it is the rainy season i am playing its song.
i sent Her a post card
taped it over my eyes and floated across the Pacific ocean on my back
it read 'ok...i give up. i am done with hide and seek. you can come out now. hello?'
and in the mornings i still wake early just to say hi and wait around.
i wake with my forehead hot and sweating out a rainyseason
i think it washed away the oil and the what holiness was left underneath put in its place a dumb fever that i can't think out and i can't think.
not with my skull soaked in sweat and dryin' up in the rising sun heat like bent sheets of plywood i don't know if i can bend it back or keep my thoughts straight anymore.
now i keep my eyelids drawn like curtains. they can't lift You up off this bed called Morning it is dawn and they are tired of trying. i am watching neon stars wash up on the back of the lids little suns rising red like blood through that maritime flag i use when i'm out of gauze
i am tired
of old bandages
on new wounds.
each red star does its best impression of you.
so i'm tired of seeing, seeing You here all over texas. so i went out got me a table top globe, used my palm, wet with the dew on your hair, to spin it slow and careful kept my eyes closed stopped it with a finger on the other side, there, i am going there, wherever that is, so long as its got good food cheap booze things to distract me from you and is nowhere near here.
tokyo.
so here i am. much love from japan.
i've shut myself inside its coasts and i'm not coming out not until you knock.
holdin' this pillow 'round my head over my ears cause i can't sleep with your deafening drowsy coughs, keepin' quiet 'cause i hear You when i sing, keepin' my hands holdin pens 'cause i feel you when i fold them to pray, keepin' my eyes down on this desk 'cause i think you've painted yourself into the sky and im too afraid to check, my mouth shut 'cause i know you'll find a way in, i know you will.
yea i've shut myself inside of it.
forty days i fasted on a diet of
white rice
raw egg
torn paper
origami cranes
soggy comics
subway cars
pond water
koi fish
shinto gods
dead emperors
buddhist bells
deer feed
green tea
japanese beer
chicken heart
hello kitty
and puddles of black ink.
on day four oh my heart was nice and ripe and fat with song.
i could hear it beating fast between two train tracks two wheels beating on the floorboards like lovers on top a shinkansen bullet train makin love at two hundred km/h sometimes people want to see things blur past and know that we are moving fast
forty days i let my nails grow long carved a circle in my chest and pulled my heart straight out,
cut down an ancient cherry blossom, the oldest i could find (i needed something that had seen things built up and torn down over and over and still blooms bright bright pink each year) stripped the sides and fashioned it into a wooden bowl, ya know, the kind you use for coffee in kyoto.
i cracked my heart open on its rim
poured the yolk inside
ate the shell
stretched out a broken English language across the top as a lid
(broken so you hear the sound and beat sing out through the holes)
dug upward into a mountain for about three nights until I had just enough dried-up dirt on my hands.
when my nails finally fell off i screwed them onto the top of my bowl with ballpoint pens already run out of ink.
i didn't have a spare.
so i spit on the jetty below, struck oil, mixed the two into the pacific, painted it on as a lacquer,
and here it is.
i made this instrument for You.
it isn't hard to play my heart, not if ya know how to hold it right.
hold it now.
hold this out before your chest outloud and up high, You,
come to me.
make me into an instrument.
a porcelain bathtub.
put your hooks in the pacific winds
ride the current 'round to this here past.
come to my door and knock and I open up.
lay me out open up my ribs pour in freezing water and ice take off your clothes
(or bathe in them).
let your hair down.
step inside.
fold your legs.
use them to make me sing.
make music with me.
make sure you leave the old water inside.
('cause i want to know like you're still in here)
and show me how to hold it.
it's my first time.
so here i am. much love from japan.
---
sunday best.
we writers
we are vultures, ya know, birds of pray.
we go sing hymns in the sky and wear the wind like our sunday best.
i confess, the air is all i know.
in fact i am up there now speaking into and outta my human self through a wire too thin to see and two well hidden cups on either end. I apologize. This kid is young his skin is wood and cracked, his voice still cracks, when he cares the most when he tries to use his tongue and lift this love like a boulder out his throat, and I still don't know how to pull these strings to make him dance, or even how dress the poor guy.
they say 'business casual', you know, look laid-back but confident and presentable
then what do band shirts and bitten off fingernails tell about me?
well i don't know.
so i call upon the birds of pray, saints tailors and seamstresses, to sew shirts with verse and jeans with scripture that's died with the indigo stains of one-eighth Cherokee blood that build fires out of stories that burn quiet but burn to this day in my veins. i hear it brings out the green in my eyes.
they showed me my family tree
it is a treehouse in marksville lousiana.
they brought with them the boltcutters they blow notes through like flutes, cut through the locks of gray hair tangled on the gate and kicked down the back door.
in the back bedroom there is a closet where my great aunt Helen stays
spannin' underground across texas and louisiana
it is where, as little kids, my mother and her sisters played dress up with state lines and wore the gulf coast in their hair and shirts the size of my papa's guitar
it's something you gotta grow into
they put seeds in their pockets and bury their bedtime gowns in the backyard ground
it's something you gotta grow into
their sleeves dangle down trace tic tac toe and little clouds in the mound of dried up orange leaves
they sag like hand-me-down wings from my uncle stanley.
and i am trying on stanley's two wings.
his clothes forty-four stories too big but when i sing they somehow seem to fit.
(my uncle stanley,
he's a bird too
and can sketch the female form to a tee.)
in this closet i found an old jacket that my dad wore in college and thought was good as gone
there are holes on the elbows from pushing out hours on a desk 9 to 5 to 9 to 5 until the blue sleeves turned gold
so he sold the jacket and spent it all on my education so one day i'll call myself a writer and be poor but proud and chip my own words outta lead musketballs and say 'dad, no, i am more proud of you.'
and my dad raised me right so i'll say it.
i am scared.
i have seen ghosts in designer suits that wrap round little kids
call their veins up to the surface
and put an emptiness in their skin.
drivin' foreign cars fast burnin' gas gaspin' nightmare skidmarks on this here dirt path
but they cannot fly.
and my papa says
'will i am, i am i am,
you sure can.'
we writers,
we are vultures, ya know, birds of pray
we find prayers lying inside dead animals on the road
and pick at their matted fur out for poems
we dip our claws in their blood like inkwells and spell the words 'i love you so so much' across no name roads that run between two no name towns.
there are pages stuck inside these wings.
there is ink drippin' from these feathers.
when you hear the suits come at you bullhorns blaring out like bulls on parade
you
don't fly away.
no.
you stay.
stay in the middle of the street and stare them down.
...
keep staring.
...
stare till they slam on their brakes
stare them into a complete fucking stop and then stay and stare at them some more
make them go around you
when they ask what you make for a living, say
"i live
and i make
and i stare at people like you
i stare you scared till you run home.
i make you afraid motherfucker.
i dig up the grave you buried your old blankey in ya know the one you used to hide under at night and i keep my shovel right in here.
there are pages stuck inside these wings.
there is ink drippin' from these feathers."
