“I’ve spent a lifetime
trying to learn the language of the dead.”
– Jim Harrison

 

The daily astonishments still
of monkeys in the trees
and traffic that doesn’t move for hours
and the sky all wrong
and how I’m finally able to read some writing in the wild
most crucially “toilet”
or that actual, physical survival
can be reduced to knowing how to say
“double shot of whisky” and “Kung Pao Chicken”
because you can live on only that if you have to
and if the chicken is red and undercooked again
just skip it, and you pray the slugs of whisky
will sterilize the rest.

I always bring my parents with me
as I move through my days in China
laughing with them at the absurdity
of my big American frame pouring sweat on a hearted run
past the toy soldiers of the Red Guard and I’m pretty sure
they are all so skinny I could break them in two with my bare hands
someone please feed them
or at least make them do push-ups
or imagining that I’m fitting right in, yessir,
putting my bike into the river of thousands of riders
like launching a skiff and pushing off
then pulled along in the currents of bikes and cars and people
that course from one side of the city to the other.

And how over the phone I can’t tell my wife who is so far away
that I’m slowly going blind
and I’m sorry for her that she will have to get that news
reading it here
but back to my parents
how we’re just amazed together
every day about it all
as we look up at the sky-scratchers
and it is “Damn! Get a load of that will ya?”
because we’re still from the ranch in Colorado
we don’t know how to be from anywhere else
and it’s still their Great Depression somehow
and it’s still the Dust Bowl with the sky darkening
and my mother saying about the terror of it
thought it was the Apocalypse and brought her to Jesus
and the sky here so full of grit and smoke
the far end of the block
is not visible for a week the air tastes like jet fuel
it is the Apocalypse sure as shooting
and how the hell did we get

here?

 

 

Day 15, 28 Days of Unreason

“The hardest part is when the river
is too swift and goes underground for days“
– Jim Harrison

 

Love me like a J-boat
all rubbery and tubular
whanging through the roil
and the walls and skys of water,
you are my Colorado rapids
running whitewater canyons

It’s been Class V crazy
but I love the thrill,
thrown overboard for you our
velocity pulls us under
and since
rescue is impossible

Will you marry me?

 

 

Day 14, 28 Days of Unreason

“I took a nap and wept for no reason.”
– Jim Harrison

 

It was more like seeping than weeping,
water beaded on the walls of our dreams

Did we know the quiet of snow’s malice,
Spring’s melt too slow, too sure for imagination?

How it would rise like sleep,
darkness spread in lazy pools across the floor

A cellar that welcomed nightmare
from between the cold stones of its walls

What mother language of night did you know
to wake with a start and tell me “it’s time”

And I again to descend,
in the wake of the flood.

 

Day 13, 28 Days of Unreason

“The mountains are so dominant
that some days the people refuse
to look at them as children
turn away from the fathers who beat them.”
– Jim Harrison

 

We paid the villagers a dollar each to carry our tents and food and water mile after mile along the Dragon’s Back.

The humidity and heat like a backhand across the face as we climbed to a remote mountain fortress on the Great Wall of China.

A dollar. Think about that. They were happy for it – old women and children were less expensive than donkeys. I’ve never felt monstrous before, a Great White Father.

I know the Mandarin for “Foreign Devil”, said with a smile when we paid them. Yáng guǐzi. 洋鬼子

We spent our night in the Dragon’s Teeth.

 

 

Day 12, 28 Days of Unreason

“Nearly everything we are taught is false except how to read.”
– Jim Harrison

 

Sometimes everyone reads it wrong –
in darkness you pulled your own cart
to Tyburn.

Look that up
or leave it hanging,
so much lost to me.

 

 

Day 11, 28 Days of Unreason

“Just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.”
– Jim Harrison

 

I’ve got this
ball-peen hammer,
damnedest thing –

Let’s me pound out
tin sheets of stars and love,
bend life into different shapes

Dimple and soften
faces
that were hard as steel

Beat time and space
to the round music
of the spheres

But does each
tiny blow
leave a bruise

Like that ping when a grape
gives way
to wine

Or is it just me again,
all thumbs
and curses

 

 

Day 10, 28 Days of Unreason

“I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I don’t know what.”
– Jim Harrison

 

I, for one, woke up this morning amazed I was not a seagull. Not some Kafkaesque nightmare, because how cool would it be to be a seagull? Tooling around in the sky over the beach, dive bombing fish, surrounding picnickers for a reprise of “The Birds.” Plus that satisfying smack! when a clam hits the rocks from 200 feet. People pay good money for raw cherrystones.

Sure, there was other stuff I was amazed at too. Like how no matter how hard I tried, when I lay face down in the grass inhaling through my nose, I just couldn’t tell the difference between one tuft of sod and another two feet apart. My dog scoffed at my ineptitude, since it is soooo obvious. One sward is clearly correct for business, the other is not.

But back to being a seagull. The flinty Yankee in me (I lived in Boston for 30+ years, so made rank) thinks I should stick the winters out around the Cape and Islands, but so damn cold. Better maybe to head south. A good life picking Mexican out of dumpsters in Cabo.

 

No picnic, this bird
I too, scavenger of scraps –
Cheetos for fool’s gold

 

Day 9, 28 Days of Unreason

 

“So I sit on the edge, wagging my feet above the abyss.”
– Jim Harrison

 

Except the abyss is the Toto song Africa playing in an empty shopping mall at 3AM with not even mall cops on Segways to hear.

Stuck in my head again after all these years when I’d finally stopped hearing “I bless the rains down in Aaaa-frica” over and over until the brink of insanity.

See, now it’s got you too – la la laaaa la la. We’re fucked. Toto on endless 80’s repeat, which was bad enough the first time around.

I blame Columbine on Toto – it wasn’t video games or bowling it was those songs from childhood scraping at the inside of Dylan Klebold’s head until he was going to kill someone.

The Toto subreddit has hundreds of clips of Africa playing over the speakers in empty car parks, stores, janitors pushing the floor buffers of despair.

I watch them all, again and again, and the absurd music video that first ran on MTV and everything on Wikipedia and Google.

There’s no way out but through.

 

Day 8, 28 Days of Unreason

 

“What beauty in this the darkest music
over which you can hear the lightest music of human
behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.”
– Jim Harrison

 

Starless, spangle-less,
Ford Galaxy write-off scrap –
Launch pad in the dumps

 

*Yet Another Galaxy

 

Day 7, 28 Days of Unreason

“Her nights are full of the red teeth of death”
– Jim Harrison

 

Jim? Jimmer? We need to talk.
Enough with the death.

“Her nights are full of teeth-staining red wine,
Her smile drunk to the devil’s own lees”

Or such. Nice, right? No death.

This is an intervention Jim.
Going to get you some dream rehab.
Some art therapy.
Make your mom some metaphor ashtrays
and popsicle-stick poems.

They don’t make Narcan for your problem Jim.
Might not be a next time.

 

 

Day 6, 28 Days of Unreason