scruta

There was a time when I would sit by your banks,

In awe at the characters, pronouncing “silvered strings.”

You were a riddle, an ambiguous shape-shifting beast

That stretched and burned for the sky.

I thought that living inside you long enough,

I wouldn’t look at myself in the mirror and utter “old” or “foreign.”

The riddle has been solved. How wrong I was.

This middle kingdom, China, roils on

In sizzling squids, all spiced to burn like hell,

In giant sacks of tarp and packing tape,

In dust that never sits, but boils bright

In sun-lit dreams of wealth and power made

In factories and smokey banquet halls

In words that speak without a hint or voice

In popcorn bangs, and fangs of urchin mouths

Unfurled before this wide-eyed wanderer

His eyes too blue, his nose too high to hide:

“The money! money! hello! the money-a!”

These temples as splitting

Crumbling idols straight to the dome.

Reach for an aspirin.

This old notebook has a lesson:
I taught you the perfect tense,
That tiring technicality grammarians see,
How the past remains even now,
The solidity of things that have been,
And you remarked, “How strange?
Who could remember such a thing?
Don’t they forget as they speak?”

Now I know how you felt.
Realizing the difficulty of speaking something perfectly,
Of remembering something that happened
That couldn’t be denied even now.

For isn’t love perfect?

An old friend’s pet parrot,

Sid,

This cantankerous, eyeballing, cage-locked, grey-feathered fiend,

Speech mimicker, mood shifter, and small sum reckoner

Amused me most with his eating.

Chuckling at his splatters,

His vainglorious, ruffled attempts at dignity

While lacking opposeable thumbs

And the ability to make handtools (or nuclear weapons),

I watched him fling bits of seed shells,

Regurgitates of fruit skins,

Hawked up hunks of corn

Upon the newspaper thoughtfully laid out before him

To make the cesspool of his excrement and food shavings

Easier for disposal.

He, no doubt, would have termed it ”abstract expressionism”

If you said around him enough.

I, for one, have been cawing the term for many years

And frequently find myself staggering in consumptive filth:

Saliva covered mawings and the stench of sopped up sewers,

Baking on a humid October night in the northern hemisphere.

I realize rather late

My superciliousness was misguided.

Let Sid ruffle his molted mantle in pride.

These opposable thumbs have got to stretch a lot of newsprint.

You invented a box to delight and reshuffle your tracks,

Tap-lit buttons you gridded in bright, oh my! orangey arrays.

There weren’t records that spun, or the token fly-wheels

Of faux spinners still lost in the age of two tastes.

It’s your labyrinthine machine that sings in a myriad voice,

That can speak the swift babble of billions of tongues,

A new cascade of sounds that feed sounds, a wide sonic mix hall

Of reflections of reflections to pops and re-bubbled beat blends.

They remind our perked ears of the never-a-stop pace of life

That we humans have cleft from the soil – reinvent! reinvent!

May you fop upon keys with inscrutable methods of mash

So we hear, and we see, and we gawk, and we blush,

That our bodies all wag in assent, and we learn to re-live

As the sounds you have served before us.

Listen! Listen! Listen!

Haphazardly, I wandered through the industrial outcrops of the city,

Strange avenues of weaved concrete binding hovels and factories,

Racing motor-machines, harbingers of this world in violent transition.

Then this long, pedestrian underpass, maybe just a place the planners forgot.

Women walk their infants here, far from the roar of scooters and clinky-clank bicycles muscling for a space between giant rigs and huff-and-puff taxis.

Is this the peace they hoped for? That they were promised so many times? This palisade in a jungle of concrete?

Under the belly of the overpass, rows of billiard tables lie dormant, tended by a lowly refuse wheeler, stacking his newest crop of waste sky high.

I stop to look, and so does he.

I’m too embarrassed to ask if my camera offends him.

He’s too confused to tell me that it does.

When you see an alien on the moon, you don’t question his motives.

Some club somewhere is being opened or shut.

A bunch of intrepid souls who framed their ideas of decadence in fuzzy, feathered sofas with oversized backings. Angel Bar. Heaven. Paradise. Club Fur. Dreamzone.

It’s all on hold now. Welcome to the Sidewalk Lounge.

A dirt road leading to another part of the city.

Monoliths radiating a sense of progress, renaissance, prosperity. The future.

I follow the road instinctively, as if someone had whispered the way in my dreams.

A slagheap comes into vision on the right. Junked car parts. Gritty slips of plastic sheeting. Eviscerated wrappers.

Reeds from a curdling estuary frame it. Taunt it with unhesitating passivity. As if desperately trying to overcome it with a whisper. Finding it unwilling to budge.

The wall nearby is riddled with numbers scrawled in desperate commerce. The vestiges of people on the road to progress, waylaid by the necessity of achieving their visions, leaving only refuse in their wake.

Another heap on the left. More masonry in the mix of insulation, carpet, and rubber tubing swirled in a conglomeration warped by myopic motives. Like a movie fashioned by advertising executives looking for exposure, but forgetting forethought, forgetting art. Self-serving garbage.

Above the walls of ivy leaves, cranes are busy hoisting new heights of concrete and reenforced steel to this land near the end of the road. A vision of order that rose from the junkyard. Or is going there.

Looking back from the cranes towards the road to the skyscrapers, there’s a sudden thought that maybe I’ve gotten time all wrong.

The future’s here with flotsam. Skyscrapers are dreams of the past.

Mind gusts whisping skin drunk in the cold,

The A/C reriddles clamors of the heart.

Because of an airconditioner, our contrivances to try and make things more comfortable, you died.

It was hot, and my girlfriend wasn’t having it.

It kind’ve pissed me off.

I had so hoped that you and I could have been good friends, but alas, you gone and kicked it.

Sent off to the Garden of Eden, aboreum uptopia, or whatever place it is that plants are supposed to go mythically, where it’s always sunny and raining at the same time.

Thanks, a lot Sap. Or is it Flora?

Regardless of your gender, I have decided to throw you in the trash can.

It has now occurred to me that I, being human, rather like the ideas of life, of love, and of goodness,

but damn if I’m not attracted to just letting everything around me go to hell.

Just looking into the undifferentiated meaninglessness that sits on the edge of the psyche and saying, well, fuck it.  At least now and then.

You, my leafed friend, were the unfortunate victim of this tendency.

This could be a chemical problem. One that you could consult your doctor about. There are a slew of new medicines available to treat this condition called… ahem.

I’ve always thought of it as an inability to avoid the abyss that sits on the edge of my psyche. I really can’t blame myself. It’s actually framed quite nicely:

Like the water of a giant backyard swimming pool, with beautiful people slanging super-straight labcoat-white teeth in designer bathingsuits all laughing and playing. Death, looking uber-stylish with a lei slung around his sickle is lying on a chaise drinking maitai after maitai extolling the virtues of taking a dip. Most people just treat him like an idiot drunkard who crashed the party, but he scares the hell out of me. I spend the entire party staring into the abyss while all my friends score.

I must say there are benefits to looking into the abyss of one’s self.

Weird shit just pops out of there:

like leprechaunic fantasies of riding around in jetplanes with oil barons, deciding the fate of a small island in Dubai shaped like an ostrich with a pot of gold in the middle.

***

Oil Baron

So I really thought the pot of gold in the middle was over the top.

Ferret

No, it couldn’t be. I mean, how else are you supposed to swim Scrooge McDuck style?

Oil Barron

Well, unfortunately it’ll be too hot for the time being. You know…

Ferret

Oh yeah, the desert.

Oil Baron

Yeah, that. But I’m working on importing a giant cooling system to blast continually cold air on it so that I can swim in the gold pile in the middle of my ostrich shaped ocean of sand.

Ferret

Sounds sweet.

Oil Baron

Yeah.

Ferret

Hey, isn’t gold heavy?

Oil Baron

It’s damn heavy. That’s why I’ve got to wear the special suit when I swim. It’s designed to ionize the gold or something like that. I don’t really understand how it works, but apparently they’ve been doing military testing with it for about three years now.

Ferret

Man, is there anything that oil can’t do?

Oil Baron

Make more of itself I’m afraid.

Ferret

Some say that’s a matter of contention.

Oil Baron

Come on, let’s not get carried away by fantasies.

Ferret

Sorry. What’s that plant over there in the corner doing?

Oil Baron

It’s supposed to offset my carbon footprint.

Ferret

It’s dead.

Oil Baron

Yeah. Well, it’s not working very well right now. I’m going to have to get someone to fix it.

***

It’s good to know that the world’s wealth isn’t going to waste… hopefully my plant didn’t either.

Inspiration I nabbed in this blurb from SH Magazine, although I couldn’t find it on their website:

“Inspired by JIA (“home”), You Qian Life Enhancing Developments took the concept of small, design-led hotels to its absolute end point in terms of bijou, frou-frou, boho, oh-so, boutique, boutique-y-chic-y – oh, darling – cheekiness, and launched… The Apartment. Yes. While some boutique hotels boast of 30 rooms and some swagger with ten, this final word in personal travel only has one, single, exclusive, reclusive, private room. In the suite there is the gratifyingly private restaurant, called The Kitchen. There is an en suite shower and spa facility, called The Bathroom. And of course, the personal concierge service, called The Girlfriend. Guests will also be issued with their own security assistant, The Key. No sooner was The Apartment unveiled than investors went wild, block-booking the room until July 23, 2024…”

-SH Magazine, Friday June 20, 2008; p. 3

Ode to Luxury

Did you hear? Did you know?
The best way to live has found its way to show.
When rich you’ll lead chariots of isolate charm–
Feasts with your beckoning by spoke healed alarm,
With pretty faced girls who sigh with your call,
Massaging taut loins with abandon and gall.
And when the day falls with your thoughts by your side
Of swift machinations and enemies who hide,
Remember you’re safe and isolate here,
That you command all, there’s no one to fear.

In this paradise you hold, you show all the way
How others can come and find this and say:
Did you hear? Did you know?