Journal 34 - Silver Streaks

I watch the shiny wet slug slovenly wriggle its
way across the brown carpeted floor – silver streaks
of mucus unlike silver linings stretch like poop
contrails behind the water fattened polka-dotted leech
cousin. It's hard to see a slug on a brown carpet -
silver lining aside. I'd like to watch the performance
of a slug under the cyclone of a hair dryer. Water
has a weakness. I have a hard time believing that
tomorrow will twist itself right like a cockroach
left on its back. My 'nature' images can be so
urban for a Southerner. Oh noes, I may lose
my passport. The tiny bubbles slide down my
red wine glass like stars dancing before your eyes
after being punched in the nose – there's probably a
correlation – a causally related correlation. Cause it
seems is a difficult thing – not so simple as every
effect has a cause. What's the cause of her
hitting that winning billiard shot in a fun haphazard
game of friendship? I know friends don't come
and go like laughter but they certainly come with
laughter. It's true as truth may be (Eliot) that
laughter is the best medicine, at least the best
placebo; the best mesmerizing triumph of our
conscious minds. Organization is a beautiful thing -
self-organization is quite miraculous. Two cups
of sausage and 3 eggs is not a bad breakfast. Who
ate the first egg? Psycho. Who threw the first
piece of raw meat on the evening winter fire
to be startled by the juicy aroma of beef sizzling
in that flame? That first bite must have been
like the first orgasm – no matter how overdone.
I feel my throat and my heart are conspiring to
overthrow and constrict on me like two small
pythons in a death match for the big game prize.
Good thing I'm fattening myself up for them – not
quite like a sluggish leech but less removed than
one would hope. Hope – again it smuggles itself in
through the slimy back doors of my drunken mind -
like a mutt insistent your smelly home is where his
sleeping blanket lives.

4.14.09

Journal 33 - Invested Teeth

The Easter Bunny is hopping like a white frog into
the cheery dreams of my 2-year old blond-haired
daughter. Blue eyes are odd in this family and
odd are the words of her chatter. Therapy is
around the corner, and at such a young age - loss
is an abstraction of Pez denied or peanut butter on
the spoon refused, her loss is a thing conjured up
by the by-gone wonders of yesteryear's panoply. Loss
is the smoke that rises through the vents and sucks
the oxygen from the room – seeping in through the
accidental igniting of kindlin' from a backyard
beer guzzling fiesta with queso and piñatas. I
want to strike the head of a made-up animal
and be rewarded with fruity candy rotting out my
well-paid-for teeth. I've invested years in my
teeth – 401K be damned, see my white smile. -
how toothy. I do want to get in trouble – I do
want to start a fight. I can twirl this pen
around my hand and fingers, and etch out these words
with knee-jerk scratched on well-lined paper but
thoughts impressed are chalky and heavy with
eyelids and pressured lungs. The day was a big
grin from the child in your 1-year old's class who
pulls down the pants of another student – not
knowing the lewd compulsion that is being
fondled. The teacher laughs it away each time -
until her pants are pulled down by a drunken
daring date – she realized they being so early; guns
are known a-priori. Along with ridicule and
gross infatuation. There are châteaux in the left
bank of Bordeaux that will knock the latent
buds off your salient immature tongue; oh so
cruel in their war for your soul and your wallet -
not unlike the up-scale hooker. Would I pay
to have sex, when it is free as long as one is
paying attention? I guess I pay for television
and internet and movies; sex is more than mere
entertainment – it is a mixing of bodily drippings
such that no two people have sex the same way
with anyone else;- survival is key; lust is life.

4.11.09

Journal 32 - Mold Cancer

I don't want cork in my belly, even if it's
cork from the Medoc region – corks are so invasive
and tasteless when they lurch into your throaty
world. My throat has diminished in confidence and
authority these recent springtime days – unfolding
like pollen-showered daisies with their nasty
mucus-generating cough. My throat feels like
mold cancer – if cancer could feel. My joints
snap but they don't hurt. My throat hurts
but doesn't snap – I think a good thing. The
room I sit in smells, reeks of sweaty gym
class clothes and socks mixed with a liberal does
of 2 year old vomit – very distinctive in its
milk-based stench. Each breath is like a
breath inhaled among the corpses of smelly
feet and bio-undegradeable waste kicking out
a post-mortem living in prime real-estate -
do not tread on the paths of the dead: ghosts
could be real even if I've never shook hands
with one. Ghosts are such close cousins to
the ancient fairy tales. Counterpacts or counter
points are always needed; all we need now
are the realists hacking away at the fine
chiseled beauty that is the Davíd. So cut
in his naked hard looks – Michelangelo knew
the ways of love, sought the ways of sweet
unrequited love – decisions can be such
surprises in their natural furtive state – whom
now I love is a mystery as old as Plato
and King David – older than the dead throbbing
lights that call to us from the ancient
night – penetrating this man's brush and that
woman's pen – asleep in deep thought the misfit
beckoned from his rocky path I grabbed his
arm and tried to prevent his physical in-
trusion to their manicured home – one more
death senseless countless death, since men
convinced Jesus and the Holy Spirit to sit back
and observe how wise man cures poverty and
homelessness.

4.10.09

Journal 31 - Divin' Duck

“If the river was whiskey, you know I'd be a divin'
duck” - words indeed to live by – even sober in the
waiting room or your daughter's pediatric care; she's
young and resourceful, able to bound back like a pro-
fessional drug-less athlete. (assuming they exist) What
is it about the fertile dense gravity pulling nature of
Louisiana? Particularly New Orleans. Accidental
discipline can't explain in the gifted talent-drawing
pull of NO, nor can accidental materialism. The
blues is against the predictable strictures of the
white-walled brilliant scientists. I've seen the fly
snipped by the quick flicking tongue of the bouncing
frog. Predictable in its belly-filling encore; I want
to believe there is a significant difference between
the fly and between me. Something more than mere
complexity of disparate organized cells. The fly can
see so much more, or at least more angles. These
asexual amphibian egg-like eyes are spooky in their
unblinking assertiveness. But how annoying to lick
and clean them every so often with your crazy
spiked legs – quivering in the cold dark corner of
the room where once couples danced with great wide
smiles on their un-reluctant faces – where happy feet
skipped round the room in art-inebriated joy,
heads tossed back in silly ecstasy forgetting the
heavy-headed task of dilly-ing out appropriate
political-laced rhetoric; heads with happy toothy
smiles of sweet carved pumpkins the night before
Halloween (when the hapless teenagers will happily
destroy the succulent jack-o-lanterns with the swift
destructive force of a military-laced booth). So
damaging to teeth – whether made of vegetable or
calcium – the gaps are there for all to see and
snide or sneer or cry or laugh. Laughter it seems
is common these days, laughter manages our lost
days with deceptive ease. What seemed so silly
to us yesterday has resurrected its severed head
with adolescent defiance, not what one would expect
after so many years. OK. Time to squelch bruised
apple heads.

4.7.09

Journal 30 - Free Willin' Cells

Was that the wind light in the remnants of
the bye-bye storm or the sound of the sheets
and the covers as she shifted positions in the
big bed – it’s all blurry to me as I stumble into
the bathroom, tripping over toddler stools in
the dark – life is what you make of it my friend.
(Silverado) The wind still nestles and nustles and
rubs elbows with the leaves in the spring trees –
brief cycles of memories of all the times the wind
in the trees meant something. Fill in the sordid
and topaz blanks of your own throat deteriorating
lives. It has been said (& quoted) that “you’ve been
dying since the day you were born.” It has a
certain ring to it. When is that real turning/
tipping point when the cells in your body stop
predominately growing but predominately wither
away, losing their moisture and drying up like
along mocked toyed-with snail, homeless in its
thirsty quest for a silver lining that is real and
meaningful. I sometimes (e.g., now) wonder if my
life is but a cardboard box of cheap wine –
popular among the sweet unrefined undisciplined
mediocre yet beautiful teary indisposable and won-
derfully unintellectual keepers of the light that
actually reflects a soul peaking out of its leathery
shell like an ancient bird in the Galapagos Islds.
The evolution of a nose – who knew it would
mean so much? Our cells are free if we are free –
but I repeat myself. they may be free but
apparently doesn’t mean bright. A pensieve would
be cool to have. Or a direction – velocity is
a bit overrated when it comes to human to
human interaction, or interface as the cold
scientific philosopher would have it. I swear at
times the wind sounds like some giant, or a
supernatural being, is breathing in through the
big gap in her front teeth in a gasping – slow
lugubrious gasping –furtive harbinger of not very
delightful phantasies to come – nightmares in
the chimes and the trees and the bruising of knees.

4.6.09

Journal 29 - Duessa's Sister

Words were cotton swabs for my inebriated
brain – soaking up the drivelling drool and narrowing
the seeping thoughts until there was at least one
coherent idea. That was long ago – now the words the
broken letters tumble out of my head like pieces of
hurricane soaked scrabble puzzle pieces. Sometimes I
just say, Fuck it. Not as much in recent years – ironic
as it sounds. The toilet doesn’t sound so foreign to
the girl standing alone on the dance floor at her
last prom waving goodbye to her date as the
mascara drips down her cheeks in dirty ash-tray
rivulets like a melting vampire. Black streaks are
much cooler in thought than in practice. I’m all
black-nailed now; look at me – don’t you want
to see the beautiful yellow flower underneath if
only you wouldn’t judge me by my cover. Wait –
what’s the point now? I’ve seen the mirror
pecked away where nothing’s left but the plain
white boring next door neighbor thoughts and
plans – cosmetics is so overplayed. Cosmetics is
a rose garden over a bed of rattlesnakes. I
wonder where the biker cries before he realizes
the other bikers cry too? It’s not unreasonable to
believe that crying is an overflowing of water for
the growth of the soul. I feel that marijuana
cannot do what my two-year old can do –
make me smile laugh and dance without regret
at artificiality later. Alcohol is a kiss on the
cheek or the pecker from Duessa’s lost sister –
daughters of Lethe. It’s not yet time to die –
it’s time to begin to remember and recall and
cast away such secret little spells conjured by
the li’l leprechaun of laughter we call a tall
glass of wine and beer. Thirty four years have passed
like a busted pipe under an overcharged land-
locked dirty apartment – spewing forth muddy
water with no-one to soak it up. Something
should happen in 33 years. Jesus re-defined
humanity in that time. I haven’t defined myself
much less re-define it, or allow a healthy roundabout.

4.5.09

Journal 28 - Streaked Mascara

The sky was streaked today with wet mascara
from the soot and shit dispersed from our lovely
fuel inefficient SUVs and trucks trolling along the
highway, which of course was built with its
own fair expenditure of waste. Waste is inevitable.
Ask Newton. Entropy likes to bite us in the ass –
especially when we try to subvert it to our own pleasures –
like the ID guys. It seems organization is not at
arms with entropy. We’ll see later. I need someone
to double-click on my heart or my soul or my
pecker – whatever they can to jump-start me like
an old ’72 Dodge – gaskets blown all over the
road. I sometimes wish I were colorful like the
variant creatures of the controversial kingdom –
say a red-shaled turtle or a dazzling prance of
the shameless bird family; lorikeet or peacock.
The Eyes of Argus are watching the way the wind
blows up the peacock’s skirt. I could be a shimmering
snake in alternating turquoise and green – red tossed
in for completeness. I know where the mad hatter lived –
along side the other mad women of the former years –
equality tends to attenuate sharpness and edges.
Perhaps that’s why women chose the opposite pole from
men – that is, men without penises. Or rationality.
The effortless weight of the wine bottle in the
over flowing bathtub has sent me to the toilet in
a spasm of 1 year old contractions – lost in my
own inability to control my movements I wallow
in my exhaust like a happy shiny child shitting
for the first time in the neighbor’s bathroom –
it’s all good over there. The physical act of writing
is stressful and cramping and enough to require
another drink to appease the revolt of my
addicted legs. I could be floating, floating down
the muddy Mississippi on a wooden raft
on my back, stretched out like a 2-D paper
cut out of Flat Stanley – absorbing the sun’s
twisted rays on my splotchy skin like a blistered
sponge. There go the white bones of Huck Finn,
smiling at Nigger Jim.


3.31.09

Journal 27 - Mannequin Legs

Legs are so much more than practical automotive
muscles. Long tone curved tan beacons to sexual
desire so far removed from the everyday matter
of evolution of locomotion. And then there’s
the muscular toned ass at rest atop like a
bust on display of a beautiful pedestal by Rodin.
Round and inviting in its effortless in-your-face
‘sweetness.’ I digress. Deliciously. But a fine firm
ass can cover a multitude of stupidity. It’s
true but only partly sad. In any rate of exchange
a woman’s body is the same across any point in
time. I’ve heard of the Renaissance belly but
bring Michelangelo or Raphael here and tell me
the bulbous plump is sexier than Halle Berry or
Evangeline Lilly. I know these thoughts are reeking
with the stench and steam of shit sifting out
of the sewer on main street, or King Street –
outside the CHS Place Hotel, O but tall boots on
long white legs. Color of course is a secondary
attribute – accidental in its subjective interpretation.
Consider the nature of cheese. Injected with
color or aged to rust in its beautiful trio of
texture, smell and taste. Why must things I enjoy
be administered by the smug insecure snobs of
pseudo-intellectual egomaniacs? Wine, cheese, books,
music and cigars. I suppose I must be one myself –
if it walks, talks, looks and acts like a duck it is
(probably) not an anteater. I won’t lie when I say
that I can’t help but watch a thin fit calved woman
walk across the lobby with blonde hair and perfect
clothes with ‘fancy’ flip-flops - she is most likely
a mannequin in bed. But I still lustfully watch,
glue-eyed. It’s stupid really – the air-brushed throb
in magazine is as likely to mean something in my
dream engulfed life. Hemingway said to stop
writing before the well was dry – I should heed
his experience; these words are drivel and a bit
below a placeholder for my wannabe mediocre
existence. There are so many to blame. Unless
I’m honest. I have spiritual glaucoma.

3.28.09

Journal 26 - Death by Ether

I wrote on Facebook: lost in a gauze of soaked ether;
dissolved in poached decisions and precisions; yes – a
patient undone upon a table. I always associate the
word 'undone' with Isaiah 6:5 (KJV) – but this time it is
definitely the image of a body on the autopsy table.
Though unstitched would be better. Perhaps I do like
the double entendre of the Isaiah reference. The
passage is important. And obviously I've been reading
Eliot again. Of course 'undone' is associated with
him also now I think about it – via Dante – I had
not thought death had undone so many. Apparently
the world is on a crash course with constriction and
absorption into the supernovae of the Sun's future
outburst. Death by fire not water. The prophecy
should hold according to science. And we who walk
the accumulated dirt of our forefather's ashes and
shit, having oozed out of the chemical laden pond,
somehow aware of our meaningless plight through
the magic mysticism of quantum fluctuation and
simultaneous duplicity, only accidentally favored above
the cockroach crushed with a loud snapped back
under our booted feet, swarming under grand intellectual
edifices, that portend glory and worth in their fight
to control through religion or politics – all thoughts
thought before – you know there is nothing new under
the sun (except lust in the heart is adultery) – we
trample on our own meaning haunted history with
webbed feet and circumcised tails, marching
through our conscious history with a machete not a
scalpel – removing and swiping away anything im-
material. My friend and fellow cousin of the stuff
that composes our bodies – my friend the slow-moving
silver snot-trailing slug lifts his wet head to my
big toe and smiles. I douse him in salt and laugh.
What's the difference? It's all made up anyway.
Goodnight moth. Goodnight cricket. Goodnight daisy.
Goodnight monkey looking over the forest for a hazy
place to call home. Goodnight sweet dying sun. Have
hot fun in your long-last blast. Goodnight tree; goodnight
moon. We'll be together soon.


3.24.09

Journal 25 - A Blue Ribbon Eunuch

The shadows crept along the wall and curled about
the shade of the inappropriate lamp for the brilliant
minds of yesteryear. Is it wrong that I just want
to toast a blue ribbon beer to a friend from the
other side of the proverbial pond? Each night sticks
like acid in the stomach or psilocybin in the shitty
shroom. It's hard to eyeball quantity in the round
purple-stalked shroom encased in a patty of
moist cow shit. Juice can be made for amateurs.
But sardonic laughter falls close to the tree when
someone who graduated to professional drug addict
has the opportunity to ridicule a future cell mate
(whether physical or mental) – puffing up his joint
and his head. I need to visit the sea and stick
my oval head underneath the heavy comforter of
the water and smile like a lover upon seeing his
beloved risen from the murky deeps. Murky deeps -
clichés can't escape my attention deficit mind -
I need it seems a pill to undo my mind's erratic
and debilitating behavior. I did not know pills
could re-do so many. My niece lists her pink
pacifier as her prized possession and guards it like
a gold diamond necklace – she is 7. It's okay though -
she lost her father before she could stand. Perhaps a
primary-colored pill could revert the proper path-
finding chemicals to the rainbow stream of
well-connected neurons and easy-firing synapses.
Ah, synapses, synaptic cleft – listen to me, I'm
so intelligent. Next I will dazzle you with words
like bereft and conducive. Or speak insipidly about
strings and worm holes. Electrons have free-will
they say – that is, if we have free will. They
can also be in two places at once though – we, not
so much. An army of errant electrons is driving my
material soul to the brink of a grand theological
realization – I just need to realize it. Insights
are like the no-seeums down South. I must have
been born with a skin oil of OFF for insights.
High idea productivity – just not good ones.
An intellectual eunuch.


3.23.09

Journal 24 - Yellow Crusted Sleepies

To think under the same light as the so-called
Keepers of the Ancient Light – to watch the
rising and changing of the same colorful moon
waltzing in the same exploding remnants in the
night sky, trying to recapture Beauty after her
desiccation by more erudite foes – it is indeed
difficult. Pound knew out the ways of words;
Eliot searched the torpid paths of grinding thought -
I am left to waddle in my still-born intellectual
infancy wiping the yellow crusted sleepies out of my
alien eyes. Translation of thought tempered or
sautéed with feeling into a well grown poem is
a job for someone else. Someone who knows
the intimate ingredients of his cabinet along with the
cabinets of other nationalities. Perhaps I should
resign myself to surfing or shrimping, even trapped
in front of the computer all day – with gusto.
Instead I am being quartered and split among
opposing realms of thought. Today it is theology
or the philosophy of religion – the life of a
pedestrian academic. Tomorrow it is the computer
programmer – lost in logic and flow-charts pacing
the carpeted concrete halls for the perfect 'algo.'
Then it will be the writer – abandoning all
attempts at survival and home and food for my
demanding family. Perhaps today I will learn a
language – Greek or French; C++ or Java?
My intellectual focus is blurred by indecision and
alcohol, as I pause for another sip of Marcus
James wine. Cheap and grape-y. A mind split
is mediocre and ambivalent – unable to surprise
and elevate itself to a new step on the ladder
of mindful growth. Plateaus are for the tourists.
I'm a tourist looking in on the ideas of the past
shivering in the cold – oblivious to the snow
and sun and breaths around me. Intellectual pres-
byopia is settling in upon my mind – calloused
and hardened with responsibilities and roofs and
air and gas and clothes [TV internet too] – I stare
at people with intoxicated souls crying - mon semblable.

3.22.09

Scattered Gutters

       Variation on a familiar theme

And the sun stretched forth his orange-yellow
hand, and groomed the city streets, and
followed the country roads, and even scanned
the island retreats for the slender hand he so
longed to hold; and finding none of his
desired worth strolling through the day,
He reclined - to reflect on Cabernet, and
determined to assign his son the task;
the son, who with his father’s borrowed light
patrols the undeserted streets at night;

And through the dank alleyways of beer-glass broken gutters,
his pale arm crept softly over our simple heads, and
under concrete bridges and over cardboard beds,
in over-populated three-in-the-morning bars, and
theatres filled with song and dance and weeping bards -
he filtered through those sound awake and sleeping
to find the earthy hand his father now desired instead
of the emaciated sky;
but nothing here on earth - and nothing through the sea
could be gathered to compare
with her infinitely finite blue supply
of cloud-swept grace and star-borne flare.

Wilted Grapes

Often upon the wilted rose, I
hang toward earth and swing and sway,
fold my arms in feigned irreverence,
furtively murmuring prayers I know;

So soon it seems our lives unfold
So soon we see in doubtful reverence;
We chomp on this our undernourished day,
pleading for just one quiet afternoon.

Heavy with the weight of foot-pressed grape -
We glare blood-eyed and thoughtless yelp
Of every unsuppressed, disreputable tale
On which we squint and contemplate

Ourselves, our world and our soul-isle;
Alone and beached, our stare dead-eyed
sucking air like a spectacular washed-up whale:
Between each breath our secret prayer to die.

Our world is clinched between the structured
And the free; both giddy and forlorn.
I have nibbled the imprecatory psalm
Tossed and thrown, smiling and wave-worn.

Wood Chimes

It's all too complicated, or complex
I never know which or what or why;
Is that the Oak Leaf shouting the words
Or the 5-year sleepless nights down

South, thick wet hot; thirsty for some
No, not water; nothing too reasonable -
Red red wine should slow the neural effects,
Until words drop like drool from numb lips.

What was it I said before she departed
From the televised speech and touched upon
A note Battle herself could all but will
Into her voice; What? Was that a broken noise

Of shattered panes of glass? It happens.
Shit happens. So comforting; I now can sleep.
I now can collapse into a deep wine-cooler
sleep, waking to the slobber on my sheet.

I mentioned it was all my fault? All I know
Is much to confess. I mean; didn't I just
Pass the church's test? It was bearable.
I bet the church don't know what now is best.

McDonald's or Stouffer's? I've seen my share
Of two-year old's celluloid fat scrunched up like
A hair-squiggy from 1988. What? You watch
TV? Don't you know your soul will surely die?

Single vision would be nice to have. I allow
Double. It's the least I could do for me
or for you. It is the very least to not dry-heave
Awakened to another sweat-toothed August day.

Now is the time for all men to stop, to hear.
(Ah, yes, I know; now is the time for women too)
We've had our share of dark European beer.
We've heard the Ballads; we know what's new -

We stood like Harps; we followed our minds
Left only with mirrors and old wood chimes...
I feel drawn back to loaves of flat bread,
Drawn from the stains of my tossed hotel bed

Journal 23 - Cute Dichotomies

The soaked wind was a falsetto as it stormed down
the cute little street with children's push toys
abandoned in mechanical yards. Manicured yards
are okay in their clean lego-land look. There is a
poor standard where manicured is uppity but un-
manicured is lazy and dirty. I'll settle for being
whatever they label me. I have no time for their
projections and wish-fulfillment atrophies. The solution
to Beauty and Love eludes me. And yet I hear Phish
with Slave to the Traffic Light and I know that the
mistress Beauty is resting with a full soul tonight.
Two opposing realms of faulty lore? Perhaps this
cute dichotomy is resisting a sensible resolution.
Both could be constructed as the yin to the other's
yang. But I'm still a loving slave to the Slave of
a Traffic light. My toes scrunch in my attempt
to close the sonnet. No more sonnets. They aren't
dead except when I try to complete one. Harry
Hood could do a better job. Sometimes I regret
not being a poet. Perhaps.... the ending to the multi-
tudinous endings to the effervescent Perhaps is an
arm grasping dream – the ending could be trite in its
accusations of an improper environment or praising
in its selective favorable reminiscing of singular moments
where Beauty showed herself behind Love's flamboyant
gyrations. Excuses are like assholes, or something like
that. My back hurts and my wine glass is empty and
purple-streaked – like my dry lips. I'm not sure it's obvious
but I have nothing to say. Yeah, it's probably pretty
obvious. The drool leaks out of my drunken mouth like
the thick slobber of my teething two year old (18-mo).
I wear, or should, a surgeon's mask to collect the
refuse of my wet mouth. Each micro-second that
passes I become geometrically more stupid. I blame
T.V. - but the wine may be more culpable – I
of course am innocent. I could be a sample in a jar.
Discarded and left as an exhibit in a court house
somewhere as a sobering example of how not to spend
one's lonely days – use '93 gas, not '87. It matters.

3.21.09

Journal 22 – Lazy Rivers and Morning Ghosts

Morning film is blurry on sleep-sodden bleary eyes.
This sentence repeats and rolls around my soft
morning skull – vainly trying to raise itself to some
stylistic pleasure. Gone are the days of Shakespeare.
Beethoven stole the show and used up all the cognizant
available yarn. But there are others. Pound, Eliot, Joyce,
Rilke, Auden, Cummings, Dickenson. Dylan – Zimmerman
that is – surpasses them all – after Shakespeare and
Beethoven that is. Fear not – Dante has his place of
exaltation. Arnaut too. I admit I'm a bitch of Pound &
Eliot. The moon hangs like a ball of cotton candy
in the early evening. An illusion I am surely
told. It still smells like cotton candy or the dying
electric blue of a short lamp post in 1938. Keats didn't
return any yarn to the spool you know. Dying young is
not a mulligan or do-over. Kovacevich is close I think
to Beethoven re-incarnated as a performer of his dead
ghost works. Ghosts are such petty silly stuff these
enlightened days. I once was told by such an enlightened
man his belief in ghosts was acutely pre-empted by his
disbelief in other wonder-filled things and beings entailed
by belief in minor beings as ghosts that to believe would
surely be intellectual suicide. Would I were enlightened.
Lazy as an inner tube on a lazy river on the other side
of the magic kingdom life would flow like an
effervescent dream where beer and wine and cheese
are offered each pass by the arithmetically distant
starting point. Oh so good. Lazy irreverent rivers
are a thing of the present pounding and trilling of the
black and white keys of the time-blasted keyboard
of Beethoven – strong and practised. The performer
is everything. Anxiety about our flailing economy and
waffling angry seat of the pants leadership should have
me tossing in bed like a goldfish dropped from the
Wal-Mart bag on the way to the car – but instead of
nutrient rich water I have the soul-swathing rich elements
of Yeungling and Jim Beam to lay me down to forgetful sleep.

3.19.09