Gospel & Universe ⛱ Señor Locke
The Gringo Takes Stock
From Howl - Tequila Therapy - Robbery Poem
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From Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1955)
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, […]
Prowl (2000)
I saw the best finds of my veneration destroyed by corn chips and lime margaritas, gorged poetical ornate dragging my self through the Zócalo dawn, a wide-eyed canadiense addicted to the mestizas of Mexico City and the altar of the sun in the winter of 1992,
who on the prowl for intercultural connection got mugged on Calle Jésus María several blocks east of the Zócalo and then walked away a hollow-eyed Canuck, having imagined he could walk around anywhere because it’s a free world, isn’t it?
who was now a disillusioned forlorn tourist and took the first plane to Acapulco to forget the gangster demons of Jésus María and the hook on the end of the knife in the market where he heard “Like a Rolling Stone” and was forced to ask himself How does it feel?
who answered Not so great and realized that he was just a spoiled gringo and was better off lying on the beach with his ridiculous green UBC cap, or sitting in a white wooden beach chair on the burning sands ordering a never-ending spiral of salty-rimmed margaritas, or staring angloheaded into the cultural possibilities of a menu,
Tequila Therapy
When the brain burns with the memory of blades and dusty streets, surrender yourself to the healing hands of Margarita. Her lime and orange vapours will clear your head, and her valiant caballero, Don Agave, will knock those memories dead,
who was then calm enough to recollect in tequility his week in Mexico City where one afternoon as the sun scattered gold dust amid the rubbled streets he sat down on a doorstep behind a market stall where Bob Dylan sang about Napoleon in rags and about how they all did tricks for you,
Robbery Poem
Not understanding the economic geography of Mexico City, the innocent canadiense wanders from the wrought iron of the Centro Histórico, straight into the arms of Jesús María, crossed somewhere near República de El Salvador, until the knife comes out and the wallet’s gone. Another tourist bites the dust in the Mexican sun;
who watched himself hovering above the market umbrellas as one thief undid his watch while the other nestled a blade next to his ribs, making him wonder what happened to the two women on the stoop beside him just a minute ago drinking beer,
who decided to ignore the trauma of recent sense impressions and planted his toes in the golden sands of Acapulco, allowing his mind to remember the other details of his week in Mexico City,
who remembered the powerful streets as they slowly snaked their way outward from the Torre Latinoamericana,
who remembered the cars like battered piñatas in the decorous streets off Cinco de Mayo and the old town with its stain glass and its wrought iron and its echoes of Spain,
who remembered the girls smiling from the doorways of the shiny tin houses as he sailed on a city bus to the pyramids of Teotihuacán, the birthplace of the gods,
who chanted existential verses parsed from the heavy prose of Darwin and Locke beneath a quadrangle of invisible stars as he looked up to the Pyramid of the Sun,
who raised his fists to the angry and unpronounceable gods Coyolxauquhui Huitzilopchtli and the ubiquitous Chac Mool,
who stood on the ancient stones in a red shirt and imagined himself a cosmos, of Vancouver the Son,
who refused to bow down before the ancient gods Spanish grammar bacteria the law of the jungle or hooked blades,
who dared to lift his corporeal frame above the Earth and hovered above the peaks of the Aonian Mount delivering prophecies of Adam Smith and individual rights,
whose nose then dripped blood because of the wrath of Chac Mool who simply couldn't abide the sight of a gringo who lived off the fat of the land and yet hadn’t even chipped in for one quinceañera,
who then wondered about this whole business of the quinceañera and about the 15-year-old girl in Aura, a novel by Carlos Fuentes: Aura, the belle of the ball, dressed up in the finest Spanish embroidery, the type that old maids wear around their cold shoulders, and yet Aura’s eyes shone like two youthful suns that spoke without using words,
en la cara dos soles que sin palabras hablan,
who then remembered all the beautiful girls he’d seen in his travels in Latin America — starting with a girl in La Peñita de Jaltemba, with her bright dark eyes and her shy 15-year-old girl laugh,
who tried to teach this girl and her friend some expressions in French in a friendly afternoon language swap, which was a grand success up until the point when they finally grasped the French counting system (initially they thought, Surely, he’s putting us on!) in which the words for 88 are quatre-vingt-dix-huit, which translates to 4 X 20 + 10 + 8, which was so undeniably absurd that they almost fell off their chairs laughing,
who saw the same magnetic dark eyes from the bars of Havana Centro down the highway to Trinidad and on to Camagüey, past unnumbered beaches of ron especial and mojitos, all the way to Santiago where the frenzied street-party had no ending, except for when you finally got to the bottom of the street and found a seat at Casa Granda where you could drink peacefully on the patio with Graham Greene, and then several days later you found yourself back in Havana at La Florida, once again drinking with Grahame Green on the patio, decades in the past, lost in lands of salsa and rhythm,
who then remembered even further into his past, back to when he was a 15-year-old in Paris scaling the pyramid of his subconscious, down the Champs Élysées blasted by sand dunes and lysergic acid and the heat waves of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” … All I see turns to brown / As the sun burns the ground / And my eyes fill with sand …Try to find, try to find the way I feel … Oh, when I want, when I'm on my way, yeah…,
who went down the memory highway from Paris to Cannes with a dozen hits of white blotter and 100 grams of Red Lebanese in a borrowed van, with Wait-a-minute-Chester in the backseat with his pink John Lennon glasses, when the officer stopped us and told us to follow him to the station where we sat across a table trying to explain that the van was borrowed, the van with a dozen hits of white blotter and 100 grams of Red Lebanese, and now Wait-a-minute-Chester is looking blankly at the officer across the table with his hair down to his waist and his pink John Lennon glasses, when you finally realize where you are after the officer asks, Donc, la camionette, c’est vraiment à vous? / So the van, it’s really yours? and you shout back, Mais, bien sûr! … and this tiny outburst of frenchness convinces him and he lets us go, back on our way, yeah … As the dust that floats high in June / We're moving through Kashmir,
who back in Paris told Chester to wait a minute while he swallowed a small pyramid, a refinement on the scheme of white rabbits, that flew him down the Champs Élysées at one thousand kilometres an hour, into the metro and a Senegalese bar and the basement of the American Church to talk to the blonde angel of his dreams and back onto the psychedelic streets with their colours now draining from his occipital lobe as he wends his way back to their local bar, to find Chester and his brother and Jacques Brel sitting at a cod-swept table drinking beer, not from Amsterdam but from Leuvan, from the Belgium Brel hated so much, yet seduced and pacified in his raging lust by the bright star of Artois,
who, after that long detour into the misdeeds of his youth, returned to the present, in Mexico, and his memories of scampering down from the Pyramid of the Sun like a superstitious monkey, gibbering in fright at the ancient curse that would sour his enjoyment of margaritas and make him wonder how he was ever going to square his rich gringo lifestyle with the poverty that crouched like a jaguar in the backstreets of México lindo y querido,
who was beaten by thugs and unpronounceable gods and flew back to his innocuous country to spend his afternoons sulking in his local coffee shop pretending to be important, a poet even,
who submerged his anonymity and fed on the sparse urban scene of Vancouver, multicultural even, until years later his courage grew and he bought another plane ticket and found himself sitting at a different café under the white canvas umbrellas of Guanajuato 300 kilometres northwest of Mexico City in the year 2000,
who found himself fuelled by strong coffee and listening to Spanish pop songs and arguing with John Locke and his theory that we're merely the puppets of our sense impressions,
who wondered about the nine years between robbery in Mexico City and umbrellas in Guanjuato and about where those sense impressions went and how deep they were buried,
who questioned meaning in general in the moment under the umbrellas when he looked into the dark eyes of an angel named Aura who he was reading about in a book by Carlos Fuentes,
who dreamed of Andalucían girls and secretly watched the dancing angel disguised as a Mexican waitress drinking Bohemia beer in the shadow of Jung,
who made him dream about three thousand years of Mexican history, from the Olmecs to Vicente Fox, one sunny afternoon in December 2000,
who, at the Yeatsian hub of the Wheel of the new millennium, saw visions of Quetzalcoatl in his doom,
and who made him write it all down until it resembled a poem by Allen Ginsberg, at least for one more line?
What a stupid question. It was of course me.
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Next: Under the Umbrellas
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