camera, sign, chandelier

These are the mementos we cannot capture in song or on paper. We cannot hold their essence within a melody or ink, bronze or clay; no camera can shutter this place between us. This chance to know delirium and dust. If I am so grateful to have "found" you, then why do I feel so "lost in your eyes"? Its the endless deeps, oblivions, oblivious, and time may tell that I have known your ink stained hands and mason jars with willows, the loveliest of leaves, the boldest of lines, the softest of curves; the way you threw my red flannel shirt over the lamp, a mini-chandelier for us to swing from, while the snow fell as frozen stars in the warm glows of the streetlights, but then everything has a warmth and a glow melting the icy fear that grips the heart; the inevitable urge to foresee the future is dangerous especially when the moon becomes a sliver yet returns full bodied, red as Luna's blue-blood cycle.
This maybe one that I tear off the page, fold up and put in your worry jar. I need not fear, for in the dream you cut his hands off, not to cause pain but to help him heal. Aren't we all on an endless expedition, looking for signs – between the stars and in the rising stems from the rich soil, the roots that hold them in place as they push down, through the ground, searching for nourishment.

Barry Sanders

the porch steps up to the house have been ravaged
by weather and time
they lead to my grandfather's house
spring street, late december, dark by noon

inside my brother and i paint the walls
and i think of my mother
as a little girl bounding up those steps
with schoolbooks and the hope of youth

in the basement i find the woodworking tools
they carved the little blocks as i child i would
i would play with
in the sandbox in the backyard

i'm no longer a child
my mother is sick
i think of her running up the front steps
the day she met my father

they met while carving pumpkins
was her heart full of hope?
racing with the promise
of young love?

and years later, two of her sons
repaint the walls of the house
on spring street
watching the Lions

bathtub reverie obsession window

It had been two minutes before Renata realized she had been staring into space still clutching the shower curtain. It was the goose bumps on her arms and the water droplets that were still gathering on the ends of her hair that jarred her from her reverie. Her trance had begun while still in the shower, obsessing over the events of the past three weeks with a microscopic focus, replaying every time lapsed wound that eventually led to the bleed out death of her relationship with Greg.

Greg, her liberal artist ex-boyfriend, had infiltrated her waking thoughts with a viral like efficiency. Thoughts multiplied and grew on each other like colonies of microbials growing inside darkened Petri dishes. He was the one that had stormed the fortress of Renata’s heart and shattered it’s walls with his wit, charm and they way he spoke with such (in her eyes at least) authority on the many subjects he seemed to have such a mastery of.

In Greg, Renata found a voice for the voice she never dared raise. He had ambition where she felt aimless, his confidence strident where she folded in on herself, he was charismatic where she was enigmatic. She had completed her degree in psychology four years earlier yet still hadn’t found a job in her field, nor experienced any sort of rush or surge of inspiration to do much of anything professionally.

She had been thinking of her last hour with Greg…how he tearfully lamented the “wilted flower of their love” as he looked deeply into her eyes, but then not much more than half an hour later was almost cheerfully explaining that he was going to move out west to stay with his brother and “sort through some things”. The fact that he didn’t seem too upset about the demise of their relationship irked Renata, that and the fact he was able to walk away under his own power; she resented him for his confidence, charisma, and direction that now seemed arrogant, smug and cruel.

Renata stepped out of the shower and began to towel off. She put on her bathrobe and walked into the living room to get her purse. She returned to the bathroom, opened her purse, took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, set the purse on the floor and then stood at the bathroom window, staring out of it. Despite the below-freezing temperatures, she opened the window about six inches, lit a cigarette and dragged on it, anxiously blowing the smoke out the window through the screen.

Setting the cigarette on the window sill she turned and walked to the mirror. With a furrowed brow and scrunched lips Renata regarded herself. She took a long lock of her hair and put it between her forefinger and her middle finger and began slowly combing it out and staring at her image in the mirror.

It was another two minutes before she realized that the cigarette had fallen off the windowsill and landed in her purse and was smoldering some old receipts inside.

Grace Cathedral Hill

“A Blowout Does Not Mean That I Will Have A Good Night”
-Avey Tare-

"The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent Was Summer In San Francisco"
-Mark Twain-


I must have been searching for something. I'm not much of a spiritual person, but I was looking for something outside and beyond my limited understanding, something steady and true as I felt unguided and lost.

Each morning, standing in the cold fog and soggy, damp air as I sipped my scalding coffee, I would unfold the plastic map and determine the days destination. Completely adrift, unemployed, I was in San Francisco staying with a friend in the hope that I would find some sort of work and an apartment to restart my life in one of the most expensive cities in the world when I wasn’t in very good shape; emotionally or psychologically. The truth was I was killing time, unsure of myself, wandering the city in aimless loops, waiting for something or someone to tell me what to do and/or do it for me.

I was in no shape for a serious job search, relocation, new start, new dawn...It was what I needed, but not necessarily in the Geographical sense. To find a job I needed to hit the ground running with a Green Beret-like blood lust and singularity of purpose; pounding the pavement with the vigor and determination of a recent college graduate looking for that first foot in the door…determination, discipline and an enthusiasm to play the job seeker game, and i had none of it. 

This isn’t to say that I wasn’t motivated. I was up early every morning, rising with the bay fog…was out the door with the morning sun…the difference between me and everyone else up at that time was that I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, no one was expecting me to be anywhere at any time.

I didn’t matter to anyone. My life meant nothing because I wasn’t contributing to the world in any meaningful way. You get what you give and I was giving absolutely nothing.  I had wandered up and down Polk Ave, burning through my savings at breakfast diners, deep oblivion coffee in the Russian district on Nob Hill, down to the Wharf where the tourists traveled in rolling waves, where I stopped to watch break dancers and painters and a colony of otters among other thing.  The later afternoons, possibly to the Mission district to read underground music magazines in musty bookstores or to Haight Ashbury to connect to some psychedelic residue of enlightenment but only found Starbucks and Pizza Huts.  As the shadows grew long and elastic I would make my way back to the Hemlock Tavern on Polk, down beers and look longingly at the other people in the bar, envious of their comraderie and conversation...other days spent with the martian flora and fauna of Golden Gate park, fighting off earaches from the cold ocean air...what the hell was I doing?
 
As I stated prior, I fancied myself on some sort of quest, in search of some truth about myself perhaps?    So, there I would go; Up and down the steep hills and deep valleys of the city, pausing to admire and study the  bluish flowers and exotic twisted trees the likes of which I had never seen.  The crush of people everywhere, pushing through Chinatown and the Tenderloin district and for the first time in my sweet sheltered life t I felt like a minority in the city, the clamor of voices and languages unlike my lily-white-bread own, lent itself to the otherworldly experience. I would rest on the regal steps Opera House on Van Ess, past the mansions on Nob Hill...so much happening all around me and all I could do was walk and stare at the ground, all bent out of shape over the past.

In the late afternoons, in the dying California light, that sepia-toned gold casting long shadows, the twilight awakened, with arms outstretched and wide mouth yawns, I would head for home. I’d make my way back through Chinatown or up and over Knob Hill stopping in at the Russian coffee house, to sip black coffee and smoke cigarettes one last time before rolling down Van Ess back to the apartment. Those were my days: Zig-zagging and aimless, spending money I needed to be saving - I simply did not know what to do with myself.
 
Not knowing what to do, I thought I would ask someone, and who better to ask than one who can predict the future?  I stopped into have my palm read and my fortune told; the answers and direction I sought would be layed out in the deck of cards on a cheap jewel encrusted table in a room with the air thick with incense and a bead and tie-dye decorum. There were fortune-tellers on every corner it seemed. Mystical experiences waiting to be had for 10 dollars or more. The future unfurled, all doubts waived, the fog - lifted, the Golden Path laid out in detail.

“You’re on the wrong path, you’re are not where you need to be, you need to be course corrected” One told me.


“You are paying for your mistakes, you are paying a karmic debt” Another gypsy said.


“You will have one final conversation with her and then you will never speak again”, yet another fortune teller told me.


They were all correct in some way. Looking back now I was looking for some semblance of security in my life. I wanted one of them to tell me that everything was going to be ok. Hell, Ok, I'm sure what I really wanted was for one of them to hold me, to let me cry in her arms…I was overwhelmed, lost and wandering in a foreign city, my bearings gone, the very ground beneath me seemed to shift with each step I took.

"What Excursion of the Legs can Bring The Heart and Mind Closer Together?"
-R.W. Emerson-

When I had two weeks left in SF and it became apparent I wasn't going to find a job, I finally began to explore the city with a plan; I would pick two different Cathedrals/Temples/Synagogues/Churches to visit each day. This brought me to Grace Cathedral Hill. Not far from the apartment, I would sit sipping my coffe in the park across the street from the colossal structure, a daunting, mammoth 'House of God', picking at sod grass and basically looking around at...nothing.  One a couple occasions I considered walking the labyrinth outside the cathedral, but knew that I was already in a labyrinth, there was no need for simulation.


I spent my last several misty San Francisco mornings sitting cross legged in the grass, staring across the bay at the Pacific Ocean, turning to face the sun dappled stain glass window of Grace Cathedral, recalling my own Catholic upbringing.


Those mornings I thought about forgiveness, divinity, clarity, direction, purpose, charity, and just how utterly aimless I was. I think in some way I was praying without ever setting foot in the cathedral. I knew I was a sinner from my upbringing, but something about sitting across the street in the park, about the willingness to search for an answer…for something deeper, but I could not bring myself to go inside.

On my last night in San Francisco, a very dense foggy night, my companions and I strolled through the mists, in a glowing slightly drunk swagger. There I was, I thought I was wise; very early 30s, a touch of grey at my temple, in one of the greatest cities in the world. Elegant, "living fast and dying young" like a real rock and roller beatnik non-pink anti-establishment slacker…slouching toward Bethlehem…We stopped in the park at Grace Cathedral Hill…laughing as the drizzle fell. I put a cocktail umbrella in women’s hair like a flower. I brushed her locks back from her forehead as she looked up into my eyes. We laughed and she hugged me tight. I never saw or spoke to her again.

The next morning I flew back to Kalamazoo, Michigan - but I suppose that's another story for another time.

Coming Clean

Dennis slid the starched collar stiff shower curtain and stepped into the mildew-ridden, crooked plastic shower. The refrigerator boxed shower sat in the back of his mother’s trailer in the far end of Carmel Pines RV and trailer park.

The soap scum that had formed around the faucet handles made it difficult to start the water and Dennis had to lean into it for the lukewarm trickle that emerged from the rust and iron encrusted shower head. .

The lack of water pressure barely washed the vomit that had caked to Dennis’s whiskers like dried Parmesian cheese on a spaghetti dinner plate. He examined the grime underneath his fingernails and dug them into the sliver like bar of Kirk’s Castille soap in hopes of excavating the blackened compost gathered there. He knew it would take a firehose to blast all of the filth from him. Possibly a baptism.

A Baptism, like the ones that bucktoothed Reverend Jonah Green and his born again followers would do down at the old Clompers Gravel pit that had been made into a pond.

Old Jonah’s acolytes in the pond-water brown robes that had once been pearly white, wading out in muck and sea-weed to have Jonah place his twig like fingers on their heads and submerge them in the stagnant water, full of duck-shit and bottom feeders. Whatever hex he placed on them, somehow they emerged from the silt and scum filled waters, baptized, born anew.

There was the time Dennis and Tommy Ostopovich sat on the far end of the pond, guzzling, crumpling and tossing aluminum Budweiser’s into the pond in a 1-2-3 motion, while Reverend Jonah performed his baptisms for his flock. Dennis heard the ‘tongues’ that Green spoke in and thought it sounded like orgasmic cooing…like the that Vicky girl he sometimes messed around with in her trailer at the other end of Carmel Pines.Vicky stood almost 5 feet tall. Her legs stunted in growth by a disease Dennis couldn’t pronounce. That morning he woke up in her bed, the sheets smelling of stale cigarettes and mountain dew. They smoked pot and she went down on him for what seemed hours, she finally gave up in exhaustion, Dennis unable to achieve rigidity. Dennis sauntered out of her trailer and staggered his way down the gravel lane that ran the length of the trailer park, He dazedly noticed that Mrs. Kellog was gone to work at her job as a clerk somewhere downtown, doing something with phones and pens and calculators.

Dennis climbed in through the back window of her empty trailer, prying it open with a crowbar he hid underneath Mrs. Kellog’s stairs. Inside he helped himself to two frozen sausage egg muffin sandwiches from her icebox. He sat at the green and gray speckled formica table and waited for the microwave to ding. He pulled the two greasy cakes from the microwave with a papertowel…the outer muffin too hot to touch and the grey meat inside nearly frozen in the middle.

Dennis ate them anyway, flipping through a three-week old issue of IN-Touch magazine that was on the kitchen table. Dennis couldn’t read very well, but he was taken with how clean the celebrities looked. How white their teeth were, how cascading and flaxen their hair.

The water trickled luke-warm over his shoulders, pock marked and acned, Dennis coughed in the shower, he knew that what had come next that day, no water could wash away. No, this was a stain on his soul.

Lightning Strikes The Postman

I don't know what woke me up first; the rain or the bad dream. I suppose it doesn't matter so much. I was laying there, with a feeling of dread as the storm rolled in. The limbs of the trees wavering in the wind, casting shadows from the security light outside...the thunder and lightning...

Then, the loudest thunderclap I have ever heard, the brightest bolt of lightning I have ever seen and suddenly there were sparks shooting out of the light fixture in the bedroom.

I thought 'holy fuck, the house just got struck by lightning'...

I went outside to see if the house was on fire or something...there was the neighbor from downstairs and he reported the same thing had happened to his light fixture.

The power was still on, the lights all still worked...

Still, it felt like a warning letter.

distant early warning

you gotta squarsh it like a juice pig!
gol'daggit it's worse then a north dakota pine wibbler...
sucks more than a hudson bay barnacle...
burns hotter than a nicaraguan saw beetle crawlin up the 'rethra...

i wish i was a lumberjack and could yell things at the greenhorns with spittle flying through my broom bristle beard. holding an axe...and just yelling.