J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Mad Swirl, The Beatnik Cowboy, Yellow Mama, Horror Sleaze Trash and The Dope Fiend Daily. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
I remember my first semester in grad school taking fifteen hours.
I remember working in a just opened pub checking proof and reading A Clockwork Orange.
I remember reading twelve hours a day with a baby and another one on the way.
I remember the job became an everyday of the week thing as the bar took off.
I remember not sleeping.
I remember how that made me feel.
I remember my draft status at that time changed from 2S to IA which meant I was Eligible.
I remember what that made me feel like.
I remember that my thoughts were becoming jumbled, hazy, mixed up in class and out.
I remember listening to the college clarion chime the early morning hours as I read another endless Victorian novel.
I remember literature into movies, my favorite class.
I remember Mixing up sentiments from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Traven’s Treasure ofSierra Madre and somehow the observation about negative influence Catholicism was pertinent to both books.
I remember feeling like the two men and a woman in Jules et Jim driving off the harbor to drown together.
I remember seeing Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf at the Stanely Theatre in Utica.
I remember how the audience thought it was a comedy, laughing all the way to just before the end.
I remember them not getting the question and answer, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am.
I remember thinking I was too; afraid that is.
I remember seeing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly there as well, my first Eastwood movie.
I remember the first time I heard Warren Zevon singing Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.
I remember the first open coffin funeral I went to.
I remember it was a Sonny Corleone experience I never wanted to relive but here I am doing it.
I remember thinking I could write books, novels in the modern Barthelme, Coover mode and make money doing it.
I remember how many years it took to disabuse myself of that absurd notion.
I remember playing The Association song, “Requiem for the Masses” and the B side, “Pandora’s Heebie Jeebies” on all the college bar jukeboxes in Utica.
I remember in grad school hearing that Kurt Vonnegut’s brother taught Physics at the State University of New York at Albany that I was attending.
I remember Bernard Vonnegut, the Physicist, was largely responsible for the theory and execution of cloud seeding.
I remember never meeting him.
I remember almost meeting Kurt but not quite.
I remember Kurt worked at GE Schenectady and lived there though not in the same neighborhood I was living in.
I remember Vonnegut’s novel, Player Piano, as a fictionalized account of working for GE.
I remember how much he hated it.
I remember how GE outsourced twenty or so thousand jobs from the plant in the 70’s and effectively killed the city.
I remember thinking Kurt would have said, “So it goes.”
I remember hearing Kubrick planned to move Australia after releasing Dr. Strangelove.
I remember Kubrick fearing for his life, career, and his family’s security after filming Clockwork Orange.
I remember the first six times I saw Strangelove in a theater.
I remember Seven Days in May.
I remember Fail Safe.
I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I remember thinking I would not live to see 25 years of age.
I remember when I was 25 at The Blue Note record shop in Albany buying Vintage 45’s to put on my jukebox in the tavern I now ran two years after reading Clockwork Orange checking proof at the door.
I remember scoring a Philadelphia orchestra conducted by Ormandy version of the Star-Spangled Banner.
I remember putting it on the jukebox under the title Fear and Loathing in America.
I remember playing that every night at closing along with “moving music” Blues in F.
I remember that no one ever found it on jukebox.
I remember thinking it wasn’t really that hard to spot the ringer but no one ever did.
I remember some extremely tempting offers from sorority pledges to reveal the secret location but I never would.
I remember submitting poems and stories for three plus years while working and alternately attending and dropping out of grad school.
I remember nothing ever being accepted.
I remember how excited I was when The Iowa Review, edited by my literary hero at the time, Robert Coover accepted my story, “All the Coney Islands of the Mind.”
I remember the hand-written rejection for the Chicago Review comparing my story favorably with Samuel Beckett’s writing the same week.
I remember the handwritten not I got from Iowa Review assistant editor at the time, T.C. Boyle, regretting that the Review had to trim the acceptances for financial reasons and mine was one of those to go.
I remember keeping that note and thinking I should frame it the way Byron had a human skull on his writing desk he often drank wine from.
I remember when Woody Allen movies were funny.
I remember phone calls I got at work where I told no one ever to call me.
I remember my uncle telling me my mother was arrested.
I remember he told me in a matter of fact, composed way I could never summon under those circumstances, that she tried to kill their mother and that the hearing was later that week.
I remember that was the longest chapter, a prelude, or the hell portion, leading up to my personal book of the dead.
I remember six or seven years later the call from the New York City Police department with regards to the case of BJC.
I remember asking the detective, “What has she done now?”
I remember him telling me someone from your precinct will be by to deliver the news in person.
I remember telling him we don’t have precincts Upstate.
I remember thinking for the first time that no matter how worldly, how streetwise most NYC policemen were, they have an extremely insular frame of reference and near total ignorance of all things not immediate NYC metro area.
I remember the detective told me that someone would be by from your department then to tell me the news.
I remember I knew what that meant.
I remember the rookie, fresh faced, nervous as all hell, kid from the police department ringing my door bell and not knowing what to say.
I remember saying, “She dead, isn’t she?”
I remember how relived he was that already knew and he wouldn’t have to break the bad news.
I remember how relieved I was and that it wasn’t really bad news.
I remember thinking a few months later that you never know what troubles are until the real troubles begin.
I remember a line in my first chapter in my Books of the Dead that said, “There wasn’t enough scotch in Manhattan to completely drown that feeling (of what it was like to imagine what he life had been locked into a dismal dark hotel room in midtown Manhattan) And there never would be.
I remember when No Trump was just a bridge bid.
I remember the first time I formed an opinion about Trump was when an TV interviewer told him how beautiful his new wife, Marla Maples was and Trump replied, “You should see her naked.”
I remember high school.
I remember how much I hated remembering high school until I finally had a girlfriend my junior year.
I remember writing a poem in English class , An Ode to a Shopping Cart, as a joke and Sir Sev, Marty to his friends after graduation, allowed that it wasn’t half-bad.
I remember thinking maybe I could do better if I actually tried.
I remember of such humble beginnings an apprenticeship begins.
I remember thinking despite having hundreds of poems accepted in the early 80’s, I really had no idea what I was doing until I wrote a series of poems about seeing my mother at Pilgrim State.
I remember how those poems came, almost whole in a white-hot stream of elevated consciousness unlike anything I had ever experienced previously.
I remember the chapbook of these collected poems was first runner up in The Looking Gladd Chapbook contest and was published by Pudding Publications.
I remember the titles poem, Visiting Day on the Psychiatric Ward was the most republished poem I have ever written including in an anthology by the NIH.
I remember after a decade of frustration and book rejections publishing two chapbooks and a full-length “bar book” in consecutive months in the early 80’s.
I remember the full-length book was to be the first of a five-volume set of bar-books to be called Animal Acts after the first volume.
I remember the contract the publisher sent em, to sign for those books that he hadn’t signed yet.
I remember not thinking at the time maybe that was a bad omen.
I remember the assistant football coach who came into the tavern I was working in after a division three contest with Albany State.
I remember how he took an ungodly amount of loose change from his pocket and put it on the bar and ordered, “the cheapest draft you’ve got.”
I remember him counting out exact change in dimes and nickels for each beer.
I remember he was the only person in the bar at the time and we shot the shit.
I remember making the mistake, it’s always a mistake, of saying I wrote when I wasn’t working.
I remember he asked me if I knew T.C. Boyle who was Tom when he was an undergrad.
I remember Boyle had changed his name to T.C. to, if nothing else, to disassociate himself from the crazy over-the -top drunken drug abusing wild man that he was.
I remember telling him we had briefly corresponded when he was a grad student but I didn’t; keep it up.
I remember coach said they were good friends when they were undergrads.
I remember trying to envision what that one-sided friendship must have been like.
I remember thinking what could the enfant terrible of, rising star of the literary world have in common with this terminal jock type who had risen to the pinnacle of his career as an assistant coach at a division three school?
I remember thinking it couldn’t have been much more complicated than beer, booze, and babes.
I remember after about a dozen of exact change cheap beers, coach scooped up what remained of that ungodly pile of change and stuffed it in his pocket.
I remember he didn’t leave a tip, not even a stray penny or a lucky quarter.
I remember thinking, I bet Boyle actually does know this guy.
I remember wishing I got his name but thinking, somehow, Boyle would just know who it was if I ever got to talk to him which wasn’t likely.
Would you read poems to me as wolves howl by moonlight?
Would you be that “uncle uncouth kook”
who scurry around with a black cape at night? Would you read to me about your obsession with your
elderly neighbor with the “evil eye” and
how in your madness you dismembered and buried him below your thighs ?!
Would you tell me about your pet bird “Raven”?
And that you often think about stuffing it in your oven?
Would you tell me incendiary tales of lurking males whose
murderous prowess never fails?
True! VERY true-you could be a shadowy vision in the night Hiding in your own fermented fright No friends or foe abide in your sight Only you seem to be the lone one under the cover of night HAWK! HAWK! Who goes there?!
And in that moment truth be true,
why you’re undertaking your own entombment
Resulting from autonomous nervous system reactions to loveless threats
Resorting to becoming a kook who cooks his pets!
An embodiment of dysfunctional patterns of psycho prototypes
Practicing man-made madness archetypes
negative neurological feedback loops succumb to lunacy
Living on chilling hills in your ominous haughty chateau
Where you’re likely to take down your victims
disguised as guests with just one blow!
Below you sit a body of water where bare bodies are submerged
and nightmares come true
And as mounting bodies are stacked,
To Boston you’ll turn your back too!
Your traumas, your wounds your trials
Lead to your passions your purpose
That which makes your pig lust hideous heart beat faster at midnight
Amidst the night when one longer stick lie atop a shorter stick and the
Coo coo c (l) ock COMES oooouuuuut to flip you his bird!
A ghastly desire that you must retire
Sunken shadowy “eye” peeping peep holes
Maladroit cataracts heal their woes
Oh! good god! this tell-tale is finally told!!
Now this heart no longer bears a confession to behold…–
Jacques FleuryJacques Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey Towards Understanding Your Authentic Self
Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and a literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc… He has been published in prestigious publications such as Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Litterateur Redefining World anthologies out of India, Poets Reading the News, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him at: http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.–
The bird in the blue sky pauses wing motion and hovers, glides, surveying something. Those fields are open and not. They are interesting to imagine from a Carlos Castaneda type view, a would-be mystical lens. Sky and ground and sky and ground what’s all around? There are impossibly tall hydro lines, looking like stationary monsters, and their wires go down just a little bit, right?- if you watched them from car windows long ago you know this and you probably know this anyhow. They are comprising something from another world in the midst of those lands. A copse of trees near, winter branches barren and lonesome, jutting upwards in airs, also still and bereft of life. Grey. They are grey and I wonder if anything besides the black and grey squirrels traverse ‘round them.
Hawk. The bird is a hawk. Another one arrives and they seem to sway as if on invisible strings in a cosmic play. Then they move along and soon disappear. There is then nothing. Water flows along a stream, as a stream, and on the inside ridges are formed icicles half melted and looking for some reason like champagne glasses, dozens of them in each group as one goes along.
There must be deer and coyote that go past at some point. Nocturnal? Coy? Like some spirit totem animals. Rabbit. The summer snake, dragonfly, butterfly maybe also. Other things. There is always more than one thought. Other worlds. Could be spirits if metaphysics is true. What then watches?- deva, sprite, fairy, limbo soul earthbound spectre happy angry or sad phantoms?- I don’t know. Pebbles. Stones. Some bricks at certain passages. Places where water traces lines on hills and follows them down into the larger water. Sojourns for precipitation. Beingness. The natural world of wildflowers and animals, of flora and fauna plus the ground in any season and the skies, are better than social constructs and the infrastructure of metropolis and even the quaintest of towns.
Hue. Realm. Language gives the possibility of poems and poets, so that’s good, the benevolence of idiom, diction, slang and formality both, doesn’t go too much farther than that, or so I would think anyhow.
Existence raw. Those hawks. Flowing water. Those things were before and will be after. We just enter for a little while. If there is the transmigration of souls, a continued journey after, fine, good and well. If not, it’s a win-win situation as there would be no ‘us,’ ‘soul,’ or consciousness to be disappointed anyhow. If we are dust and ash, far less than the beautiful winter hawks, far less than even a field mouse, far less than a part of a dying flying falling petal, then so be it, and that world, which is the real world, universally and scientifically, physically, is okay, has to be okay. It has its own eternal flare, glare, and stare.
Soon the wind arrives and goes along the branches and distant lakes, around tall golden growths like wheat proud and together in the middle of somewhere. But it’s cold. It doesn’t carry the true and desired warmth that spring air can sometimes, the type of warmth that assuages the trouble of many souls for a minute, and inclines them to shift perspective towards minor but important comments such as, ‘Spring is coming,’ or, ‘I heard it’s going to get really warm next week,’ and, ‘I’d like to clean the outside places of some leaves soon…’ no, the wind is not from an auspicious poem them, but still cold and it is also like this: winter, a guest that one thought left but hadn’t. Thought: ‘Oh, they are still here. They had left the room momentarily and I took it that they left the greater house and grounds. But they are here. What’s more, they don’t even look like they getting ready to leaving.’
Oh how it goes like that. But it’s nice, the company of the competent bird there. Hover again just like then, no?- over the hydro lines monstrous, above the stream, perhaps as spirits watch on, by the great glen that leads to wide and wild side boulders. Hover and glide for a few seconds more.
