Small Town Living
The Beats
What’s What
Work #67
The End
Cosmic Blues
Howie Good is the author of The Titanic Sails at Dawn (Alien Buddha
Press, 2019).
My heart is a town so small it doesn’t have a
doctor or a cop or a priest, doesn’t even have anyone on standby to plow the
roads in winter or fill in the potholes in spring, and maybe that’s why people
say all those teeth-rattling, bone-jarring things about me, but you ignore what
people say and undo your buttons and unpin your hair, and then it’s like
daylight at night, the light streaming in on a soft slant, poking at the black
seeds in the corners and the weeds in the flowerboxes, stirring the town back
to stunned life.
The Beats
Gregory Corso was sitting in the window of
Allen Ginsberg's East Village apartment – two, three hours, just sitting in
silence. He had vowed to himself not to be a willing participant to any further
chaos. Just to be every day, it took everything. You could be having a really
nice time at the beach or the park one minute and in the next minute there
could be cops with meaty red faces gassing and clubbing you. Once at a reading
some lady asked him, “What’s an id?” and he thought a bit before answering,
“Eighteenth-century sea captains carousing in Surinam.”
What’s What
A lot of people around here have no idea this
sort of stuff goes on. They haven’t heard about Syria. They say, “Where is
Syria?” Some think it’s Siberia. Several pieces of evidence show it must be Van
Gogh’s suicide gun. Night stretches on for days. There are guys with their
dicks out. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if sometime soon all packaged items come
labeled: “Do not insert in rectum or vagina using fingers or mechanical
device.” Only the little birds out back seem to know what’s what, darting,
gliding, fluttering, then sharing battered space on a leafless branch.
Work #67
History is the memory of what never happened. Certainly
stop in and bring an energy bar and a yarmulke if you got one and want to
accumulate a variety of religious experiences. The Pilgrim fathers may be off
somewhere searching for street cred.
It’s the women, anyway, who do the real work, continuously passing back
and forth through a door in the forest. The beavers beat a warning when the
water is rising or when the men return from time to time with their darkness
and their grievances. There are gods but with faces shaped a lot like our own.
The End
The doctors say anger can give you a heart
attack or stroke, and anxiety can give you cancer. I’m often angry, and when
I’m not angry, I’m often anxious. Rivers of darkness are expanding and
spilling, and a mass shooter has tweeted, “If you see me, weep.” Dazed mothers
wander through a bombed-out city with their dead children draped over their
arms. This could be just one more sign that the end is about to begin. While we
wait, some demand proof, some wear hazmat suits, some only sigh. I’ve painted
my beard blue and stuck gold stars on it.
Cosmic Blues
I’m not really into cosmic things, but I don’t
have a choice. Salvador Dali is forever. I used to see seagulls everywhere.
Then a mirror unrolled from the sky, and the seagulls were just skeletons. None
of it made a lot of sense. Someone said to me, “It’s simple. A black hole is
where time and space disappear.” Simple?! Solid objects are melting into air at
an alarming pace. It’s not an unknown future. It’s almost here. I think it must
be like a wasp nest in a barrack in a German concentration camp or 634 minutes
inside a volcano.
