Great Great Grandmother Fredericka & the Sioux

The Dakota War of 1862, one of the more tragic events in Minnesota’s history, was an armed conflict between the United States and several bands of the Dakota Indians. It began on August 17, 1862 along the Minnesota River in southwest Minnesota (14 days after the birth of my Great Grandfather) and ended with a mass execution of 38 Dakota Indians on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota. The bodies were buried together in a trench dug in the sand of the riverbank. Before they were buried, an unknown man nicknamed “Dr. Sheardown” was reported to have removed the skin from some of the bodies; later, tiny boxes containing the skin were sold in town.

The uprising caught Minnesota by surprise, but the fact that it occurred is not. The Dakota (also called “Sioux,” meaning “snake,” by enemy Indian tribes and whites) had surrendered almost all their land in treaties of 1805, 1837, 1851 and 1858. They were forced to live on two reservations, two narrow strips of land along the Minnesota River, terrain worthless for hunting. The whites tried to teach the Sioux to farm, but were unsuccessful. During this time, my Great Great Grandma Fredericka Borchart Schuft acted as a mid-wife for the Dakota; she helped them set their broken bones and shared her food with them. But, treaty violations by the United States and late or unfair annuity payments by Indian agents caused increased hunger and hardship among the Sioux. The insensitivity from the whites is most glaringly represented by a comment from storekeeper Andrew Myrick; when told that the Indians were starving, he replied: Let them eat grass.

On August 17, 1862, four Dakota killed five American settlers while on a hunting expedition. That night a council of Dakota decided to attack settlements throughout the Minnesota River valley in order to drive the whites out of the area. The next day, Little Crow led an attack on the Lower Sioux Agency, a U.S. government Indian agency established in 1853 to be the administrative center of the newly created Dakota reservations. Andrew Myrick was among the first who were killed. He was caught trying to escape through a second-floor window of a building at the agency. After the attack, his body was found with grass shoved down the throat.

The day before the uprising, the particular tribe my Great Great Grandmother had befriended sent a scout into the village to warn her. He advised her to pack up her family and go to the forest to hide (my Great Great Grandpa Frederick was supposedly an invalid at the time, and my Great Grandfather, William, would have been an infant, since his birthday was August 3, 1862). After the uprising had ended, they returned to find nothing left standing but their cabin. Everything had been burned to the ground and the people who didn’t escape had been massacred.

Did Great Great Grandma Fredericka feel over-whelming gratitude for her family’s survival or did she experience the “survivor’s guilt” we speak of today in relation to our modern disasters - that mental condition that occurs when a person perceives himself or herself to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not? Did she even warn her neighbors? That’s not part of the story. I’m concerned.

Finally, did people make fun of my Great Great Grandparents for being named Fredericka and Frederick?

William at a Bus Stop

William sat at a bus stop with an empty paper coffee cup balanced on his left shoulder, sitting to the left of a moderately dark skinned man who had fallen asleep with his chin on his chest. Although the fattish man was fast asleep, he breathed with such vigor that his chin actually only touched his chest intermittently, so as to allow the air in and out from between his purplish rubber lips, and up and down his likely constricted windpipe.

Just another sad somebody or other, William thought, trying to get by.

Just breathe, my man, he said allowed.

What? said his man, popping his head up and staring, annoyed, at William, who successfully contained a surprised look from emerging in his facial features. William had serious facial strength.

Oh. Nothing. Sorry.

William looked away and pretended to be very interested in a squirrel he spotted twisting about a telephone pole. The man touched his chin to his chest and resumed breathing his head up and down, like someone sleeping. Then, William became authentically interested in the squirrel. He imagined things.

He imagined the squirrel to be a mother with a nest at the top of the phone pole. He imagined some hunters deciding to shoot down the nest, suspecting it to be a crow’s nest. But, sadly, it turned out to be a poor mama squirrel’s nest with three very young babies whose eyes were not yet open. The mother, sadly, didn’t escape the hunters’ gunshot and she fell to the ground, her body unrecognizable, shredded by the cloud of propelling shotgun pellets. With mama now dead, the hunters were left with the unexpected and weighty responsibility of the three closed-eyed babies. One hunter said to the other, Let’s take the babies to William. William accepted the responsibility of the baby squirrels, for he had a good wood-burning stove in his kitchen. He took the babies and kept them warm in a basket lined with a towel sitting on the open oven door. He fed them cow’s milk out of a medicine dropper. Two of them didn’t survive, but a beautiful female named “Peanuts” lived with him for several years. He had some fellows down at the lumberyard build a two-story cage out of wood and wire, with tiny sets of stairs at each end to connect the floors. Peanuts really didn’t need the stairs, so she chewed them up. That’s one way of getting rid of household items! thought William, laughing aloud. Finally, Peanuts was able to escape and he never saw her again. And for all this, William would have been a “Wildlife Rehabilitator Specialist” and would have been given a federal permit. He smiled, looking forward to the possibilities.

What? said the awake man, again lifting his head towards William, again annoyed.

William pretended not to hear him, and continued smiling while staring with hope at the twisting squirrel.

Suddenly, in the midst of looking forward to something, he could feel the sharp weight of truth in his chest… the truth that it is so sadly ridiculous to be excited about anything at all.

The coffee cup fell back against the glass encasement of the bus stop, landing pathetically, soundlessly, like a quiet turd balloon deflating, on the concrete just behind the heels of William’s Vans (a seemingly childish brand of shoes he’d only purchased for the first time at the age of 32 - an age at which he currently resides).

And the bus never arrived during all this time.

This is a life, where nothing much happens and everything means nothing much, if anything at all.

News from Sequoia and Kings Canyon

The Chief Park Ranger, Peter H. Schuft is retiring from the National Park Service this month after serving over thirty years.

Schufts have lived in Sequoia National Park for the past 12 years.

He and his wife, Catherine, were honored at the Buckaroo Inn last Monday by a large group of friends and fellow workers.

After the social hour and dinner, Hank Schmidt, Superintendent, officiated at a ceremonial program that offered many laughs and formed a relaxful and fun party. Hank was Pete’s first park service boss in 1941, and is again his boss at the end of Pete’s career.

Pete has been in charge of Resources and Management and many of his co-workers took turns speaking of a particular phase of their work under Pete’s direction and then presented the Schufts with various, unusual gifts.

The theme of the evening was centered around Pete and Catherine’s hobby of golf.

The gifts included momentos reminiscent of occasions never to be forgotten. Such as the remains of Dick Rigglehouth’s new jacket and new lunch box left behind on what came to be the fireline. The remains of a cable once installed by the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co. who neglected heeding Pete’s advice that underground cables have real advantages.

From fire control and presented by Bob Scott, came a truly unique device inscribed “The Original McSchuftezski Tool”. This Pete can lug to the golf course daily now that he retired. It is fully equipped with a light to see, a radio for help, equipment to dig divots and even equipped to fight fire. An old golf bad with splinted and bandaged golf clubs are ready for Pete’s first round at the tees.

John Bowdler presented the Pulaski - McCloud award and Bill Halsey presented Pete with an insulated “beer” carrying case. Also given was a five foot long match which Pete says will go will over his mantle. They also received a beautifully tooled wooden sign saying “The Schufts” to hang in front of their new home. Another gift was an “alabaster carving”.

Schufts were also presented with a scarp book made up of momentos, letters and photos from all of the Schufts friends. They also received a framed color photograph of the park.

Following the presentations Superintendent Schmidt asked Pete to say a few words at which there was a long round of applause and a standing ovation.

Catherine was presented with a corsage for the evening.

A tribute was paid to Cliff and Ruby Bandy for their fine meal and excellent service. The many people in the party filled the dining room.

Out of town guests present for the occasion were; Dee and Dick McLaren from the Grand Canyon; Doric and Bill Stevenson from Lake Mead; Betty and John Lewis from Boulder Creek; Patsy and Andy Ringold from Lassen; Fay and Joe Windsor from Yosemite; Bob Greenhall from Porterville; Bill Halsey from the Miramonte Forest Service And Billie and Fred McGregor representing the Forest Service here at Hammond. These persons are practically all former residents in Sequoia Park.

Last week, another party was given at the Buckaroo in honor of Catherine, which about 45 women attended. She was presented with two large handwoven pillows made by Peggy Burns at this luncheon.

Another farewell dinner was held in their honor at the home of Irma Buchholz recently. Cohostesses were Alice Quist and Helga Raftery.

Besides playing golf with her husband whenever they had the opportunity, Catherine also actively played duplicate bridge in Three Rivers as well as playing a weekly foursome for many years. Catherine has also been active in St. Clair’s Catholic Church.

With the exception of three years military duty, Pete’s government career has been devoted to the National Park Service. His tours of duty have included Natural Bridges and Casa Grande National Monuments, Lake Texoma National Recreational Area, Grand Canyon, Olympic and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. All of Pete’s assignments have been in the protection division, where he has been a staunch advocate and innovator in park resource and management. In recent years he has initiated programs involving restoration of fire to the park environment and management of visitor use in the back country.

Pete and Catherine have purchased a retirement home at 315 Arcadia, Morro Bay, California, 93442. they have been doing some remodeling and plan to play a lot of golf since the course is located just a few steps from their door.

Congratulations to Pete and Catherine and may you find much happiness and contentment in your new home.

the truth

the truth is, sometimes sara gets so upset when i fart in bed, that i have to use my hands to spread my ass cheeks so that they don’t make any noise coming out.

grandpa : where it all ends up

DEATH

We are saddened by the death of our friend, Peter H. Schuft, on October 10. He had been ill for quite some time, and his death came quietly at their home in Morro Bay.

Pete Schuft retired from Sequoia and Kings canyon as Chief Park Ranger on February 3, 1973, with 31 years of Federal service to his credit.

He had a fine career with the National Park Service, serving as Chief Park Ranger at SEKI from 1960 until retirement. Other assignments were Assistant Chief Ranger at Olympic; Assistant Chief Ranger at Grand Canyon; Park Ranger at Lake Texoma, Casa Grande, and Natural Bridges.

Pete served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1946, and was Lieutenant, JG, when he was discharged.

His accomplishments in the resource management and visitor protection fields were recognized Servicewide, as well as throughout the State. In 1966, he received a Special Act Award for his part in developing a series of talks and two television programs which were presented to the Los Angeles public schools. He was on the planning team to develop the forestry division at Reedley Junior College.

In 1971, Pete was given the Meritorious Service Award in recognition for exceptional Government service in the field of national park resource management. His programs have proven to be landmarks in environmental management of park and wilderness lands, as the award predicted.

Love and deep sympathy go to Catherine and to their sons, John, Tom, and Mike, and their families.

PETER SCHUFT

Memorial services for Peter Howard Schuft, 65, will be at 10 a.m. Tuesday in the Benedict-Rettey Chapel in Morro Bay. Officers of the B.P.O.E. Elk’s Lodge #322 will conduct the rites.

Mr. Schuft was born Jan. 22, 1915, in Hutchinson, Minn. He moved to Morro Bay seven years ago from King’s Canyon National Park after retiring from 32 years with the National Park Service. He was chief ranger at Sequoia National Park for many of those years.

He was a member of the Elk’s Lodge in San Luis Obispo.

Mr. Schuft, who died Friday at his home in Morro Bay, is survived by his wife Catherine; three sons, John W. of Redding, Michael J. of Paradise, Thomas T. of Salem, Ore.; two brothers, Elmer Schuft of MacGregor, Minn., and Melbourne Schuft of Minneapolis, Minn; and two grandchildren.

Bennedict-Rettey is in charge of arrangements.

unshakeable

Staring out at assimilable expanse, emotionlessly whipped to written in the memory banks, but somehow, still, a fetalistic want for shaking. My program insists incapables, the forgotten masked by astounding capability. But observing the shaking cityscape, the urge insists, hangs there, unerased, like an invisible heat floating at the front of my forehard. The urge, qualitilized additions to grand expanding screensavers. Those others shaking, while I’m ballasted - what are they to me? Other than others, a responsibility, an imposedaccept task program, filling city window frames illuminated by dead yellow and orange. Initially glowing silhouettes, for a millisecond, beautifully beyond, and then, shaking into sudden infinite everything. Complete, filed, saved, totally knowable.

I know that shaking.

Then, a shotgun blasts into a sickheart beating in the room above. I’m made to wait for this. I respond in echo. Explosion details recorded, every sound within sound within sound within sound filed away accordingly. Urgency executed, only now.

Upstairs, in the hallway, stretchlit longly, Investigate, outside a deadcut door, my knowing processing a half-inch off its rough splintery surface, Investigate, imageing beyond it, moveless.

::::: inputting :::::

Some sigh, surrender, sudden airlessness.

The crinkling strands of so much hair crowded under a limply settling hand.

A cheekbone touching down, soft and colding.

So much blood splashing, dripping, roaring out of guttural…

in exchange for so much outside moving in - suction of switch.

Temperature trade.

***CONFIRMATION - EXECUTED ACCOMPLISHED - END LIFEFORM***

I’m made to wait.

The vacuous of the blast still hangs in the air.

A drawing in of dust, each piece scraping through space.

The shotgun - suddenly rushing down, falling at 15 depth in 25 feet deep room, falling at exact middle of 16 feet room width, 1.5 feet from end of 7 by 5 by 3 foot bed, 10 and half-inch from my knowing, falling from 4 feet midair, downwards, dropped.

But then - unprogrammed unknown - just as shotgun freefalls, 15 feet away, the bowing third story window’s curtain billows its corner dryly against movement, unimageable form exiting, too still to make shape in space. The shotgun image hits wooden plank floor image - clear, cloudless, descript - undeniably recorded - but that formless floating through the window, already gone, nothing. There are no prints, no DNA, no remnants on shotgun - I already image its form made dropping through the air - the air molded it my memory - it is too clean, too many unprogrammed unknowns.

I do not open the door. There is no requirement. He is dead. It is gone.

It, the exiter, the executor, moving movelessly.

It, I, both, unshakeable.

Unprogrammed unknown.

My America

America, listen. You fucker. I wannuh talk to you.

I mean, are you serious, America? Really?

America, you’ve tried to give me so much, whenever you could, including a four-wheel dirt bike, but you skipped out on me to play “Russian-roulette” somewhere in your childless night. Now, granted, I am a little bit of a pussy, and I didn’t accept your four-wheeler ‘cause I was afraid I might fall off and roll it on top of me, just like I never really skateboarded, but instead just laid down on the thing and rolled down very small hills, not even hills really, BUT, that gives you no fucking right to play cards with my college fund or to get chased down by the DEA while on crank because you’re farming marijuana in the wrong fucking decade.

Wait. That was my Dad. Sorry, America. Forget I said all that. I get you guys mixed up.

Wait. America. Are you my Father? You are my father. Jesus.

America, you’ve become far too “unavailable,” America. I can’t even have “cosmic vibrations or mystical visions.” Where are you? What are you doing? Chase me down, for God’s sake! Arrest me. Persecute me. Torture me. What the fuck do I have to do to get you to cause me to have revelation, man? I cannot accomplish anything!

America, I’m not even sure you’re there. That’s just not enough. Absence is just too pathetically dramatic; I need trauma…. drama. Trauma drama.

America, if you’re not there, am I there? Where in the hell am I?

America, please don’t take off your clothes. Your naked body is so gross. Ugh. Your quiet, ugly thing… just… egh…

America, am I America? Am I talking to myself? Who’s talking?

America, I don’t even know why I’m talking to you, man.

America… do you like Trader Joe’s? I feel like I’m meditating when I shop there. Do you like trail-mix? I fuckin’ love pistachios. ‘Course you like Trader Joe’s.

I don’t know, America. I guess you’re all right.

When I remember the fact that someday you’ll never exist, I do feel very fond of you.

But there is nothing special about my shoulders, America. And you have no wheel.

the piss hid

out of the corner of my eye,
whilst I was pissing,
it somehow must’ve leapt my stream,
to land the propped up seat.
sudden manifest,
uncanny,
i saw that somewhat golden pearl,
cling on the edge of great white ring,
or so I s’pose it must’ve seemed.
and just as gleaming caught my eye,
on current universe’s edge,
it slid away forever,
gone again.
to where I knew I’d never go,
yet here I am.

A Series of Titles for as Yet Unfinished Poem or Prose

A Series of Titles for as Yet Unfinished Poem or Prose

or A Series of Titles for as Yet Unfinished Poem

or A Series of Titles for as Yet Unfinished Prose

Write Away the Candelabra

17 to Yellowstone

Hibbing of You

Sand linE

If I Could Just See Your Chest

Memory Shrink

When We’re in a Bar in the Midwest I’ll Tell You

Blue Box Boyscout

A Series of Titles as Yet Unfinished

The Backseat Experience of Your Head Disappearance

RoaR

The Mom Moon & Easter

A Matter of Fuct

The Americans

The Mechanicals of Pencil

Bust My Dust Again

Now My Desk is Clean

Mashed & Stuffing

You & I Between Milwaukee

You Should Write a Song

The Piss Hid

You Can Count on Me, Humphrey

the uncle harry poem experiment

Uncle breakfast
lit coffee
and brain.
But upstairs
he morning
and head.
A halo,
a headset,
a towel.
And away,
and followed,
concerned.
He bathroom,
into it,
and stairs.
Uncle frantic,
and hard,
although was,
so himself,
he agreed:
I that.
And up,
around sip,
at kitchen.
He up
so quickly
that burst.
And vessel,
bursting, beautiful,
on volcano.
But horrible,
in undershirt,
in kitchen,
burning hand,
burning other,
he nothing…
…but roaring.
There roaring.
And nothing.

Uncle Harry’s Poem

Uncle Harry came down to breakfast,
lit a cigarette and sipped his coffee,
and fell over dead from a burst blood vessel in his brain.
But upstairs
he had seen the reflection of his morning
and felt a great silence fall around his head.
A settling halo,
a radio headset,
a damp hot towel.
And Uncle Harry saw himself move away,
and he followed,
concerned.
He followed himself out of the bathroom,
into the spilt mustard sunlight that filled it,
and down the stairs.
Uncle Harry was fearful and frantic,
and couldn’t feel his heart beat hard,
although he knew that it was.
So, following himself,
he agreed:
I have to be there, inside that.
And he caught up,
around the long cigarette lighting and the coffee sip,
at the bottom of the stairs and in the kitchen.
He caught up
so quickly
that a blood vessel burst.
And imagine that blood vessel,
bursting, how beautiful,
on the inside of a volcano.
But it was horrible,
in a white undershirt,
in a kitchen,
burning cigarette in one hand,
burning coffee in the other,
he knows nothing…
…but roaring.
There is a great roaring.
And nothing.

some other uncle harry

Uncle Harry came down to breakfast, lit a cigarette, took a drink of his morning coffee, and fell over dead from a burst blood vessel in his brain.

Before this… incident, upstairs, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, seeing the reflection of his morning, already in one of his never-ending white undershirts, wondering again if he was simple or capable enough…

He felt a great silence fall around his head like a halo or a radio headset or a damp hot towel.

And in that moment, in the bathroom mirror, Uncle Harry saw himself moving away.

And he followed, concerned.

He followed himself out of the bathroom, and into the bedroom, into the spilt mustard sunlight that filled it, cast on pieces of walls, bedspreads and carpets, through greasy windowpane; so familiar it seemed ancient, or simply old.

Uncle Harry tried to hurry after the something which kept moving, the something that swung its hand, with, it seemed, so much instinctual finesse, its dry clay fingers that had clasped so much of a lifetime, scooped, deftly hooked the plaid over-shirt up and off the ridge of the bed’s wooden footboard, leaving a billow of particles, dust and deadness, floating in its trail.

Uncle Harry was fearful and almost frantic, and couldn’t feel his heart beat hard, although he knew that it was, so, following himself, looking at himself, he made an agreement with the thought: I have to be there, inside that.

And so he catches up.

Right around the long cigarette lighting and the coffee sip, at the bottom of the stairs and in the kitchen.

When he catches up, after the cigarette is lit and the coffee is sipped, after that fragrant steam is inhaled, along with the burning tobacco fumes, he catches up to himself, so quickly, so abruptly and urgently, that his snapping up to himself, his snapping into himself, causes a blood vessel to burst in his head, somewhere unsafe, where blood vessels shouldn’t burst.

And while, if we can imagine that blood vessel, bursting, that moment, if we can see it, how beautiful it would seem, if we were that close, on the inside of a volcano.

But it wasn’t quick or easy or a nice way to go.

It was horrible, because Uncle Harry’s experience of it all was so sudden and the brain was working through it so abruptly during those last seconds, that the trauma was most painful.

If only he’d had cancer and could have taken his time.

Uncle Harry moved so quickly, so definitively with such determination, so simply and capably, that, between the moment when he knew he had to be there, inside, between that moment and the moment he stood in a white undershirt, plaid work shirt cast over his shoulder, in the vague notion of what a 1950s kitchen looks like, a burning cigarette in one hand, steaming cup of coffee in the other, he knows nothing…

…but arriving.

And roaring.

There is a great roaring.

And nothing.

Uncle Harry

My Uncle Harry came down to breakfast, lit a cigarette, took a drink of his morning coffee & fell over dead from a burst blood vessel in his brain.

- John William Schuft

[Uncle Harry. It's one of those things you try to remember. Let's see: I see him walk down those stairs. It's like remembering a dream, sleeping, the way I can see his legs, those long white limbs swinging down at me, and his upper body, like some far off something or other, floating in the sky, coming down at you, slowly. How can I see this? I thought. But I sat at that dream table, some kind of blurry kitchen table, or a particle board desk, floating under my cold hands - and they were cold - distant and dead - my own hands - unmoving.] Uncle Harry looked in the mirror, tweezers twisted in hand, and wondered how he could manage it. He knew others thought him more simple and capable than that. He wasn’t. He paused with the glimmering silver pinchers just short the entrance of his right nostril. This is what he was doing right now. This is what I am doing right now, he thought. Uncle Harry, looking at himself, pausing for what seemed like such a long time, was confronted, like so often, standing before himself in his already sweaty white undershirt, each morning, or most mornings. [And, Uncle Harry, how do I get to you? Are you something out there that I'll end up at?] Uncle Harry felt a great silence fall around his head like a halo or a radio headset or a damp hot towel. He paused again. And, while he paused, his hand kept moving. It cast the clamp of the tweezers deeply into the porous covered cavity of his nostril - that grand, Mount Rushmore nose, covered in dirty pink potholes, a road in danger, pointless to pass over, and inside, those long arms of the future, harvested a bundle of hair, mostly white, stiff and wiry, out of his head. The tears welled up at the brim of his bottom right eyelid, and, in the mirror, he could not look at the left, for fear. [Can Uncle Harry get through my self-consciousness? Can you? (And he went and got a bowl of pasta and his family wondered when he would pick up where he left off or never began and if it was at all worth it and if he was a writer at all and if his self-deprecation was interesting enough to publish.)] He wasn’t more simple and capable. He was complex and paralyzed. Uncle Harry stared and came up with reasons to stay reflected. But something else continued. He stayed there, looking in that mirror, steady, forgotten, motionless, and other words that have to do with stillness and nothingness, and the other thing moved on. The other thing put the tweezers down and left the hair growth unbalanced - one nostril harvested and the other overgrown. That something set those tweezers down on the wet edge of the bathroom sink; it did not pay attention to the closeness of the sink edge in relation to the tweezers placement, or to the tweezers slipping, suddenly wetly, into the belly of the sink bowl. As they did so, they made a porcelainic scraping noise that slid Uncle Harry out of his pause, but just a little too late, a little behind what had kept going… so then, now, Uncle Harry saw himself moving away in the mirror. And he followed, concerned. [Before I forget. When he catches up to himself, after the cigarette is lit and the coffee is sipped, he catches up to himself so quickly, so abruptly and urgently, that his snapping into himself, his snapping up to himself, is what causes the stroke, or the hemorrhage, or the blood vessel burst, and it wasn't safe or easy or nice... it was horrible, because the experience of it all was so sudden and the brain was working through it so suddenly for those last seconds, that the trauma was what was most painful - and if only he'd had cancer and could have taken his time.] He followed himself out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, into the mustard daylight that filled it, cast on bedspreads and carpets, through greasy windowpane, so familiar it seemed ancient, or just old. [Can he stop and look around and can you see the room and does it matter what the bed did or how the windowpane was in need of cleaning or what about the rugs and wooden things or the magnified oldness of it all?] Uncle Harry tried to hurry after the something which kept moving, the something that swung its hand, with so much practice, it seemed, along the ridge of the bed end, its dry clay fingers that had clasped so much of a lifetime, scooped, hooked the plaid over-shirt up and off the wooden footboard, leaving a billow of particles, dust and deadness, floating in its trail. Before Uncle Harry could move his line of sight through the billowing, before he again laid eyes on the back of that moving (a back he knew looked so much like his own back, though he’d rarely seen it in a lifetime, but about which he had an instinct), that moving had already got its arms through the short-sleeved plaid, and Uncle Harry knew, that on the front of that back, there would be an efficient and mindless buttoning up, and that it would all be done, and tucked tautly, by the time that moving something arrived at the top of the stairs. And that something, Uncle Harry thought desperately, to his own surprise, for he felt few things desperately in his longish lifetime, “belonged” to him. And he wanted to be a part of it all. So he moved more quickly, as if through thickened air, but still more quickly than usual, to catch himself, to get inside there. Uncle Harry was fearful and frantic, and couldn’t feel his heart beat harder, but knew it was, so he made an agreement with the thought: I have to be there, inside that. When he got to the top of the stairs he knew he could catch it. He could see it descending below, like a slowly settling cloud, and he knew if he skipped steps he would arrive, soon. Look around you, I thought. Look around you. Don’t worry about it. Let it go. But he catches up. Right around the long cigarette lighting and the coffee sip, at the bottom of the stairs and in the kitchen. Uncle Harry moves so quickly, so suddenly, so finally with such determination, so simply and capably, that, between the top of the stairs, when he finally decides what must happen, between that and standing in the vague notion of what a kitchen looks like in the 1950s, he knows nothing but arriving. And roaring. The roaring. There is a great roaring. [I can feel the hours getting ahead of me, passing and accomplishing more than I.] There is nothing literarily special about this moment. Uncle Harry catches up to himself and goes. [Was anyone there? Was anyone standing nearby to watch him fall?] He was not. He was caught up to himself. He was caught up to his falling. Collapse. Nothing.

this is a piece of art.

this is a poem.
my stomach is nervous.
i am writing a poem.
i am riding my mom’s death.
this is a piece.
this is prose.
this is a poem.
listen to me.
listen to me repeat and speak and try and iron out the edges of it all.
come and stand with me by her bedside.
this is our moment.
i am here. i am watching it all happen to you. it all happened to you.
this is you. this is yours.
i let you stand out of the Chrysler and fall backwards.
i reprimanded you for not waiting for me.
i watched you on the ground.
we stood there, unable to lift you, and you apologetically explained to your passing neighbor why you could not stand. you’re tired.
your teeth, your dentures came out in the chemo chair, and you were embarrassed. but the black sores in your mouth. you could not hold them there.
i told you to take them out.
“mom. don’t be ridiculous. if they’re hurting…”
you were so sick and tired and moving farther away from me.
that whole week i watched you move.
i watched you drop away from me.
until the funeral home, where you were so heavy, and your hair, so many new colors, streaming down.
i watched you get so heavy.
i watched you fall.
we wheeled you on office chair from bed to bathroom.
and K.C. had to go in there.
into that tiny glowing space, to be right up against you while you tried to live.
you were so tired, but we’d seen it so many ways before, so we just ate thanksgiving dinner in the dining room, while you slept so heavily, dying, next to a small plate of mashed and stuffing, while you slept so heavily in that tiny bed that moved too easily.
and i didn’t come in there enough. i didn’t sit in there enough.
and this is a poem.
this is a piece of art.
this is a piece of art that i’m sharing with you.
you were so heavy.
you were too heavy.
and we stood so far away from you in that hospital room.
and it only took 4 hours.
the doctor told us there was nothing to do.
and then he talked to you, in front of us, about life-support, but you asked us, “What do you think?” and we killed you, because we could only stand and cry and not say anything.
and you saw it all come down around you.
I watched that.
your head so small.
your whole wrapped up whiteness.
and a radio got louder. you heard a radio and you wanted it off.
and we laughed, like it was just another time to be sick.
then the nurses suddenly.
they rushed in and pushed us outside of you.
until there was no reason for them to be there.
so we could find that place again at your side.
and i watched it happen.
that thing.
the weight.
you became complete weight.
so heavy.
feeling you more and more in my hands.
I held your hand and kissed your face and wept.
I whispered, “Don’t be afraid. I love you. It’s okay.”
Pulling that oxygen mask off because…
I thought she said something.
I pulled that mask off so awkwardly.
alone in the room, somehow.
I fed her ice and cooled her lips.
Her heels ached and I rubbed them…
she breathed slowly and more slowly through sore lips…
her eyes golden…
her skin warm…
and we wept blindly, with fury, and rubbed and kissed softly…
This is a poem.
This is a piece of art.
I’m reading this.
And we went to the funeral home…
we went in to see her…
Someone’s combed her hair gold, silver, white, brown, straight down into the center of everything…
the velocity of her departure rushing through those strands…
she was red, blotchy, discolored…
she was different and I felt little.
like I needed to stand on my toes.
this is a poem.
this a piece of art.
I’m reading this.

it all goes

he writes. he writes. he blogs. he puts it down. he puts it all down. he sleeps on the solid ground. he puts it all down on the ground. he can’t make a word for the life of his. he can’t lay it down that way. he can’t remember the words. he can’t let himself remember. he protects him. he can’t get vulnerable. he forgets the fog. and when two sentences emerge he feels a life ahead of himself. he has to to clear it all up. and he does. but he can’t get the word out. and he keeps setting her up. and he hates it. and he hates to let it all out. and he hates and. so he drops it. for another word. replaces it. exchanges it. trades it out and brings it in. just the beginning. he wants to see how the work goes. he wants to look ahead, but can’t see around the moment. he wishes. and the phone rings. and calls. he hangs up again. in fury and frustration. if those two words can be together. he’s not lively. he’s tired. he’s hungover. he can’t imagine what it is like to be anything else. he gives it all up to another day or a day that already happened. he hates the name buster. can you read this buster? he thinks. stop reading this buster. it’s not fair. does it show you when someone types the name buster? is there a prize? he thinks. he hopes. maybe that’ll get me to stand out. and the cookie is old and tired. and he wants to put it away. he wants to put and away. the music doesn’t match where he’s at. he’s gottuh change it. it gets all sad and blue and darker. he’s glad. he wants to slow down and the music helps him do just that. the music helps him slow way down. his dad sends him old things. things he’s never wanted. or things he never meant to own. he’s glad to see them, because it reminds him that the old man is still out there. but he thinks about his deathbed a lot. his dad’s deathbed. and imagines a lot of whiteness and not a lot of people. he loves him like they could never understand. but they are not in the wrong. dad is. his dad is. and it’s sad to see that happen to someone. but we all end up alone, go on alone, go groan alone, like he said, sadly, we all go on alone that way. we all groan on alone that way. it’s the matter of fact. he remembers games and winning pool, and this comforts him. but he sees right through it all. and it passes. there’s an old organ that sings behind him, while he looks around and stares. he has to be that kind of dark wandering eye. he has to look out in just that way. and he loves it. and the organ grinds. it wells and swells. he is glad to be forgotten. he is glad to be a wicked memory and even the adjective is too much. it’s glamorous when there’s no reason to be. there is no glamour. there are no adjectives. and the words march on. he watches them stream out in front of him. like a great tall tower laid down on the ground, an endless yellow brick road, stretching out before him, for so many days. it tires him just looking at it. he tries to stay focused on those first few words, but the whole thing avalanches into his vision. he gets sick. he wants to vomit. he wants to throw it all up, but he’s stuck under the whole grand pile of it all. he wants to throw out all the adjectives and forget the connections. but he can’t help it. he is where he is, and in his weary state, he settles back down, looking sideways as he floats a few feet, two feet, above the ground, and from here he can look over at his father, who lies in white, with his eyes closed, and wants to be a mirror. he floats here. staring. exactly where he suddenly wants to be. and the great grand mischievous forgettable wash away is spreading out from under him. like some kind of movie scene you only remember. he looks away from Dad and turns his eyes closed. and this is when it all goes.

the book: my dad

i’m working on a book. it’s emerging as a magically realistic homage to my family tree. it’s still fairly early in the project process, but currently the main focus of my work is collecting and transcribing letters, e-mails, interviews with my family members. my dad is a focal point of this data collection, and he has been so movingly generous enough to take the time to write out sometimes 20 page letters in response to questions i send him. i wanted to share this aspect of my writing work here, because, although it’s not my own writing, it is severely appropriate for my blog, as not only an influence on my own writing, but eventually as a source of content for the book…

the excerpt below is in response to my questions about dreams he’s had that really struck him or occurrences he’s experienced that aren’t easily explained - it is from my favorite of his letters… i LOVE how he intertwines the two answers.

he should write a book.

“Feb. 4 2010

I have thought about these new subjects for a while, but can’t really recall anything coherent. I have always had a very vivid dream life, however, and when I was very young had a recurring set of dreams. The first was the “wolf” dream. It usually involved looking into a darkness & knowing that the wolf was there & it was coming for me. I would try to run & couldn’t & at the critical moment I would wake up screaming in terror. This lasted until I was about 11 when one night I had the dream, but instead of trying to run away I turned and faced the darkness & said something along the line of: Well, come ahead. I will not be afraid whatever happens. I never had the dream again. The other dream sequence was flying & falling not always together. In this situation I would be flying (sans airplane, balloon, etc…) and would gradually lose my ability to stay aloft in some sort of bad situation, usually something threatening I think, but they weren’t always similar. I guess these types of dreams are fairly common in children. Jack London believed the flying dreams were connected to primeval memories from the time in the trees. I guess it is as good as anything in the way of an explanation.

In rereading this section I am struck by the fact that your topic is much more interesting than my response. I am afraid this section is made rather simplistic due to faulty memory or a mundane youth.

Although I have never experienced much that couldn’t be explained I have been in places in the forest where I have felt a hostile aura or perhaps a presence wishing me gone. There is a phrase somewhere in Steinbeck about the “watchers on the ridge” and I have often been one of them. I suppose it is inevitable that I would also at times have been the “watched.” These places are generally dark & totally silent & usually there is something peculiar in the geography (i.e. a curious rock formation, a deep canyon, …) I remember coming through just such a place where the trees seemed to be stunted or dying & the rock structure resembled some sort of medieval ruins. In my mind it was totally silent, no birds, no insects & the air was hot & stifling. As I came through I had to step over a downed tree & lo!! as I stepped up a tiny little skunk leaped out & without a hint of fear scuttled indignantly away in the rocks! Shades of Walt Disney!!?

Another time I was camped near a deer trail in an area where a cougar had a den. Often it would come into the area & scream at me while the deer herd congregated near my camp as if knowing they were safe there. One night I was laying up reading when I heard something running, running full tilt in my direction. I lay there frozen as the sound got louder & louder until wham it hit the side of the tent. I got up, but nothing was there or it fled at a much quieter pace. You know how when you’re half asleep a noise (a door, a siren, something loud…) wakes you & the noise was a part of your half conscious dream, but now you are fully awake & the noise is a part of your consciousness? That has happened to me many times & it can be quite frightening in the woods, when it is dark & you are alone…

But then all you have to do is say: Come on then if you’re going to… or maybe just freeze & wait for it to go away…”

hi.

i’m here. i’m writing.

look at me

look at me.
did I choose this thing?
I mean
look at these crazy arms
these legs
I’m great big slabs of meat
slapping over the earth.
look at me walk.
have you seen me walk?
I’m a skin boulder.
a people pile.
rolling
a fleshy bone ball.
a spinning flab sack.
a skin boulder.
I’m a meaty moving.
it’s like a dream I had once
where I was an old black man
making love to a fat odd looking tall girl
making love to this big woman
was like laying down my head
on the railroad line
and waiting for a train to run up on me
and she did
and i remembering loving it
but only for the surprise
the surprise of it
but now
I’m stuck there
here
surprised.
a friend asked me,
a friend of mine,
asked me,
“are these my knees?”
and I replied,
“yes.”
but in my fat head,
I thought,
“those are my knees.”
confused.
like, once
a blind man swung me up in his hand
and rode me across the street
and then left me for a bus stop
and
I stood there stunned, thinking,
“is this me?”
I saw the people in the cars staring
and thinking the same thing
without realizing it.
they also thought,
realizing it,
they thought,
“he is such a big thing.
that man.
look at him roll about.
fascinating.”
but
the little man
inside of me
the little man who could stand in the palm of your hand
and you wouldn’t feel it.
he thought differently.
he thought, “did I become something I meant to be?
this head I’m in swivels and swings
its like
being inside
a big mad legless cow
rolling across the earth
vibrating about.
and where’s my bus?
is this bus mine?”
that little man
he’s in a hot air balloon basket
and when it all ends
I’ll settle and sink all down around him
and me, this fat upside down bag of air
deflating
and him, that little man
tented on the inside
suffocating in the weight
he’ll peel it all back
hopefully
if he can crawl out of that sagging
he will
and find his way to a bus stop
to see what else he’ll get
but no matter
whatever bus is coming
comes
and he’ll just have to ride.

a hot air balloon passenger basket

“You’re a hot air balloon passenger basket.” He remembered the words, but not the context. He felt annoyed, recalling the sentence, but couldn’t figure out why, so, he bit his nails, followed by two other bad habits. He looked at a woman he’d seen in the café before. She’d lost a good amount of weight – most of her body, actually. Her head seemed to be misplaced. As if it actually belonged on a small doll with bad skin. Or old skin. Something worn out or burnt a bit. What hadn’t changed was her ass. She had a nice ass. Or a good jean skirt on. “Pair of skirts?” he thought, as he watched her posterior swing behind her and out the door to the car parked just outside the café window. He saw her head staring up the street while her hands held a coffee and unlocked her car door. This all took place behind the window’s translucent blinds, pulled down to fill most the window frame, but for a slight gap at the bottom. Looking at the woman, the texture of the blinds, and the way the sunlight cast across them, made him feel as though he were looking at his own reflection. He knew he wasn’t, but still, he needed to confirm the fact, thinking: “I’m looking straight ahead. She’s looking to the side and up the street. This can’t be my reflection.” He bit his index fingernail until pain burst through the tip – a fire fusing his teeth to his skin – a bit of aliveness. How could all of this, everything here, be his life? He picked up and stumbled through the crowd of café chairs, just to make something happen. Outside, she’d already gone. “Hot air balloon passenger basket.” She’d had a low cut red dress on when she’d said it. Bowing slightly, he looked in the window, under the blinds, back into the café, at the chair he’d just left, which some old man, taller than he, had already piled into.

it’s the tree…

It’s the tree.

Most of what I remember is laying on the carpeted floor on my belly, dressed in some kind of cotton pajamas, old enough to be the softest clothing ever, tucked into the corner of the dining room, in some other world. The bottom of the tree was my access point - this was where I was able to reach up into the guts of the pine, and dance my miniature creature ornaments along an intricate highway system of twisting branches. The ornaments - tiny Santa-likes living in snow-covered orange peel homes, snowmen with holes in which to insert Christmas lights for carrot noses, holiday rodents with brooms to sweep about their paths, tiny clay wreath frames with my sister’s school mug smiling out at me… I would immerse my head into the string lit forest, into these tiny lives, as long as bedtime held off, lost in the playful creation of giving being to the inanimate… all dressed in the blaze of little colored bulbs burning in between the pine needles…

And my mom… she would be on the other side of the kitchen table, dressed in her nightgown and robe, sipping white wine, Franzia, and watching TV. Nowadays, I often darkly assume my mom was always sitting there, whether it was holding the newborn me, or sitting on the hearth next to my father, or at the kitchen table drinking wine, but always with her mind somewhere else, very far away - sad and preoccupied, longing and regretful. But I think the truth of the matter is, she was right there, loving my angel innocence, brought into peace by her child’s awe as I stared up into the secret world of the Christmas light lit pine tree…

the tree - something she wanted to put up every year, without fail, and prepare by decoration, knowing that her beautiful son would lie on his belly and glow in its illumination, so very nearby.

time

Time. Gary Blum died recently. There’s a memorial for him this weekend in a park. I barely recognize something about his face. Like maybe I’ve seen him before. But I think it might just be death. I think I might be seeing that. But his head is blurry and seems unstable. In the photo. It’s like something is shaking loose. In a coffee shop. It’s like something is shaking loose in a coffee shop. Him sitting there. Gary. With his back to some dark cherry wood, feeling sick, just a little, feeling like he’s floating and nothing too dramatic. Not too invested in any of it and trying to avoid too much connection because it might tighten his chest painful. And he doesn’t read his book, but lays his palm down on its cover to feel it. He doesn’t want to rush it and for him time seems especially slow now. He relishes in it and stares through the café window as a car drives by backwards down the street. He hopes he’s got time moving that slowly, but then sees a pale young man in a grey t-shirt, with a shaved head, walking in the same direction as the car. Not backwards. So then he has to imagine the car’s parking space and the parallel parking up against a meter flashing red, wanting change, and so time gets to speed up. As much as he wanted otherwise. He presses the bones of his spine hard against the dark wood, the curve of his posture bows humbly. The afternoon is broken. He feels its cracking in the movement of the air around his blurry face. The lighting from above settles like an oven glow on his forehead, warm. A man with a bag slung over his shoulder stops above him, looking down at Gary with sympathy, and they exchange words that have nothing to do with what really matters - their hug. The man bends down to cradle Gary in his arms, so softly they don’t seem to be touching at all, and Gary handles the man’s torso, his back and sides, like a trembling glass cloud, carefully, as if he knows fragility. What does he know? A man in a bright blue and black plaid shirt, with enormous tanned calves, stops at the coffee prep counter. It’s where you get your cream or honey or lids and sleeves, and stirring his coffee to a lighter brown, lighter than the color of his skin, he sees Gary’s photo, framed blood red, sitting on the ledge of the window to the right of the cream or honey or lids and sleeves, and he pauses to lean in closely, to read about the memorial, to look into Gary’s face familiarly. Gary’s head is turned just enough to ask that you not look at him any longer and the man with the dark calves and a blue stirring stick hanging out of his lightly baked face complies and will likely think little of Gary again until the following morning. Gary is indifferent and turns his head in the earth somewhere or in his lovely ashes, his lonely ashes. And I think about my mom and how she’s still clinging to the rocks at Point Reyes. Perhaps. It’s been six years in November. Thanksgiving. And I still wonder how to capture it all and think how strange it is that my most common reoccurring remembering of my mom is those last days of her life. How do I honor her, remembering her falling backwards when she stood out of my car and I reprimanded her for not letting me help her, like a child, her apology, so tired and weak… the pile of her collapse on the sidewalk outside her apartment, embarrassed, offering excuses to a neighbor while my sister and I struggle to help her to her feet… her dark room while we eat turkey and mashed and cranberry… her lying in the hospital bed going away, hearing radio sounds, confused, aching, ice in my fingers on her lips, rubbing her legs and I lean over her to shed my love… and I lean over her to shed my love…

Untitled

US economic growth falls to 14-year low. I rub my mother’s legs as she lies in the hospital bed. General Motors cuts 67,000 jobs. I lose my mind when the nurses begin to rush about her body in a sudden silent frenzy. Recession slows but doesn’t stop local golf industry. The dawn drizzles into being like a broken egg yoke running. AIG Inc reported the largest quarterly loss in US corporate history. I can barely see the rain against the background of wet, grey buildings. Nokia cuts 1,700 jobs in sinking phone market. I see a white shoulder in a neighbor’s window, pale in the cloudy morning light. US jobless seen nearing 10 percent. I watch a woman drag her boy behind her like a ground bound kite. Royal Bank of Scotland posted the biggest loss in UK corporate history. I saw a girl draw flowers like atom bomb blasts in her notebook. 45 percent of World’s wealth destroyed. The fruit man’s son is dead. US household wealth falls $11.2 trillion in 2008. I held his hand and looked into his eyes as we cried. US consumer confidence plunges to all time low. Walking down my street, I am protected from the rain by trees that leave dry concrete silhouettes. Slump moves from Wall Street to Main Street. An old red-haired man licks his lips bloated, scarlet and sore. Irish recession worst than rest of the world. I ride the train sitting across from a lonely Diet Coke. US output plummets, manufacturing at record low. Amidst sheaths of newspaper an Asian woman loses her balance in the wind of an oncoming train. Chinese output growth slumps to record low. My mother asked me, “Am I going to die?” Hewlett Packard had 24,600 layoffs. “Someday,” I say. California hemorrhages jobs, but all states hurting. My father is a beautiful old man. Recession hits city’s waterfront. I will hold his hand when he dies and let him be.

The Browning of Banana

The banana sat still, coolly, on the high school lawn, this great unused lawn running on for hundreds of yards, unmarked, without goals or sports like design, only lain out for the kids who want to walk away for as long as possible, who want to turn their back forever, until they reach the broken opening of the chain link fence that runs the perimeter of the field, where there they can stoop and disappear into the foliage hiding the houses from being seen, or the foliage that helps keep their cries muted and muffled. People that live on the perimeter of a high school are old, and don’t exist and the foliage helps with that, while the old people think differently. It’s often quiet out there on the sun drenched grass, warming, perspiring in the heat, and the hot blanket mutes the farther off sounds of sports and chatter, school bells and the laughter of children - and these are children - little, wonderful “to be”s acting as sexy and important as their little bodies can allow, or as quiet and unnoticed, but its cold right now on the lawn, in that field, and it’s not quite quiet, because the silent morning is its own sound. And the banana sits browning in the chilly air, left there by some angry kid, who wanted to eat it very badly, but he was afraid of dying and didn’t know it, and so he dropped his fruit carelessly while being buried too deep in a world he thought was falling apart. And he was right, because everything he believed would be as true and as real as the browning banana. It’s only afterwards, with our runny noses and a rotten banana, completely browned, mushy and moldy, a tarry midnight moon, a sliver in the dark green sky, it’s only then that we can pause and sit down in it all, cross our legs next to such a thing… or I don’t know… All I care about is writing this down because I’m in love with it. I’m sitting cross-legged in the field behind my high school and I get to watch it all turn brown.

My Descent

Yesterday, I’m walking down the stairs to the MUNI at Church and Market, southwest entrance. I’m behind a young woman, with shiny black hair rivering in all directions, and some kind of pink and white something on. She walks at a steady pace and I’m at her heels, and suddenly, before we’re halfway down the stairs, we’re slowed to a crawl. An old Chinese man is walking one step at a time, shuffling with a cane in one hand and the railing in the other (at least I think he’s Chinese, because the nape of his neck seemed Chinese, with its black hairs standing out individually against orangish skin). He’s slow. Well below average in speed. And quickly, moments after some worried thoughts about missing my train (which I in fact do), I’m able to enjoy his pace. Actually, thinking of my mentality of the time, that doesn’t sound right. I didn’t miss my train. The train missed me and I’m not sure why it’s better to phrase it that way. So, we walked slowly, the girl and I, and the old man leading our measured descent - I accepted it and it was perfect.

Then, suddenly, a man’s voice fires off directly behind me. “Come on, mother f-k-r!!! Hurry the f-k up!!!!” And that’s his version of perfect. I can feel his angry breath blowing through my hair.

At first I resisted and thought about the things I’d say to the gentleman.

“Hey, don’t you know you’re gonnuh die someday? What’s the point of that? Would you talk to your Grandpa that way?”

And I smiled, because I knew I already had all the versions of this guy’s answers.

In response to the question about his Grandfather he would reply, “Yeah. My Granpa beat me. Shut the f-k up.”

But the conversation wouldn’t get so far along. The interrogation wouldn’t get past my first question, the one about dying. It’s a question I like to think of as an enlightened response to the ridiculousness of people in my life. I think it, say it and text it as if it’s the only answer - well, an answer in the form of a question. “With this handful of words I will crack your reality open to the truth of everything. You will love and cry and understand. Remember me. My name is Ned and I’ve changed your life.” Yeah. Of course, in reality, the man behind me on the stairs would assume I was instead threatening his life, he would pull a gun out from his yellow and gold billowing sweater covered in cartoon skulls, and shoot me in the chest.

I also imagined abruptly turning on the stairs to face him, total physical confrontation, to which his response would be to push me down the stairs onto my head.

So, instead of taking any action, instead of changing this guy’s life forever, I opted for quiet smiling and let the whole thing be perfect.

dharma haikus

one wet sock
and then another
drying on the burning boulder

in the belly of twilight
the moon grins widely
at my baked beans and blueberry pie

clicking
in the glow of the fire
the wood beads light up one by one

charred logs
wetted from the rain
i see your orange eyes looking at me

wrapped in frozen air
my hand warms
on the long neck of a wine bottle

crawling in the leaves
fallen from the naked tree
the rattlesnake flips me off

on the mountaintop
dressed in clouds
chinese lunatics and mountain goats

laying in his hand
the melted snow spittle
cools the burn

in the cornfield
under a blanket of fog
is that dog laughing?

a mosquito
as big as a horse hoof
runs off with my insides

“THE STORY OF THE GILAK MONSTER” or “Love Notes in the Bathroom”

A woman wove a basket.

the 1^st basket

For earrings, beads and comb.

she thought

“It had never been done”

and then

quail woman –> Sister

               “Might I weave a basket”

                “Yes I think so.

                                    It’s dangerous.”

                           Something could happen.

                                      Be careful.

Swan Woman –> quail woman

            “Yes. Do it. Be careful. I can protect you.

                        From dry ones. And water ones

                                                , but not flying ones.”

She began -

            Snakes, water ripples, quail crest

                        (feather from quail woman)

   quail woman made LARGE basket

       I                        for her husband for his relatives

       I                                            ’–> hawk

       ‘ –> but then she was sorry, felt bad

because her husband was adulterous

she finished and ran away

                       left red tracks

                             on track on rocks on land

                                          in the water

“he will follow me.”

(You’re the most amazing man

I’ve ever known.

How did I find you? Why did you choose

me? Sometimes I stare at you, almost

in disbelief, and I just have to reach

out and touch you. Make sure it’s real.

               I love you so much.)

                  but he didn’t.

she took it in the river

        and floated away

    “I wish my children will fall asleep

                and I’ll send a dream to come to me.”

      dry meat, acorns for them to eat

She floated

          Monsters came to her

                ”     entranced

She landed on the shore

                    ”Where now?”

                               N

                           W  +   E

                                S

Gilak Monster flew and saw her and

                       took her to his home in the mountains

                 fast, loud

ginty gitty gitty gitty ginny

     his brother opened the flap on the front

                                       door

    he wore his sister

  yawning sharp teeth

Gilak - man, woman, children

ginty gitty gitty gitty ginny

      drops people though the hole

             she chews them and spits them out

a bear, two snakes, a watchman - one eye

              Gilak gouged his other eye

                               ‘cause he slept

“next time I’ll take out the other eye”

one legged brother he forgot to set the trap

            “next time, the other”

if the bear, snakes would be asleep

      the trap would break your back

Hawk’s wife was brought here

      but not the hole

      but through the door

  “take care of her for me”

Hawk man cried “I’ll get her back”

(You’ve got me lost in you.

I’m kissing memories and

  making love to mystery

oceans away. Us set spinning

on a globe… two little souls

within one another’s dream…

I am yours and the miles

  make me ache with

         heart glow for

              your face…)

Grandpa Coyote said “no - Gilak will kill you.

                                             you can’t beat them”

Hawk didn’t listen

He rolled in the dirt and grew feathers

 flew, bow + arrow

   flew

rubbed off his feathers

    crept to the door

the trap got him, swung him to the

          center post, broke his back

brother threw him to his sister

     who opened her legs

          ate him

          spit him out

and grandpa coyote man cried

The Fruit Man’s Son is Dead

I didn’t see the fruit man’s canvas covered stand today
He sells pluots, persimmons and jujubes
He’s a fat man with long grey hair who smiles and learns your name
Who cried when we talked about his dad
I’d carry home a bag of fruit for the week
Tucked between my feet on the train
And people would place their eyes upon it
And I’d wonder what they wonder
Last week he rolled his hand through the persimmons
As I handed him my bills
He pinched their little bodies with his chubby careful hands
And he gave me one on him
A ripe sagging bag of red
As his thin quiet wife stepped by to say hello
And I spread its orange insides on my toast the morning after
“His son died on the way to a funeral,” someone told me.
“He might be back in January.”

Jennifer and Jimbob

Another Quote

When I was younger I thought that the feelings that went through me were - that I would outgrow them, that the anxiety or panic or whatever it is called would disappear, but you sort of suspect it at thirty-five, [and] when you get to be fifty you definitely know you’re stuck with your neuroses, or whatever you want to classify them as - demons, completed ceremonies, any old damn thing. - harry smith

As a writer…

As a writer, you need to be able to lie in bed at night and understand the darkness of the ceiling.

Or that’s how it seemed to me last night.

I looked up at the ceiling and understood the shadows hanging above me. I understood the light peeling through the crack in the bedroom door and how that light played against the dark. I could relate to the silent closet doors. The curtains over the window, just a certain shade of gray, I could connect to. I thought like the stillness and could translate what it had to say. I was available, naturally. 

Then I thought, my own thought, which was, “What’s the point of all this darkness? Why not a joke?”

And I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t even laugh. I just continued to stare at the darkness, knowingly.

And I want to.

In the Mourning

Benjamin woke up to a neighbor clearing his throat of phlegm, choking on a web of spittle and snot. Ben’s building and the building next store touched, wall to wall, like much of the buildings in the city, but for a small space between them into which several apartment windows opened, into which the noises of various lives constantly spilled. Intimate noises, but noises that echo in the space of concrete and plywood siding, and end as deadened and lifeless sounds.

Lying in bed, stress became him, thoughts of the day without lightness. So he rose.

He stood naked by the bedroom window, illuminated by the pale glow of morning, closing the blinds left open through the night. I have nothing to create. A child screamed itself awake in the building next to theirs. Your parents enable you. It’s just a phase.

He looked at his girlfriend lying still, breathing deeply, in bed. If she doesn’t tell you often that you have food in your teeth, then you’re unhappy. You’re not smiling enough. Some old friend whose name he couldn’t recall, but still quotable.

He leaned over the bed to kiss her cheek, and stopped, suddenly feeling powerful. I’m the doctor who, with stethoscope hanging round my neck, checks the heartbeat of the men after they’re hung. I make sure they’re dead after they stop shaking. His lips were frozen inches from her cheek. As if she knew, she rolled to the far side of the bed, into the imprint of his body left from the night. I can’t stop.

In the kitchen, while the water heated to a boil, Benjamin stared at a small hole he’d made in the wall the day they moved in. Something was meant to hang there, but relocated. It’s not important. Whatever you feel about that hole, it’s not important. All of it passes. The string on his teabag read, “When ego is lost, limit is lost.” He laughed, secretly hoping there were people whose lives were changed by teabags.

Wrapped tightly in his bathrobe, he stepped outside to lift the morning paper from the stoop. The homeless man sat on the curb.

He is a 300-pound man who wears a tiny white tank top that could belong to a little girl. His backpack is a sweater with the sleeves tied to its bottom to make straps. He wears it upside down on his back. Another article of clothing is stuffed in the neck hole to keep things from falling out. He wears an extra large Alcatraz t-shirt as pants, with his legs through the sleeves, and the bottom tied tightly around his waste so as to prevent them from slipping off when he stands. His creamy white belly balloons forward onto his lap. His hat is strapped around his jaw that chews away at indiscernible words.

I feel the sudden urge to talk to this man who so often sits picking a nipple or sleeps stretched out on the sidewalk. 

Wailing the Work

The front door of someone’s apartment sits right outside our kitchen window located at the rear of our building. You can see the stairs ascend to the front door while sitting at our dining table. The apartment is inset deeply into the rectangular residential block formed by Noe, Duboce, 14th and Walter streets, requiring a building-length walk to gain access. A man who lives there practices the trumpet. His horn blows in filling our rooms. It’s loud enough to touch each nook and corner on a quiet day, but faint enough to remind your subconscious that you might be in a movie. It’s a movie about a lonely man who lives in a city. He spends most of the film in his apartment, and most of the time he’s there the sound of the horn spills into his home, breathed from the life of some faceless musician. It’s the director’s attempt at representing heartbreak through art. The man does not have a TV. He does not play music. Pictures spot the walls and are too dark to distinguish. He does not talk to anyone and when his phone rings he does not answer. He does not have an answering machine. He has white t-shirts and pants that aren’t sweatpants, but only look like sweatpants. He keeps the blinds open, but the sunlight seems to stop just inside the window. A shot of a stovetop flame clicking and lighting. A shot of a boiling pot of red. A shot of the man leaning back against the counter, hands resting on its edge, head bowed. A close-up of his hand. Whichever. The man sits in silence, before a steaming bowl, unshaven, with sags under his eyes, and stares. Sometimes I’ll leave while the trumpet is wailing and when I return, hours later, I can still hear it. The commitment is relentless. Scales. Songs. Piercingly string like instrumental sounds, like sudden wailing exclamations of a violin. Again and again. His lips are swollen and meaty pink. His cheeks ball out from his face. His throat breathes differently than yours or mine. He wails the work of the horn. He wails the work. I listen imagining.

After the Win

I worked at the restaurant the night of the election. Towards the end of the evening, listening to Obama’s acceptance speech, I leaned against the counter, celebrating with a beer in hand, and noticed the Mexican cooks toiling hurriedly in the kitchen.

One of the cooks and I play a game where we hit one another in the arm until one of us gives. I give.

On the way home, waiting for the J-train, 30 minutes behind schedule, a homeless man shuffles down the steps from the bridge over the 280. He climbs over the divide into the freeway and, bowed, walks to his island home out of which juts a massive column supporting an overpass. Rags, papers, bags, trash, all tuck up against the concrete pillar forming a great round bed of debris. I forget about him in my mounting frustration with the tardy train, until, minutes later, a flame bursts out of his shadows lighting his form and immediately subsides.

After waiting for a train that should have arrived 40 minutes earlier I can’t get the backdoor to open, so I slam myself through its front door thinking I’m furious and it matters.

Walking down Duboce Street to my apartment I notice darkened helicopters hovering over our Castro neighborhood and realize Prop 8 will not pass. The noise from the incessant chopping of the cold night does not cease until after I fall asleep.

Walking to school in the morning, it seems everyone thinks you voted for McCain. The space between us has that feel.

The Smoke Hurts

She sits, with dead grassy hair, kneeling, collapsed on her knees, her feet tucked under to touch her bare toes to the wall, leaning forward onto her elbows, so her burning butt is inches from the ground, breathing out the smoke by holding an index finger, with its dirty pink fingernail, against one nostril, to pinch it closed, letting the pale smoke leak out the other…

I’m Writing

Oh. Um. Boy.
I got nothin’ right now.
I’m up, and I’m after it, but I’m empty.
I feel good, but I have nothin’ drawing towards the page.
8:02am.
Hm.
8:03am.
A ball of light.
Explosion.
A dog’s rear end in the night.
Rearend?
Rear-end.
Hyphens.
Hyphens are always trying to find a place in my documents.
Where they don’t belong.
No. I am serious. This is serious writing.
Um.
A dusty window, sunlit, um, pane.
Look at your green triangle roof.
A blow dryer.
Yeah. Nothin’ doin’.
There are brooms, swiffer sweepers, mops that contrapt, buckets to my right.
A blank wall in front of me.
Ooooo.
I’m staring at a blank wall.
A blank space.
I’m writing.
No.
E-mail.
Organize.
Feel accomplished.
Morning noises knocking on the shell of my office.
Nothin’ doin’.
8:10am.
8:16am.
E-mail.
Drinking green tea that says to me, “It’s not life that matters, it’s the courage that we bring to it.”
Sip.
8:17am.
I hear a bird.
I have nine minutes.
I’m done.
I’m a writer.

A Dream

I had a dream last night that we climbed through a cityscape. We climbed shelves of ramshackle buildings, scattered and rotting in the highest regions of a metropolis, up into cold heights of poverty and loneliness. These splintering, tottering, hollow shacks were sun stained and worn by the wind. We ran through their endless open doorways and windows emptied of glass, finding nothing but browned rags, dried and clumped in corners, and shards of bleached wood, peeled away from the structure walls and lying in piles on the dirty, dry floors.

At first, when I saw it coming on the horizon, I thought it was a vivid night, one of those nights where you can see forever - Mars and shooting stars and ridiculously glowing constellations. Then I saw a brilliant burning comet spraying a pyramid path into the sky, so bright I thought to put it in my palm, and I realized that we looked upon the end - the midnight movement of death.

The end of the world came, a firestorm roaring across the earth, a horizon of black clouds billowing into the heavens, scratched with cracks of lightening shooting in all directions, and glowing in its belly was the rolling sun, brought down from the sky and sent burning unto us, embracing everything…

…and we huddled round each other, you two and some woman I can’t remember.

We hugged each other closely, and just as I told you, “I love you,” the blackness swallowed us and you were gone.

What replaced you was the total silence of a cradling void.
I was frozen in the fetal position and could not move.
I acknowledged the nothingness with my aloneness.
Dead is immovable darkness and heavy breathing.
That is all.

Entirely awake, lying in the cool sheets of my bed, it was some time before I accepted that I could move.

When I was finally able to open my eyes, I thought I’d learned something…

Sister

I remember a blue kiddy pool sliding downhill. I remember cracks in a faded green hose. I see a living stream of silver, warm then cold, pouring forth a rising body of water. I lie down, belly first in that perfectly shallow bowl, quickly heated by the sun. There were creatures spotting the rippled surface, lifted off the pool by light playing in the tiny waves. That backyard slanted, but somehow we stuck, the only time I ever remember. The Redding sun was an explosion in the sky, a prickly white light reaching out from a single point in the heavens. There is no want in its glare. We will remember the heat of it forever, and talk about it like a dead mother. That day, it toasted us in a soup of splashing laughter. We were raised up above the first floor of our home - our memory removed from the toils of our long gray patio, from the creased and heavy stare of the kitchen, and from the deep slumped shadows of the dining room. These spaces now are only white gold, without description, filled with the shower of sunlight. I cannot remember you, only imagine. But, in recalling my giggling and where my eyes looked with a child’s pure love and admiration, I see you. We stepped from the pool into our upstairs world. In our underwear, toweled and toasted, we lay together in the original innocence. My skin, the smoothest warmth I can ever remember, so warm I suck my thumb and rub my tummy with my small hands, moving my fingers around my belly’s bulge. The sun, much less direct, spilled into the cupped wooden hands of the balcony and through the sliding glass door, sending dust stars floating above our napping heads.

My Rear Window

I can look out my window and see things happening that my neighbors will never know. Across the stretch of long backyards a squirrel bounds up the wooden steps running along the back of a building. It’s like Rear Window, but more detailed and less dramatic. I think about walking around the block, knocking on that neighbor’s door, and saying:

“Hey. A squirrel just bounded up the steps at the back of your building.”

“It’s 7:30 in the morning,” they’d say, wrapping himself or herself tighter in a blanket or robe.

“Oh. Right. I know. But I just got up to write and happened to look out my living room window and I saw this squirrel bounding up your steps. I thought it was a bird at first. Your robe or blanket is the same color as mine.”

“Yeah.”

“Heh. So, anyway, I had this thought, like, ‘My neighbor doesn’t know this is happening,’ like, ‘My neighbor doesn’t know this special moment is happening and what would it be like to let them know.’ So, that’s when I decided to stop by and let you know.”

“Don’t ever do this again.”

And they’d close the door, and I’d walk back around the block, in my blanket and/or robe, and shuffle back into my building, down the long hallway, and into my living room, and I’d stand again at the window, and look out over the long backyards to those wooden steps, and see, just at that moment, in the backdoor at the top of the stairs, a bundle of someone pulling back into the darkness of their home and closing the door.

Joy

I see you sitting at the kitchen table with your hands curled on your crossed knees.
You are staring out the wall of windows.
Your long black hair curls backwards towards me.
I know you are crying.
The young daylight dresses down on you.
Coffee steams a background to your form.
An emptying brown bowl coldly touches a table tile.
A milky spoon reflects sunlight.
Squirrels run the lines.
Crows caw.
Chills funnel through me.
You are recording yourself in the consciousness of a frame.
I must sit down on the carpet to let the ripples occur.
I hear my imagination echo a train.
And I can’t move.
It will always seem like I sat down.

Hard Rain

My vision is on fire listening to Dylan’s Hard Rain. I walk 16th again in those early yawnings of dawn. I want to learn those songs and cry while I sing them, yelling them out, up from the sidewalk, until people have to stop. I run to catch my train. I sweat, descending into the ground. As words about clowns shower down, a woman, blind, ascends the escalator. I see worlds in my periphery. Her hair spins orange, swirling around the dying pink skin of her scalp. I hear her tightrope walk between the trees. She seems to not be on the rope, but standing with one foot on the hill. She totters a foot off the ground as cloud shadows crowd passed, trying to knock her off balance. They stream across the grass. I see three men on the other side of the world, in love, smiling over breakfast, tucked in the corner of warmth. These brothers laugh about sex and dying, bringing fists together, acknowledging the noise they make… they distract me, and when I realize it, she’s already fallen out of sight.

Latino Boy

I watched this Latino boy sitting on the train with me, with eyes shifting to and fro like dancing fleas in tiny jars. I stared at him with my aviators on, seeing him scramble on hands and knees to reclaim an almost empty Gatorade, which he’d dropped under a middle-aged thin man with graying hair, who spoke into bright white headphones with business lips. I wondered if it was the last of oranged alcohol swaying in that bottle, and didn’t forgive him, until I saw his large black plastic glasses I’ve seen the elderly wear, wrap his face to hide out the sun and protect his sensitive pupils due to whatever his abnormality.

EXPULSION

Expulsion
I’m surrounded
By eyes - black olives floating in pools of nonfat milk sagging in the burnt surface of so many melting faces
If I write, I am saved
There is shining light from where my pencil strikes
The same clawed at yellow light I’ve seen lay down on city buildings
The light of smoke screened suns
And everything is old newspaper
Boxed and pressed in closet corners, basements and in attics
Vibrating yellowed memories
And a wadded paper cloud, scribbled with grey lines, is tucked into the crook of a tree formed by a sawed off limb
It is Ginsberg’s poetry
Perhaps placed by his homeless ghost
Finally
Everything I see, I selfishly see reflecting me
The only time I pay attention
I want to what?
I have anything?
This is not my world?
I asked to be here before I was born
And I picked up something on the way that refuses to accept it.

…

Looking at a woman’s cleavage, I thought: “I don’t believe you,” and she disappeared.

I Saw You Old

I’ve had these moments in my life,
looking at a good friend,
where I suddenly see them aged old.
It’s not an imposition of my imagination.
In fact, it’s something that’s gifted unto me,
like an instant of angelic glow illuminating a face.
It just becomes.
It’s an epiphany of knowing someone’s presence in my life,
beyond my general comprehension.

Looking at you last night,
your perfect face struck me
and I understood how precious it is that I can look at you
and that I’m going to do so for a very, very long time…

You’re beautiful old.

The News

A sea lion is saved from swimming up the LA River. The media names him Chili Pepper because a radio station covering the news story plays The Red Hot Chili Peppers current hit single for the rescue crew that saves his life.

A dog chases a rabbit into a pipe and gets his head stuck. The local firemen are able to cut the dog free from the pipe after much media hoopla. The local news channel names the dog Leary because their station is about to air the first episode in the new season of Rescue Me.

A dead man’s body is found unidentifiable. Instead of naming him John Doe, the local church names him Lazarus. A new version of the Bible is about to be released.

The 1936 Olympic Diving Competition

How you doin’?
Good. You?
Not bad. Not bad at all.
What’s your name again?
Pete.
Pete. Right.
He yawns from the bottom of his gut.
I’m sorry. I’m just fighting with my Ipod here.
No problem.
He hums while moving his hands as if an accordion were between them, with his Ipod earphones hanging like a web of bright white from his fingers. His hair falls down to the small of his back.
I’m sorry.
Statistically, women say I’m sorry more than men.
Well, they say you should sleep through your pregnancy since you won’t be sleepin’ after the kid’s been born.
I know. I missed the boat on that one.
His face is puffy with paleness. Sunken in circles of pink skin, his eyes do not blink. He has a comb in the back left pocket of his baggy blue jeans. A knife clips in the front right. We begin staring at one another until his friend walks between us and I look away before our eyes meet again. He wears a Dr. Seuss hat and sucks on a juice box.
I don’t even know how my grammar and punctuation speak.
You’re right. You don’t know.
His pants are baggy like a man who never buys pants. In the background, to the right of his head, footage from the 1936 Olympic diving competition plays in black and white on a TV.
I get up and move to the window seat.

The Twins

The little girls wore identical golden slip-on shoes, red skirts, and sweaters - one blue, one pink - that only buttoned at the top, flaring out towards the bottom, exposing the bump of their little girl bellies covered by the stretch of matching white shirts. Their stockings were duplicates, but only in style - one pair was white and the other rainbow striped. They both looked to be around nine or ten years old. Their hair was short and blonde, cut in a bob, implying they were children traveling the world, originating in some European country where the bob prevails over little girl heads. Their eyes were cold and didn’t smile. Although they might have been the girls to inspire the concept, their role in the world of imagination is not as elements of a Hollywood horror, like twin girls on tricycles weaving down endless hotel hallways pursued by a deluge of blood or combing one another’s hair in the dark while singing children’s lullabies accompanied by long shrill notes on a violin. These girls are actually only worth noting because of their mother. She is swallowed in the horrific arrogant auras which connect the two little girls in the space between them. Can you imagine your childish ego if it had one more version of you to stare at, to bathe in the sound of, to admire and adore? A description of the mother would deny the circumstances. She is unimportant within their world, invisible in their creepy cuteness and dissolved in the reflection between her two little girls. And for the same reason, their mother is why they’re worth mentioning at all.

Jack

Jack sits on a stack of wooden planks behind the Railroad buildings. These silent metal mountainous boxes push up against the water, leaving a tight strip of red mud collecting long planks of scrap metal and piles of rotting wood for men like Jack to hunker down in and disappear. He sits with a grease smeared bottle of muddy liquid. He lifts and tilts the bottle back, pouring a molasses swallow between his cracked, chapped lips. He is years beyond the point where one grimaces. There are no longer first sips that burn the throat. The sky hangs of gloom - a filmy stretch of dark blue and milky purple peppered with clumps of soggy grey clouds.
The answers are where the dancers are. That’s the class.
The words slur out of him onto the damp red soil between his boots. It’s not raining and won’t. The river’s water burps and sighs, shifting slightly with each sound, moving in no particular direction.
You’re a cold breath, river. A cold breath… breathin’ in.
Jack is a mound of ashen cloth.
Behind him, some silver rusted cap atop a building whirs into motion, humming on the same canvas plane as a giant string of cobweb smoke billowing through the cold air. The smoke leaks out of a worn red vent tilted on the same roof.
Jack doesn’t turn towards the humming, but instead crumples forward onto the red earth before him. There is a muffled crack and shattering of his warm bottle underneath the settling weight of a ragged body.

I am an angel

I am a heartbroken angel of lightening
I am the coughing mountain’s grasping on the edge of earth’s washed out dream
Can you imagine the experience of that dream if you’d never dreamt before?
And what of this great life?
Open your eyes sleeper!
Can you conceive of the absurdity that is your state of concern?
Smell your palms and squint in the light that projects from the back of your memory
You are not lost, but knowing is lost to you
When the midnight clock’s hand shakes a finger at your thinking, your soul will come to attention and your senses will help you while you wait
I have never wondered deeply enough
Wrapped in a rainbow, I start
I begin to peer down passed the ribbons of color to catch a glimpse of my bare feet
Someday they will not be mine
I can not wait
Tea vapors still themselves underneath my nose
Light contains all the answers you’ll need and, blind or not, it is available always
Wonder
Could you have ever dreamt of this, and, if so, would you have ever remembered the magnitude of your discovery once you saw it for the first time twice?
I have no time for your stories today
Only for the endless curve of a woman’s breast, or the vividness of the eye awakened, or the reflection of light off the inside of my mind, or the sweet breath of an inaudibly spinning earth pasting my face, or my knowing, or, or, or, or…
I am confronted by two ‘me’s
My left eye looks directly into my right eye and vice versa
The questions drill forth until their ceaseless pounding becomes a humming to put me to sleep
To understand that all you need is right here is something I can only begin to feel
So, turn your pigeon head into your Buddha belly and curl until you’re flat and still
Close your eyes and let the dream experience continue because whether you let it in or not, it will go on with you
Thank God
Rest in that
That is what you have
Can you feel your hands vibrating?
Can you see the particles of life dancing in the moisture covering the surface of your eyes?
Can you feel the heat in the balls of your feet?
Take time
Take time
Take time
You are glowing
You are laughing
Thank God for you
How wonderful that it means nothing and there is no point to any of it
What a weight off your chest
Thank God
Take time
That which is now has already been
Take time

So, Here’s this piece.

I miscalculated how long it would take to get a piece done after work. Actually, I miscalculated when I would get off work. So, it’s 11:37pm, I just got home from work, and I don’t want to muscle my brain through a piece. I didn’t want to start a piece now, intending it to seem like I’d sat down this afternoon and scribbled out some dramatic poem or a cinematic story. In fact, I could’ve managed to pull it off, but I just sat down at my computer, sweaty from the race to get home from work (a ran to BART from the pizzeria, I waited for three minutes for a train, a quick two stops later I come up out of the earth on Mission Street hoping to catch the 22 bus that would drop me off “near” my house, but the electronic sign said it would take 22 minutes before one came by, so I kicked a heated pace into my sore feet and walked all the way home and stepped in the door minutes ago to sit at my computer), and after my journey to get here, sitting at my computer, I gave up what I’d usually do. So, here’s the piece. What’s out there? There’s so much to write on. If I’m writing everyday, plenty of my writings can be something just like this. It’s up to me, right? God, I take myself so seriously. I’m tired. I’m done.

A Quote

Focused and pointed she was, buried in the depths of her star, swallowed in its peace and strength; and not feeling her flesh growing cold, cold as the rain that fell from the invisible sky upon the doomed living and the dead that never dies. - richard wright from “bright and morning star”

My response to the above quote is best captured in yet another quote…

A person reading a wonderful book is overwhelmed by feelings of inspiration and ignorance, bafflement and belief, and becomes a sort of dogged, dazzled apostle, limping after the priestly figure of the writer. - paul theroux from his novel my other life

I’m in LA

I’m in LA sitting on a friend’s epic stretch of porch in a passable cooling North Hollywood breeze. I am suddenly content and then not so much. I could use water. I am dry. Music from passenger planes flying out of Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport screams far overhead in the upside down pool of hot smog. Blond sunglassed bodies walk the sidewalk carrying groceries for bulky hard boyfriend’s who won’t engage. Planes thunder over and over. I journeyed through Hollywood today, before dipping underground and resurfacing at the North Hollywood Metrorail station. It’s there that you come up into a neighborhood that is well prepared too soon for a lot of people roaming the streets between their lofts and the places they’ll spend money… so, for now, these streets are eerily empty in the sweltering heat. The energy of fame in Los Angeles fills the void. It is unavoidable in direct relation to the version of mentality that I have. All the attention your ego could ever want is behind everything you see. It star strikes you, while at the same time hollowing out all those things that don’t fit in a world of perfection - a too young girl’s exposed cleavage, a man loitering drunk, greasy on Hollywood Boulevard with a shirt that reads: “Yeah whatever. Blah, blah, blah,” a store named RITZ missing an “I” on its sign… it’s all the more meaningfully dark and saddening, but in the same dramatically fake way that stars draw millions seeking fame in this great concrete haystack of billboards and concrete. It’s because in a childish country like ours, growing up with Hollywood as its younger stubborn sibling, fame and stardom is synonymous with success and accomplishment, with really being worthy. My friend rolls up on his bike and doesn’t notice me. He reaches in his mailbox to grab a handful of letters, turns and sees me, says, “Hey brother,” gives me a hug, and, before I say anything, says, “Let’s get you some water.” We disappear from this world into his home.

Sunset Ariquepa

So long new sun
The moon is forever here
The taxis line up like one of your last rays
You have sent me into the night, cool and dreamy, just like my heart expected
Pigeons spill like falling night shadows in Ariquepa center
With the constant babble of all rich language I know, but can’t understand
Our waitress turns on a light and I have my friend turn it off
The lights of the city are taking over a long tall cathedral
Arequipa’s air breathes like syrup
Lasagna de la Bolognesa rumbles my stomach with Andean cheese
This is like any of my moments
Anywhere
Using the simple bits to communicate worlds through my prose and poetry
Ready
Go.

A Quote

And the writer has got primarily to be a writer first, everything else must go by the board. Let him be a writer first; let him be honest, brave or whatever, but let him be a writer first. - william faulkner

I have yet to figure out what this means for the writing version of me, but this commitment to the daily production of material has me sitting face to face with him.
And he’s staring at me, waiting for me to say something.

Ariquepa Monastery

I feel your dusty walls and don’t know the stone
These colors - blue, red and brown - can’t be real
My feet ache on your empty cobbled walkways
You nuns prayed under a God here for 370 years, but all things pass and here I am
Snorting, farting, guffawing my way through corridors of ghosts
Worried that no one likes me and everyone’s leaving me
You bathed here and now naked sunlight lays vulnerable to me prying into old spaces
I am caught up with at the fountain of fish babbling
I take pictures of the places your dusty feet shuffled while you slouched in habits hiding barbed wires
That’s the thing I’ll take with me until I forget

A Muttering Bum

In San Francisco I am always inside a masterpiece… I’ve got all the need and love anyone can possibly have for a city, but my words blow about the streets like dusty dead leaves and then they’re beautifully fitting. I am in the painting I always wanted to escape to.

As a child I peered through shivering back seat windows, hanging my puppet hand down into the framed painting and running my index and middle fingers like a giant’s legs on the snapping landscape passing. My top heavy, meaty man bounded blundering thunder steps, hurtling through AMPMs and miniature golf courses, ACE Hardwares and feed stores, through the shanty towns full of too many poor people to grow into the greater city limits of Redding, Cal. My giant tickled a loving separation between my mind and reality. When my hand dropped away from the window to rest running muscles, my eyesight would blur with the passing world until settling on the stable mountain skyline, the rolling pyramids of green cast before the hanging curtain of heaven, heaving and billowing like a subtle mirage in the winds of our roaring white Plymouth Minivan flinging down the freeway into the raining dark of dusk. When the horizon of mountains found my focus, like green toes of Gods, untouched and unaffected, I was certain we should pass them as fast as the stones that line the interstate, but we don’t and they are magic mountains then and I will myself into the warm womb of their grand rolling. I will instant transport to these lands, to drop my bare boy’s feet onto the glowing sloping grass mountainsides inspired by the likes of Tolkien and Lewis… or maybe birthed out of the creative innocence of a child’s original knowing… a place we all wish we could bathe our minds in forever.

Alright, Alright…

 

 Motherless Bastard performed by The Books [4:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Alright, alright… I have issues with my dad. Or, more accurately, who my dad was. It’s all in the voice of the child heard in the song posted above, his final pleading utterance when he realizes his dad is foresaking him. Can we, as beings proven capable of such great accomplishments, waste any more time in protecting ourselves? I was surprised recently when an old friend told me that I didn’t use to say “I love you” to someone I now know I should be loving on continually. How do we get the necessary perspective on our present selves to gain clarity on those things that it seems only time reveals? We are so fragile. We are so mortal. In our vulnerability we are constantly protecting ourselves. We want to be loved so badly that we prevent ourselves from the experience for fear it will end in hurt and loneliness. I’m so grateful I’ve had the opportunity to waste so much time… I’m learning something, I think.

Some day, my kid is going to post writings on their blog about a dad who smothered them too much.

Blind Date

“So tell me about your work? Flowers. Yum. Sounds fun.”
Steven was tired of people talking. He was tired of hearing people talk. We’re all going to die and everything I’m saying and everything she’s saying has already been said. What are we trying to duplicate? Why are we duplicating this?
“Steven? Did you hear me?”
“I do,” he said. “I am angry enough to die.”
“What?”
It seemed unimportant to speak any longer. He hated being with her, so he committed to saying one more thing: “I have a feeling that…” he paused and looked outside the restaurant. Through its open door he could see a curtain billowing in an open upstairs apartment window.
“Yes,” she said. “What do you feel?”
Her voice reminded him of the smell of rotting, soggy rose stems in stale water.
He started again, “I have a feeling that,” and, after another pause, “you’re stupid.”
She wasn’t even there.
“What?” she said. “What did you say?”
He sat alone.
Again. “I have a feeling that you’re stupid.”
It’s a memory or a prophecy.
She stared at him.
It’s something in the future,
She grabbed her purse from off the floor where it lay next to her chair.
like when he saw himself years later as an old man,
She finished her glass of wine in one swallow.
asleep on a bench in the park that a wildfire destroyed last summer,
She didn’t look him in the eye and had an understanding, knowing look on her face.
dressed in a green flannel shirt,
She stood.
wearing pants with an overalls feel.
“Thanks for the dinner, Steven,” she said, and walked out of the restaurant.
He put a piece of dry bread in his mouth.
“Vomit me on dry land,” he mumbled.

Speaking with a Friend

Sitting outside of Sooz coffee shop I realize I spend a lot of time at coffee shops. I speak with a friend about existence. A blind man sits at a table across from us, helped to his seat by a café worker. He pulls the lid off his double cupped coffee carefully and with no gratuitous movement. He pulls out his phone that looks like a chocolate bar and dials a number. “Maybe it is and he doesn’t realize it,” I think. I notice all of his movements are intentional and necessary, although, as he talks into the candy bar, he flips the cup lid in his hand playfully. He takes a sip from his coffee by bending his head over the table and bringing his mouth to the cup’s lip. I think he looks up at me. I look down at my sunglasses sitting on the table. In their reflection, I see the tiny head of a man looking back at me. After studying the tiny man’s silhouetted bust for some time, I realize I’m wearing a t-shirt with Jack Kerouac’s head printed on its front. I acknowledge my overzealous need to believe in the extraordinary. An odd sounding bird flies into a tree overhead. The blind man freezes and turns his face to the sky. I wonder if I would have noticed how odd the bird sounded if the blind man hadn’t noticed it too. A boy sits nearby. He has a book with him. He says hello to my friend and, “I’ll see you at the bird.” I know they work together at a restaurant with a bird’s name, so think nothing of it. We get up to leave. As we walk to the car and pass the boy’s table, I look at his book cover and see that it’s Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It’s hot - maybe 92 degrees.

Cell Phone Lights

In the falling night there is a glow on all the many faces from cell phone lights.

I remember myself as a child, lying at the top of our brown carpeted stairs, trying to see what my dad watched on TV. I spied my father sitting in our living room sofa chair. The chair had a headrest like a flap of skin or a hood which you could lift and place your head underneath to hide. I watched him in his boxers and plaid, unbuttoned shirt, with his bare legs and moccasin tucked feet resting on the ottoman. The ottoman had wheels that fell off when it rolled on the carpet and you had to pick it up on its side to put them back in, one by one, holding each wheel in place until you could set it down again. I watched him from under the wooden banister and from between two of its support posts, hanging down the carpeted stairs, looking at an upside down world framed by those strips of poorly placed wood. The stairs ran passed the ceiling and there the banister stopped, cut at an angle to fit plush against the ceiling surface. The support posts continued running along the ceiling surface, passed where the banister ended, shortening until they were no more than a foot long, and providing a tiny wooden window of protection, a window from which I could watch my dad undetected, hidden in the shadows of the stairs. I’d watch him and be back in bed before he’d leave, well passed bedtime. I would hear the screen door settle and his cowboy boots knock down the concrete walkway. His truck lights would spill on my room’s ceiling and walls while I lay in bed staring at my window. I would hear the sound of the gravel under his wheels and see the dimming lights disappearing from my room until only the noise of his truck engine could be heard fading off into the night and then darkness and quiet…

The many faces glow in cell phone lights.

What strange memories I recall as life offers up these beautifully unrelated reminders.

A Quote

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. - henry miller

You don’t exist, so explode… before you shrivel up.

The Rope

I see a homeless man chewing on a dog leash - a rope really. One end of the bright white rope wraps the neck of a black and white puppy. The other end does the same, but around another puppy, this one white with a beige left ear. This man with nappy hanging blonde hair that shines oily (almost gold, as if his head is dripping warm lemon yogurt) bites incessantly at the rope. The beige eared puppy does the same a few feet down the line. Staring on, I think of my friends with dogs and that they’d be concerned if they were staring with me. A round woman sits nearby holding her little girl in the folds of her skin, and she cries. I think of my mother. A man on a bench, with his arm wrapped aggressively around a woman’s shoulders, the bulk of his muscles full of forceful intention, talk incessantly and condescendingly to the woman’s nervous smile. She seems disconnected, darting her smiling teeth around her, as if looking for someone to help her find a way out. It reminds me of the ‘friends’ I had in grade school and junior high who picked particular days to try and make me flinch or choked me with their arm around my throat. I wondered what happened in their home, long after dusk.

I realize I experience everything through a lens of who I am. It is either my goal to rid myself of this habit or to get you to believe what I see as your own truth.

A Phone Call Worth Mentioning

My wife received this message on her phone during our drive home from a cell phone reception-less Independence Day weekend in the mountains of Calaveras County:

“Hey… Whassup Sara. This is Cologne.
I’m using my Cousin Mel’s phone right now.
If you get this message, why don’tchoo try and comeback and see me before… you leave.
Alright.
Bye-bye.

(pause… some encouraging talk in the background)

And, I enjoyed your presence.
Thank you.
I really enjoyed myself.
Alright.
Bye-bye.”

It’s all in the details.

The Writer’s Perspective

To switch on the writer’s perspective is to me a definitive occurrence, one that transforms reality and is grossly unique from the perspective of the being with which I find myself most often associating. In so far as I am capable, engaging in the writer’s perspective is an act of forgetting “me.” After the switch has been flipped… the banana peel lying in the dirt at the base of a wind tormented tree, or a little girl, with her nose flattened against the glass, blue eyeing a man eating near a restaurant window, or a tentative Latino boy in a peach collared shirt, stylish brown belt strapped around the top of tan pats shooting down into dark brown loafers, with a white apron hanging in front of his lap, staring around the café uncertainly, shifting chairs as if it’s his first day and he needs something to do lest he be fired, or the nipples of a bulldog bitch lying on her side on the hard gray carpeting of a Radio Shack, close enough to her owners shifting soles that I’m nervous… these things suddenly supersede my own need to seem significant… these are the things that are precious. In these things I am freed from “me.”

My Life

My life isn’t a very interesting one, but if I could, I’d like to tell you my story here, highlighting the significant points, the ones that merit mentioning.

I was born on October 16th, 1977. And, mmm, the next thing worth noting… hm… let’s see… Oh, right - not too long ago, I was sitting in a café writing and drinking a soy latte. Soy lattes are my coffee drink of choice. Vanilla soy makes a great latte. So, I suddenly noticed a homeless man sitting next to me. What caught my attention were the noises he made throwing up in his small cup of coffee. An instant after I noticed him and realized what he was doing, he threw the vomit and coffee in my face and stabbed me in the heart with a sharpened tree branch. I died almost immediately - not before knocking my vanilla soy latte in my lap. It burned. That was on July, 27th 2008.

Welcome to my life: fairly uneventful, but with a big finish.

above me

saint dominic’s catholic church
corner of Bush and Steiner
waiting for a friend

at a towering church jesus hangs on a cross at it highest point, in the sky, far above me, and just when i notice him a deep throaty frog’s croak spills into the distance between us. it is coming from the largest crow i’ve ever seen which crowns his blurry head. startled by a noise in the street, i look away from his figure, and immediately notice the curb is painted with the words: no parking during posted sermons. standing on the sidewalk, i fumble for the moleskine in my jacket pocket. i look again to his crown, but realize the space between us has long been silenced and the crow has disappeared, leaving me, peter, with much more an eerie feeling than if i had seen it fly away.

Sometimes

Sometimes you sit with your pencil hovering above a fresh blank page, with all its possibilities, and you never write a thing, but while pausing, looking for inspiration, you take in the holy moment as it seems it should be taken in - with unbridled attention, as an empty vessel, completely available and vulnerable to get what’s floating out there in it all… whatever it might be.

And when you get it like that, there’s not much you feel the need to write about after all…

The Train Set

The locomotive shakes speedily along, catching fluorescent sunlight at plastic angles, taking naively curved tracks in tight corners at dangerous speeds, thundering passed the world all too closely. Its working rods rotate into a blur, the metal wheels magnet to the track, shaking miniature buildings at their foundations. It moves forth passed homes and businesses of brown and gray which are tender and seemingly ready to tumble with a finger’s touch, but immovable with the silent strength of superglue. Follow the train passed little melted people in two tone glory with plastic pink skin. Striped with a coat of red for a dress, an expressionless woman stands awkward on the corner of nameless streets intersecting. A businessman, with a stroke of black and white for pants and shirt, is lying on his side, fallen from the weight of his suitcase. A farmer in dripping blue overalls is melted and bent, broken backed, sitting on a toothpick bench. It is their quiet town this train rumbles through. Mini light street lamps are cast worthless and wireless across dusty car-less driveways. The driveways lead out to grey cardboard roads splattered with white stars where water drops washed the paint out of the asphalt. The yellow lines are inconsistent and don’t divide the road as they should. The streets are unmanaged and empty. They lay simple and crooked, mapping a town with roadways that go nowhere. Follow the train on deftly lain crisscross tracks pinned to cork on crumbling ballast. Follow it up and out of the city, passed vacant mines echoing the silence of this world of dirt and spider webs. The tracks run by still water plastic rivers coated in blue, coated in dust, and under the arch of clawing bent metal trees misshapen and unnatural, so lifeless they don’t cast shadows upon the ashy grass hills from which they stick. There are no frozen fierce bears here to tower over mute deaf deer. There are no does with fawns soldered forever to their flank. There are no owls clawing for eternity at tiny tree branches and flightless are the skies. These animals can only be found stacked and stashed haphazardly in the paper belly of an HO trolley cardboard box, set aside this world, on the wooden beam shelving of the Milky Way. Watch the train as it disappears into a tunnel burrowed in a towering plaster of Paris mountain which stands weightless, looming over the hollow whispers of town.

Set against the backside of this mountain is a flannel shirt unbuttoned and open to the hairy belly and chest of my father. His head casts a shadow on the mountain top and his face is a reddish moon hanging over the train set… his enormous somber being is hunched heavily over this world. A cigarette burns at his lips, its smoke drifts through the atmosphere and mingles with the classical music in bundles over the fading town, worn out to ghostly hues. His eyes are a far off dark deep blue, cast down on the trundling train. Without looking up, with his balding head reflecting the glare of fluorescent lights in my direction, he says, “You’d better slow it down. You wannuh jump the tracks?”

I don’t slow it down. I let myself be lost in the bellow of a freight train furiously charging through spinning worlds, blanketed by Godlike echoes of NPR that pour forth from a tinny black radio, caressed by the breeze of a warm summer night, the wooden door of the garage swung open and pulled up to the sky. I sit upon a crooked sway leg stool swaying back and forth with the rhythm of the train. I push the power knob a bit hotter. My dad stands looking on, silently.

The Corner

There is a ragged old black man standing in the street. He holds a Burger King cup with a tightly fixed lid, shaking it out in front of him like a maraca. The ice rattles inside. A cigarette hangs from his lips. It could be a miniature burning world in the dimming light of dusk. My perspective falls forward, through space, coming to a trembling stop, floating in the crackling warmth emanating from the end of his hanging Marlboro. Thick white ribbons pour up from the grey trees spanning its surface, and through it all, you can see molten underbrush afire. Looking up passed the cigarette end, his face is a dark blur through the vaporous heat, mountainous from this perspective, steaming with dirt and sweat. My vision is thrown back when a roaring murmur descends on me from between his peeling, cracked lips. The world normalizes, rematerializing before my eyes, as

Om Mani Padme Hum

echoes around and through me. With my vision settled I see the man is a woman kneeling near the curb. She is layered in black, sits back on her heels and rolls an empty, lidless cup in her hands as if it were wet, shining clay ready for a kiln. When I pass, she looks at me and spits her sputtering cigarette into the gutter. I can hear it sizzle into a wet, dead world. She doesn’t ask for change, but when the traffic builds up at the intersection, she stands, holds the cup out in front of her and disappears, zigzagging into their exhaust…

The Past and After

And after class on the beats, I looked up out of my low grey car seat and saw Burroughs in a taxi, staring straight ahead. He would not look at me. I loved the challenge. He was shadows and death, but vibrating ghostlike in his ride. Should I stop and slide into the back seat? To ride off into his dark mind? I am heartless for my calling. I am already washed out and old. Billy dead is more alive than I have ever been. I’d like to put an apple on my head and shoot myself between the sighs. In his black and white movie I am a passing soundtrack. I want to scratch the dash and skip a beat and turn up the wrong street. I’m so afraid to write and to never be used up. This stretch of blank pages holds me frozen in timid stare. I turned the corner behind his mind and cut/pasted myself upon a reality that doesn’t line up. There is a marijuana pipe man shooting a machine gun rifle at my feet… his long snake of weed hose hair hanging out his hat like an experimental reggae cowboy. He’s rat-a-tat-tatting against my feet. It feels just right. Bull shite and as fake as can be. I’m so excited to uncover the façade that is me, for underneath is egolessness… egoless bliss. How hilarious is it that I have the potential of struggle in my palm? No need to succeed or fail, but pure attempt is my life juice spurting haphazardly across the panoramic view. Can I accept completely being alone in everything, a part of everything? Can I accept the fate of the fly on the wall? Is my breath alone? Can I ask questions regardless of those bugs on my brain? What’s better? Writing in rhyme under my drinking dime or writing sober daylight sprays or nighttime starlights?

To whom it may concern in 367…

To whom it may concern in 367…

                                  Hello. I was walking in your neighborhood, saw your address and suddenly felt compelled to write you, so, here’s your letter. No, you don’t know me. I think. You might know me actually, but not well enough for me to know where you live. Pure coincidence is possible. Why am I writing you, then? No, I didn’t used to live in your house; this isn’t one of those things. I don’t even know if you’re a boy or a girl. I really don’t. I just saw your address while walking through your neighborhood. I looked up and there it was, in gold block numbering, and I could see myself in the 3 when I stepped real close. So, I wrote it down. I haven’t been back since. I have a kid. Well, I’m waiting on a kid. It’s an adoption thing. Not sure why I mentioned it. Seems an odd thing to say to someone. Especially in an anonymous letter to an anonymous person, but I saw the toy train, the green one that says ‘george’ in white lettering on the bottom. It was in the dirt under the hedge to the right of your door. The planter or whatever. You know what it is. The shrub. Listen - I’m writing this to you, so please don’t give it to other people to read, please? Yeah - how would I know if you did? But just don’t. I’ll trust you and then I can write this as if it’s just to you and not to a group of your friends. I’ll trust you. I’ve been waiting for the adoption to go through for a while now. Five years. More than five years. More than six. It’s okay. It’ll happen when it’s right. I’ve come to believe that there are little children out there, like the ones in your neighborhood, like the red head with the big front teeth, or that blonde with the black eye, or that quiet one that walks on his toes, all those kids have parents from other lives, you know? They have parents in this life and then they have other parents from past lives and just like how they’ve returned to another life, to live again and all that, their parents have come back around too, you know? So, that’s why I know it’ll work out. The adoption thing. Because when those kids, like the ones on your street, end up with parents who just can’t do it, or parents who don’t want to, or parents who die, or hurt their children, well, luckily, I’m out here waiting for my baby. I’m ready to be there when they need me. I wish their new parents would do all right by them, but it just doesn’t work. So, I’m here. I’m here. And it’ll be okay. So, I’m waiting. And in the mean time, I take walks! And I saw your address. I guess that’s why I’m writing. It’s a great address. Do you clean those numbers? Alright, I’m running out of paper here. Thank you for reading….
                                                                     Sincerely,
                                                                             Anonymous

P.S. I’ll leave the train under the shrub next time I’m in the neighborhood.

And He Dies

There is a hospital room door that is closed.
Behind the door there is an old man lying in a white bed.
He is quiet.
His eyes are closed.
His family stands around him.
Some of them rub his legs and arms.
Others cry quietly.
Some of them hold hands.
They put their hands on the shoulders and backs of others, carefully and for longer than usual.
Some of them do not touch.
They don’t look at him, but look instead at the linoleum floor with its speckles of grey.
They say nothing.
One of them caresses his forehead, petting the gray hair away from his face.
Someone looks to the window.
His breath drags on.
The time between his inhaling and exhaling slowly increases.
The last inhale holds in him for an immeasurable amount of time.
Someone begins to sob.
Someone sighs.
Someone caresses his head more slowly.
Finally, his mouth opens and the last breath presses out.
It does not stop.
It seeps forth until a whisper of sound accompanies it.
The whisper becomes a note.
The note holds with the breath.
It does not stop.
It is louder than before.
It is a louder sound than the old man has ever uttered.
It is a more beautiful sound than they have ever heard from him.
They are weeping.
Their tears vibrate in the wake of his unending exhale.
The note is stunning.
And then it splits into a thousand notes.
They grasp at one another, sobbing, collapsing together in a pool of angelic harmony.
They have never heard anything like this.
The sound is as clear, sure and perfect as the tears that pour forth from their eyes.
It roars out of the old man and hangs in their bodies.
It does not stop.
It is immortal.

The old man stops breathing.

Silence falls.

They sob as one.

Two People Don’t Belong

This is a short story about a man and woman who don’t belong together.

“I hear Spanish.”

John sat across from her at their tiny, round table. He acted like he hadn’t heard her. It was then that their hands briefly touched in the center of the green marble circle on which their coffee steamed and he knew it wasn’t going to work.

He looked out the window. Across the street a barbershop’s awning hung red over the sidewalk. Bill’s Barbershop. The lettering on the awning was printed so high up that the top of the words were cut off. This annoyed John. It annoyed him that someone would spend the time, energy and money to put up an awning with the shop’s name, but so carelessly. A man sitting on the opposite side of the window pane, nodding rhythmically with a smirk smeared on his face, turned in his chair to face John. John quickly looked down at his coffee.

“No. I hear Italian,” she said, looking around the café.

John rolled his eyes. Slightly.

“What?” she asked defensively.

A fly.

“I have to use the bathroom,” he said.

A fly crawled up the window directly behind her.

John stood and, seeing that there was no bathroom door in sight, stepped to the counter to ask a barista if there was one he could use.

To get to the bathroom John had to enter behind the counter, walk the length of the bar, along a wall of dark coffee beans crawling against glass, down passed two baristas, a thin girl with short brown hair and a ring shining in the right side of her bottom lip and a thin boy with thick black hair peeling out from under a felt cap. As John passed the girl she shouted in a cartoon voice, “Comin’ behind you!” The boy responded with, “Comin’ behind!” in a voice that made John think of trains. He then had to turn the corner of the café counter’s L-shape, walk through a pea green door, down some stairs and, four steps more, directly into the old white door of the bathroom.

John stood, unmoving, looking at the sign above the toilet. It read: Dear Bathroom Patrons: Please try and keep “it” (poops) in the toilet. Much Appreciated, the Plumber/Bathroom Cleaner

John laughed aloud. Then he quieted, thinking about what might have caused the Plumber/Bathroom Cleaner to put the sign up.

As he peed, he thought how he didn’t want to return to the café, to his girlfriend and their table with two coffees. He felt comfortable here in this small white space, a foggy window illuminating him, a tin fan whirring above his head. There was no sink and no mirror. That comforted him too.

He sighed with effort.

God help their children, he thought.

He went back to their table, fully intending to end it with her. The seven years of their relationship followed him.

When he sat down in his chair with a soft groan, he happened to look up across the street at the barbershop awning and saw, for the first time, written in cursive on the bottom right side of the sign, the words: just a little bit off the top.

Eating Cereal

The edge of this metal table is cold. I’m eating shredded wheat and listening to my iPod. The earphone wires keep getting caught in the teeth of my sweater. I look up at my reflection in the powerless TV screen. I have no face. Looking back down at my milk, I imagine the shadows on its surface as reflections of birds flying overhead. I look up at the TV again, and seeing I still have no face, I think of Capote’s Clutter family, with their heads encased in cotton. I recall walking along a sidewalk the day before. To avoid the busy crowds, I took to the edge. Atop the curb, between the fire hydrants, mail boxes, newspaper stands and the parked cars, I ran up against another man with the same route in mind. In passing, we looked at each other knowingly. I nodded, but I don’t think he got it. I look back down at my collection of soggy wheat strands, mostly submerged in milk. I imagine myself walking on the backs of birds, just above the cold surface of the white liquid lake, swiftly and without purpose.

The Truth

To speak a bit further to this daily writing commitment, I’d like to address my craving for praise. The point that this blog satiates my appetite for acknowledgement is a mute one, except to get across to you, the reader, that my goal of implementing a daily commitment to writing could only be accomplished, at first, by deceiving my ego. My ego was willing to write everyday with the expectation that the result would be people reading the postings and subsequently being impressed. But, ironically enough, the commitment to writing everyday often guarantees sub par results. Then, the same thing that got my ego onboard in the first place, is the first thing that dissolves, as I push my potential to its limits, writing when I don’t feel like it, when I’m bored by the work, not inspired, or any variation on the results of a struggle to get something done daily. The ego starts to question, “Wait a second. This stuff you’re doing isn’t always good? Wait - you never told me people aren’t always going like it. I’ve been bamboozled. Duped. Flimflammed. Oooo - write that down.” So, my ego and I are faced with our desire, our downright need, to be perfect. This need is one that manifests in multiple versions of needing: namely, the need to - be everyone’s favorite, upset no one, make everyone laugh, be most liked, and, in this context, be the best writer ever blogging. Fortunately, a commitment to writing daily finds this need to be burdensome and has no time to dwell in it intricacies or atrocities, for the writing must get done - daily.

Then, here you go.

Interestingly enough, what has emerged of late out of the fact that I must write daily, and therefore have been, is not only the glaringly obvious truth of my imperfection, but the realization that perfection is not really what I want at all. What I want has become distorted into the need for perfection. What I need, truly, and I get this now and again, but not always, is to be entirely open, vulnerable and available, loving and being loved unabashedly. Perfection is a child’s way of getting what he wants. Perfection and imperfection are simply flimsy paper masks I’ve cut out of my short life to represent the things I do and don’t want. I must leave these games behind someday, put away somewhere forever, with my collection of childish things.

So, I keep writing, because it’s about a whole lot more than a pat on the back, a pile of kudos or a nice comment left on the website…

I keep writing because it’s about the truth.

An iPod World: House of Cards

 

 House of Cards performed by Radiohead [5:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

The guitar starts strumming
I’m walking on the tops of trees
Staring down on a landscape lawn of animals bathing in the sun
This is how a poem goes
Let it roll and the song plays on
I smile when the guitar strums
The poem is said by a voice behind my eyes
I run for the train and swing up through the doors, settle down into my seat, smile and look around to see if any one gets it
They drink coffee and fold their greasy hair
They stare into their iPod and wish they were naked
They place A Light in August on their laps and stare at adoption posters and maybe say something nice about the world
Although they are younger, we could be friends, as far as I can tell
And that guitar strums again and I smile, floating my eyes about
Keep padding your soft feet through me
And the wind blows and I’m aware of the blurry column of white light above my head
Sit down in front of me and show me you are too
“I don’t believe these tears I’m crying,” she says and so I question everything
At the next stop, I tap the grey bar to open the doors, step down to the concrete sun, and nod to the driver, who nods back
And the poem stops being said behind my eyes
The guitar starts again
I smile and let it end.

Daren

Daren woke up with this thought in her head: “I am a lost ball trying to make the best of my bounce.”

She sighed and closed her eyes as she slid the warming bed sheet up passed her mouth onto the bridge of her nose, softly along her forehead and passed her hairline, straight down onto the pillow, flattening her hair streamline back against the top of her head. She held the sheet there and sighed again under the taut spread of glowing white.

“Nothing else could happen more interesting than this,” she thought. She thought this, but not to herself. Herself had stopped listening.

She wondered what music she could play to start her day. Maybe nothing. Thinking “maybe nothing” made Daren sick to her stomach. She was not in love and music made her feel like she was. The sickness came with knowing this truth about herself. Herself that wasn’t listening.

She reached out from under the cover and touched play on her iPod. The RZA’s “Ode to Oren Ishi” spilled out into the room and vibrated across the trembling bed spread.

Daren stared at the ceiling through the sheet and felt herself in love.

San Francisco

Love San Francisco.
The zero emissions bus wobbles into view outside the café where I sit.
It’s already gone by the time I finish the line.
A tow truck tip toes to the edge of the intersection.
Tiny glowing white men beckon us into the crosswalk.
Large orange men countdown, telling us to go back.
We are open.
Girl’s look sideways while cigarettes spit smoke.
You recall tomorrow.
Mimic me, you say.
Prove that what I see is not my own to share.
Mimic me.
Men walk hand in hand.
Your ribs hurt.
Girls surround you, smoking.
It’s 11:20pm.
Midnight shakes its finger.
Taxis come onto set.
Two men come in to sip hot chocolates and go.
Susana Baca sings a hidden track into my drums.
The heat lamp glows red down upon my head.
I have a little red candle sitting atop my moleskine.
This city is a theater set.
The cars are dragged by chains across the stage.
The ceiling is too low and too lit.
It’s too cold for the actors.
They go inside to leave me alone, on stage, with a few girls chatting nearby for atmosphere, and I’m under the heat.
I sip my beer and the neck foams after I set it down.
My ice melts and shifts, soaking in the Jack Daniels.
You know trains run under your feet.
And you find your poem.
You think of a skeleton first.
The flesh will pour forth later.
Or the soul is found and the flesh will dress it soon enough.
Accept it and let them go.
No one knows what you know and how you know it.
11:30 nears and you’re sad.
And suddenly a thousand people take to the streets.
Midnight beckons.
Would the publishing companies please publish a book titled The Unremarkable Writings of Jack Kerouac?
The trees aren’t real at this hour.
They are train set trees I’ve stuck into plaster of Paris mountain ranges or cardboard sidewalks.
Inside an old man reads with a magnifying glass.
Jack and Stella belong together.
And with just one more drink from my beer, I am suddenly exactly where I want to be…
The busboy just took my candle.
This is my reality.
This is yours.
And now the busboy turns off my heat lamp…

Three Old Men

In the middle of the city there are three old men sitting at the opening of a one car garage.
They all look to be in their late 70s or 80s.
They yawn often, and in succession, and laugh in low rumbling bursts, in unison and for only a few seconds, before winding down into mute stares.
They are your grandpa or who you thought your grandpa was going to be.
One of the men reads a blanket of newspaper.
One of the men smokes.
The small garage is like a long hospital hallway.
From its depths, music echoes out over the men and onto the sidewalk.
The lyrics describe a lone man dressed in dirt colors strumming something on a guitar that doesn’t go along with the song the singer hears in his head. He’s walking down a sterile hallway, lit with almost green light, on his way to catch a train.
The song comes from an exit at the backend of the garage.
The exit opens into an outdoor area behind the building.
From the street, looking through the garage and out the exit, one can see a section of beige staircase, dead grass, orange flowers with strawberry plant leaves and the shadows of a tree’s branches.
Beyond the section of stairs, chicken wire is rolled against a soiled white slate wall.
It seems that all that exists through that exit is what is captured within its frame.
Anything else is unimaginable and is not.
One of the men smokes slowly, deliberately, as if his cigarette is the weight of a sandbag, as if his arm prefers he’d quit, and grimaces as if his face is smoke itself.
He mentions that a woman could put a cactus in her vagina to protect herself.
“Watch that boy’s bounce,” says another. “He’s got springs in his shoes.”
They rumble.
It is a girl that bounces.
Her hinting areolas on her petite breasts glow like dark moons from under a thin white t-shirt, but her face is hung with worry and confusion, approaching the look of disgust.
She passes.
One old man leans forward slightly and farts.
He says he ‘shat’ himself.
Before their rumbling ceases, the old man reading the paper comments, “It’s a shame. The pregnant Mexican farm worker died.”
He sets the paper down, pauses for a moment, points at a flattened milk carton in the road and says something about Mrs. Wilson’s breast from The Great Gatsby.
They rumble.

Boundaries

this is the way i like to write
my thoughts fit better in neat
these plain pages and plain alone
organized space for a sole purpose
i lost my last one on new yrs
full of how i remember it
all gone just like eventually
so, i start anew in crispness
my favorite space to create
and someday these will hang
and the wind will blow them
you will see less ‘ands’ in them
you’ll be satisfied at what i left
to end on a note of satisfaction
my tea is too hot, but i look forward
time to read, inspiration to write
we are a silly bunch sifting
but i love all of us as my own

The dad memory…

I woke up thinking about my dad - one memory in particular. During the greater portion of my childhood we lived a 15 minute drive from the city of Redding, CA - an eight minute stretch of road north on the Interstate 5 and then a winding seven minute drive into and through the outlying town of Mountain Gate. If you drive the I-5, the long monotonous gray ribbon, the speeding spinal cord of California, from Los Angeles to Oregon, Mountain Gate marks the first significant elevation leap since the Grape Vine, which lies just north of L.A. If you keep driving north, passed this tree covered burg, you climb into the Cascade Mountain Range, and passed the pride of North California, Mount Shasta, before finally dropping into the state of Oregon. We were at the edge of the wild. Our house was a secluded one, a nestled two stories, no neighbors in sight, on the top of a hill. It was its own world. After winding your way from the I-5 into the hills of Mountain Gate, you left the stoplights, stop signs and painted dashes on asphalt for the areas where tax dollars didn’t spend. The road we lived off of, Copper Canyon, ran from Old Oregon Trail North to our driveway. It had no painted dividers and was just wide enough for two cars to pass each other, slowly, and it wound away from civilization, degrading here and there into several unnamable dirt roads. Our driveway was a long stretch of two thin strips of concrete running up a steep hill for about a ½ mile to our house and then on up to another piece of property that I can’t visualize. I don’t remember seeing a home up there. I do remember that the man who lived there shot guns on his property and didn’t want other people doing the same. (I learned this when I set an M30 off in a metal pipe deep in the woods, far enough away from my mom’s ears and too close to his.) The driveway, more than our house, is where the memory unfolds. The picture includes my dad’s clunky hulk of a truck, pieced together into a version of the original from a collection of parts needed to sustain the beast’s life, rattling down the hill, away from our home. In the driver seat - my dad, wearing his signature brown fedora, with a smoking cigarette in his hand, held out the window just so, his elbow resting on the windowsill. As Dad left, I distinctly remember running across the gravel in the front of our house onto a trail that entered into the surrounding vegetation. At first the trail was hidden from the driveway, behind overgrown manzanita and leaning pine trees, but then the two paths ran along side one another, cascading parallel downhill. I remember crying and running, almost falling down the hillside, dropping through time, and then emerging from the foliage along side my father’s truck. For a moment my dad, framed by his truck window, and my falling young body seemed almost to touch, as if I could reach out and tug his dress shirt sleeve, stained by the sweat of midnight poker games, or lay my palm against the yellow whiskers on his cheek, the hairs colored by the cigarette smoke wrapping his face forever. I remember my dad, a picture of stoicism, edging away from me. I don’t remember him ever looking at me. And that’s all I remember. There is no end. He drives away forever, while I sob and run in pursuit, forever. And every time I recall the moment, I question whether it ever really happened. I question it because it is a story too dramatically symbolic of being the product of a broken home; it is too pitifully perfect for me to dwell in the nurtured sorrow of a youth that no longer exists.

I remember…

One of my earliest memories is being up with my mom in the middle of the night, while dad was away playing cards or farming, when they were still married. I remember her in a night gown and me in my 4 year old pjs. A prowler was circling our home. I remember his eyes staring down on me from the kitchen window, while I hung on my mom’s arm. Just his eyes.

When I was older, just before I could drive, I remember her taking me into town once to drop me off at school before going to work at the daycare center. She had the flu. She passed out suddenly going 55mph down the I-5 and our white Plymouth minivan slowly began to veer into the semi truck in the next lane. I yelled, waking her, just after she’d dented the van’s hood on the underbelly of the truck’s container. She said she was fine - irritably.

During the time I lived with my mom while she was sick, I remember her coming home one afternoon, she came into the apartment frantic, wholly lost, almost out of control, crying that she had pulled out in front of an oncoming car and that she hadn’t seen them. She was the most terrified I’d ever seen her.

I remember my mom, sick and weak, during the last days of her life, collapsing on the concrete path as my sister and I tried to get her up the stairs and into her apartment. Her skin was already yellow. She felt the need to mumble an excuse for her state of being at a passing neighbor while my sister and I fumbled, trying to get her to her feet.

A Memory

I saw large birds in a clump, together. I saw two shiny black birds in a clump. I saw two glimmering tarry black birds entangled in a school yard. I saw two oily birds entangled in some dead grass and dirt at the corner of a school building.

In a coffee shop a girl touches her chest while she talks, placing her whole hand against the skin that her dress leaves exposed. Her eyes widen and she speaks in a way that her teeth seem revealed to the world for the first time, her lips peeling open like a curtain. She touches her chin, slowing her speech.

I saw two black oily birds entangled in the dust and dead grass at the corner of a yellowed high school building.

The girl smiles and stares into someone’s eyes.

I saw two glimmering, dripping, oily black birds entangled, in love, inside one another, rolling in the smoky sunlight. Rolling. Dripping. Shining. Entwined. Entangled.

I can smell her musk from where I sit. It is not perfume. It is lady’s musk. A musk that my second high school girlfriend wore, the tom-girl, the one that giggled me in love with her, the one I walked up to in the pouring rain after the game, on the field while I wore a cheerleader’s outfit and she wore a football uniform, with black smears painted under her eyes, and the rain fell, rolled, dripped slick on our faces, over our open eyes, down our light skin, off our young lips, and it felt warm and we kissed, the bleachers emptying, the field empty, the grass muddied, slowly drowning in water at our feet, and the kiss entangled, entwined, buried. All of it in total silence. Quiet, quick, holy.

As I got closer, I could see that the birds were nothing but a black plastic bag standing upside-down on its handles, floating on school property by the nature of a breeze, tickled by the lifeless grass and untouched by the dry dusty soil.

A toothpick…

A toothpick, used, is sitting on my moleskine. It questions me.
“So what if I’m all you have?” it says.
I stare back at it and try to give it more attention.
“Really?” it asks.
I keep staring and all it does is get whiter. More white.
“Do you smile at me?” it asks.
No. I don’t smile at you.
“You should.”
I see that its ends are not as sharp as I thought. It is not as smooth as I thought.
A hooker, or someone I suppose to be a hooker, sits down at the bar, two seats down from my own seat.
She orders a banana and pineapple shake.
I’m glad to hear pineapple is an option on the menu.
“This is what is happening,” the toothpick pipes in.
“I’m lying on your moleskine and you are writing about a girl who you think to be a hooker,” it adds.
The waitress pours me more water with no ice, as specified.
Suddenly, the hooker is already done with her milkshake.
Yes, I am staring at her milkshake.
I think, “Her milkshake brings all her boys to the yard.”
“Doin’ okay here?” the waitress asks me.
“I’m doin’ real good. Thanks,” I reply.
I don’t remember the exact next line to the song.
The hooker is paying. I wonder if the milkshake is a sort of ritual that she does to get her ‘game on’.
I don’t think this. I write it.
“Is that possible?’ comments the toothpick with a question.
I recall someone telling me once that when you write what someone says, while writing like I’m writing now, and dialogue… writing dialogue. Yeah. When writing dialogue you should just write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ and not get too much into things like ‘he quipped’ or ‘he snapped’ or ‘she burst’.
“You’re rambling,” the toothpick said.
I don’t remember things very clearly.
“Do you want anything else?” asks the waitress.
“How do you make your shakes?” I ask her. “Do you use real ice cream?”
“We use vanilla ice cream.”
“Do you have real pineapple or flavoring?’
“Flavoring.”
“Lemme think about it.”
She smiles.
I think she likes me a little. She’s short and thin framed. Her skin is silky. It looks silky.
“Can this moment be this interesting?” asks the toothpick.
“If I make it so,” I think.
The hooker has left for the yard.
I question my seating choice. I see a couple smiling as they sit down at a two top table located up some stairs at the far side of the restaurant.
What kind of view do they have?
“Yeah. I’m going to have a pineapple milkshake.”
“A pineapple milkshake and…” she gestures towards my water glass.
“Yeah, a pineapple milkshake and more water.”
“…and more water,” she says.
“Jeezuz,” the toothpick whispers.
“Do you hear that?” I ask the waitress.
She makes sexy eyes at me, finishes filling my water glass, and walks away, smirking.
She must have three kids.
“Jeezuz,” he whispers again.
I put the toothpick in my mouth.

An iPod World: Oh Sister

 

 Oh Sister performed by Andrew Bird [4:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

There are black people on the corner; I see them from the bus.
I smile mildly from behind my glasses at the round head of a large black boy facing the right side of the bus.
He does not smile back.
It’s at the top of the hill, above Glen Park.
I look to my left and see them.
A black boy embraces a shorter black girl and an even shorter black boy.
They are frozen, frozen like only the look out of the window of a moving bus can freeze people.
They face away from me, towards the corner of an apartment building.
It’s at Addison & Farnum.
A black man is on his cell phone sitting on the sidewalk in the shade of a tree.
He is turned away from the children just enough that his conversation seems seriously father like.
Oh Sister, performed by Andrew Bird, plays on my earphones.
The bus turns away from them and takes me down the hill.

TIM

I met Tim in a small café across from my work. A dog, small and caramel, sat back on its haunches in the doorway, looking over its shoulder into my stare. As the dog turned its eyes back to the street, Tim asked me for the time - abrupt and loud. My eyes left the back of the dog’s head and looked at Tim. He sat at a table a few feet away from my own. I took my earphones out and after a quick look at my cell phone, rounding the time to 3:45, I told him, “3:45.”

 “My older brother Johnny died of cancer,” he replied.

He didn’t know why.

He misses him.

He asked me the time again. I looked at my cell phone. “3:45,” I said. Now it really was 3:45.

He stood, with his oversized maroon backpack attached, his sailing light brown hair uncombed, and went into the bathroom.

A middle aged Asian man in a full body worker suit sat with his friend who looked like a nurse who rapes his coma patients. The Asian worker started up laughing and gesturing towards the bathroom door, which Tim had just entered.

At that moment a six foot something old man walked through the doorway to the café.

The caramel dog was gone.

When the tall old man heard the Asian worker laughing, he joined him.

I’d seen this tall old man before. His eyes always watery, like large glass marbles ready to fall. He smells like raisins. He’s just an old man who likes to laugh. He often stands at the café counter, in his clothing that always looks like overalls, but aren’t, wearing a baseball cap that looks like blue dust floating on his head, talking to the barista about anything.

I keep hearing a noise that sounds like the noise a character dying makes in an old Nintendo video game. I’m not sure which game or where it’s coming from. My earphones lay on the table.

When Tim comes out of the bathroom he asks everyone in the café what time it is.

No one responds.

“3:48,” I tell him.

“Is it quarter to 7 yet?” he asks me.

“Not yet.”

He walks to the café counter and asks the barista, an elegantly frail woman with a disproportionately large ass, what Monday’s holiday is. It’s Washington’s birthday. And then what time it is. The Asian worker and the tall old man laugh.

Suddenly Tim snaps, “Sorry to bother you!”

He yells “STOP LAUGHING AT ME GOD!!!” four times, hushing the entire café with his volume.

No drinks are being made at this time.

The barista tells him that no one is laughing at him.

“I’m laughing with you,” says the tall old man from his table.

Tim leaves.

The Asian man laughs.

The tall old man says to the Asian man and his friend, “I sometimes wish I could do that. You sometimes wish you could say that.”

The Asian man doesn’t respond, but seems to suddenly pay his nurse friend more attention.

The tall old man and the Asian man don’t understand one another. This is what the Asian man thinks.

But the tall old man thinks he understands the Asian man.

Every time the Asian man laughs with his friend, the tall old man laughs alone.

A black man in a 49er jacket passes the door screaming something indiscernible.

The tall old man says, “Must be a full moon.”

The Asian man laughs.

Some of the buildings in San Francisco…

Some of the buildings in San Francisco are shrouded in long white sheets, like how I dressed up as a ghost when I was a child, Halloween after Halloween, but these ghosts have no eyes and often speak Spanish. Sometimes colors bleed out from their insides, splattering the sidewalks.

There is a lone tree sitting in the shadow cast by one of these towering apparitions. The rocks surrounding the tree’s base, contained by its square of soil, look like pigeons nestling into the earth.

It’s at this moment, standing before this lamely thin tree swaying in the shadow of a Spanish speaking ghost dripping coral pink, that I recall for the first time since I can remember the little notes my mother would place into the lunches she made me for school. I can visualize the fantastic white paper, so out of place, tucked under a peanut butter, jelly and butter sandwich, so significant and bright, set against the internal light blue of my Smurfs lunch box. I remember this same slip of paper crumpled with the malleable bottom of my eventual brown paper sack. As long as she made me lunch, she wrote me notes. I don’t know when it began or ended, but of course there are definitive amounts of paper, food and time floating where truths are found. Thousands of pounds of food, hundreds of pounds of notes, limited amounts of time… and I can’t recall what a single one of the notes read.

But I can imagine the words “love” and “my” and “neddy” written in blue ink on those tiny slips of white paper.

And I do imagine it, standing by the tree waving within the ghost’s great shadow.

I saw a black woman…

I saw a black woman in a wheelchair from behind. She looked as if her head was a coconut; her hair was so neatly shelled and yellowed. She cut through a three street intersection and a man walking towards me yelled after her, “You piggy!” or “You hippy! You f&*kin’ crazy b*&ch!” I looked at her reaction through the hot black of the streets converging and her face was the rotten inside of a coconut half, staring back at me, expressionless. She disappeared down one of the streets, moving as a series of sudden frozen glimpses within frames made by trees, mail boxes and light posts.

I don’t know how…

I don’t know how.

I had a dream about you, but I didn’t.

You were shriveled and decrepit, rolling in the off-white sheets of a hospital bed.

When the people surrounded your bedside, you cowered and curled and fell away into another bed.

A woman met you there, spooning into the space your short bent body provided.

She comforted you, but in your eyes I could still see the fear and shame glowing darkly.

A young man and his father…

In a coffee shop a young man and his father take on the roles of my dad and I, respectively.

“I feel like I’m not going to make it,” says the young man.

“How far do you have to make it?” replies the older man - the father.

Neither of them laughs.

“You know what I mean. I feel like I might do something to myself.”

His father says, “I have a job for you. Minimum wage. Driving cars. Picking people up.”

The young man begins pumping his knee rapidly.

He’ll stop.

He’ll do it again.

He’ll stop.

He’ll do it again.

The piece that inspired the blog…

I walk down the isles of Walgreens, zigzagging my way along the linoleum. I pay no attention to what’s on the shelves, because I don’t want it. He kneels on the floor stacking nothing because I refuse to see it.

“Where can I find the t-shirts?” I say, ”Do you carry the t-shirts that say San Francisco?”

He does not get up, but points amicably down the store’s steps towards an aisle number he may have said. I don’t know. An old woman passes between us just then. Her temples are tight, dragging at her hair and the top half of her head so that maybe they vibrate a bit with the tension. Her eyes and hearing aids certainly do. I envision a gooey web of dark blue water grabbing at her face. She walks between the kneeling Asian man and me.

“He is facing Mecca, you know,” she says and walks on without turning her head to see if I acknowledge her.

I do. By saying, “Ha. Ha. Ha. Yes. I know,” I do acknowledge her and before I finish the sentence I’m already walking away. I see that the back of her head is not smiling and the Asian man continues stacking nothing and the t-shirts on aisle four I have seen in the Mission at the place where I bought your piggy bank.