& Deer ([Ampersand, misunderstood])

-- it seems overwhelming to me,
MY HAVING NO
conceptualization of schema

 -- Ultimately we need to gather
our friends and settle in a glen
near our families
a shady grove
not sketchy but well-wooded
or were it sketched, well-wrought

well-wooded, populated by extremophiles who
hide, who inhabit inscrutable depths
of wood, stone and earth;

 -- with woodpeckers friendly a-thump, snakes not vicious
but yes, dangerous (we are men, after all);
wild, out-there, your kids need to know;
& deer, the great misunderstood deer, Kissinger's
useless eaters, but not useless, even if animals
could be. (Set aside
humanity, for now). Right here in the U.S.A,
God's own city,
these deer are our own natives,
Polacks of the Great American Ruminants,
drinking firewater of polluted landscapes,
but still alive. Eating tree & bush
& grass beneath the frost. [Bison with huge necks
massively heave snow aside. Who said snow
was just white and pretty; We reside.]

(Nothing more natural than electricity,
fatigue, the quest
to not be extinguished. In some ways,
we are that fragile.)

 -- The
snakes not man, you know, men unserpentine:
surreptitious but uncoiled. blasphemy without heat.
salamanders and saddled feet.
our children must know,
forest.

 -- &
tribesmen stone creeks in the evening, gathering
piles along the banks, relieving. reliving ghost
fires, the weird swift waters. something like time
gathering, fathering. uncomfortableness sure as
mother's milk, even now developing. our greatest
mistake: not knowing how this debacle nourishes
us, forces necessity upon us like a dagger and
a dangerous but absolute mission. Failure never
was an option. That's not just an idiom, but a 
truth. It's just something that happens.
We do not try
not to love, nor
would we claim to

(intentionally)

adorn hearths with rubbish or something
unwholesome   after all   love
 is more the trumpets
than the harp; more than trumpets
and less than harp-song. Lesser and more ordinary,
simpler, but less crafty. It is here &
there; it is right here. 

 -- (intentionally)

Right beneath your wings. Call it poetic
but true-- ... ... and now, becomes 
(is) the truth redacted. Nothing less perfect,
I say, then pigeons taking wing
and defecating without awareness.
These kind of accidents
are not accidents. Ashberry was right:
these accents seem their own defense.

Strange paths

(Note to self: look up the word “wroth”)

((Note to reader: This is about a walk and random
corner-store encounter...
it's significance may be elevated beyond discovery))

(((wroth)))

moffed (meaning lowered) brow
or certain picayune discovery
walking from ledge to ledge along the uncertain
delivery of phrases: here’s a block, here’s a house,
herein the home OF A CENTRAL MAROON’S CHEERLEADER
like an advertisement for unwanted? loitering, malingering…

squirrels, their houses clumps of leaves-in-tree, sparring
with the world, saying: skkkkkkkrriiiiiiiittttttt! squeak!
and so forth.

past the old savings & loan to the corner store, where we meet
a florid youth, quite out of his head, acting as if he were on
a high dose of amphetamines, but that’s only how I could understand it,
because I cannot understand it—Tim is clearly insane, says he’s
23, picks up a hair tie off the ground and says, “I could need this,”
and then, “Oh, that’s my hair.” I ask him how he ended up here (says he’s from New York, been here 10 years) and he only replies, “Yes, I wash my hair everyday.”

And “good god, there’s no advantage in it, good gawd, working their asses off, student, worker, good gawd…”

I try to understand him, share a smoke, cut a heater, and he compares me to somebody he knows. A smartass, probably. Either listens and gives his opinion like he doesn’t give a shit, or just stands there, smoking (you know, wistful wafts of smoke out the mouth, like) and doesn’t listen, just seems to, but doesn’t, doesn’t acknowledge.

And that ain’t the worst of it, just hanging around, my friend don’t even have a place, probably just sitting under a bridge a long ways that way toward downtown, not givin’ a shit! Good gawd!”

Hair—bad—day! Understand? Hair—bad—day, Good god, that’s not a good thing. Understand?”

He said most of these things. I observed him, long hair with random too-many hair ties, hair stringy, long, maybe dirty, puffy, he looks like a crazy man up a bridge sheering…

but then he is just himself, a self-acclaimed crazy bum, not a bum but somebody like a bum, bumming for smokes, lights, chastising, elaborating, proclaiming, waiting, spitting, smoking.

He crouches in the parking lot, hawks a good one, and spits.

“That’s my brain.”

I cannot disagree. When I leave he shakes my hand (I don’t like this, but I do it anyway).

“Nice to meet you,” he says. I never tell him my name... just one part of the strangeness.

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