I Got No Zen

Have a wreck!

It's a beautiful picture, but I don't want to live this way no more.

We're leaving Michigan some day but we'll never get our souls in the suitcase—they're too deeply caught in the swamps.

Faster! Faster! Turn left! Turn right! Have a wreck!

I hate, and I hate, and I never get enough of hating.

There are a lot of things to say, in fact, we might never shut up—

but at least once in a life, the poet says:

It's a beautiful picture but I don't want to live like this no more.

belladonna and gasoline

Driving into Las Cruces, desert crossroads, hurtling 90 mph between worlds at twilight. To our right, vigorous lightning scratches the cliff-face, while mountains on our left flush under the fire of a big harvest moon, burning all red and orange behind black clouds. We toss and twitch through brief roadside sleep just pass El Paso then make a mad dash across the vastness of Texas. Twenty-four hours and two time zones later, Lake Charles, Louisiana looms up out of the night lit by city-sized refineries and the glare of gambling parks afloat on sullen water. The sun rises out of swamp like an egg poached in blood. The air smells of belladonna and gasoline. Asleep at the wheel on a sinuous highway, winding snakelike over miles of water we enter the Land of the Dead.

The hot, sticky bottom of the continent.

Crossroads of jungle and womb, hung with moss and flowering vines, winding drunk between river and bay, bounded by bayous thick with wheezing malarial breezes whistling like the last gasp of an accordion gut-shot in the bellows with a sawed-off shotgun; breeding ground of burial rite blues and sexy swing. Under yellow tornado skies, thunderstorms wrestle the infernal reverberating sun; red moons crawl up out of stagnant waters; steamed mornings lick the delta mud with soft tongues carmine-hued. Days swirling into one long snake moan or crucible of soul flavored gumbo, jambalaya jamboree of ghosts and ancestors and secret courtyard gardens, arboreal balconies, squares never forgotten but seldom tread in the old dangerous dances now. In the dark cemeteries junkies spike gris-gris powders in opiate rituals, zombified but far from docile. I feel as though I've been here for days, weeks, wandering streets in a thick sweat, boiling like a crawfish.

Everything blurs.

The mind loses time.

The past plays loud in the background here as though the neighbors had gone out and left the radio on full blast tuned to Radio Ancestrale—one gets lost in it, sucked down in delta silt and sediment to the hot, sticky bottom of the continent.

Harangues of mirthful tragedy

The old cemeteries lay plundered and plowed under—resembling nothing so much as a raised garden plot growing bumper crops of bones. The dead may stay dead but, by god, you can't keep 'em down! Bones push to the surface and bask in the sun—ribs, skull fragments, vertebrae, all jumbled up with broken glass, votive candles and statuary, rusty coffin nails and the ubiquitous riverbed shells dredged up for fill.

In New Orleans the boneyard is just that, a yard full'a bones. Yes, there are also the stately catacombs, tenement housing piled high inside with calciferous remains, but even these spill over under the weight of numbers and time. Split open, busting at the guts, these thin towers vomit up the dead under the impetus of grave robbers' crowbars and the shock of the swamp's great humidity which warps their marble to resemble frosted funhouse mirrors, buckled and sway-bellied as a sick horse, a wrecked car, a drowned leather boot. In the necropoli of New Orleans you can bury a corpse, but not a secret. Sooner or later, even in this city of secrets, the dead tell everything—streaming into the sunlight by gush or trickle, blasting gale-force whispers cross windows and thresholds in the night, rasping every soft thing to its bone center of truth, shaving fictions away with razor tongued harangues of mirthful tragedy. One can only hope the relevance of a secret is lost before its seclusion is—homeless armies of the dead bearing it forth, shaking it in their alms cups with a jarring rattle.

Like a thick sweat

Commercial Hoodoo plasters the skin of New Orleans like a thick sweat. Like the Mexican honey sweat that made Dean Moriarty leap and exclaim “Imagine what that does to their souls!” Yes, imagine. Voodoo dolls stitched from Day-Glo cloth must actually outnumber the citizens of this ancient city of America, spilling from plastic bins in every store. Readers of palms and cards line the streets of the quarter, overwhelming street musicians in a city which always singing, swinging, humming and dancing. In N'Orleans, the dead well outnumber the living but they must feel surrounded all the same, overrun by tourists and merchants, suckers, hawkers and hucksters who crowd the ancestral connection with sales calls and advertisements.

Ah, religious kitsch—what does it do to their souls?

A mean kind of sweet that says it all

Have you seen Basquiat's spooky hoodoo paintings? Words, totems and fetishes inhabit his canvases as part of a vast story sunk under the waters…altogether a slide glissando sort of narration, impenetrable and immediate at the same time. He's got a way about him of grabbing up the demons of the modern mind and packing them knee-deep in gris-gris till you see how all the same it is. A happy horror gumbo of streets and needles, virus and soul-sickness, deep moaning blues of color. He went to his lonely needle-death by his lonesome, walking long on dark trouble roads, but when you look at what he left behind, when you just let that sink into your eyes like a bloated corpse going back down into the murky river it rose up out of, you can hear the band that met him, rockin' down some crossroads juke on the other side. It's a mean kind of sweet that says it all the way it wants to be said.

The world is full

The world is full of monsters, strange beauties and normal people.

So what?

Ain't we all.

Think of the many rains

The rain today is full of history. It is the same kind of rain that used to wash over Traverse City on cold fall days or at the onset of spring. This is the rain I walked through on my way to look at books and drink endless cups of daydreamy coffee. These clouds pour memories, stories, a tangible past. Despite the incessant precipitation of your waterlogged coast, this rain never fell when I lived out west.

Sit back over a hot cup of Joe and revel in the memory of those shivery Traverse rains. The cold will warm your homesick heart. Come back to where the rain is right—right as rain. Regardless of strip malling and urban sprawl, every place still has its own rain, with a smell, taste, and particular wetness as recognizable and pleasant as the onset of sleep. Think of the many rains. In Ypsi and Detroit they were soft and misty and good to walk in at night, under yellow street lights. In Ann Arbor the rain was always just miserable. Today, Chicago has stolen Traverse City's rain.

 

That garden of amnesty,

The diner is the ultimate sanctuary of the American poet, the poor, whipped, beat, broke bastard of American letters. The man who never fucking gives up. And the diner, that holy ground, that safe-house, sanctum, that garden of amnesty, is at its best when it protects the poet not only from apathy and home-squalor, from jobs and tedium and lack of understanding but from the very elements themselves. Stomping out of the cold and slush into a greasy spoon humid as a jungle, to read and write and talk from midnight till the dawn. Oh, let me sing of the heat of bodies and cooking, the light—bright as the end of the world or smokehouse dim, steam mingling from the grill, coffee and thawing shoes, smiles of waitresses, smell of smoke and breakfast, din of talk, harsh cries of the short order cook—the beautiful anonymity of being all alone in a crowded, bustling place.

They circle the city like powerful magnets

Well, there may not be many trains anymore, but there are still shopping carts. Everywhere you look in this city, wrecked men, demolished and bent by wretched hard luck, have been condemned to haul wagon trains of shopping carts, loaded high with any scrap metal they can wrap their frozen hands around. They circle the city like powerful magnets, drawing all forsaken metal to its inevitable molten end. In winter, smoking buckets of embers hang at the back of their carts, occasionally sending up a half-hearted flame to lick their blackened coats. These flames are as much a flag, symbol or standard as they are a paltry source of heat. What cannot be eaten or sold to the iron monger, is put in the bucket and burned. The smoke makes these men, who once might have been hobos, look like freight cars as they go along.