Man Among the Living

The moon shines happy in my bedroom window, growing bigger. It rained earlier and a little bit the last few days, so the air is mulchy and cool. A whole new July world has presented itself, sweatshirts without sunglasses and puddles in the dirt. I'm listening to a friend's sister's CD (actually in my iPhone so my statement is anachronistic)...not sure whether to go to bed or crawl out into the wet sage and talk to the rabbits. I'm busy, as they say, but it's so sweet and cool and my eyes don't hurt anymore. The smoke has been composted into the clay and maybe it'll bring new vegetables. A tough start to a summer, the toughest I've ever been part of...but a few days of afternoon clouds and the smell of raisin rain and it's all erased. This is the most hospitable place on earth, after the volcanoes spewed and the land upheaved...if you lived through that you're in the right place. My house is cool and I'll be able to sleep with a smiley face...I felt the smile at 4:43am last night when I rolled over to drink water and caught a draft from the dormer window. I reveled with the stink bugs, lizards and spiders strutting through my room with no issues. We all smiled into the big windows showing the blinking stars and listening to the quiet coyotes waiting until tomorrow for forage. I hear crying babies and slow cars with cigarette red lights spinning crazed into the Mesa for hot springs and campsites and people waiting for days. And I know to tell the soft nothingness here that I'm still around to witness and feel this in my gnarled feet. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing and nowhere else I'd rather be. Sad, yes, but with the taste of the Rio Grande in my teeth, and the sense that the thunderstorms love us and will give us what we need, man among the living.

Chilly Last of Spring

I love this - it is June 20th and I'm wearing a sweatshirt, a slight shiver and purple hew to my lips and fingers. The clouds are low and it is raining in the mountains. We have not had rain since May 26th. It won't be much, maybe a few stray drops, but it feels good, smells like the coast. My black hoodie is bunched over my striped green, breezy, summery button down shirt. I have Jeans on my legs, and socks on my feet - rarities the past 4 weeks. Birds are singing, some swooning. They seem to like the cool and brooding. And my cell phone is ringing on my hip, not the sound of birds.

Back for the Eclipse with Pain

It's been so long my friend. A gentle dusk on the desert on a day of full moon lunar eclipse in Sagittarius. The smoke from wildfires has dissipated leaving a peach clarity to the horizon, lifting up from darkness the pinons on the dinosaur mounds and cat back ridges. I can see into the bottoms of arroyos and catch black birds leaving branches on the escarpments. There is emptiness in my mouth where 4 hours ago a molar once rooted. With a hole in its hull that would have sunk it (and me), it now sits on my altar, a specter of the past, a notch of lived life, a symbol of mutation. It hurts in the bone above the hole and radiates with my heartbeat out toward my right ear. I let it hurt, waiting for the aspirin I'll take closer to my sleep. The full moon awaits out there, behind the Pueblo and it will light up my bedroom in the wee hours. I am tired and know I must sleep on my back. There is writing fluttering in my left ear, and stuffing my lungs. It longs for glistening green spinach and creamy pesto, mason jars of cooled Mate and bags of mixed nuts and berries. It stays quiet, mostly, not in apathy or timidity, but in wait, in breathing, in a slower beat, a half closed eye, a smoothed out foot. It is cocked, not loaded, a ghost limb limbering, a fastball not yet thrown. And it does not matter when the throw is made. We're at a tipping point - me and me, and you and you. I move about wondering less about the games going on about me, out there, in the crackling morning radio, in the faces of people stuck in traffic on the one road connecting dots on the vast high desert. There is still, though, outside of politics, partying, and my skin wanting to be touched, a hunt for security and a fleeing from some force, some hunger that smells metallic and sounds like an army of cicadas. I'm forgetting my face in the mirror, dropping more crumbs in my car, talking less and giving up more. And yet there is a bubble growing inside me that smells of spring laundry, and feels like sitting on a bench and just looking, and looking until I fall asleep without the fear of being slapped in the head. My face hurts where my tooth used to be and it's now dark in my house. Pain sounds like a conversation with myself, feels like rowing a boat in thick water. I think of money and fresh vegetables, and finding my soul in the hole left by a broken tooth.