AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1)

Here is a part 1 of a long poem in progress:

Incense ash hanging by a thread like umbilical cord – dancing silk wafts of smoke reaching down in rhythm to my tea cup steaming – Chinese Black Tea – cha – window shade open to let in grey shine of fog in winter January – like a black & white movie the colors of the pine and shrubs are dulled. No blue no sun no movement except for the dancing plumes of this incense stick as it burns down over skull dish. Beautiful smoke designs like expensive fabric in high winds, or a flag on high staff with a light shining up from the ground. I remember sitting at the breakfast counter on vacation in LA at the home of family friends and watching their cigarette smoke swim around hair and head in the air lingering making rivers of smoke currents – hanging streams. This incense the same, but much more pleasant aroma. It dances just the same, but does it have the same ill effects? It doesn’t matter really. This vision it conjures up is a pleasant one. Cats in the house, and comfortable chairs and a pool table on the screened-in porch – game after game of pool to the tunes of The Doors – LA Woman – and BBQ Weber Grill and steaks – always good food, good laughs, good TV, good times with Disneyland just down the way - we always paid it a visit – two birds . . . Mickey Mouse and the Matterhorn and Tomorrow Land. I was born in LA – Huntington Beach – with pier and sand and surfboard shops on old downtown strip – bikinis and skin and broken sand-dollars along the shore. Wave one after the other moving in and taking the beach out with it – 1969 – October. Month of Halloween howls and goblins – trick-or-treat is my favorite holiday with vampire bats into blood sucking monsters and werewolves that slash the hearts out of pure innocent angels out knocking door-to-door looking for free candy handouts. I like Halloween – it’s my favorite holiday. Huntington Beach we lived on the corner of Main in the corner house next to the corner mortuary where my old man worked – 625 Main Street – a yellow place with porch and windows and neighbors on all sides – dead neighbors on one side but neighbors just the same. I stubbed my toe in vacant lot across the street – lost the nail – OUCH – and sat on kitchen counter crying while mother snipped off the hanging part. Blond hair kid left in walker and then filmed on 16MM – home movies – “You loved that chair,” my mother saying as we sit around watching the funny looking kid staring blank at the camera in the front yard while world spins and days become night – we laugh – brother and sister laugh. I was born in 1969 in Huntington Beach. I was very young. Just a kid – not even in school yet, but there was a bus for that – a bus for a kindergartner. The house on the corner is gone now – torn down and leveled for parking lot spaces for the dead relative family and friends. One needs to park once in a while. People die – check out – fall asleep forever. 2 hour parking – quiet please the dead are trying to nap until the resurrection of the body. Corner cleared and paved over and lines of battle drawn – painted in white with several blue Reserved slots for our handicapped brothers and sisters. Now visits south with family friends ever once in a while – been six years or more since I’ve been there for pool and darts and cribbage. Too long between . . . too long . . . gotta get back and feel the surf crash into my legs my shins soak me – out on the horizon always a tanker carrying zillions of gallons of crude – back and forth along the hazy horizon disturbing the sunset scene all orange glow and sizzle as the sun goes out. West Coast night hand-in-hand walk footprints washed away.

Winter January cold – stuffed up sinus – coughing that destroys the voice box quality. My eyes hurt. Sick Sick Sick. Sleep would cure me but it don’t come easy – toss and turn so much to do but don’t want to do any of it – want to read and paint and write and walk and nothing else – sex too in afternoon romp // these would cure me but my mind and body are weak like my legs were weak in 1987 ailment that left me stretched out on living room couch in muscle pain cramps – unable to move about freely / unable to stand on tippy-toes / limping from couch to bathroom and back for months – staggering up to receive high school diploma in June – summer and vacation and abduction into alien craft in Idaho mountains – or Montana? – Hungry Horse Reservoir and the Lost Johnny Trail up slope (I couldn’t make it) and lost memory (and time?) unconfirmed. Years later I couldn’t remember ever being there. Was I there? Yes sir/ pictures prove that but I’m missing the memory of it. A vague remembrance of standing knee deep in icy chill water as other fish, but how much of that is picture memory? How much is authentic? O the silver craft that carried me away – its lights blinding and the metallic walls cold around me – Pitter-patter footsteps and big eyes looking down on me lying there exposed. Did we play cards? Did I teach them the magic of cribbage? Search out scrabble words in a jumble of tiles? What happened to me there? Was there the classic anal probe? Or the drill bit into the eye and tubes from above into the stomach for research? What did they want with me? The animals / the creatures of space that spit me out ill and alone on the Lost Johnny / so many years ago. This is my autobiography – where is it coming from? Movie? Book? Authentic memory? My god-forsaken imagination? None of it really matters. What matters is the rain – the snow and rain that falls onto the pavement and into the gutter and down the drain and into holding areas and back up into the sky and all over again. It has snowed in the valley before – but first snow was Roswell snow – O no back to the aliens again – winter 1982 – New Mexico – land where my father searched for a new life and took us with him. Not much good out of desert dwelling back then but the winter. White drifts of soft white ½ a foot deep falling in flurry blizzard – school closed and tree branches iced over – bitter frost to the bone cold – snowballs, snowman, snowflakes, snowplows, snowdrifts, and icicles. Icicles – swords – frozen blades hanging from roofs edge and tree limbs.

Looking out the back window of the laundry – converted to a Rock & Roll den – an escape place with tunes cranked and whirling cycle of the dryer keeping beat and keeping the cinderblock cave warm. It was a room off the garage, off the kitchen, off the dining room, off the living room, off the hall, off my bedroom shared that I shared with my country music loving brother – a large poster of Willie Nelson looking out over the room, keeping watch, making sure the walls were not poisoned with images of heavy metal GODS – AC/DC – red light image of Angus Young – his head a blur – his Gibson SG soaked. Willie watched out and made sure the room was kept pure – kept the devil in the laundry room where he belonged. Outside the window white, a blanket stretched out over yards shared – a community? – we never saw a neighbor one that I remember – so a blanket white reaching, virgin, untouched, no sex for me, lost in adolescence – snow like aerobic workout bodies stretching, reaching, falling, moving to the music of winter. It was so cold. The walk to the bus stop for our trip into school seemed a million miles – feet frozen thru only a few feet from the door. Slushy ice gutters and silent cars moving on to work. We threw rocks into the trees to cause a crash of ice – a frozen waterfall of ice crashing down, burying itself in the snow. Tree after tree crashing just the same. It was a long walk to the bus stop. To school – middle school – a long halled school that was alien to a native Californian – they had corporal punishment policies for crying out loud – foreigner with VANS tennis shoes and OP t-shirts who had never touched a surfboard in his life – a Valley boy growing up 3 hours from anywhere but they didn’t know that, they didn’t know. Every door opened to the ocean, every address was Los Angeles – bikini babes with blond hair and an appetite for going down as babysitters/or girlfriends/ or slutty pick-ups. “What do you mean you have never had a piece of ass? You’re from California ain’t ya?” Let’s Party! Surf’s Up, Dudes!

I grew up in the Valley. Sunsets made orange red burnt by dust. O but they burn. I still see it. I’m still here! The Valley holds you. We were one year gone, only to be pulled back by the curse. Is it a curse though? 99 a blood vein that is so much a part of me it will never clog. The smell of onions through Atwater have never faltered, never weakened. The shit smell of my home town, Turlock, has grown worse – I step on the gas and fly past the Lander and West Main exits. More people, more houses, more strip malls and Wal-Mart’s, but still so much a part I can not deny it’s place. One year gone – away – taken by the alien existence to another planet – I’ve written of it before. Only one year then back to the old house, the old realm, the old address – 433 South Laurel – two blocks off Lander at the 711, across from the Exxon station and a stones throw from Glen’s Liquor with it’s racks of every porn magazine imaginable. The Valley. The Valley. The Valley. I live here still.