Let the dusk take the day,
I won’t say Brett’s the last straw,
Pruitt ain’t gonna do it
A Frank Blair (1915) hologram
bleakly announces the death of Sun Ra (’93).
So opens the new Howard Hawks (1896) film,
a bizarre new take on the murder of Joan of Arc in 1431,
starring Keir Dullea (1936) and Michael J. Pollard (1936)
as a conjoined-twins version of the heroine, voiced by Mel Blanc (1908),
whose last vision is of Jimi Hendrix at Berkeley (1970),
the great lefty axeman portrayed by Stepin Fetchit (1892)
in a marvel of editing. An uncredited walk on by Clint Walker (1927)
as Turk Lown (1924) relieves tension and leads to the final gasp
as Gayle Sayers (1943) and Lydell Mitchell (1949) arise from the pyre
as Joan’s conjoined souls and are transplanted into the bodies of
Mike Sadek (1946) and Mike LaCoss (1956) as life’s eternal battery.
Somewhere in the mix, Max Carey dies (’76).
He is played, with lifelike precision, by John Felske (1942).
Joan’s song vocals by Idina Menzel (1971).
“Hymn To Sun Ra” by Ceelo Green (1974).
The movie is dedicated to the memory of Claude Pepper (d. ’89).
Thoughts and prayers go out to bears whom hunters can now stalk inside their den.
That’s not the only rub: they now can shoot the cub. O, what it takes to create manly men!
And caribou can now be shot from boats. A reindeer can be threatening when it floats.
We’ll turn back every rule and reach new heights in cruel.
Our wildlife will survive just as footnotes. But we’ll all look so smart in our fur coats.
Reasonable dialog, dead as a hot dog,
has been packed away with the rats.
Freedom of thinking, burnt out and stinking,
is now criticized as ersatz.
In the land of money, the currency is lies.
The golden rule’s the stuff of fools.
Forget the things you learned in schools,
The new frontier, it seems, is where truth dies.
There is no benefit for honesty.
It’s painted now as last resort of rubes.
Misinformation has a ministry,
while truth and trust slide quickly down the tubes.
Two waters wet and dry
burn and chill
illuminate mountains
extinguish stars
melt freeze pose timidly
on leaves sweat bullets
in peacetime shimmer
in war calling sand to task
impregnating rivers
screaming tears dilute
and overflow allowing
for gods of mud and ice.
Well it’s T-Bone and the Russkies and their pack of inbred huskies
we see scrambling every day for some solution.
Seeking some equation that will pacify the nation,
maybe say it’s just evasion, not collusion.
They repeat to their cronies that accusers are just phonies;
this “witch hunt” is deemed a personal attack.
T-Bone won’t let justice try him and his party will stand by him.
If they don’t he’ll simply stab them in the back.
Kelly Con and Sarah Hucker tell bold lies to save this fucker,
play the country like a sucker, truth be damned.
It’s D.C. Comics come to life, orange man and hypno wife.
But how much longer can we be flimflammed?
Forty nine questions.
The croaker croaks.
The tweeter tweets.
The garden of heathens
is showing its colors.
In the weeds predators huddle.
Seeds of democracy are scattered.
We must be active gardeners
to insure truth must flower.
And spring may clean
our great distress.
It’s into a world of hurt we waken every morn,
to the time we go to dirt, from the moment born.
Screaming out into the light until our silent getaway,
wending way through war and fight, dark of night and blast of day.
Life is but a battleground, endless maps of conflagration,
blood its color, death its sound, nation pitted versus nation.
For the few there are good gods who baffle all this pain.
But none of us can beat the odds and in this world remain.
Scooter McQuail and the Faulkland Twins
had this one song they sang
with rosary beads in their mouths.
Sounded like angels with special needs.
And sometimes resulted in choking.
Well, one could see how this could be redefined
in devilish ways, and that, indeed, was the case,
and they became very popular.
One of the twins married Tree Vincent’s
lock-jawed son and a new percussion was born.
McQuail took up throat singing and was scooped
by a didgeridoo trio: sounded like a battle
of the painfully lap banded inside a cage of ham shanks.
Mother died today. And I am no Camus.
She danced along her way, begun in twenty-two.
A raving farm girl beauty, with rabbits in her yard,
and pledged to family duty, life later became hard.
A mother to her brother, who’d always be a child,
she jumped too soon at marriage, and that’s when things got wild.
She lived a whirlwind fantasy in fifties social scenes.
Her husband grew in power. They had fun and they had means.
But marriage cracked by loving lacked and someone had to fall.
She wound up in an institution, slave to alcohol.
Faith and pure determination put her back on track.
Father found her with the next door neighbor, in the sack.
Post divorce, she moved from city to a trailer park.
There she grew back into life, escaping from the dark.
She went back to school, acted in plays and modeled, too.
She took photographs which now expressed her lightened view.
She went back to church, went back to work and really flourished.
Old age gradually snuck in, but with her spirit nourished,
she remained a dignified and always loving presence.
Now she’s with the flowers, which have always been her essence.