Wolves of Midwinter
When life deals
the hand of needles
I grasp them in full
grip and bleed the
negativity through
the bandages of
indifference
I look at the world’s
problems with a stone
cold face and
an open heart
I mush my wolves
towards a destination
which I feel only I can see
Over the bumps and through
the hurricane
I am determined and
I will see this journey
through
THE GREATEST
You breathe your intentions
Vague as summer haze
Sunlight whistles casually
Obfuscating dreams
Bright light. Cages
Crooked awkward limbs.
How do you get to sleep, I wonder
When you are God?
When you are recalcitrant
When with the coming of morning
You are returned to order
A deity bleeding from the nose
A God hacked off at the knees
Chopped. Adrift. Fumbling
Lost ripped flesh
Scuffed
Broken
Trees.
How do you sleep, I ask
I am still waiting for my reply
THE BOOT YOU DON’T SEE COMING
The woodlouse cowers
at my omnipotent boot
I stand majestic
Lord of the land
Crusher of souls
Executioner
I weigh his world in my mind
A judge. A giant.
Then, from my back
Someone yanks my strings
I’m cut back down to size.
Put back in my place.
The woodlouse carries on unabated
Not knowing
Or caring
Just how close he came.
“Popularity Contest”
The problem
with taste
all goes back
to publishers
guilty of never
using mouthwash
The problem
with wit
all goes back
to quasi-poets
who have no
concept of
how to ingeniously
complete a poem
Instead they excel
at the art
of kissing ass
I’ll like yours
if you like mine
Pandering to please
the alleged fan base
Publisher’s are
going broke
The used bookstore
is up for sale
I’m a half-ass poet
happily wasting
my time
but my breath
is fresh
I feel no need
to partake
in the kissing
of digital asshole
under the guise
of popularity
Sometimes the simplest words are the hardest to say
(First appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review)
In memory of my beloved sister
Does language determine thought?
Or, does thought determine language?
This debate is still not settled.
Still it’s fascinating how quickly
does our language change,
how quickly does it accommodate reality,
as soon as someone dies.
Our tongue, suddenly,
rolls out verbs
in the past tense
before our mind
could even form thoughts.
It’s as if our tongues have a mind of their own.
Sometimes, in the race between
language and thought,
language finds a way
to get ahead.
But not always.
It’s been 11 years since I’ve lost
my sister to blood cancer, and
yet it’s one of the shortest words in
my language, I find
impossible to use.
I guess, I refuse to use.
(Feminine, singular, past tense)
I can hear you
(First published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature)
I can hear you
when you say the first time.
I can hear you
when you assume how I might have missed it.
I can hear you
when you say the second time.
I can hear you
when you start to speak loud at the top of your lungs.
I can hear you
when you start to move your lips super slowly.
I can hear you
when you begin to get irritated.
I can hear you
when you take a deep breath,
shake your head in frustration.
I can hear you
when you start to say something,
leave off midway.
I can hear you
when you say it would require too much effort.
I can hear you
when you do not speak to me directly,
but in third person
with others, even when I’m around.
I can hear you
more often than you think.
Even without
my hearing aid.
I can hear you well
better than you would expect.
We are much bigger than anything you’ve ever known before. Or ever will know again. And just think it is you who make us so. It’s all too beautiful, and so are you. Believe it, bank on it, for why would I say such a thing if it were not so scurrilously true. For we are, far more than most, as real as we are without trying. And I we like you, remember, we have a vested interest. We go together, to the top and over. It is we who will always be here, tirelessly championing you. And how do we know what and whom to champion? Well, let me put it like this, the Grateful Dead had Jerry Garcia, among all the other musical giants in the band, and it was he that made them superlatively great. The Cowboy has me, and Chris, and our road less traveled makes all the difference. We purposely do things – publish people – the others won’t catch on to. Folks the others won’t see greatness in. Why? Because we are great too, like you, and we would not publish you unless you were equal to or beyond us. And we like to think you are all beyond us, and few can touch us, so that’s pretty good. So please, keep writing, and share you with all your fans most especially your editors Chris and I.
We have no grandchildren. Nor do we want them. With us they broke the mold. We want no others. Only us, and only you. For we are special, and we will prove it. There will never be another art magazine quite like the Beatnik Cowboy. Just watch our – and your – trajectory. Oh you can dabble with others, but we will always be an anchor. We are, to put it most truthfully, the cat’s meow. Come purr with us. Furthermore, we are excruciatingly humble. We are so humble, at times, it hurts. Don’t give us a reason to be humble. Floor us with your wonderful…ability. We only want to be with you. That’s all, to the end. We want no offspring being what we should have been in the first place. Call us the Vasectomies.
And who are you, really? Are you what you’ve always wanted to be, or some phony trying to be what you can’t. Truth will be you being what you are, and you and we laughing at the rest. When you see yourself you will see others. The key will be seeing yourself. Can you see? Can you see we? Me? If you can come along (or go alone) we too have come to take our children home. With us you are eternally, unconditionally welcome. This goes for all, for life and beyond. Unless we don’t like you, then we’ll arrange for others to hopefully like you. Or we’ll non-persuade you to a point of happy-sadness and great confusion. No matter, you will in the long run not survive. And the sooner you understand this and get it under your ego, the better you will be able to do in this limited amount of time you have in your present mind and body. Stay healthy and keep writing, this the prescription for happiness contentment. Or just keep writing, then sickness and death won’t get you so down. Everything dies, except I suppose, viral things and death itself which must need life to not extinct itself.
Who created this idea of the finality of death anyway? Death never ends anything, it only terminates a state, a condition, for a while. When a door closes a window opens. That is, if you’ve got a house. Let us give a house, a home, for you and your mind. You are for us, such a wonderful find. Please submit and let us and others know you. Let us help the world understand your genius. And thank you for the thing that is you. You are so special. Never forget that and don’t walk out of the movie before it is over. Please try to hear me. I’m crying.
Relentlessly,
Randall
6/3/2016
True believer
she was a rockabilly girl
with cool boots and red hair
her eyes were pin wheels
and I think it was
because I made eye contact
that she sat down at my table
in the coffee shop
I was alone and had
wanted it that way
she dumped out her purse
across my table
a pile of rusty springs
a birds skull and assorted
animal bones costume jewelry
and at least four catholic rosaries
she stared at all of it and said
you can see it can’t you
you can see how serious I am
that this is the stuff you need
you really need to get clean
I know my mind is sick
and I have to do something
these are tools for getting
myself clean and my mind right
my mind is sick
and I have to live with it
have to sleep with it
but I don’t have to let it fuck me
don’t have to let it own me
don’t have to eat with it
you know don’t you
you can see it can’t you
can’t you
can’t you
she looks for the first time
into my surprised face and sees
that I don’t know and then
maybe she wonders if she
or anybody knows anything
her hands fly around like birds
as she stuffs her things back
into her purse then she slinks
away from my table like
a wet cat crawling out of the rain.
|
|
A punk kid
today I’m sitting on
an Appalachian porch
in my mind but
beneath my feet
its Erie Pa
I have a banjo
in my arms like
a lover full of sorrow
as I pick out
the notes to O Death
and sing almost on key
I think and remember
asking my dad
why he liked this
hillbilly music so much
back when I was
maybe fifteen
because when you
get old you realize
these are the songs
that tell the truth
my truth anyway
he said as he hummed
along all the way to
the industrial supply house
he worked in
dad never sang along
I just remember
thinking how much
I hated country music
and how dumb that
banjo picking hillbilly
sounded and I would
take the Dead Kennedys
any day or Black Flag
or the Ramones
but at fifteen
what did I know
about death sorrow
heart ache loss
misery or pain
I’d never had the blues
I was a punk rock kid
with no truth yet
to tell.
Yo Adrian,
Sometimes you just gotta write. To convince yourself that the stuff you think or are able to think up is worth writing down. And to write it down, speak it into a recorder whatever just get it down somehow. Preserve it for future reflection, pride or embarrassment, anything as long as it is preserved. For you and yours are history, living history as of now but soon to be but wind and dust. And you want to be damn dusty don’t you and leave a big pile of effluvia? And ectoplasmic goo? Boo-hoo who knew you flew to the side most difficult because anything normal not quirky is just not for long appealing enough. For you, and all you been through, and all you will go through before its over because, well,
that’s you and at core, it’s always been you and you knew, from age seven or eight or so, right?
But enough about writing. Do some and send it to us. We feel the need to discover, recognize, lend adulation, popularize and assist in many ways. And we expect the same in return from you. If you are willing and able – to let yourself go with us. To where let us discover together and take us all with you on your journey. Everywhere as of now except Sheol or the biblical “land of the dead”. Let us save that for later when dying seems a better proposition, down the road a piece.
It seems I am always answering Zen Master’s questions good enough. So this month or less let us all not write Zen question poems that maybe, just maybe, I can’t answer. Zen poems such as the following:
Will the town I am in be like Roman ruins in thousands of years? And what, Heaven forbid, will happen to my stuff?!! My two stuffed cobras, for instance, what will happen to them? Oh, I hope they go to good homes, and are prominently displayed. Oh Lord Yeah!!!
This time oh boy do we have the poems. Pound for pound, kilo for kilo, these poems are the toughest bastardos out there. These are hard nuts to crack. Sleeper poems ready to wham-mo your psyche sometime, somewhere. Don’t yell out! Don’t scream; “No it can’t happen here!!!” because these pearls cast out swine. That is these gems we are discovering are, unquestionably, priceless in their amplitude of wisdom, word play, and wit. Not to mention the mellifluousness. But don’t take my word for it, explore yourself. Scroll on, read, and get groovy. Boogie on down that poetry road. Or try a short, short story. Type it up and send to us. We need to share your unique. Your very own genius. Write on righteous! And the world needs more like you. Or, well, we’ll be the judge of that if you don’t mind. But to most we say yes. So come with us, and enjoy our ride – straight to Hell!!! Yee-haw Pleasure Island!!!
Oh Lord Yeah!!!
5/28/2016
Amen,
Lord Randall Rogers I
“Relative Deprivation”
It didn’t happen in the cities because the workers were all gone. They’d been moved to the countryside and out of the city so it was more difficult for them to get together and agitate. Or their jobs had been shipped overseas and they had no work. Then, at first they congregated in the cities with no jobs, or they worked too low paying minimum wage jobs, at Wal-mart or other retail outlets, or in the fast food industry or other service industry where they couldn’t make enough to get beyond SNAP and TANF benefits. Life for them, their families and relations in the cities just wasn’t good. They could be happy on very little no matter how much they earned, but the social control agencies, the police especially, just wouldn’t let them be. Apparently the powers that be considered the underclass too dangerous or unsightly to be anything but obsequious servants or locked up. And the the prison criminal justice system industry was booming. Nearly everything those unable to achieve a living wage did in the cities for enjoyment was illegal or made illegal. And rather than change their ways or adapt to a deck increasingly stacked against them the underemployed chose to go rural en mass. In this manner a great majority of the urban poor sought to escape the poverty, incarceration, death and decay of the inner city. The social control agencies’ idea of a good underclass was a profitably locked up one, and this few people were willing to bank on as a viable future.
The great exodus of late 2016 had begun.
Many of them walked. Others drove what they could or hitched rides anyway they could. Far and wide they ranged arriving in small towns and rural areas across America. The smaller the population the better. The more remote the better. To all states and all counties they came; black, white, Hispanic, Asian, they came to rural America because no small town would refuse them. This was America after all.
Jerzy Matusky was fifty-four. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1961. In the early 1960s his family moved to South Dakota where his father took a job in the brokerage industry. Except for periods living in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul Jerzy’s life had been spent in South Dakota. He had matriculated in South Dakota schools, had worked South Dakota jobs, dated South Dakota women, often Native American “Sioux” women. Except for seventeen years spent at various locations teaching overseas, Jerzy was as Dakotan as they come. He never married, cohabiting with various “foreign” women in the countries and cities in which he lived and worked and moving from country to country, institution to institution often enough that no woman ever captured his heart or home for life. It was not that he didn’t love. It was that his peripatetic ways found him continually leaving the country in which his love interest lived, always searching for more experience, greater knowledge, a wider audience until his failing health overseas finally sent him home to South Dakota seemingly, at age fifty-four, for good. Whatever he hoped to do, whatever voice or activity he wished to add to his home nation, his home state and the world, he would do so from South Dakota – and more specifically – from the city of Rapid City, South Dakota, at that, at the foothills of the Black Hills. And in doing so he was well suited to witness and interact with the diaspora of 2016.
Rapid City in 2016 was a city of some 62,487 souls on the western edge of South Dakota near the Wyoming and Montana borders. Its major feature was that it fronted the historically and economically important Black Hills of South Dakota, which served as an area for tourism, outdoor recreation, mining and logging boasting the highest peak (Harney Peak) east of the Rocky Mountains until the Himalayas. Indeed the geologic formation of the Black Hills is the oldest mountainous area in the world having
arisen over a span of some 100,000 years long before the rise of the great mountainous areas of the Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains, the European Alps, and the Andes cordillera of Central and South America. As the oldest extant mountains of the world the Black Hills have been worn down by time, they are accessible, not too high, and the mineral wealth they offer is close to the surface and easily mined. The Hill’s mineral wealth, and the high plains grazing lands that surround the Hills, make the area important economically for gold, silver, and uranium mining along with cattle and beef production, as well as logging and tourism which flourish in the region.
Jerzy was about five-six, one hundred fifty-five pounds. He’d had a lot of education, and read books all the time, but he considered himself at core a common man and only put on educational airs if he had to. He was good-looking cute and most of the women secretly liked him. Jerzy knew that soon with this many poor city folk moving in to the Rapid City area and so fierce a response by local law enforcement something was bound to occur.
It began on a Saturday around nine am. when Jerzy awoke. He climbed out of bed and immediately heard the cry.
“Good God! They’re roasting old man Johnson up on Cedar Ridge!” It was the Crowd. The Great Horde, ravaging society, once again. Oh it wasn’t a new notion. Since the dawn of the Fertile Crescent it appears the haves and the have-nots have been the crux of the problem. What is less certain is how the apparent circulation of elites would deal with this new aspect of the problem.
Old Man Johnson owned much of the Valley. Rapid Valley, a subsection of Rapid City. A group of recent migrants was roasting him, over an open pit fire, on a tree-less hill near a large wooden old-style three story home and an abandoned government missile site. His wife and children, his extended family as a whole, all naked, cowed and beaten, kneeled by. The crowd’s leaders took turns cutting thick slabs of “meat” from Old Man Johnson’s body and throwing it about. They force fed it to his kneeling naked family beating them mercilessly.
The crowd was formed of an underclass whom had discovered the potential of their power. Mostly brown, Native or young uneducated whites, the leaders were older, street and protest savvy and educated. They were gamblers, alcoholics, and drug addicts. From all parts of the nation and somewhat from the world, they came by every route imaginable to Rapid City, South Dakota, USA. They had heard it was scarcely populated, scarcely policed, and beautiful. In the second aspect they originally thought wrong. That a strong, noble-handsome Native American “Red Indian” people lived there, was a plus.
And they found the city and area weak and appealing. With the police quickly overwhelmed by the rapid influx of the migrants anarchy and violence after mere weeks reigned supreme. Initially it began in the smaller cities, or what was left of them, and in the rural areas on the farms.
Jerzy was walking, walking to freedom. He was what you might call a rapscallion. He was high-minded but definitely low-brow. For one thing, he was, most certainly, an opportunist. All his friends throughout his life all said so. After he’d lived so long in so many different locations, and done so very many different things, currently, in spite of his health issues he hadn’t given up on things, yet. He still loved rape, pillage, and murder, like many of his kind. He was, to put it mildly, a history fanatic. The current situation reminded him of conditions and occurrences in 14th century France.
That’s the 1300s, a time of swords and lances and knights in total body armor. Nobles leading private mercenary armies vaguely loyal to both king and church were the norm in France and England then engaged in the France versus England Hundred Years War. It was the idea of a poor people’s rebellion that lay here, in the fourteenth century, in the 1300s, and that notion was bound up with what has come down to history as the “jacquerie”.
The jacquerie was a fourteenth century (1300s) peasant uprising in France. Directed against the Second Estate – the noble class – the uprising gathered adherents spreading from fiefdom to fiefdom, area to area, castle to castle. Serfs rising up against and attacking their overlords; tax collectors, judges, court officials, landowning nobles. Killing them in increasingly gruesome and cruel ways.
By late 2016 the 14th century jacquerie had come to South Dakota.
Old Man Johnson’s granddaughter at first refused her tormentor’s command. She refused to take part in the consumption of her roasting grandfather. Her kneeling, naked refusal resulted in the surprised expelling of her sister Helena’s brains. One of the leaders fired into her sister and the crowd roared its approval. Sexy defiant granddaughter ate what she was offered after that, visibly swallowing obscene roasted hunks of her steaming hot smoking grandfather.
Jerzy, the opportunist, arrived upon the scene. He surveyed the landscape. He saw the contortions the naked beaten Johnsons were being forced to endure. He came close to the kneeling naked clans-folk, clans-folk now being beaten, killed, their gullets rapidly filling with force-fed roast Grandpa. Such a fond family communion for the exploiters!
Defiant granddaughter belched loudly. The resultant burp-breath air became foul; it was a stench of sloppy fellatio and repeated helpings of freshly swallowed sperm. It emanated from distended belly engorged with the sizzling hot remains of freshly roasted bourgeois in the form of the cooked flesh of her charred medium well-done grandfather. When Jerzy came upon her she was being forced by the leaders to swallow her grandfather’s cooked-in-his-head eyeballs. Her sister’s bullet ravaged cranium oozed blood and brains dead beside her.
The air sweet with fresh blood Jerzy grabbed her naked head and twisted. Her throat bulged, she gasped for air, struggled and died. He then was shot by one of the leaders. Jerzy grabbed the weapon of a nearby guard and turned it first on his attackers cutting them down precision-like, in rapid succession. Soon, due to his methodical expertise, he stood alone as the sole armed survivor in the immediate vicinity of capitalist Johnson’s naked, kneeling, abused, bloody,dead and dying wealthy family. Those able to see looked to him to determine what would occur next. The crowd stopped partying and strained to catch sight of the gun play carnage that had just occurred. The air reeked of freshly spilled blood and misery.
Jerzy discarded his weapon. He grabbed another. He loomed over the whimpering remnants of the bloody white-skinned extended Johnson family. They had lived like and were royalty living off the fruits of others’ labor. Now, like the dukes, barons and baronets, lords and landowners of the 1300s, of the 14th century, during the jacquerie uprising of the poor of that era, the uprising of the serfs, in 2016 a similar owning elite, the capitalist class, the owners and propertied, the 1%, the exploiters and penalizers, were now like their 14th century counterparts getting their just desserts. And it tore at Jerzy’s heart that this was occurring. He leveled his new weapon at those remaining of the disgraced Johnson family.
“Die Motherfuckers!” he cried as he emptied his weapon into the remaining naked family members.
The world-wide revolt of the many have-nots against the so very few haves could not now be stopped. It had supremely enveloped the land, and nothing could now stop it.
Finis 5/27/2016
Notes: Tuchman, Barbara W., “A Distant Mirror; Life in the 14th Century. 1978. New York: Alfred Knopf Company.
I WANT ANOTHER ONE ON THE PORCH WHERE WE USED TO FIGHT AS CHILDREN
You said my last letter
Sent you in to labour
That the flood and crash
Of memories and emotions
Made your waters break
Causing you to drop the paper
My words lying wet and crumpled
Ink running
In a puddle on the floor
I sit alone and consider it silently
I’m pleased
I think
Secretly moved
My words have sometimes been
responsible for making babies
But this is the first time
They’ve ever brought
one out
into the world
Hi Esme
Pleased to meet you
Your Momma hates me and
It only gets weirder from here
CHESTFUL OF DIESEL
I like the scent of the older women
When they sit near me on the bus
Not real old
Like
45
Or something
They smell of money
Luxury
and boredom
it makes me think of
huge green gardens
well manicured hedges
flowers all around
of great big bookshelves
filled with dust and shitty books
of fresh air and comfort
I wonder what they think of
When they smell my scent
A chest full of diesel
The belching’s of a tan and broken heart
They probably think of whiskey
And of fucking
Of failure
And seedy little bars
That’s ok
I think
I can live with that
Lies and misplaced judgement
Never really caused me any harm
It was the truth
that always
did me
in.
JENNY, YOU’RE EXCUSED
You entered my life like
a rock through glass
wearing nothing but tiny
summer dresses and
a clean pair of heels
You left my life like
Wet leaves down a clogged drain
Washed away in the storm floods
Looking far less prettier
Than when you first came
Crisp
Breathless
Aglow
The promise of something better
Dripping from your tongue
The bit in the middle is called life
Don’t feel bad
It gets everybody
In the end.
Poem 1
RAW
For Nick Cave, Joe Strummer, Ian Curtis, Jim Reid and all those others
In this bleak charm of youth –
Those lightning bolts.
Some strange bird will sing.
The antidote to the:
Natural order – of – things.
In the world view a Chernobyl grows.
And grows blistering and pricking
In soothing mid-winter- wind – chill – factor
There is the curse that will ensnare
To trip and strangulate
The idealist dream;
The seed is planted,
In the night’s long desert….
Smoke climbs toward to window
Pen dancing in every direction.
Then! The voice creeps out
Rising about the flight of birds
Growing in the basest sweat
Of they whose chords who’ve been struck
As they ‘dance dance
dance dance dance to the radio.’
And on, a sea over lapping
Waves and currents
Raising some to immeasurable heights
And others drown in the day’s long gutter.
Strummer in his arrogant stance
Echoing put ‘I fought the law’
On and up to the centre of city
And then the revelation:
“JUST….”
‘Let Love In’*
The centre of the city
Being walking through
The sweat after the gig
“Remember, you were alive”
Those raw voices reached
Out drew us in
That smell of sweat….
And passed on
Tattooing the memory
Tattooing the soul.
*The album by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Poem 2
Lost alone at night
I found myself in the accident of dressing
That cats and dogs never quite got.
I found myself taking the train
From the diaconal Paddington Station
Finding hollow space – invisible pressure
On my head – all ideas extricated
Face up: face out against the window –
That chill air, that glass holds so well.
Poem 3
Night in the park among the sculptures
After the wine and coffee
And talk…night drop curtained with cold air.
We back wondered along through the freezing night air
Although this apparently still scene
Suddenly became alive.
They came alive beneath the moonlight
We passing along: watching.
their eyes adhered to us
Their defiance in abstraction
The nomological ignored –
I wanted to talk to them
They wanted to play some game
Hide and seek perhaps.
In their nocturnal life
Some worlds never collide
As they must not
The Beatnik Cowboy 