Sweet Machine (2)

GOOGLE, PLEX

2003

I.

I’ve found much in this
Well out on the Web’s
sprawled spoor, and the
search engine Google
has led me there -- its
algorhythms have an
arch nose for dowsing
out skulls & hulls &
divers low ruins,
old hollows which bell
my hallooing voice.
As engines go, this one
has some mighty hooves.
The name Google itself
resounds, sending me
back into the Sixties
when I was first heard
it’s homophones. My
seventh grade math
teacher told us of
the discovery of the
biggest numbers next
to infinity: Googol, one
with 100 zeroes (ten
to the hundredth factor);
and Googolplex, one with
a googol zeroes (10 to
the ten to the hundredth)
They were apt numerals
of that age, moog in name,
op-operatic in their reach,
way out there in space
and somehow wildly more:
both Apollo on the moon
and some supercock-
shaped ship approaching
Jupiter in “2001:
A Space Odyssey.”
Hyper- and preter-real,
they purpled and
splooshed my own
possibilities, a kid
nearing puberty in
a rebellious, daring,
dangerous age. Googol,
googolplex: Wendy
Carlos in the spheres,
lysergic zeroes plumping
up a far-fetching rear
that zings.


II.

Those numbers also
mined a rhythm which
already sawed down me,
suggesting doors which
opened into rooms
infinitely deeper than
what chattered on the
surface of my
12-year-old day:
Solitude and savage
loneliness, sweet desire
and the maw of sex,
mod and modernity’s
overripened, poppy
crush. Googol, googolplex.
I could grasp the size
of that vault of vaulting
zeroes whenever I tried
to guess how close I
got to girls, moments
which only made them
seem infinitely far from
what my heart desired.
Ingress, egress, mons,
moon: My fantasies of
kisses and clenches
inflamed those middle
school years into an
impossible yearning,
a hundred times a hundred
swoons each time a girl
looked away. Hopelessness,
I found, was just the
a dark mirror-face of
love, equal in absolute
measure to that first
kiss I dreamed of growing
on an orange tree far South.


III.

Googol, googolplex
-- a mad echo there:
I began to have strange
spells in that Math class,
the day’s integers
fizzing like an Alka-Seltzer
into the image of a salesman
on TV talking over and
over about a washing machine.
The banality of the spell
had a vicious doppler to it,
banging wall to surreal
wall of real; I felt a vertigo
which hyped to panic
when it felt that I was
stuck forever in that
lousy commercial. But
each time I just washed
ashore dazed and strange,
cowled with a bad
headache. It was a whiff
of my underworld’s sick
breath, enough hell for
me back then. In
later years the spells
would bloom through
booze and speed into real
blackout toffs, swirling
me down through that
sucking door far below
strapped to a bier
of rigid, black bone.

IV.

Googol, googolplex.
The numbers crunched
their infinities the other
way, too, for the time
was awful and yet
awfully sweet. My
parents separated,
moving us into a smaller
house: and though the
tears leaked from every
room, its was also that
magic time when some
dark flower opened its
O-mouth to me, pelting
me with such sweetness
that each night my hand
dowsed down under the sheets
to rouse a white heat
until it flooded out the dark.
I’d fall asleep on some
oceanic curve, my heart’s
hammers slowing to drowse,
the surf collapsing round
me in an insatiable ebb.
Googol, googol-plex: the
sumless summation always
left me wanting more, my
thirst eternal, the cup
an ocean’s shore.

V.

Somewhere back
then I was given a paper
calculating machine
called a hexa-flex: a
hexagon with two visible
and four invisible faces.
You inserted the thumb
and two fingers
of each hand, asked of
the device a sum,
then folded and flexed
the paper mouth
some number of times,
peeling back a flap
to reveal always
the right answer. I
never thought much
about how it worked;
instead I just let the
magic do its thing,
sawing this way, then
that, to the truth. Hex,
flex, googol, plex.
The mouths formed
zeroes which stretched
toward the infinity of
space, almost as far as
I yearned. Out, back,
in, down: When I was
six and first discovering
girls I drew a house with
rooms filled with crossed
O’s in two sizes -- cunts
and butts -- I must have
been storing up the ones
I’d seen when playing
that child’s revealing game
of “show me yours & I’ll
show you mine,” out in
the woods outside first
grade during recess. I never
finished the drawing -- shame
or some other thrill
drew me on -- (monsters,
I think). Anyway, the
rooms were left half-full,
the page buried in some
secret place I forgot for
many years. Hex, flex,
the room was there and
gone, part of the sum
which tallied me on
those strange, dark years,
its treasures uncounted,
its vault a bell both
womb and cell.

VI.

Googol. Googolplex.
Such big numbers arch
toward a distant shore
they’ll quite reach,
like a well that lathes abyss.
Newer ones will come
tomorrow -- and the next --
but the hex-flex motion will
never change. These days
I gambol out on Google’s
interface, finding rooms
I filled up long ago. I use
what I find out there in here,
filling one well by digging
up another. This motion
was minted in me long ago
-- to see, to show -- sawing
between the sweet and its
dark-sweeter hole, hoarding
my visions in that oak room
which has no floor, though
deeper down I suspect
there’s a door where God lets
all the zeroes go. Googol,
googol-plex, this is today’s
sum; tomorrow there will be
some other. Looking out on
this morning’s paling
wash of dew-fresh green,
I want this calculus
of rooms to last forever.
Is there an end which does
not fold and flex like a
lover’s pagelike limbs?
As metaphor is simile,
a mouth which opens
both ways ladles up the
richest flow. Regale, perplex:
A googol wells out there
sum this complex hole,
crossing all my O’s,
enriching the
infernal toll.




HE GETS THE GIRL

2002


As a kid I changed the world
by going into my room
and acting out James Bond:
Killing evil Blofeld
at the crack of worldwide doom
then lounging in lazy billows
with his yeasty girl.
The James Bond theme
would ease my steps
back into the real world,
a little while: Before all
the cold winds conspired
to blow me back to smithereens.
I could turn tin to gold
by placing my face
to a pillow, changing
the channel to David
Gets The Girl. I watched
a pretty girl edge round
a deep pond then fall:
I dove in and hauled
her back, her gratitude
flooding me with this
sweet, presexual warmth,
like milk straight from
gold-knockered Pussy Galore.
When the real leaves you
homeless, there’s always the peel,
the pith and rind of surface cool.
I yearned and learned to
glide there lubed by
cool quaffs of Bond and
my own bouncing balls,
chasing the Laylas of La-La.
—a mystic of moments,
a bra unclasping its double
wealth, the shoosh of
jeans sliding down
their white daughters.
O splendid crucifix,
crying for immortal nails.
—That was the dance, those
Penthouse Letter-moments
where, Dear Reader, I found
what I never thought
I would personally ever
encounter. I dropped out
of the monastic mill
of college to play rock n roll,
hurling the delights
of a few nights with Becky
into the coiffed frenzies
of boogie brawn, each song
another dive in her rocking,
ululate bed— holding my guitar
like a surf-pole, casting
out these chord progressions,
humming a while, then
hauling up a solo that was
at once glittering, fierce, and
wild. At least, that’s what
I sure hoped for, and tried
to live for, amid a howling
ruin of wasted hours,
initiate and annihilate
twinned in a 25-year
old boy. Rightburn, I called it,
that perfect balance
of opiates (booze, pot,
speed or coke) carrying
me out on the coracle of song,
a triangulation of
wish fulfillment, drunkenness
and balls, unsheathing a
bright blade after the
second chorus, tempered
cruel and swift and
eternally sharp. Such moments
came as frequently as
the perfect babes. Dear Reader,
it never happened, some guy
on staff wrote all that crap,
the whole fantasy of sex
and drugs and rocknroll,
knowing exactly what we all
wanted, what we prayed
for each night we walked
into a crowded bar. It
was the entire exception
to the rule that I prized
above all else, thus dooming
me to the quest for a chalice
which in truth proved
the millstone of my years.
It seems I’m always
investing in fictions
and pay dearly for them all.
Has much really changed?
Here I labor away
on this overlong, overly
autobiographical lyric
meditation, earnest as ever
to ink a gleaming fish
on white pages, the mirror
of a life deemed greater
than what it can only refract.
I’m entertaining at best
a troop of ghosts in my
own head, bandmates,
lovers, all the guys
who played James Bond,
the solemn poets. Having
written this far it’s a struggle
to shift back to the day slowly
waking outside, now washes
of blue warbling along
with scattered birds.
My face always felt strange
lifting from the heavy warmth
of that pillow-TV, protesting
the effort of returns to the real.
What can you say of a life
spent voyaging the top feet of the sea?
What have I learned
but to ink obliquity?
No matter: I’m hard wired
to the James Bond theme,
walking round that deep pool
whose waters shake only what’s stirred.





SHAMANIC LETTER

2005

Among the Alarsk Buryat studied by
Sandschejew shamanism is transmitted
in the paternal or maternal line. But it
is also spontaneous. In either case
vocation is manifested by dreams and
convulsions, both provided by ancestral
spirits (utcha). A shamanic vocation is
obligatory; one cannot refuse it. If there
are no suitable candidates, the ancestral
spirits torture children, who cry in their
sleep, become nervous and dreamy, and
at 13 are designated for the profession.
The preparatory period involves a long
series of ecstatic experiences which are
at the same time initiatory; the ancestral
spirits appear in dreams and sometimes
carry the candidate down to the underworld.
Meanwhile the youth continues to study
under the shamans and the elders; he
learns the clan genealogy and traditions,
the shamanic mythology and vocabulary.
The teacher is called the Father Shaman.
During his ecstasy the candidate sings
shamanic hymns. This is the sign that
contact with the Beyond has finally
been established.

-- Mercea Eliade,
Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy


I.

Father, I’ve been writing you a while
on shores stronger and stranger even
than the man who cried me forth,
though that paternity mustered sufficient
libido and its mystery in my brain
to ache me on toward you, out there
on the next great shore of vibrant
swimming dark. Last night I dreamt
of planning Halloween in our yard though
it belonged to richer folks than us,
large house & big yard like my wealthy
uncle’s, lots of stations to spook up.
Though also with that magnitude the
difficulty increased, with big rutty holes
in the asphalt sure to gobble kids, with
blatant steel girders from some older
ruined enterprise jutting out like rude
iron phalli, malefic, more than kiddie
stuff. As I let go my plans I mused upon
a red-capped devil’s tale, the song
I must have heard a bit of when I wrote
“Red Dragon” yesterday; something burrowed
down and deep into the inner sea of
my singing ear, down into that wild-water
resonance which bounce whale-songs
from shore to shore. I don’t now recall
his words which in my dream were so
harrowing and pure, but in the dream
I thought to publish his song instead
of my own, dark psalms instead of
childishly spooked-up palms with paper
ghouls and too-dim ghastly lights.
And so I here continue down that
red-capped shaman song which pulses
ugly in an angry vein astride some
engorged cock inside my addered tongue,
ferrying back the harrowed blood in
some infernal circuitry: I rouse to flap
his blackened wings and write this
dragon singing down. And as my left
hand writes these words my right forearm’s
wrapped in medical tape, concealing the
IV font I’ve been plugged thrice to
in receipt of a stiffer migraine cure
than all the physic hurled before
trying to quell that beast at last. There’s
been great relief -- three more doses
left to go -- though today I woke from
my dream with my eyes sealed fast
with that irritating goop that doesn’t
have a name (I squeeze Alrex drops
to knock it back) & that old infernal
hammer at it again in the base of my
skull, knocking at Hell’s Gate. I write
because I dream and because the hour’s
mean: I write because You complete
a work louder in my ear than a
mere falling angel’s world-wide scream.

II.

Those early migraines that hit me with a
waking dream and then split my skull in
two: I was in seventh grade, 1969 I believe,
my parent’s marriage burning up and
world outside of it also on fire, no where
wet enough to stand without one foot
becoming a pyre. It was always in Math--
that subject which always made a fool
of my lazy, dreaming mind with its ticking,
dreadful sums -- that the pillow in my head
would suddenly lamp up and I watched the
same deja-vu-swamped scene where some oily
salesman compared one appliance to another,
expressing the logic of a sale I also could
not fathom, pitching me from its summa
down a dizzy oubliette of sense, whirling
toward a blackness I always cracked just
short of as my skull, it, seemed, split wide.
The headache was sudden and blinding
and short-lived, dulling in the drone of
pencils scratching formulas, erased with
a rubberlike ferocity till I was me again.
Were those the hours when You first arose
in me, Your bald red skull dripping with
the O-shape of infinity, the roaring in my
ears your own, a surf collapsing my sanity
in white foam? My first seizures were thus
headaches too, that malaise which so
tormented my latter youth becoming
this other which so shadows these
early latter days, both perhaps circulating
from that massy growth on my brain
above one temple which was revealed
in a CAT scan three years ago. Is that
Your temple, and this banging in my head
today (a migraine, in the midst of such
massive treatment of late, no less) like
a gong, defiant of every shrink and doc
to come along with dayside remedies?
Who was that dweeby guy in the waking
dream, selling dross yet fundamental
merchandise -- a dishwasher no less,
with its riot of cleansing blue? He was
no one I ever spied in the pantheon,
just a character actor iconic in his
oiliness, his eyes ringed with weariness
or worry, his staccato delivery which
acted like a strobe in my diseased brain,
signalling the waking dream to torment
and haul me down again: was he hermaneut
or some dissociative warlord of my
bruised and shitty life, winging me off
and away from my day but good? Who
knows? I just let him now crow on the
wires of my historic pulse to You, those
veins which freight the harrowed juice,
the marrow of these daily chats with God.

III.

Or did you initiate me in a swarm of
lust when I saw that big bra hanging
in a tree outside the public school I so
feared? I was 13 by then, living in Florida
with my maritally sundered so wounded
mom and three siblings who were just
as bruised as I; and all I wanted in the
world after seeing that booby trap swinging
cup-heavy in the breeze was whatever
swelled girls wild and saucy just that
way. No matter I had no ideas what
teeth were hidden there between
the smiles and the underwear, on
that road from a t-shirt’s hem up under
all the way to what that goofy bra
disclosed slung high into a tree
You planted just for me. My entire
miserable childhood tore in torrent loose
in the single moment of that sight: right
then I was no longer in but in and
desperately wanting out, or suddenly
so out and wanting in. Sugared by the
works which spun cotton brassieres
round the slather of my brain, I jerked off
every night with that high bra held in
sight, rubbing my newly-wakened cock
against the sheets til they were soaked
in sperm and blood. (Heavens, what did
my mother think? Were You thus satyrizing
her as You were plecturing me?) Sometimes
I wonder if the booze was just the surest
conduit to pussy, to that catastrophically
sweet swirl in the soft curves and musk oils
of a willing enough, bra-freed girl. Which
was booze and whence the bottle but from
Your cabinet of thrills, red master? And
whose worm swirled at the bottom of
my endlessness cry for more -- me or Your
latent now wakening desire for those
bloody lines of sperm ink I wrote on
those first white sheets? Though the medium
has changed, I’m still gouting all I think
about that primary bliss; that white bra’s
still turning on a summery and warm
too-noctal breeze, flashing like a smile
in the dark where all lovers climax in
a spark which burns the matter down
once more -- No, there’s no escaping this
tonsured shirt of fire. Father, your head
is reddest with the depths of it, and I am
just another aching pent baritone in
one huge randy, forever famished choir.

IV

As usual, there’s not enough time to sing
things full enough -- the day I choose
intrudes with the bright wings of Your
morning star staircasing into dawn. I
always shut Your book and head upstairs
to wake a second time with my wife,
stroking her feet slow and light with
fingertips still glowing with Your gules.
Does she sense at all the heat of our
dialogue, this ecstasy transcribed for her
in the angel’s touch she understands?
Does any of this ever remain topside?
I do not tell her much of where You
and I have flown, nor of what depths of
bliss we found descending pages in such
heedless flux of verbal sooth: The words
just seem acrid, self-musked, the strange
smell of a husband’s life one tolerates
for reasons known only for love of house
and garden love bestowes. For her its
all about what follows, not precedes, the
kiss; her strand’s far up from mine, inland
from where waves crash and fold the
lovers’ psalmody. Night and day this beach-
wild song and my fingers on her soles,
yet its still just the one long day I love
and live and work to death. It’s 4 a.m. here,
night leaking a thick fog from its vents,
too warm for November (though tonight
its supposed to cool down a great deal).
Another hellbent day ahead, with my last
infusion of DHE and Toradol and some
anti-nauseating drug at 9 a.m. (I’m dosing
twice a day for three days in this latest
big-gun assault on knocking migraines out);
then its in to work for a day of fast and
hard production finishing off the weekly
package in time to mail everything off
today since tomorrow is Vets Day.
My eyes are feeling glutinous and tacked
with whatever’s ailing them -- too much
of what’s to do in sight? -- and I’m weary,
not having slept well despite the increased
dose of Depakote. As usual You fight
the medicines, the way you battled therapy
when it was so hard to yield to EMDR.
You’re as stubborn as a rude hardon which
no amount of feathered talk can hide,
much less deny. Well, this song’s Your
chance to vent but good. To every devil
His due, and Your’s it seems, is wildest blue.

V.

In my dream last night You might have
surfaced once again as that bald fat
aging criminal whose heart was pure
lust for larceny, stealing what he could and
then challenging a pretty girl to a rassling
match in the center of my brain. He looked
a bit like I imagine Judge Holden in Blood
Meridian, ax godless godlike man of such
hard intelligence he was primed to fuck
the world in every way, especially all its
softest maids. But the dream didn’t give
that naked brute a chance, instead switching
channels to the house I lived in when
my first marriage ended. I stood in my
study at the back of the house looking
out on the back yard where I saw a
young man naked as the day with
a long thin hardon crowing proud,
curved like a sexual scimitar. He was
thrusting away at the hindquarters of
a fattish crone, someone the brute
equivalent of the earlier fat man, perhaps
the sort of woman inside that sort of
man. Anyway the young guy was just
pumping away while the woman grunted
and yowled her ecstasy, demanding of him
his all, from crown to hilt of bouncing
balls. Is that how all this passes on
down to here, each page a blasted heath
so foul and fair as to smirch the
Mother’s underwear with the blood-
spermed spume of Your white whale?
In 5,000 poems lost to this thrall
which no one hardly cares to read,
have I yet waded half across the sea
of her undinal sighs? Far indeed from
actual hips the plunging of this membered
sense, now 2000 words or worse long.
Yet when did You ever have any need
for that sweet pink cusp of Venusian mons,
a labial littoral shored by swirly pubic hair?
It now seems to me that that just kept
on the singer’s tongue enough taste of the sea
as to rudder metaphoricals toward the beach
where You made this man out of me.
What am I now but the son of an infernal
scree, about a totem Father’s tide?
See: I’m nothing now but waves, all surge
and salt-coiled clench, collapsing verbs
in foam. My singing is forever half offshore,
of one wet world winged with the other’s
drydocked feather. New bucks are horning
up Your wood. May ever song of salt derange
show them how to plunge the depths but good.
And if a cracked head keeps Your door flung wide,
then may this migraine fog the wildest wood.