i've been saved, ray

its another one of those nights...where the heat is pouring in from the streets, and i want to play some music...but it is late and i would wake someone up...my dreams are becoming confused with reality...i often think, did i tell someone this dream, or did i dream i told someone, and was this dream a dream at all, or was it real...i don't know really what that is supposed to mean...maybe it means i am getting closer, or maybe it means i am going completely insane...i suppose i worry about that more than i should...but the days have been opening up on me, and my mind is soaring...there is a vast bleak emptiness that is stretching across the land...i've been trying to listen to music that accentuates that feeling...and am succeeding...the world is awash in vast bubbling, foaming, glasses of beer...steaming sour in the late july afternoons...and i look at all the strange and sad folks that inhabit the world with me and it breaks me down...the streets are full of madmen, like the wide hudson expanse, forever flowing, madder and madder, out to the sparkling sea...

the light of the ages

one of my good friends is having a girl today...she was supposed to come out a week ago and evidently didn't want to...hell i don't blame her...i too didn't want to come out...it is nice to see people procreating...i guess...at least good people doing so...there are so many knuckle-grinding fools out there that are having multiple litters of steaming-hot ridiculous children that it hardly seems as if there is hope for the future...but i suppose there has never been 'hope'...hope exists in the minds of humans simply because all of us morons need something...some word that will keep perpetuating existence, not only for our future generations, but also for our present ones...i look over the world tonite with my fine tooth-ed comb and see nothing but endless destruction and desperation...the only exception being in one quiet pennsylvania hospital...where tonite amidst the sterile white rooms, and overtime-ed nurses, there is an enlightened soul reluctantly beginning her suffering...

the magical light of existence

as his eyes opened to the lush scene in front of him, he for a minute forgot that he was still on earth...the green, the purples of the wildflowers, the haunting barrenness of the groved trees in which numerous creatures were stirring...he thought for a minute that the paradise that the preachers promised but never delivered was reached...he was happy to be out of that stifling southern town he grew up in...full of sad sacks boiling over with moonshine and ignorance...the way they joyfully raised money for sunday sermons about hellfire and hate...like some vast ugly web of insanity wrangling at their spirits...the way they spoke of the land also bothered him...as if it was theirs, as if it was an ancient birthright bequeathed to them from some fire and brimstone good-ole boy in time immemorial...but as he stood now, arms outstretched in his own private wilderness, all those thoughts shrunk like the insides of tired old bullies...they shrank at the true, pure light of the jungle...the wild and unadulterated freedom that the wilderness possesses..."oh no, them preachers won't bother me out here", he says to the trees as if the trees gave a damn about him or his preachers..."out here a freed-man can be free"...and he was right, there would be no tragic lumps from the town to bother with, because their fear, their true and undying fear of the unknown would keep them away...that is why those sunday sermons had no resonance, no bite, no mystery...because of the fear they invoked, and the fear of the messenger...oh no, with that fear the animal withdraws, submits, and is controlled...running and shrinking from the light of truth and the light of knowledge and spirit that engulfs the lesser in weeping pools of foul stinking bodily fluids, while the greater; lover of love, lover of peace, lover of freedom loses all those pointless and easily manipulated words of the truth, and becomes the greater self they always were...a golden being without fear and shining with the magical light of existence...

ode to keith

i like keith hernandez, although i don't like the mets...he makes watching that low-rent team bearable...he's funny...like a huggable bear...and cantankerous...like me...i like gary carter as well...i saw him the other day, looking like a big fat blob, far from the days of '86...it made me chuckle a little...although i am a yankee fan, much like someone born into catholicism is a catholic, the mets give me a laugh...and thank god for keith, because without his biting commentary, there would be no reason to watch that team from queens...

to an old friend

i miss you p. guth...you are one of the few truly gifted and compassionate souls on this wasteland of a planet...it seems like ages since the days by the lake, or the cross-country madness...the role playing of childhood acquaintances and experiences...it is hard to believe that we sat silently next to each other in saxophone row, that everyday i drove you and johnny boy to school in the almighty k...we saw the raw and ugly side of this country from mountain rednecks and their 'terlits' that wouldn't take, to the horrid pasty euro-trash of copenhagen that brought tears to your eyes...somewhere in turkey you are sleeping soundly tonite...far from the america of little league, small jersey towns, and the endless troughs of piss stained wrigley field...i suppose i am just feeling a little nostalgic tonite and i am sorry if this maudlin crap is getting on your nerves...you would always have a strange joke, emerging like a koan, to pull me out of this extreme self-loathing and illusion...i think i will go have a glass of whiskey if for no other reason than to toast your existence...you see with all the suffering, whether it be intestinal blockage that causes one to shit out their mouth, or the spiritual blockage which causes one to shit out their soul, the good lord (probably in a moment of weakness) decided to let you roam the earth...i suppose all that needs to be said is that this shit kitchen is more tolerable with you being a part of it...

letter to j/k/r

you don't know what you're missing...the acres of savages here...running around on the streets, all hours, like madcap flashes...the latinos commenting on the sweet ass of the twenty-one year old innocent in front of me...the hydrants gushing water, the old ones hobbling on rusty knees, the hot oppressive nature of the air...filled with untold carcinogens...if you are going to live, even for a little while, and i mean be alive, this is the place...skunked last night i requested a song about ole chris reeve...it was played and then someone in the sparse crowd said "that's inappropriate"...how insane...inappropriate?...am i suddenly hanging out with i'll humoured den mothers?...i responded "life is inappropriate"...then nothing...the silence of an air conditioned evening...i woke up this morning hurting...my soul seems to be rotting away...the disease of the ages has broken through, pulling with all its might...i think of the beauty i have left behind...the beauty of the life that is fading...the quiet sadness of existence...can i at least mention that, or is that also "inappropriate"...

"engendered"...my ass

'engendered'?!!?...get out of your head and into my car!!!...i'll drive you far away from the mis-information of academia and into the cool mist of the infinite ocean...oh wait, i don't have a car, i suppose you will forever be stuck in the desert of a discontent you hardly realize...one so all pervasive and powerful that years ago as you began to realize the power of these destructive thoughts you masked them in the language of philosophy...you see, no philosopher worth his salt ever figures anything out that is not already known intrinsically in the hearts of men...their job is to constantly spin yarns, move circularly, and figure nothing...only writing the boredom of proofs that cannot be proven, and smugly playing childish language games that lead nowhere but to the deathbed...if this is not the case, why are the best philosophers the least appreciated by their colleagues...and the well bred golden children of the day, whose theories if grasped fully are pointless, the most celebrated...it is the curse of existence...the absurd follows us around every corner...it has you, me, and the all the other ghastly human beings by the balls...

shirtless on the d train

boom! those dirty little cretins on the street are setting off fireworks a day early...dirty hands, and snotty noses...the evening streets reeking of ten year olds..."stay away from my pristine corpse" i yell out of the ever-bleeding windows of the heights...my voice echoes throughout the palisades, the rocky cliffs, and the left behind's...i took a long ride on the i.r.t. today...interesting how things change...the faces and downcast eyes of the fellow hopeless up here, to the beautiful and rich of the upper-west side...down to the nose in the air crowd (ironically still using the subway)...to the self-important second-handers of the village, and finally to the strange mal-formed humans of the outskirts...a ride it is indeed, as this lost soul tries to negotiate between wind-swept brooklyn shorelines, and mid-town mainstream junkies...i suppose it doesn't matter, when sailing out in the harbour...on your way to somewhere new with not a care in the world...and i suppose it doesn't matter when sweating it out in the upper nineties...but hey this is all we have...and even if it doesn't matter, there is something to be said for the eternal shit of suffering...

the curled foot of death

the sounds of the city are engulfing me...sirens, jack-hammers, the whirling of rotary fan blades...i am sitting alone on a couch that smells of cat piss reading celine...could it be any other way?...the darkness of the human being alive in a brain on a couch long after the writer has passed onward into the future, into another hot, sweating, car alarmed night...this strange new world has overtaken my soul and i find myself spinning further into the lonesome abyss...nothing to hold me from the bottomless pit of realization...of every misdeed, infraction, and dark secret of the human soul...it is all here for you and for me, on the streets of this once lovely dutch colony, once english stronghold, and now merely modern city, sadly human...someday the colony will be complete, and we will raise the flag of accomplishment...until that day however, we remain the dark animalia of yester-year...