End 1992

December 31, 1992

 

 

An Eight Bar Solo

I
Some
Many
(too Many)
things are too many too often
"Toots Thielmans" for example, and
sirens, meant to clear a local path, heard, in bed, half-way across town and commercial messages on the radio, dividing the wheat from the wheat,
--so to speak--
(does my radio listening surprise you?)
You
I am sure
can tell many more
(not too)
Group therapy for the non-incarcerated
(functional explanation of this poem)
II
Some authors say they never write when they are drunk.
(they have other explanations for how they use drinking--makes 'em sound quite reasonable)
Some authors say they never write when they are depressed
they never write when they are happy
they never write when they are... (help me, here, your mind is working better than mine is today)

I am writing today and I am angry.
(I usually say "mad," but I grew-up in a household of malapprops:
Aunt Gladys still says "It just don't... and he don't..."
I correct her every time.
Miss Schmidtle haunts me.

I'm MAD
(that is to say, pissed-off)
The year is ending in a few hours and its all the same.
(what is?)
Liver lips Leissring does his Jagger imitation screaming "no satisfaction"
(you make your own reality)
So what your telling me is what I got I built
(yup)
III
When does the learning begin?
When do we start to see ourselves as we go, not as we went?
Bierce told us this about experience: it is the way we should not have gone!
So much for retrospection.
But is spection
the question
Dog's don't
(they don't have lawyers or collect art, either)
Nor mice, cockroaches, cats do.

Ever see a cat ask herself a probing, searching question?
Ever see a dissatisfied cat?
Unh Unh
(they either get theirs or leave)
Think about that
IV
Its been about 100 years of Freud
somewhat less of Jung
Millions of people spending lots of money to listen to themselves speak to themselves in the presence of someone who (they think) knows more about them than they do
The guru syndrome.
I was there once, too.
My credulity embarrasses me.

What we're talking about here is free will.
Some think they've got it. Like balls.
Years of Dewey, poured down the drain: as the twig is bent
so grows the tree.
Bull
Bullshit
The tunnel prepared for us by our genome is very narrow indeed.
V
Knowing this
(you might ask)
(I certainly did)
Why would I ponder about anything?
Drop into the groove; stay for the trip.
That's just it.
Don't you see?
If you get the evil combination of vision and will to change your life is spent upon the rack of competing vitalities.
And, too, you lose trust in democracy.
Your fellow humans are idiots, ignoramuses, fools, estupidos, jerks and brainless twits.
They don't know this
(I cleverly create here an impersonal pronoun which refers to the vast hulk of fellow humanoids who are these: idolators, law makers, police types, sports game watchers and listeners, wives, husbands, PTA members, all club members, all union members, all church goers, all guru worshippers, feminists of both sexes, everyman--including me)
They think they're cool.
VI
I do trust this: my heart
I trust my heart.
The problem is my heart gets lost, at times for years, behind the armor
I only get to see it occasionally.
At times, when its power is so great that nothing can hide it, it appears
VII
But to return, I'm pissed.
I hate my own judgement.
I hate feeling loyalty to word, honor of friend,
hate fighting carnal urge hate
my bad choices
my lack of satisfaction with what is
my need to twist it
I hate Plato and especially the Plato in me.
How can it be? Men who accept and love women, large as cows, or dead women, brains beaten by TV, glamour magazines, fashion, hollow women, mannequins piloting their husband's Mercedes or the yuppy car of the year, jaws clenched in determination. Her goal: clear title to her dead husband's property.
Or fearfull women, not married, feeling inside the churning prods of fertility, a stimulus response to eternity. Women panicked by barrenness, husbandless women, accepting by pipette what is witheld by penis, isssueing another maddened generation of fatherless children.
Or hateful women, women who hate themselve so much because they cannot be women, women who become instead, men, and call themselves feminists, and who adopt all of the characteristics of the hated men, who are their enemy because the men will not see them as women, because they are not women, they are something else, not men, not women, but editors in chief (of their husband's magazines) or publishers (of their husbands or daddy's magazines) or are seen in photographs, lounging as if women, next to their monthly little psalm that begins another clone of itself and of every other magazine.
Or dissatisfied women, who believe being a woman is not enough, women who do it first and then change diapers at 45 while weeping uncontrolled in menopausal insanity; doing it their way, missing the beat of the universe:
Listen ye women to Moms (Maybley)
"If it don't fit, don't force it!"
VIII
We have seen
here
what it is I hate,
to be sure
what pisses me off.

I hate that there is not a woman whose desire is to be the best woman she can be.

That's what I want: to be the best man I can be.