Ode to Potato Man

once upon a time
potato men were real, actual men
. . . but that was once upon a time.

profile of a potato man:

[usually]

(1.) married with children
(2.) middle aged
(3.) at least 20 pounds overweight (who's noticing?)

[always]

(4.) lackluster skin
(5.) wears unflattering clothes (who's noticing?)
(6.) rarely makes eye contact
(7.) signs lots of checks
(8.) and, of course, lover less, lover less, God help them,
lover
less

when a potato man walks into a shopping mall
he has no illusions,
he knows what he's in for,
(like a steer diving into a Brazilian river churning with piranhas).

immediately a garden of goddesses absorbs him,
moving around him, through him,
moving under unconcealing dresses like sexual panthers
serenely indifferent to the dead rabbits of potato men.
buttocks of women in their prime
cupped in saran wrap designer jeans (or is it paint?)
blossom like ripe globes of flesh fruit in Eden's
from which potato men are banished.

cleavage also, of course, abounds in all quadrants,
breasts to make a god cry out,
spilling
almost,
but never quite,
their nipple secrets before the world and the sky.
coarse words, over the centuries, from all civilizations,
can muddy these waters, but the glory of female nakedness
is a holy place, a sacred place, for all men with souls.

it's amazing how you can die and die and die
without falling on the floor,
without calling attention yourself
or that you're bleeding from orifices
unknown to any surgeon on this planet.

and yet, you keep "running your errands",
putting one foot in front of the other, as they say,
while all the while you're dying in that water torture,
holy way
men always die like dogs without lovers,
without that unique, special, oh so personal woman
who treasures your company, your dignity and spirituality
and who is as swollen and moist with lust for you
as you are for her

a PASSIONATE woman
who leaps,
over and over and over again,
hand holding with you,
and you only
into
the
abyss
of
abandon.

the paradox of potato men
is their desperate, pitiful charade
that the Holy Grail of loving your lover,
and being loved BY your lover,
has become for them a matter of no consequence.
they have, after all, their tasks de jour,
pants to buy, bills to pay, lawns to mow, and they fold
letters quite evenly before sticking them in envelopes.

thus in sexual concentration camps, like shopping malls
(there's many others)
a potato man keeps his eye on the ball,
and walks dutiful, responsibility walks
on rainbow less, castrated, Platonic journeys.
but SHOULD his eyes wander (naughty, naughty!)
to the cheeks of the woman burgeoning so artfully before him,
he merely shifts his gaze,
nonchalantly announcing to whomever,
no big deal, I've got more IMPORTANT things on MY mind,
gee, I've got some pants to buy, what do you think about that?
why should I be paying attention to the mere ass of a goddess?

this dying game he plays with himself countless times a day!
but why do potato men do this?
I'm not sure you really want to know,
it may break your heart,
but here's the answer anyway.

it's all about not adding insult to injury.
you see, for potato men,
living = dying from THIS injury,
and you just die and die until you're finally, fucking dead!
but IN THE MEANTIME, potato men (at least try to) give themselves
the only gift left in life they CAN give themselves,
which is to act "as if" they're above all this passion business
and placidly detached.

thus, when glimpsing even the coverings
of creatures they used to prowl in
FUCKING YOUR BRAINS OUT JUNGLES WITH,
they turn away like mannequins
preoccupied with pencils and erasers.

what else can they do?
roll around the floor, holding in what's left of their guts,
howling to the universe for their (once upon a time) lovers?
who gives a shit?
who's listening?

but here's something worth doing.
find a potato man (trust me, they're everywhere),
but don't look at his clothes,
look into his eyes,
but be warned, that's hard to do, since potato men make a science
of eye contactlessness (so infinite is their shame and loss).
but IF you can get his gaze, and hold it,
what you'll find there see may surprise you,
because there's a REAL man inside that potato man
who's never stopped keeping the faith for a lover.
a man who knows all about passion and abandon
and hand holding in French restaurants and feeling
mountain winds at night and breakfasting on the seashore,
and who will hold in his heart,
and who will hold in his groin,
to very death and beyond death,
the sacredness and human poignancy of what passion can be like

between a man and a woman

Coffee

Maggie never liked her name
that's for openers
but the day was fresh and promising
there was lots of sun
and her hair looked good
so she was feeling pretty jazzy
not pissy and negative
like Jimmy was always accusing her of.

Maggie paid attention to male asses
and on a scale of 1 to 10
Jimmy was a 9:
a nice male ass
with good definition
and cheeks pouching out like a male butt should
but his deck always seemed to be minus a few cards.
The problem is he never finished his sentences
as if he didn't have any periods in his brain
and always ended up muttering into his shirt or something
or something.

But Jimmy didn't see it that way
and really wasn’t trying to communicate anyway
he just wanted to convince people
he was really there
since he had some doubts about that
because no one seemed to take him seriously
at least not the way he wanted to be taken seriously
so he used his mouth horn to broadcast his "facticity".
-- he got that word from Sartre, even though he still pronounced
Sartre, Sart.
Oh well.

Ed joined Maggie and Jimmy
at a plate sized coffee table at the Hippopotamus
and suggested the shop be renamed
"A Very Large Animal"
since he kept confusing it with a rhinoceros.
It actually was an easy place to forget
with its wobbly white plastic chairs
but it did have a good location
and some delicious dark bread you could knock somebody out with
if you hit them with a loaf of it.

Ed was bony
his essence was bony
he was bone city when he walked into the room
but he was evenly constructed
had a little money
(certainly more than most of the clientele of "A Very Large Animal")
which he tried to use to his advantage when fishing for women
by talking of flying to places over the weekend
like Mexico or some spa in Kentucky
places like that
but no one ever knew if he actually did any those things
and really didn't give a shit
but still Ed talked his bony, money talk.

The white plastic chairs
didn't participate in the antics
of the bipedal life forms which folded themselves like "h's" over them
and when testosteroned graduate students
made theoretical pontifications
about their quantum soup entrails
to impress their (always unimpressed) dates
the chairs would have turned a deaf ear to these speeches
had they any ears to turn
but in point of fact the white plastic chairs
were neither white nor plastic
and for the cockroaches which ran amuck
when the sun was on the other side of the planet
they were more like towers in the sky
and hard to climb even for these oblong survivor machines
but sometimes possessing feasts de jour on their aromatic plateaus.

When Jimmy made eye contact with Ed
he'd snap away quickly
not wanting Ed to think he took him more seriously
than he was convinced Ed took him
even though Ed did the same
but only because Ed didn't like to make eye contact with anyone
since he was a strictly a turn-off-all-the-lights male
when it came to sex
plus Ed knew his body
albeit functional
wasn't that of the jock
he’d always dreamed of being in high school
but since he always ended up getting A's in math classes
that locked in his fate
and so eye contact for Ed was
Verboten because he was scared shitless
of what he might see looking DIRECTLY back at him
in the eyes of others
and never wanted to find out.

Eye contact anxiety was never a problem for the Hippopotamus
the building that is
with equations, names, and pictures scribbled on its inside walls
and the structure never concerned itself with Sartre or Sart
and was never seduced into depressions, passions, or even resignations
since the building was basically a box
with things inside it
like white plastic chairs and plate sized little tables
you couldn't put both food and books on
A box among boxes on a vast turning ball in deep space
scurried into and out of through rectangular holes in the wall
by bipedal life forms with names like Maggie and Jimmy and Ed
thus not the common denominator of anything
BUT a cool place to get espresso (those weird machines!)
and dark, heavy bread.

The beat goes on.

Maggie: Hey, this cheese Danish is really great today! I can't believe it. Why don't they always make it like this?

Ed: Yeah, but no one ever makes any serious money in places like this. I wonder how they get investors in the first place. It's probably their relatives.

Jimmy: Jesus Christ, Ed, who gives a rat's ass? Anyway, what's the story about this titty Mary Lou you were talking about? You know, that "dancer" you met on the plane coming back from Mexico City (rolling his eyes at Maggie -- and muttering).

Ed: Well, she turned out to be married or something, so much ado about nothing.

Maggie: Why? Don't you studs (Ed loved that one) know housewives are DYING for it? Hell, getting laid is the LAST reason a woman ever gets married.

Jimmy: Boy, you got that right!

Ed: Yeah, well I think she has a kid or something.

Maggie: Duh! Why else would she be married?

It was already twilight
when Ginger breezed into the Hippopotamus after her classes
as the regulars were defending
their table's rights of possession
with demitasse residues of tepid liquid
which would play no role
in the hoped for religious experiences of the swallowers
during their yoga class around the corner.

Ginger was not bony
and her breasts stuck out like two little tents
as the strap of her shoulder bag
creased between them
no, Ginger was not bony.

The yoga teacher was well intentioned
and physically functional in those ways
practitioners of yoga are deservedly healthy
but troubled in his secret, oh so secret, heart
because even though spirituality was his thing
he had no son and he had no daughter
no little angels to bless his vulnerability
trailing clouds of glory through his days and nights
to love and protect a thousand times a thousand times over
so he was a guy with good intentions, cotton clothes
relatively good digestion and lots of paper back books
but he had no children
and something in him would
never, never stop weeping because of it.

Hippopotami too have children
whom they love with Hippopotami hearts
and they worry, protect and are loved back by them.
Occasionally they even eat tourists together
but if Jimmy could read the heart of a submerged mother Hippopotamus
while rushing to the aid of her endangered son
Jimmy would no longer be Jimmy
but he would never be able to explain to anyone else why not.

When Ginger sits down between Maggie and Ed
Maggie knows she's there in ways
exquisitely oblivious to Ed
classifying her, as he does, as the presence of sexuality
and only in tangential ways a person.
Ginger's parents know otherwise.
Ed's body also knows otherwise
since bodies know universes unknown to universities
or the hormone goosed fantasies of memory
and had the name "Ginger" been stamped on the body
now sitting between Maggie and Ed
that body would have taken it no more seriously
than today's lipstick or the variable shoulder bag.

Jimmy: (now more alert) Hey.

Ginger: My GOD, I never thought those classes would end today, and that last one, with Professor mouse face, Jesus, I thought he'd NEVER shut up about "rational functions" and their graphs with "asymptotes" or something -- at 4:00 in the afternoon!

Ed: Yeah, well you're the one who took the class as an elective. Why'd you do it?

Ginger: Don't look at me, it was my advisor. She said a math class would round out my music major. It's ok, I can do it I guess, but it's so . . . abstract. I mean, how do you math majors (looking at Ed) keep your SANITY during all that symbol, symbol, symbol business?

Jimmy: That's easy, they don't. Ed's already seeing a therapist at student health, aren't you Ed. You know, the one you'd like to eat (and then mutters something).

Maggie: Are you really Ed? Hey, that's cool. I think therapy makes a lot of sense and if I had the time and money I'd be doing too.

Ed: It's actually not expensive at student health. Five bucks a pop, two or three times a week. The problem with the one I'm seeing now is that she's, well, very attractive, and that sort of trashes my soul searching. I go there to talk about my dysfunctional childhood and always end up looking at her crotch. (Jimmy snickers)

Ginger: Oh that's disgusting. What do you men do when you AREN'T watching our crotches?

Jimmy: You don't want to know.

Bubbles of bipedal conversation
float above the plate sized tables
like demitasse flotsam and jetsam
jostled by Brownian motion
now this way
now that.
The air participates in these conversations
invisibly
as the medium of vibration
the necessary but not sufficient condition
for jokes, threats
and the talking heart of things.
In the void between the earth and the moon
there's no breathing
no significant looks
no coffee tables or sexual innuendos
but something
else.

Jimmy was cognizant of his mutterings
and knew something peculiar was going on.
He also knew it was noticed
like a tick or stutter
but hoped it was mostly ignored
like a pungent smell can fade, in time
into the forgotten basements of consciousness.
Maggie never dreamed the disorientation she caused
when she twitted him for this "eccentricity"
and received in return
muted, guarded anger
dressed up as free floating criticism
from an ambiguous friendship.

Jimmy had been the successful jock, in fact
Ed had aspired to be in fantasy
but then, abruptly
left that Spartan world
of sweat, showers, and symbolic warfare
and became, to the astonishment of his family and friends
a philosophy major
and followed this commitment
into the bookish haunts of graduate school.
But for the core confusion
which lay in the center of Jimmy's life
the tomes of Immanuel Kant were no quick fix.
Maggie and Ginger once gigglingly, and privately, summed up
Ed as a mind without a body
and Jimmy as a body without a mind
but Jimmy was far from mindless
far, far from mindless.
And the beat goes on.

The sidewalk in front of the Hippopotamus
is never confused about anything
and never accepting of anything either.
It's uninsultable, never meditates
and the dogs which piss on it
or curl up on it when it's warmed by the sun
don't see it as the personal property of the human condition.
But for the bipedal denizens of the Hippopotamus
even the very air itself and the ball of the sun
cockroaches, pencils, and the very everything of everything
are frames merely, or adaptations
to the variable, designer stories of these creatures with names.
But the sidewalk
minus its name
is no longer IN a story.

How about you?

Green Blood

the trees explode silently

obediently

from sidewalks which undergird our unjournyings

like submissive poodles fat women wear at length.

exhaust perfumed and feeble leaved

they worship the darkness above our gummy paths

and dream of sidewalk less, arbor nirvanas

or facing Olympian storms without intermediaries.

the calling river sinews through buildings

not made by elephants or lived in by angels

and hurries to where not all of it can ever be at the same time

while a dead spirited teenager

hoping for lifetime elusive vindication

answers by crumbling into lung filled oblivion.

the crashing of thunder during Saturday afternoon baseball games

fries other fish

and yesterday's urgencies sing no songs for this tumbling journeyer

into the swirling substance of sorrowlessness.

a child at last.

these cities of man blink at the universe

with Edison eyes

and are rained on from sky heights of unconstructed electricity’s

which illuminate and frighten the animals below.

Opus 66

a yellow wooden pencil
tube like
and pointed at one end
rubbery and red at the other
is surprisingly hexagonal.

the black lead peeks out uncertainly
waiting to serve some purpose
unknown to its imprisoned
eraser head.

the marriage between the eraser
and the pipe of lead
within the trunk of wood
is discreetly hidden
by a thin metal crown.

this pencil has already lost it's virginity
leaving thin marks intelligible to something
somewhere.

it's larger than an ant,
and smaller than an elephant,
but then so are a great many things.

Opus 77 (Halloween)

Halloween
for the boy in a small town
was quite an event
with paper sacks
loaded to the top
with popcorn balls, Hershey bars, and hard candy for
winters in Alaska.

the costume making
started after school
and often went on for an hour or two
under the auspices
of mostly older siblings and mothers
while the dusk of an evening evolved into
darkness between street lamps
unknown to city children.

gnomes of the night
giggling and sweaty
crisscrossed neighborhoods
on the other side of town
and breathlessly exchanged information
with devils, ghosts, and
masked faces
sometimes identical to your own,
about the bulb lit porches down the street.

here was your chance of the year
to stop being a kid or a student
and most of all
a life form without parents.

behind the garish mask
with its soggy breathing hole
held to your face
by a thin elastic band
was the you known only to yourself.
a breather of darkness,
the middle of the night you
with the radio by your bed turned on
singing secretly
to the massacred privacy of childhood.

occasionally the boy
would get out of bed
walk to the window
and breathe the secret winds of the night
while listening to the heartbeat of the town.

the daylight world awaiting him
now at bay
would skewer him in due course,
but for now, by the window, in the darkness
was freedom and romance.

with the radio in the background
whispering to him about worlds beyond
schools and churches
and families which claim to be finalities
the boy would cease to exist
utterly,
but not finally,
as a creature with three names
in a solar system family.

the boy embraced the darkness
like a lover
like a lover.
the boy embraced the darkness
like a lover.

boxes

flat walls
in rooms of deceased relatives
stare at nothing.
not waiting
not singing
just being wallpaper flatness
Euclidian boundaries for bugs
containing air no longer (if ever) breathed
by Heroes of Purpose
or Victims of Satan.

if you kissed the paper skin inside these
constructed stomachs
you would taste dust and flatness
merely
and hardness
and silence
s i l e n c e / s i l e n c i o
you could drink it if your were a ghost.
are you a ghost?

these are rooms in which your ears ring
nothing else
the horse shit from busy busy busyness
has blown far and wide
it's all over here.
done
no second chances
don't call us
we won't call you.

boxes for being vertical in
boxes for being horizontal in.

these faces of flatness are
there
they're there
defining a moment
emboxing a life.

touch the walls, go ahead,
do it, do it, touch i
t, touchit, run your hand
fromlefttoright, don't close it, ke
ep your palm open, belly up to this paper drum of flatness
-- it won't be nice.

this queer, dry feeling is a cut,
a rule,
a declaration that says STOP RIGHT HERE
you can't go through here!
move away, you're too goddamn close
go over there and sit down and
stay in fleshland. touch fleshland. make love to fleshland.
stay away from us.

oh, oh,
there's a hole in that wall
a rectangular portal to
. . . another box?
flat faces there too
and dryness.
but they're not waiting for me
they have no agendas, wallpaper doesn't unstick itself
or have to be buried
with sacraments or grave gear
or tears.

if I fell to my knees
in rooms of deceased relatives,
the flatness, the FLATness and dryness
and hardness,
the wallpaper, sticking
wallpaper
on grainy, painted walls
(except on portals)
would make no eye contact with me.
I wouldn't be blinked at or listened to
or insulted
even ignored.

something else

something else

Opus 61

the morning emerges from yesterday's resignations
and struggles to meet the day vertically and combed.
snowflakes of the night,
now melted into irrelevance,
no longer blind us with revelations
and the day awaits bipedal outpourings
onto the atmosphere floor.

a black comb in the boy's pocket
bulges slightly
and catches on drawers when he walks too close,
inconveniencing parent policed,
rushing to school trajectories,
but not defining his life into grandparent non futures
since relatives for him drop off the edge of the world
with no particular fanfare.

but grandparents remember still, occasionally,
snowstorms and kitchens of long ago schoolings:
scolding teachers, homework dungeons, and Christmas holidays
now lost beyond lostness,
lost beyond anticipation, commitment, or someone else's prayers
and exquisitely unimaginable to their own children's grudging paybacks.
these sighing epiphanies are flavored with tutored acceptance,
but never with smiles.

the boy’s school is a warehouse of cross talking pandemonium
in which taller and heavier life forms
perform pedagogical rituals which they never took seriously either
and the boy learns far more about what the grownups don't know
than what they, never convincingly,
claim to know with such absolute certainty.
this lesson requires no homework and is never forgotten.

the boy starts to breathe again
the moment he leaves these peculiar factories
and surrenders while walking home to a calling ancientness
which encourages him to bite off small branches overhanging the sidewalk
just for the animal hell of it.
he does so
and spits
and much prefers this jaw living
to the escaped again chalkboard comas.

in jungle summers he sometimes visits dry creek beds
slightly out of town,
memory innocent, adult less, and usually alone
exploring alternative realities
unimaginable to philosophers and businessmen.

breathing and eyes only remain
when merging into these insect glorias and heat saturated weeds,
antidote dimensions to the clutchings of language drunk adults
-- the dead eyed ones who think they're alive
but feed on the earth magic of children.

in early teens he bicycles to small rivers of privacy
into which he abandonly walks
otter nude and sun alive
and drifts beyond the consensus insanities of the world.
the mud moves between his toes
while currents embracing his utter body
propel him through adventures with logs, leaves,
even turtles, and pell mell turnings.
the sky is plane less, the sounds aren't man made.
he has come home.

in due course the booming advice guns
of head livers
penetrate his very castle,
there to echo unceasingly,
contemptuously ignored only by his loins
which remain invincibly memory proof.
the open winged,
sky eyed living of boyhood
shrinks to a bubble of jabber
claiming to be a soul,
an ache of lost wildness
which breaks the hearts of angels.

oh, young boy, young man,
how right you were about everything,
everything,
and everything.

Opus 29 (Two crows on a wire)

Two crows on a wire
laser eye the highway.
Do these keen, blacks beings read our fantasies as we pass?
Do they hear our prayers, celebrate our joys, heal our fears?

No ships passing by night here,
no communication, no intermediaries, no United Nations of species.
Are we in their movie, or are they in ours (or both, or neither)?
If we could make mind contact -- would we really want to?
What alien sharpness, what force of realness would attack us utterly?
How their cries demote our science/religion/philosophies to fatuousness!

Of course, they really aren’t crows,
they don't have feathers or beaks,
and they aren't even animals or things,
but to ignore this sky/wind presence is terror success.
Out of sight may be out of mind (furniture),
but out of mind isn't out of ISness.

. . . they watch us long after we've forgotten them.