BORN into such a world balbutiant haletant aspirant espérant Where now Boy with your Tante Emilie in her cloche hat a true 1920s flapper with the long dress very décolleté on the fifth-floor running balcony one morning the mountains the white mountains of Alsace in the far distance Where now ghost come back to your early beginnings the first touchings in the first light the first imprints early footprints handprints on the sands of me-me-me je me souviens and I was hiding under a pillow and she calling Lu-Lu-Lulu où est-tu? and she bent over me décolleté Did I not glimpse full happiness then never again the sun just turning the far corner beyond the boulevard the sun shone in the chestnut trees the breeze stirred them though all was silent Nothing stirred the universe holding its breath the eternal morning the first morning of the world in my little crib on the French balcony when she bent over me her hair straight like Louise Brooks curved around the ear Did they call it a bob was it bobbed hair what did I know primary imprint the sun echoing in the chestnut trees les marroniers a voice beyond all time was calling
Aie! Aie!
A far cry a distant singing down to today echoing do I not hear it still I hear Ti Jean Jack Kerouac singing drunk Ti Jean whom Ginzy always tried to make into a gay whereas Ti Jean was straight as they come always chasing skirts before alcohol replaced them Ti Jean built like a lumberjack in plaid shirts and baseball cap you have seen the photos when later he was blotto and bloated a sad story indeed and Ginzy always going for straights whom he loved to convert or at least tried and succeeded sometime suck-seeded at least part-time with for instance Neal Cocksman and Adonis poor sweet Allen not always so sweet yet compassion his great thing he found in Buddhist consciousness lovely Allen always falling in love with straights like Peter whom he converted most of the time at least oh what a tale signifying something by the River Liffey and onward into the sea the sea the great maw the final maw mother of us all father of us all where we come from where we go from Sea sea lapping forever on our shores on its shores lent to us by the sea for this fleeting moment in eternity these fair beaches those far reaches we roost upon but the sea soon will take them back the icebergs melting and all that and humankind the temporary tenant floating toward the precipice unable to stop itself and its self-destruction yes a civilization incapable of solving its problems that are killing it is a decadent civilization sed Aimé Césaire a civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a moribund civilization a civilization that lives by cunning and fraud is a gone civilization or so you would think if you thought at all if I thought at all I might get a glimpse of it la chute the fall the failing the exhaustion of the life force that makes the world go round and round one civilization épuisée foutue and au revoir mes enfants the dusk is coming the dark descending but all is not lost no never all lost as long as Buck can get his pecker up and eat his Mulligan stew no matter what with a pint or two me dandies here’s to you and here’s to all of us including me-me-me I’m still breathing I’m still thinking tick-tick there’s no blood running out not yet at least while I can still put together a consciousness of sorts becoming dumber and dumber day by day Will I never learn the ways of the heart the ways of the mind and which one leads the other oh I see said the blind man who didn’t see at all didn’t see the sea And a river ran through his life through my life a river runs through it mysterious and wisterias while baboons make good bedfellows and tante-pis Les Soldats de l’Éternité now marching around the world through various museums Londres Rome Vienna Paris copies in bronze pants the original clay not fit to travel from eleventh-century China and the great emperor Cin who gave his name to China and began to build the Great Wall in his free time which was infinite having a million slaves to wash his undies with sperm spent on a thousand courtesans and he Cin building his vast tomb a microcosm of his vast kingdom complete with thousands of soldiers and slaves cast in clay plus courtiers and functionaries and servants and peasants and commanders so that he Cin could rule forever over his kingdom after he died aha alas all in vain! his great tomb discovered by a dirt farmer in the twentieth century and all then fallen under the rule of Mao Tse-tung mouse-say-tongue and the Chinese Revolution Mao say tongue-in-cheek ah yes many a year ago and où sont les neiges d’antan? Romanticism is dead or is it and I’m not one to tell in Hell there are no Frigidaires and everyone laid out horizontal unable to climb out Dante’s fire escape with the tour guide Virgil And the whole myth of Heaven and Hell a medieval superstition an ignorant aboriginal construction inventing out of whole cloth a hierarchy a kingdom of a make-believe God invented to escape death-death-death imagining an immortality a transmigration of souls and soul itself an invention to perpetuate me-me-me And I saw God and she was pissed by the Nazi Pope’s fabrications O Lord who told you you have a kingdom anyway for the only Kingdom you have is the Kingdom of the Great Unknown and all we really have is just you and me-me-me in eternity as if eternity itself really existed oh I resisted all that along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Being and Nothingness take your choice How can you prove you’re alive how can you prove it’s not all a dream that everything you are being is not really dreaming as Edgar Poe said it? just like that time when I was fifteen and my first roommate at Mount Hermon School west of Boston an older boy had me down on a rug in our room and would not let me up until I admitted I couldn’t prove I wasn’t dreaming everything and me-me-me crying no no I’m real and you’re real I’m real but he wouldn’t let me up he was big but he was gentle he was Aristotle and Descartes he was a senior and I’d still be lying there if he hadn’t relented like a big brother and not Little Brother Orwell for I was free in the land of the pilgrims’ pride America America before nations were overrun with faceless hordes in search of food and shelter circa 2184 A.D. in another age beyond ours après le déluge where once the sweet birds sang and may or may not sing again and Subcomandante Marcos saying Please excuse the inconvenience but this is a revolution
BUT that old dream keeps coming back at me and finds me always still walking in the great cement city where now and then suddenly some stranger shows up right in front of me like a guy with a flatbed truck who is headed uptown and seems like he’s willing to give me a ride but just as sudden he vanishes in the dusk and again there is no one in the street except me and I keep walking and then just as suddenly a hay wagon appears in front of me with a hayseed driver exhorting his horses to move on but they won’t move as he yells to me to “hop on!” but the horses still don’t move and the whole scene fades away with me still on the pavement, looking for home…
GOD whose invisible proof may possibly exist controls everything through the gates of the sun, all life on earth day and night, night and day, light and shadow, light and total darkness, And wasn’t it clever the way humans have dreamed up gods who can’t be seen invisible gods who hang out in some high place Valhalla or Heaven and have strange names or Greek names or no name at all but in any case can’t be seen or unseen and therefore can’t be proved to not exist yes indeed what a tall tale to tell over and over in temples churches or sin-agogs or other far-out agogs or pulpits made of metaphysics or Pataphysics or psychosomatic syllogistics Lord Lord am I not my brother’s keeper
DON’T hand me that all that blarney about we’re all in the same boat or the same bathtub and don’t throw out the baby with the bathing beauty hubba-hubba so let’s all now together stroke-stroke-stroke I’m the cockswain and you’re the peon rowing for your life while the bare truth is that there ain’t enuf life jackets to go around especially since nobody will stop having babies and it’s every man for himself sal si puedes over and over blam-blam and set ’em up in the other alley and let’s fuck fuck fuck for to fuck is to love again but maybe we can go to the other side of the sun someplace and start a new life a planetary civilization a greater empire of a new benevolent colonialism with us the benefactor spreading capitalism masquerading as Christianity oh man beam me up Scotty there ain’t no intelligent life down here just millions of scrawny humanoids
like ayrabs or other assholes out to kill us but we could use their mineral deposits gold in their closets oil from the lamps of China or anywhere we can get it steal it to keep our cozy cars rolling to keep Autogeddon going and I ain’t gonna get out of my auto for anyone not even you dear god my car is my castle and fuck you peasants the earth is flat in cyberspace and we got the most powerful computers and most overpowering armies so what’s to stop us from conquering the whole world flat or round We’re the victors we set the exchange rates the laws the treaties not worth the paper they are printed on ha-ha we’ll tell you how to breathe all you fuckers trying to destroy us bombing the Twin Towers you little creeps with your pajama clothes and weird religions and who the hell was Mohammed Zoroaster Sufi Buddha-boy Omar Khayyam Rumi smoking hookahs and kicking back we’ll take care of you buddy after the Twin Towers we’ll generate this huge national paranoia allowing our guv to abolish liberty in the land of the free with panic legislation It’s called shock treatment after any disaster we move in and take over and South of the Border is where we’d like to go with every dame every señora that comes along with her promised land the vulva O lay me down I love it aye mates to the breach the dawn is coming and your señorita won’t be blooming forever So now where was I the original mail chauvinist pig dancing on the rim of the world on the first and the last frontier and all that Onward Christian Soldiers and Love Thy Nabor only it’s tough-love tough-tiddy and I do love tiddies give me to suck and fuck I love you oh yes and how many times in your life have you said I love you how many times to how many people have you said it how many times did Mister Proust say it when they were doing their cattleya A voice beyond the earth was calling and did the earth move for you whispered that lover in the sack for whom the bell tolled as if eternal love were only while the earth shook eternal love only for a day and how long is eternity anyway if you can see it in a grain of sand and it’s always two people in a pod and that’s our story And I’ll never forget I’ll never forget…what’s-her-name what’s-his-name light of my life gay or straight oh how I loved that asshole have I anything more to say I’m getting dumber and dumber every day and when at last I attain enlightenment I will know Nothing which is the ultimate asininity while light is what it’s all about light makes Mary-go-round and all you can do is reach for the brass ring as you whirl about around and around ta-ta Don’t tell me this is a wooden horse I’m on in a circle of golden chariots with gilt horses caparisoned with golden reins and riders leaning out to catch the golden faux-golden ring and if someone catches one another at once pops up to replace it just like consumer society, vero? and I’m whirling about and the world whirls with me the round earth that is not the faux flat one on the world wide web yeah so is it the real round man or the faux flat man who will rule the world in the future in any future if there is one? oh what a question as if there could be an answer and the dawn coming up like thunder out of China ’cross the bay on the road to Mandalay or Nirvana or samsara or paradise in a spaghetti Western and John Wayne on his real horse leading the charge over the far horizon over the last frontier to the final shore and the white sand beaches and the immigrants’ dream come too true and lost among the consumer-gatherers And everything’s gone straight to Hell since Sinatra played Juarez
BUT seize the night, she said, carpe diem carpe notte, Lay down lie down with me she said and it was a womb lost in time it’s time for us to lie down together now you and me as if we were the first two people the first lovers the first man and woman or woman and woman or man and man for the first time in the dawn of the world and we’re the first beasts the first humans to conceive of love beyond sex Yes she said first we must get beyond sex we must go through it yes and not because it is a chore no indeed it is a lovely thing a joy the first joy of all the ecstasy sweet singer hear my song and it is not a sin to lie nude together in innocence and ecstasy before the first preacher pasted the fig leaves on us although not upon all the other beasts of the forest the silent savages still on four legs oh no we were singled out to lose our innocence while the rest of the animal world was left to roam free of guilt free of gelt which soon crept into our special picture ah so here we are and let us lie down again as in the first light bend down bend down and kiss my body everywhere kiss my breasts my vulva kiss my penis over and over for I am you and I am every sex at once one on one the two of us are one sex one breathing body breathing love without even knowing what love is as if love were only bodies stuck together fill me with your love of me my body your body in me oh I am you indeed I feel it I am all of you and you are all of me and our eyes have it our eyes in each other’s eyes as if to tell all to reveal all as if two beings could ever be one could ever really melt into each other absorbing all of the other and becoming the Other and is that love is that the ultimate lure only reached through the portal of bodies afire only reached through those portals of desire fellaheen barbare hairy beast I take you into me and the earth shakes in me in us and this the male fantasy and the female fantasy something else perhaps a final charade between two bodies hungry for love beyond bodies and Drive she said into the heart of being Drive she said and be happy oh happy he or she who sights the light of day dear light sweet light light of your eyes light of my eyes Is there anything else that counts light of our days the morning light early morning light that pours in over the rooftops through the leaves of trees through their lovely branches stretched to the rising sun ah love let us be true to one another let us love one another lover and lover brother and brother sister and sister are we not all one in the early morn are we not part of the landscape bathed by the sun of all our days that falls equally on all yet as it falls creates its own inequalities light and shade light and shadow ombre and lumière deep shadow casting all in doubt casting half of us into darkness making us dark making us part of night the shadow of a man his negative a photo-negative to develop in the photo-developer the ambient solution of air and everything that surrounds us war and peace holocausts and winds seas lapping at the shores of our lives breathe in breathe out with the universe the world turns breathing in the cosmos green planet seen from space turning and turning brown with the bad breath of machines Am I repeating myself while with our computers we turn into plastic machines of flesh and bone and how will the flat earth look from outer space a round orb turning into noir and us on it as on a lost ship in a Bermuda Triangle all sails set and a smoking pipe on the captain’s table a half a bottle of cognac and the chronometer still ticking tick-tick Let us go then you and me-me-me the heroes and the heroines of this endless tale about to end but I haven’t even gotten into the story yet the story of he-he she-she he-she-she-he me-me hidden among the rest of humanity as if we were humane whereas and wherefore we are maybe all insane and the whole world a madhouse the earth the place the rest of the universe has decided to put all the nutcases that ever existed so that so that they would be isolated and not spread their madness like a virus to all other creatures sentient or not all over the rest of the cosmos our crazy strain of genes propagating its own mad life on earth
Little Boy Page 3
