the gift

i wasn't always this way

sitting here in my la-z-boy

pass me that remote, will you?
thanks, we don't need to compete
with that stupid television

the crap they put on now
it's just bizarre, shows about people
with mental conditions like hoarding

yeah i watch them now and then
it's kind of like when you see
a smash up on the freeway
you can't take your eyes off it
not at first anyway

so, what was i...
oh yeah, i wasn't always this way

i mean, living in this house
and barely going out at all

i was in the spotlights
-believe it or not.

see that picture over there,
on the mantel?
the one beside the little statue?

that's me.
doing my one man show.
hardly recognize me now, can ya?

see, that was when i had become
the master of the random
you want me to explain?

it's like this:
when you make something,
i mean almost anything
a painting, a house, a car
a poem, it tends to have
a certain pattern, a symmetry

or maybe not exactly symmetry
but the structure, the contrivance
the hand of the creator
so to speak, is apparent

we recognize that a person
created it rather than nature
it's the difference between say
a really earnest attempt

to make an artificial christmas tree
and a fir tree growing in the woods
but that's what i could do

make stuff that looked like nature
i could arrange rocks in a pattern that was beautiful
but had a randomness and asymmetry
that still contained the sacred and mysterious

i had this gig doing panels for a big
apartment project down by the embarcadero
setting river pebbles in concrete
and it was really going great,

but i had a little habit of starting
off my day with a couple boilermakers
down at this dive on the docks
(this was before they sanitized
and yuppified the waterfront)

anyway, even though i was doing
all this great work, the contractor
kind of got a stick up his ass
about me showing up for work
with a pretty good buzz on

and he thought, well these panels
with all the pebbles look random and natural,
there's no discernible pattern.

anybody could do it.
so he laid me off and got some
regular sober guy to try to do the gig

and well, you know what happened, right?
no matter how he tried, the pebbles
started going into rows, and worse than that,
because he was trying to make it look natural,
they were really awkward half-assed

-they looked like shit.

so finally, they laid him off and hired me back
and i finished up the job

i realized then that i could apply this
to other things, that it was just the way
my brain works, a kind of cognitive dissonance
that still had some pattern to it
like chaos theory, know what i mean?

like the way driftwood piles up
at the high tideline on the beach
or clouds are shaped and arranged across the sky,
the color that the sun paints them with at sunrise

so i began to cast my net to gather up
other kinds of stuff, with a camera or
a tape recorder, and of course my eyes and ears
and i would put them together
in photographs or poems

i think that's what jackson pollack
was trying to do, in his way
letting the action guide his hand
to strip away the confines of deliberation
the imprisonment of mind,

but at the same time, there is a consciousness
at play, it's kind of like like you fool the frontal cortex
and let the deeper parts of your mind direct
your hand or your words or whatever and bring out
something that has meaning and beauty
even in apparent dissonance
without being just a jumble or gibberish

do you really think a monkey could do that?

it's hard! i mean, i think that's what joyce
was trying to do with finnegan's wake
but you need a annotated guide to really
get what he was saying, so does that
mean his attempt failed? maybe.
i'm glad he tried.

like i think that i have. but i can't seem to tap
that magic anymore. my instincts have slipped away
now the world itself is too bewildering,
algorithms do this all auto-magically
if i search the web for 'rats in a piano'
a million hits come up: even a video of rats playing on a piano
pied pipers, the superstitions of negros in new orleans,
piano insurance against vermin damage,
exterminators............

there's a television show about that now you know?
billy the exterminator. followed by shows
dedicated to morbid obesity,
or how to protect myself from
national security agencies tracking
credit card microchips by lining
my wallet with aluminum foil

what could i possibly say that equals
that bouillabaisse? speaking of which,
it's time for the show about the crab fishermen braving arctic storms,
would you pass me the remote, if you don't mind?
i think i'll just ease this la-z-boy back to full recline