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"Goodtime Jesus"

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

p. 177

"Ashbery is an epistemological genius whose world has arrayed itself around him as a world in which it's possible for a man to live on condition that he reserve his passion for totality, as it were for another life. His world is a separate world in which it is impossible to meet another soul" (45).

"a universe that escapes tragedy by escaping terminal structure" (44)

Ballard's "The Index" - The fictional paratext "to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century." Killin' it, Ballard. Killin' it. http://johntranter.com/00/index-the-b...

"The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you being to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction." (24)

"I suppose I should tell you
I've finally been fired
from the globe factory.
I'd been putting beaches
in North Dakota
for two months.
Before that, it was mountains.
When I was on map duty,
I put a fairground
next to our neighborhood.
I thought it would help.
I could have spent
an entire week there
painting your face.
Remember when
I took you to see Kansas City?
That was Omaha. (85)

"When she opens her mouth, crows and doves are making a nest in her throat." (42)

"I couldn't sleep
so I dug a tunnel
in my backyard.

At the end
was a country western bar.
I've been visiting

religiously since.
It's the loneliest place
I've ever been.

Instead of a jukebox,
there is an aquarium
but I can't

find any of the fish.
I sit in the bar's
darkest corner

with my beers
and wear a lampshade.
Crack some walnuts.

Crack some walnuts
with my new claw. (18-19)

As I paint the street

I melt the houses
to point up the turreted cupola
I make hoopla

of the low tavern's neon cross--
very like a cross from here--
I honor the huge blue distant dome
valid somehow to the fellow falling high (198)

That torture called by men delight / touches her no more. / So calm she looked, half smiling: Heaven? / No, restore / my matter, free from motion, / to the soil's roar. (111)

Mennonite spotting, as if they were their own nation: "They were simple enough. / Swedes, Germans, / Mennonites, Dutch, / Irish, escaping / Europe. / Running."