Some things are harder than others to figure out. A certain age reached without any effort at all yet how the work of the years piles up. You find yourself thinking, "did I do this right?" There's a sense of absolute confusion about how to do the rest. Are we meant to keep doing things? The same things or different things, better things? My mind is a cluttered set of files but any one of them when pulled out is nearly a masterpiece. Nearly until it is released into the air at one of the gatherings of older adults who hang out with each other. I am not sure at all why we do this. Why do we like each other so much. We try to impress each other and we notice who the good listeners are and who to listen to. The hardest part is being the best story teller in the group and learning to just listen. All it takes is one honest person to ruin the silence for me when they turn softly and interview me. I am not sure about that either. Why do they do that? I am certain that they have better things to do. My teeth are falling out and I can tell when I look a little older in the light and have already begun noticing that deathly light you start seeing, usually early evening. It is the color of the shade, the kind not produced by a sun. No one tells you about the effect that has, how it intoxicates each and every one of us sooner or later, how we hope to lay down a bit longer and longer every day until we just cease to ever get up again. No one ever tells you about it because they can't quite put their finger on it until when they do, it's to late. Every morning I awake to a message in the bottle. A would-be writer named Ben lives up the hill keeps trying to convince himself that a book is going to be produced. His novel is a constant in my life, his habits and right down to what he makes for dinner. Oblivious to the fact that I know. I know everything about it because he advertises alot. I'm not sure why people do that either. To be fair, we all advertise our plots and themes, it is human nature. Let's get that straight before moving on.

 I've done my homework which consists of remote observations and occasional run-ins with this desperately lonesome divorced dad whose grown children appear just as sad as he is until they are with their mother and then they appear in pictures as if every day is a birthday. At ease. With their father they seldom seem to smile. It must have been a hairy break up but I can only guess. His "ex" as they prefix them, the thrown away men and women people practice on nowdays, works in the film industry and honestly, I do not know who was to blame, who walked away. I hope to find out and tell you. She is known to me after due diligence on my part. She is horse-faced at best, lean and sinewy but must have been quite attractive especially in her thirties, when she hit her stride. Men of a certain age who remain single demonstrate strong propensities for types. Like the journalist who prefers Italian starlets, ah, he's a rich character and yes, this is all true. And no, who cares. It's enough isn't it that the men out there who have rejected so much of what makes women real deserve to be called out for what they are. So called lovers of women yet they failed to care for one for her entire life. As if women could be dropped off at no-kill shelters like border collies. Are all these rejected women border collies? The most returned dog there is yet in this case I've a feeling that if not at least mutual and amicable, he'd rather have stayed. As a matter of fact, there are three male collies returned for every female, perhaps more.

 Every morning I awake to a message in the bottle. He lives up the hill and keeps trying to convince himself that a book is going to be produced. His novel is a constant in my life, his never- ending attempts to blow on a fire that's long been out. His rare and uncommon books that he announces opening and thumbing through, as it were, to do some light reading. His plans for the next day pinned perhaps on little post it notes on a desk burying ashtrays and stray marbles he uses for inspiration sometimes, when it isn't a figurine or the head of a doll, the remnant of a bell. All archaic and at one time, useful, essential even. The things archeologists will treasure in cargo pant pockets full of teeth and what appear to be some type of spindle which one day will be the focus of entire dissertations. He scribbles down little reminders for things that no one needs reminding to accomplish. "Farmer's market tomorrow." "Do laundry Wednesday." "Solitary lunch at Mag's New People Cafe." All endearingly pathetic or so he hopes, so why wait for the archeologist when the site is fresh right now, the squid ink pasta he insists upon eating far too often is still steaming in the sink. You are what you eat. Pathos is not the most difficult state to emulate but it is certainly the one most cloyingly unattractive. It isn't that per se, it is the fact that the pathos of the situation is invisible to the player most of all. It must be how some actors feel when they get into character, can't get out and end up being arrested for shoplifting a year later. And then they spiral on down as if the spindle at once cut loose from the point at which it is fixed, spins clear off the table.

And then it hits me. These are not reminders and not even props. It occurs to me that he is hoping for some help to write this magnum opus by living it, designing the creature he's become after being discarded by the people who could have translated the work into a foreign language best. He wants help and therefore, I shall not remain sullen or guilt-ridden just because I pay attention. Secretly. It's a big secret we all know but whisper all the same. 

Just last week I was heading up the hill to get a glimpse of the locals dressed up like characters, at once a sort of circus yet exerting tremendous energy to appear to be thespians, propelled by enormous speciousness. And succeeding. Fun and games is another way of saying pardon me for my enire lack of insight. The me-generation hangover persists. They keep playing dress up, never satiated and upping the ante even though they are already dressed up and their lines on rewind-play-rewind-echo, already in drag. An old acquaintence sat outside a place called Elmos. I'll not bother to dissimulate as before long, we'll both be dead. He was once married to a world famous dancer, let's call her Twyla. I babysat once at their place, back when my sister was intoxicated by the 1960s. She was heading out with her old man, they were heading out with them, not Twyla but a new one, his current housemate and old lover, her name too sacred to mention even by me. Because she is elderly now and in poor health. I decided to sit down and have a word with Peter. I am royalty as is he. My penchant for living out of that loop, his is however firmly rooted in the loop, gives me rights that I employ and allow these world famous types to empty their load into my circuitry. We were making small talk, I was asking about the home situation and he told me he has four caregivers. All of a sudden this young woman approached us and she stopped and started discussing some pictures she needed. From Peter. Who sells art in NYC where Twyla lives and works. I'm thinking, he trusts this young woman who supplies needles to heroine addicts for a living to inventory his collection. All the while we are sitting on a ledge stained with the vomit of a hundred lost souls outside a bar called Elmos. I am not sure why I mention this at all except to say, the signs are everywhere one just has to be open to recognizing what they are. If they are able. We surrender to this violent urge to connect, in one way or the other, before the silence descends for good. Perhaps I'll send this to Twyla, show her what she lost. Tell her how being famous in a small town is no different from being so in NYC. I've been there, even been to Tom's. I've also been in a foreign prison. So what.

All the while, Ben holes up on the hill staging scenes that he pretends to write about in what he calls episodes. These episodes are meant to be strung together to create what is called a novel. Novel, something of particular value, a new thing that is test driven by a reader until they either toss it aside or dive in and drown. There's just too much going on nowdays for many of us to do the latter so Ben wisely writes down these episodes never evading the pervasive empetus to package and tape it closed. If it fits, it ships. He has a small range of moleskin notebooks in which he hand writes the things. Each and every one follows a simple framework and to me it appears it is the longest suicide note ever written. By anyone. Promises made, promises broken. Teeth lost along the way. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the pretentiousness of dolls' heads and squid ink. Attempts at food preservation lovingly recorded as if women hadn't been doing this all along for their familiars. A new buzzword which is a buzzword meaning, more than a stranger but less than a family member. A non binary way of saying recognizable as a persistant image with which one is engaged. I could do this all day. Chop down whole forests of declension into convenient bite size pieces for a reader to gnaw on aimlessly, tirelessly, drowning. Why beat a dead horse though?

Darla Whitehead Tells All

Besides Carmen, there is an associated blog that contains some offbeat work. That blog is known as Darla Whitehead Tells All (I'll place a link in the comments). Darla Whitehead is a nom de plume based on having been a Darling (of my poetry mentor) and my godparents, Burt and Ruth Whitehead. Now there is no better name than Whitehead in terms of nom de plumes and whatnots. No better name. I'll bet they knew exactly where the Bays lived all those years ago...on Park Ave (how I enjoy this guy's posts to Bisbee Community...). Anyhows...I was over there killing some time at Darla's place and found a poem that might be ready for human eyes to see..other than mine of course. I'm actually very protective of some pieces...because they are way way too deep to be understood...sometimes even by me. I'll tell you a secret about writing poetry.....the really weird stuff (never throw it away unless it's just plain horrid to begin with)....the really weird stuff is sometimes laden with premonition. Yes. There have been times in life when...in a fit of sadness or extreme trauma...I've reviewed some old stuff and discovered lo! I was predicting the future. There it is...in plain view...whatever I am currently experiencing is described in an old poem...I know it's crazy but I tell you true. I just don't know when I go into what is more or less a 'trance' as I write, what some poems mean. As I get older, there are fewer of those types of poems and most of the poems I write now are quite deliberate and almost all involve to some degree, trance states. Yes, I will confess....when I write I can go into a trance. My kids will tell you this and they used to laugh as they would catch me there and I would turn to them....still typing and staring at them with trance eyes hahaha. I have to say, keyboards really do facilitate trance states. Big time. Anyway.....this poem was written nearly ten years ago when I was really suffering some writer's block (of some type) so I just did what some call "automatic" writing. Not really the same thing as the trance state. Trance states are organic....you insert an idea (like a seed) into a certain slot in the brain and off you go into a trance. Automatic (at least for me) involves just allowing a pile of random thoughts and words to fill pages without any concern for their actual thoughtful cohesion and they are not based on a seed thought. Here's one of those automatic poems which I have not adjusted in any way (edited):

A Day After

A frozen not yet suspension
of objects - their objects
some objects of their things
their things in merge
between practice - the public
pantomime ultra habitual
of their lives
in their own words
coupled with observations
undercycling a continuum
of events, theoretic social
metabolism and the history
both symbolic and non -
enormous tracts of people
organized by color, size
effort, delinquency, car
offspring and times
to data base per week -
these are the items of
the universe - the shape
a redemption manifesto
in Divine Love
as part of forever.
Here is where taken apart
it is all examined
for a nation of gimmicks
in quota and realm,
here the clock
fixes and ticks.

To Whom It May Concern Again it is coming of age, blown open blossom, turn key operators and survivors, coming up for air twice. Yet forty or fifty are burned alive, forty or fifty are buried, forty or fifty become lost scrambling up the hill to check. When the machines start to stop at zero, replacing the hums with great silence filled and fitted by one huge conversation between nature and her guests: promises and facts, big success stories, all of it gravity gravity gravity.

The Mummeries Not sure where the sound comes from although it is very early to hear such motors and moving. Might be out back, further away like a fighter jet at noon in the parking lot of the group home where disabled adults act like babies. Perhaps that is the answer, yet poems are just formulas.

Tallow Who cares about the Gods anymore in brown fires between us, latent fat quick to learn temperature. A birthing begins and ends in Julian, in the quiet there. Here is where the sadness began, here is the corpse of happiness or at least the memory, a sweet aftertaste of mix-matched wax and bones.

Here is where to keep
a white sky between six and seven.
Here is the place to store
the special parts and quiet pieces.

Crossing

For a week the blood
smear as deer had
dragged herself
on broken legs to a side
of the road and lay there
like a hand swipes
a frozen window.

There she watched the last cars
and shooting stars, took a final hit
off the moon where no Injuns
ever stood either and she promised.


Praiseworthy Appearance

On Friday night
the fox speeds up
to make it -
away from the town
full of light and actions.
The way he smooths on by -
a little train of feet, film
made of fur and tail
in one brilliant line.
Left to right as if
a switch lifted and the chute
opened through which
he aimed and shot.