Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

123. BROAD DAY ROSE - MICKEY BLUE EYES:

1. AUTOCRATIC AD LIB:
Broad day rose : Mickey Blue Eyes : autocrat ad lib and Mandrake the Magician too - "I am sorrowful and sad and broken by the wheel but what can you give to me in return ? for I have sought to heed all commandments and rules too but it has brought me nothing : a rain still runs in my gutter and small birds come to drink THAT MUCH for sure I can say but there is no butter on the bread nor is there ANYWHERE any music pleasing to my ears Oh Lord ! can you hear me ? all things are fakery and soiled imitations and disposable wants and artificial needs : and I am speechless again and sorrowful and sad."

I read the story of Jacob and I HAVE read the same story too but it makes no sense of time or drama for me to know what I've read - nothing is as it seems and nothing is as it is and that paradox belies the entire underpinnings of what else there is GOD at first reluctant to get involved but then GOD making man to prove his own worth.
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There's always going to be someone to talk to you even when you don't want it - those stalwart types on the bus for instance - the ladies in the crisp skirts and blouses with everything somehow matching even if they don't so that the entire ensemble is put together at will to be stunning with expensive shoes and some sort of fantastic and crazed handbag and they exude some aged sexuality and they know it and all they want is some pale acknowledgement of that - what is lost is never mentioned nor are any of their feverish loves and lost emotions - and if they REALLY were anything they'd not be riding the bus and all that show-stopping look of their moment would be somewhere else : museum halls and lobbies enormous and vaulted restaurants with muraled ceilings and skylit dens the leather-bound library books in a tycoon's study wine caps and goblets of sherry or scotch thrown back like water and pictures of old Mohawks or Navajos on the wall with a Remington sculpture in pride on the mantlepiece and an expensive membership at some crazy uptown club : but no one ever mentions any of these things - engineers dismantle bridges or at least discuss the new ones they're building while matrons sample the teas and crumpets put before them and it's always in such a proper world that we lose more than we had to lose and walk away empty and void of everything else so that money becomes a mere subject to be considered laughed at and walked away from and just as some thirty years ago you could find artistic and comedic 'shorts' being shown on TV - old film festival things and student works - so now there is nothing like that left : phone booths sandwich shops steambaths and sidewalk social clubs : they've all been replaced with some bland generic and neutered-out reality no one knows enough to name and like some blitzkrieg from another war the sky is all a'lit with fires and storms and loud noises knock things over and the rubble lives in infamy and we fear EVERYTHING but fear itself.

- And I knew a man who knew a man who knew a man yet all together they could get nothing for their eyes were shaded and their cloak was DOUBT and all they consumed were the most bitter of roots and reeds so that NOTHING ever satisfied and they were never SATED nor sedated either and everything together had led them to believe in nothing and proudly too - so that one day the bridge beneath them - modern and strong and serene - just collapsed of an instant and they all fell to their deaths - far down below - far up above - it is ALL THE SAME in the instant of last movement and all things which are to come shall come in due time and that is the message of blood and that is the message of fame so bury your heart where the best wishes blow and you too shall stay there forever - (and that is the end of this message).

'Abracadabra one two three and there's nothing left of what used to be'

- that was the jingle running through my head as I walked some stupid parapet of a catwalk over the water Brooklyn Bridge Williamsburg Bridge Manhattan Bridge and all the rest - looking over the huddled masses yearning to be free (huddled asses yearning to be me) - there were women with beautiful faces and lithesome hands with men of indeterminate situations flying high over some golden globe of gilded commerce and there were hags and beasted-brothers and the foolish forelocked clientele of Mammon and the rest and they all walked straight ahead whether to or from where they were going I cared not and nothing for their ways and means - 'Watchtower' it somehow said in the sky and 'Domino Sugar' too I thought I'd seen - I simply sought companionship amidst the space of sky alotted and even had himself Hart Crane come forth to greet me I'd have barfed for once in his face and his and his Walt Whitman swaggering man while anyone who calls Brooklyn home calls something wrong and the icy frieze of art and its masters made me snort short abort the court and sally forth so I turned around towards Manhattan-bound and walked again that awful row of rows and lanes and traffic and towers finance police civic government and every 1930's form of welfare chisel-state synopsis I saw stretching out before me so sad and wasteful forlorn and bedgraggled and I KNEW THE END WAS COMING but I had no sign and the man with double vision looked over at me while I espied some sister-bride in all revealing clothing sold for seven hundred dollars on a March noonday storm of fence and ivy and "there was never half of what you've been told you know and she's only had those breasts now about 5 years" some wiseass New York jodphur had addressed me straight directly and I replied "that's OK for me for that's 5 more years than I've had them" and he laughed and said "hey pretty good wanna' do a show with me?" and I asked what he meant and he said he was playing open-microphone comedy bullshit at Wildegreen's Comedy Club on William Street in the pavilion and I said "is that near Hanover Square?" but he didn't answer and handed me a flyer and a discount card instead and as I looked at it I saw the figure of some half-robed woman bending over and I thought 'what the heck is this - some tight-ass giving me a card with a tight-ass on it?' and I never figured any of this to come far past anything but I stayed with my own program and minded my own pizazz and watched that guy walk away - saying not a word since anyway I was headed in his direction but I never heeded warnings and never paid at doors either so no comedy club was in my future and I put it out of my mind and wished instead for a seat at the India Club where real men sat to tea and lunch with the power crowd : I always liked that spot but never figured it out : was it some four-hundred year old remnant of all that used to be or just some gassed-up parody of memory and heritage wherever they could find it ? I wondered about stuff like that and never really got answers to questions or anyway I got answers to questions I never asked - which was pretty much all the same anyway and whoever listened to bullshit like that ? never mind never matter the clock's running down and oceans are failing and bad news abounds - so what seeks a companion when there's nothing else around ? bedbugs spiders cockroaches rats and mice I suppose and once I read 'never poison the space you live in' and that too made NO sense to me because if that's where the rats and cockroaches are what else are you supposed to do - break into your neighbor's joint and poison them there ? and that's maybe good for you but not too golden-ruley when it comes to your neighbor - see - so just let them slide and the planet will survive the world will roam and the entire cosmos will still have no meaning NONE at all unless you MAKE IT - which is what language is all about anyway 'the harvest of tares - sown in inequity and reaped in wrath' which pretty much describes the effect of the environment of the world of any Freddy or Tom or Mary or Jane : there's NOTHING you can do about it except just let it fall like Blanchard's Leather or Alice's Pioneer Pub out on Frelinghuysen Avenue : nothing but black-girl whores walking those streets and dudes on motorcycles trying to get drunk on a ten dollar bill while the hulks and skeletons of all the old factories crumble and fall and are taken away and replaced soon enough by prefabricated replacement ratty-looking tacky duplexes supposed to make up a city nowadays like some Charlotte Street project of the old South Bronx - given away for free and tax-subsidized on other people's money until the ends of days : COMING SOON to a theater near you!
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'The desire of the just ends only in good : the expectation of the wicked is wrath.'
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I could never watch the girl go home alone - which is why I never liked movies and I could never allow for the removal of reality enough to pretend something was happening either - sort of the very opposite of the first and yet in some way the two are inextricably linked for in the usual 'movie' sense of things the girl it seems NEVER goes home alone because unhappy endings are frowned upon in an industry dedicated to the serviceable notion that all of life has happy endings and most-positive situations and any of that can easily be put into the service of generating profit and elongating careers for thousands of people : just today along Fulton Street and that area I was stopped by marshalls and traffic police and told I could not walk to where I was headed as the street was closed for filming of a television series pilot - a car crash - for a weekly show to be called 'Mayor' about the streets of New York and the necessary cars had already been put into position - placed strategically - for the crash to take place and extras in expensive business attire and briefcases and the like had already been situated in place for the scene and lights-camera-action and all of that was about to start and the guy who was moving me about the streets right along there said they had been closed for the day and I saw that people were being turned away just as I had been and the nearby corner with the scene and lighting trucks also had an operational catering truck serving lunch to the actors and crew and as soon as that was all complete he said they'd be back to work filming the collision-scene as already set-up and I turned to him and said "you mean to say this really is an 'accident about to happen' don't you?" and he laughed and said he guessed so yes and I went along my way up the street towards the Strand Bookstore which was busy with its usual downtown branch activities - books in bins along the sidewalk and the rest - and it all gave me time to consider the fact of reality versus fantasy and real people against actors and situations which never really occur being made to occur and the whole reality at that point of everything else too and those sorts of thoughts filled my mind as I walked along : garbage men postal trucks huge tourist buses sanitation trucks and police people all rolled into one as well as handfuls of groups of tourists on their ways to or from and in fact one slow and dazed looking Fed Ex delivery guy ambling along with three overnight packets in his hands looking slowly for a certain and particular address for whatever reason right nearby to the old Excelsior Power Station and Eden Alley (which is now anything but Edenic).

122. DEATH NEARING:

Dazzling in a winning way they swarmed the cafeteria counter and asked a million questions and posed for photos and sat down together and hands met hands and all things jammed and merged and maneuvered in a single way and the only thing left at the wavering pines was the whispering patron of some ancient lines written long ago in a reverie fine - with pebbles in mouth and beach-fronted twine Demosthenes-style enjoined and consigned to the junk-heap of olden times’ history and olden times’ stories and other days' glories but for whatsoever matter it may have occurred no one ended caring and the story seem to veer until VOILA! we found ourselves walking on ice at some Lake Surprise in the midst of great woods where cars parked in three’s and horses walked by and the grand deserted village turned over itself ‘reading history like this never before’ yet even then I’d wished I was gone and much more instead at the water-wheel I sat and watched things pass along and listened to the trees and their unerring song which whispering again to me sure seemed to say : "we’ve got so far to go and we’ve just left today and the narrow wagons of time in whatever disguise shall stay near us and dog us and twist these fair days yet STAY WITH US SIR oh fine gentleman man we are lonely and sad and throughout this fair land we find there’s a need for good company’s parted and we’re again left alone and seem broken-hearted" so if the water I thought and trees like that talked than who am I to ignore what I’d sensed or I’d thought and I rose up then slowly and bowed to the sky and touched with both hands the tree to my eye and for certain that I was alone and unseen I lifted the cap of the evergreen scene and realized my motives had nothing to do with foraging for love or viewing the zoo of all human-kind as they stumbled and yelped and I took to my glory instead the great belt above me of starlight and moon and walked through the sky as steady as soon and months may have passed while I lived in those woods though there’s nothing I know or recall if I could and hunger had taken its great raging toll like some Van Winkle boy back to this present I stole and said to anyone’s ears who may have been hearing "THIS is my life and this is my bearing" and I took me a room in the Excel Hotel and settled down in comfort and slept ‘till DEATH NEARING.

121. 'I DISAVOW NOTHING - I STAND BY WHAT I SAID':

So you see (needless to say) and I reiterate - people are stupid and get things wrong and that wrongness grows and they continue to build upon it thus getting things 'wronger' or more wrong as you put it : they neither care nor understand the apparent transposition of the relativity of their positions into absolutes which enter the mainstream and propagate further errors and the efforts commensurate with them : IT SEEMED I KNEW ALL THAT already somehow and I lived my life not just as life alone but as if another room a library alongside me was always at access and with me and in that 'library' were all the volumes and facts needed for anything I'd need - figures ideas explanations and revelations which could at any time advance me and explain for me any issue of consequence the world around me and I could delve into that whenever I wished at any time and from anywhere too - it was a very valuable resource and I used it always and from it I drew a certain form of cosmic sustenance which affected the very warp of what I was living and it was all as if a constant physics of my own making had disinterred from some grand depth all that which had effected the marks and makings of my days and hours - I was able to bend time to my own workings and to fathom things I'd otherwise not understand : a great magic wheel above me in the sky was constantly rotating and bringing into new focus by its unique lenses the issues and items I needed so as to continually somehow create a reality of my own which I then carried with me through the physical world below into which I'd fallen (or 'been dipped' I liked to say - using a metaphor from my ice-cream store days) and I learned to talk and learned to understand all over again : one characteristic I noticed right off is the manner in which 'talk' gives a person away - the very sound and manner of the voice is an immediate touchstone as to the where and how of someone's personal life and interior status - thus a hammer is the equal of the coarse builder and the quill pen bespeaks the genteel scholar - silly marks but marks nonetheless and this was the time of construction workers chasing down protesters in the street and bashing heads and this was the time of anti-war demonstrators screaming and flailing and breaking glass and running random through wild streets - the time of shouts not murmurs the years of screaming and maniacal frenzy and then IT SIMPLY ALL STOPPED! everyone broke down again the edges had blurred the world fell apart and heroin and cocaine were the new currency of a more modern and ugly day - the Steve Rubells of the world (like cheap champion bowlers) had taken over the streets and displaced everything else : Max's Kansas City transvestites and cranks : that was all I really ever saw and it was all 'raw ribald stupid and sour' (the street-world's new law firm to be sure).