I'm alive. I'm in love with a strong woman that loves me. I have friends that I can call friends and who call me friend. I have my health for the most part. I have my mind for now. I discovered that I have a dollar still in my pocket. I have cigs and coffee for the day. I have my education and skills and experience that I know set me a notch above many that are as stuck as I am. I have a heart. I have passion. I have a sense of humor even in the blackest times. I have my memories back and the perspective that losing them for a Summer gave me. I have a craft for words and a vision for images. I have 37 years of piano and songs in my head. I have a sense of justice and a sense of mercy and a sense of forgiveness. I have a sense that there might be a God and that he has a shit sense of wicked humor that I have no choice but to tip my hat to if he'd only allow me to get rich enough to afford a hat. I gave a homeless man all my change even though I'm homeless, too. I gave a man a cig even though I am counting how many I have left. I told a woman to smile as I passed by and she called from the end of the street, "Hey! Thank you! That just made my day." I can speak more than one language and I was able to smile at jokes told on a bus in Spanish. I have been blessed with beautiful people in my life from all over the world. Perri, Lucyna, Andrea, Burckaan, Ana Kamiar, Deepak, Josh Yaphe, Stephanie Grant, Elzbeta, Crystal, Mustafah, Creature (who has taken on a life of his own), Tony (who has given me my second chance at life even as he questions the need for his own), Trinity, Laura Duffy, Michele, Cindy Williams (who's cutting words often keep me real), Maria Sibiriak who humbled me and taught me shame, Brian (my brother who is perfectly real all the time), My father whose advice is invaluable even though he never followed any of it and whom I buried, Lisa (my step-sister who taught me that I could be accepted on my own terms and not to compromise and who taught me how to respect a woman and what a woman was, anyway).

I turn 41 and I have many things to be thankful for even as my life is at its darkest and also at its most brilliant. Kelsey has taught me a depth of love that I could have only dreamed existed. I hoped even as I dared not hope that a Kelsey could maybe exist in the world.

Today, a woman slept with her head in my lap and I dared not move but that I would destroy the moment. Today, a woman's arms held me close and my heat warmed her. Today, love was made long before the sun would rise. Today, I was kissed by a woman as she left. Today, I drank coffee. Today, I found Cohen's "Here It Is" and listened to it. Today, I got a web site finished. Today, I saw the sun rise after all of this.

Happy Birthday to me.

____________________

Stephanie dared me to try to write a poem without rhyme.

____________________

The wind in the willows were what woke me from my dreams
I couldn't figure out how they could still be screaming
with the voices of women and children and men
when they had been chopped down years ago
The thud as they landed went right through me
and the leaves in the street blowing past?
How could those damn trees still have leaves?
So I woke and listened to the rain with a cig in my hand

_____________

meh...

___________________


Look at this room that you wake in
and look at it hard through the smoke of the cig
that wafts up to paint the walls in yellow tar
The mattress on the floor and the chair of dirty laundry
The laptop fan whirs on the tv table you use as a desk
and sunlight streams in to show you how it is
Good Morning!
How you gonna get out of this?

Green flem hacked up from the depths of blackened lungs
the vestiges of a cold in a cold room warmed only by coffee
one cup at a time
It's time to empty the trash when the Ramon noodle wrappers
won't stay in, anymore
It's time to do laundry when you've decided to match the last clean sock with a dirty one.
It's time to rethink life when you have to choose between bus fare and a black and mild
because the Mavericks are just too expensive in this part of town

Lunch is.... lunch is... oh! Wait! I still have that half a sandwich in my bag.
Lunch is solved.
Thirty more letters go out begging for work in the guise of confidence
thirty more cigs are smoked waiting for a reply
thirty more days have gone buy without rent being paid
thirty more dollars I'll have to borrow for the chance to get out of this
thirty more kisses give me hope that I exist

Look at this room you wake in
look hard through the fog of your mind
as it paints a past and plans a future yet again:
Don't you ever learn, Sean?
Isn't the definition of insanity the expectation of different results
doing exactly what you're doing, now?

Look at this room you wake in.
Happy Birthday to me.

Tags: blessings, essay, poem, poetry
Current Location: Richmond
Current Mood: grateful
Current Music: Dark Alan by Capercaillie

O.K.

The alarm bells are going off in my head and there are certain people who know me well enough that their eye-brows are starting to lift. However, I'm supposed to move on, right?

Only...

Only, I feel the psychology courses laughing at my motives. The sheer impossibility of anything emerging; anything lasting from such a union....

The attraction of youth when one must start over; the attraction of age when one must start for the first time. Is it not natural, though doomed? Would she become a toy? An amusement? Or, a bird in a gilded cage? Would I struggle to maintain my upper hand? constrain her so that she depended always on me?

Would I be able to set her free when the time comes?

I am The Fool. The hanged man who cares not the consequence of somebody else's decisions. "Find a cliff and jump off of it," I proclaimed to her in exactly those words and knew to expect the sudden hunger in her eyes; knew of the hopelessness that a small town could seem to some types of people... know always how to recognize such people.

I should learn the pipes that I may lead the children and the rats.

Come with me! Come with me! Follow me down this path and I will show you hardship that you may grow strong enough to walk from my enchantment one day; strong enough to leave me alone to my charms and intransagence..

Tags: essay
Current Mood: peaceful
Current Music: Peter Gabriel: Passion

Dear L_____:

I'm listening to Adagio by a man named Tomaso Albinoni. It's slow and almost entirely of strings and a sad, old pipe organ worthy of Preisner. As it plays, I imagine a man in a trench coat walking cobbled, city streets alone in a darkly, grey foggy evening. He stops on a bridge and looks out over the water with the wet of the air plastering his thin, balding hair to his scalp. Passerby's ignore him as they hurry pass. He exists by himself in the world.

Fade out.

--

I'm writing this to you because it is what I know to do. I know that most of my words can no longer touch you, yet still I try to lay them side by side on this paper in some magical arrangement like the notes of music that I'm listening to. I try to invoke some deep, dark magic; a Qabbalistic venture where the weight of each sound of each of these syllables push against closed doors and open them.

Words.

Only words.

--

I live in a room with five walls and a door that leads neither in, nor out, but only somewhere else. Always, I walk through as one person and walk through again as another. If only I could imagine where this door of mine will lead to, next. I could rest my hand on the doorknob, close my eyes and wish. I would open my eyes and then the door and walking through, I would be there.

Ah, the Cello plays, now. It is a sad, gentle giant of a voice murmuring as it turns in its sleep there under the hill.

--

I am the man who could capture you, once.

I was of a thought that I had not grown since that day when I first dared to hold the hand of the woman that seemed so far out of my ability to reach. As these words flow out of me, though, I can feel a thing that these last weeks have allowed me to find. Were I to meet that girl of five years ago today, I would not reach... not with my hand, and not with fear. But, she is gone and with her some of the strings from the music in my life fall silent.

These words...

I chuckle at your observation that I am not like other men. How we were able to talk is not how other people talk. You want to learn to get along as they do. You want the ease with which men talk to men... men as old as you are, now. You want to speak the casual language of rising stars and be seen, not as you were with me, but as one of them; as a leader of them.

You'll learn.

You'll learn that I've ruined your pleasure of the surface of things. You want more. Go explore, as you say.

Go explore what lays underneath the ties and jackets; the penetrating eyes that can hold your stare and release it as a game not worth playing, or already won. Go explore the touch of that man and I think you will see. You'll finally be content.
--

I am free.

Finally, I am free.

Tags: essay, letters, poems