A lopsided sun with teeth

shedding broken rays,

Flower heads sticking

out of a hillside,

A house slanting to one side

as if pushed by constant force

of violent winds,

windows are black.

There is a road also

or a river

pausing halfway up the hill

to become a lump with shut eyelids.

A hibernating turtle?

A murdered rock?

Then the road picking up

and disappearing

behind the precarious house.

A child's drawing on a paper bag

small picture of logic

I found in a drawer, drunk

(clear)

fumbling for can opener.

I have seen these renditions

of a peculiar reality,

or ones like them,

stuck to sidewalks in the rain,

laying among weeds and beer cans,

dirty, faded, lost.

They do not seem to care

whether they impress,

make a point, tell

a story.

I do not really understand

what makes them sometimes

work,

but I give them credit

(for what little it's worth)

for quitting

while still ahead,

for not growing

into something else,

for not killing

the hand that made them

the mind that accidently

found them.

I put the brown icon back

in the drawer.

This charming reminiscence

has no place else

to go.

.....tearing down the walls

............of the lately deceased clown's

.....................dressing room,

..........the show's managers discovered

...............among his largely mundane

....................personal effects

.........a private saloon in various stages of use,

....................a panoply of gags

................such as the rubber daffodil

.....................which squirted water,

...............a canned snake,

..........a derringer which shot out flags,

........and a smashed golden binoculars

used once by his son on a sunny birthday

.............many years ago

............then broken the next day

..................in a train crash

..........from which the child did not

........................walk away alive.

.................if any of the vultures

............had cared to peer through

.......................the eyepiece

....................of this voyeurs instrument,

...........................they might have seen

.....................an aerospace view

.........................of four roofless walls

.......................standing in an old field

..........................of brick-orange flowers

.................................at time's end,

.......................a drunken clown

......................sitting in his underwear

....................in this little open-air room

......................singing an obscene duet

........................with an unseen voice

.....................similar in sound to rain

................................rustling tents

...everything which is magic

...........everything which hangs on

......despite odds

............owes something

.........to this laughter

rooted in desolation

...........these eyes crashing wildly around

......as if trying to follow

.............a fly......o

........where are the golden binoculars

...............that bring reasons to the seasons

...................breath to our death

.................strings

..................to things?

again. the same torn book:

Not Arthur, nor The Aeniad,

no roll of drums,

no cast of thousands

defending a rock named England

or Ithaca,

but an ill-fated crusade

on the part

of a small feathered animal

to warn a distant king

of the sky falling.

I put down

this barnyard epic.

There is in each of us,

my daughter and I,

the sudden drop

of a flag,

the slow winding down

of the Indianapolis 500,

a summer rain chasing all the dust

and torturing heat

back to hell.

The king, I think,

would have never believed

a chicken, anyway.

I divest myself

of the couch

to stare

at a wilting flower

in a jar.

She returns to T.V.

and instant blight.

Our friendship,

despite the obvious terms,

remains a mystery.

with hoses fifty yards long the firemen came running

they came with the small guarded eyes of men

who want to save others from fire and

into the place with jangling galoshes they came

and pressed back through the smoke

as if it were petals of death, looking for the fire

which was not to be found

which was concealed somewhere like a red rose

whining in a bottle, and all the old men

sat silently at the bar with nowhere else to go

and around all their shoulders had fallen

the blue mantle of not caring...the backs of

many heads growing vague like things

in a garden of hell, and the firemen

began to notice that they were not alone,

they screamed at the old men to get their asses moving

they grabbed whole shoulders and shook them

to open the eyes of dead children

and one by one the old men went,

reluctant, the silhouettes of birds

leaving a summer country, the night going away

over hills and hills, until the bar

was empty and the firemen returned

to put out the fire, and one old

man with legs as determined as

trees walked back in to finish his drink.

the prehistoric horses appeared

for a few minutes last night on Haight Street

but it seemed they had always been standing

there

offering no resistance

to the forms of waking and walking

that men make through time.

there were only five or six of them

huddled together at the end of the street

under the trees

and they were not much larger

than the drawings we have seen

on the walls of caves in Madrid,

grazing on something we

could not see.

I felt foolish and sad

about their necks nudging

each other. they laughed

the way dead leaves

flutter on the ground.

I don't know why they were back.

I had a rabbit.

His name doesn't matter.

I gave him a different name every week,

but he never knew. It was just between myself

and the others who came to watch him.

The rabbit ate newspaper.

It was odd.

There would be the rabbit

sitting on the bed eating the paper,

and the bed hadn't even been made.

But the rabbit looked perfectly content

sitting in the rumpled sheets.

My friends came over,

and noticed the rabbit

sitting on the bed eating the paper.

It was easy for them to say things like,

"That rabbit is starving. Lettuce is

just as cheap as newspaper.

Why don't you feed the rabbit lettuce?"

Mike came over and said,

"Look at that bed. Look at the

newspapers in shreds all over the bed.

If I were you, I would keep the rabbit

in the bathroom. I'd make it a cardboard

bed, lay it with newspaper, and close

the door at night."

I didn't know about Mike. He was in the army,

and he visited me very rarely.

The rabbit was really none of his concern.

Actually, I was visited rarely by everyone.

I had a feeling that they only came to

watch my rabbit eating the newspaper.

It was odd.

After they saw the rabbit,

they would walk around my rooms

as if looking for something.

They would put their hands on the walls,

and knock on the tables.

I had a single chair, by the bed.

It was piled with newspapers.

My strange friends looked at the chair,

and started talking about

anything that came into their heads.

But they soon exhausted themselves.

The rabbit still ate newspaper

as if it were lettuce.

I tore a few loose pages off the chair,

and threw them on the bed.

The rabbit pricked up his ears,

and perhaps that is how

a rabbit smiles.

Then my friends said they'd better move.

I didn't say anything to this.

I watched them take a short last look

at the bed, turn their backs

and leave.

By this time I was thinking about

going to bed. I was tired of having

the people walk around my rooms, wondering

about what goes through the head of a man

who lives alone with a rabbit

and a single chair.

I took off my pants

and lay them over the chair.

I got into bed.

The rabbit sighed, I think,

having had its fill of newspaper

for one evening,

and it hopped on top of the pillow.

I turned off the light,

put my head at the base of the pillow

and lay there for several minutes,

listening to last week's headlines.

Some other long-out-of-print Kryss books:

*Nuclear Roses and Quiet Rooms (Open Skull Press, S.F.)

*Falling Through the Cracks (Fuck If I Know Press, S.F.)

*New Majiks--selected poems & rabbits (Radical America, Cambridge, Mass.)

*Dialogue in Pale Blue--collaboration between Kryss & rjs; (blue paper collage on blue paper; 200 copies, each hand-assembled, each unique); (Broken Mimeo Press, Cleveland)

************************************************************

A COLLECTED WORKS PROPOSAL

It just occurred to me that it would be a noble endeavor to put together the collected works of these fast-disappearing outsider poets--Kryss, Albert Huffstickler, Jack Saunders to date, Maia Penfold on the horizon, more to come after that. But tackling noble endeavors has kept me in the poor house for the past 35 years and lost me a wife and a sweetheart or two.

Being somewhat of an outsider myself (at least I've past the over-fifty test), I have a very difficult time writing proposals and filling out applications--they fly in my face like shrapnel. So I'll cut to the chase:

It would be nice to have someone bankroll at least the printing costs on a collected works series. Or, bankroll the poet(s) who move you most. Some sort of deal could be worked out. What would be even nicer would be someone with a truly big heart and ample financial resources who would bankroll production costs and kick back some cash to the poet(s) of their choice--they're all poor, these poets, some of them flat-out indigent.

This is the best I can come up with in the help asking department, so if there is anyone out there reading this who is solvent and willing, anyone who's in synch with the wild spirit of stark-naked freedom, anyone who digs, respects and admires what people like Kryss, Saunders, Huffstickler and Penfold (wait until you read her stuff!) have done all their lives and are still doing, get in touch. Amen.

John Bennett

vagabond@eburg.com