Renewed - gone large label back to navel

Some drama came into the scene. Drama! To excite the stale air. To fuck up anyone's agenda. Anarchy!
Some spent out on long nights and hazy days between command central (some adulator's basement or garage) and the civic center. Planned protest! The sound of it makes most young activists want to switch and become substitute teachers... probably most do. Or join the green party ranks. Or jump off some bridge. Or move to Amsterdam or Vancouver. Or talk on talk radio.  To be located and chicken-wired into a city 4 block radius by choice? Planned Protest? More like planned parenthood for dizzy girls spun dry from wet, half show up to the clinic because everyone's betting they will be -- but they aren't! -- pregnant yet.

All washes away, tears and problems and headaches and trash. But the drama remains. A great decompression hits the air, and electricity unloads upon the city and picks up pavement like legs over jumpropes. Feelings around the block are so diverse and tangential, burning like coals in the eyes and faces of those who live deep in the heart of the American city.  Every American city, from Quebec to Tijuana, Houston to Montreal, Toronto to Rio de Janeiro. Feelings are burning and so alive. Need no lighter fluid because the (sent by the sun) solar flares have arrived.

The fabric of life undervalued and torn. Woven across the city in dust colored thread, corn rows
and baggy clothes. Bare hands. Bare feet and calloused toes. Life in the streets was intense as hell, and when you survived the day and met the night, nothing else could be so sweet. Sewn back together ends of days - and carefully self-placed in the bed. Eye of needle sees the thread and closes ranks. Send in the dreams, the fortified tanks.

by Karen Garman, 2011

I found myself in a jam....reluctance berry preserves -- grown on common kinda ground, and a salve to the disheartened lost souls like myself. I knew. I saw them reaching for the same jars in the same grocery outlets. We had the same eyes and fears and blood pressure.

I found myself in a jam. Halfway through my peanut butter sandwich. But I saw no end to the torment I fought so hard to get over. I struggle and effort and fight and try. And why?  My mood, my status and my affect --my sense of myself in this chair this room this house this hood this town this city this country this world this universe this emptiness. Senseless sometimes. I can feel so foolish, my reputation fallen. My spirit lost and out there somewhere lookin' for me. Callin' and callin'.

I feel the shift always into drama.  Like when the burn through the subway the burn through the atmosphere the burn through my oats and honey and brown sugar. The burn in my belly. The burn of hot chlorinated tap water spraying out the pipes onto my thin skin.

 I might stop. Mid-sentence. Mid-summer. Mid-night. Or any other time I choose. I might.

 If we are speaking then of course I will not stop like that, no way. I cannot afford to stop! Hey! I might pull too quickly away from vacuuming the room to do the dishes. Or vice versa. Then in moments I realize the track switchers switched my tracks without my clear knowledge, and it burns me but its a slow burn like St Louis ribs or a the extremities exposed to high altitudes, low temperatures. I suppose i will taste good when the fuckers eat me the hell up! Haha. Hey! I did not mean to stop. I didn't stop at all, in fact. Prove it! No no no, give me another chance, will ya? I know its your show. I got carried away. Thought I was the main act! You got me excited, though, it was you! So come on man, shit. Give me a break!

Too fuckin' bad i am still without a studio. Thanks to my big mouth shot off again. Interviews so close to complete. Bank account so far from replete. To shut it all out and pay attention to this channel is all I know to do. All i can do, all i am able to. My last trick, come on. Show some compassion? Meet me underwater, where all distractions die and everyone knows the party's relocated to Paris. And Paris is right there, right fucking there! I swear!

I had to drop the many ways I came to greet you. No announcement. Like you.Your arrival unexpected, split second! Kinda brutal. We like it like that here in this little earthen corner of the sky earth water joint. Don't we get along so well? I study you within the four walls, floor and ceiling. But never confined, no, always free you are to float toward or away from me and us and this condition cannot condition the unconditionable -- that is you. You make me crazy, whatever whomever however you are.

 I was green, yes,  but not for long. Maybe only St Patricks, and felt like an imposter even then. Maybe as a kid? But I felt older then, when I was younger I felt much much older. Can you hear the stress in my voice as I raise to the rafters my own? my drama? I demand it, damn it! They get theirs, so im gonna get mine! I will be juvenile like third grade elementary if necessary. This is the kinda sacrifice I will make.

 I opened the door, yeah, but too many times. The door is now a japanese hand fan. Today and maybe tomorrow. The nickel bags of weed turned into quarter ounces rolled in dimes. This all started in the nineties, and took so long to leave behind me. The ones among them true, dropped out my life in pairs. I took the stairs and waved goodbye looking down at you in your descent, over the rail, and over my head you went.

You may have seen them in the hall, did you? Bounced like checks before they fall. You so fortunate, my dear, to see all this in the rear mirror view. Had you lit up the scene with your presence fine I know, the colors would bleed out. What commenced blue might have finished lacking color. Maybe not completely taken out, but still so far from feeling right. Like putting on those fresh dry unpressed cottons and feeling still too hot and yet beneath your skin you feel cold, ya know? Okay, well what is mine is mine! Something unique to me, calming that way, like I am somebody no one else be, like I am a singular moving object in a forest of trees.

Turn on, huh. Oxygenated really...wow what a turn on!   (to be continued)...

loco - motion

With the passing of trains half of nights through oakland, i often stop what i am doing and catch the fresh wave of memories that extend past this life, back i believe. Dare say. Stop my dreaming and wake to it. Stop my typing and rise to the occasion. Stop my tv, my radio, my dual core thoughts spinnin round and round at a feverish pace like Ratt blowin out the rafters at some warfield or nondescript american music hall somewhere in Jersey, any year any day any time for any reason so long as theres hairspray, tights, a wall of sound and hair   -- bienvenidos baby!

Yes I wake to this rare and clearly audible across the sleeping city streets straight to my heart, my spirit, my affect lit up like a candle and soon after maybe self-drawn down and out with taper of wax rope into a calm silent predawn meditation like never before. Only to come again like a sudden shift of energy like a buckshot to the booty to spike the adrenaline and imbalance my mood. Taken to the heights for some reason, I dont know why. I guess its past life love affairs i cannot and will never have the will to deny.

Yes I catch the deep whistle two am oakland. The antiquated rail travel carry the heavy of lumbering train cars, to where the weight of past life memory coincide.. a brand new light revealed out of thin air. A push of electricity every damn time i swear! True love. I can feel it. A cottoncandy kinda recollection falls with me sweet even into bedsheets. Mothers milk if i ever knew it. Takes out my feet, levels my head. Out of whatever OCD kinda track i was on to some fly switched track back to some old fashioned mix, to some fantastic retrograde recollect callin me like pay phone street sound lonely ringin for the desperate connect back in the old town, east coast.

I gotta talk about the real steel for a second, gotta stop and pay mind to the channel of the divine. he real industrial hydraulic momentum generation of all my past life memory i miss you beautiful trains back then were bold steel and smoke and looking glasses. Leather upholstered genuine rawhide seats. Satin embroidered pillows. Velvet curtains to transition dining cars from smoking cars from sleeping cars. Needlepoint welcome mats as you step aboard. Opaque linens to offer light into redwood carved chamber anterooms falling discreetly off the main oakwood supported halls driving sleek lines from caboose through locomotive machinations to the coalfires stoked by attendants with metal rake and shovels with halfmoon sharpened edges diving into the living maelstrom dripping black charsmoke over the countentance of prebellum Europe, Asia, Soviet Union stretched out in rails pushed into place by hard laboring peasant and cossack farmers with hearts simple aligned with love of country? Ya? I dont know where it comes from but i have had these scenes fresh on my tongue, since i was young.

Piston pull, arms juiced every morning into some woven experiment toward heavy metal, interconnection. Or the hard laboring chain gangs who involuntarily paved the transamerican continental railway...really a poor copy of the sister railways of other great countries, the transsiberian. Even Canada showed her teeth, carving through cold winter granite to expose to the world that she would not be stopped so easily, no not at all. not at all.

Yes...see i dream of working on, traveling in, witnessing from, feeling of the past lives in me who may have bought the ticket to ride. Instead i get the stale substitute of Amtrak, which is like a plane or two dropped out, not so light, not so clean, robbed of pure wood and steel amenities shining, muffled the sound of clack-a-clack, domesticated from what i feel from those days i no longer carry thoughts or memories except in my senses deep, my breathe, my way of moving in and out of space, the wandering of my eyes to rest on USA, gone west of west...

Still i love her! goddamn fuck, i love the motive, makes me loco, stops me still! Like the deadening of panic post the trek up some nondescript citys pill hill.  Drops me down by any other american windowsill. Nondescript all around me, even my own flesh might cut out on some nail cause at those times the heart goes, the mind travels, the spirit flies and the rest playin catch up! My friends had trains pass through their backyard Richmond, and every time i heard that  shit --- hey! check me burstin' with the best moves i can make to dodge and dart out there and hop the broken down fence and then push up like the mosh pit of gen x days full pressin' toward nirvana, nondescript.

Hey all goes ghost! All get out all get out and go! to see her, hear her, anything and all so sensual and reverberating across the gps of my whole soul!

The train she got my heart, man.
Time? Fuck time. I got all the patience in the world for a long enduring train ride, the nondescript people you meet. The meeting i have with my nondescript self, in nondescript towns that harbor trains in strangeways you never been. Beats never been. Kerouac never been. Burroughs never been. Break out the gin nondescript for a nondescript sit for a spell. While others take in the local produce, fruit swill, the local smiles of those thankful to have a job, even so small as to polish someones shoes. The fresh orange juice with pulp stirred automatically by the motion with your nondescript vodka driving screws into a fixed witness of agape landscapes post sunset in middle some country. Hell son, you and me both be stoking the fires of our contemplative nondescript period blues.

 they chose me, crazy loco self thats me, steel and smoke and looking glass-eyed-sigh of self, that wisp of me who crosses you not, yet opacity full and driven west against the jetstream like a waterfall come up against a scream, moulded and melting into the love of haunted hitchcock night trains, soldier story told certainties of death... certainties of rebirth and hell shine up the silver faucet fetch above the rubber fitted catch, caught in a siberian dream of aquamarine fluid stream into river into greater embrace of oceanic magnificence... like the transcanadian transition into endless pine forest greenness. End of all apocryphal bred of searching insecurities kind of self-ignorance...trasmutation back to your youth and anyone who pays attention to the lands flying by in patchwork sky...will see....themselves, their people, their purpose, high steeple, deep well, poor people of the life of the land do tell. Do tell.. Do tell.

Cause right now i know this room, this home among homes, this road among streets, town among cities...this life among lives before and before us also...needs to listen to your simple story again. These television people. These fearful sons daughters parents grandparents through time. Fabric of lives by chaotic design. Do tell, in the fury of midnight passage descent into ravines never heard no other industrial sounds other than, trains whistle blow. dry and pristine.

The slow trains are ghostly, the many cars as they pass over terrain passed over an infinite time, infinite times uncounted. Temporal aberration. Perhaps circular as well, spiral shaped. Not unlike the nondescript fried dough. This year (like the nondescript last) she blew me over like a sweet evening seabreeze. all of her energy blew over me so, she blew me over. i felt blessed and kissed by the sweet touch moist air down there. where i fell. in that nondescript small patch of earthen compression.