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.