Sometimes I am candled and lit by sunlight streaming straight through cool clean sea wind, setting my wonder aflame with the mellow joy often found in a glass of wine, ablaze even in the outdoors as I trace sparse and ornamental greens upon the branches of what counts as city nature. Call me a kid, but I could inspect the topography of garden soil for an hour even as the loam pulsates with worms, call me an idiot, but I could place my face into the folds of a rose blossom for minutes to let its perfume dissipate car exhaust about the corners of my couch-fabric coat. And in these small moments I am alive and unafraid, ready to donate money to the homeless after marching in a Labor Day parade. But then I get the feeling that something isn't real beneath all that joy, as though an adult walked by and told me to take a shower. I am fortunate for the wonder even when it passes by as quickly as it swelled from a secret way kept under all these clothes and skin.

For those of you who are free from the establishment of terror that bureaucratizes thoughts, I envy you. Such an existence almost seems like innocence and naivete when agents of suffering are gaining new footholds on the world. But also, I am terrorized by conventions, harrowed by the routine matters involved in micro-economics, angst-ridden after too many failed dealings with institutions. School couldn't help me graduate, mental hospitals couldn't cure me, and life only sends its best regards in the accomplishments of others. Larger and less self-centered is the suffering worldwide; famines, corruption, droughts, disease, wars, and death which we ignore in order to hum happily along in tune with our fellow happy hummers.

But we have lost our wonder, our child-like appraisal, despite retaining our ignorance. We can lose our ignorance and improve our wonder, it is possible, just difficult.

I Am Waiting

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
Of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the second coming
And I am waiting
For a religious revival
To sweep thru the state of Arizona
And I am waiting
For the grapes of wrath to stored
And I am waiting
For them to prove
That God is really American
And I am waiting
To see God on television
Piped into church altars
If they can find
The right channel
To tune it in on
And I am waiting
for the last supper to be served again
and a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed
and I anxiously waiting
For the secret of eternal life to be discovered
By an obscure practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and TV rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting for retribution
for what America did to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty's clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeting lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

If you could tell me the work of worlds
I would not listen unless
your words involved the play of hearts
upon love's orbit which brings the seasons
and hardens thin blood to warm frost.

The science of locks repels me
from a supple clever key,
the physics of hatred demands
movements that have nothing to do
with the style that you sing.

And in the last world that magnified
my broken ankle from past and future
to agonizing present, we fought for
grander things than the safety of our
knees.

The edges of a scientist's dream
must be rational indeed
to account for the old trunks
we carry with us while waking
and while asleep. God forgot
to give us the combination
on this world where beauty
locks itself inside the blossoms
of a billowing cherry tree, he
forgot to make us study love
instead of the Earth's engine
while ignoring spiritless disease

I saw the yard wide open filled with bleached tree trunks
emptier than bones. The dead garden struck me like
my own confessions set to the difficulties of songs
fashioned by small birds and at the driveway my
mind began cracking open like the pavement's
silent verse, filled with a concrete degradation
of soil's softness spread about the earth.

As for the hospital's intervention, the nurses
really hung their words at the gallows where
frail meanings break their necks before
rebellion saw its birth. The rooms missed
artistic expression and smelled cold like
a dead bird taken from the freezer before
cooking in the hearth.

Patched up effortlessly by some pills and cognac,
then discarded to the Earth.

Made difficult by old musics cliched conclusions
and the perfect circles drawn vicious by coins
leaning against art's worth. Made easy by
idiot watches counting numbers lost even
when you come in first place.

I saw the formula for oceans in the tired
waves sweeping shorelines around shipwrecks
I heard the gulls open up like conversation
as the ravens warned of storms and the
spirits of dead captains lined up to navigate
hell for the chance of brandy beyond the
hurricane horizon.

It was Earth;
I could feel it,
it was home and not on drugs,
it didn't drink
but ate only mangoes
and flowers on a path
too difficult for solitude to traverse
with its heavy pack. But here,
the sea wind conceals the swirls
of gasoline, the ocean burgeons
before the waste of ships and
the streets burn with so much
false light that you no longer
want to keep your eyes open to belief.

The birds I sent you in those letters,
did they sound like the lines I erased?
The winds I gathered for envelopes,
did they sound like fate collecting feathers
strewn where oceans end in desert?

We will eat boysenberries plump on dying vines in our free time
and listen to harmonicas beneath freeway overpasses hum
like wind chime rhymes. We will graffiti property thefts and
mural slave halls in fresco as the engines of monolithic design
shear our breath into labored pain, as the factory smokestacks
choke us with their ashen refrain, as the missiles screech like eagles
inside this cage of blue. We will sell our speech for new
rose petals, we will drink the river meshed by pollution's
fetters, and we will reach a tower where the sun tells the
hour if only to celebrate heaven while we painfully age.

We will be excused from lectures once we have had too much
to think. We will send in papers scrawled with hieroglyphic
letters and call professors late at night to inform them that
ideology too wears argyle sweaters and speaks in structured
diagrams of chalk safe from the weather unfurled like
a flood behind our kitchen door. At night we will read
the charts of the stars and ask to be lead through the
waters rising above parked cars into a home softly free
and floating like our hearts.

We will forget how to speak as the television informs
us of a thrilling new disease, when the radio names war
by failing to list any recent casualties, when the papers
bleed in blackened ink we're still able to read like
the price of gasoline versus the cost of our destructive
machine that we decided to lease from an institution
charging us hidden fees, well you know in the end
you just do it to make amends and not to think about
permutations that could have been.

your average charity

Three courtesy pennies dulled as beaten tin on the counter
nestled in a Joe Camel ashtray.

Water fountains burnished with tan stains and aluminum scratches,
faded as though by nuclear war.

History books dog-eared and thicker than halibut, page edges
swathed by permanent marker. Book plate reads: "This Book
Belongs To Your Momma Is Gay," the crowning achievement
of famous activities as performed and related by white European
mongrel males.

A fingernail sized piece of gouda at the supermarket,
free parking on holidays, a sun that bathes us in a warm
watercolor wash of frescoed daylight.

Museums with donations. An ocean of air sliding
through the narrow hallway of earth and ozone.

Helloes, pretty dresses on strangers, and a free credit report
once a year. Some time upon the weekend and a checking
account if you are a student.

Goodbyes. Disease. Dreams of fresh mangoes pregnant
beneath a banyan tree. Scattered stale cranberry muffins
beneath an unlocked dumster's lid. A shoe on the highway.
Eyes, ears, nose, lung, and limb. Swirling pale arms in fluid
arcs beneath the ocean's skin. Kissing. The soft fire
glowing in euphoria when you take a chance and win.

Allow me to ask of you, rare reader, to entertain my indulgence concerning the floridly lit labyrinths of my neuroses. I have to admit that they will probably leave you feeling the worse for having entertained my favor, however their is a slight chance that wading through the rubbled drivel of confusing yet terrifying visions and emotional fears will benefit you in identifying and isolating some of your own. It is for that outside chance, the three cherries in the slot machine of writing, that I continue instead of dispensing with the activity and the awkward formalities necessary in this instance.

I find myself often at uncommon odds with persons I meet who lie on the edge of my limited social circle. From such an egotistical perspective, it should be no wonder that I am at odds with them, however being introduced to a friend's cousin who I will probably never see again leaves me with an aloofness and subtle thin hatred for having to construct a tailor-made set of impressions for a person who I will never or rarely see again. I feel a deep pointlessness during the brief meetings, followed by an empty sort of apathy; in short, a feeling akin to watching the Tyra Banks show or the accomplishment of beating a terrible video game. It feels mechanical, unnecessary, and like none of it should have happened. It wouldn't be frustrating if the spontaneous took flight on our words and nestled on the dinner table before us in the display of peacock-like beauty, but mostly we discover what each other does for a living and if one of us has a new truck, girl, or disease. It is kind of like watching commercials, except instead of advertising the benefits of new products, these conversations reflect advertisements for the self.

This is not to say that human interaction isn't valuable. These meetings and strained encounters are the very foundation on which people begin to know each other, though it remains a rare experience for me to consider myself worth knowing or the other person. Immediately my social radar designates who is useful, threatening, dissimilar, comatose, or volatile. In some situations, when a person who could be described as a character is encountered, I feel an immediate distaste permeate my mouth followed by a desire to leave into the kitchen for a glass of wine.

In my instance, this could be caused by the gaping chasm created by establishing a false parity between actual and literary life. Writers and characters in books hold so much more fascination for me; I'd rather be listening to Rashkolnikov than mild mannered conformity masters, to an obtuse Marcuse than an acute hypochondriac. Another important facet of the problem involves the way we interpret the people who populate books versus the people who populate the world, a manner in which I usually fail to ascribe to unless I'm benevolently drunk or suitably bored. Protagonists in books have to be inherently interesting to survive the submission process in writing, but people in real life don't have to meet this qualification in order to stay alive, more or less fortunately. Plus, in real life, everybody is their own protagonist, driving their own narratives, which sometimes can make the problem of overpopulation all the more frustrating when it means dealing with an army of thematically scattered yet self-interested and effacing consciousnesses. Like reading a book written by a hundred different authors, life turns out to be brilliantly varied or catatonically confusing, depending on the page you find yourself experiencing.

Beyond the analytical pseudo critical phenomenon of meeting people, there is the somewhat more realist problem I have with trusting people. Some of the worst people I have ever encountered are the ones who insist on fulfilling the duties of their employment without imagination or compassion. But this isn't really worth getting into, as it seems everybody hates those people except for those people themselves, whoever they are. May they not be people close to you or me, is all I can hope to wish for. And yet, their is a note of empathy left in my slow sadness that would extend warmth towards these folks, for whom perhaps experience and necessity has dictated a loss of sensitivity to the world of dreams and kindness. Yet, these still are the people who have ruined my faith in trust, and not the obviously evil or malignant. The latter can generally be known for what they are avoided, while the former have an unfortunate tendency for appearing in institutions such as business, government, education, and medicine. Their basic humanity demands our human trust, yet their actions often demand that we ally ourselves with an odious bureaucracy if we are wont to recognize their humanity.

Lastly, their are my own foibles, which amount to stalling like a car on railroad tracks during certain social interactions. My thoughts leave me like a frightened driver hearing the oncoming train, and I'll sit their wincing invisiblely before the inevitable disaster happens. I have a penchant for encountering multiple trains somehow, those extroverted super-personalities engineered by the undiagnosed mad socialites of the world who cajole me into the third world of introversion until I gain enough energy to propel myself to an empty room or the outdoors after creating a meager excuse. Alternatively, their are rareperiods of time where I am that super-personality, crackling coal in the furnace while shining my mono-headlight down on some poor waifish fop who had the bad fortune to find me billowing with intensity.

What I don't understand, given the relative lack of solutions for anything mentioned, is how ordinary people are expected to form communities of emotion and transcend the necessity of business and familial interactions when the minor problems I have mentioned foster such a strongly negative experience. I guess the answer for me is to just deal with socially awkward situations that I should have mastered in high school. But what is the answer for an auto-mechanic getting fired by a boss he spent thirty years pretending to like, only to find out that unemployment is just around the corner? What is the answer for the single mother struggling with a waitressing position and a young mouth to feed? What is the solution for the family bombarded by medical bills? Are these people supposed to contain their desperate situations and unobserved tragedies in favor of social cohesion? Are they supposed to hide who they are, or embarrass themselves with revelations about their lives? This is why I fear strangers, why I don't trust them; because of my own unique problems that do not translate, because of the unnecessary suffering involved in pretending happiness before the face of someone you haven't an idea of how to care about, and because of the artless ways people react when you are at your most genuine.

heads they win, tails you lose

The dwindling machinations of a few dispersed themes writhing like common words in the soil of the mind. So much to consider and so few places to act, as though our access to the world is blocked by rubble and offers only the chance to wriggle through in our fleshy vulnerability. Money increases our levels of available activity like a back-hoe hoisting barricades from our labyrinthine paths and lack of it sets up new obstacles with a hideous ease reminiscent of fantastical conceptions of magic. Welcome to the world, the flowers bloom in April, the leaves die in April, and you can only get what you want if you pay for it.

I am stuck observing the comfortable while they live out their dreams. The recession has changed the amount of piddling pittances doled out the poor, while company executives screech cross-country to plead for billions in hand-out money even though they are laying off works, raising prices, and generally using the economic downturn as an excuse to save money. Credit has all but evaporated, and the dream of a decent wage is being replaced with the possible loss of the income tax refund. It is rarely pointed out that what people are losing is not only money, but lifestyle choices and experiences, education opportunities and idealism rooted in an optimistic appraisal of their dreams. It is enough to lose one's life in the slow procession of aging, but to be sapped of faith in the future is quite another thing entirely, raising the low-level emergency of day-to-day living into a desperate pleading against forces which are paradoxically within our power to change and beyond us.

Personally, I would like to finish my education and move to Portland. But the budget cuts in California have ultimately timed themselves perfectly to add stress and nervous disappointment to my desires, since I am partially dependent on state supplemental income to make my way in the world. The only comfort proffered to me exists in the form of spiritual fantasy that tenuously grounds me in a world that has made too many mistakes while destroying the individual for their own. I would wish again for an ideology for which I can measure the world as if through a garden fence, but cynicism dictates that I could only be fascinated by grotesque depression brought on by noticing the severe lack of blossoming flowers.

I am a little disturbed by the great and somewhat innocently ignorant faith Americans convey by placing their faith without question into the government concerning the current economic crisis. As if the workings of the system hadn't already proved themselves to be far more inefficient than a logically-minded family possessing a savings account. It has been operating on borrowed money since time immemorial, and the recent policies of handing out money lack the real growth potential as developing new industries such as alternative energy and green technologies. It is disheartening to watch the treasury run the money printing machines while businesses have quit expanding. But, let it be known here, Americans have always been for the most part, a rather faithful people, excepting the American Revolution and perhaps the 1960's. Little improvements have been made in terms of changing the way that government and business is ran, just has few advances in combating social problems such as poverty, addiction, and underlying racial issues have been achieved.

It seems though as if the rest of the world is having similar economic difficulties, not to mention countries who are not even considered as developing nations any longer since the word 'developing' became too optimistic of a term to describe whatever buildings and groups of people counted as industries. America's problem is the world's problem, and the world's problem is America's. This means that we can no longer function with economic policies that act as a clever child flipping a coin to settle an argument, basically "Tails, I win, Heads, you lose." We must work to honor our interactions, first and foremost, in order that our communication and relationships honor us with side effects of prosperity that will salve the wounds of financial turmoil.

I thought the road began running
as I walked down the highway of fossils
where I became as ancient as unobserved moonlight.
What was that old sinew taut in my arms
exposed as I waved to passing cars
that wouldn't stop for strangers after midnight?
The powerlines in my nerves were still running
as I figured the streetlights looked funny
glowing in sodium yellow against a canopy
of dead stars that with their last threw out
the brightness from their hearts that
traveled to this darkened defunct road site.
I continued to gather nebulous signs
that exhibited messianic lies and
heretical truths captured in a glance
by the peripheral function of my eyes
and aS I toed the center divider
and passed between fast cars I could
hear a false wind take on a voice like
a loud and rushing sign that said
we suffer just to die that said we
rush in hopes of flight until a
true distance is shown by symbols
better left alone if one desires
happiness in their small life.

Now, some of us know
the language of fallen leaves
scattered across an
asphalt destiny,
and our wish is to lie enraptured
beneath tangled forest trees possessing
a madness that with ease discerns
the meaning of nature's solemn feats
instead of the idiot facts interpreted
by drivers sitting at stoplights.

The sublime, you find it easily when you're not looking
(even in hard times that make the body sing in fear
with the hunted wildlife).
The sublime, you feel it breezily when you're out
and running with the deer.
The sublime, you'll know it certainly when you
pack up and disappear until only the heather
knows your movements where the constellations
mark the year.