Blue

The sinking comes on strong, out of nowhere. You were OK a minute ago, smiling even. Just another day until it hit you. The triggers are everywhere -- a chipotle salsa, fat moon, giggle across the room -- and then it happens. You fizzle in a very unspectacular dud of a downer. Then you can barely drag yourself into the next second, much less the next minute or month or anything like a favorable future. The sting comes from having run when should have taken a stand, gone down the hard road, said yes. It's a disgrace, a wound, a great big target that says fuck up. While you can't see them, most everybody else is carrying these things around too. They are the regrets, the maybes, the might-have-beens. In this compromise of a half-baked life, they stink. At least mine do. It's a hard thing to do, but comes a time when you have to stop, turn around, take a hard look, take the blame, and get down to the hard work of hack-sawing, chiseling, filing, or even chewing on the steel chains with your teeth. If you have to, cut your leg to free yourself from the trap. It's that or stay stuck in the coulda-shoulda blues. You may have missed one chance, but the only way you will have another is to face the thing you most fear, the thing you most desire. It will feel like you stuck your finger in a light socket: the wind, sun, and dust so bright suddenly you will stagger back on your heels. Don't fall you say to no one but some hopeful part of yourself. Dig in. Lean into it.Don't let the next chance get away.

Drawn

It's falling apart. A couple of nails, tacked in as afterthought stand between it and a quick crash to earth. A stiff breeze would blow the thing down. I have to tear the ramada down and re-build it. Better. Getting from here to there is a problem. That problem throws down the glove of challenge. The challenge is to engage with the chaos of not knowing exactly what to do. I can either run away, do it sloppily, or take the hard path of thinking it through, getting the right materials, and making a plan. Not the way I usually operate. So, crossing the grain, going against the grain, I pull out a pen and begin to sketch a possible plan. It's rough, so I scrap that and start over. I draw in the roof-line, the hurricane strips, the stringer that will run the length of the re-build, the joist hangers, the rafters, the perlins, the notched 4x4 s, the piers. The lines are straight, show the perspective, take into account a vanishing point. Mindfulness guides my pen, quiets the fears, the resistance, the avoidance. It pulls me forward is a tug into the unknown, new ways of doing things. The ramada is a place holder, the surface covering an ocean of things loved and lost, things too terribly dear to say out loud for fear of becoming. I don't operate like this because I decided long ago to not achieve out of spite. Those old habits don't want to go quietly, but I comfort them and step forward, drawn to you, my love, what I have lost,  by urgency to shore up all that has been broken, left undone, all that waits for recognition, embrace, a call home. I will not rest until I hold you close, finally, after all these years.  

September Is the Month of Moths and Spiders

The moths gather on the deck around the pool, their eyes reflecting the light of my headlamp. They are thick this year, and throw themselves into the water when the pool light is on. It's off now, so they fly into the beam of my headlamp. I have to wonder why they so desire the light. The spiders too have taken over, but they are on the porch. Their eyes shine with an even greater intensity in the beam of my lamp. Some of the webs are the tough silk of black widows. Now those are ones to watch for. I see webs streaming off the ends of branches and prickly pear pads when the wind blows at sunset. The light catches the threads as they dance like banners of some arachnid clan gathering. Moths are desire. Spiders are weavers. I need them both in this fall of scribbling, this windfall of changing season, of this call to wake up.

Buds

They rise from a waxy skin covered with spines. Where before there was only the smooth exterior of the columnar cactus they sprout, as if from nothing, into long stems that lift what will be an impossible bloom when the sun sets. In the darkness they will open, white and delicate as falling snow. Through the night they wait for the attention of a moth whose touch will mingle the desires of pollen and egg. Sweet sex. With the first light, the petals will close, sealing the magic of growing fruit. Cloistered, the stem dries in the heat. Life grows from the spark. The flower surrenders and fades. Does it remember the moth, the touch of wings in the night?

Open

Nectar bats have drained the hummingbird feeder. They are here this time of year but will migrate south soon and leave the feeder to the local hungry hummers. Most people take their feeders down after dark, or cover them with screen to keep the bats from guzzling the nectar. I take the dimmer view that they should have the goods while they are here, that they migrate for food, and will leave soon enough. The empty feeder in the morning is a small price to pay. The dry glass hanging from a steel cable reminds me of all I have lost, all I have longed for and never attained. At least the bats will have a frenzy to look back on when they again head south, over the walls that close off movement, possibility, the urge to taste the delights of this short life. I can give them that then, my bats of the hungry heart. 

A Good Goddamn

Eden closed its doors after I was given the boot. That was a long time ago, and this country of scramble and compromise has been an unforgiving home -- the curse a result of seeing two sides, gray, and unresolved, a case of asking a question too many times. I pried open the vault containing taboos, forbidden doubts. I have been wandering ever since, not that I mind that much. I have company from time to time. We reminisce about the golden glow of knowing for certain, the peace, the comforts of obedience. Those still burn late at night. It's impossible not to grieve. Unrequited love wanders the windswept stones left by glaciers long since receded. This excommunication is a price to pay, and it hurts. But my heart still beats; I still stand, even though my legs have begun to tire. I walk the walk of the damned, but it's a good goddamn.

No Man's Land

I am not good company on prison days. Aloof, irritable, withdrawn, I sleep-walk through Saturday morning chores. I have gone inside and need space to gird my loins, armor myself, visually rehearse my routine: go to Bookman's for used books, magazines, dictionaries, then to an office supply place for pads of paper, accordion folders, and pens, then to the University for copies of inmate work, and turnout lists that I print out. Then the long drive from the sculpted lawns of the university to the strafed, naked ground of the prison. The physical and material preparation is nothing compared to hardening of the psyche though.

My usual life -- and the moralities that go with it -- don't apply in prison. Prison rules of the road fall more into the Darwinian, opportunistic, and brutal plays of dominance and power. Yes, there are power structures in the free world too, but they are less naked, overt, urgent, less desperate, less unrelenting. In prison there are no breaks from the scramble to survive, even the boredom of the place feels close to fatal.

The workshops offer a bit of a reprieve. Often, but not always, we have air conditioning, and they get paper, conversation, and a forum. I am not naive enough to think that the exigencies of prison life don't trail in with the inmates, that some of the shot callers aren't using the time to sneak in some politicking, that notes don't get passed under the table, that looks aren't telegraphing outside prison business, but men show up. They are not just inmates any more. Many of them have something to say and want to learn how to say it better.

With all the conning, fishing, and hustle that goes on, why do prison workshops? And how did I end up here?

On a personal level, I am the last person who should be here. Introverted to distress, soft from a life of academic work, somewhat middle class, white, male, and having avoided violence most of my life, utterly absent of tattoos, guns, and locked doors, I come from a standpoint far removed from prison realities. I live in something like another country, both materially and psychologically. In many ways I am less altruistic than ignorant, or in denial, of prison realities. I don't have to fight for my place. In the eyes on inmates, I likely do not even register on the scale that measures "cred."

The boundaries between the men in the workshops and me are stark, the wall already built (and Mexico didn't even have to pay for it). And getting into prison is almost as hard as getting out. The paperwork of clearance, the doors, the locks, the searches, the occasional contempt of the cops for someone doing "creative writing," said with real disdain, all add up to hassle.

Plus I defy my volunteer directives. I carry contraband, distribute banned reading material. I am already doing what I would do if I were being fished or conned, so why bother?

Part of what helps cross the boundaries is that the usual game of prison life gets short-circuited in the workshops. There are no cops. I turn off the radio. What I am interested in is writing. I invite them to leave their territory, as I have left mine, and meet on the ground of expression. Here we overlap. Here we have stories, we have wounds, we have lost, we grieve and we rejoice. We read what others have written about love, work, death, longing, lust, nature, betrayal, unfairness, fathers, children, cars.

The common ground outside or between the boundaries shakes down my perceptions of the inmates and it opens the possibility to see writing as a kind of freedom from prison.

I am not saying this just because I think it. I say it because they tell me it is so for them, some of them anyway.

Learning to express opens possibilities, other ways of seeing. The voice on the page is not always the voice of the man speaking on the yard. The voice on the page may see an alternative to violence as an answer, may see a connection or a story where before there was nothing. It may speak from an identity heretofore unknown, a stranger.

Here I do step in to say, that I believe in writing and literacy and language as tied to creating a full humanity. Self-critical enough not to be wholly evangelical, I confide with them that believing and living this is what gets me off my ass on Saturday mornings and out to a place where I might leap across a void so impossible that it might as well be on Mars.

But then it happens. And, in a strange way, I am at home in a place I cannot live.

We meet in no man's land for a brief encounter. The air here is too rarefied for both them and me. I offer a distilled tonic of expression, share the refined riches of my life as a teacher and writer. They offer their best truths. We exchange goods, even though the currencies are mixed. It's a barter, but it's contact.

In another life, we might be friends. In this life, we will remain strangers, but for the brief taste, this communion of the word.