I Need an Editor or a Hand Job

I am partial to people and things that are deemed unsuccessful or losers.  Second novels, the hard six, eggs covered with bacteria, old gods, scars on pretty faces, missed appointments, schizophrenic bums; all carry a certain attraction.

I was talking to my fellow authors today and we decided that we needed to stop posting shit on Tin Hats.  Not that the words are shit, well maybe, but it’s more the act of posting…bam, here’s another Tin Hats for your enjoyment…all ten of you.  Too much…it’s simply too much.  How can we edit this much shit?

Confusion sets in and our eyes go in circles like birds above carrion.

To get inside of each of my failures seems far more important than being a fan of the popular and the prosperous. There are odd things to learn in realities gone wrong and if one is looking for illusive truth, moving a dead baby into the shade is more fulfilling than wearing expensive clothing and being on time for a leech massage.

The Dadaista in me says, “Art is dead…there is no longer something called art.”  Maybe…look at the guy who won an art prize by putting a crucifix into a jar of piss and then sold the photos.  I think the devil paid around $270,000 at a Sotheby’s auction: signed and numbered.  Forget the cross, look at what the piss brought.

People get tired of me living in bamboo huts.  Between yellow-green cracks in the wall I keep my eye on the garbage dump across the path.  I lie on the wooden platform, there, in the hut, watching the white smoke twist up and the dogs running back and forth and then she comes to me and puts her head on my shoulder.  Jonathan Wilson is playing on the tape recorder, the little one I bought from the drunken sailor as the schooner headed into the red sky.

New moon, full moon…we need to walk down the beach searching for neon waves.

She can’t read or write and is poor and not particularly good-looking, but she keeps a monkey on a long, trouble-infested chain.  I’m attracted to women with monkeys.

The wash of probability drips upon my face.  Understanding how things get to be so disastrous is my religion.  It’s really too bad I can’t belch lightning and fart thunder.  I could get everyone on their knees.

I feel alive when I am out there, somewhere, with only the derelict and the hopeless.

Mexican hair is always black.  Who knew the night can dye?

Riding down from the valley of the silver moon, across the Bajio; stumbling along the trail, always down towards the pueblito.  She’s waiting for me in the bamboo hut.

We feel more than we see and are given to naming slices of silence.

The careless driver, the hole, the bullet between a drag of pot and a sip of coffee, the shift of political giants who spit speeches that move millions toward the edge and then we all cry at night and touch the faces of sleeping lovers.  Nobody likes it and no one is happy.  Yet we live to die.

What are these things that control us, that tell us what to do by whispering subtle words without meaning?

Who built the unaffordable coffins and trained the soloist who can’t sing?

Who are these people who smash our faces with hammers and take chain saws to our children and then plow entire villages into the mud?  Who named the chemicals that go into the daily whirl of our lives as we track each other across the great divide?

Rusted coolers and boarded up gas stations are the lining of life: the chant of the Bible.

At first she writes to me about going to the ends of the earth in search of herself.  That is an elusive prize under the silver moon: the new moon, the full moon and then she’s dead, just like art, just like all this shit on Tin Hats.

I need a good editor or at least a hand job.  I’m totally open.