 
Living The Zine Life

Mel C. Thompson

Copyright © 2010, 2018, Mel C. Thompson

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

Lafayette, California 94549

melcthompson@yahoo.com

This book is dedicated to the late Denver Harold. May the poets always remember what he did for us.

Cover Photograph: Joie Cook.

Text Notes:

The following prose works are reformatted and edited forms of the original poems published in hard-copy zines. Because the "school" of poetry I was involved in pushed the boundaries of prose and poetry to a place where they were barely distinguishable, it is fairly easy to present these works as short prose pieces in order to take advantage of the natural text flow of ebooks. The original versions were with line breaks, most of which were removed for this particular product. Copy editing and rewriting was done to make the pieces hold together better in ordinary prose paragraphs, and other changes were made to deal with issues caused by rapidly changing language and culture. In attempting to import works written in the "stone age" of primitive desktop publishing into the modern area of multi-device compatibility, compromises were made to make this book readable on everything from large desktop computers to small handheld tablets and smartphones. However, I have still credited the publications that published the original versions of these pieces, especially since many of these works still have about ninety percent of the original wording in spite in spite of the many changes that were made to present the work in this medium.

Table of Contents

Poems 1-10

1. Greener Pastures

2. The Ambulance

3. Suburban Families: Their Eating Disorders And Their Sexual Dysfunctions

4. Asking To Be Teased

5. The Sadness

6. The Dead

7. Would It?

8. Café Du Loser

9. The Final Assault On Burundi

10. Pyro

Poems 11-20:

11. Upon The First Meeting of My Two Tormentors

12. Robert

13. Urban Lullaby

14. What Andrea Told Me

15. Other Empires That Fell

16. Truth Or Dare

17. For P.W. Stevens In Honor of His Death

18. All Things In Excess

19. The Flames of Hell

20. Men

Poems 21-30

21. At The John Wayne Airport

22. Dance of The Bower Birds

23. Notes From Freelance Gardener And Landscaper

24. Trying To Date Sister Dharmastream

25. Sensei's Koans

26. One Great Path

27. The Fundamental Virtue

28. Visualization

29. An Unhappily-Married Woman

30. Facts About English Garden Robins

Poems 31-40

31. The Ghost Is The Machine

32. Elizabeth 2002

33. Moss Beach, El Granada, Miramar

34. Klipschutz At Rockaway Beach & Linda Mar

35. Selected Ancient Fragments From The Scrolls of To Fu

36. To A Woman Named Eli

37. Notes On Astronomy And You

38. The Physics of Despair — Part I

39. An Irresistible Sale

40. A Day At Cerebral Care Center, A.D. 2100

Poems 41-50

41. Sun Ships

42. Anthropology 100

43. South of Everywhere

44. Werner Erhard

45. Hegel — Abbreviated In Seven Stages (19th Century German Idealism Made Simpler)

46. Mass Transit Bedouin

47. The Libido of Power

48. Without Him, Your Whole Theory Collapses

49. Higher Consciousness Through Coffee

50. House of Lost Men

Poems 51-60

51. Virtually Reality

52. On My Preference For Humans

53. My Girlfriend's Butt

54. Former Academic Now Encased In Newspapers

55. On Intimacy And Future Shock

56. Nightmare Poetry Boyfriend

57. A Most Unusual Pink Slip

58. The Handjob That Saved The World

59. Soul For Sale

60. After The Sentencing

Poems 61-70

61. How I've Come To Know You

62. Consort Without A Nervous System

63. A Meeting of Suns

64. How We Made Our Fortune

65. A Language We Shared

66. Concept #2

67. The Wretched Ones

68. Carrying The Torch

69. Your Real Name Is Janis

70. The Human Paper Blizzard

Poems 71-72

71. Three Generation Xers Collide

72. L.A. Chinatown # 1

Notes On Zines And The Zine Life

A. My Introduction To Zines

B. How Zines Saved My Artistic Life And My Sanity

C. The Criteria For Choosing Zines And Poems

D. Short Notes On A Few of The Zine-Makers

Poems 1-10

Greener Pastures

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When you're a poet, you watch your friends drift away. And after a while it doesn't even make you sad anymore. You are only left marveling at the reasons they give.

Sandra got into Religious Science, and she told me she didn't like the universe I'd created for myself. That was before she called me from a South American jail. She was screaming and crying incoherently about latex and spandex and rubber. I couldn't fully understand what she was saying about foreign obscenity laws and the porn flick she was trying to make. But she wanted me to come to Havana and bail her out. I told her I couldn't help her until she created a better universe for herself.

Billy said he couldn't hang around with me anymore: "I expect a certain level of growth and functioning from my friends. And honestly, I'm disappointed with how little you've done with your life."

He changed his mind three months later after his fourth wife left him and he became an alcoholic again. I told him he could send me some of his poetry in the mail. "If your writing is good enough," I said to him, "maybe we can be friends."

Poets can see the interpersonal politics for what they are. And after a while it doesn't even insult you anymore. You are only left amused at how easily people sell you out.

Jerry and me were real close till he got into positive thinking. "I can't accept your fatalism and negativity," he proclaimed. "Me and my wife are trying to build a life together. We're planning to start a business and have some kids and buy a home. We want positive reinforcement of our values. We want our children to be around inspiring role models."

The police came by my house five years later to ask me some questions. They wanted to know what could have motivated Jerry to blockade himself inside his house with a gun and scream to the authorities, "The ham and rye sandwich! I won't come out till you bring me the ham and rye sandwich!" Why, Jerry? Why?

Now it was hard to take when Renee left me. But I'll be damned if I'll let her get to me. She was always on my back about my self-image.

"I need a man with more self-confidence than you," she'd complain. That was after she confessed to me about the psychotherapy practice she was running and how she used to take Valium every day just to be able to face her patients in the morning, patients whom she was supposedly helping to learn to face life without using drugs.

Did I tell you she sent me a letter last week? "I miss the little spankings you used to give me," she wrote. "Do you still have those black leather straps around?"

I just decided to put the letter in my file box. And I thought to myself, "Well, well, isn't life just a tender little thing?"

Bullhorn, Volume 3, Number 11, November, 1990

The Ambulance

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It started out as a visit to the doctor's office, out now the ambulance is coming. It is occupied by Mr. Craft and Mr. Jones. Mr. Craft is a tall and lean man capable of driving seventy miles an hour in a traffic jam. Mr. Jones is a stocky and muscular man, ready for any contingency, up to, and including, paramilitary situations. You should never fall to the ground screaming, unless you want the ambulance to come.

Because you told the doctor your life was over, the ambulance is coming. Because you can no longer be trusted out on the streets alone, the ambulance is coming. Because adding water to a can of tomato soup and eating it with a spoon is beyond your capacity, the ambulance is coming.

The ambulance is coming because it will probably be three days before you are able to select items from a menu without crying over your indecision. The ambulance is coming because you honestly believe you are dying when your worst physical symptoms are heart palpitations, acid reflux and insomnia. The ambulance is coming because you have to be under observation when you're on the stuff they're going to have to give you just to shut you up for five minutes.

Mr. Craft and Mr. Jones will be polite so long as you cooperate, so long as you are not violent. No one has ever won an argument with them. Ambulance rides are strictly on their terms.

They are in the lobby now to take you away because you haven't seen your mother in twenty-four years. They are in the lobby now to take you away because you can't work at the same place or date the same woman for more than two months without running away. They are in the lobby now to take you away because you can't stop fantasizing that you are a secret agent or a rock star, or the President of some third world country, or the greatest philosopher who ever lived, or some incarnation of God in the flesh. They are in the lobby now to take you away because you're getting way too old to be living on ten thousand dollars a year, to still be living alone, to still be calling your friends from high school because no one new would tolerate you for ten minutes.

You messed up when you climbed the high-voltage power lines on a dare and the police showed up and detained you. You messed up when you got caught stealing things and they threw you in the amusement park jail and called your parents to bring you home. You messed up when you almost failed out of high school and got put on suspension for truancy. You messed up when you asked a woman you didn't even like to marry you. You messed up when you moved to the East Coast to live with a girl you'd only slept with four times.

But now you've really gone and done it. At last you've crossed over that fine line into the big leagues of weird. And now, finally, after all these years, the ambulance is coming.

Bullhorn, Volume 4, Number 1, November, 1991

Suburban Families: Their Eating Disorders And Their Sexual Dysfunctions

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A brand new Mercedes 450 SL is parked near a Malibu condominium overlooking the Pacific Ocean. This is the top of the hill. They say money needn't get in the way of relaxation. What do you think?

She is 35 and a very attractive woman. She's slender, career oriented, a half-devoted mother, and a wife when she remembers to be. There's nothing wrong with taking a Valium now and then when things get a little tense, like now.

He believes he's not brutal at the office. Only yells when they deserve it, like now. 20 or 25 pounds overweight isn't too bad. Be back in shape soon when I can cut back on the brews, soon as the office cools down a little. I don't have a drinking problem. What will their children grow up to be?

PTA meetings are important. It's easier to talk to other adults about children than to talk to children who don't understand their own problems anyway. Why do people grow up and be crazy? Insanity is no defense.

Mother never listens to the children except when dad wants sex. Then it is very important to tend to the children, or the dogs, or the housework, or her parents, or religion.

Bill wants a raise, a dollar more an hour. I could get someone to do the job cheaper. Besides, that's $160 more a month. How will I ever get my Porsche rims replaced if I keep giving raises? Screw Bill. I am fair with my children. I am reasonable. I am educated. I am unable to obtain an erection. I wonder why?

The Mercedes is in the shop today. Mother looks upset. How come Mother has such small servings on her plate? She yells at us to eat our vegetables. I've never actually seen her eat her own vegetables. She says she eats them after we leave.

What is an eating disorder? I saw a commercial about that, but I couldn't understand it because Mom always starts talking during those commercials. Mom is too skinny.

Dad is fat and he's drinking again. Dad has four or five servings a night and five or six martinis a night. I don't want to talk to him. I'm afraid he might yell or hit. When we were younger Mom used to sit next to Dad every night. Now she is in the other room reading.

My parents were embarrassed to tell me where babies come from, so my friends told me. I was seven. It's hard to imagine Dad doing that to Mom. Wouldn't he crush her or something?

My brother Jimmy is in the bathroom again. He stays in there for hours. My sister says he plays with himself in there. Mom always gets worried: "Jimmy! What are you doing in there?" An older boy told me that it was normal. Why is Mom so worried about Jimmy? Sometimes, if I know my family is asleep, I do it too. I wonder who else in my family does it. Once I asked Mom if she did it and she got mad at me. That must mean she probably does it. Why are grown-ups so afraid to be embarrassed? Who gets mad at Mom when she's naughty? Sometimes Mom says that Dad is naughty too.

You know what happened today? Mom ate just as much as Dad did, and that's a lot. Then she ran to the bathroom. She says she was sick. She always gets sick when she eats a lot. Dad can eat a whole lot and never get sick.

"I'm sorry, honey. It happened again." Despairing and helpless, a feeling of inadequacy and a feeling of reduced masculinity cried him to sleep. She was sure he found her unattractive. Why can't I get it up? Why feel guilty anyway? Did she ever apologize for using KY Jelly? It hadn't come naturally for her in years. Maybe if she had more energy after work. Maybe if she ate a little more. Maybe if she didn't get sick when she ate. Maybe if her father had ever talked to her. Maybe if she hadn't married a man identical to her father. Maybe.

The alarm clock, that enemy of God and man, that signifier of the next unconscious ten hours. A shrill air siren, not the bombing of a city or military installation, but the bombing of the conscious mind with a reality that could only be described as someone else's. But, it paid for the Mercedes and the condo and the wife. What do I get out of the latter?

Preparing a meal for others to eat / at 6:00AM. Taking care of that uncaring, dull, ungrateful, rude dork and his three children. Why am I in this mess?

The Porsche is running fine this morning. The sky is blue and clear. Traffic is light. I've got $400 in my pocket. Business is going well. I think I'll find myself a mistress today.

One need only look down the hall where a fine, young word processor with fiery hormones, firm breasts, and a yearning to interfere with family life, lay in wait. He may soon discover that his lost potency was only connected to one for whom he had contempt. It seemed unrealistic to make love to the same person for 60 years anyway.

She would take off work today. A priest waited in the office to counsel the lost. His advice: self-control above all else.

Our Father who art in Heaven: I am anorexic and frigid. Hallowed be thy name. My husband is alcoholic and obese. Thy will be done. Our marriage stinks. On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day. I constantly need to buy things to make me happy. And lead us not into temptation. My husband is having an affair. But deliver us from evil. And my son masturbates all day. For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory. And my Mercedes keeps breaking down. Amen. (And God too was perplexed.)

He stared lovingly at the degree on the wall, a Master's in Business Administration. It no longer troubled him that he'd cheated in three statistics classes. What counts is who wins. He had now clearly seen that purity and higher morality were a thing of the sixties. Screw Charity.

He wrote another check to the William Dannemeyer Reelection Fund because he didn't want to see another dime of welfare money going to blacks and Mexicans. Instead he preferred a strong national defense, especially since all that tax money would go to all the white defense contractors he knew.

Being a little sister is weird. Mommy tells me to act different than the boys do. She wants me to act like a lady. I don't want to be a lady. I want to have fun. Mommy never has fun.

Bullhorn, Volume 3, Number 12, December, 1990

Asking To Be Teased

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I want you to tease me unfairly, build up my hopes and lead me nowhere.

My love in an overpriced set of luggage. My love is a back-alley frame job. That's the only kind of arrangement my heart can understand.

I want you to pretend to be secretly in love with me, to pretend you have such a crush on me that you just don't know what to do; and then I want you to dump me for a 23-year-old coke fiend who wears Iron Maiden tee-shirts. I would dig that.

My love is as sincere as a personal injury attorney, as predictable as a request for alimony.

I want you to flirt with me like you can hardly wait to touch me and then sneak out of the restaurant, while you are supposedly going to the women's room, and then leave me stuck with the bill. It would appeal to my sense of persecution.

I want you to tease me, because I couldn't face it if you actually wanted me to be the biggest part of your life. Tempt me and stir me up and get my blood circulating again so I know I'm alive, but don't try to make good on your promises.

I want you to tease me all night, mercilessly. Fantasy is what I live for, not the real-life drudgery of compromise and negotiation, and sacrifice and resentment.

My love is a byproduct of food tampering. My love is being recycled and turned into cans of Moroccan sardines.

I am asking you to lead me on with suggestive statements that draw attention and energy to you, but leave me empty-handed. You see, as long as you don't deliver, I can keep on dreaming, dreaming that your flesh is like cream and sugar, dreaming that your body would quake and tremble with every fingertip laid on you, dreaming that your hot juices would soak my sheets and stain my pillowcases, dreaming that you love lust so much that I could never, that the world could never, give you enough to satisfy you for a single night.

Don't do it. Don't let me find out it's not true. Don't let me touch you and turn us both to cold, hard stone.

But as long as it's make believe, baby, my love is burning, burning like molten steel, glowing red hot like bricks in a furnace, baby.

My love flows out like radiation clouds in a total meltdown, girl. My love's like acid rain that's glad to kill, honey. My love's every mutant, leprous freak who ever begged you for a nickel.

Just as long as it's bullshit, woman, I'll believe your every commercial. Shit, I'll write the ads for network television. I'll sell my conscience down the river and let it float out to sea with every toxic chemical and nightmare poison those pin-stripe, rust-belt, smokestack bastards ever made.

If you lead me on, baby, lead me on, then I'll lend you my credit cards. Send me dirty pictures in the mail with postage due. You can even call me collect just to jerk me around a little.

My love is a corrosive substance, sweetheart. You can carry it around if you want, but just don't let it out of the bottle.

Bullhorn, Volume 4, Number 2, February, 1991

The Sadness

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The sadness will go away one day, and you just won't believe it.

Your heart will break, at first, when sadness leaves, because it has been your only faithful companion since you were just a child, since you played in the dirt with rocks and sticks.

And happiness will seem repulsive, at first, because it has been a total stranger to you. Happiness is like some simpering fool who walks into the room and winks at you like he owns the place, like he's known you all his life.

But the day will come when altar boys in white robes will blow out the candles that burned with unconsummated love. And they will lead you down a hall past pictures of bishops and deacons into a banquet hall filled with new faces who love you already. They will serve you red wine and prime rib and pull you tightly to their breasts and say, "All is forgiven. All is forgotten. The curse has been broken."

Your legs will feel shaky beneath you. Then the walls around you will be transformed into an enormous womb. And tubes will be joined to your body. Your eyesight, your clothing, and the entire external world, will disappear. Your thumb will move into your mouth, and the blood of The One Mother will rush into your open veins, replacing the lonely fluids that once filled your body. Your heart will beat slowly and easily again and your tear ducts will dry up completely. The planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and Earth, along with hundreds of other moons and asteroids, will mix with the amniotic fluids that surround you.

The mind you will become is a vast moving picture. Your life was a meaningless speck in an unfathomably large chaos. But nothing will hurt you anymore after the sadness goes.

And if you feel like anything, you will like an egg that has no need of hatching, a fetus that is far beyond the silliness of having to be born.

Oh, the pain is gonna' go.

Or maybe you will wake up in a lawyer's office and not know why. And the lawyer will be tapping his finger nervously on his heavy, oak desk, smiling, almost giggling, as his whole staff looks on. He will motion for you to come to his desk and say, "This has been willed to you." Then he will turn over a card with a number on it which is so large you stop breathing and matter stops moving.

Perhaps you will then become so rich that you cease being a mere person and actually become an entity so big that your cells are composed of capital cities and your nerve endings are made of entire mountain ranges.

Ah, the sadness.

The sadness has really got to go one day. But who could ever be ready for a change as big as that?

Maybe we all prefer, for now, to stay with the present arrangement, sadness and all.

Bullhorn, Volume 4, Number 4, April 1991

The Dead

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The dead will not leave me alone.

How can I drink my morning coffee when the dead keep asking me why they were murdered just to satisfy someone's morbid curiosity? They want to know why no one visits their graves anymore, or remembers them on holidays, or even speaks their names out loud?

The dead are always on my back for something. I can't even enjoy my lunch because the dead keep making fun of me, telling me not to bother with health food or workouts. The dead have a habit of pointing out that time is on their side and not mine. They say they have seen the day of my death and they assure me I won't like it.

It's hard to get any rest when the dead keep knocking on my door and calling me on the telephone all night, warning me about how horrible everyone else's death will be. They tell me non-existence is painful, that it hurts so deeply not to be anything anymore.

The dead are only allowed to be ghosts for four hours a day in rotating shifts. The rest of the time they are sent to nothingness to serve their eternal sentences. They scream. No one hears. They listen. There is no sound. They look, but there is no world to see. They try to run, but they have no bodies. They sniff, but there are no odors. Just zero, zero, zero forever.

The dead tell me that's the worst part of their fate. You get to be aware of being dead and nothing else.

It's hard to have any fun with the dead always hanging around, stealing my beer and getting into my things.

The dead say they got my name from a mailing list of people who can't face death. The dead mock everything and everybody I love.

The dead are always moaning in my hallways while I'm trying to watch television. The dead / will not cooperate. They will not be reasonable. They crawl inside my cereal boxes and climb over the front gate of my apartment building when I try to lock them out.

The dead have been stealing my socks and underwear; and they are always hiding my scissors and scotch tape. I have seen the dead stuffing ballot boxes and rigging elections against my favorite candidates. I have seen them engineering Cal-Trains and posing as BART policemen.

The dead say they have the last word on everything. The dead say that life is so short that most of them have long forgotten that they ever lived.

The dead / just won't go away.

The dead / just won't leave me alone.

Bullhorn, Volume 4, Number 7, July, 1991

Would It?

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Would it make you happy if we gave you money that never touched a finger at The Department of Defense, green cash that was innocent of red blood in every way, good checks that never strip-mined, or clear-cut, or hurt a single animal?

Would it make you happy if life was a nurse who listened, a doctor who really cared, a God who took your prayers as seriously as a tax audit?

Would you promise to be happy if we gave you room service, letters signed, "I love you," in your mailbox every day, if the government paid your bills, and the mayor built free apartments for everyone who asked?

Would it finally lift your burdens if people lined up to suck on you and no one dared insult you, if we wanted you like diamonds and needed you like water?

Do you want us at your mercy? Show us your mercy now.

Would you stop complaining if we put you in charge of Chevron, if we made you our God and said you were beautiful, gave you a second childhood and your own private playground?

Would it make your day if you were shielded from boredom by a gown made of lust, if your backyard was Paris and everything was always new? What are you prepared to give?

Would it make you happy if cops were always nice guys, if Capitalism finally failed and Socialism was sweeping the world? Do you want to be the winner, or does it help to play the underdog?

Would you rest in peace knowing they'd finally found a cure for aging, but it only worked on poets and artists, that there was a new pandemic disease, but it only killed your political enemies?

Would it fill your heart with joy if fear were a friend to sing with, if we filled your world with tunnels you could crawl through like a weasel?

Is there an asshole tight enough, a vagina engorged enough, a penis big enough, to somehow give you that climax you have always been waiting for? How much longer is the world expecting us to wait?

Would you be satisfied if you had a personal secretary who honestly thought you were ethical, if low-calorie food actually tasted good enough to binge on, and no one remembered all the times you acted like a prick?

Exactly what are you looking for? Because nobody's in the business of filling up holes around here, unless they're working a con. Would you feel better if somebody told you they felt very guilty?

Would it make you happy if we put you on a rocket, shot you out somewhere past Neptune and said, "Here's the whole universe. You can pretty much have it to yourself."

Bullhorn, Volume 4, Number 10, October, 1991

Café Du Loser

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I will not humiliate myself by drinking coffee in the Haight in my typical dirty-thirties fashion in my decade-too-late jeans, nor will I sadly ogle the college girls from beneath my bald spot which covers and even greater void.

Instead, I will join the haggard patrons of the default bakeries near the glumness of central Market Street where my lonely and resigned compatriots stare down at their stale glazed donuts contemplating their defeated wives who fairly retaliate against these men with useless pot bellies by refusing to wrestle alone against nature any longer, and who, absent worthy husbands, bear no further duty to ab-rollers and stairmasters and butt-firmers and thigh-trimmers and the frantic cult of aerobics and all of the other inhuman slavery that only the wealthy and the youthful can demand.

The mid-day sun filters between apartment towers and office prisons, reflecting off of a flaming redhead wearing a cut-off tee-shirt and tightly-cropped black shorts. Sensing an opportunity to shine, she struts confidently past our fortress of humiliation and furtively scans the field of tables sporting gray-haired drunks talking football; failed, abandoned entrepreneurs still scheming; and novelists near suicide.

As her muscular backside passes the last yard of open window, she tosses her eyes briefly back to catch admirers in the act. But there is not one head turned.

Bullhorn, Volume 1, Number 3, November, 1997

The Final Assault On Burundi

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This is the windy foreword to the lofty introduction to the preface that never ends, the ornately-scripted brackets around the parenthetical remarks of a footnote in history.

Lieutenant Colonel Lowell summoned us at 11:00PM, Pacific Standard Time, to the temporary strategic headquarters, a luxury bunker in the Grand Hyatt Union Square.

We were to make a rendezvous in formal attire with a used, green Cadillac transport unit. Our duty was to escort General David Lerner to his eighth-floor command post.

Rations and other field provisions were to be supplied by room service and would included unlimited alcoholic beverages, a broiled salmon and nachos with bean dip.

"Admiral Thompson," General Lerner explained, "I am without a nation to rule. Perhaps a coup d'état is in order, but our cache of ammunition is low. For the battle, all we have are prescription drugs and whatever contraband the underground can offer."

"Perhaps an invasion force of two limousines," I replied, "and a trunk full of heroin, could immobilize Burundi's small army."

"Yes!" General Lerner affirmed, "Burundi! We will launch a final assault tomorrow. I should have thought of it sooner!"

But, by daybreak his key officers were defecting and he was forced to flee on foot. His faithful corps of bottles and syringes had mutinied against him.

Even Field Marshal Lithium, his confidante and closest advisor, was said to be collaborating with the enemy as a spy. Perhaps before nightfall, or at dawn, all of his strongholds will be broken.

The Capital of Burundi lay quiet. General Lerner's forces never reached the border.

But this is only the woeful foreword to the circular introduction to the preface that never ends, the brackets of iron and stone around the parenthetical remarks of a footnote in history.

Bullhorn, David Lerner Memorial Issue, August 1997

Pyro

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I wanted to light things on fire when I was nine and burning, the shrink said, with young lust, lust that opened itself to destroying or killing to express the quiet rage that was sex, sex that surely was the match inside the testicle.

Maybe I was and ready to murder on accident and watch the tall grass igniting, turning blue, turning red, turning yellow, then white hot. It was supposed I was just another gender-ambivalent child, a child afraid of the women, so many women, who had tried, but failed, to be mothers.

Another analyst speculated that the subconsciously-inspired pyromania was a product of the will-to-homosexuality, a homosexuality which was chosen, she believed, because boys feared ego dissolution, total absorption in the female.

The pyromania was emotionally safer for boys than the soft overwhelming curves she says motivate us to pressure women into being skinny like men, a skinniness that helps men be less afraid of merging with that cosmic mother who feels no shame about the fat or the odors or the bleeding that sends adolescent boys running.

It was an accident-prone era, as disaster after disaster tore apart my hands and legs with cuts, cuts that symbolized soul blood, until pyromania finally gave way to nights of guilty physical pleasure, a kind of love which never broke hearts, nor started us down the road toward financial ruin or that state of mutual distrust called holy matrimony or the sacrament of righteously shacking up.

But maybe there's something to say about those who kept their futures vague and somehow held open the option of keeping sex a dirty word just because the match burned brighter that way.

Bullhorn, Volume 5, Number 3, March, 1992

Poems 11-20

Upon The First Meeting of My Two Tormentors

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In a fit of impotent machismo, I was reduced to this sentence:

"I have slept with more women than both of you combined."

But I failed to note how many fell asleep, so that sleeping was all we did, how many did it out of pity and wished they were somewhere else, how many put me through hoops and enjoyed the debasement of mocking me as I floundered. I especially didn't mention the ones who threw up before and after my gallant courting rituals. Oh yes, and who could forget the times we were so drunk that we didn't know how we ended up in each other's apartments. There were times I woke up on musty couches several rooms away from the woman in question and didn't know whether what happened even counted as sex.

I didn't tell them that for every woman whose judgment lapsed, there were ten who firmly said, "It just won't work. I don't feel any chemistry at all."

Oh, my fairest ladies, there are so many stories like these that your man might tell you if he had the honesty to recount them, and if he felt you had the courage to listen.

Bullhorn, Volume II, Number 2, November, 1998

Robert

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The gentleman is a thief and a liar, a con man and a vulture. He preys on the poor and the sick, and exploits the elderly and the dying.

Yes, he is a television star. Yes, he is a faith healer, and he is a millionaire too. He is also a friend of mine, and I believe in him.

I believe he is a vortex of power, a conduit of cosmic energies, the fountain of life and the river of living water. He is the embodiment of power, intoxication and ecstasy. He is the manifestation of evil, darkness and despair. But he is only one man, Robert.

He is humanity's immoral ambassador, an emissary on behalf of the churches, a representative of all that is human and divine, a spokesman for open-hearted compassion and cynical manipulation. Within Robert's soul the furthest reaches of human feeling are reconciled and in harmony. He is a wellspring of universal hope and aspiration, and also a cesspool of unimaginably cold calculation.

To put this all more simply: I like him.

Robert is a deeply religious man and the most sublime blasphemer. He is a man made in God's image, a mirror reflection of The Creator whom I overheard Robert praying to as "The Lord of supreme good and delicious evil, Father of the saints and the demons, guide and friend to Mother Theresa and Joseph Stalin."

This is no Atheist putting on a circus. Robert is a believer. And he might say to you something like, "He who has ears, / let him hear!"

If you watch Robert, you will be changed. You might even get converted, or be born again, or speak in tongues, or get that big check in the mail; or Robert might say to you personally, "Lame man, rise up from your bed and walk!"

And you might send him a thousand dollars, or even ten thousand.

Yes, he is a snake. Yes, he is a devil.

One time he said this to me:"You know, I heal 'em through the power of God, and I take their money through the power of God. He who has eyes, let him see!"

Robert is a prophet anointed by God. He contains all of life's corruption and insanity and all of life's ambition and aspiration. His personal contradictions are the message itself. And we, we're just the little ones. Robert, he sees the big picture.

The whole world is waiting for us. All we have to do is turn on our televisions. Robert is here to love you, and to lead you to the truth, and to screw you for every dime you've got.

But when all is said and done, he's just another talented guy with a big job to do. And yes, he "works hard for the money." But there's one more thing about Robert that would really piss people off: I happen to know that he sleeps pretty well most nights.

Bullhorn, Volume 3, Number 3, March, 1990

Urban Lullaby

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This child is crying, fighting an unknown future, wrestling with the deep, navy-blue darkness of a hot and fitful fall night.

Sleep has come and gone, though the city never knew it. Stealthy and strong, it fools the insomniac who thinks he is always awake.

Peace, that sly one, has even overtaken the anxious policeman who cannot grasp the fact that the world is beyond his control.

And a barely audible clarinet mixes inconspicuously into a rustling cacophony of traffic and people force-feeding fun as though it were another duty.

There is a seasoned criminal sweating angry drops onto a small, unloving bed as he fights the overpowering urge to embrace and forgive the world, a battle he will lose tonight.

Always there is one more errand, one more fist-clenching protest, another memory, another grudge, another reminder, before that solo, a cello creeping through slowly-pulled harp strings, causes each human lamp to slip out, one by one, as all life fades into a divine and perfect rest.

Heads are getting heavy as bodies become leaden, all responding to a low minor seventh chord from a grand piano and French horn.

Who lived and who died, and how long they suffered — all these considerations are buried, finally, in this tender nocturne.

Even while you live, you are pulled from this world.

And these tympani are held back to a gentle rumble which moves past stirring apartments, hushing every competitive mouth.

White man, black man — you may fight and die tomorrow for your sad and silly causes. But tonight, sleep will have dominion; and love and hate will be lost.

Sleep. Sleep. Good night, my little City. Good night.

Bullhorn Volume 5, Number 10, December, 1992

What Andrea Told Me

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You could say I've gotten to know a lot of creative people. There's not much to my life since I've been on tranquilizers. So maybe I live vicariously through my friends andnd the people I know.

Just got a letter from my buddy in jail. The guy used to enjoy pulling the wings off of flies when he was a kid. By the time the cops caught up to him, he was pulling the arms off of people.

And then there's Alice, the jaded one. Once told me she was so bored with life that she volunteered to work at a hospice just so she could watch people die.

And, of course, Ed. I could never forget Ed. I'll always remember how he kidnapped his baby sister. Sold her to an Argentinian business man who dealt in sex slaves. And, you know, I don't think he ever got busted for that. But you got to give him credit. He kept his bills paid.

I'm not sure why I'm attracted to these freaks. Could be I just done it all and seen it all. Guess I depend on these clowns to keep me amused.

Like sandy. She has a thing for amphibians. Says they're the only things that satisfy her in bed. Says people are just too hard to deal with right now.

You know, I used to figure there wasn't any God, because otherwise, how could people get so fucked up? But now I'm starting to be a believer, because people couldn't get this fucked up on accident. Only a divine being who could do three types of calculus at once could mess shit up this badly.

Take Roscoe, for instance. He really wants to die. Tried to kill himself six times, and botched it up every time. Finally gave up. Converted to a born-again Christian. Comes to my door in tears every now and then. Says he's worried about my salvation.

Then you got Freddie. Fifty years old. Never been laid. Never had a job. Still lives with his mother. What trips me out is that he doesn't really seem to mind it: driving his mother to the store, pushing his mother around in her wheelchair, mowing his mother's lawn, taking his mother to the doctor's office. Says that's just fine by him.

Maybe I been lucky. Never let any one thing take me down like everyone else. I just rotate habits so nothing can ever take me over: One night it's booze. Next night it's sex. Next night it's prescription drugs. Next night it's a half gallon of chocolate ice cream. You get the picture.

We all got to do what we can to keep out of the nut house. But it's okay to go to the nut house if it'll keep you from going to jail. And it's okay to go to jail if that'll keep you from thinking too hard.

That's the important thing to remember: Just don't think too hard.

Bullhorn, Volume 3, Number 10, October, 1990

Other Empires That Fell

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It was pretty good while it lasted, you selling ceramic pots on a cobblestone street, smiling in your fair skin and blazing hair, all healthy and strong and silly and drunk, on a perfect October day. But that's on its way out.

That was a pretty good scam, back when you could pull it off, giving money to your friends in exchange for weapons to be used as psychoerotic sex toys. How you used to rape the earth, even as you crossed yourself with holy water; and that worked for you; and I was sick enough to admire it then. But that's all over with.

It was an okay arrangement while people were still falling for it. You raised your children in crystal spheres, free from bacteria and pollen. We marveled at their perfect shoes and the innocent intolerance you inculcated into every aspect of their lives.

We were all about to join you till the egg started to crack, till everyone saw there was nothing inside. Now almost everything humane Is out of the question. Victory is simply everything.

Things were sharp as a whistle when humans were allegedly not animals. That was when the tin and cardboard shacks were still far away, back when you could actually convince people that stealing food to survive was illogical, back when people considered yielding territory in exchange for cash. It was a lot of fun to be sure, but how long could it last?

It was the show to end all shows till the planks on the stage started rotting, and all the actors forgot their lines, and the theater closed down because nobody was getting paid, which left the director on stage reciting Hamlet to himself in the dark like a moron. Now none of that shit even matters any more.

Those were the days, back when our kind of vapidity could rule proudly and unhindered. Yes, I was a part of that movement. We mostly worried about wrapping styles, and things like dinnerware sets, and what sort of waxes looked best on our late model Japanese sedans.

Those were times of great celebration, in Southern California, in 1984, when a vote for Ronald Reagan seemed constructive and patriotic. The dudes selling that stuff today don't even pretend to believe it.

It was a hot deal if you could swing it, feigning bravery at a time when there was nothing to die for, back when military contracting seemed different than welfare, when development was seen as something that might help people, back when screaming was reserved for irrational hysterics. Remember when you could afford to just keep quiet instead of arguing, back before you ever dreamed that economic fear would be like a god that lived forever.

Wasn't it sweet? Oh, the future was big, like a burly, old grandfather in a red and black flannel shirt. It was an article of faith that debt would certainly be swallowed by divinely-inspired economic expansion. Now debt looms before us all like some underpaid, soul-dead executioner.

And I really thought it was likely that I might not ever have to endure the final humiliation of death because Jesus was coming soon to lift us into a soft, white sky where our nausea and shame were to be dissolved into magic fairy dust.

That's how it was to be Christian and Anti-Socialist in Orange County, where you could drive fifty miles and not see one poor soul living out of the shopping carts that will soon be marketed to us as reconditioned luxury apartments.

There is no home now for that kind of game, but still it was pretty good while it lasted

Dangerous Stew, December 1991, Volume One, Issue Eight

Truth Or Dare

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While I stood at a bus stop in Huntington Beach, a tall, blonde woman pulls up in a Porsche and gets out. She walks over to me, and we get into an inappropriately-intimate conversation. She offers me a ride. I immediately accept. We pull into an abandoned, undeveloped lot. Pulling out a syringe, she offers me some intravenous speed. "No thanks," I reply. She offers me some oral sex. "Sorry, I'm not really in the mood tonight," I say. Then she tries to convert me to born-again Christianity. Why am I confused?

Laying on the grass under an oak tree in the park, I am fingering a Mormon girl, and she is undulating with trembling satisfaction. I go to make "the move," and she says, "No, I can't." So I offer her some oral sex instead. "Ew," she replies. "Oral sex is gross!" She explains that premarital sex is against her religion. I desperately protest that Joseph Smith up in heaven has already recorded the fact that she's allowed me to give her hand job. I ask if it could it really be that when we die, he'll greet us at St. Peter's gate and laud us for stopping at heavy petting? Of course I did not convince her to go any further, and my reasoning process clearly did not impress her. And so I faced another night of choosing between sexual suppression and degrading masturbation.

I knew many Evangelical couples, many who were engaged but not married. They explained to me how they loved oral sex. However, they also asserted that they were not guilty of the sin of fornication, since oral sex didn't count as real sex, penetration apparently being the demarcation line between the holy lives of the believers and the profane lives of the heathen populace. (In a weird twist, when I later tried Socialism, I found out that the liberals were way, way more uptight about sex than conservatives ever were. And I told everyone: Run this experiment: Go to the local DNC office parties and try to get some action, and then go to the local GOP office party and try to get some action. You tell me where you score first.)

So I have come, in all my twisting, turning religious travels, to rely on Pentecostal girls, 'cause they believe in speaking in tongues, tongue to tongue, tongues licking furiously with the fire of the Holy Spirit, tongues slurping and flickering all over God's creation. And they believe in the laying on of hands, anywhere you want to lay them. And in the heat of passion they say things like, "Oh! Oh God, forgive me. Oh, but ain't the Devil / gettin' his way tonight. Yes, yes, honey! You know it's good and hot when ya' feel too guilty to go to church for a week. Oh, oh, my dear Savior, come soon, or I'm gonna' come all over this sweet gentleman here. Ah, ah, ah, Jesus, you are the Lord!" And I say, "Amen, brothers and sisters."

Dangerous Stew, January, 1990, Volume One, Issue One

For P.W. Stevens In Honor of His Death

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So you finally took the Big Dive. Well, screw the Planet Earth anyway. Yeah, I can just picture you kicking the doors down on the other side. Maybe you're humping the heavenly virgins, telling Buddha to get fucked, cutting angels' harp strings and forcing them to learn electric guitar. Maybe you're kicking the prophets' asses and saying, "Get a sense of humor, you uptight squares!"

Maybe you're having meetings with Kafka and Dostoyevski, urging them to give up writing turgid novels, convincing them to try smoking cannabis, pushing bottles of Valium into their overcoat pockets.

Maybe you're luring innocently-conformist souls into S & M orgy chambers, scribbling, "This is all bullshit!" on every sheet of scripture in the cold vaults of monotheism's stuffy eternity.

I could picture you flashing your butt cheeks at all the lifeless saints who sit frowning forever.

Meanwhile we vain, pretentious art snobs are down here defending the sad little cause of deathly-serious fine literature, pining over critical issues like comma placement, and line breaks, and other pissy, petty trash.

But I'll just bet you're addressing the high council in heaven, saying, "You want poetry! I got your poetry hangin' right between my stubby little legs!"

Dangerous Stew, May, 1992, Volume Two, Issue Two

All Things In Excess

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There are women stuck in military-base housing who watch out their windows for hours anticipating the arrival of the mail man.

There are people so unwanted and so obscure they break their own appliances to have an excuse to call the repair service.

There are millionaires who pretend to need directions, or pretend not to know what time it is, just to have a pretext to talk to someone.

There are people who've been propositioned so many times that ordinary conversation without ulterior motives /seems like a sex act to them.

I saw a man volunteer his throat to another man who wanted to cut it with a knife just to see what it was like. The man was so tired of life that he would not run. He preferred to sit there quietly, unobjecting as they proceeded to slash and beat him. In an act of heroic valor I screamed at the assailants and frightened them off. The man was angry at me for saving his life.

All things in excess. Nothing in moderation.

We are all hoarding something: Smiles, insults, compliments, indignant stares. We are hanging onto celibacy and monasticism as if it could be traded on the Chicago Futures Exchange at just the right time for a windfall profit of adoration from the saints.

What is so strategic about self-denial?

Why are my files in such neat order?

Do worms burrow into men's caskets and relay the grateful thanks of relatives for the inheritances they're spending?

All things in excess. Nothing in moderation.

There are people so happy that they injure the people who love them just to feel the relief of crying tears of guilt.

There are salesmen so successful that they purposely screw up orders and discourage customers from buying just to feel like they could give something up if they ever had to.

There are people whose lives are so boring that all they can do is exhaust themselves with giving until everyone they help becomes ungrateful.

All things in excess. Nothing in moderation.

As a little boy, I once lit a field on fire just to watch the fire trucks come.

I used to take mile-long jogs in the nude through the streets of my home town in the middle of the night, running naked around a Mormon church at one in the morning.

It worked wonders for me. But I practice all things in excess and nothing in moderation.

Somewhere our nerve endings stopped sending signals. People started going to too many weddings every summer and stopped being sufficiently afraid of their own mortality.

People I used to trust can now look me straight in the eye and claim that they love their husbands and wives even as the contempt they feel for them manifestly oozes out of every pore.

While most people claim that being single was never for them, I, for one, can hardly wait to get old enough to forget about my penis and pay more attention to the television and radio streaming all night and day into our living rooms like petty dictators.

All things in excess. Nothing in moderation.

Home is where the heartbeat is. You'll have to do whatever smokes your shorts, whatever charges your batteries. That's about the only advice I have for you anymore. David Lerner said, "I'm running out of things to recommend."

Of course, you could always go to the Ritz Carlton in Rancho Mirage and order the most expensive wine on their menu. Hell, it's only sixteen hundred dollars a bottle. Maybe that'll do something for you. Maybe not.

Dangerous Stew, June, 1991, Volume 1, Issue 4

The Flames of Hell

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Are you the one of whom it is said, "He dwells in unfathomable darkness and his abode is that of the lake of fire?" Are you the guy they named "666"? I think you are.

We try to reject half of ourselves, the half that craves for power and revenge, the half that defines success by the number of orgasms achieved.

What we call evil is just the force of life that will not be denied, that incurable lizard brain that always reappears in a new form, end-running every puritanical proscription, coopting every foray into virtue-signaling goody-good-ness. It is moving forward with or without your permission.

Are you trying to be good like the homophobic televangelists who were toppled by prostitutes and the cadre of gay lovers? Are you trying to be pure like the priests of every religion who are molesting our children? Are you trying to be humble like the soft-spoken gentleman whose frustrated pelvic thrusts are converted to cruise missiles with multiple warheads?

Are you vain enough to imagine you could resist if temptation came and she locked you in a room and began moaning sweetly and breathing heavily, and if her pulsating hips wriggled out of her tight, red, miniskirt? Are you saying you would shove her away if her blouse was already off and only a few long, silver chains hung down between her erect nipples and her whole body glistened rom the oil she sensually rubbed all over herself?

And if she said, "All I want, right now, is the feel of you deep inside of me," do you think your Southern Californian conscience would prevail? If you tell me you could walk away without a regret, I will call you a liar, because I think you want to make it with her.

I think you want to get down with her, whether you are "saving it for the right one" or not, have vows of chastity or not, are going steady or not, are married or not, because you are not a fool. No one really is. The id, the life urge, the thing you have tried to call a devil or a demon, the thing that is actually the force of evolution itself, knows best in these matters.

The Universe is not buying your line about "higher morality"or "enlightened self-interest."

The id, whether it's true or not, says, "Look dude, there ain't no fucking afterlife. There ain't no fucking brownie points with The Creator. There ain't no fucking karma engine churning out universal justice in the akashic record. All there is right here Is you, alive now, and the reality of the bits of dust you'll be later."

The id says, "So, dig it, dude, before you die, you either made it with her, or you rotted in the ground with your seed unspent, not knowing what it would've been like to have your hot sperm fill her every orifice as her fingernails dug wildly into your trembling ass."

And when you consider what the id has to say, I predict you will repent of your "supremacy of reason" and your "philosophical integrity," and your "oneness with all of humanity."

I predict you will fall into sin with stunned joy, like you had just won an unexpected prize, and you will unabashedly proclaim that the flames of Hell are beautiful.

Dangerous Stew, April, 1991, Volume 1, Issue 2

Men

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Men are pathetic.

There is nothing more abjectly humiliating than being a man.

Men have to call phone sex operators because no one will even speak to them for free. Imagine, women, being so lonely that you must pay hundreds of dollars an hour for any kind of conversation.

Men should be exterminated, like worthless, annoying termites. They are fit only to be poisoned.

Men have to use prostitutes because they are so lacking in charm and beauty that no one would voluntarily touch them. Honestly, who wants their hairy, smelly dicks anyway?

Men are like lime deposits. Perhaps with enough effort they can be scrubbed away.

When a woman walks into a bar, things stop, heads turn and people are filled with hope. When a man walks into a bar, it's so insignificant that it's like a flea being killed by a dog collar.

Men are simply sewer filth. They are like a toxin that needs to be purged from the environment.

Men have to look at porno movies and magazines because they are so utterly contemptible that recorded and printed depictions of human intimacy are as close as they'll ever get to actual life.

Men are useless. They move like rigid machines without brains, savvy or sophistication.

Women have an intuitive grasp of emotional and social situations while men just plow ahead, mindlessly grabbing sex and money with all the grace of a steer in heat.

All men can do is fuck, work, fight and talk about sports.

Women can wait till they're approached, not just because of their gender role, but also because of their incredible desirability. If a man waited for his magnetism to land him a date, he would rot into a skeleton where he sat.

Men are just entirely negligible. They have only a rock-headed logic and absolutely no class. Beneath their finely-tailored suits, men are dull-witted automatons.

So women, next time some lecherous worm of a man propositions you, try to contain your revulsion and just have some pity.

Pinched Nerves, Volume 2, Number 3, 1992

Poems 21-30

At The John Wayne Airport

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Looking down at my shoes — there must be feet in there, but I don't feel them. It seems self-evident that my body is mostly theoretical, since nobody ever touches me. Why is there is never time for play?

The night before the flight, I called U.C. Irvine crisis hotline and told them I was only a gray background and a grid composed of white intersecting lines. They told me to get to the County Hospital right away.

Walking toward the airline terminal gates contemplating my 4.0 grade average and my thesis on Lao Tsu, I realized that life in the town of Fullerton is like a continual effort to make a gentle landing on a pyramid point. Godless, loveless and fighting freedom, I take my seat, (but I am braced for nothing).

For me love has been a runway a thousand miles long. We are picking up speed, but can't ever go fast enough to hurl our wingless souls into the boundless, peerless, endless sky.

Pinched Nerves, Volume 2, Number 5, 1992

Dance of The Bower Birds

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The theism of plastic explosives, the Jesus Christ of derivatives, my self-destructive relationships — It's a triple shot of socioeconomic death dope.

We toss our babies from bridges. We're doing chemical boomerangs. We're doing life without parole (on the outside). You jail yourself.

I'm not seeing the profit margin. These are no win-win scenarios. If your body can handle the abuse, I'd start drinking heavily.

A student-loan murder-suicide, a child-support and alimony scaffolding, a Jim Jones mortgage Kool Aid: This is my song of love to you.

Neon Geyser, Porcelain Sky, Volume 4, Issue 1

Notes From Freelance Gardener And Landscaper

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At the age of eleven I knew that bad careers can't begin too early. I am the face of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Give me a new lawnmower and pray your garden survives the onslaught. I'll sell my soul for two dollars.

Never trust your power tools to an obsessive-compulsive poet who's on the borderline of puberty.

My rows are rigidly straight. These edges are razor-sharp. This covers for a lack of stability.

We are not the stuff of business. You could find me playing pinball to the tune of summers vanishing.

Here is a sports-card collection that's worth a fortune in sweat. I should have retired at the outset.

Don't ask me to dig your trenches or deal with your pruning sheers. I can't even handle condoms.

Chronic fatigue overwhelms me. Dehydration stalks the suburbs. We are weary of drinking water.

Somewhere in Uganda they're selling the estate of the late Idi Amin. Don't call me to pull the weeds.

Neon Geyser, Porcelain Sky, Volume 3, Issue 3

Trying To Date Sister Dharmastream

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"I'd like to go out with you sometime."

"That's not going to happen."

"What sort of man are you looking for?"

"Certainly not the kind of old, bald, flabby pauper sitting in front of me now."

"Could you be more specific?"

"I prefer the hunky, young professionals with six-figure salaries."

"That seems rather shallow."

"And isn't it shallow of you to ask me out when I'm the only one in the temple working part time as a model? That chubby gal who leads the chants in the morning service has been in love with you for three years now. Why haven't you asked her out?"

"Okay, so I'm a bit vapid. But you're our Buddhist instructor, so I expected you to have a deeper perspective."

"Surprise, surprise."

"So you've not transcended the world at all?"

"Transcended the world? I've not even transcended the bad cooking around here."

"Has any Zen Master transcended the world?"

"Try stealing their parking space and you'll find out."

FUCK!, Volume 7, Number 1, January, 2004

Sensei's Koans

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"When the Buddha could not solve a problem in his life, who did he turn to for guidance?"

"How can we teach the Eternal Dharma, since it too is subject to the law of impermanence?"

"If two Buddhists belong to different sects with opposing views, how will they debate this matter without insisting that one kind of emptiness is superior to another kind of emptiness?"

"The Heart Sutra says there is nothing to be attained. If this is true, how did Kanon Bodhisattva transcend distress and suffering?"

"The Heart Sutra says there is no birth and no death. Since you have no origins and no extinction, what is it that you were seeking to be liberated from?"

FUCK!, Volume 7, Number 1, January, 2004

One Great Path

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"How may I best follow the Eightfold Path?"

"By seeing it as One Great Path."

"How shall I follow the One Great Path?"

"By seeing it as no path at all."

"So first there are eight paths, then one, then none?"

"If I strike you eight times, you'll wish I'd only hit you once. If I hit you once, you'll wish I'd never hit you at all."

FUCK!, Volume 7, Number 1, January, 2004

The Fundamental Virtue

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Little Bikhu and Sensei were walking through a rock garden in the desert. They came upon a polished boulder that weighed several tons.

Little Bikhu turned to Sensei and said, "Sir, what is the fundamental virtue?"

Sensei looked at him and said, "You must pulverize that boulder using only the power of your mind."

"Don't be silly," retorted Little Bikhu. "That's impossible."

"All right then," said Sensei, "shout so ferociously that the boulder splits in half."

"Such a thing has never happened in all of human history," protested Little Bikhu.

"That's the problem," concluded Sensei. "You think you know human history."

FUCK!, Volume 7, Number 1, January, 2004

Visualization

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"Master," asked a student, "do you ever practice visualization techniques during your meditations?"

"Yes," replied the Master, "I frequently do."

"Can you describe the techniques you use during your visualization exercises?" said the student.

"I sit in the traditional Za Zen posture," said the Master, "and concentrate on my breathing. With each inhalation, I visualize the entire Universe being created, sustained and destroyed. With every exhalation, I say to myself: Nothing of the sort ever happened."

FUCK!, Volume 7, Number 1, January, 2004

An Unhappily-Married Woman

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Sister Dharmastream had been visited every week, for several moths, by an unhappily-married woman

who complained, in mind-numbing detail, about every aspect of her husband's alleged flaws.

At one point she said ruefully, "It's a shame you're feeling so badly, because at this moment a new Buddha is being born."

"Really," said the woman, "I've not seen nor heard anything about it."

"Okay," replied Sister Dharmastream, "then a blind and deaf Buddha has just come into the world."

FUCK!, Volume 7, Number 1, January, 2004

Facts About English Garden Robins

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Robins die in fourteen short British months. There is but one season to sing the sum of this life. They puff their orange breasts, bravely facing the autumn chill.

One in ten males are murdered by rivals. Their eyes are pecked clean out.

When her husband dies, the female robin mourns for about thirty minutes then summarily rids the nest of the husband's body and chooses a new lover. Love has never been for the faint of heart.

When the male robin takes his afternoon stroll among the garden flowers his mate will copulate with any rival having / the moxie to try. Says David Attenborough, "It's a wise robin indeed who knows its true Father."

FUCK!, Volume 5, Number 6, June, 2002

Poems 31-40

The Ghost Is The Machine

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My body is a singing instrument of the gods. My body is not for my personal use. It is collectively owned by all the world's dusts. All the world's dusts are Mother God's body.

Keep making entries in your Palm Pilot. You and your weekly planner are doomed. You are water and a sprinkling of minerals. This is a test of your early warning system.

You have t-minus one billion years. Our sun is an expanding red giant. Common sense will be cooked into all of us. This poem is temporary non-sand.

My lungs are still pink. I plan to keep shouting this shit. I will boast my way into a sediment layer. Your opinion of me will die with you.

I crayon the universe with my mouth. The limits of sex have fully dawned on me. Procreation is not an

insurance policy. Our song is simply a table of elements.

We are blown about by solar winds, bits of interstellar photochemistry surging through the gulf stream of space/time. We are currents, tides, volcanic sea beds.

Volume 5, Number 6, June, 2002

Elizabeth 2002

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Her fabulous hair spreads like fiery tentacles around her thin shoulders. She holds forth with comedians and installation artists. She suspects President Bush himself of terrorist masterminding. Video footage streams through her eyes.

Her love, so they say, is a flash flood, cleaning out the desert floor before total evaporation. Distance keeps her love lean, agile. The tedium of partnership is cloying, satiating, wilting. There are no warranties.

The venue must change before ennui sets in. Her lovers would do well to seek fallout shelters. The hydrogen bomb detonates. She is that rose — lovely, cataclysmic.

FUCK!, Volume 5, Number 9, September, 2002

Moss Beach, El Granada, Miramar, Princeton-By-The-Sea & Half Moon Bay

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I vanilla-frapped my way to a high-end distillery, found a tiny floral shrine to a fallen cliff climber, saw the odious faces of enemies who prospered.

I chanted Hare Krishna as a sea otter frolicked. I sang John Lennon lyrics in a small sand-storm as people stared uneasily.

I bothered snooty salesmen who guarded art galleries and arched their eyebrows. I invaded cheese-and wine art openings of cautious painters, studied the strained aspects of functional alcoholics and violent skateboarders slamming their wheels. I saw the kindness of truly declining souls.

I saw that the Pacific was less than a drop of mist.

A fish carcass rotted in the shade as I ate my lemon pie.

This is my sales pitch.

FUCK!, Volume 5, Number 9, September, 2002

klipschutz At Rockaway Beach & Linda Mar

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He has issues with balance. Bagel man hits the cliffs hankering for a soy latte.

He evades the quiet shops, feels incredulity toward Heart Consciousness Church, sides with the locals against mercilessly widening freeways and modernity's onslaught.

Something frightens him about this nomenclature: "A Pillar Of Fire Ministry."

He mercilessly claims the last vanilla creme, tips generously, winks.

Pantheists are regarded suspect from his metaphysical and socio-psychological viewpoint. He regards them as lacking in rigor. They are too self-satisfied to trust.

He pulls out a tablet to write: "One rusty, orange Porsche. A blue plastic flamingo."

In this distant setting he confesses to crimes, admits he took acid. At last he is moved by the scattered steel bones of covered wagons, their rusted wheel rims recalling a gentler epoch for aspiring men of letters.

FUCK!, Volume 5, Number 9, September, 2002

Selected Ancient Fragments From The Scrolls of To Fu

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1.

I have produced these works, but sadly the emperor rejects them. Now I suffer loss of face, even as my brother's fame spreads.

2.

The young women parade through the banner-filled streets. They seek profitable husbands. I've not had a date in months.

3.

I sit in the cold silence of this slat-board guard shack, guarding the coal mounds from the hungry hands of villagers.

4.

The simplicity of the country life we lived at Divine Rice Road — it is stamped always on my heart. Too bad they chased me out of there.

5.

The nobility of being a simple worker, tending to the planting of seeds — it was all ruined one day when I groped the farmer's wife.

6.

In the distance, temple bells ring, harkening back to monkish days. Truly I have learned this lesson: Never raid the Abbott's sake stash.

7.

Even children in the streets know of my poetic doings. "Your verses," they tell me, "Always ring of falsehood."

8.

I was accidentally published by an inattentive editor who mistook my name, thinking I was my famous brother.

9.

Sometimes I find partially-burned pages of my poetry blowing about the deserted streets of the outskirts. My books are used as fire kindling.

10.

When I speak to women passing by, they start to scowl and look sickened. But turning to each other in disgust, they snicker scornfully as they walk away.

11.

"The gods have been good to me." I say this without proof. I add, "Gods come to the aid of men,: but who am I trying to kid?

12.

The tea pot is steaming hot. The sole reason I rise from bed is to sip from its offerings. For a brief moment I have dignity.

13.

I lie every day to the fat women, claiming to think they're lovely. They're almost foolish enough to buy it, but at last refuse to sleep with me.

FUCK!, Volume 8, Number 5, May, 2005

To A Woman Named Eli

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In the prime of my life, I counted three-hundred friends, and then came the endings, tumbling one over the other.

In rapid succession they went, to AIDS, at first, then insanity, then suicide, then drugs, until now maybe two or three remain; and these last two or three look very wobbly too.

So when David told me you had suddenly gone, I simply tried to shrug it off. Having developed that thick, other-worldly shell of the constantly bereaved, I said, "Ah, another one. So it must be. The law of impermanence," and so on.

I did a great job of forgetting until I stumbled onto Ocean Beach and saw the bench that says, "My dog says nothing, and I believe him." I sat there, and you came flooding back in. How many hours on the phone?

And the pain was too much; and so with all my strength, I spent a week forcing your memory back into time's portal.

Then Bruce played a tape of one of your poetry readings, and you stood next to us. Even then, I braved the storm and took more pills, drank more coffee.

When P.W. Stevens died, I called you, and tried to talk about it calmly, and you said simply, "So then you miss him." And suddenly I found myself crying. That was the last time I wept in front of anyone.

These days I catch myself preaching, "We have so little time left. There is no strength to indulge in grief. Forget everyone, and save yourself."

I once called you and told you I love you. You replied, "Do you really?" The phone was silent a moment. Yes, I did, but what to say next?

As the years kept passing, I kept calling, and sometimes I'd feel like a pest and say, "I'm sorry I keep calling too much." Your reply was, "You said that, not me."

After you moved to North Carolina, I kept calling, and once asked, "So what are the people like in the Deep South?" You paused, then said, "Complex."

My life is almost empty now, and love seems insanely implausible. I've become a survival machine. (I said that, not you.) And as weeks go by without a soul seeing my home, there appears before me the journey so many aging people make through an almost endless stretch of hollow, silent solitude.

Here I bring few memories, as sentiment uses up vital resources. And you were a problem, I'd thought, that was already taken care of.

Last night I felt a desperation to see you. But the only message I could hear in my mind was you saying, "Did you have something more to say?"

FUCK!, Volume 8, Number 9, September, 2005

Notes On Astronomy And You

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There are whole galaxies at the fringes of the Universe whose images we will never see. But it gets even worse: Those far off solar systems are moving so very quickly that they might outrun their own light.

I think I'm feeling rather sickly. Ninety percent of the universe appears to be entirely missing. This may explain my intractable relationship problems.

All we've ever had will vanish, or so the Sutra so unkindly tells us. For some reason this makes me think we'd all look better in a green and red felt fez.

I've searched the dark and endless heavens to find some newer star than our own, in hopes of buying time. Sometimes when I'm feeling hopeless, suddenly, there you are.

You are like a migrating asteroid, less gorgeous than seductive. You flash and spin and shine, before you get self-destructive, before everyone with a proper survival instinct has the good sense to flee.

Is it time for a leap of faith? Those NASA folks keep trying. I pray, "Oh, hear my plea Andromeda. Our little star is dying I'm here on Easter Island, reborn as a megalith, looking outward at that sky as I pray to see the Mothership.

FUCK!, Volume 9, Number 3, March, 2006

The Physics of Despair — Part I

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Buddhists and Physicist agree: The body cannot be located. The mind cannot be located. The soul cannot be located. Just thought you should know.

Christians, Muslims and Jews agree: God is invisible. God is inaudible. God is inscrutable. Just in case you were wondering.

Men, women and transsexuals agree: Love is not about beauty. Love is not about money. Love is not about intelligence. This is a public service announcement.

Scientists and Chemists agree: The world is made of atoms. Atoms are made of energy. Energy is made of nothing. This paraphrase is not exactly true. The exact truth is more difficult, and less conclusive, and far more unsettling.

Here's twenty models of the universe. Pick any one that's convenient.

Could I have the blue one?

Sure, blue is as good as red or green.

It takes hundreds of trillions of molecules working in harmony just to have sex one time. This is just a reminder.

Remain calm. Remain disciplined. Remain in control. You have no resources. Be creative.

FUCK!, Volume 9, Number 3, March, 2006

An Irresistible Sale

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There stands my last wife in the dawn of my waking mind, firing 357 rounds at my torso, shouting, "You're a patriarchal son-of-a-bitch!" She has been buying on credit again and would rather kill me than listen to my rambling lectures on consumer debt.

A large, white moving van is pulling up slowly behind the madwoman's shadow. Antique end tables from San Anselmo, and full-length, oak-trim vanity mirrors from Kentfield, are methodically unloaded and carted into our lower-middle-class living room.

In the end I must see for myself that love cannot endure lust's fury. I must cut up all our VISA cards.

Sivullinen, Summer, 1996, Helsinki, Finland

A Day At Cerebral Care Center, A.D. 2100

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A wrinkly brain, three centuries old, sits in a bath of oxygenated fluids contemplating cellular biology theories and certain tricky math problems. Neurochemists interpret its thoughts by reading printouts generated from a set of electrodes connected to a compact supercomputer interface which translates electrical pulses from pins stuck into every square inch of its gray matter. It lives like the others, housed forever on a rack of brains, a so called "cerebral neighborhood."

The brain in space 49X is recovering from a traumatic, nearly fatal assault. Apparently a perverted surgical technician sneaked into the highly-guarded complex one night and grafted it to a brain of the opposite sex, causing both to go temporarily crazy. Fortunately, the prank was discovered quickly by an alert night watchman who summoned medical authorities immediately. An emergency operation performed at 2:00AM was able to separate the confused pair safely.

Today one of the brains is depressed. It is experiencing multiple phantom-limb sensations and is so sad it keeps swelling and turning purple. It wants to see the High Sierras again and return to its job as a ski instructor. Another brain, who is still a practicing therapist, tries to reason with it through the interface. But the forlorn brain cannot be reasoned with and has to be put on Wellbutrin for two months.

The brain in 25C is kind of a loser who uses the interface to distribute pornography, and he's had his relatives pay off a lab worker to inject him with nicotine and caffeine. Once he had this crackpot scheme to cross-clone his DNA with the brain in 66J and have a child through a surrogate mother. But mostly he works as a test subject for pharmaceutical companies and drug researchers.

The brain of an unidentified young woman overheats due to an unusual disorder and must be kept in the refrigeration unit. Her body died in a motorcycle accident, but here brain was recovered intact. She was eventually moved to Cerebral Care Center. The doctors have tried to explain to her what happened, but she will not respond to the interface signals. Her printouts reveal only that she's singing and humming to herself all alone in there, though the melodies come strictly without words. In her mind she has a four octave range and her notes soar right off the graph paper. Maybe she never knew what hit her. Maybe she's pretending not to understand. Maybe a song was all she ever had.

Sivullinen, Winter, 1995, Helsinki, Finland

Poems 41-50

Sun Ships

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Forget "Round Earth" theories. Remember you are a Norseman, and Odin, god of death and hanged men waits with honey wine and ox meat to greet you with song in Valhalla.

See the prows of Viking fleets filled with rowing warriors in armored chest plates and horned helmets greeting the sun at the horizon, loading the golden god-disk into the center of their greatest ship.

Tonight they'll paddle their shining treasure through the murky, foggy, dark, gray underworld, escorting it past the shadowy, reptilian monsters and deformed giants wading in those waters.

Tomorrow they'll return our sun safely to the drivers of the chariots of fire who will pull it blazing across the sky.

Remember Norsemen, the sun has brought us life, and our brave brothers in Viking ships have brought us the sun.

Sivullinen #22, Helsinki, Finland

Anthropology 100

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Once, during a tequila-sloshed weekend under the empty, dark Mexican sky, I asked my father if he believed in God.

He shook his head slightly and said, "Sometimes at night you look up at the sky and you realize the stars go on forever."

My father is an evasive man who will deny most anything until cornered. The he will tell, plainly, the few things he knows and what little he'll admit to remembering.

This is how the pagan Scandinavian faiths must have passed between father and son, warmly, directly and without eloquence.

And mostly I am like my father, unknowingly following the way of Thor and all of the human gods, long before the Althing gathered in Iceland to embrace Christianity because of its usefulness in war.

And I have never bothered to ask dad whether he believes in Heaven or Hell, because we both know the gray wolf waits for every good Norwegian, pouncing suddenly on their lives without warning, without mercy.

Though my forefather's gods are sleeping and mine have died of old age, I can still look up and see the stars go on forever.

Sivullinen #22, Helsinki, Finland

South of Everywhere

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There's a big, open heart in tough and sleepy Bernal Heights, and it is as raggedy and full of holes as the bland, old slat-board houses with faded paint and worn screens crammed together and stacked over this high tabernacle city clustered with rotting docks, wrinkled, exhausted poets and crippled pigeons too stupid to live.

nd this heart is millisected by converging lines of force moving in and out of her frame which is surrounded by distemperate dogs and men who refuse to work, some of whom are robbing every shopkeeper and hapless stroller along half-conscious Courtland Avenue.

There's a big, open heart in tough and sleepy Bernal Heights, and it has lived alone and uncertain in a sea of Taoist philosophers and dancing cranes whose waltz was interrupted by summer storms of passion, sweat and love songs.

And she consults her charts, studies the thousand openings, tries to determine where everything entered and why things remain incurable.

She is at the stillpoint, the core, where all is turmoil molten lava and incense.

Cokefishing In Alpha Beat Soup, November, 1997

Werner Erhard

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He had us ironing his clothes for free after we paid hundreds of dollars for his seminars, had us polishing his hand mirrors, refilling his shampoo bottles and arranging his toiletries in alphabetical order. Sometimes we'd be rushing to meticulously pack his suitcases and shop for his dinner supplies. And then we paid additional fees for retraining after that. Still, I have never hated him.

Many of us went nights without sleep, worrying exactly how to arrange furniture and manage paperwork for him, even though most of his management personnel just cursed us. Essentially he took advantage of everyone he ever met; and yet I am still glad he was our leader.

His organization was a dangerous, brainwashing cult. That is why I highly recommend it to everyone, (even though it was creepy to see him walking around with armed bodyguards).

I was glad to not go to the bathroom, if that's what it took to cross the threshold into excellence.

Finally the news networks put an end to it all. He was falsely accused of beating his wife, falsely accused of having sex with his children, falsely accused of cheating on his taxes. (Everyone recanted and all the charges were dropped, but the damage was done.)

Eventually he fled the country in a pricey yacht, the very boat he'd lived on in Sausalito harbor.

And now that he is gone, I miss him very much. He wasn't much of a messiah, but he was the only messiah I've ever had, and I wish he'd come home.

Cokefishing In Alpha Beat Soup, September, 1993

Hegel — Abbreviated In Seven Stages (19th Century German Idealism Made Simpler)

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1. Big Bang, galaxies, nebula — and so on.

2. Cell division, plant life, small critters, bugs.

3. Dinosaurs tromp about — go extinct, etc.

4. Greek Philosophy, Lao Tsu — various wars and stuff.

5. Socialism, American Jazz — assorted lawsuits.

6. Airplanes, computers, venereal disease.

7. Universe looks at itself through the Hubble telescope and decides to write a poem about love. It recites that poem by buzzing in code bytes which shower the expanse with neutrinos.

DIE PRESSEFREIHEIT, 1994, / a product of X-it press & ZAP, inc.

Mass Transit Bedouin

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It could be a camel or a luxury cruise ship. I'll ride whatever the State will sponsor, and do anything to avoid Greyhound.

I'll connect six city buses across six counties, averaging four miles an hour to cheat Amtrak out of $20.

It's better to take two ferries across two polluted, stinking harbors and take a non-air-conditioned shuttle with uncomfortable seats through several twisting, rural neighborhoods over bumpy roads if it'll make Avis lose money.

These are my petty vendettas. I am a man of honor.

And I have allowed myself to be let off in ghost towns, in empty parking lots near deserted dirt roads without toilets or stores or fast food, in order to walk six more miles to catch an overheated, rusting van to a flop-shit loser's motel in the middle of the night, just to get around paying a $15 taxi fare to anyone who looks even remotely similar to me.

I am not a Socialist out of Idealism. I am a Socialist out of cheapness.

There is nothing more fulfilling to me than the thought of even one cent of Rush Limbaugh's tax money going to Marin County's federally-subsidized coaches which take leeches like me to Mill Valley to worship Pagan deities.

I am a Mass Transit Bedouin, and I will defraud your Christian money mongers and suck the milk out of your cow-sized cash nipples.

The heart of my philosophy is my blood-sealed vow to never give you a God-damned dime if it is within my power to withhold it from you.

These are my petty vendettas. I am a man of honor.

yin and yang, 1994, / a product of X-it press & ZAP, inc.

The Libido of Power

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Are you into power?

I am.

Power like Sylvia Plath in spiked heels riding the back of a crocodile with its mouth strapped shut. Power like industrial metal funk, rhythmic waves of mechanical white noise, "robots fucking" in virtual sex parlors. Power like cortisone and protein powder mixed with citrus fruits and ice cubes and tossed into a Black & Decker blender.

Control fantasies drive my engines as I lust for an infomercial and a phalanx of supermodels to answer my order lines.

Does power bother you?

I find it soothing.

Are you into meat?

I am.

Meat like prime rib, thick, medium rare, marinated in its own blood for days, red in the middle, crispy on the edges. Meat like submissive's bare asses, like handfuls of fat and muscle restrained by corsets of wire and mesh. Meat like he and she, politically erect, rubbed down in olive oil, ready to serve, worshiping the goddess of cash bastards and greedy bitches.

But what a waste of Atheism you Bay Area people are with your subconscious Christianity and your secular Puritanism, you with your purebred puppies and charity drives that never help a single homeless person. Why did you ever bother pretending to rebellion when you're more square than your great grandfather from World War II?

Meat and power, hot on the grill, are the salt of this wet earth.

Come and get some.

You're all invited to my barbecue.

yin and yang, 1994, / a product of X-it press & ZAP, inc.

Without Him Your Whole Theory Collapses

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You desperately need to believe the average white man: sits alone in an underground bunker jacking off to "Soldier of Fortune," sends unmarked, brown envelopes of cash to his skinhead sons in Bensonhurst, has infiltrated the Department of Agriculture to undermine the distribution of Food Stamps.

You desperately need to believe the average white man: fondles 24-karat gold swastikas under black-light posters of Hitler, issues death threats from his cellular phone to human rights groups and civil rights workers, has part-time jobs in the FBI and CIA spying for Third World dictators.

You desperately need to believe the average white man: never had to interview for a job because of his privileged status at birth, knows that secret, special way of winking that causes banks to give him free money, rides around in bullet-proof limousines with tinted windows laughing at the sufferings of the impoverished masses.

You desperately need to believe the average white man: enjoys driving animals and plants to extinction and loves to clear-cut ancient redwoods only for spite, chains his submissive wife to the cellar wall and only lets her out to cook dinner, collects assault rifles for self-defense and looks anxiously forward to a continent-wide race war.

You desperately need to believe in an all-powerful, all-evil enemy. Without him, you whole theory collapses into petty bickering, while the whole of this great life passes you by like a daydream.

yin and yang, 1994, / a product of X-it press & ZAP, inc.

Higher Consciousness Through Coffee

For Joie Cook, Patron Saint of Moderate Drug Abuse

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I give you my French Vanilla denial. Like King David I am commanded not to fear if 10,000 fall to the left of my Suisse Mocha, not to tremble if 10,000 fall to the right of my cinnamon shaker. We will calmly sip our lattes as whole categories of employment are tossed into vocational oblivion.

This is my coffee vigil. As the population of Indonesia expands to a billion and beyond, I will be in a serene Marin bistro slightly high on a moderate caffeine dose, rationalizing away the problem of evil, watching the sun slowly refract through countless tree limbs as the giant condors circle slowly over the green and brown hills of Novato.

And when we're sixty-seven and comfortably on Social Security, we'll share a table at the Plaza Hotel. And from an impeccably clean window seat, we'll observe the collapse of Western Civilization with the objectivity of history professors.

I will say to you, over the gunfire, "Joie, do you see those poor working suckers? Even the career criminals among them are struggling like hell to make it, and the saddest part is it's all in their minds." And I know you will agree, nodding obviously, as you munch on some pâté-smothered cracker.

Even in those sun-darkened days, the hills of Columbia will be bursting at the seams with coca leaves and coffee beans. Together we'll hold out with our hubris, too stoned on ourselves to ever know what hit us.

EWE, 1994, / a product of X-it press & ZAP, inc.

House of Lost Men

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Under my thin, rickety door I find a threatening letter: "Whoever took my new compact disk out of the mailbox has twenty-four hours to return the stolen object . . . no questions asked. If I receive no further information from the perpetrator — (you know who you are) — I will begin to set in motion forces you cannot begin to understand."

Here, in Kentfield's only urban slum, Marin's most delirious souls live out their remaining days of disgrace together, tensely refusing to speak in the kitchen or greet neighbors in the hallway. They are preoccupied with the task of nursing their wounded masculinity in a sea of indifferent entrepreneurs and mockingly beautiful trees.

An unemployed, suicidal, ex-athlete drones on daily about how we all waste water and expensive, non renewable energy by taking long, hot showers instead of disciplined two-minute sponge baths.

A would-be rock photographer who claims to be a spiritual hippie bursts out of his room shouting threats, inviting "any faggot around to throw a punch" so he could "drill them through the fucking wall." "I grew up in Chicago, man! I fought Blacks, Whites, Puerto Ricans! I've been stabbed, shot, chased and robbed; and I'm not afraid of any of you cowards!" He rages on about his disgust with pubic hair all over the bathroom and festering piss in unflushed toilets.

Within ear shot of these audio-assaults, I am painstakingly documenting every aspect of my indigence to a host of social service agencies. I nag the screaming, discredited hippie photographer to give in and get some Food Stamps because I'm sick of watching him starve, but he is too proud to ask for help. I am certain he is driving himself insane and will end up murdering someone when the landlord evicts him. He has never paid a month's rent, but stalks about as if he owns the entire property.

We are all quickly silenced by a succession of crashing sounds from the over-crowded bottom floor. Bodies land against walls. Loud cussing and hysterical crying erupt. Furniture and glass break. Flashlights appear below and two-way radios echo through our dark, sunken-in yard. The battle-weary sheriff appears again to restore some semblance of order to our trouble-laden address.

Unable to reach any compromise, and unwilling to gain any understanding, each of us returns to our small, ugly rooms, wondering how such a fate has befallen us. Fewer and fewer visitors are received; and the House of Lost Men drifts deeper into isolation and powerlessness.

The building owner tried to lift the gloom by sending prospective female renters to examine the dreaded, always-vacant back unit, long abandoned by the last wave of drug-addicted, fascist punkers. But no self-respecting woman would ever feel safe or comfortable amidst the hostile, leering faces of these unkempt, petty tyrants who feel it is their sacred duty to protect their only remaining haven with implacably aggressive postures and territorial door slamming.

February should be the shortest month, but for the lost men of New Age Land it drags on in agonizingly slow minutes as metallic death rock grinds out the hours in our freezing house.

Even in the bucolic Great White North, I am surrounded by the inner city. The ghetto follows me everywhere.

EWE, 1994, / a product of X-it press & ZAP, inc.

Poems 51-60

Virtually Reality

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The highest possible resolution with maximum number of colors and the largest screen ever produced at no cost to the operator.

Perfect 3-D replication in a full-body sensation arena with flawless hard copy and no system failures and never a software upgrade required.

To procure this product: turn off personal computer, rise from desk chair, abandon cubicle, leave office building and walk outside.

The truth is nearly blinding.

Brouhaha 15, Final Issue, January, 1999

On My Preference For Humans

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So you want a saintly return to the wholesome goodness of undiluted Mother Nature?

You are not serious.

I once saw an alpha female lion pin a zebra to the ground. Refusing to snap its neck or pierce its jugular vein, she held the wailing quadruped as her subordinates tore deeply into its beautiful, writhing limbs and its vulnerable body as it shrieked and died a senselessly prolonged death in an unthinkable, incalculable agony.

So you say nature is pure, balanced and harmonious?

But would you trust your fate to it?

Consider the pairs of coral shrimp who prowl the sandy reefs, turning starfish on their backs, leaving them immobile, helpless. Ponder how they drag these graceful beings into their lairs as fresh food supplies, taking a hideously-long seven days to slowly eat their victim alive, starting by feeding on the tips of their arms and nibbling inwards.

So you protest man's ruthlessness and his exploitation of the planet?

Fair enough, but are you aware of how some wasps are born?

Some lay their eggs under the skin of a caterpillar. The larvae feed on its body mass for two months, as their host eats frantically to sustain itself. Exhausted and unable to metamorphose, the would-be moth becomes a zombie until the ravenous, emerging offspring burst out of its skin and consume its flesh, brains and internal organs.

Mercy, if it exists at all, is rarely found in the wild.

Brouhaha 14, Second-To-Last Issue, July, 1998

My Girlfriend's Butt

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My girlfriend's butt sprouts a thousand goose bumps when you kiss the small of her curvy muscular back.

My girlfriend's butt is as wonderful as a bowl of peaches smothered with whipped cream and sprinkled with almond chips.

My girlfriend's butt has a beautiful crack and rosy cheeks for grabbing, pinching and spanking.

My girlfriend's butt is the missing sutra, the crux of the mystery, the Way of the Patriarchs.

My girlfriend's butt is the shining apple of gold, the juicy, tasty fruit of the dreams of dirty old men.

Brouhaha 11, 1997

Former Academic Now Encased In Newspapers

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The arms are tubular, spun up like long rolls of wallpaper, bent at the middle with fingers protruding at the far ends.

The intellect itself is subsumed by an oversized hood of newsprint. Bodily love is nothing but collage, an assemblage of classified advertising.

Promises of herbal healing are the surface of the chest that once breathed; and televised congressional debates have been transcribed over its clothes.

Headlines, color photographs, pleas for life-long companionship — they have all been plastered over its mouth, which has no opinions left to speak of.

The facade is delicate. It cannot leave the house until the rain stops and the wind slows down. Every thing it knows is in ten-point type.

Happy Kitty # 5, Spring 1996

On Intimacy And Future Shock

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Every discernible part of me has been collected and priced, turned inside out and labeled.

My feelings are on sale along with the scratch paper I doodled on and the toilet paper I wiped with.

The vain loves and petty hates, the fetishes over certain unwashed laundry items, and my old toothbrush holders, are now archived at Stanford for daily public viewing because you have adored me so.

Like Lenin's glass tomb in Moscow, my dead furniture is dated and placed on lighted pedestals.

I contributed nothing to progress or the human cause, except for standing in the right place at the ideal moment.

The all-seeing eye of the camera was looking and liked what it saw: pure image without a hint of substance.

In my next life, I pray to be born a prostitute to the stars without the tedious curse of intellect. For only in divine retrospect are we aware of what is priceless: fallen pubic hair and stained hankies.

God, if I could purge the art that still circulates in my blood, then I would have the business sense to auction my empty milk cartons and half-full jars of Vaseline, my jars of rotten raspberry jam and pitless olives.

Please fill out this card and become a line on my mailing list of people I would never want to know.

Please don't forget me and my transient video heart or my failing magnetic face.

I said, "I love you all!"

Did you get that on tape?

Happy Kitty # 4, Winter 1995-1996

Nightmare Poetry Boyfriend

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Darling, I love you. Darling, I need a bed, some food and some wine. Darling, I need a bed, some food and some wine much, much more than I love you. But when you consider my genius, surely you're honored to help.

Oh beloved, I see you have one bottle of government-issued vodka, made in those pristine labs in Finland. I cannot bear to ask you for it. Forgive me if you find it missing, along with a few dollars hidden in your dresser. Your investment will pay off one day.

After all I have mentioned you in my poems, written of you in my diaries. All of it will be archived and studied at major universities.

True, my poetry is found a bit wanting for quality, but the great poets all wrote of me, what a scoundrel I was, how I stole their girlfriends, how I borrowed money and never paid back a cent of it.

And so long as their greatness stands, so long as they are remembered, I too will be remembered. And the historians could not avoid including a few of my poems in their chronicles, simply so that the reader might comprehend a bit more about the moral monster who made great inroads with the upper crust of the art world only to be tossed into the abyss.

It's not a very sturdy pillar to hang your pretty hat on, but it's all we have for now.

It's getting cold and dark out here. Would you mind opening the door? My ex-wife has kicked me out again.

Over The Transom # 19, 2010

A Most Unusual Pink Slip

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A collection of publishers, promoters and critics descended upon Amateur Poet's home with a heavy knock on his side door.

Amateur Poet wrinkled his brow: "No one comes by without calling first. It must be serious."

These leaders of American Poetry had a short, simple message: "You're fired."

"1 am fired!" he exclaimed. "Fired from what? I haven't had a real job in three years."

"Fired from Poetry," replied the leader.

Amateur Poet's head spun: "But how? Why?"

Another man in the group pointed at Amateur Poet and said, "We're sick of you. Do you hear me? We've had it with your self-absorbed beatnik posturing. We're tired of reading your badly crafted verses. It's all thinly-disguised prose. If we see you at any of the open readings, you'll get a very rough visit from our friends."

"What friends?" said the Amateur Poet, now backing away in alarm.

A woman stepped forward and replied: "The Poetry Enforcers. They break knee caps."

The leader interjected: "And another thing: You've never thought my wife is beautiful. You avoid her every time she tries to flirt with you. That's pretty cold, if you ask me."

"But I . . . I . . . " stammered Amateur Poet.

"No! No more excuses!" a publisher chimed in. "If we see you've wriggled / your way into print somewhere, we'll slit your tires and break your windows."

The leader raised his hand: "Okay, okay, we've made our point."

He looked gravely at Amateur Poet: "Look, I'm sure you meant no harm. Have you considered another hobby? Maybe you should go back to night school, learn a foreign language, take up welding, metal sculptures or something. At least get a girlfriend or a plant or a dog. You need to stop pretending to be a writer."

After they left, Amateur Poet collapsed onto a chair, sorted over his life: almost fifty employers, nearly twenty careers. Nothing worked out.

"Okay," he reasoned, "this is the fourth time these literary leaders have threatened me this way, but nothing ever happens."

He sorted through his works and worried for a moment. Then a perverse grin spread across his face. He picked up his phone: "Hey, Poetry Friend! Are you going to the open mic at the Old Leather Shoe this Friday?"

"Count me in," replied Poetry Friend.

"We'll go together!"

Space and Time stood still.

Amateur Poet thought, "I am a living legend."

Over The Transom # 19, 2010

The Handjob That Saved The World

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A local crack whore gave me a thirty-dollar handjob which greatly buoyed my floundering ego. This caused ordinary women to be attracted to my newly-found self-confidence. I ended up in a passionate romance which involved lots of wine and coffee. Being stoned every day, I started to have mystical experiences which caused me to launch an epic spiritual search. This led me to a holy man hemp dealer who opened the door to God-drug realization. That spurred an avalanche of creative efforts resulting in mind-expanding poems that awakened millions of souls who then used their newfound clarity to change governments and cultures worldwide. Therefore we should never doubt the value of a hand job.

Over The Transom # 18, 2009

Soul For Sale

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Soul For Sale. Owner must sell. Motivated. Facing deadline. Will exchange idealism for all-expenses-paid vacation. Prices slashed. Unreasonable offers accepted. Will renounce compassion for shares of technology stocks. Abandoning literary pursuits in favor of real estate books. Will work long hours at dull jobs to get anyone to marry me. Owner slashing artistic production. Planning more shopping trips. Will betray Buddhist principles for sex of any kind. Soul for sale. Owner desperate.

ZYX, April, 1998

After The Sentencing

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When I contemplate my body, a collection of brittle shards, I wonder at your mercy. Living in this ashen cave with me, you search the recesses where albino fish swim blindly. You come to this empty stage littered with forgotten books and unpopular songs as I proclaim a disorganized gospel to a theater of vacant seats. You alone are listening. I can forgive the withheld yawn. My soliloquies are long and manifold. The months traipse slowly by. "Into this long night" you have loved me.

ZYX, April, 1998

Poems 61-70

How I've Come To Know You

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I have survived without legs, without hands, without eyes. I thrust my limbless form toward you, believing in love, although I must propel my thorax by rippling my stomach muscles in a careful sequence of gyrations, snailing along at the speed of stone. The whole world graces past me, doing in moments what would take me whole lifetimes. My breathing is growing deeper. I am transforming, adapting invincibly, evolving permanently. I am ready to crystallize, to spread through this planet with a billion mineral capillaries. My blood will be your blood. My body will be your body. Together we will be birthless and deathless. I am a man of my word.

ZYX, April, 1998

Consort Without A Nervous System

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Oh, megalithic sponge, pumping like a bouquet of hearts, I am joined to your grid of circles, sucking in gallons of seawater per second. Strange and deformed, like my upper lip, lisping, you whistle in low frequencies through your body of pores. You mirror my twisted nose with your barrel cactus hollows, have sex without competition, grow without combinations. Perfectly reduced to inhalation-exhalation, without brain-wave interference, a growing building without property lines, defiant of the surveyor's glass eye. Could I caress your tubes, reach in your cavities, learn to breathe my dinner too? Is it true you can never love me?

ZYX, April, 1998

A Meeting of Suns

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When Vega comes with ancient, burning parchment of iron and ultra-violet, we will test the fabric of faith in the furnace of love at time's stake. Vega rushes onward toward this epoch of water and compacted stellar dust to execute our vengeance half a million years too late to matter.

Oh, tender Vega, their innocent children, countless generations hence, will pay dearly for our wasted ovum and spoiled, rotting semen. When Vega draws nigh, our bones will crackle with fossilized joy beneath a seared earth of champions and vanquished, smoldering.

When Vega comes, our spiteful kisses will come to rest in long solar flares as suns embrace and clocks implode.

When Vega comes, you better have your shit together.

ZYX, April, 1998

How We Made Our Fortune

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We steamed to Scotland,

bought a glass-bottomed boat,

docked it at Loch Ness

and hoped the thing would float.

We found an old sub

they were selling for scrap,

hired a mechanic

and built a tourist trap.

We attached some flippers

with old engines inside

so our gullible sight-seers

would believe it paddled by.

We enlisted a welder

from the shipyards to tack

metal triangles on top

for the false dragon's back.

We washed it in green

to complete the disguise.

We painted its face

with black, beady eyes.

The head dangled 'round

from a plastic pipe neck.

Now all that remained

was to fill our boat's decks.

"Come see the monster!"

our billboard sign shouted.

"The legend lives on.

You'll be sorry you doubted."

The scientists came snooping

and discovered our fraud.

The reporters just laughed.

The tabloids were awed.

But the children clamored

and their parents scurried

to pay twenty per family.

We got rich in a hurry.

Our glass-bottomed boat

daily carries its fill

of the lovers of Nessie

through the Loch in the hills.

Krax 37, 2000, Yorkshire, UK

A Language We Shared

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If you could speak Spanglish, these Ventura Coast Mountains, (their feet covered with orange groves, and their high brush faces covered with wrinkly crevices), might make more sense to you.

I knew the sons of Mexican American farmers, worked with them in the back kitchens of food-service assembly lines. The Latino name they gave me, "Muchacho Blanco Feo," (Ugly Little White Boy), was an affectionate pet name and nothing to take offense over.

I washed dishes beside a family man christened, "Hombre Bato Gordo," (Wild Fat Man). This was our way of intimacy. Crippled workers had other Spanglish names: "One Arm, Stump Leg and Tortured Face." No obvious feature was overlooked.

These were times of great closeness. Here, up North, we speak properly, guarding each phrase carefully, as if an exchange of pleasantries could hide our lack of love. Hardly anyone here speaks Spanglish.

It feels lonely in The Orthodox Church of Political Correctness where we proclaim our lack of racism in rooms full of colorless, pallid faces, as if the act of merely not-hating somehow brought love to the loveless halls of UC Berkeley.

"Gringo," a Guatemalan poet told me, "You could not even buy yourself a soul." And while others objected to what he said, I didn't believe he was only speaking to me. And that, perhaps, is the great opening of the heart, the realization that it's almost never about me, or you.

Vigil, Issue Twelve, "Figures in an American Landscape, October, 1996

Concept #2

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A man takes the bus to Powell Street, sets up a folding chair next to an end table. He is dressed in a $500 Italian suit and wears a business-like hat with a distinctive-looking peacock feather. He sits down, appearing completely relaxed. Money is collected in a silver punch bowl which sits glimmering in the mid-day sun. The solicitor does not speak as he elegantly sips sparkling cider from a hand-blown crystal goblet while reading Harper's Bazaar and ignoring passersby. Behind the man is a large sign saying. "I'll Party Tonight On Your Hard-Earned Cash. $5.00 Minimum Contribution. Visa/Mastercard Accepted. $10.00 Service Charge On All Returned Checks." After approximately three hours, the man packs up and gets back on the bus, having collected his daily average of $300. The other panhandlers feel resentful, judgmental, though, ethically speaking, they are unsure exactly what is wrong with this scenario.

Squirm # 5, April, 1993

The Wretched Ones

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Smart-ass remarks and catty one-liners that make you feel stupid and ugly. Smug little sneers and pretentiously-thoughtful drags from expensively-thin cigarettes. And, "No you can't dance with me." It's always the wretched ones that make us fall in love.

G-string bikinis and Brooks Brothers suits have an ongoing relationship; and I am one jealous, spiteful harelip. It's imperative to our destiny that we try to force models to smile as they pose, though they're really aloof and strange. Like Platonic gods they can only be copied or idealized. Yes, it's always the wretched ones that make us fall in love.

People who see us as transitional lovers for desperate situations, calling us up and pretending to miss our uniqueness or our specialness, but mostly enjoying our eternal availability. "Available" is the code word for absolutely dispensable. They will replace us quickly when the economy recovers, or their highly-personal depressions subside, or their alpha male or alpha female lover breaks down and comes home. It's always the wretched ones that make us fall in love.

That way they abandon us and make it look like a mere communication problem. The way their "Dear John" or "Dear Jane" letters read, as if they were unaware you'd spend the next two years completely alone, as if it were a reasonable world in which any good person had a fair chance for love.

No, I am not angry. I am a dead man, one of those people whose nervous system keeps twitching after the rest of them are gone, except it's been twenty-four years since I died, and I'm still moving somehow. It's always the wretched ones that make us fall in love.

That rational calm of knowing they can't lose. And no matter how much more you say to try to get at them, you just dig yourself in deeper, because there's no credibility in the anger of a sore loser. It seems unbelievable that you actually got conned into thinking you were rescuing them. It's crazier than the way we five-dollar-an-hour workers are forced to pay our taxes to bail out bankers who are still employing chauffeurs. It's always the wretched ones that make us fall in love.

Self-confidence that has never had to face a real challenge, never had to fight on foreign soil, never had to beg for attention. It pisses me off.

I once asked someone why they chose to stay with a partner who beat them instead of dating a guy like me. "Because," she said, "it's way better to stay with a wife-beater who looks cool, than to face the humiliation of being seen with a total dork like you."

It's always the wretched ones that make us fall in love.

The Fold, Fall, 1991

Carrying The Torch

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I still love your plump, junkie ass, how you keep (almost) dyin' young — your scratchy, nervous whiskey talk.

Isn't this love letter just totally trash?

The thing is, I'm still hooked on the sober home we never shared and the love that never grows cold between us.

Don't you fully hate this romantic crap?

How 'bout I fake it's no sweat if you're pissing off the cops or fillin' another county hospital bed?

Yeah, it really sucks deep about the European border scene, the creative creeps you sleep with, the binges, the needles, the tears.

Who the hell needs it — bein' love sick, disorganized, wrenches thrown in prayers, poems and diary pages tossed everywhere?

Other guys do this to you, don't they?

Worship you from afar, get overwhelmed by your sex life, want to cuddle and apologize.

Your men are mostly useless: One goes on a life-long fishing trip, another rots away in a desert slum and the rest all somehow stop floating.

I thought about giving you a white horse that feeds itself, a rosebush that needs no water, a marriage without a jealous bone; but I had no business painting spring around your rusty eyes, smoothing over your jagged heart or imagining you could ever change.

Aren't my love poems just bullshit?

Veins, Volume 1, Number 2, Summer, 1994

Your Real Name Is Janis

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And there you are again on a side street in El Paso with your botched make up and your Frank Sinatra pose singing White Rabbit a cappella to a crowd of four people, your voice shaking and cracking below the slivered gold ring of the sun's corona in totality.

But this time the papers never come. It just gets dark and everyone gets on with their day.

An eclipse is just too rare to live for.

Veins, Volume 1, Number 2, Summer, 1994

The Human Paper Blizzard

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During construction, the streamers were rolled up and paper clipped to a skeleton of cheap staples and clear packing tape. As the work area expanded to cover their entire lawn, the neighboring homeowners became uneasy and suspicious.

His wife could not bear to watch when her neat, orderly husband became obsessed by fits of arbitrary public outbursts. As he labored excitedly in the hot sun, she discreetly left the premises, choosing to drop off the laundry and stock up on groceries.

At the well-manicured community park, families and sunbathers ignored the shiny, wide sheets of butcher paper encircling his frame like papal vestiges. People remained intent on their duties as the banners he wore whipped around him, crisscrossing and tearing as he ran yelling across an empty soccer field.

The Blind Man's Rainbow, / December, 1996/January, 1997, Volume 2, Issue 4

Poems 71-72

Three Generation Xers Collide

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Student A cruises to the Fillmore to score dope and babes. He is approached by hostile Student B and ordered to surrender his wallet.

Student A does not surrender his walled, but replies, "Chill out, man. One Love. We can hang," prompting enraged student B to shoot student A six times.

Student B is immediately surrounded by a sea of angry, nervous policemen both pleading and demanding that he disarm immediately.

Student B shouts, "Nobody / disses me!" and waves his gun frantically as a hail of bullets shreds his youthful body.

Student C observs this sequence of events and looks on contemptuously and notes that not only are his friends dead, but he won't be scoring any ecstasy today.

No one come to claim either of the bodies. Their neighbors raid their now-unoccupied studio apartments and remove all of the valuables they are able to.

This has been a class in San Francisco ethics.

The Blind Man's Rainbow, December, 1996/January, 1997, Volume 2, Issue 4

L.A. Chinatown #1

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A shadow falls across my face. The wind hardly lifts the flags. It's a sleepy day in Chinatown. The crowds are not crowding.

As for this little matter of love? Weren't we supposed to transcend all such vestiges of worldliness? My door remains completely shut.

From below you might see faces looking down in restrained ennui. I call myself a Taoist. By trade I'm just an old joker.

My old sex poems still get the audience laughing. But make no mistake, I'm pining, lonely, alert with fear, bent before any altar I can find.

Letterfounder # 56, February, 2009

Notes On Zines And The Zine Life

A. My Introduction To Zines

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I don't claim to have any authoritative or accurate definition for the word "zine," and I'm convinced that various artists, readers and critics all have their own personal slant on the word. The word itself is derivative of the word "magazine." And while I don't know the history of the word, I can explain a little about the sequence of events that brought the word to my attention.

Before 1989 I lived in mostly conservative enclaves of Orange County where the distribution of various media forms was strictly conventional. Albums were made by record companies such as Warner Brothers and Capitol Records. Magazines were printed by large national or multinational entities and bore names like Newsweek, National Geographic and People Magazine.

However, when I moved to San Francisco in the late part of 1989, I became aware of such districts as The Mission, The Haight and South of Market. These districts contained used record stores, alternative news stands and counter-cultural coffee shops. It was here I stumbled into treasure troves of alternative media for the first time.

It would not be uncommon to find books and records or posters and bumper stickers that were produced by small cottage industries, often at a loss, and often by a person, or group of people, far too poor to sustain these losses. It was here that I also was introduced to alternative magazines and little magazines, often centering around some combination of punk music, kinky sex, goth attire and confessional prose poetry. It was shocking for me to see that the production values were extremely anti-materialistic. A page of these magazines might consist in an almost random collection of poems and images, pasted together, apparently in haste and reproduced on xerox machines of extremely dubious quality. These types of publications, with almost infinite variants, were described to me by other people as "zines."

Zines could have a very small distribution. Literally, a person might xerox ten of them and hand

them out at a local coffee shop, poetry reading or punk concert. That might be the entire press

run, although more typically a "publisher" might run off a hundred copies or three hundred

copies. Often these three hundred copies, in the case of "nationally distributed" zines, could be

mailed all over the world to specific poets, readers, musicians and other zine publishers.

Counter-intuitively, while these zines often lacked a certain production value from a commercial point of view, they often possessed a passionate readership. Most of us who were "published" in

zines would receive our "author's copies" in the mail and read the publication all the way through.

Oddly, very "legitimate" writers from prestigious workshops, would have virtually zero audience, since the thick, polished journals they were published in had almost no readers, not even the authors who appeared in them. These stolid journals often sat in University libraries or languished on bookstore magazine racks unread.

Conversely, one might get instantly known to various "underground" writers, publishers and promoters around the country by being published four or five times in nationally-distributed zines which ostensibly had "no prestige." Indeed, one might, within the year, end up with pen pals and admirers from several countries and a dozen US states, if one got in with the right zine publishers, since the zines were actually read, usually cover to cover.

Many times I experienced what I called the "zine echo chamber effect," where one zine would publish me and other zine publishers would like the poem and ask me if it could be republished in their zine. A single poem might be in almost continuous publication for months on end this way.

B. How Zines Saved My Artistic Life And My Sanity

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As fate would have it, just after I was released from the psychiatric hospital, I happened to get involved with a group of poets known as the Babarians. This group of poets attended many readings in the Bay Area, but their home base was at the Café Babar in the Mission District of San Francisco. Before this latest nervous breakdown, my poetry was somewhat conventional, but lately it had become downright confessional, which was, and is, a problem for a lot of critics and poets at many venues. Thankfully, the Babarians were open to my work and even encouraged me in the direction I wanted to go, more so than any other literary group.

Needless to say, I was very low on self-confidence. I had recently lost my job, my girlfriend (who I'd intended to marry), and also my sanity. Furthermore, audiences, up to that point, had not been consistently thrilled with my work, and it appeared that my poetry "career" was not really lifting off. I'd heard that all kinds of people around me were being offered featured readings and were getting published in literary journals and zines, but I wasn't getting any of that action.

One day I appeared at the Café Babar with an extremely-long, eight-minute poem detailing the entire history of a neurotic suburban family, not unlike dozens of such families I'd observed in my native Orange County. Firstly, it was remarkable that the promoters of the event would indulge an open mic reader this much, since time limits were "five minutes max," (and now that has shrunk to "two minutes max, and could you please try to make it shorter since the list is so long today"). Secondly, it seemed like a very lucky break that the most important zine publisher of my life was in the audience that day, and his closest advisor was sitting next to him at the time. She nudged him, after my poem ended, and said, "Get that poem for Bullhorn."

I didn't really understand what Bullhorn was, but I was happy to be asked to contribute a poem to it. Since people actually read zines, within days several other poets were saying things that made me feel good about my work. The zine publisher was David Gollub, and his friend was Julia Vinograd. It's true that the zine was "merely a stack of xeroxed sheets stapled together and mixed with randomly-pasted line art," but I was thrilled to be a part of it.

I just recently went through all of my publications, and found out that David Gollub and Bullhorn published more of my work than any other publisher. The first several poems in this book consist entirely of poems published in Bullhorn. It is an entire short book of poetry in itself.

This initial act of kindness, and the many subsequent issues of Bullhorn that included my work, created an atmosphere of acceptance, not only of my work, but also of my psychiatric conditions. And, coming from Orange County, I can say that such tolerance was a rare thing in those days. And truly, nothing could have been more invalidating than the petty and mean North Orange County of my childhood. How I ever survived that economic concentration camp, I'll never know. It's a miracle that I ever escaped that mind-set and accepted the advice of a friend to get out of there before I wasted my whole life in that vast cultural void.

In any case, the transition between worlds was rough, and might not have worked, had I not found an artistic community and publishing home in Bullhorn. They may not have known it at the time, but it was the support I got from this crowd of people at the Babar that gave me the strength to attain some modicum of functionality and some sense of self after the trauma of enduring thirty years of the conformist hell that I grew up in.

C. The Criteria For Choosing Zines And Poems

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In this volume I have attempted to collect all of the poems that I've had published in zines. That being said, it is worth noting that some zines I was published in don't appear in this collection. Not included in this publication were "echo publications." So, if a poem was published in more than one zine, generally it appears here crediting only the first zine that published it. Also, there are many small magazines of limited circulation which nonetheless were made or edited in such a way that they come off in a bit more of a traditional light. (I hope to publish future volumes of poetry in which I properly credit all of the reviews, journals and magazines that published other poems.) In any case, the mood of this book took on a life of its own, and, in an almost backward-looking sense, I deduced what criteria I was using to declare a publication a zine. What follows is my attempt at describing this.

I considered nothing of "high production value" unless it was consciously made with the idea of looking "undergroundy," nothing that looked like, or was called, a journal, review or anthology. No books or broadsides featuring me and only one other person. If it looked pasted together, haphazardly-stapled, was utterly unstapled or had glued-on line art, it was usually included in this collection.

Other pluses included having a minimalist, punk-type look, or some hints of goth, kink or metal. It was even advantageous if the xeroxing looked like it was done on a drug store xerox machine that was not well maintained. Sharp-looking, high-volume, production xeroxing, while acceptable, was not considered optimal. The less "careerist" and the less professional looking, the better. Signs of disorganization are also a plus. Publications lacking tables of contents, ones that appear without title pages or proper contact information, and ones in which the author's poem was shrunk on a xerox machine and pasted into the zine sideways or upside down, were also more likely to be selected for this collection. Furthermore, the definition of "zine" seemed to explicitly include hand-built anthologies in which pages were stapled onto the surfaces of other pages and where the color of the paper changed on each subsequent page. Hint of glue stick residue, crooked bindings and uneven trim all helped in deciding which publications would be included.

Unfortunately, this means that, for the purposes of this particular collection, I left out works published by many of my most devoted publishers and promoters. As I previously noted, I fully intend to include those works in future publications and credit them duly.

I liken this work to a kind of research project into the origins of a literary life. The ponds that I sprung out of were primordial and full of animalistic impulse. The danger of any ongoing hobby or vocation is the onset of professional sophistication. In doing the ladder climbing we do, we risk losing track of where we came from and who nurtured us in the very beginning. Although this volume contains all poems written by me, I still consider it a tribute to those often unsung heroes who supported me and validated me when no one else would.

In truth, it wasn't long after the first few times I was published in zines, that more "professional-looking" magazines approached me asking for work. And so there could be a tendency to romanticize my origins, which were perhaps not as "undergroundy" as I might make them out to be. In any case, I feel that those other publications, to whom I owe a great debt, have generally received a goodly share of acknowledgement. And, in producing this work, I made an aesthetic decision that I think creates a holistic and organic flavor to this document.

The work, as a whole, now strikes me as more overtly brash than I had imagined it would be. In fact, the idea of releasing this work as one product, made me quite queasy. I really had forgotten the nature of my emotional states back then. Actually, I am still that same person, but I've polished up my exterior to some degree. And also, advancing age and declining health have done a lot to naturally tone down the fearless mania I evinced in those days. In truth, I cannot even now stand behind the exact ideas espoused in some of these works, but I can stand behind the process that produced them. It was a take-no-prisoners confessionalism, which, regardless of what I wrote about, or the positions I took, was fun as hell and worked wonders for my mental health.

D. Short Notes On A Few of The Zine-Makers

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David Gollub: As stated earlier in this forward, David is a true hero of the underground poetry scene of San Francisco. He not only published, edited and produced Bullhorn, but he also selflessly gave poets rides to readings. (Cars were often a very scarce commodity among spoken-word artists in San Francisco at that time.) More than once, he helped me move when I was changing apartments. And there were times when my mental and physical health was such that I was just unable to tend to the harsh submissions protocols of other magazines. If it were not for Bullhorn, there would have been many months, and for some folks years, of poetic invisibility in the print media. Many other poets published in Bullhorn were published more times there than in any other publication. This is still true for me.

Dangerous Stew: This publication was very lively and was a perfect compliment to Bullhorn. It was published in virtually the same physical format, however it leaned toward even more radical work as a whole. The publisher, a wonderful fellow with a very kindly disposition, Denver Harold, happened to work practically around the corner from where I was living in Cathedral Hill. On lonely days when anxiety attacks were plaguing me and I was still afraid I'd end up back in the hospital permanently, it would soothe my nerves to drop by Denver's work and smoke a couple of cigarettes and have a couple of cups of coffee with him.

I was very passionate about this little zine and I was eventually asked to help recruit authors, and was named consulting editor for some issues. Denver's approval of my works gave me a sense that there might be more horizons for my work than I had known up to that point. Of course, as many of us knew, he had an advanced case of AIDS and so the magazine could only possibly go on for a couple of years.

While Denver's death was one of the first in a now seemingly endless stream of passings that afflicted our scene, his death affected me a lot. He really was the second publisher, after David Gollub, to really make me feel accepted in the world, not just as a writer, but as a human being. Unlike some people, he was not creeped out by my obvious mental illness, but soothingly and quietly accepted my phobias and anxieties. I felt I could say anything to him and he would understand.

Pinched Nerves: Ken DiMaggio was only on the scene for a couple of years before moving back to his native stomping grounds of New Britain, Connecticut. But while he was here, he made a big impression on me. Firstly, he was chosen by one of the editors who worked with my Cyborg Productions label, Alan Kaufman, to appear in the Horsemen of the Apocalypse book. Me and Alan and Ken, along with Steve Arntson, did several gigs to promote the publication. Ken was a lively performer, both funny and witty and very expressive. Later he went on to be the publisher of Pinched Nerves, a 2-sided 11" X 17" broadside zine that managed to cram a lot of poetry and opinion into those two large pages. When he went back east to publish his zine, he was kind enough to include me. And, I suppose, this was the first East Coast publication to use my work.

Neon Geyser / Porcelain Sky: At one point, due to business and family obligations, Bruce Isaacson, legendary publisher of Zeitgeist Press, happened to move to Las Vegas to work and to set up family life. However, he not only continued publishing San Francisco authors and making their works available in his catalog, but he also managed to publish some Las Vegas authors too. To this day, he regularly pilgrimages from Las Vegas to the Bay Area in order to promote his own very fine poetry as well as the works of other writers he believes in. It has been my opinion for some years that Bruce Isaacson remains one of the best narrative poets in the United States.

FUCK!: Lee Thorn is nothing less than a saint of underground zine publishing. His little zine, FUCK, is not only notable for it's very sharp editing and commitment to quality, but also for its stability and enduring nature. At last count, some years ago, Thorn had already put out over 100 monthly issues of FUCK. And there's one feature that sets Thorn apart from both mainstream-establishment publishers and other underground publishers: He pays! Imagine most author's surprise when they submit their poem to this small underground, xeroxed zine in Tuscon, Arizona and find, several weeks later, waiting in their mailbox, an envelope with two author's copies of FUCK and a crisp twenty-dollar bill. Indeed, it is the sort of generosity one associates with a bygone era, or perhaps an era that never existed.

Sivullinen: I can't recall what set of connections eventually got my work introduced to Jouni Waarakangas of Helsinki, Finland, but I will always be grateful for my first international zine debut. The great thing about this Finnish zine is that it was always meant to be international in its orientation, and thus Waarakangas always maintained a large international mailing list. Interestingly, the publisher loves the English language, and so it may strike some readers as curious that a zine from Finland is an English-language-only publication, but, from what I hear, this is actually somewhat common in Europe. In any case, when one got published in Sivullinen, one could expect to get letters of appreciation from Rolla, Missouri or Paris, France or Buenos Aires, Argentina. One great thing about the zine world, it really is interconnected. The small punk publication in a small town in Maine is interlinked with a larger publisher in London that may mail zines to dozens of cities worldwide. Names and reputations spread fast. And even though the contact is sporadic and the distances imposing, true admiration and affection travel through those envelopes.

Cokefishing In Alpha Beat Soup: This was the wonderful broadside zine of Dave and Anna Christy. The two were the kindly couple of the underground who served, for many, as a reference point. Many underground authors, themselves feeling rather spiritually homeless and alienated from their families, would travel great distances to hang out with Dave and Anna. And they loved underground writers, admired them, venerated them, and made them feel important and cared for. Although they only published me a few times, it seemed that they rarely forgot me. It seemed that every several months I'd be on the phone with some undergrounder when someone would say, "Oh, by the way, Dave and Anna send you their love." I never did get back there to meet them, and yet, I always felt included and never forgotten. Dave passed away just months ago, and Anna had to move away to be near her children as her health had been a problem for a long while. They spent their lives taking good care of poets.

X-it press & ZAP, inc. (publishing under various subtitles): This edgy set of zines was the brainchild of the charming, affectionate and wild Bobby Star. I can't remember how his name got passed on to me. (Or did my name get passed on to him?) In any case, Bobby published me a few times and remained my friend for years. He had this very personal habit of making cassette tapes to communicate with poets he was fond of. (This was back when long-distance phone calls were very expensive and digital recording did not exist for home use.) Every several months I would receive a cassette, made just for me, full of sound-effects, rambling discussions about his life in "dreary, Erie, Pennsylvania" and any other topic that came to mind. I also sent him cassettes. It was an amazing dialogue. And all of this is typical of "the zine life," a life that is about something more than poetry and publishing. It's a real community, a free-floating international home that borders and clocks rarely limit.

Brouhaha: Ian Griffin put more into a zine than anyone I ever knew. Each copy of each issue was obviously constructed by hand and represented perhaps an hour of assembly work. These wonderful editions were stapled and duct-taped and pasted in many odd configurations. And they weren't small zines, but long and bulky and colorful and strange. He put in quite a few years of truly conscientious labor crafting items that were not only nice books, but true souvenirs of a physical area of publishing that may never been seen again. When Ian Griffin published you, you not only felt included, but also honored. His manner was always gentle, friendly and truly humane.

Over The Transom: After several years of seemly having vanished from the poetry scene, I found myself on disability and wondering what to do with my life once the full-time working world was no longer an option for me. I figured I was through with poetry, and that I had been forgotten, or, if I were remembered, it would be as a person from an era long gone. I was pleasantly surprised one day that, with the encouragement of a roommate, I began to feel inspired to write and perform poetry again. Needless to say, I was very insecure and very much wondering if there was still a place for me in the zine world and/or the ladder-climbing world of main-stream publications. Frankly, I had been on a dry spell and no one was buying my unpublished old work, and no one seemed to be considering printing my new works. Right at the height of my insecurity, Jonathan Hayes came along and published me in his very excellent San Francisco zine "Over The Transom." In addition to publishing me in his own zine, he put his extensive knowledge of the national zine scene to work and figured out several publishers who would like my work. For a time my "career" consisted in sending things wherever Jonathan told me to. Amazingly, my acceptance rate went way up and I began to get a lot of self-confidence and regained much of my former cocky arrogance and cynical hubris, (traits teachers of Buddhism and Poetry are always trying to beat down while I keep touting them as prime spiritual assets).

Of course I can never do justice to the throngs of people who have kept my poetry vocation alive through their financial support, their publishing support, their promotional support and through their sage advice and guidance. But it was important to me to take some time to let readers know who I am and where I came from. I am a product of the zine world and am still living the zine life.

— Mel C. Thompson, Lafayette, CA, 6-15-2010

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