WHITE BUFFALO: The Story of a Mayan Prince

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Doktor Speedkills has a birthday,
but it unfolds like the crash scene in *Le Mans*

Oaxacan Mescal is the fuel that burn the hours
> the driver barely escapes in slow-mo

.. It’s the impact that severs the disconnect from the connection
What every addict craves - a mashup of the paired existences
the unavoidable junction of inside to outside

White Butterfly [concussion]

Andy had lent me a beat-up work pickup
I barely can “see” it in here - maybe pale, long bed and dented
where I come to, in a dawn so cold and beautiful
only a high desert dreamer can identify, in this stillness
of memory, Day’s miraculous newness, the attendant incredulity

How did I survive last night? Is this what the birth of day
feels like [Rudy hands me a bar napkin, saying
‘I got a good one…’ - “The Moon is the Day of the Night”]

This is the convergent instant, no regular life
will ever again suffice, not a bird or tree in sight,
just scrub cedar and sand, Sangre mountains over yonder,
[Shift, wheel]
all mechanics mysterious, impossible to conceive of the spin
cycle rebooting, and of a sudden a sense of the ultimate

cessation and a terminal amorousness for life’s charms,
like an amulet in a leather pouch strung round one’s throat
but not like anything simultaneously, no irony, but
an icy humor like a gravestone one-liner. The West
is famous for them. Now I know why.

Lost [Chorus]
on the Road to the Highway to Santa Fe.

Transposed
later into song, performed at the bookstore on Old
Santa Fe Trail, across from Mike Civelli’s Texaco,
where I hung two paintings, a crazy old maid
- a man with a gourd in turquoise

We engaged in polemics, Mike & I.
I contested his contention
that speed racers were art and he an artist, not
because the cars are all handmade [His Angle]
[Mechanic] in spite of that [Perspective]
more for love and sacrifice or accomplishment,
integrity and sustained improvement in craft, or
money.

The painting is the proof of the difference.
[Inside>Outside & SEAM + HOME] to combat that
Cold Empty Feelin’ [HUM]

The French taught America the lesson, with the Statue
at Ellis Island, Lady Liberty, that gorgeous patina,
green as old dollars. It is the object. D’ART. [MY
AMAZON ARTIST FRIEND CALLS VERBAL BARBS DARTS]

[Chorus] I vomit on my filthy dirty clothes. Nothing
glamorous about it. Purging, medicinal retching. A lens
ejects from these prescription sunglasses. Lasik fixes
the vision 13 years later. My designer lenses still spill
to the carpet. I think I couldn’t find the lost lens,
tonight foggily recall hunting for it under the seat,
in the horrid pile of laundry, no - it’s in the poem;
wasn’t a piece of crafted glass or polymer, but buds.
[Chorus] Not a lens so much as a scope or filter. [Chorus]
Or was it the keys that were lost?

Is that an owl calling outside? My Apache friend
fears Owl as a harbinger of Death. My Hula girl
loves Owl as a harbinger of Love. Are all right
as the world rotates?

[clips] Doktor kindly invited me to the festivities, 
CELEBRATING HIS BIRTH
merriment [family] his normal and lovely family in a new
house, in the Santa Fe style, which he left for points
East, at some point later. We spoke on the phone once or
twice maybe - was I appealing for aid? I can’t remember
[disconnect] The plan
soured with my steadily diminishing clarity. What was
that plan?

I curled up - on a rug, maybe?
Get NUMB/ or OTHER
next to the fire, untended
[later] sipping champagne from a black flask, Dom probably

[Chorus]

I recorded with ink in my grid paper booklet:
“electric jubilation” [record is not factual; interpretive]
My painting hangs in this house - in my memory
it doesn’t hang there - not any more.

I couldn’t find this his house, not for a million dollars,
& where now is MAN? Where are those paintings?

:Adoration manifest

The surface:
Spray sparkles before the interference colors evolved
in the Golden line > those were Liquitex, I believe.

The fluorescent paints of medium viscosity, I don’t even
have photos anymore. Hundreds of documentary snapshots
were abandoned to a Kinko’s on Montezuma in - I think -
1990.
[Intermission]
I returned to the shop with cash six months after
dropping the photos off for reprints, but the sad-faced
cashier told me they’d tossed them the week before - bad luck.
The deflation, the wrong of it. The loss and the lack of recourse.
Bad timing. [Chorus]
Paintings have a life of their own.
Those lives are relative to people, but not the same.
The *Red Violin* cinematically dramatically depicts this,
but not
:dimensionally - I don’t know of a proper rendering and there
won’t be for a while, if ever, not if THEY can help it.
For when reality begins to tell the truth, THEY fear the power
will slip away, and good riddance. THEY would prefer we
attend to the impending apocalypse, rather than each to his
own one.
>
under the painting,
hanging on a hook,
high on the stucco wall, a child, his son
is pinballing [sugar? tension?] from vertical surface [not art]
to vertical surface, squealing, the bulldog scuttling after him.
[Cut to the dining hall, a long table, my manners are terrible
…we told mad tales while his mom glared,
the combination of sounds and inner dialogue an irrational anthem
[Chorus]
memorializing a folly of excess or wasted chance,
inebriate mirth disguising reduced motor skills,
all mundane, when it shouldn’t have been at all
- it could have been a celebration of life and birth,
MAN, but that plan was drowned
[Chorus]
:re-sequence/notation
I riled up his English pit bull, in the crux of Doktor’s
backstory, the naming of the pit bull, its derivation in gore
> as narrated by the host with pride, bragging through
clenched teeth on Hunter Thompson’s cigarette holder
> enraptured by the animal’s loyalty and protectiveness, genes
and breeding… [Blurred montage] An accident as I try to pull out,
crashing
the truck into a Ferrari or other luxury item that moves.
Just like I would do after my first wedding reception,
smashing the minivan’s door with the Pumpkin-colored Chevy
[Fade to black]
[Intermission]
None of which is explainable to the cop who stops
on his way to work to ask if I’m ok.
How was I not arrested?
Thank thank god thank god I have some smokes left. No feeling
in my feet. Did I lose the keys or was the engine dead? I can’t
remember, but I walked home. Where was I living then? Was I
camping at the Ski Basin, or in the bitty one bedroom in the
barrio.

Even when the sun is high in the sky it is a
Full moon. & the debbils out.
[Chorus]

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Good prerequisite for sand painting.
A real handicap in a job search.

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