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 71

The white-hot moon holds the sheet-dark sky. The white-hot moon burns itself in your eyes. Carry that. Lay that bright hole on the pale body of your friend, naked in the grass in the sand: clarified moles, pure light bullet holes, surprise windows of a looking out soul. The sea sips at your feet and sighs its tickling shivers. At that moment, a triad: beautiful you, your friend/beloved and the white-hot moon. This pain pleasure is the top of an arc, is the gathering white chaos upon an inbound wave. This moment with your friend/your beloved, the pain-pleasure of giggling in the chill, is time suspended atop parabola. The past falls away and the future precipitous, and this moment is the pleasant tension, feeling salt-tight skin and that little grit discomfort. The burn in your eyes is the push-pull of whirl, of your beloved and their whirl too, sharing the feel: the smell of salt of smoke of sweat of chill, the cool radiance of other, the burn of now replaced by past. Hold tight let go the intermingle, the pause in arc of story. Hold tight let go before fear. Perceive and release your beloved and you in soft light, like the two of you and the dark sky in the grasp of the white-hot moon

Postcard 69

I love you, he says. What does that even mean, she replies.  I love you, he says. You do but you're not very good at it, he replies. I love you, she says. He leaves the room, terrified. I love you, she says. Me too, she replies. I love you, she says. They change the subject abruptly. I love you, she says. I know, he replies. I love you, he says. You're a fucking liar, he replies. I love you, she says. Do you? he asks. I love you, they say. Then why do you hurt me, she asks? I love you, he says. Right now, in this moment, he replies. I love you, they say. I love you too, they reply. I love you, he says. You know better than that, she replies. I love you, he says. I didn't ask for that, she replies. I love you, he says. Its only fucking, she replies. I love you, she says. Prove it, she replies. I love you, they say. Please don't, he replies. I love you, she says. I used to love you, they reply. I love you, he says. Say it again, say it again, she replies. I love you, she says. She is asleep. I love you, she says. He is only a photograph, says nothing. I love you, they say. Goodbye, she replies. I love you, he says. You don't even know me, she replies. I love you, she says. That used to mean something, he replies. I love you, she says. Yes, you do, she replies. I love you, I say.

Postcard 68

Think of me, don't think of me. Think of you through me, my eyes, my gaze. Think of misty nights of bus-stop waiting, in blurred confidences buried securely in oblivion. Think of crying, solid-shouldered brotherhood and clumsy corner punching jaws. Think of love captured and committed, as complex as river-cut stone. Think of proud parent gazing down and the wonder: what happens when I fall? Think of you through me, aging friendship found and strained. Teeth on lips and shoulders, and 'you know better' and 'I know'. Think of fire-warmed skin in forest dark and all our gleaming-bodied friends. Think of scared unsure and hurt and the hope and grace of my strong-muscled hand in yours and yours in mine. Think of too worn apologies thrown and skipped and skipped and accepted into dark like river swallowed stones. Think of laughter, of teeth, of eyes. Think of the beauty of bodies aging, round or lithe. Think of sun-kissed shoulders new and tight, of chapped lips and the graceful lines of living long across your face. Think of holding me weak, of me holding you strong. Think of witness. Think each smell that holds a whole. Think that moment when, through me, you were all, and that walk away.

Postcard 67

A witness? A witness to your many lives. Do you remain consistent? And the days forgotten, the gaps and gashes submerged by rising time, or shoved under and drowned? Recall those brave and failed experiments, cardboard boxed and hot highway driven. And the hot flush of anger, the washed out mornings of shame. Love and death and money and each their converse; the hinges that your life folds upon itself. You have been there always -- your eyes, hands, goosebumps. Your mind, your fears, desires, passions. You have been there in and of it by choice and chance. Who has been your witness, you are not enough. You are not and you know that. So who has seen your movement, your love and heartbreak, felt your misplaced wrath? Do you know that you are partnered, by choice and chance, to that strange family of witnesses, that strange dream-bound family? Do you hold a space that by choice and chance you cannot? You are of one body now, and that body will persist ad pass away, a thing between you, holding on like a heartbeat, like respiration, continuous and unthought of.

Postcard 63

Came up from four-cornered desert. Ive got four lovers there.
First one rattletraps and drives out of Reno like a wild and speckled mare.
They got her slam-gated up on that highway down the coast,
bound for Pomona. They gonna break her over that glitter rodeo fence.
I come up from four-cornered desert like a lost postcard with too much blank space to fill.
Too much chalk-gypsum white light dust and time to kill.
My second lover was a ghost who spoke into herself and hid fierce scared eyes in wild dark hair.
Her freewheeling trailer is parked on bricks, and she won't come in till the well dusts dry.
Come up from four-cornered desert like an indian cross.
White bones under a hot yellow sun in a turquoise sky.
She's got that inlaid silver on her wrist.
All I remember is a bench seat on a school bus and a cool dry kiss
and too hot car seats and sweet cigarette breath and the dust in the light and the shimmer of heat.
Came up from four-cornered desert that no one is from, and all four directions are out and away.
Had a slim lover with a lean sharp sway.
She grew slow and ripe as a cactus on a windy hill.
She was a beauty but guarded and cruel.
When I think of her I think of a stunted bush we passed as we walked to school,
and in the hottest months, the fruit we stole and split and its sweet chill.
I come up from four-cornered desert horrified by my own magic and any magic I had grabbed:
silver rings and bracelets, bones and pomegranate seeds, all held up in a horse-hair bag

A Distance is a Silence (perhaps this is a song)

Ten years my Father travelled,
Travelled stony island shores
And I my twenty on planted lines
 - Pennies on the track. Love.
Love is copper over eyes.

Orphaning boats on murderous seas,
Jealous beasts charge tons of steel.
The feral death a mile back -
Love, love is the stopping,
walking the cold wet miles of track

I kick. I push. I thrust myself
Upon dark miles of static
To love. To love is laying hands
On warm and humming rails
Distance is time gone, like songs of long gone lands

How far Sirens, can you call?
Across these prairies wide?
To love, to love is to feel
where the fingers were, the rot
The rot of dry bone in the soil

Look back. Watch distance disappear,
A single point of gone.
Rolling from cool intimacy
Collapsed to empty space
Love, love is wrestling with speed.

And I, who've lost grand fights to silence,
belt unbuckled at a nod -
Each sense painfully aware -
Beyond the smell of food and light.
To Love is to give without care.

How long have we been traveling?
Glad the air is shared and stale
To Love is a slow stirring
Like age a desperate silence
A slow and plodding hurry.

A classroom of kindergarteners was murdered today

Tragedy is a word I've heard a lot today. Its not a very powerful word, comes standard in news broadcasts and political recognitions. Aside from its acquired vulgarity, it is an individual experience, as I understand it. There were twenty eight tragedies dealt quickly and countless following that. I am searching for a word, something that indicates the ragged gash that was torn.
An anguish. A cluster of anguishes.
I sobbed all day, the newsman reporting over the radio sobbed, the policeman in charge sobbed, the president addressing the nation did too. The sobs were an admission that it does not matter. It does not matter that the president stopped leading the world to recognize a local horror. It does not matter that the policemen were securing schools across the state and securing warrants. It does not matter that a reporter pried for details to deliver up to the minute about an event that was finished. It does not matter that a man's heart was broken for hearing it.
It does not matter because it is done. A roomful of the most magical brightness and promise has been snubbed out by one person who must surely have lost all that and been in so much pain. I hope that the poor young man gets to a heaven where each of his victims come to him to forgive him before they all melt back to the infinite.

As for the living, we remain. Twenty sets of limbless parents with impossible tomorrows. Classrooms full of miraculous brightnesses tarnished. Teachers returning to do what they do not know. A community grappling with shameful relief and clumsy support. Policemen searching cause for reasonlessness, seeking to punish a ghost. Politicians, perhaps honestly, expressing empathies doomed to course policy scufflings.  And even the killer, someone must have loved him and if not, someone surly should have.

A man across the nation, trying to bypass the bromides of sympathy, trying to find scope of an event that has affected him but that he cannot affect. A common man sharing common feelings. Trying to stop sobbing for a blip of horrors amongst horrors, knocking together a crude assemblage of words for what?

I have a message, and it is not mine but it is in my own words:  With compassion, you cannot know a person without loving them. It is our reason in this world, to seek that compassion always, to strive. And it is also our duty, good people, to strive to be more easily loved, but mostly to endeavor to love those who do not or maybe can not.