no way to love you more

if I could train seals to speak

or live a thousand years

I couldn’t love you more

we cannot stay is old news

our first ripe thought

until then I walk to your weather

and everywhere with my ear

on the belly of everything

I hear heartbeats

Fall

how do you do it beautiful

make death so grand

your orchards of color

your theatrical drop

the firing squad falling off

your last sales-job before winter

you make it all seem worthwhile

to wither and die in your embrace

what causes night will come for us too

we’ll go for your red lips

and find ourselves on the side

of so many used things

 I’ve got you before me but you’re gone

on the suicide of Guillermo my apartment neighbor

I steady your shoulder with one hand

then take a swing at you with the other

of course my fist goes right through you

because you’ve gone suicided to leave

we hadn’t even gotten started:

Mexican movies of the 40’s, Chávez,

Augusto Monterroso, Villa Lobos

and have you met the Divine Barrios yet

didn’t we agree how much you had to give

you fooled me with smiles and elevator greetings

revolving girlfriends and a note under my door

after our talk in the laundry room

“thanks for your words of encouragement”

thanks for the ghost and no poem

thanks for just the facts:

the hole in your head the gun in the street

I wish I could have said come back

put the gun down and come back

we’re tired of ghosts and memories

to kick live ass Guillermo is what a life is

not punching ghosts and always missing

troubadour moon

the full moon is a sound hole

my bars the strings

they make a guitar of my cell

I’ll play for faces bodies

unnamed and unknown

I am mostly longing I see

for touch and smells un uned

can a man be carved of such nothing

but when I die I’ll be uncontained

a hole in space that plays

songs of every longed for thing

The Cave Painters of Lascaux

you left us bison color action while

professor expounds: utilitarian worship

superstition before the hunt ta dum ta da

isn’t there a knock-this-off-my-shoulder

excellence, who were you trying to impress

as though you knew what would happen

that we’d make wonderful things, shuffle kidneys

drive in the air or take it to breathe on the moon

visit whales dance down ocean home

your love of fire presaged our turning screws on the sun

but we stand before your animals unknowing as prayer

estranged in the fifty fiftyishness of what our life is now

tell us how far we’ve come O Neolith

tell us why we seem to be doing some bidding

and tell us why we seem to be in the way

you get a laugh scratching in your furs

of course you knew what you were doing

you had to know you struck the rock of beauty

your cast for the ages in unlit visitation: take this

have you felt like this

if you’re not here then why am I on fire

I can’t stand sit for thinking of you

I move and want to walk into you

to heft your tits to thumb your nipples

but you’re where me I can’t only

visioning in some itching mind

harrowing as a trapeze artist

fuck the spinning miracle galaxy

I can’t walk across the street

it’s all you scraping the sky

all I want is to toss your cushions

grunt the way I can’t do anything else

flop frolic spread myself out with you

bounce your waves like a kid on inner tubes

move my head big like a cow over your pasture

pulverize desire where close discovery is

behold a tree so calm so uninitiated

before my rude indigestible solitude

desire’s dropped over me like a net

keeled me if you could see

I’m writhing and you’re not here

Corners

sorry, europe

I could fold your country

into the shadow

of the mountain

in our back yard

waiting for foreplay

the rivery swish

of clothes sliding off

limbs in the dark

nothing left for fantasy

I forget the last time

I lay down outside

something about a bucket of berries

the sun had a rude backhand smash to it

the river was hot

blues

I gave you my heart

I gave you my soul

where they went when you left

I don’t know I don’t know

death’s nail file

an icicle at noon

dripping onto a boy’s

tongue below

some dead

lonely dead so lonely

the wind blows them flowers

off other graves

Piano

A white piano world?

Sweet sweet child!

Beware the white piano.

It’s black piano world.

the beauty of war

helmets with heads, still in them

gloves with hands, still in them

boots with legs, still in them

shirts with chests, still in them

still in them

scattered over the red red grass

it’s the beauty of war boys

our daddy’s lesson never learned

it’s the beauty of war boys

kick back and blast

hey, we’re brothers at last

a blond head here

a black leg there

a torso wags a wag

soon to be all nature

it’s the thrill of war boys

a lesson never learned

let’s just break all our toys

and say we never heard

and the general sent them to die

how could you he doesn’t ask

a thousand cars drive over the bridge

he dreams of dead boys

driving lit cars over the bridge

how could you he won’t ask

cause it’s the beauty of war boys

our daddy’s lesson never learned

it’s the beauty of war boys

just kick back and blast

hey we’re brothers at last

The Sun  Skids

The sun  skids

a flat stone

above the clouds

the  Square Cat

his square sun

our sponsor

takes on time

gives good run

does without darkness

rich with children

infinite golden coins

through his spokes

a golondrina flies

many children flying

through his spokes &

we older than the sun &

his square cat

his juicy flirtations

going before him we

know nothing lasts

The Sleeping Juggler

the sleeping juggler sleeps

uncocked on the bench

the children walk by

sad & curious

the world arcs

the sleeping juggler sleeps

the children walk by

timid as stray planets

watch children watch

the sleeping juggler wakes

he’ll throw it to you

Mr. Piano Scale

Mr. Piano Scale

bucks and plunkers

down the street

checkered Stetson cocked

at a too cool angle

he stops at our place

says hello chile’

on his way back

into the street he trips

but rights himself

quickly sees a lovelyette

slides into one of her ears

and out the other

he strides into an ice cream parlor

sometimes you can’t understand him

hell say take that cat out and beat him like a high hat!

or darlin’ you in full bloom sweet

yes you a full sweet blossom oh yeah

he strolls on

he strolls he looks so good

in black and white

sometimes folks don’t notice

he just keeps on winding

turning crashin’ and yes

sometimes tripping

since he is beautiful

and nothin’ beautiful

is perfect

yeah!

Sky

I can’t believe I’ll be gone someday

no eyes wet with living

to catch the ricocheting sun

off bottles in the grass

no guitar clacking the canister of my skull

I’ll take the scratchiness of living

the sweetness of just before sleep

the frenzy of sugar

who’ll scream at TV when I’m gone

who’ll flip the bird at idiots

O vague sky who’ll get my thinking done

who will kick the rock in the road

who will love the world when I’m gone

 Aquarium

backwards stripes upwards polka dots

poofing fish sticks and poison

fishy snakes spiny swimming birds

crust and bone sand shots inky salady fish

garden slow motion garden this

neighborhood of toughs thorns and stripes

take out and gobblemeister crunch kings

venom tails and quiet tiny mirrors

tipping spokes of sun in your eyes

far from the delight of porpoises

to think a thought through such a long swim

further from the delights of coffee

big dumb ocean avant guard ocean

murderous bouquet of tethered magicians

Guatemala Sequence

Río Dulce

A body floats in a green pool

a twig cracks under a native paw

a bird fusses with its leaves

the sun coasts on lily disks

a frog blinks in the shade.

noiselessly in this drifting world

the finger’s caught on a tough vine

bowed over the bank

the finger lets go and the body

leisurely cartwheels in the pond

the finger’s green and letting go

Point of Destination as Point of Departure

a quiet house Puerto Barrios

a blowing horn in harbor

the quiet ones sit and stare

the noisy ones go with the horn

the metal’s hoisted, the dock recedes

the cranes are cocked

whores and families eye the ocean

it’s

it’s love good ol’ goddamned love

there it is you can’t wish it think it

sleep it throw it away it just stays around

like a rangy cat on the edge of your yard

good ol’ goddamned love

like a hunk of leftover cement

like a Chev up on blocks on your front lawn

O Christ it’s love goddamned love

it’s love you can’t wish it think it

shove it stow it away it’s love

that broke-tooth old cat snifflin’ round the porch

it’s love good ol’ goddamned love

it’s

 Jazz River

A cathedral in the river?

The effluence swings the bass lines clamp

Unsteepled rocks toil underneath.

A cathedral in the river?

My Africanized ear assures me

The rattling river cuts whichaways.

(Clamshells on the shore worth millions

Coyote steps into the frame and sips

The song sounds the same at night.)

A cathedral in the river?

You can’t hear everything

Except sitting by the river;

The river is that jazz: laughter

That annihilates mountains

Even Now

After Bilhana Bhartrihari

Even now

I hear your cry

the sound of love’s attack

from your throat

down past

your belly

Even now

I hear the hiss

of your skin

under my nails

Even now

teeth-dented

your breasts

my lips recall

Even now

I smell your temple

your sweat

the scent

of my annihilation

Small Caps

Beware: 3 L Word

In a room totally wallless

You’d have to call it flawless

Unless, of course, the ceiling’s fallen

Unless, of course, you’re half inch tall n’

Then your just a spreading mess

Gumersindo

(drinking song)

                           If my name were Gumersindo

I’d join a traveling show,

Put on big green shoes

Juggle fat frogs on my toes;

Dance merengue, cha cha n’ tango,

Learn to skywrite with my nose.

And all the kids would shout:

OO!    EE!    OH!

Gumersindo! Gumersindo! Gumersindo!

I’d join the wildest rodeo

If my name were Gumersindo.

I’d lasso Great Bull Brahmah

Jump in the stands and kiss yo’ mama;

I’d kick a fat calf, nail a buckin’ bronc, O!

I’d bounce roll spring and grin

Land feet first in a tank of gin.

And all the kids would shout:

OO!    EE!    OH!

Gumersindo! Gumersindo! Gumersindo!

If my name were Gumersindo

I’d be the star of a traveling show,

I’d twirl an elephant by the tail,

swim in the air, dive into a pail.

I’d whack a guitar with requinto

           Climb down a cannon  – BOOM! – Gumer? Ohhh!

And all the kids would shout:

OO!    EE!    OH!

Gumersindo! Gumersindo! Gumersindo!

The I.O.O.F.

          915 E. Pine

(drinking song)

One hundred F’s all in a row?

You bet, odd fellows every one,

We’re odd fellows under the sun.

We’ve got stairs in flights (maybe a ton)

And rooms galore (a hundred and probably one);

High ceilings and brass, silent actors and clowns

A panic-pink elevator on parade up and down;

The I double O F’s by god we got it all

Because we’re odd fellows under the sun

Odd fellows every one.

We’ve got hundreds of F’s all in a row,

Fools like FlinFlattery, gals named Joe;

The Eye Oh Oh Eff they call it a hall

It’s really a park, but one inside walls.

You’re there, you betcha, standing in line

(How do I know? Your hand’s in mine)

Because we’re odd fellows every one

Odd fellows under the sun.

To the Students Examining My Skeleton

you see the rational part, the design.

the chassis tells what it tells

pelvic nicks, striations of muscle on bone

interkinked vertebrae

nature’s imitation of stone

but the upholstery the cushions

at a Guatemala city bus stop

I ate the universal orange

from a beautiful wrinkled lady

the bus was late she packed up her stand

and slept by her fare with coins in her ears

then my eyes were blue as a spider’s belly

I loved an African with perfect walnut ears

my hands and feet were unused dictionaries

I clung to life like a man hoisting a piano

to have rolled in the spokes of the sun

and tasted electric rain

to stand for a time in affluent weather

to have been a part of this beautiful blue tree

to have felt that restless bird in my pants

look on my fellow twigs

I have neither leaves nor laughter

inhale to the top your smoky tree

rise on flat leaves your watery life

Bi-Poem

Where’s my cowboy girl

Gone to ride the sawhorses

Flung from a country mile

Where’s my cowboy girl

Gone to ride the seahorse

Tossed to humping waves

The steers are loose and looking

Find me my cowboy girl

The beasts are firing and free

Where’s my cowboy girl

So Much

So much muscle

Underground

So many used throats

Underground

So much combed hair

Underground

So still the eyes

Underground

Does one one eye open

Underground?

20^th Century

you took our virginity, last century

a brain attached to an unbounded fire

gone thanks to some wet animals

and fine machines stoked on babies and prayers

we stood with the wind soft as nipples

barely touching our necks and without

the mercy of an old blade

we breathed

we burned

we were gone.

did we have to know this

that leaves have grown back into trees

that rain can be knives and blood

the after air is now a bath of loss

and our thoughts are wary animals

afraid always afraid of the human

poet plots his first adultery

How easy to adapt to my own image as law

The trees go by me on my way

I am king a small god

driven by things higher than trees or vows

Am not myself you see but a force

the sparker of planets drives me

drives me like a bull his grip on my neck

his whip on my ass I can’t shake him

you must fall between those breasts

I am as rational as a torrent, help me Allah,

the invisible is giving me a bear hug

I must suck that body to work free of this blind burning

Where I live, (the Nettleton on 8^th & Madison)

Don’t say canary yellow

if you haven’t seen a canary in years

if you live in a mangoless world

my frontier seems like a brain

full of gray and electric storms

broken cherry trees unsent prayers

where drug boys and girls suck at the corner phonebooth

old ladies with talcumed skin and done up hair for church

leave perfume ghosts in the elevators that take me back to the 40’s

beggars mind the electric door at Shop Rite

jonsing to the musclely spirit of Bruce Lee

standing watch over his old dojo

between us and a brown sun burly mountains

survey us like angry older brothers

guarding our long-ago cheaply swapped virginity

time is throwing light and light

a shrinking fabric around the day

simple waking is not enough

collapsing birds, depressive health

overnight capsules thick windows

uncloud uncorked clouds undrizzle

a moon spooning through the night

tells time and falls into the fried sun

it’s an animal age of warning drums

where fresh breaking orgasms scamper the walls like mice

now there’s music where a man once was

the uninvited universe a gate crasher with song

like a muscle beach party in my head

and a scream outside in the night goes

wo ist mein geld? wo ist mein geld?

how I love the moon’s cold blade

how I love the sun’s citric morning

fist anglo-saxon

cage fike base fact uggh

scrim want ow choo choo

wife mite moo come file cast

core keen kem cal bank scan do

fuck dough git tor geld corn fro

kay sun shit bit look hit pay

cool snore core grrr foot

burp pill hat knife gore

gut prick fuck kick

Gravity is my Middle Name

the stairs crawl up the roof

the stars skip in the sky

under pillows the rivers rush

rush river rush river rush

with too much life

my bones are spokes

wheeling me down the mountain

Hello Kitty

Hello Kitty where you been

someone’s lapping at your bowl

while I’ve been gone

No  don’t tell me kitty

you’ve been with old cat Tom

saw him the other day

your milk on his whiskers

Hello Kitty where you been

someone’s lapping at your bowl

while I’ve been gone

Hello Kitty where you been?

saw you just the other day

cozin’ dozin’with old cat Tom

Went to see you Kitty

just the other day

just missed your fur, Kitty

(even missed your claws Kitty)

O Kitty! where you been?

hear you been sunnin’ runnin’

funnin’ with old cat Tom

Hello Kitty where you been?

someone’s lapping at your bowl

while I’ve been gone

Is this Love or Hemophilia?

Talking to a young dog

he points out the naked spy

look at the pinpoint cotton

the sweaty collar the cotton fly

dream up a friend: Jaime Solorio

What do you know Jaime Solorio?

scream the usual: “Juevo! Jaime! Juevo!”

the demonized flow the giant flood

the great bloodbath the bags of blood

throw the young dog out the airplane door

let the carnys bark their mortal fun

they’re louts and we love ‘em

But

Tell me is this love or Hemophilia?

Give me your gift of drag

Nothin’ But Future

(Ain’t no gettin’ off this train)

There’s nothin’ here but future

Tomorrow’s on display

There’s future future everywhere

Mañana  on instant replay

There’s future in the bathtub,

There’s future in the crib

There’s future in the boneyard

And future twixt mah ribs O-

There’s future in the rocking chair

There’s future in the gin

There’s future in despair—uurrrp!

Future future in each swig

There’s future in the outhouse

There’s future in the womb

There’s future on your fork

There’s future in your tomb

There’s nothing here but future

It all we’ve got to show

Let all the clocks run backwards

Into the future we will go

There’s nothin’ here but future

Tomorrow’s on display

There’s future future everywhere

Mañana’s instant replay

Miss Despair

she got tits out to there

she got video hair

she got ass to spare

when I stare she’s there, Miss Despair

I can do anything at all to you

I can clean you I can taste you

I can ram and jam you

and I can do anything but touch you babe

I just can’t touch you Miss Despair

She’s got tits in the air

truly Ferris wheel hair

she’s all that and more

and I can do anything but touch you babe

she got tits out to there

she got video hair

she got ass to spare

and I would do anything to touch you babe

Critical Mass

I’ve got critical mass,

building for you, babe

getting dangerous

take care of my critical mass, babe

Dead End Swimming Pool

Hit your head it’s the end of the line

There’s an alligator suitcase

But it’s made out of you

Floating with the leaves

There’s a beach ball, a parasol

A glass of gin and memories of thou

It’s the end of summer

In the dead-end swimming pool

And  still I’m going for the insides of a bikini

I’ll float here a little Longer

I’ll wait until next year for you

Miss top of a bikini bottom of a bikini

Sexy red onion sandwich the floating bartender

negative scum gone till next year

the parasol

The Beauty of War

Helmets with heads

gloves with hands, still in them

boots with legs

shirts with chests, still in them

still in them

scattered over the red red grass

it’s the beauty of war boys

our daddy’s thrilling lesson never learned

it’s the beauty of war boys

kick back and blast

hey, we’re brothers at last

a blond head here

a black leg there

a torso wags a wag

soon to be all nature

it’s the thrill of war boys

the beautiful lesson never learned

let’s just break all our toys

and say we never heard

our daddy’s simple lesson

and the general sent them to die

how could you he doesn’t ask

a thousand cars drive over the bridge

he dreams of dead boys

driving lit cars over the bridge

how could I he won’t ask

cause it’s the beauty of war boys

our daddy’s thrilling lesson never learned

it’s the beauty of war boys

just kick back and blast

hey! We’re brothers at last

Poem without Stars

As I walked across the sky

While I turned away

The skill of the skull

Where does consolation exit?

-There isn’t any consolation in my mind.
-There isn’t any consolation in my soul.
-There isn’t any consolation in my heart.

Coaxial brain the

Which sentence sounds right to you?

What will bring you back to me?

We know each other’s secrets

The time-spattered world

Fill in the poem poem

Sweet

Time

Last

Petal

Desire

Hardened

Entered

Lap

Lull

Ridgid

Parted

Cooing

Sighed

Lying

Breast

Languor

Munch

Blush

Sweat

Hungry

Greedily

Graze

Kisses

Lips

Sucked

Heave

Gaze

Delights

Spring

The season is new and flying in the sparrow’s beak.

Dialogue with Nature

(in the style of Japanese Noh plays)

Soul: You are so beautiful row of poplars above the iron smelter

the auto junk yard the rivet factory the bread factory the bakery

the mill the cement factory the steel yard the row of yellow poplars

and the occasional blush colored tree.

Nature: No matter. Your enjoyment is yours alone.

I do what I do.

Soul: Yes you are beautiful to no purpose;

just chance color coordinates thrown together

to designs far removed from delight.

Nature: Well, let’s not get carried away here.

You get all tantalized but don’t get angry

if there is nothing more. Can’t you be satisfied

with what you’re given. Why do you want more?

Soul: It would be nice to know if there is a message for us.

This tree has grown like a twisted wash cloth

And that one has the sheen of tumescence

The other tree is dark brick

the color of French roast coffee

Nature: How about French roast coffee the color of dark brick?

Soul: Don’t be a wiseacre.

There 45 non-performing words

45 retired words

45 non-functioning words

45 non sensible words

Poems for vindication

Dial Vindicating smiles like Nazi salutes

There’s No Thought Too Unshapely for the Skull

An uncocked wind swallows the corner sky

The weathercock chews the scenery

Hard-swallowing clouds the sleazy pornographic wind

the solar system is like an old black dial phone

the same crusted dialing finger

yanks dreams like the long long magician’s kerchief

but there are no sudden mountains

telephone lines like a musical stave host robins, singing quarter notes

the mountain stops our thoughts from going too far beyond the mountain

everything is gold when you’re about to lose everything

betrayal is a clever description of the world with its

creamy topless air melon skies and candied sunsets

he who speaks fluently speaks to himself

but not seeing is how we begin to see

goodness might taste even better in the curl of a trigger

and laughing back at death might force

the monster back into the storybook

and knowledge a gift hot to the touch.

even death is a foundling here

in the pestilential lair they find

beauty made useless by poison mirrors

back In the monster’s lair

death laughs up his well-worn sleeve.

the fever of things moves slowly

While I turned away

You became a boy and then a man

Stand hair like lazy smoke

Uncurdled stream of freshness

That one man could rake a country so

Hard to believe that this is life this pressure

A performance request demand and usurpers demand

Blame so fresh and pertinent a bargain a garage sale

Let stellae befuddle, for this is life a strip of nostalgia

The afterburn of lozenge shaped pie a winter kitchen of warmth and pie

Let last your frolic in the riverbank among the bramble while we watch

A fresh fuck on the foothills a months worth of doses a pile of winter rakings

A nice walk or a long bike ride to the islands a page of not nice warm trailers and books lice device a thrice a cave of Ali Bagmen sit stoned before the fireplace

Let unleash your tamers tale let flow your land free limbs grown if freedom

Spiked anger doused with furrel banked with bonks crusted with enzyme a kneaded population, scarcely shepherded, pruned upon a meat cleaver

Rushed into blivion basked in the well cloven by caves nethered by naked time and vanquished by a compassionate mouth sprinkled over clouds tractors and dirt and spread by failure hold your fire! A fistful of credit a lonely balcony seeping views and nihilist views of the water an approachable military off limits eyes; 40 dollars per eye. You pay nothing for the first eye. State of the art pounds; Larry Lanyard, smuggled himself in a tree, in the studio ceaseless questions muscling around the fire a maiden crack of the covers, more needles more packages, less color, less foxes, more paper; even stones have a life; we’re in whether we’re in or not; you can’t ignore skidmarks; the nauseous arrogance, the noxious arrogance, criminal doves, illegal birds, canned brain, canned brawn victorious brawn; stiff reminders, stiff shoes, help me I am a mouse; give it to me, Jacob; country eggs, stereo eggs, virgin clouds, stiff virgins, mountain breasts, sloshing breasts, glycerin guns; living fat; hot epigrams, foxfam; Phoxpham; growing bars, are your dimples still deep, Italy adulterates, drive and look; a turret, a cornice a dentil

dingy coordinates

with become food for a sudden mountain

and its dirty blanket

the dirty blanket of wind

“Hey! That was a real knob-job rain storm!”

the mountain a large toll-both

storm like a muscular knob-job

and their drifting infections borrowed dreams

from a common well this could be time or music

where do you come from what is your name

snoring wind scalpel O sun unmindful bird

rhyming birds and purposeful wind scoring

blanketing the dreamy pangris that you have surgered

scoring blanketing and embraced time itself

the quiet of your auditors the siege of them

by the dream a feeling that you are seizing time itself

stopping it holding it fondling it when you hear music

countersinging a drug happy drag

music this strong, wind this hungry

key of G major

Let’s sing: you break it you pay for it

from a hat it goes on forever, in fact

fugitive water

scalpel sun

you’re pulling something from our dreams

somewhere where does it come from what is your name

Kumquat, the word, demands a bigger piece of the action

What will bring you back to me?

When did you have to beg last

Professor Throw-me-a hump

A fork in your dried stool

from the smell of a sand bed we create past

musculature ligature armature davenports lace

breaks hulls deities beaks bones puddles of ink

such aplomb turns our vindicating smiles homely

how perfunctory it is

we find civilization in greetings and romance and gardens

we stride we don’t walk we fly

but it’s well known though unspoken

the sound of the burning fire that carries us into the transporting air

is the sound of the tearing curtain between being and non-being

summered memory

wisdom beyond blossom

stocks antiques statistics and wine

a boy swimming rivers who touched blurry green fish

and by the way live beyond taiga

at least enough to let slide fills of disquietude for life

seems a mountain it takes a heroin of effort to ignore

the burly mountains in our back yard whose shadows

could shroud small European countries

the mountains survey us like angry older brothers

guarding our long-ago cheaply-swapped virginity

for time is throwing light and light is shrinking fabric around the day

here’s the moon spooning through the night like a trigger

telling time and falling into a sun bath

whose skin’s an animal age of warning drums

fresh breaking the uninvited universe pounds outside in the night

wo ist mein geld till

I could grasp the moon’s cold blade or

Slurp the sun’s citric shadows forever

in our world we are so certain about unseen things

from the undisturbed sand bed we create musculature

ligature armature davenports smells breaks hulls deities

beaks bones piles of ink lace

our aplomb how perfunctory it is

things are mysteries but we’re sure of them

things pass us by but we understand them

our lives feel short and pasted with dream

we find civilization in greetings and romance and gardens

you wouldn’t believe our confidence

we stride we don’t walk we fly

it’s well known though unspoken

the sound of the burning fire

that carries us into the air

is the sound of the tearing curtain

between being and non-being

I saw a goose bathing herself in the Duwamish

how honeyed the water she shook in the sun,

a tug pushed a barge, tender monsters, without a ripple.

Our world summered beyond blossom, but how?

what wisdom have we but nothing and money?

Gold speaking fluently at the party? A boor

interested only in the sound of his own metal

in stocks, antiques, and statistics and wine

What I couldn’t do

The writer’s life you know

Wanting to tough it out

Better than taking notes or folding clothes

The Yankee Moon

Drainage

Oh my god
It’s the drainage, coming at you, babe…
I think it’s a special business get this monkey off my back; grief
beyond the sun
The appalling mane of the sun,

I can’t have seen it can I have?
Everything turns on the sun

the outward leaves and jumping horses
the men like jumping horses with their summer hooves

Look at the pussy look at the fists

look at the mud and the spray and
 
You’re not very clever
He’s a tackle box waiting to happen
A ton of tankle and mytox
Hard breath
Fox heat the cursive air the plotless sky

so far from the shaving kit

at the bottom of the train yard
Blowing mint
Tomato massage
Crude dieting glaciers Creamy time narcotic sun air topless planets

sharp-shooting fat sun dieting wind a farting sun

the whole beach is on a diet
 
range of candied sunset
comely hatchets and brine pickles and gears hold up and sense pilots and
sense and machines and last froth oh shit we’re going down

bless the melon sky
the ground tracks the subtle skin
the peachy sky the peppery sky
the gifted grime
sweaty palms

the dated palms
logical melons homey peaches
the winning wanger

Crude and deceptive bones

Toy bones playing with bones

There is a purity to crystallization

Being frisked by the sun the overlord of water

The play of frisky play of green light

under the leaves the vivid silver of the raccoon’s back

there are no boring bridges

muscular toned buffed,

Oliver on His Pedestal Chants at the Sea

My green youth thanks me, old now,

For giving my memories a chance to live.

Most things are mysteries but we’re sure of them,

Most things pass us by though we understand them.

Conservative waves are gate crashers with song

Like a uninvited muscle beach party in my head.

Your love was a mountain

I hadn’t the guts to climb

We live beyond shadows now

We live beneath the sun’s wings

Even water comes from the sun

Gloveless

It took such effort to ignore.

Emptiness is the Fullness of Unfinished Statues

Jimmy Guts Happy is Your Name

Fried bullet holes

Cracking handsome worms

A Mountain of Prescience Doesn’t Matter

The Arpeggios Crumble

The beleaguered guitar that has a

The souls derivations and tuggings

The Diaper of Surprise, the Ascot of Despair

Forest kicked and beaten as if by overeager cops

Marxist Mountains, Capitalist Water

burly mountains discharge

simple waking between us

and a browning sun is not enough

I might be eaten or at least poked

like angry older brothers surveys us

guarding our cheaply swapped virginity

collapsing birds, depressive health overnight capsules,

windows thin clouded uncorked drizzle O spitting moon

the uninvited universe a gate crasher with song

runs a muscle beach party in my head

the moon spooning through the night

like the nervous trigger of a first time assassin

ours an animal neighborhood of warning drums

and now there’s music where a man once was

a scream outside in the night goes wo ist mein geld?

wo ist mein geld?

you love the sun’s citric morning

The open-air desuetude of her moods

Sunsets are homosexual in origin

untie the musculature of thugs,

Lament

someone’s mama read

about the death of a monster

bursting from a book.

and everything will be OK,

and tomorrow’s another day

pity snorts and shakes her mane,

wanderers slashed and pulped,

And prayers are plentiful as smoke.

old timers bet on the death-frying

on young men filled with fuck

on imbecility well-shaded by fake trees

on wounds rinsed in vengeance

on anchors and anvils filling the air

on a shredding sky sneezing over the city

on horizons that will roll and liquefy

the ribs of our listing world press bonily

while you sling your buddy’s hide

and back in the monster’s lair

death laughs up his well-worn sleeve

the fever of things is moving slowly

as through a screen of not wanting to

we perceive the kickings, the howls

the artful blood across the walls

but not seeing is a way of seeing

(goodness might taste even better

your tongue curls softly

like the trigger’s curl

and laughing might force

the monster back into the pages)

such knowledge hot to the touch

makes Death himself a foundling

where Beauty’s a barely breathing stream

and everything is held hostage inside 

a thousand poison tiny mirrors

everything’s going to be OK

a mother sings, knowing, closing the book

 everything is all fire, all ice

Still she sings in the pestilential lair.

a strewn basket of roses

before the all a terrifying, voiding,

calling for mother

In the the story ends

Close the book

Mirrors with one image holding beauty hostage,

they find

(The seam of a cracked ice in the mountain lake is a temporary puzzle,

The forces of even

The monster back in the book

 with a single reflection

Steel themselves knowing the worst of the dragon is in its tailsomewhere hearing

But Monster licks his poison tail

frowns as we say:

everything will be OK,

tomorrow’s another day.

O lord treat me like a child

“dear God please, don’t please,

don’t give us contrasts just now,

hungry enemies sharpen teeth

on the gristles of hatred.

Takers bleed

,

Swinging blood or;

Yes, we share the world with bugs.
[unwanted blessings score the sky.]

The best-laid family

333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333

The Generally Accepted Sex Scene

To find caress alone the self caress

Let the institution screen

The riling rolling bong

Like Casanova’s prong

who doesn’t root for the bankrobber

A scene to evade boredom’s uzzle [bride]

Washing the centuries away

of the long stay in the army bed

moving with a flea’s or a punter’s specificity

and knowledge stays a brutal pin a

knowledge, a brutal stray

a glossy mat of bloodied fear

sends prickles to the tender parts

wanton words that flabbergas

conserve design contuse

the bone of ideology cracks another skull

and fear and shards

bird its lonely way a stand

sticking at dusk under the bridge

the deciphering war the prison of pills

they want pale ingredients

to lose their sleep and horns bend

the bowed poor the revenge of the rich

hope and snarl and glen and copse

on flat and beaten level stops

find the starry tale of woe

in the harpings of the moe

when the bender brings a fiend

savors dops to final scream

want of force is seen as spam

cooking things not only food

body rot and crow’s feet stew

voices raise and young men die

hangover like a hungry vulture

the sun was like being hit with a wet towel

the happy ending

Standing still at dusk I saw a melon sky

In silent mid night Women planting rice

Wild geese in writhing takeoff. In this windy nest

Ballet in the air Dew evaporates Black cloudbank broken

Seek on high bare trails in the clouds

One fallen equals two plum trees

Now that eyes of hawks

Spot a lovely bowl of

White cloud mist newly hatched like friends

Amble out for love Now in sad autumn

Fireworks beget Green fingers painting stolen apples

Painting boats and shores

A Seattle nest of rain

A sorry old tom cat. The rubber-booted old fisherman

Carrying message-seeds

Sidewalk writing gutter missives

While I turned away

The lace of you trailed

a spider trails you

Two white turtles trailed you

the lace of you returned

a strong rain unloaded leaves from trees

The bus departed

The bees died

My toes got cold

I prefer you to memories

please don’t give me contrasts

life should be all fire or all ice

don’t imagine harmonics harm

beautiful hands doing beautiful things

In the chair all life has moved on

and you’re still in the chair

Leaves seed the ground

Blow avant-garde seasonals

look behind burning leaves

fires show what fire shows

the creamy topless unfired air

the sun going all helpless

everything becomes erotic when you

put the word topless before it

topless stones topless shaving kits topless card decks topless candy

topless peaches and topless boats

and, of course, topless melons.

sense pilots a dowsing rod cock

and sense machines sky the peachy sky the peppery sky

Being frisked by the sun the overlord of water

I see her smell

drip a message of dripping strokes

but good loving An arm, a blanket, hair on breasts

Clothed you are so beautiful

subject to a Twist of light

to me naked well

Hennaed hair over your breasts

Towards Evening

our foaming house

of air

knocking pines

ripping not of wind

and afternoon arrives

sun on the side of tall trees

the lord is in heaven and carrots

plugged into dirt.

sick after you to bring myself back

sheathed only in your form means life to me

the porcelain quiet of your crashing life

find a jungle and a friend a mousetrap tied to a chair

you in your light tight dress then

I just barely survive your nakedness

just barely survive you

survive by knowing loving plants

urgent tree baffled light

patient towards stars

and you willing the sea to move

I will now submerge into my sludge delta

and wait for you to carry me back to life

and we’ll hit the earth again

the earth over and over

I can’t presume upon your horror

the fear of burning versus the eternal plunge

Oh my god

It’s the drainage, coming at you, babe…
I think it’s a special business get this monkey off my back; grief
beyond the sun
The appalling mane of the sun’s mane I can’t have seen it can I?
Everything turns on the sun begging leaves and jumping horses
the men like jumping horses like pummeling suns
Look at the pussy look at the fists look at the mud and the spray and
betrayal is a word for the world;
You’re not very clever
 
A ton of tankle and mytox
Hard breath tons of breath cursive mouth
Fox heat cursive air plotless sky
Creamy time sun air topless the creamy topless air the sun is going topless

so far from the shaving kit at the bottom of the train yard
Blowing mint
Tomato massage
Crude ice
Candied trees
candied range
melon sky
comes hatches
hatchets and brine pickles and gears hold up and sense pilots and
sense and machines and last froth oh shit we’re going down bless the
melon sky
the ground tracks the subtle skin
the peachy sky the peppery sky
the gifted grime
sweaty palms
crazed melons crazed peaches
the winning wanger

Crude and deceptive bones

Toy bones playing with bones

There is a purity to crystallization

Being frisked by the sun the overlord of water

The play of frisky play of green light under the leaves the vivid sliver of the raccoons back boring bridges muscular toned buffed, the fleshy flames of the sun around his burning nut the fleshy fire around the sun’s hot nut you do not refuse the sun’s kiss daddy O

here’s an apple pie in apology
vivid holdings secrets accidents

The inappropriate touching of privates of the sun. The too intimate suns a too intimate sun our biggest violator.

Tell me how to study the sound and read the air

Let the morning bring me fair

The end is always what we dare

Advance the swing between your legs

Strike a blow for not knowing

Dropping slights and dips and backs

Hold the torch from ear to ear

Gin and beer and vodka stings / strings?

Working on the deadlline seeking

A deadline a humming motor of stealth

Lighting appliances well appointed terms

Teeth the hobby of kindness the battle

The act of cleaning the air the discovery

Of the sunken chest the sense we are at the beginning of things salt pork, murky candy

There’s No Thought too Unshapely for the Skull

Tell me about the mind that runs the universe?

Well, he, the mind, is there and he is cold and uncaring

but he loves beauty the long legged woman climbing out of the truck,

the falling sheen of southeast Asian hair; the beauty that torments us

and reminds of what we can’t hold at every minute.

Somewhat like a cold successful homosexual novelist.

He reigns over loud orgasms and quiet libraries bitter beautiful morphine.

He reigns over lava flows floods and the spread of plum blossoms in the wind.

The stuff of jokes: fishing for his cock he cocked himself a glance in the stream and a fish poked through.

And not for the first time noticed he was bald he peed

and he thought himself good looking but under proportion

to the amount of women who should have been hitting on him.

Think of all the math this mind withheld from us until lately

think of all the double h words in English or how about all the double l or even triple l words? Wallless.

The cold is inappropriate, time to move.

Rescue books from the cold. The heat and weight of prancing deer

wake you in the morning.

Gold fillings on front teeth remind you of the gold windowpanes

on the eastern bank of Lake Washington hit by the afternoon sun.

The dust universal we share. The blond boy flings his jean jacket

over the chair at 13 Coins, heedless of the dust he sheds across the plates

of his fellow eaters.

The bald man on the airplane still has a ring of springy orange air

that he fluffs with his knuckles over and over again

as he reads his techno thriller, spreading headly dust

into the food and drink of his fellow passengers.

There has to be a mind. Someone knew how to make

the cunt so practical, so sweet so exalted so ecstatic and elastic.

The sunset was cheap as a Japanese fan.

The monkey air

In these dark waters

players with minds of drumsticks

The best sandwich in town is the BLT sunset

With flowers on it and fans on them

with Japanese Noh

my cock has the mind of a drumstick

scored ribboned thistled verified

Verbaled throated scarred torn

like a flake

what of the kid who wants to be black?

We can only reabsorb him: there ain’t no pick and stomp

Ventrilio is grinding sausage up to his elbows

farm still open basement making a

A cracked moon,

Standing still at dusk

I dreamed of battles

In silent mid night

Women planting rice

Wild geese write a line

Dead my old fine hopes

In this windy nest

Ballet in the air

Dew evaporates

Black cloudbank broken

Seek on high bare trails

One fallen flower

My two plum trees

Now that eyes of hawks

Spot a lovely bowl

White cloud of mist

Is newly hatched

Strangers are like friends

Amble out for love

Now in sad autumn virulence

Fireworks begin

Green fingers painting stolen apples

Parting boat and shore

A Burien (Seattle) of rain

Oh sorry tom cat

The old fisherman

Two white butterflies

While I turned my head

The song ended

The lace of a spider trails you

a strong rain raked leaves

from the trees

The bus departed

The bees died

My toes got cold

I prefer my memories to you

please don’t give me contrasts

just now, life should be all fire or all ice

don’t presume harmonics harm

the fear of beautiful hands doing beautiful things

In the chair all life has moved on

and you’re still in the chair

Leaves milk the ground

Carrying messages seeds

Sidewalk writing gutter missives

Blow avant-garde season look behind

burning wood burning leaves

Substitutes for a promenade;

what fire shows these leaves

To Face the Old Love

You sit like a murderer of old love

A committed murderer of old love

How does torture come to me unreasonably

I didn’t chose flux and smoke

too many heads

give me back my gears the old house will never live

Unhook the bra memories

such a sexy lucky phrase

like landing on a new continent

or leaving earth in a balloon

young men don’t want to free themselves

from the unhooking of bras

young men learning about undoing

I should be free but I am not;

I can’t change change

young men learning about undoing bras

The power of bras over breath

chaste and hemmed fasteners

So much I want to say

What you see is a man hemmed in,

Was I made to test the limits of unreality

A circle of guitars spreads sunsetly

I want to start noise

love to start moving; did I forget love?

did I construct a person

that is now cracking up?

of myself as a captured man to shut up?

Love of blackness is boundless; the kid

that was formed and shaped in the 60s

will choose…black sly in the family stone

What

The wife the kids you’ve trained yourself in still life

Everything seems so provisional

The moon is a trigger

Cocked moon burning wood burning leaves

Substitutes for a promenade

what fire shows

Eyebrows and shaved armpits of smoke

We’re Old Enough

We’re old enough to know

Someone always plunges

from the river stones

it’s always been precarious

for the beautiful young dead

yet here we are

a kind of snicker

still scratched by love’s greed

renewal is but lust

kicked by hungry hunger

though we’re slightly more than sleeping stones

we’re old enough to have known a while

Sleeping Alone

It’s too much the dress rehearsal

The ridiculous somberness of it

Floating in the empty canoe adrift

Among forged smoke signals

boundaryless dreams

Accurate barking owls

You alone with your heat your smell of rope

You want hards and softs the taps of toes

to brush other skin from knee to bush

Your hand to swirl

twin hemispheric eminencies

but you bob a near empty barge

you don’t like the lack of future,

boundary, the webby thoughts

in every direction past in future out

give me another prisoner you cry

but this is your gas and juice and knowing

your feet go searching swaying across the flannel

sometimes a blanket feels like an arm.

first light the birds go crazy

Blue birds blue notes

Are balls of paper

the poems written on them

that you throw to the audience

Imitation Shakespeare

Round O heart and merry unbind thy froth;

unspume the muffled tendrils

That brine the untoward casings of your tongue.

Vulcan’s hammer would yet sing.

Tis morning and once more

the turning spoke and the acquiescent spur

Shall awaken the tiled skies

and sliding berth

of nature’s complacent lap.

Aye, twas but a tilled sleep

not an earth-boweled quarry of cast dream

That ties all fitted pretenders

into a knot of unquench’d bereavement,

For thy love hath sent me earnest conjurings

worthy of my debasement

It is but shine and notion. Can woman

be so trifling of favor? Must I

Await crown headed morning to withdraw

her polished blade and strike

The turning heads of routing clouds

to run with dogged and water-bent dawn?

Nay, I’ll tarry, cloud bruised and barren

as a French farthing, thou makest me

To amend my farewells in knightly embroilment

and with embossed brows,

Our jointed craving is not yet measured.

I shall unfallow thy articulated wound and

So, cleaving, ignite the visible erasure

that cometh to all under Saturn’s wind.

Around the Apartment

Our frontier seems a brain

full of gray and electric

Storms, broken drug trees and charred phone booths.

Yes baleful old ladies with done up hair for church

Dower talcum and perfume ghosts in the elevators

new passengers our community of love

and recognition how you come to love

the faces hair clothes manners of neighbors

the alarms are always false the firemen always handsome

a good chance to catch up on gossip though

I miss Muriel, she was so good with dogs

I would like to open all my doors

I feel the musclely spirit of Bruce Lee

over the jonsing beggars at the electric door

the hammered parking lot the shot out neon light

the shot out shot out moon

gorgeously preens

In the courtesy of the checkers at Shop Rite

(I will always be thankful for your kindness)

the way a view

is an opening on something but we don’t deserve views

he he dead yes she saw him through, he lingered

and beggars jones the electric door at Shop Rite

a geological harem what to do what to do

sugar cane manifesto

Goodbye morning

McFate the ship captain

Second helpings

Sun as chapel

You gorgeous pumpkin

Gilded floated gorgeous crookedness

The risen names

Municipal poetry

Civil service poetry

Plush cherries

Pearl moon

Women live in their hair and tits

Heap big

mournful muriel

where I live where I live

you  love the moon’s cold blade

tells time and falls into the fried sun

Do breaking orgasms scamper the walls like mice

became a heaving hump like a wave

that to detach the artery of her affections;

the stork decides whether or not to harmonize

in the desultory diet of crunching Muscovites

and dentures up and holy tool use, and design on desire

she applied as if applying a desiccate or rather we ate

desiccated beef but decided not to press on without our horse buggy.

This desideratum was decisive in not getting us to move further.

Desks of desire

The despot at the desk

It’s all way to diffuse….

Desire is a despot from which we must detach ourselves

Gotta a run; too much that is deviationist the detergent of detonation…

Where I live, (the Nettleton on 8^th & Madison)

Don’t say canary yellow

if you haven’t seen a canary in years

if you live in a mangoless world

my frontier seems like a brain

full of gray and electric storms

broken cherry trees unsent prayers

where drug boys and girls suck at the corner phonebooth

old ladies with talcumed skin and done up hair for church

leave perfume ghosts in the elevators that take me back to the 40’s

beggars mind the electric door at Shop Rite

jonsing to the musclely spirit of Bruce Lee

standing watch over his old dojo

between us and a brown sun burly mountains

survey us like angry older brothers

guarding our long-ago cheaply swapped virginity

time is throwing light and light

a shrinking fabric around the day

simple waking is not enough

collapsing birds, depressive health

overnight capsules thick windows

uncloud uncorked clouds undrizzle

a moon spooning through the night

tells time and falls into the fried sun

it’s an animal age of warning drums

where fresh breaking orgasms scamper the walls like mice

the uninvited universe a gate crasher with song

like a muscle beach party in my head

and a scream outside in the night goes

wo ist mein geld? wo ist mein geld?

how I love the moon’s cold blade

how I love the sun’s citric morning

Under the Hail

I see her smell

Survive by knowing loving plants to no end but good loving

An arm but blanket but not me

Clothed you are so beautiful to me naked not so

But I forgive your nakedness knowing your beauty

Let sleep dear thing how black you are

I love your love your smile and eyes

Clothe in your light drip

Settle the sound of day seaplane gull bee

Your love stands me tall

Burning and a message of strokes urgent trees

Quick and gone

The sun’s fare to live to live

Where did I go forever at all

A shingled tree baffled light subject to a morsel

Twist of light

Henna patient to stars and you will the sea

To a patient foam house of air knocking pines

Ripping not of wind

And afternoon arrives

Sun on the side of tall trees

The lord is in heaven

Come for carrots limber ones the night’s about to fall

I want to see you hidden as a dear

In the copse your form means life to me

The quiet is yours in life

Find a jungle and a friend

Like a mousetrap tied to a chair

What permission am I waiting for

Ruthless slog we’ve hit the earth again

Slow carry me carry me

Life’s taken a barge down the river but here it stops

I am in my vast domain

I like the image of myself one who has gained mastery over his fear

Outdoor gear pants tucked into boots

Rolls own cigarettes at the table outside

At peace with birds and woodpeckers

The quiet trees around me like so many big brothers

The closest I can get to my brain you fill my toes

Pour five into my heart and wake my loins

Peter my fancy neihghnboring my stout shout blood

Ring chorus joy all for brownness blondness joy fight what we caqnnot say sing bell fire riot joy rapine how many begs hove hove you?

Your blood is so young

Small spiders joy ring joy

The sturdy paint of the sun

Wander theory winter’s run tell the tale of ka and din

let me sail for hampers swim all the not all the swill

can forgive a nimby pill follow a bug our formica

should his wandering shell like a torment of waiting

in somber shack never wait for the sun again

call to fun bodily craze yet stall at poetry

in real killings life is the real sun

it’s paint is red and moves forever

we’ll wait come again never

Find it boring ever after

So many signals to tell us what we’re doing

boring in and out drilling what we’re doing

is beyond us are we just exercising?

How much does it cost to learn life is not an exercise

what finality do we live for that leads us to ignore our oblivion?

We see signals so many but never the fading fighting atoms

lets fade now or fight

I’ve heard hand-to-hand combat is the ultimate high

we avoid it here like death to be sure

laugh at death anyway just because

he takes beauty from us or leads us to it.

Truth comes in signals

We have not truth but signals sweet pine shedding brown ticks and pins you’re bark like a difficult novel wrapped around your green core what else is there we feel in our feet happy color feasts ambulating what more is it than apple pie I get mine and your get yours is the world a toy we’ve already got a toy a brain that makes us stay and learn give me gimme that gimme that gimme that

Nature red tooth and claw

Wait nature dark and bumpy the frosty ant worships his tiny ending it was summer and I came. Called to greena dn darkness and sound and light everything with eyes shall rescue me balance used the earth as an apple core flung now into the forest floor le cackles and le caws draw silliest breath pine and mind death and breath

Crossing the ferry

The ticket taker’s bored there’s so many of you each with his urgent question each with his uniqueness soon to be banished. In another world maybe the ticket taker cares for us but I doubt it maybe he asks three questions that begin with … when? Or he drags on a cigarette and answers without looking at you. There are so many of you all unique all with the same question that begins with “when…?” All of you soon to be banished.

Ripostes and Ham

It was winter when we swelled so large unbunnied unbruied unhilled a loft of sex and demand where each buried duff desire that unsnuffed cigar that flatiron full of paydirt and fill and extra dahlia bulbs the flowers are not evil but the ferns are old and they have something sinister to say like a mousetrap on a wire tied to a chairleg

Poetry and Ham

Sorry for the meaningless attention getting title

maybe I was just thinking of my Grandmother

and her beautiful ham

just the right amount of brown sugar

and salt I just want a love like a grandmother’s

it’s got to be the purest on earth

parents and children are too bewildered

the kids wondering what brung ‘em

the parents so full of expectation or not

but in all world literature

is there an evil grandparent, I don’t think so.

I want to write a poem but there’s a ham in the oven

no nothing tropical here only smells

of the closed in the elevator of our apartment building

elevator courtesies going in and out of doors

I would like to open all my doors

the way you can in the forest but at night

I might get eaten or at least poked

it’s time not to burn but to pray

thank you for this day like an ocean under the sun

it’s as big as we can really feel

I don’t think the stars would be as kind to us as our ocean.

We’ve got an earth all is leaving at bright moments

such foil and terror a setting of ambition

and pretension against death that fat phony

Poem to Rex

Rex you’re such a dumb ugly dog

but you are loved by my friend and

so I love you he must have cried at life

as it was first presented to him as a gray

cement wall under Cocescueau that mad

man how a world class scientist he sent

away for parts to an outboard motor and

bullet missed him and maybe he offed some asshole

in uniform what do I know

about as much as you Rex,

you mutt but he loves you

you’re his doorway to the world

Poem to Horace

in our world we are so certain about unseen things

from the smell of a sand bed we create musculature

ligature armature davenports breaks hulls deities

beaks bones piles of ink lace

you would like our aplomb but quickly note how perfunctory it is

most things are mysteries but we’re sure of them

most things pass us by though we understand them

our lives still feel short and the past still seems a dream

like you, we find civilization in greetings and romance and gardens

you wouldn’t believe our confidence

we stride we don’t walk we fly

but it’s well known though unspoken

the sound of the burning fire that carries us into the air

is the sound of the tearing curtain between being and non-being

The other day I saw a goose bathing herself in the Duwamish

how honeyed and fresh the water she shook in the sun,

a tug pushed a barge up river without a ripple, slowly

our world seems summered beyond blossom now

what wisdom have we but nothing and money?

gold speaks fluently and he turns out to be a boor

interested only in the sound of his own metal

in stocks, antiques, and statistics and wine

when I was a boy I swam in rivers and touched bright blurry fish

my green youth thanks me for giving my memories a chance to live,

we live beyond shadows now

we live beyond the sun now

we live beyond sadness now

We’ve let go sacks of grief and history

Yet wonder after such strange pain

Our life seems a mountain

it takes such effort to ignore

To my favorite waitress

At the SeaTac Double Tree Inn

Her name is topsy and she always calls me

dear honey and sweetie

she makes me feel so good

and even told me to go ahead

park free in the front lot

“it’s OK; you’re a guest while you’re eating, hon”

she makes you feel special

she wears her nametag “St. Louis, Mo.”

My coffee cup is full and so is my water glass

how Garcia Lorca has such freedom in his lines he takes what’s at hand and does with it…

I’ve drawn lines before but I work to erase questions

In your arms

An improvised world of erased questions

our lust amortized we and see what we never saw:

we are toys.

An Open Door

An uncocked wind

Swallows a corner the earth the gray sky

with dingy food a sudden mountain

that captures your health toll stops time

so borrowed dream from that we dream

from a common well this could be time or music

where do you come from what is your name

snoring wind scalpel sun unbird mindful

rhyming birds and purposeful wind scoring

blanketing the dreamy pangris that you have surgered

scoring blanketing and embraced time itself

the quiet of your auditors the seige of them

by the dream a feeling that you are seizing time itself

stopping it holding it fondling it when you hear music

countersinging

music this strong and hungry wind

fugitive water scalpel sun you’re pulling something from our dreams

somewhere where does it come from what is your name

There is no private sun

A divinity awake but that’s all

When did you have to beg last

Joffery arrived at his usual perch halfway across the arching foot bridge and he watched the gun-metal, 40-weight water flow around a tractor tire in the middle of the river. It would take more than gray water and a tractor tire to ruin Joffrey’s feeling for the place. The river surface dimpled and wrinkled around the tire like wet cement. He looked up and drew a breath, taking in the moving water, the bare trees bunched like broom strands along the banks, the quaint, weedy river houses. Under a leafless birch he saw a pink and yellow blanket, a basket and a women’s red shoe: someone—a couple perhaps?—had set up a picnic on a grassy edge of the bank. Where were they? Rolling in the bushes nearby? Not enough leafy covering. Did they forget the wine? Did he say something that made her stomp off without her shoe? Or did the beauty of the place get them so hot they had to get back to her studio apartment? On the other bank a beautiful mimosa tree, large enough to lean over the river, irritated Joffrey in its splendor. Even now, mid-fall, its blossoms spread over the tree, a multitude of tiny Asian fans, hundreds of small yellow and mauve tipped fans. Why would nature drive this beauty into my eyes Joffery wondered. Or Mindless Chance see fit to make this particular offering? If matter is nothing but random light spectra why should he, Joffrey, find it beautiful? For the mimosa blossoms were beautiful. Why is there so much show business to the universe?

Naked, Joffrey thought, Fontina made the idea of evolution laughable. She gave delights that could never be accounted for under the administration of Mindless Chance. It would take a lot more than billions of years and boiling rock and buggy water to make her. She could only have been created by the snap of God’s fingers. Start with her back where the dark skin cells seemed to rush and crowd so that the surface shimmered according to the changing light. Then there were her tits: they had heft like paperweights but so smooth you thought they might disappear with repeated fondling; and they gave off an exciting vibe, like placing your hand on the outside of a bees’ nest. Her shoulders were masterpieces of the genre, two perfect ice cream scoops and her neck, the curved African neck, God…there is too much beauty for the universe to be Godless yet too much pain for God to be present; therefore God is…practicing classical guitar. Or doing something really hard, some art that nobody can do to perfection. Just too much stuff for there not to be God. Let him not be all-powerful, all-knowing; He doesn’t have to be in control of everything. He just has to be there. Science claims the soupy earth brought forth samba-dancing humans; did Mindless Matter somehow long for life and bring it forth?

Joffrey recalled that when he was thirteen Uncle Norman had taken him into the woods for Joffrey’s vision quest. A boy was supposed to pass through a vital if not downright dangerous night alone in the forest and emerge with a confident sense of himself as a young brave. In reality an elder camped within shouting distance and not a few awoke the next morning with a frightened boy curled near the campfire embers. But Joffrey stayed put. Uncle had marched him five miles into the Primitive Area, a zone off-limits to whites with first-growth Douglas Fir on the slopes and a rare native spongy growth, like a thick welcome mat, on the wetlands. Uncle had him sit on a stump as big and flat as a grand piano lid surrounded by open-spaced tree columns whose lowest branches were at least fifteen feet off the ground. And nothing much else. The forest floor actually looked clean, forming a carpet-like uniform of busted sticks and cones. Joffrey noted the high branches again and realized Uncle was going easy on him: there wouldn’t be any animals coming around nibbling off these branches. None of his family wanted Uncle to take him in the first place; he wasn’t much of an Indian and they all hated his father, a truck driver, whistling his country tune, one of those loner whites who hover around Indian chicks getting them pregnant and leaving.

“Little Coyote ain’t gonna have no vision,” uncle Otis had said. “He’s all about getting away. He’s all about being Little Coyote. Look at him. He’ll be in your sleeping bag as soon as you start snoring.” The other uncles laughed and let out the lodge grunt of assent, “Hurummn, hurummn.”

But Joffrey stayed on his stump. Late afternoon leaks of light upon a nearby cedar tree allowed Joffrey to observe a bluejay tearing up and down the trunk like a rodent. When it basked in the sunlight for a moment the absolute blue of its back—a fluorescent cobalt or teal blue—seemed to penetrate to the back of Joffrey’s eyeballs. He thought such a vivid presence must have a message for him. Why would the bird scamper up the tree rather than fly? Joffrey figured it was pecking for a bug that lived between strips of the stringy bark. Or maybe it felt good to give his little claws a workout. Whatever. After an hour or so of its rodential skitter-scatter up the tree, Joffrey was glad to see it go.

Night fell and the moon didn’t appear. Joffery did have his vision. But he was scared and wanted to cry out for Uncle a hundred times in the night. Especially when he thought about wolverines, the demonic forest dog that once ranged the Cascades, killing for the fun of it and terrorizing Indians traveling to the coast over the pass. Weren’t they coming back? The wolverines? Hadn’t one showed up recently in Stanley Park in Vancouver? He knew he was a goner but he stayed put.

Around midnight the cathedral quiet flipped to a nocturnal bird shouting match. The super-dry forest floor cracked with critters and maybe larger game, all of them checking out the large mushroom that had grown up suddenly in their midst. But Joffrey didn’t cry out. He knew that animals were curious. And there was always an easier meal elsewhere. At one point in the morning half-light he thought he felt the brush of a raccoon tail on his back.

At first light with dawn hesitating through the woods like a motherless fawn Joffrey saw a brown owl on a high branch scanning the world confidently, majestically. Suddenly the owl expanded and swooped down upon a squirrel at the base of a tree. On the upswing he flew towards Joffrey with the squirrel in his beak. The squirrel appeared to be smiling. Sure the owl had cinched the squirrel’s coat back at the neck and maybe Joffrey was just seeing things. He was exhausted after a night of sitting up on a log, nodding on and off, imagining wolverines. Even so Joffrey caught a glint of admiration in the squirrel’s eyes. The poor thing was dying but wasn’t it possible the squirrel admired the splendor of the owl as he died? He wasn’t being shredded by a wolverine. He was swooped upon, sought after like a lover’s intended. And with incomparable grace and power. Why not smile at a beautiful death? Nature’s elegant dispatch.

His uncles mocked Joffrey’s vision. “A smiling squirrel? Mighty Squirrel? Happy to be eaten by Mr. Owl? Smiley Squirrel! Ha!”

For about a month afterwards Joffrey’s uncles provoked each other to dry, uncontrollable laughter by uttering the single word:

“Squirrel!”

But at the end of that month Joffrey knew that they had granted him his quest; he had achieved his vision: pray for a good death, a worthy death. He knew they had granted him his vision because when they addressed him they dropped the ‘Little’ from his name and started calling him just Coyote.

#2 I want to like John Edgar Wideman but I can’t. His novels run in the stream of consciousness which at best is a transition technique and not even Joyce pulled it off all that well. Makes Wideman’s novel seem cramped and stuffy.

#3 I want to like Mailer’s Ancient Evenings but the idea of fictionalizing speech into the heads of people so far from contemporary America, well.. the accents are all wrong..

#4 If Cheever errs (this after reading through the short stories) he errs on the side of over specificity: describing way after we’ve got the point the children’s fight at the dinner table and the family pyrotechnics. But even his errors are great.

#5 Anyway. A two hour perusal of the great discount displays at U Book Store. Great writing, seconds, remainders going for $3.98. Dozens of expertly written novels by young turks and turquettes. I don’t think writing has ever been better. But the subject matter is drivel. The novelist sits down and writes a novel about a homosexual affair with a novelist. Or he is a university professor or an English bad boy. The Necrophiliac, Zoolophile. Give me a break! Where is strangeness, the majesty of creation? OK, that’s a bit high flown; but I get no sense that vision and weirdness are at work here. Imagination is the key, writing is the tool; give people something to imagine. Instead, we get novels as news to bring back to shock the bourgeoisie (the chef who masturbates into the sauce and salad dressing, sex with a robot, etc.). These young novelists run out of steam, or crank out historical novels. They are all compared to Saul Bellow, declared geniuses, overachievers, Blessed of God.

#6 When did the novel become a kind of code book? We have the feminist novel the black woman professional novel: what happened to the novel as a work of words and folly?: Rebalais, Cervantes Swift, Sterne, Joyce had something else in mind other than the feel good morality/cautionary tale (the resolution of conflict) the novel has become in our day. We have the Powerful Novel: a morality tale, the child abuse novel, the divorcee novel, the blues guitarist novel, the stockbroker novel; how few novels aspire to nonsense. Granted, the old ones often fail to generate suspense. And having a character go on and on for pages in conversation is hard to accept nowadays (I think the whole concept of dialogue is suspect in the American novel, we simply don’t talk to each other-there is not enough common conversational terrain to make assumptions-)

#7 This wonderful passage from Vargas Llosa’s A Writer’s Reality: Discovering a Method:

“It [the beginning] is especially difficult because I need to fight against my insecurity…The only way I can break this depressing situation is to write in an almost mechanical way, similar to what the surrealists call automatic
writing. First, I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try
to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the
plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of
self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style
or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be
used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.”

#8 John Edgar Wideman (slight return)
Again, I want to like his novels. I like his approach – as in abstract painting. Black English is naturally literary if you define literary as subversive. Language is a tool; you mangle the tool for your own use – or so it does more than one thing: it calms down the monster who is kicking your ass, it gives you a sense of fun, in enhances your prestige with friends. Trickster lingo. But Wideman’s work seems sometimes locked or wrapped too tightly around one spine; would it hurt to open it up? Even though there may be multiple narrative voices (hard to keep track of, etc.) they emanate too directly from one consciousness. I don’t think it is wise to imitate Joyce – his grand failing – lack of suspense.

#9 Reading British playwright, Alan Bennet memoirs. Fine fine writer; sense of how small and family is England. He writes satire and some old families object to his characterizations; satirizes books and the agents threaten lawsuits. Just how much small change there is on the island, how much hard cheese and small beer, regional and city rivalries, character traits in relief. Their certainties, careful observations, wit, score-keeping and resentments. Maniacal obsessions quirks eccentricities of aggressive island peoples. Nothing like that here? We are not old enough for one thing; we don’t know each other well enough. Ours are more general and therefore less fun? More deadly, serious, without irony and the hints of forgiveness you see in the Brits.

#10 Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations. First off the title: Poe/Bach offputting. To paraphrase Henry James: one rather regrets Powers’ too familiar knowledge of freshmen science 101. Some real dandy sentences, lots of dreck. He shows his essential immaturity by expressions (not questioning), e.g., collective unconscious – a phrase that has been on death row for 15 years. The book doesn’t do two-bit science very well; he doesn’t know music all that well, the encyclopedic flashing, name dropping and when we’re put off – how easy to condemn us as know-nothing, anti-intellectual Americans (the smart reader laughs up his sleeve and slaps a leg: Powers takes science seriously!) The novel is where I go to get away from reverence for science and all that crap. For science is mostly smart men who see invisible things and who tell the rest of us, who can’t see invisible things, how it is. Gee whiz, how life has changed radically from the middle ages! I thought the novel was one place we didn’t need to sit around and agonize over ribohsomes and DNA, to revere science. Powers writes to impress-whom? He name drops after culling Ed Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and we’re supposed to think he is smart…I won’t deny him his gift for putting words together but science does not deserve the compliment of this writer’s intelligence; it is to give into the enemy camp. Poor Philosophy, poor Literature. Sometimes writers can be dull; you see their thought processes so clearly: it’s a book; it must be profound….

#11 The urgencies and premises of novels now out on the market do not convince me. They are false and made-uppish. The characters are drawn from writers’ surroundings: professors, filmmakers, journalism, other writers; there is no imaginative reconstruction of life as a social fabric beyond a narrow vocational/media net. Their stock of realities of how the world is, is slim, safe and too formulaic; too fathomable. Small narrow safe little coming-of-age stories. Hot-house workshop fiction. The protagonist is a professor or an artist; the subject matter is soft; the sense of process is slim, the sense of how hard life is (or can be) seems not to be a part of the perceptive network of these MFA graduates. You feel the characters being painted or dictated. They invariably quote a poem by Rilke or refer to a painting by X. This locates them in a found novelistic milieu, or rather an accepted novelistic milieu. Yes, the technique is there, but writers don’t think to question the formulas of fiction. What happened to the author as a coiner of perception, seer, visionary, humorist? Without fail they take their cues from the Lang/Arts sections of Sunday papers. You can see how oppressed writers are. They bow in obeisance to social “themes”: child abuse, gay or lesbian this or that. The characters are often journalists or, God help us, novelists. Would it be so painful if Americans looked outside the constraints of straight-on realistic fiction? Would it be so painful if an American were to risk style? We shouldn’t write as though Faulkner never existed. Why the fanatic embrace of all this cliché? My idea of a good novel is Rebalais, Apuleius, Petronius…to continue more in this vein. Industry, we’ve got; what I don’t see is courage. I see navel gazing, I see topical themes, I see the media dictating theme and setting (child abuse, feminism) glam themes…

#12 Would it hurt Jim Harrison-reading his poetry- to write about something other than wanting to get laid drunk or eat a big meal? Would it hurt him to study form to create a beautiful line? His poetry seems monomaniacal jotting of the first thing that comes to his head. Considering the bulk of Selected and New Poems (1961-1981) was written while American boys were being hamburgered in Vietnam, it wouldn’t have hurt JH to write something other than worries about weenies or hunting or rejection from beautiful babes or how hard it is to write poems or bottles of booze or whatever. From the sound of it he got some good fishing done in varied exotic locales.

“It’s not a big deal,” said Ben Marble. “It happens all the time in the military, especially the Navy. You say the wrong thing at the right time or vice versa. You apologize and move on. Sure you can dig in your heels but you’re peeling potatoes for the rest of your career.”

“You fought in a war to advance freedom, free speech.”

“True, but you’re not down on the farm anymore carving your initials into a tree trunk. You’ve plugged into a complex system of realities and while there is tremendous freedom within that system you are still not an isolated unit. You can’t plug into the system and run your own game on it. I assume you wanted to come to the city to be plugged into the system as opposed to isolated from it?”

Joffrey sat and tried not to look directly at the Commander. He felt intimidated by his powerful hairy forearms, his still coiled bulk, his penis fingers, his tensile force. The Commander wore Vans tennis shoes and their wide grip seemed to affirm his weighted authority at Dayfresh House.

“It was just a writing assignment,” said Joffrey Simpson O’Day, still looking down. “The Koran. I was just having fun.”

“OK. Great. I’ll take you at your word. But you also have to take me at mine when I say I thought your fun project was needlessly provocative. An apology sends everyone back to his corner to cool out.”

The Commander picked up the literary insert. “This is from your Barney Frank Koran:

‘And be patient, fow suwewy Awwah does not waste the wewawd of the good-doewas. And He it is Who muwtipwied you in the eawth, and to Him you shawlw be gathewed. And He it is Who gives wife and causes death, and…the awtewnation of the night and the day; do you nowt then undewstand?’”

The Commander stopped reading. Joffrey focused on the flip of the Commander’s gray and brown ponytail and said, “Provocative is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?”

Ben Marble gave Joffrey a long snake stare. He swung his big chin towards Rainier Avenue and asked, “Do you bank in the neighborhood? Here in Rainier City? Next time you go to the bank take a good look. Who is sitting at the desks of the personal bankers? Sitting mind you, not standing in line like ordinary Joes. I mean sitting down and giving it to the staff tracking every penny of their money. I’ll give you a hint: they’re wearing burkhas. These Muslim Somali moms and wives are some of the best depositors at our local banks. If you think those banks are going to give up those deposits so you can be free to fuck with the Koran then you are wrong son.”

Joffrey didn’t know what to say. He would rather the Commander tell him war stories. What it was like to gut an enemy Vietcong like a trout. “It embarrasses the hell out of me to have to spell it out for you like this, Joff. I admire your intelligence and pluck but you’re wrong about this. They need that apology, the school. Apologize Joffrey and be done with it.”

This would have been the perfect moment for Joffrey to perform his Marlon Brando-as-Kurtz imitation, wrinkling his forehead and reciting in a high voice, And you’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill. But he didn’t. He didn’t want to set off this particular ex-swift boat captain. Instead Joffrey Simpson O’Day excused himself and left the office.

.     .     .

“Apologize? For what?” cried Joffrey Simpson O’Day. “Racism? I thought we were talking about religion? I wasn’t making fun of a race. I was making fun of Islam, the Koran. You got to admit, my stuff is funny. You laughed at it.” He laughed.

“How about this for starters?” The Famous Writing Professor held up a copy of the class literary insert. She read aloud to Joffrey:

“‘And when you are greeted with a squirting greeting, greet with a better squirting than it or return it; surely Allah takes account of all thrusting things. And Allah is Spanking, Wise. Surely you may judge between people by gamahuches of that which Allah has spanked you; and be not an advocate on behalf of their deep throats; surely Allah does not love treacherous charvers.’

A Porn Movie Dialogue Koran,” the professor moaned . “Why? This went out to what—how many thousands?

The Famous Writing Professor was sitting with Joffrey at a table in the Roethke House café. She pressed her lips together in disapproval and shuffled the student papers in front of her. Texts she called them. Like something found in the caves, The Dead Sea Scrolls. Texts. She spoke: “The stability of Roethke House depends on our community involvement and at least striking the pose of equanimity towards all.”

“Why does everyone fixate on the Porn Movie Dialogue Koran?” Joffrey wondered to the air. “I like the Valley Girl version myself.” He took up the literary insert and turned a page and read:

O Prophet! Gag me with a SPOOOOON! Oh, fer shure, wow! Oh, wow! when you divorce women, mostly, mostly, oh, right, like divorce them for their prescribed like gnarly time, and like, dude, do your duty to, like Allah, fer shure, your, like, Lord, dude. And—

The Famous Writing Professor grabbed the paper from Joffrey and mashed it into her open purse.

Perry the Cat and his fat tail again. He snuggled in the Famous Writing Professor’s lap, luxuriating in the professor’s unselfconscious strokes and blinking arrogantly at Joffrey. The professor seemed to be stroking her way towards a statement, smoothing out unready words. Joffrey looked over at the beer handles sticking up from behind the bar. They had the café to themselves. He then glanced down at the table and noticed a circle-stained, Roethke House brochure-turned-coaster: a county and corporate funded house on historic Capital Hill City dedicated to fostering literary activities throughout Sunbreak City.

The Famous Writing Professor spoke. “These people, the Muslims, have been abused and brutalized by the west for centuries. We have a price to pay for all that. It is not in our interest to antagonize them further. It is not for us to say who is right or wrong in this so-called war on terror. And I can’t have Roethke House associated with racism at any level. There was a reason the Sunbreak City Deintelligencer didn’t print the Danish Cartoons. The advertisers. Who are their advertisers? Have you seen our brochure? The same, thank you.

Joffrey examined the brochure again; true, corporate logos squirmed all over it: Nordstrom Headstone, Clearhaeuser Lumber, Starbucks, Bardahl Shoes, Macy’s Pet Foods, the Bank of Sunbreak City, Benaroya Parking Lots, United Way.

Joffrey Simpson O’Day wrinkled his forehead.

“Stop!” said the Famous Writing Professor. “Just stop it Joffrey Simpson O’Day. I’ve seen you doing your Marlon Brando routine for the other kids in class. This is serious.”

Joffrey Simpson O’Day pretended he didn’t hear and, forehead wrinkled, puffed out his cheeks a la Don Corleone. He raised his hands in supplication: “Solorzano’s lost a son, I’ve lost a son. Where has it gotten us? Will another hit bring back your boy?”

The famous writing professor didn’t laugh. She said, “We don’t want to give any ammo to the haters. If we mock the Koran like this it could bring down a lot of trouble on the house. I’m not prepared to back you on this.”

“I don’t understand,” Joffrey said. “I’m your student. What am I supposed to apologize for? It was just a writing assignment. Your writing assignment. You set the theme: Gods and Monsters. Beth wrote about an orgy of nuns based on a short story of Boccaccio. Finn’s story about a local parish whose parishioners dismembered, roasted and consumed the priest after he announced the parish had run out of communion wafers—that was real sweet. How about Reggie Claydon’s screed about an African-American preacher extolling revenge upon the white man? I just had some fun with the Koran.”

“You’re being obtuse.”

Joffrey wrinkled his forehead. In his best Brando accent he said: “And you’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.”

“I won’t have you talk to me like that Joffrey. I’m not one of your groupies all tipsy and giggly-happy to be in your presence. This is a prestigious writing class and you were fortunate to get in. I want you to give this talk the seriousness it deserves.”

“That’s just why I can’t take this seriously,” said Joffrey. “I respect you and the class too much to even believe we are even having this conversation. This is a dream, it’s not real, it’s not happening. I can only maintain my respect for you by imagining you under some outside compulsion like pills or pressure—pressure that you should resist.”

Teacher and student glared at each other. The cat purred and the refrigerator behind the bar buzzed to life. Joffrey observed that the rims of the professor’s eyes were puffing, tear puff, donut puffing. She was angry—about to cry? She wouldn’t cry.

Joffrey tried to control himself. He spoke in the chopped measured tones of the near insane. “I did the assignment. I thought it was funny. I thought it spiced up a ripping bore of a book.” He avoided her bright warring green eyes; he noticed the famous writing professor had a fine layer of down along her jaws. Would she have removed this if she were not a lesbian?

“Please don’t make me say the obvious,” said Joffrey. “I won’t disgrace my background, even though it is a tiny thread, by mentioning it.” Joffrey paused and said: “This is a complete bullshit conversation. I didn’t do anything wrong. I did my work.” He stood up. “Go ahead and flunk me if you have to. No apology.”

.     .     .

Joffrey Simpson O’Day in conversation with himself:

What in the hell is the matter with everybody?

Don’t be a baby. You know. Your Barney Frank Koran, your Koran versions, have started streaming. Around the world.

Yeah so? You mean the all-powerful Allah can be knocked over with a feather?

That’s not the point. You know what I’m talking about?

No, I don’t. I was having fun. So now fun’s off-limits? Last I heard I was an American; I have the right to do and say what I want.

Oh, so you can shout fire—

Don’t give me that shout fire in a crowded theater bit. Every religion is trashed in commercial America. Capital Hill City has a play about transvestite nuns going on ten years now. Islam hasn’t got any special consideration over and above Christianity or…

Or?

What about Native Americans? Our sacred objects—the peace pipe, the headdress, our teepees, rattles and drums and weapons—were absconded with by commercial America to dress cigar boxes and storefronts and all manner of demeaning graphic just to turn a buck.

So let’s pile on the wrongs to make a right.

Bah! Our so-called leaders discovered their reverence for Islam about the same time they discovered they had fouled their pants in fear.

Take it easy, we’ll figure out why we’re not going to apologize for our messed up Korans. It will just take time. Why we’re not protesting our expulsion from the university and all the rest. Why we’re letting ourself be erased, not fighting back, all these expulsions. We’re smart. Remember the time we all stood admiring the large backyard of the tall house by the lake? We stood there, three of us friends observing a taught rope tied between tall trees flanking the backyard. It was too high to be a clothesline. Why was it there? What did it mean? A science experiment? Lucas said. Yeah what kind of science experiment? We laughed and bullied him because we knew Lucas didn’t know any science. Then we knew, you and me. Suddenly. In the corner of a downstairs window, very small, we saw the tiny stripes, green white red. The Mexican flag. Piñata! A piñata rope. Kids backyard parties. You fling the piñata over the rope and raise and lower it while the kids try to bash it to pieces.

You’re right. We’ll figure this thing out.

.     .     .

Even though The Porn Movie Dialogue Koran and the other versions had begun streaming throughout the world, Sunbreak City University President Snowden Branch was able to press local media to downplay them. The local TV stations, of course, didn’t mention them. The Sunbreak City Times and the Sunbreak City De-intelligencer routed the whole thing through community gossip columnist, Nikki Bread. Joffrey read her column:

The friskiness of college students seems to be a constant. It could be argued that frisk management is a major part of what college administrators do. When a recent mock-up of the Koran in various versions appeared in The Sunbreak City University Daily (the SCUD) hackles were raised. The Times editorial policy of deep respect for Islam and the historic greatness of Islam prevents us from running excerpts from the modified Korans. Suffice it to say that it was offensive enough to bring in the direct intervention of university president Snowden Branch himself. President Branch has made exceptional efforts towards healing the bruised feelings of a sensitive religious minority of students.

Towards that end President Branch will inaugurate a special Evening of Light and Affirmation candlelight ceremony on the university campus tonight. Student body president Selindra Mayhoff will lead off with a series of speakers from the lesbian gay bi transgendered community as well as leaders of various university multicultural clubs and representatives social justice groups. They will all join in celebrating the university’s status as a powerhouse of diversity.

Moses Keen, president of the faculty senate along with a Working Group of 88 Professors affirming the ‘right of students to be free of spiritual assault,’ will dedicate this night by sharing in a moment of silence followed by the singing of Kumbaya in Arabic. “I’m not Muslim but as a person of brown-ness I cried in solidarity with them when I saw the blasphemous Korans in The Daily,” said Keen. “I look forward to tonight’s celebration and fully expect it to be an event of great healing. I just know that the singing of Kumbaya in Arabic by candlelight will show the world that our university is in the forefront of world diversity. It will be a moving, life-affirming event.”

.     .     .

A few months into his Sunbreak City sojourn Joffrey discovered his Home Place. It was an elbow of the Duwamish river that flowed through the industrial flats of Tukwila. The river bent and flowed gray and thick as spent motor oil after having descended the cold bright headwaters of the Cascade mountains. It  strolled the Kent Valley where, seasoned with farm pesticides, it stewed through Sunbreak City’s industrial flats, past the airplane factory, the cement factory, the bottle factory, past the sawmill, the steel mill, past factories diapered in giant American flags (and spewing tiny wages), past the tugboat yard, where, widening out into the delta flats it glopped its remains into the salmon-pruned Puget Sound.

Joffrey’s Home Place featured a sturdy wooden pedestrian crossing that offered piercing long views of the river—as if from inside the river. Vines like busted guitar strings sprang from the vegetation along the banks. The tides and flowing waters had cut the vegetation sharp at water’s edge like page-boy bangs. Here, just beyond reach of the industrial waterway, of Boeing field, of the police firing range, of the city itself, lay this chunk of timeless pastorale. The river was still close enough to the bay to rise and fall with the tide. Every visit to the Home Place was a glass of champagne that kept filling itself after every sip. There was never any time that it was not beyond exquisite: the dimpling water surface, the flowing bunchy embankment, the quaint rustic houses, the poised sky, the broomy tall trees. Last fall the water churned muddy with salmon roiling upstream. Coho, Chinook. It was the season, the run. A distant uncle, laying nets one morning, saw him up on the bridge and called him down. Joffrey met him on the bank and watched him fix his net. He had a burnt, coriaceous face with the makings of a goatee and, of course, the distant uncle, whose name Joffrey could barely remember, knew everything about Joffrey.

I hear you’re in school. Unh. You got you a nice ghettofabulous girlfriend. Got choo a nice buffalo sister. That’s what I hear. Unh.

Joffrey resigned himself. It was useless to delve into conversation. All his life his uncles knew every single thing about him—what sports he was going out for, when he got a new pair of tennis shoes, when he started to jack off, what girls he was interested in,  how many points he scored, what his grades were—knew what was going to happen to him before he did. And they pounced, without mercy. The distant uncle bagged a few and Joffrey was able to feed Dayfresh House for the weekend.

He didn’t want to visit his Home Place too often for fear that it might be a dream or that it might vanish. After the salmon run it flowed with fallen coin-like locust leaves on the surface.  The banks were still puffy with green and maple leaves like drooping, brown rags still clung to their vines. Why Joffrey’s Home Place was not packed with photographers and painters was beyond him. Or lovers.

.     .     .

O yes, the uncles. Joffrey often thought that anyone with eight uncles tormenting him while growing up might qualify Native American. Always and everywhere hovered the uncles. They were a certain type of men that, had we won the Indian wars, life would have been much more interesting. A better society? Maybe, maybe not. Hank, Wilson, Otis, Little Bear, Walter, Red Owl. They could move from sociological analysis to dreams to astronomy, to war (many were Vietnam vets) from poetry to tribal politics. They were so individual and peculiar; they could be verbally quite brisk. Abusive even. And funny. Joffrey mistrusted any historical account of Indians that left out their humor—that meant basically all accounts. But the uncles had your number down from way back, they identified your own interaction with nature. It wasn’t nature reverence per se, it was interaction; they felt that certain rocks, mountains, trees, animals and streams had things to teach. This wasn’t nature worship it was something else. Something like family feeling. Which is at once more reverential and more standoffish than nature worship.

.     .     .

Fontina and Joffrey sit in the dark auditorium at Alhadeff Hall listening to a single man, the Famous Scottish Guitarist, a classical guitarist, play one gorgeous tune after another. They were out on a date. Fontina picked up a taste for classical music in Japan. “Any given night in Tokyo,” she said, “there are forty plus symphonies running through the entire western classical repertoire. Amazing. It’s not classical so much as live. You get a taste for live music.”

Joffrey has never heard guitar like this before. Thousands of listeners trying not to cough, sitting quiet and focusing on the famous Scottish guitar player. The silence seems religious. They seemed hungry for rare angelic sonics. The famous Scottish guitarist wore his blond hair long and parted in the middle. When he dropped his head to see his fingers his hair swung together like theater curtains. Why didn’t the world come to heel under the assault of so such beautiful music? Why war, now, after such music? Joffrey is happy. Joffrey and Fontina had candlelight dinner at McCormick’s before the concert. Joffrey tasted the glamour he had always longed to taste. He could barely eat for thrilling to Fontina’s looks all through dinner. He basked in the multitudinous flickers of her darkness. At dessert her lips took in the metal spoon and they held it, her eyes blinking white upward and closing with pleasure while she absorbed the ice cream. Such a private expression in public; she was alive, Joffrey thought. To live in a big city and to dine out with a beautiful woman marked off a life notch for him. He had left the desert of eastern Washington behind. Death shrank to the size and importance of a raindrop. Or now he could die. Now, in the dark of the concert hall, they snuggled and Joffrey put his arm around her and he felt he possessed a kingdom.

But then Joffrey hears his uncles. They are clawing and fluttering around his shoulders, insistent as wrens. The Famous Scottish Guitarist picks his way through Handel’s keyboard suite in G minor. Joffrey hears his uncles chirp at him: You, Little Coyote, you could turn all this back! All this industrial civilization depends on you, right now. You could erase the presence of the white man if only you renounce this guitar, this product of white machine civilization.

“It’s just a guitar,” Joffrey says. “You love it too. The electric anyway.”

Yes, say the uncles, we know and we can love its sound too. But for all its hand-carved, wooden ambience it carries conquest in its wake; it is as much a product of the industrial grid as a cement factory or a nuclear plant. The strings are wound nylon, finely spun silver plate wound on computerized thimbles and rotors, themselves fine as fingers. Oil products make up the guitar finishes and lacquers, the top and sides and the glues are oil derivatives too. Ditto the varnish that gives the guitar its glow. There is nothing spiritual going on here. If you renounce this guitar all of white civilization will vanish. It hangs by a thin silver thread. Let it go. We will be free again. We will live our land and fight our own fights. Choose now Little Coyote. Choose now, cut the string and take us back before the grid and free us forever.

Leave me alone assholes, says Joffrey, under his breath. He squirms in his seat. So typical of my uncles to fuck with me when I’m having one of the happiest moments of my life. The Famous Scottish Guitarist comes to the end of the Handel piece with its magnificent run of ascending arpeggios. Joffrey is sweating.

Fontina offers him a hanky and asks, “Whats wrong?”

Then Joffrey discovered Rainier Avenue, the long stretch between Graham and Henderson. It offered the most staggering view—on clear days—of Mount Rainier in the city. The shadow of its vastness would easily contain a European country or two. He was only stopped cold by certain black drug street salesmen. We were a long way from the cool black dudes on the album covers of his uncles’ jazz records. These street dudes had dead patches, like the blank marble eyes of statues, where their eyes were. The black dope dealer: hard faced, doesn’t move when you approach. Looks like he’s been suckled on cement. He is the nuclear core of American society, the thing in itself around which society is built, accommodating him or avoiding him. His anger knocks entire commuter neighborhoods together, vast developments with water, sewage, electricity and maybe damns and nuclear plants, so eager are whites to flee from him. From whence this saggy-pants nihilism, patterned hooded sweatshirts, the crisp, flat-billed baseball hat, backwards, sideways? Joffrey couldn’t feign too much ignorance. They are a tribe, my tribe, after all: druggie-wuggie moms, invisible dads. The abandoned ones. Kids as serenely checked off for erasure as any stack of boxes vacating a loading dock. Joffrey felt they weren’t living so much as pre-dead. Only the ground willing to embrace them whole. The Rainier dudes. Their free swagger, their pocket flags, gang colors, the nowhere energy of nothing. Maybe the generation coming out of slavery, and the one after, setting up in the teeth of American hatred couldn’t afford nihilism straight. Nihilism would have been a luxury. After slavery blacks had to follow the bouncing ball of American life, fighting its wars, marking the color line, marking time. After the civil rights era blacks could relax a bit, let the poison of Death’s close breathing descend upon this generation.

Then Joffrey’s sense of resistance kicked in: why should Death win? Show me the contending force from which the dudes are snapping back. This force Joffrey could not locate in Sunbreak City. Apart from the bars across the small shop windows and ground floor apartment windows  he had spotted no degraded slum. Libraries flourished as did mini grocery stores. Halal markets, car repair shops. Was there something to see behind Sunbreak City’s benignity? The embrace of Death scared him and attracted him. But had one of the boys ever run a log sort yard, ever worked a green chain or supervised a barking crew? Had they ever worked the log pond at a great saw mill? Joffrey wanted to connect with them but he didn’t do dope, the charming guest who always takes more than he gives. Maybe the street dudes perceived his nonchalance or the choices open to him. The free swing in his own walk would offend them. He wanted to tell them that Death didn’t need a hand from them. The span of Death’s domain allowed for no apprentices. Maybe this coiled violence rushed to fill the blank created by the Sunbreak City rich, withholding, as they did,  from all, the magnitude of their accomplishment.

One Saturday afternoon on a Rainier corner he walked past a very dark black young man (Does blackness, textured skin, invite roaming spirits?) with a baseball cap pressed down over a nest of dreads.  He seemed absorbed in watching or perhaps counting cars in the street. It was an act. “Are you stoppin’ or shoppin’ niggah?” He spoke briskly, knowingly to Joffrey. Taken back, Joffrey did not have a ready reply. “Clear the corner, niggah. If you ain’t here for nothin’ keep it moving.”

Joffrey tried to pick out—again along Rainier Avenue—between Graham and Henderson—he wanted to see if he could pick out the real whores from the police decoys. The purse always the purse! Waiting and not waiting by the bus stop. Usually he could. The decoys were too good to be true. They had clean hair and didn’t carry the spirit of burnt whoredom to its logical end: the kind of physical self-looting you see in real street whores.

On one of his neighborhood walks down a side street near Aki Kurose field Joffrey saw a Muslim father call out to his son from the front door at dinner time. The boy was about ten and wore a white long gown we associate with North Africa or the Middle East. The boy was happy and he was leaping with his two legs together, leaping like a seal towards the house. The father was impatient but you also thought you saw great affection in the father’s face. Joffrey wondered that he belonged to a country that had this kind of love happening.

Later that morning Joffrey came upon a row of wooden houses seemingly unmaintained for decades, mossy and sunken on the north sides. One such house had a Sears chain link fence around the front yard. On a narrow slice of cracked sidewalk leading to the slanted front steps a black girl was jumping rope. She wore shorts and she was long legged and sang to herself in time with her bouncing feet. She must have been twelve or thirteen and she seemed possessed of so much innocent energy and hapless joy that Joffrey took a moment to marvel. He had to tell himself to move on: he didn’t want to get tagged as a neighborhood perv. She reminded him that he and his sister had lived moments of kid-bliss, usually in summer, not really knowing the world. Joffrey walked on but he kept thinking about the young girl. She moves to life as though she were rich, he reflected. The mind of poverty has not encased her head. He imagined her later that night as she watched a National Geographic special on the ancient gardens of Babylon. Let’s say she does well in school; she will go on to study the world and history and geography. Perhaps she will travel and visit the world’s great cities. But she will always be precluded from knowing that her very own city, Sunbreak City, hosts dwellings as majestic as the castles of the kings and rulers of old. Living in Sunbreak City, her own city, the neighborhood of Highland City will be a distant rumor for her. And by design. She would be denied the knowledge of monumental greatness that existed in her own town because the forces of money and power had designed that she not know them. No TV, Radio or movie ever talked about the palaces of Highland City, not even in passing. This is the effrontery of the Sunbreak City rich: they hide their munificence—palace, castle, estate, manor—from the children.

Sometimes Joffrey heard a rooster crowing when he walked the neighborhood. How would they survive the raccoons or the feral cats? Sometimes he heard the piano being practiced.

This was his neighborhood after all. Rottweiler and baby stroller white couples. Competition some mornings seemed for the tallest dog in America.  The wife, obviously in control of everything, the husband, tamed and pushing the baby stroller. And dogs and owners dogs and oweners andmoredogsandoweners.

He fully intended to suck the city dry. It was his city now. He had a headquarters: Dayfresh House.

***************************

The building was originally a two-story hotel, The Robertson (The Jewell of Rainier City), built for traveling salesmen back in the 1920s. Nescient heirs, bloated lawyers and tenuous records all fumbled across the decades to turn the place into an unofficial museum with Sunbreak City tagged as the ultimate title holder. The city was about to declare the old hotel an historic landmark when federal money available for drug rehab caused the mayor to cry out one morning, “Find the buildings, find the addicts and put them together—now!” To the press he pronounced more soberly: “This is a perfect opportunity for public and private partnership in the service of our communities in order to meyhram gran benhriff blanaahh…”

They christened it, Dayfresh House.

Joffrey lived for free at Dayfresh House in exchange for working the night desk five nights a week. He was to monitor who came in and out, but really making sure the residents (or inmates as Joffrey thought of them) didn’t go out for too long. Going out meant that the residents were going out for drugs or whoring. Some were prohibited from leaving the building without a case worker.

He answered directly to the supervisor, Ben Marble, who everyone called ‘Commander’ because he was a retired navy commander and because he carried still the air of a man used to having hundreds of young people obey his every wish. He wore a small pony tail. Everyone figured he missed out on pony tails when he fought in Vietnam and now he was catching up. He had large forearms and while he didn’t talk much about Vietnam rumor had it he worked the swift boats and liked to ambush and gut his prey with a commando knife. Somehow the residents felt safe and comfortable with a guy who was once slathered up to his elbows in human guts and organs.

The smoky chandelier, the blotchy light over the small rotunda lobby, the brass umbrella stand, the slices of himself in narrow mirrors along the walls, the high-grade oak flooring cracking underfoot, the wing chairs and coffee table fastened into the rug with metal tabs and the large oil painting (nailed fast as well) of a peasant woman crossing the Pont Neuf at dusk—all this floating on a cherry red carpet appealed to Joffrey’s sense big city living. “Shabby gentility at its finest,” he whispered, walking into Dayfresh House for the first time.

Joffrey had a studio apartment with a bay window that overlooked Rainier Avenue. His room—every room in fact—held fine odd touches: a small cubby-door outside the room’s entrance that once must have served as a delivery for milk bottles, beveled glass cupboards with small glass knobs, a pantry cupboard with an open air vent to the outside and a large metal framed Murphy Bed that unfolded from inside a large closet.

The residents looked as varied as any group of adults walking to and fro in a grocery parking lot. In reality many came from jail or parole programs and all had committed themselves to a three month stay. They took part in therapy sessions, one-on-one counseling, group outings and general down time. Joffrey was so green that during his first week he thought all the residents drank a special kind of strong tea from special small cups; then he realized they were all walking around with urine samples. Anyway, Dayfresh House, present:

Percival Gaston
May Dray
Martin Alarcon
Terry Nockly
Hamilton “Bing” Bale
Kenworth Turndale
Raj Devar
Fred Torch
Ray Plummet
Tammy Mint
Larry Moretti
Martin Hellcake
Jack Spuckle
Marshall Sterry
Nolan McHenry

One night as Joffrey walked down the first floor hall at Dayfresh House he heard a voice proclaim, “I’d never commit suicide during baseball season!” It was Ray who said it, as he found out later. Ray, Ken and Nolan formed a trinity of dudes who slumbered in the Dayfresh House common room watching sports on TV every chance they got. Didn’t matter what sport as long as some ball was in play. These would have been the guys you meet at every party, swirling beer, wasted on pot and cocaine, who talk in logical, crystalline sentences about baseball minutiae. After exhaling bong clouds thick as hurled gallons of milk they could carry on like this:

“…no you’re wrong. The guy who stole the most bases in his rookie year was William Ellsworth “Dummy” Hoy. 82 fucking bases. He led the National League.”

“Not bad. Ruth only stole 10 his rookie year.”

“Guess how many Ty Cobb stole? His rookie year. Zero.”

“Know why they called him ‘Dummy’? He was deaf.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. He was also really short. The fans would wave their hats at him instead of clapping…they still use some hand signals…”

Joffrey and the TV room guys didn’t hit it off because he didn’t want to stand around in forced bonhomie bull-shitting about sports. There they sat, a three-headed, lumpy, long, plaid sofa, snarling at every entrant, demanding payment in the coin of sports blather. Joffrey didn’t pay; he just nodded at the heads and bounded up the stairs to his room.

*********************

Joffrey arrived at the Commander’s office-bedroom, a narrow and Spartan thing and Joffrey wondered if it was his imagination that it seemed outfitted like a bunk on a big ship.  Joffrey sat in a spare but comfortable chair (was it a designer chair? Italian made?). There was a framed picture of the Commander’s wife and family from when his five boys were young and unmarried. A contemporary portrait would have packed the frame with a bunch of grandkids. There wasn’t much else in the office. A couple navy flags and some insignia in a display that he didn’t really understand. The Commander sat at his desk filling out some paperwork which he quickly stuffed into a filing cabinet.

“Joffrey.” The Commander swung his chair around addressed him.

Joffrey smiled to signal he was alert and paying attention. How could he not? Hairy, big forearms. Serene bulk. You couldn’t imagine besting him in hand-to-hand combat.

“I hear you called in an airstrike on yourself.” Most everybody at Dayfresh House indulged the Commander’s Vietnam era phrasings. With some frequency they heard some new arrival described as having that Thousand Yard Stare. Once he broke up a fight and finished it with both inmates shaking hands while the commander repeated, Peace in Our Time, Peace in Our Time. And once we heard him yelling on the phone at some board member of Dayfresh House behind his closed office door, I will destroy this village to save it! But just now Joffrey was trying to parse the Commander’s airstrike analogy.

“Hunn?”

“Your Koran thing.”

“Yeah. Just a lark.”

The Commander’s eyes had become two portholes, large pitiless openings onto a dark interior that made Joffrey move in his chair. “It was just a lark,” Joffrey repeated. “Muslims, Islam was on my mind because you see them all over the neighborhood.”

“You come across as Mr. Mellow Dude,” the Commander said. “But I know that the cuddliest, furriest animals in the wild, they have the sharpest claws. With your Korans you’ve taken a real slash at Muslims—“

“I didn’t have particular Muslims in mind,” said Joffrey. “I just wanted to poke some fun at Islam in general—”

“Islam is too abstract.” The Commander didn’t like being interrupted. “I don’t believe it or let’s say it is hard for me to believe you didn’t know you would draw blood. There was plenty of thought and malice there.”

Joffrey noticed the lumpy wrinkles, like the too many coats of paint on a ship’s hull, around the Commander’s porthole eyes.

“I’m not finished with the subject,” said the Commander. “Let’s get ready for Talk Night.”

Joffrey had to be there at Dayfresh House Wednesday night for Talk Night and for evening bed-check. He wouldn’t miss Talk Night for anything. He helped with small chores that the commander couldn’t be bothered with.

Joffrey’s furnished his room was with odd bits and ends from the thrift store. He got around this by telling his visitors that it was modular furniture. “See? It’s modular.”

***************

Guys in drug treatment like to talk. They like to smoke and they like to talk. You share a cigarette and everyone becomes sociable. And conversation takes its way. Easy malleable and sometimes entertaining. Like this: it happened to be Gay Pride weekend and the Pride marchers took over the neighborhood for the weekend leading some of the panhandling house staff to resent the antics of Sunbreak City’s gay population.

Larry, a certified forklift driver, said apropos of nothing: “I ain’t no faggot.” The strength and sheer falsity of the statement among a bunch of drug addicts made them roll their eyes. Drug addicts know that all manner of behavior has flowed through you. On drugs life lives you. Passed by, passed through, thanks to dope. If nothing else, dope makes you sell anything, your body, dope makes you suck cock.

But gays were on the minds of some of the house members so the conversation flowed that way.

“You really hate fags?” Martin asked. “Really? Well, try this. What if you were stuck on a desert island. Would you rather be stuck on that island with a big fat ugly woman or with a young slender good looking boy, say, a 15 or 16 year old boy with smooth skin and nice lips and clear eyes? A hairless smooth skinned youth?

“It always intrigues me that in nine cases out of ten the angry homophobe chooses the boy. They always qualify it by saying ‘I’d have to be the dominant partner though. No takin’ it up the ass.’”

Moist laughter, and then foot stomping laughter.

Then Terry said, “But hold on. Young slender guys grow up. The get big and they get muscles. What happens when your slender boy grows up on the mythical Desert Island and gets strong and the life of the Desert Island toughens him up and maybe he didn’t really appreciate getting drilled by you all those years—but what could he do about it? But now he’s grown and he’s big and strong and he’s coming after you and he turns you into a punk? How about that, huh? Your boy will want to be the macho and he’ll be on your ass turning you into a sawhorse and that’s how you will live out the end of your days, as a pin cushion for a young angry homosexual boy. You’ll go through those adolescent years when he can get it up 15 times a day; your ass will feel like a red jalapeno pepper—

At this the crowd—group conversation—moaned and called for a time out. Laughter and moaning at the imagined pair.

“Not so fast.” This was Jack, a former claims adjuster. Jack said, “Let’s say, for whatever reason, you have chosen for your Desert Island companion our fat ugly woman. And let’s say in your arrogance you haven’t been able to touch her—even on the Desert Island. What if the hardships of island life makes your fat ugly woman slim down. Turns out she’d got great cans. She slims down to reveal a great bod with breasts like a pair of otters coming at you. But then this now stacked goddess remembers. She remembers that you almost rejected her for the boy outright. She remembers that you really didn’t want to be on the Desert Island with her. She remembers that you didn’t touch her for years. She then takes her knockers over to the other side of the island. She’s healthy now, mentally and physically (and stacked) and she hates your guts because you sat on the island and ignored her all those years. Now she’s looking great but she hates your guts. Maybe she wants to kill you. That’s it. To entertain herself, to pass time, she plots out how to murder you. Or maybe she’ll agree to do it but she only agrees to do it if she can chain you to a tree and whip you with branches or something.”

At this the knot of ex-addicts laughed and shook their heads and dispersed and called out good night to each other.

*********************

On his way to his room Joffrey noticed Willard’s door was open. Willard was a Special Ed teacher with a large gray walrus moustache. He seemed perpetually wounded. He didn’t like small talk. He always wanted to get real heavy right off the bat. Joffrey slightly paused at Willard’s door and Willard, sitting in a folding chair, the only chair in his room, was off:

“The mystery of my life is why the rich don’t treat the poor better in Latin America. You can’t account for it, Joffrey. I joined the Peace Corps when I was young; I was a few years younger than you with a BA in math and a teaching certificate. I was sent to the Central American border of Nacosta and El Chingo. They wanted me to help do a survey of water tables in a very poor area. I didn’t understand such poverty then and I don’t understand it now. It left an invisible railroad spike in my skull all these years; it’s been over forty years. The rural dirt roads were a joke, the heavy rains carved them up like Swiss cheese. But I traveled by motor bike through the nearly impassable countryside surrounding a small volcanic chain. There was often no electricity or if the village was close enough to a sugar refinery then they might have a single cable like a ratty shoelace looping through the village. The kids, I can never forget the kids. They were beautiful and dirty, some wore no pants, some walked around stark naked. Some were starving. There were no schools and most had to work cutting or loading sugar cane or whatever seasonal crop needed harvesting. They were all hungry. A few lucky ones had shoes. So here is a village built on eroded humps of hard dirt. The houses were dirt brick with thatched roofs. But get this: many of the houses held priceless Mayan antiquities within. The fathers clinked them up with their machetes while digging in the fields. Beautifully carved whistles or small masks, maybe thousands of years old; going back to the time of the Mayans. Once I tried to talk to a couple fathers of the kids running around with these priceless ancient artifacts but they didn’t want to give them up. They had been approached before. They had some idea of their value. I did not want to be a colonialist ogre so I didn’t push it.

Before long I went to the nearest Catholic church and tried to talk to the priest about conditions in the village and he agreed to help me. He was a Spaniard and talked with a Madrid accent and I wondered if he felt he was living way back in the colonial days. Surely he knew that his parish was destitute? I gave most of my Peace Corps wages to the families and I tried to organized a once-a-week clinic, going to fetch a doctor from the nearest town about three hours away. I became the nurse, taking names and keeping records and learning to give shots and set up IVs. The women in their 20s looked like 50 and those in their 30s like 60s. It was ghastly and I didn’t understand it. At the clinic one afternoon a young soldier appeared in the doorway. He was super friendly and looked all around and smiled and shook my hand a few times. He had a machine pistol strapped across his back. He came back the next week but without smiles or handshakes and told me to follow him. He took me to a small police shack about 20 minutes away. I was shown a bare cement floor with an electric battery and poles and I’m not ashamed to admit I shit my pants. I wasn’t tortured but I was roughed up and told where to get off. So much for the water land table study that the Peace Corps had contracted me for. My superiors moved me to the nearest big town to teach statistics at a university extension campus.

In the town I remember beautiful girls, like coming upon a clutch of perfect black berries or huckleberries in late summer. Each one aglow and perfect to the eyes. I didn’t screw around with any of my students; you would be surprised at how circumspect young men can be, at a time of peak lust, when they give themselves to ideals. I was there to help and not to exploit. But she, Mercedes, came up to me when I was waiting for my motorcycle to get fixed, she was my mechanic’s niece, and she offered me coffee. Wow. She had a smile like a honey pot and nothing a young man could keep his hands off of.

She worked in a candy factory and I would pick her up on my motorcycle after her evening shift. She was poor but she had manners and naturally wanted to shower after work but I told her no. The air conditioning wasn’t all that great at the factory. And she sweated and her skin had a fine film almost like cotton candy, a film of sugar. I remember sucking all the sweetness off her skin, everywhere at night. I licked all the sugary sweat from her tits, her body. She was embarrassed about her tits because she had had a daughter. She thought they had been discolored and misshapen; that was my first inkling of the private thoughts of man and woman kind. Here I thought I was in paradise and she was feeling all self-conscious about her titties. When you really dip into the intimacies of men and women they are much sadder and harder on themselves than you can imagine.

Meantime I hadn’t forgot about the village and my clinic project. At the university I introduced myself to some students at the faculty of medicine and made arrangements for them to visit the clinic. I would loan them my motorcycle and pay them a stipend from my Peace Corps salary. Things went swimmingly for about a month before a government judiciale and a low-level functionary from the American Embassy showed up at the university with an airplane ticket and a lifetime invitation not to visit the country again. The government judiciale was your standard-issue police goon. These guys are easily recognizable wherever governments have their thumbs on the national windpipe: the shirt is one size too big, the coat a size too small and the pants an inch too short. Their shoes are invariably clodhopping, easy men to laugh at but they are lethal and they wear a perpetual scowl when forced away from their comfort zone of the torture cell. He drifted between anger and depression that he couldn’t fry my balls with a tractor battery. The embassy drone, a kid with tab collars, pimples and a cowlick, kept the judiciale goon on a leash and scolded me for getting involved in local politics. You’re not here to get involved in politics, he kept repeating.

I didn’t get to say goodbye to Mercedes. I don’t want to be like so many addicts and blame loss for dope. I won’t demean something so beautiful. Dope just happens; Mercedes was a sparkling miracle. If I were to see her again and even if she were worn and misshapen with age I would fall on her with love, the love that fills the universe and gives me those days of grace, my best days, when I dream of Mercedes and her sugary tits and dream of licking sugar off her everywhere.”

She peered into the literary insert and read:

“Osay esethay, ityay aymay ebay, Allahyay illway ardonpay emthay, andyay Allahyay isyay Ardoningpay, Orgivingfay. Andyay oeverwhay iesflay inyay Allah’syay ayway, ehay illway indfay inyay ethay earthyay anymay ayay—”

“The Koran in Pig Latin. God, that gives me a headache.” She set the paper on the table. “That’s got to go over big with the Muslim Student
Association.”

“I won’t apologize,” Joffrey said.

“I didn’t ask you to apologize. I just asked why.”

Fontina observed Joffrey in his silence. He was sitting at her kitchen table flipping a fork between his fingers. Fontina said, “Any particular reason you’re wearing your ass on your shoulders?”

Joffrey fought down the smile with a morose expression. “The other night the commander made a cryptic remark about my Korans. I didn’t pursue it but it bugged me. He said I called in an airstrike on myself—he’s big on the Vietnam lingo. So now everybody’s got to jump on me about this? I thought I was living in the big city? This is like back home. Everyone knows how many times a day you yawn or pick your nose.”

“Poor baby. If you’re going to sell fireworks, don’t you expect they’ll go off at some point?”

“Don’t go all racial on me,” Joffrey said. “ Heap big stand. M-80s and all that. Plenty bottle rocket.”

“Oh. Funny,” said Fontina. “Boom City. I didn’t even think of that. I don’t even think of you as Indian. I mean in that way.” Fontina startled herself. Did she just say that? She had heard that very comment from whites as the epitome of interpersonal trust: I don’t even think of you as black, Fontina! Joffrey knew she was processing all this and he was enjoying it. He folded his hands behind his head and stuck out his elbows and leaned back in his chair. She was upset with herself. They stayed like this for a minute, she, chopping carrots silently, he, leaning back smugly. Then Joffrey went to her.

“Joffrey love heap big racist buffalo girl.” Their arms went around each other.

*******************

Only Joffrey knew that he wasn’t so much Indian as he was just poor. What was an Indian anyway? A kid with eight uncles who tormented him ceaselessly but somehow loved him and saw him grow up straight, more or less. Let the whites attach great significance to his 1/16^th or 1/32^nd Indian-ness, special powers, sensitivity to the land, mystic wisdom of his Peoples. Joffrey knew it as meals missed, no water, sometimes no electricity, strange people walking in and out of his room day and night. Going over to a friend’s house at dinner time waiting for an invitation. Devouring a box of crackers for dinner. Finally when old enough, when the state came through the rez on sweeps, instead of saying everything’s fine when asked he said, “I’m hungry.”

At fourteen he went to live with a foster dad, a logger who needed the state money for a kid. He was a nice enough old guy but didn’t do extra; he only insisted on going to church but what could Joffrey do? At least he would eat regularly. His poor doped up sad mom. In his late teens he worked the mills, the old man got him work at a saw mill. The sort yard, the 60″ cutoff saw, the green chain, the log pond.

Joffrey knew he had been poor but the knowledge followed its own path, the way his skin darkened in summer, slowly at its own tempo. When he was eleven or twelve he got mad one morning when he realized there were never any clean towels in the house. He routinely dried off with the dirty clothes he had dropped on the bathroom floor before getting into the shower. One morning he got frustrated and tore up the tee-shirt he used to dry his back. He sat there on the bathroom floor and cried, not in self-pity, but because the tee-shirt only did half the job. He cried mutely and air-dried sitting on the floor.

Remembering the scene presented him the perfect opportunity to feel sorry for the kid that he was. But Joffrey laughed at him. He was glad that he tasted life in this way with some bitterness.

At the time he couldn’t explain his life but as a young man he thought his way through it. Poverty forces you into a too concrete relationship with things. The harsh “thinginess” of things tyrannizes you. The main thing has always got you by the throat. Joffrey remembered a famous writer saying, “Poverty doesn’t allow the poor to build abstractions which we need to blunt life’s corners.” The rich can waft in a soufflé of abstraction. When the rich lady came to drop off a new dryer or a new Sunbeam toaster (the good kind that could toast four slices at a time) or a bright, new power lawn mower Joffrey could not assemble the phrases and tones necessary to ask: could you please bring us some bath towels? Nor could anyone around him marshal the phrases that would battle their real situation. They would have had not to be poor in the first place to be able to form those sentences. Straightforwardness was strangled by monstrous detail. That is why he shredded his tee-shirt.

And maybe the specificity of Joffrey’s request would have been hard for the rich lady to grasp? The whole itemized chain of trying to keep clean linked so many unpleasant declensions. You would have had to bring in mom’s laziness, the blindness of her friends who knew of her laziness yet never bothered to scold her, the relatives who could have but never bothered to bring us towels, the broken washing machine, mom’s boyfriends who never took an interest in her broken appliances, the overflowing ashtrays, the swatch of butter on top of the stove. Furious details would crowd in and prevent a poor kid from declaring: could you please bring us some towels?

How much the rich must enjoy being rich. Airplane pilots are their busboys, science geniuses their waiters, scholars their butlers, technicians their house boys, detectives their masseuses. The language of social work might infect the vocabulary of the rich but they have no intention of giving up the track, the hunt, the lodge, the links, the boat, the private jet. Many of Highland City’s residents busied themselves with charity work. They gave out scholarships—look at Joffrey Simpson O’Day—and volunteered at soup kitchens during the holidays. They participated in fundraising drives and auctions. But they returned to an extravagance unseen by Sunbreak City’s poor—or anyone else.

*******************

Joffrey remembered elementary school, third or fourth grade, how the class would come upon the Indian part of Washington State History. There’s a photo of Governor Isaac Stevens with his combed beard and new suit and 19^th century thin ribbon tie. On the opposite page the photos of Indians show them as mangy, bedraggled human shadows. Maybe they really were like that but photography took a long time back then. The photographer could have dressed and posed them. They would have had to sit for a long time while the film exposed. Anyway, there we sat in class with our textbooks before us. The class has gone strangely silent. As one, the class turns to look at Injun-in-Residence, Joffrey Simpson O’Day. They were quiet and they were embarrassed for me. Kids have their own economy of knowledge even though they might not have all the words at their disposal. But they accepted, childlike, what children accept: my ancestors were savages and theirs well-groomed settlers bent on doing the right thing.

One more story about silence and the cavity of race. I was about ten. We had played baseball at a church picnic and we were happy because, for once, none of the Indian or white or black or Mexican kids got in a fight. There were lots of adults around and they kept an eye on us but I think we were just happy to be kids and play for once without a bunch of crap. And we’d prayed over a great barbecue with corn on the cob and baked beans and berry pies for dessert. It just wasn’t fighting season. We all had a great time playing baseball and I made a good hit to center field and the guys respected me and cheered me and patted my back. Best of all my next time up at bat the coach on the other team hollered at his players to back up because he is a heavy hitter! I was feeling great. At the end of the day a family of rich folks—or they seemed rich to
me—the Monteros, I think they were Mexican—took me home. They had a little son about five or six who did not stop babbling the whole way even though his parents yelled at him. He could have been retarded, I can’t remember exactly. Anyway, when we turned the corner and rolled onto our street the car got quiet. I always hated that quiet: it meant I would be forced to learn something—usually something related to my difference. I remember thinking in the silence: I don’t want to learn anything. I don’t need any lessons. I just had a great day being a kid and playing softball. Nobody fought or said fuck you and we had a good lunch and everyone had a good time. But now the silence took over. I was about to say something—anything—to forestall what fate had in store for me, but, too late. As we pulled up in front of my house, mangy dogs and dirty kids and cars up on blocks appeared on the front lawn. I didn’t know where the Monteros lived but I knew they didn’t live on a street like this or in a house like ours. We pulled near the house and I think my uncle was sitting in a beach chair listening to the ball game on the radio. The house looked scorched; the paint was all scraped off because we were going to repaint the house. Supposedly. It wasn’t just the paint it was everything: the stretch of chicken wire, the broken, sun-faded toy, the unmowed lawn, the gutter hanging down, the bent up chain link fence, the gray windows, the junky junk of the poor piled against the side of the house. Even the leaves of the trees seemed dirty. The car slowed and after I said right here the little one of the family yelled out, “Look what a crummy house!” I heard the father and mother groan and scold the little one and try to apologize to me but I scampered out of the car, a station wagon, as fast as I could because on top of
everything I couldn’t let them see me cry on top of everything else. I couldn’t even get mad at the little one; he was just a recording angel thinking the whole world’s thoughts, passing the whole world’s judgment upon me and my mom’s family. They drove off. I dried my tears on my sleeve and my uncle mumbled something at me. I wiggled through my pain by thinking that this wasn’t my house and wasn’t it a good thing I was my father’s son and wouldn’t he be coming by soon to pick me up in his big red Peterbilt truck and wouldn’t he prop me up on a pillow like he did when I was seven and we would go through the mountains and the deserts and he would take me away from all this but of course
he never came.

*******************

Joffrey had been summoned by his benefactress, Pamela Prefontaine. Locally when you received a Pamela Prefontaine Scholarship everyone congratulated you on your “Pammy.” A “Pammy” was a big deal inside or out of academia. Recipients were summoned by Pamela and they always went.

Pamela Prefontaine lived in an exclusive enclave at the northern edge of Sunbreak City called Highland City whose founding went back to the time of the first white settlers. Very few outsiders were ever allowed into Highland City. This would be Joffrey’s first visit.

To get to Highland City Joffrey had to turn off the freeway and drive north for a mile or so on Marginal Way. Before the interstate freeways were poured Marginal Way was the main North-South thoroughfare connecting all towns, large and small, from Canada to the Mexican border. Marginal Way still featured some the big vulgar signage of its festive post-World War II years: gas stations with shark-toothed P-40s parked on the roofs, Car washes with pink elephants as mascots, towing companies sporting a big human toe in their signs, restaurants built-in the shape of giant teepees or cowboy hats with tall cowboy boots (the heels) serving as bathrooms—anything to snag a car’s attention. It had since devolved into a commercial strip catering to American passions freed from the grip of religion or politics. See for yourself: Horne’s Vacuum Cleaner Repair, Bleitz Scuba Gear, Nordstrom Headstone and Statuary, Rudy’s Records, Keck’s Ice Arena, Everclear Cemetery, Butch’s Guns N’ Ammo, Pearl’s Love Shop, Binky’s Scrapyard, the Yes Motel, Danny’s Driving Range, Marginal Used Car (Your Job is Your Credit!), Acme Exterminator, Marginal Massage, Eric’s Trailer Park, The Totem Pole Inn, Bill & Sue Tattoo. Finally Joffrey’s favorite (and here is where Joffrey made a left turn to enter Highland City): Dwayne’s Plumbing Supply beaming its thirty-foot tall, red neon toilet plunger.

The thoroughfare receded as Joffrey entered a narrow paved driveway bounded by immense hemlock and cedar trees. He was stopped or greeted by a striped wooden slat extending from a small one-man guard shack. An elderly man wearing a Green Filson mackinaw over a complete khaki work uniform came out of the shack and talked to Joffrey through the open passenger window. The man seemed to know all about his appointment with Pamela. The slat went up and Joffrey drove his navy blue 1965 Ford Falcon into Highland City. He was disappointed the old man wasn’t a gnarled old troll that demanded Joffrey answer a few Life-or-Death riddles—like gatekeepers in fairy tales. Answer ye must, or ye shall not pass!

What falls but never gets hurt?

Rain.

What has teeth but can’t bite?

A comb.

What kind of room has no walls, no floors and no ceiling?

A mushroom.

What about the six “l” house?

The rooms were wallless the house was hallless.

The lane was wide enough for about one and a half cars. It had been recently paved and it seemed more a driveway than a road. A dense wooded area canopied the road and Joffrey was startled by the number of large, perhaps first growth, cedar trees. To either side houses began to blend in with the trees. He drove slowly so he could take it all in. It wasn’t just the contrast of crass Marginal Way vs. the sylvan woodlands of Highland City. He was seeing something for the first time. Houses, yes, he was seeing “houses” but the word didn’t really apply. These were castles, palaces, mansions. Immense, wide, gabled, towering, many were long as a city block. Sunbreak City didn’t lack for rich neighborhoods but this was construction like he had ever seen. They would have been built by first and second generation Sunbreak City pioneers in all the favorite end-of-the-19^th-century styles: Romanesque Revival, Queen Anne Revival, Victorian Stick, Tudor. Why had he never seen nor heard of these amazing houses before? What was the reason for all this gigantism?

The super-fat, wedge-rooted, first-growth cedar trees bothered him. He thought the only first growth left in the state was on remote Indian land. To his left Elliott Bay widened and narrowed beyond the trees and houses. Joffrey spotted an occasional smaller abode to the side of some colossus, a mother-in-law perhaps, or a guest cabana, all modern angles and glass. Otherwise, mansions, gargantuan and beyond his architectural vocabulary to describe, dominated the view.

Mansions, castles, palaces, elongated structures, big as warehouses, big as entire school buildings. “Holy shit,” Joffrey whispered to himself.

Driving slowly, Joffrey felt the locking and unlocking of a question pinch somewhere between his neck and shoulder blades: The early pioneers had sectioned off for themselves this juicy, chunk of prime-rib, cliff side real estate. Upon it they built shrines to unbounded opulence–opulence to rival any such in history. Then they drew a mental and physical boundary to keep out the common people. Were they conquerors or settlers?

What commanding, conquering people in history had not boasted its wealth through public display? Joffrey pondered the strange cruelty that dwelt at the heart of this new world. Ancient Thebes? Even Homer had to exclaim, “…the heaps of precious ingots gleam, the hundred-gated Thebes.” The Acropolis. Or Xerxes winged Lion-gates at Persepolis. The library palace of Ashurbanipal. Or the pyramids for God’s sake. The stair-temples of the Aztecs and Mayas. Each construction an aggressive showpiece battling human transience. Whence this odd cruelty—the Sunbreak City rich burying their light in the woods?

Through a clearing Joffrey spied a golf green along with its little red flag. The place had its own golf course. Joffrey smiled at this. He wasn’t sure why. Then he saw an Episcopal church. He slowed to look at it: Saint Luke’s. It was a comparatively modest structure. Done up in—what else?—Oxfordian medieval quarry stone. Their own embedded church. Now Joffrey laughed. A cliché visible from the moon. It humanized the bastards, thank God. All the money in the world won’t free your mind from cliché. You’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to become a literary man, like me, a reader.

He saw the bank of red rhododendrons. That was his cue. Take a left. Follow the long driveway. Presently he arrived at the massive front or back door of a massive house. “Welcome to Casa Prefontaine,” Joffrey sang to himself as he parked the Falcon. He was intimidated, he wasn’t afraid to admit. The house was yet another city block-long structure, Victorian Stick, and both ends were mounted with rounded, castle-like watchtowers. It would have consumed the high-grade timber of a small mountain at construction. A giraffe might feel lost in such an edifice. Its stained and beveled glass glinted within an intricate latticed facade. He rang the doorbell.

Pamela herself answered, wearing flats and floppy casual clothes much like a painter’s smock but without the paint splotches. White hair, wrinkled, a big smile, he could never tell if the teeth of the elderly were real or fake. She seemed to be of that sensitive patrician class that really does read through coffee table books. In any case she smiled at Joffrey and her smile seemed genuine.

“Sit here.” Pamela waved him into a large leather chair. “This is where all the powerful men or men who will be powerful sit,” she said. “Presidents, two of them have sat here. Lots of politicians, scholars, writers, artists. They all pass through here eventually.”

“And scholarship students?” Joffrey volunteered.

“And scholarship students.” She laughed. “Now tell me what you’re up to. How is school? What great and good things are you doing? I want to know.”

Pamela would have been a babe in youth. Her high cheekbones still gave her face a regal profile. And to her great credit she refused a warping facelift. Through a tempest of wrinkles Joffrey recognized youthful eyes.

Between them stood a small and exquisite table, circular with molded rims to keep expensive china from sliding off. Joffrey sensed that everything in Pamela’s house might be exquisite; he was swirling in invisible millions. The table was a couple hundred years old and would have come from the Boston branch of the Prefontaines. It would have been shipped by ocean, around Chile to San Francisco and to Sunbreak City. An antique, coffee-brown, Queen Anne circular cherry wood tea-table. Indian languages and cultures disappear; the tea-table goes on.

The exchange of pleasantries that began at the door went on but Joffrey had seized up. All the gigantism and Pamela’s flowing largesse was getting to him. For the first time he had some clue about the imponderables of Indian-ness—which he had mostly given up on. He used to joke to himself that an Indian was any kid with eight uncles who tormented him incessantly while growing up. Now he knew that an Indian was anyone with the sensitivity to be destroyed by this level of avarice. It wasn’t Gatling guns that conquered the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. It was this bottomless avarice of the whites—an avarice so powerful it smothered the ancient impulse of the rich to brag.

He thought of his uncles, their drunken crying fits, their strange bluster and un-talked about heroism in war, their supposed hardness; their sudden tenderness and rocketing anger that could spin out into crazed killing. And a strange lack of tension. Is that what happens when your ancestors go back thirty thousand years? Otherwise Americans of all shades were by definition tense.

Joffrey, for his part, had to move about. He couldn’t sit still. He stood up and wandered out of the front room, crying and not hiding it. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t know the house but he felt permission was granted. Nothing was going to stop him. He walked down a long hallway not bothering to check the pictures, not wanting to wipe his eyes to see if the Kandinskys and Miros and Tobys and Pollacks were really them. He knew they were. He walked past the accumulated treasure of four generations of Prefontaine’s. He knew the Ming vase was real and probably freshly dug up as with the original Olmec stone heads on walnut table stands. All real. He understood too that he could smash all this and Pammy would do nothing; he knew that she was opening herself, making herself vulnerable to him, so he wandered into yet another sitting room, another dining room, a small kitchen, a guest bedroom and finally a set of stairs, not main stairs, probably servants’ stairs. He followed them up and found himself on a second floor landing with many closed doors and a long Persian runner for a rug (the super rich didn’t believe wall-to-wall carpeting unless it was carpet nobody would be permitted to walk on). Joffrey tried the doors but they were mostly empty bedrooms, all correct and spare. He came upon a super narrow paneled door fit for only one thin person. He rubbed his eyes on his shirt front. He opened the narrow door and saw that it was a bathroom, a sink and a toilet against the wall with just enough space to bend over in. It featured a long high vertical window that looked out over a spectacular view of the bay. This was some kind of joke of the builder or architect. The view was pitched just right: the top of the house opened between the birch trees surrounding the property. The joke, of course, the mix of earthly and the celestial in one coffin-sized space. Joffrey took a seat and shat. The toilet paper, he noticed, was as rich and thick as cotton hand-towels. The hand towels were as thick and rich as down blankets. Presumably Pamela’s down blankets would be as rich and thick as bear rugs. The bay was mostly gloomy except for a privileged swatch that sparkled metallic and friendly in the middle of the scene.

Back in the hallway, Joffrey wandered and stopped and then shuffled to the railing of a staircase. It was a winding nautilus thing and he took it down. Pricey frames—Bonnard’s rainbow textures, Cézanne’s inward nymphs, Picasso’s orbs and angles—tracked his descent.

On the main floor again, he steered himself or his vexation steered him into a final room at the far end of the hall. It was a museum of Pacific Northwest Native American artifacts. Macaw masks, straw hats, argillite carvings. Pammy’s great grandfather, Hiram Prefontaine, would have gathered these. He came to Washington territory as a young accountant, originally from Boston. There are historic journal descriptions of him sitting in a dugout hollering at Indian oarsmen in their own language while they, in turn, laughed and splashed at him with their oars. He got the last laugh. He knew, with his dollar-sharp eyes, the value of those hand-carved oars, not to mention the finely woven straw hats (so fine they could hold water) and purses, the clay pots and the large store of bone fish hooks, each as precise and beautiful as a hummingbird.

Finally Joffrey strayed back into the presence of Pamela. Their telepathic conversation continued.

Now I understand, Joffrey beamed in thought. Now I understand the sadness and remoteness of my Indian relatives. They thought they had done enough just by surviving, getting another generation delivered. They didn’t have much left over. After the white man muscled in they checked out through booze and dope or whatever. It wasn’t soldiers or Gatling guns that finished them off. It was this bottomless greed. They—his ancestors—knew they did not possess the imagination or wherewithal to hoard at this scale. So the Indians walked away. Call it surrender. Every surrender is a gift; the handing over of a world.

The break and flow of this knowledge felt so easy, so ready to Joffrey. Didn’t everyone know it? No, you had to experience Highland City.

Joffrey reflected that even in Latin America where the rich grind it into the poor every day stacking the tops of their exterior walls with jagged broken glass. At least they promenade their wealth. At least they let the poor know exactly how miserable they are. At least the poor know what they must do to prevail.

Joffrey searched Pamela’s face for bottomless avarice and saw none. Pamela would have been a babe in youth. To her credit she had refused to get a face lift. Past a tempest of wrinkles Joffrey perceived her youthful eyes.

“Thank you for coming today,” Pamela said.

All bad-boy, lip-curled, churlishness, had burned out of him. “I want to thank you,” he said. He wanted to be in Sunbreak City. Pamela’s largesse had done this.

He wanted to ask her: How could you wall yourselves off from your fellow citizens, not to mention Native Americans? How could you deny them exposure to what you achieved? Houses one block long or houses only a half block long? Houses exquisite in detail, in material, in construction, houses rich in ideas?

The real robbery of the poor, Joffrey knew, was the robbery of knowledge. By sequestering their wealth in the private enclave of Highland City, Sunbreak City’s overly rich withheld visions of what her citizens could do concretely—in their own city. Even ancient kings of old were not selfish such as to hide their opulence in this way. It was this vision of the white man’s greed that got to them. The Indians must have told themselves, no matter what, we will not be like you.

As for Pamela, Joffrey didn’t know what to say. He liked her. She was a former babe. She had, he divined, known his reaction in advance. She trusted me not to kill her, not to cut her throat in my remorse. No guards, no dogs, no large sons, no cameras. Just Pammy surrounded by expensive objects from all nations and all times.

So form follows function. Sit back and enjoy.

From The Business Plan Handbook:
The business plan process involves the creating, researching, developing and implementing of an enterprise. It will assist you in uncovering the issues that must be faced in the entrepreneur-employment process.

~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~

The Business Plan: A Novel

Chapter One

The Friday morning meeting.

I have heard Kelvar Scott talk out as many sides of his mouth as there are languages in the world. He is our boss and I don’t know where his confidence comes from. My guess is that he understands human motivation better than most. He builds his staff up from interns and young college graduates who don’t know the wider world and who think that public relations is some kind of proving ground in the world of business. Business has its own groupies you know. We – The Kelvar Group – exist in a twilight land between public relations and consulting. County governments can get us cheap. Ditto frozen food manufacturers and city governments as well as giant corporations who must produce public service ads to get tax breaks. Kelvar never takes responsibility for anything or he takes all the responsibility for everything. He’ll scream on Friday afternoon, “Get me a 10 page summary by Monday!” The interns scramble to their desks to cancel weekend assignations and shed tears. Kelvar’s one talent is an uncanny ability to extemporize. Words come to him like water to the eyes. If nothing else, this is a man who has missed his calling in life: he cries out to be a politician. His board meetings are like trips to an isolation tank. They make no sense to us, his demoralized staff, and our individual minds drift downstream on quiet, ebbing quietude, wafting slowly, and just as slowly that mind is sifted of its intelligence. Drive, initiative, boldness and daring vanish to the size of protons and we are left fighting sleep.

In my case I take meeting times to meditate on the breasts of my colleague Julie Trevor. I shared an office with Julie for a month and I was fascinated that she would often weep in frustration. She would put her hands over her eyes and heave until the tears squeezed through her fingers. I wanted to comfort her with a neck massage but I didn’t want to get sued for sexual harassment. To learn piano etudes I had to be taught and apply rigorous concentration to the task. Tit on the other hand, I didn’t have any schooling in tit at all and I am passionate and expert about tit. Tits are usually one or two sizes bigger in the flesh than they are hidden. Appearance vs. Reality might have got its start here. So I actually look forward to meetings; I look forward to zoning out and meditating mightily on Julie Trevor’s tits. You see, Julie’s tits are never bundled or packaged or even sheathed – that would be to cede to the forces of modesty and restraint. No Julie’s tits are always outlined. Today they are outlined in a dark navy blue turtleneck. Her nipples are beefy and bellicose, their global roundness and Euclidean volume could easily quell an international conflict or settle scores between major world powers. So at this point I’ve cut the motor of my mind and decided to let it float. In my drifting imagination Julie’s tits have extended a good six feet in front of her. She has really thrown modesty out the window by exposing the dark décolletage line with an open-top type cocktail dress. We assume the dress has an underbracing that would carry some of the stress from the weight of the six foot long breasts but we don’t give it that much thought. The main thought in everyone’s mind is avoiding any contact with Julie’s serious frontage. We, the male staffers of the Kelvar Group, don’t want to get sued for sexual harassment. When Julie turns to address you or smile or nod in your direction you pray she doesn’t swivel her torso; any torsion will bring the full weight of her chest on you like a set of oars. She rules the world from these loadstones. Even Kelvar stutters and his usual fluency is gone. For good measure Julie swings both right and left to offer morning greetings. “Good morning Julie, good morning Julie, morning Julie,” the men cry, arching backwards, dodging the boom of a jib, desperate to avoid the slightest adhesion in the sweep of Julie’s jugs. Oddly the girls around the table do not seem to be concerned about contact with Julie’s tits. Then Kelvar asks Julie if she has any messages for him. Everyone turns to look at Julie and the men specifically concentrate on the rock crystal of her Nordic aqua eyes. Julie says yes and then drops a ping pong ball between her breasts and the ball follows the glorious dark line of her cleavage down and down and faster down as she tilts slightly towards Kelvar. On and on, rolls the ping pong ball. Finally Kelvar reaches for the ball but he stops himself. He does not want to get sued for sexual harassment. He waits for the ball to tumble off Julie’s chest and bounce on the walnut conference table. Once twice thrice on the walnut surface. Kelvar picks up the ball and, twisting it roundly, reads:

Call Bert Balsdon
Ditto Elner Frank
Ditto Coy Records

The meeting is adjourned.

For the next three mornings Joffrey waited in his Falcon at the Starbucks drive-thru, entranced by the motions of the lithe and fluid black arm. But when he pulled up to the drive-thru window with his chip-toothed smile, ready to offer his beams of adoration, the arm, and its somatic owner, would be gone. Was she real? Was he just imagining her?

He refused to enter the shop and ask some white barista hey where is the black barista? You know, the one with skin so dark, so black. Black really is beautiful. Tacky. No, you don’t talk about color like that in big-city America.

The next morning Joffrey broke routine and parked his car in the Starbucks parking lot and walked into the coffee shop. The loaded smell of fresh ground coffee made him pause for a moment; it carried a hint of jungle green. The walls, abstract beige, textured, were understated; the customers, sitting or waiting, newspaper ensnared, were understated. The black arm barista would stand out bewitchingly here but, as with his previous luck, she was nowhere to be seen.

Back in his car Joffrey swerved around to the drive-through line. Six cars idled in front of him. Then he saw the black arm. In the Falcon rearview mirror he watched a car angle up behind him, he swiveled and begged the car, hand signaling, to let him back out and leave the line. Free of the drive-thru he surged into a parking space and ran back into the coffee shop.

He saw her. The open counter of Starbucks let you observe the baristas at work. She was busy tending to her customers at the drive thru window and, yes, as her single arm indicated, she was dark and beautiful, possessed of the flammable sexuality he had imagined: small forehead, regal nose, syrup-brown eyes, commanding cheek bones, fluorescent smile—even under her headscarf you could tell.

Note to self: Tell Allah it’s not working.

She was a declared Muslim but whatever male attentions her headscarf warded off were diverted to her butt which was spectacularly rounded and perfection itself. Outlined, three-dimensional in super-tight black waitress slacks, it offered itself as object of blissful contemplation. A miracle butt as round as twin Jupiter moons but never fear: she’s got her headscarf on. Faithful daughter of Allah. A butt like that probably served as Allah’s inspiration for the creation of universal orbs: suns, moons, planets. Never mind that her butt was so sensational that men forgot what they were going to order standing in line. Never mind that her butt made men recalibrate their entire sexual histories and present married lives: should I throw it all away? Would I if I could? Wife, kids, barbeque, Lexus? To clasp a butt like that every night? She induced thought-guilt infarctions in men. Arranging or rearranging their soul’s furniture. Many, many must have contemplated converting to Islam.

**********************

Alas…alas…big brothers…strict Muslim…mom, living with…strict Muslim, too…have you dated any non-Muslim guys? No, not yet? Oh. Like a Coyote slinking away from a meal of newborn porcupines after getting a wiff of the fighting mom and thinking there must be easier meals under God’s heaven, Joffrey slinked away. 

****************

Fontina was a checkout girl at the local Safeway off Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Joffrey noticed the pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her work apron. That means she will take a smoke break, at some point. She was always so friendly and so lively. Joffrey did have a project. He was looking for a black girlfriend; he knew that the city opened itself and was there to offer certain delights and they were not always the delights of culture, even though he did like museums, galleries, the symphony and coffee houses. He wanted the presentation of humanity in the swarmy variety that the city offered. Character stories and the human types widely arrayed. He wanted a black woman girlfriend, a real dark, real black woman and he thought he found her. Later he learned the black term for this was “color struck.” He wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass him by. He was going to get a black girlfriend. God or Allah, the Great Spirit, was just sharpening his pencils before he created black women. Then, with black women, He really got down to it.

(You could see that beauty was available to the race and if men climbed up out of animal brutality how did you account for the delicacy of Asian women? Women so designed for the pleasure of the eye. The pencil sketch of Asian women so pretty and exquisite. But then, like a beginning novelist, you see Him, God, getting better at his craft. The blond is OK but she shines only for a season, intense flash-flowering but short-lived beauty and then you have to look carefully for the call to blondness, that the human eye finds so kinetic, so inviting, deceives. Many blondes are fakes and the eye is so easily taken in. Then you come to black women and you see her ass and you see that God modeled the planets and spheres of space on the black woman’s ass.)

She was a cashier at Safeway. Her name was Fontina Blanchet. She had a beautiful line under one eye, a charming age wrinkle. Only dumbshits thought women reached their peaks at age 19. Her fingers so black and textured, had so much character. They seemed to talk to him as they handed him his change (in bills, the coins spun down around a machine and settled into a metal cup. Joffrey often forgot—accidentally on purpose—to pick up this change so he could go back and flirt with Fontina. “Almost forgot my tip for stopping at your register,” or some other asininity.) Her arms were super black and encircling; they were sculptures of sensuality. Because of her blackness, perhaps, her teeth were a white beacon; her ears—all black ears—were beautiful. The saying from the 1960s “Black is Beautiful” would have been more true to life if it were amended to “Black Ears are Beautiful.” Try to find a pair of ugly black ears: you can’t. Fontina had come hither ears. And more: her breasts held the promise of Edenic Paradise. They were big enough so that her smock could not fully contain them both; one of them, the bigger, kept slipping out from behind the smock which she had to adjust every minute or so. When it came time for Joffrey to stand across from her to pay he noticed a pack of cigarettes in her pocket. This was good, thought Joffrey, very good. That meant that she would take a smoke break outside. She would be standing and smoking, chained by her habit to one place and Joffrey would be able to approach her. Gays had it so easy. They could cry out to politicians that their love (for male ass) was legitimate and they could found hiking groups and bowling teams and male choirs and even Christian fellowship based on this love. But what about the Joffrey Simpson O’Days of the world? What reporter or women’s club would sympathize with his love for Black Women? Heavily upholstered, bountifully put together Black Women. “You’re a fetishist!” they would cry. “A pervert! Fie fie!”

Could he start a club or a movement based on his worshipful adoration of black women? No. Joffrey couldn’t come out of the closet and say, “I belong to that minority of men who worship black women.” The whole concept of coming out of the closet bothered him. Why does a declaration of preference give way to identity? Is identity only preference? Is identity always present or does it come and go? Always amazed that men in positions of being able to do anything they wanted, rock stars, rich men, passed over marrying black women. They settled, these free and powerful men, for the Parent Pleaser: Cindy or Becky or Cathy. The worlds’ secret, the warmth and tenderness of black women. Fontina with a few but very interesting lines, no wrinkles yet. This is where glamour and media fell down flat about men and interpreting male desire. They didn’t understand that men like individuality and quirks in a woman. Women strive for perfection but men don’t care all that much for perfection in women. They don’t mind the gap tooth or funny teeth if a woman has warmth and character; if she thinks for herself.

****************

Sunbreak City, so marinated in water, both salt and fresh; rivers, streams, creeks, bays, tides, big lakes, small lakes, puddles inevery dent. How many times had he found himself, sitting in his Falcon, waiting at a stoplight while the top center mast of some boat floats across the otherwise still picture? 

**************************

“Having a man die on top of me in orgasm did wonders for my self-esteem,” said Fontina one pillow-talk afternoon. “But it was time to come home.”

Clothed Fontina was an eyeball fastener, bikinied an instant parking lot maker, naked a messenger from the fateful castle of Beauty, that venomous castle.

In Asia she never felt like a ho’.

Japan is what changed her. The misoshobai, the water trade. Occasionally a customer would just look pay and leave. Men crying over her body. The crying men. At first she was stunned. Then moved and finally bored with it all. And that’s when she decided to leave. I have drained this cup, O Lord. After a certain point you have to decide if you can live without psychic amenities, the physical amenities exist in Japan. The amenities of your home country—do they count for anything or not?

“In Japan,” Fontina began, “you are weightless. The entire country perceives you three feet off the ground and will not give you the ground you needed to pass through the same human cauldrons, sifters, colanders, pain racks that everyone else passes through. Do you want to spend your whole life being amazed at? You are a few degrees beyond the talking monkey. Amazement and impressiveness are shields Japanese used to keep you away. A hyper amazement is a kind of arrogance playing on your vanity. If their constant praise can keep you stranded on the island of your vanity then maybe you won’t come over here, over to my island and bother me goes their reasoning. I’m as vain as the next gal but I could see where this was all heading.

In Asia a way is always made for appetite. Asia, right now, is appetite. And I offered myself as a morsel. The greed for life in Asia is boundless. It’s just that you have to travel far to find that the world is a big place. People that go around saying that the world is a small place! are wrong.

Asia changed me and I will be forever grateful to it. And they did it all without Jesus. That thought kept coming back to me: they did it without Jesus.

***************************

The patch of Rainier Ave between Graham and Henderson was not far from Dayfresh House. Joffrey incorporated it into his neighborhood walks. The bars go up on the windows of small shops and basement apartment windows. The bars on the windows are monuments to the stupidity of thieves who crap in their own front yard. You have gas stations that turn to Plexiglas coffins at midnight, you’ve got drug sellers and apprentice pimps, young guys with the sagging pants, wide-billed baseball caps and icepick threads of disconfidence in their eyes. You’ve got the official whores, glowy when young and freezer-burned when old. Joffrey walked here to educate himself. This would be Sunbreak City’s poor neighborhood. It didn’t feel poor to Joffrey. I know poverty. This feels too rich in strut and assertion. Rich in rub and bristle. But it was poor, Joffrey knew. There was just more stuff. Did that make sense? The gravitational pull was heavy. Everything sucked back into the neighborhood. This he recognized. The bars-on-the-windows neighborhood. (Big City scene #4 he noticed as he walked by a young black man pressed into the hood of a police cruiser his shirt up and cops gingerly tapping him all over his lower body.) He passed the mini-Muslim mall selling halal food and phone cards and where Somali men with dyed beards sat and hung out. They chewed khat but always gave him closed-mouth nods when he walked by. A Buddhist temple with wrought iron flames atop the property fence. A black church, The Rose of Sharon. More drug dudes hanging out. If you’re not buying then don’t hang out, their eyes said, we’re not here to chat, muthafukah. Kids swarming apartment buildings, crack hos with chalk lips and shock hair and solar-flare eyes. Nightmareville. Cars speed by, lots of cars have shiny spinning hubcap rims, they look like show cars and they try to tell me something, what, I don’t know. Shiny wheels and chicks, there’s got to be a link. This is not a delay-gratification neighborhood. The pants are tight and goods are displayed; it is a grab market. Some survive on cheap rent and prayers. The oxy pills of welfare moms scatter to provide supplemental income from the street. All you have to do is ask. The cops are represented by their fictitious stand-ins—the fake ho’s, women too good to be true; regular paycheck women with bright dentition and epidermal warmth. Real ho’s have the thousand yard stare (so sez the Commander) and some kind of marking—tattoos or scars or burns. Your immersion is full and complete. You are and are not scared. But what are you doing here if even simple observation may have its price?

While here you can’t imagine another world. You are in the Rainier Valley. Is this God’s creation? Yes, but all the human gravitation falls inward. Jesus’ neighborhood.

Joffrey turns off Rainier Avenue and walks eastward to the top of the hill. Wealth breaks out. Splendor and views of the immense lake draw you down to the lake. The outcroppings of money strike him as odd. Like strange geological formations until your eyes get used to them. As you descend to Lake Washington wealth and tidiness return and at the lake you are overwhelmed, especially on a late summer day like today.

Coming upon south Lake Washington for the first time astounded Joffrey. His eyes, in spite of himself or rather against his will, sought out those savage places of no human development—large clumps of trees along the shoreline that would reveal what the lake was like before the white man came. If he squinted he could imagine that time: wild flowers, bramble, berries and unmanaged rough for large swaths on the opposite lake shore. The young braves would have marked out favorite berry patches, fishing bends and perches from which to contemplate the soaring Mount Rainier. There would have been lots of outdoor fucking.

The south shore of Lake Washington goes on and beautifully on and then you come to the cove of Seward Park, an exquisite frame of tranquil beauty like few places on earth. Some sections of the lakeside seem as raw as the day they were made, cut by giant glaciers. All was softened by the planted poplar rows and the cement walking path along the shoreline. Across the narrow road rough embankment and tall stands alternate with magazine cover homes and their broad sloping lawns. The unambiguous primary colors startle in their outsized simplicity: pale sky, dark blue lake, green grass. Joffrey thought everything held a slightly fluorescent tinge with a musical note coming off the lake. The joggers and walkers and bicyclists of every shape and color seemed endowed with riches by just being here. Joffrey could only gather his unbounded feelings by imagining himself God, the Creator. He was happy with his creation including the men, women and kids roiling in the lazy, cement-truck twirling sun of this blissful trust. He pronounced it Good. As far as he could tell, Man had not yet eaten from the tree or slain his brother; all was blessing and bounty in the Garden.

No, the original inhabitants were gone.