bgbm

So my roommate and I decided that Oscar weekend was the perfect time to venture out and see a film that received only a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  That film was The Roommate.  While we love bad movies, it's not often that we pay to see them in theaters.  Usually we and some other friends relegate them to something called bgbm.  The "bgbm" stands for "bad girls, bad movies" and while I'm still a little unclear about the bad girls part (maybe because we make rude comments?), the bad movies began in 2007 with 50 First Dates and have gone on to include It's Alive, The Room, I Know Who Killed Me, Troll 2, Gymkata, Leprechaun 5: In the Hood, and even one called The Oscar.

Some were not so bad (Death to Smoochy, Spice World).  Others were so terrible they could only be categorized as mind-numbingly dull and not even worth making fun of (*cough Glitter cough*).  And yet others were remarkable because of the discovery of people who are famous now but at one time were attached to schlock like this (google The Apple and Nigel Lythgoe).

While we're on the subject of bad movies, might I also suggest that there is a fourth category which could be labeled "Movies I Am Ashamed to Admit I Love"?  These are movies that I acknowledge are not paragons of cinema, yet every time they are on TV I have to watch or record them.  You could also call it Jurassic Park Syndrome, but that movie is EXCELLENT.

For me, probably the best example of MIAATAIL would be Where the Heart Is.  That movie . . . where do I even begin?  It has everything:  an all-star cast, babies born in Wal-mart, tornadoes, kidnapping, children named after snack foods, bad southern accents, librarian alcoholism, deadbeat dads getting hit by trains . . . and I love it.  It fascinates me.  I will never get tired of watching this movie.  The only reason I would ever change the channel when it's on is if my roommate walks into the room, and even then I usually make her watch about 10 minutes of it, depending on if Natalie Portman had the Wal-mart baby yet.

So there you have it.  If you, too, would like to start your own bgbm (or bbbm), email me and I'll give you a starter list of movies free of charge.

Oh and hey!  Today is Dr. Seuss's birthday!  Enjoy:

Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons, and she named them all Dave?
Well, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do.
You see, when she wants one, and calls out “Yoo-Hoo!
Come into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one.
All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!
This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’
As you can imagine, with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that, when they were born,
She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn.
And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm.
And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.
Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.
Another one Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face.
And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate…
But she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.

A bit of a downer, frankly

I wanted to share this poem by W. H. Auden.  You might recognize him as the author of the poem John Hannah recited in Four Weddings and a Funeral.  This one caught my eye on one of the poetry sites I frequent- sometimes they post an excerpt of a classic to lure people in on the home page.  But as I was reading through it, it really struck me today.  You know the phrase "arresting image"?  It's something that makes you stop what you're doing and pay attention.  That's how I feel about the following passage:

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

Here is the poem in its entirety.  Maybe it will strike you, too.

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

Loaded for Bhaer

I was watching the 1949 version of Little Women this weekend, and I suddenly realized that every adaptation of the book- nay, even the very book itself- infuriates me.  The problem is Jo.  She's a great character whom a lot of girls look up to: a headstrong, outspoken writer who struggles against society's expectations of her to get married and stay home and knit.  Clearly she is a representation of the author, Louisa May Alcott.

In case you are unfamiliar with the plot, Jo is best friends with "Laurie" Lawrence.  His character is developed as charming, handsome, fun, and basically the peas to Jo's carrots.  Laurie loves Jo, and Alcott seems to be setting them up as the perfect match through most of the book.  But in the second half, it becomes more and more clear that Jo does not feel the same about Laurie, until she finally rejects his marriage proposal and breaks his heart.  She goes off to New York, hoping that it will give him time to get over her, and it's there that she meets the wretched Professor Bhaer.

Guess what.  She ends up marrying old Bhaer.  Oh, Louisa.  We don't care about the Professor!  He's middle-aged and always poorly cast in movies.  He and Jo have a teacher-student relationship, and it's incredibly boring.  She's fascinated by his thoughts on philosophy.  She ends up darning his socks.  In the movie, she sews a button on his coat for him.  What happened to the unconventional young woman who rejected traditional domestic roles?  Alcott herself ended up never marrying.  Why not the same for her heroine who was so adamant in her rejection of Laurie that she probably would never marry?

Look, even if she had to marry old Square Bhaer, could we at least have gotten a more interesting, better developed sense of character?  In a book that is 47 chapters long, Bhaersy only enters in number 34.  Compare that to Laurie, who appears from chapter three onward, and you've got a lot to compensate for.

A Complaint

There is a change—and I am poor;

Your love hath been, nor long ago,

A fountain at my fond heart's door,

Whose only business was to flow;

And flow it did; not taking heed

Of its own bounty, or my need.

What happy moments did I count!

Blest was I then all bliss above!

Now, for that consecrated fount

Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,

What have I? shall I dare to tell?

A comfortless and hidden well.

A well of love—it may be deep—

I trust it is,—and never dry:

What matter? if the waters sleep

In silence and obscurity.

—Such change, and at the very door

Of my fond heart, hath made me poor.

-William Wordsworth

The great American minstrel

The last few days AMC has been running the old movie White Christmas back to back to back.  I hadn't watched the entire thing before, but I was lying in bed with a case of too much time difference between East and West coasts, so I thought, why not?  It stars Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye.  On Danny Kaye alone I was sold.

Well, despite the fact that most of the second half of the movie hinges on the passive aggressive nature of Rosemary Clooney's character, it's not bad.  The songs are so catchy, they've been in my head for days.  Irving Berlin composed all the tunes.  I was once in a play in high school and this girl acting opposite me had the line, "Could Irving Berlin have done better?"  She was a bit over-the-top, so now whenever I hear his name I think of her saying "Irrrrrrving Berrrrrlin."  Anyway, Berlin was amazing.  I never realized how many hits he really wrote: "White Christmas," "Happy Holiday," "God Bless America," and you know how I feel about "There's No Business Like Show Business."  Come on.

According to Wikipedia, he wrote over 1,500 songs in his entire career. The man was such a genius of a songwriter, he's been compared more to the likes of poets Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg.  I thought I would go ahead and post some of his lyrics from White Christmas here as poems.  They really just seem effortless.  Enjoy.

When I was mustered out
I thought without a doubt
That I was through with all my care and strife
I thought that I was then
The happiest of men
But after months of tough civilian life

Gee, I wish I was back in the Army
The Army wasn't really bad at all

Three meals a day
For which you didn't pay
Uniforms for winter, spring, and fall

There's a lot to be said for the Army
The life without responsibility

A soldier out of luck
Was really never stuck
There's always someone higher up where you can pass the buck
Oh, gee, I wish I was back in the Army

[2nd chorus for female:]
Gee, I wish I was back in the Army
The Army was the place to find romance

Soldiers and WACS
The WACS who dressed in slacks
Dancing cheek to cheek and pants to pants

There's a lot to be said for the Army
A gal was never lost for company

A million handsome guys
With longing in their eyes
And all you had to do was pick the age, the weight, the size
Oh, gee, I wish I was back in the Army

Gee, I wish I was back in the Army
The shows we got civilians couldn't see

How we would yell for Dietrich and Cornell
Jolson, Hope and Benny all for free

There's a lot to be said for the Army
The best of doctors watched you carefully

A dentist and a clerk
For weeks and weeks they'd work
They'd make a thousand dollar job and give it to a jerk
Oh, gee, I wish I was back in the Army

Three meals a day
For which you didn't pay
A million handsome guys
With longing in their eyes
I thought that I was through with all my care and strife
But after months and months of tough civilian life
Oh, gee
I wish I was back in the Army now



Sisters, sisters
There were never such devoted sisters,
Never had to have a chaperone, No sir.
I'm there to keep my eye on her
Caring, sharing
Every little thing that we are wearing
When a certain gentleman arrived from Rome
She wore the dress, and I stayed home
All kinds of weather, we stick together
The same in the rain and sun
Two different faces, but in tight places
We think and we act as one
Those who've seen us
Know that not a thing could come between us
Many men have tried to split us up, but no one can
Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister
And Lord help the sister, who comes between me and my man



Funny side note: Can you totally tell how Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen are the real dancers?  Look how angry Rosemary Clooney looks when she first comes out on stage in the Army song.  She seems to be concentrating on getting the dance moves down and forgetting to smile!  And poor Bing sure is trying, but he's got nothing on Danny's energy.

I know this much is true.

Look, I'm just going to say it: Jurassic Park is the best movie ever.  It was on TV this weekend, and I watched it.  And when it was over, I watched it again.  I ask you, is there a better opening scene than a guy getting eaten by an unseen creature in a crate?  Is anything scarier than velociraptors in the kitchen?  Is there a better line delivered in a British accent to said velociraptor than "Clever girl"?  These are all rhetorical questions because clearly the answer is "no." 

Watching Jurassic Park in the theater in the summer of 1993 was one of the defining moments of my life.  It completely changed the way I saw movies.  If there was a job that consisted of bringing dinosaurs to life, I wanted in.  Think of the power!  That's what fascinated me about movies.  I knew that if I wrote scripts, I could see creatures in my imagination become real.  It was an intoxicating and terrifying idea.  Of course, it could be done badly.  After Jurassic Park finished airing on the SyFy channel, they showed some made-for-TV movie called Triassic Attack about dinosaur skeletons attacking people.  I realize they must have been working within a budget, but dinosaur skeletons?  Weak. 

Now I have a bad habit of writing action scripts and putting the characters in sticky situations just so I can introduce something like a sharkmeleon (that's a shark that's a chameleon) to create a diversion and help them escape.  It blends in with the skyline and then *CHOMP* OMG IT ATE THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AND EVERYONE ON IT. 

Awesome.

To Help the Monkey Cross the River

by Thomas Lux

which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.

Blankety-blank-blank

I get so aggravated when I see an ad for a movie that has a generic title.  If it's vague and tells me nothing specific about the plot, then I don't want to see it.  Examples that immediately come to mind are The Core, The Happening, The Fighter, You Again, Everybody's Fine, Life as We Know It, and pretty much every Harrison Ford movie ever.  Even Inception's title was enough to put me off seeing it until I heard the positive reviews and felt assured that it was worth my $14. 

As a kid, I took issue with restaurants that were named after the owner or some cultural representative of the type of cuisine.  I was incensed at the lack of imagination displayed by Mario's, Molly's or Don Jose's.  Maybe this resentment of lazy movie titles is residual of that, but come on, people.  You're writers!  I know titles are tricky, but unless you're adapting a board game you have no excuse. 
Now I'm going to step down off this soap box, and let you Analyze That.  If I catch you doing That Thing You Do again, I'll have the G-Force on you in 88 Minutes.  Trust me, It Could Happen to You.


so you want to be a writer?

-Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

In a world where James Franco still has two arms and "Howl" is a movie . . .

I've been trying to figure out for a while now how to work Allen Ginsberg's seminal poem "Howl" into this blog.  I didn't want to just drop it at the bottom of an entry as a way of emphasizing some other point.  "Howl" is so crucial to who I am as a writer that it deserves the spotlight.

I thank my 10th grade creative writing teacher, Ms. Garrison, for introducing Ginsberg to our class.  We read "Howl" out loud and it has stuck with me ever since.  I will always be grateful to Ms. Garrison for having faith in her students the way that no other teacher I ever had did.  She challenged us to interpret the poem and even take a stab at imitating Ginsberg's style with our own attempts at poetry.

The reason I bring all this up now is that there is a movie called "Howl" that came out in very limited release (New York and San Francisco) in September.  It's about the obscenity trial following "Howl"'s publication and Ginsberg's explanation of the poem.  There's also an animated part that takes you through the imagery of the poem itself.  James Franco plays Ginsberg, and it's got an all-star cast including Jon Hamm and Mary Louise Parker.  Here is the trailer:



It looks like the movie could get a wider release sometime in the near future, but until it does, there are still special screenings being held all over the country.  Check out this link to see if it's going to be showing near you.  And of course, there's always Netflix.  I will be on the look out for it, and I hope you will, too.  Yes, James Franco is a little ubiquitous right now, but it could be a great way to introduce a new audience to this poem.

Howl was first published in 1956.  It is written in three parts with an additional footnote at the end.  Below is Part I, which is probably the best known.  Notice how Ginsberg repeats the word "who" as a way to keep the rhythm, and think about how the "best minds" of his generation were really societal outcasts.

Howl, Part I

for Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
& stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.