Cha Cha and Changes

"You sure are a fickle boy."

- My mama, addressing me on the phone. I responded with a light chuckle.

*********************************

One step toward me, then two, you can move,
you know how to do the cha cha.
Your butterfly hips were formed,
not from rigid bone, but rhythm.
Muy bonita! Cha cha chicita!

*********************************

Ennui.

My Take on Capote

The other day I rented two movies, Brokeback Mountain and Capote. I thought they were both excellent, and Brokeback Mountain, predictably, generated more controversy than it deserved. But Capote. If you have not yet seen it, please do. Philip Seymour Hoffman is, of course, fantastic as Truman Capote. I mean, come on, we're talking about the man who brought Brandt to life ("I hope you're not avoiding this call because of the rug, which I assure you is not a problem."). But the true genius behind the movie lies in the story itself.
The movie chronicles the five year period during which Capote researched and wrote his classic crime novel In Cold Blood. During this period he comes to befriend, and ultimately betray, one of the killers involved in the murder at the heart of his book. Capote manipulates the man into revealing details of his childhood and personal life, and eventually elicits from the man a grisly recounting of the murder. What is arresting is how much of an influence Capote's constant presence had on the ultimate fate of the two killers. I won't go into too much detail, but essentially Capote keeps the men alive long enough to get his story and ultimately abandons them to be hanged so that he can secure the perfect ending for his novel.
The point of the movie, or at least a major one, is that the observer always has an effect on the observed, and in turn the observed affects the observer. In science, quite appropriately, this phenomenon is called "the Observer Effect." The famous example in quantum physics of Schrodinger's cat, in which a cat placed in a sealed box has a fifty-fifty chance of being killed by radioactive gas, illustrates this principle. In the example, at the time just before the box is opened, the cat is technically half-alive and half-dead. The cat is not either alive or dead, but an admixture of both realities. If you plot the probabilities on a sin curve it's supposed to show this. Don't ask me how to do that.
The point is, reality is so fluid and we tend to take it for granted that things exist as points in time rather than as waves, probabilities, possibilities, illusions. It is impossible to be objective about anything. So much of what we sense and experience is affected by factors we often fail to recognize, and our smallest actions often have huge impacts we may never suspect. Capote's work on the novel chilled him so deeply that he carried the sadness with him for the rest of his life; according to the movie, it played a major part in his drug- and alcohol-related death. He delved into the project seeking praise and wound up receiving a burden he could not shoulder. Think of all the minor actions, the breaths you take, glances cast, steps chosen, that may have impacted reality in meaningful ways. Enough to drive you mad. But I guess sometimes a good story has to end with two men hanging from a gallows.

Mountains

In the morning in Tennessee the dark blue mountains
roll like waves in the fog against an ocean of sky even bluer still.
The mountains are the serpent’s spine, a walk through time,
a labyrinth indecipherable, as are all mysteries, from the outside.
Their truths twist through gray shadow, granite and sandstone.
They are giants lounging, languid in the cool March air,
drinking a thousand streams through their mouths.
The mountains they have no pity for human frailty,
they are not soft or easy on our brittle bones and deadened muscles.
The mountains demand respect and they demand discipline,
they will teach you all you need to know of them.
“Rise,” they command, “early as the sun over the hills,
sure as the tall, sturdy birches, their roots gripping the rock beneath.
Rise, your thighs locked tight, back rigid, teeth clenched.
Persist like rock, steady as stone.
Fall gracefully, like the water runs downhill after a night of hard rain,
light-footed and laughing, reflecting only the sky and its clouds.
The water does not need to ask where to go, it knows,
the mountain directs its path. The mountain will direct your own.
The mountains there in Tennessee are tough teachers, rough old bastards,
born long before your grandfather’s great grandfather was born,
and they will certainly outlive us all, standing firmly outside of time,
while all our lives fade like stars into the morning sun.

Teevee Dreams

Lately television gives me nightmares. I don’t even watch it, but when I happen to pass a set, the advertisements, the news, the talk shows, they frighten me. They glow inside my mind like malevolent suicide angels and at night manifest themselves in images of unspeakable horror and atrocity. A sunken world, always red sky and black rain, inhabited by the dirty dregs of the earth. There’s me, dirty and destroyed, addicted to buying, addicted to thrills, a television set where my stomach should be. I eat money I eat radio keys and antennae. The advertisements are invading every empty site in your memory like cockroaches inside the walls of your house waiting to come out at night and scurry around your brain, cockroaches that look like dull jingles and bright, flashing colors, dollar signs, and pictures of living room sets that could look so cute in your cramped apartment. Even when you crush them they are all gross and gooey and stick to your shoe or umbrella.

(Working Title)

I should not drive home when I am too drunk to see,
when sharp visions of your blurred face escape my mind.
I woke up in the morning tired and sore as hell,
drank a gallon of water from the jug in the fridge.
Spent all of Saturday inside, the weather was fine.
How many more drinks, Joe? How many more beers?
All I ever do is think, "Drink and drink and drink and drink."
But all the bottles, the bottomless beers, they rhyme
with "my long and lengthening litany of fears"
and "since your pale face I cry only frozen tears"
and "your hot teeth on my summertime ears"
and "all these fast, fading, fucked up years."
My eyelids squeak, all we are getting is older,
drunker, slower, fatter, and farther and farther apart.
The bottles will soon be too many to throw out, green and brown and clear and hollow.
Drink me like your favorite cocktail (I recall it was whiskey and Coke),
I will get you just as drunk.
Discard me like a bottle (a whiskey bottle shattered and sparkling on the pavement),
I am green, I am brown, I am clear, I am hollow.
There was a time on your bed in the quiet of night when you were scared
I was drunk, too drunk maybe, and now we sit on our separate beds.
I had a drink to remember you by on your birthday,
I hope you had a drink on mine.
A bottle of champagne on ice, please,
a freshly opened bottle of wine.

Two Things

I get cold now when before I would never get cold.

I would walk unshod in the dead of winter
and never notice the coldness of the concrete
beneath my calloused feet.

But now, oh yeah, I feel the cold in my bones,
like an axe splitting a timber.

************************************************************

Donald Brumby's wife eats pills.
She's a nurse at a nursing home,
in charge of administering the meds.
Suddenly she's developed a sore back,
a sore throat, shaky nerves, and acute depression.
She steals and eats pills of all shapes, colors, and sizes,
and she does not speak much to anyone.

Donald Brumby wants to make love to his wife,
but when he slowly unbuttons her blouse
it is like opening a medicine cabinet;
he can hear all the small pills
rattling around in her stomach. The sound
sickens him and he recoils in disgust.
And beside, she's much too tired for that.

Suddenly Everything Has Changed

Audubon Park in the evening and the birds, the great blue herons the snowy egrets the ibises the mallards the wood ducks, birds of every class and creed come together to roost in the trees and to eat supper in the salmon and orange sky. They are squawking, it is a chorus, a funky birdsong, having family quarrels, racial strife, telling jokes, feeding the chicks teetering clumsily on the edges of the nests. An egret chick, wings like rubberbands, flapping, trying to fly like mother and father.
The sun sinks behind the last of the oaks and the cathedral is glowing in the twilight when it is time to go. Fuel light on, stop to get gas and sixteen pounds of bananas decorated yellow and funky. High in Potassium! High in Vitamins! Funky bananas, space bananas, alien funk bananas! Phallic or not, they're good for you! This girl, her eyes are drunk brown eyes and she will not take a banana! I AM A MISOGYNIST, I AM A BANANA RAPIST, A BANANA RACIST! I love the weird looks and I have an agenda to fill the whole world with bunches and bunches of the funkiest bananas, and fuck all! Free bananas for everyone, free bananas on the streets and in the bars and on the windshields of the cars, left for some lucky soul. Is there funk after death?
George Clinton is the conductor for the evening in his clothes made of light and sparkle and imagination. His hair in technicolor braids, sunglasses on tight in the dark and smoke. He screams like an animal and his hands tremble with a rage and a funk and an intensity that makes me think his fists will turn into beautiful bouquets of flame and hellfire. Trumpet turns red then blue then red then blue. Skin and abs and ass and legs and a sixty-year-old man in a diaper! I am tired but my legs are unwilling to rest like noodles in a boiling pot. Thirsty, heart thumping, thirsty, heart thumping, thirsty, heart thumping . . . This human organism, black and brown and white and blue and red and green, throbbing and pulsing, expanding and contracting, sweating and breathing fire and alcohol. Ass on my thigh, ass on my thigh, hand on her ass, hand on my face, feet in opposite directions, soul upside down, hanging from the rafters like a vampire bat! And Ed Bradley, SIXTY FUCKING MINUTES, dancing drunk with George Clinton, and George Clinton screams like a demon or an angel announcing the Coming of the Lamb, with his feet of bronze and his hair like sheep's wool, "ED BRADLEY! ED BRADLEY EVERYBODY! ED BRADLEY!"

Bells

Young couples on the sidewalk talk of white paper and a first kiss,
while sheep hidden in the hills of Virginia are birthing lambs
amidst the millions of flies and the morning fog.

The fog pours down the hills, across the swamps and marshes,
and the fog finds its way through neighborhoods and cars,
in the summer when the river is full and the heat is high.
In the foggy backseat of her mother's Buick they are naked and damp,
a baby already growing in her belly and God smiling in the dark.

They go to the white church Sundays, the wine dark, the sermon stern.
Corruption in the crumbling schools! Corruption in the closed city hall!
Burning heart in Mary's breast! Burning tongue in Jesus' face!