The Angel of Doo Wop
snaked up to me in a dive bar somewhere down south, and it placed my finger over the knob that punched I Only Have Eyes for You – by the Flamingos – so that I could hear the echo of harmonic voices lifting up and humming in the stars over a swamp behind us, and a lonesome woman, a blond, gazed over into my eyes – she was probably sensing something real, some signal from the heart she felt, or remembered, as millions of people go by but, gazing into me, they all disappeared from view because, her eyes said to me, I only have eyes for you. And I leaned across the wooden bar, gazed back into her earth angel eyes, as if telling her she would be the only one I adore. Then the Five Satins, In the Still Of the Night, played – a man in a corduroy coat had shuffled over and pressed it to play, and the echoes of the glassware tinkling in the bar pulsed like stars, like eyes watching over us: over our sad beauty, our inescapable matter, our nights in May when we claim our love for one another and, in the still of the night, a man outdoors – we could see him through the glazed bar window – stood rocking on the step of an empty building playing his exquisite saxophone to that part of Being he, himself, could never play – except by and through the sublime strobe lights of God flooding his horn with all the incandescent light that the stars and fate are made of, and the sad doo wop angel leaned over to me, drink in hand, and said, you know Kant was correct when he mumbled beauty is the only finality here, and the song on the juke box was Come Softly to Me by the Fleetwoods, and the girl’s voices, silken across the mic, thrilled me until I was a mirror somersaulting me back to my own desire – to the love songs of winsome school girls with scarlet ribbons – and the angel pointed me toward the infinite veils of beauty that, in this bar, because they are from the other mansion on the hill – that house we can’t see but only feel with the heart’s espionage of poetry – are absolutely without equivocation, without reflection, without hesitation born from that light most glad of all, and, because of that – because they caress and baptize us with magic – they’re everlasting.
The Caretaking Angels Encounter Me
This was on a foggy winter morning, on the back streets of Venice Beach where the meth addicts hid in messy cars and did their business while the city of Los Angeles ticketed their junked cars for illegal parking. I was standing alone under a strange tree, studying a lovely yellow flower’s pointed tips while the innocent children chased one another across a play ground in a spirited game of hide-and-seek or rag tag – it was difficult to figure it out. Along Abbot Kinney Blvd I watched a man watching a woman as she passed quickly by him in her yoga pants – she was chirping steadily on her cell phone to someone – and some part of him began his initiatory descent into hell while the muscle men on the wild beach lifted weights together, tugged and pushed the barbells high up, into the paradisal pacific sky so dense with cataclysmic clouds marauding over the ocean’s lathering concourse of waves, crashing to shore. And men, dressed shabbily in drag, abolished themselves to a kind of farcical ornamentation because they were dressed in littered fabric and large black refuse bags, and when I gazed back at them, before leaving the beach, I thought they resembled a conjuration of dumpsters. Some assemblage of plasma. Along Sunset Avenue, I watched a boy inhale the meth by himself like a feral pariah dog. His gray fingers, cupping the glass pipe with a sphere on its end where, in the after burn, a smog escaped just after he pulled his slanted mouth away from it, burning him – seemingly – in the rancid heat. And when I saw him light it again, the crystal meth liquefied and he moved his small yellow lighter back and forth in front of it as he inhaled the vapors until his eyes lids dropped shut like a sickly salamander. Keats, you know, wrote so dizzy, mixing the senses especially in that poem Ode On Melancholy where he asserts “but when the melancholy fit shall fall from heaven like a weeping cloud that fosters the droop-headed flowers all,” I think he might have been seeing this boy addict crouching down in the shadows along Sunset Avenue, near the fast Pacific Highway, while delivery trucks thundered past him in dust clouds. I think I was unstoppable in my own lostness, clothed in my own vapor when I found myself adrift in the canals, mesmerized by the brown saltine waters until it hit me I was trapped, too, by the distinct boutique of the abyss. And the boy’s smoking of meth – like some initiatory departing of himself into lost vaporization – turned me obscure and transparent, like I was just blue condensation, mist, fog. Nothing left of me but drowsy salt-light. And, kneeling beside a white flower in a pot, I felt the structure of the world bending me down, so fraught with all these irreconcilable ideas and impregnable deities without actual names and, while a woman watered her plants and the silent canals flowed memoryless – without interpretation – I became remote, like the meth addict boy, lost in translation, without prayer. On the beach, far off, rain collected over the pier and a police car rode silently up to it. Another woman, a nightingale, talked sporadic into her cell phone as I walked up to the pier to drown myself in haze. And the Caretaking Angels – those beings sent to gather all of us poorly born to flesh again – crouched in ranks along the shore, readying one by one to cradle me into their extended gentle arms: I could see them in the wave’s bloom and sprawl. And the rain fell silent, like the hungry splintered spirits of us all.
My Horoscope in a Style of Harry Houdini
The horoscope read, “you wound up in this situation because somebody else wanted it.” So let me tell you how to escape it: you lay the white cloth out on a table by your bedside. Then you mix the white powder you have dutifully purchased from the dealer, in 20-40mg of water, and, then, filter it through a small balled up piece of cotton. Then, take the needle and flick all the air in it to the top and push it out. Then, with the red headband in hand, tie it over the top of your left arm so that a blue vein bulges out enough to pierce it, and insert the tip of the needle at just 20 degrees, and, then, inject the solution into your vein there. In a moment you will feel a wind to which no angel has seen or felt. And then you will fall out. Something in your mind will lose rule. And then your evaporation, your escape from all this, will be complete. Yes. I have told you this to stir your notice – says Houdini, unwrapping himself from ropes. This is while I am alone in a room in Detroit, the old heaters rattling the building with steam. And this is at a time when I am without name or number; I am anonymous. And to be anonymous is the way that advantage seizes someone; rules them. I watch Houdini walk straight up a wall. The woman downstairs, intoxicated, starts singing the song La Vie En Rose. I believe, in her sorrow, she sings it to me. Houdini sets a cup of tea for us. Says – and I have captured you, in this drug imagery, because to escape yourself is to unravel time. And those who try it, try it too often with drugs or gambling, which is a foolish bid for bad blood. And so you must push yourself in – to this beer barrel of your body’s jar – and then tie off where your arms rule all your certainty, and then you must insist that someone – your lover is best – push and lock the top of the barrel over you, and then secure it tight with nails. You must be fixed inside a circumstance. It’s only through fixity we discover a spirit in us – which must be accessed to escape. And then – inside the barrel’s prison – you must see yourself in a vision where the entrapped light in there is just a lonely hobo encircling you. And then, when terror strikes you like a match and you’re lit aflame – a tree igniting itself as it stops disputing all that aggresses against it – you will inhabit the silence it takes to achieve your horoscope’s benevolent refrain; this escaping, of another’s wish for you. And after you have fell to quiet, which cannot come through injection but rather, must come from a lawlessness only a self-devotion provides to you, let your hands rise up to the lid’s rim and push it open, for it was always just a cloud you thought was wooden, such is the falsehood of all illusion – just like this selfhood you’re alive in. Only after will you know a true limit. And when I blinked my eyes open to find Houdini in there – in this room where I believe he died in – all I saw was a wall clock that read five o’clock, a Monday. And the river was slate gray. There was no sign of Mr. Houdini. Just the sea gulls, wailing their usual song.
Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, will be published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. He has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, The Wayfarer and Rabid Oak.