I have a good ten
book titles
kicking around,
I need to start
herding poems
their way,
but they’re an
unruly lot,
the poems,
the moment they see
the lasso swinging
at my side they
rise up like
Box Canyon Mustangs &
thunder off,
their eyes wide &
their ears back.
Box Canyon Mustangs!
Another book title!
Over this way
I coax,
but they paw
the earth &
toss their heads,
filling me
with fierce love.
Filed under poems & short jabs
Climate change and the tangled roots of awareness. Out-of-tune music blaring from the rooftop of CIA headquarters. Who’s up there, living in a pigeon coup? is it someone to consult? Up we go on the freight elevator, like a pilgrimage of monkeys.
All around me weddings and funerals. A ceremony for all of it, a shortage of ritual.
There’s a big difference between dying slow and dying sudden. Low-flying birds and high-flying helicopters.
Off in a New York publishing house a brain child half my age with a masters from Brandeis puzzles over my synopsis for my latest novel. This she thinks, is not who we are, hits delete and goes back to pawing through a stack of chick lit.
Filed under shards
It’s probably not a good sign when what’s happening to me right now won’t take place for another three weeks. But, there it is. Most people who carry on about “Living in the Now” aren’t really doing it, they’re living in a concept. “Living in the Now” is sparked by the commingling of cosmic forces with recent personal actions, and it always takes you by surprise.
This morning, for instance, coming out of a deep sleep at 5 a.m. and realizing I wouldn’t be able to drift off again. My plan had been to sleep in and then head down to the laundromat, but I wound up starting the day three hours earlier than planned.
Acceptance is the portal to the Now. I’d gone to bed bone-tired and only got four hours sleep, but I let it go. I didn’t get caught on the barbwire of I Must Be Tired. I didn’t get trapped by a routine that dictated a hot bath and a healthful breakfast before going out the door. I just slipped on some clothes, ate half a banana, and carried the laundry basket to the van.
It was dark, and everything was iced over. There was a slight wind. I started the van, and while it warmed up I began scraping ice off the windshield. Halfway through I stopped to light a cigarette and look up at the dark sky. It began sprinkling hail, and right there, standing on the street looking up at the sky with a cigarette in one hand and a scraper in the other, it happened–there was no place else I wanted to be. I was in the Now, and chronic physical pain, cold wind, hail and the closeness of death were all absorbed into that moment.
“Living in the Now” is misnomer phraseology for a permeating realization that you live in eternity, and when such a realization comes over you, you feel pleasantness. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I didn’t concentrate on that, and it lasted through the rest of the morning. Once, after a series of severely traumatic occurrences, I stayed in the zone for weeks, until one day I stubbed my toe, swore and it was over.
Now, twelve hours later, this morning’s pleasantness has been replaced by living three weeks in the future when I’ll ride a train south and with a feminist and a Stalinist, take turns reading to an audience from behind a podium. Such events have negative reference points in my past, and being in that space of expectation kick starts some pretty stormy mojo. But I’m doing my best to put into practice what I’ve learned over the years, which is nothing. Which shouldn’t be ambiguous if you’ve followed what I’ve been saying.
With a little luck I’ll step off that train into a blazing sunrise and suck the whole city of Sacramento into the aura of my winning smile.
Filed under shards
A well-lighted place. Wasn’t that the title of a Hemingway story? Are you able to write in a well-lighted place? Hemingway’s well-lighted place, if I remember right, was a nighttime cafe terrace in pre-Franco Spain, the light artificial but clean, a light to ward off the suffocating feeling of having too much bottled-up inside.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. I’ve forgotten the story completely, I don’t think I even have the title right. It might have been “A Clean Well-lighted Place.” All I remember now is the mood it created in me when I read it in Cologne at an outdoor table in broad daylight, on the Ring, on an overnight pass — army days. A place to make a stand and hide out simultaneously, that’s the mood the story evoked in me, a place to turn around twice and lie down in and let it flow out of me–the stories, the poems, the novels, all of it dammed up inside like a deep brooding body of water.
What I started to say here, a few lifetimes after that day in Cologne, what I meant to say but got sidetracked by a flicker of recollection, is that if it’s in you you need to shape it and sail it on out there, you don’t have the luxury to hesitate and strike poses. You don’t even have the option. You’ve got to learn how to get it out anywhere under any conditions, like in this well-lighted restaurant I’m in right now, glaringly well-lighted, packed with people including a girl’s basketball team taking up five or six tables, wearing purple and white school sweats with San Francisco State in gold letters across the front of their jerseys, not a one of them under 5′ 10″. Did they come all this way on a bus to kick ass on the local college girls? Do they know they’re fucking with my writing space?
I forge on no matter what, and eventually what came out shaped into poems and novels, and after enough time went by, the poems and novels melted down into an uninterrupted flow, and I called it Shards, just to put a name on it. I forge on, even when it comes out like this, writing about the writing and how it got that way. I don’t falter even then, I speed up in fact and if I persist page after page I come to the place where less than 24 hours ago a very good friend closed his eyes forever and possibly passed into the cleanest of all well-lighted places, leaving behind a house crawling with paramedics and cops and hospice workers and his wife in a state of shock flushing his pharmaceuticals down the toilet and people arriving and crying out and holding her in their arms, and each time she bursts into tears all over again, until her eyes are swollen and red, and is this all life has to offer once the dancing’s done?
Life is a savage force that devours itself without consideration. We call the ultimate outcome of life’s process death.
A clean well-lighted place is where we realize the darkness to come and rush toward it.
Filed under shards
People who
think people
writing in
the first
person are
writing about
themselves are
usually wrong.
People who
think people
writing in
the third
person are
writing about
someone else are
usually wrong.
People who
think grammar
draws lines
between us
don’t realize
how many
people watch
them sleep
at night,
standing at
the foot of
their beds.
Filed under poems & short jabs
