…everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real.
-Max Read
We’re no longer the suckers, folks, and people aren’t looking at us as suckers and I love you…
-President Donald J. Trump
Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.
-Hunter S. Thompson
The enemy is a very good teacher.
–The Dalai Lama
Look at this place. Totes overturned with guts of electronics spilled out beneath a cockeyed ironing board and black oxford draped over it sulking. A pathetic hill of business cards, fliers and receipts piled up on a throw rug and in the shadow of the Tacoma Guild in its Wolfpak case. My poetry and prose collections have taken over the Yoga trunk and coffee table. The dresser is covered in clothes and candles with 2 of its drawers dead open and gaping. The bathroom is a waste and an embarassment to describe—beard clippings and dirty tees and the toilet like a bomb site due to too many months of gastro trouble. To think at this time last week I was beneath the soft blue sky in the Land of Eternal Spring, where nobody knows my name but out on the street everybody says Buenas! I’m at a loss for today’s post, which is exactly how I like it. The speed of the news and acceleration of our decline is dizzying, ain’t it though, and our acclimation to death and war is just as alarming. There’s no place I’d rather be than down here at the Office, in the maelstrom of my own mess, recovering from thirty-two hundred miles, two book releases and 4 shows in 11 days. This blog was invented for this. Down at the Office we fly by our seat, without time to think because premeditated writing comes off as fake and essay writing is a bore.
I include you because I need you, truth be told, so these posts are meant to be an embrace. I write poetry to get a hit off reality and spin it out beyond compunction and bleed the bone-dry moments on an IBM Selectric II. I send my work out to pubs like El Informe, The Adroit and Sybil Journals because that’s what writers do and I need to get the work away from me before I fall in love with it or it’s destroyed and otherwise buried beneath a mountain of time and typewritten pages. The news isn’t bothering me much this week. Living in the Land of the Free my problems are few. I’m generally perturbed by the vestiges of a clinching world though, it seems that every year I’ll need some clearing off and what could be a more fitting end to the Year of the Cock than a hatchet? We should shake the dust, good Reader, rid ourselves of deadweight, lift each other or pry their grubby fingers off and what better way to do it than in writing? I know you get the same charge I do reading these posts and I know we couldn’t make it otherwise. You know this is my life. You affirm it every time you read. I love writing, it should be plain, and the way traffic on the highway washes past and my ears get filled with the almost painfull quiet of solitide. I relish in these couple hours alone each week. You tune in and read and we’ve got each other and isn’t that nice?
All bluster and filigree aside and beneath the flowerings of that anger, what I’m trying to say is my life is good, it’s taken some fortuitous and enjoyable turns as of late and in 2019 I’ll be carving out some real time for us together. You bet. The haters and imitators will draw ever more concentric circles around us but our love will have only grown. Next year I’ll have even less time for that and if my psychological growth is any indication, my quickenings will double and hate will bounce off me because at my root I’ll be a repulsing pole for: jealousy, mocking, small-mindedness, insanity, inclusiveness, bad writing and fake poetry. This is the new stuff. I go dancing in. May the Year of the Brown Pig bring us great fortune and happiness. Hugs will be rationed and I’ll guard my time with my life but you know I’ve always got time for you, good Reader. I owe it all to you and am marvelled by you—you’ve kept your heart’s beacon ablaze and out on the frontier and wasteland of my own blues I can always see you burning.
Run like a river, glow like a beacon fire…
Vox populi, vox dei.
Trainer
AUSTIN TX
Going for the Throat 