Back behind the machine, I worked into the poem. It had been awhile for me. The poem was a good animal. Faulkner had said that novelists were failed short story writers, and all short story writers were failed poets. Which was utter nonsense. Poets were filled with less longevity in form, and they concentrated more color into smaller spaces, and aside from a handful of them that moved me, I thought that most poets were terrible at it. I’d started out writing poems as a younger man, a child of that handful of poets, and Faulkner wasn’t one of them. As I became older and moved into more experience, the pages grew into stories, and they grew into novels. Now it was a trip back and forth between the two, but the poem was still important to me, it was the blood that ran beneath the veins of everything that I did behind the machine. The years of poems had built my base, and whatever grew from that toward the sky was only as strong as the feelings the poems gave me. I had hundreds of pages of poems on file, and maybe one day I would submit them, but maybe I wouldn’t. And there I thought about aphorisms, axioms, the priceless words of the greats , which always made me laugh a bit, because when a man does nothing but plays with words for a lifetime, he’s bound to come up with a few stones from the mud. Not to say that the words of great writers hadn’t put the world where it was, because they had. But the way people hung on the ideals of others just because they were reading them in print, it halted independent thought and went beyond reference, which is all information really is. For every wise sentence another person gave you, it was there as a stem for your own enhancement, or intelligent debate, not something to be lived by. All of this triggered a memory of a moment, in a bar in Portland, and I wrote it, about back in my early thirties, after I had quit smoking cigarettes –one, because I thought that it was a disgusting habit−and two, because I didn’t want to keep feeling like crap−and three, because I thought that it lacked grace. And it wasn’t hard to quit, they just tell you it is. But after I’d cut them out, I sat in a bar with a buddy of mine, who lit up and shook his head at me, and relied on a paraphrased dictum from Abraham Lincoln. He shot the smoke from his nostrils and looked at me arrogantly: “Every good man has a vice.” “No, every good man had a vice.” I sat there remembering, and let the words pour down the page in broadside, free from structure, and the old rush came back. The opaque blood that might have started to filter into the bloodstream was colored over again, just for good measure. But I wrote about the bar, my friend, who actually had a rare condition of being born without enamel on his teeth, and the gears engaged until the oil cycled through. I wrote a grip more, some about present day, some about Los Angeles. It was good to check in and feed the flames.

"Don't ever meet your heroes, son...I could have had George Jones for a roommate back in the 60s, but I liked him too well to do that to us."

"If you want to be a recording artist, you can't afford to give a shit about anyone but yourself; that's just the way it is."

"Someone stole your song idea? Think of it as a compliment..."

"I think that third line in your second verse could use some work..."

"God writes the songs; I just hold the pen."

"Son, remember--EVERYBODY is having a bad day."

I felt the bristles from bushes graze my legs. I kept walking into the woods. I saw old camp sites along the way. The deeper I traveled the further I was from civilization. I kept following the unmade path I was on further into the woods until I reached my spot. A spot on top of one of the rocks in a boulder field. I balanced large rocks on top of one another and made my own stair case. I stumbled my way up as always but it was worth it. I was there for a while. Listening to my favorite mix of birds by nature. Falling asleep minutes later. I was woken up by the sound of a loud bell. I thought to myself a bell in the middle of the woods. I must have been dreaming. It rang again, and again another time. I started down the set of rocks and ran as fast as I could to get out of there. I followed my known path to the opening of the woods and tripped on my own feet. I felt my hands immediately hit the ground along with the right side of my body. By the time my head made contact with the ground I was out cold. I heard the bell ring again. This time I woke up by the sound ofanother person's voice.

"Kate, wake up! You fell asleep in class again and you're going to be late if you don't wake up!"

There is the old saying "on the roadmap of life."

Maps give us insights into certain areas, help us to navigate unknown territories, and reveal points of interest for further and future exploration.

The stories of our lives are much the same.

Our stories help people to understand how to navigate the territory of "us." After all, aren't some roads best avoided, and some areas private or even off limits? They are.

When people venture into these places lacking a map, they often find themselves lost, and/or in places and situations which are normally restricted.

Unfortunately we cannot draw a picture of our lives for people to study, so that they might navigate our territories with informed understanding. But, our stories do serve in a similar fashion.

When people take the time to learn the "map" of another, they have to first enter into a foreign land. And by studying their map, or learning their stories, they are able to better understand the territory in which they travel.

It is in our stories that the map of our life is drawn.

Study well, or risk getting lost.

you’ve sold me

a radio without

sound

rice without the

cooker

a place with no

ceiling

a car with a

bum engine

I lived in your caves

and adapted

carried your words around

like stone tablets

-really believed in you and

your cause

well, you’ve taught me a thing or two

and as much as I’ve wanted

to hunt you down and

kill you

with

my bare hands

I

haven’t

you’ve given me a

pure solitude.

I love your input / output / voice, C., but find it sort of hilarious that you seem to be unable to criticize any way of thinking you disagree with without pouring a huge sackfull of venomous and often contradictory hatewords on your target(s).

You did a great Facebook rant a couple months ago that viciously dismissed any non-professional artist who reads poetry or tries to play music in public as a "hipster shithead jerkoff Bukowski / Burroughs / Kerouac wanna-bee who should shut the fuck up and stay in their parent's basement"; it went on and on and on with so many "motherfuckers" and "cocksuckers" and such savage spitting hatred that I actually began to laugh out loud, partly because, yeah, there are a number of poets and musicians out there who are self-deluded as to their talent level, but your raw red rage at their mere existence hit a point where it became humorous, a parody of "the Hater" and an unwitting self-satire, rather than a rough tweak to the noses of the self-important.

Today, you tell us that those who don't share the views of the "84%" of the planet who have "some sort of faith" in God (where did you get that specific percentage? And how? My guess is "not scientifically") are "liberal fascist narrow-minded yippie yoga chakra-believing fucks" and etc. Fine if you don't like liberals, but you, yourself, much more resemble a "liberal" than a "fascist". These words are not synonyms, bro. The Nazis put liberals in the death camps right along with homosexuals, Jews, Gypsies, and people with the wrong kind of art on their walls or books in their shelves. If there had been any Filipinos in Germany, they'd have gone in right alongside the other "subhuman non-aryans".

Liberals can be irritating, but I (and most people) will not accept Liberalism as equaling Nazism or even "yippie-ism", whatever that is now. A Yippie USED to be a member of the Youth International Party in the 60s, but I don't think they exist any more. C., you indicate you believe in a God, that is, (correct me if I have it wrong) an invisible Being outside yourself who is the source of all good, but you curse and condemn anyone who buys into something crazy like "chakras" or "yoga". Well, chakras are not easily proven to exist by hard science--much like "God", we have only anecdotal evidence. But yoga is a visible, proven form of effective exercise that can actually be seen to work; it is not a political party or a theory; it doesn't exist "up there" or require any "faith", only work. Yoga redeemed iconic bad-guy wrestler Jake "the Snake" Roberts from being a near-dead crackhead, for instance.

For anyone who was interested in the nature of your particular "God" and wanted to hear more about that God--well, we don't get to hear about it, because you are too busy bringing the hate to go into that. You're a good writer, C.,--TOO good to rely on the totally lazy, typically-Facebookian approach of carpet-bombing the "enemy" with an unoriginal string of "fuck you shit liberal cocksucker nazi fuck shit new ager piss shit hipster fuck fucks, etc..." The naughty words are so old and tired now; they no longer have power to shock, and labelling other people in a way that reduces them to nothing more than labels is something I'd expect from a prejudiced bigot, not someone like YOU, brutha...

We hit some bars by my place. We stayed in the Burgundy Room. It was good drinking with Mick. The bar was full so we sat at a table and talked about great, dead men.

We moved to the bar. Mick was sitting next to a huge black man straight out of 1930s Harlem. He was smooth. They were talking low to each other. I was sitting on the corner next to Mick. I knew what they were doing but I didn’t know what they were doing it over. Mick leaned over to me.

“Hey, man. Let me borrow twenty bucks, I’m a little short for this.”

“For what?”

1930 opened his big palm under the bar. I looked under casually. A large black egg of hash. Mick looked at me and nodded. I gave him a twenty, the deal was made under the bar, and Mick was happy with the deal. He kept giving me sly looks. Back at the booth we talked to a couple of girls but nothing was going to happen with them. Before we got to my place, he hit an ATM and gave me a twenty. Upstairs he sat on the box and broke the hash apart, drunk. He looked like a giant squirrel.

“Man. A hundred and twenty five bucks for a two golf ball chunk.”

“That’s a good deal?”

He kept breaking the hash, “Hell yeah, it is.”

Meg rose to his lap and sniffed the hash. She sneezed and crawled under my chair. Mick mixed in some of the egg with some weed and rolled it. He lit the end and inhaled. He held it out to me. I took a hit.

“You don’t get high that much, huh?”

“Not really,” I passed it back.

He took another hit and handed it back over.

“You’ll be good and high tonight.”

“Fuck it,” I said, “When in Rome.”

We heard gunshots and he laughed.