WACKADOO-DOO

Recently, I found myself chafing in a room full of local poets, listening to poet after poet broadcasting his or her sexual conquests to a bar full of relatively unconscious ears. I wasn't innocent to these goings-on. In the colloquialism of these strange times of literary exhibitionism, such ramblings aren't called rants. Instead, some call them "brags." It's pretty basic, really. When a poet brags, a poet, like a bird in a tree, is establishing territory, breaking in turf, warning off potential rivals in a game of survival-of-the-fittest that is so obvious to me that, half the time at least, I simply manage to forget about it. Lest we all forget, the major imperative for most poets is to "score": Find women, prove to rivals that said rival's sexual potency is less alluring than that of onself.

One poet, a friend of mine, has an annoying habit: He'll succeed in a half-baked sexual conquest--making out like a high-school boy in the parking lot of a barroom dive, whistling out a kiss when a train impedes automotive progress in the middle of a drunken drive homeward--and then he'll broadcast the entire scenario on his blog. The intent is simplistic: He's trying to create an image for himself. Inside, he's a man who's found plenty of compromise in his life to conquer--but he'll have none of that, won't deal with any of it, is content to rebel, rebel, and rebel until, someday, he'll be a white-haired rebel, stunned he's gone nowhere in his life. He may be immodest to a fault, but everyone's been so compassionate to him, he's been badly hurt by a marriage that imploded, is never ashamed to show it, and if any of his antics serve him well, we're happy for him. If he could spell, it might help. If he's ever bothered to read Strunk & Whites "The Elements of Style" or, God forbid, leafed through the Chicago Manual of Style, he certainly hasn't shown it. Though we do note here he believes spelling and punctuation is irrelevant. I hope his spelling and punctuation in bed is better than it is in his testimonies of bed. He even uses Latin phrases to introduce his blog, but he doesn't know any Latin, really; he can barely speak English. We know his short string of sexual conquest is really about his ego--trying to shore up his faulty self-image--and we usually give him a break. But how do the women who've been subjected to what amounts to a network simulcast of his kiss-and-tell routine feel about this? They probably like it--as long as he doesn't mention their names. If I was a woman and some guy wrote about me in lurid detail--the size of my tits, the texture of my skin, how I groaned when he shoved his big hand between my legs--I think I'd blanch. Regardless, we have to examine his audience. They're really not that sophisticated. That sort of exhibitionism in the name of false wisdom and ramshackle poetry is probably a fashion statement that turns some floozies on. Those of us who write simple lyrics about love, expressions of love, for some reason, sometimes end up branded as "dirty old men." What's that all about? Probably more simple posturing.

"One would not mistake true tenderness," the pre-revolutionary Russian poet, the young, mysterious and beautiful Anna Akhmatova, thinking perhaps of the more obvious aspects of tender-trap posturing from a suitor thinking his not-so-sincere advances were subtle and could be mistaken for meaningful, wrote in 1913.

"With anything else, and it is quiet.

In vain you carefully wrap

My shoulders and breast in furs.

And in vain you utter respectful words

About the first love.

How well I know those persistent,

Insatiable glances of yours!"

Consequently, and I was telling a friend all about this one afternoon, the exhibitionism--the old spread-eagled display! display! in the jungleland of a barroom alcove--of for all intents and purposes a silver-back gorilla (I say this affectionately) has made me re-examine my own erotic poetry. I've written plenty of it: But I'm a little old school about my sentiments. A little like the ancient metaphysical poets, I believe that the most important experiences, especially those in the erotic arena, are best expressed by indirection: You make metaphors of the experiences, you stab at the meat, so to speak, obliquely, or, when the experience seems especially sacred, maintain your silence before the eyes of the world. The friend to whom I was speaking, by the way, is quite a gentleman in this respect: He doesn't kiss and tell. His sexual experiences with women--one woman in particular--he keeps a private matter. It's not that he's particularly concerned about embarrassing the woman--she's probably beyond embarrassment about her sex life anyway--it's that he sees erotic experience as a strictly private thing, something best left to the erotic experience itself. He never brags about how he shagged this woman, or teased that woman; no, he keeps his mouth shut. He's quite successful with his women.

"Man, I just think all that exhibitionistic stuff is so ridiculous," I told my friend.

"He's just a boy," my friend replied. "He's living in the way-back machine. Probably got shoved back into the high school hallways of his mind when his wife left him."

"Yeah," I replied. "He's like a big, giant bird: CHIRP!"

"Women would have to be utter fools to fall for that sort of thing. He thinks he's being so subtle."

"CHIRP! CHIRP-CHIRP!"

"By the way," I concluded, "how is she? I really worry about her sometimes. It really hurt when I realized our friendship had hit a dead-end. I'd call her to talk sometimes, she'd pull this dumb game one of her friends taught her and simply not call me back, so I quit calling her. I thought we were way beyond game-playing."

"Well, she's fine," he said. "I think she's really been working too much. Not making enough money either. She had to move--did you know that?"

"Yeah. I found that out by accident. I was trying to get hold of Joey one night and called her old telephone number. Discovered she'd moved. I'm sure she's not particularly happy about being forced to move from her favorite neighborhood to a place far north of where she was. When I called her, she sounded like she was miles away, a little girl really unhappy about certain developments. I felt like just fathering her. Yeah, she's got that hard exterior, but deep inside she's a sensitive and loving woman. But I'm sure you know that."

But I've managed to diverge from my commentary about sexual exhibitionism on the internet, now haven't I? Anyway, after that short conversation, I decided that I, too, could take my sexual conquests, recent and otherwise, and broadcast them to the world--you know, just to improve my "rep," whatever that's supposed to mean. It was quite a laugh-fest when I scrawled a particularly graphic episode of sexual licence, but it turned out fairly well. I wrote my other friend, the great big romeo, thought I'd ask for a little advice on the poem, considering he likes to style himself "the greatest poet of his generation." I thought I could follow in your footsteps, I wrote, or something along those lines, and here's a poem I wrote. Let me know what you think.

Huh? He never responded.

In fact, though the comment and the poem were posted by me on his blog, he, for one reason or another, decided it was perhaps too threatening to his own "rep" to even post it as a comment to one of his blog entries. I started laughing when I discovered his telling omission. I just couldn't help it. After all, I was writing to the great "expert." I was coming to the poetry-god on my knees. What did I get for my little prayer to Don Juan?

He ignored my little CHIRP. How friendly is that?

Well. I've got to respond in some way. I thought I'd use my blog to broadcast this testimony of one of my finest moments with a woman. I'm certain it will accomplish absolutely nothing--poetry is a useless contrivance anyway--but I hope readers who stumble upon this message in a bottle enjoy what they see.

OLDER WOMAN WITH LINCOLN

I'm twenty-five all over again

slim as a silvery new buck knife.

It's Christmas Eve, alone with mom

and her English teacher friend

floating in my childhood home

like three olives in a cocktail

five minutes to the clock chime

watching her friend's restless legs

their nylon sheen shining

as she squeezes her fine thighs

and she's watching me too.

She's suddenly divorced, mom says

too drunk to steer that big car.

Will you drive her home? I'll follow

in the station wagon. Let's get

her home. The woman inclines

to breathe deeply, chest expanding

pressing her girlish breasts hard

against her blouse. She glares

black pupils large in the dim room

small teeth appearing--to bite

her lower lip. You can drive me

can't you? Rising to take her hand

help her rise from her place

I feel her grasp my middle finger

as she collapses against me.

In the cold, the Lincoln starts

me telling her I like the sound of it

when she flattens against my body--

biting my breast? I titter a little

when she tightens her mouth again

slips her hand onto my crotch

and whispers, Merry Christmas.

Driving her home too slowly

I sing a soft carol to the woman

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

as she laughs as I pull inside

a parking spot too tight for Mark V's.

I tell my mom, I'm going to make

certain she's comfortable--be outside

in a moment--as I turn the key

of a deadbolt apartment door lock.

I'm twenty-five, driving a Lincoln

pushing a comely middle-aged woman

against the front door to her home

listening to her yowl like a wildcat

as she perches herself on my shoes

her dress rumpling as I pull it up

and rip a hole in her pantie-hose crotch

my mother waiting in the parking lot

waiting for Santa Claus to come.

O God of Sex! Goddesses of the Erotic! Little muses everywhere! I'm such a man! Applaud to me, admire me from afar, send gestures and smiles to me from your seat in the audience. Oooooh...sooooo...dangerous....! Remember, though: The next one could be about you. And this was such a long, long, long, long poem....And Christi? Sorry about the pantie-hose. Did the excitement you needed after your divorce merit the cost? Mmmmmm...so expensive...so rich...so smooth...tawny...wet nylon...the surface of a deep lake...dappled with rain in the spring...little heart....

COMMERCIAL INTERRUPTION: WELCOME AMERICA AND ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA

If you need weather information--faceshaker's daily complaint and associated day poems--please feel welcome to go to www.myspace.com/faceshaker for updated reports. Here you will find up-to-date commentary designed to combat the unnecessary narcissim, billious and overblown egotism and self-regarding, pretentiously false wisdom in the blogosphere. Take down as follows:

"The walls were covered with paintings that must have looked very strange to the public, and with sentences no less strange. 'I like watching children die'--that line from Mayakovsky's early, prerevolutionary poem--was on the wall in order to shock those who entered...No one talked art here, there were no discussions, no heart searchings: those present were divided into actors and spectators. The audience consisted of the remnants of the bourgeoisie--profiteers, writers, philistines in search of entertainment...David Burlyuk would mount the platform, his face heavily powdered, lorgnette in hand, and recite: 'I like pregnant men.'"

--Ilya Ehrenburg
commenting on
her experiences
at Moscow's Stray Dog
1920

OH, WELL...BACK TO THE STUPID REVOLUTION

When you come to the devastated village, and it's like a life-saving dream, one of those quasi-nightmares that ushers up from unconsciousness like a dark angel or some kind of saving grace, for the first time you realize that, yes, this is the Third World. All your life, you’ve heard of that horrific place of frustrating sorrows and mind-bending poverty. Of course, in your own life, you've seen both frustrating sorrow and mind-bending poverty, but this is the real thing. It's not a dream. Now you see it, the Third World, for the first time. Why, on this prison planet of good and bad, rich and poor, entitled and disenfranchised, does this place exist?

Here in the Third World, where it’s India or Pakistan or Kenya or Bali any other easily mis-pronounceable nations that don't make the news briefs ever and all the time, every day, a plague of insects has decimated family life, destroyed the livelihoods of men, annihilated the playgrounds of children. Fire ants, millions upon millions of them, scour the bare, moon-like ground. Your mission? Exterminate. Disallow insects from bonding, from creating any semblance of even the barest of inhuman relation, break it down, remove the debris, plant seeds, hand out the hoes, dig wells and lay new foundations. Scour the sacred homes that have persisted since the ancient of days, clean the lowly cupboards of the poor, release the pantries of the inhuman parasite, flush out the baths, even the turn the mattresses of the sadly broken bedsteads–turn them all over, spray down the insects until they kick their feet toward heaven, high as the mites in a marijuana patch, keep your eyes peeled for the bugs.

This place was once like a cantaloupe: Rich farmland, brimming with life and bees humming, flowers blooming, yellow in the wild fields, the muskrats crawling. Now it’s dead, victim of an all-too-human battlefield of concepts, strategies, tactics and, of course, the dupes, the angry, the hungry and the used. The abstract against the real.

First came the disease: Conjured in the deep basements of some Socialist or Fascist demon, men and women were precluded from the essential relation, the act of love itself, the moment when man and woman, it is said, experience God untrammelled by the petty illusions and dogma, and suddenly it was a fearful thing, to hold one another, to reap the fields of the orgasm. Men died by the thousands, women bore diseased children, and of course the farmland--especially here in the Third World--went fallow under the sun until the plague's true children, anger and frustration, became kings and queens, hateful tyrants, and the gangs of survivors took up arms against one another in the name, oddly, of freedom, revolution, safety from the proverbial slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, all of them sowed so silently and hurtfully by men with agendas.

You are a social worker with no social connections. You've come with insecticide. You've come to remove the dictatorship of disease, to bring the hope--at least--of freedom to the suffering, the blind and the hopelessly grieved. But what can you do? The once grassy world is now nothing but a world of stones. The fire ants are everywhere on the most lowly of fruit. See it? It lies there on the broken clods, split in half, fireants crawling and feeding on the division like a metaphor. Yes, men are divided against themselves and against one another while in the more fruitful nations, men and women are clamoring against the war to which you cannot relate, mere pawns, you sometimes think.

You move the man away from the colloidal suspension of the boundaries they've made. He's dying. Hungry. How many days will he live? Yet the children of your country are aghast, it seems, against their own poverty, against the policies of a government they only pretend to understand. In a different reality, you remove the man's mattress from its pinons and spray the insecticide. You're almost in a panic. Because there are so many bugs. You'd like to kill them one by one. But you can't. In the distance, while you cannot see them, gangs of hungry humans, stoked up on the political excuses when it was always a social thing, a disease, a parasite, a horrific and ugly conspiracy bred by men and women so selfish they cannot comprehend the humanity of the dupes upon which they depend. They sit in the boardrooms, they listen to the parades enacted in their names, they sleep silently and quietly, huge pictures of their faces scapegoat stopgaps for a real dream.

In America, they're talking in the underground of moving to the small towns, of taking the dissatisfaction and steering it into political action. But they don't seem to know anything about the evil that has been bred in the name of something far beyond what they think they know. They know nothing of the starving men brought into antagonism against the evils they've been told have been brought against them. They know nothing of the animosity sewn, nothing of the hurt, the anger, the hatred. Instead, they're told of a better world, a good place in which man and man live in harmony in an almost spiritual communion with the land. But it's a lie. You know that.

And you've felt it yourself: The fire ants, taking advantage of all you have been, your property, your livelihood, your reputation, your hopes, your need to be loved--preying upon your inefficiencies, even your poverty. You've been crushed in a dozen one-way tickets to nowhere, pushed down by ignorant societies of dupes and idiots, antagonized when you were poor and alienated. Yes, you've walked the streets, slept in the parking garages, you've smelled the stench of 300 homeless bodies cringing in their sleep. And yes, you've seen the fire ants, changing faces, places, spaces. They do not belong in your world, yet still they come.

Spray, you tell yourself. Kill each one. Remove the anger and the hatred and sew understanding. Someday, you hope, there will be freedom from those for whom feeding on decay is like the nectar of God. Until that day arrives, your job is hopeless. How is it that spokespeople for a world communion would proclaim such beauty when it's such ugliness they sew? Why so many ignorant accepting such hypocrisy? You feel so unholy sometimes. It's not easy freeing people from the socialized hatred--the one-on-one displacement, the severing of ties, the men crying in their rooms from loneliness--brought down from above so seemingly nebulous it's almost incredulous to accept. How could men and women cry, "Peace! Peace!" when it's discord they command? The insecticide. Kill each bug. The ghost of its bonding must not survive.

Well, call it the Peace Corps. Call it a United Nations assignment. Call it NGO. Call it faith-based. But in Iraq, where the intention of fire ants has reached a critical mass, the armies of your nation are facing fire, and no matter what you do, it's called unholy, against the will of God. Red-checkers: Where was the Marxist mudrassa?

You remember the time you needed love just as the face of a man on television, his son blown to bits in the falsely-used name of Allah. You felt broken, your children in your hands. You were alone, scarfing through garbage on the back streets in the richest nation on earth. All you believed you needed at the time was to be held, to be called to be human again, and yet, for some strange reason, all your hopes were abandoned by people who, it seemed, came from nowhere. So strange who the freedom-bringers were. So strange to not be utilized for the anger that could be focused, but fed, clothed, housed and taught to feel again beyond the survial mode and the callow glance. At that time, of course, being an innocent to the socialization of an idiot's dream, you didn't know none of this had been planned. But the petty men who you knew were planning against this freedom upon which you learned to base your life, did you see them sneer at you when you didn't seem to listen or take-to-heart the numerous rejections and dismisals? Yes, indeed it was one-on-one: one person at a time, broken, pieced back together until each one became, it seemed, a machine of hatred, a tool of contempt. How could you have caught yourself in time?

To put you to sit alone in your room. To place alcohol before you. Yes, that was the plan. If you didn't join, then you'd be put into destroying yourself. In such a world, how could you find your center?

Now you are here: The Third World. This is the harvest of the plans of petty men, men who have nothing to do with capitalism or the mercantile aspiration. How clearly you see their facade, their fakery, their ugliness all couched in idealism and hope and faith. What hateful hypocrites. You bend to salve the wounds of the men those people used.

O, never listen to the paranoid dreams of early Spring.

THE NON-RETURNABLE TELEPHONE CALL TO HELL

And now I understand:

You leave with everything.

You leave with everything I am.

Memories?

--Courtney Love--to Kurt Cobain

Interesting fact: When my mother was a little girl, she fell into a well. Heavy boards fell around her like dangerous bombs. All she had been doing when she fell through rotten wood, she says, was chasing a beautiful tan cottontail through the high grass. As she recalls this traumatic event, she says she called and called and called. All she had to hold on to was a slick, mossy, metal pole. The water was cold, she tells me. I think she was six years old. I don't have any complete connection to this to recall, however. All I remember is being a small child at the swimming pool of the Bear Creek Country Club in Denver, Colorado, swimming into the deep end as a six-year-old myself, interesting coincidence, calling for my mother--look at me! I'm a dolphin!--the overly thin woman in the pink plastic bathing cap and the rose-colored one-piece smiling a tentative, somewhat shut-down smile as she watched me from the shore: To this day, she is afraid of water. Even putting her head under the surface, I can only imagine, is enough to bring her back into that sad old well on property that is now the Philmont Boy Scout Camp in northern New Mexico. I've never known her to take so much as a bath, possibly because showers apparently seem so much safer to her.

Luckily, as my mother hovered in dark water close to drowning, someone heard her. It was a farmhand of my grandfather's, probably one of the Navajo Indians who had long before befriended the Las Vegas, New Mexico family. Isn't it strange how often small children are so lucky like this? Someone answered her calls. Within the short space of a few moments--I can only imagine the panic my mother felt, her hands slipping against the rough but mossy stone walls of that well--a hardy New Mexico farmhand, good and strong, rushed to a nearby toolshed, fetched a tough rope, returned to the scene of the accident and slowly raised my mother from possible doom. She remembers: She had gotten so cold in the mountain well her body temperature had plummeted. She shivered in the man's arms as he raced to the nearby ranch house, covered her with heavy wool blankets and prayed.

She recalls that as she called, her voice had weakened. Her throat had filled with water. Would I have begun to panic in such a situation? Being as she was only a small girl, she held on as tightly as she could. When she tells this story today, something she politely avoids, she remembers the air rushing out of her because help had arrived.

I bring all this up from the bottom of a well because I have a problem with communication myself. It's as deep as that well, too, and no matter how intently I've tried working it out in my mind, the problem persists to this day. Yes, I've felt that same panic. I've called out to people many times, my voice somehow weakened, my message never comprehended outside the silly fears and indignancy of the modern day world of Be Afraid; Be Very Afraid.

Help, as I said, hauled my mother on horseback to the ranch house. She coughed up well water, she says. But she lived, just as she's lived with enough tragedy to send anyone less strong straight into bedlam and the madhouse. Perhaps this gives me courage: Your own mother as your greatest hero. And some nights, when it all gets too much to take, when the pain I'm given sends my head under water, when I cough it up, remembering here for convenience a girl I once loved who ended a horrible addiction with the experience she laughingly called "choking up charcoal" in the Parkland Emergency Intensive Care Unit after a lackadasical overdose on a combination of heroin, cocaine and ecstacy, older pain emerges. I have to be brave when this happens. I've got to remember the courage of my mother, drowning, a six-year-old in a New Mexico mountain well.

Here, we flash forward many years, moving from the early years of the Great Depression to the fearful days of the Days of Rage: Vietnam War protesters bombing the United States Capital, Black Panthers murdering their own, soldiers gunning down students at Kent State University in Ohio. Actually, I'm not sure when what I'm trying to cough up really began. All I really remember is that, from a very early age, I was quite aware that my father, a big loving man, often didn't come home from work in the evening. All I really knew is that I'd panic: My mother in tears, pacing the floor, calling and calling my father's office, slapping the dinner onto his plate, covering it with tin foil and slamming it into the oven. Where was he? God only knows. Sometimes, he didn't come home for days; other times he'd call from jail; once the Dallas Police discovered him naked and unconscious in a stranger's house, and how he got in there no one really said they knew; other times he'd return late--two or three in the morning--so drunk you could smell him the instant he hit the front door. But before that--there's where the trouble for me began.

You know, your father, especially when you're a small child, is like a god to you. You listen to whatever he says: If he curses, you learn to use that word; if he slaps your mother, you unconsciously decide that "this is love," and possibly a generational cycle of abuse either begins or continues; if he hugs you when you've been good, you remember that. You pick up on it all. And so my father sometimes didn't come home. I'd lay there in my bunk bed in a panic. Why didn't he return? Where was he? Why doesn't he love me enough to come home from work? What have I done wrong? Sometimes, I'd be so crazy with panic and anxiety I'd not sleep--something unhealthy for a growing kid. Other times I'd feel my head spin as if I was hurtling through space. One of my earliest memories of coming into consciousness of the meaning of all this is a mental picture of me, 10 years old, a cold January, standing against the metal door of White Rock Elementary, waiting for the door to open. I hadn't slept all night. I'd listened to the fights, the shouting, the hateful and angry talk. Black circles had grown around my eyes, and the kids called me racoon boy. I hated being alive at that moment. And the door? It was closed, steel, red steel and cold. I remember shivering. Would someone ever open it and let me into the warmth of the school? But even there, I couldn't concentrate: I was in trouble with the teachers and the principal because my reading comprehension had dropped significantly in the space of only three months. All because my father hadn't returned.

But I couldn't say that to him. I probably would have been told to go to my room. In fact, there was a code of silence in our family; although we later learned that the entire neighborhood could hear the raging fights, we presented a picture of a pretty family--good kids, kids who went to church, kids who worked to keep their grades up, no matter what happened.

As I became a teenager, and those hormones began kicking in, the family discord of which I speak here escalated. I can't help but believe that my sexual awakening, a powerful force, somehow rhymed a discordant rhyme with the discord in the house. It's such a confusing time to be sure. Young girls were visiting all the time, yet sometimes I was so depressed I simply couldn't respond to the good intentions abounding in the house and on the front steps. What was in my mind? The arguments sometimes became actual fights. My sister would scream, cowering upon the pretty bed in her room like some queen in a fortress under attack, all in her room, hysterical, crying, "Shut up! Shut up!" I'd try to protect her, but I too was frightened. And worse, my father began talking of suicide. He began letting me down, disappointing me, promising me things and then breaking the promises, working hard, I later understood, to make me hate him--because when the bullet hit the bone, he seemed to be thinking, he wanted to insulate me just a little.

Eventually, that bullet rang out through the Flagpole Hill area neighborhood. I was 16--sweet 16. I can still hear the ambulances racing through the neighborhood like a mystery as I sat in my high school mathematics course that morning. I remember looking at the clock: It was eleven in the morning, a Tuesday.

I won't go into the grevious details. Suffice it to say that I'd been pushed deep into a well of blackness. After my father took his own life on September 29, 1970, I remember waiting for him to come home--just as I had for years. The pattern had been set. Sometimes I'd even call my father's former office, listening to the telephone ring and ring. Would he come home? Would he return when I called to him? For years, I'd listen for the car to come up the street--late at night, complete silence, the nearby horses in a neighborhood boarding stable kicking their stalls, stuck in the middle of bad dreams of confinement. And I'd wait for him. This was only part of grief, I know now. But at the time it seemed both so real and so unreal.

What was the result, the practical result, of this? If a friend was coming by, I'd expect that person to be at my door either before or exactly on time. If that didn't happen--and often it didn't--I'd have a panic attack. My skin would blanch. I'd begin to shake. Sometimes, I'd be so upset I couldn't sleep for a couple of days. And if I ever called someone, and if that person, for whatever reason, didn't return my telephone call, I'd go crazy. And this has never really left me. And let me tell you: I hate telephone message machines. I need the human voice, the vox humana of living experience. Of course, the panic I used to feel has reduced its intensity as I've learned its causes, but it's never really left me.

Two years ago, I talked to a young boy who claimed Courtney Love had somehow murdered the generally-acclaimed Seattle martyr and songwriter Kurt Cobain. She was a bitch, she said. She drove him to do it. What a loud-mouthed bitch. But I think I understand the panic that comes when someone you love has become so alienated it's impossible to reach him. What panic did Courtney Love feel in the months, weeks, days before Cobain propped a shotgun against his head and pulled the trigger? How hard had she tried to reach the unreachable?

I remember a series of telephone calls I made in panic several years ago: A woman had abandoned me, had begun to avoid me, all because I'd told her I had "special feelings" for her. I had no money that summer afternoon, only a few dollars. And I didn't have a telephone either. But I remember marching to a nearby pay telephone to call and call and call--just as my mother had called when she held on for her life in a deep and cold well. And I was in a well, too. I'd get the telephone message, beg the woman to pick up her telephone, then I'd panic, I'd scream, just like the screams in my childhood household. Finally, I'd go home and cry.

It got me into a lot of trouble. The woman accused me of stalking her. It's amazing of the prejudice humans perpetrate in the name of ignorance and the lack of care thereof. So many people in this world, claiming they care, yet not caring. What is wrong with the picture? I had nothing to take to heart but imperfect information. All I really wanted was to understand why she wasn't coming around me anymore. It's completely illogical, I know, but this was a little like my father not coming around anymore--an unconscious association of sorrowful and panicky proportions. But I got to be treated like a criminal for something I couldn't understand yet. What could have been done? I really don't know, but I don't trust people who claim to be compassionate or keenly aware of social justice when they've never done anything in their personal lives to prove it.

I know nobody cares about this. These are private thoughts: Me, coughing up charcoal. Some woman somewhere, wearing yellow ribbons, looking away from me. And I'm sitting in a room, alone, thinking about Courtney Love and her great big bad rap. She's heard the phone call. She's tried to return the message so many times. The non-returnable telephone call from Hell, even now, raises its head from that well--and I believe in generational memory--and yet I'm calling, I'm calling, calling.

REPAIRING THE BROKEN CONNECTION

Not long ago, I asked myself a serious question: What on earth is romantic love? Many times, like most men I suppose, I've merely shrugged off the quandary, thinking, I'm not certain what it is, exactly, but I'll know it when I see it. But this time, lying in bed, way past two a.m., entirely alone, too, staring at the patterns of shadow and light on my dark bedroom wall, I came to a few conclusions about something about which we usually dismiss. Funny, too: Not a tinge of sadness sat upon my heart in how I thought. Rather, I felt joy.

When I was really young, I remember making for myself a secret place. I'd already been to plenty of places that had impressed me--Red Rocks, Colorado; the top of a huge mesa in New Mexico where Navajo shamans sang to the sun and sky; the big boulder from which Boulder, Colorado was named--but this was nothing so dramatic. It was merely a soft spot in some pine needles in the middle of a huge virgin forest in East Texas. How did I find it? How did it become so special? Actually, after walking for three or so hours, I'd picked out a nice Loblolly Pine, placed my head against its trunk and fell asleep. I suppose I was really tired.

When I woke up, I placed a rock next to the tree--to mark it. This wasn't a special rock; no, simply a piece of magnetite iron I pulled from a nearby creek bed: sandy and red and most likely ancient. What made it mean something to me was the thought that accompanied my finding it: I was thinking about that tree, that good sleep, and wanted to honor both. I think most people would be afraid to sleep alone in the woods.

But I also wanted to find that tree again.

Time after time, then, I visited that pine. As I walked, I'd usually find a rock or two, remember what I'd been thinking about when I'd found them, and slowly I built a mound of stones, unobtrusive stones, next to the pine where I'd taken a nap once. Call me silly if you want: You would have had to have been there, completely there in my mind, merely to understand my sentiment.

Eventually, this spot--a place I imagined no one could find, one with a memorial of sorts that remained intact--became my secret place. It was like that old hole in the fence almost all children imagined was the gateway to some kind of magical place. Although no man can completely possess anything, this place was my place. I invested all the sacredness I could hold there. When rejected by a girl who was dating a basketball player at the time--but who also understood by my voice when I called her that I was scared to death to ask her out, and consequently let me take her out--I remember visiting that place. When I failed a test, I went there. In fact, whenever I needed to remember that there is a place somewhere where I felt a connection, a peaceful, simple feeling, I went there. It wasn't any big deal. I'd always been a bit like that anyway.

Eventually, I met a young girl. She was the world champion strut twirler, an olympic quality athlete who jogged five miles a day and could spin a silver baton so fast you couldn't see it, but I retained my sense of humor. We fell in love. To say the least, that hurt plenty: I'm not sure everyone feels love the way I do, but I felt almost torn into two pieces. Perhaps I merely felt inadequate to engage such a superior being, though she wanted to bear my children, silly me. One part of me, at least when I was alone, literally longed to be with her every moment. Of course, that wasn't possible. I spent a thousand mythically sleepless nights in longing for her. Yet the other part, that part of me that dwelled in the merciless fright of a man in love, wanted to run. The only way I found the two peacefully coexisted was when I was with that girl. When I was certain I loved her, I showed her my secret place.

It's because we carry this place with us wherever we go. No one can really go there; no one can take it away. Only we ourselves can lose that place. And if its real-world embodiment, that tree, in that old forest, still exists, I could find it today, although it's been more than thirty years. Some people hear this place whenever they hear a certain churchbell ring. Others hear it in a particular song. For some, it's a touch--the fur of a dog, perhaps; the rememberance of a kiss or how a hand felt. And I suppose that, as I lay there in my bed, remembering a little pile of rocks in the woods, I'd been granted access to it once again. I wish I was as eloquent now as I believed I was that night. But it slips away and even seems somewhat meaningless the farther I travel away from that place in my soul, or heart, or head. I knew a woman once who believed that place was in the body. I believe her.

Not long ago, I don't think I could have entered that place without some residual pain. I'd allowed a huge callous of sorts to surround it--partially to protect it, partially to forget it. Maybe the night I remembered it with all my emotions, the crack in this broken cup had miraculously healed.

For example, I remember coming near that secret place in my heart. It was early one morning. A bunch of us were clowning around in a stand of trees. I put my arm around a young woman special to me when my eye fell upon a rock next to a tree. I remember laughing under my breath because I'd remembered other rocks piled in another place.

"What's so funny?"

"Rock," I said.

She giggled. "I need a rock, " she said.

Yeah. It could have been a flirtatious remark. But I was also feeling pain. I wasn't too responsive at that time to flirt about much of anything. I was merely another dead angel on the ground. My heart was the rock I coveted. I was bitter and holy and the absurdly invented constellations I'd pointed out to her the night before were borne to my place of private mystery with bitterness and insecurity. I clasped her shoulder and smiled.

"There it is."

For some, these rocks are milestones. For others, they're millstones. For the best of us, they're a little bit of both. Why? Because we carry them with us everywhere we go. Because we are responsible for them, and must care for them. There are those who never learn to relate to themselves in such a way. For me, I use it as my measure. If I can feel comfortable to the degree that I can contact that place inside me, then a situation, mysterious to my understanding, becomes at least a little easier to comprehend. And when situations breed chaos, when people let me down, I can remember it, too, try to return to it if I can, and if anything else, I can honor it in some secret way. And when I share it, and when it's also shared, perhaps then is where romantic love begins.

It's funny. As I finished that last sentence, a group of young people knocked at my door and told me about some kind of teenager's alcohol abuse program. What could I do but give them a dollar? You know, make a tiny difference in a life, help pay for a phone bill or the rent, make life a little more comfortable for someone somewhere trying to make a difference for someone somewhere? Special places begin in unseemly events. Even a silly old dollar can become a sacred stone that, when it's pitched into the pool of chaos, sends out ripples. Romantic love is like that: a small thing, maybe a rock, holds your spirit, and you don't dare let it loose without the faith that comes from your good, special, secretive place. Even my password on MySpace.com is a sacred stone that tells volumes about me and hearts that never asked for more.

O.K. MOTORHEAD

Come on: I'm the sensitive type.

Yes, it's a come-on; I know that; but it's also the best I've got right now. Sure, my motor-mounts might not be what they used to be. Hell, sometimes they're a little too springy. Other times, they creak, but at least that creaking's sexy. I'll tell you one thing, though, and it's truer than anything I've ever said before. I'm a Mercedes in a roomful of Fords over at the State Fair of Texas Automotive Building. We're talking 20th Century German engineering: One devil of a lot smoother than that 1972 Pontiac DeVille you've been driving.

You know who you are. Everybody's been talking about that shit-brown jalopy that looks like it's been skinned. We see it everywhere: Over at the 7-11, when you're buying all sorts of fast food: potato chips, taquitos, sometimes even pumpkin seeds. And over at the bar where you hang out: slurping one freaking cheap beer after another. Then you're over at the Temple of Lost Discipline, angling for nuns and fun. It's Saturday night and Sunday morning all over again--and again and again and again and again. The operative term here is "repair": If you can find a good mechanic, we've heard you deliver time after time to whichever ear you can get to listen, you're going to get the bastard home. And home? What's that? Home seems to have something to do with shortcuts on transcendence. You've got to hot-wire the system--that's what we think--and if you can get the right wires under the steering wheel crossed, the blasted thing's going to start again. But where's it all going?

You with that bumper sticker on the rear window where everybody can see: LORD, PROTECT US FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS. But who's the Lord here? Lord Montbatten, famous British military expert? Maybe Lord Jim, novelist Joseph Conrad's famous failure on the road to self-redemption? Possibly one of the guys from P-funk? Man! We could go on all night about this one.

You know what? I'm afraid to let you drive me. All my real friends have been warning me for two weeks straight. Hell, you're not listening, are you? Push my pedal and the car doesn't slouch forward, it glides. Even the slightest press sends it into motion as surely as the moon moves in its orbit. And when you're out on the road--rolling up Interstate 30, for example--when you hit those Department of Transportation hair-pins, I'm going to shift from one lane to another like magic. While yours is going to move as a matter of sheer force. And the gas coming out the rear end? Non-existent in my case. But in yours--or, I might say, out of your case--it's a blossom of billowing soot and the kind of smell you'd expect on the road to Midlothian, where those huge refineries are.

My upholstery is smooth and well-tended. Yours seems to have a number of unseemly springs poking through, something that could damage just about any driver's ass. Your skin looks post-steroidal: enough welts to make your hood look like either a chronic acne survivor or the champion of the last big hailstorm. Strictly Earl Shieb. And the trunk? What've you got rolling around back there? The gas station attendant? A head of three-week-old organic lettuce? Possibly your brain. What's up with that?

I know, I know: You try to clean the big old baby up sometimes. Sometimes, when you're not pre-occupied with the latest episode of Digimon, you'll even go out and shine it. But this is mainly for display. You want people to know you're shining that body. Ostentatiousness in the singles lane. People are supposed to feel sorry for you, pummelling a rusted cab with a ragged dishrag for almost 15 whole minutes. Poor, pray tell, needs a new vehicle. But that's the whole point: The more beat-up it all seems, the better you believe in your chances with the neighbors, strangers and yes, especially strangers, the ones who least expect the truth behind the image. It's kind of like a pity-fuck, that vehicle of yours. Crushingly heavy. Lot's of complaining. A case of the shakes. A professionalized study in victimology. The lost chapter of Moby Dick, moving down the freeway in a giant blatfest. Obnoxious noises coming from just about everywhere imaginable. It's one big, silverbacked grunt, threatening people in the other lane, and sometimes it refuses to start at all, mainly because the engine's flooded with gasoline.

So don't even try getting near this one. I don't like my door scraped in the parking lot either. Like I said, the kind of car you drive represents, to put it into modern-day lingo, the kind of person you are. You might tell yourself, "This is only for a while, until I get on my feet," but we know the story. We've seen it a thousand million times. The old project, sitting right there in the driveway, positioned so it can catch the sun just right. People drive by it and stare and stare. But this one at least runs most of the time. This one doesn't require all that grease and special sauce in the old tank. It's been well taken care of. It might have a few marks on it, a little storm damage and all that rot, but it's a beauty. And, like I said, it's a smooth ride that requires a smooth rider. Too much on the gas or the brakes and you might ruin it.

Excuse me while I kiss the sky. Smooooooth moooooving steel--vegetable lover....

WELCOME TO THE HOUSEHOLD, ESMERALDA!

Sometimes life gets more real all the time.

Take plants as an example: I have a specific thing about plants. I might only have a few, I'm not the sort who has a yen to turn my apartment into a greenhouse, but many people have only two or three children, and nobody makes value judgments about their "kid's thumb" or anything like that. I've known people who literally swim in their own personal rainforest, and for them this is a penchant that can only be described as "vegetative machismo." For me, however, there's nothing macho about my love for greenery. Many people have love for a different kind of greenery: some call it green, others imbue their love with terms like "economics." Still others have a love for what they dub "green." But we'll not get into that at this time.

Suffice it to say that I'm one of those people who likes to mythologize about the consciousness of plants. Nothing's proven, but I too suspect the world of fauna is besotten with consciousness. It might not be the same kind of consciousness we as humans enjoy, but it's consciousness just the same, and for that alone, it should be respected. Moreover, I also believe that the consciousness of plants deeply resides in symbiotic relationship with our own consciousness. The ancients believed this, and though they've been wrong on many points, I suspect they're right on the money on that belief.

Once, I remember seeing a magazine supplement photograph of a prominent Dallas-area poet. He was holding onto the bark of a tree and telling the reporter something about life on Mars. He was greeted in public as being some kind of eccentric, mainly because mainstream journalists really can't comprehend the mind of a poet no matter how hard they try, but I also couldn't help but wonder if he, too, holds a deep and soulful respect for the amplifying power of the vegetative world?

At that time, I was, for all intents and purposes, a mystic. I had a mystical understanding of things that often went beyond the boundaries of rational logic. Sometimes my ideas worked; most of the time they remained, and were later proven to be, fantasies. But after seeing that photograph, I began to go outside my apartment and place my hand on the bark of the huge pecan rising high above the patio. Was it my imagination? Or did I feel a kind of energy pulsing into me? Strangely, I do remember, I did feel restored, enervated, almost reclaimed. After that point, I began to contemplate the tree, enjoy its leaves, watch as it went into winter dormancy. I'd water it, too, sometimes even going so far as to turn up my stereo so the tree could "hear" the music of Mozart.

Go ahead. Laugh at that last statement: That plants respond to certain types of music is an established scientific fact. Scientists have utilized EEG--electroencephalograph, the same machine that follows human and animal brain waves--to track a plant's nervous trajectory. They learned that plants, just like humans, respond to calming, soothing music differently than they would to agitating, relentless music. And, of course, everybody's heard the story about the scientist who tried eating a salad in the room he was conducting an EEG experiment on a plant. He'd take a bite and the EEG's graph would go wild: Apparently, the plant "understood" that a "murder" of its kind was in progress. I suppose the same thing could be said for Mozart: If you tried "eating" one of his girlfriends in front of him, he'd go wild and start writing for Megadeath--200 years before the advent of thrash metal. Maybe Motorhead. Yeah. Motorhead sounds better here.

I've got a close friend who has a huge lizard he named Tree. Tree's got a cage full of branches, and Tree will freeze on the branches and actually turn the same color and take the same patterning of the branches. Hence, the name, Tree. But what if Tree was doing something more than simply camoflaging himself? What if he was communing with the vegetative world? What if this was part of his feeding program, something we just don't know about? My friend used to ask those questions himself. Of course, this same friend had a huge parrot he'd named Bird. Go figure.

But we're getting off the point. Everyone has had the distinct experience that the trees were communicating, right? I remember standing in a grove of Juniper trees and listening to the breeze stroke their branches as they bobbed slowly up and down. I felt as if I was in the center of a conclave of philosophers. The sense I had was of utter peace. The Juniper Conclave, as it came to be called in my imagination, asked me to join in, but I didn't have anything profound to say. But it takes years to understand the language of philosophy. It takes years to comprehend the concepts. Why shouldn't it take years to reach a stage of consciousness development that enables us to speak with the most populous form of life on the planet? What else are those plants doing? Just standing there?

The huge Mulberry outside my window is perhaps the most accomplished visual artist I've ever known. That old Mulberry makes shadow drawings on my wall that dwarf the accomplishments of Picasso, and Picasso is hard to beat.

Consequently, although I've never revealed this before--that's right, you saw it here first!--I consider the houseplants I for which I care sentient beings. This, as I said, may merely be imaginary, but it does help me to cultivate (interesting word, eh?) a clearer understanding of my sense of floral husbandry. It's easier to think about caring for a sentient being than it is to care for an inantimate object. It would be interesting to see what would happen were the majority of men in this world to take this axiom to heart when dealing with their wives and lovers.

Yes, I talk to my plants.

In fact, I name them. When my mother gave me a huge ivy for my front window, I immediately began to feel love for the creature, and almost automatically, I named the ivy, well, Planty. Planty obviously likes to be looked at: Planty's a little vain. But whenever I'm in the same room as Planty's domain, I do glance at her quite a bit. Yes, I've wallowed in the Land of Planty many times.

In my bedroom, I have an airplane plant. Actually, there are several individual plants gathered together in a huge pot beside my bed. What to call them? It's easy! I named them The Wright Brothers. Get it? Airplane plant. In other words, I named this one after the place the Wright Brothers first built the plane that conquered Kitty Hawk.

One clipping fell off the huge ivy in my front room. I had a really hard time getting it to grow: Now she's a hydrophonic. I call her Sorrow. She's always wallowing in her tears. So to speak.

Finally, last week, I was at my area Whole Foods Groceries, happy to discover beautiful Aloe Veras on sale for only $5.95. I snatched up what seemed to me the happiest one and got it home. The name was simple: Esmeralda. Kind of a secret name, the sort of "pet" name we writers use for things like pens or special coffee mugs. Taking it into my bathroom, where I have a great, sunny window-ledge, I positioned Esmeralda in such a way that this sweet, bracingly green beauty could get the "rain" it needs: Whenever I take a shower, whenever I am cleansing my body and washing away all the soot and smog of daily life in the urban environment, when I'm clearing out all the day's tensions with happy wallops of spray, the succulent Esmeralda gets a light sprinkling of splashing, shooting liquid. And wow! Is she ever happy!

Still the question begs: What sort of music do Esmeralda and I listen to when we're sharing conscious space together? I did think of Mozart--mainly because that's what some experts believe nurtures newborn babies best. But Esmeralda is no babe in the woods. She's a full grown woman, and I have heard her roar. Laughing a little at myself, then, musing over the hippy-dippy quality of my least-shared personal lives, I decided I wanted Esmeralda to be nurtured on a healthy diet of really supercalifragilistic hippy music: The Mamas and Papas, It's A Beautiful Day, Jefferson Airplane. After a good, nourishing shower, I imagine Esmeralda is quite happy listening to "Dedicated To The One I Love," and "White Bird" and "Won't You Try (Saturday Afternoon)?"

The succulent name of Esmeralda the Aloe Vera may be a bit difficult to say repeatedly and as fast as possible, but it seems to have stuck to her. And while I am online--online is like a huge plant with root systems and stems and branches and even trunks spanning everywhere on earth and even into space--I would like to use the energy of light and electricity to welcome Esmeralda the Aloe Vera to the household.

Sure. Soon my friends will comment: Say "Hello" to Esmeralda. I'll tell them this: Gladly. I'll spill a little on her for you.

"SOLITUDE STANDING": THE SELF-INTERVIEW

Q--It's raining today. Dallas has been in one of the longest, most severe droughts since the 1950s. But we're glad you were able to make it to this interview. How are you today? To put it into the words of Tom Waits, what's your emotional weather report?

A--Emotional weather reports? That's quite an old cliche, don't you think? But it's true--to a certain extent. Our hearts speak to us in moods. Scientists have recently discovered, for instance, that the solar plexus, a knot of nerves located just above the heart, is a center of neural activity second only to the brain. Sometimes, I suspect it's even more important. Yet we live in a "brainy" time. The scientific rationalism of Newton and Bacon has reached what may be its apex. Our legal system, for example, is based upon reason. In fact, almost every aspect of our lives is consumed by reason, despite the insistence of some, especially feminists, that are advocating at least a partial return to what could be termed "unreason." I agree with these people. So many powerful human beings on this earth have completely disconnected themselves from mood. The power of instinct, it's sometimes believed, has been pushed into abeyance. I'm often a moody person. But the rain doesn't affect me that much. In fact, I really love the rain. Last night, at five a.m., thunder awakened me, and in my bed I literally tingled. Thunder is perhaps my favorite sound. Not that I really thunder that much. I remember my mother telling me that thunder was the sound of angels bowling in Heaven. I like to tell myself that thunder is the heartbeat of the Universal Mind, and I was alone with that heartbeat last night. BOOM! it said. But I could only peep my tiny human peep. I've been thinking about that today--how all our human concerns are so small in comparison with thunder.

Q--So. We start out this interview talking about the weather.

A--I had an epiphany six months ago. A friend of mine has a twice-yearly campout on his family's land outside of Hico, a tiny town on the cusp of Texas hill country. As the sunset was beginning, a number of us drug our lawn chairs to the edge of a cliff to watch. That glowing orb, cherry red, electrocuted the surrounding high clouds as it slowly dipped below the distant horizon. Beautiful enough. But what struck me was this huge cottonwood tree across the valley from us. It rose above the cedar bush and scrub, and its silver leaves, shining and reflecting the dying light, quivered in the wind. You had to be really still to even notice it. For me, the quivering leaves were a kind of vespers song. Celebrating the end of a day. How long had this been happening? How long had that tree been displaying its reverence with no one to notice? Of course, unlike us, the cottonwood cannot move. So what's its purpose? Yet, for some unknown reason, it was as if I had been chosen to witness this beautiful and intimate expression of the cottonwood. Perhaps that sounds silly. Back at the campground, it seemed as if the big goal of my friends was to get as messed up as humanly possible. At the campfire, I asked myself: What is it these people are chasing? The answer was resounding: Connection. These people, all of them lovely human beings, are desperately attempting to re-connect to Nature. And I'd been doing it too--for too long a time. I can't let myself forget that I live in a huge urban area. There's something like six million people all jammed together in a space a hundred miles from end to end. Nature has been pushed below the surface--except for parks. It's easy, then, for us to forget our emotional weather, so to speak. Did you hear that? It just thundered.

Q--How did this experience connect with your poetry?

A--Oh, that's easy! For several years, I've been writing about the distortions we experience as human creatures who have changed our environment to the point that our animal nature is opposed to our supposedly civilized nature. I don't care if you're the President of the United States, you're still an animal. You've got an animal experience that has been repressed. A lot of what happens in a white-collar business environment has something to do with learning to repress our animal natures according to various measures of decorum. Years ago, as a legal assistant at the largest law firm in the State of Texas, I participated in the largest Federal Trade Commission-related lawsuit in American history. I worked twelve-hours-a-day, I made plenty of money--pulling in something like $4,000 a month, a huge sum to a man who's lived his life in what used to be called voluntary simplicity--but in the end, although "our" firm won in a settlement, we managed to bankrupt the plaintiff, and two days before Christmas, 10,000 employees of the plaintiff's company suddenly were laid off. I felt horrible to be party to that. So I asked my supervisor what I should do to cope with it. She told me that I had to learn to become callous to the effects of my actions. I couldn't do that. The executive lawyers, of course, were operating according to their animal instincts, but they also had a lot of rationalizations they employed to justify their behavior. See? These are the distortions we create for ourselves because we've forced our animal natures out of the picture.

Recently, then, I've realized I need to restore my own connection to my animal nature. I've got to learn to listen all over again. As a poet, I've always fiercely defended my emotional vulnerability. But as we age, this vulnerability sometimes becomes more precarious--due to the school of hard knocks, that course regimen you just can't audit. Consequently, I've been watching clouds. I know that sounds stupid, but it's good therapy. As a kid I used to sit in this huge Elm tree in Denver, Colorado, watching billows of huge clouds pour over Mount Evans. Sometimes I wouldn't even come down for dinner. Perhaps I'm trying to reconnect to that child. And today, it's raining. How does the rain itself feel? What is its consciousness? Several supposedly renegade scientists are telling us that water does have a consciousness. I don't see why not. So how does the rain feel today? Silver. Rain today is silver. It's been relegated to second place behind all the gold in Dallas. But I also love silver. Silver is the shine in a woman's eyes. Silver is glare on glass. Silver has so many moods. I don't think I'm big enough to choose the mood of the rain today. I can only look on and enjoy it talking to me.

Q--This sounds a lot like Eastern Mysticism.

A--No. Not at all. Eastern Mysticism is like any other religion. I've got a couple of friends, both of them poets, who are Buddhists. One night, I sat in the back seat of a car, listening to them as if I was a child listening to my parents argue about the relative merits of Catholicism versus Episcopalianism. The one thing they agreed upon was that the Tibetan Buddhists have it all wrong. Christ! So what did we have there that night? A couple of Southern Baptist Buddhists? Saying that the Methodist Buddhists are dumb? Sure sounded like it to me. An old friend of mine called that behavior "dogma doo doo." But what I'm saying has more to do with ethology--the social behavior of animals. In Iraq, for example, we've got "dogma doo doo" turning into a civil war because the Southern Baptist Shiites are angry at the Cumberland Baptist Sunis and the Methodist Kurds. But this "dogma doo doo" is one of the distortions we encounter when we form civilizations. Civilization contains plenty of prerequisites in its gift-pack: We agree to certain rules in order to preserve domestic order. We've got traffic lights we agree to utilize in order to keep traffic from turning into chaos. The distortion arrives when we take this stuff on and let it consume us. And believe me: I've been consumed.

Q--How is that? Please explain yourself.

A--Oh, all these petty human concerns. We're concerned about money for one thing. We've let money consume us when money should be nothing more than a tool. And even standards of beauty--we let them consume us and drown out our ability to connect to one another. Sometimes we even let human-borne standards of beauty define us. If you're beautiful the way a model on television is beautiful then you're somehow more human than the rest of humanity. We let ideology consume us. I don't care if you're left or right, if you're following the rules of ideology, you're political beliefs are consuming you. That's what I'm trying to free myself of right now.

Q--And your poetry?

A--I've decided to return to a simpler, more embracing poetry. I've decided to cut it out with all the fancy footwork. I've been reading a biography of Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova, and her concepts of writing simple lines about simple human matters, describing simply the simple scenes of domestic life is something I think I can utilize in my poetry. I do have to divine where my animal nature comes into play there. And this can be difficult. This, as I've said, is merely an extension of what I've been thinking about for years. I'm not being anti-social however. I find nothing wrong with civilized society except insofar as it is consuming us. Technology is taking us over. It's like the movie, "I Robot." But...as you can see...we're utilizing technology right here. Yet think of how many people let this mere tool consume them. It's horrible.

Well, I think the rain is letting up a little. I've spoken my piece. One thing more, though. When you begin to re-connect with your animal nature, it's funny, but people begin to see you differently. You're out of synch with all their unconscious beliefs. Sometimes, such people find themselves even threatened by what they almost but not quite perceive about you. I think it's necessary to be charitable towards them. You know: humor them. But it is difficult sometimes. I don't think I'll ever be where I want to be with this, and I'm definitely not special by any means. But I am solitary.

TEENAGED TERRORISTS AND CBS REPORTER LARA LOGAN ARE ALL ABOUT ME--REALLY

There have been times in recent years when I've wanted to blow up refrigerators just because I want to express my disdain for the corporatocracy that holds us all hostage. Mainly, all I really want to do is get laid. I mean, look at me: I don't want to be friends, I really think the idea of liking anybody has no utility, insofar as it tends to be about them and not about me, and I'm all about me, all the time. Yet I really just can't get over my confusion about what constitutes love and what constitutes lust. Connection is the operative word here: Since I don't have the faintest idea what a wholesome connection entails, I want to destroy the entire world. I want to see buildings crumple mainly because the builders never bothered to connect to what's all about me, which of course, is me--what I'm all about.

Doubtless the two driving forces in my life--wanting to destroy the worldwide foundations of capitalism and wanting to satisfy various and sundry animal dictates of self-perpetuation--are interconnected. But I'm so close to the damage they're both doing to my thinking that I don't seem to have gotten the news yet. I'm so far from conscious understanding of these harrying compulsions, and how they feed upon one another, in fact, that I'm a complete blank regarding them. I mean, I've got nothing here.

Look: Even the news of the world doesn't seem to clue me into what I'm doing to myself. Some nights, I'll sit in front of the CBS Evening News, of all things, and the obviousness of these determinations weighs in nightly, full force and free of charge, like a nude sumo smack-down in a muddy pen that somehow resembles my mind. In one corner stand any number of Islamist fundamentalist terrorists. I can't help but laugh at them. Those guys have all kinds of zealous proscriptions against sexual licentiousness suppressing their normal instincts that it's no wonder they're out to kill people all the time. They can't sleep with women at will. They can't even look at a woman. The religious machinery under-girding everything they know is so tyrannical the more powerful ones even force women to wear full body suits that conceal all vestiges of femininity--and it's all because of a facade: They've been conditioned since childhood to believe that being open about their sexual needs and behavior is blasphemy against Allah. Worse, their ability to reason has been so atrophied by constant bombardments of religious propaganda they can't even see that the whole thing is social control relegated into the hands of mullahs--who themselves are more interested in power than in the happiness of others. The women who step out of bounds are usually kidnapped, raped and killed. The upshot is that these guys are so sexually frustrated they'll do just about anything to get their hands on those 70 virgins the mullahs promise them if they'll martyr themselves for the cause. This is a major strategy behind the tactics of world terrorism. You'll have do die before you'll get laid.

But there's a strange set of connections between the terrorists and I that I don't usually like to look into here. Like me, the terrorists I see on television want to destroy the foundations of world capitalism. Like me, like I just said, they're walking tangles of sexual frustration. Like me, they don't like what's happening to the world. Like me, they have a distinctly theological understanding of the world--even if their understanding, like mine, tends toward the superficial and half-baked. Like me, they generally see the superciliousness of capitalistic existence eroding what is sacred in the world. And I want things the way they were when I was a child, when I didn't have any responsibility; they want things the way they were in the 8th Century. We're a match made in Allah's Heaven. But since I've market profiled myself as a "pacifist," the only way terrorism can help me is in helping me to view myself as superior to those who kill people. If you don't like that, or embarrass me with any of these contradictions when I'm trying to score over at the club, I'll kick your fucking little ass.

In the other corner of this giant mud wrestling free-for-all of the hell-bent and half-baked inside my head, stands, well, Lara Logan, CBS Mideast correspondent. I'm smacking my lips just thinking of her. She looks pert in a Kevlar vest. I'd like to do her while she's wearing one. Why? Walking down the proverbial Arab Street, Lara Logan is literally a walking advertisement for sex. I've never seen hips that just cry out to be stroked as do those of Lara Logan. Even the Iraqi teenagers curiously following Logan and her camera crew take note of it: Watch them and notice where their eyes go. Of course, CBS News' executive producer, Leslie Moonves, is quite aware of this: If it bleeds, it leads, but sex sells just as well. And since the CBS News Division has been in a ratings trough for several years, especially in that all-important, 18-25-year-old male age grouping, it's only logical that one good way to get the attention of testosterone-driven males who haven't yet learned to take the reins of their own sexuality is to relish news clips with sexy mamas like Lara Logan. All the female correspondents for CBS are hotties. Those girls wading in the waters of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, rubber boots up to their crotches, compete glowingly with online porno photos of leather-clad dominatrices straddling motorcycles in viscious-looking boots, the obligatory police caps cocked flirtatively on their frizzy blond hairdos. But all Lara Logan really needs is a pair of tan, brushed corduroy jeans. She could destroy the world with the slightest roll of the tongue out the corner of those pink lips. Oh, man!

"Man" definitely is the operative word here: The violence on CBS Evening News pumps up my adrenaline, then Lara Logan fulfils me as the testosterone rush rewards my viewing. Sex and violence. I feel so tough when I watch the CBS Evening News. I could just crush skulls. It's a wonder the U.S. Army hasn't picked up on what's happening on CBS. A recruitment commercial right after a Lara Logan report could work miracles. I'd join up in a second just to get close to her. You know: be her bodyguard.

It's not that I don't see CBS Evening News is manipulating me. But, just as I'm completely privy to what Islamist mullahs are doing the the brains of impressionable 13-yeaar-olds, I'm above all that subliminal seduction crap that's gotten so popular on network television. Naturally, because I'm a debonair intellectual who likes to slum in bars frequented by lower-class college students and blue-collar workers, I feel quite superior to both CBS tactics to get me to watch and to Islamist fundamentalist zealots who are blowing up villages, water pipelines and even children. They're all just so below me: CBS Evening News, the college students, the blue collars and the zealots. See how this works? If I really push myself, I can make myself feel superior to anything on earth! Which is the point when everything on earth is all about you. But it's not all about you at all. It's all about me.

I even might have remarked on the spur of the moment that those 13-year-old dudes--every single one of them--are sexually frustrated. It doesn't matter to me that their lives are hand-to-mouth existences. Or that they're simply young boys who are feeling all sorts of bad chemicals coursing through their pre-adult bodies. They must be desperate. I'm not nearly as desperate as they are, but it's convenient to paint myself as a victim--mainly because it gets female sympathy. There's no better way on earth to get an air-headed woman's attention than to cry and whine in public. And I like air-headed women the best. The ones who can think for themselves are too dangerous for narcissists like me to handle. That's why I go places where the dumb ones congregate.

But what's unusual here about the superiority I'm copping whenever I see the zealots in action (the ones on television) is that I just can't see my own perceptions of the world mirrored in their actions. I don't quite know why this is. I might jabber this about "we're all one" on one little ball of dirt in the middle of vast space, I might yammer about my feelings, but I don't make the connection between myself and 13-year-old terrorists. This lens of self-superiority directed at 13-year-old boys who strap bombs to their waists and turn Israeli discotheques into disco infernos hides the facts surrounding my own, similar "disdain" of the greater world around me. It's nothing more than an unconscious means of repressing my own passive experience of aggression. That's right. I'll admit it. You saw it first here: I'm passive-aggressive. Keep quiet and passive about it or I'll kick your ass.

Passive-aggressive? You see, I've got a lot of stuff in my life that makes me feel powerless. I don't feel nearly as important as the image I want people to see. Most of the time I don't even know myself how unimportant I feel. If my head was nothing but a ball of skin, there'd be this huge callous wrapped tightly around my self-image, a kind of armor designed to keep out any messages to the contrary of what I want to project to others: mainly those dumb-head bitches I want to screw me. In other words, I'm running on ego. Narcissists can't run on anything else.

And because of that repressed sense of powerlessness I work so hard to hide, I get angry when CBS Evening News manipulates me. I don't like the fact a television image of a war correspondent like Lara Logan has the ability to give me a "woody." Apparently, despite my knowledge of this whole machine of manipulation, my animal instincts just...don't...care. And that gets me hot and bothered. After all, my reason is supposed to have made me impervious to that kind of stuff. But it hasn't, I feel powerless against the instincts I haven't learned to live with, and want to bash heads when it's really my instincts I'd like to bang. Strangely, because of that, I'm also a victim: this buildup of aggression tends to manifest itself in out-of-control sexual urges. Kind of like a Nazi soldier who gets aroused when he's bayoneting an innocent bystander to the blitzkrieg. And that also pisses me off.

Consequently, whenever I watch the news, I get pretty angry. I do take note that 13-year-old Islamist martyrs have been unjustifiably exploited by powerful people interested in their lost lives only so far as death tends to score points for the cause, and I don't like it. But I really don't like being exploited by CBS Evening News for the sake of ratings. How on earth am I supposed to get to Lara Logan anyway? She's got a ring the size of Rikers Island on her left hand. Probably married to one of the men who know how to make realistic connection to the world, one of the guys who exploit people who can't make that kind of connection. Why are the people running the networks being so callow towards my inability to control my animal instincts? Oh, it's all about money. And I don't have much of that. Which, of course, pisses me off.

Sometimes I wonder if I couldn't be taught to make wholesome connections with the world--with human beings instead of objects of self-satisfaction or self-inflation, with human beings instead of projections of my repressed aggression, with human beings instead of this fantasy of a worldwide conspiracy to make mutts like me buy things. But to do that, I'd have to let go of my massive ego. Right now, that ego is about the size of the Astrodome in Houston. I hate to admit it, but my ego's bigger than my wiener. Besides, if I was to let go of that ego, I'd have to admit defeats in my immediate life: All the stuff I avoid through the distraction of conspiracy theories and continual whining about justice--a concept absolutely beyond my comprehension.

The other night, I was watching Lara Logan report from Baghdad. Her hair wisped into her face, she brushed it gently from her green eyes, and then she unconsciously smiled. Unconsciously. Sitting there, watching the television, I myself felt a deep connection to Lara Logan. Something happened. Maybe it was "a moment." I caught myself smiling back at her.

We all know that the corporatocracy designs to rob the human individual of mental telepathy. Lara Logan would be ashamed to admit she felt something herself. Perhaps she pictured me in her mind when I smiled: This huge, goofy guy sitting there in his mom's house eating a fast-food burrito (Monterrey jack cheese), smiling at what, from here on out, will be termed "his latest bitch."

Lara Logan: You smiled. It was all about me. Everything is all about me. And since your smile, about me, indicated that you indeed saw my telepathically-projected image in your mind as you broad-casted live from Baghdad, I am once again a hero. That's right. I'm heroic. So you've been tagged: You're my bitch, Lara Logan.

And that's the way it is.