POETIC LICENSES

 

More from the 'basement boxes'.....a page from my 1st book (attempt), that was assembled from correspondence done during summer 'recesses' from college, wherein I usually had plenty of time to write, draw, paint and collage....before returning to University, to spend months in more academic pursuits........I never showed any of this largesse of words to Donald Davidson, Cleanth Brooks, Dr. Finney or Robert Penn Warren.....thinking they just weren't 'hip' enough for my post-Agrarian jumbles of words and pictures....cut, sliced, glued and pasted, bound...and, generally, tossed to the trash or burned as ritual sacrifices.....the 'blood of the poet' mindset........toss the paper blood to the burning embers of total frustration, don some strange costuming, and walk...alone....on the blackest nights.....to the all night eateries.....where, 'playing the artiste', i could write on napkins, wipe ketchup from my lips...as blood....then ignite the napk...

  Viewing the very last recomposited episode, ending "Seventeen f***ing years", as Tony admired a collection of historic 'dope bags' through his nostalgic lower East Side junkie eyes, swollen with indulgences and alcohol, exclaiming in his soft, worn, gravely voice, “You knew you were doing something bad when you bought a product called ‘Toilet’ and shot it in your arm”...his existential despair surfacing like a desert-dweller, drowning...not having actually considered learning to swim in the great Sewer of Life Ocean, about which he so beautifully and 'knowningly' composed tales of.....     i was drawn to this image, from the edits....'boarded up and graffitied over with strokes and sprays of alienation and contempt'....one that may have eclipsed even Bourdain's later cover tales of Life's bitter-tainted actualities......  Amusedly, he downed a couple of John Lurie's hard-boiled eggs, stared blankly across a tableful of Debbie Harry, even ...