First I will tell you a true story

First I will tell you a true story. Then I will throw a big bag of words at you, because I can.

True story: About a year ago I was working with a kid who did not talk, almost three years old, no language at all. I spent a few months getting past his fear and hysteria, helping to lead his mother to the A word. Autism. One day, teaming with my therapy partner, she was talking with mom about his learning style. While they talked , I had Lou leaning against me, looking at cards as I turned them over and named them.  It was rare for him to touch me, or to sit quietly, or to interact in any social way. I showed him another card and said the name: Violin. And the next one: Rainbow. He took them from me and said: Violin. And showed me the card. Then the other: Rainbow. And showed me the card. Then he danced around the room with the two cards, saying Violin (holding it out). Rainbow (holding it out).  First words. Violin. Rainbow. Three years old. For the next few weeks, he kept those cards close, repeating the names. And new words came, all of a sudden, a suddenly opening door.

 

Suddenly words

You might consider your libido as a kind of ornament, hanging on a tree like a ripe tomato, or secret and deep as a trench, ripe and sweet as fresh-squeezed juice. But that’s not how we do it round here. We keep our spirits up, we’re green and crisp as spring salad. We like to showcase our young; reservations are required. At the Odium Theatre every year there is an extravaganza that features filigreed kimonos (most of them in mauve) challenging the deep water acrobats, diving into moats, down gorges, smiling and waving all the way down. The journalists draw pictures of them, smirking like Cheshire cats, jumping down that gorge, making aerial hairpin turns, alive alive alive until there’s a bad moment, could have been just a bruise but instead the truth is a bastard, a dastardly freak who gloats at the bloated corpse that floats downstream until it is washed up in a swamp, a quagmire, a murky, queer and unlikely terrain. The distinguished gentleman stands and with characteristic discernment and an unseemly relish demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge, his Hail Britannica superiority. After hours he goes home, shoots up, and plays the violin, watches as the sun goes down, where the rainbow smudges the lengthening sky. But never mind all that, indeed, certainly not, it’s not surely, but you jest, and you find this questionable, this questionable judgment that zooms past us while we stand and pontificate. Zip it up, friend, make it work, it’s not me, it’s the esoteric tickle of uncertainty, the chronic temperamental temptations of someone who loves Pandora, the Explora who is no esoteric Cassandra, no hunch maker, inkling spreader, odds wagerer. She is more like coals carried aloft on balloons, leaving their baggage suspended on earth day, the flying Brenda on the wall, bounteous, dubious, glorious, smack down gorgeous, suspended indefinitely by curious safeguards draped in a koolaid smile.

Rainbow Ocean by Thelma 1 at deviantart.com

Summer Triptych

Summertime

Little baby with flyaway hair is dancing. White sheets on a clothesline and a tree with green leaves waving high to the big blue sky. Baby laughs and waves at tree and sheets and runs through grass to cool mud. A reel-to-reel memory and the baby has blue-green eyes, half on land, half at sea. We laugh and toss her between us. Then nothing and the film strip thwock thwocks at the end of the reel. Thwock thwock, thwock thwock, then the living room is dark except for the hard white light staring out the end of the projector.

In summertime, there are many smells. Smells of hot, melting tarmac, of laundromats billowing out sweet dirty laundry sheets and bleach. Hair burnt crunchy and dry, slightly green from chlorine and swim lessons. Chemistry smells lingering wherever blue pools light up at night. Steaming bright midnight, an abandoned inflatable chair rocking gently in the wee hours as the pool filter blurbs and billows, benign and protective.

 

Making do

Wish I had a shoestring. What do I have? Rummaging in this paper bag, I find a bag of Fritos, a dollar twenty five in change, and a book of matches. Making do. I buy a single cigarette from the Circle K on the corner of Solano and Hadley, sit on the corner in the hot July evening. I eat the Fritos and go back inside for a cherry lime slurpee. Then back out on the curb, I smoke the cigarette and drink the slurpee and my tongue turns bright red. A white Chevy Nova pulls up at the corner and I kiss the boy in the driver’s seat with my bright red tongue, which is still cold. Then I run away into the dark alley behind the Circle K and lose him almost immediately. Ten minutes pass, then twenty, and I walk back to the Circle K for another cigarette. They are three cents apiece. I now have a paper bag, 45 cents, and no place to sleep tonight. It is 1 a.m. and the streets are still hot. I can see moths and fireflies banging against the streetlight in the parking lot. I put the cigarette out and save the butt in an empty pack, then walk down Hadley three blocks, four, til I come to a small square park with a bandstand in a summer pagoda. It is the only building lit this time of night. The boy is there, waiting for me, and we dance a polka on the raised stage. There are still flowers in early summer, not worn and dry like everything else here will be by August.  We sit on the steps at the edge of the stage; we can both see the fourth of July from here, still three weeks away. We lean back and look up at the sky and the stars are fireworks, shooting up into the deep forever and bursting. Thousands of shooting stars bursting and showering the night, comet tails leaving a bright, trailing signature. We sleep in the Nova that night, him in the front seat sitting up, me in the back with a trunk blanket on the floorboards in case of a chilly dawn. In the morning, we drive to the Denny’s to wash our hands and faces, and order coffee, and fill my purse with crackers and jelly packets and a bottle of catsup for later. Then we go back to the Circle K for a cigarette, which we share. Later, we will either go back home, or find another place to stay, or do the same thing again tonight.

 

Be happy, precious five

Be happy, precious five.
Five fingers, five toes.
Five days in a work week.
Five acres, five dreams
Dreamt in a night of coupling

Uncoupling, dreamt in a night
Of sweat and a morning of worry.
The snow coming late, left early
And everything is dry:
Grass, air, trees, eyes, and dry is a crisp
Threat calling sparks from the sky.

I am counting on my five
Fingers, five toes, counting on
Rain, counting on clouds piling up over
There, over there, purple and heavy,
Pregnant like cattle in this late spring.
We are overdue, it is past time.
I am counting the days til the rains begin.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Until then, I cannot afford to breathe. Hail Mary,
Hail Mary, send us hail, send us rain,
send us rain. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

 

(Three prompts: “Summer” 10 minutes; “Making do on a shoestring” 20 minutes; “Precious Five” – W.H. Auden – 10 minutes.)

Sky caves

Clouds, Albuquerque - from Albuquerque Daily Photo

Sky caves collect where ice and air interact with heat and wind. I collect sky caves. I collect sky caves and gather them high where the clouds are piled. The clouds are piled and at the top the ice crystals form. I wait.

The winds blow, the grasses lay flat, storm crashes against the sky bottom all at once, and then there is fire. I gather the fire and pour it into the river and it boils up again into the sky, where it hits the sky caves with a great crash and then there is rain.

There is rain, sent down by the air gods, not me; they gather the ice and shake it hard with fire. When it comes down to earth the trees hold their hands up and shake their wild heads and laugh and cry all at once. The tree people cry for water, joy and sex soaking into the roots, and for pain as their arms are broken and thrown down in the wind, and the branches lay on the ground, which is clay mud and runs red like blood to the river. The ground is a river running red with mud, my collection has shattered, glass in shards have scattered and broken against the bosque floor. The sun warms, the water runs fast, the morning birds wake. They sing the air gods to sleep, high in the sky caves that rest, now, silent and still in the thin air.

 

20 minutes, writing group. Topic: Ice. Thank you, Mike!

To see a storm in central New Mexico, see the link below from You Tube. My neighborhood has more cottonwoods, wild giant trees, being in the bosque itself, but this is beautiful viewing also.

** The embedding feature for this video is disabled, but you can still watch it by clicking on the You Tube logo. My understanding of protocol in You Tube is limited, for now.

Sudden spring wind

 

The pragmatic asthmatic relaxed into the dance, the shimmy shammy prance, the collective breath. The pragmatic asthmatic learned to meditate, to breathe into his third eye, his fourth eye, his belly button and his nebulizer. The pragmatic asthmatic is nebulous in his desires, his tendencies tender, blenderized, repressed and released from their straight jacket cover. He lives in a puddle of hope, the asthmatic pragmatic, the empresario, the unlikely lothario, the man whose breath is short but whose shadow is long. There are times when the difference between calm and comatose is muddy; he looks into the murky waters and they are shallow, shallow and guarded, a familiar habit whose resolution could jeopardize the expectations of the masses, and this is how graves are dug.

Get out a shovel, get out a pick, get out a set of orders, a tuxedo stored in lavendar sachet. Splash, I am an aqua velva man, says Sugar, sweet and barbed and brown. Sugar lives in a disco universe, percolator blurping, mirror ball twisting in dance halls, rectories, refracting, reacting, acting, profilacting. We have doubts, hesitations, regrets, returns, we have return addresses that are no longer there. Did you know that? You will send the cavalry out to rescue the distressed players of your past, and they will no longer be at that venue.

Stand on the avenue and hand out flyers; rewritten play holding auditions in fingers splayed open, dance running like sand and covering your fingers, your belly, the soles of your feet. Nancy Drew auditions for a role; so does James Bond, the Nancy Boys, the Clancy Brothers, and the Oliver Twister Sisters. There is room for all of them; you know this to be true and so you make a pot of beans and collard greens and invite them in to write, rehearse and sing. They have fencing battles with potstickers and potliquor, and announcements are posted on telephone poles and coffee shops and oxygen bars where asthmatics wheeze and elephants sneeze and this is a turbulent time.

It’s time for gravity and antimatter and Auntie Maggie and Auntie Macassar, and the two make chai for the masses, the clams and the teachers – the geoducks challenge the continental divide, and the continent does then divide and conquer. The croquet set reaches out, goosenecks grab a sweet meat, so tender, so tenderized, held and cradled and memorized. There’s a place in this world for deliberate nonsense, for accidental sense, for labels and for white out late at night.

White out, night out; a full moon only illuminates what it shines upon. I saw a cow and a spoon and dish, I saw a moon and a spoon of raspberry preserves. The crumpet dreams buttery hot dreams of jam and cream and wakes up blushing. The rushing wind calls upon us; the silenced wind sits suddenly still and we sitting in its wake are shaken, light blankets in March, hanging on a clothesline, April calling from across the field. Fool, no nebulizer needed here, no gasping shortness, no empty field. Fielded, flooded fields full, watered, impregnated, saturated, sated with spring.

(quick write – 20 minutes. needs an image. more later.)

Ten minute verse

 

 

The limerick packs laughs a bit anatomical
The hyena forestells disasters astronomical
The hermit sees shows that are not so comical,
The blowtorch makes glass that is curved or conical.

What happened to the moment of limit, not limited
by greed or shape or sudden inhalations, some primitive
wishing for Jesus or Joseph or Mary
or Bill ‘O or Monroe or rich guys who nary
a word said against them are nonetheless wrong or words
said against them are strong in the long
run where there is no fortress no mercy no song
where whatever there is, is where rope may be hung
on a cassock, a limb, on a boat, where he clings,
where the deep gapes its maw, like a song that he sings
a song like a cris, like a prayer, like a dirge, like a bell
that is ringing, clanging, as day runs to a well
of night, of night, of light that fades and well it fades

Smooth, grey, velvet rays darkening in times astronomical
the hermit lights the lamp in a night long and comical
the blowtorch makes glass that is curved or conical,
a limerick packs laughs a bit anatomical.

 

 (ten minute freewrite at the end of a busy night of writing)

 

Found pillow

In marble halls as white as milk,
lined with a skin as soft as silk,
An image of women, an image of men,
Dented and battered, scarred and thin.

Within, without, with hearts and rain,
With cabbages, kings, with kites without strings.
Their eyes were watching, were watching god,
in bare rooms, empty, were watching god,
With shadowed eyes, bare mattresses, odd,
shortened breath, shortened life, watching god,
watching god.

We suspect them of having mean hearts, she said.
She looked through the windows, she looked in their heads.
We suspect them of breathing, we suspect them of crime,
The crime of not sleeping, of eating dry bread
of drawing breath, of drawing
a bridge, of drawing a card to carry the dead.

This book is harmless, written and sad.
These people have gone where nothing is said.
This loss is a pillow, grieved and wet. 
This loss is a pillow, beaten, set,
Thrown on the floor, wrinkled and sad.

This loss is a pillow, grieved and wet, buried
In walls, breathing out, breathing in,
in a marble hall, as white as milk,
Lined with a skin, as soft as silk.

 

 

 

 

 

(found poem, writing group, 15 minutes, untouched)

Sleep

The acoustic bed is where I lie with headphones on. When I lie there, my eyes are closed. My eyes are closed and the bed shakes me. Atomic, powerful, electric. There is no such thing as too loud. I heard that somewhere, and I know it is true. I am on my knees to the glory of sound. Power chords. Death metal. Teeth crushing volume. This is a spiritual experience, make no mistake.

When I am saturated with sound, it is time for light. Nuclear, flaming, magical, reflective. I am in my vision bed and it is a mandala, a flaming tower blooming skyward and then circling. I am deaf, I am nothing but one large optical nerve looking out, looking west into the sun, burning rays and falling blind on my face. Blind and deaf.

On my knees again, I am blind and deaf. But my nose, oh my nose, oh my subtle quivering proboscis seeking out more honey, more. How could I have thought that light or sound could match, could compete, could even perform in the same arena? My olfactory bed is redolent – herbal, musky, rancid, floral. It is ozone and rain, it is the rotten sweetness of death and the iron bloody smell of birth. The olfactory bed consumes me, suffocated, breathless, gasping, lost.

When I wake it is tomorrow. The bed that wakes me seems perfectly ordinary, except for around the edges, where there are burnt crispy bits, with little whispers of smoke rising, disappearing out the morning window.

 

(* Writing prompt – used 5 syllable rhyming words “rhymes with shower” from Rhyme Zone. Wrote for 20 minutes. Thank you, Red Ravine, for the “Tools We Use” list.)

New Job Haiku

time bandit

 

 

Swipe in, sign here please.
Tomorrow do it again.
Goodbye says hello.

Bark howl squeak

I am a frightened dog. Have you ever seen a frightened dog?

The frightened dog is a frightened man-bear. The frightened dog will pee himself or bite you. The frightened dog will hide behind a blanket, a curtain, between your legs, or in the doorway that connects your kitchen and your dining room.

The frightened dog is an uncertain equation. I am a frightened dog. What should I do?

Being, as I am, a frightened dog, I feel naked, defenseless and – I don’t know – shocked. Like I’ve been strapped in a test car moving through an electric landscape, and the test is me, how well I will survive strapped in and shooting through the desertscape in the hot sun. I imagine me, my heart, my heart racing through and somehow escaping from sage and tumble into a wide open highway, hurtling over it with heart pounding bright and red until suddenly there is a stop and rest and water. This is a moment of respite from being a frightened dog, and I am starting to think again, about bookstores and libraries and word-landia, where being as I am is not necessarily a shock to someone’s system. Knowing that I will eventually be sucked back again onto that road.

I am not really a frightened dog, am I? No one ever really stopped the car and said get out, get out now and threw rocks at me. Stupid dog. I am more like a frightened idea, like a frightened idea of someone or some beast not sure where to go as the landscape breathes, a pattern of expand and contract, less of some things and so much, too much, of others.

No one ever really stopped the car and told me to get out. Not really. What they did, what they did and what left me wandering in full sun in the desert sage and willow was me, little creature, naked, more naked than any bluejay’s imaginings, and I am a child/bear/dog/coyote/man boy, masked and mystified by my own arrival, 7 days gone, on a beach in Baja, where my nakedness is more apparent. There is a low set of waves foaming at beach edge. There is a set of low waves lapping and licking at my naked toes and my appreciation of warm blue water. The water is warm and blue with little foam tongues, and I am a naked boy child walking in the tide until my ankles say that is enough. That is enough for little ones; tide coming in is fine, tide going out is danger.

I am wrapped in a towel, in a large yellow towel with a pattern of trailing red roses along the borders. The towel swallows me up. Inside it, I can hear beach voices – radio, seagull, human voice washing in and out rhythmically, smoothly. The waves recede, the voices rise.

The voices of humans rise as the tide recedes. Little shells with air pock the surface as water runs away. There are crabs and sand holes and apologists in the wet sand on the beach where later we will lie still, full of sandwiches and fruit. The crabs will march unoffended a few mere feet away. I wave at them, absent-mindedly. I imagine that they are waving back, grateful that there is room for some crustaceans here on the white washed sand. I whistle; somewhere, a crab steams and screams like an oncoming locomotive.

There is no chance of boarding the wrong train here, I think, and sit down one bench seat away from a man clutching a small cage, inside of which is a pink-eyed rat who watches me carefully, hopefully.

The physics lesson of Australopithecus

 

Light travels in red grey sunset angles through the deep trees in the ancient jungle. Tiny Australopithecus rummages underneath his leafy bed and slides into his flip-flops. Strapping on the pith helmet left him by his grandfather, the great great great grand father of the hominid just before us, he walks quietly into the night.

He walks quietly into the night; stealth is a gift we are given by the DNA of our common ancestry with things that need both to be afraid and to be feared. I carry a stick. You carry a stick. Miraculously, the enormous lonely rhythm of the heart running through the carotid artery and out again keeps fear at bay and carries messages through the jungle that we are ant we are anteater we are poodle we are dictator. Blood messages, like time travelers, salinating and desalinating the bitter taste of worry. Quickly, quickly, quickly tricking the heart into believing in the ticking of the bomb that carries away sweetness and the mating of apes and aphids.

The mating of apes and aphids is contained in a module on biological sciences, stored in the library next to a laminated poster of dinosaurs eating swamp grass, heads swiveling, looking for predators. In the courtyard nearby there is a substitute teacher; he is sweating and his eyebrows feel worried. He strokes his face and wishes he had not dropped out of graduate school again. He strokes his face and looks down the hall. He is tall, the hall is long, the bell has rung and he is surrounded by a sea of pygmies, washing around him and he is afraid. He sees a boy and thinks of himself and thinks about sitting out in the parking lot listening to Abba on his Ipod, but today is a strange day and someone would probably call the police to report a strange man with worried eyebrows sitting alone in his car, and at least inside the school he has a known identity. Sub. Subject. Subjected. There is such as thing as too closely shaved; his skin feels raw and shiny like a baby something, a baby something not human, more newt-like or reptilian, and the air feels cold rushing against his naked face as the children open and close the doors on their way to the playground.

On their way to the playground they find a fossil. They find many fossils, and some sticks. Here: I carry a stick and you carry a stick. Put the stick down. Put the stick down. Then later all of them pouring out of the playground like Ovaltine and slightly burned milk, too hot to settle down now. The man is an Australopithecus wandering lonely in the jungle, the desert, the changing expectations, the creased perma-press dockers, the perma-frost largely unmentioned in classroom or cafeteria but ubiquitous nonetheless. Ubiquitous, the melting down of hard to soft, of cold to hot, the disenfranchisement of order. The blacktop is melted, the tar pits are hardened, the hominid hums a little tune and carries a little stick to dig in the earth. He digs in the earth, humming a little tune and then he goes home and sings the song to his son.

He goes home and sings the song to his son and they make a new bed together, out of rushes woven together and this year there are no stinging insects, because the cold that surprised them killed the mites that bit them and the woman who bore the children. They carry their little sticks and pots of water and grow things, and then centuries – thousands upon thousands of them – happen. The waters melt and freeze and someone invents Miracle Whip and pajamas and then they are here, with the frightened substitute teacher and the freakish death of the drummer for Abba, who fell through a window and slit his own throat. He carried a stick, and he hummed little songs for himself and his daughter, his little dancing queen now all grown up but fatherless and the substitute teacher is sad today.

The substitute teacher is sad today, but like the tides will get over it and reach in and out of the bag in which he carries his secrets, the sorrows and those epiphanies that surprise us whenever we find them, no matter how many times we’ve found them before. It’s the scrabble bag, all the letters are the same every time but the recombination of elements makes every moment new. All the letters are the same every time. Origin of species giving us the same dreams dreamed by a tiny man in a timeless world in a spinning orb in the gasses that surround us. Light travels from unimaginable distances to unimaginable distances, light travels like time, light travels like no time, light travels, light travels.