....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 

“I won’t come out, you must come in to see me”*

*the lords and the new creatures; jdmorrison