Cerulean

Cerulean

would have been the word for the sky just

moments ago. Now it is jet
black and the lights of the houses on the
steep hills so near make it seem there are
space ships looming close. I go out into the yard,
the patio behind the building, smiling that it feels
just the same as it did when I was a kid and would
walk out the kitchen door at night when
everyone else was asleep. It feels not
dangerous but daring, and as I did then I wonder
if I could make a nest out here and bundle up and sleep
under the stars. Of course there are no stars to be seen but
after all I do know they're up there. And of course I
come back in and head straight for bed. And little as I
liked that lonely life I wish sometimes to be
back there in that brass bed. I did not like it but I
knew I was home. Now I don't know where home is and
everything smells strange - we patients shit and fart and
the workers spray stuff to kill the odor. They don't know
I guess that lighting a match and blowing it out would
do it better. The stuff they spray merely turns the
unpleasant into the
unnatural. But never mind, the
sky is the same sky and the stars I can't see now are
the same ones I actually could see then. I remember
standing on the porch in my
Dr. Dentons learning
the big and little dippers and how to find the
North Star. Well, maybe I can't find home but on clear nights
I can still find the North Star. So part of my address remains
what it was when I was first memorizing it in 1930: North America,
Planet Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy, The
Universe! That should
take care of it.

SKILLED NURSING CARE

I cough from somewhere deep down, making

a noise, not a
joyful one. "Are you okay?"
inquires a passing nurse, but emulates
Pilate and goes on by while I
go on coughing. After a while I
stop coughing so I guess you could say her treatment
worked.

(Being Grownup): So Fuckin Hard

So Fuckin Hard
to ignore my own postponed adolescence, blooming
like crazy in Los Angeles when i was 40.  Vermont Avenue
from Griffith Park down to  8th Street was my exercise track,
avoiding eyes and looking all the time at legs, wearing
hand-me-downs that labeled me with the wrong
label but that was an advantage as was later another
costume altogether, my thrift shop uniform:  Black
pajamas and a cone hat, what fun
that was and when my daughter, still
a baby really, asked me "Why do you always wear
black  (others would ask her, and she would hear them
tell me, Honey, black is not your color)?" I would say what I
believed, that I was mourning
Vietnam dead, but there was more to it than that, I was
mourning a lot i didn't even really know about, including
my own delayed teens, my permissible horniness.  Happiest
when accidentally in tune with the musics flowing through us
as the times were changing and we were too, walking up
Western above Franklin through Griffith Park to the
Observatory with toddler in stroller, sometimes through the woods
and sometimes on the path, once in a while face to face with
wandering deer, but stopping along the way for the
Diggers's soup line, sometimes with another child, Amy,
in tow too, Amy who screamed at the word "Police" which to her
meant someone was coming to take
her mom away, but
with me she didn't have to hear it except when an older boy
in the building would say it to hear her scream.  I had not
read On the Road yet so couldn't follow her mom very well when
she described herself in the book, her daughter called me
Mortissue because of my black pajamas and skinniness, I
tried to grow up.

Cop

How he whined and complained about the
cop who gave him a ticket for a safe but
illegal left turn, saying that
California law allowed safe moves whether
strictly legal or not, as it did, I believe, at that
time, so finally I said well, do you like
getting these tickets and having to pay them?  Of
course he snarled at that and I said all you have to do
not to get them is not to make moves a watching cop can
find illegal.  That's not so hard.  What did I mean?  Just
drive to the satisfaction of that imaginary cop in the
back seat.  You might have the right to make an
illegal left turn but he has the right to give you a
ticket too.  Just drive so that he doesn't
have a chance.  If you do that, after a while he will
leave you alone.  Not too long after that he ended up in
jail again for a traffic infraction; I forget how that worked, maybe
if you couldn't pay the fine they jailed you.  Anyway I think he
asked himself, "Do you like
going to jail and having to call people and beg?" and when he
answered no he quit getting
arrested.  For good.  And kept on writing and going to work
and practicing his schemes while I wondered almost without
hope how he could keep on writing the way he did.  No matter
what else that typer was always going, recording his
days and his vision.  When his doctor and his publisher
convinced him he could no longer keep on at the
Annex he got drunk a lot and ran scared for a
long time but he made it through and now when I
laugh at people who ask me if I make my living by
writing I realize at the same time that if I had to
it was obvious that I could; he did.  I took note
then of his example and also of the work of
Diane Wakoski who made a study of it
and passed her results on to her
fellows.  Still,
I never
made money at it until now, with this
little book; that's
going to pay for itself and then for
the next one, already visible in the river
of words flowing by my window.  Even so, not my
doing but that of Ste. Anne Marie, who knows how to
manage.

IF YOU'RE GOING

to leave dishes in the sink you're going to have to
wash a lot more dishes than you would if you'd
leave the dirty ones on the counter so I can
use the sink to wash my own. It irritates me that I can't
have an empty sink but maybe I should be
grateful - I'll just let you
go ahead and wash my dishes. Thanks
a lot.

A WOMAN I KNOW

has plenty of brains
and beauty that will never cease
knocking everyone's socks off
and she goes around acting the moron
with men, I suppose because of the usual
supposition that men
don't like women with brains, but they do! They do!
Real men do. But there are men
who don't mind them as long as they play dumb
and that's the kind she finds. She listens to the
chauvinistic stories they tell her as if she could not
think for herself. I'm afraid if this goes on long
enough it will become true. And as far as I can see
this will be fine with her.

Who would want
to hang around such men? Women find
men to sleep with, men to dance with, men
to converse with, without turning themselves into
morons. So I started thinking, "What are her
core values?" and it struck me that perhaps following the
teachings of her first lover, she became a
mammonite. It's sad, too; mammonites never
get to enjoy what money can buy for them (a study of which
would reveal their core values); it's the money, the mere
symbol, they go after, not the thing itself. As for me,
I love to spend money but I don't like to work
for it, but though I spend whatever is given me I
would be just as happy without it, I'm
funny that way. And they
are money that way. I think
my happiest years were those I spent trying to figure out
how to stretch a borrowed three dollars to cover
dinner for two and how
to pay it back. Working. I don't like to
work but I like
having a little coming in and making it
do me, while all the while wishing
for more. Oh, it's a lie, that I
don't like working, I do, I love it. Even
sitting at a desk alI day had its
moments but remembering to bring the
promised coffee and making change while taking orders
- that was joy. I don't remember ever thinking
"Oh, how I wish I were happy" when I had
hardly any money. Now I have enough and don't
even have to work for it any more and
wish that all the time.

THAT DAMNED CHRISTINA

That Damned Christina

disappeared my nuts. I'm going

to kill her. Perfectly good nuts
ziplocked away
without the slightest attraction for ants.
I remember her
standing over there saying something about
how she hated ants and I
agreed with her, never dreaming she would
throw my nuts out. She is nuts and if I could I would
throw her out. Never mind, I'm going back to
Fonda this very day and get more nuts and
this time I will put a big sign on them saying
DO NOT DISTURB. ON PAIN OF DEATH,
DO NOT
MOVE THESE NUTS FROM THIS SPOT.

I used to have belongings that I thought
were mine - a doll, a rattle, a yo-yo I couldn't
work - that I learned were not mine by having them
disappeared by my mother, the boss of
the universe. Christina is not
my mother and she is not the boss of
anything in this house but she acts as if
she were both. I think I will just
tell her the next time she comes, "Christina,
if you move my nuts or anything of mine
from where it is to somewhere else where I will not
know to look for it - if you do that, Christina, I
will kill you. On the spot. In cold blood. And your
children will go hungry and I will go to
prison I know but that doesn't matter because I am
not long for this world now anyhow and I will die happy knowing
you can never again hide my snacks.