Heightened Attention To Chance- Nature shots

The Catalina Panoramas - Poems/Photos

Shiver to swat me like a fast fly. Got my ass but I’ll recover. Put away the old mania and its bored cognition. Wait for me to land, then go for the top. I have a plan that will steam your shirts. It takes the weak secret, makes a perfect binding for the mess. Wait, let me get hot before this comes off. Shout out to people feeling beautiful right now.

Good morning and luck. Let me reach for you in this light like where I once did. Vandalism and other expectant mothers go flocked of lower worlds while we play. And we’re not loose yet of skin or future abasements. Look whose hear claims form. Your voice a series of whispered triple sevens and mined in the dark seepage of a lung. Taking care to blanch bets.

Birthday kid. Put on your own candlelight. How much is that sorry in the window? It’s a wish to have a lovely effort. Electric samsara brings me to that place of peace. A little smile and a lean one way beside the blue. There there, their there. Pleasing and fervent and patient and fluffy. You’ll get one, though I don’t know now just how.

Anything helps. Even helplessness. Not always a blessing but scored with possible power. I don’t have an arm to think with. I’ve spared all the teeth too like change in the bowl or the bucket begging to be a better book or dogfood. Dish me out some sorry some other time. I’m here to look and tell all of it back to myself later.

So long new years wish or a blown kiss. I can taste the dirt in the thaw. Its a bus stop life and no one stops to pick up strangers any more. Much light lives in the quest for cracks. Do your boots a favor when you come on over and take them off. I wanted that house, didn’t you? The one we get our best years from. Squeezing the backyard tree until blood comes out. Maybe it’s your blood. Maybe it’s just your friends pouring beer on you to stop the fire. It's all you have.

Junk or jewels? Black falls over the wild and delicate light. Like a mane or a stepped-on blossom, I realize what it is my turn to retrieve. The cloak, the link, the soft shield in sanguine, the uninterpreted banquet. Greedy steps spill too early toward the afterlife. What now to hinge on the year? Just rest, and see. Met out for delicious capture is the artful wave of time.

Tired of your goddamn maniac kiss. Tired of fragmented juju sweeps near the butthole. I sit by the door and that’s my job. Hogging the whoopseydaisey. Leaking all over a perfectly fresh midnight. Clogging every drain with sadsack poetry. Oooh but you make me mad the way you talk and don’t give me any subtle perfections. Did you forget your passwords for the day or your money? You are like describing an eye from the side.

The heart never truly quits. Sparks from your ring out are punched holes in my combed corridor. Shadows at my window. Anomalies flowers lending me a deep laugh. Come here if you can come. Play shelter without strictness or surprise. I’ll grow more teeth and show you my rather-than. Sorry is not a warning.

I eat my sleep. So help me. Any knotted angel tests my upholstered basement mind. Can you fly into my neon quarter? Please, I need your will to demolish bad black loops. Will earthen November relinquish our gutted emeralds long enough for us to spitshine them back to a gin-soaked lustre? Tell me flayed folders hiss open sticking paper meat and remember our hearts at last.

The Tamborine Vs. The Screwdriver

Every morning, if I'm not out of bed, my husband will leave me a sweet note.

The idea is, I don't see it until he's darted off to work and I am sitting down with the morning coffee.
I anticipate this little love-confection. Later in the morning, a message will come by the phone with still more morning greetings and wishes.

We plan dates and get excited for every month that passes leading up to the next. I never thought I would get here, and it has a very grown-up feeling to it. I think too that my dear husband also did not believe he would find himself again in a place where a(nother) marriage seemed like a good idea. I might not either if I got financially burned so badly by a previous partner's poor planning or ill-favored actions.

Back to the rainy bliss of Friday. A pale coffee and a still unmade bed. Jacket off my shoulders in the dark comedy of my apartment. All my stuff and my husband's stuff is here. And the big trucks go past, reminding me of where I grew up. Also that place is no here, but only that here and there have a few things in common.

Music is always good in that it takes the place of drugs.

I have no one in particular to write to at the moment. I have only to admit that I have exhausted all possibilities so new ones may now arise. Only the young-muse-dog/god will intuit when he is fit to receive me, and I him, if you know what I mean...

Meantime, the coffee is kicking in, and the temperature is dropping and I just checked the word of the day: Jeopardy. Sounds like a good start to a nervous condition.

Daydreams will always have the better symphonies, and occasionally you can get at them a little with your pen. The pen is mightier, after all. In this case the pen takes the form of the hyper and unmistakable staccato of the Olympia DeLuxe German-made typing machine. My own printing press of gutless glory.

I will wear a new dress tonight. There is no pressure to worry about tomorrow. It will arrive with all its peasant error like a black hair growing indecently from the nipple.

I do press myself in relief against the fear of being uprooted by the sandy soils of a soft life. Too many pillows and stubbornly beautiful conveniences. And permissions to engage in so much bad grammar- like an editing demiurge, threatening to become self-aware and ruin my carefully preserved bad batch of poems.

At the moment, the tamborine and the screwdriver are equally silent. The genius caffeine is causing my armpits to release a pleasant amount of distress due to elevated heart rates and nothing yet to sustain the belly. The stalwart soap-boat of the belly. Churning numb, incautious acids. Breeding a bile-wracked party of styleless core-driven sugar-grasping jeremiad.

Whatever, anyway... we are a happy couple of lucky maps.

Last night I had a dream that certainly came out of skydiving. It was a week that flew by and now it's Friday and I am typing for something to do. Perhaps just to wake me up a little and give me a sense of accomplishment.

The day instructs us all to be slaves to the waking life. We are fortunate enough to get to decide exactly what part of that life we are slaves to.

It's going to rain all day, and I sit here half-naked and expecting my period. Always better to get it than to not. The new meditation is leaving me giddy with inaction. From ‘Oblique Strategies’: "Do nothing for as long as possible." Causing the recall that, when it is time to finally take action, this prolonged and self-enforced care to think for a drawn-out possible will mean for your action to have that much more intent than ever before.

Blue Stocking in a Brown Study

When you know you want to think, walk to the skate park. Take a bench and hit a cigarette.

3 kids with decks, 2 on bikes. No rollerblades. No other goofy trick machines.

A slow Thursday afternoon. For a moment these children are completely in charge of their own destinies, and that is a kind of utopia.

The kind of day on which the sun shines so beautifully that even if you have problems, you could close your eyes and feel it's deep warmth and not care so much about them.

Sometimes you don't know what you even need or want to think about, you just know you need to think.

The sound of clack-clack-skurr and muffled punk rock from somebody's beat up boom box are just what you need to do it.

After the cigarette there's the lollipop.

Now you’re warm enough to take off that cardigan and get out your notebook and begin. Beginning anywhere feels good.

Being here to begin feels best.

 Search This Title to find This Book Now on Amazon.com in Paperback and for Kindle E-reader...

The Morning Commute Portfolio

I am up and out right when the thin rain turns to soft snow in the air. A transition witnessed by those lucky enough to be commuting while the sparrows are farting.

The still mostly-quiet streets reflected double in unfrozen puddles. Its like the inside of a snowglobe after awhile. Things always seem more festive and homey this time of year when the white stuff fluffs down out of the big blue nowhere. Should have worn the Santa cap today.

Under the bright lights of the bus innards, it looks to be even darker outside. My stomach flops about from late night pizza recall and one ibuprofen at 4am to stem a would-be hangover. Abstaining from coffee. Eager for tea.

Not a whiteout but close. The silent wipers going the whole way and Larry keeping the cab toasty. Everything in the suburbs is sugar dusted an inch save the roads. Its early on a whipped cream day.

Yesterday was sun and chill and my luck spotted a dollar on the ground which I used in the record store. There are plenty of things to feel lucky about from now on, and having you is the best one of them.

Love you this morning and every one hence.

In An April So Cruel-

-

I'm in this train car, and it's full of rock stars.

PJ Harvey is in the seat by the emergency exit to the next car, pleased to be left alone to recross her legs and read her book, while Chris Cornell is swinging on the vertical railing closest to the doors, observing the neighborhood.

Wesley Willis is walking thru, trying to sell everybody a fake flower or three, while Lenny Kravitz and Kim Gordon seem to be engaged in an intense discussion mid-car over what may or may not be the best length of guitar neck, or guitar body, or string gage for that matter.

Jon Spencer gets on, then gets right off at the next stop. And on and on it goes. A ride of legends for ages.

-

The same punk rock girl I saw last week is riding the train. I am jealous of her look. Torn black tights and black low-top sneaks. Her hair is the color of day old dinosaur puke, and her ripped cutoff shorts are a grey-black that most fair-skinned and Scandinavian girls look great in.

I bet her name is Maura. Or Colleen. A feisty but feminine name that is like beauty. Staying nothing and everything at once. We are in the same car now. But I probably won't pay attention to where she gets off. I'll leave that to somebody else.

Did the hangover knock something loose? It usually does...

-

Currently unmoored in the reeling, catastrophic zoetrope of the world of love. How massive and beautiful and so unreal in power, scope, potential. To heal, to redeem, to master. I hang in its warm spectrum like a captive on a ship seeing land for the first time in years.

That anyone dare to summon the dark finality of the fall of man in the presence of a glow so righteous and significant is a perversity nigh unforgivable.

And then, the delicate afternoon puts the hair of the dog into my palm, and I am grown up inside time's wild promise.

-

I sat by and thought the thoughts while communing with today, which was tomorrow, which will soon be yesterday.

It's sounds and mid-day madness, not utterly steeped in frivolous actions, but mostly I sat and read and drank and thought. And the thinking was the act that brought me the greatest reward, even if it was just a loamy buzzing behind the eyes, or an unanswered meditation on a phrase surfacing again and leading me to a place of gratitude-laden reflection. No demand for a cross-examination or a too-industrious pass.

Questions form, then drop away in favor of memories. Memories are godsent, magnificent healers. I don't thank them enough.

-

It's the idea of taking my first trip to the city of Paris making me nervous in that way that causes your stomach to flip. Like you're about to do drugs. A drug. One that will fuck you up for a little while. Probably a good long while in a good way, and you've saved the afternoon for it, but you're still nervous.

But it’s just a place. For existing. Like any other. And sure, for doing too, but not necessarily doing, and not doing the hardest thing in the world, certainly. Which is something I don't necessarily want to do.

In other words: is traveling to Europe one step closer to motherhood? Yes. No. Maybe.

-

Sleepwalking Versaille

...in this moment I am swollen like a tear... 

I rip the poster from the doorway.The show has come and gone. It went well. I managed to unlock a part of myself to do it. It is the best it could be, and I have passed one test and now, hopefully oddly, there will be others.

There is a man whom I see on the street in stark contrast to the beautiful people. He is not homeless or drunk, but in fact comfortably dressed in clean clothes. He drinks a cup of coffee when he isn't using a broom or sitting for a moment. He is very crippled. He is most likely someone's uncle. He has few teeth, but a big smile.

I didn't know what to make of him at first, and now I know he is safe, and someone is looking out for him.

 I am restless with the feeling that the day has already run away with everything and everyone important. The hazy light and cool air seems to put everyone into a motion capture. The fresh blue morning aliasing me and my collected intentions out to the coffee shop to write. I'd been threading to camp here some day and people watch until something better pulls me away. 

That day is today.

I'm reading a book so short and good that I will probably finish it in one pass.

Here there is a cappuccino and croissant and soft music and three female baristas who laugh and twitter on and I think about flirting, and my husband from the late night previous. His brown eyes sparkling with exhaustion in the bedside lamplight.

The bus arrives out the window to the right. I deposits and retrieves and workers make their connections. There is a rush, then a lull, then a rush again. Waves.

Some of them have no way of knowing how love will transform their lives.

Perhaps this random summer day will afford them some idea.I feel soft today. Adequately spent. Carbon-burnt as a sparkler. I'd almost wish the hours to rush and come to the place for alcohol and music again. I want to pass the time in the shade and still make a new friend.

The last tatters of croissant sit on my plate like badly arranged art. I don't wait very long to put down the pen when I can't think of something else to say.

And then I have a memory. The nature of their odd occurrence is a delightful mystery. I relish the recollections of the girl with the Peter-pan tattoo across her back. And a girl at the show last night who, in the edge less shadows looked like an old friend. That familiar ramp, also new every time. A fresh topography of a one-piece collection leading to the next. A scent, a color, an emotion. The rising flavor sweetening or spurring the day, however briefly.

Striking polyphanous bells that triangulate an emotional position. A season of grateful existence.I begin by taking the shortcut thru the park to get home. I write while walking. I begin by looking for things discarded by others which might be useful to me. I begin by trying to be open and gentle. The sun both invites and threatens this. In my life, the old and almost irreplaceable thing is preferred to the new and untainted. I could walk hours, or just sit in the garden and think of nothing where the birds bicker and jostle the tall greenery, and the sun is about to rise completely over the rear gate and suck up all the dew thru its straws of rays that will keep burning and searching.
I begin by taking the long way around.