The woman up at the front of the room was giving me diamonds, I swear I could taste them like drops of white lemon in my mouth. Dinner! Everyone said “Dinner! Let’s all go out for Dinner!” And I thought, “Huh, Dinner, I like it, like Dinner, as much as the next mouth.” But there was no way I could not go home to write after that. There were 'possums on the roadway in my head and I imagined squirrels and songs I could write. I wished for to be something other than I am for a long time, long and long, waiting for the way the eaves open upward and windows everywhere, nothing not-alive and nothing to be ashamed of and just me and opening up my worldhead, the mother up in front of the room, reading poems about her son the Pisces and I am a Pisces and I was her son for a moment, though she might have been even younger than me, but she was all mother love in the world and I felt good about it, remembered reading and getting kissed on the forehead and the cheek, wishing to be alive forever in that love, and also remembered breaking up hard with a woman I loved like a mother and even called her that accidentally a few times...But it was no accident, I was looking for a mother, for someone’s sustenance, direction, piles of warm and wonder to hold me in my lonely post-traumatic, even-now-traumatic life, and found myself lost when we broke, when she left for another fellow, another bloke, who needed no nurturing the way I needed. So she said goodbye I’m kissing another guy, starting a life with another gent, and I dropped the phone, put on my running shoes and ran out into the rain, went running in the cold winter rain for hours, didn’t care about ninjistic ice brain that kept forming and re-forming, didn’t care about lungburn, legs getting wobbly and wanting to cry. (But I ask you, how the hell do you let your fuckin' legs cry when they need to? You just freaking can’t.) And I came home from that run and was alive to the moment of insane cinderblocks packed into my chest (a
wonder of hurt), a bullet traveling slowly through me, barbed and empty, made of desire, bursting out my back, leaving a great canyon behind. And I sat down simply on the floor to get contact with basic breath, kernel of non-pain. No good, no good, no good, still sad me in realm of thought, expiring alone, alone in the world, lonely forever. Sitting for hours, untalking. And then my mom, my heavenly Ma, small-framed and thin, Laurie, with love stronger than thought, drove over, walked in my room, knelt down, my Mother Saint of Grace, held me in her long little arms while I followed my breath. Me crying, shoulders shaking in her hands. She simply held me, protected, man in her arms. Now, thinking back on that moment, full decade ago, more dreamlike than anything else, I remember dimly the pain, but remember the love like fire, live fire all around me, strong hearth emanations coming up from generations of blood and mothers. And tonight, as I write this, the desert is outside, alive. And as that poet read to me from her poems, another saintly woman, I could tell, I simply knew, I could feel my heart go slippy and make contact with inner world of motherlove again again again. Good, and I was drinking Coke. It was good, it was sweet, it had a mystic tinge, nothing about me felt wounded, nothing was behind me, sinister or full of fear, I was aware of the wicker basket at the back of the room, aware of the painting on the wall to the left, with an athlete, face fixed in severe gaze of striving and yearning. A feeling of mercy filled the room, a feeling of holy mixing with whatever hells the listeners were in and it was okay, no plague of desire, no writhing frustration, even though poems of longing and poems that hinted at the way the world could be if we could lead with our hands instead of our balled fists. Nobody was sad, nobody’s body rebelled against her, the future there was promise and the air was easy to breathe. I could feel my legs talking to the hair on my legs. They were happy together. Which was strange, since they never had a conflict or a problem before. But tonight they were appreciative of their relations. O, I suppose there was some yearning, some sense that people everywhere had tears and busted up lives to keep living out. But up there was a mother, Hoa Nguyen, pouring out her mere everything for us, and she knew and we knew and even in the midst of a city (collection of lost souls living close to feel like the fire’s not far) we were connected, we felt, or at least
I felt, like I inhabited a connected body. Body of work and body of light. Body of feeling. And if I were to die today (I almost died last night—ah, Christ, I’m always almost dying, so much so that to hell with the whole concept. Who needs it?
Who needs it? Not me, no death. Like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, famous death guru, says, after you spend enough time next to the dying, you know. Know it’s all bunk, all mirror-myth. No Death. No End. Reepicheep knows it, has gone beyond fear. Just moving onward. Who knows where? No worries, just a way, una selva oscura, a path into the woods, no trubba, trubba not, zanting in the minced moonlight, all eyes peering out from some teary cold head-world, and even though I almost went under a car last night, tonight I am willing, open up my arms. Right now, no shit. As I write this, no joke. I’m really doing it, really opening my arms, it’s good. No helmet on as I write this, no need, even though the night is full of things, full of ways to respire my last. I hope the next time I die I’ll die with wide open inner eyes, unworrying, inward-smiling, poems reeling forth quietly from my ears...Poem of the quiet night beyond whatever nutty way my body rings the gong.) it’d be okay. And I promise to write letters to the people of the world, this language we have, this love, this expression of the lost world that lies within us, we make it and frame it in such wacked-out ways. (Hey, that’s good. That’s okay.) And I’m no longer fearful of that part of myself that seeks something motherly in a mate, soft hands and compassion, it’s cool. But what of the dance, the extra-dance that utters softly in the night? That is not mother/son. Something else entirely, hey? Yes, though it’s soft it has a different kind of heart, a feeling of making close connections, good for everyone’s inner self, good for the body, good for the connection force, good for principalities of pleasure and the bright soft living inside illumination of holy connection between bodies, lover and lover, ah, you sense its quiet raucous power, ‘tis good, ‘tis mighty good. Green things grow green because of that pushing. Bodies? Hell, bodies are just containers. Something to hold our feelings for us. Something for letting them go, too.
So I just watched this movie with Christopher Walken in it called Seven Psychopaths. It's not a great movie. It's not even a very good movie. But it's not terrible either.
I'd say it's a notch or two above mediocre. And I'm watching this movie and there are several scenes that are good-not-great. And while I'm watching them, I'm kind of puzzled and scratching my head and thinking to myself: "This is a decent scene. But I BET if you had a crack at the screenplay before production started, you could have turned this scene into something really tremendous. Something that people would quote to each other late at night, while drunk." And then after the movie is over I listen to an old Led Zeppelin song, from a concert they did. It's "Going to California." Anyway, while I'm listening to it, again, I think of you, and I think about how some of my blood and a bunch of my words are, in fact, "going to California," to greet you...be with you. And THEN, for some strange-ass reason, I think of this painting that I love, that's hanging in the New York MOMA, called "Young Kafka, A Dalai Lama."
And I'm imagining the picture, and looking at the picture, and imagining the picture... And then I'm imagining the two of us standing in front of the picture in the New York MOMA, and we're holding hands, and looking at the painting very intently, and very quietly. And all these people are walking by us, looking at the painting briefly, and then walking on. And time kind of slows down for us, and, in the same way that there seem to be either flower petals or large snowflakes hanging in the air in the painting, while young Kafka stands on the surface of a lake, so also are we suddenly aware that the motes of dust in the air around us, and the passersby, and their swishing scarves, are all frozen still in the air. And yet somehow we can turn our heads to look at each other, even in the midst of frozen time. And we are aware that the ground we stand on has properties very much like liquid, or even air. And it's only because we are there together, wondering about the crack of the universe, and stillness, and the yearning to express the depths of time and loneliness, that are all evoked by the painting, that we are not sinking through the floor into the stone, like sinking into liquid.
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