CARBON DATING

Nighttime. I turn on my laptop and log in and start to read the new news and blues and see what screws have come loose now. Instantly I start to get a dull headache as the room starts to fill up slow and bittersweet and steady and unstoppable with exhaust fumes of destruction, exhausting fumes of pure corruption, the brainkilling carbon monoxide poisoning symptoms of a country in dangerous and serious mental and emotional and physical decline; empire of the slum. The news is always bad. A deranged pornographic kaleidoscope of ever-more-insane hysteria and pain and madness and stupidity dances crippled before my disbelieving wide analytic eyes: abortion killers, fun-damn-mentalist Bible-bashing blowhard bastards, fuck-the-country wannabe-secessionists, uncompromising progress-blockers in every legal and artistic and sociological arena, nigger-haters, gun-lovers, government disbelievers, hatefueled true believers, gaybashers, invisible everywhere-lurking terrorists, crosswaving self-loathing ugly female senators throwing out impotent legal bills of gynecologic fury from the unfucked cunts of their religious insanity, and always the never-amended-or-mended Second Amendment bullet ballet argument, militant militia mania, they can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead ideology, and everywhere the rank dogpiss ammonia smell of corporate madness and hatred seeping from every clogged societal pore, madmen at the country wheel steering it over the financial cliff of evil and psychopathology, herding us into the deathcamps of global warming and absolute final solution consumerist stupidity, and yes we see the tempers and temperatures in the country are escalating, too late to scale back, we know you, we own you, we know how to control you, and long as we keep you overfed and braindead and preoccupied with fads and gadgets and new apps 24/7 365/365 you won’t even look up as you bump into people on the streets as our inaction-encouraging distractions gain traction in your dopamined brains, reward chemicals for another Facebook message, a last lost look at your ever-receding hairline and humanity and ever-increasing gut and hatred and confusion, we are your new and last and weary gods, we are the new emperors who wear no clothes but the ones we design and sell to you, we are the new insane kings and fuhrers of all inherent evil, the hierarchical stupidity of the human race never went away, it just disguised itself in the sheep’s clothing of a young wolf country born ready to be betrayed by all within and its own unbending arrogance and incomprehension, a dying country with no pride, no principles, no societal cohesion, no neighbors anybody knows or cares about so let’s just line ‘em up like sitting ducks in some new weekly ever-occurring school shooting and have the NRA talk about the DOA as if they were AOK and say well, we need to sell you more guns to kill more people because we’re all in one big open-air insane asylum shooting gallery now, automatic rejection of semi-automatic gun control, of course the blood and bones and brains of dead kindergartners don’t concern us, we have a war to sell here, the war on Americans versus Americans as the maniacs at the top laugh and yelp in mad dog glee from behind gated communities of infinite stasis and decay and death, pounding their fists on sturdy mahogany antique tables at the hilarious sights of a country lost at sea and drowning steadily, from sea to shining seizure, but no seizure of guns, can’t ruin the fun, got to keep them killing each other brother and mother and father and sister and cousin and missus and mister, north versus south versus east versus west versus good versus bad versus ugly versus right versus wrong, and it never ever stops even for a second, throw some more coal on the ire, a bit more racism, a bit more religion, a bit more homophobia, a bit more abject stupidity, we need a vagrant vapid bill or two to attack that uppity nigrah in the White House, yes the White House for white men, historically, we don’t want to see the changing population demographic numbers, the election flagged our flaccid erection, our country club is shrinking and being powerless is calling, we’re fighting tooth and nail for all the shit we don’t even care about anyway, no miserable person like a rich person, as a nation of vapid teenage narcissists masturbates on cam for bored hiding middle aged men and every bloody body just tries to stick their head in the sandcastles that will effectively be ejected from the historical record by time and tides that wait for no man, kill an illegal immigrant for Christ or sport or fun, it’s all the same to us, just another underground video for the sick kids to jerk off to before it goes viral, their parents watching sexy pathologists easily solving crimes and righting all wrongs in the unreal world, restoring justice and sanity to a meaningless existence, the bad guys are always caught, but there are funeral pyres of the death of dignity and human decency and privacy burning ever-brighter in the clammy consumerist night far as the tired pain-reflecting eye can see, the slipscream of the Bush legacy, Bush, the man who toppled the twin towers of reason and sanity in America and turned the place into Jesus-loves-guns-and-madness-and-droneland, they say ignorance is bliss, but really, ignorance is a blister bursting the bubble of every citizen of America in its own painful way, free dumb of speechless with nothing to say, as our already-old kids educate us as to how to use some new stupid app on some new stupid gadget, and it takes too much effort to get angry and rebel, but why would we rebel against comfort anyway, and what would a revolution bring, meet the new boss same as the old busted flush, flush that shit down the toilet of history, no time for retro utopias anymore, just stick our snouts in the televisual and internet trough as the sky fills with holes and carbon gases and we don’t know what to do but at least we have an excuse for our nameless faceless fear, we don’t know our friends our neighbors our history or anything about the ultimate mystery or beauty of life, we have nothing to live or die for, and the levels of carbon monoxide are building in my room, my lips are blue cyanosis my prognosis and mass hypnosis and mass psychosis are my diagnosis, who the fuck are these people and how did they get so fucked up and why am I here, why am I reading about this still filling myself up with their alien madness, I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this anymore, I CAN’T FUCKING DO THIS ANYMORE I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE, I don’t know why they let themselves be led, not with a whimper but with a big bang of psychic electricity and had-enough-bullshit sanity and grace and humanity, so before my brain can get any more beaten and battered and bloody and bruised and used and abused and confused I switch off the laptop with one last somehow burst of energy and go to see what time it is and it’s morning I have been lost in cyberspace or someplace wearing someface somehow somewhere and I go for a brisk stiff early morning walk down by Lake Michigan and stroll along the pier by the Loyola dorms and stand looking out onto choppy waters on a wet rainy morning and spit words of swept-away nothing out into the mocking natural void and look to the event horizon and a beautyfuel red ball of sun starts to rise to illuminate the new natural day slow and sweet and steady and unstoppable and therapeutic.

BODICE RIPPER

Esther is Jewish
The People of the Book
She has dementia
Never stops talking gibberish
Apparently in her day she was
an avid reader, it was all she did
The other day she was sitting
in her wheelchair in the
activities room of the
assisted living facility
I work at and she was reaching
across to try and grab a romance novel
from the table in front of her
So I went to hand it to her and she looked confused
Not taking it from me initially
I smiled and asked her if she wanted it
She squinted and smiled weakly in confusion
Said yes and took it from me
I went off to help other people out
for a while ducking and diving
here there everywhere and nowhere
as you do in that busy environment
When I came back later on into the room
She had taken the book and torn it into pieces
throwing them on the floor all around her chair
A pile of broken hearts and snapped spines
and dead lines and permanently demotivated characters
And as I sighed sadly and picked them up
to consign them to the dustbin of literary history
I thought well, Esther's days of
romancing and reading are
definitely long gone
Forever.

FRIENDLY FIRE


Wayne’s an ex-military
Resident with dementia
In the nursing home I work in
Can’t remember his old rank and it doesn’t matter now
He sleeps fully clothed and laughs when you wake him up
Tells you he slept well and undresses easily for you
Ambulatory amiable full of life and smiles and weirdness
Pulling his cellphone TV remote control from his pocket
Toilet splattered with ill-aimed nocturnal diarrhea
Not cleaned by lazy careless housekeepers
The nurse tells me he shouldn’t be here
Because he’s violent but the place is new
And the owners are trying to fill it up
With nothing but well-paying residents
Not a single race but white in sight
Except for the caregivers of course
Apparently Wayne tries to punch or elbow you in the face
If he gets agitated, his home caregiver quit
Said she couldn’t take it anymore
That old American military violence still
Lurking ready to surgical strike
He grabbed me the other day by the arm
When I was trying to take him to his room
To change his diaper and he dragged me along
“HURRY! JUST LIKE IN THE ARMY!”
Giving me my marching orders
I wrestled my arm free, smiling blandly
Cos you can’t take any of this stuff personally
And told him to please let me go soldier
Which he did and a moment later
He was back to abnormal again
His usual confused constantly-laughing docile state
And I got him changed and on his nowhere way
He tells me he never saw any combat, thankfully
But he definitely caught some family friendly fire
In the inescapable bloodsoaked battlefield
Of genetics and the bad luck of the physiological draw
Turning his flickering brain to quietly dying nothing
Combat radio signals across the minefield of life
Fading slowly to cheap unintelligible gibberish
Orders from central command torn to pieces
By dementia shrapnel lodged in the assaulted brain
We have ways of making you talk total garbage
Won the existential battle but lost the cerebral war
And there is no way he’s going to get evacuated
From this
Internal
Unwinnable
Warzone
Now or
Ever.


END (2.39pm, 7/17/2012)

YOUNG MINNESOTA WOMANSWIM

Late morning in Starbucks on N Sheridan. She sits by the window, drinking, eating, planning, fanning out her evolving thoughts across the table for idle introspection inspection. Ageless early 20s. Shortish dark-brown modish self-cut-and-dyed hair, straight from the successful home hairdresser fashion lab. There is a delicious twinkle in her glasses-clad chameleon-color beautiful eyes as she says and then sees what she thinks about things, reflected back in an off-kilter refracting Celtic mirror, turning stray thoughts in her mind behind those sometimes-knitted-in-bemusement brows, curiosity killed the categories once available to and defining her past present future. Visiting Minnesota just isn’t the same or home anymore, the Mississippi is just a puddle next to the great elegant mystery and stationary heft of Lake Michigan, she’s glad now to get back to her true home sweet home, the Windy City. She came to Chicago as a grateful foreign member of the Midwestern student diaspora, studying the past, taking chances, making changes, meeting strange and interesting or weird and wired new people, wide-eyed and wild-hearted and drinking it all in, smalltown frown to big city big girl smile, all or nothing, noting all, devoting time to study and dance and drinking and basketball, far far away from the naïve girl of her youth, tectonic plates shifting in her life grinding against each other and splitting off to create whole new future countries of infinite possibility, continental shifts and drifts from MN to IL to A-OK, family ties stretching over roads weary of separating distance, muted summer dreams of sibling homecoming, shooting her presence quick sharp and gone again into the Minnesota old home territories by stealth bus trip under cover of mission-obscuring night through Wisconsin and silent public dark, tidemarks of where the Mississippi used to reach to in her dreams receding under summer droughts of waterkiller education, cracked mudtracks of youthful expectation, storms of confused coming-adulthood post-collegiate tears never enough to fill a thimbleful of the lost liquid of hometown black hole suction, the MN gravity pull never strong enough to hold her and her unconquerable ambitions to know it all and more or less, knowledge sponge, mind stretching and growing nimble and muscular with concepts and precepts long-way removed from hometown arguing with the state fair Godboys, a religious education in moral depths and theories of relative existence, good and bad and black and white and right and wrong and write her jazzlover song, soulseeker, bluestweaker,I love it I love it I love it can’t get enough of it, played sax in high school, sweet thing it’s just a singswingthing, Heaven-11, sometimes the books speak and sometimes they speak with forked tongues twisting old views and fables methodically into something new and exciting and revelationary and revolutionary and evolutionary strands of Minnesotan rebirth, they certainly know it all and nothing don’t they, all those hierarchies of knowledge and pain and aggression under progression, tell me some more of your old-worldview-reinforcing swept-away-soon stormsong, I see the coming cleansing scholastic fire, the sweeping away of the lies, the capitalistic furies and harpies, the rumors, the suppressed histories, the vicious female mysteries, teach me it all and more, I’ll throw your dead dry bookbones up into the air and laugh as I explain the new unprecedented patterns they fall down into, hieroglyphs of tradition and sedition and new raw deal invention and suppression and resurrection of human dignity and grace and sanity and my new iPhone makes me just like them I wanna help heal the world hold the world in my loving arms and balmy charms and make it all alright again make the people tight with each other it’s the way it should be you know, don’t be so cynical, the mass of people aren’t so bad, they’re just confused deluded protested and planned against and the Occupy movement has its moments but there’s a goal-sullying class divide there, the bohos versus the blue collar street people, anarchists, homeless, jobless, money-obsessed-goal-free, void of the strictures of middle-to-upper-middle-class entitlement dramas and dreams of the perfect job they were promised since privileged birth, I don’t know, it’s just a mass debating point, just a thought or two, it’s all there to be played with or played for, all or nothing or something like that, and I don’t know, really, and nor do you, so let’s just finish up this coffee and go out into the ever-appealing-or-appalling early spring sunshine and say goodbye to idle unsurprising nothing-solving chattering classes in coffee house discourse and catch some rays there’s still a million things to do so I’ll catch you later on the other side of the new born breed takeover.

A NEW YEAR'S PARIS OF THE MIND

I knock at your door and you answer. We smile hellos and I tell you it’s time to take a no-time at-all trip to Paris near New Year 2011 in praise of its architecture and history and people and art and atmosphere. You agree and ask me how we’ll get there at such short notice and without baggage or tickets and I smile widely and say it’s never a problem to take a trip with your mind across the ocean. I grab you by the head and heart and hand and within moments we’re undertaking a faster-than-Concorde speed-of-soundless transatlantic voyage through the air. It’s a warm night and the choppy beating waves below in the dark calligraffiti a neverending series of half-curlicues onto the water as they crash on blindly to nowhere in particular with no goal or need for justification of their aquatic calisthenics. We fly invisibly under planes and over boats and indistinct quick-passed landmasses and islands and hear occasional curious gullcries and tiny human voices crying out in the speeding-by blue-blackness. In no time we are in France and over very early morning Paris and we glide free as laughing vertiginous birds as we fly round and drink in the endless loops of natural beauty the place eternally has to offer. The breathtaking Eiffel Tower is lit up like the world’s biggest Christmas tree and morning is slow-breaking behind it, the sun peeking and poking and peering unconquerably through the darkshade metal struts and bringing with it the scent of a coming new year’s hope and dreams and promises. We land and begin to walk and think and drink in the beauty of the scenery. Vendors hawk newspapers using tough throaty Gallic shouts, passersby throw down Euros for blues of news or butter-dripper croissants and strong hot refreshing awakening coffee, and cooking smells of a million delicate cuisine variations meet and mingle delicious and transient in the hungry grateful air. The city is coming out of its short nightly hibernation like an unseasonal butterfly from an esthetic cocoon and it spreads its eye-stunning multicolor wings in all directions at all times and in all ways. The stereotypical phantoms of accordion music ring faint and pleasurable in our foreign ears as the soft mellifluous French tongue cracks the silence of the morning and sets the city ablaze with a million catch-up tales of the day and night before, a million cellphones ring in staccato communicative satellite rhythm, streetwalkers and nightcrawlers disappear like scorched vampires at the first true blazing razing rays of the invasive intolerant sun. Light bounces back from blank reflective foreheads of building, windows open, blinds are opened, half-clothed people yawn and squint into the day, lovers untangle, showers wash off traces of spilled love or partying from the decadent hedonistic holiday evening before. The commingled gas-guzzler noises of cars and buses and motorcycles and trains and clank-and-clacking trams start to build to a sullen omnipresent inescapable roar on the narrow-compared-to-Chicago busy streets and alleyways. Half-understood signs ecrire en Francaise, la langue d’amour give us no clear guidance or direction at all but that doesn’t matter, we have the unflappable compass-direction accuracy that only a fantasy tripper can offer a city and its sights to be seen. People sit outside cobblestone-flanked cafes and eat baguettes and gulp down gossip or news and coffee as cyclists buzz unheedingly by. We stop and buy some food and laugh and smile and happily watch the new day go ever-faster by from our seats next to a reflective tourist-curious window. Stores of all shapes and sizes are open for business, as we wander round the retro socialist utopian dreams and visions of an ancient and wary and slightly wary but never fully jaded or defeated people, liberte egalite fraternite their ecstatic tripartite motto, one for all and all for one. We are everywhere and nowhere in Paris all at the same time and have no map or timeline or reality anchor, so we rush this way and that, back and forth, up and down, round and round, close-crowded arches and statues of ancient French heroes of all descriptions everywhere we look or walk. Then we’re crossing the River Seine and Notre Dame Cathedral is looming up into gray gothic inescapable view, its architecture and intimidating demanding presence awe-and-vertigo-inspiring, the kind of unbeatable incredible human monument that makes you want to let out a whoop of joy and amazement to loose streams of pigeons and maybe even concrete-cracked gargoyles from the building’s nooks and crannies to fill the startled sky with the crack and beat of their adrenaline wings on the fearful winds of escape and hiding. We think of the hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo’s misshapen 1831 creation hidden high in his belfry, sanctuary and safety beating deep and rhythmic in his hunchbacked bellringer’s heart, and what a lovely Esmerelda you would make, with the garlands of his doomed love braided into your gypsy hair, and we talk of how Charles Laughton’s 1939 monochrome-clad performance as the poor misfit was the ultimate representation of his pain and anger and ecstasy. The day has worn on into late morning and we stop for a refreshing overhauling glass of fine French red wine from the Bordeaux region in a stylish bar, examining the frescoes and neon arabesques of verite décor on the tres chic walls, before setting out again along to the Musee de Louvre on the Right Bank of the Seine, 1st arrondissement, 218 years of art history and mystery and wealth, where you have been dying to go since we first arrived. We marvel at the shopping mall glass skylight outside the Louvre, La Pyramid Inversee, a construction that makes us reflect on Egypt, and we go inside. The Pyramid outside mirrors the Egyptian collection of art and antiquities inside, and you, potential modern Isis incarnation, feel mysterious affinities tremble in your beautiful brown flesh at the half-buried half-dormant racial memory of some far-off era as it swims towards the contemporary surface before disappearing back down into the Stygian evolutionary depths of time and chance and insoluble heritage mystery. We disappear for awestruck contemplative hours into deep gazing at the paintings of the art section, Rembrandt and Caravaggio and Vermeer, and of course da Vinci’s enigmatic damsel, Mona Lisa, whose eternally celebrated small half-smile cannot hold a candle to your own beauty, which is so hot I am surprised it doesn’t cause the day to curl up at the sides black and crisp like a photograph held over a negative flame. I could imagine your smile or personality hung there among the all-time greats to be marveled over by a million lovesick tourists a year. We are truly lost among contemplations and ruminations on artistic revelations and artifact arty-facts revealed to us in our thirsty-for-knowledge ignorance which is not bliss, and we lose all track of time and space and place. Before we know it the place is closing and we bid the greats of the artworld a sad fond goodbye and make our way out to the Champs-Elysees and walk along there for hours, talking of past and present and future, saluting L’Arc de Triomphe’s majesty and myth and might in the dark. The 2011 holiday season theme for lighting les Champs-Elysees is Tree Rings, with many of the avenue’s horse-chestnut trees being encircles by a beautiful ring of neon firelight, and the reflection from the synthetic glow in your dark smiling eyes is a stunning thing indeed, a warm vibrant constant loop of circles of joy and seasonal esthetic bliss and purity, the most beautiful sight in all Paris, incomparable illumination, kilowatt voltage overdose, and I feel as turned-around as the huge lit-up blazing Ferris wheel at the end of the avenue, pleased and proud to be with you here in my overawed imagination. But morning is coming again and it’s time to go. You complain a bit but know I’m right and then off we go again as the fading Eiffel Christmas lights losing their battle against sunrise bid us a fond electric farewell. In the blink of an eye we are back at Lake Michigan again, and in our building, and it’s still dark here, the middle of the night. You thank me for a wonderful minds-eye bird’s-eye view of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and I say you’re more than welcome, we can go there or anywhere anytime, there’s much more to see and poetry flows like red ink waiting to be spilled in expression through my release-screaming veins. I kiss you once, a goodnight-cum-New-Year’s kiss, and then I am gone but not forgotten.

THE PLACE OF THE CURE OF THE SOUL

Sailing through centuries-long rivers of evolutionary bloodfire for a brief terminal stop on the North African shore of perfect female possibility. Lineage and heritage swimming through tributaries of attraction and sweating brown flesh distraction to coalesce in five foot three of giant playstorm, sandswarms, eternal beauty inviolate, time will never erase or violate or annihilate the sharp-focus careful-brushstroke image etched onto the grateful retina of eternity. A circus of unknown unexperienced animals, tortoises and crocodiles and cobras, African heritage natural icons and anthems to freedom subconsciously absorbed and reproduced free of right-now American behavioral strictures. Flooding season in the artistic heart of Rogers Park, schoolwork screams dying down to relieved thankful sighs, the red earth scholastic desert trekked through, cool studied words of poetic poignant poise of bittersweet teardrinker reminisces. Electronic communication crackles through the cinnamon-tainted painter’s air, second takes on half-baked half-concealed cookies and cupcakes, parallel playnight, childhood analogies, progress into regression personal artistic obsession and character-laws lesson, clothed in black with Jackson Pollock Rorschach paintgunsprays, sartorial nightmare feverdreambubbles, dreams lighter than all air, black hair, artgirl lair, emotional shellslayer, fervent orchid prayer to a gathering of all the luck of the world in one place, it’s the music I put on when I need nothing to listen to, noiseless sonics leaving their environment utterly undisturbed. Bemused semi-fascinated grin, bubbletrouble sketchily etched onto a sketchbook fetched through self-conscious arthide, lost art, found art, round-the-heart-wound art, sound wound round the artheart, artforming, brainstorming all the colors under the brainrainbow, brainbow to nobody, standing on the brow or bow of a ship made of papyrus and Egyptian sweat and inspiration, perspiration pays, psychedreams, Jung Turx, outdated mental tick the boxes for a readymade pathology cure-path. The boat borne on the meaty swift bloodbeat under the transparent inchoate skin and opposite sexswarm. Enigmatic dark retinal coalburn quietfire lifefury, blacksparkle oh-no-go-show toenails, orangesock lookyseefail, freefall, nightwall, stopfan, tiny words floating above bubbles impatient to be free of the page, purple fingernails atop hieroglyph digits inscribing internal-stormstate-describing cryptic runes of styleburn calligraphy, calligraffiti, call it graffiti, American Egyptian Guyanan colorloops, flamelick honeysun skin with brown vertiginous nipples, alien breast scene, Nile rivers and valleys of infinite valuable depth and fertile beauty and purity, allcolors from paintbrushes rushing down over young heartonsleeve body to rainbow-streak the prickling flesh, stark sharp juxtaposition of wet pink lily of sex and brown molded bodyfire, shocking contrast, Valley of the Queens, Isis portrait, Ra shining smiling down on one of the Seven Wonders of the World, treasure of the pharaohs, the sun finally setting on the oblique pyramids of Rogers Park dreams and then down the wooden hill for an unexplored hurricane of tomorrows. 10pm-12.12pm, 12/8-9/2011.

FRIDAY TIGHT

FRIDAY TIGHT (11.08pm-11.16pm, 3/23/2012, one take straight through, no revisions)

Hamilton's Bar
Corner of N Broadway
and educational drunkenness
Early in the night
a half-hundred empty seats
patiently awaiting a
thousand boozelubed
drunken Friday evening
dreams to be
Various ages
Various dipsomaniac stages
Excited promising sound
of the dancestorm
beginning slowbuilding
Back bar open
Soon dozens of partiers
Hoping of hopping on a pleasure bus to
nowhere but
Back and forth and up and down
A million TV jetsets
broadcasting unintelligible
various sporting
screams from the ceiling
of little sensible but
the scores of college
basketball or nothing at all
Currently underemployed
whitetop waitresses wait distressed
and circle and stalk like
tip-starved great whites
Fresh flash of college flesh
Flush and gush of beertap
Watching idly the passersby
Scotland-similar
archetypes arty types
partytypes legpartertypes
The night is young
The night is well hung
between daycrowd and
nightshift ready to clock
in and sing and swing and
raise a glass to the
University of Life in passing
sensurround and another round
and round and about and
Mine's a Guinness
Cheers
Slainte.

WORDPAINTING A BEACHFRONT MURAL (9/12/2011, 3.31pm-4.05pm)

Concrete beachfront seating mural divided into visions and dreams and advertisements a few feet wide. These graykiller paintings have been done by local people and businesses. I saw them being prepared under the sweatsheen sun a few weeks ago; one is helpfully memory-jogger-dated 6/19/11. The beach and vision-attacked seating was a boiling contrary hive of laughing shouting jumping praising appraising paintsmear bodies creating their tribal community naïve artburns. The colors are vibrant and eyegrabbing; all-shade rainbow palettes construct an everchanging static vista of dream faces and ocean scenes and nonexistent eerie salamander-like animals and dogs and awestruck celebratory singing fish and horses and men and women and footprints and skylines and flowers and clenched solidarity-urging fists and pianoplaying and trees and islands and kiteflyers and Biblical scenes and windows to other mindworlds and insects and welcoming immigrant borders and footballsize globes and mushrooms and sleeping dreamers and aliens and sharks and octopi and lions and skyscrapers and snowcap mountains and skiers and rabbits and streams and stars and moons and books and cryptic dream transcriptions and handshadowpuppets and cloudsleeper babies and Mona Lisa and John Lennon and ice cream and feet and erupting volcanos and scissors and skeletons and dinosaurs and fairies and mermaids and Daliesque surrealist grindscapes and skullhead snakes and bees and houses and suns and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and hearts and minds laid bare on an endless imagestorm kaleidoscope groping for some sort of winning inner truth or thought-tide externalized and communicated. The previous panel about an artist creating their own truth, that Gene kicked in anger before falling over when I mischievously pointed it out to him in May, has been painted over. I don’t know who flowed these colorslick flickershows or if they were given an idea to create around, though I would assume they were (I could check but really don't want to know, preferring instead to impose my own subjective spinterpretation on the pictures) as dreams are a constant recurring theme-thread: dreams of a new better tomorrow, dreams of peace, dreams of world purity, dreams of sweet dreams, ugly and scary somnambulistic nightmare-dreaming dramas, silent primal screams of nightfight terrors. Spirituality is presented often too, looping artistic representations of New Age and religious tropes past and present, naïve atombased stabs at everlasting serenity and wisdom and salvation or maybe just unwitting dimly-remembered-echo paintings of the eternal rest in peace to be found on the other silent side of the forever-wailing wall of death, each oily snapshot numbered, 1-151 with some having won prizes in their teen or whatever class; win a prize for turning yourself inside out and upside down truth and guts and brains and heart laid out in a hundred-and-a-half internal romantic panoramic slices, everyone’s a winner but the dreams will only grow sadly thinner and more jaded and hazy with the unbeatable fading effect of the beating sun’s unstoppable scandalous ultraviolet vandalism as the end of the where-did-it-go year runs at us at full grinding-halt gallop.

FURBLUR

I can see a couple of wee squirrels from where I am sitting. Chicago is squirrel central. Seen them eat anything from old cold pizza to chicken Mcnuggets; they're not fussy or healthy eaters, hell no! I love that lolloping galloping archback run they have, the wee black eyes in the brown face, scamper, scuttle, white-and-brown tailflick, forage, sniff sniff sniff ground, stop, wait, alert, sense something in the air, look round, listen to the wind, hear a sound, fly off up a tree or into a garden never to be seen again.

WAITRESSES OF THE AREA

One is blonde, a totally gorgeous wee honey lighting the day up wherever she walks and whenever she talks, and is training to be a massage therapist. I told her she looks, to me, like a young Cybill Shepherd. She didn’t get the reference. Oh well.

One is from Louisiana, has tattoos, wears neon-red lipstick, loves Bukowski, and reeks of raw bad-girl-gone-mostly-good energy.

One is lovely, studies English at Loyola, loves JK Rowling and liked my stories about the Edinburgh café where she wrote the first Harry Potter book. Says I’m the first Scotsman she’s ever served. I believe her.

One is pretty and bespectacled and end seems endearingly kooky. Says she’d love to hear some of my work read out to music, picking up on its rhythmic intonations.

One just graduated Loyola as an actor. I haven’t seen her in anything yet, but confess I don’t get out to the theatre much at all.

One is inattentive and furtive-seeming for no clear reason; you know how you just feel that way about some people. She just seems like she can’t be bothered and should be doing another job.

One is black and very beautiful, another Loyola girl, works on Tuesdays and bears the name of a continent.

One is Hispanic and very attractive and drives a white car. Gave me a jump-start one time and saved me a lot of trouble by doing so. Said she feels like she’s been married twice with two deep relationships she’s been in.

One is attractive and wears glasses, studies Science at Loyola and has a super-intelligent gaze that looks like it could cut through steel or split the atom. I made her laugh and she told me I was an easy table.

SATURDAY BREAKBEAT (8/27/2011, 12.19PM - 1.06PM)

Slowglide lakefront wanderlust. Shorthair tattooed blackhair white woman and middle aged gray-goatee black man in Pakistan teeshirt heartbeat out a lazy tom-tom afternoon rhythm. Monochrome communication vibrations slip gently through the grateful displaced air. Strategically placed shadowsoaker tents and barbeques decorate the park grass. A black helicopter momentarily waspbuzz-disturbs an angry cloud-choked sky. A red birdlike kite flies further down the beach, static-anchored in the everblowing warm breeze. A man rows and flows effortlessly by in a rowboat. The mischievous wind laughingly ruffles the bookpages of a glasses-wearing lassie sunbathing and word-drinking. An unstoppable napkin blows by like manmade garbage tumbleweed. Far-off boatsails cut the horizon like sharkfins. Jaws associations grip my mind for a moment, evil unforgettable John Williams killerfish theme tune, Amity vile horror, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw (huh three R first names) all at sea no-landshocked unsteady sealegs drunk and singing show me the way to go home, Quint-death, oxygen tank explosion, scattering splattering red chunkrain of dead great white shark. A small white Cessna-type plane chugs merrily by, and the bottle-green lake must be quite a heady skimmed liquid sight from that low almost-splashed height. Sometimes I think I glimpse a familiar Scottish face or hear a Scottish accent but of course I’m always wrong and don’t know why I even think it. Sudden brief nostalgia stab and grab at nothing but Chicago's warm thin air. A young couple in lockstep love walks happily by arms and charms and hearts wrapped round each other in perfect-partner-found pheromone bliss. Beardo riff from earlier sporadically licking and kicking the inside of my aurally assaulted skull, Fight a Revolution, sad song mad song but not bad song, nice one son, been freebassing on that album for a week now and loving it. Middle-aged woman eating nice ice cream, sunbathers lost in shut-eye UV dreams, gulls caw and glide and beachcomb in ever-shifting-pattern aerial wingpacks. Two young black kids, maybe three and five, furiously cycle by on training-wheel-stabilized bikes. The day when those wheels come off and they pedal by themselves will be a giddy ecstatic barely-believed moment of earthbound flight they will never forget. Gentle soothing Spanish guitar from behind me gives way to The Archies doing Sugar Sugar over a muffled-thump P.A. The sand bears the historic fossil footsteps of every race and nation on the planet. Two young helmet-clad women bike by, legs slowly pumping in clockwork tandem rhythm. A Hispanic church meeting broadcasts fictional ancient news from eternity. I trap a too-hard-thrown dirty tennis ball with my foot as it rips my way and throw it back to a thank-you boy of around seven. Spanish announcements occasionally change into English, strange bilingual life-meaning-searching pronouncements as the Henry Mancini Pink Panther theme plays slinky and raucous in the misunderstood religious air. Teeshirt slogan: 100 SEMBRADOR; who knows? The afternoon vision peters and fizzles out as human life remains as unsolved and unresolved as ever forever and never to part from the unexplained atom-body script with no words or meaning or tune. Then sit, sand from shoes as usual, and home again home again jiggedy jig.

A Falkirk Man In America Writes...

Hi there. I am a Scotsman born and bred now resident in Chicago. I moved to East Rogers Park in February 2011. I have been writing descriptions here and there of the place for my own amusement, and to stay wordsharp. I hope you like them. I may add more as I go along; always seeing new things and people and faces and places. The lake mentioned is Lake Michigan, for those from outside the area or city. I may add some other stuff here or there I have had published that is from different areas, we'll see. Nothing here is particularly graphic, so don't worry about that. And you can contact me at: protocore@hotmail.com if you want. Thanks.




LOYOLA PARK AND RIDE THE FUTURE (2/29/2011, 1.57-2.21PM)

Sand is defrosted soft underfoot for the first time this year. Slight nippy wind. Artery-flowing tidewasher lake is light khaki moving in gradients to jade on the crisp in-focus horizon. Sand soft and pliable, unlike earlier this year with ice visible under slowly blowing-away grains, landtrapped iceberg in a fake cold winter desert. Random crisscross of meaningless telltale tracks, dog and gull and human. Looking left along the beach or lakebank it could be anywhere, Tangier to Marbella to undercover Chicago faroff slow suburb storm. The constant wavewash slaplap is relaxing white H2O noise. White plastic product bucket of some kind on stones near water's choppy uneven edge. Coldish wind whistling on half-covered ears. Sky subdued but growing in heat-strength after a long bad dark blizzard-scarred winter. Pastel shadings of cloud fur the aerial view. Fingers grow slightly numb and moan of cold recording overwork. Harsh discordant windswept gullcries. Sand progressively less dark backing away from urgent insistent water and all the way back into Rogers Park infinity. You can almost hear tattered intermittent acoustic-strummed lovesongs round a beach bonfire borne on the historic wind, young laughter, passed hand-to-mouth winejugs and joints, melting stickjammed marshmallows, writhing furtive lovemaking just out of emberglow-illuminated crowd kiss-and-tell view, barking dogs, youthful heat and quiet lifeburn fury, legends of nothing but dark-obscured summer fun, drunken freezecry skinnydipping, horseplay, sandkicks, firepokes, feverstorms of urgent Midwestern passion, firefly-eyes glinting reflecting it all and nothing, sandswarms, brainstorms, painstops.

Here comes the longed-for summer sing the romantic growing new-seasonal undertones.




IN THE MIDSTS OF THE MISTS OF THE MIDWESTERN LAKE (3/19/2011, 8.15-8.36PM)

Walking down W Morse to the gray hidden lake, choked by an airborne sea of mist. Toiling streetlamps barely illuminate with fuzzy orange halogen halos. The cold pleasant damp sits unconquerable in the sodden air. Random confused lost birdcries cut the atmosphere with a tiny avian vocals knife. PARK CLOSES 11PM, park closed for visibility early tonight. Spectral gray hovering threatening everywhere. Sights unseen blurred into indistinct deceptive changed-perspective two-dimensional ghosts. Fake raindrops drip and drizzle from condensation-sodden trees. Far off or nearby dog yelps, windworked sand far back on suffocating grass verges. Crisscross of tiretracks and footprints and pawprints fading into seagullcry-marked lakeside. Ahead, spring wanderers long gone. Green and blue garbage cans glimpsed here and there like grayblack tombstones on a suddenly-could-be-graveyard deathplain. Down towards the lake and the halos behind grow weary and small and impotent warning of impending graysmear nightfall blackout. Chill air still air thrill air, no buildings to either side visible not even the pier mere yards or miles away, the somewhere impossible sky slowly crashes and colorburns in gray gradients until suddenly becoming earthbound, fluid, liquid, laketrapped, wavelapped, washing right back up onto the eternally unconquered mystery-shorn sandshore to wonder forever how it slid and fell to earth returning to nothing but its natural sensational self time after time after time after tide waiting for no man to answer the riddle of the clockwork creation mythology and night screams silently down heavy and pure and in control of itself once again never to be outdone by a mere graysplash freak climactic
imposter competitor
Because the air and earth
will always and never
win against
her powerful
unstoppable
self.



(This following piece was a wee experiment. I saw a young woman whose face I recognized from the area, and asked her if I could do a wordsketch of her, take a wordsnapshot. It didn't quite turn out as planned, but she was a good sport about it and she liked it, so it turned out okay. It's something I'd actually like to do more of, having learned a lot from that initial encounter, but anybody having it done would have to volunteer - it's way too embarrassing to ask somebody to do, especially when you're not quite sure what you're trying to do yourself! I'd definitely be open to that, so if you're interested, drop me an email.

Thanks again, Ella.)



ELLA (7/12/2011)

Tuesday late morning
Chicago Public Library at the
corner of Morse and Sunstroke
80 degree heat beating
boiling brains and blood in veins
Me just after
Fumbling mumbling grumbling
with their first-try bloody sci-fi wi-fi a
blonde beautyfuel young Midwestern girl
No type she could be but wellbred cornfed American
Exuding that USA today vibrancy and confidence and
urgent ill-concealed energy pointing towards
some unknowable but totally conquerable tomorrow
Chicago Public Library public garden 80 degree heat
in head and heart and hand stuck without pad and pen and
I can’t see my monitor for the glare to write
anything anybody anywhere anyhow anywhy
Tells me she’s from Montana and my ideas of her local genesis
go up in punctured-bubble smoke signals fade to nothing
Wild horses run Rocky in my mind as she speaks of mountains
and enjoying the slow snow show she and her contrary friends
rushing down to the lake to revel in its pure white revealing blankness
as the rest of the burning-weather-ruined city foolishly turns and runs
Bright silver slightly scratched shades she is wearing reflecting
concrete, bushes, sunscream, confusion at this literary experimentation
from left of known and acceptable field trips to weirdness
Humoring me out of vague curiosity impatient
to get down to the lake to fry in ultraviolet tanning fury
Multitechnicolor long skirt ready to swish and sway away
down the road to the end of land and surf the sand
Who am I to deny her that sweet sunsweat leisure pleasure treasure
So I show and throw and flow her a few air-pulled syllables and images
from the inexhaustible supply inside and she’s off once again
flying on her merry way to brighten up the light of the life of the day
with her sunbathing presence and East Rogers Park celebrates that spark
that’s just one of thousands of beautiful
touches and tastes sights and sounds and smells and smiles
gratefully and graciously at its luck to have been born in the middle of such a
whirlwind tornado nexus free of windblown destruction except for that
done and dusted by the eyeburning pretty young women of the city
And that’s no bad bargain at that for any area to labor under
we all know
that’s true
and that’s
all there
is to
it.




SURFING THE HEATWAVE (7/17/2011, AROUND 4.30PM)

90+ degree heat. A vital vibrant increasing-in-sound-and-fury walk down to the lakefront greasily clad in insect repellent and sunscream. Every nationality dots the sand dunes and grass and beach: black and white and Mexican and oriental and indeterminate origin, beautiful original genetic recombinations, the human race sprinting ever-nowhereward on its evolutionary trip. Young and old and sky and bold and kids laughing and screaming and sundreaming and sandpulling and windmilling and toing-and-froing and back-and-forthing and swimming splashing waterspurting divebombing brainstorming new ways to piss off their dunked half-drowned friends. A young fearful blonde boy of round four is led through aquatic etiquette by his concerned dad. A woman with a near-see-through top lets a blue swooping soaring kite control the burning sky, letting it out on a green further-and-further stringstorm to tangle with a far-up helicopter. A man clangclanging an ice-cream message cycles slowly by looking for wannabe-cool takers. Sand castles, land castles, grand castles, bland castles, manned castles. Two young Mexican boys have a third buried up to his neck and laugh at a dirt dick they have put on his body. Tanning sunbaking flesh boils and reflects everywhere, tanning lotions and potions and slow-motion stop the rot of ultraviolet damage bouncing back off the eyes gleaming from fine ripe young greasy tits and tummies. A new young mother smiles shyly as she walks past with offspring in buggy, baby’s first summer, memories pour from the humid air and swarm around me ready to come to life again in timeworn colored-muted form. Mother hasn’t lost the babyweight yet and anxiously gently hands her darling to glowing grandparents. Looks like their sweetheart has barely mastered holding her head up on a wobbly nodding-dog neck. Two beautiful bikini-clad women in their 30s lie on their stomachs and chat, oblivious to everything, including the shouting smoking mocking Mexican guys nearby. Some of these sunstunned dozing people look dead and it’s not morbid, just funny. A black man bathes his tiny daughter in a fountain; a young black couple wash their sandy feet using watercups from the same fountain later. Hotdogs and ice-cream and soda and picnics and iced tea from Styrofoam coolers and always an international battering chitter-chatter of happy voices, languages known and not, Spanish English Eastern European and who knows. The rise and fall of poorly sculpted sand empires. Sand in often-emptied shoes, careful of how I’m sitting with short sport kilt on. A young black girl of around six runs joyously yelping kicking up sand, voice a sonic palette of all the variant intangible joys of summer. Young guys dive around with sand stuck to them playing with a basketball. And finally sunbeaten and home again, a final knocking of sand from shoes, a final goodbye to the lakefront multicolor allsound carnival for today, but there’s always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…