It was
53 years ago
today
that I
took a
gunshot wound
to the chest
and died
on an
operating table.
In solidarity
with bad poets
everywhere,
I proffer
this garbled
and unfinished
offering:
night mares (a ride on the dream horses)/
i almost kissed the mouth of Death
so wan and thin was her ruthless grin
that when she knocked i nearly let her in
brazen her manner and so barren her breath
as she placed her face right next to mine
i could certainly see her dark eyes shine
no word she spoke but pursed her lips
and touched my cheek with icy fingertips
such a wintry woman i remember thinking
then dreamed that i screamed and found myself sinking
deeper and downward into a trance of no waking
curious lady, is it my life loan you're taking?
she said, i do not steal, i just reclaim
and in paying your debt there is no shame
our night mares are saddled, the journey awaits
the black road before us, will you open your gates?
mental prisms and prison, the colors and the chains
no laughter in the hereafter, i offer you the reins
to the horse of forever, a steed as fast as bliss
but first we seal the bargain, i ask you for a kiss
i never married it's true, i said, but still i have a wife
and if only one kiss is left to give
if this lonely minute is the last i live
i plant my kiss on the open lips of Life
i will not kiss the mouth of Death
nor hold my destruction in my own tired arms
though i weary of struggling for ragged breath
and forgetfulness has its haggard charms
i will not hold the hand of harm
nor will i camp on the banks of Lethe
i will thaw myself out by candlelight
i will choose the day and refuse the night
she shook her head gravely, there were no tears
you answer me bravely, but do not think you can win
there are many more doorways, many more years
i remember you now, and you'll see me again
it was Philly and the bartender said
what and I said, gimme a draft, Jim,
got to get the nerves straight, I'm
going to look for a job. you, he said,
a job?
yeah, Jim, I saw something in the paper,
no experience necessary.
and he said, hell, you don't want a job,
and I said, hell no, but I need money,
and I finished the beer
and got on the bus and I watched the numbers
and soon the numbers got closer
and then I was right there
and I pulled the cord and the bus stopped and
I got off.
it was a large building made of tin
the sliding door was stuck in the dirt
I pulled it back and went in
and there wasn't any floor, just more ground,
lumpy, wet, and it stank
and there were sounds like things being sawed in half
and things drilled and it was dark
and men walked on girders overhead
and men pushed trucks across the ground
and men sat at machines doing things
and there were shots of lightning and thunder
and suddenly a bucket full of flame came swinging at
my head, it roared and boiled with flame
it hung from a loose chain and it came right at me
and somebody hollered, HEY LOOK OUT!
and I just ducked under the bucket
feeling the heat go over me,
and somebody asked,
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
and I said, WHERE IS YOUR NEAREST CRAPPER?
and I was told
and I went inside
then came out and saw silhouettes of men
moving through flame and sound and
I walked to the door, got outside, and
took the bus back to the bar and sat down
and ordered another draft, and Jim asked,
what happened? I said, they didn't want me, Jim.
then this whore came in and sat down and everybody
looked at her, she looked fine, and I remember it
was the first time in my life I almost wished I had a
vagina and clit instead of what I had, but in 2 or 3 days
I got over that and I was reading the
want ads again.
--Charles Bukowski Looking for a Job
Shall We Go You And I While We Can (51 years Later)
Grateful Dead: Dark Star...2/24/74
This is perhaps why
Dante chooses the poet
Virgil to be his guide
in the Inferno;
in visiting a strange location,
it's always best to go
with someone who's
been there before,
and – most important of all
on a sightseeing tour of Hell
– who might also know
how to get you out again.
Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the spirit of the Mountain was thinking; and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great western slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the eastern Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed
and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. And beyond, beyond, over the Sierras the other side of Carson sink was bejeweled bay-encircled night like old Frisco of my dreams. We were situated on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night, eastward over the plains where somewhere a man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word and would arrive any minute and make us silent.
--Jack Kerouac On the Road
CHEOPS PYRAMID--ISIS TEMPLE SADDLE
TWO VIEWS OF HANCE RAPID
HAUNTED CANYON COTTONWOODS
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
--William Cullen Bryant Thanatopsis
Grateful Dead: Black Peter
Grateful Dead: Black Peter...2/13/70
see here how everything
leads up to this day
and it's just like
any other day
that's ever been
sun going up and then
the sun going down
shine through my window
and my friends they come around
Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker.
First thing you should do to a soothsayer
is poke them in the eye and say, Didn’t see that coming, did you?
--Mark Lawrence
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.
You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, far removed from the seats of strife, as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.
There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.
At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, Hey, I did sixteen miles today, any more than you think, Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today. It’s just what you do.
--Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods
HOLY GRAIL TEMPLE
ALSO WITH KING ARTHUR AND GUINEVERE CASTLES
ZOROASTER AND BRAHMA TEMPLES FROM HORSESHOE MESA
AND OUTSIDE LONETREE CANYON
HANCE RAPID
James McMurty and the Heartless Bastards:
No More Buffalo There was no confining the man. Famous Shoes was in the habit of walking where he chose and when he chose. He might get up one morning and walk for three months. Once, when he was younger, he had decided to walk north, to the place the ducks and the geese came from and returned to every year. He knew the birds could travel much faster than he could, and that he would have to get a big jump on them if he was to visit them in their home in the north. He started early in the spring, thinking he would be in the place the birds returned to, when they returned. He had been told that they nested at the edge of the world. An old Apache man who, like himself, took an interest in birds, told him that. The old Apache believed that the ducks and geese, and even the cranes, flew to the edge of the world each fall, to build their nests and hatch their young. Famous Shoes wanted to see it. In his dreams, he saw a place where all the ducks and geese came to nest. It would be noisy, of course. So many birds would make a lot of racket. But it would still be worth it. What defeated the plan was that Famous Shoes did not really enjoy cold weather. It was cold enough in the Madre, and even colder on the plains, north of the Rio Rojo. But those colds were as nothing to the north. He had walked to the top of the plain, and into the wooded country. As the days shortened, he began to see strings of geese overhead, and thought that he must be getting close to the great nesting place at the edge of the world. But then, it seemed to him, he reached the edge of the world without getting to the nesting place. He passed through the great forests, and came to a place where the trees were only as tall as he was, and Famous Shoes was not tall. Ahead, he could see horizons where there were no trees at all, and only a few plants of any kind. There seemed to be only snow ahead of him. He survived by knocking over fat birds and slow rabbits, but the snow was becoming painful to his feet, and the diminishing vegetation worried him. With no wood to make fires, he knew he might freeze. Also, it was only fall. The real cold was ahead. Reluctantly, Famous Shoes stopped when he reached the place of the last tree. He looked north, as far as he could see, wondering if the edge of the world was only a day or two away. A day or two he might risk, but he knew it would be foolish to go to a place without wood, when the great cold was coming. Overhead, the sky was thick with ducks and geese, going to the place Famous Shoes wanted to go. He heard them all night, calling to one another as they neared their home. He was annoyed with the geese, for he felt that they should appreciate how far he had walked, out of an interest in them, and that some great goose should come down and help him go there. The old Apache man claimed that he had once seen a white goose big enough for a man to ride. Famous Shoes didn't know if the story was true, for the old Apache man had been a little crazy, and was also fond of mescal. He might have been drunk, and the liquor might have made the goose grow into a goose that a man could ride. But if there was such a goose somewhere, it too must be on its way home. Famous Shoes waited a whole day by the last tree, his feet aching from the snow, hoping the great goose would see him and recognize his appreciation of the greatness of birds and alight and fly him to the big nesting place. Also, while he was there, he meant to look off the edge of the world and see what he could see. But no great goose came, and Famous Shoes was forced to turn back, before his feet were frozen. Months later, when he was still far from his home in the Madre, Famous Shoes saw the geese and the ducks overhead, flying south again. It seemed to him that their calls mocked him, as they flew above him. For a time, he became bitter, and decided he didn't like birds, after all. They didn't care that he had walked a whole year, just to see their nesting place. He resolved to take no more interest in such ungrateful, unappreciative creatures. But once back home in the Sierra Madre, watching the great eagles that lived near his home, Famous Shoes gradually lost his bitterness. In the presence of the great eagles, he became ashamed of himself. Two or three of the eagles knew him, and would let him sit near them; not too near, but near enough that he could see their eyes, as they watched the valleys far below. Their dignity made him feel that he had been silly, to expect the ducks and geese, or any birds, to take an interest in his movements. He knew himself to be a great walker--he was not Famous Shoes for nothing--but what was that to any bird? The geese and the great cranes could fly in an hour distances it would take him a day to cover. The eagles and the hawks could see much farther than he could, and even the small birds, the sparrows and the cactus wrens, could do the one thing he couldn't do: they could fly. That was their greatness, not his, and his walking must seem a poor thing, to them. Famous Shoes was grateful to the eagles for letting him sit near them and recover himself from his long journey. He needed to recover from the vanity of thinking that he was as special as the birds. He did not deserve to see the great nesting places, nor to look off the edge of the world. He was only a man, of the earth and not of the sky, and his skills were not the skills of birds. --Larry McMurtry Streets of Laredo
watching the long faces
riding this rundown track
and the lost places
from a dream that
never brings them back
and the sad truth is
nothing but a cold hard fact
i'm riding the blue train
over the miles yet to cover
a ghost in a hurry to fade
i'm taking it one way to nowhere
afraid you might be there
to find me inside this blue train
counting the burned bridges
trailing this rusted wreck
as our back pages
scatter in the dust we left
like a pearl necklace
falling from around my neck
i'm riding the blue train
over the miles yet to cover
a ghost in a hurry to fade
i'm taking it one way to nowhere
afraid you might be there
to find me inside this blue train
away down the low road
a ticket to an empty room
a rendezvous unknown
i'm riding the blue train
over the miles yet to cover
a ghost in a hurry to fade
i'm taking it one way to nowhere
afraid you might be there
to find me inside this blue train
