Postcard 12

World, I give up world / I don't want to read you anymore / I give up / Take my hands from me / and empty them of effort / World take my hands / shake them out and hang them up / World let them empty / World you've got it all / its just too much World / pincushion babies, rattletrap old men / woman hollow incidentals to perpetual violence / World? I give up hear me / an elephant does not care world / a whale a frog all the birds all the fish / forever going they do not mind / crack it and spill it finally / World mind that it is clear / of every day and meaning, every motion it can direct / here World is my white flag of truce / I'm only here to make terms -- desperate terms / I petition you world be merciless/take my last strivings and my cares / take this me I trundle / that hurts where others hurt / take me World and do as you do / take no prisoners, wash me and beat me dry upon a rock / dry me world so 'I' am only 'it' / and even that I surrender

quarryings and striations

I am backpacking with my two sons, snow is on the ground. Lake Basin,  high in the Sierras  -- glacial grind, snowmelt and landslides.

The two of them are excited, or more specifically enthusiastic -- bear their burdens gladly, only it is too cold. They know, though, the worth is in the work. 

What if, asks the younger, we were just dropped off and all our stuff was already there and set up? 

It would ruin it, replied the older, shifting his pack on his shoulders, thats what its all about. 

We look over a sheer slate wall down to the rippling lake blue like a jewel. Hold on, shouts the younger, I'm sketching you in my notebook. He makes us hold onto poses we did not know we were striking. He draws with immersion. His tongue seems to be concentrating.

I can see how excited they are to be men with me and I am filled with a sky-blue delight. 

The setting sun marks the next day's goal, marks the sharp peak red as dragon's teeth.

I am watching the fire die while they two are all drowsed away in warm and downy sleep

I watch the fire die. I keep company with paper and pencil, pipe and whiskey. The moon creeps full. I pull a card from the deck: The beginning of all things. God's magic thunder-light. Alpha.

I am terrified of the cold of the world in the dying light, but tonight I will rest in downy peace between my two princes.

 King of what's left.

Postcard 11

The cup is a small sacrilege, the ladle, the gourd. We may be forgiven it with only the purgatorial cost of longer, more secure lives. Plumbing though, is a true heresy and we are removed finally and totally from grace through it. Each river seeks the sea to pay tribute. The bay and the willow cast themselves over in solemn prayer. These are the cherubim and seraphim. And each creature that must return to the source bends its neck for the honor and with a crack and a strike the holy blades are bared in teeth and claw and ivory and an offering is made.

So see, ashes to ashes, dust to dust is the rubbish of a sun god. First , most truly the breath, then the substance the water, and what is left -- dust.

Get down on dirty penitent knees. Smell the air for fear that must and should be felt. Push your hands into the loamy boundary and feel the infinite deaths beneath you. Lower your head and submerge into what sustains, and give yourself a moment. Fragile open ribs. Neck as to an executioner. Eyes, ears, all receptors closed but to a still moment on a razor's edge of potentials. Drink.

Postcard 10

Do not love a cowboy/he will shoot you/he carries peacemakers//Do not love a whale/it will swallow you whales dive deep//Do not love a musician/she will leave you/musicians have wheels on their guitars//Do not love a bear/it will bury you/bears have scimitar claws//Do not love a model/he will stand too still/models never stand still//Do not love a peach, an apple, an orange, even an avocado/it will grow thick-skinned/all fruit is a stand of trees within//Do not love a light-house keeper/she will stand her ground against the sea/lighthouse keepers must tend their mirrors//Do not love a fox/he will make you chase him/foxes are, each, a day of sunlight//Do not love a bricklayer/he will close you in/bricklayers have plenty of lime and mortar//Do not love a goldfish/she will die/goldfish are like tin coins//Do not love a poet he will immortalize you/poets carry only pens and pencils//Do not love a tiffany lamp/it is always broken/tiffany lamps see nothing whole//Do not love a pack of wolves/when it is cold they will turn on you/a pack of wolves is always stronger//Do not love a warrior/he will penetrate you/warriors have blood on their hands//Do not love a hummingbird/it will win/hummingbirds are much too fast//Do not love a motorcycle/it will buck you off motorcycles are fire-breathing horses//Do not love a horse/it will kick you in the head/every horse hates fences//Do not love a unicorn/it will disappoint you/unicorns exist only where they do not//Do not love a child/he must watch you die/children are more like fruit than anything//Do not love a man or a woman/a man or a woman will possess and hurt you/they are only human

Postcard 9

"En tout ce qui est repete, quelque chose s'épuise et quelque chose murit. Une sorte de plus profond equilibre est obscurément cherche et partiellement trouve" H.M. 

A factory in Southeast Asia -- from viscous plasticene mix, dyes and natural fibered twine -- produces strings of regular brown beads in a sequence of unknown importance. Packed in gross and shipped in muddy alleys by indifferent immigrant laborers dodging time for a smoke, any break. Shipped, unpacked, bought, sold, commerced all, they find a meaning in nervous pious fingers wearing prayer down to the cotton thread. Hail Mary full of grace. It is not the empty blessing of a priest on payroll, it is not transmutation of blind belief, it is the saying so over and over and over that callouses fingers, forges valleys in the mind to hold cataracts of faith. There is a man who sweeps up after us, who scrubs our toilets and lines our cans. Each action is a redundancy, each day a repetition and he will die on his feet doing it or retire useless. Each flourish of the broom approaches a perfect dancing arc. Each bag pulled, replaced and tied -- a sequence beautiful in intent -- a scribe of transcendental curves in space and time --epicycloid, lissajous, catenary, clilies, isochone, cornu spiral, syntractex -- these could be his rosary as each action moves and dances closer and closer to meaning closer and closer to the valley of faith.

Postcard 8

I'm starting to see everything in terms of parabolas. The sway of the sun in a low winter sky, the slow curves of a woman's belly and hips, the arc of memory in each direction -- toward the infinite unknowns of birth and death -- the crest I ride in the present, the hills pushing the clouds up in parallel, the birds and bugs -- all that flies, leaving traces of light, burnt for a moment in my eyes. There is no abrupt, there is only the ride of ascent, the giddy round cresting, the descent -- a relief of tension. A smile, a salty path of tear, a farewell. Whirl is King

Postcard 7

I once made maps of each my friends and lovers, flat things with shoals and borders transcribed roughly -- strange symbolic keys, terra incognito, hic sunt dracones, crossed lines of terrain. I once had a lover, butch dyke and whiskey, and we would take out our sexual frustrations on each other like every best friend wishes they could. 

I came upon two women who had conspired to create a map readable to only the two of them, unlabeled. They chopped it up and had the segments scribed in tattoo upon each other's bodies at random. When they made love, as women love each other, wrapped up in sympathies, entwined, intersecting, a jumble on the ever-changing terrain of their bodies, I am reminded -- the waves of energy are only two dimensional images of what is dense and real.

Postcard 6

Butch & Sundance, Patroclus & Achilles, Hawkeye & Trapper John, Jesus & Peter, Watson & Holmes, Neil Cassidy & Jack Kerouac, Boswell & Johnson, Davis & Samuel, Enkidu & Gilgamesh, Cooper & Truman Tom & Huck, Huck & Jim, Yaweh & Lucifer…

Now let us speak of the great unspoken love affairs, let us speak of the camaraderie of men, today so perverse. In the 40's & 50's the so called greatest generation, hardened in the kiln of the depression, broken on the altar of the so called 'just war' -- as if necessity was synonymous with Justice -- that generation, on whose shoulders this whole mess lies, parked all that trauma in a crew cut and a two car garage. The only response is absurd. As dada followed the first, beat followed the second. That feeling when your eyes are closed and you have forgotten and immersed and the lights come on -- embarrassment. That was the dragon they chased -- with booze and mescaline, with jazz and fluid sexuality --  chasing the hollow echo of a moment of the real. Jesus wept. Achilles wept. Gilgamesh and them journeyed to the underworld -- rent their clothes. David sang weeping psalms,  Hawkeye went mad, Huck and Jim floated downriver. Butch and Sundance drove their cherry-red convertible off a cliff in Peru. Man, man, my brother, my lover, what can we do? We can look upon women and envy their easy beauty so heavy on dainty shoulders, swing axes, fear death, sweet whiskey and cry.

Postcard 5

I was having a conversation with my bartender and she confessed to struggling with nihilism and being able to muster compassion. I wondered at how many others, unspoken or even unknown to themselves, are having a similar experience and I recall a current fascination. This is the 100th anniversary of the first world war (an event that bleeds into and really includes the second world war). The great powers of Europe and Asia were rotten with the natural rot of colonialism, the hypocrisy of treaties and alliances and the cancer of institutionalized financial interests. For the first time in modernity the line between business and war profiteering vanished. The moneyed classes looked with disdain on the working people who were percolating in socialism and anarchy. In the modern way so familiar now -- war proved to be a palpable vent, enabling businesses, criminalizing anarchy and silencing dissent and socialism. Perhaps it got out of hand, but that is also familiar now. How does our present situation recall that history? Its certainly not a linear analogy, though it could reasonable asserted that profiteering, power asserting, populace pacifying conflict does now exist on a world-wide level, but the powers that be have gotten much better at disguising and exporting the costs of colonialism. Up to my evening conversation, that is how I have been exploring the idea. But with my bartender that night, her bright youth and clear beauty, her sharp and delicate mind all burdened to the point of nihilism, of hopelessness, I imagines that as a social rather than a personal problem and it brings to mind the broken minds who emerged from broken worlds. The half-dead survivors of Flanders, Ypres, Gallipoli, the Atlantic. The results were existentialism, dadaism, neo-futurism, absurdism, the surreal, the postmoderns ripping themselves apart on the tension between personhood and violence, meaning and nothing. Today, we are not watching our brothers choke to yellow death on the sharp wire. We are spared that, we are watching our noble ideals reasoned out of existence, our fellow human's blood on our hands, our very home destroyed and defiled beyond habitation. It is hard to keep caring through each layer of crap.

Postcard 4

The world it does spin. This we know, not in space as we are told. It spins in time we feel and see. Two hands you have on two long arms. With one you pull at ocean's tides. The other hand is gauntlet gloved. Two brothers borne and lived and died. One was born a knife who plunged hilt deep into hot flesh of girl and man, but contentment was too deep. The other one was born a stone, silent and still but seeking, was dropped into a well. Plop was the only sound he ever made and finding depth plumbed was done. Their sister is a circle ever growing, she whispers in men's ears. Oh turquoise daughter, this world spins too fast for me. There is a pile of leaves that smolders. There is a pile of leaves conceals more death than I have ever seen. There is a top between our legs that spins perpetually. A man stands waist deep in the sea. The rip tide cleaves him in two. Turquoise daughter, birds fall from trees. Turquoise daughter darkening aflame. The sun is burning the western sky. Turquoise mother what are our names? The dog stars fly, the wires scream. There are two breasts, but children three. When she dies she becomes a great white pelican, wings drawing on the water. Then, there's just mankind and her. The pelican is wiser. She cuts apart the piles of leaves. She cuts the breasts from off her chest. She cuts the marrow from her bones. The great white pelican, she cuts like no knife or tide or sharp stone can. She whispers in mens' ears she says it spins too fast for you and wire cuts too deep. This we know, we feel and see -- the great turquoise pelican can cut the tides, but cannot chase the sea.