Not In Kansas Anymore

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Sometimes I have this dream, I am beating someone. I'm serious about it, methodical.
I look around. Hoping someone will come stop me doing what I am doing.


But nobody does.



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I just keep working away at it.




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To me, I'm just a nice guy. I'm pretty laid back, I take things as they come for the most part. I mean, I guess I can be a little difficult to be around sometimes, but you'd have to know me pretty good or catch me at the wrong time. But sometimes other people around me don't see me that way.


You know, how they hug the wall and look down at their shoes when I walk past them in the hallway, or how they run screaming, tripping over themselves in their rush to get somewhere I'm not.



Some people, huh?



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There's days when the glory of the world shines down on me from above. When I drink in golden light and honey through my pores and taste heaven in each breath I take in. Just the sight of the morning sun on the ocean, or how a black net of birds bursts out of the branches of some tree as I drive by can fill me up with a delicious kind of unbearable happiness.

And its times when every single thing is perfectly fine and I sit in my bed with my jaws clenched tight and my stomach churning and I got no way to apprehend what there could be that is good in this world.


Just like you, I guess.



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Last night I was kind of moving back and forth between those extremes, like sampling a little bit of each from the buffet...I poured myself a nightcap of ice-cold vodka and read some Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton out of my very favorite book, that Poulin 5th edition of Modern American Poetry. And their voices were in my body like the booming waves on the beach north of Cayucos and for that little while I could taste it all just fine...


Maybe it was the vodka.


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Probably it was.





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Here's lookin' at you, kid.



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