I was reading information on the song I currently have on my profile and I found some interesting information I thought worthy of passing on. For your reference the lyrics to the song itself are at the end of this entry.
Lead singer, Jakob Dylan of The Wallflowers had this to say on the song, "One Headlight"; "I tend to write with a lot of metaphors and images, so people take them literally. The song's meaning is all in the first verse. [. . . ] At times, it seems like there should be a code among human beings that is about respect and appreciation."
The song itself released in 1996 is about a woman who dies after suffering from breast cancer, thus the title, "One Headlight" and the reference to "a broken heart disease" (line 4). But it's not the cancer which took her life, she takes her own with the help of a close friend who in turn is left to deal with the legal ramifications of participating in an assisted suicide. Thus the reference to, "The long broken arm of human law" (line 6).
In the chorus sections (beginning lines 10, 30 and 48) you can see that this friend was supportive through the situation almost by saying that even after mastectomy you are still beautiful and that she can still get through.
The stanza beginning at line 18 is pretty much the recollection of that moment where it's realized that the value one places on life does not exceed that of an individual's pain and suffering.
In the stanza beginning line 38 is that point of realization that the narrator is without her and left to clean up the mess.
Why do I bring it up? Jack Kevorkian was recently released from prison. This song was released at the apex of his career as Dr. Death. In his official statement he said, "My new mission is not assisted suicide. My work is effectively done there. I'll do what I can to have it legalized" (Associated Press. June 5) Did he learn that assisted suicide is wrong? Obviously not, he just learned a different approach. We are again addressed with the question of "Is it wrong?"
"Do you think he'll kill again?" I remember being asked the day after his release and I thought, "What's wrong with you?" I happen to think there nothing wrong about it. I personally believe in Living Wills. I leave explicit instruction with my Family Doctor and the hospital of what to do in case I attempt to check out as a result of another automobile accident or even minor surgery.
It was once reported to me that another person on learning of my medical history said, "He must have a better appreciation for life" and I do believe that is a correct assumption. That situation combined with volunteer work I had done at geriatric facilities in my youth makes me believe that life is nothing without quality. Also keeping a personal copy of your complete medical history is handy.
That last paragraph makes me think of what a contradiction I am and always have been. In my blog about the Berlin Wall I discussed a facet of my youth; yes I did drugs and I was no stranger to law enforcement. I started volunteering at geriatric facilities as court order community service when I was 13. Even after I had completed the ordered 2,000 plus hours I stayed on and even volunteered at other facilities when I'd move until I was about 17. If I wasn't finding trouble, I was reading to the elderly. It was actually a lot of fun, especially so when I had blue hair and worked with mental patients. If you need I can provide references.
Overall I'm here to make you think, what is your opinion on the subject then? Feel free to respond.
Note; Singer/Songwriter Jakob Dylan is the son of Bob Dylan.
The Wallflowers; One Headlight.
1) So long ago, I don't remember when
That's when they say I lost my only friend
Well they said she died easy of a broken heart disease
As I listened through the cemetery trees
5) I seen the sun comin' up at the funeral at dawn
The long broken arm of human law
Now it always seemed such a waste
She always had a pretty face
So I wondered how she hung around this place
10) Hey, come on try a little
Nothing is forever
There's got to be something better than
In the middle
But me & Cinderella
We put it all together
We can drive it home
With one headlight
18) She said it's cold
It feels like Independence Day
And I can't break away from this parade
But there's got to be an opening
Somewhere here in front of me
Through this maze of ugliness and greed
And I seen the sun up ahead
At the county line bridge
Sayin' all there's good and nothingness is dead
We'll run until she's out of breath
She ran until there's nothin' left
She hit the end-it's just her window ledge
30) Hey, come on try a little
Nothing is forever
There's got to be something better than
In the middle
But me & Cinderella
We put it all together
We can drive it home
With one headlight
38) Well this place is old
It feels just like a beat up truck
I turn the engine, but the engine doesn't turn
Well it smells of cheap wine & cigarettes
This place is always such a mess
Sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn
I'm so alone, and I feel just like somebody else
Man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same
But somewhere here in between the city walls of dyin' dreams
I think her death it must be killin' me
48) Hey, come on try a little
Nothing is forever
There's got to be something better than
In the middle
But me & Cinderella
We put it all together
We can drive it home
With one headlight
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Howling with Ginsberg
I sat outside my classroom waiting for the last class to leave. We had a separate assignment not marked on the syllabus and I had forgotten which page we were to read; fortunately a girl in my class showed up and I was able to ask her. She told me the page and I opened that page. As I read she started about how she didn’t get it. I continued to read a midst her statements of how she was enjoying my facial reactions to the contents. There was a rhythm to the work that I began tapping my pencil to as my mind moved through it. I could feel myself falling into it.
Two others from my class showed up and began discussing the reading. They too were having trouble consuming it; one said, “It just looks like a drug addled rant.” I looked up from my book and simply stated, “No you do not get it. This isn’t the Pre-Raphaelites or even iambic pentameter. You have to read it like Emerson or Thoreau.”
All three looked at me with puzzled expressions characterized by tilted heads and cocked eyebrows. “I don’t understand,” the girl said.
“What did you understand?” I asked.
“Just the reference to drugs and criticism of Jews.” The other two agreed.
“Those are just in reference to the overall statement. Did no one catch the homo-erotic imagery? It’s a voice.” I said, “It’s meant to be heard not read.” Their expressions did not change so I began to read aloud.
HOWL
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
I felt my reality shift. As I read the prose aloud I could feel the words drip from my lips. Their meanings were sticky and wet on my mind. I felt intoxicated.
I had only made it through part one by the time the previous class left the room and we stood to move into the room. The girl looked at me and said, “We should have every class in the hallway.” The two others mumbled in agreement.
Two others from my class showed up and began discussing the reading. They too were having trouble consuming it; one said, “It just looks like a drug addled rant.” I looked up from my book and simply stated, “No you do not get it. This isn’t the Pre-Raphaelites or even iambic pentameter. You have to read it like Emerson or Thoreau.”
All three looked at me with puzzled expressions characterized by tilted heads and cocked eyebrows. “I don’t understand,” the girl said.
“What did you understand?” I asked.
“Just the reference to drugs and criticism of Jews.” The other two agreed.
“Those are just in reference to the overall statement. Did no one catch the homo-erotic imagery? It’s a voice.” I said, “It’s meant to be heard not read.” Their expressions did not change so I began to read aloud.
HOWL
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
I felt my reality shift. As I read the prose aloud I could feel the words drip from my lips. Their meanings were sticky and wet on my mind. I felt intoxicated.
I had only made it through part one by the time the previous class left the room and we stood to move into the room. The girl looked at me and said, “We should have every class in the hallway.” The two others mumbled in agreement.
Heroes?
Originally posted on Myspace on 6/11/2006. I moved it here as I’ve decided to establish a new blog home.
Do heroes have heroes? I mean the real life ones; we have all seen the various public service broadcast where some prominent sports figure or otherwise says that some ordinary person (usually a teacher) was their hero. Sports figures are not really heroes anyway. They are little more than a means of misguiding young minds towards unproductive careers.
Not everybody can be a football star; the world needs ditch diggers too and that is how they are made. A young mind is given some lofty image to aspire too and from the beginning they get set up for failure. Why do you think that Jesus is not depicted as a hero? I never saw any Jesus lunchboxes when I was in grade school. No Saturday Morning Cartoons depicting Jesus thwarting the evils of Hell or mending the ills of society. Much less I have never seen a Jesus costume on sale for Halloween, and that is a great idea for a costume! Is not the Halloween costume the ultimate expression for a kids appreciation for a hero; dressing like them and emulating them? Maybe next Halloween I will dress as either Jesus or Osama Bin Laden; not for the hero worship, I would do it for the sheer shock value.
But I digress, the reason Jesus is not a hero is because any kid knows that they could never grow up to be him. I mean come on; your dad has to be other worldly and your mom has to be a virgin. Heh, they both may as well be from another planet. . . like Krypton. Any kid though could get bitten by a radioactive spider, see their parents die at the hands of a bloodthirsty gangster or be solicited by aliens to act as law enforcement for this part of the galaxy right? You mean they cannot?
See here I go on my rationale on why Lex Luthor is my hero. He had no special circumstance surrounding his coming up in the ranks of super villainy other than he blamed Superman for his male pattern baldness. He was just a man like any other yet he was driven by internal principles to succeed. Imagine the tenacity it takes to wake up each day and say to yourself, Today is the day that I kill Superman; der Übermensch .
I recall when I was a child being raised as a fledgling mormon I was told that evil was easier to do than good, that is why there are evil people. You know what; it is damned hard being evil even for the comic strip villains. First off there is that continued trial and error especially when you know that the deck is stacked against you. Then you have issues with the Justice League, the unlimited resources of Bruce Wayne, labor and logistics, not to mention the backing of the American Military. We all know how rare sample rocks from Mars are on this planet; do you have any idea what a rock from Krypton would cost? What choice do you have but to form the Legion of Doom and take on a bunch of other freaks as co-workers?
Now let us take a look at real life Super-Villains. No I am not counting the serial killers and various thugs in American society or religious fanatics and cult leaders, they would not even make middle management in the Legion of Doom. I am not sure how the Joker got a chair in there, but we are past that conversation.
The people I am talking about Ill take from what we as Americans have been spoon fed to believe are realities villains. Most immediately that come to mind would be Osama Bin Laden, Sadam Hussein, Mullah Muhammad Omar, Fidel Castro and former Panamanian Dictator Manuel Noriega. This carries us from the present back to the 70s with the exclusion of the Ayatollah Khomeini, more on him later. But what these guys have in common is that they ruled countries with an iron fist and they came to power by a sole force, the backing of the American Military. Guess that places them firmly on the side of the Justice League then even if they did not turn into the puppet governments we had hoped for.
So then the Anti-Heroes; or as Id like to call them, the underdogs must be the people who ran counter to this modern day Justice League; the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nikita Khrushchev and the former Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Already I am seeing problems in this group. Though a formidable opponent, Hirohito remained Emperor of Japan until his death in the 80s and very much enjoyed the support and presence of the Americans Military in the 40 plus years following the end of World War Two. Khrushchev fought on the side of the Allied Armies in repelling the Nazis so he is out. I am not even going to option the Nazis considering the strong American support their party had in taking power. Then there is Khomeini whom had his convictions and ideals which helped to overthrow a government and made him a constant thorn in the side of the Justice League until his death in 1989. But that association of with the Justice League makes him like the Joker which in turn makes Hussein out to be Batman and we already know that I do not approve of the Joker having a chair in the Legion of Doom; although it does make sense to associate Hussein as Batman; darkly sociopathic and operating under his own rules to the same ends as the Justice League.
All those leaders ruled with an iron fist too. Maybe I need to start working with that quality which I found most admirable in them all; like doing what I feel is right for me and fisting the masses.
Yeah I’ll work it out.
Do heroes have heroes? I mean the real life ones; we have all seen the various public service broadcast where some prominent sports figure or otherwise says that some ordinary person (usually a teacher) was their hero. Sports figures are not really heroes anyway. They are little more than a means of misguiding young minds towards unproductive careers.
Not everybody can be a football star; the world needs ditch diggers too and that is how they are made. A young mind is given some lofty image to aspire too and from the beginning they get set up for failure. Why do you think that Jesus is not depicted as a hero? I never saw any Jesus lunchboxes when I was in grade school. No Saturday Morning Cartoons depicting Jesus thwarting the evils of Hell or mending the ills of society. Much less I have never seen a Jesus costume on sale for Halloween, and that is a great idea for a costume! Is not the Halloween costume the ultimate expression for a kids appreciation for a hero; dressing like them and emulating them? Maybe next Halloween I will dress as either Jesus or Osama Bin Laden; not for the hero worship, I would do it for the sheer shock value.
But I digress, the reason Jesus is not a hero is because any kid knows that they could never grow up to be him. I mean come on; your dad has to be other worldly and your mom has to be a virgin. Heh, they both may as well be from another planet. . . like Krypton. Any kid though could get bitten by a radioactive spider, see their parents die at the hands of a bloodthirsty gangster or be solicited by aliens to act as law enforcement for this part of the galaxy right? You mean they cannot?
See here I go on my rationale on why Lex Luthor is my hero. He had no special circumstance surrounding his coming up in the ranks of super villainy other than he blamed Superman for his male pattern baldness. He was just a man like any other yet he was driven by internal principles to succeed. Imagine the tenacity it takes to wake up each day and say to yourself, Today is the day that I kill Superman; der Übermensch .
I recall when I was a child being raised as a fledgling mormon I was told that evil was easier to do than good, that is why there are evil people. You know what; it is damned hard being evil even for the comic strip villains. First off there is that continued trial and error especially when you know that the deck is stacked against you. Then you have issues with the Justice League, the unlimited resources of Bruce Wayne, labor and logistics, not to mention the backing of the American Military. We all know how rare sample rocks from Mars are on this planet; do you have any idea what a rock from Krypton would cost? What choice do you have but to form the Legion of Doom and take on a bunch of other freaks as co-workers?
Now let us take a look at real life Super-Villains. No I am not counting the serial killers and various thugs in American society or religious fanatics and cult leaders, they would not even make middle management in the Legion of Doom. I am not sure how the Joker got a chair in there, but we are past that conversation.
The people I am talking about Ill take from what we as Americans have been spoon fed to believe are realities villains. Most immediately that come to mind would be Osama Bin Laden, Sadam Hussein, Mullah Muhammad Omar, Fidel Castro and former Panamanian Dictator Manuel Noriega. This carries us from the present back to the 70s with the exclusion of the Ayatollah Khomeini, more on him later. But what these guys have in common is that they ruled countries with an iron fist and they came to power by a sole force, the backing of the American Military. Guess that places them firmly on the side of the Justice League then even if they did not turn into the puppet governments we had hoped for.
So then the Anti-Heroes; or as Id like to call them, the underdogs must be the people who ran counter to this modern day Justice League; the Ayatollah Khomeini, Nikita Khrushchev and the former Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Already I am seeing problems in this group. Though a formidable opponent, Hirohito remained Emperor of Japan until his death in the 80s and very much enjoyed the support and presence of the Americans Military in the 40 plus years following the end of World War Two. Khrushchev fought on the side of the Allied Armies in repelling the Nazis so he is out. I am not even going to option the Nazis considering the strong American support their party had in taking power. Then there is Khomeini whom had his convictions and ideals which helped to overthrow a government and made him a constant thorn in the side of the Justice League until his death in 1989. But that association of with the Justice League makes him like the Joker which in turn makes Hussein out to be Batman and we already know that I do not approve of the Joker having a chair in the Legion of Doom; although it does make sense to associate Hussein as Batman; darkly sociopathic and operating under his own rules to the same ends as the Justice League.
All those leaders ruled with an iron fist too. Maybe I need to start working with that quality which I found most admirable in them all; like doing what I feel is right for me and fisting the masses.
Yeah I’ll work it out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)