walking home in the cold october wind, (halloween a few days away), i pack my last pack of camels and remove the first cigarette. i stop for a moment and cup my hand to light it. inhale. (HACKing cough, rasping death gasp...) smoking too many cigarettes but if these could be my last twenty, what do i want them to represent? i mean, we are speaking in allegorical parables here aren't we?
i light my next cigarette while thinking about my last statement. (how long in between, tho?) do U see? symbolist or minimalist? which is it to be? but wait! why not a mixture, a combination if you will, of both these and many more -ist's. (is that a word? well, i guess it doesn't really matter s'long as i get my point across...) inhale. exhale. the whole routine. mainline oblivion and the assembly line saved humanity. that's what they say anyway as i sit at this computer keyboard typing both night and day away. nothing to say, just an attitude of antiattitude. a worthwhile skill to have in today's day and age. some people see this but most want THAT and also everyone's hats are always getting mistaken for other people's hats. ack! and then the cats come into the story (that 20th century broadway thing that ran and ran and is still running...) anyway, smoking number two i'm trying to say, dramatically, if not also surrealistically, that my words wander willingly westward while my mortal shell stays here amidst the cornfields and cold, hard winters. (Xtremes) the mirror stares back at me. it grins. my reflection smirks at me. night and day merge into one moment of ouroborousness that is infinite and finite both. how U ask? well, i don't know either so let's move on, the cigarette's almost gone and i don't have a single concrete image (except for an ash falling dangerously close to the keyboard...)
and so it happens one certain monday morning right now or months away... skipping ahead freely! dancing, grooving, transcending the everyday to the fabulous realms beyond. i nod, i glance, i look that way and she smiles and says, "cigarettes?"
oh how confused i am! are these out of order? the clerk smirks at me (art school coffee fiend clerk) and i just nod my head and say, "yeah, well, i guess if it's like that, i'll take a pack." green grin as she stares curiously at my shaved head.
"you guess if it's like that, you say?" she says, her eyes searching/scanning/delving for something...who knows if she finds... the smile, tho. yeah, she smiled when she said it so now it becomes obvious and tedious and boring and old school and tired even. oh how to continue with cigarette #18? is it a metaphorical treatise on age? or is it just a number, a symbol, lonely symbol representing maybe a monetary unit. U know, those oh so very tres cool things called dollars and pounds and franks and cents and pence and yen and susan anthony even! confusing coughs cluttering desktops in the mind where time is but another drag off the sickening stick o'nicotine. yeah, i guess U could say this means i'm going to quit, trying to quit, need to quit...(quit!)
quit already with that self pitying shit. i mean, for real. can't U see that this world is a world where world means money and power and bigger and bigger guns. at least a certain number of people see it that way. me? well, i guess i see the world as cigarette #17...how so, U ask?
because poetry is this cigarette, in motion, retroactive a thousand years past...#17 poem is the world and the world is poetic when seen thru the colored lense of my mind's inner eye (i) so artistic and lean and crude and mean and this artistic image sees into the future and the past and the present moment becomes the peak of all expenditures... money spent seeking for this neomythical beast pOem is also the world. this means the calculations are off. if indeed cigarette #17 is no more than money in the end, what of it? let's smoke it and be done w/it. poetic green currency of the imagination. no retreat, only retaliation... forward - moving on - the cigarette ash growing - embers - red speck in the darkness. drag after drag... inhale and more time to think about the last moment when money is no longer time and poetry is no longer the money that isn't worth anything. so confusing, but alas, makes sense...the ashtray fills...
time spills on my lap like some strange, unknown, and new idea. i ponder for a few eternity from many different angles. time misplaced. disgraced beyond dignity the mirror cowers in the corner, coveting the estranged glanced from the two strangers who met under the willow tree. so sad to see this party in here ruined, raped, misled, and waylaid by the monstrously ravishing entity known as tIme. gasp * sigh... winter's retreat and the calm embrace of yet another spring. seasonal references to states of mind. all time is mine is yours is there and here and way back when it was just realized that the moon went 'round so many times. calendar of diseased idioms, dead ideas, and fruitless slaughter. wars add up in time and now the #'s are relevant. time is like a cigarette sitting unsmoked in an unopened pack on the shelf in a store somewhere in detroit on halloween night. time is this smoke being lit with a single strike of a match - the sound of the sulphur igniting as it passes over the back of the pack. flame appears and the cigarette draws near, slowly, hesitently, lest the motion of the air around the hand holding the match cause it to go out. and now the first drag to get it going and the match is extinguished... (tIme puts me out...)
this time thru i see something else hovering so disconcerned on the horizon of illahieved dreams and nightmare realities of day to day living. runon sentences heading off towards montana, the day before they succeed in their succession from the states of consciousness. the west topples/tumbles/falls/rebounds and is ready to pounce/strike once again. uncle sam, uncle sam where are you now? where is the nation that once was? oh, here it is, founded on polite genocide )i see the indian's (our name for them) tears which aren't falling for me but anyway his stare looks back into the past, two hundred years ago, and he sees that the trees back then were much healthier and then came the white man who called himself european and civilised then comes...the end of these parenthetical extremes...) our nation under the sky so blue and look here at our indusTRIAL might! we have more bombers, we seem to say every chance we get, rolling them off the airstrips to rain down mass chunks of metal and chemicals on any who dare to oppose us or mistrust us or badmouth us or go against a policy we happen to like. police the world is what they say, but you know what? i just don't care.
i think. as i light this cigarette, finally, i think we should look to our own borders because we also have cold, hungry/starving people and crazed drug czars running the streets (and forget not corrupt cops and politicians of all flavors and sizes, and postal workers going on rampages and dead rock stars and top forty radio and censorship...) but no, the pile is getting too large for US to handle. america is a cigarette we are all taking drags off of. is she about burnt up? maybe? U see? just a little? *sigh* well, ok then, another glimpse at the tv nation slowly fading in all the right areas - (bombers but no artists?) - yeah, sadly and to my utmost dismay, this civilisation we have turns its back on all things that aren't money, aren't somehow american. the same sad soiled dream from centuries ago haunting mankind still. we are patriotic? yeah right, long live the precious all american dollar...
#14
a cigarette is like saying, altho somewhat politely, i just don't give a fuck. maybe just this one personal freedom we have, the right to be addicted by choice, bugs the ominous THEM enough to try to take this simple pleasure away from us...
this smoke for me represents a certain girl i left behind when i shouldn't have but i did and there's nothing I can do about it... this will hopefully relieve some of the built up emotions involving this certain someone who was a sixteen year old vampire who used me for escape but maybe cried once or twice when i was gone. no, maybe i'm all confused. it was so long ago that i can't recall what it was we had between us. it was a curious relationship to say the least. we both took what we needed, we fed off each other, needed something the other had. just to a certain degree, tho. we were never really intimately close. we almost came to it a few times but she was sixteen and i was inexperienced. so, like all bad love stories from four years ago, this has to end on a sad, tragic note of forgetfullness and late night roadtrips - wandering around, both of us looking for something in the other and finding a small part. and then we drift. (she stops smoking and i start...)
twelve is going to the costume ball dressed as a clown, not your everyday blowup-balloons-and-tie-them-together-at-parties clown, but a real live rebellious poetic clown from years and years ago. (i juggle this cigarette from hand to hand as i stand in middle of a bridge, overlooking a river of infinite sadness in which i see Hesse floating by, his skin blue/green, his soul somehow warning me...) so this clown goes to this ritzy costume ball and sneaks in as the vice president of quebec. after he gains entrance, he proceeds to drink drinks, gyrate in time with the music, and generally make a loud, obnoxious nuisance of himself. his time comes, tho, and the rebellious clown gets shunned and leaves the party. thing is, he can't get his costume off. (reality leaves me breathless...)
#11
comes in just left of center but they take it anway and now here we are in the bottom of the eleventh inning and the crowd is going absolutely crazy! can U hear them? i hope so. (get yur peeeeaaa-nuts! got yur pea-NUTS!) and we're sitting way back here, knowing that no homers have been over the literary fence in a long time. i look to my left and see salinger sitting in a raincoat, wearing darkshades, trying not to be noticed. seems he can't get up to hit anymore. (no, not fair. grin. i realize U have no more need of an audience, except for yourself, so i should admire you and your ways...) to my right is the esteemed novelist, JOHN Q POPULAR, whose latest book, "In the Hummingbird Closets of Death," had reached the number one spot in three hours after the first copy hit the shelves. (grimy gore and violence but i guess the characters are genre so he doesn't have to get up to bat like the rest of us...) and many more besides that hanging around out here in center field, waiting for someone to inspire us enough to want to step up to the plate again, someone to instill in us a sense of the suddeness that's needed to win this allegorical game...
the tenth cigarette is ten writers who influenced me and why...
the list goes on, but i bore U, i can see it...
and now here we are w/yet another tedious cigarette. what to do about it, tho? nothing really. just sit here and wait silently, patiently, for the one crystal clear image that sometimes comes. number nine is love on a certain night somewhere in a darkened room with only a candle illuminating the poor depressed soul who spends all his time writing lines that don't make sense. Alive! On Fire! Love for me is the girl also sitting in the backrow, so like me, (reading on the sly, etc...), the girl who writes and rants and rages against the idiotic machine we (i think mistakingly) call life. maybe this is the view i have around me, tho, just because no one is by my side to help me hide the injustices and concentrate on just being who i am and nothing more. oh what a bore i must seem with no certain female by my side to say she sometimes loves me and sometimes hates me but never really wants to leave me. distant daydreams. reality is the cough of the nineth drag of the nineth cigarette, almost not necessary sometimes. *wry grin* so i begin, once again, to try to grasp even a tedious fraction of what there is to know out there. sometimes i wonder if it all just isn't... but no, i see her again in cigarette number nine, my angel divine, the artistic soul so close to mine. her name is a mystery and i'm lost in misery as i try and try to say what it feels like...but alas, nothing comes out right and i still write the stale old lines over and over again, perpetuating the madness, this thing called language, this thing called ARt, this thing called Literature, (yes, even literature that goes on and on, rambling and making no sense to the untrained mind but still nonetheless sounding pretty good...) i lose myself sometimes, the words take over and i never know where i'm going. maybe this is bad. who knows? i like to think that it's good, tho, because i get practice, practice, more practice at this crazy writing thing. *sigh* (extended breath) this thing called existence...w/out her i am a somber, zombie-like slave of the machine, w/out her i will wither one day and die and my words, like all others, will be forgotten or misunderstood, w/out her i sit here and U STill can't see #nine too clearly, can U? O well, what can i do about it? w/out her i'm so very sad and lonely and the words themselves die...(the cigarette, like all others, eventually goes out...)
number eight is a picture found in back of my wallet, a representation of someone i knew many many years ago, a childhood photograph. anyway, this image brings back to me a collage of memories of those days, (O how young i was!), so, i pull it out and stare into her eyes. it's a bad like ness but like i said, i recall standing in her house, sneaking out after dark, being fourteen and arefree, all that kind of thing. private school hijinx. who knew, tho? we were sitting in her living room after hours, all our parents somewhere else. we sat and talked and i didn't smoke then but i am now, number eight in fact, eight to go before i just pack up and quit altogether. ack! aargghh! can i do it? i just don't know. will it work, can i stop meeting death on such a close basis day after day? i'm wandering again. *sigh* it always happens when i smoke and write at the same time. (what if it was YOUR last smoke? well? i'd really like to know...) number eight is calm and warm on the first of november, no wait, now it's the second, very early morn, walking around this crazy campus town, burnt out, a poet shell stumbling here and there, looking for something, someone, but never finding it, her. so sad and melancholy it now seems. (smashing pumpkins on the stereo won't even remove the mood...) falling into slippery waters unlike this or that cat in the hat. sam i am i am not. so, do what U want. just don't say it aloud. so trite in november so i won't bore U with the scenery, just know that she's out there somewhere in this wide world and i'm dreaming of her and writing about her and telling the story of two souls made for each other but never meeting. i do the story over and over in many styles, using different plots, character, localities, and various time periods all with distinct flavors. so many worthwhile things to write about HER, wherever she is, wherever she WILL be. but when will we be together again? silly me. the seasons never last forever...or do they?
a change in plans. we've somehow got off course int his crazy narrative and i'm here to save us lest we fall into some literary traps already fell into years and years ago. first of all U must see the resemblance between the muse, the moon, and the sea - rapturous beauty, repititious madness of sadness, this insane game playing itself over and over again. this word is also that word because it's so old, but i see U don't understand so i won't bore U with the actual grammatical rule, but rest assured it exists, somewhere...i also see in the last twelve something unmeasurably immense, so intense that it leaves me breathless. that one taste of love, but so many years ago it now seems but a dream. i see how she is involved in my destiny, tho. O what a tragedy! i want to laugh, i want to cry, i want to shout! i just want to let it all out, just like...ok, wait a minute, he's infecting me with that damned surrealism too! (#7 falls prey...)
and the walls are having their
little laugh this time around so what can i do but sit and sigh and ponder and maybe
sometimes even wonder why...not just a single why, but all of them put together. love is a
big why. i think so anyway. it's still the same day and because love isn't here i dwell on
its absence, it seems somehow more poignant. bitter sting of the absence of love. pain
increases. unbearable. utter agony as i try to write the words that will soothe a
century's worth of pain, maybe, somehow...i mean, i hope i cause someone to stop and
think, if even just for a moment, about the question dangling somewhere in the back of all
our minds. love is back, tho, it's not being here never left me. i just tried to put on a
false face to make it thru but it didn't work. i'm still here and she's not. just don't
think i can make it this time. time - what
a silly why, don't you think? why time? why not the absence of time? but it's always this
and not that and is called reality and shoved in our face since birth. time to step out of
our cages and explore our minds a bit, don't'cha think? well, maybe you don't, but i do.
in fact, it's HER that i think about. HER and her off kilter ideas much like mine, her
vivid poetry remaining in my mind days after i read it. *gasp* i guess this is the HER i
see, the HER i seek. who knows if we'll ever intercept, tho?
a candle lights a painting on the wall and i recall a certain fall a few years back that i merrily tripped thru, literally lost weekend after weekend with no escape. now i'm here, somewhere on the other side, looking at this painting that was there the first night i ventured forth into new literary realms. i guess you could call it a stage, a brief transitional period of my life, something i had to go thru. maybe not but i did and what i write now sometimes surprises me but i still like it, it somehow feels closer to my soul, my whole being, my existence in a nutshell. a candle, a painting, paper and ink, and me, the indelible poet/clown w/a *smirk* on my face...
curtained sense of self. no phone calls in quite a while so i sit here in the dim light as the sun struggles to come around the globe once again, and i write. well, actually typing in particular but writing's what it's called when someone sits down without a specific purpose and lets the words flow. no, wrong again. must specify. writing surrealism, if not also symbolism. somehow tragedy is also my cellmate in this hell hole soul called home and now i can only cry bitter tears as the wind rips thru the cracks in the window, causing the blinds to stir, rattle, moan in the early morn hour. i sit here in my perfect safety shell, hoping one day you come to the zoo and see me and maybe say...but no, i guess not. the shell is broken away from and the butterfly is let loose intot he world to expliore on his own, the cocoon a dream of many many days ago. time so short it seems real long. is it the same with OUR lives? number six seems to be dragging out forever and ever but maybe this is just my interpretation of it, how i see it, not in reality, (ie, the supposed existence everyone else sees...) does anyone else see the artistic need like me? are manifestos out of style? already? (no, no title saying as much, but i trust you can see thru the need of a subtle beginnine...hehehe...) no, manifestos are out of style when crazed lunatics with bomb making expertise can blow shit up and demand publishing. so let this just be cigarette number four, and if my demands are met i will value U as my friend, a grateful soul who has taken the time to read my words and maybe see in them a cry for change, a rallying voice saying let's storm the literary castle and bring poetry back to the people. crazed madman dreams but they're me and i say again, let's not let this generation of artists fall by the wayside, tromp in the paths trod by writers and painters and poets of centuries past. let's instead be the generation that brings it one full step closer to the impossible goal that we all strive for even tho we know we'll never make it. it's in our psyche. our dna says we must strive therefore most of us do. i don't know. yes i do! i do and am glad for my silly/happy self and that's enough (4) me...(is it evident?)
is this the morning before or the night after? time's echoing laughter fills the halls of this humble man's soul. this is something now but not like before. the door opens and we await, wait in line, rhymes w/out reason and the season, i mean the century, is the 20th. it's coming to an end and so i know i can continue, last a few more, if we even have that many. still so somber i don't know what to do. the rainy weather causes my hand to ache and ache and maybe that's why i smoke. it will be my excuse for tonight. rainy wet atmosphere in the near future. nothing to do about it. it's cold and getting colder, soon the rain will crystallize in the sky and fall to us in the form of snow, dotting the landscape. outside the trees bare and in here kind of warm, kind of cold. what could it possibly matter, tho? i mean, to me i guess i'll be here all the same but the wind whistles thru the spaces in the windowframe and the sound is eerie, even now, after halloween. troubled daydreams and i stand around all night and now here at home i need to write but somehow the words just don't add up right. yeah, this is the little ditty about work in the modern world, spending hours and hours to earn my way thru and when i get home to what i want to do (write!) it becomes a struggle against the monster lethargy. how to make it thru? what to do? where to go? now? not later? should i hurry? or am i already late? the beggers gate is out back? well, i know now that i need to go so goodbye. i wave and wander away from the illusion and get back to the writing, a little wiser, a little dumber, a little more mystified. the answer is evident but i can't pronounce any of it. incomprehensible gibberings heard from galaxies far far away. is this the beginning the middle or the end?
the stories i have, locked in my head, if only i could somehow transfer these memories to the page. write what U know, they said and still say so i do. autobiographical tragedies and dire comedies. i'm slowly sinking in the quagmire of the wealth/money/power/fame game once again. no, can't let the story of how i went three months w/out a car to prove i could, i guess, in a way, survive so dangerously close to the poverty level, ruin whatever chance i have of making this strange, odd, eclectic collection of words weave and wander and stray across the page in wanton release. withdrawing into the introduction where where i was born comes into effect, i guess. U know, terribly boring to be branded but i'm guilty too so what the hell. have to continue the show, it must always go on. struggling towards the back of the line, i wait and wonder and stare at the pictures! (suddenly a thousand feet above sealevel) winded before birth and then i started smoking (cigarettes) and everything is blurred, repititious, filled with explicatives. i wandered willingly westward but nothing came of it. too anxious...(i remember a nicotine buzz when her friends had just driven off and she stared into my eyes, as if saying goodbye, and then we were in illinois w/static filling the airwaves. no communication, building up rage and one day she got drunk and i cried and in the morning, filled with a strange new sense of freedom, i crept out the garage (yes, i know he was on the back porch. i'm sorry. don't think of me as a thief in the night...) and walked down the long gravel driveway and guess what? the dogs followed me! all the puppies! adorable monsters...i almost didn't go. i couldn't shake 'em away from me. i recalled a moment or two at the pond on the metal rowboat half submerged in the shore and yeah, it was three or four days, wasn't it? *sigh* memories go so very far back that sometimes it's hard to remember the beginning and the end. ok, the farmer came in his truck with bales of hay in the back and i threw my sack in the back and he said, 'you better bring it up here,' like i was an idiot or something. maybe i am. i don't know anymore. is this bad? anyway, he drove me to the town limits, as if saying goodbye in a strange farmer kind of way. one more thing, tho, before i close. some other words he said to me. he said, 'i don't pick people up on the main highways but if someone is back here on these county roads walking, more than likely he's headed somewhere.'
'as far as you can take me,' i said calmly, all tore up on the inside. (how can i explain?
he seemed to understand. maybe him and your gramps had had a talk. i don't know. he gave me a friendly if not cordial farewell. and i left on the hitchhike from hell and now i'm back here in another, more stable hell and sometimes i wish i would've stuck it out and maybe saw what happened. a clutz, a poet, a flower, a monstrous dis3as3d thought, apoet sham, a poet shaman. so close, so very very close. anyway, just wanted to maybe say one final farewell to U, a goodbye with this number two to go. *gasp!* my last pack of cigarettes?
my last pack of CIGARETTEs but the beginning of what? getting rid of the stolen Schwinn perhaps? *laugh*giggle*laugh* yeah, i guess it has to go with this last cigarette. especially since the seasons are changing. (i light a big, phat phillies. oh the time differential! one a day, at night. *hehehehe* do i see sam clemens? oh no, oh me oh my i smell the speil of an englishman. and a country is born! american nation of plenty and quebec coming so damn close that we want to believe it can happen. it won't happen. i can't see how they can let a country fall and think out its own destiny. it would be france ii...(and on the moon france iii?)...i see england, i see france, i see america's underpants. sue the royal Dickens out of 'em. up!:u.p. (he deserved it of course...) yeah, number one is a year long trial for someone with money and three months or even two weeks depending on how much money U don't have. such a system! i see it and i scream it here in this short from the outlands where few souls dare tread day after day. my last cigarette magically transforms itself into a cigar and i smoke and large clouds of bluish smoke fill the air. i still sit here and write, tho, so i guess it doesn't matter. (i contentedly take another puff) forgetting the name of a song. what is wrong with this? short term memory bit? yet again? O what a flimsy flip fall trip thru the halls in may but now it's november and what is there for me to do but try harder? for what, tho? this is the question, i trust, U were waiting for, the one key piece of evidence that makes all these words guilty of capturing your attention. O how i rant and rave and sometimes save certain conversations in my head, meaning to rewrite them later, put them to some use. creation? what is creation but a reflection of what is going on? (i see you're confused, but remember, this is the inside, and the key is still charity *wink*...) anyway, remember the way this or that happened w/perfect clarity? well, i like to save these and put them down on paper. maybe sometimes they amuse people, make them think. more often then not, i hope. *sigh* so smoky in here. the air stale, dead, fibrous. (i put out the cigar in my makeshift ashtray and a piece of it fell on the table just now. it just didn't seem to want to be put out. is this true of all of us?) so i say, sometimes on certain nights like tonight where the koolaid is warm and the dreams somber, carefree, and reflective at the same time. this room is my room in my city in my world on my planet but yet i own nothing and am content with my crazy otherworldly wanderings with words. working for, striving constantly, for something that can't be too easily captured with words. ever elusive, never inclusive. (now the real last cigarette is lit and there's a full moon coming up in just four days and i think i'm going to get some film and take some shots. black and white with tree limbs in the foreground and the glowing orb in the background, immense, filled w/a strange sense of majesty. a hunk of rock following our adventures thru space and time. sometimes i think we forget what a world we live in. sometimes maybe we go too fast and try too hard for certain things when instead we should be working on our inner beings. quarter it. *sly grin* (here i go again, off on tangents as autumn falls into winter...) a quarterly zine with an illustrated manifesto coming up in january and still so much work to do. (hard to type with a cigarette in your hand *hehehe*) so, yeah, maybe some shots of the moon interspersed with these particular words and i'll call it a little something off the top of my head. (deep thinker - shallow stream avoider - the ocean - vast - fathoms...) this is, let's say, the first major step of yet another writer who wants to have a say in what is taken seriously. nah, bah, and boo to the critics. in my salinger stance i can overcome all obstacles and stay true to form given to me...a gift i choose to use and now maybe the real story begins. i mean, is a manifesto a good way to begin? will we be any better off? can anyone hear me? i glance at a pile of postage lying on my desk. a cast of characters networking the globe and the web. information must be free. the scream has been released and as of a few weeks ago there were 110,000 sites on the web. (with even realtime audio equaling long distance for free! *hehehehe*) oh yeah, this crazy information age we are rolling into so unaware. w/out a second look back we are frolicking towards... hmmm, just what is it, tho? is there more? surprised/stun/stare! oh really? oh me oh my, how we try and try and save and hope that maybe one day we will win the lottery (fuck that, i ain't goin out like that...) sad soiled money rotting in pockets and purses and vaults and jars and etc. everywhere. so many uses for this thing called currency. some claim it can buy anything but i like to think we have a better world. my vision is filled w/intense Xtremes, redundancy, routines, the mundane day after day grind of work and O i can't stop writing! it's coming to an end, tho. (of course U know i'm lying about the cigarettes, right? can't U see that it's out and i'm thinking about my next?) it's the end and i'm thinking of a new beginning.
Here is what the author has to say for himself..... "file under, prelude to my next book, 'adios dr. smiley' tentatively titled, of course... thanx for wasting ######### minutes reading this... ps, feel free to fill in the symbols (blanks) as U see fit. i'm just that sorta poet/clown w/a story i guess... [end, fini, stop::::11.4.95 : 6o9 AM : etc ad nauseum...] [*smirk*...].
For more stories appearing the Sign of the Times by kp mallasch, click here.
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