Collected Memories

Pictures in my mind.  Like postcards from the past.  Sitting on a train, riding through bavaria.  Not sick, just reeling.  Trying to find a vein in a toilet in a cafe in Paris.  There were no stalls.  The hole in the ground, with a bucket and a spigot for toiletry in Tangier.  The rooftops of Tangier.  The dark dark night at 2nd and Cambria.  Paris Metro Châtelet Gogol; Skenan and Euro paper.

Hostile Hostels in Edinburgh.  The jukebox with Toto Africa, the SudAfrikaan making threats at me.  The passenger I was through Lincolnshire.  The darkness of Harlem, the 6th floor view North North West.  Collages of porn.

Montages of sex and lips.  The celebration of victories in Action Discount, the mourning of young mortality in Action Discount.  New Jersey Zoe's room and kitchen.  Stealing a bottle of wine and a bottle of valium.  After that, the image fades.  Zoe's on York Ave; where I was left long enough to read all her Welsh books and sweat up her duvet.  The coconut FrozFruit.

Bathrooms, I remember so many bathrooms.  The wet, mossy stones of England.  The boxes in Brixton, the faces and the tobacco.  The sun coming in the window to my cell.  

Empty strip mall lots, and the asphalt.  The inconvenient stretched out spaces in suburbia.  Bottles accumulated on the coffee table in a college town.  Mario's kitchen with the fulgurite.

The great wooden furniture with the drawers under my turntables.  The young provocation of the fates and faithed efforts to cut through the aether with chemicals and the phurba of my dick.  The gate, the turnstyle gate to Mexico.  The hill I climbed in Daly city begging for truth and blessing.  The waves of cement and steel cresting over me in Brooklyn at 4th Ave.  4th Ave.  The bodega outside the window.  

The rooftop on 116th, the rooftop on 2nd, the rooftop on 147th, the rooftops the rooftops and the rooftop where I phoned Zoe up on 83rd.   I was so happy.  Looking at the cover of "Zero:  Biography of a Dangerous Idea" on the subway.  Snow on 135th street.  

Sitting in the back of a windowless white work van with layers of sod, shovels, firewood, and kerosene. Rumbling along blindly and smoking.  The rolling liquid terra of Wyoming, BLM wilderness and wild horses.  These are pictures I still have.

The faces so pleased, generous, antagonistic, defeated and affectionate.  The customs guys.  The rooms in high schools.  The sanctuary on Ocean Drive.  So recent, so vivid.  So much I can't say; the truth could hurt.  The nights before I left the U.S. for the first time.  The map on the wall, and Andy K.  Pencader dorms -- oh that dorm room.  

Bleedin' Kplate.  Boxer's car rides, the Kosciuszko Bridge.  Faded graffiti on NJ geology on the way into NYC.  School bus reading in 4th grade, sitting on the window seat on the driver's side.   Sharing the book with Jon, who insisted on reading faster than me.  I controlled the pages.  The feeling of 100,000 fireflies with Boxer at the helm riding the wave of lights uptown.  Decibel nights.  

Le Mazel.  The long bike ride, so long I thought I may be lost, down 6km of mountain.  The shorter ride back up.  The perfect quiet of the manse.  The nights I had alone.  The shade of blue, like shale, the sky, clean and open.  

London before I met Gemma.  Ryan's K lady, and her little fireplace that seemed like a toy in the bedsit in London.  London, watching television and trying to understand so many foreign words.  London, the sartorial form of the money.  London, the K rosewater bottle, brown like a peroxide bottle.  Whitechapel cafe, sun in the afternoon.  So young, and happy, and horny.  I remember these images.