Postcard 90

Sitting with my guilt that runs the low points of my flaws. Sitting, swimming I should say, in down-bent cataracts seeking base, cutting away at solid ground. Looking up to slimming sky, to ever further topsoil loam, to ragged edges built on many layered pasts, bisected. Oh the beauty! Oh the colors of those histories stacked -- but dead. This is how contours are cut. This is how dark aquifers are fed. Over gravelly sunless beds, this is where my guilt is purified. Here, it is only the flow of actions leeching limestone from my marrowed bones. It is only me. But of those backward cut cliffs, there is another way -- of tumult, growth and friction. I must uproot the earth itself, thrust firmament against firmament and up! There are powers, deeply sought, that can sunlight the high parts of me. Stark precipices shrugging off poor action, making high streams feeding growth supple and green.

Postcard 89

The child stood under a shaggy palm in his crabgrass frontyard. It was that thief in the night, called desert spring.  The child, a boy about four years old, golden-haired, striped-shirted, was pondering the strange whims of nature. The same rare breeze that tousled his hair like a father, also tousled the palm and shook from its bunch of dead fronds the easter-egg blue eggs of two-penny sparrows. Some were, amazingly, unbroken. Some leaked broken yolk. A couple revealed still-born chicks. And look -- a horrible miracle -- a still living chick struggling in small circles and stretching its neck. A girl came out of her house across the street and called to him. She was about five or six and had long straight hair. Maybe she was beautiful; he couldn't know. There was a fake wishing well in her front yard. It seemed mystical. They chattered like birds for a bit. The boy was new to the neighborhood and this was an exciting welcoming. But next door, in a hardpacked yard with white-painted trees and cockeyed pickup trucks, another boy emerged. He didn't like the girl and she didn't like him. He shouted across insults and she shouted retorts. C'mon, said the boy, and he picked up some dirtclods and pitched them across the street. He was aiming for the girl but they fell short. C'mon! And the first boy looked to him, hard and sure, sunbrowned and beautiful, then to the girl, so far away across the street. He picked up a dirtclod and threw it, then another. She did not cry, but retreated into her house. The child felt a new feeling and determined that he could not show his new friend the eggs and baby sparrows.

Postcard 88

Songs of my country:

There is the unmissable martial song of sturm und drang. Inherited, it stretches back through time like a column -- infantry batteries, cavalry, supply train. Loud and grand and simple. The words, matching beats, do not change: Patriot! Gallantry! Mother-Father-Homeland! Bravery!
Try and be the brave one who stands stoic, sober, calm and quiet within this eager violent cavalcade.

But behind that -- listen slight -- is a chorus wise with injury and pain. The women's song, masked and robed praising Fates of irony and folly, tragedy and dark humor strained. Singing songs of every privation, rape and pillage, and every wounded soldier's fist-transferred pain. The chorus is a windy chant of natural force as ever present as the air, but rises sometime banshee-like to gale, to tempest, to typhoon -- madness of despair

But of despair there is a song we must listen low to hear. True, it is easy to ignore, but once heard it is there and there and there. It is the dirge of black mothers left with only broken sons. The rhythm is the slow trampling of hoses, clubs, and dogs, and guns. The rhythm is the blood tamped dirt, the swaying of young tree-hung bodies in the breeze.

There is the song of un-earned power, that fears the limits of its guns, that fears and sings more loudly still...but then there is the song of slow power justly earned and won. The songs that percolate in well graced anger, in wombs and blood rich soil. Where fear is wrung out and all but gone.

Postcard 87

Here is what is real in layers beat like sword steel.
Here is what is real:
What we see with eyes, with hands, with tools;
the glass perspires and stains the table,
the moon is falling forever away,
and the real miracle is mass and waves.
The real, as miracle, shows no concern, and,
but for wonder, we owe it no more.

Here is what is true:
In time, things move and pull
the space between now and then.
What is true is the stretch, the snap of strings.
You did this, and I did that, and they did other things.
It is true a bullet kills a man, but so
a stone, a fall and rust itself.
It is true that life seeks life and must consume and
every snap and stretch is -- even pleasure -- pain.
It is true I left this hammer here, and left my boots out in the rain
It is true you lost your car keys, and it is true that I complained.

It is true that we have leaders, so called,
but they are real and they speak false.
I expect nothing more or less of them, nor you nor me nor anyone,
but I'll not abide dishonesty
There is real and there is make-believe.
There is true and there is false, but lies lie in dishonesty
Honest is agreement of the why, that
what is spoken carries forth to what will speak again

It is wrong to torture, wrong to hurt, to speak
false against our fellow man.
Love speaks against the cynic's equivocating heart.

Postcard 86

That monkey on my back looks too much like me, perched up there on sharp knees. Old man of the sea, is there no end to his pestering? He pulls each ear to guide my steps and turn my path. He covers my eyes, each hand a screen. All about, this foreign world is protean and mean. His voice, thin and reedy, says: see what you may. I look along our pathless paths and see flowers and nymphs, anemone. He removes is reedy fingers and look: pestilence and pain. He leads me along flaking cliffs and ambuscades. All that is illusion too. His other fingers hold my face, and those he removes. We are in void of sea or space. He leers and speaks: to get what you wish, first you must catch simian me. And though he is all sharp elbows and stabbing knees, he's as hard to hold as mercury. And I feel old and godlike, and I feel young and horribly free. And what if what I would wish would be to catch and hold the beast? And what if 'simian me' is not him but me. And what if I'm just turning on myself, meaningless in a boiling sea?

Postcard 85

When they came for me, it was late night like always. They awoke me from a recurring dream. Do not ask them why they don't sleep nights. Inquiries only makes them hit harder. I do not care if they have guilt (if they did, they should quit).They have only been waiting for the freedom. Law makes for insipid morality.
When they threw me in the room, I was happy. That bright windowless room. I wanted to lick the walls. I wanted to taste the blood, the sweat, the piss of my dream family. Only the worthy pass through those rooms. Only the worthy are pulled out of bed, are stripped, are truncheoned. Only the worthy are up to answering their impossible questions. They may be dumb as pigs, but somehow they can sniff out the worthy. I could not lick those slick shining walls, chained as I was to the table, but when my teeth flew out and onto the floor, I grinned.
I was the least of these. The beauty of a true pride, the confused, the innocent, the weary fighters, the blood-handed and the bargaining.
This is the recurring dream that wakes me as they come already, not yet arriving. Every bullet, every rubber hose and pipe, every noose, every cane field, every open airplane has found its true mark on the best of us.
Is it true?
I sit up in bed and turn on the bright lights and look around at the history that flow and I swear that I will do whatever I do, and I will risk, as I must, with love. The only thing that counts worthwhile.

Postcard 84

You can have a good fight, if you just open up your hands.
You can lay the roadwork, but you must let the water pass.
You  can get your song loud -- spitting out, if you only learn how to dance
I want to be your dream-eater, slurping up all your pain.
I'll be your dream-eater, rest your tired soul on me.
Chomping chomping away away
You can build that hill house, high and clear as can be, if you just kick down the doors
You can help the helpless, but you'll have to give up, helpless too.
I'm trying to be your dream-eater, go in where your mind is dark.
Dream-eater, licking your wounds away, sucking, slurping the marrow of each day.
You can make change, if you just forget how to count.
You can persist, insist, resist, but you've got to close your eyes and rest.
I'll be there laying bare the fine wires of your sleep.
I'll be your dream-eater. There are no bad dreams, only twilight, night and day.

Postcard 80

There's that old cat lady again, that cantankerous anarchist flipping me off. Up at dawn, stocking redoubts in every weather, she feeds the cats with pure passion love. She feeds the cats with whole heart regardless. She stands on a pike of dead wild birds. She wakes and stands upon the ten thousand.
Despair of wholeness.
Each day, every day in drought, I watch the trees die. When the rains finally came, the  soil was washes away and the trees upturned in loosened clay. Dead trees watered are dead just the same.Do you know the last act of a dying tree? Its seeds. Bare brown branches bristling with cones and pods.
The other day in the grocery store line, I ran into the cat lady. But for the cans and cans of cat food, I did not recognize her, and without my hat and shirt and truck, she did not know me. I watched her in her loneliness, her free given love and her will to life, and I thought -- there goes a saint. A saint of feral cats under the dead trees.
Today, today after years of drought and weeks of rain, the levees are overrun and the swollen ground will take no more. The birds play in ponds where paths used to be. Today we lost two more trees. Despairing of wholeness, I feel like the drowning ground.
But consider the seeds.

Postcard 81

You must first have grace to be disgraced.
Each morning we awake and scan the far horizon, knowing what is coming without hope: bomb blast, dark synthetic cloud, dull false air. But look, the sun yet rises. But look, we too arise and kick our dirty feet to dirty floor and appraise each others' hanging bodies in gritty light. I put on cracked work boots and you creak into kitchen, spark fire for coffee, tea. Each day we share a coffee-bitter moment before the yelp and stomp of kid and dog, and we appraise: with horizon always rushing over us, we are hardly winners but we have not lost.
We refuse the game.
Though each day ends in slow collapse and starts in a more tired tired, we have the grace of looking on, the wet eyes, the crying smiles of 'this is serious'. The laughing supersede of adding up, of well clanking words of 'this is why'. We speak the sounds of this home in its settle, fade and flake, the carpet wear of sheltered guests, our broken friends, each and every one -- like us -- a refugee, each a thousand small lines of frailty. We cut our hands in murky sinks of broken glasses. We go down each night laughing in small moments grasped with sometimes liquor sometimes sex. With drugs not dull but bright. Though we rise each morning scanning, the sun grows dim. The poison is mete incrementally. The smoke obscures but we wise graceful and, weary, try. We speaking honest. We coughing blood -- you and me, our friends, dream family.
You must first gotta have soul to be sad.

Postcard 82

You haven't slept for days it seems -- not really. Too real dreams, distressingly normal dreams. Anxiety normalized through closed doors, pillows, white sheets. Unbend your long arms, sore as if the longness of them made them more so. Long unbent arms shooting their soreness out to your fingers. This too is a dream, your pain-glowing arms. The unreal is real. You have been calling pages of phone numbers, numbers with some important designation of which you cannot be sure. Each call rings four times  and is answered by the same blithe young lady, redirecting you to call the next number. She is kind. She sounds kind and confused. This is her job! You shout between calls. She sits in a small grey room at a metal desk waiting patiently for each call, upright in her neat flower dress. Who put her up to this? Anxiety, an acid faucet within you. It either flows or it drips. Bad seals says the man. But can you fix it? He just closes up his box and shrugs and leaves. He was supposed to help. And you with your phone calls and that girl. It's supposed to help. And this post card -- it was supposed to help. The real is unreal and you are sore, or at least very tired. Help who anyway? I am so tired, you think. I'll just give up. The world is so large and irreconcilable. The phone in front of you is ringing again. Straighten your dress and pick up the receiver. Someone is in great distress. You, haltering, don't know how to help. Still, you persist.