The ebb and flow of the Jesus crowd washed nostalgic candies into the streets of LipLock, Tejas on a sweltering Sunday school day gone mad. The bacon was loaded. Mosaic scrawlings of jelly looked like sparkling guts on the sourdough. Coffee was but swirling blood fueled by cream and sugar. The roar of the hungry throng was like Madagascar jungle traffic. Everyone was full of the holy spearmint, and everyone was hungry for a hot breakfast at the very same time.
So, we swirled through the stuffed parking lot looking for a space and I just knew it was going to be bad. The porch swings out front cradled the starved corpses of those who had to wait too long. The list of names at the front podium was a mile high and the hostess chick was losing her mind as people moaned and bitched. We held our ground in the lobby, but it was tough. I tried to examine a sack of maple nut goodies but dames and dudes with urinary urges kept bumping into me.
“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me …”
How it dinged and donged in my throbbing head. It was like riding a stream train by clinging to the under belly. Too many people. Not enough space.
And that is what it is like down here in LipLock, Tejas. The infrastructure is flawed. The streets are designed to encourage collisions. It’s a great bulging bubble all steaming and hot and there’s nothing to do but eat, eat, eat … at Cracker Barrel, on a Sunday morn after worshipping super fresh Bog and all his hip angels. I had never seen a crowd like that squeezed into such a mediocre joint. How could anyone expect a fine dining experience amid so much chaos? Shove them in. Take their money. Clear them out.
Our one-star waiter was a lanky and shaky fellow who could barely keep up with the maddening buzz all around him. He managed to pour a few cups of decent joe but brought us limp bacon and not enough coffee cream and no jelly for the biscuits and I felt bad for the dude as we piled more and more demands upon him, but hell, it was his job. But did he deserve to have to eke out some paltry living this way? Does anyone? It all seems so futile and petty and yet Big Biz tries to fake us out with the corporate propaganda and the sterile smiles of robotic clerkies in glossy advertisements. It’s not real. None of it’s real. Yet we buy it, and we pay for it time and time and time again until our lives are completely absorbed and then wrung out by the pretty-polly machine. And it’s accepted as the social norm by the big bugged-out mass audience riding around in bumper cars, staring at smart phones, listening to factory-farmed crap music. It’s brain stew with no meat and no hearty gravy. We live in a watered-down world where the stooges flock like fire ants to pay for the privilege of emptiness in a vacuum of noise.
The pumping, screaming arteries of the static cling are unnatural. I think I would prefer to dine in the pines with only the sounds of the wind and the water and the wine, sans the flaring of the human crack pipe. And so, it goes no matter where one goes – east, west, north or south – the same strip mall mentality all lined up for the gibbons to feed. It’s all so lacking character, so lacking old-world charm, this architecture of capitalism, boxes stuffed with crap that we just can’t live without. We work all week to spend the weekends spending wages on Chinese goods packed into big metal boxes with drab neon signs and bullshit slogans – the flame thrower fluorescents sunburning us with sacrificial radiation, to crack our knees and send us down to bow to the almighty escapade of enslavement.
They advertise perfection but deliver the exact opposite.
this angel skull of Harlem doesn’t sing or sink like the wind. it’s laundry day in Manitowoc, the MAT is down by the old Navy ship resting in its watery grave and the sky and the rain is so damn gray and sad as I hoist canvas bag over shoulder like some old-time dirty clothes beatnik hobo with wrinkled clothes and wrinkled charms. cigarette smoke burns the eyes at the frantic cross walk, the digital intersection and all those mod bods in the cars have dingy faces glued to smart ass phones. you got to watch the itch they have in their eyes, or they will just run you down. you got to be defensive at all times, a defensive posture and mind that is. no one pays attention except me. some lady comes up to the cross walk with some kid and she gets mean when smoke trails into her face then swirls around her balding child with the bad cough. she talks about asthma or some other respiratory illness and berates me for fogging up the public spaces. she says something about going off by myself to suck poison. maybe over there, she points, a lone picnic table beneath a low branch of a big old pine tree. sit there and suck on that thing is what she says. I answered with a big ol’ I was here first … and she huffed and the light changed and I stepped out into the street and nearly got hit by a car but they slammed on their brakes at the very last last last second and I did not die but instead went to the lone picnic table like that mothering broad said and sat there by myself and watched the dumb world be all mindless and beautiful even so and I just stayed there for a very long time and in the very background I could hear the crashing of the lake waves against the not too distant shore and it made my belly feel real lonely and then it was made worse when the bell tower of some ornate stone church a couple of blocks away started tolling away too and the lonely belly feeling started to feel even lonelier and then it was the dropping sun cracking through the clouds that added to the whole mix of lonely sadness, an Americana downtown’s brick and glass in sunwash light now. that gutty loneliness sweeping me up and getting me all choked up. it was all too lonely to sit still and think about it. I moved on, my bleached canvas laundry tote slung over my shoulder, into a rainbow all wet and smelling like gasoline as a magpie ate paint chips.
It was somewhere between Q-Town and the LA basin of all that glitters and orange grove cathedrals that there came the great snow and I was forced to shut down in some Arizona town— I was in between lives, feverishly dodging the corruption of compassion that come raining down all over the world like a meteor shower, and I watch them soar through the sky and hit the snow land with a restless thud, they vaporize, we sterilize … every sense known to the jungleland juke joint spread all haywire on fire through the spires piercing the all heaven sense bandage bowl of God’s finely-bleached robe.
I sat out by the pool in my parka at The Orange Motel watching the bar maiden get ice for my drinks from the ground. She was still wearing shorts and her legs were turning blue as she walked over to me carrying a tall glass and a snow shovel. She passed me peacock periwinkle strangulation and I asked her to clean the pool, for I wanted to take a polar dip before 6 and when the news came on to spill all that bloodied guts on the monitor screen, so it seems, always screams and rarely a tender hug at the tender claw ripping the sky wide open and screaming for a cleaner to vacuum the golden halls where I walk with purpose, as the world spins so recklessly, so topsy-turvy beneath a linen-scented sky blanket, and gas blue demon dryer chewing on the laundry in some long-lost, perfect Wisconsin town.
On the memory ship … every drip of her laugh as we tossed the witch puppet skyward and to the outer cast regions of all mind space lest we forget county fair good times and smells ripping through like vibrant magnets sucking on the carnival lights, of night, of altitude flight, harmonious vapors all twisted in glorious gut roar, and the corn smells like machine, dive deep down deep blue baby blonde beneath the tree, you smell like Arabic perfumed, bleached cotton, and I colorize every breath you take beneath this butter-yellow moon, beneath the old pine in the backwoods of grandma’s joint, I was honking for you late into the night like mad cap Harpo Marx, going around in circles and circles, sucking the eclipse like a drag stone, hoping you would fall forth from your window like a mannequin come to life, to light a fire to the day, to burn deep down together in the brown hut on the hill, that place that smelled of sour wood and inky red geraniums, my brother in his death suit, eating potatoes all alone in the corner, he already knew, God would punch his lights out all too soon, with drugs fantastic ferocious and with the tortuous scrape of a metal spoon.
Monsoon mind as I dig into the ice bin flickering in the outer hall of The Orange Motel. TV bullshit is blurping through the cinder-block, comatose, American fuck night walls … down the cascading lighted halls, the yellow puncture of deep night, the road raging right over there, the snow falling like chandelier light, the color of milk and tequila all spit out on the falls, like pastoral glitter bombs raging shoulder to shoulder with sun flares in the soul of all she rips from the veins, brother, brother, brother … do you remember the orange kitchen floor and Daddy doo smoking Kent fags at the supper table? Do you remember all that up in Heaven as I sway and sweat in The Orange Motel in some Arizona glow on the highway between here and there and ever after?
Locked in room and thinking about how disappointed I was that the sick ass fish joint Smith Bros in the Port Washington had somehow collapsed and shut down on that dreary day I arrived under that electric sun to watch the waves crash and roll … how I so looked forward to the perch, the fish sandwich all dangled up in my mind like fat ass tattoos and circular taboos wailing mad at the peaceful street at Beach City where I once held your hand and collapsed to the beat of your beautiful heart … all static and mad now down the river head where I breathe alone in room 6 foot 12 and all the walls look the same and it’s all caged corporate heat up in here … knock, knock, four-o-clock … “I’m afraid all the highways are closed, even so you wish to float away, to LA.”
Static fissures burn a hole in the roof of my mouth as Parka Pam comes pounding on the door … “Sorry love, no time for the old in-out, I’ve just come to wish Mars good luck in its search for extraterrestrial life!”
And so I want to keep going, but it’s Canadian orange vinegar that’s got my head all knotted up and thinking about razor-sharp love, you know, the kind that cuts you and leaves a trail of blood behind you as you walk home to step into the empty flat and you can think of nothing else to do but turn on the stereo really loud to chase all the heartbroken voices away, back to the clouds, back to the period of time where indigo beauty at dawn in the radiation void desert wasn’t so beautiful after all … but you shake it from your head, yet she does not swim to the other side of the ocean, but she lingers, like all scent exploded, forever in the air, forever, everywhere.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 