Opium of the People

If it wasn't a cold digital reading and the push of a vinyl button

The nurse had found an errant blue-black seed in the crack between the driveway and her mother's vegetable garden

And warmed the soil so as not to shock the fragile thing, and misted it with a thoroughly rinsed spray n wash bottle

Each morning, bleary-eyed, sensing how many spurts might replicate a humid morning in  Bangledesh

And cradled its trailings as she transferred it to a larger space along the side of the house

Between the pottery kiln with the frayed power cord and the deflated basketball,

Would there be a pain justi....

I notice my thoughts have carried me away again and I bow to them like Jack Kornfield's tapes taught me,

Acknowledge the 7 year old Mennonite girl across the childrens section of the Kanab Library

Realize that I'd shifted my arm to obstruct her view of my more obvious arm tattoos without even thinking about it

All the universe
Teach us our true nature, we're
Ready to unlearn

Aslama

I pause my morning smoke and meditation to retrieve a bright blue pool noodle almost out the left-open gate.  Bed it safely back in the orange toy bucket against the chilly Autumn wind. Pandora is playing a song that meant a lot to me at one point. Exhale yet again and this is the one. This is the time when I truly let go and watch the memories drift with the frozen cigarrete smoke until diluted enough to not seem to matter.

The Mother

I think it's cause for celebration, in certain cultures... or eras, or species... something i think i've read.

Here and now I'm scared to acknowledge my own daughter's new ability to grow life. I'd hate to embarass her...

I've just decided I think my favorite thing about the seashore is not the smell or the air that lets your skin finally breathe or even the waves, never not interesting.

It's that for some reason, even though the gravity must be at least minutely stronger at Big Sur than high in my mountain home, the Pacific draws my feet and mind up and out.

How, I'll never know, which makes it all the easier to smile dumbly into the thinning mist and feel that childhood rapture, irrepresibly caught up in the onrushing unknown and recognizing that what is happening to you has never happened to anything ever before

Sensory inputs
FUBAR, outputs emitting
Unwanted quanta

I have pieced together a world-view, as we all must, which allows easily for the atrocities we can point at of course the boat of Somali refugees gunned down by an apache helicopter the sharp pricks of friend and scoutmaster suicides even the shamelessunending ache of losing that one yellow bird and not ever knowingadmitting why but knowingadmitting full well that I'm not coming back from that one, not quite but sometimes i let slip this view for a moment let go the safety of a bigger self my face pretends its not and see the planets as lost children in the ultimate night, finding impossibly through that dark dark cold, a fire blazing, drawing them near and like a father, not too near but all the more worshipworthy for that aloof inability to let you in all the way and isnt there something to be said for that archetypal sunfather that lets us be in this deathvacuum when he could so easily not

I inherited my large nose from my father.  Along with a calm and slightly depressed affect, an exposure to good books, a love-hate relationship with redheaded women, bad knees, a lack of fashion sense, a stubborn faith in the goodness of our children...  From my younger brother I got a sense of guilty inadequacy in my ability to nurture or protect, as well as a humourous Harry Potter t-shirt I swiped while he was off on a mission for his church...  From my sisters and elder brother, a wealth of love, selfless patience, and devotion, alongside a crippling inferiority complex.  From my mother, an appreciation for the complexity of human relationships, an inflated value placed on learning, an exposure to mindfulness practice, poor eyesight, and a nearly-hopeless “addictive personality” courtesy of her father (I am told this grandfather also passed along his fondness for baseball and playing the guitar).  One of the more interesting opportunities of my life has been observing my mother flesh out her image of this man, discovering her father if you will, through the process of losing her mother.

     

Fresh out of rehab and no longer having a job or family of my own, I volunteered a lot of my excessive free time to helping my mother and stepfather clean out my Alzheimer-stricken grandma’s home and relocate her to an assisted living facility nearer to us.  My grandma was a recovering hoarder but never fully kicked the habit.  Consequently there were boxes upon boxes of pictures, documents, letters, tax statements, newspaper clippings, cookbooks, weight loss and TV guides to sort through.  I imagine I will not soon forget (unless I also inherit Alzheimer's) the moment my mother discovered the love letters her dad had written to her mom from prison.  They were eloquent, affectionate, and beautifully handwritten.  I don’t pretend to know all the feelings my mother held towards her father but I got the feeling that the author of these letters did not fit the image she had shared with us of a deadbeat, absentee meth addict.  She would later come upon several exquisite leather purses which he had embellished with silver and intricately-worked floral patterns.  The last treasure unearthed was a black and white photo of my mother, about age 7, sitting on the knee of her proud father during a visit at the prison.  A couple of his friends sit on either side, mid-laugh, with half-smoked cigarettes momentarily forgotten.

15 years prior to cleaning out that house, at about age 13, I had discovered, while using the relatively-novel internet, that this man had passed away on my 10th birthday, reportedly sober for the last few years of his life, before succumbing to bleeding stomach ulcers.  We held a small service at his 3-year-old grave-site.  Prior to that, the last time my mother had seen him had been while pregnant with me, also at a funeral, this time for one of their shared relatives.  If he noticed her at that time, he showed no indication of it.

   

We are always planting seeds. Whether we’re asleep or in the shower or in church or getting high or writing blogs.   We are always planting seeds and we will, in one form or another, reap a harvest similar to the seeds which we planted.

"You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

The dog’s food dish is empty.  I will fill it then go to bed.  Words can be beautiful but can’t be taken too seriously.

O Great Telephone

Wouldn't it be strange
If light had made that trip and
Found no eyes in range?

Winter quilt thrown back
She appears in the doorway