Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

128. SOME COCKAMAMIE RANT BY LINDY (nyc, 1978):

James Baldwin wrote a book called 'Another Country' and I read that pretty voraciously just as I read 'If Beale Street Could Talk' and 'Giovanni's Room' which was much of what I was indwelling 'it's a street thing blackness is a street thing (someone told me this on Great Jones Street on a wintry morning of ice and snow) it's the self-identification of the people on the street Bed-Stuy Harlem even Watts in L.A. - Harlem it's not so much the streetness of Harlem but it's more the history and the badness of the vibes and black is the baddest in the best sense I mean THAT'S where you have to go to make sense of the magic of existence and you pass through all that streetness and weight and terror and you come out a more dimensional person' and I said 'hey I'm white what do I know about black about blackness about BEING black how do I get into that?' and he said 'I can't put it into words' and I said 'well screw that then because you just started this whole shit with words and now you just try to drop it all because you say you 'can't put it into words' - what the hell's that ? some half-hearted cockamamie attempt to get away with something?' and I knew that was racist just in the saying of it but figured he wouldn't because you see there was a cock and there was a mamie and both of them together denote some plantation-era black stud back in the slave-quarters being claimed and solely by 'Mama' for his size and prowess - as in 'you see dat ! dat's the cock o' mamie' and every time this black stud got caught in the coming or going from mamie's shack he'd get out of it by weaving some 'cockamamie' story about where he'd been or why he was out and anyway 'it sure did beated de' troubles I cudda' got'.

127. 'I FELT AS IF THERE WAS SOMETHING IN MY HANDS NOT JUST WATER' - & ALL ELSE IS FALLING WITH IT:

It was always some sort of retribution - this life was - the kind of retribution the top-notch meditators and zen-addled facilitators would often go on about as Karma and Destiny entwined their useless limbs about some flaccid point-of-purpose which no one could ever know and entire confused religions were built up around that one point : all that we do NOT know and cannot and will not know about existence summed up in a peculiar set of commands and dictates left by God for us to follow and then the resultant second depth of confusion concerned the how and why of our means of 'following' those dictates of who said what to whom and where so that because of this essentially religions have warred upon religions (made up of people eventually dead whether by sword cannon or old age itself answering its own question) and religions in turn have warred upon the world and all its secular and scientific attributes together and chosen individuals have selected themselves to speak that word and call the reasons and limits while committees synods and cominterns by same manner have arisen to mark the rules and methods to choose the values and meanings and within all this BALL of confusion science and logic have mixed with philosophy and physics to form its own anti-matter of time and situation into that selfsame mix of locus and ethos : minions of the lost parlaying their losses into place while history lame History weaves backward its last-look story of all that once-was-may-have-been-could-have-been this time this way ONCE so long ago : and no one winces for no one knows and those who know don't know in spite while Earth the globe the logic-mantle the ossified rock sets still its spinning time and stays in place while falling - and all else (it seems) is falling with it.

126. THIS NEW CYCLE OF THOUGHT

And I'm sitting on a train watching the land go by me with every hillock and rivulet passing in the light as the vague sun comes up over the horizon in oranges and yellows and reds and the entire scene is crushed by a certain vulnerability which seems to come from the heart and a sadness too which permeates the light and the awakening fields which seem forsaken and forlorn and ripped and neglected as the old industrial foundations now ruined and abandoned too are overgrown with broken weeds and choppy sumacs and twisty winter vines with wiry shrubs of a wild nature and all this while distant houses - set in a row - in whites and greens and yellows and reds can be seen in lines and formations where once these old woods had extended but now are gone : small waterways and sudden pockets of marsh and water in pools are all that are left and only then because they couldn't be drained so as to be built on and it's a sorry world to see so much gone so much removed and taken away like that but this same world runs by me at speed as the train I sit in whizzes over whatever once may have been and cuts through trees which once were and old paths and lanes too now gone and different overlays enact different scenes to the lands and places we pass : once here an armaments factory for WWI and over there an old automobile plant now long gone while to the right the landscape and garden sheds of some hardware emporium coat the land with limes and nitrogens in bags not yet broken apart as the train whistle howls for something and we approach another stop - where distant people wait and hunch with their bodies tribal and overwhelmed with everything they live - three men in suits and newspapers on their arms a woman carrying a basket and a girl pulling luggage and a bag while the conductor surveys his scene and waves his arms in the quiet morning light only now just awakening into some figment of real life - some imagined leap into an imagined reality we all seem so sure of as we walk and settle upon : this Earth - it is thought - knows us enough forever to continually invite us in and back and we fall for the invitation so willingly each time - to what should we owe the honor ? this rumination this new cycle of thought ?

125. 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 assistant 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.

124. SO NO ONE REALLY KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE:

Some kind of misery is measured out in miles - or something like that - I'd heard one night at the Round Square Tavern by Cherry Street and Drovers Lane or was it Drovers Street and Cherry Lane I forget that too with all the resounding of echoes inside my head but this one night was was special enough with some Lily Langtrey lookalike plying her trades (both of them) close to my face nearly all night and her name was Mary Elle she said and she spoke with a lilt which never stopped - about Ireland her home and the way it was all going and what she should do really to forget it and she would if she chose to and could too right now even upstairs if I wanted but her hand on my leg was enough to keep me interested and whichever gibberish she spoke I heard and the slow hand went higher up too and I tried to forget but couldn't but did kiss her once and then again like a dare to myself and that was enough for that hand o'hers to turn into a feeler for me and she hit her target too and before it got too crazy I eased it back off and said to her that I really didn't think right of taking her right then and although her body to me sang of many things I hadn't the need to ennerve the other fellows by striking out on my own like that and I could see by her heaving chest she wasn't having any of that so we kissed some more anyway and then it all ended over a few more drinks and she sauntered soon away as others came in to catch her fancy too - her dollar to be made not mine all night - and that was that Mary Elle was gone to me and thus I catalogued too what I could - she had wonderful legs a luscious tight ass and structured frame beyond compare and great tits too and she was dressed as provocatively as one could get without getting and dark hair like a dream and eyes like an angel red lips and a pout on cheeks that would kill and her hands were the hands of some divine-inspired study by someone not me but great with the pen-tip to draw such delights and now you know that and I move on - other things too catch the eye - hundreds literally pieces of old baseball memorabilia somehow hanging still upon the walls bats hats gloves pictures signs balls and banners and the another wall seemingly filled with old gasoline memorabilia oil signs gas fillers posters metal advertisements and car ads too all from days of old and the adjacent incongruous collection of Ireland maps and insets and photo details of castles fens and marshes and highlands and old thatched homes everything a'jumble and smashed together along with ale mugs cigar ads old posters for events long gone some Irish poetry scrawled on old paper and more - things and stuff to alert the eye to something different faraway and strange and things which somehow add new vibrancy and color to tired old haunches still stuck on barstools and benches with endless foul music blaring amidst its own foul-changing array and the loud raucous talk of twenty patrons annulled to anything not theirs loud louder and loudest were all there too : to wit a scene of color and volume and the gawkiest collection of semblance of same - as in nearly every other bar-room and tap citywide - and nothing different then but nothing the same either as I just sat there awhile and gazed while Mary Elle went to work.
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These streets are old pretty old old enough for fourth generation windows and rotted wood frames where they're not and the rising sun and the setting sun over thousands of times and thousands more have sent light careening through them or from and cigarette smokes attest to the yellow and pails of water and waste trace all the lineage of man - but still so many people do not get it or if they do refuse to recognize it and wander on lame or wasted and silent or mute and the rising petrified screen of image is seen as higher buildings grow and from these grow again but it's like that in both Paradise and Hell alike so no one really knows the difference.