Alan Catlin


from Memories

               375-

The topography of intimacy,
“God is a joke no one gets.”
Not Johnny B Goode. Howie Good.
“Between coffee & fentanyl, 
Between Love Mes & Go Fuck Yourself,
there’s so much life to be gotten
through.” Whatever you say, Kim
Addonizio. “It’s too late to drink
myself to death at a young age.”





               376-

Inland Empire. Grand Hotel. Gran
Taqueria. Gran Barista.  The Tijuana
Book of the Dead. Urea. Cuidad Juarez. 
2666. Not a Palm Beach Desert address.
“I hear a ticking in my head.” Something
wicked this way comes. “That car that
just passed us. It exploded.” A Touch
of Evil.





               377-

“Can the dead remember their native
tongue.” Not Malcolm Lowry. Not
Under the Volcano. Serena Fusek.
Ancient Maps and a Tarot Pack. 
The Hands of Orlac. On the Day of
Dead. Peter Lorre. Not Joel Cairo. M.
In Oaxaca Yellow matter custard.
Dripping from a dead dog’s eye.





               378-

“When I think of order, I think of
Disorder.” Diane Suess. And Emily
Dickinson.  Her Midnight Ride of
the Monster Woman. Diane’s not Emily’s.
Her Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks 
and a Girl. Her Four-Legged Girl.
Ray Hicks. “I’m tired of taking shit
from inferior people.” Who’ll Stop
the Rain.





               379-

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
W.B. Yeats. A Vision. Automatic writing
Or automat sandwiches. Ask Georgie.
Not the girl with a y, the wife. Already
Dead. Not Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.
Not the tarot card. Not Jesus’ Son. 
The Gibbet. As Leonora Carrington saw it.
And her Transference. As she envisioned it.
Decoding The Wasteland. With a wicked
deck of cards. The joker laughs at you.





               391-

“Was he saying that women should
be put in a box and be happy in that box?”
Like a Beckett play. The living sea of dreams.
12 or 13 minutes of living hell.
Not like a car crash. 16 times in a variety
of colors. Not one you can look away from.
A play. In staged shadows. Endlessly rocking.
Or tits up in a graveyard urn. “Fuck life.”
Rockaby, baby.





               392-

A life well lived. Is a life well edited.
The Art of the Biography or Krapp’s
Last Tape. Beckett. Again. And again.
Abd again. “And so their mother continued
To live no matter what living might mean.
It began to feel almost like a madness.”
A Tasmanian devil. Richard Flanagan.
“Fuck the young.” “Fuck them all.”

Alan Catlin is a poet, editor and wordsmith currently living in Upstate NY. Among his most recent publications is a group of poems about coming of age in the 60's, Sunshine Superman (Cyberwit) ,and The Road to Perdition (Alien Buddha), three chapbooks length collections in one book, from a series of Noir movie poems now eleven chapbooks long under the working title Hollyweird.

Collations of earlier poems from the series which the above pieces are from have appeared as two books, the first, Memories, is from Alien Buddha, and the second, Memories Too, is from Dos Madres. There's a third ready to go.

 
 

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