Newspoem November 1996

Danielle and Mark (with whom I share this house) just left to go be in a midnight performance of Waiting for Godot on unicycles at the Rubber Nose Free Theater. So that gives me a few hours to catch up on my correspondence with you. I sure hope they don’t get hurt like last night. Anyway, thinks here have been pretty confused since the shelf cave-in, as you know. What with the pneumonia I have been unable to open any of my mail for about six weeks. You should see the unread newspapers on my front step. We use the back door now. I know we haven’t seen each other since we were at the Dreamtime Village in conservative West Lima, Wisconsin together, and I was too shy to talk to you then. But I remember the night you asked me about metaphor and I only croaked in response – a two-hour lecture stuck in my throat and that night I wandered the fields with a loose goat trying to find the words. Just as well. Many the night I stood in the moon just outside the mansion hoping to serenade you, desperately trying to detune the thing before the sun came up. Usually, Lon heard me and joined in singing while I was still trying to detune, confusing me, making me leave. You have a piece of me anyway, and I’m not sure what that leaves me with but your watercolor hangs on my wall growing bluer with fermenting memories like blackberry wine. If I could be there over again I wouldn’t even try to write. Just watching the leaves groping across the window turn to fire and die on the branches here as I sit at this keyboard for seven weeks trying to decide between “I” and “we” inspires in me a sense of urgency so urgent I almost act on it but can never decide how to start the next sentence of my life. The pneumonia developed into complications worse than music and I caught typhoon fever, which ran its course before I knew what I had contracted. Several mobile home parks will be demolished, but not because of the typhoon fever but because of bloodless landowners. The fact that you are a stranger is spicy to me and strange. If I could lure a small blue part of you through the postal system I’d probably swoon like a gypsy, erratic like a moth. Things are cold here, but they have a certain clarity. Better than ice but no warmer. Something inside of me is on fire though, but I’ll save it for a future letter. As I may never have mentioned, I am in the second and final year of a Masters in Creative Writing in Normal Illinois. The only restriction the academy puts on my writing is that after two years I have to check a box to indicate whether it’s poetry, prose, tech, drama, or theory. This, of course, is not that. This is a letter. I am writing a novel I will happily send you at the slightest sign of interest from you, including none. It is supposed to be 250 pages and I have finished two. A very tight two pages though, I managed to keep it at 240 words after six months of rewriting. I left Dreamtime the second time to go write it, but I got lonely and your afterimage seemed etched on my studio wall. My thesis is like a DIV 3, only with less paperwork, and quite possibly I am more into it then people there are, on average, into their own things because I am more into mine, on average, than people here. The comparisons are false but unavoidable. I am ready to be in school again. The theory and tedium are a lavish dream to me. Being in school really beats working in a bookstore, which I also do. I also live in a big old house with (Danielle and Mark and) seven plants and two cats: Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I didn’t name them, neuter or declaw them; but their previous owner did which is all the more convenient for me. Sebastian is a coffee-point siamese, and he’s a little too talkative if you want to know the truth. Woofy and I get along though – he’s quiet and likes catnip. Well, he’s not quiet. I like them all. Except me, all I want to do is write, its weird. It’s a little bit sick. I’m not interested in food, and I go without sex for days. I love writing – the backache and the blurred vision; the cough and the carpal strain: it’s heaven. Beats trying to read Lyn Hejinian in a crowded bar during some football game, which I also do. Sunday at the bar I had to quit reading My Life when I noticed that Hejinian kept repeating the sentence “The obvious analogy is with music.” I found this too distracting, or maybe it was the jukebox which someone had programmed to play Revolution #9 30 times. So I read in the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette that U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry had said, in response to a foreign leader criticizing the U.S. for dominating Iraqi air space: “The U.S. military does not pose a threat to Iraq.” Then some team scored a goal and everybody at the bar cheered. Somebody bought me a drink. Goldschlager and Curacoa, I think. The obvious analogy is with music. It made me funny. I couldn’t read a straight line of sober homoerotic poetry after that. Sometimes I wonder about you and all the people I have liked and if I’ll see you again, about where I would want home to be and whom I would want there. I remember dumb fond things, like holding hands when all of us held hands and tried to unknot ourselves into a ring, resolving anarchy through geometry, it didn’t work. At Jonathan’s suggestion I think. I remember our last night there in fact. Someone had baked a pie with salt instead of sugar and my eyes watered, everything on the verge of adverbs. All of which was somehow related to (cybernetics). The sky was very blue today, like that painting. I try to imagine who you are there in that expensive weird college I have spent many a blizzard lodged at, instead of in the burnt mansion, that smokesoaked windowless gutted ghosthouse. At the bar I met an inarticulate spokesman for a pharmaceutical company. Apparently there is a drug which can cure schizophrenia. The spokesman said, in response to my accusations that the drug was too expensive: “Yeah, the thing about dat is,… a hospital stay is more expensive so you’re really getting ‘a lot of bang for your buck.’ I know this is going to sound weird, but I think that schizophrenics can ‘get back to ‘work.’’” He had some speculation as to whether schizophrenic people would benefit from a lifetime prescription to the drug, but little doubt that the pharmaceutical company would. Then we got into an argument – I don’t remember how – and we made a bet which I won. I proved it by going to my house, gathering all 65 newspapers from my front lawn, and taking them right back to the bar. I delegated everyone in the bar to tasks. We sorted the news by section and date and each read a fraction of it and summarized it for everyone else at the bar in fifteen minutes using only an effects processor and an overhead projector. I was right: it was October 3, 1996 when a man wearing a Bob Dole mask robbed a bank in Wheaton, IL. He bought me a something served in a flaming cocanut. You should visit: we can go to my other favorite bar: The Office. That joint is humming, flourescent, and divided into cubicles with typewriters and telephones. They just installed a network and a server and with 20 terminals. You have to fax in your drink orders. If they aren’t busy you can use the intercom. Sometimes they’ve got the brass vacuum tubes working – very classy. Today I am going there and writing cocktail napkin ideas for a dying (again) resolution. My resolution to write a poem a day about the news this year, remember. I never wanted to be a hard worker. I just wanted to be that cartoon Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs-Bunny-Road-Runner-Show. I wanted my life to be a context I might enjoy stimulants in. I never wanted to come this far in this direction, I just wanted to stay up all night driving. I’ve been using fertilizer as fuel, drugs as nutrition, and food as a catalyst. I am interested in living differently. I don’t see how it can happen in this society. I require alienation and excess and exhaustion. Don’t get me wrong. Being an English major isn’t all smoking marijuana on railroad tracks beneath a full moon. It isn’t all sex, drugs, and critical theory. I’ll be frank: it has boring moments. Today I attended a seminar, wait it was a colloquium, given by the man who introduced the word “pedagogically” into the English language. I’m also in a technical writing class. I’m am trying to write instruction manuals for poetry. I’m trying to work out a series of ten symbols which can communicate all meaning to native speakers of every language. We have one assignment which is to design a label for an imaginary food: I’m doing Milkshake-in-a-Can. Also Tater-Tot-on-a-Stick. Or the time I opened my mouth to tell you what I thought of you and couldn’t, choked, and burst into song. You probably thought I was a dork, and you were probably onto something. If I were a newspaper I’d find a way to sign you up for a decade-long subscription. If, on the other hand, I was the T.V. news, I’d hope I was on. Or the nights you fell asleep in the hotel lobby and I sat across from you, knitting or trying to write an opera about yoga. It wasn’t the only night I ever spent. And Urbana, it isn’t all free theater and good songs either. In the past two weeks Urbana seems to have lost all recycling and be on the verge of losing the Francis Nelson health center. Living with Danielle is complicated, but living with me is worse. One of my hobbies, for example, is building houses of cards. Sometimes they get big enough to block the front door, and it upsets me when they are knocked over. Another hobby of mine is practicing cymbals, and waterballoon throwing. So if you ever want to meet me someplace convenient, like Ohio or Michigan, let me know, but I do have idiosyncrasies. Sometimes I listen to the Beatles. I remember Hampshire. Mostly I remember the blizzard. I’m poor and write a lot and, happily, have no career to take time away from writing you. I knew you got the package I sent because Rebecca said when she was here for a night with two of her lovers en route to their intended community in Tennessee, which I guess flipped over when somebody drew a line somewhere and she ended back up in Philadelphia making love and seeing Shakespeare on the cobblestones forgotten; and she is still groovy, naturally. Yeah, I went from West Lima to West Virginia pausing In Illinois just long enough to experience despair and dump a box of art into an envelope, scrawl your signature on it. My cat has had too much catnip I think. He is watching me type most curious. It’s making me nervous if you want to know. Boys are good. I hear. I am typing books and building letters from letters. Falling into debt like everything is falling towards the center of the earth at a constant rate of acceleration. What kind of public art is there in India? Tell your mom I was the one dripping wax behind your sink. I was there in the middle of the night with a candle looking at one of your drawings of a worm, wondering if you still made animated films of vegetables at film school there in Frisco. I’m glad you mentioned it because last Thursday 12 people showed up in my house and cooked dinner without saying a word, it was weird. Go ahead and thank me for making you think, get it over with. I never even got your old address, so it’s a good thing it doesn’t make sense anymore. I never got your last name either. I didn’t get much of you at all, so I’m not sure why I miss what I’m missing, but I do. On September 1^st 1996, my 27^th birthday I didn’t know it yet, but they were going to bomb Iraq again in two days. My room is swamped with papers and unopened bills. Did I mention the newspapers? So when I got your postcard I flipped because I didn’t know how long it had been there. I won’t find out until Tuesday, but among the unopened bills is the unopened student loan check I need before I can open and pay the bills. In the meantime, I wonder how things are in community and in Tennesse. Which poem did you lose I forget? I’ll send you another or something. I want to live, anyway. I am trying to write a poem a day about events in the news this year. So this month I am writing them directly to my friends. 30 letters hath november. Do I have that many friends? I would settle for half, and probably will. I don’t know; I am not a rock, I am not an island, furthermore I am not even the blade of grass who bends in the winds that dismantle the oak. I am a hot air balloon, riding the winds that bend the grass and dismantle the oak. And my Dad once said: If you’re ever thrown through a windshield, go limp. Roll with punches, but don’t turn the other cheek: pretend you’re unconscious. He thought I should be a speechwriter and if I had listened, I might have someday penned: “Time And again Saddam has made clear his disdain for civilized behavior. He brutalized his own people, attacked his neighbors, supported terrorism, and sought to acquire instruments of mass destruction. Our policy is equally clear.” When the Republican National Convention features men holding babies and hired African Americans. When the Democrats slash welfare so it can never again be a “political issue.” When the left is betrayed by the left. When compassion is equated with police. These are the days. Getting someone else to notice the news is almost a revolution. Tomorrow is election day. I’m not complaining or anything I just thought you might not know that if you’re somewhere in Tennessee where people work really hard on getting along and working everything out in consensus meetings then you probably aren’t reading the daily news at freezing busstops waiting to catch public transportation to your restaurant job, hoping to hell the fucking bus isn’t late. Speaking of the so-called “real” world, your question “Where can a poet make $ on his work?” I am touched at your innocence. I don’t think I want to answer, just keep hoping it’ll happen. The sentence, by the way, is grammatically incorrect. It should read “Where can a poet make money on her work?” Sorry, I teach English. That reminds me: it will be Galileo's second flyby of the largest moon in the solar system since arriving in Jupiter's atmosphere in December so I am thinking of giving a free concert on the parking garage by Dickenson Hall up in Normal where I go to school. It’s fun, I’m reading Charles Bernstein, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, newspapers, books from Sun and Moon Press, poetry, theory, graphic design textbooks, and credit card offers. Did I mention newspapers? I taped President Clinton’s Address-to-the-Nation-the-Morning-he-Bombed-Iraq-(Again) while driving to Normal at seven AM and seventy MPH and played it for my class. We talked about it. They are coming of voting age right now and must be having a hard time keeping track of which ones are Republicans and which ones Democrats. Okay, so which of them is in favor of killing welfare again..? Which of them bombed Iraq..? So confusing… I was inspirational, inspiring, or maybe just inspired but at least wired (weird) and said: the second thing is English 145, the first thing is deciding what you want. As the Caribbean islands prepare for a possible hit from Hortense, residents of North Carolina, Virginia and other states face a huge cleanup job after Fran. In North Carolina, workers are replacing hundreds of miles of downed power lines, repairing roads and hauling away fallen trees and debris. She was sentenced to two years in prison for those convictions, but it was not immediately clear how much time she would serve on the contempt of-court charge. So I guess things are pretty slow here. Seriously, I’d love to come down with some pals and teach and developmentally-disabled obscure experimental poetic techniques and performance tactics. I just opened a capsule of catnip and poured it on the desk and now Woofy is stoned and reeling, sprawled on my papers. I feel like covering him with all these unpaid bills just like the CIA covered up evidence that U.S. troops were exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons during the Gulf War. The secretive intelligence organization held a rare, on-camera news conference at its headquarters in Langley, Va., to announce the probe into claims by two former CIA employees, as empty and quiet as the covered bridge the evening of the six pack, darkness, and our intimate conversations about sex and psychophysiology. In the starlight filtered by ancient boards you reminded me of CIA Executive Director Nora Slatkin. She says the CIA has been as open as possible in its efforts to get to the bottom of the mysterious plan we made that night to get some clowns together to surround Bosnia or the Lincoln Home trailer park here in Urbana. It is election day today, by the way. I just voted no on a bill that would privilege the rich and no on another bill that would privilege the rich. There were certain elections where only Republicans were running and I refused to vote. I asked the woman with the directory if it was okay if I didn’t vote on certain items. She shrugged and said “you don’t have to do anything.” I walked out of the church laughing, thinking that that’s what I love about this country. President Clinton surged to a strong lead over Republican Bob Dole in the first wave of major U.S. voting returns tonight and seems headed for re-election by a handy margin. Computerized analysis of early voting returns by television networks project Clinton the winner in Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, New Hampshire and Vermont as polls began closing in the east of the country. Florida and Ohio are crushing losses for Dole. Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, Indiana, North Carolina and Kentucky appear too close to call, from where I’m sitting – my room. A festive mood is gripping President Clinton's hometown tonight as Clinton and his oldest, most loyal supporters follow election returns that appear certain to make him the first Democrat to win a second term in 60 years. I hope they don’t come over here drunk at four o’clock in the morning. Dole voted at the First Cross-Burning Christian Church in his hometown of Russell, Kan., saying he "was a little nervous" because he had never voted for himself for president before. So he had a stiff drink and voted for Ralph Nader, which calmed him down. Dole campaigned virtually non-stop for 96 hours, man I wish I could write that hard. Perot, who is stuck in single figures in most opinion polls, refused to offer a prediction on the election as he voted in his home town of Dallas in the morning. "We'll see how it works out," he told reporters before urging people to go to the polls and "vote their conscience." Perot's spokeswoman, Sharon Holman, said the Reform Party was confident Perot and his running mate Pat Choate would prove all the opinion polls wrong, and vote for Ralph Nader as well. I am not likely to win a congressional seat myself, at least according to network television projections. In another closely watched race, conservative Republican Strom Thurmond retained his South Carolina Senate seat, aiming to celebrate his 100th birthday as a senator in six years' time. Thurmond will be 94 on Dec. 5. In early television projections, New Hampshire voters elected state Sen. Jeanne Shaheen the first woman governor in its history and the first Democrat in the post since 1980. Shaheen defeated Republican Ovide Lamontagne in New England's most conservative state. The U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia has advised Americans living in the kingdom to "exercise extreme caution" against possible attacks coinciding with today's U.S. presidential election. The advisory in Saudi Arabia said "terrorist groups" could be encouraged to attack U.S. interests and facilities because of "elections in the United States, upcoming international conferences as well as the one-year anniversary of the bombing ... in Riyadh." Five Americans and two Indians died in a blast that rocked a U.S.-run military training center in the Saudi capital in November 1995. Also today, the U.S. embassy in Paraguay cancelled its election celebrations after receiving a terrorist threat. Boris Yeltsin came through seven hours of open heart surgery today and doctors called the operation a success. Renat Akchurin, the Russian cardiologist who led the surgical team, voiced a note of caution. His bombing campaign was said to have been motivated by frustration over his failure to get a 1972 federal conviction for possessing a pipe bomb overturned. When I got pneumonia (around the night of the ragweed festival) Katie gave me a get-well present: the Recovering Nicotene-Addict and Aspiring-Alcoholic Coffee Giftset. Right now I am drinking the Marlboro-and-Nighttrain prune wine-flavored coffee with shots of Frangelico and Bailey’s Irish Cream. I feel queasy. There are signs that agreement on a labor contract between GM and the United Auto Workers may still face significant hurdles. That doesn’t help. Meanwhile, local strikes at two GM plants are forcing more shutdowns at GM facilities across the country. How am I supposed to sleep? Two major U.S. economic reports are out today: A> The Labor Department says the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.2 percent in October, and the economy resumed producing new jobs at a healthy rate. The number of non-farm jobs rose by 210,000 after falling 35,000 in September. B> Another report shows a gauge of economic activity posted an eighth monthly rise in a row in September. You can get rid of fleas (temporarily anyway) by mopping with diluted Citronella oil. That’s one of the many things I’ve learned living with Danielle. Another thing I learned was that my house has fleas. They don’t bite me: I’m poisonous and probably skinny. They bite her though. And the cats, Woofy and Sebastian, they just bring them in. It’s the season, the leaves turning to flame, our big old house with the vacant lot backyard. E. coli bacteria, on the other hand, poisoning, I do not have. It is linked to apple juice. My diet is not now such that I need worry. Danielle occasionally threatens to draw a line on the stairs and forbid me to cross it, rendering me prisoner. I just banished all furniture from my room. Now I type at my computer while I sit in the lotus position on a thin cushion. I type sloppily, but at least 20 people, under questioning by Simpson lawyer Robert Baker, admitted to "carelessness" in one instance, so what the hell. You should visit here. Champaign-Urbana is just large enough that you will be happy to finally leave. Danielle, Mark, and I we get along, Wolfy Sebastian too. It’s a nice house especially since I installed the plant hospital. It is mellow here, it is not L.A. Out there, at one point, I hear, Baker slammed a police report on the witness stand. A four-year-old boy on the ground was killed in the accident. The plane's pilot ejected and was not seriously injured. He was cleared of fault in the crash and has been promoted from captain to major. So it goes, but it’s not like that there at the Farm, I’ll bet. Mushrooms are good. Damn I miss you, all of you. You, you you you you; write me back and I’ll visit you. How about X-Mas? Seriously. I’ll be so free it’ll be painful. Just a bookstore job and about 10,000 writing projects. Do you get any news there? Did you hear? In August, NASA announced that it found evidence of former life on Mars in a 3.6 billion year-old rock! The Britons say they found organic matter in two meteorites - - one was the meteorite tested by NASA and the other, a newly tested meteorite that crashed to Earth 600,000 years ago, between 140 million and 160 million years old. Researchers at London's Open University and London's Natural History Museum say they found residues and chemicals in the rock that could only be formed by living organisms. "This is a smoking gun[1] for life on Mars," said chemist Ian Wright. "I believe we will be in a position soon to study Martian metabolism. I believe I can say life existed -- and may still -- exist on Mars.” When I heard about life on Mars I was overcome by weird memories – red dust storms, two big moons and a small sun, my mother putting me inside the capsule, the acceleration. When I was life on Mars all I could think about was how damn cold it was. Nobody left at Gesundheit. Just Kathy. I wonder if George visited you. The few leaves left are being whistled thin by wind outside my window pane. There are men across the street who are dismantling a house in order to move it a foot to the left. My left, not yours. I am always afraid they are going to build a loud dance bar in the vacant lot I currently think of as a backyard. But I am recovering from pneumonia at least as well as Boris Yeltsin is recovering from surgery. But I’m having some trouble with my tech writing class because I am not interested in getting a software job for an ad industry and sliding easily into the technocratic elite of well-paid white people and at times I feel suffocated by privilege and the resistance paralyzes me and I want to yell and throw a chair at the mac plus to watch its 5000 $ monitor explode in glittering pixels of cyan, magenta, yellow and black light. I want to punch a hole through the plastic shell of the CPU and rip out its hard drive with my bare hands. Actually, it’s not really like that very often, only when I and the lab monitor have to wait until 20 minutes after the lab closes because that’s how long it takes a slow computer to eject my disc. Anyway, I just got home from seeing the Kronos Quartet. They played Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same,” Bach, recent arrangements of some ancient Greek music which was destroyed by Romans in 200 BC, arrangements of a few McDonald commercials by John Zorn, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and chopsticks. They are very eclectic, for a string quartet. I was there with my Mom. She had a purple mohawk: it was embarrassing. Tomorrow night’s concert features adaptations of the jazz of Miles Smokestack, a trombonist whose approach to music was so pure that some say he never blew a single note. This will be my own approach to music, I’m sure. I can’t cook without a cookbook because I don’t cook food, I cook text. Similarly with music: why memorize a song if it destroys the pleasure of reading it on the page? At the concert I fell asleep gazing at all the attractive people there to enjoy an environment of sophistication. When I awoke the concert had ended and the quartet was answering questions about their wardrobes. I was disillusioned: a lot of what they wore wasn’t real silk. I wandered through the lobby thinking that if I sat at a table and leafed through this stack of Silt River Poetry Quarterly submissions sadly, maybe you would mysteriously appear. I walked home along the railroad tracks whistling Myxolidian. I had the blues, no question, and I walked beneath a ragged moth-eaten half-moon. I was halfway between home and somewhere else, where I’m sure you have been yourself. I knew I would write tonight and no amount of walking would alter that too much. Write… but what? I have been trying to work out a new formal poetics in which I restrict myself to a single letter. And it can’t be in the English alphabet. I haven’t gotten very far. I had more luck with single-syllable poetry. Still poetry is nothing if it isn’t something other than discipline. Or not. So these are the assignments I give myself: find a headline with a copulative: make an equation a la Scully. In other words, find a newspaper headline which (if you wrote it out using grammar) would have some form of the verb “to be.” Then, using that verb as an equals sign, you work out the sentence as if it were an algebra equation as Frank Scully does in his book Line Break. That reminds me: I am writing a book called Line Breaks. I am using line breaks to diagram the sentence structure of headlines, especially ambiguous ones. It is like opening tiny windows hoping to find something that wasn’t put there in order to be found. I remember the time I was your advent calendar. I had a window behind which were printed the words I’m sure would have driven you to revolution. You never opened me. Like last summer I remember a tangle of smoke rings and marijuana bringing the stars into focus like a celestial acupuncture of clarity walking deserted mindight mountain highways between whistling cilantro and purple coneflower and a desperate future we were blind to. If I didn’t have a shred of your handwriting kissed in my mailbox upon returning from there, from then, from that dreamtime, place, it wouldn’t have been a home anymore, just an origami anchor and a ghost of a paperweight. So I know too well the paralysis you describe when dawn is screaming at you midafternoon when your own toxic spirits flooding your veins you lie on the grass framed beneath the heavy blue glass sky, sketched butterfly or something else, whose dream are you now? And believe me, the wind from the west presses against my windowpane and night and whispers urgent promises of a new topography upon which to chart these memories which have made this county a scribbled mess that doesn’t separate into shapes anymore. I can be an address for you, anyway. Is it scary because you are afraid that after a certain point what you’ll be falling in won’t be love anymore but something else? You think that will be the final insult but even then are secretly afraid there will be more to come. So you let your heart out only when it’s safe, when there’s one other person there and they live somewhere else or are leaving in few days or you are so… I wish I knew how to sleep with people. I have too many safety devices and I tell myself they’re there for their safety, not mine. There has been this strange cat hanging around my back porch. Sebastian went after it, a blaze of Halloween fang. Listen, though, seriously, almost all of my friends in Chicago have gotten[2] into weird drugs and disappeared. Just move out of the city, okay? Please please please don’t take X and go to a rave. Ever. That’s what my friend David did and now he’s in Texas doing experimental theater. Instead of with us. In Urbana, making experimental theater. And don’t move to NYC and shoot smack. No no no. My friend Keith did that and joined a rock band and got a job in a tudor-nightmare hotel. You can do that here. Also, if rioting sweeps through the city, stay indoors. Or at least take notes. Rioting swept through St. Petersburg Florida the other day when a white police officer shot an unarmed motorist. Rioters trashed the Salvador Dali museum. Someone threw a chair through Through The Hallucinogenic Toreador. The TWA flight was shot down by the U.S.Military. Of course, that was already in the British newspapers before it briefly resurfaced on the news here, then sank again. Of course, the local paper’s main story is about a rest area opening on I-74. The city of Farmer City paid about $750000 of the cost. Mayor Maurice “Pedo” Miller solemnly flushed the first toilet 9 AM yesterday. As he emerged from the stall, belt buckle glinting, a few flashbulbs popped. $750000.000 out of more than $8000000.0000 I’m in a bit of a pinch myself, moneywise. Like wondering how I’m going to pay for my next staple and stuff and stuff like that. I work in a used bookstore. Yesterday someone came in and tried to sell us the rosetta stone and the dead sea scrolls. I gave them five bucks for them. I make fivefifty an hour though last Sunday after I closed I vacuumed the whole store and paid myself overtime. In books. I got a copy of Anton Weber’s letters to Richard Strauss and a copy of Anna Mahler’s prison notebooks. I don’t get out much. I think I was meant to be a housewife or on home electronic detention. I think I was meant to be a butterfly or fixture. According to legend, I was born with a typewriter correction ribbon in my hand. I gotta figure out someway of getting more money. Marijuana doesn’t grow on trees you know. Wait a minute – it does grow on trees. Right now I’m drinking a Saki screwdriver sans orange juice. I’m trying to grade 34 6-page papers which is like trying to read 204 pages three times each which is a lot like trying to read 612 pages. Nothing political usually, nobody is going to touch East Timur or Iran-Contra or even the Mitsubishi Plant right there in their hometown. Remember that time we were drinking in that weird bar -- the Aviary -- and were served gin and tonics in coconut-wide champagne glasses along a birdshit splattered bar. Shrieking cockatiels fought for your cocktail onion. A family of mallards wandered past our ashtray and plunged flapping into the bar sink. I was poor then but now I’m just textual. I don’t get old I just get more predictable. My life remains interesting. Pastors for Peace is crashing on my couch tonight – their school bus full of sandwiches and medical supplies for Chiapas in the backyard parked between The Newspoetry Mobile Cow and Mark’s Toyota Planter; and Rick knows Moxy Fruvous. I have one student writing about his lobotomy and another writing about her golf game. Getting along with people is at least as difficult as grading their papers. Like sometimes someone will ask you to drain a swamp, and you try but maybe they’re hurt by your failure to drain the swamp, and you’re digging and digging but the hole keeps filling up with sludge and they’re getting angrier and angrier. Or when someone asks you to build a dominochain on a movingtrain. Or build a house of cards in a revolving door. Did I mention that that was my hobby? Most people don’t appreciate the politics of such a futile undertaking. It is the politics of hope and sunflowers. I have given my class (English 145 – RhetComp 2000 – the use of definite articles in Medieval Textsetting) nearly complete freedom. They merely have to write forty polished pages in the next month at the last minute. CIA chief braves South-Central's anger and suspicion: At unusual community meeting, people demand proof the agency didn't sponsor drug trafficking. In a move described as unprecedented, you had your phone number changed, even as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency on Friday fielded questions from a mostly black group of about 500 people at a community meeting in South-Central Los Angeles. ''I did not come here thinking everyone here was going to believe me,'' CIA Director John Deutch said after an often-raucous session that began with a mix of applause and boos, and was punctuated by heckling; unlike the standing ovation the Kronos Q. received as I scrawled your ephemeral phone number on the back of the program.

''(But) I go away with a better appreciation of what's on your mind ... (and) a conviction that we're going to do more to stop drugs coming into the United States,''

I snorted near the end of the concert: I don’t know what I was thinking. Show me your art. Call me please please please. And put all of my writing in glass sculptures. I’ve already signed the copyrights into your name in hope that you will. Relationships, friendships, dynamics: I’m not sure I want all these nouns between me and the people I love. In fact, recently I was talking to Danielle and suddenly became convinced that she was speaking in nouns and I was speaking in verbs and our efforts to use grammar obscured the fact that we were speaking different languages. Language and reality are not the same thing, so go write a 3000 page book with at least three nouns and a colon in the title. The sound of your poetry hitting my desktop was like a starter’s pistol being fired in a dark alley. That day I felt empty, worse than my checking account. I finally got a poem published – in E, America’s only edible literary journal. The average reader doesn’t, but everybody with a future tense eats. I could never understand why you have a copy of Queneau’s Last Days on your coffeetable. So I read it and still didn’t understand why. So I learned French so as to better appreciate the puns. Finally I went to Paris in the twenties. I really didn’t understand then. It wasn’t a very nice place. Being a woman was out of the question for me then. I wonder what has to distinguish you as a writer before they name a font after you. There is a font called Perec which only has eleven letters: U, L, C, E, R, A, T, I, O, N, and S. There is also a font called crytography which is exactly like Times New Roman with the letters all shifted to the next highest rung of the alphabet. Rung, I like that. The snow here in Zurich is sideways. Please don’t feel that you’ve been mistreated any worse than any of my friends. The only time I buy chicken is in the Spring when David Foster Wallace has the class over to dinner at his house. He’s a determined anti-intellectual when it comes to dinner so I tell him the tandoori paste is barbecue sauce and slip Marquardt the mango chutney on the sly. I can see where he’s coming from. I had too many modifiers last night and got sick. Give me a recipe like “spinach and strawberries.” I saw a book of recipes by famous authors. It was pretty disappointing – it was all stuff like whiskey soup. Marinated toast. Raw carrots. Strong coffee. Did I ever tell you the one about the time I got a job working as a bartender at Hooligan’s -- the Happy Horse: a restaurant with a cartoon-western motife and the specialty of the house was a drink called The Soggy Dungaree – gin and croutons. I did, didn’t I. But I added an embellishment: the drink is served in a real cactus. After two or more your hand feels worse than your head. Okay, Adam made that part of the joke up. Last night, when we were at the Siesta Café’ – a great place to make fun of restaurants. It is not so much a Mexican restaurant as an ironic reference to one. Do you remember Don? He moved back here from Chicago because he had forgotten what a front yard looked like. He just got a job at the rest area on I57, not the one on I74 which was under construction for ten years and cost over eight million dollars that I drive by four to ten times a week, but the one where, two days after the Pfish concert, a U of I student with Chevy Blazer freaked out badly, and, when the police came, went into one of the stalls and began to remove his clothes. Any second now Danielle will return from her meeting with Capstone, the developers who bought the Lincoln Home trailer park. Last night I came home drunk with two boxes full of illegitimate books. Then I called up Don, honked into the phone, and hung up. He knew what I meant. Then, immediately, Vanessa called from a cellular phone at a table in a restaurant in Normal to enlist my help in a scheme to get the graduate advisor in the college of Theoretical Vetrinary Medicine ousted. I wasn’t that into the plan, unfortunately, even though I have this recurring nightmare in which I am asleep in a four-poster bed in a turret in a mansion during a hurricane and I hear a tapping on the window and when I look out into the storm I see professor Woodson floating there, grinning, with a copy of my GRE scores. I wish I could be more outraged at the University, but it is hard for me to get around the fact that teaching a boring English class in exchange for enough money to pay rent fifteen days late and go out once a month to a restaurant to have soda crackers and ice water may be the best job I will ever have. By the time I get pissed off it will all be over so I am just going to write until June when the last period falls into place and then I will go back and proofread everything I’ve written since 1987. When I was famous, people would admire my work without reading it. I’d hate to be Proust right now. I can never read Proust. I am afraid that if I read a la recherche du temps perdu now I might not understand its criticism anymore. Just like having read Pynchon’s first four books really caused me trouble when I read somewhere that he was a great writer. What is the difference between “complex” and “convoluted”? Writing a thousand page book is a great way to avoid looking like an idiot. Nobody will ever read the thing closely enough to discover that halfway through you forgot who the main character was. If they do they will say it is postmodern: meaning flat, nonlinear, decentered, and without a foundation. Like an elliptical Frisbee that doesn’t work very well. My spell-checker insisted on capitalizing frisbee. Let me check something else: microsoft. Yep: Microsoft. IBM. Aha: apple. Never trust any single dictionary. It must be lonely being an anonymous famous writer of encyclopedic American novels. All those people who didn’t finish your book don’t even recognize you. I wonder what it’s like to be a really famous writer, though – like Raymond Queneau. Queneau is so famous that an incredibly dedicated researcher, working for months in one of the top-three largest University libraries in America, might be able to find an entire book. Or a truly crazed person (true story) might even call up the publisher and cough up twenty dollars for a hundred-page novel that leaves them mildly dissatisfied – the mark of a true experimentalist. Sometimes when you say “famous” I hear it as “recorded or published at all.” Mark told me about a haiku with internal rhymes on the WWW. Danielle plans to collect the belongings abandoned by people who lost their trailers – furniture, lamps, birdcages -- and take them to the city council meeting and strew them on the sidewalk or to wrap the remaining trailers in big ribbons for Christmas. She should be home from having breakfast with the mean company any second now. She came home and said they agreed to help out, to pressure the city to insure that all the homeless would have homes by July, and otherwise there would be a messy protest at the Council meeting in December. In other words, she would call out the clown brigade. Us, in other words. Me, I’m itching to dress up like Phil Ochs (not dressing up, in other words) and show up with a Ukelele and nervousness burning the fingertips off my gloves. That’s why I always hated when the tape ran out in the middle of a song: all those broken songs oozing guitar solos into the atmosphere will eventually condense as permanent muzak. Clouds like headlines in the sky. Seriously, though, what I like about art is that it contains those small truths. Let me give you an example. The new Hitchcock CD has a line – “`Caroline’: no need to spell it backwards that’s ‘Enilorac.’” That’s so true. The next line also seems true: “Besides, I’m not so sure I am not me.” How could he be, you know? Wait, maybe he meant: “Besides, I’m not so sure: I am not me.” Well that also has a shard of truth to it. It’s true, if grammatically problematic. Be careful. Another example, from Ron Silliman’s What: “All metal garbage cans are dented.” I memorized that. Oh gross, I just had an epiphany. I’d better go clean it up. I am going to design the envelope for this letter with desktop publishing technology so that all your friends will think I am a large corporation and gradually come to treat you with a certain amount of care, fear, & new respect. When I was reading your letter many of the sentences made me dizzy but only one made me yell. Out loud and everything, scaring Woofy into the basement. The obvious analogy is with music. You know, I’m not sure who you are, and I’m probably too soft to admit this to you, but Rescue squads in India are working through the night in fields littered with debris to retrieve mangled bodies after some 350 people died in the world's worst mid-air collision; Texaco has suspended two current employees and the benefits of two retirees allegedly involved in a plan to destroy documents in the lawsuit; President Clinton met with the Republican leaders of Congress Tuesday to discuss balancing the budget; the Army said charges ranging from consensual intercourse to indecent assault were brought against three noncommissioned officers at Fort Leonard Wood in south-central Missouri; bands of dense snowstorms fed by the warm waters of the Great Lakes have buried parts of five states under a pre-season taste of winter; at the civil trial an FBI expert testified that a knit hat found at the scene of the murders contained hairs that bore the same characteristics as hairs found on Goldman's shirt and matched Simpson's; U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said he expected more than 12 countries would make up the Canadian-led force and hoped that the United States would provide logistical support in the operation to help some 1.2 million refugees fleeing fighting between Tutsi rebels and Zaire's army; the experts said the U.S. health care system is not designed to treat their growing ranks and costs because it is based on "an acute care system that emphasizes 'curing' disease;" a jury in Michigan has found a television talk show guest guilty of second-degree murder for killing a man who revealed a homosexual crush on him during a taping of the show; and the judge in the Connecticut rape trial of Alex Kelly, who was a national symbol of privileged youth in trouble with the law, declared a mistrial when the jury failed to deliver a verdict. The sunset was worth all the opium I had to use. Phosphor splotches and spokes of crimson. A traffic jam I shuffled through disconsolate, on foot, overcoat. I had just been sitting in Andy’s furnitureless apartment in a room best described as the Sun & Moon Press damaged books room after an earthquake had happened and a convention of chain-smoking electric guitarists had crashed there. I sat against a softening wall, the marginalization of poetry on my knee, smoking melting into dreams. Dreams of unsafe streets. The meeting in a high school auditorium -- with sharpshooters posted on the roof of a neighboring building. SCLA. CIA director denying links between the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and drug trafficking in the 1980s. Millions of dollars in drug profits were funneled to the Nicaraguan Contras, an anti-communist army that was supported by the CIA. I hadn’t woken up from this dream when it was time for me to leave in the middle of the Soul Coughing album so Andy could get a full night’s sleep in two hours in time to staple his books of poetry before the performance of Bethany’s music tonight at eight. I still haven’t. Woken up. Was I even on drugs?

CIA says it finds no link to Nicaragua cocaine ring in its records

Published:

Nov. 9, 1996

I will get to the bottom of it, and I will let you know the results of what I've found. In the meantime, getting my English 145 class to read “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice / Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not” by Carole Maso will be like threading the moon through the eye of a needle. Sometimes, like them, I need to shatter a writers block, and I need to fall back on my plaid notebook with the 10,000 exercises guaranteed to loosen the creative juices like backing over an overripe mango with a 16-wheeler. For example: my exercise 400 nouns, where you have to come up with 400 singular nouns without letting slip a single verb. “Water”, for example, does not count as a noun since it is also a transitiverb. Proper nouns and pronouns are, of course, a sign that another exercise is needed to sharpen the pencils. Like the exercise 4000 proper nouns. Or the really hard one: 40,000 pronouns. That exercise takes about two years, provided you go insane. There’s also write Don Quixote backwards from memory where you write Don Quixote, from memory, letter-for-letter, backwards. In 17^th century Spanish. If you’ve never read Don Quixote you fake it. Also there are easier exercises: 9 verb forms in which you serialize nine verb tenses. Meaning you use each tense once before repeating any of them. Maybe an example will help: Maybe an example helps: Maybe an example helped: Maybe an example is helping: Maybe an example will be helping: Maybe an example was helping: Haybe an example will have been helping: Maybe an example had been helping: Maybe an example would have had to have been helping. Sometimes you aren’t sure if you’ve found a new tense or wandered off the edge of grammar, groping, groping. Did I mention Danielle? You asked me to. I am crazy about her. She is in the bathtub now. She is unbelievably sexy, believe me. I had to come write out of shame. I went into the bathroom with the excuse that I needed to deliver to her a fifteen minute lecture on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, but I got choked up when I tried to talk about My Life. The obvious analogy is with music. She is trying to teach me how to be a good friend, which must be like trying to teach the blind to paint. She thinks of a relationship as a third thing besides the two people. She explained the word “dynamic” to me. I have very seldom tried living closely with someone before. Closely as in telling them where I’m going, when, and why. Most of my life I have been a screen door slam in the night. I lived in seven different places in two years. After I lost my gerbils I was rootless. I don’t mind having an address. I don’t mind having a phone number either, except when I have to answer it. Like when I’m living with someone. It is clear that I need to think of a relationship as a canvas or word-processing file, something I know how to work on. Trouble is, a painting or novel is something you finish working on so you can do something new. Which makes them easy to invest a lot of work in: the harder you work on them the sooner you can quit. Unlike a piece of art, a garden or a kitchen requires constant maintenance. I am searching for a metaphor, can you tell? I have never gardened although my first ever (except the one whose tragic demise makes it too painful to remember) potted basil plant is nearly ankle high. I water it, and feed it, and ensure light, and occasionally eat its leaves. A relationship is not that, though. Is a relationship a kitchen? Like a relationship, a kitchen is an everchanging, complex simultaneity of interrelated problems to solve. Unlike a relationship, a kitchen has clearly-defined tasks to accomplish: wash dish, chop basil, cook at a vigorous pace stirring frequently until most of the water has been thrown off of the mushrooms. Like a relationship, a kitchen requires a mixture of routine and spontaneous solutions. Routine: wash dish. Spontaneous solution: this basil is going bad and we have all this rotini, Tess will be staying here tonight, the floor is especially in need of a mop. If a kitchen is thought of as a set of dynamics (patterns of behavior) rather than a place, then, like a relationship, a kitchen can be moved to a different place and adjusted to fit it: Danielle finally moved her desk downstairs, she wants to move to New York City to go to the New School for Social Research and take me. Learning to talk. I never told her that I am opposed to New York City on principle: I don’t even like the idea of a New York City. Two people cooking the same meal need to talk to each other so they don’t both forget to set the water on to boil and both pull too many basil leaves off the plant. I think most would agree that human contact or even affection is a biological necessity as much as food. But I’m not sure I would. I have been very alone and never died. Of course, I write to real and imaginary people all the time, and that must be human contact even if it never leaves my computer. One of the most amazing things Danielle (or anyone) has ever done was to organize a group called the Friends of the Lincoln Mobile Home park. When Danielle was a school bus driver, one of the long-term employees of the facility -- her friend Zoë -- told Danielle a story about how Zoë was going to lose Zoë’s home because her trailer park had been sold to a developer and her trailer was too old to be moved. Right now Danielle is working herself into a nervous pretzel to prepare a speech to give to members of the community at a dinner tonight. I am going to stop this letter and see if I can help. Just as well. I’m not sure what else to add right now. If I knew what to say I would and we could breathe in a miracle tangle of one anothers’ good intentions, and pave something more certain than stone. For now I am a paper-airplane errant, one of the last scholars of poverty among the emerging software-literati. If I missed you could I file a complaint with Scotland Yard? Never mind. I regret saying all those things I never had the guts to, even though I didn’t. This violin concerto sounds like a moist corpse being dragged down soft cellar stairs. Marjorie Perloff could comment on the sibilance in that last line. Let’s meet sometime, someplace, somehow, or something. I might get over my fear enough to send you e-mail but I doubt it. I’m not sure which pill I’m taking, possibly the eighth. Eighth has four consonants in a row, which is rare. Nietzsche is rarer. Four caffeine 100 mg., and four ephedrine hcl 25mg./guaifenesin (three vowels in a row) 100mg. Osco brand caffeine tablets, 60 per bottle, must have taken me six months which is not to imply that I don’t drink unlimited coffee daily. Oops, here goes eight. Did you know about line breaks? They can be grammatical or not. A pause mid-line, usually involving punctuation, is a caesura. This is all to celebrate: I am almost out of marijuana. There isn’t enough alcohol in the house to last the night: this wineglass contains the last of the whitewine as well as the last of the saki, and orange juice to neutralize the flavor.

I wrote this in my diary today:

Hot & Cold Running Scared

I’m having this trouble: I’m too drunk to type and I object, philosophically and aesthetically, to my tech writing class. I think software documentation should be expressive, not instructional. Anyway, I’ll just fail it and get it over with. Who cares about college? Kerouac, they say he got thrown out of college and lived with his Mom. Of course, they also think he’s an interesting writer. Give me Perec or give me lung cancer at a saddeningly young age. I’m not sure what to do about the fact that evidence that primitive microscopic life existed on Mars 3.6 billion years ago may have been found in a meteorite that fell to Earth.

During an exhaustive study of minuscule fissures in the surface of the Mars rock, a team led by researchers from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston found what they say could be fossils of tiny extraterrestrial organisms stuck to the surfaces.

I mean, what would you do? Trying your whole life to become an amateur newspoet and getting four hours of sleep a night so as not to dream about the mist, the dryness, the frost, the canals, your mother’s rocket, emerging from a smouldering crater into insanely flat huge lush agricultural grids, learning to be human. Danielle is asleep on my couch, Eisenstein’s new book on hatred cocked open in her sleeping hand, pencil cocked, ready for notetaking, alseep/adrift, and away from Eisenstein’s faulty parallelism, post-Marxist marketadamia, but ready to defend herself against the use of slashes as “ands” and as “ors” in the same passages. A book that isn’t finished, a flow-chart rough draft. Which reminds me. I should finish my review of David Markson’s Reader’s Block for radio soon, before Maggie is hospitalized again. I am drinking Hindenberg Stout, Ein Schwartzbier. Give me a beer with rotten chunks of wood and rusty nails floating in it. Give me a beer I can stick a toothpick in and pull it out clean. It isn’t helping the pills settle. I never cared much for pills. They’re too sanitary. I’ve always felt that taking drugs should always be guttural: exactly as disgusting as it is. I was a big fan of cigarette smoking, before I contracted Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder that is. Give me a drug that is physically addictive and renders you unable to masturbate in a matter of days. Give me overflowing ashtrays and canned beers. Actually, I was the one who fished the 555 butt you left on Broadway Sidewalk. Actually, I was the butt. When you discarded me, spent, bent, I was lost amid cracks and gutters hoping for a bum before a rainshower. It’s hard to explain, especially now that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is disbanded, tenured, and slash or addicted. A flak shin the pan. I get that craving sometimes and there is no brain to stop me. She is still asleep, upright, pencil cocked and sharpened. If anyone were to burst into the room she could sketch them in detail in five seconds. Actually, she’s not that good, she’s better. She’s one of my favorites, actually. That’s why I’m shy: if the pencil sags I’m leaving these keys and I’m going to kneel at her side and straighten/sharpen her graphite. Chinese Classical Music is like the blues, inept to perfection. Some folks is even whiter than me, although nobody springs to mind. Reading the so-called Language Poets hasn’t helped me wriggle out of my own opaque narcissism yet. She is beautiful, drooling in the infra-red, slumped beneath a heatlamp, theory melting into pudding on her knee. Goodness me, did I forget to get offline? I love the WWW. Let me give you a taste of the pressures I face as a grad student. I am supposed to have turned (past perfect, but the past is a different story altogether) in two books of poetry to my techwriting course. Of course, I’m not being graded on my writing, just my layout. I’m listening to Perez Prado, and this record I would keep even after a global nuclear holocaust. Even if there was no chance of electricity again in my lifetime, I would carry this melting slice of vinyl everywhere. I have no idea where it came from. A neglected shelf at WCAT where I interned as a jazz poser? Or the record store the Analog Anachronism? This beer is so dark that no light can escape: it absorbs all wavelengths. The temperature in this room is dropping fast – I’d better drink up. This is much worse than you deserve. Lucky you to get a letter from me in my peeling-the-label-off period. Hiccup This letter isn’ going quite as planned. I’d somehow hoped to weave a semester’s essays, a HTML file, my masters thesis, and a letter to my bank into this. Guess I’ll have to start from scratch. A road between Zaire and Rwanda remains clogged with Hutu refugees returning to Rwanda. I just threw up. Something sadder than time, the shards of a shattered glass waterpipe, something you could never touch lips to. A dismantled checking account. The glass of scotch, now weak from melted ice, a gradation of hue from clear to brown. The morning after, I eye it nostalgically, in the unfortunate position of now knowing better. The smashed waterpipe and the other pipe nowhere to be found. Forced to clean my entire room just to get high. Pfrumpf. I can’t find my memory this morning, it’s lost somewhere among the unopened bills Something small and tragic about Andy and I, and now so much is lost: the glass, the scotch; so much is wasted. Are these shards, this colorless liquid whose precious alcohol evaporates into sad air, are these things trophies of a life lived decently, or exactly as they appear: garbage? It is Saturday November 16 10:17 PM EST and Defense Secretary William Perry says the U.S. may modify its planned mission in Central Africa as a result of the Pentagon has chosen Lockheed Martin and Boeing to compete in a $170 billion program to build 3,000 fighter jets for the next century. The biggest weapons project of the early 21^st century will provide a common "joint strike fighter" with some variations for the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, and the British Navy. A team headed by McDonnell Douglas was eliminated from the "joint strike fighter program" in the announcement by Defense Secretary William Perry at a Pentagon news conference today. Boeing and Lockheed will now each build a test model. The winner is expected to be announced in 2001. President Clinton says he approved plans to send U.S. troops to Bosnia and Zaire after assurances their risks would be limited. Clinton spoke by phone with South African President Nelson Mandela as Washington pressed for broad-based regional participation in the mission to help Rwandan refugees. Clinton, resting in Hawaii before departing Monday on visits to Australia, the Philippines and Thailand, used his weekly radio address to pledge relief for the starving world leaders meeting in Rome tomorrow to dig through the night in search of survivors from a blast, possibly caused by a bomb, that killed up to 32 early today in Russia's southern republic of Dagestan near Chechnya. Russian news agencies put the death toll at between 13 and 32, but ten skydivers and the pilot of a twin-engine plane survived the fiery crash of the aircraft today in central Virginia, but an Islamic Hamas militant reportedly preparing to launch a suicide attack against Israel was killed in the West Bank today when a bomb exploded in his hands. In the 1990s, even panhandlers are market-driven. In lieu of hand-scrawled cardboard signs, some Miami panhandlers are toting professionally lettered placards as they stand at street corners asking motorists for money. The plastic signs carry a typical message asking for spare change, but add a line at the bottom: "Sign donated by Design Shoppe. For all your signage needs call 443-SIGN." Yeah, and where am I? In exactly the same Masters Program you left. My last contact with you was when you thought you might drive here to buy some East Central Illinois Gold, but you never called back. It is now Thanksgiving 1996 and a small bottle of champagne is chilling in the snow on the roof outside my window, along with a cool Okocim Porter, a darker Polish beer, and a glass mug. I managed to get away with just one feast this evening and am now back in front of this machine. I’ve finally figured out how to make money with my Masters’. Remember Lucy from the comic strip Peanuts and her Psychiatric Help stand? I’m going to out a stand in my front yard with a sign reading “READINGS -- $2, or 3 for $5.” People will bring me a text and say “Yeah, I need a Marxist and a Feminist reading of this by tomorrow.” And I’ll say: “I’ll throw in a New Historicist reading for $5.” And they’ll say: “I don’t need that. But do you do punctuation?” Having been sick all semester I have let a lot of poems pile up. I’m not referring to my own unwritten poems here (though maybe I will someday put together a book entitled Unwritten Poems) but rather to the submissions I have to read for Silt River Poetry Review. There are too many to read so I think I will throw the whole stack down the stairs and accept the ones that make it to the bottom, and send rejection slips to the poets who don’t even clear the landing. The ones with the biggest ideas will fall to the bottom of the staircase. It works: this is how I graded English 101. I’m superstitious. Instead of balancing my checkbook, I burn all my financial records – ATM receipts, checkbooks, monthly statements, bills -- in an urn. If I bounce a check I’ll slaughter a goat. And recently a doctor gave me a word which stood in for more than forty words, most of which hadn’t yet been penned. My love for you is fiery, like your stomach after eating rotten catfish. I wonder who’s downstairs. Anyway, this word was nothing. Pneumonia. It wasn’t even a scary word like mono nucleosis. It had a silent P, like “Pfangs.” There were times I saw your mustache in my room, fluttering around a red lamp. I knew my seconds were numbered like milemarkers, green, reflective, deadly, an affront to safety. I heard the lightswitch in the wall, it was clicking by itself as a ghost struggled with the power. Power. A five letter word meaning hospital bills. I learned a second poem by heart: Charles Olsons’ Maximus Poems. That and the Cantos. Now I am ready for a campfire with you. Here they come. Have you ever, once in your life, needed to be alone? No? Never mind, then. It is Thanksgiving – a holiday I associate with eating too much – not an association I have very often. I’m fighting off sleep by smoking aspirin and drinking cocoa and curacoa. Oceans have passed beneath our bridge and still I feel like there’s work we could do. Like build a working marzipan piano and then give an edible concert. Or write music as soundtracks to those precious but sloppy Super8 films I have gravelly VHS dubs of. Or build a hospital. Did I mention it was Thanksgiving? Being in college is weird because I love it. I get to teach and write endless, rambling texts: two of my favorite activities. Sometimes I want to go to medschool but mostly I want to write about it. Now I am writing about one word per minute. Smoking Asparagus underneath aforementioned bridge, watching oceans roll by. Colored lights. Brown bottleflies. Swatting. I wonder at whether you’re touring someplace. I insist on avoiding two out of three Thanksgiving dinner invitations in favor of typing as little as this, as little of importance as this. I am squandering floundering. I am was squandering floundering. I like many am was squandering floundering. But not now. Now I am spastic and in search of flavor – that pansearing quality. But still gutted and gillless. After about three seconds, the muscles tense up to protect themselves. It’s not like I can’t type with no particular agenda, but I have one which makes things difficult. I may never forget sitting upstairs in the post office with you, Lyx & Mikhail siphoning the last of their dreamtimes into the voluptuous pipe, and a dialogue I might aspire to participate in someday. About community, friends, the people who inspire you, the people you live near, and your hope that they should, for a second, click into alignment and then your life may extend in a single deliberate direction, sharper than a laserbeam, lighter than a pencil but less erasable. The click in this record is on cassette. The dream of living deliberately. Its their community to your communities. Their pane of glass to your spiderweb of cracks. Their gem to your facets. Keith stood in my kitchen, stopping through town to reclaim the possessions he abandoned in my house over two months ago, to go abandon them again at Gesundheit where I look forward to tripping over them again, and told me that community was the unattainable dream, and those who strive for it should do so as if astronauts who, knowing they will never return, should take careful notes so that others might be edified by their martyrdom. To splash in infinity and make the rest of the species a hapless control subject by comparison, the dream of any freak. Like us. Like you peeing on the streets of West Lima. Like that mango dissected reluctantly under the stress of an evening gone thin. I went apefire. Why don’t you spend Xmas here, or any portion of the next monthandahalf, because time has anaesthetized me and made its first incision. Because I can only do three things at once, no less. Because if there is but a single grain of rice in your handlebar, I know you would share it with me. I know how to do dishes but I have almost given up on playing with children and baking bread. Plus I heard you gotta job with a fancy web - design company in Boston. I guess I’m kinda jealous. It’s Thanksgiving and I just got off work at Slothrop’s – East Central Illinois’ only 24-hour bookstore and tavern. I worked thirteen hours today, and spent most of the day serving gin and tonics with gin instead of tonic to a book dealer from Akron. He would alternately read Jean Stafford and burst into tears. He kept trying to sell me these Time-Life books about early American furriers bound in genuine hand-tooled mink and otter pelt but I just wasn’t that interested. I’m working on a HTML file though – a virtual pop-up book. People with goggle-supportive computational architecture and sensor-gloves can experience the experience of opening a pop-up book. With scratch-and-sniff panels. Okay, I’m joking. Actually my website is wired to a 24-hour camera I wear everywhere I go. So you can watch me replace ashtrays anytime you visit the site. When Joe explained it to me, how you lived in Northhampton but worked in Boston, it made sense, but only at the time. Sorry about the last letter I sent you by the way. It was an outline-poem. You see, my word processor has certain features geared towards certain genres. It has a sonnet template, for example. If I wear the goggles, it looks and sounds and feels like a broken typewriter. Like with no “h” key. The obvious analogy is with music. Ever use one of those? I ate tat. The guy kept trying to explain to me that the old man in “At the Zoo” was his father. He had always wanted to write the Cliff’s Notes to Crime and Punishment, but his proudest moment had been proofreading the index of the Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice. Adam thinks he can get me just enough “web” ”space” for my “web” “page.” I am using quotations so that we might investigate each of these metaphors independently. For example, on my “desktop” there is a “folder” “called” “Net” ”Scape” ”Navigator” ”Gold.” So in a netlike landscape, one might navigate a golden vessel, across the desktop avoiding the treacherous Trash. Such a bad HTML editor! What it does is translate the code into the Cyrillic alphabet. Okay, I’m joking. Okay, I’m serious. Thanksgiving wasn’t supposed to be quite like this, you know. S’hard to continue in pursuit of those small shards of truths when everyone I know must surely be somewhere else eating, retaining their alcohol better than I. Besides, I’m not so sure I am not I. Like when your plastic jug of water runs out, finishing What was. And the funny thing is, the sentences that went on for half a page usually floored me. Which doesn’t happen when Faulkner opens a novel with one of them. Elizabeth Faulkner, that is. You get thirsty again anyway. Continuity is overra . Andyway. So I open another bottle of Turkey and wonder whether there are any essays left in me. As thirsty as I am. And as dissatisfied. And, with a weekend stretching out like a tentacle studded with suction cup workshifts. So much for glory. I should be going into the kitchen for another slice of champagne cheesecake or something unspeakably lovely. Instead I may write this and walk it over to you freezing. Worse, I may not even finish it and dawdle indefinitely as this Slack album spirals ever inward. Out of water for real this time no metaphor. Wishing I knew how to type. Envying those who do though maybe it is different for them in ways that I would find disadvantageous. This is no paperback, I remind myself. Let’s start a stonemason / publishing company and etch all our poetry in stone. Let’s smoke all of literature starting with Gertrude Stein and moving in any direction that seems necessary. Gertrude Stein – the endpoint of a plane. Go figure. If I were you I would take this sentence and, word by word, figure out the one or two central letters, and write a word beginning with it, or, if two central letters in the case of a word with an even number of letters, write a word beginning with the first and ending with the second. Even if you write Nietzsche your next word starts with Z. I’ll try it. So Sunoco Nono Own William’s lei evermore room Ono No Nono Own William links not only natural urgencies, no, Nono, own William lachrymose Roy opens. Enough. Keep on composin’. I remember the way you glanced through the blades of the grass, passing it, passing it, down through two celluloid bottoms. The modern poetic ear must be trained to hear noise as music. Come visit us. Here’s your jacket. Happy Thanksgiving / &Xmas See ya in East Central Illinois!

Love William.

P.S. Astronaut Tammy Jernigan said she could not fully turn the handle to open the 40-inch diameter hatch; a total of 24 U.S. soldiers were killed in two bomb attacks in Saudi Arabia in November, 1995, and in June of this year; Canadian officials say the international humanitarian mission to central Africa will be approved tomorrow at a meeting in Ottawa; the homeless and hungry were treated to turkey and trimmings on the grounds of Capitol Hill today by local groups determined that no one should miss out on the traditional Thanksgiving Day feast. More than 2,000 meals were served by late afternoon despite gray skies and freezing temperatures. President Clinton also celebrated the holiday with the traditional dinner at Camp David, Md. A White House aide says Clinton took with him a large briefing book on potential choices of new drugs; but the HIV epidemic is still exploding among women and children and gaining momentum in eastern Europe and Asia. One and a half million people have died of AIDS this year, 350,000 of them children; French truckers plan to keep their roadblocks in place for a 12th day tomorrow, in a protest sending shockwaves across Europe's economies; Jesse Jackson is welcoming a court ruling that temporarily blocks enforcement of a controversial measure to roll back affirmative action programs in California; Serbian demonstrators plan to take to the streets of Belgrade again tomorrow in a bid to overthrow President Slobodan Milosevic; Iraq says it hopes its acceptance this week of U.N. terms for an oil-for-food deal will persuade the U.S. administration to normalize ties with Baghdad. But the country's culture and information minister attacked U.S. plans to evacuate from northern Iraq thousands of Kurds and others who might be at risk since Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sent troops into the Kurdish region in August; hurricanes wrought death and destruction from Caribbean islands to the U.S. Atlantic seaboard in an unexpectedly intense season which ends, officially at least, on Saturday. Many forecasters believe the last two seasons are marking the beginning of a cycle of increased storm activity.