Goodbye, Dirty Machine is the memoir-novel-letter-long poem of a period in my life spent embroiled in the tropics. It chronicles my run from everything in San Francisco--my previous life in shambles, my future life murky, if not downright dirty. I was raw and open. I chased women, I lived with my mother, I drank copiously, and I traveled into new lands with helpless idiocy. I started to write all of it down in a whore's kitchen in Costa Rica. I banged out a page a day on any typewriter I could find. Upon returning to the states six months later, I continued this ritual until I had 367 pages of stories. And then it stopped. I couldn't finish. I was spent.
This will be the new end. I will post a page a day, erstwhile editing each to have a justifiable 2nd draft when this is all through. I am grateful to my loyal friend and fellow poet Kevin Opstedal for providing the space and the patience for this to happen. It's been a long time undone.
Michael Price
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fucking is so very lovely who can say no to it later”
-Ted Berrigan
“I don’t care who I copy, as long as it’s not myself”
-Pablo Picasso
“Real life begins when we are alone, face to face with our unknown self.”
-Henry Miller
“Even a lean pig has it in him to rage around.”
-I Ching
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1
It was a dirty spring. An ashen winter, filled with promise, but a rotten, filthy spring. How joyous it was to be embarking on the happiness of the flesh, to be moving from the escape of my mother and into the arms of my ex-wife and back into the arms of my blessed mother...a seminal song wrought through late fall in my tiny monk’s room 14th Street apartment in the heart of the Mission...a drudge in my muse, afraid of virtue and on the heels of sweet vice, I had become a steady customer of desire and a frequent speculator in the business of women.
San Francisco was dead. The bitter waters of the Pacific lapped at the commercial wharfs, the people had become more jaded than artificial intelligence...there was an angry dyke on every corner, a dirty mayor liberal on every street car, and confusion was more dense than the summer fog...My god the city was dying all day long and the only thing to do was get out...seven summers I waited, and what was a San Francisco Summer but the dreary winter? I had slipped into the net of a lazy lefty tunic, but now was my chance to waylay a piece of history...get out and become real again.
