I'll speak to your condition

 I'll speak to your condition if you'll speak to mine, 

it's no accident that the only thing I love is that. 

Though it does seem odd that we have to find our way into it, every day. 

May we stay stay stay in that house house house. 

Listening like a mouse though it may be my wolf is howling, 

or your pack of puppies are making a royal mess out of the toilet paper roll 

that the cat put on the floor.

But these are all just things we already know, 

so I wipe my face with my hand, down then up like a windshield wiper. 

Looking for the new meaning that is hiding under the stale old meaning. 

And envisioning us always having fun when we are out. 

And we go all kinds of places, wherever we want actually. 

Like a wide smile that holds all thoughts, all possibilities, 

this world is not ended yet. No endism for us, that would be for the 

exact opposite group than us, as well as me for half my life before now, 

though much of it in denial, addiction running amuck like a horse and chariot 

across the wide plains of central Asia, wherever the fuck those wide plains are 

where the wheel was invented probably and then the chariot. 

Chariots of fire, as the name of that movie, chariots of fire. 

I know how to listen for the thundering hooves of the Huns, the Goths, 

the Vandals, the Ostrogoths and Visigoths and God knows who. 

I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know. But now I know a couple things 

and couple things only: now and tomorrow with you.

Kernel of truth, maybe that could be a writing genre...

"As a child, 'perceptive internalizers' can't help but notice it 

 when their parents aren't truly connecting with them." 

I had a melancholy phase at the old homestead when I was 11 to 14. 

Staring out the window, the song Billy Boy playing: 

"Billy boy, where are you going to, do you like the things that life is showing you?

Grazing Tommorow's Past-ure

 

 Synthesis… the answer! Stupidly, like bumping into a wall in the dark, exactly as it should be. Yes, I’ve been so bad, in the past. Thought only at certain moments of myself, and apologies are due. Like Penelope and the sacro-cranial, which is what I need now, perhaps an advanced chiropractory, that Penelope does and not George. He does the part which hangs out in the world, has dualistic capabilities, right doesn’t know what the left hand is doing but one foot sure has to lead off. And what a leaping off. A bicycle for me. From Worcester MA to the gently rolling hills of Southeastern Ohio. Barns leaning faded red. Old Quakers from the last century with wide hats and bonnets and one on the floor chanting sing song into the future. No one’s hardly said God to me like that since. Squeeks perhaps, eeek a techno mouse. Hello, goodbye?

 Have our parents really reached further into the future than we’ll ever go and opened their arms there, making room amidst the ruins and brambles, seen us there in the past/future so we could make a home? Some of the parents and imperfectly seen, but enough. Whose parents then, I ask each and everyone, one by one tediously, without theory, with only a grazing of poetry. Grazing in the pasture.

 Singing now humming to myself, skull vibrating like an old shed no one’s used in like 60 yrs. Sturdy enough in timbers to hold some hay, but quite leaky. When I began the first summer song at New England Yearly Meeting, to which I had invited myself, a girl cried, and I wondered what have I done? The leader took me home and prescribed my protein needs, how many hard boiled eggs, and then turned towards me, trying futile-like to go to bed with me. I kept on hitchhiking instead of making home. I tickled two girls while passing through Rhode Island, they tickled Dan and I, I think he found his way eventually. Later at Ohio Yearly Meeting also uninvited the most beautiful took me to the apple orchard and later I wrote a song to the moon that was inside us both. Aaaaahhh these are non-adventures, merely extensions, fashion accesories, though sugar cakeish, surprisingly distant near crunchy. Words only at the right moment, are the goal, and your words also. Fundrazing, picking apples gloriously from the top of the tree with my friend Richard that fall, I said goodbye to him yesterday, the one I can’t see yet, hazed tho not angry.

 And thus do I hear the blade falling soon. No long hair for me ever. Time to scurry inside. From so far above, through pin point pricks of light, a somber gleewigwagwam manufactured in Earth’s fawn core, if surely arising resoundingly from both places at once, eeeeeeeee primarily either the first sound left standing or the inside sound of out and down, mothers dream of this word being enough to call their children home after all that simple claptrack and late night comedy on tv. Just one sweat ceremony and I said nothing at all while eating after wards.

 David Binney, touching every note and every phrase and every chord, easily letting go early without choosing the chosen or anyway.

 I’d like to find some people to stand behind and play the bass clarinet I hope I’ll have.

 

Table. Write.

this morning I had some ideas and was writing in my journal. I wanted to write about bbb, the funniest Pippilongstocking experience of the last I don't know how many years. Actually I wanted to type in the computer cuz I knew it would be better to fast-write, and I was curious to see what would come out. I actually had a momentary 'vision' of how the knowledge is sorta like in-the-fingers and being a curious sort, if I sit down to write, some stuff will come out. This is the nature of writing, an aazing detail that seems to get left out of the educations of most peope, all those who arrive unexpectedly at adulthood and don't know about the vast vortex that is writing and knowing.

I'm guessing it is called 'the examined life' and don't even want to go into the word 'woke' cuz that's another story, and for now I feel like I am just exploring my style of writing, perhaps getting a glimpse of what my ouvre might be someday, which gives me a inner lol to actually say out loud. What entitlement, but meanwhile everybody might be curious about the Pippilongstocking story. But I don't know the ending,

It's the End of the World

 It's the end of the world again and nothing matters all over,
like rolling a steamroller onto it's side and leaving the past behind
like a steaming turd of rainbow colored chords...
Noise, we need it, a wash in detail though, the micro meets the macro,
the personal is the political but we're being digested in the belly of the beast.
My arm leaves me, a leg washes by, a cock and cunt fucking in and out
of the foggy wash, then easily your dream comes closer to my eyes.
But it's your big toe in my mouth and so I spit it out on the floor where it rolls away,
a marble under the radiator. "Leave me alone!" I hear a shouting and it's my voice
echoing back from a great mirror in the sky, the aural mirror,
the one that soaks up every sound ever made, these sounds have drifted up to the sky
where a Godbox soaks it all up into one vast aural soupnoisecrash
excrutiatingly dense and rich and I can even pick out the single last moan
of the unrecognized genius Bob, his arm could do anti-gravity,
he's a homeless person on 4th and Bainbridge, one snowy night long ago:
"mmumooooooaaanhshfk!" and then he died painlessly, -frozen, numb.

.

Amphibuous

     How do I love the Kate Zambreno voice: brave yet probably not saying much, just brave. And somehow not alone. Alone but not. Elegiac, after all, just floating. And always fresh, every word, even if its about the stale and empty. After all, how much can a writer do about the modern and postmodern world? Write like Wordsworth? I remember a phase for me when I was very attracted to Wordsworth but I never actually read that much of it. I just needed the sense of someone having been sincerely in awe and wonder for a lifetime. I assumed anyway, -don't know that he was for a fact.

Been thinking about Richard recently a bit. A feeling of having not risen to the occasion, when he lay dying. He gave me a house key, after all, and I didn't get the significance of that. I visited as much as I could, probably about once every three weeks. But one visit he's laying in bed and I think I felt, in the air, that he was not talking to me, on purpose. He was mad at me. So I tried to just ignore that and give as much as I could, even through the silence, with the tv blaring on. Some soapy show about a rebellion in ancient Rome. A bit of gratuitous sex and violence. And I thought about maybe this was a perfect show for him and for the day and for our era. Though I still don't know the name of that show and probably wouldn't be able to get through more than twenty minutes of it for his sake. 

But the truth of it is, he was there for me, always. And then I hadn't been there for him when he'd been lonely for me actually. After all, we'd set out into the world together. As a team. (Just like Jeb and I had always been gallivanting around Old Chatham in an earlier teenaged phase.) That team feeling, like the scouts or a secret club or something, a mini-army. Assemblage, as D&G talk about. The one where you can find your mental health in it, through thick and thin etc. That feeling we, who have kids, try to give to them, instead of that all alone feeling. Its supposed to be part of families too, isn't it? Instead of that all alone feeling, all alone in the universe, which is what Jeb had to deal with - I've been thinking alot about that recently. As well as myself, after all. It can result in the cursed dark clouds of suicidal ideation, don't forget. (Is that what our mom was facing as she screamed to the sky that time, in the back yard at Hartford? Fathomless.)

I do think Richard thought it over after that, at some point and decided to forgive me. That that's just the way I am, a bit irresponsible. Full of love, but just not always there. Always going off in a direction, coming back. Flying off suddenly. Like Jeb, in a way, needing the alone, traveling time, to clear my head. The stars, even if they're in my head. Little chimeras of artistic goals. And meanwhile, he had managed to settle down and find that grounded feeling that allows for true magnaminousness. Is that a word? I mean a truly graceful and everlasting giving. Generosity to the nth degree.

That's what I found when I visited him at Jefferson, a busy place, and many machines and lights and the tv blaring. His kids were there and he obviously didn't want to talk about important deep stuff. But I wish we could've or maybe I don't need to wish that. He was ebullient, is the word that jumps to mind. He was transcendent. I've never been in the presence of someone like that before, he was like one of those gurus, and amongst all those machines and people. He was and was being all accepting, glad to be alive, truly happy it seems. Letting go. Wanting to give this gift of life to me, wanting me to feel it, be happy. And so I was. We didn't say much, I'd like to think I actually held his hand for a minute perhaps while he lay in the bed with the mattress half tilted up towards us all. I think he was up though when I left and I hugged him and I did say out loud, I love you bro, and he returned the favor - just like that damned commercial, I can hear that too from the 80's, which I won't even go on about. I said I love you and hugged him and left the room full of blinking lights, and he went on his way to the bathroom pulling the IV along.

The next day I felt strange and uncomfortable at work, and I know I should've left work and gone down to the hospice where he'd been moved. But I'm paralyzed in that way and even today. 

The next morning I do go down though, first thing, it's the old Graduate Hospital building which sits alone on a center city block. The corridors are wide and nearly empty. Large sitting rooms with potted plants, an available coffee station with a fridge. I walk into his room and he's sleeping, stiff and grey. I think he's sleeping and sit there for quite a while, nearby looking at him, so still.

His kids come in a half hour later and tell me it's ok if I take a picture. So do have that in the digital realm somewhere. Aaah my neck hurts today, this rainy mid March morning. Hang your head and cry dear boy, like one of those old cowboy songs. I never could stick with the folk music regime though, but maybe I should get back to it. It's where I started.

It would be a relief actually to not write the memoir with that LA Writers workshop online and just redouble my efforts to connect with and work with those who are nearby, and wanting to just get going on things. Because you never know when the curtains will start closing. Maybe writing little pieces about people, like this piece, will be good enough for now.

Perhaps this morning, writing this one, remembering Richard, my old buddy, best friend - the good times and not so good - even if deeply and forever, unchangeably not so good - perhaps this morning I'm getting the clearest feeling in a long time of what I do want to do. After such a long phase of revisiting the past and precious people back there. And its not yet time to spend hours rehashing every old memory yet again and trying to synthesize in order to, well, to synthesize. Maybe it's ok to remain fragmented and partial. Broken into parts. Unforgiven, in my own heart, for not having given back to him what he, without fail, gave to me. I don't think he once failed to aid me when I asked. And many a time when I couldn't find the words. Indeed, I find myself not getting back to many people right now to whom I feel obliged. The paralyzing feeling has been setting in to a larger degree, like a swamp that is spreading, the water is rising. 

Time to become amphibious. Which I have been before, long ago, back in the beginning. In Old Chatham, running down to the pond at Powell House, diving in and letting myself glide. Holding my breath, take a stroke and then glide further, further. I found that I was using almost no energy on the glide, I could feel that specifically. And there was a sense of glory and freedom in that, just gliding underwater without air, through that murky pond sitting out next to nowhere, upstate N.Y. Gliding, gliding then one big stroke, and more gliding towards the end, in the darkness, eyes open underwater, green light far above. I found I could go really astonishing far in this way.

 

PS, I found the show: Spartacus, Blood and Sand; 2010- 2013