The Savage Review, Part Two – Henry Palm III
April 20, 2012
Reading Hopscotch
73
I changed my mind about poetry. Rather, the mind has changed its stance on poetry, on poets, on literature.
1
Maga’s flesh bruises and bleeds easily. Who would have thought, or who thinks. Perforated washcloth bucket seats in a color between black and blue, underneath the hatch, reclined, foggy breathing, I bite into you Maria. You make poetry surge from every squeezed pore, from every line on every arm, and the complete canvass stains itself a visceral pigment. A figment, is what I listen to and believe in now, no longer absolutes or devoid of absolutism, whether the sun is set or the grass remains attached to the ground, on the soil where the squirt is absorbed.
2
Shady. You’re too lazy on a Sunday to drive out to a glassy green synthetic bocce ball field? In the middle, you can take a profound douche. That doesn’t sound good to you? Maga Maria, Rocamadour, translated into the Internet age, you have a pooch in a corner that barks all day at the surrounding noises. You’re a sugar cube statue, and you can’t keep the flies off. You fly off. You don’t spread, you’re not recumbent. You don’t alleviate anything. So what if someone doesn’t want to talk about the eight hundred pound stinking sobbing baby in the corner? I am beside myself. I am walking circles around myself. I’m right behind me. I’m too far up high to reach me. I can’t communicate with me. I’m anguished too, you know? I retrace tile by grain and ogle the hints and capriciously write them off. I’m still not sure if you’re serious, if you were ever serious, because you’re not a serious person.
116
Across the window is the heavy head of a statue. You can only see the hair design. Its face is the dark side of the moon. You guess at what its eyes might look like, are they open or closed. But who sculpts closed eyes? The thinker sequel, the anguished, eyes tight shut, fingers to the sides of the head, the depiction of a migraine that never ends. Chisel throb vein. Moldy carving cast. Without seeing the other side of the statue, you assume first, and then guess whether they are shut or closed, and they say people look different.
3
I suppose Maria Gabriela is La Maga, though I am no Horacio. So don’t play with me ’cause you’re playing with fire. Carefully tiptoeing around a fissure vent. It explodes at any moment. First you turn into a lackadaisical one with perfunctory risk and haphazard discreetness. On this side swings the will, on the other side the need, and the want is the embrace. The daylight is boring because it represents the same destructive force with which we make love to the earth. Every night the one turns itself black. There is no limit to our love. Or so I thought. The limit was the opposition.
The limitless is our passion. The one eventually kills itself off. So every night that Horacio and La Maga make it to bed without fighting, well, that’s a significant treasure of life, and I totally understand. You can’t keep sucking blood and expect not to get sick. You can’t avoid illness when your blood is constantly drained. There is more to being one than just stabbing at supple tissue, because you break through, and you have to face what comes out. From the inside, surrounding you with your own mind, your own choice and path, you stand at the déjà vu moment you keep coming back to, and then you see the déjà vu count itself off. Your memory is a trinket. All you think of is burning flesh. All you miss is burning flesh. I know it sounds a little creepy, but sometimes I fixate on your clavicles and my teeth sinking into them, I know the backgrounds and even your body and mine don’t match, just the pierce.
84
You’re an abrupt end. I saw a puppy drown in a river and it impressed me. The years passed and I never got to a comfortable place. I can’t turn backwards. I saw movie once with an arch and development, tumult and finally a rest, and it impressed me. I met various people and surrendered my love to them, I made friends and I surrendered my love to them, and I produced gifts and they did not open. I heard a song about a symbol moving into your home, and it impressed me. I searched for clues and hints, signs to point me in a direction. I read a book about the wonder, the search, and its end, and it impressed me. I looked for a comfortable place down a narrow alley of twisted bricks. Benzo found its way to me and lifted me off. Methyl put me in a comfortable place. I regret not bringing it with me to the narrow alley. A circle spins in one place. Things cannot be one way or another, but they are in many shapes and forms, sounds and patterns, texture and sensation, tepid or pleasing, frigid and stinging, messy and absorbing, fantastical and drab. Sleazy, shady again, sleazy, tired, sleepy, weeping and reawakening, forgetting and holding on, purposeful not at all. To face such things as a half, not likely. We become one, Maga, we become one and we spin in place. Calling things an end and final, even though absolutism has dissolved, a feign resolution. Let’s be clearer. In focus, I beat you, and you beat me. You whip and I bite back. There are no directions. Isn’t that funny? I actually thought I brought you up, after your upbringing. I thought I could lay you down, when I live down. We got 50 guns and 150 slaves. I have no clue what to do, other people feel inclined by some stress and pressure to do something…They are predisposed to? They want to do? They instill in themselves, or does the Earth? Who spins the circle? What is it that spins silk? And 48 rock stars in early graves. I want it to fit. I want to have things to do, and be happy with. The days will reach their climax, settle, the circle spinning in a different direction. It’s easy to look at us from the mirror. You and I, Maga, looking into the mirror, past the reflection of ourselves, we see the one. But it will never happen. You’re an abrupt end. Got 47 Kennedys and 88 white niggers bumming money off of me. Right, true, the chapter thing, the absolutism thing, it doesn’t exist, it isn’t, isn’t isn’t, isn’t, and the chapter flips over, it is over, it starts anew. A smile turns into a frown, the circle spins, the frown turns into a glance, the glance takes shape into an unidentified flying object, which is the familial Cheshire Cat smile. We all have it in our heritage. The moon is colloquial, the green is sparse to some and wealthy to others, you surf the wind and rock the ocean, the gravel, granite, particles, spinning, fucking, spitting into your eye instead of your mouth, mother Terr, your scent, the scent of traces and trails and mixes and wrappers and toilets flushing. Honey, honey, I am coming. Honey, you taste like you’re leaving. Darling, sunshine, darkness, sunset, we sweep up the papers and folders, the dust in your eyelash, your mother under the rug, your father out in the mayonnaise, your brother, your boyfriend, your husband, your cousin, your neighbor, your daughter, my front door. My exit. And a Mexican named Trum who built a casino in the mud. And though it may all seem like a bad dream friend it’s all true. Got a mustard gas war going on in Canada and dead heads finally looking for jobs. Got a story to tell all the dead men in the ground and a lot of women that I knew. And I’ll sell it to you for 80,000 bucks.
we got it all
we got it all
a crash-glam document of the late 20th century rip-off
we got it all
we got it all
the period when whitey finally made himself look bad
One day I’m thinking about you, another day you’re waking me up, and then my sense of the word creepy gets turned upside down. Even though there is no direction, Maga, and you said you agreed. Someone comes to me and says something. Another person agrees. They say things I have heard before. They repeat words. New words are seldom. An idea moves slowly, and when it does, it ingrains, and becomes old. Someone tries to force me, they do not know that no one can force anyone, by definitional language. By the worst method of communicating with anything. By a supposition, communication. Someone enters a room, a metaphorical room, or rather, they’re pushed into the room, not by choice, lack thereof, will, lack thereof, kinda just shoved out into the room, if you catch my drift. You enter the room and they hand you a piece of paper called a check and you don’t have an option to reject. The check is black and white, green or red, positive or negative. That is your check. It keeps you in check. Everyone has a check. Got some snakeskin oil and some aluminum foil and a souvenir from nowhere to. Got a first class ticket on a UFO and an 88 machine gun salute. You need to keep that check, which is a book, balanced. Or you will fall left or right on a scale. This scale varies in colors, sometimes one side will be black and one side will be white, blue and red, yellow and brown, green and red, blue and yellow, pink and blue, black or red, and it will give you some deterministic, empiricist characteristic. Visually, and surely as poorly enough, psycho(made up fucking word let’s just drop it)logically. Patterns and behaviors. Assumptions. Suppositions. And then a status report. A reality check. Stringent rules. A toothpick in the sand. A pillar in the sand. A structure in the sand. A structure made of concrete on top of a concrete floor, an idealistic vision, guided by virtue, 
organized by responsive critics, made possible by slaves. The expansion of social norms and hurrah society. Strap on, seat belts tight, spinning. Miscommunication, also known as language, wrapping a spindle in silk. Remember when we started getting high before fucking? Yeah, like that, it starts happening. The earth opens up a warm hole, everyone digs right in. A rigid structure isn’t well spread; it’s the structure of everything. Now you either live in the room or you don’t. Nothing exists outside of the room. Not even space. Forget about space. The room’s door is locked. There are no restraints. The room can change sizes, and it can contain different objects. You can even shape the room. You can make it look how you want it to. You can even make it so that you can’t see the walls, so that that the room seems so never-ending it is wider than the feasible brain universe itself. Got a hooker who likes to play solitaire when I’m having blackouts. Got a round-trip ticket to parts unknown. I’ll use it when you’re out of control.
we got it all
we got it all
a welfare picture of a crazy man’s antenna
we got it all
we got it all
we got videos of when life got bad at the end of the road
The walls will always be there. You can ignore them, push them off to the furthest corner, but you can’t escape them. Then comes the reality of shaping the room. You can do so with your mind, but not with your environment and your resources. In fact, pretty soon the picture you paint starts to reveal itself, your hand is held by another hand, the brush its own strings, strings made of silk, a circle spinning on another circle, another web. The first web spins and history begins. That web catches and webs spin off, catching more, encompassing, everyone tied down to string, shrinking and slowing down. How many webs are you stuck to? Got a picture of Zoot Horn Rollo looking out in his Beefheart hat. Got some naked pictures of your wife I bought from a bartender in Houston. The light in the room expires. Got some really nasty stories to tell you about my life that you wouldn’t want to hear. Got the scoop of what really happened at Paul Simon’s and Edie Brickell’s honeymoon.
we got it all
we got it all
a crash glam document of the late 20th century rip-off
we got it all
we got it all
the period when whitey finally made himself look bad
Look, we got nothing, nothing is anything. You’re an abrupt end. I feel even with you. Even if it isn’t even with your romantic lifestyle, it is a world I do not participate in, a proximity or solace is what I want, not what I’m looking for, because I FOUND IT. BUT I FOUND a way to lose it, to make it go away. So what do I do now Maga?
4
Past the tongue of the snake there is a fold, and beyond that fold there lies a ridge. That is where you find the Serpent’s Club. Maga and I never participated in these clubs. When we’d go out late at night after the show and the club and the party and the drive and even after the late night drug theater, the social club climb you crawl into in the a.m., Maga never had any interest in doing something other than laughing at everyone around her. That’s how it must have been long ago, only laughing at me. Then laughing together. Now I’m laughing at her, and she’s not even thinking about me.
What’s the magic there, in the air, past the late at night, amongst a sacred friendship that doesn’t last longer than your bag of blow does? Everyone’s gonna get to know each other real well, right? The records will be played and the conversation will disperse, sliced into pieces based on pace, rapport, and vigor. Someone leads, and another falters, and then a private trip to the private room, or just behind the bushes, thrilling and full of expectations until past the a.m. once again on your way home. Who calls each other the next day for lunch?
71
The past future of communism, the present future of capitalism, and beyond the present no one knows, except Fukuyama, who’s bold enough to say that there is nothing beyond the present, that history ends here. Karl told us we would become managers of our own society, and that society would be powered by a robot, the cornucopia machine, who’s responsibility is to nurture us and support every level of our needs, and we owe it nothing but regular maintenance. Milton said we’d be fair to one another as fair as the value of a market can be, because the market punishes those who punish themselves. Francis said after that it’s over. Come on Francis. You really think it’s over?
5
Dang, can’t believe how much of a snob I’ve been. What is better than playing record after record, passing joints around, drinking some beers and having stupid and funny conversation amongst friends, at one of your apartments, and maybe getting into bed with one of them afterwards?
I don’t think I’ve ever slept in a hotel room, either with someone or alone. I’ve been inside of plenty, I have entered the showers and filled the bathtubs with ice, and set up the circular table with two chairs on the corner into a poker table, and the AC into a frigidaire, but I have never closed my eyes for winks, and I never clenched my teeth for love. What I do reme