The Climb

We eventually dug our way out of the tunnel. It was bound to happen sooner or later. If we worked hard enough, we were bound to be successful. We had talked about it long enough. We had dreamt about it for so many nights that were like days, and we had sung about quietly during the days that were dark.
One night we clawed through all the muddled dreams, through the bright geometric nightmares, through unspeakably complex puzzles all made of dirt and branches and dust. And we did it with our own hands and we did it with our own voices and with our newfound language which easily disturbed and broke apart the thick walls of our established identities that had turned into heavy pieces of rock.

I could feel the heavy force of gravity the entire time – pulling us down, down, down. I saw old symbols carved into the walls as we passed by and kept on moving and many times I slipped on the outstretched forms of a few equations and algorithms for which I had no understanding or explanation.

Something may have helped us along the way, something that sometimes pulled us up, something leading us along through barely visible silver threads. But it had no name and it had no voice so we would never speak of it and we couldn’t have said anything about it even if we wanted to speak. We would never acknowledge its presence even among ourselves.

Our improvised songs travelled out ahead of us like guides, then came back as echoes and told us of the future. We wouldn’t let any force stop us. Not fear, not hunger, not exhaustion. Nothing would pull us back, we wouldn’t let anything pull us back down. Sometimes when I looked ahead I saw the same nothing staring back at me, nothing behind, nothing ahead, nothing below us, nothing above. But I kept on digging, and I kept on singing and I kept on speaking.

I awoke on the other side, naked and red with blood and bruises, encircled by cold and darkness. Bubbles clung to my skin, and the past dissolved behind us in a black puddle.

We all walked away in different directions then and I never saw any of them again. I never even tried to search for them. When I think of them now, they have no faces and they have no names. I am not even sure that they ever existed at all.

The Battle

The battle for her, for the thousands of infinitesimal parts which combined to make her, was in full swing.  For several weeks she could feel it building, the pressurized energy mounting, doubling on itself in the course of thirty-six hours. The pulsing of her chest was like a metronome with spastic batteries.
She could not remember another time like this, if there had been one it was so long in the past as to make it non-existent. She knew now that she was oscillating between hell and clarity, and hell had a much stronger pull. It was the black hole, sucking her inwards with a relentless drive. Her mind, her limbs, the heart, her smile, her jaw and teeth, every part of her ached. 
Her heart was hard, lifted only momentarily by a soft touch or smile every now and then. Her mind, a constant deluge of thoughts and anxieties, leading her always downwards, further away from the people she almost stopped recognizing.
In the bursts of clarity, she could feel the movement of every muscle. She focused on every step across her kitchen, grabbing a glass of water in her hand, bringing it to her lips with careful slowness. In those moments she remembered what was nearly always in the background, disguised and disfigured by the daily rhythms of work and obligations. Through the fog she could move beautifully through a space, her attention moving both forwards and backwards.
But mostly she tumbled. Out into the black space where not a hand could reach her. Straight-jacketed in her own misery, she watched the passing world though a car window, the flashes of color and shapes, billboards, couples, conversations. As she saw it fade she was barely conscious of her own desperation, just the tears, the sting of heartache that descended quickly, firmly, coating her in its shell, a thick organic membrane that even those who loved her dared not get close, for her misery was transmittable and they knew to stay away, keeping up lively debates as she fell, further and deeper beside them.
She wondered if this was madness, if it was the natural state of her body.  Was she in the deepest hole or were there blacker lands still to find?
Could she climb? Did she want to? She was frightened most by that thought, the simple thought- did she want to make the effort to climb, to push herself upwards? What if she wanted to sink, what then?

Voyage

The breath is golden and light. Silence is the space between six hands. Stars are there, present, blinking out communication. 
Hold still and wait, the messages come through our skin, into our eyes. They bypass the mind and seep in like water on a meadow.  Patience. It comes. More slowly than you’d like, but sit still, you’ll feel it tingling, moving like excited bees over open flower faces. 
Yes, we are sweet, just let the city melt as it needs to. Those lights and bulbs and glass are not needed. Let them melt into pools of reflection.
The bees will find us open and pungent, sticky sweet and seeping with desire. 
Sit still, you will feel it. Silence is the space between six hands. The stars are there, blinking. Night waits for us, holds us in its quiet hours. 
Let your skin listen, the space behind you knees, the shadows radiating with intensity. Wide are our hands, chests, tubes and ventricles. Tired, our bodies.  Sit still, let the body listen. The muscles, aching. Screaming for rest. 
Oh, the Blanket.  Mother in her folds.  Infancy folded and clean, smelling of newness and fluff. The eyes, so bright, peeking from behind lids that weigh down; gravity will not be outsmarted, though we try.
Dream, oh, the dream.  Shifting in its red and black.  The orange moving like wispy clouds.
Ours is the road. A spiral of tar and gravel. Wide avenues that sometimes break into trenches and dirt paths.
None are the same, as the labyrinth walls can attest. Travel is motion, our steps clatter in the cracks of time, bouncing in the silence between our hands.

Strength In Michigan

The first thing she remembers is the heat. With the thunderstorms came the tangible thickness of moist air. It was unlike the dry desert heat she was used to, and the slippery grips of humidity held her limbs and pulled on her strength, dragging her to the floor. For the first days of her stay in Michigan, she sought refuge in the one room of the small Victorian that had an air conditioner. She let her boyfriend drink with his old friends while she remained in the dark coolness of the room, letting the pleasant hum of the machine keep her company.

She was at Marty’s house, an old friend she had heard about so often from Jay, her boyfriend. The house was on a well maintained residential block, lined with tall, sprawling bowed trees that were just starting to turn yellow. It was a street of single-family detached homes, all nearly identical in form and lot size. Each one had a small front yard, a squat rectangular house, and a wooden fence that wrapped around the side and outlined a long rectangular yard. It was a racially mixed neighborhood of working class families and an ice cream truck drove through each day a little after noon. From the sidewalk, there were six steps up to the screened-in porch. Above the roof of the porch was a pointed rooftop with a window facing the street. It was the window for the one second-story room where Marty slept. The screened in porch was the only space in the house where smoking was permitted, thus, it was the place to lounge and drink through the long humid days. The space was accommodating for many people, providing plenty of places to sit. Along the walls were two long mismatched couches, one on each side of the front door. There were a cluster of chairs, some wooden, some padded, some metal. At the far end of the porch was a circular wooden table with some chairs pushed into it, as though waiting for the players of a soon-to-be poker game. The porch floor revealed the age of the house and its abuse in the extreme natural elements of Michigan. It was worn and brown. The grains of the wood had faded and splintered long ago. The furniture was badly beaten, the fabric stained and thin. It was the party room and was treated as such. There were cigarette butts scattered on the floor, smelly ashtrays were filled with the delicate gray remnants of tobacco and paper. There were empty beer cans and bottles that sat on tables and the floor, waiting for the maid that would never come.

Nightly, a group of three to fifteen would congregate on the porch, each laden with some form of alcohol. She knew this was their habit, their form of celebration, so she tried to relax into it. She knew Jay had missed his friends, that he had felt isolated with her in California, but she thought she could sense his cognitive dissonance, his feeling of distance from the people he once thought of as family. The memories were brighter than the people that stood before him now. She sat on the couch, sipping her beer and trying not to wince as clouds of smoke ambled past her in their search for the night outside the screens. Jay was talkative and looking stylish with his grandfather’s fedora tilted on his head. She would watch Dara, Marty’s Latvian girlfriend who always looked bored as she sat at the round table. She was the only completely sober person on that narrow porch, she was going through a court-ordered DUI program and couldn’t drink.

Marty was about 42. He was tall and had a stout stomach and meaty arms and legs. His complexion was pinkish and extended to his strawberry blond hair and eyebrows. He had an extra ten years on the majority of the group. As far as she could tell, he was the one most able to function in society. He had bought the house in the early nineties and filled it with some roommates, and because the mortgage was so cheap, he only worked a few months in the winter delivering pizzas. Marty drank socially, but he never got into the hard drugs or severe alcohol abuse that almost everyone else had. He was the stability of the group, not as cool as the others, not as interesting, but the one solid rock with a house that the rest of them revolved around. If someone left town and came back years later, they always came to Marty’s house.

Jay had always described his friends as artists and musicians. But from what she saw, it seemed to be a thing of the past. Something they talked about and remembered, but not something they did. The majority of them seemed to be in their late twenties, but they seemed so old to her, like their long decline had begun long ago.

After the first couple of days on their visit, Fran, Jay’s old girlfriend, came over with her new boyfriend, Mike, (a guy who had been Jay’s friend). She knew all about Fran and Jay’s complicated relationship. Among her many problems related to substance abuse, Fran had been prosecuted by the district attorney for domestic abuse (she had broken Jay’s arm) and had had several abortions she only told Jay about afterwards. When she came over, the air was noticeably more tense. There were the old problems, the lingering questions and hurt and the new lover’s presence, packed into a small space. Fran walked with a small stagger and her eyelids remained slightly closed, like she was always one step away from intoxicated sleep. Jay carried a picture of Fran in his wallet and mentioned many times how pretty she had been with her big doe-like eyes. The girl on the couch had given herself over to alcohol. She wore long men’s style shorts and a stained wife-beater that accentuated her bulging stomach. Her legs were hairy and her hair was a mess of faded pink and blond dreadlocks. But it was the way Fran sat and talked that revealed her the most, she just seemed to be so tired of everything…Michigan, the old friends, the faded memories, the alcohol, her body…

One day, she and Jay planned to prepare a small barbecue. They left Fran and Mike and Dara and Marty and the rest of them back at the house and they walked to the store together, hand in hand. They bought some red meat and potatoes and vegetables for the shish-kabobs. When they walked into Marty’s house an hour later, their hands hurting from the weight of the heavy plastic bags, they knew something had shifted. Fran had gotten very drunk and was making a mess and talking about the ways Jay had hurt her. Dara and Marty had gotten into a fight. There was another couple downstairs in the midst of an argument. The entire house was tense. Jay went to try to talk to Fran in the living room.

Seeing no other plan, she continued on to the small kitchen with the groceries. It was shaped like a very small “L” and was just barely big enough for three people to stand in. There was one long window that faced the green backyard and two long windows perpendicular to it that faced the fence and the house on the opposite side. The fridge in the corner was covered with magnets and cartoons and a newspaper article about a potential police officer who had been denied entry into the academy because his IQ was too high. She took a deep breath and inhaled the soft light of the late afternoon. The cabinets were dingy white and the floor was covered in a checkered Formica pattern. The kitchen seemed so cool and calm to her, a welcome oasis from the drama that was all around her. She got out the cutting board and opened the bags of vegetables. She stood there, slicing and chopping, trying to move forward with the plan for a barbecue. The afternoon light streamed in through the windows. She felt anxious energy all around, but focused on her labor and remaining as calm as she could. Jay came up behind her and put his arms around her shoulders. “You are so strong,” he said. She smiled, happy that he saw her as a pillar that wouldn’t crumble. Then her attention moved back to preparing the meat.

Buried Treasure

It had drifted to them during the waning-hours of a beach party. Almost everyone had taken off, packing up their backpacks and heading back into the bright lights of the city. Only they had stayed because Kate insisted on beach-combing. Whenever they came to the water, she would take her little plastic bucket, one she had had since childhood and walk to the far ends of the beach. She would disappear for hours and come back with rocks and shells and things that most anyone would consider litter. Why she brought the lone sneaker, the lens-less sunglasses…he could never understand. He would just shake his head and laugh when she showed him her treasures. It was no surprise to him to find himself in the dim light of the setting sun, resting on a colorful beach towel and waiting for Kate. A wind blew in from the ocean, “a cold front,” he thought. He reached for his backpack to retrieve the hoodie inside.
“Max! Max!”
He looked up and to the north, running along the shore, small and white against the blue background of the ocean was Kate. He could see the white outline of her body in the even whiter bikini that came towards him. “I wonder what she found this time…” He got up, pulling the hoodie over his head. He started walking towards her.
“Max! Max! Look what I found.” She was carrying something large in one of her hands, the red plastic bucket was in the other. “Look,” she thrust an old bottle into his hands. It was worn and white. It was cold, cold from years of travelling the ocean currents.
“Wow, look at the glass, it’s all cloudy and milky-white, it must have been out there forever.,” he said with a slight hint of curiosity.
“Yeah, and you know, I think there’s something inside it, listen,” she held the bottle to his ear as she shook it slightly.
Max smiled slightly, “it’s like from a movie,”
He took the bottle from her hands, he gave it a little shake and then tried to unplug the cork. “ahh, I think it’s useless, the cork’s really in there, we’re gonna have to break it.”
“Oh, but the bottle is so pretty, I thought you’d be able to open it with some sort of tool.” Her eyes showed a bit of worry. This was her treasure, now he talked about destroying it.
“Well look, don’t you want to see what’s inside?”
She nodded her head.
“Well there’s a years worth of salt buildup along the cork, I’m not sure if I can get it out, if I push it in, it could destroy what’s inside. I think the only thing we can do is break it.”
“Really?” she said, still a little worried.
He nodded. He took her silence as consent and turned and started walking towards the cement bathrooms. There were lots of rocks near the bathrooms. He picked one that was slightly larger than his hand, he brought it down tentatively, striking the bottle. Nothing happened, the bottle was slick. He raised his hand higher, he brought it downward and closed his eyes upon impact. There was the sound of glass breaking.
“Max! you said you’d be careful!”
“It wasn’t going to work any other way, it needed some force.”
He carefully reached his finger among the pile of creamy-white broken glass. There was a small tube, a tube of paper. He brought his thumb and index finger to the edge of the paper and pulled it out, shaking the paper gently and letting the glass shards fall.
“Made a little mess,” he said with a devilish smile.
Kate shook her head, “you like destroying things, don’t you?”
He smiled. They turned their attention to the paper. Their fingers fumbled together as they tried to un-scroll it. “It’s a map,” she said in disbelief.

Three months ago they had found the map, and now they were here, tromping along the south side of Tikam-sui, a small island in the Sampui Republic, which was really a collection of a dozen small islands in the South Pacific. The map had taken a hold of them, like a plague of the imagination.
“What if it’s really true?” Kate would wonder at night. “What if it was the last message sent from a sinking ship? What if a defector made a map and threw it overboard in the middle of the night?”
They came up with dozens of stories, they wanted it to be true. And now they were here, animated creatures following the lines of the map, looking for the buried treasure. Was it jewels that the map promised? There was no picture of a treasure box on the map, nothing that overt. But there were complicated lines indicating the ocean currents and this was the modern-day nation that the lines all pointed to. This was the place with the “X.” The “X” that promised nothing but mystery.
“So…I’m not sure how the topography has changed since the map was made, but if it’s still slightly close, then we’re on the right side of the island. This beach is big, how the hell are we supposed to find it? Whatever it is?” Max wondered out loud.
Kate shook her head, “just pick a place and start digging,” she said. “But you know,” she added, “don’t try to use your head, just walk ‘til it feels good and then start digging.”
They held the map between them, four hands held the corners open in the light of the setting sun.
“Well, we should probably make a nice fire and carve out a place to sleep…maybe eat some chocolate…we can start looking tomorrow, soon as the sun rises.”

They slept among a sparkling blanket of stars. They were at least a thousand miles away from any big-city noise and neon signs, here the night lights came out from hiding, they showed themselves to wondrous eyes in unabashed openness. Max and Kate lay together, in the double sleeping bag they had brought.
She nestled her head against his chest, “I can’t believe this all exists, it’s too beautiful.”

The sun came up against a layer of sinewy blue clouds that burned away quickly.
“Ok, remember, pick a place with your body, not your head,” Kate said with more confidence than she felt.
Max nodded. They each started walking, in slightly parallel lines and then, after a couple of steps, they diverged. Kate walked for forty more steps, then sunk to her knees and started digging with her small metal shovel. She dug until the sun was high overhead and her stomach was rumbling. She climbed out of the sandy hole and went to look for Max. She walked down the beach half a mile and saw three holes that were close together, each was a couple of feet deep. He was shoveling into the third hole.
“Ready for lunch?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up and squinting, there was sand stuck to his cheeks. “You know, this is gonna be a big job.”
She nodded. “How come there are three different holes?”
“Well, I started and then, obviously, didn’t find anything, so I started digging in another spot.”
She nodded, vague memories rushed to her of all the things Max started and then stopped. The two hours of guitar lessons, the two weeks of Karate, the single lesson of sculpture. Nothing held his interest too long. She imagined a beach pocked with a thousand knee-high holes.
“I’m still working on mine, it’s pretty deep,” she said. “Cool, different styles, I guess.”

They ate their lunch and returned to their respective places on the beach. At night, they returned to their camp and made a fire and held each other in the soft confines of their sleeping bag.
“This is gonna be a lot of work,” Max said as he drifted to dreamland.
Kate knew Max would never find it, the mysterious “X.” He just never went far enough, he always stayed at the surface, giving up before making a committed effort. The only thing she had ever seen him commit to was her. She smiled a little and kissed his sleeping forehead. She thought to herself, “if there is anything here, it’s sure to be buried deep. Anything worth hiding is worth hiding well. They would have hid it thinking ahead, thinking of storms, of the ever-present sea, of the coming years, without the certain truth they would ever come back. Whatever it is, it is probably buried very deep.”

The next morning the sound of a small bird awoke them. It spoke in the rhythmic intervals of a metronome. Somewhere in the thicket of tropical trees behind them, a chorus of little birds answered.
“Time to get up,” Max said, kissing Kate on the forehead.
“Let’s find the mystery…” she said with sleepy eyes.
“You want to come over to my side of the beach to help me?” Max asked.
“No, I want to really make sure that it’s not there, or make sure it is. Either way, I need to keep digging.”
Max shrugged.

They dug for hours, they dug for days. The days turned into a week, the week transformed, moving out of the regimented intervals they had grown accustomed to. As she had seen with her mind’s eye, Max had indeed dug a hundred small holes over the beach. Time only had two designations for them now, light and dark. They dug when it was light, they made love when the sun moved away from them. Each morning, Kate went back to the same large hole she had started with. The one her heart had chosen. With each movement of her shovel, she thought of something precious she would want to hide and protect, she thought of how deep she would have struggled to protect it from unworthy hands. There was nothing else to do. There was the sun, the beach, the sand and the work. Sweat ran down her forehead as she came to realize that nothing else truly mattered anymore.

Back And Forth

“This is how you do it… see?” The tall blond man pulled his racket back as the tennis ball came towards him, he stretched back and then swung at the ball with precise violence. The ball went flying over the net ferociously, it bounced off the green cement and then flew back against the tall wire fence that encircled the tennis court. “See? You can’t hit it softly. That just won’t do. You can’t be afraid of it. Here, try it…”
The tall blond man walked over to where his son was standing. His son was eleven years old, blond as well, dressed in long pants that didn’t allow him to run as freely as he could have otherwise. The man handed him the racket and looked to make sure that the boy was holding it in the correct way.
“Make sure your grip is tight, make sure you don’t let it get weak as you swing, make sure…”
The boy nodded and walked towards his position at the edge of the court. The tall blonde man signaled and his friend on the other side of the court threw a very easy ball over the net. The boy pulled back his arm and swung awkwardly at it. The ball bounced off the edge of the racket and flew back towards the blond man, who caught it easily with his hand.
“You see what I’m telling you? You can’t swing so tentatively! You can’t be afraid of it! Look… it’s soft! It won’t hurt you!” He threw the ball softly at the boy and the boy caught it easily with his hand. He nodded, acknowledging that the ball was indeed very soft. Then the blond man walked over towards him and he stood right over him, creating a cone of shade around the boy.
“Look, I know what it’s like… you hear me?” His voice was a bit softer now, almost a whisper. ”I was like you are now. Once I was afraid of things, of girls, of men, of people in general, of little balls…”
The boy looked up at him, squeezing his eyes and wondering if the friend on the other side of the court would be getting impatient. He didn’t want to make a scene. He just wanted the whole thing to be over as soon as possible. But his father was still talking.
“I was like that… you know?… afraid of everything… and you know what happens when you’re afraid of everything? Nothing… that’s what happens… nothing at all… you swing at the ball and it just bounces back at you… and nothing happens at all… no game, no back and forth… no back and forth at all…”
“Let me try again then… let me…”
“No, you have to listen now… when the ball comes, you have to set aside all your fear and swing at it with all your strength…just set your fear aside… if you learn to do that here… you’ll do it anywhere… but here is where it starts…”
He stood back and nodded towards the friend who was waiting on the other side. A new ball came flying towards them. It flew easily over the net in a wide arch, with such a slow grace that it almost seemed suspended in the air. The boy pulled his racket back and brought it flying around his body, driving it directly towards the ball that was flying at him. The ball missed the racket by only a few inches and flew back into his father’s waiting hands.
“Not good enough, see?… Don’t get me wrong…I saw you trying…but it’s just not good enough…As long as you flinch, as long as you hesitate, then there can’t be a true game, and it’s only when the back and forth begins, that’s when the game has started… then we can talk about winning…but right now you can’t even play a real game…”
He pulled the boy aside gently and then stood where he had stood. He pulled back on his own racket and looked across the court. He nodded to his friend and the ball came at him with swift violence. There was an audible zoom as the man brought the racket around and a clear pleasant explosion of air when the racket met the ball. The ball went flying violently again, bouncing against the court on the other side and then bouncing again off the fence, hard enough to make the fence shake. The boy liked watching it happen and he smiled. The man turned towards him, there were long drops of sweat dripping from his forehead onto his face. “That is how you do it…see? When you can do that, without fear… that’s when the game begins.”

An Endless Walk That Spans The Length Of Time

An endless walk that spans the length of time. The number of fog covered mountain passes defies the measurement of mathematicians. They are also invisible within the vast void of my imagination. They sprinkle their theories and equations, erupting in sums, moving though suns, embedded within orange planets of amber. I sit on a chaise lounge in Miami, sipping cool tea and contemplating the cause of my condensation. Pastel buildings surround me and brown asses jiggle past my hands every three seconds. Iridescent beads drip towards my belly, finding solace within the deep hole of my belly button. Quickly, you come and suck them out, the last bit of water that sits upon my surface. The endless desert stretches taught on this pale sand. Mirages are liberally dosed within all my crevasses, and there are many. Explorers have mapped the contours of a an armpit, but only you have discovered the valley of date trees. Barefooted men have found their way to these fields, a spectacle of tall trees, geometric in their planted patterns. Row after row, each springs forth from the land at 36 inch intervals. Down to the millimeter, the measure is exact, the desire of a lost king. Shedding their names and memories, the bald headed men, each uniformly dressed in red shirts and white slacks, they cling to the bark with their overdeveloped leg muscles. It is their thighs alone that keep them upright, that keep them from plunging head first into the cracked silver earth. A machete in their mouths, they move like a battalion of hungry military men, in search of the fruits that will shed them with endless wealth.
Move you fools, higher still!
The branches sag, the boughs not easily giving up their seeds. Their meaty flesh. The hunger within pushes them beyond any limit. The limit of words or biological strength. The sounds of high ringing can be heard even clearer at this height. Ring inside, the clanging pushes this energy even further past the doorway of eternal glimpses.
Let me shine with the glory of a thousand lifetimes, a thousand deaths that defy the meaning of logic, the meaning of these words, bound in a leather bound dictionary and carried by a little Asian schoolgirl in her backpack. You can use it for the test, but the memory will soon be forgotten.
It’s not enough to remember, you must learn.
You must learn to do.
Must learn how to do.
There is this…or the other.
Not doing.
Checking out. To swim in a vast pool of misery and human dread. The endless search for nothing. Can you find something in an illusion? Can you project your own lifetime and its own conclusion?
The death of my ancestors. The death of me comes closer each day. I only hope that it happens in the bed of my lover. May I have my brains freshly tasted and be buried beneath the sage. Burn my leaves. Smell me before the invocation.
If I have learned to do before then, perhaps I will enter, perhaps I will dance inside of you.
Perhaps I will move with all the atmospheric movement you shall circulate within the earthly confines of a café full of curiously scared wide-eyed fools.
When you reach for me, I will be the same as I am now.
The same as it ever was.

Goals and Movement

He pushed the heavy shopping cart by leaning forward and resting all his weight on the metal handle. The cart was specially heavy today because they had loaded it with many extra supplies which they intended to use for trade. His woman had found an abandoned baby stroller just a couple of days earlier.
She was so happy when she came running up to him in the late morning, right when he was sitting among a group of friends close to the old smelly tunnel covered in moss and moist with old rain water. She ran right up to him and said: "I found something good. You have to come and help me get it!" but he was too aware of the looks that the other men gave each other as she approached, so he replied: "I don’t have to do nothing woman. I am free as a bird. That’s what makes us special. That’s what keeps us going! Look around!" and he signaled to all the men that sat around him, with their eyes bubbling up red and crisscrossed with sharp red veins and their blackened gloves which protected their blackened hands and their pants that smelled of old sweat and piss and shit and their chins still dribbling with beer and all of them nodded back at her, acknowledging their freedom, their carefree lifestyle which allowed them to do as they wished, and he nodded once again, looking back at her: "See, free as birds and you don’t tell me what to do!" Right then she realized her mistake and slid backwards a little and she whispered, as if to nobody: "I know where it is. Just tell me when you feel like getting it. I can wait." And she walked away and sat by a tall tree and slowly chewed on an old chocolate bar that she had been saving in the side pocket of her old ripped up pants.
About an hour later, he came over to her and said: "Don’t ever pull something like that again! You know that we have little, but at least we have our reputation!" and she nodded and agreed that she had made a mistake and then she led him to where the baby stroller was hiding, where someone had thrown it away in the middle of a web of branches that hung over a pit of trash. He saw it and smiled and nodded to her and he could tell right away that it would come in very handy for them, so he said: "Look after my cart and I will climb around the trees and will get it."
All of that had been a couple of days earlier. The next two days they spent begging pedestrians on Haight street for a little change here and there and they bought old things from other beggars and they scavenged through trash bins and they looked in the metal bins outside of the houses and they even stole a few beers from the local liquor store and finally they were ready. They wrapped it all in bags and loaded up the shopping cart, which always keeled over to the side because one of the wheels was bent, and they loaded up the baby stroller which she had found and he had managed to rescue.
When everything was ready, he said to her: "Now we will go for a long walk, you understand? I know you haven’t been with me long, but now you have to walk with me." She was still fixing the baby stroller just right so that things wouldn’t fall off when she pushed it. When the sound of his voice came to her, she looked up at him, clearing some thick dark snot from her nose, "Sure thing… but where are we going?" He smiled and looked at her with sharp eyes, "We’re going all the way to the beach. There’s a whole other crew over there and I’m friends with some of them. They always have some good stuff, it’s easier to get it over there, but other things you can’t get at all. So we will bring them some of this stuff and they will go crazy happy and then they will give us some of what we want." She nodded, "You sure? I wouldn’t want to go all the way over there for nothing." He frowned and leaned over her, suddenly terribly disappointed that he had shared this knowledge with her. "Look, I’m going all the way to the beach, I’m going to see the crew that’s over there, they’re friends of mine. You can come along if you want to, or you can stay here and wait, or you can go to hell for all I care…" She looked up at him with wide eyes and he was breathing hard and looking down at her with a smirk in his face, and his cheeks were stained with grease and old dirt and his eyes were bloodshot and his chin was all gooey with trails of saliva. He took a deep breath and then he talked again. "Look, it’s better if you come, because I can’t push the cart and the baby stroller at the same time, and now we have more shit, so we have more responsibilities… you can push the stroller, I will push the cart... are you ready?" She shrugged and stood up and said: "Yeah, I’m ready. I don’t have nothing else to do right?" "Right," he said and they started on their way.
Now they were just over a third of the way there and he couldn’t say out lout what he was thinking because what he was thinking resembled too much what she had said: "What if they don’t have nothing? What if they’re not even there?’ and the sweat was dripping over his face, and down his back, and his arms were hurting and his legs were hurting and he was pushing as hard as he could but the heavy cart moved so slowly that it sometimes seemed that it wasn’t moving at all. She was quiet next to him, also drenched in sweat but not as bad as him, and pushing on the stroller and looking ahead, all the way to where a sliver of white and blue outlined their final destination.
They came to a corner and stopped while a loud truck passed by. He grunted and gasped for breath and she said: "You alright?" and he said "Yeah, I just need to rest for a bit." She nodded and took a deep breath herself, looking up at the trees and at few birds that were flying among the branches. "Let’s rest a little, but let’s not stop too long. We have to make it all the way to the beach today. You said so yourself." He nodded and grabbed onto the handle of the heavy cart again. "Yeah, I know I said so and we’re going. I can rest a bit later. I think we’ll make it today." She nodded and pushed the stroller across the street. "Oh, we will. I know we will. You said so yourself." And they slowly crossed the corner, and kept on slowly making their way to the beach. "You said so yourself. You sure did…"

Anything

I lost control of my kite, my precious kite. Back in the days of darkness when I lived in a cage and could not hold my own babies on their birthdays I dreamed that one day I would stand with them on a hilltop and sail a kite over the blue with them. Now I can fly a kite and we have kept it up on some bright clear days, but then, on some other days, windy days like this, I’ve lost my grip and it sails away without me. Goodbye for now, kite.
I want desperately to say something but I don’t know what it is that I wish to say. I want to tell you NOTHING. I want to growl like a bear, whine like a dog, and coo like a dove. I want to be plugged into the wall like an appliance and sing my electrified robot love into the dark jealous night. I’d like to live in you, fade into you, and drink from the blue vial, stage my own death, run wild through life rather than become such a meek shade that all I shall inherit is dirt and the taste of a master’s boot heel. I have longed, since before I gasped my first breath, to do something. I came screaming into this world with a purpose which I cannot put into words, a purpose that is a roar, and my intent for following through with this impulse to live is stronger than steel. For a moment I may wax feeble, then at the last moment, as I sink into the pillowy soft depths of sleep, I remember to make a terrible sound, a sound which will shake the earth to it’s foundation and cause the mountains and plains to be shed like a skin and the oceans to leap out into the black abyss.
I do not want to loose a moment, patience has been a hard won upgrade. Saying something, anything at all is better than slipping quietly from birth to death. I want to live. I want LIFE with the capital letters. Let me manipulate this tender dream flesh, this world skin, until I have achieved that mysterious something which I intuit cannot be achieved, but is my purpose none the less.
If I am chaos, if my words are chaos, then at least they are something. At least they are here. I lack discipline. Without it I will never be able to realize my desire. This heart filled to the brim with sloppy passions and fears like tiny bent paper clips- cold malleable things that cannot hold any thing together, the pages will blow away in the wind despite motions to the contrary, and yet I keep the bent paper clips as if they will somehow do me some good.
I do not think that I will have to die.
Then I accept that I will but I cannot believe that I might have to return to my dark cell someday, my cold dripping cage.
Anything I say is silly. Everything I say is silly.
I can’t seem to hold myself together. I cannot even find the glow right now, the warmth that emanates from within me and spreads out across the universe, a warmth that is you, a heat that I call love. My cup overflowed, I let too much wine spill out upon the cold stone steps.
Damn machine, damn animal.
Damn metal spider like staples trying to hold me together at the seems. My molar is vibrating and I can see myself as a crazy man on the streets smiling with empty rubbery pink gums teeth long since removed with a dirty pair of pliers.
When I see those people, I know it’s me. I know, I know. I can look into their eyes and say, "I Know. I know it was real. I know it because things like that have happened to me"
They are real and they are unreal, these strange dreams I am dreaming.
I burn my soup. I burn cookies almost every day, and every day I try again to make good cookies but I always burn them. They are lumpy when I wish they were smooth, and smooth when I wish they would be puffy. I can’t find the right recipe Every morning dirty dishes wait for me and I try to clean them. I clean them all day long and still they are there in the morning waiting for me. I can’t get a fresh start, I long for a clean slate, a day to dawn upon which I awaken and everything is set and ready for me to run.
But instead each day my running shoes are tied together at the laces and my gym clothes are dirty and wrinkled and I can’t get them out of my locker because I don’t know how to open the combination lock and no one can take the time to show me how.
Everyone else knows, they can all do it, but I can’t because I found a gold ring in the gutter walking home from school, clothed in my grandfathers military jacket and lost it a year later changing before PE.
I can’t do it because my parents disappeared so they couldn’t teach me how to do it.
I couldn’t do it because my teachers loathed me because everyone else loathed them. I think they liked to see me fail because then my peers could turn their jeers and criticism on me and forget all about the teacher who can now turn while they’re not looking and wipe the beads of sweat from their forehead unnoticed. Everyone I knew before you lied to me. I didn’t realize it, or I couldn’t believe it or I wanted to excuse them for it so that everything would be all right. Everyone before you wanted me to fail whether they admitted that fact to themselves or not. They wanted me to fail so that I would stay with them, be more like them, or give them someone to whip.
You bought me a kite. You put my dream directly into my hands. We bought it at a drug store off of mission and I took my girls to a cliff near the sea and we flew the kite until the wind acted savagely and tried to tear it away from us.
Today I lost it, but tomorrow it will be back.
Tomorrow I will fly it again.

A Family From The Mountains

They came from a tiny village in eastern Slovenia, where the high mountains were covered in thick trees and the winters were long and bleak. Even the summer months had a slight darkness about them, as though all the native creatures simply couldn’t let go of the cold memories of winter. They held on to them even through the warmest days, letting the shadows cover the fleeting moments of light. It would be the darkness, the increasing severity of the winters, that would push them away, far from the thick boulders and tall green trees that defined the land.
It was Tadej, the youngest son of the family, that first packed his sack and began the family migration. He left without any thought of a destination. He knew nothing of the world beyond the large village that lay at the valley floor, a day’s journey for him on mule-back. What lay further than this was a hazy vision that only existed within his imagination. He dreamt of colorful women, sweet wines and great shining cities of gold.
On the family farm, Tadej had been chosen as a courier, delivering the seasonal crops to the small markets of the local villages. Small businesses had been sprouting fast, they catered to the people that had stopped farming and devoted their labor to the small factories that had also began flourishing in the mountainous region. In ten years, he had watched many of his neighbors abandon their farms to move to the larger towns at the base of the mountains. As he watched them leave, with their burdened animals laden with bedding and house wares, he could not imagine leaving. He believed himself to be a man of the soil, dirty with earth and sweat. He gave his blood to the land, and in return, she delivered carrots and purple skinned potatoes. Year after year, she provided them with everything she was capable of…she gave herself to them without reservation, and he loved her for this. No, he could never leave. He liked visiting the towns, he rumbled past the apartment houses and the buildings of administration. He liked talking with the shop owners and young women who brought up water from the wells, but as the sun began to cool, he liked riding back to his home, his land at the top of the world.
When he arrived home, he always needed to put his barrels in the cellars. The cellars were deep and dark, Tadej remembered his grandfather shoveling out the earth to create the dark havens to store the vegetables. He had been a very small boy, and he remembered eating apple pieces out of a small wooden bowl while watching as the piles of loose soil piled high, like replicas of the mountains surrounding them. After putting away his supplies, he would give his mother the small piece chocolate she always requested from town.
She was a large woman, very plump and round. She had been made big and tough by the hearty diet of potatoes and tough meat, by the thick, cool air and the life of constant work. She would haul wood and beat dust from the family’s collection of colorful woolen rugs. The small wood house was laden with rugs. Tadej’s grandparents had been collectors, and in the summer nights, it would be common for travelling gypsy caravans to stop by their farm to show off their latest creations. Tadej remembered nights when the stars shined with complete abandon, and a group of travelers would crowd into their home, surrounding the hearth, singing sad songs of persecution to the upbeat melody of an accordion. Tadej, always a bit shy around people with such bravado, would watch quietly from a corner of the room, while the foreign women danced with their colorful scarves and his mother served liquor to all the guests.
Their move to the United States began five years before they voyaged by ship to the harbor of New York. The winters had been getting colder, Tadej first noticed it when the leaves of his favorite tree began to change colors in July. It was a mature tree that stood alone in a natural clearing of Silar trees. It was Tadej’s favorite tree and he visited it often. He sat and read at its base. Upon returning from his trips into town, he would come to it, tired and sleepy, and he would nap with one of its large roots in his arms. When his house seemed too small and the people within in just a bit too loud, he would bring a heavy rug and a thick blanket and spend the night outside by the base of the old tree.
He was dozing off in mid July, and a falling yellow leaf brushed across his face. With sleep filled eyes he gazed at it, simply observing its shape and color, without any thought to interrupt his exam. He just looked, as he would have looked at a small spider tramping across his skin. But then, his mind began to piece together associations, the way that brains do, and he saw the color, yellow. Yellow, the color of an approaching fall. But it was July, there should be months of sunshine until then. He looked up and saw that the upper canopy of the tree had begun to change colors. Most were still partially green, but the threat of an early winter was real. And when it came this early, it meant that winter would be especially cold and brutal. He took the leaf to his grandfather.
The old man had seen early seasons, but never by three months. The omen of the yellow leaf, as they came to call it, was the beginning of the coldest five years the tiny county had ever seen. Within this time, the growing times and harvests became shorter. In the first year, most of the radishes did not have enough time to grow before the first freeze. Then nearly the whole crop of the small purple potatoes froze in the cold hard ground. The family tried to dig them out, but the ground was as hard as a rock. Each year, the summer seemed to get shorter and the winter months intensified and spilled over into fall and spring. The gypsies had not come through in several years. Tadej figured they had remained in the more temperate lower altitudes.
After five years, the family’s resources were exhausted. They had cleared so much of the surrounding land for fire wood that the land was unrecognizable. The mules and horses required food that the land could no longer provide. The men of the family agreed that they could not survive another frozen season.
Tadej packed his small sack and set out in the early morning. He walked down the little road that he always took to town. But as the sun rose in the sky, and he entered the town, he did not stop at the well or the markets that had become fixtures in his weekly routine. He continued walking, out of town, past all the landmarks that were familiar to him. He took the road that brought other traders from the towns of the low lands. He walked, knowing he must find a better place to bring his family.
He was searching for more farmland, a place where he and his family could raise sheep and pigs and once again reap the tender life of the earth. He knew that the earth had become angry at them. She had became cold and harsh, turning her pretty face from them. She had become like a dead statue. She would not give them life, and, as life begets life, they could not stay there much longer. Tadej walked fast, he was aware that the food reserves in the cellar were diminishing fast. There were barrels of potatoes and apples, and many, many jugs of wine, but after another freezing winter it would all be gone, and soon after, they would all starve. This thought, the picture of his thick mother withering from hunger, made him walk with more determination. If he happened to pass another tradesman, he would ask them about their land, and if they knew the land which the sun had begun to favor.
He walked for three days until he found a train depot. He had never seen a train, but a couple of the market owners had told him of an invention that moved people and goods faster than the speediest horse. When he arrived in this town, larger and busier than any he had ever seen, it was a scene beyond anything he could imagine. The landscape was teeming, reminding him of the ant swarms he would watch as a young boy. The streets were chaotic. Horses, mules and humans morphed into an undulating crowd that heaved and pulsated with a never ceasing force.
He heard a sound in the far distance, a screeching whistle that roared through the town, the land, and his ears with a deafening force. As it grew louder with each second, he looked around for the source of this unnatural sound. A woman was passing by him just then and he grabbed her arm with a firm grip. She looked at him, shocked and stunned by this sudden assault on her free movement. "What is that sound, miss?" his voice revealing his fear. "It’s the train," she said and she pulled her arm free, fleeing from his grip. As she ran away from him, he felt the ground rumble under his feet. He winced and he heard the blood curdling sound of another long whistle. It was the beast, made of black metal, emitting smoke like a blood thirsty dragon. Perhaps it was his sense of impending doom, but he knew then that mounting this other worldly beast would deliver him to another world, it alone could take him to a new fertile land. As afraid as he was before this terrible apparition, he felt his blood rushing through his veins with a force he had never felt before, he felt himself become truly alive and glowing with reckless courage.
Tadej had been gone seven months and the family had not heard from him. His father, fearing the worst, had decided that the family could wait no longer, they would have to leave their land before Tadej sent for them. This winter had been the worst yet. The snow piled and piled, the winds never ceased. It took all their strength just to keep warm. The animals were dying without the grasses they had been accustomed to and the cold was only adding to their misery.
At the end of March, they bundled together all their most beautiful rugs, their photos and the small set of silver tea cups that had been a family heirloom. The grandmother gathered her bottles of salves and her collection of sketches, a lifetime of landscape drawings. Each family member gathered the few things they could not part with and they bundled it all onto their four mules and two horses and began to walk the single lane trail into town. Arriving at the closest town, Grandfather was stopped by his old friend who managed the post office. A letter from Tadej had arrived the previous night. It urged them to come "west." He had found a small piece of land. It was in the valley of a land called "Mexico." The family, excited and nervous, followed the same path he had walked out of town. They walked to the large city even further down the mountain and boarded the great dragon he warned them about in his letter. After five months of travel, the family was reunited with Tadej in the San Joaquin valley.
After only four months, Grandfather was found dead in his bed. He had been very old when they began the descent from the mountains of Slovenia. The train ride, the boat ride, and the second train across the vast land they had come to, it had all been very hard on his old tired body. He had been made tough by years of work in the fields, but his age had truly begun to show when the cold winters began. The thought that kept him alive on the journey was the thought of seeing the new piece of land. Every day, before rising, he thought of this new bright land that Tadej had written about. Gold land and gold light, where the earth thrives with abandon. This was what pushed him forward, it allowed him to move and breathe. Before he died, and he knew it was coming soon, he wanted to see this land that his grandson had discovered.
And when he did finally see the golden land that nestled in the soft contours of this new mysterious mountains, and he saw his family living again from the earth that was no longer angry at them but loved them as it had so many years ago, his body finally relaxed and it allowed himself to depart peacefully. They found him in the morning, cold and hard, with his eyes closed and his wrinkled face calm. Leaving aside the day chores, the remaining family members walked around the circumference of their new land, holding a small white candle and chanting very old prayers.
Tadej found a new tree on which to rest every day, up on a hill of soft dry grass and sliding dusty pebbles. From there, he could see that the world was new and he was getting old. He would soon become Grandfather, and his face would be full of wrinkles and his arms would be brittle and weak, and some day, sooner than he could expect it, it would be time again to die.