powerful lovers, sharing soft intimacies and near beastly passion. We married and had a family, and our fires burned tall and long in many colors of wonderful joys. I also saw nearly the same life shared, but I saw her murder me and I murder her, one after the other so completely without logic—us insane—our children orphans. More than these lives together, I saw other lifetimes, but ones I am unable to recall, ones where their possibility and their impossibility overwhelm.
After I saw nothing more and had walked a ways away, I looked back at this ill, old woman and felt disgust and love for each and between each of us.
I see the woman again often and smile at her; usually she’s oblivious; but I am fairly sure that a few times she smiled back: after we pass each other, I always see us, holding ourselves, together, both mouth and body.
Sometimes, I think about our children, as happy parts of a healthy family, and also how they would survive as orphans. Then, asking myself: what else could they become?
City Life
There they lived: living in a city, seeing the places innocently. Then, in time, knowing on many blocks where blood was shed. The place on a busy avenue near where there are great views of sunsets where a girl while walking to school on the sidewalk was hit and killed by a car that hit another car and lost control; and down the street not far from there, the death of a recent college graduate crossing the street who was hit directly; the bar owner who was shot through the window of his bar for unknown reasons; the celebrating co-workers at a restaurant who were suddenly grieving because one of them was shot by a stranger over a miscommunication taken as an insult; and there was the stabbing a woman near a grocery store further from there near the water where the air is cold but fresh; downtown—beatings; more stabbings; shootings; the robberies—there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, many other places all over the city in every dirty and clean neighborhood with pointed guns; every place—every person on every street either suspicious or susceptible; the shock of the friend of a friend who was killed at this place; the horror at the family of a friend who was killed this other place; the many homeless and the ones that didn’t wake up; the bus that hit and killed this person and that person at this place and that place; the train that hit and took the head off of in an accident; the many people who stood in front of trains full of people going to or from somewhere; the bridge that is a tourist draw but has so many suicide stories; and over in that area, three people shot that night; the other area the other night, five shot; two people dead in separate instances on one evening a few blocks from a good cafe on a favorite street of many who shop, eat and drink there—all these places where all the streets became stained; even one of the parks, where a tree limb fell on and killed a woman while under a grove there, the park that people go to be swallowed by a small forest where it is quiet and where many can be seen serene.
Knowing so much and finding it unacceptable, so leaving to another city where unaware. Looking at this new place lived in with cautious but similar innocence as before. Discovering different forms and methods of violence, many ways of bleeding.
Years later coming back to the city left. Acceptance of living in a place of dying. Also non-acceptance.
The Smiling Scent Of Lavender Above The Clouds Becoming Fragrant Moonlight
Two travelers meet in a place while both are staying far from the different places each knows as home. In this place, they become lovers and create, through the genuineness of their intimacy, a single thing that is the togetherness of them. This lasts for two weeks. Each then decides to continue their separate travels.
The day both are gone from this place, an ambulance on the way to the hospital races by, nearly hitting the building where they had stayed, picking up the togetherness of the lovers, which stayed in this place when they left. In the ambulance is a person who has had a severe stroke, who in a year will awake not able to talk, move, hear or see—unable to communicate with other people.
As the person awakes, there is an awareness of fear that is the only awareness until the person becomes aware that the togetherness, which was picked up along the ambulance’s path, is now passionately part of and forever inseparable from the person.
The Philosopher And The Crazy Person
A philosopher walks for about an hour one afternoon, stopping to rest and relax and reflect in a small park with several benches spread along its edges. Sitting on a bench at one end of the park, the philosopher sees a person near a bench about fifty steps away at an other end of the park who is screaming with face pushed into the air; the whole of the person’s body next jerking towards the ground; and, once lying at the foot of the bench, talking to plants and a scattered variety of objects.
“This person must be crazy,” the philosopher thinks. But then the philosopher considers some of the things the person said, finding oneself rather surprised by the level of thoughtfulness in many parts of what previously seemed at least nearly insane.
Studying the person further, the philosopher stares right at the person, getting away with being rather obvious doing it. The person, now standing again, picks up an object that had been part of that person’s conversation, and when the person does this the philosopher feels with the philosopher’s own physical body the feeling that the person’s arm is part of the philosopher, where the sensations of the object being picked up are as real as anything the philosopher had ever felt.
Bedtime Story
The child awoke early and shouted, “Traveling on yellow hippos!—Traveling on yellow hippos!” The others in the house questioned this. “At the start of long sea voyages with tiny purple rhinos alongside us!” shouted the child.
Some of the others tried to put the child back to sleep. “When I am trying to sleep, these one-half-foot tall people with orange and green fur start tickling me—they jump up and down on my pillow and do back flips and side flips and front flips up and down my bed and me until I tell them stories about when I was an octopus and lived in the clouds.” “So you will go to sleep then?” those others asked. The child said, “They leave me alone to sleep if I do that.” “Do that,” said the others.
At The Height Of Being Grounded
When living in the city on the seventh floor, the mind would say “Jump! Jump out the window!” “Jump-jump! Jump out! It is all shit anyway. End it!” Over and over for most of a year this would repeat. The person would walk to the kitchen where there was a half-open window to the side of the refrigerator and grab some hummus or lunch-meat, looking through the window as the fridge door shut; the person hearing its mind’s repetition of exclamation, ignoring it as best as possible, sometimes saying “Shut up!” Then, the person moved to a house in the country with a window nearly level with the land, but the mind would still say the same thing: “Jump Jump-jump! Jump goddammit!” And the person began saying “Fuck you mind! What do you know!?”
Portrait Of A Naked Octogenarian Woman In A Grocery Store
“They look at my body thinking of decomposition, are reminded of their own mortality—so coil away. But they look again and imagine: me young and nude, imagine themselves my contemporaries, are aroused in fantasy.
The truth: I just want to pick up potato chips—not deal with all this life and death shit.”
What A Lovely Day
There was a person who discovered love with everyone that was met and talked to. It wouldn’t always happen immediately, but it would soon happen. There was an appreciation of this other that was met, so that there was an intimate feeling flowing into and out from both of them. When this happened, the other would feel this but would not experience it in the same way as the person who discovered the love. The others then went on with what they did and to the people in their lives.
The love made the person’s body begin shining with light from every part of it. This was beautiful to the person. When the person became illuminated, there was a seeing of possibility and limitation; at that moment, everything that was that love became possible if that was going to be the c
hoice of the life lived; at the same moment, there was also the limitation of everything else that could not happen if that life was lived. No matter the possibility or limitation, the love was fully felt and realized for the person in the experience of the discovery—it was all the things that real life is but lived in a momentary movement of light. This moment followed into another that was the experiencing of the death of all the love of all these people because the person could make no choice and because the person also didn’t want to and couldn’t make the others love even if there was a choice for those others.
After an experience of the love happened, when there was no longer light shining from the body, the person walked alone considering the possibilities of what could be the shared life of loving with the other that there was love discovered with. As the person walked, there was a feeling of following the lives of each one of the others, the most recent together with all the rest, along the path taken. There was the beautiful part, and there were the many real experiences of love, but the person would feel depressed, exhausted, horrified after a while when walking and then flicker with light. Walking