- bart plantenga
“The meaning of ‘hallucination,’ is to wander in the mind … a species of reality, as
capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything
else that falls through your life.”
- Terence McKenna
I was reading Rimbaud, Kerouac’s Dr. Sax, Jarry, Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” Walt Whitman, listening to Patti Smith’s “Radio Ethiopia,” Pharoah Sanders & the Modern Lovers until one night while driving cab I suddenly began feeling feverish, raving in a frenzied manner, running red lights until I for a second realized this was not adventure, not eccentricity, but a potentially dangerous careening into lunacy.
It seems I’d caught something while cabbying the nighttime streets of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The doctor confirmed measles & recommended I rest, prevent dehydration, ride out the fever, swimming around in a sweaty delirium for 2, 3, 4, 5 days.
Maybe it was Roxy, the transvestite [1] or other aspiration+genitalic manifestation; Roxy who by night ran slender girlie piano fingers through my long hair. Each finger tipped with long fake hex sign nails – souvenirs from a childhood spent in Pennsylvania Dutch country. The ride always disappointingly too short for Roxy, always foreclosing on further escalations of potential intimacies. Tales of woe in dark lots on the edge of town, punctuated by melancholy sighs, generous apologetic tips. The plexiglass security partition always open for Roxy who wanted to be so many things for the self she dreamed of being. & then Rocky by day who I never saw.
Rubeola, a more exotic term for measles, reminded me of reading up on Native American sweat lodge ceremonies, including by Michigan’s Chippewas. The purification ceremony, involves initiants leaving behind logic, comforts, & gravity to be transported beyond reason & linear time to discover realities that do not behave as the realities we grew up with, hallucinations that foster the sensation that, as Terence McKenna noted, you’re “getting somewhere.”
The fever dream: Five days of water-only, ranting, raving, hallucinating, twitching eyes, fever of 104∘ … & writing this poem almost as it was dictated to me by a ranting, feverishly over-revved dream brain where the images flickered by like a Soviet montage from the 20s.
[“Since childhood, I have been painting, for no special reason, numerous dots and nets, drawing from the hallucinations that seem to appear endlessly. I can’t explain why if you ask me.” • Yayoi Kusama]
Do we have an auto-pilot setting for alternate consciousness? Never before & never since have I experienced this [not even on acid]: a poem that came out whole & perfect, line for line with very few alterations & when the fever finally broke & I came to my senses I was relieved but also disappointed, as disappointed as the stenographer who has been misplaced by the orator; the pen without the paper, the film without the projector. I was somewhere else where tools & destinations had to be reinvented. I was hungry, very hungry, 15 pounds lighter, slender as a pen knive slitting open an envelope with stamps from an unfamiliar country – on day 7 everything tasted explosively fascinating, extraordinarly exuberant like the sense of taste had bled into smell, sight & hearing. I thought of that crazy candy, Pop Rock Crackling Candy [introduced 1976] that we, although no longer kids, consumed, inviting this dangerous, exploding, sugary confection into our eating habits to add a volatile dimension to the eating experience.
Eventually – hours, a day, maybe day 4 – I found myself at my desk, staring at this typewritten travelogue that mapped out a peculiar place so commonly misunderstood.
~~
A green liquor, me seeing me toasting to the lunar chemistry my muse my out my machine
liquor my midrib you might say i walk languid tipsy turvy
the moist moss – the feel … & repeating the phrase “moist moss”
“an entry wound into another realm” she said, she liking the outlandish sound of it
the described nimbus is milk tested i am gimp-kneed & numb i feel
my way ok & nimble swelled fingers in baseball mitts i be so
the sky is falling swirling blankets full of back grease loud flaps &
a dog’s bark collapsing into the wound of itself streetlights bent fishing-pole-style quivering with a whopper glowing luminous crustacean bulbs
bobbering in the black breeze coming back to me in an hour bent back to
itself taut as a bow begging to spit up the arrow
a telepathic shadow
in the dent of nite
as rumored as Sax
as feared as flight
An old woman pinches her eye thru a slit in the blind. she sigh-moans. the walls
miserable here painted miserably everywhere greasy crumbling thin. Don’t lean there.
Don’t lean there. she keeps the neighbors awake. sores in her mouth that just
won’t heal in the pockets of dusty air. Here the sorting out begins. Perceptive
organs open/their objects open. Welcome each & every shard of mucous, scratch,
thread & sinew. I seldom saw if I was moving. I vow: I’m gonna get younger I
swear under the blind of half-cut trees before they lay me deep, amen.
i brushed a centipede
from Patricia’s lap
in among the wrinkles
it looked like Dr. Sax
on the nite you say you saw the huddle of wet rattus neuroticus force pedestrians
into the street i saw you didn’t
it was flapping,
not a flag a cape,
a flying cape
it followed me a hundred friggin’ years
before i went nimble & escaped
down eaves my thots drunk among trees: snycamores & wooping willows that talk back
before they’ve even been talked to – inedible thick bark but for boats-fine!
floats well too! indelible when fixed with twine. escape scenarios should be
well rehearsed tho. so i can return to return to turn in the screw of youth.
Juiced & unfixed. windblown with a fist full of hood ornaments so heavy precious
glinting at that moment ever onward. Of substance & process i was now aware. A
winged nymphet ripped raw from custom Hudson (what’s a car like that doing here?!).
That’s my prize. There’s a mortician’s pride in the hint of promise of chrome
& what the hell you see there. Ah the beauty, the beauty of seeing the beauty
of me seeing the beauty of the beauty of the beauty of seeing all the beauty beauty.
All around the slow drab avenues. They overlap.
I think of a knot of newborn snakes. A map crumpled by a lost driver in a rage.
w/ a sullen wink – a serious come-on that turns yr stomach – a wink to our woozy
forebears – those who bore us so hollow. & dropped us. & ridicules us for letting them drop us.
Loud leaps down cluttered stairs in loose shoes. Ill fits.
This is progress. Rude laughing freedom usually
overwhelms us. we plummet into a din of dust, shavings & shed skin. this is the
big time, a few limp swaying stars. blown black & forth. back & blue. Steel
magnetic stars. theories of solitude. infinity. well-greased torsos. Brushing
before bed. already
Smooth as a pool cue ok
carved & i was ready
all my ok dream sharp spears
hone the hunting knives
clutch them fast & dear
i saw friends dare to jack off atop dirt mounds to defy the jittery god. All
paranoia really. They ululate … you can see the veins in their necks early spring
among half-built housing patterns & dirty snow snot-nosed, dedicating each
gut-wrenched pearl of spit to Lesley or Ellen. Oh how they cling & heave &
wiggle mysteriously on swing sets. Oh dirt dumb we smeared mud all over our
bodies in their honor, me dreaming as breathing like a bottle inside another
bottle on my sting ray bike hotdogging it to hook her eye circling
her home her room her breathing memorizing Romeo: ‘if i profane w/ my unworthiest hand this holy shrine,’ listening to my red transistor clamped to
my ear Chiffons 4 Seasons Drifters & something urgent will go
unsaid. In 3rd storey window! Is that yr head? A lampshade? A jar of vaseline?
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; polliwogs – DO YOU SEE THEM? ; ; ; ; sperm are very … small tadpoles [no teacher would ever teach this…]
[psst: they used to call you “homo” if you didn’t come within 30 seconds – the inaccurate irony]
‘The rose reached you’ i suppose you know i read it would i heard i thought
i thought i hoped & begged it’d convey a thousand years of meaning
They
not to name names taught me to walk
REALLY walk!
by breaking both my legs They
watching me wobble & give in to gravity
a sinister fruity pungence just out of reach
i remember my mother’s skirt too as a sigh
an umbrella in rain
a parachute to me
w/ my cheeks pinched tight
between her knees
Thus lust entered before the vacuum lost its suction. A perfume that permeates
glass. A narrow aisle of books. i remember her neck the hairs in the dusty
light the tiptoe stretch to reach hearing her breathe thru her nose reaching
a sigh straight thru the curve of her arch my heart wandered like a pixilated
architect the librarian aromatic as a dusty street after a midwest
summer
rain
i remember
the fruit
the nectar the ravenous beckoning for grace
in search of a book the skirt hiking up sssshhhh somewhere between
etiquette & religion revealing the dark root beer colored tops of her
nylons. She an outlier, her nakedness against the cramped lawn upbringing
in a windy burb lane of drawn curtain homes, whispers, always down for it
glistening ululating at midnight as an exit plan
later i kissed that girl thinking of her
she kissed like a mounted fish [but wanted to learn]
as if i were dusting a lacquered trophy
w/ my tongue w/ radio secrets
wending in & out in the era of good feelings
was it a day or a century?
[when you lick the salt from the underside of her breast
humid insinuating skin & all does it mean you’re now going steady?]
the fib is as near to her puckered lips, eyes closed, I ever got
the truth to untruth as do to undo
i remember her heels bandaids on the raw rubies
(the echo shot thru everything brick
drenched in rhapsody mighty thick.)
she strolling Hanover Square in the shoes
she just had to have
after the pizza joint
in a stained apron i don’t care
i can never talk to her again never to undo
the pretty shoes folding her toes
she never wrote another poem
job-job-job tired-accrue
[her elders convinced themselves that it was never too young to kill the spirit, lying to their deceitful selves that “breaking her back to make it stronger” was what the preacher said the bible said]
i looked her way. i looked away. she looked my way. i think how can i make hope
happen? i looked away. she looked away. i looked her way. maybe my hair’s ok the
way it is right now. storm or not. why do i have to keep telling you i’m a
nice guy? i didn’t invent history or the abuse of hormones! i was born into the
same mess.
in a field of diamond dust
she stretches out (i follow her you might’ve guessed)
like poured molasses from a jar
under lunar lite
the inside of her mouth gleams
the way scranton anthracite used to (i’m late getting
home)
As if skin could just be moved aside.
to finally get at what wiggles in the marrow.
she managed to pick
plenty of rushes
as the boat glides by
by the scratch of vines on its belly
but there was always
a more lovely one
that caught her eye
just out of reach her sweat
which pastes the hair to her face
does something immense & organized to me
in thick fog she catches her breath in her palm like frost or a shattered
snifter. tosses it over the side nonchalantly a heavy splash followed it
she lifts her skirt my tent each defiant stroke ripples a slap across the
water onto the shores & other women i have known gather around in junks &
rafts, they are full of moans & doubt a choir both ethereal & carnivorous
both mendacity & mnemonic we continue laughing at the tricks of fever
or false labor or the orgasmic shifts in energy she is sweating & her whole
face has disappeared into the creases of her private ecstasy a sudden stillness.
then the click (like the cluck of a sardonic tongue) & explosion of light
blinding us from all sides at once. We are surrounded by thousands of gargoyles
dead sailors buffoons Dybbunk [spelled wrong, disembodied lodger inhabiting the entrails of a grump, the soul rotting, the music crackling atop the greenish foam]
lecherous pestering deity to sow doubt
recommendation for all to play dead &
stupid derelicts & lepers all gazing & fondling our smooth digits
bickering over the limbs & exquisite delicacies past mercenarial loves w/
crude foreign curling tongues i shoot a pistol poppoppoppoppoppop 6
times
they just laugh at my aim which is aimless
at dinner
i think of yr size 4c shoes
& the perfect aromatic mortar pounded out by yr heels
even now when talking to you
between the flowers in 2 vases
among platters steaming
yr mother & father there
like bronze presidential bookends
between mouthfuls & exquisite laces
i “borrowed” 5 bucks from mom’s leatherette purse & went to all-nude all-nite
theatre. a borrowed life of cheap gin & locked doors a series of rehearsed
soprano shrieks & later a neat bed-shaped ditch. I’ll pay her back
it’s more’n 5 i owe …
[at her last rough breaths many years on … I remembered dog earing the need to remember not to forget to remember until it was the moment too late to apologize, the remembering after forgetting until she … ah the futility – & selfish need for absolution – that was the criticism]
slinging
bad coffee grounds
pungent w/ green gems
of mold
to the floor
it’s the way you said it
a fish breathing heavy & cold
this is the way it ends
immune to liability
to accidents of precognition
& premeditation
trying to make of fate yr own big thing
(embedded in a network of relationships where i begin & you end disappears
the way a knife plunges into its sheath)
the cackle of balding grackles mocks me – or maybe you – how do you dress up the
final sentence in wavering punctuation a door closed but not locked & hear
she drives a buffed Songbird [Pontiac] now full of stuff a pink interior tinted glass
full stereo & i heard something about steroids or is that a painkiller
is that LudesPercsAbstralZorroSublimazeDemerolVicodinMissEmmaNumorphan …
hand me your dead eye to play blackball on the green field
i want to cheat & act like her
the breasts she wore
nipples – well polished purple seeds
& a painful sprouting
blue lips – so late 70s mocking dying
as well the undetermined fruit we bit
was rotten to the inner inner inner most core
i swallowed a semi-precious gem
never checked the cut
or the way it might rearrange my gut
internal bleeding is the least of my worries tho. For instance there’s a murky
river that flows south then abruptly north. the floating bloated bodies are so
ridiculous that we end up laughing until we realize they’re mocking our drinking water
a bird sings not to make us glad but to stake out the territory it has claimed
in a neighborhood where an axis – an important one to many – is humming electric
whirling in a mild fiction – or rather – FRIction. the tv antenna revolves on
the house or is it an allusion to see the 4 horizons vertigo gyrating around
that slender axis a confusion of rotation & gravity where the world you
graduate thru is illiterate to transcendence. A burden to believe when i received
the diploma i became a carrier of a tired culture. i had a few tools: some
twisted phrases, gnarled sarcasm, a year’s supply of Coke, a vise-like grip, a shorthand system
my body no longer mine (i’m not me. are you? i’m not me. are you? this could go
leaps that got me out. this is testimony of nowhere to go the nature of
myopia & hindsight caught in a fishing net.
you claim & plead
the appearance aint important
its how you bleed
not white shoes, french lapels, a new scent.
remember all those ideas
to upheaval we were bent
selling cars, record commissions
is what you meant
its you for money now
not money for you
‘what’s the diff anyhow?’
you ask, spent by every last cent
‘at length the utterly despairing of success.’
i’ll wager-bet, now to think of it,
childhood’s nearest to true life
its ferocious jabbing clarity
as we follow the guiding silver-blade-like alewife,
swimming edible upstream – not wife nor beer
naivete scratching away the scab
intimation of her mouse ear [2]
doubling as a coin purse
the blade’s still sharp & voice still clear
mishandled both improper
the whispering wound will not stop her!
Ok, so growing up means managing money or stupidity legitimized
w/ pantouffle comforts, magnitude, velocity, grandeur, artificial atmospheres, access to
first tier dopamine consumer themed attractions
the winking woman wearing 12 logos on her fish spangled swimsuit
wistfully sans irony or cynicism [the company, she says, has detection devices
to measure enthusiasm]
with the only evasion being to forge it – acting lessons help
she’s heard
Nights off sultry next to a man in muscle Tees
fully revving in shimmering customized metal, the intersections, the blinking signal lights
he’s married & oiled from the gym, harvests praise underhandedly
thieving foodstuff from the mouth of his child
you refuse to see yourself in, your glum resistance will have to do
even tho he forgets you in the torqued pale decibels of a the necessary amnesia
his love his wheels offer
The thing that kills us from inside out is our skillless consent to
the inevitable boredom & the monetization of ennui
Today i frequent the biographies of deviants the way a Hoover runs across a
threadbare persian rug sweat-palmed get drunk in our correspondences as if
we’re twirling at the same speed on barstools side by side squeaking away like
that pivotal tv antenna i hear my own cadence my own emphasis of reality’s
conspiracies coming from the brown mouths of men who sleep in the steam of
iron grates.
in a low budget flick i know how we could make that look
like heaven i know what these men are going to say before they say it &
they may be right
i walk home in the scattered light that refracts & confuses
redraws the pain & symmetry of joy
while fireflies ricochet thru my guts
& i’m short of breath to explain it. my backbone bends
to you supplicant slip honed by neglect abandoned by fervor
……….. i need to walk, sinner server, my fists damp, feathered shiver in lint,
singing Memphis in the spring
‘Do i wanna wanna wanna
take RR Erie Lackawana-wana
rid of talons & ties
& geomagnetic cries
i’m gonna go yeah i’m goner gonna go go goner’
shed a heavy fragrance a thick skin crawling off in the game of fear
w/ no solution no home no honor to uphold
my ribs accurately measuring the seismic tremors.
i’m tuned to my land my mound of glass trash & dirt
aware of the tender waft……. “Bright stars & guitars & ……. put them all together /
much to yr surprise / you’ll find a bit of heaven / right before your eyes”
[“Popsicles & Icicles,” the Murmaids, lyrics: David Gates of Bread
– i don’t believe, you don’t either, that he wrote this]
scrawled out later like an ecstatic on patches of shattered glass
i hear erections are mere miracles of biomechanics
& everything rusts, leaves stains Desire indeed curdled. the saddest
thing the temp falls to oh 10 below the saddest thing the car won’t start
you’re losing fluids the saddest thing is whether to call an ambulance or
tow truck yet you know the gravel the bare trees the off ramps the tangled barriers you know too that everyman’s responsible for his own face despite the
weather near the factory near the 7-11 w/ ample parking my god
all nite laundromat my god! heaven flickering in the fluorescent
yeah, i’m sittin’ in a pile of junk i bought i think i’m caught i’ve lied alot but finally
i think i’m caught
a significant instant plucked outa nowhere when in a loud suit, a suit
people threw bowling pins at & began to sing:
“i cant remember
is roy orbison
still w/ that
‘Pretty Woman’?
black or white?
dead or alive?
coke or pepsi?
still singing?
i can’t remember.”
voices of children try to describe pilots as wanderers – stars for stray sheep
or angels or nonentities or this vacancy when words begin to groom – not dig
& join the trendy therapy us! where experts make money win praise for razing
people down then make even more raising & rebuilding them back up w/ a slow
tragic flaw like a brick missing from a wall
when i was young
old stiff socks
round my fists
& a frostbitten man
tied a charm for luck
round my wrist
baggies from stealth
kitchen drawer
kept my toes kinda dry
a bundle – i looked 40
felt like 4
once at 10, i shattered glass
on the 5:01 from Hoboken
it was terror for terror
an iceball round & oaken
then saw 3 boys fall from goats – or bikes – down the orange hillside like balls
of graceful drapes i joined them back on top to piss down miles to make deep
erosive parts in the dark soil until we awakened the fat cemetery worms
someone
to say all this to. Youth enthused & color opiated stained glass seeing blood
in an aquarium get to see the creatures enlarged that eat us up memory by memory
in this friggin’ kingdom of the sick i don’t even have to pull up my own pants
a joke like that provokes itchy laughter obscurity is my mask & any
homage to mystery or decadence entails admitting the map’s in the rain & the
colors the colors the colors, the arteries of color bleeding. Pretty.
—-
1 today’s accepted term is cross-dresser]
2 Euphemism in several country-blues songs especially those of Cliff Carlisle that refers to the female genitalia, the labia…
© photo by Linda Scott
—-
I prefer hallucinations cause they tend to make more sense than experience.
Todd Rundgren
My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. … I create pieces even when I don’t see hallucinations, though.
- Yayoi Kusama