Spector Gant

I can remember the day I could single out the individual instruments on a track–standing on the platform at Pacific Avenue, staring into the dark tunnel looking for the headlights of the B train–a day that changed everything. That is to say, it doesn’t start like breathing. Without instruction you learn to ignore what’s so close about you, but one day you smell your own freshness in the stink of the crowd and you smile.

Youthful ardor, like the light refracted off the trapped bubbles inside a round, blue paperweight made of blown glass, expressed in love poems. Dead trees are used in conjunction with standardized storytelling in an attempt to graft a preconceived hope for constrained growth to the secret past of second-hand bookstore meetings and rambunctious back room public house readings. Like a grand conspiracy, the signs are everywhere, and perhaps you smell your own freshness in the refined and processed and paginated dead trees, and the refined and processed and mechanized instructions, or the slight odor of burning shellac that some describe as ‘noodle soup’, a process of ionization and heat and dry eyes.

I started to stare at them all with my round, blue eyes, and my hot, pink ears, and mouth them, assisted by my wet, willing tongue. Sometimes something secret and partially obscured would wink back. It’s a pantomime of the mind. The secrets bubble out, but so do all the instructions. The How-Tos and DIYs win out in the end, but every end is a beginning and you remember the old wisdom that there are only middles, which is both encouraging and discouraging at the same time.

Not because I have to;
Not because it’s all I know;
Not because of the humming light that spills out of my cracked mind;
Like signing hands trying to hold a gallon of ice cold water.

Maybe it’s like walking.

I break bread on the good days my water breaks. I dance round the Devil’s pit on the days I can only clown. There’s a sort of broad rejection of the Theory of Forms, yet we all play with the dimly lit shadows. Then again, perhaps Ashbery is correct to say, “play is a deeper outside thing.” Dig deep enough and you realize the game afoot has some real stakes, baby, and we all in.

There was an Old Man in a flower hat,
who cursed and broke wind and he spat;
never getting the news
‘bout looking the fools,
cause ain’t no Old Man in a flower hat.

In hollow dolls’ heads he stored his tobaccy.
Funk reeked from his rolls and he was quite wacky.
Twas tha Pits Of Change, dontcha know,
that proved the Sun his true Foe;
though that flower hat was reeeeeal tacky.

Ignoring the Old Man in a flower hat,
mercy riddles hope over this and over that–
but haven’t they heard
tis that that’s truly absurd?
There was an Old Man in a flower hat.

You are heading
downtown
and ask if I
need a ride,
which reminds me I’ve
forgotten how to
properly walk.
I’m not sure
exactly how or
when this happened, but
it’s clear to me that I’ve
wandered out
of my own picture
somehow
without even
noticing.

Growing up, we
had no car
and my father and
I would walk
and walk
everywhere,
passing those
folks who
slumped at the bus stop
with a kind of
smirk on our
faces, as if to say:
look at these
saps wasting away,
waiting,
while we,
like some holy men,
monks
on the
path of
some
sacred pilgrimage,
we are in motion
in order to
reach—
the arcade,
where we’d spend
rolls of quarters on
Elevator Action;
or to the park,
for a long game of Frisbee.

Just the other day
I had to walk
from the office
to the Rite Aid,
a mere block
away,
when I first detected the
absence within me of the
art of walking.
Not half a block up and
somebody
was about to
pass me…
Where should
I cast my
gaze?
My curiosity and my
awkwardness
were in a
tug of war
with my eyes as
they darted
all over the place,
towards
and away
this alien life form
entering my atmosphere.
My mouth in a toothy
grin, my arms
frozen still at my side,
sweat building in a rush
as my face flushed—
and I nearly fell,
tripping on the
the lip of the
protruding sidewalk
in front of me.

I survived what I
imagine would have
been a perfect kill
in the wild:
the other walker
sensing my weakness
would have pounced
and snapped my neck,
dinner for the pride.
From thoughts of
blood and my undoing,
I hear you shut the
front door.
I dig deep,
seek out my
courage, my will,
my
history.
Wait,
I shout,
Don’t leave
without me.

When I grew up in Bensonhurst
poetry existed in the lines
of the faces of the old,
Italian ladies who worked
in the laudromat on the corner.
They wore shifts and their pockets
were full of round candy in
clear, cellophane wrappers, and
quarters for the laundry.
I saw a man chase a woman
with a knife outside that
laundromat, the chase like a figure
eight—she smacked him from
behind every time he made to quit.
In the streets of my youth
older kids ignored school
books and threw fish at you as
they drove past your game of tag.
Periodically, we would search for
the new location of the local
whorehouse (probably mafia-run)
which would close down in one spot
and reopen in another.
I appreciate deep, close readings
but it’s not where I come from.

Living in the long, tall shadow
of Manhattan, a long letter train away,
you hear things. There’s at least one
nutso living in every neighborhood in
Brooklyn, and he tells you about
Jarry and Bukowski and R. Crumb,
and he recommends you rent Videodrome
and Eraserhead from the video store.
Your mom tells you to stay
away from him, but you
don’t, even though he asks you how
far along your pubic hair has grown
(“stubble, or is it like a forest down there?”).
You learn things, even though your
attention span
is short
and you
love
those shitty
shows like
Punky Brewster and
Small Wonder.
In small doses,
I learned things.

I smoked pot and watched Patrick McGoohan
in The Prisoner and thought I was on to
something.
I scribbled in a note pad, writing silly
love poems and surreal romps. Sure, I also
wrote sexual fantasy ‘books’ styled
after the Choose Your Own Adventure series.
I thought I was genius:
“If you decide to have the three-way, turn to
page 12…”
I had teachers who cared about me,
who nurtured my interests,
while my mom fucked
strangers and lived inside a bottle.
Slowly, I learned to do the same,
but still…

Little by little I learned things.
Like when I was twenty and I adored
Allen Ginsburg, got blue light high
and wrote Ginsburgian poetry buck
naked by candlelight.
(Didn’t you?)
That same kid in his twenties
read Lolita and Gravity’s Rainbow
and The Dharma Bums
and knew he was on to
something.
I love that kid. that kid tried and tried
and tried and tried and tried,
and, hell, we can appreciate that now.

Beyond the hard work
and years of writing and writing,
and countless rejection letters
is the blog culture
where people ‘self-publish’ on
Wordpress or Tumblr;
the culture of writing
in 140 characters or less.
I know there is a hallow ground that
exists beyond this
democratic space. It exists
someplace around a silent signpost.
It tells me to
look closer, look closer.
But the truth I’m reaching at here,
like all truths
shuns absolutes.
Do we have to live in one world
or another?
Absolutes will bury you,
cave in around you and
close out the light, where
you will be filled with
the sounds of your own
heavy breathing.

Age has taught me to
defy the expected, and to
celebrate life as if it’s
on fire.
In spite of ourselves,
we find peers, and just maybe
someone who will read
our crazy fucking poetry.
With every connection, we build
new ways of expressing ourselves,
of revealing ourselves.
Like an endless tree, even the
smallest of our branches plays a part
in the overall reach and,
if not beauty, then at least
provides a bud to blossom.
Despite the disposable
environments of status updates
and tweets, and the ease of
posting poems and fiction,
there will always be the Brautigan-type
working on the perfect line,
getting the rhythm just ah’um,
or who works on it endlessly
never succeeding to satisfaction;
and of course, the opposite:
the casual send,
tossed off, a piece that isn’t crafted,
which could use further gestation
(like this poem),
and maybe
it is simply forgotten
with the click of a button,
or even—perhaps more
alarming—retweeted, reblogged.

And yet, here I am,
among you,
some knucklehead from
Bensonhurst who
is still reaching for
the light,
reaching past
the grime and weeds.
Little by little,
my littlest of littlest
branches bending in
the air, extending
out
out
out to the
great beyond.
In fact, I’m
already into
something else.

What you are about to read is, how should I put it?…inexact. Not that I don’t have the best of intentions. Perhaps it’s the medium’s fault. Or, perhaps it’s the different relationships at play: me to me, it to me, it to you, you to it, you to me…Whatever it is, one thing I know for sure is there are expectations. Expectations are dangerous. But that’s another story. Let’s get back to the falsehood at hand. I’m trying to tell you something—get a point across, elucidate a certain something—until it’s clear as mud.

Speaking of good intentions, I believe most ernest artists work hard at their craft shaping the raw materials at their disposal—molding the clay, so to speak—even allowing for happy accidents, all towards the hopeful manifestation of some kind of truth. Sometimes it’s a successfully articulated inner truth. Sometimes it’s, even more impressively, a larger truth. Let’s call it ‘the pith’. And for shits and giggles, let’s give it an orange scent.

I’m sure that at least once you’ve had one of those moments when you’ve understood something in a ‘sharper-than-normal’ way. You know, that feeling that only the best of poets can capture, be it sideways and/or inside out. This is not one of those moments.

This is nothing more than a kind of make believe, and a very false one at that. While it’s true that our feelings can be manipulated, it’s unlikely in this case. For example, I can tell you that my mother one day out of the blue sent me a text message to let me know that she no longer wanted to have any contact with me. Truly painful stuff, to be sure, but, really, I hope you’re distracted enough by my false tone to not feel that. You should be wary of such ‘truths’ in this context. Still with me?

Sometimes our visceral reactions lead us astray. Not that I’m implying our feelings are entirely out of order. I often feel deeply as a result of the written word: I have been moved to tears, frustration, lust, and much, much more. Even gratefully moved, allowing for a cathartic cleansing. Again, that’s another story. It’s just that what I’m trying to tell you, well, It’s nothing you do not already know—namely, that this is a construct, a contrivance.

You’ve been here before, and even now you’re realizing (if you haven’t earlier) that I have been working towards this moment: driving my point in a certain direction, albeit a very circuitous, somewhat Escher-like route. I’ve led you back to the end, which is really an echo of the beginning. It’s an ending you’ve been expecting (admit it, you knew this was coming): what you have read is completely false.