My Totem's Blue Taboos are You

“Taking all this together it becomes highly probable that a totemic culture was at one time the preliminary stage of every later evolution as well as a transition stage between the state of primitive man and the age of gods and heaven.”

-- W. Wundt, The Elements of the Psychology of Races (1912), quote in Freud’s Totem and Taboo


NORTHERN LIGHT,
SOUTHERN CROSS

Nov. 6, 2006

I.

Since I found and
lost her in the fish
tale of my life (always
the divined one
who swam away), I’ve
been digging down
and round the labyrinth
of history, finding in
my soul’s bones & jones
a vast cathedral founded
on a pagan’s Venus mound,
itself erected over a
cavern’s chapel spiralling
down to those first
wild seas when she
gave birth to You in me.
As I the world: my
history Your spume-
flung mysteries;
in Nature’s symmetry
my tale is Yours, flapping
brutal flukes against
the wake of time’s
buoy bells that
margin human hell from
its vaster vaginal heaven
with a harrowing death-spasm.
C’est tu est mois::
Your work is mine and
mine full yours, in
this archangelic soak
between the antonyms,
bedding every
metaphoric curve of blue to
honk a homonym of You.
When I first read of
how St. Columba tried
to build his abbey
directly over Manannan's
liquid bones, I felt a
pick-axe here, disturbing
a sward I didn’t know
was exactly beneath my
Christian faith -- as when
I was baptisde in the
Atlantic of Melbourne Beach
at 14, I pierced with
that amen a fish
already fast to Poseidon’s
trident, hauling something
wriggling up from a text
which I found had dragged
me flailing down into
a tale’s old and older
thrall. Or how, back
in the mythic narrative,
each day’s work each
night was blown over by
a vicious gale: Yes!
That’s the text beneath
of my drinking years
where I was ruled by
two wills -- the one
which builds,
the other staunchly
refusing profane day uses
with a black seal’s abuses
poured from bursting
bodices of bad booze.
And when Columba vigils
a long night facing off
with the entire pagan
devilment of his tribe,
up from the froth of
brutal Hebridean tide,
at midnight, mid-ride
of a full’s moon’s harrows,
a fish-woman thus emerged,
hair trailing wet and wild
as a nightmare’s mane,
breasts blue and savage
as two berserking Picts,
the mouth Sibyllic, as
O-shaped as the moon,
oracular, giving the saint
the news that first water
must be propitiated by
the sacrifice of an erect
man (standing in a grave
a tad taller than the victim):
Wham: the full nocturn
sang me down, or up
and in, inside the
fish-god’s drowned domain,
my every word and concept
become pure phallus,
water’s own founding
stone, the arch through
which dark spasms us
loose to wake and walk
our life’s long shore.
A killer myth, at least
for me: My totem song
astride its fish,
between the gripping
knees of a divinely
savage impulse
to part and ride all seas.

II.

There’s a full moon
this morning high in
the night’s black steeple,
ringing salty sea-chanteys
over all the misty people
of my sacred history.
The true engagement
sings beneath the profane one,
my tanist Oran’s adventure
writing in reverse
beneath this aging
scriptorium I work
and weary every day.
A sweet sad lucence
rich as cold buttermilk
burns everything that
moonlight touches
with the old ghost-
phosphor of love’s lost nights,
the aching reach
of the lover’s loneliness
outside of love’s first
swoon. I dreamed last
night of a mall of sorts
where three stories
came together; there
were three music stores
at the junction of
three halls that
faded back to salty black.
I went through each
with some Other;
first I showed how
I could still ride across
a guitar’s neck
like a sea horse of
infernal measure, the
prince of paupered
pleasures hooving
hard right up the furrow
of tne next barmaid’s
unpantied tundra,
my solos spitting hellfire
up her ululant yesses
likes a third rail between
nocturnal ire & the
next day’s dooming.
In the next store
I explained to her
how I once managed
employee events
for a newspaper
years ago, pulling
titanic displays of
faux-recognition
for a brutal corporation,
staging veterans dinners
and all-day meals
inside tents bigger than
the pressroom, set outside
in the parking lot -- work
as faded from my bones
as that earlier jones for
rocking hard and late.
Gone, yet vivid in that
mall below where Oran
sails in search of
the fish-god father
he was tossed to from
the docks of mortal time.
And then in the third
singing store of the
dream, its strangest:
I found myself
with my face pressed
deep against her nude
ass, my tongue inside
her squishy heated cunt;
I thought how impossible
yet the dream cried Not!
& I pressed my face
up closer, those asscheeks
in my eyesockets,
my nose inside an
asshole, my tongue
singing real blue
psalms at last,
relishing the words
inside the strange wild airs
of a juicy cunt and ass.
Boy! Put me down for
shaken and stirred when
I woke up at 3:15 a.m.,
more ready than ever
to write dreams down.
And thus I exhume
those wild draughts
of my sea god’s derange
here upon the sane
white odorless page
of 4:30 a.m., here
at the start of another
bust-ass week in the
trenches of the
loved lived life. Those
perplex shifting
refractions of the heart
are like waters kin
to moonlight, streaming
and lapping round the stone
totem who crests and shores
my every imagined spree
and labored Sidhe.
He’s the naked dude
hanging on for dear life
as the fish he is dares
to spout and dive the
whole mystery of his
tribe in my present
pale exult, taking
highest pleasure
in in predations
of the word I dare
not so much say as
ride inside the ink-
hurled tide, a spasm
of spermatic joy
welled straight from
Moby’s sea-bottomed
dick. He shouts Yes!
and so do I, with all
the ink a man can fly.

III.

This morning’s savage
moonlight takes me
back to another night
long ago, when at 14
I went on a church retreat
at some Pentacostal
church. I’d come at
at some kid’s invitation
and was sure I’d save
everything they’d lost.
But for some strange
reason -- Your’s, today I claim --
I brought along both totem
and exactly what it feared --
my cherry red Fender Mustang
guitar/amp; and Sue, the
girl who changed in front
of me in her room, a
greatly fallen girl who had
never stepped inside a church,
much less offered up
her too-fucked heart to
anyone, especially God.
Who was I trying to save,
those kids, or her, or me
from falling either way?
The gathering was typical --
gawky boys and girls all
of an age gathering in
a cement-walled sanctuary,
singing boomy Christian
arias in off-key unison,
bending hard all knees
to remit the bullish roar
arousing from below.
The youth pastor toned
a long prayer against
sin and its damnations
and when he said amen
my Sue was gone, her
sad silky presence
ebbed from the room,
taking with it all
the tension which lured
me with Your fire.
The night dragged on
and on from there,
keel-hauling me over
my own conflicted
nails, half of me
wanting to save those
souls & the other half
wanting to be done
forever with with
Christian dorks,
desperate to join Sue
wherever she had
gone in that long
great moony night.
We prayed more
and sang, we ate chips
and dip & sipped Cokes,
screeched around a
volleyball net til after
midnight & then separated
to our halls, boys one way
and girls the other. At
some very late a.m. a boy
took up my guitar and
started playing the opening
to “Secret Agent Man” over
and over and over, sound
turned low with lots of
reverb, a plainchant drone
I hated as I lay there in
the belly of that church,
the windows burning
with a lunar brilliance
that seared my soul
with what the church could
never save me from.
I didn’t know how to say
the words, but my mood
swore at those depths
that I’d get out to nail
the world with my moon-
fraught loins, right through
every woman I could
corral or deceive or
seduce my way to.
Secret words which
welled into my mind’s
mouth up from Oran’s
breech I think, down there
in the vicious North Sea
saving us from salvation’s
white decrees. The both
of us aboard the back
of that diving divining fish.
At dawn they found Sue
passed out on the front lawn,
her hair in wild tangles,
drunk as a skunk and
irritated as hell at those
girls who swarmed round
her in maidlike Christian
warmth, leading her inside
to comb out the perfect
tangles in her hair &
read her scriptures as
she dozed and woke
to glare. A few days later
when I went over to
her house, I got the whole
story: bored and more
than a little afraid of
our trancelike prayers,
she’d crept out a back door
and walked the streets
a while until a car
with two boys roared up
& offered a good night’s
boozing. She went with
them: that’s all of it
she’d tell me, except
that along the way
she’d passed out and
woke there in the grass
with a sprinkler hazing
her feet and ankles. So
much for my world’s union,
back then as now. I stayed
between enrapt and
terrified of the sweet
inch that kept me from
entering and being her,
a spectral ghost-child
of the moon forever afoot
on wild hightways outside
of town. And yet that
moonlight is still over
and inside me, kissed
into me by her perhaps
when we necked and
my hands crept up
her t-shirt. Who knows.
I’m still in that music,
that blue amplitude
of water’s night, and all
of it yet to dream somewhere
further down this page
or the next or the next.

IV.

Three cups are on my
father’s totem crest, each
filled with milk poured
from the other by tonight’s
full moon: God guitar
and woman, yes -- history
mystery & more; laughter
music & sleep; the
triune porpoise who
rides beneath my sleep,
hauling me from shore
to shore to shore,
our passage exactly
where You and I
are more than just
a poem’s wrack at
the end of failing
quite to say it well.
A third wave’s secret
swell surprises us
both here with the
taste of the booze
Sue surely tasted
while I wished my
lips were pressed to
hers, a wave surprising
You and I both
crashing over all,
causing me to look
around and find a
third welcome in my
thrall of divinely
curving spells. As then
now: What I found
there beneath the
moon is inside this
morning’s beacon sky,
Oran’s boat up in
the Northern Lights
my hands squeezed on
that night I reached
up Sue’s t-shirt and
felt the moon, squeezing
out the juice which
still augments You and I.
C’est tu est mois:
to us this whalebone sky.




S. Reinach ... in the year 1900 sketched the following Code du Totemisme in twelve articles like a catchism of the totemic religion:

1. Certain animals must not be killed or eaten, but men bring up individual animals of these species and take care of them.

2. An animal that dies accidentally is mourned an buried with the same honors as a member of the tribe.

3. The prohibition as to eating sometimes only refers to certain parts of the animal.

4. If pressure of necessity compels the klling of an animal usually spared, it is done with excuses to the animal and an attempt is made to mitigate the violation of the tabboo, namely the killing, through various tricks and evasions.

5. If the animal is sacrificed by ritual, it is solemnly mourned.

6. At specified solemn occasions, like religious ceremonies, the skins of certain animals are donned. Where totemis exists, these are totem animals.

7. Tribes and individuals assume the names of totem animals.

8. Many tribes use pictures of animals as coats of arms and decorate their weapons with them; the men paint animal pictures on their bodies or have them tattooed.

9. If the totem is one of the feared and dangerous animals, it is assumed that the animal will spare the members of the tribe named after it.

10. The totem animal protects and warns the members of the tribe.

11. The totem animal foretells the future to those faithful to it and serves as their leader.

12. The members of a totem tribe often believe that they are connected with the totem animal by the bond of a common origin.

-- also in Freud’s Totem and Taboo




FACES

from "A Breviary of Guitars," 2000


Fall 1971

I have never been
brave enough
to face the world
on my own. Always
(or since the
bruising of history)
needed an amulet,
a charm, a tool,
a totem father.
This pen and poem.
My penis. God’s
dogmatic fire.
Love’s billow.
That Fender Mustang
and all the guitars
that followed, a
royal road which
led me deep
into the world
& then left
me there.
Strings leading
back and down
my story
from the acoustic
guitar now
gathering dust
in my closet
to a blue
Hamer Phantom
to a white Fender
Jaguar to a black
Les Paul to
an oak Music
Man to sunburst
Gibson J45
down through
a brace of
Epiphone 6
and 12 string
guitars to
that cherry red
Mustang.
But not stopping
there -- keep
on down from
my first guitar
to that little
ukelele I used
to sing to
Big Toad.
A vertebrae
of guitars
& a song
threading
through the core
upon which
I perched
the face
I created from
song, whether
to fill in all
the nasty gashes
from the world’s
random knives
or perhaps
some genetic
geneological
pulse which
found its
most chord
in me. When
I pulled that
Fender Mustang
from its plush case
and fitted its
thick leather strap
over my shoulder,
that guitar hugged
close to me patched
me somehow
into a wilderness
I could never
have entered on
my own. Cranking
up the amp, banging
out big chords.
Strutting large
out of the house.
Playing that
crowing cock
I grew cocksure
and the girls
I once mooned
for in deathly
remove
noticed



HORSE TATTOO

2002

By some defect of soul
I’ve got it all reversed:
my downs appeal,
forward steps appall.
For my first three years
I carried a strange birthmark,
a red heart with an arrow
through it, right over my heart.
Cute, eh? A woman who
babysat for me back then
once remarked to my mother,
he aint gonna be nuthin’
but a lover. Only the mark
was upside down. A backwards love.
May that’s why I like tattoos.
I got my first one of
a man riding a dolphin
etched on my left upper
arm in a greeny blue
right after my first marriage.
It replicates a figure from
my father’s chosen coat
of arms (fanciful at best),
some rebel spirit who
cruises between love and
iniquity. Years later
after a split with my second
wife a second tattoo
seemed necessary. I’d
always like the Uffington
Horse, that huge figure
carved into a chalk hillside
in England. It looks like a
horse, though locals swear
it represents the dragon
Saint George slew nearby.
Somehow that was apt:
having left home in a funk
of desire and drunkenness,
I had that careening spirit
carved into my right arm
not in red—as dragons go—
but instead in black, the
negative of that white ichor
which illuminates that
hill horse’s bones.
Well, I didn’t die of that
spirit—not yet—and I’m
working my way slowly
home again to my wife.
So the tattoo, I guess, is
an irony, the road eventually
not taken which only leads
to ruin. I’m branded by
the fires which drove me here:
Are they good or ill, or
simply mine? Am I some
inwarding beast mined
from love’s reversals?
I will never know for sure.
Today, I’m proud and fearful
of those markings: They light
the way ahead for me
with their weird, otherworldly glow,
balled makings with nowhere
right now to go.




MASTER OF REALITY

from “A Breviary of Guitars, 2000”

fall 1971


That my 10th grade
sped so smoothly
like a well practiced
12 bar blues
meant I had
coined an identity
that sufficed,
glinting with
the plural
golds of Jesus
and Fender.
In the mornings
before class
I gathered with
my fellow
Christians to
hold hands and
pray for
our school’s
salvation from
sins we feared
so reverently.
With the bell
I fled to
the safety of
classrooms far
away where
my faith
was of a different
order. Amid
the drone of
instruction in
chemistry
and French and
world history I
drew cartoons
of wrestlers
and guitar players
and made
ligatures of songs.
My head a teeming
sea of teenaged
fancies, of muscles
and guitars and
girls, girls, girls.
I reveled in
the opportunities
unfolding
in each class:
Dawn who sat
behind me in History
copying my test
who smacked
her gum loudly
and made
extravant noises
when stretching.
Cathy Sims
in French with
her blonde hair
and freckles
and shy eager smile.
Renae and Katie
in Typing like
bookends of
my encyclopedia
of longing,
Renae moonfaced
and beautiful
the (virgin goddess)
whom I wanted
to save and
succor and
Katie the
blonde breasty
Venus who
reveled in
teasing me
to distraction.
Why either
cared for me
much was
a mystery - both
were juniors (two
years older than
me) -- perhaps
I was just a fresh
innocent safe boy
whose delight
in them was
brilliantly clear.
My eagerness
to drink in
everything they
offered required
no actual touch.
I sat there
like Ferdinand
on Miranda’s
beach drunk
on the sweet
sounds swirling
from their
eyes & smiles
& hair & perfume
& voices & laughter
& tanned arms &
legs & undulating
walk & the
Venusian peaks
rising from
my startled Earth.


2.
At home I
finished homework,
practiced my guitar,
lifted weights,
listened to songs
on WORJ and sketched
psalms of baseball
and hippie love.
I was by
then skilled
at self-amusement,
yet my room
was no longer
a locked cell.
On my wall a
livid cerulean
poster of Peace
with the peace
symbol cut out
(Satan’s claw,
my mother proclaimed).
Without a black
light it didn’t
much matter,
but the hole
in that poster
was a door
leading out
of my room.

After dinner
I’d head out
for an hour
or two of
fellowship
with Christian
brothers.
Dusk a rich
saturate of
late gold light
& the air in
October still
citrus sweet with
humid urges.
I’d light a
first cigarette
as I rounded
the corner
and inhale deep:
and out the
hole my poster
I would seep,
no longer
in Christian day
heading now
into rock and roll
night. Each step
away making
me feel lean
and hungry,
wide-eyed at
all that was
too perilous
to embrace
hence impossible
to resist.
Kids on minibikes
and knocking
those clacker
balls on a string.
Ululations of
swamp music
rising far ahead.

3.
In Sue’s room
she and I listened
to 3 Dog Night
while Sue told
me all about
the terrible tack
her life had
takened after
moving to
Winter Haven
from Sparta
in New Jersey.
Cruel teachers
& her parents
telling her
she could
do whatever
she wanted now
because they
didn’t care.
As proof
she would change
in front of me.
Silk green panties
with a flaming
heart on the front.
Once I play
wrestled her
on the bed while
she was half
dressed and
ran my finger
up the hairy
thatch on
the front
of her panties.
Sus stilled
and looked at me
with frank
invitation. But
I just giggled
and pulled
back, my
heart hammering
so loud I
swore she could
hear it too.
We usually
ended up
out by the lake
smoking Marlboros
watching the
moon and
stars glitter
cold blue on
black water.
She’d tell me
about all the
boys who’d
had their way
with her and
how she
couldn’t wait
to turn 18 and
get the hell
out of here.
I sat and
just listened, enthralled
with how the
world had entered
her so many times.
There’s a music
in a bad girl’s
tale that I’m
an absolute
sucker for.
All I wanted
was just to
hear it
rock and roll
the precarious
motions
of the night.

4.
Where I thought
it was safe I
wreaked my
totem-guitar
havoc. The
Parties with
my old pals
from Ridge
Independent
where Everybody
Dances With Everybody
became a
specie of my bedlam.
I’d weep aside
that dreck by
Cat and James
and Carol and
put my new
Black Sabbath album
“Master of
Reality” on the
turntable and
crank the hard
stuff. The dancing
now darker and
pulpy with desire
as I pushed
and pushed at
the next boundary.
Each party
I picked out
one of the girls
and worked her
for the night,
smiling and then
scrabbling my
name all over
her dance card.
Following her
to the snack table.
Stealing kisses
during the slow
dance. Watching
her eyes progress
from first glint
to widened surprise
on to languid
release. It was
always just a kiss with
darker implications:
a tip of tongue,
hugs strong enough
to forget the
boundary of clothes,
a fluttery heart
pounding harder.
By night’s end
I got what I
wanted. The Yes.
Having heard that
sweet chord in her
body, I slammed
down my guitar
and scythed myself
free. I’ll call!
And sashay
out the door
with her yes
clutched in my
hand to take home
and cast it
with the others
I had collected.
In the dark
I diddled
with what I
could not do,
dotting each
of her circles
with a jot from
my pen, standing
over her
with one
killer of a howl.





TIN AHAB

2002

... I see now that the force
that made him great
Drove me to the dregs of life.

— Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

Be sure of this, O young ambition,
all mortal greatness is but disease.

— Melville


It was the ungodly godly man
whose ship I so earnestly
yet badly sailed. I too yearned
to be a terror of the yeasty deep,
feral, uncompromising, brave,
unmatched but for the whale
which would drag me in the end to hell.
But who’s ever heard of a tragic
hero without a pair of pewter balls?
I merely drank in all the places
I should have been living
with impunity. The heart
of that grand amoral captain
of wild surges eluded me; I was
far too timid, too petty,
to vain; in the end I
was just too drunk.
My nights were just bad Melville,
a sot infatuated with grand
designs drifting in an inky
stinky whaleboat sans
oar or rudder, my will
two sheets to any breeze.
All the grand catches
got away, my barbs cartoonish,
slavish to false rigors.
No man’s more foolish
than he who hammers
a gold man from bad tin:
nor imparts less nobility
to the melancholy ship
he slowly sinks within.





CROSSROADS

2004

There is a crossroads
just outside of every
Florida town. It’s
not marked on
any map and you can’t
find it if try, but
you also can’t help
running into it
again and again.
Another road
crosses yours and
there isn’t a stop sign,
no street or highway
signs either. A
boarded-up gas station
or convenience store
sits on one corner
like a discarded
giant’s skull. Catty
corner an orange
grove deepens for what
seems like miles. The heat
is flattening and still;
you feel a welling
of that mercury’s
friable, sacerdotal goo
up some hidden
temples throbbing in
the place, as if some
mind you entered
but did not own
was composed from
this crossing of
what seems like roads.
A creaking further
off draws your attention
to a skeleton twisting in
a Southern oak, its
supposed gender, race,
and crimes absolved in
the bleaching tide of
the Florida sun. That
low rock and spin just
over the weave
of crickets is like
the psaltery of ghastly
ends which must
perforce all altar here,
for all the dead
turned left or right
at this place where
we walked on.
You get the feeling
that a thousand moving
vans crossed here
and disappeared,
trucking their wide-
eyed freight into suburbs
far under the suburbs,
beneath the groves
and lakes and sands
far under here to
serve the Paradise
inverted to our own.
What is that music
playing just ahead
where the roads
seem to fuse in
a wheeled axle
of pale fire? It sounds
like that old Cream
anthem “Crossroads”
hacked out by some
cover band at a
highschool dance
some 30 years
ago, and somehow
you’re just stepping
off that dance floor
to here, still sweaty
and trembling at the
sight of that young
girl dancing in the
pale green minidress,
her breasts doing
a sort of late 60’s
frugaloo, sensing
that eyes had drank
as deeply of you
as you of her in
that dance that
the two of you will
always find
the other here, each
looking back toward
the other way as you
stepped off of that
dancing floor.
There’s a distant thunder,
a shifting in the breeze,
those creaky bones
and the maddened
pungent sweet of
a million orange
trees in fresh eternal
bloom; and though
there’s no traffic
in sight you somehow
get the feeling that
it’s mauling from
two ways at once
in ways you can’t
quite know, a
cacauphony of wooden
wheels and diesel engines,
Model-A’s and Pintos,
smuggler jet-boats
and galleons and
the paddle of a canoe,
bicycles and ice trucks
and busses on the way
to perdition and/or Paradise.
Pay your dues here
as you can; lay a stone
upon the herm, whistle
some of that old Robert
Johnson blues, give
thanks to your God for
the sweet smell of those
blooms & how a woman’s
cleavage can summon
up these crossroads,
as does the memory
of your father waving
farewell as you drove off.
Then blink your eyes
and of course its gone,
no other road in
the rear view mirror,
just the droll rural mash
of farms for sale and
naked billboards and
turkey buzzards in
a dazzling sky, spiralling
around a shrinking,
ever-more-distant kill.
(Or was it a kiss?)
All roads eventually
must come to this.
The crossroads will
come up again,
sure as this and all
the other worlds
are writing with
something like this pen.
And all I didn’t
get quite right before
will in that brute
crossing orient
that tale again.