Chess With le Chat Ti Gris

There sitting at his desk: lamp light. He has his e-mail account open, he is using a fresh, new message to write a scattered poem. He writes the following: a novel poetic style incorporating the aesthetics of the modern Information Age....

"Midnight Angel, a poem

sidewalk standing room, 8 PM, standing by the red light,  walk(3  spaces for long pauses,   5 for longer(est))

"here I come,   midnight angel," I said. Prose like this. The "o" button on my keyboard is off (I just thought for one second to myself before the push, "is there a capital 'o' button? Nope.") so I have to push it extra and gently, a hold-down of the quickest nip, artistically  (as I'm not writing a bloody thesis). The keyboard affords nicely.

b as in each sentence's short beginning in coughed, rank, old notes.

e as in all of the sentences' short beginnings in Bukowski's old-scene texts.

earlier downtown walking across the street when the light turned green I said aloud to the city, "Here I come,   midnight angel," real loud and extensively talkative to myself.

walked to the subway, went to the Goodwill near USC. Bought some donuts. Thought about the woman working at the Goodwill with the name "Blu" tattooed on her arm. I loved it (it was her dog's name, a Husky mix, she ended up showing me a pic), especially because I always spelled blue blu in my prose and poems, after Kerouac and the Dodgers and the Los Angeles Blues (blues counts as the blues), which I was going to mention but didn't and instead I shared a very nice conversation with her, a conversation which I wrote about later in my notebook when I was sitting on the steps between the rose garden and the Museum, by the coliseum: warm conversation. I thought about "you're mah boy, blue," the old quote from OLD SCHOOL, but my thoughts were also blutinted. We merely talked about her Husky, there at the register. I was sorry for the woman working there, wishing her and I and Blu, or even, maybe even her boyfriend if she had one or kids too if she had them and in which case I could just find myself another fine blu gal and then we could all move in together, wishing we could all perhaps just live far away on a farm somewhere by a nice, big lake reflectin' a big sky or river ah that'd be the life, but no, we're here in L.A. And I'm blu. And she's got her dog's name tattooed on her arm: Old Blu. Mah boy.

when I came home I walked into the kitchen (orange-tangerine glow of soft-kitchen light at night switched on,   mmmmm) and saw the time: it was 12:01. Midnight Angel, I thought, thinking back on my facetious schizoid self-aggrandizing street walking and outloud talkativity.

then   it hit me. I saw, out of the corner of my eye:   the other clock: the other digital numberbox. On the counter by the kitchen sink: almost with a halo around its rectangular Steve-jobsism. The time showed on the screen:  11:54.

the stove clock was wrong. The iPad said 11:54. The Midnight Angel's still a-comin'. Oh boy.

and so I Go and open further a Youtube tab and I watch a Frank Zappa interview and love it and copypaste the comments section here for us all:

Joe Horizon

4 years ago

Zappa had issues with nicotine and caffeine. During a show in Chicago in 1980, I watched as he did away with a half pack of smokes and two entire pots of coffee. He never left to use the can either. Somehow in a 90 minute plus show, his body used the coffee somehow. I'll never forget the guitar tech guy, both tuning his guitars and making the coffee so there was no possibility of a shortage.

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418

REPLY

goodmorning123

5 years ago

"I think she was too stoned to know what I was talking about". Hahahahah!!

222

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Toby Henry

6 years ago

"Nothing will screw your mind up more than religion or drugs" -- Frank Zappa

562

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Cakravartin

7 years ago

It's sad that he eventually died from cancer. Only a few rockstars stay away from drugs. Zappa was one of them. A man worth living over 100 years.

81

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imageartists

8 years ago

Yet Keith Richards is still alive after shooting up half of Indochna.

156

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thediamonddog95

5 years ago

I would like to see how Frank would describe my generation."

Such is the run of the new poem.

He looks up from the laptop, hesitantly looks over at his typewriter on the floor next to his desk. He scratches his chin: his thoughts popping like firecrackers, going back over the past several hours like cats along the side-paths of houses.

He types the following in the e-mail template.

"There are three things I want- no, need- to say.  

One, the cat has found immortality. 

Two, the road was not, as Aldous Huxley claimed it to be, and do please gently allow my paraphrasing his old English, too long, nor was it, as he also claimed it to be, too boring.

Three, the Beat Fairy Tale of the Lost and Long, Gray American Dream is not, in fact, dead. 

Having settled these three Truths, I can sit back, let out a drafty, long, unshallowing sigh, and have a glance over at my sweet, kindly bookshelf, where I see the seven tiers of books, those wonderous, honeycomb-like beauties.  

The fifth shelf is full of Hindu meditation bibles and different Rumi collections. 

The fourth, under it, almost as sacred and essential, shelves the following titles in order: The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, The Town and the City, The Kerouac Reader, Ann Charter's Kerouac: A Biography, three volumes of Kerouac's letters, two volumes of Ginsberg's collected poems, and a single copy of Hart Crane's collected poems. I threw away my one and only Walt Whitman, which would've co-existed there with the other books, after my copy of Leaves of Grass became so decrepit and thoroughly used-up I had to let go of it one day: a day of wandering and reading and writing poetry all over from the glammy hill-rounds of the Beverly’d Hills to the busy, busy shorelines that make up the block of Santa Monica's bleary and plainly beautiful sunlit stretches: oh, those sunny crowds along the promenade. I threw that ashy copy of Leaves of Grass in a garbage bin back by some alley which sided a Thai Food restaurant off 3rd Street.

Shoved up over the fourth-shelf's row of book-tops is a folded-longways print-out of an article written by Paul Guzzo back in June of 2020. The article is about the house Jack Kerouac lived in in St. Petersburg, Florida being sold to an unnamed buyer. The main news being (and catalyzing me into a fit-burst of inspirational writing there on the spot as I was reading it and so leading me to print it out among other things) the Friends of the Jack Kerouac House not being able to come up with the allotted amount of money (the $200,000 ultimatum left for them by the Shen-Sampas family) in time; thus the house was bleakly acquired by the unnamed and anonymous buyer (rank Caliban). Along with this article, sheathed over the fourth-shelf, are three sheets of paper all enfolded together. Their contents were typed out by this young writer on his Smith Corona typewriter.

Their contents are as follows, and they are still steaming: 

The First Page 

OK so now I sit here finishing up my second re-reading of Vanity of Duluoz, his final addition to his legend, also having printed out, as tears fell, in some wild act of insane reverence, the article exhibiting how, last year, 2020, the Friends of the Jack Kerouac House (a non-profit which exists to give young up-and-coming writers a priceless writer’s experience, a non-profit that tried with all its bloody and mighty angel-like madness to get its pure and rightful hands on the property, which it should and needs to and- damn it! must own, for that is the purpose of my typing out here this essay on Truth) were unable to come up with enough cash to buy-out the place.

The house Kerouac lived in down in St.Petersberg was sold off to, as far as we can figure, an anonymous and non-literary personage. Guzzo's article mentions them having said they wish to clean the place up and sell it. Unacceptable. The fairy tale must never die. I go to revive it. I pack my Matthew Arnold for toiletry, and I set out on the road, again. The truth of the fairy tale, to revive. 

The Second Page 

Un poème pour le chat Ti Gris

Here, cat. Come, lil kitty, lil kitty, lil Smoke (your original name given you by your mum Mrs. Joyce Johnson, then Joyce Glassman), lil Smokee, lil Ti Gris, thus dubbed by the grand ole Dubber heself. 

Said you went after the Golden Eternity Dragon of the embodiment of immortality- somewhere to China, someplace in China- said you were to become immortal, lil smoke-colored cat, you. Lil kitty, Ti Gris. 

Tch tch tch, here, kitty, come, Ti Gris.

Thus I spent my forsaken adolescence: hitch-hiking through the massive plains and levels of New Mexico and the vast, green expanses of Colorado, thence over westward to Vegas, where I slept in the bushes and by the railroad tracks. From there up to the woods of Oregon. More recently, just before the pandemic started, a western European tour, and a Mediterranean discourse of sorts along its southern shorelines, where I met an Italian woman, which is a whole other story in itself. And throughout all of my traveling: tch tch tch tch tch, like this: tch tch tch tch tch, here Ti Gris, come kitty, here kitty, here Ti Gris, following the beat cat, following the cat that escaped out Joyce’s window, pushing the screen off, into the foreverhood of the Great Beatdom of Egyptian-Americano Eterneetee. 

Tch tch tch Ti Gris, here Ti Gris, Meow. I'm just sad for a cat, that’s all. 

The Third Page 

April 2, 2021: six years ago today I was sittin’ on, or, well, I was real near it at least, the state borderline I mean, I was sittin’ there cross-legged on the state borderline between Oregon and Nevada. I was, technically, on the Nevada side I guess, northeastern Nevada (this lil town had a little Library, and in that little Library was a little pregnant mother, and to this lil mother I wrote and signed a poem, and she read it and smiled and teared and said thank you and said she’s gonna frame it and put it up somewhere, it was a short poem about the sky there in Nevada, and all us people going about under it, it was nice), out by a trucker highway-town, somewhere in the vicinity of those dastardly signs that say in big, huge letters DO NOT PICK UP HITCH-HIKERS all over the place, due to there bein' a prison in the area. Long story short: a friend of mine was giving me a ride up to Oregon, or he was supposed to, when we got in a bit of a drunken brawl up a creek a ways, and he dumped my butt in that small town there by the border. Oh well. Booted. 

So there I was sittin’ cross-legged by the rotting rodeo stand and cattle drive and staring out over the great long stretches of American landscape, watchin’ the clouds moo over, readin’ from a Kerouac I brought along always, wonderin’ where life would take me next, following Ti Gris, following Ti Gris, and even Old Ti Gris, the father we never found.... 

Following Old Ti Gris into the foreverhood of the Great Beatdom."

Such were the poetics of the contents.... & standing now one last time by his bookshelf: in some wild flight to reawaken the Truth of the American Fairy Tale, full of the Great Midnight Lost American essence, this young writer takes off now across the wide-scaled continent (from the here and now in Los Angeles on down to ole St. Petersberg, Florida), to try and raise $200,000 so that he can, for all us kids, buy back the American Dream. For the mad ones. For all the pregnant, little mamas. For all of them. Pour le chat Ti Gris et mah boy Blu.

Thumb’s out: bit of a thrift, the thrift of the Midnight Angel from the commons. The boy is blu. The cat’s the one he’s a-followin'  down the road. 

Here, Ti Gris, here,  kitty, kitty, kitty.   Come, Ti Gris. Here, kitty, kitty, here, Ti Gris. Here Ti Gris.   Ti Gris.