Poems from Young Lovers

They were written by candlelight
and emailed across the darkness of fiber-optic wilderness
Received miles from their origin or anything similar
Love poems of a youth barely conceived of love
A conservatism of inexperience and morals
shaped by word, but not by living
loosened by the promise of new touches
Each line on edge, delicately balanced to fall
to the abandon of lust, or illusion of temperament
Hungry mouths shaping each word in the writing
and in the reading, in absence of forming to one another
Pictures accompanying the poems, printed out and bound
for a trip away from their only contact
Inexperienced love demanding the reassurance of paper
carried in place of what couldn’t be carried in the heart
Now to read them, to make a study of her face
lit by candlelight and shaped by mouthed words
is to see a great dam of inexperience across the river of living
The raw youth in the cock of her hip, the set of her mouth
a confusion of movie star emulation and desire
I see what it was to be young, and all the tripping places
For she is my mirror, and now stands a perfect image, a loving line
a museum of what I dreamed to be
when I painted in the dark of things I’d never seen
These poems were written of love with the inexperience of short years
In the flickering false light of candles
before the day, and the harsher light of having to grow up
We exposed love, broke it upon the rocks of our young selves
and finding beneath the husk a bitter meat, left it to rot
A hand bound, marker illustrated, chapbook of youth
and two strong wills, crystalline intellects, striving
against one another
for something that could only be had with age
Our love poems are written to others now
an older, polished, love of adults who’ve attained a knowing
to support the desiring
Mouths hungering for what we now know is as old as the stones
but once thought we’d invented solely between ourselves
and once thought we’d solely destroyed
Until in the good harsh light of day, it was rediscovered

The Hope of Warlords

Once I said if I could be anything in history, I’d want to be a pirate. Now, I think not. By then it was already too late. The world had begun to end, to flatten. Colonialism was the first step. Wooden ships sailing across oceans, putting alien boots on alien soil, would be part of the problem – Even as one of the predators. Predation didn’t slow it down any measurable amount.
I look in the mirror and piracy is not what I want. I want to be a Pashtun warlord, tucked away in the mountains. Horseback and high, with my muskets, and Khyber knives. Killing traders, wanderers, adventurers. Letting enemy armies batter themselves against my mountains. Watching their wills shattered by the stones and the cold as I slip ravine to ravine in shadow.
If I could be anything else, at least tonight, I would be high, dry, and cold with my warhorses, my tribe and my wives.

That day may yet come. Am I wrong to hope?

Bird

He’d made the best coffee in the world. He’d had this old aluminum dripolator. Boil the water, pour it in via the top and let it drip through. She’d almost stolen it when she left. But it wouldn’t have tasted the same not in his kitchen. In her kitchen, the one she was going to have, it would’ve tasted bitter, or not bitter enough. Too much of aluminum, or not enough. She’d left it, sitting in the early morning sun on the kitchen counter.
That was really the problem with leaving. She had to leave everything, could take none of the perfection with her. Anything she took would’ve been too little, or too much, once removed. Once not in his house, not in his vision or touch, the magic would be gone. Not in their house, their vision. Even she had to be someone else.
Her key slipped, rasping, into the slot. Flecks of chrome fell from the keyway, sticking to the red car door. She wondered if he’d been in it for the car. The old blood red Volvo 1800. She smiled as she slid behind the wheel. It had been hers, and never his. She would take this with her. Let him keep the coffee pot. All the good it would do him.
The little car rumbled, happily, as she backed down the driveway. The last of her clothes already in the trunk, and one last thermos of coffee on the passenger seat. She’d always wanted a dog, tried to get him to buy a dog. Now she was glad, her hand on the warm steel cylinder, to have that seat free. A dog would remember, and try to take things that had to be left behind. But it would’ve been such a terrible thing to leave a dog. Without food especially. Though, she guessed, he’d have eaten eventually.
She rolled down her window, and listened to the wind and tires. No radio, not yet. Wait until she was in another broadcasting zone. Then she would find an oldies station, and listen to music they had never shared. Dangling a hand out the window, she played in the air currents. Fingers splayed, then closed, angled up, then down. Like an airplane wing.
“I wanna fly, daddy,” she said to the air rushing past, “like a little bird.”
She looked at the gas gauge. Enough to cross the state line before she needed to worry. She’d thought about not taking his money. But money changed so many hands, what could it possibly take with it? She had plenty now, and could claim it as hers. She’d also thought about siphoning a little gas. But why spend the extra money? She’d never yelled at him for smoking in bed anyway, it had been part of the perfection.
Another mile marker rushed up and she began to play a counting game. She was going backwards, towards mile one. Smiling, hand soaring out the window, she wiggled down into the seat for the drive.

Capability

Her breathing comes in ragged gasps. Too shallow and quick, too struggling each one a violent shuddering of the thorax. I hold her close, one hand pressed to her side to still her. The other holds the stethoscope against her side. Her left lung sounds like a squeaky toy, or two balloons being rubbed together. Beneath the wheeze, the thick sounds of fluid. It rises to her nose and sprays with each breath. Thin and clear mucous. She is weak, lethargic and anorexic. I listen, and cannot hear her heart for the protesting of each breath. Replacing the stethoscope to my bag, I use my fingers to locate a femoral pulse. I am relieved to find it strong and constant. But the pneumonia is taking its toll. Her brown eyes are desperate, looking at me frantic with hope. Fix it. A cough racks her body and she closes her eyes. Looking takes too much energy better used for breathing.
That was yesterday. When her desperation for breath was only matched by ours for money for the vet. For antibiotics. For anything to help.
Today, her lungs are less filled. Head hung over the couch she drained for hours last night. Ran a fever. Coughed. Fought harder for breath. Finally slept, or lost consciousness in the gunmetal morning. She woke breathing easier, tail up and eyes full of her usual precocious curiosity. Still, she blows snot. She wheezes a little. I can hear her heart today though, strong and constant. She is on the upswing.

Yesterday again. We scrounged and found antibiotics. A human sized dose for just a couple of days. Too much for a dog who weighs less than a sack of her own food. I broke a capsule and weighed 500mg of Amoxicillin on the reloading scale. Then I weighed out a fifth of that. Twenty times over.
I had already pulled the high flow oxygen regulator from my bag, and given her oxygen. Holding her, with the canula just below her nose. Blow by, they call it. Canulating a dog doesn’t work, usually. Just put so much in front of their nose they have to breath it. We took turns doing that for awhile.
Checking her pulse, using the stethoscope to listen to lungs and heart. Listen to her fight. Dosing antibiotics. Holding her, pushing oxygen. Simply loving her, and watching her. Its paying off.

I’m proud of us. Worried for her, but not scared anymore, and proud of us. This is capability. The fundamental ability to care for your loved ones, two and four legged, when they need it the most.
I wonder, with so many others out of work and suffering poverty, how many can actually do that. How many are capable, much less prepared, of providing for their families that well?
I’m proud to be one of those few, although that pride feels strange. I cannot imagine being any other way. I grew up like this, around people like this – A functional element of the lifestyle. Yet, how alone am I, are we? We few who can actually do this.
Is the society at large so crippled by consumer culture that we’ve sacrificed that much?

Human Rights

"The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature."

Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. "Sir? How about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'?"

"Ah, yes, the 'unalienable rights.' Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What 'right' to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What 'right' to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of "right'? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's 'right' is 'unalienable'? And is it 'right'? As to liberty, the heroes who signed that great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called 'natural human fights' that have ever been invented, liberty is the least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost."

"The third 'right'?--the 'pursuit of happiness'? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long as my brain lives--but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it."

From Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.
I'll post something substantial, of my own, later. I promise.

Theft

I steal from people. Not money, not material goods, not women (though, not for lack of trying). I don't steal for gains of wealth or flesh. I steal words, experiences, lives.
It's one of the habits of a writer. I don't plagiarize, of course not, but if you share a witty quip around me, a unique perspective, a strange story or a behavior so goddamned bizarre it couldn't possibly be made up? It goes in the file.
It wont come out the same way it went in, but it will work its way back out eventually. Twisted, different, but still some form of truth like all the best lies. Your behavior integrated with someone else's quip, and inserted in a setting I was drunk when I first filed and hung-over when recalling.
I collect these little moments of life, mine and other peoples, without any real intent. It's not malicious, I assure you. Besides, it's not like you were really using it anyway.

Tonight I came across a young woman referencing her use of a diet-system of some sort to loose weight. That's what brought this on, really. I filed away her quip, the attitude behind it. Flagged it as identifiable, a truth I saw in myself as well.
She said, and I paraphrase, "I've lost thirty pounds with Nutrisystem and hard liquor, though I don't really stick to the nutrisystem."
That's a story. Complete. A whole picture, in one sentance. I do so love collecting these things from people. Twisting them into some new truth.

I've put down close to 10,000 words of new material since yesterday. Some not-so-fiction, some technical stuff on trauma medicine, some outright lies (but good ones). Am fairly pleased with that. Both the work and the varied nature of it. Just wish there was some way to fashion it all into making a living. But it's not what you know, or how much of a character you are, that fills out a resume - Merely what you can prove with certificates and degrees. Cest la guerre, as my old enemy said.
Every thief dreams of the one big score. I want to steal the right bunches of truths, and turn them into the right series of lies. Not the great American novel. I'm thinking the so-so, rent paying, article.

Tommy

"I saw the whole relationship right there," he laughed with her as I sat down coffee in hand, "But that's okay, it was a good breakup. I got the place, you got the instruments and the dog. Even though it was my dog..." His grin opened up from the long white mustache and goatee. Old laughter, lascivious once, now a joke on itself.
On the outside, it was just an old hippie, better than sixty and sharing laughter with a couple twenty-something kids in a small town coffee shop.

He had been sitting there on the couches when my friend and I walked in. Back to the window and drinking coffee, paper held open to the crossword. An old flat brimmed hat, and a canvas musette bag beside him on the deep cushions of the couch. His hair, white and long, but clean shaven from his cheeks and sides of his jaws, and back lit. Old clothes, but clean, with a well cared for leather vest, and lots of shined silver and polished stones around his neck. Another of the peculiar creatures that lurk the coffee shop, an unknown who looked somehow so right for the place.
My friend and I, lost in our conversation and food sat opposite him in the same corner circle of lounge chairs and couches. Our talk ranged music and tattoo's, she was wearing a fresh one, and life in general. We sandwiched on turkey and avocado, drinking coffee and lemonade.
The gent opposite continued his crossword for a time, and then rustled to life in a creak of leather couch, folding of newspaper and shaking out of his tobacco pouch. I watched him with interest, his leathery hands sunk into his makin's with delicacy. Pinching and distributing just the right amount of fine tobacco, and gently rolling the fragile paper with an unconscious competence of practice. I smiled, thinking of my father and all the men I had grown up around, and of the pouch in my pocket, full of hand rolled cigarettes and makin's. "Someone who stills rolls his own" I said, unaware of where those words would take me.
The next hour was filled with story telling, rich with mirth and memory. A wanderer from time to time and place to place, he told us about old girlfriends, houses, gigs and rooms full of drying peyote. He laughed at those girlfriends who had gone straight, become soccer moms and grandmothers. About this town, thirty years ago, and the "hippies and Techies" running wild and painting the town green for St. Pats. He showed us a picture of his own grandkids, from Philadelphia, a place distant in both miles and time, and talked about his daughter. How he'd reassured her that she was no wilder than her mother had been, a young Sicilian girl rebelling against Catholic school and marrying a nice Sicilian boy. "But you ain't supposed to run off with the hippies, ah no... So that's just what she did," he paused, "She was wild, and ran like the wind..." and he smiled to no one in the room.
The old hippie continued, and somewhere his history with Socorro county became the topic, his coming full circle again to old places, and busking in front of grocery stores. And then he let drop a gem.
"When I first got here, I ended up out on the other side of Ladrone mountain, down by the Salado."
This man, this stranger from far and wide, kids in Philly, and friends in the Pacific Northwest, had uttered the name of one of the most personally sacred places to me in whole world. Riley, the little ghost town on the Rio Salado, where I've been to a lifetime of matanzas, fiestas, weddings and funerals. I saw Riley every day as a kid, on the 45 mile drive into town for school. It's about as middle of nowhere as anywhere on the Earth, in relation to anyplace ever called "somewhere".
He spoke of the old hippie place, and the travel trailer with the metal siding (that's still out there) that had been his, and of the people.
"Did you know the Bustamante's?" I ask
"Herman? Oh yeaah..." and the names went on.
"The ranchers, they didn't much know what to make of us, but those guys, they thought we were all right."
And he told us a story of one of the old men out there, a name I forgot to remember, "The hippie girls, they go down there in the river for mud baths, and he rides down there and sees them. Of course, 'bout the only woman he's ever seen naked is his wife, and he just wants to get outta there, man. But the hippie girls, 'Oh hey man, can we pet your horse? He's soo pretty', they wanna pet all over that horse. And all of a sudden, the sky is real interesting, and that cactus over there, never noticed it, I'll look at it, and anything but them naked hippie girls."
After another forty-five minutes of talking and laughter, I finally got his name; Tommy. We shook hands, and he made a mental not to himself, "Morgan the Blacksmith, and Rebecca the... artist people, band posters."

It wasn't long after that we parted ways, shaking hands with Tommy and going on our way, bellies full of food, coffee and laughter.
Tommy, who dried peyote in that little house on California that never got torn down during the renovation of Socorro's main drag. Who dated a girl that wrecked her van in a canyon in the northern reaches of the state, and lived down there for a year, and then ran into this girl 30 years later here, and could only laugh at her minivan and pearls. Tommy, "the old hippie, crazy guy", who played Arlo Guthrie songs for an autistic girl in a home, and got the first reaction anyone had ever seen her give anyone, singing "...bringing in two keys, don't touch my bags if you please, Mr. Customs man." Tommy, the random coffee shop encounter with memories, and a shared past. Well, Tommy, The path is strange and twisted, and I'll see you out there.