I do believe

I'm going!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The suspense

Is driving me a little insane...

For Not Us - Rewrite

VIII

for P.C.


There's a lattice
of steel bars
as your voice
in me:
all meaning
fails itself
you can say
trade the wind
like a point
bloated with principle
I'm here
you're there
just beyond
green lines
show how holy
blood each day
is wasted on
prophet tongues
not here—not for
rubble hordes
a grip of stone
pebble pastiche
stoned fiction
for a time
the story seemed
to hold by name
a siege enthroned
ad hominem
ecce homo
ex nihilo.

Fences

"you’ve seen so many fences that it makes you want to weep."
--John Cleary

Euphemisms

Why can't we say "died"? Why do people pass? Pass sounds like a voluntary choice to me. You pass on seconds at a dinner table, you pass a road sign to where you're going while your distracted by the beautiful blonde in the BMW passing you, you pass the greay poupon, pass the carrots, you pass your glass for a refill, you pass on condoms because you're too drunk to keep it up with that much latex. In all these things pass is voluntary except when most people die. Now we can make an argument that suicides should be the model for voluntary death, but you know there's a sticky gray area there too.

I'm still uncomfortable with relying on the 12th definition of the verb form of pass in reference to a person's death. I might prefer the 1st definition of the word's noun form as being closer related to coins for Charon than the act of transition. However, why can't we say died or death? Is there something to permanent in those two words that there isn't in pass? Is passing away imply a passage to someplace? Is there a destination in pass that you don't get in death or died?

I've always been curious about this. I find it hard to use the term passed away, I just say died. I feel more comfortabl with the absolute nature of that phrase than with the nebulous and implied potentials with passing away. I don't like to think that my loved ones passed away, willingly or otherwise, and that they may be in some thick reality definied by the faithful and instituted by zealots in an afterlife church of eternal exclusivity. No, I want to think of them as having expired, used this flesh up and finally it or whatever passes for soul or spirit, relinquished it's grip and expired. That seems like an equally euphemised way of looking at something for which we have a perfectly good term, yet it still doesn't quite satisfy.

Why do we want to pass away? Why can't we just come to grips with dying? "The dead look so very dead when they're dead." wrote Sommerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge. The statement seems to plant the dead where they should be, not among the living, but dead, in a state other than living. If the path to that state weren't important, then they can't have passed into a state where they look very dead as the dead tend to be when they're dead. It seems that death, in this case, is evoked for three senses or means by which we understand the world: the dead (noun) look so very dead (appearance) when they're dead (being). Language vs. the appearance of reality vs. that thing in itself concept that Schoppenhauer talked so much about.

Perhaps we can find a reason for our need to put choice into the equation whose result is death: "The dead only know one thing: it's better to be alive." These words came from the internal monologue like narration of Mathew Modine's character in Full Metal Jacket as he stood over a pit full of corpses covered in lime. Private Joker muses that the state of death has a knwoledge in it, something that we can say is similar to willing passage, that the dead know something we the living don't. Is it that are privy to the great mystery of the beyond before we are? Is there a certainty in the state of being dead that the living only guess at, or in a complete abandonment of empirical rationality, embrace whole heartedly regardless of the possible dissapointment? The dead, if they knew that living was better, might make the choice of passage even more difficult to stomach.

The sad fact is that we need to pass, we need transition to represent something. As myth is as much to explain natural phenomenon as to place an individual into the constructed cosmology and realize the self in terms of "other" according to Jung, then death has to have a meaning and a continuity through human history. Our greatest fear is falling out of the thread, so we pass, from one thread to another, from memory to memory like a photograph carried through a sea of people. We have to have our loved ones pass from this place to the kingdom du jour so that we can still feel like potentn creatures capable of affecting positive changes in the world around, because there is a choice.

reflections in perspective

Delillo wrote about in white noise, the most important unifying trait between humans is their ability to communicate their fear and wonder at death through language. We're brothers and sisters because we can talk about death.

But is it possible that death can make us want to feel more than we should? Is it possible that between head and heart there exists an exterior syntax of emotion that we can only understand through an empathic vernacular that gives us pause? I didn't know him that well, but I can't stop thinking about him. I see the tattoos on his arms taking flight, lifting off his skin, pealing away, and I miss the potential of running into him again and sharing a pint of whiskey. There's nothing touching about my emotions here, only their genuine quality is what's striking and I sit here and curse the almighty for being a poor steward and all those other things as pointless as tears but just as necessary.

I wonder if we need to feel other than ourselves sometimes.

From the time (in anticipation -edited)

from the time

you landed maybe until you might wake up knowing night was figment the buildings tall sleekness etched chunk architectures borrowed and built to remain civil in the way that organisms take space and grow from center out stalin marked his mass with bigger blocks in an older strain not of this century but the river’s ice can support the city in times of need large trucks rolled across frozen water the worst floods are marked with iron quarters were germans got their own high water line russian corners in this room and that still painting over twelve languages of graphiti to rosko’s murder happened in a book but the stairs will echo his steps exhaustive walking wears away what can be written into stones zdes ohn napisal prestuplenya e nakazanya or its not his city in the seems bursting countryside clerks there’s twenty thousand memoires floating in the pages of zapiski iz podpolya the thing is its not about hiding if it weren’t for ownership the flats we used as temporary housing for the jet set elite in soviet times mark this hall with exposed piping set out with brass knobs to look less shoddy shoe repair is tops in small wooden shacks on the street is something missed in every museum you just can’t take in whole stories here rolling on the grass with a chain collar his claws haven’t quite learned how deadly we have become speaking candidly my favorite club was underground they called boonkar on its roof was patio far at street level jenya came back from chicago at twelve she came back here knowing the lingo can make money lips drunken the closer we spoke and scream she leaning forward just far enough and tight top low vee-cut I couldn’t not bare but stare back to the subject of literary stigmatas shelves in every pub crawl with books and zoom cafes the check on page thirty-six now mates with lenin and maybe the waitress borrowed her mother’s dress to pioneer the new western freedoms here’s a tv with cherenko walking by and zip to fucking forms in soft core shells landed in spilled blood’s fifth dome knocking down a big chunk o jesus was originally of three domes for father son and holy coat of arms triangulated on their gold crowns until mountain men painted heaven’s glorylaid out on every corner unlike other churches sasha said you have to be dressed prelechnya what you choose to wear is your business but take off the star five points to it and its everywhere like mars field flames to fan it still burns in everything never is forgotten time memorials 1881 at 20:36 someone had to stop the rain which keeps it all green and the water was high enough to submerge the first floor cellars where the best eats still sink down under the building just far enough for the stray dog to seem filled with smoke and the green fumes of absinth fueling liberation’s freedom from lucid resignations for the dead like vrubel’s lavender gestalt generally understood you have to come to terms with food and the power wielded by grocery stores have now succumb to supermarkets and dixie lies around every corner shops stay open all the time and each one has a state sponsored drunk across from my hotel his name was kolya and looked like he was close to sainthood at twenty three for the solstice and the last bell where they give them the city that he hasn’t yet returned for their own uses can you tell that things revolve and you can live for celebration and acceleration while moods are not advised for foreigners there are still niggers and a nigger is a nigger he tried to tell the cop that they were cousins and he was a racist because he was the only black man on the streets while making quick work of something that should be kept indoors the goom displays cases against the jews because sasha couldn’t understand why they died the same but death isn’t unknowable and he knew that they were dead but still reviled even in death there’s no such thing as a jewish hero of the soviet and something like perestroika enduring the longest hatred has got to be a civil duty to serve at eighteen while vera asked her to go na belayi notche and we were followed by body guards for ten days of canon’s hand and the huge motif of what’s really quite a small head in exaggerated relief aid was something that a people must do for themselves while shostokovich wrote a symphony under siege this city is always playing even when you can’t stop looking look again at your watch telling you one thing and if it were the 19^th centuries’ clock faced grin you’d wonder if he’s the worst sort of man that can’t even hold his liquor while you’re sitting on the shitter when the revolution came the aurora glowed on nevya where she rusts to the racket of a nearby caravan of busses in five indo-european peoples we were fucked by the mongols and then took turns being done and doing sweeden declared in olden times the worst enemy but it was not a crime open to imagination you think if they see it somehow reversed like a dove flying through a mirror and every square has been mistranslated into its current form zamak and zamok mean they have a natural and integral link if you could unlock one to get to the other side of the river isn’t quit the same here in the center of the city you’ll be kept well and hospitable and for fifty bucks she’ll make you orgasm all night long listen you call me next time you come here as the rain fell I thought back to his job and couldn’t help but chuckle that everyone thinks they’ve been deceived s’mokrayi dela the cops will leave you be for fifteen hundred it’s the most expensive piss you’ve ever given that the west doesn’t understand the beauty of birch in the thickest of ancient slavic bath houses its purely a russian phenomenon to want something more you ask in metrics drink in english pubs around the world are just as bad outside of england similarly overpriced markets for colorful knick knacks patty whack this old night went rolling into that bronze horseman on the whicker rock he rode down but as you enter the place where five million people dwell and you can’t help but feel that devastation was built into the design of the city

27th & Fulton

What were you thinking?

I was making up for something I should’ve done.

That was your thinking?

No, that’s just what I did.

So you just picked her up?

She stopped me as I was getting out of the car. I had just pulled up to my building with a belly full of Filipino delicacies and a head full of nostalgia. She asked me where the 2000 block of 44th was. I pointed toward the ocean and said across the park she said that she was scared to cross the park. It was 11 already.

So it was dark and she didn’t want to walk a few blocks?

Could you blame her?

Was she pretty?

You don’t have to be attractive to fear for your skin. She asked me if I’d give her a ride. I’d just popped the trunk to fetch my bag and some goodies I bought earlier. I paused and choked down a mouth full of um’s and uh’s. Without really thinking the whole thing through a yeah came rolling off my lips. So I walked to the otherside of the car, cleared my stuff from the passenger seat, she saddled up with her three bags, all small handbag things that looked like canvas even though they were some hybrid leather thing. I didn’t bother closing the door for her.

She wasn’t pretty.

That’s not the point. I just climbed into the driver seat half expecting her to be holding a derringer to my head. She held her bags close and I fired up the car and started down Fulton. She asked me if I was from New York, I told her people get that impression, it must be the jewish father in me. She didn’t get it.

Get what?

I barreled down Fulton cause I had a date, see, I had to get back cause she was coming over. I wasn’t even really sure what I was doing at that point. I hung a left on 43rd and when we reached that first intersection I said, did you know there’s buffalo in the park? What do you mean she said. I said, there’s a buffalo paddock in the park, its just one of those things that people don’t know or realize. That’s crazy she said. So I shifted down into third and hurried it along.

What else did she say?

Not much really, she was quiet in that way that you’re quiet when you really don’t know what you’re doing. She thought San Francisco was full of do-gooders.

Why’d she think that?

Cause I gave her a ride I suppose.

You’re a regular mighty mouse.

I know, I told her she caught me on a good day, that’s all. She said she was from San Diego and that people weren’t quite so nice. I told her that she’s probably walking on a borrowed carpet of luck. About this time I made the left on 44th at Lincoln. It was the 1000 block.

Did you drop her off?

No, felt bad, it was cold, damp, you know the way that summers get, early on, the nights and that neo-gothic-fog thing that happens as a way of pretending that the rest of the world isn’t enjoying a bit of warmth.

Yeah.

I decided to keep driving. We went by one hundreds, each block a bit closer, each distance marked by an ever thicker silence until finally she opened her mouth and said that she didn’t know the people she was going to stay with very well. We crossed Taraval at that point and I was just a couple blocks off. I ran a stop sign and pulled up at the end of the next block, 2100. I said to her that we had arrived. She opened the door, and I was about to take that sigh…

Relief?

Something less pure… Fuck, it’s over.

So did she get out?

She looked down at her feet. Maybe the revolver was in her leg warmer, or maybe she had a shiv poked up in that furry knit cap she wore. I started to get into my mental bruce lee posture for whatever was coming. No one’s really happy she asked me.

So what did you say?

I agreed with her…

but…

I didn’t say it, I just said, I am.

That’s not like you.

No, it really isn’t. But the free ride didn’t include a chat about the world’s inclination toward unhappiness and false senses of security. So she got out of the car and said thanks as the door was closing. I pulled away as soon as she had cleared the rear tire.

Was it worth it?

I think I’m still in debt.

You know anything could’ve happened, she could’ve called the cops, and…

Yeah I know, but she didn’t seem the type.

So why’d you do it?

I think I want to live in a place where that’s possible.

What’s possible.

Depending on strangers.

But you didn’t talk to her.

I know, that’s too personal.