Monday, May 23, 2011

on the in-betweens

...Santa Cruz Lake, New Mexico, neither New nor Mexico.  I remember now to look and really see.  Worn faces and ramshackle places, all clean and kept for company but eroded at the edges with hints of the layers and barriers between, though it all just passes by as soon as I see, I saw.  Vast sky and little baby faces, voices, laughter, choices that ease us on down the road and the ones that shock us into knowing where to go.  It ain't all gonna go down so easy, so I'll let this wash over me in the sun, sitting on a log, journaling with my favourite right behind.  Haven't looked, but if I do I know I'll find him there.

Somebody's always floating, some are diving down deep, some drown.  There's a warm, powerful breeze on my skin and a little touch of lost underneath.  I don't know if I'll ever stop wandering away...

...Fell open into the Rio Grande, with a feather in my fist and a steering wheel in my other hand.  I'm on a Texas road, red soil, coyotes, full moon on the mesa, and I couldn'ta dreamed it better than this way.  As I sit down to write I'm losing the light of day.  Always wishing I was better is wearing me down, whittling me into a frown which I do not wish to claim.

A man on a boat with a parasol.  The turtle rock.  Your back against my legs as we sit on a rock and praise the moon for her beauty and grace.  Late night pictures in the fullness of our imagination.  Kind strangers.  So, so many kind strangers.  The light is fading by the moment.  My pen bleeds into the dawning black.  Who lives here?  What is it that these people experience?  It seems so different, but I suspect that it's very much the same in every way that matters...

...and for now I'm happy to be sitting still-in-motion, it makes the familiarity just that much sweeter.  Walked an underwhelming famous Austin strip last night before having my mind blown by an ordinary backyard scene, complete with community and redemption from ego.  I'm alone in a crowd, pressed against the universes inside the strangers, appearing separate but so obviously orbiting around one another, brushing up against infinity and pretending it's not incredible to feel skin-on-skin.  Maybe I am out of control radiation, needing to be controlled lest I give the world cancer.  Maybe I am just a blink of an eye, a twitch in the night, a faltering word that belies a deep emotional undercurrent.  Maybe I'm on fire all the time, and all I really know is that someday, baby, I'm gonna die.

The breeze is different everywhere you go.  Sometimes the air sticks to you like an entity, others it just disappears and sucks you dry, so that moisture becomes coveted like a dream...

...leaving New Orleans, driving in a Subaru named Rosie straight into the heart of the apocalypse.  Back to the roving consistency of the trio, our stuff, our destination hanging in the future like a mystery puzzle we do not hurry to solve.  I am so affected by the heartbeat of the city behind us.  The air is so wet that the skin here glows, bodies press together and anything goes.  Part celebration, part self-destruction.  I am drawn to this particular pulse like a magnet.  There's something in me represented by this place, see?  Raw, passionate, dirty breath of humanity in all its glory and pain.  The streets run with blood, you can sense it, and somehow that means priorities have been straightened out, lives reexamined.  You can't dance with death that closely without tapping into life, I suppose.  Colors and fabrics and characters swirl around the voodoo alley where the mistress keeps her secrets and mine in a fake coffee can that smells vaguely of Vicks Vapo-Rub.

Murky water, bridges, tunnels, pockets of magnolias and live oaks, the smell of frying bread and bird, music in the distance played for change.  I never knew before I came.  Never knew from books I read.  You can't kill us, we are already dead.  Ghosts in the alley, filling up on cheap booze and tempestuous sex, sin, and cajun kin.  I wish I was enjoying the shit out of today, but really I feel heavy, tortured, alive, inspired, tired.  Do we have to talk about it?  I think so.  The city is a swamp, hot, black, watery, steamed up, potentially dangerous and spectacularly beautiful...

...A day off in Taylor, Mississippi.  The porch is the town square, chatting away, wiling away the hours of the day.  Touring - road life - it turns out, is an art.  All this outward energy, socializing, performing, being hosted, gracios, present, friendly, thankful...it's a lot of hard work.  A lot of easy work too.

We forgot about breakfast, and here we are hungry and planless.  I draw Queen of Wands from the Tarot and skip away to the corners of my mind outside the limitations of space and time.  Tomorrow is very far away.  Ok then, bye bye now...


Wednesday, May 18, 2011

New Mexico ain't bad, Lord

And the people there they treat you fine. Is today the luckiest day of the year? Life just keeps changing and we are happy and healthy and sitting by Santa Cruz Lake- north east of Santa Fe. Cruz got the lake. Fe got the city. I wonder if there was any kind of rivalry or jealousy. Maybe Cruz thought "Fe got to be the exciting city and all I got to be is this dinky little lake!" but Fe thought- "I am so tired of this city. The poverty is awful but what's worse is the was they hastily cover it up. If only I could trade places with Cruz- just sit and listen to the wind and waves." but Cruz also had the problem of little pestering fishermen, like flies on a horse.

We left Taos and took 518 to 75 to 76. The scenic route. We got out and tried to walk round the lake. there were 2 fishermen in one spot- a quiet old man and a middleaged man in a yellow shirt. He talked a lot to us. I said- "What do you got in there?"- meaning what kind of fish are stocked in the lake. He thought I was asking what kind of bait he had. He answered- "PowerBait and Salmon Eggs. That's all I got." He said it apologetically. There was also a cute chubby little girl. She said "Hi!" to us in the middle of the middle aged man's sentence. He told us that the wind was ruining the day. Said he'd been here since 10. It was 3:30. Kris asked if the wind scared the fish away. Something like- "Do the fish hear the wind?" I watched him sip a beer and counted six empty beer bottles neatly lined up in front of him. "No," he replied to Kris, "the wind blows the rod too much and it moves the bait around."

 I thought you were supposed to move the bait around a little. That makes the fish think that the bait is some little creature- swimming about and having a perfectly merry frolic beneath the waves. That's when the fish decides to brutally murder the little being. But! to the ultimate chagrin of the fish, it's victim was not an innocent frolicking little being! It is actually a lump of chemicals stuck on a sharp barbed metal hook! the hook pierces through the sacred head of the cruel unwitting fish and he is yanked out of the universe, through a worm hole and slapped against the hot dry sand- squirming beneath the cheap Walmart pocket knife.

He envisions his past memories projecting on a movie screen. It's a Drive-In. All the fish are sitting in seashells. Some are eating the eggs of smaller fish the way we eat popcorn. He watched himself hatch- bursting forth into the wonderful shimmering underwater phenomena. He saw his first bicycle ride- his first day at school, his first kiss. He saw his first 'F', the first time he got fired, the first time he got dumped.  One fish in a seashell leaned over to another fish- feeling naively safe from the dangers projected on the screen before her- and whispered- "Who was fatter- Fats Waller or Fats Domino?"

The movie ended and life continued on as before. We got in the car and stepped on the gas- drove east, watching the desert turn into grass.