Dennis Hopper in TRUE ROMANCE

 

“Do you know who I am, Mr. Whorley? I’m the Antichrist.”

 

--from True Romance

 

 

 

The devil spoke of pantomimes,

then smashed your nose:

the fist came down like truth

the ex-cop thinks how

many times have I done that myself,

fucked some bastard up for shitting me?

The Sicilian is talking, the guys

behind him are restless as wings,

the fist comes down

and it doesn’t matter

you’re off the force for years

alone someplace with your stupid dog.

you knew someday he would come,

the man with the fist, a mouth

full of death. He says your boy

has done some shit but it’s you he means:

(that raid, you shot that whore in the eye)

You weren’t so clear in your head

those days, you sloshed

like a bucket of spunk and rage; like the world

was always kicking your face you spilled

on your wife, that whore, the guys

you fucked up alone in a chair.

The floor of your heart was cold

with piss and sterile light.

Where is the boy? he asks.

Your face all noble and stupid

against him, he opens a mouth in your hand

more eager for talk: he’ll open others,

one of them screaming a name, an L.A. address

and your son will inherit this chair from you.

You bum a smoke. The Sicilian is gracious,

he thinks you’ll talk; if you lie,

he’ll whittle you down to betrayal.

When the cigarette’s done, you tell

the truth about the devil.

It comes to you easy, like a paper

and coffee from God, and your enemy’s eyes

burn wrath like oil when you read the news:

How the Sicilian’s a slave to history,

the craven son of an ancient rape.

You call him a nigger, fruitof Moorish pillage,

glittering, dark and impotent. You call him an eggplant.

Then your aria’s over.

The Sicilian can only kill you once.

All laughing rage, he turns to load his gun.

The coffee of God has gone

through your guts and your son rides away.

He came for information; you gave him

another day to be something more

than a drunk, some fucked up violent

schmuck with a gun, a mouth full of death.

The coffee of God is gone:

and there’s nothing for you

but terror, a scared ex-cop,

a hot seat cold with piss.

You think of that girl your boy brought,

how she kissed you goodbye.

She wasn’t a whore; she was nice.

Maybe they’ll make it together.

Bound and enthroned, you wonder when

did I ever serve and protect until now?

When the devil’s kiss opens

your brain to the last page

you read there:

this is what it means to be a king.

 

 

 

Here’s a sonnet I wrote a few days ago.  IF you know anything about sonnets, this one has an unusual rhyme scheme while still fulfilling, so far as I can tell, all the requirements of a sonnet:  One octet followed by one sestet with a volt or turn around line nine.  The subject is unusual and very modern.  Rather than focusing on the exploits of some cruel love, I have taken as a point of departure the crash, or the myth of the crash, at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.  I think of it as a rather sad poem, a little like Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” in a certain way, without claiming to be the poet that Matthew Arnold is.  Enjoy, if you will.

 

 

---

 

 

Roswell

 

O, Flung across the darkness, dust, despair
of starplains thrummed with poison light, you came
so trillions far from world of surging heart-fast  air,
you pilgrims grey; the void expunged your name,
and so you crashed on desert rolling rare
around a yellow sun, its bluest earth
       alight with eyes so heaven-turned, they bear
the hope of twins betrayed,   betwained at birth:
to join again, to build a solar firth.
Instead, you fell from hectic flashing skies,
exploding ship a silver sun eclipse.
O, what is lost, what flashing mortal mirth
betrayed when pilgrim tumbles down and dies?
A silence now:  the void annoints our lips.

A Boot Fantasia in Three Parts

 

 

Boot Fantasia in Three Parts

 

copyright 2011 William L. Houts

United States of America 

All Rights Reserved

 

 

I.

 

There are boots in the desert.

The sun has eaten their laces.

The wind has taken their

high black polish.

In places, their soles are thin.

They stand under sand.

I think there’s more than

a pair of them sharing darkness

between those grains of earth,

darkness like underground sky.

I don’t know how or why the boots

arrived in the desert.

Maybe they fell from above.

It has happened before:

a torrent of stones

like shards of hard heaven,

a blizzard of toads on snoring towns.

The boots could come down,

a plague we never read about.

Some sad magician’s wonder

of boots from a cloud.

Or maybe the people who live

in the desert are prone

to losing their boots.

Riding strange horses

they come to rest at a shady oasis.

They might loosen their laces

And kick off their boots

to bathe and to drink: and drunk

on the clear dark wines

casked in such cellars of the earth,

they ride off again,

leaving their boots behind.

But never mind that.

These boots are all over the desert,

not just oases, and besides,

I’ve heard that people who

forget things do not survive

long in that place.

 

 

II.

 

It may not matter

where the boots came from.

It may only matter

that I want a pair myself,

boots as black as sharks

and twice as dangerous.

In a pair of boots,

a woman or man can

stride the wide world and

never feel the ambivalent

earth between their toes

A pair of black boots

can make fists of your feet;

their shiny heels

strike holes in the ground

with the sound of

clenched fists on a lecture stand.

 

 

III.

 

I have this notion

or dream of the boots

rising up from the desert

and crossing the ocean:

a parade of old shoes,

a triumph of tatters

through our city gates.

They make muttering noises,

as you might hear

a chorus of voices shouting

down a corridor of fifty

or a thousand years.

I don’t know what words

the boots might speak, unless

with cracked black tongues they croak

the verbs which sound the same

in any language.

If the boots came to your door,

would you let them in?

If the boots entered your house,

wouldn’t you put them on?

The Talespin King

 

 

I’ve read a number of Stephen King novels, and in general have been satisfied with them.  The man has been writing for forty years or so  and his paid his dues; even if he did get a six figure advance for CARRIE back at the beginning of a career.  But I’ve recently read what was meant to be his path to novelist glory, the DARK TOWER series, and I fear that in my opinion, it’s not all that he meant it to be.

 

The first sentence of the series is glorious, it promises something classical, grand and hypnotic.  Listen:

 

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.:

 

Who wouldn’t want to find out who this gunslinger and his quarry are?  It’s magnificent.  And the first two books of the novel live up to that adjective.  But he just doesn’t sustain it through the rest of the series.  First of all, he is self-indulgent.  He includes references to other popular novels –and his own—throughout the book.  If he did this once, it would be all right, a bit of hat-tipping, a bit of vaudeville.  But the fabric of the book depends to some extent to these kind of references and it’s distracting to say the least.  King even includes himself as a crucial secondary character.  I want to like it, I want it to pay off, but it only leads to certain novelistic party tricks and a certain amount of sophomore philosophizing. 

 

Now, I’ve got to say something about the Stephen King phenomenon and how I deal with it as a writer.  In general, writers who thing of themselves as doing literary work Hate King.  They thing he’s too rich, they think he’s a hack, they celebrate his nearly being run over and killed a few years ago.  I am not one of these.  Some of his novels are very enjoyable, if you overlook certain flaws.  THE STAND is good if you can overlook the fact that the demon Randal Flagg and his ghoulies are ultimately swatted out of existence by the very Hand of God.  MISERY is a wonderful novel if you can overlook the fact that the imprisoned writer escapes Annie Wilkes by breaking her back with a thrown Underwood typewriter.  And so on.  But let’s not forget THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, which is without any flaw as far as I can see, and is beautiful work into the bargain.

 

But back to TDT.  I think my two biggest complaints about the series are that the Tower itself isn’t really explored.  At the beginning of the series, the sorceror Walter explains that it is the lynchpin of existence, and that to climb the Dark Tower is to ascend through the very scales of being, from the microscoppic to the stellar.  Now, I have no idea how this could be represented, but then I’m not the one who made the brag –through Walter—that he was going to explore this.

 

Secondly, all of the gunsluingers except Roland die before they reach the Tower.  Now, unlike some, I don’t resent the author who kills off major characters.  But it occurs to me that King might have explored the Tower my fully by bringing these characters to it and mounting its steps with their varied psychologies.  But that, I’m afraid, probably requires a philosopher, and Mr. King restrains himself to being a popular entertainer;  a fine enough thing, surely, but, it seems, not equal to the task of exploring Robert Burns’s classic poem through fiction.

The Plight of the Mired Novelist

 

 

Ending with a sentence which I think may turn out to be the besst in the book, I finished Chapter 25 late Friday morning.  IT was one of my really good days, full of spirit and flow, the secret liquors with which I water my garden. 

 

Naively, I expected that this weekend would be a mad frenzy of writing as a consequence, but it seems that novels don’t work like that: at least mine don’t.  I write a chapter full of juice and later on, two days or two weeks later I know exactly what it points to, but the day after, I always have a creative hangover:  I can’t find the sense of the chapter, I can’t find the write words, I can’t even find my socks. I suppose I should just roll over and play dead, read a book or something, but like I said here yesterday, I feel the mass of this project growing within me and it wants to be out in the world where people can read it and I can move onto the next project, God be praised.

 

So I’m sitting here staring at the screen, which I remember now is how a lot of this writer’s writing time is spent, and writing a blog entry which is probably a little silly and probably a little obvious, but which keeps my fingers moving and the birth pains from being quite as sharp.  It all puts me in mind of the bit from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”:

 

Eric Idle:  I want to have babies.

 

John Cleese:  You can’t have babies; you’re a man.  What’s it going to gestate in, are you going to keep it in a box?

 

Eric Idle:  I want the right to have babies.

 

John Cleese:  (Outraged, the way only John cleese can be outraged)  What’s the point in having the right to have babies if you can’t have babies?

 

 

Well, I’m telling you that this man can and will have a baby, and the sonogram says it looks to be about five hundred and fifty pages from head to toe.  I just wish the miracle of childbirth were happening TODAY.

Pregnancy

 

 

I’ve been fretting for some time now that, although I write for four to six hours five or six days every week, I’m not making the progress on the novel that I would like to.  With Word 2003 set at a 12 point Times New roman font, I had only written, or seemed to have written around 230 pages after some one and a half years of work.  It is good work, but it seemed to me that there wasn’t a lot of it for the time invested and I began to feel depressed and rather hard on myself as a lazy slacker.

 

Then my dear friend Kevin reminded me that book length isn’t determined by number of pages as shown by Word for Windows, but by word count.  And when I applied the word count utility, the novel I’ve written so far is no 230 pages but near twice that in length.  Needless to say, I am very, very pleased with myself and take the title of slacker Prince as a badge of honor.  The truth is, I’m kicking ass novelistically speaking and am probably between three quarters and four fifths of the way through my first draft.  The second and third drafts, I expect, will go very swiftly as I already have a pretty good idea of the alterations which need to be made before the book is totally coherent.

 

But even though it turns out I’m writing an ox-stunner rather than a slim volume, there is still a certain amount of suffering involved at this point.  I began to feel this about seven years into my first book, “The Apocalypse Hilton”.  I describe it as a feeling of wanting to give birth when I still haveanother trimester to go.  I have all these characters and situations and they want to be in a published book, not next year sometime and certainly not five years from now, but today or tomorrow.  In fact, I think I feel, as much as any man can, the way a pregnant woman feels when she thinks to her unborn child: “Damn it, baby, I’m tired.  ARRIVE already!”

 

 

In Case of Falling Astronauts, Break Glass

 

copyright William L. Houts 2010

United States of America

All Rights Reserved

 

 

I.

 

o heavenly desert for a wandering tribe, nazareth to astronauts;

cradle of prophets with mirrored faces, our mystics of absolute zero,

striding through hells of kelvin heat or leaping lead-footed for joy.

we knew no domes of glass nor wise antennaed

mayors would meet our traveling boys, flown so far

from the roiling blue, flung so far into darkness and dust.

but if a desert, still a place of birth, you anvil moon: like silver

minted fresh, we’d shine our lives by the pure silent hammers of sol.

this was our dream, our all-american dream of astronauts

grave and poetic: faces full of infinity, minds on plans

for compassionate cities, angelic hands at work in the vine-

yards of science. the rocket packs and rayguns were toys,

dolls in the hands of scheming boys we never thought they’d keep.

what we were after, as always, was space: another place to go

when nowhere was left

a heavenly desert to a wandering tribe,

second bethlehem to a dream.

 

 

 

II.

 

I wonder what plagues we gave to the Indians of the Moon,

I struggle to remember which treaties we broke with the Lunar Sioux,

the precise year of that famous ambush so successfully sprung by

the cavalry of the American Third Orbital Marines upon the Lakota

living by the shores of the Sea of Tranquility.

And I forget exactly how many chiefs we lashed to the coils

of fusion drives, or swung from rocket gantries

or tumbled into void with a one two three.

I get all the dates mixed up, but from where I’m standing

I can still smell the silicate smoke of tipis burning on lunar prairies.

 

 

 

III.

 

When I still played hopscotch,

when i knew just how to throw the stone

and what these lines are for,

I read about Laika, the dog in space,

How the Russians loved their doggy cosmonaut

(a snapshot from some grade school primer:

white coated men and a scrappy mutt

with a lolling tongue) and how she loved her cozy Sputnik, just enough room for her race.

I imagined the husky steering her tiny craft:

Adroit Captain Laika, the dog between worlds,

equal parts Egyptian goddess and loyal pet;

the constellation, drawn in the sky with

stars of chalk, the constellation given life,

the Hunter’s Dog unleashed to gambol and howl

fully enfleshed in the backyards of night.

When I still played hopscotch, and knew

the counting rhymes, and how to get through the game

without hitting the lines, I read about Laika:

but not how her husky fur must have burned

in a blaze when her tiny cage returned to earth,

nor a word for her terrified yawp as the Sputnik

crashed through a ceiling of air, splashed down

in the southernmost part of the Indian Sea.

I know she died before I was born, and how.

But I learned it late, and now I call her:

here girl, come on down now and lick my hand;

and brief me on dreams brought low,

dogs in space, these chalk marks

whose use I used to know.

 

 

 

 

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