Hurricane on the Bayou

You know there's a hurricane coming up the Bayou. It's pushing north all of those waves again, and I can feel the rupture of the seas inside. Breaking, to know it's suffocating the air from the pocket between dazzling waters & the sky heavens-upward.

Wonder if it'll reach my doorstep just aside, in a giant puddle --- and we'll all have to paddle away in wooden canoes..... and breathe slowly looking at the sight around.
Beautiful destruction, like snow covering everything white and pure.

/ / /

As a kid one evening, the tide went very, very far out in the Bay, a rare event in nature --- so that the new lapping edges almost started at the opposite shore a mile off ---- and you could walk & frolic in quarter-inch mushy sand all the way past where a day ago was drowning height. 

I remember how tall my father seemed with his dark hair and thick coat, how beautiful the stormy sky looked, and how strange it was that something I loved could just recede….. 

How it was truly magic.

In such a child's way -- I wondered if the water would ever return, and if I'd ever remember that moment & sight -- so I squeezed my eyes real tight and froze it. Re-opened them, and Dad hollered over the wind; "Let's head home sweetheart, Mom will be worried" 

What I'd give to go back there, how it seemed (for the first of many times), like nature itself --- felt like me. Like my insides mimicked entirely. So many years before the first heartbreak, but I felt it coming just then --- without the words to define the thought. Or even the idea of love. 

/ / /

Now, oh…. think I need a couple months just of thought. + A thousand years of nights just lovin'. + Candlelit baths, lounge chairs outside in the woods, all the pages and canvases to cover. All to re-start my body again. 

Feel only -- and all of --- the moments that chase the nightmares away.

All of the passion I no longer understand so fully. Less than that child on the shore. She knew everything, and then forgot it all. 

Guess that's how it goes, waiting for the next storm. Readying ourselves for winter coming shortly. Readying our minds for new moons and new….decisions. 

In the morning I'll drive down to shore just to see an old friend for a little while. Just to know from where I come. 





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The Papers

/ / / / a little short story, a little tale about innocence... / / / / 

That girl you knew is dead. Read it in the papers the other day. Someone wrote her into a movie in the hills of California. And she's gone. 

She was sweet and delicate, and playing with the strings of new ideas & youth. Eagerness in her eyes so trusting, laid everything of herself against me while we laid. But I just made the warm honey summer cold. Wanted to strangle something of the naiveté out, like the juice that ran down the counter edge. 

Now I'm playing with piano keys in an empty hotel room lobby, and she's gone. Funny I'd see you here because I've been wanting to talk of someone near. Someone of 'the times my man, when we were the crowd being talked about. A time when I lied and said it meant everything. 

It meant so much more. It truly was the world she always talked about living in. It existed as she had built it in the air with fingertips and stories. 

Wonder where the soul is now, if I could get it back. Force it back to Earth for a jubilee. Wonder if it's new creation is something even greater. 

All the years are growing so very fast. All the mem-or-iesss...so wondrous.





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Chi Hotel

I laid in bed all evening, because it was the kind to do so. ----- One where tired, hot feet rest in cool, white sheets-- hair still smells of sand -- and your body, feels good. A lovers kind of night, when joy fills long silences…and both get so happily lost in the playing field of a bed. Lost, what a wide word. Lost, like I've been a time again. ------ Knowing the sun is setting from the reflections between heavy hotel curtains. Not daring to move and brake the trance of lonely trails of mild revelations and word-spells.

What is it about this city that feels this way? Something about the way nothing comes to mind for a response to all the great mess quietly forming around my head like a grimy, binding, fog. Something about the wide streets and wonderful sites, and grey - grey - shiny grey- all around. And the people -- so many of them. All the hours that I walked today. 

Want to fly home tomorrow just to move, want to fly back just to feel. Want everything all at once --- liked I used to say. But it's so much farther away than a townhouse down the road bursting broken with passion and cut ecstasy. 

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