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.

after only moments - an after moment

It matters most when the lights begin to gather in on themselves to form an unresponsive shadow - an apparition that doesn't need to be rescued as much as it needs to be cauterized before spreading into the size and shape of smoke colored memories. We don't belong here anymore, books of folded pages and table leg marks, books from people who lost the ability to communicate years ago so now they spend their waking moments hiding from the sun. It matters most when the lights begin to flutter, when the wings that carry breath away from the earth reaches just above our heads and for a second there is something hopeful about tomorrow. Little slices of lives like bits of sand, fractured ideas moving against the spiraling of thoughts moving in and out of thinking about the fractured rain coming down the sloped windows of my car.

i could use the air

I know what you're thinking. I've been here before. I've seen this simple book, the shiny metal spirals glistening in the new dawn, the reduced pages of black finger marks and broken lettering that any child of conscious thought could mutter out between visits to grandmas house and the old creek bed now filled with the dead and dying bottleneck flies of summer.

I know I've been here before, poised, readied drink in hand, thoughts remiss of the good old days of some forgotten dream I thought I'd push ahead of me like some protective projectile. But I'm getting ahead of myself again. You've only just begun to make the descent, to position yourself for the lengthy and sometimes untidy journey of an other's mindfulness. So, we've been here, not this now but the nows before this that were just as full of quiet questions and still life moving, things held by a sense of soft impermanence. Yet I am also moving in similar patterns, direct lines and those indirect ones caught gazing as the sun slides through morning bay haze, the color and shape of trees dissected by power lines and advertisements colored by graffiti and this feeling deep below the surface of my dreams that whispers every now and again to breathe.

do not duplicate

I found them in an old cardboard box with torn edges. They hadn't changed even though I had so very much so. I remember them clearly now in my hand, the tarnished gold and silver on the bent wire circles - the plastic one that made the doors beep - one to enter, one to leave. I can't recall which doors they open now, which they did. I'm sure the locks have all been changed these days. There are small ones for cabinets and boxes, other security containers that are a little less secure now.

How long has it been?
Made in the U.S.A.
Haworth.
L001.
Lyon Aurora, Ill.
ESP Corp.
Do not duplicate.
Schlage. 5x75.
Chicago lock co.


I am blank. The box affords no less mystery now than it did the years before this, the sliced hours, the seconds pushing themselves against an inevitable collision of dust and shadows. Now I listen to doorbells and strangers walking through the day outside, the trees and grass drying in the heat, the gentle wind falling down like the voices of children kept too long in dark rooms and antechambers. It's not like that of course. People haven't any idea of it except to say the windows do not lie about the here and now of things, the stress of silence, the distance of searching for things that aren't there.

Here again looking back over the years and wondering what it has to do with anything to be here.

in this new beginning place...

...I carry with me these dissimilar seconds, the quiet that appears and slides like memory, one always competing with the one before, busily musing my lives all at once. The miles roll by beneath me, steel wheels, the tired blue berber carpet, these listless and frozen faces. I'll be there in eight stops, no nine, small exchanges flanked by larger ones, words my necessary company, ideas struggling to outlive my attention, my memory. Some of this will sound familiar. How many times I've been here, done this, changing pens for ink, for the feel of a fountain pen on my pysche. Cars form, connecting the rectangles along the freeways, the red white and blue motifs, reocurring feeling we're using up our resources too quickly. It can't last. When things fall apart it is becuase the center cannot hold, the duldrum of circles, of hand shapes batting shadows still, massaging currents from inexact air to change slowly from the now to the end of being upright.

In this new beginning place I carry with me opportunity to breathe, to exist in all the moments that have yet to live, to draw breath in and let loose the daggers of mind, our troubled past, the uneasy and the unimportant words the build like bricks, like palm fronds, those spiny limbs that refuse to let go of this world no matter how great the next.

These lights remind me some things can last, they have to, the world of moving and slowing, of pushing ideas to replace quarantees that must fail if we are to ever dream again or feel free from the end.

When words travel outward there is pause in sunlight and shadow, breath from the creation that is and isn't the way in from the tangle of not knowing. Sometimes the dead and dying follow us too closely, they want in, to nurture is to be close, to breathe in the good air and let go of the bad.

This is the beginning place where birth and death live sometimes stumbling, always in for the long score - words, just simple ink that tells us where we've been and where we've yet to go.