ahh, inhale. What I have been doing, and writing on paper again, preferably with a pencil no less. I rarely miss writing here - this life in now is so physical. Simple in its truth, stretching in morning light, every evening walks on broken abandoned wharves to the cool honeysuckled river banks. Except the honeysuckle's pretty much out of season now, how clean and sweet in my face every morning and twilight, even with a face full of tears, those buttered petals were before they bowed.
My Crows came back with Cody's passing - my partner, truly, that cannot be sniggered at - no, not "just a cat" but a deep soul and seer who watched me for 17 years - so many photographs I have of him watching me - cool and straight - he is becoming surely something even more magnificent - perhaps the man who will save the world from other men. I rest easy in his absence because I have no regrets - he and I loved eachother deeply for 17 years and we both knew it - what more is there than that?
And the crows came back strong - and the copper pennies as well. The work I am doing is as intimate as a copper penny between index finger and thumb, rubbed. My new series of photographs tell that story - and the pennies themselves tell another one - there's endless streams of information flowing - I immediately think of Burroughs - and my winter walks with him around his grandparents' building in Detroit - finding that wooden pallet with his last name stenciled on it, blasted away in the center by a shotgun, I'm serious, I found that. And covered it with blood red red and left it behind when I left.
Lighted masts pass over my window, the river's right there and that is a glorious thing. Especially now as a train pulls in the opposite direction. My musics are real and free. For example at twilight the air burst out in song as the calliope wheezed through "Wonderful World". How do I not stop and cling to the fence peering up river at the whirling waters and cathedral spires? I didn't did not and then improvised my own lyric, "Plastic bag in grass, dog's wavy tail, barbed wire sky, train on the rail - and I think to myself - wonderful world." I live in the city where Louis Armstrong wrote that and that is no accident.
Then there's Portugal and Jamaica - my second and third homes - and then eastern Poland with her mothers and gardens, still Russian in demeanor - and then the river cutting through Prague, the rivers of people in Barcelona. These are my places but more than ever I'm aiming for India. Yes, India, where I migrated I've been told, after Greece, where I made sense of crow's wings rhythms to tell the people something. We become what we are still and I like this becoming I am. "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" he tells me in all caps at least once a day. And you are.