Departure/Terminus

Departure

We’re different and alike
all going somewhere, soon 
to be strewn across the world.

Few of us are beautiful, I’m afraid but
my friends say my sight is out of sight
from these golden hazy days.

What is beauty even? though
I snap to.  You are beautiful,
that is all I know and all
in my dreams.

Strangers hardly speak to each other
the we-are-animals visible like never before
all foraging for a place to go home. 

Is it in our nature to say nothing?
to be aloof, yes
especially here on these teal plastic seats
sticky from the yeasty heat.

I have so many questions and
too few answers before I go.


      *            *            *            *            *

Terminus

A motherly woman
passing terminus time
an adult novel in hand
KEN FOLLETT
in letters offensive as these.

To Milan, a hungry looking girl
dark-eyed, shifty, mousy
so hungry looking it’s savage
windy hair done right
just like she was taught.

Sharp dressed Italians
wearing flat foot bottoms
husbands in tucked-in v-necks
shaded in their shades™
indoors before the gate
but it’s dark outside too
Here again, we must assume Milan.

Fresh from Duty Free
bag of booze in hand
dressed like a businessman
surreal on a Sunday
as is the likeness of tint
from leather briefcase
to leather shoes.

Some really terrible looking pajama girls
next to a man who says terrorist
heads turn to the turban
we must assume London (it is the only other stop)
then off to America.

And all other sorts of characters
passing along and around
like a parade
going somewhere soon
to be strewn
across the world.

Waterloo Sunset

After hearing this song for the first time in years, not sure quite where to locate it, I'm moved to add a special post.  I suspect the memory is buried somewhere in late childhood, wandering around car shows in West Michigan with the family when summers seemed to have no end.  

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling, rolling into the night

People so busy, make me feel dizzy, taxi light shines so bright
But I don't, need no friends
As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset, I am in paradise
Every day I look at the world from my window
Chilly chilly is the evening time, Waterloo sunset's fine

Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday night
But I am so lazy, don't want to wander, I stay at home at night
But I don't, feel afraid
As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset, I am in paradise
Every day I look at the world from my window
Chilly chilly is the evening time, Waterloo sunset's fine.

Millions of people swarming like flies 'round Waterloo underground
Terry and Julie cross over the river where they feel safe and sound
And they don't, need no friends
As long as they gaze on Waterloo Sunset, they are in paradise

Saturday Set

Blood and Rain - a fictional piece

The clouds opened up at the bullring
this afternoon in Madrid wind came too
blowing gusts like sheets across the streets and
sideways into the crowd.

If you think there is nothing like the smell
of late afternoon rain in the spring, like
lilacs mature in bloom
then there is just as equally
nothing like the smell
of fresh blood in wet sand.

      *            *            *            *            *

I’m Writing About You

We’ve shared a lot of sunsets
you and I, we’re contemporaries
in our time
this one no more special than the last
only documented and warmer
since I hold you closer.

We’re both happy the day is at its end -
people go home!
and you’re left glossed in a heavenly blue-gold
while I just kind of gasp at the mix
    ambient steel drum and sax
    a light foot tap with bells around your ankle
    lifting up to feathery clouds.

A stranger is curled up tight beside me
reading Ahora Yo
Now Me    some kind of self help
    she’s spanish and beautiful, and I think
    she’s been hurt before.
        I wish she’d smile.

She’s dark too.  I know those eyes
like black diamonds up close
but she maintains looking serious and sad
focused on Me
gets up and walks away.
        I just wish she’d smile.

We’re in our best hour
I, haggard and so under-slept I’m depressed
but you picking it up for both of us
with the warm hues and haze
        (paint sound like it’s light
        paint darkness like it’s cold)
my ear is exploding with the gush of a kiss
like all the beauty that is love
the rarest and most pristine thing in the world.
I imagine you all have a lot in common.

Summer Trip

Othello Dreaming Venice

Memory and Michigan

Memory and Michigan

Remembering where I’ve never been
the distance now makes memory so
dreaming like I dream these days
of that place in the summer
Empire, MI - our Empire
we built out of beach fires, friends, sand
empty beer cans
it’s all there etc, etc
clearer than our talks and laughs
all there in its best light.

Coming from the north
shooting across the night sky
whiter than the moon
hanging just above the dune
the night of the Solstice in June...
Remembering like this is blinding.
    songs by legendary fires,                  
    songs in the woods
    (you more whistling
    because you’re always bashful like that -
    even when it’s just me -
    and I howling to the sky
    up tree trunks to below the brush
    singing morels to me)
    “Like gold, fungi gold,”
    you glow
    “They taste as sweet as the forest!”
I can still see the look on your face
among the wreckage of memory
like trilliums scattered
fragments across a deep green forest floor
when was the last time
we built such an empire? you wonder.

The sound of sand blowing across sand
is the sound of nothing.
You know, the pictures are there:
digitized, hard-drived, memorized
burnt in like cigarette spots on the beach
at the end of the night.
We wrote this story before
although I can’t quite remember
how it goes.

History

History
Locke/Geiger

On the banks of the Vlatava
flowing out of Prague
ships coming in, ships coming out
   
    brought people down its banks
    all those voices bobbing up and on by
    sediments, glass, metal,
    other forms of growth too sick to think about.
    Swaying on the river bed.

On the banks of the Vlatava
dancing to Saint-Saëns, who
plays a dance-tune 
Zig, zig, zig, on his violin.

Above in the sun (On the banks of the Vlatava)
people scurry back and forth
taking the same shots from this end and the other
   
    forward and behind pictures
    to last a lifetime pictures
    and pictures of people with cameras raised
    in silence or laughing, pictures.

But not like the silence ON THE BANKS OF THE VLATAVA
the night before, natural silence
crossing the Charles Bridge
opposite this bank
after the laughing and rollicking and
living like we’ll never die.

Morning Song

In the morning when light is once again new
another strange night of dreaming is over
black and white, Captain of a mutinous crew
only a single frame I remember.

Leading a ship over mountains in Mallorca
instead of the sea
faces I had known all my life
rising up against me
what can it mean, will it come to be
in future tomorrows
when mornings aren't as bright
as the sight of
love's old smile?

I can't say I care much
alone on this island like the Mars rover
leader of none, these high seas are rocks now
and I'm just glad that the night is over.

Set from Starbucks

Dress/Girl

I’ve seen that dress before.
I just saw it last night
crammed on the metro
thanks to the workers’ strike
General Strike in Madrid - March 29, 2012!
smashed up against hot breath and breasts,
mostly focused on the breasts...
I’m getting away from myself here.

The dress.

It’s a spring dress
just above the knee
in style
“de moda” they’d say here
lacy
swirly
designs in white
vintage in every sense of the word
20’s vintage, well done
topped off with a thin brown belt
wrapped around fun looking hips
the dress has never looked nicer
than it looks on you.


Starbucks

I’m a strange looking man.
I’m a blue looking man.
Head to toe in it
swimming in denim and stripes
sitting in Starbucks on Paseo del Prado,
the first one ever in the city,
the flagship
the Mothership
writing poems furiously in the corner
about a girl in a dress
I’ve seen before - the dress -
then Memory and Michigan
then the dress
then the girl
my pencil not even moving for a sec
why do they come to me all in one day?
the girls and the dresses and poems
I cannot choose these times
but I can choose what I wear
and today I decided to be all blue.

Heart's in the Park

Finally got a song up!

Granada Part III

III Short 1’s   

I

Play on boys                                      
sing and clap on               
rough gypsy sketches
of flamenco         
echo a live demo                  
before the valley
in Granada                   
flowing to the Sierra Nevada
warm and dry
“Free as a Bird”
I fly
between the palace and
San Nicolas
to the white sun

II

I’ll never be a king but I’m content in my own dream
reaching out to touch you on the ledge where you sit
legs dangling like a dance
long-haired queen.

III

The clouds make the mountains grow higher
snowy peaks growing brighter
old Irving the damn statue writer
following us all day.
But, Washington!
that’s O.K.

Granada: Part II - Cats and History

    We did this and that and walked through the city up to a dry olive grove until we were no longer really in the city limits anymore because we could see no man-made borders from so high except a crumbling wall running along the hill from Muslim days.  In front of us here were mountains that I earlier in the day mistook for clouds, their peaks were that white.  It really looked as if the whole powdery top could trail off into the sky.  Sitting on a rock big and flat enough for just us two, close to the orange-red soil in the parched, out-of-season grove, we took everything in like the first tourists: contemplating the Alhambra below; in awe of its imposing structure and gardens and all their exotic embellishments; on top of the world with only the Sierra Nevada more mighty.
    “You go to these places,” motioning to the landscape ahead and sky “and you don’t think about anything.  Nothing.  You don’t even feel.”
    “I’m thinking right now.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “Yeah, I’m thinking about Cats.* ”
    “..........”
    “...the little one we saw coming up here?”
    “You see, you’re thinking about nothing, it’s great.  Genial.” I throatily proclaimed.(It was a word I was and still am very fond of in such situations.)  “You know, I hate cats.  Almost as much as I hate Washington Irving.**"
    “Oh I get mad at my cat all the time.”
    “I think if I had a cat, I’d punch it in the face all the time.”
    “Have you seen that kitten YouTube video?” She just kept on chugging along with it.
    “No.”
    “It’s a little girl narrating a kitten’s picture book.  It’s called Kittens Presented by Kittens.”
    (Long pause here, much longer than the one before, such an amount of dot dot dots would be insulting.)  “If we lived here and had an open-air place, I’d let you have a cat.”
    “Yeah, I’d want a pretty independent cat, like it’d get its own food and be free-roaming.  I think that’d be the ideal cat.  And Life Partner.”
    It was an absurd conversation in an inspiring place.  And this was the best we could come up with?  Cats?  The big rock alone in the grove there for just us two, the cracked orange-red soil close enough to taste, the wide blue sky and the stony confusion of the clouds and mountain tops.  The view.***  I mean, this was a serious, historic site, some fucking holy ground, and we were both inward looking enough people.  It didn’t make much sense.  But then neither do many events when we’re busy living them. 
    It seems to be a reoccurring motif in my travels these days too more than it used to be, the inability to take what I need  - or what I think I need - out of a place while “in the moment.”  You want it to be all its worth, right?  Because there’s careful planning and preparation involved, anticipation for the sites and sounds and all it will be, an investment.  At the time, up there on the mount, from those lofty heights in the white light where we could peer into the fortress palace below, I didn’t think about much of anything (though I do remember noting that the soil had the same tinge as the cocktail**** I had drunk the night before in a little burn-out bar on Elvira street.) 
    So, finally we descended down to enter the Alhambra, purely giddy from the sunshine and wine settling in from lunch and each other’s presence.  Although, of course, as usual I did not know this then until much later when she had left at the bus station in Granada and I had gotten back to Madrid.





















*Not to be confused with the musical Cats; she really did make it sound like it was capitalized.

**American romanticist reference resulting from said author’s surprisingly steady, if not static, level of fame and the subsequent cafes, bookstores, vendors and even tobacco shops throughout Granada that bear his name and sell his acclaimed 1832 hit Tales of the Alhambra.

***We also proposed the landscape as suitably Jurassic - a perfect setting for dinosaurs to roam - then imagined c. 1200 AD Arabic warriors saddled atop them and what an even more formidable place, the Alhambra that is, really would be.

****a negroni

Granada: Part I

What was intended to be the "About Me" section but was "more than 1200 characters."

    It is ironic that I finally scramble to write this “about me” section and officially create this blog on the last day of February of a leap year.  For reasons which are completely senseless and of my own personal agenda, I had set off in 2012 to make a blog “before March” (quoting an entry from somewhere between Michigan and Madrid in the fading inspiration of a New Year’s resolution, unable to sleep on the flight.)  And so here I am, and any other year it would be March. 
    I also find it bold to say that from this point forward every piece you find here will be drawn entirely from the present.  That’s not to say that experiences we cannot fully grapple with yet because they are so new should not be drawn from; look no further than sound journalism, for instance.  Chronicle by it’s very name, though, is a snapshot from everywhere, all time, past and present.  And everything you find here - poems, pictures, songs and lyrics, and other short writings - comes from somewhere profound: The hand-me-down rust-colored swivel chair in last year’s Ann Arbor apartment; my favorite rock formation I spent many a Sunday afternoon at in Segovia back in 2009, buses, lectures, trains, cafes, jets.  Jets*.  Kundera says “We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.”  I saw that the other day, like when I saw the name Chronicle on a bus stop outside the Retiro Park advertising a movie of the same name and hurried on home to finally put up a place to document and store these time pieces from when the stage was black and the audience was both familiar and unknown. 








*cool word

Memories of past March's

Marzo! Until Next Time My Friend


We were training down the Italian Coast
around this time last year, my friend
through the heart of Tuscany
pulling on in a rainstorm
into a green castled field

Remember out desperate cravings for writing
in forgotten plazas and miscellaneous flights of stairs?
furiously wandering at the pace we set each day
What a time it was, what a time!

And when we got to Rome - because our roads lead there –
we set eyes on the end of the world at night
at dawn, the Travesteria not once but twice
never ending steps up, up, up more grand
overlooking the city and its vastness
searching for the seven hills
through the smell of cigars and sounds of bustling
vendors, people, footsteps

Ours just another beat to the drum
on a drummed on city
This we spoke of too, not in Italy but
at the old thinking rock
in front of the Alcazar,
or the gardens in Parc Guell, or
a bus whisking us away until the next time.