counterwave-k-blog

[counterwave-k-blog]

1

Egg yolk sunshine oozes, reclines really, across the sky over a town where school teachers polish fire hydrants in their spare time and police officers content themselves to chase away pigeons from underneath the tables of outdoor restaurant customers. The town was named after the Californio aristocrat and rancher whose lands were seized and despoiled a hundred and sixty-eight years ago by the hard men that brought their beef enterprises westward, and with them, the American frontier itself.  These men they rent in twain the governing structure of the Mexican society that had hitherto existed for generations, while the killing they wrought to this end produced the stench of victimhood they blamed for waking them from their narcotic slumber in the first place.

And now now very now Jackie Keymaker sits on the terrace of that very restaurant in this town, cradling a glass of wine, his seat and table resting on top of the very ground of that contradiction of which he is completely unaware. As he takes his sip and closes his eyes, an observer could easily mistake this moment as one of sensual transcendence while in fact his life crashes down around him, because Dana Gardner witnessed something that he did, a sin committed, something he does not remember, and she has chosen to ruin his reputation with the information, and he clutches the glass because the simple flicker of pleasure dancing around in the wine is all there is left in the world and it is ferocious to need that flicker as much as he does, but he does, like the lion who does not want to crush the lamb and yet as the moment of that tender thought of conscience disappears as the flicker itself subsides, the lion crushes the lamb, must crush the lamb after all.

[counterwave-k-blog]

2

yes I will yes and who does not love the sound of the right voice tearing itself apart but today I will put myself together today I will put myself together yes I will yes

It was really all about one song.

It was years later. She had been kicked out of a karaoke club the night before. She only came to that club because they had that one punk rock song she loved, and it was the only place in town that had that one song. But in the middle of the song, the machine glitches hard and so she flips out, kicks the mic stand from underneath the microphone and yet still holds the mic, if you can picture that. So she talks some shit about the situation into the mic, sings along “what the fuck is going on here”, which are not the words, I think you understand me. The manager collects the mic stand from the ground and puts it exactly where it’s supposed to be. The machine glitches out again so she throws down the mic. The manager says fuck it, you’re out of here. And she just holds up her hands and sighs and say ha! I’m already on my way out.

She was always always already on her way out.

But I guess this that time on her way out the anti-feminist asshole bouncer apparently thought the bitch had too much talent and so he stuck out his foot and she fell and hit her head hard on the same curb she’d kicked me to six months before.

She didn’t get out of the hospital for six months. She didn’t remember my name until the nurses found my business card in her wallet. Shit, she didn’t remember her mom’s name.

She said later that it made her feel like a kid. And still I tell her that knowing her makes me feel like a kid. Hell, I still am a kid. 

I never wanted be a detective. But my sister has no one to take care of her, and I have a talent for this sleuthing thing, so I have to do what I have to do to pay our bills. Forgive me.

When she got out of the hospital she didn’t remember the song she had so badly wanted to sing. And this was the year of the song, after all. 

That was the day when she pulled my card from her wallet and later ended up in my office.

The days now they hold still waiting for their chance to move, to become other days now

to be no longer able to enter danger willingly, in the infinitive, and yet to fear it is already too late, also infinitive, et. al.

they forget now how it goes/so/wind chimes. they forget how it goes

to wear the mask of beauty and they say 

yes we will yes and who does not love the sound of the right voices singing the song that these heady days we will keep for tomorrow when it is colder and harder and yet today we will put ourselves together today we will put ourselves together yes we will, Yes.

[counterwave-k-blog]

1

Egg yolk sunshine oozes, reclines really, across the sky over a town where school teachers polish fire hydrants in their spare time and police officers content themselves to chase away pigeons from underneath the tables of outdoor restaurant customers. The town was named after the Californio aristocrat and rancher whose lands were seized and despoiled a hundred and sixty-eight years ago by the hard men that brought their beef enterprises westward, and with them, the American frontier itself.  These men they rent in twain the governing structure of the Mexican society that had hitherto existed for generations, while the killing they wrought to this end produced the stench of victimhood they blamed for waking them from their narcotic slumber in the first place.

And now now very now Jackie Keymaker sits on the terrace of that very restaurant in this town, cradling a glass of wine, his seat and table resting on top of the very ground of that contradiction of which he is completely unaware. As he takes his sip and closes his eyes, an observer could easily mistake this moment as one of sensual transcendence while in fact his life crashes down around him, because Dana Gardner witnessed something that he did, a sin committed, something he does not remember, and she has chosen to ruin his reputation with the information, and he clutches the glass because the simple flicker of pleasure dancing around in the wine is all there is left in the world and it is ferocious to need that flicker as much as he does, but he does, like the lion who does not want to crush the lamb and yet as the moment of that tender thought of conscience disappears as the flicker itself subsides, the lion crushes the lamb, must crush the lamb after all.

[counterwave-k-blog]

17

The women in my family are what you might call..unusual. We don’t fight. We don’t even talk, really. But. 

That’s because we don’t need to. 

I’m not looking for your approval by the way.  I just needed somebody to tell.

We don’t need to talk because

We all dream of the same house

No one’s ever been to the house. No one’s ever seen it. 

Every war is a war of attrition. Every fight is a fight to the death. 

But every woman in my family dreams of the same house.

[counterwave-k-blog]

[counterwave-k-blog]

15

when life is like a dinner party of wit and dalliance

to make up for all the suffering

Mrs. Jetsetter and her slave of a husband dish out the cole slaw,

and no one bids us goodbye

[counterwave-k-blog]

14

noise love noise love noise,

It was all

about one song.

The Program was

Harmonic Beloved.

[counterwave-k-blog]

13

With which eyes

Will we behold

(Our vision penetrating through

The coastal mountain mist),

This synthetic beauty,

Beyond vision,

Into the textured fabric of our interrelations, and

Into the inside of all of it?

With these,

Our eyes, the only eyes,

that take up

What they behold,

Yes with these eyes,

For they will suffice,

They will suffice.

[counterwave-k-blog]

12

Descartes asked if thought

Was substance -

The world gave way as if

To an avalanche.

It got off its couch.

And yet in full florid

lurid detail,

All the cool kids

Disagreed.

[counterwave-k-blog]

11

and to get rid of

this itch

do we need to say

fuck you to love

and Western civilization?

[counterwave-k-blog]

Lady Hedda’s Little Lair

These things are given in the living visual memory

The ice queen

The shareholders’ revolt

The French redress

Despite its apparent size

retains its identity

Through the Australian drummer who’s quirks take size

through the constancy of its own limited perspective.

We are all form We are all death We all

one song.

This Hallelujah will give way

To a desperate motorcycles hym

singing along with it.

[counterwave-k-blog]

9

I have a sandbox that can blow up the world

Whether its strategic opacity or temporary blindness

There are you are. Delicious mind. Drink you up

And we leave in separate cars.

[counterwave-k-blog]

8

All these songs we sing for the death of the city,

to the heroes of the working class, yea

for the dogged miserable

who still manage to enjoy 

their morning tea, and

for those first people who thought they’d been exiled

from the garden

when,

        Truly,

God did not want them to leave.

[counterwave-k-blog]

7

A morning like this. Cold and sunny. With the light falling down the same diagonal line, dumping its yellow gore onto the splendid stage, parking lot pavement. It was before, though. Now could never do that.

                  The North Berkeley train station. 

                  Do you have any idea what it would do to my life if I stayed here with                                 

                   you?

                   It was enough, it was everything that she even considered it.

                   I’m not asking you to stay. Go.

                  Her eyes gleaming the desperate radiance, pleading.                   That desperate radiance was enough, it was everything. But I 

                   couldn’t let her feel it. Our Casablanca moment.

                   I turned my back to her.

                   And she left. I never saw her again.

What can now do, really, now that things are like this? Refill the store it’s Sunday replenish the stock it’s Monday. Buy your jeans and your nylons, buy your salami and say to yourself this is democracy.  But even your cars, even your savings accounts won’t save you when your son comes home again to say I’m sorry. We used to believe in something. We use to have a vision of a better world. We fought a war for it. And who won? The consumer. The worm. The louse. I still believe in the revolution. I still believe in the                   driving from Ventura. The business trip. Three hundred miles of stop 

                  and go traffic. 

                  Then the whirly gig, the siren. The Accident. The yellow gore on the            

                   pavement.

                  To turn away is to

                  I will die but I will not surrender.

                 My head fell to one side.

                 The yellow truck.  Written on the wind a wave of chainsaws and

Dear David,

Lately he favors the term dissembling, I suppose because of the tension between its passive and active connotations, because he says it implies an act of audacity, rather than one of elision. Lately he's begun to believe that every time the technique of determining truth advances, the technique of deception, (seeming of its own volition) perfects itself simultaneously. Always staying a step or two ahead, of course. And of course you know he says that.

Lately he's dying, which somehow makes him haughty, nasty, and brave. Lately there is a great space between us. It’s hard for me to describe it to you. And you can be so easy to talk to. But it was never there before, the space between him and me. The more I love him now the less I can stand to be around him. 

I guess that’s what now does now.

As always, we look out our window onto our, (yes, your joke), Ancient Roman Garden, and bellow the trellis, of course, the dirtiest part of the 405 freeway by Reseda Blvd where you stayed that summer. We think of you, since we all laughed about that then.

You simply must come visit again or I don't know what I'll do. 

Yours.

Dr. Dana Darr

March 7th, 1941

[counterwave-k-blog]

6

             It was she who told me that to savor the heartbreak                                       is always to              consecrate some small victory.

             I saw then that the ruins of that Nevada town cume city                                      give way now to newer earth              always wanting pushing waiting for its chance to move.

             To move upward and against what we, though not I not you,                                      have built there.              What is it that we have built when when there are no more flowers                                      and no water and no              good food and no good air, what is it that we have built.       

             And while the children have slept, we have wasted our lives.                                 First we waisted them on fullness             while split and partial we remain. And then we wasted them again                                 when we became obsessed with style.

             A hard chemical layering surrounds that memory that both prevents                                it being forgotten, and also from being              recalled too often. In Las Vegas you can drink yourself              to death for fifteen dollars. There’s a capricious cherub god around                                here who feels no need to              wear the mask of beauty and yet it is always his right                                 to take the damn thing away from you              the moment he gets jealous that you have something that he does not.              the moment he gets jealous that you have something that he does not.

             I fictionalized the cherub god Rex in Las Vegas yes,                               but not before              he fictionalized himself. What has this demand for structure                             done to              beauty, elegance and grace. 

             Sometimes we had to struggle to understand each other.                             Yet we celebrated the passage              of time, even though it was our undoing.

            The ruins of that city just stand still now, waiting to                             become other ruins.              If you were still alive, you would have said. Perhaps the                             invented past invented us.             Those would not have been your words though.

            Even if you have wrecked the sky, brought the stars down, even                             if you have feasted greedily on the guts of             the gazelle, even if you have not told the truth, even if                            you are not clean even then,             still, we have a song for you.

            This whole thing, Chapter Six is my way of saying that I miss you.                                             Maybe everything I will                 say now will just be a way of saying that. Not just missing you,                             but all that has so gracefully fallen to ruin. 

            I hope not everything I will say will always mean that. I know you                             would not want that.

            But if in the course of building this monument we discover that                             the only             right thing to do is to take it apart again,

            and to walk away. Will we have the courage for that also?                             You will.

[counterwave-k-blog]

5

I downloaded the Program before anyone else did.

In my hotel room, I looked over my shoulder in the mirror and saw the progress bar moving and concluded with some satisfaction that it was finally transferring properly. And thank god this trip was almost over. In a week, I would be home, and I would see my girlfriend. She would find out that I had downloaded the Program and she would say Oh you did good, Didn’t you? Come into my Bedroom and Let Us Close the Door.

I was at the hotel because I was on a business trip.

The Program did different things to different people, that was its magic. Most people felt a sense of connection through some effect of its interstitial, non-chronological clusters implying intensified retroactive change. Like the sound of the right voice tearing itself apart. Like a long, deep conversation with an old friend, a conversation that had somehow already happened at the same time that it was still happening.

Others experienced it as a drug high. The Program also made a very few people feel nothing at all. I wish I had been one of those.

I told myself that I would wait until I was with my girlfriend again to use it for the first time. But of course, I opened it as soon as the computer said download complete…

There are things I do now to make time move differently. Do you have a problem with that? The days they just stand still now, waiting to become other days. Some days, I think these days will never come. Some days, it seems they have already passed. Some days, I think I am still lying in that hospital bed. After the crash.

I don’t remember much about that first time I used the Program. I am certain that I floated through a memory of being in traction therapy. After the crash. I remembered that at that time, I did not trust the Practitioner, which is always a very hard reality for the Recipient.

I also remembered that it nevertheless felt good to have relief for at least the time period during which I was in the machine. And I remembered that at least the relief made me able to listen finally to music. To listen to the eighties song that played over the boombox while I was in the machine, while I stared at the ceiling.

I’m sorry if I was just thinking of the right words to say, I know that  they don’t sound the way I planned them to be…

The business trip didn’t exist. Although I did make contact with Someone Else, I had only come to the hotel for the bandwidth and the proximity to the server necessary to download the Program. I decided not to use it until I saw her. Then I drove home.

I called her. I said, I downloaded the Program before anyone else did.

My girlfriend pulled up in her white truck. She brought me someone else, this time, to keep me satisfied.  She was so ready for this, it seemed like it was the whole point for her to have ever known me.

She sat down in front of the Program and her head fell to one side. Her inky blue iris reflected the imagery of the Program. It was moving very fast this time. She herself could not move.

You only get so much time with the Program.

She did not say Oh you did Good. She did not say so Let Us Close the Door.

We don’t remember much about that first time we used the Program. We did not share the same experience, although it happened to us at the same time.  Her head fell to one side. Every time you use the Program, it lasts for a shorter time. So while she was still Underneath, I had the presence of mind to make contact again with Someone Else.

My girlfriend woke up and left her in her yellow truck.

[counterwave-k-blog]

4

To him yes to him. A drink for him, a drink for our dear and pure noun phrase,

Can we not lend him this, our true love, during this, his trying time?

I don’t know

       but I think he needs it right now.

Can we not place him on a bed,

can we not touch his face

can we not for now,

for an instant of this glassy 

         shard of a life,

let him grieve

        for all those lifetimes he could not select.

Can we not touch his face

can we not cradle his elbow

and not ourselves any longer covet this

anteriority anymore, and 

can we not

let ourselves grieve

       for all those lifetimes he could not select.