Phone Line Crows
I spent the break
in the day
trying to gain the trust of the birds.
They chattered in disdain
when I spread crumbs out on the sill
and yet
pecked the bread to dust
when I had my back turned.
Solo
Saxophone music drifts
through the market.
There is a faint electric buzzing
in my head in the form of neurons
& their repeated failures.
Oh, to connect the music with a mouthpiece,
with a history and a set of lungs
and the ghostly, crowded brass
no one else can notice.
Conversations on the bus are limited by a quiet decency to get along – to make no one any less comfortable than already and the tactic includes going deeply internal, into the glowing screen and headphones – put off an I get along alright vibe, thank you & thankfully not cold enough to blast the defrosters and make us sweaty, make us more uncomfortable than already.
This feels familiar and uncomfortable – anonymous, surrounded by people who care for each other, love like a credit card kept open, “enjoy your promotion.” What is doing the feeling is a sense of suspenseful unwelcome. I know I can expand within Seattle and become an interactive body among the other connected bodies…. (?) …. clearly not enough. Do you know who is hiring around here?
For this to work best it requires cleaner edges, and consistency in font size. Style must be constant enough – it is the same night confined and tessellated here after-all. Consider this a timely prototype and later patterning colors and statements and font size variable based on the importance of what is said.
We are deep within the season of edges, a thin channel walled in by socked-in coasts, like I’m in a rowboat with you and you are unaware of the dangers. Fins multiply, wind picks up – so drink up, have fresh hop while it lasts, love your freedom, assert your empathy, we will be alright, this boat is endless. I did not mean to frighten you with what you avoid.
The choice between noise-punk and indie goddess is decided with a vegan blt. It is ten past 8. Both shows start at 8. The noise punk National play last, giving me time, plenty, while they chop and slice and pile fries, toss dirty knives into a bowl of soapy water, change the radio station, shoot the shit for a minute… it will be a longer show in this manner. It will take me deeper.
(something weird happens here supposedly)
Jesus, I’m not going back there. Instead heading up to see noise at Chop Suey while this prose snowflake unfolds. If you are reading this, understand it as meta, and know this electric navy blue as the beginning of an idea. To fill little spaces, folded, of a full piece of paper, lined, torn out of a notebook, once straightened out and framed, what a nightly kaleidoscope it will make.
Disconnected to the mechanical metaphor of interlocking parts of the city with fiery clarity, this is something I know too well, this disconnection. It will take great effort to enact redemption – moxie, art. The visuals are all there, the substance is out or not quite in – the beauty of a dissociative soundtrack – a glitchy silent film – an anxious pull toward meaning, toward fulfilling work (no one is hiring, the (…?…) is violently competitive.) “Keep up your spirit,” says a whiskey label.
I refuse to conceal how sadly present I am in this writing, not freakish, but – the reactions here keep a tone of total indifference. Swing hard, Merrell. It is the bottom of the 9th. Even still, not engrossed by that or what’s happening on stage. In the fog a striped shirted man hollering and strutting, like a Mick Jagger on lean. Classic punk style but vacuous of meaning now that ‘punk’ has illuminated itself elsewhere.
Standard human hearing. Comfortable socially. There is hardly a method you know, getting neglected in the chain of shots. I wasted it on myself for transient holy feelings when the rest were made uncomfortable with their tasks for closing… you moved nowhere closer to your goal.
Does that place exist? No, and it was in San Diego. Might be a rush of waitstaff from other places coming in. That’s my temporary. I am sorry for keeping you up – move into an uncrowded bar – but with too much gain on the cymbals – punk with a miscue in. Painful production (with that high gain) – we capture emotion with intent to make it reach the frequencies of Standard human hearing.
Let’s talk about dad and mountains. Practice environmental consciousness and think with the M.S. Merwin poem about the names of trees they grew up with and never knew, I don’t know, and I don’t know (cut off the serrated edges next time). I am clearly engrossed and alone, but alone in a place like this, the house of $2 PBRs, looks like waiting, waiting for a beloved friend to show up out of the fog.
The weather for last call might prevent and influx… “Play like a champion, leave no doubt.” Can you close my card whenever? I’m sorry but who are you. Little cues, rags thrown aside while harmless patrons sip slow last calls or play pool without adding to their stamped cards. You moved nowhere closer to your goal.
The jealousy can’t be mutual. For me it is a weight I think I can ignore, no matter how many knots form in my shoulders. No longer in the house of $2 PBRs, and cars zoom by the Florida ceiling windows, enjoy yourself angel… enjoy your baseball – share your mouthwash, forget the aux cable, etc. Forget the rest of the World.
Waiting Along With Others Waiting Also
There was a cutthroat, bottle-neck traffic
threatening efficient Arrivals pick-up –
like a fleet of ships in a bottle trying to get out
all at once – this is the meaning
of the bottle-neck. A constriction
where an open vista and the open movement
through the landscape
funnel together like a draining tub.
The flight was short and turbulent.
The cities seemed like other cities
from halfway between them and the jets.
All attempts at sleep were shaken awake
“like a baby in a crib,” she said.
When we hit the highway north
we were quiet
pinned down by unsayable things.
the light today. the light felt right. there was something in the quality of the light. something magic in the light which gave the birds, the mountains, the green fishing boats heading home to harbor, the irises of the guests, the hanging flowers, the shopwindows a positive identifier : the green ships were aware of how perfect their green hulls flowed greenly through the reflective mountainous hemlock forests who, enjoying their participation in the scene, reflected on other stages in their growth, back before they allowed green ships to pass through their wavery watery underworld.
even the clouds seemed proudly unashamed of what blue skies they concealed. the blue skies, blissfully unaware for the moment of the infinite void of cold, soundless space only a few miles further away from them and the green ships and the hemlocks, seemed happy to engage in the harmony of light concentrated on this first day of August, 2017, albeit intermittent.
the lake was moody when the brilliant blue skies picked out patches of spruce tips and hugged their sharp branches with a golden light. I felt a ripple forming.
the red salmon. the sockeye. the mispronunciation that stuck to the history books. (sock-eye is a kind of onomatopoeia for a Coastal Salish word suk – kegh and the italics, of course, are a translation as well of a spoken-only language into the English alphabet).
the salmon seemed content in their retirement. their dehydrated red fins waving above the surface like flags of defeat. the swimming dead. the final phase change. the home stream. the magnetic influence. the biological impulse. the nutrients in the trees. the core samples. the this and the that about the salmon on this fine day. pick a metaphor and hold onto it.
the swimming dead. these fish fortunately are close to their home channel as they phase change and take on a negligent diet. however, once the circle is met, the spawning occurs, there is nothing in them to keep them alive. they must flip and flop around until death comes by claw or talon or net. their spirit warms the hibernation chambers of a female bear up above 3,000 feet, getting her ready for the birth of her litter of cubs. their spirit rides the thermals higher than the mountain peaks with an 8 times magnified binocular vision zooming in and out of the landscape and providing the energy to swoop in for another kill to feed the young. their spirit fuels a fistfight at the fisherman’s bar over a game of shuffleboard. beer spilled everywhere.
the light made everything aware of itself to me. everything seemed confident in it being what it was. today, the water and the mountains, the movements they make… occurred to me as a correspondence. a long, slow decision making process. the light opened a window into this exchange. the light led me astray in the perfect direction, the noted observations, the new realm of seeing, the opened mind in the light of its own opening, like an iris acutely aware of its height above the buttercups yet jealous of the yellow light emanating from them as reflected indirectly in the diffuse light of the jagged clouds. the clouds held the light back and handed it out liberally to everything I set my mind to today.
wake up to the minutes
& red silk and lipstick
record each other
giving compliments
then slip into bed
which is not to go
wasted on me.
At night, alive in the room, there’s a dark blue feeling coming over me – it is here I make myself overwhelmed. Oh, my. You still haven’t shared any of your photos of Friday Harbor with the Others. You’ve yet to share enough of yourself. You still haven’t opened. Listen to Chopin and cry your lower back out of alignment. Continue reading
There had to have been a goodbye I was waiting for to say this. To say I wanted to move away the windows willingly, to move away from the steering wheel and into a savage hold up of resources and whims – the nomadic makeup of without and the mascara runs of the internal makeup of within, though a dosage of transience would help everything out because a big burst of colors is always waiting to happen (in the northern hemisphere without light pollution and somewhere in clear skies from Portland to Alberta). It is hard to believe in the churning wheel branches of green that can overwhelm our night stars. Where is this new trip coming from? How many other sensations can I attribute to something like an acid flashback? Is it possible to flash forward and back at the same time? There are oak trees everywhere with roots extending outward beyond any property line.
A CENTO – ((stolen prose fragments from The Control of Nature by John McPhee))
The crisis was simple and economic,
decorated with a relief model –
to keep them from plunging through.
Fireworks flew high into their interiors,
molten, growling, and weighed
two-thirds of a mile a piece.
As it happened, the edge never being stationary,
one cubic metre of flowing lava, of
prescription beer, and the wind shifted,
houses burst into flame mechanically,
and never took no for an answer.
The volcano came loose, extending
like a finger halfway across the harbormouth.
Dad swims up to the glass in a “silent
scream of terror” and felt but a mild quake
when the living room imploded
and removed itself hereafter.
I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. Though my body has taken all day to recover from sleeping in my car, 50 yards away from a rented bed. I had no desire to drunken stumble into the shared closet, waking up others. My mind was gone and it’s okay, the graduate students were on a fisheries weekend retreat, bitching me out.
Okay then. Walking in a stupor. It is 4 pm and my stomach is sour. I napped on a mossy knoll, as advised through devious teeth. Hey I’m having fun with my words, letting them fall out unfiltered. Is it approaching the flow state? Where the valve is cranked open and the steamy water starts shooting out galaxies? Anyway, unique universe is the term to cherish, to hold as your only object.
Dwellings 