\quote - When something is incomprehensible to me ("Finnigan's Wake," Lowry's "Under the Volcano," "Delilah" by Marcus Goodrich) I try to understand it, the author's intellect, and passion, and mystery. To label it incoherent is not only a semantic mistake, but an act of cowardice and intellectual death. Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse. The masses catch up with the incomprehensible; incoherent finds its way to an intelligently written page. - unquote

Mr. Kerouac

(Reaching Back)

Reaching beyond

You'll go out of harm's ways to avoid it. The extreme cases go primarily unmentioned. William Tyndale-strangled burnt at the stake translates holy scripture to standard vernacular English. 1535, or so. Harsh. (If you ask me.) We wonder why nobody speaks up? Of interest is the word heretic. Or mad. Traitor. A number of other cattle-brands as well. Danger to themselves, or others. Delusional. Fostering unsettled behavior in the standard automatons around them. No metals. No pats on back. Royal deeds, femoral arteries and political action spurt blood, when lacerated. Read as: Examine.

Your Life runs at full throttle.

The Question is:

How much are you gonna slip your vehicle's clutch?!

Burn hours' disk smell - your life's hot embers, falling…

"If it weren't for my kids, I'd have no reason to live."

Credo non-literati ardor, overheard in institutionally-colored hallway, batches of rankfile paper spilling her hands. If you slip the pedal carefully enough, you stay in one place exactly. Few see this high art form. Yet history tells its sordid meters of the exact faulted footing I am hungrily absorbing in oblivious low-life stories, rich in candor and mirth. They speak, and I walk letters' throng to twirling bottles, fist-fights heartbreaks plus words. Their names fall through crashed cars, worry lines, attestations, miracle diets and better sex. They pour and I drink, never able to slake a torrential thirst.

When I love, I'm more like a woman. I decide:

That Man with beach-ball belly across my path, has more room to hide alien automatonics - that fat sand gladiator … doesn't look up at the winsome stripes doesn't see lazy-afternoon jet vapor trailing to stitches, and blue-background genome puffs… X Y chromosomes,

before dissolving into cerulean 2:30 air.

I step around his bulk. Must go beyond being appreciated by men, and women, to enter world in a new way. Must go beyond the shallow version of marriage - to find a marriage within. The fable alchemy-union… not necessary don't create tangibly-dine romantic with woman inside, on a beautiful desert island, a land beyond sharks, shadows, saviors and caricatures.

Click. Flawed photo.

Sea salt drying on pant cuffs. Accordions opera vibrato, woven from thick room of cigar smoke, thicker coffee, and big red tumblers wine. A drunk sprawls in cold French fries and catsup-people step over him, assuming No-Corpse. Assume 'intoxicated'. He could have keeled from a heart attack, as six cops guns-draw traffic to a stop, fifteen blocks from impossible cranes lifting skyscraper parts - they guerrilla homely deli of gangly white crackhead stuffing pound pork sausage down pants (forgot it dere). Ambulance ambles post-shoplift drama, to drunk fryface afterthought. Customers begin to wonder if bum's even breathing. Crackhead don't know who put dat hamburgrr downdere! (He seems genuine enough.) Lady and cigarette with most beautiful crow's feet walking her eyes. Breathes out delicious-fazing cats, in empty-cornered cove-ceiling rooms

Door bangs loudly.

Coffee machine spits steam owner swears 'gainst gaskets an' handles he honestly wouldn't have any other way. All Zen null in pushbutton hushed-hiss devoid of perfect-cup compliments. Zero down-time sixteen year old whiz-kid dirtying hands, eager patrons watching. No man cutting makeshifts from bicycle inner tubes, FDA nose over counter. Off-duty inspector won't turn old-guards in. This moment: why he comes here! Music volume inspirational real-times patrons to clapping time. Boy Wonder charges espresso boiler, shoots owner small white ceramic cup. Band rolls drum plaudits. We watch her face closely, for signs of ecstasy.

"…On second thought Maude, don't ever git rid of that ole fussy machine."

She does so, pardoning no favors. Ecstatic crowsfoot woman takes another long drag, her fingers knit. I've never seen anyone smoke cigarettes like that before

As German's head slumps

on a bent parking meter's 4-hours-fer-twenty-cents, leaning radical side-stand divots of hot summer days gone by. Truck backs into pole bends 40° kink mathamatically oriented with bobbing heads, steep sidewalks, and generally-square poles to cornices, pedestrians plus streetlights. Precise walks mark tourists, following predetermined steps, frowning from bookmarks to bookmarks. Dire sad couples gray already-grey concrete, in sightsee party lines.

"… Know, do you?"

Snippets. Need a fusion of computers, writing, and art. Need to lend computers a form of creation, a form of praxis, a form of emotional lament give them tears fabric space and destiny give them the hilarious, and sultry laughters, out-n-out moments of earth-shaking doubt

I've thought that before.

As comp ticket Pakistani hip-hop free Indian food wind-rain hollow blows the door, the deluge the Mercedes, the blurry-sweat indecipherable YOU-PAID stamps, the hot tempers' men dancing marvels - the refreshing lack of BoyGirl bullshit, turbans awash in spins, and clapped hands. One picture on the wall, tweak pixels. Everyone looks at it. Engorged from the rest. But why? What is it about this particular… configuration?

Life has no meaning, unless you wrestle it.

Jewish tradition : When somebody dies, sit Shiva. All clocks stop. People come visit every thought turning reweaving holes in the fabric a departing soul rend. The very civilized tradition we dispensed with, for some reason. I grope an example-finger newspaper rhetoric, see-the capture of some cockamamie satellite. Weighs one ton, moving 17, 000 miles an hour. Trying to stop this contraption?-instant gold tin-foil post semi truck. Space shuttle exactly matches satellite's few kilometers an hour faster barely-hovering, going 17 thousand miles an hour plus or minus. Faster, actually, considering relative motion planet round sun rotation whole solar system moving the arm our galaxy rotating ways and means through regions of other ultra-numerous mind-boggling objects comprising a few elements clustering to supercluster (add s) of galaxies speeding condensing smaller parts of larger and larger moving bodies. Multidimensional, without a reference to measure 'fast' or 'where' we are actually moving

Beyond scale.

"I have a great deal of respect for women's insight, and expect more out of humans capable of ascertaining truth. In other words, I consider women to be emotionally "smarter" than men, thus I hold them totally responsible for all time-honored, self-destructive streaks. We are grounding the fucked-up dance of destruction together. A woman's silence is half the problem with this world going down the toilet. So I don't admire it. (JJackson 1991)

Kidding, of course.

I should overlook fact men mucked up everything. Why women are always right. Why men are afraid to be wrong. What filigree embosses the railings we lean, imprinting our palms, to get better looks at Rome's fiddle music? Ignore. Stop asking questions. Can we admit somewhere deep-deep, men and women are equal? Can be. Won't be. Gender-blind eyes, roving around? Admit menace, solace, prayers - some who do, and don't? Decide the color your slate, to drain the force of schools' perpetually-white chalk. Wander the gash of gaping-yawns, feel bombast that puts soundly to sell, and buy, forming the contentment that isn't? But most of all: can we bear to admit the destruction equally weighs our gender-opposite shoulders?

Men fess to idiocy. Women admit faults.

Headlines you're not bound to see, shrieking D-Day delight in. Kissing on corners, without regard to AIDs, or other foot-mouth diseases. Happiness forthright-(Hardy-harr!) Slapstick ass and back flank steaked. Father and Mother mill differences, become partially enlightened. Awareness of three, in eleven-thousand-layer reality cake. Calculate you vector out to local galaxy cluster. Call it good. Get nice night's sleep over

The Hell of it.

Planet's fun, cuz you can still be an Explorer. If everybody knew the answers… (knew we were psychic, could tele-transport travel other worlds thru conscious and out of the body dreams, or manifest whatever stupendous thing desired not be held by gender sex yearning depression pain loss need loneliness…) well. What fun it isn't, being a herd animal.

Imagination.

Reads reality. Where dies. Where born. At five rivers' confluence, include spirit-subconscious-mind +2, then inward-dive. Nothing but flotsam-strung rope marking the laplanes. (Nothing but excuses.) Lines quantum-Neutonian… no crossing here! Not my department. Come back next week (when we're not 'ere). Monsters coming up to breathe. Mud meets calamity-sworl. Clarity - swirl. CurrentVortex. Your downstream alarm. Going off.

Collision!

The real, and the fantastic. The gender war. The scenery, and the smell. Science, against the flowers. What it is down deep : Threatening

A Fear of program.

Men. Women. Agendas, seldom meet middles. Each side thinks betters, disgusted with its mirror opposition. The return to humus is overwhelming, at certain points in life.

The Aging switch is On.

They'll disable it, right after you're dead. (New & old turtles are indistinguishably frisky.) Shit works those ways - never glass-sharding the concepts, like how awful it is to breathe for seven hundred years, without a useable spaceship.

…and, "Sex, at ninety, is irrelevant."

She says, looking rocking-chair back, three short of her century. Word games plaid out, moves tried, scripted, reworked, and recognized. Nobody wails no more, 'less it physically hurts. Anger-somehow irrelevant. Boredoms travail. Old memory's new surface. "Did I truly…" think that thought? Sun crept stealth up dog-manure mountain, going orange hues, and deep scarlet

RRRRRrrrrr

A firetruck streams plugged-ears roaring a one way street's wrong way, scratching lost time. One minute port, par starboard runs slicker-yellow man, hanging off like old days, yelling house numbers. Something gone rather awry - namely, their computer. Auto-Seek blinks, as they haywire have-to-feel seat of pant hybrids in city-street Braille. Somebody having heart attack. Somebody smeared cross-pavement, smacked by pickup truck piloted by the one of countless imbeciles. Eleven people crowd around, watching her leather jacket drip blood from its collar. People afraid to unzip, and see her pulsating guts. They hear lost sirens, watch flashing lights pass six, or seven blocks' wrong-way. Pavement generously soaks life up, as men without navigation switch their pre-Cartesian brainstems. Foolishly, paramedics follow this firetruck-As person gasping handshake with death, as slicker men and women on their old-time running boards feel their throats constrict. They were

one minute too late.

Can you imagine?

You probably can't/won't don't want to.

Ever see a paramedic burst into tears? Blood all over hands lost a little bit too much

so uncanny. Sixty seconds. All it took. All of seventeen years old. Beautiful.

Speechless observers, higher-ups turn away.

Shielding hands from

No Sun.

Now, this instant…

There is no gender.

There is no day and night, no thought, we are everyone, reduced to rubble, meaning nothing but everything, because we are still alive. This person is not.

What else matters?

We feel badly.

Because she had to die right in front of us.

No reason. Whatsoever.

Except

To take us - HERE.

This moment, where

Judgment is suspended. Judgment does not exist.

Here/there. People reflect - there is the rest of our lives.

What's keeping us there? Quite apart from here. Addictions on less than opportune circumstances, garnets for rubies the FARM. Having bought it. Animal farm. Plots and plottius. Political intrigues. Rivulets and laughter. Biding the time. Long stories. Ontologies. Orders of laws, fish and chips, soggy laundry - the world. The works. Judgment, fear. You know. Everything but… what matters.

Life. Being live.

Addiction.

The thing about addiction:

We leak blood, engaging it.

That's us! We're all addicted.

Addicted to things-to behaviors clipping God's wings.

Things which depth-charge the roof of our world. The extent

we ignore, or rather, enable self-destructive tendencies allows the

behavior's exult inside us. Imagine using person B's surreptitious demise, to slide your slippery path-(abet temporal)-to a unique form of abasement. The fiefdom, where I used to lie, on striate sand,

gawking at jet trails.

I consider consequence of blowing whistles

you and her, trying on addiction, knowing-one soul has will to stop anytime, one does not. (Or so we think.) You silently vilify habit she's enslaved to, empowering her suicide,

participating to extent you do, seeking … you know!

Some people are cool with their habits, and some are not.

Choose wisely, when you live with others

on the walk

across that street, the chalk outline

still visible body gone, I notice an EMERGENCY ROOM sign one block away.

A BLOCK AWAY!? Where was that the day the firetruck … came here? We didn't move that bleeding victim because… (Too afraid of lawsuits). Didn't see a carry victim there,

waiting those million years of

Emotional destruction.

Separation doesn't come close/walk

her slippery-edged life. The magnitude of birds motors and ladles of soup.

The hemophiliac motorcycle racer. His dance of / with fear / Socrates death.

Crumbs of broken tortilla chips, and chewing gum in ashtrays. Christmas lights strung over blissed-out similes, spinning-dizzy salsa, cigarette butts littering

stone-cold grounds. Dancing makes us human

under reflection pool-shot beak, sting-ray eyes -

catch the electronic flash in smoke-filled room.

C Prompt> "How'd you like the Alcatraz tour?"

Okay ; mostly I liked

sitting in the smallest prison cell. Did you hear yourself say that?

(You take everything too seriously.) (Do I really?) Sleepy pupils set rim of dry-foam beer glass, droop and rise late night remorse for no interesting men found. The bad barbarian movie plays its brainwash TV, whose flaming moat lighting glitter-ceilings the corners grey-beard drunks slump. Surly bartender shoots two-fist tequila in-between mopping a high-cheekbone girl's runny mouth. Ringlet-blond-boy talks up-down, looks surreptitious at her inner thigh, so thoughtlessly exposed. Reminding bad habits. Things upsetting the racial balance - U-C caretaking issues - What U doin' ta-take care of yurself Right Now? Ask whenever co-dependence thing slaps your face. External realities inner reality. The world a surrealist's picture of bloody guts spilling the groaning repast tables. . . watching OP clean scalpel, grimace, plunge in. Again and again.

On video tape.

(That's me!)

The barren-desert ass kicked

cocaine, an' You like mainstream music?

One can steamed carrots, squirt the hot sauce = Dinn-din bell.

fired at work. Wasted his transistors - nasty melted smell! Worse than hair aflame.

Cranked his change

amplifier past ten. C >Live it up. Life might be (is) short

sounds golden, in a Bohemian beer brawl. Go-Best story wins!

Look to rainbow. M.O. : Open point Open Mic. Kerouac binding quote - When something is incomprehensible to me ("Finnigan's Wake," Lowry's "Under the Volcano," "Delilah" by Marcus Goodrich) I try to understand it, the author's intellect, and passion, and mystery. To label it incoherent is not only a semantic mistake, but an act of cowardice and intellectual death. Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse. The masses catch up with the incomprehensible; incoherent finds its way to an intelligently written page. - unquote.

The beginning of a very long stir-fry.

In the Gin-besotted night, we share the glasses on mean stares of bouncers, their tree trunk arms flexed, wrapped like torrential rivers eating corners of land - fraught with swollen freeze, just beginning to melt. Two stragglers read the newspaper like The Talmud, too chapped with brown log-necks to notice. A war movie rages the snow-filled tube, oblivious to the sullen drama outside its penned-in sphere. Time to go hike a take. To mispronounce officer. Violence looms thin lips, pursed to a severe line. Drink up. Now. I'm taking your glass. Sixteen seconds. Consider : The poignancy of war. How death erases the insignificant. How it lights the mundane. Life above all,

and Judgment is

delirium

Blood. Romance. Everything so beautifully innocent when you're twenty. War tills willing hearts, ready for pain. The variety finding me so deep and dark, I can't speak. Men; silent dumb posts, staggered by magnitude. Women prying. Thinking talk makes better.

Seven seconds. Arms de-twisting.

He threw us out.

A dreamless night.

"In the shortage of light

a photographer is forced to consider objects, by nature of their

haphazard illumination, he or she would

never normally organize into compositions

let alone, photograph solely upon

their intrinsic nature."

": The process of reconnoitering and

and analyzing the unusually mundane

always allows genius to flourish."

The man, blind as a possum crossing an interstate, lithe cane on boundary rocks, searching pea-gravel trails. "How do you know about photography?" I ask.

"My sight came back, for a time, after a fancy operation. No photographer became more engaged in recording the world than I."

He lectures willing ears while

I snap 39 pix of cool light gracing tips, and angles of things.

He sighs the

last frame fired.

How did he know that?

"Was it good for you?"

I nearly joke

(but he wasn't).

as sun's retina, its burnt orb finally drops

leaving hue absorbed sky

pulsated greens din burnished orange

shoots up from white comet clouds'

Clink.

He heard my shutter trip.

knew by its sound

what it meant.

Cheap cameras don't sound like

somebody's breathing from the lens. Doesn't sound like

somebody's heart stops a mirror cavatates a focal plane

as it's sliding across and time. Captured.

Iris leaving deathlife, it falls through space

gliding

the glass-smooth

lake of perfect moments gathered.

As old couple moves

glacially by, their tiny lotus

steps a synchronic stall, their wooden candy

canes bob the

rubber tips'

togetherness.

"Are you alone?"

I ask the man, who says he's Mr. Mateson.

"Why yes. Does it look

like I'm not?"

Loaded yes. I am there, conversing. With how much of my

soul? [Perhaps I'm not 'here' at all.]

Use for relativity:

"But… how did you… ?" (get here?)

"I walked."

Impossible to imagine. Not the reality I'm

eager to live. Not a

sunny time.

Wish you had more film?

I dip my head ascent, not conditioned, to how he's taking it in.

Last-light beauty hits aging couple's

arm in arm. Their security of knowing

someone is there death till parting

tears out hearts-

He seeing, me feeling

our roles totally reversed.

I take his house and telephone number making oldest-dumbest mistake

blind people are deaf. "How do you …" (I'm talking to loud.)

Mouth jammed its lip door half-said sin, that he finished for me.

Answer the phone?

I tell my name, in full. Apologize for genetic failings.

"Did you know, when I was a writer, I'd fish a whole day for a name like yours?"

'No kidding?' Rhetoric asking ego more open-ended answers. "Sure. I'd think about the vibe of each letter of the alphabet, then choose the ones with the attributes of a person, or concept, I wanted to create. Then I'd assume a name was anagrammed there."

I am faculty, at the non-existent university. In the furtive sense.

It doesn't and couldn't ever exist/breathe

such monastic filth

and still be accredited.

But such nothing compared to the rough suture between sex/gender! Didn't science "prove" men tend to east-west-north-south and women primarily landmark? True, the sexes - equally proficient at finding their way "home"- how could it be otherwise? Like, what is home? You masters of science?

As if you know metaphor.

I ask him, if I can walk him home.

Are you sure you want to, or is it compelled-a feel sorry for blind-man act?

Oh, but please! I am actually interested in you. What you have to say. Who you are. I get the feeling you could teach me a lot of things. About seeing clearly, for instance. Did I say that?

You're probably right. Only those who have no ability to see, appreciate what seeing means. They instinctively discover subtleties others seems to miss. We go straight thru lack to find what everybody's found there. We are too obsessed with what we're being programmed to see. I agree with thy estimation. Before you graced me with this lecture, on shooting what light points out, I thought there was nothing worth photographing in this park. I was blinded by my notions of what's suitable to snap. Of what's beautiful.

You see! we both suffer from visual prosthetics.

(Sound of feet on asphalt. Would I hear it, if he wasn't here?)

His place is seven blocks east of the park.

Neighbors greet him from closed windows, tapping panes of glass.

He instinctively knows who each of them are.

How long did it take you to…

"Not cry?"

is the question you should ask. I'd get a half block from this apartment, and become so totally turned around, I could have been in French Polynesia. Or Timbuktu. My life - so hopeless, I thought killing myself, like clockwork, every other night. I was a visual artist. Do you know what that means!? Losing your art? Losing your mind? How - do the two separate? My wife left me. She wouldn't be saddled with scrap-iron man. The weight was simply too much for her. She was young and beautiful. Needed to really live. Not be stuck caring for an immobile madman, once vibrant, and passionate in everything.

His walls, hung pictures. Blurry black and whites, streaking emotional rain. At first, I though them poorly executed. Shows how much I know! "My young friend, I can tell you're letting judgments impede intuition… Again - I might add."

hastens to chastise. My reply :

"How did you…[know?]"

"I fancy myself wee bit ova mind-reader, every now and again."

Man's right. I'm submerged in judgments, my lungs bursting for breath.

"Aren't my pictures 'beautiful' enough for you?" he says in the condescending tone of an artist. Knows they are genius-knows people ask ignorant 'experts' what constitutes genius. As if they had any idea.

I look closer.

Closer.

Details pop.

A craftsmanship explodes.

His subtlety hidden in flaws. Flaws his beauty.

They carry a message of the imperceptible-of… "You are silent in a different way, my friend. I assume you look now, instead of judge." And did I nod? "Young man, I had to lose my eyesight, to see these things. Don't make the same mistakes I did. Open your mind and look!" I feel him put a hand on my shoulder. I think. Didn't he? But no. He is fully six feet away, sitting down. I stood at that wall for a long time.

Can I come back, and visit you?

Surely. When?

On call. Eight am

working a flimsy aluminum telescope, wobbling towards the top of a poorly-roofed building, wind blows rain straight through my eye sockets, to back of my skull. Collecting, in a large rank puddle - shoes shlosh muddy tree leaves, a car exhaust-slop running down my arms from razor-sharp flashing, tar crack, defeating raincoat best intentions-hanging there-HEY! Hold the goddamn ladder, willya?! Rated 220# (my ass) in laboratory vacuum, weight carefully balanced top rung by zero-vibration overhead crane. Forty fuckin' feet's a long slide down vertical asbestos shingles to concrete. Never mind atoms are mostly free space, electrons some mad sidereal distance from their nuclear meat. The illusion of solid matter is hard. Let me ask you : What happens if you tie a buttered piece of toast to the back of a cat, and drop it? Didn't know. Toast reference made me hungry. Nothing at hacienda but Indian rice in nine pound nuclear-dust fallout cloth sacks, or potatoes sprouting desperation for dirt, sniffing spider tendrils towards a dead-ivy plant's soil, some impossible distance away. Like eating slow-moving arachnid from another galaxy. One where concrete ain't so hard, and water don't pour down your arms, hoisting overhead power tools in rain. When can I see you again? We'll go on another shoot.

How would that be?

Soaked and frozen

broken window old VW bus

leaking on right arm

can of ether ready

for steep-hill stalls

tires slipping, thirst. Men's

friendships aggravate silence

bodies tired-need cold sweat beers

Live music gurls to gawk at She's art

-ist lamming crack-plastic

accordion to musical form

as trumpets drill holes (in ) stale

smoke air gum tortured

in drummer's dry stone mouth like a sheik in

desert opium den - sticks tap a marble sheet

of cut brass rotating slowly

from unused

microphone stand

my head pounding with

subterranean fever

our dark-cage Christmas light

iniquity they

sculpt ice images, which somehow

never seem to melt.

Reverb Invades the part of us hospitals

used to lobotomize, leaving

distant crinkling paper blows

white-picket thoughts' fence

Unhinged Gate

Banging.

(Next round!)

Is good sex worth a nasty

Chest cold ? I am wondering,

watching her bellow that antique

windbox coughing TB germs

between short songs legs splaying wide

Smoking Camels to dill oracular

Pain.

pause-unmeasuredbeats-pause-never letting

cacophony reinwild partition wild, subdued

strumming explosion quick relent quiet ending but

why not - totally

expand?!

Sidewalk poets

blowingsteam words'

memorized harangues while

light finger jazz pianists

the

slash electronic ivories with

rusty, jagged fingers sing

hoarse cigarette-infested

gutterals.

Get up, wince, collapse back to the

over-padded chair , knee cartilage

hot with depression's bike ride

stomping low gear hills in frenetic

frame bending angst

"You need another drink?"

Teeth clenched, throbbing alcohol

can not abate. Sure. You think…

I can't get it myself? Let me tell you my boy - I have bat-like radar

in crowds of drunk

people.

Scatologica gains on better people's attentions.

Alcohol gets roadblocks out of the way.

Memories are tasked

with keeping track of bodies

run over.

Who are you meeting here?

This blind guy I met in the park.

Is he here yet?

Go ahead and take their picture.

It's too tern-dark in here!

Bullshit. I used to take photos all the time in places like this.

What if they don't want their picture taken?

Of course they don't. Not as we intend to catch them, anyway.

Don't even ask?!

That's right.

Yea. He went to get us some more drinks.

Wow. You're sure he's okay?

Just because he's blind, doesn't mean he's a cripple.

Sure,

I'm sure.

I saw a man you might see at a quay, in Orwell's Down and Out checking gutters for butts. I am ignoring his blatant regard for ignoring me adorning each moment we're in eyeshot with tangible lack of adornment. We're taut and insinuating, shuffling Echers a good twenty steps from each other. Angularly compels the other to sneak silent sidelongs and asymmetrical urges. His beard stubby as freshly shaven porcupines, he is one of many re-interpreted Popeyes, pounding cracked pavement for luck, their sea legs wobbly. God the devil - a way more interesting fellow than rote do-good istics of everyone else around. I watch him through some type of mindeye, until I awake. Till I stop watching, and he moves off down Baptist-Church land. He is so retrained, walking his tires-scuff, as if he's flying. Two cats yowl daylights, launch into well-matched fur-brawl-too close to lovemaking-hard to tell eithersex kitty. Their disparaging comments, making hindsight. The hard-edged cliff, we lemmings sail. The trance, that keeps us from hitting each other, all the way down. (Original sins.) Karmic destiny. All that. Digressions, to say least.

Disembowel(mind.)

Square plasticy sportscar parks in crosswalk like always this time of morning, does with Beep-Beep Alarm test thing announcing : Who wants me?! Ego-X-rays. Show how mighty-important owner thinks their car would be stolen in plain sight 29 feet from the coffee counter in nice neighborhood ( it's not going anywhere), big windows all-round? A morning jab of caffeine doesn't wake the slumbered from a starchhouse illusion. The horribly-witted smugness, hearing alarm blip warnings, as pedestrians try to circumnavigate her bright red consumerism. Bob Kaufman is shocked by all the girls he never made love to, and she is not one of them.

Live that giant walled blandishment!

Have fun in the process.

We'll provide you all the grey-zone drugs you can do, keeping the clunks of inner-machinery to the minuet, so you won't be disturbed at night, walking cool marble floors. It's hard to be a dogeared spearhead spread-eagle on short cur leash. (Flogged by Heel Boys, Sit! and Don't Beg?) One hard dog's day tieup, when other mutts yelp open fence yards - Be Quiet! Shush! Index point-finger menaces. Malapropisms. Trapped lost hunted confined in three-foot nylon cord, six feet from tasty hydrant, bladder bursting soul-reeking piss.

My new friend

was tired of nobody calling Spilling their innocent Woe.

'I've got the sniffles, and my car's in the shop.' Oh yea?

I lost my job went blind wanna kill myself haven't eaten in two days can't even

find a grocery store wife's

left me all alone stuck in a rainstorm pneumonia broke can't dial the

phone. Nothing but moldy bread heels gonna eat them right now.

Are yours a bad case?

Of what?

The Sniffles. I thought you had the sniffles.

Caller has forgotten self. Self likes to whine-

doesn't like back seat.

Phone

is suddenly

still.

Background noise. Café Flur. Some goddamn French word, signed neon out window, half cut off. Neighbor Tactless riffles mockintellectual ability to ecclesiasticize history into apostathought. He sieves linear innovative manners through clever polarizing filters to sharpercleaner divisions - discovering, (like radio frequency) hidden carrier waves between walls, as large as the adjoining rooms themselves. And so on. This manipulation of random access memory to enduring compressed hyperlink rationale designed to halo photospherical stricture round the metonymics of any plausible argument. Here, thought poses as complete expression. Here, pages of bored-stiff doodle notes riddle do-list numbers, and dada flowers. Much more honest than percussive ranters, spieling their bombastic textbookian drawls. One mindless ball point pen spiral, is truer than tomes of hypertextural what ifs, end-butted in Homerific proof. The voyage to conclusion denies destination its lurid fractal. What liberation, in closed-fisted emotions, collecting plaudits for clever fact sifting?

*

Pneumonia from

laying in the street in

the rain, Lost and

dejected, two maybe three

blocks from my house.

*

What I tell the university stooge, sitting there drinking his too-big T, spilling all ten large concepts contained in safety factors, from theory-ego boxes. Who cares about what you care about? And most importantly, Why? When was the last time you snake-slithered the unknown bathroom floor, of your pitch-black house?

Because you had to pee?

I'm going to tell you a secret.

What ?

You're afraid of me.

I am ? No I'm not !

Don't be so quick to retort.

You're afraid of what I represent.

Which is?

I couldn't follow his sure/unsure path. Stepstep

faith click from stick sans-

handle. You have to feel vibrations you

can't have anything between your reality, and a

sleight of hand. I think of condoms

Tick tick. tick

Tock. Late.

You're afraid of what I represent. An old blind man battered by life,

abandoned by loved ones & art. You're terrified I

could be you.

Shot pictures fifty, or so.

"Too tense. Too Fast-ah; nice."

his comments

saw each frame

inhabiting my lens.

"The exotic, in the utterly mundane."

You have to love seeing as much as not seeing.

I'm going to tell you something profound. For a long time, I could still see light. A friend made me a contraption that used small high-intensity lights which blinked, and I wore it at night, to change my state of mind. After using it a few hours, my inner vision began to bloom - gave me a three dimensional landscape of pulsating colors, and shifting shapes.

That's when I leaned on the cane too heavily.

This realization changed, by degree, my whole mental state.

Inner landmarks began to speak.

.

.

I skulked around my neighborhood, like a stranger from another time and place. People were too embarrassed ta-ask me hawzit going.

.

.

I would sense, how they felt. How their thoughts worked. What was true, what was trash, spoken without their inner-consent.

This insight nearly dialed me out.

What I concluded, is love as much as you hate. Which sounds easy, at first.

Tears are usually a long way from laughter-both must be equally accessible

in each moment. You must adore death, as much as you do life. Otherwise, your existence is a countdown.

And time runs faster.

You know what I think?

What?

The edge :

It's a micron-thick line between one state

and its other. Love females as much as hate males. Am I getting this confused?

Value judgments - love hate. Love drinking as much as not drinking. Love as much as not caring - can live without whatever it is. Ask yourself who's winning the war. Why not 'Check!' the king both sides, every move? Like Chess? Zowie. The enactment - the metaphorical tears and laughter, hidden in apathy. Addiction rubs balances drive. The war of curiousier and curiouser, forgets funs for guns. Ancient history reins.

Is this possible? I'm not sorry to say yes.

It'll wreck your world.

Cabin on the high seas, rocking.

Sick to stomach, waves washing rain.

Washing the men.

'Kidding.'

Why do we

say that?

Because the resemblance

of truth

is difficult.

At best, you can dissuade a person or two (in your whole life) from some precipice. It's hard to say that's bad - a foolhardy thing to accomplish. But, perhaps it is! Our brutish salvos fired in the general direction of a right way to live take no heed of tambor, patina or destiny. The cruisy-swish of fad + history, decimates individual notions, like DDT killings. This man is a fucking genius. You must constantly be re-inventing yourself, or die the living death of people too afraid to love. I have to redefine pallid old notions of 'sight'.

fire

secrets

the place

nobody can

heart

truth

us

intriguing

no breath -

the weight

laboring where

the secret

isn't.

[mining]

they are

A yearning for intimacy

a lack of trust

compeling us

to set sacred stones

in our

grimy concrete.

looking for balance

invent your own

pain and incarceration ?

False

irony bullshit

what is it

you're after?

I'm in another fucking world.

The people around me talking

endlessness I don't

care about. Their lives.

Shallow and futile.

Full of cars and

joy-buzzer backpats

(circularity)

powerlessness a feature of

the seal on containers

Powerlessness breeds hate of

towards perceived oppression self-

potential

you have

in other

words,

given up.

[lightning bolts]

[brackets]

[underlines]

LIKE

Men create war

for

intensity.

They weren't made to endure

monotonous

days.

every time you think

"I hate . " you are saying

"I hate men."

(Viceversa)

Because dreams happen in a language of poetry.

Write them down, if you can.

I told me. One night.

When he balked:

But I'm a photographer, not a writer.

You have to understand the logos you move through. Words are building blocks of realities. They are Neurolinguistic illusions you move through, nobody else is aware of. Your job is to record that reality, in a way others are incapable of seeing. You must have original conclusions based in truth. It's a big responsibility.

What a bitch! I just wanna take nice pictures.

You know what that word means? Sure. Who doesn't? Bitch: The sacred logos of Artemis-Diana and her Vedic death curs. Bitcean hunting dog. Bawd = Dog olde Englifh. Priestesses, with bad raps for hungry behavior. Bawdy houses. God-ess Lupa wolf bitch priestess the lupae to nasty 'prostitute' title. She liked to fuck (like the rest of us). And men with inferiority, couldn't screw her any horny moments. (Jealous.) Called Son of a …(Pagan God) scared blasphemous ChristLovers. Sons of bitches. Made them think the o-sin nasty deeds n-fantasies. Men always looking to control that gate. Who gets inside - why, when and how. As if they owned that-slippery hole themselves! Couldn't stand the idea, males didn't make the bodies. Drives them crazy! No rational men are alive, post-cumwad.

That's what he told me.

Right off the top o'is head.

When somebody starts on a topic you don't know much about-

show them all you don't know.

Ignore the minutia you do.

Why? If I have something to add?

You may find, you don't know one thing about what's being said. But you pretend you do. Logos is a way we gain power. We want verifiable reality - one that can't easily be stepped on, or regoddes-sized. Hermes Trisgistus was word made flesh. He wanted us men to override Kali, whose Om presaged life. Hermes had a secret that wasn't. Which made him omnipotent, in some eyes.

How did you learn all this?

The hard way.

The bloody way.

Foreshortened shrieks of little mice getting their tails whacked off, then stepped on, poisoned, splayed-guts all over the sawdust floor. Wet concrete glistens beach sand corner, where rusty implements of understanding the world slouch dejected in black-white breakdowns.

The traps remain.

I have to abandon my hopeful saviors, with insight is limited to empathy, and awareness of oppressors. They're in a constant state of awakening to their own victimization, unable to transcend a barrier, into protraction, from some subliminal foci of competent incisive partnership with modern society's DANCE OF

DESTRUCTION.

That non-rational, quasi-linear

Subterfuge.

The Lair. The self inhabits - a shewolf.

Kali brings forth

thy young - the hidden humiliations

of sirens calling sirens depths -

the world the humanity

inters it's destruction.

Sounds the bell Sounds the Alarm backing up covering its tracks.

And the moving van, high-centered, 23^rd and Church. The tow truck, rearing like an unbroken Stallion. Waiting for gears

to slip. Cogs

to break.

The workings of the world. A concrete scraped to gravel, at the apex of what we'd hide. The embarrassment of driver admitting - he should have known better.

Did it anyway.

Post box. Wet mail. Friend writes me:

I gave up on higher emotional intelligence when this genius lucid mother of five, penner of heart-stopping insights laden letters, tells me she's gonna marry jail-man. Arranging non-Mafioso letter of credit plus lawyer and time. I heard her first husband beat her-you'd think-with-all that penetrating insight-maybe… but obviously,

she hasn't forgotten.

Crumple.

Hello? Anyone home?! They don't like to admit. Killing the world is

the larger scale of killing yourself.

I used to hate the people who sat at home reading books. They polished their plate silver minds, and claimed to know the world. Now that I'm house-bound, to a large degree, I tend to see things differently. Funny word, that. I cringe every thousandth time I say it. See; we're so damned visually-based. It's downfall, as a culture. But that's a nudder-topic entirely.

Seems like I'm seeing torrents of shit, lately.

The more you begin to intuit, the more you're going to perceive, which will open the flood gates further. You ask what happened to me, after all the vomit wove my ankles, and knocked me down? Are you ready for a cliché?

"I ate it."

I thought people who didn't get out and do things, were wasting their lives. I thought they were parasites, rank termites digesting other people's impassioned lives, nesting in their soggy cellulite lairs. They are the Secret Bestiary, feeding off fearless-soul endeavors, birthed in bright, clean adrenaline air.

I can hardly believe this man takes his intimate time, to teach me things. He seems to be … somewhat past my league. Why bother? I am his public service? I thought he was my do-goodism! What a flaw in the fabric of time-space, first impressions are.

They were fine, dodging the bullets and emotional thrills. They provide useful functions, digesting all the vibes experientialists produce. Look at me! I get more out of your pictures than you do, and I haven't seen a single one! Thought and object must resurrect into other concise, nutrient-rich forms. The only thing we really do of laudable merit, is produce soul other beings grow from. Without experience-saprophytes, the experientialists would all asphyxiate from too many deeds done, and emotions felt. Know what I mean?

Somebody must render history into a relevance. And I say - let it be the couch potatoes.

A fascinating conversation. Experience, is out of fashion. Information rendering; that's the hot new topic. In front of computers. With bottled water, and Cliff Bars.

Besides. We can go anywhere in dreams. Bodies are more of an illusion, than a reality. And seeing isn't "tangible", when it's the state of mind. "Sight" exists independently of scientific measurement. If you're on the path of the doers and risk-takers, consider yourself licked-chops.

What ever that menaces. Licked chops?

Photography is an invisible art. You're at the mercy of light, a substance that isn't one thing or another. You must create to make it real, in some internal way. I used to think about light as water-an effluvium, which fanned out from river of sky. It has a profound effect on everything it strikes. More than simple illumination - and only a few people know how to see this. That's why photographers exist. And writers. You're here to document the magic of light. That's more or less what he said, while I thought about pork chops.

So; you can feel light?

Sight is a crude fallback, in some ways.

Are you at peace with what's happened?

As much as we ever are, facing our personal tragedies.

jooking, vestal, lowly, enumeration, deacon, desperadoes, poignancy, scapula, tamarind, postmodern, phantasmal,

gridiron, petrific, miasmatic, eradication, erasure, addled, disembowelment, combatants,

enshrined, sequined, cambric, amethyst, denouement, effaced, morbid, impunity,

blandishments, anterior, pratfall, tenements, impudence, reiterate,

enmity, minuet, avowed, germinal, ebony, pulping,

pimping, conced, adroitly, euphonistic…

Mr. Mateson, I know your friendship, only through a last name.

what is your name, if you don't mind me asking?

Because names aren't important. They distract us from the present. They make us concepts, in stead of acts. Like courage, and credit. But it's Bret, if you must know.

froths, antipode, paten, usurpation, totem, Neoplatonic, prerogative, cornucopic, palpable,

gyrations, conceit(poetry), swooned, epicritic, stippled,

camera obscura, triptych, undulation,

pyretic, spathe, connotes,

puffery, synesthesia.

These days, in competition rings, horses jump ground-up brand name tennis shoes. Did you know that? Sawdust and dirt are way out of style. So isn't it funny, that a more profound way of seeing things - one that makes humans jump metaphorically higher, with less stress and strain on their psyches, would be shunned, in favor of sharp rocks? Broken glass, refuse, radioactivity, and nastily-splintered wood with nails sticking out. That's what we're used to landing on. For all the good it does us.

I'm not sure I understand you.

We're existing in a closed loop, where the reality is outside, and what we think matters, is a kaleidoscope of our own making, inside. It takes a lot of time to make sense of the world. We spend our whole lives struggling with it. What I'm saying is - it takes the same amount of time to see things correctly outside the feedback loop we've created as it does to be in it. It isn't any harder to do. But for some reason (and I'm as guilty as anyone), we've decided pain should lie outside our brightly colored, man-made reality.

Women made it too.

Naturally. It's just an old way of speaking.

You have an issue with that? Or what?

Are women claiming they didn't make the world?

5

I was thinking about him, through the festivities.

Through the rusty condom machine, stocked with cheesy, temporary tattoos,

and surprise love gifts. In the unisex bathroom, where toilet ware stood eight rolls deep.

Cubana music blasting. I could die dancing. The rest of life is only an approximation of these moments. The mime-The feeling of not caring-bout anything in the future. I overhear some man talking the what he "is" bullshit. What we "are", is the dance. And I feel for him joanzing my date, eager to tell her his is-this is-thats of owning and succeeding. What does it matter? Can you tell me that? She is manhandled. Part of her life is distilled by that. It is her past. The alchemy. She is bride-The dibbs! They all want her. They can sense her conventionality, under all that exotica. Under the brilliance, and radiance.

It also corresponds with their pasts.

I miss the parrot calling out my jingoist shit.

I don't miss the part I played, walking it around.

I always want to build bridges to take people to-this moment of not caring,

when music moves your soul. I am compelled to ferry the enabled across.

But the part of me that de-odorized their inability to act in their own best interest

is tired of the gived-damns. Is tired of sorry for people who don't have

this much fun.

But you take pictures to show people how to get to such places.

I know, I know. That's the big picture answer. But the real life day to day answer = I can't live without capturing seconds everybody misses. I myself miss them, if I don't examine the world with artist eyes.

Can I make you an unusual proposition?

I didn't think trouble when I stripped off my clothing for a bath. He's blind, fer-christsakes. This can hardly be a turn-on. 'I want to show you some other sense. Now get in, and tell me when you're ready. I'm going to arrange a blindfold.' I hear him chuckling, and began to wonder the wise idea. 'Ha! The blind lead the blind! A wiser proverb than most people think!' which made me relax, for the ineffable reason. With a great deal of precision, (probably from having bumped everything in his apartment, half a million times) he threaded his way to the bathroom. 'You in?' I am. The water feels great. Steam it issued, made my hearing more acute as bubbles popped - their astute fizz… A life of a soap bubble - so short!

We are all beasts slumbering in the body of time.

Something life doesn't want you to know. It's a distracting fact to observe.

Let me tie this on you.

Seemed perfectly natural - taking a bath in a relative stranger's house. While he quizzes me from the other side of a blindfold. Sheet. Life is stranger all the time.

There's a word for what you're about to do. What? Mix up the senses. They were never meant to stand alone. All senses, like atomic particles, are interconnected. You mean quantum particles. What do you think comprises atomic particles? That's the very kind of selective thinking I'm speaking about. (As if thinking and seeing are exclusive.) What's the word? 'It's your job to find it.' he told me. 'Now lay back and relax. I've added some herbs to the water.' Is that what this is? I hold it up, as if he could see the small white package. 'Yes. I wrapped them in my grandmother's lace monogrammed handkerchief. I've never used the thing, till now.' Which flabbergasted me, a little bit. For the time it spent, neatly folded in drawers, holding memories. 'You… are ill at ease?' Am I? Just because I wouldn't do the same for him… Any of this? I thought of the few keepsakes I had of that grand old lady I'd called Oma. You shouldn't have. I have moved the blindfold. This thing is exquisite. It can never be the same. It is exquisite, because you have recognized its worth. Had it not been in this bath… I didn't want to believe that. 'This is an important moment for you. I wanted to send you onto it with the best champagne.' He's right, in his shy crooked smile. Now, I'm determined to listen, feel and smell. To honor a memory to the elders, whomever they are.

It seemed so tragic, I lost my voice for a moment. Could he see what he sacrificed to me? A person he hardly even knows?

Just steep here for a few moments. I'm going to get more herbs.

Easy request. Eager muscles relaxing. I had strange thoughts - wonders about the sex lives of cripples, and why do I keep thinking that word? Thinking about isolation, and loneliness. How does he clean the place up? Do the wash? Go shopping? Life would be full time trauma - no moments for 'work'. 'How are you doing?' Is he back already? How much time passed? 'Now we're going to have the experiment. I'm about to open a jar of herbs - ones you probably know - and I want you to tell me, upon breathing in deeply, where those meet the herbs in the water.' Huh? 'What parts of your body are a middle ground, between what you smell, and what you feel.' Oh. I think I get it. As smell became feel. My lower back; and my throat. That's good. Now we're onto another. 'This time, let the herb tell you what it does.' How would I know that? 'You do, but you won't ordinarily let yourself, because such information requires a blending of senses.' That word? 'Yes, that word. But words are uni-dimensional, wrought by people with dim understandings in the continuum of sense. They suggest an overlap of categorizations, not any seamless gradients.' Herb show you, through your conveyance of smell, what they do. He asks me questions, when I stray from sight he purveys.

That night, I dreamed. Of realized monsters, cast forward from life past.

I'm so sick of men! They call, and first-thing ask for an engineer. I'm an engineer, fuck head! Why not assume I am! Instead, they hear the most polite voice, saying yes, I can help you. It rattles them a little, but not near enough.

I know what you mean. I'm always getting Dear Sir letters. They go straight into the waste-basket. We're so shit on, as women in the professional workplace, it's ridiculous.

I am stapled to the wall, trying not to butt in.

I have never been someone who's into material stuff….

I would love to say : bullshit lady. Your car's worth thirty grand.

You and your fucking 4WD Range Rover joke. You think its not uselessly materialistic, because you bought it used? And it has some scratches on in. A dent in the rear quarter-panel. You and that Hassleblad, you're currently extolling virtues of. The one you supposedly bought at the garage sale. 'Everything in my house was a deal.' And that exempts you from materialism? You think you're any less dross than the Dear Sir assumptions you're a secretary, instead of an engineer?

Listen? You hear that?

I am pulled from a fray, I was two steps from entering. Lady, do you know how many precious minutes of life I've wasted explaining complicated details to secretaries, trying to be open to your contingency, they might know what I'm talking about? Car parts, electronics, camera shops, developing labs… They listen so attentively. Wait till you've blued yourself in the face with a convoluted idiosyncratic tale, nobody should need to repeat twice. Then they say, just a minute, I'll transfer you to… After awhile you play odds, and not bothering with political correctness. What? I don't hear anything.

It was a truck driving over a roll of bubble plastic..

I am dumbfounded. A roll of…

'No, probably a lot of sheets of bubble wrap, actually. The sound lasted too long for a roll.' he corrected himself. How would you… know that, I almost returned. And, what's so amazing about it?

Have you ever heard that sound before?

No. Anticipating me. You didn't hear it this time, either. Missed the miracle most belabor, popping them one at a time. All to the potentially loudmouthed-misogynist, in radical feminist ears. Who cares what they are broadcasting? It's their problem. How did you know what that sound was? (vague audio event, not long ago.) Simple. I was listening. And intuition spoke. I listened to rubbish while He heard music of spheres. You were distracted by their need to draw you into their argument. The oldest ploy in a book. Don't be fodder for cannons, if you can avoid it. Come on, let's go.

He took me to Church street, riding the J line. After #22, the bus jammed with misfits, yelling at their kids. This is life. He says. Hiding is impossible, in the bus of humanity. I squirm.

To the 45^th anniversary of a place you'd expect to find in the depths of the South. "You've come to San Francisco to come here!" its sign says. To this run-down purple building. To hear words of GOD's son Jesus. I don't go to church. You do now. Shit. But I was veering, to curiosity. That's better. I can feel your mood turning. I'll see what a metaphorical last light-falls on. And examine it closely. The place was cavernous and dilapidated and (am I really in up-n-coming yuppie Noe Valley? Can't be!) water damaged throwback to big pre-earthquakes, chairs and pews in mass confusion. A ragtag congregation populated the first two rows, listing to burly black man lay down truth.

Listen carefully. Bret said.

"Okay."

He asked me what I thought afterwards.

That was fuckin' amazing. I've never heard anything like it.

Funny. What? You would have said Seen, before I met you. Am I right?

He grinned. I've never seen anything…

Probably right.

The more you realize how fragile life is, the more you feel.

Look for an angle. Look for color. Wait patiently (but not too) for an innocent to catch, at an unusual angle. Last light is precious. You have to know why you're waiting, without over-analyzing the shot. You have to know when to let go, and keep searching. There are a number of perfect moments locked in every judgment of 'banal'. You've got to say the things you feel out loud, to get used to hearing their truth. This shot's time is past. I've got to move on. It's easier to act on verbal commands. Don't be seduced by equipment. You can take a prize-winning photograph with a cardboard box. Don't believe me? I'll show you my book.

Tumbling out of him. Wisdom. Cataracts of it.

She thinks it's sick.

"Friendship should be the most important thing. I want men to treat me a little badly. What other conclusion can I come to? It's all fucked up. It bugs me. A lot. No; I don't know what to do about it." He was young and toothy, with uterine smile. With a chin that dropped like an avalanche, and the unruliest mop of hair. Everything he said a monologue a hundred miles long, too riveting to do anything but dream about. As if her brother were a baby, his each word a sentence, or a complete paragraph in itself. People listen, and demand more, knuckles stiffened and enlarging, the thirst-quenching water pouring through their knarled hands, cupped to sacred well. Bret's heart beat the city's motored breathing, he heaves cocktails down bird-baby gape-beaks, those flightless creatures desperate for communion with Rorschach tests, and blood spots on clean satin sheets.

"That's why women have been subjugated for 25,000 years."

I say.

Her jaw drops.

"What are you…?!!"

Saying? Reflex disagreement protects her sisters, as usual.

Part of her hears it. Considers

an impossible

(Silence.)

"That thought scares me. But maybe you're on to something."

Educated computer graphic artist working for high-level cable TV show. 'Considers' with extra-reserved fear. Salsa music washes participants. A beauty of intimate touches, with total strangers. Life excels in music, flesh, and fine drinks. All civilized cultures realized the necessity of social dancing-which makes toil bearable. It swells the population, immediately after. More ways than one-People… Her eyes-imagine not seeing her eyes?! (Horrible thoughts to consider.) Bret is mollified by vibe of girl sporting un-erect StrapOn bulgin' under her oversized, wash out Levi Jeans. Struts the piss and coffee-stained sidewalk, next to the ear-scorching screech of train brakes. How in the FUCK did he eidetic her? How do you see a soul, without windows to peer through? I was amazed. What will he tell me this time?

Can't imagine. How would I sway soul winds, with my eyes clamped shut?

Bret, please enlighten me.

"You feel from your center of mass. All other components, make distractions. For example - if you smoke a cigarette and feel each breath of it - and I mean really feel, from your center out - you won't want another one right away. It's the same with men and women. You'll need a break, in between."

But he's not around. Not this night - or the next. The night of fermented artichokes, ice on side. One more please. Someone I have never met, buys it for me. (Strange concept.) Usual concept for women. You had to check your uptight culture at the door. No numbers given - it's all the same-damn thing. Our up-tightness. Many manifestations of fear. Bret said, not long ago. And I revel in that Latin way - so full of joy, and abandon - but women are clueing me to something profound, in slight deep stabs of dark, musk eye and flawless dancing. My drink, bitter, sliding down. Nobody here afraid to touch bodies, or emotions… but spirits; another matter completely. Holds my gaze for few scant seconds, though personalities are ebullient and, contagious. Say it's a cultural thing (excuse). For fever and passion. Money flowing. Dreaminess- music you must to move with. Why no one shows me who they are?

Fragile shells. Can't

sustain intense

scrutiny. They know

you'll see them. Placate

the disparity with

generosity.

I didn't ask myself what it had to do with taking pictures.

I'm not that stupid, anymore.

I have the last name for nothing. Fate demands it. This mad mania can not be denied its sad, meddlesome self. One must always be looking carefully, pretending not to - forgetting the entire ruse - the simple isms of searching to cinch the obvious in outback's tucker bag, hope it lasts the etheric voyage back to the waking world. For when it isn't fleet of mind and soul, pictures slip away. You've got to hoover light up, drink it like

Drink pain, like Bachus deals wine. You've got to Hoover pain up - treat it as a sacred gift - he will intoxicate you with creativity, and insight, if you find the blessing in catastrophe. Pain will adjunct your spirit with sight, parse your thoughts in compassion, and

Draino, blast up the stopped up plumbing. Bret tells me lots of madness I need to assimilate. A lot of glimmers of emotion thought - in chaotically organized grains of sand, numbered with small inscriptions on their burnt flat faces, sliding cascade final familiarity as words rush by. Words we might share in holographic tomes, with grey clouds and blue chirping thingamajings on their covers, azure gems bursting within. The song that's always the same, when we're not present to sing it-my clavicles, like xylophones sleep beneath skin, waiting bugs gentle caresses. Waiting stone, and earthworm for company someday before bleaching white under future's sprawling sky. The gloam has fled its lair, awoken from a slim sleep in our quickly rotting bodies of time. Old selves disintegration- with people you love - it is difficult, but not as difficult as leaving people you hate in yourself. A case might me-because the rush of daily activity. The 15 minutes to run

totally frazzled to the corner to

find the last bus departed alas

no reason to do anything but

sit in the sun and

drink life.

Deeply. Big, daring draughts of it.

Contemplate the parsecs of atomic particles waiting to become something profound.

Swish them around in your mouth.

Breathe.

Spit.

Hooo-Wee!

Tes-asss! You count them fence posts an'

lined in dat ole road and you

lettus know how many?

Yahear?

Skwished critters, too.

Alwya's wanted ta-know.

Pick one up, and mailer back.

Soul grinding Universal Quantum State questions thru

sloe gin slides -n- hot molasses boards of deep Southern summertimes

when you're on the verge of something big

when the vultures circle

and thieves lie wait

their greedy punches, hands into pockets

trembling kinetic, as self erects bevies of roadblocks

it will know, to knock down, testing the mettle of rampant feats

fears of success must hurdle. So difficult to see… the phosphorous shadow of having stared at the sun too long, blocking a moment to jump. To save falling, or bruising your shins.

Bret, I have a question for you. I'm not sure if you're the authority to ask, but I'm going to try you anyway. Shoot. He says, forefinger cocked. And did you know that pinpoint, accusing or shooting… Here, give me your hand. He takes it gently, feels the palm, and turns it over. Long fingers. Hands of a frustrated artist. With precision, he straightens my index finger, lifts my thumb, folds the other fingers back on themselves. One points up, one points out, three point... This was a major, earthshaking revelation for me. Back at myself! Nobody's ever shown you this before? He must have felt me staring at my hand.

How many times had I pointed the accusation of one forward, three back home?

Segue to question. "Why do you think, woman wants what she says she doesn't?"

As if men don't? We replay the role models organized society, and specifically, our parents represent. They were our original social blueprints. I'm not sure why I'm asking you this-but it seems important. What seems, often is. When we can recognize the parameters of the reference circle we draw out conclusions from, we are free to look elsewhere. A photographer must be an astute observer of human behavior. That's the way he, or she finds sublime between moments' rote of 'real life'. So-she is mimicking her real life father's strengths and weaknesses, when she chooses a man? And her mother's. And their problems, together.

Which is exactly what I do, as well?

Silence answers the rhetorical.

"We fell powerless against the seemingly indelible problems running pell-mell through us. But that is our fateful side, deciding change is too difficult. It is easy to change. Let me draw you an example."

He is full of examples. He is full of countries and stories and sudden moments and insights and superlatives and explosive silences. Everything related to art, though its word hardly actually mentioned, three quarters of time. I must think of action - as potential. As an even horizon, where a blip occurs. That blip is the immediate act, you are free to take, or ignore. "The next event happens at the event horizon of your black hole, that unknown. Of the void. Of the nothing. It is the creative space, that allows pictures to happen. It sighs the backdrops, that instigate consciousness, and all the lovely colors. Act right away for pain to be minimized; and growth maximized. he said. I scream. Between-tears, fully on positive vibe.

He felt 'irrational pleasure' at the sound of a felt hat, striking my carpet. "I know what you mean. The luminance of a backlit church steeple by a last-night, azure sky. With pinkwhips by Orion lightning rods. I heave inside, the irrepressible joy. Can barely stand it, to tell truth. We are members of the fanatical cult of diseased, deranged madmen, who sing to themselves, with warped wood floors too beautiful to look at. These wilted flowers to drag tears from eyes-we terminal vagabonds fleeing the mundane, the chinz, expected, and acclimatized. Why is something so intense, so beautiful, I find myself saying I can't stand it? What is it, I can't stand? My everyday non-subtle 'luminant' life? The shoddy moments of minutes crammed together into hours, into days, in this body of time

we leave behind?

These sublime, euphonic memories, playing full volume - I lust for a tape recorder, or a camera, exactly when I don't have one. Don't worry-life is a photographer's school.

Soon enough, those moments will increase in frequency. "Look, you're pushing frantically against some blocks," he tells me. "and in pushing, you continue to push them in front of you." Which rang forms of bells. Fear creates a corridor between us and the thing we're trying to avoid. There is nothing but vacuum behind the thing, so our movement thrusts it back farther. The right way to do it, is invite the block in. Lure it, like a fly-fisherman. Once it's in you, the path beyond is obvious. Until that moment, you are the fear of unknown.

Portrait of a dog, waiting so beautifully, battened by leash, and bench, each movement, precise and graceful. I kiss it's nose, because it so perfectly embodies God - and the universe's surprising patience, and its ferocious explosion, as a tongue-loll laborador appears, dragging good-natured humpty-dumpty owner, both whiny, and beatifically incongruent with sacred moments best friends tend to have. Peace and war now seamlessly integrated - bridge backwards, leaving hapless stranded center. Fighting a current, above water. Where most virulent mosquitoes breed, and present day fever lays, full of jaundice ruts of emotions, and everyday lives - swirls behind glass (why are the panes there?), as we catatonically stare up from a pathetic box splattered with dabs of glow in the dark paint. Our stars have hung there for lifetimes, flung haphazardly to lowered ceilings of moronic acoustical tile. Flat-backed, looking up-sheets soggy and rancid with sweat, from lifetimes of chilblains. Everyday events are texture between us, and what we want. But what we want is illusion. Do you understand? He only said see, when he tried to make its point. The rest of us, say do you see? when sight's not implicated. People strive their whole lives for things they don't intend to get. That way, they never have to realize how shallow the pursuit is. Everything is a boundary condition, we dictate. That's what he's leading me towards. People want to develop skills that will yield results outside the dream their boundary condition currently defines. But I was toast. Completely last-place lost, bamboozled and unable to even nod, in dumb-post recognition. What? is a boundary condition? Lets us regress. Lies are sagacious, in some instances. Do you agree? Yes. They can further development. True. Then be aware that the truth can foster deceit. Joshed me, all the time. Never knew which way's up. Around him.

Basically, the person who wants to be something, or possess some supernatural ability, fails to realize they are already employing as much of that energy as they are capable of harnessing. That's a boundary condition. Somebody who wants to be psychic, or influence the world in some artistic, or unexplainable way, doesn't realize the (perhaps) very profound ways they already do just that. The skills are so seamlessly integrated into a daily existence of the organism, it can not rationally deduce them. We are the wood of tableau, pieces move upon. We are the pictures, minus the emulsion. Note the event-horizon of your boundary condition, and all the envelopes of it, next time you push your shutter real-lease. Josh Bret, something makes me want to blow my brains out, and start over again, when you talk that stuff. Where the hell are you getting it? 'Basically, my friend, the more you're able to address events and emotions (and mostly the latter) the instant radar blips something's out of balance, the more you're able to condescend "destruction". The layers of judgment and fear you'll coat the seed of change with, don't have to rupture like sidewalk concrete, at the simple thrust of a weed, from the casein of its slumber.' Is more or less what he told me. 'I do miraculous things to you, because you have kept your boundaries smaller.

On purpose, I might add.'

Which jilted me, but I know he's rude for a reason. I know it's true.

Funny how those words are almost anagrams of each other. Rude. True.

You and I are co-conspirators, in an undercover work.

We are trying cloak the secrets, helicoptering over them, dropping parabolic mistletoe, and seeing who disses who. That's the beauty of two. One hits their boundary condition (or simple fear), and the other can take him/her further. The synchronicity of people's conditions, always leaves gaps you can slip through, to bootstrap beyond. Never condign yourself to mediocrity, when there are others, of like mind, around.

(Here-here, Bret.)

Entropy is catchment for a limited vision, or the judgments of 'organized' and disorganized. What if systems actually rendered to more complex states in time? Like that giant fungus organism, stretching many square miles? The largest living thing yet discovered, yet we call it primitive. How do we know that? What if entropy has a complexity so sublime - so profound - we can't even see it? He is right down the alleyway of my thought. I can't "see" half the things he does. Imagine the technology of thirty-five years ago, compared to today. The clunky, cast iron curcuits whose existence carved that era's cutting edge! How mournful they appear today - in this beginning of the gravitational collapse of information. How trite, and perfidious.

What do you mean-gravitational collapse?

Collapse. The etheric weight of data - its compounding psychemass. Like matter - at some crucial point, it attracts itself to a point.

And what might that point be?

I was sorry I asked.

.

.

.

I shouldn't have wasted my breath on you. he admitted afterwards. 'But I suppose, that's what breath is for - ' he becomes thoughtful; runs his hand slowly along my sleek, black-lacquer railing. 'To hear yourself wasting it.'

I didn't see him for almost a month. In which time, I thought the raving, he left me with. Its congealing ball of question marks, sticking to everything. I stumbled over it, getting its tarry substance fixed to my shore. At first, it seemed like madness. Imagine somebody you thought you knew -spouting that gibberish! Makes a person question everything that preceded. Let me back up, though. I'll try to relay what he said, that late afternoon. His theory … or should I say …

an electron is a blueprint of the universe. An electron, like a DNA molecule, the blueprint of biology. 'All contained within layers, flying outwards, to larger and larger scales.' Electrons, those knots of photons we attempt to pin down, are time-space hyperlinks. 'You know what'ahm talking about? That's why Heisenburg invented the uncertainty principal. They [electrons?] are a living state of collapsed information, containing quantum scions' spin off - as energy jumps occur - themselves, even more highly compressed states of other dimensions. Because each blueprint for reality has a blueprint directly under it.'

Why is he telling me this?

10-29-97

In the escapist world o'literature, slash rain pouring over window, leaking between poor-putty panes, I read - and dovetail tragic destitute Henry Miller's love of wife June - yelling frantic poison at each other - from some bejeweled perspective - while Anaïs admits she likes being hypnotized by 'manly' men, by 'rough types', thinks rape may be woman's secret erotic need, sez as much, trapped in a crystal cave of refined complications, for living mind's tyrannical life, instead of that hysterical communion with nature. I guess she menaces things, people hate to hear. Her bored with 'nice men' sisters, must have crucified her. Which is all madmess, fraught with truth underpins, sticking into feet w/broken glass, and all that stuff. The bottom line is, son, (he tonguecheeks) there are only two sides of the fence. You keep trying to make them men and women. Or perhaps, artists and non-artists. All such divisions are meaningless. There are people in the moment, and people who are not. Art is living. Art is driving a car, and not being killed. Art is watering houseplants. Everything anybody does - each and every breath, no matter how labored or phlegm-choked, makes art. It is impossible to botch being an artist. Unless your ego, fixates on it.

(It's a good thing) I had time to think, before I saw him again.

'Long time no see!'

His strange humor.

You been taking a break from the wacky prophesier?

No, just thinking about what you said.

What part?

All of it.

I'm full of it. Don't take me too seriously. I will continue to take you seriously, because I like what you say. Even if it goes over my head, sometimes. He clicks approval. With tappin' cane. I fight the impasse to ask questions; I relent. "If you had to pin anything on the insights you've acquired, what would it be?" My, we are eager! I thought you'd be distant, and trivial after our electron-misunderstanding. No comment betrays I couldn't care less! a little too loudly. He lets me sit, for moment's history. Probably the loss of my love - the one of a lifetime. I nod, as if I know what's happening. It's the kind of thing… he clears his throat, and wipes his eyes. It's difficult to articulate. Imagine cleaning the toiletries from a shelf you've inhabited for years. Everything is going right in your life, you're meeting happy, well-adjusted people, work is challenging, people are genuinely fond of you, exciting travel looms on immediate horizons, and quite suddenly, you've found a razor blade. Just laying there, under the Ace Bandage. And you quite rationally think - Oh, it's time to slash my wrists now. A seamless touché - to disappear where no one can imagine. Not even yourself He checks for shock. I am numb, with his rendering. Four or five tears have rolled down the tracks of hollow, sightless eyes. you see? Before that, I couldn't cry in public. Made me think of Viet-Namese Honda Knee. Happens when two scooters are passing, and anatomy collides-it's… reportedly serious. It's a bloody godamned mess, for the record. When you see those howls burrowing your brain-I wonder, if he felt that razor blade, or saw it. I was about to ask him: Before, or after, you….? (were blind). The didn't matter, finally got me.

"You want to know more? Are you sure? Okay. I trust your judgment. I've been thinking. Imagine DNA molecules wiggling around doing their thing, their comprising atoms continually changing energy states, emitting and absorbing photons. Got that? Now - here's the tricky part. A photon emitted from an electron dropping its energy state is decoupled; and the decoupled photon - (remember, electrons are little more than photons tied in knots, as far as we know) - are caught in a form of web, inside the complex molecule. It is almost a closed system of energy - and here's the intriguing part - these rogue photons smear across valence shells of the atoms in a larger structure - they de-localize, and become probabilities. One single photon can interact, through a resonant chemical shockwave, with a thousand other molecules! Do you realize what this means?"

A 'conformational transformation' doesn't mean much to me.

And I am amazed it means anything to him. He is shaking, trying to convey a magnitude. Of the kill. Thought, with obsidian blade in hand, dripping high current. Static, St. Elmo fire. Scarlet. Ochre paint on face. Unable to properly articulate the magnitude of steaming entrails, littering our frozen ground. "I'll think about it"

My response. What else is there

to do?

The biggest problem is the backlight. The lens washes out with sun, reflecting oblique angles. Rainbows swirl balls of pedants taking stabs, at otherwise 'perfect' pictures. Beautiful. Except … without minimum insight to realize, that moment makes the ball. And there is nothing you can do and nothing you can wish away with and there it is! One immense instant of eternity an intuition pushing Fire Alarm CLICK! shutter no moment but this one You Got It. Unique, in ten thousand years. It's flawed, I tell my friend There's no such thing as 'flaw'. He retorts. Heavy vitriol for breath. Add ignition. What you call a flaw, sez the profane … Sez what people are too afraid to masticate. Too afraid to internalize. The picture is ruined, because it is not sterile. It is imbibed with a riddle. An I, inside my self, believes him. Om I, from beyond 'time' electrons make fun of. Beyond thinking-I think. I am bothered by death, he calls riddle. How can I sell shit like this?! People see aberration, through picture's obvious power. No. They are seeing the power. That's what bothers them. It silences them. It is their eternal, showing through. Helpless, in its grasp; they must judge. And most importantly, you must judge. Inchoate thoughts are dangerous. They must be labeled Flawed. I personally think, you should take more flawed photos.

Come to peace with them~!

They are now your teacher.

He gave me some grief, but I bought him thirty-five rolls of ten-dollar film.

For three bucks a pop. Connections make friends.

ViceVersa.

She as a

silent wildcat.

Imagine the scattered crumple

of cigarette boxes

bottles of wine

candy wrappers

computer paper

DC amplifier humming

U see us laying there, she's on her back

drunk.

I'm lost.

I'm afraid

I don't know what I'm doing

where I'm going what

it all means.

Forlorn. It's you. A chest ripped up, the observer peering in. The deepest most fragile bits, pulsing. So clotted and bare it's excruciating to look. To hear. I try to say something-gets car crashed, in my throat. Horrible. Solutionless. Quiet talk, slow---staring at ceiling. Caresses make is daylight. The past offorgettingitself. "I WANTED TO BE SOAKED THROUGH AND THROUGH, THEN STABBED, THEN THROWN INTO THE GUTTER, THEN FLATTENED OUT BY A HEAVY TRUCK, THEN GROUND DOWN INTO THE MUCK AND MIRE, OBLITERATED, ANNIHILATED FOR GOOD AND ALL." but it was nothing like that. Not so self-absorbed, and actively seeking death. The will to life carried her ebb tide, through the forlorn malaise. The single flame fought to burn, without wax, of still air. And it wasn't that, either. Like a trance. Speaking in legible tongues. The content scorched my heart, tied my tongue to knots. I wanted to say something kind to help. I wanted to. Before I realized she was me, and I was her. And somewhere, we're all lost. That lost, and alone. My soul shaken, cognitive hand holding cigarette, burning the carpet, unable to focus. Unable to orient myself, to accepting the pain.

She empties the over-slopped ashtray, pushed aside the forest of bottles, and we make love. For two days, eating frozen pretzels with kosher salt. In sixteen hours' stint, I tell her about … and the fire alarm goes off again, so well shrouded with cobwebs, and attempts to shunt it off, flinging towels and T-shirts, signaling the forgotten sun. Where were we?

You were telling my arm about somebody.

Oh yes. I thought your arm should hear this.

God, your arms are strong! She's kneading my neck, grabbing my arm-raked nail lines, art aback. Kids. I hate to admit it. My left is stronger, because that's the one I use to hold them down. Kids are strong! So I like to think of it, as a grip-workout for windsurfing. I vice them into place-you have to! To shove IVs in their arms. While bobcats and bears stalk her living room, taking turns from their hardware-cloth cages, so as not to tear each other apart. As cubs and cuddly kittens, they'd been stars at the Mall of America, increasing sales of succulent chocolates, and Asian-stuffed animals. Now they're dangerous food vacuums, growling in postal nightmares come true. Man out his open sash window is berating himself, and we hear my soul, wincing. The craftsmanship of cars He loves / hates What they do - I imagine large-pored hands brimming technical skills eight years in percolation

now, hardly even used. We are swatting imaginary flies for him, sea water sloshing out the funny-shaped gunnels, sweating two bodies skulking together, in lusty musk filled Roman bath. He draws breath from eight huge-bore pistons forged and stamped, pumping alien atmospherics-deadly to life on earth.

What was your name then?

Same as it is now.

I have a different one.

No diddling?

Yes sir. In the old country, we used names Americans can't pronounce.

Tell me.

It's secret. Names are magic.

Indeed.

How did you meet her?

Who?

The woman you told my arm about. My bicep's curious.

At a party.

And you went to her place?

She lived in a temporary shelter, like a Steinbeck Novel.

Science Watch p.45

What is the state in-between uncertainty? What is the fence we walk upon? Where is the eternity sandwiched in the concepts we theorize into existence? uncertainty thermodynamics entropy judgment action thinking mussing mulling mule-headed thoughts into tangibility, no wrong actions it takes the bigger ego and smaller brain to forge ahead in meteor storms where the principles of two states coincide into the dense Euclidean universe. Electrons as DNA, quantum particles for computational aids in futuristic computers on pentaflop drawing boards-shit!! They send protons billions of light years away, perhaps, teleporting information on some light angle polarization, god down, looking up. When we least expected it. Genes parceled upon platters, mulled over by overpaid grant scientists, doing blotter paper acid on their few days off, probing morphogenetic fields. Bottling the infinity of rules inhabiting the short segment of line, points attached to finite ends. For amusement 'in silica', where computers are bored completing endless scrutiny of detonation tests, resolving half-millimeter details on alien instant landscapes, obliterated by direct hits. The genocentric follies are so variegate, slipping through the cracks hybridizes us. Morphogenetic fields rules and sequences that appear finite, and containing, but… I better not get into theater like that. He launched into a dialogue about stones from the Queen of Shiba's palace, originally taken from Yemen's high country, where they were prayed about by naked dancers carnalizing hidden psychic listlessness, a good five thousand years ago. Then he ran back to the single atom theory of computers. NO PROBLEM; WE'LL JUST GO SUBATOMIC. His loud and clear answer. DON'T YOU SEE HOW IT ALL RELATES?

It's because very minute changes can interact in massively complex ways, un-understandable to normal rational methodologies science employs. It's because female fireflies eat the males they signal with their irresistible cool luminescence, to assimilate lucibufagin, a male's chemical protection from spiders (another bug endowed in genetic pre-dispensation for post-coital cannibalism.) Basically, the science teacher counseling the crackheads, was one herself, addicted to eating mates, and throwing the empty vials away. It's funny, the way things work. The scale-invariant self-similar fractality of it all. Makes a shoreline as sharp as a dull razor blade close-up, from above. Up there, God looking down.

You're caught in a power struggle. Let me make an educated guess about your upbringing - mom was overly protective, and dad blamed her for his (and your) apparent incarceration.

Does this ring a bell?

"No, it doesn't."

But it did, somewhere.

Dad blaming mom for his not being able to cut loose and be more Bohemian. e blamed his children too, but he conspiratorially rallied the kids to his side, by highlighting his wife's obvious fear of boy-things, recreational drugs, third world dirt, and highly-powered low-slung vehicles. 'See what your mother makes us do?' (Winkwinks&nodnods) we all have to humor her, or there'll be that emotional hell to pay. This demonizes moms, the the early cultural archetype of woman, to her aspiring adolescents. Mom is restraining us - manipulating our circumstances to suit her ends. While dad's home-free to revel in his displaced mechanisms of self-restraint. 'You're mother says...' : God's tablet, continually handed down. 'You know how she gets.' [OBEY.] Live a safe sane life monetarily fueled by an upstanding job. Depravity. Deprogram. Risk is bad. Castration. Read books, don't do crank and fuck in the back of a Pontiac. Weak springs. 50's cartoon - rocking up and down. What's this stain on the seat?! As if she knew, t-be so indignant. Catsup mom. She's on her period. Why you eatin' in the back seat?

Almost funny.

Sort of.

Mom becomes woman in general - Conspiracy Theory - women want-don't-want domesticized men. Domesticated animals. Dad becomes man. Sorrow and love. Attachment to...

"Maybe you've got something there."

I tell him. He taps his cane nervously.

"Beers my dad does blame my mom. How did you know that?"

"Elementary. You're like me, and I grew up in a family with that dynamic. Except my mom blamed my dad."

I tried to imagine.

"Your mom was the free spirit?"

"Totally."

"But not really, because she used my dad as the excuse to pin herself in. So in fact, dad, in his relative couch-slouchy way, was the free one."

"Because he did what he wanted to?"

"Nothing of the sort. He was as trapped as my mom, but he knew he was under his own thumb. He was completely free to change, choosing not to."

Bret gave me a few minutes.

Mulled it over.

Twice. Started again.

Bret, you know ... I ...

You're blowing my mind. Both my parents were in both roles, in completely different ways.

Take a lot of pictures, then let the subject define which ones you keep. Don't anticipate so much. better to have a successful snap-action, than an unsuccessful one, frittering away precious light. Even if it isn't a prize winning picture, make the best you can with it... get the optimum, which what you have t work with. It will teach you to respect those precious moments, when the mediocre can suddenly become the best hint to stretch the imagination to new limits. Taking pictures is a competitive running race - you don't stop to talk to paserbys, you feel the crunch of the dirt under your feet, and pace yourself to the ribbon. Magic light doesn't last very long. You have to keep going, and not get stuck thinking the details to death. Light will show you where to go, and what to do... like the unseen wind guides a pilot, tides a mariner, and so on. Keep in mind how much reserve you have, so you'll be sure to use all of it, and finish the race. Pictures have to be interesting. They have to say so much, they'll captivate and audience. There must be a lifetime of introspection in each image, for its picture to achieve a timelessness. All great photos have captured a corner of infinity, somewhere . You can't skim pictures, like you do books. Every element must say something by itself, and in the context of a whole. It doesn't matter if the audience gets it or not - they will still sense that something there, they need to pay attention to. Pictures can be full of secret codes, neither the photographer, nor his/her audience need be fully aware of. Let them be. If you try to frame them more "intelligently", you will devastate their questions marks. Don't break your pace! A shoot should have a momentum to it-one that ties in with the intimacy of moments gliding by. Never take a single second for granted; but don't be intimidated by their passing. It's a respect for time I'm talking about here. If you're thinking too much, you're missing important points - your telltales, that give you clues where sublime hides. If you're running out of momentum, stop. What you shoot from that moment on, teaches you to take pictures without passion. I'm not saying you won't get good salable prints - but are they the essence of what you're seeking? The state of mind-you understand me? Don't fatten yourself on mediocre photo shoots. You'll grow heavy, and unable to move, when it most counts to do so.

Ironic, isn't it?

So... what other issues do you have?

A lot.

Huh?

The gulf of the sexes.

I am? Yes. Caught there. Who isn't?

A shallow knee-jerk response. We're attempting to move beyond the ruts most people drive through.

Oh yea, I almost

forgot!

I'm going to tell you a trick in life that's both easy, and difficult. What? You just go ahead and judge, but don't judge the judgments. I'dn't getcha. What do you mean? It wasn't a short answer. Mostly because I didn't get it, and he had to hit if from five or six directions. You've gotta be open from your core, when you meet situations. Be more specific. Okay. Take people for example. Usually, we assume a stance others have to prove themselves to us, either through time spent together in their company, pr deeds accomplished before we'll be open on profound emotional levels. They have to prove they won't hurt us. Yea. I agree with that. Why not be open right away? Why not assume your proximity to them, by acts of fate God synchronicity or circumstance, are all the test you need? What do you mean, open?

A man who doesn't know how to play the piano is playing the piano. But it's odd. He's almost too good, at not knowing how to play. And yet, some of it sounds very deliberate. A Nam vet in coal-dark sunglasses watches the pool cue, and the bearings of the overhead fan grind. A late blooming hippie with a Mao shirt is crumpling, and cunningly twisting newspaper into balloon art, as I squint through two pints of stone-cold ale.

I mean...

God. That was somekinda answer.

"Open from the deepest level. The level of blood." - the kind of connection you feel with your siblings... you have any? Sure you do. You don't seem like an only child to me - even if you don't, (you know what I mean). You can be estranged from your parents for years, and then when one dies - you're fucked. Because you're open to them on some deep level.

For instance - that man over there.

The Nam vet.

That's when it began to get weird.

Be open to him. Bret said. Pretend he's a member of your family. I didn't want to look him in the eyes... or anywhere near them. He must have infra-red vision, to see through those nuclear test glasses. I imagine him flipping out coming over and killing me, in some arcane Asian way. I can do this without looking at him, I realize. He's my uncle. I have known him forever. Open. A garage door, creeping up. Within five, he is sitting by us. In three more, I am hearing a life story. He is shamelessly telling me intimate details, as if I were his closest confidant. This; from the man who didn't say a single thing (far as I could tell) for an hour. He seems to know intuitively, Bret has been there. A drunken, fucked-up articulate marvel is gracing our table with tales. I shut the door. Just to test the theory. Judgment pours on top. The door supports them, like a roman column, a mile wide. He's dirty homeless mentally damaged post traumatic bleeding self-abased rambling drunken alcoholic ADD a whole lot more. A coastline of jagged rocks, ships flounder on. Open the creaky door again. He is interesting. He is human. He is articulate. He lives a radically different version of "life". He is not afraid to be different, or recognize his shortcomings. The column is gone, and judgments ring hollow, when hit. They have lost their support, and seem ineffectual-unsafe to stand on. Time to go. We shake hinds. Embrace.

Bret didn't have to say anything

in an all-night takeout pizza place, where the same thing started to happen

ten minutes later. Dead-end job forty year old flypaper-for-judgments pizza jock makes careful artistic pie for us, engages in deeper sharing than I usually experience with longtime acquaintances. The judgments are still occurring, but they have no cutting edges. They are stillborn particles winking into and out of my virtual world, like neon lights on a strip mall. They don't make you buy anything. Fete and artichoke hearts, in his beautiful pattern. I've never had an art zog before, I say, cheese running down my chin.

Your openness is art; which lets art happen. I tell him about the metaphor I designed. Of life constantly running at full throttle, and us slipping our clutches, thinking we're trying to accelerate. Our pedals all mixed with suppositions. Pressure plates warped-disks finally fired like glass. Smooth. No more friction to grab the wheel of life, spinning the intensity of the sublime.

Those men showed you the best of themselves. Why?

I wanted to know.

Because you unilaterally showed yourself. You didn't make them prove their worth first. You weren't operation-oriented, probing and poking with judgments. They saw you were genuine, because your judgments came up. If they hadn't seen them appear, they wouldn't have appreciated how you let them go. Only people at he core of something, can let the little stuff go.

As I'm sure you're aware, it's possible to have this kind of relationship with inanimate objects as well. he said, as if I'd actually thought of it.

Bye Bret. When will I see you again?

'When it's perfect.'

An odd answer.

He knew his tenants by their steps. The way they shifted their weight, when they walked. He laughed when the fast food tender unwrapped two frozen burritos, and put them in the oven for lunch. I quizzed him why. All this food around, and he gets something cellophane-wrapped from the store? Don't you think that's funny? Woman yells from hot oil fryer. Twenty phone numbers on the wall - the last one : "THE MAN - 911".

Can we go for doughnuts? I'll go.

The polite schizophrenic in the all-night gas station, actually buying his cups of coffee and hard-sprinkle donuts-his recent past lined like sarcophagi in neat contained rows. I count six cups, and seven furtively crunched napkins. His pants hang way down in back, by the bustle that's a number of overstretched unwashed wool sweaters, thrust into the abutment of his missing-decal jeans. Another doughnut - white glaze this time, and as he wags his finger at invisible Martians, populating a nearby deserted table, I walk out.

What'd you get me?

The drink barfly (still cute) is conducting unheard rhythms in stoned-out 60's music, having recently emerged from an underground party where Jimmi Hendrix brother plays the WALL OF SOUND. Can you imagine always being Jimmi Hendrix's brother?! She asks the seenitallbartender. 'Yea. I'm sure it's better than being Andrew Manson's brother, which is what people call me. Tell me about this place. Be honest, he threatened. And I was loose enough to do so.

It's a bar of people running from loved ones, feeling stifled and slowly murdered, under all the caring. And the harmonic of the woman in the other bar- the one with the boyfriend that's too nice to her. The salsa music raging. Here I am. In her shusshed confession.

I left him. Insisted I walk home alone. It was hard for him, to let go.

And it was 3:02 AM, snow falling it the mountains. Tons of it - blanketing everything in sight. As I gazed at photographs of people I've never met. Old seventies prints that seemed like a mission through time-an objective, a million years ago, next to the lady who lost her innocent eyes somewhere, and desperately needed to find the it. 4:30. Like staring at DaVinci's codex, without reference to twisted sides of genius. Without feeling ravings of an unbridled intellect . Without hearing the pant in this world. We're all riding the wave of expectation and agenda, trying nor to fall into the boiling white foam.

It's difficult. I'm drunker than I thought I was.

The micro-fabric we wave, in front of us - is woven, with painstaking care, forms ethic filaments a thousand times thinner than spider's web. Traps of, and without number. Riffles slight breeze of ghosts moving, illusively suggesting depth, and innocence.

I tripped and fell. Warm blood. Tasteless- but for salt.

Too many cigarettes.

What lies beneath is a mystery to all involved.

Hello? Help!

He never takes it seriously- But he despair he must feel!

He tells me he fell, trying to get home.

I can't imagine what he goes through, inside. I vow to ask him about it.

Soon. But I felt kind'a bad.

Kind'a unfulfilled.

Tell me what you learned today?

He said he was sure the family, is an indivisible bit of society. Men externalize what they learned in the family. Women sublimate it. The result, meets in the middle. Resulting in? Disaster.

Or enlightenment, I remind him.

I pick up the teleport phone line-like

a new form of communication, developed

more along Alexander's original vision. Scientist poised invention

to talk with dead father, papers never really-read. Vibes translated through

capricious scarp cross-ether. Jimmi jamming. RCA dog, rapt.

Don't get stuck in agendas. You want people to be things they aren't. Let them be. Instead, ask : What am I trying to reach? What is my agenda, they aren't meeting? They do something you feel a need to respond to, in any way imaginable. What is it you're trying to reach... through them? Why do you feel a need to respond to their action, or query? You are in their trap. You have walked there freely. You both stay by mutual design.

Individuals are not flowers, or global sex traits -

much as you'd like to label them.

Trying to defend myself.

Remember: Everyone is caged.

The Enough is Enough! finally gets you.

Deep drifts of dog hair swirl into consciousness, as the door slamms animated by a strong breeze blowing through the house. Windows creak in their rotten sashes, and rain drums the roof to crescendo African circumcision rite, happening concurrently somewhere, hollow logs booming. The kind of storm you never want to go outside in, unless a house is burning, or a beautiful single lass called to say she's afraid, and would die for some company. Latter, in dreamland.

The voice-synthesized thank you irks me profoundly. Since when is a machine glad you put in an extra ten cents? Could it care if it completes your call at all? It's a frightening anthropomorphism, we're all-too inured to. The streets slick with slimy ice in New York, and here, the sun beckons shorts. Not that it is warm enough for them, mind you. But their intimation wears you down - makes ya wanna to strip. Funny, I enjoy not being able to look in a mirror, and mercilessly critique my body, and I miss that judgment as well.

The couple dynamics drove me crazy. I think I lasted all of ten minutes at the first party, where hair-care product girls lounge the overstuffs, eating tortilla chips with freshly-painted nails as boyfriends scream big-screen TV for instant-replay two top view, of quarterback sack.

"Off-sides! Offsides!!"

"You fucking REF! Only needed one lousy yard to first down!"

Sex girl appendages pretend interest in barbaric beer grid-iron, wasting another day being 'together', as if a feat worthy of note. They are doing their group dynamics, these pathetic couples, clogging arteries with plastic cheese dip and mindless New Year's precedents. I excuse myself, and the men want to know what's wrong with me. You're leaving this game? Man, you gotta be crazy! Hints of question, turning sides, false hegemony, treason (sins) - corners of their eyes. What's wrong with this man? They know. Yearning, and fearing a first-love state.

I've been thinking about insides. How we always approach problems slinging guns, blasting away at perimeters. Defenses they re-bulwark, from our inside out. They being us, in the war. We attach ourselves to roles, when we try to assault problems. This part of the personality shall stand for defense, this for attack. Here are the rules. You can do whatever you want, but he keep shall be held at all costs. Let's play! And the cannons start booming. And the triptych falls. The spies invade-double agents, all. The only hope of seeing the castle keep's interior, is in a period of peace, when one-time enemies are invited in. When sides forge alliance. Bret makes me antsy. Otherwise, the keep is destroyed. Trying to take it. The things he says keep coming back to haunt me. It got worse. One of my schoolchums is stuck in a marriage, and tries to make merry with brunch. Primary caretaker of four cherubs, devoted bonded profoundly - wife's a lawyer, would obviously get total custody. Alimony. Threatened sexual abuse charge. Both little girls. So how much fun is his party? His game? No refs to scream into; the echoes' abundance, hurt his ears. God! How did the sexes get this screwed up? Who let this happen? We did, I told him. He honestly didn't know what I was talking about. It was almost - endearing. Yes, I think I'd use that word. Endearing. Innocent. We make the sex rift wider, every time we eat from its trough. Every time we turn the door knob clockwise, never considering any other course of action. I like that analogy. I have a friend with a bathroom latch that turns the wrong way - or, I always thought so, until Bret's comment. Once I stood there for a whole minute, trying to open it. Having to go like MAD. As if I'd never opened the damned thing before! Thinking it was jammed, Jesus-I can almost laugh at myself now. Bret, what do you think about, when you're flipping that stick back and forth, feeling your ways and means down streets. Stay with that thought, and notice it. Notice all the things that associate there. Fear. Guilt. Compassion. Projection. Theory. A million possible conclusions, segues into millions of others. That's exactly what I don't do. I can't think about anything. I have to be present, and feel. I have to be empty of thought; I have no time for it. Thinking makes me miss things I can't afford to.

I know what you mean. I'm a servile idiot, bowing down to my thoughts most of the day.

This morning I was sitting on the porch watching the sun come up, when thoughts of things I must do, kept welling up. I had to physically force myself to keep sitting there... absorbing the beauty of the clouds. Relaxed profoundly, if lists of things to do, and people to call didn't seep into my reverie. Sat there for the better part of two hours, sowing nothing.

I can't imagine time better spent.

Ring. Riing-Ring.

"Didn't you have to go to work?"

"I called in sick."

For once, I'm jealous of you.

"Well, what did you do after that?"

"I went snowboarding."

He wanted to know. Tell me everything. Tell me in pictures. The road closed-a maelstrom of flakes, scouring the windshield, wipers useless. We thought-waste of time-a big avalanche dead end, car heater roaring. Then a snowblower emerged, and a road grader, scraping one glassy strip clean. At the ski area, power'd been out. The hills were pristine, as we waited in line, shivering with anticipations.

"In pictures!"

I didn't know what he meant. "I'm giving you pictures, aren't I?"

"Hardly."

I put viewfinder to eye. Snapped. Rewound. Snapped.

Torrents of snow. Feet of powder. Drifts shaped by knife winds, covering wells skiers are disappearing into. War whoops, screams of delight-I am wrestling waist-depth mounds of Monte Blanc momentum. I'm sweating buckets, digging out, as trees dump heavy loads' accumulation.

"You are giving me a narrative."

I am frustrated. I scream-AHH! This is fucking incredible! Jesus, hang on, don't crash now-too flat, coming up, is that a cliff? Yaaahoooo! Ummph, wobble, weight back, tree! Turn jump back leg... burning bout to give out can't stop-can't lose momentum, too deep here, snow's getting heavy, like mortar mix-I'm hosed-what was THAT?! Not a drift-airborne SONOVABITCH! Twist, you're head's down-Mummmmph.

How was that?

"More like a movie."

I have a grin in place.

"I switch-hit you. Movies are still pictures, strung end to end."

It would be foolish to argue your point. "You win."

Feet numb, bindings cranked tight, one bolt broken, last wax log-ago scraped off, fingers wet face-shots pummeling goggles steamed with eyeballs watering, trying not to blink, breathing that hard. Yelling, every other minute.

Push the message button no idea what I'll say who's there last one's been there six months people are beginning to complain. Record while listening-that kind of machine. Spout gospel testifire hand raise South for heaven, just put yurself in preacher mood. Amazed by eulogy spillout. Somebody trying to sell me something, message five. Phone tag part six. Call seven note return number as long as hang-up eight, then forgetting. Message nine. I am delinquent answering ferrous tape particles.

Ten: Selena

excited by the idea of buying a new car-a yellow one, engineering progeny of what's attempting to announce itself latest-greatest ever to wear four tires. She used to own a VW bug. After twenty accidents, it crabs sideways hops it's frightfully punched-in right front menacingly on left handers. Does she assume moving caution cone car will better bad driving? Blow out last burning birthday candle - and dreams come true. Mucho moola for heater seats leather grip anti-locks (insurance cheaper ) diesel five speed sun roof super stereo upgraded tires black trim-ooh! So many cool choices. Five grand down sight-unseen delivery two to six. The rest in easy monthly you-knows. I want to be impulsive! she says, armed with new high-pay yuppie Micro-cush job. I need to commute a stress-free gridlock in my yellow submarine, tunes cranked cell phone standby, adjust fader. Engine's in front, this time. Heat, and headlights! Everything you want. Everything whose lack gave the original VW verve. Add total to dehumanizing masses burning fossil fumes for descendant's breath. Get excited about it. Be a slave for years. Row! Row! (Whip for enthusiasm.) Paying homages. To waste. To E-Z credit. Buy now, sob later. Via internet hype. They're all over it. We're wired to buy. Push the button. No wallet to pull out anymore, punchPIN number. We'll shackle you.

Hope you like it.

I see her.

Eating an atrocity of saturated fat for lunch hour, she reads this. She'll be pissed. And why? Because a good friend exposed her. Because she's in diet phase, lifting weights overtime, eyes burnt from computer screen. And it's true. And it's false. Cars; our new gods. They give results church alters never. They take us places. Adventure. Convenience. We want to feel good about ourselves. Clogging roads and manhandling horns, in hermetic sterility. Idling death through countless tailpipes. With climate control. With two-stage charcoal filters, making life bright, Christmas-tree clean. And more. She's really pissed. I'm not taking care of my friends am I? Should let them follow their bliss. No matter how rash ecstasy is. She wants a new yellow VeeDub that sounds like the one she grew up driving plus tax complete insurance prep options tabs transfer setup garage space big first tune up. She wants to be reckless and BUY NOW to cease recitation of Spanish love poetry, burdened by monthly this and soon to be monthly that and ... better start saving for down on a house hoping everything will manifest in exact-right order kids hubbie and suddenly, art disappears. Message eight.

Killer.

What was that number again? Changes. She moved.

Third playthrough,

I call her. Yodel holier-thouisms. She said : 'Mail me a transcript. Your ego's so big, I stumble over it. So I'm surprised, when she calls a week later - after a nude shoot. The new yellow car yuppie? (Did you say Nude shoot?!) So/did ya five-thousand-down your dream car?

Heard eschewing.

No.

Better to drive a wreck, and be free.

She says: I say:

I love your answer. Need to say more?

Absolutely not. I Experience the outgoing message recorded earlier, on the way to Elizabeth's house. Later. Not much. On 24th's corner. Wild eyes. Fire. Man with bible, epiphanizing. He said: What I said. Almost exactly. I want black southern holy man to call my message machine and listen. Just to prove he won't be amazed. Like I think he should be. Sir: Here's a quarter. I dare you. Going to Elizabeth's house. The film maker. What was I thinking? I mean, before that. Euphrates. In the late spring melt. Or the monsoon. I wonder both. (Not that...) something silly. Who knows why. Pictures are frozen moments. You can string them together, to give the illusion of... (A river?) Motion. Like a river - it's not really moving, only appearing to. He's unbinding his feet, going quantum. Because things are moving even when they're 'standing still', so the measure is meaningless. imagine somebody motionless on a castaway island, statue-still, as you're watching a movie. You could say there was no action. But everything is in motion. I can tell he means everything! Frames are slipping by, sixteen to a second. And you might think: why bother filming something that doesn't move? But it's exactly that tension, which comprises great films' moments.

'Is insanity more rational?'

paraphrases Elizabeth. The motion picture

maker. In

whose moment,

something clicks. I'm them. They're me. 100%

male-female

every interaction - equality. A mutual plan.

The fire truck - here, flashing its lights.

Sans bleeding bodies.

That perfect picture.

1/16th second frame removed.

Sight is irrelevant

somehow.

further thanks to:

Barbara

IntensePaine

EcoStock

DMHoyt

From: Brock Foxworthy Hanson <novelink@speakeasy.org>

Organization: Novel Ink. (www.speakeasy.org/~novelink)

To: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House <mabel@newmex.com>

References: 1

I am taking a Seattle hiatus, attending college in San Francisco for a quarter, charging my wanderlust battery on the weird, which is ominously perfected here. Great stuff for experientials - the glorious vibe of SF. After this, who knows. My assumed future has dissipated into sans-comfort cloud. Structure crumbles, leaving steel beams and

grass, if being has bothered to erect, or grown any.