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Author: Bartleby

Looking at the Sky

Looking at the Sky

I remember him well, a young man draped over a metal tube bench, looking up as the sunlight dappled through the lightly scurried leaves of the some flame-spreading maple. The green underbellies twisting oh so slightly as they glowed in the sunlight. He wore some kind of T-shirt shorts and black suede ankle-high walking boots with flat rubber soles and he propped his crew-cut head atop on the metal tube arm on one end of the bench, while twisting his body into the crook between benchseat and bench back. An uncomfortable pose, and it didn’t last long. Listening to a best of Credence Clearwater playing on the discman he’d brought with him from his hometown across the sea and through a thousand miles, over plains, across rivers, through forests and towns, over mountains and lakes, cities, and all. He was a young American in early summer in Heidelberg, resting on on a cobblestone plaza in the old part of the university.

The new part of the university is a ways out of the downtown, and as ugly as Bauhaus. But the old part is beautiful old buildings woven into a beautiful medieval town. This building in particular, which had to do maybe with law and/or philosophy, looks charmingly eternal. Red brick at the corners; over each of two front doors, a red-stone arch flanked by small red-stone columns half disappeared into the facade, which is the whitest white; and three stories of a dozen plus red-stone trimmed windows. And the roof a most remarkable undulating barn, covered in black scales, shot through with little portholes aimed straight ahead by what look like extremely sawed-off cannons, and topped off with a black rectangular clock tower, itself completed with a similar looking roof that quickly gives way to a patinated globe-topped staff.

This young man, muscled by youth and tanned by the sun, felt the rustle of the gentle breeze, felt the light fill the air and splash all objects. He saw the brightness of the leaves and the light blue of the cloudless sky. He’d purchased this CD, which now explained that it ain’t no fortunate son, underling the point with it’s folksy rocknrolling,at a flea market in Le Havre.

Have you ever been to Le Havre? It is the favorite destination for overwrought, overleisured young English-speakers exchanging a year away at the University of Heidelberg, and who now–late-May, two-thirds through the second semester of smoking, drinking, goofing off in German, freewriting, and taking a few courses–have, due to a confusing incident itself founded upon a great and still relatively un-self-perceived distance between their minds and their feelings, realized that they must kill their English-speaking self, which–they ramblingly reason–would best be accomplished with a trip to Le Havre in which they continue speaking to themselves nonstop, but for these five days only in their now passable German or their French, which they’ve studied now for one and a half semesters.

But have you ever been there? To Le Havre?

Birthday in Barcelona

Birthday in Barcelona

No one remembers the details of his 21st birthday. There was a tall, plank-thin, tube-limbed, big-eyed, laughing sweet blond guy there. Also a shortish, sturdily curvy, always-tan (with or without the sun’s help), eagerly thoughtful girl with dark brown kinky hair. He’d known them both for some time, but never really talked to the girl. She was more the other guy’s friend. Anyway, there they were. But who remembers what happened or what it looked like?

A beach somehow, sun sparkling on the waves and sand, the happy hoards splashing in the cool waters or basking in the warm air and on the warmer sand. Then darkness, cooler but still warm air, a bright lit bar or restaurant where they drank sangria and conversed. Who can imagine what sorts of things they said?

At that time, at the age of 21, having his birthday in Barcelona without bothering to try to call his parents (it was, to be fair, still kind of tricky and expensive to make international calls in those muggy days before widespread cellphone use). What was going on with him? I cannot tunnel back to him. I like how well his skin accepted the sun, how easily it let the summer brown it. I applaud the rippling of his muscles and the vigor of his movements. I envy the inability of alcohol or–as we’d soon find out–cigarettes to counteract his body’s certainty, it’s exquisitely solid grip on health. I flinch by what he says, and woebegone my eyes while flatten-pursing my lips when I think of the distance between his mind and the rest of him. Creaking, groaning, wobbling, jerking, like a robot trying to move like a human. Painful to watch. But a fun guy, I guess. And so funny, I’ve heard. Who can remember?

Not everything goes well. Sometimes you try to connect what is inside with the outside options and just don’t have the linking structure in place. And what then are the others to think? They stand outside your outside, within their own inside, looking through their own gauzy linking contraption into the common space where you are carrying on so awkwardly. Their wisdom sees your desperation and goes gentle on you. Their own blindness sees things differently. But neither their wisdom nor their blindness can accept a bouquet of flowers tossed hurriedly at their face.

She changes her mind

She changes her mind

She tied her shoelace and looked up, her long muscled butt on the bench, her long stringy blond hair in a pony tail bunched out in the crook of her neck. Pale face, red cheeks, blue eyes. She’ll never make the pros. Why should she want to anyway? The pros don’t make that much and they tire themselves out and wear out their young bones pounding up and down the court.

She’ll never make the pros. She’s always risen early to shoot a few hoops. When she was just a kid, out back on the nice smooth white driveway, shooting freethrows (WNBA marked) in the dusty morning light. And then when she was on the highschool team, early to the gym where she and a few others of both sexes–mostly the other sex–had, with the help of an energetic coaching staff, secured the right to shoot hoops from 6:30AM to 7:30AM. And now every morning at one of the gyms on campus, twisting the rubbery toe of her white hightops into the yellow plastic flooring, reveling in the squeak, setting back on her haunches, ball overhead like a dancing bear she readies herself for the shot.

Maybe she’ll make the pros. But I doubt it. She’s never had the quickness.

The seats are small. Those wrap-around desks of metal tubing and composite plastic colored yellow. Not a super bright yellow, but not a soft yellow. A banana yellow, an industrial yellow. Her long legs in blue jeans (feet in flip flops–like so many in her sorority when the weather permits) sprawl out like a giraffe standing up. In a sorority sweatshirt she–long forearms triangling on the tabletop and long fingers dangling over the edge–leans over talking to a crew-cut young man in a similarly casual and Greek outfit.

She’ll probably be a chemist. Or a doctor. She likes sciences and is very industrious. She doesn’t even want to go pro all that much anymore.

Hero and Lady and King

Hero and Lady and King

The Hero:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used:
Here comes the lady; let her witness it.

His Lady:
In dark times wild minds race vainly fore
while gentle heads expand and plop inside
the gooey gel of milk n honey’s mix.
Mistaken both the over and the under strong–
So hold then each Medusa’s writhing locks,
and look away as you hack them aside.

This man, though not so schooled in sciences
entombed in books, is still surpassing skilled
in keeping to the center, where men best
find the happiest course. That’s

The King her father:
I’ve loved you all your life, my child bold
and bright who sparkles ‘gainst this world as stars
against the night.
Your counsels recommend I to those who
counsel me.
So long I’ve trusted in your mind, I must
now trust your heart–for mind and heart do share
quite equal parts in wisdom’s secret art
to know the good and find the path that leads
us flesh and bone spirit casements where
the good would tell us go.

Her father loved me; oft invited me;
Still question’d me the story of my life,
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have passed.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,–such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer’d. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, twas strange, ’twas passing strange,
‘Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank’d me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used:
Here comes the lady; let her witness it.

Mr. Mann comes to town

Mr. Mann comes to town

It was a drizzly day in Heidelberg, a town with the oldest university in Germany. I believe the university was founded centuries ago–perhaps 400, or maybe more, it just depends how you look at it.

It was a drizzly October day in Heidelberg, and some 21 year old American exchange student walked down the cobblestop Haupstrasse, smoking a thin cigar. He’d be switching to cigarettes within a few weeks, but he didn’t know it yet.

It was a drizzly October afternoon in Heidelberg, and some 19 year old French exchange student waived to the American exchange student she’d met the other day when all the exchange students had toured the exercise complex.

Let them go, let them slide apart, let them go without meeting, let him just politely wave back and keep moving on, let him drift on past her pretty young face. Don’t let him notice how cute she is, how bright her face shines, how clean her face curves and how big her eyes smile.

Oop! Too late.

Mr. Mann lived next door. Well, not in October, but a little later. In October the girl from Arizona lived next door. She moved to pursue a slightly bigger room on the other hall. There were two halls, and they met at the entrance to the kitchen.

Mr. Mann, who at some point lived next door, was short and homely losing his thick brown hair on top and grown as a beard down to his concave little chest. Each night Mr. Mann comforted himself with a double-sized wine bottle. He liked to talk but had nothing to say, and his forehead was bunched up like lamp shades fashionable in the olden days.

Mr. Mann had things to say, but he was too lonely to organize his thoughts and so just bounced them off you like a fipped-up ping-pong table. Mr. Mann studied something or other, not because he wanted to become that something or other, but because he liked being a student.

At some point, this short man, perhaps early thirties and with a glossy pate, a skilled musician and able scholar, disappeared.

A pupil–a young blue-eyed man in a loose-fitting square-cut T-shirt–of Mr. Mann’s found his way up to the hallway. His blond hair plopped beautifully on his long pale head like a bowl of angel-hair spaghetti. “Do you know where he went?” No one does. The kid looks angry. Maybe he already paid for a bunch of lessons. Or maybe he’s just sick of Mr. Mann’s shit, sick of wanting to learn to play like a man who’s never learned to live. Speculation, pure speculation. The truth is that we don’t know what made that handsome, soft-featured young fellow scowl and pout up his face into some kind of angry ashtray.

Who is Mr. Mann? Why did he come to town? Why did he leave? These questions were scarcely raised. He was there, shuffling with his professorial little wine gut out front, perpetually drunk but never noticeably so. And then he was gone. The whole thing lasted a couple months. The young American exchange student knew the most about him, but no one asked him for the particulars, and in time he would forget most of what he’d learned in their few conversations. To this day, no one from that floor of an old dorm building slated for demolition come summer knows what became of Mr. Mann. I guess he died. Actually, there’s no reason to suppose that. For most 30 year olds living in the glorious West in our prosperous era, twenty years pass amiably enough and death still looms far off in the distance, a worry but still not anything approaching a certainty.

This was Mr. Mann’s chapter. Will he get so much as another sentence?

I don’t want to get old without a cause

I don’t want to get old without a cause

Children of the future,
looking to see further
than we did when we took
our whirl as cute hope.

Give up blank space:

Discarded Verses:

What becomes of a soul
when it’s no longer fresh faced,
a part of the future?

What becomes of a heart
when it’s time to grow up
but it cannot?

What becomes of a mind
that never learned to play
the way it is on the inside?

Where to go now that it’s over
a

A man with no purpose

A man with no purpose

Too lazy even to drink
too bored even to bitch
too done even to remember
what he’d meant to make.

No one cares.
Nobody minds.
He leaves them alone.
It is kind of fun to get big eyes
and lean into a friend, all soft
with concern for the poor guy.

One more day here and there
I’ve quit believing in you
in what you said
It isn’t for me to say
but everybody knows
you’re done
a has been has at least
something to look back upon
something to smile distantly
about when what was’s raised

Take me back to sea

Take me back to sea

He’s always been a funny guy,
flips up the collar of his pea coat
tidies the flip-up of navy woolen cap
struts like a rooster with forward-pursed beak
gonna turn the world upside down.

There he goes, hands in woolen pockets,
peacocking like he’s moving to 70s funky rock
instead of the clank of heavy chain, the whirr
of spinning crane and the smirking shouts
of dockers.

Take him back, sweet sea, sweep him back out into your rough hewn heart.
Take him back, let him wobble his head and glitter movie star eyes
while harmlessly floating far from society.

Author: BW
Copyright: AMW

Evil Friends

Evil Friends

Sinister friends,
laughing sneerers with wooden hearts,
counting money at a wobbly card table
in a dank dirt-floored cellar
where a single bulb hangs overhead
from a long and fraying wire.

My dirty friends,
screwing as a job
drinking as a cause
smoking on the job
bored with their hair,
how to change,
really change
my look?

My stupid friends,
chortling and grabbing
after waitresses and in parking lots
proud to fail and just
take it easy man

A man without friends is a man looking
he’s a man on the prowl
a man with a mission
anything to end this loneliness
anything to meet my needs
as a social animal.
You know?

Author: BW
Copyright: AMW

The water watcher

The water watcher

Watching water from my perch sitting on the sky bringing the ladle to my lips and you cannot hear my screams down there down inside the terrarium where the pigeons fight for crumbs in the town square.

Drinking from a paper cup. Drinking water I stole from the board of elections table when the old woman in the carpet-bag sweater turned, with an open smile of delighted surprise (a clever joke from a real fire cracker) and holding the rims of her swooping batwing glasses, to her neighbor.

I live her inside this dark room. I pace the floors wet slate floors in bare feet. Cold and wet and squishy with a plop plop smack sound all day long, hands behind back, stupid head down, trying to pretend to try to think. So lame. Someone come help me! Someone lower a love crane and pull me up out of here. Someone someone out there, get the floodlights off and come to the small hole in the ground 100 feet above my head. I can’t see you–especially as your head obscures my only source of light. Call down to me; tell me you believe in

We don’t know who can stop the waste of life and love.