Convenience Store

A living man, a cunning man

whose curiosity, dispassion --

the putative crime of gawking

surreptitiously from the aisle of plastic knives --

I wondered whether she,

clearly from Africa, was dragging her leg

because of a question put strongly

because of an impatience about something at stake.

You know, in the old days -- harried from the shtetl,

railed forth from formal schooling at Berlin -- 

they stood footsore in the camp dust, soon barbered

of their long locks afforded for the dolls of lucky girls.

And cunning men, tired of their passion

in the afterhours of exquisite music and talk

of the freeing-up of humankind,

connived efficiencies unthought-of regarding skin.

.

Warren Beatty For President

Warren should have thrown it in the ring, his hat.

Rubber chicken dinners and ten months we would have stuck it with him

July smelling of sunscreen, the campaign geared for the neighborly gusto

of good women, picnic melon, Mission figs, the local cheese and follow-up thank-yous.

I'd be a lieutenant in that corps, burnishing the leader's star

think how better we'd look, how pretty the city, how fresh the USA, what curvature the globe would spoon to, had he.

How fine-tuned a world that runs cinematically on time, cordially, but with a big stick

you need someone with panache, you need someone to explain it all that way.

.

Celebrity

 

Young women with a list of long ambitions

pant and mug and snore and throw a lifetime

achievement for just twenty seconds more.

All those little people cast on a couch

a bevy in that human race race ready

for that closer, tight close-up.

The entire humanitarian film world, and

the Housewives of Wherever -- fame frames us

flashes in our face: Surprise!  I'm here and gone.




.

Burglary

Tingling inside the entry hall, left of the foyer stairs

where guests have glanced in worry, hot, up at her shrine.

She's not here and this is a strange, after-hours tour

any room to be cooked by flashlight, meat smells in the air.

What was that song heard coming, coming in, about gone love?

Booties forensic with quietude and task

padding up to the second floor, toes outstretching like beast noses

toward one room and crack of the next for discriminate sniff

so when it comes to choice, one follows the wits, the point of it all

as if it were a jungle night, one can't be heard,

to her mumbled voice on tape by a bedside jug

garbling her text, her very own whisper that it's all okay, he's here

the country, it's in good hands, watch:  the last act's simple comedy --

and the world goes wet, spit pearls like the ones at her neck

making it a new day in the dark, turning it upside down.

.

The Process

Entering a room with a closet on a hushed late morning with rain heavy at times

only with the thought of keeping madness within bounds,

legislating reason into it, into the cross words merged with physicality,

hedging with restrictive clauses the feral urges.

Taking a test vote to register in public and hide a subcommittee fire -- 

who governs shall lead each for each into a dark called light,

bills getting passed as countries pass away,

then going into the kitchen and pretending nothing happened but nature.

.

The Five

One normal way. In yellows and greys, in cheek-pinks and corneas moderated to a Carolina blue,the spirited hope of warm day time, loin love and the occasional aged whiskey -- 

that if it were just a matter of being alone, just a matter of self-solace -- this tenderness -- one would manage it like a watercolor, a paper sheet done within the breeze of half-an-hour, sun slapping the hand with its burn.

But then there's night to think of and the second self, impatient, ready for the baton of blood, 

the impetus to purge, to frizz the hair, dance around in nakedness, slap-happy deeds, to the i-don't-care, to the fuck-you, and its dualistic song of oh, oh, oh.

Why, my love, the birth of it!  That other, sequent life, das Kind, 

the leprechaun of a piece of yourself which calls your name in a cat yowl closing on a suckle, burping thrice before dozing into a body-warm swaddle.

Don't we gather here, my friends, open-hearted enough in our success to embarrass the look on each other's face, 

that there's a fraternity to acknowledge at the offramp where cold breath meets cardboard sign and one reaches for the limp bill stuffed in a pocket -- 

avoiding those central places where American men line-up and the bold and crazy women chart a circle of repugnance and you just cast them four odd coins that you scramble-for as you break into run to miss a witch's curse.

The other us, the fifth, we bring to that table, that table of one's own version of kosher, 

what's filled the heart like leftover canteen water, a secret, the slosh of worrying that it's just luck after all, 

that the salt taste is actually one of one's own tear-grieving and we bring in the chairs, vindicate the emptiness by inviting-in the whole world.

.

Dead Ducks

Some statements elevate a man.

For instance, Kung Fu, circa years ago, 

prescribed that rules must play like music --

and the notes on Yeshua watch him urge

(in a throw-off line) to be like babes.

William Tecumseh Sherman,

man to fight all war, pronounced that war is all hell.

And there's Qoheleth's 'all turn to dust again',

and then, and then, there's Nietzsche,

or S. Freud, or even Groucho Marx.

J.P. Sartre, in fictional despair,

saw the omens present, the encroachment

on the eve of World War Two

of the throb -- if you heed -- that causes the heart

to burst its dam, to flood it all.

Some prophet, just to be one up,

to get the last word in, from his webcast shouts

Give me a match to strike and I'll fire the world

and the crowds somewhere, with butane near the stage,

flare-up the hall, bring the curtain down.

.

The Enabler

 

Night after night she loops through the nausea of word games

the drunken, petty moments in which the politics of speech

sounds like theirs, standing as a cluster of dry bushes, once

cherished tomatoes gone to seed withering in the first frost.

There's this too, the guarantee of garbled fear she slurs

making one think of the disappearance of all things

which amounts to saying goodbye to yourself, icy

and motionless, plunged in a horrible ecstasy, the other you.

To drive with her, this America, this lover,

pushes across the state-line edges around the clock,

just flight and risk, until the only sleep a neck-crick,

back-creak -- roadside sleep, refuge under a hunter's moon.

.

The Bureaucratic Frisson, Part 2 Of 2

You haven't gotten the whole story.  During this waiting time, maybe 25 minutes in, a very personable young woman with a clipboard, after attending to a score of others south of the aisle, made her way to me over the three ranks of chairs where I sat, and asked if she had managed to talk with me yet.

I was prepared, having seen her 'work the room' up to then, and explained clearly my simple problem:  how to use the online system designed to prevent people from having to queue up in the local offices like this one, like I was doing now.  I left out anything that sounded remotely snide.

She was sympathetic, but pointed out, there's nothing I can do from here.

I went back to looking at the screen, and as my number was near to being called, I stuffed Sartre into my book satchel, zipped it, and prepared for what seemed to be the need for a modest dash to the proper window before the potency of my queue number deliquesced.

My turn, Window 8.  The lady there was girded like any pro to deal with what happened to come her professional way.  I threw her off-balance.  

I was hoping to get you!  I chirped.  

She locked her chin a bit closer down to her clavicle and pretended to finish-off some prior business on her computer screen before she asked how she might help.

I detailed cleanly and quickly my problem -- really a simple one, I underscored.  She had an answer oh-so-ready.  You'll have to call the national number.

Ah, but I have done, and it, too, could offer no access -- is this a systems problem, then?

Her distant frown emphatically denied knowledge of any, and told me to keep on trying.

I nodded and then asked her an allied question about how to change my email with the Agency.

She denied even the possibility that there was any email contact whatever between the Agency and any individual at any time, and began to explain how The Privacy Act interlocked with government programs.

I nodded and raised the question of what I must have been smoking at the time that the Agency screen seemed to show an email I may have inadvertently and irrelevantly given at the time of my online contact.  She began to smile strangely, but at that point we both heard very raised voices coming from another window south of the aisle.

You'll have to come back, someone was saying to someone else.

The other voice muttered something in a growl.

You'll have to come back, the first voice insisted again

Fuck you!

My window lady had her head turned in that direction.  I whispered to her, I used to work in a public office.  She said, Security should have stopped all that, but he's just standing there.

Our business was almost at an end, but I decided to play my trump card.

I used to work for SSA.

She perked up, now connecting up why in blazes I had been able to use, earlier in the conversation, the term 'T bens'.  Up here? She asked, now with true interest.

Mostly at Bay Area Regional, in Richmond.

We chatted shop talk for another few minutes, but by the time I left, it was as though we had worked in the same unit, desk-to-desk, for a dozen years.  No.  As though we had served, unit-to-unit, in the same theater of war.

So familiar we had become so quickly, that when I told her my stint of service, she dubbed me a 'pioneer', and when I told her I left with my retirement, she came close to 'high-fiving' me.

Sometime soon, she intimated, and to signal her intended exit, she scuttled the fingers of her left hand across the counter as if they were departing feet.

I actually did get up -- her time-per-conversation being measured for efficiency -- I went to shake her hand.  She seemed almost giddy, our talk a sun-break in her very cloudy workday.  She responded with a jazz riff of a handshake, fingers thrumming the inside of my palm.

This wasn't 'business' -- this was homecoming and fond departure.

Good talking with you, I said.

Remember to call that number, she chuckled.

.

The Bureaucratic Frisson, Part 1 Of 2

I have become a card-carrying Medicare enrollee and am unashamed of it.

The application process, online, went smoothly, and the personal 'call-back' I expected from a 'live representative' didn't have to happen.  They just sent me the Award Letter and my card.

Later on, thinking about my access to online information, I re-entered the system, quickly realizing I hadn't yet established a password, so I followed the instructions to get one.  After going through four entry screens, the alert showed:  Unable to access at this time.

Ultimately understanding my standard American English pronunciation, the automated, sound-sensitive, multi-menu national phone number, which I went to next and which might have resolved things, also didn't.  After several of my vocal and numeric attempts over the phone, the alert sounded: Unable to access at this time.

This is not a major problem, since I'm still working -- functionally, happily, and getting better at what I do -- and when I do retire, I'll be applying online again, a new claim, a retirement claim, at which time my 'access' problem would likely be resolved.

But I'm something of a terrier, and I like to dig.

So I went into a local office.

Knowing fully ahead of time that the press of humanity would not be genteel, I readied myself with patience and a book.  The office itself is situated in a newly-constructed building, the fourth floor, and there is a greeting station wherein you punch your choice of reasons for visiting, get a 'triaged' number (four separate sets, depending on your query), and take a seat in an area set up like a private viewing room.

It's well-lit, has an aisle.  There's a big screen TV silently displaying the current numbers being served.  Those numbers were getting matched every so often over a loudspeaker directing people to particular windows.

General information also gets displayed on the big screen TV.  It shows in English and then in Spanish.  I deliberately avoided the English in order to practice my Spanish.  I also watched a close-captioned version of how Social Security works to one's advantage.  It stars Patty Duke-Astin and George ('Mr. Sulu') Takei and takes place on a mock-up of the Starship Enterprise, its bridge.

I'm sure it's a comedy, but I was too absorbed in the book I brought along, La Nausée, Sartre's seminal novel in which a bridge between Phenomenology and Existentialism is laid out in fictional form.

Although written in the late 30s in France just as fascism was rising as a plausible political force in Europe -- what with Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler saluting and huffing and shouting and lying and bashing -- the realization felt by the main character Roquentin that the existence of any thing was nothing more than an empty abstraction, that its reality was only a convenience, a relation between itself and any other thing, including oneself (!) -- that realization made him sick.  Movement and arbitrary assignment of meaning.  

I might say that I myself was getting a bit of vertigo trying to comprehend the missing floor that Roquentin had found himself unable to stand on.  And I was sitting.

I jerked myself away from the book's momentary abyss and looked at the screen.  My category of numbers (Roquentin would have rejected all categories as ephemeral?) had reached A32.  My number was A35.  I, for some inexplicable reason, began feeling butterflies in my stomach.  They flew around each other, one non-thing around another, one nerve impulse firing on the basis of chemical activity derived by my reading a book in a public office.  I had to stop this.  It was almost my turn.  Almost my time on stage.

.

In Two

I followed the news and cried or came close.

Airplanes and buildings made me sick.

I prayed the witness of peace in a book --

but I thrilled at video Gunga Din.

I wrote to a Quaker church:

The silent god, inside me, wanted out -- 

yet I thought I could enlist and man a desk,

and stood when the players sang to my flag.

I shut out all the hate talk,

cringed at the jingo Friday night carhonks --

yet I didn't read the church replies;

my parents lay in a Navy grave.

I swim this purposeful, blind wave,

where I crest with Mohandas Gandhi

and curl with G.I. Joe:  we're one -- but

we're too distant to clasp hands.

.

The Violinist's Daughter

The last he saw her -- flimsy blouse and dirty feet, a little drunk and nails bit broken, speaking loose, and her heroin boyfriend out and in

in Amsterdam -- had she known that she was getting this, into the weatherbeating of steetwind, life as only suddenness, a joy of coming high

and welcoming old classmates prim from the States as though she spilled from the beatitude of orgasmic up-all-night collapse

the liver over-exercised, surmising rightly she'd be now long dead, an object of anecdote, a generational footnote.

.

Ground Zero

At a late age, yet, with comfortable money, friends, why does he crack,what crazy does he find, why does he crime since no one thinks remotely

by what flash of nature determine himself as the doer of deed -- he, never predisposed, never disturbative, not known as a secretive, nor never alleged before

the mal salt airs do it, too much sun, his trendy hair trim and gizmo watch and a knowing nod at the bakery with just the right tune in his aging ear

the wind takes on a voice -- and it, the Devil's -- and when he dances into the street the morning of, in a wedding tux fit for a violation, his eyes glitter, Oxfords smartly click along the pave

.

The Long Goodbye

Maybe you're 30 and it's America's 70s and you've got a place above Franklin in Hollywood and the place is next to a roomful of New Age girls practicing naked yoga.

Maybe you've got a 'Madison' sent to you from Mexico to pay for your expenses and to buy off your friendship and you wear a thin tie and black suit and smoke too much.

Maybe there's a mysterious, classy blonde heavily put-upon by her washed-up novelist drunkard husband and they have a doberman who dislikes your face, but the blonde cooks you chicken kiev and begs your help.

Maybe the cops distrust you and the mob does, too, and you lose your cat even though you go out at 3 a.m. to buy special food for it.

Maybe you've got access to the Malibu Colony and a classic car to drive to the border.

Maybe you've got the moral grit to 'resolve all issues' and the sun is on you and maybe it is a Hollywood ending to an episode that sums up your life.

Maybe that's what it's all about.

.

The Cost Of Some Things

Unfolded, the menu labels the food in sequential pages, alphabetically, one set of courses per page.  The actual dishes read in Chinese characters, and the accompanying English makes sense, but sounds more exotic than what we normally find.

What's 'pottage'?

She tells me.  Her ensuing oral presentation, very hard to understand, includes reciting the daily special which is either one or two or three separate options.  We're not sure which.

How much?  B asks.

The waitress begins an explanation of what comes along with the beef or oysters or tofu -- or all three.

How much does it cost?  B clarifies her question.

We think she thinks we are asking to be told more about the beef dish.

I point at numbers on the menu.  Price?

Oh.  Eight dollar.

When they come, the two items we've ordered overfill our table-for-two.  Six small boats and one large of differing dishes: pork, rice, edamame, tofu, leeks, mushrooms, brick-red dried chilis.  We've been told that this is 'Taiwanese street food' -- no street I've ever been on.  This has the look of elegant service and the taste of sophisticated cuisine.  But not at all its expense.

To maximize their square footage, the place is set up for café seating, so we lunch with two young men on one side and two middle-aged women on the other.  I can't help overhearing the women's conversation the segments I catch of which center around family history, something I first think will be a genealogical recital but turns into something else.

When we leave and I take a step or two to follow B out, I pivot back and muster the greatest politeness I can find.

Excuse me -- were you just talking about the internment camps?

Yes.

I am looking at her, but not really 'seeing' her, not comfortable -- I conclude later -- focusing on her face.  She's as willing to talk about this with me, though, as she was eager, it must have been, to arrange the meeting about it with her friend.

My father at one point was interned just south of here.  She shifts paperwork a bit.  This is a map of the inside of it.

She points down at the document she's had out this whole time -- I think again her reason for lunching.  Barracks, in rectangles.  Plotted-out in numbers.  Fences.  Gates.  Guard towers.

I shake my head, not quite sure what I am going to say.  Are your parents still . . . in the area?

Yes.

With the impression I've glanced from her face, and from her voice and figure, she's an attractive woman, perhaps 60 years old.  And I'm standing before her, interrupting her engagement.  The words we are exchanging are nearly idle, flat.  My purpose is unclear to her and inchoate within me.  The conversation inherits whatever stablility it should have by taking place in the bustling ambiance of a public lunchroom where things are quite safe.

I have no business doing this.

Then I say what I must have felt I had to say.  My concentration on her face now brings her features into sharp focus. 

Let them know that I care.

.

Victory In Europe, 1945

This Vera Lynn RAF appearance.

Stanley Kubrick uses her song as the exit from his 1964 Dr. Strangelove, as an 'automated deterrent' of nuclear bombs mistakenly (subconsciously!) gets triggered -- the Doomsday Machine causing 'blossoms', one after the other, Springtime.

Kubrick's irony goes, as usual, that distance into the human heart . . . which only The Shadow seems to know.

This entry to the brave people, dead and living, who weathered those times and fought that 'good war'.

And good will to the many who oppose fascism in all its forms.

.

Management Praxis

What needs to be done.

What needs to be said about what needs to be done.

What must not be said about what needs to be said about what needs to be done.

What must be said never to have been said to one about what must not be said about what needs to be said about what needs to be done.

Got it?

Absolutely!

Then it's yours to steer.  I'm sure you won't let us down.

.

With Jeanne Moreau As 'Christine'

We get a lot of that, the logging debris, splinter chips, hillsides looking like a bad shave, bark-shred torn away like venison mauled-off by a bear.

Walking the moss that's grown seasons high up, now in low shadows of treelings cracked haphazardly and interlocked, we follow the path of mammals.

Last night I watched John Frankenheimer's film, the one about the train burglarizing Modern art from Paris into Germany,

The mania of a colonel steeled to steal.  He's High-Cultured, sure, a man with an eye and a purpose.

But he's a Nazi and uses the ways of The Reich to fetch the paintings home to him, chafed between their 'decadence' and excellence.

The Allies are near.  The Resistance has its work cut out, and as in all the post-War winning views, heroic French leave lives, in existential black-and-white.

Burt Lancaster, here a Frenchman, diverts the art train's path for a full screen-hour, finally chuffs up a hill, and with his bum leg slips and staggers and ultimately rolls to loosen the lugs on the railroad ties and knock out their quoins, derailing, when soon it comes, the engine and its first car.

The end takes place, in this case, by the wooded hill abutting the railway line, the way to Deutschland.

This end brings death to hostages and 'Krauts', this ends in boxes of Degas, scattered-about Seurat, piled-up Picasso, contents of the Jeu de Paume atumble amidst the timber-trash of broken ties, 

Art ambiguously crated-up from sight, inert and quiet, beautiful inside, ready for the next appreciator's ego, ready for the next dare and swaggering excuse.

Ends always come.

.