Free Mints

    Maybe it's a regret. Maybe a celebration. Or a combination of both. Or a combination that we don't yet know about? But when I read in the paper that Levon Helm died well that was a bit of a page stopper. So I played some Band c.d.'s later that afternoon in the studio. Everything goes away. Despite a life, and a career that I followed in his music, and the sing-along with respect that happens afterwards. That's the real time leftover from the object lesson when things change. And running corollary to the sad news on the obit pages were the first tulips blooming outside in the garden as a kind of welcome news. And there was a song bird perched on a rose bush. A little bird passing through the yards that I did not recognize and who flew off too soon for me to grab the field guide and glasses and try to identify.  Ain't that the way we compile the world? Or at least for me. What we see we forget. And what we forget we look up as information about a world already having been there for the viewing in the first place. It's like trying to catch up to the past, playing with  the future, in the hopes that you establish a present?
   Sure it might have all been different. But how? More importantly, to realize, it wasn't different. And the weird thing was to take someone else's obituary and then start to think about your own life. That seemed fucked up but I did it regardless. Like some kind of advice.
   And fitting in I guess was the weather. The day was alternating sun and clouds, cold pockets to scare you, warm light on the skin. It was like all these earthly adventures I never had, and having a queer feeling of nostalgia for places I've never been. But if you've never had those experiences, how is it possible to long for them? Don't you need to have something already in hand before you lose it?
   Perhaps I should make a list. It's an odd brainstorm indeed to imagine yourself as being attached to regret. The blow to memory and all that. A kick in the pants as the body wears down. However, as a open link, beyond the permitters, where we die how we live, it was his music and listening to it and having my take upon it that seemed to say foremost get out of the way and stay tuned.  

 

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

       A morning dove was making its nest inside my neighbor's rain gutter. I watched the bird work from the bedroom window. And it was way cool to see the construction and watch little bits of twigs become the the overall pattern, but I had a thought, and the thought was, this is a bad plan. Making a home that's sure to be washed out?  Especially with all the storms we've been having...
   Must be that algebra of springtime again! Everything growing. Everything moving. Everything taking in light and giving back air. And then whatever. As long as you're engaged... Certainly the nurse said. But are you propositioning me about this she asked?
   Not really I said. I simply like it more when you're around. Than not I mean.
   Than not what she asked?
   A place I said. Somewhere to belong to and somewhere that's cool and somewhere kinda the opposite of trouble. If you know what I mean.
   Oh come on the nurse said. I can't be that.  What do you want me for, a situation? And let's say I enjoy the walks and talks. And maybe that's it. Maybe there's little more than that to get worked up over.
   Nature doesn't like a vacuum I answered. And so, what's rushing in to fill this void? So. Where is that?   And so, if there's nothing more to think about, but another bad night with more downpour rain for however many days counting that it's been falling down, and the cold air seeping inside at the windows that comes along with it, then this makes me feel like I have nothing else to talk about. In a sense I feel worse off than I did last week. And shouldn't it be the other way around?
   You have such a silly head the nurse said. Another day. Another bandage. That's how you take it. Now be still while I do this.
   Everyone's favorite metaphor I said is small steps.
   Not a bad thing to remember the nurse said finishing with the syringe.
   But I said that doesn't really get me anywhere. Where's that comic book sensibility? Able to leap tall buildings and all that.
   Look the nurse said don't let it work against you. At your recovery pace, I'll be around for over a year.
   I was afraid to ask and then what?
   Don't be sad the nurse said. Don't be the man who knew too much.
   Well maybe I was afraid to say it,  but I felt that way.  As soon as the bandage was changed, and the dishes washed, and the bed made, I'll walk downtown slowly for a newspaper and some peanut butter. Along the way I'll criticize everything I see as though I have something to say about it and live that way. And so I'll be happy to have gotten there and back again for having said it? Just curious I wanted to say.
Isn't that something we always want? The place after what we have and we don't get any further? A light hearted touch dedicated - again - again - to a moment and so folded over by the big sweet world that even if there was nowhere to go you might have the nerve to say I need to be here. To sculpt time from nothing but the air.    

Epistle. To: Elisabeth Bardo

  Here's something else I remember from the past year. Christmas Day. Just a little snow in the air. Flurries and a gray cold morning lifted around the trees in the window. Glad to be here etc. But what's the catch?                
   Pancakes and bacon and coffee - what could be simple. James Brown's Funky Christmas on the stereo before daylight even!  And the kind of ritual that having a meal on an appointed day becomes as a year follows a year follows a year. I'm prone to wide angle thoughts on a holiday anyway. Maybe it's because the pancakes have a beautiful lazy feel to them after you're done eating. Maybe it's because bacon makes everything taste better like some wild enzyme running loose in your head. Maybe it's simply the end game of the year and so you sit back at the table and survey the past and wonder might there be a different plan?
  Ah. Another piece of bacon left!
  Later I went for a walk in the park. Even if we're on a short leash and considering a relative point of view to the world at large, and that means you have to die all the time when you think about it, it's better to go out that way than trying to conjure up a method where all the years seemed equal. I mean you can still have those doubts about what trips you up or how clumsy you were. The flurries persisted and the sky remained steely cold. Snow globe weather shaken around me... a brilliant e-card I received the other day on the computer with animated reindeer singing etc and how that makes the heart feel cheap and wonderful... the sound of my boots stepping along the dirt path and crunching on the frozen ground in the morning's silence like a hymn being sung by a choir. The evergreens sagging with long boughs falling around in tier after tier of needle green. The views out onto the lake thieved with a gray green light almost painted from the sky and so meeting the foggy condensed moisture boosted off the waves hitting the rocky icy shoreline in winter...
   Born to walk. And so in kind walk to be born.
   In answer to your question no I don't have a family. Maybe it's stupid and all that. But I'm digging in the earth for rare elements.

Epistle. to: Bernadette Wild Garden

  The nurse had to run back up to the big house for a few hours  - aka the hospital. That meant being off her sweet tether and in some other orbit that was my own making. For the moment I guess. I mean in that moment that goes and is eventually replaced by a hope. And then by another moment. Or what? Alas I asked her before she left. Then I'm not the only one!
  No she said. You're not.
 And that look in her eyes. That one. Yes. I saw it first off and still can't forget it. And I know, it's only been months. After waking up in the recovery room... it's still hard to figure I was dead... and was brought back again to life with the heartbeat of science that costs a fortune and those big electrical paddles you always see in those made for television movies. Else we take ourselves too seriously or course. Where did I go? And the first thing I saw on the way back were those scary eyes. Those beautiful eyes. Green-gray and fluid and set in porcelain and with an effect that seemed to rake in time . Like a crushing apparatus where used machinery gets thrown into for the scrap steel afterwards. I felt I had to move fast. Part lottery ticket if you chanced it. Part weather forecast if you believed it.  Maybe it's only a small testament to feelings but I did fear letting those eyes go and having them walk out the door without me. Even though that happened each day because she was the nurse and I was the client and she had to be on her way... you can't say don't go because that doesn't mean anything... and you can't say please stay...
  And so the wind started to blow. Alas. Like it should!
 And there was a sound outside the house.  And it was a sound that I did not hear. Or a memory of a sound that I wanted to hear.
 A few months ago I cut off a tree limb growing against the house, practically growing into the house, so now when the wind blows the tree limb doesn't scratch up against the windows. And so the sound of not hearing that sound  was the sound that I heard. Or did not hear depending. Yea. It can get confusing. (!)      
 When the tree limb was there it was maddening. Something desperate. Something larger on the outside calling for attention. It was like something grabbing against the house and hearing that was unnerving...  
 How many years ago was it that I planted that tree? There used to be a juniper bush out front. Gnarly and prickly and half dead. I removed that and put the tree in its place instead. And as a tree goes it is unshapely and bent and its crown isn't what you might consider calender material. But the tree grows every year since I planted it. It's like an unruly thought. Maybe that's the satisfaction. It's not perfect by any means. But what do I know? The tree will outlast me unless lightning or disease interfere.
  We should ask the tree and see what it thinks.

Epistle. To: Grace Nelson

The Band was singing I Shall Be Released as the movie soundtrack ends, and I said to the nurse that's a great song but it always gives me the loneliness business whenever I hear it.
 Big sheets of rain snapped against the windows for the third day counting. The local baseball team cancelled a double header. And this was supposed to be a make-up game for the game that was cancelled earlier in the season due to heavy rains. I said to the nurse I want to sing along to that song each time I hear it but at the same time feel haunted by mouthing the words. Afterwards the song stays with me for days. Like I  hear that song and then get chills. And that's like having hope I said.
That's nonsense the nurse said. You don't sing well enough.
Maybe so I said but we do get caught in the middle. The nurse asked what should we watch now? The late news and catch up with that cute anchor and see how she continues to look silly and out of place and not in the studio and out in the weather in her perfectly creased yellow slicker? Or look she said surfing the remote like some goddess of the waves. An evangelical cooking show and that prefect recipe for fried dough on a stick!  Or what about this commercial bullet to the head? The nurse did a pretty cool obnoxious voice-over. She even morphed her face around to almost resemble this grinning weasel-like guy trying to sell us these spray cans of some rubberized shit.  Don't call a handyman! That will cost you thousands!
Maybe another movie instead you asked? Sure the nurse said, with a look on her face that was like a garden fading in the sweet last days of August, all spent and therefore beautiful in all its details for simply having done it. Sometimes I have no idea where I am. Maybe she said you're just watching yourself and that feels like it's somewhere else instead. Yea I suppose, but we do need to show up. That would be a necessity the nurse added. So what do you think: king fu car chase with an electric Hong Kong or a coming of age loser gets laid comedy? Sex violence irreverence - that's what we have in the stacks. All that sounds good I said. But I worry about being dead. You can't do anything about that the nurse said. You were dead. And there's a flat line screen on record to prove it. Just a narrow green line with no vocals behind it. What was silence like she asked? It was really busy I said. It was like going to the dump on a crowded Saturday and waiting in line and getting rid of this old piece of sheetrock that I had in the basement forever. It was way too small to save and maybe way too valuable to throw away. And that was silence she asked?
No. But it was more than you might expect. I had this dream -
When the nurse asked? When you were dead?
No I said, the other night. I was riding in a truck with Natalie Portman the actress. I recognized her but I didn't say anything. Like you might say hey I know you when you really don't. She was driving and the weather was warm. I touched her arm, her skin, because the weather was warm. She smiled behind a big pair of sunglasses and drove on wearing this killer t-shirt that only had me wanting to touch her arm more so for the looking. Outside the truck windows a river flowed past. On the river, or in it, all these household items flew past along a  strong muddy current. Desks chairs tables lamps. Going by in multitudes like a housing development upstream had been washed away. People came down by the river to watch and talk quietly. When I looked back from the river I was no longer in a truck driving with Natalie Portman and her killer t-shirt. I was standing inside a house and looking outside from behind an old window frame with these ratty curtains. Farmhouse curtains like from that movie. Days of Heaven.
Did you try and get her autograph or something the nurse asked?
No nothing like that. But it felt cool riding in the truck like that.
Maybe you have a punch list you need to go through.
Before what?
All these dreams she said. What do you think?
Well I said sometimes you try and account for your life and so what do you come up with? Comments about the weather? Or money?
I don't know she said. The porch deck you painted before you died looks good.
Yea thanks. But I had this other dream the other night...
You do have a stiff learning curve the nurse offered...
Yea... But I was standing with an unidentified woman and together we were placing the days on a sort of graph that was either on a chart on a wall or either the wall itself was a holograph. Whether the days were charted for ourselves or others was unclear. She had long red hair worn everywhere around her like a signal flare and wore a plaid shirt like she was a camper or something. Her fingers moved quickly across the graph placing a Tuesday over there or say a Thursday down in a corner. I seem to be her helper, handing her the odd Friday for instance. Fortunes might happen. Tragedy might happen. That's what I make out of it.
If we're watching another movie the nurse said then I'm reheating the tacos.
I wouldn't know where it all went I said to her through doorways and into the kitchen.
It's okay there's plenty left she said.
Another dream I had: I'm feeding chunks of wood into a stove that only has two sides. I'm worried someone has taken my vial of pills. I can look through the wood stove and see tree lines and fields. Maybe someone has eaten all the pills? Or maybe they just stole them? There are people in the yard but I don't know them. Maybe it's a party. I look through a serving tray filled with containers of pills. But none are mine. I worry. I keep looking. That keeps me going on.
Red or green sauce I heard her say. And then I thought about late night tacos... with the nurse serving them up... her hands like an artisan... her breath like a measured count that when you felt it against you it seemed to wind sweetly around some undefined still point between the hemispheres of the brain... and I liked all that... big time so to speak... but it's always scary... when you like something... because something else has to give... I wanted green sauce so I said that.
We're having tea the nurse said. And chocolate chips. Since you didn't make cookies yesterday...
I keep looking for something I said but don't know where to find it. Like the other night a woman sat down next to me. And then another woman sat down next to her. And they both began making suggestions into one another's ear. I seem to be missing something, like the proverbial boat -
Did you say you want onions?
- yea onions are great. And shred up more lettuce if you will. But suddenly both those women were gone. And I was walking down a crowded street with too many corners and they all lead nowhere in particular. And then suddenly again I was back in a hospital room. Watching a ball game to kill time. Some was calling me on the telephone but I could not get the in house connection to work so the phone rang and rang and rang... and rang... and then the ball game shifted and outside below the fifth floor, in the parking lot, there were all these kids turning the asphalt into a yard, and they were excavating the dirt with small versions of heavy equipment and it was like they were digging some foundation for a new building with toys.
Do you want more cheese or less?
And I don't remember the forecast calling for a thunderstorm today. And so in that sleepy semi-alert way between the worlds my eyes were surprised open. Where was I? I was answering questions to Japanese tourists about plants in a garden. Apparently this was a specialty that I had, although I had a deep seated feeling while speaking to them that I knew nothing at all. I was carving a piece of wood and the wood crumbled away like it was rotten. I cooked a piece of meat only the have the thing in the pan boil away until it was bright red. There was a rented room with too much furniture so a friend called management. At the parade a little girl made a seat for me from out of old tires and placed them near the street so I might watch better. Now she said. And walked away. A woman with fashionably short hair buttoned a tan blouse and in the process pulled off the top button before it got to her chin and handed it too me. Some guy in a Red Sox t-shirt said come on man you gotta check my math in the box scores.
I'm gonna open up a new jar of peppers. Okay?
 

Epistle. To: Mercy Hunt

Thanks. Got your old school cut and paste card. Delivered naturally by the dying empire of the postal service. Too bad about that actually. Taking one's time is not only a regime and a breath against the new empire - the instant archive -  but it  also comes in as a sensually deep thing, an embodiment, a surprise. And naturally, like a contradiction, this response is being delivered electronically! All the interior arrangements, like thoughts, like your card shows - having a room in the world is like sleeping out in the open - and as such being susceptible to things like lullabies whose childhood rhymes we often remember and those hints of pornography creeping in the shadows we so often desire.  What was the best thing you remember about grade school? For me it was recess! When you and I and all the other kids ran like crazy for fifteen minutes twice a day in the school parking lot. The only way in the world to have that taken away would have been to put us all in lock down! And even then, I imagine you, taking all the necessary measurements, staring at confinement,  and then potting an escape. Anyway I have a memory. From better days. Back in those days when walking provided me with the most constant reminder of a life I've  ever had... was like a kind of lost island to have... in step...  and to set up one's own view of paradise. Ah. To walk along. To have thoughts. Or to have no thoughts at the same time.  I miss that kind of walking. To be out in a warm breeze with little on and smiling at the chains of light in the air and feeling did the solstice happen yet? Or to be out in cold air and feeling there is no replacement for what might be gone if you don't keep moving when you're freezing. And it all feels equal -  from going around the corner to the movies, to taking the journey of a thousand steps etc. But I digress. I was walking in the woods one morning along the familiar contour lines of an old farm road - it's all logical and on the map in perfect sense - now it's an ATV road and a snow machine path in winter - and then took a detour onto a narrow trail heading downhill toward the stream. There was a broken tree where the trail dropped off and several birds were singing in what was left of its crown. A weather worn sign nailed into the tree trunk read Elivra Town in burnt letters. But there were no houses nor barns. Nothing left but way rusted plows like relics. A small graveyard with tilted chewed at headstones and hand chiseled inscriptions like omens of their own short times to try and farm out a living in the hills. But there were runs of these big stone foundations scattered about, holes in the ground now, like mouths like crying where lives once stood. Ferns and birch trees sprouted up in the holes like efforts to reclaim the soils for the forest. You could see into the outline of the things that were a landscape and if you looked out into the trees at some level just beyond eye contact you made out where the old meadows used to be. Imagine corn rows and vegetable plots and a grove of silent apple trees giving it up in the fall. Elvira town was gone, but wasn't I walking through it still? Do you think it's a cinema of petty miseries that makes us look for a game changer? Or are we at the tip of a big soft brush painting in the outlines of the  unknown? Maybe there is nothing like unfulfilled hopes to throw you for a loop. But don't we have to show up regardless? Maybe I need to learn and just walk on and mind my own business. But when I look around there's so much wonder... and I fall back upon a notion that I'm an intruder... I'm trying to side step entropy... and am left with many questions and the default of such imaging seems to be where do I belong? When I got down to a landing in the hollow of the mountains where I hoped to get across the stream, the stream was totally swollen from multiple days raining. The water was wicked fast moving and crashed across rocks in the stream bed, rocks that used to be from the top of the mountain back in the glacier days of furry hunters and magic charcoal, and it was hypnotizing to look into the water as it hit the rocks and sprayed against the air like this wild crazy desire to find the river and then keep on going to sea level. That's where it goes. The tintinnabulations  from nowhere... Just having an apple then to eat and then surrendering that this was the end of line. The crisp snap and juice from each bite. Bug dope as well as the humidity clings to the skin. Water racing across rocks that you won't walk across less you get knocked down from the knees and swept off like dumbness for the attempt to try and ride nature's ride unharmed. I suppose I might have followed the stream and looked for a better place to cross, but fuck it, I walked back up the small trail and back into Elvira Town. Picked up where I was and continued on. Back down to the stream where I knew there was a bridge in place for certain...
     

Epistle. To: Lady Kimono Clan

Woke up in a fog to a silent room. Soft airbrushed light. A question like where am I was easy enough to come by. But I really could not answer it. The body has its opinions. Vapor dreams. Medicinal scripts. Some pain was to be expected the discharge orders said. The body has its opinions. Like Fat Boy Slim singing Right Here Right Now. Not that I was listening to it at the time but I remembered it and it came into my head with as much reason as anything does not long after you open your eyes. Small bird songs like mementos drifted through windows. Streams of information. Things that aren't available to occupy right now. The way shadows from the morning lay upside down and floated on a low ceiling as they also drifted through the windows. The body has its opinion and wants to float upon a ceiling. Magazine quality shadows I need to write that down but I don't move. Smothered by desires or whatever else that shows. I like the word necessity. There's a day spinning somewhere but it's not here. Just the effects. I can sense it outside like the beginnings of color in the sky. I can't make it there because I can't move so I bring up music. Hence the discharge orders come to  mind. Chinese ink shadows on the ceiling that seem centuries old in the telling. The race car driver who in an interview on television last night said he got crashed. A phone downstairs that rings and rings and climbs up the stairs crashing the atmosphere of the house with finally a voice message. Of course I'm here and of course I can't come to the phone right now because... I need to fill in the blanks. I'm a monster to look at. But does that me a monster? Children on the street point at me. Some giggle. Some just stare back at me with little heads twisted around and smoke rings forming where their mouths should be. They must know something. I must know something. And sometimes I laugh back. And that seems to scare them. Doesn't confusion begin in clarity? Yesterday I offered some fresh tomatoes to a group of passerby's walking past the house. I doubt whether they might have even noticed me until I said,  here want some. They looked at me, then looked at the tomatoes, and back at me and said no thanks. They were good ripe tomatoes. The plants were growing in plain view in the garden boxes along the driveway. Killer plants - tall bushy healthy green bursting with fruit. The nurse and I planted them as a celebration after another recent surgery, this one to go after the hot dog cart shrapnel in my head. Unfortunately some of it may have to stay in there permanently. Stay tuned for details. But I felt totally left out when the passerby's refused the tomatoes. Who doesn't want a fresh picked tomato on a glorious August evening? Why do anything? Why even ask why? Apparently they did not understand what a necessity it is to give something away. To make an offering. To present a gift. How about some flowers I asked? Take a rose. Zinnias. Brown eyes. But no luck there either. They turned and walked away, leaving me with my ambitions unsettled and due for another time. Here's my worry. The whole time thing. It's almost like I have too much of it to do anything with it. All I have is time. What happens when I heal? When my knees have been replaced with plastic gadgets... and there's a tree branch of steel in my spine to keep me from walking like an ape... and a face that I once knew by heart in a mirror has to be reconstructed by a factory of surgeons and replaced with a digital lift from old passport photos ... I was on vacation once and was walking around on the last evening and thinking like some lonesome romantic fool searching the earth. Thinking about... and then having to go home the next day... Yea I know, of all things... And all that preponderance and importance that goes with being away for a time and having some money to throw around and carry on upon an evening's walkabout.  A number of galleries in town were closed and that surprised me. Given the weather was doing well within season and the atmosphere was caught between a warm day and a cool night I had hoped to skip through the night without even a thought. But no. I did have a pleasurable moment out on the pier watching the sun go down. Twilight yellows that bend the eyes beyond what there is to look at.  Dusky pink grays going succulent through the calm bay water. Sitting on a bench with a small boy and his father and the kid was tearing the last of a sad looking take out hamburger into little pieces and tossing it underhand like crazy to a gang of seagulls. Yea yea he said! Weren't you hungry? No no he said! The boats coming back to the harbor docked at their moorings with their running lights on against a slowly enveloping dark that literally came out of the air and it was like watching some mechanical sense of belonging come to be. It's a big ocean out there I said to the kid. And that enough settled things. I thought so what. An unbroken chain of days with all there is to show for it and all that remains to never have, I'll treat myself to a sit down meal at some pricey joint and be spot on content to lose track and imagine time moving in and out like old tides do past brown seaweed high water marks on the sand and then collect them back in a wave and start over. So I walked along... found a restaurant... and it seemed there was nothing so rewarding that broke down the limits of responsibility like going home or eating overpriced seafood as much as there was just sitting down for a meal at an outdoor table. Ah, the nectar and the night. A kind of tall combustible illusion that if you step inside will give you in return a tender voltage. After ten minutes I didn't have a menu. Not even a drink order. No one came around. Like I wasn't even there in the first place.

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

So the nurse asked, can't we get the sunlight out of our eyes?  I need to be somewhere else. Like where I asked? I don't know she said. A big shade tree maybe. An awning over a picnic table in the backyard. So it's like a parallel world I asked? Not so much she said. I like the sunset but it's too hot to sit against. Yea I said but you work inside. Afterward don't you want to get outside and have a blast? Sure she said all that's great but I'm sweating and being hit by radiation. Can't we retreat? And I thought that's always been difficult to do. What I need is to have a sense that I've done something and then leave it at that. But to go backwards throws me. Where's that? It's not even memory lane - which is different -  because memory was a shape onto itself and comes to surface when you think about it. Once in remembrance there can be rightfully no turning back. Okay I said let's retreat. It's not like we're doing bikinis anyway. The nurse looked back at me. Whoa. Sometimes I feel default looking at a landscape. As though the whole account of life circled around - in pattern - in question - and in turn you felt stupid about it. But that's just the way it goes. It probably isn't that way really. Like where the footpath path cuts through the trees and comes to the water there was a small white shoe, a kid's shoe, and it was stuck on a piece of driftwood that was wedged between the rocks. Like it was there as something waiting to be found after it was lost. Waiting - but not really. It's we who invent the waiting. Not the shoe. But it really looked like it was waiting, to be found, or even lost all over again. Small white shoe on driftwood.. beauty as a kind of problem... far from perfect and far from harm. And in the nurse's eyes was the landscape reflected back at me. The fading sky with the long warming glare of the sunlight as a star gone in colors. The water with that light upon it almost like burning an oil on the waves. And the the trees in the park making those longed for awnings on a summer evening. What would a cardiologist say if this were a flipped over comic book universe? That I was having another heart attack, only now it was in reverse?  And what happens in this other universe was you get to evade the past and escape the future and stop the crazy wave action of time. You stand with the plants of the world and listen to the blood flow. But that seemed like asking for a cosmic credit. A good run but slippery. So we had a meal in retreat beneath a quiet old tree pruned many times over the years by faithful minimum wage parks and recreation department hands and whose branches were lopsided and not quite right to behold but were beautiful to watch and take in underneath. Fried chicken and cornbread from an old family recipe the nurse had in mind but was non-electronic to the extreme. If you wanted a copy to print out there was none to have. You had to drive north toward Canada and retrieve it from whomever was talking it then and giving it away like archival words passed around some long fire. The nurse said if you want this you need to go along. And so I did. The family looked at me like I was a creature somewhere detained between dreams. Alas I said and limped into the gathering. I met your cousin sometime after I died. Between hypodermic needles and ginger ale and the stormy effects of once being crushed. She's a tough ass. But she's also a blessing and as lovely as a small round stone that sits in the palm of your hand without clutching it. An aunt hit me with a fly swatter told me not to curse. I gave a younger brother a red painting. We had coffee and biscuits and drove off to dogs barking and chasing themselves and little kids imitating my monster walk across the gravel driveway. Back at the picnic we had local grown fennel and red onion slaw from the dreadlocks and banjo kids turning over dirt by the river into food and trying to make a decent business in the process. It was like farmer's market in the morning and then magic tricks in the evening. What it takes to have a meal. Maybe somewhere in a place we haven't yet discovered myth turns into a common object. Somewhere among the rest of us and our polarized selves we all just show up. And the pills were like tiny silhouettes to hide behind. Like having a rose tattoo on your shoulder that you only looked at in the mirror when you were twisted around. And yea I know, the brain chemistry should be there, like some two thousand year old asian vase that works in someone's home and doesn't line up on a museum wall. But I don't have that. I'm from a material culture. And so live within the great yelp of trade offs. What else to do but savor? Lovely August. Someone to have walk beside my own personal limp. Someone to unbuckle my braces. Oh to slump down on the grass and fall over the way a bad wind up toy might collapse when the spring goes loose.  The trouble always lies in what happens next. That's what gets to me I said to the nurse. What she asked? Well what are the days like? Here she said and handed me her cell phone. Call someone.

Epistle. To: Mercy Hunt

It was like two o'clock in the morning when I was startled awake. It was an old feeling and that shook the sleep from my head and started to thread needle points into my spine. I recognized it like some nasty troll come back from the dark territories looking for some place to intimidate and I regretted immediately having the nerve endings to see it and to internalize it. The room was crowded. I was stark naked alone but everything else was there squatting on my head.  Can't lie still. Can't run away. Can't tell the truth and can't tell a lie. Can't do anything quiet. Except fall.  Fall and twist through overheated synapses that pressurize on contact and build beyond control. Need Escape would be an apt here. Get me out is all your brain can shout but it was too late for that.  I was having a dream. I had to dive underneath the water. I had to fetch something down there or to meet someone below the surface. And before I knew it - wham - there was electricity running through me like I was a wire.  I limped outside and ran my eyes against the stars. Overhead the night sky was beautiful and catching and took you away to beautiful ends the way it does and overlays you in the drunken asides of songs. Down below however there was a different equal sign. Do you try and convince yourself hey this is all just in my head? When what's happening amounts to your body being squeezed and atomized and you think wait a minute I'm disappearing? Perhaps my greatest fear would be losing a sense of humor that I've had since birth. If I can't laugh then  I can't be serious. And it's not for a lack of maintenance! I could sit on the back porch forever. Like some exercise in extreme sitting and watch the world turn and go away and have it not miss me as though there was the sky and this was the face of a mountain. But I like to participate. I like to be somewhere. I like to have attention. Even if desires lose out to a moment in time - and what you have is all this shit surrounded by futility - ah the fucking life of it! - the point as I was seeing it last night was this total freaky moment. How do you pull back from something that's in your head but is not necessarily your thoughts? And I had this weird image sitting on the porch. It was a calculation. Which in itself was strange. But here it is. There are only fourteen weekends in a summer... Now whose idea was that? And those weekends go fast. So fast enough you're scared if you look at them squarely.  

Epistle. To: Wolstonecraft

Thanks. Despite what you warn me about about -  the cumbersome shell of the heart - what more can I do? I let fantasies of liberation get to me and the more I want the more there is to want till it becomes a kind of game. The little voice in the back of my head says be content with the way things are. The weird voice in the back of my head says what happens when the clock starts winding and then you lose out? I joke with the nurse about moving in together. She's here so often we could be a unit. But she doesn't see it that way other than me mentioning it and she thinking it a joke. But we're already kind of dating I said to her. Dating she said? What dating? Well we've gone to the movies I said and we've gone out to stores to buy things. And that's your definition of dating she said? No I said it's not like a definition. What then she said? More like a distraction I said. I like the look in your eyes, the way it can suddenly make me forget what day it is. She trained those queen sized lids on me and said that's nice but I'm not an escape plan. And I said but I don't want to come up empty. Who wants to settle for only the concept? Things should just materialize. That would be cool she said. Like a perpetuating mystery box don't you think I said? So she said, adjusting the bleach solution in the syringe as she prepared to change a bandage, let's suppose you were hungry and wanted a meal. Am I the hot dog? Or am I the grill?  Maybe dating is the wrong way to put it I said. So what is it she said? I thought about it. Hot dogs are about the easiest things to cook she said. She was right. Hot dogs were fucking simple. I then had a flash - as I got a needle full of that bleach solution straight into an open gash in my sternum - die bacteria die! - that not only are we just made from parts and leftovers that some process in life deemed us to be but there's also a world where you try and balance loneliness and companionship as though they were the the twin motors of the daily forage outward and back. If I were displaced in a song that would be a comfort. But I am not. I can't believe it fully or at least I fool myself into thinking that way but, really, you do have to ask, what purpose did dying serve? Time to begin again? And so as what? Another repository for aches and pains? A time sink that gathers information over the years and as a consequence gives out advice? And what's the answer to dating someone? How do you do that or not and come away so everyone feels clean? And so I continued and said to the nurse while it may seem at these unfortunate times that life as we know it is an action calamity squeezed between something like an endurance of a faith in breathing and a grudge match to simply and purposely hold on wouldn't you like to imagine we could be the stopper in the excess that totally wears us down? The nurse looked at me and packed some freshly opened gauze into the hole but didn't say anything. Why keep it dull I said? But she kept looking at me. She was like someone who went to a party in a good mood and would never allow all those otherwise bridges of language - like drunks yelling over the music -  or the fabled sweet nothings of sex come ons in her ears - to tie herself up in the head contrary-wise. She was able to look into the future about herself. And be clear. She was like cicadas calling out beneath a hot summer air that one day the whole air changes when you hear it but also you understand it's been that way for a very long time. And that was scary in the sense because you could count on it. It was also I'm afraid to admit way alluring. I'm trying to develop desirable points of view. If I have another life to live and if death has graced me that way then I want in. But I don't know if it's too late. And so I said I walked over to the park this afternoon. No she said you didn't. Her expression changed and she shook her big sad eyes across my face. No I said sensing her disappointment it wasn't like that at all. I need to get out I said. I found no trouble. I did nothing wrong. Try and see this I said. Paddle boards like the latest fad were out on the lake in clumsy happy numbers all nervous and almost experimental and looking stupid for lack of skills with people falling off them and getting back on board beneath a sterling light hitting the water. Soccer balls skimmed across the grass like they do each weekend in a pick up game and people on the sidelines shouted and had fried chicken and clandestine cold beer. Young bodies in bathing suits that fit them like stars exploding in desperate time were stretched out on the rocks soaking up the cancer and vitamin D in the sun. Mindless hedonistic and turned on from old reptile dreams. And I guess being in the surroundings indicates an involvement whether it's here or nothing else. I had all the pills I needed to elevate the mood and yes I did grab a beer from a chummy soccer fan. And somewhere between the soccer game played back and forth on the ground and the water played into the coves on small hot winds I yelled hey check it out I'm back from back from the dead! What more was there to want? A fucking tax credit for being alive? I see it the nurse said. The seven o'clock bells rang out upon the evening. Some rain last night but the garden needed it. The lilies have gone away for the year and just that alone to think about, the way you might lose a quality, marks a calender as subjective and makes you wonder where the damage is. But the brown eyes have muscle now in the space cleared by the lilies. It's a plan like that. All I did was plant it in motion and waited to see what happened. Do you like bonfire parties the nurse asked?  

Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

My horoscope said -  you must outwit the riddle. Not solve the riddle. But outwit it. And that's catchy but where does it leave you?  Are you still at it? Did you still play both sides? Maybe in the heart of things you might redo my chart? As for things now I'm escaping a bad night outside. It's raining and blowing against the windows in downpours and knots of wind pound against the house like something large and simplified trying to crash through the walls. I'm hiding on the inside in a dimmed room with a single lamp burning like some old torch lit up in the halls of darkness. It's late and I have a familiar feeling. Where you can't fall asleep for trying so you try and bother someone else and try and talk to them. Where you stay marginally awake at a loss until early morning and as you're about to fall asleep in the early morning you stop and you say to yourself wait a minute don't I usually wake up in the early morning? Thunder rolls across the skylights shaking dust off the blinds. Lightening flashes ride the clouds in herds of electricity. Everything lets go with a storm. Don't you think? The way the world sometimes appears to look back at you. Sometimes it's all so great and you feel so alive that you must fail, correct errors, repeat the process to ensure your feet are still lovingly planted above ground. Sometimes you look into the night sky and what you find staring back is ridicule. Like a vast silence telling in credits but no dialogue - hey yo you be small. Do you think the world has a brain? I mean a collective one. I guess it's like breathing. A bunch of thoughts gathered up and let loose like a manner of sorts plotting on how to get even. Each day I try and extend my reach. I try to walk further. The punch list that's never complete! But when I look out the window I'm faced with geometries of memory and what those sensations are and how they run deeper than just filling in the hours. You were important. Perhaps you still are. All that spook work you did must have made you some enemies worth nothing. Remember how that president's wife would never let the president even take a nap without looking at the chart? Central America? Banking deregulation? The hot line to Russia? Nothing happened higher up like that without first consulting the charts that you built on the stars. And so, are you hiding tonight? We're not the same. We never were. I was a fool and you never were. Maybe I'm just scared and would like someone else to take up the job and be afraid for me. (!) I just finished reading a post by some guy who's taking a year off to bicycle around, in order to have a "radically local life." I just saw Jane Eyre with the nurse. Tell me your tale of woe Rochester asked her. Woe she replied? Sir she said, I have no tale of woe. Ah Miss Eyre, Rochester said, behind a smokescreen of cigar rising in his face and a tumbler glass of shadowy alcohol brought to his lips, we all have a tale of woe. I try but suddenly the whole thing goes off into the past and I feel stupid looking at it like I've been left behind. Should I just leave the deal alone? How's that possible though? The way we're made inside. If it's written in the stars?  And this is more complex than I ever gave it credit for being. I guess I'm not sure what I should do - so when you tell me I have extra DNA to scatter about what does that mean? The hospital mechanics want to put me back together - but even if they get on with their best laid plans of mice and men - I will never be the same. Who would I be - I mean who can I be - if I don't have my old body to live within? It's an attraction for sure. The whole body thing. I remember I always felt safe when we talked about things walking around together after school. I remember setting a book on your thigh and I remember you picking up that book and hitting me with it broadside across my head. I remember how it was your face would change and shift by how long or short the daylight was falling on your face. At times it was soft and craving. Other times it was cut wicked and angular and seemed to have it all and what that said was don't ask for more. Ah. But is this just me? Or the wind and the rain. Or the moon that isn't there.

Epistle. To: Bernadette Wild Garden

Started the red paintings last week. It felt like there was nothing to start with other than what I knew. And if there were lonesome perspectives to have, then trying to bridge what you know, with something yet not made, then starting with what you know turns around and looks back at you like a solitary confinement.  I feel like a ghost. Like I've been dead and now am walking around dead. Wait - that's a zombie. And I don't want to be a zombie. I want to be a ghost. I want that special knowledge that comes afterward. Like after something goes wrong you have this weird understanding. Like when you see a car wreck or a train wreck or a drunk wreck, don't you have this immediate sense?  Doesn't it feel like seeing it has now made it your own?  Human nature becomes drawn to killer apps like that. Why we look. Why we speak out later on. Why? We're on the further end of process.  Hearing voices in the windows when you stare out in the street. The corner chair in a room where a spider web keeps appearing after the nurse ran through the room with a vacuum. And the crows that drop into the garden like airborne thugs with shiny feathers and who land for a moment and do nothing else but inhabit a freakish brief time and then lift off back into the air without a sound either coming or going. I want to paint everything red and that's the problem. It's the color. There's too much of it. It's hard to paint that color. You need a toe hold in the land of forever and that's a bastard to get. And I don't have that.  It's equally as difficult not to paint that color. But if I don't paint that color then what? Will I be left? And if so where would I be left?  Maybe it's like this. Maybe the color red is on to something. But what though? I don't have that answer. I don't know where it is. I want to locate something. And in return have that something locate me. I have this rush to get into an ethers of dreams. An ether of practical day long opportunities. An ether that wont stop. What I fear is I will be left behind to roost. Like watching a dragonfly hover in the warm humid air above a set of green plastic lawn chairs... then longing for that motion... where that motion appears as a stop in visual time... There used to be a body out in the world that once belonged to me and now that body has long been gone. And it's best to remember here, reverie should never be mistaken for nostalgia. What's in the past is just so. Like any amazement that happened to you. Why sift through that dust? What's the popularity there? If you have an idea you need to make that idea stand up and sing and that won't happen yesterday just because you thought it up yesterday. Ideas don't wait for us to get an act together.  The overall feelings we hunt for  - like where did that body go - where do we pause and stand tall in the shit stream - or whatever else we want  - take those into account and what I find is that the image of ourselves we need in that face of time running away is not important. That image counts less than the details. And once fired those details bring a money shot but thank goodness they settle back down and then bring out a tired old truth for inspection - that we can't make anything happen again. The nurse was just here. I was talking with her about red paintings. And she said any stage of life was just another label that didn't pay as well as the one before did. Why keep it dull she said? She sighed and tossed me a dish towel. Part of my occupational therapy is to catch things in motion and then put them away. I'm getting better at it. Though sometimes that quick response and coordination reflex I'm to build upon leaves me somewhere ajar in the brain and that's another place to deal with. On occasion I miss the dish towel.
    

Epistle. To: Lady Kimono Clan

Perhaps there are no suitable answers to build upon. Perhaps it's just an intellectual curiosity that happens to be strange and gets appreciated each day like the sunlight over the trees. Or how remarkably similar we can feel from one day to the next without even thinking about it. Did we make it that way? Is it built in? Maybe it was just the tortured infected springtime and the glacial pace of recovery that now governs my days. How long does it take to be well? Isn't that a stupid question to even ask? However when that distance of loneliness shows on occasion and begins tossing its weight around and there's no place to hide because it knows where you are, I'm frankly afraid of it, and am conversely, drawn to it like a small bit of magnetic ore. How does it settle in? A chilly ghost-like presence. Now-  here's a niche market to visit - a porn site dedicated to warm ghosts! Yea not only would we show up but there also might be a party! Usually though I look about and see change as the culprit. Which is like a panic attack whistling past and I worry full well that I'll be the one around to live through the change. I mean I accept change. It's the currency formed from all life on the one planet we know about. How do you trade with anything else? Let's face it - the world is in charge! Shifting viewpoints. High tides/ low tides. Storm days/ calm days. Sweet dreams/ drunks singing outside the windows in the dead-night. The stuff of nature grows between and like the fortune cookie fortune said opportunity knocks so pay attention. But there's all these grubby little fears that for one moment show up and just as quickly leave and undermine and fuck up my day. It's like I'm being chased and the only thing I can do to get away from them is to move away and step on that thought - even if that thought and the stepping away were irrational - looking at it and being scared shitless from nothing to speak of -  but also to get the fuck out and to move away physically from it like a yelp from adapt or die like a herd of beasts might do seeing a fire break out across the water hole and begin to spread across the old savannas of consciousness. Do you document it and leave it go and say these are twisted behaviors? Where's the serotonin levels? But in truth - and you do know me - like a warm ghost site! - alas why don't you friend me? - I do prefer an orderly scheme to the way things work. I maintain a time. A practical. A spiritual. An outlook or a leveling throughout the sunrise/sunset thing. I don't even know what that means. And I don't care what it means. And I don't care what it means to anyone else. Where it comes down to is a question. Being scared? Or not being scared? I walk past a yard in the neighborhoods every day. And there's a wagon or cart-like toy in that yard that never moves. It's a peculiar point of interest and I'm drawn to staring at it. How do you look at it? That toy I mean. Maybe it's just flotsam and jetsam. Who's out there to play with it? And if it was just left there, where it is, day after day, no one moving it, how come was it left alone? For me it's been that way for over a half-century and counting.

Epistle. To: Mercy Hunt

When I got home that evening not only was I trashed but the nurse was waiting up for me and was livid. What a total pain in the ass she said... and I said something like well anger doesn't suit you.. and she said what the fuck do you know anyway? It was at that point - and it was a low point -  it hit me like I was drunk dialing through an address book and no one else was around to pick up the receiver on the other end and that's like a terrific lonely feeling to have when you're drunk and want to talk and it seems the rest of the world is not around and so pretty soon you get the hint to just shut up. But! To sail away like the hundreds of boats did on the lake after the fireworks were over I said and their running lights slowly erased into the nighttime like candle wicks run out of wax and left to burn and to eventually dissolve. How could you do this she asked? Hearing her shout made my ears throb. All I did was go out I said. Look at you she said! I guess it was true. I did look like a mess. My bandages were unravelling and stunk like beer. I was covered in food stains. What a meal I said! And apparently I had wandered into the lake. The boats I said the boats! The soft casts beneath the leg braces were soaked, and what was inside those casts, like a pair of scared up legs dreaming of dance videos to come, would start to mold and rot if not taken apart and cleaned and have the system put back together immediately. And someone apparently took the liberty to place two ice creams cones - apparently chocolate and strawberry - impale them actually on the upright spikes of the metal halo holding my head up - and while it was probably a fun thing to do at the time but all the ice cream did was melt and run down over my shoulders like tributaries from a larger erosion. I didn't mean anything I said. But what that meant I wasn't sure I said. Can you not mean anything if you've already been out there and done it and then have to think about it afterward I asked? For lack of a better definition what I saw in response to my questions was both the living beauty of anger in its fine amplitudes of righteousness shot back through me like a sledgehammer but also what was there was the stasis of that anger and where it cannot go without doing more harm than already having it. Look at you she said. I wish you were not my problem she said. Ah. I can't tell you how much I imagined it earlier and how much a relief it was to be home then later on.

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

I looked up, from an otherwise Sunday evening - ah - the standard repertoire time invented - the welcome but cumbersome newspaper, the generous wine that has yet to disagree with me, a blue sky like the color of home above with summer clouds rolling across - and there were several fat neighborhood cats walking through the gardens, like they were suspicious, like they knew something else. I watched them for a while. But how long is that in the moments that a cat takes in? Damned if I knew. But the day before was something else. I skipped out on everything. And without knowing why I ended up in atmospheres. Earlier that day the nurse rushed off to deal with a family squabble. Some blood-kin fire for sure that had to be put out and could not be put out without her jumping in a car immediately and driving hours toward Canada. And then once there, waving some black art words through the air like a spell, the family would calm down. The nurse would look around. Peace on earth. Someone in the backdrop as a cousin would pick up a fiddle and start to to play. That was a sign things were good. Soon after, armed with fresh bread and venison meat, the nurse would immediately hop in the car and drive back down from near Canada. At least this was how she explained this whole thing to me. Will you be all right she asked? I didn't know really. I mean I've always taken it this way or another that I will be all right. The nurse said she had to go. And I totally liked that about her. Always a definite in the blank space about what leaving meant.  I could call the emergency number to get help if I needed etc. But she was worried. And when she said that, dare I say it, when I heard it, she was worried, well that little number pulled a heart string. Oh I know. I remember what it was like. To have worry. And to be worried. Weren't those the days! But really it serves notice as such, one evening doesn't change anything. Even if something drastic happened, the next day all the other wheels keep spinning. However, back to that evening. With the nurse gone and me uncovered for a few hours I went downtown to watch the fireworks. Probably not the smartest thing to do - but hey - look who we're dealing with. Ever have those feelings where you felt like a vocabulary word looking for the right definition to fix itself onto you? So I tried these: jaunt - stroll - tramp - ramble. None of them fit. But I wanted them to. And that's the way it goes.  One way or another I saw those words across horizons and streets and traffic as I imagined them in play. But that was more for the gray matter you understand. Now - I've been out for walks. But not for long times. And am sorry to admit it but I have been back to surgery. But that evening was different. I left the pattern. Different. Forget average. Place - as I saw it -  became inspirational -  and not just another whereabouts to pass through on the way back home. It's always good to get out of the house! People though continue to look at me. Something about the bandages I suppose and the metal halo holding my head in place. And the leg braces - like totally bad limps - make me machine wise but human dull, in that I can't bend to get things going but need to swing everything from the hips for motion. I overheard a doc one time in the recovery room. He said by the time this guy's done he'll have enough new parts inside to be a monster! Perhaps there's something there. Eventually I will have to live up to this. Like some fucked up grown up thing! But the air that evening I tell you was soft warm July like sweetness done up in planetary mechanisms and then laid back down on you like a fine coating. Place. Sure there were weirdos running about waving tiny flags and sparklers like they were masturbating in the land of the free. And what can you do about the lonesome gradualism that has more flags on trash bags sponsoring auto dealerships with dead history heros and a toothy gal with naked shoulders in the home of the brave? I mean there's always a risk going out in public. But this was like reckoning square into the optimism of the american century in localized portions. Harley riders with gnarly hair streaming like contrails above the exhaust pipes of their bikes. Rolling american thunder one gal yelled. Skull bones accurately needled and other assorted personal information tattoos like love and fuck you on large cubist biceps. I wandered across a parking lot where gray hairs sat in circled lawn chairs smoking dope in rainbow shirts against running mouth skateboards and missing cats stapled onto utility poles. I wandered into a backyard. Citizens rallied around beer can oratories like this were the rainbow and not a constitution promise. Kids ran through the  fading daylight with berries shortcakes and cream making a mess in their wake and having a total fun doing it. More flags. Someone with a suggestive barbeque apron and a cartoon hat pored me an umbrella drink and said here motherfucker happy fourth! Honey his wife said I don't know what it is about these kids but they all seem to keep getting younger. Wasn't that the point? For the old melting pot to keep stirred?  Somewhere we belong. Even if we blow the chances - even if everyone was a child from a war  - even if the oracle was not in at the moment but will be with you shortly - somewhere we belong. Fellowship maybe or even some kind of frenzy. I told the backyard hosts thanks for the drink but I needed to move on but would like to be back some day and maybe hang out. Honey she said - and this seemed reasonable- that the umbrella drinks apparently don't stop at one but move forward into mysteries like prime numbers - the last time I saw you I said nothing at all which means the last time I saw you I did not see you at all. I had no idea what she meant but that was fine with me. I was out on the street limping wild. Day lilies shot up in from cracks in pavements. Boat lights on the lake were rolling in a sudden breeze and extending the darkness like fireflies might across a hilly field. Driver's licenses and passports and social numbers - nobody I knew - but all this documentation I was somehow related to by dint of birth - and making us a country tangled in the holiday life for now and just as gone tomorrow as any sunflower or some railroad tree. But isn't that the best part? I made it down to the waterfront tents which was thrilling but was however a big mistake. I walked along the food vender aisle. Wanting nothing but that was just another feeling to have. High on meds because I had to trust something. Wanting everything because that's the way it is as the sky galvanized the evening clouds like a print from the factories of watercolor dreams. I heard crowds call out for hamburgers sizzling. French fries so deep in the fat they left marks on the air once taken out of the basket and tossed onto a little paper boat. Some guy said I gotta have me at one of them corn dogs. Pizza slices below tidings of elysium tomato sauces - middle eastern salads like refugees from the arab spring - tofu milkshakes that were really good if you added the chocolate syrup and a splash of the hot sauce from the nearby taco mania cart. Maybe I was hungry. Or was just lost in the love of digression as the sign of life. It's hard to tell. But I really couldn't eat/walk/think at the same time. Those are like harebrained things enough to do on a good day. And then it was dark and the concert band shut up thankfully after an eternity of cover tunes and boom went the night up in a single high liner to get the crowd teased. Amazing what explosions do for the attention span. Who's paying for this someone asked? Her companion added - like someone trying to be sly but who ends looking stupid for it -  I even don't like fireworks. Boom. Boom. Smoke. Multi-hued light like a birth of a universe and if you watch those science channels this was pretty close. Two young neighborhood scenesters stood next to each other and were texting one another standing basically in the same footprint about what was happening a thousand yards above them. And laughing I guess cosmically. Boom. We love loud. The companion said there goes our freedoms up in smoke... Don't you think that's funny he asked? She didn't say anything, just sat there looking up at the sky like anyone you might forget. Maybe she was still worried over the cost. I mean how do you except to impress a date with a hoary line like freedoms going up in smoke? First of all there are no freedoms I said and so what. And second I said why don't you just buck up and enjoy a night out. But I suspect I said this is some sort of internal life you're sharing with the rest of us out here in the open. And third I said - but he cut me off before I might finish- both of us secluded in shadowy environs -  and he said excuse me. With some expression I imagined was supposed to flash anger like some wounded animal in its own head defending itself but was de facto lost in the long sad backwash like some shut down anus in evolution and was trying to fight it and trying to live up to it but truthfully in a stare down the hormones failed and he was just another guy on the way to fucking up his date and did not know how to get out of a failed chimpanzee stance.  Liberal astonishment was practically glued over his face. And that wasn't a pretty sight to look back at believe me. There were rockets crashing up into the sky as stage lights and crashing into the one that was just fired a moment before like some antidote to loneliness. Someone else was too drunk to find his cup holder and was urinating onto a milkweed plant in a neoclassical male pose like a statue in front of a bank building and sure enough losing ground fell over onto the grass trying to grab nothing for support and his friends all took out their phones and made sure this life was captured and preserved.  The companion said excuse me. Like he was polite to the ends of the earth but he never meant it. Like some dumb shit. Dumb shit. I thought fuck this - your middle aged ponytail that you still wear as hair despite the icky dome sweat on your forehead. The  crow's feet at the ends of your eyes just because you've been around the block more than once and you now think because you've been around that block that now that block owes you something in return. The pea bright green overalls you're wearing like no natural color this side of some near extinct amazon lizard and without a shirt underneath like you don't have flabby man breasts all wedged out of the straps like some totally bad burlesque act. And really I didn't know what else to say after I said that, so, I said excuse me? Boom. More smoke and light. The crowd went ooooohhh... releasing a collective breath into the night that would hold us together for as long as a a rocket show...  after that we're back on our own... and the companion threw a beer into my face. Maybe the umbrella drinks made me too happy. Maybe I was mobbed in excess of passion. I'd like to think I was taken off like a doomed romantic and didn't care what happened next but really I was too old for any of that. I looked around and saw a woman in huge dreadlocks with bunting tied in her hair wearing face paint and balanced on a unicycle. In the smoke and light show that flashed off on/ off on/ she looked like a gunpowder zombie dancing on a single wheel. But now I had beer dripping all over me. But hey -  doesn't that happen anyway - over the long course of many an american holiday? A neighborhood scenester come over and said, dude that was way harsh. And I didn't stop to think if he meant me or the companion. Namely postcards from the grave. And he said that beer sucks. Here he said have one of these. I took the can and drank it in a gulp as though this were a creation myth and I had just ripped off a fig leaf and was now all butt-assed power and left just as embarrassed. Maybe I was a monster. A ghost story who when inflamed kills someone at festivals. An effortless kung fu movie swipe in the dark. But - drifted over the ages - through magic - cave paintings - alchemy - centuries of it building and plugged into the bones throughout - all the fears to stand beyond how we get thrown around and as a result how to be something known and nothing more -  DNA science to explain a leg up on having a beer thrown in your face - even if I were the agent of contagion and hit the prompt button on the companion's nervous breakdown - the assorted head devices like mercy or paranoia or revenge - how to live each day getting fucked over in the world by forces and strangers - I wanted nothing more than an immediate frame of reference. And that was to live to fear nothing. And then to live again to tell about it. Like a Blind Faith lyric - I'm wasted... and can't find my way home...

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Epistle. To: Mercy Hunt

I like to think maybe I beat it. Beat it at its own game even. I like to think I acted randomly. Down through the years and all that. Not so much from something personal, but something more like looking around and trying to decipher it. Like algebra class. Remember Mister Z and how earnest the man was?  Oh the chalk lines dragged across one's nerves! Algebra class -  like all the rest that we sat through - back in the dreaded school years of being developed for the coming phase of life where we would be all stuck later on as adults. And it was also like spades working against you when trying to fit in was more important than something like having a second thought about it.  But the one good thing from algebra class - other than of course having you as a text-mate to cheat from!  - was getting credit for trying to solve the problem. Even if you didn't arrive at the correct answer in the back of the book you did get marks for your scratch-work in the side columns for pursing the damn thing etc. But it made me wonder. Pursing problems and all that. Ah. The grand scheme in the nature game. The one that doesn't like a vacuum. But to get you up to speed here's what happened. I was riding my bicycle along the Onion Avenues north to south when I got t-boned at Main and the hot dog cart by another bicycle. Some wild and crazy guy flying down Main east to west hit me broad side and sent me into orbit south east to north west. I remember being forced off my seat into a kind of suspended air and flying through some eternal moment in the books. It being totally beautiful to become air born. Like the stuff from where dreams are made. Only now I appeared capable beyond the abstract. I was flying through the air. And I guess somewhere it registered that right now I was in the air - forced against my wishes - but really wasn't that a pedestrian thing we all fear? In the air I flew-  breath taking - gonad tightening - above the curb-scape - a small city intersection with hip hop boys holding skateboards like instruments and music apps stuck in their heads and tourists in bad shorts sweating for ice cream cones. Bare chested hard hat laborers dug in the filth of ongoing asphalt repaving to make the streets simpler to negotiate. I was flying above land. I was a mammal with stock options and a coupon for a free car wash in the next month. And now whoa. A bird's eye of things below more defined than any gods might be since they were already there in the air and that's why they were gods to begin with and not mammals flying through the air.  I was making my own dream. Could this get any better? The beautiful stuff lasted for a few seconds until I slammed head first into the metal sides of the hot dog cart. With impact enough to geyser steamed wieners and the relish trays up into a fountain and then back down in a sticky sweet protein filled mess onto the heads of a group of city councilors out for a break from budget negotiations. When I woke up I was a room. Whoa. Where did the air go? This was not a place where the gods hung out! And maybe waking up wasn't a clear enough description. Had I come around to what? It was explained to me. There was a pause in the manufactured breathing tubes stuck down my throat and into my nostrils where I volunteered something like my own breath and then opened my eyes. This wasn't anyplace to be I thought again and I knew it immediately. Like if you've ever sat down to a poker table and looking around you if you don't see a sucker at the table than brother you're it. Machines were all around and it was like being lost inside the workings of a mechanical forest that stretched to the door frame and then wrapped back toward me around the walls. White whispers spoken beyond a pall of understanding and needle ports rising out of me. Welcome back some gal said looking down into my eyes. Don't even think about moving she added. What was next I thought? Was I going to be told that I was doing fine? You're not doing so well she said. I tried to talk. But I had no voice on the outside. All I had were sounds on the inside. They were like shouts no one heard but me and they filled my ears with equal mixtures of fear and curiosity like a balance point not arrived yet. If I texted I might say WTF? But I don't. All I have is a landline that the telecommunications company of origin keeps embarrassingly updating to the 21st Century until they get rid of me and all the other landline users. I tried to raise my hand. Hoping for the odd calligraphy gesture that by a simple physical act was meant to communicate a need from within and write thoughts upon the air to be viewed. But the bed held onto me. The gal kept looking down at me. I kept looking out. Through something. I was looking out through something. You were dead the gal said. Huh? When the EMT's finally pulled your head from the hot dog cart you had a seizure and went into cardiac arrest and then you bought the farm. Huh? That means you died. Huh? Technically you were gone for a minute and forty-nine seconds. Huh? They put the paddles to you and that banged your heart around and that got you kick started back up. You were quite the mess when they brought you in. Now you're here. Suddenly it was clear. I was in a hospital room. Either that or now I was still dreaming. Either way I thought I'm screwed. But who was this gal? Did she text? And if so did I now have to get an app? Cue the neurons. What can I say? But I liked the way she talked. I liked how it was. I wanted to hear more how it was she sounded. Dead? Well wasn't that the shit... And a thought I then had was - am I still dead and this was just a memory? Cool I thought. Maybe I'm in the Twilight Zone? A syndicated television re-run. Like the one at the bus station. How many time have I see that one? After the Rod Serling introduction some guy with baggage checks his whereabouts but it's pretty clear he's just another invisibility left in the aisles among confused passengers and bad fares and inept schedules heading off into forever - which was really his life repeating again and again - without really knowing anything different because you get off one bus and get on another beneath the big time clocks and black and white postings for tickets. But what if that wasn't it? Maybe I was in the future. The old piss smelling bus station where thieves share the night was no longer there. Instead confused passengers bad fares inept schedules were installed as the old same template but this time around was posted onto a brand new off the drawing board federal grant designed multi-modal-user-transit- sender and the exits hummed like illuminations with different cites imprinted virtually upon the air in brilliant smart phone colors. But wouldn't it be in the end the same old invisibility to contend with? So nonetheless I felt stuck. The fucking present. I couldn't talk. I couldn't move. And naturally I wanted out. Here's the program the gal said. Severe facial lacerations. Collapsed vertebrae. Broken sternum. Your knees look like dog meat. And here's the kicker. There's a piece of the hot dog cart stuck inside your head that can't be removed at this time. There's too much swelling in there to get a clear shot at it she said. And with situations like this there's always the risk of hemorrhage where even if the surgery were a success well if you bleed too much afterward then your brain might blow up she said and so she said there's no point at this time putting you through all that. Plus she said who you need to do the operation is at this moment wind surfing off the coast of Oregon and who if I do read the e-mails correctly won't be back until the last gust calms down. Realistically she said  he'll be back in the office in nine days. It's a problem with professionals she said. Especially the brain surgeons. They get away from the lasers and the scalpels and turn into nature boys. My job here she said is to care for you. I do have to inform you that while you are in the hospital there's always the possibility for infection. Bacteria aren't exactly the easiest creatures to catch she said. She looked down on me with big leafy eyes that seemed like elements on her face. I wanted to say whoa. I wanted to say I can't talk back but I will look up into those greenstone rims and herbal-like corneas until the turn of the century faded away. I wanted to say majestic. I wanted to say this is a fucking nightmare. I wanted to say but what happened to my bicycle? Relax she said and hit a button on an IV port. It's cocktail hours she said. And oh she said. The You Tube with you and the hot dog cart that went viral.        

Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

How to know what to want, like happiness maybe, or even avoiding pain, is trouble enough. But when confronted by choices like eight different toasters or six different blenders it feels completely default-like to say oh they're all the same. Shouldn't you make a choice regardless? Was it good enough to toss out the extremes? Eliminate the cheapest model and the most expensive at the same time? And if doing so, then what was left? A bow to the way of the bargain hunting samurai taking up a solid intellectual position in the middle? But let's think about it - while half the world starves each night for lack of food or clean water or decent shelter there are eight different toaster variations to choose from. Just for burning bread muffins and bagels to be toped with something that melts and satisfies another whole list of cravings to have. Naturally any rationale can slip out of hand. Looking around just one store, in just one town, one could blow off a whole afternoon and become trapped by exploring the promises of all the gadgets in sight for sale. I needed a toaster. My old one from like fifteen years had shit the bed. But looking at all the toasters had a sudden and an almost violently pleasurable affect upon me. With all this in sight I scanned around and tried my best to stay defensive but truthfully when left to ponder on acres of merchandise and acres of mind I now wanted a toaster. I wanted wide settings. I wanted profanely cheap looking digital readouts. I said to the woman across the aisle -  who studied a large stainless dough mixing bowl with industrial paddles as though she were realizing she now needed to feed multitudes - can you believe this. Perhaps my scars made her uncomfortable. She said nothing in return and quietly made her way off past the vacuum food processing machines and chop-a-matic devices that accordingly turn any meal into a party. Were it not perverse I would say this was magic. I was landed somewhere I had not intended to be. And so feeling the drug-like benefits of shopping I moved laterally to the blenders. I didn't need a blender. Nor did I want one. But I was now certain something different would happen despite what I thought about it. Ah - twelve speeds - crush fruit ice alcohol - the smoothie of unrealized dreams - cocktails like dragonflies hovering in warm summer air - the deeper stuff requires some work even if money does make us strange - and the play on rule was here in effect so I had to continue this with dignity and purpose in a fucked-up world or else leave the store entirely. I've had plenty of toasters in my life and not many regrets about them. But never a blender. And that recognition struck me as odd. I asked the nurse how can I let this go? The nurse looked over the blenders, going over each one with a precision touch that was her fingertips at work in the world. Do you really want more junk in your life she asked? I knew she was right. But that wasn't the point. Look I said. When we were younger all this never crossed the radar. We used to run around like something wildness gave bones to. Clones of time really but believing we were mystics. And maybe we were. Out looking for experience. Longing for great unstated eagerness to haul us away. The nurse held up a blender. Yes I saw it. Like it was a trophy. Or some admittable evidence in court. And so you're trading this she asked? By now I was trying hard to really want a blender. I was trying to come away clean like the air does after a good rain. To do what you think. No I said. There's not much left to trade. Then buy a blender she said. But I didn't really believe it. That was just talk. And I told her so. So she asked? No I said it's like this -  I seem better when I remember. Sure the nurse said, putting one blender back and then picking  up another to inspect, it's all over too soon. Now I wanted everything. I wanted memories as crazy as the fake flowers bursting over in aisle 9. I wanted crappy home appliances that locked me up in retail chains of bliss and let me in on how to  make food like celebrity endorsements showed how. I wanted the sunlight falling outside across the parking lot like a huge dying star slicing suburban cars in two with shadows. I wanted to hear the nurse say again yes she would come by tomorrow while it was still a beautiful spring afternoon today and we were out driving and listening to play lists and throwing debit cards to the wind. Because the future was there - just this side of a lie and just on the other side of honesty -

Epistle. To: Bernadette Wild Garden

I remember it was mid-January and on into what appear culturally to us most as long bleak days lost in winter. The holiday season was over. Color was gone from front porches and no one felt like getting together for dinner. Why everyone needs a break mid-January remains an odd quantum equation. But nonetheless, looking around one evening I saw the day stretching. Dozens and dozens and dozens of crows heading across the sky flew off above the windows like a single crazed motion. A black winged rodeo. A folk lore anthology refers to multiplies or crows as: a murder of crows.  But who or what was riding that stirrup? Not that I saw where they came from. Or even where they were going. Suddenly they filled the sky in the window. What to do but  step outdoors... be closer to what was happening above as though I were somehow kin to it all along. Snow began falling. Falling in mists at first and then heavy flurries and soon after there was a storm whirling around. And it was below zero cold which made it seem so easy. This was the time - to have one foot outside in the snow like weary mammals looking into the cold and dark and the other indoors in the pipe line heat of our urbanite hermitage - for vegetables cooked in a stew like winter demands - dark bread with sweet butter fat - alcohol spirits that chase troubles out the door but never solve them - but no one was around. But looking it up later on the weather channel what intuition said was a gimme was confirmed with information from satellites. The days were growing longer, if only by seconds. Why count? Ah, but that's the thing. Time - the life long habit we make - being in the drift of forever - starts taking an express. What to do then? The calender day may be longer. But the further out we go the more that calender day runs out! I remember walking on the frozen lake one evening and you said I don't know if I'll be coming home soon. The crunch of snow underfoot - clean sounding - direct - and the more you walked the more you needed to hear that sound - as though snow underfoot spoke for the world and was not simply another silence in winter. The sunlight had long settled beyond the white nests of the high Adirondack peaks. A fishing shanty began to glow behind a dirty plastic window in a gas lantern but otherwise the other ice holes were vacated for the night. Yea there were stars that formed. But that's all. Way out light in the distance. But today - like a fulcrum - remembrance springs eternal - one self as its called though we should constantly doubt it - is impossible - without today and the reverie - they both have to be somewhere in the same place for us to exist - so forgetting about the present today I painted over an old painting. And I had a sudden feeling or maybe an exchange of feelings that I was erasing some part of the past. In a way that was probably so. But was it the painting - or the times - that is memory - associated with the painting? Again what? A sort of perky melancholy in the abstract that held a breath of life to itself? Or was it literally something I would never see again? Frankly what I needed were the materials more - the physical fact that was the canvas and the already built up surface with layers of paint - than I required the image on the canvas despite the sentiment or even the technical value involved. And outside the snow was falling. A fine light snow covering up the old crust. And maybe what I was doing was also snowing. Covering up a storm of record with something different. Maybe the new painting will be called the snow of attraction. But that sounds too stupid to do. But anyway I was relived. Like I was no longer someplace else but present. In the studio. With music on. A pot of soup cooking in the house. Watching the snow fantastic falling in pressures and twilight lost in the build up.            

Epistle. To: Lady Kimono Clan

Been over two months since I've had a proper shower. Pesky wound and all that. What you can do though with a sponge bath and dumping a pot of water over your head! The silver lining thing and all that. And each time I run that wash cloth around like some flag of surrender I think about swimming in the lake. After a day on land - isn't it usually fucked up or some otherwise arrangement - don't know why that is but that seems the nature on land - when you dive in and splash suddenly it's like things be gone. Maybe it's the floating body ripe for discovery. How the word buoyancy stands out like a second thought. The complete way - a Taoist sensibility -  water takes the feet out from under us and gives us fear of drowning-  but once over that - water becomes the  world -  waves to negotiate and sunlit reflections. And I know all that is dreamy. But that's what I'm thinking about despite all the tricky footwork. To be caught up in a dream. And not the dream getting caught up. So let the world fold us over. What would the point be having a life anyway? Remember the floating grave sites? And the trail maps? Pot luck for the dead with free music! Those were the days when distribution mattered. Old school paper clues. When you could throw announcements from the backs of trucks at people and everyone got it. Anyway there's not much real swimming these days. Unless you count walking outside the door into another rainstorm underneath a massive gray sky. The nurse said maybe there's a cloud in your future. I miss barbecues I said. I miss the innocent visions that go along with a plate of potato salad and sweet pickles and green beans. Green beans are mostly tasteless the nurse said until you kill them with salt.  I'll make them Italian style for you I said. Par-steam them and then soaked in ice water to retain their color and then patted dry and sauteed in olive oil with garlic until they darken. Turn off the heat before you think you need to and don't burn them to a crisp. Served with noodles quickly shaded from a bath in a light red sauce. Black and green olives scattered about for accent and tang. Hard wicked sharp cheese in peels. And bread. The gods have ovens I said. And they bake bread. Unfortunately though - forget the legends - someone has to make it - bread does not drop out of the sky. The nurse said I thought M&M's were the food of the gods. Well they are I said. But the gods do dabble about. And I'm not sure about the cloud and all that. Or even the future if you want to try and put a mark on it. But the nurse asked do the gods dabble about with paintings? Why so I wondered? Look at that cardinal in that tree she said. That would make a painting. And it was there - or there it was - like a heartbeat outside the window. This was not a recognizable time to quit I suggested. You can rest later she said. I'm always afraid that I'll just stand around empty handed. Forever taking leave... stop she said. And she was right. Being around her made me feel that way. Like what comes to the good -  or the bad - who knows - was measured all around in strange doses. Do some red paintings she said. And there was the cardinal - like song itself in the heavies and a rush of color in damp overcast -  hanging on a branch against the willow's creamy green leaves. And it was a red concentrated to imagine and to conflict, like a spiritual energy that flipped itself inside out and was now visible in eyes beak and wings. Forget that idea over a sunny day she said. This was getting to be a habit and one I should give up enjoying. Since time -  in the cliche-  heals all wounds-  and that in turn meant I lost the nurse. But we all lose. If there's a given then that's it. But I've found no less in the extremes. Being a fool in love did make you a sitting target. But why not just go out and lose? I don't really know - was it simpler that way? Loss. Making things with your hands and then placing them within the viewfinder of the world. But what happens afterwards is something that has frightened me from the beginning. When loss is celebrated different expectations arise in sets and take on a pattern because you're now the record of fact for others to see. Why does it have to be that complicated the nurse asked? Just do some red paintings. The last show was fine and she added you made cash.          

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

The old magazines had to go. As did some fucking old catalogues that I never bought anything from anyway. And books that now seemed worth more in trade at a used book store than they were for the ideas I once wanted from them or any memories I took off their pages. And there was a CD with a band's label but with no music on it when played, like that was the story on that. What you find when you move a bookcase from its place on the floor was not only dust from the last century and many dead bugs but also the obvious question - why has this stuff been kept around for so long? Maybe it was a zen riddle. Who never gets off the ground? Something aloud but with no answer. The answer being the form in question but the form in question requires you to have a take at it without ever coming around to it etc. So what you have is no answer worth printing. Dirt caught in spider webs. Monologues in shadows. Endless loops so what you end up doing is clean the bookcase. Odd though to see all the old magazines and catalogues with your name on it. And I thought what's it been like to be apart from that name? Was this like fumbling across some garage version of Gone With The Wind? Frankly I don't give a damn! But I know that's not it. But I also know I'm not like that Russian money guy who spends millions on a calender year in the hope he codes his DNA for future use after he dies. What for? So he can live again? To hear him tell it once he's gone there's an evolutionary right for him - to stay on as an idea - because he can afford to do so -  and more importantly he said there was someone else in the business willing to take his money and tell him yes sir of course and more so in the gross vernacular they were willing to grease his jizz. Maybe. But I also know what happened when I saw that name. Funny isn't it how buying something can seem like a ticket to a thought. Just as it's impossible to have only one direction home. What I guess I'm trying to do is to not mistake one thing for another, trying not to misplace reverie with nostalgia, and so stand on my own and not so much with a willingness to stand apart. And stuff like that was never but linear even in a practical way. So I look at an old book. And then outside the kitchen window two cardinals build a nest in the rose arbor. One reminds me about walking in the mountains, alive and young, steering the world through emptiness and all that. The other I simply stare at.    
      

Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

Hummingbird speed would be cool. As though you held different parts and those parts were different types of scales that entered in and out. And when you look at hummingbirds it's like why hold onto a branch? A refresher course in the finer arts of empty thinking. How would you paint a hummingbird I asked the nurse? A few scratchy lines like a blur? Are you using a solid ground or not she wanted to know? I didn't know and that threw me. So I asked do you think birds have any idea about breakfast? Oh birds completely understand about breakfast she said and laughed. Besides she said what can happen overnight? She had fine gray green eyes which made them easy to look into and then feel lost without regrets. The thing is you settle in for a time and then it changes. Much of the day these days is spent in idleness - taken from an old Chinese world view - a lazybones word for a spiritual posture - and from there one can only ask further questions. When the sunlight  is out I do a good imitation of the lizard king routine and sit in a plastic chair on the deck sipping a ginger ale for a thrill. Face up to the radiation and getting a dose to warm the blood in springtime after a long fucked up winter. Do you imagine falling asleep is medicine? And the lake is way high over normal stages. And I read that for every foot of lake water above flood level it takes twenty days for that extra foot of water to drain down and go away. Naturally I have water down in the basement which I cannot do anything about. The lake is like two feet higher than what it should be. And when I get out on that deck chair and have a couple of pain meds - to lose that sorrowful blueprint left post-surgical - and then nod off - like Marge does in the front seat of the land rover  in Who'll Stop the Rain as the agents and the husband she left close in - she left whatever it was she had behind - both for the Vietnam heroin she now loves and the anti-hero Ray who provides it - but whom she still wants is still the question - what is it that she wants? -  everything - she wants the dope the husband the lover - but then the agents close in - and I open my eyes suddenly and I'm like two feet higher too! The nurse said well don't expect so much. But I said if you can't believe in movies what then? The nurse had wavy auburn hair that shook down in curls around her shoulders and was like the color of a flower pot you might pick up at a tag sale for a song. But I said why not believe in the miraculous overnight? Why not forget about time as a marker? Because the nurse said you need to toughen up. And that is not magic. It's day after day she said. And when she said that something hit. It was Friday the 13th. I had an opening that night. A swank retail establishment where a painting was altogether another consumer good up for sale. And did I need a payday!  Life was filled with chances we never take anyway - hanging on thin air waiting for us to recognize - so I asked her. Would you like to come along? It seemed innocent enough- but hey nothing really is -  and I think she understood that. Maybe I just feared. Where does the love come from? Where does anything like help come from when you're no longer hurt and don't always spend the waking moments so to speak looking over your shoulder? Maybe I simply wanted to walk into an evening with someone else as a look or a combination. The nurse said I have my doubts. Yea it's funny that way I said.    

Epistle. To: Bernadette Wild Garden

Went to the movies yesterday afternoon. Got lost for a couple hours in take away fictions and big sound systems. And walked there in a rainstorm which seems the course for the earth locally the past few days. We've become a citizenry of umbrella wearers. Water piled up at street intersections. The storm drains in the city - a facet of civil engineering if not politics - were not exactly in the best shape.  For the most part they were placed at higher grades than the streets themselves. And it doesn't take a genius to see the problem here. The rain once it collected downhill from the university heights behaved like rivers in floods will do and sought their own gravity. As such with no adequate drainage pattern the rain storm heaved in directions back around corners where it came from and sloshed over curbs where if you were a pedestrian with a short legged dog the dog would be swimming on its leash. Design is a good thing when it works. But was this actually thought out? It was like standing in awe- watching the water hit the rim of the storm drains and then go around every which way but down like crazy. And it was a good sized crowd for a matinee and suddenly in the dim light finding a seat in that movie going mingling while feeling alone I had this slap in the head. Almost like I was trying to impress myself. Lazy and sanguine and walking in the rain. Inflated intentions even. But the hiss you hear are simply your thoughts evaporating into the air. If this were a bar scene and whomever was pouring the drinks and then having to listen the bartender character might say yea, whatever, now drink up and go home. We look for thrills. We look for love. Instead the dull drift of life runs amok around the storm drains! And settled into the movie house. Ah the quiet between the ears implicit while the eyes were stranded in images. And really that's not too much to expect is it? But like the song says - if it's not asking too much - that whole mental clearinghouse never got off the ground. Trouble was sitting in the seats in front of me. A couple of over the hill nimrods. It was like they were harpooning better days now that their salad days were about over and as such wanted everyone else to know. And at a freaky volume. Were they trying to blow out the neon exit signs?  Checking their phones and then yelling gossip from one seat to the next that was personal enough to not amount to shit among strangers. Checking their watches and then arguing data. Presence it seemed was their paramour. Chain swallowing a box of twizzlers and a tub of popcorn while worried out loud over the calories in a diet soda? Yelling out wrong answers to the trivia quiz before the feature. And then yelling oh damn it I should've gotten that one!  Like that might have changed anything. And I do know. They were just having fun. But even so. Remember as a kid doing stunts in the playground and yelling to whatever disinterested adult who had surveying duty at the time look at me! If there were questions of silence - like in a movie house - they filled it with enormity. And if I could read minds - which I can't - I might want a box of twizzlers. Even so it went - through the feature - chomp - phone buzz - loud satisfaction - oh look there's a train crash!