it's wednesday.
in my 10th month of work.
in 2 days it's friday.
in 6-8 months it'll be permanent weekend.
they will let my ego go, or
i'll call down a plague of locoweed upon them
& burn their number.
let my ego go -
or is that leggo my ego.
at least i don't drive a hugo,
tho my ego is huge-o.
and i do play calypso.
daylight come and me wanna go home.
Every Friday night,
buy a gram and a half
of coke
from rehabber--
Would snort
half of it,
watching a movie with Mom
then shoot
the other half
every 20 minutes
for four or five hours
**
Before Mom,
I slapped myself back twice
from overdose
Coke rehabber customer
got caught by cops--
squealed--
Rehabber came over
to sell me a thousand,
twelve hundred dollars of coke
for seven fifty
Didn't have it
He had to get rid of it--
told me to pay his boyfriend
in installments
He split for Europe
**
So I had all this coke
Shot up for a
real long time
got to the point I couldn't
hit my veins
was sitting on the floor of the bathroom,
naked, trying to hit a vein
in my foot
missed over and over
realized how stupid this all was
kept doing it
**
Shooting up is a hurtling sensation
You hurtle outward,
you expand
It's just like when
they go into hyperspace
in Star Trek
You literally are hurtling out
into the universe,
released from your physical boundaries,
go beyond skin
You can hear atoms
bouncing around inside your blood and head,
expanding outward, zooming outward
and you're literally zinging,
your system is going, Twing!
like you're a bell rung right
pure
You become time and space,
actually
**
Twice realized,
if this kept going
there'd be nobody left
You have to know what
overdose was like compared to
hitting just right
When you hit just right,
you hurtle outwards, real fast,
but fun
Overdose is
too fast,
too far,
no fun
scary
I realize that if I kept going
this fast
there'd be nothing left
to come back to
So I started slapping myself
to give my brain something else
to process so it couldn't spend
all its energy going
away
Besides, your body's just fluttering,
wispy, tenuous
**
Glad I can't do it anymore
Few things
call more loudly
as delivery systems
than needles
There's nothing to compare it to
except perhaps the first toke of
freebase or crack
It's so efficient
it's a pharmaceutical drug
straight into your bloodstream
(fuck the brain/blood barrier)
All the other ways,
smoking, eating, snorting,
sniffing, skin popping--
all take time
Needles are now
Glad I have been there,
glad I'm not there
would never ever
take a friend there
Could not handle being there now
**
When they took me out--
when I overdrank--
I disappeared in the ambulance
Came back,
looked at nurse, said, Wow,
nice to be back
Then threw up huge amount
of gelatinous blood
from my stomach
Looked like Jello,
already eaten
**
It was an interesting process
lying in bed,
thinking I was dying
I had vomited blood
the previous December
for three, four hours
I managed to stop it
through sheer will
So, I thought I could stop this one
Mom's downstairs in her place
I'm upstairs for fourteen hours
vomiting blood into a bedside bucket,
passing out, coming back,
all the time my little computer computing,
saying, This is serious, you're gonna
have to go to the hospital
Had no insurance so lingered
I was poor
couldn't afford to go
And right now, I can get up
and drive to the hospital
Couple hours later, more blood,
more unconsciousness,
I'm saying, Well now I can take a bus
to the hospital, because I couldn't drive anymore
Then now,
I can call a cab
Finally, all this blood in the bucket
and also all this time
I'm wondering
What art piece I can make
with this bucket of blood
and this is serious art supply
I weakly call out over and over
wake Mom, she calls EMS,
I'm too heavy for them to carry down
from the loft, 70, 80 lbs. heavier then
from the wine
So I roll out of my waterbed,
crawl on my belly across the floor,
and slide
like a sled,
head first,
down my loft stairs,
whereupon they put me on their thingy,
carry me into the ambulance,
and I disappear
Mom threw away the bucket of blood,
said it stank.
Everybody's an art critic.
**
Oh, I was gone,
I mean,
you leave the body
When I was lying there,
the fourteen hours of vomiting blood,
I would occasionally lose consciousness
And each time
there'd be this
nether region
where I was aware
I might not be coming back
and then I'd worry about Mom
and I'd come back
Down in the ambulance,
I just zoomed right past that point.
I have no idea where I was.
I was gone.
When I regained sight,
it was literally, Wow, I'm back
and it felt good,
I was glad
**
Everybody cringes
when you mention needles
Dick Head took me over to Rastaman
to buy grass
He told me I could come back
but don't bring Dick Head
Came back, asked for speed
Rastaman went white--
which was interesting
because whites is slang
for speed--
Pot was OK
Acid was OK
Alcohol was OK
Needles were not
**
I would guess 1983,
there's a pounding on the fire door
of my fourth floor warehouse space
It was Dick Head,
didn't know him
He said, Got any drugs?
Said, No, but if you find any,
come back
Couple hours later he's banging
on the fire door, with drugs
**
Dick Head's highlight--
he's reading poetry at
the Old Brooklyn Inn, wearing nothing
but an octopus wrapped around his waist
Had octopus tentacles hanging down
and Dick Head's dick
He's got this big stuffed frog
and he's standing on plastine sheeting
and he's got a knife and he starts shouting
I only eat dead frogs / when I have to
lifes a bitch not a bore / Im a slut not a whore
live for lust / loves a drag / I only eat dead frogs
when I have to
Art is free / but paint cost money
The galleries are full / of commies faggots & more
I dont let it get me sore / Cus I only eat dead frogs
When I have to
And then he gut stabs the stuffed frog
and all these cow entrails he'd sewn into it
the previous night spill out over the floor
One of the finest poetry moments I can recall
Even the college kids sat up
those college kids--
because I had short hair and a sports coat,
came up to me and said, Thank God,
somebody normal, and started talking
about football
I looked at Wilcox and asked him
if he knew what they were talking about
**
Last time I saw Dick Head's dick
was at the ArtCrimes 20 publication party
He had a stud in the head
and I could see it flashing
as he read
I've seen him with leopard skin hair
I've seen him with half his hair shaved
and a safety pin through the scalp
Laughed once,
said, You remind me
of me five years ago
I was angry,
pissin vinegar,
he was
laid-back mellow
I'd irritated too many
people with my genitals,
american flags
and
dead fish
And I wanted to do
an Art Behind Bars
installation with Wilcox
Cuz the artists doing it
weren't doing it
very well
The Public Arts people
were afraid I'd offend
somebody
Wilcox assured them,
I'd be OK
Basically, got me back
into the art game
Art Behind Bars,
everybody else just did two windows,
We opened up the windows
and did the room behind,
as well--
It was magic enigmatic
'Night we finished,
went outside across the street
and up the hill,
to see what it looked like--
Coming back down,
tripped on a root,
flew 10, 20 feet onto the asphalt,
head first
Wilcox says I bounced,
little rocks popped out from
underneath me,broke both wrists,
both elbows
Got up,
everything worked,
drove him home,
drove me home
Next morning,
took about two hours
to put on jeans,
untied shoes and a t-shirt
Drove to the hospital,
got x-rayed,
gave me the x-rays,
told me to have somebody drive me
to another hospital to read them
drove to that hospital,
gave me a lot of codeine,
couple days later,
Wilcox and I drove non-stop
Cleveland to Las Vegas
to see my brother.
I'd snort speed to drive for four hours,
then I'd drop
couple codeine
to kill the pain for four hours and sleep
All the way out,
all the way back.
Did great collage there,
titled, Art As R Pain,
Wilcox has it
Not many people break both arms
and both wrists during an art
installation
We were in the deep basement
of a warehouse working behind
two barred windows
Working blind because we
couldn't see what we were doing looked like
from outside
Outside, across the hill,
we'd done magic
I was ecstatic
ran down the hill in joy
tripped on a root,
kissed the road
Try wiping your ass
with two broken wrists
and two broken elbows
Had to change a flat tire
one night with it
Pain everywhere,
jack kept sinking into the mud,
took couple hours to change
Missed my movie
Ended up laughing, though
Can't be serious
with that much anger and pain
**
Later we did a 5 thousand square foot
installation
Had a magic mirror display window
a mirrored exit box
hanging fluorescent light calliope
a second floor lit up with fragments of mirror shards
and a hole in the floor
We could look down
and see Wilcox's excavation
of half-buried white slip
ceramic pieces
We even paid five poets
fifty dollars each
for opening celebration reading--
really proud of that--
nobody pays poets
poets are filler--
they'll come from far away
and pay you to read
Hessler Street won't even
let them on the stage
I was the sixth poet,
didn't get paid
cuz I wasn't in the budget
Didn't get paid for reading at Miracles, either
even though everybody else did
Didn't get paid for doing an installation for Frank Green
even though everybody else did
I'm real good at not getting paid
Kinda glad, though
It's more fun doing it for the fun
That's why I like installations,
they're pure
**
Last installation with Wilcox
and Beth Wolfe at Spaces
put my brother's ashes
on top of a dead-line small TV
Someone pinched the bag,
broke,
small pile of ashes came out
on the TV
Gallery director came over in tears,
showed me what had happened,
I said, Wow, I wish I had thought of doing that,
and did,
in my next installation
Years later, found out
Jim Lang was curious what the ash bag felt like
Was so thin,
it broke just with him touching it
So I thanked him
Art is good.
It ain't a job
It's an adventure
Ain't the pay,
it's the people
You get to do
what other people go to movies
to see
So this story is good
No drugs, no running from the law,
no armed robbery,
no sadness,
just art
A lot of people don't know what's going on
I mean, It's pretty fucking scary right now,
trojan issues right up the assfuck time!
They want you to buy plastic
so you have to buy into the system
And then you have to work and work and work
to pay for the plastic you bought
and to buy more plastic
and you spend all your time with plastic
and you don't know what's going on
because you're spending all your time
paying for your plastic
They want you to have 2.5 children
and home improvement projects
and walks for the cure
I'd set the table
paired fork and spoon
tight throat tight rope--
divined a water jar
with the tines of the fork
underneath the crystal chandelier
a lonely lovely--
still life
shadows
minus
days and days and days
unsold flesh
in sold house
sleeping
loneliness had its holy rarities--
gorgeous moments
in an unshared history
in the thirsty world
but
How often do you
see an angry fly or the
shadow of gravel?
We who roar by on the highways
On this walk,
and the day is suddenly warm,
makes a perfume of the foliage
and Sky Pappy is all clear,
the silent slice of a bird's
straight line through the blue-
Who is more awake?
The bird or the man who just
chunked by in his truck, off to his
industriousness?
I think the insects are
more awake, bumbling
about in their outside business
Would I, outside all the time
become drugged?
Is it only the sharp splash
into a pool that thrills?
