the erotic prophet

 

maybe one hour after supervising the morning execution of eight members of the french resistance (seven men, one woman), a nazi captain takes in a copy of picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, guernica, which depicts the slaughter of civilians in the spanish civil war. then picasso sells him the painting. maybe art would help the nazi? it paid for picasso’s paint and cigarettes. if you allow that picasso was beyond good and evil and selling art to nazis was an act beyond ethics, morality, politics, and religion, then you must allow that guernica lacks the emotional commitment many attribute to it. the artist is actually beyond feeling. the artist as the beneficent sociopath, improving our lives while serving himself. at best i sit here and think of the creation of guernica as an emotional lapse commissioned by the spanish republicans. yes, picasso did not paint guerica of  his own volition in response to his feelings for the murdered in his native land. guernica was painted by a cold man - the spiritual elite. 

a firing range meets the noise requirement in the age of reason. i’m over here, downwind, eating slugs. i had in mind a semen-infused transmission from planet guernica, but what i got is america, which is as alone as it gets.

and frantic plastic bags. avalanches of crushed cans. pots punching pans. sounds from this new apartment splinter my nervous system. last night was my first night. after the shooting stopped, i left the window open with the fan on. one sheet and a thin blanket and i shivered in and out of a nightmare all night. we have crows here. they’re small, maybe fish crows, coastal crows, beach bums. they talk less and make flight look difficult. vultures spiraled down upon the doves and small dogs yesterday. i counted five gliding down on adjusting wings. their goal was on a hill above me. they reached the earth and fell out of rotation. their necks were drawn in so tightly they looked headless. headless and covering their necks, they go in circles and pray for death. i’ve known a few.

dogs bark most of the noise here. everyone in this town has a dog, six chickens, a rooster, two goats, a llama, a horse or mule, and a cow. only the ocean fog reminds me this is the california coast. the bitch down the street has dogs. that’s the most i can say for her. they spend their days in the sun jailed in a wire cage on her front lawn, which resembles a permanent junk sale. i can’t say she waves the white flag of trash, more like a patchwork of neuroses. one dog whimpered and cried in her front yard for three hours today. i walked by and closed the window.

a natural response to infinite change: i’ve been protected from my environment. i deflect over-stimulation. i do not want contact. that thing, the human element, which we can’t count on, i can count on to ruin my day. when i say i want kids, i mean the kind who grow horns. luck: there’s a desk built into my back porch. plywood. i forgot to pray for it,  had not conceived of it, and here it is. i lean over it. i sit on it and eat solar flares. to be an artist, one must be objective about oneself. no one else can be as hard on you and that metal is essential to forming an innate sense of what is freed and what is enslaved.

painful and inconsequential things have happened. i’m not talking about my swollen liver or shrunken brain. sorry to be vague, but one rite in moving on is forgetting. i live in a land that is so conscious of protecting me, i can’t toast an english muffin.

  “we don’t like how you depicted us ‘making love all over the house’ in that short story,” my mother says.

  “it’s fiction.”

  “well, we’re very embarrassed.”

  “you two have never admitted to having sex.”

  “what are you and your sister, then?”

  “evidence of two fucks.”

  “just twice.”

  “two for two.”

  “we’d expect deference.”

  “from me?”

  “you were a precocious youth.”

  “i was the worst you ever saw.”

  “your father thought so.”

peter is missing. prolonged silences among the terminally ill are unsettling. last i knew he was in a hospital 80 miles south of palos verdes, where he had been living in his sister’s waterfront house until she kicked him out for buying a band aid with her credit card. i’ve left two voicemails and written his aunt, joan, my last landlady. peter spends a lot of time in hospitals. i’ve known him a few months and he’s been admitted for long stretches at least three times. blood fountains out his nose, his eyes, his mouth, flows brown from his dick and seeps out his ass. peter knows he’s alive. he drank himself into this. he’s 53 and quit drinking for 20 years. but the liver does not regenerate. we trade stories about our ailing livers. i breathe in pants as fluid from my liver fills the peritoneal cavity and presses on the diaphragm. i don’t drink for fun. sober, the pain is unsustainable. the last time i was sober i bought a .380 automatic and went into the woods to end it. i sat on a rock and put the pistol down and opened one of the beers i’d brought with me. by the second beer, my ideas were changing. i finished it and walked out of the woods with the gun in my front pocket. beer had saved my pathetic life. i think i have a weakness in the blood. maybe i have seen too much. i have let peter know he is welcome to stay here. he said he’d give it serious thought and that was the last i talked to him. into the hospital he went. when i first saw and heard peter at joan’s house, he was a con-artist in love with his own ucla disc jockey voice. the record playing was “i drove my porsche as fast as it would go and i built a mansion for my mother.” he was also religious. it should not surprise anyone, especially me, that the less righteous person emerged after two weeks in the same house. people can’t hide and the exposed often flee in hatred and fear- or attack. peter and i peeled potatoes together for the family and sat together on the front porch, discussed our lives while we finished them off, mulling over the capriciousness of internal organs. we are unlikely friends and some people tell me this. one thing i was reminded of by peter is that we are all working through our arrogances. marilyn, my lover, says peter lacks someone to live for. she is right, but peter had it and lost it and cannot be forever blamed for his suffering. he now has himself to die for.

the apartment is big. i am opening beers faster than i drink them. i open a beer, drink, then set it on the counter. a few minutes later i have forgotten it and open another. i just downed three opened beers i came upon around the house. when i lived in rooms, such oversight was impossible. i guess this is what it’s like to be rich: distracted, overwhelmed, conspicuous.

the sound of rusty hinges, the piggish bite as the barn door opens and closes. teeth grind. facial muscles contract. my hair turns white. it’s a barn and i must suspect, am obligated to conclude, that some ass is doing it intentionally to interfere with my mission, the same hard dissonant noise i get from agents and editors on both coasts. “avant garde!” “not for us!” opposition to my writing began when i was 12, as soon as i switched my focus from science fiction monsters and cowboys onto my classmates. i had believed they had warm blood in their veins. my first artistic blunder.

to the things themselves. where there is no explaining. tis a gift to be simple, a miracle to be moment-to-moment, live . . . where do i stand? now depends on seeing this. even if only inside my small and private context, i must have light.

on campus at the respected but uninspiring university back east, where the ivy is thick as cash and nobody is serious, talking to a blonde accounting major between classes. she is in a thin red dress and the sun in her hair is nice to look at. undergraduates sweat up the academic mountain while we stand on the summit and look at our last days. she says she’s got a job in boston after graduation, fifty grand a year. we’ve been meeting like this and i will get a night with that smile and body, only to discover she needs 50 cocktails a day to sustain her pleasantness. you’d never know talking to her. i was hardly touching a beer then. i wanted to graduate. i was writing for a weekly and surfing. the newspaper wanted me and was willing to pay $15,000. miranda would walk over to say hi. she had a class across the street. the blonde was friendly. miranda was the virgin who tasted like copper daisies. she was not shy, but she was afraid to get in the shower with me. she feared her virginity would be compromised and that she might get pregnant. miranda gave the finest head, but she made assumptions about my lifestyle. people had said things about me and she believed them. a mouth full of semen, but our genitals could not touch. our loss. because she was afraid. we remain friends, unconsummated lovers. we’re old now and have lost our nudity. she dresses to earn her house. i dress because i don’t want to go to jail. she is terrified that i am writing about her. she says she will lose her job and house. fear still, though my writing has lost politicians their jobs and homes.

lacking reference here, the detached modern man, fragmented by his shower of experience. his great sickness defines the borders of his small health. we’re all here somewhere, looking for the answer: the lottery! aliens! war! marijuana! (scraggly young motherfucker, with a wiry red humboldt beard and an audi, a miracle of laconics and hair braiding, paying the cashier in pennies, a seven-minute bitch holding up the register and running the stop sign a block away with sheepish arrogance. from his grave, bob marley is trying to pull his music from this kook’s cd player . . .  roaches in the ashtray of his self-absorbtion . . . ) these new hippies fall into a fashion that was yesterday. they are worse than the first time. everything happens twice, the second time as a parody of itself. self-indulged in a corner of life, rabid capitalists in dreadlocks, they have not shed egotism. hippies did not end vietnam. political activists did. abbie hoffman, bobby seale, and john lennon put their necks on the line while hippies gorged on the revolution in the air, much like ramoras, and got sick. hippies and music did not end vietnam, they were a soundrack. social change through music is fallicy,perpetuated by musicians who make reputations off the herd. political change happens in the realms of politics, dirtier than woodstock, more complex than three chords, and deadlier than a bad record and bad acid. for personal sacrifice, look to kent state. those murders changed minds. these kids now are average. unwittingly conservative, they are happily inert playmates. they want to be high and fuck while mom and dad pay tuition, spinning the same elitism as their brothers and sisters at duke and annapolis. they conform. i was at woodstock – a bunch of babies in a traffic jam. where there is a crowd there is untruth. kierkegaard said that. where there is a hippie, there is money to be made. i said that.

the neighbor’s telephone is ringing across the sand alley. machine. leave a message. leave something . . . a putrid odor on the windy alley, all-american, the detached odor, penetrating the moment with roaming, flight our common fact. the neighbor is a cop and his son’s name is dylan. he acts about 10. the cop rides a motorcycle to work. it’s inescapable. the cop shaves his head and does not look at me. i see him every morning and night and on his days off, when he welds and plays with his motorcycles. he works sunday through wednesday. he is forty feet away and his silent engagement is conspicuous. dylan and his younger blonde sister, who calls him “brother, brother,” won’t look at me either: instructions: that man writing at the desk is evil. i once heard them shove christian rock out their windows like long division. but his gorgeous wife looks at me plenty. she comes out to water the grass every day – only the grass in front of my perch. she’s looking because he’s looking. when i laugh at her kids, she smiles. the married couple – so young, so dissolved. she’s stranded on his motorcycle obsession, the cock feathers he waves at other women. she will never break, but she’s got motorcycles of her own. i don’t look at the kids too much. it’s dangerous to look at kids in america. when i see the daughter i immediately think of prison. funny how most molestorers are people parents trust their kids with. the media-consuming populace seems to forget this. they consume the fear, but not the facts. me? i must want to throat-fuck your 8-year-old daughter because my hair is wild and i have paint on my jeans. just being near these people gives me dry-heaves . . . marliyn wipes my tears.

. . . it happened at the beach today. i’d gone there to check out the surf. there were about 20 guys out. the waves were small, three summer feet. i walked to the water. there was a kid skimboarding in the wet sand. he was trying, anyhow. he was throwing the board and then running after it. the board had slowed down or stopped by the time he caught up to it and jumped onboard. he travelled nowhere and usually fell. he was a chubby kid in long blue trunks, maybe 11 years old, with mud and enthusiasm on his face. i sensed that he had not spent much time by the ocean. i wanted to help him out, so i started a conversation. “you cold?” i asked. “no,” he said. of course not. kids are never cold at the beach. i suggested to him that he run first, then throw the board into the water and sand while running, and jump on it. he didn’t seem to understand me and continued falling. i told him again, in-between laughing at his spills. he was confident and determined and he casually adopted my method like it was his idea. he would learn. he had little inhibition talking to me. then we were swarmed by his father and his brother and his sister and some other guy smoking a cigarette. they rushed down to the water. they stood between us, their backs to me. they were obese people covered in tattoos. the father, 350 pounds of him hanging out over his trunks, cornered the boy and let him have it: “what do you think you’re doing coming out here alone without telling us?” the kid listened. he didn’t say anything. i stood there wondering at how integral it is that fear be embedded and fostered in american children. i stood by as the various family members took turns falling into the mud. i stayed 15 minutes, watching, and not once did any member of that family acknowledge me or even look at me. my role was established from behind, as i stood on the waterline talking with a kid who needed a little help.

yesterday i was writing at the plywood desk on the deck when i heard two men talking in my driveway below. the deck is zipped up to the belly, so i couldn’t see them without sitting up in my chair. they were talking about a ghostly scallywag. they knew where it lived, but did not know if it was home. “i saw him walking down the street,” one voice said. i looked over the deck rail and there in my driveway were the cop and the neighborhood socialite. they looked up at me. “there he is right there!” the socialite said, pointing. i felt like a chimp who masturbates with frogs. the cop covered his eyes with one hand. i’m not joking. the cop covered his face.

my neighbor to the right is a black woman. she is the one with the plastic bags and pots and pans. short, crumpled face, narrow hips, always wears a knitted hat on her large head. when she opens her back door and sees me on the back deck, she slams her door closed and deadbolts fly into place. it isn’t fear. it’s insult. when she walks to her jeep, she is a slow, silent, avoids eye-contact. i said hello once, but the more distance she can maintain between us, the freer she is to hassle me through the walls. a tow-truck driver came up the back stairs and knocked on her door last night. “do you know if he’s home?” he asked me. “i thought he was a she,” i said. he looked at a paper, said, “i think it’s a he. i’m not sure.” he shuddered, his arms laughed down to his fingers. all i lack is a shave, so why do i feel so isolated?  i have logged 45,000 miles in america and so often i meet the same crap. i was brought up to believe in something better. your cities and towns are getting tiresome, america. i will resist the idea that it is me, however embedded it is in my psyche.

the things we do to confirm our existences to ourselves. how one struggles to exist defines his essence. wanting to stay alive has become man’s greatest imperative. in it’s absurdity, the question is greater than the struggle to stay alive. a harley does not count. a harley is a condiment. the condiment race, more insecure and separate than any race before. the man is so alienated he doesn’t want to live beyond biological function. he’s put himself in the category of “other being” or “default man” and mounts the nearest machine. he lacks the cognizance and support of what he means to others because there are no others. at night he prays he can become a tree. the nihilist wants to become a rock in a zoo pond because he’s too egotistical to eat. summoning fortifications for the false, he makes a mark we must contemplate for angelic legitimacy! “i don’t know i am wrong, but if you told me i had a soul, i’d believe it and say, ‘who cares?’” man and his pull towards the abyss, his version of sainthood. the things we do to confirm we do not dream.

you don’t need to be a mathematician or philosopher to see that logic works for itself. logic is a lack of faith. man has pinned his hopes on a belief that favors zero. logic kills and logic saves evenly. it shines brightest when man is committing suicide.

“what are you doing in california?”

  “i’m in love.”

  “do you have a plan?”

  “getting here was the plan.”

  “and?”

  “and i don’t know what to do.”

  “so you’re just sitting here in love looking dumb?”

  “yes.”

  “you’re a success.”

  “thank you.”

most great artists are conservatives: they are interested in conserving life. the typical person we call conservative, is interested only in conserving his own money. art battles greed with faith. given man’s tastes for killing and stealing, artists should be more ready to pick up a gun,

a rare and impossible moment of honesty from an italian-american novelist

i learned that if you want to talk to vinny, you must lie to vinny: his ego demands that his elaborate and perverted truths and overblown self-image become your own. if it threatens his ego, it must be denied. there have been things i wanted to say to danny, but i couldn’t because i wanted to preserve our friendship. here, i say them because there is nothing to lose; i am done with him. this dialogue is a fictional portrayal that would never happen in life because vinny lacks humility and has strange self-relations. part of vinny’s denial is the non-recognition of mystery, which you see in his writing. his work is mired in the superficial consciousness of ego. if he can’t know it, it doesn’t exist. he will not allow for the fact that man does not know everything about life and the universe. he is walling himself in. in his jealousy of other writers, his controlling of loves and friends, and his denying of anything greater than himself, he is the woman in the wall. as with dogs, minor artists will have their day, even if they write like geologists, or cartographers mapping out a crater. they can’t get past their hatred of life – and fear of it.

vinny says, “my friends cause me only grief.”

  paddy says, “i admit i’ve brought you my share, but most of it has been fair and truthful.”

  “i have many friends,” vinny says.

  “that’s because you’re a walking public relations firm,” paddy says. “they make you feel big, don’t they?”

  “i want them and collect them like books,” vinny says, “but they make me feel miserable and guilty.”

  “you create guilt and roll in it,” paddy says.

  “how do i create guilt?” vinny says.

  “you treat people like shit,” paddy says.

  “i don’t know why,” vinny says.

  “it makes you feel even bigger,” paddy says.

  “are you saying you don’t take me seriously?” vinny says.

  “you are interesting and a genius, but no, i don’t,” paddy says. “i think you’re lost and your exaggerated empathy is a form of anesthesia and self-destruction. you’re the most selfish, self-centered person i have ever encountered, and that includes the women.”

  “i wall myself in with lies,” vinny says.

  “because you expect lies yourself,” paddy says.

  “and i get what i want,” vinny says. “don’t i?”

  “ego.”

  vinny says, “i am inflated by guilt and lies.”

  “birds talk to one another in the morning, expectations low,” paddy says.

  “birds are taken seriously.” vinny says. “why can’t i be alone?”

  “you lack humility,” paddy says. “you are diffused.”

  “my first novel was great,” vinny says. “you said it was the funniest thing you’d ever read.”

  “it was, but comedy is not an expression of man’s highest aspiration,” paddy says. “humor is nice, but it’s avoidance, a retreat before man’s condition. your novel appeals to professionals and the righteous, just like the stories you send to the new yorker. you obscurify to the delight of the upper middle class and merchants, professionals. you are a bourgeois writer. you write for boring people trying to escape.”

  “if that is true, i am playing a big joke,” vinny says. “i’ve become a jester.”

  “you play it best on yourself. at best, you’re a moralist. you are always trying to be the best. thing is, the best don’t try.”

  “i’m always trying to be cool,” vinny says. “that’s why i wear a leather jacket and motorcycle boots, two-hundred-dollar custom-tailored shirts.”

  “i thought you were trying to be taller.”

  “i’m taller than faulkner.”

  “have you ever stood next to him?” paddy says.

  “some critics might think so,” vinny says.

  “you mean the critic who compared you to walt whitman?”

  “one of them,” vinny says.

  “you think whitman ever abused a woman or anyone else?” paddy says.

  “fuck you.”

  “have you ever apologized to your wives, girlfriends, or friends who you treated like shit?”

  “no.”

  “but you admit it?” paddy says.

  “yes.”

  “why haven’t you apologized?”

  “i don’t believe in regrets.”

  “even if you have them?”

  “that’s right. don’t look back.”

  “you don’t subscribe to the golden rule.”

  “you get less out of people that way.”

  “remember what you said to me when my life was destroyed by manic-depression, when i was suicidal and paralytic, when i lost my job, my girlfriend, and my house?” paddy says.

  “i don’t remember.”

  “you said, ‘light bothers my eyes too.’”

  “i was jealous and self-centered,” vinny says.

  “remember when i gave you that nude, one of my best, which i could have sold but gave to you – and you loved it? remember what you said?”

  “i told you that if i put it on my wall i wouldn’t look at it, so i was putting it in my closet,” vinny says.

  “you wanted to reject me.”

  “i was afraid of it,” vinny says.

  ”remember what you said when i sent you my first novel?” paddy says. “you read the first few pages and said “i wouldn’t change a word, but i can’t read it because it might affect my writing style.’ after i read both your novels twice – and gave you input you used.”

  “i wanted to deny you,” vinny says.

  “i overlooked your slights for years, one at a time, but recently all your bullshit crowded my mind at once.”

  “what bullshit?“

  “the final straw was when you said my long-distance relationship with marliyn ‘wasn’t real,’” paddy says. “despite that fact that that was how you met your wife, and then your lover, and then your next lover.”

  “i have always tried to take you down.”

  “you’re a dunce.”

  “i don’t know why i oppose you.”

  “you affront what you love,” paddy says.

  “i try to be good,” vinny says.

  “we had a decent friendship despite it all. you were a sort of mentor to me in the early years.”

  “now you’re mine,” vinny says. “but i don’t want you. my ego will not allow it.”

  “you were my friend, but you didn’t like me,” paddy says.

  “no. i was just jealous of your creativity,” vinny says. “i am threatened by it.”

  “quit trying,” paddy says. “do you want to be a writer or a socialite? a seer or a joker? do you want to be an artist or live inside your head?”

  “i want to be cool,” vinny says.

  “you haven’t been beaten down yet,” paddy says. “that’s the most i can hope for you. how’s the writing?”

  “a paragraph a day,” vinny says.

  “that’s an occlusion.”

  “i’ve never been a fountain,” vinny says. “not all of us can finish two paintings a day.”

  “you’re too polluted with yourself,” paddy says. “you can play with words. you’re an outsider trying to write about the inside. you hide behind artistry. you do not want to reveal yourself. you may not be capable. at best, you don’t want to risk yourself. in a way, you are the perfect american writer, a mirror of man’s pathetic stance – arrogant.”

  “i strut myself because i am afraid,” vinny says. “you’re up there in the sails with a knife clenched between your teeth. everything you say rings true, yet i can’t listen to you.”

  “is there any thought that runs through your mind throughout the day?” paddy says.

  “’what would bob dylan do?’”” vinny says.

  “what would bob dylan do?” paddy says.

  “he’d try to use you to make himself look good,” vinny says.

  “’how do i look?’” paddy says.

  “it’s a hang-up.”

  “’said the joker to the thief.’” paddy laughs.

  “i’m ruined for life,” vinny says.

  “we’ve been through that,” paddy says.

  “not me,” danny says.

  “you care for yourself more than a man should.”

  “at least i am not antisocial,” danny says.

  “no, i’m just alone,” paddy says. “it’s a loneliness i carry with me honestly. how’s it going at time magazine?”

  “editing stories all day long,” vinny says.

  “you’re great with grammar,” paddy says.

i saw the sandinistas as an army of freedom fighters, rebelling against a homicidal regime in nicaragua that the united states supported. i had seen capitalism birth sociopathic behavior, laziness, anxiety, stupidifying wealth, paranoia, alienation, and immigration by the greedy. capitalism had also proven to be the most efficiently homicidal philosophy to ever exist. i was not a communist and i don’t think anybody is, but to the oppressed it’s promises are a cause. you’d pin your hopes on mist if you were surviving on ketchup and murder. i was recruited by classmates who’d seen my journalism. i’d written: “who cares if a peasant wants to be a communist? he still needs to milk the cows.” i devoted myself to protesting against united states policies in central america, i remember one protest on the steps of the capitol. it was organized and activists at hundreds of universities knew about it. thirty people showed up. americans were distracted by the trickle-down voodoo and fantastic debt that would plow them asunder. they may have also been distracted by cocaine and new wave music. a woman played guitar and sang folk songs on the steps of the capitol. the guitar was a feeble ancillary. it offered no hope for el salvador, sounded more like a requiem for our freedom and conscience. in a nation of 300,000,000 people, just 30 showed up to protest the slaughter of thousands of women and children. (none of them were hippies.) dean’s list engineers and english majors, musicians and the undecided travelled hundreds of miles in vans to state their case to the state. when we arrived, serious men in badges greeted us and said we had to move our presence from the front steps of the capitol to the back steps. reagan was forcing his will upon el salvador and had americans diffused, scattered and afraid. reagan stoked paranoia so he could put billions into the pockets of a few friends and had given the press an orcheotomy. of course the press laid its balls on the block voluntarily because it was drunk on cash. what’s a little country in central america matter? let ron play out his cold war paranoias. let him out-shop the planet for guns with our money. thirty-five of us protested outside the providence journal. the providence journal, in its editorials, was engaged in obscene pandering to the right, essentially saying “please let reagan keep killing children because we are making money.” there were photographers in washington and providence. at the journal, a young staffer came out the front door in a leather jacket to shoot the gathering. in washington, he was straight from quantico. he stayed a long time, unlike the newspaper photographer. he shot all of us from many angles. i had an uneasy feeling about his mission, but accepted the risk as a means to our goal. i asked him what paper he was from and he didn’t say a word. no other photographers or reporters showed at the protests. they were certainly not competing for a story. when el mozote went down, two reporters were there. the new york times and the washington post reported the massacre our contras had committed against a small village in el salvador. reagan said it didn’t happen, said it was sandinista propoganda. time magazine and the wall street journal joined reagan and attacked the reporters. they were communists. they were incompetent and not credible.  the reporters were run out of town until a few years later, after reagan was out of office and his mind, when three-hundred skeletons were dug up at el mozote – men, women, children – all shot. america’s contras had come into town, decked out in justification. reagan wanted his own private vietnam, he wanted a second screening of the war he had lost to john lennon and students at berkeley, he wanted to make things right with the peasant farmers who dared to dream of food and free elections, to live in peace. america, your apathy is complicity. you have destroyed fidelity. wonder why nobody talks to his neighbor?

el mozote was a small rural hamlet in the el salvadorian countryside. there were about 20 homes, a school, and a church. the first day the contras forced the citizens of el mozote into the town square and made them lie with their faces to the ground. then they were locked in their homes. the next morning, the men were brought out and interrogated. they were accused of collaborating with the fsln – frente sandinista liberacion nacional. the men were tortured and shot. america, the barrel of your m-16 was shoved up the ass of a man who milked cows, up the ass of freedom while you stood browsing in a new car lot. his heart exploded. hope for life bled onto the white house lawn. every man at el mozote was executed, except for one man who hid in a tree and watched. the women were taken into the town square, except for a nun who hid in a bush. they were interrogated. they were beaten. they were raped. the girls down to the age of 10 years old were raped. then they were all shot. the cia provided the ammunition. now only the youngest children remained. they were locked inside the church. the contras insulated themselves from the ultimate crime by shooting down the children through the windows of the church. the church was then set ablaze. time magazine and the wall street journal were not there, but were ambitious enough to call the nun, the man in the tree, the reporters from the new york times and the washington post, and the 300 bloating and blackening corpses, liars. the contras returned to the scene to collect the skulls of the dead for candle holders and good luck charms. the bodies were buried, but it was too late: the world knew what reagan was determined to be, relying on men whose minds belonged to no one. a soave guy who murdered people and made the rich richer; america bought it. i can’t be artistic about it. there is nothing sacred here anymore. el mazote is man at his sickest. ideas infect a man, he gets sick, and he can’t shake his idealogical fever. he becomes too enthusiastic. machine-gunning babies cannot cure it. blowing the head off an infant is temporary solace. to look for rationality or love in man’s actions is masturbation, however much man clings to the rational. here, man, chaos is your fantasy. your mind breaks apart on our ideas. you have no control. i’ll repeat it, your mind belongs to no one, firstly to yourself.

50,000 died. next time you’re in a large football stadium, america, look around. in the end, the superpower met the tortilla and the tortilla won. blood on the palms of a nation drifting oblivious to mass murder, baby-killers . . . baby-killers dispatched from santa barbara, baby-killers dispatched from greenwich village and omaha, baby-killers dispatched from studio 51 and ford motor company, swimming in unearned hatreds and ignorance and viciousness. john lennon knew and reagan knew he knew. assassination most always comes from the right. where does an unemployed schizophrenic get the cash to fly from hawaii to new york twice? if you can slaughter babies, a real problem is not a problem.

the summer has the kids. the summer gets the kids. summer as perennial and everlasting, here before the kids took it off. dogs around here, a lot of them, and i am not without one. everybody once had a horse and a dog. now we have dogs. dogs work less and are more potent. i have a dog at my lover’s. sascha, the sleek black german shepherd who believes in food, comfort, affection, beer, wrestling, and revenge for perceived slights. he must be seven feet long, 105 pounds, with sad brown eyes. he is clumsy. he trips when running and bumps his head on deck rails and bench legs. marliyn calls him a “goofball” and i call him “the buddy.” if you ignore him when he bumps your arm, he’ll immediately take the head off your favorite zinnia. if you don’t share your beer, he’ll strip your favorite rose bush. if you don’t let him inside, he’ll crap on your jasmine. sascha and i have an understanding and dependence. he tells a gentle story with gigantic teeth. i pin him to the ground and he bites my hands. when i scratch his hairy belly, he is helpless. i knew german shepherds were the smartest of all canines, and he is sensitive and giving and expects the same from his humans, whom he respects and would give his life for. for two weeks i fucked this british girl so violently i plunged her into re-evaluation: how could a poet ream her out better than a soccer player? “you mean . . . ?” she said, pointing to a jock in the bar. don’t ask me, a job’s a job, and there’s nothing better than getting it done while upholding standards.

a lover says,“make love to me.”.

  “okay.”

  “that was nice,” she says, “make love to me again.”

  “it was very nice, but i need to catch my breath.”

  “i’m so happy anyway,” she says.

  “i am too.”

  “i feel so satisfied,” she says.

  “so do i.”

  “i love you,” she says. “i feel empowered.”

  “i love you.”

  “don’t talk to me now,” she says. “i’m high in my own head. i’m courageous.”

  “you’re somewhere else, baby.”

  “please fuck me,” she says.

  “you need more?”

  “i feel depressed,” she says.

  “i thought you were high?”

  “i have a headache only you can cure,” she says.

  “i thought you were satisfied.”

  “time has passed and i am miserable,” she says. “please fuck me.”

  “i think i must.”

stories and novels stuck at publishers who receive one-thousand submissions an hour and one great novel every 100 years – during which time publishers let slide 3.5 million abortions for people who need to have their ways affirmed in print. they do not publish for people who have made it through intact. i am somewhere in the queue. i’ll be read in three years by a distracted editor, her ivy league engagement versus my charmed disaster and chain-smoking, her curly black hair versus my immortality and decay, her five-star dinner dates (with a guy whose glasses have narrow black rectangular frames) versus my soup kitchen, her bulova and pomegranate martinis versus my natty light, her bausch and lomb versus my drift . . .

i write with so many distractions, in so many places, in so many states, in the car, on the deck, at this table and that desk, at the beach and on the bus, on different paper, different pens, computer crashes, dozens of typewriters, sober and drugged on heroin and morphine and drinking beer, deranged by manic depression, one day maine, the next california, making notes walking down the street, crawling out of bed to make more notes, rarely sitting for more than 30 minutes, building homes out of manuscripts tied up with string . . . publication has become just one more distraction. i write outside with sascha standing up like the sunflowers, as far from bifocals and and st. mark’s as you can get.

california divorce law will take care of him, but he remains my problem. marilyn’s mother compared me to her hated ex because i am “depressive and smoke and am introverted.” this woman could be my mother-in-law someday. i can’t deny that i am depressed and smoke but i am not an introvert. i have been singed by the human race and been humbled by the human experience. i am reserved. i can talk to anyone anywhere about anything. if i am silent, well, now, then, there, all things tend toward silence. i have arrived. it’s distressing to have your girlfriend’s mother drawing heavy conclusions about you after your first meeting, comparing you to the tranquilized ex who didn’t look at his son for 10 years. yes, i am just like her ex, who was strangling her to death when the cops busted down the door, i am just like the ex who was pulled over for driving 100 mph with his infant son in the back seat on his way home from buying a $3,500 mountain bike he would ride once, i am just like the ex who pointed his .9 mm automatic at her forehead before firing it in this close neighborhood, i am just like the ex who fired two bullets through the wall of the study into the kid’s bedroom, i am just like the ex who fired his .9 millimeter through the garage door and into the side of the neighbor’s house, i am just like the ex stoned on valium and crashing cars, i am just like the ex who brought home a $75,000 bmw he bought with marilyn’s credit without telling her, i am just like the ex who spent his salary on himself and contributed nothing to the household, mortage, kid, food, i am just like the ex who stepped over his kid and never talked to him, i am just like the ex who abandoned the german shepherd he had to have . . . marilyn assures me that her mother’s comparison is not an insult. she tells me there are big differences between myself and her ex. “you are a genius and i want to sleep with you.” i say, “geniuses are a dime a dozen. the other thing might be rarer.” (11 months later and marilyn’s mother treats me like the boyfriend she wants to force out. she read this story and was furious, said she didn’t hate marilyn’s ex and she accused marliyn of betraying her by telling me what she had said about me, smoker, depressed, introvert, etc. after 11 months, mom has finally said one sentence to me: “do you want more whipped cream on your strawberries?”

marilyn says: “in the 80’s, people were thin. now they’re all overweight.”

  i say: “you can do something about that.”

   marilyn says: “i wasn’t talking about myself. i’m fine. thanks.” she slams the slider and retreats to her bed. i thought i’d been gentle and her reaction too heavy.

even idiots can speak seven languages . . . the italian-american poet from the 21st century tells me:

  “sex is boring.”

  paddy says, “your dreams must be boring.”

  the italian poet says, “sex is boring.”

  “proclamations are boring,” paddy says.

  “sex is boring,” the italian poet says.

  “laundry is boring,” paddy says. “sex is unnecessary, sometimes disgusting, but never boring.”

  “sex is boring,” the italian poet says.

  paddy says, “if you’re a nihilist, sex, reproduction, is a means to extend senseless misery, but many things without purpose are compelling – like writing. myself, i prefer writing, but sex is an exciting intermission. sex requires a certain playfulness”

  the italian poet says, “sex is boring.”

  paddy says, “you mean sex is beneath you?”

  the italian poet says, “sex is boring.”

  “it isn’t what it was when i was 22,” paddy says, “and i don’t need it as much, but it’s never boring.”

  “sex is boring,” the italian poet says. 

  paddy says, “maybe you’re bored with the dance?”

  “sex is boring,” says the italian poet.

  “sex is like everything else, exciting in the beginning when everything wants to thrive . . . it works in the middle, like not wanting to die. the sex impulse is the life impulse, a blind imperative . . . pleasure and immortality . . . the climax is a passing on, better expressed by women.”

the italian poet says, “sex is boring.”

paddy says, “you sound like a dried-up sensualist and burned-out fornicator.”

the italian poet says, “fuck you.”

greg called. two hours. what did we talk about? if i tried to remember, i’d be dishonest. women. insanity. women who are insane. how we’d rather be killed than paralyzed. brains on the street, faces ground off, it’s better than living with a manipulative borderline holding a can of gasoline and a zippo to your balls. greg sustains a monologue about himself that is difficult to interrupt or contribute to. he’s moving to the florida keys. he’s getting a harley 883. he is going to try to love the chick he’s moving in with. he’s bringing the beagle. my contributions are rushed and trampled opon. we do not have many silences, greg and i. we have problems and they are all our fault.

i have found peter. he is bleeding in a nursing home near van nuys. he was on his way to see a gastrointestinal specialist when he texted back. he doesn’t answer questions about his condition. i don’t know whether he will die tomorrow or is just using the nursing home as a free hotel. he is homeless because he bought bandages and ointment for his infected foot using his sister’s credit card, which she had given him to feed her two brats, whom he was watching while she was out of town buying and selling real estate. then, though peter allowed the kids to have parties with their friends while their mother way away, and though he cooked dinner for them and their friends, the rich little brats ratted out his rotting toe. peter’s niece, a college student, then saw a yellow convertible volkswagen bug she had to have. she already had an suv her mother had bought her, but she needed a summer car to work on her tan. that’s what she said. she needed the volkswagen for her tan. her mother, the millionaire real estate wrangler who wouldn’t pay for a tube of neosporin, had peter go look at the volkswagen. he was limping.

man’s thirst for completion, the depression on plato’s grave  – logic – will complete him.

to live is to rebel. the grass and the trees sing revolt. this is why we love them.

end