AQUA-CAT

Call it "Aqua-Cat"; you -- meaning, I -- hope it will make 'em laugh.
"Aqua-Cat and the trash bandits erect revolutionary 'green' recycling center,"
will say the fake headlines. The New Pornographers,
zheez-new-conformistssss, Batdorft would hiss,
all this new fiction appearing like a stark
usher appearing and saying
"I am Doug Main's favorite
death metaphor," the stark usher, a park plusher
than your quarters, containing row after row of
well? --pointless wordplay, (not you, Tal, an impersonal
fiction) for these men and their new cigarettes.

That's right! I contain multitudes, would say Norman
Mailer, that Brooklyn-Jew-Harvard-Army kid who
not enough people read, what a piece of work, just like
me? right, just like me, just like you.

Which comes to the harder part -- the brick-laying,
the deeper art, the Aqua-Cat we can't get rid of.

The whole Point here being that I saw a promising
young co-ed, whose sweatshirt said something like
"Aqua-Cat," but it wasn't quite that -- it even more
obscure, but not as absurd -- the absurd being the
bend in the rake that makes it useful for something.
Not Nihilism or waste: The appreciation, the appreciation
of shoals and heart and dynamite and the written word
and everything that involves herbal medicine and spacecraft.

Absurd: absurdist. Learn to live with it
or die without
loving
it.

Stanzas are
for a reason.

So am I: Soma, body, blind luncheons.
Is the food better? I don't know. Ask the
sightless. I'd be interested. Probably the taste would
(lacking sight -- that 20th century sense)
prove more intense. Like sex w/ studded or ultra-sweet
condoms designed for all sorts of enhanced
pleasure. You know this new technology, right?
I can't keep my eyes off it.

How bout some Splenda?

Batdorf asked. It was his chance to confuse lil Ginny.
"No thanks, dove," she answered, and promptly
punched him in the stomach, and batted the gun out
of his hand. It landed in a (heretofore unknown)

cat's milk bowl. "Ahhhhhhh...." Said Batdorf.
He crumpled to the floor and reached for the gun.
But Ginny was too fast. She stepped on his canard-
like hand, a real gander of a fishy, mallard thing,
his hand being like a goose's neck and twice as
strong.

"Gotcha," said Ginny. "No use crying over spilt milk."

Would you like some milk?

"No thanks, sugar. I don't drink milk
in my tea, I'm not a child."
"Take it easy" replied Kroger, "or I'll
beat the shit out of you like the last time."

Batdorf had had enough.
"That was the last time, Kroger"
He pulled out his pistol, brandishing it
unnecessarily, somewhat carelessly.

"Please, don't shoot! I love him!"
cried whatever-her-name-is.
"Yeah right," replied Batdorf.
He coolly shot Kroger between the eyes
once, then again.

Batdorf: "I'll take the teapot, You grab the milk."
"One step ahead of you," she replied, reaching
into the fridge. "That was a short party.
Shall we take it back to my place?"

Batdorf saw through this ruse. She
clearly wanted the tea for herself, probably
the milk too, no matter what she said.
"I'd better kill her while I have the chance."

Would the tea even be hot by the time
they got to her place? He doubted it.
That meant that she planned to kill him right there,
right now. Somebody had to make the first move.
Pot, meet kettle. He swung for the fences.

It's a Luncheon, Part 3

It's a three-part tea party
thrice the crumpets, thrice the fun
An isolated case of closure
the crime was already solved

With intensive care to his
badly injured left knee,
Batdorf made his way through
the alley, to the tea party

Drunk on a whim
from some gin,
Ginny stopped, puked,
then walked upstairs

Apartment 11.
She knocked.
Batdorf limped up the stairs.
Kroger answered the door

To be continued...

Band Names pt Three(ve)

Ira's Luncheon
Snow & Glass
The Wine Boy's Malaise
Bald Osprey (actually that's just a bird species)
The Night of the Frail Hero
The Big Pun
The Big Purse From Daddyo's
Natalie's Celestial Crown
Troy's Decadence
Nobody Owns Us
Frigid Hogs Skate Upon The Tiny Ice Pond
HOWARD
Drake's Ledger
The Eager Egrets (another type of bird)
PANDA
Nobody Came
The Nobodys (actually a decent name)
The Broadsleeve Crooks
Club Bakesale
Iron Pony Brigade
Mike's AV Hoes
Horace and the Thirsty Wenches
Trebled Bass
Troubled Basset Hounds
The GLARE District
37 Nugs
Tha Glo-Boyz
The Longball Gentlemen (actually a perfect name for an IM softball team)

Band Names pt II

Quasi-Killers
Triplefuck
The Comatose Whores
Your dad is a munson
The Chocolate
Duncan 127
The Balding Wizards
Mike's band
Ponies in the Sky
The Broadleaf Convention
Minivan Morrison
Boners, Hugs and Harmony
Two Sweaty Joggers
Travon and the Bigdick Five
Gray Carpet

Band Names pt 1

Possible troupe titles:
--Sky Pony
--The Broadleaf Indecision
--Gordon's Precision Incisions
--Eric's Band
--Saurus
--The Pew Ponies
--SIFT
--Jew Wanna Party

Fish and Wildlife

Pony race
I got 10 bucks on Secretariat
of the Interior
if I win I'll decorate my hat
like a veteran
and not the Aryan kind that heals
I've got a dog
but it's not the kind that heels
it pretty much just does its own thing.

A black lab
pitch dark except for the uranium -
probaby should turn a light on, bro
wouldn't want to burn your bunsen
or God forbid knock over a beaker.
your eyesight isn't that good
to begin with

And to end with, carrots don't
really help with that problem.
I think it's a myth, and not even
one the Greeks and Romans believe.
That doesn't bode well for any myth,
but apparently you can't see that.
Get some glasses, you blind fuck.

That was overly harsh - we can't
all have perfect vision. Just get
surgery. An incision, maybe two
and you'll be seeing rainbows and
snowflakes in no time. You can stare
at the moon but not at the sun.

Cray / Baked Goods

That's right, buddy, them
crawdaddies are all the same
(the Cray's short for
crayonpony,
roach of the
cock-a-doodle sea).

& milksteak with the fox?
surrender epithets about stockings
if your foxhole is for finding;
The hunt was glorious.

And the verses:
ah, well, let me be terse
in saying that sprockets cause
more problems than we give them due.

I too am averse to
verse after verse of petty
rhymes, puns and wordplay. Which is
why I strangely don't rhyme but let butter
run from one rum concoction to the next
and set my sights on the prize:
baked goods. We aren't that
thirsty after all.

Time & Time Again

Still, its
frightening to the
falcon down the road

Or should I say
falcon-groan
like an animal
(or a boy)
issuing his call.

Yeah call, not
time, not twine.
I telephone him time
& again. Guess that's
it. Green everywhere.

Time
& time again,
everybody getting high. Time
& time
and time again.

Latrell is Dead

I've tried to tell them time and time again. Latrell... is... dead. He is not alive anymore.

Everybody I told about Latrell was star-bound, like, "Wow. Latrell."

( Bursts from the furnace north
a few fires short of a hearth )

A million idioms
eaten up by the moment. Latrell is dead no joke,
she said, like, this whole thing about dying isn't funny
because we don't believe in it
why else our Modern Medicine?

Though Latrell is dead it doesn't change the fact that
America does not believe in death
and is therefore doomed to
discover it, one day;

Witness Latrell.

Guns and Guns

Pepperspray deodorant
it burns like a rug
Simon says
shut the fuck up

in a nice way,
of course. Still, its
frightening to the
falcon-boy next door

Or should I say
falcon-buoy
like an ant
out of tine.

Yeah tine, not
time, not twine,
I could spin yarns
but i won't

I could till soil too,
but I won't. I don't
grow motherfucking beans
and I don't sharecrop.

I don't sell drugs
at least I don't now.
I sell rugs, but not
for a living.

Crayfish

Crawfish? Crawdads?
They're all the same?
Why??? Crayfish is short
for crayonponyfish - truly
the cockaroach of the sea.

The milksteak, best believe
I get it with raw jellybeans
and white wine, in a box. Drinking
with a fox, her knee-high socks
pulled up altogether too high.

Why can I never flow from
verse to verse? I'm not averse
to trying, but I am averse to
verse after verse of petty
rhymes, puns and wordplay.

Fuck it, fuck trying
A motto to live by

Clay #2

This clay--portraiture. Clay filings in the mop closet.
Rush the locks. Let them turn. Illumine
the drugs on youth. Their pasttime. Their lurking
essence, evervesence. Youth on drugs. That
sweet ocean of pot, sweeter than sugar and
sharp like burnt grass or lust become sadness,
murky. That's why you should open a window
more often. Fresh air is wonder &
cold--

Clay #1

shine! --the snow glass;
pepper; freedom; Lance?
The Lancet, the man, grabbings
in the cafeteria. Working out. Grunting.
Who hasn't been pet?
The children
(child's child's child, mind you)

oh Greg
St. Stanislaus
oh reverie
sunbeam

proceed

was snow less white
without her purchase?

every prevarication prevail
in deciding, when drunk,
to get a public massage in Memphis

sequestered in Alleghany
subpoenaed upon Allerton
Tip-Top-Tap goes the Water Tower
& all her memories of tomorrow

oh dear the pelican,
pale stork of the moment
look out empty on the grass
and cry with a frail beak:
'Proceed.'

Drake Monsoon's Diary Entry #1

:::::Her legs
were like features
of an ancient rainbow sun-place
someplace below where it oughta be
spelling it out, bees and rainbows

(your stems were
features of a desert landscape)

regard a man
replete with youth, all his cards in his hands,
splayed out like so, with a girl, receiving fellatio.

He has the sweet vine of the world.
God’s redolent head rains down on him
pure sunshine of the oceanic dream
and everything was chloroformed
a neat tremendous nightmare
nobody remembers

regard a man
sitting on his couch
feeling groovy,
wearing a fedora

<>
Julia’s trite poem: “The Hat. The old hat / was very sad. / It held his head / like a box of lead.”

<>
Scrawled genius
glorious corollary empties whole jars of coal:
everybody believes everything you’ve ever said.:::::

Amerika Kandy-Flake Shotgun

i don't want to get caught up
on this image

of a buxom teen
wielding a shotgun

but let's be honest
America arouses

even the prudest
police boyscout

the poisonwood duty cauliflower
his exquistive existence

programs him
to follow without pretense.

And then there was everything else.

Before Thursday, After Thursday

I live without you
like a Jew inhabiting
somebody else’s corner
your aura: Kosher
like a dill wonder world
awoke on Sunday morning to see everything in its right place
garden here, furniture over there
like an overt pumpkin or an orchard of a television movie
about learning how to hope in
causes worthy.

People, therein
on the lawn and inbetween
covert conversations, mooring pathways
from her ship of life to his
tree-house

mists of ephemeral
yesterdays
like stale oatmeal on Monday
becomes deeper and better partners
without anybody knowing...

Expeditions

“We were meant to be / We were supposed to be / But we lost it…”

Avril Lavigne, ‘My Happy Ending’

Outside it's raining and -- I'm sure it's been noted before -- it reminds me of tears. Of course it's raining somewhere in the world. Of course somebody's crying. And, of course, I might just too, what the hell?

You ring around the rosie so many times you end up like this: a lost ruffian, just lost, fucking about in the woods (such is the judgment of outside observers) but at least enjoying it along the way, yessir.

That is one step forward. At the end of the Purdue days, nothing was very good. Douglas got tired of being the only man in the fountain. And the fountain had stopped flowing. Not much but cracked cement and spraying water, but not the celebratory kind -- rather the excretory, the mistaken, unexpected spurts and children shrieking in mock horror (or real, who knows the difference?).

It was, so. Whaddaya gonna do about it

that's what Paul Simon would like to know

So I sit here, resolved to write more prosaically than usual, because most don't seem to understand poetry, and the dank diffidence it allows to bloom, but--here, soldier, you may be on to something. All I'm gonna do RIGHT NOW is sit down on my couch and write and there's not a goddam thing in the world you can do to change that. To change me. I cannot be changed I am the self-seeking goddess womb of the Earth. Mother Mary and Brother Douglas all rolled in to one.

There is, of course, one minor detail I'd like to get out of the way. So from at least August 8th until late September, a solid six weeks or so, I didn't smoke pot. Thought it would help clear the air, allow me to be less "depressed," get my "shit together" and get going and feel good, or at least better.

I started up again last week.

My initial conclusion is that: damn, the stuff really ain't that bad for you. In fact if I look at my level of writing and artistic output it's definitely higher this past week than general… certainly way above or almost possibly shortly equaling in size all that I “accomplished” during my weed-free experiment. I thought the weed was contributing to sleeping way too much but once again, this habit showed no signs of getting better and may have even gotten worse, actually significantly worse, during the time without it. I cannot explain this but feel justified in smoking again at least for the time being. Marijuana consists of unpollinated flowers, used by humans for thousands and thousands of years. It's more than you can say for Prozac, Xanax, and all these other synthetic neurotransmitter-altering drugs we take without flinching, actually thinking it's good for us. Both my parents for example have strongly encouraged me to take antidepressants, in fact, because in truth they think it's the best for me. Part of me has thought: well, maybe they're right. Certainly there is something deeply real, troubling depression thing. It has had me by the feet and I don't even want to explain where I am now, just the small nascent bits of insight I seemed to have accumulated in these pasts years and months.

I'm a 25-year-old gorilla. Who will now, for the sake of science, smoke a bowl of cannabis and see how that changes things. I doubt it will but I felt it important to get out these few trenchant thoughts while I was "sober," though sobriety offers little calm to a person whose troubles have not been solved in a sober state. It's really irrelevant--the point is seeing the results, producing the results. And here it goes:

Pack a bowl of good quality cannabis. The unsmoked smell of the plant is quite remarkable and sagacious; redolent and pleasing. Before getting high I can tell you it smells like opportunity, wild promise, and reminiscent of walking into a bank, deep underground, though somehow still lit by bright sunshine, shimmying to get a piece of this holy place’s currency, fruit of the dark magic Earth.  

It smells like approaching rain or distant skunk. But it doesn't want us to get away... no, the cannabis plant long ago learned that we like her delicate redolence, the slightly-bewildering magic and a million generations of re-birth, flowers and buds and hippies and high school kids and punk rockers and actresses and waiters and midnight lovers in the park, all passing around and surviving on the glory of this punk magic weed, marijuana.

Now I'll start smoking.

So i've done it. The magic spring whispers of the plant become impregnant women (meaning impractical teen's out shopping pregnant). Magic lantern slides. Like I was saying earlier, the past few days have been like a re-purposing, a re-branding: Do I Really Want To Go To Law School more than I'd like to do anything else?

I don't think so.

So that perhaps helps explain all the sleeping and the crass boredom and fake tears and real misery that I just keep kidding and hiding myself away from.

Look Main, we got it. You're miserable already. Nothing is right and you're never happy. You don't want to go running or take the initiative to join athletic leagues and do much to seek out new friends. As much as you're improving you still are moving slowly.

And at the same time, reign in the sly motive, that entity entitled "fake anger." It's not the real kind of angry that actually makes you get up to do something drastic; it's the feeling -- he or she -- which says, "I could theoretically pick up that TV and break it, would what good would it do?" Or more simply: yes, I'm angry enough to get out there and run a marathon just like that, fix it all with one big punch.

Okay, okay, so he doesn't like running. This isn't the goddam runner's club already. And we know it cannot all be done so quickly. He knows he prefers basketball. But there always minor obstacles which seem like marjor obstacles. He has to call up people, or oh, get an overpriced pass to the student gymnasium only to be constantly reminded YOU ARE NOT A STUDENT HERE, or anywhere, BRO.

That's all part of it, goddam it. Part.

My words speak for themselves,

but what of it

Hammond & His Purchase

The man below this sentence,

just bought a new cellular phone.

Disclaimer, Yo

Here's an important disclaimer I gotta share with y'all in real prose for once: read this crazy shit at your own risk. Cause this stuff right here, this shit is crazy! You know what I mean when I say dat? Cra-Zayyyyyyyyyyy!!! mother-lover you gotta step back before you get yo ass dusted, playa!

But seriously guys it's really potent gangster memories
(already breaking my own rule)
about things that were important
to the kind of parties only ruined by
self-impinging metaphor balls
just hopping out and horrifying everyone!!!

Eric's Freakout!

1. Before the Hospital


Here's what Eric said:

'I too had an abscess on my molar
the "doctor" solar-sore and obsessed
with excess said:
"You been riding the
bipolar express?" '



(watch me reverse standard rules!)

'So I checked in
to an Excedrin clinic
look at me look at him look at
Eric
that chill escalator all moving up on me
believing i'm a pepper worm
or somebody's effluent noxious waste.'

Geppetto's Oath or Someone's Personal Ad

You must name your dad Sycamore
or Mulberry if he acts girly.

I'm looking for a hip single gal
in her early thirties (i'm tweny five-
years-old, and swervy-curvaayyyy)

(there i go, all Mulberry)

But what I really mean to say is
I am a man who knows
how to snipe Jacktails,
and I ain't afraid of shit!

Nice slacks!

every time we lunch,
become brainiacs –
I didn’t say tongue because why say
got-‘em-back, or "Hey, nice slacks!"

(or "Shark attack!" so suck on that)

I’m outta town; I’m out of whack
when the stones look at me, they crack.

Snack on worms and pelicans. Warm me
with your "Them. It was not us but
Them."

The oldest level game
growing at your ear like something fear
some

thinking DNA has already written every
curve of every body of every religion let us fly
on into the wilderness of this crazy religion fever
flying red, flying green, every color but the color of dungaree
(blue lives those lives because of me!)

so just please believe me and let it be
we are becoming dangerous already. Please respect
the way I communicate. Please
believe in cinnamon; it is a flavor
uxorious to the point of
being the last "U" in the dictionary and a word which means
"someone like George Bush, who expresses excessive love
fer theyrrrrrrrrrrrre wiiife, Nancy!"

(what a boondoggle, dictionary friends!)

A flavor like love-me-in-specific-winter-situations way
that says: i'll bring you a Red Stripe and we'll watch
the United States Ski Team tank the other assholes
in the Winter Olympics, sponsored by CocaCola
and brought to you by
Sagittarius sex symbols
everywhere!