a person before

June 25th, 2009

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So I go to the barbershop. This is an important ritual for me, and an unnecessary expense. They always just shave my head- an operation I can easily perform on my own, but I love the barber’s. A singular male ritual.

As the stringy Russian dabs foam on a pasty business dude, the news breaks about Michael and quickly advances from spectacle to outright tragedy. I am called to the chair and sadness washes over me. Michael is dead. I try to hold on to my personal sadness. Not a sadness for a figure, some placeholder for my childhood, or even a great entertainer, but simply for a departed soul. In recognition that there was a person before the personification.

I am lost in my pity for this media sacrifice. Robbed of his youth, he spent all his coin building a shrine to Peter Pan.

Michael 10 years old was too black and too real. Is that why he needed to white himself out and become a ghost? All celebrities are asked to wear a mask. Was he the first to have his surgically attached?

Suddenly the barber is animated- in an accent thick as pickled herring he babbles about the prophecy of 2012:

“Jackson, the other actress die, the rain- these are signs!!!”

“Is that Nostradamus?” I ask in that nonchalant voice you use with insane people.

“Nostrodamus, I- Ching, the Mayans.. you name it. This is sign…”

I admit it. After 9/11 everyone was so surprised. I didn’t get it. I was haunted by a sense that the plot was written years in advance. You could smell it in the air. If you possessed some basic understanding of history, the event seemed almost inevitable.

Michael is feeling the same. You’ve already read this story. Judy- Elvis- Jesus (the Man not the Message)- only Michael is this story on steroids. More saturated, exposed and mediated.

The crazed barber is telling me how Jesus is gonna return and the Jews will be sorry- right then he opens the straight razor to do my neck. Interesting. I make sure to tell him my family is from South America as if that will obscure my Jewface. He’s ranting about Mother Mary appearing in Spain and how Rabbis with giant servers decoded 9/11 in the Torah. It’s an old argument. History is simply a code. In the movies of course, the shit really hits the fan once the code is cracked.

Spellbind

June 6th, 2009

TO WHOMEVER IS CONCERNED: the madmen are undergoing construction!!!


osho3

Meantime Enjoy Verses From HARRY:


The Balance

All of these Heads
snapped into suits
They no longer fit

The skulls strain
from their shirts
The minds grunt
and stomp their hooves

Everybody wants a piece of the other

Instead they drive up
their I-Pods
and slump into Stunned Oblivion

The corral opens upon
the singular eye of God
A sky pissing yesterday’s news

Everyday a sentence
Everyday a prayer

A man in a second-hand suit chants
Jesus Loves You
Jesus Loves You
Jesus Loves You

Even he is crunching the numbers

Meanwhile a young man
piously wraps his heart
in tissue paper

He slips into the crowd
nervous as a fish
A woman spies his secret gift
and licks her lips

There is no space for Mercy
on the Balance

*****************************************

MOODY MORNING

J train lurching bleery eyes
Bushwick yawns below
tombstones are the tenement teeth
the people rubbing spray paint
out of crusty eyes
too many visions last night
tagged inside those walls
the faded hands crush
coffee cups and blink 1, 2, 3

this train is trying to get somewhere
it has some kind of will
twists its spine up out of the river
and calls the stops with a
“bing-bong”
like it’s a toaster oven or a microwave
and not some rambling mononlogue
about “how the sky and the earth
just aren’t getting along anymore”

Wake Up Brooklyn!
it’s a sausage and egg on a roll

Wake up!
the cranes all look moody
these forlorn eaters
playing with their knives and forks
at the murky counter of the Hudson River

Wake Up!
don’t ya’ know the bodegas
are winding up their bacheta music
this day is a diamond facet
concealed by clouds
Go ahead, cry your heart out Heaven!

when the doors of the train part
people drop like thoughts
and we’re having a conversation
about somewhere familiar
you’ve never been before

6/6/09