youtube poem reading: Dark Side

Rats Are Humanizing

Good things and bad things alike may be prone to escalation. When the weather turns wet and cold, chronic conditions such as tendinitis may act up. In fact, like some cowering child in a dunce cap in the corner, tendinitis is an example of a bad thing escalating. Another bad thing that was escalating, in my private life, some years back, were rats.

The vermin are common to my part of town, as they are most places. There is a network of caves and caverns under the vacant lots between our rowhouses and freestanding section 8 dwelling places that convey the rats from home to home. Rats have a talent for both digging long cavernous networks of tunnels, and also have sly inbred radar with which to identify existing networks of caves and tunnels. Like people, rats come in a variety of breeds, each with its unique talents, and among them there are some technological innovators whose gift is to improve and expand pre-existing rat holes. I met real estate developers when I lived in the South side who remind me most of this type of rat.

So I had a pre-existing rat problem when I bought my home in Perry South. But I didn't notice it right away. In 1998 my gloriously lovely calico cat was in her prime. As often as twice a month I would find a large dead rat in the living room.    My beloved Noodles would stand aside from it like Rembrandt indicating his freshly painted Nightwatch. I'm not a great fan of Rembrandt's paintings, but I sure loved Noodles the cat, and the love and admiration I felt was genuine and heartfelt. She had a lovely way of expressing generosity and pride in her work. She always looked so proud when she killed a big rat, and I felt both proud and grateful for the service. I wouldn't learn for several years how great a  service Noodles provided me. In her prime she was a gifted rat killer.

She and I passed a decade in bliss. If I was counting, I found perhaps a couple hundred rats on the living room floor, freshly killed, my beautiful cat watching me, my every move, my every action, like a spouse presenting a boxed anniversary gift. And so much like the aches and pains I'm feeling now from my own advancing age, I deduced  over a period of about one year that Noodles had lost her sense of smell. 

The loss coincided directly with an escalation in the number of rats coming into the house. Better stated, Noodles had been robbed of her ability to catch rats, thus I was seeing the rats, in the house, alive, that in years past Noodles would've left me as an ativistic gift in rigor mortis. The gift of posthumous vermin. And now I was experiencing virile and abundant living vermin. My beautiful cat retained beauty for all of her nineteen years, and I loved her as much as ever for the decade that followed, but the matter of killing  rats had passed from Noodles to me. It gets like that in marriages. As partners trade their services.

Thus I learned to love rat poison.  And I've been warned by some wise practitioners of Zen that sentiment can be toxic, so I will be spare in these harp string recollections.  There once sold rat poisons a plumbing supply store that looked so banal, from the outside, people would turn their nose up at it, as if it wasn't more fun than Kennywood.   Along with it's rows of pipes and plungers and sink fittings, there was a premanent ninety nine cent sale that kept me coming back for more cheap junk.  But most of all, they sold an array of pesticides that could wipe out most things that creep into our shabby North Side slum dwellings.  My very favorite one was  this rat poison that came in hexagonal bars, about an inch by six inches, in a pleasant, waxy adhesive, nice freindly pale yellow color.  The things never failed.   One week I had fourteen inch long rats with muscular thighs, next week no rats.  Pest-free, thou source of light immortal.   And it all coincided with the vanishing hexagonal bars of rat poison.  Jolly-o.

It was at that erstwhile plumbing store, used to be Keystone Plumbing, that I encountered humanity at its finest.  So often, when I went there to buy more poison, a person nearby would notice, and be reminded that he or she, too, have an ongoing problem with rats.  It was one thing, sure as state reps and bed bugs, we had all, at one time or other, had difficulties with.  We could all take action in the matter, unlike those things politicians plague upon us all.  If only there was a pesticide for Congress and the Supreme Court.  Too bad.  I'm willing accept my limitations, and take pleasure in small victories.  The poison killed my rats, and I had spirited social interatctions with fellow North Siders about rats, rat poison, ants, roaches, cheating spouses, toxic waste related ailments, and all subjects relevant to people who didn't know one rat-infested thing  about one another, till they started a chat while buying rat poison.  In that regard, some very good things escalated.  Something bad, rats, declined.  So good here, North Side.
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Musical Waste

It was the screaching, gnawing low price that played concert master to this pitiful personal inner symphony.  

A violin piqued my interest, and after some viscerally twining ruminations, in time, I hit the 'buy it now' button on the browser that is shining internet  glories at me this moment.  Leading to the purchase, there was  titillating, teasing inner dialog...

Is it smart or stupid to get what any moron should guess is a shitty music widget?  How bad is it to waste time?   Is it possible to waste time, considering how nothing has happened in years to validate it as better or worse for the human condition.   If all time is loaded like a clear vinyl backpack full of stupidity, ugliness and failed hopes, there is no conflict between time and a shitty violin.

I can afford to waste the price of the violin, much as I can blow the same thirty five bucks on dinner for four at McDonald's.  And then I am obliged to trundle the old wheel barrow in which I wheel humanistic explanations for unproductive activities.   I learned a shitload of insignificant things in the course of acquiring and playing an awful violin.   The value of this is easily proven by running it past a consensus of cloistered people all selected for being easily amused.  At large, there are whole colleges and business enterprises that place people in a leisured fool's paradise, and in some of them, they find pleasure in what a nut case learned off his shitty, pressed plywood violin.

It came to the front door in a week, in a trapazoidal FedEx carton I'd be comfortable being interred in after my most sadly inevitable cremation.   The fiddle comes in an injection molded plastic hard shell case that I'd be even better elated to be interred it.  Mortality was among the inner interogatives that lead me to close acquisitions on a $35, post paid, violin.   And laid out in its plastic vault, like the late Chairman Mao after a royal taxidermy, the dreadful imported, mass produced  musical instrument took it's first gander at American residential light.

It has no musical value to speak of.  To learn violin on it is a waste of time.  Sounds like shit.  I am planning to shoot it with my crossbow, next summer.  It will be hanged from the dead oak tree in the vacant lot behind the house.   It deserves it.  And I  will derive pleasure. So will you, when you see the  youtube project I'm going to make.. Unless you are a stick in the mud.

This human interest story is total BS, and has nothing to do with me. Total fiction.

My Unsuccessful Sex Surgery 

For years, I suffered lower back pain from the weight of it. I was embarrassed, from the freakish lower body disfigurement my problem was causing me. And I was ostracized for it. My doctor, at first, tried to convince me it was normal to have an eighteen inch penis. But he was from Japan. How the fuck would he know? 

Imagine the fear of a wardrobe malfunction. Running shorts were a distant dream. I had to do my jogging in deep purple pantaloons, to hide my deformity. I begged and begged. I was desperate. Why couldn't I be like all the other men in my bridge group, hung like a Marlboro. They were all happily married, to frigid, workaholic spouses, and had wonderful, dim witted children. There was a crass comment made one evening, something about 'overbidding.' They were friends, for true, but they should know better than to rib a man suffering from 'the long dong.' 

The doctor finally consented, and he was willing to do it in his 42nd street walk up. It was supposed to be a simple hack saw and button hole thread job. There were complications. He had to resection it with his cork screw. There was a lot of bleeding. 

I should thank my stars the dang thing still sits up and begs, but the scarring and plain cylinder stump of it is a whole new story to tell to the hundreds of stewardesses and nurses I socialize with. Some understand, and accept that I have to use an adjustable wrench to achieve penetration. The others complain, and tell me that their last boy friend was a Virginia Slim. That's all I know to tell you. A malpractice suit is pending. Might lose. Hard to prove your life could get worse after having the long dong. I've turned to religion. 

Rant Along With Mitch....................or, it's just me, beefing out loud

Sharing, sharing, helping like Suzy Homemaker, I had a brainstorm that could save our fair city from future financial ruin.  Letting it out, like a primal scream:  Live sex shows on the bicycle powered tourist vehicles.  The vehicles on which about a dozen tourists provide leg power, not unlike on the Flintstones, to propel the happy consumers, seated at opposite sides of a steel wagon.  It serves refreshments, has sing alongs, and performs various inventive cheering  behaviors as they pedal around the cultural district. Salubrious so it wishes, the things get on my nerves.

But how lucrative could this business model be?   Not my business,  some would say.  Ontologically, everything is everyone's business.  I am forced to see the wagons when I'm waiting for the bus.   Call me a lemon sucker, but cheering antics have a negative impact on my inner wirings.

 I care about Pittsburgh, and I think there is going to be major municipal money problems if it doesn't find itself a nice fat cash cow.  And I saw one mooing this afternoon.  It was one of those pedal power tour vehicles for a dozen tourists, And at once, I realized what was missing.

There needs to be rampant sex partners, going at it, hot X rated.  And they have to pay a ton of money for the privilege, because there are suckers born every minute, and some have the cash to buy delirious  exhibitionist sex on the service deck.  There's  room on the vehicles for it, and there are a lot of people desperate for attention.  Some of them will pay tens of grands for the experience, and the public will flock downtown to watch for the tourist tantras.  People will be willing to pay hundreds of times the usual fee for pedaling the stainless steel ox carts.  It promotes more buisness opportunites.   It will help boost local sex trades, which is always good for the economy.

There could be alternate straight and gay sex wagons.   Newly weds might want to make their first go at it on a pedal powered tourist vehicle.   People who just hit the jack pot at the casino might just want to blow the whole kitty on one momentous fuck.  Makes sense.  Consider all you've read and seen.  This shit is lucrative.

Well, thanks for reading.  I'm trying to be a helpful ass motherfucker.  Thanks some more.

Lilting, Lyrical Little Numbers

the booth is oak like the Great Wall Of China
sunlight comes out through the glory hole
trumpets ride rubber buggy bumpers into a barreling bassoonist
common slip and and fall injury
call this chap in Mount Lebonon
gets you loot
it all streams in through the hole

Witch Hunting

People's cows were not producing milk and it seemed to be my fault
I did not put  a whammy on their bovines
I bought a corn broom at the Dollar General
tied it to the Schwinn
and rode through their pastures
on the bike path
thus peckerheads postulate that I am a witch
easy mistake

Remembrance of Nitwits Past

Please imagine the author Herman Wouk's famous novel, Remembrance of Things Past. Picture Herman dressed in a clown suit while so doing. Or a bulky gorilla costume. That's exactly how grotesque my experience with a local poet/personality was.

Names are withheld. I met this poet in the early 1990s after he had performed a reading at the Southside Beehive coffee shop. He and I were introduced by an acquaintance, and avid writer that I am, I asked the poet would he  like to meet some afternoon to discuss poetry writing. The fellow was at first skittish, citing the fact that he was a professional writer, and that he generally required a fee for discussion similar to the one I was recommending. With my usual candor and weasel-talk, I  convinced the poet that it was worthwhile to have a conversation, gratis. We agreed to meet the next day, at the Beehive.

What a beguiling next day it was. The poet showed up with a large leather sample case, such as salesman carry. They put insurance policies and carpet samples in  that type of case. Before the poet and I got  around to the subject of poetry readings and writings, he opened his case and pulled out a handful of brochures.

There wasn't a word about poetry uttered by either one of us that afternoon.   The poet launched directly into a sales presentation. He was deeply wrapped in a multilevel marketing business. He was a distributor of charcoal water filters. The brochures tell you all about them. Rather than discuss poems, the poet wanted me to assist him in completing a sale. He also wanted me to purchase my own dealership, because selling water filters was half of the game, the other half was selling distributorships. Had I purchased a distributorship, the poet would've received payment on every water filter I sold inside of my distributorship. Also some of the money I would've earned would have  filtered upward to succeeding levels of the multilevel marketing business. The water filters being sold probably cost about three dollars to manufacture because they were vinyl tubing and activated charcoal that fits under your sink, and the things  were selling for upwards of $300 each. It was explained to me that this is necessary because so many people have to be paid per unit sale. Hundreds and hundreds of poets, artists, intellectuals and clean water advocates were all entitled to a share of money raised by selling water filters.

He made a request, as if to test my artistic integrity.  He wanted me to close a sale that he was having trouble with.  I had nothing to lose at the time, aside from self respect, so I took him up on it.  I called a woman,by phone, and attempted to sell her a filter.  My sales call was going well, she was interested in getting a filter, and was concerned with contaminants in tap water.  The filter picks them out like Lucille Ball inspecting candy on a conveyor belt.  But I hit a snag.  She became suspicious, and asked who I was calling on behalf of.  Her tone was quite, quite serious.  This wasn't ordinary common interest in me or the filters or the call itself.  I was concerned, so I spilled the beans.  I told her that the poet had asked me to make the sales call.  She became quite, quite angry.  It appears the poet had been harassing her for some time,by phone, visits, other unwanted communication, because he was obsessed with two things, the filter business, and her.  It's called stalking.  And I got to be complicit in the poet's stalking behavior.

I did not go further with the multi-level marketing initiative.  I did continue writing poems, after that.  The meeting, and the sales call,  wasn't too horridly damaging.  But I left behind the shed snake skin of mendacity, greed, falsehood and poor conduct.  Poets can be a real jerk.

I'm a politically active fool, and fucking proud of it.

Organizations and Strangers

Lean parking twixt tumble weeds
you should see the bulk on that valet
it's the talking toys on his belt that ramp up acquisitions
clearly space is precious
awfully, time sucks into this dreadfully articulated sponge
costs money to sustain an ethic
costs wads on precious gambling junkets
for every creep who saves his saw bucks
read that book of numbers

it's riveting how more things mean more pleasure
and here's this creep
this petty ante creep
breathing rich air

Credo Barfing

Go on ahead.  Dare me to get pompous.  Thank you.  I'm there.

I am pompous about the subject of free speech.  Sounds simple?  Wrong-o, dearies.  There are more ways to deprive individuals of it than you can pull out of a hoarder's slum lodgings.

  Monsanto curtails the speech of farmers by suing them.   Newspaper magnates can limit publishing,all over creation,to whatever they care to report, blotting from notice person's not favored by, at this ugly juncture, fucking near every news outlet on the planet.

 They are all conglomerated.   You are you.  They will win in the area of mass communications, and those gazillion victories might all be called deprivation of free speech.    Money has a fat shitload to do with all this crap.  More money is more influence, same shit as free speech.  So there are other ways of stopping people from communicating negotiating, applying influence upon, fucking near anything.   People can be demonized.  Careers have been destroyed by way of affirmative action complaints.   That's a way of shutting people up.  Otherwise influential, talented people, who stand to lose it all should they be alleged a racist, sexist or flagrant sub-humanist.  People have never been less able to open their traps,type on the internet, or yodel into a smart phone without fear of being spied on.  Acted upon.  Sent to an Orwellian, Vincent Price-looking FranzKafkaLand.  I'm trying to help.