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"The Difference"

There are poets stuck to the underside of the chair by their fingers. If you give them string they will put it in their mouth and it will come out sticky. That is as close to being spiders as they can get. And, there are bugs under my fingers, bouncing them across the keys like Mexican jumping beans. That's as close to being a poet as I can get. The difference between me and most insects is that I approach the truly sexless, while they approach the truly heartless. The difference between me and most poets is I am really a spider. -1989

"CHOKI G O SIXTH" - [Chapbook version] (Title piece from 2nd chapbook. 1st edition 1978, 2nd edition 1979. This poem also appeared in the Bumbershoot Anthology 1984 with 2 small parts missing.)

Night after night it's the same. The loonies the phonies the wild hysterics the sad punchy derilects. The evil eyed the scar eyed and pie eyed children. The sad eyed the sorry eyed the dead and mean and hot eyed pulling and tearing and chewing the night gullet slides into their arms and into their bellies and up and down their bones their xylophone skeletons like musical pirhana * sets your bowels on fire, baby. Sets your bowels on fire. * All the sorry lost dogs who get maimed in the traffic get wiped out in the traffic the recks and the ruins sad soapies sick saggies the virginal discretions vaginal secretions slopped without hope on the sidewalks sizzling the whimpering fetus squeezed through wet panties flopping out from under her wild skirts * The wonderful whores and jittery honkies twitching and slobbering * And we haven't even started to talk about the REAL SEX of the street the bing bang bell boinger swack smacker pinball fuck of the cold black nightshift hungry on Main, choking on Sixth moaning in the cathouse and sleeping in the doghouse

* Going home, mother. Someday. * No or the stink. The perfume burnt eyelashes burps and farts and shit and hairspray the perspiration of bars and whorehouses and all night doughnut places on evil corners in evil cities with evil waitresses and terrible coffee and stale doughnuts with crust, not frosting and porn theaters and drunks and whores and ticket takers and bartenders and johns and voyeurs and louses and wheeler dealers the perspiration of freeways blind alleys dead streets with dead houses dead cars dead families dead dogs dead newspapers dead letters dead bills dead nightmares dead virgins the hysterical mailboxes grasping for good news and choking on the other. The wheezing the hiss of decomposition. The yellow nausea of decay. The smells, yes, of my native land. * Oh the madwomen with razor blades pinned in their hair like bouquets grab em by the scalp and the petals cut off all your fingers. All painted and smelling of paint slapped together and beat apart fruitless desire and fruitless pain twisting around in their little provinces of separated flesh flashing like ghosts like knives like the darker than dark rips in the sky from which even the blades of lightning have fled. And we haven't even started to talk, yet About people all pinned together by tight shrieks and staples and sharp wires and dead phones About "We need an ambulance down here" and all the ambulances are tied up to the moveable hitching post of death White horses white riders white wagons full of purple blood black lungs... half the parts are lost. Done. *

Baked onions. Baked cabbage. Baked hydrangeas. * The Japanese guiger counters picking up on the power of money. * The loonie bins at night. Oh my God, oh my God. The mad raping the mad. A short account: They came over to my bed--eight or nine of them, I can't remember--and stuffed a sock with something hard in it, about the size of a golfball, into my mouth. Then they pulled my pants down around my knees. I was thirteen. They spread something--it felt like peanut butter--around my asshole. 'Just try and relax,' one of the said. And they began. * The heavens open and the black and white men and women get sucked away into the stars. The bars where the makers of all right and wrong lay up and get drunk and try on their furious disguises and bleet like lambs and snarl like foxes and sniffle like junkies and cry like babies and fart like factories and kill like gods. No dice. No cards. No horses. No whores. No dope. No wine. No queers. No sadists. No children. No pets. No madmen. No costumes. No masks. No heavy make up. There's a sign. That's what it says. You can't go to heaven. Period. * And then the quiet interruptions of the dead. Displaying their pale tatoos they show up with needles and drugs and they talk you into taking it again. Night after night: It's the same old streets.

" I ETY- I E BOTTLES OF JIZZ O THE WALL, I ETY- I E..."

These harbors of jizz and barking barfing drunk heaps of sick meat and bones yellowed by inner urine. These bodies: old sacks of black wax play them burn them until all the songs are smeared. Wiped off the record. Torn up by the needle. Destroyed in a housefire. Deaf. Our haunted houses. Shake the shadows out of the creeps, let the luminous hearts of the ghosts gather into their bright fright orchestra. Let the shambles of souls heap their willowy voices upon the gargoyle madness of dead chalkboard funnybone houses * And the lean lima-bean heads of the barkers sick pale green pointing hands at the prostitutes and mute niggers, sucking soft souls into the icky night of swampy cunts and horror gland nightmare spasms. Shivers of shame rattling in the bosoms of false delight. Where the eye wheels and softens and the violin vision smudges and the bedbugs squirm against the blankets and mattress of dread and the single shark steel blue machine jitters into a bakery of swollen teeth chewing on the sacred loaf of my arm veins popping, harps joking in the dismal auditorium of paradise about my bloods scream shrieking across dead floors. * When the hate hour grinds into its alarm position and the horror blossom unfolds in the garden of hell and the fate grimace scrapes upon the slippery face of my dreary end... LET IT HAPPEN. Let the fat blimps roar across paradise exploding into the dimpled face of the Baby Jesus and let the death curdle in the sour canon of the

barren milk of the pimp's ass nipple Let the un-Jesus drip mucous from the pale stigmata of their infectioned palms and Let the rapists tear into the sick vaginas of our grieving mothers. * This is the night and the drunk rips his cock out of his shorts and sprays his thin piddle into the broken jar of your murderous cunt. You are knocked up, honey. He is the infidel father of your jabbering morons and miscarriages... throwing up into the Baldwin piano and biting on your precious flowers. * This is the night The end The flop face down end of all our magic The torturous winding up shout shrink shuffle spasm jerk shrivel of... of.

"JA IS JOPLI 'S DEAD VALE TI E (for K.J.)

AAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!! AAAAHHHHHHHHHAAAAAANNNNNNGGGGGGNNNN!!! HHHHEEEEEEYYYYYYY!!!!! HELLLLLPPPPP!!!!! SHITTT!!! SHHH. * Yeah. I want to scream. I WANT TO SCREAM AND YELL AND PEE MY PANTS. I WANT TO SHIT AND CHOP MY HANDS OFF AND MY TONGUE AND SPIT IT IN THE TOILET. * I didn't hear anything just then. You didn't hear anything because I'm all alone. i haven't made a peep. Not a fucking peep. The only sounds are the typerwriter, the cigarette lighter the cars outside, some kids over in the churchyard. But I didn't say nothing. Not me, baby. My actual voice is dead. * You have to be paralyzed and full of knots and crushing tensions to do what I do. Yes you do. You do! * You hear this shit in your head. You want to HEAR something? Go to a war, go to a concert, go to an earthquake. Get out of your chair and quit reading this. * Writing is mostly like one of those dreams where you're cornered by sick filthy dogs and the mad and death closing in fast and blind and you open your mouth to scream and you are so horrified that your breath is gone your circulation staggers, heavy as mumps and there's no sound....HLLLLLPPPPP!!!!!..... Mutes screaming with their hand signals. Suicide notes written as blood spurts from the gashes in the wrists

as seveny five seconals start working. * This is the rock and roll of corpses. The wormy body of Janis Joplin bawling under six feet of Texas dirt. And doctors can't do nothing for me and women can't do nothing for me and God can't do nothing for me. I'm gone. Janis Joplin loud sexy body can't do nothing for me. Her voice is flat and dead and grey and... * Booze and words and cigarettes. Pussy. Food aint shit. Nothing. Books are worthless. Dogerel. Thorazine. Television. The weird groans and cries of the un-dead. * The forests are strung up with high tension wires Giant puppet robots that look like perfect wives from another planet. All hung together in their strings. You get where you can see a whole bunch of them coming over the hill... it's a stampede. A bunch of female can openers. Writers parade up the Avenue of the Americas in New York City. Buzzing and crackling. IT'S THE SAME IT'S THE SAME I INSIST IT'S THE SAME. I INSIST. * Well now I'm good and drunk. If I scream, I get thrown out of my room. My landlady will come up the stairs and say: "Okay. That's enough. Get out." Buzzing and crackling. Hot wires. Full of hot wires. * Janis? AAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!! FUCK. You were great, honey. I caught your act once back in the sixties at the Fillmore. You were great. Soon they're gonna bury me, too. So...Bye-bye, baby. bye-bye.

"I CRY AT THE MOVIES" I cry at the movies cry at people who stick together in fires cry at people who help each other to die easily * the confusion of animals the hopeless pursuits of love the pathetic ends of poetry the sorry disorder of people lost from each other in fear and war and paranoia and sorrow and disillusionment and sinking ships and burning buildings and cars that've gone out of control and pregnancies that that produce dead babies and lovers that suddenly don't recognize each other's faces or thoughts or disguises or desires or phantasmas or enigmas or fingers or tits or cocks or assholes * It is life losing and finding itself grappling with its own muscles and strength and sex and heart and spirit and succulance and spirit and boquet. The blossom, yes, closing over itself in death, it's own soggy shroud the sad eulogy of wrinkles drawing together: first the blood then the dead skin The sexless grey the sexless grey plethora of bloodless toes sticking out from under the cold blankets of the dead * OH heartless angels who inhabit the strange morgue of paradise who torture the luckless with promises and threats and puzzles:

Your heaven your little loaf of cheese. it's covered with flies you stinking jackass of a God. * And I cry for the poor saps who you bully up to the alter cringing and kneeling and squeeling and shivering. And you say THESE are the ones you love, but who are the ones that you reward? * I do not cry for the cocksuckers who own South America. I do not cry for the fanged buzzards before whose psychopathic whims the rest of us are turned carrion and torn to shreds. I do not cry for the silly thinkers or the poets jacking off in their beards. * OH who are the poor saps who believe in you? Children for whom this world holds no comfort. Madmen and sadmen and ripped and shredded men and women with sick bastard sons and daughters and women with mad alcoholic and women with sick bastard sons and daughters and women with mad alcoholic husbands and foodstamps and greenstamps and drowning in credit Screaming at the game shows and weeping at the soaps and sucking up some rotten brand of booze waiting for the kids to come home or not to come home and waiting for the man to come home, shamed and trapped twisted to crap by G.M. and Ford and Fisher and Lear and Boeing and Lockheed and hell and hell and hell. He'll kill you, bitch. The man will kill you. For sure. You al believe in God, right? Yeah, he believes in God and she believes in God. Good. Shit. Swell. * And the kids. Well of course they believe in God, too. Knifing each other at random and turning tricks on the pier and eating reds and shrieking hopelessly at the bad old world. Hopeless.

Kill. *

God.

OH and I cry at broken lollipops with pocket hair stuck on them and cry at squashed puppies and eyeless teddybears and piss in the sink and boring old women who don't know what to do now that her husband's dead and her children are gone and her house is empty and sad and still.

Half the people in her photograph album no longer exist.

If she were to dig them up now and take a look, a good look at them just as they are what do you suppose she'd see? She'd jump right in on top of them a bombshell pulling the dirt in on top of herself. * A bunch of folks falling down a black elevator shaft trying to get out of a burning building. Christ: yeah, you. Where the fuck are you. Mister Mercy? Only ones crying for us is each other. * Fell out of my chair. I was drunk. Heaved into the wastebasket. Wiped my mouth on my sleeve. Cryed a bit. Then I quit.

"A WHOLE ERA IS FI ISHED" Oh help my God the mean streaks the broken sharks the trick panda bears evil women and torn pants. When I woke up the other morning it was like some kid had gone crazy in my room with watercolors. Everything was the wrong color. Some things were more than one wrong color. The TV was still on from the night before. I looked at it. It was a religious show. The color was all fouled up. Bright orange faces. Acid green clothes. Pink shoes. This is a black and white set. At the bottom of the screen there was a phone number. The man said: "Our counselors are waiting to take your call." I thought about it, but I was too sick to get out of bed. So I layed there and looked at my green hands. Later. When I was feeling better, I went down stairs and called the hospital. They asked me if I had been taking drugs. "Two fifths of Southern Comfort." "Can you make it down here?" "No." "Well, good luck then. Goodbye." I went back to my room and looked around. Things were almost back to normal. I crawled back into bed and switched the channel. * I will imagine several ways of dying, but the way it goes down is none of my business, finally. People are always talking about choices and opportunities. What a bunch of shit. If I become something that I am not, than I am nothing. I'm dead. Even suicide is uncertain. * Now the lights are fucked up. Now the shades are black. They say the man is scared. There are birds around his fevered bed. They say that nothing can happen. They have faith. * And everytime he goes to the hospital, spitting his

bowels out of his mouth; they say he looks fine. * Dying is the only honest thing to do. The moon has quit being a charm. It's silver and piercing. A snarl. This is my end. I am not thankful. I die howling, sitting up in my bed, braying in bloody pajamas, scared being engulfed jabbing at the nurses with a broken waterglass and finally gasping collapse, un-dead. What makes a man so angry? Life is not hard to understand. Bruise is a hemhorage: deep scarlet... blood escaping under the skin and appearing black and yellow* My landlady is out in the hall again. She's banging the furniture around. Turning the vacuum cleaner off and on. Talking to herself. What she's really doing out there is she's trying to coerce me into coming out and talking to her. She's lonely and old. She doesn't know what to do with herself. If I start typing, maybe she'll go away. Instead she starts talking to me through the door. i don't know what to say to her. It's sad. I wish she was younger. Really, she's a lot like me. Finally, I just open the door and tell her to go away. I'm busy. She walks down the stairs heavily. She likes me a lot. But it's hard to imagine why she's put up with me for the last three years. I make a lot of noise and I'm always messing up the bathrooms. * I can't stand the TV anymore. It comes and goes. About six months at a time. That's all I can take. Six months at a time. During that six months I watch the thing almost constantly. During the next six I can't even stand to be in the same room with one. Anyway I can feel myself starting to come to life and starting to get disgusted with the television. Everyone looks the same. All the news sounds the same. The movies are all dull. The talk shows are really nauseating. Educational programs make me sick. Soaps, situation comedies... all of it is impossible. I jump out of bed and slam the palm of my hand against the button that shuts the thing off. Sick or no sick, anything is better than this. The television falls backward on the table. I don't bother to stand it up.

But I'm breathing... hungry and breathing. A whole era is finished. February 1979 Seattle, Washington

The Wraith (excerpt) What is this face of agony? All these eyes falling on me like bandits, robbing me. I'm haunted, spirited like a rainy old battlement, captured. Full of dead soldiers...bloated, glutted...the ghosts of dead killers. And everywhere there are childrenfat little jugs of honey, pots of cookies and candy. But it all makes me sick. I can't look at it. Can't you understand? It's all going right down the drain, anyway, so what's the difference? It makes me want to puke. Everyone wants so badly to hold life in their hands, to fondle it, but who's willing to cup death so sweetly and gently among their fingers, to allow life to slide away without passion? Then, out come the clown-suitsthe bright masks and rubber-noses of human-suffering turned hilarious, hahahaha! And the music! The calliope! Trumpets and tubas and xylophones. So cheerful! What a fine day! Trees in bloom and full of monkeys and laughter and mischief. Baskets of fruit and sandwiches. Bouncy and colorful balloons, floating around like moldy pickles; white and blue and icegreen. "Hey you! You! Get away from me! Scram, sonny!" Why should I have to put up with these brats? So pink. All covered with mucous. And they just naturally smell bad. Always messing their clothes, fouling themselves up. Just try and smoke a cigar in the park, and they're all over you. Right away, they want to know what you have in your pockets. "Get out of here, you little shitheads! Go back to your mommies!" But by that time they're all over you, shrieking away, rummaging through your coat. "OHMIGOD! HELP! POLICE! HEY! HELP! COPS! COPS!" But who cares? The little bird-brains, the little innocents plainly have the right-of-way. And there are their moms, with spoons over their eyes and grease on their cheeks, sagging away in the sun. And their dads, far off, squatting together in dismal bunches, moaning and groaning and taking their watches and combs out of their pockets, using and looking at them, and putting them back into their pockets. I tossed my burning cigar into the duck-pond. The birds scattered, fanned out in a big-fat-hurry. Then I knocked all those squirts off me, dug their hands out of my pockets, tossing them this way and thatto the right and to the leftand took off at a near-trot.

My room: as tidy as a fresh grave. Smooth green carpet, flowers around the edges, sober draperies. And the insides of all the drawers are arranged like monuments, too. Shavers, socks, suspenders, bowties, handkerchiefs, lighters. And then there are packets of snapshots and other testaments, sealed up as though in catacombs. So I rake in the bodies, stack them up and pack them away. All the mementosthe small lives which once clung to my life. Their days are gone, and now I watch over their corpses. Yes, and privately I weep over them. And when there's nothing left of life around me. I'll go flying into the vortex of my own being, and I and all I have ever seen and known will be joined together in death's perfect symmetry/cemetery. The Moslems understand that life is the interruption of a flawless patterna little dissonance in the physical harmony of the universe. They represent that principle in their art. Take note: One string out of tunethat's life. And so the babies: they're far from the hand that governs the final, rigid coagulation of meat and blood. They're always screwing things up for the rest of us. We'd like so much to die, to arrange things in an immutable order so that we could rest, at last. But then along come these little monsters, upsetting tables and vases and puking on our spotless furniture, drooling on all our finery. But, we have them to thank for our next breath, for every breath is a gasp of indignation. For me it's a bit different. All of my elements are on a direct collision-course with their correct slots. They speed along, like steel ball-bearings, each in their own groove. I'm being fired like a cannon-ball, rather than lowered gently into the grave. No, it's not one of the usual diseasesit's not heart disease or cancer or TB. There're no sanitariums, there's no ward in any hospital equipped to deal with my malady. Not a single doctor, no kind or amount of any drugs, no form of surgery or quackery or mumbo-jumbo can interrupt the jellying, the flooding with dark blubber, of my limbs. Who knows what will succumb first? And if someone does, why ask them? What's the difference? It hardly matters. Now I switch on the radio: A concerto for brass instruments. Trumpets and baritones and French-horns. The silent minerals boiled and rolled into tools of the human soulthe noisy human soul. Brass and silver and steel. And I change my suspenders and tie. God-only-knows how come. What causes a man to change his suspenders and bowtie in the middle of the day? Exchanging red for purple, blue for black. And then a fresh cigar. But this time I'll smoke it by my private window. Those kids...that crazy circus down in the park...all the miserable and lunatic parents...the clowns and other exotic and baffling creatures. The shrill, pale MC, Ta-ta-ta, dadadadadada. One, two, three, four horns. I blow the smoke out the window. A cigar, glass of strong tea or, late in the afternoon a glass of port. A small brown radio. All the stations seem to broadcast the same message: "You are far away, you are small." Radios are for old people. When fear is a dim apparition with long pale arms and sizzling fingerssizzling with coldyou must turn on your radio, take a sip or two from the cup, blow the smoke out your yellow window, and cry

deeply into your bed. And if, when you twirl the knob there is no music, the fire is cold, the wine tasteless, and the tears without meaning, then turn and behold the cowl, the hourglass and the blade: they are surely behind you, peering over your shoulders, measuring your skull. A pocket-watch, timed to the trains, timed to the early braying of the calves and, too, to the groaning, shuddering protestations of the dying. Thin fingers remove this watch from a slot in the vest, and small eyes examine its face. An expensive and accurate time-piece. Another puff, another sipdeath relaxes, picking the dust off his sleeves. I relax, scratching my eyebrows. The traffic honks and hurries along, spilling smoke and collecting no dust. They're going to and from the beach, back and forth between their homes and the museums. Baseball-parks, amusementparks, historical and memorial-parks. And all the tiny homes; their windows at sunset like square dishes of pink ice-cream. Rolling into the driveways, stumbling and falling out of their carsa day at the beach, a day at the park. Checking my watch"Pretty soon, eh?" But I'm not thinking anything special.

First the news, and then a symphonyplenty of horns and timpanis. The strings and woodwinds bearing down with all their weight. Frankly I don't like this sort of music. I like simple music: a few horns, a violin or two, a piano. Simple as a stick- pin, or a scorpion in the pocket. Or, simple and sweet as a grape. Gum-wrappers. I must've sat there for half-an-hour looking at those gum-wrappers in the waste-basket. Crinkled blue paper and dusty foil. I shifted in my chair, picked up another cigar off the chest, adjusted my tie and lit the cigar. "I don't chew gum," I thought. I looked again, down at the wrappers, and turned to the window, smoking. Puffing.

I'm not rich, but I'm not starving.... Well, I'm not starving like I used to starve. But I imagined things were going to be a lot different; there're still so many horrors. Those brats! But let's not start that up, again. Out there the nursery-school, the jungle-gym. Oh, never mind. Just never mind. Still two cigars. Look, a burn-hole in my suspender. Pandemonium! Wolves! Thieves! Okay, let's get this over with: I'm off my rocker. All my good mannersthey're a pretense. Strictly phony. But they keep people out of my hair. They want to bug me? Let them try! My face, flat and stiff. They'll never get through that. Like plate-steel. Black. Iron. Have at it! Oh, go right ahead! Insane. What do I care? Say whatever you like. You can't touch...can't reach me. That's for sure. I look out for my little tub-of-muck. Open the curtains. No, they're already open. But it's still dark, so I must be dreaming. I hear a chant. A rant. They're calling for me; they're all calling. Ghosts, specters. So, you think I'm an innocent, myself? Is that what you think? Well, you're wrong, and that's no goddamn joke. Nothing funny about it. See?

A servant of ten-thousand dizzy, curving streets. No, I don't police them or, indeed sweep them up after the furious mobs spin through, spitting rubbish. No, I work for the streets, but necessarily upon them. I tell their tales and share their emptiest hours. See? The circus has vanished! The children squealed home on their rubber wheels, popped balloons and broken toys parading after...and then, finally their folks. But I'm the one who inhales the perfume tale that lingers. And I put it all back in its placein slots and crevasses. Narrow slots, jagged, unmarked cracks. A dismal file of decay and grubby little murders. Crimes; all petty and unglamorous. Vegetable stands robbed and already-dead-bodies strangled with real vengeance, but without effect. What? A few coins, a bit of dried blood. And I wait till the dark creeps into my hair and under my collar, up my pants-legs, up around my stockingstill the dark makes my knees cold, till it's as black as my hat. Then I examine the scattered spoils. I can't stand the smell of either criminals, or victims. But the crimes, themselves smell sweet, smell sweetly of the future a rugged and lawless, a healthy future. Oh, Mozart! Now, as I write this he twirls his barbed feathers in my ears. The crook! The ghoul! Death crawls in with its cruel fingers. And I refer to cruelty in its purest sense: Force of the type that only the truest of true gamblers understand...really understand. One's life hanging on a simple pair of eights. It's only when the cards are on the table, face up, when the game's in the balance, so to speak, that the shimmering drug of risk begins to take effect...to really color the blood of the player. For such a wager, for such stakes, one has to tempt death into the game. As a playerjust another player. Here is my life, squandered.

Hermione (excerpt) Here she sits. The house is isolated. She sits in a closed porch looking out on a full orchestra, carved in the snow. The sky, too, is white. The sky and the earth are like bars of soap. Hermione is like a bar of soap, with terrific, secretive eyes. The orchestra plays softly, tremulously. Some speckled brown birds pause on a wire, listening patiently. It's a deep couch of a winteroverstuffed, blinding white. Everything living is numb; everything not living feels as much as it is able. Hermione's eyeballs wiggle. She touches the wooden chair with both hands, steadying herself. Then she coughs. It's a light, unconscious cough. What can she learn from fear? The music stands up straight in its tails, in its brutal wig. "It's the medicine acting up," Hermione thinks of slipping on the bathroom tiles, cracking her chin on the tub. She's done that four times in her life, each time repeating the same movements, exactly. That's part of her illness: She repeats herself. The medicine misfires exactly as it did yesterday, and the day before yesterday. The music woos her. She starts to smile. The fear slides away from her bony forehead like a sheet of ice; it's replaced by an exotic flower petal. Although she only moves a few inches, she seems to be reclining. Hermione offers her hand courteously, then crudely whistles a few bars of the music she has been listening to. "A kiss, then a slap...it's just like they told us." These are all mechanical movementsthey happen over and over, thoughtlessly. The music is played, Hermione offers her hand to the snow, the medicine stops working and she's scared peeless for a few seconds, then the gears fall back in place and everything runs smoothly, again. Her illness keeps her busy. She's a sick machine. A sick machine that starts its day on farina and light toast. She continually hears people coming and going; footsteps, doors opening and closing, light chatter. She won't allow herself to believe that she's alone. She's comforted by the clattering of a banquet. The guests have come from miles around. They admire the garden: "Oh, aren't these lovely? And what're those? They're so delicate!" Hermione's safe, surrounded by cheerful company. "And let me show you Vladimir's greenhouse." She's flushed with pride and a cozy sense of well-being. Hers is such a bright, busy home. She leans forward with her hands pressed into her stomach and throws up delicately on the painted

floor. "Oh, goodness!" She wipes her mouth on her hand and wipes her hand on the hem of her dress. The brown medicine doesn't agree with her. The music whirls her around a few turns. Hermione almost falls out of her chair. "Nooooooo....." She manages to regain her balance. The birds blink on and off. The electrical wire shivers. The flow of the current crackles. Lights and appliances glow unsteadily. The music chokes and glugs. Hermione listens: The wire whistles in a bright wind. The snow is silver. The shapes of the birds flash nauseatingly, here and there. "The walls are so close. My own hide is too close." Hermione's very skin is expensive, a little too well tailored. She suffers the pinched nervousness of a thoroughbred animal. She squeezes herself unlovingly. Elda crosses the kitchen floor to the laundry room, where she has been ironing all morning, with an electric iron. She has been in the bathroom. Elda uses the bathroom a lot: She has some very unpleasant personal problems. She is ironing the bedsheets...the bedsheets and the napkins. Smells of scorched cotton and starch. After-smell of bleach. Something in her manner and appearance is identical with these smellsthey seem to come from her body. A woman whose slow, determined progress across life is evidenced by a blank, sunny, nearly straight stripe peeling back behind her. She picks up the iron and starts working. In the bathroom a length of pink rubber hose hangs dripping from a nickel-plated bar over the tub. She looks out the window, across miles of snow. Over and over she wipes the steam off the glass. So, this will probably be it. She will live out her last years here, keeping house for, and taking care of Hermione and Vladimir. Elda has no ambition. "It's good enough." Her life shows no sign of imagination. Her own illness is the only thing that actually touches her feelings, that awakens any fascination in her. She's one of those people who eats, does her job, goes to bed at night...and that's all. She never married. She never thought of marrying. And it never occurred to her to pursue any interest in life. She continues to look out the window. Vladimir found Elda by advertising in the newspaper. She didn't bother sending a resumeshe appeared at the front door with her suitcase, and that was it. Vladimir hired her, at once. It was easy to see that she was experienced and possessed of the right temperament for her work. Hermione expressed her approval plainly, without words. She treated Elda with warm familiarity, from the start. "She hasn't spoken to anyone out loud for almost two years. She needs some looking after, but mostly she just sits quietly in a chair." Hermione stood in a doorway. At that last pronouncement she nodded her head peaceably and turned her palms outward. "This house needs a scrubbing." "We've just recently moved here. Hermione is claustrophobic." "If you don't mind, sir, I'll put my things away and start the cleaning." "We'll call each other by first names. Hermione, Vladimir and...?" "Elda. Why will we do that?"

"Because we don't have a last name." "Very well." "And now I'll show you your room." Vladimir led the way to the foot of the stairs, followed closely by Elda. Hermione turned around and walked back to the dining room table where she had been sitting, looking through a big pile of pictures. Her long, white fingers separated the dingy squares and oblongs of paper and cardboard. She seemed to be reading the pictures with her hands. Her eyes were fixed on the window, on the strip of glass between the drapes. In the distance she saw a line of white birch trees. "They're cut out of paper." Hermione looked down for a moment, at a picture she held between her fingers. "A bearded man on a bicycle." She put that picture next to another one of a prize-winning pumpkin. Upstairs, Vladimir and Elda stood in the middle of a bare, dusty room. There was no mattress on the narrow bed frame. The dresser was missing a drawer. The carpet was rolled up against a wall. Vladimir found the mattress and missing drawer in the closet. He pulled them out and put them where they belonged. Then, the two of them unrolled the carpet. "Well, that's done." Elda put her suitcase on the mattress. "Where are the linens and cleaning supplies?" "They're in the service room. Here, I'll show you." He ushered her out of the room and closed the door. They walked side by side down the long hall, toward the stairs. Hermione stands with her face and hands pressed against one of the big panes of glass out on the closed porch. She is humming, whimpering a little between the lines of music. "Will I ever get out? Will I ever get out?" She places her body as close as she can to the rigid perimeter of her confinement. The world is barren on both sides; Hermione wishes to prove this for herself. "It might just be a picture, put there to trick me." As long as there is more than one side to the world.... The orchestra has turned to a mob of balding old washer women, swinging their mops in the snow. They are all bitter philosophers, chewing on their lower lips. All Hermione hears now are cackling accidents of musicbuckets banging, knobby joints crackling. Groaning and grumbling. Every one a soloist, a genius. That's what they're screaming at her, through the glass... "Hermione, it's time for your medicine." It's Elda. "I have it right here." She stands, waiting to be recognized, in the broad doorway. Hermione moves away from the glass. The strange music dims. She turns around, moving her mouth as though chewing. Elda approaches her with the medicine traytwo small cups, some bottles, a glass, a spoon, a pitcher of water. "There now. Drink it down and I'll give you a glass of water." Hermione guzzles the water, choking and sputtering. The interface of pink cheek and icy glass. Her two fists balled up in her hair. That there's a dream rising, like the red fluid in a thermometer is almost plain, is certainly to be suspected. Look how it troubles Hermione's eyelids. She how her lips move, soundlessly? Who can believe that she's simply "thinking things over?" Elda's in the service room thinking. Vladimir's thinking at his desk, in his toasty office. Hermione is being thoughta confusion of words. A mix-up. But is she dreaming? The images

are straight out of her life.

Personal Effects (excerpt)

"It doesn't affect me, personally."

Dreary murmuring, dingy flowers grey-green bushes. Popcorn box, wheel. Long walk among talkers and dead mouthed. Baby, man with twitching snout dripping brown juice. Cloud with two lumps, like dirty brassiereaging sky with tired white breasts. Violence in public restroom. "It doesn't affect me personally, but it affects me." Eyesight is a remarkable thing; hearing, senses of smell, heat, cold, touch... remarkable. Whistling breeches that let what is outside get inside. Ends of two pale brown shoes. A hand with fingers, ring that means nothingsome lives are devoid of symbols, utterly blank. Nose full of oily holes, dirty glasses. One shoe goes, the other one waitsthen, the other goes. Man carries long mirrordressing mirror. The mirror reflects the world, and heaven, at random. You see what flashes in your face, there is no choice. A bone aches. Sitting on green bench, big paint chip caught under one thumbnail. Plunging into small fun mirror of pain, looking at this. As boy, picking at woodwork. Woman struggles along, lifting legs like steel barbells, fake pocket watch around neck on heavy chainwatch tells correct time, but pocket watch around neck on heavy chainwatch tells correct time, but is somehow false. Straining to see numbers bobbing in squishy cleavage. "It affects me, but it doesn't get close enough to touch me." 4:05...4:30...6:20. Dinner. Grey potatoes, wrinkled frankfurters, soft, faded vegetables. Food prepared in washing machinesoaked in bleach and detergent, hung out to dry under dismal sun. Dinner has same dreary connotation as laundry. Men sit down with wet plates, bent eating utensils. One man farts, another man farts. Woman comes in her scary glasses, lifeless apron, carrying dinner. Memory. Spilled ink drips from trees and lavatory roof, blackening pavement and tortured lawns. Afternoon sky is smeared with dirty fingerprints, approaching sleep with shallow whimper, like unwashed, hungry

child. Hand looks for faceto touch it? to slap it? to feel what's left of shave? Fingers move in darkening air, close to cold cheek. Hand goes back to leg, preferring to rest on a less personal part leave face, with its terrible sense of identity, wobbling at top of throat, filled with intense birds of anguish, a scrappy nest of rocks, toothpicks and grimy feathers. "It doesn't get close enough to touch me. It could throw a brick at my head. That would be something something personal." Dinner is worth missing. Woman doesn't know how to make a bed. Laundry is ruined. Everything is colorless. Violence enters from corner, too far away to understand, to clearly see. Not murder, it's fun violence. Fun with fear, purple and yellow bruises, small amounts of blood. Too late to leavedark and violence fall together. Pansy shrouds in fools pillow. Blazing antipathetic needle pierces lapping pupil. Howard, he gets belt. Buttocks drizzle with lumpy frost, and tighten up to blank wood, looking up at punisher. Heat of tanning overcomes Howard's inner cold. Boy is conquered, is prey of every hand of discipline. He keeps his own hands away from his other partspunishing hands. Ass freezes and grows squarely bald, shrinking in pants, hurting ..ed bench. Woman in glasses is desirable. Wet food is appealing. Trembling hands shake hourglassdoes sand run out faster, is it hurried by fear? Bleeding stems of stolen flowers. Smell of crippled earth. Dime on grass, reflecting a faraway light. Palms suspended over knees, so close it looks like they're touching. Back a ball of killers, neck a frozen crow. Both arms cramped in furious disgrace. "It never touches me. If I look at it, it moves away." Light from a buildingbright oral surgeon's light. Patient is unconscious; surgeon smokes a cigarette as he works, dropping ashes in open mouth. A woman in pants is running. It's too late for food. Everything smells like food. Woman's fear smells like sizzling meat. Hungry boys run after woman, nostrils rolled open, hair rattling like chopsticks. Chasing fear. Paper man glued to bench, grey, ill, covered with unreported news, shivering in wind, on the crisp edge of night. It doesn't touch him, doesn't even notice him, violence. It isn't personal. Bare dirt pounding up on woman, as boys pound down. She is hot with hammering and rubbing, like pink eraser squished, twisted between bored, grimy hands. Everyone waits to be released by violence. Its fingers drill holes in world; it reaches out of hell, picks people up, throws them at each other. Boys think they are attacking woman; woman thinks she is only victim; earth bounces indecently. Man on bench thinks he is unaffected, because he is untouched, personally. Dinner's over. Every room has worn, overstuffed rocker. House clanks and shivers to hard music of men trying to relax. Popping spines of newspapers, jabbering black lips of a radio. "Why worry? None of this has happened, yet." Impossible to place anything in history. It all washes grey. Events bleed into each other, decompose into soggy threads, like clothes left in a washing machine, overnight. Cold, damp shoes on stiff carpet. Hunger enters room like drunk visitor, with lurid uneasiness. Empty newspaper stands, no dinner after six. Rocker, wall, dark window like mirror.

Outside: light like dime caught in glare of window. Surgical glare. "Suffocation under anesthesia. Cause: tracheal blockage by six millimeter burn blister. Burn agent: cigarette ash." Cover guilt with handspunishment handslike covering green light bulb. Advice for someone else. Rocker afraid of its maimed dog, stops going. Night traffic. Aladdin's Lamp burns on greed, dreams, whispers in dark down web of tar veins. Grinning genie with poison stingerfreezes hard in victim's bloodgleaming killboy eyes. Down long night to banks, prostitutes: place where sacred visions meet religious nightmares, are opened up, filled with bullet holes; where dreams of pigs wallow in boys' brains, kicked out bones of stall. All at room temperature, covered with fingernail polish. Candy. Gooshee ghosts and liampotomis'sdon't go there. Wings of carpet caterwaul as waking dreamer dives into glass skin of still darkening night. Candy in dresser. Thought sickens. Hungry little feet. Tarantula goes for throat, from stomach, drenched in yellow acid. Tongue itches and turns sour. Creature hunches in oily mouth, baring small venomous teeth, scanning dark world for candy. Hunger's grey host stands, goes to dresser, opens a drawer, takes out bright little package, tears into it with revulsion. Removes flat brown squares, spreads jaws, feeds spider. Foul taste tickling follow bad candy. Man's insides stop killing him. Close drawer, go back to chair, sit down, rock. Dinner over. Rocking horse bobs; to its dark, painted eyes the world falls, rises, pitches, only settles into lines, blocks, chunks, bulks, crevices when empty, or asleep. Man, shredded back into grey ribbons, is stuffed into dead horse. Black belly of bubbling slumber, aswim with pink, creamy blue buzz fish and vanishing track mice. Reports are split and scrambled. Light on. Breathing like rake over stiff catapuses. Weathered bluff of melancholy moans under stars. Creaking sea-colored ship, its many burning eyes searching for light, anywhere.

WOMA I PA TS RAPED, BEATE , ROBBED I PARK. BOYS SOUGHT.

"She wasn't dead," said cook who found her. Ship leans and crawls toward shore. Lips of pale and belch, shudder. (Whatever happened to vanishing trapeze, where artist is left with nothing to hold onto?) Paint oozes from animal's flapping nostrils. Butter is arranged on wall. Howard shouting, guns unveiled. Ingenuity no object. Quiet hostility churning behind it. A foot of clean carpet, then a wall. Picture of tarantulas breeding: male holds pudendum open, female has him in a death grip; he inserts a fang-like spider penis, and ejaculates, then runs for his life. Male rarely survives sex ordeal.

BOY CRUSHED BY FA GED LABIA. PARTLY EATE CORPSE FOU D. Sleepless men take beach, their frayed and ripped uniforms chattering in icy breeze. Numb revenge pain goes on too long for revenge to be satisfyingsomething that is seized, then forgotten. Armed machines twirl on naked legs, memory of smoking wreckage. FIRING POSITION AND... wipe out sad, moonlit cloud. Feat accomplished. Take beach. Moon with two strips of bacon. "There's not a coward among us. What about Howard? Howard's a coward. Hey, Howard the Coward, wake up and eat your laundry!" Room slips from its security envelope, and unfolds slowly, is read by damp, bleary eyes; nothing understood; returned to envelope. (Whatever happened to vanishing artist, where trapeze is left to swing to a stop?) Hattie Horsie goes up, down, up, down, slower, lesser, up, down till she halts. Sun rises cold green, shrieks over sill, broad, grass blade slicing into head at eye sockets, at level of closed lids. Two thick mucus seals broken by powerful muscles hidden in skull. Webbed security flap peeled down. Sensitive trip-levers trigger trap springs that lift apron. Dishes sweep area, picking up furniture and growing blood orange. Turned ankle and dead bovine foot. Hair of tooth. Flavor of rancid mincemeat. If babies could cook, what would they cook? Monotonous job of feeding hunger. Woman in dirty glasses sleeps with an anvil on her head, crushing her deaf bones to toneless misery of stomach marbles rattling in steel bowls. Finally, thick fragrance of warm, sleep-soaked bedding. Throw back padded feet. Actual vat of sputtering oatmeal. Woman holds blunt spoon. Face close to heat vent. Chattering of bowls and spoons, running water, steam, sponges and pieces of wet cloth. Perfect, excruciating smell of toast. Buttery mist rises from floor. A solid punch in face. Sit gulping, edge of bed squeezing dead foot, blood dotting surface as brilliant red needles. Dust brown shoes; hard, dry, warped soles. One next to the other, by wall. Legs a pair of tired shovels; two hard shafts, banged up steel feet. Thin, gummy socks. Stale as police underwear returned from crime, arms, legs everywhere, face a crushed lamb fetus, fainting underpants. Day after day soiled by opening doors on mutilation.

MURDERED I THE MIDDLE OF THE IGHT I was lonely, my hands holding each other tight. You think it is never like that for me, but it is. A scorched flower rested on my forehead, a bottle of pills rattled as I walked from one end of the dance floor to the other. You could tell I was sick, no one wanted to dance with me that night. But how long was the night? And every dance went on and on painfully. Yes, your happiness was like a good whipping. I laid down in a room full of coats and hats and umbrellas and took it. Then I tore off my head and stuffed pills in its mouth. I threw the head in the waste basket and walked down the hall to the mens room. Even though I didnt have a head I was still a man. Maybe people screamed and ran into each other trying to get away from me, I couldnt see or hear anything. Blood ran down my shirt. Blood or spit or sweat. The dance was meaningless. The head, having taken its pills, was all well. The rest was riddled with disease, but stumbled on thoughtlessly. Doubtless you were in someones arms. Maybe you hadnt even heard about the headless man poking at the doors in the hall. He was dressed for love, I was dressed for love. It is the same as murder when I have to dress for it. My balls crushed against the edge of a table, a bowl of punch and ice cubes splashed all over me, thats all I know. My hands touched one another again, as though they had never met. In another room they were giving me a shot and tying me to the stretcher. It is a waste of time trying to save a man without a head. Tomorrow, that part will be found empty in the coat room with its flower and its mouth full of medicine. All the love went with the body and the body is covered with punch and blood. In fact, they have taken the clothes that I wore for love and put them in a bag. Now I am naked and I dont have a head. I am on this slab and they are looking. This one got murdered in the middle of the dance.

It's Just A Little Bit Of Everything (That's Brought Me Down To This) Waiting for the news to break I've been waiting for the magic kiss I've been up all night, looking down at the city lights It's just a little bit of everything That brought me down to this Living in the afterglow Of a flame that burned out long ago And when the darkness fades from my window shades It'll be a little bit of everything That brought me down to this No, no, no... Living on one light tonight When there isn't any end in sight You got to hide from the sun when you're living a loaded gun It's just a little bit of everything That brought me down to this And I'm waiting for the news to break And I'm waiting for the magic kiss I've been up all night, looking down at those city lights It's just a little bit of everything That brought me down to this
From The Sad Bag Cassette Release 1990

"It Is Fake Statuary..." by S. Jesse Bernstein It is fake statuary Like pink marble But soft, When the ground shakes They fall over The arms and legs And heads flapping Stupidly. They are pretty But frail.

They roll over & over Down a steep hill, They get all Tangled up in their Limbs. Inside they are Purple Jelly And sticks And string And noodles. At the bottom of the hill The statues, Flopping and bouncing Their insides popping Out through little tears, Are pressed together. They come to a stop On a little mound Of dirt and weeds And broken shoes. When the Earth Has quit trembling I stroll down the hill Plucking at berries And flowers And leaves. At the bottom I stop and look At the two twisted Broken figures: "They weren't real stone,"I think, "They were only lovers." I take off my shoes And walk away On my two real feet.

SKYVIEWS VOL.2 NO.3

"Letter to the editor concerning good and bad poetry" Dear Skyviews: My remedy to our collective weaknesses as writers and poets is to encourage everyone to write as much of whatever they feel like writing as they want to, and to get up and spout off in front of others as they like. And the more little books floating around, the better. I cannot evaluate other people's incentives or aspirations. If someone writes poems because they want to be a college professor, or because they want to get laid, that's fine; whatever lights a fire under them, I'm glad. That they keep doing it at all -- writing, getting up and talking -- is admirable, and a good sign. To open the spigots all the way will act, finally, as a purgative. But, I am not much interested in routing out purported "impurities" in the writing community. What we are doing here (including those of us who some of us think aren't doing anything) is at worst the lesser of many evils, and at best the finest of many virtuous deeds. I find it hard to tear anyone down for being sloppy or dishonest on paper -- the little closet of a poem is a worthy place to try those things on. (Of course, it's a good place to start taking them off, too.) Anyway, a little -- or even a lot -- of "bad" poetry isn't going to damage anything; it's just something to fill in the spaces between the "good" poems. Whatever. I don't like splitting things up that way. Jesse Bernstein Hotel Ontario
SKYVIEWS VOL.2 NO.10

"How Do We Develop An Audience For Literary Arts? " by Steven Jesse Bernstein Present poetry/other writing/literary performance regularly, often, with a lot of publicity aimed at a random, as well as, literary audience. Writing of any type, even in performance, is a slow medium, compared to visual arts, music. U.S. culture is fixated on accelerated communication and adrenalin. Speed and shock are U.S. values in art. Literature breaks down into elements, then reassembles, an idea or experience. My belief is that this will never be as attractive to U.S. audiences as rock 'n' roll, movies, powerful cars. We are into drug art, here: if it isn't a drug, it isn't art. Americans want art to do something compelling to them, against their will. We go for the fix. There is no way of presenting literature, poetry, whatever, that will compete with 120 decibels of pounding drums, bass, human shrieks, stabbed into and separated by horns and guitars and pianos... blinding strobes, clouds of red smoke, shimmering sweat and leather. And everything is on that level, here, all thrown into one arena to fight it out for dominance of effect. Once in a while, with a few people, the poets win.
SKYVIEWS VOL.3 NO.2

Art or Anarchy? 1987: A friend read Art or Anarchy? (Or "What is Poetry") over the phone. Indeed. At its best art is the final kick in the gut that is the inspiration of anarchy--a falling away of slivers of glass and rubbery sheets of paint, a noisy caving in of walls that leads to the whistling clear and lawless out-of-doors. Or it is a vision of life beyond confinement. Hopefully, art releases someone from somewhere they didn't want to be; maybe someplace they didn't know they were until they got away from it. Poems are often notes of escaping laboratory animals having been experimented to luridness by keen pickle jar scientists. It can be said that these desperate screeches and groans are entirely subjective and are too sweaty and unstudied to be called art. Yet I will refer even to the tracks leading to the open window as poems. Poetry, as such, as a term of definition, is a wild card. It is permissible, and even encouraged, to consider any and all collections of words as poems. Or to think of single words as poems. Or to regard things that aren't words as words and, therefore, conceivably, as poems. This elasticity of denotations of cultural significance is true for art, in general, it seems. We hear the professor's shoes, the clattering of scalpels; we are chewing on the metal cages, anxious to try anything. The test of the integrity of a poem, or any work of art, may be, simply: does it lead, in the end, to freedom, or does it merely expand the arena of confinement? A voice from the outside, truly, is what we need to hear. Even a single word. Even something that is not a word, but suggests such a word. "Taboo" The intellectual, moral, legalistic approach to censorship is beside the point. All this is coffee clatch rumination, go nowhere sophomoric prattle. A tepid protest of lawyers and other already nailed down, intellects instant toaster oven personalities, who have never, and most certainly will never be censored, except maybe distantly by association. Blabbermouthing, minutely dissecting the myriad personal and political implications of slamming the lid down on artistic, intellectual or any other type of expression serves to articulate, and therefore strengthen the components of the very machinery of censorship. What does it feel like to have a big square of sticky tape slapped over your mouth, to have naked and forbidden blanks in your field of perception, so dark and empty that you don't know they're there? People are made to wear ovenmitts to keep them from writing a single word. Their gullets are stuffed with bleach soaked rags. What counts is the preemptive scream. A wave of unrestrained fury that drives the cops back into their shooting ranges, the supreme court into their dismal chambers. There are voices that cannot be muffled. Change the channels fast enough; learn to read the shattered image, keep the volume at a deafening pitch; the content is couched in distortion and static. If we change our physiology faster than the law can adapt to the crimes of our peculiar mutated receptor cells and disembodied radio voices, free communication will always be ahead of the cumbersome vehicle of repression. It is getting your ass out there and saying what you have to say in intense, unrepeatable language -effective and temporal as a lightning storm -- losing the brain and heart together in a facile assault against the static brickwork of church and execution chamber. Be the gun that riddles the flags of dead borders. 'Beat no retreat'. Appear blinking in the folds of the sky. Never shut another up. Just go. There is no justification. There is no 'need' for you to be free. So, there is nothing to talk about, to defend. You are a rampant angel, as is the damp pornographer, and the nazi bristling with

guns. Even the justices speak, choking on their swollen tongues. And, the cops. Talk in code. Talk under the level of the spirit. Wipe out your face. Don't 'fight' censorship, be unresponsive to it. Go.

-Steven J. Bernstein

"PAYI G HOMAGE"

Dear Skyviews: In answer to your letter...: No, Burroughs is not my "greatest influence." Then, you add, "as it would seem." Why would it seem that he was? I can't imagine. He has been a teacher, and somewhat of a mentor to me. I have certainly learned a lot about the development of mythologies, and exploration of the mechanics and possible evolution of writing from William Burroughs. And, yes, I 'do' like his work, a lot. Influences on my writing change. Currently, the novels of Issac B. Singer are an inspiration. Perennial influences on my day to day approach to writing are Susan Jones, Michael Spafford (a painter), Rainer Maria Rilke, and yes, William S. Burroughs. "What do you read during a year's time?" Few newspapers. In the last year I have read an exhaustive psychiatric study on the behavioral pathology of Nazi doctors and German physicians, in general, from 1934 to 1945, "The Nazi Doctors", by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.; "Man's Search for Meaning", by Viktor E. Frankl, M.D., which is the foundation of the existential psycho-analytic approach, "logotherapy," which postulates that humanity's individual and collective search for meaning is essential, rather than "secondary," as Freud asserted... Yes, I do read poetry -- rarely by the bookful. I like to read the same poems, over and over. Because it is a concentrated substance, I consume and digest poetry slowly, and in spare quantities... Most memorable literary work read in 1987: The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Steven J. Bernstein [N.B.: Jesse will be reading a selection of his works, backed up by William Burroughs, on July 9th, 8 pm at the Moore Theater. This is a COCA sponsored event.]
SKYVIEWS VOL.3 NO.2

"CRIMI AL MI D" Jesse Bernstein interviews William S. Burroughs The Rocket, July 1988.

Early crimes of William S. Burroughs, in book form: Queer, 1947. It was illegal to be queer in America in 1947. It is very nearly a crime, still, until recently, American homosexuals were dangerous outlaws - they faced prison. Their intimacies were criminal acts, like robbery, or assault with a deadly weapon. Junky, 1952. Being a junky is still illegal, still an affront to shaky American moral sensibilities, Naked Lunch, 1956. The book itself was a crime. Naked Lunch was published in the U.S., only after a long, whooping court battle. These books were written when Sinatra and Disney were king, before America had discovered the hoola-hoop. Reading Burroughs was questionable, suggestive of a criminal mind, criminal attitudes. Though technically legal, his books are still moral contraband. Insinuating that prevailing ideas of justice and morality are arbitrary, and therefore perverse, relative to people's lives, grates nastily against the toothy parchment of America's puritan foundation. It is only with the utmost tenacity and daring that Burroughs has slipped us his books for three decades. Hero to some, to others he is the devil, incarnate. He is also a writer, a subtle and powerful performer, commentator, recording artist, personality, painter. His voice came over the wires, crackling and buzzing... Jesse: How do you see the relationship between your public image, and... there's a William S. Burroughs archetype... the relationship between that image, your body of work, and yourself, the actual man. William: There is no actual man. J: Why not?

W: Listen, um, of course the Buddhists have always maintained that the idea of an actual person is an illusion. There is no such thing. Theories, posits changing all the time - there are very few constraints. And, this is doubly true, of course, for the writer. There is no wheel. J: Ha! W: The image varies from person to person... I've built up a sort of a sulfurous image. Some people... they see the devil at the mention of my name. J: Hahaha! W: It's comical, yes. J: Well, it is, yeah. When considered altogether, an audience has a persona. This is how audiences look to me: like a lot of cells. The crowd - a specific crowd - seem to have a face, certain characteristics. And, then there's one's whole audience, regarded across the breadth of a career. I wonder if you can describe your audience? As though it was a person. W: Well, not...not really. J: Do you get heckled? W: Never. J: Did you ever get heckled? W: Uhhh, nooo. Once in Paris. Brian and I did some poems, and... J: Gysin? W: Yes. And, there was some heckling, but it didn't amount to much. That's the only time. J: So your audience is attentive. W: They've been, without exception. I'd say...very accepting. All over the States, Canada. I've read in Amsterdam six times, Belgium, Brussels, Helsinki, Guttenberg, Sweden, Denmark... J: Do you read in English in all those places? W: OH, yeah, of course. What else would I read in? J: I can't imagine. W: Yeah, they speak English, or they don't come. I don't speak any other language. I couldn't possibly read in any other language. J: Is that pretty steady, over the last thirty years, that kind of response?

W: Well, no, because I've only been reading since 1974. J: I had the impression that you had been reading all along. W: No, no, no. J: So it's a fourteen year relationship... W: Yup! J: ...with that type of audience... W: Yup! J: How do you decide what you are going to read? W: Well, I pick very carefully. That is, I don't just read anything. These are pieces that I've perused very carefully. Most of them are in the, um, humorous vein. J: That seems to go over with people. W: Yes. It's easiest. J: I wonder why that is. W: Well, you don't want to...at least I don't want to...get into heavy subjects. Although, I do touch on them. But, it's supposed to be...most of it is humorous. Even the reading I do on drug hysteria. J: Which has the most impact - the written or the spoken word? W: It depends on what you mean by impact. J: Immediate impact...slam. W: It's hard to say. They're not the same. A lot of written material is not at all suitable for reading. You don't read long descriptions. J: Ah! W: In fact, I don't read any descriptions. It doesn't read well. J: Out loud. W: Well that's it. Yes. I mean, you can take very good prose, like The Great Gatsby - okay, that's fine to read on the page, but there's not much point in reading it aloud.

J: Yeah, I've been trying to figure that one out - why certain things work, and other things don't work, at all, as a performance. W: I make up my mind before the audience. That is, I pick something up and I read it, and see if i sounds right, or not. J: You do that at home? W: Of course. J: Huh. W: Well? J: With me it's trial and error. I think a thing sounds really good, at home, and then I'll go and do it in front of an audience, and it''ll be a disaster, and I'll try another audience, and it'll be a disaster, again. In that way I'll discover that it...that a piece of writing probably doesn't work. W: Hahaha! J: And in my case sometimes people throw things. They can make a lot of noise. W: Oh, I've never had that happen. J: Maybe I inspire that, I don't know. So, you are saying that the written and the spoken word are two different animals? W: Pretty much so, yes. Pretty much so. J: Can you explain why, I mean what are the mechanics of tha? W: Oh, no, it just isn't the same thing. Reading on a page, okay, they can read a little bit, they do something else. It isn't the same at all as listening to someone talk. J: True. W: Yes. J: Have you to Seattle, before? W: No, never. I've been to Vancouver, though. I think I'm going to get an art show there. I've already sold five paintings. J: Great! W: On slides. J: On the sly, that's a...

W: On slides. J: Oh, hahaha. W: On the sly, hahaha. On slides. J: On slides, okay. I like what I've seen. W: It seems to be doing well. J: Ah! (William Burroughs and Steven Jesse Bernstein will be giving a reading at the Moore Theater Saturday, July 9, 8:00 p.m. as part of the ongoing COCA season. Recent drawings by Burroughs will be exhibited in COCA's gallery space opening July 8.)

"I'M OT A SAI T I'M A WRITER" These are dangerous, subversive men: William Burroughs and Jesse Bernstein. Both have clawed difficult niches out of life, patrolling the dark shadows at the edge of what passes for civilization, taking obscene changes - chemically, artistically, personally - made possible and productive only by the weird combination of guts and intellect that drives them. They met through the mail. A letter in response to Burroughs' job got an unexpected response from the author. Bernstein retaliated with 81 letters in two months. The men have been friends since. Few other people write well enough to be censored. Bernstein on Bernstein: "I was born on December 4th 1950 in Los Angeles. I didn't do well in school now. Actually, I quit school early and spent a number of yearsbetween institutions and the country at large. I am not a Viet Nam Veteran. I went to the draft board wearing ladies clothes, eating a kielbasa, which is a large sausage. And claimed to be a Christian, and tried to convert the people at the draft board. They threw me out. "I have a son now who's in the Army. He's a tank driver stationed up against the Iron Curtain somewhere. With his tank. He's also very skinny so I guess they thought he'd be good in a cramped space. "I was a professional musician for a long time. For a living: A bass player and a vocalist. I've done a lot of things. The two things I was actually proudest of was that I was a really good dishwasher and a really good ditch digger. I don't do either of 'em anymore. I was a drunk and a drug addict for a long time. Alternately, not both at the same time. I don't do either of them anymore. I actually lost interest.

It's not very dramatic, I just lost interest. It didn't help my writing any." Burroughs and Bernstein have become peculiar commodities, a kind of uncomfortable freak show a deranged rollercoaster in the literary fun house. This makes it easy to forget that they are very serious about their work. Their work is not easy to forget. - Grant Alden

"AIDS A D THE EEDLE USER" by Steven J. Bernstein The Rocket, October 1988.

This is a very flat subject. Flat like the twinkling of a run over cat on a frozen January morning. But this is about people; and it isn't one lonely body killed fast and forgotten, but thousands dead and thousands more doomed to die slow and miserable. Each one of these may represent 10 or 20 or a hundred people marked for death, later. A bitter network of unstoppable killing like that is a flat subject - there is no way to spruce it up and make it jingle, so I'm just going to lay it out on a few slices o cool white paper, and slip it to you. If you are knowingly taking chances with AIDS - gambling against the odds that you won't get it from careless sex or shared needles - you are betting other people's lives, along with your own. Like playing cards with stolen money. A bunch of people picking each other's pockets. All of a sudden everyone turns up broke, the house packs it in and kills the lights. It's hard to get needle users to lower their chances of getting or passing AIDS by cleaning their works with bleach and not sharing them. This isn't because people are ignorant, it's mostly because they're apathetic. Some needle users have said, if they get AIDS they deserve it. Others just can't get it together to protect themselves or their friends by washing out their syringes and needles with bleach, before they sit down to fix. One needle user with AIDS can pass the disease around an entire community of users in no time at all. You have three people on the same needle, one of them is carrying Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and they all get infected. Then, each of them gets another needle and goes somewhere else, scores and fixes with some other people. And, if these are people who fix four or six times a day, and if the same grimy needles get passed around and sold and so on... A whole lot of people can get sick with this miserable, mostly untreatable killing disease, fast, accidentally. And, that's not taking into account people's sex lives. It's similarly difficult to get prostitutes to insist on using condoms. It's bad for business. Well. We are talking about something a lot meaner than a bullet in the head, but there are people who will just stand there looking right into the muzzle of this gun, while a very ugly killer on the other end of the thing is taking aim, slow and leisurely, squeezing the trigger. It is a common belief that people who shoot dope are completely worthless: criminals, fiends. This idea festers at the back of the minds of most Americans. Needle users often see themselves in this light, and treat themselves and each other accordingly. Old term used by addicts: "Hope-to-die dopefiend." It's more true today: and now it's a shared death, one that's passed around easily, without malice, among friends. Turning away from a broken mirror. In fact, what we have here is a medical problem, simply, complicated by a springy tangle of moral and psychological barbwire. But, the medical problem, itself - spreading AIDS by sharing needles and syringes - could be effectively dealt with if we made it legal for needle users to buy clean equipment from the drugstore, and if we, as a society, discarded the worn out image of the IV drug user as a demonic specter with claws and fangs... vermin.

One of the many things that makes AIDS so depressingly virulent is that while it is spread by passing body fluids from one person to another, it is allowed to spread mostly because of our screwed up attitudes, as a culture, towards certain groups of people. Queers, junkies... Who would care, really, if they managed to annihilate themselves with AIDS? Who would give a damn if there were no more dope addicts hanging around downtown looking to score? Especially, considering that it's taking place slowly, a kind of creeping mass execution that the victims carry out themselves. It would take a while to notice that these people were gone. Then there would be a melancholy sigh, a few books would be written, and that would be it. So much for those perverts. Of course, that wouldn't take care of the disease, at all - it would just start mysteriously killing off all the plain old nice people. So the fundamentalists and all the rest are right: AIDS is a moral disease... a virus that is nurtured and spread by diseased morals. As I write this some kid somewhere in Seattle is looking for a vein for the first time. "ow, shit! Ow, ow! Ouch!" Pressing the plunger: "Ahhh. Mmmm." Zzzzzzz. The kid has just joined the scum at the bottom of America, or so say the lopsided scales of human worth. Probably it is a borrowed needle. And this kid will not start thinking about being careful about protecting himself against AIDS and other diseases - for a long time... maybe too long, maybe never. That this scenario is happening right now, as I'm writing it, as you're reading it, is a statistical probability - one of the flattest parts of this flat story. A grey frost that the sun may never reach. There are no odds when it comes to AIDS. Chances of getting infected increase, finally to a point of near certainty, for those who don't protect themselves. If you hit the jackpot in this game you're a dead loser. Protect yourself. If you're a needle user don't share needles or syringes with anyone and clean your works with bleach, using what is called the two by two method: fill and empty the syringe (with the needle attached) twice with bleach, then fill and empty twice with water. Fill and empty the syringe all the way each time, so the syringe and needle are completely cleaned and rinsed. If you have any questions about the two by two method, about AIDS and needle use or other questions about AIDS and AIDS prevention call the AIDS Prevention Project at (206) 296-4999, between 9 am and 5 pm. You're worth taking care of. So, that's a pretty grey song for a hot day in September, but what am I gonna do? The facts is the facts. People are screwing around and dying every goddamn day. All I can do is write about it and hope a few people get away with their skin. Written by: Steven J. Bernstein with the help of Research Assistant: Barbara Buckland. (Steven J. Bernstein spent his adolescence on the streets and in and out of institutions and jails. He became a narcotics addict and alcoholic. He also became a writer, musician, poet, painter... Jesse quit using narcotics in the early 1970's, and stopped drinking in 1981. He continues to write novels, journalism, poetry, plays - and also does reading performance and, in the last few years, acting and directing.)

"SHE HAS LOTS OF TATTOOS" by Steven J. Bernstein The Rocket, August 1989.

Kathy Acker has a lot of tattoos, sleek, tough biceps, large wandering eyes. She reminds me of a fair cheeked but rugged sailor-picture on an old army & navy store. Crewcut with waxed front. Also, a black dress, low neckline, cowboy boots. Dreams that have been sweated to he surface and woke up. When Kathy talks, she sticks out her tongue, you read what's on it, she pulls it back in and swallows; then, she sticks her tongue back out, and there's something else on it. I have a feeling that she is living the mysterious part of her life, out loud, so that she can experience it, herself. She writes what she finds written on her body, whatever she can sense. Yet, it was hard to get her o talk about herself. It may be that if you can't see it - if what you want to know about Kathy isn't already obvious - it isn't ready to be said. She kept turning my questions back on me, trying to bring my life into focus so she could read me, while I read her. Kathy seemed to want to take enough of me with her so she could include my life in her own experience, call it up in her writing. Whatever Kathy can read, it seems - whatever she can understand - is part of her experience, her life. If she reads something in the newspaper about a safe falling out of a window and crushing someone on the sidewalk; she has also fallen out of a window and landed on someone else. If you tell her your life story, she will add it to her own. And, everything she reads - everything she experiences - goes into her writing. Though Kathy Acker and I spent a lot of time together, while she was in Seattle, eating and talking and reading our writing to each other, I almost forgot to interview her. We had the following conversation while she was getting ready to leave for London. K.A. was born in New York City, has lived in a few U.S. cities, including Seattle, and now lives in London. Her books include "Empire of the Senseless", "Don Quixote", "Blood and Guts in High school". These three are Grove Press publications.

Jesse: What are you hoping to do with your writing? Kathy: I'm more interested with what my writing is going to do with my writing...to do the job properly, so that my writing can do what it's supposed to do with the writing. J: Are your parents proud of you? K: My parents are dead. I never met my father, so I don't know if he's alive or dead. My mother suicided when I was 30. I was disowned when I was 19. I just went to a fortune teller who told me that wherever...down wherever...w herever my mother is that she really cares about me. J: What is your fondest dream? K: That I'm running over these plains, these hills - they're so terrific and I'm running with animals, and the animals accept me and I'm running with tigers and horses. J: I have the same dream. K: It's the best, isn't it? J: You say some very violent things in your writing. Is that your life, or what you see around you, or what? K: What my writing is is just me talking other books, so if it's there, it's in other books. I don't think people really see what they see. They read all this violent shit, and they see it on TV, and they don't really know they're reading it or seeing it. I literally take other text and write it. But sometimes I do talk about my own life, or stories someone tells me about their life - it's just copying, too. I don't think my text is any more violent than the news. That's just how things are. J: Do you plan to return to the U.S. to live? K: What do you think? I don't know what to do. I'm led around by my cunt. J: How do you approach your work on a day-to-day basis? K: I wake up in the morning, do about an hour of meditation, then I go to work. As far as I'm concerned, it's about like bricklaying. J: Who do you see as being your closest allies, in terms of what you are trying to get across, what are you trying to do in the world? K: It changes. I could answer more easily if you asked me who are my enemies. But, there's a kind of network...

J: Does recognition have any value, other than monetary value? K: Yeah, it's a good thing on the whole. It takes you out of your baby crib, and gets you out into the world. You get a chance to stop being reactive. I don't think there's anything wrong with power. You can misuse power, but you should have power over your life, your circumstances. J: A lot of people want to define themselves as "artist" these days - what does this word "artist" mean? K: I live in London, now. To say someone was "arty" would be to put them down. Being an artist isn't a nice thing. J: It seems to me that people are not satisfied to just live - I mean, find some way to get along, have a family, and so on. It is always some object, an objectification of themself that they are after. Why do you suppose that is? K: You remember in the hippy days, when people had a hundred ways of living? In London, now, it's money and relationships. everyone wants to be Madonna. Thirtysomething. The TV show, that's the big thing. Who would want to "just live," now? I mean, people aren't even supposed to fuck, anymore. J: What do you hope to achieve as a writer? K: I hope to be recognized by my peers. Like I said before, the writing will do it. It's about power. The writing is the real religion. It's what religion was to other cultures. All real religion is art.

"A CO VERSATIO WITH TAD" by Steven Jesse Bernstein The Rocket, June 1990. Truth is I think he misses Boise, Idaho. And, he hates fakes, won't allow his soul to be cornered, presses others to crash their way out of corners, avoid the cons. Keep your soul in front like the blade of a bulldozer. Tad. Thomas Andrew Doyle. Born 1960, Boise. He tells me his mother is on his side, elbows on the table, hands folded in front of his face. He talks soft between long pauses. He's loyal to the band everyone in TAD is as important as Tad. He talks a lot about loyalty. We're in a big room full of empty chairs, a stage, pinball machines - back room of the OK. There's just one table. He wrinkles his eyebrows a lot, working hard to make himself understood. Then he looks me over to make sure I have gotten his point. But, Tad's quiet, plainspoken honesty makes it hard to miss the bottom line of what he's saying. The image versus the artist. Tad's solidness - which is what impresses me most - a hitman absoluteness, comes out in his music and performance. But, what Tad does on stage, and on records, is most often translated into a sweating, out-of-control fatman image. That is the bare surface of what he represents, like a truck coming up fast in your face. But, there's an engine behind the grill plate, and a driver up in the cab. The man across the table, screwing and unscrewing his hands, is intense, thoughtful, worried about the future, about people getting buried in history without noticing. The image comes from wanting to get people to pay attention to what's in front of them.

The band, TAD, has done hundreds of performances in the US, England and Germany. They have an album, "God's Balls, a single, a split single with Pussy Galore, a new EP "Salt Lick", and cuts on Sub Pop 200 and Dope, Guns and Fucking in the Streets, Part Three. TAD: I think what I'm saying is don't let people push you into doing something you don't want to do, and do whatever you want, whenever you want to do it - and don't feel bad about it. Don't let people run over you. And, people definitely will. That's what this society's all about , somebody's fortune is somebody else's misfortune. It's bound to keep happening. BERNSTEIN: You're saying that message, doing it on stage. TAD: Maybe it's too serious though. BERNSTEIN: Sometimes it's horse shit. TAD: There's the badass stuff. That's just reactionary. Trying to get a reaction out of people. If people are just standing there. You say, "Hey, what do you think about this?"Well, I'm bound to tell 'em what I think, because that's just the way I am. I think people should be able to talk more freely about things - not worry about what other people think about it. Do what you want, be free. BERNSTEIN: You've been doing well in Germany. TAD: Yeah, England, too. Although it was a surprise, there, because the crowds are so abusive - I mean as abusive as I am to most crowds. They were dishing out what I was dishing out, back. That's never happened to me, before. I thought, well, hell, they just plain don't like us. But, that wasn't the case - they were joining in. BERNSTEIN: Why's it like that - I mean in England? TAD: There's just so many damn people in such a small area. People are all so loudmouthed, they're all mixed together. But, the same people who were flipping us mass shit, and throwing shit at us they'd come up to us after a show and say, "yeah, I liked it, it was cool." BERNSTEIN: The people who like you the most give you the most crap. TAD: That's a hard one to figure. Maybe they just know where you're coming from, and they know what you're about, and they try and get you going a little bit more...get you to fly for a while. BERNSTEIN: People love to see you go - it gives them some kind of relief. TAD: I try to make 'em laugh about things. About me, themselves...and just laugh, period. Laughter takes a little of the boring, stale water of life away from people. You can forget about all the bills, and all that kind of crap...the threat of nuclear obliteration, the job...or if you don't have a job, the thought of not having a job. We've (TAD) always been able to laugh at ourselves, and that's why we don't get upset about the press - especially me, you know...all the fat jokes. BERNSTEIN: The fat jokes. TAD: The English press is really big on that kind of stuff. They put my head on Sumo wrestlers, and

that kind of shit. They described a live show...they said, "when Tad stage dove the shadow cast over the crowd was larger than the Zeppelin in nineteen-forty-whatever." That kind of crap. BERNSTEIN: One dimension. TAD: I'm more than just a fatman, you know. I'm a woman-hear-me-roar, that kinda thing. The press has always been a thing that went for your weakness.. BERNSTEIN: You wouldn't get too far just being fat...if that's all that was happening. You have to have an effect on people. TAD: Sight, appearance is a big thing for those of us who can see. And, for those of us who can't see, too. Not being blind - I'm not talking about that. You can have eyes and not be able to see. And, I think a lot of people are that way, too. So, "He's just a big fat guy," and that's all there is to it. BERNSTEIN: You don't fake much - some performers really screw themselves up. TAD: A lot of times people think on stage you gotta lie, or make yourself something that you're not. Like heavy metal bands, for example, poof out their hair...they poof it out and spray it, wear stuff they wouldn't normally wear at home - Spandex. I don't know, maybe they really do wear that kinda shit. Anything I say on stage isn't different from what I'd say at home. BERNSTEIN: You're at home, the audience is at home. But, they kinda got a license to tear the place up, because they paid at the door to do that. TAD: That's it. BERNSTEIN: Do you think you're going to get rich and buy a house in Magnolia? TAD: Certainly not by doing this, no. If the band starts not being fun - well, that's why I'm in it, because it's fun. And, if it stops being fun I'm gonna probably go back to school and try to do something. BERNSTEIN: Do you have any idea what that might be? TAD: Well, I was a performance and music major in Boise. And, if I would've gotten a degree...if there was openings in symphony orchestras or ensembles, I could've tried out for something like that. If I would've gotten a degree I could've either done that, I could've been a teacher of music. Either way. BERNSTEIN: You play classical music. TAD: I have, yeah. BERNSTEIN: What instrument? TAD: I did percussion, which meant that I had to learn piano and xylophone, bells. I was studying to learn a brass instrument. BERNSTEIN: So, you have always played music.

TAD: Not always like what I'm doing now. But, music's music. You got a soul. There's lots of people that play notes off a page, but to really play it right you gotta feel it. Don't you agree?

A POETRY READI G SALUTI G THE SPIRIT OF JIMI HE DRIX By John Marshall P-I Columnist THURSDAY, July 2, 1987 Seattle Post-Intellegencer Section: News, Page: D1 This has nothing to do with '60s nostalgia, they emphasize. This has to do with paying their respects and honoring his memory and maybe drawing some inspiration from all being gathered together there, where Jimi Hendrix is buried. Other pilgrims have made their way to his grave at the small Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, usually to leave a flower or guitar pick, maybe share a joint or a beer, putting together these impromptu parties that sometimes get a little out of hand, as if that were some way to recapture what they see as the spirit of the man: Jimi Hendrix, flamboyant rock star. But those involved with the Red Sky Poetry Theater see a different Jimi Hendrix and have a different sort of celebration planned for his grave. This Sunday, starting at 2 p.m., they plan to hold a public poetry reading there, a reading supplemented by some acoustic music, all intended to celebrate the spirit of Jimi Hendrix, the artist with a guitar who did things that had never been done before and maybe not since. THAT ACCOMPLISHMENT has often been lost in the past, they say, amid all the hype, mystery and controversy that swirled around Jimi Hendrix in life and even after his death. From the way he sometimes set his guitar on fire concluding a performance to the circumstances surrounding his death in his sleep after an overdose of barbiturates. From the way a fake foundation used his name to bilk the public of a quarter of a million dollars to the great debate over how Seattle should honor this native son, finally leading to the Jimi Hendrix Overlook at Woodland Park Zoo, a most understated little monument. Jesse Bernstein has heard enough of all that. So have the other writers and performers involved with the upcoming Red Sky Poetry Theater event, people like Phoebe Boche, Jayne Taini and Judith Roche. They want to focus on Hendrix's music, not his myth. Bernstein does know how hard that is. He has been trying to write something new about Hendrix for Sunday's performance, but he is finding it "difficult to stay away from the sensational and cliched ways of viewing what the man did and how he wound up." What has finally helped Bernstein get past that is to remember the time he saw Hendrix live 20 years ago at the Fillmore in San Francisco and how impressed he was. And to remember, too, the last time he heard a Hendrix album, maybe three months ago, when someone was playing a lot of records one night and how Hendrix's music still stands up after all the years. Bernstein, a former musician himself, considers Hendrix to be "a true musical innovator" and he likens the staying power of Hendrix's music to that of jazz great Charlie Parker.

"Hey, man, it's strong stuff," says Bernstein. "It doesn't go away, it's like Charlie Parker who can still knock your socks off 30 years later. . . . What other people were doing as only occasional licks on the guitar, Jimi Hendrix turned into a whole new way of playing." WHAT OTHERS INVOLVED with Red Sky remember about Hendrix and what they plan to celebrate Sunday may be less esoteric than Bernstein, but made just as lasting an impression. For Judith Roche, it is something as simple as one line from one Hendrix song - " 'scuse me while I kiss the sky," which she says is "one of the best lines in rock music." But it also something more complex that Hendrix conveyed, the way he and his music embodied his time with "a tremendous feeling of freedom and change." For Jayne Taini, it is remembering how "Jimi Hendrix was my first black hero growing up as a little girl from Magnolia." But more than that, it is reflecting on the life of Jimi Hendrix and how it represents the struggle of the artist. Taini recalls how Jimi Hendrix taught himself to play, a left-hander who forever played a right-handed guitar upside down and backwards; how he dropped out of Garfield High, left the Army after a parachuting injury, struggled through years as a backup player, received no recognition in the country where he was born; how he then moved to England, became a sensation, returned to the U.S. in triumph and went on to become recognized around the world as one of the greatest artists ever to play his chosen instrument, all in a life that lasted only 27 years. So the people from Red Sky figure their celebration at Jimi Hendrix's grave is overdue. "It's a good idea to go out there and pay some homage to him," says Jesse Bernstein. "He's got it coming." John Marshall is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.

"HE DRIX by Jesse Bernstein (Read at Jimi Hendrix's grave site by Jesse Bernstein Sunday, July 5th 1987) Already he is one of the 'old ones'. Nail the lid on the coffin and time goes by at a terrible speed relieved of the weight of the body. There were noises deep in the fat and muscle; unseen hands tried to lift the skeleton from its box.

A harrowing music played abruptly on the tight nerves at the center of hearing. Bodies wagging Blood changed course: twenty years ago mobs transformed. Red summers Bluish winters. The Hands worked fighting the human disease, the whole man coiled around the instrument struggling with its animal. A public contest. I could've told you how it would come out; it's always the same with that thing. If nothing else, it will outlast you. His art was bending things beyond themselves where they met other things; unknown and dissonant things. Where these things joined he created a sudden understanding, a jolt in the spine. They said he was a drug addict an alcoholic unconscious of what he was doing. But, his was a hidden art worked with well-disguised sanity. Maybe he stayed high: drugs are an inner costume. There has to be someone underneath all the layers making the arms and legs go opening

and closing the mouth. He was hiding out Making his moves in secret. It was all in the news: the dying part. Hendrix with big hair and wide mouth. Nothing of his inventions the cry of his human soul made over and over coherent in slabs. Artists go in a lump when they die: dead artists. Dead of drugs Dead young Dead of suicide. The truth is not so easy to tell. The truth is told before death by the artist and cannot be retold after death by anyone else. So they pick over the remains pretending to find truths in what is already decomposed, incapable of speaking. Then they say whatever pops into their heads-something about the 'dead artist'. I don't know about Jimi Hendrix the Dead Artist, but I noticed when he was alive he was quickly consumed and digested, made into something edible by the tense imagination of mob hunger and marketing slobs. But, he was all alive. I saw him do a concert

and he looked alive. to me. The man who worked in secret behind himself remained intact was not eaten died in secret of unknown causes. Even after he stops he's still in there. The ribcage of music shakes with the pounding of many hearts listening for each other's song. Every voice lends a little of itself to every other voice. It is all a single heart beating. Bach Charlie Parker Jimi Hendrix Philip Glass. Across the airshaft (I can see him) a boy sits near the window practicing the clarinet: He's in there, too. For as long as he keeps playing; even after he stops he's part of it. There's the boy Hendrix banging and pulling on the strings in dirty tennis shoes with the tv on. Did he ever get on tv? I don't remember. It was a long time ago.

Come Out Tonight Forecast in chrome and plastic, tyrants breathing out oil, slavery, planet hunger versions of Jackie-O. Sherry, Sherry baby, won't you come out tonight. And the stars whisper like old blood at the edges of the body of night. She stood with one hand on the phone for four hours, poised as only a few seconds had passed. I watched her through the crack between the shade and the sill. She waited for a forecast in human trembling, together with other important women. Come, come, come out tonight. The world suffers for her. The clock hurries like a terrified animal and stops, dribbling saliva. She is eating chicken pie and bubble gum. For a month the Luftewaffe lived on raisins, same with the French after the war. Jackie-O recieved fresh oranges from John Kennedy. Silly girl! She can not put down the telephone reciever. She is waiting to recieve my body of work. She wants to take it into her ear. A modeled flush builds under her cheeks. She eats Christmas candy while she waits. The telephone rings and rings. I am not at home. I am with Jackie-O. We are eating oranges from the President. We are alone on the roof of a Park Avenue penthouse. Picture of Marylin Monroe in my back pocket, molded by heat and sweat to the shape of my buttocks. You are gripping the phone, smiling, eating candy, crying, "I am with the important women now." I am secretly an important man. Hang up the phone, I can't dance with you anymore. Go to your freezer and get a popsicle. Go to your TV. Turn on your TV. You will see me and Jackie-O. Sh e will be taking it in the ear, my body of work. In the planetarium, you will recieve a forecast: I will always be more important than you. You will never be important enough. You will never be on the repent end of slavery, never be the one to wield hunger against humanity. Heaven will never be an extension of your body. Your body will always belong to someone else. The picture of Marylin Monroe flutters across the roof, steaming, shaped like me, shaped like my ass. The sky is filled with oranges during t he war. We eat them. The President is alone in a room. He is unimportant. As we eat his oranges the sky grows blacker. The moon ripens and turns red. It rots and is swallowed by the darkness. You are still by the phone. It is ringing and ringing, dead. Sherry, Sherry baby, won't you come out tonight. It is completely dark. The earth freezes. You put down the reciever and go to the window. Come, come, come out tonight.

'The Onion As It Is Cooked' The bookworks produced by the Flockophobic Press are known for their eccentricity: 'We put words into bottles and boxes, onto menus, maps and oversized noodles.' The oversized noodle in question is a bookwork designed by A.S.C. Rower from a concept by Sally Schneider entitled 'The Onion as it is cooked'. The work comprises a prose poem by Steven J. Bernstein impressed, using a magnesium plate, onto a hand-rolled sheet of saffron pasta. It is accompanied by a packet of desiccant and an envelope with the instruction, 'open after consumption' printed on its flap. The envelope contains a paper copy of the poem and a letterpress colophon. The poem, on the subject of a prospective interview, is written in cryptic free verse, interspersed with lines of a dialogue taking place as an aside along the right-hand margin. The poem contains culinary references throughout and ends with a question in French, which, to all intents and purposes, appears nonsensical, 'Faire savourer vu les oignon comme cuisiner?' In an edition of 100, signed by the author, 'chef' and designer.

A.S.C. Rower, Steven J. Bernstein, Sally Schneider Published by Flockophobic Press New York, USA, 1990 Height 25 cm x width 13 cm NAL pressmark: X920165

In 1991, the specialty artists book press, Flockophobic Press, run by Alexander S. C. Rower (grandson of Alexander Calder and Director of the Calder Foundation), collaborated with Jesse to publish glass, 'wine bottles' to be exact, with labels designed by Alexander S. C. Rower to look like traditional French wine bottles. Jesse's poem "Strip Poker" was printed on one continuous strip of paper and sealed in these specially designed/decorated bottles.

New York: Flockophobic Press, 1991. Limited edition artist 'book' of 200 copies of Jesse's poem 'Strip Poker' in a bottle. 100 - Red topped 100 - Green topped

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