And what they call reformation.

Jesse S. Mitchell

previous part, The Laundromat , here

At first he seemed like Johnny Rotten.  Blasting holes in everything.  every time he spoke.  He would open his mouth not like a cannon but like a handgun, two arms like machete.  It was impossible.  You couldn’t write words around him, nothing fit, every one of them burst into tiny syllables.  A mess.   And unacceptable.  I had to let him go.  So, he is out there free now. Sorry really, but you know characters never die, law of conservation of matter and energy and all of that.   And I can’t keep them all around, real people are dying everyday and my brain just aches.
My um
My…
It rips your brain apart.
But bravery, bray-ver-reee.
The only thing ever lacking to anyone when they endeavor to take up letters, is a kind of bravery.  A sick masochistic courage like a gruesome curiosity, a willingness to poke your fingers into the deepest, goriest wounds.
That is what is lacking, lacking…that ole courage.  Courage and coldness but vulnerability too and long sight.  Good eyes and ears and a strong back.    
But I left him with the hair, close to the head almost shaved  but thick and bright red.  And with the eyes, big and expressive, like things that are alive.  Still alive… And with the slight but grimacing slouch to his shoulders.
Other than that, nothing the same.  A new person is coming.  They have collided.  And eventually they will fuse together like stars or atoms or galaxies in space and I’m just watching now for the explosion.  That explosion. When that happens, we will begin.
Not only, not only have I seen the shadows fall but I have watched them move.  The minuscule moment to moment movement, how they grow and shift from side to side and then die away.  I’ve studied them.  I know the importance of an hour of a day.  How we change as the hours decay and decline and go sliding away.  I know the differences.
We are naturalistic things.  Being a part of nature.  We let the seasons change us.  Seasons ghost me, they haunt my every thought.  Because I know, I know, I know that you are never closer to the worst greyest day of deep winter than on the high July summer after noon.  Right below you, beneath you, looking right back at you.  Every moment of your life is this way.  And what is more is that most of it is dictated by ancient primitive hormonal traits that only served to mark out zones of dominance, watering holes, toilet areas.  That sort of thing. You are mostly in control of nothing.  But everyone knows this, everyone feels it, the weightlessness behind your knees, the paranoia, so on with the runt.  Tusks to the ground.
A parsec from cosmic annihilation, a second away from respiratory failure, glimmer and then fade.  Now we are all gone.  Dead.
But I’ve gone berserk, left out in the sun too long.  Warped mind.  I don’t see straight.  Spent too long trying to tying together loose fragments, arms and legs, souls, too long cobbling men and women alive, all in my imagination. Brain as factory.   How industrious.  I mean, I can’t look down at my hands and not see a hundred different hands of hundred different arms, arms of a hundred different people.  People who all swung those arms for a million different reasons, they all need those hands of a million different reasons.     So, you lose your mind.
and
God is dead.  Fuck rock and roll.  Hold heaven for ransom.  Let it rain razor blades, screaming Jay Hawkins, Greta Garbo movies.  It’s the end.
And that is what it becomes a long rolling gasping rambling monologue speech given to yourself in the  mirror, with all the soap scum and speckles of toothpaste and shower fog.
But I would scatter it all to the winds, every bit, every bacchanal, every pandemic.  Every avenue, every Seagram building, every drug addiction, every war, every single last ugly festering word of it, I would scatter it all, civilization to the winds…
And let it blow away…
Lost
Hidden deep whenever it came to lay.
Whatever finds it, can keep it.
Forever and ever and ever and ever.
Or I take them from dreams, odd people with odd characteristics, little ticks and seemingly endless possibilities.  I take them whole cloth or bits and pieces from out of my slippery surreal slumbering imagination.  Souls who don’t belong anywhere, surrounded by events that should never happen, days that never should take place, wasted energies, empty hours filled with bizarre atonal moments.  Dead eyed dreaming, hands up to heaven, begging.
Or I make them wish for perfection, lust after it, I make them want things and that is how they are defined.
And then I disappoint them.
Or I make them believe they are Paul Newman, Steve McQueen. St. Augustine.
And then I disappoint them.
I take that away from them, I make them sinners and then force them to be selfless, or the any other way around.
If I had my way, I would find them, hidden away in my mind, and let them live.  Let them develop any way that the spirit moved them.  But that is not a possibility.  There are wild other compulsions at work.  Things must happen.  A kissing door between heart and head, a swinging pendulum that mark offs the rapid distinctions amid living and dead.
That is how I know I am alive,
The most alive.
And then I have to give him a villain.   Or a foil.  Or a sounding board.  An accomplice.
Some shogunate  sorceress, a fascist femme fatal.  Or maybe he’s the assassin.  Maybe he is a scoundrel.
And probably it is all my fault, beyond their control, for putting them in such situations.
Lift an eyebrow.  Take note of the time.
Because to be alive is to be full of possibilities.    Can’t commit to anything yet, you have to let thoughts just happen.   You can’t force it.
And you have to find some place for them and everything to exist.  Someplace real?  Too many details.  Someplace imaginary?  Too few.  But someplace else.  You have to build some other empire, new but completely out of old lumber, old brick.  You have to recognize it but it has to surprise you.  You have to know it by the creaks of the floor but still lose your way through the halls.
Or I take them from me, little pieces I rip away and roll between my fingers until pliable, like clay.  I have had no shortage of exposure to strong personalities, iron wills, awful abominable losers.  Lots of material.
And everything is like me, all mixed up, everything is loud, a lot of pushing and shoving, swinging legs, tapping feet, everything goes wild every minute on the minute, chaos but scheduled chaos.  Everything is always almost out of control, almost.  A spinning top.  A whirlwind.
Pull your balaclava down, more soul robbing to do, sit straight up and imagine.  Revolutionary.  Radical orphan words begging in the back of my mind to be written, something just to be uttered.  Silence is absorption of all the sound, like black devours light, to speak a single word is to make a tiny glint along the horizon-sea.  Watch the waves come up over it and drown it out, the dragon eats it, but you  saw it, you heard it, that slight momentary crackle, that lightning flash.  Wait.  Don’t think.  Wait for the effects.
Or I make them born pure animal beasts, milk-fed, all covered in hairs, just like me, just like everyone.
And then if they are monsters, it’s on their time.

The Laundromat as reading library for Nihilism and other personally pessimistic philosophies (or Who Will Lead the Charge? Not me).

Jesse S. Mitchell

first part, About the birds in the Air, here

Don’t break rank.
William Saroyan and Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf all sitting stacked on my desk.
I had to go to the Laundromat yesterday.  I am fairly sure that early trips to the Laundromat made me a nihilist.  All that bright white light digging into your skin, trying to eat out your eyeballs.  All those bleached rebleached chipped white vinyl tiles all stacked together on the floor with thick black lines in between, all running one way and then another until its all wavy and blurry, like forest fire and you lose your mind.  And in the front of the building a long big window with a elongated thick crack all through it.  Horizontally.  The crack was thick because the glass was thick and the very broken edge was clearly visible both top and bottom and you could see inside it a perfect reflection of everything happening inside the Laundromat and also everything outside the window, overlaid and hazy and flipped upside down, both ways, facing each other.  A provocative sight to a sensitive sort.  It is just this kind of thing that will make a person lose all faith in humankind. It sucks the soul away.
Yesterday, there was a new addition to further deepen the already sophisticated gloom and wretchedness of the place.  A television.  Not only a little grey box of blathering mercantile fuzz but a big one, a flat one, a loud one.  Loud enough to drown down even the mechanical hum of the tumbling dryer drums.  Some recklessness, some party political broadcast gone twisted and left to linger too long.  The kind of thing sensible minds are being made to endure all over this world since everything became merchandizing.  We got a file on you.   Know how you shop, how you vote.
I swear I heard a voice utter condemnation for every human ill, snake oilers, traveling circus tent preachers…, ears all piqued, all jealous.   Parasites.  I clearly heard that one.  I love the old chestnuts.  The swastika memories of these sad heathens that choke and surge down our streets, run long, they do…
It’s a fabulist’s  world anyway.  No one ever learns a thing, gets a punch line.
Like in front of the Laundromat, on the other side of a spiraling curve of the oddly circular road  between them stands a small globular park. Not a playing, bring the kids, kind of park, but one with neat lanes and short tasteful markers and one gigantic statue of a miner.  A coal miner in fact.  The major occupation of this area when it was still a job.  It is still around, in bits.  It is basically slavery is what it is…but not to the terrible limits, not yet.
But this is where I get off the boat.  This is where humanity and I usually part ways.  Because to most people, especially locals, it is some spot of at least half-hearted reverence and a little bit of pride.  To me, it is definitely in the running for one of the most legitimately depressing places of all the Earth.
You can walk up the sidewalks and paths and almost stand directly in the center. Past the scrubby boxwoods and quasi-feral rosebushes planted beneath the statue base and get yourself quite nearly smack dab in the middle, pause for a breath and look all around you, up, down, everywhere.
   But what does that tell you?  You are at the center of the universe?  Your universe?
Mostly.
And to most people who ever lay eyes on it.
How awful.
I have no pride in that at all.
I have no idea for sure where I was when I first realized I was all alone.  We are all alone.  I could have been on the cloudy banks of Iona or Skye, the ocean water mere inches from my feet, gray fog rolling over in billows.  Soundless.  On some solitary stroll when I first looked up and observed the heavens and noticed they were naked, devoid of any divine reflection.
I could have been there, quantum physically, but I wasn’t, never have been.  And a good thing too, I think it would’ve killed me, pulled me out of myself and left me like a fish to drown in the unfriendly thin air.  But instead when that realization came to me, I was surrounded by family and friends, in the normal course of my daily life.  This is the way such things should happen.  Such shocks to the system must be singular and must be buffered by stiff reassurance.  
It is also not wise to deal with life alone.  And I do not.  I have a large family.  A wife. Children.  All of them better and more talented than me.  More of that old time brilliance, glorious.   But far from threatening me, it relaxes me, relieves me.  I am free to be dimwitted to the very end, released.  Neil Innis singing in the background, playing the piano.
One should not look at life alone.  And one should not look at life from any bizarre angles or from afar. Not from top or from the bottom or sideways, glancing.  If you cannot look at life straight on, full on in the face, best not to look at it at all, keep your eyes off it.  Let it pass, like water, don’t bother.  Don’t make a splash or a sound.  Go your whole existence without, devoid of it.  That is if you can, if you’re lucky.
But there is so little life at all to see anymore.  The chance of a set of eyes mistakenly dooming themselves to a subsistence of introspection and insight is so mind bogglingly slight, so small, it is safe to cast about stares anywhere.  But be wary, lest you catch the old bugs of compassion or selflessness, both still communicable by way of hearing or reading.  Not that anyone listens, not that there is anything to read.
But it’s not so bad.  We are all alone together.  We sympathize.  We are in unison.  A lonely herd of ennui-beasts, blood red lips and weepy eyes, two long hands full of fingers slipping and probing into the surrounding everywhere darkness.  Shoulder to shoulder with each other.  We should understand.  We should.
I mean
Imagine trying to be a human being in this world today and all the multitudinous problems this age brings.  But you don’t have to imagine them, you live them, so just recognize them.  And recognition of what it means to be a living thing in a living world and empathy for its troubles, is all it takes to be a human being.
But like nothing more than zombies we wander over the surface of the earth, a cloud of caffeine, amphetamines, and television fumes.  Eyes eaten out by eagles.  Blind.  Groping.  Clumsy with perception and deficient of compassion.  We tear at each other.      
Imagine a thin magnetic film stretched over the surface of a tumultuous planet, pulled tight and held between Heaven and hell or between earth and sky, a translucent membrane, a continuous cloth, all woven together, a vast human field…of atoms and molecules, made of taste bids and finger tips, of the bottoms of feet and the corners of lips.  Just one thing, here we are, just one thing, a human race.
You can’t.  No one can.  We aren’t wired that way.  Not yet anyway.  We struggle and we grind our gears, the best of us even.  But something is amiss. Because as music is just one fire and each note a flare or spark, we too are just one ocean.  But it is tumultuous now, our sea.  That is what troubles me.  One note off and the fire flickers out of control or dies away.  
But enough about that.  In this window with the broken glass, the thick crystalline split makes a clear horizon but veers up into the high left and ends at the top of the corner.  And in that corner a spider had made a web, the web had collected all the sunlight, yellows and reds, like dewdrops and was reflected first in the top edge of the crack, reversed and then in the bottom, right side round but with a million strings of silk making a million lines and glares of refracted light buzzing over both images, everything tied together.  I saw that yesterday.
This is where I keep my fire-eyes.  I have them.  I can use them, see with them.
I use them for discerning.
Distinguishing
Between right and wrong
Up and down
Left and right
Life from death.
I coil my fingers together in my lap and rock slightly in my chair remembering the sensation.
But recollection of sensation is not creating, is not writing...  
But it is a start, a solid start.
And imagine yet, me, in the act of creation, having to put my hands in all of that, make something of it, pull something out of it.  Into the swarming midst of it, the Jungian sub-consciousness, like diver bird and come out with a pebble, a rock.  And build on it.
That’s how it is done.  It is an exhaustive process.  An introspective one.  It is a rookie mistake to take too much, or choose the wrong things.  To make the stories too dark, the setting too tragic, the characters too complex.  Nothing is that interesting, so it won’t be real, and if it isn’t real, no one will believe it.  If it isn’t believable, it isn’t read.
So it is best to only scan the surface.  Not trouble the water too terribly, make only the slightest of ripples, observe them out the corners of your eyes, unassuming.  But don’t be boring.  It is just as easy to make a world so perfect and pure, so blue, you give in to all manners of lunacy.  Nothing ever bites back, there is nothing to fight back, everything is crystal clear.
It never ends.
I could have been in the Pampas grasses or on the Okavango or in Muscat under a hundred thousand layers of sky and atmosphere a tiny dusty mite-covered speck of life begging to reflect some light back to some unseen, unblinking eye.   Like a meteor falling out the sky, a rough collection of skin and bone thrown down to earth all alone, left to realize I was on my own.
I could have been anywhere.  I could have been anyone in all of space and time.
I can’t remember where I was when I first knew that I was it, the end, you and me, us, that’s it.  All alone.
But more than likely I was in a Laundromat.

About the Birds in the Air

Jesse S. Mitchell

Nothing but the sounds of birds.
Nothing but the buzzing of the bees.

The glimmer glint of rebel-light, like steel in the sun.

The love of collapsing buildings
    And wayward planets that can support no life.
Escaping over sturdy fences into fields so close to barrenness
    That they are called barren, and you can see their barrenness
They are bare-exposed in their nakedness
Worthless except for the space.
The space that they inhabit.

But that is revolutionary
Living in full lux of time.
And when it is Sao Paulo or Sarajevo when we die
Vacant, all cauldron-eyed deep and hollow,
Nothing but a bunch of husk.
And me, as much as you, an uninvited guest,
I will say, the world has begun to turn without us.
Has begun to turn without us.

About the birds in the air…
Horseflies in a cluster on the screen. These are savage times.  It makes me wonder how there are so many of them, woven together, in insectual bunches, their little black legs twisted in with the vinyl string mesh of the storm door window.  It is a marvel to me that anything so small and soft and hopeless survives.  The secret is in their power of flight, or in their numbers, maybe their tenacity…
They usually only congregate like this before a storm.  They get all worked up together and swarm around in clouds.  And they bite.  Suck blood from cattle and horses and people.  Vampiric.  
Something about the change in barometric pressure or the humidity, incites them, drives them to this unholy madness.
The air before a storm is particularly sharp, very dynamic and I find that I myself am drawn to it.  I like to go out into it, walk around.  Feel the dark grey change of mist overhead, feel the deep dampening of the air around me, immersed.  
It is really the approach that is the magic.  For a while anything could happen, the sky could become anything, electricity everywhere, there is potential.  There is an energetic kind of potential.  And potential is the best thing ever.  The most alive thing ever.
A real thing.
And then the storm finally breaks, tears open that long grey sheet of heaven and bursts out.  The rain starts to fall, stinging and delicate at first., but it tires quickly and soon the long lethargic drops begin to splatter and drip over everything and all is set and all the questions answered.  This is the way things are going to be…and we all sink a little bit further down into the forgetful mud. 
The horseflies scatter.
And then an end comes to even that, and the bugs and flies flutter around, all funeral dirges and picking up the pieces.  But soon even all this woefulness ceases and the old moods return and cicadas chant out their mating hum and crickets and spiders nervously rub their legs.
The air gets thin again, lean and empty and clear as glass.  When all the blue finally fades back in, the birds return and begin circling and streaking, each depending on the breed and temperament.   
The sounds of the street begin to pop back out, more prominent now after the low droning hiss of rain.  The air conditioner kicks on, makes a clank in the vents and sends up the cold.  It isn’t really all that hot yet but the A/C unit is old and easily confused by the changes in humidity and evaporation.  A girl rides by on a bicycle, a slow repetitive squeak. Her hair, Scandinavian-straight, picks up the wind a bit as she passes a creeping police car and turns the corner.  She turns onto the road that leads to the western part of town, where they keep the industrial and commercial places. The few factories, a couple of mostly empty professional complexes, the stores, the green behind the community college where they are setting up an outside pavilion for a Tuesday Weld film fest, and finally the lake.  The lake is almost totally round.  And large.  And it was almost always glass-still.  Nothing disturbs the surface.  
The lake was also the spot where the last aboriginal peoples of this area stood some land for the final time and were then summarily slaughtered.  Gunned down and left to rot.  That blood is still there, as particularly iron rich soil that supports some of the tallest and sweetest water flowers and grasses anywhere.
The lake is now  a popular local week-end and holiday recreational area.  They have picnic shelters and camper hook-ups and extremely filthy trash cans chained to iron poles stuck in the ground, as if they were in some danger of being taken.  
The girl is most likely heading there.
It is depressing the way summer returns to the day after a storm.  It is a kind of boring-heaviness, a weight, a obnoxious mass, a crammed-wet-paper-bag-full kind of weight. A nuclear radiating kind of warm weight.  It is warm but a false warm.  Everything is too bright.  Everything is trying too hard.  But we’ll get over it. 
I wish I could write a book with a photo of Simone de Beauvoir on the cover.  I have no such book in mind.  I don’t even know what it could be about, could be about anything really, I just want to write something that would justify the use of such imagery.  
I look out the door for some sign of the horseflies.  I watch a few cars roll down the street.  Trees move slightly.  People getting their mail.  I lose focus.
These are the hot blasts of civilization that come creeping into my mind.  Totally unprovoked, I swear.  Uninvited.  Unwelcome.  And the biggest part of everyone of my days is spent running around this house and this life in general, sealing up all the cracks and patching all the holes.  But there is always that little draft.  I must avoid it.  
Here is my place in time.  How depressing.  So here I stand, my arms by my side, trapped by time, by gravity, by circumstances beyond my control, by science, by wild random science.  By events.  Best to get used to it.  Best to put the paper down and switch off the television.  Wait it out. 
I am a hurricane.  A hurricane is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘a strong violent wind of with at least level 12 Beaufort scale force’ and the word comes from the Taino word for their god of the storms, Hurakan.  But that’s me, a swirling mass of appendages, mad tentacles of anxiety drunk numb fingers and toes, a clumsy destructive mess.  With an extremely calm core.  Not a thing moves, total stillness.
I am also a misanthrope.  I do not like people.  I think what I dislike most about them is their laziness.  I don’t mean physical laziness, I don’t care how many bales you tote, or hours in your day, I don’t give a shit about so-called ’work’.  I mean, our all over laziness.  How we allow the awfulness of this world to persist and even increase.  How we still perpetuate evil and violence on each other.  How we continue to allow some to go without and how we permit so many to die.  All before our very eyes.  
If I ever state this, I usually hear the old line ’but we don’t know any better. ’  But we do.  Have you ever  read a book, watched a film, studied religion, mythology?  We know exactly how to be.  The human story is beautiful.  It is rich and warm and so full of mercy and advancement, it draws even the iron tear.  There is such a promise, such a possibility of what our future could be, as to be so wonderful that it reduce any legend of heaven or hell a dull glint lost in the overgrown weeds.  The end.  We could be so much, it courses through our blood, it invades our imaginations (obliviously) , we breathe its air…but we won’t do it.
But we won’t do it.
And we will blame it on something else.
And we will avoid it and we won’t even talk about it and we will try to never ever think about it
And we certainly won’t look at it or deal with it.
But me either.  I’m not better. I’m no better.
Robert Heinlein said that ‘Sin lies only in the harming of others unnecessarily and all other sins are invented nonsense’.  Yes.  I agree with that.  But we won’t even follow just that one rule.  We cannot stop ourselves.  All we really need do, is never intentionally or  needlessly harm another living thing and we would be golden.  Humankind I could love you again.  I could live side by side with you again.  I could write your stories again.  I would grant you any reputation you wished.  Because we all want reputations.  Saviors. Heroes.  Don’t speak ill of the dead.  Dictators holding whole herds of scholars, dacha bound and restless, with cold gun pressed to warm throat, all to rewrite a little history.  Who is a liberator?  Who is an oppressor?  No one goes to the grave a villain.  
Just don’t kill.  Just don’t maim.  Don’t torture.  And don’t let it happen.  Let us move on.  Move us on.  Be happy.  Let everyone born on your watch go to the grave in their natural time and in one piece.  And I will grant you any reputation you desire.  Go out under the stars and breathe your saintly hymns to the moon.  Into churches or alleyways or caves or temples and do your things, I do not care.
But I’m no better of course, of course of course, of course I’m no better either. 
I’m no better.
I need to get myself together.
Walk into the other room, turn the computer on, pull open all the curtains. Let a lot of sunlight in.  oddly enough as reclusive as I am, I cannot stand the blinds drawn. I must have the sun. Electric lights are hideous yellow and they buzz.  I can hear the noise everywhere.  I feel it.  Echoing around inside my bony porous skull-head.  It is unnerving.  It reminds me of my cadaverous nature.  I am just a dead body tossed on earth alone for long enough for me to realize it on my own.  
I sit down to type.  I wait.  I think in my mind of my characters.  I visualize them.  I put them in situations and I wait.  I wait for them to react, to respond and when they do, I smile because their reply pleases me.  But then it does not.  Because it is not real.  They have done what I wished them to do and not what they would have done.  It is not honest.  
My universe is filled with deep thinking individuals in so far as their deep thoughts could only be as deep as mine, with all my limitations but then again, within my world, my thoughts are the deepest thoughts that can be thought.  Yes, they are conscientious, profound beings.  And they are hardly never wrong.  They kill me.  
You may say ’why bother?  What from Swann’s Way to Infinite Jest, there is nothing left to say in Modern literature.’  You many say that, and I might even agree.  But I don’t think we are still in the ‘Modern’, ‘post-Modern’, ‘Contemporary’ days.  That all ready happened and our out right refusal to move on is one of the biggest causes our recent malfunctions. 
    And then come those moments of perfect stillness.  Too introspective, pushing the brain too far. And our eyes go empty blank and it pours over you like water threatening to drown.  But you don’t, you hover on the verge of breathlessness and compulsion.  Compulsion to gasp for air.  We realize we are alive, we are life, this is life…
And we seem insignificant and we seem sad and we seem lost.  But we get over it, as is our nature, our nature is to survive, to surmount.  We get over it and we move to the next phase, pure delirium.  We shake overtaken with joy and we realize we are alive, we are life, all of this is life and everything is beautiful and wonderful no matter who you are or what you believe.  And there is where the real madness lies, because as it is beautiful and grand, it is also so fleeting and it is so quick and  the rapture pulls away from you, and you find yourself unable to stand it, the quick obliteration and the fading of all the light.
My fingers in front of me, all flesh and bone.  They tremble.  They shake.  
It is dangerous to think of characters this way.  
And we go rampaging towards an end.
And we go rampaging…
The birds swoop between the power lines outside the house and go streaming up over the neighbor’s roof.  

And the horseflies buzz hover in mid-air with the blood lust on their lips.   

Chicagospell (part 3 1/2)

Jesse S. Mitchell

part 3 here

As they walk down the aisle, shimmering-appearing next to them, on the right and on the left, transparent images of people start to appear.  Charlie looks over at them, holographic ghosts, automatons moving stiffly. Every set of thin, translucent eyeballs staring back at him and the cigar man as they pass.
As they walk down the aisle, shimmering-appearing next to them, on the right and on the left, transparent images of people start to appear.  Charlie looks over at them, holographic ghosts, automatons moving stiffly. All of them dressed in rags and torn clothes, dirty faces, stained, cracked hands, a hundred years of sun ruined skin stretched tight across their faces. Every set of thin, translucent eyeballs staring back at him and the cigar man as they pass.
Charlie feels his skin goose pimple up, a frown comes across his face, creeped out.
He shakes his head.
“Look at these people.”  He blurts out.
The cigar smoking looks over his shoulder and shrugs.
“You see, I never wanted to be these people.  A herd of mediocrity and feebleness, a bunch of hog butchers and ditch diggers, sans-culottes.  And don’t think they don’t have a taste for blood.  Oh no, don’t ever fail to take these monsters seriously, they’ll gut you right open.  Yeah.  But, don’t think I don’t sympathize.  I have no love for their enemies…some of their enemies, the rich, the cowardly wealth-mongers, the thirsty beyond any satiation.  But also, they hate the talented, the gifted, the new, the novel.  Slit your throat for showing up any of their deficiencies.  I grew up in a trailer park.  I did.  I really did.  I know this life.  I know these people.  They will steal the blood from your veins, the copper from your wires, the breath from your life, diminish their own kind, too frightened to lash out at real villains, too confused to see real life.  Wife-beaters, child-abusers, time-wasters.  This place makes me sad, churches always do, churches, temples, mosques, jails, joke shops.”
Charlie runs his hands over the dark red-brown wood of the pews.  Smooth, takes his hand up and looks over his fingertips, they are clean, impeccable the care people take to care for their sacred places.
“If only everyone of us was considered so special, so sacred.  What if every moment of every life was held so holy.  What would be different?  What would be so safeguarded?  What if we could accept what we saw with our own eyes as being so remarkable as the mythical things dreamt of by others and then related to our young ears by means of poetry…and if not poetry than by guile?”
“A different world.” a uniformed man barely says.
“Ah! So you can speak.” Charlie shouts
“A different time.”
“Hmm.  And I suppose you will tell me something about faith, faith in man, and love, and beauty, and hope and all the rest.  But I wouldn‘t waste my breath, you know.  Not that I don‘t see the benefit in that whole ball of bullshit.  Give a person a light at the end of a tunnel and they will keep chugging on.  A little bit of hope for something better some far off maybe someday, and as the years go by, and pile up all skeletal and bleached, they will smile on and on, their little pitiful face turned towards the sun, the setting, always setting sun.  Heaven makes good slaves, peace and hope and wild stories of charity and compassion makes good slaves.  Something to work towards, something to look forward to, and then you don‘t notice the shit around your waist, the rope around your neck.  I can‘t see why people can‘t ever just see the world like the Vikings?  Those people had the right way of looking at things, everything was going to end eventually, it was all going to come crumbing down, the world was going to end and everything you ever knew or love was going to crumble with it.  Good was not going to win.  But, but that wasn’t going to be for some time, better get your livin’ in, get the good times now, and even heaven, if you make there, warrior or saint, even heaven was in danger of total collapse, best get it all in while you can.  Now, that is a healthy philosophy for life. ”
The ragged ghosts flicker faintly, static, broken-breath, like bad TV reception, they start to disappear leaving the inside of the cathedral empty and quiet.  Charlie’s footsteps echo, sound like bomb dropping, going off.  Startled by the new reverberation, he steps gingerly, trying to avoid the little explosions.
“Look, put your arms out.  You can feel it all around you.  We two, you and me, whoever you are, whatever you happen to look like when I look back up and see you, whatever vision, imaginary or hallucinatory, real  practical living seeing breathing whatever, just listen to me.  You and I, put your arms out next to mine, here we stand on the absolute edge of all creation.  Standing, like gritting teeth, clinched fists, bated breath, chest-deep on the very cusp of the penultimate crest, the highest water mark of the nearest everything, the top of the wave of time.  Here we are, in the actual present, real time, real life, we are here, now, right now.  But are we crashing forward?  Or are we ebbing away?  Coming in on the tide, frothy surf, or relaxing, recoiling back under the cold currents?  Folding back into all the ocean that has come before us, carried us here?”
Charlie stand still for a second or more, a slight sly smile on his face, his eyes closed, a serenity blooming over his face, happy with himself, with his questioning mind.  The look fades, his face melts back to a acerbic scowl.  He waves his hand in front of his face.
“But forget it, I’m an old man now or at least old enough to know better, know better.  Yes, know better, know that I roll away with the peaks and the troughs, the deep way down, the deep red earth.  Made from dirt, deposited on the shore, stood up, strong legs, lived a life…sort of, did my time, sun come bleach my bones, birds come pick my flesh, grow new, grow new.  Greek ironic punishments.  Humph, but that’s life, an ironic twist on a violent birth, a slow wither.”
“We go forward as far as we dare, at whatever speed we choose.”
“Do we?  You put this on me, then?  But what have I been saying?  That I even wished to go further?  No, if you had been listening this whole time, you’d know, I’ve been sounding the retreat for sometime now.  Going to get away, put in my feelers, and try to avoid the disturbing air, the breeze, the flow.  Be an internal creature from here on out, a turtle, a snail, deep inside my shell, tired of cherry, tired of rice, tired of this whole world.  That‘s Basho.  That‘s the true hermit call.”

(The Bee-Skin Flint/Homusubi) Jubilee

Jesse S. Mitchell

Izanagi & Izanami 

Coming over the mountains
The wild animals cross over into our blood stream
Spark (tungsten, type b)
Electric lighting up our eyes.
Flash.
Driving us crazy from the bottoms of our humid lungs
To the very tips of our hair.
We burst
We burst into flame.
We glimmer, alive.

This is how I remember being born.

this poem is from 47 Venezuela which can be downloaded in its entirety (for free!) here, along with many other great chapbooks.  Check them out.  

Warwick Slavik isn’t the center of the Universe

Jesse S. Mitchell

The rain started suddenly and it began to end as abruptly, coming down in odd streaks and rivulets.   Precipitation as ribaldry, Deluge as mockery, the concrete could not absorb it, it just rushed and washed this way and that, aimless, in limbo.  The taxi lurched through the clogged streets, and Warwick saw them, two people huddled together in a doorway, asylum seekers, and their faces pressed together, oblivious now that the rain had stopped.  The scene looked black and white, sepiatoned, shades of grey, like a Vivian Meier.  A binary star system, twin suns locked in gravitational orbit of pure elation.  The epicenter of their own galaxy. Warwick felt the way he imagined it felt to be Jean Cocteau, or Mark Rothko, all alone in purgatory rain, adrift in empty space, watching, watching from the edge.

 Because nobody could be the center of an anything, anywhere, without an anybody else. 

Chicagospell (part 3)

Jesse S. Mitchell

part 2 here

part 1 here

Charlie felt a small hand touch his palm.  The hand seized a hold of fingers and tugged frantically.  He looked down to see the little girl again, she was pulling him and leading through the foliage.
“We have to keep moving.”  She said without looking back at him.  And they moved on.  On the other side of the shrubbery, was the orchard still but the fruit trees began to be replaced with tall skeletal trees, black as pitch, and sharp and hard like spears sticking point up out of a rapidly freezing soil, leaves hanging down like knife blades, razor-sharp and ominous.  The white birds gone, but now black birds on every branch, ravens, cawing and not chanting.  Overheard the light followed them, a spotlight, a floodlight, and the definite chopping of air, the whirl and bite of a helicopter.  Several helicopters swarming as Charlie and the little girl ran-walked through the steel forest.  Snow beginning to fall.  Huge white flakes covering over everything.
“Where are we?”  Charlie asked, nearly out of breath, out of shape and unaccustomed to this kind of physicality.
“Not far from Sheridan Road actually.”
“Really?” amazed.
“Listen, we have to keep moving.  We have to make it past the Ogre of the ironwoods.”
“Okay.” amazed. “But, it is getting hard to see, is the thing.  Are you sure you know which way you are going?” a certain noticeable condescending tone to his voice, humoring the small child.  She didn’t answer him back, but kept wrenching him forward.  An orange glow slowing emerging deep within the center of the forest, a deep red, a fire light, and the sound of low groaning, grinding stone, a terrible concrete hard, blood gurgling sound, and terrible bright, frightening light.  And they were heading towards it.  The birds, the black feathered crows, covered with snow, charred snow, and soot, their feathers hanging and dripping thin droplets of melt and blood, long demonic claws, talons like bayonet blades stabbed-stuck in the thin bony branches, the birds began to caw-chant a sing-song language, “krieg! Sich bekriegen. La guerre. Amputacja. Bloed! Death.”
In the middle of the woods, they came upon a large clearing.  The little girl stopped, put her hand and motioned for Charlie to stop as well, put her finger to her lips. “Be very quiet.  We will have to move around the edges.”
As they moved slowly, quietly around the perimeter of the clearing, Charlie looked into the center of the breach, watched the fire blazing.  Sitting high, fifteen of twenty feet tall, legs spread wide, a deep cadaver-grey humanoid beast, all covered in scars and putrid scabs, long ragged nails, bulging blue thrombosis-veins snaking wildly under the ugly skin.  Fat, rotund gut jutting out in front, sweat dripping out the pours.  Grabbing up great handfuls of sun bleached bones, broken vertebrae, and busted skulls, throwing them down violently into the fire, no wood, the fuel was completely bone and corpse.  The monster’s mouth was huge, nearly splitting the head completely into two different objects, and ringed on the bottom with rows of short sharp teeth, shark jaws, and the cavity inside the mouth was filled to the brim with blood, dark brick red blood, spilling as the ogre moved.
“Don’t look it in the eye.”  the girl warned.
“Why?  What will happen?”
“Madness.  Violence.  You will be become like them.”  She pointed to the rows of rotting bodies in various uniforms stuck decaying, impaled on the sharp branches of the trees, some still clutching gun, or rifle, or knife.
“Hmm.  So, this place is…”
“The end of the whole world.” the little girl interrupted.
They both stood still and watched, moments past, and as Charlie and the child turned to head the other way, they moved strangely, a whole 180 degree turn without moving their bodies, just their view.  And the forest was gone.  The dark was gone.  The sun had returned but the sky was overcast.  Clouds and a stiff breeze, a chill to the air, and a rocky beach had their feet.  It would seem they had reached the other end of the island.  The ocean came up quickly, rushing, tall waves but the surf turned gentle as it washed up on the boulders and grey stones.  They didn’t move.  They just watched the sea.  And then Charlie spoke.
“You know, one of the first things you have to accept in this world is nobody really cares what you do, about the things you do.  I mean, of course, everyone has a few friends, some family, and they are happy when you are happy, glad when you are glad, satisfied to see you occupied and productive, but mostly we are alone with our endeavors.  But that’s good.  And that’s okay.  We call that freedom. We call that autonomy.  Nobody is looking, do what you want, it’s your life after all.  And that is called wisdom.  It is the gift you get for livin’ long enough.   But it is a kind of wisdom wasted, because the best years of your life are used up trying to make a mark on this world, and that can’t be done, this world isn’t clay, this world is iron, hot iron. Atrophied and half-starved, a bag of broken bones hoping to make a rattle, this empire or that, it is so easy to get mixed up.
 Back before I started writing plays, when I was still a journalist, when I was still mostly human,” Charlie chuckled, “I was young, yeah, I… I would come across these stories, or was assigned a story , or whatever, I would sit down to write the thing, and I would tell myself to really make this one stick, squeeze as much poetry in as I could.  With newspaper writing, there is no room for bullshit, concise, you gotta be concise, but I would find a way, I would find a way to be as artsy as I could.  I mean, it was a big city, it was a big newspaper, one of these damned stories would pull me out, the right eyes would see, and then, I would have it made.  But you know what the trouble with that was?”  He looked down at the little girl.
“What?”
“No one reads the damned newspaper.”
And they started walking out into the cold grey water, a gentle foam around their ankles.  
Charlie continued  walking, the water lapping and moving around his ankles.  The little girl was gone but Charlie was still talking, either because he hadn’t noticed her departure or else because he had become accustom to the mood, and the words spilled out freely.
“Ah, but what did I expect, really?  I mean, I blame on it on this or on that, on the apathy of the dimming populace, the liaising of ignorance and ease of living.  But, but I know those are just terrible excuses, easy answers, go to places for a bitter mind.  I was never aggressive enough.  Not with my work.  Not with myself.  Maybe if I had of pushed a little harder, I could’ve, sort of made some kind of scratch, a smear, on the face of this Earth.  Maybe not a globe of clay but maybe one of a softer metal, if I could’ve just put my back into it.  I have seen in my life, great huge trees wither away and die, tiny shoots spring up and grew straight and high, vine covered hills, blossoming brambles eat away at hard rock and straggle out hard barked ciders and snuff out thorny rose bushes.  And all for the sake of the sun, the earth food, the liquid swelling under the stony ground.  Nothing is impossible to life.  I am not even a good socialist because I can see this, and everywhere, without the struggle for resources, we would be living a thin green film, a planet of slime and slime eaters, no diversity.  Nothing new, no niches to fill.”
The water churned.  Bright big bubble popped up and in the effervesce, walls began to grow up around Charlie, a roof began to cover over his head, and soon a whiff  of sweet tobacco smoke blew into his face.  The scent he noticed first and came slowly out of his delirium, he saw walking in front of him the man in the beret and green fatigues.  He looked around to his side and saw that they were walking down the very middle of the Nave of St. Sernin  in Toulouse.  Shiny chandeliers hanging gold and brilliant from the high ceilings, tall arcades and vaulted archways, dark wooden seats and pews to each side of them.
“You again.”
The man nodded.
“But maybe it was my subject matter.  With the plays at least, who did I thin I was, the very patron saint of total toothless pomposity, writing, squealing out screeds.  Sitting around some zombie-eyed toothless old typewriter, click-clacking away, everything about impossibility, sincerity, immorality, probability, soggy science, all wan colors. The different states of matter, the frozen notion of the time, the liquid leaking away of days, the gaseous cloud of expression, everything rotating around our heads, our lives. And for what?  To sate my desire to hear myself talk.  To put words in mouths not my own to have confirmation of principles I thought dubious but wanted…wanted so very badly to be real or to not be real, to live on their own, or to finally die away.  I wanted to be god.  A god.  A divine breaking of words against a most destructive wind of wild and complete ennui.    The demon, indifference that plagued me so, what tear me to my bones, that stripped away my flesh.  To heal my hurts.”