Invocation of the Muse

 Hey faggot!...  You--faggot motherfucker in the brown hat!

(That would be me.  And the hat is more of a camel color...but, whatever.  The voice accosting me is squeaking out of a 12-yr-old with black hair, sitting up a tree in his pajamas.)

"What do you want, Damian?"

Ohh, good one, GenX.  I just want you to get your shit straightened out.

"You think I don't?  I'm trying--"

'I'm lost, whine.  There's something missing, whine.  I don't know what's going on.'

"You sound like a chew toy."

Well *you* sound like a bitch!  Falling asleep in front of the news with a beer you can't even finish?  You should be channeling spirits like a fucking table thumper!  You should be fever dreaming 5-star Michelin sex parties!

"What?"  (Now who's squeaking?)

Music of the Spheres, homo!  You promised me poetry!

(And with that, he screwed up his face and threw handfuls of spiny balls at my head.  When I looked back, he was gone, without a scramble.)

110320

The moment I press 'pause' on it all.  Twilight.  Mars beaming bright above a tree still full of curly orange leaves.  Seventy-five degrees dropping slowly, a cool breeze in a warm envelope.  The creaking of some insects that survived the frosts & brief snow.  Even a small spastic bat, late for its Halloween audition.  The air is crunchy with Autumn's sweet, dry decay.  Honestly, that sentence might be too much.  Who can say, in a year such as this?

I won't look at the news.  I won't ride the rollercoaster.  I put some pumpernickel rolls in the oven to go with the huge pot of split pea soup I made last night.  Thick mushy green with chunks of carrot & potato, sharp bay leaves & the last of my birch-smoked, Icelandic sea salt (thanks AC!).  It's a good night for this new album "Crier's Bane", a collaboration by Dead Melodies & Beyond the Ghost.  The cover could be a painting of the inside of my head.  A cloaked figure looking out on a crowd of shadowy steeples in a dense fog.  What?  Was I supposed to grow out of it?

082920

 I'm not sure where the beginning is so I'll start with the bed frame.  It was old heavy wood with drawers underneath, carved in simple patterns but painted blue & red & yellow, like something from a gypsy wagon.  J had painted it & I felt like it was one of the last tangible items from our time together.  I was worried about the water coming in from the windows behind it.  They were shut, but the wind was strong enough that draughts were blowing the curtains out from them.  Thin white curtains.  Somehow there was a narrow mat of vegetation from the rain guttering on the sill inside with plants sprouting from it.  While trying to keep it from falling behind the bed, I see a City garbage truck driving through my back yard.  This shouldn't be possible & I'm yelling obscenities at it as it squeezes around the corner of my house.  Then I notice everything that should be behind my house is gone.  There are trucks & equipment & open foundations where structures should be.  I am so angry.  I head out of the bedroom & in passing, glimpse that I now have three dogs, but the new one is still just a shadowy face in a closet.  When I get to the living room my phone buzzes.  It's my old flip-phone, but there is a video playing on the little outside screen.  It's a clip from a sitcom & I squint at it trying to figure it out.  I shake my head, thinking this is exactly what's wrong with people, they'll stop in the middle of anything to look at anything their phone tells them to.  When I get to the front door I notice that my kitchen seems so much bigger because my refrigerator & table are gone, having left a radius of dust bunnies.  Believing the people outside stole my stuff, I open the door to demand answers & am stunned to find my whole street is a bombed-out disaster.  Jagged remains of houses choked with ash as far as I could see.  Like a postcard of Dresden in WW2.  And it is freezing.  I hear someone screaming.  As I shut the door I realize I'm dreaming.  I know that I am dreaming, but I think that it only started when I looked at my phone, like a hypnotic suggestion.  I wonder if I'm sleepwalking or if my body is on the floor.  And I think that if I'm dreaming, then I can control some of it.  I want a coat, so there is a closet by the door that doesn't really exist.  I dig out a thrift store McGregor ranch jacket I've had since I was 16 & put it on over my pajamas.  I want things to be different when I open the door, and so everything is verdant again.  My front yard is fenced & covered in Summer vines.  I walk to the corner of the yard to latch the gate, wondering how the trucks made it through without damaging anything.  I wander out to the street & around some parked cars.  I hear an early-Sixties song, like Lesley Gore or Brenda Lee singing something along the line of "I gave my love to the wishing well".  I remember that I am dreaming when two ridiculous humanoid Rottweilers wearing superhero outfits fly by overhead & I mutter, "What the f***?", and convince myself it was an ugly kite.  To have such a creepy dream end on such a stupid image should not faze me in 2020.

032820

"We stand with a different frame around us now."
Those words, from deep within my Ultravox block, second vocalist Midge Ure.  I'm standing in an uncomfortable group of morning patrons of the unlikely bakery on my street, picking up to-go orders, adjusting the space between us like anxious & annoyed magnets all flipped to the same pole.  I assume that everyone here has gone out of their way to show support for this local business, as safely as we can, navigating a nebulous new reality & living life as it is this day.  It isn't convenience shopping.  Except, it really is.
Sitting in my back yard with a totally unnecessary Americano & lemon curd croissant.  The fog has dissipated & four hawks are scouting above, making sounds like a rusty gate, reflecting the sun in a slow spiral of silvery feathers.  Violets have popped up in the shade of the compost pile.
Empty shelves at grocery stores, fights over toilet paper, ugly slurs & casual rascism directed at Asians, kneejerk hoaxers & jokers mock-coughing in the face of the world.  I'm not a fan of us on good days, so this disappointment isn't surprising.  We are part virus, part parasite, both communicable disease & rare benevolent host:  people gonna people.
How do you see this ending?  How many think this runs its course & life goes back to normal?  How many think there isn't another virus waiting its turn to spread through the overpopulated, international, spit-swapping free-for-all we exist in?  Not to be alarmist, mind you.  But we know these things exist.  We know how they spread.  Soon we will be pressured to get back out there & shop.  Crowd the bars, the restaurants, theaters & planes.  Frown at those who wear masks & gloves in public.  People who didn't watch someone die will wonder what it was all for & post memes of the Great TP Epidemic of 2020.  I can't help seeing this as a prelude to a time when PPE becomes fashionable & homes have decontamination chamber foyers.  But until then, please keep washing your damned hands & coughing into your elbow.  And I'll be doing my shopping at 6AM.
Wind is thrashing everything outside my windows.  A neighbor's flag billows above his roofline and tree trunks wear a shifting camouflage of shrub shadow.  The absence of traffic keeps Thursday's storm debris littering the street.

100719

Tall time to call your ma
Hey ma  Hey ma
What's your favorite color?  One time you said it was red.
You smoked Marlboro Reds.
I always liked the smell of that first puff.
I did not like when you'd lick your finger to rub something off my face.
Dried cigarette saliva.
Hey ma.  How can the moon & sun be in the sky at the same time?
What if they collide?
In a bedroom in California I was helpless as you cried.
Artichokes & mayonaisse.  Greyhound exhaust.
We hitchhiked & I dreamed the car drove away with me running behind.
I don't know what happened between you & my dad.
You & my brothers' dad.
You & my sister's dad.
People are tricky.  People suck.  We suck.
I never told you I stomped on your mood ring.
I panicked & hid it in the junk drawer, afraid I had released a spirit.
Six white horses, coming two by two.
Coming for my mother no matter how I love her.
When did I start swallowing my anger?

I love my siblings but I miss when it was just us.
Your granny glasses and embroidered bells.
Macrame owls & guinea pigs.
Pigs in a blanket & shit on a shingle.
The kitchen wallpapered in Sunday comics.
I heard you singing Landslide when you thought I was asleep.
The radio was always on, glowing in the dark.
But the scenery changes around us & we become different versions of ourselves.
And again & again.  A rolodex of alternate lives.
You're smiling, serving cotton candy at a carnival in Georgia.
You're pregnant & lost in thought, driving a truck through the desert.
You're drunk on an old man's moonshine, driving your children into a ditch.
Hey ma.  Why do people hurt each other?  When is love not enough?
Because when a man punches your mother you start planning ways to kill him.
And that's all I wanna say about that.
I wanted you to believe in yourself.
I wanted you to turn that bad-hand-dealt into an assassin's fan.
I wanted you to feel like you'd lived before you died.
I called you my doorway into the world & you laughed.

The sun is weak & the moon's a smudge of chalk on an October afternoon,
and living isn't winning, living is living.  We love who we love.
My little boy arms couldn't keep you here.
My Amazon playlist of 70's hits didn't make the tumor disappear.
Hey ma.  I still have so many questions.

022017

Off to the West was a searing bright line where a scrap of the day-long Victorian smoke dome had been sautered away.  The angle of the sun gilded the tops of trees, while leaving everything else in shadow.  It made me think of Maxfield Parrish--more specifically, the cover of the Dali's Car album, because I couldn't think of his name.  My brain was telling me "Max Frey", also an artist, but the sky was a bit short on giant sea creatures to hang the effect on him.
According to my list, I was leaving the house for a very few things:  a book on hold at the library, dog biscuits, lighter fluid, and beer.  Unfortunately, everyone else had left their houses, too, or were on the way home.  Earlier this month, I noticed my crowd anxiety had resurfaced some, and it was worse today.  I don't know why.  It's this weird amalgam of smiling & being courteous while inwardly flinching & almost hating people for being in my world.  Underlying that is a dread I've forgotten something, too many dangling plots, a "tomorrow is my Monday" depression.  The girl at the hardware store asked if I wanted to donate to the Children's Miracle Network.  I didn't know it involved a paper heart on the window, I signed "Jason C" and made my exit.  The fluid, after all, was for his Zippo, for lighting my incense.  When I walked into the liquor store I was accosted by some whiny song dragging Weezer's sunglass-wearing corpse around "in his Quiet Riot voice singing Cum On Feel the Noize"...  WTF?  (Edit:  Reliant K?)  I took it as an ill omen.  None of the beer sounded good, so I went with a Columbia Valley Gewurtztraminer.  If I can't live in Washington, then it can live in me.
Saturday night I managed to traverse the Rorschach roads that led into the dark, train-blasted factories-under-bridges part of Kansas City to have Robyn Hitchcock play One Long Pair of Eyes maybe fifteen feet in front of me & refer to pink wine as "lady petrol".  Santeria candles flickered in multi-paned steel frame windows open on a 60 degree Winter.  It was pretty much a pop-up show.  When I got there, I was one of four watching the soundcheck & maybe 50 arrived over all.  Part of me was screaming "Bucket Fucking List!!" and part of me was going, I know this guy...I've hung out with this guy...how is that possible?  In dreams?
This morning I had one of those dreams where I can't control my car.  I'm trying to brake but I'm stomping on the gas, the road is newly-laid asphalt in hairpin turns, I spin into a parking lot hoping to make it look like a James Bond parking in reverse stunt, my mom points out a cop, but it doesn't matter because nothing but waking up is stopping this car.  I do wake up.  And as soon as I close my eyes, I'm in the car again, but I'm in Heidelberg.
No--get up.  Let the dog out.  It's February, the windows are open & the house smells like rain.

Mauer im Kopf

Bulldozers under fluorescent lighting in the Black Forest. Washing my face in the Munchen Hauptbahnhof Burger King restroom. Staring numbly at a bush outside of Dachau. Marveling at the variety of olives at the Viktualienmarkt. Four legs locked in a locked shower stall. Peeing behind a tree in a park famous for nudists. Spicy noodles & Glockenspiel. A tiny tot in a red hammer & sickle shirt. Empty shelving under the Reichstag. Bullet holes & scorched concrete. Scaffolding, cranes, construction everywhere. A British voice in a doner kebab saying, "You look shattered." Empty windows in trackside suicide towns. The best fucking mustard you will ever taste bought on the edge of a deserted Cubist-inspired housing project. Sad Gypsy accordion from a pedestrian tunnel. Searching for Vonnegut in reconstructed Dresden. Sleeping amongst bicycles at the end of the train. Doing sums with Turkish boys outside Essen. Cold War cameras making Internet porn. Korean directions in Heidelberg elevator. Shadows in the eaves. Family secrets tossed into the Neckar. Smoked beer & oily potatoes. Radiant adolescents cherub-ing at the foot of the Schlossgarten. How many steps. How many steps. Marianne Faithful flying over the handlebars.