Light and Dark

The body is hung from the blue gallows of the sky. Strung up in its noose at the tip, at the almost breaking of dawn and then slung up into a lightening sky, it chokes all day. The orbiting Earth, drawing the great spherical head of the Sun up into the sky from its body of space. Raising it, for all the land to see, of its death upon the ground below, a show for the millions. The head is drawn down at sunset, and cut loose from the gallows, the body as a whole then resting below the ground. Day after day the Sun endures this death, rising from the dead at sun rise and falling back, it's death taking only a moment to the Sun, but a whole day for Earth's people. The eternal rise and fall and glaring rays of a dying man's face causes the masses to squint as they stare up into the noontime surrender, when the Sun's final breathe catches, deep within the lungs and the eyes close, slowly, slowly, across a darkening sky.

Tumultous Times; Turning Tables, Turning Tides

How do I even start to describe, the turmoil, the sudden, unexpected turmoil of Summer.

Something I vaguely remember about what I thought would be all
sweat
cabbage moths
long starry nights
love
tiger lilies
long gravel roads
lemonade
birthday candles
hands to hold
thoughts to ponder

Turned into some wandering loss.
Good night.
Won't be back for a while.
Come visit.
Soon.

serendipity

Psssshhaaaw

Goddamnit. Curse you gov school and all your insolent dog shitty hell.
I'm NOT going back next year.

Just for you that don't know, theres an oil spill going on. And, I mean, I go down to Florida at least once every two years, or somewheres close to that. And I want to go help!! Activism isn't activism unless you push for something and put time in. If things work out I'll be fairly close to the Gulf this summer, which by the way, if you never have been there, the water WAS gorgeous. Crystal clear, wade out for yards, drop dead gorgeous. And now it's all about as wasted as one drunk dead man on a motorcycle with his head half shaved off onto asphault. I'll be down in Texas, which is going to be so itching close, and I want to DO something about it.

For activism see also:
The Cove

Talk about a mind fuck-
Tarintino and Kubrick movies back to back

The second day is only the first.

So, school is all over. And here I am, watching Bruce Willis with Karen O's twin, racing around on a chopper. So I've decided to run this summer, and to make things different then...then before. In about two weeks my summer will be over for about a month and a half, and I want to enjoy what I have until it's done. I need ideas on what to do. I have a couple ideas....

I need:
my first slurpee
a motorcycle ride
run Percival's Island
watch Fast Times At Ridgemont High


but right now,
that's all I have.

Sittin on the Dock of the Bay

Can I expect the world to hold on its turning
never a second breaks
without new breaths unfurling
every second aches
It is etched in the glass I drink from
the lip's residue of glazed food
ticking upon the sun
the trickling sands I view
Summer, expendable, dwindling, reaches
a new forray into sublime
and bayside a preacher preaches
a new meaning to ripe time
There's a boat to carry those
spending the time life bought
with fleshed dallores
and here we keep the catch we caught
Each of us sailing an impenetrable sea
passing hands against the glaring sun
we're all ripe from the breeze
and we'll sink when we're done

Foreigner in a Native Land

Hi...
Smacks gum. Hi.
I'm here for my appointment.
She flips through her book, Name?
I lean over the counter and whisper it to her, watching her eyes as the cognitive gears whir.
You? In the papers?
Shh. Please.
Yeah, sure, I thought they had you nailed. Everybody in the town has been searching for you. I didn't recognize y...
Yeah. Can I go in?
Let me tell him your in, you aren't going to do anything are you?
I stared at her, I'm innocent, I gave her my innocent smile.
Okay..... be back in a second.
I waited, sitting beside a businessman.
He watched me.
I watched him.
He looked at my legs, then looked away nervously.
I picked up a magazine to hide my skirt.
He looked back.
Watch it kid.
What?
Shhh, holding a finger to my lips. It echoes really easy in here.
What?
I started reading an article in the magazine, and he stared at me.
I guess we're all in here for the same reason.
I felt the wh... forming on his lips. Then it registered.
Yes.

Except.

What?
Nothing.
Good.
You look familiar?
...Not a smart move.
No I don't.
Okay.
Okay.
Door opens back up.
He'll see you now, quickly.
Bye kid.
Whaa...
Don't bother. I smoothed my skirt back over.

He was standing in the hall.

Pulling in, I remembered back to what they said. “You can’t just expect him not to, you know, he just wants the best.” But I figured, that if what we couldn’t agree to wasn’t best, than I should just leave. Normally, that was how I did things anyway. Shirking the right to a good full on fight. Scared of what it might cause. I can’t help it if I left the coast. It was only my nature….

The driveway was short and circular for the first house I pulled into, and I could see immediately that it was completely wrong. All over the property there was Virginia pines, broom straw and other scrub, where there should be a lawn. No shade could be offered to the roof of the house and the brick screamed a fiery red in the noon time blaze. The soil was a cracked and dusty, the same Virginia clay that the house was made with, baked into a solid brick acres wide. In the back, the hum of the air conditioner carried on the air like the buzz of hornets.

“I’m glad you found it ma’am” he said, reaching out a sweaty palm to me. I took it and shook it loosely, nodding. Once we unfastened I wiped my hand off on my dress as he stood there, watching.
“It sure is far out here, but it was no trouble finding it. Hot day, isn’t it?” I said, rearranging my dress. He made me uneasy, with a wrinkled shirt that was sweat stained where it contacted his body. “I’m really not sure it’s what I’m looking for, too big, you know?” That really wasn’t my trouble with the house. It was gorgeous in its design, a real modernist’s approach to the classic Southern planter’s home. But the surrounding area, and the total attitude of the house was wrong. He waved me inside and I followed obediently, my curiosity to search the inside overwhelming that sickness that comes when I walk into an empty home. It was cold as a Frigidaire as I stepped into the living room, steps echoing from blank dry wall and hardwood floors. I rubbed my arms, skin prickling with cooling sweat. He showed me around and blabbed on about the square footage and whatnot but I tuned him out and only responded to the silence with mmhhms, to show I was listening. The view out past the windows was horrendous, a real scraggly nightmare. I started heading back to the front door and he followed and I shook his hand there and told him goodbye.
“You’re not interested in the house ma’am?”
“No, I don’t think I am. It’s not what I was looking for at all, but thanks anyway.” I knew the only reason he had assigned me to the listing was because my price range was so high and he was looking for the extra money so I left him inside to lock up and walked out my car, cranking the windows down in the baking interior.

The corn was small, dry in its rows. Row after row.
I drove down through the fields, acres and acres of them, along the back roads. Looking for the lane I slowed down, encountering no traffic except for the occasional slow moving truck. Other than that all that took up the roads were blackbirds that flew up as I came through and then settled back down onto the black top. Heat mirages waved up as the road stretched out between its shadier, curvier sections. Winter wheat, yellowing on the stalk and drying in the sun, frizzled and fried like a blonde burnout.

My hair kept catching the wind, both windows down, the humidity sticking my dress to me along my back and chest, sweat edging my upper lip. There wasn't any wind here to clear it off like there was on the coast, the air all full of spit. And there wasn't a shady cloud in the sky, the sun magnified and reflected off the hot flat open.

All the houses along the road up to that point were either cinder block three room homes, sometimes covered in vinyl siding, or they were dilapidated farm houses. But as the farmland began to stretch out in dusty expanses, the houses grew larger,with trees in the front sometimes shading a moss-like yard extending out from a front porch covered in chairs. But these were few and far between, the roadside littered with dumpy little villages of three or four houses built right on top of each other, yards littered with rusting cars and plastic swingsets and yard furniture. Scruffy dogs barked from chainlink prisons as I drove by, paying little heed to their calls.

Men in the fields were gathering sweet hay, all covered in denim and long t-shirts in defense the of hay dust which made your skin itch to the bone and your eyes swollen. They were red faced and sweating, but raised a hand in courtesy as a greeting of my travels. This was a custom here as I had learned, and even though growing up on the coast I had encountered this kind acceptance, what I encountered more often were the cold or wandering stares of tourists, you can never seem to keep their eyes, or their hands for that matter, to themselves. People here waved from porches, from the drivers side of their cars, from tractors, and from lawn chairs sat out in their yard, where they keep a watchful eye on the road during the heat of the day.

Camomille flowers and a small yellow wildflower lining the road swung in my wake as I watched them through my rear view mirrors. Dragonflies flitted to the left and right before clearing a path before me and then taking off into the oak trees lining the road. I slowed down more here, taking a gravel road off the state route as my directions told me to.


To be continued...