Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

183. IN THE SAME HOTHOUSE AIR (nyc, autumn, 1967):

Times like that were tense and funny and I was still a newcomer to that Summer town - August and September 1967 I was still finding things on every streetcorner that astounded me and it felt as if each day was a billion degrees with hot sidewalks melting and streets of black tar sagging in the weight of old pennies screws and washers and gum melted in – if you looked carefully you could see most anything pressed into the soft surfaces of each street and corner - and most everything was brand new to me the witnessing and the watching - the hoist-winch of 71st street piano movers as they manuevered through a double-wide seventh-floor drawing-room balcony out over the street or to see the Julliard students moving along uptown with the huge cellos from taxi to curb outside Lincoln Center - it was a wond’rous excitement just to watch trucks unloading and hear the catcalls and bravado of the drivers and carriers - whistling or shouting out to passing women or yelling about this or that as they moved and scurried about at the sidewalk floor receiving elevators and basement entryways which opened onto the open sidewalk with cars more tracks and taxis honking and screaming in their bids to get past - people walked around or over things as they has to – the girls and women in the shortest pastel-colored skirts imaginable in a stylistic fantasy of bloom which defined that Summer and those few years - no qualms about showing whatever showed and it was as if on that singular level of id eros and sexuality no one cared as everyone cared – a blasé lust was in the air everywhere – men and women too – sex ruled the night airs and married women it seemed suddenly gained a second wind : I didn’t know what to make of much of it and for sure a lot of it all probably passed me by : I literally lived for a time with no sexual fantasies of any nature at all and I walked about as if a kangaroo-character in some odyssey of the Outback a wandering localized continental drift which was apt to take me anywhere – some places had connections in my head to other things – like some mesmerizing Holden Caulfield grip on the Central Park Boathouse or lake or the Natural History Museum and so many other references everywhere about – I scrounged and I waited I littered and I took – and most everything I got I got for free and strange mountains of food and refuse seemed always about as much as the breezes off either river blowing inward to cool off or try to some unfettered blinding lower eastside heat blasting along St. Mark’s or 1st Avenue or A or B it never mattered as everything just seemed adrift in the same hothouse air.

185. HIGH-BUTTON SHOES BEING SOMETIMES STILL IN VOGUE (nyc, westside docks, 1967):

I can't saddle you with guilt the kind of guilt that drives men crazy and it's not yours anyway for the having : here I was I was in trouble by the rubble - an old pile of discarded steel and brick and masonry and glass and everything else from thrown-off old Pennsylvania Station as it was left there - after having come down to be replaced and tracked a lot of the rubble stayed in place for near a year or more and in cold-steel mornings of solitary walking/nothingness at all I'd pass across the entire old westside of the 1960's almost spectacularly unconscious as I was - walking just walking from some train-station repeal of function and scene to a cold-morning's icy-blister of trudge and magic and anything I'd see I'd see twice and then twice again as everything was being changed over into something else - nothing stayed static the old city was on the move : hunched-over postmen with nothing to do and all their postal trucks and warmed over cars filled and saddled with mail while nearby the old horse-dealers and wagon-guys trudged forward in the deep early-morning cold with their horses and wagons going along at a slow-nothing walk across the regal old avenue while filled with some cargo of new or old - the waning days of horse-traffic were slapping me in the face and I knew it well - I'd talk to the Puerto Rican guys at the slop-shop where the trickle of water never ceased and they'd be tending stables of shit and a few leftover-to-die horses still around and we'd laugh back and forth as they'd ask what some 'jerk kid like you was doing walking with two cold feet?' and I could always answer back something stupid like 'going to steal from your mother' or 'taking the walk where you've never been' - those kinds of low-key stupid jokes were all we shared really - the little coffee stand nearby where the old black guy who knew me still took a dime for whatever and I'd sit there until the morning was high and it was well past eleven and then I'd walk off holding something - a leftover memento of having been there - and my feet would lean towards the elevated highway where the traffic was humming along and across the road and underneath I'd hop over stuff to get to the old docks and the guys I knew well there - the gas-can guys who'd be working on trucks or unloading crates and draining oils and moving bales of whatever and cords of rope and twine - all the sorts of things I could join in on and earn a dollar or two for three or four hours work and it was a treat in its way just to see those guys - the boats would come in and the trucks would stop and the exchanges made were for all the little things a city is in need of - west-side livery stuff from Jersey and elsewhere - nothing like today where the only ship cargo is in gigantic sheds and containers from far far overseas and away - all the Chinese and Taiwan and Thailand and India stuff - back then there was none of that and no one would touch it anyway and if they did then nobody wanted it - all the same - so it was all much different - smoky and oily and greasy and dark and black and dank and dirty with little regard for anything else and the truck guys would come over and take a piss into the water or spit on whatever they chose and the nearby toolsheds and such held always surprises - like the babes who'd come aboard for just some fun and just some money - enough guys to pay right there for a college education for sure : nobody cared and everything mixed - it was a solid old-time man's world and as funny as it is those are the same areas now where the only thing around is layers and layers of distant and different stuff everywhere - who'd laugh at that now I wonder? - but even leather bars and Badlands and bondage shops can't hold a candle to the magic I'd see back then and all these years later I can remember in a flash the very best of all that was worst and the very worst of the best too : Chinamen camouflaged as servants and cooks and the lame doorman at Whithurst and Parks - the old boarding house along Charles Street at the end - who always had betting slips and wads of cash to payoff from both ends and the winners and the losers who'd come his way or have to be dragged there to pay - ice-picked hands and broken knuckles notwithstanding most debts did get paid and win or lose the dice were thrown and everyday the same moniker was there in play - 'Dinky says draw and fifty at nine' or the big guy in the Buick who'd come by and have some black guy slowly walk in with another day's take - cash or what I never really knew the game : but the stevedores and the draymen did and the round-backed men pushing barrels and crates seemed always ready to play - for three bucks I'd start a trash-barrel fire and tend to it all day - keeping warm how many guys I can't remember nor say - always something - booze bottles or babes and either one of them in a regular old 1940's fashion or guilt swagger stupidity and daring : high-button shoes sometimes being still in vogue.

184. THANK GOD FOR MAYHEM ('ABOARD! Bright Marshmallow!')

So from you far I went to strange oh lively city of lights and glimmer with rivers sidewalks and alleys and great Manhattan schist each running full with folk and the scurrying eddies of fiction and feeling as the less than distant river's light was reflected and shown again on its watery top as if some urban past is passing by me slowly one drip after another as NOW once again the hour the liners depart is here : and I look down the east/west street to see a broad bright marshmallow passing and only then later - there/here - amidst a gas station rumble four cop cars arrive screaming and lit and scurrying forth cop bodies emerge holding frantic flashlights and guns and clubs and only one lonely soul hurt on the ground writhes in some pain a real urban pain a sub-lunar pain while they hold him down searching his car's ripped innards and padding and clothing askew as gawkers watch talking and pointing as one swift justice of words amidst jeers for what's happened AND although NO ONE quite knows they're all sure they've seen and alongside such carnage of intention and deed the dire waitress seeds each diner plate with gravies and sauces galore as she watches from the Tunnel Diner window at what's been transpiring and says 'thank God for MAYHEM!' exclaiming aloud what her mind must see - her way I suppose of gaining from the crowd and in that mind she hears : 'let it keep coming and let them eat!' : for those who enter stay and slow like slumber the cops depart and the excitement fades and the darkening fall of the parking lot pavement black advances again and all anyone is left with are the ten-pm lights shining back onto that pavement with few cars as witness and mute and I'm thinking back to the daylight ships passing 'a broad bright marshmallow' and I'm turning it back to 'ABOARD! Bright Marshmallow!' instead and what turns for turning is passing and gone and I look back at the waitress carving ham at her counter and realize she's as angry as I am and listening only begrudgingly to Frank the cook who scours the grease off the griddle while talking of 'later' whatever that is and I try to think of them as a couple and wonder if they are or perhaps their lives together as lonely as this intersect only here but matter not it does so I move on - noticing all the misspelled words on the menu-board 'greaves' for 'gravies' and 'chudder' for 'chowder' and broken epitaphs and menu words all spoiled and rotten and stupid on a broadly errant wall and in the back - along the alcove to the men's room - someone desperately has written on the wall (I swear) 'Repent YE for the KINGDOM of God is at hand!' and someone else has written 'Jesus is coming - will YOU swallow?' and I want to laugh but don't instead noting the phone number alongside it '201 whatever you want NO joke - loves anything' and sauntering on I put that one away and leave past a fat family happy with food and the eyes of one youngster agape and watching and think what has changed ? has everything changed or nothing changed and I decide nothing has changed and that everything I see is what I would have seen anyway and the only change is the constant of movement and growth and gravity ('like endless pylons and seeded housing groaning with growth and taking up their energies solemnly and alive') and then I think then why bother with anything for it is all on its own course anyway and all we can do is watch and needle the world for its being NOTHING MORE than that and echoes conspire to resound echoes like 'THANK GOD FOR MAYHEM' for that is what keeps us going....

183. MEGO MINO AND ALL THAT IT MEANS - (Ben Franklin & Philadelphia, 2003):

Words from an attic of stone - an old broken down house set off from the road on the side of a thoroughfare now long disappeared - one wherein the cantilevered herds of nuns and parsons of a hundred different days often assembled to rejoin their kin on the fields of there and then : candle'd messages in ghost-like scrawls and conjured tricks of spirit and flesh TOGETHER MAIMED : for (it was decided) once that 'all things illusionary are as real as we make them' and this is the story of a billion different lives : farmer plowman fiddler doctor lawyer seamstress mason builder dyer killer priest soldier painter piker cooper or nurse: ['Oh Lord I was walking with but a candle of my own'] - Mego Mino and all that it means : Benjamin Franklin himself would never know the difference : Doctor Electric ('who's going to be the next in line?') and visiting his grave in PHIL-A-DELPHIA one sees nothing BUT a bare stone in a lonely churchyard near a busy road 'and the tour buses roll by STARING morosely at the loose-fitting world' on their way to the Liberty Bell and I still hear his rowdy echoes and bawdy lines resounding down liquid and lost corridors of grime - 'the greatest monarch on the proudest throne is oblig'd to sit upon his own arse' UNIVERSAL SMOKE DOCTOR designer of chimneys 'old conjuror' the most dangerous man in America whom I see right now arm in arm with Tom Paine both somehow dancing the minuet of pain across the throttled land as seen in retrospect with ungiven rancor and idled promise bliss invention caress unfaring similacritude of every Pennsylvania daisy and roadside rose seen wiggling in philosophical winds : 'The Monarch Erected By Wisdom' which title was supposed to have been their combined and co-written biography but it all had to wait for Dr. Franklin's new invention of the thinking typewriter which he never finished but died first and that was the end of that with the nasty rain through the roof leaking water upon the desk they shared their papers upon and RUNNING ALL THE INK together the real true jumble LOST became their masterwork AND NOW A HIGHWAY RUNS THROUGH IT and Major Porter Doctor Lutz Guy Magnet and every other person who'd ever visited the Assembly of Air and spent their time there THEY 'all would know of the ancient airs and most precious words and all those things which have come before' and in his 53rd year Ben Franklin was no different than me (except I could listen to Shostakovitch while he could not) and then CONSIDER THIS: by Robert Lowell "Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones and fenced their gardens with Redmen's bones; embarking from the Nether Land of Holland pilgrims unjousled by Geneva's night they planted here the Serpent's seeds of light; and here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock the riotous glass houses built on rock and candles gutter in a hall of mirrors and light is where the ancient blood of Cain is burning burning the unburied grain" and if I didn't know any better I'd feel that was meant for the ages the lapsed Pilgrims themselves huddled now and folded into US ourselves handless and wingless and broken by our own plow as we are and rimmed and shouldered by the side-winds of doubt and loss and only reason only logic bereft of the elixr'd magic powder of GRACE and love and SUNDERED as we are and broken by possession addicted to mobility we pass our bright blue houses without lament and notice nothing of what has gone and all that we have lost 'FOR YOU were once darkness but now you are light in the Lord so WALK as children of light' - and that was from Ephesians as retold by generations around the hearth and the Pilgrim Fathers then too thought of themselves as seeds of light escaping the darkness of Europe to bring the light and the Lord to the New World but 'such is Amerikey' they say in the hills and hollers of Virginny and Maine SO WE LET THEM and what is (I mutter) 'unhousled' if you don't mind me asking ? 'a word some might recall from Hamlet from the Ghost's cry to Hamlet that he was sent to his death 'unhousle'd' that is without the chance to partake of the Eucharist in a Final mass' - and yes THAT ANSWERS THAT all over again doesn't it.