The Sick Bag Song Page 4

  •

  The train has a screeching yellow face. The face is blankly nothing. The silver tracks vibrate furiously and are eaten by the train. The train eats the rattling track ballast. Behind the train is nothing – not space, not time, not memory, not love. The sun hammers down, burning everything away to blank. The whistle shrieks its head off. The nothing-train will eat the boy. The boy begins to scream for his mother and rears up, huh, huh, huh, in his hotel bed, running sweat and black hair dye and blanching ghosts and corroded dreams, crying –

  Memory is love! Oh my God! Love is memory! Help us!

  Who the fuck am I? I shout. Fucking help us! I scream.

  Eventually everybody took up residence inside me.

  As I stand on the edge of the king-sized bed

  At the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood,

  Like a small erect god,

  My heart is tied to the tracks of a shrieking train.

  To my left, a shadowy concrete pylon, to my right,

  The lethal branches of a half-felled tree.

  You lie naked and partially submerged

  In the muddy water below, thumbing nonchalantly

  Through a motivational manual.

  Eventually everybody took up residence inside me.

  I am a haunted house howling and wheezing with memory.

  Beds shake and cupboard doors spring open unaided,

  And chairs stack and restack themselves.

  Jets of ectoplasm spurt through the air.

  My intestines ring with the sound of clanking chains.

  You put the book to one side and raise your gash in the air.

  You moan and discharge a bolt of feral tension that snaps

  Your arms and legs backwards, your hard ridged throat,

  Stretching and splitting open and your thin black animal

  Tongue undulating towards me through the orange light.

  I say –

  I have come down from the hills,

  I have crossed mountains and rivers,

  I have travelled great highways,

  I have entered your moist and shadowy fortress,

  To be with you tonight.

  I am the vehicle you have chosen to step in and out of.

  You are as white as a snowdrop in the morning sun.

  I cast a giant shadow against the sky.

  Like a miniature deity, I gaze into the brown water.

  I slide my little songs out from under you,

  I am a small god crawling around a giant world,

  Becoming an engorged god crawling around a small world.

  Unfold yourself, my darling one!

  We are luminous leapers, all of us, here in this bed tonight.

  Together we are making our tomorrows different.

  I am in a steakhouse in Austin, reading an Aztec poem called ‘The Artist’ in an anthology of poetry of the Indian North Americas, called Shaking the Pumpkin, edited by the brilliant Jerome Rothenberg, which I wish I could say I bought from City Lights Books on Columbus Avenue, in San Francisco, but didn’t.

  The true artist: capable, practising, skilful,

  Draws out all from his heart,

  Works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,

  Works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, etc…

  The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at people,

  Makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of things,

  Works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.

  (translation by Denise Levertov)

  Look out, you fuckers! Here I come with my sick bag song!

  Working at random – Hey! I’m on fucking tour!

  Sneering at people – Out of my way, you accursed acolytes!

  Making things opaque – All that dark, imagined sex!

  Whaddaya expect?

  Is a thief – Okay, you’ve got me there, you crafty Aztecs!

  Roll my sacrificial head down your temple steps!

  OMG! Hail the mighty Conquistador!

  At night Fearsome Panther Warrior and Great Eagle Warrior

  Sweep the blood and sick and sperm off the bar-room floor.

  •

  The true artist is the expansive dream!

  The carrion artist is the contracting nightmare!

  The true artist is in the present and of the present!

  The carrion artist lives in memory and history!

  •

  It’s Country time, and I’m keeping Austin weird!

  On the next table a Homo antecessor female

  In a sequined Stetson scoops the brains

  Out of her husband’s decapitated head. She eats his eyes.

  By the way, this is more or less true. I nail myself

  To a blackened brontosaurus rib with duck fat fries and chew,

  Then across the room hear Yabba Dabba fucking Do!

  As Fred bashes complaining shopaholic Wilma

  With his bowling ball and leaves her battered body

  Under Willie Nelson’s statue. Keeping Austin weird!

  •

  I am a small being crawling around a prehistoric world!

  I am a tiny Mungo Man with a giant Pleistocene ding-dong!

  We are walking through the lobby of the W Hotel,

  Into the lunatic end of a Texan hen night.

  I’m singing and swinging my sick bag song.

  Let the world know that I died of love.

  But hark! All about us, forest-fold,

  Clad in the creamy entreatments of their transparent slips,

  Were two hundred long, lean, tanned Texan legs

  That pedestalled the raucous klaxons of their sex.

  And the band and I were little old Toulouse-Lautrecs,

  Standing on tippy-toe but still not able to reach the bar.

  Here, the Texan girls said, let us sit you on our knees,

  And lifted us up like naughty Howdy Doodies.

  A cranberry and soda with ice and a piece of lime, please,

  My square, mechanical mouth clacking as I spoke,

  While the women poured liquor down their headless necks,

  And I fucked off for a think and a smoke.

  •

  The critic is the true voice of our destructive nature.

  It is the town crier of our innermost beliefs.

  It walks up and down our veins and nerves ringing its bell.

  You are wasting your time. You are not good enough.

  Step back, it says, to the little boy. Step back!

  The concrete pylon will crush you!

  The branches of the half-felled tree will embarrass you!

  Step back, it says. Step back!

  The critic’s voice is nothing new. It is a living voice inside us,

  A persecution-mantra we’ve heard countless times before,

  I think to myself, as I return to the Texan hen party.

  •

  Hey! I’m back! And this is a forest I’m happy to get lost in!

  I am sitting in the happy lap of the longest legs in Austin.

  Hello! My name is Howdy Doody Lautrec,

  Sawing into the vast stretches of your Texan neck

  With my savage hinged jaw.

  Hop in my sick bag! All you wild Texan girls!

  Look out, Patti! Watch out, Bryan!

  There are a hundred new she-sheriffs in your sick bag town.

  I’m heading back down, gonna get me some.

  Down, down to old drowned New Orleans,

  Past the Live Oaks and the Crepe Myrtle,

  To the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

  In every love story you’ll find a dragon slain.

  Here I am, with my lance dripping milky blood.

  I have committed such carnage to be with you, my dear.

  Take the damn photo! I feel stupid standing here.

  Of course I’ll sign the inside of your Louisiana thigh.

  I’ll tattoo it with my oozing lance in dragon�
��s blood.

  Yes, please! I love your town! It’s sick!

  With the streets of the Lower Garden District,

  Named after the nine Muses.

  Listen! You can hear them voodooing their lyres and singing,

  It cut the women’s neck and throw the head down

  We pick them. Pick! Pick! Pick!

  It cut the women’s neck and throw the head down

  We pick them. Pick! Pick! Pick!

  I’m sick of hearing Sick Bag Steve and Windex Pete

  Rapping their fucking washboards on Bourbon Street.

  Belief is the belief that keeps on believing, but still

  I stick my doubting fingers in your nail-wound to be sure.

  In the morning they sweep the sawdust from the bar-room floor,

  Sweep it clean and out onto the street.

  Can you hear me, Sick Bag Steve?

  Can you hear me, Windex Pete?

  Still your spoons and lay your rattling washboards down.

  The Muses are all tucked up in bed asleep.

  If you listen very carefully you will hear their final dying sound.

  It cut the women’s neck and throw the head down.

  •

  That night in the Sonesta on Bourbon Street,

  The hours passed like funerals till the dreaded four.

  The naked, tangled Muses did softly snore and one by one,

  Rubbed their tired eyes to stir – as an awful, nasal drone,

  Emanated from a radio next door.

  Is that who I think it is? shuddered Calliope, in dread.

  It’s Bob Dylan, I said, for sure.

  And with a groan the Muses hung their beset, collective head.

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

  •

  I stepped gently from my trailer into a ferocious storm.

  It was 1998 at Glastonbury on muddy Worthy Farm.

  The artists’ trailers were arranged in a neat square,

  That boxed in a vast flooded slough. Thunder crashed.

  It was pure mythic Greek. You could drown a cow.

  I saw through the veil of pelting rain,

  A trailer door open on the other side of the bog,

  And a hooded figure step out. He climbed into a little boat,

  And with a bag of wind under his arm, blew himself

  Across that ghastly moat.

  Lost in the dark reaches of his hood,

  The stranger decanted from his boat and stood

  Before me, yet I recognised – in slow motion –

  The beak, the squint and the fluffy chin.

  And all the world ground to a halt

  To accommodate this thought. It’s him.

  Then slowly, extending from his sleeve,

  A cold, white, satin hand took mine.

  Hey, I like what you do, he said to me.

  I like what you do too, I replied. I nearly died.

  Then his hand retracted up his sleeve,

  And Bob Dylan turned and took his leave,

  Disappearing back into the rain.

  But wait, Calliope, my impatient Muse! The tale does not end here!

  I walked back inside my trailer on that peculiar day

  Feeling suddenly drained. Drained of blood! Of life!

  And weak! So emptied out I could fade away.

  Which is basically what I did for three whole years.

  A dull, paralysing torpor hung over me.

  An occasional note plucked from a disconsolate piano.

  The odd word scratched into my teary notebook,

  Then scratched out again.

  Each night I dreamed of that slow vampiric hand

  Extending from its awful cuff!

  Stop now! said Calliope, rising to her feet,

  Let it go! You are completely enough!

  Soon after I noticed, just in passing,

  Bob Dylan released Love and Theft,

  Which got an A+ rating in The Village Voice.

  Bob was back on top!

  Meanwhile, I released Nocturama, which was a flop.

  •

  In the Royal Sonesta on Bourbon Street, we closed our eyes,

  As the morning woke and its tail began to wag,

  And just before we all fell back to sleep to softly snore

  Someone kindly turned the radio off next door.

  The nine daughter-Muses ruffle the waters of the Potomac With their sleepy breathing and in the Ritz-Carlton, D.C. I do my laundry list – six shirts, six shorts, six socks a pair, And write you a song and leave it on your answer machine.

  The Recruitment Officer

  A man approaches you and wants to take your photograph.

  It is a form of recruitment.

  It resembles something like belonging so you accept.

  You have grown to be owned and long to belong.

  There is no safe place on this earth to sit or stand or lay down

  . Sit down, he says. Stand up, he says. Lay down.

  Years later a different man approaches you

  And asks you to marry him.

  In a way he is as adrift and disgraced as you. You wed.

  You arrange all the photographs before him on the bed.

  He puts his hand inside you and pulls out the photographer.

  He pulls out the first husband, the red-headed boy from Japan,

  The famous artist, the gangster, the blurred maybe-men,

  The ghost-children, all your ownings, all your growings,

  All your leavings.

  He attaches them to a gold band and spins them out into the sky.

  Saying, sit down. Saying, stand up. Saying, lay down.

  But this is not the last you see of them, because sometimes

  At night you sense them crawling up the wainscot and moving

  across the panelled ceiling of your room.

  You think they are coming for you.

  You think they want to kill you.

  Abuse Man, Japan Man, Painter Man, Gangster Man, Ghost Baby,

  Blurred Man, Husband Man.

  The recruitment officer shifts in the shadows.

  Sit down, he says. Stand up, he says. Lay down.

  By the way, I never actually walked across the Big Four Pedestrian and Bicycle Bridge in Louisville, Kentucky, eating fried chicken. Warren, my violinist, did. He told me about it over a bowl of Grape Nuts in the breakfast room of the 21c Museum Hotel the next morning. It is what I call a liberated memory, appropriated but kept safe, lest we all forget.

  •

  I like ‘The Recruitment Officer’ a lot more than ‘The Beekeeper’s Wife’, and with a bit of editing it could be pretty good. Having said that, I am a little disappointed with the passive victim role of my wife in the song and the hoary old idea of the husband-as-saviour-as-abuser. We deserve better from those overflowing fonts of inspiration, the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne! Neither of these roles even remotely corresponds to the way my wife and I conduct our lives.

  I just wish she would pick up the fucking telephone.

  Fuck Rocky Balboa and his seventy-two stone steps to the top

  Of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Benjamin Franklin Parkway!

  I climbed fifty and had to go back and begin again from the start.

  Biggest Duchamp collection in the USA, mumbles Willner

  From the back of the car as we take the divine Belmont,

  Through West Philly to the Mann Center at Fairmount Park.

  I was a nude descending a staircase in a pair of boxing trunks,

  Into the anticipating dark. Ratso says that Sylvester Stallone

  Wrote the screenplay for Rocky in three weeks flat.

  Belief is the belief that keeps on believing.

  And inspiration is the gift that brings and brings.

  Here come the angels, descending golden staircases

  Into Hollywood, with their script ideas tucked under their wings.

  But the angels ins
ist that we take the first step alone.

  Everyone loves a good boxing story, especially God.

  An underdog fighter beats the shit out of Apollo Creed,

  The champion of the world. In Rocky IV, in the fifteenth round,

  Old Rocky brings Russia to its heavyweight knees.

  Over the Ukraine today they are pick, pick, picking

  Airplane passengers out of the trees,

  And as the lights come on, the band begins to play.

  God punches the air! He cares!

  I step into the light. I kneel at your altar. My severed head

  Bounces down seventy-two stroboscopic stairs.

  •

  At the Mann Center at Fairmount Park, the audience are a rolling river of hands, and after the show, in the dressing room, I pick at a thread in my jacket sleeve, pick, pick, pick, then drift out into the parking lot behind the auditorium for a smoke, where I sign a young woman’s thigh with a red marker, while backstage someone delivers a pyramid of foil-wrapped Philly cheese steaks, but starving Ratso checks his Urbanspoon app to find a place where we could all sit down and eat, whereupon we drive around Philly, unsuccessfully, for hours, looking for the restaurant, which we eventually find, but the guy is mopping out, so we head back to the Ritz-Carlton and sit on the massive columned steps and a bunch of us drink and smoke and laugh and eat bar food, and Willner quietly tells me that his friend Lou Reed clung hungrily to life, hungrily, but then calmly took his leave. More people show up after that and we all talk till late, and that night, in my hotel room, I pick at the unravelling thread in my sleeve and remember that the audience were like a rolling river of hands and the next morning housekeeping deliver my dry-cleaning to my room and I cry with happiness to find the laundered socks have come back secured with paper bands.

  There are those who work so they can stop.

  Stopping is the why of work.

  There are those who stop so they can work.