Meet the New Boss

I looked over my shoulder
and what did I see?

A band of Angels
coming after me.

That buzz
became a roar and then
I couldn't take another step
for the bikes all around.

The sun was hard
in the hot blue sky.
The desert stretched
away to burnt mountains.

Nobody else around.
Not that it would have mattered.

They grinned like wolves.
I breathed deep .

"Hey, Cool,"
one of them said.
"Who might you be?"

Nicely written, Rick, and mighty interesting....

School's Out


"So, Odin, where do we live?"

"We live in the desert.
Godsville.  It's in the desert."

"True, Odin, but I meant
what country do we live in?"

"I know!  I know!"

"Yes Dharma?"

"We live in the United
States of Consciousness!"

"That's right, Dharma,
and what does it mean
to live in the United States of Consciousness?"

"It means Freedom of the Buzz
and the Rule of Cool."

"Correct, Dharma.
Yes Phineas?"

"Can we play now?"

Thanks, Tom.  I'm going to be reworking a fictional idea I got about ten years ago.  This will be the third long narrative I've tried.  I wonder if poem form can hold the freight.  Well, we'll find out.

Rick

3.  Fitting the Profile

For awhile there, it was all
cop talk
of the non-hostile variety:

Where you from?
How'd you get here?
See anything we should know about?

Then the blonde girl
who was their spider,
staring hard at her console, said
"He's not in here.  Anywhere."

And even for the desert
it got quiet.

"Did you send his picture?"
asked the leader,
a wide-body sort
with an eye patch.

"First thing,"
she said.

"What about his name?"
said the other leader,
snakey-looking
with a scar across his cheek.

"Three alternate spellings,"
said the spider.
Her hair,
long and held back
with leather bands,
waggled doubtfully.

Somebody's holster unsnapped.

Still enjoying this a lot, Rick.

4.  At the Academy

"Deb, you're in charge of the new boy.
I'll leave him here with you.
Up to speed as soon as possible, please."

"Yes, Ma'am.
Your name is George, right?"

"Yeah."

"It's 'Yes, Ma'am.'
Eveyone above you is Sir or Ma'am.
And right now,
everyone's above you."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Take this school manual
and sit there by the ficus.
You have two days
to learn it
or we throw you back.
The bathroom is there.
The lunchroom is next to it.
Take your breaks as you see fit.
I'll be in Product Development
if you need me, but
don't need me."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"You must have been a real
problem for them over there.
It's rare for us
to get an eight-year old.
Usually they're broken by then."

He grinned.
"Yes, Ma'am."

5.  A Bear by Any Other Name


“So Bear’s your name?”
said Widebody,
shifting on his Harley.

“That’s right,”
I said, trying
to look bored.

“That your full name?”

“Didn’t know
I’d be needing it.
Ching Monkey
Sleeps With Bear.
That’s the full label.”

“Not in the system,’
said Spider,
shaking that braid.
“Though there is
a Ching Monkey.
One of the old Supers.
Gone about ten years.”

Snake looked interested.
“Dead?”

I didn’t like them
talking about me, so
I cut in.
“No, and I’ll tell you
when and where.
Burning Man 1990.
That’s the last time
your folks pinned me down.
One of ‘em wanted
a reading.”

“He throws the Ching,”
said the blonde,
reading off the screen.

“Allegedly,” said Snake.
“Say he’s a spy.
He could have doped
that story out of the real
Ching Monkey
before he offed him. 

“Immy,”
said a voice behind me.

“Eggy, maybe”
said another voice.

Immy.  Illegal immigrant.
Eggy. Exile.  Government in exile.  Spy.

I was feeling the whole thing
slide, and wasn’t sure
how to dig in.

“Just for speculation,”
said a chick with
whipped around black hair,
“let’s ask him how
he got the rest of the name.”

“Taquamenon Falls,”
I said to the two leaders.
“Inducted
into Bear Lodge there.
Nineteen ninety-four.”

“At last!” said the blonde,
her fingers flying over the keys.
“Something to check.”

Thanks, Silent.  Rootless grins back atcha.

6.  At the Rat's Ass Bar and Grill


"I hear they took your kid.
Sucks."

"Yeah, but he was glad to go.
Hated my ass ever since
the first time I backhanded him
for smartmouth.  Kid never could
let go of a grudge."

"Swung a mean bat, though.
School's gonna miss him next spring.
I can't see him at the new place
prancing around in tennis whites."

"He's not gonna stay there.
He's too cool for them Straights."

"You ain't saying."

"Yeah, I'm saying.
Fucking kid's
gonna climb right up the pole
and sit there
till somebody shoots him off."

"Hey, don't cry.
He'll be all right."

"I hated my old man, too.
You're supposed to.
But not like that."

nice portrait of confused feelings here, Rick.

7.  On the Road

She turned the screen
so everybody could see.

A big, hairy face filled it.
“Beat it!” said the face.
“We ain’t open till sundown.”

“Is this Taquamenon Falls Bear Lodge?”
said the Spider.
“We got a fellow here
says he’s one of yours.

“Lemme see!”
She turned the camera to face me.

“Never laid eyes on him before!”

I opened my mouth.
Somebody grabbed my arm.

“Holster your sidearms, folks!”
said the face, cracking a grin.
“I was just having some fun
cause you woke me and all.

No, that ugly sombitch
is Ching Monkey Sleeps with Bear.  
We call him Sleepy,
but we’re family.
Not surprised you got him down
and started nibbling on him.
Dumb shit couldn’t tell
a beehive from a hornet’s nest
if it bit him, and they often do.”

The hand left my arm.
I shook a little,
couldn’t speak.

“But dumb as he is,” said the face,
“he got the full
faith and credit of Bear Clan Universe,
and we protect our own.”
That last was said
with a stare straight into the camera,
a stare that would set you backing up slow
if you saw it on a real bear.

After that it was wine and roses,
Or at least ripple and pot brownies.
They said their sorriest all around,
Handed me a joint, handed me some blotter,
Invited me to ride with them
Back to the barracks.

I smiled.  It was a sickly smile.  
I could feel it sliding down my face.
Then they left in a roar
and the silence wrapped me again.

I threw away the acid,
kept the joint,
headed straight off the road
till I couldn’t see it anymore.

good, good, good

8.  Jump-rope

   One, two, three, four,
   They made us go to their fucking war.
   Five, six, seven, eight,
   We put an end to their whole damn state.


“Yellow, what’s a fuckingwar?”

“Fucking  war.”  It’s a bad war
where the wrong people
kill the wrong people
for the wrong reasons.
Thirty years ago there was a bad war
and the people made a revolution
so that the United States of America
disappeared and became us,
the United States of Consciousness.

“Oh.
Were you ever in a war?”

“There hasn’t been a war
since the Rev.
The USC is a peaceful country.
We don’t bother anybody
and nobody bothers us.”

“Why are you called Yellow?”

“It’s short for Yellow Composite,
a type of flower.
I was a botanist when I tested,
and my leary gave me that name.”

“I want to play jump-rope.”

“Go over and ask them.”

“They’ll say no.”

“Not while I’m here.
They want to be Cools someday
and no Cool can refuse
a reasonable request.”

“From each according to a billy,
To each according to need.”

“From each according to ability.
They have the rope
and they can turn it.
To each according to need.
You need exercise like any kid.”

“OK.
HEY!  CAN I PLAY TOO?”




   

mucho gusto

9.  At the Godsville People’s Park

Six cross-legged in a circle,
one standing in the center,
a couple of Angels outside.

Green grass, waving trees,
sprinklers hissing beyond.

“Caught him at the Rat’s Ass,”
said an Angel.

“Doing what, as if I didn’t know,”
 said an old woman in the circle.

“Organizing a union against
the capitalist oppressors,”
said the guy standing.

"We are the capitalist oppressors,"
said a guy in the circle.
Except we're not capitalists."

"And we're not oppresssors."
Said a wide-hipped, dark-haired
girl in the circle nursing a baby.

Everybody chuckled,
including the man standing.
He seemed quite pleased
with the way things were going.

The old woman spoke.  "Red Danny,
how many times have we had you here?"

“Six or eight.  I guess that means
I lost my Cool, huh?"

“Red Danny,”
said the old woman,
“we can’t just strip your status.
The Straights wouldn't have you,
and it would just increase
your standing among the Grunts.
We can't have them getting organized,
even for the best of reasons."

The people seated
looked around  Red Danny’s legs
at each other.  Then the old woman
nodded to the Angels.  

“Shallow grave?” one of them asked.

“Deep one.  We don’t want
bones circulating around.”

Red Danny drew himself
up to his full height, grinning widely.
“I clutch the red flag of martyrdom
in solidarity with. . . “

An Angel
shoved a needle in his neck
and he crumpled.

The Cools in the circle started to stand.
“I wonder what he was on,” said one.

“Don’t know,” said an Angel.
“You want us to do a tox?”

They shook their heads.

lotta good stuff here too, Rick, but the poli-sci discuss in middle flags, I think:

“But Marx said. . . .”
said the man in the center.

A seated woman
was nursing a baby.  She spoke:
“And you want a dictatorship
of the proletariat?  Look
at what happened in Russia and China!
Animals!  Beasts!  Give the workers
a hammer and they’ll hit you with it.”

“What we have in this country,”
said Flame Tattoo,
“is a democracy of consciousness.
The wise rule the merely smart,
and the smart rule the dumb.
Anyone who shows wisdom
can join the wise.  This is all
school stuff.  You know that!”

“No one can be wise
as long as any are in chains,”
said the center man, smiling
as if at a stupid child.

Made some cuts, Tom.  Better now?

yeah. Stalinist style shines thru more clearly, actually. Tom

10.  My Analyst Told Me

Late afternoon.
Still enough time
to pitch a decent camp
and build a fire.

But they’ll
know where you are.

Everybody knows where I am.
Now. 
Damn web.

So build a fake camp
and stay outside.

Too obvious.
They’d know.

So would you.
Maybe get a glimpse this time.

Nobody’s trying to kill me.

So you say.
Submitted for your review
is the following set
of terrifying memories.

Just incidents in a long life
lived on the road.

You may stop
trembling then.

Fuck you!

enjoyed....

for me, Rick, it's time for a more coherent larger narrative to be emerging in my head.

Thanks, Tom.  Comin' up tomorrow.

dear Rick

this journal is unwinding very nicely,
i keep coming back to sneak around
to see which flavors of ice cream sandwiches are being served.

though you might enjoy this one about God from Elizabeth Thomas.

silent lotus



Revelation

His T-shirt says, “I am God”.
I think - My lucky day!
I’ll run over,
shake his hand,
ask for an autograph.
I might never have this chance again.

But, as God sits there
waiting to step into
the Vice Principal’s office,
I look closely –
at his faded T-shirt
two sizes too big,
sneakers older than he is,
thin legs swinging
barely long enough to reach the floor,
dirty hands massaging a dirty forehead and think –
This is not God.
This is a little boy
who maybe swore in the lavatory
or tussled on the playground.
A child who probably forgot
to eat breakfast,
did not expect a good-bye kiss.
When he gets home from school today
he’ll let himself in
with the key
that hangs around his neck.
He might help himself to Twinkies
and a glass of Coke,
a micro-waved pizza in front of the TV.

Struggling to raise his head
the circles under his eyes
slope toward his chin,
pick up the lines around his mouth
and carry it down as well.
It’s not easy taking care of the world!

Using the back of his hand
he trails snot and tears across his face
into his hair,
which heads out in all directions
as if just lifted from a pillow.
He looks neglected
like homework after a long weekend.
This boy ain’t been loved in a long time.

I want to walk over
kneel on both knees,
use my sleeve to clean his cheeks,
tie his sneakers.

He looks up
and in his eyes
I see my own son.
Unable to look away,
I want to say something
make some excuse
beg for forgiveness.
But, this is God.
What could I possibly say
he does not already know?


Elizabeth Thomas


~

Powerful poem, SL!  Thanks!

11.  Slip Kid

Okay, so I gave in and made a trap.
Set up tent, stuck out my totem,
(grizzly bear skull on a stick),
built a fire, cooked some Spam,
tossed the joint they gave me
into the coals.

Footprints all over
as I gathered burnables
confused the tracks I made
to my stand about 75 yards off
on the lip of a wash
where I stashed my rifle,
one canteen and a box of shells.

I was starting to walk back
to the stand when she came out
from behind a juniper tree.

“Hi,” she said.  “Expecting company?”

Shit.
It was the Spider from the Angels.
She had real traveler’s gear,
complete with iron—
rifle and pistol both-- and what
looked like a flare gun.

“Been here long?” I said.

“Long enough.  Your fire base
is good for the dark,
but you’d be easy in daylight.”  
Her hair switched a little.

“You’re like a cat,” I said.
“You think with your tail.”

She laughed.  
“That’s what my Dad always said.”
She had a cop’s trick of changing the subject.
“Who’s after you, Ching Monkey?”

“Call me Bear.  And I don’t know.”

“How long?”

“About ten years.”

“That why you dropped off the web?”

“That’s it, Spider.”

“Spider’s my job.
Sneezeweed’s my name.”

“I know that plant.  Good for colds.”
I nodded at the backpack.
“You’re not here to pick flowers.”

“Angels go armed.
I’m here to do something we forgot.
All Cools have DNA on file now.
Prevents situations like the one today.”

I grinned.  “Sperm sample?”

She blushed.  “A few cells
from inside your cheek.”
She handed me a little package
with a vial and cotton swab.

I did the deed and handed her the vial.
“Now it won’t matter
how bad I get mauled.”

“Up to a point.  Bets are off
if you’re vaporized.”

The sun was flattening itself
against the mountains.
A dust devil walked past.
“. . .hhhhi” it said.
I nodded to be courteous.

She followed my nod
and raised a hand in greeting.

“So you talk to ‘em, too,”
I said.

“How could I not?
They’re such conversationalists.”

“All the news that’s fit to hiss.”

“It’ll be full dark soon.
Let’s do your stakeout.”

“Might as well.
You were gonna kill me,
I’d been dead gathering wood.”

She smiled,
“You wasted that joint.”

She settled in beside me
on the lip of the wash,
pulled out some night glasses
and we shared them.

Nothing happened
and nobody came.

Well, sort of.

enjoyed....

12.   Voodoo Child

“Your bear claw
tickled my nipples last night.”

“It likes you.  
Hear that helicopter?”

“Been coming awhile.
Old ears get dull,  Cool.”

“One of yours?”

“Oh yeah.  And I know
who’s on the stick.”

“Who?”

She said nothing as the sound
got louder.  
I reached for my rifle.  She
held my hand.

“You’ll probably want to,”
she said, “but you’re not
allowed.”

The thing was close enough now
to show the Angels’ winged A.
The one who got out was
black leather neck to toe,
with an old fashioned
biker cap on top of the hair.
Wind-whipped hair, I believe I called it.

“I bet she didn’t use
birth control last night,”
she said.

I looked at Sneezeweed.
That girl could blush.

“My name’s Theda.
after Theda Bara.
I wouldn’t have used b.c. either.
It’s a new program.
‘Keep Cool in the Pool.’
Any Angel gets knocked up
by a Super Cool like you
gets a raise in grade
and two years’ kiddy leave.”

“You fucking . . . .“ said Sneezeweed.
It was my turn to do the restraining.

“Watch this,”
I said, and walked up,
wrapping a surprised Theda
in my best hug.

“Ow!” she yelped.
“Your goddamn claw bit me!”

“Some things are simple,”
I said to Sneezeweed.

13.  Taking Care of Business



“Did you spend all night here?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“You’re supposed to go home.”

“They don’t want me.”

“Well, your ID
should be ready now.
It’ll be at the office.
Use the want ads,
rent yourself a room,
and charge it to your school account.
They’ll try to cheat you
because you’re a kid.
Don’t pay more than
two hundred a month.
Make sure you get wireless,
your own bathroom,
and kitchen privileges.

Then go to the school store
and buy three complete sets:
dress, casual, and sports.
They’ll give you
everything you need.
That will be charged. too.
Keep track of what you spend.

School supplies will be free.
Part of doing business.

Meet me in the caf at noon.
After lunch, we’ll test you
on the regs.  It’ll be three hours
with two essays.  Since
you were raised a Grunt,
the essays will just be
diagnostic.  Any questions?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“I’ll be in Marketing.
Don’t need me.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

14.   As I Was Awalkin’


“You came on foot,”
I said.

“Nine miles.  
Just two and a half hours.”

“Under a loaded pack.”

“Didn’t know
what I would find.”

“A paranoid old hippie.”

“Fifty isn’t old.”

I laughed.
“Desert’s pretty
this time of morning.”

“You’re not mad at me,”
she said, sounding surprised.

“Cause you want
to save my genes?
I’ve seen grizzlies mate.
The earth shakes for real.
Sex has its own rules.”

“They’re right
about your generation.
You really are different.”

“Don’t blame the Boomers.
Been on the run ten years.
That’ll change anybody.”

A lot of slience after that.
The girl could do silence.

still here, still reading enjoyably, still don't really have a big picture narratively, but do "thematically" - which is interesting.

Tom,

I don't think I know what you mean about no big picture narratively.  I've been intercutting several plot strands, and except for the short sections 11-13, put in as a joke (to be removed as soon as I have the time to re-number), every section can be read in chronological order following the one before and preceding the one after.  I'm not sure what else you're looking for.  

All the characters seem to be familiar with a lot the story and how its characters fit together that I'm not privy to: the contexts of the individuals, the groups. So at this point, I'm worried that my questions - is the boy in 4 one of the grownups in other sections? etc. - are proliferating quicker than understandings. Mind you, I'm not studying this text, just reading it. Information may be embedded it that I'm not noting. Tom

  Valid crit, my friend.  So far,with the next poem, the clock has run about 24 hours.  There will be flashbacks, but not yet.  Maybe the next one will start to tie up a plot strand for you.

15.  Seventh Inning Stretch


“They killed that little faggot.”

“What little faggot?
Place is crawling with ‘em.”

“Red Whatshisface,
guy who wanted us
in his union.”

“Who killed him?”

“The dope heads.
Whodaya think?”

“Naw.   He was one of them.
They don’t kill their own.”

“Nacho saw it.
They had him
in one of their circles.
Cop chopped him in the neck.”

“Shiiit.  They just knocked him out.
Catch and release.
He’s probly sucking some chickie's toes
in Frisco right now.”

"Eddie the Vig
said they came
and took a back hoe off the job.
Two hours later
they brought it back.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.  Little faggot was crazy
but he wanted to give us a hand.”

“They’ll never let us organize.”

“They already have.”

“The fuck!”

"Think about it.
Baseball, basketball, football,
little teams travel the region,
big teams travel the country.
Each team has leaders and followers,
plans and organization.
Fucking Cools encourage sports.
They think it wears us out.

Win or lose,
the Sun Dogs are leaving here
with 24 sticks of dynamite
we snitched from the road crews and the mine.
We're waving goodbye,
setting on a crate of assault rifles."

"Jesus Christ!
How long's this been going on?"

"Ten years, more or less."

"And nobody ever told me!"

"We were keeping it small.
Now it's getting so we'll need soldiers,
and you'd make a good squad leader.
You in?"

"Hell yeah!"

"OK, go over to the beer wagon.
Tell the girl you want
some more of that panther piss.
She'll pass your name around,
so everybody knows.

From now on, you never drink alone.
Only with me
or somebody I tell you is safe.

Hurry up.  They're getting eady to play."

I tried to keep the exposition light and implied because you seem not to like the civics lesson.  Many of the conflicts arise from the social structure of that world, just as they do in this one.  Bear with me (no pun intended).  I'll keep salting the story with connections.  I firmly believe eventually the picture will snap to grid.

I took poem 19 and made it more explicit.  I wanted to show some plot emerging.

16.  Sympathy for the Devil


We came into town on a state road
among the tall familiar signs
every town has:

Jack Shit Motors
“If You Don’t Know Jack, You Don’t Know Jack”

Izzy’s First Jewboy Bank
“Jesus Saves, But Moses Invests”

Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream
“Try Our Revolutionary Road”

We stopped at the Angel barracks
so Sneezeweed could check in.
I’d talked her into going back out
for another night in the desert.

I was sitting on the porch steps
when the two leaders came out
and sat on either side of me.

“Now what?” I said.
Big and Wide (whose name was Moby)
spoke first.

“Got a job for you, CM,”
he said in a voice that seemed
to come from down around his balls.
If the real Moby had a voice,
I imagine it would sound like that.

“Yeah, and you can’t refuse”
said Snake (called Ahab) in a sandy whisper.

I looked at Ahab.
“Listen, child.  I was there
when we wrote the code.
What is it that’s so reasonable
I can’t refuse?”

Moby reached around him
and gave him a little shove.
I never approved of the idea
of having two commanders
for every Angel base.
It bred shit like this all the time.

Ahab stood up, his hand
reaching for something.

“You two just cool it!”
I said.  “Now what’s the deal?
There’s a sweet young babe
wants my DNA, and that’s a request
I really can’t turn down.”

“Come and see,”
hissed Ahab, walking into the house.

A man my age--
jeans, work shirt, boots--
was sitting on the couch
surrounded by Angels.
His hands were chained
and so were his legs.

Theda gave me a finger wave,
“We got a priest, CM.
He’s an old one and needs
your gentle touch.”

“Won’t talk to us,”
one of the Angels said.

“Only light interrogation so far,”
said Ahab.  “No force, no drugs.
Waiting for you.”

Back in the dining room,
I could see Sneezeweed
hunched over a terminal.

“DNA sample,” I guessed.

“Two of ‘em,”
said an Angel.
“One from his cheek,
one from his dick.
Gotta watch them boy-fuckers.”

“What’s  your name?”
I said to the priest.

“Isaac Jogues.”

“That’s your first lie, Father.
Try again.”

“It’s the name the Pope gave me.
My earlier one doesn’t count.”

“Watch out for this one,” I said
to the room at large.  “Isaac Jogues
was a missionary killed by Indians up north.  
Means our boy here wants to die.
Keep him away from sharp objects.
All baptismal certificates in crayon.”
Everybody laughed but the priest.

“Where you from originally, Isaac?”
I said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Where were you in the Rev?”

“Under fire.”

“Weren’t we all.  How come
you’re talking to me, and not them?”
I nodded around the room.

“I never bother with the imps.
It’s the big devil I’m looking for.”

I’d been getting slowly pissed off
since I got there.  I finally let myself boil.

“Well you found him, Pilgrim.
I’m the dude who started the Flaming Nun Races.”

He looked me in the eye.
I looked him right back.  Fuck you, Father.

“Flaming nun races?” said the Angels around us.
Giggles, looks of puzzlement.
Clearly not a lesson they learned at school.

Still looking in my eyes--
or letting me look in his--
the priest said, “Sick shit, man.
Like I did in the Nam.”

“No wonder you wanna die,”
I said.

“How about you?” he said.

The Angels were chattering among themselves.
I broke the contact, relieved to have an excuse.
This was new stuff about an old story,
and they were getting it from
one who was there.

I looked around.
“I’ll tell Sneezeweed, and she
can tell you.  Meantime,
if this guy’s all right. . . “

A little pinging sound.
“Just in,”  said Sneezeweed.
He’s clean.

“. . . since this guy’s all right,
put a tracker on his leg
and wire on a block of C4.
If he goes out of transmitter range,
it blows his leg off.”

More chatter.
They hadn’t expected this.

“No, we’re not putting him in a copter
and dropping him over Mexico.
Some people here have been Catholic
longer than there was a USA.
They need their priest,
and this one seems OK.”

I turned to the priest.
I don’t think he had shifted his stare.
it was right there,
and I hooked on like some kind
of navigation beam.

“When your work is done around here,
Isaac, come back to the barracks.
I plan to be long gone.
The boys will be able to figure out
what to do with you after that.
Come on, Sneeze, let’s go.”

I turned around and walked out.

still enjoying, Rick. the dislocation is part of the appeal. re plot - here's what clear to me: everyone going around challenging everyone else's bona fides. what else? is our N trying to accomplish something, as in a protagonist? is there some overarching conflict within him? in the society around him? Tom

17.  Smoke on the Water


“So tell me about the nun races,”
she said later, as we sat staring at the campfire.

“The cops’ biggest mistake in the Revolution
 was making light of us college kids,” I said.
“Cops in those days got their training
from the military and a couple of years
at the academy.  They were good
at following orders, and they fought
like lions, but they didn’t think.”

“And we did?”

“At the beginning, that’s all we did.
And that was one of the reasons
the cops discounted us.
Talk, talk, talk.  Revolution this.
Revolution that.  But we also played.
And playfulness in an enemy can be deadly.”

She looked at me.  I knew she wasn’t getting it.

“Look,” I said, “If you knew
what old-time military training was like,
you’d see how much play
we built into yours.
We teach you to think, plan, improvise,
all with bullets in the air and your buddies down.”

“Okay. . .” she said.

“In my own case, we were Chem. E. students.
Chemical Engineering.  Three of us, all Juniors:
O Wow, Amish Andy, and me.”

“You know O Wow!?  He’s. . . .”

“Archangel for the Middle Third.  
I avoid him because he’d put me to work.
Like most Chem majors at the time,
we three had a fascination with booms and flames.
For example, there’s a little paste you can spread wet
under a toilet seat, and when it dries,
pressure sets it off, so the next guy or girl
in for a quiet dump ends up
hanging onto the light fixture on the ceiling,
not because of any force, but because the bang
has ‘em jump that high.”

She giggled.

“Tell me you never played tricks like that,”
I said.

“Not that one.  But yeah.  We do that stuff.
You’ll have to give me the formula.”

“You wanna plaster Theda to the ceiling?”

She giggled.

“Anyway, kids were dying at Kent and Jackson State.
We were working on a compound
that would blow out stereo speakers
whey you played Credence but not Janis Joplin,
when one of the Weathermen
came into the lab asking for advice.
We tore his bomb designs apart
and sent him away happy.
The Quad Squad, they called us,
and soon we were making and planting booms
all over Cleveland, which is where our college was.

One of our side activities was education reform.
Ow Wow and I had been raised Catholic,
terrified by nuns in different schools.
So we went into schools around the Diocese of Cleveland
and asked the kids who the meanest nuns were.
We put ‘em in a truck and hauled ‘em
to a football field.  We dosed ‘em with a
cute little liquid that burns at 72 Farenheit—
flames and all, but you can hold your hand over it
and feel nothing.  We told the nuns
they were going to be martyrs for The Faith,
but they could save lives if they raced
each other to the goal line on the other side.
The first one to make it,
we would spare all her sisters at that school.
The other ones. . .“  I made the finger-across-
the-throat sign.

“The poor old women were so scared,
they ran the hundred yards
without noticing they weren’t burning.
O Wow and I couldn’t stand up.”

“So it was just a big joke?
Nobody got hurt?”

“Not then.  O Wow and I had other work,
and somebody else took over.
They expanded the program to include
betting and public school teachers,
and they didn’t know how
to make our cute little compound,
so they used lighter fluid and gas.”

“Jeeze.”

“And that’s why you never heard of
the Flaming Nun Races.”

enjoyed...!

Not everyone.  It's the Angels' job to maintain order in a society with a three-tier caste system:  Cools, Straights, and Grunts.  Since I axed the exposition from the execution scene in the part 9, the reader must absorb it atmospherically.  The Angels (the police force) are particularly nervous because, being on the southern border, there's a chance of infiltration from the Catholic Church (Father Jogues) and from the losers of the revolution, the Government in Exile (poem 5).  They want to make sure the N. (Ching Monkey) is not an eggie in disguise.

Deb is not checking George's bona fides.  She's giving him an entrance test into the Straight school.  The Boss Grunt (not named-- in "Seventh Inning Stretch") is recruiting talent for an insurgency. [/quote]


He's trying to stay alive.  He thinks someone has been stalking him for the last 10 years.  That's why he dropped off the grid and they couldn't find him in the web.  See poem 10 and following.

   

He's trying to stay alive.  Is he really being stalked, or is he paranoid? We don't know yet.  He could be both.  The poem called "Smoke on the Water" gives a sense of why he may be feeling guilty about past actions, and thus why he may be concocting the whole thing.  But "Seventh Inning Stretch" indicates that the Grunts are arming to overthrow the system, which would, I assume, include the Cools at the top.  So maybe somebody is stalking him, since he's an old-time Super Cool from the Revolution.


See above.  Things are getting ready to blow, and people are feeling it in their bones.  Looking at the two schools, you can see that the Cools and Straights have very different cultural trajectories.  I haven't even gotten into the economics yet, or the politics, though you did see a capital trial take place in the park.  Cools killing a Cool for trying to unionize the Grunts.  Maybe this will be more clear if the poems are read straight through, not two a day as they were composed.  Thanks for sticking with them.

Rick

loving this! i'm glued to my screen.  i noticed that the further the poem progresses the more the perameters (really hope i'm using that right) are stretching out to the right (ex: the line 'so we went... of cleveland' is much longer).  going out on a limb here, but is that a bit of symbolism like 'the plot is thickening'?  
quick question, you mentioned earlier that you were going to remove some of the pieces and then renumber them.  not sure if you have already, but could you please update when and if you do?
love the humor and witty dialogue.  the earlier school poems take me back to James Clavell's 'The Childrens Story'.  lots of fun here.  can't wait for more.  
thx!

  Thanks, Matt.  The poem seems to be wanting longer lines, but that might just be that I'm finally finding the rhythm in the story, as Maya Angelou says.  I may end up going back and shortening later lines, lengthening earlier lines, or both.  Right now, the thing is very bendy, and I'll let it find its own voice, if I can. 

The pieces are removed and the whole thing renumbered.  I will probably have to do that several times more before the story is done. (No, I don't know how it's going to turn out, though I have flashes of future scenes.)

I'm honored to be compared with Clavell.  Dude can write.

Thanks,

Rick

Brown Shoes Don’t Make It



Later on, I said,
“Do you know  the hardest thing
about mass murder?”

She said nothing,
but her eyes were on mine.

“Corpse disposal.
Ditch graves ferment.
Bodies deep-sixed wash up on shore.
Recycling gets you
soap, lampshades, and rugs,
but you have to have a phenomenal
organization behind you,
and besides, the whole thing
probably cost Hitler the war.

Didn’t have that problem in Cleveland
because of the steel.”

“You melted them into steel?”

“Too much work, and we didn’t really
know how to run things there.
No, we used the pickling beds,
big clay-lined pits full of acid
they used to clean the scale
off the steel they were going to work.
The big fat cops we threw in were polish dills.  
The little kids caught in crossfire
we called them gherkins.”

She walked outside the firelight
and threw up.

I figured she’d never talk to me again,
but she came back looking defiant.

“Okay, what’s the easiest
thing about mass murder?”

"Picking your targets.  You might have
heard about The Cleveland White Socks
in school.  The books say they were
paramilitary, something like the Klan.
Really, they were just a bunch of guys
whose parents were from Eastern Europe,
and they liked to wear white socks.
They could have been the Cleveland Bowling Bags,
but they wore the socks more often.

Baseball games, football games,
we stationed snipers and went for the flashes of white.
Once we even got a bunch coming out of
a studio where they’d been the audience for
'Frankie Yankovic’s Polka Varieties.'”

“Were you part of that?”

“A Cool cannot refuse a reasonable request,
especially from another Cool in time of trouble.
Gee, do you think
it might have been a time of trouble?"

She clutched her stomach
but didn’t throw up again.

can't wait to see how it ends, but at the same time don't want it to.  really hope these postings are just the beginning and this turns into a much bigger project for you.  one lil thing, the line 'off steel they were gonna work' made me pause a second.  maybe throw a 'the' in front of 'steel' just for smoother flow?  hehe, feels odd suggesting a change to you.  keep 'em coming!

nice having Zappa in here....

  Thanks.  Modification done per your suggestion plus some other stuff.

  He's in it up to his shaggy eyebrows, Tom.

and I'm reading with the Airplane's "Volunteers" as soundtrack, along with Blows Against the Empire

Let it Be


I came back to camp
with the sunrise at my back so I could see.
She was making breakfast.

“Did you finally give up trying to die?”
she asked.

“I was hunting a cougar,
the one that circled our camp
over and over last night.”

“With your bowie knife.
Ever thought about that thirty-thirty you carry?”

“Rifle’s no good in the dark.”

“Tell that to my instructors.”

“I’m tired of running.
I wanted to give it a shot at me.”

”She didn’t want a thing to do with you.
Twice she let you walk right by.
She was just attracted by the smell of dinner.”

“How do you know it was female?”

“Nursing mother.
I saw her dugs hanging down.”

“You were out there?”

“The whole time.  With your rifle.
Guess  I have something
to teach you after all.”

“I’m sorry about last night.  The stories.”

“You did what you did for us.
No war in two generations.
When’s the last time that happened?
It was a bad system and you killed it.
We’re all grateful.”

“Not the Grunts.  I’ve seen Grunt cooks
spit in the food at Cool places.”

“Then maybe you didn’t
kill enough.”

lol, that's how I wrote a couple of 'em

Thanks, SL. Complicity is rich territory for philosopher and writer alike.

Teach Your Children


"Where we going?"

"Use complete sentences, Georgie."

"Yes, Ma'am.
Where are we going?"

"We are going to the storm door factory
so your class can watch the
actual practice of the
management techniques
we have been studying.

"Students, collect your safety gear.
Hard hats, white coats, rawhide gloves,
goggles, shin guards,
steel-toed work boots.
Sign for them here.
Put them on in the bus.
No one leaves the bus
without proper attire.  And Georgie?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Your father works there."

"I know, Ma'am."

"Try not to make a scene."

"Why should I?
I hate him."

"That's what I mean."

 

cool, cool!

Put Away That DDT Now


“Truk, you go with him,” said Ahab.  
A slab of wall detached itself and became
a six-eight, four-hundred-pound Angel.

Half Black, half Islander, all gay,
Truk starred in the bad dreams
of several different kinds of folks.
He was the enforcement wing
of the Angels’ environmental protection effort.

I was – at the moment, anyhow—
its administration.  Some Cool kids
had found toxic gunk in a wash
and traced it back to the storm door factory.
Truk and I were sent to effect a correction.

“I’m going with him,” said Sneezeweed.
We’d just gotten in from the desert.

“Not this time,” said Moby.
“The webwork is piling up, and Truk
will protect him.”

“I promise to keep the girlies away,”
said Truk in a high, thin voice, and then giggled.
That was the scariest giggle I’d ever heard.

The secretary at the factory
 told us to wait
while she called the manager,
and I said we’d wait a minute.
The clock on the wall obliged me
and in sixty seconds I had Truk
kick in the door behind her desk.

“Which way?” said Truk,
as we looked down a long hall
with doors on either side.
Heads popped out of offices
then popped back in.
Doors slammed and locked.

“Corner office, probably,”
I said.  'Let’s try this way.'

Got it on the first try.
“You the boss?” I asked the guy in
the fine looking suit
behind the fine looking desk.

“I’m Chief of Operations,”
he said, not hiding his distaste.
If I could smell his cologne,
I’m sure he could smell my funk.
Our scents fought in the air.

“You’re dumping shit you should be
incinerating.  Sealant showed up
where it shouldn’t.”

“We never dump sealant.”

“Maybe one of your foremen
got behind schedule.”

“Show me your proof.”

I turned to Truk.

“Truk, what do you think of the décor?”
Truk turned in a slow circle.

“It’s the least bit jejune,” he said.  

“’Go to it, Oh jazz man,” I said quoting Sandburg,
and Truk was poetry in motion
with that logging chain he carried.

The Chief of Operations turned red
then purple.
He stood, clutching the edge of his desk.
“You can’t. . . .”  he said.

Truk was good with that chain.
No shards of glass, wood or metal
came anywhere near us.

“Less jejune?” I asked when he stopped.

“Somewhat,” said Truk
whose breathing had quickened
just the slightest amount.

Someone must have called Security,
because several  guys in grey
stood outside the door.
I made eye contact
and the lead guy held up his hands.

I cocked an eyebrow at the Chief,
but he just glared.

“Nice suit,” I said.
“Truk, don’t you like his suit?”

“Yes,” breathed Truk,
“but it’s the smallest bit jejune.”

The Chief went white.
“All right,” he said.
“We’ll clean it up.”

“I’ll send the kids out tomorrow,”
I said.

“TOMORROW?!”
he almost turned red again.

“Looks like you’ll
be paying overtime,” I said.

The grey guys parted gently
as we left.

This reminds me graphic novels, you do it with words.

I've always thought of poetic narratives as line drawings.

Thanks for sticking with this, Tom.  I know it was trying your patiencee at one point.

You're welcome, Rick, but no, never tried my patience. I don't have patience. I was just trying to let you know what I was hoping for, when. Tom

Gimme Shelter


I was standing in the parking lot
of the storm door factory
sharing a victory joint with Truk
when a school bus pulled up
and a bunch of little spacemen
poured out.

“No other way to describe them,”
said Truk when I mentioned it.

Yellow hard hats, white lab coats,
goggles, gloves, big high-topped shoes,
they milled around the front of the bus
while their teacher, similarly garbed,
descended the steps.

They started to line up by twos
when one broke from the pack
and beat feet in our direction.
He went airborne the last yard
and latched himself onto Truk’s leg.
“Help me!  Help me!  They’re insane!”
he wailed.

“Goes without saying, little dude,”
said Truk, gently peeling the boy off.
I squatted and removed his helmet and goggles.
Shiny dark eyes burned back at me.
“You want saved from those people?” I said.
He nodded.

Shit.

“Listen, Bear,” said Truk, “raising cubs
ain’t my cup of meat. I'm more
the fairy godfather type.“

By then the head space-teacher
had reached us and was grabbing the kid
with a long-nailed hand.

I narrowed my eyes, bared my teeth, and growled.

Seemed like the quickest form of communication.

She stepped back.

“See this?” I said, taking my bear claw
out of my shirt and showing it to her.
“The little guy has invoked the rule of Cool
and is now under the protection of Bear Clan,
for which I speak.”

She took off her helmet and goggles.
“But. . . “

“Sorry, Lady,” said Truk.
“I know you got a lotta paperwork to fill out now,
but this deal has gone down.
You know Cools can’t refuse to help,
and the kid here, he picked a Cool
who happens also to be a Bear.
We all know about bears and cubs.”

“Fine!” she said, throwing her helmet down.
“Keep him!  It’s obvious he was planning
to do just what he did.  He’s a jumped-up little Grunt
with delusions of grandeur, no loyalty to anybody,
and the ability to bide his time.
If I were you, I’d give him to the Snake clan,
because that’s what he is!”

As she stomped off, I said to the boy, “You OK
with being a Bear?  Cause that’s how you’ll
be raised until you’re old enough to choose.”

“It’s alright,” he said, “But I’m a Dragon.”

“There's no Dragon clan.”

“Then I’m the first.”

good read!
missing an "s" at "As he stomped off" a few lines from the end?

Enjoying, Rick, and maybe the more so as I also see 'Grunt' as a fish, because of the species so named and which I'm afraid I slaughtered many to feed my face.

Cheers

milner

Milner, thanks for the info.  "Grunt" is a term American combat soldiers applied to themselves in Viet Nam.  Today, dirty,  dangerous, low-paying, repetitive work is sometimes called "grunt work."

just keeps getting better with each post.  a truly great story.

Very tasty meat here, Rick.  On the whole I think it holds together well in poetic form but are instances
where I can feel it straining to derail and enjoy steaming in the added liberty that prose would allow.

Thanks, Matt.  Peter, you're right-- the thing went through two incarnations as a  novel before this.  I hope that some of the straining is just plot tension, though -- or the reader's desire to figure out what the hell is going on.

We Can Work it Out



"Listen, little dude. . . ."

"Call me Dragon."

"How old are you?"

"Eight and a half."

"That's probably in centuries.
What name were you born with?"

"George Hector Mondragon.
A priest gave me another name, too,
but I forgot it.  I can tell you
where the priest is,
if you wanna bust him."

"Later.  Right now you're going to school."

"I just broke out of school."

"This is a different one.
You can't break out of it,
because anything you do
is what they want you to do.
If you run away,
that's a field trip.
Hell, you'll probably
be in charge of the place
by the time I pick you up."

"Cool."

"Here.  Wear my claw.
It identifies you as Bear
to anyone who needs to know."

"It's hot."

"That's 'cause you're fighting it.
You wanna be Cool,
you gotta learn to roll with things.
It's time to accept protection
and just be a kid.  Let the claw
do its job."

"Okay.  It's cooling down.
It'll do til I find
a dragon claw."

"You keep looking.
I gotta be alone and think.
Truk will take you to the school.
I'll meet you there
before sundown.

I like this relationship.

Straining was the wrong word.  On first reading the sections with just dialogue, I think I was subconsciously wanting that verbosity of prose, not just the "...", he said, stroking his moustache -type elements but that volubility of the un-central-to-the-narrative irrelevancies, the sun glinted through the clouds -type things but I realise I was subconsciously trying to read it as prose.  I'm liking how you're, rather than stripping down the wider narrative, are intensifying its essence; and on re-reading it's growing on me the way the dialogue-only sections mesh with the mixed sections.

P.S.  Just ignore some of the above :-)  I think I derailed onto a personal appraisal of narrative poetry in general rather than particular, and was substantiating more my initial comment, which I've changed my mind about, than the job at hand because there are, in fact, wonderful un-central-to-the-narrative observations in the poems.

Just re-read 1. Meet the New Boss - that is an absolutely superb opener.

Blowin’ in the Wind


Out in the desert I found a nice flat boulder—
no other critters on or under it—
got cross-legged and started to breathe.
Anybody in the USC who doesn’t know
the different kinds of breath ing
just isn’t paying attention.

It was warm but not bad on that rock.

Soon I attracted a dust devil.

hhhhi
 said the being.

“Hi, yourself,” I said back.

hhhheavy
it said.

“Yeah, heavy,” I said back.
I had no idea
what it was talking about
or why it was talking to me.
“The spiral people just like you,”
said my teacher Mad Marie one time.
This would be fine
if some of them weren’t really big.
I’ve seen more than my share
of hurricanes and tornadoes.
One of the reasons
I liked the Southwest—
spiral people stayed under
a thousand feet tall.

This one stood only a couple of yards
and was mostly transparent.
I felt more than saw it.

hhhhector
it said.

“He wants to be called Dragon.”

hhhhuricane

“I suspected as much.
Any pointers, my friend?”

hhhhide

“Too late.”

hhhhang on.
Then it danced away.

I’m Ching Monkey
because I was into the I Ching
when I was named.
I don’t throw the Ching anymore.
Don’t need to.

Seems like everybody
and his spiral
is out to give me advice.

funny ending, good read....

What a great soundtrack you're assembling here too Rick. you could conceivably put together an online book that plays the songs while the reader reads the chapters.

Just today, I was reading college freshman draft essays about poet Adele Kenny while listening to my music on earphones, and wow, two of them had me in tears.

Tom

Co-inky-dink.  I was reading essays to music today, too.  Not all tunes helped, though.  Interesting how tune-specific it all is.  I'm typing this to Steve Miller, frinstance.  "Fly Like an Eagle" seems to work.  I like the idea of a sound track, and that's partly why I'm alluding to (or as we say now, referencing) songs.  I want them to be a ghost-track behind the poems.  Not original.  TS Eliot did it first:

O O O O  that Shakespeherian Rag —
It's so elegant
So intelligent

Foxy Lady



“My name’s Dharma.
What’s yours?”

“Dragon.”

“Cool.  Where you from?”

“Gruntside.
I got ‘em to send me
to the Academy.
I just left there.”

“I didn’t know
they let kids out.”

“They had to.
I got a Cool to sponsor me.”

“Wow!  Who?”

“Don’t know his name.
He looks kinda like a grizzly.
He’ll be coming by later.

“That why you have the claw?”

“Yeah.  For now.”

“Wanna play jump rope?
Me and Thalassa need a third.”

“Jump rope’s for girls.”

“Uncle Thunder—that’s our sensei—
says jumprope’s almost as good
as the katas.”

“What’s a sensei?”

“You really are new.
It’s a master.  Uncle Thunder
teaches bing-fa, the arts of war.”

“You’re a warrior?”

“I want to be in Badger clan.
I have to be.  Badgers fight.”

“Shit.”

“Ok.  Try to knock me down.”

“Oof.  Ow.”

“That lady over there is Yellow.
She’s our teacher.
She’ll wrap up your ankle.
Hi, Thalassa!”

“He’s cute!
What’s his name, Dharma?”

“Dragon.”

“I hope you didn’t
break anything.”

“No.  It’s just a sprain.”

“Do you think
he’ll play jumprope
after what you did?”

“Once he can stand again.
He started out as a Grunt.
They’re tough.”

Peter, the whole narrative thing in poetry is something we're re-figuring-out.  It dropped out and got rolled flat by the lyric, and it's been waiting to be rediscovered for the last three generations.  We're all feeling our way.

Rick

Break on Through


The kid was a star at the Angel barracks.
They stopped calling him Little Dude
twenty seconds after he hit the doorway.

He wanted to see everything—
dorm, kitchen, motor pool, gym,
hospital, library, armory,
command center, munitions,
antennas, backup generators,
perimeter defenses, firing range.

He shot a pistol, an assault rifle,
set off a Claymore, fired an RPG.
He sent a message to Sanfran,
got a reply from the Archangel herself.

“Hope to God he’s not a spy,”
said Sneezeweed as we watched
his procession around the place.

“Probably worse than that,”
I told Sneezeweed.
“Nothing like a convert
for being a fanatic.”

They had a banquet in his honor.
Barbecue, beer, booze (he didn’t want any)
and all the fixings.  Everybody
made their specialty, and
we were all on the floor
with our belts undone
as the Stones vibrated the walls.

I slept where I fell.
“Just like the Rev,”
I said to Sneezer before I conked out.

good, good...

Another Brick in the Wall


So I became a dad.
I’m a father several times over,
but never got along all that well
with the chicks in question—
not at close quarters, for days on end.
No harm, no foul, I’m just a loner.

But so was Dragon.
About as much a loner as you can get,
not even a social class,
just the one he didn’t belong to yet,
except through me.

I even got a job.
Foot patrol for the Angels.
“Need someone to keep things cool
on the ground.  Mounted patrols
got a lot to cover out here,” Ahab told me.

So I wandered around
 in my fashion.  It being summer, I
napped in the people’s park a lot,
and sometimes sat jury duty.

But I did make sure to go into
every store and public place
at least once a week.
You can’t keep a Cool out of anywhere—
I could have entered a bedroom during sex—
but I was polite, and besides,
I’m not kinky that way.

The Krishnas fed me curry.

The white Baptist preacher tried to save my soul.
(I never figured out how you could be Cool and white
and a Baptist, but some folks make it work.
Black Baptists were cool by definition.)

White Rabbit and I talked about
magick and ritual objects.  She
coveted my grizzly skull,
but I said no way.  That thing did guard duty
when I slept.

Jerome the Gnome brought out
his phenomenal array of constumes.
I fell in love with a World War I
German oficer's rig complete
with spiked helmet, and if he'd had
the right size, I'd have got it for Dragon.

The folks at the Academy and the Opportunity School
answered my questions as briefly as they could.
No refreshments, no small talk.
I was the Man and they wanted me gone,
same way we treated the rent-a-cops on campus.

At the Rat’s Ass I drank beer out of the bottle.
Didn't want some Grunt
dropping a loogie in my brew.
I knew how to talk sports
but I wasn’t fooling anybody
or really trying to.  

So I’m walking through this alley
and I came on an old man
faced by two kids with knives.
Before I could even shift my weight,
the old man flew into blur-whirl-whack-slam
and the two delinquents were ass-down
and six feet from their weapons.

He turned around and smiled at me,
“Thanks, Marshal, for having my back,”
he said.

Turns out this was Uncle Thunder,
the bing-fa master, and the kids were
from the Cool school.  “Most violence
happens not in the dojo but on the street,
not so?” said the old man, as he
helped the kids up.  He turned to the boys,
“Now go and write down what happened,
then analyze the interaction to produce victory
for your side.  I will give you a hint.
Your number worked against you.”

The sensei and I retired to No-Shit Bobby’s
for his famous chili.  

“Word has it you believe
someone is stalking you,” said the old man.

“Word gets around.”

“Is it true?”

“I don’t know.”

“Consider the tao.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe you have made yourself vulnerable
by standing in opposition to the tao.”

“You mean the whole fucking world
is out to get me?”

“Or maybe just a part of it.”

“But why?”

“That’s the question.”

The chili still tasted good,
but it tasted stranger after that.

enjoyed, Rick..

Thanks.  I tightened a few strings.  Not sure where to go from here.

look for the conflict? moral conflict in your main character?

`

The Baptist preacher tried to save my soul.
(I never figured out how you could be Cool
and a Baptist, but some folks make it work.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Live at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, los Angeles, January 13, 1972

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg5PZtSTTN4

Another Little Piece of my Heart


She liked how we imploded that cop shop,
not a blue left alive.

Her name was Demolitia,
and she wanted to ride with us.
Amish Andy, Oh Wow, and me.
Actually, she wanted to ride with me.

“You need a fourth for the Quad Squad,”
she said.  Looked like Grace Slick
on Surrealistic Pillow, some said.
I said she looked better.

Long, black hair, thick lashes,
ice-blue eyes like a wolf’s howl in the snow.
Amish Andy hated me from that day.
Oh Wow kept his distance.

But she wasn’t a chemist.
Never kept her glassware clean.
Thought we were old women
working with mechanical arms
behind six inches of plexi.

There were good hospitals in Cleveland then,
and the docs—the young ones, at least—
were on our side.

“Am I still beautiful?”
she asked me after the last surgery.

“More beautiful,” I said,
keeping my voice even.

“Prove it.”

She kept her eyes open the whole time,
those skillfully made glass eyes.

You remember how the Cuyahoga River
caught fire.  That was Amish Andy,
lighting himself and jumping in.

Yikes! Intense Rick.

Ah yes, my kind of gal too!

Hello Darkness, my Old Friend


“What are you doing under
an overpass?”

“Hearing confessions.  You next?”

“I thought they’d have you squirreled away
in some cozy house somewhere.”

“Not with this.”

“Ankle tracker?  I didn’t order that.”

“I bet you didn’t tell ‘em not to.”

“Hadn’t thought of it.”

“You call us boy-fuckers.
Ever think that maybe
it didn’t occur to the Pope to say,
“Now don’t go humping little children?
It does now, though.”

“Not funny, Father.”

“Isn’t this supposed to be
the country with an official
sense of humor?”

“There wouldn’t have been
a Rev at all if Cardinal Spellman
hadn’t got poor old JFK
into Viet Nam.”

“You don’t expect me to
defend Piggy Spellman, do you?
Man ate too well.  Clogged his brain.”

“And so here you are
with your little fire and your book of answers,
waiting for some poor fucker
to sneak up and tell you how he hits
his wife.”

“And here you are
wandering out by the highway
because your conscience
won’t let you sleep.”

“How can you serve that bunch
of eunuchs back in their palaces?”

“I don’t.  That’s why I’m here.
And how do you like
serving a bunch of bad-smelling
smug jerks whose idea of worship
is to get stoned and fuck outdoors?”

“I don’t.  That’s why I’m here.”

“Folks in town say you’re marked.
Someone’s trying to kill you.
Or at least that’s what you think.”

“Jesus.  And they wonder
why I stay off the web.”

“I think you’re setting yourself up
because of your minor place
in the history of all the shit
that got done back then.
Like walking out here alone
where any joe with a rifle
could pot you from the highway.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Does guilt ring a bell?”

“Oh yeah.  And you just happen
to be in the forgiveness biz.”

“It wouldn’t work on you.
You don’t believe.”

“Hell if I don’t.
I believe in Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Odin,
Jupiter, Athena, Tim Leary, Apsu, Momo, Ti’amat
and Tom Waits.

“You don’t believe in forgiveness.”

“How can I?
I was the Avenging Angel, remember?
Lotta Polish boys missed out on
a lotta Carling Black Label
because of me.
Anyway, there’s probably
three of your flock hiding
behind every juniper bush waiting
for me to shove off so they
can grovel their way back to
Mea Culpaville.”

“At least don’t walk the ridge line.
I could see you coming
against the lights of town.”

last two S really nice..

I've Come to Talk With You Again


"Two nights in a row.
People will start to talk."

"So how does this forgiveness thing work?"

"It's from Old English meaning
to give up completely.
They used to use the term
in marriage contracts.
You just give up, give away,
give in.  The matter no longer matters.
Like a husband giving up other women
and a wife giving up other men.
It's off the table."

"How can I say
those cops I brought the walls down on
don't matter?"

"You think it matters to them
who brought the walls down?
You think with all eternity
to be concerned about,
they even remember how they got there?"

"I've been shot, shot at,
chased across an open field by a truck,
almost dropped in a river by a drawbridge,
stabbed once and poisoned once.
Yeah, it matters."

"But does it matter who did those things,
Biff Dombrowsky--or his dog Fido?"

"Only to keep it from happening again."

"See.  You've already forgiven
Biff Dombrowski or his dog,
whichever it was.  You still hate
that folks have tried to kill you,
but it's a start.  So how do you feel?"

"Better.  A little better.  It's weird."

"Weird comes from an Old English word
meaning fate, which in my book
is another way of saying the will of God.
God wants us to forgive."

"I knew you'd drag in God somehow."

"Hard to keep Him out."

This one came out really well, Rick, though my credulity was strained where he says forgiving a hypothetical guy or dog made him feel better. Tom

good ending there, Rick.
excellent perspective.

tiko

It's the thinnest edge of the wedge, Tom, and you have a right to be skeptical.  The priest is showing Bear that some aspect of his situation -- the particular identity of the one who went after him on those various occasions -- doesn't matter.  This drops the emotional charge a noticeable amount.  There's less that Bear now has to do to make the situation right.  He doesn't have to identify every assailant or connect them.  He just has to prevent the next attack, or at least not bring it on.  I don't think any official godman would call that forgiveness.  It's the priest's own definition.  He wants to get some movement in our hero's mental state.  More like foxhole therapy than textbook religion.

Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things


"Listen, Georgie. . . . ."

"It's Dragon."

"Call yourself what you want,
you're still just a hardhat.
A burpfart.  A laborer."

"I was always cool.
Look."

"What are you doing?
You're crazy!
That's a fucking scorpion!

"And now it's in my hand.
Hold out your hand."

"No!  It'll bite me!"

"Not if you're cool.  Here."

"Momm-EEEEE!"

"Pretty sad.
Thanks, little fella.
You can go home now."

"

Like how this episode interacts with the title song, Rick.

S3 sounds like Dragon's conversation-mate is his superior, later in poem sounds like they're on the same level. Am I imagining that?

made me smile!

Stella

  Dragon's conversation-mate thought he was D's superior, for sure.  Schooled in the talk, anyway, but not in the actual doing of cool.  Dragon is risking his life.  Scorpions can kill children.  Both kids know that.  I can imagine the evil grin on D's face when he proffers the bug.

Thanks, Stella!

Where It's At


"We will talk about yesterday."

"The thing with the scorpion, Uncle Thunder?"

"Yes, Dharma.
First, Sungold, you were uncool
to put down Georgie."

"I'm sorry, Uncle Thunder."

"And since you were already being uncool,
it was easy to become more so
and run from the scorpion.  And Georgie . . ."

"It's Dragon."

"Georgie, the most important thing
about our names is that they are given to us
by someone else.  Our first name is used by our parents
to symbolize their hopes for us,
and our acid name is given by our leary
who uses it as a signpost to point our way.
Do you think I would choose Uncle Thunder?
It sounds like a man who farts."

"But I'm a dragon."

"And you would be a dragon
if your name was Mouse.
Sometimes the tension
between who we are and what we are called
provides the energy for our life.
Scaring Sungold with that bug
was not a thing a dragon would do."

"But I. . . ."

"Cool is behaving well
when you lack knowledge or control.
The first time a scorpion walked on your hand,
that was cool because
you didn't know what it would do.
When you learned, and this no longer was
an act of cool.

"Children, most of the time
life is beyond our knowledge or control.
The cool are those who understand this
and learn to use it.  

They think we are lazy,
but we are watchful.
They think we are ignorant,
But we are open.
They think we have no ambition,
but our ambition is the greatest of all --
to live at one with the Mystery.

Now go and play."

Like this especially, Rick: ""Cool is behaving well
when you lack knowledge or control." Enjoyed all. Tom

Teach Your Children


"Is Bear your whole name?"

"No, it's Ching Monkey Sleeps With Bear"

"Weird."

"Yep.  Like my life."

"How'd you get it?"

"Ching Monkey came out of my acid test.
I was sixteen and in love with the I Ching,
crawling through the golden lines of a hexagram,
and that's what my leary called me
when I told him."

"What's a hexagram?"

"Six parallel lines, some solid, some broken.
They form a picture of reality.
I'll show you
when be get back to the barracks."

"That's all right.
How'd you get the Bear part?"

"Hurricane in the Smoky Mountains.
Shared a cave with a sow bear.
Her cubs were caught in swaying trees.
She couldn't leave 'em, couldn't help 'em.
It seemed like the human condition,
so I tossed her some crackers
and she followed me into the cave.

"We slept in opposite corners,
but the Bear sage I met at a party
was convinced we swapped souls awhile
and some of hers stuck.
She was a leary too, the sage was,
and re-named me on the spot,
a bunch of other Bears
pouring beer on my head.  
Made me a member of the clan.

"Oh.  
Am I stuck with Georgie?"

"Until your acid test.
You can call yourself Dragon,
but folks think it's bad luck
pushing the river that way."

"OK. I'm Georgie.
Look what I found."

"It's a fossil claw.
Some kind of dinosaur.
Small one, I think.
We'll get one of the Angels
to break it out of the rock,
then drill it for a thong.
Looks like you found your
dragon claw after all.

good, good...

Have You Ever Seen the Rain?


The desert wouldn't seem the place
to have to worry about
death by drowning,
but for about two months every year,
the one I was in—
technically called the Upper Chihuahuan—
was.

To be accurate, it wasn't the drowning
that got you first,
but the fifteen-foot fist of water
that showed up in the arroyo
you happened to be crossing.

So it was more like death
by slamming, crushing, and grinding,
but the point is that foot travel
was not always a good idea.

And you know that song about
the sky not being cloudy all day?
Well, our monsoons came cloud by cloud,
and the clouds came up pretty quick,
so in that very big country
one dude could be looking at a pretty rainbow
or even a patch of searing blue
while another dude
could be going down for the third time.

All this is to say that
although I wanted to check out
a funky little college in Silver City,
I decided to keep myself and Georgie
in Godsville for the monsoons.

I had my job, he had school,
and there weren't any arroyos right nearby.

Teach Your Parents Well


Well, Dragon became Georgie
but Dragon happened anyway--
the clan, that is. Some folks just
started wearing dragon claws
and getting dragon tattoos.
Down by the railroad tracks
they started hanging out
in the old depot, playing volleyball
and drinking beer.  "What better
place, man?  A train's just
a dragon with wheels,"
somebody said.  "So's a semi,"
somebody else said, and
a few long-haul truckers
started parking there.

"It's how things happen,"
said Uncle Thunder.
"There's a dragon-shaped
hole and chi gathers there."

Of course, Dragon joined them,
and though he was way too young
to run the show, he became
their mascot.  Along with his crew.
No-one should be surprised
he had a crew.

Word got on the web fast,
and the Clans were polled.
The only ones in Godsville--
Raven, Snake, and Horse--
said to leave them be for now,
and the other clans agreed.

"Be careful now," said
the voice of Mad Marie
in my headphones one night.
"Bears aren't too bright.
We take things as they come.
You have no idea
how this little dragon thinks."

"No shit," I replied.

Like the hint of conflict to come...

Through the Grapevine


“Your boy’s acting weird,”
Moby said to me,
lowering his bulk
to the step where I was sitting.

“Weird how?”

“Folks are saying
he’s inducting grunts
into the Dragons
as if he was a leary.
For Chrissake, he’s only a kid!”

I sighed and stood up,
my knees popping.
“I’ll go see.”

At the depot, I found
a woman named Eroika,
formerly of Snake clan,
sitting cross-legged in the sun,
eyes closed, face still.
“Howdy, Marshal,”
she said when my shadow
fell across her.

I nodded, though she
couldn’t have seen the gesture.  
“Been hearing
you’re letting Georgie
induct Grunts into Cool
as part of making them Dragons.”

Her eyes remained closed.
“Grapevine got it wrong.
I’m the leary.  I induct.
Nobody else.  Georgie just
gives his opinion.
So far we’ve agreed
a hundred percent.”

“Since you and the kid
agree one hundred percent anyway,
just go with your own mind, OK?”

“Is this official?”

“Yep.  Pretty much.”

“Groovy.  Dragons obey the law.”

I thought that would be
 the end of it.

Interesting, Rick...

Here:

as part of making them Dragons.”

Her eyes remained closed.
“Grapevine got it wrong.

I think the line layout confuses who's speaking.

Marshall=Marshal?

Tom

  Thanks, Tomas!

--And Your Mind is Moving Low


I was digging into a bowl of con carne
at No Shit Bobby's when a tall brown
drink of water named Flattop
bent himself down to get in the door,
unbent himself so he almost touched the ceiling,
said, "I'll finish your chili, Chief.  Can't let it go to waste."

I raised an eyebrow.  He cocked a long thumb
out the window at the column of white smoke.
"Holy shit!" I said, out the door.

Didn't have my porta-phone.  Hated those things.
I was surprising myself how fast
I could take the alleys, cut through the yards,
the rifle on my pack reminding me it was there
and what it was for.

I figured the Angels had seen the cloud
and what was needed was my presence
rather than a call for help.

They were already there--the Angels--
and I thought from the perimeter
they'd set up around the place
there was some kind of hostage thing.

The place was White Rabbit's Magickal Emporium,
just a wooden house with a big painted sign
above the front porch, and one of the best
collections of ritual paraphernalia in the world.

Theda stood by her bike
all in black as if posing for a calendar
(Miss March.  Turn-offs: polyesther, stock options.
Turn-ons:  sweaty leather, resisting arrest).

"Go on in, Bear Man," she said, smiling.
"The mess is all yours anyway."

Sneezeweed came up and took my arn.
"Bear, it's Georgie.  We're here
to keep him inside.

White Rabbit said when I entered
the dark of the store, "I set the fire out back--
good ol' smoke signals still work.  
I know how you feel about being wired.
Georgie got into my stash,
took a couple tabs of Doctor Whatiff.
The last thing he said in English was,
"I need to be a Leary for the clan.
I'm giving myself the test."

"A couple tabs? He's eight!" I said.
Usually half a tab and I'm good for a weekend,
happy among the tambourines and elephants.

"Yeah, and he's over there," she said,
pointing down a row of open bins
to a round shadow, the top
of a little boy's head.

You're the first to notice it in a month or so.  They're antennae.  Need to keep tuned in.

lol

You've been sampling the goods of your last poem, Rick!

When Logic and Proportion
Have Fallen Sloppy Dead

Bear wisdom says that
half the time, the best way
to deal with a situation
is to walk right up to it.

About a third of the time, though
that's the worst possible thing to do.
Get you shot, trapped, made into a rug.

So a judicious bear will often just sit.

I just sat. 

On the counter, next to Rabbit
as she gently swung her legs back and forth
in her granny dress.

I thought I heard a static-y old radio
and asked her about it.

"That's the boy," she said.
"He's talking his language.  Bunch of
hisses, clicks, and pops.  Right now he's speaking
to himself or to the objects--
can't tell which-- but if you address him directly,
he'll answer you in it.  I recorded some. 
Angels hung it out on the web.
Preliminary is, it's a language,
just one nobody knows."

"Wow."  (You could always count on me
for a witty rejoinder.)

Rabbit said, "Could be he's manufacturing it as he goes.
His brain's stretchy enough to do that.
Don't know if he'll remember it afterward
or if he'll come out of it at all.
For a little boy tripping his balls off,
he's been awfully sedate.  Just walks around
like your standard Wiccan,
picking up stuff for Beltane."

Actually, if you didn't know the background,
the whole thing was about as exciting
as shopping for school clothes with your mom.
The light got longer, the shadows deeper,
and one of the Angels came in
to inform me they were breaking up the cordon.
"Call if you need us," he said, handing me a phone.

I was wondering if the noise of their departure
would startle a reaction out of Georgie,
but it didn't.  Right around sunset
he walked up to the counter and said,
"I'm a leary now.  My acid name is Dragon,
like I said before."

"You need a leary to give you an acid name,"
said White Rabbit gently.

"They gave it to me," he said,
pointing back to the shelves and bins
of skulls, stones, roots, bones, daggers,
and weird little gem-encrusted things.

"You go that way.  I'll go this way.
We'll meet in the middle." said Rabbit.
I did, she did, and we met in the middle.
"Usually a place like this is a babble of vibes,"
said Rabbit.  "All these things from different
ages and cultures, all with different purposes.
Hell, the bins and the shelves are
made and spelled to keep them
from attacking each other.  But there's no
fighting now.  They're playing nice together,
and they all agree about Dragon being Dragon."

I couldn't have said how I knew,
but I thought so too.

enjoyed...

Season of the Witch

It must have gone like this
in a thousand places--


Which is how
I came to be sitting
with my old friend Mountain Mike
from Deep Gap North Carrolina
and my bear-mother
Mad Marie who'd hitched in
on a log truck from Sturgeon Bay.
We were in No-Shit Bobby's
over Christmas enchiladas
(red chile plus green chili).

"Glad I took the gas bag to see it,"
said Mike, referring to his cross-country
zeppelin ride.  "Wouldn't have believed it,
but he's the real deal.  Even if he does
talk dragon half the time."

Mad Marie shook her head gently
and her hair flew around
(I always thought she was half gorgon).
"He isn't the Blackness, Mike.
He's too young.  You aren't good
for anybody if you're not the Blackness."

Mack took a swig of Dos Equis.
"All kids are the natural Blackness."

"But it's gotta be the thick Blackness.
Kid's way thin." she said.

"So thin he's thick.
What's the thinnest thing you know?
It's space, right?  And how far does
that stuff go?  On and on and on!

(Learies.  You gotta love 'em,
even if you can't understand 'em.)

"Wait till sex.  That'll thicken his ass.
Maybe in the wrong way." Marie said.
Or her hair said.  Can't always tell.

Heads shook all over town
as learies disagreed, disputed, debated
and finally decided to leave well enough alone.

For now.

Bad Moon Rising


Summer lazed into autumn
and it was about time for me to go.

I had decided to winter in Silver City,
if the place fit my liking.  
Dragon could go to school there
and I would loaf around
between the Bear lodge and the college.

But first there was the big annual baseball game--
Angels versus Grunts set for Labor Day.  
Somebody's idea of no-hard-feelings horseplay.
It was bigger in small towns
than it was in the cities, but even in the cities
every park had its own game.

So here I am,
sitting at the top of the bleachers,
liking the height but hating the crowd.
Sneezeweed is on my left,
Dragon on my right.
The Angels are first at bat.

I just got the chance to register something funny,
as the catcher dove behind the backstop
and the batter--who happened to be Moby--
dissolved in a red mist.

Then I was falling over backward
and the sky was blue
and then gold
and then black.

There was a ripping sound.

The sky went to gold and then blue
and I was being dragged along the dirt
of the parking lot by two sets of hands,
one little, one bigger (with painted nails).

And then I was in the cab of a bread truck
(Cousin Franny's Buns:  
Your meat.  Our buns.  Good times.)
Dragon on my lap and we were
screaming out of the lot
with Sneezeweeed at the wheel.

"Sorry I pushed you, Bear,"
she said.  "It was a trap.
The whole Grunt side
stood up with automatic rifles,
starting at the bottom of the bleachers
and working up.  People above
trapped by the bodies of the people below.
I hit you before they did.
You landed flat on your back
and passed out.  Loss of wind.
You're all right, I think.
Dragged you cause I couldn't wait."

"W'ere getting slaughtered,"
said Dragon, unaware of how
sports-oriented he sounded.  
"Blood was dripping down the stands.
They nailed us good."

"Where we headed?"
I croaked out.

"Barracks," she said,
and then a shock wave
rocked the truck, and we
looked there, and a pillar of smoke
pointed right down to the barracks.

"Not a good notion," I said.
"Hit the park.  Maybe somebody there
will know something."

At first it looked as if every tree
was being hugged by a Cool,
but driving closer we could see
that they were actually nailed
to their trees, and each one had a kill shot
in the back of the head.

I switched places with Sneezeweed
so she could work he Web
through her hand-held.

Instinct told me to get the fuck out,
and reason told me to stay away
from any place with people.

So while she tried to get something
other than static, I pointed our faithful steed
up a back road to Silver City.
No towns for 44 miles, Dragon informed me,
looking at the map.

I just wondered
what was  waiting for us in Silver City.

hello!

Midnight Rider

Sneezeweed from the back of the truck:
"Got a ton of buns back here.
They're the grunt kind.
You can mash one down to
a little ball and carry a week's supply easy.
That is, if you have water.
Damn things'll take water to digest."

"Got my canteen,"  I said, slowing the truck
once we were away from town.
Just a bread truck, ma'am, going about
our daily rounds.  "It's a two-quart
but only half full.

"Water's no problem," she said.  "You watch."

"You seem downright cheerful," I said.

"Counterinsurgency, Bear.
This is what we trained for.
The grunts rise up,
probably with money from the straights.
Bound to happen, we just didn't know how.
So what we did is, we planned for the second move--
what we would do after.
And this is it:  fragment, fade away, re-form."

So we went through an inventory of what we had:
my 30.06 with a box of shells,
Sneezeweed's semi-auto on her hip
with a couple of clips in her belt,
my buck knife, my hatchet, Sneezer's trench knife
(brass knuckle grip, serrated blade),
Dragon's little gadget from the Swiss Army,
and his ceremonial dagger from the clan
(nice job -- dragon handle, wavy blade
coming out of the dragon's mouth).

Matches?  Check.
Sleeping bags?  One that would unzip to cover three
Compass?  Three. (We laughed at that.)
Maps?  Dragon found some in the glove box.
Rope, twenty yards, all-purpose (mine).
Whetstone, fish hooks and line, nails
and a couple cans of Spam, date unknown.

They made me ditch the bear skull
and Sneezeweed broke her tazer shock box
("At that range, you just bean 'em with a rock.").
We kept my copy of the I Ching
for kindling if nothing else.  The rest went scattering
out the window, even her lipstick and eye shadow.
"Shoulda saved it for war paint," I said.
"If I use paint, it's gonna be blood," she said,
"and not my own.

Next stop, Jack Shit Motors
(vacated -- either killing or being killed)
where Sneezeweed found us some clean
wiper fluid containers
and filled them up in the john.
"Go to the cornfield for water.
Go to the well for corn," she said,
quoting one of her training phrases.

"What did they do to you?"
I asked.  "You sound like a cross
between Lao Tzu and John Wayne."

"And here I thought you kept out of touch,"
she said, laughing again.

She had her porta-phone
but decided not to use it.
"The local towers are down.
I can hook up right to a satellite,
but it'll drain the charge.
I wanna wait till there's
more of the Web on line."

"We still going to Silver City?"
Dragon asked.

"They call it Silver," she said,
"and not right in by the road.
We're going to park about halfway up,
hide the truck, and hump through
those little old mountains
to the Continental Divide.
It runs right by town."  

So we started off again,
just a little family on an outing,
ready to camp out and armed to the teeth.    

You, Who Are on the Road


The mood lasted
till we rounded a curve
and saw who was there with his thumb out.

"Hit him!" said Dragoon.

"Duck!" said Sneezeweed.
"Don't let him see your face."

I pulled over and stopped.
War or peace, hitchhikers are sacred.

"Good afternoon, Father," I said.
"Out for a stroll?"

"Fleeing the carnage, same as you."

"I thought you'd be leading it," I said.

"It's true the Church hates the USC,
but we provide intelligence and
moral support only.  Not money,
not soldiers.  We're not big enough
for soldiers, and money
makes a one-way trip-- into Rome, not out.
Besides, when you strapped me with that tracker,
the folks here didn't trust me.
I was buying a hotdog at the game
when it all came down."

"What's your plan?"  Dragon asked.

"Same as you.  Save my ass
and wait till the dust clears."

Sneezeweed looked at Dragon.
"Frisk him the way we showed you.
Pockets, backpack, socks, shoes, crotch.
Check especially for transmitters,
cameras, recorders,
but also look for blades and wire."

The priest held up his hands.
"Am I your prisoner?" he asked.

"Looks that way," I said.

Unprepared for?  Reply 35, "Seventh Inning Stretch," sets it up, but maybe it was too long ago?  The whole thing will read differently when it's not days between sections. "

Witchy Woman


And then we caught
another passenger.

Curly black hair,
black velvet dress, a row of
silver buttons along her spine.

She turned when she heard us,
stuck out her thumb.

She was swinging a cat carrier,
but the black cat--tall for a cat--
was walking beside her.

Sneezeweed started to chant,
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
Down the back, back, back
and that turned out to be her name.

"Psychedelic jumprope," she said.
"The leary named me after
my favorite rhyme.  This is Medea,"
she said, pointing to the cat
who sat beside her on the floor of the truck.

"Any weapons?" Sneezeweed asked her.

"There's Medea," she replied.

I laughed.  "Yeah right.  An attack cat."

"She's a splice job," Mary said.
"A couple of my genes
in her scent recognition array.
An attack on me's an attack on her.
Flying ball of teeth and claws,
reflexes a ninja would envy."

The priest crossed himself.

"I've heard of that," said Sneezeweed,
"Pretty advanced stuff."

"I've also got this," said Mary, pulling
a long barreled pistol with a fat magazine
out of the cat carrier.  I saw Dragon
reach for his dagger.  I got ready
to jerk the wheel and jog her aim.
Sneezeweed did nothing.

"An attack on her's an attack on you,"
Sneezeweed said.

"She's almost kin," Mary replied,
smile like a thin crescent moon.

"Well, sisters," I said,
looking back over my shoulder and
addressing both female and feline,
"The grunts are in revolt
and you're drafted."

She nodded.  The smile remained.
The cat just sat.  Taking it in.

Let Me Take You Down


And then we got hit
by a rocket.

But first:

      "Bear!  Chopper!  Three o'clock!"
  
      "Ours?"

      "No!  Hit the brakes!  Everybody out!"

That was Sneezeweed,
and we scattered in the light
of the setting sun and the burning truck.

The copter
got off a couple rifle shots,
but the high desert has trees,
albeit short ones,
and we scampered in a way
that would make a lizard proud.

We waited till full dark
then gathered on the mountainous
north side of the road,
where the trees were taller
and the flying would be trickier.

I thought we'd lost the Good Father,
but he came limping in.
"I thought about fading,
but I've got the grub,"
he said, holding up a case
of Cousin Franny's Buns.

"Twisted ankle?" I asked.

"Not bad."

Miss Mary Mack and the cat,
aside from some pine needles,
looked the same as when we
picked them up.

I was all right.
Sneezeweed had a scraped cheek and forearm,
but she was ticking like a mainspring--
regular, purposeful.
Dragon was dragon.

"Weapons check," Sneezeweed said.

We had:
her trench knife,
my buck knife,
Dragon's ceremonial dagger,
and the cat.

"Prayer," said the priest.
"All I ever had,
Nam or anywhere else."

"Where's your iron?"
I asked Sneezeweed.

"On the road, damn it."
Must have popped the holster snap
when I pitched out the door.

"We'll get it tomorrow," I said.

"We've gotta be long gone,"
she said.  "We're only about
ten miles out of town.
They're gonna come looking."

The priest was handing around buns.
I said, "These are no good without water.
They'll dehydrate you."

"Water's no problem," said Dragon.
"Apaches dug holes in the bedrock
in the canyons.  Monsoons filled 'em up.
Kids at school keep 'em scooped out.
Each one's enough for a horse."

So we ate our bread
and got ready to move out,
Apaches on foot
fleeing the Grunt cavalry.

"But first," said Dragon,
holding up a hand,
"stay there.  I gotta talk
to someone."
And he walked off into the bush.

We looked at what we could see
of each other's faces in the starlight
when dragon's voice
came floating back,
doing that hiss-click-pop thing.

"Huh-huh-huh HUHHH!" came back.
I shivered.  Sounded like a man almost dead
trying to force out the name of his killer.

More of the same for awhile,
then the kid came back.
"That was a Gila monster,"
he said.  "I heard him
prowling and I wanted
to see if he knew of any other people
around.  He said we were the only ones.
I said we wouldn't hurt him
as long as he didn't get underfoot
and he said OK, he won't bite.
Just walk slow.  Gilas are kind of lazy."

Mary and the cat
were looking at each other.
"Medea wants to know
if there are any coyotes around,"
she said.

"I didn't ask," said Dragon,
"but I don't feel any.
They have a slippery vibe."

The cat jumped on Mary's shoulder
and we started out.

When the going gets weird,
the weird go after Apache water.

Like this especially, Rick....

"Prayer," said the priest.
"All I ever had,
Nam or anywhere else."

...and the kid going Don Juan. Tom

Thanks, Tom.  I'm in the characters-surprise-your-ass stage.  It's an interesting place to be, no?  I know you were therre with your Zeus poems.

True. And it is great - when they're shaped just enough to start acting & speaking up on their own! Tom

I'm not aware of doing any shaping.  Except myself  -- they come to the door and I shape up and let them in.

Rick

That's the door with that nice graphic painted on it?

dear Rick

i really enjoyed "That was a Gila monster,"

and of course brought up some thoughts of Leah  & Cordelia

http://www.gilawildernessventures.com/theoutfitter/theoutfitter.htm

http://www.wmlabyrinths.com/index.shtml


this revolution series is the kind of journaling i like to revisit.


silent lotus

`

Tom,

It's a pink door with glass blocks on either side.  I see the character through the glass, distortedly.

sl

Thanks for the links.  Nice sites.  And thanks for the appreciation.  Mostly we poets sing in a vacuum.

r

The Urge for Going


Roads.  Bless the Romans and their
crested little helmets.
Life's a lot sweatier, harder, and more
uncertain without roads

Stumbling along in the dark,
sleeping under cover in the light,
we made it up and around
the mountains, now and then
catching glimpses of the road
to make sure we were heading right.

(Three compasses-- one broken, two lost.)

We ran out of buns.  Good thing.
I was beginning to hate the human race
for the invention of bread.  
We survived on raw rabbit (no matches or flint)
raw rattlesnake, prickly pear, and pine nuts--
courtesy of bloody hands, broken nails,
big rocks, and the cat, who brought the rabbits.

"They're not tracking us,"
I said to Sneezeweed.

"Probably got bigger fish to fry, 
turned on the straights
after they ran us off,
and the straights fought back
golf clubs against ball bats."

"Don't mention fish," said the priest.

"Or frying," said Dragon.

Eventually we came to Mordor.

That's what it looked like, anyway.
The Tyrone Open Pit Mine.
A mile across, a hundred stories deep.

And nothing living that I could see.

"Wait!" said Dragon.
"Way down at the bottom.
See that dot?  I think it's a truck."

"It's moving," Sneezeweed said.
"Slow.  But it's moving."

"In a circle," said Dragon.

"Dead man in the cab," said the priest.  
"He's caught in the steering wheel,
foot laid across the pedal."

I thought of railyards,
steel mills, cotton mills,
loading docks, warehouses,
idle or burning.  One thing about the Rev,
we left the "infrastructure" intact,
as the straights would say.

We went around the pit,
angled northeast to Silver City,
where we stopped at the edge of town
on what we would later find
was called Snake Hill.

Mary sent the cat to reconnoiter.

"Medea thinks in pictures,"  Mary said.
"Probably in smells, too, but I
can't pick 'em up from her.
Here's what she saw:
a bunch of people gathering
and then they left
and one person stayed."

"Lynching,"
the priest and I said at once.
We knew about those from the Rev.

Baby, Please Don't Go


I said, "There's a Bear Lodge down there.
Alive or dead, I have to see."

"Likely dead," said the priest.
"The Clans are mostly Cools,
and the Grunts are dispensing drumhead justice."

Sneezeweed looked me in the eye.
"We're a family, now, Bear."

Oops.  I've heard that before,
said in just that way.

"Boy or girl?" I asked.

"Why wreck the surprise?"

"Your first?"

"Yep.  I was waiting for
the right smelly old boar to come along.
You go down, I have your back."

"In your Angel leathers?
Might as well paint a target on."

She laughed.  "You may have noticed
they're black.  Best color for night action."

"She has your back,
I'll have hers," said Dragon
in that no-argument tone he had.

"I'm going no matter what,"
said the priest.  "Lots of Catholics here."

"You spill our plans,
I'll gut you like a hog," Sneezeweed snarled,
pulling her trench knife.

"What plans?  All I see are some crazy hippies
running for their lives."

"Well, I'm staying here," said Miss Mary Mack.
"I'll send Medea down with Dragon.
She's a good courier."

I noticed she had assumed
that Dragon could read cats.
I noticed I had, too.

good installment....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVXqocPAz1k

Black Betty, Bam-ba-lam


A tree-lined arroyo
ran down the mountain
right into town,
so we had cover
four blocks from
their main drag.

Whispered conference:
    
     Sneezeweed:  "You can slide
     along that wall, and then. . . "

     Me:  "No, I'm walking.  
     Sneaking only works
     when you know the place.  
     The haircut makes me look
     straight from a distance, and
     a distance is all I'm gonna need.
     I don't plan on striking up
     any howdy-strangers
     this time of night."

She had hacked off my pony tail
and considerably curtailed my facial hair.
"Sharp shiv's a girl's best friend," she said.

So with my stained grey Stetson
and the cowboy boots
I borrowed from Father Jogues,
I looked like scenery in any town
for a thousand square miles.

"Back by sunrise," I said.

"If you're not,
I fuckin reap the place."

It's hard walking easy when
you want to run.  But I have had
so much practice faking cool
that I made it all the way
to their main intersection
looking like I had someplace to go.

There I said my first howdy-stranger:
woman in black with a shotgun
sitting on the curb near a hanging corpse.

Black Betty, she said her name was.
Her Angela Davis 'fro was dusted with grey.

"Who's your friend?"
I said, nodding at the corpse.

"She's a Doggie.  Daughter of the Goddess.
They tried to bring peace
after the grunts rose up,
but they were pacifists,
so they all got killed.
She was the head.
There's a bunch more
hanging in the Big Ditch,"
she said, hitching a thumb over her shoulder.
"They hung the leader here to make a point."

"And you're the honor guard?"

"Hell, no. I'm Raven Clan.
To us, hanging's sacred.
An offering to the birds.
Nobody's cutting her down
till Raven doesn't want her anymore."

"The grunts let you run around loose?"

"Grunts here are mostly Chicano.
They think the Clans are brujas
and leave us alone.  They watch us, though,
just in case."

She gave me directions to Bear Lodge,
and I nodded to the two boys
smoking on the corner
as I turned left onto Market.

I was wondering why the clan
would set a Buddha statue
in front of the door
till the Buddha stood up
with a baseball bat like a toothpick
in one huge hand.
"Howdy Brother," it said,
in a voice a boiling pot of mud
would have if it could speak.

"How'd you know?" I asked.

"Bear that can't tell Bear ain't Bear,"
he said.  

His name was Asshole Bob,
because he'd been so obnoxious to his leary.
He stood six eleven,
weighed five hundred and twenty-five pounds.
"I'm a delaying action," he said.
"Bullet could take me out same as anybody,
but then they'd have to move the corpse,
and that'd slow 'em down."

I asked why be so careful
if they weren't under attack.

"Case you ain't noticed,
the power's off.  That means food's spoiling.  
Not for us, though.
Got a meat locker in the basement,
beer cellar below that,
grain and veggies in the second sub-basement,
all kept cool and dry by solar panels on the roof,
where we got snipers.  They saw you coming."

So they fed me--bacon, biscuits,
buttermilk, oranges, pears--
and I went back up the mountain
with a ham (still hot), a small keg of beer,
and an escort to bring us all back down.

Nobody fucked with the Bears.

Good reading, Rick. One question,

 I don't plan on striking up
     any howdy-stranger
     this time of night

to

There I had my first howdy-stranger

reads weird to me. Tom

The whole stretch?  Or just the phrase?

No, not the whole stretch, sorry. The turn-around from "no howdy-stranger" to "my first howdy-stranger" took me by surprise, didn't pick up any recognition that it was a turnaround.

Was hoping the odd phrase would signal that Bear was aware of the turnaround.  Dude's got a dry sense of humor, and this is his second tour in hell.  In that sense he's like the priest.

I Really Wanna Know


"Heard you got a delegation last night."

"Just some pilgrims."

"I want to question them."

"Can't do that, Manny.  They're
under the Bear."

"Maybe I'll take 'em from you."

"Have a beer first.  Catch."

"Don't want no cerveza.
I'm responsible for what happens
in this town.  You gotta have respect."

"Manny, my friend, How many times
we had a beer together?
Me tossing you a bottle,
that is respect.
And if you wanna be the big patron,
why not get the lights back on?"

"We're workin' on it.  How you keep
the beer so cold?"

"Solar on the roof.  No big secret.
See it from all over town."

"You better not be planning anything.
The bosses are dead and the Cools' day is over.
It's the workers now.  We run things."

"Too bad you killed all the folks
who made things happen."

"They kept it from us.
We'll figure it out.
Grunts ain't dumb."

"Didn't say they were.  Here.
have another one."

"Thanks.  You still got
that bear in there?"

"Den Mother?  Sure do.
Eight hundred pounds of love.
She's eating up a storm right now,
getting ready for nap time."

"She hibernates, huh?"

"Yeah, but don't get ideas.
A winter-woke bear's a mean cuss.
We tiptoe around her
when things get cold."

"Her and you about the same size.
Oughta go dancing."

"Who says we don't?"

Added a character to reply 140.  She insisted.

good reading...

All Along the Watchtower

"You told that beaner
there's a bear in here."

"There is, little dude.
Her name's Den Mother.
She lives on the third floor."

"My name's Dragon."

"Heard about you.
Grunt to leary in one jump.
No offense, but
you get to be five twenty-five,
everybody'll look little to you, too."

"Can I see her?"

"The bear?  Best not.
She's blind.
We found her as a cub
with a face full of buckshot.
Don't know what happened
to her mom.  We brought her here.
She lives on the third floor.
Has the whole place to herself.
New scents disturb her,
so only a few of us visit.
We feed her a lot of different stuff
to keep her interest, but mostly
she just wanders around
one shoulder to the wall,
or she sleeps.   Sometimes
I play guitar and sing to her.
She likes Simon and Garfunkel."

"Does she ever attack?"

"Now and then she
gets cranky and takes a swipe,
but she's basically calm.
The hash oil we put in her grub
helps some."

"A lot of hash oil for one that big."

"That's just stuff we tell the cits.
She's not a griz, just a little black bear,
a hundred and fifty pounds, give or take.
We trim back her claws
so she won't dig through the floor,
so when she does take a swipe,
it's just a love tap.  Half the time
she misses altogether.  Never bites.
Can't see well enough."

"The beaner was scared."

"Sometimes that's a good thing."

"I'm starting a clan.
I'll remember that."

Goog Goog a Joob

"How come you
keep calling Manny a beaner?
You're a beaner too."

"I'm a Dragon."

"You're a beaner first."

"I'm a beaner Dragon."

"I didn't know you could smile."

Why Can't We Go on as Three?

"NO!
And if that bitch
tries anything with you,
I'll open her
from cunt to breastbone!"

"Look, it's not her idea.
Asshole Bob says the Bear women
hate having an unattached girl around,
especially one who's not Bear."

"That doesn't mean
you should marry her!"

"She's gotta be spoken for,
the way you're spoken for.
I'm Bear.  You're mine.
If I say she's mine, too,
they'll hang a claw around her neck
and leave her alone.
It's still open season on Cools out there,
and she doesn't have a Clan.
If the Bears turn her out,
she's dead."

"Yeah, and when I get fat,
you'll have somebody else
to entertain you."

"Didn't happen the other three times.
I'll like watching you round out."

"Why did you break up
with the others?"

"First one left me for an artist.
Second couldn't stand to wander.
Third thought I was a bad influence,
loafing around the way I do.
She shoulda been a Straight
with all that ambition.  Owns
a chain of boutiques now."

"I like to wander.
And I stalk better than you do.
You couldn't run far enough
to shake me off."

"Wouldn't think of it.
Now, can I tell everybody
Miss Mary Mack and her cat
are wives two and two point five?"

"I suppose we'll have to sleep together."

"Yeah, but honestly,
she sort of creeps me out,
and I never liked sleeping with a cat."

"Well, in case you two get frisky,
I'm sleeping with my blade."

Dog and Butterfly

"Are you Sleepswithbear?
My name is Lilac.
I keep the Book here at the Lodge.
Is it true you married the cat lady?
If it is, I gotta write it down."

"Full name's Ching Monkey Sleepswithbear.
And I married Miss Mary Mack and her cat,
whose name is Medea.  Mary wanted
to make sure the cat was official.  It has
some of her DNA in it."

"Wow.  I like bears, but I wouldn't
put my DNA in one."

"Me neither.  But what can you do?"

"Well, I think you're cool.
Most men wouldn't do that
just to keep a woman safe.
Now you got to protect her,
keep her fed, all that.  And if
she gets knocked up, the kid's yours.
You only met her the other day, right?"

"Getting shot at together
makes a quick bond.
We'll get a divorce
after this shit's over."

"If you survive it."

"Right on."

"<Giggle> We say 'right arm' now."

"Outa state."

"<Giggle>
<Pause>
I wanna tell you something.
You need to know this.
Everybody does, but most won't hear."

"A secret?"

"It will be, if nobody does nothing.
 It's about the Doggies.
Daughters of the Goddess."

"The ones got killed."

"Shot like fish in a barrel.
They lived in the Big Ditch,
an arroyo that used to be Main Street
till the idiot men that settled the place
cut down all the trees
and the water didn't have anything
to hold it back.  In 1890 the monsoon
dug out a trench eighty feet deep
and a quarter mile wide.
Only one house stood,
owned by a woman who had the sense
to sandbag it when the rain started.
After the Rev, a bunch of women
settled in the ditch, calling it the Cleft of the Goddess.
Folks called 'em Doggies,
and they really believed in peace.
You coulda raped one and she wouldn't have
done so much as grab for a rock.
What woulda happened is her Sisters
would swarm on you and hug and hug
till you couldn't stand it anymore
and put your thing back in your pants.
That's what made 'em hated.  
And not just by Grunts.
Straights and Cools hated 'em too.
See, they would get between
a man and his woman
and soak up his anger
so he couldn't hit her no more.
Men called 'em dykes, and some were,
but mainly the men were pissed
that the Doggies took away their punching bags.
So when they rose up,
the Grunts poured rifle fire into the ditch
and hung the leader.  The Clans
sat around and cleaned their nails.
I wasn't a Doggie--man messes with me,
he's got a ballbat coming--
but still, those girls
deserved better than that,
and people should know
what happened to 'em."

"You want me to tell the story?"

"I want you to see for yourself.
There's still bodies unburied."

"Let me tell Sneezeweed I'm going."

"She'll want to go with.
With that Angel black,
she'd be dead on the sidewalk."

"We gotta get her some new duds."

"Just come with me.
You got Bear all over you.
So do I.  They're still leaving Clans alone.
We'll go down to the grocery store,
cross the bridge and get some beer.
Look into the Ditch but keep moving.
I'll tell Asshole Bob so he'll come looking
if we get stopped.  But we won't."

"All right."

"I knew you'd take the chance.
Bears are brave.
But they're not always kind.
<Giggle>You need a third wife,
just say so."

 

dear Rick

as i continue to return here and enjoy not only your pen
but also the snippets of song titles and lyrics,
Came The Revolution keeps bringing back
thoughts of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
by the recently departed Gil Scott Heron
and vaguely as well as the backwards
and forwards of  "Revolution 9"
from "The White Album"
from Lennon.


just a few fun items to ponder
many thanks

silent lotus

`

Soul Man

On the bridge I met the priest.

“Hey, Ike,” I said, “Whatcha doin?”

“Last rites.  They won’t
let me go down and bury ‘em,
so I’m doing it from here.”

“I thought these guys
were all priest lovers.”

“Lotta Prots among ‘em.
Baptists, Church of Christ,
Nazarenes.  They don’t like priests
any more than you do.
The Angels like to think
we’re some kind of spy force,
but the Baseball Massacre
caught us off guard too.
They’re letting us
walk around for now
because they don’t know
what else to do.
Even odds they do us like the Doggies,
especially since we broke from Rome
the day before the ballgame.”

“You broke from Rome?!”

“Great timing, huh?
Yeah, that creepy little old Hitler Youth
they got on the throne now
was the last straw.
Let those soft-handed little gangsters
have their gold-encrusted rules.
The Holy See of the USC
is now Emporia Kansas,
and our pope is Bill the First.
Before everything blew up,
it looked like San Francisco
would recognize us and declare us Cool.
But that’s Mother Church for you—
always out of step.”

“Jesus,” I said.

Lilac tugged my sleeve.
“We gotta go, man.
The guards are looking at us.”

So we went,
the stink following us to the store.

Sky Pilot (Second Verse)

On the way back, he was still there.

"How long you gonna pray?" I asked.

"How long would you
want someone to remember you?"
he answered.

"Must feel good
to be out in the open," I said.

"Speaking of feeling good," he said.
"What happened to alll that fear
you were carrying around?
You're walking like a man
who's right where he belongs."

That surprised me.
"Hadn't thought of it.
I guess I don't have to worry
about who's trying to kill me,
'cause now I know."

"You and me," he said,
"we got our dials set by the Rev,
and here we are again."

I laughed.
It felt good to laugh
there on the bridge
above corpses
with armed enemy on either end.