scenes from a life - burrito bowl

The companion series

scenes from a life - jan 16-18 - the narrow road to the deep north and other poems

ep 1 - the narrow road to the deep north and other poems



ep 2 - Now That I am Old and Mature I can Go Back to Myself



ep 3 - birds in a bus station
 

scenes from a life - rocky mtn hi

ep 1 - rocky mtn hi



ep 2 - softcore



ep 3 - jeremiah johnson



ep 4 - arches

feel it all the way

them california roads
where the steel river flows
they just don't reach far enough for me
each day it's increasingly clear
I gotta get the hell outta here
I just wasn't made to live in los feliz

the kiss you left behind
is branded on my mind
no ocean's worth of tide'll wash it away
the absence of your words
is all I've ever heard
there's a tape stuck in the deck that just won't play

and I feel it all the way
feel it all the way
through the long ride home

this redundant smiling sun
is not fooling anyone
it just ain't got a cloud to hide behind
I wish it'd go away
find another song to play
your tan's the only proof it ever shined

the same day repeats itself
in this air-conditioned hell
I think too much for anybody's good
I been waiting for your call
I waited much too long
longer than any normal person would

I feel it all the way
I feel it all the way
through the long ride home

the stars are trapped
in a blazing light
I'm racing back
to a midwest night

the same day repeats itself
in this air-conditioned hell
I think too much for anybody's good
I been waiting for your call
I waited much too long
longer than any normal person would


I feel it all the way
I feel it all the way
through the long ride home

Marfa Lights

West Texas Breakfast wakes us.
The road rides the land, its hills,
over the old dinosaur shells.
The universe was made
to become aware of itself
and then die. Dinos proved incapable
so God blew them to smithereens
and passed the tasks to us,
the gunbarrel He puts in His own mouth.

Out in Marfa, the ghost lights are burning.
Stars whisper secrets to the desert
that the city can't be trusted with.
This is something else though, something
we repeat only to ourselves,
light from Route 67 caught
in North America's darkest sky.
The compass finds its destiny.
The feet step. I read the road.

Song of the Open Road: The American Machine

For the wanderer doesn't bring back from the mountainside
to the valley a handful of earth, unsayable to everyone, but
rather a word gained, a pure word.
-Rilke
The Ninth Elegy

10-20-98 Columbus OH: Much different than other shows I have done here. More people than usual and a much better venue.

Ohio is flat and the people are trapped on the flat plains. The endless small towns, full of American flags and bad food. All that time and television. You want the real America? It is here that you will find it. Ohio, Michigan, these are the places where the American slow death plays itself out over the seasons. Football and raking leaves. All that heritage. Depressed towns that are now shells of the boomtowns they once tried to be. No one told them it was a joke and the joke was on them; that the American Dream is only for a few, that the rest just serve their time in this tortured land of beautiful fugitives. Small towns are suppliers to the American Machine. Soldier boys, food, patriotic air, good sturdy racism and separatist spirit.
-Henry Rollins
Smile, You're Travelling

You said: "I'll go to another country, to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed
them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don't hope for things
elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

-C.P. Cavafy

The City

Young French would-be punk-rock stars

listening to American westerns on the juke

trying to figure out

how to get out of town

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous. Here it is the cocktail hour.

New York is the very opposite of Paris. People’s last concern is with intimacy. No attention is given to friendship and its development. Nothing is done to soften the harshness of life itself. There is much talk about the ‘world,’ about millions, groups, but no warmth between human beings. They persecute subjectivity, which is a sense of inner life; an individual’s concern with growth and self-development is frowned upon.

-Anais Nin

The Diary of Anais Nin 

I want the city

but I want the country too.

-Jonathan Richman

City Vs. Country

Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,

Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,

(But where is what I started for so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?)

-Walt Whitman

Facing West from California's Shores

"This shit's all fake. As long as you remember that when you come out here. It's all movies. Everybody's an actor. The money's real but everything else is fake."

-Dude on balcony in Hollywood on his cell phone

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a sainte-terrer", a saunterer — a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.

****

What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?

****

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road; and walking over the surface of God’s earth, shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities then before the evil days come.
-Henry David Thoreau

Walking

Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.

-Bruce Chatwin

The Songlines


Where you been is good and gone
All you keep's the getting there

The Peach blossom follows the water

-Li Po

Red Hook

Watching a Movie In Bed In New York

Watching a movie in bed in New York,
I think I recognize the green soy fields of Ohio.
My eyes, trained one year
in the angular
graphite of street and skyscraper,
are struck by the wild green.

I look past the faces of the farmers,
the deep wells of fear in their eyes,
wanting only to see the grass and oak,
the green I can hardly believe,
the smooth yellow fields,
the occasional patches of shady trees,
the long gray roads and heavy blue skies.

I want to lie down in those fields,
I want to drive those gray roads.
The wide green seems a good bed
but there the garter snake lies.

Route 33

Route 33 is the most beautiful road.
It used to go to my girlfriend's house.
In the winter, when the Scioto was frozen,
driving alongside
the wide, white river
to the soft light coming
through the windshield
there was a Heaven above
and below.
There was a Heaven
in all directions.

Sad Ohio Stars

Sad Ohio stars smudged across the windshield,
frozen tracks caught in the snow.
Silence of purple winter nights
looked at through drowsy headlights
struggling to keep awake.

We turned into adults
in drunken nights lost on High St.
to the tune of the garbage flowers
sprung from guitar strings,
rising with the foam of PBR cans
in warm bars full of song.
The girls pointed cameras at each other and clicked
as smoke ascended from the ends of their forked fingers
and the bands sang for nights
when small glories were won
in each other's arms.
Bringing the bars to a close,
we trekked home across the grimy snow,
unfucked, lugging six packs
with arms empty of women.

One night, we watched from the bed
of my brother’s pick up as the fire of stars
leapt across the sky,
out of nowhere
back into nowhere,
too timid even to wish on them.
I was trying to figure out
what the Greeks were up to,
conjuring brawny Gods from
three puny dots connected by a line
drawn with a finger in a child’s eyes.

The stars meant nothing to me,
all of them.
I did not know who they were.
We were lost to each other’s stares
a hundred roads ago.

In Central Ohio it’s the garbage that’s beautiful.
The empty cardboard beer cases
turning into crowns, the hardwood floors
stuck to your shoes on Sunday morning.
Shit makes the flowers grow
from this landscape of boredom,
where the cows stand in one place all their lives,
and the corn waits obediently between strip malls
and wonderful green mountains beyond the gray sunset
rubbed out like a mistake with a Staedtler eraser.

The casket skies of old Ohio,
one year from me,
moving, changing, shifting,
falling harder into the gray.

My family came over the hills of Chillicothe,
out of the huge mists of Nogytuck and Pity-me,
the gunsmoke of Israel Putnam and a crooked fork
thrown to the bottom of the Scioto River.
We had reasons to be lonely.
We had reasons to leave home.
We had nothing and no one
but each other,
the same people we'd always had.

Traveling,
I will always be digging
at my heart in Ohio's
frozen dirt.

Go have a youth, I remind myself,
but I never really knew how
to be young and
the saddest city is the one
you grow up in,
the one
you never get out of.

The Sound of No Hands Clapping: Haiku

Come closer to the night
my wonderful sun,
it's time you met the moon.

The dog's tail thumps
against his cage as
two travelers pull luggage
up the steps of a brownstone.

The treetops reach
for their lost leaves
and grasp the cold wind.

In Chinatown,
A dying shrimp leaps
from a pile of ice
into the snow.

Time casts the shadows.
Time moves the day.
The rain falls in moments
across the night.

The moon and clouds collaborate
on a graceful rain.

The brave tree clenches it's leaves
past the December winds
into January.

Central Park.
The carriage horses nod
to the ducks flying south.

We have come a thousand years
to this night of rain.
Another happy gift!

On my window
a bit of star
caught in a raindrop.

A cricket chirps
stowed away for winter
in the pot of my palm tree

Somewhere in the city
two lovers are not sleeping
to the song of the rain.

All over New York City,
hives of sleeping children
flying through their dreams.

All over New York City,
walls full of cockroaches
dreaming of the moon.

A man pushes a loaded cart
up the dark mountain
of the Manhattan Bridge.

A hunched woman pulls
from the garbage
one silver can.

The hermit finds his forest
in the happy city
of the graves.

The insomniac wind
walks like a widow
through every January night.

The rain sings across the windows
asking the flowers
to come back once more.

Moon, the soft light
of the bodega
will stay on all night.

I wonder how the sun
will fall tomorrow
on the black squirrels
of Washington Square Park.

A stars glows at the end
of your cigarette.
That last hour with you
was not even a moment.

The Long Way

How did I get so far
away from everything?
I am such a small person,
with such a small scope,
and such small knowledge,
How did I get such large opinions?

I've never been anywhere
close to love.
It's all I've wanted.

How did I get here
and not there
in your arms?

What is this misunderstanding,
this judgement
leading me to?

Is it bringing me
the long way around
to love?
Is it taking me
the long way home
to you?

Lake Erie

My Mom and Dad riding bikes by the lake,
my brother and I perched on the backs.
It never happened. I don’t recall.
I’ve got the pictures, that’s all,
in the photo album, gory and stained.
It looks so tired today, the rain.
It doesn’t want to fall.
The sun stayed home in bed.
The Rainbow shot itself in the head.
It bled all over the horizon.
We rode our bikes by Lake Erie
and it was never on fire.
Randy Newman wrote that song.
Lake Erie burns on and on.

The New Sod is Establishing Its Root System

The lawn in Bryant Park is not open yet. The sign says
"The new sod is establishing its root system".
Good. Okay. We will allow that.
I can relate. I am also establishing my root system
in the colossal garden of Manhattan
where it can be so hard to reach the sun.
It's a tender journey into a new soil;
They are the arms of new lovers
inhabiting each other for the first time.
The kids are sitting on their horses
waiting for the carousel to begin.
I am sitting at a cafe table
on my break from work. A girl nearby
reads "The Catcher in the Rye."
I see a rabbit the size of a pony
begin to hop through the hedges
with a child on it's back.
It is not at all a convincing imitation
of the real thing.
I get up and, as I walk over to get a closer look,
the ramshackle rhythm of the calliope's song
dawns in my ears.
The children go smiling and twirling
and I'm smiling right along
to the beautiful, victorious song.
My life is becoming what I wished it would be.
The sprinkler blesses it's new constituents
then dwindles and is gulped back into the earth.
As I leave I see a shovel
standing upright in the dirt.
It is time to get to work.

Song Of the Open Road - New York - Extracts

The Fountain of my country's destiny
And of the destiny of Earth itself,
That great emporium, Chronicle at once
And Burial-place of passions and their home
Imperial, and chief living residence.
-Wordsworth

He said to me: "Where are you from?" And I said: "New York." He said: "Ah, New York! Yes, that's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?" And I said: "Oh, yes!" And he said: "Why do you think they don't leave?" I gave him different banal theories. He said: "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all." He said: "I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they've built, they've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made, or to even see it as a prison. And then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said: "This is a pine tree." He put it in my hand and he said: "Escape, before it's too late."
-My Dinner With Andre

Eventually we all wound up in New York studying or looking for jobs-- which reminds me of a point I would like to make about New York, namely, that is you live in most other places, like San Francisco, Paris, or Bloomington, you are, almost against your will, taking a stand of some kind, and the stand is that you are not living in New York. If you live in New York, however, you are probably not doing so because you like it or feel it expresses you, but because it's the most convenient place: there are people, jobs, concerts and so on, but it doesn't add up to a place: one has no feeling of living 'somewhere.' New York is really an anti-place, an abstract climate, and I am not prepared to take up the cudgels to defend such a place, especially when I would much rather be living in San Francisco.
-John Ashbery

"I had a dream that when I woke up, the city was under siege."
-A friend of a friend, who is kind of a Bro

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
-Wordsworth

Paul Allen has mistaken me for this dickhead Marcus Halberstram. It seems logical because Marcus also works at P&P and in fact does the same exact thing I do and he also has a penchant for Valentino suits and Oliver Peoples glasses. Marcus and I even go to the same barber, although I have a slightly better haircut.
-American Psycho

Sitting in a corner of the gallery
I notice that Albers scratches a tiny A
in the lower right corner with the date
and the paintings are like floodlights
on my emptiness
that I am out of context waiting
for the place where my life exists like a tree
in a meadow
the warm traffic going by is my natural scenery
because I am not alone there
as the sky above the top of a tenement
is nearer
which is what the ancients meant by heaven
to be with someone
not just waiting wherever you are
-Frank O'Hara

The little island wedged between three rivers,
from which our letters come and go, is the personification of hope.
The buildings are black and white like sonnets. And enveloped
in between the first sweet cherries of the season are being delivered.
-Henri Cole

Song of the Open Road: June - Los Angeles

L.A., the delirious fever dream of the world.

The sun is a spotlight that never goes out. The clouds come visit sometimes, but they know when to leave.

Oranges are bursting off the trees. The orange juice there is much more radiant, closer to life than in Ohio. Not as long deceased and preserved and frozen.

Enflamed flowers. They can't stop them from growing. The sun and the flowers decorate an otherwise grungy place.

Ohio weather has such bearing on everything, such presence and dominance. The seasons arrange and shape all life. L.A. weather just kind of leaves you alone.

A relaxed, stoned vibe to everything. Very warm, low key wavelength. Like a Beach Boys song playing everywhere.

The traffic is a procession of iron and smog going everywhere at once. A great snake devouring itself. The 405 is strangely unmonumental, not a gregarious American superhighway. Everyone drives slow. You change lanes anytime you need to. Cars do not swarm.

Operatic mountains, great red martian surfaces. Roads tangled through like intestines.

It's a holy place, the Hollywood Sign. We drove up to see it in the night and it was gone, vanished into the fog.

Hollywood mirrors the night sky. There are stars in the sidewalks.

You can't hardly get a glimpse of the ocean over the wall of houses. It's like standing tip-toe in the back row of a concert.

Color everywhere. Pink, orange, green, red. Hand-painted. A surprising lack of joy. Lapped over crumbly little apartments and strip malls. Little variety in architecture. Simple shelving for people shooting for the stars.

Presumably the beauty is all hidden behind topiary walls and shubbery.

A strange continuity to the place. Few breaks in style. Even Musso and Franks looks like a shithole from the outside.

The Hollywood Hills have unbelievable roads, lashing like a county fair ride assmbled and operated by a junky.

Paint flaking off the battered walls of the Paramount lot.

The women are fucking gorgeous. Professionally gorgeous. L.A. sucks up most of the beautiful people from everywhere else. They were born that way, they might as well try and derive money from it.

People very nice and not in a fake way. I'm nobody, after all, and they treated me well.

Little altars with candles and incense and effigies and pictures of mahareshis and yogis.

Everyone is in pictures. A little girl told me how to frame a snapshot of her and her friends.

It's like the sky has been botoxed. No snow. Little cold. Just a smile, lips.

Song of the Open Road - Extracts 2

And never so much as today have I found myself
With all the road ahead of me, alone.
-Cesar Vallejo

I praise what is truly alive,
What longs to be burned to death.
-Goethe

And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
-Emerson

It is the lumps and trials
That tell us whether we shall be known
And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.
All the rest is waiting
For a letter that never arrives,
Day after day, the exasperation
Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,
The two envelope halves lying on a plate.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago.
-John Ashbery

I am pursuing you, life, to the ends of the earth
-Frederick Seidel

Mr Henry: It's an esoteric journey. We're renegades from despair.
-Bottle Rocket

The ancient British Bards had for the title of their order, 'Those who are free throughout the world.'
-Emerson

The spread of materialistic values has contributed to a moral coarsening and a growing cynicism in our country. Within a manipulative world all motives seem venal, all efforts illusory. But at a deeper level, it is the commodifying of imagination itself, the moral passivity, the social isolation, the angst that is generated by living in a solipsistic world of fraudulent satisfactions that is producing the greatest evil.
-Larry Harvey

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven
-Wordsworth

When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer the keys to living things,
When people who go about singing or kissing
Know deeper things than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
And people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.
-Novalis

We waste our life waiting, and I haven't the faintest idea
How to act or talk... in the lean years who needs poets?
But poets as you say are like the holy disciple of the Wild One
Who used to stroll over the fields through the whole divine night.
-Holderlin

You must not cling to your boyhood any longer--
It is time you were a man
-The Odyssey

ANDRE: Well, you know, I could imagine a life, Wally, in which each day would become an incredible monumental creative task. And we're not necessarily up to it. I mean, if you felt like walking out on the person you live with, you'd walk out. Then if you felt like it, you'd come back, but meanwhile the other person would have reacted to your walking out. It would be a life of such feeling. I mean, what was amazing in the workshops I led was how quickly people seem to fall into enthusiasm, celebration, joy, wonder, abandon, wildness, tenderness! Could we stand to live like that?

WALLY: Yeah, I think it's that moment of contact with another person. I mean that's what scares us. I mean, that moment of being face to face with another person. I mean, now, you wouldn't think it would be so frightening. It's strange that we find it so frightening.

ANDRE: Well, it isn't that strange. I mean, first of all, there are some pretty good reasons for being frightened. I mean, you know, a human being is a complex and dangerous creature. I mean, really if you start living each moment, Christ, that's quite a challenge! I mean, if you really reach out, and you're really in touch with the other person? Well, that really is something to strive for, I think; I really do.

WALLY: Yeah, it's just so pathetic if one doesn't do that.

ANDRE: Of course there's a problem, because the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious and unreachable that person becomes. I mean, you know, you have to reach out and you have to go back and forth with them, and you have to relate, and yet you're relating to a ghost or something. I don't know, because we're ghosts, we're phantoms. Who are we?
-My Dinner With Andre

Song of the Open Road - Extracts

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune— I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

The earth—that is sufficient;
I do not want the constellations any nearer;
I know they are very well where they are;
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens;
I carry them, men and women— I carry them with me wherever I go;
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

-Walt Whitman
Song of the Open Road



Humans are not made to sit at computer terminals or travel by aeroplane; destiny intended something different for us. For too long now we have been estranged from the essential, which is the nomadic life: traveling on foot. A distinction must be made between hiking and traveling on foot. In today's society - though it would be ridiculous to advocate traveling on foot for everyone to every possible destination - I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in my life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear that you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing. The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience. I have never been a tourist, for a tourist destroys cultures...Cultures around the world visited by tourists are having their basic dignity and identity stripped away.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot

Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

-Werner Herzog




"Why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?"
-On the Road

The Road is better than the Inn
-Old Spanish Proverb

I hopped off the plane at LAX
with a dream and my cardigan
welcome to the land of fame excess, (woah)
am I gonna fit in?
-Miley Cyrus
Party in the USA