"Authorship, as Rimbaud was perhaps the first to perceive, was not necessarily private property staked out by a signature."

- Harold Norse, Beat Hotel

* * *

by Luke Edwards

Next

Table of Contents

Previous

Seven

* * *

The story Sheriff Terry Gardner got Ed's manic letter on Halloween night under toast Ed made in plain view of the customer's, the open kitchen in which Ed was made up to be a pale, toothless vampire. Cindy delivered the order of toast though the table, all six or eight of them, sheriffs and deputies, had ordered only coffee.

___

On Friday Gardner got a letter from Son of Sam

reprinted in the paper in front of me: "Sir,

all this is just to let you know what your (sic)

up against. Forget it...." And on a Gospel newsletter:

"Are you making any progress? I doubt you are.

I doubt you can! D.B." from Attica prison, New York,

I'm not sure what most of this page means but the fact that it's written in broken words and such short lines is an indication that this is a very coded section of the Gnome notebook.

___


OK, I'll give up the secret.

The secret is

that I will pet

it

i

on Bi

ll B

urr

o

ugh

s be

ca

use I had a rea

son aw

hile ago (heilige¹ Mann) be

ca

use he use

d to b

e a peder

as

t and is an author

it

y and an e

as

y sub

tle, A

risto

cracy, the

re we

re mo

re re

a

sons be 

fore for he's pa

rt of t

he poe

m? fro and to seem to be spon

sore

d w

hen I w

rite a lon

g gay s

tory an

d he Will s

ee th

is poem through lo

am, will cover it for eighty-

eight, for years as m

y next poem. Will be

a long gay story:

I al

read

y k

no

w t

he w

hole thin

g b

ut musth¹ (sic) s

till w

rite it l

ate

rrrr.

___

Etc., etc., etc., sic, sic, sic. or spelling back

wards. Count. Why?

I wish I didn't have to,

won't continue this poem.

Three weeks later?

Soon to the RAMJAC Pit

whether or not I destroy the whole:

my existence and reflection in the time-turn.

Burn! The Calvinists are right, the Catholics are

right, the Jews and multi-Lutheran synods right,

the Moslems are almost right, Buddhists missing

Christ, the matrix.


___


Titles: Practically Edible: the set.

-philosophy applied, in in

-vented more time

to be contin-

ued.

The end comes before the beginning.

Fill in the blanks.

___

Even I, the head Hacker, can't butcher web sites as well as Edward butchers language, cuts it up so that what had been the smallest parts, words,

now have parts to them, letters, significances, magic.

The head Hacker never gets Writer's Void.

There has to be some other way. There has to be some other way.

Rimbaud keeps supplying me with khat and Yage,

but he doesn't tell me how to prepare it.

"It's like curare," Bill Kurtis says, "used on arrow tips to poison people. The perfect murder weapon."

I'll need to teach Edward (I like to call him "Ed" which he detests) how to murder Baysans.

Hit and run won't do like it did for Poet X.

Poet X is dead. Long live Poet X.

Perhaps curare. Perhaps something even better.

Ed's looking for work and beating his head bloody.

I hate to see it (but I'm licking my lips).

"The Perfect Murder" on American Justice, Jim Post's favorite channel is Court TV.

He's sleeping as I write this, learning tomorrow's lines.

I'm working up some murder instruction sheets to leave for Edward (if you must).

Where does the poem end and the murder begin?

I'd better save this. Save early, destroy often.

More from Ed's lame attempt at chronicling my fire:

___

This is the use of memory:

Reverend Jim Jones Eliot

on the mount, the kool-aid fire

sermon by Alan the grey

boy, suddenly there's Godot.

This is the use of memory:

Unless we learn from the past,

we are doomed

to repeat the mistakes, or some

-thing like unheeded that. And so

this is the use of memory:

Keeping only one jump a

-head of the future which is as

evil as the past and they (evil

-ly, lye, lie, lay, low) know it.

___

The only thing I can see in these writings that presages a mental breakdown in the direction of up is perhaps an attention to religious events: Jim Jones, etc. It's not enough to warrant the kind of mental event that occurred.

What's missing? Like the fact that he was in physical pain (dental), there's no documentation of the things Edward Lacie was reading as he was writing the Gnome notebook. Not a single mention of Ram Dass or Rimbaud or "The Waste Land". Here to pray where prayer has been sufficient.¸³

It's dull, isn't it? My own private Ramadan: fasting when the sun's up for a month.

I can't find the exact formula to repeat the seer experience. I'm going to end up with New Coke instead of Coke.

I can't write Edward's poetry forever. "I won't do anything at all." (Last line before the chorus of Matchbox Twenty's early hit single, "Push," circa 1987.)