gone fishin'

handwritten '79, austin, tx

gone fishin’ 

© white cloud 1979, Austin, Texas

handwritten two-sided copy paper

This may well be my first reading. And I do not recall capturing to text before either. Note to self …

gone fishin’

When sometimes like now, I am getting busy or involved in or out of doors, I hang this sign and my off the hook telephone reiterates ‘gone fishing gone fishing’.

Hell is freezing over,* the cows are coming home, walking right across it), famous actors are dead and living in New York, the marriage of Art and Life is getting a divorce and while the end of the world is coming and going, I am going fishing.

Been fishing along while, from the long drawn out tales of cave dwellers, the scrawling of Lao Tzu, in Gutenberg‘s wildest dreams, through the declarations of interdependence, decreed on the bazaar walls of Chairman Mao, the great American flyer, a ghost is fading fast.

“I’ve noticed live poems dying when I say “let me write that down.“ They go down, sounding better than Rachmaninoff and 20 violins doing the blues with the Southern wind attached at the harmonica like Siamese twins.”

…

All of us have sat one time or another reading this while clock tick when we could be fishing, 

fresh track and blood, 
young medicine, 
greasy hand and thigh, 

but no, I in Pavlov’s doggy sideshow, chasing bells and salivating molten Monsanto from a raw meat mouth (Monsanto, an engineering plastic), sit with a chameleon memory, a transparent, lizard that crawl across the face of my past, I can barely see through it, a neon pterodactyl in a carnival day-glow sky, flapping plastic leather wings, and radar blips, fading out of range, leaves me a working man’s hobo, one grade less than a master hobo, drifting from job to job for shit wages, I’d rather be an alcoholic writer.

Here, where we find the psilocybin in the shit of our existence, I find my self missing in action while in the archives unrecorded cemetery somewhere or yet in the brain field lay, the poetry, the poetry, the MIA.

Red line riding on a low tachometer - depraved I go for days without letting up.

It’s raining and I’m drinking beer while on one side of the river or the other where the toxins and poisons enemy camp and pull raids and party and parade through my nervous center cities, all my relatives passing under that big sky, all passing, all going south, somewhere in their blood. All my relatives, travois light and gather there where the stuff is lush and abundant.

Five above the limit, 
we come rolling into town, 
hootin’ and hollerin’ 
with the top down on our 
vintage Russell Edson.

 … give me a couple guns and a couple cane poles, lay in a stock of hooks and bullets, some gardening seeds and tools, a sail cloth teepee, a round-trip ticket to nowhere and could you wrap that go?

If you haven’t left already, then don’t pack, please turn back, don’t talk or make contact, cause nobody will be here. 

Gone Fishin

Poem, to Amy, A.

This book is dedicated to going fishing, hunting cow pies, and flying kites.

*

* Where it says hell is freezing over I am sure I meant to include the other shoe dropping, the fat lady singing, when pigs fly, and any other similar phrases.