Cindy and Bert - Schlager Gehen Metal

Lazarus II -2022

LAZARUS II

Two summers ago
In the black night of Brooklyn
I
A sixty-nine year old man spewed blood
Into the bathroom tub
After wiping the retch
From my face
More spew, more blood, liters of blood red red red
Something not right
Something very wrong
And I went back to sleep
Planning to go to a hospital
If I make the morn__
At dawn
I crossed the East River
Not in an amubulance
In a taxi
To a 1st Avenue hospital
Inside the emergency room
The staff took one look
A scrum of nurses, orderlies, and doctors speed my body from ER to OR
Many hands stripped my old body naked
“Sir, can you hear me?
A young intern
Nod
“You are bleeding to death from the varices.”
“Varices?”
“Small stomach fissures."
A nod
"Do you have family in New York?”
Head shake from side to side
“Do you want to be revived?”
“From the dead?”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”___
An oxygen mask
Over my mouth and nose
“If you have any prayers, say them.”
“Síoraíocht.”
The Celtic word for eternity
No meaning to Christians
Their only afterlifes
Heaven hell or purgatory__
None of that now
Only the hiss of gas
Propofol
Me
Into a Limbo
White light
Nothing, only white
There was something else___
Eternal nothingness
Síoraíocht times zero equals zero
This was death
This was eternity
I was cool with that__
And then I was back
Life
The waking eternity
Here
Pain
The Here not my own bed__
Their hospital
The pain mine.
None of this a dream
Sucked air
The other patient in the room
Not breathing
Never again
Lost to eternity___
Me
Hospital
Nurses
Doctors
An earnest doctor reading a chart
“You were very lucky. We stopped the bleeding.”
“I like luck.”
Ahd in Gaelic
“I have bad news.”
Plenty of bad news__
Cancer
Cirrhosis
The looming threat of death
The forever that death's eternity__
I 69
Alone in a hospital bed
In a city of millions
Bad news
It was all right
I had had a grand life__
And I was not dead yet
Still alive
Straddling eternity
No fear for the past, present or future or nothing__
I had died before
Car crashes
Beatings
Broken hearts
Whatever didn’t kill me
Made me wish I was__
My friends thought this was the end
Some saw death in my eyes
My children in Thailand prayed to Buddha
That I will live forever
People believed in life eternal
In Heaven, Limbo,or Hell
I had believed the same
As a child
Not now
I had had a good life___
New England, New York, California, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, Quebec, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Nepal, Tibet, Kenya, Tanzania, and Belize, Guatamala, Honduras, Peru, Jamaica
How can I forget India, the Ganges at dawn
The burning bodies with a raga drifting on the smoke from a ghat temple
Friends by the thousands
Two family in Thailand
Five children
Two grandchildren
A good life__
But I was not dead
Still alive
Straddling eternity
Why fight for life?
Why not accept this fate?
Acceptance
Surrender
Freedom__ Morphine made surrender easy
Free five days later
Never to drink again__
And there was still more to come___
Months passed
A year and more
Pain, jaundice, weight loss
Down to 142 pounds
People thought
I looked like a Rolling Stone
Keith Richards___
Ahead my last days
Fly to Thailand
Watch the sun set
Over the emerald green rice fields
My family by my side
Loaded on morphine__
Then a miracle__
Yulemas
An available transplant.
That night back in the OR
The room cuts to black
Clear light
I know this Limbo well
No gods, no heaven, no hell
Nowhere
Nothing
No one
The embrace of eternity Goen from the white light
A detour
To London
The Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse
My body on a chopping block
Entrails scattered across the wood
Then snap back to life__
Sniff the air
Antiseptic smell
The gore of the abattoir gone
Clean sheets
The machines beep
A nurse gave me water
Tasting of life
My fingers touch
A black scar
Marking the execution of the old me.
A new me alive
Alive with another soul within me
Paula My donor
Forty years old
300 pounds
A suicide
I love her and she me
Old School Lazarus II
Where’s the morphine?__

From the white propofol extinction
Back from the Smithfield Market Slaughterhouse Back to the eternity__

The new me
In a hospital bed
High over the East River
Not alone
Just Paula and Lazarus II
Wicked scars
Never dead before my time
Only dead to the time before now
Now a gray winter sky o’er Brooklyn
Time eternal
Because there is no time in nothingness
Only Nothing Paula and Lazarus II__
We are not lonely together
Living forever again
Remember from whence thee came and where we’re going
Ashes to Ashes not___

poetry lives with me. this poem has gone through many metamorphosis. Every time I read or recite it, the poem spawns newness with the previously unseen. Always alive like me and Paula and eternity and Síoraíocht__

HERMAPHRODITE by Peter Nolan Smith

Starting in 1984 the construction of IM Pei’s pyramid blocked the courtyard access to the Louvre Museum, leaving the ancient palace of the Bourbon kings mostly to art historians and a few tourists, however I had discovered that the museum possessed a second entrance on the Quai du Louvre and regularly wandered the museum’s desolate corridors to admire its vast collection famed for the Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of a quixotic woman was surrounded by a small crowd. Every other gallery in the Louvre had been empty. Maybe forty people gathered before the painting. I didn't get it and turned to leave. I didn't like crowds.

To the left lay an ancient white marble statue on a graying marble mattress of a prone naked woman with her back to me. A robe haphazardly wrapped around ankles. A left foot dangled in the air. Knees swiveled to heighten her buttocks' fullness. A few chips marred by her back. Another chipped her right shoulder. Her hair coiffed like a tame Medusa and her eyes blind as stone. Her face was at peace. I read the placard.

Le Borghese Hermaphroditus.

Hermaphroditus

Hermaphrodite.

My Catholic high school had us read Bullfinch's Mythology. The word's etymology originated from the union of the Greek gods Hermes and Aphrodite. I rounded the near-perfect statue to discover this succubus possessed a penis and breasts. A few more scars to her left arm. I saw not a hint of a vagina. I thought the model to have been a a young transvestite. My friend back in New York, Dove, was one. The guards watched the Mona Lisa. The Hermaphrodite garnered no attention from the tourists. Her body lay as an invitation. I had to touch the marble. My right palm slid across the stone thigh. Thousands of years ago the sculptor had created her from stone like Pygmalion had done so for Galatea as told by Ovid. I had also read his Metamorphoses in high school. Latin was my first second language. The first word we learned was amo. I love.

This statue had seduced men throughout the centuries. The placard explained that the Hermaphroditus had been found buried under the Diocletian Baths until its disinterment in 1618. The Borghese family possessed le Hermaphroditus, until the sleeping beauty had been sold to the Bourbon in the late-18th Century.

I took away my hand. No one had seen me. I left the Louvre in love with a treasure, who could never love me. It was alright. For me there was no love more faithful than unrequited love.

I learned through reading that Lady Townsend was said by Horace Walpole to have remarked, upon viewing his bronze copy of the sleeping hermaphrodite, that "it is the only happy couple she ever saw."

At that time I was employed as the Bains-Douches’ psychionomiste or doorman. The bains-Douches was the coolest boite-de-nuit in Paris along with le Privilege under thLa Palace disco. My friend Alabama Tony tended bar at Paris’ only Mexican restaurant. We threw a football in the cour or courtyard off Rue de Vielle Temple. The chestnut tree in the corner restricted our range and the cobblestones were murder on our feet. Still the French clientele were charmed by our re-enactment of Joe Namath and Don Maynard in Super Bowl III, especially after a menage a trois of margaritas. Young American models flocked to le Studio on Rue du Temple. The restaurant was a grand success and at night’s Alabama Tony played Lynard Skynard and Blue Cheer on his guitar to homesick Southern models, who loved the long-haired redneck for being Alabama Tony in a city of Yves and Jacques.

“You came all the way from Birmingham to hang out with girls from below the Mason-Dixon line?”

“Hold your horns, a pretty girl is a pretty girl, but even prettier with a drawl.”

“Can’t argue with you about that.” I was having an affair with his sister, a blonde army sergeant stationed in Germany. I had a thing for women in a uniform. After hearing about the Louvre’s desolation, Tony said, “I’d like to go with y’all.”

“You like Art?”

“Not even as a name for a boy, but I’d love to chunk a football in the Louvre, if it’s empty as you says.” Tony had a good arm and I was fast on my feet. The Studio’s touch football team had beaten every expat squad this side of the Seine. Tony strummed the opening chords of FREEBIRD.

“Maybe three people in each gallery.”

“Guards.”

“Few.”

“Then let’s do it.”

Next day the two of us entered the Louvre with a pigskin in Alabama Tony’s backpack. We climbed to the second-floor galleries overlooking the Seine the river. The afternoon sun glowed through unwashed windows the height of a three-story building. Epic paintings scaled the walls to the vaulted ceilings.

“The king used to live here? Pretty darned big palace.” Tony was impressed by the regal surroundings.

“Until 1682 when the Sun King moved to Versailles.”

“Louis Fourteen, right?” The City of Light had worked its magic on the redneck. He loved its history, as would anyone from Mobile, Alabama.

“One and the same and the palace stored their art collection until the Revolution.”

“Damn, the rich were rich back then and the poor were poor. Same as now.” “Except none of them had indoor plumbing and the upper-classes had to shit in a bucket same as the hoi polloi.”

“A bas le Roi.” Tony tugged out the football. No one else was in the long hall and he waved his left hand “Go long for the lower classes.”

I sprinted down the wooden floor and caught the long spiral around a secondary Delacroix. We were a little careful with our passes. These paintings were worth millions. A group of Japanese tourists appeared in the distance and Tony stashed the football.

“What y’all know about this ‘art’?”

“A little.” I had taken Art Appreciation 101 at university.

“Then give me a tour.”

“Okay.”

I introduced the Davids, Vermeers, George de la Tours, artifacts from ancient civilizations and royal jewelry learned from listening to the group guides during my previous visits and said, “Actually there is only one piece here I love.”

“The Mona Lisa?”

“Over-rated. But not far from it. When we get there, I’ll show you.”

I guided him to the Mona Lisa. Gawking foreign visitors stood before Leonardo’s masterpiece, which was considered the most famous painting in the world. The great artist’s muse Salai had sold the painting to Francis I for 4000 ecrus of gold, but we had not come here to see La Joconda and I told him, “Turn your head to the right.”

Tony swung his gaze to a reclining marble naked figure on a buttoned mattress.

“The Sleeping Hermaphroditus.”

“Hermaphrodite? I heard of them, but thought they were mythical like mermaids.”

“They exist. Both as man and a woman."

“You ever meet one?”

“At a carnival in Maine a barker wanted a dollar for a look. My mother considered the sideshow a blasphemy and dragged me from temptation.”

Tony stepped forward to examine the sheer white sleeping enigma of sexuality, its marble unblemished by war, riots, or neglect and he asked, “How old is it?”

“Dates back 2500 years. Artist unknown.”

“Old as dirt.”

“Yes, the statue had been lost for centuries. The Romans thought hermaphrodites were demons and cast them into the sea or rivers. Someone buried this to protect it from that fate. it was uncovered in the 17th Century. The statue became known as the Sleeping or Borghese Hermaphroditus, since it had been sold to the Borghese family, one of the richest in Europe. Old name. Old money. Old blood.”

“Lot of them uppity types in Paris. ‘Bama too.” Tony looked at the crowd before Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting. Visitors passed without a simple glance at the naked statue.

“They’re here for the Mona Lisa. Some people say that the sitter was Beatrice d'Este, the wife of Milanese duke, but the Leonardo supposedly said, “The Mona Lisa is androgynous—half man and half woman,” and the other model for the painting might have been da Vinci's lover. No one of them knows for sure just like no one knows the sculptor of leHermaphroditus.”

“L’Hermaphrodite is more beautiful and you consider this the most important piece in the Louvre?”

“Yes.” “If you had a choice, who would you take?”

“As A lover? L’hermaphrodite, bien sur. Leonardo’s model was his boyfriend. Bearded youth. I don’t play that way.”

Tony caressed the ancient stone.

“Cool and smooth.”

“Yes, but be careful touching it with someone else. You might fall in love.”

"That true."

"No."

He withdrew his hand and laughed, “You’ll got some funny stories.”

That night I dined at the Studio with Tony’s sister, Eliie. Her brother was with a runaway beauty from Louisiana. During dessert he suggested that they visit the Louvre.

“What for?” the blonde asked with a bayou accent.

“Because I want you to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“Herma. Don’t look so disappointed. Herma is very old. Italian. She sees nothing and everything. The French talk about a curse. How if you touch the statue with someone else, you’ll fall in love.”

“Sounds scary,” Tony’s sister, Ellie, wasn’t scared of anything. Her barracks in Germany were on the front line of the Iron Curtain. This was the height of the Cold War.

“I like scary.” The blonde signed up for the tour and we agreed to meet in the afternoon.

After dinner Tony departed with the blonde, Ellie and I walked back to my Marais hotel on Rue des Ecouffes and the army sergeant lay in bed, smelling of the Cold War, and asked, “So who is Herma? I hate secrets, so tell me the truth or you’re sleeping on the floor.”

“Herma is a statue. A beautiful statue of a Hermaphrodite. The best piece in the Louvre and neglected by everyone since she is next to the Mona Lisa.” I explained it in detail and she assumed the position. "Close, but you're thinner."

"And flesh, not stone."

I climbed naked into bed and caressed her flesh. Smooth as stone. Warm to the touch. Alive.

"I like you more."

“No accounting forbad taste. Like you and me.”

“Taste has nothing to do with us.”

Later the next afternoon the four of us met in the courtyard of the Louvre. Pigeons swirled in the air and the few tourists looked lost in the Pryamid's construction. We wandered over to the Seine entrance. Tony and I paid thirty-five francs for the girls and guided them to the riverside galleries, where the southern light off the Seine cloaked the Louvre’s forgotten passages in gold. We refrained from throwing the football and Tony ordered our guests, “Don’t look at the paintings.”

“Why not?” asked Ellie, expecting a good answer and the Lower Alabama native said, “Hundreds of thousand of people have seen them. Usually for only seventeen seconds according to art dealers and no painting are satisfied with an attention span of seventeen seconds.”

He fixed his gaze on the blonde. It lasted almost a minute.

“Forget Michelangelo, David, or Delacroix. You’re more beautiful than any of theses paintings and you’ll be more beautiful, if y’all don’t let them steal your beauty.”

“Like a camera stealing your soul,” asked the rookie model.

“Everything gets older faster when someone is watching.” Alabama Tony led us through the Louvre and the blonde believed everything he said with that mush-mouthed drawl, since he sounded like two hundred miles east of ‘home’.

“Where Tony learn that shit?” Ellie held my hand.

“I gave him a lesson or two.”

“I thought that bullshit sounded familiar.” She was familiar with my rap from two previous expeditions of Paris.

“Merde peut-etre, mais regardez pas les tableaux.”

“Let me guess. They want to steal our souls.”

Our eyes-down tour passed Bellini’s sculptures, Raphael’s cherubs, and the treasures of France, and at the Mona Lisa, where Tony announced, “Don’t lift your head, but y’all standing in front of the most famous painting in the world. Everyone knows its name. Maybe it’s a woman. Maybe it’s a man. She has a smile. No one knows why.”

“The Mona Lisa.” Even the blonde knew that and she was only eighteen.

The girls wanted to see the Mona Lisa, but Tony and I blocked their field of vision.

“The Mona Lisa is better known than the Crimson Tide football team and everyone wants fame, but to your left is the most exquisite statue in existence this side of the Boll Weevil Monument in downtown Enterprise, Alabama.”

“I hate that creepy thing.” Ellie shuddered with disgust.

“Well, this ain’t that.” Tony played his grits card with vingt-et-un cool and his French was impeccable for someone brought up north of Mobile. “Fermay tes ewes and donnez moi y’all hands.”

Our ‘dates’ obeyed his instruction and we led them to the Hermaphrodite.

“This is the Borghese Hermaphroditus. It’s not famous like the Mona Lisa, but the Hermaphrodite survived the fall of Rome. The Louvre is filled with Greek and Roman statues without noses, arms, or legs, but this statue escaped all harm for over two thousand years. It is immortal.”

Tony had the timing of a Delta tide and paused for a span of time not needing a count.

“Y’all can open your eyes.”

The statue’s whiteness glowed in the light of the approaching dusk.

“Maybe a boy, maybe a girl, but certainly not the Mona Lisa.” Alabama Tony pointed back to Da Vinci’s immortal painting.

“No one can touch the Mona Lisa, but anyone who touches the Borghese Hermaphroditus will fall in love.”

That line was my cue to finish up the tour. We had created the curse, but both of us were in awe of the statue’s power to have existed for centuries without any damage.

“You girls care to drink some wine in the Palais Royal?”

Ellie said yes and we retreated to a renowned cafe at the northern end of the garden. The barman knew our names. Les Bains and Studio were on his list of after-closing bars. We toasted the magic of the Borghese Hermaphroditus. Everyone was happy.

Throughout the following months we perfected our non-seeing tours of Le Louvre with other models, Sorbonne painters, dancers from the Crazy Horse, and wandering heiresses. Our best time from the Seine entrance to le Hermaphrodite was twelve minutes, but our luck couldn’t last as long as the existence of a naked transvestite’s statue.

Tony spent that winter with one girl. Tracy was a brunette from Vermont, a twenty year-old dripping with North Country innocence. Her smile was too lovely for a cover girl, but Tony had been blinded by her maple syrup brown eyes and I met him at the Studio to see how he was.

“I think she wants to get serious.”

“How serious?”

“I’m not seeing anyone else.”

Those words explained the sad faces on the Dixie girls at the Studio. Tony wasn’t playing FREEBIRD after last call anymore.

“She wants to go to the Louvre.”

“You going to give her the tour?”

“What you’ll think?”

“You like her?” I thought she was a good woman. Like me Traci was a New Englander.

“More than like.”

“Then do what you think is best as long as you remember the danger of the Hermaphrodite.”

“You mean I’ll fall in love?”

“It happened to me.” A young artist from La Ruche had dared me to touch Herma. I hadn’t looked at any woman since. We were in love.

“That falling love story’s a bunch of phooey. Intouched it and Didn't fall in love with you.” Tony smirked at my caution. “Besides Traci’s from Vermont.”

“What’s that have to do with it?”

“She’s just another Yankee girl.”

“And you’re Johnny Reb. Every town squares in Vermont had a statue of a Union soldier defiantly facing the South. The South will not rise again.”

“We will, you damn Yankee, but I want you to come along, so I don't touch Herma."

The next day Tony led the way through the museum. Tracy was smart for a teenager. She had studied art at a real school in Brattleboro. She pouted at his warning to not regard the other paintings.

“I didn’t come to Paris to be told what to do. I could have stayed in Vermont for that.” Tracy pointed to the wall. “That painting's English. That’s French and that’s Delacroix’s LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE.”

“How you know that?” Tony had been coming to the Louvre on his own. He looked at the paintings. The color of the light showed him the truth about Art. Paris had him in its power.

“I’ve been here before.” Tracy stepped closer.

“I’ve never seen you here.” Tony held her hand and felt the softness of a stalled breeze.

“And I’ve never seen you here until now.”

A vagrant ray of sunset struck the wall mirror. The only camera was their memory. Time slowed to the pace of their breathing and she hushed, “What now?”

“I’ll show you my favorite piece in the Louvre.”

“The Sleeping Hermaphroditus.”

She laughed like she had been waiting for this punchline.

“How you know?”

“Every model in Paris talks about how you two bring them here and have them touch the Sleeping Hermaphroditus’ ass to fall in love. Funny, but they all loved you for a few days. Maybe that’s the power of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus. You willing to try?”

“I am, if you are.”

Tracy led him toward the Mona Lisa. They passed the gaggle of admirers before Leonardo’s painting and stopped before the blemishless statue.

“It’s so perfect.”

“Saved from a grave of dirt.”

“To sleep on stone.”

They touched the marble together.

That autumn the two got married at the Studio. Leaves from the old Chestnut tree covered cobblestones. We drank tequila and danced to the owner playing OLD ROCKY TOP on the fiddle.

At the end of the night Tony and I threw a football in the medieval Marais courtyard. Two high stakes Ivy League lawyers challenged us to a game. We beat them like rented mules. Cobblestones were our home advantage and we toasted our victory, yelling “Joe Namath.”

Tony stopped.

“What?”

“Look.”

I did.

Tracy beamed at her football hero. Neither of us had broken a window in the courtyard. At dawn the newlyweds went home. The Louvre was never the same for me after that. As IM Pei’s Pyramid took form, people once more discovered the museum.

French first. English. Dutch. German. Japanese. It wasn't same with all them. it no longer belonged to me. The foreign crowds flocked to see the masterpieces. All of them stopped at the Mona Lisa.

As always few bothered to at le Borghese Hermaphroditus, because the fame of Mona Lisa was a tough act to follow even for the cool stone of her sleeping beauty.

None touched her.

I always did, because nothing else felt more of eternity, when you wanted to fall in love during football season.

Even in Paris.

Go long.

Frank the owner of Le Studio, Tracy, and Tony 1983.

"Her prayers found favour with the gods: for, as they lay together, their bodies were united and from being two persons they became one. As when a gardener grafts a branch on to a tree, and sees the two unite as they grow, and come to maturity together, so when their limbs met in that clinging embrace the nymph and the boy were no longer two, but a single form, possessed of a dual nature, which could not be called male or female, but seemed to be at once both and neither."

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Nude Modeling Day # 1 - Mar 19, 2025

On Canal Street
In Chinatown
Seven minutes to 1
On time
Climb three flights of stairs
First floor a wonton shop
Second floor a Mah-Jong parlor
The clack of tiles
Third floor a massage parlor
A faint aroma of tobacco
One more set of steps to the drawing studio___
Seven older artists before easels
Sitting on folding chairs
Fluorescent lights overhead
I say hello
No hello back
They are here to draw
I am here to be naked
Three hours
$75 cash___
Strip in a corner
A green robe
Ralph Lauren
Twelve years old tattered
Covering my nakedness
I 72
In a state of ruin
Like the Acropolis
Once we had been something___
Stand on the platform
The wood clean to my feet
Robe off from my shoulders
See me
I now officially a nude model
Timer on
Twenty minutes pose
Five minute break
Three hours
Sit in a folding chair
Take the pose
Not Rodin's THE THINKER
$25 an hour
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Eyes straight ahead
I see no one___
They see my body
Wonder how they see me
Doesn't matter
I am only a naked body
Lines, curves, shadows
I look at none of them
Eyes ahead
To the brick wall across Canal Street___
Strange to be the object of no desire.
Thirty years past my prime
Skin hangs off my bones
Muscles shadows of ruin
A long scar across my abdomen___
No one talks
Pencils scratch on paper
Electric heaters moan
I am naked
Not cold___
No phone in my hand
No music
No talking
My mind runs rampant
Seeking to land somewhere
I pick prime numbers
1,3,5, 7 ad 1001
1001 is divisible by 7 and more
It is not a prime
I did the math in my head___
Change focus
The Sexual Revolution.
So long ago
So forgotten by the followers of the Nailed God
I sit naked
Twenty minutes pose
Five minute break
My pose
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Naked
Exposed
Dream of the Sexual Revolution
1964 to Now
Michelangelo's David
I am bigger___
More reminescences
1967
Finding Steven Hammer's THE ITCH
The stroke book had all the answers
Atop Nahanton Hill
Glossy sex magazines in the Combat Zone
The smell of Pine Sol
XXX double-bills in Times Square
Sticky floors
Libbie in the hallway of the Ritz Hotel
Alice crying God in a swimming pool
Beer little Beer on Soi Six
Elena under the Brooklyn Bridge
Candida at the Piscine Deligny
Sharon everywhere
Ro
I was her angel under candle light
She got me this job
Nude modeling
Three hours
$75 cash
I look down
Not a rise
A flaccid penis
Just like Michelangelo's David__
Twenty minute pose
Five minute break
Furious strokes from one artist
They are all older than thirty
Two women
I turn off my wicked thoughts
Resuming the pose
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Eyes straight ahead
I fall on Tinoretto's drawings
A revelation
At the Morgan Library
The bare bones of paintings
All starts with pencil and paper
Light shadows form lines
Filling in the space
This is not Magic, only Art ___
Once again my gaze on the brick wall
Across Canal Street
The bricks yellow orange___
Two more sessions to go
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Eyes straight ahead
Twenty minutes pose
Five minute break
The Adonis theater
On Eighth Avenue north of ShowWorld
Naked, but for a jock strap.
A little stiffness
The Sexual Revolution
Is not dead
For in me
It is alive
Simmering in our veins
Awaiting the awakening___
Last session
Twenty minutes pose
Five minute break
Legs apart
Hands on my knees
Eyes straight ahead
My mind blank
No thoughts
No erection
Across the street
The bricks yellow tan
Only four artists left
One leaves
Rolls up his drawing
Color pencils
Good work
Looks nothing like me
I am only a naked body
My mind blank
No erection___
Maybe next time
I'll take Viagra
Viva le Sexual Revolution___

ps I was later fired from this job for tardiness__

ps The penis on Michelangelo's 17-foot-tall David statue measures approximately 5.43 inches long. I am slightly bigger. Just slightly.

Hippie Power Forever

"I am very happy to see so many flowers here today and that is why I want to remind you that flowers by themselves have no power whatsoever."

Herbert Marcuse from a speech at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, London 1967

I was a late blooming hippie in 1969. Before that I was just a normal American teenager, believing in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Never In God We Trust. I missed out on Woodstock. I dropped LSD in 1970. I reached San Francisco well after the Summer of Love. I cut my long hair in 1974 to convey a good image to a judge ruling over my charge of a high-speed chase. I was driving a VW. I still believe that flowers have a power. Maybe I'm wrong, but this autumn the roses appeared once more in Fort Greene park and to me that's a miracle. I wake up every day expecting for the sun to shine. This is the dawning of Aquarius.

"When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars". Lyrics from Aquarius the musical.

According to Wikipedia Analytical psychologist Carl Jung mentions the "age of Aquarius" in his book Aion, believing that the "age of Aquarius" will "constellate the problem of the union of the opposites". In accordance with prominent astrologers, Jung believed the "age of Aquarius" will be a dark and spiritually deficient time for humanity, writing that, "It will no longer be possible to write off evil as the mere privation of good; its real existence will have to be recognized in the age of Aquarius". ps Aion a Greek deity ruled the cosmos and eternity where the future is a recurring past or vice versa.

In 2025 evil seems to have triumphed over good, especially in this country/ Many of my fellow citizens worship an all-powerful America and aspire to gain wealth trhough greed. Their trillions of dollars exist only in the wealth cloud via stocks and crypto-currency. None of which really exist, although they are able to acquire estates, private yachts, young wives, and a elitist life in which no crime applies to them.

I have nothing or almost nothing.

A poet's life.

This summer I slept in a tent on a beach.

I write what I want. I seek neither fame nor fortune. I only spend what I have, whihc is almost nothing, since I am a river to my people. My families et al. Deconsume, Deconsume. All of us together now.

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ps foto is from 1973 when I drove taxi in Boston.

Birthday Suit Swimming - 2009

Man and woman are emerged naked from their mothers. Nudity is our natural state. Adam and Eve roamed through the Garden of Eden without any Gucci grape leaves covering their genitalia. despite this biblical precedent New York retains several laws on the penal code banning public nakedness. Most were written to prevent the spread of pornography, however law § 245.01 against exposure of a person's private parts. Friday night I protested this odious restriction by skinny-dipping at the dumpsters pool along the Gowanus Canal.

It was late. The full moon was hidden by clouds. Our host Jocko Weyland green-lighted my nakedness and I climbed onto the deck with my female accomplice. Shelley was wearing a bathing suit and expressed no need to bare her flesh to the four elements on a summer night. The glimmer of silver moonlight bathed the transformed parking lot and I stripped off my jeans and shirt. I was commando on the underwear front.

The swimmers in the pools laughed, as I approached the water. Fifty-seven year-old naked men are funny, especially since my hands were cupped over my genitalia to avoid any embarrassment about the size of my penis. I leaped in the water. It was cold. Not as cold as the air, but my cock shriveled to a cashew. The other bathers veered away from me, until my accomplice joined me. Shelley was young. Twenty-two. A fellow poet. The companion of a female tends to lessen the collective disdain for naked old men. I kept my distance. Room for the Holy Ghost. I was no longer a pervert.

Only cold and I climbed from the dumpster filled with water to dressed in my clothing. No one had really saw my member and I was glad. I'm definitely bigger than Michelangelo's DAVID.

At least after I'm shaken off the cold.

I only believe in indecent exposure in the bedroom.

Both alone and with my wife.

Thai Tattoos Too -2007

Pattaya must be the per capita capitol of farangs with tattoos. Shirtless westerners parade the streets to exhibit the beauty of their body art, despite the collateral damage to the colored flesh from the tropical sun. Most tattoos are eagles, dragons, and declarations of never-ending love to go-go girls festooned with vows of fidelity to previous girlfriends. Occasionally you come across tattoos of incredible stupidity.

Several years ago I spotted a twenty year-old Brit with the name DAVID tattooed down his spine.

"Why David?" I asked him.

“So people know who they just saw.”

"You're David?" Conventioneers wear a simple name tag to say hello.

"The one and only." A name tag through his pierced nipple would have been a more effective form of introduction.

"If you say so." David is the second most common name in America. The same has to be true for Britain.

Later I mentioned the stupidity of this particular David to my friend, Jamie Parker. We sat at the Buffalo Bar on Sai 3. More than a few of the girls had tattoos and a trio of British lager louts bore years of blue ink on their forearms, necks, and faces.

"Can't you imagine Michelangelo's Statue of David with a tattoo?"

"Good, unless it wasn't on that little acorn of a penis." Jamie hated male nude statues and their mini-cocks. "You know that I don't have any tattoos. "

I didn't say anything about the tracks on his arm. Jamie had been clean for ten years now.

"Me neither." The nuns at Our Lady of the Foothills warned their students that any skin art banned them from heaven. I had none, even though my faith was atheism. The sisters were excellent teachers.

"Last thing I needed as a kid was an identification scar or body marking." Jamie had been a criminal in his younger years. "In prison cons tattoo to their bodies out of boredom or rebellion. I was always thinking that one day I'd be on the outside and I intended to stay on the outside, but a couple of months ago I was taking a whitewater rafting trip at the Sabaii Massage."

"I know the place." Whitewater rafting was the local euphemism for a soapie with a naked girl or two.

"This one spinner had the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE to the American flag tattooed on her back. Being with her made me feel a little patriotic."

"I can imagine the feeling." Neither of us had been back in the USA for years. "I have a friend who had MADE IN THE UK tattooed on his forehead."

"Stupid place for a tattoo."

"Even worse his mother told him he had been born in Poland."

"Dumb Polack."

"What about Thai tattoos?"

"I don't talk about that. I'm a guest of this country and those tattoos are magic." Jamie had a healthy fear of red-lom.

"Traditional Thai tattoos or 'sakyant' are supposed to protect the wearers from misfortune and evil spirits and anyone getting men tattooed are asked to obey the five following rules; honor your parents, be faithful to your wife, no drugs, don't eat any fruit from off the ground, and no oral sex with women."

"I'm good with honoring my parents, faithful to my wife, and fruit off the trees, unless you're hungry."

"I'm good with most of them too." The oral sex was impossible." "My problem with tattoos has been finding one I could live with the rest of my life. 69, Born to be Wild, Mom, the name of my son or daughter might have fit the bill."

"But not the Pledge of Allegiance."

"Not a chance." I don't need to prove my allegiance to the USA."

"I doubt that poor girl knows what she’s wearing."

"Probably true, but America salutes her patriotism."

We lifted our beer glasses to toast her.

"USA USA USA."

The Brits at the bar glared at us. Jamie glared right back. We weren't going to heaven, but we were in Pattaya and as anyone knows who has lived in the Last Babylon for more than two weeks it's paradise on earth.