Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

199. WHERE THE MOON NEVER SETTLES AND THE SUN NEVER SETS (aug. 1967):

When I heard the gay guy talking I knew I just had to stop : 'your big dick adds nothing to the situation' and the way he said that it was all just so funny - he spoke deliberately and sharply and denoted every word like it was a bullet and that nasally high twang that gave gayness away was benumbing and startling at the same time as well - whatever these two idiots were talking about went far beyond me but I enjoyed every moment of it for the few it lasted - sputtering gays having a spat I figured - and where else you gonn'a see that 'cept right where I was - some slop-hole pilastered barroom storefront Sheridan Square pisshole now so long gone it hurts just thinking back - but that wintry night it's what I remember best and if they were sports fans for sure I knew I'd have liked like to say 'what would you rather be ? a Yanker or a Yankee?' but they'd probably have squared off together and hit me hard and that would've just solved everything for them - I never knew and I never cared where the meat-cleaver came down and the old dirty ramp where the guy with the horses kept his wagons was always good to sleep in - bundled straw and closed from the worst of the night and kind of warm enough and I just noticed now it's a parking garage today but it's all the same all that huge heavy old concrete and plaster and the ramp and the old wooden beams in the ceiling and roof but no instead of horses and wagons and carriages they stuff in as many freaking-ass automobiles as they can for like a hundred and forty bucks a day and a few motorcycles too and other shit and they call it convenience and the whole modern day has folded in on itself like some Grethen Falkern hideaway with no story to tell (Gretchen Falkern was a girl I knew back then who catered to fucking expensive men - escort cum service exactly and they couldn't never be betrayed at penalty of death and she knew that - politicians ballplayers priests reverends doctors and famous assholes everywhere - so I called her place the 'hideaway with no story to tell') but that episode's over years back and probably all those fuckheads are dead by now anyway - reverence for the dead and reverie of their memory thinking back of those many times they'd spent with Gretchen Fetchin' Gretchen - that's how cool life is : all those things you learn along the way and then keep with you for the hundreds of thousands of the rest of your days and hours - where the moon never settles and the sun never sets - in the very old ancient recesses of the mind.

198. THE FABERGE EGG:

So that we have heard all that can be heard we have left our broad ears open and wide like at the very beginning of life when all sounds are new and you cannot yet distinguish what you are hearing from the normal background noise of an everyday existence so that the whoosh of cars on pavement the roar of bus exhaust the treble hum of drillers and diggers the basso profundo of trains and the deep hoots of boat whistles all can pass you by without notice without comment and the only sound you hear to notice is the tearing of a soda pop top the metallic rip that strange enervating sound of the aluminum can or the bottle of sugar-water you have been given in one or another guises as it comes to you whether CokePepsi7Up whatever that's the stuff you first catch on to and hold not even the sweet soft source of mother's milk any longer no sustenance there no margin of indifference just nothing as a flesh-life a reality once known a tribal hold has disappeared from all our lives and we have moved onto post-modern efforts at will and growth to be as philosophically sound and up-standing as we can and proud to walk the hovel or the train-tracks where whistles yet blow and teen-age boys with sticks patrol and the young kid with the baseball-bat-blasted head lies near death with an eye out of his socket and the blasted debris of people everything Sri Lanka once Ceylon Chechnya Bratislava Serbia New York Houston New South Wales everywhere there are pieces of life and people walking either to it or from it without regard for lateness or consequences and like the baton runner in the strange lead of some garbled Olympic Parade the torch has gone out the flame is unlit so we watch movies of Jack and Jackie from nineteen hundred and fifty three and nineteen hundred and fifty six and sixty and sixty three and try to forget and realize how all so much the trip to Dallas changed the world or at least the feeling of it which they still insist on pandering and everyone in those photos looks so bad anyway all the inauguration men in silk tophats and that poetry guy Sandburg or Frost or whomever they blew in from New Hampshire meaningless overlapping gestures will talk about how the land was there before we were and yeah I guess so all right no problem we were the lands before it was ours so what and why not now the mills and factories all along the rivers from Webster New Hampshire to Kennebunkport Maine are all gone the free floating log roll of time is ended we all look like ancients now but no one can recognize anything "They tramped on and on singing 'May his memory be eternal' and when they stopped it seemed that their legs the horses the wind went on singing it out of force of habit" all that at about the same time as those opening lines to Doctor Zhivago started pounding into people's heads and then even the rancid Hollywood cabal took it over and the next you knew there were hundreds of thousands of people over and over going to see moving pictures of a story without meaning unless they called it love love not ideology for the people stupid people wouldn't know it by that name and like pearls before swine they galloped through train cars and glugged the stuff down the words undiluted and directed by coin only memories of this or that memories of death 'I keep thinking of times that are long past of a house in the Petersburg Quarter you had come in from the steppeland Kursk Province of a none-too-rich mother to daughter...tightly closing eyelids heights and cloudy spheres rivers waters boulders centuries and years...the murmurs ebb, onto the stage I enter I am trying standing in the door to discover in the distant echoes...' as quickly and as simply as all that we think back to see and hear anew and again the other time and place of birth and from genesis where we have all come from the Kill Van Kull that lonely working river space filled with barge and boat and tug and tanker slowly gliding by with the errant water hum of work while the thin girl sunbathes along the new shore in only the summer sun or while in the deep winter the piled up debris and snow rots and discolors as it melts all things food banana peels cookies crumbs bookbindings tires everything along the working place where men nod before they speak if they ever speak at all and the time is clock-ticked for money only every contract written with limits and wages intact and sure to please someone as much as it displeases someone else and the low buildings house soldiers lost in time themselves still fighting on seas of ire and the nearby factories make things which people use and each small room above has space for family and growth and television and perhaps here and there a car before everybody later had to have two just think a trickle-up theory of economy the likes of which was never before ever seen and the rodents ran free and the rats and mice chased by cats with lice ran loudly screeching under bulkhead and wharf and the night watchman with his chain-key and flashlight walked the docks and watched out for contraband leaving not coming the internal theft was amazing there were all sorts of goods for the taking monkeys from China lights from Yugoslavia and hammers and tools made in Poland and France wonderful implements for nuts and wine bottles and cork-stoppers and pens and glass balls and globes of snow and rabbit ear TV antennas and poor beleaguered Japan back then even made cars but cheap metal model ones worth a dime for a hundred no more and all there was left standing by itself alone was a Russian Faberge Egg one Russian Faberge Egg and those boxes which went one inside another inside another inside another until small and smaller they simply disappeared.

197. 'THIS ROLLER DERBY AIN'T FOR ME':

I have tried to make everything talk - standing guard near the old armory just to see what enters and what goes by - shoeless viragos and pillager tyrants and then to my surprise a bunch of Roller-Derby girls come along from the other corner – all noisy and loud shouting and whooping and dressed like vamp-mannequins in black-net Gothic garb : little dresses and skirts big shoes black eyeliners and fingernails loud colors and metal-clanging jewelry seemingly everywhere – going straight they were to the armory through the nearby side-door readying up for the 7pm Roller-Derby fiasco competition championship and just before long before I knew before I ever cared people began arriving and the main gate opened and all these fledgling types in clothes just as wild paced around and lined up and went in - bands already playing fearsome music and people all milling about outside and half inside – smoking talking greeting laughing - and I knew I was in for something : boozefest at the least : but I stayed away couldn't care couldn't stay YOU SEE it wasn't part of History and had nothing to do with me and I had found that FREE ASSOCIATION is never free ! hanging around with people of a certain 'ilk' had ways of rubbing off on one's own character and any of this bunch of creepsters I'd find nothing in common with in fact they drew me to boredom and nastiness right off - first off they were certainly in no way 'culture' rats and in fact between them all they hadn't an ounce of class or learning either and what passed for learning between them all I'd not want to know of so as much as they were trying to put out that 'oh come on over we're all so friendly' routine that was as much as I was trying to avoid it so I hummed a few bars of 'so long it's been good to know you' and walked my speedy way off - back once into the fiery cauldron of another blackening night.

196. KILLING TIME (nyc, 1967):

I never wanted to hate nor did I ever really have that many things to hate but back in those days I realized that once you set out trying to determine what to hate you're quickly surprised by learning how many things there are worthy of hatred and - for me at that time - my entire life was spinning reeling leaping out of control in some aspects : things I had little inkling of or situational management over - there suddenly arose plenty and so I guess what I'm saying is that everyone should just look out for this stuff because it is going to come at you and get you and unless you ferret out ahead of time the singularities and specifics of what you're going to be looking at - whether for or against - it's all going to blast you - these are really the most important things of every moment of your time - vastly more important than who you're making out with eating with having sex with working with and all that and it's right then too when you're MOST vulnerable because all those school-bastards who've had your mind for 18 or 20 years until then THEY'RE not going to let on they're just going instead to try and teach you the rules and the operations of business as usual - both so they can continue to be paid and so that you can find your own shitty rung on that ladder of crap the rest of your time will be sent trying to 'climb' up but instead all it does is - in the long run - strangle you as much as you will let it and for me I was beset at every turn with eerily haunting things trying to chase me down - draft board maniacal killers trying to snare me as well into their nightmare bullshit quagmire of Army life Vietnam butt-crunching nasty fucking lies and twisted facts gun-mill fodder-for-the-cannon routine run as it was by little weaselly pointy-headed drill sergeant bastards posted in small offices all across the land - nothing having to do with combat but just instead pushing others into it with their mealy-mouthed lies and false attributions and absolutely no brains at all NOT ME THANKS and I fought that and fled that as well as any business-oriented 'achiever's ideal' experience of the lawyerly let's-stay-in-school-and-be-something crowd and I'd seen plenty of that too and - well shit it was already decided (and this was the REALLY revolutionary stuff) - if I 'had' to kill anyone it would have to be one of them thank you all the same.

195. SOMEONE'S FORGOTTEN JACKET AT THE OLD FARM SHED JUNKHEAP - (the view from here, Bradford County, PA):

I am walking the old dirt road which runs along and parallel now to the paved county road nearby it - over hill and hillock and valley below alongside the small tumbling river and the two streams which roll into it and I am meeting in my fate the very essence of the life and the place I live (as if this was now and not long ago) and as I stumble upon a patch of dirt I see the high blue sky and the old broken fence where it falls away to nothing and I step onto the old gravel of the lot left here right next to what remains of the old farm shed I can remember so well some 40 years ago and at that moment - excelsior wind great white light - something - the very place seems to stop all things and all time and sever all the connections we know of and I swear I hear the very spot talking itself to me like this : 'I have come through misery okay as if it was in fact a frank privilege a submission to be subdued and along the way I've seen many things - the delicious smokes of roadside odors and the smells of foodside stalls alongside the piled up heaps of jumbled metal making up cars and trucks and trucks and cars running at idle turned off or abandoned and the weakened doors of the old garages leaning with the forgotten vehicles in the weeds next to them showing season after season of growth and moss and fallen leaves and decay outlined on the aging paint they carry and the drain and the wash old pipes and broken gutters or the piled up leavings of old lumber now bent and distorted and blackened from weather and age - the two-wheeled bicycle broken and without chain or pedals and thrown as it was left on some equally leaning fence in the grass the piles of old metals and wire-rolls mixed with grass and branches cut from some summer lawn the piped smokes of exhausts and heat the stained marks of cooling fans and air conditioners as they drip and drop the condensation of water and air of 90-degree days and the way old things turn into layers of rust someone's forgotten jacket someone's old gloves someone's left-about paint cans and mixing sticks and brushes deadly and stiff with age - an old car windshield with a 12-year old sticker with water marks left greening in the grass and fragments of old hose dry and rotted with a nozzle rusted into a solid action but flowing nothing the wheel rim the vanity mirror broken and chipped the metal car door leaning on an angle propped on the old swing-set steel bars a pitchfork a shovel a wrench a lantern a can of rusted nails the old window from some old garage with oil-stickers and gasoline price markings still stuck onto it the glass cracked and broken an ancient cash register now one solid heap of brown with its cash-drawer stuck open and empty and empty and open - white wood curling and dead and needing more paint the shredded and torn screening and the old roll of mesh nearby it - all that way now for some thirty summers and so dried out the uneven wind goes about shredding it even more.'