/kəmˈpōZHər/

Rain and wind greet me at the door, catch me off balance, give me pause. I see the yard, it hasn't changed, green and black figs like bloated pygmy heads dangle from stubby limbs, dog shit withers, the sun is no where in sight. I fight the urge to move, it's better that way, a chance to encounter upright, a way to breath again. I could be a thousand miles from here or less, maybe in the desert looking at all the stars, huddle too close to that camp fire that singed my pant bottoms, melted my shoes just a little. There are years between us now. That is where memory goes, behind and inside, elusive, unnecessary, a black and jagged shape dissecting the sky, a handful of stones and sticks, an album no one has seen but me since.

Clearing the clutter I prepare myself with things, with things I dislike mostly, with things that I fear will remain a part of my slow and steady decline, things that dig in, bite, wound, things that no one should have to carry around with them. These load stones are gathered for me, around me, they root me to the ground and threaten to carry me away. I have no way of knowing what is just up ahead but it is there, a specter maybe, a faceless face with slits for eyes and the burden of tomorrow held up to the sky.

I write this down in empty space and leave it like a tiny boat made from sticks and bubble gum wrappers. I leave it go in tall and crimson water, in all this absent place that falls like invisible wings of the dead and dying would refuse one more time to solidify.

It Doesn't Matter -- It Hasn't Mattered in a very long time

You called and left a message on my phone. I knew it was you but I didn't answer. It was ten. I should have been asleep for an hour but then again, I should be a lot of things at that hour that I rarely am. And then I listened to your message.

Who you hate?
In the swamps, trying to make a life...3 bottles of wine. Where are you - I miss you. There is a farm here. A farm and a guest house in Uruguay and I'm finishing this film. It's called In Repose. No hope in California. I don't care if you're disappointed in me.

Don't forget me.

And then the message ended and I've never heard from you since.

something positive

I like to think of things in relationships like the line where earth and sky meet, the place along the shore where wet water meets dry sand and they push against one another to be the strongest to survive. I like to think about positive things but negative things are always nearby; the last five years have proven rocks to be the weight of forever on my shoulders and simple breath-like-smiles the stuff of dreams. But I’m prefacing again, side stepping again, looking for a way to make sense of my everyday dilemmas because no one else can. Maybe in the halving of my life between good and bad I should be better at letting go. Maybe conformity isn’t giving up like others give up to drudgery and lethargy. But for now I write about something positive, here like a school assignment I was never very good at.

When I was in the third grade I remember sitting at the tall table in the kitchen of our ranch house and tracing the shapes of dinosaurs on paper too big for tiny hands. If I close my eyes I can almost feel the blue crayon between my stubby fingers filling an outline of long dead reptiles replicated by my mother’s hand. Mom encouraged me and my brother between puffs on a Raleigh cigarette that scored the room with blue and white tendrils caught by shafts of daylight. I think we had just returned from Florida two weeks prior and were still in the awkward phase of moving back in with my fathers parents; two families in one rundown house. That was thirty three years ago.

none of this would matter ever again

I found the old house
wiped the dreams from my eyes,
tears still, hope tingling because I still couldn’t believe
What I was being told was the immeasurable weight of breath, life.
The trees were wet with morning, the grass
bent over here and there with the impressions of footprints
the footprints of strangers to and from the falling house.
I searched the uniforms for names, searched the faces for someone familiar,
someone who could tell me about the night – but no one came forward,
no one explained to me that this was no temporary visit, they came
for to ask questions and figure out what I already knew to be true – none
of this would matter ever again.

Blog Cabins: Movie Reviews and Commentary Made Fun: Fletch's Film Review: Toy Story 3

Blog Cabins: Movie Reviews and Commentary Made Fun: Fletch's Film Review: Toy Story 3

Found this, again, totally by the randomness of blog-hopping, I think I started at http://detailedcriticisms.blogspot.com/

anyway, great review. don't forget mine at http://rorydean.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/toy-story-3-from-past-to-present/

So I copied your personal essay today

So I copied your personal essay today, had to, needed to make it bigger cause my eyes are blurry from too much sleep or not enough. So I’m looking at the words now, after the fact, font size large, screen size larger, and I’m thinking your first sentence tells it all – being alone and realizing you’re alone are two completely different, but connected things. The baptism of voyage, the rain and all make miles I’m guessing, not knowing if you’re talking about driving from Oakland to Nashville or some other beginning and ending. I like the water metaphor. It rains a lot in my personal stories too only I can’t seem to get the windshield wipers to work right or keep the road in focus. Is that what those white lines are for?

I keep tripping over myself. I check my shoes even though I bought them precisely because they didn’t have laces. I think my uncertainty makes me twice left footed because I don’t know whether to keep on through this inspired ramble-on or just tell you how much I’ve enjoyed reading about your happenings.

So I continue like I didn’t just write that. I tell myself writing is part of breathing and even if this gets lost somewhere between this, what, place, this make-believe place, I don’t think so but I keep going back to it like an Oakland sidewalk I haven’t seen up close before, just passing by to somewhere else. But I read on and write on because right now it’s eleven twenty-two and I can’t get back to the finding the job thing right now.

So I’m following you, alone in a car full of people. I like that thought. I often say it similarly but with different people, in a room not a car, in a situation I know I can walk away from but choose not to until it’s too late and I have to answer to someone, anyone. The idea of being closed in seems right, the kind of place I mean where you meet people, find relationship people, even end up attached people but I think it better to avoid that old cliché because there are some parts of your life where being alone is the best it is ever going to get because you don’t know any more than you hope for.

I haven’t made the effort to know your age but I remember nights like that, Arsenio’s big ass smile, not Oprah though, couldn’t get that, eluded me though I can see where she was then as a direct comment on where she was heading, is. “If I can’t see you, you’ve gone too far,” words to live by for sure no matter what kind of upbringing you have to keep your memories in – like a worn out old box, dog ears, torn and tapped too many times but not enough to keep your things from spilling out.

I cannot go to Carnton, I have no business there and realize in my realizing, I must return with dusty steps to what the Spanish call the “apple orchard” for some kind of some kind, here in California’s Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas. Manzanar, sixty some odd seventy years ago where ‘we’ put the Japanese, where ‘we’ employed the term ‘forced relocation’ like it didn’t mean what it meant and someone wasn’t going to remember enough about it to write it down for later, for shame.

Damn right words there, “no sense of home, no sense of where I belong.” I find your words again and then let them go. I have to continue this journey you started, this journey you shared and keep on with my own now because I have to share, because twenty-one years is a long time but my ten years seems longer, no Florida relatives here though I spent a handful of years in Belle Glade some decades ago.

Best in your quest just beginning after this one. I’m mid-road and stepping, I’m listening and wondering when the rain is going to leave me the way it left you.

Inspired by http://inkwell-masterpiece.blogspot.com/

There's a lot you don't know about

There are a lot of things we don’t know about each other.


I don’t know what it was like for my great, great paternal grandfather 'Manual' to gather up his two wee-daughters and wife in tow and travel by boat from the Azore Islands to America and stake his claim in the rich, fertile grounds of the central San Joaquin Valley at the turn of the century. I can't know what the crops of those first years must have yielded, though I can imagine poorly as most, before taking hold, before roots find much needed footing and nutrients deep below the surface, wither at the first sign of sun and a moment without water; stalks the size of grass, seeds brittle and infertile. There are no pictures of the feeble canal sending mud choked water into the channels that carried them one by one from one end of the ranch to the other and finally, very near exhaustion, the old man must have fallen right there in the pastry-flour like earth to watch in the fleeting hours of the night at the first signs that something, anything was going to keep them from starving much longer.

I have no pictures of the grand two story home he built with his own hands, with the other laborers putting in twelve hours a day until it were built for a cup of thin soup and crusty bread three times a day for a month and finally, together, they sat around with wine and whiskey and strong drink that first evening after and full of spirit lay down their head on the hardwood floor and called themselves kings of crown and country with songs from the old country long forgotten, songs with worn smooth words to prick the ears of lovers and warm the hearts of children to young yet to know such ways. I have no pictures, only stories told with wet eyes because one evening, short on money and patience, the old man took two pennies instead of fuses and rigged up the electrical fuse box to get the lights back on so his wife could finish the wash and the children could do their arithmetic - only in the early, cold hours after all had hurried off, to school and other places, the house caught to fire because of those pennies and by the time anyone was there to stop the blaze the entire place had gone up, one long plume of smoke and ash and fire, a bonfire piercing the sky over and over again until even the men folk had tears in their eyes and the children shivered and the women hadn't even a blanket to chase away the cold.


And I don’t know the name of the pub my great, great maternal grandfather spent his evenings all those years ago. I don't know if it were a regular place or a makeshift room with a sturdy table and a keg of the finest Irish stout to be had from pillar to post and everyone who was in the know knew about the old place. I can't say if a sign hung from the roof, a tin thing held with wire and rivulets of rusty steel. I don't know if the old man propped himself up on a stool or crate after scratching a living out of the earth from sun up to sun down, whether he preferred stout or lager; though if he were anything like me, or I like him, he fancied himself a lager a time or two for a wee parched throat and to soothe his dry and cracked hands from the unforgiving hardwood of an ax handle or the worn smooth handle of a shovel with a head polished like a mirror from the baked and rocky earth of old Ireland. I'd have no way of seeing him, covered in dust, smelling of lager, bent over and crooning over his youngest, one little man with his papa's eyes and disposition, perched for a kiss with a glint only fathers and sons know about. He'd make a go of finding his bed beside the best woman who would ever have him, the woman with the softest hands he had ever known and who he would spend extra on a bar of the smoothest lotion for her after working all day to clean the house and tend the garden and make the clothing look proper, intermittent seconds to peek from one giant laundry pot full of lye to the soup pot on the stove making tough meat edible and making tap water and spices the best stew for crusty bread you have ever known in all your life.

But I would know about her, what a decade just past, the years like stickers in the soles of my feet, what we called goat-heads or puncture vines; little seedy buggers that like barbs would break off in the soft places of your feet to fester and infect. I don't have to close my eyes to see her, not ever I wager, a picture as easily as a memory, moving, hair golden and soft in the wind, angel hair and will-o-wisp to spare, a photograph every second between open sky and the patchy shadows of Eucalyptus or Dutch Elm trees; she had a way of floating about, devil may care even though I knew better, I knew her smile hid such imperfections as children and their mother's don't speak of. I knew how the dark could fall like bricks in heavy, wet burlap and cover one up, snuff out the breath and the light like night but the sun was still up. I knew how words could wound at the very sound of them and how if you held your ears too long your wrists would go numb and you'd have no recourse for the insults, for the jagged and violent words, for the tattering and the bleeding. I know about those things but I’d surely have no idea about those last days, the final hours when the last days of my mother’s life had been just a decade ago crashing and I have hardly the strength to put these words into proper meaning. I know of the ensuing deaths within a year of all but myself; now a vagabond of sorts and wayward traveler of the mind, frequently lost in self aggrandizing.

How I might marvel at my own obituary-worthy accomplishments as though I could in such circumstances, gather a dozen people with hardly an interest in one another to sit around and sip wine on my occasion, to drink in the heady air of summer fair, perched to combat the feeling of another simple passing, another wayward traveler who will not return from this trip. What might a poorly written clip contains; Here lived a man, born at this time, dead today, not much to speak of really. He was an educated man who traveled a bit and wrote a little more, he made a few works of art such as they were and spread them about in limited circles. He was a giving fellow and a curious chap. He fancied a pint or two and conversations so; he died where others have died before and surely there will be those come hither to meet their maker. He was born, he lived, and he died. And that is that.

Do you ever look up?

Do you ever look up?

I mean really look up, cock your head back and gawk at all the shit over you that might all at once come crashing down in one immeasurable ka-boom before you know it. I imagine that it is what a bomb going off or a high pressure gas line exploding might be like.

First the sensation of the earth moving, of the beams holding the roof of your house flexing and a rumble like no rumble you’ve ever felt before rising up like waves through your feet first then your ankles, rising instantaneously, so fast you haven’t time to even register the wave as it shoots through your pelvis, belly and lungs before you become light headed for an instant and balance is all but a memory, hands grasping for the wall, for the refrigerator handle as your knees hinge and knees guide you to the floor with a ringing like a child’s strand of bells dinging in your ears. Then the sound erupts like breath against the hair on your arms and shoulders, against your neck, the slap of a thousand fingers all at once, equal parts discernable sounds and something else, something you can’t quite put words to. Then the walls come apart. Right before your eyes pictures evaporate and curtains puff orange and red and yellow then black out of sight. Furniture, the table that had been a gift from your long dead grandmother who brought it here on some shit hole ocean liner wrapped in jackets and thick quilts, it lifts as of its own volition and winks out of the room about as quickly as you open your mouth, trying to clear your ears, trying to believe your eyes. All this blurs from one room to the next as plaster and paint peel away, as the bare bone wooden frame of your house is splayed open, dusty nail heads ripped away, spider webs wadded up and inhaled by the maul of a force that has no face to speak of, no real voice or eyes locked on yours, but a hole that is at once warm then burning, caressing then tearing, and right there in the midst of an enormous span of birth and renewal, of death and never having been alive at all, is the ceiling of your kitchen and a spec of something dark, a tiny thing held there by a web of sorts very nearly invisible except for the way morning sunshine is pushing in all around it to form a shadow that might spell the initials of your name if you name was someone else’s.

Looking up; do you ever look up?

spring cleaning in summer time

I spray water on the clipped grass tracing the almond tree shadow, preparing a place for my chair, positioning into the evening.  The sun is setting, the sky giving up the consistent blue.  Traffic has settled.  In four hours it might be cool.

The day is everywhere around me.  From my backyard I can hear train horns and automobile engines, birds perched on overhead telephone wires, wind filling trees one branch at a time – the whole neighborhood is moving.

To the South the trees create a thirty foot tall grouping, not quite a wall, more like an incomplete hedge, spotty and disproportionate.  The orange tree in my neighbor’s yard is limp, dying – soon it might match his dead lawn, grass the color of wheat, an alley still beyond my chain link fence.

I am paused here, the wind chimes for company, the tin-tin jingle of my dogs’ collars in the breezeway, the sound of dry tree limbs rubbing against one another.  The garbage men continue to find the can’s missed throughout the day, met by the occasional neighbor dragging the heavy plastic totes up their driveway, over rocks and gardens, behind fences or left out in error.

For the time being I am moved towards a chance to write about personal impasse, the struggle to belong to something bigger than this circle.  The phone rarely rings here.  I sometimes question my link with the rest of the world at all – especially now that I have become a cripple.

I’m not sure.  Where can one go from here?

something positive

I like to think of things in relationships like the line where earth and sky meet, the place along the shore where wet water meets dry sand and they push against one another to be the strongest to survive.  I like to think about positive things but negative things are always nearby; the last five years have proven rocks to be the weight of forever on my shoulders and simple breath-like-smiles the stuff of dreams.  But I'm prefacing again, side stepping again, looking for a way to make sense of my everyday dilemmas because no one else can.  Maybe in the halving of my life between good and bad I should be better at letting go.  Maybe conformity isn't giving up like others give up to drudgery and lethargy.  But for now I write about something positive, here like a school assignment I was never very good at.

because it will be May today

The dream opens in a well-kept neighborhood. I find myself at the sidewalk of a large home with a sprawling lot full of trees, bushes that have been neatly taken care of – personal. There is an odd sense of familiarity to the scene like I’ve been here before or in the least I am reminded of the old ranch – a direct contrast to this place. There are nice cars in the driveway and the garden is full of small, sturdy flowers. In the next moment I am walking up the driveway toward the front door. Once I get there I hesitate for a moment and then in the next instant I’m inside the house, alone. I hear people moving around inside, the voices of children and adults. I continue to have this feeling of familiarity, an overwhelming warmth that starts in my belly and unravels there, full, thick with emotion. I am in the kitchen now, moving, waiting while this mother and father figure come into view. They are OK with me being there. There are a lot of fragments at this point. I think I say something. I think I hear something, someone moving, a series of questions and answers that don’t add up. Then I’m crying. I’m crying and I’m reaching out for mom. She embraces me and holds me as though I am a baby, her baby, pushing a silent, comforting sound out of her lips, lulling me there in her arms, saying things will be OK some day without uttering the words. The embrace is warm and fills me. For a few seconds I feel OK and the sadness leaves me like blood from an open wound. I close my eyes and stand there sobbing, hoping that the moment will not end, praying as best I can that this is not a dream and that this is my real life. I hold my breath and am afraid to let it out. I want my lungs to keep it all in, to prevent this moment from changing into something else, something closer to the truth. But inevitably it must end. There are more fragments here. I lose track of myself in the illusory details of the dream, the sounds of people nearby, the questions posed by a girl child, “are you my brother?” “No,” I respond. “No I’m not.” The words are deafening. Suddenly this place is full of sound as though a thousand trees are falling at the same time and the impending crash is a noise all itself, a drowning gasp for air, for circulation. Even as I am speaking I realize that I am forcing the dream into a place where it cannot survive. The dream waivers for a moment, a dull sheen as though something heavy, looming and threatening is moving up around it on all sides. There are the impressions of hands around me, huge fingers lost in shadows, the details blurred by inexact sketch work of lines. I watch it move again and then it is still, as though it has become a photograph. The reflection is still and then it is over. I am suffocating in blackness. I cannot breathe. My mind is spiraling and it is all that I can do to remain upright, to retain my balance. In a second there is more silence, the noise of uncertainty like water in the air. I open my eyes and I am wet as the dream ends. I feel my chest throbbing and I am breathing hard, my face slick, my hands numb from being clenched across my chest. After a moment I return, here, in this place with you, all of you out there listening, thoughts lingering, words held in the light – their own universe perched in time and space like shiny balls pushing against a windowsill that refuses to open. Do you feel the darkness? Can you hear how quiet it is between words, between my voice and this recollection? Close your eyes with me. Close your eyes. I am tired, looking for words that aren’t there.