The way my mind works
There is always poetry up there in it
 I'm always deep down in it
 And most of it's for me.

  He became fixated on the smoothness of walls
  And he'd paid the contractors so mcuh to make it all smooth
  But it was over, they were gone,
    places where he could see bumps
  where screws had not been covered,
 where seems had not been made smooth.

  Maria Salva said
    that back in the province
 where the eternal holiday
   lives forever
     in an ancient room
 plastered by an ancient master
     the bumps and lumps and textured humps
    of plaster added character
   to the charm of the stucco
        and the artists confictions
          running amuck-co.

     By evening
        they'd drank all of the complementary wine
     the markets all closed by 10 AM
  they had no bread
      no cheese
      no happy bed.

   He lay there
       she wouldn't come back down
  It was stuffy
     a musty smell from an old pillow
 he tried to put far enough away.
   He couldn't just throw it out the window.
   There was no 'cooler' switch to turn all the way cold.
  Her's was up all the way he was thinking.
      Not cool at all.
 Very heated.

  If  drive  twelve miles along
     seaside roads and
  you know that the marriage is over
    before it even got off the ground
   she's taken off the golden band.
    She doesn't have it anymore.

  Those cliffs go way down there to death
     and the sea
  where Neptune waits
       for you and me
     born again 
      as a sea aenenemi

  He didn't know why
      he told the guy
 smoothing down the walls the
    story about Italy
   and his first marriage that they'd
                     gotten annuled.
     And how he always wanted to write about it
      in some grand novel
  worthy of being discussed
     in reviews of books.

  "I wrote 12 novels."  says the dry-wall guy
    "Each of them was about a past life
     living 
    first in Philadelphia,
    then in Burlington Vermont
 Then in Lowell
    Then in Alston/Brighton;
    then in Milford, MA
 then in Ann Arbor Michegan,
  next it was about being a farm boy in 
     rural next to everywhere;
     Next I was president
  Then I was a shoe shine boy
      Then I was a prisoner, no body understood me, no body cared. I 
    built myself a prison and went in there
    and strangled myself.
 After that I found God, my favorite 
        novel of all
    the real reason for the Novel
 And the final book
    I was in Heaven.

  But he couldn't believe it
     it was all far fetched
 so the thirteenth novel
     is him doing my dry wall
 because I don't like seeing lumps on the wall
    he thinks
  because it reminds me of her?

  It all comes back to him as a vivid blur.
  She had finished the rest of the wine.
  she went back down stairs to 'use the bathroom'. 
   Two hours passed and still she was not back.
      He decided to go out and look for her.
 But he couldn't find his shoes.
   She had hidden his shoes.
 So he walked outside anyway, 
    broken glass from the celebration
   all over the ancient sidewalks.
   He sees a man who looks like a fabled songwriter
   sluffing off to Brussels and his next gig.
     He hears the sound of conuddling
      coming from a place
    inside the garden.
    he goes near to this dianiseen scene
    And it's his wife
     and the man who had carried their bags.

  "So I took to writing poetry
    in my off hours
  on pieces of bread
    with ketchup
 and, 
     as I was down on the beach
   I'd feed them to the birds
  and they'd take those poems
  way up high
      and far out over the surf
  higher than any parasailer
      could ever go
  and not needing a tether
 and they fight over them,
      my poems
       up there closer to Heaven
  with bright sunbeams and clouds.
     they fight for my poems
        like people never do
     and thus make them holy."

 and then he said
    "I am wholey put off
 by your concept of the holy.
       And I'd like this job quick done
   because this wall is very holey.
        And I've me a pistoli
   but I won't show it to you.
   Because it's all part of the story
     of the girl
    because she grabbed the wheel,
   that was the deal
  and she wanted me to beg
 and to squeel
    that I'd made her hurt
  in way she shouldn't feel
       and I was a bad deal
   she can't believe what she felt for me was real."

  The wall guy, filling holes,
  while the mansion owner stands there
   with his riding crop collection of
      mahogaany mockups from the Gilded Age
        fart-tory
   located on Highway 'Mericaa
  east of Lonsome-tucky (out beyond The Dead Mountain Wilderness
      and descatted fossil catacti forest
  beyond the craters and the dry-up sea beds 
 

   So I told that girl
      to let go or we really would
            go off the cliff
 and down into the briney depths.
     I gave her a glare of a stare
   like she'd never seen there
         before then.
 She started sprouting out wings
     like an over exxcited hen
      and she oozed of stale zen 
  (poet's note:     I don't now how or why or when)

  But then there was a flock of doves
    in seven essays
    by a poet novelist
 of the middle modern period
  right around the collapse of
 european capitalism and the
    capitulations with the coin-holders.

  His views were intertacular
  a word that means precisly nothing
  mean to mean cause
  the novelist isn't
    supposed to show his soul to the
 world so they can 
    invade the Upper Vallies of your
   cherished privacy
    growing up on a cherished knoll.
  Keeping secrets of iconic novelists who
   live on the next dirt road over.

  where it is he will never tell
    be go up a hill
   or down into a dungeny dell
 where ssecret doors with keys of ancient story
      that if you have to hear the whole tale
    it would overwhelmingly bore me.

   "There was a play that
     I wrote in a dream
  in the fifth novel, it was
   a dream about the third novel
    and Jesus
 loving me
     on a Saturday
 with the rain
  and the sound of a frieght train
  in the fall
        after the landslide
   of opposites
       spread their false hopes upwards
   like a Cumberland Cloud
     in a dream of disaster
  named for the lack of steller possibilities.
     It was hurting him now,
  he didn't want to recollect anymore
   but he had to . . . 
  it was a Confessional poem
 the type that are po-po in Town-talker
    Journals from the Big City Apple
  (talkers 
        always taking
              notes
                   joting it down
                    with merry
       disaster
         named after a lack of steller possibilities, the
       etemology of the thing,
    with it's silver and crystal staircases
   to the many moons 
      of any singular person's
         imaginagions and most
         G_d-memmoring moments
  the purpose of the novel
    in a dream
    at the bar
 down at the lake run out of gas for the car
  but gas in the boat
   so a three day trip to a tree
 and a half week ride to Heaven in
    your mind with a good book
   a novel idea
  an Anonymous Gospel
  named after sapphire skies that
      shed tourgoise rain and 
 rainbows
      of eternal love
   for everyone especially
 He Who Made the Rain."

But then I awoke.
  Already the morning light had
       anhilated the night before
    the dew drops glistened as they
      disappeared into the heat of the day
  temporary
  like a river in a dream from a novel of a dream
  by a lake
      run out of gas
 Loving God
     and you and liife.

  The mansion owner was abacke
     with his questioning
 literature notebook taking time
  walk in the garden of noveletic delights.
 Nothing makes sense if you covet it to.
  Nothing you can want will satisfy you
     while you still want it.
  and it only satisifies you 
    when you forget it.
 Anything that becomes a fetish
    unless it can be used as a way for festive "Glory To God"
 praise celebration . . . bring you
    to what is good for you and
   loves you back . . .

   I won't have gruel today,
   he thinks.
  all of that money
 and pig food is the best food for you.
 We really are all the same
    in this modern age.


  The wallboard guy is back today.
   He sees him summersaulting through the far off hallways, his
   reflection in all of the silver platers not
  yet tarnished from neglect.

   "i've got more moldings to 
 plane
  and a couple of windows to
 put on a window-vane, a
 little bit of hardwood
       and a tiny brass chain?"

  No. No, that isn't it.
 He's called him here
    to read his novel.

     

  "While I was in prison
  awaiting for the trial
 everything had gotten
    Kafkaesque, and
    I couldn't get any peace
 any peace at all
 from the time between the litigations
 and the envious lawyer's call.

   My only rest
      was writing poems
  which I rearainged 
    into an outline
  to all of the mistakes
   that one can make
 when one makes
    many mistakes
    takes
  the rakes 
 and pays too much
 to the jakes
  and the fakes
 and the messes he makes.

   It was Saturday
 only this time
   I wasn't feeling that Jesus high
 like I probably should have been.
 Should have fallen down and begged for it
   
should have been well awaare of my 
   retchedness in the face of it
 but then getting that lift up
 wipe away the tears.
    He loves me too.

 He loves you more
   than you could ever love him
 it's isn't a mistake
   it isn't a passing whim.
  He isn't just some guy
 you see off near the rim
    of life's great canyons.

  He takes you farther
    thatn you could ever take yourself
 and he fills up your cup
 even when you have little wealth.
     It isn't just a day, a week or a season.
  He gives the kind of love
    where there is never treason.

  But I didn't know all of this back then.

   So off to cloud worlds on high
 I would linger in a grand methaphor
 of loving that perfect someone one
     named my love.
 She was perfect in every way except
    for my imperfection.
   perfection is a flaw
  that takes away the necessary angel
     of needing to feel that one can just come on in.
 love
  in a mueseum
     of what has been, in the past
  coveted.
 love in a mueseum of you
 not loving me
 and me not loving you
  but each of us 
   loving someone else
  who loves us as much as we love this other
   and can't understand why
   we can't love each other too
 and it's too much to bare
    so we both loose that
   eternal love
  and the glory of eternity in bliss with
 that special other because
  we can't love each other who both love Her.

  And then we find out that we are each other anyway depending on the
    story
 that is being foisted out
 to those publishing minds of
   telling things out there
 in the places where people listen.

  They stand
     in silence to hear
  the sounds that just come about
 by the wind and the birds
 that live in the ceilings and moldings
    of this grand temple.
 The canopies of life
    rise up before us
 and all around us
 to show us 
 the glories of God Almighty
   by showing us smething
 that is not even close to his glory
  how glorious He must be 
  if we can see him.

   It could have been night time
   if you think of things in hours
   where he had gone
    off towards those fancy moldings
  of where he'd been
 no one cared enough to do anything more 
 that trowel over the lumpy cement
   some of it falling down onto the brick floor
 making lumps where the prisoner sleeps
     with those hard things sticking into him.

   He can not move to the new land
  because they won't let him go, he's stuck.

  "Oh what it must have been like in Prauge"
   he thinks one day
  cursing his misfortune
   at not having been a marter
   for one of the great grand causes.
 Oh, if only, only if, iffin only.
  How can I  tell the world not to be the world
  when I stranggle myself
  within my dream of the temporary
     patterns of color
 that hypnotize me into realization
 of the greatness of all,
  realise it on my own if I could
 weak as I am I've got a fear in me sometimes
   that creeps up onto me and compels me
   to write a story
 that I put in my note book
 and I don't type very well
  so I got me a stenographer
    who was able to input all of my notes
  into the word processor 
 and I've got it on a papper tape,
 then transfered it to punch cards.
   Then I put it on a real to real
 that cost a million dollars
    a back up that no body ever used.
 Then I had floppy disks
 and I could hold my whole world in my hand.
  Then it was a review of the European Novel.
  Then it was off for icecream.
  Then it was the rain.
   And, again, it was Saturday
      and I still hadn't gotten back to my local
  church mosque or synogouge
   in the religion in which I was raised
  where all of everything is love
 and there are no terrorists 
 in any true religion
 praise The Prophet
 praise Jesus
 May peace be not just upon him but upon you.

  If people believe what
    they want to believe
 and you have this grand theory
   of History
 and God and you put God
 in the past because you
  praise Atheism
 and then you understand the mistake and
  you go back to your roots to find
 that those who don't know God it isn't
    that they don't love Him but they
 haven't met him yet.
  Or they were in the room with Him
  and they just didn't know that they were.
 and you meet Jesus
    on the road to Damascus
   with Saint Francis and Rumi
     but you don't know who any of them are.
 Like meeting the great author
    in a prison cell
 and not realizing that he
    is the famous Czech.

  The famous Czech
  told me all about a play
 that would never be written
 and characters
   who, nasty and sexual
 like cat on the prowel
 turn in their mother's and husbands
  for kibbles.
  Nobody
   back in Prauge,
                I found out later,
    liked this man in the least
 and they all said 
   that he really did do all of the nasty things
     that everybody said that he did
 despite the facts
  that he'd once been well recieved in Paris.

  I think the novel suffers,
       I tell him
 not realizing who he is, his
       notoriety. . .

 The novel suffers from a
      hubris of soul.
    There isn't anything more in it
   than sex and betrayal
     And there are no characters
 that you'd want to invite
      to your Summer home.

  "I never had a Summer home." he tells me.
 "I loath the idea of a Summer home."

 "ooeee." I tell him
     "I am so impressed with your
  niehilistic nay-saying
  your opportunity to convey, say
       some new truth to the world
 has been squandered.
       I will consider your case
      no longer."

But he really wanted to know what I thought
  of his play
  which he'd written for so long
     not just in one day
 It wasn't just a piece of trash to
   throw away.

   "I did like how you wrote the story
 you're use of words surely didn't bore me.
   

  He explained to me then these grand
   plots and existential 
      banterings that
 he'd woven with in the whole
 literary work.
   I didn't want to come off as a novel-writing jerk.
  I told him that maybe it was me, just my silly quirk
     but I didn't see it.

  I don't understand why a novel always has to be new
 nothing under the sun is so how could a novel be true
    to the rule of 'it must have something new to convey.'
 more literary who-ee 

 There are dried sea beds
  in this live
 where the worlds
   of yesterday
 have dissicated
      into the past memorances
  that can not be reconstituted.
  These husks of lost time
   might just seem like nothing,
 not even a curiosity
  no one  even sees them there
  or notices how much of it 
   is all around us.

   That world where he stood
 looking at the tourist literature
  wishing that there was air conditioning
  in the gas station, 
 waiting for a girl
    who wasn't going to take his calls anymore
  that world
    had lost a certain charm to him
       then lost
   in a feeling of being alive
 he was failing to live.
  That is what he'd told himself afterwards
   trying to make sense of all of the heartache.