Excerpts FROM MASON DIXON LINE BLUES (2013)
Over January 10th and 11th I was in Pennsylvania playing two shows in Twilight Memories. A whole lot of memories came back when visiting the old neighborhood in West Philadelphia...even though it's been only two years....I wrote a book of sorts when living there on Buckingham Place. Here are five prose/poem excerpts. Someday I will do something with all these writings. A lot of cemetery poems---one finds a foreign past and the so-called present. These are all drafts and not finished quite.
Poem Among Tombstones
Within Woodland Cemetery Upon Schuylkill River
I’m existence among
T o m b s t o n e s
Crows in cherry blossoms.
Crows caw among cherry blossoms. darken sooty spots. REminders
of the industrial revolution's pendulum past
even the dog taunts the
root. reduced back into the lure of the
fantasy the rock
the ether the concrete nonexistent,
someone is blaring whose
biology?
YesterdaY, he noticed a back tooth upon the right side of
the mouth
Has a crack.
The crack is not yet,
Painful, yet.
A Philadelphia MemorY
The cherry blossoms
On bucking hammer street were
all photocopies of blurry medical textbooks involving
Exploded hearts.
Rain kept. Rain kept up. They wouldn’t take me at the community Health
center. I had to live in the basement
with my wife-- the house of two witches, mostly good, held
RoooST, roosT
Rain kept rain kept Up.
So did the cold weather weathering and IT was supposed to be jiffY
spring that never quite sprung. I got
sick. Real sick. MostLy the physicaL
body this time. Though the brain did get
a touch of the sickness. I got so sick I
could not drinK no whiskeY anymore.
I got confused and
confiscated into the delusion. What
delusion?
Well it called Mortician jig
hip thrust thump-- a new crazy dance sweeping the nation. You know by the waY Dick Clark got his starT
not that far far away.
I remember all this cause I
left Filthidelphia--reading a Chinese poetry book called
Chinese Love Lyrics.
I barely visited China Town
once during my Philadelphia Sojourn.
When I read words back, not dependent if I wrote them or
not, tha words change--they shape shift--literal and metaphysical
---a trickster word thar
I often will be aware of this as
the Escapades--so I go back and will read it again.
Is this like memories?
Mysticism recollected--
then attempt at Public Medical Health Care, Philadelphia
YoU can dream mysticism when
yer bodY is sick. This I aligned well.
The last ghost creation’s
white comedy of becoming lost.
Compromised sister again.
Great fiery rain upon silver
panes. Dark deaths.
Bow woven front business
North.
Death path where the cherry blossom trees have been axed
down. Amnesia stones.
Decrying shadow--the dwelling
vice a ROOT ROLLING LINE
SHADOW.
After eternal and after body
truth.
Sinister moon congregates! I am socked speechless with horrific blows.
Dark to darkness.
The story ask God questions.
I am at Health District five
trying to get medical help. The nurse
won’t believe my symptoms. She don’t
believe who I am, who I say I am, neither do three clerks drunk on the high of
social work. Somber or Sober? Queen blithe Bitch of the security guards. I watch two episodes of The Jeffersons
on the television In fatigue. Some
numbers are called. The numbers apply to
separate flesh. Each separation of flesh
is seeking some kind of laboratory work.//tests.
I am told I cannot be helped with any medical care. I storm out in anger fermented with body
sickly into pale Philly morning and destroy a fallen tree limb in the
courtyard. I am deep asleep at noon.
Oakland Cemetery PA
Between a hammer and a
whisper
I walked up hill--the small
hill within the confines of the Pennsylvania cemetery. North East Philadelphia. I walked the
overgrown path that carriages used to roll with wooden wheels. I walked through thorns --I had to break some
thorns and kept walking. I had to get
caught up in some thorns.
I got down on my knees and
prayed in the central axis I got down on my knees and prayed in the circle
formed by four naked swaying bone trees.
I prayed to tha lord, even though lord don’t mean lord.
I found car parts in the
woods, though no full car. My lover
found a hammer buried deep in the dirt road.
Philadelphia Stone
STONE. The stone lettering. The stone lettering can take you aback with
stern declamation. The letters make a worn
phrase. Through the darkness to the light was inscribed in late
nineteenth century lettering. The
triumphant stone angel blackened by acid rain and ancient factory soot. The monument overlooking the Schuylkill River. Where the
bend occurs.
SKULL KILLS--
I keep finding dead snakes in
this cemetery. Small serpents. Green grayish serpentine plurals. A whole (dead) nest of them neath a large
rock. One among the crumbling leaves that
were turning into dust. The whole earth
turns into dust.
Woodland cemetery. A paradise garden to safe keep the dead and
bring the living , devoutly together in life’s interactive.
I place a dead snake upon one
tombstone overlooking the river. I then
find one alive neath the leaves. I prod
the serpentine with a stick and give up out of boredom and or mercy. I had a different mind that day. Those days.
The mind was in disorder as well as the heart. The heart disorderly into contempt and
simplifications.
I forgot all praise. I praise the blue sky and the streaks of sun
shimmering the cold marble monuments in late winter or early spring. Winter and spring keep on becoming the same
here.
An older man and younger
woman are painting the mansion’s columns white.
A new coat for the change of seasonal.
The decay is concealed. One
supposes.
Close proximity to the front
burial ground gates.---There is an old liquor bottle that has human claws
floating in a liquid that could be liquor or formaldehyde. A paper is a tunnel inside with explanations
in hand writing. Message in the bottle
neath the old Elm. When you hold the
bottle up to the light and try to read the note you can easily discern the word
GOD.
The prostitute
perceives a Ghost Man
I am the ghost that drifts
past the soliciting prostitute.
A prostitute with flop shoe
sandals on North Philadelphia summer after midnight I’m lost--lost in lost ness
my lover just dumped me out of my grandfather’s old white ford truck and drove
away drunk in the night I am also drunk
yet heightened by fear and terror that has shivered into the hot sweats of a
psychotic bliss state of survival--4four young pimps in long t-shirts are
emerging out of the dark park.
I walk by and do not even
glance at the woman who is doing the seduction dance in all probabilities very
poorly and I will not be a part of her wheel of fortune tonight as I have sent
wild prayers silently expounding into the hot trickery infested atmosphere---
She is stomping her plastic
sandals behind me on the concrete I expect words yet I hear no words I clutch
my knife in right pocket knife extended I know those young pimps emerging out
of the dark park are going to converge with her--
She is stamping her plastic
sandals dollar store sandals on the cracked pavement--I wont’ fuck her==I won’t
pay money to fuck her--I don’t want to wait for the 4four young pimps emerging
out of the dark park who are looking to make money out of this ho.
I sing my own gospel songs
bout how the devil and god are both gonna arrive from up and down and kill us
all--I make the divine feel my sparse bleak spark of desperation---I am left
alone and I continue alone lost in North somewhere Philadelphia tunneling
deeper into my blackhole of lostness and condemnation (s).
Summer is arriving at another
end. This is my 33 summer in the outside
realm. My thirty fourth if one counts
the time served in the womb before swimming through the water to that odd light
that jettisons one into this physical realm to interact with the physical
realm.
…………the problem is always
focusing and completing anxiety dread what are these nervous twitching?
