september [fragments]

ukiah's only street sleeps in its fading dream,
here a stillborn town,
the occasional water tender skulks to the corner and up the hill, while
the service station sours with it's incendiary signs
rivaling bakunin's greatest dreams.
inside, kids play pool while the owner's dad peddles his chair across the lot with a dog in tow.
the bartender knows by name, we know, they have all been the same
smoke and clouded skies, breeding thunder claps, and flash
to warn, to prolong, to rain ash again.

the grey-water girl steps out of the post office
with a tilted head, slender limbs and infinitly indifferent moods,
her small, upturned nose is my favorite place,
its marble perfection worthy of grecian hands (and keats urn)
of cousre, she's pale complected
and smokes her ciggerettes with juvinal fascination, in the style of a forties actress,
both charmed and bored with her fingers,
the smoke floats, i linger.
again the plains crossed, stalks and stems with heads of grain, lost in horizons, every road is the same.
what last words will make worthy impressions on those we'll forget?
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are we not all children, thirty-year-old kids with inebriated dreams,
who will deliver us from ourselves?
i think it was fizgerald who said that no one wants their youth back,
they only want another chance to lose their innocence.
how apropos, i think, as smoke fills the living room,
the dirtiest couch, the cushion springs freed,
our prediliction to waste an afternoon.

i used to know what i wanted, or i used to want something,
but now, now i forget that i am alive. i forget that there is anything
beyond being- we dream when we do not sleep!
we sleep and do not understand. we understand but we do not how
to make it important.
reader pretend they know! because surely they do not.

what is it we supress, the purity we long for
that never existed except in our ideals?
in the rain i am alright, seasons i have reconciled myslef to,
i have reconciled too.
i only dream when i sleep, but i am not certain if
i can live in a world deconstructed, no pretence of what is natural
no ghosts or second lives to brighten possible futures.
how much of men's actions, i wonder, are driven by bordem?

the figments of my past are overcome by the lives of those around me,
we are all chasing someone else's illusion,
making them the realities of our own,
but where is the autheticity in me?
making my place from the better words of other men.
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here in the early morning of the end, i cast into the fog
a spinner, a river with ocean tides
while lightning chides the not-too-distant coast,
hoping for a little less percipitation.
i believe that i have become ungrounded,
i am but tethered to a few familiar feelings
and nothing but, perhaps habit,
leads me back home