So that nuggets of gold might surface

Holiest of shit two days running. It must be holy because my head is streaked with pain and allergy in a bloody way that must be some form of god. Banks and scanners work in tandem in my hindrance this week. Big scanner project for the good doctor is threatened! Meantime I enter into a sea-storm relationship with HP Support. When first we begin whispering our fuzzy introductions we are kind, but when I introduce the problem, the HP personality heaves a hearty defense mechanism between us, passing me on to another personality. And then another. And then another. And then another. Salt and fierce slashing, my cannon prepares but stays back. Until I return to the initial personality who passed me off to the second personality. Curses! I counter with a blast of my own bipolarity. Sweet ‘n’ inquisitive turn stern ‘n’ curt. My stereo is furious.

Yesterday I let my head swell red with throb. I steamed and stomped out to my car and drove maniacally home almost two hours later than normal. At home I guzzled a cold Blue Ribbon—immediately. An insidious backwoods dweller ripe with murderous instinct. I have two heads. My roommate made ham sandwiches and string beans. I made sense of my guitar lesson. My book splayed open and I let more magus pull loose my line between fantasy and reality. Tenuous.

With the long hid sunshine I entered today, in calm proper perspective. Some things just go askew some times. Just now the good doctor called from afar. Black and red story having been told, he was calm, deserving of his title, along with the plumpest orange. Furies have set down their forks, and I am beyond storm.

This here giraffe

Or, clouds taste metallic today.

I am Wayne Coyne. You have been deceived, I have been deceived, he has been deceived. I’m glad we all now know. I am dramatic, cracked and bloody. I bang gongs. I save planets. Together we are excited but nervous and simultaneously a little Madame Curie sliced with Bettie Page in our blazing puckers. Let us dress like animals and never have neck pain again.

Flanked with fortuity, souped up in synchronicity, alliteration threatens me to use it whorishly. I do. What else is there. The Magus in the book has trickled out from the page and into my bedroom, my blood and walks knee-high in my boots with me, promising that I’ve been deceived all my life. The magician is the god is the magician on each beach. I believe him. Everything at once is open and vertigo thrives between bald and ripe roses in morphing sky. I am Wayne Coyne.

Porous

What a terribly rainy forecast for three hundred days to come. I suppose it isn’t necessarily terrible. Whatever the case I’m approaching it like a true Aries warrior, packing comically gloomy heat and music. This morning I drove to work soundtracked by the recent deluxe issue of The Cure’s Pornography, time-traveling back to high school days closed up in my bedroom and making angsty collages.

When I reached my office I immediately filled it with Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s lift yr. skinny fists like antennas to heaven! I volunteered to review this album when I wrote music reviews for a weekly nightlife paper, but when I went to it my brain became a bowl of soup having been thrown at a wall. Lentil soup, beet soup, no matter. Words would not coalesce. My thoughts became a tsunami, and I fought it the wrong way. Always I beat myself into writing on assignment. Cold November, I listened to the dark, epic thing on repeat until I myself became dark and epic. The abyss, I jumped into, masochistically.

Once a minute I stepped out on the porch for frosty reprieve in a cigarette. At last I began countering the emperor with a Zombies album I’d checked out of the library, playing one and then the other, back and forth for days of smoke. That’s when I fell in love with zombie vocals. I swooned over every one of them. They were my springtime. They were my respite in fantasy in light of a broken and faithless black-lung heart, chaotic head.

Rain, rain, and loss that simultaneously is not lost, both encapsulated and redistributed, both then and now, November giving way to spring and the reverse, and to vectoring out and upward. What a forecast for days to come.

Career in Cowing

An interlude to peel my eyes away from pages and pages of obstructive sleep apnea insomnia narcolepsy syndrome for which many many pharmaceuticals are prescribed each year. Absolute profundity will resume when the cows do.

Finally I’ve discovered what I’m best at and better yet it comes effortlessly. After I’ve had a couple of drinks I grow a dragonhead over my own, with loose and feisty tongue. Translation: I call my roommate foul names (e.g., motherfucker, jerkoff, assface, bitch, dicknose, stupidhead (not all of these have surfaced in action yet)), tagging easily into normal conversation. What are you doing with that pork, Bitch? It’s effortless. What to do now but start a business, target audience: masochists. I’m not much for physical violence so if you want also to be beaten, I suppose I could smack your ass with a badminton racket or corkscrew, but I’d rather stick to verbal assault.

It works like this: You, the masochist, call me toll free (1-800-HURTME). We agree either to meet at a bar, where you will buy me at least two drinks, three if I request a lesser beer for quaint’s sake or if the bartender makes a lame cocktail. You don’t tip the bartender: you tip me, and doubly. Or you bring to my house a six-pack or makings for 7&7s, my choice, unless I feel like a surprise. Then it'll be up to you. We’ll sit on the back steps, maybe whack a shuttlecock back and forth. We’ll banter while I consume and soon, without palpable transition, I will pelt you with hard little words.

All in jest, of course, for me—I toss back my head in easy laughter—but you are the masochist. You love it. For a little extra, I will intensify the assault with archaic expletives, foreign tempers, compound stones. Racial slurs available upon request. You buy it, you name it, I name you. Your dragonhead, your perky belittler.

On the 8-Ball

Illinois has cast me back eastward relatively unscathed, purged. The allergy imps in Illinois are vicious and relentless, heartless. And those mythical menses with their tinkerbell attitudes who traveled with me, after having teased me for weeks with harsh whispers, finally clubbed me after the longest prelude in history to an unkiss upon my inner belly. Minor obstacles, an elephant is in my favor.

On ground again after circling the port for a spell, I feel calmed. The bog I trod before the visit to the source has retreated peacefully. Naturally because I am human it will rise again. So it goes. For now, I have sunk the 8-ball in a rum of catharsis. My parents—what admirable people!—put me tiptoe on a welcome tightrope: They gift me boundless love and respect just for being. I aim to keep up my part adroitly.

And then nothing turned itself inside-out—I can’t soak in enough of this album today. It feels like a satisfying story of my life, each drop of sound a resonant narrative and outlook aroused warmly in me in feel and scope. I don’t know why or how. When I bought this album just after its release I didn’t want to ever stop it. I let the endless somnambulant pattern in the last track be in its endlessness. Weather casts a new spell.

Eggs

I’m out for a few days, to make brief escape to my hometown to visit my family. Hometown: Effingham. Say it out loud, revel in its obscenity.

Many emotional events have turned my head inside out in the past month, and it occurred to me that returning to the source for a few days might benefit.

In the past I would not have considered the source any kind of healthy salve or sabbath. No, family visits never resembled any sort of spa, unless brochures for such a place commonly advertise screeching, tentacled mother-daughter fights or passive-aggressive meta-talk because everybody’s too squeamish to speak truth.

One Easter morning that should have involved pastel eggs instead involved my mom and I standing in front of the house, screaming so loud at each other that words blurred into one howling wave. Neighbors in a two-street distance each direction us from played audience to our tragic psycho-slaughter upon the grass. Blood and chips of flesh ashed over the yard at the end. The applause when we bowed was silent.

Things haven’t gone that way in at least a couple of years. Finally after many years of angry daughterhood I find comfort in my mom again, which was more often than not the source of sourcal disease.

The charring decade-plus-long disintegration of intimacy between my mom and me, and the following arc up and into this comfortable room with its comfortable couch and warm fire in the place we have now, awes me. I maintain distance on occasion, when she "acts up", but I’m entitled to do so, as she is when I "act up", though mostly she accepts me as I am, in meditation rather than with a tongue-lashing. What a gift.

When I said I needed to get away, and said I was going to visit my family, several people eye-bugged: You're going to visit your family to get peace and quiet/space/escape? Why not a tropical island? At least this once, I reply, Oui, oui, mes amis.

oneironaut in medias res

When I finished putting salad into my belly for lunch yesterday, I went to the doors at the back of the hospital cafeteria and walked outside. I’d been wondering what was out there. It didn’t go to where I thought it would go, that area outside with a gazebo made of new wood. It went to a tiny area with a few benches, where people smoke after lunch. There weren’t many people out, so I sat on a bench under the sun and read my book.

Kneading through boxes and shelves of books at a rummage sale a couple of weekends ago, The Magus by John Fowles, whom I’d never read, caught my eye. I tried not to look, but I am weak in the seduction of books. Right now over 500 books, which the fellas recently helped me move into the house, are stuck midway between box and shelf. Many of these books I haven’t read. I pick them up at used stores, new stores, rummage sales, Goodwill. When it’s nearly free, and when it’s something I’d like to feed my soul with, I pick it up, perhaps under the guise of some ideal early retirement during which I’ll lie about reading and writing voraciously. In the past year or so—more?—words haven’t excited me like they used to. This has disturbed me. I equate a good read, as well as a good write, with a good orgasm. Core vigors, manna.

This book, this magic book, has woven itself into my synapses and nerve endings, my heart and fingertips. As they say, I can’t put it down. At long last, I again think about the characters and the world they live in when I’m away from the book. I underline, make notes, dog-ear, stop to think. Suddenly, again, synchronicity shows its dazzling face, the book's livelihood oscillatingly concurrent in theme with lines in my non-book life, lines in the web which glow at each new intersection.

When lunch time was over, I had to go back in through a side door. The door I’d come out was locked. This took me down a hallway. Just as I was about to pass the Security sign, a guard stepped out from around the corner, singing a single phrase, "Your dreams will come true." I didn't recognize the tune. He passed and I walked on.

Three hours later when I left from work, a truck drove toward me. Across the front of it was a large pastel-colored sticker: "Make your dreams come true." My first thought was, What kind of cheesy mother would put this on the front of this burly truck? The truck looked masculine, but by the sticker I assumed a female driver. I looked up and through the windshield. The driver was a man, dark wordless eyes, and he was staring me in the face.

It startled me. Then I remembered the security guard’s song, and the luna and my psyche’s buried map.

Bird-Sputter Internationale

Moon in my gut, sunshine overhead. I am moody, tracking psyche and finding a spot in the current. I am busy and dependent on the color of the sky, but not every time there is a sky, which eliminates a common denominator, a pattern, a logic.

Sometimes hormones, sometimes unwelcome grandmotherly strangers, sometimes spiders in the kitchen which actually are cave crickets, involve their moist invasive feelers. Sometimes I act like a girl and scream. My circulatory is caught in globular sonic vines sung by modern machines and French bodies. I wonder how many more people it will take, telling me I have French air about me, before I believe it and it is true. Uh, oui?

Yesterday I nearly split into variously shot pieces, gunpowder blown. Oversight and resulting red frustration—I dislike erring; that very dislike I consider to be a fundamental flaw prohibiting peace and flight. Mis-takes, spills. Error and allergies and antihistamines and hormones and persistently upheavaling passions—gutted me yesterday. I flayed open like a tigerlily flat in exhaust fumes, and then drove home.

This morning at a stop sign on my way to work I decided to begin to love to err. And then I turned a sharp left, maniacal, laughing.

Humming under antihistamine but flecked with sun, today I flit lightly—having been advised by an Irishman that I have youth I should enjoy. Always I will, I told him, I plan to defy time, don’t you?

Mess and Transcendence III: Kaleidoscoping and crispy tofu

(The story began here, and then continued here.)

When I shut my eyes as I lay in bed kaleidoscopes sped swirling, a wash of jewels inside, which I relished seeing but would have given anything to shut off right then. After several days off work, I had to be back in five hours. The cough medicine must have re-charged the acid. My mind buzzed. While (G) slept, I buzzed with fast thought and color.

Kaleidoscoping within myself, finally I woke (G). Caring soul tried everything, warm milk, back rub, belly rub, talking. Nothing worked. I’d been unstoppably re-charged. Finally he suggested I get up and do something. Get up! I thought. I can’t get up. I have to go to work. I only have a few hours left. This is awful!

Then he broke it to me that I was too dependent on time, because what was time anyway, arbitrarily designated markers along the sun’s course, the clock. I was a slave.

He was right. All my 22 years to then this had been true and my slavishness had never occurred to me. I allowed myself to be trapped by a circle on the wall, its needle spinning hypnotically. Artificially. I’d been attaching myself to artificial things, fleeting things, desperate to lock down some meaning. But meaning wasn’t in a pair of jeans or in some arbitrarily designated minute on the clock-face. I was in the extreme right then, with no lockdown at all, no structure, no sleep, no time, momentarily free even from any idiosyncratic pattern-hold on the day. I was unbound though not unhinged.

Clearly, no matter what happened at this point, I wasn’t going to get proper sleep for work at 8:30 in the morning. There was no use fighting—the clock, myself, or otherwise. I sat on the couch in the living room and wrote a letter to Heather, as my mom had suggested, and already tension loosed. I wrote and wrote, and at eight in the morning, still awake, I called my boss.

It wasn’t like me to miss work or class for anything. That’s what brought me to my Greek class in the midst of snow and fever. I wondered about transgression. First my mom, now this. Something new was trying to impress itself upon me, or yank me out of my thick cocoon. It was sticky and uncomfortable. Dutifully, I worked at accepting it.

I’d planned on going to work for only half a day anyway, so I asked my boss if she minded my coming in for the second half of the day instead, thinking I’d sleep before then. I did not sleep, however. The gods were chasing me, ensuring that I got the message: to free myself from the self I’d twined myself so tightly into.

At noon I arrived at the dim-lit ORDA library, no sleep. With my co-worker, I became more talkative than I’d ever been. Normally we had clipped, antagonistic dialogue—pretentious garage-rock schmuck was wrought with all sorts of too-early domestic settling and condescended to me as if he were middle-aged, even though I had years on him. Because he was intelligent, I secretly enjoyed arguing with him anyway. And this day the sun was effervescing in my brain.

After work, I met up with (G), (T), and later (K). I told them my epic odyssey. I ate crispy tofu in spicy sesame sauce, with noodles instead of rice, from New Kahala. Around eight in the evening, flushed, I thumped down on the couch at home and into sleep.

I no longer wear a watch, but that I still involuntarily adhere to the on-the-minute tells me I’m still a slave. I suppose artificial time is my catholocism, rooted in me since youth, hanging over my every move, mythic war-body imposed upon me, which I fear betraying. I consider it my duty to stretch and test it. That colorful night still has not ended.

Mess and Transcendence II: My mom and furied etching

(The story begins here.)

Fuck. I guessed I was going to have to get over that "can’t talk" thing. Big-eyed I got up and took the phone from him.

"How are you feeling?" my mom asked. Oh, right. The flu.

"Oh, uh," I became instantly aware of the black plastic thing I was holding to my ear and of the sound that was coming out of it. My mom’s disembodied voice. The room shifted 90 degrees and took on a reddish-orange hue, and then spun, and spun, and spun. My eyes wouldn’t settle on any one thing for more than a nano. The voice was still going. I shut my eyes and the room in there spun too.

"Sara?" That voice from the plastic again. "Yeah? oh sorry mom. I’m a little distracted. Friends over. And I think that medication is still making me feel weird." "You should really write to Heather. She’d like to come to…" "Ok." "should do that" "Yeah, I should get going. Friends. Not feeling up to talking right now."

Christ, I never lied to my mom. I knew that because my mom was psychic she knew something was up. I told her pretty much everything. I took note of the transgression and eventually decided there was nothing I could do. Clearly it wasn’t appropriate to tell her I was tripping. Yet I didn’t feel I was doing anything wrong, so it was as it was. This conclusion took hours to get to, however, past paranoiac looping.

I returned to the living room, picked up a notebook and pen and began drawing with a fury I didn’t know I had. At the time, I couldn’t recall the last time I’d drawn any sort of picture. Fifteen years maybe. This night, page after page, my hand moved furiously. I couldn’t stop it. At one point I sat back and watched it. My brain no longer seemed connected to it. (G) pulled me a tarot card: The Scientist.

We walked down the street to our friends’ house. Spread out on the floor and table in the living room was paper and color. I took some paper and pastels and went to task. After an indefinite period, I saw I’d pasteled myself: pink, purple, green, blue, orange. It was all over me. The pants again, stained. I freaked out for a few minutes, then quickly felt embarrassed for freaking out over something so insignificant. Nonsense details gone askew had tugged at me most of my life, mommy-dearest-like, and this felt like dregs pushing their way out. Muddied sandals, curried jeans, color outside the lines.

I drew no less than fifteen pages of pictures that night. Mostly faces done negative. I scratched in the background black until a face appeared in the white left over. Something from inside me thrust out.

(G) and I returned home around three in the morning. A walk through the snow. I was coughing again, so I drank some cough medicine, the over-the-counter kind, not that with codeine which I'd been taking. Nevertheless, dire mistake.

Or not.

Whichever the attitude, the night never ended.

(to be continued...)

Mess and Transcendence I: The sandwich-maker and my mom

(It occurs to me I might have told this story in abbreviated form on this blog before. I don’t remember and don’t feel like searching back right now. It’s in my head again, so it’s coming out, even though it’s another mess-pants-acid story. Not that kind of mess.)

Another silly mess, another transcendence. I had had a terrible head flu for well over a week. Upon doctor’s orders, I’d been filling myself with cough syrup w/codeine which made me loopy, anti-viral medication which made me incoherent, and some other medication I forget. It was near the end of my penultimate semester of college. I had work to do, papers to write. The incoherence would have driven me batty if I had been coherent enough to know it. I tried writing my paper on Spinoza, Berkeley and Leibniz. I tried writing my paper on some foul literary criticism I’ve apparently blocked out. The maps of notes I’d scribbled toward the final products looked like highly disordered pantries. I set them aside.

My face burned with fever on the inside, was whitest pallor on the outside. I tried to go to my Greek class in which we were translating part of The Odyssey. I walked through snow, I sat in my seat, I looked at the Greek I had translated, to refresh my memory. Learning by neurotic repetition was my modus operandi. I knew the translations, but still I went over them at least twice the night after class, at least twice the next day, and again just before class. This day those curling letters spoke nothing to me. I had no idea what they meant. I panicked. Frustration formed as tears in my eyes. I worried this incoherence was permanent.

Still minutes before class was to start, I returned my books to my bag and trekked across the hall, teary-eyed, and told my professor I couldn’t do it. He looked at me with big obvious eyes. It was clear I had no business being outside. I walked home, though I don’t know where the energy came from going either direction. Mind over matter. I do that.

Days passed. I couldn’t eat. I didn’t even want water. I lay there fevering on the living room floor. My then-boyfriend (G) brought me a small clear plastic container full of lettuce and told me to eat it. I didn’t want to but he said it would help, so I balanced a fork between fingers and ate.

Soon I was sitting upright and resumed work on those papers. My brain was routing clearly again. It hit me: I feel good! I feel great! Nobody was home, so there was nobody to tell. I was about to explode with it. Finally (G) and a friend of ours (J) walked in. I raced into the living room and shouted, "I feel good!"

"What you need, then, is a good hit of acid," (J) told me.

I laughed with suspicious eyes, my lips pressed together with both disbelief and curiosity about the remedy.

"No, really," he said. "There’s nothing better to give that final kick to the sickness out of your system." He pulled a white tab out of his wallet and held it out to me.

This is also the friend who gave me a convincing and rather Shakespearean monologue about the benefits of smoking when I decided to give that a whirl.

I stood there as before, thinking. Obviously it sounded like a bad idea. But I was open to possibilities I hadn’t considered.

"Ok," I said. "But I told my boss I’m coming back to work tomorrow, at 8:30 in the morning." I counted the hours. It was early evening then, so that would be plenty of time to trip and then sleep. "That should work, though."

"You should have two then," he advised.

Hm. "Ok."

I popped the white tabs in my mouth and we set off. We had to go to (J)’s house to retrieve more white tabs for him and (G), stopping at Subway along the way for some dinner. My brain, having been sick and medicated for the past week and a half, was soft wet and wide open for the chemicals. The stuff seeped in deeply and immediately. I had a terribly slapstick time ordering my 6-inch veggie sub on wheat. At each utterance of ingredient I exploded with laughter. "Everything is funny," I told them. The sandwich-maker was not fazed.

We returned home, another friend (K) joined us, and the Aleister Crowley tarot cards appeared. The light in the room was dim, and I was in a roiling colorful space made into the sofa chair. I watched the three of them pulling cards and talking about the Vast. I realized: I was incapable of speaking.

The phone rang. (G) went into the bedroom to answer it. After he was gone for several minutes, I said to my friends, "I’m glad he got that. I feel like I can’t speak. I can’t talk right now."

(G) called from the bedroom, "It’s your mom."

(For some reason this is becoming much lengthier than I imagined it could be. More later.)

Currying

Apparently I’ve become much more laid back than I used to be, or at least less concerned about minor accidents.

This morning I filled my car with sound of The Zombies. Filled me with such morning-sun bliss I didn’t notice the slow traffic or that I had to park a country away from where I work and walk. I decided, as I shut my car door, that I was going to begin the day differently. I would bypass coffee at the hospital café on the way in, and instead begin with a smaller, albeit much less tasty, cup from the break room. Simply to stir the order of things. (If I’d thought ahead I’d have stopped mid-bliss at a place that serves good coffee before I got to work, but it was the shutting of the door that incited the skew in the first place.)

Pulled a paper cup off the pile, pressed the red button, dumped in some sugar, some milk (no half & half in the fridge, which frankly is necessary in this shitty break room perc), stirred. And as I took my first step out of the break room the brown sloshed up and out of the cup, down my pink skirt. Down my long pink skirt, splotches all the way down. There was a time when such an event would have made for me a dark neurotic day in a dark neurotic park.

The progression: I was nine years old. My mom and dad (whom, as he had not yet adopted me, I still called by his first name) had gotten serious and decided to buy a house together in a new neighborhood just outside of town. The new neighborhood was made of mud. I walked across the street into the virgin grassless yard, and my new white sandals sank into the ripe shit-hued mud. I threw back my head and screamed. My sandals were ruined. Or so I thought. My poor new dad, joining forces with two femmes lunatiques. I also played in the dirt back then, scaled dirt hills, dug my fingers into the damp grass-poked dark soil. I guess I was very particular about mud.

Skipping forth in the timeline, while in college I ate some acid with my then-boyfriend and met up with a friend. We walked to New Kahala, where I almost always ordered crispy tofu in spicy sesame sauce. This time I ordered curry chicken. My friend’s religion professor was there. I’d heard this guy was an august mix of intelligent and cool, and I’d wanted to meet him. All I could do all wide-eyed and scoping inward, though, was smile and blush.

When our food was ready we took it to the Springer house, where several of our friends lived, as well as a multitude of musical instruments and brain candies. I guess I was really enjoying my curry chicken, as I had poked the fork right through the styrofoam without realizing it, and for some indefinite time, curry had been soaking into my favorite jeans. After which my jeans were colored Elton John-style (as in the video for "I’m Still Standing" which I fantasized about participating in when I was a little girl). I spent a few minutes freaking out until I decided there was nothing to be done. I had been curried.

The rest of the night had us filming our naked Japanese friend in a cowboy hat and angel wings, in frame with one of the other (as in other than me and another) "quiet ones" in our loopy circus, wearing a monk’s robe. There was also the scribbling of the colors and patterns in our brains onto slides for later use in a light show, and a girl who got her bare boobs painted. It was the only weeknight I gave acid to my brain while school was in session.

All of this was required of sorting purpose in the world: Jeans and sandals are insignificant. Colors stay.

There is another mess and recovery which will make this post much too fat, in which case it will be tomorrow’s party.

Swiped sucker sticks and the power that is

Lately I haven’t been sleeping. I wake up long before my alarm does and do not return to sleep. I buzz. I drive to work footless and buzzing and when my legs slip under my desk I begin: I read about sleep disorders. This is one of two ironic jobs I’ve held. The other is the summer at the air conditioner factory, which was not air-conditioned, during a particularly jungle Illinois summer. Yes, the grassland sometimes is the jungle in the summertime, air so thick you can sink your canines into it, chew it, put it between your hands, lather, and bathe in it. Only you won't get clean because no surface is free of the moisture. You just rub it around into new spirographs. I become a slug clung to a porch's railing. Illinois, for certain, is not the most humid place on this earthy ball, so I wonder what would happen to my body and lungs in more humid airs. Probably the wet would not suffocate me and my soul would adapt as environment challenges. I do not know the jungle.

Lately I feel in control of little, at least not at root. Things happen, passions shift, which I consider and then act on. Primordial shifting persists. Wordsworth, Shelley, you beautiful dreadful truthsayers! If a fast food worker can appear out of nowhere and defy all known paradigms by politely inquiring, "Are you finished with those?" and by those mean soggy white chewed-on sucker sticks having been placed on a greasy fast-food table, and if grassland can transfigure at whim into jungle and within it transfigure me accordingly without grip or clue, then each player must be subject to being acted upon and not a subject acting, objects trapped in the accusative case, all innocently acquiescent in the missionary hump, who simultaneously are the actors, in the sense of being both doers and shifting performers.

A spring day

I’m tired of talking and tired of thinking. I’d rather be a rock star riding a vast-eared elephant stepping in beat along a narrow bridge--the water rushing and high so that it splashes my toes atop the elephant’s back but is no threat to us.

Ganesh? Yes, still seeking Ganesh and the ultimate burrito. The mouse is behind us. Let’s try a heavier song. You huff out bass tones while I holler the ants out of my gut into a stratified Wake up are we woken up we’re waking up Wake up. We will be awake and we will be at peace with our bagels and our whiskeys. And they will be at peace with theirs. We will not be sepia-toned but we will appreciate the hazelnuts that are. Reminisce the radio days and hurting organs. See.

Sunshine--but before that, there will be whiskey whisking demons and debris out of the flower bed. Carnations, tulips. And then lilies of the valley self-slung loosely across a sleek new casket having been built by industrious ants sorting events past. The sight will hurt our eyes. It will solve and release. A spring day.

p.s. Candor will climb out of the carriage when it is sharp and strapping. Meantime, train rumblings such as this are in the air.

Pollen Falling

Caught up in an emotional moment, reflecting on relationships, their beginnings and endings, their happenings in between and what happens to those happenings when they become memories, I began thinking about my grandma—A leap in thought, yes. That’s how I operate.—how in recent time I’ve become more open with her, seeing she is more receptive to me than I thought. I am neither china doll nor perfect angel, and it turns out she’s ok with that. Rather she redefines what these things are as I transform before her: vessels whose contents transmogrify according to who’s passing it around to pour and sip. That’s unconditional love, and sublimely so.

Tears moved into my eyes, then the music I’d put on my CD player here in the barren office loudened back into my ears: "We all live in a yellow submarine—hiiyaaa!"

Being alive is fucking weird, what with cubist juxtapositions and mighty intersections that defy physics and sense itself.

More later as spring settles in my head as my head churns and casts it back out.