from the journey, oh the places we have gone

my pilgrimage 

This is why I hike 

I never use a filter, I wait for when the light is right 

 

 

 

 ....these fleeting thoughts as I pass through the end of one stage and turn

there is awareness over how voices I’ve listened to before were harmful. They wanted things from me as they opened their hands and offered me their veiled gifts

I see I have turned the corner and learned how to keep going on calloused soled feet that gained their rites of passage at last

they will no longer chain me down

I walked away at last

      I didn’t know I had instilled the callus as shield with the rubber exterior that bounces and deflects what once I had no defense against.... oh those flesh eating parasites.... goodbye. I don’t care anymore. No I’m not an asshole, I’ve just gone hard inside from the callus of experiences of a journey you will never know. If that makes me cold, so be it, but the world was always cold on this path when faces sneered and turned away in narrow judgement

I find warmth in places I’d never have expected .... New York which once had been my punisher comes now to rescue me as if the ghost of my father carries me to his historical monument. I stand at his statue on this city’s street and humble myself at his feet knowing awe stumbling to it by sheer accident.... my father

“What is it?” he asks me as I watch absently squirrels gathering their acorns. Sit on the wood floor with legs up against me, my head against the wall. “You’re so quiet these last few days...”

His hands run up my arms as he sits behind me. He pulls me to him sitting behind me

“I think that I realize now that identity.... is a riddle about the measure of being different.... and I don’t know why the relevance of this has left me so empty lately. The shift of meaning seems to appear to me more about the emotions that drive us; the desperate ones.... What is voice?”

what is voice

when I can only whisper, no one hears, that is apocalyptic emptiness 

Northport memories

I used to love to drive out to the waterfront in Northport in my old Hyundai hatchback on an early spring day . 

You know, there was still that nip in the air and the trees all still bear. But the air was so crisp. I’d whizz along the snaking 25-A and make that sharp left down that quaint little road that descended all the way down to the water. 

I’d dream of those dockside houses with their odd garages. The bricks of the road. The cats that tiptoed across the sidewalk like ballerinas.

Down down to the water.

My escape. 

Sometimes after work, sometimes from buttercup lane where my parents lived five minutes away off of 25-a and cherry lane and just past where my equestrian trainer’s house was.

Northport was so nice and sleepy with its tram tracks on the street where Jack Kerouac lived. I used to sit on the curb out there and stare up at his window imagining ….what he saw. With a tuna fish salad sandwich walk along the tram tracks to the path that lead to the long dock.

The Northport New York yachts under a setting sun were often my best company.

John and I lived between a cemetery and a biker’s dive. Our last place together. 

I’d go at high speed over the railroad tracks and do a wheelie right into the drive and more often than not he was standing with a crossbow aimed at a squirrel 

Miss Pim/fleeting thought; intro of a Short

Brenda would often wonder what Greg would turn out like once he’d grown up…. but she always found it so impossible. 

He had always been such a dark horse. 

It felt unreal he should be only about a yard away when so many years had now passed. She had sensed him, she realized, even before she came to this spot. It seemed she always could sense him. When he was near, when he was about to do something reckless, when he was thinking of her; she could feel it, it always seemed. 

“Are you—?” she began ….

But just then a sudden downpour of rain fell upon them without warning and….

   whatever she was about to say —was eclipsed 

“This way!!!” he said and reached without hesitation and pulled her under his arm and then he half dragged her in a direction towards some parked cars

And it was not until later that she would reflect upon the ease of which his familiarity felt by just that presumed touch —almost like a reactor waking and returning to that place of self-aware

Miss Pim/Another, another story

Returning to the old school brought up old memories again 

It had been when Brenda had been student teaching. Before she had decided to become a student counselor. She had been forced to study abroad due to her family’s circumstances at the time; her father was an American diplomat and he had been caught up in politics that forced caution. So she had to remain near her father for protection by the secret service as she attended university.

But how she wound up doing her internship at a school deep in the center of a society beyond her experience; the English Midlands; was quite the mystery. Then—just on her way to her higher degrees in what later became her field due to ….an encounter with one particular student. 

He was a boy at the school who was always getting into fights even though he was a very bright student. And she had become somehow drawn into the case. They wanted to take him up on charges over something —only, what was it, again? She didn’t remember….one day she decided instead of forcing a confrontation with him about the incidences that had everyone so upset about, she shared with him some drawings she had been working on for an idea for a comic book. And somehow it took another turn 

How old would he be now? She wondered. 

What was his name again? 

Brenda was only back in the area because an old friend of hers from school was getting married and she had heard the old headmaster of the school was retiring. There was some event being made of it which she had found by chance when she was reading about local news. 

She found herself going back to some old familiar places and outside the school down the road was one spot of particular memory.  

It was a grey, wintry day but Brenda’s eyes swept the vista and they fell, by memory, to the very spot of the swings …. there….there it was…. 

and, 

“there,” she said aloud 

But then there was a sound, like a scrape of a shoe behind her before,

“I knew somehow that you would be back….”

the voice —was ….

“Greg….” she turned around 

“Miss Pim.”

tango for tea

 

on the stripped to cement floor of the penthouse living room and my old quilt as the magic carpet beneath us, as if this is so natural to sit here with him. so natural that I can stretch myself to reach my toes to him ….after years 

no place now to even hide but the shadows of the room that keep us under the illusion of safety until I think— of the glare of the morning

he suddenly says

“I have discovered something about you I never knew,” he tells me now with that impossible lilt from his native land that dusts everything with magic 

“What?” I ask and start to feel the color rise to my face 

He reaches across the floor beside me where lies my mobil. He taps it,

“when you got up before ….you really should put a passcode on your phone tsk tsk .”

I reach for my phone but look at him, I just keep my hand there

“I’ll keep that in mind —while you’re here.”

But he is just watching me,

“I always had the feeling. But—now it’s confirmed—so—that website—you’re not as —vanilla as you liked to pretend in —the past?”

“Did I ever pretend that?” I ask but no, I’m already standing up and grabbing my phone and wondering 

“You’re angry.”

He says that. 

I think I’m meant to ask:

“what are you playing at?”

But, instead, I look at him and slowly so as to seem quite bored with the game, walk in the direction towards the kitchen

do I know the answer to that? and the reply that is in the no reply

He follows me 

and as he does so I say, waving my hand in the direction of New York City,

“and while all that is at my feet….” and here I stop to peer out at the city street of the city that never sleeps, “it could be on the other side of the universe for all the good of its charms —when I can’t even afford a hot dog off the corner stand,” I say

But then I say,

“maybe I didn’t have the vocabulary to speak of more complex flavors like black sabbath raspberry ginger snaps so you only heard vanilla —but I don’t remember you complaining of me that time in the telephone booth, but I guess you forgot about that?”

where are the dreams from wherein we first were sprung