POEMS & SHORTS

November 19, 2009

Not into it. Not into it at all today. Starting late even writing this shite, must be, well I don’t have to guess; (oh, love the semi-colon when I get it right, friggin illiterate that I am) the time is right on my screen. 330pm. Yeah, afternoon and as far as mother nature is concerned, another nice one, 74 degrees, soft breeze in the clear blue sky with the winter sun just soothing enough warm without the swelter. I went surfing this morning at Zuma beach. The water temperature was a cool 58 but the color was a clear blue green. When I sit on my surfboard with my feet dangling over and stare down through that water 15 feet all the way to the sand and raise my head to the sky, watching Pelicans and Seagulls swoop past and the occasional Dolphin cruisin’ by casual…I must say, I love it, love it, love it. Lazy boy surfer now. Fuck, I’m getting addicted to it. I just started again this past summer after a 23 year hiatus and I get out there in the ocean every chance I get. I borrowed a friends 8 foot board but light one with triple fins and I am improving with each surf. But I sound so boring to myself. Anyway, the waves were a good 3 to 4 feet and glassed over but semi-walled up, to coin a surf phrase… and fast. I mean you had to take off on them fast and find your way, which is easier done on a shorter board, like say 6’ 4” or so and with a bit more ability than I have although I managed to snag a few good corners and even saw some green room on one ride. Yeah I took off on a good sized right, dropped in and was face close to the wall, riding across. So how ling can that stay with ya after you get out of the water to keep you going, especially if not much else is going on in your life. I think that may be a lot of Surfer population’s dilemma…fuck, I didn’t know dilemma had two m’s. Thank you, spell check. Yeah, so anyway, surfing takes up a lot of hours in the day and once you get hooked in, you seem to sacrifice a good percentage of your other commitments just to make yourself available for those surf hours. When the waves appear, so do the surfers, in droves that is and opportunity of riding a wave far outweighs the opportunity of employment field. And what is my point? I knew until I started writing it down. In simple terms; many, many surfers are unemployed or barely working. They get fulfillment in the water but afterwards they come back to the reality that they live with mom at thirty-five and….ya know what? I should just scratch all that crap out. Because I AM NOT TAKING MY TIME. I AM NOT TAKING MY TIME, WRITING BUT JUST BARRELLING THROUGH THE BULLSHIT! Funny on the Jazz station, Mile’s Davis ‘So What’ just filtered in. One of the best songs ever recorded in my humble opinion. If I could surf and write and live in the ‘So What’ zone without the narcotics to get to that state...life would be sooooo smooooth. And fucking John Coltrane playing with him. This song just stops my thoughts and re-directs them into, well into THE SONG. I guess like when you get into a wave. Gee, I feel like I’m coming up with something here that is venturing towards profound…but I don’t really feel it. Gotta dive down deep and I’m just dippin in for a little reporting here, I think. Swimmin’ fast and skimming the surface. God, please, give me a zone like Miles. Well, that stops me. I just wanna bop to the song anyway and yes, I just wanna ride the wave anyway. And when it’s over, where do I go? That’s it. I must go on and love it, love it, love it all. Christ do I feel dumb today. If I wasn’t trying to just get some pages down I would delete ninety percent of this dribble and that’s being kind. Hateful, hateful Dave, hating on his on parade. That’s no way to be my buddy boy. So old and sorry news that is. Lighten and liven it up. Work towards that ole’ flash of genius or new flash of genius and I never did take out the garbage enough when I was a kid. Maybe that’s it. Something from then to explain now. OR, LET’S JUST TAKE A NAP, SHALL WE? Shal Shal, Shallow. Empty, vapid, shallow…damn, my head is in my hands again. Even with Lou Donaldson on a smoking Hammond organ, playin ‘Cool Blues’. I am despairing away.

The sun is gone from the deck for the day. 4:19. Yeah, I‘ve been writing for less than an hour and I’m all washed up and want to go to sleep. Sleep, like waves, like music to take me away from my commitment to myself. This free association rambling seems to be imprisoning me. I feel shut down and locked up instead of open and inspired. I feel transpired, expired, extinct. God again, once more, revive me please. Let me live in my full deserved creative…playground? Yes, it must be…but can I even describe my wallet at this point. Let’s see: the wallet or half wallet I should say as I only have the inside part where the credit cards and license and other identification cards are held. The wallet was this thick, black one with a wrap around zipper but I fund it too bulky in my back pocket so I took out the center part which has three slots for cards, even though I stuff in about ten and then it folds out on the bottom where there are two plastic coated slots for pictures. The wallet, I belive was given to me for Christmas about 14 years ago from my sister so the plastic is more than crusty and faded with grains of sand and dirt and dust stuck to the inside.. Well, so I have a picture of my son in one. He looks handsome, his almond shaped hazel eyes, staring right into the camera with a smirk of confident mischief. His hair is a deep brown and short cropped over his ears that kind of fold out a bit and I remember when he was born his mom was in labor for 14 hours and he was not coming out so easy so the doctor had to grab his head with a pair of forceps. I think those forceps pulled on his infant ears a little and that’s why they stick out some. He has on a black t-shirt and a rust colored v-neck sweater, the one his mom used to wear…when she was alive…but my point is not to get into that but to describe the wallet here. So, love you Sandi, but I’m doing a writing exercise here to save my own life. So anyway, he is about eighteen in the picture and it is curled at the edges and all faded as is the one I just pulled out from behind it of my current wife, Sue and me on our wedding day. She is as cute as a doll here in her white dress and veil (know I described this some pages prior but fuck it, I need this now) and her arm wrapped around my shoulder as I goofy smile and the picture is so faded, I can’t even tell what my shirt looked like other than it was white too. Half assed description of both as I shove them back behind the fogged up plastic and see behind the other slot is a photo of my beloved dag who has just recently died. Not gonna elaborate other than she was the love of my life as I did write a whole book with her on almost every page. She is only a year and a half old in this photo and she is exquisite alert and gorgeous past show dog stature, standing on Crystal Lake beach in New Hampshire. I didn’t take it me as I don’t take photos well. Is it pictures or photos or can you say either? So she was there looking as vibrant as a Greek God canine when it was taken. Love, love, love her until the day I die and into eternity. Shnooky. There, I wrote her name again to bless another page. So I am noticing how fucking old this wallet is as I fiddle with it. I have about fifteen cards stuffed in besides and as I see there is also a thin metal plaque of Ramakrishna, I remember I described the same wallet in my first novel and I bet, way better. So it is an old worn black leather half wallet and it looks like I just decided what I want for Christmas. A, new one. Did I have to write, “ A new one?” I don’t think so. Critical like a Hawk swooping down on a field mouse…and it took me three tries to spell filed right. Fucking dyslexia swopping down on me like a Hawk, daily. And this is what happens, these pieces of shit pages I am writing, yes this is what happens when I don’t take my time and don’t commit and I have to keep on writing like this until it gets better. And angry hands, tap, tap tapping down hard on the keys will not make it any different, nor screaming out, “MOTHERFUCKINGCUNT! COCK SISTERASSFUCKING LAPWIPEJUSICINGWHORE! No that won’t help either. Work, work…it is all in the work.

It is dark outside now. I hear the sound of a motorcycle up the street. It seems to echo here in the canyon because I suppose there is little or no other traffic where we live most all the time. I am happy here in this house nestled amongst the trees. I hear the silence of the night. It is only 6:08 pm. Pitch black already but still early for Coyotes and Owls. Fuck. I was into this for a few sentences. Still the silent night soothes my mania. No screams. No objects hurled across the room. I am sullen (better look that up in the thesauras…can’t even spell that, god help me…) Thesaurus. Corrected. Funny, sullen is described as both gloomy and angry. Sounds more like inclement weather. The weather is sullen. Moody is more like it, right? Well, I am not sullen. Somber sounds closer or even…wait, let’s wait for it to take us over, let’s wait for that feeling like a poet would. I am sad. I am sad that I am not writing well. It hurts me, hurts me very deep. Now there are tears in my eyes. Is this what I wanted? I just took a deep, trembling breath and I swallowed hard. I had made some tea before, a chai fusion of some sort and I just took a sip. Ah, shit, caught up in particulars again. I am heartbroken at my self-diagnosed creative state. It feels like I am mourning an extended loop of death that takes place every day. Closer to it would be, experiencing the death every day. I wake up. I get ready to write. I die. And now I am writing about the death, writing about the experience of the death, on going; day after day after day. I am in it, shuffling through the shit of my words spat out careless on the page, spat out not caring on the page, spat out not. Am I doing any exercises at all? Thrash cracking cornered catastrophe hissing cankered to wrench from hackneyed progression into plunging fatality. I breath in a deep chest of sonorous heavy laden without a smother to think of pillow from my brother and why he slammed my knees against the staircase, covered with…slow, not working…go back. The ring in my ear sounds into every asylums’ corridors, calling doctor, doctor. Is a doctor a god or does god take the place of the doctor? Those ones, I’m sure. Without the chemicals, all those dudes are lost in their white examination coats. Wow! Got the Jazz back on. Oliver Nelson, be boppin away. Was he trumpet or sax? Gee, what about the google? Thirty seconds later: Oliver Nelson, sax and clarinet player, master arranger that died in 1975 of a heart attack . He was only 43 years old. Damn. And now Cannonball Adderly, another slammin’ sax player on the radio to follow it up. The song is ‘Right, Right’….I do love the world of Jazz and don’t think (that’s me) that these guys or cats as they may have called themselves, didn’t practice all day…or night as the case may be. So, me…in turn… What? Keep bangin’ away at my own keys until the song is right, right. Right?