Continuing with my poetry streak, here’s a piece I composed in December 1984. Like “Coal Black” hints at my obsession for women with long black hair, this speaks more loudly of my love for women who play guitar – either professionally or as a hobby. Part of the inspiration springs from my admiration for one of my favorite rock bands, “Heart,” founded by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson more than four decades ago. Together the duo carved their own unique path through the male-dominated world of rock music; shattering the bodice-tight image of female-as-ornament, and proving – along with a handful of similar contemporaries – that women can be both assertive and feminine.
But it also describes how emotions are often stretched in a relationship – a common theme in any genre of music – and the reality that true love, albeit subtle, is eternal.
Oh, my Lady Rock n’ Roll,
I know so many secrets that you hold.
By chance, you remember me?
I’m the man who cut you free.
I loved every ounce of your soul until you stood on your own.
Then you dropped me like a crinkled bone.
Now I’ve returned to set myself back into your mind.
And I can see that small light of love still shines.
Oh, my Lady Rock n’ Roll,
I recall a time when you weren’t so bold.
Wordless memories that were no mere charity.
Now that love has warped into a sense of disparity.
A split between your mind and your voice,
A painful note of distrust and noise.
I cried when I saw your spangled skin.
I felt you’d charred yourself with sordid sin.
Oh, my Lady Rock n’ Roll,
I pray your emotions are not forever cold.
Why you’ve slipped into a neon aura is beyond my thoughts.
This was a poem I wrote in July of 1986, when I was on a poetry kick. My inspiration was – would you believe? – lightning in the night sky. My father induced respect and admiration for lightning in me when I was little. Like most small children, I was terrified of lightning and thunder. But my father picked me up one night and carried me to a window. He pulled open the drapes and yanked up the blinds – and told me not to be scared. Lightning and thunder were just part of nature and nothing to be feared. Respected, yes, but not feared. They were born from the hands of the Great Creator. From then on, I was never afraid of lightning or thunder again.
My father had acquired veneration for all of Earth’s natural forces from his own father who would open the drapes as a lightning storm rampaged overheard. By contrast my grandmother was terrified and ran around the house clutching a rosary, lighting candles and ordering everyone to pray; that this is how the world will end: lightning, thunder, wind, rain – all at once and merciless. Of course, that may be true. But who are we to tell the Earth what to do with its tools?
My grandfather apparently displayed a sadistic streak, as his frazzled wife scampered from room to room. “Yes,” he’d tell her. “I just heard a report on the radio that a tornado is headed this way and sweeping up all women over age 40.”
Oh lightning angel.
Please smile at me.
Crackle in the caverns of that purple-black sky.
Glisten your rods of orange fire,
Whisper to me amidst vicious winds.
Please smile once more at me.
I hear your softened sensations,
And cower against your powerful heart.
Sweep my soul and steel my lungs.
Lightning angel.
Favorite of all our elements.
Looking at you from this shrinking Earth.
To your crystalline patterns.
Designs of your own creation.
Yes, lightning angel.
Gentle and sweet.
Yet you display your might.
Flashing over the silhouettes of quiet plants.
Cover my meager form on this deserted road.
Breathe your whiteness through the swollen clouds.
Ever have one of those curious friendships with someone where primary interaction – besides making dinner or bar-hopping plans – is ladled with trite insults and creative name-calling? I have just such a relationship with one of my closest friends, Pierce*, whom I’ve known for some 30 years. People who don’t know us very well often say Pierce and I sound like an old married couple and / or wonder how we could possibly be friends. The reactions of the unfamiliars is funny in and of itself.
For one thing, Pierce and I are devout movie buffs, each having studied filmmaking in college. He actually earned a B.A. in film and produced an extraordinary short film for his final thesis. Sadly, despite many years of hard work and “paying his dues” – whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean! – his dreams of building a career in the personally brutal and emotionally unstable film industry disintegrated faster than foreskin-laced pizza rolls at a bar mitzvah. Feeling somewhat dejected, Pierce returned to Dallas in 1996 and tried getting into the local film and TV business without any luck. He worked in the marketing field for a bit and now labors over a hot p.c. for a company that’s as equally brutal and emotionally unstable as any cinematic enterprise. But he also concentrates on his own personal screenplays. So, like me with my writing, he hasn’t abandoned his dreams altogether! Dreams, after all, keep you moving forward – especially if you’re trapped in an ergonomically-designed office chair alongside people whose ambitions usually mean just getting from one weekend to another without hurting a constituent or ending up homeless.
We’re both fans of one of the campiest films ever made, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the 1962 black and white classic was intended to be a psychological drama, but turned out to be a desperate attempt by two aging Hollywood film divas to remain relative in a rapidly-changing American culture. I place it in the same realm as “Barbarella” (1968) and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975) – it’s so deliciously crass and gut-wrenchingly entertaining. All three of those movies are hysterically bad and wrong on so many artistic levels that present-day viewers have to wonder how the cast and crew of each production managed to stay focused enough to get through the madness every day. I’m certain surviving cast members are reluctant to admit their involvement, while remaining perplexed how such crap could metamorphose into cult classic status. Jane Fonda usually dismisses her title role in “Barbarella” as if she was kidnaped and drugged by communist sympathizers, before being hustled off to Europe; much the same way Linda Marchiano explained her oral escapades in “Deep Throat.”
But they’re just too good to pass up! I’ve watched them again and again for the same reason I used to watch the “Jerry Springer Show”: they’re brainlessly funny, and you just know that shit’s not real!
When I worked for a bank in downtown Dallas in the 1990s, there were two receptionists in the department whom no one really liked. One was perpetually constipated, while the other (I’m sure) waited anxiously for the day the “Mother Ship” returned. The cranky one elicited the most vile reactions from people, especially the women. I jokingly referred to them as “Blanche” and “Baby Jane”, after the main characters in the aforementioned movie. Soon, most everyone else in the department began doing the same. I never thought sweet little me would start such a trend!
But Pierce and I often jokingly refer to each other as “Blanche” and “Baby Jane.”
“I’m like Blanche,” he tells people, “the desperate, victimized and more intelligent sibling. He’s the tired, washed-up, alcoholic skank!”
“She may be a tired alcoholic,” I say, “but that bitch could belt out a tune like no one’s business!”
And so it goes. He’s always mocking my appearance, and I’m always making fun of his weight.
“Mexicans who come across the border in the middle of the night, hot, hungry, thirsty and covered with burrs don’t look as half as bad as you do by 5:00 on Fridays!” he once told me.
While standing on a second-story veranda at a bar outside of down Dallas during a Friday happy hour, Pierce asked me to take a photo of him for a dating web site. “Make me look thin,” he said.
“Oh, well then, let me drive over to Fort Worth (some 50 miles west),” I replied.
After a Friday dinner, we stepped into a curio shop where a display table overrun with stuffed animals sat in the back. Pierce found a critter that, when wound up, would bounce around to a musical piece. “Look!” he loudly announced to me. “This one’s like you! It does tricks!” Whereupon he burst into a maniacal bwah-ha-ha type laugh.
I picked up a dachshund replica perched on its hind legs. “And this one’s like you – it sits up and begs for it!”
Pierce and I attended the same parochial elementary school in Dallas and were altar boys at the accompanying church. We didn’t know each other back then, but he often would tell people that we were sent there together by our frustrated parents, calling it “Bad Boys Reform School”; where he barely passed with a D-, while I ended up in a sanitarium because of my pornographic writings that involved lesbian nuns and the Mexican mafia.
Over the years I’ve cobbled together a number of the barbs Pierce and I have slung at one another. On the surface, they may come off as a ‘Jokes for Beginning Comics’ cache. But I it all makes for the type of goofy friendship that’s often hard to explain to outsiders.
A classic scene from a classic camp fest.
Pierce: You’re so ugly, if you get lost in the woods, they just have to look for the vultures circling overhead.
The Chief: You’re so fat, if you get lost in the woods, they just have to follow the sounds of flatulence.
Pierce: You’re so ugly grocery stores ban you from the dairy aisle.
The Chief: You’re so fat all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets turn off the ‘Open’ sign when they see you drive up.
Pierce: You’re so ugly you scared Bigfoot.
The Chief: The last time you stepped on a scale, it said ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’
Pierce: You’re so ugly a group of kids saw you sunbathing on the beach and said, “Look! A dead octopus washed up!”
The Chief: You’re so fat, when you were last on the beach, Green Peace tried to drag you into the water.
Pierce: You’re so ugly your own hands won’t masturbate you.
The Chief: You’re so fat you need two office chairs – one for your mouth, the other for your ass.
Pierce: Your own mother denies she was there when you were born.
The Chief: How many times have you walked down the street and people ask, “Have you named the quintuplets yet?”
Pierce: You walked into a doctor’s office and they said, “The vet’s next door!”
The Chief: People look at you and say, “Global warming is worse than I thought! There goes Rhode Island!”
Pierce: People see you and say, “He must have gone through hell surviving that chemical plant fire.”
The Chief: When you visited the zoo, someone announced over the loud speaker: “We found the lost elephant seal!”
Pierce: When you took your dog to the vet, they tried to neuter YOU.
The Chief: When you ask for a seat belt extension on an airplane, they hand you a 20-foot rope.
Pierce: When you visited a plastic surgeon, they gave you a chain saw and some Super Glue®.
The Chief: Last time the Houston Ship Channel flooded, they paid you to do a cannonball into the west side of the floodwaters and force it all into the Gulf.
Pierce: You wanted to be an organ donor, and they said, “We don’t accept zombies.”
The Chief: Last time you asked someone to have sex, they said, “Great! An orgy!”
Pierce: When you made funeral plans to be cremated, the funeral home offered you a fruit jar and a box of matches.
The Chief: Instead of a coffin, the funeral home offered you a piano case.
Pierce: You’re so fair-skinned you can’t go shirtless in the gym because people will think they’ve gone blind.
The Chief: Skin from your fat reduction surgery helped 1,000 burn victims.
Pierce: You accidentally fell into the recycle bin, and the city didn’t realize it until after they’d dragged your ass all the way to the dump.
The Chief: When you told some contractors your house had foundation problems, they said, “Move into a concrete bunker.”
Pierce: Every time you walk into a new gym, trainers say, “I don’t deal with abortion refuse.”
The Chief: Jenny Craig took one look at you and said, “Well, you win some; you lose some.”
One of my favorite scenes in “Barbarella” – the title character meets the “Black Queen” (Anita Pallenberg):
A friend of mine, Preston*, has recently taken to poetry writing, or more specifically to haiku writing. Haiku (or hokku) is a Japanese verse form of poetry that follows a very strict composition of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Not popular in Western cultures until about the early 1900s, haiku are often accompanied by an image, or a pair of images, meant to depict the essence of a particular moment in time. Their brevity is occasionally an introduction to a longer poem or a story, but its central purpose is to focus the reader’s attention on that one single moment that struck the poet’s mind as critical or somehow significant; a moment where everything came into focus; where the complexities of life were abruptly reduced to what is – and what is not – essential.
I trust and admire Preston greatly. I wrote about him nearly 6 years ago in “One Good Friend.” He’s truly one of those rare individuals who is focused and level-headed. For us writers, focus is always a challenge, while level-headedness is sometimes elusive.
This is a version of a poem I first composed in February 1983, when I was 19. It reveals my long-held passion for the color black, oceans, wind and the moon. It also highlights my obsession for women with long hair, especially long black hair.
They have weathered through generous pride and torrid shame.
They have felt the hate and the love.
They have lived through peace and seen blood.
They worshipped then, as now, both sun and moon.
They have guarded their temples and slept quietly in their tombs.
They have fought savage invaders and their very own.
They have been dragged through dirt and scraped their bones.
They have suffered through individual and collective emotions.
They have seen painful strife and been betrayed by unwanted notions.
These are the people who looked down from the mountains and built a nation on a lake they named Texcoco.
These are the people of a land called México.
I wrote this poem in the early 1980s and had it published in 1984 in “Our World’s Most Beloved Poems”, a compilation of poetry by the World of Poetry Press. There’s not much information available now on WPP. They published my poem for free, but – of course – I had to buy the gigantic book in which it appeared. Yes, it’s amazing how naïve people can be at the age of 20.
Odd, but I never considered myself a poet. A writer, obviously; yet poetry generally ranked somewhere between Reader’s Digest and the local classified ads, as far as I was concerned. Still, outside of my blog, letters to a newspaper editor and a couple of anonymous romance inquiries circa 1990, it’s the only thing I’ve officially had published.
They’d found another one. It was huge. A drone surveying the area counted 109 figures; its sensors initially identifying them as human. Rivas and Mugabe had stood in awe upon studying the preliminary data, alongside the rest of the team. If 109 human bodies did lay in the rubble – remnants of what they believed to be a hotel – it would be the largest collection of human remains the team had discovered in more than a decade of scouring the locale.
The region itself was gigantic; what once had been a placed called Texas. More specifically, the northeastern stretch; where two of the most heavily-populated metropolises had once thrived. Until seven millennia ago. Before the 2019 event simply known now as “The Cataclysm.”
“There have to be thousands, if not millions,” Rivas had told the expeditioners just a day before the drone returned with its stunning data estimate. “Not just here in this one building. I mean, across the entire region. These cities were among the grandest of their time.”
“Right now,” Mugabe interjected, “let’s just concentrate on this one building. Or what’s left of it.” He didn’t want the group to get too excited about anything; least of all a site containing so many bodies.
“Yes, of course,” Rivas concurred with a grin.
The crew was already stretched; pushed to the precipice of exhaustion as they continued searching through the unimaginable layers of dirt, rock and dust. But whenever they did find the remains of someone, they’d also noticed the individual was clutching an object in their hands. All of them – each and every corpse – held a similar object. Every single one of them – holding tight to a single item.
The 2019 sunstorm had been massive; the worst on record. Then and now. Among the archived records of all the sunstorms hitting Earth before and since, none matched the 2019 event. That’s why scientists dubbed it “The Cataclysm.” The word is so bland, so ordinary in a way; yet it said everything. To the untold numbers of people who studied the event – and the subsequent, wide-scale societal collapses it induced – the term “cataclysm” itself had come to signify that one unimaginable episode.
It was inevitable. By the start of the 21st century, humanity had come to rely upon technology too much. People across the globe identified with tangible pieces of metal and plastic more closely, perhaps, than their own families and friends. In fact, personal interactions seemed routed through the mystical electronic clouds they’d created for their world; a world they claimed was better than any before. To their descendants of the 90th century C.E., such flippant beliefs were almost laughable.
It remains a miracle – no minor one – that anyone should survive to the present day. Any human, that is. When the multitude of satellites cluttering the ionosphere fell silent in the days immediately following “The Cataclysm,” it appeared – from what records remain – a brutal chain-reaction of minor cataclysms exploded across the planet. Power plants – able to remain operational for a while – eventually died; as did water treatment plants, telecommunication lines. Everything attached to an actual or virtual wire just…died.
And thus, so did people. Countless numbers of people; millions of them. A mass exodus of souls floating from the decaying flesh of their hosts; rising past those same darkened satellites and up into the brighter stars.
Perusing photos of other recently-discovered sites made Rivas and Mugabe think of an even more ancient but equally horrific episode: the destruction of Pompeii. Pictures from 20th century archaeologists captured the disaster in a manner never seen before. The city-state’s residents – trapped in the environs of what they surely thought was a safe place – caught off-guard in the worst possible way. Their bodies and terrified expressions frozen in swarms of scorching lava for future humans to see and study. There was nothing like it.
Until now.
But this – this was on a much larger scale. Pompeii was a single prosperous city with the unfortunate coincidence of being situated beneath a ubiquitous volcano. What the explorers saw in the remains of some nondescript building in the midst of a place once teeming with life was a tiny fraction, a sliver of the human wasteland that stretched across the globe. The societal collapses had driven many of their ancestors underground into vast caverns constructed for just such an event. Or something like it. But surely even those initial survivors couldn’t have foreseen the rolling swathes of brutality that followed the darkening of those wicked satellites; surely even they couldn’t have imagined the blessed sun betraying them in such a vile manner.
Yet, they lived; they survived. They survived to repopulate and prosper with a greater understanding of their own humanity, their vulnerability, their fragile nature. They survived to love that sun unlike their immediate ancestors who lived within the confines of those mystical clouds.
Rivas and Mugabe stared at those antiquitous photos of Pompeii’s victims; frozen in lava; terrified and helpless. And then they looked at the drone photos of the bodies in this building; the 109 discovered so far. And they realized the vast difference between the two events; a difference apparent in the faces and hands of the dead. The people of Pompeii had died clutching their loved ones. The victims of the 2019 event died clutching their cell phones and laptops; waiting for the Internet to come back up.
