Silence

Weary & lost in the iron veins
of the city's electric soul
illuminated by a dark dream--
the poison of fear
paints the night's coliseum

Always a prisoner
of the reflection of eyes--
The hoof-beat of years
rattles through the mind

The language of war scars the sky
The collision of dreams
written in the soil's tears
The cries of 3,000
entombed within the breath of history--

The stream of sorrow
continues
until the reign of silence
buries every cannon blast
and murder-cry--
fading ripples upon a sea
unending--
Sunlight piercing
the prison wall

I am in the Twilight of My Youth

Thank God! The sun is setting on the tumult of thirty years of awkward strife! Amen and amen again I say to its passing--farewell to the demons of insecurity. The cracked mask of youth falls away as the sure face of manhood emerges. The weight of those thirty years knocking about in the darkness of confusion, the hurricane swirl of emotion sometimes almost paralyzing in its force. And goodbye to those years of constant struggle against my physical enemy: cerebral palsy. You were an adversary whom had much to teach me, and while you will still lurk in my muscles and sinews until my dying day, we know that I have won, that I have banished you to the no-man's land of defeat. But I feel still that you are an old friend, that I was formed as a result of our unending war. The scars I wear from our battle I wear with pride. They are more precious than any medals handed out by any army or government, they are not pinned to a uniform, but are forever seared into my flesh--they are the man that I am, a document of every foot advanced on the battlefield that is life. Thank God the battle continues!

I walk about the street and in the store windows I see the magazines that hold up the slaves of youth as mortal gods. Their Eden is illusion; the god they worship is a lie. The ones that wear the perpetual plastic smile of youth, the never fading smile, the doll house smile that sparkles in the incandescent light of a nuclear blast. I walk down the street and see their inhuman gladness unhindered by the journey of the soul. Ten thousand years in the grave and their smiles will still be shimmering up to the heavens while the corpse beneath rots away. Even today while I see them in their ghostly gracefulness wisp down the street, beneath the myriad smiles I smell the stench of rot. It invigorates me, sustains me, jolts me from sleep and reminds me that I am still living. It is a pungent flower, to be sure, and its beauty is that of the undying flower bred in factories--but we live in the assembly line age. Soon we will join with the undying flowers and taste the stale breath of eternity--never dying, never living, with our perfectly painted smiles uniformly stitched upon the face. The wonders of the future almost in reach!

Black Memories Fade Hard

A stiff shot of Yukon Jack, for medicinal purposes (remember, Oscar?), a cold Augsburger Golden, and Frank Zappa's Waka/Jawaka--not a bad way to start out a Wednesday night, all in all. At least enough to lift me out of the perpetual swirl of weirdness that is Our World, God love it. Or is it? Where were you when the crazy shit started to go down? As I recall, I was safely installed in my efficiency apartment" (aka: a closet with kitchenette and head) on Kane St., Milwaukee, reading Henry Miller's Black Spring. It was a glorious morning, as I remember. The kind that moves poets to verse. I was lounging about, drinking my second cup of Irish Breakfast tea, when for some reason now lost to time, I had to call up my parents. Little did I realize when making that phone call that not only would my world never be the same, but no other Americans' as well. My father answered, and proceeded to tell me that a commercial airliner had ripped through one of the Twin Towers.

"Dear Jesus in Heaven," I thought, "could this be real?" But I knew my father to be a reliable source, since he is an amateur pilot. And I somehow doubted that any broadcast news station would be sick enough to play a joke like that, even though I found myself hoping that it were nothing more than that.

Since I had no television at that time, I raced over to the student union at the U of W, Milwaukee to find a television and make some sort of sense out of the bare bones details that my father had given to me. I arrived just in time to see the second tower hit, then the Pentagon. It looked like some bad Hollywood action movie, but I knew it was real. Many around me gaped at the screen in utter disbelief, but all I felt was a rising tide of fury, all the more so because of the sense of futility that accompanied it. I had never felt so goddamn helpless, and that's what really infuriated me.

We all know what happened from there on out. And yet, I still have not come to terms with the grim realities that were unleashed on that black day in September. If anything, that day only seemed to confirm my darkest suspicions of the human nature, that in the millions of years that have passed since we first took that bold step from the primordial slim, we have developed little beyond our pack animal simian beginnings. Still sequestered within our prides, still eyeing the others of our species with glances fraught with suspicion, still in blind competition for the mastodon.

I am not entirely certain what I had intended to accomplish when I began this screed, but it became what it was meant to be, I am certain of that much. And you will not blame me if my mind so quickly clouded with memories of that vicious day in 2001, for the dust and smoke lifted into the air on that day has yet to settle, and it will be a long time coming before it finally does. I think in many ways it was a doorway leading to a maze, and the only way out of that maze is to come together, not in any narrow nationalistic sense, but as one people, if that will ever be possible. We are all groping about in the dark and we will continue to do so as long as we are filled with such irrational loathing for each other.

I have no answers, no secret maps to get us out of this corner. I'm not sure what can be done as long as men continue to kill in the name of God--how can you reason with that? But even though 9/11 was a doorway leading into a maze, it was really just an extension of the maze humanity had been stumbling about in since time immemorial. To see beyond the maze, I think, is the trick. Perhaps even the key. To see beyond its walls while working within them. That's the best I can do at this time. Sorry I don't have more.

And don't forget that we are spinning around in a vast void on a little speck of space. That should put anyone who thinks that are the golden apple of God's eye in their place. We are one or two steps away from the ant--dig yourself.

OK--that'll do it for now.

Highway 61 Revisited Once More

Mike Bloomfield's guitar is cutting through the air with it's wild metallic hale of howls--there's something about the whole alchemical mix, the combination of post-apocalypse Burroughsian imagery, honky tonk piano, Chicago Chess blues guitar on Owsley's finest blend & nightmare organ of Manhattan Bleecher St. midnight--something that hits your ears and tears up the synapse highway to the medulla inner sanctum of the brain that tells ya that somewhere in there between Like a Rolling Stone and Desolation Row a corner was turned, a tidal wave of change hit Plymouth rock, the black & white world went to technicolor in the space of a note being born, a bomb was dropped akin to Bird & Diz at Minton's, a page turned in the Big Book of Time imperceptible to intellectual slaves chained to Marxist/Captialist/Modernist analysis--flowers blooming in the big room of perception like Aldous Huxley's smile, the Alpha & Omega do the fandango while old gypsy women gaze into the crystal ball eternal & I recall Highway 61 rollin' from Duluth down to the shores of Mother Mississippi while the voices of bluesmen echo from the shadows of Tombstone Blues while Franz Kafka walks over the darkened Charles Bridge, Beatles singing "I'm A Loser"--there's a bit of historical perspective for ya. Who saw the shot out of the cannon coming? Not even Miles Davis had donned his pimpin' shades--the difference between yesterday and today, between Michelle and Nowhere Man, between the Kapitalist--Communist battles that buffeted the King of May and the gravity that holds the rainbow in place. The sergeant at arms has left his post, but we're still adrift in the sea of time, the escape pod carrying the silvery seeds to a new home somewhere beyond the horizon of the sun while Bob Dylan carries on the guerilla war through the stages of the world--This is American music, to be sure.