Postcard 127

The Unbecoming of Self (Harpers 336) They take me, take, take me away & that takes my sleep away. There she is in that place & she can't get out. I'm like a slow motion version of my old self. Where's my wife? I want my wife. Giraffe -- they just run around don't they? Chickens -- I guess chickens are animals. Pigs! We had a farm & I liked the pigs! I feel very good all the time, oh boy! Why is that woman bothering me? My butt is drunk. I have everything done! Everything done. Its all going in the place that goes in the place for each. This is not a bad thing. It is just a different thing. It requires different kinds of attention.

For all of us who fear -- I must die so that others may live. It will be my mind, I suspect, that kills me. Or, amusingly, my other end - either one incontinent. Lets not discount a failure of skin, or my heart gets up in protest. Anyhow, I will go, finally unknown, finally unknowable. I may leave, but I will go and others will be. Should I rage, should I fight, who or what would I resist, but me -- unknown letting go? I say easy sink into dark sea unrelenting. I say, feed another stream. Fold up on myself. And, half written, half unknown, O rejoice at being. A being beyond my own design, wondering if I did it well. Well, did I? Let go of words, of hard won thoughts like me, thou, I. I must die so others may be. Return to sea.

Postcard 126

Do not think for a moment
that I don't take stock:

Four starlings harass
an egg-hungry crow
a sheaf of blank paper
-clear white terror
A blue tarp threadbarely clinging to
a single anchor, marks and charts
every pitch and yaw of wind
This hand
-ten solid scars
eleven on the other
Halfway between them,
a single wrinkled plum-pit of being
-bottomless, inscrutable
(In the space of)
seven broken sentences
eight people have passed by
-some to
-mostly fro
Only two of them distracted me
An hour of sunlight in
my cup of coffee
-bitter black
-cool in mouth
Both legs a-tingle
half asleep
My body sleeping on the job
A full bladder
(as distinct from
but not separate from)
a stirring of loins at
a somewhat unwelcome pleasant memory
Four. No,
five. Now
nine or ten cut memories
A single unseen and unconcerned editor of thought
One guilty thought
the table rocks
one half an inch on
four legs
An itch I cannot scratch
A friendly red dog

I am just getting started

Postcard 125

I don't know
I don't know what I'm for
Be a river of sunshine
Be a graceful piece of thunder

Out on serpentine, the prairie grass
moves beneath the moving wind
with no uncertain grace.
Rooted, then suspend

Cloud-banks and cattle fatly graze,
and chirping careless birds
all seem idle within a nature
of brute consequence

In being, in making sense,
I slide and do I root?
My eyes are full of greens &
bending blue of sky

My ears -- the hum
of wind in trees, of dreamy
sunning bugs, of flirting seeds &
careless spume -- go mute

I settle like the hunch of fence &
warm boards, thoughtless,
unsensed. I root and settle
I am unmade

My surface skittles in the wind.
I am unmade, reduced to hand,
my fat reach, my extend. Ants &
ants. two flies loop and land.

I am two hands overlapped to hold
with every free nerve. To hold the moving air.
To bend beneath and finally to be held.
For a moment to behold every free nerve

To beheld

Postcard 124

You are the high lake and You are the cradle
You are the cold deep and You are the clear springs that feed
You are the split lip smile of wild and You are the salt skinned christian child
You are the arching rider and You are the tugging underneath
You are the high plains spirit and You are the dirty spoon in milky bowl
You are the raw gravel-set heel You are the gap in teeth
You are the end of two straightblack lanes and You are the shimmering heat
You are the broken yellow lines and You are the coffee stain on passengers seat
You are the click in the dark of the thermostat and You are the rattle of keys
You are the thin wear of that brown flowered dress
You are the suitcase under the bed.
You are the rain on the creosote and You are the goatheaded thorn
You are the thin song of plain gray little birds and You are their thin reedy home
You are the thunderhead and You are the cicadas return
You are the rich air of imminent storm
You are the cold beer behind the wheel and You are the itinerant soul
You are the grit on sunburnt neck and You are the sundowner song on radio
You are the single lucky gas station at night and You are the bent pack of cigarettes
You are the red spattered glass and you are the crumpled bird roadside
You are the careless grace of the broad naked sky and You are the million stars across your face
You are the pink scars on your elbows and knees and You are the pull at your heart

Postcard 123

The man descends. He is weary. It seems easier this way. Finally, he comes to a landing.
The final door there is unlocked and opens to basement and the guts of the building. Tubes and pipes come and go, leaping around corners, plunging off to obscurity. Some feed the building above, buzzing and hissing aggressively. Some burble its waste off to labyrinthine bowels below. The man touches the hand rail and recoils. Every surface is clammy and damp and somehow active. A great unconscious industry prevails, cold, rust-brown. He had not imagined he wold end up here. He had some job to do. Some job..? All along he had been sure he was to ascend -- to seek some goal in the high opened ceiling clear glass room at the top. Yet here he stands. The man leaves the catwalk for the solid floor. Hard. An aluminum chute drops debris in a rattling of noise and movement. He jumps. Now all sounds are heartbeat, breathing. His previous confidence returns with his gun in his hand, but it is different. It is reduced and shallow. He moves through the cluttered industrial space, efficient, intentional, yet without belief. His feet move athletically. He keeps his back to anything solid. His arms hold the small gun near, like springs. But every body part extends away like foreign things. The man as man is retracting behind his eyes, to the back of his head, the base of his skull. He hears voices and moves near. He comes round a corner to a hall and further on another corner. He sees the figure and strikes. His gun fires twice and jams. He throws it at the figure and finally sees. He is in a small boy's bedroom. He is alone. He has shot twice a poster of that popular action star. He withers and collapses in the boy's bed. The voice is clear now -- a woman's, "I don't know who he is. You'd better send someone. Yes."

Postcard 122

But for us there would have been a forest here.
But for us there would have been a teeming sea.
Is treefall a snap? A bang?
But for us  there would have been rejoicing
-- trunks raised to the dawn and singing out,
and open-faced leaves.
Sparrow-fall is silent is it not?
But for us we would have been noble stewards
of each holy spoken name.
When a final creature earth-fall trundles to does it know,
and is last breath a whisper or a groan?
But for us there would have been substance
beneath each spoken name.
Who will sing out, the stones?
Know there is a sound to nullity
-- a persistent wailing groan.
But for us there'd be no myth.
Is myth just story toward the groan.
Myth of leopards.
Myth of bats.
Myth of death singing emerald frogs
from the cups of leaves.
Myths of leaves.
Myth of morning greeting elephants.
Myth of condors.
Myths of oceans filled with fish.
Myth of whales of ancient geneology
in ledgers of old wooden ships.
Myth of squids, of worms, of eels.
Myth of great white buffalo.
Myth of spiders sharks and snakes
etched in our spines.
Myth of bird or bee or locust blotting out the sunlit sky.
Myth of any place that is not a waste.
Myth lumbering toothless into desolate twilight.
We will, like the stones, cry out in groaning lament

Postcard 121

The man fades into awareness. He is sobbing. He is weakly leaning against the door to the green room, weakly banging his head and palm against the door. Weakly sobbing -- let me in, let me in. The door 'Go away. Go away. There's nobody here. Go away.' The door is...red? 'You don't belong here. Go away!' The man is obedient. He turns away meekly toward the hallway of red doors -- an infinite canyon. His mind is parallax. He begins a wild careen down the hall, past three doors, and collapses against the far wall. He rolls against it and cannot discern from which direction he came. He repeats this same action again and again -- sometimes continuing deeper down the hall, sometimes returning. Finally, he makes it to some end. Exhausted, his back against the wall, he peers at his path. His shuffling steps have scribed into the thick carpet a pattern of spiraling arcs off into seeming infinity. The man catches his breath. He is determined to regain his wits. Once more he checks his phone. It has been busy looking for signal. 'Searching' it says 'Goodbye'. The man curses and pitches it down the hall. There is blood on his hand! It is not bleeding. He touches his forehead. His fingers...red. He is at an intersection. To his right another hall extends into unlit darkness. To his left, a phosphorous green sign. Exit. He lurches toward it. When the door closes behind him he is in a bright white stairwell, extending up and down to end of sight. The door behind him is locked. They all are.

Postcard 120

The man stood before the crimson door seething. "Open the door, " he demanded, "Let me in!" A latch was pulled and the door opened to a dark room. A vague figure slouched away into a recessed seat in which it seemed to belong. The man carried his frustration into the room with him. "What is this -- why did you say nobody was in here? Whats going on?" He ground to a slow halt as it became clear the the room and the figure were absorbing him with indifference. The figure gestured with a hand from within robes, a hand dominated by long brown nails. The man sat in the chair so indicated. A table was at his knees in the gloom, and on it a copper goblet perspired. "I'm not important, a nobody. Have a drink wont you." The man sneered mindlessly at the goblet and produced his whiskey flask, but reconsidered. He reached for his hydration flask and found nothing. He leaned forward on is knees and leered toward the figure as he reached for the goblet -- cold. "My, you are quite the beast aren't you." "Huh." the man gulped at the drink like it was a challenge. The fluid hit his tongue bittersweet, but went down his throat like a salty broth. "Now tell me, why are you here?" The man resented being asked, interrogated, by nobody, but the thought stuck in his mind like an itch. A clarity swept through him that contained no substance, no answers. "Hey, whats in this...why are you here? What!" "Why are you here," asked the figure. The man clutched at his throat. "Why are you here?" The green came up around him. "Beast. Why are you here?"

Postcard 119

Lenses everywhere unsees lapping me up.
I am drawing in, I am apature inviolate.
Sex is violence, is it not?
Violence on a short leash.
Well this is razor play with my own light
You think I am bound?
I titillate.

And you, you are many camera congregate --
You're dying to get inside.
You desperate catch my breath, my voice
but I, I'll only black box my echo.

All my light is infinite
and all my vision full
All my breath is deeply heald
and unlike you,
my pleasure is not dull.

I feel your numbers running over me --
trying to voyeur my will.
It turns me on -- its violence right?
It turns me on -- you desperate captured
by my powers -- entranced.

Your many marshaled microphones,
your algorithmic cameras and cords,
your desperate burning satellites,
seeking, hungry, seeking.

I'm not buying and I'm not selling,
I'm giving it away.
My will is past you.
My rhythmic blood is too.

You are billions harnessed, grasping clever.
I just need to be. I just need to be.
(and you?) I only need to be

Postcard 118

When the invention was complete, you put the knives away. They made a painful carving sound together. You wrapped up the invention in waxed butcher paper, taking care to crease each fold. You taped it up with that yellowed cellophane tape. It looked quite neat. The tape had that peculiar antique adhesive smell. The paper smelled of pulp, but made you think of meat. The knives didn't smell, or maybe they did: a metal you could smell under your fingernails. The invention, too, smelled -- both from within its wrapped bulk, and from its shavings atop the table, the bench and the floor. But you had worked with it so long, you smelled it inasmuch as your own clean sweat. You turned off the light and shut the door gently, and gently placed the invention in the passenger seat of your car. You got in opposite, and after a moment, started the car and pulled away. While you drove, your mind was consumed with thoughts: Why did you consider it 'the invention' rather than 'the creation'? It was almost a discovery, so natural was the process. To create, you considered, is godlike. To be invented is to come into being.

You park the car and retrieve the invention. Unwrapping it, you kneel at the close water's edge, dark and still as onyx. With both hands you hold the invention in the water. You let go and it is still before it pulls away. Against the cool smell of the water, you can smell it on your hands. Smell it for the first time.