the two hippies and Echo the dog

so then one morning in Chinatown, Los Angeles, I 
decided I could do without 
the other homeless people around 
the library and I got all my shit 
into the bags I had at that point and 
walked up the hill towards the bridge. 

there was this tall, black homeless
guy sweeping the sideway out-
side of a tentcity for half 
a dozen people, he asked me for 
a cigarette, which I didn't have, 
but since I was planning to collect and 
redeem cans for the first part of the day, I 
asked him if  he'd watch my things 
and I'd compensate him with 
a couple cigarettes 
after the fact. 

I stayed there for about two months. 

one night this man who operated a gas-station 
offered me a free coffee while I was 
digging, rummaging through the 
big plastic cans by the fuel-pumps. 
I started going there pretty regularly. 

and then one morning I 
broke routine and went to 
the Burger King 
across the street from where 
I got peppersprayed one time 
and this squarefaced drugdealer in 
his late-20s and his partner and 
their dog coughed and laughed 
and undermined a hundred mornings of 
shitting in blackdawn streets and 
thunderstorm extinction awakenings, 
like so many pebbles gone like smoke... 
I had a phone at that point. she  had 
an easy voice 
and a soft mouth. 






****

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Various Appointments (to be completed, soonish)

ONE  At night, he'd lay a plastic tarp in a wooded area near the edge of the city he relied upon, a certain modicum of gratitude in the ritual. He'd remove the comforter from the large leaf-bag, unroll it, shake it, lay it upon the tarp. He'd take some default note of the temperature--typically cold--and provoke a small memory of endurance, push against the unkindness of his situation. It was all but permanently bad, hardly more than an accumulation of rudeness and inhospitability that consumed the energy and good will that wagered against it. He'd lay a backpack with a few books and like supplies and everyday needs such as a toothbrush at the head of the blanket and remove his coat and sweater and fold them into a pillow and set the bundle atop the backpack. The hard air running slow and steady through everything. And on nights when he was sober enough to, he'd remove his shoes, socks, pants, shirt, and set these somewhere dry enough, close enough, for the morning....
Read more

the respiratory habits of fish

if there's some habit, vitamin, pharmaceutical that corrects short attention spans I haven't seen it.  all day long my eyes drown in the hapless, abject conformity of turdsuckers overpiling with words and not a flare of meaning or  whit discernible,  their voices trapped in some world before language: immigrants of this unwanted country this timeline all futures would beg to be spared from-- the leaves and the rocks and the wind and what else move in the space of the expanding universe and I try  to meditate on the respiratory habits of fish: those whose ancestors navigated, bred  endured trials century and millennia old, hungry, thinking creatures with a perception older than dinosaurs, citizens of a world no name has been provided.  **** 
Read more

glass [and] razorblades

 glass ~ even the routinely-poor are afforded  some small mercies and graces --  earlier, today, for instance  a discreet 3-panel  animation of a woman  smoking in close-up  of narrowing proximity  rolled into my periphery of  a sudden at the weedstore  and, tonight, outside the church  where my eyes close to some rest:  the fierce stone of the architecture  spraying indismissibly into  the moment...  ...when counselors,  nurses,  clerks, interviewers,  doctors, various staff  ask me why I consume  alcohol to the degree I do,  this is what I can't remember  or manage  to tell them, this  perpetual, permanent  withering, something abundant yet  feeble in its abundance, the glass  before something else  that always  was.  ****  razorblades  ~ stuff this into your brain:  there's this overflowing pile  of billions and more...
Read more