Journal 52 - Salt on a Slug

The drab brown thrasher confessed his drab brown
love to the red cardinal perched in the highest bare
tree. The cardinal gave a tweet-tweet-tweet in response
and flew down south. That's "thanks for the thought" in
bird speak. There are too many red lights flashing at
me - so many meanings - my phone flashes for e-mail in
3 different accounts; the answering machine flashes (sometimes);
the traffic light flashes; the TiVo flashes; the VCR
used to flash; the car lights flash (on the dashboard and
outside); and the lights in the red light district flash
their ancient red lights like winking red eyes in the
subterranean night. I sometimes think my daily life at
work is like a large liberal does of salt on a slug after
a 3-week rain, the superlative of enervation. My throat
certainly feels oversalted.  Reaching into the bowels of a
friend's couch is an act of unacknowledged intimacy. So
much to learn and find and discover and reveal. Revelation
on a lazy Saturday afternoon while playing Madden '08
can be broken into an arpeggio of this or that and often
something else. But if your nose bleeds the noisy prophets
may be whistling around the corner ready to pinch your
cheeks and call you Xavier. Prophets would wear suits
and toes with neat laced shoes and perhaps a pony-
tail just to say pay attention. It's hard to be a prophet
among attention-deficit doppelgangers careening through
the streets with lucid crossed eyes dipped in emeralds or
rhodonite. Eyes are worth so much more than gems -
more beautiful too. I'd rather stare at eyes the color
of the Mediterranean than the Mediterranean. The horizon
is missing on that side of the world btw. I'm tired of
my throat feeling like fish sucking air outside the aquarium.
So many writers writing around the block writing about
writer's block and indefinite revisions of imprecise
collisions of adverbs and conjunctions. And yet I like
the facilitating conjunction. Adverbs though are for the birds
too stubborn to fly south when the food is stuck, frozen in
the local pond. The cycle of life eludes me like the
gravitational constant or the nickle-back defense. Are you
part of the cycle or part of the problem to paraphrase
my mother.


5.16.09