As/Is

4.21.2016

Feel (2005/2006)

I.

I saw the greatest artists of my generation parched, hardened & scarred

             by a virtual machine,

blood cleaned from shiny surfaces, purposed to cut out the soul’s wisdom, the body’s                             

             agita, the heart’s

heaviness, creators neutered & spayed by a decaying empire, wired

             for a never-ending battle

w/ bureaucrats, corporate drones & art-world phonies, bones rattling

             in Philly February snow & ice,

D.C.’s perpetual snooze, loose NYC streets that tighten round the Village,

             while they tried to chill-pill themselves,

direct their energy to the task at hand, finding a plan, an escape route from playing

              cogs, greased-gears freezing all around them—

who worked for banks & were fired for downloading porn,  moved into dank South Philly

              studios, recorded, put out CDs, whored themselves to wine-stores & occult dives

              where poor mottled matrons paid ten dollars for card readings & felt themselves

              bleed at the collapse of the Tower,

who stripped, did coke, published poems on the Net, learned massage, started as Temps,

              ended as Temps, sang dirges at West Philly art-parties for free Schlitz, dove-

              tailed joints in brick alleyways, scars glossed over w/ blush, sweaty-breasted,

who wrote comic book epics for guitar & voice, developed mystical Jesus raps at Goth

              clubs, Christian-blissed as Trent Reznor blared through stacks of amps & love-

              boys got blow-jobs in corners,

who were pregnant at 21, had & ignored the kid, got locked in jail for neglect, expecting

                daddy to come w/ bail, no help from a shitty city,

who threw out poetry to work for an architect, drank w/ kids in Manayunk bars

                & got a beer-gut, “make it new” screwed into soft-fucks,

who were forced into drag by failure, post-avant punk records dis-chorded into oblivion,

                 scarcely attended bumper-boring tours from Alaska to Milan,

who made the cover of the City Paper, lost a sugar-mommy & dealt coke, wigger pants,

                 trench-coated, eyes bleary, nose runny, walking round & round liquor

                 stores miming interest in Pinot Grigio,

who got on planes to London to live in sardine tins, no sex for two years, music biz lies

                 don’t work even near the Hyde Park Serpentine,

who spent afternoons at McGlinchy’s cadging Manhattans, making out w/ strangers,                           

                  blowing band dudes w/ Ron Wood haircuts, dreaming of a Khyber stage &

                  the place packed,

who lost a hustler father to heart failure, took Greyhounds to Atlantic City weekends, put

                  trust-fund dollars on poker chips glistening black in the lurid light, ice rattling

                  in gin tumblers, Italian pimps leaning forward for the kill in silk pants,

who painted Apollos & Athenas in high-windowed studios in the Gilbert Building,                    

                   getting laid on pull-out black sofas stained cadmium red,

who went to D.C. to lobby, did puppet shows miming councilmen in Philly, gave up lit

                    to look for kinks in The System & were left holding onions in the Italian

                    Market,

who managed Chinese restaurants in State College, sang shirtless for bands at the White

                     Lodge, sailed off to Oregon looking for a label,

who followed two L.A. chicks from Bar Noir to Ocean City, snorting H off a hotel toilet

                     & becoming a ghost & drifting down halls & collapsing on carpeted stairs,

who played soccer w/ tin cans on summer afternoons in alleys off of South Street, Blow

                     Fly singing “you’re too fat to fuck” in the background,

who took in jail-bait to complete a ménage a trios, then watched her try to jump out the

                      window of the Highwire Gallery, strip at parties but for a thong, get

                      arrested for stealing from a Verizon register, all the while keeping two

                      boyfriends in South Jersey, construction workers, blind to the bricks,

who spent nights chasing hipster-girls in Upper Darby, paying the cab-fare from Dirty

                      Frank’s, then left to rot on the downstairs couch surrounded by plastic

                      Christmas candles & a mother’s footsteps down the stairs,

who curated minor shows at the Kelly Writer’s House, dreaming of future glory, having

                      Koons & Schnabel show up & kiss ass to the one & only,

who shouted at drunken idiots through bull-horns on 4^th Street Mardi Gras, perched in

                      windows like Dada ready-made patrolmen,

who took girls to the Walnut Street Bridge & laid in the grass at midnight, ‘til cops white

                      blazing light scared their pants on in the summer mist,

who stumbled half-awake onstage at Doc Watson’s, ploughed through a short set & sat at

                      the bar knocking back Tequilas, eager for the next gig,

Grape Street, Pontiac Grille, La Tazza, Balcony, hallowed stages where the eternally

                      neglected Philly bands knocked out Fixx-mixed Corgan-riffed Patti

                      Smith blues, watched by no one in particular, & thus by the Gods,

who started independent newspapers & did press-runs of 10,000, garnering national

                       acclaim & absolutely no money,

who worked nights at the Taco House on Pine Street, smoking pot in the back room,

                       scribbling notes for an endless first novel to be read at Molly’s Books

                       while despair unfolded of ever knowing anything about sex,

& who therefore threw out a U of Arts degree to strip, thinking of Colette & Courtney

                       Love, wanting to know what this flesh thing was all about,

who died in obscurity in Roxborough, then had volumes of poems thrown away by a

                       jealous lover who was somehow  managing the estate, & is therefore even 

                       more obscure, Alexandra, unacknowledged legislator of Philly lit,

                       stalking health food at Essene, reading at Robin’s, always taking the bus,

                       a car too much hassle & no time to scribble poems in the back,

what were you working for if not eternity? Your name up in the klieg lights of greatness,

                       may happen yet, some of us are holding a torch, will continue to, for you—

who had pictures taken w/ Allen Ginsberg, then locked themselves in the house once the

                       Painted Bride Quarterly was gone for good,

who were reduced to writing fishing books when the poetry wouldn’t fly, then insisted on

            comparing themselves to Joyce, Proust, & Kafka,

who hooked up w/ metal-faced teenagers in stairwells, sucking on brass where a nipple

            should’ve been, riding a nitrous high into a screened window,

who met guys on the Internet & moved up to Philly from Florida, settled in studios at

             Juniper & Locust & were watched by pervs in the parking lot next door,

& then joined spoken-word bands & did shows in baby-doll dresses, took up w/ a poet,

             got cheated on by a poet & went back to Florida & came back again,

who decorated an apartment w/ fourteen dead Christmas trees, licked up pine needles

             on slow nights & had whiskey-drunk one-night stands to kill time,

who decided to move to L.A., was psyched to move to L.A., got everything packed to

              move to L.A. & then realized that there wasn’t any money left,

or moved to L.A. via Daddy’s money & helped sign bands to major labels, gave up

              painting, got a new boyfriend & turned into a palm tree,

who appointed themselves guardians of Duchamp’s bikes, staged toilet races in Old City,

              installed grungy bathtubs, humongous cheese graters & doodles of teeth being

              shaved in space 1026, welded themselves to the Last Drop & the Bean, were

              followed by throngs of Dada-minded hipsters, then went into hiding,

who bought condos off Washington Square, were ripped off by newspapers, wrestled

              w/ an incomplete second novel & an NYC agent w/ a talent for evasion,

who wrote columns for Philly Weekly & earned the hatred of hipsters for loving Simon

              & Garfunkel, saw the world behind thick glasses, wrote songs & earned a

              modest following & was then murdered by a divorce,

who found themselves up against an Ivy League wall, fought the Philistines w/ Keats,

              & made Penn bow down to the genius of Wordsworth,

who sat in coffee shops talking poetics & politics, acknowledging the impotence of the

              current generation in fighting Bush & his cronies,

& also acknowledging that this generation is a small generation & virtual & unlikely

               to change anything substantial now that the Boomers run everything, & it’ll

               be this way ‘til they die out, thirty more years of boredom,

who served cocktails to Centrist poets in Boston, had miscellaneous affairs w/ Philly

               writers & others, wanted to be Bonnie & Clyde w/ out Clyde,

who made a mint off a rock record in Japan, spent it all & started Temping, all the while

                looking to keep falling in love all the time in the Village,

who put together multi-media shows, served hash brownies & whiskey, made a little

                money & used it to buy more hash,

who e-mailed Noam Chomsky, decided not to be Zionist & took off a Star-of-David,

                realizing that the Holy Land is only an interior reality,

who went to live on a kibbutz & came back disillusioned w/ everything & not having

                fought in the army went out & bought guns instead,

who fled to San Francisco for no apparent reason after putting out a book in Philly &

                watching it sit unmolested at Book Trader,

who was fired from Barnes & Noble for feeling up female employees, worked in a loony

                bin, wrote in the loony bin, then caved in & joined the Masters program at

                Temple,

who roamed Villanova searching for dead souls, waiting for the words to come back as

                years slipped away into a haze of academic mediocrity,

who stood in line w/ bags of pasta at dollar stores, picked up butts from sidewalks, took

                resin hits, chomped on bits of stale bread & shat in buckets,

who did Action paintings on cold nights in Northern Liberties, slaved away at Office

            Cents lugging parcels around Center City, latched onto female grad students w/

            swank apartments & made slow-motion art movies of silent screams & hollering

            demons wading through the half-frozen Delaware,

who painted Kabbalistic cool-color fantasies & sent them to Tyler openings, managed

             restaurants & threw canvases away & walked around Germantown awaiting the

             arrival of the Sixth Race who will cool the Earth & set it on the Tree of Life

             & protect it from malignant ministers of Malkuth,

who retreated to Philly after 9/11 to find the city half-dead & the sinking stink of global

              warming hovering over Rittenhouse Square like a huge clove of garlic, & the

              vampires w/ Gucci glasses wandering & watching & warping what tenderness

              remained for lovers of cigars & Salman Rushdie,

who mourned for Rachel Corrie from a perch at the Good Dog, wrote secret pro-

              Palestinian pamphlets & hid them under socks & condoms,

who tried painting & poetry & music but found the balance in yoga, only to find the

              yogic mind devalued in the capitalist slip-stream of a run-down economy, &

              thus made plans to go to New Mexico for the summer & squat amidst clay,

who found themselves a million miles away from everything on Race Street, so retreated

              to Cherry St. to hit on Moore girls & manicure-giving bar-maids, & took one

              home & found her ready & then was too drunk to fuck,

who ploughed through five years PHD work to find a vacant job market & the few open

              classes not enough to pay rent, so built houses in the ‘burbs & sipped Bud in

              rabbi’s back yards hearing stories of Moses & Joshua & Aaron, & the story

              of Job hit a special nerve,

who got fat in Bainbridge Street lofts living off pot-dealing money, writing landscape

              poems remembering Virginia beaches & a shiksa’s skinny little ass, how much

              give it had or didn’t have as it bobbed up & down in the waves,

who met booty calls on the Franklin Institute steps & got naked & boned watched by Jane

              across the street fingering herself secretly,

who got sent to Budapest by parents to study math, having failed out of Penn & Temple

               & having been burned out by years of scraping three-chord riffs & hitting bars

               & orgies & all the time wondering why things seemed so empty,

who were exiled to academic New Hampshire, poems in hand, devising childhood

               vignettes of coffee Moms & smoking Dads & cold mornings out on Federal,

who kept afloat writing copy for Urban Outfitter’s, getting blitzed at poetry parties & up-

               staging ex-boyfriends w/ yuppie-puppy hook-ups,

who worked as concierge at the Four Seasons, scored w/ a pale blonde bookstore chick

               only to have a bookstore Byron steal her back & write about it,

               & you have to see him every day, he’s always lurking in odd

               café corners & no one knows what he’s thinking or why,

(& in fact no one knows what anybody’s thinking, it’s a sin & a drag & candor is in short

                supply in an artificial virtual era, & our “there” is nowhere),

who collapsed in lines at Starbucks, knocking over displays of gourmet tea, spent two

                weeks in the psych ward at Jefferson, visited by solicitous boyfriends bearing

                chocolate & coffee table Raphael books & playing ping pong for hours while

                several schizophrenics huddle together watching “Sleepless in Seattle”,

who picked up photographers in coffee-shops & boned them sans condom on piles

            of black & white prints,

who prowled through suburbs w/ a half-lit bowl, passing dread Cheltenham where

             endless tears flowed through virginal misery, stopping for a deep hit by the old

             house drowning nostalgia in thick green smoke,

who toured the world & got famous & threw it away for a needle & couldn’t sleep for the

             thought that the thing could never happen again,

who sat at Gleaners waiting for contracting jobs, played UNO & Scrabble &were masters

             of both, well-spoken beneath knitted caps & trapped as lame tigers,

who got knocked up by Rastafarians & were left to raise babies on a waitress’s salary,

             picking up tips & shit for being bitter, sister at home keeping the baby fed,

who wrestled demons of bi-polarity tool-box in hand, looking for lost screws & sockets,

             fixing locks toilets hinges refrigerators, hoping the voices wouldn’t come at an

             important moment, rattling through the ether w/ a sinister cackle, mocking the

             silliness of ever doing anything other than smoke drink & fuck,

who were flushed out of New Orleans like a tampon back into the soot of Spruce Street,

              drinking through frigid winter Philly doldrums, mornings too raw for walking,

              too-white music in the clubs, no mint juleps on the menu, only Jager & Jack &

              Stoli & Captain Morgan’s,

who got it on w/ keyboardists for riot grrl bands in bathtubs flooding tiles splashing walls

               all for ten seconds of the ultimate chorus,

who slept w/ a different guy every night two months then took a year off writing

               confessional verse on My-Space for 40,000 friends,

every one of whom wanted sex, love, a chance to hold somebody tenderly & forget that

               the whole virtual charade ever happened,

who labored through slow days in Philadelphia’s dead-end streets, breezes annoyingly

               sharp where Market hits City Hall & the Broad Street line gets off,

who took the Broad Street Line to Allegheny to look at an art gallery as possible event-

               space but found a rat-infested shit-hole w/ a few bad Basquiat imitations on

               the wall & a toilet dripped on not by Pollock & a floor that would inspire

               another Munch & a girl from the Northeast before a mirror but only too round,

& who was forced to shut-down a co-op that no one could run any more in a fractious

               scene in a fractious city in a fractious country in a fractious era,

a fractious world where the artist counts for shit & waits for shit to happen that can’t

               happen anymore because the numbers aren’t there anymore the guns are,

the artist plays w/ guns, runs around shooting blanks at a dead world, curved into

               himself like an ingrown nail, hailed randomly by strangers to carry boulders

               up hills & teach the children, the noble artist looks for the transcendent will

the natural will the will-to-form, the will to turn around the deadness into something else

               a place where hope lives & allows one to cope w/ what’s been dead in America

               for years the spirit the spirit the feeling that things are progressing must progress

               that progress can be made & there’s no reason to wait for anyone else to do it

               cause why should they it falls on the artist to create it all him or her self & that’s

what they’ve done & what they’re doing & if a new dawn awaits or if it doesn’t the

                the struggle goes on to put things down that mean something more than

                nothing which in this day & age means a hell of a lot because it’s worth

                everything & you can’t quantify it if you tried

II.

What hung over Philly, NYC, D.C., what swept through the freezing streets w/ sleet &

            cold snow?

Virtual women on cell-phones clicking buttons talking Jolie Spears & Simpson, stopping

            in boutiques to try on blouses & purses & cursing maxed credit cards!

Virtual men in suits & London fog overcoats talking numbers figures & prospects betting

            on Phillies Fliers Nationals Eagles living vicariously through overpaid clowns!

Virtual tunes on the radio, three chord synth-driven sappy cliché-ridden tripe belted out

            by Whitney Britney & Mariah, plush beat-programmed god-damned garbage!

Virtual movies w/ impossible sex scenes everything falling into place perfectly for two

            perfect bodies sans sloppiness of real caresses & how people look undressed!

Virtual galleries showing warmed over nihilistic facile installations of piles of rubbish

            lugged in w/ out skill craft or love sitting in a dump masquerading as art!

Virtual ads for virtual products gum that chews better Old Navy sweaters McDonald’s

            hamburgers Toyotas Hondas Oldsmobiles hot wheels for prosperous suburban

            jerks jamming up expressways carbon dioxide flying into an atmosphere of

            used to be American greatness faded into days of fat complacence!

Virtual leaders vomiting sound-bites for virtual commentators Fox News CNN spouting

            platitudinous blarney to keep the asshole half of the country happy w/ a disastrous

            administration bucking the Kyoto treaty to keep oil flowing & wiping out regimes

            for no good reason other than crude black crap to kill forests!

Virtual TV “illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness” inducing mass spiritual slumber

            humming a nation to sleep believing everything’s OK as long as Will & Grace

            stay happy inside the little idiot box on four hours a night!

Virtual bars & conversations knocking back twenty lagers & pints of Jagermeister

             trying to forget years frittered away in pursuit of music that didn’t work

             paintings that didn’t sell movies that went unseen as the world swirled by

             denying they ever knew or cared what art was!

Virtual love affairs based on fucking can’t say what you’re feeling but kneel before the 

             altar of sex for its’ own sake magazine culture!

Virtual friends virtually loving virtually hugging virtually drugging each other on the

             Internet fretting waiting for e-mail games of who writes first!

Virtual Jesus virtual Moses virtual Buddha virtual Jewish pleas to please return to Baruch

             Atah Adonai Elohanu Melech Chaolom,

Blessed art thou Lord of the Universe Forever & Ever Amen now please give me Bar

             Mitzvah money to spend on Nintendo Super Mario & a hot new I-Pod ready

             for instant use on spring afternoons before Hebrew School,

& the world is only virtually holy anymore & holiness can be bought in any store where

             money changes hands cause solvency is Heaven Thy Kingdom Come Thy Will

             Be Done our Father, Holy Ghost & Son delivered all in holy green!

            

III.

suffer ye victims

of a virtual age!

suffer ye victims

of Microsoft rage!

suffer ye noble,

wayward as Shelley,

suffer ye hopeful,

fire in belly!

suffer a new, bitter, screwed, littered America!

suffer ye who know Jesus w/ out casting

stones!

suffer the action abandoned to dumbness,

suffering the actions unspoken & loveless,

suffering the action unfurling our country,

picking up oil & oil-soaked money!

IV.

Allen Ginsberg! I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where we feel like two sages,

where bread is unleavened

   & no granfalloon rages!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where the air is like nitrous,

where deadness is deadened

    & you’re plagued by no virus!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where the feeling is placid,

where we’re ruled by no felon

   & lay tripping on acid!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

    where the Buddha is grinning,

where no self-schemas leaden

    lead to feelings of sinning!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where poetry’s money,

where the moon’s always setting

   & the sky’s always sunny!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where each spirit is sexy,

where you love who you’re bedding

   & you touch them correctly!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where no fame is too famous,

where you know what you’re getting

   & all power is blameless!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where each spirit can run things,

where self-governed settlements

    take place of gun-slings!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

    where America’s perfect,

where the states have no nettles

    & the taxes are worth it!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where we’re writing this poem,

where we’re secretly betting

    how far we can throw ‘em!

I’m w/ you in Heaven

   where the jokes are Eternal,

where the Hope is unfettered

    & the dope is supernal!

I’m w/ you in Heaven,

    where I’ll stay ‘til the war ends,

where I’ll lay w/ your blessing

    in the shade of a God-Head!

V.

Apocalypse! Apocalypse! It’s over! It’s over! We’re living in twilight! Twilight the streets, twilight the houses, twilight the beats, twilight the louses! This is Rome, this is Nero, this is home, this is Zero! Apocalypse! Apocalypse! It’s ending! Ending the guns, ending the money, ending the sun, ending the honey— bums, guns, sex, drugs, scum, Jesus, love, reason, all over! All ending! All covered! All bending! This is Rome, this is Egypt, this is feces! It’s over! We’re living in the End-Times! Over the getting, over the spending, over the feeling, over the lending! Forests, traffic, mountains, madness, plaster suburbs, drastic lovers, over! Apocalypse! Apocalypse! Twilight the schools, twilight the college, twilight the fools, twilight the knowledge! Twilight degrees, twilight alone, twilight & freeze, twilight unknown! Ending the quest, ending the artist, ending the rest, ending the parties! This is Rome, this Atlantis, this is home, this is hopeless! Dope, smoke, Starbucks, Hotmail, gropes, jokes, spirit e-mail, souls, moles, used car salesmen, fags, hags, gun-mad mailmen! Apocalypse! Apocalypse even for the faithful! Even for the Enlightened! Even for the patient! Even for the frightened! Even for the transcendent unbending resplendent defended art-mensch! Apocalypse! Run for shelter! Run for cover! Helter-skelter! Find a lover! Do something! Hold something! Screw something! Do someone! Before the end that’s coming! Before the end that’s drumming! Before the end of suffer! Before the end of lover! Act, suffer, feel, act, suffer, feel, & do it & do it again! Over the time when you live in a rhyme & it’s okay to rest & to slowly confess! Apocalypse! Apocalypse! It’s over! It’s over!

                                                                                   

posted by Adam Fieled on Thursday, April 21, 2016

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