Robin Egg Blue

It sits there in the shade beneath the mesquite tree where the dealer said he would put it so it would be cool when I came to take a look at it. "Sits" maybe isn't the right verb. Crouching maybe. Ready-to-pounce for sure. It looked animated, the lines speaking speed. This was not a comfort car, nor was it a quiet commuter. Metal flake shade shifting paint, low profile tires, gold rims, air scoop, fairing (that actually worked) on the trunk. It likely could go twice the speed limit of most highways, maybe the interstate. It was everything I shouldn't be: irresponsible, sensational, imprudent. But it was a burr in my brain, an image I couldn't shake. It was my version of Peter Fonda's Captain America chopper in Easy Rider. We know how that turned out. Flirting with disaster feels fine as I lean over a dizzying precipice.

Tribes

They sit segregated by race and by choice. It's the way things go in prison, this prison, anyway. This prison, a state prison in Arizona, is an old-school punish-'em-til-they-break, just-keep-the fights-from-spreading-outside-the-yard prison. Education is in short supply. The food is bad. Time outside the cell is short, one hour of rec per day. In a place like this, you need your homies for protection, and you need to represent when your card is called. If that means taking someone out, a stoolie say, then you do it. Or you risk the ire of your tribe, the shot callers, the rules of the game and the requirements for membership in your tribe. Autonomy is a quaint abstraction from some other life, some other world. There is no opting out without consequences that hurt for a long time. Tribes feed on fear, on scarcity, on absence of options, on differences, on turf lost or gained. Arizona law makers like it that way. The tribes run the yards, like packs of sharks. But that is outside, for a few hours anyway. Right now we read a poem about work, about finding one's way through the labyrinth that life presents, something that everyone, no matter the tribe, has to figure out. In this we have some common ground. We look for the words that might describe that. They are elusive, but we join together in the hunt.

Gateway Drug

It starts with the weak stuff at the diner when you are sixteen and order two eggs over-easy with hashbrowns and get permission to drink what might as well be dishwater it is so thin. But the little boost you get from that swill in a 1950s cup with chips and stains from too much use is enough to pique your cravings. Before you know it you are on a bike tour in northern Wisconsin and need the drug to cover the next 32 miles to the campsite. Before you know it again you are in college, getting up to go to your job in the student union while it is still dark and the wind outside is screaming off of some iceberg in Greenland and you don't even eat because you need that fix. One day, the barista, a friendly little pusher-woman, offers you a free shot of espresso because it is free-shot Monday. The brown bloom and the extra kick send you into a heightened caffeine-induced ecstasy. You ask for another. Then you hit the streets in search of Italian espresso beans, the mainline. Your kitchen fills with roasters, burr grinders, steaming gleaming stainless steel steamers. Your dreams are laced with lattes. The cupboards fill with tiny cups for the strong stuff. You hide beans under your bed and lie to your friends about why you are smiling all the time. You carry a portable grinder on backpacking trips and refuse to go anywhere that doesn't serve coffee. Your bank account drains into boutique varieties of Joe and you travel to the source and sneak onto cafetales in Central America to pick the raw cherries of the strongest brew. Your eyes are crazed. Your hands tremble. The jitters haunt your dreams. Your wife says you smell like French roast. You hit bottom and seek professional help. They tell you what you really want is just hot water. You try. It doesn't take. You wander the arroyos, sleep under bridges, carry grounds in a plastic bag, share your secrets of perfect water temperatures. You keep the company of other junkies. When your time comes, and the hooded reaper stands at the door with his scythe poised sharp as a scalpel, you ask if he can wait while you brew just one more for the road.

Encumbrances

They are invisible, but they are strong as steel cables, those threads that I have woven over the years, and that now bind me like duct tape, freezing me in a near catatonic state. The more I fight them, the tighter they become, until I must either surrender or die trying to break them. The kicker here is that they are my own creation, my way of coping before I knew better. Knowing that doesn't make them any less real, but it does point to the way out. They will only dissolve if I examine the living braid of reasons, shine light on the secrets, tease out the errors, and then re-wire and re-imagine them. I can then accept the pain of them as they burn in the crucible of transformation. There is a cost for change, paid in full when the shell cracks open and a light pours through and the old crust falls, smoking, to the waiting earth.

Ode to Blood

It is getting to where it is needed. Old friends, visible veins, have begun to visit the rock of a foot at the end of my right leg. Under siege, the swelling has been in retreat. Purple and red shifts to pink. The callouses on the soles of my feet are long gone, and summer barefoot season is past. Still can't feel anything on one side under the calf muscle. Tiny corpuscles pick up the toxic waste of too much postponement. Stiffness dreams of breaking the bonds of limitation. Numb, stiff, hard, calcified, I wiggle my toes. Don't really care much about how the skin hangs there, no longer taut; I just want to be move, swivel, bear, and walk. It is blood I need, blood I long for, blood that quells the ache in my heart. I have been frozen for too long.

On Turning Sixty

The decade sounds ominous
Now "S"s as the "F"s
Recede in the rear view mirror

A curdling unease
Vague notions of hobbling
Canes, vanished virility

Creaky joints crimped digestion
And "sir" as the cashier
Rings up milk of magnesia

The mile marker slides
By the window of this
Passing train

A shade lowers a bit
To hide the harsh light

Tell me something
I don't know
That days have numbers

That fall and rise
The price set by how
They are spent

Short supply
Infuses illusion
With clarity

The forelock of time
Waits to be plucked
Love to be spoken

I am learning to
Take a deeper
Breath

A welcome shock
To the System

A sweet taste
Of creosote
Of hot chiles

The Olympics I Would Like to See

It's too late again as I zap the TV after watching Olympic athletes do their things. I've been glued since dinner and it's now early morning on a work day. The short night will hurt when work demands focus that I don't have from lack of sleep.

Oh well. It's worth it. I love this stuff.

And it's not completely what I would like to see.

Yes, Simone Biles and her stratospheric flight in laid-out twisting double back flips is impressive beyond words. And it's not what I have to learn to do.

I would like to see an Olympics for living. You know, juggling work, home, relationships, self-care, world-awareness, finances.

Here are some possibilities:

1.) An Olympics for energy and water saving. Contestants would start with some seed money and have to build, from scratch, a water-harvesting system, solar panels, waste disposal, and efficient structure. There could be individual and team events.

2.) A diaper-changing sprint.

3.) Debt hurdles.

4.) Car maintenance heptathlon.

5.) Teaching marathon (with standardized, timed testing for thirty randomly selected students).

6.) Financial aid forms decathlon.

7.) Floor exercise of tile, grout, sealing, and molding installation.

8.) Doubles and singles parenting with degree of difficulty points for staying calm when the talk gets personal and pushes all kinds of anger/upset buttons. Contestants would be monitored for blood pressure, infanticide fantasies. Bonus points for meditation classes, communication clarity, and setting the bar high.

9.) Morning routine for both style and degree of difficulty after getting up late.

10.) Meal prep given random ingredients in varying stages of freshness. Bonus points when judges actually eat what you cook.

OK, there is more. But this life is an ordeal of sorts, and it would be helpful to see how the pros do some of the tasks. Might learn something...