Love Your Ass Off

Have you ever heard anyone say, "I loved my ass off last night"? or "I loved my head off" or "I loved so hard I burst a blood vessel" or "I loved my brains out" (we've all heard "fucked my brains out") or "I loved myself silly"?

Ooh, ooh That Smell...

Do you know the smell of the late night? It is metallic in liquid form, melted from the people that walked earlier in the light, plying the "daily life." And that smell, that air, is filled with genies, they dance and swim in circles, and they want more; they've been rubbed out of their hiding places. Some are affable, some bent on destruction. These genies are everywhere, freeze dried, in spores, spilling from ceilings and crawling out of couches. They are smart and protozoan, just looking to latch on and suck nutrients. The later it gets, the colder they smell. Only a warm touch can neutralize the odor.

Union of Truth Digging

I'm digging for the truth, but I take a lot of breaks. It feels good, the digging, makes muscles, increases lung capacity. But I'm used to breaks. Just as I hit my rhythm, as I'm about to be lost in the task, gone like the jiggling tips of sage plants, like the clouds in their dusk shapes, like people making love locked in dreams, unrecognizable, on the edge, of falling or flying, it occurs to take a break, to be found again, to agitate, to loaf, to slouch, to move about awareness, to taunt it and then to feel guilty.

Ze Moon

I live out on a desert where snow and ice lay thick on the caliche, and I am weary looking at red, perky Jupiter out my writing room window. I want to listen to my body. It's voice has been in my ears and in my eyes forever, and I have heard, but rarely have I listened. On the doorstep of the solstice and I am alone. I remember little Jack, on a years ago solstice at Virginia's house on Valverde, looking out the window at the late, late moon rise, and intoning "ze moon, ze moon. Look, look, ze moon." A 2 year old mophead, smudge faced and naked, stalking around a bunch of beached, shroomed up wee hour revelers strewn about a room filled with couches, sleeping bags and piles of people's belongings. Somebody was stroking a guitar in the other room, and the scent of brownies and pinon logs filled the air. I sat on the couch under the big window with Jack and reached out addicted to the texture of his baby skin, those elbow dimples and that face of exploding delight. I bounced him around, got him all giggly and hoarse. It had snowed a lot that night, but the sky cleared late and the moon crossed the front yard above our snow-hatter cars and the leaning telephone poles. It took it's time and Jack was transfixed. The room was dark, but for the orange fireglow, and l could see la luna wobbling bright on Jack's amber irises. That was the solstice, right there, in Jack's eyes, on the couch with the rest of the people lying on the wood floor propped on elbows, heavy-lidded and happy, knowing that the longest night of the year was almost behind us. The moon slid toward the southern edge of the window where it began to disappear behind the neighbors' house. This time Jack asked, "ze moon?"

Part of the Circus

Writing is hard, man. That's not what I came home to say, but that's the first thing that comes to mind. It's snowing, the darkness has hardened the frozen slop on the roads, and another fetch of moisture is streaming in from CA and AZ as we speak. A little while ago, I was in town, getting a package out through the virtually empty post office, dumping some garbage in a dumpster behind a place I used to live (and, by virtue of that, still lay claim to dumping rights), and having an easy chai at the World Cup where I found myself talking to a retired economics professor from the Univ. of Tulsa about identity theft and the blind trust that inhabits the other side of that coin and is essential for the human community to function. Usually, I avoid conversations with this guy, he's one of those black holes, a nice black hole, no dark energy anti-gravitational force, but I'm living "out there" now and he was the first being I spoke with today who inhabited the same time and space (I think). It was pleasant to converse. And then, with a little time leftover from the no-line post office transaction, I went over to Robert Mirabal's store in Yucca Plaza; walked through fat flakes over the sidewalk mushy with mashed potato snow plowed off Paseo. It was calm and moist, mild-feeling with all my layers on. Mirabal has just published a novel, autobiographical, called "Running Alone in Photographs" where he writes of Pueblo life through a female protagonist, Reyes Wind. I wanted a book for myself, and two as presents, and I'd been shut out when he sold out in 10 minutes at Moby Dickens bookstore last Saturday. Tonight, I got there right at 5:30 when the selling/signing was to begin. There were only 2 or 3 others there when I came in the door, my computer bag full of books and notebooks slung over my right shoulder (no room for the computer). A scruffy man in an orange cap with a salty and peppery five O'clock shadow, a bulbous nose and bursty bright energy, introduced himself to me as Dean and told me that the food would be ready in a few minutes and I should eat. Then I saw Robert. He came across the room with those wonder-lit eyes, somehow shining through the flourescence in their coal-and-white combo, long pontail, Levi's jean jacket over a brown suede vest over a buckskin shirt, faded jeans tapering to snow boots of fur and leather. When he got to me he gave me a peace hand-grasp, then a hug. He doesn't know me well, but he knows me, and vice versa. We connected a few times 5 years ago when I was hanging with his striking and skittish cousin, B. The one time that stands out was at the Taos Inn's Adobe Bar, on a snowy night, when I came to meet B and she was hanging in the far corner of the bar, against the wall, with Robert, her usual 9pm smirk on and a shot of tequila in her hand. Mirabal had one, too. I joined and we got to drinking. We each had 5 or 6 shots of Commemorativo, and the conversation turned to creation, the need, the heart of it. B floated out into the other room and we just talked about art being like breathing and food and exercise and religion and love, and the endless need to do it, or "do this", the drinking (which he said he doesn't do much of - and by his prolific creations in music, painting, instrument making, acting, writing/storytelling, you know it to be true). And without going too far or getting too reverent or sycophantic, or just plain cheesy, we fucking bonded, as artists. We hugged on it and he gave me eye-to-eye support and told me he knew I was a writer and creator whether I was doing it or not (at that time very little), and in that is the memory that stands, the communal bond. But it was more, too. It was a welcoming to this place where I now live on a level in the dirt and rocks beyond the people screaming me off my bicycle from their trucks, or the macho challenges in the bars. This is when I first lived here, before I was sure-footed enough and rooted in the history of this place to stand comfortably on its skin. And B was his family, and he was ok with me and her, although he did warn me that she had "the old Indian blood." So, when I saw him tonight, all of that was there. And that's not all of what I mean to say. What struck me tonight, in his store, was a sense of celebrity, the excitement of being around a person who creates in what seems like fearlessness, and that I am part of that circus commune of people who channel and entertain and spill and tell. And all of this is sounding cheesy to me, but what's more and at the core is that I feel this here about a lot of my friends and acquaintances. I'm in this humming, hodgepodge world of actors, writers, poets, acrobats and circus performers, chefs, performance artists, painters, potters, healers, filmmakers, monologists, extreme athletes, sculptors, musicians, toymakers, creators and interpreters of everything - and I freaking know them...they are my people. We are fugueing together. And I'm dumbfounded that I get to be part of it. My skin tingles. I'm forever a little kid invited backstage to meet the actors at a Broadway play. It's ridiculous. That's what it's like living here. And I feel like this about so many people. When my friends in a band play onstage (even when I'm the MC), I can't believe my good fortune to be part of it, in the organism, just in. It's hard to describe, because the ego of it is gone most of the time, friends are friends, but still, still...they are talented and creating and blowing people away, making them move, weep, leap, remember, fall in love, change their course....so much it dribbles into a puddle. And I'm not saying they are good, bad, better or worse than anyone else, it's just that it's a tribe, a traveling band of people, mixed and matched and mismatched, too, but all with that eye-to-eye support from whatever is the thing that drives creation. And I got that from Robert Mirabal tonight. Eye-to-eye, full person to full person. He who now has an oscar, a touring band, is in a movie about Georgia O'Keefe coming out next year, makes flutes, writes childrens stories and now novels....all of this is inspiring. And, at the same time, it's ordinary. Maybe that's where my sadness bled in as I left his store after listening to Mirabal talk to Ted Egri, a 95 year old sculptor who still sculpts (who looks like he has years left to go, smiling, sharp, clear-eyed and moving his walker along smoothly) and saying goodbye to a couple I know who run a fitness center (the guy acts, writes, plays and writes music and is a super athlete). I was walking back to my car in the darkness and I thought of various friends, their faces floating in front of me, and realized that I both love them in the most ordinary way in the soil of us as people, and also I am captivated, motivated, titillated and inspired by them, and feel lucky, giddy, a holy-shit-I-am-part-of-this grin in my solar plexus. And maybe that means I am home.

Blue Dream

Waiting for the phone to ring in a blue dream, a full moon floating out the window. It may have rung, you feel a conversation and it leaks about you the next day, maybe for years. A fiddler in green satin with her chin poised to play takes up residence in snowdrifts, and empty houses, in airports, and in the bare orchard along the river of the canyon that you keep driving by, always wanting to stop and look around. You're slow in the waiting, in the listening, not sure if you've heard, or seen, or felt...anything.

Rabbit Redux

A rabbit rooting dawn today out here on the high Mesa riding the white-capped waves of old volcanoes. No clouds with 2 below on the window thermometer, the caldera silenced, a subtle cherry haze made of woodsmoke and yesterday's snowmelt drifting over town way in the eastern and southern distance. Out here aboard the Watership (upside) Down, I skim along with rabbits, plump ones and stringy, sinewy, demon-eyed jacks, lured out of my warm nautilus into the newly bright world, stalks of dry grass glistening like Christmas tinsel. Those rabbits, the rotunds, sniff the Tiffany-glittering surface of the snow for rabbit food and don't mind my first, heavy gulps of frozen air. I walk in my rubber and leather insulated Sorel's (bought, I must relate, for $80 at the Boulder Army store in 1994) in the direction of a dark juniper covered hump topped by a kissy-lips peak. I'm hoping to find the rabbit city and enter that world, whatever size may be required of me. But once I start moving with purpose, they skip into the dark tunnels of sage, and I turn back to my vessel. Only one remains in sight, a tall jack thinking it's a kangaroo, bounding as if on a pogo stick, along the south side of the dirt road, keeping up with a sherry red prius going 30 mph in the direction of the gorge.

Nearing home I am halted by three dogs, a bony malamute, a shorthaired, lean-muscular african looking pup, and a wylie-faced collie-shepherd mix. They move around and in-and-about me like water, sniffing and smiling, rubbing and panting. I'm soft among them, nobodied, and wish to enter like Gumby into their world. But there's the house, and they see it, too, and it brings back memories of the former tenant lady who, I'm told, used to feed them porkchops. I've no chops, and realize that I don't know what to feed them. I've been petless my whole life other than Dannie, my friends' Newfoundland, who I lived with for 4 years, and had been trained to feed. I tricked myself for a minute that they were just happy to be with me as a being among them, but they wanted the goods and they knew I could, or eventually would deliver. And I will, but still, I'm left with a lingering sadness from this morning; the disappearance of the rabbits at my clodding steps, and the heads-turning-in-unison departure of the tres amigos, noses tuned to other gastronomical possibilities up-mesa. I stepped back into my house, still toasty from yesterday's sun, and sat to meditate, thinking that maybe one day I'd crawl out into the sage and find Alice's wonderland.