MEMOIR OF THE NEXT MOMENT

MEMOIR OF THE NEXT MOMENT

(My Collage Education)

BEFORE THOUGHT

I have nowhere left to go but to the next moment. This is where my future lies. It is buried in the prose and the cons of thought. It is of, by and for the moment that the thought takes place. It often veers off into amateurish prose and oblique poetry. It is a forest of co-incidents, each multiplying the borderline definition of rehearsed spontaneity.

Chaos with a boundary. A scribble of coherent ideas. The gurgling dishwasher chanting like a monk. A sudden intrusion of the angular inner circle. All things happening all at once!

sometime somewhere I said  

                                                “circumstance has a mind of its own”

                                                                                                (I am now my own parrot)

I am now my own parrot

an echo of a green shadow

an echo of a shadow

“Oh, grassy glades! Oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, though long perched by the dead drought of the earthly life, -- in ye, men may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: -- through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But, once gone through, we trace the round again: and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it,” said Ishmael.

“Yeah, but…,”.

“The Way that can be experienced is not true; the world that can be constructed is not true. The Way manifests all that happens and may happen; the world represents all that exists and may exist. To experience without intention is to sense the world; to experience with intention is to anticipate the world. These two experiences are indistinguishable; their construction differs but their effect is the same. Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way, which is ever greater and more subtle than the world,” replied Lao Zi.

“Yeah, but…,”.

The germ of an idea, a viral thought, a disease of the mind, the body of language

eating its own words, suffering a feverish ill effect defined by bed written

poems of the survival of the unfit…small mediums that build themselves up

by the foretelling of misfortune.

“Yeah but…”

THE SAME OLD STORY

Try umph for a change.

In the meantime the average falls somewhere in the center of the middle. Poetry fondles the bewildered and befuddled remembrance. Perhaps because it hasn’t happened yet, the present dictates the sadness at being depressed. Unencumbered by loss, a prisoner of endings. From where I sit, I can’t stand it because privacy closes in on loneliness as it has all along.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, try umph for a change – huff and puff and try umph for a change and live a small life: (8:18:12)

no in betweens  no extremes  no perhaps  no mishaps  no denying  no complying

no intentions  no dissentions  no understanding  no demanding 

no illusions  no intrusions  no decisions  no collisions  no perfection  no rejection

 no crying  no lying  no confusions  no delusions  no perceptions  no deceptions

 no saving  no having  no possessions  no obsessions  no excuses  no misuses

no forward  no backward  no stillness  no willingness  no inclination  no destination

 no point no line  no thing defined 

no foreseeable past  no thing that lasts

(9:12:14:17:12)

NO RHYME OR REASON

JUST ARRIVING IN TIME

THROUGH A CRACK IN THE UNI VERSE

AND OFF AND ON GOING ON AND ON 

FROM THERE

05271947121510202012935

AM

A hollow weaning off the solid mass destruction

CANCELLED

S  AND  Y

After the math, the difference between right and wrong is negative, too. Also, I’m positive that’s wrong: “It’s less than you think, more than you know and the same as it has been such as in “This has been has been so depressed though blessed. Opposing himself at every turn.”

The 5 agents knock on my invisible door

WATER WOOD FIRE EARTH METAL

KNOCK KNOCK

The deep green mountains are damaged by the diseased thorns

The red and black wind blossoms

Heaven and earth is secretly spreading stars into the pulverized darkness

The hazy sunset and wild beasts are stampeding into the sun’s illusions

Existence is a trembling maple leaf of golden dust

Lies about the spring startle the birds flying into street lights

The white and black jungle rivers flow through the heart of boundless time

said Du Fu, Li Bai, Duo Duo and Bai Dao

Life is off track railing at the groove that failed. Broken symmetry breaks in half mirroring its uniform differences. Here is where things begin and end. Life hangs

in the abeyance.

Life is

still life

moving

Destiny has reached its destination. A composite destined to be what it ends up being. To be or not to be questions the answer and begs to differ. Two opposites rush into each other’s arms and create a wind that carries debris and crumbling structures – a disheveled subtraction takes our breath away and reminds us that all is subject to removal. Don’t feel too confident, transitory permanence is the shadow of existence.

CHAPTER 1

Art begins at conception. My life begins right now. Each moment is a birth and the accumulation attaches its life to its next birth creating a long tail, a story that drags along the concrete, the abstractions, the attractions and the gravity, causing the sparking of imaginations, nations of imaginings, remembrance and re-cognition.

IS THIS A NEVERENDING SHORT STORY?

(my life is not over, but it’s getting there)

It always begins here – there is nowhere else to begin.

Silence is the answer to the question that cannot be heard. It is the action that follows withdrawal. It is the reverse of verse, the unwritten poem read by a blind audience and performed by an absent poet. It is being not there that is present in the memorable, forgotten sleep. It is the piece at the end of a torn fabric – the peace at the end of a war – a threadbare posture withstanding the curvature of the earth’s spine, bent on disappearance, unable to jump to the conclusions that no longer exist. (8:10:11)

“Correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and seasons because they, unlike man, are in the order of their life and have not perverted that order by reason,” said Swedenberg to James Joyce. (6:16:11)

Crosshatched from eccentricities, I was born from between the shell game of then and now; not cracked up to be anything but a shard of cutting edge creation. I hear the smooth talkers having rough conversations with their silent partners using unheard of words that break the silence and exit through a window of opportunity. Once outside the realm of speech, grunts of gasping air and exasperating efforts whip up a wind that carries the music of stillness in rhythmic gusts that whirl around the corners of the circumlocution of square deals. Honestly, the lies resonate and make the truth stand for deception and allow it to ring true! That signals the birth of non-communication and its counterpoint of reference, a reflection of opacity and the audacity of not being there. (7:24:11)

Yeah but, what about the Bronx?

No need to go there. It is there and I was there. Dropped in like a raindrop in a small puddle. I remember nothing other than what I was told. Infancy and fancy embellish the speck of becoming me. All I know is that my brother shot my sister with a rubber arrow. Then I was moved into my childhood on a snowy day in April.

At the same time, “I’m” is born,  I am me, also.

Dear Me,

On the outside looking out for myself. I spy I, trying to find the one thing I have in

common with myself.

In the interim the outer rim of the boundary of chaos scribbles a message to clean up the inner sanctum.

It should rock with works of art-iculation. Suddenly I am here where I am. Here, right here, deep inside the inner ear where I am everywhere receiving direction from the chaos of silent sounds.

Placing myself inside the magnetic field attracting the traction of gravity, holding me in place with a hand that moves across the universe and paints my pain to a “T”.

In the corner sits an exact opposite of my duplicate, another appendage of old age and wisdom. Added to this subtraction is an approximate truth.

This is seen separately from the attachment to the whole truth and nothing. But the truth persists and swims in the river on the periphery of the outer rim.

I catch its drift and float upstream of consciousness. Burning the candle at both ends, I am half awake, half awake, sleeping in the conjunction of the caboose of the train of thought, a crazy reason to be reasonable, a loco motive.

I think I can. I think I can.

Both ideas skywrite their impression of this identical indentation with an attention to

detail. Each finger points to a choice. Each choice points to love’s suspended animation and disbelief.

In this tunnel of delight mishaps ricochet off the dark particles of transition bouncing off the walls until the onslaught offers a compromise - light with heavy consequence.

It is a sequence of black ands and yellow commas that hook each sentence to its

counterpoint conjoining the punishment with the future release. And in the counterpart the map of interplay zig-zags back and forth crossing the tracks and playing the role of hobo.

Way off track, the wonderer wanders into the tunnel inside the tunnel, a deep depression that is at the root of all totality – birth. Why do I always end up at the beginning?

There there.

I start over, stopping under the bridge, understanding the umbrella’s black arc that diverts the compounding downfall into a puddle at my feet.

My reflection mirrors this deflection, askew, awkward and slanted toward my next step.

When it splashes, I awaken to my sleepy cover-up. My eyes water expressing the excess sorrow with a flowing stoppage, choking movement by clutching the stiff neck of disappointment with fingers that refuse to move. Yet in the natural flow of things, things move in spite of stillness. They naturally change places with the moment before the next move.

The choice is no choice or no choice. It just is. As unjust as is, is or might be.

Events eventually explode on the scene like the next breath of autonomy. Breathe in,

breathe out. Give in, give out. Collapse, relapse and then lapse into a comma along with my periodic double, a look alike who looks nothing like me and likes being someone else, elsewhere.

A mirror image with a life of its own.

He wakes up much later than me without guilt and walks into a documentary of the imaginary struggle between a picture and the picture that it projects.

“I keep killing myself at the same time that I’m dying to be alive.”

And then suddenly I find myself in Queens.

109-27 204^th Street, Hollis Avenue, Francis Lewis Boulevard, PS 134, The Island Movie Theater, Schmidt’s, Davis’, White Castle, Wally Weigert, Evan Hecht, Alan Leventhal, Lenny Scwartz, hit the penny, stoop ball, Jack Hedden, Mrs. Waterson, Virginia Zimmer, leaner’s, slap ball, steam, pennsy pinkies, 5ft League, knock hockey, West Point Club, pin boys, duck pins, Manhasset, Make Believe Ballroom, winky dink, King Kong, million dollar movie, the world series, July 18, Jamaica Savings, Q2, Little League, Tiny Tim, Bubba, Harriet’s legs, a straight jacket, a drunken sailor, The Lone Ranger, The N.Y. Yankees, egg foo young, Miss Lurin, Mr. Vogt, AAA crossing guard, punch ball, the sun parlor, Dr. Schmatolla, Archie and Veronica and Nancy and Sluggo, “no promotion in sight”….

“I was born in the Bronx a long time ago. I was born in Switzerland also. My dada and mama watched me grow. I edited a magazine called Ego. Published only my own work

which is all that I knew. I had to flee the Swiss because I was too neutral. In 1982 I had my first two-man show. It was held in the infamous Black Gallery. It will be reported that when I die I will be semi conscious. I will be buried under the epitaph I myself will write some time before I die….

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up?”

Stuart PP Tomatoz

December 25, 2012….Christ, More Christ…Christ Más….familiar but somehow in the distant future of the distant past….a family that exists only as an extension of the tense Christmas presence….that lost supper where fantasy is in the back seat overlooking the front that we all put up in order to shield us against the wind….I’m alone in the sleep that protects me from awakening to the god awful truth that I am awake….and I have a part in this playground of interpretation …monkey bars and sliding scales call a spade a heart and dispel the correctness of misspelled witchcraft  that hovers above the chance that anything can happen….and when it does we have our unjust desserts….. 

1955,

My ‘First Book of Pomes”: God, The Fall and “I won’t make a fuss if I had just one bus”, goose bumps in front of the dinosaurs, flying over the trees on 204^th Street, a nostalgic connection to the mystery that had recently expelled me into this familiar foreign land inhabited by a strange relativity that set my life in motion, bowel movements, clock movements spinning on an axis of perpetual change, and the daily differences, differences you can measure (height, weight, etc) and those that scratch their dimensions into the cloud formations that float above the future, those whose impact appears as invisible dots above the “i” that pretends to be me, like something I used to know well and have to pull forward from time to time,

TIME IS LOOPY

re:turning forward

eyes in the back of ahead

My partner, who is me, is alone, dancing on the wooden flaws in my character – a box step encircling the absence of room to move

in between a soft place and a rock lies the sicklical nature of cyclical Nature (5•23•11)

Where the sky meets the ocean; the missing links that connect the lost journey to its destination (which is right here where I am) as the movement of stillness surges…

and up pops this:

“we never live long enough

to know what today is like”

John Ashbery

(12•8•12)

I’m resisting arrested development, continuing the battle for truth and specificity, I’m a good listener because I have nothing to say and I use double meaning to say exactly what I mean.

“Oddly, New Year’s is an evening out of the rough days gone by…The time before the next time…and, of course, next time it will all be different…this moment is married to the past, for better or for worse, ‘til death do we part…then for time in memoriam it continues without us as we really are…so, where does the time go?...we’re dying to know…” (12•31•12)

Where am I going?

nowhere

When will I get there?

in no time

What will I do when I arrive?

nothing

Who am I?

no one

When will I become someone?

when you’re not here

“Hands, do what you're bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed,” said Yeats.

“Then close the door

no strings attached

  and get out of bed,”

said I.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

1952:

 Back then the mystery lived next door and hugged my awakenings with open arms. Trees understood and stood above my meanderings, shading the differences and close calls. Insects asked me questions about my own nature. I was only a few steps away from my first few steps and answering their questions felt like a connection to my own vastness that covered me with the warm coat of enlightenment.  Then language tipped the scales and knowing something closed my eyes to all the other possibilities. Back then, like now I felt alone. Then it is was warm and now it is cold and warm only now and then. Back then my dumbfounded, silent ignorance made me feel omni-potent and now I fall asleep early and dream about then. Back then I jumped at the chance and now I give up easily. Back then answering the door felt like a revelation and now I am closing it. Back then there was a forthcoming coming and now there is just a memoir of the next moment.

2001:

"all of a sudden nothing stands for everything, absence stands for presence, next stands for before and right now cannot stand it and quietly sits in the corner
waiting for the past…”

…when all is clear the light blinds the window so we shade our mirrors and make shadows…we distance the close calls with stuttering pre-dictions, words before language, explosions before bombshells…doors burn shut as we enter the future…ceilings expose their flaws…walking forward is an exercise in futility...muscles contract weakness and withdraw…we can feel the standstills in our bones…a photograph of the only moment that still is…the odor of smoldering temples
throb in the heads of state …the people are left behind in the dust to inhale particles of the endgame…

"nothing has changed…everything has changed…all else remains
the same…as the universe awaits our small issues with open black holes…the whole emptiness is filled with a space that is full of objects and subjects…”

all saints mask our indifference which is the difference between trick or treat and yes or no…and in between we sit trembling in the wake of a sleepy whisper…the words spread to the mailroom where all the messages are uneasy and this disease shakes the foundation of every motto and cliché…the hard cold taste of our own words
curdle in a scream of overripe nightmares… they fall up from the sky’s limit
and break down all our traditions…

pieces of aimless wanderings fly off into the sunset…motionless, they go through the motions undetected and they continue like there’s no tomorrow…

Climbing Lenox Hill: 1987

He started the climb 3 or 4 years earlier. It was his own adventure and departure. He kept it to himself. He kept most things (if not all things) to himself. He sat in his chair, hands pressed together (almost like a prayer) placed across his mouth, under his nose, holding back the stress of being. The pain and inconvenience was kept secret along with his financial health. But I’m sure he was, in some way, prepared for this and knew exactly how he would react. He went to the Yankee game on his 70th birthday, in the throes of life and death, (a different kind of throw- a different kind of game, – an end game) and he never let on.  Unlike me with my ‘romantic distress” making sure my children know why I am what I am… he made sure we didn’t…he made quiet sacrifices for the good of the family that no one really heard or gave him credit for. He gave up poetry for accounting. I gave up accounting for poetry. He was an unsung hero in my life…who I eventually did sing about…

WAS/IS (for Pop)

night time comes in pieces

then the day falls into place

the blank slate then deceases

and we fly off into space

then we take all our skin off

and we lay it in the ground

we hear the closing window

as we make our closing sounds

was/is

then he comes into my room

and he whispers in my ear

"I've touched the light inside you son

and you'll always find me near"

then he puts his arms around me

and he kisses me hello

his strength and love surrounds me

with a brightly lit shadow

taking it all, taking it all in

giving it up, giving it to him

shaking the fall, shaking it senseless

living it down, living defenseless

taking it off, taking it all off

spinning around, spinning a web

making it soft, making it so soft

neutral ground, neutral bed

taking it all, taking it all in

giving it up, giving it to him

was/is

“my life as me has been quite familiar,” he said. “No time to change my mind

no time to reform my tendencies or reform the shape I’m in, in no time. Just as is, quite unjust and quiet but pleasantly surprised by expectation.”

“Just as I expected – unjust! Fairness is an intense carnival complete with
clowns and big tops with midget ideas at the bottom of it all pouring out of a vehicle, that is me, one by one by one by one …….forever (10•9•10)

(And nothing has changed, it’s the only thing that has. )

Everything happens in a moment. The momentum adds infinitum to the future. Fiction hits the walled in pond with a pinpointed splash…a flash in the panacea that quickly becomes infinite and in the next moment it begins again.

AND HERE WE ARE

(12•4•00)

(here, nothing matters except the size, shape and weight of that moment)