true detective

I'm eating my mixed greens more and more using not a fork but fingers. The wind is shaking the palm trees like maracas tonight. Jostling the soul from hibernation, dance, life, dance. A work uniform, laughing at the waste of it all, mortality. I told my brother on the phone, it might be temporary but I'm glad I get to share it with you. The Indian food guy asked for my money first this time. He could see my red eyes from crying to the thinning light, knees on the sand, burying a bunch of feelings in tears. I told the Swedish girl, later that night, at a bar, that crying feels good like a completion, an emotional orgasm or something. I wept for the right reasons. Could feel it becoming a truth. And it was sad. And lately my doubt has been a liberation. Like if none of it happens the way I ever wanted it to happen, it would all still dim to the awesomeness of a true moment. And I'm wrapping my heart over and clenching a moment, devouring it like an octopus, satiated and underwater. It's one thing to talk about the concept, an entire world to know a glimpse. Maybe I found God. Maybe I drink too much. Maybe I stared despair in the face and butchered it. Maybe this is all a spell cast and acting itself out from delayed voodoo. I have been to Hispaniola. I've made love and given my heart and fluids on an island while taking nothing in my bag but a card from an intimate 500 year-old hotel where pilgrim nuns once slept but her and I barely did. I used to think that people had to read this stuff of mine to understand but it's becoming less and less relevant to my purpose. Maybe I'm just supposed to keep trying as hard as I can, bringing my passion into it as massively as I can, misguided or not, because it's about doing it in obscurity or tied to my Tolstoy chair beneath a spotlight and it doesn't matter which. Maybe it's about losing and waking up again and again. I keep having flashes now. I keep having the strangest flashes of life memories. It used to be so active, it consumed me, reflecting and delving deep into the past, actively. But now it's all happening in flashes, like it's been neglected and is chasing me, like it knows I've moved on.

a favorite rain

It doesn't take much but curiosity. A drive north. A new cafe recommended by a friend from the old cafe. It doesn't take much but a used book sale at the Beverly Hills Library. A bucketful of titles duplicate and unread carried to your car with energy. The same car that brought you up the resolving California coastline. Your nervous system calming beneath a gigantic eucalyptus tree across a river from loud rambunctious frat guys camping together. You, playing guitar sitting on the provided picnic table, Sierra Nevada Torpedo tall boys cold, warm campfire alone, thinking up adjectives to express the more stars than sky white cut above you. The stars, enough time looking at them and they become an answer. The same as any single thing. Night-bathing with floating naked strangers. A mountain lion on the premises as you opened your arms wide with a couple of towels provided. The stars again, revealed after a passing fog, ocean crashing beneath you. Up on a cliff. A young woman's breasts. An old man's dangling penis. A black and white German couple. The sheepish way that blonde beauty looked into your eyes before giving you permission to rival the constellations. Prayer. How it melted you back into primal colors and numbers. The conversations with god and a guitar and the unexamined mid-blue of those powerful waves. Fat slob elephant seals, bringing a smile. Zebras. The San Simeon pier with those two finger picking chords capo on third fret. Returning with wild curiosity. Going down with a couple martinis. Rising up with a few hours helping Jeff lift his dresser upstairs for him and his love with baby on the way. Then carrying your mom's stuff up her steep driveway into another moving truck, knowing that love is the only way to identify yourself in truth. Tallulah's tiny freckles perfect on her nose, cheeks, beneath splendid knowing blue eyes. Seeing a woman emerge from the baby I once saw born. It doesn't take much but it turns into something overflowing abundantly up and over your heart spilling itself fertile onto whatever soils of the universe. Sunday breakfast with your father at a restaurant in Malibu, once frequented together in another lifetime, the two of you smiling over morning quesadillas. It doesn't take much but when I drive up to Big Sur I have this tradition of leaving the radio off and listening to the wind letting itself in rapidly through the windows, my thoughts sorting out all over place, watching the television of life participating through the windshield, and the up and down levelling of my enlivened pulse dialing to the correct setting. I'm at this new cafe that reminds me of ones from older experiences but it's entirely new and the coffee is delicious and it doesn't take much but a beautiful rain outside and a nose for an adventure.