Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

rooms for rent in the dark house
on haven next to the stockyards
you can hear the pigs shriek
and the soil is black as tar
down on the low-low
behind sherries show bar
max could roll a jay at three
jelly rat face diving
headfirst into your balls
sticky little fuck
donna was fixing her face
she worked the villanova
next to the midway
the place with the green door
in the dark house
it was drop time in two dimensions
grey-skinned okie stickmen
whiffle cut with coin slot eyes:
got the flakes
they good
don't fuck me
wanda of the knife edge giggled
and danced in the ring of blue fire
bamboo legs clickety clacking
grey neon pinpricks in a color suckout
clamhead muffled
swimming
yellow piss pocket
gravity pressed
max tied roaches together
tetherballing on an invisible axis
spinning nowhere
pulling each other apart
in the dark house

I got a different memory of The Block, mine goes to about 1954, the summer of Brown V Topeaka Board of Education when the schools in baltimore were integrated. I was going to summer school that year, I took the number 20 bus down baltimore st from Chester st to Holiday st. GOt off there by pollock johnnies and walked over to the the war memorial plaza to catch the number 19 street car to Clifton Jr High out on hartford rd. I saw it all through the eyes of a pubescent recklessly eyeballing those posters of the strippers out side the bars and the Gayiety. Put my pennies in pollock johnnies penny arcade. Playing hookie some days going up to Howard st to the old howard movie house afternoon shows for a quater.

My memory of a slaugher house a funeral at Hebrew cemetery next to the Esskay slaugher house, we all standing at the grave site in our black skull caps trying to hear the Rabbi above the screams of the hogs being slaughtered. This was
Esskay
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Esskay_Meats
I think it was on Orleans but I could be wrong it might have been Haven St.



But these are nothing to do with your poem. That was the summer I punched a cop for the first and only time in my life. Spent the day at the pine street jail.

My first time in a jail cell.


Interesting a poem but I am confused by the geography, I thought haven street was out in Highlandtown not near the block, I could be wrong.

Years later I went to a bar called the Dead End Saloon I think it was at the end of Thames St practically out on the wharf.

Heard a great rock and roll band, women, singing a song about making love to a black widow spider, those were strange days for me, smoking bella donna for some reason, I had an active death wish back then. These days it is more like suicide by jelly donuts

Glad to see you posting again.

Sorry about this mess
clean it up later
open text box let it rip
and I am exhausted
my dog barking and whinning all night with a turd stuck half way out his ass. I had to bathe him, wear my motor cycle jacket and heavy work gloves cause he bites like hell when he ain't pleased

so anyway I did not get much sleep and I got stone about three am and am running on the residual buzz.

thus this compulsive typing
I like class wordfare a lot

haven street borders esskay's as does orleans. sherrie's show bar is on orleans - behind sherries is a block of houses where there are dark houses as well as on haven. it was a neighborhood of transients. i know the cemetery of which you speak. the poem though is not one of locale though i did frame it in a location - but their are dark houses everywhere - there is a dark house in you and me. the poem is based on personal stylized history. perhaps including the villanova and the midway made it block oriented., but i thought the names i used could be taken in another sense and not make the poem fixed in place . people's memories of the block are too good! i used to go to the howard theatre when i copped out of school sometimes. nicetalking; i've missed our conversations.

the dark houses
the dark sea within us


Cut and paste

Freud is not so much a pessimist as a realist, possibly the most thoroughgoing realist in Western thought.


"we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence." ---Bertrand Russell

http://www.gibbsonline.com/philos3.html

but i thought the names i used could be taken in another sense and not make the poem fixed in place

Good morning Constantine, thanks for the modulation on the poem. I think I got that, the poem is fixed in the blood red heart of man. That is how I read it.

We walked the streets of Baltimore together and all that seperated us was a generation.

It is great to talk to you too.