Up early today.























Got the worm.

Sometimes I'm low.
and quiet
not really despondent
or depressed
just
low.

And quiet.

She says she doesn't like the desert,
says it's ugly
and I can't help but wonder
why?
And she's sometimes quiet
but never low.
I think maybe the desert is in me
and when lowness abounds
the wind whips the dunes of my soul
and shapes me as it sees fit
that wind is the sound in my ear
just
before
sleep finally takes me.

and although we wouldn't know what to do with it
even if we had it,
we will pray on for
rain.

Not sure if you’ve ever
heard of
Phineas Gage,
but he was a railroad man somewhere
in Vermont
and one day he accidentally blew a
******* iron rod through his
******* think-box and
here’s the kicker:

He
*******
lived.

Now, this big metal cylinder,
on its flight path,
carved a cavern in Gage’s
cerebrum, more specifically
through his frontal lobe
and when the bleeding finally stopped
and they got his left eye all sewn shut
he told the first person he saw,
probably a loved one crowded around his
filthy hospital bed
to kindly
******* and Die.

He got out of that hospital bed,
eventually,
and when he did, he tried his damndest
to go back to work
but he just couldn’t.

What’s more his friends said he just wasn’t
Gage
any more. His personality
had changed.

He didn’t give a **** about
the sunset anymore.
He liked his coffee black and his pancakes
dry.
Which is strange because beforehand
he didn’t drink any coffee
and he didn’t like pancakes much neither.
He also became quite
the drinker,
which is funny considering he hadn’t had
a drop
of alcohol
in his life
before then.

You see I always thought that
personality
was something you couldn’t
touch.
That it was some grand unifying evidence
of the existence of the human
soul.
But here’s Gage,
who just so happens to take
a pole to the dome
and suddenly he’s just
not
Gage.

So maybe it’s true
that we’re all just
machines
and you can pull a man’s
favorite color
or his taste in music
or his eating habits
out of his head
and set them on a sterile tray
right in front of him.

That makes sense.

But everything in me
still wants to
believe.

The women drink the tapwater-
even the infants are drunk.

She said,
"you won't believe what I'm looking right now.
The flames must be fifteen ******* feet above the roof"

And I went outside and I could see the plume of smoke like it was a block up from the house
so I ran back in and got everyone out of the house and we hopped in the car and sped off
toward
the flames
-just like a gruesome car accident-
and when we finally came within a few blocks it looked like the revolution
gone and started without us
people were running and jumping fences
to get closer to it.
So we got out and started running
through back alleys
and back yards
and suddenly, we came around a corner
and there it was.

They said the building was abandoned, that no one had been inside when it started.
It wasn't much of a building now.
It was a skeleton
and the flames were maggots picking it clean.
Inside was like the brightness of the sun
and the fire crews were giving it all the water in the world
to little avail.
Gigantic plumes of tiny embers were jetting from its open ribs into the twilight-
falling all over houses and businesses

and all I could think was
"what if it
doesn't
stop?
What if this is it? and it can't be contained?
and the whole
city
goes down with it?"
We were standing in the middle of a riot ready to happen-
it was like a backdraft-
an explosion minus one ingredient-
a single exhaled breath.
So what if this is it?
What if the end starts right here, right now?

So I began to root for the fire, not the firefighters.
I prayed for it to collapse
and eject all that hot ash over everything
to end us all.

But it didn't.
and after fifteen minutes or so the firefighters were winning.
So we turned on heel
and we hobbled home.

Live to fight another day.

The sun is resplendent and warming.
on this bench in front of these shops in a town we’ve never been to.
Italy’s a lot nicer if you’re in a small town.

I’m watching her peel an orange
slowly,
meticulously
she’s removing the skin from the meat.

She reminds me of a boxer wrapping his hands
before a big fight.

The last moment of meditative solitude
before the **** hits the fan.

She’s finishing with the peel now, setting the pieces on the bench next to us
as she splits it in half, an aerosol of juice sprays from the orange
she hands me one half
and begins to eat the other herself.

I peel the segments apart, eating them slowly
and spitting the seeds into the gutter.
she’s smiling,
the juice running down her chin,
and neither of us are speaking.

Later I’m smelling the citrus on her fingers
as she runs them through my hair;
it’s barely long enough to run fingers through,
and I’m thankful for that.

I’m thankful for that orange.
I’m glad I saw that small town,
the one without tourist attractions or snakeoil peddlers
I’m glad my scalp ever knew her citrus fingers.


it came,

I saw,

it went.

I threw away an old pair of shoes today.
They were a few years old
and the seams had begun to burst
particularly about the sole, there was one hole big enough
to slide a toe through.
It’s winter and I don’t need them anymore
so they became trash.

Someone returned a relic of my past to me recently.
It was a dreamcatcher,
a furnace big enough to fit my most evil of nightmares.
It was a gift from a person I once knew.
I was looking at it one night
for a long time;
I took it from the wall where it had been hanging
and tossed it into a nearby garbage can.

I can handle my nightmares on my own now.

I’m shaking off the weights of the things I don’t need
because,
if there’s a lesson I’ve learned in my adulthood,
it is to travel often
and to travel light.

Plain and simple, I didn’t need those old shoes.
I have leather boots.
They’re warm and waterproof and will never get holes in them.

They were as good as dead weight-

so I let them go.