BUT how now I remember a love as when I saw her in Jermyn Street that time eating an apple and striding along in a full flowered skirt, was it not a sight for wide eyes to see and my eyes soared if not my heart oh what a day it was the white clouds scudding in a deep sky like sailboats or lost souls looking for a harbor and later on the beach lying on the hot sand and the tide rising, salt brine upon our lips, the dusk falling and the gulls calling A cry beyond the world and long long we lay in the sands, with lanterns on the waters far out but then the final dense dark with no lyric escape and the dawn never coming and nothing but night night endless night the night of the great void in which the world spins and we upon it waiting for a strike of light to light us up
INDEED indeed I say mumbling to myself in the Caffe Trieste San Francisco, and is not capitalism the very enemy of democracy if you think about it or even if you don’t think for the aims of one are the destroyers of the other and vice versa Oh but let’s indulge in the Lyric Escape again and orgasms aren’t necessary for ecstasy when there are myriad other highs to take us higher than parachutes as for instance as I remember Paris 1948 and the snow falling as I strode along through the Tuileries with my seabag over my shoulder looking a little like Conrad carrying Coleridge’s albatross and the albatross my past I was eager to drown in this first time in Paris since childhood my second home come back again I felt like kissing the ground as when I landed in Normandy June 1944 but never made it to Paris until years later the sun shimmered on the chestnut trees and the snow falling silently silently on the tranced statues and the formal gardens and my life as a Sorbonne student stretched out before me and what is the plot of this novel if not the remembrance of things still not past for the past is but a cautious counselor of what has yet to come what has yet to transpire or expire so farewell final albatross as time ticks on and all of us like insects in an anthill seen from space all nebulous figures dancing in a tropic night through the night-mazes singing a lyric escape again then and why not Are we to live in despair all the time thinking only of our certain deaths so why not live the highs and ignore the lows Let blasphemies rain down let tragedies and cataclysms rain down upon us but we are not so easy to melt down as even in death clowns laugh in our theaters of the absurd in which a turd may turn into a toothsome trollop male or female and what’s to say you’re wrong except the medieval man in the round collar Amen oh man om om as in the Buddhist chant the sound of the universe turning yes the music of the spheres the sightless singing a voice beyond the world the voice of consciousness itself that higher or lower consciousness they say that humans have and where did they get it where did it come from if not from the great beyond yes yes the voice of consciousness setting us apart from other animals the disembodied voice of the fourth person so singular the ventriloquized voice of some god or goddess sounding in us And so faced into the future or faced with the future my country tears of thee Sweet Land of demi-democracy or plutocracy or whatever you want to call it and will it continue as is into the future or morph into something better or worse in the course of inhuman events oh man Is Rome burning Is Paris burning and am I signaling you through the flames So Quo Vadis baby and where do we go from here oh man and oh woman the two of you will decide everything including your own ecological meltdown as if mankind or manunkind were too stupid and too greedy to save itself from melt-down eco-disaster and so bye-bye civilization as we know it and should I just let everybody else die as long as I got my piece of prime cheese oh man it’s all beyond me-me-me and I’m resigning from the government to return to private life and the Little Woman and kids as they say You’ve heard the politicos mouth those phrases after conning everybody around them So here we are again dreaming of love in a hot climate Ah well am I raving yes indeed I am It’s the rage to live It’s a rave a huge high known as living a rave of living and breathing a rave of loving and breathing and flying on Ecstasy that drug of being of simply being alive It’s a kind of madness and am I mad or just crazy as Don Quixote de la Mancha the chivalrous knight caught up in his own illusions of saving ladies with his lance and unhorsing rampant knights in iron suits with Brooks labels and Yale locks upon the pants and with penis erectus for spear he slays all old ladies making them young again with a touch of his swaying sword retrouving them their maidenhoods and -heads ah yes and why am I still in this squirrel cage going round and round when I want to be out in the green fields or on the high seas with Greenpeace or Chris Columbus discovering a symbolic India we have yet to find or even envision a river still to be found in the heart of America with Jack Kerouac and his merry band and not so merry as all that in fact quite the opposite in their imagined quest for you name it an America that no longer existed even as he embarked to find it with his crazy crew oh and it wasn’t just America they were looking for driven as they were by testosterone and the rage of living personified by one Neal Cassady the driven driver of their beat jalopy Cocksman and Adonis American antihero outlaw cowboy who would stop to do brave deeds and rescue a beautiful maiden as in all those old cowboy shoot-’em-up Westerns only with Cassady his hotrod was his horse and he gunned it over the horizon but the only brave deeds he did were stealing cars in which to screw the maidens etc etc his tale of testosterone and a roving phallus goes on until he ends high on uppers and down on downers walking along a railroad track in the dark dawn of San Miguel de Allende a lone lonely figure lying stretched on a railroad trestle as anonymous as a stray dog in death a fourth person singular and the Road ending with the end of their crazy youth or the end of American innocence as some weeping sociologists claimed oh yeah wasn’t that a sad story and Let It Come Down on us yeah everything that the wiggy prophets prophesied about what would come down on us in the last half of the twentieth century when Moloch and Mammon would take over totally and the Youth Revolt of the 1960s would be buried in the general conflagration of greed greed greed and politicos selling us down the river Lord Lord and yet new generations yet to spring up to save us oh for sure let us dream For youth forever sets forth again for the far shore to forge a new conscience a new consciousness to become mariners of love or avatars of love like certain gurus who love to sleep with their acolytes or students and indeed why not Isn’t that the best way to transmit love pure or impure or are those gurus just lecherous old cons or whatever Oh no Everybody has his own calling and some are called to Make Out as much as possible with every possible Other and if I am an Other half forever longing for the Other half of self to make my self whole and why not spread Love instead of hate as if Gandhi could stop Hitler oh don’t give me that old saw haw-haw but all I know is that Mount Analogue is a symbolic mountain that doesn’t exist on any map or chart and yet exists for all of us to find and climb and is it a mountain of love or a hill of hate and it’s up to you to decide and guide your life thereby or maybe it isn’t a fount of love or hate but rather just a metaphor for absolute beauty or absolute truth or some other absolute that exists though not on any map yes the idea of truth and the idea of beauty still exist even if all the beauty in the world has been destroyed the idea of truth exists even if truth everywhere has been destroyed as if there was not a single beautiful thing left in a destroyed world old Plato said in his Republic a platonic ideal as I knew it that time in Jermyn Street or another time on the beach in Provincetown that endless summer when the tide was out and along the far strand there came toward me in the gloaming a tan beauty with straight hair shining like a weapon in the late sun and the sound of small waves lapping filled the universe of sand and sky even as the rest of the world was about to blow up or perhaps already had and this moment on this strand was all that was left of being on earth oh such romanticism you haven’t heard in an age but maybe isn’t it about time for it For is science and objective rational reason to rule unopposed forever while poets and painters are all still trying to create pure light the ultimate source and the first source of life so why not a little bald romanticism in the face of the dark cruel world in the face of the blind unfeeling unthinking universe a
nd blind fate with its scissors cutting up all life including yours snip snip and you’re finished so lie down and die the earth turns on and you are but an ash upon its wind so now flay me down to sleep I pray my Lord my soul to keep which is the grandest science fiction with Mozart’s Requiem echoing in Gothic vaults and Dies Irae descending like fate itself upon us And all the time the Ouroboros serpent eating its tail like life itself and by a process of concatenous circumnavigation do we wind around to our beginnings and recognize ourselves for the first time like Ulysses returning home or Stephen Dedalus turned into Finnagain where the iffey River Liffey flows back to its beginnings only we do not begin again our lives do not begin again but rather once flowed into the sea there’s no returning the all-engulfing sea where we all began but even there we do go around eaten by plankton digested by never-seen monsters of the dark deep and then on and on eventually rising to the surface of the seas in amphibious creepy-crawlers and so creep up the beaches into the sunlight and raise up new cities and new utopias with perfected humans singing Happy Days Are Here Again and let the good times roll over looking backward with Edward Bellamy to our present day with all our fatal flaws in the Shakespearean sense forcing us to fatal ends as life itself cannot stop eating its tail Oh man can’t I get off this spinning meat-wheel animal kingdom oh man stop the bus I want to get off And this the lament of the disconsolate chimera in the wasted land of the world unable to see beyond its dark horizon where light still sings in the high voice of the fourth person singular And yet we still have Night because the light from that far place where all is light hasn’t got here yet and we can’t go on like this but we do and there is no plot there is only me-me-me and my Others and if Hell is other people then that leaves me alone in Paradiso and am I an angel or a devil dancing on the head of a penis or a pin
WHILE King Arthur turned into a crow croaked in my window from his high perch telling me of the endless life of the world as seen through his own endless life and he cawed the great caw of it all even as the universe remained a vast wheeling unknowable thing with everything made up of identical particles or seeds and some seeds were made of love and some seeds made of hate and nobody yet could tell which seed would in the end dominate the pluriverse especially not in old-timey cities filled with fishermen boozers layabouts dreamers liars seamstresses salesmen con men porters politicians panhandlers laundresses carpenters sausage-makers blacksmiths wheelwrights and water sellers who went barefoot and lived largely on bread and figs but also not in megalopolises in future worlds in which nations as we know them would no longer exist and the world swept with multiethnic hordes seeking food and shelter While still endless life goes on and will go on even in the worst adversity and will go on with so many human emotions so many lovers pining for each other so many tears and so much singing and sighing so much fighting and killing and so many flights of fancy and flights of fear and so much camaraderie and solidarity in spite of all in the face of total annihilation while all the while in spite of all the slaying there are more and more people overcrowding the earth because in spite of all there is the chronic habit the chronic unstoppable ungovernable urge to propagate with or without love yes indeed it’s the chronic problem of fornication that rules over all governments as soon as night falls and we are alone with each other in tight embrace ah yes in tight embrace and here begins the real narrative of me and you Tell me tell me before the dawn before and before and before we were born before I was born before the brave alliteration of language invaded my brain I knew without words the rage to live the hunger for living and the narrative of it still to be discovered and articulated the narrative of living if not its meaning since perhaps there is no meaning there is only existing just as a poem or a painting does not mean but Is and there are only episodes that don’t add up to any meaning but exert in themselves the pith of living like that time when I was walking down a path and met a shining someone or did not meet anyone or was not walking but driving or flying and the earth my oyster still as Our gang goes on killing the Other gang on and on the rivers of blood still running and where does all this end if not in our beginning over and over Oh for a little erectile dysfunction before the earth bursts its latitudinals with overpopulation the spaceship earth overloaded and no end to the eternal rutting and breeding a primeval instinct that will not be denied and no politician dare touch it and don’t tell me I can’t have a baby! is the universal cry and the world a grand hotel where the lights are always on and still every baby born between urine and feces and every life an aperture through which the light of the universe shines and every eye a precious lens saying what can only be said in the voice of the fourth person singular the wordless telling of the real lowdown on life and what else is there to say what else am I to mumble inside my monkey mind and so I’m still here in this cave recording the shadows on the wall yes recording all these reflections of reality or whatever is going on and everything reflecting light and not-light or life and not-life but who am I and what am I doing here in the light and dark of the world and what do I want in this world and if I can’t answer such questions could I just pack up and take off for some other world where I would have to face the same conundrums as if I had a bus transfer saying “Use for travel in any direction until time expires” oh yeah as if I had a choice and could go someplace else and keep avoiding the basic question of what do I really want because obviously I must want something am I not eternally hungry for something like everybody else and mayhap there are three kinds of desire not necessarily in this order and not necessarily leading to each other and they are the Desire to Possess and the Desire to Merge and then the Desire to Withdraw and so then where am I in all this desire and what did I ever really want or what did I first want when I started off on my endless adventures like what did the Man of La Mancha want what did Ophelia want or Ulysses or Tristram Shandy or King Arthur or the Rose of Tralee oh what did they all want as I go on evading the question of what I wanted when I first sprang up and I could just say like Gregory Corso that I became a poet so that I could get girls and maybe that’s it after all and so then what is the plot of this mellow-drama this melo-declamation of my desire on earth and is it all a dumb play where every character speaks and acts for no other reason than to get what he wants and some hide it better than others but it all boils down to no one but Me and so Billy Boy here we are again and no matter where you go there you are
YES yes and he had lived and loved and won or lost and he had wanted her and wanted her with her high breasts and wild hair like a sibyl rising from the sea in his illusion of her in her bathing trunks and bra that time at that lake resort midsummer in the Catskills and the heat upon them desire and flesh upon flesh in the throbbing sun yet she still would not be possessed and so on and on with desire and despair seated on a bench in Central Park or under the linden trees in Boston Common and the leaves falling that autumn in the sea wind the brittle leaves swept along the brown ground and our little hero is pure desire while despair his other half is seated next to him in the fall of that year when he was working as a waiter in Durgin Park and hanging out in Jack Powers’ Stone Soup Bookstore and pursuing some other image of beauty and love as he imagined it and there was the mad pursuit and even then the possession on the backseat of a car but then the withdrawal and the distancing and back he was again seated on a bench and what is to be done about it except to stride along the strand back in Gloucester with The Sun Also Rises in one pocket and Look Homeward, Angel in the other but his mind not on books as the sun rises over the Three Pound Light, and Vincent Ferrini the poetic conscience of Gloucester comes sailing along with the wind blowing his cape like a sail his wide hat held on with a string and Vincent famous for his eternal flight and pursuit of the eternal feminine looking always forward to new conquests with greater sightings of truth beauty goodness in a panting bosom and promises of pneumatic bliss And he an orphan left without a tit as a baby on a doorstep sprung up and ran into the world chasing shadows of Mom and Pop in the suburbs oh it’s a br
eathless story told over and over in the history of man and woman or woman and beast and the sun setting on far pampas as animals stalk each other including humans man after woman and vice versa or twice worser or gender seeking gender tender in the twilight and it’s pretty basic ain’t it if you know what I mean and tender is the night or not so tender depending on the avariciousness of hungers my god do you have to lay that on me again yeah yeah well I’m just reciting to you the story of me-me-me and my early orphanhood and my life growing up not to mention the inner terror of the worm in the bottle mamma mia the worm in the bottle of tequila reposada a proof of its 100-proof power to turn you into a lusting lover lost staggering-blind in the Mexican night or stoned on mescal in a Mexican cantina like the consul in Under the Volcano and mescal Aficionados laid out in dark corners of the café called the Place Where You Lose Your Soul where swinging doors let in nothing but night and the horrors of the turning worm Aye but was I not speaking of love as seen by Freud and his discontents as if all comes down to sex as with our little teenager chasing a girl under bleachers at the high-school ball game and feeling for the first time a certain surge in his body if not in his pants and her elusiveness ending in nothing and the home team routed to come another day boy oh boy the American boy become a Boy Scout in the suburbs with merit badges attesting to his expertise in knot-tying or kindling a roaring fire by rubbing two sticks together or two scouts together and hitchhiking his fourteen-mile hike to win the country trophy for Scout Troop 2 and so on after living in an orphanage in Chappaqua New York and forced to eat undercooked Cat’s Eyes tapioca It’s good for your eyes they told him but didn’t tell him much else except brush your teeth and eat your spinach and think of the starving Armenians and it was the Great Depression and he delivering newspapers at five in the morning to pay for his fodder as well as peeping in early bedroom windows to glimpse flesh on flesh in the dawn and sex the savior of the working class strung out in bread lines until at last when FDR and World War II bailed us out and he set out to work himself through some provincial college and henceforth emerged as a reasonably miseducated product of high culture and not all so irrelevant as rebels might imagine as if he knew any rebels anyway since everyone really seemed to be in mad pursuit of the same instant gratification and never mind rebellion or the starving masses and so on with this abortive attempt to find a plot in my life or in his life or anybody’s life as if there could possibly be any plot in all of life as if anyone or any genius or any god or goddess who had invented life could possibly have had any plot in mind when he/she invented it what with the blind force of physics ruling everything unthinkingly unmorally nonethically Ah yes indeed I must revert instead to the recounting and accounting of my own fantasies my ideas and agitations and dumb contemplations of the workings of the mind and heart and as some love poet long ago said the heart has its reasons the mind never comprehends oh yes indeed but what is this organ of flesh known as the heart that pumps blood with only so many beats for any one life why is this involuntary muscle considered a guiding force in the conduct of personal affairs while it is known that the heart does not neurologically think like the brain and so where does that leave me-me-me filled with melancholy and confused imaginings in a novel landscape filled with tragicomic adventures as great as any in all the picaresque on-the-road novels of the world with their heroes of sorrowful faces and mad minds and hearts inflated with the rage to live And so do I return to the monologue of my life seen as an endless novel simply because I don’t know how to end any life So where away again my hearties once again into the breach with breach buoys and breech cloths covering groins male and female and we are not born with road maps in the palms of our hands with Heart lines and Life lines and direction signs at intersections to tell us which way to direct our lives nor is there any road map in the night skies or in the night heavens with its Greek mythologies and pagan gods warring with each other every night for our total mystification and no one to tell us how to avoid black holes and other life disasters even though navigators used to use stars to steer by on the surface of the sea but not how to navigate below the surface of living and how to steer me down the street to a warm lover or other object of my desire but listen let’s not fall deep into romanticism again for the warming world is too much with us late and soon with the ongoing result of pure rampant capitalism being the universal dispossession of whole populations whose lands and natural resources are taken from them by a new world elite a class above the rule of nations blah blah blah but the tide is turning and maybe some form of humanitarian socialism for the dispossessed will eventually emerge but unfortunately it might very well turn out to be a kind of state fascism oh yeah you bettah believe it brother yack yack yack do I have to listen to all this doomsday scenario by a bunch of weirdos and leftist creeps here in my cave with only the fourth person singular for company oh sure I know loneliness is my own fault and all I have to do is fling out to the nearest café or bookstore or movie house and mingle with the Jack and Jills who inhabit those places like they’re all spin-offs from the 1960s when everyone was liberated to love it up with anybody and isn’t that what everybody still wants and all of this would lead to universal peace where we could all lie around in saffron saris smoking aphrodisiacs stretched out with fetching beauties all of whom would be disposed to love me-me-me oh man do you dig it now or should we get lost in the unconscious machinery of the Oedipal conflict as it works itself out in me-me-me but why should I be afraid of Freud just because I was always in search of my father jousting through the world to find him while all the while unrequited passion unfulfilled longing drove others on including Sappho and Dante and Yeats and even he whose lady lamented his penis was too small Lord save us is that all that counts the erect phallus still ruling all and the search for the father nothing but a treasure hunt for Big Daddy with the biggest bat in the lineup the kingpin in the bowling alley of life so set ’em up in the other alley and have another beer on the house great father great artificer stand by me now in good stead as I set out now to meet my fate in the forge of the world where the plumber with the right joint wins the golden shower oh fer Christ’s sake what kind of highfalutin talk is that let’s get down to the mean streets again where my rebel side starts showing up my shadow self my bad half my dark self my wild half a real asshole my Other who keeps on butting in on my life as if I needed him to fulfill me oh sure and why not so let’s get down to tin tacks with this Other who is always acting up and doing what I sometimes wanted to do but didn’t have the chops to do like he’s some kind of swinging cat as they used to say when it was hip to swing and hip to rebel against everything O what a satire of himself was he acting out his frustrations or convictions always Out There doing what I could never do like getting drunk and standing up in a bus and telling everybody to “wake up and pee the world’s on fire” etc etc a kind of antihero I guess whom I could never be yet wanted to be at least some of the time oh I’m sure you know the type like Gregory Corso the poet always the crazy rebel with his wild words which were right on the mark pinning people down or destroying them with some cruel truth so witty at the same time and Shelley his hero oh I really admired him oh what is all this about alienation from society or whatever and do we still have to be alienated these days and isn’t it possible to create a society in which one would no longer have to be dissident? Oh yeah well put that in your sebsi and smoke it haven’t I got better things to do being a big pain in the butt always questioning everything and disturbing everybody in their pursuit of property which is what the founding fathers really had in mind oh man give me a break just leave me alone to lead my own private life but then other people come back at me and say oh you and your ilk and your pursuit of happiness intent on your own private gratifications in spite of everything like even though there’s always this bully with his fascist mentality loping alongside of you and if you just ignore this goon he will grow larger and larger and take over while you’re fucking around so you have to turn aside from your private obsessions
and give this lout a few clouts to cut him down to size or else or else and so on and so forth into the boring workaday existence where everything is button-down biz-biz-biz and no futzing around and no wild imagination of another way to live or anything like that yeah yeah am I still my brother’s keeper and since I have a lot of brothers am I to be the keeper of all of them of all men and women Brother I ain’t got a dime And Brando on the take in The Wild One saying Well whaddya got?
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