Sang Praise Of Maxwell

Maxwell replaced the water in the birdbath and put new seed in the feeder. The garden smelled like night blooming jasmine and the moon was a scythe hanging over his head. The birds were all off somewhere silently sleeping. He took in his bedroom light and the purple, plumbed heavens behind his simple A-frame home and a sentimental ping pierced his heart. All over the world he pictured simple scenes like this and it helped him feel connected. He wanted to stay in the garden longer but his bones shivered in the cold night air and the warmth of his bed called to him like a burning hearth.

He went back inside and fell asleep with the TV buzzing in the background. In the morning he rose, opened his blinds and looked out of the window. The sparrows were chirping in the yard and flapping their wings joyfully.

“You’ve come home, my children. Now eat and by merry.”

Maxwell descended the stairs and started a pot of coffee in the kitchen. The sky was gentle and blue and exhausting in its perfection. He turned on the radio to an oldies station and some song he remembered as a teenager filled the air and gently carried him out of his kitchen back to the dance floors of his youth. He remembered picking Sarah up in his Chevrolet Clipper that he bought for $900 and the dress she wore was a lime green color. He remembered smelling her perfume as they danced. Something beeped and Maxwell was startled back to the present by the steaming pot of coffee sitting on his counter top, his reverie cut tragically short by the convenience of the modern world.

“Time is a nasty bugger to keep up with,” he commented to the ghosts. The sparrows sitting out on the bough of an oak tree fluttered their wings and shook their tiny legs, by working together they were able to make the branch bounce up and down. Maxwell witnessed the display of excitement and tapped on the window. “You guys behave.”

He sat down at the table and sipped his coffee, admiring the bend of the trees and the dappled, early light that sneaked through the foliage. There was still dew on the leaves so they sparkled in the slanted sun rays touching the Earth. It was a dazzling display, Maxwell thought, the way the morning sun casts such a soft light upon the world it makes everything seem fresh and harmless.

Why must the afternoon come when morning is this peaceful? Why can’t we hold on to the things we find dear? Why is it that time always has to keep moving? He brooded over cobwebs, listening to songs from years ago mosey out of the radio speakers, feeling caught in another person’s body — like we all do when we realize just how much life we’ve lived.

The grass in the yard needed cutting. There are three withered rose bushes that need to be removed. Maxwell gazed upon the land where he spread his wife’s ashes, reflecting on a long life. There is no other place more holy to him. It is his kingdom. He stood up and went over to the window with his cup of coffee and looked out upon the garden and the twittering sparrows. “You guys have no worries as long as I’m around,” he announced. “You don’t know how lucky you have it.”

Outside the lawnmower slept peacefully in the tool shed and an airplane floated 30,000 feet overhead, the lightheaded passengers pulled forward through the thin oxygen. Invisible radio waves stretched across the sky like muscles in an arm. Time kept going. The breeze made the shimmering leaves shake like castanets and tossed pollen into the air. It moved the air around and wasted thousands of dandelion wishes. Spirits played in the ephemeral gossamer. The Earth hummed along indifferently as the sparrows sang praise of Maxwell.

The Earth hummed along indifferently.

Time kept going.

The sparrows sang praise of Maxwell.

The Balustrade

I’ve got splinters in my toes, confetti on my nose.
I move in circles, circling the stem of a dead rose.
 
I want a wild thing, nothing tamed.
I want something without a name.

Even the King of Hearts is just a playing card.
Eating off of paper plates a salad of shards.

You keep moving around this planet and I can’t keep up.
Dancing in the kitchen, toasting wine in a plastic teacup.
You keep painting pictures of the sea and I can’t see why.
Sailing around the big blue bay, flying through the pink sky.
I thought you weren’t real until you disappeared….
Now I feel you everywhere, you’re always near.

The months turn into years that turn into memories
that eventually turn into moths that live in your heart
and one day they’ll escape and become distant history
and you’ll realize that you were wrong right from the start.

Oh…

I was never that keen on being mean, 
I never meant to be your Queen,
So stop sulking and acting obscene,
she screamed. And one last thing.

Oh, oh. Oh, one last thing.
I’ll take you to places in my heart
that were never meant to be seen.
Oh, oh, oh.  

You had a home made of many rooms
but only sat in one.
You had servants to serve you, lovers too,
but you only loved one.  
And it wasn’t me. 

This house of cards leans and sways,
the breeze blows, the walls quit
I watch it fall holding onto the balustrade 
Now it’s my turn to pick up the shit.

Pick it up.
Cherish it. 
Every hiccup.
Every tender moment of silence.
Every lost second
will only expedite
our eventual reckoning.  
But you were counting on that.

I’m spreading out the bedspread
while you stick the pillow over your head.
I can’t sleep with the light on, you sleep in mascara
and it’s really bright in Alaska.

It’s really bright on the ice.
The sun only goes down once a year here.
It’s really nice in the light. 

I want a wild thing, nothing tamed.
I want something without a name.

Acting out the play. I am the actor
that forgot his lines. Mapping the places
I’ve stayed. I’ve stayed everywhere

Let’s keep moving around so we never 
have to touch the ground.  
Let’s keep lying to each other so we never
have to risk being unsure.

(jotted down quickly, urgently, and without reservation
unedited – the Sparrow King)

POstcarD PLaineS

Our minds are electrical freeways. Crowded, cluttered cities. Neurons shoot and fire and explode and we’re left yelling obscenities and insanities in the line at Dunkin Donuts. We’re all psychological drive-by bystanders. Caught in a sticky, mental, web-like gossamer; the hazy Saturday morning blue-gray sea.

I’m listening to compressed computer files. Drinking from an old shoe. I cleaned the apartment and now I’m dirtying it. Thinking of stuff to do. I go to sleep to dream and live to sleep. Everyday is the same yet new.

I want my life to be warm and cozy, like a Russian fur hat. Live in a tin castle. Die in a Greek Epic. I want them to make a movie of how spectacular I crashed.

I wrote a list of all the questions I want answered before I’m dead and I carry it around in case I run into the people who can provide me the answers. Some are personal. Some don’t have an answer. Some only people I will never meet are able to answer. People who are dead. People who live in distant countries. Famous people. Scientists. Thor. The guy who invented sit-ups.

Did you know that ‘goodbye’ is a descendant of ‘God be with ye’?

To the East there are postcard plains. Grass leaning towards the horizon. Highways stabbing space. Lonely towns aching to disappear. A country of gas stations and hot dog stands. Long, cold walks in woods. Wilderness we share with the animals. Werewolves and such. Black bottles of whiskey.

The highways take us there. Atlases are slashed with red interstate wounds. The land is a knife victim. I travel the impersonal roads to towns I’ve never heard of. Mountains named after outlaws. I watched desert sunsets in Arizona. The sky touch both ends of the world in Montana. I drank champagne on a roof in New York on New Year’s. I drove through the swamps outside New Orleans bleary-eyed and insane and made it through to Memphis listening to The Who.

Everywhere everything and nothing.

There are countless vines of grapes that will get smashed into wine and swish around in my glass. I will stare at the water going down the drain while washing the glass and think of my heart, so gentle and easily crushed. There will be hundreds of birds waiting in the trees to sing to you. Buddha throws up his hands and laughs. What do you do? Think of your heart. Is it full of tables and chairs and beautiful things?

Worshiping in bars. Drunk at the museum. Greasy rag sky. Blinking in the luminance of beauty.

Everywhere we go we go sure that both good and bad things will happen but when either of them do we can hardly believe it. We open our souls to stowaways and buy things to throw away. There’s a building in Silver Lake that is over ten stories tall and made of solid concrete. It’s sole purpose is so that the citizens of L.A. have an extra place to put their shit. Pretty soon the skyline will be nothing but public storage.

Everywhere we go we go sure that our thoughts alone  are special and unique, but they’re not, and when we find someone just like us we call it phenomenon.

The sun is finally coming out after an afternoon of writing, of rummaging my hands through my hair in deep thought, light thought, shitty-splattery thought. In Iran they’re in the streets bleeding for freedom, while over here I can’t think of a good reason to leave the house. Even with the sun claiming its throne in the sky. With the sparrows calling me their king.

I stay home flipping through a million channels. Looking for nothing, finding it in excess.

I go out to eat and the menu is bigger than a newspaper. The food comes out in wheelbarrows. Mash potatoes you can ski down.

Pretty soon nothing is going to impress me. There will be a billboard on every building and a reality show for every person. I can now listen to a radio station in Tokyo or Berlin or Moscow if I want. I can shoot deer frolicking in Vermont from my laptop. It’s true. I can pay to fly to space except I don’t have the money to pay to fly to space, so instead I’ll go to Saturdays Off The 405 at the Getty and take in the city finely splayed out in atoms and molecules.

After I’ll go to La Cabana and order chicken mole. This city is a tapestry. I take off my shoes and dance in my bare feet. It’s a stupid analogy.

Buddha throws up his hands and laughs.

What do you do?

Stomp On The Sky

The weather lately has been sad and sappy. Big, soppy, black and gray, beasts-of-clouds hovered over L.A like a mechanic’s washrag all week. It’s hard to get enthused about anything these days. The mood around town has been lethargic at best. Beautiful people just don’t have the will to exert much effort when the weather is this depressing.

It rained so lightly today that my car didn’t get a free wash as much as the dirt simply was diluted into mud. It rained while I slept so I didn’t see it either.  As far as experiences go, I could have done without today’s rain. In fact, I essentially did do without today’s rain, all except for seeing the puddles and drops on the cars. Having gained knowledge of said rainfall, though, I immediately felt a little sad for having missed it. Funny how the brain needlessly punishes us.

We all want perfection, all the time, but if we were to ever receive it it’d probably bore us in nanoseconds.

What we really want is comfort, I think. We want to be able to predict what the next day will look like. It is our lives’ mission to eliminate stress. We marry in order to know who we’ll be waking up to and who’ll we’ll buy Valentine’s day flowers for. We get careers so we know where our bread is going to be buttered. We buy marble tombstones so we know our final words are going to last.

The pitfall of all this activity is often comfortableness and happiness are not the same thing. At the end of the day there is still a nagging sensation that our lives could be bigger, better. ‘I was meant for more meaningful things’ is a common refrain when this happens. We like our lives but they’re not as great as the ones we imagined for ourselves a long time ago, when we were young. It’s like we bought a suit we thought looked respectable at the store and once we got home and put it on realized it’s not quite right, but we have no choice because it’s our only suit and we can’t just walk around naked.

We only have the ability of looking at our lives through one set of lens, ours, and that unfortunately means everything is slanted and sideways, biased. We see the world exactly how we feel about it. When everything is going along swimmingly and great you think clouds and rain and the grumpy homeless guy yelling are all charming trinkets of a beautiful life. If you’re in a shitty mood these things remind you how sad and ugly and smelly life is.

The way you think about the world colors your perception of it which reinforces your previously held belief. We do all this, of course, without thinking about it. An endless loop. On and on. No off.

It’s not really anything to tear your hair out over, though, it’s just how Man was programmed to deal with his environment. How we’re able to exist in an universe of endless stimuli. We’re hardwired to repeat patterns so the brain doesn’t have to work so hard conjuring everything from thin air. Can you imagine if you actually had to use your brain and think when you saw a stop sign, a burning stove, or $20 dollar bill. It’s because our brains immediately knows how to process this stuff that we can stop behind the line, avoid burning ourselves, or pay our bar tabs without too much mental exertion on our part.

The trick is acquiring productive habits and patterns.

In the words of the great Spencer Krug…

You know your heart
But it’s an idiot heart

I like to come up with games only I can play, and that aren’t really even games as much as exercises, just ways of looking at the world really. Today I’m going to notice color. Every thing I see I’m going to think, ‘Oh, there’s a blue car. A green door. A yellow pad of paper with blue lines on it.’ You should try it, it’s totally fun except it makes the day go by really slowly.

Have you ever been at work and daydreamed about being home on the couch watching telly and drinking a cold beer and then at night when you’re home in front of the television with a delicious Stella Artois in your hand you daydream about stuff at work?

Life is a fleeting glance. All your memories equal one snapshot. The present, however, is a vivid, hi-res movie that you’re staring in, occurring Now, and always compelling. Even when we don’t think so, you have to admit, life is pretty fucking compelling. Don’t think too much about the snapshots. Don’t worry about something that doesn’t exist. Nothing exists except for Right Now. It’s a basic — maybe the most basic — fact of life. Both past and future are just concepts. The present is the only thing you’re ever going to experience. It’s the only time frame you can touch. However obvious this fact is we still operate 90% of our lives in the past or future, always waiting for something good to happen, or if not, remembering when something good was happening. And yes, I did just pull that number out of my ass.

It’s Saturday. An ugly, dreary Saturday. But it’s life. And I’m not going to let a few clouds beat me. I’m going to stomp on the sky and dance my heretic’s jig. I’m going to stay right Here for a minute and drink a beer and think of nothing else but drinking that beer and the way the curtain string sways like a pendulum, back and forth, even though there isn’t a draft and nothing to move it.

Bank Life

My paycheck came in the mail so I hiked to the bank to make a deposit. It’s street cleaning day so cars only lined the south side of the street, all except one poor sap with a ticket waiting for him tucked under the wiperblade. They changed the name of the bank. There was a rabbit by the ATM that belonged to the homeless guy that sleeps next to the statue of the great man. I don’t know the name of the great man. I know the name of my new bank.

Fairfax Boulevard was humming and June Gloom drowned the city in gray. My headphones conveyed the songs of the Fleet Foxes. I was wearing shorts and a scarf and looked as confused as my clothes. I fed my account with money and considered the myriad ways to spend it. My account likes to eat envelopes with checks inside.

I went and bought a cup of coffee and decided to put off spending money for another day. Except for the coffee, and lunch of course. My frig is a vast, empty catacomb of cooled air, and so I really should go to the grocery store as well.

It’s quite impossible not to spend money. Even when I don’t have money I spend it. The Lakers are in the Finals — there’s no way you’re not going to buy a six-pack to watch the games. You’re out of toothpaste, what are you going to do? At least the premiere party on Friday was free, but the valet wasn’t.

It’s an endless chain of need and want that gets us, no, forces us, from one day to the next.

Haircuts.
Scotch tape.
Cable.
Afternoon Coffee.
Lip Balm.
New book.
Gas Money.
Car Insurance.
Diner Out.
Art Supplies.
Smoothies.

Don’t get me started on shoes, clothes, beauty supplies, booze, music, rent, etc…

This life is not ours. It’s a binary wonderland. A bar coded universe you navigate by swiping plastic. A mathematical haunted house. The variables are down to the decimals. It’s a bank life. We’re just cardholders.

They’re kicking the vagabonds out of Venice. They’re filling in the swamps. They’re setting fire to the barn to chase out the rats. They’re handing out pink slips to your dreams. They’re cleaning up Brooklyn.

I don’t know whether to jump in or hitch a ride out of town. I don’t know whether to jeer or cheerlead. Maybe I’ll just pass out cups of water at the rat race, and not actually take part. Maybe there is a way to win by not even playing. Maybe that’s true for not just atomic warfare, but the day to day warfare we take part in as well.  The scramble and dash. The pull and push. The alarm going off at 8:30am. Walking to the ATM. Getting the mail. Lighting torches and gathering pitchforks.

I got back to my apartment with the last of my coffee and turned on the television. I watched it for a spell and then turned it off. I looked around at my things and concluded that I needed new things. Starting with a new couch. I took a deep breath and wondered what that costs these days. I looked up at the sky and sighed that at least that’s still free.

I didn’t hear the sky reply.

Today Is Going To Be The Day (or tomorrow)

Today is not going to be like the others.

You’re going to do that piece of street art you’ve been planning for seven months. You’re going to make stencils and wear ripped jeans. Your ideas are going to come alive. Time is nothing but buttons on your coats.

There is nothing stopping you.

Nothing…

(not me)

You are going to go out into the city and search out all who are hopeless and lost and point them to the Way, into the loving, compassionate arms of the Universe. You are going to reinvent what it means to spread joy.

There is too much to lose.

Perhaps, all of it.

(except the blues)

You’re going to write something important. Something that describes what it means to be you, what this world is all about, being alive today, in this age. It’s going to be daring and original and absolutely no one will read it! It’ll be outlawed and you’ll be incarcerated by the State.

There is so much to say.

And I am ready to hear.

(I’m listening)

We’re going to put on our clothes, drive our automobiles to the mechanic, and exist fearlessly and pure in spite of it all. We’re going to defy convention and established rule and live our lives to match our soul’s dreams. Even if it kills us.

There is a wonderful life to be had.

I want to be had.

(if only we were not so dumb)

We are not going to be afraid — even though it’s easier that way. Even though there are spiders, ghosts, and dark corners, and haunted woods. We are going to be brave and blind dancers. Dancing in the basement.

There’s nothing left to kill.

Nothing.

(even spiders deserve to live)

I’m going to invest in time and not just a watch and I’m going to grow as a person. I’m going to learn a different language and immerse myself in other cultures. I’m not going to bellyache anymore. I want to be the type of person that smiles at everything.

There is so much joy to share.

So much joy.

(It’s a matter of recognition)

I’m going to swim, fly, dance, sing, recite poetry. I’m going to shake hands and take a bow. I’m going to open up my heart and toughen up. I’m going to start a religion and when it fails start another one. I’m going to offshore the deities. It’s going to be immaculate.

There is another world within this one.

Within this.

(it’s full of chaos and beauty)

I am going to be here now, as the mystics say. I’m going to be radiant and brilliant. Educated. Enlightened. Engaged. Today is full of possibilities. There are crystals in the glass and pearls in the grass. There are fish fossils in the asphalt. The sun is up and golden. Today is like no other.

There are none as special as this one.

This one day…

TODAY

(or tomorrow)

Walk Around Like You Own The Joint

I’ve been walking around town, looking into windows, buying things I don’t need, nor even want. I like the way people treat you when you buy something from them. They almost look you in the eye. I’ve been seeing doctors so they tell me I’m alright. I’ve been hanging outside the jail to remind myself I’m not in one.

Bartenders tell me it’s going to be okay. Sycophants cheer me on.

The buildings sway when I walk by. I remind myself they’re not going to fall and keep moving. I’ve been grinding these shoes down and now they’re just two flapping pieces of rubber. Life is sometimes better left to a song. I remind myself the planet was this way when I found it and keep singing.

Cab drivers give me Christmas cards. Junkies sing me carols.

I’ve been running with nighttime animals. These beasts look so elegant and sparkly pouring bottled water out on a cactus. The years go by like a bullet train while the days’ excruciating labor runs you over. You’re tied to the tracks and the damn thing is you’re the one who laid them there. I nail in the last spike and keep shoveling coal.

My brain gets upset with me. My lungs like to scream.

The Earth trembles and the pictures fall off the wall. I wear sunglasses inside so no one knows what I’m thinking. I’ve been drawing pictures on post-its and counting my change. It’s the first day of June and I’m considering going back to sleep until July. I keep writing although nothing comes out. The little birds outside crown me the Sparrow king.

Heckled by the crows. Jeered by the telephone wires.

The purple eucalyptus tree is twittering with birds. The garbage bins have been pillaged.  Trucks rumble nearby with debris to be hauled away. I’ve been watching the city tear itself up and rebuild limb by limb for thirty years and it still looks the same to me, sun-dried and pale, feline. Los Angeles likes to lick its paws and drag in rats.

The ground speeds me along. The sky holds me here.