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Gershwin

And I said, “umm skalladaleica, umm skaladee, gooo offf to that grand ole opry with me.” You sang a song of a seventh moon and a kiss by the door. It was a heartbreaking moment, in which I thought I would see you no more. Electric bill don’t matter too much. You’ve got a phenomenon. Legs as plump as a midline streamer and my eyes all out of rest. And I said, “Ummmm skaladaka, umm skalaka deeee, we might fall to the bottom of the ocean.” I like the way your heart seems to wrap around me and the way you’ll try a new potion. I’ll never admit it took me 29 years to come to the revery, to make mad, make decisions, make the whole world look down, a nose, like my nose, they fear our notions. But baby, oh baby, if I never said it outright before, I’s say it outright here, “umm skalakee dee, do the fixin.”
Shug, should we take a pause for 10, 15 minutes or something. You been away too long, but you’s was just right over. I can hear the beating in this heart, head, hound of mine. I’m going crazy. A lot makes nothing and nothing makes lots. My mama told me always find it wheres I find it and I found it right where I gots, but my aunt Theresa worries. And my mama at times worries. My whole world, and the whirly bird seems to be worried. I wants to say, “juss truss me james, juss truss me belinda.” I made it alright. I eat at fish house. Supreme fish delight on Sunday nights after 4PM departures from church. Good lord done got me in my heart and I’s in his. I make sun borne fish to a declining ridge.
I still fill the ridge of your noses. I feel the outstanding. I loves you Porgy. I loves you Bess. And it is hot, and southern and night and summer and crazy. If I could take everyone of you, as my friend says, detractors, under my left breast, I would show you that yous educated fools ain’t got nothing on me. I walk through a vinyard half-clothed and the whole world revolves at my feet.

La columna de tu espalda.

When I’s a baby, my mama says, I’s a feverish baby. Collicky. Wouldn’t shut up, the day or the night. I made an early career of fucking up everyone else’s career, and a good night’s sleep. I suffered for the nipple and the coaxing hand. Separation anxiety ruled and I made a great deal of the need for the flesh.
Not to sound dirty here, but I could make the life of a woman completely unbearable before I even had a memory, or a consciousness of what a woman outside of my family may or may not need – or one inside of my family for that matter.
At twelve years, i took up the camera, developed a fascination for the photographic. I adored the way in which, even now, your skin, could be yours, or it could be the Sierra-Nevada mountain range. I took multiple photos of my inner, hairless thigh. With the right lighting, the right crop, the right artisitic eye, your body would be the whole world. But all of this of course, happened long before the age of twelve, and so it means nothing of the one who stands here now.
There was nothing of the way you stand there, but only of the way in which you were there standing beyond and distant from the viewfinder. Everything could be, and was best if it was, seen as something other than what it was. I love it all. Your back as Nags Head’s dunes was my favorite. I travelled, but should’ve travelled more.
But I have grown. I take pictures still. Mostly at 30 frames/second. More to see of you but less to interpret. I walk silkenly stars in a grotesque mass of information overload. Your back is your back now.
I put it all down tonight. I put down the foreign capture device. The lens and the distance. The hour and a half in dark room with me and a memory of the way it all went down. The way in which apparently I cannot deal with that which is real. Life seems to happen on the other side of a lens. Or at least on the other side of someone’s lens. I want to make amends, or love, or peace, or something like that.
Sensory organs grow from the end of my arms, I find. The way in which I used to read topographic maps, I read the back of a woman tonight. And not just any one, but rather, one that I had wondered about the way in wich she twitches and turns. The way she may turn to say, “I love you.”
And in a way, it’s Frida, and “La columna de mi espalda”. Around number twleve you have experienced a fracture and a disk protruding. I felt it with my own hands and it wrote into my encumbered mind an image of what exactly it is going on inside of you. I made memory with touch that becomes photographic and forever. I render prison keys with nothing but my head.
Three and one half inches up your spine on your right is a mole of indeterminate size and I think it is on that that you should blame all of the problems. I saw it not with the viewfinder, or with my own eyes, but with my hand as it glided across to comfort, and perhaps to woo. I know it is there, just as your other protrusion further down is.
My hands are helicopters twirling as whirlybirds are wont to over the back of something such as this, or the spine of the Appalachian mountains. I make it all up you now. There is no way that this happened. My fingers have memories that my head cannot possibly account for.
I remember the way your skin felt under my fingers better than I remember the way it posssibly could have looked before my eyes. I lay my lens aside and consider the landscape. The way the mountains look this time of the year in a frost brought on at the end of spring.

Pink Flamingos.

It was moonlight and twinkle light reflecting off of pink flamingos on your cotton/linen skirt and then further onto your face, and you looked like starlight, Hollywood and the hills beyond.
I awoke this morning thinking, after dreams, that a life of nights like that would be completely, and more than so, acceptable. I do come on too strong.
You see, I’m in a pickle and it is not as though I haven’t proclaimed it to the world here and in person. The spirit of a Danish prince has me, and has had me, for months. I walk around in black and gingham and plaid patterns of the aforementioned color. I make rainbows of shades therein.
But last night it was pink flamingos and, no matter how it is shaken, there is not a shade of black to be had there.
There was a dream, look up, and in that there was you and marble and whiskey and frosted glass – window treatments, harmony vocals, Fun Dip� and one-legged pink birds. I’m sorry if it all doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t to me either, and I feel as odd as a six-legged elephant today .
But to go on…
There were two girls in dance recital attire, a boy in baseball leggings and a message from your mother when we got home politely asking if everything was alright, and how we were doing – if we needed anything. My mom asking how the girls were doing. A walk to the closet after bathing children, and two pink flamingos standing in a puddle in the yard at midnight, of all things.

Barnacle.

Your hair smells just like hair. The way I always thought it would smell — and your eyes make one thousand country roads uninteresting. Love is a barnacular pleasantry, but your lake makes it all worth the while. If I could be there, there would be salmon steaks, moon smiles and a dozen other whispers from you. If nothing means love more than this, please let this make an inroad.
B

The lamb of my porch.

I bought a new CD today. I know, irresponsible for me, a person to be unemployed in under a week. The CD was just released and is some of the earliest recordings of Townes Van Zandt called In The Beginning (click on the link and buy the CD, if you want to help a brotha out). I was so taken with song number seven that I immediately began working on my own version. Here it is in all of it’s glory. Again, unfinished. I can hear all sorts of textures in the background and drums kicking in with the big “Wizard of Oz” moment.
Let me know what you think.
When Your Dream Lovers Die (MP3, 2.9MB)

The Hillary Step.

I’ve been opening up my head. In a way like surgery and not like freeing your mind. I am rewiring this sonofabitch. It only seems to get me into trouble.
Repatched and rewired, I have taken the plug out of the socket 15 times in 7 days and finally it seems to be purring along like a window cat. I took out the low frequencies and added an oscillator that seems to be the right frequency to keep me from convulsions.
It was good while it lasted, but sooner or later the waves collided and cancelled and I fell off the wagon and under the truck tires of the lorrie driven by the Amish man with black hat and beard and his three boys, two girls and wife in a bonnet.
Sooner or later you decide that you have to live, I suppose – either that or the other option and at that point you can’t write a thing anymore – and upon making that decision there’s a moment of clarity.
This is my announcement that I am not your biggest fan.
I know it sounds strange, but the truth of the matter is that I have been sliding for the past couple of months. If I made it there without you I would feel as odd as toothpaste on a cracker. I guess it really makes no difference the other way around. All the luck in the world to you. My rates just went up. I’ll hear it on the radio when you get there. Watch it at the Hillary step. There’s been many to lose a life there.
A good accountant and a good lawyer are always advisable. As well, make sure the company throws some marketing bucks your way, and a good web designer… I’ve got a list, and in the end some folks will indeed purchase the improved product, I guarantee it.
We could all quit work for a few days on the proceeds. We can talk later about this portion.
I wish that I could write vindictive. My heart is just not in it.
Oh, you’ve changed. I imagine the same could be said of me. Remember, this is not the brain you used to know. The engine is rebuilt as well as the transmission. Everything is in retrograde or so I have heard, but round about today the tides are shifting. Certain gravitational pulls have been alleviated. I’m taking the back way into the alley, to the cab awaiting and then to home. Snails carry homes around everywhere the go, they can sleep in the bar alley with a roof over their head – I suppose that is part of the fascination.
But we might as well make it level from here. Or at least level with one another. I am not your biggest fan. I may have once been but all that has changed. My compass doesn’t even point north anymore. I might just as easily take flight and turn into ice as make a decision that seems sensible in your paradigm.
I do believe in truth and love and home and that when you meet a girl that you love, you should marry her and make a home and never look back. Rock and roll will always be there, and you and me and possibilities, but that does nothing towards baking the bread in the morning, a laugh from my nephew when he falls from his bicycle. We got the beat, he’s got the beat… I even think you’ve got the beat. It’s there. I know.
You’ll let it all come in someday. It will wash over like a river in the 100 year flood. Mark my words. The beat is there and you will be too. Send me a postcard to tell me you are happy once you arrive. Otherwise, I will stay heartbroken.
“Goodbye, Jack.”
“Goodbye, Dean.”
“See you around.”
Or something like that.