https://www.angelfire.com/Ks2/dickens/index.html
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Subject: https://www.angelfire.com/Ks2/dickens/index.html
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 11:55:16 CDT
The birthday came and went. Life goes on.
And....damn...someone by name of Msallthat and Co. went ahead and created this...website for me featuring ME and all my disjointed mutterings and ramblings. Heart was so incredibly touched. I cannot remember a birthday present which so delighted and surprised me. The addy is:
https://www.angelfire.com/ks2/dickens/index.html
And thank all of you for the cards you sent! And the msgs of caring, love. Isn't this what the Circle is all about? Some of the cards have been delayed in the (snail)mail, and SisterNancy will be dropping them by as they come in.
Lovely.
My poetry has slowed, and one of the reasons for that is that there are some really GOOD poets here in the Circle, and I hesitate to bring such meager offerings to those of you who write so well. Nonetheless, if I don't include my "notes," then I will undoubtedly lose the germs of future poems.
With that caveat, two I wrote this morning at JavaBreak:
"The Bitch Might Take Me West"
I am sitting at a round
Dirty glass-covered table
Thinking of you,
Your energy,
Your heart.
Your poems are spread out
In open invitation
And I touch, taste, kiss
Them one by one amidst
The still life
Of sunglasses and coffee
And loose tobacco
With papers as delicate
As your breath
Which I can almost feel from here.
Dear Girl!
You move from Philly
To L.A.
To there and there and even there
But never quite
Here.
The Greyhound is such a lovely
Bitch
Which
Might take me someday
West
Where dances allthat I
Love best.
~~~~~~
"Off the Top of My Head"
My cap says, "IOWA,"
And the dome of it
Is printed like a map
Of the counties and towns
Of I-O-WAY.
Yesterday I spent
Half an hour
Looking for Eldora, Iowa,
Where my reform school
Was
And even though
I know
Precisely where the steel bars
Must surely be
And where sad young small boys
Are punched and pummeled into
An eternity
Of submission
Until they suck and spread,
Still I could not find
Eldora
On the top of my cap
Off the top of my head.
Even though
I know
Where it must surely be
Stuck within
Dysfunctionality.
~~~~~~~~
Nicoletta was there, greeting me with a smile and words which forever gush out with smiles built within. A wonderful young woman, complexion lovely enough for models to die for. She'd made me something special, the little paper insulated holder for the coffee cup decorated and saying, "Happy B'day Dickens." Touched. Sentimental me, I saved it, proof positive that as I passed through this life someone cared enough to do something like that.
The party was...the party. There was a woman named (gawd, I forget her name) who shared the same b'day date, and I took a nearly instant dislike to her. I mean, what is this? Shouldn't everyone having a b'day on the 16th of October be, um, sen-si-tive and kewl and outrageously won-der-ful? I moved away from her and spent most of the evening talking with Mike Bell whose picture is beneath the term "anal retentive" there in good ole Webster. I like him a great deal. He talks at such great length, explaining everything to the nth degree, then explaining and elaborating on the explanation. Makes for a lazy Dickens in the conversation.
I'd exercised wonderful restraint, and so waited until after the meal to open my gifts from Msallthat, the cards from Loveisarose and NU. I felt so...special.
Nancy and Steve's house is 17 miles out in the country, situated at the top of a hill on 43 acres of poison ivy. Some 100 yards or so from their octagonal house (with 12 sided "Sky Room") is a 90' stainless steel Pullman Dining Car sitting there atop a couple of platforms of timbers thicker than railroad ties. Such a strange thing to come upon there in the underbrush.
How did they get the Thing up there?
How on earth could they possibly turn such a Thing on the tight little corners of gravelly Kansas country roads?
Mike Bell was wondering all of this and offering possible solutions which he had to come back to ever and again to emend and further elaborate. I stood there silent, listening. Mike Bell. Before he grew bald on top, people used to call him the Marlboro Man.
Elaine, who lies in Germany beside her young Chinese psychologist lover, is an artist, and her touch is evident throughout the railroad car. Art is everywhere. Elaine is everywhere. I adore her.
Steve is drinking red wine and talking at the table about various kinds of intelligence, pointing out that his brand of intelligence is highly weighted toward the logical, the 3-dimensional.
Whereas Elaine, on the other hand (he sez), has an intelligence of a different order. She sees things which are absolutely beyond me. She sees in a DIFFERENT way than I do. But it's genius.
And (nodding toward me) Dickens, too. He writes poetry. I can't do that. I can't do art. But I can do chemistry.
Point taken.
I took Mike Bell throughout the house, listening to him ohhhh and ahhhh at the construction details. The Sky Room put him into heavy breathing. "This gives me ideas," he panted. He has half an acre in one of the small towns nearby and now he wants to build some kind of Sky Room himself. I am pleased to have been the vehicle for bringing him here, showing him this.
He talks about the 30 panes of glass he brought all the way from Kentucky and what he will do with them. His excitement is a bit contagious, and I begin to think of the day when I, too, will own half an acre (or more) somewhere, and how I, too, will build some lovely structure with my own two hands and perhaps even a...Sky Room.
Then it's time to go, and I sit in the back as Monte drives erratically down the road, listening to Mike rhapsodize about Sky Rooms and panes of glass and the garage he's building and what shade of paint do I think he should use for his shutters?
****
The DharmaTent was still there, domeing up in the dark of Sarah's garage, and the candles cast a lovely glow upon my statue of Kwan Yin on the altar, the Chinese Goddess of Mercy which I have carried with me all the way from when I was such a successful businessman in Honolulu, making $100 an hour. We have come such a long way together, and she still gazes at me with infinite compassion.
I feel like such a failure, I whisper to her.
She looks at me with infinite compassion.
I'm growing old, I whisper.
Again, the compassion.
I feel lost, irrelevant, useless!
I reach out and touch her once more. There begin to appear white chips where the black spray-painted plaster has chipped away. In the Spring I will give her a new look, this Precious One I have carried with me so long.
The maroon sleeping bag chills my legs as I slide in, but soon enough the warmth builds, lulls and rocks me to that point of near-sleep, where the logical world of today dissolves and what is left is the magic of eternal childhood.
I see a party of people come to honor someone...Akeem...Steve's friend. Akeem says to me, Dickens, find a place where they love you...stay there. He holds his arms up, arcing, fingertips touching. What does that mean?
I am drifting now, riding the dark horse of my first grade reader...the horse named Midnight...he is carrying me to sleep.
Find a place where they love you...the voice says...and now it is Kwan Yin whispering to me. She holds her bowl to me and I gaze down into the arc of that offering.
And as sleep takes me the arcing arms and arcing bowl take me to a place where I am loved, to those who love me, the Circle, and that is the last thought I can remember as I ride that black horse into the dissolution of self into that magic dream
Of Sky Rooms
And Dodo Birds
And 30 panes of glass
And a witch sharing my birthday
And a madman at the wheel
Of my life.
I love you.
Dickens@55
