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.

Postcard 83

It will be a time of birds. 

Light, hollow-boned, meager flight. 

This is bird weather -- the wind the rain. 

Shuddering off beaded dew, first risers of morning light. 

Strength of heart, strength of cabled tendon and sinew, strength of breast.

Heartbeat fluttering against frost of night. 

It will be a time of birds. 

 The flock, in air, moves in more dimensions. 

Each rise and turn and fall a thousand small arcs scribed.

Each flash of light, like turning scales, a thousand breasts bared. 

Each flock is writing etched in sky. 

It will be a time of birds.

Unwithered but fluttered and singing with clear and clever joy and fun.

Be everywhere at home, move upon axes strange and unknown. 

Take flight and be your own arc scribed decisive within decisive flock

Thrust forward your quick-beating heart. 

Do not take comfort. 

Do not relax. 

Do not be impervious. 

Do not withstand attacks. 

Strength of keen eyes and first awake. 

Strength of limbs that cannot help but tendon-bend to work at hand: 

persistence in loud defying dumb laws of gravity. 

It will be a time of birds. 

Live a meager hollow-boned life.

 Be light, sing out and free. 

The only thing straight is dive. 

Take flight! Master of whirl.

Postcard 79

We are always dying down in steerage -- have always been.
Here's another myth: The captain goes down with the ship.
You travel both on the backs of stevedores in sweat-black walls,
and star-eyed dreamers in sky-less holds,
fire bolted and contained,
water always finding seams.
We are down with the steam.
We are always dying down in steerage --
Hatches closed on water persistent.
Hatches closed on fire unloosed.
Hatches closed on bursting boilers.
Hatches closed on our echoing songs.
We see sky when dead on deck, when over-rail dumped.
Who are the uncounted numbers and who are the names?
We are the heartbeat down in steerage, the piston thud, the hum of driving screw.
We are whomever you call rat: the dago spic queers, the Jews, the junkies, chinks, fags the blacks.
We are the fire behind the hatch. The fluid and the flame, the artist fighters, the exposed wires.
Always dying down in steerage -- always have and always will,
but this ship is a ghost ship, and we hold sway behind hatches
where we hide your wonder and the power,
behind hatches where wanders your desire.
Behind and beneath in the coal-black fires.
While you move over waters, we move through seas.
We are always dying down in steerage -- may always be,
but we are living ripe, dying but pregnant, alive but oddly free.

Postcard 78

What am I to do? 

What am I to do? 

What are we to do in the aloneness of survive? 

Screens up, bags packed on that old tendonitis shoulder. That old to the wheel soreness. The queue wraps upon itself and its the same old faces by the time we are at the front, by the time we are at the end looking back at that old tempered glass just waiting for a blast, holding all that old energy, just waiting for a blast. 

What are we to do? 

All the pillars, reinforced, are burning slow inside with rust. It takes its toll to be alive - did that face just say? There is a final rest in being gone, but here we are moving , moving along. And that other face - is it not as tense as glass, as weak as rust? 

Us survivors we survive and wonder at reasons why, or what or how, or even who - who will survive us now? 

A bank of fire is rust sped up. A shattered glass is tension let. And these old bones must hold up skies, hold up the whole old firmament. 

What are we to do? 

Take off your shoes, you're at the front, pass through. 

These uniforms hold nothing back - each face the fractured wonder and the grief of survive and why? and why and why and why

Postcard 77

When they say danger, well what is safe? Is safety destroy-create? No, safety is sterility. And where you may say destroy-create, which is forever yes, they will say no, obliterate. Where shall we live? In something called a house? And if we must move, then we must drive. We must have drive and then success, which we know, but they will name arrival (at a wasteland), clothed, prepared and stranded. We know this dream, the lotus dream of constant invitation. We must prop open eyes and use legs unbuckling to carry them that would be us.The only dream bigger than our myths is success. When they say secure, they mean invest. Well, cash is the only lie bigger than the fictions we make with stone and gel and sound and ink and pen. The lie of the present, future-bent. An open car on a desert trip. Sometimes we are right to boo,and sometimes it is good to burn and to watch the dishonesty: When they say danger, they mean we, the honest liars. When they say secure, invest, they mean forget. When they sing praise, exalt, show up at vigil, mourn, respect -- what they mean is they are terrified of destroy-create, are terrified of terrified, of waking up and clarity and please please please forget.

Postcard 76

The dream family is a light burden. The dream family carries me. It is the whirl about me and the many selfs that are me. It is every iteration of family. It is every iteration of dream. Brothers that are not brothers, sisters not sisters. Lovers that are not lovers. My dream family sends messages, turns cards, visits me. People out of selves, only meanings. People changing faces, clearly who they are - but out of focus. My dream daughter came to me riding an arrow pinned dear. She died. She shrank to the size of a pea. She was my daughter, my son and me. My dream lover came to me, a witch, using me in archaic ceremony. My dream brother and his father -- dead -- passed away again. My dream son came to me, pure art confused and collapsed into music inarticulate. I walk, awake, along the streets. My brother/not brother passes and he is you. My dream lover is the past - a smoky ghost of rain and autumn leaves. I strum and she sings. Turned to the past, she is strings. My dream wife is the fire I offer my seed. Looking up, she is the galaxy. Looking down she is the sea. My dream family cries and celebrates. They grow and fade. We raise our glasses - we are wound, a knot of scars and warm embraces, ageless faces - heat in cold of time. My dream family is the silence when it speaks, the shock sit-up, awake. My dream lover is Kali, held on and released, my dream brothers are angry christ, and I am the cross, the cursed tree. With them, with you, I return to home. In my dream family, I am reborn.