To the Artist's Page             To our home page

To Kurt Lee's previous piece     To Kurt Lee's next piece

palebo
for somerset

1

my father had tried to discipline me at a remarkably late age in life, late teens, and i had reacted badly, after being threatened and threatening him back, how i hated him then and still do, ended with the both of us crying and him giving me 100$ which i spent on dope later that night after agreeing to go to a mental institution. thus began the phase of my life which i consider "palebo".

palebo kidnapped me and held me hostage at 3:55 pm december 17 1996, i remember the date distinctly, as when i first heard the deep humming sounds that have never ceased to fill my brain with schizm. all day and all night i can hear the hum, in my mind, whirring sometimes loud and sometimes muffled, as a car engine wrapped in rags. i am miserable. miserable is an understatement. my life has become something that reflects light from the most abstract. palebo sometimes offers me pain, sometimes entertainment, but i am never content. palebo is a land of limbo, without stinging insects, full of lead pillows and skunky beer.

the mental institution came after long bouts of walking in which i shed some 90 pounds from my torso and so became attractive. i was having an affair with a young greek teenager named austi, whom i had come to depend upon for my soul and simple refuge of human compassion. him being an endless well of compassion, and me starved and famished for it, we got along well and i worshipped him with the lividity that the dawn worships the closing of the night and the suffering worship the opening of it. i had given him a blowjob one night when i found him especially attractive clad in a tight black t-shirt and black jeans. i pounced hungrily on him as he eyed me. thus marks the only denizen of palebo who took me in hand, and lead me across the shore and to the tree on which peppers grow, writhing like the hind ends of snakes wishing for heads or beheaded.

we plucked these vegetables from the tree, dried them out, and! crushed them under steel rolling pins and smoked them in cob pipes with our foreheads in the frigid winter night panting for sex and more.

bouts of long solitude, the nights of palebo lasting three times as long as the days, and i spent these nights listening to the singing tree which grew near the three on which the peppers grew, the tree had infinite voices and conspiratory songs, sometimes repeating ones i enjoyed for me when i wept for them and scattered ashes on its branches. i found myself stumbling forward for water for the pepper tree, as its peppers had been remarkably small and shriveled as of late, in perambulated paths trodden of rubber tires in moist grey great snow that collected in fistfuls on the street, leaving a crooked trail of footsteps in my wake, and made my way to the first epoch of palebo, the first estate, Holland Oil

i arrived at 6am and applied for a job, for which i was instantly hired and started later that day, i was thrilled. from thence forward i was working in a short tunnel, loading elixirs into the trunks and sides of cars on customers, 4pm to 12 midnight, and palebo, pleased with my working, shortened my long nights and i acquired water to saturate the trees roots. although my checks were scanty, i was shocked to be earning money, and sometimes i would spend the money on ears, which i would toss into the bay. what do cigarettes symbolize?

the admitting of a working class. the admonition of a working class. the accepting. mad with lust and energy i plunged myself in the night once again to acquired cigarettes, poor and starving, clad in rags, before i was admitted to the working class at a small drug store. they gave me my first pack of marlboro reds. shiny and tight and soft the box glittered in my hands. i sat in my basement looking at kadinsky paintings on my computer, chain smoking them and feeling very urbane, abstract and elated.

thence forward they were a constant comfort when the buzzing grew to loud, or the briars in which i was habitually fettered tightened around my ankles.

the briars grew months after the buzzing, as i constantly walked terrified of the aspect of becoming a fatass, they grew out of my ankles and steadfastly grappled around me as if i had stumbled into a tangle of irate barbed wire and proceeded to clamp around my legs inhibiting my ambulatory movement. angered at my beauty, this was a gift from palebo. i continued to work every night at holland oil, until one night austi came through the drive through and his eyes reached out like hovering pools of glistening oil and covered my body, asking could he work here with me, i drank in the oil, which coated my heart and made it melt into my gut, and a lambid arm emerged from my gut and caressed his face, the hand tangled around the oil mixing our souls together like beer into whiskey, and we drank in abundance, fawning over each other that night, licking, sucking, fucking, kissing, caressing with words, telling each other to get away but somehow we couldn’t, the two elements had mixed and refused to depart, we were bound, sewn together like two pillows full of gourds and empty bottles, and each day as i worked i longed to see him, begged long cool aisles of beer to see him, smoked my cigarettes and swayed my hips next to the cash register, posing on stacks of beer, in case he might arrive, hoping to exude FUCK ME to him.

I can say, that of all the people on this earth, i am one of them that has truly been in love, truly felt that fire of longing and want, the absolute need and pain of needing someone, until the bones ache and fires scream like banshees in the mind, like i had been cursed, and cursed i had been by austi, who had cast a spell on me in his back yard with a rough bedpost and a circle of table salt, praying to the profane opal that someone might love him, and deeply i feel for him, impaled on his icon of love.

out of hunger for the peppers i would sell alcohol to minors for a five dollar tip and was turned in by the son of a cop who hated fags with a passion and on my birthday was kicked out of the palebo estate by a supervisor dumping me on the street with a pack of cigarettes and a dead look on my face so i could call austi and tell him i got fired and we could howl like wolverines about our poverty and smoke pot and listen to 50 year old blues music in a smoky basement entirely detached from the rest of the world, oh things will look up, things will get better, were still alive aren’t we? well be ok, no one can take life from us except ourselves or anyone else we come across who don’t take too kindly. i climbed to the top of the pepper tree and slept in fury, puffing on my pipe until dream rose from the earth like evaporating frost, wandering the railroad tracks scattering ash into the stones, opera shrieking into my ears to elude the buzzing sound, briars wrapped around my ankles sprinkling arbitrary drops of blood into the dirt coal peppered snow. how long did i float in this dream state? about six months of lethargy before i found another job in a drug store. CVS pharmacy. of this job i cannot say much, but it was given to me by palebo as mean to deprive me of love and to assault me with nightmares. stocked on the shelves were jittering, capering, sputtering devices which would cackle and spit at me as i walked by, elderly familiar customers who would insult me for not be avuncular. a boss who wrenched books out of my hand so that i might stock shelves. remember kid, your nothing but a working class ape, reading fine literature has no place in the filth that is your useless mind.

you are shit and i am the world, the inside of a drugstore is the whole planet, this is all of palebo, there are no magical shores waiting for me as were waiting for rimbaud, and as he attached a weight to my ankle so my plight would be that much worse, he spoke of his golf swing.

but i found a pile of gold dust and escaped.

i snorted it, smoked it, with languishing youths begging for fuck.

and on a gossamer evening, laced with amethyst pepper smoke i hopped in a cab to the bus station and made my way to new orleans.

what visions, what passion, what music, what drugs.

i checked into a 10 dollar a night hostel and bought drugs from the bellhop and proceeded, for a week, to sleep in a room with no windows, to smoke and smoke peppers, smoking pot, out with it, writing, crying, transversing the deepest and most passionate rivers of smoke kicking cans and shaking firebombs in the street to angry vampires spitting their venom onto my torso in between beers and fascinating clarinet revolutions. i came home a perverted version of a human, i had seen art burning in its true form, the sentence demolished into an explosion of vision, new orleans stole from me my terror, and transfixed it into a bouquet of flowers with buds on both ends slowly floating away in a reflecting pond.

palebo thus became lebopa.

i quit my job at cvs and austi left me after a nasty fistfight which shattered my soul like an empty beer bottle flung over a fence into an blacktop lot.

lebopah then became frozen.

instead of snow, fell bits of jagged metal.

instead of sunlight, ammonia filtered into my eyes.

instead of clouds, flesh coating sack of lard.

instead of rain, aids infected semen.

instead of peppers, i drank oil.

instead of beauty, there was disgust, terror, and misery.

where can i go? there is nowhere to go.

what can i do? i can stack cans.

how can i suffer? in all ways.

suicide?

its alive, for a dirty, useless drunken faggot failed writer.

i hate myself and it shows.

someone help me, please.

footsteps on the stairs fill my ears, and there’s nothing here, but cigarettes, booze, darkness, and a shattered heart.

2

searching for sanity

the last poem is over, the last song is sung, the last criminal hung, what is there to do? i sip my drink and bite my nails. this is all there is. searching for paradise? there is none, just booze, and is it really that bad?

3

with dad i get in a fistfight. he attacks me with a shovel and i knock him out cold. weeping i run into the streets and hide in the bushes. they arrest me days later while painting a picture and listening to miles davis. the police officer thinks its funny. arresting some random kid because his father lies to the police. oceans of hatred but i cant do a thing. in jail some con teaches me how to make whiskey out of apple juice

"i wont be here that long but.. ok...

To the top of this page