The West    

by Lutz Finkler

He once again pulled back the curtain within his deep night.
In Oslo it was yet 4 o'clock in the morning
in his motel room in Englewood
and saw a white wall covered with evening sun
and hanging red blossoms.
The flight: white Greenland, then again the sea
at last, divided by trails, dirty brown desert.
His seat neighbor had got no lunch by accident.
He closed the curtain.
Yellow toilet light from above the room besides without window
made his head skin visible through the so-called main hair.
He pulled a grimace in front of the mirror. The drinking hole of the Coors-beercans
blue and ivory, had been enlarged
so that it now sounded "gluck gluck" instead of "drrrt".
Dark colored the south of Nevada, the north of Arizona
Idaho, Montana, Kansas, too.
Once again the curtain:
The sunny white wall.

In Venice Beach a van rolled along the promenade.
"You got no right to drive here", shouted an upset woman.
"And you got no right to talk to me", came out of the car.
On the broad path along the promenade
for inline skaters and mountain bikers
with curbs and artificial obstacles
he disturbed a rolling valkyrie
and was covered with insults.
Don't disturb my circles.
So many circles make the interstice scarce
and I seem to be the only one who needs it.
Inactivity seems like joblessness.
Daddy from Germany, with his family, on rollers, too.
California! You know what I've always dreamt?
Once in a lifetime with inline skaters in Venice! Pamela Anderson.
And once in a lifetime 80 miles straight with a Harley Davidson.
Passing by artists, jugglers, esoterics and owners of truth.
One juggles with a running chain saw and three balls.
In front of a souvenir shop one has erected a narrow bewritten showboard
on which the proof is given that christianity doesn't help.

Ex-CIA-Major Dynes can send out search beams
to find lost children, terrorists and even the future.
He can listen to thousand phone calls at the same time.
He runs a psychological detective agency.
Chupa Cabra is a creature that sucks blood out of goats
mainly in Costa Rica. Also from London a case is reported.
It is small, goes erect and sometimes steals little children.
Drawings after the statements of eye-witnesses
Gus calls them up in the Internet
shows a mixture of insect (eyes) and monkey (chin)
in all a Yeti.
A naked girl out of sand, photo one dollar.
Should I take pictures of all this
three films? Or nothing...
One had a snake around his neck, showing its tongue.
Not far the car is parked, covered with bright light
for ten dollars. Turning for a look direction sea
while motor running. The Pacific. The North Sea. The South Sea.
On Tahiti a sandwich costs ten dollars. Land's end. Bullshit.

On the hill the Hollywood sign.
Getting to there as close as possible, ending on a private road.
The sea, still so near. Turning, no, turning once more
into the desert, into the 'highlands", passing highway bridges
built after an earthquake, the desert like building trash up to the horizon
bridges in no man's land like new formed ruins
homes like from boxes of bricks
and everywhere they already lived
Where do they come from, epidemic regions?
Congestion, a construction area. It is getting warmer.
Air condition on while while windows open, that's the best.
Finally in the twilight, on a secondary road, a sign:
No service the next hundred miles.
Above the illuminated motel pool the sky was closing.
A small plane was to be heard, an aimless insect.
The room table showed small ropes inside the plastic.
"I don't have to travel to the countryside myself, that's not necessary.
I send my dressed body...I lie in bed in the meantime"

In a bar in the middle of the Canadian wilderness Henry had given the keeper some narrow bewritten sheets of paper.
He was drunk, so most of them fell on the floor. He cursed. After that he was considered disappeared.
Natives said that they had seen him on a small railroad track writing down something.
After that he had been fallen into a deep dreamless sleep, Chief Bromden reported to the rangers.
And had suddenly seen the bright white light of a monster.
Had jumped away like a Neanderthal man.
But all he had owned had been rolling down the abyss.
Mary Buffalo, post agent in Blue River, reports that there had been somebody
wondering why the stamps necessary for letters to overseas were so cheap.

Gus has done something on his home in South Tucson in the meantime.
He had the asbestos shingles outside torn off and inside removed the floral wall painting of the former owner. Was probably a teacher.
His son bummed around in the house with two other teenagers. Sometimes they phoned, then they watched TV, sometimes one of them stood up, sometimes all together. To find themselves in the room besides.
Mighty rain clouds could be seen. A couple of drops fell.
That time of year you have the south here, said Gus on his Tennessee-Williams-veranda.
Everything stayed dry, an undecided weather.
Rain two miles further. Cars smashed away pools that had developed in the hollows of the crossings.
The sometimes heavy wind brought the sound of the freight trains, like in the book.
In the neighborhood a dog barked for a second.
The brown female dog that once had run towards Gus straightened ears and ran to the fence.
Came back, moved back and forward, turned around herself, lay back again.
She was falling on his nerves because she begged for his attention.
She was dull, no education, and probably needed love.
She doesn't get it cause she's so dull.
She recently tore to pieces the Tibetan flag that was hanging down from the timber work.
He stood up for another beer, sat back while the dog snapped for insects.

Somebody has said that state road 666, devil's highway, doesn't exist anymore.
The symbol-believing Mormons had it changed.
Maybe the couple of miles in Utah there is another number.
In New Mexico and Colorado everything's still alright.
The Navahos don't seem to care.
There are no devil's canyons here.
The prairie is not good for such sensations.
Nothing but poor shacks beside the road and mobile homes
The devil: the anti-sensation of poorness
not a monster with an animal's body.
How to get the monthly check
the discussions of families sitting at bar tables
colored like the eternal yellow cat.

Butte in biting evening sun.
Situated on a hill like a south Italian town.
In the fifties somebody wrote about an eternal black sky
hungry flashed from the red shinings of fires of smelt.
Now renovated everything, big hotels and the theatre.
Museum mining towers in front of a red and yellow eaten up hill.
Above, on the mountain's edge, a white madonna, with mist approaching.
My motel room window shows the Interstate through the curtain.
The most beautiful thing that can happen is
making the car roll back from the gas station onto the highway.
The day then is so new.

William Burroughs has died. If he doesn't live eternal, who else can?
He always liked to come back to Boulder, shouted the Denver Post.
Burroughs and outer places! Bullshit.
Or was he at least a sentimental old one
who wanted to go back to "places"?

On a pass road mountain goats block the way
used to getting fed by passengers
Chase them away with a triple horn!
Because here comes the crown of creation.
later that day they're all gone again
and ice covers the upper world again
on 12,000 feet altitude
in the middle of stones and darkness winds howl
winds and mosses howl!
Cultivated pavements arrange the desert
and there's a light on every intersection.
You even can see that from a space ship.

The outer site of the Timberline Lodge, 6,000 ft. high,
is the only thing used for Kubrick's horror movie The Shining
The interior scenes are constructed elsewhere
and of course this labyrinth garden doesn't exist
The only thing you find are a couple of cripple pines.
Above there are points
marching through the light white
like regular flees
skiing through the summer.

If there was a well constructed highway along the equator
a holiday of four weeks would be sufficient to go around the planet
included the time for sleep, TV and beer.
Of course there has to be an adequate motel infrastructure.
Plus you'll have to go 120 mph in average.
If somebody condemned you to repeat everything by foot
it would take about four years.
A hitchhiker told that he had walked 900 miles the last weeks
all along the Continental Divide
This morning somebody had stopped and offered him a coke
but wouldn't pick him up.
One night he had faced the ruin of a sacral building
ruin, but like put together to a new form.
A voice had sung sort of a requiem: why had all that happened...
The architecture, the song: not from this world!
Maybe it had been better to live like an Indian 200 years ago.
Really? 300 years ago the pest in Europe
has killed more men than even modern wars can do.

I want to see Greg Benson the painter who paints planes and cactuses
but I lose my way and find myself on a dustroad.
A stone hits a hole in the tire.
The dust covers the car and even the gas hole.
Above me little white clouds, in front of me a sign: Benson 52 miles.

My name is Harry. I'm a washing detergent agent. I have a credit card. I drive a car. At home I have another one. I like to drive the car back from the gas station onto the highway, into the traffic rivers. The day is so fresh at that moment.
I'm on vacation. I'm tired. I make miles, the country is big enough. In the stores where I buy my beer there are cashiers who phone with their husbands while work. Nice landscapes during the days. I found out that it's the best leaving the windows open while the air condition is on. Where ever you go, go with your entire heart, that's what I read in the newspaper last weekend. From Confucius. One day I saw a bear beside the road. Some cars had already stopped. I'm open for sensations. Life is more than only being born. Life is so precious. I mean the inner life, too. In the middle of the giants of the Redwoods, immune from fire and insects, suddenly a little child, on the arm of his mother, said hi to me, simply! At the beaches of Oregon little birds ran. Have their lodgings right behind the dunes. Yesterday I dreamt that somebody wanted me to be a rock star. I had to color my hair black. Strange guys who ordered me to do that. Those who do wrong seem to have the most fun in life. I already saw the stage, but then everything disappeared. Somebody drove my car into an abyss. How do I ever manage to get it out of there

A comment about The West.by Oupee