sing me a rueful old dirge

In America fear was bubbly again. All the creepy clowns were outlawed and nobody liked an incongruent affect anymore. The children were safe in their beds and Poltergeist was just a movie despite all indications to the contrary, the untimely deaths in subsequent years of several key players on the set. I was in the woods and came across a painted face, beckoning me from the shadows. He was smiling but not, shiny and hot, and had hospital scrubs for a clown suit. I followed him to a quaint house camouflaged by the moss, and inside I met others, none of whom spoke a single word. They served me venison and goose off the iron, flame-broiled with the world's animosity. Shriveled balloons were all about the dirty floor, and my feet were followed by the eyes of a cur beneath the table, with a dagger tail and long resting jaw. The scene had teeth. The food was outrageously good and the company so silent and modest. I felt ashamed for I was clothed in the fear of my culture, which made these good people recede to the margins. I thanked them prolifically large, then sang them a rueful old dirge. They applauded like grateful old mimes. My faced turned red as their smiles almost, and stayed that way somehow. My hair fell off my head in one lump into my hands, and my eyes widened as I looked at this wig. I looked around and before me at my empty plate, the utensils had grown twice the size or more. My hands went to grab them and that's when I saw my own hands had swelled up like balloons. The funny old woman with the green painted eyes, she drew out some plastic white gloves like the kind you see in the cartoons. She tenderly took my wrists while staring into my eyes, and pulled them over my hands. Some mangy children beneath the table had pulled off my shoes and replaced them with ones like the others. I got up to leave and tried to cry out but no words would escape from my mouth, and I honked and I bonked and puffed and huffed my way to the door of this godforsaken place. But someone tripped me or else I tripped on my silly fat shoes, and that guy with the cherry nose and beady eyes came and put me in a headlock. Out the corner of my eye I saw the hospital scrubs, lime green, being drawn over me where my clothing once was. That's when the face painters came - to finish me off.

simply colorful everything. simply all night long.

What will the weekend be like, i wonder,  going into it alone and willing with a working spirit. i guess i feel better working than anything else anymore, which may be different than i once was. you see i once wanted to be reckless and free of responsibility, and searched a way out of the static. i went alone then, too, but always ready to be with anyone rolling the same way, as i am now. like me they might hold your hand for a moment longer than others, or hold your eyes with theirs. tractor beam. attraction. being chosen could be sacred again, not a consumer driven concept in the great malls of material faith now centrifuges and research labs for the subtle senses, the homes of renowned empiricists now filled by squatters, a luxury activity exclusive to the partially brilliant who move to town from city and sift and shift through the yet to be appropriated. today i would roll more with optimists and cynics, anyone who wants to roll up sleeves and kick ass for their country for family for the home made feeling, keeping to something meaningful even if it's not how you pay your mortgage or rent, your car note, insurance, your phone bill and grocery, your internet connection, electric, wardrobe and water. we may even get out and vote in a couple weeks, after we smash the pumpkins and drive the point home to the vampires. bloody hell. six sense perception dwindling down to three or four. age and race, time and place, seen and heard and felt, we come together then go it alone, swimming slow, canvassing the urban element. leaves fall off trees to the sidewalks awhile, people run past screaming from deranged clowns, tight trance joints in the clubs spilling out past security. social security. no, the future and 2023 are not cold, computer, the silent ones are chosen. they patronize the magazine stand and the cafe. tractor beam attraction. open to living different, no real right or wrong, simply colorful everything, simply all night long. Well, they might hold your hand. a moment longer than the others.

untitled. mentions clowns.

we cannot
be cured

of love
undying

our patience
endures

legendary
lying

we break out
in laughter

alone
in a room

we empty
our lungs

of hateful
profanity

we sigh
collectively

free from
vanity

we die
with dignity

we kill
for sanity

a smile
we assuage
from sad kids
with braces

employed
as clowns

we
make
funny
faces

my friend the diy queen and killer (and lead singer for the bacon maybes)

Let me tell you about my old friend. The DIY Queen. Stitched her own clothes. She was that kinda chick. I am sure she would have homeschooled her kids, had she lived long enough to have kids. She was just that kinda wonderfully eccentric. Licked her stamps, long after stamp licking went out of fashion. She refused to buy the stickers. You couldn't tell her half of nothing! Patched her bicycle tubes with the old-fashioned patches. Thats how they got her DNA (the stamps, not patches), the detectives who tracked her down somewhere between Boulder, Colorado and Roswell, New Mexico. She wasn't able to run no more. She had broken her leg, on stage, after eloping with a clown. Such is the common result of fabricating your own shoelaces from yarn. Eloping with clowns, that is, not breaking a leg.

She was long gone just before then, long gone from California and where we grew up together. She sent a postcard to the State Fair and all its entertainers. That's how they caught her. Through those postcards she wrote to create alibis for herself, the profilers later said on the news. Selfish-like! That's the reason I decided to write this, here. Because someone needs to set the record straight. And I can tell your for damn sure! She never sent a postcard selfish-like in her all-2-short life! I know. I even have the sweet postcards she sent me, to prove it. But it's all too late for that, now. They claimed for a fact she wrote postcards selfishly, for appearances. Not to cement friendships. And she prioritized the envelopes with little sky blue Par Avion  stickers, thinking flight would hasten delivery from out of state. She conveniently forgot the extra postage required, they suggested.

She addressed the postcard in question to: 'family '. Yet those damn fool profilers and lawmen done her wrong, simply to do her wrong. Because she was the diy killer. Well, let me tell ya. She may be the diy killer to you, but she was my diy Queen!

The postcard was delivered by a truck without wings. The driver of the truck drank coffee from machines, and endlessly smoked smokeless e-cigarrettes. Just like her. Lucky for him, commonality ended there. He was simply an inconspicuous courier for the communique of a murderess, they said. That's why they could not pick her up sooner. She was too much of a yarn-laced straight shooter. An environmentalist. Contributor to the Save the Manatee campaign. No ifs. No ands. And No butts. She gave a shout out to technology, before they remotely switched the fatal dose of electricity into her (After her last request e-cigarrette with the near fatal dose of chemicals, in an e-filter she had put together DIY style during her many clocks on death row).

All the wannabe amateur tattoo artists shed an extra ink tear that day, for her. She had revolutionized the making of ink guns behind bars, among other things. The pivoting needles she made with smuggled ball bearings and button wheels, had earned her the nickname Rosie the Pivoter, which was a great promotion from her original name Suzie the Shuffler. She had not been overmedicated, however. Little did they know when they named her, she was simply effecting static electricity by the soles of her shoes.

No one at the California State Fair could remember her at first. The bearded lady finally ID'd her, with help from the psychic and a lineup, and some vague threats and from certain cops, not the least of which was to shave her face. This happened after the suggestion of near future financial windfall (not the shave, the ID). In the midst of a healthy reward, posted by an cuckolded clown. The bearded man (a detective) turned the whole thing over and over in his mind looking back. He felt disturbed. He had a strange attraction to the bearded lady. This attraction became an immense and lifelong distraction and burgeoning addiction to hirsute porn. So they say. He stuck the postcard to a lonely corkboard, with a paperclip he straightened into a pin. When questioned about his methodology by the chief of police, he suggested he was trying to live inside the head of the alleged diy killer. The chief screwed up his eyes, then called upon the local stock employee to stock the detective's office desk with pushpins.

They had the diy killer by her own confession, finally. What other way could there be? She took great pride in having taken the law in her own hands so naturally, in her vainglorious DIY-style. Her band, the Bacon Maybes, may have made their debut the following year, had she not been locked up. No one will ever know what kind of fame they would have achieved, Rosie the Pivoter and the Bacon Maybes, outside of her great infamy.

Far as I can tell, she was the first DIY Queen, I mean, she was mine. We made our own kombucha. She taught me. It was a nasty start, but it was a start. Ultimately she made good on her promise to one day have her own hens to lay her eggs she could crack in the frying pan. Plenty leftover to trade for milk and cheese at the farmer's market, or for hard boiling. Hell, if she had lived long enough to have had her own land, I wouldn't dare bet against her trafficking in just about anything the earth can turn up. Give her the sun, a hose and some dirt, and pretty much anything and everything was made possible.

But not men. She did quietly outsource them her whole life. She confided in me how she loved the adrenaline rush of a one night stand. Made me shiver. She was a modern woman. Not a feminist. Not traditional. Just a single mom by choice. She didn't hate men. She loved whomever was worthy of her love. Whom just so happened to be clowns, most of the time. Not losers, mind you. Clowns. Entertainers. Entertainers of children and families alike. They loved her, and she loved them. She could accessorize a clown with enough of her inventions to draw his act out a half hour or more. And you thought flowers that spit water and noses that honked like horns were special? Please. I don't have time to go into it, but please! We are talking about my diy Queen.

She just made her choices, with the experiences she had been given. Long ago, when she was still a teenager, she got caught up with a boyfriend turned sneaker pimp. Soon he had her pulling tricks. By proxy of another bad habit she learned from him: phenobarbital washed down with margarita mix. The storebought kind. Corn syrup with a whole tie-dye list of artificially flavored, numbered colors. The nightmare was over almost before it started. She was far from a pimp's paradise. Within a year or two, well, she was sleeping in her own bed again. He was nowhere to be found. Not just not in her bed, I mean. Nowhere. The sneakers, without the pimp.

The way I like to look at it? I guess one of them was bound to disappear, anyhow.

I choose to remember my friend, I knew. Not the DIY whore she became. We used to chew on licorice stalks, and talk serious about light things like cloud formations on an otherwise partly sunny day. She had this magic of making light of what was serious, and vice versa. We made eachother laugh. She inspired me to see things differently. We once had an benevolent kinda influence on us. Evolution of trust. if you ever heard of trust before. Trust existed way back when, before tv and sedentary life of suburban planning, when people had to rely on people to survive. Before culture began to stall like seems to do, now. Before shit got so comfortable. Before the able became the dysable. So simple it makes no sense, no more.