Pillow of Darkness

 

I lay on a pillow of darkness

Pure black

Except for the tiny flecks of light

Moving in random patterns

I imagine intersecting lines

at 35-degree angles from each other.

they fade intermittently

and form other shapes

I cannot remember the shapes

I cannot describe them

 

xxx

 

I feel as if I disappear.

perhaps for a few moments

perhaps forever.

I become invisible

a thing that was

but is no more.

 

Xxx

 

I hate the graveyards

the long lines of tombstones

lawns overgrown with weeds

decaying presents for the dead,

weathered teddy bears and deflated balloons.

I hate the roses left to decompose in the sun,

To be later thrown in metal dumpsters

like forgotten dreams

unspoken conversations.

I hate all of it.

the sales people

the ground crew men in dirty pants

the people looking for solace amongst quiet bones.

 

xxx

 

i want freedom

water

waves

I want to slide into oblivion like the other nameless souls

come and now gone.

Will anyone find our music

our words

our small attempts at transformation?

 

xxx

 

I lay on a pillow of darkness

floating somewhere between ocean and desert

between hot and cold

between life and death

The desert now blooms with newfound moisture,

purple flowers and panting lizards,

mermaid clouds.

The oceans begin to sing,

singing of sun trees and orange fruit that drip with sugar,

forming puddles

lakes and creatures that would become myths

and great dreams and nightmares.

 

xxx

 

I will become nameless

i will descend into the chaos I came from.

Into the blood,

the dirt,

the blackness

the specks of light in strange patterns

the nothingness that somehow becomes something.

 

xxx

 

Out of the chaos I am whole

for a moment,

such a short moment.

I am a sentence,

a name,

two sentences and then another,

and then one year, and then another.

I emerge from rough ideas

and soft kisses

from pain and chaos

from dirt and blood

from stories that were lost by people I never met

from stories that may be told long after I’m gone

I am all the people that are now lost,

forgotten,

buried in the blackness

in the darkness

in the soil that made me,

the waves that quenched me

the sun which fed me,

the same sun which crushed and bruised

and landed on my lips

that touched my eyes

and made me whole,

the sun that pulled me out of the darkness

for a moment,

such a short moment.

 

Divide

The candlelight

was weak,

about to fade away.

The winter had laid us bare,

but the trees

encircled us,

made for us an

unassuming home.

In his arms

there was a tenderness

something unusual.

I sensed a seeker

that had dropped

old attachments

and penetrated the

thousand-year divide

between lives.

In his words

were ancient whispers,

an electric promise

radiating through the ocean

and flowing to the stars.

The journey

was about to begin

fresh and new

ancient and arcane

ageless and eternal.

Starlife

There was still some life left in the central star, a pulsing red heart close to extinction. The flame soon to be extinguished, the warmth soon to bleed out into the cold expanse, and yet there was still some life left. Enough to nourish a dragon and send it out with a message.

"Tell them that I was here. That I lived, that I gave life freely for billions upon billions of years. That my children grew up around me and became other than they were until at last they needed me no more and moved on. Tell them that I too changed and changed again until I was turned inside out with change. Tell them that I am not gone, but that I have gone on. Or tell them nothing and simply fly, my last creation before I am the absence. Now go swiftly, or I will not be able to help taking you with me as I collapse."

The dragon shot out like a spark into the great beyond. When it was a safe distance away it stopped to watch the heart from which it was issued turning black.

Open Up

Open up and sing
the body is ready for death
the mouth, a portal to the end
the stadiums outside are filled
and the onlookers are hungry,
the preachers
the women with their diapered babes
the wolves at their side.
The prayer has begun,
The song, still ringing.
The chant builds,
The body is ready,
The flesh has a message.
And our book is open
And I see a torn page,
an invitation to the end.

A single tear rolls, takes speed.
Falls to the ground,
spreading its salty spirit,
its whispered secret.
In ten years there will be a sapling,
bleeding its ocean blood.
I watch it disappear,
a single drop into the earth,
dark as coal.

Pale pink petals float by,
a gift of the wind.
One sticks to my lip and I draw it in,
move it around like
my favorite piece of paper,
Then let it sit at the base of my tongue.
It can stay as long as it likes,
no longer alone in the wind.
Here it has a home,
till we open up, and sing.

Until The End

The law would not bend to her will.  She wished to reverse time, to stop decay in its path, to find the fountain.  Her bones were made of steel. The taste of metal lingered in her mouth; even after brushing her shiny teeth she could sense the elements and polished earth.
The years since her birth had flown like a blue feather on a hurricane gust. Childhood had at first been painfully slow, but the moment her breasts were upright and singing, the years gathered strength and momentum, rolling faster and faster until she came to the edge and her pulse slowed. She grew out her hair in an attempt to capture what had been.

Now, her white mane long and clean, her hair had become a symbol of the past, like some sort of guiding line attached to a place she could not quite remember. The girl that had been, she had never known her.
She had watched herself from a distance, seeing the movements and thoughts of a skinny girl from an outsider’s perspective. Her dancing and singing was put under scrutiny, not by all those teachers and fellow students, but by the loud voice in her own mind that beat its comments into an ever-present rhythm she confused with the body’s pulse.
Her hair was long now, longer than it had even been.  When naked she could feel the soft ends of her white waves rubbing against the back of her thighs. 

Sprouting life seemed to grow unabated just beyond her fingertips.  The tree outside the window, once a sapling she had planted with her own hands, had grown into a massive fruit bearing vine.  It had pushed its way through the cracks in the house foundation, had climbed up the interior wall in her bedroom and spread along the ceiling. 
There were flocks of bright colored birds perched along the ledges of her roof and in the garden. A once carefully tended plot of vegetables had exploded into a new life form.  The tentacles of squash plants covered the land, expanding outwards, resolutely mounting wooden fences in its path, winding its way over forgotten toys and sun-chairs in the neighbor’s yard. 

She wished she could bend that universal law into a pretzel, making time into a new shape so that she could experience it all again in a different way, perhaps with more clarity, perhaps with more wisdom.
She was old and her bones were metallic.  Little walks around the block towards the park sent sparks through her, sometimes igniting the dried up lawns beside the path.
If only the proliferation of vines and thick weeds and the sun could wait for her, could keep her in their company.  She would like to see it all to the end, every moment of existence before it all went up in a colossal puff of smoke. 
She swung her hips as best she could, leaving a trail of embers on the sidewalk.

A Moment Alone

The sky is black with a few speckled stars. Isa’s black truck is parked twenty feet away in a row of 10 empty parking spots beside the sidewalk. The only thing separating the cars from the ocean is a wide sidewalk and a cliff side covered in ice plants and a few invasive species of grass. 
Isa is nestled in the thick coiling roots of a Monterrey Cypress. The roots are curved and exposed to the air like tentacles that emerge from the earth and then dive back into it after a series of loops.  The trunk of the tree is massive, the bark scratches against her back which is only covered in a thin cotton long-sleeved shirt. The roots hide her body from anyone that might be walking along the sidewalk or the occasional car that passes by, their headlights illuminating the tree for just a second before driving on. 
She is just a few steps and a leap from the ocean.  Fifteen feet below, the waves crash into the rocks, colliding not with violence, but with a persistent relaxed motion that moves forever without rest.  The sound is calming, like a nighttime lullaby.
Isa looks out into the black ocean sparkling with faint moonlight.  The air is crisp with approaching fall. The elements seem more alive, and she feels more real in it.  With acute clarity, she feels the coolness of the salty cliff covered in fine dust, the rough bark of the trunk, the breeze full of salt and moisture, the roar of elements as water and rock meet. 
Her left hand is in her pants, feeling the warmth of her bare skin.  Her thumb and pointer finger are expertly holding a vibrator to her clit while her others hold back the cotton of her panties.  She is hidden there, alone under the cloak of a dark sky, the protruding tree roots and the ocean sounds.
Her eyes are open, alternating her gaze from the sea to the cypress canopy above, barely visible against the dark sky, to her stomach and her legs.  Isa closes her eyes as she gets closer, clenches her abdomen and imagines tied-up young women on stage in front of a barely visible audience, women bent over metal contraptions, gagged, helpless.
The fantasies quicken her excitement and her clitoris swells with blood. She moves rhythmically and opens her eyes, watching the approach of foam-tipped waves and the serene rise and fall of salt water in the distance. 
She is alone out here, alone but accompanied by all the elements. She begins to ride the tide, pushes her breath out a little quicker, tightens her lower abdomen, and she soars over the edge.

The New World

Yesterday he asks about my relationship to the café’s owners. I tell him they’re my friends. He says maybe he can make friends with me. I admit I’m easy to make friends with. His name is Erasmus.
Today I ask him if he plays chess. He says he can. I tell him I’ll bring a chessboard. He says it’s nice to have a friend. He tells me that someone else once said that we should love our friends with the greatest intensity possible from whatever distance is necessary. He explains that the woman he is quoting came to a bad end. I say that most extraordinary people do. He says that his mother was extraordinary and she led a peaceful existence. I amend my statement. Many extraordinary people come to a bad end.

This morning Walter Richard Patton came in and ordered a Danish. In high school he reversed the order of his first and middle name and came to be known by all as Dick or Dickie. His father died in Chicago the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. The next day Dick's younger brother, Arthur, came to him and said he wanted to join the Navy. He was 16 years old. Dick helped him to alter his baptismal record by changing a 5 to a 3, thus helping Arthur to gain enough years to enlist. Dick himself joined the navy shortly after his family moved to Utah.

Erasmus told me this afternoon that he once hunted down an archeologist who studies modern artifacts; eye droppers, paper cups, anything that can be found in an urban gutter. Erasmus located him, surprisingly, tucked away in rural Maine. The gentleman told him that he had worked in Berkeley on the development of the Nuclear bomb. He described the day after the bombing of Hiroshima, standing among the scientists who had helped create the most devastating weapon designed by mortal men. He told Erasmus that they all went a little crazy that day, the day after 66,000 people were killed all at once.

When Dick came out of the Navy he found himself in California. He could never bring himself to return to his family's home. There was a reason for this. In 1945 Art was lost off the coast of a small island in the South Pacific. Dick felt responsible. He was the one who had changed that 5 to a 3.

When Erasmus was ten years old his teacher and the school's principal called a special conference with his mother. In this conference she was told that her son was mentally retarded. She asked on what grounds they were making this proclamation. She was told that he didn’t understand that he should sit in his seat. He preferred to sit in the windowsill. She was then shown a paper covered in writing and told that he didn’t understand how to write in the lines. She withdrew Erasmus from the school and sent him to another.

Dick’s grandmother came from Austria with her husband and their family. Her brother in law brought his family all at the same time, but after passing through Ellis island, the two brothers never saw or heard from each other again. They simply lost one another in the strange new world.

I listen to Erasmus conducting an interview on the radio. He is speaking with a woman from England who leaked secret documents revealing a plot to bribe members of the United Nations into supporting the Iraq war. He asks her if she regrets having done it. She tells him she does not. She explains that she had thought the war might be stopped if she revealed the truth, but nothing came of her actions. She was fired from her job, she faced imprisonment, but there was a war just the same. Erasmus thanks her for her bravery.

Dick’s father died in Chicago the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. The day after the attack on Hiroshima, a group of scientists in Berkeley went a little crazy. One of them became an archeologist that studies modern artifacts. Arthur was lost at sea off the coast of a small island in the south pacific. Dick could never go home again. He sits in an empty café in Berkley, a very lonely old man with a heavy heart. Erasmus’s mother was an extraordinary woman who was told that her young son was mentally retarded. Later he was nominated for a Pulitzer. Now he is interviewing a person that hoped to prevent a war by telling the truth.

Someone said that we should love our friends with the greatest intensity possible from whatever distance is necessary. That someone came to a bad end. Many extraordinary people come to a lonely, painful end. They are simply lost, separated from those they once loved by choice or death or circumstance, left alone to face the strange new world.

Charles

The bright orange, red and yellow of crushed leaves on the gray concrete just outside the open door. Charles’s pale blue irises highlighted by red streaks crossing the whites and the puffy crimson rims of his eyelids.
A dog looks in the window at me, just the brown muzzle and the floppy ears of a canine, peering in through the lower left hand corner of the window. Men are laughing out in the street where I cannot see. Another yellow leaf drops and blows wildly in the wake of a passing car. More cars with their anxiety making noise passing close to the open door. When they pass on the other side of the street the noise is soft and pleasant like the crashing of distant waves. Even on this side of the street some cars manage to create a gentle whoosh while others gurgle, grunt, growl and roar.
The cars are small bursts of motion and color streaking past the glass like fish in an aquarium. The trucks are slow, crawling monsters of loud carbon emitting wrath. I see a bicycle leaning against the meter that serves the whole street.
A man passes by and looks in. His nose is a cruel shape, his mouth is agape slightly as if he were breathing through it, incapable of smiling with it. The eyes of a zombie, hard like marbles, uncaring. But he is young and women who like tall lean bitter young men will find him attractive. I shudder.
Charles is soft and friendly and mumbles. His flesh looks pale and soft. There is enough of it that if you squeezed him it would be like squeezing a marshmallow. Because of the way the red made the blue of his eyes look, because I was looking in his eyes and he was looking in mine for just a moment as we spoke, I contemplate what that squeezing would feel like.
That way that he talks quietly with his back turned as he moves and I’m not sure if he is speaking to me or to himself, at first it reminded me of a dream in which you can’t quiet understand what is being said. It made me feel confused and uneasy. I wanted clear bright communication.
Today it furthers his aura of softness. His mumbling fills the air around us like clouds of cotton, cushioning us within this space of hard floors and polished mahogany.
When we first met he seemed accusing, threatening, alien. He is still alien but I like being in the room with him. I wish he would not go, not now that I suspect that what disconcerted me before was only softness.
Another leaf, this one orange like brass, summersaults down behind the back of a black man in a navy blue sports jacket who is feeding the meter.
I wish Charles would not go, but he is already gone, and I am here so that he need not be. I am left wondering over the only curiously human things we said, the few words that we exchanged that weren’t about change and cream and bags and glass cleaner.
I said: “You look tired.”
The counter was between us.
He answered: “I do? Naw. I only got up at five this morning.”
At this point he is drifting away from the counter towards the door, moving backwards as if rewinding in slow motion. “I only got to sleep for like two hours the other day.”
“Geez.” I say trying to express sympathy.
“Naw.” he says, and actually what he says sounds more like ‘No Ah‘, “I figure it’s good practice, you know, for having kids.” And then he’s out the door drifting away down the strip of gray concrete with the leaves and the cars and the others.
I compile a list of data. What do I know about Charles? He is in school because he mentioned exams when he asked me to take his shift last week. He sometimes sleeps in his car. He bakes bread and manages this store. This is precious little information. His curious remark about practice for having children, does it mean he is about to be a father? Does he have a wife? A girlfriend? Is he a bachelor who actually thinks of a future in which he has children with so much hope that he takes today’s trials as preparation?
There are not enough clues for me to come to a conclusion, not enough for me to form a working picture of what Charles’s life is like.
A fire engine screams by, a big red rectangle with flashing red yellow and white headdress rushing for disaster.
I try to imagine what it would be like to be the girlfriend of Charles. I find it difficult to imagine a conversation with him. If we got together in a different setting for coffee, what could we say to each other?
It is a challenge to imagine him saying anything deeply philosophical. This after all is the man who came out of the restroom half an hour ago and didn’t wash his hands, not even for show.
Nor can I imagine myself being a convincingly interesting person to speak to without the conversation getting philosophical. Politics is a challenge for me, and anyway I can’t picture him being passionate in that regard. Books? He can read, he is in school, but does he like to? I move on assuming that we have schlepped our way through the small talk with lots of eye contact.
I can imagine a kiss, a hug, soft warm embraces. That part is easy. He is a man and I am a woman. These two simple facts are often enough to bridge the distance between two human beings. It is enough to allow for at least brief moments of bliss.
I try to imagine him as an older man, as a husband, as a respectable member of society. I can picture him in a sweater vest.
As if to illustrate my inner musings, a man in a bright yellow dress shirt and sweater vest tromps by the window. A paper bag holding lunch swings in his hands. There he goes, my dear Charles, on his way to the office.
This is as far as I will bother my imagination to take me. The plot is already stretched thin by the fact that I could not be myself in even those earliest conversations. A life time of hiding myself is the lifetime I have already rejected. And honestly, if you were Charles and you read this, wouldn’t you find it at least mildly disturbing ?
More bodies pass by the window, a few faces turn in to see me. Many manage kinder noses and inoffensive mouths, but their eyes are those same inexpressive marbles. Cold eyes that deny entry to the soul. Leaves tremble on the sidewalk under the caress of a breeze, but never quite lift off. A man across the street turns the corner, his reflection accompanies him in the mirrored glass of the tall building he passes. A harp sings incessantly from the speakers behind my head. An older man limps by with the help of his cane.
Charles alone after I am dead and gone… Lives in motion before my eyes, lives imagined in the eyes of soft spoken strangers.
A young couple strolls by arm in arm, her red sweater against his cobalt blue coat sleeve. Just outside the open door the high heels of her black boots crush the bright orange, red, and yellow of winter leaves into confetti upon the concrete.

Ecstatic Fury

It all begins this night, a night of fright and terror, this night when everything descends into a lethal silence, a silence in which all things are paralyzed, everything has stopped due to what has happened on the other side, the other side which on this particular night has come into this side, this side which is afraid to lose everything it has ever known, everything it has ever seen during its forty something years of life. (I remember being unafraid of loss, unconcerned with either living or dying, but this too I lost eventually.)
Nothing was forever, that was the simple rule to remember, everything was temporary and without sense, it was others who gave it sense, others speaking, others looking, others pointing things out, all the other things that in one day or another could be found along the path, a path full of life or full of nothing. What could it matter if everything was made of nothingness to begin with, if everything is and was an essence of nothingness and came from nothingness and to nothingness would return?

The things that happened on that night are indescribable and heart wrenching at once, because of the fear and the accent on horror, life had horrified itself. In a matter of seconds nothing that life had accumulated for years and centuries, none of it had any more importance nor substance. None of it was real, none of it was worth anything, everything was garbage and shit. It was all the worst hypocrisy in which a spirit could get into so that it might get away with what it could, to escape from whatever it would be, from whatever it was. Here nothing mattered anymore, it was a life whose only purpose was to observe a particular situation, an event, a something, a nothing, and that turned everything into a loss. It made life from what it wasn't, but nothing was what it could be. Everything had lost its brilliance, the color that it once possessed. In everything there was a sense of agony, of darkness, of harshness, of laziness, life in full degeneration. A slow decay of things that would never again return, things that would never be happy with themselves, the things that happened on that night.

“To hell with so many expectations! To hell with life itself!” it said.
Who said it? It didn't matter if it died, it died all the time. Badly born, recently deceased, thoughts weighed down by irony and by this life which had cracked like an egg, it had fallen from an unknown distance. What difference could it make? Everything was the same. It was all the cursed agony of an ancient being, covered in tumors, having repeated this agony so many times, this weakness, this same foolishness of dying from lack of skill at living.
“Life and its heaven,” it said, “what a disgusting prison! How large it is! And how narrow is heaven!”

More confused, more painful, is that blue expanse which laughed at us at every moment. With its pretentious greatness, perpetually showing us its unreachable dexterity in being able to be anywhere. And we are down here, unable to move away, unable to emerge from under its damned sphere of cursed power. We are unable to escape its cowardice and refusal to show us its liberator face, the face that could free us from so many sins, sins which we have been subjected to during all these years of being newly born in an egg that is dead and rotten, broken by the damned beak of a bird that flies over us, reminding us that up there is a heaven of sheer agony. A heaven dying every single day in all the tones, in all the colors, in all that could be a single stumble, a single moment of union. Whatever it is, it is everywhere and it ends everywhere.

This is a snack for gods of the void, of whatever is and whatever isn't, whatever manages to be what it can't be, whatever manages to truly be what it is. I don't understand anything. It is simply life which talks about itself and says whatever it wants to say, as if it's asking me to fuck it, to make love to it, asking me to throw it from a window, from a corridor, from the fifth floor of an empty building, from something that is also made of everything and nothing. Asking me to kill this agony inside of me and kill the rats that are part of your glory and your desolation. Your fears are your gods, your gods are your loves, and the rest is not important. The demons don't matter. My tomb will be in the nothingness some day. Deep under the earth I will sleep.

I go through the dying during a long period of tenderness and of eternity. What matters is to sleep and nothing else. It is the same to me, the state that is the agony of living and of dying. Nothing matters, not anymore. Life, death, they are both here. They have always been here and they will always be here. It's the same to me; a monkey, an elephant, some other thing that tries to jump, tries to die, tries to achieve something in which it might find a way to live, to feel, to really feel, to feel anything at all. To feel hate, real perfect hate and not that garbage that they show us on the radio and the TV, on the Internet, in these words of 'who knows what this man is trying to say here', this imbecile that is writing to try to say what he doesn't dare to say in his own insides, this damned idiot that is just barely learning to say a half truth that he learned somewhere in his country of El Salvador, The Savior, as if this was the savior of that fucking word that is hell, in which everyone burns and then remains confused. The fucking fear of burning playing for eternity among the heretics which were burned alive and crucified so they could reach the endless glory of hell, where they would never be able to understand their own martyrdom, waiting to sense that everything that is, everything that can be achieved, could come one day to liberate them. Something else would come to do the hard work of sacrifice, so they could keep on fooling around and making trouble with the gun powder that one day was in their words. The fire that they picked up from a virtual garbage can in which man found himself due to the thousand speeches of centrifugal language. It all begins this night, in the things that happened on that one night, the things that I will forever be at a loss to describe.

Toni And The Police

I awoke in a haze of sleep, my dreams evaporating instantly. The room was still dark, nearly pitch black to my half closed eyes. I pulled the thick covers away mechanically and stepped onto the carpet. Holding my hands in front like a blind man, I sought the hard realness of the desk against the wall and the glass doorknob I would find to the left of it. Holding the knob, I slipped my feet into the slippers I had thoughtfully left by the door. There was a sea of cold tiles that stretched from my bedroom to the bathroom, and I tried to avoid the frigid shock. I pulled the French-style door open, and a cool air hit my face. Without central heating- a cold darkness lay just beyond the bedroom walls.
It took me a second to realize it, while my brain computed and bumped along, but there was an unmistakable flashing red light coming from the garage. My door was open just a crack, and I pulled on the knob. The garage pulsed with flashing red and blue lights, like an empty nightclub. I urged my feet forward, carefully stepping over the guitar and microphone cords that criss-crossed the floor. The light source came from outside, just beyond the wood panels and high frosted glass windows that made our garage door. I stood on my toes and looked through the diamond shaped window, an architectural necessity for any house constructed in the 50s.
Two police cars were double parked in the street, one just in front of our house, the other in front of the first car, almost out of sight. Both had their lights on- blinking red and blue that seemed to scream silently in the night. There were the cars and the houses on the other side of the street, illuminated in the blazing lights. I immediately thought of our next door neighbors, the ones who had just moved in and brought with them loud voices and almost a dozen children. I listened hard for voices, but heard none. No sobbing women, no shrieking children. I pulled a green and cracked vinyl chair towards me and quietly stepped up, looking through the diamond window once again.
Partially shadowed by the night, then brightened by the lights, was Toni, our neighbor, with her hands behind her back, surrounded by four large police officers. Three of the men were white and large, one of them wearing a black beanie on his seemingly bald head. The fourth officer was a stocky Asian man. Toni looked so small and thin next to them, her chocolate skin illuminated and somehow looking pale.
“They don’t take care of my mom, I do!” she shouted. The men mumbled their responses.
They walked together towards the car closest to our house. One cop in front with the black beanie leading, one next to Toni, the two others following. The man in front was shaking his head, and from where I stood, he seemed to be looking right at me. I wondered if he was. Was it a warning? I felt myself grow cautious, wondering if they could see my curious white face through the small window. I felt a fear creep inside. The men felt dangerous. Men armed and willing, ready to take a life. They closed the backseat door behind Toni, then huddled by the trunk, looking at something the one with the beanie held. Toni shouted from inside the car, but her words were muffled, just the anger escaped through the closed metal door.
“Shut UP!” yelled the man wearing the hat. He turned instantly to the Asian man on his left, smiling. His smile filled me with fear. Bullies from high school, men with a license to shout and abuse, kill if need be. He thought it was funny. He did not have the insight to see that his actions altered the course of lives. What was a job, a routine night perhaps, something he would write a report about and then forget as he put the pen down, it was different on the other end, between the metal cuffs, waiting in the backseat of a car. A river flowing one way was instantly diverted with his presence. Arrest wasn’t a minor thing, though he might have gotten used to being the figure with power. And when he laughed, like he didn’t care, like she was just another piece of trash he had to deal with before his next coffee break, it etched a dread in me I had not felt in a long time.
The men conferred behind the car, looking at something. The Asian man broke away and walked to the police car. He opened the driver’s door and spoke through the metal grate to Toni.
“What’s your name?” he said quietly, but distinctly. I thought I heard her say Jessica, but I probably misheard.
I thought of Toni confessing months ago that she used to do crack, that her grown children were still mad at her for how she had been when she was raising them. What had she done tonight? I imagined her in a yellow lit house, wandering from room to room. Which one of her family members had called the police? Who would take care of her mother with dementia? I thought of the old woman who sat in the easy chair in front of the window, what would happen to her? What would they do with Toni? I imagined her heart shattered, crumbling in on itself as she thought about the helpless mother she was being dragged away from. What had she done?
I left the window and walked back quietly through the garage, careful to step over all the cords. I used the bathroom, never turning on a single light. I stood by the doorway to the garage, wondering if I should go back to bed. But then I heard my friend’s voice, asking me questions. I thought about Toni and thought someone should keep witness. Moving gently to the window again, I stood on my tiptoes. I looked into the windows of the other houses across the street, looking for other faces. If they were there, they were hidden. And if it was just me, watching as Toni was taken by the four men. Then I should watch it through to the end, whatever would be the end at this hour.
As I stood, the word boredom crossed my mind, and I felt guilty that the events had lost my interest. The scene was a bit more quiet, Toni had stopped cursing. Two cops now stood by the hood of the police car closest to me. The steps leading to Toni’s front door was illuminated by the porch light. I could see the purple exterior paint and the metal gate at the landing that was slightly ajar. I watched the quiet scene for a little while, then the light above her garage door came on. I wondered if it was a motion sensor, maybe a cat had walked by. Maybe someone had turned it on. A few minutes passed, then the sound of jingling, perhaps keys, though it sounded more like glass.
One cop came down the front steps, taking each step quickly, with a sort of bounce. His large black Maglight was beaming and down-turned. At the sidewalk by the steps, he began to search the driveway, carefully looking around the red car that was parked there. Toni started cursing again and another cop turned on his flashlight, joining the search. They didn’t find anything and within a few minutes two cops walked towards the car parked just beyond our house. I heard the ignition start.
The cop with the black beanie walked to the other car and took his place behind the wheel, his partner sat beside him. He turned on the engine and then turned his face to the left, in my direction. The shadow of the car’s roof hid his eyes, but I felt like he was watching me, perhaps daring me to do something. A deeper sense of fear moved through me, the man was dangerous, more ugly than many I had met. He stayed like that for several seconds and neither of us moved. Then he looked straight ahead and drove away.
I stood in the garage for several minutes, the space now black again without the police car lights. I moved back towards my room, but lingered in the doorway to the garage, wondering if I should lock my door. The space seemed less safe, not because of whatever Toni had done, but because of those men. The police and what they stood for.
Men without any hero’s code of honor, but simply men that had passed a few tests, a few obstacle courses…men that had been given a gun and the power to enforce laws, the power to hurt, the power to change destinies. They were nothing special, but they were backed by cells and judges and an entire system of repression that would bite down on the prettiest of flowers without a thought.
I was cold. I got under the blankets again and stared at the blackness of my wall until the sky turned blue.

A Day Without Sunshine

The sky was endless blue, so bright and clear, it could have been water. He rested his back into the thick trunk of the village’s largest banyan tree and stared towards the heavens. So clear. So absolutely blue it hurt his eyes. Squinting, he noticed a small flock of black birds darting back and forth, their small shapes looking like chaotic falling stars in a world of inside-out colors. So blue, so absolutely clear.
It had been that way for years, for as long as he had been a farmer and looked into the cloudless sun-filled sky and wondered when it would rain. His body was still lean then, and firm, and he walked as straight as the tallest tree. He remembered looking at his little sprouts of millet just emerging from the soil, then praying for the water to give them life. They were so tender then, bright green and as big as the nail on his smallest finger. Each one so delicate and precious. Looking at his rows of crops, he felt a love for each little shoot, a love not quite the same, but not completely different from the affection he felt for his children, for all the children in the village. For the fields were life too, raw and bright and moving towards the sun with all the power and knowledge they possessed.
He imagined a day when the spouts would grow, till they reached his shoulders, and in his mind he could almost hear the raucous chants of the harvest festival and the overwhelming sense of happiness, knowing that for another year, the people would be fed. He would be fed, and really, it was all that he cared for, knowing that the children could grow to be men and beautiful women.
That’s what he wanted, as a young man that first year with fields of his own to sow and plant and harvest, he wanted what each farmer would have wanted, but in the arid plains where he lived, there must be rain. And after the spring rains many months before and after the small buds of life had begun, the skies cleared and never clouded again.
Everyday his heart sank a little deeper as each of the small millet sprouts shriveled and burned beneath the unrelenting sun. The scales of the earth had tilted, there was just too much heat, too much power. The rain never came. Not that year, not in the years that would follow. He grew old waiting for a cloud.
His muscles had softened, his hair had grayed. He had spent his life looking to the sky, asking, pleading, begging for one day without sunshine. Just for one day, just so the soil could drink and life could begin once again, green and tender.
But the sun did not answer. The burning light never softened, it refused to smile shyly and recede, relinquishing its light so a thick layer of clouds could roll into darkness. His knees had grown weak from kneeling, from pleading beneath the unmoved sun. Could it not feel? How could it shine, shine year after year, while they starved beneath the endless blue sky. And though he was hungry, and though he was weak, he got on his knees, as he did every day, asking quietly for a day without sunshine.

I Can See Her Now

I can see her now

Stretching for miles
while dancing
lonely in the moonlight,
White long dress
and black flowing hair
Trailing behind her
like the tail of a comet,
Feet gliding over the asphalt
Of a dark empty street,
Touched by rain and wind
Cradled in the warm embrace
The invisible arms
of the endless black night.

I can see her now
Out of the corner of my eye
Eating the remains of the dead
While others gorge on hope,
On dreams of what could be
Of what could someday happen.
I can see her
Laughing at their pain
At their painful smiles
And their cackling cries
Big belly bouncing up and down
Rolls of thick flesh
making waves of pasty skin
Waves that begin everywhere
And end nowhere.

I can see her now
Even if I turn away
Her smile is ever present,
Her eyes have the knowing gaze
Of the one that knows
How it all turns out
In the end.
I can see her now
But I wish I could forget her
And then be reminded
In a sudden flash of lightning
As the Real meets my Illusion
And all fantasies come to an end.

Letting A Butterfly Go

It was a trailer that sat alone in a big dirt lot off of Grand Avenue, not too far from where it intersected with Riverside drive near the corner of the Lake where the old Machado house still stood hidden in a thicket of eucalyptus and pepper trees. From there to the ALANO building it was a short walk, and due to the lack of many other buildings, one could easily have supposed that the trailer was somehow officially connected with the ALANO club house, but this was not the case. The only other structure within close reach was a small shabby liqueur store to tempt the alcoholics on their way to and from meetings. A gravel road adorned with no trespassing signs ran from Grand Ave. along the side of the trailer and continued down as far as the lake where a loftier private residence was tucked behind a gate to protect it from the riff raff that congregated a half mile in front of its door step.

Jesse had once lived in a house further down Grand Ave. under the shade of the Ortega mountain range in Lake Land Village. There, for the majority of his life, he had dwelt with his mother and stepfather and two half sisters as a ghostly remnant of his mother’s past, haunting their wholesome attempt to build a family. He had been partially allowed to be a part of the new family life but at the same time he had been isolated from them by his origin and was permitted to drift in his own private life, mostly unsupervised, and occasionally reprimanded for his boyish exploits. His stepsisters brought their friends to the house in those days and he had been warned not to tease the little girls who were only two or four years younger than himself. At that age, however, two years younger may as well have been a decade, and four years a century, for while he was already stealing nudie magazines from the liquor stores and smoking cigarettes and throwing rocks at passing cars, they were running around barelegged in the front yard chasing bubbles and skipping rope.

Back in those days, the oldest of his two sisters, Morgan, had two companions that accompanied her most often, June, who was knitted to Morgan at the waist, and Lane who drifted about the other two like a lost butterfly. While Morgan was short and thick with mouse brown hair that made her seem as if she had been forged of clay, and June was about as short but less thick than Morgan, Lane was tall and skinny and fair haired. Jesse interacted with them minimally, either to quarrel with his sister or to trade them pogs for their lunch money. When Lane switched schools and vanished, he hardly noticed. That was in the time when they still lived in the house with its yard behind a brick fence. Then over the course of five years his mother’s drinking grew out of control and her husband threw her out and eventually Jesse and Morgan, now in high school, followed her to the trailer that sat under the blazing sun beside the ALANO club.

It was there in the trailer that Lane re-emerged one hot September evening alongside Morgan. It was a Friday night and both Morgan and Jesse had been permitted to invite a friend to spend the night. The girls would take the bedroom usually split between brother and sister, and the boys would stay in the living room. As in days of old, his mother had warned him to stay away from the younger girls, but it was no longer because she feared that he would tease them. She had a whole new set of concerns that, whether she knew it or not, were well founded. (Over the summer, Morgan and June had tagged along with Jesse to parties where they lost their virginity in a drunken revelry that left them stained with guilt. The two girls were avid Born Again Christians and Straight Edge punks by the time school started in the fall.)
Morgan led Lane to the room and played a Violent Femmes CD. Lane asked if they could listen to a Rage Against the Machine album that caught her eye. Morgan told her that it belonged to her brother and added,
“Besides, Rage Against The Machine sucks, Lane!”
Then she went to start her laundry in the old Kenmore on the back porch and left Lane alone in the room.

Jesse was waiting for his friend Brian to arrive so they could take a long walk down the dark wasteland of Grand Ave. and smoke marijuana and come back after his mother was asleep and try their hand with the girls. He came into the bedroom where Lane stood in her short cut off shorts, vintage polyester blouse and tattered flip flops. Her legs were long and pale, her hair long and blonde. While he dug around in the pocket of his leather jacket to retrieve his Zippo, she asked him about the Rage Against The Machine CD that lay by the stereo. She picked up the case and told Jesse that she loved Rage Against the Machine, even if every one else was into punk rock now. She asked if he still liked them. He said he did. There was something in the way that she spoke to him, without guile, without hope of looking cool. She still talked as though she were a little girl with no ulterior motives. She looked at him as if he were equally innocent. He was sure that she knew he was something else, but she looked at him and spoke to him with trust, like a little bird walking into the mouth of an alligator.

She started talking about good and evil, offering theories and observations, asking him his opinion. She used big words constructed in proper sentences void of slang. The way she spoke was more alien to him than the off color topic she wanted to explore. Drinking her in with his eyes he felt a stirring in his chest, a sort of painful ache.
“You’re pretty, but weird, you know that?” he said to her. Her look told him that by now she did know, and that knowing made her uncomfortable and proud. Then she asked him if they could play the CD so he put it on for her.

Later, after their walk Jesse and Brian lay sprawled on sleeping bags in the murk of the living room They snickered at the snores that drifted down the hall from his mother’s room. Brain, who had hooked up with Morgan once during the summer, said,
“Dude, I think your Mom’s asleep. Let’s go see what the girls are doing.”
Jesse imagined creeping into the bedroom and finding Lane in his bed. She would lie there and accept whatever he whispered to her and do whatever he wanted. He knew it with certainty and felt the aching in his chest again, remembering her wide blue eyes trained on him, the CD clutched in her hand, the instant warmth she had offered.
“No man, I promised my Mom.” He said.
“What?” Brian laughed, “So what?”
“So if she finds out, I’m out of here.” He answered truthfully, although he wasn’t worried about that at all. It hurt him a little to say it, because no one could tell him what he could do or couldn’t, and that was part of his cool.
“What?” Brian asked and his voice revealed his disappointment not only in the way the evening was panning out but also in his companion’s possible act of obedience.
“Just forget about it.” Jesse told him. “I’m tired anyway.”
And he rolled over and pretended to be falling asleep even though the room was full of an agonizing tension. He thought that Brian would say something else, but he didn’t, and, after a while, the tension began to fade and Brian’s breathing slowed down and he too rolled over and adjusted his pillow and soon he was making the deep snorting noises of a sleeper.

Jesse lay still and awake, awash in a bath of conflicted emotions. It would have been nice to touch her, and now he looked bad in Brian’s eyes. But for better or worse, she was unlike himself and his sister and the rest. He felt that she should be allowed to remain that way. He knew that a butterfly’s wings should never be touched. If they were, it would be unable to fly ever again and it would be a butterfly no more. It was a little sacrifice that he made, lying there in the dark of the trailer that stood by the ALANO club, a sacrifice that would keep her from joining them all down in the heavy muck that was confusion and regret and sorrow. Lying on the sleeping bag thrown over the worn carpet, by the couch with broken springs, in the trailer on Grand Avenue, not far from the old Machado house, he let a butterfly go.