This be literature.

What if there was a God, so to speak, and one who would create a being of the same image.  That creatuure, man, let's say, would be thoroughly equipped to do the things of "God's work," just as he, or she, was.  Wouldn't need to be anybody other than who he was, just as he was.  He wouldn't do any particular career other than what came naturally to him and his two hands.  He wouldn't have to be a priest, not a doctor, nor a banker, nor a lawyer, though all of those too might share the image of "God" as well.   There wouldn't be much of that which is typically regarded as selfish.  He'd be kind, interested in the world, get sad when whales die with their guts full of plastic bags.   He'd look up to the night sky, enjoy a quiet street or a busy one, be glad for the simple things on Earth like trees, birds, animals, the natural paths of running water, and so forth.  He might well be, as Dostoevsky or Melville might have predicted in their physics of the soul, something of an idiot.  He'd be respected as a coworker for being a guy who got the job done, efficiently, without extra noise.  He'd recite The Lord's Prayer in a simple and earnest fashion out of respect for its own mathematics.  He'd rejoice in the success of people like Jacques Pépin.  He'd like to cook, because cooking is important.  He'd take joy in root vegetables, and, if he liked, cooking hamburgers with onion.  He'd like wine, and the company of those who also enjoy it, for that would mean that they too were from the image, the blueprint that is because it is, that which is, just the human being part of it all.

Would there be a childishness to him?  Would he be gullible, but outgrow that in time, while remaining as he was, nothing in particular, a server of wine, let's say.

He'd be arrested by, and disgusted with, images of violence and violence itself, even it meant what another more aggressive type of social being might consider losing face by not tending forth violence back.  Would there be an innocence to him?  Something off-putting, if you didn't know his overall plan which was also part of the pattern blown into the dust that made him, which he wouldn't consciously know himself as the expression about the left hand and the right hand.  Would he spout off such things as I write now?  No, he'd probably keep it pretty cool, and go about things without too much fanfare.  He would not claim to be an expert, but that rather all people know their tastes, their own inner knowledge, their own ability to discern what is placed before them.  Much like pouring a tasting of wine for people, giving them a basic vocabulary to which they will react.

He would already be doing what he was doing, and the question was merely letting the inner shine out, without any need for self-promotion.  This would seem like a problem to most people by their own good common sense.

But, as a father who was a teacher once explained to his son, there are throughout all history and space such types quietly going about their business in an enlightened fashion, sort of like the adepts who can finally come and go as they please through space and time.  "It's the same guy," he would say to his son, "who appears here as Moses, here as the Buddha, here as Jesus, showing up over and over again."  Thus, reincarnation.

The paradigm, the model, the pattern of divine image comes down to the things around him, the way he populates his life, the surroundings he is found in, his place of work.   And to him, just as so, things are well.  He would help the people he came into contact, just by being himself, as he was.

It is kind of a boring story, but one worth studying as a kind of taxonomy of human being and related animals.

In the timelines poetically representative of the natural life cycle of birth, life, death, he would be understood as a being.  In the end he would be regarded more or less simply as a person who noticed other people, gave them their due, endured himself and others with patience, forgiving of trespasses and sins as we all share, and take that as a moment, an opportunity, to learn, to study, to eventually try to bring better forward who he was and wanted to be.  If you met him on the street, he would be shy but friendly, humorous, but not over stepping bounds beyond showing that boundaries were sometimes unnecessary and even wrong, a matter of prejudging, a discrimination of the unnecessary and wrong kind.  One path of life is narrowing, a matter of specialization and then the training of sophistication.  But there is another, and it is broader, more general, like the lily and the sparrow, and perhaps it can be described as friendship, as in the friendship between chefs, brought together by good cooking, and also wine and a sense of humor.

That is why the old restaurant too can be within the pattern, taking on the role of peace maker, spreader of good will, education, the exchange of knowledge, the acknowledgement of sustenance and mortality.  and of course the old model of serving people  in the most direct and confidently humble way there is, though all of us share that.

I am not even a writer.  I am just trying to let it flow.  I could say I am self-taught, but that would not at all be true.  The real matter is that of finding what you are comfortable with as finding material.  There is a beauty in the simplicity of a plate.  Look how much joy can come along with it.


But if one came into the world, and managed from childhood on upward, manage somehow to not lose that connection with the image of "God," how, would we even be able to, would we recognize "him or her."  Where, in our system, that includes labels.  In the olden days, so strange was his appearance, they attributed some interesting stories to his presence, hearings, miracles, whether or not they happened, who knows.  Perhaps he jus didn't fit in quite so neatly.  How to understand, they would have asked.  There is of course evidence that the local authorities felt an upstart in their midst, claiming their own authority and even more beyond.  His friends and people who knew him would tell his stories, to reaffirm their claim of knowing him and being his friend, and as we all know, this is how folklore starts, continues and perhaps the stories grow, a bit of embellishment upon the truth.

There is left recorded some of the things the man might have actually said, and the people's basic sense that he was something of a teacher, "a rabbi," of some sort, and of which they approved.

What was the kernel of the story, beginning at the real core of it as happened in reality as a history, and then on outward into the common dreams of him and his acts.  People made a big deal out of it, and created and transcribed literature from it.

Where does that leave us, in understanding the "image of God,"  "the Son of Man."

Too much for our minds to even go there, without a queasy feeling of trespassing upon something.  Even if we too kind of get it, deep down, personally, without as much as peeping a word about it.  Reality has its own little cults, its own way of embellishment, of making something important, and then that important self-feeding.

It was all a reasonable myth, this person made in God's image.  More reasonable than other things that would come along....

The whole thing, what this guy comes up with, would be fresh and unpredicted, out of the blue.  It would therefore be a work of imagination, of the realizations that belong to the realm of art.  Unexpected eloquence, unexpected insight, unexpected kindness, unexpected action.  The story, itself, in a way, rather simple, thus allowing embellishment, verses, songs, imagery, retroactive to the beginning, reshaping the story's elements backward and forward, some of it a story-teller's justification, sometimes to further justify the story, to make the rough bones of it all make it in to the overall, to complete it with each step.

But this stuff is not made for making a thinker comfortable with.   There'd be more a feeling leftover by it of feeling "like sick man, an ill man."  Perhaps a necessary part of getting into the role of understanding, poking such a thing.  Cringe-worthy.

When you go through therapy, the matter seems to be that of identifying your values.  Values have a system.  Values are what make you tick.  Values are what you respond to.  Values are what you see in the world and how you see it, how you grasp its components.

Values are what can potentially make you miserable.  Or, they are something you keep in natural balance, finding your happiness through them, celebrating, enjoying, finding peace therein.

When you don't seem to fit in with where you live, the tone and temper of the town, perhaps there is reason to enjoy your unique perspective, what you have to offer, the things you find yourself doing over and over again.  Is it, was it, fate that brought you where you are?

For a long while, everything seemed a struggle.  Cause for complaint.  And yet, over and over again, you experience a strange joy and even a talent in what you've been doing.  There are pieces to a puzzle, but they are coming closer together and even start to fit, whereas before the pieces seemed distant and even warring with each other, at conflict, at odds.  Enough to put you into complaining mode, feeling down about yourself and your situation.

Things are as they are because of your value system, the things subtly ingrained into the fibers of your being, what kind of person you'd be, how you'd act, the way you'd talk.  And in life you cannot disrespect those values within, at least for long, at least in the long run, because they are what you've got, they are who you are, and these some things cannot be changed.  They are the fire in your brain, the joy of your working hands, the voice you have within.


I'd sort of looked at it all from a perspective emphasizing the downsides of life, my own life.  There was college, there was the girl, there were all the things I'd "fucked up."  There were the things that were the "consequence" of those crucial mistakes at a crucial formative time, and I would be very down on myself and wonder why I'd fallen so low, "down and out" not in London or Paris, but in Washington, District of Columbia.  Not in New York City.  I looked at things negatively, in the logical part of the mind, as in trying to figure it out.  Why was I different?  Why wasn't I working in the daytime, in an office, like everybody else?  Why did I live not all that far away from paycheck to paycheck?  Why was I single, no wife, no kids, a renter, not an owner, figuratively speaking?

I will admit, I had a bad attitude, a voice telling me, "well, things aren't really going to work out that great, though I will manage to survive, get home after another long shift, and with some energy to play the guitar."  I don't blame the mythical princess who was a girl when I was a boy more or less, clumsy I was, and not forceful enough and sometimes too emotional, as young people, I think, can be, when it's a bit too easy to feel hurt when you shouldn't feel hurt.  If one knew then that simple habit of optimism, of ignoring the false symbol message and seeing the truer positive one, as in, "me thinks the lady doth protest too much," in the dance of courtship, male female interaction such as it is.

Nature recycles.  Hair brushed from the shedding cat, bits of newspaper's stringlike end cutting, old bits of grass and leaf stem, odds and ends of twig and straw become nesting material for our friends of the air, where they will nurture their children.


Therapy changes patterns, old habits.  The therapist, hearing you recounting an old tale of an old story, remarks of what "she" said.  "She was treating you like you were a low-life..."   Pounds of heavy weights lifting off, room, a crack of light to move in, to crawl out from under a guilty burden.



And for that matter, it's just as well, probably, I never became much of a scholar, much as I might have wanted to, following in my father's gentle caste, wishing all the while to preserve the laws of nature of societies, maintenance of their function.  Oh, for the longest while, of this whole life, I really truly was saying to myself, "what was I thinking, what was I thinking?"

Good medicine dissipates the negative thinking.  At my middle Dante stage of life, early fifties, yes, there was a considerable rut of pattern I needed to drive myself out of.  And I will say, to the best of my knowledge, therapy and a little gentle bit of daily medication, in my case Lexapro--I had been long suspicious of medicines not in the natural state, like ginseng, or turmeric or holy basil or cayenne, or L-Tyrosine, or GABA, or 5-HTP--helped in that small area in which a balance is tipped just a tiny bit for the better, like as if from a good walk in the forest along the path by the stream, enough to make a daily difference for those of us who have become are own harshest critic somehow from within.


Writing was a component of my value system.  There is something psychologically beneficial about putting the things you experience down on some form of paper.  Being of negative mind, worn down, perceiving some unfairness at work, I would sometimes carp.  Out of love and respect, and out of grace for the tradition of, say, the old form of classic Parisian bistrot, I would write out my complaints given my limited perspective and my sense of things, my feelings, feelings that come out of nights when the AC is not working, when there are too many people and not enough waiters.

Fortunately time refreshes your perspective, and you see things not out of the paranoia and negativity, but with an eye for the ultimate fairness of the burdens pulled by the team, given the restaurant as it is.  You see them again with the old affections that were always running firmly as a current beneath the work, that camaraderie, the kitchen, the chef, the dishwasher, the downstairs wait staff, the upstairs bar staff, the bussers, the clock itself, the late hours setting things up for the next day, and maybe even pulling a notepad out to write down a few of the good thoughts about those values I seem to have inherited, somewhere inclusive and between hospitality and education, psychology, a pleasant exposure to different walks of life in an international city, longing something to be out in the country as I might have wanted to be.


Well, there was a whole pile of writing.  Some of it kvetching.  But there were strains in it that presented the nuggets of my values...

Things happen in life along our inner fault lines, and only we know where ours are.  The boy who loves writing and reading after growing up drawing prodigiously goes to college, finds his life's work, writes well, and then, who knows why, takes longer and longer reading and writing.  He gets a bad grade finally, simply for being late, and no feedback on the paper he spent so long figuring out the answer he knows somehow is there.  He grows cynical.  The problem is exacerbated.  The feed into the world of New York writing fades, and it takes him a long time just to get back into any meaningful form of writing.

Eventually he follows his brother, older, down to Washington, DC.  Knowing a good deal about Lincoln and Kennedy, speeches and history, maybe he'll be a speechwriter one day, except the Hill never happens for him, distracted as he is.  He ends up working in the restaurant business, so, at least he tells himself, he can write, freed from an unhappy clerkship in an HMO attached to a local university, and no energy left to use any school benefit therein.

Sad, one fault line meets another, meets another.  The girl he liked in college and spoke well with and understood was also part kryptonite for him,   And so is his chosen profession, being a barman, part good, part bad, all across the line.

I guess it was Hemingway who wrote that we all are cracked, in a way.  And thus we are brave, holding ourselves together, even as cracks meet other cracks, as they do.   Lucky us, so on and so on.

The effects of our inner fault lines link up, accounting for our great worldly failures, employment, personal, financial, etc., etc., etc.  And, I suppose, likewise with our successes, though it might well take the most mature of Buddhas to see the moral claim of them.  And even so with the body's own wisdom within, the joy of a late evening happy juice and musical creativity being a low feeling the next day.

Years go by, a status quo, the dungeon of an odd job...  And the highest wisdom, one wonders, is no help, perhaps a hindrance to the action and choices necessary to living life, selflessness not being at all practical, the world of people demanding that you stand up for yourself, look out as you must for number one.

I am a poet.  Use the platform...

But there is no way around putting in the years.  There is a lesson in it.  There is self-knowledge gained, the only way you can do it.  The years are a mistake in themselves, but, maybe they can serve some purpose, where someone learns the err of his ways.  You were taken advantage of, yes, but you do learn something, and perhaps that edges up upon the moral element.

After more than twenty five years, I realize I hardly belong here, in this town.  Wasn't cut out for it.  A country boy wandering in urban roughs.   Mainly my good impulses and education thwarted, leaving me the life of a slave.

Funny thing, to wake up, after a trip visiting out there away from the city, regular America, visiting with my elderly mom who lives alone up by the shores of Lake Ontario where she retired from a late career in education, conversations with the maintenance man about Fireman's Field Day grilled chicken and fishing stories.  Regular people, people not cold, not looking at me with some form of contempt.  The city, the attitude, and I don't belong in it.

Feeling better, even with the cold, the hacking cough, the week taking away your energy.

Day off, I stay close to the house.  Nothing but rest.  I suppose I am  beginning to see some need to change this habit of writing.  If I am feeling better, perhaps it's no longer so necessary here.  There's not much energy for it anyway.  A lack of purpose.  Or is it this new found state of being has its own ups and downs.  Being sick does not help.  I've felt sleepy all day.


And then, the better feeling, slowly coming over me, the desire to clean, to focus, to watch or read something suitable, not felt in a long time, somehow.


Do I even want to go back, to Amherst, such as I am?  I put so much into it.

This weird feeling here, of not doing it, but... that overriding purpose, to get better.  And that is good enough, the story of all people.


dreams, a vision of brian, my brother's pal, his hearty laughing company, along with a dog, my brother's friendship and approval.  That wonderful time when we were all together, participating...

waking sweaty, after the long rest.  only 1 bottle, a beaujolais, 12.5%, in total last night, good nutrition.

Three o'clock, PM, fuck, it is really time to rouse this body to go to work?  Give it another snooze nine minutes.  There are cooked sausages in the fridge, and I made the pot of green tea, somewhere late in the night as I cleaned, a new approach to the dusty old bedroom and all the piles of books, the old dust of winter, set in with all the habits of my old lovely literary mom...  Books back into the rough simple pine coffin board book cases made of wine cases, Bordeaux and other.  The Irish stack, next to the bed.  A strange mountain climbing book by the literary critic A. Alvarez, friend of Bonnington, of Hughes and Plath, tales of rock climbing the Old Man of Hoy, and in the Dolomites, and Himalaya, the addiction, "Feed The Rat."...  in order to turn in, and then, shit, is it time, yes, no one to work for me, graduation weekend, I must go, and isn't that old milepost, graduation weekend, a thing in the mind, and at the restaurant, those pretty young people bound for success as you might expect, in Washington, D.C.

The strange good moods pop up, from time to time, new to me, but, again, like those of being young. These moods are strange, surprising, creative as I've always loved to be creative, to be spiritual, to let that side of intelligence hang out like that of a free jumper or some other bold adventurer caught or catching the high, in my case, some of my high, words, the words themselves, apparent in that old bastard, Shakeyspeare.  I would have loved to have gone bike riding with him on the high road above the valley, spring still gritty from all the road crews had put on the roads to tame the winter grip of frozen wet, down that road, lined with trees, having to brake and diplomatize with the group of dogs, left to overlook Deansboro and drop a lovely sinking road to the Deansboro Hotel, or right, as you looked toward Tassle Hill the mystic pagan mound as if chipped round by druids the quick down spiraling road past the quarry down to 12B, less far away from Oriskany Falls.  Those roads will never be like they were in my childhood, though the green will be the same, and the farms still there. Years ago, on a return, I outran a pit bull type dog who came up along with predatory silence, in a large enough gear, and the even that long bend down, westward to the valley and 24, coming from OK Falls to Vernon Center, the real center of everything if you stopped to think, and loved by Wallace Markfield, for its bandstand, and tractor yard and market store, down that, the one real hairpin turn, woozy to take, down to that valley where Knoxboro was, and higher above the land, the ridges just like min, where the documentary, Brother's Keeper, was, is, eternal, set, one of the poetic things, the story of the Ward brothers, who I never might, but might have cycled by, who knows, on those old lovely green green sunny days of old towns that confirmed in the boy, me, that I wanted to be some sort of documentarian, not in a fancy defined way, but in those old tools we all have,  that of the powering flashes in our minds, those words which cross our lips, silently, invisibly, in dreams, in forms that seem to haunt us in good ways.  The imaginative imagining, wrought and banged out by books and things and poems we've read, some sort of iron shop, of crucible and melted metal, rods banged upon on an anvil, the hammer blow and bang.   The trees, the old cemetery, the strong mansion like house of Colonel Knox, figure of the Revolutionary War, now quiet, and as you climbed the hill, on this old Iroquoia route--they knew--another old mansion with high fences, and strong warning signs not to trespass at all.  I suppose further up the ridge was that old simple derelict farmhouse to the left or the right was that of the Ward Brothers, and I never was able to find it, having to journey back on my bicycle, to deal with the barking dog storming out as you climbed back up up past that lovely hairpin turn with that valley view and the streams below you now, the houses laid out around them, naturally, to get back, back to Skyline Drive, then back to those own hills of home and school bus route.  I made the time for those bike rides, as carefully as I did, as the inception, the birth of my writing career, and as painful as it was, that's where I wanted to go when I graduated college, back there, to write, even though there was nothing there to write about really, except those things we will, as a mindful species, always write about, those psychological and shapeshifting things that, when we look back, will be found on, within, the things we keep, like the pictures I took back when there was film in cameras of old snowy farms, silos, barns, the roads that kept them, the trees that lined them to protect and whisper poetry.  That was a rich life, and my parents were wise. and selfless and guided by things we do not know directly of, to give me that life, not that of  Amherst, the town, but a real part of the world, less run by old Congregationalist names, populated by barns, and pastures, cats, dogs, people whose children you rode the school bus with, birds singing, hawks, pastures, sugar maples, and views worthy of, you thought, some sort of bicycle race tour, not necessarily going very fast, one of appreciation, mileposts, local attractions, architecture of barns, lots of idling livestock and farm implements and vehicles, and granary devices low in the valley and up above.

Home from the bar, hunger prompting bringing hone a burger to ease the hunger and the stress, in the kitchen a cockroach has daintily upended herself over the little plastic dosage cup that comes with cough syrup, apparently enjoying the sugar of it, there on the counter top I try my best, as a cook, to keep clean.   Makes you think, the times, being sick,  you don't clean that little cup out, refill it, go back to bed.  The standard American big red cockroach will pull surprises on you, like being there in your pint sized water glass by the bed when you wearily lift it to pull a sip to soothe the dryness, the general feeling you need to put some water through that system, but we won't go there now.   Could one day we make pets out of them, these walky characters, the large bug who likes our showers and our sinks, our silverware, our cutting boards...

The Ward brothers, read about in  NY Times, then that documentary film, they were real.  One, at least, reacted to the presence of a camera so strongly that he shook, and at one point, moves a board of a barn to go hide, because of who he was, not of some guilt that the creepy modern prosecutorial officious legalist policing-heavy world wanted to impose upon him.  Let him free, let him be, no spotlight needs he.  And isn't that a lesson, how the legal pushes the news which in turn pushes upon us our taste for  the nachos and the cop, for world history made now sudden, something like that.  When the news could rather be on that level of simple reportage about the strangeness of backward characters born in those old locals we used to know before we moved to cities, remembering the simplicity and the meaning inherent in roads in country towns, that's how you got to farmer joe's or that old Mirror Bar in the long lost Oriskany Falls hotel where there was incredible pizza and sawdust slide metal disk game for the children while they waited.

Shyness is the reaction, finding these old memory worth tale, the good feelings that crop up now and again.  What am I doing, feeling well, all of a sudden, what do I do with it, where should I be?

I feel the light here, in the morning, the breeze, the birds call back and forth.   This nice place reminds me of where I grew up, my childhood, the light of Amherst, and always wondering when I would sleep, what I would dream.

Doing a headstand, adjusting legs into poses similar to walking, the muscles are connected.  Leg to upper arm, pelvis to tricep.  In wholesomeness we are well-arranged, aligned, a totality.

End of the week of the psychical work, demanding, a cold with a hacking cough developing in the later part of it.  Rest.  Interrupted by the cough.

If the work is wholesome, than the writing that follows should be as well.  And if unwholesome, likewise.  Anyway, there is the muscular connection.

But what links the two kinds of muscles, the footwork of entertaining, both verbally and with the work of stocking and serving, clearing and cleaning, the taking of payment, the reading of customer through different mode, all of that on the one hand, and then, the equally long and often dull and tedious effort of writing something meaningful to life as a way of finding direction and bearing.

The yoga, solitary, along with its meditations, serves as a connection, a center of balance.  There could not be one, the sometimes violent social life, and the quiet time of reflection, without the other. There would  be experience and the credential without the connected presence of the two.  Even if there is hard work to both, imposed upon you, even if there is not always clear meaning in the effort as a whole for providing a decent life. the two exist side by side.  And perhaps they must both belong to a certain realm, like unto the fireman who prevents fires, the baker who bakes bread.

The week was not easy.  I closed each night, and wrote nothing.  Saturday was very busy, Sunday was the long slog of Mother's Day, a special menu, Monday great live jazz, a Safeway run, Tuesday marked by my walking up the avenue to walk through the woods to work as an unprecedented number of Police cars came screaming down the avenue in the left lanes to react to thuggish security marking the visit of Erdogan by attacking, was they wore their dark suits, the Kurdish protestors on Sheridan Circle, as I spoke with my mom over the phone, hoping she was having a better day than the one before in her faraway loneliness.  Perhaps one bright spot besides the friendship of a chef who's old friends with my chef boss, was the report from therapist, not easy to rouse myself for, a hot shower to loosten the phlegm, a bike ride down to downtown, newly hot with the steamy feel of DC summer, that I was doing better, that the medication of Lexapro seemed to be working, along with daylight.  Judging from my demeanor, she proposed that soon a visit every other week would suffice. Along with the good news, a good bit of relief, bouts of diarrhea.

The day off, with nothing but administrative tasks before me, I did yoga, drank various forms of tea, and ordered Chinese, too fatigued to cook and put dishes away.  What a life.


Then the recovery starts to happen, oddly, by itself, a lifting of a veil.  All the things you missed, flash somewhere along the edges of the mind.   A life in the mountains making music unaffected--if that's the word--by the outside world.   The Carter family, driving to Bristol, in a model T, fording streams and muddy roads, one woman pregnant, one nursing a baby boy.

The light comes up from the Venus morning star, I still have not had a date in years, and my social life is chosen by the places I can or must go.  Medicines.  To treat the beast who endures the job of barman at this edge of the South, humid now, just like that lonely day on the train, arriving to the steam about ten o'clock at night.  The air is still now, after fire danced electrically, cloud to cloud in veins, and mockingbirds talked in the trees as I came home from the RiteAid, with cough syrup, toilet paper, and other nostrums.  Does the redwood tree wonder, in mid-life, who am I, where am I going, who is listening friendly?  The tree takes his soothe from the depths below, the Guinness down in the earth, minerals of smoked barley and the DNA of hops.  The tree wishes to play the guitar, to thump on some taught string, taught-ed, I wish to say.

What are we doing, do any of us know?  Who would be a leader now, or is?

The tree might strive for calm, but still wish for that draught of earth by morning light, before the heat comes so that his leaves stay still with a minor droop, attempting to hold what beneficial oils might come in the air from neighbor.  The calming taste of earth, the magic of the living soulful chemistry that is the opposite of dark invisible energy, the talk of the Spanish underforest, living life below, breeding, working away in that layer.  The great tree must stand alone, not many of his species left, but in groves, here and there, and who knows when some new idiot might threaten, as is the lesson of history.

Does old Sequoia have a girlfriend?  Or is time spent trying to hang on, to keep adaption, as warmer and drier winds blow up.

And each word, a little cell, pushing out the old skin of the trunk, and strangely fresh and alive and watery, the pith where the sap runs.

The stress of the week, the deficit of nutrition, the hollow feeble weakness, the headache, the soreness, the sorrow, the tiredness, these are things faced at night, in the great forest lifting above grown in stature.

rough draft

"Chicks like bullshit," my best friend at the bar said,

still in the game.

And I had no bullshit to give,

except if you were to carefully observe yourself,

the good job I did at it, with a wink,

the thousands of people I had talked to

in more than two decades on my feet

in front of them, shaking hands.

So was I worried when she said,

she'd met a boy.

But not much I could really do.

More than twice her age.

What could I tell her,

about all the things

I'd been through, survived,

with pluck and toil, humor,

simple absorption.

The kid was bad enough,

who knew what he wanted,

and how to get there.

But--the bright spot--

hard for me to see at first,

no idea who he is.

But I am bullshit too.

Very good at it, in fact.

The first time you see a face

is the first time all over again,

an iceberg of a person,

floating in the cold sea,

responding to heat and sun.

The things, the talent,

people do not see,

and little the possibility

of knowing you very well,

but when you get on the other side of age,

and start to appreciate character,

the odd bits about a person

who somehow maintained 

being an individual,

which even he or she might not

the self understand.

How to bring this poem to a close,

but that you've kept that possibility,

of knowing who are, what you want,

and something how to get it,

what shape it is, what it looks like

and feels like, seen in a picture,

fresh, alive, there, here, now,

allowing wildness,

not captivity of the thing.

The effort you've put forth, all your life,

coming into some focus, and even some use.

Write a poem without knowing well,

but of what you have to say.

I suppose that it is that particular condition, something somewhat in the realm of depression, that makes a writer.

 This is why we find Ernest Hemingway immortalizing a camp breakfast by the big river, Kerouac's favorite chamois shirt found in a dump.  Breakfast revives, a shirt keeps you warm.

In my own long depression, enduring after college, I kept a job as a neighborhood barman.  It kept me social, got me out of my shell, gave my life tools of a trade, texture, things to put my hands on, reasons to stand up and move carefully and precisely enough to deliver.  The office of the health insurance clerk for an HMO was too dreary, the stale coffee miserable relief to the brain, too sedentary, offering little as far as the material of puzzlements to be solved.  The restaurant job offered direct look on human beings and human nature, an observers post, as a waiting person.

The five long night shifts are over.  I wake groggy and the usual pot of green tea does not revive me much.  But I remember, there is good bacon in the refrigerator to cook in the iron pan.  The experience of cooking, turning the bacon over as it crisps, wakens me, and I eat hungrily, chewing the fat, and then I am up with enough energy to enter into the flow of worded thoughts.  They were long nights, closing each night.

I've taken my little medications, along with a little ginseng, GABA, l-tyrosine, half a beta-blocker, in addition to one tablet of Lexapro and Rhodiola.  Now that I've eaten breakfast, a B vitamin.  I've skipped the flaxseed fiber in my tea.  Perhaps later, hot water over muddled lime with turmeric and a dash of good salt.  The winter is long when the clock changes and you work at night, commuting by foot and bicycle.   The computer screen blue light in the loneliness of night can keep you up, and there is a balance in how dark to make a bedroom, and on overcast days, the airplane noises is reflected down across the town.  I like the forest for fresh air and for hiding from the city, but that is a walk from here.

There's not really a lot to write about when you get right down to it.  But there is a therapeutic aspect, one which comes from describing one thing, and letting it have things attached to it.  There are dirty dishes with the grease of merguez sausages kept in the fridge, the collection of tea cups and pint water glasses that sat by the bed at night.

There is nervousness as I write still.  NHK has a show on Zen gardens.  Transience informs the sense of beauty.  I should have been a gardener.  But we are survivors, and that is good enough.  The monk examines an object for the spirit in it.  Muga, absence of self, informs design, mutual coexistence human beings and earth.


My job as neighborhood barman was more than just a job.  I was a nexus of information.  It was a job that, like all jobs, gave me an identity, a place to live and socialize.  I was a steady feature in some local lives on different scales.  My service was deeper than it might have looked on the surface.  Not about the cocktail, but about the wine, about life and vintage years.  It was a job that fit with the rest, the natural balance that the writer being within me sought to achieve.


Or then would it not be better, then, having found health, to move on from writing, more or less, to give up on it, to find a different use for the energy...  Would it be necessary anymore?  Feeling better, the thought is, now what?  You don't crave the wine nearly as much.  You feel like a sneak, hiding from things, by habit of that previous life.  Hunger, the need for nutrition.  Walking down to P Street for a late night gyro at DC Cafe, barely making it before the grill closes at three...



What does it mean, when he says, The Son of Man has no place to lay his head.    But that he is his job, his work, that all he does is related, so that he might be considered to be, always, out on the road.  But who wants to think about that...   The writer, so-called, wakes, after dreams and a rest of the muscles to work on God knows what.  Bit by bit, chisel chip by chisel chip.  Not even a story, but a form to work on, a description of something he knows not of, releasing the figure from the block of marble stone.

To face that work...  well, it has to be strange.  Just to face the implausibility of the human condition, nothing particular cut out to do, just trying to keep up a good practice of journaling, really, little more.  Easy enough to find a purpose when you have people to wait on.  Or something specific.  Write a laundry list, call it a day before you almost even start, go for a walk, make a subtle plan with your coworker for later on when they get out of work, the night shift.  The place is clean, the bed is set, the sheets are straight, matching pillow cases.  The morning is never the best part of the day as far as mood.

Is there a way to avoid, to not find yourself on, the path, of being some sort of monk-like being.  And each time the world of technology or human enterprise increases or brings greater speed or ease, there is an escalation in the need for nature and contemplation and observations on the ephemeral nature of life.   Congratulations for the one who simply gets up and doesn't do a lot of damage to the old earth rather than for the robber baron commodity seller.  The need for the day of quiet peace and a Zen garden.  Perhaps the wine bar is as close as I could get to the Zen garden here.  As if to set some example.

That's the private life of the writer I keep to myself, who must necessarily have perspective, a different eye than he does when he is in it all.