thumbnail ramble

Waiting for the taxi to take me to work. I have a deal with the drivers, making it slightly cost effective. The buses don't start until 8am and in the mornings 8am is when I need to be there.  I know so many stories about the taxi business in this town. I met the dude who took a felon to a "titty bar" while the police radio was describing his passenger in the backseat to a T. I met a driver who was twenty years sober and happy. He taught me which roads were the cheapest to work. And then there was this woman, broke down the fee and what not to pay in tips. Usually they act as if we never met, but we pick up on the stories wherever they may be. I can tell the dispatch folks who remember me and sometimes I get "Off to work again". Eh, I feel lucky.

I got up early this morning so I could push time. Get quiet, get coffee, read a little newspaper and listen to music. Now time is almost up to change my form into worker and I'm pushing the envelope a little longer. 5 minutes. The taxi should be here.

Guess I'll stop for now.

It is time

To get the funk out.
To let the words flow.
To show you the world from my senses. I ate banana chips yesterday. Let my tongue investigate the sweet precipice, tip to roof, before sliding it between the teeth, crunching the smell of banana, filling the back of the throat and then swallow. Simple. No revelations. No ecstatic brilliance slipping into the brain. Just me and this banana chip, and I was happy.
To come out of the shell.
To stay in the shell.
To bring me here.
To do what I have always done...
To live my life.

stark winter day

Lay your head down

                                       against my chest

             I will pet your mane.

Let your hands investigate       the curves of my reprieve,

                                 subtle strokes across my spine.

We will take comfort 

                                        you and I.

a brief conversation with the wind

He writes me and tells me to talk to the wind, see what it has to say, so I go outside and hold out my ear and tongue. The wind rushes and roars into deafening howls around the corners, and yet each time I speak, it settles into a quiet hum and brushes my cheek with blessings. When I speak the words, “I don’t know what I’m doing”, the wind slaps me with a tiny twig that gets snared in my hair. I pick it out and slip it behind the ear. It’s Devil’s Shoestring, protection & luck.

Composition #1

Here I am. It’s a new day. I sip my coffee and examine the world from my window. The sky is a thin sheet of white with chiffon of gray hung low in the distance. An autumnal mood lit in the backdrop, the sky gives way to a ceiling of brightness mirrored in the illuminated leaves rusting on the stem. Here I am. It’s a new day. I curl into the reprieve of this fall’s contradiction. Stormy, dark, cold, bright. Amber, sage, ember, crimson, Spanish orange, and amarillo paint the whole scene beautiful and this day glows. Hope lingers here.

Hope. It’s not time, I tell myself, to be the seer, just be here. So, I let hope linger somewhere in the ethereal clouds, accept this stage, this view from my window and sip my coffee. I can write a thousand words to show my door is open like she requested while she’ll remind me of a thousand more that it’s on me to keep it closed. Who knows? Here I am. It’s a new day. I keep my door open for me.

Fall is not about death, even though I watch a neighbor scrape up the decay and stuff the carcasses in brown bags, tag, and layer the bodies on the curbside for “pick up”. Not me. I'll leave this layer of compost on the ground, if only to listen to it crinkle against the sole. The hidden sun genuflected in this decomposition also composes. What looks dead is only transformation’s cocoon. I trust this.

Here I am. I sip my coffee and blink back the scene. It's a new day.

Sketch: The Day After

The pubescent heart put back on the shelf.
We’ve past the last call for “I love you”.
Carnage in the sheets settles back to sleep.
Touch that grew reprieve and fed the pneuma
between mind and body. Dead?
We quenched. We dreamed. We laughed.
The words have past.
I date the canopic jar yesterday.

Invisible Room

Where is the place I can go and hide from your view, without becoming completely invisible?

A space, a place in time where I can be me, exactly as I am, without my shell to sheathe the truth of me?

I cannot acquiesce that this harbor is also the silence of me. I need to hear this self sing!

It is not invisibility I seek, but the gaze that forces me into silence - arbitrary judgments and misunderstandings, the whole damn world has an opinion. I'm not trying to succeed at anything here, except to finish what I started long ago, this meager writer by definition, solely because I need to write. Share something!

This is my invisibility room, where I get to be exactly as I am, in liberty without having to defend my existence.