Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
In another time's forgotten space
Your eyes looked through your mother's face.
-- Robert Hunter
Just what the hell am I doing in this shithole? Everything
just jumped off the rails somewhere way back up the tracks.
I remember sitting in a dreary Savannah motel listening to
the radio, amazed to hear "Under My Thumb," but I was
still thinking about Willie Nelson and certain girls; well, any
girls, really. Soon, too soon, to be returning to Texas, but
not for long, not for long, and everything would be different
then. Now I'm sitting here reading A.S. King and wishing
for a way to slip out of these compressing walls, but I just
can't seem to connect the dots all the way back across the
scattered, vagabond years.
You keep looking for reason here like you actually expect
to find it; you keep believing in some rational subtext, but
I tell you all is bullshit in this place, on board this rudderless
ship of fools. All is chaos, and we'd better find a way to
break the hell out before the flames push any closer. They
always seem to come in fire ‑‑ always in fire ‑‑ angels with
their swords ablaze.
And yet. . . .And yet. . . .
And yet here I still sit, or else I'm swimming like a secret
predator among the blind cavefish, or down along the noisy
highways and strip malls where the useless ones tend to
congregate. Lord, these monkeys do gibber on like the
idiots they frankly are, loudly protesting, they've taken
offense to too much truth, and they're fully committed to
the insincerity they feel compelled to spew, casting it
around them like peasants from the middle ages, laboring
and sweating heavily in their stony fields under gravid
sacks of mealy seed. Just like the ones we used to see
down in the humid sink of San Carlos where we ventured
along the muddy beach at night under the scythe-like
moon, catching crabs for the stewpot and conspiring to
elude cholera's pressing advance and set up a new
religion. Feasting like kings we were in those times, we
made a careless banquet of shrimp and garlic-buttered
crab, putting away the Pacifico under a blazing Mexico
sun. Much later, pulling off the highway for another
pit stop in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, I knew
somewhere along the line I'd acquired teeth like a
crocodile and the eyes of a red tail hawk. So you better
think twice before you set down your bags here. Yeah.
Maybe you'd better just go right on walking.
I gotta get the hell outta this place before I go completely
crazy, go somewhere they still remember how to play
steel guitar and pick a catchy tune, just like CCR. Four
lean hounds low-crouching, smiling, and lions lying on
high tree branches, they stink of old blood and buzz with
biting black flies. How do you feel about these
mini-dramas that are just a little bit more ambivalent
than the norm? With your PVC bong and your hemostat
roach clips, the vampires of fate are bleeding us dry
night after boring night with nothing new under the polar
sun, only military hardware to fill up every inch of sky.
And thinking back to those half-forgotten plantation
ghosts who stroll the waterfront in peace leaves me cold
and numb in this occult rain of hardtack. But count your
blessings, son; at least we won't ever have to hear
anymore Dan Fogelberg or Leif Garrett again.
Man, I swear to God that Heaven must sound
just like CCR.
"Just what the hell am I doing in this shithole?" Oh good, I'm not the only one who feels like that. It's a horrible feeling when you feel like the world has nothing left in it for you. Perhaps the only way to "move on" is through spirituality? Hmm...
ReplyDeleteI was going to quote lines from the second stanza, until I realized that I liked the entire thing, so kudos for writing that. The first line, the breaking out of Hell part, the angels with blazing swords, ahh--it's all so amazing!
"You better think twice before you set down your bags here." LOL :P
"Plantation ghosts." Haunting.
I adore such nostalgia elegies. Good old plain rock, not those metal moans from hell. The speaker is entangled in the modern world, conscious of the evil around, but somehow paralyzed between the 'compressed walls'- this is a very valuable insight into the perturbations of modern culture.
ReplyDeleteI liked the 'vampyre of fate bleeding us dry' metaphor especially- not only is it brutal and painful but implies some sort of fate or predictable quality to the ups and downs of society. The fate of the speaker seems impossible to evade and his hopes are in the mystical Heaven- a place where CCR resounds in its full glory.
The style uniform throughout the poem- the colloquialism and conventional language bordering, almost in a conflict, with poetic expressions and skillful metaphors- astoundingly serve a semantic function, namely, that of underlining the speaker's indecision- to escape the prison or to remain passive and, possibly, the very doubt in his power to change the world.
I really enjoyed this piece with its nostalgic tone and the ambiguous feelings of the speaker which, alas, are so prevalent in the modern age.
As a small digression, I can't help but notice the multitude of culture references which, without the aid of wikipedia, meant nothing to me. It is, of course, wholly desirable to make cultural references but I realized, reading this poem, that such techniques limit the experience and, possibly, the audience of the author's expression to an extremity not to be ignored. I think the global culture of nowadays calls for a a global approach in English poetry, using cross-culture references easily understood by the educated readers all throughout the globe.
you have some interesting points here, mr denair. i must say i didn't think i was writing anything nostalgic, but i see your reasoning. the entire piece grows pretty organcally out of the opening question, and i don't really care to return to the past, but only use it to illustrate the point that the present i'm describing is not viable. the past presented here is only illustrative. what happened was the other day i was posting some scans of some micrographs i'd photographed when i was in grad school (1985) on flickr, and later i contrasted the setting i was in now to that i was in then. anyway, i was an oceanographer at the time, just come back into savannah from 3 weeks in the north atlantic, soon to return to grad school in texas, which i'd decided to quit. jumps ahead then to abt 1990 i think with a couple friends down in mexico on a glorious mini-vacation. truth or consequences is just one of those places you sometimes find you have to stop, usually against your will, when driving through new mexico. the waterfront ghosts are a brief return to savannah (why was i wasting time in a crappy motel in a town like that?). as for fogelberg and garrett, you're much better off if you don't know.
ReplyDeleteyour last paragraph is somewhat intriguing. i think the real issue is how time continues to accelerate; for centuries nothing ever changed and no one required such footnotes to know exactly what anyone was talking about. not anymore. of course i always kinda think people are lazy when they take the time to post: 'what does this mean?' w/o taking the time to cut and paste something into their google search bar -- which is a major advantage we didn't have for centuries and centuries. i hear your point, but i don't think i can be bothered to provide the footnotes or links, which would interfere more, i think, with the vitality of the flow, with the concrete details i'm inserting that cause you to stumble. but i'm not dismissing your point out of hand. certainly i cannot limit myself to using references familiar to the global least common denominator. but i probably will give some thought to the matter, whether or not i do anything about it. thanks for the input.