Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

71. I MADE MY OWN CONTEXT:

You may very well here ask me what it is I am speaking of and I could not precisely tell you for it is as it all came to me : and there was a time on these old streets when everything was unclear and then it all became clear to me ALL I WAS TO DO was listen and people would ask and I would say 'well I'm mainly from New York' but that kind of answer fooled no one but that was OK too for I knew that people would figure what I meant to say just as I knew what they meant to say and be by their BEING other things - money family place and the rest EACH of which were something I never had and with nothing to contribute there to them except stories of hardship and want and stupidity too and all the results of a meager life spent on the shoals of situations lived between things so I found myself usually left out or alone or eventually abandoned and some case-study of mischief as I was I played roles and played roles well - hobo drifter train-kid running homeless NY street bum someone with nothing a no-person in my own no-man's land and if they'd listen I'd go on about this or that until it got me something and one way or another I MADE my own context - I was the pure act for which I'd lived so long this weary path and nothing hindered me and nothing kept me back as I was educated in the tides of mankind simply by living and nothing more and I'd say I was 'waiting for my miracle' and the moment it came I'd be unhindered and set but the only miracle I wanted to see was God putting legs back on amputees or arms back where they'd been taken off and you could have all your other miracles - too easy too fake to simple to believe - like the man losing his shakes at God's command or the woman claiming to be cured of her pain and any ailment I knew like that was bogus fake forgery by preachers seeking money I wanted the real and the authentic in everything - 'put LEGS back on that man and then I'll believe your works are real' - I'd say that at every crippled lame bum's side that I saw and I'd turn it back to onto every screaming preacher I ever saw going on about redemption and money and salvation and money and all their healing too for the lame shall walk and the blind shall see and surely there's no end to the game.

70. KNOCK ON ANY DOOR:

People are avoiding me like I am radioactive or have the plague and if one is not safe in their own home any more then I don't know what is - that's what people say anyway - as I am coursing the street along the western edge of Central Park once more in the area of where Tony Main kept court : ah Tony ! been a long time old buddy and all that goes with it and you were once there to shelter the scarecrow child but now gone and as I found out long ago once you begin to live on the streets there's really no ending to any of it and whatever comes you have to take and hope for something good or at least more of the same which is pretty much nothing anyway and the most prevalent concerns are the weather and food and warmth and light but it's funny how those things sound when you say them or even how they look right now on paper as typed because they're just everyday meaningless things really and who'd ever care about that but the rest of mankind goes about its business having those things mostly already taken care of - or at least the majority of Americans and Europeans anyway - and no one knows any longer the reach or the generation or the how of electricity and how it gets to them and what it is they use when they use it and the same for their heat and warmth and food and everything else but when you're 'out there' in whatever way all of those things become vital and important and that's why you can occasionally still find bums and streetpeople tapping into city electrical lines or light poles for power so they can shave or charge batteries or even cook and have light and at that level everything else is different and everything becomes singular and special and worth some extra attention and whatever work even tapping into a lighpole is becomes somehow worth doing and all this time later (for the years have passed and though I am still me I am not quite still THAT me who once was) I can still put myself into those old feet and remember distinctly most every little part and parcel of what I lived and now it's all spliced together and modified by the present day and the time in between the then and now which I've put together to erect something new and that's why these words are as they are and go deep and fly all over the place but winsomeness has no place at funerals or wakes either - and here we sit together - and if I am speaking back to you from the dead (which I will be doing surely certainly and clearly once day if not already) than I want you to shut-up and listen sit up straight and be attentive dedicate yourself to this and stay with it ALL of it each of the tens of thousands of words : Tony Main I can only assume is dead by now (adding 40 some years to his then-age would almost guarantee that) and I do miss him even as NOW it's far too late to make recompense for the time THEN when I could have seen him but he was a character and a charmer a person filled with some form of mettle and I've known a few others like him since - little people with that sort of energy - and even Jim Tomberg back then was pretty much just like him and later Fred Fox a guy from Rahway NJ I'd gotten to know in his garage - all time pending and filling up with car parts cars wheels and tires and Chris-Craft boats and a '67 Eldorado which he truly loved - all white with a red interior and a convertible top some crazed-man's dream of vastness sleek and sallow and I never saw it move though I'm sure it did but the huge workplace-business-garage was perfect for all of this with an office and parts room and clutter with a capital 'C' and he ran a respectable business in repairs and sales right out of that little place which I loved - he's gone his father's gone and the building's gone too - Route One now cuts right through the location as overpass and roadway were built as everything else was just made to DISAPPEAR by some mandate or another and he'd somehow collected that antique wooden Chris-Craft beauty of a boat though it too never moved but was perfect in every way polished and kept in tune but it's like that with so many things - ideas and philosophies and points of view - they're often 'well kept-up' but mostly they go nowhere are never taken out for a spin are never brought forth to greet or meet or engage the world and so they all simply remain conceptualized dreams of something else with no real presence - never hitting the pavement so to speak to see how it really is and if they'd be able to keep up and I suppose that's what's meant sometimes by 'rarified' thinking and 'ivory-tower' ideas and all that but it really is true in a way because you can have any and every most beautiful Cadillac Eldorado and Chris-Craft boat but if they never get OUT there and get put to work they're really just good for shit or have to be seen merely as collectibles and objects and nothing more - at that point not even 'objects of derision' which would at least - by contrast - be something : and you see I have outlived all of these things I AM still about here to tell of them but there are no EXPLOITS worth telling and sometimes it's just not worth the bother because a lot of these things went nowhere : failure is a bed-fellow too you know and my friend Joe one day just blew his brains out in some shitty little car in his California backyard for no good reason no exploitable frenzy just a bunch of lazy tired shit that somehow did him in and all his great promise and the rest - leaving behind nothing really except piles of shit and crap to be sorted through and among a crazy unfinished and unsatisfied story and promise and no matter because he did it to himself willingly and THAT was to him HIS way of 'taking' it out on the road (his Cadillac Eldorado his Chris-Craft) so as to see if it worked and you know what IT DIDN'T! and he left a real bloody mess and we got the 'body of evidence' so to speak - unlike Tony Main my erstwhile friend whom I just let 'disappear' without even thinking about it.

69. NO THANKS FOR THAT:

One day I was talking to some lady named Priscilla Iresk and she had a lot to say about the world and about certain things that got her angry and one was about the waste of golf courses - which she called 'greenery made stupid' and she said that she'd like to see the day when every golf course was taken away from the elite and the people who played there ('the rich' she claimed) and were instead turned over to be used as tented housing encampments for the needy and homeless and she sort of felt that this would be her solution to that problem a solution by the way that I could actually envision as a decent solution at least in the best of weather or in good weather but cold spells rains and snows would wreak havoc with the idea as would sanitation and food service unless it was all to be done as a vast communized experiment of mass implementation of an idealized vision of social living and that itself doesn't even touch on the raucous and trouble the wealthy would make upon losing their golf courses nor does it actually 'address' the issue of the endlessly continual stream of stupid and dense people of little intelligence or incentive who do end up as these indigents she was purporting to help and as far as I was concerned it was all crap and junk science and screw them whatever their situation - not a very charitable point of view I figured so I kept quiet about it and actually there was one last and major objection I could have thrown out to the idea which would have been WHO are the THEY that would be running this and I suppose selecting the people for inclusion ? and that's where my most intense concern would have been the WHO of the people for it all seemed to me as just another jumble of elitists adept at showing up others and taking command and staying there and NO THANKS for that - and every indigenous culture the world over is now in limbo anyway - caught between nature and the city as corporations pursue their land minerals and plants and why should the POOR be any different from them and the only remedy anyway for it all is to return to the garden some place where the human mind which developed in the wilderness and still needs it can yet go and where coolness cools the mind and clean air brings clarity of thought but there's way way WAY too many people for that now and all those people well THEY'RE the problem and it's not really anything else that must be faced off except such massive overpopulation but how in the world do you deal with that?

68. I TRIED TO START YOU BUT I COULDN'T REACH:

There was nothing going backwards but words and the cage and I'd already tired of that so I attempted putting you in the picture frame by the random window but quickly realized you'd never fit and we had flowers in the flower pot and some orchids by the window west - nomenclature had failed us as I recall on the twelfth of Never (it was once called) which is different from 'it once was called' in a conditional way - and it ended up not mattering anyway because the pilfered lampshade had come tumbling down and the air-fighter-pilot with the message-jacketed lightning rod had just started talking and the curtain rang down : lights camera action was all the rage while the astronaut in the diaper was the current image of the newest art to be seen - five men in a red sedan three corner dogs in ersatz tiaras barking with a smile (yes the dogs not the tiaras) and someone was heard to say 'let's run to Jersey City' while another person grimaced at all the bother for it's easier to ride anywhere like that than to run and Journal Square holds nothing anymore anyway any dollar store you want any Aztec two-step mongoloid any Asian rip-rap food frenzy mama holding out her loins for all to see but they went anyway in a fifty-seven Ford Fairlane of the sort never seen like some dentist's assitant car all pink and white reminding me of gums or bleeding gums anyway and breaking the speed limit - always an impossibility in that heap - though never an option still sounded like a good idea or what's the turnpike for and I watched from some obscure hilltop as they crested the Elizabeth crescent and bent over Bayonne's hump to land right there in Sip Avenue and come up to the city from the bottom (legendary great idea) but the cymbals were clashing or the symbols were crashing (I never knew which) while the church on the hillside ablaze and afire was burning its Mexican clergy (Jesu Maria Mon Dieu and all the rest) Father Diego Carmellano Miranda Lopez Diaz himself - clapping hands with the Devil singing songs in a trance blessing the bosoms of mothers and girls putting the crucifix in Don Carlos' pants - but it was ALWAYS like that in the locus of plain Paradise to come and no one could speak any faster than that.

67. THE MARRIAGE TAX:

I wanted a place to ‘hide in’ - the lady said "there's a place fur elise on Beethoven Street" - I said "I’ll take it if it isn’t too cheap and I’ve got nasty habits and I’m not very clean so call me tomorrow IF YOU THINK that you mean I can have it for now and I’ll take it next Thursday and by the way Lady Day you’ve a glamorous sheen and I’d wonder to love you if you’d move away but perhaps since perdition you’re constant you’ll stay" and with that she alighted from far-none-the-distance and said "listen sonny it's not that I’m nasty or narrow of habit it’s just that I’m busy and can’t take the last bit about all my glamour I’ve nails and nice clothing and fuck like a cat but my number’s not up which should mean all of that but I’d give you the place if it wasn’t for Daddy who sits around much and looks really ratty but if you push him aside and don’t take to drinking maybe we all can live there NOW THAT’S what I’m thinking" and we shook tender hands by the lamppost which leaned and she walked quick away towards the car and the carriage and two doors were just closing and some animal screamed but it wasn’t lethargic instead it was mean but whatever was moving was moving for nothing for the place was an uproar and called for its mutton and the paper I read was so simple in reading and it simply listed names from Portsmouth to Reading and places I’d been but never returned on Gloucester on Salem and Harvard and Main down Broad Street to Market and back all the same and the rooms I was in I just noticed right now are painted steel blue and stink like a cow but the Skyway Café beneath which I’m living is crowded at noon and dead by eleven with Portuguese girls who’d just as soon stroke then get on their backs or talk about folks whom they met in church or at the new social center for Catholics and are like this ‘THEY EAT THE PLACENTA’ I’ve even heard that on the side by the fences with the young boys for priests and the other intentions and the five-dollar brawn is as broad as they get but the marrow is thicker in bones they’ve not yet so there’s lots of new work to be keeping us busy by the old hat that sings and the family chimney by the hearth with the window and two golden arches where the fat babies rise and repair with great starches the military brass taking place in new marches and fabulous battles and air-strike anarchics and the next thing I knew the first lady returned the one with the rooms that Beethoven had earned and she again sat me down but now climbed on my face and said "here are your dollars now this is the place and either way you approach it you can have it for free now just shut your big mouth and have a great lick of me" and with no further ado or no no more to be said I took the three rooms and took her PROMPTLY to bed and lived for a while on Beethoven Street as you probably have heard with two dogs and no meat but I’ve never regretted anything that I’ve done – and this is my story and here is our son!

66. SHADRAK SUCKED ME DRY:

I did nothing to cry out I washed no blackboards uncoiled no hoses I painted no walls on un-numbered doorways I rolled no solid tires down streets paved with stone I called for no Earthen religion on castles and heaps I read nothing of death or destruction and all the while I stayed in one place waiting I expected nothing but waited anyway and as this all occurred I saw mothers suckling their infants and fathers wrapped in gauze and burial monuments for the recent dead uncorked like wine bottles at a decent celebration and nothing came to mind but every living thing remembered something as the sky itself dipped down from high and touched the living blessed leaving marks on heads and shoulders - tongues of icy flame delivered judgment and wires of some new dimension roped their way 'round hearts and minds and I turned to the first man I saw and said "has anyone yet seen deliverance?" and he replied to me "I have - once before - and was really non-plussed" and with that he turned into something other than himself as I watched him disappear down Guardian Lane with a quite bedaggered limp and cane - it all arrived at once this jagged lump of message in a bundle : fifteen sailors looking for gold five ladies in waiting standing there two dogs for the dog fight ready and a candy-stickered flame a'lit on the edge of the symbol and all John Street was blazing with room for some more as the blessed priest from Joralemon stepped forward to read the words he saw 'Introibo ad altare Dei" and the crowd tried to roar but found it was mute as carriages and horses fitted themselves coarsely down that very narrow street - the idea was to get by even without a good fit - there were burial mounds and oyster mounds and piles of indian shells everywhere as I wondered to myself 'what should I do about this presence beneath my cloak?' and it came to pass that it was mere spirit sprightly and vain trying to unencumber the feelings from inside my heart (they had grown cold they had grown so cold) but I saw nothing beyond yesterday and planned for far less as dollars floating down from Heaven breathed envy on the marking men who sauntered by with ledger books and pens : "good sir what is it that you write?" I loudly asked and one turned and said "I write for all those who cannot and all their little children too" and I realized he must be joking as his pen had turned to rain and it was pouring down like tears but the cemetery force was cold as ice and none were left to speak - 'what shall I say' was all that was left - written like tattoo'd fire afloat on the bold blue sky and I awoke and Shadrak had sucked me dry.