Sure, I read Bukowski. He’s good. To me he’s good. I got to be in the right mood, though. Some people hate him. He’s a little rough. But he tells it as he sees it. Told it as he saw it.

I was really into Henry Miller in my 30s, maybe 40s. He’s tougher to read. A lot of French in those Tropic books. He had an extensive vocabulary and I had notebooks filled with words that I didn’t know the meaning of. But I learned. I wrote them down and looked them up. Now I forget. I have no idea where the notebooks are.

I was reading Tropic of Capricorn long ago in a motel in northern New Mexico, I think. It may have been Northern Ireland. It was a gray and blue evening, the dusky sky being the color of a human bruise. I don’t know why, or maybe I just don’t remember, but there was a lot of sadness in that night. I think I was supposed to be somewhere, but I wasn’t there. I probably had let someone down again. Despite myself always being let down by the same others.

I had wandered off again all lopsided and loony because I never could find a place I fit into. I was never comfortable in any space but my own, that I made my own, away from the mad world and its defining rules and painful pinchers and suffering structures and caustic cubes and devices and policies and directives and common senses and lanes and boxes and pews. The gods especially, had too many rules.

I was never good at following along with all that. The only thing I was ever good at was being alone and thinking about things, writing thoughts down and looking up at the stars and falling in deep love with a girl from that green Tennessee. But even in that I am rough around the edges. I was born tarnished, perhaps. I always have a tint of unwanted patina upon my living being. I’m like a wormed apple or a brown banana or a stuck turnstile in the subway tubes of the gaseous underworld.

The people of the world. I often cannot stand them. I don’t want to join them and cheer for the idiots. I don’t want to put frauds on pedestals. I don’t want to wave flags in favor of death. I don’t want to buy into the latest and greatest because it really isn’t all that great. Most of the time.

My rocket always comes around from a sweet, lonely trip to the dark side of the moon to see the light in her ocean eyes back down there on blue marble Earth. There’s always that desire to return to love.

I also like going to the cathedrals on Mars. It’s a fantastic getaway. The best is San Sarro on the Boulevard Elliptical Wave. It’s the one right across the sandy, windy, partially upturned square from that famous Martian donut place — The Red Vibrato Hole — they have donuts with zippers on them, edible zippers, candied zippers that melt in your mouth, and you can open the donut up and look inside at all that delicious jam or cream, like having your wife for sex dessert. The Red Vibrato Hole is more of a sweet café than just a regular donut shop there on the Boulevard Elliptical Wave. The coffee is very good, maddening good, and I like to just sit there by a thick window and look out at sandstorms and ancient ruins and the people who wander there are just better. Their priorities on Mars are more aligned with my own thinking. Most of the time.

It’s hard to breathe sometimes, though. The wind, the dust, the cold in the summer, the heat in the winter. The last sip of my coffee is always bittersweet. I must get back to Earth to cook spaghetti and meatballs for the prophets and all their wives. It’s usually something like that that calls me away. I always tip my waiter well. He’s always so nice but has weird eyes that make him look evil. But he’s not evil. His name is Bruce. Sometimes the ones who don’t look evil are the ones you should watch out for. Why are they trying to be so perfect? Is it all just a pleasant disguise? The sheep are so easily won over by the fake pleasantries and promises and chilled buckets of hate.

I saw some angels swimming in space on my return trip. The captain alerted us to their presence and said we should look out the window for a “real treat.” The angels were glowing like Los Angeles and soaring like glittery whales in the ocean on Christmas. They sang a similar song. I turned off my overhead light and rested my head against the ship’s inner hull on a small pillow the color of cranberries. I had a dream of someone shaving and cleaning cobs of corn at the same time. I hope the people who eat that corn don’t confuse shaving cream for butter. I think it would taste like soap. There must have been something weird in that donut to make me think of such odd things. Fucking Bruce. Whatever or not. I have always been weird and misaligned with the real world down there. I hold my breath as we descend.   

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