"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

sunday afternoon.  jerry ali farka toure and the rolling stones come off exile on main street.  the speakerfoam is shot and no insane amount of duct tape will bring it back.  but these ashes accumulating beneath the emptynest of subwoofers are the nest of speaker phoenix.  worthy of pink floyd when syd was still there.  having these speakers clarifies the concept of 'producing an album.'  and this bit about the speakers clarifies the concept i came to lay down for you.  im all about these speakers and all ive been reading is iraq afghan and the man who gave us the bomb and then ted kennedy dies.  so of course im thinking about my father. 

 

 my dad at one time was brilliant and beautiful.  articulate and cock-sure immigrant with fine skin fair hair  beyond the pale blue eyes.  had had some black bloomless seeds implanted somewhere early on the floor of his wide blood ocean but could dance and say things in a growly foreign tone to girls that made them think he was far out and made him think he sounded like real kgb.   he lived in the city when they came from where they were after they left with the ghosts in the farmhouse and where he wore long blond curls and leiderhosen and had to kill all the cats with his hands.  he lived in the city and they kept rabbits in the backyard and the neighbors thought that was sweet but he ate them.  he killed them with his hands.  and he was sharp and learned to speak the language by telling jokes.  the whole cold red peril was big big fresh hot and steaming make them laugh.  make their chemicals change.  like a star through the sad city schools and big deal college in america for this we ate dirt at the side of the road beneath which an ocean of our blood is buried.  big american businessman.  fancy suit smooth hands smelling of real cologne the coins make a bright shuffling in his pocket.   

  

saw a girl in the secretary pool real pretty looked like natalie wood was like him had come a long way to get here.  she was quiet like a comet.  one night he sent her to fetch some beer and he told everyone they were getting married.  when she got back she couldnt understand why everyone was so happy.  he hadnt told her.  they got married.  bought a pink house in the suburbs.  i was born. 

  

he traveled a lot.  he traveled quite literally around the world.  he sold people from different countries these big american machines.  maybe because the people of the world recognize him as not american, and it would throw them off their guard.  he was damn good at what he did  but those seeds got soaked in alcohol during that trip around the world and the hot hard itchy seeds cracked and something in them stirred.  and the progress and politics of the world made telling jokes and selling machines harder to do and the progress was crushing and the factory closed.  distracted, my father had become obsolete. 

  

fertile ground for spiny vines that lay along the heartroad and siphon with a million hollow teeth the blood of whatever he had come to be fated now somehow to become what was left.  his plantsnake consciousness predatory and insatiable.   i grew up in that sucking jungle i grew up like a lucky rabbit. 

  

but the history of him was blinding.  dovie was the last one to see him break the surface of that ocean of blood.  engaging, like in a war. they sent him to kuwait and riadh and afghanistan and i remember when they would have slim dark bearded men over for dinner sometimes too and i had to go to grandmas and eat sweet porridge and watch the lawrence welk show and you would forget the very concept of time when he told you stories of pissing off balconies with howard hughes and swimming in the lake when mengele died.  i have photographs of him and beautiful brazillian whores.  stories.  marvelous wonderful sensuous stories.  the round trip world tour adventure a comet a star.  this volatile fuming clusterbomb on the brown tweed couch i remember when he drove the lincoln through the tollgate my mother scurried up the stairs and told me to lay very quietly and other blind nights when we played kitten.  his name for me was always nigger and when i was young he would tell me after i came home from school that some guy named ted kennedy called, could i come for a ride.  he loved his speakers.      

  

i read the newspaper at three and from then on i best know how to define this, spell that or else i get the tendriltail my first word was miscegenation.  to this day if theres a crossword its like crack and i do it hard and fast and in pen.  there were years we lived together and didnt speak.  i was in middle school.  i was a butterfly on a pin and he was horrified somehow that i had managed to live to maturity.  i fled.  when my mother was dying and they wanted me to stay i said i couldnt live in the same house with him.  and when the cowboy asked me to be nice afterward i got within a foot and a half of him and he hit me.  then he died.   and they didnt find him for two days.  

 

and im reading all these books about the middle east and perseverating about the disintegrating speakerheads and goddamn its been two months since my last crossword.