Sapo Negro Issue #47 Cover I had the oportunity to create for art show of magazine cover series from the Brainchild of Russian artist Deems. (back a few years ago)....
There was only one way out of this place. The ham, serrano, was good and processed. half melted on the counter, with no intention of interesting any vagrant. The dubliner, firm, two pieces of yellow un toasted toast to toast the occasion. every conflagration that requires one to bring out a flask and suck it's tip. The conversation, a broken record with mad lib lines to fill in the interesting "parts" as someone would say. Didn't help that fact that the whiskey found it's home on Fulano's tongue. The place smelled of ashes, rust, and Wednesday's tuna. The flask, a concealed weapon, kept it's secrets hidden. Together. The beats would not be missed tonight. The canteen of the brothel bedouin. The trumpet blaring in the back of the head, miles away the waves hitting the shore. That shore. Lonely shore, that waited for no one. called to him, but waited for no man. Waited for no congregations of the counseled, couch cackling, coke cake eating, cock in a speedo wearing corsicans. It did call to him. A subconscious entrail, a jealous jellyfish, a cold train to paris after a hot night in Tunisia.
Heroes weren't dead. God wasn't dead. Hitler hid out in a castle made of sand where the crosstown traffic made him remember those machine guns and he sat their crying. Stalin became a painter, and Mussolini, well we all know too well got stuck playing bass for that asshole Glen, misfit that he was.
But mother. Mother. The children are still coming up this way. Coming up the road to see the accident. Coming up the road to see the truck spilling habaneros near the havana. Spilling chilies like blood, covering the concrete with sugar, the lunatics have sex while sky diving into that magic truffle mushroom's magenta. Pigs that they are. Who cares if that trumpet hits that note? That high note over the sun?
The fingers kept tapping on the table. Knees, hell bent on instructing the feet on where to go. As usual. When did this galaxy turn into Gattaca? You have out to hide out in places like these to get to know no one, and make sure no one gets to know you. Where flesh forgets sin, and fish forgive the bathers for not frying them in the hot sun. Penultimate fan watching the entire room. Back and forth. The pentagon was empty. The pentagram pointed south. That edge where the tip touches the earth on that green paper, scraping the skin.
Writers need room. Trumpets need space. A naked woman needs a canvas. The rest of them need dollars to spend on that umbrella strip pole that kills the vaginal rain from pouring water in to that river. Walden. Whitman, and now just fucking Waldo. Fuck Waldo. Fuck waiting. Fuck water. Whiskey. If I could fuck whiskey, then make mine well. so the taste stays with me the next week. The sweat out out of my pan pipe can be smelt in the next train car. A man once never said to me, "suicide if there's no whiskey." Well then, just enough to get through this night. To whisk me away to that place, where the dead chase you through empty rooms in empty mansions and never speak.
Writing, is like fucking. No. Fucking is a dog in an alley, covered in mud, performing Wagner's ride of the valkyries. Penetrating that dripping playstation that has no end credits. Breaking that brick wall with the backside and buttocks of the betrothed. Writing is smoking a cigarette, laying on his back on the floor. Momentary memory still dripping on an upside down Tunisian rug, passed down from the family, covered in the the cum of saints and the confessions of sinners. El ingles no sirve para lo que escriben. No tiene animo, ni animal en sus palabras. Solamente qiuere placer el prosista.
Who says you can't write in two languages? Quien dijo? Bernay's to Bernie if you get the clues so far. But most of you are so far away you don't see the eye land. Glass and ice don't do whiskey justice. It must be the nickel or metal of the flask that give it that kick. In your throat. In your thoughts, to keep everything moving along. easier to pass to a partner. The words are running now, flowing out of your head. The great writers listened to jazz. The playwrights, silence( people screaming upstairs from their apartments). The musicians, (sitting on their fire escapes) the street. The cars, the traffic, the urgency to get somewhere. The roads that people needed to be on. Every occasion a silent drift of space would come in between, a lull, allowing memory to stand on the corner of the three story storage space that buzzed tween midnight and dawn.
Melody didn't care that i stripped. The whiskey was a fireman in four five one. I was a book near a candle. The bonfire began. The walls caught on . The ceiling had a feeling. It wasn't the first time I had penetrated the posterior passageway of a dolly parton with my dewey decimal digits. Index, first. I was a gentleman. After a five finger distant country did i decide that a coup de etat was necessary to evolve the meditation to another situation. I simply took a train from the wheat station to the sugar cane plantation. Not since the poolsides of an ulterior motive in the Arizona desert, by a kitchen stove, had I decided to enter such palaces broadsword in hand. She asked. We thought deeply about it for a few hours.
The escalator was at the other end of the platform. Trains slid in and slid out of the station from both sides. Doors opened and people got out. Other people got in, and doors closed. The platform was full. Again. It was always full of people coming and going somewhere. Musicians sitting somewhere playing the soundtrack to their lives. Rumble, swish. Pause. Pum, Pum. Horse stampede. pause. Horse stampede. Pause. Swish, screech, rumble.
Melody knew that it was dangerous to play with water in the space station. Scott told everyone he played with fire up there from time to time. His Twitter account had photos of it. She thought she could do one better. At the next video conference for Nasa, she played around with a water bubble. That showed him. That showed all of them. The firmament was intact and the water outside wasn't going to penetrate on her watch. It was a tough job. Sitting up in the air for weeks and months, just watching the seas above the skies. But, she was patient, and it would soon pay off. That first step so many years ago in that empty desert where they saw an eagle land, would still stand for something. Even if she knew that she could never tell anyone that something that she knew.
So, the escalator. Is still at the other end of the slowly elongating platform. But, I have to get through all the people that are coming in my direction. Today, we recorded again. Trying to finish an album takes time. takes finesse. Takes a lot of gear. Now, I was with most of this gear. Alone at this 59th St. station. searching for an elevator. A modern minstrel on a mission. I have my guitar strapped to my back, with no outer case. An old mexican made fender stratocaster that had seen it's day. But, as chance would have it, bought back from the dead. Black, covered with stickers, an eye of providence, and a , "Squirrel, it's whats for dinner," sticker in big fat rat bastard yellow colors.
The finger guard is covered with a tiny comic book story about a man in the middle of the night. A man journeying through the night, in search of a kidnapped moon. The sequestered son of the sun. You see, no one knew who took the moon. It was believed that a man threw a rope up and lassoed it for love. For a girl. But, that was another fairy tale. This was not that story. In this story, the moon is gone. Missing. You ever see the night sky when the moon is in it's death phase? It's as if it's not even there. Strange thing is, if it is there, wouldn't you just see a black circle surrounded by stars? Hmm. I hadn't thought of that until now. So where is the moon then? Or maybe I just never noticed on those nights. How many nights has it been since I've been a kid? Well in the story, the main character Samuel, goes searching for a moon that hasn't been seen in more than a month. The people in the story started to get scared that the moon just up and fell off of it's plane, down into, or is it up into? space. Or someone or thing either stole the moon, or vaporized it. And just like that, nights became darker. Lovers and poets lost their way. Who was to guide them now? What was to bring the tides in? The oceans, laid there motionless. But it has only been a month. There was artificial lighting everywhere. People could see. They had their cellphones and candles. But what would become of this new night?
You see the nights of no moon were, to the pagans, a night of ritual. A night of bringing in new ideas. A night of sacrifices and Bacchus orgies of wine and flesh. But all this was in the hopes that the new moon would come. Breathing new life into whatever was asked for on the eve of. If the moon never returned, what will become of this new way. With the nightlight gone, that flashlight over the seaman's desert, there would be nothing there to guide them. caress them.
Apparently, I spend a lot of time thinking about the moon, the earth, the sun, the stars, the firmament, Copernicus, Scully, and Moulder, but without all the alien agendas and ancient stuff. Just the thought that we are floating or hurling through space. Space. SPACE. When you have space in a room. Hang on. space and room can be the same thing. Space is either a location where you put your things, this can also be your room. If you have space, which you can have in a room, then there are less things in the room leaving a lot of space there. You can also have a lot of room in your space as well, and room in you room to put things in the space left by the emptiness of the room. Hence space. This is what happens when you too much time on your hands and are sitting in your space, or room, contemplating these things. Which leads me to that other space. The one outside of the Earth, or surrounding the Earth, that goes on forever in every direction and has tons of stars in them(which we came from), or nothing in it and it is just a fake creation of the people in room 237. Either way it's a bit to think about. And yet, we don't. We don't talk about it.
Space is the elephant in the room left by the lull in the conversation about non-space. Just for the record, if there was nothing (lots of empty space) before the big bang, and space (lots of room in an otherwise empty space filled with some stuff) after, then where does that leave us? It's a big mind fuck that no one is paying attention to, like this story, which no one is reading, except for you.
Speaking of which, how come on their three day journey to the moon, no one took pictures? I take an hour car ride, and I take at least a few pictures of the sun and the landscape and other people. But, space? First time seeing it and you don't wanna record it? They had windows. There were three astronauts. Three guys, three days, not one picture? Is space boring? Was there really nothing out there? They obviously knew how to use them Hasselblads on the moon.
I watched the conference the astronauts had when they returned from the Apollo 11 mission. I got the impression that they were bored. Not excited to return after a journey that No One had taken before. No excitement. enthusiasm nil. What happened in space? What happened on the moon? Did they see something they couldn't talk about? Large strobe light looking aliens? There was more written about Columbus, Marco Polo, and tons of other people that were the "first" to step on dirt. Some dirt far away from the dirt they lived on. Still, the dirt from this Earth. But, these guys stepped on the moon! The first guy to do that came back to tell everyone about it, and what does he do at the conference? Just sits there, waiting for it to be over. Looking like a guy who wished he never took that step for all mankind. This, is probably why some people think the Eagle never landed. But, most don't look at it that way. They look at the photos. They look at the images of the ship, and the lighting, and they look for all the possible reasons why they couldn't have gone. All they had to look for was sitting right in their faces. Those three guys. Out there, somewhere, for at least a week, and came back from a vacation from Everyone with no stories. I get it. There are no bars up there. There are no landmarks to take pictures of. No natives to learn things from. I get it. It was just a cold, dark, death, star, of a small planet/satellite with no life. No stories. Nothing to see. Nothing to say. Keep it moving people. But wait! we are going to Mars now!!! (See how easily get distracted?)
There is a man somewhere on the internet that believes that the moon is just a hologram. His name isn't Truman. The bible and the people in it, believe that there is a dome covering the Earth. A firmament. Outside of that dome, is space, or more water, depending on how you take in your oxygen.
In my right hand, 2 amps on a luggage cart, A brothel red 20 watt fender amp, and a smaller black Peavey for some kick. On top of them, some microphones in a solid carry case that would otherwise be used to carry large amounts of cash, drugs, or illegally imported whoopie cushions. But I haven't seen that day yet. Finishing the leaning tower of Bill Gate's Babel, an M-Audio interface board. Long, sleek, and covered in the front with beautiful shiny knobs. The back flushed with ports, and portholes for balanced beams and XLR cables, that connect unbalanced tight rope walking tune makers to the ballast of an newly created Itunes page.
An unrolled, crushed cigarette messes about in my left pocket. Tobacco everywhere in there. I can feel the little crunches every time my arm swishes past that spot. I put my hand in there and feel the dry shards of plant life, that once covered some green field in Virginia, Mars. Hung up to dry, like so many of us. Waiting for someone to pull us out, roll us up, smoke us, and exhale our souls into the beautiful bleak blue.