Time and Space

Months pour like golden water down a large drain shaped like a wide-open mouth, days swirls in bubbles riding the surface of the downward flush, minutes and seconds and moments to remember are simply shadows, reflections, and shimmering flashes of light that disappear rapidly upon this undulating flow.

String-light stars hover every visible night like a web that either holds back the inky black or contains the gaudy neon, halogen, and fluorescent distractions this planet expresses outward. That connection between the stars, the invisible force that holds them steady in their positions, anchors me to this ground, presses me against the strata, makes my blood work harder on the return to my heart, spins my possiblities in life around, charted on the familiar face of my compass.

Draft Dodger

I went through my postings, from the user side of the blog, and found several drafts I started or didn't like or forgot about or whatever. I want to use them, so I'm putting them all together here for you to read in a Burroughes style of cut/paste writing. I don't know if I like or dislike these pieces, but for some reason they exist. So, here they are...

A Narrow Escape

It was a calm morning.

She screams it, "that's what's going to kill me 10 years before I have to die!


Predator

Sometimes I catch glimpses on those skinny legs behind me, following me, against the treeline as the headlights from the passing cars rush by me. I walk faster, I speed up, the shadow is there and then it is gone from sight. Never let your shadow catch you.


Begin

This inward twist is candy coated around pestilence, lick of delight and demise...sickly sweet.

Want to write about the charred insides, like descriptions of the haunting interiors of crack houses, meth labs, broken, beaten people, lost lives in the final moments. I hesitate...I have that similar downtrodden, destitue black shadow across my back for certain, but I resist sharing it even though it offers me relief.


Maturity

This blog can continue to be sadness, dissonance, caustic magma regret...or it can change and alter and tranform the way I want my life to become.


Divide

I step on either side of this divide, one foot in good and the other in anti-good. You don't want to know...you do, but you don't. I cannot poison any longer my friends, family, and faithful readers knowing that I'm a purveyor of smut. The smut is who I am.


Overcome

This blog will change henceforth. I wish to thank you for your continued interest and faithful attention. I can't just blast out the filth any longer: It is not fit for you not fair to my writing, and it is deadening, wasteful talent besides.

I might need an old-school relief from time to time, but this blog...and me...are changing.


Requires Adjustment

Short lived, burned and embitttered, wasteful.
Decadent
Derision
Self-analyzed, self-inflicted, selfish
Doldrums
Disconnect
Delination of the mark.


Auras tickle and blend hues of complimentary colors on an unusual Thursday night.


Watchful

If after lunch I seem strange,
And if I don't nod or smile,
If I ignore you, unintentionally,
Know I'll care tomorrow, later,
When we are passed and apart.
Afternoons suck my life out
Pull me apart, away, awry,
Inside out of my life.
I see the storm's forecasted
Arrival, my barometer drops,
At lunchtime, while you smile
During my jokes, while eating
nutrition to stave off the
encrouching grasp of
conclusion,
I'm watchful.


onwar

We are living phantoms of long past ways, glimpsed by most in licking flame-trickery-of-the-eyes campfires, crushing surround of breath-holding quiet fear while alone in forests, or not easily discarded gut feelings of intuition.

Those sensations constitute me and my brother, locking us anachronistically in the present time though our familiar community is long extinct, regardless of our ever-shrinking retreats of nature, and knowing that the father we both bore the loss of here on Earth is somewhere in the spirit world as hapless and transistional as we've become.

This sparce place was the surge of a positive Sunday calm folding onward into the dull grind of Monday bleakness: The lull of impending gravitational, aging, timelapsed disattachment.

Bobber

This unit dips and rises, swerves and stills, hovers against two different forces of matter with a clashing orange and yellow dress of paint for recognition. A line lifts me, a weight pulls me downward, so I stretch higher and lower on the uneven permanence of each passing moment's impact on my suspended being. My purpose? To snare the movement below and signal the observers above. I capture and alert and I am simply an ancient tool for indicating another life has been caught, leaving you to reel in for the kill.

A checklist

List of Art styles I did this year:

Collage
Pen and Ink
Colored Pencils
Watercolor
Graphite
Chalk
Oil Pastels
Colored Markers
Wire Sculpture
Spray Paint
Digitally Enhanced Imagery

Next: Acoustic Guitar

Shimmers

Flailing for truth I grab-hold clamor outward, a reality smack of resounding pain upon skin's impact and nerve-ending alarm of rude awakening--emptiness; I change inside when I step out of my position of perceived control and let life roll around me, like learning to float on your back in the swimming pool...relax, breathe and resist the urge to struggle against the transparent medium that is your body's backrest and fearful, timidly trusted support. You learn to stretch out on faith of molecules and density and invisible inhalations and achieve the balance of solid form and ever-altering, surrounding chaos alone, realizing the delicacy of your tiny existence.

Squirt-Guns

A good few months before the media got ahold of the scoop and twisted it into personal resume building news clips of doom with a smile and carefully recited station code, or bylines followed by drunken sentences denoting certain hate and instigation covered with sterile banality and political correctness, no...before the whole ordeal became so widely known that Waffle House waitresses could carry on a somewhat-informed discourse with some equally dull patron...I'm talking late aught seven, Indian summer, those with eyes could easily see the slow-motion shit as it was heading toward the proverbial fan. And no one, not even the painty-waist worrywarts!, did a damn thing to halt this slow-rolling calamity. I saw it coming, oh yeah, but it was like reading the end of the world in Revelations out of the Bible: You know it is on it's way, but what to do but pray? And pray I did...well, that and drink and look at the night sky in my yard at night, which did nothing except cause my neighbors to watch my weird, kinda drunk-ass.

I believe the opening salvo in the war between the states had to be based on nothing but sheer disregard for others and a complete lack of any kind of idea at all to resolve the problem. When ignorance and selfish collide, watch out. We kept looking for more water from our puny sources and those states below us or dependent on us keep getting less and less water. Politicans bristled in pompous oratory displays, lawsuits were filed everywhere causing legal clerks many caffeine-addled hours of stress, environmentalists raged, folks with boats and lake houses sulked and felt cheated, the grocery stores began to crawl the price of bottled water upward, and we idiot masses lived in houses with dead yards and drove dirty cars. It hadn't sunk in then even! We thought it was like gasoline, there would be some from somewhere at a higher price. But no, water was not gas. And what really confused us was that the media was screaming about the melting glaciers due to global warming, yet we weren't allowed to water our grass...and hell, I didn't even know if filling my bird bath was still legal, though I did it anyway so screw 'em.

But back to the opening shots in the war over the diminishing water: Who would have thought it, though the timing makes some horsesense now that we can see hindsight with clear eyes?
A trailer park in the middle of nowhere Georgia, bordering nothingville Alabama, is where our story truly begins. And the sentry of the night, the non-sleeping, the rotten mouth meth-head trailer hicks noticed the unfamiliar traffic down their dirt roads one Sunday early, meth-addict early...like 2 or 3 in the a.m., and were witness to the first definitive act of war in this state-to-state rights of waterway pissing match.

To be continued...

Cycles of the Same

Elongate lonesome to make it curve circular and meet itself in the middle of some kind of abandoned disengaged daily routine.

Let me know if you find a way out.

Stadid

Distance entwines time and memory and feeling until the words presently hanging on the tips of your lips are fake diamonds to adorn some posed form that no longer equals or resembles or captures the one that caused all the pain.

2 Years Past

Cilantro Tea

Green and murky
Herbal aroma
Paints our disheveled den;
Two empty stomaches speak
As water bubbles

Cilantro Tea

She pours my cup and
Then she makes her a cup
We sit in the dark
Sipping this tea tonight
The first thing our bodies
Feel is nourishment,
At last

Cilantro Tea

Calms
Energizes
Connects two broken
Halves of a promise,
Completing a wishful silver ring,
That we don't speak of
Within dark silence
Sipping fortifying
cilantro tea.

Easy

A bum shares a white sheet, not a blanket, with a fellow homeless person as they walk down the street outside my workplace this morning in a passing glimpse of resilient empathy.

I sit with headphones clouding my senses, typing away on the computer in my cubicle, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. The boss, the bigwig boss of the entire floor of workers, hands me a donut. I drop the headphones and say, "Thanks. Wow. Thank you for making it Friday." He smiles and walks away.

Our Friday work lunch is usually a long trip, several blocks onto the college campus nearby, for the barbecue joint that is tucked neatly into the rigid city lines and vertical structures. We order, we laugh, we greedily fork delicious sauce-coated bird or pig into our faces, and then we walk the heavy lunch off somewhat as we cross city blocks back to our building. Our trip was a little over 45 minutes today, not the hour-plus journey it usually takes, and we smiled at one another like we conquered something profound.

I smiled at every single person I passed in my walking today.

I left the bar and people and the fun and the routine and boarded Marta for the haul home. I read the Bible. I talked to a man who was not liked by the occupants of my train car. This person wasn't mean, he was just slower and loud and kind of redundant. I listened to him and responded to him and encouraged his dreams, which he willingly told me on my trip home.

I took a cab from the train station and left my shoulder bag in his car. He had given me his business card because we found each other easy to talk to and he hoped I'd use him as a driver every Friday. I grabbed the business card and called him, explaining my bag being in the cab. He turned around and dropped it off in my driveway to my relief and gratitude.

I finished my throwaway art project for R.J. Reynolds and listened to the final regular season Braves game and felt the wind of autumn curl around my expectant skin.

This is the day you thank your maker for and count as a blessing for life is soft and comforting and easy on the soul.

Vine-St. Louis Haircut

Close...CLLLLooooSEEEEEEE! to the ear. Scary. Sexy. Invigorating. Satisfying.

Shivers.

He now came upstairs, feeling my shiver and calm.

"What have you done to his head?"
"I'm giving him a cut, nothing."
"Well it is making a mess on the floor."

One-two-three is trilled, "do you like the Transformers?"...asked quite earnestly as if I needed to side in the battle; "and then Marcus said that we were all free and the teacher laughed because Shaun accidentally moved his desk and it sounded like a fart!". IT WAS SOOOOO...stupid...hello? MOM."

"Everyone, this is Mark. He's up from Atlanta and I'm cutting his hair. He's Rob and Laura's buddy and he said he needed a haircut."

"Do you like Optimus Prime?"

"Yes, I like anything that can change into something else."

"Yeah...he's cool."

"MOM, what about the fart in class? That is so gross! But it might have been his desk."
"Then, are you saying it was a gross desk?"

"Hold still..."
Hand on my head, buzz of slicing scissors in my ear, shifting of the Earth's poles in the magnetic hum of clippers circling my skull, and the tender touch of control.

The kitchen contained us all: boyfriend Ronn, 3 kids of varying ages, my drunken ass, and lots of cross conversations.

"Do you like it?"
"I think it is great!"

"Really???"
"Yes. I will think of you every time I look in the mirror."

And I felt the air soften like a pink-cloud sunset when she smiled, content. The wind wisked through my shorn head and cooled me to a soft burning purr.

I swept up the mess and she walked me outside to wait for my ride back to their large neighborhood and we finally softly spoke one to the other in the shadowed driveway. I had said goodnight to the kids. I forgot to say goodbye to Ronn as I rode off.

Greek Chorus

I have company this late night/early morning. The Greek Chorus.

I watch the 2 am repeat of tonight's episode of Intervention on A&E and I see...I feel...the women I've known in my life sitting around me in the den. The tv is low to prevent problems. The lights are down because I want the dimness, only leaving the hood light of the stove on. The cat grooms itself amid shadows, white on black in gray and a permanent muted state, it manages to locate a warm lap of one seeing himself on an episode of Intervention...with the Greek Chorus.

Here's how it worked: The sofa was too far away for the volume to reach my ears and maintain quiet and so I moved to the singular chair with matching footstool. That caused the cat calamity in that it had just finished all the licking preparations before the proverbial cat nap. I moved, taking the remote, grabbing a fresh beer at 2 am, and slunk into the unfamiliar and still-not-worn-in-yet chair. Intervention came on and it was some boob who messed his life up but shoot! he was a smart and good guy, kinda talented too. I zoned into the drama, the cat groomed on the footstool in hesitation, my beer disappeared sooner that it should.

Somewhere in the drama of how this goober on Intervention was shooting up smack 8 times a day I started to nod off myself, bored and it being on into the morning hours. But something he said grabbed me: "Here I am, killing myself daily, when I know how much she loves me." (referencing his only soul connection, his ex-girlfriend, as she sobs to the camera about how jacked up he was).

But that sentence hit me, hit home, hit the stones of my soul. And the Greek Chorus wafted onto the opposite chair, the long sofa, the footstool, and peeked from the hallway. I felt other eyes as well, though undefined, in the darkness of the hall...like one of them had gone to pee or to my room or was hiding for revenge.

Across the glow from the tv was Jenn in the big chair. Oh, I had heard it a trillion times from her how f-ed up I was, how I was missing it, how I had it and was blowing it, how could I let it all go and lose her?

Next, at the far end of the sofa (my damn cat slinking up to her lap, traitor!) was Tyger, no words to say, no adminitions. Her eyes cast lost, cast deprivation, cast woe, cast failed attempt. Those eyes, those shining eyes peered from the dark and told me what I could never have as she slowly stroked my white, deaf cat. Not a word was said...and truly, I felt no pain. My heart was broken already.

Beside her sat Amanda/Autumn, a twin figure. Two women who entered my life one after the other, both bearing bad news about where I was going and both only concerned about themselves, merely observing my sinking ship which floated away, as they did from me, without even a postcard to remember.

And then the shadow came from the darkened hallway. These words haunted me, poetic and precise and diplomatic and deeply slicing and then gone. What was I to think? The fear, the cut...the denoument and discarding of attention. That ghost shrieked back to whence it originated, a whirlwind in a lonely closet of a disorganized mind that can't be straightened not matter how many unappreciated times you locate the missing set of car/house keys.

And near me, always close to me in who I really am, she lounges on the footstool. A smile bursts forth from those drapes of darkness; the one from all those years back. Hey kid, have another, c'mon. We aren't done yet, I haven't finished talking! Are you listening? Are you registering again and again and again and again the circles of my life that I choose not to break? Oh, let's have fun and forget it. Let's just have some more of this good, gd, good time, so shutup, wake up, continue to listen again and that's right...shut up, listen, again.

Selfish but haunting like the howl of a wolf, cunning feigned closness like the clasp of a crab claw, evil is the black of the night reflected in calculating eyes. Memories fucking finally expressed on all you wenches in my blog writings like the cautionary pottery of other historical bitches, left as postmarks for mankind to beware your kind...and only now, eventually, understood by me.

After writing, after venting...I go back to the den. My soft white cat lies asleep at the edge of the couch...waiting for the stroke of ghosts only she can see and I still feel.

Vine-St. Louis Day 1

The traffic was continual, humming into his left ear amid neck craning for views in all of the car mirrors, ready for a glimpse of his visitor. He was supposed to be here three minutes ago, totally pushing his luck by being parked in the airport pickup and they tow and ticket readily now. The heat, the traffic, the stress: all gone when the visitor poked a friendly face through the open passenger window. Back slapping and handshakes and grins followed, and they were out of there and onward to the long weekend ahead. He hadn't seen his old friend, his truest companion in the state he left to save and repair his family, in over a year. And it felt good to be sitting here in his car, talking silly stuff and feeling close after such a long absence.

The visitor looked about the same, a couple of more lines around the eyes and shorter hair. But it was the same old guy he shared so much with in South when all his other friends were left behind and his home town was distant and that new city felt cold and unwelcoming. This friend, this local "cool" guy, befriended him and together they shared good times, bad situations, and all that shit in between that glues together the days on the calendar.

Stopping in for some beers, gas, and snacks, they both realized how much their old times had changed, the move back home separating the familiar routines, making the contact between them less frequent. Ah, but the visitor was here now, his past connected, a landmark in their friendship. Nothing but fun for a good couple of days.

To Be Continued

Broken Hope

Familiar, these dim pathways I trod with trepidation, with hesitant steps, and arms outstretched to feel sight during temporary blindness. Recognizable in that I comprehend I'm lost, anew, behind the enemy's line and far from the fight, inside that evil opponent's territory.
Normal is this hesitation of control, this second-guessing burned-hand syndrome from lashes and burns and bright white lies to cover...the scars. Eyes widened in panic, can't get the direction focused on the dial, inwardly rages meaningless debates that justify nothing, not even the wasted time spent upon their defense.
Routine is a worn groove of lapsing in fortitude, slipping in strength, sliding downward with storybook charmed hopes and disastrous words that bind this broken reality to sturdy joists beams of actuality, of regret, of whipped confidence. Leaving the chained fool, restrained and captured, on public display as the example for viewing: here droops broken hope.

Vine Project

Project Vine is the codename for my latest writing attempt. I'm practicing here on the da' blog and experimenting with different styles of writing. The storyline is nothing, truly nothing. The first two Vine installments were based on my last Friday Marta experience upon leaving my watering hole. They don't represent actual true life events. For example, I don't know if my observer in Vine 2 was actually horny. I just don't know. I do know that my friend Amber was on the platform but I don't know her state of arousal. Like I said, this is my writing experiment. Please be patient with me. This pic is a colored pencil piece I did in my shed. I scanned it and added a Photoshop filter to it. I like muscadines best of all berries.

Vine-2

This train is way too hot and I can't stand the pressure of the crowd. As I was starting to panic from claustrophobia I swirled around in agitation and saw him through the window of the train car as he stood waiting on the platform for his train. I lurched forward with the motion of the train's acceleration and watched him slip out of sight. He consumes my thoughts. Why him? Why did I lock onto him to feel the sentiments I hold inside when I'm around him? I shift from the heavy guy thumbing the wheel on his phone/pda thingy, and look around at the other passengers. Why him? I don't understand myself. Tonight I'm going home alone again and I don't want to be alone. I know he is a good person, but he's messed up. He's scarred and hurt and numb, yet...not brilliant...no, nothing like that. But his style of life is...engrossing, either watching the soon-to-be trainwreck or seeing him escape from near misses on all levels. I'm horny and stuck on a train to my lonely house and he's going the opposite way to destroy himself further, never knowing my care and concern and impression of him.

Vine-Me

Vine is a writing experiment I'm currently pushing myself to do for the greater good of my writing. This blog, with your apologies, understanding, and input, with help me with my project. The Vine is a long tendril holding many berry clusters. That is my idea for this project. I started with myself for the focus of this writing piece in the Vine project.

It was a quiet, even aloof, Friday evening for me. This caused considerable consernation in that it broke the drunken, ego-pandering routine of redundant familiarity. I left work, slugged down some quick cold ones at the closest decent bar, blathered enough to register inebriation, and in my departure I sweated under intense summertime heat while winding between the towering buildings that lined the roads to the public transportation station. Now, very alone in my thoughts and sensory dullness, I found myself engulfed into a tidal wash of human movement. 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, on the rail line in the city, meant swarms of folks of all stripes heading the Hell outta where ever the were just working, suffering, or loitering.
I slap my transportation passcard against the reader on the gates and merge through the barrier, moving into the awaiting crowd milling on the train platform. I see workers of all gradients of occupations, old folks, wheelchair-bound persons, visually impaired people sweeping canes in exploratory patterns, college students, troublemakers, withdrawn characters beaten until their faces can only grimace pain...and I join their midst. My appearance exudes professionalism, contemporary clothing, Friday relaxed office dress, a shoulder bag containing essentials, beer-tainted breath, searching eyes, hidden hurt. The train arrives and engulfs most of us waiting while dispensing only a few passengers.
We cling to this lateral forward motion in echoes of forced movement against our bodies; all present occupants of this train, patiently accepting our cramped confinement on missions to various destinations; this closeness to one another is not personal, or even preferred, but we know it to be necessary for our passage elsewhere.
I don't like you, stinky breath guy, nor do I like loud-talker wig-wearing woman, nor space hogger, weird chin guy or fatty that has an odd porportional shape. I dislike the looming seated woman who can't quit staring at me with laser eyes that reflect no emotion and a face of stone to match that disattachment. I'm turned off by the girl whose hairline starts halfway back on her skull, yet she portends superiority or perceived attractiveness by her conceited display of her styling.
I'm edgy about the various jokers and oddballs with backpacks--who knows what those packs contain?--and the window reflections that become a hall of mirrors forces me to understand that I, too, am being judged, sized up, analyzed, social rejected and gauged by strangers glancing from multiple vector angles on the glass, and furthermore their scrutiny is beyond my ability to confront, engage, or return. I sink into the hopeful anonymity of us all: people, travelers, folks, still alive for this moment, yet overall gossamer mortals.
My emotions stir, and guilt weighs on my initial judgements of the collective of fellow riders; I am only human.

Over

Time arches around established moments defined by emotions that serve as benchmarks in an undetermined, yet destined, walk on this planet.

Factor in love, hate, disappointment, regret, failure, joy, accomplishment, wonder, discovery, desire and determination and the journey from start to finish and those passing moments that click off coloring grid squared on a calendar and you have existence, ongoing.

Alligator Hole

I was out too late, and certainly my brother was too. He sat beside me in the backseat of the Oldsmobile, fighting the heavy lids of his eyes to capture the excitement. My teenage cousins had somehow managed to pry the car from the parents, most likely with talltales of seeing the beach at night from another end of the island. The real magic they wove to the parental units was the spell that allowed me and my kid brother to go with them on their joyride.
Upfront, behind the wheel, was my cousin Kevin, decidedly the most level-headed of the group. Riding shotgun was his brother Keith. Stuffed into the backseat was my cousin Jackie and her girlfriend, me, and my kid brother Gregg. Pink Floyd was loudly emitting from the radio and everyone but me and my brother were smoking cigarettes. The cool night breeze, salted by the ocean, slipped into the backseat from the door windows and slapped my hair onto my face while clouding me in the strange-smelling smoke from the teenagers' shared cigarette. Gregg, wedged between me and the girls, said nothing; normally we fought over our line of demarcation that divided his side of the backseat from mine, but tonight was something new and exciting and we suffered each other's closeness in silence.
The two-lane roadway that encircled the tiny 13-mile island was barren of cars or people, decorated only by eerie street lamps punctuating over-reaching shadows from the surrounding forestry. I remember wind, the words "Tear Down The Wall!", my cousins all laughing, and some soft background hum of crickets during the ride that June night. For some strange reason, I noticed green hills out of the windshield and felt the car lurch and dip under us. It took a minute or two, but we all realized soon enough that we had driven out onto the golf course. The car slowed near a small lake and we piled out into the night air and lumpy terrain of shadows.
My brother and I hung around the car while the others wondered off into the darkness, laughing and talking loudly. Soon they were out of reach of hearing and we were alone. I think my brother and I both placed where we were on the golf course, having been here many times with my father to go crabbing. We were next to the best crabbing spot on the course, known to all who have visited the spot, as the Alligator Hole. We slowly turned toward the water's edge and looked into the ink of liquid night. Two shiny spots reflected the light from the car's headlights. We were alone with the gator.
The lake had no fence or retaining wall, only a sloping bank and then the turf of the golf course. My brother and I were less than 50 feet from the water's edge and approximately 125 feet from the set of glowing eyes belonging to the bone crushing, death-rolling alligator. No words were spoken leaving sound to be filled by crickets, the lap of the water against the bank, and the resounding pulsations of our hearts' fear-induced rhythm.
Earlier that day our father and mother had taken us out for some crabbing. This process was as easy as weighting a line of utility rope, tying some raw chicken on the end, and attaching the rope to a roll for coiling. There are other ways to crab using metal traps, but we were doing it the old way. We dropped our chicken-baited ropes and let the crabs slowly make their way to the meal. Father pointed out the lazy alligator out in the shadows of the water's edge, languid and resting in the heat of the afternoon sun. Mom gave us Cokes and watched the golfers. My brother and I grew bored waiting for our catch and scouted around the area. The afternoon's visit was how I was certain of where we were on the golf course even now in the dark.
The time to pull up the ropes finally arrived and we were all rolling up the ropes around the tubular handle. Mom caught one, I pulled one up only to have him release his grip at the waters edge, my brother had his bait stolen, but my Father had something of an amazing catch. He was straining on his rope, the dry material pulling against his skin and cutting red lines into his taunt grip. His biceps flexed, he struggled, and we gawked in amazement of the imagined size of the crab that could give my Father such resistance.
My dad heaved, and nearly pitched forward into the water. My Mom braced him and me and my brother got close to the edge to help drag the rope ashore. With one final power surge my Father, the rope slicing deep into the skin of his hands, revealed the front nose, rough skin, and askew teeth of a sneaky, determined alligator, my brother and I being face to snout with the beast.
My Mother's scream disengaged my Father's frozen contest and the rope was tossed into the water. My brother and I had somehow moved 25 yards away as if we teleported, our hair standing on end and my Mother's blood-curdling scream still echoing in our ears and across our enlivened nerves. Our family silently packed up and headed back to the rental after that, quietly going to our room and sharing nothing of our bad luck, lost bait and rope, or our collective fearful episode.
Now, here my brother and I were again...back to face this fearful beast. Alone but for each other, our terror choking us into silence, our eyes unblinking and locked on the glowing orbs in the water, our nerves straining and our muscles so over-adrenalized that we were hoplessly inert. The blood drained from my brother's face and I moved us back into the car and closed the doors. I began honking the horn, bleating that alarm of fear into the drapery of night, ruining my cousins' fun, maybe even arousing the attention of the routinely bored authorities, but in my mind it was the cry for survival, for fortification of our young lives, for help.
The ride back to our rental was somber. My brother cried the entire time and had nightmares the next couple of nights, as did my Father, kicking the sheets and punctuating the calm of sleep with frightened, unintelligible exclamations. My Mother and I shared a bed, leaving them to suffer the lingering alligator's clutch together, but we had no rest.
I remember the look of discredit the older ones flashed to each other regarding us. "They were too young, we should have known.", they seemed to say. I didn't feel guilt for ruining their fun, though it surprises me today the feeling isn't in my recollection of the night, not even now that I could relate to what my cousins suffered through, both in the downer party interruption and, most likely, the sharp words they received from the older adults.
Instead I felt relief. I felt lucky. I now feel blessed that we didn't die to the droning tunes of Pink Floyd, amid open night air spiced by strange smoke and goofy, brazen teenagers, while alone on the edge of the darkened alligator hole, either by the beast's evil jaws or from the sheer horror created in our young imaginations.

Source

History of Writing

It was the beginning of the most important days in our history, truly THE history, the origination of light and dark and water and land and trees and birds and man or woman.

It was given to us by a smear, a dishonor, a way of separating one who wronged from those who would see this symbol and understand it what it meant, the consequences of a bad action.

This comprehension of a meaningful symbol lead to other symbols, and other methods of recording meanings, and making recorded history or business documents or transported correspondence or decrees of war or declarations of love.

Fastforward.

Eventually, it lead to my job as an editor and to my blog.

So I read ithe history of writing full circle: the murder, the mark, the symbols, then letters, then words, then languages, then a key to language translation, the advancement in various styles of writing, and the Bible as a record of events.

Fastforward.

Now I read the Bible, go to work, correct text in digital format for proper grammatical display on a monitor screen, print it to show my corrections with symbolic marks of red ink, come home and read the newspaper to unwind, and hopefully write the letters of my thoughts and emotions and dreams in this digital blog with hope or at the very least some relaxation.

All because God showed us a marked man, the murderer Cain, with his symbol for all to see, understand, recognize, and develop.

Writing is born of hindsight regret and condemnation for deeds that are unforgivable.

This Changing Night

Strength comes from distant places, promises kept and fortified from distant darkness.
When the will expresses the finally realized connection,
The closeness squeezes tight enough to rip though layers of
lies and hurt and fears and regrets and misdirection and ignorance
To embrace and clench and hug tight and understand
The chosen one.

The Reverse

Psalms 114 clinched hope in the day and showed me the experimental writing of the Bible. Look at it, I challenge you. I could have put it here for you to peruse, but I'd rather you dust off the Bible and see for yourself how this writer, listed as anonymous, pushed the boundaries of fiction, spiritual writing, and even praise. I'm deeply impressed. It took reading one-hundred and fourteen Psalms for me to be truly moved. I edit for a living, easy enough. For the Bible to surprise me in a writing style is a hard task since it is historical and my learning foundation was built upon it and other period-specific styles and works. I had a very pleasant commute home knowing that life still has unknown corners to peek around and discover hidden blessings.

Exert:
"What’s wrong, Red Sea, that made you hurry out of their way?
What happened, Jordan River, that you turned away?
6 Why, mountains, did you skip like rams?
Why, hills, like lambs?"

Intensive

He couldn't be persuaded from it. The only way to correct the problem was on his terms. It was delicate, the interplay of weening his beast. It started like old deals. On Marta: "I'll be there in two dimes." On a hiking trip: "Trees, plenty of green to be had." Around the table: "You don't matter after the bills have dropped." It was trying times, and he came around...like the dopeman circling the block.

7/18/07

Gray falls in slices
Nipped with precision
At almost 20 hard-earned bills
I hope she knows "cool".

Haircut on my birthday
35 and maintaining
Realizing time moves
Onward, uncaring

6am, cigarette reflection
Hum of bugs amid chirping
Wondered why in the hell
I woke up so early

It was my birthday.

Walking Home Alone

Anger
Misdirection
Plodding in footfalls that only resound splashes of lost wanderings

A lightning bug splashes green in front of me
I smile
Edge of sunset light smiles goodbye

Space
Time
Soft summer raindrops keep my hope alive tonight

After Night

Can't shake her from my walking, working, bus-card-slapping dreams...no, it won't disappear as long as I reach from the hunger in my heart to hold her.

Now it is time to lay my head down in a dark room with swirling ghosts circulated from a droning fan. I will awake 4 times before the alarm and every time I stretch outward, I find an empty bed.

The morning is transit card beeps, bouncing nodding half sleep in hard bus seats, the Bible reading, the routine elevators, my cube, and the omnipresent hate 15 floors above the beggars and beaten forms languishing below.

Lunch is the hopeful funny, the interesting tale, the strange dish. Lunch is short lately.

The afternoon stretch tempts my limits of smoking and not getting into trouble with my employer for smoking too much. After 4 I find that time changes into some kind of downward slope that I slide on until I rest on a transit train headed for home. Sometimes the Bible reading resurfaces.

I walk a good clip, maybe a mile?, and it is just considered exercise to me. It is part of getting back to my not-home where I reside, to go into my disconnected shed for slap-it-together art and old music and too many cigarettes amid forgotten warming beers.

And then I pause on the front porch to smoke out the night with finality cigs and the dregs of beers and clouding crickets and these very thoughts I pour out now are mere reflections of what spins around in my lonely thoughts night after night after night after night after night.

Respect

She was confused, not used to the train's surging starts or stops. It began with sudden motion, she reached for the suitcase, motion confounded her...pitching toward the floor his long arms stopped her. He leaned back when she regained balance. No words were spoken.

I observed this from my corner.

The next stop the folks departed...a confused woman suddenly realized her need to exit. She ran to the side of the train that had doors closed, while the open doors began to close. She screamed, he reached his long arm out into the closing door and caused it to retract and sound an alarm of inoperation. He scurried her through the doors and they promptly closed, ending the alarm. I waited until everyone settled back into the ride.

I spotted an empty seat and went to take it. I passed the long-arm man. I said, "Good moves, dude!". He looked surprised, and calmly replied, "It was my good deed for the day."

I gave him the dap hand motion, touching closed fist knuckles with one another, and said, "No, two good deeds." He was astonished at his actions, now noted in the public eye, and said, "Yeah, two...".

He got off at the next stop, nodding a departing recogniton at me.

He deserved his props, for no one is supposed to care or notice others on Marta. The rule is to ignore, withdraw, disconnect from the collective crowd.

He felt outwardly instead of obeying unwritten rules.

Forgotten Comfort

Found the jeans that fit so well, so close to my curves, worn to comfort. Found them staring at me in my dark closet...what I was in there looking for I can't remember...but they laid out themselves for my eyes. I tried them on, remembering all the closeness of their comfort, all the adventures they joined me on. This fits me, this relaxes me, this completes my picture of who I am.

Scratch Pad

Being undecided or determined,it failed to occur, remaining unformed, theoretical; drafting a letter, a fading pen, leaving doodled derisions.

I Can't Sleep

Was/Past/Gone called on the earpiece, forcing the recall of over-and-done times, and I clutched up with dread and irritation and curiousity. It had been several years since we last spoke.

Was/Past/Gone has issues, problems, a pronounced denoument these days...guess she wanted to share it with me. Or she was reaching out, grasping outward to connect to someone who can aid her, solve her mysteries, make her do better. I sure as hell wasn't the savior since she had, frankly, become the unforgiven and forgotten.

But I didn't sleep well for two nights thinking of my past days with a vocal ghost. I didn't know how to feel; did I react and involve myself in something that was unsolveable by me? Did I act as a soft shoulder, a listener? Who knows, not me, not with the swirling of the past gliding by me like moths or spiders as I cast shadows against my porch walls for late-night, troubled cigarettes.

The broken engine coughs to life, without a key in the ignition, and pleads for your attention to aid it...from a distant junkyard.

Clueless

Left at Love.
Twenty paces right to Detachment.
Plot a line of 180 degrees.
And close your eyes,
Plodding haphazard, needy arms extended.
Scream loudly until blood steadily
Seeps from fresh cuts.
Drawn to unknown places;
A fortune! Undiscovered.

Blank

I've got a way to silence you, to dismantle your vocal structures, your holographic reasoning.

I've got a blank card in this deck, worse than an Ace, more control than a 2 in Pres&Ass, not a spade or a color or a suit or a number. It is blank for a purpose; if I play this card you will be soon forgotten, blanked.

Evenings, Sundays, Calm

Hymnal falls open to "Amazing Grace"
Afternoon sunlight lazily paints
Stained glass memories
Amid quiet echoes;
My church and cornerstone.

Gauntlet Runs

Oh, you will suffer. No doubt about it, you will be ravaged and exhaused and fooled until you learn to deny your basic cravings. Sin is suffocating, clouding your next step with tainted illumination, and prepare for evil doorways to beckon you inward with offerings of respite; plainly spoken, you cross the threshold of this den and you will be the spider's dinner. You will die or wish you were, for your path will have ended with one false presentation or another...nevermind what sucked you in to lose the plodding ahead...finding only regret is left to ridicule your soul-lacking bones for eternity.

Morning light peeks gently through the slit of my shades, pinning the cat in the corner in spot-lit grooming, and my nightmares evaporate into the versions that are real, visceral, kniving and biting: the new day begins. Prayer splashes me in the shower, words of the Bible train me in patience on my commute of bus and train, but the path is slippery, perilous even, but remember that it is not destined.

Narrowly

The shadow-draped corner, stalled now by the guy with a similar hat who snaked into the bathroom and shut the door before I could react, now was teeming with seven hefty, imposing, unsmiling bouncers who knew only that their target of inflicted pain was a "dude in a hat" and there I stood. The long-haired narc grabbed my arm and whispered, "Get Out Of Here!" and I looked into his face with shock, followed by quick panicky comprehension. The bathroom door opened, dude's hat emerged preceeding his form, and I slipped carefully between the hulking forms of angry, violent men before the screams and meaty pounding sounds and the squirt of red, alcohol-thinned blood splashed. My cuz and my dumbass, blessed again.

Exposed Film

Straining the poisons between two eyeballs, a pair unfocused, seeps a little death left, half contrite right. This draft is whiplashed words slit onto the expressed page; I'm broken but in that suction down I glimpsed her. I connected with her; remember that amid the daily strangling, under the bouncing of battering, when the onlookers sneer and whisper. Think on the beauty of the scenery during the headlong plunge over the cliff, for it is a one-time viewing, and your flight will either splash red or surface to amazement and awe.

Repainting Iron Railings

Early in his life, the upward stretch beckoned him to explore. The lazy mid-morning light was languid and the neighborhood air calm and empty, especially of parental figures. He reached high on the rails, meeting the halfway mark and gripped tight. His feet holds were problematic; the curves of the swirled inlays in the wrought-iron railing resisted easy ascension. He wedged a Converse hightop into a swirl's connection to the left rail and shimmed his hands up over the flaking rustoleum paint for greater height while his unsure right foot dangled behind him. With extreme concentration and exertion, he pigeon-holed his right shoe into the bottom of a bigger curlycue and felt his left ankle starting to shake from the pressure of his form; his right leg now bore some of his form's weight at another obtuse angle, but at least the burden was shared between his two legs. His hands slid upward, quicker now in his physical interaction...like time was running out for his climb...and caught a spiderweb in his hand. One hand gripped the rail while the other tried to shake free the dusty adherence. Both ankles began to strain, he was almost up to the top, and he suffered the web-crusted hand for a victory extension of his feat--needing to slap his palm onto the carport ceiling for verification, which he did with a hurried pop--and then he clung to the rails while his gravity intensified. His bottom foot seemed to be asleep and stuck, unresponsive to his coaxed releasing. His right foot was wedged; this was when his arms and hands and back and shoulders chorused their exerted pain. His panic was real. He yanked on his right foot, bending the curved decoration inlay on the wrought ironwork, wrenching his leg free. His exulation of movement caused his handgrip to give away suddennly, plummeting him to the ground. A final touching of his right leg, under the weight of this fall, and the weakened handgrips that came far too late, combined to find him on his back with the left shoe still trapped in the now bent bottom curve of the wrought iron railing, fists white-knuckle locked about 2 feet off the ground saving himself from the smack of concrete by sheer fear and coursing adrenaline, and heavenly luck. He gasped for breath, his hands stung, his leg was twisted but numb from lack of bloodflow, and he was practically in shock by the flurry of events. Extracting his twisted foot, he recalled that he reached upward, he had touched the top, he had overcome his desire without dying.

Grass

Lines fold from lack of structure, tall survivors of green aromatic grass between grooved lines of swirling destruction taunt me with resilence. I aim again, second round, to destroy your progressive height and to erase my amateurish driving. Inbetween doomed patterns, I drive around this old yard thinking of time past. I recall early life, innocent days and nutured living. I remind myself, amidst the spreading razor-scythe swath of demise I leave behind my lawnmower...I remind myself of how I grew up in this yard like the hardy weeds that slip by my destructive path. Times flash backwards, show how my best friend edged out alive too, which is so rare from our ghostly generation. These thoughts tremor along vibrations and screams of shattered sticks and the suffocated bogged-down dead grass bodies clogging the swirling machination of finality. Weeds survive; the common, generalize grassy lawn is shorn and unremembered and dismissed as unnecesary.

Black and Blue Sunset

Hate to let my mind roam over the areas of my thoughts that are sprinkled with landmines of hurt like a decorated zero-donut of demise, so I turn it off. Click. The switch is heavy to flip upward, spring-loaded downward. I crush those heavy draping recollections so as to not stumble under the weight of a bruising, a battering, a beating that is my past...that is still me when I'm out of focus...that is my upturned hands presented to the sky in abject confusion of love.

Hold onto distance as a cloak to withdraw into so as to avoid plugging into lives of surrounding "others" and dance behind the puppet wall, the cut-out mask, the costumed fool, the shadowy pantomime. Ride that elevator up to work and hop that train and pull the covers up over blackened regret and painful remorse and after the prayer by the lonely bedside, the words whispered across the darkened room that cry for help paint the backdrops of my dreams.

Restricted

Like the others that wave from outside the glass surround of your gazing eyeball, so life beckons me to come out-of-doors and play on the freshly cut lawn today.

"Sorry, I can't play today. I'm...", closing myself into shadows and stale corners of an overworn house of familiarity.

Not today.

Stalled

This light that pulls
Out the other shadows
Is always radiating
I lose my bearings

Hard fall again
Is not planned
The hurt contains
End inward slams

Wound around my own words
Captured, I stir the memories
Grasping, groping, reaching for holds
Acceptance--stalled motion precedes demise.

Complacent

Sunsets enjoyed from my backporch have always defined good moments of my life, and tonight was a recollection and awknowledgement of those special transitions: A book, a cigarette, a cold beer, and the slowly sinking colors of the day bathing this quiet, tranquil space in peaceful changing actualization. No matter how many times I've reveled in this sensation I still connect and reflect and absorb anew the moving-shadow imagery of our planet's rotation...and the sensory presentation of the concept of time.

I sat out back and watched the gentle swaying of the trees and bushes, heard the scampering of birds and squirrels as they slowed the day's activities, noted the coming-home sounds of the neighbors resound and fade off like the churn of the distant roadway traffic, and let my eyes gradually react to the diminishing light of this day's color spectrum amid a restful disattachment from my usual cares, worries, and emotions.

Satori

Onward drips the heavy rounded beads of days, gravity pulling the weight of each contained drop downward into a sort of mini-river of memory, with the past being that gathered pool underneath the river's waterfall. A defined, calculated slice of the passage of this constant current is a day--a 24-hour period in which the earth circles a full rotation inside of its greater orbit of the sun. One day is a circular completion of each given water drop: specific in its fluid edges which separate this encapsulement from the greater water source, the drop is now pulled into a motion after a maturation of density bearing a gravitational descent; yet this individual drop forms a particular shape pattern, colored by reflected light, and expresses unique soundwaves generated upon impact with the greater flow of the mini-river of memory. Even enveloped into the splashed conformity of formless, flowing days past, amid swirling inclusion of the ever-flowing stream of events, a recalled memory can find and identify a completed drop once immersed into the collective liquid. The mini-river gains force and widens as it degenerates over a pitched edge, cascading airly and sprayed into splintered projections onto a general pool of all the created drops, which slowly ebbs and flows and pulses and reflects...until a final drop shatters the calm surface, breathing outward a concluding reverberation.

Unspoken

Chocolate layers of deepening receptors swallow eyesight
Inverting reason and capturing care on slick pitcher-plant walls
Absorbing, engulfing, encapsulating, compiling
Stacked and packaged and arranged presentations
To discover the sincerity of the origin
In a lingered, shiny flash
Portrait-painted faces and masked visages
And ensnared words captured, sticky,
On locked tongues, withheld
Under such a powerful glance.

Bloody Frustration

Touching the black and white wires sparks and arcs and crosses currents and melts, burns, rends the segregated halves of the system. Dazed-in shock-I reel from the eye-blinding burst on contact and stagger over to the toolbox. I reach for the metal, long and kinda skinny, flattened phillips head with a rachet and drill bit that has the bubble in the magnetic extension ruler...the non-existent instrument that will fix my fused, reversed current, deflated, empty and dried, dead, broken life. My collection of hand tools, accumulated from my years and lessons and experiences, lacks the special implement needed to restore and repair this wasting heap that I work on daily. I wipe my hands on a dirty rag, swig on my flat can of beer, puff off my nub cigarette, and swear under my breath at the time I've wasted on this dead-end project.

Easily Captured

There are things in life that each individual is really good at for unknown reasons, a natural adeptness that is unexplainable. One of my lucky traits is making musical mixes. I can take 10 completely random artists and put them together to create a mood, a statement, or a dreamy background fade. I don't know why I have this ability but I cherish it, and so do my friends. Most of my mixes are simply made to see what can be made from this "stuff", which is very consistent with my "throwaway art". I have a term called throwaway art to which I apply on any kind of art that is created or reformed or hacked together to create a bigger, more organized on concepted artwork, particularly if the elements come from found or discarded materials. The end result is that the finalized piece is to be "left" for others to find and ponder over. The ability to mix music, burn it onto a cd (or record it onto a tape in old-school days), is a tangent of my throwaway art form. My friends benefit greatly from this habitual, hobbyistic trait of mine. I most recently took 10 dusty cds from various artists that I haven't, literally, played or even touched the cases of in at least 6 years and within 30 minutes I easily had one of my mixes. This latest one I truly like: a dreamy background fade. It is music that you play while you read a book, take a bath, clean the house, etc. It really is not meant to be listened to with scrutiny, rather it is a space absorber.
My pals Andy or Dan...or maybe even Sue...definetely my cuz DJ Jubei...will reap the understanding of this mix. If you are interested in any of my throwaway mixes, shoot me an email telling me why you'd like to hear one and I'll send it out to you on my dime.

Took 15 Minutes

A series of opening lines...

1. The fork tines rang anger in clanking waves of constrained soundwave rings that was easily heard amid the hunched shoulder, tense but polite guests seated for the dinner. "Invites be damned, if he...," she thought while locking her forehead into the opposite of tense, but nowhere near relaxed. "HEY, oh shoot, dinner is on the table!" her husband proclaimed as he and her best friend emerged to join the dinner in progress from their extensive, lengthy tour of their basement.

2. "Drop me off here dude...", and then he added, "please." The rain was fierce hammering points of liquid fury onto fools out-of-doors. He slammed the truck's door and dipped into his coat's hood with the repetitive rain clouding his hearing so that he only heard the passing hiss of air as if he was trapped in a seashell's cavernous nautilus, intoning brief reflection on his youth before quickly striding down into the dark neighborhood streets of danger, demise, regret...alone.

3. Exiting the train station he had the cigarette perched upon his lip, ready, before he opened the exterior push doors. The cold scratched at his exposed skin, a flame kissed the awaiting tobacco stick, wind curling around skyscrapers making ignition troublesome. A down-on-his-luck character approached him in his hurry; eyes connected, pleading looks and inward groaning, he shook his head no. Across the busy street he paused, guilt clouding his gut. He looked back to recompense his callousness but the person was gone, the moment passed, decision cast.

4. I raced into the train as the doors shut, settling into the gaze of an old gentleman observer, and in reaching for my small Bible I saw the hidden fortune cookie. I offered it to the man, who was so surprised that he took a long time before shaking his head negatively, and it caused me to smile to myself as I put the unopened message back in my satchel in exchange for the book of Mark in my tiny Bible given to me as a gift when I was baptised.

5. I was so happy to have time alone with her because she amazes me with each topic we squeeze in between the crowd's surges and exclamations and peels of laughter. I'm too scared to let her know that I admire her, nervous to move too fast, cautious of error, and I find myself spending long thoughts, daydreams I guess, hoping for more minutes to become lost together with her.

Gentle Extending Hand

A message to myself and those smart enough not to tune out...

"So we must listen very carefully to the truths we have heard, or we may drift away from them. For since the messages from angels have always proved true and people have always been punished for disobeying them..."

I choose the KJV here for this one to tie it together, more bossy and bold:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen..."

But I love my LIfe Application version sooooo much, which says it as so...

"What is faith? It is the confident assurance that somthing we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us, even though we cannot see it up ahead."

That is encapsulating, engulfing, to me. That is worth seeking out on any terms prescribed unto me. It sure beats the terms I've been given by any other persona in my life.

Faith is needed: My alcohol problem, my smoky lies, my unfinished attempts...faith. Faith. FAITH, carefully, words by both authors show the love, guidance, care, concern, needed articulation of faith to those that seek or care or even peer in curiosity in a moment's lingering. We should see the unquestionable love that extends to us, backward and forward, from our meager step to take one mico-brain second to believe, or even give pause for consideration.

Thank You Note

You--I want you to know that I truly appreciate the dinner, this kindly proffered food for me...for I surely would not have eaten this night if it was not for your generosity. I would have languished in some corner, with a growling stomach, and I would not have seen nourishment. That food! Oh, the taste of it still lingers in my mouth. I never knew that simple food could be so delicious, so wonderous! I thank you, I know you won't ever read my appreciation. I grubbed on true dinner this evening; I didn't tear my body's fortitude down for needed energy from the cells that form my constitution, to survive; Why? Because you fed me, you provided for me, you cared about me in my tarnished state, my lost plight.

Thank you again. I will pull these covers over my head and try to rest for tomorrow will roll over all too soon and I'll be in search again.

Sincerely,
Your bum son

Unearthing Hurt

For Ian

The lights dimmed, the surrounding noise followed suit, leasing shadows time among elbows, glass reflections, and haze smoke circulating.
"I'll tell you, I'll say it all...doesn't mean a damn really. Here, toast me to it--the story."
Mugs clinked, fluid sloshed, the bartender without a bra settled against the bar pretending to stare at a speck on the wall.
"It went down like this: two stupid people lost sight of the end of a tunnel."
There was a long pause which called for some serious endurance, and I sipped my beer a couple of times.
"And?"
"That's it Mate. That is the story in the concentrated form."
I watched the bartender walk away, noticeably let-down and bored from the summation of the story, and when she was out of earshot I whispered to my companion the horrible, the almost evil truth.
"LIfe was inverted for me, for our situation, and someone would die, no doubt, soon, if a drastic change didn't happen."
I let that sit inside of background noise, swallows, taps of a cigarette on the ashtray.
Finally, he straightened up and asked, or noted, "So...you are saying that by leaving her and the kids...just up and abandoning them...you saved a life, or their lives?"
My cigarette smoke swirled slowly around my hand, shifting away as I reached for the mug, and then dispersed as I snubbed the butt out. I drank the remaining contents of the mug.
I turned to my companion, locking on his eyes.
"Yes. Someone would have died if I didn't split the scene. It was truly a matter of life and death."
I threw down some bills and we left the bar with the heaviness of my past expressed out loud hovering between us.

Pad Days 2

This town seemed to ghost away before his eyes, daily fading into swirling dust and wind-blown curtains from open, empty windows of houses that once held vibrant life...families, laughter, connection.

The railroad spur discounted this community, sought a hard, bent-steel rail right into perceived ripened valleys of opportunity.

Mailboxes sat empty on hand-fashioned posts that lean from uncare, disuse.

The swirl of the wind whips when the life of a town is exhumed to past status.

He tilted his grimy hat brim, looking longing down streets that echoed calls of neighbors, youth, turmoil, care...he stood rigid against time with squinted eyes and a locked jaw. A fool on an empty Main Street of forgotten, moved-on-to-newer dreams; planted in his stance, he would continue this little town in words, in fistfuls of scourned, mouthed sounds, in gritty determination--disappearing words marking the dusk like Indian symbols, for those members that no longer gather.

He...cared about the Pad--people, purpose, potential. He felt it needed permanence and he obeyed--alone--because he found himself reaching out into empty night sky.

The wind quickend, the dust circled, he lowered his head and scratched positivity into the shifting dirt underfoot, trying to define time against an unyielding grind of motion.

This one stood against change for realizations...in solitude.

Turntablism

For Jubei

Echo...reverbing note bends in the foreshadowing of your eardrum, mind's eye, fingertip.
Manipulate from the tingle inside of your bio-timing,
Bleeding feelings into streamlined emotions
Poured outside to gathered, mingling receptors.

Sweat means you're human,
Ice settles in the cup,
Reaching for the follow up,
Control? No, only flow.

Watching distant aloof
You provide for my slice of life
For those to enjoy, decide, overload;
You leave alone knowing your tones
Echo...inside of us.

Flame

Sleep-Spoken Prayers

Don't die on me tonight in the hush of coated slumber, inert and unguarded in your form's rest, for this rocky road still extends onward.

I can fold like the flower I am amid the forces hurling against me...oh so easily I can snap...threatening to uproot my feeble roots, just like you.

Smoke, silence, solitude, scared.

We are lost, my brother and I, lost like my father in his purgatory wanderings...only we have not yet given over in the face of doom.

Our lips move in our restless nights of widescreen dreams that pain us sure as reality, maybe more so for our lack of defenses in our fetal-shaped slumber disattachment.

Don't ask explanations of us; others can't know inside workings and few can help us, nor can the rare ones that stretch out for us understand our vaporous hugs.

We are brothers locked in pain.

We are hurt, and sliding, and clinging tight to the lonely coldness inside...a void which presents the uncertainty of every upcoming day,

awakening our new fresh mistakes,

amid our hapless progression through empty waste.

This is the only way we know to proceed, the only direction we follow, on a path beyond you, or us, or this, or done or that which is undone; we pray for one another silently.

Daily Routine Interrupted

Lush, liquid laughter
Absolute
Tender
On a day of complete surprise
New paths
Dreamy, dare?
A necessary connection.

Crunch

All, none
patterns run
ruined fun
assumptions
single shadow
the voice,
words connect
time is music
in steps
in rain
on a reflective
captured revelation
showing my time
this way,
today

By Myself

Forgotten Words

Yet another installment of the discoveries of my past writings. These were hidden in boxes of old crap that littered the space under my bed.

Cast Vestiges 10/4/05
Though we stand
paces apart
faces parted
An embrace only expresses
those wasted moments
left to define our
conscious
splintered life;
Soon we'll learn
broken survival


Anyone For Chinese? circa 1988
Guilt-It pounds my head like
construction workers,
pounds my soul like
elephants at the circus
The stupid part is that
I'm supposedly in...
Control-I left it outside,
with the garbage, to
be taken away.
I put it in the mailbox,
and pulled up the flag.
Too bad no one can get
rid of control since
there is...
Desire-shapes my heart,
twists my mind.
I live in a contortion,
I'm in torture.
Break the fortune cookie.

Resuscitation

Wind screamed, bellowed, caved in my eardrums to the point of bloodletting inside of my head. The altitude dipped alarmingly, crushing, painfully cut the levels of acceptance. This pointy piece of metal known as a plane, something meant to fly and soar, was sinking like a submarine...with me inside gripping the yoke and screaming into the clamor of wind and staring wide-eyed but too scared to cry. I braced for impact.
When the chute pulled my inert, dumbed ass out of the top hatch I still screamed, still stared, still gripped air like there was a steering yoke in my hands. My hollering voice broke and I finally blinked my eyelids. I moved my gaze to see the explosion of Hell-orange and red and yellow and bright white spray licking flames against the surrounding darkness. I finally breathed in deeply and understood that I was floating downward, but at a sharp angle. This raging windstorm beat against my feeble parachute cloth and sent my lucky-ass into a new situation of danger.
Toothpick arms bent the harness guidelines to no avail amid the heavy downward pulls of the banking windstream and I pulsed the adrenaline of fear into my tired blood vessels anew as I drifted over pointy steeples and antennas, electrical wires, a large building. I was nearing ground with an accelerated force wind and no control and wild contortions of helplessly gyrations. I looked ahead to the large train tracks hoisted high on an elevated bridge over a deep gorge. I looked to the side and saw no land and the wind sent me directly to the tracks, cracking my midsection into the planted side and knocking loose a tooth as my face bounced awkwardly off of a metal track clamp.
But I was briefly grounded, my chute lines tangled in the edges of the crossbars of the tracks, and the wind swept my body bouncing over the opposite side of the narrow span of tracks. I spun in mid air, frantic grabs for the foundation of structure rose unconsciously inside of me and I crawled back onto the tracks. I fearfully clutched the tracks of the train as the wind whipped my chute and buffeted me, while one hand reached for the strap releases. I somehow released one side of the harness and the chute fairly ripped the other side from my frame as I fought with gritted teeth to cling to the span of wood separating me from free descent into the swirling blackness of river far below me. Watching the chute that saved my life, and nearly took my life as well, puff off rapidly into the surrounding night sky, I clutched the tracks with both arms and closed my eyes and took deep breaths. I planted my face against the gritty, greasy rails and nearly puked my guts out as I said a brief prayer of gratitude for protection.
I must have laid there for several minutes, breathing and absorbing my blessing of deliverence. My arms were robotic; I locked onto those steel rails with the fear of mortality and my muscles finally began to cramp and protest. I was still unsure of my foundation high on that archway over the water and depth of death from my battle with the parachute-ripped winds. I chose to inch my way toward the side of land my head was currently facing, tears flowed from my tightly-closed eyelids and the night sky was so close to me here on this crazy bridge of tracks above the abysm...I just barely could move my form from each desperate clutch toward anywhere. I sighed deeply in the whip of the fresh air and listened for some voice of direction. That's when I heard the chugging of the train's engine.
I was up and running, trying to catch each tie with a sure footfall, but I slipped immediately and one leg hung through the tracks like a limp branch. My thigh was scratched and I smashed my balls, but I just hoist myself up and ran forward with abject fright. The train's horn sounded behind my scramble and my eyes fought to discern track tie from downward inky blackness and my legs sought a pattern: I found it! Two strides was the placement of the cross ties. I would half jump, land, leap outward far, land...I skipped one in-between. I ran with all my concentration, like a football player training on the rings of tires, pumping and pushing myself. The rails started to vibrate and the area around my frame lit up like a spotlight. Now I truly heard the train's horn, felt the resonance of it, understood the dire situation I was involved in.
I had 20 yards to the edge of land, the train was already on the bridge, and my legs were crumbling and confused with fear. One foot missed the mark and slipped into the void between the tracks. I grasped the shaking rails and raised myself, my arms faltered and shook with impending doom. The uncaring hunk of metal and light and overtaking sound bore down on me, bore down on the unseen, non-expected form way out on this outcropping of track. The light overtook my vision and the noise encompassed my brain and the force of the churning engines let me know my puny legs would never get me to my freedom. I panicked again and survival took over.
I swung over the chasm and moved my hands from the train track to the edge of the crossbeam, swinging my legs to grip the other side of the beam as I suspended myself over a black drop of certain pain and doom. My fingers were narrowly missed by the molten hot wheels of steel and now I found my fillings rattling in my teeth, my bones shaken nearly to snapping, my vision so violently shaken that focus was impossible. But luck, by fate, the single engine screamed over my spiderlike form clutching the underside of the expansion leaving my rattled frame to scamper back onto the boiling hot rails that served as a handgrip.
I wondered if I could die, because maybe I should just go ahead and thrust my beaten body into the reaching gorge...but I had come so far and survived so much. I shakily stood and began the careful picking of crossbeams, hearing the roar of the train fade into the drape of night. I moved toward land, toward solid underfooting.
I craved a cigarette like no man on earth has ever needed one and that is the drive that made my face feel the soft dew on the silent hillside grass while I prayed tearful prayers of thankfulness. This was my resuscitation.

One LIne For Friday

Quiet is a cold hurt coating the retrospection glare I focus inward on my ritual life story, too late to matter for reconstruction but shamefully silent is the cloud of sickening regret.

Pad Days 1

From Wikipedia...The 1992 Los Angeles riots, also known as the Rodney King uprising or the Rodney King riots, were sparked on April 29, 1992 when a mostly white jury acquitted four police officers accused in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King, after he fled from police. Thousands of people in Los Angeles joined in what has often been characterized as a race riot, or a mini-civil war, involving acts of law-breaking compounded by existing racial tensions, including looting, arson and murder. In all, 55 people were killed during the riots.

Smaller, copycat riots occurred in other United States cities. San Francisco police arrested 1400 rioters in the downtown area and established a curfew. The Nevada National Guard was deployed to Las Vegas and 200 people were arrested. Seattle was hit by overnight mobs of up to 100 people rampaging through business districts. Fresno had gangs rampaging through the older downtown business district with one bystander murdered in their car. New York saw racial beatings, a mob looting a shopping mall, and another at Madison Square Garden.Hundreds of protesters confronted police in Atlanta. Minor incidents were reported in Tampa, Pittsburgh, Birmingham and Omaha. Major incidents took place in Dallas and Madison, Wisconsin, etc.

And what we knew...

The television did not enter our pad until later in the year and we never, ever tuned in a radio station the entire time we stayed there. News filtered in from neighbors or from phone calls or news never reached our ears. It was very strange that we all knew of a major surge of anger, destruction, and mayhem on this otherwise normal, most likely boring, Wednesday.

I think I remember warnings about Atlanta being in turmoil, only certain areas of Atlanta though, and that folks should avoid travel as a precaution. The members of the pad all gathered at our place and for once it was strangely quiet, like a thoughtful burden was draping our usual exploratory conversations, games, fun, and randomness. We weren't directly affected; I doubt a single one of us had read a newspaper in over a year, but suddenly current events were shaping our feelings and thoughts. And it was out of our control.

We saw it in the eyes of our local beer store owner. We saw roads nearly barren. We listened to the sirens off in the distance, numerous sirens, constant sirens. We looked into the faces of one another for some answer or normalcy. We knew that parts of the city were in complete chaos, that parts of the US were burning with fire and hate and indignation and injustice. We understood that something had broken through to critical measures, long past the boiling point of acceptance, and that we were white and Rodney King was black.

We were peaceful, even removed by choice. White and black were things we watched on the back of our eyelids. But this seemed very heavy, that society was warned, burning, raging...it altered our perceptions of the present days.

Cornelia Test-n-Tune

Quickly, hurried before the sun falls behind the treeline, I rush to make the necessary repairs to the old truck. This old beater truck is me; this rusted, bruised shell has a strong heart and miles left inside the core.

Flipping the pages of the manual I learn that I need to check levels, particularly the brakes. I can't stop. I have to stop, that is part of forward motion--the ability to stop is very handy when you are driven. My fluid is below the marker so I fill the reservoir with the magic juice that helps control momentum. This truck and I try to find a balance between forward and motionless in careful swigs of liquid, preventing a disasterous crash.

I see in the handy directions of the manual that I need to ignite the engine and check how the heart of the truck feels. I sit inside the cab, feeling the key into the special slot that clings tightly around the probe and fits so perfectly. I turn it and send electric sparks into the core, into the heart, and it resounds with a rumble that echoes off of Stone Mountain. I idle in the driveway, I let my core burn.

The truck's handbook tells me to check the speed, to turn the engine down if running too fast. It tells me to amp up the engine if the motor is stuttering or coughing or hesistating. I twist it up. I twist it louder! I feel for the engine because it strains, but vibrates so good...making my heart roar and skin scream and feel completely alive. But wisdom causes me to spiral the idle back to a calm, even click. It purrs now, the engine's output is smooth and the feeling of a strong-running, enduring vehicle is mine. This balance, this proper tuning, is me and my truck and everything I breathe or touch or believe--a connection of harmony.

I turn off my truck and lower the hood, feeling the click of the latch. I lock the doors and watch the fading hue strokes of the day's end between the jagged treetop line in the distance from the empty truck bed. I feel quiet and solitude inside of cold night air.

I wait for my passenger, a pleasant hope, as I smoke a cigarette tonight.

Inertia

The shadows are shorter in the fog-draped night. I steer left, stumbling and probing with each step inside this absence of illumination. The path veers away from the roadway of streaking light trails, wind-snapped noises of hurried air, and metal death. Feet, find my pathway. To miss the footfall, to disassociate into a dreamy thought, to unattach into the memories of the beer-swilling evening I enjoyed...well, it will mean my death here tonight on the shoulder of an unforgiving roadway encroached by uncaring fog. Roadkill.
I plant my footfall in a more sober way and edge passing flashes of headlights as my boundary, the ditch of my left the foot's extreme for placement. Gravel crunches, I hear a train, I cross a side street and narrowly miss some speeding idiot who sees me finally in his rearview mirror. I'm halfway to the store.

The red clay slips under each step and this part of the journey is the most fearful in that the left side of my stride is a noisy, eerie wooded area. I slip/step faster and note all the clicks, the cracks, the sudden empty roadway, the full wolf moon. I nearly break into a run from uncertainty. I resist. I created this time, here besides these dark woods, on a slippery upward slope of crumbling steps, absorbing the barren lack of traffic and absorbing the lonesome moon's glow.

I surface the hill and into the corner intersection lights and busy actions. I now want to blend into the dark covering shade of the woods now gone; I am an eye catcher, something to notice out of a side window of a car with a blue light bar. I aim for the convenience store. I enter it, I grab this thing that culls me from a mile away at a ridiculous hour and suctions me through gauntlets of dark horrors and fear and possible doom. I lift that container and carry it to the bullet-protected window and smile at the girl behind the wall. I pay and I stall and ask her what she likes in life outside of her job. This odd question causes her anxiety and stalls the line, but I pursue it in different phrases until she knows I require some answer about herself, a human touch connecting through see-through plastic protective walls.

She says she likes to write. I promise to bring her some of my words. I turn and leave the store, the return trip unfolds before the tips of my shoes. I have a weight now, an odd lope to the footprint patterns I trace backwards, leaving the reverse indentations with one side heavier than the other. I have purchased a weapon, a loss to the point of my whole journey if used, for an encounter by the dark woods. I have a flimsy reason for this inane waste of time, money, and safety in the conversational engagement with the protected shopkeeper. I have inward justification, fake and phony and false, but something to help me know that this night is unlike all the others. That this night's dark unwinding of who am I is not only familiar, but normal.

Once I make it back to the familiar driveway, quietly I open the bottle and light a cigarette and sit looking at the wolf moon of January on the bed of my immobile truck.

I drink, I exhale, I redefine ordinary.

Presidents and Assholes Pt.3

I ran my fingers through my unkempt, shaggy hair as I regarded the card players seated around the table. Taking my time, I decided to just lowly top the presented 3 of clubs with a 4 of spades, taking advantage of my position directly to the left of Denard who had started the round of cards. B followed with a 5 of hearts, Matt played a 7, Vanderhorst a 9, Amiz was busy talking to Cree and we all had to goad her into laying something down, play for crying out loud!, and she slapped down a Queen. Unfazed by the escalation in the hierarchy of cards numeration, Cree threw down a 2. A 2, a single 2 mind you, of any suit, will immediately stop the round and let the thrower of the 2 begin the next round of cards. It also forces the asshole to have to rake the cards of the previous round. Since we had not designated the asshole yet, or president for that matter, I scraped the cards to clear the table.
Cree eyed his hand, his obtuse hand of cards always positioned in some random order to throw off our perceptions of what his hand held--his trademark routine--and reached for a single card, slapping it down with authority. There sat a slightly spinning ace of spades.
Remarks from all the assembled players consisted of groans, exclamations of "why!?", and low mutters of disses toward Cree for dashing the hopes of all our held hands of cards. Denard pointed out that he was now completely screwed for, being directly to Cree's left, why someone would start a round with the next-to-highest card. Denard passed, not able to discard or unwilling to spend a 2 (if he even had one in his hand) to obtain control of the round again. I pondered for half a second and passed, along with the rest of the table. Until it was Amiz's turn. Oh no, she simply pulled out a 2 and effectively ended the round. Cree smiled, his plan having worked. I cleaned up the round of spent cards.
Amiz dumped double 3s and Cree, being to her left in rotation, topped them with a pair of 4s. Denard had no complaints and discarded two 6s. I had a high pair of Kinks (our terminology for Kings) and opted to pass again. B laid down a pair of 8s and demanded a social. Everyone drank from their beers. Matt put down two Hooks (Jacks) and Vanderhorst passed. Amiz laid down another 2 to keep control. I raked the cards.
Amiz threw down some paltry 5 and Cree became maniacal again, yanking out his other Ace. Denard grimaced, giving Cree the middle finger as he passed on the play. I was annoyed, and frankly knew my fate was doomed--hell, I was already practicing for my asshole role with my polite, janitorial card collecting--and tossed a Kink, breaking my pair up. B threw the remaining 2, taking control of the round. I collected the spent cards and felt my placement in the card play order. I was sucking hind tit, ie. last in the round before the originator of the round has a chance to top to finish that round, thus he will retain control and dump twice as many cards as the other players in every round that he is able to start and finish.
B's 4 was eagerly met with Matt's 5, Vanderhorst's 6, Amiz's 7, Cree flopped an ace and shouted President! We all gave him a social, Denard couldn't play so he passed, as did I. Denard benefited from the play ending with Cree so he dished out his hightest offering, a Hook, and I passed. B passed, Matt topped it with a Kink and, having spent his cards, he claimed Vice President status. Jason passed, Amiz passed, and I raked the meager round.
Denard discarded his last card, which was a 6; I put down an 8 and demanded everyone drink. We did. The newly inaugurated President commanded me to drink again, which I dutifully did, and B hopped out with his final discard of a 10. Vanderhorst passed, as did Amiz, so I collected the cards.
Vanderhorst exited the fray by laying down a pair of 9s, which neither Amiz or I could play on since we did not have any doubles (inwardly cursing myself for having broken up my pair of Kings and my pair of 8s, though the 8s were of little use to me this round), and then topped his hand with a pair of 10s. Amiz threw down a Queen, closing the uneventful round with a smirk and a hidden ace.
I was stuck with a bunch of useless cards, the new label of being asshole, and a bunch of subservient duties to attend to: namely I was to fetch fresh beers for the collected players, shuffle the deck, and change the cd. If I did not do these tasks to the satisfaction of any of the drunken players, I would be resoundingly punished in drinks, not to mention overwhelming insults and denigrations from the President and all the other players. The verbal harrassment began immediately with the chanting cry of "Drink asshole!" originating from the remaining 8 card left in my worthless hand.
I drank heartily.
I sighed as I opened the fridge for the beers. It was going to be a long, very probable drunken evening of cards. I meshed the worn deck of cards together and began shuffling, hoping for a better hand.