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Prologue to Noah Webster:
When I was a little boy and growing up, ignorant and without understanding, I entered puberty at about the same time I entered my freshman year at a class-conscious high school. At first it came as a shock, the cruel and unusual treatment by strangers, but almost immediately I was saved and whisked away by Dante and Homer and ushered into a new world, the world of pandemic pentameter, a vast world from which I was able to reconsider the necessity of a program that was being fostered upon me by a society in the thralls of a cold war. I had no idea then how old the world already was, or that it had a history, or that other lands and times and cultures believed differently than I.
At the time it didn't matter, as I was quickly whisked from the classroom by my custodians and placed into a reformatory, not unlike the one Dante had warned me about in his revelations of Hell. Upon release, I sought a circular route back home, similar to the one that Homer had given his hero Odysseus to travel some lifetimes before. I still didn't have a home to go home to, or a proper guide... thus my young mind grasped onto the first universe that floated by and carried me on with it. To where, I didn't know.
A dozen years later I awoke on a beach in Venice California inebriated to the gills by a Mexican whore called Circe, who lay in my arms along side a handful of men -- also at my side -- braying and decaying like a stable of swine. Where I had come to was the very place Dante and Homer in their wisdom had directed me to, depositing me in their stead to collect a future interest. And I knew instantly what had never been revealed in that primitive classroom in which my ancestors had placed me -- if I were ever going to read another great novel, I was going to have to write it myself!
And so, one chilly afternoon in A Burger King in Cincinnati, with my coffee cup filled to overflow with whiskey and my mind focused on faraway lands, I began to think like a writer thinks. It would be a long solitary journey, I decided, alone and adrift with my only companion the great and venerable Noah Webster, our friend who gave us the dictionary. No woman had ever wanted me, but now it would be okay; I had a date with Noah Webster awaiting me...
A DATE WITH NOAH WEBSTER
The Twin Towers Mix 2001
A Poem by Fred Burkhart
1.
Now when I was a little boy and growing up
and forming my earliest memories
One of the earliest was about being adopted
into the Middle Class
Having spent the first 8 years
with an old coal miner
in a shack without electricity
or plumbing,
I got used to the concrete and steel
And boy was I shocked
when I got to my new parents' house
and saw the two of them just sitting there
with their black & white television on low
and patterning the nerve speech.
All I learned in that house was how to hate the Enemy.
But then, God bless 'em, my young friends taught me
how to masturbate!
And so when I reached puberty,
I climbed onto the back of
the first available baby sitter
and rode her doggy-style around the room
a half-dozen times
before I fell off dazed and delirious at her feet
with her just a smiling and pissing and pointing me
in the direction of Whitman's open road and
the way out of there.
And so, with an emerging awareness
I began to dream of the day
that I too
would wallow with my new mommy and daddy
in that great bed of cum
and piss
and shit
and procreation
that they called the American Way
While the visions of sugarplums danced in our heads
and the pink flamingos strutted boldly
across the papered walls
that we called our lives.
I'm talking about the Fifties before Elvis...
Oh yeah, I moved on out of there all right
And met the woman of my dreams!
She was a Fifties nudie-cutie
with the stench of a musty beaver
and she looked a lot like Betty
or some other Page torn lustily
from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge,
the one they'd torn down and circulated
as the (pre-hefner) girlie magazines of those days.
Oh we started out all right,
It was peace and love and all that propaganda!
But it didn't take us long
before we were both just sitting there
trapped inside a 1969 drunk accusation,
our color televisions on low
and patterning the nerve speech,
the controls on her television forever corroded
and stuck there
like the pasties she wore
to conceal the cavity
that used to contain her heart...
Oh that poor dear child.
But now here it is the long awaited millennium
and the girl I got my eyes on now
is young,
wet
and from the suburbs.
But come to find out that she too is trapped inside
and struggling to free herself
from her boyfriend's lame excuse for a hallucination...
the both of them just sitting there in a trance
with their Black Sabbath records playing backwards
and patterning the nerve speech.
And far above them, the bombs still bursting in air...
2.
Why have you noticed
that real speech as revelation
has now become twisted into the speech of speculation
Indoctrination and Intimidation,
Rationalization and Insinuation.
It's Nation Against Nation
and Fascination with Fashion
and Feces and Fascism
and any other ism but the realism.
Schism and Jism and Any Other Ism but the Realism.
The nerve! Speech...
dominating and persuading and brainwashing us
to the point where our nerves have been drained dull
and incapable of living peacefully with the other side...
incapable of allowing the Living God
that bleeds and pounds and resides within each of us
to once and for all finally escape
and define itself
for the glory of all of us...
The Nerve!
Speech...
The Rib Word from the very beginning
and the Lib Word from deep inside
forever forsaken for the Pavlovian Program
we were implanted with.
Oh yes my children
these are the days of Adam and Eve…
the Neanderthal Jock and his Bitch Slave
evolving superiority of the fittest
into all that racist garbage
and death
to our neighbors next door.
Ahh yes, the Rib Word
and the Lib Word
and their uninformed children
greasing the Garden
The Father of Lies manipulating that very same Garden -
the Ghetto!
The Mother of All Living
begetting children with every
Harry Dick and Adam
Those very same children clueless and kicked out of
the garden...
The gall, you say!
"Eve..."
"O yes, Father, I'm down on my knees... what is it this time?"
"It's about your kids again..."
"O no, Father, not again!"
"Yes, and this time they've been caught
smoking the leaves off the Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil."
"The gall, you say"
"But alas," they say…
"That broad's been on pension since puberty,
her television of color the inculcation of nerve speech."
Oh yes, the Nerve Speech:
The Rib Word
and the Lib Word
and the Kids High on
Kitty Litter,
Kids high on pubescent sin and kitty litter
Kids forever high and on a date with Noah Webster.
3.
The Date?
Well they first stopped at Wrigley Field,
Chicago's equivalent of a cultural revolution...
Hold it! CUT!
...to the oral humming of Byronic melancholy,
to the image of twin towers crumbling
like two tarot card lovers
running in opposite directions of a lobotomy.
Long past the honoring of an ancient debt,
arriving finally at the point where she finally begins to feel...
I don't think you heard me right, Ladies, I said...
She's arrived at the point where her cigarette begins to feel
like it weighs 37 pounds...
Quite startled she drops it to the floor
as some unseen tongue slips into her ear
and washes away the sounds from outside,
whispering, wet and alive, within her brain
until the reverberations become words
and take on the proportion of meaning:
"All your parents Deities...
and all of your parents values...
are so many chunks of shit,"
she coos,
"And what's even worse, see how we all have become
passengers trapped in a 1941 Time."
Only the bombs have changed...
Today they are made out of human body parts,
not just coke cans and metallic debris.
So... at last, to the point... to Time.
the teacher...
Haven't we learned your lessons yet?
Didn't we watch helpless as the Nazis burned up the Jews?
Helpless again, as the Americans evened the score
and burned down the Germans,
bombed the Japs
and stood in line
for the whole new batch of transistor radios that
started arriving?
"O, hold on there, buddy...
I think you're talking about a later war...
They didn't have any transistors back there in World War Two!
"Hey bro, maybe you be rappin' about the Vietnamese?"
Or how about the American Indians...
Didn't we put a bullet in one or two of those Indians?
Or was that the South American Indians?
O, how confusing this history has become,
filtered down through the televisions in our living rooms...
(The copies of this world the body makes)
"O, Holy Christ!... now I think they're shooting at our own kids this time!"
Dead students from Kent State to Columbine
Fires ablaze in Philly and Watts
"And what's about the inalienable rights
of all that uranium released today?"
That's what's on every grad students mind
until they finally wake up and discover
that they're still only 200 pages into Orwell's 1984...
About to that part where the bullet enters
the neck of the American president John F. Kennedy,
escalates into an entire fuselage of living brain tissue
and keeps on exiting,
over and over and over,
from the wounds in the now thoroughly hollow skull
of the World Trade Center,
reminding Winston of the spear that pierced the side of the Lord
and prompted the healing prescription:
"Forgive them... for they know not what they do."
"Wow, the ultimate tattoo!"
"Finally, the Mark of the Beast is upon us!"
No wait... over there... up in the sky...
It's not a bird anymore... is it another airplane?
No, no... it's only Aristotle's rational animal called Man again...
Still preferring to copy the animals in
his nervous response,
rather than
get down
and express some love and forgiveness...
A deranged animal who's propped himself up
on Prozac and Phenobarbital,
no longer even a rational animal
but a rational plant, still suiting himself up fine
in the latest chemical dimension.
Why, did you know,
that out there in space,
she even puts on another suit!?
"You're damn right," she confides,
"We're gonna keep on growing skin all over each other
and the transparency..."
And so on into infinity...
The ecstasy of stale odor at the end of our toothpicks,
the pungency of pubescent sin and kitty litter,
the broken Rib words and painted Lib words of tainted flesh
The once awesome and formidable Tree of Knowledge
now broken down into the obscure branches of
so-called logic and religion
The destruction and abuse of our forests,
Folded into acres of newspaper trees
with branches in all major cities
What was once a great Garden of Sustenance
now reduced to our Ghettos of Color
The Eternal as the Origin of Words - the Logos
Somehow tragically lassoed and waylaid
and reduced to the flesh of obscure places
Lost in a world of name-calling and retribution
Reduced forever more to a Date With Noah Webster
Words forever lost on eulogizing one another.
TEXT AND IMAGES COPYRIGHTED
by FRED BURKHART 2001
BURKHART STUDIOS
2845 N. HALSTED STREET CHICAGO ILLINOIS 60657 773 348-8536
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