Pico de Orizaba

Pico de Orizaba
Taken from Huatusco, Veracruz, the closest town to Margarita's family's ranch.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Call and Response Poem; James and Ross

September 7th, 1999

To Ross
No sadness in this one, no wont, no confusion, no wierdness, 
no sexual battery of the self,
no frustration to clog our sinks, 
no anticlimactic fuzzthinkers......
I just wanted to know how your holiday was......


oh, and to say I am well and 
in no way close to the place I was in the last few confusing middle of the night shots in the dark..
I fed myself up with that whole amberthing 
and one of the shots hit a piñata that bled all over me 
the rediculous rain that rains and rains all over us and we can't stop it, 
it is there, for us or against us....
always for us and against us, 
it hits and we can laugh, smile or get angry and upset...
let it rain...
let it rain out my cigarette..., thankfully so. 
There is much much power in the littlest things... 
like turning the ringer off on the phone. 
I decided that no call could make me feel any better and 
she wouldn't call anyway and 
if she was to I wouldn't care or need that. No good could come of that anyway...
no call could give me what I was looking for so
I switched it off for a night, then two. 
There is power in that, 
a great tantamount starshaking power that does wonders 
that St. John's Wort and funny movies can only imagine reaching....
Maybe you remember it. It is a definate bachelor type of power, 
maybe an illegal intoxicant..
It was and it worked. It made me free, 
like throwing away a half smoked smoke, 
like turning off a song that you love halfway through..
It was necessary and made a step, 
a step out of the darkness......the night they drove old dixie down...
.na na na na nana na an na na ............... .Love James

To James

To reply...
To reply with a laugh and a smile and a sigh. 
No tears in the eye? 
No Joe 
we must flow with things not so salty and wet yet sweet sweat. 
To reply with a gleam in the eyes 
when Joe NOLA boy tells stories of morning glorious dreams come true 
like that time he decided it was time to stop stewing in love-sick soup telephone ringer roues.
Yes! 
And bravo para mi hombre if only I could speak Spanish. 
And yes. 
I found a chord and accord a connection and reflection.
Some circumspection... manipulated...
and that blood stained rust caked word we worship or adore adulterate then abhore
when SHE forgets that mi penga AINT no sign of the times and a nursery rhyme spewing lemon flavored lyme. 
An exclamation point 
or an untouched joint 
choking on token moments of affection mistaken for truth 
and a blood stained rust caked gold plated peuter word at times used as a sword that some love-wishers hord.
Yes it was a good weekend and a holiday. 
No piñatas spitting upon my mind multicultural candy coins. 
Just sweet sweat minus chocha amarga. 
A vacation from spirit stimied by New New Yawkers and unhospitality hawkers. 
From conformity sharks and matty matty matty materialist paddies clothed in the latest garments of ever so perpetuated styles and when that ever-so-rare a New York notion appears I mean ya see Wall Street to Mid-town even East to West Village silicon smiles. 
I walk miles 
to meet the real and true 
HE and SHE
that understands 
GOD is WE 
as long as we are honest and considerate, compassionate, thoughtful and free to be as we are 
when we are truly true.
Who? 
Oh I REALLY DON'T KNOW 
as the story goes about the tale of Joe or Jack with the weight of too many loves on his back. 
She was gorgeous. 
Gorgeous I tell ya. 
Yet she melted in my mind the way cotton candy disolves on one's tongue. 
True Freedom. 
Like that time I walked out the door without taking my art supplies and six books three journals a walkman two weeks worth of discs and seventeen scratchy scratch pens in a satchel, duffel bag and backpack for an evening of coffee house haunting waiting just waiting pre-senile osteo perosis. 
Yes... 
She was gone with the last change in barometric pressure or direction of wind. 
Did I swim?
 It could be that I was that sugar molecule melting in saliva on MY tongue. 
Absorbed and reabsorbed into my very own stream of consciousness.
SO...
gotta run, gotta skip, gotta jump. 
Gotta pretend earning a living for the sum sense of paying my rent is equivalent to worshiping the sun.
Love,
Ross in the city that hasn't yet awakened to the fact that style worn too tightly wears like old shoelaces and freyes and snaps. 
Style worn in place of soul is equivalent to the aftermath of sex being various forms of venereal disease, the clap. 
Attitude worn like clothes as style is like the assumption that buildings made of thick cement walls along the San Andres Fault will not crack and crumble.

2 comments:

james said...

Joyful exchange between two travellers.....

Ross said...

Well, you've gotta wonder... que tipo de dolor en la cabeza... te darias... just to advance to an uncertain adulthood... an imagination that you are above the chaos of a once lived youth... Lo rechazas la verdad, el dolor en la cabeza... el dolor en el alma.. You wish for translation? But it was all the same, wasn't it... Now you grasp for the freedom and wildness of something about your past and you seek a past exchange, connection. Although you reject the truth. And the truth is that you find yourself being pulled through time into a quickly approaching future, that you probably hope won't appear so soon. And you reach into a vague past of hope that you rejected when you thought you had become more responsible, because you are a father... But maybe you were insensible. And knowing that... you tiptoe here and re-read a vague exchange between you and someone you thought you respected and then you found yourself disrespecting... And here you are like a whil-o-whisp looking or seeking something from me, but unwilling to be a healthy person.

We are just people James. We have very unique experiences that shape our lives. Maybe those experiences control our lives in certain ways. Maybe some things shouldn't have been. A child is innocent. An adult should know better, because the actions of adults can shape the life of the child who will become an adult to... The truth is it all is a lesson we must learn. If you shy away from the lecture, you fail. Didn't you know that? You're put there to confront what it is thrown in your face. For some people life is much more difficult than for others; and it is just circumstantial. But that does not make their experiences any less valid. You don't like what you see or read and you wish to erase it or close the book or turn the channel. But, in life, you can't do that. You can do that to people. Yes, you can. But, what you say is OK for you to do to others is alright for others to do to you. We are born. We live how ever long a life we live. And then we die. A lot of experience may occur between the day you are born and the day you die. That experience and how you relate to it is you. Somethings you don't have the option for relating in any other form than you a forced towards relating... Like when you develop a mortal illness and you don't have resources for prolonging your life. So, you get ill, you live with the suffering of your illness and you die. And then it is all over. And that is the truth of all human beings. Today we are here. Tomorrow we are gone. All of us. And it didn't really matter what you did. However, you may have shaped how another person relates to themself or others or the world or the universe and that person may pass the same thing on to another person who will pass it onto others... And hopefully you didn't pass on dishonesty, denile, avoidance, cowardice, hypocracy, hedonism etc... Do you know what I mean Mr. Tiptoe through my tulips?