thinking of you ben, and of you miss molly bloom as the autumn sweeps in.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

sunday afternoon.  jerry ali farka toure and the rolling stones come off exile on main street.  the speakerfoam is shot and no insane amount of duct tape will bring it back.  but these ashes accumulating beneath the emptynest of subwoofers are the nest of speaker phoenix.  worthy of pink floyd when syd was still there.  having these speakers clarifies the concept of 'producing an album.'  and this bit about the speakers clarifies the concept i came to lay down for you.  im all about these speakers and all ive been reading is iraq afghan and the man who gave us the bomb and then ted kennedy dies.  so of course im thinking about my father. 

 

 my dad at one time was brilliant and beautiful.  articulate and cock-sure immigrant with fine skin fair hair  beyond the pale blue eyes.  had had some black bloomless seeds implanted somewhere early on the floor of his wide blood ocean but could dance and say things in a growly foreign tone to girls that made them think he was far out and made him think he sounded like real kgb.   he lived in the city when they came from where they were after they left with the ghosts in the farmhouse and where he wore long blond curls and leiderhosen and had to kill all the cats with his hands.  he lived in the city and they kept rabbits in the backyard and the neighbors thought that was sweet but he ate them.  he killed them with his hands.  and he was sharp and learned to speak the language by telling jokes.  the whole cold red peril was big big fresh hot and steaming make them laugh.  make their chemicals change.  like a star through the sad city schools and big deal college in america for this we ate dirt at the side of the road beneath which an ocean of our blood is buried.  big american businessman.  fancy suit smooth hands smelling of real cologne the coins make a bright shuffling in his pocket.   

  

saw a girl in the secretary pool real pretty looked like natalie wood was like him had come a long way to get here.  she was quiet like a comet.  one night he sent her to fetch some beer and he told everyone they were getting married.  when she got back she couldnt understand why everyone was so happy.  he hadnt told her.  they got married.  bought a pink house in the suburbs.  i was born. 

  

he traveled a lot.  he traveled quite literally around the world.  he sold people from different countries these big american machines.  maybe because the people of the world recognize him as not american, and it would throw them off their guard.  he was damn good at what he did  but those seeds got soaked in alcohol during that trip around the world and the hot hard itchy seeds cracked and something in them stirred.  and the progress and politics of the world made telling jokes and selling machines harder to do and the progress was crushing and the factory closed.  distracted, my father had become obsolete. 

  

fertile ground for spiny vines that lay along the heartroad and siphon with a million hollow teeth the blood of whatever he had come to be fated now somehow to become what was left.  his plantsnake consciousness predatory and insatiable.   i grew up in that sucking jungle i grew up like a lucky rabbit. 

  

but the history of him was blinding.  dovie was the last one to see him break the surface of that ocean of blood.  engaging, like in a war. they sent him to kuwait and riadh and afghanistan and i remember when they would have slim dark bearded men over for dinner sometimes too and i had to go to grandmas and eat sweet porridge and watch the lawrence welk show and you would forget the very concept of time when he told you stories of pissing off balconies with howard hughes and swimming in the lake when mengele died.  i have photographs of him and beautiful brazillian whores.  stories.  marvelous wonderful sensuous stories.  the round trip world tour adventure a comet a star.  this volatile fuming clusterbomb on the brown tweed couch i remember when he drove the lincoln through the tollgate my mother scurried up the stairs and told me to lay very quietly and other blind nights when we played kitten.  his name for me was always nigger and when i was young he would tell me after i came home from school that some guy named ted kennedy called, could i come for a ride.  he loved his speakers.      

  

i read the newspaper at three and from then on i best know how to define this, spell that or else i get the tendriltail my first word was miscegenation.  to this day if theres a crossword its like crack and i do it hard and fast and in pen.  there were years we lived together and didnt speak.  i was in middle school.  i was a butterfly on a pin and he was horrified somehow that i had managed to live to maturity.  i fled.  when my mother was dying and they wanted me to stay i said i couldnt live in the same house with him.  and when the cowboy asked me to be nice afterward i got within a foot and a half of him and he hit me.  then he died.   and they didnt find him for two days.  

 

and im reading all these books about the middle east and perseverating about the disintegrating speakerheads and goddamn its been two months since my last crossword. 

a heaviness.  an acceptance.  feelings of guilt for not measuring up to others expectations but its all external.  inside there might be disappointment but its fleeting.  theres been an incredible amount of slack around here on my part for sure, but the days of structure and obligation are coming and im sucking the very last marrow from my lazybones before.  better today, clearer, the hormone vortex subsides.  acceptance of who i am and what i make of myself.  an it harm none do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.   

cowboys been very cool about it all.  i think were both realizing how much of ourselves is defined by negative space, by whats not there.  and that absence requires a great deal of energy, it absorbs light unlike being and doing which creates it.  that is to say ive been feeling a little like a blackhole.  once again this summer my relationship with the tomatoes has fallen apart entirely, and theres only so much i can blame on everyone elses bad luck, too.  i realize all this sounds rather dreadful but what i really want to get across the event horizon of my days is that i can stand before all my failures and with an unassailable earnestness say:

im grateful to be learning from my mistakes in all areas of my life.  i believe that i can take these shortcomings and disappointments and build something stronger brighter and more satisfying.  the rubble of bricks and the vastness of space will offer me tools with which to build a house for my soul, something of joy and nourishment for my spirit.  inexhaustible optimism.  picking oneself up, dusting oneself off and trying again to dance with the devils, wrestle with the angels.  learning where to put your will, learning to listen to the whisper in the wind.  learning ultimately to be alive.   

we all fall short one way or another, were mortal, the failure is hardwired.  its learning to work around it.  its the red thread running through the system.  all of us with spinal cords can either get up and dance or lay down and die.  im realizing how fragile i can be if i let that disappointment fester.  the rot at the heart of a tree.  im recognizing all the aversion techniques, all the locks on poorly hung doors that block a million thresholds.  anger, self-loathing, fear.  and inside me all around me is that softness.  that tender consciousness  i want to share.  like a bag of food from my garden or a smile. 

look, this is where i am tired, where i ache, where my heart wants to be let in  and to let in in return.  i didnt do half the things i wanted to this summer but i learned so much i grew so much.  it was the summer of the sowing, of it all happening underground.  and sometime soon a little shoot will break the miraculous surface of the earth and something will be born.  something emerging from the center of myself growing toward the light in all things.   i have seen flashes of the light within me and i am learning to not be drawn back into the shadow it invariably casts.

42 of 365:

1.  advair.

2.  laughing out loud. 

3.  this book.

4.  the cowboy.

5.  autumn is coming.

6.  my good sweet boys.

7.  hope.

8.  amy goodman.

9.  sunflowers.

10.backyard sweetcorn.
11.my new dictionary!

how'd you rate?  i got three outta five...

im still learning how to dance with the new blogformatting.   ITS ALL A LEARNING EXPERIENCE!

 

“It's better to send in the Peace Corps than the Marine Corps.”  - Edward Kennedy

  

the sun never really rose today despite a dim blue sky it only got darker and more humid.  a familiar mewling alerted me to the arrival of kittens again on the sleeping bag in T's bedroom.  lots.  of course the two already picked from the litter, they have the faces of losing pugilists.  a spotted one, of all things, and one with just this face, this broad wide face.  the niece wanted a black so ill give her the one from the last litter.  but lets keep this fertile myrtle home til we can get her fixed.  funny last night i spoke of the birth smell and here i am today in the half light head in a sleeping bag smelling of the ocean.  kittens.  

  

 the new formatting.  im not going to fight it.  it wants the photos this way, fine.  it wants me to write centered, fine.  the datura energy is remarkable.  resonant.  it reaches out along its psychic ley lines and binds the focus.  weekly castrations are called for but one is certainly enough for this lightworker.  a presence in the garden diametrically opposed to the sunflowers.  balance.  the sunflowers give and give and give even after they are gone.  this datura tempts.  ensnares.  takes and takes along.  it is what the datura wants, not anything we could impose upon it.  it is literally a fascinating plant.  the stick broke before it, the smell is rather indescribable.  it smells like time.

  

made bread, brownies, sauce.  got an email from sdg asking "WHAT IS TRUTH?"  i offer for your consideration my knee-jerk responses composed while attempting to not eat the entire pan of brownies, the smell of new kittens still in my nose:

is it subjective or objective?    i once broke up with a boyfriend on christmas eve and sent him out into the snow because he believed in human objective truth.  objective truth in math, maybe.  not with people.  an infinite set of variables i believe makes human objective truth impossible.             

is it the opposite of anything?  does anyone remember big daddy from cat on a hot tin roof and his mendacity bit?  this is a difficult question.  didnt kant say anything by virtue of existing is truth, the yes?  what is not true?  i think when you lie about how you feel thats a lie.  the truth is a constant but lying is something we superimpose on the truth like lipstick on a pig.  the lipstick is a lie.  but its fleeting and does not change the nature of the truth in any way.  but the truth does not need us.  it exists independently.  lies need us to exist.  in the absence of human mendacity everything is true.  and i said that.

if you tell a lie but no one catches you, does that make it the truth?  no.  thats lipstick on a pig.  no one catching you just makes you a makeup artist. 

is it an absolute, ever? i believe that there are some absolute truths within the boundaries of our consciousness.  the mechanics of the solar system, gravity, friction, thermodynamics, hydromechanics.  i think we call them constants.  theyre pretty unassailable.  entropy in carbon based life forms.  thats a big one.  thats the closest you get to human objective truth.

can it change?  if it did it would not be a system we would recognize and it would alter all other aspect of that system and make our present consciousness obsolete.  this makes me rethink the idea of the solar system, say, as absolute.  introduce some random chaotic event.  an asteroid or whatever hitting one of the planets, setting all the orbits askew, cosmic bumpercars, all hell would break loose and the way life had gone on for millennia would be out the window.  i dont think were intelligent enough to notice subtle changes that are probably altering our consciousness over an enormous period of time.  like all the nuclear detonations weve made.  those must be mutating our very cells in a subtle way, not so subtle if you consider all the cancer now.  we dont have universal perspective.  this is leading me into a train of thought about karma, but were not talking karma.  truth can change.  yes.  we see it now, climate change.  theres not one kind of truth.  theres the truth i live with , live by, then theres physical, chemical, biological truth, etc.  what is true about me might not change over the blink of a lifetime.  in spanish theres the i am truth -- i am a girl.  i am a brunette.  then theres the transient truth about me -- i am hungry i am cold.  again, i think, the lipstick could be true but it will never be as true as the pig.   these are infinitely fascinating questions.

If it changes does the thing that was previously true become a lie?  or just not true?  it is still true.  when you look at a photograph of yourself in a diaper covered in chocolate cake that is true.  whether or not that photo was taken twenty years ago or last night.  insofar as every moment is the present and there is no future no past just the infinite now the truth we can really only hold on to for right now.  now.  now.  and some truths, the solar system pig truths, maybe take longer to disintegrate than the weather lipstick truths.  the lipstick lies are like building a model with pingpong balls and wire and calling yourself master of the universe.  lies are absolutely toxic and deadly and i think the greeks had some sort of harpies that ate the livers of liars.   lies are fear and the universe is love and lies fizzle in their own shit and i believe eventually get washed up on shore like beach glass, scoured beautiful from the wreck of the model solar system at sea.  boy, i can really go on.  

is there a difference between a lie and not true?  a lie is intentional.  not true simply is.  it is not true that brad pitt and i are secret lovers.  but if i tell you brad pitt and i are secret lovers, that is a lie.  brad and i not lovers = pig.  i am brads secret lover = lipstick. and i realized i confused the lipstick thing by making it sometimes a lie and sometimes a transient truth.  i am an incoherent philospher.  but for a fleeting instant that dichotomy addresses the question of transient truth vs. no longer true.  

how about between not true and no longer true?  this might be the same question as "If it changes does the thing that was previously true become a lie?"  is this a trick question?

 

41 of 365:

1.  new kittens.
2.  steve earle.
3.  my garden.
4.  typhoo tea.
5.  my resurrected love affair with dictionaries.
6.  dim cool weather.
7.  my compost piles.
8.  the good kitchen smells.
9.  mary oliver.
10.my ceramic mug.

very sad all this. i flinched inwardly when he used the term 'resuscitate.'

"...the passenger is always right vs. never let the passenger carry his own bag..."

40 of 365:

1. "howling fantods."

2. my banana bread ovenwarm with butter.

3. everyone gets along when my sisters dogs come to stay for the week and the

little brown one sleeps on my head.

4. i have a job to go to in september.

5. books, booklists, bookblogs, bookshops, the smell and feel of books, the sound

of pages, getting books, anticipating getting books, having books, having time

to read books, having money to purchase books (used, as a rule).

6. my friends ncm and sdg.

7. my two beautiful boys.

8. night quiet and cool.

9. the first mashed potatoes after a long time.

10. looking forward.

soft again soft again jiggety jig.  the waves, the breaking against the rock, receding, returning.  always returning bringing new things to shore beachcombing my soul things that glitter wet bits of broken ship now smooth as stone a shell was someones home now an empty treasure bladderwrack the salt cleans all wounds scours the surfaces everything smells of birth.  be gentle i asked him.  be gentle and i will in return because i cannot bear the heavy hand after so long at sea im exhausted waterlogged sundevoured everything trying to eat me free me but im here now before you dazzle eyed and drifting abit with the muscle memory of so long on the water.   hello.  be gentle and i will return.

the second dream i remember having is one where a black panther walks the tree canopy above me. i wasnt afraid, it was more like a protection. but this poem reminded me of that dream, and how black panther still figures prominently in my life. plus, this is one plath poem i never read before. 

There is a panther stalks me down:

One day I'll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,

He prowls more lordly than the sun.

Most soft, most suavely glides that step,

Advancing always at my back;

From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:

The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.

Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,

Haggard through the hot white noon.

Along red network of his veins

What fires run, what craving wakes?

Insatiate, he ransacks the land

Condemned by our ancestral fault,

Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;

Meat must glut his mouth's raw wound.

Keen the rending teeth and sweet

The singeing fury of his fur;

His kisses parch, each paw's a briar,

Doom consummates that appetite.

In the wake of this fierce cat,

Kindled like torches for his joy,

Charred and ravened women lie,

Become his starving body's bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;

Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;

The black marauder, hauled by love

On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.

Behind snarled thickets of my eyes

Lurks the lithe one; in dreams' ambush

Bright those claws that mar the flesh

And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.

His ardor snares me, lights the trees,

And I run flaring in my skin;

What lull, what cool can lap me in

When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,

To quench his thirst I squander blood;

He eats, and still his need seeks food,

Compels a total sacrifice.

His voice waylays me, spells a trance,

The gutted forest falls to ash;

Appalled by secret want, I rush

From such assault of radiance.

Entering the tower of my fears,

I shut my doors on that dark guilt,

I bolt the door, each door I bolt.

Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther's tread is on the stairs,

Coming up and up the stairs.

Sylvia Plath

after i posted i saw there were dupli-duplicates of photos. oh well.



its okay. i can be open and soft but i think ive earned the right to say, "its probably not a good idea for me to do this," and stay home and read. theres a part of me that believes its environment. that if i were elsewhere i certainly wouldnt stand out like a peacock in a henhouse. ive been places like that. ive been with folks who dont make me feel like a lumbering toxin. but in all things ive planted myself square in the henhouse and i should be surprised? if i cant communicate my feelings with the cowboy without causing a row when all i wanted to say was this is how i feel what do you think i should do? then silence is a golden cage. back to the old dancehall, the same steps. the red shoes. i should be surprised?



im having so much trouble with posting external etcetera that im not gonna do it anymore. just me and mine and that probably makes more sense. i will occasionally hyperlink to a photo. like this.



rough seas. but a morning spent drifting in peace, puttering, homemade bread into toast with good preserves and english tea. sunshine. couldnt save the dragonfly. dont panic. the film that didnt have a happy ending but the lesson was let it go. decide whats important. it was a crazy downward spiral of a film and my mouth was literally hanging open at the long and dreadful end. what is home? what is important? and how our choices are not vacuum packed. they affect everyone forever. i was angry because i felt i was not being heard by the only person i felt i needed to hear me.



D. back from his summer away, so tall and the beautiful eyes, the long hair, my gentle headbanger. talking to him about how it is with me on the way home in the flaming dusk trying to explain my lifetime. his lifetime in the context of others. desperate to be honest and not then shouted down. yesterday the sounds of small boys with legos and young men with electric guitars. between sets at the show the three of us ate cheddar kettle corn and i talked to some guy about a town with eight lanes and a good korean restaurant. is there still that cornfield at the end of that road? i asked his friend. most of it, he said.



"...poor emotional contact with other people...talks all too freely...an impaired sense of what is socially appropriate...to show a mood state not apparently congruous with what is being discussed...to have some unusual, metaphorical way of expressing oneself...to find tidiness and punctuality difficult to achieve..."



and i danced and danced and danced and danced and danced and danced.



T's first show, with me in the ladies talking to two peggys neither margaret my batik wraparound goes from bottom to muumuu its hot in the paddle and sway of the crowd and my body wants space and air. space and air. im so glad the boys will both be home soon and we settle into the winter routine. the going in. the deep quiet. i was so angry the other day i felt like all the talking in the world had been into a hole. like a bad dream where no one is listening.



i get so soft and then the hard hurt comes. it waits. foot in the door, boot on the neck, and my failure is in fighting back. i need to be peace, let go, breathe. but it hurts so much when he doesnt hear me. because there isnt anyone else for there to hear. he is my one phone call from the cell of exile and he does not accept. we do our best, lay a clean cloth over the wound and eat together from the plate of time. but the wound is there, and hurts us both.



"...of superior intelligence...prefers animals to people...conversations characterized by emotional detachment, literalness and much use of metaphor...the sense of being different from everyone else..."



39 of 365:

1. tulsi sweet rose tea.
2. having food from the garden to share.
3. starting to bake beautiful bread again.
4. dagoba chocolate with lavender and blueberry.
5. this book.
6. a washing machine in the house.
7. line drying.
8. soft clean sheets.
9. derek trucks.
10. being home.

Chavez said that Obama is, "lost in the galaxy of Andromeda...he is entering a terrible labyrinth...we are asking that the empire get its hands off...get its claws out..."

i love south american political rhetoric. words like challenge and leadership make me think middle-management.



in "the early going of the quest for the magic boon" im supposed to find the place where the forbidden is offered freely. my own secret heart?

happy birthday to the dame who said, "I'm no model. A model's just an imitation of the real thing."



"These days, every battle won is like hand-to-hand combat."



everyone there was happy and healthy. connected and content and unhaunted unscathed. it was unnerving. i should have scuttled to the lake and kept my mouth shut. and i learned a little more clearly who i am everyday i learn a little more clearly. and i said what i meant and then went to rinse off the dessert plates. i brought flowers, salad, banana bread. i brought my ugly truth. its the chitchat that drives me mad. time is running out, folks, lets say something that means something makes a difference lets go around and talk about who we want to be what we want to do before the dead line. its the chitchat. we just dont have time for chitchat. i think i sabotage the chitchat. guilty.



felicitations to the cat that said, "You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity."

"If he told me all the world was a river of unconsciousness, that all of us here are nothing more or less than the dream of the universe, I could almost believe it."




"We sweep through fields of knowledge and later all we can see is the dirt that clings to the hems of our clothes."



"...refused to admit that the feral urges of man, his bloodlust and his will to power, most often trump his capacity for logic and empathy."

one day the first tomato and mayo sandwich on white bread of the summer will be my last.



last night the wandering elite im channeling wavy gravy banana bread straw hat laughing smiling curious. i ask too many questions. i get a little too interested in your history with the seventh day adventists, what you get out of alpine skiing, the place in the world you like the least. im sorry, i said at one point after asking the man how fast he went at the racetrack, i see everything. which of course isnt true but what is true is my willingness to try to see everything, to give it all an equal shot through the open gate of my awareness. i did, however, restrain my self from saying that circumcision began in the middle east as logic cloaked in mysticism when he complained that karachi was the dirtiest place in the world.



we wandered down to the lake and i put my two-piece on, the one ive had for ten years, and i floated around with an operations manager and we talked a little about the minimum wage. the man from the next beach came over and started a fire. i hope that instead of seeming annoying people feel good that some elaborate stranger finds them interesting. but now im rationalizing.






"In the center were the two of them, bound together, and what rotated, what clung, what distant satellite might orbit them in a faint attraction, far out from the core held fast, was mostly empty space."


i told my coyote story and we sang a little of three coins in the fountain. the little house in the trees, pandoras box, raspberry pie. it was a fine time.



"The bodies beg us to go free."

today is humid hot again the invitation to be down on the water but i decline with difficulty, heartstrings and a hard sell but i decline and sit in front of the enormous factory floor fan reading.



"The hat actually posed alone for photographs."

the farm. alas, i dont believe the stars are thus aligned. someone out there needs that farm. i wish them health and happiness, peace and prosperity. i will wave.



the heat and the light are psychedelic, like a certain kind of darkness. thoughts like water like standing waist-deep in thoughts like water moving touching the buffet of wake tide small waves and light broken on the face of the water light pure and absolutely full reflected back on wooden boats eyes the sky.



it was familiar and beautiful and i didnt feel awkward or ashamed to say see? see there thats me. it must not have lasted long cause i was born in '72. born with something to learn something to come to understand a vital light left out the last time. but that was then and what am i gonna do about now?



honor that light and the dark that bore it sunlight on water a beautiful idea. see it as light reflection vibration molecules waves see myself. waist deep. get serious i wrote to myself awhiles back in a riptide dont waste your time. arrange and rearrange the lines connections colors masks dancing weaving ribbons on a pole. rearrange the concepts of you you adhere to. open the boxes and feel what really there. coffee and dogs and slide guitar.



today was the first tomato. the garden rough around the edges beetle and pigroot but feeding me and the honed edge of the way the sagebush smells the way the lavender and the chamomile play together feathers and fins volunteer tomato vine sunward on a cornstalk eared out silks slowly drying. lima pods bean flowers a cauliflower i didnt even know was there. onions i think about onions and roses. grow garlic by the apple tree chives by the roses onions everywhere. i think about the pyrotechnic architecture of an allium. i think about the hypnotic fibonaci seed arrangement of a sunflower. tithonia cleome theres dirt in my hair burdock in the bunches of my skirt my arms scathed with wild briar and rose.



theres a sense of decline. some small leaf falls into and out of a lean rectangle of light. each day a journey in mind along the withy wall one side brackenshadow one side lightfield a broken fence to allow for the exchange of magick the release of secrets. some of the glens have secrets theyre unwilling to divulge. let them be, last years leaf litter creeper vine concealing whats too tired to rise.



moonman and proudbelly sending up dust behind them in the projection of evening light through treelines her eyes are open her lips are smiling it feels so good to walk the seasonal use highway early sundown and be alive. maybe its book about oppenheimer im reading my subconscious in the virid shadow of annihilation. these days, i figure, its the death of an incrementally boiled frog. but a certain end all the same so get serious. dont waste your time.







for your consideration.

38 of 365:

1. this cat.
2. homemade ratatouille over brown rice.
3. kisses.
4. npr.
5. tomatoes ripening.
6. summer in a temperate climate.
7. wishing wanting and then letting go.
8. yarn.
9. breathing.
10. a peaceful heart.

stay light. m.p.

old friend. so good to sit across from you and watch your face change. light, expression, embodiment. beautiful. familiar and akin to something i see in myself, the socio-genetic resistance to time. resilience. survival. like two of the last speakers of some tribal language atrophied by what the children call progress. this is what i can say to you because you will understand me. we have an understanding. and for me that is beyond the pale of my hermetrix existence, keeping to my hedge and my hounds, my garden and my grotto the white bed in which i dream the room in which i write. but sweet welcome, sister, and with the hours allowed us well reconnect weave the threads together exchange confidence and laugh.



the breeze from the east moves across the meadow august sun on tall grass queen anne chicory acorn walnut hickory heavy on the branch. going for eggs to the mennonites theyre running a blood drive. the vfd deserted, the bosslady a heavyset madam of a certain age barking into a phone in front of the stage fan im the only one, the man behind the folding table remembered my name from that one afternoon in the copy room. the nurse and i discuss the definition of country music, the warped tour and the desire for white people to suffer vicariously through rap. "i told my daughter when she started bringing that stuff home i said, girl, you got on jimmy choos and a coach bag. theres just no way." another woman comes over to tell me she had dinner with the headliner of a show we both happened to attend recently because her father and the star were old surf buddies. i told her he seemed like a groovy cat. "you did not just say that," the nurse says. were laughing and chatting and all the while my blood ("my its bright," the nurse says)is being channeled into a bag to be saved to save a life someday, or so im led to believe. juice and cookies and the men and i discuss food fixation and mall aversion and im back on the street headed for eggs.



the heart is a muscle, the spirit a fire.



she gifted me with woolens nectar and a flower for my arm. she left poetry on the bathroom wall, she took seeds to say my friend grew these and now im growing them. she suggested ducks for the bugs and she and the cowboy discussed hen truck chickens and why the greeks kill your dog. i didnt feel like fleeing from you i was nervous awkward full of feeling but i didnt run i sat and smiled and tried to say something that sounded like something that meant something. and you gave me that spacetime to say what i could manage to say. an hourglass on the table and a lifetime behind.



you didnt ask but i told you anyway what i thought the dream meant. cancer and a plant are both alive but in different ways, approached accordingly. is it cancer or a plant? what it is to us defines how we deal with it. f**k is okay, you said. c**k is not. not if you want to get read. all i had to offer was ripe green honeydew and unsweetened tea with an ant in it. you shared with me again and again. how absolutely rare that is for me. thank you.



and a belated happy happy to a favorite storyteller

37 of 365:

1. s(d)g
2. mod podge
3. egg fruit and vegetable stands
4. i can give blood
5. the second honeymoon
6. she said, "ive talked to people successfully married a long time and they say
things like, 'there were some bad years'"
7. books and the time to read them.
8. deadwood
9. walks
10. my home

and this one just makes me so damn happy. the soundtrack of my days...my brain on perpetual hold...