BACK BEAT

Through our backyard door

While slicing onions

Shadows drifting

Quiet green

After so many attempts gone astray, will the bluebird of expression land at last upon my shoulder? There is no courting this bird. Begging is laughable. Perhaps the scent of eucalyptus is necessary. Or ocean salt spray, some slip of the mind like that. It flies where it will.

We come to the place where sun and science meet. With barbeque cook-offs. Tong wars over the back fence. And possibilities have diminished somewhat since Orchard Supply Hardware threw stuff on its funeral pyre.

The only real argument is not about taking down coal mining or emissions. Which will be reduced if there is the will. Fossil fuels clearly feed the elephants. It's about the ivory. The Endangered Petroleum Act exists to prevent an extinction of assigned value.

There, if you dare, is that crippled shopping cart with a wheel eternally flopping out of contact with the polished floor of Lucky Market. Winding out onto the river, out to sea, a horizon too far to follow. Or Kyo Po Market, if preferred. The flow of it, no kidding, is everywhere.

Lord only knows what's meant by this. There it goes on angel wings, had to have its say. It was some Venice Beach delivery thing riding a dune buggy right up to the lobby door of, say, The Atlantic magazine, through flyover plains, geological wonders flying past the window. Seems to have flown the coop, chirping joyful nonsense. Close enough.

That was a back beat improvisation, my jazz musician's ride. Drummers have a cymbal for it. In the midst of hell, bubbles stew and sizzle, white noise and not just some kind of black gumbo but the whole planet. And no arguments about a big bang when it all comes down to that symbol.

Gotta be some kind of metasomething. Weren't we talking dreams here? or the price of gas, the next blockbuster movie, thermonuclear weapon – ho-hum. But it's California in the summer, and not so fun. The tall grass fires are burning. All this stuff and the prefab prayers stumbling out, this time for the weather. By the time they're folded into a magazine article Facebook rant, there's another ghost in the wings already trying on a new suit.

Briefly but dimly illuminated by studies at San Jose City college, seventy nine years in literary limbo are gladly relinquished. The supposed advantages are frizzled in data sets being fed to quantum computers. I cared as much as necessary, but it was a burdensome adaptation. All the greats. Writers, artists, philosophers, historians, musicians, all stuck in traditions. Bugs on pins. A few managing to flail free in fumes better than chloroform. It clarified the mystery of existence implied by relations with others. It has informed a better idea of what insanity is. And the days of wine and other people's words have become the sound of a distant stadium in full roar, the distant sea. Sanity I delightfully surrender to those who believe they possess it. A glass of water is on the table.

I go nowhere and visitors arrive. This place is empty. Something immaterial lives here. The world rages to find this, missing it by a sliver. Since it can't be known, why bother?

What's left of the world flew in on wings of a chattering squirrel. The everyday sense of it belongs to an illusion of somewhere else, or to the sanity of it. If this were the norm, how much happier and habitable our world would be.

To just sit here, an overall appreciation does wonders. Mr. Finch and family, Lady Hummingbird, Squirrel and Big Bee all agree. And we don't need to talk about it.