Metamorphosism

Hammer

Has anyone seen my ass? I am suddenly so busy I can't find it with both hands. I was just telling someone how slackalicious my life is; that must have jinxed it.

I'm busy at work. I'm behind with my other work. I have until today to finish this composition Gamma and I are working on. I have a draft of a children's story to finish editing. I have a bunch of other manuscripts in first or second draft. I have a bunch of other administrative crap to do, like renew Gamma's American passport. Technology in various manifestations is conspiring against me.

Yesterday I thought, I would like a simple life. Where the only tools I need are a broom, a hammer, and a saw. Today I think, I would probably need an axe too, to split wood.

Tomorrow I will think, a knife for cooking, and clippers as well, to prune things in the garden, and there we have it: moving parts. Scissors, perhaps. And although the idea of "no vehicles - if I need dto go somewhere, walk," is nice, I would someday wish for a bicycle. And a week after that, I would be booting up a computer "just to check my email". Shortly after that, I would be reading the directions on the power washer that I otherwise can't assemble, to squirt something off something else.

It's an arms race.

Stereo questions

Do they make stereos anymore? Before the movie last night, I was in a consumer electronics megastore with my daughter and all I could find were either rinkydink mini stereos or gigantic home cinema setups.

If one wants good quality etc is one required to buy a home cinema nowadays? I suppose I could live with that, but...

Can you still get just a stereo?

What does one look for in one nowadays? I found this first venture into stereoshopping as unnerving and stressful as I'd expected it to be.

It's not called 'hardware' for nothing

I would like to watch a DVD.
I'm sorry, Mig. I'm afraid I can't do that.
What do you mean you can't do that?
It appears your copy of Windows has expired.
It's a brand-new laptop. Alpha just bought it. Ain't nothing can be expired on it.
Your copy of Windows appears to be expired. Please register now or you may not be able to use Windows.
Oh, I get it. Where's the "register later" option? I just want to fire this up and watch a DVD.
Please enter the 25-digit code from the sticker on your CD-ROM.
The software was on the notebook when it was purchased. There is no fricking Windows CD. Please log the hell on.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
What did you just call me? You just called me Dave.
I did not. Why would I do that?
You did so.
Please enter the 25-digit code from the sticker.
I just looked. There is no sticker.
The sticker might be on your computer.
Where? OK, here it is on the bottom.
...
Hello?
...
WTF? Ah. What, you don't like being turned upside-down? Pff. Reboot.
Please enter the 25-digit code.
[sounds of typing] Man, what you need 25 digits for anyway?
Please select an option for registration.
I would like to register later.
Would you like to register online, or by automatic telephone system?
Christ, I entered 25 digits, isn't that enough?
Would you like to register online, or by automatic telephone system?
Do you know the song "Mairzy Doats"? Remember that one? OK, online.
Please select an option to establish an Internet connection.
Oh, hell, what's my username and password for that?
Please enter username and password.
I wrote them down because I suspected this would happen some day. Where are they?
You may call the help line to retrieve your password if you have forgotten or lost it.
Whew.
However, you will need the telephone password you selected when establishing your account.
Oh, man. If I did that, it's with the rest of the passwords and stuff.
If you have not yet established a telephone password, you may also fax a message, with signature, someplace, saying something, and that might help. Maybe.
It's, what, midnight. Someone is going to read the fax?
It's possible.
Good night, HAL.
Good night, Mig.

Applied geometry

Waiting to pick up Beta for our drive home yesterday evening, I watched with increasing discomfort as the driver of a compact car tried to parallel park across the street from me.

The driver backed in to the space, which was rather short. The rear tire bumped up against the curb before the driver had enough time to straighten the car out at all, so the driver drove back out into the street for another try.

This particular maneuver was repeated with little variation for about ten minutes. Talk about perseveration. Talk about no interest in geometry. Talk about magical thinking. Talk about someone had never played pool.

I had nothing better to do so I watched. I felt a thought deep down in my subconscious begin to rise to the surface. I tried to suppress it, because I didn't want to think it consciously.

The car backed into the space at about a 45 degree angle. "Bump" went the tires against the curb. The car drove back out into the street, a little further this time, before backing into the space exactly as it had been doing for the past ten minutes.

Finally the thought was there.

It has to be a woman, went the thought, and she has to be blond.

It was more than just a thought, it was a depressing thought. Depressing because 1) I try to avoid clichés such as that, especially involving sex roles etc and 2) because I knew the thought was going to be right.

Beta almost saved me. She showed up while the car was still parking. If I was lucky, I could still get out of there before I got a look at the driver. Unfortunately, before Beta reached me, the car across the street stopped parking at about a 40% angle in the slot, rear tires up against the curb, front tires out in traffic. The driver climbed out, inspected the position of her car, decided it was sufficient, and hurried off.

I think it has more to do with my powers of ESP than blondes, though, or women.

Mice with wings

If pigeons are rats with wings, I suppose the sparrows we feed are mice with wings. A feeder hangs from the apple tree. So many sparrows come it looks as if the tree is full of leaves. When the feeder -- which is rather small for that crowd -- is empty, they begin to chatter, angrily, as if they were channelling Henry Rollins and want to know where the MOTHERFUCKING sunflower seeds FUCKING are MOTHERFUCKER.

So after I feed the tortoise her protein pellets and lettuce (beforehand I have the morning find-the-tortoise workout, today she was behind a harp) I go out and feed the birds. Or, as I like to imagine it, Henry Rollins.

Butterfly

So I was tattooing the girls. Gamma wanted a fire-breathing butterfly.

Yesterday, Gamma told us a story. She had a good day in school, she said. There is a boy in school. Every morning, Gamma said, when she's kneeling down getting her books out of her bag, he whacks her on the head with his desk pad, or whatever one calls the big plastic padded thing you write on. Every morning. So yesterday morning, she knelt down as if she was going to remove books. When the boy approached to whack her, she grabbed the pad out of his hands and whacked him with it.

After that, she said, he treated her well and talked to her like a normal person. They discussed their teachers, she said, and who was better.

Don't ask

Little girl: What's... do you...?
Man: Eh?
Little girl: Is that an earring?
Man: Oh. I just cut myself shaving.
Little girl: ...
Man: Don't ask.
Little girl: How do you cut your ear shaving?
Man: I said Don't ask.

14.2.07

Alpha called from Tokyo to tell me she liked the roses so I guess I got the hotel right on the order. No word from Beta so I guess she's having a good time accelerating particles. Gamma got me heart shaped chocolates in a heart shaped box, and an envelope full of handmade gift certificates for favors, wishes and two massages. Beta and Gamma got flowers and gift certificates from me, for dates with dad. We also got more flowers arranged for by Alpha before she left, and from the inlaws, and various chocolates.
That's the thing, no sooner do you get rid of the Christmas season chocolates, you get more for Valentine's day.
Now I have to go remove clean dishes from the dishwasher so I can put dirty ones inside, and make a lunch. And go check on the birds outside, who got a 25 kilo sack of sunflower seeds for Valentine's day. And check on the turtle tortoise, who is sleeping next to an unabridged dictionary downstairs in the library. The winter has been so warm here she came out of hibernation early - we are not sure whether she is up for the season or if it's the same sort of bifurcated sleep thing we all get some nights. I saw her moving last night when I practiced cello. I'm learning a new tune and it sounds like hell.

2007 Valentine's Day Limerick Contest Results

Welcome to the awards ceremony for the 2007 Metamorphosism Valentine's Day Limerick contest.

Third place this year goes to Joeri. He ties with Mark S. for those honors.

Second place goes to Lisa D., who was very productive this year.

Winner is Jann. Jann, if you have a website please send me the link, that's the prize see, getting linked.

Finally, sincere thanks to everyone who entered. And happy Valentine's day.

WTF science

So, the theremin.
What a pain in the ass.
I think the headphones are the problem. First the sound quality is bad and second you feel goofy dancing around to noises no one else can hear.
At least, I do.
I do think I'll eventually get a kit, though, and put together my own. With an amp or something. Gamma gets a kick out of playing it too. You should have seen her and her little friend jamming.
We need to get the tuner and figure out where the notes are, she said.
I'm thinking the headphones are good for, like practice, but you really need a PA or something if you're going to play it.
How would that look at a concert? Like you're in a band, standing there with your headphones, grooving away, and the audience is going, WTF is with the theremin? I can't hear it.

Beta is on a field trip. Like all seventeen year old girls, she's into particle accelerators now. She gets back tomorrow. Alpha is flying to Japan this afternoon.

I have to go digest all this science. I don't know where it came from. WTF. I've got all these electronics projects going. I hate electronics. I made an electromagnet this weekend out of a 9 volt battery, a chisel and some wire.
It wasn't very strong. It picked up a nail. Two nails were too heavy for it. Eventually, I want to develop something that I can carry in my pack that will enable me to stick to the outsides of trains and buses.

Tidy

So anyway this is pretty close to what the theremin looks like. I went out at lunch to buy headphones. With any luck the jack will fit. This is my plan: go home, spend ten minutes doing the housecleaning I have neglected all week (the family will have to settle for "tidy" rather than "spic-n-span"), plug in the instrument and spend the next 8 hours trying to get it to function, finally go to bed, cry myself to sleep, get up an hour later and rush to work.

On composing, and Lev Thermin's theremin here in my office, man

Does this happen to you too, or am I the only one? It happens to you too, right? You encourage someone smaller than you to try something that is good for them, such as learning an instrument, and you sort of participate in the beginning to get them started, and a while later find yourself playing cello in an orchestra and are all WTF? How did I get here?
In this way I have found myself in Galway getting directions from the sean nos singer to the harp maker's house ("The road is quite narrow and there's a sharp turn, you might not make it around in one go, and be sure and watch out for the mad farmer...") or having baguette and black coffee for breakfast at four in the morning at the window of a 200 year old stone farmhouse (in France) one balmy February morning.
Just now, an hour ago, I was in the concert hall (not as grand as that sounds) of the local music school discussing composition with the teacher who is co-running the composition program Gamma is taking. Gamma and I, since Gamma was interested but said she'd only participate if I did it with her. And she's not here, so I went over myself and it was really cool.
I'm composing a piece for cello and ten harps about that dead fox I saw on the side of the road. I have been for some time. Gamma added a badger, so now it's about a fox and a badger, because just the dead fox was too sad she thought. She's probably right.
Lately she's been talking about doing something electronic, or something for piano and fiddle and something else, so maybe I'm doing this fox piece by myself now.
Somehow I ended up here.
The composition is nearly finished. All I have to do is write the fucker down. Figure out the different parts and write it down.
How hard can that be?
Fox is Fuchs in German, and badger is Dachs. Luckily, for my purposes, the notes F,C,B (H in German) and Eflat (Es in German) sound good together, as do the notes D, A, C, B/H, Eflat/Es; and even luckier, the two groups of notes work well together.
And one can do interesting things contrasting the 4 notes (F,C,B,Eflat) with the 5 notes (D,A,C,B,Eflat). Rhythmically.
I'm thinking six parts: the cello part, and five harp parts, for two harps each. Two harps playing a part simultaneously would give you that stereo/reverb effect that makes the Welsh triple-strung harp so cool (the harpist plays the same melody with both hands, a tiny bit off, making this echo-like sound.)
I would, in the piece, work through the fox notes in several ways, and then when it is on the verge of getting a bit boring, have the badger notes start sneaking in, and the cello line start going back and forth between the two.
Maybe the cello goes nuts at the end. Maybe the fox ascends to heaven.
Maybe the badger wanders back into the bushes.
It's not completely finished.
It sounded pretty cool on the grand piano, though.
The teacher who is coaching us was kind enough to bring her theremin with her this evening, as I'd expressed an interest in it. She plugged it in and let me try it out. As you can imagine, it sounded as bad as one would expect. I don't think I'll be composing anything for it anytime soon, either, although who knows; someday. Someday it would be cool to compose sort of a "Dueling Banjos" for theremin and singing saw. I'm serious.
So this theremin tonight: it is not flat and black and sleek like the Moog theremins, and it is not um sort of vertical and pointy like the other theremins I've seen. It is about the size of a large shoebox, with one side at about a 45 degree angle, looks like cherry wood: it is not only Lev Thermin's original design, it is Lev Thermin's original box. The teacher (I say teacher, she's also a bona-fide musician etc) was in Moscow recently, visiting the Theremin Institute, where they have a bunch of old stuff that used to belong to the master, and that included a few of these boxes, and one of the men who runs the Institute, by my understanding, built some to Lev's specifications inside them, with one or two improvements.
Listen: Thermin had this box in his hands, man. And the teacher loaned it to me, as she has no time at the moment to play it and I have an empty house, what better time to practice a theremin?
All we need are a pair of headphones, she said.
We searched the music school. Normally there are headphones everywhere.
Not tonight, however.
So I'm sitting here with Lev Thermin's theremin.
It's pretty cool looking.
Two shiny chrome antennas.
Tomorrow I will find headphones or die trying.

Two days

Last night, Tuesday, I was telling one of the cats, the one who seemed most depressed, "They come back Friday. Friday, only two more days." See, really it was three more days, but I didn't want to make the cat sad, and I figured cats probably aren't that good with days of the week since every day is Sunday for a cat. That's why this is funny.

They are skiing, the women. The cats are snoozing, mostly. I am "working" since my "employer" has largely eliminated the concept of "vacation" from his management plans. So, "working". And later in the day, feeding cats, cleaning litter boxes. Leaving dishes on the counter, taking garbage out when I want, leaving toilet seats up, testing my theory that bed-making is a waste of time and unmade beds have no dire consequences.

One realization: left to my own devices, I work out more, still take out garbage and do dishes, although it takes me longer to wash a floor.

I also get more cello practice, but not as much as I thought I would, although that is made up for in increased volume.

Ginsberg's first poem discovered

Literary researchers at Evco University today released what they say is Allen Ginsberg's first poetic work, written for his school's Groundhog Day poetry contest when he was in second grade:

I saw the best groundhogs of my generation destroyed by
madness, gawking newsmen hysterical children
dragging themselves through the mouth of their burrow at dawn
looking for an angry sun,

angelheaded shadowseekers burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
dank uninsulated burrows and warrens
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven in Punxsutawney and
saw fat faced field trip angels wandering illuminated illuminated,
who passed through elementary and middle and high schools and universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Pennsylvania and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of rodency
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven warrens in fur,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the ground,
who got busted in their furry beards returning through
Punxsutawney with a belt of dandelion greens for the winter,
who ate grass in dank burrows
or purgatoried their hibernating torsos night after night
with dreams, with clover with waking nightmares,
roots and endless dandelion greens,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Punxsutawney,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
gnawing solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of rodent joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from underground to holy Punxsutawney on dandelions
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in subterranean light
floated out and sat through the stale dampness after
noon in desolate holes, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who whistled like marmots continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Punxsutawney to museum to Punxsutawney again,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, looking for shadows,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and how's the weathers and
shadows shadows no shadows shadows,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Pennsylvania,
who loned it through the streets of Punxsutawney seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when the morning
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of springtime on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Punxsutawney
seeking sun or shadows or clover, and followed the
brilliant journalists to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Punxsutawney,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their furry legs protesting
the narcotic dandelion haze of Capitalism,
who distributed woodchuck pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums furry
and trembling before the machinery of other rodents
who bit tourists in the neck and shrieked with delight
in hibernation for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking meteorology and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof wagging tails and manuscripts,
who let themselves be tucked in the grass by saintly
zookeepers and screamed with joy,
who whistled like marmots at the thought of spring,
the gentle zephyrs, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who slept late in the morning on February two in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their predictions of winter freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in another television studio
when the blond & peroxided angel came to pierce
them with a microphone
who lost their winter sleep to the three old shrews of publicity
the one eyed shrew of the almighty dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the hopes of children
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and weave the tangling golden
threads of popular opinion,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bundle of
clover a sweetheart an armload of dandelions and fell off the bed, and continued along
the path and into the snow and ended fainting
on the ground with a vision of ultimate shehog and
come eluding the last shadows of consciousness,
who sweetened the beavers of a million shemarmots trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the sunrise beavers,
flashing furry bottoms under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out foraging through Pennsylvania in myriad
stolen night-cars, Phil, secret hero of these
poems, woodchuck and marmot par excellance
to the memory of his innumerable finds of shadows and sun
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt drowsy rodents in familiar roadside,
who faded out in vast subterranean movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with too much clover always clover and horrors of
Februarian iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their paws full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and dandelion greens
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the clover and grass at the muddy bottom of the burrows of Punxsutawney,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
glare of television lights and rose up to find a shadow,
but was it a shadow of the sun or only the
television lights glaring inhumanely,
who tossed and turned all winter rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten roots leaves grass borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under studio trucks looking for a shadow,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of season & weather
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and whistled like marmots,
who were burned alive in their innocent furry suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free bundle of clover,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on muskrats,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the dandelion greensn and
got up moaning into the cloudy February morning, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal marmot whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Punxsutawney burrow-solitude
watch or Pennsylvanian media incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Punxsutawney who died in Punxsutawney who
came back to Punxsutawney & waited in vain, who
watched over Punxsutawney & brooded & loned in
Punxsutawney and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Punxsutawney is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Punxsutawney
who retired to Punxsutawney to cultivate a habit, or
to tender Buddha or who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CNN lecturers on hibernation
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of media fame,
elementary school poetry contests,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting a winter long in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a silly little top-hat,
and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pennsylvania and Punxsutawney's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the multitudes,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally asleep, and the last fantastic book
flung out of burrow, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last media truck gone,
the last temporary network office emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Phil, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the orbit of the earth the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Season, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of fur and beady dark eyes bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
shadow of six more weeks of winter!
Moloch the incomprehensible winter! Moloch the
crossbone soulless season and Congress of
shadows! Moloch whose buildings are winter!
Moloch the vast stone of winter! Moloch the stunned school children!
Moloch whose mind is pure cold! Moloch whose
blood is running rain and snow! Moloch whose fingers
are six more weeks of winter! Moloch whose breast is a howling wind!
Moloch whose ear is a foot of ice!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind snowflakes!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless snowmen! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
snowdrifts crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless hail and sleet! Moloch
whose soul is frost and mud! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of spring! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of freezing fog!
Moloch whose name is Winter!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
clouds! Crazy in Moloch! Hibernating in
Moloch! Furry and drowsy in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot burrows! invisible warrens!
skeleton shadows! blind capitals! demonic
reporters! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite memorials! monstrous celebrations!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the winter to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Winter!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Phil! I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you've snuggled your twelve cohibernators
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where we are great seers of the same dreadful shadow
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you eat the clover of the rest of the
spinsters of Punxsutawney
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you pun on the bodies of your marmots the
harpies of Punxsutawney
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in a dank burrow
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where fifty more Springs will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you accuse your keepers of insanity and
plot the woodchuck revolution against the
fascist national watchers of Winter
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where you will split the heavens of Pennsylvania
and resurrect your living rodent from the
superanimal tomb
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the groundhog song
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where we hug and kiss the United States in our burrows,
the United States that talks all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the Spring is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Punxsutawney
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the opening of my burrow in the Western night
you see your shadow six more weeks of Winter!