]Exister[

By William Fairbrother

Poet, playwright, and novelist William Fairbrother's oeuvre as novel. Oeuvre as novel. Autobiography, fiction, poetry, prose-poetry, code-work poetry, plays, film, experimental poetry and prose, novellas, Denmark, Colorado, California, Mexico, Australia. This book is the first half... the second half is "]Exister]2" ]Exister[: Gravimeter, Scherzi, Wanderings, Is Rain at Night Black?, Fish Terror, First Lines and Titles.
Philosophical literature...

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Fairbrother
• Release date: Feb 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463220276

William Fairbrother

born april 10, 1956, la jolla, california, 10:10 pm. was santa claus in the sixth grade christmas play. played little league, pop warner football, huffy basketball, track and field, swimming. hand bitten by a bear at yellowstone. read a lot, wrote silly poems and very short stories. learned to cook. became a boyscout, a mormon. trips and vacations to baja. read thurber. took up photography. watched television and movies and plays. took up surfing, skateboarding, biking, made surfboards. immigrated by ship with mom to sydney australia. bondi beach. painting and literature and world history. played tennis, rugby, painted, read shakespeare... learned to drive. was homeless. flew back home to california. graduated high school. played golf, went skiing. read a lot, wrote a lot, surfed a lot. worked in restaurants - all positions. attended community college: literature, theatre (buddy ashbrook), art history, native american studies. plays produced. read symbolists, dadaists, and from there back and forth through all of world literature. played on the badminton team. became editor of the college literary magazine. won the bravura award for poetry. lived with a woman and her daughter. attended university of hawaii, lihue, painting, art history, sociology. moved back to california. amateur surfing competitions up and down coast. one professional contest - seaside heights, new jersey. saw charles bernstein, william burroughs, jim carroll. attended ucsd - literature/writing (reinhard lettau, ron silliman, bram dijkstra, bobbie louise hawkins, paul dresman +), art history (moira roth +), playwriting (adele shank, paul foster) and directing (alan schneider), performance art (alan kaprow, elanor antin, jerome rothenberg). plays produced and poetry readings various uc colleges. many surf trips to hawaii and mexico. lived in vw van. lived with several different women. met ferlinghetti. moved to colorado - worked as handyman at the rolf institute, worked in restaurants. ginsberg liked one poem. went snowboarding. lived with mom holding her hand while she died of bone cancer. moved to chicago. moved back to colorado. lived in willis, texas. lived in baja california sur in a tent on the beach with a girlfriend from chicago. moved back to california. moved to denmark. after two months married a woman (an artist) with a young daughter - they had a son. opened the first state-controlled organic restaurant in europe, in copenhagen: "southern california mexican natural foods" - after two years went out of business. traveled some in europe. placed second in denmark's surfing championships. wrote a lot. worked as chef in a 700 seat restaurant. published several chapbooks of poetry, quite a few poems online - both english and danish. created own website: 'virtualitch'. after 10 years of marriage got divorced. became a cobbler at a medieval tourist center. once son turned 18 moved back to california - sacramento. (after 20 years in europe). worked as a librarian at the rudolf steiner teacher's school, then many cooking jobs downtown and midtown. off and on homelessness. attacked by an idiot with a knife - 10 surgeries - lost use of right hand... currently homeless

Book preview

]Exister[

by

William Fairbrother

© Copyright 2019, William Fairbrother

ISBN: 9780463220276

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019920367

Published by William Fairbrother at Smashwords

Other books by/with William Fairbrother

I Cry Gray Mountains on the Moon (Literary Objects)… Xlibris Corporation

Burning Gorgeous – Seven Twenty-First Century Poets… Robertson Publishing

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

ISBN: 98-1-945526-95-4

Table of Contents

Gravimeter

Scherzi

Wanderings

Is Rain at Night Black?

Fish Terror

First Lines and Titles

Gravimeter

A rectangle of white sand, a white-face cliff, a grey fence, a red fence, the flesh-colored back of a house. He plays until he cannot see; all night long during the summer, under Mom’s window, tiptoes, scoots, crawls, whispers, readies the troops for seven a.m. war.

One night he turns the water on shuts it off, runs, stands quiet at the side of the house. Eating breakfast Mom says she thought she’d heard the water running.

The cliff face is an immobile theater curtain. He hammers sticks into the folds and sets men on them, steps back and throws rocks.

He dumps boulders on the front lines.

There are hospitals in which men are glued and taped back together, two-limb minimum. Once decapitated they are dead, their bodies buried and their heads given as prizes. One General has twenty-eight heads displayed on his walls.

Each man owns a house. They are paid right after battle, the wounded less. Dry green-gray clay is gold. It is clawed from the cliff with the back of a hammer: One summer he discovers a huge deposit in a cliff at the beach and spends three days lugging beach-towel-fulls the mile and a half home.

Ice Plant People wear ice plant tip helmets. Hill People wear splinters in their heads.

The Hill People are run into the hills. The Ice Plant People plant ice plant throughout the yard, which the Hill People sabotage.

The Ice Plant People are run into the ice plant patch up against the house. The Hill People stock-pile ammo and build huge fortresses, which the Ice Plant People overtake.

Warriors come out of battles unscathed. After ten battles Warriors are promoted to Generals. The Headless dig out of their graves and gather in the grass-weeds by the grey fence. One at a time they sneak out and get their heads back and behead the man who’d gotten theirs and glue that man’s head on top of their own. The Headless then become the slaves of the Two-Heads.

The Headless revolt. The Two-Heads flee to the ice plant patch. The Ice Plant People flush them out. There is a terrific battle which leaves just two Two-Heads alive. One of them becomes the leader of the Ice Plant People and the other becomes the leader of the Hill People.

There’s a month’s peace before they sell the house.

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There’s a ravine that doesn’t have a name like ‘the woods’ or ‘the slough,’ full of sage, manzanita, tall scrub brush, and two scrawny trees. Between and under he walks on knees or belly crawls. There’s a place near the middle where he stands and is still hidden.

Rajah and he play hide-and-seek. He throws a stick and Rajah fetches. He runs in the opposite direction, to his special corner, and once Rajah gets hoarse from barking he crawls some then stands up. Rajah comes running, grinning-wagging his entire red body.

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They have ice plant fights; usually just his brother against him (dog barking), but sometimes others.

They throw dirt-clods. Sometimes even rocks.

They throw pointy sticks.

They fight until dark, or until someone gets hurt.

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She wasn’t beautiful, perhaps pretty, surely seductive. Not responsive, but vivacious. They’d wade through games of tag that lasted whole hours between change of hands. They performed surgeries. Shirts off only, finger-write into each other’s back and face and chest and belly; tickle-giggle the real words out. After a while he’d slip a hand down the front of her pants.

She’d fidget and giggle then twist over mad. One afternoon his hand stuck when she rolled and he tumbled over her off the bed crashing pulling her down on top of himself laughing. They stared, almost kissed.

She’d offer him affection when others weren’t around, bluff nonchalance when he gave her his. One day playing tag she caught him, kissed him, awarded him a quick feel. They’d crawl under- into her faintly urine bedding with a flashlight, fondle ‘just the upper half", make-believe, taste, push their heads together til it hurt. First thing in her room dove onto her bed.

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One Saturday morning amid cartoons and commercials he sticks his tongue out far as it will go, closes his eyes, touches it to the screen. Scoots back rubbing everywhere inside his mouth. Then he gets back up on his knees and shuffles up to the screen and presses the top of his tongue flat on it for half-a-minute.

The next trip he laps it freely, feeling the beating trapped electricity. That night he has nightmares: the screen cracking and him dissolving. The next morning he names the flavor ‘silver’.

In the evenings Mom says: Looks like you kids’ve been finger painting the TV again. She goes grabs the Windex and the towel from the refrigerator handle.

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Run on the beach; bend over hands on knees, stare down at shadow-filled divots in the sand. Orange-gray explosion; run back.

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

Oh, I used them to cover the car the other day when I’d washed it and that rain came right afterwards. They’ve been washed, of course, but they still smell a little moldy.

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

Accidents explain great sleep. Accidents are the consciousness of dreams. Accidents are pulled from dreams like teeth. And dreams are pulled from crashes like victims. He wakes up groggy, which he loves.

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

Sharp features, well-shuffled fears. He sees the building’s bones even from the distance, like a transparent animal’s. Same bed his father had died in, he‘s certain of it, naw, they‘re all alike; he was looking for that room, wandered, but belonged wherever he went; gave-up; this was Frankie‘s room.

Next time I’ll bring you a plant you can pull up. That’ll make you feel better.

Frankie was out in twelve days, a steel pin in his left knee.

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

"The first, and even now still the only hallucination that’s ever occurred to me, occurred with me sitting on the floor of my twelve-foot-square studio. I sit on the floor my back against the couch when I write tragedies, directly across from where I sit up in bed and write comedies. One night I declared poetry dead. I used to sit on the floor in the kitchen to write poetry. The kitchen a walk-in closet outfitted with cabinets, an imitation Formica counter, and a tiny aluminum sink. I ripped half the shag out of there, it was ratty and moldy.

"I’d write poetry, and it stank sitting there. Food and crumbs in the carpet and dirty pans and dishes, there was always something rotting. Anyway, probably the stench made me stop. I don’t have anything against poetry.

"The first, only, hallucination, no need to say why it occurred… sitting there there’s the desk lamp which stretches out, gives plenty of light and also radiates a little heat, not enough for a real cold night, that’s why I write comedies in the winter, sit-up under my quilt with clothes stacked on it. There’s also a side view of the tv.

"A small sparrow appeared from between two stacks of books under my bed. Books hold the bed up. First he stayed close to his cave, hopping- pacing. He looked mature enough to fly, but he was extremely small even for a sparrow. Then he ventured out toward me timidly. Hopped to a certain distance away then ran-hopped back to his cave. Then he came out to the previous distance and hopped one or two hops closer, then ran-hopped back. He was already smaller than he should’ve been, about the size of a female hummingbird. But the closer he came, the smaller he shrank; halfway between me and the cave he was no bigger than a peanut. I thought he was real. I crawled over to the cave and looked around for droppings, then swiped up a thing in a shadow: a lint ball. I thought it was an illusion again but kneeled there still for a moment and listened; things moving to the wind, then distant birds, then the groaning freeway, which isn’t that far-off, I’ve just learned not to listen to it. A girl who lived in the studio backing mine for a few months last summer told me the freeway was unbearable. Dark sunken eyes and the tired mannerisms of a junkie. I never asked her out. I know she liked me. She probably wasn’t a junkie.

Let’s see; I didn’t hear the sparrow, but just outside my door there was a bird rapid-chirping, call of a mother bird to her lost chick; I thought the chirping was a part of the hallucination, but it sounded so real, so desperate. I reached into the cave again, touched some web or something hanging down from my bed, jerked my hand out, then laughed. A man across the alley yelled out his window Shut up ya stupid bird!" The bird shut-up. I pulled my jeans on threw open the door flicking the porch light on; no bird, and the man-who’d-yelled’s lights were out, if he’d turned them on for his yell. I got out of my jeans and settled back down on the floor; an hour later the sparrow was flying, stroking the ceiling and walls with shadows, round and round faster and faster. I closed my eyes; when I opened them he was gone. I chided myself for believing him real.

Two more times that night he appeared; perched on the headboard, and perched on top of the bamboo bookcase; knowing by then that he was an illusion, he faded.

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

"When I was six I started playing this game in which I’d pick up any fairly straight cane-length stick and pretend it was a snake, carried it by its tail, and would seek-out small roundy rocks and pretend they were frogs; I’d whack the frog with the snake and burst-out laughing watching the frog go sailing-tumbling.

"Mom wouldn’t let me play it at certain times. All other kids thought the game was stupid. I played it with my brother, but he’d smack the frog and not laugh. By the time I was eight I’d forgotten the game.

Last weekend right after hammering the best drive of my life I laughed so hard I had to sit on the grass. These three important men standing around me, an agent and two producers, deciding who should slap me unconscious or who should drive to the clubhouse for a doctor. I couldn’t explain it, made a joke about a heart-attack of laughter. Then two days ago I figured it out.

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

I’m hidden from myself but know where I’m hiding so I’m not hidden from myself but from reality behind myself as if I began playing a game of hide-and-seek when I was ten and the child who’s it to find me never has.

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

I’m dead to the world Mom would announce plopping down on the divan kicking off pumps gulping vodka martini rocks.

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

In the mirror there’s a knot as if a tree had fallen into its mixture while solidifying. Flat, gray, causing distortions in every face, a fissure, where you and I collide into one break apart. A riverless canyon, ice crevasse or storm rising from us both and I enter by staring by stretching with my hands stepping through and creating what’s on the other side.

You called to me once when I was standing there. I thought of hiding so I ran but was still standing there and you came up kissed my neck, your arms around me pulled me back. I turned to you and said I wonder if I’m still alive?

||||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

Screen door then hollow wood door, side door, to remain open for Bandit: the kitchen and dining room. Un-polishable beach-brown thin roll fifties tract-house (creaks) linoleum speckled with dull white, mustard, dark brown, and red, as if with spots of paint: viewing the first waves Pollock has thrown to a canvas.

Dog dish and water bowl, both green plastic, to be filled each morning though he only eats at night.

A modern refrigerator, appliance yellow, a patch of strawberry and banana magnets. A wicker bowl on a yellow-gold restaurant napkin with rust spots on the corner that catches in the door-top, filled with plastic apples and bananas so well covered in dusty cobwebs they appear to be molding.

An older brown stove with oven beneath, its door streaked with grease and with a near-straight hairline fracture down the middle top to bottom. Smeared clock running accurate.

Shiny slightly sticky oak cabinets, their dark knots with the character of children’s faces, the edges a little burned. Fine black curlicue copper door handles and hinges.

Yellow Formica counter, chipped, stained, marred with knife, cigarette-burned: coffee-maker, double toaster, green electric can-opener, red-yellow crock-pot green plastic dish-rack half-full, double sink; stiff white curtained window, orange-yellow curly plastic scrubber, white bunched plastic net scrubber, dense steel wool rock set in the mouth of a ceramic horned frog with humor; Comet, Dawn, empty large bottle of Alka-Seltzer; stacked amber glass ashtrays, all three with butts and ash; and an unopened can of Kal Kan.

Collector plates mounted on the back wall by the nook, several just an inch below the ceiling, two actually touching. One set off to the right, well below eye level; they all appear to have been tossed to their brackets from the dining room, greasy and dusty. The wall has this same film, like a fish just pulled from an attic. His finger leaves a gleaming stroke. He smears it in with circular rubbing, smoothing until background.

A brown-lipped hole cut-out of the yellow ceiling over the stove. A bare circular neon tube; the switch flicked, on the count of four bursts.

Eggs. Bacon. Apple juice. Bottle with tap water. Vons margarine. Vons mayonnaise. Black walnut ice cream - one frosted scoop left.

Plain label cans. Four kidney beans, two pork and beans, one creamed corn, one chicken and rice soup, one Star-Kist tuna.

Glasses, most from gas stations. White ceramic cups. White with brown and green design ceramic plates. Green plastic bowls.

Mismatched stainless steel silverware, spotted with rust.

Raw wood floor, cold, but soft as carpet. Collapsible gold-tube-legged dining table covered with blue plastic lace table cloth with cigarette burns; four red-orange flowered plastic chairs with tall lean backs softly squared like the antiques at Mrs. Kennan’s. A wall phone; it rings loud, can’t be adjusted. A corner buffet, plain dark stained wood: the phone book. Plates round-framing an antique wall-clock; directly below: Prince Charles and Lady Di wed. Bread plates with places, events, dates, in a line over the window.

Two couches against walls, one of them an eight-footer on which every night he watches amateur light-weight boxing on twenty-one inch cable.

Flattened three-green shag, almost yellow, green, almost blue (carpet sweeper in the hall closet); five cookies daily on the floor, a puddle between dining room and living room… pink icing.

Bandit has gray curly springy hair, hair in his eyes; he’s fourteen, Barney said if he dies while they’re gone not to worry, just call his son in San Diego. He’s purblind, one eye a glassy gray staring thing, the other the same but with a pupil.

Brittle brocade curtains, to be pulled shut afternoons to shade Jenny’s white afghans run along the backs of the couches like snow. Sun- cracked and spotted, Barney ripped one curtain showing him how to pull them. He leaves them shut.

Fly swatters on the coffee table. A black rubber fly the size of a plum glued to the table lamp; its knob turns wild, its shade white-yellow.

The front door is next to the television; its screen door has a frozen handle; he tells people come around to the side door, or talks to them through the screen. A young canvasser pitched his entire routine through the screen, inserting jokes about it, even referring to it as a challenge.

Three to ten year old best-sellers perched on snow and stacked under the coffee table and the table lamp. A green cracked-vinyl (yellowy foam) recliner up close to the wall so it can’t be reclined. Five county-fair won ashtrays with butts and ashes. All of the furniture except for the television has at least one brown-yellow burn or brown burn or black burn or hole.

On the flat-white wall above the long couch is a large painting; on black velvet, a white outlined blue bull’s side, head twisting down-around. Human boredom stare; yellow, red, orange, green, white, and blue tasseled banderillos stuck in his humped back bloodlessly. The event occurring in outer space, held inside a rough-hewn black frame.

A clock in every room: stove, ten-eighteen; dining room, ten-twenty-three; next to the television, ten-fifteen; Jenny’s room, ten-twenty; guest room, ten-twenty-eight; four of them are alarm clocks, the other is antique-looking, frozen at five past noon or midnight.

The hall closet has a skinny door; its shelves are crammed with decades of sleep-laundering; the door left open an inch or two, the back rooms no longer reek of dog.

The hall bathroom has the bath, a soft plastic seat hangs on its hot water knob. A pink cotton candy throw-rug on scratched grey-white linoleum. A wicker clothes hamper painted pink, with a pink vinyl padded lid, two inches too tall for sitting. A mirror with rounded corners; no medicine chest. A white sink with steep angular bowl set in a box-like plywood cabinet painted pink, drops on the floor, with a handle less door: plumbing; two rolls of white toilet paper; Ajax; a stiff blue sponge. No place to set his toothbrush but in the sink itself. Toothpaste, tightly capped, set on a bath-towel on the toilet tank-lid. A bare bulb center-ceiling.

The guest room, their last son’s room and both sons’ room before that, is his. Barney and Jenny both offered their beds Jenny’s has an electric blanket! Barney’s a single mattress and his room a mess. His room has a double bed, had blankets and heavy clothes stacked on it the day before they’d left. The stolid atmosphere of storage-memories. He sleeps well.

A dark antique-like vanity with a tall narrow oval mirror and a short oval stool: it seems solid, as if carved out of a single dark tree, but also delicate, a dainty cloth hand-smoothed perfectly centered, a row of girlish knick- knacks. A magazine rack full of sixties pop albums. A functional book shelf stuffed with old best-sellers, romances, movie-star bio-graphies, books turned into films and films turned into books, high school textbooks, how-to books, and reversed into a corner an Xavier Hollander Sex-Citing... documentation. The headboard is a bookshelf with the same. The window faces the blank green-grey side of the house next door. The curtains are stiff red imitation lace rayon; he tucks a blanket into the curtain rod to do work and to sleep. A fluffy pink bathroom throw-rug next to the bed Jenny had pulled it out of a closet for him, its ends curl up, unused but has lost its brand-new smell, more than likely the product of a two-for-one sale.

A pleasant old chair with arms for sitting. A fifth dining set chair with a stack of hand-towels, bath-towels, beach-towels, and a pillow. A full-length mirror stuck on the back of the door. The door doesn’t lock.

Jenny’s room is clean, dark, the bed made but its spread tattered, photographs of relatives meticulously arranged on the dresser, some of them frameless. In the corner close to the bed a grocery sack brimming with romances; the light switch has to be toyed with, the first time he flicked it off, hot out of a shower, the light stayed on. He stepped back to the bed and sat; after a moment he turned and saw his pale face in the mirror, fell back laughing.

Jenny’s room leads to the large bathroom. The only door in the house that locks. The shower a good twenty minutes of hot water that comes out in a wide soft spray no more invigorating than dense steam. The shower-head can’t be adjusted or redirected. Jenny’s terry robe lies on the counter (there are tee-shirts, socks, blouses and all other clothes lying about the house). A triple light switch, vertical, the switches flick sideways, the top two are for light, the bottom one is for a glowing orange heat-lamp, with all three flicked-on there’s a tense buzzing, like being in the lavatory of a 747 in flight. Two tall wide wall-mirrors. Two plastic-handled hand-mirrors lying next to each other on the vanity. The chair for the vanity is turned to face the toilet. An oval sink, a single knob, water-on when the knob’s pushed back, hot water when the knobs pushed right, cold water when the knob’s pushed left. In the cabinet below the sink: pink toilet paper, pink bars of soap, a small white cardboard box with tangled steins of wool and two short metal knitting needles and two long ones sticking out; Vaseline; a light blue swimming cap; a pint of good scotch with just a nip left.

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Reconstructing past thoughts is marvelous - if they’ve been written down it can be an exact science. Or not. Obviously what had been written down is a reconstruction itself.

One can embrace fragmatism, or one can denounce it.

One can joke, hey, ever since the invention of television...

Or, some serious sad sack - Tristram Shanty...

The world is perceived through fragments of information, packets. And perhaps Cubism was correct in atuning these packets to levels of cognition.

So Why does the ape hop and reach for words? The words are in the trees.

And why do the birds sing to the heavens? They are in the trees.

Thus spake Druidism.

That this current fragmentation (2013) leads to revolution or anarchy - simple nonsense.

I’ve examined each one, especially the media - and they’re all hinting, they’re all riding the thoroughbred - but it happens to be down a fairway at a Fair and a child is pointing a water cannon at a slot that will move their horse forward. Better it were a monkey, well, old chum?

We are basically stupid. That’s our gist.

Most human beings never learn to read and write. Fucking difficult, when you’re starving.

We are so stupid we have allowed a concept: GREED, to take over everything in our lives - we are all imbued with it, we’re part of it - but all of our sins combined equals less. Even murder - which at some level has a point.

Greed has nothing to do with survival.

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exo

You say no:

You acquiesce

You quit

You become violent

You are hurt

You are void

You tire, feign sleep

You aliven and jump

You persist until annoying

You scream out

You basically die

You shiver beyond cold

You break a dead silence

You are everywhere

You bother me like death

You jump to a conclusion

You gush like a dam

You throw conniption fits

You buck and buck and buck

You play and entertain

You forgive yourself

You can do no wrong

You are without control

You are without equal

You are pinned, cannot dance

You have no function

you are without friction

you memorize yourself

you demonize your other

you are always enthralled

you love your nakedness

you just killed somebody

you fly in the face of it

you pretend to care

you lose your balance

you believe everything unequal, paramount, done

you have sinned

you are without stain

you in the wilderness

you the green child

you are without regret

you are not innocent

you remember everything

you are my shadow

you complete nothing

you pretend and progress

you have no beginning

you end in a miasma, dunno -

you are dead before I’m born

you pretend everything

you realize your faults

you blame consciousness

you are without silence

you create your own wilderness

you get devoured by the beasts

you then devour the beasts

you accompany your end

you shed all ignorance

you ignore all sovereignty -

you are all alone

you passively progress.

you say hello to death

you die and say hello to god

you lie in wait and die

you begin nothing

you end nothing, fuck it

you create your own halo -

you own nothing, nothing real,

you are ignorant of the fact you never existed.

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the sleek foil would eye to a man

ask for we query box flow

so lurk fought tire saw

or felt it by what raft

geared for plum figure

law asking you quiet jazz gin

she’s asking all

luck sick lacks moons bold flag

life filled hands

oh it jumbles fake

dolls soiled soaked faminous

old wire more jokes kiss yes

peek dark fun come mix missed

life skilled falls

a week finds kindle soaked

dew’s whimsy up puke it

then from sadness mud jade kiosk self-cough

duty did find in box

wire knife

see envy jungle lengthen flatten thick at the ends

sends host diamonds (floating down)

heaving fighting the skull

|||||||||||||.......||||||||||||||

The story is everything

how are you suddenly without attire?

without you there there is no one there

as is without you here there is no one here...

desire is not nonsense, it’s animation

we can create abstraction in our thoughts but everything becomes absurd

smells like burnt peanut butter but not peanut brittle, Mr. Peanut

easy to disturb

back when I loved you back when it was possible to love

pictures take us away from life

this fragmentation is nothing in comparison to what is about to become

solely numbers

redaction becomes real when numbers cease to exist we are not numbers

images are important to audiences let’s go blind

I love you, I love you not - pulling leaves off unchallenged challenges

without occasion

How wrong things enter the door Imperial nonsense

I am without substance

If you are within shot, please

I am calling from a dying planet.

How the child-mind works.

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1

"What happens when I see is I think, which is bad and so, what happened when I saw was I thought.

"What happens when I see is I feel, which is good and so, what happens when I see is I feel what happened when I saw what I thought.

"What happens when I see is I sing, which is good and so, what happens when I see is I sing about what happens when I feel what happened when I saw what I thought.

"What happens when I see is truth; what happens when I see is truth about what happens when I feel what happened when I saw what I thought.

"What happens when I see a distortion? I absorb it because it may not be one, and just so I’ll have it.

What happens when I see?

2

Mine and the Christian notion blend, but never completely homogenize so that the two become one, but maybe partially, maybe toward the edges they bleed, and perhaps this makes belief approachable, which creates something close to communion with my ‘spirit,’ a true spirituality in thought, but the spirit doesn’t originate in the mind, thought can only harm it, harms it by distorting it or by abandoning it, but the spirit is always rejuvenating itself, sometimes with the aid of the mind, even though too embarrassed to seek help, but not too embarrassed to present this.

3

I tell too much, I don’t say what would be pleasing to hear, I’m too involved in truth, in myself, it becomes obvious I’m pretentious, it becomes obvious I’m limited intellectually, that I plain and simple don’t know what I’m talking about, even when talking about myself.

4

I need you, him, though I pretend not to at times, because I’m using such pretending to pull myself out of an immaturity which haunts me.

5

‘I still don’t know him. You’ve been very fair in your relating of him to me, never overly bitter, perhaps a bit too kind, unreal in that respect. But I’m able to read through that, so I believe I have at least an outline of him. I don’t necessarily want more, only when the occasion arises to talk about him, and that occasion has truthfully never risen. The glimpses, the shortened facts, the abbreviated interpretations, and descriptions and the occasional new photographs or unremembered photographs do not have the effect of a blast of heat from a heater when I’m very cold which is how they would effect if they really meant something. I’m not saying that I’ll be disinterested in him for the rest of my days. I even suspect it’s my immaturity which causes this disinterest. So someday I may come to you full of questions, of images you can corroborate or correct. In maybe years; [… it may take a fourth dimension…] |||| it may never hold importance; as I’ve learned from you, I’m not bitter towards him, and, if anything, I want you to know that I’m proud of you.

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Can it be formulated from this that a person can obtain faith by reading text as an example not of whatever the work is about or of how it has become or had become, but as an example of location? [that the word(s) and the reader exist, proves the existence of God… Ippen] The next word you think is God, namu-amida-butsu so, because you’re exhibited in the plot-story of the plot-story-character, the writer, (is) (you are) the written work?

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One day the ‘being’ inside me who had grown from a feeling inside me began to write my poems through me instead of me writing them. It was fun at first, sometimes effortless, sometimes arduous, but always joyous. The works alive for the hours, days, years in which I admired them; the ones I disliked from the start were thrown out, with remorse, anger turned sadness, I threw nothing out; the works praised one day and rejected the next then re-praised then re- rejected, shit. Rejected three times they were marked ‘Naga’ and never read again. But I never threw anything out.

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As a young writer I let writing happen to me instead of learning how to do it, the consequence being believing meditations, believing them capable of healing all, even physical ailments; thought fragmented because I needed time to concentrate, but when I took-off for two years just to write, the two years became a limitation, what at first I’d thought to be enough time to create ‘my’ masterpiece… which gives the work a pretentiousness which possibly rubbed-off on me…

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Right now you ask yourself why you read this.

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"I’m going to start with a silly question. I know you as a silly guy, that’s why. When you died, there was all this hoop-la about drugs and alcohol. One guy even speculated that you’d eaten yourself to death. But there was this girl that was with you, so of course I thought you had a heart attack during intercourse or something. If you’d planned it I’m sure that’s the way you would’ve had it. A kind of planned improvisation, right? There were these newscasters in San Diego who had never heard of you in their lives, who almost cried just reporting it. You would’ve liked that. There was this Samurai Medical Examiner who did the autopsy, who’d made some pretty bizarre statements about Natalie Wood’s death, so all he said was ‘no comment’ as to drugs and stuff, said something about a heart attack. By the way, have you heard the joke: ‘What kind of wood doesn’t float? Natalie Wood.’

"There was some mention that you had agreed to host the Oscars with Danny Ackroyd, really? Anyway, for these four days I didn’t watch Saturday Night Live reruns starring you, but instead watched the late news. They talked about you on all three networks. It was, in a way, kind of funny to watch these things instead of you, do you get it? I think you would’ve done the same.

"They didn’t say, and I want to know, did you die with a smile? - and if so, did it have anything to do with, I’m not implying you took drugs, but did it have to do with the line of Baudelaire’s: TODAY YOU MUST DIE OF LAUGHTER? Well, if not, doesn’t really matter. Guess what? Though it’s not important, one time I was your waiter. It was at the La Costa Resort Hotel. I was a room service waiter, you were following the diet there for a week or something, and you were finished with the diet and I served you a huge meal, steak, salad, potatoes, desserts, and you ripped into it, ate it like a pig, even threw some food, and I laughed; but what I want to know, most people gave a few bucks cash tip when we delivered, but you never did tip; I admit the gratuity was included in your bill, but you never tipped, except once. I believe it was your last day there. You ate out by the spa pool and there were a lot of magazine people hovering around. You gave the waiter a ten dollar tip. Wasn’t me. I passed-up taking out that order because I considered it a stiff. The last laugh’s on me, isn’t it?

But don’t let me get away with being presumptuous, I used to think Truffaut was a French pastry until I found-out it’s a film director’s name. I was embarrassed until I’d seen his films and it occurred to me I’d been right all along. What do you think? Did you really want to be a James Dean? I don’t believe it. An Elvis. A Brando. It’s all Nixon’s fault isn’t it, don’t you think so?

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He wears seventy-five years magnificently. In his twenties he’d culti-vated a respect in his gestures and stance that was extraordinary for that age.

The people of his village didn’t understand why they respected him, least of all himself, who until his forties never noticed any respect.

His philosophy (a word he’d never use), never spoken, was left in fragments of thought never to be repeated even in his dreams, was remembered, kept in his mind: sitting on the beach he tells himself Mexico is being licked by the ocean like a man licks a woman or a woman licks a man; walking in the jungle, swooshing flies, he tells himself that Mexico is related to paradise, the flies are angels being swatted; traveling through the desert he tells himself Mexico is thirsty, but easily satisfied with a short rain.

He fell in love with a girl when he was in his early teens. She knew he loved her. He knew that by her looks at him, coy and sublime, always inviting. He never spoke to her past pleasantries. By the time they were in their last year at the small schoolhouse her looks at him had waned to the point he knew he could never encourage himself to talk to her, especially of love. Another, a friend of his, was known to be her boyfriend by then. He never fell in love again. It had nothing to do with the girl, he simply never found love in any face besides hers, though there were many beautiful faces, and many longing faces.

Now, he steals through the border fence with some young punks and some women and children late at night. They take off in predetermined directions.

He surveys the United States with a sweep of his eyes, and by kicking the dirt. Only the fence is alien, the bush and brown earth are seemingly Mexican. He heads West toward the ocean, and North, so the gringos won’t guess his crime.

He jogs across the first paved road he comes to; it has no scars, but isn’t new, so he worries about it, but he doesn’t know why. The sound of whirring engines leads him to the brink of a huge freeway. He knew such roads existed but its appearance still shocks him. He sits with plenty of dark-time before daybreak and watches the headlights advance and pass, though uneven, they form a pleasant pattern.

He decides to follow the great road, to walk along its edge; that he should go along