obsessions are maybe like songs

   Can't get over it when I see all these people in the morning walking to work and in a sense I envy them how each day they're off and about. Not only are they walking without a limp (!) but they seem to have a place to go and something to do. ( I'm hurt and unemployed with no job to return to). And I know it's just my impressions guiding me, even these people might feel lost, but they're all off and after something. At the circling back point where a day layers upon the day before, don't we wish, don't we won't, the little pieces of physical evidence we have to start grabbing onto a void of sorts and contribute to something done with? At least for me it's that way. I hark to the object.  And to make a sentence out of one's life - to take living as language and to lose the appeals of authority for that life -  like to forget that frothy dictate I am who am -  that leaves a subject to dissolve in the making and a verb in the action word sense to make the thing presentable to see. Manufacture suits me. Something rather than nothing I guess and yea I add to all the layers of material stuff that overwhelm us. But I find it unsettling to do nothing. Give me a tool, a baking pan, a paintbrush...

Epistle. To: Elisabeth Bardo

    Don't we all crave? Somehow to be loosened off the screws of disappointment and be left off to float? Float on a world we didn't make. Float on a world that might not exist if we did not make it up?
   Relax the nurse thought. It's just another bad night's sleep.
   Yea I said there's nothing like it. Something picks me apart and rolls me around like a piece of dough.
   Wasn't it you she said that said get rid of the anxieties in life and then what's left?
   Alright I'm not alone I admitted. But without a decent night's sleep what's left in the morning?
   Oh I know the nurse thought. Isolation. Dread. Weird fears. But listen. There is no condition working against you. This is just a bad night's sleep is all.
   But where's the super glue that's supposed to hold things together?  Where's that voice? The one that's like a backup plan. The one that tells you it's just the mind of your life twisting you around and so don't pay attention to it? I'm out of context.
   This is just another surgery she said. This is not out of control. This is what happens on a long list.
   Maybe we should leave I said. Go out for a drive in the truck and never come back.
   You need to be put back together the nurse thought. That's life in the really slow lane.
   I want to imagine heaven I said. But I'm nowhere close.
   Heaven is impossible the nurse said. The minute you say the word your head starts to fill up with junk. Even if you're nowhere close the place still exists far away and you can't get there.
   Why? Why is it impossible?
   Because she said. And if that's not reason enough then you just keeping thinking butch because that's what you're good at. You know what happens then? Then he and Sundance get blasted by the Bolivians. Great photo. Fade out. Cue the raindrops keep falling on my head music and then you leave the theater stepping on all the wasted popcorn that got spilled into the aisles.
   It just needs to be easier is all that's what I said.
   Here the nurse said. Take these pills. You're do. Find some happiness for the moment in chemicals.
   I guess she was right. But we only get to see what we see. Isn't that a kind of problem? I fell back on the couch and ate a slice of grilled eggplant like I was born to do this. Like I was some kind of by-product of my own ignorance and it just kept coming back to this. Don't get me wrong. The eggplant was fine. In fact we grew it outside the door.  Also there was salad from outside and flatbread the nurse made and as ever a plate of deer meat from the cousins up north near the border. And despite knowing where our food comes from, and how a meal was put together, do we know what we're talking about?
   The nurse thought - geez - just enjoy what you're doing and deal with things later.
   That's all fine I said. But the shit does get thicker.
   Tell me something else she said. Be the nobody you can be.
   Alright I said.
   And she was right. Falling back on a standard did seem like a cheap way to go, but who cared? Who was scoring? But I couldn't help feeling like all I wanted to do was to run away, run away and forget the whole mess, and in turn be so easily forgotten that no one's head would ever spin no matter what happened. Flatbread though is excellent. And fucking simple. Flatbread eggplant deer meat oh my. I felt like a champion taking on rewards. Late sunlight on a squirrel's profile on the willow tree. A few small birds like a gang outside the window on the roses. I saw a dragonfly this afternoon buzzing around the potted plants like one of those zen precepts we take to mind but find it hard to live against its influence. Flatbread though is excellent and so are the pills and who understands where anything goes? Yea. That's simplistic... I know that... it's like some ace to have and play or a hand to fold like a trick... and so tries to split a line of obsessions square through the middle... But I've been told to let go and forget the markings... which I can't... which is what I think I should do...  
   Alright I said. But there was nowhere to go. That's not so frightening as such, but as I wanted to speak there were these walls, they appeared in the distance of my eyeballs and seemed blown closer in around me the longer I stared at them. Alright I said and I saw the nurse looking back at me. I rode through the park the other day. But it couldn't have been the other day since I've been this way for months and haven't been on my bicycle since then.
   You're just a creature the nurse thought. And you're remembering. Don't let it get in the way.  
   Alright I said. Everyone in the park was stretched out. On the grass. On the rocks. On the beach. It was like everyone was lying conscious in the sun and hardly anyone moving. Like they were bombarded from the air by some massive lazy ray that put everything extra out of reach. All the sunlight... little humidity... there was a breeze drifting over the picnic tables and the lines of trees that make for a soothing natural edge at the water... and you go there to have no worries for a time... and that small breeze that seemed banked off the mountains across the lake from the west... there's something about being in the park... any park really... that's why parks are built... to let loose emotions... something we have that's at ease and that we have something inside and you know maybe stays buried during all those tortured and personal agendas that make up our day and slowly destroy us and keep us locked together because there's employment and love and jokes and places to go that don't add up... and then when you get out to the park you kinda feel a sensuality that might understand and give back to you why you're here to bail out on what your own head has already done... and that's like you said I said I think I said it might might stay hidden during the rest of the day and so I said to one of those kid micro-cops on loan for the summer from a criminal degree major patrolling the lanes for excessive fun and dog shit that wasn't picked up I said to him experience accumulates and it's like having an account here every time I come over...
  What did he say the nurse wondered.
   He just looked back at me with this extra credit smile that meant nothing.
   Maybe it's just another beautiful evening the nurse said. Or do you often think of yourself as to what you've failed?
   I get so frightened by time I answered. That the minute I think about something I have to be off and into it.
   Oh lucky man she thought. Thinking big about nothing.
   Often there's this intersection I said. Between stasis and why you consider it worthwhile to get up and leave a chair. Either way it's like stepping into an avalanche of your own thoughts... either way if I don't do it now worlds collide and the orbits go wrong...  
   I'll tell you a dream the nurse said.
   Alright I said. Still waiting. Still waiting for development to arrive...
   I had this dream where I was in places that I'd been before, in another dream. I was running back home and had a long way to go. There was a store where I stopped to talk with someone in a town, on a main street with lots of cars going by. Then there was a narrow farm road overgrown on both sides with weeds and trees and rusty fences. I had run up this road before in another dream. The licorice red ant colony was still there woven around an old fence post. I passed the same two kids on bicycles again. I was running well. I seemed able to do it with ease. Came to the big fast river with the empty power station nobody used any longer. Busted shale rocks all around. Kept running because I was going home, to something, or someone. There was this barn around the curve and I recognized the farmer and his wife. They waved back and smiled. Same cows. I ran through the barn, past a new door that's been built, the old one was falling apart and was off its track. Was I in the same dream? No. Different dream. Same places. I went down a flight of steps and into a large wooden room. I was stopped cold in my footsteps. Stunned. I felt happiness.  My mouth wide open. I had been here before. In this room. In another dream. In the current dream I tried to remember when that was and who I was after at the time. And I grinned like a fool in the dream. Looking around the big wooden room. Having been here before I kept asking questions that could only be answered from that other dream. I knew I had to keep running. But it was so wonderful to stand there. To sense.