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What are you waiting for?
Juggling
Sometimes I get to wondering
How this one's going to play out?
Will it hold its mud or sink six deep?
be as free as any dolphin
or wretched as a slave?
Wondering, figuring, imaginating
rendering fractured judgments
asked unanswerable questions
questions after question
with only one answer
I don't know.
No habla the future
The winds will be the winds
& they will do want they do
regardless off our wondering
or wanderings
Now matter how I juggle it
there's too many orbs
up in the air spinning in my life
All at once. Too many. Like always
life or death, love or aloneness
madness or bliss
So many, too many questions
spinning around all my maybes
in short fast orbits around a planet without an answer
Should one collide with a stray if
or an imploding fuck it all
there would be nothing left
to juggle
& I still wouldn't know
Copyright 2013
Marcus Stein
Shooting Up The Sea
“There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.”
I found the rumble of the diesel oddly comforting, like the purring growl of a big cat. We motored on calm seas 3 miles straight out until there was only sea and sky. I had the helm, getting the feel of the tiller. It serves as a wheel and resembles an oversized oar. Push to port to turn starboard, as needed to hold or change course. An almost constant thing with the boat pushed by wind and current. Adjust and readjust, like life in that way.
It was a plank of unfinished teak wood, broad where in came up from the rudder then curved and tapered to the working end, about a hand and a half wide.
If there comes a storm the man at the tiller must stand strong. On his feet with both hands to it, chest high for best leverage. Pushing against the overpowering force of an agitated sea.
With the pull of moon drawn tides and waves grown strong on their long uninterrupted journey to a unseen shore. With the wind whistling past your ears and horizontal rain in your face. With the confused blending of waves coming from all directions. Breaking white water across beam and bow, coming in a teeth rattling thud that makes you tense your grip and tests your faith. On a boat so small with the sea so vast.
Brave the roaring 40's in the Southern Ocean and lash yourself to the tiller to be tossed and thrown like a wet rag doll, surfing waves big as houses, heading up the Triton's lip to the crest and then down to the brief respite of the trough until the next and the next and the next one come. With no sleep, rest or reprieve until at its whim the storm blows itself out. Exhilarated after the slow bullet passes.
“You ready to go sailing,” Joe shouted, snapping me out of my reverie.
“Hell yeah, what do you want me to do?”
He told me to stand by while he went below to kill the engine.
The sudden silence was complete and deeper than any I had ever felt before. Sweetened only by the gentle lap of waves against the hull and spiced by the taste of the salty wind. The sound of a different world, a world I was at home in. The feeling as strong and immediate as a shot of smack to the brain, but even more comforting.
Because there had been some unidentifiable yet essential thing missing before that moment.
On land I didn't fit in. Never felt quite at home. People were careful with me because they could sense my discomfort. I withdrew deep into myself. I read The Idiot instead of Civics 101. Beat poetry and Leonard Cohen,Richard Farina and Camus and Kurt Vonnegut instead of Math. Of women I was ignorant and shy in an angst-ed teenage way. Never could find the words quite right to say. A displaced person between places.
Leaving the inexplicable America had helped. Europeans made much more sense. They had time to learn about what matters. Through war and plague, earthquake and typhoon. The falsehoods couldn't endure the realities of ruin, rebuilding and realization. Americans subscribe to a whole herd of disbelief's that they don't even know enough about to question. Work until your head explodes; get as much stuff as you can, even if it kills you; poets aren't necessary, we don't need all that jazz;
I'll have time later; what's good for General Motors is good for the country; we will die for your lies and never know it. Ad infinite nausuem.
The sea is a mystery found and another one opened. I left my baggage ashore. It could never quite make the transition anyway. Why worry about then, with all this wonderful now around.
Joe told me how to unfurl the mainsail and I did it. Unsnapped the brass eyelets on the canvas cover and let loose a line to free the unfurling. At first we were still, but not for long as the wind started popping the canvas making more and more pockets until at last it filled and we were taken by the wind.
Another shot, stronger than the first. Better than, longer than morphine. In the wind, destination unknown. The beginning of a new life for me.
****
Copyright 2013
Marcus Stein
The Log of the Voyage
Part 1
If you were to ask me, a 64 year old man who's been around, why at this late stage in the play I am about to embark on another adventure I will tell you that while it does have all the elements of great adventure, I think of it more of a continuing adventure that was interrupted by the fallout from the explosion of my useless appendix. It is in fact the only body part that I know about that serves no meaningful purpose. We can have one or not have one and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference unless it goes bad. Then it can kill you. It almost killed me.
How sad it would have been to have died, sabotaged by the poisonous bite of a useless but none the less deadly........appendix. The very word of it reeks of unimportance. As if it were a redundant footnote in some massively researched and equally meaningless tome.
It was all downhill from there. Maybe my other grand and essential body parts were thrown into revolt by the violence of their useless cousin. Some poisoned molecule in the river of blood that gathered one onto another to dam the flow. Life's blood squeezed to a trickle. Dams undone by scalpel, the remnants swallowed by the succubus of evil machinery. Finding myself in a dark basement with only madness and pain for company. The siren song of suicide beckoned and I crawled to its edge, ready.
But instead of death, I had a moment. You know, one of those timeless ones, with all the light? The ones that can change the course of your life in an instant? I guess you either know what I mean, or you don't. My best hope for you would be that you do. It's what makes life worth living. Step out of the madness and slow to the pace of eternity. Be you but not you. You but more you.
Anyway, I've passed the point of waiting for you, dear reader, to ask me anything. I will take it from here.,thank you very much. I have some questions of my own. But questions, thoughts, evaluations, expectations just make my head hurt. I've taken some good shots, the ones that smacked me in that square inch of chin like lightening and the next thing I knew it was later, and I couldn't quite remember exactly what happened.
And so now I bid you adieu. You raise me an adieu and I call. Raise you with a bon voyage. You think I may be bluffing, but then again you really don't know. Not when it comes to this.
Trade me this sanitized mass insanity for a coral reef and the glide of free manta rays. Take this rusted body and turn it into lovers meat again. Don't ask me why. That is why I have taken control of the questioning. I trust my gut and I've learned about life the way everybody learns. The hard way.
I choose transcendence over suffering, being over thinking. I am hungrier for life than I ever have been. As sure as I've ever been in my life. I see some daylight and I'm going to run for it. Because I'm a man. Because I can. And if you love me you will miss me some but that same love makes you happy that I have this chance.
I hope I will be able to report back to you from the white sand beaches, from the raining down of ecstasy on my parched flesh. I hope I hope I hope.
And with that I bid you a do and a be. Cards on the table.
More later.
Chapter 1
The Big Lie
“How can we keep people from believing
that we're not just throwing troops down a rat hole?”
Clark Clifford-1968
Vietnam was the Black Hole, the rat hole that tore my generation apart. The question reveals the inhumanity of the ruling class. Who waged war as if there was no blood. No death. The draft was the long arm of the Monster, ever reaching out to draw more bodies into the slaughter.
It was all part of the Big Lie. The Lie that keeps you in the dark. That keeps you mute. That keeps you afraid and apart. Because when men speak together of their fear and sense of injustice their fear turns to anger and angry men fight back. The Monster who lives and breathes control above all cannot abide anger. Without a war, a wrong war that angered millions,they would have just continued to sedate by television and kept slaves to Mammon.
The reality was too ugly to ignore. Could this really be the world? Could the world really be this cruel? This unfair? Yes. And more. Much more than what can be processed by a mere brain.
There I was just minding my own business. Not hurting anyone except myself. Now they wanted my body for the rat hole. If this was reality I wanted no part of it.
They claimed their reality as the only one. But that was only because theirs could beat up mine. That made me angrier and I was forced to abandon reality for surreality. I get that way because the world is upside down and I still can't tap dance on the ceiling.
Men like me are like trained bears. We will be happy to eat your steaks instead of your head. We'll even wrestle with you and not claw your eyes out. But please, don't poke the bear. You're not going to like what you happens.
I could see the rat hole, asshole. I could see what you were doing to make us not believe it's there. We said FUCK YOU. We said HELL NO I WON'T GO. We burned our Draft Cards. We said they were murderers. We called them on their shit. We gathered by the thousands,faced down by gunners on horseback. We showed up for our physicals up for three days on drink and drugs. Dressed in tu-tus, dressed in capes. Parkas in the summer, shorts in the Winter. Anything to be declared officially crazy and excused from a trip down the rat hole.
I didn't have to pretend. I was crazy already. I was outside of the outsiders. Nothing in the world made sense.
But that fell under Catch 22; If you don't want to go to war you're not crazy.
Nobody was going to tell me I wasn't crazy, especially them.
Death to Monkey Mind Again
monkey mind
monkey mind
monkey mind
ya just can't let it ride
ya just can't let it glide
ya squeak cackle and hiss
flailing like a blindman
in a library of knives
go eat your past and wash it down
with hemlock
go stand in for all the dead bad actors
in your theater of revolving doors
go back to sleep in your shit stained
blanket of shame
and eat a regurgitated breakfast
of scrambled dreams
with a side of burnt and bitter delight
and I will watch from a safe distance
while your furry deluded head
explodes back into spacedust
Copyright 2013
Marcus Stein
Hypocritical Boxcars of Evil
Hypocritical boxcars of evil
have slipped the tracks.
Get away if you can
take your sons and daughters
take your husbands and wives
take your dogs and cats
Get away if you can
To a place beyond price tags
beyond subterfuge & unfeelingness
while there's still time
I see a Monster on the track
I see the technologically
in a rats nest of artificial knots
all designed to keep them separate
while they think they're connecting
I see them rushing I hear them honking
Where do they think they're going anyway
Always in a fierce hurry to where?
More waiting for the next big thing?
For the next flash of false redemption
that they just have to have?
Someone to buy off
something to buy into?
More
going places
and not being there?
What kind of a world is this
anyway
you can have it
but you can't
Copyright 2013
Marcus Stein
Chapter 3
Chicago 1968
The Battle of Chicago
I was more angry than scared. Sometimes the other way around. The world was burning and I had to go someplace. The Monster was hungry and relentless. It needed more bodies for the slaughter. One of them was mine. It could find you if you were sleeping. It could find you if you'd been good or bad. It would find you if you let it and kill you dead if it could.
I could feel it reach out with its deadly hand.
It was my move.
I ran.
Copyright 2013
Marcus Stein
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Gone
for Normal
gone to the meaningless cyber-kinetic static
gone to sex by proxy and virtual unreality
gone as Harpo's feet in the serious lemonade.
Gone as the Sorcerer King Hobo
eating cold beans in the ruins of innocence.
Gone all the days
the halcyon daze days
the far side of the ocean days
Gone as the ghosts of Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg
breathing heroin air
in a rehabbed loft
on the lower east side of Heaven
Gone the days of ports and storms
Gone the nights of desperate need
Standing guard by the light of a candle
rummaging through the shadows
searching for a half eaten miracle.
Gone the seasons of hungry young love
dancing naked in the moonlights insatiable glow
with hashish kisses
lingering under the skylight
Gone the pirate raids
on the ghost ships of conformity
with grappling hook questions
with daggers of outrage
with shotguns of revenge
reclaiming our voices
which had been stolen by
highly placed psychopaths
hiding in their suits
Gone as Old World charm gone as the Old World
eaten alive by the deranged harbingers of terror
People chased behind their eyes
Ears closed by plugs
Hearts afraid to open
Gone where I came from
Gone but not forgotten
Gone on the run
Gone on permanent sabatical
Gone where poets go
to remember
The Junkie Caveman Blues
Monster sleep while drugs not run out
Dugs run out, Monster wakes,
Monster scared
Scared Monster heedless as stampeding Mastodons.
monster need drugs.
Monster must have
Or Monster not sleep
********************************************************
caveman Haiku
byArg
if man not grow out of young fears
man not become man,
but boy in grown up clothes
Big empty bag of need.
int.apartment-day
He is going insane, as usual. His imaginary girlfriend,AMANDA is in the kitchen making some Jack Daniels and soda for breakfast.
AMANDA is everything he can imagine.
amanda
how's the script going?
he
i don't want to talk about it. i have no mind left.
amanda
drink your drink. your mind's just different.
he
different from what?
amanda
from a normal person.
he
i don't know any normal people. but i have a friend
named Normal. He's a poet.
amanda
Well, there you go. Normal people don't get you. In
fact, they can't even see you.
he
So now i'm invisible.
amanda
Only to normal people, because they're unconscious. They
don't notice anything or anyone. don't take it personally.
he
Must be why all my friends have been artists. Or thought like one.
amanda
Precisely.
Amanda, being the perfect imaginary girlfriend insists that they have wild monkey sex.
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