The Getty Villa: Admission Free

On the rolling hills of the la-la lands, you just go in 

To Villa dei Papiri, a rising into Elysium, a nest 

Befitting Hadrian, painstakingly imagined, of how

To live at last like a human being (Nero’s words) 

Under Vesuvius, the dangerous, before the underground spoke, 

To leave us one man’s fantasy, emanated from J Paul’s will, 

A villa he never saw himself, as he last set foot in California 1951, 

Before too much was made of his fortune. 

                                                                             We pulled a J Paul move 

At parking he'd wanted free, our poetically correct handicap tag 

Hung so we could snag some illicit car charge we walked past

The elevators he always avoided up amphitheater seats surrounded 

By his silent quotes, as he would have spoken here, to no one.

He bought Doheny’s interests after his disgrace at Teapot Dome, 

Never thinking that a few bribes among friends, even if

His friend’s name was Fall, would cause such a tempest.

The Feds'd forced his son to aver how the money'd been delivered 

Via a partner who was his secret lover (it was whispered) 

And both son and lover ended up dead by the same gun, same day,

The son who'd followed whereever the business took him, 

Whose name still echoes in the wind of Dana Point and the warp 

Of “Dead Man’s Curve,” “Surfin’ USA” – But the wind in California 

Always changes, and J Paul, student of the way things move, 

Specialized in those who fall with the wind, 

How losers are always a bargain. 

                                                           So it was with Doheny, in the teeth

Of his Great Depression. He must have been an easy mark, 

This man accustomed to drink other's milkshakes directionally, 

And J Paul in his rumpled suit, sweater out at the elbows, 

Who chewed every single bite of food 33 times, 

Wore his pedometer ‘til bed and missed not a thing – 

He could see in a flat land strain of locomotive 

There was oil under Santa Fe Springs, and how to hide it 

From the ones who did the work and the ones who paid. 

Why reveal what you know when you come to know everything? 

“The person who,” as he said, referring to information, 

“Had the most got the most.”

                              J Paul’s entourage is just inside, 

From the 26th Egyptian dynasty, 100 years, in 2026

After taking charge of his father’s company, as if he was

Amenhotep (who looks like J Paul here himself) 

And wants to remember the golden days 

Too crudely reconstructed in this unrefined time

When the desert holds the flow of chambers turning

As if the force to submit was as natural as the Nile. 

He’s held in a portal by the supervisor of secrets, who held codes 

To restricted truth locations where the oil sometimes lived 

And serpents ruled, and his particular kind of currency 

Was respected, 

                           The Third Intermediate Period, of Saite priests, 

Kushite rulers, winged cats glazed by inter-galactic awe who throw 

Their tongues out in surrender as a big-headed alien stands 

At the door and Ptolemy looks nervous, Nakhtherheb kneels 

In reverence, Hemnetjerhornebkhaset holds the portal shrine, 

Eyes in pure devotion, as the priest at Mut, Controller of the

Estates tends like goats the sons of Horus: a falcon, baboon 

And jackal – like J Paul’s own sons, powerful 

When controlled. And there is the royal treasurer, 

“Beloved sole companion to the king,” his left arm no longer there, 

A tattoo of wormhole instruction embossed upon his heart

And a bird in a cage on his arm. He toughs it out, seeing what is not 

As if it is, but he serves anyway, loves the truth anyway, 

And two blue Ushabtis animate to perform labor for their owners

Who hold – not scythes – electric manifestation rods 

That trip the light language hieroglyph fantastic

Rich with symbol, ore and reference, 

Metaphysical doubling in every verb. 

                                    Wings are chiseled into the chest of Nesisut, 

Keeper of the storehouse, who knows the price of everything, 

Knows how to say nothing, even in his sarcophagus, 

For Re takes him too across the sky as morning Khepri, 

The procession of the dead, of the walking to the light, 

Each one holding an ankh – at the end of the line, 

The magician doubles as serpent high priest

Who manifests instantly.

                                              So it is in every reimagined room, 

Where a vast emporium of lives has materialized

From past incarnations, imagination, thin air, 

As from a wand not unlike the one that divines oil. 

It clears the way for one last hero’s victory lap

Just as a gray gentleman in pastel colors walks by

Eyes charged with the idea that he too is J Paul

And this is his perfect fountain, the one all others are based on, 

White-eyed muses catching what the winds bring, 

Their black bodies shadows on the water, giver of life 

That flows everywhere the ear can hear, 

Ripples like the dragon scales of reality as it bends. 

Busts of poets surround the horti’s geometrical shrubs, 

Gardens of cat thyme and sorrell, lamb’s ear, burgundy plum – 

Such are the cultivations of a Roman – er, Draconian 

And his fountain, the richest motherfucker in the crib. 

One can practically taste the Tivoli marble 

Extracted from the purest veins, lines like fine calligraphy 

Engraving histories no one has seen. 

                                                                  Apollo with his hollow eyes, 

Unthreateningly naked, smiling, Endymion blessed with the love

Of sister moon, Young Bacchus prospecting such truth in concoction 

His whole worldview turned. All the faces stored in stone 

Are some liege of mind to J Paul, some mode of feeling his way 

Through, just like Jupiter in the center of the room, 

Vibing the truth so that he won't have to

Give orders. 

                       There’s Commodus, infamous for his cruelty, 

Impassive with a boa’s gaze, Salus the physician 

With a snake and an egg, then a murder of soldiers 

Attuned to the right move to take, their best weapon their eyes 

Guarding a line of philosophers holding not speaking 

What they have realized: Epicurus trying to free himself from fear,

Demosthenes expressing the inexpressible curse of knowing 

How everything works but never why. 

                                                                Caligula looks like a decent chap, 

Almost a frat boy in here, out to avenge his many unhealed wounds

Amid J Paul’s exquisite visions of heaven, the “Griffin warrior” pulled 

From underground, a DNA hybrid, half-eagle, half-lion, the blank-slate 

Messiah who the Minoans gathered like the Magi around, a human

In divine form, and vice-versa. 

                                                         But the lion always attacks the do-good

Griffin, the bad half always vies for supremacy. Force needs to

Overcome acuity, as when J Paul tried to be his own

Divine feminine twin, when he liked to play himself at chess. 

But no matter how longingly he looked, from his mosquito-scarred coasts

At the sublime left behind, no matter what portal he spied 

In the beehives, what gold foil, blue glass jewelry, ibis lyre,

He could not help but reach the shore an argonaut – Pelagic octopi,

Who made it his business to be everywhere, to choke off supply, 

Convince himself if he only knew each run the guns would take 

He could meet every army with the force of his no, 

Which could see and yet resist, for kept men don't know 

Themselves enough to see ahead.                                                                                                                                     As with columns

So with military men – precision-measured expenditures 

Will subdue any stone, and history will remember you, 

Surveyor of all you control, on griffin-drawn chariot, 

A freak of nature with a terrifying shriek

Who swoops down in a way impossible to stop, 

Who thinks that by knowing, the heart will be humbled

But it’s always hurt, and money once used for fuel 

Is always repurposed as poison, to envenomate 

Any relation not built on unyielding

Obedience.

                   “I would give all my millions for lasting marital success” … 

But he wasn't liquid enough to save Timmy, his 12-year-old son 

From a mind tumor (whose funeral he didn’t as was his custom attend) 

Or his grandson Paul, famously, with ear Van Gogh’d 

In brandied tourniquet to prove he wasn’t like his son

Who did heroin in Morocco with the Rolling Stones

While his mistress OD’ed, or his other son, his “Vice President 

Of Failure” who took his life at 43, or his other, favored son

Who had a secret second family … 

                                                                      Ah the irony, 

These children would inherit J Paul’s father’s wealth 

Because old George kept it from him, to teach his son 

That lesson people born with everything never learn.

It went to his mom, but he could never separate 

His business affairs from her as he would have liked. 

When someone called him out for trading her a dry well 

For access in the Kettleman Dome she only smiled, 

Replied “isn’t he smart?”

She’s Agrippina the Younger, 

Looking viperous as ever, her minions with snakes for curls 

Like the roaring twenties girls he broke to break his heart. 

And there’s Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, foot

Comfortably on the male head, who gazes almost lovingly 

With the other women in stone who look on adoringly 

No matter what you say or do. 

                                                        And they are all Faustina the Elder, 

With medusa-snake hair, the mother wound softly resigned, 

Staring down the room with ambivalence and scorn. 

She’s goddess Minerva strategizing with pursed mouth 

And Flavian curls her next move, then the emperor’s wife, 

Unrepentant with snake bracelets, then the head 

Of Antonia Minor holding the sadness of feminine victory, 

Cups in forms of heads, women as goddesses, goddesses as women, 

Women with cupids as if to conjure from stone the eternal elixir. 

                                       And his signature piece, Crouching Venus, 

The one he worked hardest to pinch – he had the head reset

When convinced the placement was correct. 

                                                                      Forever in search, it seems

Of the muse that doesn’t blink, that sees through grief, 

Finds the lost, holds the answer, knows things as they are. 

A sarcophagus of muses carried you through – 

They knew the music you had within you 

And remembered the dreams you once really wanted – 

Until your will got in the way.

The will of a boy, whose best mosaics came from public baths, 

Who favored the Satyr always innocent, its smirk of being served, 

Allowed to love. 

                             He had lovers on an oil jar with a Scorpion lamp, 

Wine cups of couples fucking, women drinking games of chance, 

Mixing vessels appointed with the Gods that humans seduced: 

Bacchus and Ariadne, Adonis and Aphrodite, 

Silenius riding a wineskin at the Symposium 

Where men can agree on women and the talk is no longer 

Of Theseus slaying the Minotaur, Herakles wrestling lions. 

                                                             He loved his comic figures, 

Sought the Fool he never had: dwarf boxer, snake-legged giant. 

And he loved the daily magic of flasks, one

For every hetaera, each prettier than the last, 

Perfume vials that pulsed with lust, amulets of power 

Charged with a manifester’s wand, of glass fine as it was marred, 

Faded for peak redolence. 

                                                   He never lived with these pearls. 

He reserved them for us, to reveal who he was, 

Beneath the veneer no one saw through.

                                      Whatever kingdom this was in his mind, 

Whatever past lives made him self-medicate karma, 

He left himself the collector’s task to reconstruct 

From what was flung ritualistically to be broken 

What he could never bring to the surface from underground: 

Etruscan portraits in the manner of the Egyptians, 

Odysseus in Hades, the wool merchant's funeral barge,

A pair of peacocks and crocodile genii of the hippopotamus God, 

Bulls and insects on the pottery, beehives and seashells, 

Statuette of a begging Lar tondo always hung in patrician homes, 

Appliques in the form of the stars, Bactrian treasures of jaspar, 

Goat’s head buckles, priest with bird, a Cycladean harp player 

With that head that tells us we don’t have all the answers, even now.

                              J Paul retained the Methodist virtue 

Of being all alone in the world, answerable to no one, 

No matter how compelled they made it seem, the Cosa Nostra

Who snatched his grandson had no more stranglehold 

Than Rockefeller finally cartel-chiseled, who conspired 

To keep John Bull and Uncle Sam apart in the neutral zone, 

But that was just the kind of prison J Paul walked right through, 

To pay, with other people’s money, for the precision of Fortuna to

Bless and curse him, may he learn to be worthy.

                                                                                      Of course there was 

A payphone, by the restroom, a magnificent Roman bath. 

He reveled in the tales of his miserliness, it saved him the trouble 

Of having to ask. He claimed to have read every letter 

Addressed to the richest man in the world 

Claiming coin in the name of Pathos, that higher vapour 

Sir J Paul quaffed, and their victimization was his vindication

Because everyone made their choice. 

                                                                    He made his too, of course,

To not give in to the apple of temptation, the curse of compassion. 

He iconoclastically laundered his own shirts to save soap money 

For silk brocades, bergeres, Boucher’s most celestial tapestries. 

When it came to business he believed, like the Japanese, 

It was so unclean one had to reuse envelopes and paper

Yet he collected every issued Roman coin, from

Mother Earth reclining to Constantine as Janus,

Fished from the cisterns and seas with the relish 

Of a youthful numismatist, as if he had finally found 

Tender that would hold its worth forever.

Out across the peristyle lies the great Pacific ocean, 

Above a red white and blue bus in Malibu and the canyon’s blackened palms. 

A drunken Satyr lounges at the end of the long pool 

As Platonic solids in marble play chess with themselves 

And Mercury faces the sea. 

                                                  Paul, of course, lived near here, 

Down the Mermaid beach of the Palisades above the Santa Monica 

Wheel of Fortune pier. He had sent through channels instruction 

On sex with a quadriplegic, but only gave her a cheap agate coaster

For all the healing she’d performed. She broke it heartbroken 

Onto the floor, because everyone is a greater victim 

And chooses how to respond. 

                                                      Gail Getty came to her

Dressed like a homeless person and still held a firm 

Maternal force field over her alone,

Always desperate son, who by any objective measure

Had already gone to the birds. Why did he go to Hollywood 

To recover from a such a Babylon, from such a notorious thing, 

Such an object lesson in how love is not here?

                                                         Only under Vesuvius 

Were great Roman paintings unearthed, an isolated current 

Of a road not taken, that lives on deformed and little known, 

Imbuing like J Paul the emotion of absence into the obelisks 

And cornices in empty, mostly unobtrusive space, 

Exquisitely ordered as ornament and nothing else, 

The barest minimal of vertex and plane to make peace 

And still be liminal, harmonious with no true angle, 

No lines symmetrical, no mark unintentional, milked of color 

With beeswax, sap and dye until the richness of paint gleams pure

To express how it feels to be here, how power is

Powerlessness, the strength to endure, emotions alive 

With awareness and nothing more. 

                                                                The Getty's lived up in the end 

To the Gettysburg name, addressing, their next generations, the needs 

Of the lost, as the oil of J Paul's donation still greases cultured palms

That may itch for an extra second at that relief of grief, for a boy 

Taken tragically so that he – we – can console ourselves. 

Olive trees are still for sale, to collectors.

Adventures of the Newly Feral

The problem with the mind
It turns life into failure
What you didn't excise.

All the heroes are assholes,
Every gesture offends
Lived life outside the box.

The violence we welcome
Who have no motive to be violent
Would have one hauled to a farm.

Yet it stirs him up, the little man,
This materialization of dream,
From slaves and judicious editing.

The invisible creators know
How fine the line 
Between hero idolizing and killing

So there's no entry possible 
At any time, to where the thing
Actually came from.

All it's good for's to throw away 
The pleasures of the present,
Turned obligation, then neglect

As one follows the drama
From end to end, the spin
Of every fun house gun

For a hoped-for sort of mirror
Instead of how banally evil
Humans can become

How futile is
Their existence.
That's what's redeems

Wasting your life away,
To never quite leap
Into someone else.

They are always too ugly
In the end, too far away,
Too fictional to immortalize 

And one must make peace

With the illusion 
Of their own life.

That's the only kindness
They can give to God,
Walk as God, as inner parent,

Who we flatter until
We are empowered
By hearing "yes"

And nothing outside it.
The only time there is
At this point says to turn

The other cheek, 
Shift your perspective,
Look the other way,

Like Frank Lloyd Wright turned
When Scottsdale became a road
Forever from the southerly direction.

Recluse in a Rocking Chair

Those Mixolydian chords

And that 350-pound voice

Singing the heart out of an emaciated junkie

How I flow with the wave of the arena hive

As if we are one with the bass and drums

And the ineffable sighs that come from feeling everything

So we give everything,

All of our attention

To what happens on the stage:

Does he have teeth missing?

Is his guitar hero drowning him out of spite?

Or is distortion just cool dangerous,

A contract they both signed,

Like blood on the label, when they were

Too young to know anything but hunger?

Or so we speculate,

The intention cultivators,

The wise ones among us, who’ve read

All the interviews,

Examined fanzine notes

And traded tapes like monks eye scriptures.

There’s darkness in his eyes, yes,

Behind the dark star shades

And his movements are not those of a normal person.

Thus we observe his obscura

As if the key to our own authenticity, and the way

We were disappointed by what he never promised.

Even he, the God, will not admit

How powerless he was, how abused,

Though everything he does and is judged so mercilessly for

Stems from not feeling safe

Among other humans, so he screams

His symphony of closure on unprotected childhood

In silenced-lion roar nevermore

Out of the legend of a garage

He seemed to whistle from like software

As if already dead

Or exploded broken on the scene

Or doubtful at least his existence was worth living.

His sound flew over any disclosure

Of the thing he once wanted

To say, but couldn’t, then or now

And the wind carried it away

To the ravenous heart of the Americas

Who were never told such truths anyway,

Though we collectively

Experienced the many same indignities

To growing up not effed up in the 80’s,

The latchkeys never listened for,

The no at each hint of resistance

To the noises made by monsters in their sleep.

We take the monster’s mike

And dance his dance

But the thing that tells us who we are eludes

As the string of indulgences blur

Of date rape, paint and brownstone

That spins our vortex in circles around,

Humming all day long its forlorn tune, a mix

Of redemption with more suffering,

Release with more revolution on the wheel.

He no longer cares

If his fear arithmetic carries,

His anarchist brain forgets the moment everything burns

Why he poured the gasoline in the first place,

For something has been released, and he’s

Still disguised inside what he is not:

A modified 12-bar blues

Infused with everyone’s agendas

From the hair stylist to the road crew,

A family of sorts, or a nest

Of kibbitzers, if you listen in too closely.

We own him 'cos he doesn’t own himself.

And we render

Unto middleman Caesar our coins

But our hearts go to what he is not able to conjure

From the invisible, for us to find ourselves

With our senses. The feeling's only movement, 

An orbit around any center that will hold.

It’s not the same working through the chords

On old guitars and trying to sing his tremolo.

He owns us as we own him.

We call his a tragedy

But it is our own drama magnified

Until it can be seen, or, more accurately,

No longer identified

Except as fantasy realized,

That thing in the needle you never see.

Memoir of when Philly Won It All

His first single, at 17, was so advanced,

Too sophisticated for even the Doo Wop residue

That hung over steak Philly like cheese,

The twist had twistered from this town 

Never to be seen again

Except in the hair

But it was in the air, the Romeos, 

Kenny's dream, there at the start,

Use the radio for good,

The good of love in all its otherworldly glory,

Of peace through listening,

Making even the expressway a heart.

A lion knows when to pounce 

And when to look, and Kenny

Knew both, transmuted the Bachs

Near Wayne State to the

South Philadelphia streets,

The most hopeless of places.

Where better to give hope

Of a love train mothers fathers sisters brothers

House band, love its message?

Only an orchestra was worthy of this Philly.

The arrangements he commissioned 

Felt as real as the Freedom Theatre,

As the natter on the French horn stoops 

And the lips on pizzicato rooftops,

The words, Kenny's sword, cut so deep 

In love you only could fall right in

To a hole so sweet you could ride the air

Swirl of Philly Free to World B 

Before it became the symbol of America

Before it became crystalized as disco

Before it became the 70s themselves.

There was an actual business plan 

With all that infused the Jersey breezes,

To clean up the ghetto in fact 

Which meant in fact to face the fact

You're not a victim if you do not

Choose to be.

The sun shone kindly 

Even on his indiscretions,

How valuable they were to the cause

Of saving the black male

By the strength of his grace,

How much he could bend

To those stringent strings

Yet stay strong as the streets.

Even tho 

The traffic lights in North Philly

Are the only light

Down a long street

And the pleasures of musical flesh

Smelled like so much peddling 

When the cocaine turned serious

Heat up on the girls who wanted to be 3 degrees

Unhooked in that long coke binge 1980s

When Michael showed he listened to Kenny

Like few before him, how the rose

Of music can burn right through the thorns

To the glorious pools

Where we bathe each other

With golden water 

Under columns of brotherly love.

But the world could not contain 

The heaven of music

And Kenny turned to the children

Of his children, offering school 

With a non-misinformed education,

One that stresses, you guessed it, love

And graduates based on standards

Of peace and brotherhood.

And even when that loophole was tightened

By the crack bank, he stayed a lion,

Pleaded for money otherwise thrown to graft

To build houses, grow children, 

Serve communities, find opportunities

In the blackened shell of the one last church.

He gambles there still, with the lost

Who always had a voice

He never failed

To hear.

From the Invictus Files

The Chinese plan,

The long-term transaction,

Requires no thought at all,

Since it is only an idea

But that same idea

Sent Eddie Holland,

Who gave Motown words,

To debtor's prison

The best place

For songs to be from.

Proving also how it wasn't

Ever really meant

For him.

Everybody knows the story,

Thinks in fact it's exactly

Them

And the heart of every story

Loves a mystery

And the only name that comes through

The room's anechoic foam

Is one Edythe Wayne,

Who no one can determine

Is an alethonym

Or an actual person,

But a lot was lost

When creating weekly galaxies

We to this day revolve around,

Still standing in the heatwave shadows

Stopped in the name of not hurrying love

Kept hanging on without a witness

Not too proud to beg a little while ...

The blueprint for the path

In other words

Of whoever heaven cared to match,

Who's melodies still cling to the rugs

And sparkling chandeliers,

Still resound in quarry and rebar,

The foundation of the coffee shop

And corner bar, the grocery decisions at 2 am,

The endless Saturday afternoon 

Shopping for everything and seeing two movies,

All for the dreaming

Of a love that could be like that,

How longing with enough badgering 

Can float,

What Berry Gordy prophesied

As he created a slot for the heart

To fit tight as a Heidelberg pin

In the vast cosmos of the blues.

This Day in Buffalo Bills History

They were named for a vaudeville show 
Because the Buffalo Bisons were already spoken for,
But that hardly explains one Elbert D. "Golden Wheels" Dubenion 
From miniscule Bluffton College to be beckoned in black face
To the first playbill will call for a casting coach named Buster
With Carlton, Wray; Torczon, LaVerne; Fowler, Willmer; Yoho, Mack ...
Impossible names all, even for vaudeville 
When they shuffle off the mortal coil
Of Buffalo's defunct and defiant ghosts of football.

They never knew they were dead, you see,
Always thinking they were in it when they weren't.
It's not the same to beat the shit out of the other pigskin misfits
As ride the golden steeds of the football gods,
As merciless and clean as they were sexy, as this crew --
Archie and Butch and Booker and Stew --
The penitents of Lou -- most assuredly were not.

And then there was Cookie, washed out with the Argonauts
For his too-cool-for Canada's dry three goose wings down,
Proof you can liquefy a cookie, to minstrel show juice.
He came with Ernie Warlick - a name I didn't make up -
To try their luck down South in the impossible TV snow

That brought light to Niagara's honeymooner cabins

And the arc welding eyes of the Lackawanna Poles,

The factory negroes, the Erie Irish, the Alsatians

Who came in on the wind. They agreed on nothing 

But the Bills, how truly disappointing they were,

And how they still prefer Pepsi 2 to 1 to Coke and think

The Bavarian creme pies on the East Side are the best in the world.

The world. Yes they want a taste of the misery of glory but

No one had anything to give, only the glory of misery.
Still they took so tiny a slot in the prime time machine,
They only took, even from the mythical Buffalo, the urge to run.

That's where Cookie came in, never crumbling,
Even at contract time, when Buffalo wingback payback
Made it apparent at last just how far Buffalo's light had cast,
The first Tesla-electrified city so they say,
And he was cast to the woeful Bronco winds 
As was Daryl "the Mad Bomber" Lamonica
Presented for peanuts and a harmonica
To the Al Davis monkey vendor, as Jack the quarterback 
Became, because he could not be the hero of this play, 
A Republican intellectual who ran for President
On an "I'm a quarterback" plank, but no one by that time
Even remembered him.

                          What travelling show can't encompass such tragedy?
Their brothers in guerilla war rode the bouncing Super Bowl
To respectability and riches while they still
Stirred the cream of a post-Cookie apocalypse.
They changed their stadium from War to Rich
After the types of sweets at the sponsor's bakery.

And no one was ever sweeter than the man they called OJ,
The rich rookie who raced through the house that Cookie built
And whose father was the souest chef in Frisco Bay,
And if it wasn't for the love of his son, not able to be
White man cool like his heterosexual celebrity dad,
Carrying his pig-skinning chef knives to maul his great white stepmother,
We would be able to remember him,
The juice in the Electric Company, a light on TV,
The way he made us forget, for a moment,
That it mattered he was black.

Shimmerings while Driving

The agreed-upon illusion frays:

The real life beckons beyond the box ...

And the voice, as experience turns to knowledge, replies

"You have always been Drew Barrymore."

Of Neptune's Songs

There's unrestrained joy in being someone else

Though it is more hotel than home,

The hermit crab shell from 1750

Embossed with a name that's familiar,

And the tavern serves real grog

And the pewter shines like it can't anymore.

Everything is imagination, the entire encounter

With the props and sets and characters

Who walk through our camera eye

As we frame, frame, frame 

And brighten and dim

At the margins

Until eventually we become

What we see,

The thing we have looked at so long

It has, by gaze alone, gained value,

The worth we've taken from us

By way of service.

The Impresario Files

               They are for me,

  somewhere between

      private and secret,

Longing to be seen

      but for my shame.

Scout, scribe, producer, creator

      of everything that is new,

      unique 

And worthy

      of our praise

Are captured in those pages

As if it really happened

            that way,

One visionary of pure commitment

     who brings the most sublime

            seemingly alone,

The Great One

     in every endeavorous occupation

            man is fit and prone to:

   

            carjacking to tiddlywinks,

            obscure presidents to

                         one-man genres

                                         of junk

All collected here

     in the perfection of detail,

What might have been, if heroes were,

    If I was in it, not as central cast player,

             not even as a person at all,

Just watching, blissfully, the librarian

                  of human perfection

             never really possible on this Earth

                   and the files better for that,

                        to have not really happened

                               but been imagined 

                                        as if remembered

                             

                                                           lived.

But the curtains are closing in,

        they can no longer be just one

              vision, each perspective puzzled 

                  into the whole, merged among soulsparks,

                     but a multitude

                          that exists for multiplicity,

And I am left with a cake – all frosting –

       and so many skinned ones left alive.

                         What drives this sweet tooth?

That brings such holiness and joy

                               this thing forbidden,

        called useless, not real,

               the thing they throw you in looney bins for,

                       dissociated, unsustainable

Until I go on to a new one, a new angle of me,

        a bender

        pulled out of the singularity,

             a near-face, a vibrancy

                       not quite there,

        where we are, 

                               here,

        but greater ones

             who can’t exist,

                       the heroes only stone,

    the longing, really, for the feeling

            achievement 

                                 bestows

            without the fetid failures

                  and lack of will, failure to pour

                       one’s insight out far enough

    no

         years of drinking beers on the coast raising chickens,

    no one-trick wonder hit ponies who never grazed

                 from the fields they was born

                                   folks not big enough

                 for my dreams to disappear into,

                     Not the composite figure 

          just like us.

         Ah but when the laws bend

it's like when too much light gets in

         the convent window,

                      there's no end

         to the contemplation

of how one could be

         what no one really was,

a sublimation of what is felt,

         the art, instead of the life

                                            that found it

                                that lived in it

                for a brief time,

          but couldn’t be that life

          existing independently of us,

    and made us human, being slightly more,

and even if the files that prove the possibility

                will be tossed

                   to the waste

   when it is no longer my memory

                 perhaps it would no longer be needed,

                               maybe it makes things go

                 somewhere else,

Maybe it's the only clue

        of what I am to be,

             having already been,

                  already seen

                                and done,

These things one would regard

                  as impossible,

     like John and Paul being

                  one and the same.

My Hero, Dave Smith

Matters of Life and Death

     are so insignificant

Compared to Identity,

     the all-seeing, 

            never-being eye.

The watching 

     makes film, cuts sheets,

Forms shards 

     in kaleidoscopic panoply 

             for fantasy

Of being on the earth

     as something whole,

Meaningful, 

     instead of the ball

            that jumps off the glove.

There is everything there,

     in the silence, they say,

Even the blue tongues of sea

     have something to say

            beyond any "I" 

Yet they are silent in all

     the ways that count

To counting folk,

     who know

             no other way

Of honoring, remembering,

     carrying a space

For the thought

     of someone

              else,

Who can seem so close

      to one's core

To feel so far,

      at home

              in another's oblivion.

It's like a gift 

     from someone intact,

Who knows something,

     recognized from 

                somewhere,

It is a person,

     unlike me,

This small 

     archive of

                humanity,

Some near-ideas

     to recite,

Distant feelings to repeat,

     charisma to extol

                 not knowing why,

Only that it makes me who I am,

     which is almost something,

Almost what I never was

      and never could

                  understand.

Evening Vignette

Salt life

Mist over the stacks

Flannel

As we turn inward

On the quiet streets

Save the occasional 

Scrape of in-line skates.

The patio people

Have moved inside.

I feel the pull 

From that old friend

Lassitude

Like a light bulb 

Freeing my brain.

The community 

Is finally

Available for me

To imagine.

Before the Bonfire

What I know,

What I bothered to learn

I had to make up.

The facts, it turns out,

Are never enough 

Unless they add up —

And there are 

Far too many

Differential equations

To turn ennui

And powerlessness 

Into bliss,

The bliss of 

An orderly mind

In an orderly world,

Where pain is

Speculated about daily

For not being known,

Although it looks like

That is all

That was left

In the last pot of gold

Shining as

The ultimate value,

For that, it turns out,

Is all we know,

The gaps

And our greed

To have them

Full.

Old Songs in Late Afternoon

The song is too familiar by now:
Hero denied, on a logical course, turns
To hero victorious, if only in pain
That we donate towards.

The progression is only of chords,
Transcendence is only in words that rhyme.
We think it’s the heartbeat that drives our lives,
The scars of love our medal to shine.

One day it will have nothing to do with your life,
As much as you’ve waited in its void
For your number to turn up.
You’re glad to have wasted your time

In another’s dream. It seemed freeing
‘Til you knew the song too well
To think it applied to you, as some homage
To your daily loss, as if that’s what it was. 

It's always whatever you need it to be,
As long as you don’t know what it is,
The tricks it consists of,
The souls given over to its charge.

The chaos of the mad as they escape the clubs
Seems like order to us now, like sanity.
There is no other world, we say,
Than the one of beauty and heartbreak,

And we line up to play our roles
As off-key singers, busy drummers, 
Guitarists without callouses or thumbs.
And even when it loses, at last, its meaning

There is still another alternative take 
Somewhere waiting, that may free you 
From the aimlessness within. There must be a song 

Beyond all last chances, to lose yourself in again.

Confessions of a Fantasy Addict

You can be anything

     when you are nothing

— Plugging volcanoes up

                        is a bore

When you only exist

                as others.

You can judge 

                        the flaws

Of the less-than-perfect

     perfection,

Make the fallen

                 angels small

Whose rosary beads

                 you handle

Intoning

      some prayer

To get you next to them

                          to feel

When the double play is turned,

     the note that no one expects is bent ...

The accomplishment 

     makes them figures of glass

And you

                 more than them.

Holy Saturday

The Jesus and Elvis syndrome

           takes its hearts

With arrows dipped in 

                     acetylene 

To inflame the pilgrims

                             with longing

That they themselves

      can be set aside 

For the iconographies

                     of fashion,

What earned the rites of peace

      in surrender.

The purple robe flung over

      the shoulders of the frame

Constitutes an impermissible pearl

           hung with a name

That ravages the non-believers

                        in themselves,

A black that grows

                        with every motion,

For the song is never right,

           the suit too sourly tight,

The light too obscure for

                       illuminating nights

Left to our own devises 

                       without device.

The agency concocts the sunrise

           in our minds

Each year, day, season,

           for every discrete reason,

Careering as the cosmos

                                locks its gems.

You will not handle them today.

                 Your longing 

Must persist.

The Urge to Turn the Dial

The song bubbles like an egg

Its gnosis

Many are called but few

Are susceptible

Fewer still take anything 

Tangible from it

Some judgement

A door

So their squeaky hinge might

Sing with the dead

Pateresque in Extremis

I remember, somehow, the vapours,

The smell of hay as strange music played,

A peculiar unveiling of notes,

As if a sculptor found a head in a block of stone, 

That frisson of suggestion 

Of an alien taste

That became an impenetrable fort

Created in the black world, by fancy

Oblivious to the snares that leave

The living mangled, forever bitter

In the waves of intellectual cruelty,

The currents of rough-hewn froth.

Enlargement -- derangement -- of the senses

Is not for us, those who know, but for those

We seal our lives against 

With the right approach, the proper turn,

To acknowledge the disappearance 

Of the agreed-upon world, unexamined

By consensus, inexperienced in truth,

No awareness that there was no consensus, 

Only compulsion, no truth, except 

As was assigned -- the openings were too bright 

To admit any concourse with such foraging 

For sustenance, in the dark of meaning.

What lifts away from 

The unassailable logic of another's ignorance

Are those who know to seek

The secret of wings, the insides of mountains,

The rooms in the clouds -- one could call it reaction,

A strike in an opposite direction

But it has always been the same,

The escape into what is just not seen --

How can they prove an existence

That requires in them no belief?

So there are labyrinthine tapestries,

Gems from Byzantium, fragrant scrolls

As holy objects set before the non-believers

By those who once were there, but are now

Interstitial, where gold lies unexplored.

Oh so many books to dig through,

So much reading, in order to know 

That what I know already is true.

Night Thoughts of Trini Lopez

The quiet has become total

           yet the mind keeps 

     spinning around itself,

Reaching for the ghost limbs

                             of the dream.

All that's left is a feeling,

        like a half-forgotten song's

        remembered charm.

It's an ancient book of fiction,

    of knowledge and its makers

    on a cross to be the victors

        over the ennui of disbelief. 

The key no longer turns.

     The station now is static.

It's dawn before the noise begins,

                            pure, white.

Piscean Overhang

The books are so many sand

     Paintings dispersed

               By a hand

As the Age of Messiahs passes,

     The hero in theory

               Always a cad

                                         In fact.

The good can only be bad,

     Much as it pains

               The martyr inside

Who knows the outside world

               Can't help

                                  To surmise.

All circles fit into the circle.

All colors metamorphize to one.

     The slogans and the flags,

               False maps.

     The stone floor contains

               Many faces

                                    Not even trapped.

Further Diversions for the Connoisseurs

I.

They are as gnats, these fantasies,

Weaving and circling in implicate paths,

Never quite breaking from the real

That holds them to float, in suspension 

And motion, something unobservable 

To observe, unreachable to claw after,

Far from the hotel morning aperitifs

In Marrakech or, say, Bologna,

The gifts of the road, the sun on the porch 

The only light exhaustion affords, those 

Are only implied. It's the force of the sun

Through fingers and a mind that is cottoned 

Like candy, what appears, in other words,

Not what is, the light, not the bearer of light,

But it is, the bearer only, we create ...

II.

Out of the creation. There is only

The creation, the form labeled illusion,

That is real, so the actual person,

The separate creator, becomes imprisoned 

In who I am, or, rather, want to be,

The skin I wish to shed, as pelt, or scalp

To prove, in how I felt about another's

Work, that I am ... worthy, or complete,

Or that I fit into an interesting world, 

Not the one we both inhabit, where vapors

Bleed from other rooms, the beats

Of central and essential drummers

After truth and beauty ... We are somehow them

In hearing it so, yet so apart we have to

Draw their essences back to still their sound.

III.

We have to wear their colors and their hair 

In some invisible approximation 

That will bend, as phantom individuals,

To a larger drummer, so conform to

The one who drums, the one who takes on

A life of its own, as simulacrum, Frankendrum

But kind enough to let the voices that are,

After all, distinct, speak, for the most part,

With only a slight revision required,

A part of the individual lives

Must be erased, to let the story play

And make room, after all, for the all.

We are one. Once we believe in that lie

All deceptions are available, and

Even the bare individual must yield.

IV.

He must be reformed to the invisible, 

The illusions that form co-creates.

One is only as good as ... what one makes,

What one is turned into, baked in the heat

Of desire and will to overcome another

For the beauty they have left behind.

The space within the acoustical void

Is too much more filled with echo than stuff

To hum on its own, without an ear

To own its moment, momentarily --

And the residue bleeds through 

The echoing rooms of the brain,

Where the dust of old libraries pullullate 

In golden light: gathered facts, names like

Talismans, ideas and images that cling.

V.

They need some place to go, where they can

Commune among themselves, and interact

Without need of our organizing minds

Sweeping up the notes of the melody 

As it weaves and circles, like so much dust

In and out of place, to sift, endlessly

And return to the same location

On the disc, in the archives of the sounds,

Cataloged by circumspect collectors

Of the original, lost, and thus preserved,

As a value, a vinyl

Itself. For, in fact, we never left

Our childhood, our imaginary friends

Of invasive Martian vines, pre-pubescent 

Gumshoes, coyotes in cowboy hats ...

VI.

The spinning wheel of karma was always on

To be lost in, platters of beat-itudes 

That never seemed to begin or end,

Only seemed to. One needs to be

Rescued from the past, by being immersed 

In the radiant essence of what had been lost,

An impossibility that could only be

Navigated by this monstrosity

Of implied wires and freeze-dried sparks,

The imaginary creator trapped

In the half-life of what was once created,

That exists now only as a virus

Accepted by the mind as part of itself,

To multiply inside the host as something else,

Growing larger as its possibility shrinks.