Illuminant Alley: Gus Poems & Other Utterances

By Al Ferber

ILLUMINANT ALLEY is Beat but not broken, broke but not beaten. It burns like the fabulous yellow light of the oncoming train at the end of your tunnel.
Hop Wechsler, writer, poet, documentarian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796049589

Al Ferber

Al Ferber a septuagenerian going on 13. Born. Regrettably… A North Philly kid. Survived education at Temple U., Penn State, Villanova U. Alcoholic 30 years. Sober 23 years. Indenture servant to Catherine the Great 34 years. Learned to love and appreciate cats and one dog. Authored 30 books of poems, 2 novels, 3 chap books. Poems in Magazines in U.S., England, Scotland, France. Still alive, on the downward path of the sliding board, as of this writing. An undocumented alien in the world. Resides Ocean City, NJ surrounded by water with Cathi, Luna, Mitzi, and Opal. So there.

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Copyright © 2019 by Al Ferber.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-7960-4959-6

                 eBook           978-1-7960-4958-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/31/2019

Xlibris

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

All poems & utterances

contained herein

have previously appeared in:

my other books, Blue House,

Painted Bride Quarterly,

La Fenetre,

the irregular gnusletter,

and/or the ether.

reprinted with my permission

Al Ferber

INTRODUCTION

My honey and I were out for a night on the town. Which town it was before the Unenlightenment was unimportant. Every town was our town now, being emptied of most light and, with it, most people.

We stumbled into a so-called Roman restaurant down a darker-than-most alley somewhere south of South (we thought). LUCEM FERRE, the occasionally-lit, more-often-not neon sign read. The light bearer, my honey told me. Thirteen years of Catholic school writ large.

We ordered red wine and mussels Fra diavolo—everything on the menu was Fra diavolo something—and talked to the bartender-poet-prophet-Buddhist-anti-anti(-anti?)-antichrist, a man-of-means-by-no-means who called himself Gus, which wasn’t his name.

He talked to us from the other end of the end of the world, about the darkness without which there is no light, about the past without which we have no future, about Mingus and madness, bullshit and the Badlands, satori and Santorum, lust and …more lust.

Ninety-nine percent of the world was now shrouded in darkness, but he was illuminant.

And now, Unknown Hypothetical Reader, the Unenlightenment is upon you. (Read a paper recently?)

You managed to stumble through the darkness, somehow. You found your way down the barely-neon-lit-for-the-moment alley. You ordered a Carménère (because the only red is dark red) from Gus.

And now, like the Legend of Wyatt Earp sez, or said, in a world back when we still had electricity and TVs still worked, his is the story you’ll hear. Fiat lux. Let there be light.

—Hop Wechsler

This book contains the emergence of the good, the bad, the ugly, the beauty, the mundane, the magnificence of damn near everything.

Gus appeared in the late 1970s as a release from pressure coming from all sides. Free from all that shit. Could say and do anything with no push back from any quarter and has been my constant companion & frequent narrator ever since, with few a sabbaticals here and there. An avid proponent of speech without constriction of any kind.

—Al Ferber

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORIES AND LIVES

of the cats

Gandalf

Tai

Gus

Malcolm

Tilly

William

Nick

Nora

Fritz

(all ashes in tins)

Their survivors (as of 6/27/2019)

Luna & Mitzi

Our resident glamour queen

rescue greyhound Opal

Cathi – my wife, best friend

love of my life

bane of my existence

my higher power and

Queen of Everything

Since 9/26/1987

And every other dog cat

gold fish turtle and human

who I ever gave a rat’s ass about.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgement

Introduction

Dedicated to the memories and lives

Unspeakable Visions

Awakening

Abstract

6 Looks

24-7 buzz

Just 4 When

Amulet

Fever

The Price Is Right

Junkyard Playground

Wink of a Twiddle

A Herd of Zebras

Hackneyed

Exploring Recesses

The Face of An Angel

Looking Glass

Random Inventory

Blue Avenue

Brooding

Oxidation

Changing Tides

A Carnival of Errors

Burning Room

Row House

Conformity

Maturation in Retrograde

Cogitation

Walking in Darkness

Bright Lights

Another Brick

Utterances

Garbage Pickers

Sidewalk Art Show

Clouds

Miles of the Streets

Between the Raindrops

Tired

Ash Cans to Ash Cans

36 Years

Bad Ass

Milky Brown

Cirrus

Strike Up The Band

Shame Man

Health Tips

heology - The Deeper Questions

The Trick of Magic

Lightning Struck

After The Back Seat Scene

Strap Hangers

The Race For Cover

Midnight

Clown Alley

1950 Something

Eclectic Electric

Fire In The Church

Wild Friday Night

Aftertalk

Climbing To The Surface

Base Line

Junkyard Cart

Almost Everything

Junkyard Dog

Wild Horses

Billiard Game

Stumbler

Parade On The Water

Dream Lover

Lip Service

Death Calls At The Boardwalk — 5/12/04

Bars

She Belongs To The World

Carry All (from L’Strange Cafe)

Formative Years

Fawkawlovia

Joy To The World (from L’Strange Cafe)

Nature

Just

Hot Hot Hot

Flora / Fauna

Whadda

Micro-mini excerpts from Beatitudes (a novel) published 2003

Pushy

Cast & Crew

Club Dancer

Not Ready

Trickle Down Epistemology

Anemic Fifties

Life Without Parole

Grasp

The Piece Movement

Pre-Graduation Blues

Turning Corners

Outside the Box

Dance No. 1005

Bring It On

No Gun

Boredom

Multiple Generation Gap

Polluted

Bubble Bubble Toil & Trouble

Seduction

Practice Field

Cleavage

Distorted Images

Magnet

PR Man

Her True Story

Neon Jungle

The Corner Song

Pancake

Grandfather in the Broom Closet

The Secularist

The Return Of Crow

Final Chapter

Squatters

Nails

Ego-system / ecosystem

Mary Magdalen’s Murderers Row

All Bets Are Off

The Last Time

My History My History

Drape Over

Repatriation

Utterances

Almost Grounded

Switch

Tumble Weeds

Digging In

Payment Due

Butterfly

The Roman ….Church

Random Sampling

The Rat in the Coal Bin

SWAT

Addict Descending Staircase

Arcane

Elements of Style (1958-1964)

Sitting on It

I Married a Mechanic

A Better Deal

Time Sure Flies

Free Will

A Life Lived Awake

Different Sphere

Crawling

Templates

Big Doings

The Fox & The Crow

Stories

Bleary

Heaven & Hell

Whiskey

The Mulberry Bush

Water Buffalo

In My Gallery

Clouds & Cool Air

The House Closing

Thinly Veiled Attack

Still

What a Woman

The Village Idiot

Recycle Recycle Recycling

In The City

Thankful, like Sly said……

One Lost Dysfunctional Family

Subterranean

Strings Attached

Through An Archway Slowly

Collectively

Red Alert

I Can’t Stand It

Keep Your Mouth Shut

No Worries

Cheap Thrill

One Step Beyond

Lightning

Home Invasion

Degrees of Separation

a’ve eye got gnus fer ewe

Everything That Counts

And now for something…

Fentanyl

Circumspect

Dogma

Unleashed

Benchmarks

The Theaters Went Dark

Shifting Shelving

Nebula

The Cauldron

Big Girl

Omens

Poets Don’t Dance

Patch Quilt

WTF

Wisdom

Underlying Causes

Zebra

Vision

Night Rolls In

Behavioral Modification

Caged Bird

Eroticism As A Remedy For Death

Rat Race

Open For Business

Quality Time

Regrettably

Return To The River

Relief

Dakota Slim

Traveling Menagerie

Black 55’ Chevy

Moth Flame

Asterix

Beat Down

Bull

Utterances

Blossom

The Rape

United / Divided

The Eichmann Cometh

Favorite Movie

Short Circuit

Chasten

A Problem With That

Wrong Turn

Celestial Stew

Caught in the Act

The Grooming Of Bill Weir

Fear of Flying

Horses On My Street

Train Wreck in Concert

Two Good Things

Nonessential Personnel

Misleading Eyes

Banana Ears

On The Scene

Last Chance Dance

Dreams & Disasters

Murk

I Smell The Rain

The Fall

Apocalyptic Change

Prayer Wheel

Green Cadillac

Little Flower

Empty Skies

The Great Theater Erosion

Little Boy

Ex-Cathedra

The Red Zone

Satanic Folklore Of Ordinary People

Dark Seas

Neurotic Angel

A Dog

Open And Close

His Dreams

First Drink

Roaring Thunder

Bertha’s Sisters

Swimmingly

What’s Wrong With It

Memory Bucket

The Dumpster