Paul Took Offense

He looked through his eyelids, eyelids that had stretched horizontally to frame the line between the sky and plain.  In the night, he heard lions.  Now that the sun was coming up, he could see the antlers twist in chorus against the wind.  They had appetites, these lions, and the gazelles were none the wiser.  Lions were sleepy animals, unless they were starving.  The morning was welcome.  It was cool.

One of the gazelles would die.  At least one would die, or the lions would.  Well, they all eventually would, but one or the other would suffer some fate in the process.  Well, they would all find some fate, but one may be more immediately painful than the next.  Paul closed his eyes. 

It wasn't his problem right now.  He had to walk to get there early to collect some rice.  Zizania, his daughter needed it.  Temitope could use the rest she was taking.  His wife had sleepy eyes like a lion.  He could work for life.  There were some old coffee.  It was mostly water, but even the dirty coffee water was good. 

As he set out, he looked across the fields again.  Gazelles were still there.  So were the lions, he imagined.  That's the way it goes.  At least there was water.  If he had a son, Paul would name him Wanjilanko.

On his way home, he saw the gazelles from well up the road.  It was warm and they were slower, and perhaps less nervous.  He would try to kill one of them.  He only had two rounds, and his rifle was very low caliber.  It was mostly supposed to be for protection.  Against what, he thought, more than being hungry, did he need protection?

When he got home, Temitope was pleased.  She was still a little bitchy though, exhausted by Zizania's antics. 

The Wheel of Destiny

I loved and lost
I frame my hours
With measured breath
Waiting my turn

Life is right now
Just then, just here
I dont command
What I can not

No one is culpa
No one is that
But when I am
I surely am

So take my blood
Number me then
Break me; do try
But dont get mad

I am savage
Its fear and pain
Not greed and hate
And I wouldnt trade

Not for the world
All thats in it
What would i do
With it anyway?

When I despise
The ways of man
It may be because
Im afraid of it

Let he who Is
Innocent cast
The first of the
Meteorites

Yes, I pray wrong
I pray for death
At least for me
My clock is fucked

How should I be?
Life sure isnt easy
What does it cost
To live life free?

Yes, Im a fool
And I forget
Gratitude is
An everyday thing

Should I give up
My dreams and hopes
And watch the news
And believe it

I dont believe
That I am able
Dear Citizen
To be your kind

Where then, I ask
Are the healers?
The lovers, the fearless
Macabre Dansers

Maybe it is sin
Honorable Judge
To take off skin
And dance in bones*

So Lexington
Prohibition
Hunt down witches
And make your war

I dont care, really
Really, I dont care
Water on the moon
Piss in the sea

Baddies and tsk
Owe society
A debt to pay
For pain and debt

Id kill myself
Except sometimes
Life warms me up
And shows me love

Even if you dont
So at my turn
Come, let me go
Far, fast, and wide

I don't know whose side I'm on. Maybe that makes sense.

Last night, trying to fall asleep, I watched Never On Sunday.  It was a Greek movie, and a very good one.  It kept my eyes open and my ears were regularly jumped by the Greek guitar.  The problem, as I saw it, was that a very idealistic and modern American loved the great beauty of ancient Greece, and, after a barfight, decided that a prostitute in the bar was the very corrupt beauty that was fallen Greece.  In a later scene, when Homer and Illia are fighting, she throws a globe at him and he throws a book past her head.  I liked that scene.

This woman, Illia, loved the Greek Tragedies, whatever they are.  I'm not terribly educated, but I have read Medea and it was clear to me that there was no happy ending.  Illia describes her as being very "sweet, but with a temper" and explains that everyone talks bad about her, calling her a witch.  Homer, as an audience to Illia telling the tale, almost loses it.  He had been warned, though, not to correct her.  Instead, he set out to try to reform her.  That is sort of how the book and the globe came into her apartment.  He, though, made a deal with No Face, a compromise to an end Homer saw as noble, for which he sacrificed credibility.  See the movie.

After that Look Back in Anger came on and I fell asleep by the end of that movie.  In my dreams, I was in a big theatre.  It was not a theatre though, it was court.  All sorts of things happened, and it was chaos.  I tried listening for my name, but it was like being in a stadium.  I spoke briefly to a woman who had three slips of paper.  She took my information and then disappeared.  If I could do anything at that point, I would undo what was.  Only in dreams do I have this power.  I don't know what I was arrested for, but it was probably narcotics.  In my dream, I didn't have any.  I hadn't had any.  I was just the man they wanted. 

Go Long

Maps fill me with longing and life.  I love the geometries, the seas, the vast spans and slim isthmus spans.  I love the archipelagos.  I love the little islands, the horn, tierra del fuego.  It's my world, and I belong to it, and if it is as promised by the cartographer, I have a sense of entitlement to it.  When I told Nanu that we were young, and couldn't die, I was wrong.  She, as god would have it, died instantly in a car accident in California.  California is on my map, with rocket skies and thin aether, sparkling lights of red and green topping towers, stars dripping down between peaks of rough hewn geology, a land of desperation and dreams.

If I am elemental, I am probably wind.  The sea is my friend.  I can deal with the magic of fire.  Earth, though, is my contest.  She is so large, encompassing, and substantial I can only barely touch her.  My head is in the clouds.  I don't know, and am repelled by the grave.  When I pass cemetaries it makes me want to spend time with the dead, but I don't believe they are in those plots.  The world can have my clay, but my soul does not belong here.

Petitioning g-d, I want the same thing I wanted when I was too young to know.  I saw the shape of Brazil, and knew I needed to go there.  I saw Madagascar and the name meant, "come here."  Cyprus, New Zealand, and Patagonia all mine.  I would spin the globe, watching the U.S.S.R. wobble topheavy and long, beckoning me to Siberia.  Let me know these places.  I suspect that one can find magic anywhere, but I don't like bowling allies. 

The part that breaks me is space.  Can man claim more than we have here?  It's a sport, an art, a science to choreograph the physics necessary to shoot the moon, but to what end?  In a contradiction, I wonder what's wrong with the Earth.  Probably the piggishness, perhaps, the social desire to claim more, more more.  More land, better land, land for oneself.  The land isn't mine.  I don't want it.  I just want to cross this road, and just the once for now.

Citizens

The night in suburbia is fragile.  It makes me tense.  I see the citizens raking their leaves, preparing for winter, coming and going on their errands in their cars.  It makes me sad for some reason.  It's not that the people are ugly, because I don't know them.  What gets to me are the silly things people put on their lawns and houses to mete out the holidays.  Maybe the holidays break my heart.  The citizens just make me feel lonely.

I'm related to citizens.  I have a mother, a sister, a grandfather and aunts and uncles.  They're all citizens.  I, however, feel like a negro, an indian boy, a savage.  My memories of skies and streets are fading.  The only thing I notice are walls, decorated by my mother with artifacts of sentimentality.  No wonder I always ran.  Wherever I ended up, it would not stink of moderation and compromise.  Wherever, that is, until captured and locked in a stark box.

When I was on the porch smoking in the dark, waiting for the sun, as if the sun promised me anything other than light and warmth, the term "skag" lept into my mind.  I'm not sure if it's American or British, but I know what it means.  I tried to air out my psyche, but it's so dark and quiet and I'm trying not to make sounds with my footsteps on this old wooden floor in this small house.  The double-sneeze is too good to resist, so I make the noise. 

Music charms me.  I seek the feeling I get when life is light and there is no fear.  Drink used to bring me there, but I learned that the panic that sets in when the booze wears off is worse than the original state.  What then, to do with one's self?  Maybe I need to skateboard.  If I'm here in the spring, it would be dreamlike to hop a boxcar with a plastic recorder and play music to the rhythm of the train.  I will make it, god, right?

Errors and Fallacies

The morning surprised me. I was still asleep when I woke up, dropped into a falling panic before my eyes had time to open. Where was I? Shit. There had to be something that could cure this. Where did I put my pills? Did I have pills? Why did I feel this way?

As I stumbled up the stairs, I realized that I needed a cigarette as well. It would be a rough one, so it seemed. Many days had started this way and warmed up nicely, but I was stuck in a fiend for something to take it all away. For so many years, coping with breathing meant finding a way to slow the breathing down, and that usually meant taking something. There was nothing to take.

The cold of sleep made my body feel stiff. Outside, I shivered with a tiny flame lighting a cigarette, the whole enterprise serving to hammer my fragile rigid corpse into flux, and not serving well. Coffee would improve my lot. I put the cigarette out only one third of the way into it, and fled inside. Now the air felt warmer, by contrast, and I breathed a deep breath. It slowed the panic.

I crept into the bathroom on my toes. I gently moved the seat lid up, then proceeded to make a jangling jingling din with my piss. If I flushed the toilet, I'd only make more noise. This was no way to live. How had I managed this? I knew the answer and my own frustration mocked me. Perhaps I was dehydrated. Jason always told me, “drink lots of water.” His helpful face annoyed me by being so right. Coffee was easier to drink than this water. The only good water from the tap is in New York City. Too much mind control in this water.

My socks felt less soft, but not dirty. They were warmish at least. How could people live out here? Why would any of my ancestors, my ancestors' ancestors, etc. have moved away from the equator? Damned fools they were. It was surely over a woman. That's the only reasonable explanation, and in my dissoving waking strop, I demanded reasonable explanations for my self-made hell. I chose to blame those that lived thousands of years ago, and the rest of them up to me. Then again, I left Miami, and I did so by behaving like a wrecking ball inside my own sanctuary. “Fucking fool,” I called myself.

I put on music, and let the gods give me pseudorandom divination in their selections. Gently, they gave me the lovely gypsy choruses of Man Man. Those men knew, perhaps better than myself, what this cosmic comic show was all about. They were psychadelic cabaret, and they played to the early morning, in the dark, before the sun, as I sought to get my bearings. I was ill-equipped. At least my underwear were relatively clean.

It made me feel better to know that I was reacting naturally to living my life in my generation. “Naturally” being a generous term, since my mental cuisinart had wrestled with the A-Bomb and its place in the natural order of things until it was brought to my attention that everything under the sun is natural, or it wouldn't exist. Natural doesn't mean conducive to survival. Death is natural, as natural as birth.  Winter is natural.  It just depends how far you are from the equator how unreasonable it can get.