The Denver Sutra

We hung around the tour buses after the Chilis’ stadium rock encores, sobering up before the long drive back to La Quinta. No, not really sobering up, just losing more of the buzz than we wanted to. We sang our depraved songs A cappella to pass the time. We think it was Desiree’s melody and my harmonization that lured Juan Alderete, the bass player for The Mars Volta, over to our place by the fence for a half hour chat on music, literature, and chaos.

*

Insufficient bitterness

to continue.

*

I never used to ask

What is he on?

What did she take?

Personal flair was accepted as

- behavior -

@ character @

Now it has to have a reason

and Occam’s Razor quickly leads me

to chemical analysis.

I’m just writing in another notebook

although Dez bought it for me

– post breakup –

she went out and picked up this

quietly stylish black/tan book

while I slept in the hotel bed

cause I asked her to… a very

girlfriend thing to do, so the pages

feel special.

*

Could the origin of this nausea be the inability to write, in the face of planet-sized feelings? Trite inarticulate honesty is better than nothing, I guess. Eases like a metabolic function, like I fed a critical mass of sick cells an illicit bit of photosynthesis for a circadian tick. But it’s all in the game.

Dez left. I’m back to the girlfriendless Nelson paradigm, in which I can’t and won’t hide my yearning to fulfill my long dormant sexual agenda. Razberrychaos still shines through, engineering monuments through fractals of drunk flailings – and even though Desiree dyed my hair red, I’ve rarely felt so dissatisfied with my look. Because I’m no longer the male half of the artist couple, the sexually-sanctioned freak compensating for failings in masculinity with cryptic lifestyle kinetics. Now I’m a free agent with a piss-poor portfolio, because although I have art on the shelf, I see how important the immediate physical connection is, the primary colors, the deficiency I feel as a sucking chest wound, what makes me invisible, not even a joke.

I could transcend with a glowing green scythe. It will be my costume for the next Shambhala. I’ll have saved my brain for a splurge of serotonin that I will use to boost my behavior algorithms in artificial confidence, ecstasy, mimicking those evolutionarily pro-adaptive progenitors, harvesting cash crops of impossible conversation with chemical currency cum quickie casuals in strange camps. Because I don’t want to get the girls with my writing, drawing, music, or even my mind. Because you can only live so long in your fuckless head before you feel your entire stalk of being wither in the burning sun of energy that doesn’t MATTER - - -

Anyway…

I’m trying to stave off the sense of nihilism I instinctively recoil from by telling myself that feelings aren’t real. That sounds counter intuitive, but nihilism is an emotion for me – the presence of negative energy.

*

Waiting at Gate C Thirty Sick

with a backpack full of expired poetry

cramps and fresh memories

pungent, reminding me

to burn a CD with a

Chili Peppers song, mediocre music

played by a world-class band

to mark the occasion.

Bad breakfast cramps, energy

settled poorly in my stomach like a disgruntled Muslim in Gaza, forcible function of racism’s rationalization in gastro-intestinal crucible, gastronomic gusto in a coffee-ground cubicle, stressing down to my bowels. If I hear about everybody’s asshole one more time I’m gonna KILL someone, I swear!

No, can’t give in to psychosis, I’ve got to catch a plane

to a 21^st century croquet game, a gentleman’s game, a proper use for a mallet, the kind of opportunity one takes with a velveteen touch and a crescent eye, ocular aversion to the cramped chunk of con swish reduction add absurdum.

*

Today, Denver is the nexus of the Stuccoverse.

I don’t know what that means but I know it’s virtual.

The psychosis creeps in like a twitching variation on an old man’s spinal disease, a novel chemical composition, a few hundred molecules to the right in a spectrometrical anomaly. The old man lived long enough to find comfort in breathing, post-matador poetic transcription, what you’re supposed to show, not say with clenched teeth, tall eyes, and known bugs in perception.

I kind of like the crazy but I hate it, I hate it, I HATE IT! I want it to stop. It seems this psychosis speaks for all energy, energy itself and its trembling handshake with matter, its bittersweetheart deal, a corrupt alliance, what matters more than any thought I could think in intersecting planes. I only really like it when I can’t have it, and I can’t take a lesson from this because I’m stuck to the hi-chair at the kiddie table. I can’t digest the grown-up food.

*

I’m stately

and stand-up

a state actor

sincerely sarcastic

sickly bombastic.

I’m jonesying for genuine friendship

incapable, unfulfilled.

I want to wish you happy discord with Hari Krishna, see how you react, but I won’t because I fear your reaction. I sense olfactory incompatibility, sublingually, subliminally.

But I think my twitchings are not obvious, and my penmanship is adequate, and I can… just barely listen to this hypermelodic R&B gargling without flipping out, which would equate to me letting my little blips of twitches build to a seizure-like spasm that would mildly alarm the woman sitting next to me.

She just sighed in a soft, friendly-sounding way and her peripherals are making me nervously excited. This is energy I can roll with but I don’t know where to enroll.

The demilitarized zone is interlocking eye-verse, eyes getting away with stealth understanding of words and thighs, and I just allowed a sigh that riffed on the girl’s, and I just allowed a smile that knows nothing of Krishna, and I’m regarding a well-tailored, probably self-tailored black back of a blouse.

Damn these dry gums, or is it an obsessive psychosomatic mirage? I’m remembering how extraordinarily run of the mill I am, filed down verbal favourites and the novelty of red hair, thinking I’ve got a little hint of Matt’s schizo floodgate, how adorable, found art, Canadian psych-kitsch from the Bronze Age of Information, before nanotech took off.

Smile again, look as pretty as you can and maybe good things will happen despite the twitches (nothing can save you from them), act like Krishna has nothing to say to you. Don’t ask if you’re a creep, don’t be redundant, hum a Thom Yorke melody if you feel like being crazy. This is a non-Sforzando flight. Soften. Mezzo piano. The bar is always open, but you can’t stay here. Heraclitus is my co-pilot. All is fire. Your skin makes me cry. But you can’t know.

OOPPivivivivivivivivivivivEENN

OOPPBUplSIeaNEsureSSEENN
OOPPivivivivivivivivivivivEENN

INNOCENT yet ILLICIT interest –

would you like a hot apple pie with that?

I still don’t really know what she looks like. Our father who art in heaven. Krishna forsakes me every day, and that’s okay, comma, comma, comma,

Malibu Stacey, I want to ride with you. Take me for a ride in your hot pink convertible, pop your afternoon birth control and come, we’re on our way to north Cali’s stately mambo stepclass, cha cha cha, the state of grace, our instructor is from Esalen, he’s the hottest ugmo I’ve ever seen, a FILF, gutless in a good way, he has an aura, steel grey, carpeted with lichen.

We’re driving back across the timewarp coast, and plastic’s come alive but our bodies stopped biodegrading, nowhere to die but up, winged tortoise studios, midpoint jetburn aftertouch intermezzo.

Do you like what you see?

Don’t answer –

too many sharks in the Spanish Galleon, not enough aliens in the abyss. Denver’s toxicity is mingling with this crybaby airspace but Krishna embraces contradictions, recommends contra-indications, wraps Contra. One day I will remember poetry, forget sacred geometry.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~

Sad steward slam, an unrequited sociophilic hemlock award for handing a poor man in a wheelchair beside the highway a thin wad of cash while finishing off a butterfinger ice-pop. One five and five ones, looked more impressive than it was. He asked me if I was sure I could afford it. Me and Raz, we thought we might have cheered him up a little, cheaper than a pack of cigarettes and I don’t think he smoked. He had a sign on his lap but I don’t remember what it said. His face said enough, it made a mockery of fakery.

There’s no such thing as charity, finding it is like trying to get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and Krishna shits in my mouth and tells me I’m failing the nutty symbol test, the quotient of intelligence, the college flunkie’s malprops, the isms crowd, the ripple reflections of the bone of my own.

~

How much did magic thighs see, I wonder? Because unlike the poor man whose presence was present enough for my thick ness to respond to, I need a sign. My face can’t be sufficiently read, except by psychics with thick thighs and highly developed observational skills, of coy minds and eyes I can’t see, people who pull on the entrails of my spirit, who demonstrate the existence of said spirit through artful zen reduction, who cue like Toscanini, who read souls like braille. I feel like a virgin with their fingers on my mind, exalted in violation.

The pen is mightier than the penis if you are a limp dick. The notebook is a shield and a prison, and a curtain of imported beads, garishly symmetrical with itself, quaintly resonant with low frequency open-stage guitar strings, drunkenly off-kilter with contemporary fashion, synthetic cornmeal with Kootenay Cabbage and Krishna, your face was – is – more than I could – can – deal with. I’d say you’ll never know but I can’t decide. Hari Krishna. Mother of God.

Dry dry dry mouth, hung out to try but left when the moment didn’t show. Substituted a blond head of hair, the best blond yet, closest to the contemporary ideal and its nuclear fusion with my illusion, just another clipoff glade of shade grazing my glandular profusion of twitchy mistaken misanthropy, spinning a line like a ragged and jagged Rapunzel tied to a loom of doom.

Time to expose my loathed arms, stymie the flow with a charmelized comma, a candycane slashed through a window’s pain, punitive rhymes for our times, check check it.

It makes me feel better to see the Beatles so distant in the rearview mirror. Not too far now to reinvention of the wheel. 300 miles to Salt Lake City.

The hotter the fire

the deeper the sleep.

-

.

The painfully pretty woman next to me, whom I didn’t even really see, craned her neck, along with a few other yokels, to see what the commotion at the back of the plane was all about. A kid with asthma, turned out to be of little consequence. Apathy had been appropriate. So she lost several cool points with me, but I guess, in accordance with the calculus of character, she gained an endearing sloppiness of personality, shook off some of the suffocating charms, soloed more like Omar than Frusciante

*

Atavistic dolce ~

~ Devil’s trill

You may not realize

but your work ethic paid off.

I know. It’s hard not to notice the grapes dangled above my midget body, just above my stretched head. The fruits of Aphrodite were grown to be known.

Satan spawn

hasn’t started his rock band yet.

He’s smart enough to avoid guitars.

His weapon of choice will be the turntable

because there is no future

of music

only the techno-gulag

of 2020,

a clear-eared dystopia.