Sunday, December 27, 2015

An Unsavory Christmas Long Enough Ago To Make It Into Total BS

There is no such thing as ghosts.  Unless people completely failed their quantum frigging physics.  If they got a C- or better, they should be right here with me about ghost-hood.  Apparitions. Christmas spirits.  Like the Christmas bastards in Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carole.'  

Last Christmas whispered past with a whole Yugo trunk full of Christmas ghost passengers.    And every item and individual is   made of sub-atomic particles. So's everything else.  Ghosts.   Nitwits where I happened to be working, one Christmas, late at night.  Everything is caught up in some shitty misconception about the way matter operates.  My desk set of ceramic ghosts appeared to me one Christmas night at an adult bookstore. 1992, while the dot com universe rolled like the Blue Streak on the other side of the continent, I spent that Christmas fielding demands for cigarettes and beer money.

Most nights there were vagrants and perverts flowing in and out of my then place of work.  The part of my body most engaged  was my right index finger, pecking up small ticket sales on the cash register, behind a discolored counter, surrounded with large dildos, video tapes, and glossy reprobate magazines.  Christmas night was special because most of the perverts had family gatherings to attend, while the vagrants were consistent with their omnipresent norm.

One bum after another came in the store, begging for money or cigarettes.   How sad life has become since smoking was banned everywhere.  I always smoked a pack per shift, and the cash register was never off. And sadder, for just one sub-atomic particle of time, people would beg for cigs, like golden retrievers at Thanksgiving.  The experience compares to getting beamed up on the Star Ship Enterprise, and the thing fucks up your atomic structure.   That's how maddening it is to deal with. And then there comes the very anti-matter of the sleaze that was giving me a totally demoralizing pain in the ass.

He was a homeless fella'.  Probably schizophrenia.  Far as I know, he didn't smoke, and didn't beg for beer money.   One could say, in that district, that a non-drinker foregoes forty ounce bottles of Midnight Dragon Malt Liquor.  And a non-smoker, on Christmas night, at the smut shop, is a type of ghost.  This one was at least as hip a Jacob Fucking Marley.  His thing was the art of conversation.  And he was just terrible at it.

As is often true of schizophrenics, his thinking was disorganized.  He wanted in the worst way to have a conversation, with someone, anyone, me, about the arts and sciences, philosophy and the way the stars act upon the fates.   He would have liked to comprehend quantum physics, and he truly gave it his best brain storm, that evening, as he pontificated to me, damn near nose to nose, gesticulating, imploring comprehension of all the things he needed to understand.  In yet more pressing urgency, the man needed to communicate with the outside world, badly enough to drift into my smut emporium one snowy night. Christmas and all, I felt obliged to do my best imitation of someone who really wanted to talk to this scrambled seeker.  And now his memory is one of my ceramic ghosts.

If it matters where that prim little smut shop was, it was located, in 1992, right across from where PNC Park is now.  The shop is a ghost store front with some other type of business in it, something cleaner, and no one is allowed to smoke inside anywhere anymore.  The city did a plum job of moving the vagrants to other environs.  Most of them probably croaked since those halcyon, primitive, squalid evenings.  My memory is long, and is filled with ghosts.   Those people on Federal Street proved quantum physics to my satisfaction.  For all the meanings people paste onto Christmas, the pricks were a prima fascia case.







Friday, December 25, 2015


Sunday, December 6, 2015

couple more poems



Minor Disappointments


moving forward on the ignited magnesium Moebius towards diddly
pins working like windmills escaping
the pitchfork service neath an indigo moon

jogging ahead of the fuse and it's a lot of bother
all hard labor seeping out
the barriers sussed  the best run by a not too shabby jock
with woodchuck ambition
and a disappointed runner slinks back to the shanties

dragging a Bobcat
no joy in light construction
those jaunty  backhoes cost a fortune
pastoral Alf and Loretta ain't on the list
the Singing Tabasco family was ingraciusly excluded from membership
I tried to spirit in and got the heave

 I had double parked the tractor
traded in the box wrench
donned me now my  festive apparel
it doesn't work here


Song of the Slumdweller  #1


there's a store front ministry near where I shop
when I run the bike past
the drums and organ send me into Oz
they sing intoxicating spirituals
it's medicine

my bicycle zaps into a broom
I'm the Wacky Warlock of the North
the bicycle disappears
I'm flying

there's this joint where celestial justice swung out
I buy eggs there
there are incantations
ribs of cow cook on a primitive charcoal grill
vast orbs of ham get affordable
the indiginous folk clip coupons
we have twenty five cent cigars
the looming loa smokes one

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Kurt Vonnegut's novel 'Cat's Cradle' was a fucking work of genius

Some people have a shitty mind, and need to be taught remedial math and reading.  Other folks have a brilliant, creative mind, and need to learn common ethics.  And then, some invisible Grand Inquisitor might have to redefine 'shitty' and 'brilliant,' for the bounding rare few who understand that smart people do stupid things, especially for reasons of personal gain.  Or that ordinary people aren't completely out to lunch.  Case in point:

The gnarled, homely nerd who invents a doomsday weapon.  He can't tell the difference between a rousing game of solitaire and a wing attack against foreign nationals.   These creeps are equally elated to see themselves doing something 'special,' like forming a cat's cradle out of string, or when they are making a product like 'Ice 9.'  In Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Cat's Cradle, the author illustrates this fact of life.   There are a lot of people out there who have the mind of a Ph.d scientist, and the morals of a two year old.  Differing and still related, there's the politician who sees fracking as a good thing because he/she is being bribed.  It's a low level of moral development, playing hide and seek with the rest of the mind's itinerary.  But, since it ain't costing me a quarter to talk, I'll have to just sit on the possibility that virtually every life on the planet could go down by way of  a special needs genius with Asperger syndrome.