E.T.: A Tribute

And there were two young bros with smooth swooped hair and florescent sneakers walking in the parking lot and one of them pointed at this lady and said to the other, “Look, Elizabeth Taylor’s been resurrected,” and the second bro cackled and his shoulders bounced in laughter. The woman’s chestnut eyes, eyes she mostly hated and tried to conceal, darted at the bros. And in fact it turned out that the resemblance was not a coincidence at all and that the lady had been a lifelong devotee of Elizabeth Taylor and had only days before been shattered by the news of her idol’s death and only moments before been released from yet another soul-demolishing, rotten day of work at the County Clerk’s, so when she saw and heard the bros cackling and pointing she snapped and couldn’t restrain herself from running across the parking lot in slumped equine arthritic strides. The boys were laughing, their arms shriveling inward in half-assed self-protective glee at the lady’s running and the absurd bouncing of her treated spider-black hairdo. The lady had only her keys in her hand as she ran and she did not notice her empty cart begin rolling backward into the parking lot’s thoroughfare or, when a wheel stopped on a pebble, spin abruptly into a screeching BMW sedan, bringing the cart and the vehicle to a synchronous halt; the lady all the time galloped toward the boys with the sharpest key on her chain now sticking out obscenely from a cage of fingers until she finally reached them and began sobbing and screaming and jabbing, and the bros chortled at each other until she got one of them in the eye, and when he went down she mounted his chest and very deliberately got him in the other eye, and when the other bro grasped her by the shoulder she sprung up and punctured his cheek and then got him in the eye too but through the lid and he began clutching his spouting face with one arm and swinging around the other apparently hoping to strike the lady but clearly he couldn’t see her because he swung and swung and shortly tottered off and tumbled over. Finally the onlookers restrained the lady and later one senescent man lay his arm across both her shoulders as she sat on the curb and whispered,—splattered with bro blood, swaying, sobbing, waiting for the police and the ambulance to arrive—whispered “Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie,” through a mask of dripping cosmetics.

NO TIME

Absence to presence,
Sun rises, filled with
Technical minutiae.
Overwhelming aberrations.
I cannot tell you how many times
This supposed love’s been put on trial runs
in sawdust
Airport hangars. Bay thirteen is
A good one some who fly say.
When desperation leaves its mark:
A branding.
And then there is nothing to brandish.
Except nothing, and a lack
Of focus, of poise, of interest.
A lack is not nothing per se.
The will to do nothing. To love no act
Except loving.
And NEVER has 'happy' floated;
Its weight my broadest burden.
And not even change the automatic
Capitalizations of the word processor,
Or the setting.
No time to focus on intentional
Indentations.
Or to separate feelings into
silly sorry stanzas.
No sun on the concrete.
Just setting.

VERY SHORT, INCREASINGLY HAIKUISH POEMS SCRIBBLED INTO A MEAD SPIRAL MEMO BOOK WHILE STANDING NEAR A GARBAGE CAN IN A DARK CORNER OF A NIGHT CLUB, DIRECTLY PRECEEDING A PERFORMANCE BY A PROMINENT AND QUITE TALENTED HIP-HOP EMCEE WHO HAPPENS TO BE A MEMBER OF THE MUCH CELEBRATED WU-TANG CLAN

Each person must create
a liking
of our own image.

The power pulses:
bass and snare drum combine,
all electronic.

A musical hoax
involves crowds of people
and chances for dancing.

People touch themselves
unaware of silence
and solitary forms.

A terrible wind
thanks you for your comfort
and finds someone else.

Social gatherings
can be lonely as hell sometimes—
depends on who’s there.

Death metal t-shirts
at the rap show shine brightly
like burnt celery.

Temptation parades
in halls as long as castles:
powder blue Times Square.

With table manners
you can never be too sure
within vague temples.

Underwear choices:
some prefer the comfort,
others like the choke.

Sounds on Biggy’s lips
make lots of simple sense
though after the fact.

The smell of ballpoint
means something mental has gone
and captured itself.

Sounds of strange verse
on pace to outrun this pen—
ballpoint’s lonely death.

School tomorrow seems
distant as Juneau or Prague:
sleep and dream and sleep.

MORE ON THE FETE'S THURSDAY (1b)

These two guys, both shirtless, one with an archipelago of acne along the top of his back and a tightly bandannaed head, the other with what looks like a Korn t-shirt hanging from the oversized pocket of his giant denim shorts and clutching a water bottle, walk astride our car for the next three hours or so. The heat sort of repeatedly clubs everyone with each grossly scorching gust, which gusts are frequent and carry none of the usual relief associated with breezes. These guys’ home-car, I imagine, is about twenty ahead of ours, and every time they get within eye shot of the AC and libations and company therein, the row pulls forward. The cars move sort of jerkily, stopping for seemingly long periods, then going great lengths in spurts that start to feel like free-falls off high mountains compared to the prolonged intervals of stasis. So the two guys aren’t really next to us the whole time or anything, but after a couple minutes of stillness following an exhilarating descent, they’ll again overtake us, telling us that ultimately we’re going the speed of these hunched and fatigued pedestrians, if not slower, but also telling us that they cannot ever catch up to the probable Freon and cold beverages of their home-vehicle, so we’re not, like, getting nowhere.

Surprisingly few cold water bottles are sold from the coolers strapped to the locals’ four-wheelers via bungee cords, especially given the excruciating heat and the amount of dehydrating liquids being consumed all around us. This water-bottle-sales business seems like it would be an insanely lucrative pursuit, even on a car-by-car basis, but during the whole interval I sit here, I see exactly zero takers. Four-wheelers and three-wheelers constantly buzz alongside the row of cars and trucks, and the locals seem to have territorial agreements concerning which areas of overheated passengers would entail their available customers. Their local meeting, which I picture as a circle of quads around a bonfire at dusk, must not have been too arduous or taxing given the extremely low population density in this area. People also sell hot dogs and other fried entrees off the steaming grills in their front yards, and again they are rounding up very little business. It becomes clear that this row of pilgrims is relatively well-stocked, provision-wise. I myself am shoveling as much salsa into my mouth per Tostito as possible to ensure completion of the salsa by the time we reach the gates, since no glass products are allowed on the premises.

At one corner, which seems to be the last commercial intersection before the long stretch to the venue, a group of officers stands and enacts selective blindness concerning the ubiquitous open alcohol containers. I hear one of them say, “saw someone with a tattoo on his” before I continue on, free-falling.

Things go slowly but they also go quickly. We drive quickly past a house in front of which twelve people are imbibing courageously from funnels—obviously not on their way to the spectacle, but residents—and hooting at the passers-by, telling them how far away they are from the venue in tenths of miles and contemplating out loud how many minutes that might translate into. People sell handmade quilts off their clothes-lines and there is a lot of old church memorabilia rusting away in everyone’s backyard. There are very few mobile homes on our trek that are devoid of an oxidizing crucifix or sign or steeple-post or frame for decorative glass. It’s like when a new church is built, everyone just takes a piece of the old one home with them and plants it in their backyard. It occurs to me that this may not be far from the truth.

Once we near the gate, everything happens a lot faster. The single line we’ve been in for the past four hours turns into eleven lines, one run by the police, who randomly, and perhaps disastrously, have people remove all their their vehicles’ contents onto the ground surrounding. The line we get on moves fairly briskly until the sudden and devastating downpour, which, coupled with the two inches of rain the area received yesterday, causes mud instantly to form, and most of the sedans struggle to get through and need to be pushed, not to mention the Volkswagen buses and the heavily Hendrix bumper-stickered station wagons, whose tires spin hopelessly until people get out and push.

The myriad flag people flanking each road ostensibly are there to make the ride in easy and stress-free, but for the most part these folks, young and probably volunteer, stand in the rain and blankly stare, their bright orange flags waving with the intensity and authority of heifers’ tails.

The rain subsides before we reach our parking spot, the flaggers at this end of the procession a bit more intense, probably due to the distraction of the drivers with whom they’re trying to communicate and the ever-increasing crowds of barely-clothed walkers swarming all around them, lunging desperately toward the Portable Toilets. The sun pours its lava down again, instantly beginning the evaporation process and filling the air with aa flows of humidity.

Settlement on Camp Clark Griswald, as I will later find out it’s called, is unrelenting and unexpectedly nasty. We’re flagged into a space aside a Mercury Sable with NJ plates. Before we even think about exiting the vehicle, a Ford F-550 or something as large parks next to us. One of its passengers, already positioned in the pickup’s bed before they park, in what I see as a sort of sneaky-veteran move, tosses tents and tarps and other enclosure-type materials onto the space behind their pickup. This alarms us. Larger than they appear, I see the two young guys on our right, maybe 18 and just having driven from NJ, pitching their two-person tent, leaving very little room. We are thoroughly flanked. Here we are, the suckers in territorial free-for-all.

I pop the trunk, unload our tent, and my collaborator and I pitch it with haste and high levels of stress, though of a different kind than the stress I’d just driven 774 miles to escape. We manage to fit our tent (which admittedly is a little overlarge for the two of us) between the two-man on one side and the small city on the other. These pickup people, with their OK-issued plates, are shaping up to be the kind of pushy self-important space-hogs you hate to sit next to on airplanes or get behind on buffet lines. A distorted sense of their own size or importance perhaps. Though I did not think drawing borders with pushy, offensively non-Hippie-type people would be part of this trip, here we were.

So we get the tent up, but part of it overlaps one of OK’s, who claim there’s no room on their other side even though I can see that there’s at least two feet between their tent and the van beyond. I try not to let this drive me completely bonkers even though this situation is high-stress and unprepared for. The NJ guys accommodate and nudge their tent dangerously close to the road to help us fit. I’m stricken with the inaccuracy and overall futility of trying to judge people’s attitudes or demeanors based on where they’re from. The whole thing feels a bit like some nineteenth-century scene in which the government has just opened up a bunch of free land to a large number of landless peasants, who, though comrades, instantly find themselves pitted against one another.

I suppose this is all part of the festival experience. I’ve never experienced a festival before. I’m trying to discover the spirit of the festival, which I thought on the way down would be vitally important, but now seems convoluted and fleeting and crass. So far my general expectations of utter personal freedom and zero-conflict have been challenged: the police-searches, the apathetic staff, the high-tension land rush.

Stress-inducing hubbub aside, our tent is pitched, our land is claimed, and now, finally, we can settle into our new home.

Reminiscences of a Creative Writing Assignment

The assignment was open-ended except it had to be exactly five sentences. It was the first assignment of the creative writing class. I didn’t know it then, but I had so many choices; I could have gone with Faulknerian serpentine subordination, or with the endless lines of parallelism, or with a mélange of adjectival or adverbial or parenthetical clauses, or with the simple declarative of the newspapers. Or simply a snappy fragment. Or I could have gone with some imagistic haikuish things, like “A sentence, at its core, is an abstraction.”

Bovine Hands

I read that to a cow some of them are like ice cream and others are like Brussels sprouts. Early this morning I found an envelope with an unreadable postmark stuffed in the mailbox the mailman never uses, and inside the bent envelope was a letter that coldly laid out her plans to stay in Switzerland another month, saying that her friends had a warm and furnished chalet available, that she’d seen the mountains, that they were nothing like the damn river-hills in Ossining or anywhere else in America, that she loved the parties, that she could breathe better in the cleaner air, that she had sex numerous times with her and her friends’ stand-up comedian hash dealer, that they were together now and he was lying completely nude in the next room with his six-pack making shadows like a series of little hills at sunset, that stand-up comedy in Swiss is just so funny, the double-entendres being so much more entertaining, that I had no idea, that I just wouldn’t understand how funny and beautiful it all was. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t differentiate Swiss from Belgian or Mandarin. Maybe this one is ice cream. It looks like it might be ice cream, to a cow. I know it’s maybe a little unsightly, but perhaps if some care were put into it, if it were just groomed a little, the grass in the sidewalk cracks would be more amiable on the eyeball. I didn’t know how long the letter had been stuffed in there, but I could guess. I should just take out those copper mailboxes and turn them in to the scrap yard. My fingers are getting dirty through the little holes worn through the tips of my cotton gloves. I don’t stop. I kill, kill, kill. These things have an incredible will to live. Some of their roots go so deep that when I pull them the whole cake of dirt wedged between the concrete slabs comes up, a quarter inch wide but a foot deep. Copper’s been down. The whole thing about the boyfriend was a little harsh. I can tell from her letter that she imagines my desire for her to be, like, astronomical. The mail is usually just sprawled on the floor, as if the slot vomited it there and didn’t bother to mop it up. Most of it is junk. We keep the recycle bin near the door and dump all the Pennysavers and Visa offers in there as soon as we get them. We’ve gotten a few notices from the city’s recycling wing telling us that they’re going to discontinue our recycling service if we don’t tie up our paper recyclables. Sometimes I don’t even get letters I’m expecting. They probably end up way down low in the recycle bin under Victoria’s Secret catalogs, promotional flyers, coupon circulars, various slips addressed to “Resident”, and are improperly recycled. This one is definitely Brussels sprouts. I can smell it. But that smell may be a good smell to a cow. How do I know what a cow smells? The sidewalk curves beyond my sight and there is greenery in every crease. It’s very healthy. All those girls she went there with—I should have known. They’re like implacable little urban weeds in her mouth. And she chews. Boy does she chew.

Migration? Exodus? Pilgrimage? (1): 1-A

The lights on the highway sign spell out orders directed at us. They tell us to take exit 127 instead of exit 112, the one we were told to use in the literature. The traffic ahead is intimidating in its size and it glistens, so we decide the sign’s order is for our own good and take exit 127.

We drive for maybe ten minutes on a country highway with large expanses of verdant farmland flanking us on both sides and very few stores before we follow the lead of the cars ahead, corroborated by yet another sign, this one permanent, telling us to use the shoulder if we are headed to a certain Event. A serpentine row of vehicles lies ahead beyond view, and framed in the tiny side-view mirror I can see a number of cars pulling to the shoulder behind us, piling up quickly until they are out of sight around a curve. After a few minutes it becomes obvious that we are not just moving really slowly, we’re not moving at all. It is clear that this fact is not lost on others in this line because passengers begin to exit their motor vehicles and walk down the shallow divot adjacent to the shoulder and sit shirtless together and crack cans of beer of various size and brand. An epicene-faced male wearing women’s sunglasses stands on the door of the SUV he’s riding in and smokes a cigarette. What looks like his little brother slides out of the vehicle and stands beside the door, wearing a standard-issue navy-blue bandanna and sort of marvels at his smoking epicene sibling. They exchange some words, and the younger brother is handed a smoke and a pack of matches, which he struggles with before finally lighting the end of the cigarette with a puff and a flare.

This dude with a tie-dyed bandanna hanging out of the pocket of his oversized black jean shorts is the first I see piss through the barbed-wire fence onto the soy crops. The cars move about thirty feet, so the pissing black-shorts guy becomes displaced, and by the end of his piss he has to walk a bit to catch up with his ride, as do all the others who sit along the highway guzzling from their cans. This type of movement happens regularly for the next twenty minutes or so, causing groups of pedestrians to congeal and disperse along the road side as they catch up with their home vehicles. At one point, the epicene-faced male ends up well behind his vehicle of origin and at the end of one interval of catch-up his brother greets him with a water bottle, from which they both drink. A lot of people piss and get left behind and have to walk pretty far to reach their cars. The heat that pours into the windows as if flung from five-gallon buckets has already gotten inside us, beneath our skin, and it presents itself as stubborn.

While stopped in front of a conventional brick-laden rural home, a large female wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with a sagging neckline comes out from underneath a large spruce tree pulling up her pants at the waist, elbows back, and talks about what a congenial and private place the tree’s canopy is for a girl to urinate outside. She mentions that there is even a hole, as if the tree’s shade were meant for such a purpose. The commode she describes strikes me as dangerous, and if I had more motivation to move my lips in this heat I would say something to her listeners about snakes or rodents and their sordid interactions with human nether-regions. As a pair of shirtless males shuffles past our window, backs arched and glistening from the heat, I hear one with a shaved head mention that he’d lost all his money somehow and now he is left here this weekend with nothing but a ticket, six one-dollar bills, and three E pills. A lot of people are walking now, catching up with vehicles, drinking beer, pissing.