my father taught me how to really see into nature despite having a blind eye turned to matters of the world. he told me how to gaze upon the scrubby bushes covering mountains and see the whole sleeping creature underneath, the texture, the fur of the world so to speak and the delicate worlds living therein are so small and potent such as the purple bud of the queen of the hills that when crushed gently and inhaled will transport to a place where beauty and calmness are things of air and water and earth and all the clamour and noise of the tv's and the cars fades away and there is a remembrance of what we really could be.  

.. 

some time ago whilst driving through los angeles on a warm and uneventful day, there appeared around a corner on the curb a man with greased back slick hair and a tight leather jacket and he was struggling to force a black plastic bag into a beat up puce colored nova and the alarming thing was that the bag was struggling back and my son i and were transfixed and silent when from the edge of the bag shot a frantic pink ruffle from a party dress and a clenched chicken claw the size of a mans hand.

and by god, there she went running down the highway, laughing and clutching some retarded concert footage of EXP that we got our panties all bunched up about in some absurd arguement and that was last summer and i called her and said, when the hell are you coming home and she said i'm not and now things are kinda quiet around here since she has taken up the life of a prairie dweller and is busy avoiding suicide deer runners on the winter roads and made her husband drop everything and move out there with her and mom and dog. i keep a little bug encased in plastic close to my heart and i'm waiting patiently for her for i've many things to tell. 

i'm waiting for a ghost ship to come my way. 

we had played a club in san fran and i was driving into the sunrise torwards home and all the boys are asleep in the van and i'm humming quietly to myself to stay awake and up ahead, framed into the horizon looms this pear shaped grey cloud that reveals itself to be smoke as i am covering the distance rapidly and blink-it's an explosion that shoots flames higher than i can see through the window of the van and by this time i am starting to feel a coldness of certainty and then i crane my head and pass the station wagon full of people who are being pushed by the waves of flames forward until their necks bow gracefully as in supplication before being arched backward by the demanding fire and their necks fall back, leaving the jaws to open wide and the whole cycle of movement bears an uncanny resemblance to the autumn leaves that sway on trees before detaching and falling quietly to the earth.  

i need you to know how it feels to have met you. i could not say this to your face and if you find your way here to this fragment of hallucination, i am not responsible for your feelings about it for it's here where i admit how i prefer to dwell in the darkness of confusion and how i marvel at the ugliness that i see pouring from me at times...... when you left, i laid on the cold floor to feel the sharpness to remind me that you are but a stranger to me and why should you care and why should it matter after all the others gone before and left to come? and i tell you now despite the absurdity of it and this comes with the disclaimer that this vulnerability has not been felt in 12 years and you scare the fuck out of me for it and so you left and i lied there like a corpse- incapable of anything, unruffled and still on the pale surface but seething inside.  

you and i are lurid equations of the citizens we are supposed to be..juice is black drunken gash..molten waylard manlike sailor, help me. .weak my knees in garden breeze, god said love lie sucking with me..this is the breaking of the barometer and sky caves in, and the black gets into your shoes..and by coming overflown and rolling and pummeling away every stylized day.. but wait, i am just the same, often on time but i am fine in postal lines. PICA2003

creeping around in basements, trying not to upset the pregnant lady upstairs who takes sadistic pleasures in watching the pea brained dog upset the pretty white cat and there is no billboard safe from the screaming image that's telling me how insufficient my body is and then we've got the protesting librarian with the screaming rastafarian and you become every wish i never spoke and you flick your fragile wrist and i stand here in the sweet biding of your time with the platter that i handed you the bitter yet often sumptuous bites of my life upon and you ATE until i felt myself running down your swollen lip to crash like on the shirt of a very sleepy fattened man and in the demarcation of the night, you yawn- flick me from you. you are done. you are content.  

it's ok- i've come to appreciate my neighbors.  

gave the kids the keys for a flash lickety second so they could bring in the bags of melting groceries but quick like evil minds do!- they throw the bags on the ground, slam grampa's car into reverse and go screeching down the driveway, popping a pint of haggen daz ice cream that shoots at the side of the house from under the tire like a brown and white missile and i'm standing there watching it slide down the side of the house as i hear my kid burn about a quarter of inch off the tires and go speeding down the road until only the remnants of the blaring marilyn manson song remain floating in the breeze and i think to myself- that kid fucking rocks.