TRUTH GAME

TOM CLARK

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS] Buffalo, New York

Truth Game by Tom Clark Copyright 2013 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover: An abandoned "Giant Slide" at Coney Island: photo by Arthur Tress, May 1973 for the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica Project (US National Archives) First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-144-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013944827 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 Editor@blazevox.org

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Truth Game

The words having given up on them, not the words but the meanings hiding behind the trees at the side of the road, the people said "We can't find the words" The people sounded like lost children then "The words have given up on us" "We can't explain" The words having been hiding away all those years in the hide and seek truth game not wanting to be found

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Messages from the Underground

It's unnatural to man to go down among the dead in the light of lost worlds. In the darkness of lost words the handwriting on the wall says all things to all people. And thereby all people are given to understand who have gone down among the dead in the cold light of indecipherable words, messages.

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Nocturnal Resolutions

Be opaque Have no memory Make no attempt to be understood Stop suffering fools Be kind to animals no matter what Listen to the angel Try to look upon death as a friend Accept pain as the condition Be more patient Don't turn on the light

aetat 72

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Older

Thirty years having passed imperceptibly as a moment in the falling of its petals, the old plum tree, now gnarled and bent, the remnants choked by ivy, this year somehow once again manages to put out blossoms to drift gently down like a miracle of spring snow upon the graves of the lost ones whose remains rest beneath its stunted limbs. And still here we are.

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Later

The sad strange someone not I who lay awake in the ruined dark all night listening across the long abyss of loss and rue and truth and suffering and wonder to the strained painful coughing of the one being loved above all others and whispering to the wolf waiting outside the door Later

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Life Story

Taking things that don't belong together, pluralistic futures, simplistic pasts, hoop dreams, screened-in porches, perfume of flowers hanging on the night, x-rays, bermudas memory spies, shadow architectures spilt down hallways toward a stair, or door, concealing a clock ticking away inside the soft skull of the child not yet born

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(Post) Moderne

I'm no longer much good at connecting things up with their names (if I ever was) but these strange long nights I do remember and indeed cannot not remember the name of my lovely young cousin who dwelt with her big strapping happy tango loving husband (to a child's eyes, happiness appears everywhere, even where it perhaps isn't) in a modernesque apartment in a place called Skokie I loved visiting there because on the way we got to drive by The Villa Moderne And when visiting there I got to listen to my favorite record in all the wide imagined modern world Hernando's Hideaway That was at a time when we were living on the near West Side where things were not very modern that is clean bright neat well organized It always seemed more things were falling apart than were being mended but I imagined a future in which things would be becoming otherwise I imagined the future as a place

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whence all that disorganization and squalor would have been chased away by a kind of geometrical evolution My private altarboy's-own-world naf design for living Things would be very different in that imagined brilliant future things would no longer require being mended because they would never fall apart The future would be available to everybody yet at the same time be a secret place like The Villa Moderne or Hernando's Hideaway I was seeing with the foolish eyes of a child then But before long when I learned that my sweet and pretty and bright and cheerful and always happy young cousin was very ill with colon cancer and suffering terribly and having her abdomen burnt away by relentless doses of radiation "therapy" and then when she died anyway so that all that remained of her bright smile in my mind was an indelible image of unspeakable agony and she was spoken of in hushed voices behind doors in the family

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and somebody whispered that her big happy tango loving man who had loved her so much had gone crazy with the pain of it all I started to have second thoughts

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Approaching the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement

It lasted one moment, like the full blown lustre of a peach or a rose, the next moment that airy dream was over, now remain the unlit business blocks, rats scurrying from trash bin to glassed-in bank arcade, pavement carpeted with wet leaves, bodies sheltering in the light rain dripping from the building overhang, the bones, the blows that fall from all directions, from unlikely sources, the scanning search beam of the police cruiser cutting through the red mist, the quiet click of the picture of no one being taken by an autoprogrammed camera somewhere beneath the big clock on the bank outside the BART station, the broken clock that's never been correct, just as the O/C guy who weirdly resembles Allen Ginsberg confides in haste-elided rapidfire aside I'maJewGeminijustlikeBobbyDylan as he rushes past on his nightly rounds, quick-pace orchestra conductor of a speeded-up cartoon ghost symphony waving his broken-off-wooden-chair-rung baton, furiously banging on every newspaper box in repetitive percussive impatient urgent enquiry to see if the lost magic of revolution might still be lingering in a broken coin slot

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