I took my bulging black-green neoprene bags down
to the recycling center, like any post-Bodoni
goodthinknik would, anticipating rolls and rolls of
delicious, hard lucre, although had you asked me,
I'd have readily confessed complete ignorance of the
going rate of exchange. The man there in his
oily blue pinstripe overalls eyed it interestedly, for the
wriggling belly-to-belly bundles filled up the bed of my
silver and red Toyota Tacoma, assembled down south in
Tijuana where pushy union demagogues and firebrands
never rocked the boat. "Whatcha got there, ked?" he said
to me and turned his head to spit, and me sitting there
grinning ear to ear, thinking about me and Veronica heading
out to the casino where we might recycle our take for a single
night's work on fortune's fickle wheel, and why, if that didn't
pan out, there was ever so much other cleaning up we might
still accomplish just outside in that reservation parking lot.
"Well sir, me and my girlfriend been up all night scrubbing
them pearl-and-alabaster skies clean of all the wasted photons
we could find. Guess we rounded up about a couple hundred
pounds of sordid light pollution." But the fool public-servant-
so-called just produced his pig sticker and carved them
beautifully bulbous bladders open, and the after-images of
4 July spilled out and raced to join in the fulgurant daylight,
already in progress. I guess one man's defilement is another
man's candle to light the way. He gave me two dimes and
a penny, and I drove away.
"scrubbing them pearl-and-alabaster skies clean of all the wasted photons"- I love that line, very evocative. You create a very complex literary world model in your poems, especially here. You've got the man going to a recycling center, his daughter/wife Veronica(which gives a heavy amount of depth to the speaker's character). Aside from this, we have various side-plots, as it were, little tongue-in-cheek remarks about the world we live in. The Toyota factory in Tijuana, the polluted skies etc. It's very compressed and sometimes difficult to process, contemplate as it were, but it's okay, complexity is better than simplicity. Though I must say I miss, from time to time, more poetic forms. You've got a grand and epic supply of vocabulary and images and I would love to see it used in an even more concise, less prose-like receptacle. Still, what I envy and admire is that there is a kind of fixed style to your writing, a trademark if you will and I mean it in a good way. No matter what form or theme, there is always something Blooming about it, hah.
ReplyDeletediscerning louis. i told isca a few weeks ago that i'm fairly dissatisfied with my writing at present. we're in some ruts. in part though i'm just busy running around and working on other projects. just drove to colorado today and will be goofing around here for about a week; also, laboring to convert a book i wrote a few years back into a web-friendly version; also working on learning this new camera and processing pix. so a break from the usual prolificacy here is not a Bad Thing. anyway, the idea for this came when i reviewed a piece by someone else who used the meme "light pollution," and it got me thinking how this concept just isn't really very fitting, really. and then i saw i could through in these contemporary cultural allusions, as you point out, and squeeze in multiple characters and figures of speech, etc., and make a couple different statements. but yeah, it is a style-thing. anyone who tries to create a style is doomed to failure, i think; it's really just your voice; who you are.
ReplyDelete"Black-green neoprene." Nice rhyming.
ReplyDelete"Demagogues." One of my favourite words is 'demagoguery' for some strange reason, so I was delighted to read this line haha.
"Fortune's fickle wheel." How Shakespearean.
"Scrubbing them pearl-and-alabaster skies clean of all the wasted photons." What a brilliant line! :D