CLEANING & COOKING
ARE
TRADITIONAL ACTIVITIES

Follow the tiny yellow ball as it bounces across the page of your
sing-along life, crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Are we having fun
yet? And just like that there’s no more paper and the little dot of
yellow hope and beige direction spins into blackness.

Rage against the dying of the light raged the poet Dylan Thomas, and
then he drank himself to death.

Mellow yellow said my dear friend Johnny N., or implied it in the
fabric of his days, and did the same.

***
How, you may be thinking, can I call someone I’ve never met dear
friend? And where in God’s name did I come up with Johnny N?

Johnny N?

Johnny N. came out of nowhere like a song. And John Nesci was my dear
friend even before he called long-distance years ago and in a grave deep
voice, as if we’d been friends forever, said:

“This is Nesci here — Feldman sent your book. We have to talk. Were
you in the Nam?”

***
Be LaRoe is hosting the New York City wake, the celebration, a gathering
of a tribe.

“I have to clean the house today,” she wrote me. “But it’s getting
hard –I miss my boy. Still, cleaning and cooking are traditional
activities when someone dies …”
***
There are X number of dear friends in life, out there waiting on the
chance encounter. Some you never meet at all. But when you do,
something that’s been there all along comes into play.

It takes death to show us what holds us in its hands.

–John Bennett

IMAGINE

A stab at stability. Pretense down the mail shoot. Special delivery
on a cold rainy day. Russians teaching English at Oxford. The same old
janitors, mopping up after class.

Anthrax, a fast train to nowhere. A one-in-a-million chance and he
blows it. The sharpshooter in the tower takes aim.

“My fellow Vespucians,” he says. “My dandies and damsels.”

And off goes the round.

***
Up goes the curtain. Down comes the flag. Cubic inches of fire and
brimstone. Mad love in the pantry. Crystal droplets in the cuff of his
trousers. He combs back his hair and walks into the day.

It only hurts for a little while, and then they open the door.

–John Bennett

THIS IS NOT A FORWARDED MESSAGE!
THIS BUD’S FOR YOU!

Terrorism and war, tuning everyone in to the same wavelength. When
the volume gets turned up, all that’s there is static.

***************************************

THE BEGINNING & THE END

I’m procrastinating. Putzing around. Sucking suds and cigarettes —
the bath water of a woman I once loved gone cold and gray; cancerous
tidings from Virginia … I drink it in. What the fuck — why not?

***

I spit on realism. I piss on it from a considerable height. I lay in
ambush for the problem solvers of the world. Everywhere I turn, hidden
agendas. Am I exempt from the draft? I should be, what with this array
of prostheses and the nightmares storming through the canyons of my
skull.

What’s left after we die is all that was there to begin with.

–John Bennett

CONCERNING THE RICE

“What are your feelings about the rice idea? No? They’ll just toss it?”
Philomene Long.

“The world is insane on a level far deeper than it realizes. The rice
won’t change things one way or the other.” John Bennett

“If we could only get enough people to walk together — but we won’t.”
Charles Bukowski in an early poem.

“If we could only get enough people to sit together –we won’t, but it
doesn’t much matter.” Something Shunryu Suzuki might have said.

“If we could only get enough people to send in their rice, we could
open a Chinese restaurant …”

–John Bennett