"At this point, anyway, begins thought, which is not at all that looking glass game where quite a few excel, without danger." Pause. Aragon continues. "Surrealism threatens to sweep them out into open water where sharks of madness cruise." 'Them'… us. Pages turning. I love-listen hand-hold gayboys speak talk-chatter 18^th by Castro shave-heads, leather vest crem-de-la-gold watch casual eyes all takers, like man-eye women. Big movie, minus wood claps, sets. Bozo backs into my bike as I eavesdrop smashes its wheel gets out driving away, cuz boys start yelling. "What?!" he yells back plays stupid, knew what he did. Shuffle shoes crinkle headline floor: MOTHER TERESA DIES brings my tears. Under my feet; so painful. Nice lady. Saint. They say. I met her, had a talk. Maybe a saint. I wouldn't know. Calcutta in emotional ruins. I see dirty street leading to hospital, the narrow back door, duck! untouchable said. People wailing. I am no longer my usual body. Castro, melts to India. Shake my head. Think of closer-to home. How distant, pain? The heart : Lake on cold clear day. No scratched bits water mirror; in school : Radiation drills, the air raid sirens, ever heard howl tested on mind of Thursday at noon? The sexual moment. The annihilation. Got even minutes, of whole eternities. Woman sees the paper, covers her eyes, hand in it. Cupped, to restrain her yearning. Who now?

The flag has fallen to the ground.

And so, the atomic bomb.

Spayed

At Larel, the ex-dancer's art-installation house, with cacophony jazz rocking avant-garde kitchen talking on the mohair phone tin orchids drifting an old Frigidaire breeze, I smoked the 'native american' cigarette over three hours sleep. The candle prayers burnt next to an ex-a-sketch (trumpets blaring cartoon napkins, soaked with beer swill and hastily jotted notes. There are way too manythings to look at a lone dog howls from a life-sized canvas shells heap the sink there's a burning desire to open the PIK-NIK 1950's cooler that used to love a '36 Chevrolet. Her place, is a smooth drug.

I'm raw the despair gray no light swing beams in an old low basement dust blurringeyes 'Where's that godawn line?!' blade jams on tongue n groove, bends ninety. Nails trapped in old growth, hidden in load-bearing beams. No crow bar long or short enough. Squeaking that splits my skull. Heads terrified, pop off. (They don't want to leave their hard cozy home.) Tiptoes fall to floor, crowbarfirst. Dark as a one-bulb dungeon. Ancient primordial dust, clogging the air. I'm strung out and exhausted. Single moms with full-loads school washing jobs family kisses and bottom wipes all the chores and bakers' dozen more to do? I don't know how. The official tally: nine-hundred pages reading behind two papers. Laundry, shopping cleaning bills. I've been out of clothing, for a week. I go whole days, hardly eating. A tongue and cheek book shop owner (charging twenty for a honest fifteen) assures me panic is normal. "If you're not behind, you're not a student. I'm amped, depressed, hopeless, sleep depraved… Am I there yet? Have I arrived? Left Seattle to leave the feeling I brought here with me. True. Triggers are to pull, not avoid. How else do you know what a gun is? How else, silhouette triggers? I am a living walking embryo of the things I've yet to understand, using them freely.

The jazz Getz sweat, rolling long baritone swells off wide-open fingers. I place diadem of cowry shells-plot my obsessive overthrow. The inner bleak landscape isn't, and is. You're a godmother two times over? What it means : Vicariousness. With kids, you feel trapped, without them, yearning. Which better engenders; which destroys? The price of loving fully : apathy. The price of yearning fully : love. Tis viscous, this circle biology… Tis ancient, and horrid. Metaphor of blood, coursing birth's channel, of entry-a stretched torn skin of smooth-stomach youth. Tis likewise, miraculous. Tis sacrifice, to yearn beyond our mortal flash. Sacrifice is not a dirty word, (logos and Eros aside.) We sit droning wine, our deeper words caught in throes of inner agonies. I guess I could try. Let's see what occurs. And she strips, me careful not to look, wanting nothing better. On the massage table, words form muscles, knots die hard stringy deaths. Images surround. I trace the lesion of all people through time, who've done this world. There are no authors of listening. There are no courses water won't flow, bloating to channel its sides. She is two different people. The wolf runs the front, the little girl the back. A hungry wolf stares me from lifesized oil. Only the head is visible. I tell her : You're holding your pan, it is burning you. You have your parents captive… the void… Plunging on. Crisp granular black, twirling light. No light. My hands jump off her. trance gone. Infinite space. The birth of stars, plates, worries, works of indescribable art. Tinged with the mythos, Native American. This, your trigger. You mean to fill yourself with it. Do not. It is the symbol of the space, of the terrible nil, none, null, vacuums, eternity, devil-death. It is the horrendous loneliness-the lone wolf, a baton-hatches storm, the electrical discharge, An existential suicide. It is there to gibe into, to give birth through. Is this dangerous, we ask. Is the main line of Mandrill here? is this our mother, out mo….. our moaning resignation, our monumental homeland, we lavish ceremony and good deeds open book reads throaty upon, tell me she says> I'm aggravated. Tears fall down my cheeks, and here I stop. leave her, sobbing. I go into the kitchen, almost breaking myself.

Cold concrete outside many steps home enthusiasm wanes left ash cigarette drops on clean cool table obscuring, filthifying revealing earthly reunion past mortifying tears pursuing coarse emotional turmoil roiling inner purposes revealing poor wretched urchins expressed in pelvic girdle thrusts real-time sneaks and bumps in nights panorama of twinkle-twinkle stars green molting parrots preening preaching piercing piles of Avant mens penmanship, cluttering the billions of pages of piss-poor prose.

The world is nothing buy the dialectical zigzags perplexing the shoal of a post-dada wool over the eyes, and didn't you know kabobs sear over internal fires, and dada was born from the post ww1 world coming unglued at its seams?

The old is very new

and men are afraid of a woman's sexual power.

So basically, I sat in a bar next to an obnoxious New Yorker I couldn't wait to run from, and thought about what my friend the Buddhist monk said, two hours earlier on the phone. We're all one. Not earthshaking news, and yet, it is. She joked on the void's expense, and we sniggered at the MIND THE GAP London underground announcement, where I thought I gave void the slip, years before. It always catches you. she claimed. There is no escape for long. The gap is between beings. The null region between us and outside, between one and two, the universe and… whatever. Mindfullness in Zen is seeking no gap. It is not turning away, when the void comes crashing in. I want to know what is worse, fearing the void, or Zen master's handy Japanese cane. And don't you get tired of rice? No. Why would I? Do you? No. See how silly questions are? So this New Yorker is drunk and an ignorant person who is boring me. Unless… it's something else. Perhaps I'm steering conversation to justify initial perceptions? He I we together-some collaborative effort of mutual pigeonholing. Truth slowly filters out. MIT worked on Wall Street grew up with famous people well read well traveled quite perceptive… Oh. I get it.

Old gentlemen and Belles of San Francisco balls, leathered, alcohol-worn women and men, hunched with loss of life, they bad-mouth sardonic smiles with outright disdain, remembering their more elegant, restrained days. the rakish hats… furious at poor social suet, crunched and bent, curators of cold dank clothing museums tucked in fragile boxes high on unreachable shelves. Self-confessed boozer brings me liquid nitrogen three-buck socialist-winter martini, poured shaky-hand rednose tip-glass-meniscus-top. Sets shaker down, one shot left. I look the sod, feel sorry to watch him say "Taker' hom!" i.e. Where's home? And why would I shoot a martini? Drones my olives, those submerged dead-shrunken testicles in bottom of no-hole funnel. All this while drunks 409-Fantastik Dow chemical chrome strips, and mop the floor. Smells fake streak. Every day above ground is a good day : General sentiments of optimists, on left side of room. Old bald silver-bracelet'd fag whisks small change from their corners, a cockroach scatters making back-sqwiggy noises, as mumbling stick-legged men speak through loose-lipped cigarettes, no-filters burning crack-pinched lips. Free drink tender stocks our beer coolers, bubbling yellowed varnish. Bartender clinks long-neck bottles, while Red Skelton fan "I got too many girlfriends in there, all trying to marry me." points.

I am realizing the love affair with beer.

He reefers to the bottles lining frieze of his studio slum. Overload.

An escape. The Irish lady, at the sixty year old water hole that used to be bordello. You know her? Irish good humor, free Czech pints, and leprechaun ears. Wisdom is everywhere. Old patrons grandfather me into sect of a local. Bartender a logistician for square blocks of humans. You're one of us now. I notice animals and children, like their leader. She is magnet. Initiate me! To wake up, full of Irish witticisms. Sit bleary on atheist's bench, across from Save the Steeple! Fund Raiser's church. Loud Hungarian man, asks if I'm schizophrenic. Not that I know of. Why? You're shaking your leg. Only schizophrenics shake. Like what? Like that. Then maybe I am. We talk. Of curt mean-eyed men, and constitutions. He is reading my mind. I should be surprised. You see? Normal schizophrenics wouldn't be having this talk with me. Normal is the people out there. Did you know 622 is the key to the 27^th dimension? Isn't so scary, when he's thinking first. Jesus. A true surrealism-man. Frightening. Madness, with lucidity. Ostracized. Insights beyond the schizophrenicism we live and work within. Oooh. Talking in multidimensional riddles, bits of truth hot branding iron. Blistered. Burnt. What aspirin with codeine won't cure. Ever seen a burning bush? No. He lights the bush on fire. See how easy? Illusions.

Don't fall. Be fooled.

"You see? You are understanding something, but you don't know what. Part of what I say makes sense, does it not?"

Rhetoric, Mr. Halsz. But you are right. Your ring, with the acrylic-caught honeybee-

"I like your ring too."

A hair tie, on my middle finger. White. Elastic terry cloth. Put it there, after my shower. Forgot.

"It's going to sting you (knowledge). Don't worry, it won't hurt. If you relax."

Searching for the beautiful-the bizarre.

The unusual.

The conundrum. I want to figure it/me out. I am this anomaly I look for, in dingy Mission dives, among the altered and used, in the clutter-sleepers, in trance music drugs and explanations silvered mirrors refuse to ogle. I interview the hunched and bent, scribbling illegible notes under If they only knew what I was writing! shnauzes, to wonder if every line of life, can be a poem, as burly-armed pro ball-rejects toss girlfriend-plus-chair in the air, almost catching her successfully. Television is on make lug-headed jeers god knows and approves, or else…. I mean, is it really simply impossible to live without art?

"Each dimension, a level. Of understanding. The key to the tenth is 40622."

They say the key to the seventh is: I make a number up. Could be right. Could be wrong. 'They'. They plays big in everybody's minds. He learned it's somewhere in Ohio. Zipcode 44654, area code 330. Don't know… (he's sort'a wiggin' out. In a minute, he calms back down.) ….the circumstances. "Have you checked death lately? Asked him about yourself?" I… "KISS. Know what it means?.. Keep it simple, stupid." My answers aren't childish enough. Crazies and children act thie imaginations out, having never entered, or left adulthood's cage. I'm about to ask him: He interupts.

"I see you. Things exist for many dimensions; you feel others, and truth is listening. What seems right is right. You don't know how, or why." He is the surrealist the Surrealists were afraid of becoming. Dimension five. Poetry relates to the harmonics of dimensions. Sublime. A word bridging imaginary gaps-dimensional rifts? He is watching me think. He is reading my mind. All his thought is metaphor, deadly with meaning.

"Now. I couldn't be having this conversation with a normal krill, could I?" (Background: 'I am the whale. You are one krill of millions inside me. Soon, you will be the whale, and I, the krill.' All is one. Dimension 65. But not linear numbers, you understand?) Wears in his eyes,

what he brushed from a sleeve.

I prowl, sucking custard life from a chocolate maple bar. Cops galore-had to go in, and see criminal. Looking at me… VIBE! Senses designed for vibe. Outside, dangerous looking villain walks by, hands me two pieces of pizza. Enjoy. Enjoy the things are not as they seem.

The sex worker took the stage and swore a Jade streak about men who take vantage of women. "I hate…" tears dripping to the tink-tink hard marble floor of the thing she hates. "And I hate…" And the music finally begins-undulating leather goes golden-brown, the knife comes out slash slash. Blood the sacrament, cracks broken tattoo muse bucket cow sacrament, she and the And and the animal who bled smear erotic death dismemberment shock abuse scarification martial arts small firm breasts dark nipples savage vampire victim writhings head flung serpents splits gruesome washes in white, plastic gallon upon gallon faux 2% milk mixed with blood, the knife-flashing another cut. Old criminals and line-worn prostitutes cringe. Too close to home this… Strange disfigurement? How long can you go on-like this? Burn fast, die long. The New York Jew who tells you this seven or eight times takes the red, milk-drenched stage, tries to recoup her pretense. Bloated hors d'oeuvre jockeys smash into the carpet, watching past-prime sex workers recollect old doggie days lip-synching pre-Motown metaphors in flouncy satin gowns, almost designed to hide annoying bags and sags.

"Gosh we're hard on these gals when they succumb to cellulite." I overhear, upstairs. "What is it, with this culture?" It's out to punish the wisdom age accumulates. (Assuming that happens.) You can get a boob job, but asses are harder. Faces stretch, and hands give you away. Lip's glass with Then what?s. Hair color.

More verve.

Went with the acrimony to the dyke bar afterwards, where buzz-topped butch girls stomped the floor and bellowed their ample muscle weight. One had a long hunting knife between her mammary glands; another appeared to bulge a gun. I was an invader. It occurred to me, these women were slowly becoming men and in six months, I'd fear for my balls. Two or three of them already scare me. Mostly for being the only dick in the place, it's LAST CALL!! and a nasty looking dominatrix is three to the wind, whip dangling. One look around the joint shows hair is out. Roots are peroxide-Shiite, black skull tats show through. A babe is sucking tit in the restroom, whose jar is a-door. The pit-bull human eyes me, making sure I didn't get off on it. This is strictly between us girls. I wonder : Is there a bi in the joint? Even the pinball machine's for dykes. Which frankly, amazed me. Talk-a bout specialized markets! I'm so distracted, I grab the red-hot candle, about to quaff some wax. A vague similarity to pint glass, I reassure myself, sucking fingers. Yea. Dangerous. Fascinating to watch girls be sexual, without pouty-looks. These dykes are man-like, because they have to work it. They've gotta be active not passive, or they won't get any pussy either. Same-sex knows the covert-manipulation game too well to use on the other. Bingo! That's why Lez pairs tend towards more masculine members, and fags towards more feminine. For games to work well, they have to be slightly profound.

The air is brisk with commerce, garage sales adorning disheveled sidewalks of every other pedestrian corner. I have a KGB-CIA shirt, a Spanish dictionary from 1940, and a free pair of shoes, a five gallon paint bucket opener in hand, thinking. All those buckets I pried with ginger fingers, and dull pocketknife. Years of painting houses; I never had one of these things. The universe, was out of kilter. Fifty cents for three. Nice aluminum tool, brand new. I took it.

Life requires you repeat classes you fail. I'm riding a motorcycle, brother on the back, to Renaissance Pleasure Faire, backpack decked with kick ass costumes. My right pocket hasa packetfulla coke a Zen friend dropped, "just for a grin or two. Enjoy." he says. Shit. I hardly know to cut the stuff. Is it strong? It's yellow. I know enough of night, to know that's good. It's hot as hell in October, sun-drunk, no sleep or food, the night before. Both, in-out separate ways. I hate the Sunday brunch thing. My brother says, as we navigate the plump aimless traffic, clogging Lombard. It's the America, I feel alien to. Hear ya. Why would you sit around on your ass six-and-eight, or ten! then sit around waiting for too much food with everybody else, on your day off, bloated like a beached walrus afterwards? It's nuts. Traffic is worse than a rush-hour Monday. We were missing the famous S and M Street fair, of whose initiation, my stomach still hurt. I can't believe what you did yesterday. He topic-shifts. Me either. Did he just walk up to you, or what? He was funny as hell, trying to talk me into teacups at a garage sale.

The third floor room was an artist's studio. A glorified nightmare, for the straight world. Leather works snaking the floor, straps and ropes snarling your ankles, shirts ripped traces of blood. Moving to the wall, for a better look. Hand-dyed made from odd bits of trash transported to realm bizarre, unusual, metaphysical. This man is a scientist of pain. The kind of plain pleasure engenders, enjoins with, cancels heightens; I examine his dungeon curtains, shredded. A-sordid things mediaeval chambers lacked, and wonted. A video of the most incredible images played-placed so the strapped victim watched. Hammers to testicles; willing enthusiasm!? The laments, the secret signs, sacred pains-My mouth agape, a hole like the black-sheet bed, in the center of its room. "Whoa." Is all it makes. This is a juncture. A forked stick in a long linearity. I could kill an old prejudice here, or… The wall hung either swords of sharp steel, or dull. Latter never occurred to me, when he ran one over my breast.

That's what I did, instead of Saturday Brunch. We stop.

My brother wants to see the red marks.

We meet the same group three plus minus one in the same parking place this is a dejá-vu haven't we done this before feeling I'm having one woman about to be Isis says. Yea. Except this time we have to pay. We've got this timely compact and a dull nail file to crush the sticky yellow gravel. People crushed in a chemical SaniClan sweltering. Sweat running rivulets inside flouncy glossy fabric. The rustle of the ritual drips, fingers dragging backs to dryer cloth. Shit. My brow threatens to dissolve the pile. Not handy with the file, severely-put upon. Rather-out of practice. Three crude lines. Fat ones. Nail file gums, after. Funny looks, sweaty body emerging. Emerging-emerging. Laughter. Okay! listen,. I fucked up last time. Was pissed off at my rules, not letting go. Go for it, I say. Don't wait till the end (of life). If you want another beer, drink one. If you want to kiss somebody, do. It's a pleasure fayre, after all. Now let's get into the new characters we're about to be. I am telling myself, pointing at them. The coke-diction defies me. Fuckin' hell. We're screamin' now!

I drank beer, flirted wenches and nobles alike, stole some light, and scored a number or two. Got on the bike-hated hate to leave, lingering last-moments, carving fingernails into windowsill, rode the riotously fragile existence of two people fifty miles East, to a party. Wind buffeting. Cars asleep. Racing. Going sixty-five. Fast=slow=fast=slow where do I turn? Foot sleeping, muscles cramped to stubby crash bar, sliding off every twenty seconds. Brother's knee surgery needs my peg. Arrive in the nick of time, food still out, J not yet departed for sharp whacks of commotion inside. Back to Japan Westerner, nine months of Zen, Nine months of Zen. Repeat after me: Five Years. Never had it so good, this lonely and sad. She is another person entirely. The one she hid, indefinitely. Now, I see you.

Now, you go.

The mail was waiting with dire news. A friend dying of cancer. A man homeless. A response to my resume-three words : "A floundering artist". You are implied. From a god-friend. He is letting the truth have its way. I am recoiling. I assay his resound to my letter, in which, I critique a letter to his parents asking-not asking for money. Good, until the last garbled page, where it lost all credibility. In other words (5) : You have lost all credibility. As a person implied. Truth is a dangerous methinks. Truth assays and then "develops", in the sense of destroys. It is a weapon of atomic capability. You must use truth with prudence, by never using it at all / What a petite, and sublime fore / to meta.

I've been reading too much poetry.

I can tell.

My intrastructure. It is not sound. It sways and teeters. People's accusations, and judgments couple. They give birth to deadly diseases, and locusts to command the light from the sky. The building is always on the brink of collapse. Why is it so opaque to criticism? Why doesn't shit bounce, or pass right through? I am a well of destruction, and realize my depths. No wonder as a culture want everything nice. We are too fragile to have it any other way; criticism is the universal cut down to size. So woeful to absorb; so easy to dole out. What's wrong with that imbalance? We're brimming, and look for places to outhouse our poison. A harsh criticism undoes a hundred compliments! Perhaps-we have a sense compliments aren't honest, most of the time. Good words have been cheapened, and inflated to the point, we don't believe them anymore.

The unequal bridge

of ten in , one out

Swings the inner chasm

perilously.

So delicate, the stack

of out inner balance

When a raindrop makes

a tree fall.

But poetry is bullshit, in a way.

It's a quick fix of white, finely powdered-

Highly charged, until loss

of ecstatic state.

An unquenchable thirst of desire rages in empty, hollow breasts

dying with the pain of sadness…

illusion, is illusion of matter, sound or person filling an impossible space.

Life is Laurels and acid, burning and covering, burning and lying, leaving and surrendering.

One peon, run amuck, would fell a forest for paper, to transcribe thoughts. How to sort th-infinite from th-silence. How to be silent in-finity. Rhetoric. Help. Panic. Monday blues. God's voice. They tousle each other's hair, then rumble in the Bronx of our beings.

Streets a torrent of drizzle, I trudge three long blocks to a corner, which leads to another corner, to the pizza shop, open five minutes more. I, drowned rat for the city of dry-homebodies who sometimes feel sorry for rats. And they walk in. Two loud, unlikely fellows. I'm draining peach cider, thinking how foofy fake oak panel is. What kind of bar is this? Free of dirt people feeling things verve. But they killed that thought. We are instantly… something. He catch-eyes, blathers about The Giants, thinking rah-rah sign, discarded by some drunk television viewer, is mine. I plot my escape, before looking in other one's eyes. Fire. Conflagrations of absolute no tangible hint-nothingness. The Idiot savant stuffs something edible to mouth, glinting no-speech mischievous, as sports fiend blabbertalks. Third-generation San Francisco native knows everyone just met the savant, who I begin to wonder-who can't seem to understand me, and won't correctly parry out moot repartees who

plays air-guitar with mad fire passion.

"I wanna go hear you on a real guitar. You live close?"

Man 2: (Savant) Beside himself. Heat billowing into cool, half-awake building.

Man 1: (Sports fiend) still talking sports. Wants to go too.

Sport fiend's deep ugly vee scar runs wrist to shoulder.

What happened?

"I'm held together with high-tech plastics n-stainless steels."

"Any particular reason? Besides excitement at airports?"

Off-hand. Savant wrestles pizza fifteen more seconds maybe.

Visitor tracks dog shit around my apartment drunk rage donned fast motorcycle two blocks of road and I'm dead. "And some people say I'm superstitious, but I knew it was going to happen, a week or so before." He means : No Diddling With Fate! I guess.

Ever think we KNOW that kind of stuff ALL the time?!

I get ready to ask sport.

Sport says "It smelled so bad, I…"

And ignores me thru telling me a story.

I ask him anyway. He'll now tell me:

"I don't like to think about stuff like that. Really."

I'll bet and he did. Nearly verbatum.

But you do! I can tell.

"But… in another way, I do kinda like deja-vu and stuff."

Bingo-I'm On-line. Disorienting because void (A.K.A. man-2 genius-savant with physics guitar) is playing hyperbolic tunes of strange languages in dreams-makes a person think they know everything. Can speak or run sticky mud if I'd just concentrate harder… plays out eyes' deep everything. This music tells the profound : I am not "music". The notes turn on themselves. He hardly-even- "jams" it's… a Hendrix-esqueness, pouring from another place. (The void.) He knows this. (I can tell.) His knowing bores through the holographic façades others find hard to explain. My comments come rainbow-thin-their volume shocked me. Veils droop and lift in front of this revue. Another language, we will discover in time. Hello!? Anybody in there? Big tomb's a crash pad. Song lyrics carpet floor. There is a book called HOW TO BE DANGEROUS ON GUITAR, supremely unopened, on only-other chair.

"It is good?"

"Never read it. Only the cover-that's enough."

Is/was true. Always will be. Dangerous notions not brought about reading books breeds metaphor : Rarefied air is unruly, wily slipping from closed containers. I open this book, and read the guitar cooking instructions. Nope.

Gazing cover's all you need.

Question Man 1 posits Man 2 Man 3 listens : What do you… (do?) ahmm, Savant once sold bud on Haight with shelves pollinated in Physics Chemistry Calculus tomes of cold hard stare. Never answered, really, da-bruthr can hardly hack "intelligent" conversation, but reads this stuff for fun? Weird world. Like chewing rock-gum. Chè Volya? (What's to be done?)

His landlady wants him out,

for smiling too much.

Sports Fiend trance. Own world crash in.

"Those cards… Can I touch them?"

Some times/things are too sacred for relative strangers.

(Yes.) G-Savant head-nod. Stoned. Tarot/Escape. Music alter state.

"You want me, to read yours?"

I ask politely. No. but he's interested. Do yourself first, he says I think about it I did/do.

Pretty rusty. Haven't used this deck… Haven't done this, in a very long time.

"Check the little book. You need to, the first few times."

his guitar warns.

I do. I do

drop a

stray card. The Sun. Strange lay. Time isn't linear. The Star. Major Arcana, everywhere. Cups with Ominous numbers underpinning. Upside down. Ill-defined. I am a bird dreaming not able to fly. Impassable head winds-instinct says MIGRATE! Feet stuck to branch. I assume dream is real. I am lone wolf, without voice to bay a cool night moon. We defend ourselves against awareness, Page of Swords declares. Turn next card, realize : This is Sport Fiend's inverse reading. Sports are your opiate. I see it clearly. 180° off. You use the its shallow bits to contain your artistic self. "Translations to actions translate the translations original authors know nothing about." He would never git-it. It's too late at night for convulsions.

I am agonizing over music with notes from depths of myself.

Cards say: You have one chance left.

You're about to blow it.

No!

Ask/answer.

And I'm not sure if I slept well. Dust from the demolition job choked my nostrils; paint votive covered my hands. Barefoot, I strike warm sidewalk - watching car bards light stop signs, ever so slightly. The schizophrenic passes fore my eyes. Shaking leg, half-phantom bears no message from mundane banality : Our lie-never parse here long to reflect. He is a rare form of truth, searing to core, make people look other way, no need to encounter distant dismal specters of themselves; this fine warm morning.

Singles me out :

"Hi Ken. Ken and Barrbie!! Ha-aha!"

Hunker down the chair, wobble backwards into corkscrew plant. Lady knows what nobody else can-gains momentary notice of me, nods a compassion. Yes. We are all kin. Kens and Barbies. Uggh! I break my book carried head-n-hand, to cover-page. Try to forget. But he's right here! Looking at me, with those fierce lone eyes. No idea. Nadja… the girl André Breton met, living mystery genius beyond him; his Knight Templar is transfixed. Mistress' address Rue Surreal. The nifty coincidence? He/she will sidle eons most no longer inhabit, to speak with gods. The poor fools who can/cannot divine magnificence-he us : The Hungarian. So confusing. Casualty of carelessness, he forgets meds six days in a row. Nadja went stark-raving in the end. I scan her pages, look up; aghast. Life!

Had no idea what this book was about.

Not the start, not the finish of time. That day, at least.

Truth is fluid, changing faster than it can properly… articulated.

Once you define, or express, truth's slipped-somewhere else.

Man on corner is busy repeating what he last said when someone approached him (whom he obviously knifes with egoself on regular basis). New protagonist asks : "How aboutthem-Giants?! Progressing ensuing script of reply-response-reply-response to artful if not downright scientific study of human interaction. Which happens another time, in the same-exact manner, with different victim. I consider the room we're occupying. Why would he want to blare tape recorder so often? And who gives a flying fuck who wins the ball game next game game after that ad-infinitums? Women must ask this weekly.

Because…

The sports-line addict last night.

Because…

Men on a stone raft that shouldn't float but it does and they know it.

No. That's the underpinning. The reality is :

Humor is despair's only permanent fix in situations like this, and Sport serves as emotion for men. Sport engenders undetectable effluviums under base smoke testosterone. Sport and its ridiculous statistical mimicry. Sport the sacred render of male truth, all people are barely-conscious of. There is only an action of sport, to express men's degenerated ability to share "something real".

Something women can not touch.

Something we have only the dimmest notion of.

Women would like more of it.

Like Pat, they might hanker for that One of the boys feeling.

They furtively hate; and crave our violent apposite sect.

Bull----! spectators say/yell. But "secret truth" doth pass, in an indigestible manner.

Discuss anything, and the It-some mythical ether, still gets conveyed.

A friend passes through-drops a present off.

I engage it. Daily. Until it's gone. Infinitesimal snakes of albino thought, sigh front, almost sneeze-I'm amazed the power dispels lethargy, and can't do the laundry life ennui. Its myth frosts tasks joyous-whispering anagrams of high purpose poised in dirty toilets, and dingy rain gear, slouching mildew in corner. I sweep carpet with broken vacuum of a broom, and hand-scrub pock-mark floor with bits of deteriorating dish sponge. This isn't so bad. Why do I put life's tasks off? (life + weightier tasks) call the Bank. Yes, the account is empty; did I think the zero would replace itself with ? Possibly... I was afraid to face my belligerence. Surely you can understand that.

There, in origami gold. Perhaps a normal-addict's day-worth. I don't know.

Snow's symbol I attempt to understand, in homeopathic doses. Well, not that minute.

Anyway…

We went to a dance performance.

On-screen. Old famous 6-5-4-3-2-scratch blip black and whites of Balshoi, and avant-moderns. With the retired call girl, who's done a thousand of cock. With void burning dark and furious in her eyes, I MIGHT ADD. Ticket taker, woman fingering money at the door, has no desperation in her. A radiance supernal, drenched by fairylight-barely of earth. I think she is fifteen. Confined, and liberated by the language of ballet… The movies begin. I am held spellbound by body's flash of brilliance. Youth's shell-game tells me after : at thirty six, a woman faces her enemies. Youth has/is ebbing. What once came naturally, is now a struggle. I've been a sex worker for twelve years, she says. And I've done it all. I've had fortunes slip sand between fingers. We enjoyed untold men, Mata Hari and me. Duels were fought; but now… You see the wrinkles come in. Unannounced, and uninvited. They are the end of me. At least, this me I knew. I cannot be a prostitute in my fifties, although some manage to try.

And I am aware of synchronicity.

Not only me… everything in middle age.

I feel change coming. It is manifest already, in the "past-prime" mentality, where doubts harbor soulful regret. I have been with sixteen women, and a couple of men. A number that seems ridiculous! What, was I doing all those prime-time years?! Abiding a moral structure. Too afraid, and shy. Hating woman, for being molested at young tender age. God knows. And she's been with thousands. Totally lives it up. No holds-barred, when sex work was underground. These days, being a sex-worker is nearly glamorous. Sez. And yes. I see why people commit suicide here. Jimmie and Marilyn. Hair goes gray, falls out, damage injury wrinkles dead-end job no high training addiction stuck dreams perishing nothing more age and problems ahead. Youth-worship becomes the insidious plague. You never noticed, young like the models. "You need to write a book for people of our age." She says to me. And we talk; and she blows me away. You're not in our system? There is no record of you? She has never paid taxes. She does not exist, in the computers the rest of us do. The list of alias, is immense. Know things that would end my life, probably, if I whispered wrong sets of ears. Technology vs. Pillow talk. I'm a political nuclear weapon. And on that note I'll tell you why they killed Mata Hari. Men want women ten miles from espionage, because we're so much better at it. You men don't know first things about deceit. I believe her. For instance, I rarely cum with my clients; and they all think I do. Always repeat customers. They come lots of times, for me-laughs to herself. That was silly.

I thought you retired? I ask. No, only changed masks. I do sensual massage, and SM.

Why'd you stop being a call girl?

Because no men wanted to go out with me.

You? The loneliest girl?

Come on!

Hundreds of adoring men, and you're loneliness itself?

She's jealous of me, when I say I'm married. Someone loved more than your body. You have a deep emotional bond with another being, or you wouldn't have considered doing that. What? Getting married, Dumbo. She is envious… of me? This is a twist!

Men can not handle what I do, nor, sadly, who I am. It makes them too insecure.

Fascinating. I've had few relative connections, but they've all been deep.

There's no depth to my friendships with men-it's always about sex.

I an amazed. You're a dreamboat. The fire in your eyes goes back a million goddamn miles.

That's because I'm full-blooded Russian Gypsy.

She regales me with tales of magic, and coincidence, for next six hours.

Morning. I've only done that a few times in my life.

What?

Not had sex with somebody I was attracted to. Especially not lying in the same bed, like that.

Nobody ever strokes me lightly, for my pleasure, like you do.

We go to the last day of the Renaissance faire, and I decide :

All women are race cars that men can't get out of second gear.

We think we're going fast, but we don't know what fast is.

And by the way, thanks for the permanent grin that won't come off my face.

Thirteen hours of sleep last night, made up for the leftover physical

fatigue, but sharing with you, has had an unusually

beneficial psychic effect upon my psyche. In fact, I feel quite like my old

self again. It's been too long a time since I've encountered anyone who could

muse with me over metaphysical workings of the universe, and stirrings of

both the psychological and sexual kind. So like a cheesy Hallmark card,

tossing out a big fat kiss, I say, "Thanks for Being You".

She writes, in E.

So I write my wife, tell her-me I might like to have an affair.

Hard to spout truth over phones. Lines are so mechanical. So electrical, full of soul-robbing hisses-n-static. Phones and movies ain't reality but we'll cry their articulate fiction. Their photons punch needle-fine grains through our plastic. A flick (besides one we're in) momentarily lodged in brain sports split image man and woman, interacting. Their two selves-each, trope higher games we barely register. They are wrestling each other and I utter one word Terrifying aloud in the theater. I decide the hard part of living, is stringing your moments of brilliance together.

No filler between.

She says okay. Chicken and mustard.

Ballet haunts me. The madness of formality : Mark-downs for personal interpretation. In theory, rigid form expands your borders of comprehension by narrowing them. But is exception rule? How do you become something you aren't, without open-ended experimentation? I consider the pain some director suffered, making film dancers mechanics. Within five seconds, you think : These are no mechanics. And not a word's been spoken! Why is it so obvious? The actor/dancer dudes weren't moving like normal people. Not that it's bad, mind you. It's just that-with all their movement schooling, they still don't know how they move. They don't get it any more. Swaggering mechanics, and normal people without formal training, don't look like dancers. And yet, it is conceivable, a mechanic

might be able to move like a dancer.

Reflect : Funny, and not so.

People suffer. A blind youthful aspiration to "succeed" in something underlines each body's flash of brilliance. Too brief and fleeting, out unbridled passion for an "impossible". Body wears, and mind becomes rigid. The numinous seems ever-more distant, as it approaches. Sexual allure diminishes, girth increases, skin sallows, and sags with ultra-violet absorption, plus sadly-you get point-days are numbered. There is choice at this juncture. Become more conservative, or (more tactfully) radical. Master Hegel believed in a totality of thought and spirit-in their self movement of whole-engendering evolution through a process negation. Russian Futurists thought anything that can be smashed, should be. Take a desecrated average of these, and ignore any synthesis. Now ask Olga Menshavik why she stands in line six hours to obtain enough food family of three, every single.

Ring!Ring! Yas. Hi. What are you doing. Nothing. You?

"Today, I'm not going to be mean to myself. Whatever I do is perfect."

She tells crunchy ear-phone. Which seems radical thought. A girl I'd met in nursery school, lost track of till Jr. High, and slipped to sex with some fateful 3 a.m. drunks riding big motorcycle home empty horn-blow street night. Some things : such good ideas, not good ideas. 1985 or so's BIG Disaster. Anyway, we're friends again, and it occurs to her she'll take a holiday from judgment. Thirty four years hard labor in job of abasement-anyone deserves a day off! With that sort of vigilance under your belt! Right. You're coming (when?) for a wedding of people I don't know she can bring a body date I'll have the Portabella mushrooms How are we getting there? Ivy league past-life folks, before she pissed-off to teach scuba diving Maldives pre-gotta be a dancer for no money whatsoever serve rich people catered foo-foos rent meanwhile. I'm personally so broke I find myself scavenging couches, to buy my next muffin for breakfast. Washing lies packed in corner, awaiting spare quarters, while I scrub the same pair of underwear every night, hang them out to dry. Sure. I tell her. I'll snap at a five-star meal.

Hey-think I should take a day off too?

Why not? See ya-soon. Click.

When are you going to finish your TV series?!

My brother asks the famous author. We're rabid for your next installment.

And soon after we learn that pressure's so killing him, he sports fresh quadruple bypass post couple angioplasties too many tubes with stuff running down them pre pills galore generally I'm here talking to you by a double-grace from god. And who are we to demand this man's precious time? He is dedicated to us. Our wants are his, and he knows they don't matter. What does matter when mortality stars you in a finite series? You know the end is probably near. Maybe it'll run another season, but still… would it be hard and easy to live in life's moment? Every hand's your breaking bet in poker. Every minute's a wager. Do I want to spend a ticking life's instants doing this? is a question childhood doesn't need to ask. A beautiful woman walks in the room I inhabit, sans husband con-kid. A not-so-beautiful woman follows with disgruntled young man in tow. She is fat with broken dreams. She is a ship moving painfully through life. Her predecessor is radiantly thin with day to day survival.

Her dreams must still be alive.

Like the author's.

Crazy life.

I have a high-tech radio-internet link so I can near-real-time chat X-call girls

from the trendy café-Laundromat, but bro's cycle sucks fumes I park to walk a Mission block cuz tacos are 15 cents cheaper down its road and I ain't got that fifteen cents, still gotta scrounge six tarnished Lincolns from customer left of counter, $1.57 no-cheese taco while lighting-fast Mex server ten-fingers worn linoleum for long-line waiting as Gringo counts too-few pennies for tax. I Eye tops of receptacles for half-eat treats, a hefty-priced laptop in one of two backpacks jammed tight with clean-fold clothing, no coffee-n-muffin money tomorrow! What's wrong with this picture? I have strange priorities. My friends always thought I was weird, and now I'm beginning to believe it. He's in private arts college pursuing grad-degreeisms with serious students, aligned with the bums on Mission, or the misfortunates on Market, bowl for five gallons left; five gallons right ladle, free oranges, cake, scurvy insults breath roting no-dentist mouths. Hot soup stale bread for dipping their food is food. In the city streets, where entertainment is five-star. Christ though. What you'll do when a house falls to rune! Stay up later than late reading my journals' years-go-by shit. I was pretty smart back then. No What happened?s land pinpoint, waiting to fly camel eyes. Early DOS type, wacky-translated off right margin-the crude-carve ASCI wood tablets-a six millennium rift in our technological head-snap. Phone… any chance of me getting paid this week? Yea. Pretty likely. What about today? Not a chance. Pissed-off stomach filled with radium hot sauce scooped by bad oil fry chips nine hours past screams real food, its pre-six mile to work after three to school day. The hard way. It's raining. Rather heavily. I scan sidewalks for loose fragments bombing down Valencia, where luck demands boss fork one funny-money C-note, you need to spend as soon as you get. Hard to believe they're worth anything's insidious retail plot. What's wrong with old Ben Franklins? Too many of him running around causing trouble? That's cuz you look at him, and he don't lie. I'm worth something. Stash me somewhere. Not his new improved self. NoSr.

Worth diddley, and that's the BIG CONSPIRACY.

Anyway, still buys bananas and artichokes.

Vegetables and toilet paper. Newspaper sucks for wipes.

Drag from feast lethargy abruptly at eleven, consider going out.

Slambrakes for Doc's Cocktails-the place I've wanted to go for years. Now is only.

But I am too late for Doc's, that notorious stumble-drunk hangout, where jiggers flood two seconds over glass, as rabid alchies gaze. Yuppie hipsters good-posture the freshly sanded elbow rest, invading dirt-dinge Mission like locusts of a coming swarm. They are dressed too well for the littered sidewalks outside. Lever my way back out, bike to totally outrageous party-move like no tomorrow no yesterday self-actualized madman. Countless rooms of bizarre art installations. Soaking Levi sweat. Biblical connotations. Machines dong-dinging, doing god-knows. Scary Japanese techno-porn. Pretzels. High energy trance, no rest for the possessed insight-This is Sufi. I can't possibly have this much nuclear power, no sleep or food. I am defining a wavelength. Life's suppose to exist here:

Dance till you drop.

Drop. Finally.

Groggy. Barely… functional. Alarm clock.

Person is crying in class. Back neck problems, neurological short-circuits

wants to be miserable, not interested in practical suggestion… might help why do people need to spill toxic waste over perfectly good sheets? I lost-thought listen, one ear peels, skin falling dried-out fruit. Me all over the place. Whining, instead of taking facts. Whingeing instead of doing whatever the fuck that's next. And next. Etc. Next-next-next!

No hesitation. No stupid fears. Wow-

Excavated

that, didn't they?

Sad footings, these old houses-steel-hard old-growth holds them up, but the foundations! The beach sand those scruffy immigrants hauled for the concrete-you know about this? He chips right angle, between wall and basement floor. See? Look at it fall away. Beach sand's chock fulla salt, huh? And these rocks! Surrounded by dirt. Where do you reckon they got such cruddy rock?! How would I know? A hundred fifty years ago? Why are you telling me this? Because you need to saw a hole in this-here. And drill twenty plate bolts. Through solid concrete?! Are you mad? I am thinking. Here, I'll do the first one for you. Watch! Drills frozen butter. Orange sand pours to original ocean-state.

Why are these houses still here? I'll leave you with a riddle. He says.

What is it? You just asked it.

RRRRrrrrraassshhhass.

Hole sixteen, six point six inches in-Because sand can't collapse in earthquakes. Concrete dies to its form in time. Turns back to sand. Hole nineteen hits non-beach concrete. Stops.

My carbide bit dulls, grinding illusions of imperfection.

How many of these things do you want?

(Nothing wrong with this concrete!) My hands

numb from roto-hammering.

More. Keep going.

Seven point six inches.

Deeper.

Rrrrhhrrhhnnjkkk!! Party flashback.

Fantuzzi drumming disk spinning strange music broken

with 1970's hall of famers. Wowee. #20. Thirty years since summer of love,

Golden Gate park, passing joints, tie dyes save the ancient forests, as if it's a question.

Why are those big windmills here, and the groovy people! Relic busses with camper vans, and boats welded on top-gypsies still a hair breadth from IRAs. You know, in the center, where the blankets cover the ground, time travel makes you dizzy. That one song-people dancing, contact high-it was there, the spirit, of those times. I felt it sweep me in. As Blue Angels flowed noiselessly over, dream-like, and people wave lovingly, the sound, its waves, drowning high-tech killing out. War peace rock monody acceptance-I can hardly believe ears eyes. It is post-surreal.

Vietnam time never would have stood for this.

Yet here we were.

A mite smarter?

The traffic. Totally

stopped, a hundred feet up the ramp.

101 East gridlock: Lick chops, split lanes.

Faster. So dangerous, I am amazed it's legal. 150% concentration required. I'll be late if I don't. I won't have as much fun if I don't. (Former, over latter, every time.) I am going to hear a famous film maker speak. He speaks, then people ask brainless questions, clutch their microphone one minute of greatness, blathering on endlessly. It's the most pathetic thing-the response-proximity to stars, brings. Freaks spouting gibberish, stomping around the platform strewn with upturned nails. Unfortunately for me Oliver thinks high-strung sensitive means more pain in life, and fear and sex are related, and you undergrad, 'Should you follow art?'-well if you must ask, you'd better get computer savvy. Fast. Then he signs things, and accepts wearily, another manuscript two video shorts some music for his personal collection of screenplays to the moon slipped to him from all corners of the world every time he's in public near budding writers like bloodthirsty mosquitoes often questioning a ridiculous occupational choice before sly back-pats for the super-coup of giving their pissant screenplay to HIM! The MAN! As if nobody else had stalked Directors, or thought of cheesy plots. The grubbiness of it! I'm sick with all the thirst for fame. Legend of own time has his violence hidden, and it comes out on film; heavy karma of celluloid killing makes mad-eyed freaky-looking all-year-in-a-basement dude with scary-scrawled box underarm, look mighty ominous. A bomb. I'm sure of it, and begin to head for the door.

Optimism is an act of will,

I remember him saying.

But I'm thinking about the call

girl. She's gotta get a whole new set of skills.

I've gotta do the same. I've breathed enough paint fume asbestos dust gypsum toxic thinner glue caulk oil grease on hands nails through shoes smashed thumbs and nightmare employees for one whole lifetime. All my honed skills are moot. I no longer want be a laborer business-wiz buyer and seller mechanic greasemonkey painter forager deal-maker. I am barely employable, in my current state of

eclectic credentials.

Fuck it. Something will happen.

Drilling sheerwall, breaking off screw heads.

Man, it's too nice a day to be in a cruddy-ole basement. Whatcha think?

Let's check out El Niño. Baker's nude beach with juice and ice cream bars. Bakin' hot.

Man with less tact than normal tactless American positions himself crotch-shot to loveliest girl on the beach, as if not psychic rape. He can't understand why girl puts her clothing back on. What does he think this is, the internet? Americans so pent-up, it's pathetic. I tell my boss: You know, when I lived on a nude beach on Kauai, that sort of shit didn't happen. People who weren't in-vibe, skulked off, wondering why they felt so ashamed. I miss islands acutely, in this moment. What's wrong with my culture?! Nothing a swim in the ocean won't make better, tho cold enough for retracting balls to adams apples-the El Niño thing a hoax. But oceans make people more human.

And Suddenly,

it is a perfect day.

François Villon was a robber-murderer. He was also a fabulous French poet. He haunted the demi-monde, or half-world of apposite arts. He existed in simultaneous semiotic fields, his odd attractors flipping random spin states. We goggle-out the man, behind the proverbial curtain. He is the manuscript, a film director doesn't want you to read. You will see how flick turned out differently, sued to chance by money-hungry robber-barons, murdering genius, for arts' "best interest".

Childhood abandons us to adulthood, with its slow decline into purposelessness. Around the age of 20, or so. Sad to think, is it not? Childhood is somehow charming, to coin and quip a certain dada hope. It is possible to live several dimensions, or lifetimes at once, pulling down blind meanings, to gaze windows devoid of everyday glass. We look towards isms to guide an illusion that old human fanaticism of 'childhood' can be salvaged from the wreckage of a life. In this battle for past senses free of society's cage (that we feel so reticent to leave, to be raving with lunatics on benches at 28^th and Church) we indulge in madness. This madness was not there before; we have created it. We have clashed, accelerated worlds of dream and wake together, attempting to keep them apart. The radiation of their explosion continues to fall. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. André Breton claims, crowbar poised to the noting, because these people are honest to a fault. What's to pry on? Honesty is easy to excite. Breton is an eager pointer for popular culture-that dog's life of entertainment and challenges sought to circumvent, more detailed, and risky inner-ventures. Because locked in his imagination, locked up inside us, there remains madness. And madness is penultimate.

(As war goes.)

I got an A. More or less. More more than less. Mostly because the instructor didn't know what to do with five pages like that. It was incomprehensible enough to invoke response from his unconscious elements. Semiotic was an intersection with something hissing hot spieling steam from its radiator. The world spun green, and livid, with semiotic. The instructor was dimly aware of this effect, the world had upon him.

A - good lively essay.

Because anti-logic is still logic. And if you stray far enough from known paradigm, you enter it again, from a profound angle… Get a whole new intuition on it. Or, people think you have. Semiotic fields are magnetic. They suck you in, directing thought, defining parameters, defoliating the marvelous world. When we searching to find the grail, we stumble on infinity, and curse our luck. A smashed toe, for the diligent seeker. A comic sign of fate.

And so-n. Horn sounding.

Nothing was clearer in my life, nautically. Fog blanketed the fine details of my shore. My wife is still my wife, and thought functions more of less the same way. I eat hot soubrettes with my eyes, and no one tells me I can't /dare. Almost piled my bike into carefully-opened car door. Screwed together with 2X4s. Screamed my surprise. She hair-on-ended. SORRY!! yelled attempt. Shake off Karma, for scaring the motorcyclist heeled over her foot-drag corner, as I pedal wrong way up it. Cursed me. And I feel apropos being her. The old friend disaster friend kindergarten nursery school friend coming for a visit-we tread lightly around each other. Love still permeates the caged, drugged animals. Caged; by what? [Fear] Why fear? Because we're caged. Full moon sky light foggy day stand on porch staring up, feel superlunal vibe. What if world ran quantum? Water rolls down hills. If I think of you, and you think of me, what happens? Observer influenced reality. Events unconnected in normal time, space. The Magic rife. It supported better posture. I felt its full quality, course my blood. Meditation. Here it is. All possible. Cells influenced from a distance. Allows for extrapolation. We are living in a quantum-effect world, pretending we aren't. Imagine body healing from all earlier life-ignorance. Those PCBs we burned, as kids. For torches. All the carbon tetrachloride, adolescent bomb chemicals, gallons of gasoline-from endless internal-combustion parts scattered through two decades of garages. Too much cellular abuse to dominate. All compounded towards the present, I'm always becoming.

"What does it mean to be complacent?" she asked him.

The rusty VW van with a mission of miles on chassis, squeaked and jounced turnsignaless left hand corners. He could hardly speak. Clears throat.

Driving home. His eight bucks well spent.

"I never want to be so 'happy' and free of pain, that a movie about Tibet doesn't tear me to pieces." Like that one did. Driving the bus with hardly brakes, and a toggle switch for ignition. No locks. Real. Rough. Personality. Knowledge. More relative silence, cross Divisadero. Tears still crept down my face. Late night. Streets mostly empty except,

flashing police lights. Feeling linger.

"Culture shock?"

"I guess."

Odd, watching erotic videos with the woman who starred in them. Look at her eyes! Sez a lot. Less glamour, more boredom and pain. Ride early morning tendrils of fog, vortices road. Get the van that loves to start. Shuffle cross-town. Hitch ride to day on coast, high north dry hills, looking down at the wedding, I'm at, under tended awnings, on the dirt, bulldozed, raped, left with a few redwood corpses which stubbornly, refuse to rot. Hard to imagine this pleasant arid scarp, as deep dark mystery. Post Ivy leaguers, computer saying dollars and security, kids scattering. "Nice" reigns. Everything is nice. We need a four wheel drive to get there, in some sport-utility mind. Nothing a '51 Bug couldn't do. Nothing a AMC Gremlin wouldn't muster. I cringe when they shift, and worry for shimmy of washboard to damage their 40-grand Jeep super-something. A slope lined with fancy gas-guzzlers. The people with kids, too well groomed. Real, and plastic. Is this America? One wonders heavily. A conversation: What are you writing about? The void. How everyone carries in themselves, carries its seeds. How to use it. How to keep it from destroying you. "Men aren't in touch with their emotions." She says. Like, the sky is blue? "Yea, it is true. But what I'm talking about goes beneath that. Women can process emotions, but they're screwed up too. You get caught in no exit processing loops, that grind emotional insight to helplessness, and poison." She doffs ascension. "I'm referring to the loneliness inside each and every one of us. How can we use it? It must be some form of energy, or positive creation in disguise." I don't have it right now." "You probably do. We cover it up, with relationships, sex, material goods, houses cars jobs kids and the rest of it. It's always there, waiting." SLAM. Door draws shut. No more inner perception allowed. Crossed the safety line. Get drunker and forget. Threatened belief structure, shore walls. The next thing she said, had nothing to do with that topic. I tried to steer us back. Vainly. Get me out of here. (Five star food, notwithstanding.)

"What was it about those people?"

I ask Jesse. Streetlights slurry past.

They have no edge.

What's an edge?

To ask…

I knew what she meant.

"They have given up, and given in. They rationalize 'maturity' as cause."

I'm not lonely. I have this husband car high-paying job education all those other things you mentioned as cairns of looking for something else.

Oh, but you are.

Why else?

Those symbols?

The night shiny with almost too much moon. Metal contracting clink-clink air cooled cylinder heads. Walking slow the door… shadows me.

"I could have been one of those people."

Jesse said.

"I could have been rich by now. Tons of money."

I say: "And, as poor as they are."

"Yea."

She adds,

filthy with loneliness and

pause. My father doesn't know how to fix the problem. He isn't aware anything needs to be fixed.

So easy. He could say : I'm sorry I fucked up Jesse. I hope you can forgive me.

for ignoring you emptying all that alcohol abuse killing mom's spirit, etc. / thought implied.

That movie is housed in my skull. The collective pain of the Tibetans. I've been there I know them. It. The senseless destruction of high forces still incarnate on earth. Scares people. Build walls for fears. Ignorance. Forests of old growth obliterated. Environments erred. No turning back. The wedding. Those people: the Chinese. Our sacred insides : the Tibetan Buddhists. Outside world : forces of terrorism. Outside world reaction to inside world. Chinese : metaphor. Each and every one of us. No coincidence, majority of planet's population. Act out individual inside reaction to inner inner wealth. Have kids to vicariously return, replant desecrated ground, as no old growth dreams itself into being, any longer. The soil stripped of its ilk. It's edge.

I write my will again.

The void in it warms me.

She is lonely. Thinks speed has changed me. For better or worse, who cares? Done's done none to worry over. Wants to touch others; too afraid. Touch, because life may be short. Short as one 2X4 door's worth. Be bold. Regrets are hallucinatory moments, where actions don't congeal. We talk. Sensuality. And why not? The world is starved for love. Those reasons' reasons enough. (But there are more.) One note of intimacy, invokes song birds to gargle, and bathe in the sky. Not raw sex love. You know? It's okay to be turned on. There's noting it, and not caring. Enjoying, even!

Compliments are ego-building.

Nothing wrong with that.

NIEDECKER said it, without saying anything terribly riposte. but she pisses me off for being so unworldly, and addictied to the famous work-aholic hypochondria man. At the expense of herself. Typical. My past weighs me with heavy anvils, strung to my neck. Marx thought so too. "The past weighs on the Brain of The Living lIke a nightmare." Perhaps sTrongly stated NONETHELESS true, in so many cases of living.

My wife wrote Hoyt,

who feels the pull

and resists it.

"Don't get me wrong…" she tells me. "I'm not unhappy we got married. Quite the contrary. I'm just not going to let the definitions society perpetrates, control me any more."

Rah-rah

to all

who come

to her position.