This is known in the western factory idyll world as a ' day off! I wake up, I woke up, I am, he is! The night before I drank and sang and fell unconscious, I lay inert and terrified for moments uncountable, I was adamant that I would die last night, probably in my sleep; you cannot die if you're awake, and that is a certainty. I often think each night will be my last; it gives me a great sense of cheerfulness in the mornings to know another day waits to be swum as an ocean. I have an old steel kettle with an attachable plug lead next to my sheets, I dream of a lone tree and vast white meadows of mist. I also have a small carton of dried milk with sugar and tea bags that I keep stored in my old red 'superman' sandwich box. I smell the sweet tale air of sandwiches lettuce and damp bread, oozing tomatoes and the aroma of a bruised apple, and my youth caresses me in small intimate ways as a dull sleepy coach journey, the hearts of old children are endless; if I of snot nose and short pants way back then, were to know this feeble me of now, I should think shamefully of every young boys future; Adolf Schickelgruber once suckled silently at a pale and plump paternal breast with its stubby brown nipple, I have a picture of an old tank on my wall, I do not know why. I remember paintings I never painted and faces of people whom I have never met. In the morning it occurs to me without the fear of death I think waking up would be intolerable by many; it gives one a sense of achievement unsurpassed by all other modes of triumph. I fill the kettle with water each night before retiring, so in the morning all I need do is flick the sturdy black switch and listen to the water bubble and hiss, whilst it hisses I pretend I am crawling heroically through the dangerous rubble and mud of my fabric trench, here I coagulate words into coherent forms in the narrative of my sleepy mind.
I think little of my youth, hopeless solemnity. My mother was never a healthy lady, she was born placid lost in a terrible infants coughing fit, too brittle to live too stubborn to die. Her domain after my birth which seemed to sap what little vitality she had left, became the conservatory above the garage, over looking the garden, so at night she could spy the mischief making of foxes and badgers. She wrote a rather fine short story in the years of her 'Happy Convalescence' as my father many years too late would refer to it, smiling mistily out of his mind. My father was a dull uninspired man, no! My father in comparison to my mother was a 'dull uninspired man' who doted, devoted and cherished my mother for twenty years, through her illness. They met at their local theatre group, were he was a long shaggy haired twenty something director/ Drama student at the local university, breathing Brecht and idolising Beckett, with a passion only the arduous youth can display. My mother had had no love for the theatre; my grandmother put her name down on her behalf as a props builder, a scenery artist, and general busy body of the backstage hero's. My father told me the story when I was ten although it could have been later; and I have never forgotten it, well the rest is self-explanatory. After the arrival of me, my mother settled down to her conservatory bubble and my father became a civil servant after graduating with a drama degree. Yet it was mother who became the true artist, and despite her illness wrote a fantastic children's story from her deathbed, she became the artist whilst he withered into mundane servitude.
'The Chronicles of the Gobbledygook Soldiers' by a mother
-There was a shuffling in the tree's, and Old Bacon stopped suddenly swishing his bushy burgundy tale, Tip Toe and Snapper came to a gentle stop, ears pricked high, noses probing the air. Old Bacon shuffled forward on his large paws, his hind looking heavy and powerful. Snapper felt sure that good Old Bacon could deal comfortably with what ever he found, yet if not then he Snapper son of Chaser would wade in as best he may with his wounded paw, Tip Toe was not at all concerned with what Old Bacon would find, Tip Toe was teasing a worm, and was having so much fun he barely noticed the tense sinister actions of the big badger as he plodded stealthily in the direction of the shuffling. Old Bacon could detect nothing un usual, yet he knew that what ever was in the tree's had been following them for some time, and only now as dawn was ebbing to light, did he feel the urgency of capturing the creature, it would not do to allow the creature to follow them back to the little ones. Slowly with a purposeful stealth that belied his age Old Bacon approached the shuffling, slowly daring only to breathe shallowly for fear of unduly arousing the beast before he Old Bacon was ready, and just as he was ready and bracing himself for the pounce, a small furry head with thin long whiskers poked its shy tiny snout from out of the grass.
'Hullo, can I help big fellow?'
'Argh' Squealed Old Bacon as he took a startled step backwards as yet more little faces appeared from out of the grass. Snapper was beside Old Bacon immediately; yet not until later, much later would Old Bacon remember this.
'What is this?' snarled Snapper impatiently as he gave up trying to count the number of apparently fearless field mice appearing all around them.
'This is the Wedding of King Summer-song, and your intruding' grunted a larger than usual field mouse, holding a tiny matchstick spear in his little paw, he also had a peanut shell atop his head, which he had to keep on adjusting and a ring pull from some human fizzy pop container covering his chest.
'A wedding?' asked Snapper incredulously.
'Yes and you have intruded most rudely'
'We do apologise-'began wise Old Bacon respectfully.
'I don't' snapped Snapper, gazing disbelievingly at the army arrayed before him, suddenly Tip Toe arrived out of the semi gloom with a worm dangling in panic from his mouth.
'Look what I got Snapper, a pet!' said Tip Toe cheerfully, the worm wiggling frantically.
'Not now Tip Toe, we are being taken prisoner' warned Snapper fiercely¦.-
As a child, I liked the things of childhood, yet as an adult I dread and detest the world I must have been here a thousand times. I can recite whole passages of life that are not my own from memory. I used to be an original, but it was lost after my deliverance into repetition, I must have lost myself in the long evolutionary transit of time; A spacious place to one hovel to some other kingdom. In my room I pretend many important people are moments away from rap tapping at my door, with this illusion I populate the outside machine with friends and lovers that come to call of their own free will, self assured comportment and gifts and kisses. I wrap my tender tentacle arms about a girl I shall adore without lust without jealousy, and in the lazy auburn wood colour of my curtains a flutter she squeezes my thigh and whispers miracle things. But no, for in solitude and the costumes of clowns I am nearly almost utterly repentant for her sins, in the dark gloom of some tepid morning hour. If she goes like old wrapping, upon a lullaby of wind a dazzling streetlight splashing radiance like freshly mined tin, when she knocks upon my door, and I stand hare fashion in the furore of common place and the blinds shadowy bars upon the far wall; well here I sit upon my thin sheets in the anorexic morning, bleating out curses and foul things. Holding a cold cup of something peeping out as I do, running the dialogue of some distant eulogy about me in thin particle streams from the window sunshine beam that bathes the murky wooden floor with melted sun light butter, I am exhilarated spasms of perception; I am me as I should always have been. The room is small and the only furniture is a table under which I sleep, the table becomes a writing desk when I stand up, I have a chair. This fiction is mine, I shield it like a jealous Knight, embracing his sweet daughters from vagabonds and mystics, that arrive dripping with beauty and Latin, yes it is a good thing the window is nailed tight if the window could be opened, and I dare say with a great deal of effort it could, I would probably throw myself out of it.
-I arrived at the 'gratification ceremony' in plain grey trousers, blue trainers and a dinner jacket I bought from a charity shop across from the cemetery, how sordid that I arrive to see off the recent dead, in clothes left by the long decayed lifeless. It was a church like the popular, and utterly indistinctive, nothing occurred of note upon arrival. I said very little to everyone, yet I was spoken at by all, I found myself lying and saying that I was her high school sweet heart, but I was drafted by the Canadian military and so had to leave to fight ravenous Inuit's invading northern Canada.
"No, no Mr Orrell, it was not in the papers, it was kept quiet, in fact I could be arrested by simply telling you, and so I tell you in the strictest confidence. Yes I did kill many Inuit's! No, only we few French Canadians were informed by our agents in the UK, yes it is sly of any government, yes sir; you're very intuitive, were the Americans involved? Well I don't know sir! But well, well now you come to mention it the Americans may have brain-washed the Inuit's, yes, yes of course the Americans used the Inuit's as cannon fodder, a diversion to invade Canada via the back door, yes! The back door as you say, you clearly have a deviant mind for detail and intrigue, Oh Mr Orrell, oh, oh dear. I left my one true love to fight in an unjust war, how cruel, how cruel!' This caused a stir within her father who demanded I stay with them that night, so I did. I never knew the women, yet I needed the odour a funeral to write a poem. To describe in detail and without deviation a sequence of mundane events, may become a person if you gaze objectively at it for a long enough period of time. Sitting on the floor with a cup of tea in my hand there is a bleach white ache in my lower back; it steals my breath away upon its occasional flashes of agony. The window does not open, some other ghost of a tenant nailed it shut in some bleak night mania of despair and paranoia, I am thankful for the precautions of a lunatic. My bed is a slapdash arrangement of old cushions arranged upon the thin urine carpet floor so as to give the sense of support, I have a black rug for a bed sheet, and a purple duvet which once warmed two bodies, but now suffices just for my own. I sleep next to the wall huddled under a table in my loose fabric trench, when the light shines I do not flourish into a butterfly, I remain deformed and ill equipped for the outside machine.
Imagination and desire I know are not the same thing - I do not censure my deceased dreaminess, or even it's passing into gloom, that is not the reason for my melancholy, the ebbing of imagination would ensure that upon itself. I feel it is more that it stems from the nowadays, the conscious instant reflective phase of the 'here' the now! If my liver would permit, I could be delightfully inebriated constantly, and the surrealism of blame would filter slowly through the sluice gates of my mind, utterly distorted upon arrival and thus of no consequence! I blame the stray cat which I feed scraps of chicken to when it sits at my window, in the windy rain, pawing sadly at the glass. I am simply suited to wishful ideas, which determine the composition of my endeavour, can we construct the society we live in, nay for it came first, it is the chicken to our 'I, egg', I am trapped inside the egg shell to which I have subordinated my thoughts, and we are indeed entering the kingdom of the obscene. I tickle my penis to stimulate an erection, the early morning indolent always masturbate. Women masturbate at night to aid sleep, men in the morning to aid bothering at all. This is the nature of the sexes I feel. Moon women and Hydrogen fuelled men lost in caves and dirty leather skins, with clubs and primitive wall paintings, shall we never subdue the Moon women moans the semi conscious preternatural hunter as he drags an unnamed carcass through the thicket to the dwelling of evolution. I lie in bed under my desk and I think about sperm whales lazy in the vast aquatic azure of some fathomless realm, and I wonder about the ocean. Sometimes the lady, who rents the apartment next to mine, plays the trombone; she often bakes cakes and leaves the burnt residue of a carrot muffin or orange sponge outside my door. I am grateful for these donations of sustenance, she is a fine cook, and she is a very accomplished artiste. In my bed, sweat linen and boredom, sipping my tea I imagine she is an impromptu galactic angel, slowly dripping to earth, one day the whole world will oscillate to her gargantuan bee winged trombone blasts, she shall ripple along the beaches, depositing burnt muffins and flat sponge cakes for our imagination to consume as we dip and tickle our toes in the cool waters of yet another day spent in haste. Yet I am in bed and recovering from the sudden influx of optimism, we share the fifth floor of the apartment block, some fantastical failure in utilitarian optimism, a great expansionist erection which before its prime fell flaccid and became good for no more than bohemian angels and failing narratives, such as our lives will come if we remain silent for long enough. I pick up a pencil and write.
Instead I grow un-people in my weary mind Now looking in the mirror, I see exactly what I expect to see, a life spent in void, a soul biting against the winds of time, which means nothing to me. This is mine all that the mirror reflects belongs to me, it is the self that we prize least yet it is all we ever truly own. I have not time for the question, "But, but do we, do we EVEN exist? cheap philosophising is the way bread of the mediocre. I do not smoke, but if I did, I would pull back from the mirror, staggering over clothes strewn across the floor, as some macabre race adagio by Miles Davis ricochets about the air, with slender wisps of early morning sunlight peeping through the dark haggard curtains, where a cat whimpers for its own deep unfathomable solemnity, I would subside, back against a wall, slowly descend into the mire whilst lighting a cool smooth cigarette, this would reflect my despair, my irrational conviction that all is not well, and as the adagio ebbed, I would blow meaningful plumes of lung lava out into the air, this scene would capture the futility of philosophy and the next scene? Would be some car chase in downtown San Francisco, with that bright Frisco sun making diamonds of headlights, and some blonde in a racy number, will say to me.
"Jack, I think you lost him, slow down fella! She says, but I Jack Heart will turn and say with an unshaven smile.
"Sugar, I can't ever slow down By which she would swoon to my crotch, thirsting to have me satisfied. The mirror I found in a dust bin, clearly the previous owner had grown so pure of mind, had attained some Buddha like tranquillity that the vanity of mirrors had lost all its glory, and indeed what is not of use to them, becomes of use to me! I can hear the cat pawing the window, but I have no food for him, or even she, I do not know the gender of my orphan cat.-
I often watch people tussle for conversation dominance, some people I have known will often call this bellicose noise conversation; yet it is a dialogue in ghost tongue and endless. At night I fantasise in my lurid mind about romances and glory, I become a third person narrative discussing my own tragic death upon some late night culture show, I am deceased and allies and haters talk of me in the past tense, in those moments until slumbers incessant lunar tide drowns me I am missed and I am dead; I read a poem out loud into the mirror, and it consoled me that we are but sonnets of roses, both articulate and ephemeral, I should think the poet was rather rich and glad when he wrote it. You must know the mother of someone with whom I am but a passing acquaintance, well she died some time past, everyone is condoling everyone else, I can not but think of the corpse. That is to say she must have been mortified, she no doubt at the moment of macabre realisation, when her reality came to an end, that which we are told does not exist, must have struck her to tears. To know you are dying and to watch others watch you die must be a shameful dilemma; it is akin to being affluent, and suddenly by misfortune to fall into squalor whilst being observed by the canaille and aristocracy. The black gone nowhere of death, no more yawning, no more randomly meeting old friends with joy, the world will persist without us. To die and rot and have old lovers continue married and smiling, unknowing of your demise, the long black corridor of silence, to die and drift out into the chill everlasting universe, spinning bottle top fashion. Yet the living, those quaint deities too self-important not to weep are fearless. The creature that adores its flesh is always greatly distressed to hear of the decay of flesh, but only in so much as they find it a rude and peculiar reminder of their own delicate nature.
"The dead are the most inconsiderate of people, no really I find them too much the barbarian of etiquette, really it is unforgivable this our collective voice of un reason that only a sixteen year old may appreciate as ridiculous, with a sly chuckle and the scent of autumn's viscous essence in his nostrils. I find this pantomime of sadness obscure, when the living become the dead, as the house whimpers under dust, and cats lick their dry paws whilst sitting on window ledges we shall all grow content.
In my room which I loathe to leave, I hear the world through thin brick walls and it appals me. The chill windy voices and the feeling of being utterly neglected; our rooms make Rapunzel ghost out of us all. Especially when the neighbours suddenly acknowledge your existence and even the post man leaves a note of condolence, at such times euphemisms are employed to distance the truth from the living with a healthy measure of romanticism, "Oh how awful it is that she passed on, I bet she was thankful that it was in her sleep mutters some aunt that everyone thought was dead. I dare say she would have been somewhat ecstatic not to die at all. Their presumptuous corporeal egotism, it is sickening really, the dead are infinitely wiser than the living! Some Uncle no one likes, because of his attic obsessions with miniature trains, smiles behind the grief of abandoned decorum, additional ravenous optimism. "It is for our own beating hearts that we lament, he mutters when a convenient moment of crowd silence prevails, everyone hears him but no one listens. Pity is a stomping fist of bloodied meat draining into the gutter.
"Are you okay Hand on shoulder, bad breath and nostril agony of the auntie unknown. The boy nods his head, because he has no senses left functioning, someone suggested that the deceased adored, admired, wanted some overly sentimental love song from a movie about a big boat that sinks to be played, grotesque sentimentality. As always directing the funeral to suit their magnificent sense of propriety a wonderful self imposed modesty of sensitivity, the living in command. The song is played as the casket is burnt like forgotten toast before the eyes of the pious blind. They sit in rows of uncomfortable opaque formality; he sits in between his new parents, a disinterested uncle who married into the family, stirs gruntingly for he knows he's probably missing something important somewhere else. Nothing is real until you can smell the wood flaming. This guilty aunt whom quarrelled with the deceased for many years, sisters are immense haters, they despise with fervour unknown to brothers, a woman may hate with infinity, for it is the primitive subconscious animal inside her which bequeaths ancestral knowledge into her womb. A truth man will never comprehend, with this she is told of her magic, that of birth. Woman die better than men, for they indulge the womb, that 'Pandora's box' of flesh and occasional tourists, this is their greatest asset; men are left floundering upon the precipice of nonchalance, knowing no gratification but of the mind and loins. You would think that they would somehow not allow it, for it is not just wood our nostrils inhale, it is the flesh of the mother, when charred bone creaking and smoky curly pubic hair is all a child can remember, is this a beautiful gift; deaths last mordant joke? I often wonder what use in the naming of emotion is there. I name love, a one syllable peculiar, but refrain from swooning, for is it not a fact, is it not impossible, for if I say love. Are you not overcome by deep sincere feelings of trust, adoration and weak knees? I find words clumsy and unsustainable, what gain a man who inherits a language but loses his soul? Twinge, cramp, pain, agony "I am aching "My leg aches "Oh she'll never forget the heart ache the word itself causes me no stress at all, if you say ache, then are you not suddenly subdued by intense discomfort? So words conceal a fear for we brave few.
I have a suit that I wore for ten years, etching madness out of routine as a detention officer, I now where my funeral attire instead of my occupational suit, I have discarded the skin of a regime for the macabre attire, a wedding dress of moth balls. One long ago lost night I wrote this on the pavement outside a Cathedral in green glowing paint.
-The story chronicles the arrival of zenith, the acme of art, each character will, slowly become singular, creating a behemoth of artistic endeavour that final voice will be the world, and in the end there shall be the word of the artist.-
My old routine was to take a shower every morning around 7:03, the shower is communal, the gentlemen who lives below me has a shower every morning as well at approximately 6:44 he masturbates, he is a fat man who always has sweat patches under the arms of his light grey jackets and is ever grovelling through lurid memories of one penny picture shows. We met once quite by chance in a local 'red' bar, I had entered to flee the driving august rains, he I presume was there for very different reasons, he saw me but did not acknowledge me, I left soon after, I waited in an alley for around three hours, spying his exit, indeed he left with a young Chinese girl, I heard them that night. He is the Beelzebub to my Trombone Angel, each morning as he vacates the shower; I wait with towel wrapped about my waist, shivering and watching ants drizzle along the wall. I listening to the amorous clunks and clangs of the piping that run in two parallel bars down the brown constantly misty hall that leads to the shower cubicle, he slams the door, and like some terrible naked obese duck he wobbles to his room, leaving damp webs of water upon the wooden floor. He leaves his lusting residue in the cubicle, the first time I noted this fact was when my toe squelched into something un pleasant, now I must let the shower run for two whole minutes before I enter, this caused a serious delay, instigated havoc in my once efficient schedule, and it was this delay which by providence caused me to know what I now know, and thus Iskra acquired my valuable services, if it were not for a fat mans appetite for gratification I would still be an ignorant servant of immorality. My room is my flesh and I its mind, what with the blaring police sirens, wild untamed youth and filth and degradation of too many creatures living too close together. The little comforts that I indulge are centred inside my room, there is tea, there is literature also, great epic novels, Prevost, Hesse, Hemingway are my the men I admire greatly, from my room I can explore their minds, their caprices and adventures as if I were the very men myself, it only takes a little imagination and a few years to spare and you can go absolutely anywhere within four dank walls and an androgynous feline.
My mother died shortly after her book was published, I remember a day relatively clearly. I awoke with sleepy boy hair and yawning lips, padded bare footed like a baby bear down stairs for my usual breakfast of a nice cup of tea and two slices of jammed toast, when to my utter amazement I saw a strange lady, stood beside the door. She had summoned energy from I can not guess where, and managed to wake, dress herself and plant herself at the front door, she was weeping I recall. Weeping because the door was locked and my father had the key, the asylum had beaten her.
'Good morning Tip Toe' she said weakly (it was her pet name for me) ' I am going to buy my book, I am going to town to buy my book!' She said resolutely, stammering her words as pain, pain that then as Tip Toe the bear cub, I could not imagine, pain maybe even beyond my understandings now, a pain that must have shot all the way through her lungs, laboured breathes of the matriarchal heroin.
'Okay, I shall help you, I have a key, but you must be quiet or you'll wake him and we will be in for it then' I said shakily, she seemed to hoist herself up from some deep chasm within, grow before my eyes as she surveyed me with warm tender dying eyes. She stroked my cheek, and I kissed her stubbly fingers, then I tip toed back upstairs and returned with key and attire suiting a mission of our importance. Outside was chill with the winters fading brilliance; spring's delicate winds were rustling the dormant field back into activity. We caught the 441 straight into town, chatting amicably about my school work, my friends, my crushes, a mute point as far as I was concerned, yet looking back I only now understand why she had such a burning earnest desire to know me. At the time I merely took it that her long sickness had come to an end, and every day would become adventure day, we would go to lakes and play sword games, or camp in the wilderness and be happy in our fear of torchlight shadows; shadows that we would tease each other about on the way home, only to stop for apple and blackberry pie and ice cream in some rustic café beside a mountain. I remember that the bus driver had to help her alight from the bus outside Jacobs Funeral services on the high street! He cautioned us about the icy pavement and gave me a sweet, great bus driver guardian angel that he was, and often in the years in-between then and now, I thought that he was indeed an angel, and he had descended to earth for the express purpose of taking my mother to town so she could buy her book! We ambled along High Street to the main precinct, which was not even open, it was only 7:30 and it did not open until 8:00. Yet we brave journeymen were not perturbed, we simply sat on a nearby bench and once more my soon to be quiet mother, stroked my curly brown hair, tickled my cheek with her cold ebbing finger tips and interrogated me. I think, as I tell you this now, as I recite a memory not oft put into words, but left to 'willow-the-wisp' in my mind that it may not have been so idyllic, odd how to speak it alters it. I have half memories of mother un able to speak, only coughing bloodied sputum all the way to town, of her falling down so often and with such cries of agony that I ran off weeping to find a somebody, only to return for I could hear a frail voice now half forgotten weakly imploring me to return; I was not a brave knight of curly hair and handsome eyes, I was coward, with snot and tears and all manner of weaknesses. A memory, to speak it alters it; but no it was as I have told you. So we laughed and giggled until the cleaning lady and a tall security guard with a big belly opened up the precinct proper, and we found the first bookshop and mother bought her book. I told the lady behind the counter who she was, and my mother, shy sweet and embarrassed, smiling, yet ultimately self-conscious autographed a copy of 'The Chronicles of the Gobbledygook Soldiers'.
Where the old tree once hung, limp, dark and decaying a desperate refugee that sacred tree of my youth, by that tree where the stream used to babble along as if a shoal of precious jewelled fish swam on the surface, bathing in the sunlight of a grey autumn's day, which is where I kissed her. A great deal of time has elapsed and the romanticism of the memory remains, hooded strangers and mystic gargoyles have passed that tree in other times and on errand more pressing than mine. I stepped through the stream with old Saxon Eyes and found my past faces lurking in the long white misty fields Elysium, they grope for me as an ancestor will grope for a same blood new born. I have no great affection for only the tree, and the vanishing stream. The tree is not the same, nor am I and in many ways neither is the memory, all that is truly the same goes unnoticed. I have travelled much since that kiss, geographical transience is a matter of flesh, the body transports itself via a various gamut vessels to where the flesh longs to be, this is not what I call travelling, it is merely moving. Rivers move, they carry flotsam and carcasses and vague intuitions about the ocean. Birds migrate, which I call neither 'moving' nor 'travelling' with them it is the invisible urgings of nature, that innate clock which strikes lazily from year to year, yet always does it strike. She I guess was susceptible to the striking of the clock, a lonely half druid itching with the memory of ancestral migration; to some the whims of transcendence are enticing to others they are just sour whims: Sea Lions growling, butterflies melting by the heat of their own wing flutter, rattle snakes silent, swift and winding. Authentic travel is not undemanding yet it has its purpose; the internal mystery life waits impatiently, but with a detached foreboding. That when and if you arrive it will be an inevitable disappointment, the last boring reminder of flesh still twitching with lustre, if I am to move let it be in secrecy, so as I may find a cave by the foamy tongues of some dull ocean, dead whales and lizard waltzes by high sun of animation, moving depends upon the weather. Travelling is absolute without destination, the charnel road but one end of a vast tree branch ensemble; it is simply a rest period we often neglect to forget. I sit in my room and yearn to go outside now, only if spring did not make so much noise I would never notice that it had passed away without me. Where do the seasons go then? For no two seasons are the same, by which it would make each one an individual, each summer has a personality of its own, some are infinite and amicable, others reticent and dour. An old lady that once would accompany; that strange coincidence of youth that was I, to church, oh damn rainy Sundays! An old lady with a shuffling bent back gait, as if her head was of some inexplicable weight, and with all those memories why would it not be, whose name I have forgotten used to say "Seasons become Saints which I thought to be nonsense, the last mad warbling of dementia, I thought a great deal way back when the stream still glistened under the canvas of parched stretching branches and yearning leafs, a lot of thinking but no travelling, only moving in ever decreasing circles of approximated disaster. I and my room with tea and Tom Waits in the auburn hours of dawn.
