When the Snow Falls on the Longest Night

I can’t sleep in this light
this orange light on this long night
December twenty-first.
It feels like a full moon
and I am so hungry.
I drink heavy cream like a cat.
I go walk alone through the drifts
the silence is magical
all sounds fall dead against the snow.
The cars are stranded
leaving only people
free on the streets
to ski and skate along, giddily.

I’ve waited till midnight
under these bursting skies
for the day to turn from getting shorter
to getting longer.
Our most enduring optimism:
there will be more light.
The snow piled up in great heaps
and everything glows with silver, and white and gold.

Regarding Perspective

I burned my lip on Mitchi’s teapot
the one she brought from Japan
after the war
where her baby and husband died
fleeing the bomb.
She married a dickhead soldier
who later raped her sister.
I only lament being cold.

David Was an Introvert

David was an introvert. The kind of guy who got along better with pets than people. Maybe his father killed himself when he was young. He lived in the big blue house on the other side of the ivy covered fence. Lived there with a woman who I presume was his wife but had the look of being more like a sister. David would go running sometimes. He wore nothing but flimsy little blue running shorts and shoes and socks. His mop of dark hair would flap behind his crown of baldness. He would run fast and come striding back into his yard on his long skinny legs with his bare chest heaving. Like a train wreck, I couldn’t help looking.

He came outside to work in the yard sometimes. Except for when he was running he moved very slowly. His other outfit was a blue flannel shirt and jeans, even in the summer. He was one of those people who got lucky in style from 1988-1993 but that’s all over now. David didn’t care. He had two cars. A late model but not new royal blue Ford Thunderbird and an old minty blue Chevrolet boat, I don’t know which model. He usually parked them one behind the other across the street. One day a car coming down the steep hill to the t-intersection of our street misjudged the right turn and crunched the corner bumper of David’s old car. They drove off without stopping. David didn’t work, or at least he didn’t leave the house everyday in any sort of work-like schedule. He barely left the house at all. On Sunday mornings he would come out followed by the mousey blond woman. They didn’t look dressed for church. They got in the Thunderbird and drove off.

Sometimes David would be out sweeping the sidewalk or tending mysteriously to some chore in the yard when I came home. He would look up but would never be the first to speak. If I didn’t say something we would pass in silence. But I always did, even during those months that I was mad at him for tagging along behind our other jerk-face neighbor who stormed into our yard one evening all red in the face and oozing Napoleon complexity, demanding to speak to “the renters” after we lit off some fireworks (good ones from the BC rez too). David was a follower. I couldn’t hold that against him.

So I always said hello and he was glad to talk, albeit clumsily. He didn’t offer much conversation from his side. But he held his gaze steady wanting more from you. I often closed with a several rounds of farewells tossed back over my shoulder as I huffed bags of groceries or the baby seat up the stairs to the yard, “Well, nice seeing you, David.” “Okay, take care then, David.” By the time I got to the front door he would still be standing at the edge of our yards in his blue flannel and hunched shoulders peering around the shrubs.

One day he met his match in our friend Michael whom he must have happened upon while Michael was smoking out front under the big cedar tree. Michael falls along the left-hand continuum of social uniqueness too but in a completing functional way – hyper-functional even. His father killed himself. He likes cocaine. He talks more than anyone I know, even my mother. But there are interesting things peppered into the constant stream of dialogue. He cares nothing for social mores or political correctness but is full of emotion and has an exact and lasting memory. He’s damn funny as a result.

I don’t know how long he was out there talking to David, but he came inside with more information about him that I had ever uncovered. David was an amateur radio broadcaster. Had a studio in his basement. Sure enough, there was a huge antenna on his roof that I once saw him fiddling with. His old minty Chevy had a cryptic license plate that apparently was his call sign. I imagined his basement was outfitted like some kind of bunker. If there was ever a disaster I could use my weird anti-social cat that David and his sister-wife liked to gain access to his food stores and radio.

I don’t see David anymore. We’ve moved away. But his cars are still parked out front when I drive past from time to time. Last night I had a dream about him. He was down in the arboretum raking up huge piles of leaves. He was there with my dog, Blue.

Dear Kat

Dear Kat,

Love the Black Bear.
He goes with Panda Bear.
And Polar Bear.
And Brown Bear.
Oliver likes Bears.

He loves opening packages too,
so the presents under the Christmas tree are a very thrilling thing.

We have snow, amazingly, after two whole days,
it hasn't melted.
Feels cold like the Midwest
on a good day.
The mountains in the winter
are breathtaking
when you can see them;
I gasped today.

Gas is cheap;
you two should drive out here in the spring
and just bring the dogs.
Poor little Gabby.
You gave her a good life.
Pavel would have fun at the dog park
by our house. When's your next break?

I won't see you this year, so
Merry Christmas!

Until the winter breaks... Love, Dawn

The Narcissist

I fall in love with words that I write
because I am so in love with me.
A true narcissist. I unwilling admit.
The dictionary is open to the n’s. How convenient:
naphthalene to nasal.
This self-admiration is hobbling.
I welcome growing old.
A narcissist hates rejection.
I’m going to turn around all the mirrors
so I can see only others.
What are these hands even then?
If they can’t illuminate what’s within?
They’ll leave behind narcissism.
My old cold hands will seek
the ineffable and
the intrinsic
in private
unreflected
consciousness.

Long Night Moon

Tonight. A surplus of moon to counter just a glipse of sun. For all you night owls...

http://stardate.org/radio/program.php?f=today

The Days of Rain

Yesterday it started to rain.
Still summer and warm
but the rain had the smell of winter.
It overcame me in one accidental breath.
I looked up to the sky squinting
(no slumping for me).
I stand tall in the rain
when it catches me,
off guard and umbrellaless.

Soon the rain will be routine
like so many things
and the smell will be the smell of everyday
and not a special one.
But yesterday it was summer
and the smell of fall was new to this year.

The days of rain are for taking it slow.
Leaves that fluttered by yesterday
now painted on to the sidewalk.
Flattened out and pasted beneath my feet like wallpaper.

The days of rain make me think of warm sweaters
and roasted chickens and fires
in the living room.
Of bundling up and pulling on
my waterproof boots
to walk the dog through wind and rain
when no one else is around.
Of the shelter of four walls
and a shingled roof
and the warmth of the kitchen stove.
There will be wind storms
and much talk of the weather.
The sound of traffic will be drowned by
the steady beating of rain
and everything will be green.
These are the days when you hold your lover tight.
When you feel a little bit crazy on the inside.

Song for a New Generation

I’m being anointed, at age thirty,
to speak for us, my generation.
What is it that you would like to hear?
Shall I tell you that we are unique?
We are innovators with fresh ideas?
That we made pornography at age 20?
Had an abortion at 22?
That we are smarter than our parents
and technology will save the world?
Racism is dying?
All our artists work in advertising?
We will network our way to greater intelligence?
Or YouTube our way to greater ignorance?
Cursive writing is dead?
Anonymousness satisfies our listlessness?
We are all winners in 42nd place?
We excel in passivity
and counteract with extreme sports?


The wind still blows.
Babies still cry in the night.

Poetry is Not Dead, We Just Sing it Now

I did a strange thing the other day. I picked up a book of poetry and read it.
Something about the rain must have made me feel nostalgic.

Back in 2003, Bruce Wexler wrote a Newsweek article proclaiming that poetry was dead. Except for a few unknown poets counter arguing amongst themselves, most of us read it and shrugged in resigned agreement, “Yeah, he’s right.” If we read it at all. http://www.newsweek.com/id/59182

So it must have been the rain or maybe that T. S. Eliot crossword puzzle clue I encountered a couple of weeks before that caused me to pick up his book of Selected Poems. Plus, I had a cold and time to kill. Alongside the penciled notes in the margins from my college days, I recalled some of my favorite lines: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

On the back cover the publisher proclaimed Eliot’s far-reaching influence, beginning with his “first and instantly famous work, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Yes, that was the crossword puzzle clue I couldn’t recall: who measured his life by coffee spoons? But wait, instantly famous in 1917? Has poetry been dead that long? What was the last famous poem I could think of? Could I imagine a poem becoming instantly famous in 2008?

The answer to the latter is, of course, no. Poems and poets no longer become broadly famous. Reading poetry is not a regular activity of my generation. It is dead for us for all the reasons the Wexler outlined in his article five years ago: “People don't possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren't willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly.” Simply put, our world is too fast and too noisy for poetry’s slow, quiet, and repetitive requirements.

Poetry, however, is not dead. We just sing it now.

What happened between Eliot’s time and today is not the death of poetry but an evolution in the way poetry is consumed by a massive audience. Somewhere between Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, as radio and television popularized passive entertainment and opened up an ever expanding field of options, we left behind the actual reading of poetry. It was too solitary; it took too long. They were so many other more compelling entertainment options that were direct, social and new.

Ginsberg wrote his famous poem “Howl” in 1955, incidentally, the last “famous” poem I could think of. He read it first for an audience at The Six Gallery in San Francisco: “Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection/to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” It was published shortly after by City Lights Press, but the momentum of the poem’s success had much to do with Ginsberg’s live readings. He transformed standard recitation into performance art, and a large audience listened. He brought style and movement into the mix, and his generation responded. His audience wanted to feel a part of something. Solitarily reading a poem in their room was not it. The first recording of Howl was made in 1956. By 1969 he had recorded many more poems, some like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, set to music.

At the same time, Bob Dylan was marking the definitive coming-of-age of the poet-musician. His first album was released in 1962, and in less than a decade poetry went from being read to being spoken to being sung. The poet-musician was reborn: “Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind/Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves/The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach/Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.”

On the heels of Dylan came a host of poets who spread their odes through song. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Tom Waits all come to mind because they have been around long enough to begin amassing credit for their writing. But our own generation is replete with poet-musicians. I hear poetry up and down the conscious radio outlets. Neko Case's 2002 album "Blacklisted" is bursting: "The red bells beckon you to ride/A handprint on the driver's side/It looks a lot like engine oil and tastes like being poor and small/And Popsicles in the summer." I hardly know where to begin in the oeuvre of Jeff Tweedy, but the opening line from the song “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is a good bet: "I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue/I'm hiding out in the big city blinking/What was I thinking when I let go of you?" And there are so many others. The knowns: Billy Bragg, Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, and the soon-to be knowns: Sera Cahoone, Bon Iver, and thousands of others. Really, I mean thousands.

Poetry is very much alive in our generation. Few of us may be able to recite a poem from memory, but ask us for the words to our favorite songs and we can shower you with out-of-tune lyrics.

In these new troubadours we find visual satisfaction too, adoring as we are of style and fashion. They remind us, what is life without style? The way they dress inspires us. The way they move arouses us. At live shows we find community, though few would dare to term it so, sounding so suburban and settled down.

This is the rebirth of poetry for our generation. In songs we do have the patience to listen to the words of a poem twenty times and gradually gain a deeper understanding of the meaning. We can “let the words wash over us like a wave” while we drive in our car, ride the bus, walk down the street, make love, make dinner. When we listen to a song over and over again, the song remains the same, just like poetry, but the meaning and the feeling changes with each successive audition. The words may take us back to old times or give new meaning to today.

Critics may argue that all of this – sound, style, movement – is a distraction from the substance of poetry. The words can’t stand alone on the page, they would say. In the scholarly realm, save for a notable few, that may be the case. But it’s not the purpose of the design that concerns me. It’s the end result. What is true poetry anyway? Isn’t it simply beautiful, insightful, or elemental words that illuminate our regular lives with understanding?

We look to our poets like we always have – to show us beauty, truth, or new way of being, but today we want them to do it in more ways than the poets of old. We want to hear it, see it, feel it, belong to it, and maybe read it too. We can dream of knowing them, being with them, being one of them. More of our needy modern senses are set up to react by them: sound, sight, imagination, inclusion. But underneath there is still poetry.

So we’re not just lazy and distracted, as Wexler’s article suggests. Our reverence for poetry remains. We instinctively recognize its value. We have only rediscovered and recreated a form that works for our rapid times. After all, lyric poetry dates back to the ancient Greeks. Sappho and her contemporaries accompanied their spoken poems with the music played on a lyre, hence “lyric” poetry. Our modern poet-musicians are returning to poetry's ancient roots, and we as an audience, happily gather round.

So how does a poem become instantly famous in 2008? It is sung to us. Songs are poetry for the new generation.

Becky’s Uncle’s Camel Ate All Her Shit

Five days in New York City:
Jazz in the basement, like it should be
(This song’s called, like, A.B. The Fishman)
A three-story house onstage on Broadway
and three toothless black men singing do-wop on the six train.
Ladies and Gentlemen:

Nothing beats four friends, four pitchers
the Viking in Ballard
and midnight burgers at Dick’s.

New York City

New York City. Here I am. Arriving on Friday late afternoon in a slog of rush hour traffic from JFK through Queens to Manhattan. Queens looked like any other city in the twilight under low rain clouds. Sure there were huge apartment complexes, but I’ve seen those in LA and Minneapolis too. But suddenly we descended into the white tiled Queens-Midtown tunnel after 45 minutes of stop and go traffic and arose in Manhattan and there was the New York I had imagined. Packed to the waterfront with buildings and crowded streets and taxi cabs honking and maneuvering. Every street full of shops and activity. Endlessly. Flying over Montana I saw the mountains below and thought, just let me off here, in the middle of nowhere with only snow and cold and elk and the starry night. Quiet and alone. It sounded so appealing. And here I was in the middle of Manhattan in a crowded bar with crying babies and office types in expensive clothes. Manhattan can certainly make you feel insecure if you are not dressed in dry-clean only attire. At the same time it has been stylishly disappointing. Flashy labels on dull clothes. I passed a woman on 5th Avenue in Midtown marveling at the designer window dressings of Cartier. “Can you imagine” she mused, “to just decide to go buy a new five thousand dollar watch on a Saturday?” Poor soul. Still it is invigorating to be here. To be able to take the subway anywhere with the swipe of an unlimited Metro Card. To stay out all night long with no worry of the town shutting down. There are ostentatious hotel bars on every corner in Midtown serving up ridiculously priced Bloody Mary’s. At the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel Bloody Mary’s were $18 each, but you are serenaded by a harp player and gaze boozilyat an oversized mural behind the bar. It was packed at 3pm. Last night a young man sat down at the bar next to his friend and said, “I propose a special toast, ‘To me still having a job.’ They’re laying people off like crazy at work right now.”

Look Out For What’s Below

I walked tonight in the misty rain.
Down to the lookout park where no one else was.
In the still night you could hear everything amplified.
The train on the tracks below.
The raindrops on the bushes down the hillside.
I heard the lonesome bark of a harbor seal.
Then the ruckus of many and a big splash in the Sound.
Under the low clouds
I smelled Christmas candles .
Except it was the real November smell that Christmas candles imitate
I only know it by the manufactured memory.

I walked this afternoon over a carpet of bright red maple leaves.
Small and several layers thick on the sidewalk.
In the gray light they were brilliant but I didn’t notice.
Until the moment I heard Good Morning
Called to me by an old lady hunched over a rolling metal grocery cart.
She was so tiny and her voice was so small
and I was moving so fast and angrily
that the sound almost passed me by.
But it did not and I froze just for a moment
To hear it and call back, Good Morning!
And there suddenly were the leaves beneath my feet
bright and wonderful.

Miss Manners

Etiquette. By Emily Post. Copyright 1923 and signed inside the front cover in ink, in a loose cursive that same year: Robert H. Mucks. 625 W. 28th St. Los Angeles Cal. Three seventy-nine was the price, circa I don’t know what year. It was a gift on my birthday several years ago. When I was hanging out with a crowd that liked to give found gifts with comedic value. I suppose I came off as proper or well-mannered to them, so this thick tome of over prescribed manners was somehow appropriate. Despite the drunken episodes? The moustache party. The Mariner’s double header. The incident at the pool with the security guard? Anyway. The gift giver was the same person who upon greeting me in a bar once told me I looked like I had just come up from a sink full of water in a Noxema commercial. So I now have Emily Post on my bookshelf and, in fact, I quite like it and have read it with a serious interest on several occasions. Of course it is still a good party favor. I mean the chapter titles and subheadings are ridiculous: “Gentlemen and Bundles” and “Formal Service Without Man Servants” and come from a time of not only extreme ostentatiousness but also exploitation and inequality. Still, there is a level of detail and thoughtfulness that is compelling. I wish all my invitations came embossed on thick stationary. Today in the New York Times I found another strange practitioner of long-lost manners:

Henry Alford reminds us, as we apparently forgot, “how to live.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/opinion/10alford.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin

I am a Weight Lifter

I am a weight-lifter. A body builder. I stumble down the stairs. In ninety minute increments of naptime or late evening lulls, the scratchy radio broadcasts sports, talk or classical. I approach the free weights part hippie part meat. It’s balance and strength. I start with lunges. Ten pound dumbbells. Three sets. Right leg first, twenty lunges. Stop. Left leg first, twenty lunges. Stop. Right leg again. Done. Blue sneaks past me during my break to lick the cats. They’re sleeping on the old rocking chair and footstool. Short protests but Neko only braces herself for his powerful bath. One lick and she’s soaked. Set break finished. I adjust the bars on the bench up to shoulder height, one side at a time, and then load the 45 lb bar with two 25 lb weights. I take a deep breath and rise onto my toes to lift the bar off and onto my shoulders. Legs shoulder-width apart. Knees bent and back arched, I look up at the photo of Twin Lakes in the rain taped to the ceiling and squat down. One. Two. Three to ten. Done. Two sets today. I adjust the bars back down. All the weight comes off. What if I turned around all the clocks in the house on the weekends? I lay down on my back with feet firm on the floor for the bench press with just the bar. It is cold and I grip it tightly for stability. Ten presses. Go. I breathe hard by the tenth and drop the bar back on the tower. Two more sets to go. Do I conserve my strength and just lay there on the bench or do I get up and walk it off ? Today I move. It’s Sunday in the afternoon. Would it matter if it were 2pm or 4? By the third set my arms shake and I grunt out loud on the last few presses. Done. Next I try the military press. Five presses and I stop. I need a day’s break before I try these again. I move on to triceps. I lean forward over the bench and lean onto my hands, feet squarely on the ground and fingers spread out on the black fabric. I pick up the dumbbell with my right hand and hold it at my side and extend back and up. Twenty times on the right. Twenty times on the left. Done. Finally I use the bench to set up lateral pulls. Time is only on my side when I ignore it. I grab the overhanging bar and sit down on the bench looking out the window at a fern and the wheel well of the car. The weight comes down and behind my head. Three sets of ten and I finish.

Golden Gardens

The teacup is too hot to lift. I have run out of distractions. It is only me and the blinking cursor now. From the ridge above Golden Gardens in the land of trees and mushrooms come these words tonight. It was warm and humid today. Sixty degrees in November. While the world was wet all around and the ground beneath my feet squished like a great green sponge, the sun shone. It seemed to be a passing moment, but it lasted for nearly an hour. Enough time to slip on my pink galoshes and march down the steps to the dog park. Blue responds to a rhythmic tugging on his collar and the jingle of his tags against the carabiner at the end of his leash. I am his sled. All one hundred and twenty five pounds of skinny girl. He’s gaining on me in size. But I put on my man voice to stay in command. Low toned and loud. Halfway down the ridge at the grassy clearing it was quiet. Then the sound of harbor seals barking. Inside the fence a giant mud hole and ragamuffin dogs became one. Rays of sun were coming down thick and lovely, warm and bright on these otherwise cold and dark November days. I sat on the picnic table next to the slab set with old silver bowls filled with water. The expanse of the clearing directly in front of me, and the ridge going up and going down to each side. Up to the house. Down to the beach. Where a high winter tide crashed onto the sand. A man battled a kite in a updraft of wind. The sun dissappeared and rain came down suddenly.

The trees are shedding their leaves in great masses.

Good Morning

My coffee cools quickly in the morning chill
Grandma’s knit socks insulate my feet from the floor
It’s pitch black at 6:15am
I hear only the breathy drone of electronics
Tiny blue lights illuminate spaces of the house
I prefer yellow light
I creak all the way down the stairs and back
A duet of floorboards and bones
It must be 50 degrees up here
I check to see my breath, none.
The furnace roars downstairs, it’s time.
Good morning.

Somewhere in Montana

When I’m old,
like the man unfolding a wheelchair
alongside a minivan
and helping his wife out of the rear sliding door,
I want to look up at the balcony of a hotel
at two young people,
one smoking and drinking a beer
the other wearing a rancher hat and drinking a beer,
and have no regrets.
To never think of time wasted
or good times not had
or loved ones who never knew your feelings.
I’ll nod to the girl in the rancher hat
and turn into the fading blue/pink/purple haze
of the smoky twilit night.

This is the Room

Long and slim, about 16 feet by 10. Enter through a dirty door, No. 13.
Shoe-toe prints along the baseboard where you kick it unstuck after turning the key.
Step onto the paint-splattered, black wood floor.
It’s chipped and stained with decades of dirt that rises from it incessantly.
Sweep to your heart’s content; you’d have to rip the floor out to get rid of it all.
And maybe not even then. Just tear the building down.
There is a closet with no door directly to your right.
Maybe four feet by three.
In it are several brown bags of garbage
(paint-soaked rollers, plastic sheeting, beer cans);
a horizontal pole at eye level where others have hung their wardrobe;
an empty box; paint supplies.
The wall to your left is bare, freshly painted white, about 16 ft. long.
The wall that houses the closet door and the one behind you is orange,
the color of madness.
Directly ahead, the exterior wall is brick,
covered with a patina of old housepaint—currently pale, institutional blue.
A palimpsest of poor interior design choices
created by decades of tenants with innumerable purposes.
There is one window, largish
and sort of stuck, half ass, into the original brick archway of the building’s façade.
The old arch juts out above the rectangular frame.
Its exterior frame is painted white,
but the glass still slides along silver spray-painted wooden framing.
Rustoleum, I bet.
“Rustoleum! For when you’ve given up!”
The remaining wall, to your right, is red, deep red,
a little unsettling really,
but it’s too late now (I painted the damn thing not two weeks ago).
There is a waist-high table built into a corner and against the brick wall. It’s white.
A small stereo sits upon it with a few CDs; an old bottle of wine,
which I may still drink;
two small cups; and a well-worn, wooden, art-supply box.
A small shelf at knee-level beneath it holds a beat-up record player
with an ancient needle.

The only furniture is this old wood desk in the corner
where I sit by the window
and a silver floor lamp behind it.
There are a couple of chairs too.
I’d count them at 2 ½.
I sit on the sturdiest one,
which is incredibly wobbly and has no nails that function with any value anymore.
It holds me up (and itself together) by the perfect amount of counter-acting force.
Me against the chair, the chair against me, the chair against the floor.
The second one’s seat is supposed to be upholstered, and it is, I guess, on top,
but all the stuffing’s falling out of the bottom onto the floor
along with any support it once offered.
It’s got a bit of an old king’s court look, and I usually throw my bag on it.
Very regal—my shoulder bag.
The ½ chair is a stretch even within this questionable company.
It supposed to be a wood-slated folding chair
but it folds in far too many unintentional ways now.
Finding the most viable configuration is kind of like a really annoying puzzle,
and sitting on it is truly a gamble.
But it came with the place so I can’t bear to get rid of it.

There is one thing on the wall—a National Geographic map of the world
with prominent crease marks
from where it was folded into the subscription solicitation letter
in which it arrived in my mailbox.

How I get here:
I usually ride down here on the bus,
Number 131—one of the grimy, run-down buses that serve the south end of Seattle. Equality in public services my ass.
The seats are saggy and the upholstery is a bland and dirty gray
where it once was blue.
We roll out of downtown past shiny new, hybrid, kneeling buses
in which well-coiffed passengers are listening to iPods
on their way back to the suburbs.
This bus serves the industrial south-end
stretching south from downtown towards Boeing Field.
The low profile buildings house tire warehouses, shipping companies, metal works,
and occasional services such as out-of-place-looking coffee shops and delis.
Most everything is shut down when I come down—evenings and weekends.
Until you get to Georgetown, that is, where the handful of bars stay open
just like everywhere else in the city
and serve their needy clientele of which I am sometimes one.

The other day I rode my bike down instead.
It was sunny and warm for February.
The road was quiet as it was a weekend,
and I could concentrate on every pothole
without threat of an 18-wheeler bowling me over.

I come down here to get away.
At first it was essential.
When I was only just starting to visit, it was a need
that I suffered without all day and fulfilled come night.
It was a bit of a secret too.
Another place, a seemingly far-away place
that only a few know about yet was self-sufficient and vibrant,
and I was a part of it.
I would sneak away from my other life
of high-rise apartments and office buildings and conspicuous consumption.
I would buy cigarettes and roll down to the working-class world
that reminded me of my father.
Greasy shop rags and toxic orange hand soap
Orange Away!
just like I remembered.

Then it became a chore,
something I should be doing.
“Remember?” I’d have to tell myself.
“You said you wanted a place to think, a place to be alone.”
But it was intimidating.
I would be isolated and the place I came from was so comfortable.
The chairs weren’t even close to falling apart
and there was media in so many forms to numb me.

Am I just a fraud then?
Coming down here to this artist enclave
in this industrial no-man’s land
from my luxury high-rise complex
in the heart of this city—million dollar views and all.
Coming down here to my little bohemian studio,
smoking cigarettes and staring out the window
at the shuttered building across the way.
My bicycle is parked in the corner
(fraud on that count too?
I don’t even own a pump to inflate my own tires).

How would I measure on the authenticity test,
should this building of artists require one at signing of lease?
Semi-fraud,
cool-as-she-looks,
or hapless-attempt?
Fortunately there’s no one around to weigh in
except me.
Only problem is
I’m the only one I’m worried about.

The Roadhouse

The Roadhouse http://kexp.org/programming/programming.asp

There’s a place you can go
Wednesday evenings in Seattle
that reveres the old style,
the slow-tuning of an analog radio
archetypal rock songs
at the dusty end of the radio dial.

The Roadhouse is what it is.
Vandy’s slightly mumbled commentary,
in on a downbeat of silence between songs
short sound mixes: one-liners, call outs
and grooves
bringing it all together.
Tune in for summer sell-outs
for music for cars with the windows down
back porch drinking
on a hot Wednesday evening,
a little bit stoned
packing for the beach.
Playing all the songs that make a Wisconsin girl smile:
Graham Parsons, The Band, The Byrds,
New Riders of the Purple Sage.

Old-time mountain music
cajun, folk, country rock
antediluvian recordings
one-of-a-kind segues
low-fi gospel cuts to the Black Keys
a scratchy recording
20th century blues, woah man
some local darlings
The Duchess and The Duke.

Sit close to appreciate
start to finish week to week.
listen for a revelation.
a complete composition
a painting, a story
subjects, background, foreground
a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Labor Day protest songs
Union bargaining
people coming together
too old to work but too young to die
Anniversary Martin Luther King
March On Washington, 1963
songs of the gospel tradition
movement for equality
Nina Simone thundering "Alabama, God Damn,"
Vandy reminds “I Have a Dream”
Lincoln Memorial mesmerizing.
Columbia River Woody Guthrie
federal government, 1941
songs for dams in the
Pacific Northwest
Roll on, Columbia, roll on.

Music in a time and a place
you can visit that place
Wednesdays
Vandy's bringing it back to our time
best history lesson on the radio.
The roots of the music
playing the soundtrack of our lives.