The Enemy of Penguins

 He was an enemy of penguins. His eccentricity became too unpredictable for any completion bonders to consider because going over budget was something KR only dealt with when the time came (which was, in the later films, more likely to happen before the most complex scenes were shot because he would have come up with some mad idea before the shots could be marked). As his agent Bobby Litman once said to me via telephone “I’m sorry, but Ken Russel’s imaginative genius does not conform to the pedantry of your fiduciary concerns.” He was a funny guy, and he was not a polygamist to success and his muse. He stayed very honest and crafty that way.
He saw deep into the depths of raw talent of Oliver Reed in a way no one else ever did before 30 pints a day did him in. The Devils is so unreal. The wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Women in Love was, at the time it came out, one of the most mind blowing stretches of film I had ever seen. I think that is what KR was good at, hitting a groove in a part of a film that was just…smashing. An English original is hard to come by, at least one that doesn't need footnotes in English below the dialogue so that even people in Wales can understand the dialogue. His love of music informed most of what he did and his love of the lake district and poets thereof. Like Nicholos Roeg he didn't let making sense get in the way of making a cinematic impression. It must have been something when he threw in with Yuri Geller; I'm sure he drove him mad!
He took camera and film with him almost everywhere he ventured. Miles of stuff left behind - probably none of it a "movie", but I am sure some of it is an absolute riot.

***

Tripping introduced to the supposedly Suzy Creamcheese while the looking for Cousin Jimmy not wanting to be part of any scene because in the end all is ruled by the big Phony. Only because we had liberated more than 20,000 hits of orange sunshine from an evidence locker somewhere in the treasure state. Gary said he knew the CIA guy since he could recognize them since his brother was basically one of them having gone from the Montana smoke jumpers to do the secret war in Laos with the Hmong and it was his bogus pokus in Amsterdam during some big protest against the fascist or was it the communists when he blabbed the wrong thing to the wrong plant. He told me that when I looked in the mirror and recognized my face but not my skin that it was natural as was when I recognized my personality but rejected my identity.

But Cousin Jimmy had said he had found a way out from revelations made at the Round River experiment that included time travel and conscious transmigration through the proper reading of John Milton’s “Samson Agonistes hah hah”. Everything was insane everything was coming off the hook but what was being revealed beside the hideous nature of civilized hierarchy was the possibility of something else which the Big Phony caught on to right away. Cousin Jimmy said elevating rock and roll over jazz was the first step in the crush of the revolution and that he himself had foiled the plot to assassinate Herbert Marcuse.

I was with him and KL when they threw all those guns and boom boom off the Aurora Bridge and KL predicted crips crack and bloods splish splash bath of blood. And as they fell and splunked to the same place where the only leaper who had ever survived (a catholic nun of the Blessed Virgin Mary) he said, ‘don’t trust anyone who says it’s all about the music, cause it isn’t, it fucking isn’t.’

Looking back I don’t think she was really Creamy SiouxCheese and we never so much as unloaded anything as we simply lost it, you know, we let it go since everything dissolves along the way.

If you can dig it.

My Guy Lied

 My guy lied as a 16 yr old to jump into Gates of the Montain fire and within a relatively short time was a persona non grata in Laos. Interesting people at his funeral, Hmong, retired spec force brass, a couple of people nobody knew who didn't speack to anybody, and a few guys who were with him "out there". His wife, who knew he had many secrets and was not just making a life "buying and selling timber" whispered in my ear "I half expected these vet guys, I knew he wasn't just a supply captain in Viet Nam. But what did he have to do with those Arab guys in the corner?"

***

 That's a cool movie for sure where you put away the pop corn and the bong, well, maybe the first time, and dig it in different ways especially if you kinda nod off while your watching it. But I don't know, maybe one could try the Ben Franklin trick where you hold a nine pound cannon ball in your hand while sitting in a chair...then boom when you nod off, quick write down your dreams, do it long enough they find you in another county having taken the neighbor's bananna bike with sparklers in the handles, all the way to another county where the difference between sleep and waking is less relevant, though downstairs neighbors might turn on you...then of course there is always writing yourself to sleep where you try to keep writing while you empty your mind and let in the undertow like the time you had the wheezing from the onset asthma and that sound in your chest wass that of a weak baby crying and you were hiding in the coats in the corner of the gym at the dance where everyone threw their coats and you were sure someone had a baby and hid it there and you went digging for it but instead found only Play It As It Lays with this wooden cover and a rusty hinge binding no baby no baby half awake what is that sound in my chest still writing letting go wondering how is it that that shadow seems to be casting the tree and the wind is like a breath this slow thing ever being pronounced never being said the baby below the book whining how did you get here did you believe all of their lies or just pretend as an excuse landing in the water instantly forgetting everything else in that instant coming up to surgeons wearing rings on their plastic gloves with tiny baby heads as he sticks an instrument in your side, the nurse said with a smile painted on her mask, you know, that's right it is the Jesus side, and the Dr. says intercranial my ass this stupid bastard insists fish have feelings peddling in the wind with it like you are the smallest part of an unknowable word with the wind as the wind reacing the ear like light the eye the constant speed of meaning every flower a revolution a dried up forgotten memory of a kiss singing about guns and losing the branches the veins in her eye the baby crying again oh fuck it i'll go ahead and take the prednazone now...

 ***

If we kill your children we'll say they were not yours, if you hold their broken bodies up to the sky screaming God is Great we will say you're nothing but hate. If you say we stole it all and that we have not right to exist we'll say you never did - as our wish to erase you explodes in your home. Whatever we say to whoever is there, whatever eerie voice echoes the call to prayer, no matter if you spend four generations in a sewer it will not really matter who you think you were. And if you don't wish to see your village burn don't even mention the right of return. Go now, bury your dead, put them back together if you can. Give us all your cannons, give us all your bombs, give us all your newsmen singing our song. But if you are ungrateful and don't watch where her heart throws her will drive our resolve right over in a bloody bulldozer. For we are just like you. We mean no harm. Any of these evils were clearly the accidents one must accept. If you disagree, go ahead, grab your rock and throw it at our tank, go ahead and pick up your bullhorn and stand in front of us with your US Passport hanging round your neck. We have always been your friend. Everyone knows what we will never admit. Everyone knows. This isn't no bible, this ain't no Koran, it's it's a long short story by Joseph Conrad.

***

I dont know how we got there you couldn't see anything outside. It was crazy. She was half wild when I told her she reminded me of the pink leather fringe girl with the fancy shooter who shot the side view of Crazy Horse in a shiny piece of sheet metal. She groaned from the deep buy Edgar Fucking Caycee here a drink. We were supposed to go ice fishing. We never made it. "I lived in a hail of bullets," she said, and kissed me on the lips, hard, right in front of Roy who she had just introduced me to as her husband. And just as I thought you know I think he's gonna bring one up he did and that was the last thing I remember till The Wizard brought me too still laughing saying how she had been kidnapped just that night by two guys who broke out of the pen where her husband worked and was always on about his Dodge Challenger how wasn't anything in Deer Lodge County could touch it so these guys broke out and went straight to his house cause they knew right where to find the keys and wrestled the shotgun out of her hands but not before she got off a shot. So they took her as a hostage but it was already too late as they moved under the heavy sky hoping ride ahead of the storm but the road block was there and as they slowed down figuring they'd just go back to their cells she screamed gun it you fucking dick heads or we're all dead meat and so they did just as the first rounds marimba'd into the grill and the impact rather than pulverizing them launched them up in the air, a quiet moment in the sky among the first snowflakes of a long sock and the falling tinkle of buckshot. Not a scracth she screeched, yelping back shots, not a scratch.

I didn't want to go back inside but Roy insisted he buy me some Jack. We got into how most people before they get too drunk are lucky to have more than two stories to tell, and he promised me, right then and there, no matter what, if he outlived me, he would go to my funeral. Gave me a card that he scrambled some fuzzy inkling of who he was. Like in the future, dying, I'd be like "oh, shit, better call what's his name, Roy, and tell him so he can get here before they plant me. I mean, Roy said over and over again as the shots lined up, you never know who you're gonna have to save in this shit hole paradise. I can't remember what the two stories were, The Wizard says that's because I always tell them when I get drunk, and honestly, it's been years. Years. Like, granpa used to say, it barely happened.

1,000,000 Monkeys

Aye....say five moons with 1,000,000 monkeys each overseen by mass murders of web-sensation juice cap sledding crows to arrive at a hypothetical conclusion in a hypothetical universe vs. a funny feeling, an unknown announcing itself as the unspoken revealed, which one more or less might ask, is more or less amazing than what dogs derive from a good ass sniffing. Or, conversationally in a polite Dutchlike offering of an alternative view: When the pre-programmed ancient brain intersects with a slight wrinkle in the cellular automata...visions abound. Just because one is failed by their apothegms doesn't mean they still won't stand by them. I do this consistently, unconsciously and it is a grave and disturbing mystery worth noticing but the attempt to solve it will only result in more television.

Gone through your Head

The shit that goes through your head is unbearable. Damnit...where'd I put it, I can't remember what it looks like, what it's called, why I want it. You bounce off the wall, for a moment a knot hole in the piney flow looks like the hair swept face of Jesus or wait, is it Che or Mitch Miller??. Oh, yeah, that! Who am I! Nevermind, let's see, I am around here somewhere. No...no...no...don't let those thoughts of Fukishima and deepwater horizon melt you fissures again. Oh fuck, we're fucked, we're totally fucked. How'd this bottle of wine get in my hand, who opened it?

It’s okay, where’s the dog? Find the dog, the dog will know. And under no circumstances answer the phone and make sure you stay away from the mirror. I mean, it could be worse, historically, the Russian army isn’t flooding in and raping all the women after all them men have been slaughtered or starved to death, the housewives aren't all spontaneously going out and drowning themselves in the river, the germans aren’t coming in and making us all take off our cloths and shoot us into pits, throwing our wee bairns on top of us to be buried alive with us, no one is sworn to kill us just because we wear glasses. We live in a different world now, really.....we do. And yes yes yes it's bad....but....but

It could be a lot worse.

What really freaks me out of this reality is that
It is going to be.

A very hard

landing.

Need to find that keyhole reality now so I can latch onto some way of escaping it while functioning at the same time...sensless aspects of a dream, it's okay okay it's only a dream. Wait...someone knocking at the door. The neighbor. Oh no. Not her. To ask me to trip her garbage disposal. Caught her licking her lips when I stuck the handle of her toilet plunger in the garbage disposal. Maybe a cold sore. Maybe not. House smells like orange rinds. Some kind of Christian radio station playing, cases of Mona Vie stacked in the hallway, a mercedes and audii in the garage. Will I take the toilet plunger again and go to work to the sound of really white sounding people singing about angels?

This is not reality, it is a statirical farce of a word that once took itself seriously. No...no...don't tell me it never was...okay, okay, breathe deep and say the mantra...Monty Python Monty Python, Monty Python Monty Python.

Flashmem walking over to her house My friend who lives in a lean too up high in the Idaho panhandle was driving his diamond rio into OK city when the Murrah building exploded. He freaked out because he thought whatever it was or whoever it was they’ll be catching somebody, anybody that will do as fast as they can and I live in a lean-to and avoid people for the most part. He has completely disappeared. They are rounding up all the Rainbow People. Don’t be ridiculous the little voice inside says. Who was it, Descartes? If there is a soul it must have a place. Calm down. Come down. Tell her you have lupus. Pour a glass of wine. It’s going to rain. Keep your mouth shut.

If nothing happens more than once it happens all the time.

And it could happen to any of us and we wouldn't know it.

Side of the Road

You might go off the side of the road and be trapped under your car when it rolls. The trucker who pulls over and cuts you out of your seat belt and drags you out of the windshield before the flames spread might hate your guts if he knew what was in your mind. But he isn't thinking about that when he pulls over. This is essential. All the rigamarole about god and sex and country and money has clouded the air between us. We are one, really, whether we know it like MLK or can't quite conceive of it like Eichmann (or maybe he did in the most perverse way imaginable). The hell of one's life can be measured sometimes by how often they have to swallow their own hate in a single day. I know I have. In someways it's easier to understand than love because there is nothing sentimental about it. Rationality and reason are over rated. You can't reason with someone who's seeing red unless you know them. You can't stop some one from hating by proving how wrong they are. Who the fuck do we think we are, anyway? Your facts and truth mean nothing to some people. So what is the other way? Gather together as an out - in group and smarmilly chortel about what a bunch of ignorant pig weenies thos people are?

We cop to more compassion than we have the heart to excercise. A great deal of fear and terror has made ALL of us what we are. And unless you grew up in the woods without a television or any books and learned the communal sonics of meadowlarks and used that as a spiritual blueprint for your understanding of nature and the universe, brothers and sisters, you are just another fleck of gravel in the asphalt, no matter how small, or big or sharp and sparkly you might be. Like my old man said once it isn't them it's us.

He knelt before a tank with a rosary in his hand with the mayor of the village in France begging that they not destroy the entry arch to the town which was built by Charlemagne. Who hates you now? Who's the slave, who's the master? How many tanks have you stopped today, how many days did you spend behind wire for trying?

How long has it been since you have seen yourself in your brother's eyes? The love that once rose up around you like a mist - has it really disappeared, or have the demons blinded you? Imagine your own death as much as you can. Our fate is sealed. None of us have the slightest fucking clue no matter how much we can pack in our brains our how well we turn a phrase on a gray blue blog. I am collapsing under my own cynicism, what were Jack Spicer's last words?...."my vocabulary did this to me..." Political movements and historical narratives will not uncover the beauty we hope to rediscover and for most here I doubt waxen fumed sundays between priest and choir would either. Im all upside down trying to kiss the stone, but it is floating out into space. I feel the note that never ends you know. I feel it always. My greatest comfort is knowing it will not end with me. Truly, anyone with a heart knows, there is no time to waste on hate.

***

Within the cave Platonic shadows of the ancient brain that was enwebbed with more than one kind of human cortex, different emerging strains of consciousness. Were they dancing yet around the flames, on the brink of discovering shadow art and making sacrifices to the shadow demon? Six hundred generations preceding Wallace Stevens carrying the strain straight to the hand between the candle and the wall/grows large against the wall.

The magic of no knowledge seeking the tree of life which in that moment was the seal who’s blood dripped on the charcoal and became part of the painting, the seal in death, quick grace in her element, the flight of the sea alive in me, the seal as provider, dripping out part of itself like Pollack drunk and cut by glass passing out on the platform above the cave of his canvass, which receives the broken glass, the blood, the wine. Blood and fat in every line with the fallen trees of the holy fire.

An ancient stain holds a mysterious secret that here in the time of the Helix Seal we may not have enough earth soul left to ask the right question. For here we walk in a world that is covered in a crust of bone dust and powdered stars. Paint on. Let life live anew in other eyes through what we leave on this our stone.

I Think of Oskar Werner

I think of Oskar Werner in "The Shoes of the Fisherman." Those eyes that seem to recognize the wealth of human sorrow, those lips that find courage in pity, the countenance of face beholding the arc of human existence in all its glorious turpitude. I think of a boy caught up by the river that roared him with millions of other boys to the steel warm bosom of Der Fuhrer, come to murder the Fatherland.

I dig my clay from the garden of a dreaming child. There is no one I can hurt, there is no one I can't help. Chagal made my heart right before he died, and put it in a little box and whispered to me as the flood broke all words are prayers, colors are the genius of the soul longing to love the world. With the moon we have, we might be the only ones who can see them.

Kings and popes, do they ever shed but tears of rage? Bondage by gold and the art of high deceit. Ashen crosses drawn on our heads, silk ribboned candles crossed at our throat, Jesus stripped down to the ninety six wounds, and every week out go the boxes, one by one, into the hearses that roll as silent as a pressed leaves past the dogs who stand to smell the dead. I dig my clay from the garden of a sleeping child where there are no Fuhrers and there are no popes.

I dig my clay from the garden of a sleeping child
where everything is holy and there are no gods

He Didn't Leave a Note

 He didn’t leave a note.

The worst is to come upon them after. Pale blue hue, eyes bulging, blood dark on the floor and bright on glass. You feel that is all your mind is - glass. A grave diving horror reaches out for the last time you saw him. You were walking down the gulch. Said something about if there was magic in the old days it didn’t go away. We did. He talked about why he always wore boots. You can’t remember what he said. You should have known, though it would not have mattered, when he said, “when I die, I want to be cremated.”

“Why you telling me this?”
“So you can roll me up and smoke me.”

A few days of rooms full of trembling hands, feint smiles, eyes you never saw so dark before, and all you want to do is head for the woods, but even that seems crazy. Everyone wanting to know why, and you thought of so many smart ass things to say when people would ask you. There was nothing left. He no longer enjoyed his own farts. As a chemist, it was unacceptable. Things he would have laughed at.

At the end of it his mother comes out of the bedroom she had disappeared to for so long as you lay his sister down dead drunk on the couch. The mother of darkness moves with the sound of windy silk and strokes her hair.

“Thank god she’s nothing like him,” she whispers.

She hands you a small piece of paper without looking at you. Pale blue sticky note. You look at it and on it is your name scrawled in pencil, hard, with a smiley face in the O.

“It was in his boot,” she says.

You look out the window and see the snow still on the highlands clinging to the scars of hard rock beneath the moonlight.

Out on the porch Lucy and Derek are asleep, and old uncle Lucky is on the old davaneu staring off at the stars. You close your eyes and feel your soul hurtling through the exploding abyss of the universe. You hear a voice speak in every fiber of your being. You do not know what any of this means.

And you know it’s him. Inside of you, outside of time.

You can hear the 150 ton engines in the pit. You can see the dust settling along the divide. You realize you are not what you are. And there is no love through love.

***

There's an old gaelic saying "love hides disgust." I grew up understanding the big parade day was more an American than an Irish invention in that, as a certain Harrington explained it to me, "on this day, all people get to be Irish, it isn't just what's in your blood, but what's in your eye." Everyone has to have some form of distinction. Shane McGowan, after all, is not exactly unheard of wherever the reels may echo; Indeed, I've known some that stayed afloat well into their '80's. False pride is a cheap trinket sold outside the baptistrey when the bells can't stop ringing in all those swollen, whiskey soaked brains. But there are these moments, you know, when all the barriers seem to break down. Yes, it is an illusion, and yes, I remember children dancing on the plank. But for an instant here and there it seems like everyone is reflecting everyone, and the old ladies who only go out once a year say stoof like "donna get me wrong sonny, I love the old country, but I wouldn't trade a yard a where I stand now for an acre of that misery over there." Things change. They claimed it as their own that which mystifies and curses since the times of the Nile. The Hibernians will sing of Ragland Road, and toss one back for Bobby Sands. Me, I celebrated reading Heaney to my son whom I named after him...then drank a pint of Guiness. For the road is long and wet and hard to see and it is important to reflect on how one may fall.

***

 If only money were the only thing. If only love or bitterness. All of it chews and all of it tears at that time your brother fell down the stairs and all you could do was laugh. You carry an edge because you couldn’t save your sister from the world, astounded that your mother was not a virgin and you are not the only son of man. So Ride the donkey, bang the bong, blame your pain on whatever comes along. The rich man parked his Lamborghini on my balls, he smashed his whiskey up and down my halls. The poor man fell asleep on the dime I lost, I can’t remember who actually nailed me to this cross. Every breath goes in like the next great gasp, tripping mad down puppy love lane, with dreams of remaining somehow sane. Reach out for the money, reach out for the gun. Let the light out of your eyes, it’s no sin to have a little fun. Inside us all the cancer grows, dancing to the music of 1,000 Jim Crows. A little plant struggles inside your window, it doesn’t need to know what anything is. Dirty Harry was a flower child. If only money were the only thing. If only bitterness. Take me home and bury me in your bed and forget everything we said. We must be leaving, leaving soon, we must escape from all these rooms. The apostles laughed at The Rich Young Man when he ran in madness away. Jesus wrote something in the sand. The only word he ever wrote. We must be leaving soon, we must escape all these rooms.