Temple Grammaton

While on Vacation

I

smelled

my fingers

in the morning.

There was a note in

my pocket explaining what

had happened. I wrote it all down

in fragments one night

when I was

Drinking.

It looked more

like a grocery list

than like entries in a diary.

The whole thing was printed

backwards. I must have wandered

into Kinko’s. The best option

was to read it in a

mirror.

For a minute,

before I opened my

eyes, that morning I heard

cherries dropping in the distance.

I didn’t whisper, her ears

were like another

pair of lips.

Flair

you nostrils

I thought to myself.

She’ll think you’re smiling.

Everyday a new mother is born,

the way a credit card slips into delinquency.

I took a cab back to

where I was

staying.

Columbo, my driver,

an old man from Senegal

laughed the whole way there, yelling

at people out the window.

To one guy he shouted

“Hey boy, why are

you wearing

women’s

jeans?”

I read an

article about

bringing “Sesame Street”

to a country at war. Only there

they call it something like

“Stories from Sesame”.

The writers are

learning how

to think

like

a child.

In the train,

I heard at least a

hundred things not worth

repeating. I write only what I’m able to

remember. If that sounds like

a piece of advice, then

it probably

is.

I heard

a little, naive

boy ask his mother

” Why doesn’t everyone do

just what they love?”

I repeated that over

and over and

over in my

mind.

It’s hard to

make it stop.

Another time, on

my way to see a movie

I overheard a conversation

between two women,

once would be

models,

with

names like

Sun Tunnel and

Star Axis. Celestial names. They

alternated between English and Spanish.

Talking softly. I heard

something

in there

about

“La Estrella Proxima”.

They each shared a story.

The first one was about a nice alcoholic.

A guy the both of them knew,

who pretended he had

never visited a bar

his friends were

going to.

He

arrived

late,” I had

trouble finding it”.

When he joined they’re table

all the waitresses, the bar man,

other people around them, everyone

there greeted him, lifting up their glasses to say

“Welcome back Mr. Chablis”. The girls

knew I was listening, but in

New York no one seems

to mind intruders.

The other girl,

maybe it was

Star Shine,

or

Sun Rain,

reminisced about

a vacation on the straight

of Gibraltar. Somewhere in the

small town of Tarifa. Her boyfriend

was feeling anxious. Both of his sisters

were pregnant, expecting they would soon be

going into labour. One lived in

Stockholm, the other in

London. Pacing

back and

forth

in their

hotel room,

he kept receiving

new messages on his phone

every couple of minutes, switching

his point of location from

Spain to Morocco

and back

again.

A line by

Basho, I think

was floating in my

head. Someone else might

have written it though, I can’t be certain,

“I dont have any heroes but I like to watch the ducks swim”.

Not only heroes maybe, but even anyone

who would call themself

a saviour?

I

was

walking

around near

Bellevue Hospital

on my way to go look

in some galleries, when I

heard a guy yelling out his window,

drinving by, with alcohol on his breath,

“Hey buddy, why are you wearing women’s pants?”

I didn’t realize until he turned the corner,

the guy was talking to me.

I sat down to read

a magazine

over

a cup of

coffee, near

the Chelsea Hotel.

I read a brief article about

Anwar Al Sadat. About his pipe

actually. The night before

I had celebrated

my birth

day.

The man

who made peace

with “The Enemy” was

assassinated, limbs flying

with blood. Killed by

guns at a

very

close range.

It was broadcast

on television that night.

It happened exactly the day I was born.

A picture called “The last smile” was taken a

few minutes before it happened.

“Were you born in “9 stories”

or something?”,

someone

asked me. I

said I didn’t think

so and besides no one

should ever be so complete.

I opened the doors to an art gallery,

clean and white like a hospital. The doors

are large. My mom

is a nurse.

When I

enter

a gallery I

feel like a child

looking for his mother.

One night at a party I met a girl

from Los Angeles. Her dad’s a producer.

Growing up, she used to baby sit Bubbles for a

friend of his. When Bubbles starting

getting aggressive, he was

banished from

the ranch.

He lives

in

Florida now.

They say he becomes

more and more human every

day. He drinks soda, watches television.

All he thinks about is sex.

One day a friend of

mine showed

me some

pictures.

there were

light leaks in them

but the problem was fixed.

In one of them Tony Shafrazi

laid the back of his hand, sitting out

of the frame, over Dennis Hopper’s eyes.

He laid down, frail and thin,

with his knees up,

wishing he was

dead.

At some

point Dennis talked

to his daughter. It probably

sounded like he was making apologies.

A siamese cat sits at the

Algonquin, guarding

it but, from

what?

A loose

gang of mice?

Other cats I assume.

I went there to see my aunt,

my mother’s sister. She was in town

with a couple of friends.

We talked about

cougars.

I told them a

romantic story about

a man who would have been

king, but who chose instead to be

with a woman. Then my aunt broke it to me

that it wasn’t really all so romantic

as that. His american wife,

divorced once

already

just had a

nice pair of lips

and a sense of adventure.

We drank Jamaican beer until late.

The next day the other women were heading

back to where they came from.

Formerly the rubber

capital of the

world.

I visited

the site of the

old Spice Factory, now

surrounded by half finished

condos. I once fell off the stage

there after a Starlight show. I had the freakiest

fucking hangover of my life the next day. A voice from the future

told me I could Reinvent the Past As Peace. “Don’t be evil” said the voice.

Stories ring like silver ware dropped on the floor.

Worse than T.V, too much privacy rots your

brain. What else is there to do but

pretend like we’re blind?

I remember

someone

saying on a talk show

once, out of nowhere, something

“like marbles in a bag, monks polish each other”.

I saw a guy in the street who stayed on

the corner with his dog. I

wondered what we

could talk about.

I imagined

him

telling me

they were both

mentally ill, only

he got hungry, but

his dog never did. I smelled

gin on his breath. It was kind of

nice. I wished I could

get closer. In

situations

like that I just

want the power

to control a man’s luck. I

was supposed to go see a litter

of kittens the next day, but when

we passed by, the garden was empty.

Apparently, there had been an emergency.

We arrived too late. In the park I

thought I heard the song

of a bird flirting like an

exited adolescent.

I was almost

caught

for one of

those “Quality of Life”

crimes. Three passing thoughts

before going to sleep. The first based

on something my father said to me. If it

wasn’t for medicine your sister

would have been

a bearded

lady.

The second

came from my

uncle.  What if the

idea of Atlantis was infact

the translation of a primordial

memory? A memory from when the Earth

was a Pangea. Since before the mediterranean

gave birth to all the Ocean’s of the

world. the third thought was

mine. It holds stuff so

we can examine it.

A regenerating filter we

can extract, capturing so many

unwanted particles from the air. It’sreally

a brilliant thing. The product

of billions of years of

evolution. Beyond

planets and

stars.

The entire sum

of intelligence in the

universe. An immortal design,

the work of God or evolutionary drift,

whatever it all amounts

to snot! Although

that thought

might

actually belong

to someone else. It

might have come from

the Communist we heard speak

at Cooper Union, standing before an

audience of a thousand, wearing a big t-shirt

hanging over his soft, round stomach.

We should dare to speak for

the unmentionable I

heard him say,

and a lot

else

which all

basically amounted

to asking “will people

(the proletariat) ever find

the courage again to stand upright

for what they believe in?”

He asked another

question.

More explicitly.

If prostitutes in Russia

before the revolution were willing

to show their left breast as

a sign of allegiance.

Which of our

parts

were we willing

to show, and to what

side would we bear our souls?

It went on for about an hour, but we

would have stayed longer. He signed books.

I got on a train. At the first stop a guy I had seen

before at a book store, who I barely had met, got on

and sat next to me. He didn’t recognize who

I was, so I struck up the conversation.

He asked what I was there for,

I told him a friend had

suggested I come

around to

present

my book,

and that maybe a

man there with two

initials before his name

might be interested. As it

turns out, they work together,

so I pulled out the book from my back pack.

I told him that in my drawings sometimes I look

for a nice, narly incompleteness. It’s a struggle I explained

for me to resist from reseting it all into coherence.

Peter gave me his card. I gave him mine.

Everything on my cards is crossed out

with black lines, except for the

only thing left that still

applies to me.

That’s my

name.

A substitute portrait of Mr. Skiles

She turned her back to face the beast.

The mask of his face slipped out of alignment.