by Tomorrow's Man
Mabon light my way and protect me 'til the Spring, I'm exposed as a limbless brain and feeling everything, Mabon wrap me in silken cloak and see me through the cold, I'll die without a warm hand at my heart, warm as the sun is gold.
Let's see you catch a look from a woman sharp as digitized contraband and keep your heading without hooking left, orbiting fast, and finding yourself in a new moon's pull. Let's see you just try it, resist that gravity pointed at you, resist that cellular tug that's got your blood pouring right into its pressurized red glass bottle.
Let's just see you try.
Ah, how that autumn air slices into the lungs, eh? Makes all those lizards out there really surf desertward. The full moon climbs through night jelly and throws knives at our eyes, but you know it does it lovingly. It wants to give us edges to read by. It wants us to tap the veil, see if we echo on the other side.
Somewhere, there's a panther skin moving through this night, and you can believe my scent is all over it.
When I was 8, I got my first kitten. His name was Tatamy, after the small town in Pennsylvania where my mother found him. He was cute as a button, blind as a bat, and ripped to shreds by a neighborhood dog three weeks after I got him.
He was the most trusting cat in the world, had to be, because he couldn't see. He assumed life could not be inherently evil, that nature's way could not truly be living Hell.
I think about finding him in a garbage bag on the porch when I got home from school, and how it was the most devastating pain I'd felt in my life. I think about how that jewel, that bright sharp pain, has not faded. Nor was it buried beneath years of joy, but in fact the pain of every day that leaves no time to worry about what used to kill you.
I probably had not thought of Tatamy in 15 years before this morning, because I have had to focus on survival. Immediately upon hearing of my own decay, my murdered kitten springs back to life in my head. I will spend the day looping a memory of his short life.
Not quite life flashing before the eyes, but I've realized: When your frailty moves up a peg, it isn't recent agonies that come to mind, but those that have always been most severe.
I am not ready for 35 years of conjured hurt.
All My Dreams To Dust
I grab my face when it begins,
the shaking,
And I can't help
Feeling like I'm caught
In this loop
that I have been in
so
many
times
before
and
I can't shake it,
I can't tear this spiral off,
I can't shake
this
coil
&nbs again
without it
killing
me
killing
us
killing
you
we
killing
we.
Where when I was a baby, born by my mother to live a life of wonder, her seed flowered into this hot life;
Where when I grew, taught by my mother to live a life of wonder, I became a child of vocabulary magic;
Where when I live, apart from my mother in a life of wonder, I'm forever her immortality, alive.
"Hi, yes, I'd like two large extra cheese pizzas with black olives and pepperoni, a greater sense of self-esteem, a two liter of Dr. Pibb, faith in my felow man, one order of the cheesy breadsticks, the ability to sleep at night without succumbing to my deepest fears, chicken fingers with barbecue and sweet 'n sour sauces, a voice of reason in a darkening world, and cheese sticks. I have a coupon."
He heard a shout, heard a warning in seven voices not to push that button, pull that lever, step on that pedal, pull that cord, light that fire, ask that question, speak that truth, reveal that mystery, touch that breast, enter that life, believe that lie, climb that mountain, breathe that air, sing that song and walk into the end of his life, but by the time he looked in the mirror and saw he was you and your shout was too late, it was too late.
Speak into the headphone, it can hear you too, the music is talking at you to tell you nothing has changed, everything is still forbidden, clean up your sleeve, put away your heart, stop fretting over the loss before the loss has hurt you and speak into the headphone, scream it out loud.
One, two, three, four.
Rhythm, time out, count down. This much time is left in your life.
One, two, three, four.
You've got choices to make. You've got decisions to avoid.
This much time is left in your life.
One, two, three, four.
You've got a trust to build, and a history to burn. And you'd better get moving.
One, two, three, four.
This much time is left in your life.
One, two, three.
Got a mind feels like Spanish leather gloves beating on blue steel bars, there's no maybe something's up mode right now, there's only oh no, and all the drama in between. Someone's moving my lawn, taking it to a different place where I never wanted to plant flowers, especially not in my now tattered once nice sorrel Spanish gloves.
Camping Notes, Sherwood, WI., III
Smoke lingers, chicken fingers.
5:17AM
Sitting in the woods having a conversation with a bear, or maybe a tree. Either way, it has explained to me exactly why the Packers would go 9-7 this season. It -- the bear or tree -- is making sound sense, despite the 39 straight hours of liver battery I've been engaged in. I asked it if the story was true that Flambeau Field was in the middle of a lake of fire, and if the Meat Puppets ever played there. The bear or tree passed me back the pipe and asked if I'd been smoking something other than what was in it.
5:31AM
I hear thunder from the thousand stars above. In a great lean, the trees have bent to whisper a secret to me: "Everything is a rose. Everything is a rose. Everything is a rose...."
5:47AM
Walk to the lake carried on a pillow of quiet. I can see my heartbeat in the mist of my breath; it corrugates the black air and forms steps I am almost positive I could climb. I can see these steps in the moonlight as they drift aloft. Where are they going? Are steps ever going somewhere, or have they always already arrived? Can one step be a link to a destination, or is it just a suggestion of a direction?
This is my thought, here by the lake, freezing, frankly. I am one step. I am somewhere between the gossamer lifts of my breaths and the earth-carved stone of the Black Hills. I am a step of resilient meat, as willing to give way as to carry. I can suggest a direction, or I can take you there. Think of me as a very short ladder on your way, willing to take you from where you are to where you belong.
6:01AM
Time to chase the darkness into the tent...light without sleep ages a body forever. Somewhere out there, over the past days, I have left steps.
I have left steps all over where we belong.
Camping Notes, Sherwood, WI., II
Someone pass me more chili -- I have to use the outhouse again, and I want to go in fully armed.
I have got to cut down on this cheap ass La Crosse Lager. It obviously contains a fairly large portion of crack cocaine.
I smell like Smoky the Bear and Jimmy Dean the Sausage Guy had an orgy in my hypodermis. I won't get this smell out for weeks. If I could fly, I could be a smoke signal telling my fellow Potawatomi JIMI HENDRIX MEANT HE WANTED TO STAND NEXT TO HER CROTCH, NOT AN ACTUAL FIRE. If I move closer, I will melt my bones. Which could be interesting -- glowing from the inside, a skin of red covering liquid bone, a phoenix from an icarus....
Who put that owl there? Who? Who?
Who?
Camping Notes, Sherwood, WI.
I think it was either Mikhail Barishnikov or Charles Nelson Riley who first said, "Spiders, they might not get easier to swallow, but boy do they get easier to chew."
The three rules to successful camping:
Don't look in your drink.
Don't look in your shoes.
And whatever you do, don't look in the hole in the outhouse unless you absolutely desire a case of the creeping bejeebers shaky enough to leave you hairless as a baboon's ass.
There's a spider on my brat.
Every place, every person, every foot of land I cross today is going to have something monumental happen to it they and them next weekend, for better or for worse.
"And then it's off to the Abbey we neophytes shall go, as the House on the Rock awaits..."
Sippin' on a can can, dancing with the man dressed in a flan fan, Pakistan hands are grand in a mad van, when did you lose your band to the night stand, here goes another mother falling further in a flim flam, watch that man he's dancing with Nico on a Warhol can, two dimension still has tension when a tap tap is a faster rap from Nico on stage with Goldfrapp slapping bass to a beat of Heroin and black cherry busting the cops in the men's can, here we go back to the flim flam, dancing with the man, man, I'm dancing with the man.
Open my eyes.
Look out the window.
The sun rises at 16,000 miles per second.
Do I feel secure?
Maybe I don't feel the planet shaking apart beneath my covers; but I'm putting my head back under them nonetheless. Sometimes a warm soft blanket is all you need to keep all that speed from catching up to you.
September always enters me with the grace of a back brace and leaves me weak in the ankles and groin, supportless, needing to explode, I lumber through September with the speed of a cold, cold February.
This isn't music, this is a poem at 0 MPH that was once 666 hundred, there's this island I once tried where Bjork they say burst from a womb, but far from her pierced parts is me here, alone in Madison as a birthday passes, slugging back the Brennivin far from that harsh hometown of the Army of Her, and I wonder, a bit, how I got here.
It was love, yes, that drove me here, like matches to a family suffering in the dark beneath a tidal wave. But it was also desire, pounding like a 6/8 beat for a musical slide I never knew would die once I arrived.
And then, and then, there is guitar plain, a finger in cool air this evening, and warm brennivin.
Happy Birthday, Day Older Universe, I. eye
Happy Birthday, World of War, Man of Wax.
Happy Birthday, Origami Boy.
Happy Birthday, 3.5th Decade; smile on your sinful city.
Happy Birthday, Red Speeding Child: You treated every road as a womb, and every womb as a journey.
Happy Birthday to Me, Parabola of a Life;
Goodnight, Dead Man.
If you use five words instead of three, seven instead of two, but one instead of ten, then you can coast for years on the fumes of your literary genius.
Late Note; B-flat
I had more countries in my toe jam late this last lost weekend than most coalitions find scratching each other's backs with their own unhired hands. It was a good weekend, whenever it was.
Amalgam of sound and scent, am I in the well of a tire's blowout or in the throes of a firehose orgasm, where is that sound coming from, what is leaking this scent, is it me, can all of this intense sense be me??
All I have wanted to be lately is a shooting star, bright, hot, something to gaze upon for a brief moment and wish upon for the key to the world, something Heavenly that seems to promise a dream.
Shooting stars, though, they're crazy with the suicide.
Labor Day BBQ Note
Being bitten by one of every bug in this burg is a bitching bowl of bilious bull.
I'm itchy.
This is my entry body, from here I breathe smoke, grow paprika in the palm of my hand, and spin with the guts of a dervish into a molten eye of pink sweet lava; this is my entry body, where I have your parts, too, open and ready, this is my entry body, where the musk dark calls an echo a spade and a promise a saint, this is my entry body, where a name means magic and a spell is cast every time I laugh.
Too fast, the windows flies into sandpaper wind becomes a fly helicopter above the sand fast it flies into the wind and becomes a wing of glass.
Dunking quickly into the honey, one thought held its breath and made a bubble, hardened, all those millenia ago, somewhere in the hive. The breath still waits for the thought to be released.
Every tree I see breathes to me, "Hey, mister, what's with that large green hat?"
The part that always gets me is that I am not wearing a large greet hat.
Okay, it is official -- there is no détante. There is only war.
I hate shaving, and shaving hates me.
This morning, I attempted the dire act again, as I have repeatedly for so many years, and again my face resulted with a look like I'd taken to it with a jailbird's anti-sodomy shiv.
That does it. I'm going grizzly.