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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