Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

194. THE ‘LANCE CORPORAL’S WITNESS’ REPORT - ('or even if I'd ever smiled at them'):

‘Save as nothing and regret even less take nothing from no one and answer to fewer’ : these were the format of mottos pasted around the youngsters’ high faces on nearly every subway kiosk and stairway - one can see amazing youth stupid youth the grand dialectic of time and space in constant revision and arguing back and forth over and anew with one another but one needs to ask the question about ‘do we really want to live this way?’ and then try to answer it but the only way to do so is by OBSERVATION strict as one can and there’s never really an answer because –face it – everything IS ! and what does one see but passing styles and regency regenerations and everything new is old again and try to learn from the past but don’t repeat it or however the motto would go IF it were presented gloriously by the same presenters and it’s always the army I see (watch that guy ramrod straight crew haircut walking tall and regimented like solid lace walking INTO his bank of choice) trying to run things by a stropism and a militarism of thought and attitude – they try to run LIFE as a military camp wherein nothing untoward can happen and only that which is preferred and pre-ordained occurs and that’s what you hear on the midnight morning news - happy faces smiling faces stupid faces dumbass faces EVERYTHING within bounds and far out of reach but even that guy walking along looks over everything stiffly and scans like an eagle the old world he sees BUT NOT for the adventure of creation or the joy of discovery but for the slow and sorry preservation of anything that already is (and since it’s changing constantly) always under revision and always in collective agreement with the ‘powers’ of the moment WELL THEN he’s really going nowhere fast ahead of his own curve and misleading himself into thinking of preservation while vanguarding a horrible constant change and ‘he would be the keeper of the flame and he would try to beat the shepherds back’ but nothing would occur in such a world except the static of the status-quo appropriated all by someone else and the notes from the Lance Corporal are written on the backs of his two hands but HE CAN’T READ and avoids all else ‘NO MORE CHEVROLETS nothing that must be kept cold no more sudden moves everything as of old’ (well there’s a maybe and ‘gimme an A’) – on the palms of their hands on the soles of their feet on the walls of their houses they wrote all their names in blue ink stained deep and just before dawn they disappeared and left the scene THEY ATE sweets until they were sick they fell asleep on the concrete floor and the next morning the newspapers it seemed they all tried to make sense out of what had supposedly occurred but no one found a key reason for any of it and there didn’t anyway seem to be any reason or feeling to the excuses that were given (“as it turned out” he heard the newsman saying “the family had been under observation for three months for a variety of what were once called (under the old regime) ‘anti-social crimes’ but which would today and in our own society of course be passed over as nothing more than foolery and flippant individual freedoms") yet of course there are still countries in which such offenses are considered serious in fact worthy of death and in this case it was just that summary sentencing and execution which had taken place as clan members and neighbors from the family’s home town massed and paraded to their very doorstep - and they each were taken out one at a time and beaten to death with sticks and pole-axe handles and the reaction in this country was horror and distaste as movements suddenly arose to question both WHY and for HOW LONG we as a nation are and shall be advancing such a society as this expending manpower firepower and great sums of money to promote such a state and PERHAPS that is the question of the day for it does merit some consideration - but then as I think about it I wonder what’s really the difference between what they do and what the militarism of thought does to us all IT’S ALL THE SAME in some lousy futuristic way and I think of the drunks passing out from fear or wonder and the small children with nowhere left to go and the small countries which have run out of coastline and the tall weird men who talk ceaselessly of black holes and random encounters and all the depths of their supposed ‘space’ and its science while they mill about holding martinis in withered hands and the corner Polish guy wiping down the tables (‘yes sir yes sir three bags full’ like a nursery rhyme from the netherland) and whatever it’s been has been a long time SEE SEE the black man outside of Birdland he staggers and shimmies and tries to get cash but nothing unlike him is heading his way accidental moments collect the same sort of guilt (‘and where are you now ? I’ve been waiting so long but no one has come and I’m sitting alone’) and everything is overdone and everything is locked and everything is regrets and malfeasance and timber-locks along some Utah border where they fell trees and go about killing bear and antelope and any other mammal which still lingers late (some PALEO MEXO PROTO whatever ZAIC they wish to call the past) for we live in overflow and lava fills the deck - and they all stared back at me but I couldn’t tell if I was smiling anymore OR EVEN IF I’D EVER SMILED AT THEM.

193. 'LET YOUR INDULGENCE SET ME FREE':

A B-52 bomber with some young punk-air-force kid behind the controls dropping five thousand pounds of ordnance on the little people unknown down below - in 1969 that was not really any big deal : bags of fire supersonic matrix modems bringing all the one-village world bullshit toge her into one place one grand ante-room of the flying-fuck dead awaiting a visitation like the holy land itself holding out a hand for deliverance and only now today years later when the freak-fog has cleared and the little people anew are seen to be bastard politicians and weasel-mouthed toadies of corporate infringement do you realize that NO LONGER do they just drop bombs upon the earth NOW they drop them (and have well succeeded) deep in people's heads and the entire world has gone crazy frenetic and sour - grabbing and getting in a frenzy as all around them everywhere it all crumbles back to Hell - the Devil rules this roost as the Devil always has - and the only answer is death DEATH to the rulers and death to the subjugated and it's all the same just different by degrees : and it used to be that wisdom could be found in the mind maybe of some kid in the back-room of some library somewhere in the hinterlands of a God-Forsaken little hillbilly town in the deep wilds of modern America (if such a place even exists in real-time anymore) but that's all gone and the only place kids like that live today is in some virtual-time/place of a zero-zone uncalibrated value-free existence - the kids come in whistling some worldwide tune and tyring to induce vomit from the shallow interior of their minds wherein they go home to find nothing because there's often nothing there and I recall the ante which I once upped but ruined walking along the street in dirtied painter-paints splattered with all the abstract-expressionist Jackson Pollack art I could ever want IF I wanted it and alongside me like in some dream comes my father dead all these years but driving the after-work car and he stops to take me in and I go in and all this endless walk to nowhere stops and he just drives and keeps talking talking about something I couldn't grasp and the horror lives with me yet today all these years later too - the horror of no amends never making peace the horrid ruins of a family wreckage probably caused by me nobody speaking nobody talking everybody mute and I know I could walk the whole entire world and never leave my regrets or my fears or my awkwardness and trembling and tumbling towards the featureless future within me and without and the fusion-memory the rooftop sessions waiting for trains to pass and suns to set and mystery dreams to dissolve or coagulate around me - the curve in the road the Route 14 angle of the highway ahead is all my entire life and all that's left too (at one and the same time) and I know I have lost it missed it all distressed it abandoned it out west somewhere and all I want to do now is go on and read and think it over and not produce another God-damned thin in my entire life just so that in the silence predicted I could watch the ending and see the film and observe the Nobodaddy curtain come flaming down over all time and all places and all people...and I ask you Sir at what point did YOU stop caring and realize there was NO meaning anywhere and you deign to answer (DO YOU? - I will wonder that forever): 'No longer mourn for me when I am dead...lest the wise world should look into your sorrow and mock you with it and with me after I am gone' - so sayeth the world entire but only in quiet solitude the sort that comes from endless graveyard and churchyard thought as it goes on and as it grows and as the newer light arises from the dawn so they say as in some form of prayer: 'release me from my bands with the help of your good hands ! gentle breath of yours must fill me sails or else my project fails - which was to please - and NOW I want spirits to enforce art to enchant and my ending is despair unless I be reliev'd by prayer which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults as you from crimes would pardoned be and let your indulgence set me free and my ending in YOUR beginning be!'

192. A LONG ARM OF THE LAW - (Breezy Point and the LAW of Moses):

There's a place just east of New York City and maybe a bit north by degree called Breezy Point - it's basically a police community where the people who go there and live are law enforcement NYC personnel with their summer homes or second homes and I'd been told of it numerous times by someone I knew who was a federal marshal operating out of Manhattan and Newark who went there as often as he could especially during the warmer season and Summer months - it always seemed by description to be a strange and enchanting place to me with eyes everywhere and people on each corner and porch and beachfront chair aware of everyone else and onto everything which went on in a sort-of intelligence community of snoops and lawmen on break and I always wondered what the situation was there towards the actual graft and corruption that always takes place in these situations - cops and their outreach with payoffs and little bits of stolen goods and cover-ups and the like plus in this case the irrepressible urges of adultery and affairs and revolving partnerships (what with all the shiftwork and such) and the assorted panoply of show-wives and trophy-wives with all their ostentatious behavior and jewelry and clothing and the inevitable alcoholic over-supplies - NO MATTER all that - it was apparent even from the people I knew who told me about this place that such behavior was rampant (and I was told) and even they themselves were before long broken up and separated with a rancorous divorce and settlement pending that I couldn't help but hearing all the details of and most of that confirmed what I'd just assumed anyway but funny world that it is it's always a surprise when you discover that behind the facades of everything exemplary (supposedly exemplary) there's dirt and deceit - in this case cops and law enforcement people and in other cases priests teachers and agents of government and it seems everywhere that the whole flaming lot of them are nothing but fakers and thieves anyway but who was the first and who will be the last shall never be determined and nothing about it known and one time this cop guy told me all about his acting in a capacity as a federal marshal on stakeout somewhere by Philadelphia in a long-term surveillance of some mobster connection - he'd bought a cheap seven hundred dollar Chevrolet pickup from someone he knew only because it looked old and battered and completely without ostentation and therefore easy to overlook and the sort of vehicle which would fit in easily and be unnoticed as he sat there night after night at some curbside watching the comings and goings of these crime figures and one night the truck just gave out on the drive down and he had to limp it into position while it was running on like five cylinders (having blown a cylinder or two) and in that same manner (hoping it would re-start - which it did) he had to carefully limp it out of there in the morning and drive it all the way back to Newark NJ hoping all the while to have eluded detection and also suspicion because if he stayed there it could have cost him his life - he'd suspected from that time that it was that surveillance job and those nights away which did in his Breezy Point marriage - 'she' had plenty of time and each night too to go about her appointed rounds : and I know this is a bum story but too good to pass up retelling and anyway it gets me to the next point I'm making - how often I've noticed that 'control' type people (cops lawyers etc.) are most often the ones who end up having the most problems within their own personal lives all the while supposing it to be that they should have dominance over proscribing the behaviors and habits of others : to wit enforcing LAWS made for the common good : and most of that's because we have a social fabric which is thrown over each of us early on and certain people take to it while others do not ever take to it and the ones who most forcefully do so are those who later become enforcers of creed - often without really thinking and mostly for the accrued money and benefits afforded by it (for 'society' itself is twisted in its favor) and they then grow into exemplars of nothing so much as NEED for laws through chasing infractions violations mis-behavior and 'error' - the very same qualities which then come to imbue their own characters and THE CONCLUSION truly is that they are exemplars of an Evil parading as a Good and their own lives represent nothing but a default on the responsibility to grow and move forward - for they are forever stalled by 'enforcement' and the result becomes Breezy Point - crazed battered people wily wives on-the-make salacious men-devils seeking trysts and gain and illicit sex (to boot) and because of their station they get away with it - I once drove a Breezy Point wife home by request of her husband in his absence (she was slightly tipsy) and truly she was all over me - sexually adventurous perverse and annoying in all her glitter and glamour but she exemplified the Breezy Point matron character perfectly - by the time I got her to Breezy Point I could have had sex for hours and been wined and dined but instead I dropped her off and high-tailed it back to my start-point with the guy's car - which I left where I'd been told and I had by that time experienced enough of Breezy Point for sure.
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So I look back (in what in anger?) and think to myself any of a million other things about everything - I was abused I was sexually assaulted ? no way for it doesn't exist - don't you see the memories are better than today's realities - bullshitted and crap-ridden as they are when people today are fearful of air and turn on each other and slap the rank and file and cops these cops and priests these priests still all go about their work oblivious to their ostentation and this was after all just a cop-wife and nothing more : 'let me start the bidding of this war at the lowest level possible and we'll see where it takes us from there and if it doesn't we'll just close up shop and regardless of endings the middle is great' and I heard that as an echo of some blandishment on a grassy lawn somewhere 'die here of hunger like a stray dog - or rise up and rule overnight!' (bet you don't know what that's from - that's from a Hebrew poem written in 1913 by the poet Shimon Ginzburg describing his fearful state of mind as a young immigrant arriving in America and to Ginzburg the Statue of Liberty seemed a foreboding Fortuna raising not a torch but a 'clenched fist' promising anything and nothing to the arriving refugees 'Come to me all who are hungry for bread or for justice; or who yearn to breathe the air of freedom - die here of hunger like a stray dog or rise up and rule overnight!' and he was playing on the Passover invocation 'Let all who are hungry come and eat' turning Jewish 'hospitality' into New York City indifference) 'the Statue of Liberty was a Lady but the most clothed one I ever saw in New York City - where most of the better disheveled ladies had frocks barely covering their charms - and plenty of charms them was!' - that was Horation Purbst in 1917 looking back on his many years in the 'New World' as he still called it - he was by the records 207 years old if you can believe that when he died on Coenties Slip in some tiny wooden hovel stuck between two larger warrens of fish-slop and salvage cellars and his mind was as filled with memories then as the day he was born ('4th good life around' he'd say) and no one could say why he was still here nor where he'd come from - Purbst would just laugh a shudder and stare - but he'd been heard to declaim 'Liberty's a whore anyway and that's a sword in her hand to slay the masses and the air of Freedom's a joke and always been one and no mighty woman with a torch was ever gonna' do anything powerful right anyway - wretched refuse and huddled masses besmirched and sullen - SEND THESE TO ME! you idiots' - he was finally buried on an April day in 1924 secretly if you must know on the back lot of a rooming house by Corlears Hook where they made hulls for ships adjacent to his beloved East River - and he had no kin it was said except everyone and wasn't that a laugh too ! and anyway passing beneath Liberty's gaze as they entered New York Harbor immigrants projected their own feelings of optimism and excitement upon the looming figure and Ginzburg's Hebraic gloom was QUITE the exception and the cult of the statue was created by a Slovenian-American journalist named Louis Adamic who in the 1930's made Lazarus's sonnet the centerpiece of his campaign to celebrate the contributions to America of immigrant and ethnic groups in a rebuke to the rise of Nazism in Europe so that even then it was all hype extraordinaire and something done with a purpose and let's check out the purpose (a good Jewry again) and let's check out who was being celebrated (a good Jewry again) and let's figure it all out from there...I LEAVE YOU BE...there's nothing pure in America for it's all a watered-down something of NO pedigree.