Philly Thermal, image by Adam Fieled
Feel
I.
I saw the greatest artists of my generation parched,
hardened & scarred
by a
virtual machine,
blood cleaned from shiny surfaces, purposed to cut out the
soul’s wisdom, the body’s
agita,
the heart’s
heaviness, creators neutered & spayed by a decaying
empire, wired
for a
never-ending battle
w/ bureaucrats, corporate drones & art-world phonies,
bones rattling
in Philly
February snow & ice,
D.C.’s perpetual snooze, loose NYC streets that tighten
round the Village,
while
they tried to chill-pill themselves,
direct their energy to the task at hand, finding a plan, an
escape route from playing
cogs, greased-gears freezing all around
them—
who worked for banks & were fired for downloading
porn, moved into dank South Philly
studios,
recorded, put out CDs, whored themselves to wine-stores & occult dives
where
poor mottled matrons paid ten dollars for card readings & felt themselves
bleed at
the collapse of the Tower,
who stripped, did coke, published poems on the Net, learned
massage, started as Temps,
ended as
Temps, sang dirges at West Philly art-parties for free Schlitz, dove-
tailed
joints in brick alleyways, scars glossed over w/ blush, sweaty-breasted,
who wrote comic book epics for guitar & voice, developed
mystical Jesus raps at Goth
clubs,
Christian-blissed as Trent Reznor blared through stacks of amps & love-
boys got
blow-jobs in corners,
who were pregnant at 21, had & ignored the kid, got
locked in jail for neglect, expecting
daddy
to come w/ bail, no help from a shitty city,
who threw out poetry to work for an architect, drank w/ kids
in Manayunk bars
&
got a beer-gut, “make it new” screwed into soft-fucks,
who were forced into drag by failure, post-avant punk
records dis-chorded into oblivion,
scarcely attended bumper-boring tours
from Alaska to Milan
who made the cover of the City Paper, lost a sugar-mommy
& dealt coke, wigger pants,
trench-coated, eyes bleary, nose runny, walking round & round liquor
stores miming interest in Pinot Grigio,
who got on planes to London
don’t
work even near the Hyde Park Serpentine,
who spent afternoons at McGlinchy’s cadging Manhattans, making
out w/ strangers,
blowing band dudes w/ Ron Wood haircuts, dreaming of a Khyber stage
&
the
place packed,
who lost a hustler father to heart failure, took Greyhounds
to Atlantic City
trust-fund dollars on poker chips glistening black in the lurid light,
ice rattling
in
gin tumblers, Italian pimps leaning forward for the kill in silk pants,
who painted Apollos & Athenas in high-windowed studios
in the Gilbert Building
getting laid on pull-out black sofas stained cadmium red,
who went to D.C. to lobby, did puppet shows miming
councilmen in Philly, gave up lit
to
look for kinks in The System & were left holding onions in the Italian
Market,
who managed Chinese restaurants in State
College , sang shirtless for bands at the White
Lodge, sailed off to Oregon
who followed two L.A. chicks
from Bar Noir to Ocean
City
& becoming a ghost & drifting down halls & collapsing on
carpeted stairs,
who played soccer w/ tin cans on summer afternoons in alleys
off of South Street
Fly singing “you’re too fat
to fuck” in the background,
who took in jail-bait to complete a ménage a trios, then
watched her try to jump out the
window of the Highwire Gallery, strip at parties but for a thong, get
arrested for stealing from a Verizon register, all the while keeping two
boyfriends in South Jersey ,
construction workers, blind to the bricks,
who spent nights chasing hipster-girls in Upper
Darby , paying the cab-fare from Dirty
Frank’s, then left to rot on the downstairs couch surrounded by plastic
Christmas candles & a mother’s footsteps down the stairs,
who curated minor shows at the Kelly Writer’s House,
dreaming of future glory, having
Koons & Schnabel show up & kiss ass to the one & only,
who shouted at drunken idiots through bull-horns on 4th Street
windows like Dada ready-made patrolmen,
who took girls to the Walnut Street
Bridge midnight , ‘til cops
white
blazing light scared their pants on in the summer mist,
who stumbled half-awake onstage at Doc Watson’s, ploughed
through a short set & sat at
the bar knocking back Tequilas,
eager for the next gig,
Grape Street, Pontiac Grille, La Tazza, Balcony, hallowed
stages where the eternally
neglected Philly bands knocked out Fixx-mixed Corgan-riffed Patti
Smith blues, watched by no one in
particular, & thus by the Gods,
who started independent newspapers & did press-runs of
10,000, garnering national
acclaim & absolutely no money,
who worked nights at the Taco House on Pine Street
scribbling notes for an endless first novel to be read at Molly’s Books
while despair unfolded of ever knowing anything about sex,
& who therefore threw out a U of Arts degree to strip,
thinking of Colette & Courtney
Love, wanting to know what this flesh thing was all about,
who died in obscurity in Roxborough, then had volumes of
poems thrown away by a
jealous lover who was somehow
managing the estate, & is therefore even
more obscure, Alexandra, unacknowledged legislator of Philly lit,
stalking health food at Essene, reading at Robin’s, always taking the
bus,
a car too much hassle & no time to
scribble poems in the back,
what were you working for if not eternity? Your name up in
the klieg lights of greatness,
may happen yet, some of us are holding a torch, will continue to, for you—
who had pictures taken w/ Allen Ginsberg, then locked
themselves in the house once the
Painted Bride Quarterly was gone for good,
who were reduced to writing fishing books when the poetry
wouldn’t fly, then insisted on
comparing themselves to Joyce, Proust, &
Kafka,
who hooked up w/ metal-faced teenagers in stairwells,
sucking on brass where a nipple
should’ve
been, riding a nitrous high into a screened window,
who met guys on the Internet & moved up to Philly from Florida
Juniper
& Locust & were watched by pervs in the parking lot next door,
& then joined spoken-word bands & did shows in
baby-doll dresses, took up w/ a poet,
got
cheated on by a poet & went back to Florida
who decorated an apartment w/ fourteen dead Christmas trees,
licked up pine needles
on slow
nights & had whiskey-drunk one-night stands to kill time,
who decided to move to L.A. ,
was psyched to move to L.A.
move to L.A.
or moved to L.A.
painting, got a new boyfriend & turned into a palm tree,
who appointed themselves guardians of Duchamp’s bikes,
staged toilet races in Old
City
installed grungy bathtubs, humongous cheese graters & doodles of
teeth being
shaved
in space 1026, welded themselves to the Last Drop & the Bean, were
followed
by throngs of Dada-minded hipsters, then went into hiding,
who bought condos off Washington Square
w/ an
incomplete second novel & an NYC agent w/ a talent for evasion,
who wrote columns for Philly Weekly & earned the hatred
of hipsters for loving Simon
&
Garfunkel, saw the world behind thick glasses, wrote songs & earned a
modest
following & was then murdered by a divorce,
who found themselves up against an Ivy League wall, fought
the Philistines w/ Keats,
&
made Penn bow down to the genius of Wordsworth,
who sat in coffee shops talking poetics & politics,
acknowledging the impotence of the
current
generation in fighting Bush & his cronies,
& also acknowledging that this generation is a small
generation & virtual & unlikely
to
change anything substantial now that the Boomers run everything, & it’ll
be this
way ‘til they die out, thirty more years of boredom,
who served cocktails to Centrist poets in Boston
writers
& others, wanted to be Bonnie & Clyde w/ out Clyde ,
who made a mint off a rock record in Japan
looking to keep falling in love all the time in the Village,
who put together multi-media shows, served hash brownies
& whiskey, made a little
money
& used it to buy more hash,
who e-mailed Noam Chomsky, decided not to be Zionist &
took off a Star-of-David,
realizing that the Holy Land is only an
interior reality,
who went to live on a kibbutz & came back disillusioned
w/ everything & not having
fought
in the army went out & bought guns instead,
who fled to San
Francisco
watching it sit unmolested at Book Trader,
who was fired from Barnes & Noble for feeling up female
employees, worked in a loony
bin, wrote in the loony bin, then
caved in & joined the Masters program at
who roamed Villanova searching for dead souls, waiting for
the words to come back as
years
slipped away into a haze of academic mediocrity,
who stood in line w/ bags of pasta at dollar stores, picked
up butts from sidewalks, took
resin
hits, chomped on bits of stale bread & shat in buckets,
who did Action paintings on cold nights in Northern
Liberties, slaved away at Office
Cents
lugging parcels around Center
City
swank
apartments & made slow-motion art movies of silent screams & hollering
demons
wading through the half-frozen Delaware
who painted Kabbalistic cool-color fantasies & sent them
to Tyler
restaurants & threw canvases away & walked around Germantown
arrival
of the Sixth Race who will cool the Earth & set it on the Tree of Life
&
protect it from malignant ministers of Malkuth,
who retreated to Philly after 9/11 to find the city
half-dead & the sinking stink of global
warming
hovering over Rittenhouse Square
vampires w/ Gucci glasses wandering &
watching & warping what tenderness
remained
for lovers of cigars & Salman Rushdie,
who mourned for Rachel Corrie from a perch at the Good Dog,
wrote secret pro-
Palestinian pamphlets & hid them under socks & condoms,
who tried painting & poetry & music but found the
balance in yoga, only to find the
yogic
mind devalued in the capitalist slip-stream of a run-down economy, &
thus
made plans to go to New Mexico
who found themselves a million miles away from everything on
Race Street
to Cherry St. Moore
home
& found her ready & then was too drunk to fuck,
who ploughed through five years PHD work to find a vacant
job market & the few open
classes
not enough to pay rent, so built houses in the ‘burbs & sipped Bud in
rabbi’s
back yards hearing stories of Moses & Joshua & Aaron, & the story
of Job
hit a special nerve,
who got fat in Bainbridge
Street
poems
remembering Virginia
give it had or didn’t have as it
bobbed up & down in the waves,
who met booty calls on the Franklin Institute steps &
got naked & boned watched by Jane
across
the street fingering herself secretly,
who got sent to Budapest
&
having been burned out by years of scraping three-chord riffs & hitting
bars
&
orgies & all the time wondering why things seemed so empty,
who were exiled to academic New Hampshire
vignettes of coffee Moms & smoking Dads & cold mornings out on
Federal,
who kept afloat writing copy for Urban Outfitter’s, getting
blitzed at poetry parties & up-
staging
ex-boyfriends w/ yuppie-puppy hook-ups,
who worked as concierge at the Four Seasons, scored w/ a
pale blonde bookstore chick
only to
have a bookstore Byron steal her back & write about it,
&
you have to see him every day, he’s always lurking in odd
café
corners & no one knows what he’s thinking or why,
(& in fact no one knows what anybody’s thinking, it’s a
sin & a drag & candor is in short
supply
in an artificial virtual era, & our “there” is nowhere),
who collapsed in lines at Starbucks, knocking over displays
of gourmet tea, spent two
weeks
in the psych ward at Jefferson , visited by
solicitous boyfriends bearing
chocolate & coffee table Raphael books & playing ping pong for
hours while
several schizophrenics huddle together watching “Sleepless in Seattle
who picked up photographers in coffee-shops & boned them
sans condom on piles
of black
& white prints,
who prowled through suburbs w/ a half-lit bowl, passing
dread Cheltenham where
endless
tears flowed through virginal misery, stopping for a deep hit by the old
house
drowning nostalgia in thick green smoke,
who toured the world & got famous & threw it away
for a needle & couldn’t sleep for the
thought
that the thing could never happen again,
who sat at Gleaners waiting for contracting jobs, played UNO
& Scrabble &were masters
of both,
well-spoken beneath knitted caps & trapped as lame tigers,
who got knocked up by Rastafarians & were left to raise
babies on a waitress’s salary,
picking
up tips & shit for being bitter, sister at home keeping the baby fed,
who wrestled demons of bi-polarity tool-box in hand, looking
for lost screws & sockets,
fixing
locks toilets hinges refrigerators, hoping the voices wouldn’t come at an
important
moment, rattling through the ether w/ a sinister cackle, mocking the
silliness
of ever doing anything other than smoke drink & fuck,
who were flushed out of New Orleans Spruce Street
drinking
through frigid winter Philly doldrums, mornings too raw for walking,
too-white music in the clubs, no mint juleps on the menu, only Jager
& Jack &
Stoli
& Captain Morgan’s,
who got it on w/ keyboardists for riot grrl bands in
bathtubs flooding tiles splashing walls
all for
ten seconds of the ultimate chorus,
who slept w/ a different guy every night two months then
took a year off writing
confessional verse on My-Space for 40,000 friends,
every one of whom wanted sex, love, a chance to hold
somebody tenderly & forget that
the
whole virtual charade ever happened,
who labored through slow days in Philadelphia
sharp
where Market hits City Hall & the Broad
Street
who took the Broad Street Line to Allegheny to look at an
art gallery as possible event-
space
but found a rat-infested shit-hole w/ a few bad Basquiat imitations on
the
wall & a toilet dripped on not by Pollock & a floor that would inspire
another
Munch & a girl from the Northeast before a mirror but only too round,
& who was forced to shut-down a co-op that no one could
run any more in a fractious
scene
in a fractious city in a fractious country in a fractious era,
a fractious world where the artist counts for shit &
waits for shit to happen that can’t
happen
anymore because the numbers aren’t there anymore the guns are,
the artist plays w/ guns, runs around shooting blanks at a
dead world, curved into
himself
like an ingrown nail, hailed randomly by strangers to carry boulders
up
hills & teach the children, the noble artist looks for the transcendent
will
the natural will the will-to-form, the will to turn around
the deadness into something else
a place
where hope lives & allows one to cope w/ what’s been dead in America
for
years the spirit the spirit the feeling that things are progressing must
progress
that
progress can be made & there’s no reason to wait for anyone else to do it
cause why should they it falls on the
artist to create it all him or her self & that’s
what they’ve done & what they’re doing & if a new
dawn awaits or if it doesn’t the
the
struggle goes on to put things down that mean something more than
nothing which in this day & age means a hell of a lot because it’s
worth
everything & you can’t quantify it if you tried
II.
What hung over Philly, NYC, D.C., what swept through the
freezing streets w/ sleet &
cold snow?
Virtual women on cell-phones clicking buttons talking Jolie
Spears & Simpson, stopping
in
boutiques to try on blouses & purses & cursing maxed credit cards!
Virtual men in suits & London
on
Phillies Fliers Nationals Eagles living vicariously through overpaid clowns!
Virtual tunes on the radio, three chord synth-driven sappy
cliché-ridden tripe belted out
by Whitney
Britney & Mariah, plush beat-programmed god-damned garbage!
Virtual movies w/ impossible sex scenes everything falling
into place perfectly for two
perfect
bodies sans sloppiness of real caresses & how people look undressed!
Virtual galleries showing warmed over nihilistic facile
installations of piles of rubbish
lugged in
w/ out skill craft or love sitting in a dump masquerading as art!
Virtual ads for virtual products gum that chews better Old
Navy sweaters McDonald’s
hamburgers
Toyotas Hondas Oldsmobiles hot wheels for prosperous suburban
jerks
jamming up expressways carbon dioxide flying into an atmosphere of
used to be
American greatness faded into days of fat complacence!
Virtual leaders vomiting sound-bites for virtual commentators
Fox News CNN spouting
platitudinous blarney to keep the asshole half of the country happy w/ a
disastrous
administration bucking the Kyoto
for no
good reason other than crude black crap to kill forests!
Virtual TV “illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness”
inducing mass spiritual slumber
humming a
nation to sleep believing everything’s OK as long as Will & Grace
stay happy
inside the little idiot box on four hours a night!
Virtual bars & conversations knocking back twenty lagers
& pints of Jagermeister
trying to
forget years frittered away in pursuit of music that didn’t work
paintings
that didn’t sell movies that went unseen as the world swirled by
denying
they ever knew or cared what art was!
Virtual love affairs based on fucking can’t say what you’re
feeling but kneel before the
altar of
sex for its’ own sake magazine culture!
Virtual friends virtually loving virtually hugging virtually
drugging each other on the
Internet
fretting waiting for e-mail games of who writes first!
Virtual Jesus virtual Moses virtual Buddha virtual Jewish
pleas to please return to Baruch
Atah Adonai Elohanu Melech Chaolom,
Blessed art thou Lord of the Universe Forever & Ever
Amen now please give me Bar
Mitzvah
money to spend on Nintendo Super Mario & a hot new I-Pod ready
for
instant use on spring afternoons before Hebrew School
& the world is only virtually holy anymore &
holiness can be bought in any store where
money
changes hands cause solvency is Heaven Thy Kingdom Come Thy Will
Be Done
our Father, Holy Ghost & Son delivered all in holy green!
III.
suffer ye victims
of a virtual age!
suffer ye victims
of Microsoft rage!
suffer ye noble,
wayward as Shelley,
suffer ye hopeful,
fire in belly!
suffer a new, bitter,
screwed, littered America
suffer ye who know
Jesus w/ out casting
stones!
suffer the action
abandoned to dumbness,
suffering the actions
unspoken & loveless,
suffering the action
unfurling our country,
picking up oil &
oil-soaked money!
IV.
Allen Ginsberg! I’m w/ you in Heaven
where we feel like
two sages,
where bread is unleavened
& no granfalloon rages!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where the air is
like nitrous,
where deadness is deadened
& you’re
plagued by no virus!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where the feeling
is placid,
where we’re ruled by no felon
& lay tripping
on acid!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where the Buddha
is grinning,
where no self-schemas leaden
lead to feelings
of sinning!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where poetry’s
money,
where the moon’s always setting
& the sky’s
always sunny!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where each spirit
is sexy,
where you love who you’re bedding
& you touch
them correctly!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where no fame is
too famous,
where you know what you’re getting
& all power is
blameless!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where each spirit can run things,
where self-governed settlements
take place of
gun-slings!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where America
where the states have no nettles
& the taxes
are worth it!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where we’re writing
this poem,
where we’re secretly betting
how far we can
throw ‘em!
I’m w/ you in Heaven
where the jokes are
Eternal,
where the Hope is unfettered
& the dope is
supernal!
I’m w/ you in Heaven,
where I’ll stay
‘til the war ends,
where I’ll lay w/ your blessing
in the shade of a
God-Head!
V.
Apocalypse! Apocalypse! It’s over! It’s over! We’re living
in twilight! Twilight the streets, twilight the houses, twilight the beats,
twilight the louses! This is Rome Rome , this is Egypt Rome
—Adam Fieled
