podunk no horse you know this place peeled paint picked flakes and rusted hay rakes anchored in duff and shrouded in weeds the moist smell of earth in your nostrils kissing the dirt and smoking snake grass talking to the notorious absent you keep coming back to know you never leave the rutted alleys --only highway 10 is paved over and under the railroad tracks that define your longing east of west your existence north of south where kids climb the mountain and mimic the world wars construction fire sex that landscape development parents can't see where you explore the spooky forest massively overgrown and glacially boulder strewn a creepy quiet dark mystery of black birds and bears south down to the river where you swim in your shit suckers lying on fishy mud banks masturbating in the sun you live for fun whatever that is on the wrong side of the tracks by the bum jungle where hobos camp in scrap shanties built into the steam train roundhouse foundations in the campfire dark of the water tower where it's always fall or early spring matted dead grass sweatshirt or jacket-cool weather nose-dripping melancholy forever this is home to you the lonelier the better a comfort zone of observation muted tones rewound some instinctive knowing nothing is clear cycles of history life love death fear helps but can't explain the rosary laced between your dead grandfather's fingers dad's rage your mother's voice in your ear
I know what Thomas Wolfe was getting at with “You Can't Go Home Again,” but I always had trouble with it because for the most part it's been my experience that I can't ever get away from it, home that is. I'm always home. It follows me everywhere I turn.
And I'm sure it has a lot to do with the literal fact that I've never gotten very far away from this place, my podunk home. For me it holds the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the best and the worst, that whole Tale of Two Cities shit. It was a pivotal time to grow-up, come of age, in the middle of the 20th century, so I guess the place you were, the landscape, the images, the people around you wind up carrying the weight of the age for you. As I will say again and again we can't get away from ourselves.
*
Spoiled Rotten I was a rich kid in Alberton, pampered inside an old two-shack, ship-lapped, slapped-together house right beside the Milwaukee Railroad. Creosote ties footed faded linoleum floors—they supported us like trains to the splintered end. Barren beaver-board walls Bled frost and our dreams. We were rocked by vibrations of a west-bound freight, electric engines and diesels rattled windows and teeth, promised fear could be soothed by iron. A worn groove on the coal chute door-sill lip made the perfect rifle rest. That shed, Fort Apache, held our secrets like swallow and wasp nests. September nights bears came for our trash. We waited breathless, dug down in sleeping bags clutching flashlights and holding our water. Our hearts raced like hummingbirds. Each hour another fantasy indulged. Skittish deer found dinner along the tracks, nosed wheat spilled meals in the snow. Dawn and dusk, white tails twitched at us. But we were spoiled most on long summer days tormenting rattlers and climbing castle rocks, skinny dipping and fishing up Petty Creek from the narrows To the old goat farm. We swam the Clark Fork like beaver, circled and slapped, threw hoots and full cannon balls. We gorged ourselves daily like Romans or kings eating filthy-rich feasts, everything in season: green apples, ripe plums, wild onions, and garden raided dirt-sweet carrots. We discovered the neighbors' basement, ate jars of silver salmon and gagged smelling Limburger cheese. We sipped on sour dandelion wine, felt out way up the dizzy stairs. Through a door left ajar, fully framed in a mirror, we saw nipples round as our mouths—secrets—only told to our dogs. We lazed under lilacs, read clouds going by, never denied we were flat-spoiled rotten and ruined for good, like Huck Finn, our hero back then. We, too, would have settled for a raft and Jim, but we damn sure didn't want to run away. Those days are still a toy chest so filled . . . that the lid can never be closed.
I grew up in Alberton, and still live a mere thirty miles away.
We leave everything behind in time.
Time changes everything, even the landscape in subtle ways,
but to remain on the plain of your existence is to explain
how the rain can change and never change.
You are about to go home with me again and again.
Hold on (and spin) this will get strangely familiar
and ridiculously repetitious before this (we) all ends.
I hope I don't bore you into giving up since I have chosen to
write this the way shit pops up, so there is no easy timeline.
Flashes of memory (it appears) lead to more made-up shit
and other words of meaningless wit, all interspersed with poems
which of course do the same fucking thing.
*
It'll be like visiting that long lost uncle Buck or Al(your very own kiddie pals) and other narcissists who never shut the fuck up, yet you have to admit are a little bit entertaining. So buckle up for the life and times, the memories and rhymes of one no-name small-town dreamer of fame who discovered the good shit (or most of it) only happens when you open your eyes.
*
So how the hell did we get to be this old, sneaking crayons from the big box, still wearing our trouser cuffs rolled-up and sporting crew cuts, wearing worn-out Chuck Taylor high-tops and wrestling the dog, Murphy, in the long grass then watching the dizzy clouds morph into faces and animals? I don't know about you, who you are now or where you're at, but I'm still trying to remain knocked out by the day.
In the Weeds I am comfortable lying in the weeds looking at the sky be it warm summer or musty fall. I like watching the bugs crawl, the flight patterns of butterflies and bees, chewing stems and smelling the grass- earthy scent around me, contrails etching across turbulent clouds unfolding images locked in my head. I listen for any sounds: trains, voices, planes, the occasional car driving by, barking dogs, chain saws, the thumping of my heart, the wind in the trees and in my chest. No one can see me there buried flat as a fawn. Sometimes I'm with a friend, but it's best by myself because the silence is all mine. Those who jump to disagree with my proclamation of loving it “in the weeds” probably haven't been there face down with the beetles and ants, eye-level to voles, then rolling over to watch hawks hover in thermals against the blue. I guess to those figurative souls “in the weeds” is to be lost— “at sea” or at least “in a funk”— certainly it has to be an inability to act decisively. Of course, for me that's the most interesting place to be, literally in the here and now of this constantly transforming magical trip, that wonderland we paid more attention to as kids— uncertainty—call me Peter Pan if you will, but I love it deep in the weeds.
*
Summer mornings sometimes when we opened the front door to grab the newspaper, Orie Sizemore would be lying curled in the weeds across the road, and we wondered if he was dead or alive. We left him alone to wake on his own and continue on his long walk home he'd begun the night before after the bars closed. He lived in a shack down by the river just north of the mouth of Petty Creek on the east edge of Fred Thompson's ranch. Orie had a severe case of the palsy, had to drink his beer through a straw. One time my dad woke him and asked him in for breakfast. His hands shook so bad he met his fork a few inches over his plate and picked up his coffee cup two-handed sloshing onto his pancakes and the table. He apologized for making a mess, said he'd always had the tremor which had gotten worse with age. It ran in the family he claimed, “If you think I'm bad,” he said dead serious, “you should see my brother, Shaky.” Orie was harmless, a kind man, yet he was the only person our Norwegian Elk hound ever bit (maybe he knew Orie wouldn't resist). For some reason Orie scared the shit out of that dog who was usually nothing but bark and bluff.
Weeds That was no bum sleeping on your lawn, bottle tucked under his arm. Didn't you recognize his Red Ball tennis shoes, remember the fish stories he told with his hands, the toothless smile, that time he danced a jig at Chadwick & Boyd's Tavern clowning for rowdy plaid-clad loggers? A gandy dancer turned choke setter, he became a Zen cat skinner before he retired to booze, had a home but never claimed it, one of those tar-paper shacks on Rose Hill. He had to stop eating at the Silver Grill, shook so bad he drank beer through a straw. You thought he'd been dead for years like Gabby Hollow, Indian Rock and Cherry Springs, all lost to the flood of sixty-four or the interstate highway construction. Don't be afraid to wake him, the sleeper, deaf-mute and drunk. We are all sleepers whether we like it or not. And isn't this your dream: the old man's polio knees bent back the wrong way; the rusty shotgun in the corner of the sheepherder's shack -- skull fragments like egg shells scattered on the floor? He sips the pint of Mad Dog 20/20, watches a cross burn Hellfire on the Catholic church steps as sheeted shadows fade into trees. He nurses his leprosy, the jug, acceptance of what is, the caked dirt he doesn't try to wash off. You'll take his unshaven face to the grave. Name him Kelly, Cookie, Blackie Marquette, Jimmy de Banda, Orie Sizemore. You know this sleeper could be Nine Mile Bill or Freddie Lavois. Still, you must wake him before sunrise, rouse him from the weeds, serve him sourdough pancakes, bacon & eggs. Listen for the signs, the wind in your blood, swim the deep, night-black in the bottom of his eyes, and slip him a five dollar bill before he goes. You know this dream, this ghost can save you.
This is the beginning, intro of sorts, to a long winded attempt at some kind of hybrid memoir or autobiographical stream of (and I’ll resist my mother’s favorite expletive here to define) consciousness. I am a poet who loves writing and reading letters along with running his mouth, but large scale projects scare (and often bore) me. So I may never figure this thing out. I’ve been reading Finnegans Wake since my return from Ireland. I read it the first time in the early 80s, and when I say “read it” I mean I put it down around page 160 and skittered over the rest of the 350 pages laughing and thinking what a great joke it was on me and everyone who picked it up. This excursion confirmed that conclusion, but I just enjoyed the word play and puzzles densely packed into every line. It is a metaphor for life: it makes no fucking sense but is loaded with mystery and laughter, the insatiable urge of reproduction, orgasm, the basic drives of humans.
Obviously “podunk” ain’t “Finnegan” but if it could find an audience, I think they’d be poetry readers, those willing to be fucked with and mildly entertained by that if not insanely obsessed with it. Puzzles. Puzzle people. I’ll get back to you on that.
Peace.
write on write something, right something, left something, wrong something, what is wrong about something right, something left, something red-wrong as woody or a wobbly song, not simply some thing's power to detest, but something best left unsaid, like the dead, something wicked this way comes on sale to the highest bidder . . . another civic hero, a bloomin' player, a rich man, a political force, a man who speaks and forces listen . . . listen . . . was that sound a guillotine or a video game execution, was it the wind slamming a door, someone closing a hatch, perhaps a jailor throwing the switch . . . another chilly draft spoiled by virtual reality . . . who owns you is better left unsaid, better to be a slave today, better to be undead, write the truth in your head, or say something, anything, a change from saying nothing, speak . . . speak for your survival, speak for everyone, it’s time for a change, time for the force to be with us, time to choose love over money over fear over death, time to love, to trust, to choose to care for one another, it’s time today to write something about love, about justice, about living a good life, it’s time to right the selfish wrongs in the land of the greedy-free, it’s time to write something, to be brave, to stand up and right the story, it’s time to be something to say