"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

* * *

by Edward Lacie

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Six

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I'm pulling into the parking lot of the White Lodge.

It's high noon time to say goodbye to Dodge.

Or is it Cheyenne? Shy Anne? New news from Seattle.

___

The next many lines and references are a sort of take-off on Allen Ginsberg's "America":

___

America, I think you are all

I think you are nothing America

I lost my last dime in your M&M machine this morn

"-ing has broken," the radio finishes for me.

October 26, 1979. I am my only mind.

America, when will we end violence?

Try fucking yourself and only yourself

and nothing but yourself for awhile. I don't feel.

Don't bother. I won't write any more someday, you'll be lost.

Sorry; scream. Vietnam already had his clothes off.

I went to the library anyway. I have no good looks.

After all it is I (for Victor, the victorious in death).

Maggie's machinery was too. I became a Visionary.

There is no other way. Burroughs was in Seattle.

I don't think he'll come back, they were echo brain.

Are you being eye being echo brain

or is this some form. The point is

I refuse to give up. America, stop

pushing, Socrates upon the Aegean.¹

I read Newsweek. Later.

I know what I'm

writing.

Maggie on trial for murder? of the dog?

Blizzard? I feel sent

-i

-mental about radios, tvs, etc.

I was a Marxist in Bouleversement and

I used to have warts. Sorry, an allusion to Rimbaud.

I used to smoke joints in this parking lot.

When I went to Seattle I got laid better than ever before.

My mind is fiction, supreme²

You should have, did you see me read. I have no psycho....

Dean did. Twice. Dean is perfectly right.

He won't convert, like Celeste, to Catholicism?

I had a musth (sic) vision, vibration, this morning.

America, why did you send a gay back to Germany two months ago? Stupid.

Dean reads  Time and will tell the rest of this poem.

I'm tired of it all. RAMJAC. News on the radio:

"...biggest price drop since WWII. Self-rule in Palestine?

"...a meeting at camp...." Camp Switch Stations: "Life's

"been good to me

"so far."

A drive around Spokane in next winter's scarf, a drive around Spokane looking for a pen, an egg, anything else.

I get, my scarf gets, stared at I love it and now

I'm in the parking lot of Comfy Kitchen.

A question is a guess.

"Dim all the lights," sings the radio. Listen:

dimness. Vietnam. Halve (sic) we found speech,

the sound perfect and imperfectly equal love?

I was writing and swerving so I pulled over to write

this down, must be so, metaphor Rod Stewart, sexy.

Gas is 95 cents a gallon. Mr Nelson taught me to hate

personification at college. At the bank, a complicated poem

to figure out later. Three men in a blue Ford pick-up

saw next winter's scarf and laughed. Pat and Marco laughed

at the porter, black. Border, more (the scarf needs).

Now I'm at the outdoor theater. Nation Denies Bomb Tests.

I love. (...the new song by Donna and Barbra)

The rest of the story, on radio, by Paul Harvey.

More tests, unprecedented. Thank you, Mr Westergaard.

Lucky to halve blood, heart, land, palm, stars, et all. (sic)

A new song by ABBA, "Dreamin'", begins on radio, 5:26 p.m.

I'm late for supper, for home. No, I can't go home.

I didn't go to the bank to find out about bad checks.

The radio plays "Breakdown" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

I loved this song for a month in Seattle last year.

My love life is boring. He was Vietnamese and not like

any other man I loved, I loved. Radio.

I'm going to the White Lodge to write. No parking available.

This is a poem alone, Spokane. About Karen, my supervisor.

"I'd about liked to had a fit," she says. At Comfy Kitchen

this is all true, in Spokane, his name is Edward Edwards.

But the library was closed. "One Flew Over" the heads

of the audience because the script calls for Chief Broom

to love the hero, Mac, so much, so much depends 

on this point of the play, 

so much that he smothers Mac when he's

had enough, Broom has, shock treatment, labotomy. We

rehearsed for four or five weeks in the room to my left

instead of on stage where a fair was set up. I realized later

how this helped make a solid fourth wall for us all.

I'm in the car shivering now, the sun almost

down and darkness in the train last night when I

flipped out again. Then this morning, my cruci-vision!

"I won't," he says and he don't turn around

to face the faceless waitress. At the door 

I threw one more towards water. 

I was rewriting Bouleversement. 

Outside it rained an hour ago while I

cooked at Comfy Kitchen. When will the radio play a song

appropriate for me to mention here, words that are apt?

Halve my chef salad. Eight years from now it will be 1987.

When I was four years young, my sugar-moist hand sweat

sweet and there is a knife on the table. Enough is

playing games of art shall art. Be

-at! Beat it all. Whimper

-ing here. I needed you, the song sings,

"sew (sic) desperately" deep in the parking lot born

to elbow live I hit it on the window dancing. I sing

out a number to the guy in the cute car, blond beard

and he didn't see me. Now I'm at the trailer

court where my sister and Bimbo lived. The song is

Dean and Maggie's waterbed I was born in the sign of

Cancer. I found it two weeks ago in the sky with

the help of encyclopedia. Bimbo lived with redhead Jerry.

Jerry, another of Larry's lovers, he claimed. They had

a dog when they lived in this lot, my sister and Bimbo.

I'm almost home. Don't hurry. These things happen, radio station

plays a next song which stops me to write it: haunted

house costs more in Seattle than Spokane, a buck fifty

per head. I don't know the song on the radio. A post

marks a spot where I honk the car as I pass. "Hot" "Blood"

"ed'"- three toots and I'm past, a foreigner¹. Home.

"Typical Lacie project, goofed before ya started," Mom says.

How to say no way a sink (think) will keep me here in Spokane?

___

The above, from the Gnome notebook, makes little or no sense to me these days, twenty-plus years later.

I'm watching the History channel with Jim Post, a show about UFO sightings. "Cite" is the html code for "italics" so as I type "cite" I'm having a lot of FBMs, enough to get the brain firing in such a way that I think I'm about to have another breakdown in the direction of up. Prepare me a straight-jacket.