Things in Light Poetry Series 2014: Patrick O'Riley

For Pola Negri Infused Wth Hope And Dreams You are not alone If you will walk underneath You will see the lightbenders And the outlanders And hear those Who speak in colors Not included in the rainbow As they mist into the foggy shadows Of the Biloweiz Forest Searching for a flannel tableau Of baby Jesus In a place Where all the kiddies Love cold stars And survive on Wisent pemmican Dipped in tobacco nectar


***

Patrick O’Riley, a very unusual fellow, studied creative writing at the University of New Mexico. He worked on the Mike Douglas show, picked tomatoes in Montana and peaches in South Carolina, pan handled in downtown LA and has spent his life writing about his experiences. He said this about his own work: “I can't think of my past without the spirit of Gabriel saying "This is boring, juice it up a little by telling about your life with the six anarchist Mexican midgets." O’Riley lives in Hurley, New Mexico.

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Things in Light Poetry Series 2014: Robert Masterson

Fly Speaks

        The cat said, "Yao" in a voice both plaintive and forlorn, a cry made for abandonment. He’d have seen some cats in his life, cats on the street, cats in the dry, dead stubble fields long harvested and mostly mouseless, cats dead in dumpsters, cats covered in scabs and parasites and open, pus-dripping sores, cooked cats on silver platters surrounded by cooked snakes—expensive servings of “Tiger Fights Dragon”—cats skinned multiple ways, cats killed by curiousity, cats landed on their feet to no purpose, fallen from too high and landed too fast. Cats wearing gold rings in their ears, tiny golden wire threaded through their delicate noses, collars, cuffs, harness, and halter and leash and chain.

        "Do you even have the right to 'yao' like that?" he asked.

        The value of a cat’s silence cannot be measured in coin. It measures itself.

***

Robert Masterson, professor of English at CUNY-BMCC in New York City, has authored Artificial Rats & Electric Cats, Trial by Water and Garnish Trouble. His work appears in numerous publications and websites, and he holds degrees from the University of New Mexico; the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado; and Shaanxi Normal University, the People’s Republic of China.

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Things in Light Poetry Series 2014: Larry Goodell

A Congress Unbuttoned

Senator Stallwort should we filibuster?

We could duck under and run for cover.

Representative Pile-Dirt, shall we take off our shirts

and ask the Democrats to suckle our nipples?

Representative Stemfelt & Representative Cockeyes

have decided to block all progress until

their immediate needs are met.

We want money, we want pussy, we want perks.

Filibuster till the cows come home with the moolah.

We want what we need & need what we want.

The President is a Wetback or a foreign spy.

We are Elephantiasis who love to fuck other Elephantiasees

under the desks of propriety.

Representative Stuck in Perpetuity of Dung

has commended the others of his Faith

members of the Donuts Under Crystal Chandeliers

We love sty in the eye progress namely

the more backward we go the more forward we are.

Representative Pissgrunt despises health care

because dying is natural for the lower classes

and the middle classes are already dead.

Representative Doughface & Senator Bathwater say

Lying is good for you and will get you what you want.

The same message heard over and over & repeated verbatim

the constitution of our morning prayer breakfast talking points:

Government sucks. The President sucks.

The Commons is a lie. We don’t need anyone

to take care of anybody because we can

shoot our way out of any situation.

Senator Fuck Everybody But Me agrees.

So does Representative Tea Potty who

was never housebroken and pees in his pants

to show his appreciation of the total stagnation

of government and the election of hate maniacs

to the governorship of some lucky states.

Senator Stallwort, should we filibuster?

Of course, thumb our noses at everybody

suck on our thumbs

and sit on the pile of dung we’ve created

which is unrepresentative government.

larry goodell / placitas, new mexico

(read at Poetry At the Range 9Apr2014)

_______

Active as a poet in Albuquerque area from 1957 on, Larry Goodell was born in Roswell, New Mexico, learned from University of Southern California in Los Angeles, studied with Robert Creeley in New Mexico, went to the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963 to study with Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen and Mr Creeley, went to the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, and married photographer/artist Lenore Goodell in 1968.

Goodell founded Duende Press in 1964 and published one poet per issue followed by poetry and art magazines Fervent Valley and Oriental Blue Streak. At the Thunderbird Bar in Placitas, he staged his poetry and fabricated his first event poems. In 1972, he toured the country doing poetry performances with Stephen Rodefer. He organized readings for Downtown Saturday Night, the Rio Grande Writers Association, the Central Torta Series, Albuquerque United Artists, and for many years the Living Batch Bookstore and, more recently, at Silva's Saloon in Bernalillo and the notable Duende Poetry Series in Placitas.

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My Town and the Police

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Here is my story about this town and the police. It ain't much. Don't get me confused for a journalist or commentator; I am one of those writers that lives mostly in his own head. My ideas have proven to be outlandish, for example, among humans best described by the geometric form whose perimeter is determined by the formula 4s.

Anyway, by now you've been practically drowned with words and pictures from experts about all of this; I don't even need to name it in this paragraph. It's been well-recorded and we will all be able to take glimpses of what happened here, what has been happening here, years from today. The people that come after us will be able to viddy it too.

There is plenty of violence in nature. Think about predation, the slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town, the effects of pesticides on songbirds. Interestingly, some animals display aggression and perform violence against their own kind. Usually this sort of behavior has to do with acquiring and demonstrating power over others. The animals responsible here are mostly mammals, I am pretty certain, but fill me in if I am wrong.

As we evolve as a species, the common assumption is that lust for power over other individuals, violence, aggression, territoriality, will fade, will be replaced by more rational and compassionate responses to each other and ourselves.

The only problem with the evolution hypothesis is that it is taking a god-damned long time to realize and we want peace now. But how can we have peace when we still can't feed and clothe the poor among us? By what magic can we institute respect for individuals and the state when we live in the simulacra of a beautiful oasis, surrounded by the reality of the smoke and noise of perpetual war?

***

The nation's popular culture transmitters continue to strongly imply that violence and aggression are adequate solutions to a vast array of problems confronting the human world. Aggression and competition for power and dominance are seen as a positive qualities in the corporate milieu. The gap between rich and poor continues to heave outward. Some research suggests that up to 80% of Americans are armed.

Through the twisted logic of wartime paranoia and corporatist values invoked by a series of now thoroughly discredited right wing administrations, the police have become seriously militarized, weapons are easy to come by, the surveillance state has been realized, yet many Americans seem totally fine with our dark inheritance. They can't respond because they are comfortable.

One of the most disturbing speakers I heard at this week's city council meeting went on and on about some officer's military record, his valor fighting terrorists in faraway oil depots and strategically located warm-water harbors. That is just fine, but how does such experience translate to serving and protecting citizens in a small city? I am glad the man conquered IEDs and tanks, grenades and automatic weapons fire. But we don't have much of that stuff here, unless you count the Police Department.

***

I've been stopped for speeding. I was pulled over near Tingley beach for exceeding the 25 MPH speed limit. I was doing about 30, I reckon, passed by a APD cruiser and knew he might pull me over. I continued though, and slowed down to wait for him. About 30 seconds later, the policeman came up behind me doing about 40 or 50, lights and siren blaring.

I pulled over. The red-faced officer, probably about 23 years old, rushed over to my car. I rolled down the window and noticed he had his hand on his gun and was fiddling with the strap that kept it in the holster. He looked in the car and said, "What are you running from?" When I tried to reason with him, he began a tirade, claiming that I intended to elude him. He would not let me talk and acted all itchy and irritated. He finally went back to his car, wrote me a ticket and I signed it. Afterwards, he stormed off with his fists clenched and I drove away, terrified. Serio.

I really believe that events like the ones I've described in this essay happen because we let them happen. All of us are responsible for making the world into what it has become. In evolutionary terms, we find ourselves at a dead end. Obviously we can't go back, we can't un-choose the choices that led us here. So this is where the branch bifurcates.

***

Choosing another way means giving up a collectively false sense of comfort, a perpetual retreat into acquisition, our outward presentation as conquering super-heroes, the belief some humans are better than others. I want to believe my species is capable of that, that I can make the leap too.

This effort will require something very ultra-non-violent called a cultural revolution; capitalism will have to be modified and imbued with compassion, corporations and advertising put aside entirely. Money spent on the war machine will need to be spent on health care, education, infrastructure, social programs to empower all the folks of America. The unemployed can be put to work, their dignity restored by involvement in building bridges, solar power plants and schools; maybe after a couple hundred years of that, space stations and star ships can be added to the to do list. 

In that future, all of the policemen and policewomen in my town are trustworthy protectors, reasonable representatives of an advanced and evolved civilization, by the way.

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Four Paragraphs Referencing Wyoming Boulevard

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Here are some things about Albuquerque you might like to know.

There was a thing called the Wyoming Mall. It was indoors y todo and had a fancy movie theater in the middle. The film house was decorated in blue and various shades of grey. This was in direct contrast to other suburban cinema hideaways in the city. The other movie theaters in town were for the most part red and gold colored on the inside. All of them showed the latest in popular celluloid fantasies but the ushers at the Wyoming Mall Cinema had to wear bowties.

A small record shop stood beside the theater and a store called Yanamoto's next to that. At the former a man in thick-lensed glasses went on and on about The Animals and The Yardbirds. He made most of his money selling rolling papers and small stone pipes from Mexico that resembled carved onyx chess pieces. At the latter outlet, rare Asian imports were craftily combined with a vision of post-war SoCal, at once confusing and robust. It was possible to get lost in the kimono aisle; the smell of tiki lamps blazing away during daylight could be intoxicating.

If you walked past the hobby business and it smelled like model airplane cement, that was okay. The sign in the window said they only sold the junk with the purchase of a complete kit, something along the lines of the Queen Mary. Or a tricked-out '55 Chevy Belair, a P-38 Lightning, or a 1/32 scale, assemble-it-yourself diorama of Washington crossing the Delaware. Each boxed project cost about 20 clams, way steep for casual users. Mostly it was pretty square like that, except for the shortwave radio display. A dude with a flattop and shop glasses (like the ones what are considered hep by kids these days) would yell at anyone who tried to tune in Moscow or Havana.

The cafeteria was decent but lacked the dusky theatrics of the big dark Italian restaurant on the periphery of this lost world. Over there were 42 varieties of sauce, possibilities of sausage, pasta shaped like smooth orifices into another world. Primitive video games and mechanical fortune tellers beeped and clunked while Neapolitan art songs were piped through crackly speakers. It was moody, mostly lit by candles and colored lights. The tablecloths were the checkered kind. Sitting down at a table for bread and antipasto meant forgetting whether it was dark outside or light.

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Nineteen Seventy-Seven

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Here is a house with an oval of grass out front. The lawn is surrounded by cold lava rocks. The rough stones have been smashed to bits, are colored like dried blood. Banging them against the sidewalk makes small white sparks.

The family next door gets up every morning at four. Lights come on, trucks zoom away and the lot of them spend the last minutes of night wrapping up copies of the daily paper. The old man wears a cotton hat, smokes Viceroy brand cigarettes.

Across the street is an airline pilot with a small foreign car. He has a swimming pool. A woman in a bathing suit and long beach towel wanders back and forth between the front door and his Triumph, singing songs from Rumours by Fleetwood Mac.

In the white house with grey trim, Chen practices the viola. His parents own a restaurant filled with heavy wooden chairs. The cook on the corner drives a Cadillac El Dorado. He has painted the automobile bright green, refers to it as the luckiest car in the universe.

There are more plants in the back yard; the sprinklers come on at midnight. A small garden with oleanders and roses has been cleaved out of clay in one corner. The far end, beyond the peach trees, smells of dog piss and pine sol.

Summertime comes around. The swamp cooler shakes and buzzes. As evening advances all of the neighbors walk out to the street without their shoes. Everyone wants to talk about food, how long the days have become or why the surrounding desert sings.

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Come to Albuquerque

by Rudolfo Carrillo

The world called Albuquerque is where you want to build your life. There is no shortage of lumber in the mountains north and east of town; someone decided to build a shanty by the arroyo. If you drill into the clay bearing sand,  the small stones pushed perpetually down to the river by rainfall and large diesel powered tractors, you will find plenty of water to drink.

The hint of petroleum distillates wafting up from your favorite clear crystal vessel and into gas-permeable membranes is there to remind all of us about the inflammatory potential buried everywhere and permeating even the best homes, despite our best efforts to contain it. Somehow all of this has to do with a project designed to take apart very heavy metal objects.

Spicy food is on the menu. Soon enough we all make the transition from bread to tortillas. Notably, some prominent geographic features are called after a watery produce or the tree that bears such pleasant edible forms. The number two breakfast at the Frontier restaurant is decent.

If you wander about town in a relaxed and confident manner similar to that affected by the conquistadors or their minions, you may encounter a snake with two tongues, a rabbit with thin veiny ears, a parrot escaped from a six thousand square foot home. Cactus plants hover, moon-like in their presentation.

Residents here have no problem restoring automobiles to their pre-revolutionary glory and have been known to use autoclaves and special paint made from cobalt in preparation for their clandestine meetings at the train yard, at the ruined chapel, a square building that will always be made from red ceramic bricks.

Of course, the sun continues to blare and is trumpet-like and bright as that instrument, but alarmingly forlorn in sustained utterances, too. I will continue to insist that it snowed here during the last decade of the twentieth century. You may be surprised and fascinated by the lack of insects available for inspection on the wide swath of next summer's conquering mower; digging will result in more ghosts.

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A Burqueña Listmas 2013

I know it's been a while since I've written, dear reader. All apologies. I've been a busy, high desert honeybee: working as a freelance writer and full-time+ as managing & music editor at le Alibi, keeping up with the Carrillo canines and a husband (you know, Rudolfo, the backbone of TiL's present content creation engine).

So, I created a hashtagged slideshow of 30 photos I nabbed from my Instagram stream. And there are some shout-outs to be shouted out.

In order of appearance:

• Free Art Friday Albuquerque
• Samantha Glass (whose work soundtracks this slideshow)
• El Sabor de Juarez
• Marrakech Kasbah Mediterranean Cuisine
• 100 Thousand Poets for Change
• Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice
• The Tannex

Happy soon-to-be-2014, y'all. Keep watching the skies.

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Three Winter Trips Away From Here

by Rudolfo Carrillo

One of the things I'd do in the eighties and nineties was to make sure not to be around Burque during the last week of the year. Places I went in the winter to avoid La Natividad in town included exotic locations in the United Kingdom and the Caribbean. But I had the best time in Mexico and made use of a variety of land routes and methods to check the place out. Sometimes I would drive and go as far as I could get, on a quest for an authentic holiday experience. Back then, that vaguely translated into looking for a party. The outcomes of all those trips varied from rousing to precarious. You can try going there if you like. After I got sick eating a cut of Argentinian beef in a seaside restaurant in Puerto Vallarta during the summer of 2001, I gave the country up for good. I heard it got dangerous after that, but has calmed down some these days. 

***
I took a short flight to Juarez on Boxing Day. Phil Collins was piping through all the headphones and it was one of those older jets, like a 727 or something. I grabbed my bags and walked over to the train station. I ended up on a commuter train to Chihuahua and stayed at a rundown hotel near downtown. The cabbie whistled and laughed when he dropped me off.

The next morning some dude was standing in the alley boiling ears of corn to sell later and I bought a hotdog wrapped in bacon from a street vendor. I found out from standing around the train station minding my own business that there was a train to the coast. It went through the mountains, and supposedly was an engineering wonder. It was cool alright, with a old fashioned observation car, but the electricity onboard was fucked up, so there was no hot food or lighted toilets for 12 hours.

On the other side of the mountains was a jagged and lush jungle with fruit trees and birds that were brightly festooned. The town of Los Mochis wasn't really memorable but there was a town further out where Chinese merchant ships docked and the sailors wandered drunkenly through town with red stars on their hats and hookers on their arms. I lost my glasses in the surf out by Topolobampo, but they mysteriously drifted back up and into my hands when the tide came back. I stayed at a hotel called the Santa Ana and ate scrambled eggs and corn tortillas in the restaurant next door.

***
Another time I drove a smashed up Datsun B210 down to the Sea of Cortes. I started out on Stanford Street and Lead Avenue. I took the freeway down to Las Cruces and crossed over in El Paso, headed straight for the mountains. This was back when you got a sticker for your front window when you made the border. About half an hour into the ride west I came to the conclusion that the sticker was a probably a good idea. The two lane road was twisty and the trucks coming the other way were constant. The sticky tag would probably survive a cascading trip down the mountain side, hooked to some window or its remnants.

Along the way there was a mining town all painted and lit up for Christmas with big colorful electric lights while the copper smelter down the road fumed and roared along though the night as we passed. A military patrol stopped the car in a town with a peculiar English name, but other than a brief and cautiously friendly question and answer session with ten heavily armed individuals on a dark road in a foreign country, and suicidal truckers pouring through the gates of hell and headed in the opposite direction I was driving, the ride was uneventful.

I checked into the Holiday Inn Hermosillo about one in the morning. They had a decent breakfast buffet with atole and everything, so I hung for a while and then headed for San Carlos. There was a Pemex station about half way.  After that the sea crept up and met the desert. I thought about how that scene might be what Mars looked like a million years ago, except without the half finished and long ago abandoned condos and occasional oyster shacks that dotted the horizon. Somehow I got sunburned on that trip and had to eat lobster, too.

***
Near the end of 1998 I rented a blue Dodge Neon in Chula Vista and decided to drive as far down the Pacific coast as a week would permit. Tijuana felt chaotic so I blew the place off after stopping at a pharmacy to pick up something to calm my gut. The pharmacist was friendly but kept wagging his tongue around a gap he had between his two front teeth. I stopped in Ensenda and got a stamp for my passport. There was a cruise ship parked in the harbor with lots of big sea birds swooping around the fancy boat. Passengers in white cotton disembarked and I put the car into second and zoomed south.

That night I stayed at a little ranch by the sea. It was off the main road, a crowded dusty thing crowded with wooden shacks and cinderblock businesses. They had been set up for continuous business; they were on the only way in and out of the peninsula. I got the name of the place from a Lonely Planet guide on Baja California. There were little huts made from stone and a lagoon with a couple of seals floating around in it.

Mostly the beaches on the west side were empty. I found a small dead whale walking around one day. There were a couple of hotels on the beach but they were empty. I wondered though one that was painted yellow and orange with buildings meant to resemble aztec temples. I finally ran into a bellhop. He had a thin mustache and was balding but just smiled and reached out to shake my hand when I asked about accommodations. I finally decided to stay at another hotel a few hundred meters further along the coast. The rooms were dark, cavernous, and air conditioned. The owners had a pet pig that walked around at night. Everything was painted pink and blue. There was a restaurant with decent enchiladas and a band that played tourist favorites like Jesusita en Chihuahua.

When the road got bad after a couple of days, I turned back. I stayed at a ridiculously baroque hotel in downtown Ensenada, but got another hankering for salt water and decided to cross the peninsula. There was a party town called San Felipe on the other side of the peninsula and I got there just in time for New Year's eve. I sat around in a bar looking at all the other humansm, ate flautas and washed them down with Tecate. The sea was really still, just ripples crossing its width, some boat shadows too. The moon was nearly full and was in the middle of the sky when 1999 was announced over the loudspeakers.

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Five Albuquerque Instances

by Rudolfo Carrillo

I decided to assemble a collection of random memories about Albuquerque and put it down here, report fashion, for your reading pleasure. I have plenty of material. Maybe I'll do this a few times with some basic parameters, so it doesn't come off as tangential. Like tonight seems sort of long-legged and eighties style, except for one instance, if you happen to be concerned with topicality. I'll tell you though, sometime maybe I will unstring all this, make each paragraph into a different book like flowers coming out of the ground in springtime. But now it is just seeds and that is fine with me.

• For a while I worked as a stagehand at Popejoy Hall, mostly before I was twenty. It was a helluva job and dangerous too. One of my duties was to climb up to the ceiling and drag around weights and pipes and scenery. The crew chief was huge guy who wore a denim vest over a variety of filthy heavy metal concert t-shirts. He chain-smoked Marlboro 100s and would yell, "You, up on the rail!" when he needed something from me. He hadn't combed his hair in ten years; his wife was named after a character on the Honeymooners. I think.
• An automobile caught fire on the corner of Tulane and Coal one summer afternoon while I was trying to paint a picture of the apocalypse; staring at the Sandia Mountains for inspiration. A sky blue Dodge Colt rattled by and stalled at the curb. It was already smoking under the hood and the woman driving got out and started walking with a stiff gait, toward Nob Hill. Back then, a vicious Rhodesian ridgeback named Vincent lived on Tulane between Coal and Lead. As the driver of the burning compact rushed by, the dog leapt out into the street ready to bite.
• During my freshman year at UNM the whole place was pretty much wide open. For instance, the basement of Castetter Hall was wrecked and abandoned but folks still went down there for the thrill, to make out, and to score broken lab equipment. The same with the labyrinth under the College of Fine Arts, dark and seemingly endless, with an occasional broken tuba or snare drum substituting for a distillation apparatus or busted autoclave.
• I am sure as shit humans were living the Werner-Gilchrist whatever house as late as 1985, though media and historical reports seem reluctant to admit such. I lived three doors down the road that year. Whoever in hell was living in the dilapidated rancho  had a couple of late model chevys parked in the yard and a green house going that beat hell out of any other garden on that shabby road called after Cornell University. I'd hear the occupants playing the piano and carrying on late at night and wonder who they were. They did not come and go much.
• I ambled in a very relaxed fashion around Johnson field twenty-three times while the three hippies I was with jogged and ran and threw themselves at the grass in great lithesome leaps, gamboling as they passed me again on that perimeter. It was just after dusk and the high intensity lighting array lent the action a dream-like quality that only dispersed after the outing, when the two women of the group began practicing astrology on guitars. I rose from the carpet and walked south toward the cemetery. 

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Vignettes from Trail Number 192

by Rudolfo Carrillo

i.

Twelve years on, Charlie Jones, Jr. had grown to be fatter than hell. At least he was trying to lose it. Some days he was a hundred percent, fucking-A sure he was gonna have a heart attack. But on he went, huffing and puffing anyway, just to see how far he could get in the pinche universe where he had been randomly embedded.

Jones switched to a diet of falafel and Gatorade, and walked around as much as he could. His repeated circumnavigation of campus and through the labyrinthine parking facilities kinda reminded Charlie of the misty past, of the time when he walked around the world in a pair of combat boots stolen from the king of the heavily guarded watermelon ranch on the edge of town. Here was a simpler task called Embudito Canyon.


ii.

The enchiladas were decent and the sauce was bitter too. It was possible to imagine the tortillas were of extraterrestrial origin. Monroe favored corn tortillas, served in a stack. Abelard and Charlie argued over the remaining flour tortilla, rolled up in a bit of foil like a magic carpet or an extra-special cigarette.

Up there in the shadow of the famous mountain, the three returned a guitar with magical properties to a scientist, wandered through flat-roofed neighborhoods, rolled down the windows to let the dry air of the western lands wash through their eyes, and now sat eating lonche at Garcia's. Pass the honey, said Abelardo. 

iii.

Jones reckoned that one way to tell if a gal was the right one was to take them hiking and to start off with a rough trail too. A hearty New Mexican meal beforehand probably wouldn't hurt either. But Darlene was different. For one thing he could not tell one goddamn way or the other whether she was amused or horrified when red chile squirted out of the burrito he was consuming and onto his shirt, accompanied by a sound that resembled radioactive decay.

Charlie and Darlene trekked up Trail 192, stopped at a small meadow, and continued upward into a part of the Earth where huge trees erupted from huge rocks, waving their limbs greenly toward the heavens beyond the canyon walls. He talked a lot about all the plants and animals and people that he associated with the mountain, how some of them had walked here and they had been together. She looked up at the sun and smoked another cigarette, and crouched to touch a cactus and looked at the sun again with her small white hand over her brow.

iv.

Stop here and I will take your picture, said Abelardo. Monroe walked over to a datura plant and attempted to communicate with it using ceremonial Nahuatl. Charlie Jones, Jr. lumbered his elephantine arse over to the trail marker and remarked on the importance of making certain the sign was clear and visible in photographic reproduction. Who knows when we will ever be here together again, said Charlie, as a lizard zoomed by and into the multitude of sage while the datura plant replied by blossoming and Abelardo touched a button on his phone.

The wind was coming down the canyon. Snakes could appear and there was a certain blueness to the colors the three men saw up there. They climbed up onto the rocks. There was some blood but mostly symbols mixed up with the granite and sandstone. Here was a water hole, there a length of sandy earth crossed with animal tracks. After an hour passed and dusk washed over their skin, Charlie and Monroe and Abelardo naturally wandered back to the rental car. They were fascinated with metal and electricity. The moon hovered.

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Peace and Love

by Larry Goodell

Peace and Love –
evolve backwards into the above.
When everything was perfect.
When was that? 
Do you have a balloon under your hat?
Even the super wealthy live in fear of being
deposed.
In fact I am their fear.
“Those poets, why doesn’t someone shut them up?”
Nobody has it easy and it takes guts to get old.
But if you’ve got to have a goal
Peace is pretty good.
Stick those drones up your ass, Mr. Military Fart-face.
Stop warring against your own people, Everybody.
Go against your petty self-serving nature
Mr. Human and stop putting down women &
       screwing over your neighbor.
You don’t need Viagra, you need
Love by the Acre!
Real love that is blushing with compassion.
The ability to touch and hug yourself
            out of this mess.
You need a benevolent group that can
            calm down your ego.
You got your dharma, your teachings, your Wikipedia,
      your books, your intenet, libraries
     of the world – 
You got your Buddhas, your Jesus, your Moses,
     your Black Elks, your swamis
     your gods galore, your teachers –
But you need your Sangha, like Thich Nhat Hanh says
     you need a community, a community of positive 
                                  interests
     to build up the commons, what’s good for everybody
     everybody gives some for the good of all –
Don’t laugh, it’s possible, it’s inevitable, it’s
filling in the blanks, connecting the dots, seeing the vision
     that exists in love, a talking circle of direction
from the drums of the original land, the indigenous
thoughts and prayers, the cycle of the seasons,
the locality of love, and produce, and
cooperation, a locality of friends not
to gouge each other’s eyes out, or
work each other to death for gain
but to get together to build a platform for song,
for music, for performers, and for the art
of governing ourselves.


10/26/2013 for the 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Albuquerque Reading Performance
larry goodell / placitas, new mexico

photograph by Carl Michener-Rodin. l to r: Joe Bottone, Olivia, Steve Rodefer, Bill Pearlman, Beverly Buffington, Mel Buffington, Laura Linsley at the door, Gene Frumkin, Kell and Betsy Robertson with baby Amy, Charlie Vermont, and me (1968, Albuquerque, North 4th Street across from the present El Patio)

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Charlie Visits Walmart

by Rudolfo Carrillo

He is driving a car that is colored like ashes or the far reaches of intergalactic space and will be good and goddamned when an oil-smeared and dusty—like the petroleum gathering machinery of Oklahoma in the Thirties—group of humans stops right in the fucking road, and he has to turn the wheel sharply to the left, else those folks be rendered lifeless components of the inanimate galaxy all around them.

They are waiting for a straggler who is still on the other side of the wide avenue. Leonard is taking a piss on the big, green electrical transformer that sits next to the rubbish dumpster behind the Walmart Supercenter. Yelling and cajoling him to be done with his relief, fearful of the heat which such watery pause often brings, at least one of them is also thinking about the simplicity and order of life in jail. None of them see the car turn the corner on a vector that might well forcefully intercept their desperate but satisfying congregation.

Thanks to Charlie's lightning-fast reflexes, a collision does not occur. He is past them and gliding into a parking space before the group's laggard finishes his work and passes out with his pants around his knees. The man's associates are fairly howling with laughter and recrimination and head on down the street, leaving Leonard to rot in the bright sunshine while our protagonist pulls himself out of the driver's seat using a kind of leverage that is ordinarily reserved for those obsessed with the weather.

The doors to the Walmart Supercenter slide open automatically when you approach them. Before he is in range of that miraculous technological demonstration, a sun-flattened man wearing a mesh baseball cap—with the name of a natural gas supplier in Lubbock, Texas embroidered roughly up front—rambles up casual-like and asks about the rain and wind. Charlie tells him it ain't ordinarily this dry and just wait until October. When the conversation veers toward money, Charlie draws out a fiver from his left front pocket and hands it over with stormy admonitions accompanying the transaction.

It only takes them a few minutes to account for and bag up his purchase: objects designed for consumption, the mysterious high-tech life-saving devices of probable Venusian origin that generally come along with those solid, liquid and gaseous forms. Charlie rushes home afterward so he can spend the rest of the early morning investigating other worlds.

He did not see the humans in the parking lot again. Charlie believes they retreated toward the tool section of the Walmart Supercenter. Maybe some of them are watching the tropical fish in the pet department. After unpacking, admiring and then storing his new acquisitions, he falls into a deep sleep and dreams that a navigable river flows through the midst of the Sandia Mountains, that there is a colorful restaurant on the edge of town, down a muddy road, where anyone who asks for a meal will be fed until they nearly burst.

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Three Eternal Devices for Navigating the Fall

by Rudolfo Carrillo

The clock on my computer says summer is over.

We have a few of these sorts of graceful machines—note to local burglars: I also have a ninety-pound red hound dog with a blue tongue and white teeth who is trained to devour strangers—but most of the time I do my work on a G4 that runs Tiger, Motorola processor y todo.

It can be slow and is ornery as hell, but it is just fine with me and I would keep it forever if I could. I've been through a few keyboards. (Flat white is a damn poor color if you like to eat pizza whilst typing.) But I think there have only been two times when the thing did not boot. 

Using the G4 is part of a personal ritual. My rite late last night, taken up with due gravity as the Pleiades swung into view, was about how everything before now continuously leaks away into the air, leaving consequences turned out into the world. The retrieval of the past's output as image and narrative is one result of this process.

I've been marking time this way for years and years, though meaning creeps toward abstraction and into sudden sea change as the middle of my century rises. The procedure also has the potential to mutate into cleverly shitty, multi-paragraph introductions designed to defend the use of a type of symbolism based in the neuro-mechanical reflections and quantum entanglements that comprise the past.

If your universe does not work in the manner I just told about, that is just fine with me; every head is a world. But I probably could not make anything at all from the temporal residue data collection area I've built from starlight and bad decisions, if not for dreamy mechanism.

I have bound myself variously to elaborate and arcane techniques perfected in the foothills of the Himalayas or else incorporating passages from all American television broadcasts into my skeletal structure with the specific purpose of gathering evidence of the discomfiting presence of magical postmodernism among a representative collection of widely divergent human organisms.

I hope you think that's funny. It is important to me that you have a good laugh while reading this, because I sometimes see my memory as a curse, and you ought to, as well, I reckon—when every moment is just hanging there like a big iron rock in the asteroid belt waiting to be mined by the well-intentioned but nonetheless colonial forces of some eccentric Earthling's half-ass literary career.

Eleven years ago, when a very different summer was declining, I met a dog that had been run over by a fellow I happened to know from art school. I saw that dude the other day in Nob Hill. He was driving a bright green convertible and hell, he is my age. I was going to walk over and bust his balls about the car or how he split after the accident, leaving me with a bloody and frightened dog, but "Karma Police" came on the radio and I kept driving. I figured he had probably forgotten all about me and was probably late to this or that country club anywho.

Back then, the dog lived, and she turned out to be a good friend of mine. I wrote all kinds of stuff about that day, about the years that followed. Now, this has been the second summer she is gone from here. I did not notice the summer before this one. I stayed in and wrote and dreamt. That summer of two-thousand-and-twelve I dreamed I left the back gate open—that her owner had finally seen a found dog sign I left at the community center ten years before, and had come to take the dog home.

She had the worst kind of cancer. The doctor ended up amputating her left leg. Her right leg had been busted on the faraway day in September I told about. I was always worried about her legs; she could not stand the rain. The night she died, I was sitting next to her, trying to convince her to contemplate the goodness of water.

She was unconvinced, was weary of earthly stuff. The dog looked up at me, nudged me with her nose and as death washed over her, an elaborate, elusive, smoky and oscillating structure appeared between us briefly and fluttered. I reached out with one hand, and the form vanished. She left behind an empty vehicle. It had the shape of dog, but it was not a dog.

After that, and at night, asleep in order to reckon with the permanence of that passage away from the land and the food and the flowers, I began to employ an all-access, backstage pass to Tlalocan, given to Cabeza de Baca after years of servitude and lonely wandering. I inadvertently scavenged this talisman from a landfill in Hermosillo in 2001, while searching for a G4 possessing magical properties and applications from beyond the stars.

The temporal displacement unit usually lands me in a vast laboratory with astronomical qualities or a byzantine transport center filled with thin locomotives and speedy aeroplanes. Sometimes, I see Rosie and the dog hops up into my lap or leads me to a telescope where I can see planets on the very edge of the galaxy, against the darkness of the void. In the morning though, the sun is bright. I am surrounded by life; yet she is nowhere to be found on this earth.

The ritual begins again as I wander out into the living room, shoeless, and greet my wife. The rest of the pack circles around her and then follows me out the back door, into autumn.

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