Beepee City Blues

Awake in a captured American city,
wide awake, uncommon and conquered
by Beepee, of thee I sing: see the greenish
star sign, flag of my new queen, no king ...

And so this is the new valley, forged
by a poisoned sea. You see? I stared
into your dark and bubbling gurgle
of gore, too long, and now I have lost
my heart, owning my death, drowned
and alive, in little bubbles of grease ...

And yours, in these hours, drifting back
into sleep now, uncovering the brown loam
of anguished grief, in the Paris of the prairie,
dreaming of the fairies, who bleep my name,
cursing my overdone disinfected dysfunction ...

At discourse with the junction of light and dark,
on my electronic ark, loading the animals now,
my music, your now now and mine, to thine
angels we seek truth, cruel, my belly, your barrel
of hell, spelled out now in the sweet spice
of good medicine, served in a box of Davey Jones,
containing my heart at the bottom of the gulf
between me and you ...

Bank of American Blues

The pedestrian road rager
sat down and listened to the deaf man,
can to string to broken cracked can man,
confessing he worked with Steven Spielberg's dad
in 1957, when they were drumming up plans
for a main frame computer program
to undo the earth, the heart, our American home,
from Huns to Hunstra, who came to a Southwestern
desert, house-built by the mob, dreamed up in Vegas,
to the compromised creosote landscape
of hornytoads and rattle snakes nabbed
in trash cans, tumbleweeds built up
along fences, a witch hunt for the wilds;
He who came to town for General Electric,
He who died on a Sunday afternoon
in a small plane crash in New Mexico,
flying back from the East, when Gee Hee,
very shortly thereafter, gave up on taikos
and the remaining Promethean games
games to come, working for golf putter
designers, golf coursey hunters of the bank
of American dreams as I now enter
the sleek confines, the cat box catcher
of red and white walls and fixed furniture,
with not much blue anywhere, not much else
but blue type spelling "Bank of America,"
lots of beeping noises, alerting the authorities
of the dangerous Danton armed to rob you,
with his big assed damn scary pen, strange
and haunted, shell-shocked eyes,
home loads of red, charged off years ago,
in overdraft fees that should be given back
to the people you croaked, the dead peasants
you croaked with check systems given out
like blankets to nineteenth century Apaches
to gather accounts made up of less than zeroes,
for third-party collection companies,
as the wind cries Mary ...

A Corporation
Recipe to Serve Man

Specialize
Create niches
Differentiate
Provide top quality, as perceived
by customer, to provide superior
service, in tangibles
to achieve extraordinary
responsiveness,
prescriptions for a world
made upside down
to launch an over-the-counter
revolution for diseased adults
so they can make for better
sales and service to blind victims,
who now listen, obsessively,
to your practiced swipes
of international card counters,
who have no concept in mind
of who the counter revolutionary
revolutionaries might lurk,
the encouraged poets of everything,
worked to death, worked to everything
but dreaming, worked to death until dropping
to support fastened failures of Chinese
plastic toys over the Christmas holidays,
O Christs of change, pocket follies,
for improved taxation purposes,
if for nothing else ...

Create corporate
capacity for more innovation
while reducing everyone elses
capacity to do anything
but train and re-train
for false employment guarantees
of securities of exchange
for status slaves ...
reduce ...
reduce ...
reduce ...
And then serve ...

~ Phoenix, Arizona

Dog Star Blues

Tough to run, but not too tough
Tough to walk on the morning tufts
of grass in your fields of earth

Your fields of earth are enough
They are enough

Stragglers will be left behind
in the alleys of deceit
and wild animal violence
driven like the tides

Getting a feel for the sun
in the dog park

Life in the dog park
alive in the dog park,
life making me a doggie
dinner, a life made of bad girls
running with me, jumping
into pools of water

But I don't recall seeing you
and I don't recall being seen
and I don't recall when I was me

You never knew me,
the me you never knew,
but knew you well enough
to say, trust me me, say
just go ... I'll say, I told you so

Mt. Pleasant, Iowa

Deconstruction of Arizona

Arizona, I don't recognize you anymore
Your creosote roots lie beneath
the perfect piles of McDonalds parking lots

Arizona, an unequal symmetry
of rubble piles collect
Ten thousand miles from here

Arizona, you are responsible ...
The middle-aged businessman
with expendable income
sweats for pleasure

Arizona, when can I stop sweating?

I swear in the heat like a pizza oven
Arizona, you are a car part store
but you got no glass to see through
and the beige collection
of air-conditioned caves
are conditioned to respond
in all the right meets wrong ways

The forests are in ashes
as the governor gapes
from a helicopter high
for the diversionary tactic
of the the unrael politic


Arizona, I can find no fluid,
no friend, nor car phone
to lean on
for company

By GPS,
you can find me in the living room,
darkly lit, with rayolight flashing
bible black blurbs

Arizona, not even Ginsberg
would gripe about your tripe,
so blurred with anonymity
hell hardly matters anymore

Arizona, my life's belonging
sare melting in a storage facility
and there are more things that beep
here than I can count

Arizona, you haven't hassled me for a while,
though I'm a loose cannon at the mousy mouth
roaring at the corporate big box store

The world is flooding, bleeding, burning
and all of the above
as you dry up and blow away

Arizona,
a kid almost got crushed in your parking lot
and I went to one of your social service buildings
and was amazed about how many homeless lurks
were sleeping in the lobby,
dreaming of Mississipi burning

Arizona, I can't get assistance at the cash register
and the mountains are closed, cats run free
and all the lizards are gone
Arizona, you are sucking in souls,
eating them, spitting them out,
at very low wages ...
of sin ... I suppose ...

Arizona,
I think you should battalion
the borders with snow
and big bad bars of soap

~ Paradise Valley,
Arizona

Mingo, Kansas, Exit Twenty Two

We all fell
like thieves
through the day,
the sudden cloud,
shadows of sentiment
and fully sentient
unbeings, unfeeling, unquieted
watch like angels over our shoulder,
shouting up new storms, loudly ...
~ Mingo, Kansas, exit. 22

Marshall, Marshal, Martial ...

As anyone who watched
Wallace and Ladmo knows,
Marshal "Martial" Good
died jumping through the window
of the Twin Towers
holding the last known
photocopy
of the Fourth Amendment

Which is why now
in the Verde Valley
the toothless methheads
just wave their rights
before the dogs arrive

Superman search
has rendered
search and seizure
asunder

Which is why Dick Cheney
can bring his shotgun
into the Pink Pony
and steroids are the drug
of choice before Sarge says,
"Let's be careful out there."

Marshall law provides cover
to the car part store
of the mind

Marshall law is broadcast
behind pulled-in blinds,
spitting out Bible black blurbs
... just ask your doctor

Marshall law is so grisly
in Meachamite-glories,
the Constitution hardly
matters anymore

Marshall law is punishment
society

And as anyone who laments
for Marshal "Martial" Good
might remember,
we adore our enforcement
with a tinge of tragi-comedy
Which is why the photo radar
captures images
of Sheriff Joe
out breathalyzing tonight
so breathless and bluesy...

Which is why soon
Marshall law will battalion
the border with snow ...

~ Tonto

Searchlight Serenade

Momma def poppa
returned from their
red, white and black
road racer rally car
trip to Nevada
dehydrated
from drinking
too much tea

On the way back
they discussed
checking the brakes
at the East India
Trade-In Company
then stopped off
at the Wal-Mart
to buy a Krate
of Klassic Koke,
an eighty-four percent share
in Monsanto korn seed,
Kool Aid for the kids,
got home (paid for), checked
the U.S. Mail, tested the Teev-Ho
for the latest on the NFL draft,
and any new instructions
from Poppa Bear
on how
to resist
socialism
and thought
control

Unlike the usual church sermon,
they still had visions of posterized
black-faced Obamas dancing
in their heads and their bull eyes
kept konjuring the kulars:
Black, white and red ...

They found the kids at home,
waiting, playing Monopoly ...
They were playing with their
children, and the children
of their children ...

Momma def Poppa
had just missed the debate
about the rule about the rule
about the rule of how and when ...
you simply toss the board
and start over again
when nobody
has any
money


Reshuffle the deck ...
Good game theory ....


Despite the appeal
to those eeking
it out on Baltic Avenue,
too many remained
unconvinced the gig
was up, and they klung
like bees at the bank window
to their paper money
hearts
of reds, black and white,
to their pixilated imaginations
of digitized seas of more time,
more money
waiting to appear
if they just pray and work
hard enough

Meanwhile, Pablo sat
out on his porch
listening to Norteno
way too loud
into the night
since it was a full moon
and he could still
dream of amnesty
and learning how
to read
Thomas Paine

The Solar Bath

She awoke
shapely but shaken
And I watched her bathe
In blinding electricity
Beneath the solarized sky
Tiamat met Zeus
Were unable to reach
The porch to punish her
And over the cornfields
Of Republicanated Iowa
Thunder a’ trumpeted,
And Tesla’s lightning
Failed to defeat her,
And solar light bounced
Off the feet of her
Bouncing upwards
Off the earth, to fire
Up the weaponized,
Quite culinary clouds
On the ninth
anti-anniversary
Of September Eleventh
She awoke shapely but shaken
As the neighborhood watchers
Faded away like gargoyles,
Draconian unbeings,
As the Ta’ Iowan
dawn made
The winds sing
A new day, and all
The old fucked up
Old ghosts all
But ran away
I watched her bathe
In electricity last night
As we watched the watchers
And then all of the watchers
Started signing in Morse Code
And before dawn we chased
Each other around
Wondering which one
Was pretending to be
The scariest and smartest
of them witches on
the mirror ball wall
And internationalist
Viagran huntsmen fumbling
For newsy spells to foul
The electrician’s switches
As the shapely but shaken
Wake up call doomed up
A first breath of hurricane fires
Churning up in the earns of the earth
And I imagined how the tectonics
Of how the globe might burst
Sending more seawater, yes,
Up from down below,
Way way way down below
More even than
the moon can send
if Zeus ever came back
to toss that old rock
down again
And before dawn she bathed
In a lake of fire
Sent down from the sky
And we all chased down
The shapely but shaken
Without causing a ruckus
Or a Venusian star
to start screaming
About her long lost
Gothic Civil rights

El Cathedral

Light leaking through the trees
in a voice of sun music
as a Jesuit-taught cowboy
poking gruff holes through
the forest, a well-worn
horse-made trail ...

In the morning's blaze
Sunshine Peak smiles
through touristas
in hangover cobwebs
after a night's
culture shock therapy ...

She is kind, but wise and cautious
as the deer but fearing nothing
except for the coming bulldozers
and coyotes of commerce
preying on the young, the weak ...

(Ah, the weak,
now there's some
cheap meat ...)

And it wouldn't be here
in the future, which is today,
and yesterday is just
this poet's old ghosts ...
roamin' ...

The next day and for years
after that, Set would go on nibbling
on greens, for no one,
said Horus, the hawk,
could crunch on greens
better than Set ...

Among he are those times
is monies folks, old blokes,
who pushed women around
for centuries, like cattle,
due to God's half-written call

And they were good
intentioned men,
just like me ...
who went home,
all unsatisfied,
to beat on their wives,
to then sleep for another day
with their brokers, pork belly
stokers, livin' among chain
smokers, all bragging about
how they had this girl and that girl,
when, in fact, they had not ...

She is kind, and wise
and no longer
free to be
alone ...

~ Persperide,
Colorado
(originally written
in the summer of 1996,
now updated for you,
the consumer)

The Rivalry

The sun came up cold, wolf-nosed,
with its business being your business,
and I knowing neither north nor south
and the divided elusive spheroid lands,
a football chopped into the Tao of two,
half cheese, half butter, all corn-fed,
rolling a gutter wash flood of drunk
monkeys into an Iowan university town ...

Saint Hayden Fry,
a cash-in-carrion
mixture of cow tippin',
tow truck drivin',
methane dispensin',
hawkwind huntin'
demythologian,
dark sunglass wearin',
Jim Jonesian hero cult
leader of the local FBI ...

Scoured and scorched
pump and dumpin' fear
into the rectangular fronted
armies of black-and-blue
burned bloody armies,
yellow hawkwind beaked,
technocratic beepee
station technocratic
fire and ice breakers
of split-levelled skyboxers
pointin' binoculars top-down
onto the grassy flats of evils
won and lost beneath
the split-level sky

A remote viewing post-toasty
hosting a contagion of baddass
battalions of flankers and big-necked
booboos, uneven into elevens,
spinning once snapped
into sun-punished twenty twos,
balancing their rises and falsies
just like the American Civil War ...

Except now the uniforms
are more graphically beautified
and the forward pass unpunted,
as opposed to the run and gas
is rewound into the awkward
remains of unconsecrated,
polyunsaturated ground ...

And there's always, outside the box
the African-American man,
remade as black boy,
who was once a believer,
shaking a broekn banana in town
since now he's unable to reach
anymore money-grubbing,
property owner theiving thieves
on the apartment rental emergency phone
in order to earn his martyred manger
for his hollowed out poverty mole mound ...

You, season ticket holder,
may have never known him
as more than a mere jersied number
but he came to school
with airy Jordan skills
glitters of jittering futurtastic
static plastic stars
in his decieved eyes

And I remember a hooded
bulldogger, drill sargeant,
screaming, "Are you a pussy?
Are you a pussy? You are just
a plain pussy, aren't you?"
I remember dirt seat and scarecrow
scared, gasping from behind my facemask ...
I remember being emasculated
for the terrifying linebacker's task
of using my helmeted Hopi head,
full of old Gaelic soul, wordy woes,
to fill a gawdamn imagined hole
so he could go home and howl
to his half-deaf bored overweight wifey
that being a wannabe Vince Lombardi,
now there, bitter cherry berry,
now, that's the life ...

Animal mind controlled
on fields of stolen gold
prairie son bloodied
all skylighted to maintain
Romanesque economies
of momentary plunder
between waves and waves
of beer and truck commercials,
church churned into jars of cash
and coins jingling into thunder ...

Yeah, Hayden Fry ...
Here's my greatest wish
to broadcast on my hopeless
limping satellite dish:
I hope that when they carry
you in that grand parade to your
tummy tucked tomb
that they bury you alive
with Iowa license plates
tattoed to your ethanol eyes ...


Thunderbolt

The Reformed
Presbyterian Church
was hit by a thunderbolt
and Morning Sun, Iowa
was rendered back to the year
Nineteen Fifty One

And brother Jesus
sat on his Cardinal corner
with the ghosts of three gauzy
British colonial columns
behind him, more than twice
the height of the man
commanding them,
who lives four or five
times more often in life
than in death,
but who's counting?

Meanwhile, the local fire captain,
Tom "Torch" Lawyer
sits as the Grand Poopba
in the unmarked Oddfellows Hall ...
He, a Big Brother, of the weather map
and he sings, "O Hey, Gaia, what did I do?"

"O yeah, there was that, and that and that ...
I'm so sorry angry sun, sorry for this,
sorry for that ... O Kracken King Igor,
heavy weather hanging from across the plains
to the mountains once made pleasant
from Denver, Colorado
to Bloomington, Indiana:
Where John Cougar Mellencamp
is still wearing his hard hat ...

"Please, O Kracken,
spare me your change
and please spare
me some of my favorite
old mason bricks,
and spare me
from my brats

"Leave me one
Rosetta stone
and at least three
favored stocks
for six hundred
and sixty six
Fortune 500 companies
and please sponsor
my one last storm rider
so he can broadcast,
like Paul Revere in silver
my long last broadcast
on the Weather Channel
on Ruppert Murdoch's
Blue Ray Disc-shaped
magic Thunderbird carpet,
so that music can still be
piped in like rock'n'roll
in a cowboy hat
at the local Wal Mart

"And spare me your golden
spike in natural gas,
your January jolt
in coffee prices,
and spare me your sanguine
advice on what to expect
and spare me your photo radar
lanes used by Fed Ex,
and spare me your
weaponized Pineapple Express
as it tingles a trio
of water spouts
across the forty eighth paralell

"But please remind me later
to use a higher quality
white ashy paint
so I can smile upward
with a stun gun kept
quite safe behind my back
as I move beneath overhanging
chemtrail inspired clouds
to keep my doormats dry
when you try to reclaim
your honestly inward saints

"And tell that bastard
Mr. Ringo, he's running
out of time, and though
he bought a Wal Mart sold
Chinese-made plastic compass
that we have him lined up
in our electronic eye sights
and he'll never get across
King Henry the Eight's
magical river line

"Because, you see,
Medicare doesn't cover
everything,
especially his supposedly
secure bright and sunny
horizons, or bullets
or my elitist religious conceits
because he can't use his cell phone
or even mark a fully mastered retreat
with the sunspots buzzing up auroras
against his great hope for liberties
because they will always cost him more
than his lonely Roosevelt socialist dime

"Say a big hello
to that second toughest
man in America,
that next-to-last Templar
because I can see, feel and read
the second coming of Joan of Arc
sleeping in her shrine ...
'Coswe all know there's nothing
more exhausting than inaction
and his sacred pen as shotgun
won't bring his dead doggies back

"So hey! Angry Solari,
let's just say it was all
a good old boy's
misunderstanding
and even if the annointed We
run the risk of getting heart arrested,
or if sanctified gloomy We
speed through our Freemason made
towns, rocket launched
at the speed
of thirteen million
miles per hour,
and even if Johnny Ringo
can teach himself
to silence the two stormy
coasts in the centered
silences of his mind,
we can cut off his touch
to Taiowa her in Iowa
in order to remain in Tombstone
to review the cannons loaded,
in the late afternoon aspenglow,
as they are pointed
at Cochise's last stronghold
so that we, alone, can enjoy
the bonny bones of Norteneo
from our weaponized
plastic transister radio,
nor can he enjoy sweet
Maggie Marlowe, sleeping
in nicotine terrified migraines
without a tweet in our jail-baited
basements humming up thunder
from our cold dark basements
down below, so we can
keep up our plans to sell off
glassified dead scorpions
to the last of the plutocratic
touristas at the high noon
military movie show."

~ Douglas McDaniel,
Morning Sun, Iowa


Lost Hero Blues


Laying down his bones
in the dispossed back alley,
the bone man shivers in the streetlight
Ambushing archers, waiting in the wood,
keep a keen eye far into the distance for the enemies of love
She picks up his bones breathes flesh from her stone,
but then walks away, stinging his flesh with a slap to awake him
Leaving his bones, again ...
Le Heusero died again, and he lingers here, beneath this tree,
as the corridor waits to hear the song of the beautiful man
whose legend is told from hill to hill,
mountain to mountain & sea to misty sea.


Information Disease

After seeing the morning light

through three motel room windows

the dog came out, delivered by a member

of the Select Committee to Keep Me

From Doing Anything But Writing Poetry

and in that morning blight, the red and yellow light

yellow as the angry sun, degenerated all of mankind

into a dumbed down cromagmun gun, that, lacking

any more access to information, imagined itself into a slick

And just as fast, although less permanent,

in the corner of my eye, the profound Eris of the deep

caught up with conversation with an heiress of the Grand Old Party

and the earth's unpleasant grip on the dominion of sin quaked, rattled, rolled

and water vapor seeped up, toward the earth's surface, from underground and flowers

bloomed louder and we all got younger and the wind softened and daylight sent love sighs

into the breeze

~

Douglas McDaniel,

Morning Sun, Iowa

Beneath the Surface

Meanwhile, at the Gothic Art show,
where the library of Alexandria
has failed to burn down,
due to better security
and more available stone,
the question gets asked,
but there is always a chance
for a follow-up question
and the mysteries are further
along, which is to say, more science,
less so magic ... but why roil of crosses?

Why is it written down at all?
Why was it written, or read, upside down?
Why should a Book be painted in two-thirds,
Magdalene in richer surroundings,
revealed with a pot of Lily
in the foreground to foretell
the coming and going of Joan of Arc?

Why would God need to read down,
creating the need to leave the Book
pointed up in order to ascertain
that which the Creator already knows?

In the Book of Kells
the Gaelic kept
the coming and going,
waiting to leave and weave
out in a swirl of possibilities,
in a dervish tree-mind of Nature ...

O, how such details are wasted
on Jesus believers in a hurry
to get home to watch the Dallas Cowboys
down from above ... They, who have found
such easy answers on the surface, maybe a halo,
a hoot, in the institutions of the arts,
who drives their hairy chariots
across the bones of the Blood
of Jesus, always the little boy,
always the Man, the Saint!

O sure, O sure,
the Iris isn't Eris
for sorrows or such fools,
for neither minnows or Bulls,
for the peacocks or for Pride,
or for Paradise
or for the AOL
of the mind ...

For Fibonacci?
For factories in Flanders?
Do we blame the Dutch ... really?
The Dutch? And speaking of towns,
tongues and virgins, unchurched,
but, all the same able to act
quite natural, but hidden for sight
in those visceral bones of sacred light,
the arcana of the Black Madonna
in from views but taller than them all
in the geometric sacred Twin Towers
of Solomon ... for Hieronymous Bosch,
who liked the challenge of harbors
in disorders and hidden orders
to synthesize the Dhambala,
the Sirius, the Dog Star ...
in order to ask O why, o why
or why ...

Fer Bermuda, Aye!

For those about
to wake up
for their next
tropical depression:
I blow a kiss
and an antidote
loaded with Vitamin D

For my brothers
and sisters,
weak, picked on,
flipped on their backs
like doomed sea turtles
for the past twenty years:
I push a little blue button
issuing a satellite beep
causing instant pain relief

For a phony Noah's Ark
full of pixilated African animals
diving deep into twin lakes,
moving slow or fast,
enjoined at their hips:
I call up a might cloud,
concealing a thunderbird

For illegal immigrants
(as well as half-human aliens)
hiding like Apaches
in the motel rooms
of America: I send
a silent warning,
a three-hour head start,
initiating a two-year
launch sequence before
the power all goes off

For dangerous rip currents
building something together
in cascades of waves,
the top one silent, deadly:
a unified nomenclature,
be you rogue waves,
sneeker waves,
baddass high tides,
a roiling, boiling
but quite sexed up
good egg project
shaping smoother shores
so we can all learn
just a little bit more
under mostly cloudy skies

For all of the supposedly poisonous
under toads, intelligent horny toadies,
a tinted glass manufactured
by mere mortal men,
to hide behind
and therefore
to evolve anew
and grow

For all of the rest
of you angel hatchlings
in your fleshy husks:
for each, a single ticket
to ride, to sink and then fly,
riding high up in wood coffins,
rising up to the sea's surface,
like the meek in the Hopi bible
swimming with the shore

~
Douglas McDaniel,
Coralville, Iowa

Thy Father's Needs

(Forgive, But Don't Forget)



In the secret agent shades

along the dirty boulevard

the disquited boys try

to hunt down new divas

with energies circling,

tryin' not to rust



As the shadows get longer

no longer rough

is no longer enough

and the divine fems

keep in their corners

reportin' on their formers



Thy father's needs

Thy father's needs

Thy father's needs

cause the earth

to bleed



Who is left or right

of the center

keep untying hearts

and poisoned darts

together feelin'

funny about the weather



And the Overlord plays

his fiddle to bards split

right down the middle

letting the dust of fast

polarities just plain settle



Thy father's needs

Thy father's needs

Thy father's needs

just suck the rust

off the gristy griddle



There's a guy here

waitin' for the gals

to complete their

conversations

dreamin' of their

own truths to private

Cherokee nations,

Cherokee people

as wedding bells ring

and a divided nation

fails to swing or sing

on either wing



Thy father's needs

Thy father's needs

Thy father's needs

boilin' up corn seeds

to cut all those Joans

of Arc but deep



Don't you feel

O so incomplete

due to thy Father's needs

Thy father's needs

Thy Father's needs

dryin' corn seeds

O so incomplete

to his dirty deeds

his dirty deeds

crossed up

cotton seeds

Ozo incomplete

Ozo incomplete

Ozo incomplete



to thy father's needs

thy father's needs

cut down those weeds

let it all just bleed

for Thy father's needs

Thy Father's needs

Thy father's needs

the whole damn earth

plain gone to seed



~ Douglas McDaniel,

The Bards of Mythville,

While on military tour

in St. Charles, Illinois

Black Hawk Up

Eleven a.m
and the unarmed
dying of the dark
can't catch up
to pre-dawn me

Upon the Midwestern plains,
the planes boss, the planes ...
Their thunderbird songs sing
to thee ... tho many of those bros
have never flown
much further West
than the Miss Yi Yapee

Dark clouds move
across the red sky
from the Southwest
airlines, all guidelined
by pill pushing plumbers,
electrostatic electricians,
by zombie-eyed truckers
dumbing down magical,
no longer mysterious
or even once mythic roads

Full moon all day headlining
to disappointing misfortunes
of Dionysus, who died that night
well before the clouds move slow
and covered wagons move fast
to confuse the fine old sun's
meandering eyes, red satellite
rounded ...

Since we are at war now
against cosmic nations
in corporate disguise
and a single black hawk
emplores the baddass
updrafts to remain,
to be still
and wise ...

~ Persperide,
Colorado

The Valley of the Single
Black Escaped Pig Fiasco

The engorged valley
was wide as the Grand Canyon,
but wider the Abdominal Void,
and shale-white stone,
a single one, most noticeable,
pointed toward the West,
toward a happy life, happier endings,
than the imaged hat-brimmed
man left in the dusty dust,
the aquarium rescue dream,
of turquise particles, dust,
and a ghost, perhaps, or a lover's
old friend, who left a single marble
from her head, to point the way

With great fear, fear alone, tore back
down the mountain ... which shook loose
again after a mere ten minutes
at the insatiable blue counters
of your local Walmart crack pipe dealer ...

After dinner, her hair turned blue
and she got the shingles from shaking
too many demons out of the newborn
skulls of other ... and she wept in the morn' ...
and the sound of a single-family home,
another of many more undone for the day
burned a new red hole in me ... and I could
barely smoke, or speak, or feel, or touch
my own nose from looking so hard to see ...

But somewhere out there in middle America
a single black pig is running free in the streets
while a shadow's brilliant pink red Father Sun
has also come undone from the blazing glories
of incomprehensible amounts of feminine hunters
charging in the last great light brigands
inspired by trampled patriarichal old souls ...

~ Persperide,
Colorado

The Eleventh
of Twelve Elves
of Mars ...

Gorgeous sun,
mother of sun
uneasy to appease,
easier to please
but bitter in death
untaking the taste test
after dinner thinker
but not much
of a drinker

This insane chain
around you was sympathy
Overpowered by your pedal
mad but no longer snoring
dreaming of diamonds, Goddess!

She law languid but stolid,
a cool, brilliant underwater
apparatus, but hell ...
no damn Illuminatress ...

... at least not quite yet,
she barely got wet

Bathed by a winged white
Macaw, disorder and the law,
unloved in luscious whispers
beneath the yellow gown
of a new moon, a taste both fast
and sweet, in glory, in flesh
and in heat ...

~ Sir Freudo,
Telluride, Colorado

Pleased to Meet Me? Why I am Not Running for the President of the United States, Right Now ...

After a considerable amount of delay, that is to say, approximately one week and two years before election day 2012, I have decided to put off any further consideration of running for the President of the United States.

Sure, gosh darn it, I need the salary. Plus, my crimes against humanity are already well documented in my own books. I am comfortable speaking in front of small crowds, as well, and I can write my own speeches, too. That would save the government money, right there ... in order to reduce the deficit.

To save even more time, so that I could have saved you, the taxpayer, even more time if not money, I could have just stopped writing speeches altogether. I could just talk off the top of my head. Like Rand Paul, or, President Ronald Reagan used to do (until they told him to keep to the "vision thing" while on the campaign trails, that is).

Oh sure, I had (have) other good qualities as well. For example, I throw my cigarette butts in the trash or the ostrich-necked containers left on public porches. Or in my pockets, if out in nature. I recycle tobacco, when needed. So that makes me a physical conservative.

My art tastes tend toward super realism. I hate to drive myself or anybody else anywhere. In fact, when possible, I refuse to drive. I promote the pedestrian lifestyle. Both in my actions and in my lifestyle choices and most certainly in pedestrian thinking.

I actually like to speak to reporters. Witches, too. I suppose that makes me pretty "Mavericky."

I have been all over the country, the cities of America, too. I know very little about other nations. But I am a God-given talent in the area of military strategy (Risk, all Avalon Hill strategy games, lots of top-down video games, such as Microsoft's "Age of Empires).

I endorse the space program. Public and private and the all kept very quite secret one(s). Both "inner" and "outer" space for me.

I feel your pain as well as my own. I'm kind. Gentle. Obedient. Brave. O sure, I'll obey the laws of the pack. I mean, like, this Dude Abides.

I have a booming voice. I have been a voting member of the Democrat, Republican and Green parties. In fact, I am very comfortable at parties. Especially after a couple of shots (Okay, okay, maybe three shots of tequila, tops). But I actually don't drink much. I really don't like beer. Never did. The stuff tastes like piss waiting to happen, if you ask me. So I would have promised to never take a dime from the beer or bourbon or aluminum can lobbies.

I'm obviously not afraid of trouble (re: Buy My Damn Books Dot Calm). I actually like hot water. Especially in the winter, when doing dishes.

I've lived in mansions and tract homes and tents and cars and at least one trailer down by the river, and gosh darn it, people do like me ... until they really, really get to know me (family, X wives, etc.)

I am not running for president even though my list of qualifications includes but is not limited to being one of the last high school quarterbacks in human history to call his own plays. Usually, I like to throw on first down. Run to the weak side. But I'll give that all up, if needed, or would've, if I even really wanted to be president.

Shoot ... I had organizational ties in many, many states; some of them altered. I speak a little Spanish, French, Haitian, Russian, Hopi and English and in Tongues, often at the same time. I'm a big military history buff. Love to buff. I buff early, buff often. I'm a regular buffalo soldier.

I never ever get tired or sleep. I won't kiss dogs or babies to get votes. Too many germs (I mean, like, I don't want to get the dogs or babies sick). I won't wag the tail to make the dog move. I keep away from the tail. I mean, like I said, this Dude Abides. I most certainly won't wag my tail at you about the way you train your dog, nor will I wag my finger at you about God.

Quite honestly, the only reason I even considered running for president was because I wanted to drink tequila at the Tea Party convention with Sarah Palin. I also would have like to speak on TV to Rachel Maddow and John Stewart. But not at the same time. Not even in Tongues. Though I might try that to heal Glenn Back (that sweater wearin' tool!) I'd certainly try to correct him on American history in the most straightforward English I could muster. Mr Rogers, in his, quote, "Neighborhood," understood it better than Glenn Beck. But so does Homer Simpson ...

Lastly, since I know many nouns, some of them are my best friends, and verbs, since I am an "action" person, I think I would have made a great toy action figure, just like that guy who got 30 or so percent of the vote running for Congress a couple of weeks ago ... before his presidential considerations, and toy action figure considerations, no doubt began (after losing). Sure, I had been just like Kathleen O'Donnell (or was it Rosie, I forget?) who lost big and might as well leave her campaign signs out for the next two years for her highly entertaining run for president of the United States.

But no, even though I would have made Alice Cooper's "I Want to Get Elected" my campaign theme song, and can karaoke new lyrics for any song by the Doors off the top of my head, I will not run. Even if I would have been committed from Day One.

Beneath the Surface

Meanwhile, at the Gothic Art show,
where the library of Alexandria
has failed to burn down,
due to better security
and more available stone,
the question gets asked,
but there is always a chance
for a follow-up question
and the mysteries are further
along, which is to say, more science,
less so magic ... but why roil of crosses?

Why is it written down at all?
Why was it written, or read, upside down?
Why should a Book be painted in two-thirds,
Magdalene in richer surroundings,
revealed with a pot of Lily
in the foreground to foretell
the coming and going of Joan of Arc?

Why would God need to read down,
creating the need to leave the Book
pointed up in order to ascertain
that which the Creator already knows?

In the Book of Kells
the Gaelic kept
the coming and going,
waiting to leave and weave
out in a swirl of possibilities,
in a dervish tree-mind of Nature ...

O, how such details are wasted
on Jesus believers in a hurry
to get home to watch the Dallas Cowboys
down from above ... They, who have found
such easy answers on the surface, maybe a halo,
a hoot, in the institutions of the arts,
who drives their hairy chariots
across the bones of the Blood
of Jesus, always the little boy,
always the Man, the Saint!

O sure, O sure,
the Iris isn't Eris
for sorrows or such fools,
for neither minnows or Bulls,
for the peacocks or for Pride,
or for Paradise
or for the AOL
of the mind ...

For Fibonacci?
For factories in Flanders?
Do we blame the Dutch ... really?
The Dutch? And speaking of towns,
tongues and virgins, unchurched,
but, all the same able to act
quite natural, but hidden for sight
in those visceral bones of sacred light,
the arcana of the Black Madonna
in from views but taller than them all
in the geometric sacred Twin Towers
of Solomon ... for Hieronymous Bosch,
who liked the challenge of harbors
in disorders and hidden orders
to synthesize the Dhambala,
the Sirius, the Dog Star ...
in order to ask O why, o why
or why ...

It's the only way to go,
Baseball on the R-A-DEE-O!

The ball field is in my mind and on the radio. Such a beautiful word to me: “radio.” It’s Vin Scully, that Dodger voice of my youth as we crossed over the California desert from Arizona on the way to Disneyland and, yeah, maybe a ball game or two. It’s the Arizona Diamondbacks over the past summer, when cable TV was unaffordable, filling my mind in the afternoons, into evenings when nothing else would do but baseball on the radio.

The contrast of the dirt infield and well-tempered green grass forming the diamond call out: The echoes of memories collected after two American centuries. You can drive by the little league ballpark and only rarely see a father and son playing catch. Nor are there games of pickup, easy and disorganized diversions where you just pick sides and play. Soon, little league teams will play there. Soon, the annual rite of spring will be renewed. But the World Series is on now, and thankfully, I can watch it on TV.

Not many young people understand this. They are into different games now. Video games such as Grand Theft Auto, or, World of Warcraft.

For some reason, for the local children, the game needs a jump start. Call it Little League, organized by dads, by men with whole different motives in mind. Instead of the pastime being as spontaneous as stickball in the street, it's an organized thing: An adult system imposed on childhood.

There are kids aplenty, and games for them on every level: Little League, Bobby Sox, Pony League, Babe Ruth, American Legion, high school ... but where do kids just go out and play?

The ball field is empty. Absolutely perfect. It's a Autumnal, World Series spring kinda day. The national pastime's light is on, but there is nobody sliding for home at the Field of Dreams in Iowa. Not today. Meanwhile, the digital streams of video violence run hot and true.

Why?

The sad state of the major leagues have something to do with this ebb in the continuum. "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and reality of the game," wrote cultural historian Jacques Barzun in his 1954 book of essays, God's Country and Mine. Sure, in '54, the game was on a roll. In '54, major league baseball was in the full glory of the golden age of Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams and Stan Musial. Ebbets Field was still standing. The collective soul of Brooklyn was still intact. That year, Willie Mays made his famous "catch" in the World Series, and the Cleveland Indians were a contender. The Indians were expected to go to the World Series.

Oh how things have changed. Barzun, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, talked like a man betrayed. "I've gotten so disgusted with baseball, I don't follow it anymore," he said, taking it all back. "I just see the headlines and turn my ahead away in shame from what we have done with our most interesting game and best, healthiest pastime."

It's doubtful, however, the average 10-year-old really cares if the game is abandoning its sense of tradition. The average 10-year-old is much more concerned with Nintendo, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and whether Shaquille O'Neal can make the transition from the basketball court to the rappin' MTV video. Meanwhile, their parents are wondering how they are going to transport their sons and daughters to all of the soccer games, basketball shoot-outs and judo jousts. Baseball is just another stop for the carpool.

Kids haven't changed, but the competition for their attention span certainly has.
Which is a shame. Baseball began as a boy's game in the country fields of 19th-century America. If the game has continued to reside anywhere, it's been in the heart of the child, both young and old. At no time of the year does the heart of the child call out more than in the spring. That's when children drag out their dusty bags of bats, tattered balls and gloves flattened like pancakes from months of disuse. You can search through relics from days gone by, and in the green cathedrals of America, to hear echoes of that fading heartbeat.

On the cover of March 1928 issue of American Boy magazine, there's a picture of a boy in knickers and stirrup socks renewing the ritual. He's apparently just searched through his closet and found his old uniform. It's spring time. Holding the jersey up to the light, he's noticed some surprising holes in his cherished outfit. "Moths!," exclaims the type. At the bottom of the page, a teaser for what's inside: "Miller Huggins Discusses His New York Yankees."

One can just imagine the excitement of a 1920s boy at the receipt of this issue. This was just one year after the fabled 1927 Yankees of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Yet, as famous as they were, such heroes were hardly the victim of overexposure. Or, for that matter, a cynical populace. For the standard kid in the Midwest, news of baseball was devoured like chocolate. Radio broadcasts were rare. Small town newspaper coverage was sporadic. And here it was, Miller Huggins, manager of the Yankees, talking about what it's like to breathe the same air as the Babe! One can just feel the hero-worshipping heart of the child at the very fevered peak of baseball in the 20th century.

And if that child could ever see the mighty Babe swing and play, well, that would be an indelible memory lasting long into childhood. Indeed, our childhood memories can resonate for a lifetime. They can be stronger than the game we saw just the other day. Which is why old baseball relics get saved to begin with: to keep those memories alive.

Move the clock forward to 1948: Ron Harner is six years old. His family, which lives in a small town in the coal mining region of central Pennsylvania, doesn't have much money. His father is good enough to play pro ball, but has to stay home to work in the mines and support his family. Any luxuries are rare. So it's a special event when Harner goes, with his mom and dad, to see the Philadelphia A's play the Chicago White Sox at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.

The A's! In person! Connie Mack! In person! Harner is ecstatic. But it gets better--in the form of a ticket stub: the picked-out-of-a-hat winner in a promotion held during the game. "I was six years old and ended up with a ticket stub that won a pair of free tickets and also an authentic A's jacket," Harner said.

The Harners go home and wait. Then, on August 9, 1948, a thunderstruck 6-year-old boy in Valley View, Pennsylvania receives the following message typed on official letterhead from the "American Base Ball Club of Philadelphia":

My dear young friend:
I know that you have been waiting patiently for the Athletics jacket which you won at the game with the White Sox on July 18th. I have just been informed that they will soon be ready.
I would like you to be my guest with one of your parents at the game between the A's and the St. Louis Browns at Shibe Park, Saturday, August 28th at which time it will be my pleasure to present this jacket to you ...
Looking forward to seeing you at the game, I am
Sincerely yours,
Connie Mack

There is no signature, and therefore no real way to know if Connie Mack wrote the letter. But Mack's hand was real when Harner shook it in the A's dugout 45 years ago. He still has that jacket, the letter and his memories of his mom, his dad, and the man whose career in baseball spans back to more than a century ago.

"I remember," Harner says, "an old man saying to me when I had the winning ticket for the prize, `Son, you just won a prize from the greatest manager in baseball.' "
Everyday he can look at that jacket and ride the only feasible time machine we'll ever have: the one inside our heads.

"Baseball always reverts back to childhood," said artist Andy Jurinko, another person whose memories of Shibe Park in the 1950s have powerful, relevant, lifetime resonances.
Jurinko saw his first baseball game at Shibe in Philadelphia when he was a teenager. In those days, he spent industrious hours making full-color diagrams of every major league ballpark. The drawings were for a dice baseball game he'd invented.

Eventually, he put childish things away. He went to Kutztown State College in Pennsylvania on a football scholarship, joined the Army, then art school, then spent years as an acid-dropping hippie artist in San Francisco in the '60s and '70s. His life was a metaphor for a changing America. His early work focused on pop culture and the street scenes of the era, topless go-go dancers, Hell's Angels, portraits of Jayne Mansfield holding a Chihuahua. Later, realizing his sense for gritty realism didn't quite fit in with flower power, he retreated east, trying to find a niche in corporate America.

Then, in the late '70s, he told a friend about his baseball dice game. Jurinko recreated the game, doing tempura paintings of old major league ballparks for the backdrop, and started playing diceball with his buddy for hours at time. He realized: This childhood obsession could be an adult one, too.

By 1986, he'd sold his first ballpark painting: A black-and-white aerial of Ebbets Field and a Polo Grounds oil, the latter going for $11,000. He was onto something. Next thing he knew, a Fenway Park piece sold for $25,000. There was money in memories. Now Jurinko is one of many who are making a living on fashioning his memories to reach a nostalgic baseball public.

Jurinko's work plugs into the way an old ballpark can conjure memories of youth. Even the most tinkertoy ballpark or ragged field can produce a cathartic flood of emotion. Such was the case for myself when I visited old Arlington Stadium in Arlington, Texas, which has since been replaced by the grand, neo-classic Ballpark at Arlington.

It was a few months before Arlington Stadium was torn down. I was let inside the ruin by an old African-American dressed in a guard's uniform with a Texas Rangers' insignia. He patroled the sun-punished remains of the ballpark as if games were still going on every night. He was a lesson in denial. His job was to refuse to let dreams die. He made the rounds, regularly checked the cluttered ramps, strolling through the red seat-backs strewn like a pile of autumn leaves.

The ballfield's infield was buried in a Kilamanjaro of scooped-out Texas peat. Windows in the luxury boxes were broken in spidderwebby patterns, and inside, knotted telephone lines were stunned into silence. I walked through all of this and got this spooky feeling. It made me feel like I was in the movie, The Poseidon Adventure, which was about a cruise ship that had been overturned by a tidal wave. The gutted luxury boxes were desolate except for cracked wall mirrors, and I wondered if this meant seven more years of second place for the Texas Rangers.

Because the Rangers were my team, ever since we lived in Dallas in the early '70s. But we left in 1972, and I didn't get to see very much ball played in this stadium as a boy. Perhaps, for that reason, the sight of that eight-ton scoreboard lying dead filled me with an overpowering sense of loss. Across the way, I could see the new stadium. It represented new dreams for all of the youths who talk their dads into buying them red caps and inflatable bats and baseball cards of Jose Canseco, Will Clark and Juan Gonzalez.

Yet, looking at the shards of seats littering old Arlington, like so many bodies after a battle, I saw my childhood denied. I broke down in tears, thinking about something I hadn't thought of for a long time: Dick Billings' wrist bands. Billings, catcher for the Rangers in '72, was my hero, mostly because of the wristbands he wore. Those red, white and blue wrist bands were the definition on machismo for this 11-year-old boy. Anyway, there I was, 34-year-old, crying like a baby. Just letting go. Then, I decided to take something of value, important to me perhaps, but nobody else. I gathered one of the red plastic seats, an old program, a blue plastic sliver off a refreshment stand that said, "Nachos."

I reclaimed my youth. And my hero, Dick Billings.

Later that day, I went to see the Rangers play the Oakland A's at the new ballpark. That night, we watched in the press box as O.J. Simpson played out his tragi-comic drama in his Ford Bronco on an L.A. Freeway. A few minutes before, I'd caught Will Clark and Jose Canseco in the hall leading to the dugout. They were ducking "The National Anthem." Canseco wheedled in an irreverent Tweedy Bird voice as Clark winked, "Can you imagine hearing that song one-hundred and sixty-two times a year and for twenty five or so spring training games?"

Yes, the modern sports hero has changed. So it's easy to understand how the intensity of a young's persons gaze is at a considerably lesser beam. But perhaps we always had to drag our kids to the ballpark. Maybe they always needed prodding to understand the game's nuances, its beauty and history. Tradition is taught, not inherited.

Father and sons play catch, at first with some tentativeness, and then with gathering speed. Adults look at their old four-fingered gloves, autographs and souvenirs and remember. It's not that we are so enamored of the game as children. It's that the seeds we planted so long ago have a way of growing on you. The continuum is funny that way, and so is listening to the sound of baseball on the radio.

... Finding Tatonka in Winfield, Iowa

You are in Winfield, Iowa and everyone seems to be staring at you. Must be the dollar store shades, since the future is so bright (here in Hades ... let us not pray), and you are in that peculiar "you are not from around here look of yours. Especially with what may seem to the locals as an odd manner of bobbing and weaving in the bush, as well as the downright Martian vocabulary.

Winfield, in the southeastern corner of the state, is far less bombed-out, bumed-out looking than nearby Morning Sun, Iowa, but that's not saying much. The people of Winfield appear, at least on this sunny day brighter, happier, perhaps even prettier. But that's only on this day. A sunny day. A Big Little Wagon Grain machine goes by and the driver waves; because, well, he's getting stared at by you, marvelling at such a large and marvelous device, because you can't get over your "am I a real boy" Tonka Trucks wonder years.

There are several cars in the front of the favorite and only restaurant, Pork's, where the food is cheap, tasty as hell, and served with an easy going smile and sense of merriment. People stroll out of the place with leftovers in styrofoam containers, big Buddha bellies, and on the way to their cars, taking up all of the parking spaces on the road out front, each and every one have one last fine thing to say to each other.

That, after nearly breaking their necks to look at you. Since you are still in that "Am I real real boy, Tonka trucks" phasey haze.

It's mid-October and the leaves are just starting to turn. Funny thing is: It was supposed to rain today.

The local historical museum, with fine bright-eyed seniors working in there, fully prepared with their centuries of knowing, to assist you in your not-so-private investigation. One lady gives you are tour. She is spry. Quite wise. Eager for this attention. She tells you, for example, that in 1907 the whole town, except for the hat shop, burned down. Another year an entire brick-made church was completely dismantled after two of the church elders ha got into a fight fight after failing to come to an agreement over how to spend the money donations attained, one would suppose, after many Sundays of passing the plate. Stuff like that, she tells you, as you gave at the black and white photos of what this church once looked like, as well as the bombed-out, post World War II firebombing look of what the town looked like after the fire of 1907, of bleak and figures silhouetted, of dazed survivors looking around, trying to figure out, "now what," after the disaster.

Now what? Indeed.

But such worries on this sunny neo-Depression era day are replaced by oyour notices of the reddish Winfield Wolves "welcome" flags posted high on the utility line posts. The noon siren on top of one of these streetlight-included posts shouts to workers and residents that it's noon ... time to eat, or leave, or just hang out at Pork's ... and so on ... as a thresher rolls by, a big Jolly green giant of a monster UFO kind. The driver waves. A king of the new Martian technology that is what really amazes you about the people and technologies of the area. The leaves keep turning into reds, oranges ... fall is coming (going by?) way too fast.

Yeah, it's one fine sunny day in this place. A day to remember. With everyone nearly breaking their necks to get a look at you in your dollar store shades.

Why? Because, because, because ... because of the wonderful things you does? Hell, no!

You are just lost in the amazement of that fabled "Am I a real boy" Tonka Truck haze and you just can't even catch up to not being in Kansas anymore ...

~ Douglas McDaniel

You are Definitely

Not Making a Movie
for HBO in

Riverside, Iowa

You were born in a cross-fire hurricane, and so therefore you can manage that kind of sad fact of life in the Disoriented Dysturbia of Disneyland, America. But if you go into a modern-day community casino, may the hair of the dog have mercy on you. You are now among the heathen, so the devil is your friend, and God is, well, an astronaut. You are in the Riverside, Iowa casino, and you are about to avoid, to the best of your abilities, dying young, dying old, and especially kicking off too soon before your number finely comes in.

You are a wannabe filmmaker, and so you are also definitely not here to make a movie for HBO about the future birthplace of Captain James. T. Kirk, which, according to the Star Trek film lore, in Riverside, Iowa. You most certainly are not William Shatner trying to film a phony movie, which turned out to be a real funny mock-u-mentary, mocking the poor people of Riverside. Not all of them are “poor,” quite likely, but some may be, unfortunately, due to the casino, built for just such fools. Fortunately, the bathrooms in the casino offer a little stand with a brochure on gambling addiction.

You find this highly ironic. Downright hilarious. You can easily go gonzo on this crap table of fodder for your little story. You might as well be in Las Vegas, loathing, fearing for not completely violating the copyrights for all you know about Hunter S. Thompson, the drug-crazed journo who made that place infamous with the book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But you are better than that. The drug years, even for the prescription pills, are over for you. Except for cigarettes and nicotine, which you are now sucking in at an incredible rate in the center of the gambling facility, which allows for such things, allows for the last legal intoxicants, other than alcohol (but you are definitely not here to not drink while definitely not making a movie for HBO) in Riverside, Iowa.

Disorientation is everything in a casino. It’s almost as bad as your regular local shopping mall. But Riverside residents, who were angry and embarrassed about what was revealed about themselves in the Shatner mock-u-mentary, have to go somewhere else to shop. Their town is dying, like most small town centers are dying, due to the big box culture of the larger communities and towns and cities, due to the Walmartification of America. But that’s a long story. Told all of the time. People seek out disorientation to shake themselves awake. To get some noise. Some excitement. You can never tell them the cities of gold aren’t bad, that they shouldn’t actually move toward the light, the phony light.

But malls rarely pay you back. They just take and take and take. However, casinos don’t. They give you hope. Insane, raging, completely irrational hope. They give you, for just that one rare momentary bit of living flame, a real sense for what it’s like to be alive. Rather than creature comfort, in a casino, the music is never as cool in the mall, it’s far cooler.

In fact, from one end of America to next, a casino offers the most serene and pleasing music ever made. That music doesn’t come from one sound, mind you, but the whole collaboration of sounds: the jingles, the bells, the whistles, the unholy cosmic blasts signifying nothing, but, perhaps, just maybe every now and then, big winners. It’s the music the very sun must here as it soaks up all of the sounds of the planets, and Pluto, too.


No sports betting at this casino mind you, but this cosmic music combines in your head, ebbing and flowing, and that’s all the God in you really needs to trust. In football, you trust. Because it’s spontaneous. Violent. Emotional from end to spinning spheroid. And coffee, too, and smokes, nine dollars a pack here. Unlike in many places in Vegas, the alcohol is not free when you gamble. So trust in that, too. But you only have one cigarette, and you are writing in frantic pirate text now, and the effect of having a cig hanging from your lip is so Hunter S. Thompson you don’t want to let go of that prop. The cig, a prop. Trust in that.

You are definitely not making a movie for HBO here in Riverside, Iowa. So you stay in the middle of the building, to keep from getting dizzy and you set your cell phone on maximum, in case you need a rescue. You stay in the center of the place, to keep from spinning out of orbit, but out of orbit is where you really need to go. To talk to the marketing manager: You are definitely not here to make a movie for HBO. Her name is Haselhoff.

Other than that weird coincidence, the Haselhoff connection, since she is not, however, related to David Haselhoff, the terrible actor who somehow made it big in Germany, according to the ongoing Saturday Night Live gag during the 1980s and early 1990s. No, this casino, other than the music of the spheres, is a pretty standard unit because all casinos are standard units. The Corvette is available for the occasional big winner, and so on …

So you are definitely are not here to make a movie about the future birthplace of Captain Kirk, who isn’t real, not anymore than anything else in the false world. You are not here to make a movie for HBO. The good and bad people of Riverside have suffered enough, and the future fake Captain James T. Kirk is still slouching to a slot machine, yet to be born.

~ Douglas McDaniel,
Riverside, Iowa

The Toto is No Longer in Kansas To-Do List

10) Wake up (Bark!)
9) Get out of the hotel room in Mythville, Iowa without waking every guest in the place in order to avoid getting kicked out or threatened bodily harm (Bark! Bark!)
8) Check the time (5 a.m.) ( Bark! Bark! Bark!)
7) Learn to count (Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!) (Four times … I mean, five!) (Bark!)
6) Search stardimmed skies for UFOs, but grow frustrated due to WalMart distribution center lights (Bark! X 5)
5) Go to Wal Mart parking lot gas station store to buy a pack of American spirit cigs with “FSC” (fire retarded) notice to indicate the packaging label’s complete lie, due to the Iowa state liberal hobgoblin that each pack is 100 percent “additive free.” (Bark! X 6)
4) Fail to spend much time reading Thomas Pynchon’s most recent detective noir novel, something, something about “Vice” (Bark to the power of XJ37=B)
3) Notice the scent of coffee on the premises … o hell, grounds (Bark! X 8)
2) Make mental note to use “spell check” more often, except when writing in “pirate lingo” mode (Bark X 9)
1) Declare Monday, Oct. 18, 2010, as the first day of the administration of President Barack Obama that everything that exists is now officially his fault, since every decision made now until election day is 100 percent politically motivated! (Bark! X 10)
- 1) Take vowel movement …

For more roads to Mythville ... Click here

Beside the Dirty River:
Reaganized and Im-Palinized Along
the Fox River in St. Charles, Illinois

Symmetry comes to your mind, but it’s hardly late enough in the hour to consider it fully, completely. More like, it’s this: Listening to a long sad aphorism by Mark Twain, once of Hannibal, Missouri, thus misquoted, misre-engineered: The hardest thing in life, the thing that really wears you out, the rub, as they say (some call it entropy), is having to spend most of your life trying to convince completely ignorant, stupid, ill-mannered, superstitious or otherwise plain retarded people that there’s such a thing as being smart.

Not to get too prideful on the subject. To think too much of your own education is no humble way to go on living. In fact, information can really get in the way. Too much information, poison. If you have too many beeping crickets in your head, if you haven’t gone completely Luddite (and therefore mad), then you are simply pushing the envelope on what the mind can actually contain. There are just too many things that if you did know, you’d wish you didn’t. If you are like one of those poor folks who are suckerfish for data, well, condolences, bothered brothers, sorry sisters. And if you wield it all like a sword, using the word (lowercase, though solemnly used) like a shield instead of a sword, well, we regretfully inform you that your apologies are not accepted.

On that opposite side of that coin, sometimes, yes, you just need the effing noise. Say you are camped along the mad boulevard of St. Charles, outside of Chicago … and it’s a Saturday morning and the motors are roaring in front of you, camped at the Starbucks, sucking down your caffeine, getting your first cig with coffee for the day. A glorious morning, with motors a roarin’. Down America’s snaky trail they go: The rented cars, the newly bought golden bows, all funded by the cash for cars program, making the whole roadway look like a new car lot running like blood from the old century into the new; the cattle trucks, the dump trucks, the pickups carrying horses to their polo games, the motorcycles, the morons and their motors, there they all go … in camper cans and brightly colored vehicles designed in the late 20th century and made to all look like aerodynamic Clorox bottles, the Porches for the Plutocrats, the Lincoln Continentals for the Republicans, the Democrats, seeking prestige, in their Priusi (hybrids of dinos, still, sucking the vampire blood from the earth, but only half as often), the independents in their silvery gleaming galaxies of wheels, the Redcoats in their redcoats, the Blues in their bluesmobiles, sex and death and terror and awestruck to the bottom of the gully in front of the Starbucks, down the red brick canyon, carting coal or gasoline or ethanol, corn oil and hydrogen and eternal air in the morning’s last pure light. Lawyers dressed as gangsta bikers. Gangsta bikers dressed as lawyers. All of the dogs and cats and homos and lesbians in their convertibles, their hair glaze getting Beatled down by the sun and blazing classic rock radio, their stereos boom boxing their personal music, their power, their Powaqua, piped in by satellites now right into their husks, into their chests, and the latter, their long blonde hair flying wild in the evil, weaponized breeze … a wind, tainted by the Fox River, on this day overflowing and reeking of kerosene … Holy Ronald Reagan! … if you are downwind today it will make you dizzy …

And there you are in front of Starbucks, with your notebooks and designer coffee, your pack of smokes, American Spirits, expensive as a vote in these Chicago gangland parts, with the strange wise guy in a T-shirt staring down at you from his second-floor window right across the street, above the pizza parlor. There you are, with your pride, your conceit. O, you have so much information flowing in your head, faster, faster, faster … esters and ketones and raging hormones, from sex denied from living in the burbs for just one week, for living among the so-called (as Tom Wolfe put it), the “Masters of the Universe.” Little do you know that, even as you think all of these wonderful beautiful mind thoughts, he is plotting against you: the Dr. Cyclops, master of all the fatherlands you can currently survey.

And he won’t pick up the phone today. He, who lured you into this state of placated freedom after a full week of endless horrors. He who knows much more than he lets on, some effing one-eyed grandmaster, He! So you thought you had one grand Peter Pan fantasy in yer head … lazy post-literate you, without a so-called “pot to piss in,” as you have heard frequently during the week. Every time you heard it you looked into your Navajo-made sacred earn for your cig smoke ash. You with you shaman pretenses, your rael as blood pink sunglass lenses … He, with his plan, working against, and yet, despite his best efforts failing … because she is basic, gorgeous, a queen, true to her times as a bee in some mysterious hive, commanding the spirits of the earth, the underworlds and over worlds, her sex divine, her Joan of Arc in full arc, her animal magnetism, fully magnetized, all sharpened by the wickedly severe engine of grief.

O yeah, it’s real. The day you two arrived in this plastic castle fantasyland Dr. Cyclops was hatching his plot against this fairyland queen and long away from home Ulysses, both barely unable to even gauge which way was north or south or east or west, save for the unfamiliar sunlight and the direction of the foul winds, blown up this north by the British Petroleum-launched war to re-take America, an undeclared war that now, not even the U.S. military quite gets yet … from the moment the divide and conquer game was on as you are carefully guided into his road raging castle on the hills of the Shire. The whole neighborhood is a military base in the meadows of the Plutocracy, homes for colonels retired but still having their use, for KGB queens, but hell, they aren’t near half as dangerous to this sacred soil as the real estate mavens in their pink Cadillacs and their busy blood for time-is-money ways and means, all meeting the endless ends, the service to the great digitized seas of that false god: The caches of electronified cash, the stolen formulas for beers, the Kentucky fried generals on their furloughs, watching it all go down in deep bunkers beneath their homes … O yeah, trust this, if nothing else: It is so effing so! In God you can trust. In Ta’Iowa you can trust the things you wished you didn’t know.

And Now

For a Few Words

on Buying

a Plastic Compass

at Wal Mart

You hear them gun up. They are like tanks gassing for battle. Just as the sun rises. You are at the Wal Mart distribution center in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and the not-so-tiny army is just getting ready for the pusch.

You want to salute, but a tall, highly distinguished looking, slightly limping, downright admiralesque truck driver is watching you, watching him, and that already, as the sun continues to climb, makes the perfectly "normal," well, perfectly "paranormal." The distribution center features a huge complex, maybe four or five football fields long, with vast numbers of trucks in the back, enclosed by a barbed wire fence. Activity is continuous after the sun rises. It is systematic. Ghosty, with few souls to be actually seen. Downright robotic.

But you are simple folk. Practically human. Actually somewhat happy. Your plan for the day is to buy a compass at the Wal Mart nearby, and if it wasn't for the blazing orb in the bright orange in the circus animal clouds, you'd never be able to tell that the Mt. Pleasant Super Center is directly east. However, you do know this: If the great cities of the earth are 24-hour-a-day hotspots, your friendly neighborhood Wal Mart burns just as brightly in the spangles still gleaming, the stars brightly steaming, and so on .... With retirees at the door. Half the county is employed there, at the Super Center, actually. The other half? Most likely running in and out of the Super Center in a kind of wild-eyed state of panic.

The panic is for going in, quite truthfully. The release can be determined, the very sense of a short-term satisfaction, maybe only as good as the car ride home, in the trail of candy wrappers, soda cans, plastic pieces of all kinds of things, that stream, chaotically, along a nearby access road bordered on both sides by fields of corn grown for ethynol.

The front of the Super Center big box store is more palatable to the eye. The front is decorated with the words "Always" in a kind of cursive, red, giant type, and "low prices," half as large, directly below: reading, thus "Always low prices." But above is not always as so below, so when it comes to the medium being the message in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, you really only know one true thing: Something is quite FUBAR here. Because, for one thing, if you check the prices in the surrounding small towns, prices are far lower, just to compete and ... maybe, just maybe, even survive.

Meanwhile, over the technologically zombiefied distribution center, the angry sun continues to rise in the east and the trucks continue to gun up and line out for invasion and the people, one out of seven in America now living in poverty, continue to get, well, hungrier, angrier, more anxious, more in panic. Toward the north (one supposes, since we are still sans a compass), the trucks slowly move out in a parade of equally metered marches to thy mind in a military mode.

The Wal Mart trucks, loaded up with every conceivable kind of petroleum- or corporation corn-seed-based product, are streaming out in a viral march into every demographically correct corner of middle America. Humming onward sweetly. Moving not-so-discretely. In perfect echelons of control. One might consider how each truck driver might be as equally automated as the consumers they are targeting now.

However, as those consumers line in and out, one is more easily led to understand quite the opposite. People who work at Wal Mart are completely varied human beings, with their own tastes, flavors, beliefs and so on ... So before you go on categorizing the consumers of middle earth as being a race of Lilliputians gone completely insane, let's set ourselves in proper motion. Let's ground ourselves. Let's first seek to maintain a proper moral compass. Let's just do that first. As the sun rises. Before it sets.

One handy way to do just that is to take a closer look at what is happening within the concentric circles of what is happening, even as you read this, in other small towns in southeastern Iowa. In places like Morning Sun, for example. Maybe 30 miles away as the crow flies. In Morning Sun, you will find, the situation downtown is dismal. The whole place could be bought up now with Monopoly money. The only storefronts or commercial retail spaces left standing look burned out, bombed out, forgotten, dead, de-neighborized, closed for the rest of steaming eternity under the angry sun.

O sure, there might be, in any one of these surrounding towns, the occasional shop keeper left standing, who will greet you like Daffy Duck, waving his finger. He wags. He complains. He dreams of moving getting out his business, entirely. If not for the few good folks who come in to shop locally, he'd be in Bermuda by now. Since the finger wagging is a universal sign indicating the common small-town accusal, meaning, "Shame on you," each of these towns on most days would be classified better as ghost towns.

"Shame for all who shop at Wal Mart," they might say. "Shame on all of you who drive out of their communities, burning all of that gas, burning all of that time and money, to go out of their way to destroy the very towns they live in. Shame on all of you, far worse criminals than the little thieves who sit in their tiny small town cop jail cells, who go all of that way to buy all of that foreign-made crap, when they can buy some of my crap, much of it frequently locally produced, that they could buy instead."

But holy Ronald Reagan, sweet finger-flipping Jesus, as everyone must not know, as all wild-eyed Wal Mart shoppers do not feel or deny or fail to understand, they know not what they do. They know not that they are citizen soldiers as well for the zombied technological armies of the corporately sponsored seige against the American dream. They can't even see how they are bleeding their own communities dry. They do not know that, without their moral compass; hell they can scarecely listen or even be told, how the Wal Mart army is a big bluesy vampire sucking their very vitals, their lifestyles, their values, completely dry.

So go ahead, buy your plastic, Chinese-made compass at Wal Mart. Notice how it breaks easily. It will happen ... someday soon. You can always buy another one, and another, and another ... and if you have enough money, in great bulky bulks at Sam's Club, too ... all soon to be built on the surface of the moon.

Fer Bermuda, Aye!

For those about
to wake up
for their next
tropical depression:
I blow a kiss
and an antidote
loaded with Vitamin D

For my brothers
and sisters,
weak, picked on,
flipped on their backs
like doomed sea turtles
for the past twenty years:
I push a little blue button
issuing a satellite beep
causing instant pain relief

For a phony Noah's Ark
full of pixilated African animals
diving deep into twin lakes,
moving slow or fast,
enjoined at their hips:
I call up a might cloud,
concealing a thunderbird

For illegal immigrants
(as well as half-human aliens)
hiding like Apaches
in the motel rooms
of America: I send
a silent warning,
a three-hour head start,
initiating a two-year
launch sequence before
the power all goes off

For dangerous rip currents
building something together
in cascades of waves,
the top one silent, deadly:
a unified nomenclature,
be you rogue waves,
sneeker waves,
baddass high tides,
a roiling, boiling
but quite sexed up
good egg project
shaping smoother shores
so we can all learn
just a little bit more
under mostly cloudy skies

For all of the supposedly poisonous
under toads, intelligent horny toadies,
a tinted glass manufactured
by mere mortal men,
to hide behind
and therefore
to evolve anew
and grow

For all of the rest
of you angel hatchlings
in your fleshy husks:
for each, a single ticket
to ride, to sink and then fly,
riding high up in wood coffins,
rising up to the sea's surface,
like the meek in the Hopi bible
swimming with the shore

~
Douglas McDaniel,
Coralville, Iowa

Courtesy of Mythville On-Demand

Thunderbolt

The Reformed
Presbyterian Church
was hit by a thunderbolt
and Morning Sun, Iowa
was rendered back to the year
Nineteen Fifty One

And brother Jesus
sat on his Cardinal corner
with the ghosts of three gauzy
British colonial columns
behind him, more than twice
the height of the man
commanding them,
who lives four or five
times more often in life
than in death,
but who's counting?

Meanwhile, the local fire captain,
Tom "Torch" Lawyer
sits as the Grand Poopba
in the unmarked Oddfellows Hall ...
He, a Big Brother, of the weather map
and he sings, "O Hey, Gaia, what did I do?"

"O yeah, there was that, and that and that ...
I'm so sorry angry sun, sorry for this,
sorry for that ... O Kracken King Igor,
heavy weather hanging from across the plains
to the mountains once made pleasant
from Denver, Colorado
to Bloomington, Indiana:
Where John Cougar Mellencamp
is still wearing his hard hat ...

"Please, O Kracken,
spare me your change
and please spare
me some of my favorite
old mason bricks,
and spare me
from my brats

"Leave me one
Rosetta stone
and at least three
favored stocks
for six hundred
and sixty six
Fortune 500 companies
and please sponsor
my one last storm rider
so he can broadcast,
like Paul Revere in silver
my long last broadcast
on the Weather Channel
on Ruppert Murdoch's
Blue Ray Disc-shaped
magic Thunderbird carpet,
so that music can still be
piped in like rock'n'roll
in a cowboy hat
at the local Wal Mart

"And spare me your golden
spike in natural gas,
your January jolt
in coffee prices,
and spare me your sanguine
advice on what to expect
and spare me your photo radar
lanes used by Fed Ex,
and spare me your
weaponized Pineapple Express
as it tingles a trio
of water spouts
across the forty eighth paralell

"But please remind me later
to use a higher quality
white ashy paint
so I can smile upward
with a stun gun kept
quite safe behind my back
as I move beneath overhanging
chemtrail inspired clouds
to keep my doormats dry
when you try to reclaim
your honestly inward saints

"And tell that bastard
Mr. Ringo, he's running
out of time, and though
he bought a Wal Mart sold
Chinese-made plastic compass
that we have him lined up
in our electronic eye sights
and he'll never get across
King Henry the Eight's
magical river line

"Because, you see,
Medicare doesn't cover
everything,
especially his supposedly
secure bright and sunny
horizons, or bullets
or my elitist religious conceits
because he can't use his cell phone
or even mark a fully mastered retreat
with the sunspots buzzing up auroras
against his great hope for liberties
because they will always cost him more
than his lonely Roosevelt socialist dime

"Say a big hello
to that second toughest
man in America,
that next-to-last Templar
because I can see, feel and read
the second coming of Joan of Arc
sleeping in her shrine ...
'Coswe all know there's nothing
more exhausting than inaction
and his sacred pen as shotgun
won't bring his dead doggies back

"So hey! Angry Solari,
let's just say it was all
a good old boy's
misunderstanding
and even if the annointed We
run the risk of getting heart arrested,
or if sanctified gloomy We
speed through our Freemason made
towns, rocket launched
at the speed
of thirteen million
miles per hour,
and even if Johnny Ringo
can teach himself
to silence the two stormy
coasts in the centered
silences of his mind,
we can cut off his touch
to Taiowa her in Iowa
in order to remain in Tombstone
to review the cannons loaded,
in the late afternoon aspenglow,
as they are pointed
at Cochise's last stronghold
so that we, alone, can enjoy
the bonny bones of Norteneo
from our weaponized
plastic transister radio,
nor can he enjoy sweet
Maggie Marlowe, sleeping
in nicotine terrified migraines
without a tweet in our jail-baited
basements humming up thunder
from our cold dark basements
down below, so we can
keep up our plans to sell off
glassified dead scorpions
to the last of the plutocratic
touristas at the high noon
military movie show."

~ Douglas McDaniel,
Morning Sun, Iowa

Published courtesy of Mythville On-Demand