Creed of Core:
I. Revery
Perhaps answers in silence, the gray area outside of argument, beyond belief systems instilled in us (systems, what we believe). Something more radical than “reform.” Action? When has anyone ever acted, not merely of conviction, but with consequence? I recall only cacophony. Our imagined “right” to call noise music when we were young things with immortal bodies, stoned on our bicycles past midnight. Invisible cricket chorus; pleasant score:. Done now, well and be done with it for good.
Were we ever outside the arena? All that star gazing, consumed by anxiety, futurity, desire. Reached for “good life.” Our delicate fix. Learned our lines and towed them, dreaming guns and type-writers, mechanical genius of The Nation. Stuff and Nonsense. Stuff, stuff and more stuff. Ter-rif-fic.
Dear Diary: today I mourn the vanished. Vanquished. Synonymous, no?
Lies, lies, promises: “once I’m settled again I’ll send for you, dear, and the children,” such such such and so forth.
Anyway who can afford all this beginning-ness, everything always new, not improved. Upgraded. Maybe a few corrections. Slight
Send it back, all of it. We haven’t got all day, or all that many days. Call the supervisor. Demand the earth stop spinning. Talk, talk and more talk Demand balcony tickets to the stars. Demand warm beds on which to plot beginnings. Real this time. Death is the song played over and over, Death and his brother, Work. I refuse to labor for cavilers and creeps. For what will I be rising and for whom and why? I get eye-strain. I have cramps. I’m claustrophobic and this cubicle is killing me. All I ever do is reach for phones. Enough! I was green yesterday, today I’m blue. Tomorrow maybe brown as mud. I’m thin. Not too thin. But thin. Why shouldn’t I expect the world?
In reverie I vanquish, always.
- PLEAURES
We had our pleasures too, of course. If music be the food of love, we feasted, feasted, gorged. Electric Guitar. Phallic fetish of our century. Crude talk of the folk. Jargon, slang, “hip-talk,” double negatives and all, amplified, distorted, turned in upon itself. Crossroad blues of dark origins bleached, and branded “Rock n’ Roll.” Louder than airplanes, louder than opinions, louder than traffic. Cacophonous prayers of Limeys, Negroes, long-haired freaks summoned young gods who lived among us briefly, brashly. Pop salvation, “instant karma” for the young.
Guitar said, “Fuck you, big man.”
Guitar said, “Shake for me.”
Guitar said, “Listen.”
Guitar said, “Walk away.”
Guitar said, “Who are you.”
Guitar said, “Lick me.”
Guitar said, “Do it.”
And whatever it was, we did, the young, for a while at least, when we heard Guitar (ubiquitous: how could we not?), knew its patois like a second tongue upon our cocks and cunts and in our throats.
It was our lyre.
But Power would have none of it.
They taught us to read books that our disease might wither. Pain management. Nobody wants to be depressed. So, if you look at all sides you’ll have that many angles. Persistence decides these things. Agitprop. Hypnosis. Look at that man there long enough, he’ll fade away.
But imagine something terrible. Then what’ll you do? And then what are you talking about. And then what you were dreaming. That girl in the hall turned on by photographs, celebrity fanzine stuff, not nightmares, not visions of stick-men, great white spermy aliens like eye-less sharks.
“Doctor, careful, forceps…”
What histories will she deliver, what dead man pulled from her gray – takes awhile to download; some of the women are quite – when he comes home the children; when she admonishes the lamp. Supper time. Consummate. We sop the blood with cake…
It ends with alarm. The television listens. It’s about seven.
Simple: you just don’t go. Have your mother write a note. Or your wife.
“Not here. Not this time,” or better yet, “I just can’t relax anymore.”
And upon the scene arrived the fire brigade. “Do you have any idea how he fell in to that well?” Life without consequence.
Like in Kindergarten. Ms. Mulhollander dissected a Praying Mantis… belly full of indigestible, iridescent wings…
“Children, say ‘thorax.’ Say, ‘abdomen.’”
It was dead already or she wouldn’t have cut it.
“Killing a Praying Mantis is illegal. They help mankind.”
Did we really want our teacher to do time?
After school we Scorched brown ants under a glass.
“We have unleashed the power of the Sun upon Japan.”
Nauseating stench. The lucky ones worked — dismantling a beetle. Arbeit Macht Frei.
“An ant can carry 500 times its own weight.”
Something like that. For the good of the colony.
“Their lives suck. There, get that one. “
Fry ‘em.
Surely we’ll be punished. Official reprimand signed by Ms. Mulhollander herself, copied, filed among our permanent records.
I remember love notes folded in pieces, place marks for anthologies of Great and Famous Men. So many I lost count. Poems, essays, stories, notes. Words relating courage to believe in
(even after what was written) worlds outside this room, if you would simply close the door on fetal life; bowls of plums; harsh angles
misunderstood by outside, outside gulped by in; believability in tatters, awaiting yet another Fall.
Why, only yesterday we mumbled whatever about how young they were when we last met, and all that pap about time flying, raging against incorrigible truth (“his daughter done him wrong” etc.).
Crying won’t solve anything. You have to face…
“There, there,” pat on the back. “Now, now.”
But once it’s reached the point of Free Delivery; of Future enfolded within Past; of marking time with cigarettes; of wanton soup; Fajitas; chrysaloid petals tucked dry without wings…you must –
– and again reality delimited real estate chunks of earth and ash, cluttered with apparatus. And again the matter of self.
“I can’t face my reflection without thinking ‘no, no, it can’t be…’”
Has Time been cruel, or did we expect too much?
Sipping cups of Yesterday to dregs of Winter.
“Fix me rum-and-chocolate, I’ll be good as new…”
Our just desserts: to be aware of it all, to watch it happen, to be helpless, human.
“I’m not particularly afraid of myself, though I have been labeled dangerous…”
We’re unhappy. We’ll die. We’ll be forgotten.
“The liquid me, the meat.”
Turning heads of old men in the park, fucking lovers senseless
as we wandered in and out of Time.
“I’m human. I have every right to be forgiven…”
Don’t go there now. Why speak of it?
“It’s easy, like riding a bicycle…”
No hands, imbalanced, credulous, unfocused. Children of faith.
“Simple, see? You just let go…”
III. Promises of Beauty
Regardless of what “society was founded on” and blah blah blah, deep human defies despised abilities: a third way, a fourth, a fifth. But we can have our dialogue with Time, our argument with Time, our diatribe against Time, at any time. We can say, you know, “Just stop. Cease. Desist. Beat it,” and that’s completely.
We will know the pleasant smell of skin; new beginnings will entice us to rise, still, yet, again, despite perceived redundancies of morning (we shall unlearn them into novelties, ecstasies), pleasure the first thing on our minds.
I ask you to take another look. The Painters dare not startle us with stark imago, for outdoors we are safe. It is (has always been, really) our power to elude sophisticated instruments, come face to face with Angels (note: NOT flat-foot tattle-tales of yore, spooks,
gumshoes of The (alleged) Almighty, “friendly” surveillance 24/7,
up to no good and probably forever, but lusty, meaty spirits like ourselves).
Listen to me: don’t fear the next line. Masturbate, soliloquize,
expose yourself, defy Leviathans of logic, again and again and again, even unto The Reckoning.
The Judgment, so much hype and ballyhoo, can be, must be, our blessing.
But only latency, for now; not specifically “what God decreed,” unless red smolders pink and even roar-fire youth reduced by bureaucrats and cynics to a hiccup, cough in Time, mere phase or fad.
Perverse obsession to be led. No. No.
Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “The psychic told me I’ve no aura. She looked at my palm and said that. She doesn’t know how I lost my aura, it’s just gone. At ten bucks a year she would research my life to find out where my aura went to, which isn’t so bad on the surface, but she brought up the possibility of ‘pre-birth’ experiences, past lives. It could cost me, this psychic doctorate of hers. ‘Apply for a grant,’ I told her. Madame Kava Kava or Java Beans or something like that. I didn’t really get her name. I tossed her card. Why? You really want to see her?”
We shared a cigarette before the dance. And no one else in her peculiar perfumed t-shirt, boxer shorts and pointy boots,
her Panama hat and hyacinth tattoo. When beauty doesn’t merely knock,
but batters down the door. We recognize such moments in association with music, whatever’s playing in the background, and olfactory stimulants. Hopelessly nostalgic for moments never known. Sooner or later she’ll wise up to all that. Didn’t you?
Possibly, in some later innocence, our clean future, we’ll abandon rubbers. Hortatory of libido, Cupid’s counsel: skin-on-skin, our skin, not latex or cellophane or whatever they’ll sell you
in those corny packages: “Night Star,” “Rough Rider” “Pure Sensation” “Dive on in.” Cold barrier. Like fucking a mackerel.
Desire to say something meaningful is a dead weight on your tongue. Even before Ovid (in translation), or Keats (as if she’d stepped out of an ode), I knew plain longing, unfinished union, promise of beauty deferred…
So don’t say “can’t get any better than this,” because it will.
IV. Underground
And yet another dumb protagonist, all inner life, asocial, dwells in tunnels built for trains the City has outgrown, forgotten. In darkest sanctuary, he dreams. Remembers. How long since the sky? Tunnels above him and The City above the tunnels and the sky above the City. Space. Stars and darkness beyond the Sun he hasn’t seen in months. Maledictions of his species and the parasitic others that remain. Rats aloof, big as bears and vicious.
She comes to him with food procured by runners who deal daily with the light and traffic, hands and markets, of Above. He and She will never live among them in the light, among them, in the noise. No, not again.
Better to Live, He and She, than to Survive.
