The Phillies vs.The Dodgers

The Phillies whooped the Dodgers.
Me and Dad and John stood behind home plate up in the 400 level
in the gentle, constant breeze
that came from the Philly skyline,
gathered speed
over the vast parking lots
and rolled over center field.
High and Inside served Guinness.
So we drank Guinness
and watched the Phillies whoop the Dodgers.

SeaBoards

Mental Sunshine
There is a resort on the tropical shores of my mind , the tide
laps up on the white sands like a playful dog.
We're all wearing shirts with Hibiscus leaf or topical fish patterns,
stenciled palm trees swaying in a department store breeze.
Fresh crispy leather sandals from the discount rack.
"Hey, that guy from 'the office' where he's gay in that movie, what was he reading? Prowst? Howdya' say it?"
Proust.

Atlantic Movements
tiny gods, create and destroy civilizations of sand and shell
- sacrificed in the deluge of salt and sea.
Umbrellas pop like colored mushroom tops,
tanned, fed and dreaming fauna bob like corks as the lifeguard's whistle calls like a clarion.
The sleepy waders hear, and move, a little, and everywhere the taste of salt and old stirs, gently,
the leviathan of ageless and nameless things in the soul,
a flutter of sea-birds in the heart.
Floating in the memory of you, every now and then,
touching the floor
of sharp and pointed things.

Anna
I hear you
rattling around in the back of your sentences, your drinking laughter
when your talk is a room of messy unlabeled boxes, spilling on the linoleum,
hiding your bottles in your baskets
On the freckle, on your neck an old man is selling poppies (he was personally effected)
But your hands are lions that do not tell the truth
and your mouth is a beautiful iron gate
some days, when you are not here, it is easy to touch you
and speak your name aloud

These Days
These days are a cigarette smoked under an oak tree, the sussuration of a blackwater creek (they skip past me on the way to parties, or playing frisbee)
Like young lovers they cast their desires into the air like autumn leaves, embrace fiercely.
I tickle these days.
These days are so good I give them names and play hooky with them.
These days see people's faces.
They are the D chord on a guitar, the first time I read "the Weir", my first girlfriend.
These days are a trumpet solo: a flurry of ecstatic notes, a band of freckles, tanned fingers, ice cubes (white wine), all the people I can remember.
These days ring in my ear like blessed solitude, holy silence,
a whole hierarchy of fecund joys that whisper fire languages.
They appear on the horizon, a candle-lit cathedral (like a Spanish galleon), carrying special things.
I gather my angels on the shores of night, singing softly, fingering beads, to wait for
these days.

A Zoo at the End of the World
Bored Pandas munch bamboo, and pray secret death prayers in their sad, childless eyes.
Cassanova, fat and insane-drunk, throws mixed nuts at them while he drinks singapore slings from a sunbleached "Superman Returns" 64 oz. Slurpee Cup."You fuckin' deadbeats!"
Mothers whisk their daughters away to the Aviary to see the rare California, white-tailed whatever.
Icarus breaks his fall with a bouquet of runaway, mirror-backed Gorilla balloons holding valentine's day hearts that say "Let's Monkey Around" with a loud pop into the Polar Bear's Pen. Children from suburb's with Parents on Saturday watch in horror as an emaciated, adorable, caged, wild animal feeds himself.
"Flew too High" a bored father says as he checks his messages and puts his cell phone back into his fanny pack.
The lion stalks his bubble-gum, cigarette speckled cage and dreams of dark ebony faces with ivory teeth.
"I used to spar with gods and Nubian princes, my life was a repast."
"Christ!" Ernest says with a shake of the head "Some limey poof went lolling around Africa with a bottle'a'laudanum naming things in latin and now this," Hemingway rips off his shirt and jumps into the cage.
Julian, John Wayne, and St. Peter are staring into the Cumaean Sybil Exhibit.
"This is fucking horrible," Wayne says, "Let's get a snack and look at those happy, little sea-otters."
At the snack bar two black kids are playing tag, one trips and skins his knee. "Slow down kids" Bukowski says, putting his cigarette out against a bronze statue of of Sir Francis Galton. He takes a flask out and pours some Powers Scotch into his Coke Zero can. "These hell dogs are gonna come after us next."

A Little Beach Music
The sound of those paddles.
The ball doesn't even bounce.
They have to stand so close together and no matter how good they are they still drop the ball every five seconds and joke about it like they are really enjoying themselves but there is an edge in both of their voices that is so obvious that it becomes even more obvious that they are both straining under an enormous effort to try and convince the other person that they want to play this stupid (what do you even call it Beach, Paddle, NoBouncing, Loud, Plastic Ball Annoy Everyone Else On The Beach,Tennis) game it's Orwellian.

2 plus 2 equals 5 to this couple.

ICE CREAM, GET YOUR ICE, Non, Va BENE Non C'e Male Si? I should have said something I remember a little, oh 1$ bottles at the Ocean Drive I should, how much do you think those pilots make?Yeah, he looks like your typical college kid, Hail Mary full of Grace, is it Sunday? No that's just some radio station, a radio station of nuns,

I have let's see,
No I've read too much non-fiction on this vacation,
I have to pee a little.

The Ocean is huge.

I mean huge.
I don't even think that it can convey it's hugeness to me.
Bully, it's just big because it's a function of it's sense that it's winning.
I don't know what that means.
I can't remember the last time that I was amazed.
Vince Walsh, that might have been the biggest moment of self-disclosure in my life, I just don't remember to remember that some days.
I wonder how he's doing?
We want to be amazed. Like Children with soft watery eyes, in darkened movie theaters.
We want glorious and transcendent things to happen. Mostly just money. I would buy a house with a tunnel and a mag-lev train that would go to Mike's house and Tom's house in my basement.
Francine and Haley would love that.
Mike's Kitchen is turning into a monster.

They shouldn't even sell boards shorter than those 7'4" funboys, that kid has been out there an hour and he hasn't caught one wave.
I should switch to the tin whistle.
Not as cumbersome, less maintenance.
"A Lazy man I'll not Maintain"
Who talks like that? These guys over here talk movie. That is their language. The commerce of words and images of motion picture studios. I'm just like that too.
This guy keeps touching his biceps and looking into the distance. He's posing. Tool-Box.

You can spot the fathers. I am not a father, but I feel for them. I think I know the yearning for a little peace and solitude that they experience. Bags under the eyes, still a little hung over from the temporary escape, old Phillie's hat, head buried in a book. Clancy, Leonard, Koontz, King, maybe Scottoline never Percy, Greene, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hemingway. I've never seen a copy of "The Old Man and the Sea" in the hands of an old man by the sea. He's already thinking of the million fucking things that he has to do to make ends meet.

Children Oblivious.

The mothers are eaten by the same things but differently, stretched a little more somehow. I don't feel that kind of pressure, not yet, certain I will someday.

Come to think of it: Why would an Old Man by the Sea read "The Old Man and the Sea"? Mortality, wasted potential, feelings of failure and inadequacy. Some things really do hit too close to home. They accuse too deeply, reveal too much. "So near to my heart this fatal wound sin" and all of that. For the late-twenties set:

1.) The Gospels - If you say "Jesus what a sweet guy" you haven't actually read him.
2.) High Fidelity - For any selfish man who has experienced regret and listens to music.
3.) Lost in the Cosmos - Ever felt alone? You are.
4.) The Philokalia - Everything is emphatically not "all good". Your instincts are correct.
5.) A Refutation of Moral Relativism - It's right there in the title. This little knockout doesn't pull any punches.
6.) The Closing of the American Mind - Learn from a great American educator, the late great Alan Bloom.
7.) Grammars of Creation - Your mind has been systematically impoverished through the impoverishment of language.

Sea Isle City
I found it when I took a vacation, it was in the bushes, right underneath the deck.
Some kids, maybe, or a pickle jar that fell out of the recycling container.
It snapped into focus: all of the houses and families and dollars, incessant scramble, the tumblequickrecline vacationdream sandbooze from the Atlantic City Expressway
the pine tree corridor, the wardrobe to happy shores of coppertone and beachfiction, where cumulus clouds take long rides and sit in the sun all day.
Walls of laughter and forgetting are built like sandcastles out of cases of coors light, sunburn, and crabcakes.
I found this place, on vacation.

Relative Motion.

- My younger brother John and I took a motorcycle trip to upstate P.A. along Route 6.

***

"It's full immersion ; like learning a language by moving to that country."

***

After about an hour at 75 m.p.h. the motorcycle decides to sell some psychotropics to your limbic system.
The wind which perpetually makes its way up into your helmet begins to orchestrate and incite elaborate gang warfare with rival pressure gradients on your eardrum that would make soccer rioters at a Roma/Lazio final blush ; so now instead of the wind, a voice like the sound of many waters.

***

The light refracts off of the visor in such a way that you're convinced you are part of a sacred parabolic function that extends infinitely, and infinitely closer to the author of creation. The endless corridor of earth/tree, road/sky dissolves into a miasma of peyote proportions and you're reminded of why you wanted to forget and forgot about what happened in class when you were 12.
And then you come to, and hunker down for a moment : scared that you actually forgot about where you were, let alone the intrinsic danger of riding a motor with two wheels, loaded with camping equipment along serpentine country roads at breakneck speeds next to a younger brother who, you're sure, is convinced he will never die, somehow.

***

The Photos won't capture the essential quality of this.
In lieu, some narrated silent films:

Pine tree, Route 6, Strip Mined Mountain Facade.
"The night I smashed my face up in Italy, I could feel the old pagan gods, those demons of antiquity after me. It started at the statues of Castor and Pollux, the twins, I'm a Gemini, I ran to the temple of Mars, the owl of Minerva flew overheard, at midnight."

A Wendy's on South 44.
"Well I think I have the most winning little man-boobs."


Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon.
"Some sorry sons-a-bitches in those black and whites on the information board actually put a railroad through this thing? To grunt and sweat under a weary life, wow, what the hell did Shakespeare know about working under early industrial conditions in some godforsaken canyon in the woods? Pretty though. John wants to take a picture."

An oil chip road that descends into a wide left turn around a sheer wall of limestone, shale and granite. Two motorcyclists lean into the horizon as in some wild Turner painting, if he had lived in this century. The road hugs the foot of a mountain on the left and drops at a sharp angle on the right before it quickly becomes a straight fall of approx. 100 feet. The overcast sky and abandoned coal mines and steel mills which punctuate the landscape like scattered tombstones imbue the vista with a preternatural cool and gives both riders a feeling that they have survived something, somehow, in ways they can neither codify nor comprehend.
"Whoa."


***

For about an hour after a long day of riding you're caught between two worlds, resurrected not yet ascended, You reply to simple direct questions with vague and near mystical answers. They are answers really, to your spaced out interpretation of what was asked, not the actual question.

***

"Do you want to get some beans?"
"I know what you mean, man."

P.U.I.

- Poetry under the Influence.

Facebook

How the hell, is this person and

How did this one - find me, I should delete this account

Let me stretch the truth and

compare

The Sun

Workdays, Anyday, I feel like the sun is a neighbor I don't want to talk to

he always has good news

trips he's taken, i want to tell him to go fuck himself

Health

Health is word cyclists in tight advertisement-riddled clothing use in the park

men with ipods ; like a bright yellow ball a child would delight in

don't feel words like that today

i just ate an old blueberry bagel with butter and didn't leave the house.

Moon

the sublime mellow silvering slice of the moon

just reflects

On Painting

Desire and Skill, married for the market, take a welcome holiday of perfect freedom

Hebrew

Hebrew looks like tongues of flame in the desert

Peace

Slipperiest, it defies, runs, hides, gives chase

The Rosary

The Rosary is a perfect circle like two hands clasped in prayer, reminds me of french cathedrals, light incarnate, it just makes your bones ache thinking about it - I want to fill my nostrils with the air of those places, satisfy that thing i can barely name oh, hail hail.

You Are Here

Look at any map, and you'll get the idea very quickly - you feel the weight of what's left out

immediately

points of interest, roads, symbols! (to denote function)

a semiotic soup of bland possibilities, you are here (red dot)

no surprises [for fuck's sake]

who you are is someone that's just here, here at the snack bar, eating a stale pretzel.

A Moment of Clarity

the mad drunk cowboys of my imagination are pissing straight whiskey on my cerebral cortex right now.

They stumble out of the subconcious corrale like half-starved wild dogs when I'm drunk like this so they can insult my manhood and steal beer.

They circle me in a mad-frenzy and kick up plumes of memories like the peacock feathers of some unholy fowl.

"where ya' goin' dan?"

she breaks in before i get there

Huh.

Yeah.

Where are we goin' [the accumulated bitterness of a young man obsessed with memory]

"dunno anna, dunno, sorry - you hungry?"

where are you going?

huh "Quo Vadis Amigo?

Nobody bu the misbegotten, the heartbroken, the poets, painters, priests, monks, mystics, forlorn, forgotten, forsaken, the sad, sorry and rejected are wondering that.

Shit, as tom says, i learned more from the books of sorrow than the pages of joy.

bartender, the cowboys need another drink

Meaning to Say

Know what I mean, he didn't mean it, that's not what I mean, Meaning? What I meant to say.

All we can hope for is the proper calibration with these dead things, these words.

I plane the wood to reveal

I'm aiming these things right at your heart, I pick it up out of myself and shape it with my best instruments, the patent words for the perceived intentions, i know you know what I mean.

nobody knows exactly what i mean, meaning has gone through such a hazing these days.