TANGENT

Sitting around on high
discussing bankruptcy plans, we are paralyzed
by high-priced beauty battering us in piles of magazines.
Loosely kept secrets and cleavages strike the pose
just like the cowboy song says—there’s no other way. Our kingdom
crumbles the same way burnt toast, virtual memory,
and a livid lion’s den melting with envy
struggles to remain in vogue,
new foci vain and too hip but in a well-measured pain,
the American struggles of hard work and meritocracy
(resonating in quicksand of the celebrity crush)
shortcircuiting the way we’re taught to reign.

And as the familiar bell of gasoline slips into the morning
welcoming me skewed and priceless, no longer the surveyor
with chains and maps and plans and rods,
or fine instruments bound to the circle,
straight lines, or schools of sweat,

I dig into the vision light scatters across the wallpaper,
a pastel Monet, and irises rising into profile
like soldiers guarding the soul, where the only death
here is imaginary and immune to the newspaper
or the streets where yet another rape is spun
(where details are withheld as purposes)
of business because I don’t own a gun
and this ain’t no comic caper
of the shapes we’re in.

Victims are a dollar a dozen. Inflation stealthly bites
into our proverbs, but have you noticed how well dressed
the common poor are these days? Fine cars, fine threads,
fine guns, fine beds, fat to the gills, but still no ease comes
to our revoltutionary heads still hung in dry nooses
conjured up by witch doctors of the dead,
mouthing words no longer built
but retrogressed.

The spies are elder foils for demons of hatred and pith,
luring a whole generation, maybe more, ever down
the path thermotaxis where juice scales weighted
(baby don’t wanna be no social experiment)
are meant for no one, not even these
heavy-laden with rubbery myth
of the thirteenth generation x—

Fall out! Fall in! The message the same,
eating into the muscle life buried within our name
under cheap shelter shaping the unknown,
until we give the victorious word, undressing
with dowried care of an innocent Brahmin calf
the issues done especially for us, inspecting, undressing
the fevers, draining off the pus infecting, suspecting
keen the trajectory our souls must make
without blame

and finding the circle of fate is God cubed,
we erase mere tangency with yet another claim
of superiority complexes and the fake
inferior rugs our interior has tubed.

[ 1993, Washington, DC ]

BACK WHEN GAS WAS FIFTY CENTS A GALLON

Thirty-one years ago, on this date, August 11, I financed my first "new" car. This was long before the Dead Milkmen wrote their song which tries to say it all about this sort of car. But it didn't even come close. My new car sported a mere five point one miles on the odometer when I drove it off the lot. It was a beautiful car. It was indeed, a bitchin' Camaro. The Milkmen nailed that much. But in fact, my 1976 Chevrolet Camaro was the nothing less than a magic carpet ride. For I would go on to put 96K miles on that metallic blue automobile in the first thirty-six months I owned it, traveling back and forth to Texas several times, and winding among the backwaters of the five southeastern states of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee in which I worked as a surveyor for a prestigious civil engineering firm headquartered in Atlanta, flummoxing mayors, city managers, and county engineers with the well-packed trunk and backseat full of bush axes, machetes, hubs, stakes, chains, range poles, level rods, magic markers, flagging, tripod, transit, level, and a truckload of other tools of the trade, all ingeniously organized and functionally accessible when needed.

I shall return to this topic. Right here, in this space.

TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE

Originally published on November 5, 1996, as one of the first, if not the very first missives contributed to the post-situationist listserv arm of the fledgling Nothingness entity.

I write:
Just wanted to go on record that of all those waking up from last night's America TODAY, there are only two kinds of people. People who vote, and those who don't.

Sam then wrote:
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide everything into simple dichotomies and those who do not.

This Sam, turned out to be Sam Hutchison, from Atlanta, who later became a strong ally in the Bully Marxist wars that followed on that particular list against NYC rivals Bill Brown and Curtis Leung. But with this early exchange, I was immediately incensed by what I had to consider the familiar ring of snobbishness, and the fact that Sam had signed off his one liner with a kicker and a nickname that summed up my original assessment, sent me to the mattresses looking for my poison pen. His kicker, "Oh yeah, down here I'm considered the apotheosis of cool." signing off as "the sewer urchin." Needless to say, I found my metaphorical pen, and as to whether it was filled with poison or healing medicinal concoction, the distinction is all in the dosage. You be the judge.

Sam, have you ever crawled inside a wet sewer pipe down upon your hands and knees through a stinky brick and mortared shit-infested rat-renewal art-survival sewer "MANHOLE", a hole in hell stopped up with soggy kotex and johnny paper, root infiltration and whiff?

Ever sat in a boat hand-dipping test tubes into a lake of shit sludge testing the toxicity of said sludge as it's filtered and treated with chemical du jour before the big drip drip drip back through the lay of the land via some "no swimming allowed" river or some off-kilter stream of consciousness?

Well, my friend, you are currently communicating with one who has not only proposed the question, but I HAVE PERFORMED these awesome uninviting tasks many times in that petty proletarian life of my younger days before I took up dividing the world into simple dichotomies. Beyond this brief but colorful description of a few of my duties as a low totem, then ranking crew chief member of a survey party hired to a civil engineering firm in Atlanta serving five SE USA states specializing in waste management systems, I dare say I have also been known to chant around certain quarters that I am indeed the anithesis of cool.

My pose as THE ANTI-COOL is not a transparent facade I must mainatain in order to spew forth the vomit I have reserved for the lukewarm chic trendy jabberwockies of the café chit chat set. No, I am not chic. I sweat. I sweat, and foam, and seethe. And more than a bit overweight, one might add. But I was not always this way. I was once a child of simple intelligence and structure. Despite the William S. Burroughs role as the Commissioner of Sewers I would point out that WSB has declared the Evil One as a freckled face kid sitting in a boat out in the middle of some woe-begotten lake. Damn. How did he manage to describe ME to a tee, or is that a cross?

Frankly Sam, is it not the very root of situationist thought this swindle that simple dichotomies are the backbone of the revolution: He be rich. I be poor. Therefore he da master. I da slave. Are we not swapping verbs and nouns on a situationist listserv? Viva la revolution! But how is the business of this post-revolution world to be conducted? Magick? Hmmm...

And so I reveal my true stripes: there are no simple dichotomies outside of SELF and THE OTHER (Derruda, Pynchon...)! Go swallow an apple, or chop down a cherry tree with the excuse that it was on line (old surveyor's joke), and then step into the shallow pond to pontificate on the differences between good and evil, one and zero, voting and non-voting.

And Sam, whomever you are and wherever you ponder, thanks for contributing to the iMote way...

GT

"I fought with my twin, that enemy within, 'til both of us fell by the side..."
—Bob Dylan