Man and Beast

When I was a child of four years

We lived in a trailer park set back off the highway
Hard by a wooded area in southeastern Wisconsin

Between Racine and Kenosha

One day I must have wandered off
For I remember my dad hearing my cries

And comforting my tears

When he found me standing alone
Crying in the middle of a frozen pond

I grew to become a timid child

Terrified of nature
Afraid of being left alone.

When I was an adolescent of seventeen

We lived in a big city
Hard by the mechanical violence of the streets

Between the nightmare and the dream

One day I suffered a terrible beating
For which no one would help me

And no one could comfort my pain

When they saw me lying alone
Crying in the middle of the schoolyard

I grew to become a frightened adult

Terrified of people and nature
Afraid of crowds and of being left alone

Then I became the old man

Living inside these memories
Softened by the timeless patterns

Between the lake and the forest

Today I saw a coyote snatch a cat
Hard by my neighbor's yard

Inside my reckoning of the past

Where I tally no relief from the
Places and the nature that cost its life

Morrison's Door

I would smash the clock at sunrise

When the sky turns to blue

I would sleep at night beneath your bed

And dream only of you

I would wash the hands of madness

Inside my hullabaloo

But I can't....so I won't

Oh no

I can't....so I won't

I would bind my eyes to midnight

Weep the tides to the shore

I would stay at night in your bed

Forever and evermore

I would tell the man that nowhere's

Worth leavin here for

But I can't....so I won't

Oh no

But I can't....so I won't

[Bridge]

Well, we ran away with the lightning

And we chased a fearsome roar

Not one of us saw it coming

When you knocked on Morrison's door

On the night it finally ended

Somebody peeled away the floor

All I wanted was in your life

Nothing less nothing more

Than what's not in the store....

[instrumental break]

[Repeat verses]

Praying

Forgive us Lord,

for we know not

what to do

nor what not to do

Actually.

A Turtle's World

I pulled up to the stop sign at the four lane highway, maneuvering my pickup truck into position for the right turn heading into town. I was about to go when I noticed a tortoise laboring on the road directly in my right of way. I stopped short to let him cross. Turtles on the move are a regular feature of Texas country life in springtime, and the people try to be respectfully accomodating.

A woman in a GMC Arcadia approaching down the opposite side of the highway pulled off suddenly onto the road shoulder, directly across from where I sat in my truck. As the woman struggled out of her seat belt to rescue the turtle her car was rear-ended by a white Ford Fiesta. The Ford never slowed. The crash pushed the GMC another five feet up the roadway. The driver of the Ford had swerved hard right to avoid hitting the turtle, and had lost control of her vehicle in the process.

When I unlocked my fingers from the wheel they were sore from gripping too tightly. Instinctively, I reached for my phone then ran across the highway.

The woman in the GMC had released her seat buckle just before impact. I leaned in and felt her wrist for a pulse. Her unseeing eyes transmuted the future. I let go her hand as if death were catching and ran back to the Ford, whose front end was accordianed into the rear bumper of the larger automobile.

The second driver's head lay against the steering column, twisted oddly out the side window, as if waiting for someone to come up and explain just what in hell had happened to her. Sulphur from the exploded airbag had burned little speckles of blackheads into her face.

She'd had striking brown eyes that stare back at me now like a carp in the fish market.

I called 911 from deep somewhere in a very darkened woods.

= Don't hurry. There's no need to hurry, at all.

I said to the dispatcher, trying to be helpful for some reason.

I leaned against the trunk of the Ford and waited, fidgeting the cell phone in my sweating fingers. The days were already warming up. Another summer loomed long, hot and stormy.

I looked down just as the tortoise reached the edge of the pavement in front of me. He had continued to plod diligently onward with unwavering determination. For all I knew, the roughest part of his journey was yet to come.

Floating the Guadalupe

How treacherously the river runs

when water levels fall

during this hot, dry

season in Hell.

Dancing the sandy bottoms

flapping and flailing,

scraped knees on rock,

sunglasses lost, beer overboard

I navigate dreams

alone on a tire tube

of false memory

that floats forever.

I try to forgive the dead

and dying myself

I learned only today:

this is nothing.

The Snorkeling unto Death

My belief is that any Revolution without a concomitant human enlightenment is doomed to failure.

We need all be Buddhas.

Without transcending our base human nature, nothing so good as a workers revolution can sustain for more than a generation or two, if that long, before the same old human perversion sinks it.

This is so plainly obvious that it makes my heart bleed in sympathy for the poverty stricken, who are all of us, when you take more than a tally of personal assets into consideration.

Having been completely broke in my life alone in a strange land without any prospects, and then becoming wealthy beyond my dreams and now back to where I started, has taught me much about the inconsequentialty of materialism.

Perception is truly all that matters. How we square what occurs beyond the end of our nose with what exists behind our eyes, where the real Revolution can only begin to take place, by necessity, if we have the courage, one animated bone bag at a time.

And yet, I am born of fight, to struggle and strive, even knowing that my effort ultimately is doomed to cease in failure, because I, like everyone, lack the substance of God. And being less than the Gods we have created we will fight vainly with each other, and with oursleves, for the trifling gain or the tragic loss, because that is what we do.

We cannot savour peace when it is denied to even one of our brothers and sisters.

Maybe our grandchildren will discover the key to adapt and find their place in the unrelievable human condition of the coming age.

It always humours an old man to fervently believe in the delusion of the goodness inside children.

But all this chatter serves no purpose, for blogging is just the aimless snorkeling of a lazy, spoiled, too pampered group of vacationers who will never reach the shore, unless the tides happen to dump our fat carcasses out incidentally onto the beach.

dogtown

I came up eastside, inside

block walls and black

enamel bang script caninas.

The cliques painting

like dogs pissing.

II

That time you received

a random ass-kicking

when you least expected it

outside of school

in front of your friends.

III

You didn't fight back.

You looked up only

when an angel

of mercy painted

the sky red behind your eyes.