“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

“I feel my failure intensely
as if it were a vital organ”
– Jim Harrison

 

If you are lucky
maybe that taproot
your heart set so deep
is a carrot, or turnip –
silly but useful,
at least something to eat
after the plough and harrow
have done their dirty work,
and planting comes in season.

But if it is hardwood,
your soul shaded by oak
or walnut,
what you thought would hold
against the deluge
comes up a balled fist
that couldn’t let go,
decades lost
in a single night
and no way to fill the hole

 

Day 3, 28 Days of Unreason