The last rays of the sun met too tall frances and the crippled bard on the shores of a reservoir, eating and gazing on the sun as it immersed itself behind a hill on the other side of the reservoir. Beyond the hill was only the sun and its glowing, neither man nor mountain nor field showed itself and the shoreline looked like a cay in the ocean, the lone solid thing between the pair, the sun and the depths of the ocean.

The food was good, night came quickly, and as the embers of the sun's passing cooled, the cripple hear a truck passing back and forth near carmen electric, its lights on and then off, t came and returned. A flashlight swept the trees at the side of the reservoir. Carmen was unattended and unlocked, her petticoats revealed and visible to whoever might happen by as she liked to say. So the cripple and francis gathered their belongings and returned to Carmen.

Soon the cripple found himself illuminated by the beam of a flashlight. Darknes had not yet drawn but the flashlight cut stark contrasts into the dusk; there was the beam and there was the shadow cast by it, shadows which grew by as the cripple's eyes became accustomed to the flashlight's beam.

Behind the flashlight stood the truck he had seen and a portly figure who said 'how's it going?' nervously, 'so what cha doin?' followed . The officer moved closer, exuding unease and a doddling attempt at comradely.

Hw made it clear that he was a game warden and that it was illegal to be at the reservoir after dark unless you were fishing. He said he'd been frightened byCarmed parked in the trees and that no one was around; "we have a lot of problems with drugs and drinking abd I thought..." problems, I'm sure, thought the cripple, thats why a game warden needs two guns, a knife and a doberman chained up in the back of his truck.

Frances hadn't arrives yet and the warden began to shine his light around nervously, well where is she then? He repeated while examining the cripple's drivers license.
"I said she's by the water, cleaning up from dinner."
"Well we better go find her mom", spitz dropped from the corners of the warden's mouth like sweat from an electioner's pores.
"Canada, hey. What do you do up there?"
"I go to university in Victoria."
"Hey where is she", he said again. flashlight bouncing around till it found francis with backpack and groceries from out of the dusk. Gathering their ID's, the warden began to calm down.
"Say, you havn't been drinking anything tonight have you?
No, no we havn't" they replied, empty vodka flask not withsanding, no, they hadn't been drinking, not as the warden would've understood it.

Then the warden, more spitz falling, turned to the cripple, coming closer and said, hey, you guys wern't smoking anything were you?, I thought I smelled something down there.
Police camp, disneyland and the great fearful american flag flashed in the cripple's head as he said, no, not at all".
Soon the warden was in hisgiant truck, headlights shining on the cripple amd Francis as they waited for their identity back, the warden inside was communioning with his laptop and the telephone. Sending their data into the network to the dispatcher who was communioning with the central intelligence file, some pan-american file that had all the data the police found relevant about the cripple and frances, from the cripple's lost passport to frances' recent citation at Zion Park.
But nothing, both were relatively clean in the gaze of the machine, of mammon, the bites and bytes revealing nothing incriminating, nothing sticky, in the eye of mammon they were clean and so they were saved, as unto jesus they waved shining, illuminated by the bright lights of the warden's truck back to carmen as we drove onwards, into the town of delores, into the night, the pervasive fear which the warden moved in slipping slowly away from Carmen as she drove in the darkness.

For fear, the warden's fear, had dominated the encounter, in the shadow s of his vision too tall and the cripple had been drug runners, drunks, convicts, a whole menagerie of vivacious, slavering hoodlums had visited his bald head, indeed such a host lived permanently, had been institutionalized, serialized by a government which outfitted its game wardens with pistols, attack dogs and mace on friday nights, institutions which believed its officers officers needed to be threatening, intimidating in order to bring the law into effect.

Here was where fear passed into France and the Cripple, here was where the Warden became an instrument, an implement, a complex that could pick out of the contours of their lives the outlines, by flashlight, in the dusk, the hoodlum, the whore, the alien, could outline an almost endless succession of of types in the fluidity of their selves, their presents and their pasts.

A government for whom power was force, stripped of all its mythic qualities, of respect, authenticity. Its proof was the gun and the law, the ability to enforce the law, sure, behind the law lay the myth of America, of a law which rose out of reason, out of the illumination of rational humanity. This myth speaks of the death of inheritance, the death of myth and so provides a dead-end for all that remains for myth is the ability to describe a power which is imminent in reason, in calculation, in the beam of the flashlight.

This is the gigantism of America that Rilke and Heidegger spoke of; the sorcery of the flashlight shining eternally from sea to sea, growing ever brighter, spreading across the light spectrum, the beam turning north and south, east and west, the anti-myth, a light ignited by the code of reason.

A culture that arms its game wardens with attack dogs and an arsenal of fears; of the dark, of Indians and birth, death, people in the bushes, making love, leg hair...too many to count, fear of the sun, of sharp edges...

drinking malt liquor with Guisto on the doorstep of the Amicia hotel in las vegas

Vegas, home and standard to everything which we have developed that is of no effect and no relevance to being, everything that has stepped out, loud and echoing in the desert
everything that blooms of our accord in the baking heat;
the artificial cool of the air conditioner,
the casinos, thick with the scent and the heaviness of money, the strip clubs dark and blooming like skunk cabbage, the 24 hour conveniance, the tourism, rich, poor, gaudy and refined, the machines, the cars, so we can bear our condition in the humming of artifice, the crack, the coke nad the ecstacy so that our hovel-esqe living attains to the sublime, the warp and the woof, the neon, the neon, those colours blooming out of the trapped sun and the contorted metals of our earth, the tongues and the anuses that in crossing supplicate our tittilated selves...

paradox, mammon, that is our god, that is how we flourish,how we worship,
the other gods, silent, abused, withdraw, ginsberg's mollox our only god now
fuck me, pay me, save me and i shall go on living in this neon husk, i shall be cooled by the cool,
feel the tongues of the heat, shall bathe naked in front of the panting men, in front of all the cooling machines!!!

i give it all willingly, fuck me, suck me, the chance to win, the chance to be a king again, my fat disappears, the colours cleave to neon, the tits are all golded and luminescent...

you can laugh
and you can cry
but there's still a sign
bright caution yellow
on some straight, stucco-lined street
in Utah which reads

caution
deaf child
in area

Zion Park- in the Virgin River

The Crippled Bard and Too tall Frances sat in the Virgin River
which ran thick and clayful, murk the colour of chocolate milk
bringing twigs and bark to nuzzle their naked bodies
around them rose the canyon walls of the Narrows,
great twisting walls of bare red rock
banded with grey and browns, curving here and bulging outwards there
the walls rose for thousands of feet above, separated below
only by the muddy band of the river.

Sitting in the porous lukewarm water
the canyon filled the souls of too tall and the cripple,
thoughts chasoming upwards around the stubborn river
really no more than a creek
besides them the hard rock of the Canyon had conceded
a small sand bar to the dirty Virgin,
littered with large rough rocks from the cliffs
and smooth ones the river
had caressed till they became warm and rounded
above the rocks stubborn box elder trees rose,
their fluttering leaves rounding out the bass of the river's flowing

now and then a monarch butterfly, bright yellow canvas,
tiger eyes catching the breezes playfully
bringing the lightness of wings to too tall and the cripple's revere

all around them, in the river, a stream of humanity waded,
bound for the next sand bar, a glimpse of the next water hewn cave, or Orderville,
where the canyon had only conceded 20 feet to the Virgin,
where the canyon split mysteriously, split into three.

carrying sticks, backpacks and cameras the humans pushed upwards, onwards
upstream, Europeans French and Spanish, Japanese and Americans of all colours
children with sticks as big as themselves, women holding their daughter's
hands while their husbands immortalized them on negative,
the light reflected by their bodily masses sealed away in the darkness
of the machine until the time of the transfer to photo paper or until

Perhaps, the flash flood, about which all the Rangers talked quietly,
and which was portended by the distant thunder which came
rolling down the canyon to the humans.
The flash flood which would wash all the humans, the butterflys
and the mud down the canyon, the flashflood which all the
Rangers pictures depicted as an angry rush of sticks, so angry that
out of the pictures came the knashing and cracking, the boom of water
which would attend such a flashflood.

But no flood came. The humans kept wading past, to and fro,
smiling greetings, trading information. The canyon walls imperceptibly gave
themselves to the music of the water,
and too tall and the cripple emerged whole from the chocolate caters of the Virgin.
They headed downstream, the chasms of their thinking replaced by the flowing river,
the hidden rocks beneath their feet,
while it slowly dawned on the cripple that only a couple
hundred kilometers to the South Las Vegas sat like a
boil on the desert pulsing humming sucking water and oil out of the desert sands
while naked women flung themselves around poles,
meaty hands pushed slot machine buttons
and thousands and millions of humans dreamt and sweated...

Like a black cloud into the canyon walls, the thought of Vegas grew in the Cripple's mind,
till he could almost hear the laughter,
the jingling of coins, the rustling of extra large pants...

Welcome

Hello. I had hoped to set this up earlier as a sort of journal of the road trip me and too tall frances are on but internet in America is very difficult to find so this will just be a post of writing and observations about this trip for now and maybe other things later. some of the entries will be long. Welcome.