The Land of Stinging Nettles

After snaking through the arbor tunnel, greeting waves with a tall, gray-haired man with some sort of tribal sword tattoo inked on the right side of his neck, talking on a cell phone, we circle a small welcome grove to come upon the den-home of Mandeja. I've never been to such an instantly awe-striking dwelling. After traipsing up the stone walkway to the front door, you're suddenly socked by a sun-room study with window-ledge reading/lounging bed, the whole ceiling a grid of windows and new, unpainted crossbeams, travel books erupting from a Vesuvius corner shelf, seashells and ships in bottles adorning the sills, string lights lining the doors and the smell of new wood.
It's nestled in the northwest portion of Puget sound, surrounded by woods of tall, naked-trunked trees, redwoods and firs, ferns, all manner of budding floral growth and something called a "Stinging Nettle," which I'm told to avoid for obvious reasons. Dragonflies have already taken an interest in my scent, and probably seethe with the intrusive plumes of cigarette smoke I exhale into the frigid, starlit dusk.
Up one small step through a door to the left of the entrance is situated the living quarters, which consists of another window-flanked day bed, a clotheslined row of matching gardening gloves hanging by clothespins from three branch support beams running vertically, and a dining table fashioned from a knotted plank of glossed wood in the corner.
There is no TV, no computer, no contemporary gadgets of any sort save for an antiquated CD player with a bold collection of salsa, calypso, blues, folk and Latin reggae albums to its left, the tones of which serve only the more to levitate this wooden jewel to loftier bravado. Like a magic pyre jutting from the ashes of a genocide, or a secret gingerbread home where Hansel and Gretel surely must have inhabited at some point - a Tolkeinian hallucination fathomed only in dreams and with total disregard for the whims of dirty white men living in the emerald castles across the Sound into Seattle.
The air hangs like muggy clouds in a terrarium haze to hide the sheets of sunlight, while wild hares sit idly in the fever-green meadow lawn, thinking of nothing, never blinking, never rooting around, just being in the no-nothingness of a twirling forest world.
The cottage Mandeja's built is almost too perfect. Nestled just north of the main house, its flanked by a garden with snapdragons, slug-tailed prehistoric foliage and salmonberry bushes. There's a quaint shaded staircase that leads to a cold porch with a table and two lonely chairs. The resident renting the abode is out, so I peak through the window-grid door to find an empty Bohemian living area; a mysterious tome at the spine rests on the coffee table in front of a trippy day bed davenport. Around the back, I can see the staircase to the loft bedroom, from which the thicket mesh of cloudy island fog and camouflage-fragrant woods kiss their reflections in the mirror.


Through the forest blockade to the rear of the cottage lay jungle trails, swampy, soupy paths more often matted by the hooves of deer than by size 13 Asics. John the woodworker whistles while he whittles away his day, giving refuge to veining, wooded routes, in some spots speckled with functional gypsy wagons; in some spots muddled by foot-long diameter fungi. The scent is like being born again.
By now I know already that the whisper-leave hush I hear is tempered resolution - the hominid vulnerability, tranquil untouched microbe husk in real-time dying woods, with gasps of cackling motor boats chugging from the capitalist cuneiformia to Asia and the Bering Strait as reminders to the necessity (disease) of distraction in the name of progress. Their foghorns honk, gasoline-spewing engines push the hulking steel through the salty waves, cutting fish in half, killing crucial oceans by insistence of the dollar, yet still we watch, in awe, and listens with paws cupped 'round our ears to the orchestra of powerful, catapulting evolution in the old Sound dissonance. It's a give and take, always. You take the sweet with the sour every day of your life.
Further west, where those old cargo vessels float toward but can't continue past, the apocalypse manifests with an invisible roar, genocides that are hidden to the States rage free and clean like the flows of an impenetrable lava, burning everything in sight, in path, with zero defense, therefore zero concern. The ancient wars explode into myths, then legends, then reality, and back again in a cylindrical assembly belt - blood as lubrication for the cogs, pride siphoned for power, death as the final stickered product. But if no one sees it - if it's marketed poorly or there's simply no capital with which to burst its hype, we're not buying. Darfur. Sudan. Israel. These wars are waged on principles that people who live in glass houses would never examine. Nest-egging shatter-proof walls seems safer. Everything boils down to love, anyway. Unfortunate are the myriad avenues to fail at it.
But back in Langley, the cold black streets creak with every footstep, tease the foundation floor off the coasts of Whidbey Island in the vast expanse Utopia off the western shores. You need a ferry ride to get there, and an open mind to stay. It's littered only with the misty stench of drooping sea, fragrant redwood Pitney trails and the loaded nostalgia of a seaport villa - like an Under Milk Woodian mirage just a quarter-turn globe spin away; Dylan Thomas' eyes closed forever before setting their thinning, bloodshot maculas on this treasure. When the tide is low, summoned by the stubbornness of the swiss cheese moon, you can wander 200 yards into the swampy water world of stinky seaweed and hermit crab castles, cordoned, of course, to a point by the waterfront real estate parallel posted to keep the tourists from the talent. It's a sad, romantic strip of road serving as the cultural epicenter of this mostly unnerving miasma, but as with almost any island community, its endearment is measured in its quaintness, rather than any contemporary elegance.
Seagulls perch and squeal atop any and all forms of precipice; earthy throwback activists with dreadlocks and rainbow-dyed T-shirts saunter and sip soy-based libations, and cradle organically crafted local wares as symbols of status in the dithering horizon shadows of the Space Needle skyline across the wavy sea. Garbage hides not in crooked corners or guttered walks waiting for street cleaners to sweep away the guilt, but in the proper waste receptacles; spendy vessels teeter by the docks, moored by a love of the shackle-free dominance of their resilience and a totalitarian bondage as useful lodging and transportation vehicles rather than gleaming trophies for insecure mainland putz exhibitionists; and the children skip and breathe fresh air, cradling soppy ice cream cones between their sticky fingers, laughing, bedazzled in the kind of wonderment of the world you'd be hard-pressed to duplicate in the clogging, smoggy fog of a major metropolis.
A thousand threatening redwoods couldn't break this enchanting post. A million bolts of lightning couldn't forge a dent in its mystique. A hundred days of rain would never drown the din of its silent, peaceful majesty. I don't think I've ever visited a more wonderful place in my life.

Sticks and Tomes

I Am Matter, Nothing More

Old Skin
Skin. It's the cloak that binds you; blinds you from the world. It's the spider web that warns the fly to rethink his route. It's the costume that ignores the tact of full disclosure and implores lengthy brooding analyses to the prize within the guise. It's your private canvas for you to paint and poke and cut and mold and stitch and ink and tan and pinch and bathe and kick and spit upon, and it's your blank page to write the wraths and remedies of your world. It's the front you plague upon the Earth. It's a business-plan synopsis - full of engaging anecdotes and bristling wit, only to bow under the burden of what's really underneath it all... You.
Ah! That's what we forget! It's you, and your hang-ups, your dreading, your bleeding heart, your fickleness, your quivering palm, your wavering sweaty soul, your crooked intent, your bellowing lovesick tummy in the humdrum sun-bloom afternoon, your elated tongue-dart psychoses, your plaintive floor-tom heart, your pulse-pump thump neuroses and your malevolent pig-fucker charity siren song that lurk beneath that old skin bag serenade. You've got a lot to hide. You've got the weight of the world beneath the skin on your shoulders alone; imagine what lies beneath the rolls of your brow! Second guess the synapse-strum of what you bury below your cell-speckled molecule hide, and when your house of cards slowly crumbles to piles of waxed-paper Arabic numeral nightmare, with Anglo-Saxon monarchy symbolists pointing and prodding your mirage, you're doomed to a stint in the pit. Everyone loves an ace in the hole, but nobody unearths a diamond in the rough without using a club. Check your vitals; it's the truth.

The Shedding
Slither out, frail pupas hominid; embrace the wind and heat and rain to your stark-pink sheen veneer. You'll always need to shed your skin, no matter what. No matter the social armor, no matter the costume, no matter your education or lack thereof. You grow and you wrinkle; you spread and you flake; you burn and you shiver. That's the way of it. Of all the ways to nullify the importance of your life, clutching that which is not you anymore is the most depressing. Ignoring the ripples in your mind, negating the chill at the back of your neck to morph and to mince words with yourself is to deny the essence of the journey. I've shed my skin too many times. Not to forget, or for regret, or for insistence on a me I'd like to be, but to evolve in the most natural ways to what is comfortable. Your skin is magnetic - attracting the positive, repelling the negative, in every way. Jobs, friends, love, bugs, harboring ultraviolets, shooshing the whispers of the damned. And there's no way around that. You are a billboard, painted with the missives of your world. And people are noticing, all the time.

New Skin
Embrace the changes. Get lost. Find things that nobody cares about but you. Tar and feather yourself if the mood strikes. Bleach and etch and cut and bruise. Everyone loves a clown. My skin has been stretched and shrunken, fattened, thinned, besmirched with plaintive worry lines, tagged by errant numbness in the legs. I walk around in this cellophane wrap, coolly calculating the streets with my tired muscle-lunge. This skin bag disguises phantom bone chill, broken heart, flat-panel rib displacement, pensive guts, weighty apathy and more confusion than the wayward moth in firelight. I will treat the outside as I treat the inside: I will degrade and deconstruct this flesh to mirror its infinite beyond. I will flake and burn and cut into it when I feel it is necessary to focus on pain and discipline instead of poverty, hunger and ignorance. It is mine. I am matter, nothing more.

From Main To Main

It was a chore, it was. Boxing all those doodads, scrubbing all those soap marks off the corner tile in the bathtub, sifting through six-and-a-half years of a life that I no longer recognized, all to move into an unknown city, with a long-lost friend, and mope and pace somewhere that didn't make me nauseous. I packed boxes full of papers, boxes full of toys, boxes full of trinkets, boxes full of trash sometimes, just to box them, to organize what was important to me, and what was in due time going to be in the possession of the noble panhandler armada on the sidewalk outside my storied Tower loft. I packed boxes of things I knew I would throw away. I supposed they needed a good send-off. They were precious to me at some point, and I was convinced at some point that they'd be precious to me again; that they'd tell my story to whomever came upon them so I wouldn't have to. So I could remain the stoic figure I feel like on the inside but don't resemble in the mirror. The tin Eiffel Tower key chain might have orated loftily of my time spent in gay Paris, though I'd never actually been there. It was kept to remind me that someone I cared about had been there, and had cared about me enough to dish me a novelty nod so I would remember that they cared about me somewhere else other than right in front of me. The black iron lamp with loop-de-loop ambient sheen and the crooked shade, which Robin's aunt Lynn had given her by default when she succumbed to cancer too young and then I threw away, might have expounded on my antiquated tastes in practical illumination, at least in a relative sense.

And that record collection. By God, those twirling black grooves would have proven, absolutely and finally, the merit with which I opine upon the world of music so routinely and profoundly. If only I hadn't had to sell them all, so that they were still sitting in neat rows on my wicker shelf that I threw out, whispering the cosmic coo to lookyloo voyeur art Nazis that even though they disagreed with my assessments on the wildly influential derivatives of Mark Arm to a new generation of fuzzed-out retro hippies, I was probably right. The proof was right in front of them. Who would they be to argue with their paltry stacks of CDs and an iPod full of illegally downloaded pander-punk and neo-gospel soul? They would be, well, the people who would know the story of my life without me having to tell it to them. And I might miss that most of all.

Owning a lot of things doesn't make you richer or greater or more sentimental or more worldly or more insane or even happier; it just makes you weighted. It just means you fill your space with things that might serve a function to you that you'll never use for that express function, that you keep bottle caps and newspapers and birthday cards and 10 cent jewelry to help you remember things that you don't really care to remember, that you're ignoring breaking under the weight of a bunch of detritus that you don't realize yet is stifling you from learning about the future instead of making you worry about remembering the past. If life is about what you have, and what you have is a lexicon of largely unimportant knickknacks and hand-me-down couches and chairs and a bed that your friend sold you for $25 and posters and dishes that you only use a few of but keep just in case people come over, it seems an empty life. To fill it, you have to go, go, go. Outside, upward, downward, sideways, fly. What you need is inside you; it's always been there, and you can add and subtract to that treasure of you as often or as little as you like. And you don't have to pack any boxes to do it.

And my friends, my family and my former lovers; lest I forget them. They've been stacked almost as densely as all those records. They don't get thrown out or donated or sold. They become foundations. They hold true the walls, rafters, ceiling, floor, stucco, windows, doors of me. But they aren't there anymore. Not the way they used to be. Not in the flesh at my call. Not here to distract me from the absence of my possessions. But they're inside too, and they kick and throw fits and pester and nag and elate and comfort me still, like the memories of my grandmother at home next to her stereo that she gave me and I threw away. Like the way I can taste food I love but can't afford before it hits my tongue. Like the way Japanese Maples remind me of 7th Avenue fall in Chico, or how the scent of bad coffee I can afford reminds me of my dad. Like the way the first few notes of Saves the Day's "Rocks Tonic Juice Magic," from their album that I sold, whisks me away to when I was 19 years old, to older friends I don't even talk to or want to talk to anymore, to ex-girlfriends who've long since moved on, to the baby steps of living on my own for the first time. Like how seeing gallon jugs of water flashes me back to dropping acid in the field behind Kent's Market by the Redding Airport, and how easily I had crushed the jug to pop the top off with my super-human drug-addled synapses and then was convinced I had been the cause for JFK Jr.'s watery death the following morning, even though he was all the way across the country and stone-cold sober.


These things don't go away, and they never will. Those sensory attributions may seem base, and mostly they are; but they're mine. And they're all I need. It's the little memories, not the little gadgets and medals that make me who I am and provide me with even the smallest semblances of worth. So, it is with pride that I've found myself on another Main Street, this one in the wind-swept Northwest metropolis of Portland, OR, 500 miles away from my old Main Street in the sun-scorched valley din of Chico, CA. I am lighter now, in more ways than one, enlightened. I've got an empty room to prove it.

Crooked Arrows, Crooked Tongues

You used to be a mission bell, measured clangs at hour's half, flailing gongs inside the steeple of the pyre-high synapse.
In the morning you would wail and creak, your brass-elastic moan took turns to mark the mealtime break and seek the salvage of the summer's burns.
The click of second hands insisted strides to tread the toil in time; the minute-slither hoisted tides to bend your choral waves to rhyme.
And sea-salt shock of ocean's freeze to tease your toes meant little more than empty deeds to feign your hunt for keys to unlock hidden doors.
When Earth stood still and turned to you, alone and shrugging, burned for you, to know which way to turn for you, to wonder when you'd chime in tune,
you closed your eyes and fled the sky and crashed into the ground to die, with shards of chords and tones you sang, refusing evermore to lie.
For time's a fleeting whim in wind when fires grow too bored to scorch, when flocks prefer the south to north, when old men pace on half a porch,
when rugged stones are smoothed by river flows and ancient tallowbeds, your moments, ticks and tocks and bells won't spare one wink for sleepyheads.
So sleep to dream, through smiles lie; smash every clock and lullaby.
Your timing's never what it seems. The mission bells will always sing.

Serial Balks

I keep myself company
with black asphalt snaking up ahead,
canyons blooming with the dead
of a hundred thousand trees.

And when I read between the lines,
I skip the consonants and rhymes
'til nothing matters but the whines
of Us and Is and Ys.

And colons seep like python bites
to trickle, cloak, envelope, dive
and filthy every other word,
annunciating useless verbs.

But every time I see a ghost,
I'm reticent to make the most
of he or she or it or thing
and ban my eyes for simpler things.

When I looked into your eyes
I saw a copperhead with fangs,
dripping venom through your thighs,
wafting toxins toward your bangs.

Moons are blackened by your ashes,
suns are crimson through the gray,
smoke and sorrow blankets grasses,
Buds and seedlings hide 'til May.

When in June you reappear,
dusting aphids off your shoulder,
seething with a different fear,
with the news you've gotten older,

Every second seems a lifetime,
every victory's a gaffe.
Each and every time your heart pumps,
you're almost certain it's the last.

You know you lived among the lilies,
and you drank from bubbling streams,
'Til you collapsed from your Achille's,
had you the warbling top of dreams?

So with or without syntax spike,
we'll croak and eek and sputter noise,
and with or without trails to hike,
We'll find our way. We're lazy boys.

Northwest Rumination

Laurelhurst Hoof

Living in infamy, vagabond operatic
hiking up lost hills
through the floral walks of Laurelhurst,
I concede now to the pre-fab
pleasantry of the pond,
where ducks and black swan swim
and dip for food before me,
Looking for handouts of bread
from dirty hands of tempered man.
Soon it will rain,
and soon I'll be drenched with the dew
of a foreign cloud.
Lonely, lusting, poor
save for the wealth of spirit hiding
somewhere in my heart.
And now the ducks and swan come rushing
to the shore to take the bait from children's hands,
their biggest thrill today by far.
Their mother sees the penman scribble,
lurking, looming,
and ushers her offspring away with the knowing glance
of a wary jungle cat,
seething with frothy mouth, cunning and counting lives in nines.
So I just smoke and look away...
I can see now why Olmsted's visions of scenery
flanked and bookended the plots of park we now take so for granted.
With sweeping strokes, the willow droops for shade
and hides the island birds,
the douglas firs jut to kiss the sky
and glint like pyres 'gainst the pond's murky sheen,
But the moment has passed now and bullet-boys
march by as reminders that without them
we'd all be nothing but ash in this pensive, plaintive grove.
Long live the Empire of Greed.
Greed in the Grove of Green.
But tell me, decorated generality: What flower wouldn't droop to bow
and note you as you pass?
Which nightly, pining, wanderlust will finally be your last?

Streetside Provincial

Wet thumb to air for wind,
to tell me which way I should walk.
Drop lines in code to speak
but I forget how to talk.
The neons have all died out
and the sidewalk's scorched and gray.
Now all that's left to do
is tread 'til sunlight fades away.
In fits and starts we step and trip,
pretending not to fall.
In puddles we can splash the grime
to paint upon the wall.
Mud splat splinters, trickles
like a Pollock phantom genius;
psycho Braille explosions
feigning only now to rue us.

For when I am lonely,
I pace and whisper to myself
that nothing's needed;
only greed and drugs bring on the dawn.
But when I'm happy,
I've got starlight tracers shooting
from the rapture that I've pleaded;
like a ripple in the muddy river
where comfort comes from specters I've withdrawn.

Old Words; Or Why Fire Breathing Dragons Was the Pinnacle of My Lyrical Ouptut

"Heads Will Roll"

This is a test.
This is a trial.
This is a sign of things to come.
These are the words that I remember.
While you foil a life that I'd prepared to lose.

Of all the things I've heard!
Trading bees for fireflies?
Basking in new dawn, trial by ice and open hands.
For every single note sung with love and broken glass, there's a sneaky pitch.
But failing never felt so right.

Big hands are waving me over.
Big faces are hiding the shame of such regret.
We'll be uptight when we're older.
Today let's swim in the seas of violet.

And heads will roll, just as they're told.
Violet's misleading when you've never seen the sky.

I'm settling for less; wishing while I've got the bug.
Trading stock in fear and wading through a vat of blood.
But we'll find diamonds in secret corners of a maze; polish through our sins.
These wicked plans are never right.

The darkest night's most trusted flights hover over lightning then dip into descent.

Night falls on dolls when you flip a switch.
To bed we lay the martyrs.
Tonight we'll fight and toast to the void; we've nothing left to falter.
In time we find that our lot in life leaves nothing left to conquer.
Oh, all the fame! Through all of the flames your legend will endure!

"The Apple And The Whip"

The smaller I am, the more room I have for maneuvering the lanes.
When weaving in and out becomes a sleight of hand, I plan my dangerous escape.
So I lay down and shade my face from the light; hide my life from the sun.
I watch the birds take flight on any afternoon, and in their dying light, I'll burn their favorite field.

So, I'm getting out alive, but I'm going it alone.
I found the reasons why I left and now I'm never coming home. But with a subtle disregard, you'll never bother me.

Our size don't matter now, and as victims we're allowed these open-ended lies.
We'll use bed to mask the sound. "Oh, there's no need for your gown! It's too heavy with the sweat of the messes we'll forget."
It's too fake now. "You're too vain to be surprised. So 'tween pops and crack of stolen skin we cry."
"And those swells can be repaired, though they're nothing when compared to the crimson cuts of one too many blistering nights of woe."

I'm getting out alive, alone. By my God-given right to cast the first stone.

We're over our best days...fly by night
And all we are asking failed tonight.
Look over your shoulder...please don't lie.
Your past's but a whisper...so don't fight.
Fill out a request for full access.
Erupt into laughter, but don't jest.
Decide if the battle's worth the war.
We've got too much riding to be bored.

You're choking at the bit
The Apple And The Whip

"Underneath Each Level"

Underneath each level of the lie, you'll see me; enveloped; verified.
To us all, give shredded bits of light, years from now, if we choose to decide.

My senses are becoming dulled.
Just give me one more hand to fold.
I find something to look forward to before I run right back on you.
As drama mocks us all tonight, it's hard to tell who's wrong or right.
My God, you can't be so severe when your intentions seem so clear.

It's easier being deranged.
I'd settle for feeling the same.
With focus receding...retreat.
White flags are unwavering.
Defeat.

I've lost something I can't explain, and all my efforts, though in vain, are structured to relive a time when my actions justified your crimes:
1. False hopes designed to soothe the meak.
2. Double-back methods (oh, so sleak).
3. Frequenting squats in search of truth.
4. Denying both pudding and the proof.

All I've read leads to promise of a better day.
But time well-spent means nothing 'til you find the way.
"So, file through until there's wrong enough to follow you."
"I'm biding time in search of everlasting paradigm!"

Underneath each level of the lie...you'll see me.