flashes

flashes of pixel and chrome

The rivulets widened to small streams from slipstreams, then converged into rivers, and the leaders all washed away from one another on a tide of nationalist foam. votes cast for nuclear disarmament gone up in brilliant flashes of pixel and chrome. maybe subconsciously the world wanted to blow itself away. if it was unconscious, did that make it okay? the thought was alarming, so we encased it in plastic and sent it to sea. it looked good in navy. uncompromised. salt water couldn’t seem to break it down. permanent as a nike swoosh to the face. on a forehead. on a lace. demonstrably positioned yet so poorly placed.

salt whispering

salt whispering of the great sea change

She knew the siphoning to be as surreptitious as it was dangerous down the river a ways, where community and real estate parted, where souls were handed off shamelessly to areas unincorporated and lesser know than a cold case file in a sub-basement archive a steep fall off the side of a paper trail, where who knows? met who cares? in the quicksand of the lost. shoelaces, cell phones, rolling papers, broken glass, one-eyed jacks, matchbooks with names scrawled into them, worry stones, loose change. there, gathered en masse, were those who frightened her by their differences, ghosts, salt whispering of the great sea change.

sea

the open sea

Underneath the surface all is well. Don’t let life get you down. Don’t listen to all those people who are waiting to be discredited before they will finally open their eyes. Beneath the surface all is well. The waves are only growing larger and more threatening where the sea meets the sky. You may be up there in your sailboat trying to stay alive. All the worries and troubles of your life making you feel them so. All the people demanding you understand. Underneath it all, nothing has ever changed. All was always well deep in your heart and you know you can go there. Have faith over fear. Go there now and be the calm that always was, and let them believe in you like you believe in your god and yourself.

what we thought we ever knew about anything

the Sea
her depths
wash out of the green
to constitute
a firmament of
jellyfish

inexact
unspoken
wobbly
uncatalogued

drawn off the balance of
good will

unaccounted for
in waves
in rolls

pretty coins
ripped open
swaying in the
tide

the amplification
of which
throws off
any and all
of what we thought we
ever knew about
anything

sugar

K in Tahoe. pic by K’s brother

These are the holidays and sugar runs high and mighty in the bloodstream. I wanna get back to baseline

back to water
back to coffee

rivers
and the sea

avoid the fake
and real news, too

back to books
and Tetley’s tea

all my old friends
and me

wild who we are

dally into dream. wild who we are

We began by recalling the sea. which was not hard to do, for the sea faithfully came back from far places with green bottles and messages inside, wrapped in the trendiest of weeds. the sea happily let us believe, then to lull us asleep to the tune of the tides. i dallied into a dream i had when i was younger, back then a stronger version of itself. i recalled it sadly now for now it could not capture me like those days back after a war, before a war. sadly like a strong figure, man or woman, who meant something to me looking up, looking up to as a child. or some strong oak tree now dying, now slowly. now drawn up in my drifting mind, as i intend to open my eyes unblinking upon it, as though i may recall it so well it’s not called recalling. where my memory ends it begins. the path made purely of small sea shells, both of my hands they were held. sweet talk of summer evenings and what ever to do. sounds and warm light spilling out of small houses. side by side. rolling granny applecores away beyond which wild flowers nobody need bother. leaving orange peels for a trail… wild is how i remember us then, and here, the foot of snail and sand, where our memories began.

pressured by fronts and driven to tears

we are not so unlike clouds in the sky, are we, puffy and bleached turning gray, you can see through us and other times opaque we hide our secrets inside us, coming for us and striking through they do, yet still we remain intrinsically unscarred or untouched, reflecting it all sea to sea and the earth, where we travel we leave the residue our prints passing silently along, forensics loves a cloud, made of water and vapor we are and capable of many forms, evocative of endless feelingstates, containing our own electromagnetic storms we are carried by winds and made by trial and fire, under certain conditions we scatter and the streets become empty and clear like the sky, monotonous, monochromatic we are pressured by fronts and driven to tears

some friend

some friends
you cast out for them

too small

they have to be tossed back
to the sea

distress mistress

Journal # ten four

The theatre was replaced by a store, on the street dead-ended at an r.v. park and a crown jewel, on calendar day ten and four. the grasses there were brown as the ground of an aftermath island by a category storm, planks of wood in a dance as they logged the water and dove by drift and distances great, colored settling on ocean floors for schools of fish. we painted on better days that shook a palm tree head of gloom. and so you stood a-looking mournfully out to the deserted street by the window of my room. the dust was swept up and circulated off of the street in the midsummer heat, damselflies at the mercy of cats and lizard wind. you turned to me with a look asked for help. i could not but inexplicably mirror your distress, and in a moment was i your mistress.

ten five. fish

some friends are like

friends are like

are like

     fish you cast out for

 them cast out for them

out for them

    and (too small) they

 have to be have

to be too small and

thrown back to the

back to the

shallows the

sea