“If it’s brown, shut it down.”
1 Like
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside those white
shorts.
6 Likes
Hull
By Allen Spaceberg
For Carl Spaceomon
I
I saw the best Captains of my generation destroyed by Unizone, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the space streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded captains burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating EDM,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Charybdian angels staggering on tenement hulls illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the viewscreens of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their credits in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the Zune,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through the Asteroids with a belt of marijuana for Don Mondo,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind space-lanes of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off portholesills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the space-lanes of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight space-lanelight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and ebooks,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the crew, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the space-lanes with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their portholes in despair, fell out of the subway porthole, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on lobsters, cried all over the space-lane, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 2830s German techno-jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their Captains in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid hulls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement porthole, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy space-lanes obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Unizone! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Unizone! Unizone! Nightmare of Unizone! Unizone the loveless! Mental Unizone! Unizone the heavy judger of men!
Unizone the incomprehensible prison! Unizone the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Unizone whose buildings are judgment! Unizone the vast stone of war! Unizone the stunned governments!
Unizone whose mind is pure machinery! Unizone whose blood is running money! Unizone whose fingers are ten armies! Unizone whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Unizone whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Unizone whose eyes are a thousand blind portholes! Unizone whose drones stand in the long space-lanes like endless Jehovahs! Unizone whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Unizone whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Unizone whose love is endless oil and stone! Unizone whose soul is electricity and banks! Unizone whose poverty is the specter of genius! Unizone whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Unizone whose name is the Mind!
Unizone in whom I sit lonely! Unizone in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Unizone! Cocksucker in Unizone! Lacklove and manless in Unizone!
Unizone who entered my soul early! Unizone in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Unizone who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Unizone whom I abandon! Wake up in Unizone! Light streaming out of the sky!
Unizone! Unizone! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Unizone to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Captains! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into Space!
III
[radacted by order of Charybdian Censors Office, “When you really need to know, we’ll let you know!”]
8 Likes
I’ve been there. Had to pay a fine or renew a licenssse or sssomesssuch. Out near the Orion Clussster, ain’t it?
1 Like
Is there still time to enter the unizone logo contest using
HOOOWWWWWLLL!
Also, I’m not sure you used enough exclamation points.
2 Likes
Well, I don’t care bout asteroids or skryzzee,
Long as I have my plastic Billi
Riding on the navpanel of my ship
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every galactic federation,
With my plastic Billi aboard for the trip.
Plastic Billi, plastic Billi
Riding on the navpanel of my ship
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every every galactic federation,
With my plastic Billi aboard for the trip.
Well, I don’t care bout that Unizone credit fee,
As long as I’ve got my Plastic Billi
Glued to the navpanel of my ship
You can buy Him phosphorescent
Glows in the dark, He’s Pink and Pleasant,
Take Him with you when can’t let your luck slip
I don’t care if it’s dark or scary
Long as I have magnetic Lizard Mary
Ridin’ on the navpanel of my ship
I feel I’m protected amply
I’ve got the whole damn Holy Family
Riding on the navpanel of my ship
You can buy a Sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell
Goin’ ninety parsecs, I’m not wary
'Cause I’ve got my Lizard Mary
Guaranteeing I won’t go to Hell
Well, I don’t care bout asteroids or skryzzee,
Long as I have my plastic Billi
Riding on the navpanel of my ship
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every galactic federation,
With my plastic Billi aboard for the trip.
11 Likes
Cool, Luke. I gotta hand it to ya…
1 Like
This moose has no idea what happened to those Unizone spacedock meters…
3 Likes
I must out to the stars again, to the lonely black and fly,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the hull’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the cloudface and a grey dawn breaking.
I must out to the stars again, for the call of the running moose
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be shook loose;
And all I ask is a windy day with the cargo flying,
And the flung art boxes and the Hot Pockets, and the barkeep crying.
I must out to the stars again to the vagrant gypsy life.
To the lizard’s way and the lobster’s way where Unizone’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
6 Likes
4 Likes
youh left out the secound U.
I opine that we’ve been left alone too long in the wilds of the Space Klondike.
6 Likes
I’ll take Us over those damn question marks bleeding over into every post
1 Like
Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?
3 Likes
Now you’re just makin’ stuff up.
+ Zͣ̄A͉͎̥̖̓ͭL̜̫͈͖͙̅͘ͅG̒̉̊ͥ̍O̭͙̝͖̹̖̎ͤ͗͗ ͆͏͚͖F͔̙̻͙̄̊̃̓͋ͥT̥ͮ̓̉͜H͉̙̰̩́̏͛ͮ̚Ḁ̖̮͍̮̠̃ͤ͒G̹̗̝̝̝̹̈ͩͬ̊̋ͭ̀ͅN̩̲̺̺̠̖ͦͣ̔̈́̿?͎̽ͣͪ +
2 Likes
10 Likes
