Plain woman bald from chemo staring like the psycho in Taxi. You talkin’ to me? She wields it with power; knows you don’t know where to look; perceives your fear. The possum’s naked face in the car headlights rattles me.
If I can’t write until everything is perfect, in order, all taken care of and accounted for, then I can’t write.
He goes out into the night of morning, onto the winding hill country roads full of leaping deer and wandering cattle. They know nothing of him coming back to me.
Sweat so thick it feels like warm, copious saliva; like I’ve been swallowed by a large, hungry God or like I am swimming in some birth canal.
The smoked turkey legs came 2 to a package ;too much for only 1 pot of black-eyes peas & 1 pot of collards. She used both; felt rich, ashamed.
The big heater compressor groans, brays, and pants outside my study window. Steam lands on icy grass.
A Japanese man came to me in a dream last night. He said, “Come. I want to show you a place where dreams of the mind come true.”
In this dream, I walked through tall walls made of finely made vertical strips of silky gold cloth. I walked through walls and laughed.
An entire floor, nicknamed “Happiness,” was a silent retreat. “Remember,” a passerby said to me, finger on lips, “no talking on Happiness.”
Morning writing in a circle of light. A spotted fawn tiptoes in the clearing outside the window. Joy.
Even when you have picked over the family bones for every scrap of meat, every scent like a starving hound, something in the marrow waits to tell you more.
The 2:30 a.m. picture window view of lightning rippling like northern lights looks like a florescent bulb going bad. I think I see a tiny sign between the flashes. It looks like the one Harry Haller* saw. I haven’t thought of this in 40 years. Why the connection now?
Tonight at the Magic Theater
for Madmen Only
Price of Admittance Your Mind
Not for Everybody
*from Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
