flying buttress

I am the hole in the donut...

Insides shriveling under this hulking blanket of mundane and khaki pants.
Is no one suffering?

flying buttress on Notre Dame Cathedral

Screaming in love anymore?
Have we all been sedated by quinoa salad and gym memberships at 4x's per week?
Has our passion been stripped monthly in $100 increments on automatic bill pay?
What will be left of me?
No more alcoholism.
No more gritty sex in tiny sedans under musty blankets and Mazzy's Star.
No more starvation and guts sinking in and around powerful ribs like a cathedral's flying buttress.
No more purging all food, all love, all failure and all bile to digest. to care.

No more free fall into shimmering pool of love to drown all worlds.

a 700 foot sink hole for which we dangle roots for miles to only taste.
No more breaking dishes when the fever can find no outlet.
No more whiskey burning and knowing it'll all be over soon
no more singing, wailing like dead cats deep into the night
...songs to say what we can no longer annunciate.
no more.

You may rage no more. wings are clipped.  food rationed.
all you have is
poetry.
and paint.
and fingers to climb and feel fear from 100 feet upon granite with the tiny swift birds, gliding.
the occassional sex that is only a misting of lips...my roots skimming.
but knowing we could go so much deeper if we didn't have to get back to it.

only me.
worrying.
flattened.
mourning.

Painting the deck where the paint has rubbed off.  listening to Red House Painters on my ipod.
ironic.
and crying...the inaudible cries of a housewife before her kids wake up.
                                   
a deep inhale brings the scent of cigarette smoke on hair from another time.
hair stuffed against a pillow I don't remember lying down upon.
and the wet spots where tears laid with me all night.
It brings the stomach lurch
the realization - I have to wait an entire day with all her hideous sunlight.

It was not better.
    It was not better.
        It was not........better.

thinking of Ginsberg and painting

For my friend, Misty Brown Sunflower Sutra I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery. The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily. Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust-- --I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past-- and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye-- corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives, all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial-- modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown-- and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these entangled in your mummied roots--and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form! A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul? Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive? You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower! And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not! So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen, --We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision. Allen Ginsberg Berkeley, 1955