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

Postcard 62

 
The quote is something along the lines of:  "Do you want to know the history of humanity? Killing children. Killing children is the history of humanity." A striking statement. Is it true? A game I play is to imagine the worse thing that could be happening and then know that it is likely, in a world as full and calloused as ours, that that thing is happening, or has recently or will soon. What  morbid game. I've not completely sussed out how this exercise helps me but I know that it gives me an idea of the scope of the size of the world and somehow builds my compassion. Yes. children are killed horrifically the world over, but not so monotonously as to be the history of humanity. I think the assertion is true if we consider it metaphorically. What is above is the extreme, the outlier. But considering the children we all begin as, consider how rarely that child survives into adulthood, then yes, that is our history. Survivors are the outliers. I don't have some naivety about the innocence of children. They are brutal and selfish and shortsighted. But as a vicious dog is made not born, so an adult is made.
Here is what is murdered, here is the murder that we partake in: the death of marvel, the oblivion of the moment and most horrifically, the brutal evisceration of trust.

Postcard 61

Two lovers on the beach, bared soles of feet turned up to the sun. Young and trim theres nothing like it. Small boat is offshore tacking with clean white triangle sails. A whole warm world with cold only suggested, to tantalize. What does not glimmer ripple rumor and tremble here? What does not not feel that breath of promise. Breeze on sand, on water, in grass, in sail, on finest hair on skin. Young goose bumped lovers in the heat. Young lovers fingers buried oblivious, a whole warmth untroubled by the promise of shimmer. A family sits nearby. A cloud bank breaks the horizon. The tide works its way in. The breeze is making good on its promise. Have we ever held such smiles? A son capsizes his new boat. A daughter runs into the sea. Two lovers on the beach, naked to the world, light a joint, bury face in face. Youth, always youth.

Postcard 60

Seek a stillness in solitude with the wind's own sibilance. 

Seek a stillness but not a silence:

Hush of breath, heart's ichor woosh, ceaseless whisper of world and whirl.

What words or wordlessnesses wayfare there?

Seek a stillness and hear.

Can we make the cooling cooking buzz of the far horizon,

The slow moan of plates and seas exalted and subsumed,

Patient histories of tribes and herds and trees?

Do we hear the grassy, snow-melting slouched shouldering of each season?

Do we hear the clicks and crunches of consume devour in root-balls and swaying blades of grass?

If we can hear these things, if we perceive some other scale of being, what does it say?

In my solitude, seeking stillness, I wonder at the power of the human day to overspeak, to stifle.

I wonder at the frailty of all these eternities in me collapsing in a human day 

-- a scale of tires on roads, of cords and plugs, 

the strange pains of want and need.

Postcard 59

I'm feeling lost in the cold of it all. I'm walking stiff and sore like an old meteor -- each facing our own dawn. I know I'm burning up but my rosacea fingers are tingling and numb. I'm feeling lost. Everywhere are subtle coercions. Each thing that pulls on me has its own warmth, but every pull is pain. I doubt my tenacity and I'm feeling lost. My brittle bones seek the flex of whirl; my soft flesh seeks a fire. The dust that makes me rattles against this plane like trapped electrons. I'm feeling lost with my madness tamped and tamped, my seek suppressed. I'm feeling lost but not, in space, directionless, not cold and flying forward in my own whirl, not pulling my own dust. I'm feeling lost between orbits and the pain is surprising.
My name is I have no name
My home is I am a stone in space
My family is I am alone
My pain is holding on of course.
My pain is holding course and my pain is letting go.
My pain is a flex of hot and cold.
It seems there's countless dust in space, not moving really, but drawing near or away. Each with pull and direction. Burning out and free with the borders of space a cold glowing dawn. Swirling together colliding, the fast coming horizon of a new day.
I'm feeling lost, so might you be, but whirl is king or queen and, cold or hot, is you and me.

Postcard 58

On the first day, you were clumsy and awkward. The wrong side of you hardened, like a wounded tree, You were rigid in that vernal desert stillness. You didn't need a rising sun on that first day. What did you need? You collapsed like the snap of a whip. That first day was so hard on you. The other days may have been worse, but that first was the hardest, an uncompromising day.

On the second day you dreamt and wandered. You wandered like an Israelite. You wrestled through forty days of fever dreams. You lay on the cool floor. Your stern father came, contentious. On that second day your father came and you turned him away. Your brother too, came, suborn and pleading. On the second day your brother came. You embraced him and asked him to leave. He said farewell with a kiss on the cheek. On that long second day your lover came. We've never touched, she said, though lovers, you insisted, you were. That night the moon waxed full. That night the fever broke and you awoke. She sat beside you in a chair combing oil through her long hair.

On the third and final day, the sun was weak. It shared the sky with that gravid moon. On that third day you gave fond farewells to everyone. Your eyes were like a calm and kind embrace. You father you forgave. Your brother you forgave. Your lover, you betrothed. And even me, a guilty friend beside you, you blessed with joy.

We mourn joyfully and the moon is brighter still with the blushing of the setting sun.

Postcard 57

I'm trying to call out. I'm trying to cry with balance, long and straight. My voice may be jagged and brittle, but my tears fall plumb and true. This world is queer. That's right -- everyone's a fag, a dyke, a tranny, or a stud. Put on our boots, lets play at men. Put on shirts and pants and belts and hats. i'll play at me. What's that? A gun? You play at you. The world's a stage, hot lamps and grease. What boards are these? Theater of the mad, theater of war, operating theater. Theater of the absurd. The world as stage; do as you please. "Death's the final word." I hope you catch my meaning. I'm not a real straight shooter, though I try. When I shoot my arrow into the air, beyond my sight, I have been told my aim's too high. But with your gun and me with my bow, is it more important where it lands or thats its fired with care. My rhyme is broken, my rhythm's bent. The world is queer etc. Is that a truth or is it more important what I meant? What I meant was this: Life is pain (except when its not). Any truth tied to another will be false more often than not. We are mostly what we are not. Be wild and free in tyranny. Be fragile and clear in a blizzard. Be a slow ceiling fan over passion. Be a faggot at the conference table. The pebble for the saw in the trunk of a tree. Be frightened at a hot meal and a water bed. Shoot all your arrows vertically. When you try to be straight, be whirl. I'll play you. You play her, and she'll give a go at being me.

Postcard 56

Politics, ugh. What short-memoried hope. Does anything trickle down but fear and hate? Look to the person looked down upon: whom do they look down upon and why? The racist poor, misogyny, well groomed cul de sac households terrified of far off mud hut dwellers. 

The only thing I can hope with is love.  The only thing I have to will is love. The only bravery that can exist is love. Well then what the fuck is love? Its people are persons. Consider the corruption of power. I've always read that from within a group, that power leads to graft and fraud and violence, but those are all external actions that affect the group or the polis. What is really corrupt, like a worm gouged fruit, is a person. A person who, having achieved what they have sought, is pathetic in the insecurity of that false goal. Poor helpless sucker who must resort to ever more desperate, ever more corrupting shoring up of a crumbling edifice about them. If that sounds familiar, it should. On some level that is each of us. 

What the fuck is love? Read The Secret. Just kidding, don't read that crap. But understand it is an exploitation of a real and true and universal thing. Confirmation bias doesn't do it justice. That assumes we are always making judgements. I would say the secret is more of an input filter, a screen or strainer. The world is a horrible dangerous place. So it is, inarguably. The world is an interconnected web of symbiotes. True! The world is inexplicable spirit. Of course! The world is a series of chance probabilities. You are clearly right. But we see one and exclude the others and start rattling with cognitive dissonance like an old car going too fast down the highway. We are all fooling ourselves with certainty and its terrifying to not. 

What the fuck is love? Its right in front of you. Can you vote for it?

Postcard 55

I am reminded how I used to sit with all the characters I could stand to be:  Adam to Zenophon, Gilgamesh to the futurists. I slink low in my chair under the remembered weight. I pushed dull blades into my chest, trying to get at that wizened pit. I wondered at my parents, teachers, friends, schools, churches and books, and could not grasp a blame. I used to crux myself, as man, within the planned arc of man. I am reminded, recently, of all that.

One river may pollute the ocean and one mill may pollute the river, but it is the need for a mill on a river, and the need for that need. 

And now?

Well, I know that I am not a stone and not a tree. I am not really man. I am not the sea. 

I am the nameless, speechless thing that peers out. 

I cannot claim to matter, but also I am not an insignificant being. 

I am reminded of a pain that now recedes.

I am sitting in a coffee shop, surveying people and things: the plank tables glued or joined, solid and well milled, fresh and clean. But none is impervious and each will warp and bow and split with time, and in my attempts at being, at words and naming things, those boards remind me of you and me. And also, of what we are not, of what we relate to but are intrinsic to.

Like trees, we reach and root to desires. We attach.

Like the sea, we precipitate in moody flows and seasoned tides and gravity.

Like other beings,  we toss painfully and pleasurable at the beings we call 'me'.

Postcard 54

To see as a stone, a geolithic indifference. To know that heat will follow cold, that pain will crumble to the comforting pulse of annihilation. To sit and not to respond. Thrust up to grinding glacial peaks, rolled and split, a pit held between the teeth of water and air. To sit like a sage on the seafloor waiting without hope for the tides to recede. To love and lust for only one thing -- the strain of gravity.To only join with and to. To only join with other stones. Indifferent to dayless space, carelessly collecting, brilliantly discarding frosty dust, seeking only parabolic speed of pull. The only thing to hold is weight. The only pull is gravity. The only things are other stones: melted and fluid, vaporous and free, organized -- for moments -- and alive. To vaporize in the friction of pull. To impact and melt. 

To dissolve. 

To dissolve in the pulse between one pull and another. To dissolve in the freedom of weightlessness. To commune with solvent water. To commute in bloody tides and ichor currents. To be as stone harnessed and unharnessed. Harnessed by gravity; unharnessed in liquid suspension. To be as stone, itinerant traveler of days flickering by like film. To be as stone, witness impassive and unimpressed the gradual imminence of erosion. To be what is and only that and then to not, to falter and seam, to split and to tumble, to gather and release, to melt igneous, to seek and stack, to compress and granulate. To swallow chalky skeletons, to seek a mean, to dissolve and always -- above all -- gravity, To crystalize.