Prodigal Sun

Change.

http://thedayonfire.blogspot.com

I want the world now
To love and leave me alone
Rain comes full circle



More thoughts on the novel by Sueskind coming soon...

Oh, I'm sure there is. Well, this should be considered the extended remix.


"Mysterious and secretly there prowl at the walker's heels all kinds of beautiful subtle walker's thoughts, such as make him stand in his ardent and regardless tracks and listen, so that he will again and again be confused and startled by curious impressions and beweitchings of spirit power, and he has the feeling that he must sink all of a sudden into the earth, or that before his dazzled, bewildered thinker's and poet's eyes an abyss has opened. His head wants to fall off, and his otherwise so lively arms and legs are as benumbed. Countryside and people, sounds and colors, faces and farms, clouds and sunlight swirl all around him like diagrams, and he must ask himself: "Where am I?" Earth and heaven suddenly stream together and collide, rocking interlocked one upon the other into a flashing, shimmering, obscure nebular energy; chaos begins, and the orders vanish. Convulsed, he laboriously tries to retain his normal state of mind; he succeeds, and he walks on, full of confidence..."

from an even longer description of the necessity of walking
from The Walk by Robert Walser (translated from the German by Christopher Middleton, et al)

Page 134 of a Calvino novel I am reading contains a hidden door.

I touched the paragraph lightly on the enjambment - which looks completely unintentional - and find myself face to face with an old fashioned priest hole of the mind. I was content to find nothing of the sort, to enjoy a couple of hours of solitude immersed in the joy of literature. However, I see now I should have expected to find such a passage within a passage, if for no other reason than had none emerged, I would have created it. Over time I have come to find that given a wide berth in which to roam, I will become unsatisfied with my bounty and seek out extra footage to explore. Where does such a habit originate? On the surface it appears the product of greed, as evidenced in and fostered by my very American past and present, a continuum of conspicuous consumption, of doing because one can, not should. It is Yang all the way - action always trumping inaction. Movement validated over its foil. It is not a question of gratitude. I do appreciate every plot of ground before me. No, I believe my incessant desire stems from an illogical coveting of things unavailable, seeing in the idea of them a mystery entirely attributed and arbitrary. Granted five unlikely hours of personal time, I want six or, more to the point, five of solitude and one of happenstance adventure that I myself must strive to create. In the course of an afternoon I want a child's agenda of a million lifetimes before dinner. Five more minutes, mommy. Just five more.

The passage in question deals - oddly enough - with this very topic, though it hardly appeared out of any real necessity. The entire book to this point has been thoroughly engaging. Its quality a continent wide with a soil rich enough to accommodate ten of the likes of me. However, as is my innate custom, I have discovered a way to even more.

Next: The passage in question and where it comes out

A disconnect of phrases will bother you now for the rest of the night. That sentence itself runs across your vision like a visible voiceover overlaid like bad linoleum on your bathroom floor. Two mirrors facing each other to conjure an endless dub of whispers certain to keep you from sleep. You curse caffeine and alcohol, almost believing they are at fault. It's the bum and you know it, what he said and what he didn't know he meant. His face, a thousand thousand times shrinking inside itself until daybreak picks the lock again. It is another good day in your life, though you will inevitably fail to recognize it.

Iambic Pentameter infuses history for a reason. A short puff followed by a heavy stroke, guaranteed to please older women. For these days if the diction is hearty enough the author is content with a steady plodding ahead, nuance left as a device for the lesser. We are a culture that outgrows its formality. Dress, manners, arts. An express engine from form to chaos.

You open the magazine on the nightstand and look for something erotic. But instead of half-covered curves you get full disclosure in marketed nonsequitor. You want a woman who may know something of your desire, but in her place the practiced dance of the bored stripper. She's not even looking to see who's looking, but following her stanzas to the end, occasionally adding, out of sheer boredom, a coda that's a chorus taken from the pop song that never seems to leave her head. You reach out to take part and may even reach arousal. But if you do, she's only been at the right place at the best time.

A notion of form implies a desire to convey, a purpose - through composition - to build toward something known, overlooked, or even mutually stumbled upon. But too much and you have a formula. A fine line between the sassy slap of the ass and choreographed, staid, gesture. Bravo, that blob of mustard just might help you sleep.

But reality sets in again. A dance while mouthing Eminem is not the same as the poetry you are reading. You've reached too far on either end to make art and life seem compatible. You lost something, the main thing, in the space of five minutes. You should have castled, and now you need to go back in time - even further - if you hope to continue the game.

The bum on the corner is about two miles from where you met him, and yet he hasn't left you for a second. The dancer yawns at a bar down the block. You are somewhere else, too, somewhere between movement and stasis (looks a lot like Franklin Avenue at Nicollet). What aroused you more? Are you getting old? Could it be that the context of these things you hold is the basis for the future of your sexuality? It's two a.m. Do you know what your libido is?

From safely behind a large window I cannot move. The sun beats at the space between my hair, aging the crust of my aging melon. However, it is not the heat that plasters me to this spot, but the split-second look between two elderly women on the bus outside the moment a gangbanger jumps aboard.

April 14, 1912 a rumor is heard simultaneously by two ship passangers seated at dinner. Strangers, their eyes meet, connected by the terrifying news they somehow know is true.

Her legs separate below and above
gods dream of Achilles
tendons balanced on mountain shoulders

Her breasts emerge at once
as the future of love to say
It is not because of beauty
the world is lost

Her face blurred by
a divinity of reason is curiously outdone
by her peasant perfect feet

What lies between them
a melting contour of salvation
hips that will save us all

Though never rendered for the likes of us
make no mistake

Venus was armed

"All words to this point are footprints on the way a land buried deep in a bracken. Instead of foliage, a mass of of grasping hands. Breaking through to the town square, a monument stands in your honor. Without fanfare take up residence again in one of its anonymous suburbs. Hold up like a hermit and power the monument's purpose forever, "Denkmal des Taugenichts", a constant reminder to your people the dangers of folly."

- What one hears while walking by the statue of Goethe on Kaiserstrasse (Frankfurt)

STEPPING TO THE EDGE
of impropriety while talking
with the barista.

He wants to pull her over the counter
and make her sorry
she married young.

Instead, he makes sure to include
words like pour in, I need,
and bed.

Each time both faces are saved
by context.

The narrow stone steps seemed for
locals only. BETWEEN FOLK TALE HOUSES
to concealed and gilded churches

down to streets no one
bothered to name I walked.

The half walls lining the steps and
guarding many of houses were filled
with pretty flowers which
if you got closer
grew straight up as if at attention



They rose between iron spikes that seemed
to me distinctly German. Not to dissuade the
children from walking the walls, the points
were bent uniformly inward to keep the
foliage in its place and beautiful beneath
the stern wishes of Godesbergians one and
all.

Looking at this I felt I saw defined the
last mysterious trait of this culture, one
that couldn't be described in a travel book,
a university course, or even in conversation
with a seasoned expat.

I wrote down what I saw, in broken words and
pictures, on a scrap of paper and buried
it in one of the planters.

Walking to the U-bahn I knew it
would be discovered soon. Read by
a local it would serve as a pathogen
forcing the next evolutionary
step for Germany. It would not start
in Berlin or Frankfurt, but right here in
little old Bad Godesberg. No one would expect.

At the main train station, ordering an overpriced
cup of coffee, I imagined an elderly woman
reading a dirty slip of paper. Her face. Her
eyes. Her arms and legs a signal box switching
the tracks of the future.

It was the least I could do for this
place so connected to family, to art and to God,
and now to me.

He leaves and some
where between us
a moment

From the periphery
I see him flipping me off

His square shoulders,
a hand raised for a reason,
inbetween

his big fuck
you head

WHEN THE WOMAN behind me takes
her change and walks away I can see
she is not walking. Her movement is just
something inside her that
falls and casts its shadow
into the material world.

Her innate reaction is to reach out
and catch it like she does the spilled
kotex, almost convinced that
one day she will not miss. It will
not fall and break at her

hot boots that turn in ten
items or less and head off.
But you can see that she's missed again,
even hear it.

You get the feeling this thing won't
stop falling, in love with her black leather stride,
a fashionable attempt to outpace
the inevitable.

a modest homage to Calvino and his amazing, invisible cities. From watching my son play with sand.


GOD PEERS DOWN THROUGH A HOLE IN THE WORLD. I watch him from a chair a few feet away. His simple voice tells me what is happening.

"I am pouring sand through a hole to make a pile underneath."

From my vantage point, however, I see he is speaking in metaphor again. A small mountain is growing beneath the desolate strata of a city all but forgotten. Its citizens left long ago in concentric droves beginning with the outermost ring. The jobs vanished first, shipped off via bug and barrow to neighboring hot spots. The workers felt they were no longer en vogue and set out in search of them and fresher air. The hull left behind became the model of the ghost town, used in all Old West movies, themselves relegated to nostalgia.




FROM ABOVE HE CRUSHES THE EMPTY STREETS, houses, useless banks and deposits them down the hole to the new society burgeoning below.

Down here we do have inhabitants, a population toiling beneath the radar (in latitude and scale). This race is different from their predecessors, I see, for they do not reconstitute the raining raw material into its previous forms, but into a single, rising knoll. All stuff and energy, like ants, is for a unified purpose. Uninterested in intricate road systems, parliaments, whored alleyways of a genuine city, this new tribe has one charge, to forge an edifice from the stuff of their origins, for the sole purpose of returning to same.

Getting up I myself walk over to look down the hole that God made.

LOOKING DOWN I AM INVESTED, a citizen of the beginning, looking on as the future works backward in a nearing point of contact.



I ask God, "Do all ancestors wonder why we make such strides in retrograde?"

The Shaper of Worlds knows better than to answer.

So I return to my chair and look again from an hourglass point of view. It becomes clear. There were never two cities, one above and one below; one beginning to find the one ending. There is only a God addicted to action, yet unwillilng to commit to a future, be content with the past.

"There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;..."

Robert W. Service


"Welcome to America! Don't talk to him, he served in Iraq!"

Buddy ranted up and down in front of the Lake Street Bar for the first time today. Only the regulars knew that the would give shows again at 8 and 11, before rubbing one off and going to bed. Buddy had two stances: attack and jubilation. The former made him into a pit bull ready to lacerate, the latter Angelina Ballerina full of herself and her potential. In truth I've never seen a drunk pirouette so well. The first thing he said to me came at just the wrong time.

"Heyyyyy, that's a nice suit. You got the job! Man, I'd hire you for dividends and a place on World Street...you know what I'm sayin'? World...Wall Street, with DIVIDENDS!" He had me by the lapels, his lips inches from mine. I was trapped and I hadn't even gotten in the door.

His face reflected a second lifetime of experiences. You can see it doubled up in the eyes, sometimes, like misprinted type. As a younger man, I would have sidestepped him in a hurry, but now, well I can't dismiss them anymore, those who've lived that much. He was in my way, but tonight, he was also a statue in the park who's plaque I needed to read and appreciate. Three feet from now this guy could end up saving my life.

His face was a milestone inside both of us, a spotlight on a big crack that shouldn't be dismissed. Something not so much in the past, as put on the backburner and left to simmer. The life you intend to leave, the one you did leave when things began to shrivel up and, by automosis, turn on themselves to find their own death rattle. His lips shook as he rambled on, and in them I saw the verge of death, the lips of the first time I saw it.

I was nine when I came upon that dog in the road. Who knew man's best friend could produce a sound so unearthly? As though the dead dog of the future had ripped through and squeezed the last imaginable sound from the gut of his gasping counterpart. With others its a crackle, like with bugs, lost in the exoskeleton parting juicy at the seams. With some, the ones who can't stay still, it is no sound at all, but a bitter phlem parked on the back of the tongue. With broken dogs at age nine, its a call note between now and things that make no sense.

Out this night Buddy was the first signpost on my way to the horizon, a broken Wyrd sister serving up comeuppance for my cushy life. He was sweating lager, and eventually wandered down the sidewalk to bend the ear of a broken chair. I got my beer, sat down outside, away from Budddy's furniture chataqua in progress. I couldn't get comfortable, and watching Buddy nearly en pointe realized I had no reason to be.


"Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh."

ibid

Cross Posted from the Little Poem Press forums. Little Poem Press is the publisher of my latest chapbook, I want to look like Henry Bataille. Available here: http://www.lulu.com/celaine.


FICTION, EVEN IN AN EXPERIMENTAL FORM, exerts itself with a base assumption that it contains a reason, a point and a means to get you to it, else be mistaken for a jumble scattered paragraphically by a malcontent. Poetry, on the other hand, approaches this madness easily and does often. We have all seen it. Poetry, poetry is to writing what absinthe is to alcohol. Stories can be badly written, but how dare one impose a framework on crazed beauty? In centuries gone by, we can only imagine how meter and rhyme somehow accentuated the essence, the glow, from a piece by Shakespeare or Donne, but if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit it is difficult. Poetry, in such formal dress, is tainted too much with the patina of history and its ‘poemness’ for it to work its magic the way it did at the time of its writing. We can’t help but focus on the gilded edges of its language first and the message (as applies to your soul, mine) second. We can be impressed at the sight of a Model T, but not with the same awe as with that more in line with our current view of sexiness, a Lamborghini Countach, the Porsche Cayman S.

I feel safe in saying formlessness, the unexpected, in writing is something that excites us. One merely needs to compare attendance at a traditional poetry reading and the ubiquitous Slam for evidence. Many enjoy the latter for its apparent ability to invoke the unexpected, the edgy. They feel this form is open enough to encompass the modern—and clearly urban—condition. But truth is, even this form has crystallized into predictability. Attend one and you cannot help but admit it follows an uninspired formula of recitation and theme. Both traditional readings and Slams need an overhaul. The former needs to be updated in format and delivery to appeal to our more modern sensibilities, and the latter needs to push itself beyond the frustrating, stylized clichés of badass reaction to oppression.

To look a little outside the box, I have thought often of the manipulation of context in relation to a new approach at engagement. Case in point, I am confident that if a stranger were to walk up to you on the corner, ranting in the right breaths about people and things that seem connected by a fascinating, vibrating thread, you would find yourself more engaged than with this month’s New Yorker poetry feature. Is this guy crazy? Is he a street poet sharing his latest work? Is he telling me something that really happened in an unwittingly artistic way? In that magazine, you know what to expect. You just need to take a drink, look at the poet’s name, and figure out what they are going for. The fact that the bum’s words draw us in because of their unexpected beauty would excite us, if we were at this point of understanding. But we aren't, a fact evidenced by the literary subscriptions piling on the nightstand.

We read that poem again in the latest issue. It got published, so we take note, maybe even take notes. We can learn from this, right? We want our name in lights, too. But did we hear that bum right? Did the landlord in his tale really bow to Scylla the myth? Was that Bullfinch tucked under a stinking arm as he kept you from boarding the 17C running east? His lost daughter. Did she simply leave him or was she taken from him, as he said, by a ghost from his past? How can you know now, your memory stumbling feverishly over the rocks and moss of half a day gone by? But this guy on the page in front of you is published, validated by the world of poetry. The bum, he’s probably eating french fries out of a dumpster somewhere. Pondering their connection, you get up to take a leak and realize - thanks to the strange luck that has you pissing into most formless century to date - the bum’s story could have been a poem (what you’re reading now, too, for that matter) were it not for a nagging suspicion that you yourself are converting it into prose, an essay on poetry and stigma perhaps, or context, on the fact that the power of words, like the truth inside history and its books, lies somewhere floating in the middle.

consider this a dvd bonus feature you don't need. deleted scenes from the cutting room floor...

$$$ But I am attempting to fool you. Yes, I can say it now. I'm trying to be more honest, more heart-opening. My agent said honesty is very in these days. I said you are crazy, but what do I know?$$$

---Good for my soul if nothing else. So yes, I am attempting to fool you all this crap about rings. They aren't real, hell no. They are not of palpable smoke, but of dizzy half-thought ----- ...The breeze is blowing too hard for smoke rings here. Revolutions between typical emotion and thoughts about things you think you should care about. That's your spinning. That's the axis right there, just below your last rib, a place doctor's call vulnerability'''

Seated less than a mile from the governor's mansion. Is he in there, behind a huge, modern desk, behind a giant hedgerow on ancient Summit Avenue that protects his honor from the eyes of the rest of us, the commonfolk, the very souls with whom he deftly portrays a connection? Did you know Reputation Management is an actual job title? It is. @invisible footnote@ I knew someone who did that. Make sure if he falls down, he's doing it for charity. If he gets caught with his pants down, he was just pissing for the poor. Does he have one of those in there with him? [icon missing: left for Spain] Who couldn't benefit from having someone like that on his staff? ++staff, funny Michael++

But perhaps he is not so reclined (reference book "Contortions of Luxury") in his token home, giving dictation to an upwardly nubile intern, the afternoon sun warming her auburn hair %--in even rhythms--%. No, perhaps he is out meeting people, proving to us he is nothing more than the proletariat made good, Mr. Smith not yet gone to Washington ///Capra, second best of his films///. But he forgets. They all do when they get to office. The moment you sell your house next to ours, the suspicion begins. Guilt, actually, until proven innocent a minimum of 324 times {stop and think about The Anchor Bar for inspiration, those teeth}. Stop drinking with us and you're pretty much dead. Try sitting with us, and watch our livers reveal the pickled memory of an elephant ***who eats apples to get drunk, fact***.

I am particularly lucky today. I am seated no more than six feet from a group of real people.

Four women are interviewing what must certainly be a local celebrity, for not one question has been asked, everyone is orange, lipstick giggling, and the agenda, as they have explicitly stated, is Bloody Marys. They are all on the same page. This is the way it is with real people. I know this is nothing new to you, but to me, well, it is always enlightening. When one reads about the world, every book and article scrap he can find, it still cannot prepare him for the atom bomb that is first hand experience. I must take notes and take them well. For when I return to my hermit's cave and reference them with maps, radar screens, paper, and short-wave radio, I must retain as much as possible. The interviewee answers his cell often, with no regard for his audience. Dully noted. They watch on with bottom lips bit in expressive allure. Footnote: They will spend the morning together in this socially accepted orgy of flirtation and thrusting innuendo. The article will be submitted at deadline with the press of a hungover finger, from a concensus of imagined lies to keep the publication of their coolness alive for one more funded month. Period.

I am sitting behind the object of attnetion with my summer hat and glasses. If each of these women were alone, I can see them almost giving into the realization that I might make for a more interesting, if not comically strange, interview. Especially with my sitting here writing like a poseur or latent and future star of book and screen.

Suddenly, I start to believe their gathering over drinks is connected to the largest art gallery and center in the Cities - a place where artistic interpretation is lubed with acid jazz and pink martinis for members. It could definitely be the Walker. Not the Loft. Footnote: Not large enough to generate a gathering so removed from their literal mission. Yes, perhaps the Walker, with its new walls and regenerated legacy, can house this fashionable vapidity for the local and visiting artist alike, and still manage its reputation for the masses. Sometimes fashion is more important than product. Again, I apologize. I am telling you nothing new. I know you know, I have to state it, say it aloud, if only to beat it into my own pop culture. Fashion is marketing; and marketing is vital.

Sidebar: Oh, but it sounds like jealousy, doesn't it? Yes, I suppose it does, but then again I am, of course I am. Who wouldn't be? To be perfectly acceptable in thought and action. Your every synaptic spark well within the lines, your patented eccentricities accepted by each and every one.

The smoke rings leap from my open smile before lilting up toward the moon. I smile because today I am particularly lucky. I am seated no more than six feet from a group of real people. That, a nice cigar and the morning moon. With every four breaths I turn the moon into saturn and relish the other, very real, heavenly bodies around me.

“…well, I like some Italian authors.”

“Ah, so you've read Calvino then?”

“One rides an old train in Prague on the afternoon it breaks down or, better, derails. No one is killed. Instead passengers are forced to emerge from odd angles, climb strangers to get to their feet. Out windows and Caligari doorways well dressed zombies wander to the nearest platform. They look en masse at schedules, clouds, chairs, adverts as if for the first time. One reaches for her old life in a coffee. Another thanks her god there was no fire. Still another, dazed, damns the world for being late for an affair started for all the right reasons.

One does all of these things and more, but one does not read Calvino.”

Taking a break to put things to the test and see what stays and what goes.

I found a pencil stub in the schoolyard
and set it on my desk after recess

only to see that there was no class
no bell
no cute girl with blond hair behind me

just the chipped yellow universe
eight years old
that has never stopped surprising me

*


I can't stop dreaming of that pencil
of my lifelong attempt to do that perfect little thing
justice. I need to return to the source and delve, headlong
into writings long overlooked. As if my visions had a destiny.
As if I myself could be Rimbaud or Nerval, had the former never
learned to read, the latter never been conceived. One can only
write so much before learning that the words themselves are watching,
waiting for us to get the joke, understand their humor whatsoever.

It is a balance, and this is something I have known and will know sometime
in the future. Eating and Excreting. I always return to it, yet have felt compelled to drive breakneck
down roads filled with signs of empty tanks. Do I imagine the speeding poles, bored
out drainage ditches? Sometimes you wake up and in a flash see that you are in a car
up on cinder blocks, wrenching the wheel left and right, vroom vroom, while
checkered flags wave on the telly, and you sit there concocting zip codes out of fireflies,
rooted in the soft southern night, sad really, without a single god damned clue.