Long Time No See

Long time no see. I would definitely attest to that being true. All it took was the first global pandemic of your lifetime, and an earthquake (also your first). Now look at you here; Being able to write a whole sentence out of the words that have been jumbled bees in your mind for the past few weeks, no months, some even years.

It just all feels so surreal. I didn't want any part in this deal.
Things finally came home. Suddenly like a car crash but slow enough to watch it happen the world stopped being 'out there.' Home became a part of the world I already wasn't sure if I wanted much business in. I came home to be an ostrich. I came home to close the door behind me and leave the world behind it. I danced and hid the key, I was sure of it. I delved into myself because I am lucky enough to have a home in which to do it in.

That's a bee I can't get out of my skull. At least the bee has a home to be in. What happens to all of those who don't have a home to be in right now? What about them? The tired, the poor... the forgotten and the already broken. I think of my days in India... what will happen to them? I look at my parents and want to believe in a god I know won't be there to listen.

There the bees go again. Getting me off track. Buzzing all around. Here and there.

I just wonder when this all will end...

Untitled One

I’m a writer who never writes. I just create riddles in my head but leave them for dead. Somethings are better left unsaid. I want to create something that speaks the truth meanwhile, my mind is the jumbled pieces of the magnetic poetry set on your refrigerator door. I want something more than all these hypocrisies. Just give me a little himalayan salt and none of us will be at fault.

Nightrise.

It’s one a.m. August 7th 2017 in Healy, Alaska. Summer is fading and time is fading into the crucible winter to come. Just like it always has. In this day in age, hoping it will continue to just the same. I sat on the front porch of my little cabin in our little cabin community in the woods and thinking how much I would enjoy a nice menthol cigarette right now.

Shanty town is a place quite enough to realize how far from the world you are and populated enough to remind you that you’re not alone. Like the rest of Alaska vices and trees are easy to find here, boundless. Alaska is like the hubble surrounded by nothing but a vastness, hard to comprehend or imagine without being seen, of trees. The pines and birch reach on for days and days. In the winter for months and months. Nothing but a highway and a few roadside cafe’s and gas stations scattered along its path. Most of the businesses aren’t even open year round, only when the sun shines all day and all night. Soon half the town will be boarded up, three-fourths of the population will be gone, and the sunniest thing you’ll find is maybe the orange juice in the store.

I’m also thinking about how much I would enjoy not wanting a cigarette.

I looked up at the sky tonight and as I did for the first time since early spring I saw the big dipper. As clear as day. The seven stars laid bare across the backdrop sky, twilight hadn’t quite faded to blackness, and it won’t for another week or two at most. The sun had set in the south and as you looked behind and spun around to face the last rays of the setting sun you can see the night fighting for its way back into the sky. Almost as if the stars of the big dipper worked together to scoop the veil across the sky. At the tip of the spoon the veil couldn’t quite reach and essence of sunlight still beamed a brighter purple, to pink, to orange, to red at the brim of the northern sky. Summer isn’t done sewing winters veil.

I smoked the cigarette. Couldn’t finish even half.

I sat there for awhile. Eventually my attention was pulled towards little mr. vol as he scurried from his hideaway across the law and into his presumable food stash. I looked up where I felt I had just been. It happens so fast. Hazy  clouds covered the just beaming big dipper, while the sun drifted even further fading effortlessly into nights cool hands. The breeze blew cool air all around while the sound of a howling dog echoed in the background noise of bustling highway traffic and tired over gravelly roads. Luminescent small town echoes. The breeze dips quickly and begins to nip at the back of the uncovered arms. It drew me inside where I laid down and wrote this. Unable to write in weeks that felt like months I found myself with an empty old journal. Eventually it was three or four in the morning and this is what was left. Once it all was out for the most part, I drifted to sleep and dreamt it all again.

Take me to the Mountain Tops

My mothers always taught me to take the high road. You don't realize until you're at the peak that you're the one left with so much more room to fall, and be broken into a million little pieces. I taught myself how to put myself back together again. 

My grandmother was the first one to ask me where I thought the mountains and oceans came from. I was six. I said the earth. She told me God. I suppose I feel the goddess more than most. So I left. I went and looking for something else. 

My spirit always led me to the scenic routes. Rolling open landscapes, peaks higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide, water ponds and lakes made of glass blown stars who cried for their mothers warmth and rained down in an ancient time lost in memory to most. I felt a beauty no man, no man made God could muster. They can only ever try to emulate. 

And I've lost myself there. No questions to answer. No questions needed asking. I wander and I'm lost in love with it.

Now my mind is taking the road less traveled by. Sometimes I see the footprints of those before me left in the mud after the rain. Treading lightly to not leave my own and walk alone. I see more mud and bootprints on the faces of the strangers I meet along the way. No need or drive to ask or wonder what road they're on or headed to. Mud and dirt left on them from those who have trampled on them. Blood and tears - their own and from the ones they've pushed down and the ones they've tried to pick up - encrusted around their eyes and and trying smiles. 'Let me take you to the stream so you can wash yourself clean. Take this fruit I don't need, take care of yourself out here in this crazy world we were all chosen to live, like it or not. And if you must take my flowers, pull them from the ground gently, leave just one root and petal so I can grow again after. Try your best replant them where they will help you grow.' 

Take them to the mountains so that when they fall the petals rain down on those low valley roads and create a new scene. 

Midnight Sessions

Once young and full hope, now complacent and smoking too much dope. Seems like all these big life dreams are about to go up in smoke. 

We've choked on the smoke from pouring water over our burning ones. Wondering if it's better to let it burn or wash out and drown away. Still we can't leave till we've tried. We would do the same for you - the shirt off my back and to the last breath of air on this dying space mission -  we'll give it all to you. Would you? 

This world seems to be tearing at the seems. We can't keep fighting for these dreams. Things are not what they seem. We tell ourselves things are right, but we're all too self-satisfying to put in towards the fight. 

I grew up living in a world that never existed. There's no glass ceiling. It's crashed in from the storm, shattering where the rest of us held it up. Our mothers fed us soft fictional  to keep our hope ignited and fed it till we became brighter than stars over mountain peaks. They knew there would be those who would add fuel to the flames when our fire was just right. They knew there would be those who pledged a sip of water only to douse the whole thing with no hope of respsarking. 

Some come to water the flowers and some stay, and then there are the boys who taken them anyway. Picked for a moment and gone forever. Tell me awful one don you think all flowers go to heaven? Do weeds go to hell? Let's plant this new garden and see. We'll plant seeds of our own and hope they grow. Once we figure this out, feed them to the rabbits, the birds, the bees. Nothing left for you or me. We'll burn the ground and leave it behind. 

Running off with no where in mind. Staying complacent but always in our minds. This ones grown and died too many times over. Here is where we'll be. Come find us and see. 

Bees Knees

My mind is lost in the forest and my feet are taking me towards the Skye. I'm staying here, just trying to get by. By and by we all get by.
I don't want to fly, I don't need to fight. Let me be here and rest.
One more cup of coffee, just another cup or my life will stay in standby.
All these thoughts are buzzing around where my mind use to be. I can't seem to get them out. I just want the bees knees, not up here where it's too tight of a squeeze between what's left and all those mindless thoughts. My mind is gone and my soul can't fill space where it needs to be.
I've lost my keys and tried to replace them luck but I'm bound to lose that just as fast as the rest.
I'm falling behind, or was I just too far ahead from the rest? Do I catch up or just play dead? I don't know.
No, we do know. I know. We've played dead long enough. I don't need to catch up. We need to get lost together instead. Time to get lost in the sea. This swirling sea of pine and birch with blue skies overhead. This time I promise to keep my feet on the ground and my head in clouds. I'll be making wishes until I'm found. Then I'll be gone again, moving to a new ground.

"Know the difference between those who stay to feed the soil. And those who come to take the fruits."

Midnight Session #2

She woke up in a room full of people she somewhat knew. She’d be alive before then but then the lights and music actually set in. She looked around and it was the eve of 2017. There were streamers and balloons galore littered all about the floor and from shiny strings on the ceiling. Surrounded by a group of strangers in the middle of a popular but forgettable often regrettable place.

-weeks later-

You know what happened last night? I stretched. I stretched myself long and tall. Let the blood rush upside down back through my veins. My vision was blurry for twenty of thirty while I stopped the flow upwards into my my brain. Instead I lowered it down to the ground. Or at least what this laminate hardwood floor suffices as. It’s the middle of Winter in Alaska and I haven’t felt the Earth between my feet or the wind on my heels since autumn came. Only the rigid long nail of weather moving about. There’s been furred and covered, at least ankle high boots, since end of October.

Apparently there is a man down south, a man so vile the history books foretold of in its repeated rhymes and lore. But nobody reads much of anything anymore. He breathes everything I’ve held my breathe in hope for. He is the breath against mine. Against every fake-told lore of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness I once was told how the world was. Those wacky sci-fi books and shows aren’t so far off base anymore. Everything feels upside down. There’s monsters about. Monsters we created from our own fascination. This all feels apart of a world I thought was old told fiction or over whispered histories.

I don’t want to be poetic. I don’t want to write my fancy fuck feelings and thoughts about what is going on. I have nothing to say. Any words just feed into the divisive slicing machine drenched in oil that sits in a ‘cost effective’ factory that is fed with lead streaked water. Good thing there is bottled water for sale. A man only makes so much when he spends all his time working through the grind.

 I just want to sing, dance, and drink under the moonlight day light until the sunlit nightlight.

This is not the world I was sang into it. She always sings me to sleep. We’re all just a phone call away in this day and age.

“Hush little baby, don’t you cry.
One of these mornings you’re going to rise up singing.
Then you’ll spread your wings and you’ll take the sky.
But till the morning, there is a nothing that can harm you.”

Feels like she’s spelling out my name.

Driving down the Alaskan highway half past 5pm, hour and a half past twilight, nightlight. Snow and ice covered trees and swamps rest easy. It’s not so dark with the radio up high and our bad singing voices to light the star lit skies. If we’re lucky we’ll see the sky cry colors of red, blue and green tonight. We’re not the only ones looking up to the skies thinking, ‘what the fuck is going on?’

Have spine. Stand up. No matter how far away you feel. No matter how small you know you are.  Reach for the tops of mountains. ‘The only man who doesn’t make it to the top of the mountains is the man who stands in another paths telling him which was to go.’ We can do better. Listen to the words in what your favorite Sunday alone with wine song says. ‘Rock out like the mangoes are in season,’ Anis Mojgani directs me to.

It’s been too cold even for fires. Today the sun hit my face for just a few seconds and it made all the difference in the world. Just two days ago it felt like the new year was beginning. Just yesterday it was the Chinese New Year. Today is a day from the late night of yesterday. Don’t let tomorrow be just another night. Goodnight.