The Radio and The Internet

I'd spent New Year's Eve with the street urchins of New Paltz, drinking all the beers and booze that could be poured, filling the tissues and nothingness within me with mountains of smoke and the wild breath of starlight and the concernless good will of of the people around me. Woke up the next morning in the hospital for dehydration, and, thinking I was still in New Paltz, I signed what I was meant to sign before leaving and asked for directions to Main Street and started walking there.  Soon found out it was about 15 miles, and kept walking.  Their confusion could be alienating at times, but the urchins weren't completely incapable of hospitality: They'd managed to rescue my bookbag (and all its contents) and stash it somewhere safe, and so I had that.  My mother or Natalie or someone was paying for a bed in the hostel for me for a while (after the a.b. someone told me about got evacuated by the cops) and I guess the family voted it was unfair to leave me outside all ...

There were multiple factors that brought about the death of Sisyphus other than the bullet fired by Peter Nicholas Levanarskie, and while they share little if any common origins in the anthropological or intellectual senses of the word, they are, were all undeniably critical in the cause of his demise on February 20th, 1926.  One of these factors was a man named Adam Black. He was the only son of Polish immigrants (whose names I've only omitted here for clarity) and his first jobs included shining shoes, keeping sweatshop seamstresses loaded with sewing materials, and even doing light maintenance on the manufacturing apparatuses that glass factories depended on before catching a lucky break when his father, an out-of-work plumber who largely spent his afternoons visiting and talking with the other unspoken-for people in his neighborhood, had casually, amiably mentioned the woes of his son Adam in the company of a man who happened to be in need of an extra set of hands to meet an un...

You'll wake up  some morning  with energy you simply  aren't used to. It  will flicker and flood  through your bloodstream,  Through the  dancing electricity  of your muscles and  your nerves. Through,  up and through the  hidden fingers that  have purchased into  the tunnels of  the elusive treasure  of your thoughts; the  warm blood thoughts  of territory, of  appetite, of lust  and hope and  chivalry. You'll  wake up with a  skeleton as firm  and confident as stone.  You'll wake up with  blood as smart as  wine or a  horse with silver eyes.  You'll still be part machine,  of course, but the fear of  a machine  will not be your fear.  You won't be fated to  planned obsolescence, nor  the cruelty of sycophants  and arrogant dullards.  You are not  the prize-addict.  You are not the defeated  wo...

One day in Amenia, I'd been doing the routine management of my alcoholism-autism-general disorder of life -- enduring some uninterrupted hours of sobriety, the usual walking singing coffee drinking cigarette smoking -- plus of course holding lots of doors open for clean old ladies and writing my notes & poems as quick as I can when they allow their shoulders to be used as desktops.  And on this day of quiet joy it occured to me that the bong & marijuana accessory shop might also sell marijuana. (I am originally a weedsmoker from the 90s: Things were, to put it mildly, very, very different back then.)  When I learned I could buy my pot in eighths from them at both a discount and a convenience from my former provider, a modest unicorn entered my day, and everything was better.  Some weeks later, I forget how many, the owner's relocated to Pleasant Valley. So, I bought my weed from there.  There were mostly three people who ran the store at that point. 2 kids in...

As I get into middleage  I notice how the grammar  of anatomy  is expressed  as much  in small, accidental  gestures  as it is  in the grander, more obvious ones.   For instance, yesterday, walking home  with a rolling suitcase filled with laundry,  I fell behind a young man -- late teens, early 20s --  walking with his legs very close together  while video-gaming his thumbs  over the screen of his phone. This  wheat-straw shape of a person  camouflaged in our New York hick sliver  of the world,  and I became preoccupied with the redistribution of  energy across muscle groups across the body  and how it looked like the young man was  walking in two worlds -- one mainly  on the pads of his feet and one mainly  on the pads of his thumbs.  And I thought, I think, How many times have I seen  this exact same thing,  this exact same thing,  this exact sam...

Home is where you make it, and nowhere else. It can be invented. It can be found. It can be created, stolen, taken away. Home is where Larry Fiskovitz was going one rainy afternoon, in the year 2034, on a Thursday in August, when the cool, drizzling rain pattered through the sky, splashing onto his crisp, black windbreaker/skicoat and he stood on the corner of Marigold and Broca Avenue, attempting to catch a cab the old-fashioned way: by hailing one out of the casual, constant herd of the rest of the traffic.  Meanwhile, another man by the name of Jerry Ratbaum, a resident of the New Life Center situated in Hammlett New York (formerly Queens) was piloting his "cab"/a 2016 Ford Chrysler with a rebuilt engine and the assorted technological add-ons like advanced gps radar for superior navigation meant to provide the driver (in some--perhaps unkempt, circles, "Captain") with a convenient shorthand in order to collect more passengers, etc. if only the computerized pharma...

Stop with the nervous precious maneuvering.  No one's buying into your amateur ballerina salesmanship.  Lot of stale juice and flaccid anatomy , sailor-jaws sailor-mandibles   with a thousand too many teeth, reflexively spitting into their hunger.  You ought to make some changes, if this is the case. You don't  have to. You can sit in the premature darkness like some  cotton snail sewing laziness into your pity  with vagrant chatter of tomorrow going...  Speaking for myself, I'm weighing out how some of my heroes  dissolved the contracts of their prohibitive creative rules  for the better. (If your mind went towards violence, pedophilia or  compulsive lying and the absolute dullest forms of circumlocution,  stop reading now. I dare you to talk to a woman,  a real, live woman, whose happened to have had an abortion.  Go for it.)  Well, whether he meant to or not, Cormac McCarthy put his  hand into magica...

The uneven sound of truth that rises and rolls over water, over water where the shadows of fish flicker beneath the waves in the Atlantic's futile, indefatigable salty approach to Dock 181-72 oppressed by the early hour and the Brooklyn sun's grainy fireworks glow, and the horns of ships painted red or white disappearing, disappeared where Troy Thompson (Sisyphus) and Charles Redford secured one end or another of an eight foot long/two foot wide/two foot tall (*deep) waxed oak container carrying gun parts they had no formal business to inquire the natural or official fate of, and with stoic dexterity maneuvered the crate away from the hoard of the dozens of others of the same or similar or complimentary paraphernalia and parcels and as their feet only quietly awkwardly tipped from one to another as they moved along the floor of the vessel and they gripped as partners, both with meaty fists enlarged by repetition, flexed with daily exposure to the sea, and Troy walked cautiously...

They think beneath things  because they're afraid  of the heights, bitter,  hopelessly, inexplicably  bitter. Dried turds  impersonating  humans  poorly in the fast-food aisle  plucking through radiant items  of emoji food, no appetite  simply the illiterate body-language  of the dead fashion of  an arrogant soul, brittle flesh mask  missing the sounds of stoic indifference  while the loud repetition of  I don't know  I don't know  I don't know          runs along the  missing Broca-wheels and the chamber  of anonymity doubts the language  it didn't have.  The airy, sophisticated and comatose  perpetually losing change  and in the scarred aftermath  of pick-up trucks  walking up the hill   to my house  I hear the shrinking voices  like feeble bones tossed  casually  into the yard. 

The years are many and grief seemed to  approach us with crimson agenda,  but goodness can manifest like lice like cotton  you remember the days when sunlight smelled of  pussy, the Jessicas, Danas (there are more)  (there are more of us than we counted)  and you find the lines that don't quit  the days and their contents that can be reconnected.  Girls in your house, spending the night watching movies.  Bubbles of cheer in their company.  You remember where your hands have been,  what they pulled towards your ear with ghostly aplomb.  You remember the secret freedom  that your heart, the god, whispered  to the name of your soul.    There is a soul. It dies. There's a soul that wishes to be taken care of and it will wipe away the crimson, the grief, and you'll know the beginning of things,  the world and the sun and every other animal that steers with its tail instead of chasing it.  ****...

Worse than a scarcity  is an abundance that  goes unappreciated.  The poems, films, songs  breathed into the atmosphere  like holy prayer  cheering the humans to  free slaves from their captors  the violin-knives and  tennis racquet conductors  swinging, sweeping, undercutting  the toxic puss ignorance  of barbarian descendants  who hope to rape with  every growl of a syllable:  Anxiety and depression  are peanuts  compared to some horseshoe-brain dilletante  insisting his scheister is currency.  Read history.  Read film.  Before apathy to conformity  renders other days to be too restless to not be angry,  too desaturated to see the color red.  **** 

"Steven, would you please close your legs!?"  "No." There were five of us in the car.  I think Ellen was driving with my mother in  the passenger seat  and Steven and I and Stephanie were stuffed  on that one bench in whatever the little four-door was.  Long Island outside the window.  I never really had any opinion of it.  My brain was headed to a waterpark in the summer and I think I had headphones: maybe Green Day or the Offspring (this was pre- Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Crass, Distraught, Dead Nation, etc.) and I just pressed myself thru time and didn't think  what any of it meant. Stephen was older than Stephanie. A couple years.  I was the smallest, sitting inbetween them.  Nowhere in the car were: Bobby F. and my half-sister  Natalie: They were excused because Natalie was too  old and Steven and Bobby didn't get along  that I'm not sure of, or doesn't make sense. I  guess I was about ten years old, I think.....

All the kids were meant to interview adults  and the adults would interview the kids  in return  for this community project for the Arts Center.  I don't know if they got the idea from a TED talk  or it was something they originally wanted  but either way, a neat idea.  At that point, I think my generation was  mostly living between being stiffly jaded and  not betraying any nervous thought  coiled in their skull caves.  So that adults and kids were having conversations  or anything like them felt just the least bit special. I'd been in a lot of these people's homes since working  in them and I'd always had social problems with  my own friends ( especially since dropping out early  in tenth grade, working in a few stores around Carmel  and Patterson, then a factory, then college, briefly,  plus moving to Nevada, moving to Illinois, moving  back to new York, and for a solid five or six years  n...

Bukowski hit the  'enter' key  so often because  it felt right. His  head moved faster/slower  and his thumb in- stinctively moved  to have something  his innerchild wanted.  He took as many of them  as he could find.  **** 

When I was very young, say around  seven or eight years old,  my mother, my father and  myself would drive from our house  in Upstate Kent New York  to various other places,  hamlets, mostly, I don't  think we'd ever go farther than  Fishkill or maybe Pleasant Valley  to go shopping at whatever outlet  or plaza or stri(p) mall  to walk around and maybe  buy a few things. I liked  Ames a lot. You could walk  from one end of the store  and the electronics end  was like the equivalent of  a city block away-- passed the Health & Beauty Aid section  that smelled like flowers  to my little nose, and then there  was the area where  the registers were located,  maybe ten total, giant block  affairs just begging to be  climbed on.  Across from those the watch & jewelry section  sparkled & glittered & blew  like a bank heist that was all  dyna...

Listen: You're not as original as you've been telling people.               You have some pretty serious problems               with compulsive lying that you lie into               further by either pleading, arguing or demanding               for a right to ignorance.  You have no such right.  You are not  entitled to the will of others-- Even other  white people! See, you old geezer, see there you ageing hipster  beating out his last batch with the Orange Tycoon  as the rollercoaster that used to at least pretend to be the Republican Party just started to drive  its shit into the Earth. See: you're protected, too!  This no infringement on other people's will sounds like  one fucking hell of an idea, even if the Red Hats  of Florida are...willing...to go along with it.  If ...

He'd finished scrubbing the sea from his pores with an oily bar of soap and a handful or three of a strangely coarse talcum mixture and his feet became increasingly stable by the minute and the rest of his faculties slowly joined the changing, ephemeral total. Sisyphus letting the lukewarm water of the shower funnel through the hair on his scalp and finding the length of that hair to be inconsistent with that of any memory he'd refer to. It wasn't long, as he thought it was. He'd pulled a small tug between the back of his neck and his left ear. Less than an inch. The hair around it and towards his mastoid & forehead not much longer. He pressed his fingers about the base, the roots of it. The bone as hard as a boulder. Sounds hazarded from nothingness. The chorus and clamour of a hundred lives pleading & arguing against the din of their inevitable defeat to choice. Sisyphus took gratitude where it was, to how he was and let the last of the soap rinse away with wh...