7/25/2016 1 Comment The Wasteland Revisited by PM FlynnThe Wasteland Revisited “The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.” Isaiah 43:20-21 1. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD GARBAGE April Fool's is the deadliest day of the year, calling every Tom, Dick or Harry jester out of the woodwork. Like breeding termites they intermarry terror with remembrances of jokes past. Winter kept the autumn garbage from stinking up the neighborhood. Summer surprised us, the heat coming before spring this year. After the garbage decomposed all the way we stopped wearing swimmer's nose-clips and took a picnic through the pocket-door gazebo on the Sound, drank sun tea distilled from salt water spilled over filtered ice cubes and talked about sitcoms. I was a child once, Swiss, German and Irish. Being the oldest I always had to take out the trash, except when visiting cousins in the Midwest. Sometimes I remembered missing the first few minutes of “The Honeymooners” because some wounded refuse bag began to crawl through the house: starting near the kitchen door, and dragging itself across the battlefield screaming for a corpsman. Spring or summer in the Cornbelt you sneeze a lot. The stalks are tall, shedding pollen, all nature ready for one big blue, harvest moon. But most of farming is excess, leavings tilled under long fields; a wayside mowed once or twice a year. What of the crop that is spirit? What new religions grow from the stony wayside? Paradise fallen on hard times boiling 10-cent bags of noodles for nourishment. I dream of Jeannie’s body, soul and spirit: balanced before the Fall, before the Son took the garbage of life upon himself. Christmas shops cannot merchandize you. It doesn’t play in Poughkeepsie. No, sir. Hell is a very small place to fall out of. No earthen garbage pit could hold you to the grave. Poet's air their dead garbage in public in the hope it will somehow live forever. For poets hopelessness is the enemy; that and dirty old men, porn queens, and movie stars: the self-imposed, exiled dreamstuff tossed from humanity's doorsteps onto the garbage heaps of formulaic vision. Their fear of dusty, religious germs kicks at every passing wind through pulp gossip fiction recycled on afternoon talk shows during the water cooler rush of the business day. I could not mush her perfumed breasts at our power lunch late last year. I carried her fragranced heart for over a year before she transferred to Casting. Horrible Hagar's personal clairvoyant grossed out his relatives. A crystal ball replaced the tarot cards. His wife viewed her kin as Arian white trash, like a pack of wild dogs roaming the pages of the Sunday comic strip on Presidential search and destroy missions. Witches eat belladonna like steroids I suppose. No personality cards for insider trading. The Dork, the man who's never invited to parties. The Nerd, who sells blood to the Red Cross to pay for surgical tape to fix glasses, or to buy fresh pencils and calculator batteries. There are the Idols, male and female singers who travel the world with a price on their heads, though few ever meet them in person or know if they are any more real than the sacred HD pixels they inhabit. Finally, the deathbed Psychologist takes priestly confessions at the worst possible moment. Fear eternal death in a Lake of Fire. Universal City: so many actors and actresses have passed under your doors, rising and falling under a jet stream of publicity born from hands shaken in singing, gurgling Jacuzzis. Why doesn’t anyone pick his or her nose on primetime? The networks give the public what it wants. I suppose to keep right brains holding in Slo-Mo. "You were with me at the Oscars?” "That dud you planted in the schedule last year…has it begun to sprout?” "Do cows have magic wings?” Millionaire Bruce Wayne became a sleaze king after syndication. Batman's ward, the Boy Wonder, died of AIDS, not into Bruce, Vicki or the sell-through. 2. A GAME OF CHESTS AND BULGES The tube chair she sat in, like a polished throne glowing beside the marble entertainment center. A dead screen comes to life at the touch of a designer button on the matching ivory control box. The HDTV with DAT premiered without litigation. Casting was impeccable. Her golden hair and Carolina Blue eyes had nothing to do with the story at hand. They tasted each other's attributes. Predictably, interruptions followed one after another for several minutes. After their moment passed, lost for all eternity, I turned to the HDTV Repair Shopping Channel to get fresh quotes. Every window was alive in the mall. Plate glass everywhere breathed in unison with my own rising and falling chest hair. Into my own house I carted many exotic items shipped in from around the world for precisely this moment in time. "You have learned the plastic well, young Luke," the invisible teacher whispered to his young Jedi dressed as a metallic-suited knight on October 31st. "Is this a fraternity prank?" the cleavaged Clerk bounced out impatiently. "I believe in the Force, God, the Creator or whatever individual preference gives you at least one unique trait so as to keep him, her and everyone from mixing everything up,” the virile Jedi offered. (Words spoken by a Jedi always hang over a crowd an extra few seconds.) She accepted the purchase card and pressed routine keys with wide red, celluloid and pouting lips, for the fortieth time that day. The Jedi entertained the thought he was becoming predicable in some manner, a regular customer, a statistic in some business database or hacker’s memory bank. The Jedi had just spent thousands on therapy to assure humanity his minimum one, individual trait was still intact. "The world is a mixed up enough place as it is,” his beautiful, Princess Lea look-alike Bride countered. "You are my sister and my friend; straight from sex-ed class," the Jedi focused on her eyes. "Can't wait for an irresponsible sex-addict to keep life interesting." "Love is a relative, beautiful thing." The Clerk slid the Jedi's purchase into a seemingly bottomless bag along with a dozen or so, freshly inked receipts and advertising brochures. She slowly looked up and down the Jedi's rippled body while his newlywed wife stood stoically, a true Jedi housewife. “Goodbye” was all a bosomed Clerk would ever tell her girlfriends about those last, fleeing moments. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.” "What are you thinking of?“ "What thinking? Who thinks around here?” "What? I never know what you are thinking. Think.” "Therefore, I am.” “Am not.” “Are too!” “R too, D2.” I think we are in a run-down cemetery where the dead men scavenge body parts from corpses untouched by heavy metal music. "What is that noise down the hall?" "Probably groupies." "This is supposed to be a select, four-star hotel." "The wind…” "Exactly. "You mean nothing?" "Exactly. "Exactly what I mean." "Nothing?" "Nothing." "Nothing." I remember the bags under her eyes. "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?" “O O O O that Shakespearean Rag—It's so elegant.” "My mind is a mass of confusion." “So intelligent.” "Oh that every marriage were made in heaven and moved as smoothly as Romeo and Juliet’s less, of course, the two death numbers at the end." "Of course. None pledge eternal love together, before the evening news ends anymore.” “Nothing pledged, nothing gained or dusted I always say.” "What shall I do now? What shall I do? Shall I rush out as I am, and walk the street and let all my hair down so, or should I be what everyone wants me to be?” “The glossies, the TV ads, the newspapers. The hot shower at ten. The 11 o'clock News, 10 Central Time.” “And if it rains, maybe I'll believe some weather reporter’s stories, others I won’t.” “And shall we play another game of monopoly, pressing greedy eyes together and waiting for a ship to come in?” “When Lil's first husband got divorced for the fourth time, I said--I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself…” “HURRY UP ITS TIME TO GO TO THE BANK.” “Now Albert's being paroled and going to remarry the live-in roommate he spent the last six months with in the co-ed halfway house, after he got out the first time, and made himself a bit smarter with refresher courses.” “He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you to get yourself educated.” “I did. He was there. Four years at a major university, Lil.” “And such a nice degree.” “He said,” I swear, “I can't, I can't bear to talk to you.” “And no more can I,” I said, “And think of poor Albert, he's been at MIT four years now, he wants a good job.” “And if you don't give it to him, there's other's that will,” I said. “Now there,” she said. “Something about the Fortune 500 firms that might appeal to him,” I said. “Then I'll know who to go on about,” she said “And give me a nasty look will ya…” “HURRY UP ITS TIME TO GO SHOPPING.” “If you don't like shopping with me you can go wait in the atrium, or the vestibule if you prefer.” “Others can pick and choose if you can't marry the man,” I said. “But if Albert elopes, it won't be for lack of a best man.” “You ought to be ashamed,” I said, “to talk so.” (And him only thirty-something.) “I can't help it,” she said, pulling on a Maidenform. “It's them books she reads from the publishers,” I said. (She's read five already, and nearly died of the last one when she listened to heavy metal records played backwards.) “The feminist shrink said it would be alright, but I was never the same.” “You are the proper fool,” I said. “Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is,” she said. “What did you get married for, if you don't want children?” “HURRY UP ITS TIME TO DO MORE SHOPPING. SHOPPING.” “LADIES.” “Well, that Sunday while we were there, Lil had a hot one.” “And they asked me to leave them alone of course, to get about while their song was still playing.“ “HURRY UP ITS TIME.” “HURRY UP ITS TIME.” “All the stores will close in a little while.” “Good night Bill. Goodnight Lou.” “Goodnight Ellie May. Good night.” “Ta ta.“ “Good night. Good night.” “Sweet dreams. Good night.” “Good night shoppers. Good night. Good night sweet shoppers. Good night.” 3. THE HIRED DEMONS The river's course is broken: the last bulldozer clutches the ground and sinks into the wet bank of dirt. The wind crosses a brown land, unheard over the roar of many grinding diesels. The nymphs have started across the walk in front of the construction site. The men whistle to their sweet things ever so softly, 'til the contract ends. This water on-site shares empty Styrofoam, floated bottles, crumpled papers, worn rubber tires, foaming wastes, cigarettes or other testimony of Satan's fall. The nymphs are crowded at the bars. And their friends: the loitering heirs of city heat having left no phone numbers. By the waters of the sea I sat down and wept… Fortune 500 poets travel so little through my house. Why am I so ugly to them, these sweet souls that run so softly along the roads they drive at night? Am I so arrogant like a black bird picking a corpse scattered across the road, chased away by every car, waiting as long as possible to be carried off by its wings? Write indoors in winter, exteriors in spring and summer and let autumn take its course. These are Poetry's first rules of success, or is that excess? I think to not write them down anymore but instead, remember the changes in this day. I envision myself king of Fortune 500 poetics, lord of every yuppie lover's heart. Yet, I am negative and critical with multi-national implications; arrogant sometimes and mostly withdrawn. Still, I remember the most positive emotions within myself and see all negative ones as chains yanked by spirits hiding in the shadows of the night. O the moon shone bright on the nymphs and on her daughters the Players that move too quickly on to the next poet. They wash their feet in rent-a-Jacuzzis, another idea past its prime. They wash their face in bubble gum. Unreal, wasted land visited for the last time under a spiritual fog and a lusty, winter moon. The land once flowed with milk and honey. How to reconcile perfect choices? Unshaven Einstein, with a pocket full of candy formulas shook the balance and opened up the military/industrial complex. A lush green haven of mind, body and spirit turned intellect, turned away for answers. He who would not swallow a Quantum pill. Now, once and for all, there is perfect hopelessness for one and all. Lack of perfection leads intellect to justify imperfection at every picnic table by the roadway of life. Turn upward from your tower where impressionable minds like fine-tuned racing machines, wait. I middle-aged though bored, exist between eleven universes with a life busier than most, to sit behind a desk writing. And still, those eleven universes may have eleven dimensions. And so on it goes until I am an ascended particle master of all I survey. I am with steroid breasts larger than most skinny women’s. I see past the happy hour. The evening hour promises bribes for those homeward angels bound over in flights of rush-hour fancy, and all that gives bartenders an extra hour's wage. The gypsy sports hero, home during the off-season, lights the one bulb lamp above his bank statements. He lays out the product endorsements, the many contracts a sportsman is expected to hustle after a day’s game. Anyone seeing the numbers would envy this ability to draw crowds. I, a middle-aged old man with wrinkled toes from standing in the river of dreams too long, no longer living in the wasteland, perceived the scene and was still able to explain it. The muses still twist one arm behind my back and tie strings around all my fingers so I won't forget. (I expect no guests in a desert void of imagination, housing war castles of sand or mud.) He, a young guitar repairman, arrived. A small businesswoman with one bold stare, one of the new neuveau, me-too so rich on whom name-dropping sits easily as a tenth-time hostess for the local fundraiser; the time now advantageous for foreplay, he guessed. The microwave meal is ended. She is bored and tired, sitting cross-legged on the couch picking her teeth. He endeavors to engage her in a caress that is unreproved, unrequited. He assaults at once. Callused fingertips encounter no defense. His vanity requires no response, and welcomes the hairy rankness of her indifferent, stale underarms and cigarette breath. (And I, a middle-aged old man, have been here before and left soon after. I, who have sat second row below Pink Floyd's wall of speakers, and walked among the lowest of the undereducated dead and lived to tell about it.) And bestows one final, patronizing kiss on the MC's upper lip, asking himself what this woman does for him. She stares a moment into an aluminum pan reflection, hardly aware of her departed heavy metal salesman. Her one remaining brain cell allows this thought to form: "He ain't no Valentino or rock music superstar." She thinks of needs and caring, paces the room alone, and never speaks of love. The lovers glow with oil and ventilate, heating the beaches blushing with a turning tide of desire for a wild ride, a pure kiss on the lips where it counts, straight up and true, pure, once more from the heart. Once more before I die. Elizabeth and Leicester bring out the worst in each other then rub the wrong way. She compares him to swollen flames and expects expectations--more true friends and family voices to flap at. E&L play their games of chance and inspiration laughing, or trying patience laughing all the time interwoven with love's most blissful spotlights; mostly doubting, still hoping perfection is like beautiful Cinderella and her fresh, Bel Air prince--too close for friendship, too unyielding to be soul mates; and both with lovers, and other internal scars only their egos see. They touch the wounds, and then rub their eyes. Both desire change and never find time, time to talk the talk, thinking they've wasted or lost the years walking a walk. 4. DEATH BY INTELLECT “Why does the public wait until after the death of an artist or writer until he or she is discovered?” “It has to do with the critics.” “They safely pick bones and theorize, and then without fear of authoritative correction or contradiction.” Ah, the life of a critic. A critic's life, gentile or Jew is one of air and expectations, except for the few exceptions. Only a university will take them in off the street and feed them. 5. WHAT THE SHRINK DIDN'T SAY "Eat your peas,” they both screamed at me. "Interesting,” he replied unemotionally. “What's it mean though?” The patient sat up on the couch alert, in expectation of this, his final session. “Very interesting your family life.” “What does it mean, Doc?” “Your family was conservative was it not?” “Yes, but what does it mean?” “As a little boy this happened, yes?” “Yes, yes. We've gone over that in detail.” “They always threatened to FedEx your dinner to all the starving children in China or Africa?” “Yes, their words exactly.” “Interesting. I've never come across a case like this in all my many years of psychiatry.” “Ahhh. This is crazy. What is it?” “Ah. Where's the time gone?” “You're kidding?” “Another day, another insight: that's my motto. Session's over.” “You're a fake.” “I would never tell anyone that, if I were you.” “I'm on the edge of a cure and you stretch it out one more session. You're crazy.” “Exactly my diagnosis. You're cured.” If nature were therapy and not rock? If there were rocks to stand on; and waterfalls; and water to catch us when we fall; a spring, a pool among the rocks to stand on and rinse off? If there were the sound of water only in this life? (Not the centipedes in the dry grass endlessly walking somewhere, walking; but the sound of water over a rock where the parrots mock from alloyed cages, "Polly is a Quaker…Polly is a Quaker.") But Mother Nature has no miracle cure. Who is the third person of the trinity always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together but when I look up Abbey Road there is always one walking beside you. I do not know whether a man or angel from our many conversations together. Quickly, who is that in the middle of the road, no on the other, other side trying to turn us just as we reach a crossroads? What is that sound on Mother's Day? Murmur of maternal lamentation, the same hooded hordes of bomb threats swarming together over endless, useless pay phone wires, stumbling in temporal, earthen houses meditating on the missed card or Mother's Day gift. Falling eardrums. Jerusalem. Athens. Alexandria. Nine out of ten therapists agree: "Don't repress feelings for your mother." Batgirl drew her long, black hair tight and fiddled popular music for the MTV video. Bats with baby faces in the caving light whistled, and beat their wings and made their way to the corporate offices. All bats out of hell are sent by former songsters when play rotation of their tune is questionable, money runs out, or songs peak too soon, when a thousand voices imprisoned in empty cassettes and exhausted vinyl sleeves sit in warehouses waiting for discount auctioneers. In this decayed denomination among the sidewalks in the moonlight, the choir is singing over the open graves about the chapel and the empty pews. The sinner's are all gone. There are no stained glass windows, and the door swings on its hinges. Dry bones collected. In a flash of enlightenment the last member of the congregation falls asleep. Ghandi's coffin was unearthed. Limp leaves were covered by dirt from the sunken-eyed diggers’ shovels. Over distant chanting faces whispering crouched, breathing heavily, expecting silent nirvana. Then spoke the thunder-- DUH TA DA. What have we forsaken? Blood surrenders to spirit. The awful daring of a shaking heart in an age of impropriety, depressed by this, and this only, we have judged existence not found in obituaries yet to be written or under seven seals broken by the angels in their empty, little heads. DA DUH TA DA. I have heard the fighting between camps. Freud vs. Jung. Jung vs. Spock. Spock vs. the Clignons. Timothy vs. the dead Leary, and so on. By the way, he knocked at my window one night, soon after croaking, him being chased I think, by every spirits he seduced for eternity. Turn the key once and turn once only. One ping only before we defect to the other side, to capitalism, where democracy campaigns with the food that would feed the motherland all winter. We think of the key, each in his or her prison, turning the key. He came to set the prisoners at liberty. Turn DA key Spock. DUH TA DA. Only at nightfall, rumors spread. Relive for a moment a heart broken for eternity. TA DA. TA DUH! People just off the boat responded to the census. To the experts the sea was wet behind the ears and responses completely predicable, well within statistical probability, and if invited to the lottery, to obediently follow Big Brother’s controlling hands. I sat upon the throne looking down with a view through the clouds below me. With arid desert plains below I lean on higher ways not my own. All the shrinks falling down, falling down, falling down; all the shrinks come falling down, my fair lady. Like London Bridge in Texas, these fragments are stored in short-term memory, maybe for eternity. I've left for the last time. Bio: PM Flynn is a North Carolina writer. He holds a B.S. in English from East Carolina University. His writing interests extend to poetry, fiction novels and screenplays. He owns a coffee house with his wife, which features live music most Friday nights. He has self-published a book on Creativity and Reason: THE CREATIVELY DRIVEN LIFE; and co-wrote and self-published ASSASSINATIONS: THE WORLD’S CLANDESTINE KILLER ELITE with Bob Chapman. Patrick has been published in many print and online literary magazines including Helen Literary Magazine, the Fictional Café, The Grassroots Women’s Project, The Mirror/Slush, etc.
1 Comment
Phyllis Bowen
7/31/2016 09:21:06 am
I enjoyed this Patrick!
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