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.

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