.

Time and life, are two different things. As humans, we invented time. The constraints therafter, are another idiom of our imperfection. I'm choosing life.

The violet hour...anonymity in the Bear Republic

You see a crack affected man framed by a fire escape with the whole grizzly Californian afternoon sun blasting down the street toward him. A bleached out eye splitting whiteness pouring forth like the pierced yoke of a poached egg. The city where bums come to die and all the same are born from concrete wombs at the base of multi million dollar foyers.

"The bay Bridge will be closed" they keep saying, on every medium of news known to woman. I imagine this island cut off from the rest of the Country (had the great American paranoia finally caught up with me?). I shared this post-apocolyptic idea with a stranger in jest, "oh no we have more than one bridge here sir, the authorities wouldn't just leave us stranded!". Did he really believe I thought this was a one road in, one road out town? I didn't want to bring up after that, the scientific predictions that the city may one day simply slide into the sea. What with all these shows spat down the wires of the networks about how to survive disasters, the disastrous disaster disasters, I figured that the modern American, backlit by the last decade in particular, would have a particularly large appetite for 'end of times' ideas.

Being somewhere else. This place, these past weeks, somewhere else. Residing in the isolation of the senses, your character kept captive by this very certain solitude. Its not that people don't give a fuck about you, they don't even know you are there. Does that beat walking the well worn path, through the meadows of living nostalgia, that is home? Admitting the fact that love left at home is something extremely difficult to deal with, and that an overnight removal of your family and everyone you've ever known is not for the feather of heart, change is worth the shrapnel its printed on. If money permits and you are dealt the luxury in your life to put foot elsewhere, if commitments only stretch so far, or you can commit to something slightly bigger than yourself and your friends, it should be done. Perhaps only for the feeling of immeasurable anxiety and joy when you realise you are going, the sickly intoxicatig mix of gut and heart kicking the fuck out of each other.

You no longer share the same land mass with love or foe, a slightly unfairly fair scenario. But people know for good where that leaves them. The void calls for calm, emerging out the other side, with the same certainty as the sun blindness down the afternoon coridoors of San Francisco, is the great bouyant raft of life, not with two of every species, but one of a copyless kind unto itself...You!

X

between your empty wallet

Nostalgia like a clean hanky,
By days end is bloodied
And green.

Long gone damp cloth
Left to clam up the space in your pocket
Between your empty wallet
And the key you still think is there.

What will you let me remember?

Maybe the smell of dank
Olive oil,
Or any such provision
Allocated by drunks at
4am for
Use in frantic
Acts of naked lunacy,
Bent double out window,
Across floor,
In front of TV,
Or not at all!
And in
My mind,
Uncovered,
Shallow,
Honest
And Implicated,
I find everyone
I ever met
And ever knew,
Eclipsing and betraying them all,
In this act
To recount,
So to
Forget once more,
All the things
We once
Lay living to.

Nostalgia swells,
Revealing
The cause of
My Love,
Reminding
Me of
The silent Longings
And private battles,
Of
Darling Hope
And the
Shroud of Melancholy,
The leaves long
Ground under foot,
The clouds since
Blown overhead.

and otherwise

True rain automatic
And the vessel
Passes through
And by,
Wind,
Instant cool
On shaven cheeks,
I won’t tell you
What you want me to
And you won’t say
What I need you to

Boxcar cinematic
And the world
An arbitrary
Device
That lets
Us build and birth
All manner of silly
Creations,
Human
And otherwise.

lies and fixes

And now we come
With blood on our knuckles
And semen in our hair,
As minstrels
And murderers,
With teeth that won’t fit our mouths
And torsos that won’t belly our guilt,
We are hapless gritty friends,
And voyeuristic strangers,
Bludgeoned by dollars we never had
And children we never knew,
We are strewn across countryside and city alike,
With an idea of what we’d prefer,
But without a lifetime to comprehend it,
We are loveless, afflicted,
Romancing our degradation with lies
And fixes,
A shimmering dissatisfaction
Revealing a pale hope,
And then in a wall of sound
Or a cowardly chord
We look for the power-up
But just as often ride the numb-out.