six a.m. radio.

welcome back.

we are coming to you live and alive from bryan.

i'll be filling in this show with flesh and bone

sorry i'm no holy ghost like your usual host.

at the moment he is broken like bread

and placed on millions of tongues on fire.

me?

i have this: a handheld radio

one i use prophesy with

i hold it to my chest and the words come out in static but loud like

'In weather, there's a cold front is blowing inside of us

so kids, make sure your parents dress their souls in layers, amen...'

welcome back.

my god calls and i return.

we use our hands like farmers sculpting fields

we keep in touch.

we stretch and make like the bones i broke way back when

we bend and break and then grow back again,

but stronger

this time around

i pray on one knee and renew wedding vows i first made way back when

sayin' with a scrape on my elbow

'eh doesn't hurt as bad as i thought.'

my god says see? i told you didn't i

and the pain will you sharper

so dive in

marry this marry something say yes soon

get on one knee more often

and while you're down there tie your shoes with second-chance laces loop swoop and pull yourself together again excempt in a double knot this time

so that you may run away towards five a.m. find the nearest accident and get hurt in it break your body tear at your ears and then get better

go way outta town to heal somewhere.'

so i do

i go out and find a great rusty oil tank no one knows about in a field no one tends and i lay on top of it i share stories with it i listen to it breathing asleep i pretend that rumbling noise below is an old skin of mine in the dryer, spinning with the bedsheet ghosts that haunted momo's back bedroom, stories i believed in and sat inside of like a fortress made of blankets and sofa cushions. then dawn breaks.

i hear my god sing in the Morning makin' six a.m. shimmer like

'the sky is a hall of mirrors on fire

and makes us shine like that too.

whether we like it or not. amen.'

welcome back.

my god calls and i return.

we are a tree branch, brittle like dogma

at last cracked cross the knee of Texas but only halfway

the splinters are graves that stick from the grass with angels breaking out of them,

come back at last to pluck their wings and walk like they are alive like us

my god calls holdin' a handful of their feather quills

she will write and send a thousand more letters to each of us in here

and make stamps look like blessings again,

ya know adhesive on one side and something to collect.

every stamp is another saint.

my god calls and i return.

we are broken but still holdin' on to one another.

we have made red rover a rite of passage.

we were characters in the first draft of Genesis but didn't make print.

'Welcome back

In the Beginning, two kids shuffled in their socks on Eden's carpet since all eternity and gave Yahweh little shocks when he wasn't lookin' and laughed and kept shuffling. They were quickly kicked out of Paradise. Ever merciful, God let them keep their socks. Amen.'

See, we invented electricity with our own two feet.

we know how to increase the signal strength of our prayers, praying not like this, but by folding my hand into hers with an hand radio in my left and bathtub overflowing in her right and we say let there be lightning amen and then we clap and evaporate into thunder, utter sound, if you tune your dials left of eden you'll pick up our signal as far as Bastrop, you'll hear us beat our pens on pages of Hindu scripture pulled taut Cross the tops of ear drums and hear our thunder talk in sanskrit like Da Da Da Be Self Controlled Be Charitable Be Compassionate we make our bodies into drums pullin' dead sea scrolls over our faces like a veil and tacking the ends in place

we

tune

our

self's

and wait to get struck by some stranger angel and hear how long our lungs ring out for.

we sleep with our own radios dialed in between bedsheet programs and in the Morning the white noise sounds like HOMMMMMMM cooked food and today i woke to the smell of gumbo. it was great.

i woke this Morning already laughing.

i woke this Morning,

really woke the Sun with nudge and kiss on the shoulder and after a night spent blind deaf half-dead and walking about light's out Dawn rolled around in bed and said.

'hi.

it's light outside.

yep already, so

open your eyes and learn how to sing with them, sing in everything you see.

write it down. go ahead use your pen like a radio transmitter.

this bed is a radio station

i hid a microphone under your pillow to

broadcast your dreams good and bad 'cause

we can't live like this off the air let's get on it

we aren't alive not till we get out of bed.

let's wake up again.

we are going live and alive in

5, 4, (3 2 1)

(open your eyes)

welcome back.

i am here in the studio with our creator.

if you have any questions

concerns

comments

criticisms

confessions

stories

secrets

songs

sound advice

shout-outs to saints

prayers

or poems,

we're taking callers.

aka i am over Alaska and see the lights already.

She, palms out, says 'open wide dear'. Sleeve rolled she reaches into my mouth down my throat felt around the blue and white lukewarm like old bathwater she's bent over the white porcelain splashing my insides out pulls the drain and i drain my lungs are empty. She takes my breath away pulls it outta me folds it in fours slips it in her shirt shakes the ocean from her heels and turns. 'Au revoir'. She saves it for later. Back home in Paris and Paris Texas She will roll my breath in cheap cigarette paper with weed sugar basil and chips of caked dirt light up and smoke my memory my reason the songs I sing in my sleep, pentatonic scales i don't know when my eyes are open. i am breathless. i have no use for outside air so soyanara.

i'm digging now. Down and down into the ground. i keep my company with the dead. i breathe in soil and sediment and earth, it smells like gasoline and then it smells like a rain-soaked Houston curb. i taste the fossils of ancient fish and pour on primordial soup like soy sauce (it is an acquired taste). i dig further in the soil and come out the bottom of a cloud and grabbed a hold of it as i came out and hung down for a bit before lettin go.

It is the rainyseason they say. i am six miles over a white blanket named Alaska. It is old and worn and the people count its holes in degrees celsius. She's packed me into the earth like luggage into the hills like a round Texas belly, pregnant, She made Texas into a mother and She's made me in the Pacific's likeness. i have come out of this cloud dirty. i have planted my arms inside my own formless frame palms out fingers stretching out like tree roots stretching out a waking sore Morning.

With one hand i hold myself together, caught hold a second wind and my blades spin again they stir the thin air and whistle out a song which becomes another sky for You. With the other hand I hold this gale and hold it hold it till i cough out six miles up. i sound like thunder and look like a storm comin.

i part the haze like a curtain slit.

And then fields made of neon lights humming red white red white yellow purple ah ah kay kee kay oh kay. It shines a different shine. It dresses up in brushstrokes. Ink. Cherry blossoms sing and sway west, bowing down and down into a Far West i call home.

i am reaching for the furthest branch.

i learn its song in all the pink,

a sedative

hymnal, nodding off

and shot cross the sky.

i skirt my way around the dimensions of time it is two moments at once.

6:07 in the pm

8:07 in the am

565 milesanhour

909.279 kilometersanhour

31869 miles traveled

51288.184 kilometers traveled

26000 feet up

7924.8 meters up

and years and years yet to go

how many i know not.

In my dreams it seems all I do is move

faster than my eyes can focus on one thing

see,

these are the most real.

We are at the crest of this Arc.

Midway through it all it open-mouthed where only thin threads of light are left.

You fill

in the yawning

blank.

This Boeing ain't a plane no more. We stand on a Great Stage falling stuck in a tailspin on fire. i am dressed up like a pilot, scarf goggles jacket patches and all. We all fly alongside the Sun dog fighting across the Pacific "comeandgetit" written on the soles of our boots razor teeth painted on the sides (i am

warhawk

tomahawk

kittyhawk

spitfire

zero

oscar

betty

bomber

flying tiger

you have met demons masquerading as airplanes

seen them dance like birds and whistle birdsongs through giant fuckin' turbine engines they got booze and fire on their breath the illegitimate second cousins of dragons.

i am allofem).

this is me, doin' that dance now hands around the Sun's hips stepping on her toes on accident. If you fly close enough and stare into its blindness and out again you will see a small girl with ashy grayed hair and cheeks blackened with soot pullin' the Sun westward that same fishing line over the big Blue gaping between far East/West coasts on the other side of the timeline bent where alpha meets end. She is small and insignificant and invisible against all the burning yellow and orange but Her hands hold great things, anything She wants. Her small fingers tap islands like piano keys push fault lines like organ stops. At night She skips home to a pocket of space that She carved out her own hand and watches you peeking through her bedroom door slightly cracked open 'cause She's scared of the dark of metaphysics and can't sleep with theory hiding quiet waiting under the bed. She won't come out all the way, no not for you, not until it's her turn to carry the fire and the light so she pulls it west like a wagon filled with lightbulbs illuminated by the static-electricity! of her imagination. She is shuffling around now, rubbing Her feet and the socks on them across a sunspot-stained tanbark that will tell her stories if She blows dust off her lips and puts her ear down flat on the floor. Her tongue is glass with a copper tip. Falling further down this line She will one day kiss the ocean mouth open with tongue, set the ocean bed on fire, magnetize the islands to reverse the continents outward drift and show us Eurasia again, i can dream can't i. ok.

Out of the airplane window i ask her name. She says She doesn't know and even if She did, She wouldn't tell me. (In time I will learn that name, for now we shall say 'She is Ameterasu She is blinding and and tidal and radiant.) With the other hand She tugs at our plane, the string running on the inside and through us.

We are marionettes. All of us.

Strung together in rows suspended at what was it? 36000 feet over the Bering Sea. The lines are thin, so thin they are invisible to the untrained eye, so thin you have to be utterly covered in gasoline and/or gunpowder to ever notice them. They are tied to the drums in our ears. We can't hear from all the blasts. A man two seats over holds up his string and we frantically tie together our loose ends in a bow and still we do not speak the same Language...

(maybe if we turn around fly the other way round and round the years and find the coast of age Two, the terrible polyglot two's, that ain't sand on the beach it's sugar.)

So i open my mouth and put my fingertips on my tongue. It is tied up in a tangled ball of string like fishing line allfuckedup on the pole She threw in the gasoline garage corner not lookin' twice damn idiot kid. shit. we're goin down. i try to pull it out and undo the mess but the string is caught on my teeth, that same fishinline diving into the wet brown rocks down there at the end of the jetty, watch where yer castin' the thing Idiot Kid, out to the left come on now. we're goin down. and so i sit...

at the end of this jetty. i am tied up in the fishin' line (Idiot Kid right?) my ear remains tied to the man at my side. We each fall asleep and listen to the others' dreams. i hear in him the Pacific stirred by the sharp point of a spear while his mother hums an old kitchen song, ocean churned like butter to create islands and typhoons. The other man hears in me Bing Crosby for the first time ever.

we're goin down.

we are marionettes all of us.

tentatively titled 'tokyo flyers.'

maybe i finished a first draft of the second book (the one about japan). maybe i didn't. either way, i'm close. it is currently only a haphazard impression of an impression of a book. a second draft is definitely in order. or maybe i'll keep it that way. who knows. anyways, here's another selection from it, to celebrate. hooray.

---

daibutsu.

Amida, the Big Buddha, sits for his seven hundred fifty-ninth year. There is a sun setting in Amida's chest and rays shining out of the stone and into the trees and recycled again underground. I am walking to Amida, even while I sit by this statue. I am walking. And Waiting still.

We come through the gate and see Amida. A collective gasp. Taking air into our lungs all at once and guarding it, as if this beautiful thing might steal it out from our lips. The kids are holding cameras to their eyes. I am walking ahead.

'Yo, try to hold the Buddha in your hand. Just try come on lemme take a picture.'

'Ehh. No thanks. Heh'

I try to be polite but...

I am not in the business of holding things in my hand or grasping things in my head or keeping history under my tongue. I am offering myself up to It, hoping it will hold me instead. I am walking now. I'll try to feel the stone cracks despite the residual numbness in my hands. It has been weeks since the flight over here, but fourteen hours of sitting in one place sure does take its toll.

(In the year 1495 AD a Tsunami washed away Amida Buddha's house for the second or third or fifteenth time.

This is only what I hear.

I hear that the storm was a forerunner cast from a New World. The winds were first born off the eastern seaboard in the slow cough of an old man with red skin who often rolled over and covered himself in a blanket that he borrowed from a stranger with white skin. Come June he was often cold, despite the youngamericanSun.

He said his hands don't work like they used to. 'But I can still build a Fire. I can still do that. I have love remaining.' He sat by his Fire, lotus-style like Amida Buddha, the last Fire he will build. He built it high as he could and then he grew into it.

Across an ocean, Amida watched it through the windows. Amida remembers how that Fire rose up and danced on top of the darkhorizon. For three years it rose up and breathed the ocean in and out. On the third year, the Fire crested over into a great tidal wave and hit Kamakura. And to this day Amida swears the Fire looked exactly a Phoenix. Others say a Dragon.

Still others say it was simply a fire, no more no less, but that it still burns alive today. It flickers and burns the Morning. And then it splits into thousands and thousands of littler flames that each become one of us, again and again, whenever we

wake up.)

Amida sits by a fire too. Burning somewhere with the waves, carried inland by these waves, and then smothered in the jetties. It is five o'clock. The fire dwindles again in the sea and is brought back inside seashells. The fire is a sound. Ghost stories told by falling coins. Bird calls. Stars turning over in their deepblack cots.

(The stars are also all-so cold. And they itch now, ever since the white man dropped anchor on the moon. The stars are sitting dead still because they are sick and afraid to move. And their Light holds decades and waves them like a flag in an old black and white photograph.)

I am walking. Not walking away from Home but rather carrying it on my back. I can't just brush Texas off my shoulders and I sure don't want to.

I am walking directionless too, listening, following the ever-tugging sounds on my ear with no particular place in mind. I am trying my damndest to just stare at my feet and feel that wire pull on my eardrum left and right and forward. Otherwise I'd end up second-guessing myself and toss my destinations out like trash and retrace my steps over and over and then just stop stubbornly in a place I'm not happy with. We humans never know where to go and towns are so uncertain even when we are certain of them. With our heels we draw circles and frowny-faces in beach sand that Shinto gods study and trace in Heaven.

I am just walking.

(Will you come with me? I know you are tired. I am too. I swear I will carry you if need be.)

Just walking still

over to Amida sitting still

in her seven hundred and fifty-ninth year still

her eyes shutting still

but never shut still.

They bend time like origami.