From Chocolate to Family to Children to Change: A writing practice

Because I don't want to, I am doing a writing practice. Right here, right now, or Write here, Write now! I must keep typing without stopping for 30 minutes. I can type slowly if I need to, but no corrections, no going back and deleting to be literary, hip, cool, smooth, smart, brilliant, rollicking, ballsy, irreverent, fearless, unfathomable, deep, and lustrous. Nope. And here I go, nowhere yet, not sure where to head. Writing practice, writing practice. An empty page (so to speak), and empty vessel. Hmmmmm, chocolate, 70% cacao, is in me, moving through, having passed the pleasure centers of the tongue, drifting choco smoke up into my sinuses and tingling my brain into a sense that I am both ok and wanting, into a slide, silky glide of my own milkiness, my own sense of slither, come hither, the nostrils flared for the soak of the sage outside, turning the desert to apples and mint. It is raining again, unexpected, but a fetch of clouds has swung low over the Mesa, dipping into the canyon above the river, threatening to unite with its kind down in the bottom, water to water, dust to dust, the insects hide in the rocks, waiting for the drips to clear the cups of the flowers that cannot stop opening wide, priapic, triumphant, Ella fucking Fitzgerald, A bald tenor, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Raindrops keep Falling on my Head, it ain't gonna stop, the deluge, the monsoon, big words for muddy roads, but not like in the lower elevations, not tropical but cool, the water shining with a bit of dark blue, a bit of lead waiting for the last rays of the sun to poke through the suddenly lifted edge of the western skin of sky. It's rose fest of cacti, delectable, edible, put in your salad dark red lusciousness, and sexy magenta of a woman just coming of age, just knowing how to sway, to take in a look, and to brandish and lavish. Soft dirt and clay, turning to pudding, years in the waiting, the one time these shapes take hold and horses have a hard time treading the land. But leaden drops calm the hooves, and we play volleyball with bouncing bellies in the bottomlands under the slopes, next to rotting cars with grass peering in the empty windows, and lost dogs tongues waving, smiling, dripping with hunger, stand close to our rippling legs, a low growl, a high whine, and nothing to grasp. It smells so good and we don't care about the drops, the lightning stinging the black volcanoes, the thunder ruffling our thighs, making us want ribs, chicken legs, meats of some sort although we have only heaps of greens and berries, and beer. It is the time of high light and it won't leave us hanging, blueberry skies mixed with the aquamarine of lost-at-sea youth, a color that used to cause creeping sadness at the thought of dinner when in the woods with smudge faced friends figuring out how to eat snails, and light the woods on fire. And it stays with us, giving us a chance, after romance, after the toilet bowl has emptied, after the early dreams have been composted and reshuffled, after the old songs have finally lost their meaning. There is still a chance. We remember bits and slices of times with family, around tables, food spilling over, bickering in the kitchen, hugs in the den, puking in the bathrooms. It is sepia toned as we might expect, doesn't matter if now or in the sepia past, past is sepia, the color of the astral floor, the color of blended muteness, the corroboration of your brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and fathers, and cute cousins, and the strange revelations you knew as a kid, among the elders, hiding in guilelessness, but listening and knowing you've been witness to the Titanic, and the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the World Series, and Man walking on the moon, and the terrible quicksand of the family legacy. Or maybe not quicksand, sometimes the blue-flame of life risen up in everybody, when remembering that their past is built on crenelated lives, hollowed from fullness, splinte3ed from their boughs, but they had heft, and they sprung, and spanked and spelunked through the caves for all of us. And we're doing that now. Me, on the desert, looking out at popping sage, so green it wants to be blue, battling my energies, trudging through late nights to get back to early mornings, feeling sadnesses born of my addicted cells, knowing that I can get back into the soft (yet firm) bed and arise christened new, bells bopping, words flying, breathing my bellybutton alive again. Seeing myself a child in the flower's faces. Seeing myself aloft in the cheeks of the people, pinched, reddish, like dolls, from the other night, tromping from place to place, desert to town, to houses filled with murals and the scent of sandalwood in the bathrooms, having fun, not ready to pay the price of tomorrow, never tomorrow, never tomorrow. And, hey, how did the dawn get away with the day....last night's always getting in my way - lyrics from a friend's song. Sometimes true. And yet dusk is hanging on through this clack, clack, and I hear the soft spilling of rain on my roof. Ravens, getting more plump with the bounty of wetness, shaking off the spatter, smiling and roiling around on the cliffs. People in tatters waqlking down the road, one-by-one, sometimes in gaggles, in groups, in trios, looking sad but found, blind and bobbling, but unboggled. Unimpeded, they keep moving toward the hot springs where they may find some warmth in the chilled rain. children of this earth, old time London backstreets urchins finding flowers to put in their hair,a nd to play drums to the weary, and wary, because they still have time, and time has them, and the world just may turn enough toward the sun that we'll all dry off with them. Music comes to me across the mesa, a sound of flutes and electric guitars, of fiddles and kettle drums, and the rain pounds harder now.