When, on some cold November night, out past midnight, wholly communions came as I first ever painted a train at the crux of our beloved coveted common grounds ~ but I am but a flight attendant in this glimpse of a lift off: a curious stewarding, just drifting and amending the rounds ~ the Lostboy crowd was where I was found: we ADHD birds so impulsive and reckless and saboteur dirt poets profound of industrial wastelands ~ finding every portal port hole to crawl through and mark our turf ~ ya’ll might be missing my gleaning, here: animals (and we be included) are inherently territorial, scraping by in the skeletal margins of societal highs (mostly lows, though) ~ and we out here with nothing to hide and all reasons excluded ~
Sewn, there’s Lostboy ~ Tango Uniform Foxtrot ~ who took me under his tattered wing and brought me into a scene that never was and could never be, obscured in the cryptic language of sight unseen ~ and I seen a kid get his ass beat just for showing up ~ his shit got dicked in the street if you can catch what I mean ~ all of them running on paint can fumes under an orange shrapnel sky ~ then lights flash & outrun the cops past bum camps and hobos homeward bound crashing in the rail yards ~ and I recall I was just a guest in that place hunting out some sense of where I belonged in a city scape built on abandonment and shame and that was the myth I knew too, from the chokehold legacy of burn & turn in the wake of every mistake ‘til you learn forgiveness ~ but what that really means is that we are WILD and full of catastrophe, there is no break but the pardons we make out of necessity ~ whatever it is that we claim to be seeking, whatever signals painted bright and glaring on crumbling walls were reaching.
I knew there was only a fine thin line between my health and what we wrote to be true ~ like you might think there’s security but not if you’re only surviving from the wound ~ and Lostboy, of all the people I knew back in that window of Kentuckee bluegrass riddle & rhyme ~ was the only one who spoke the truth:
The only one who spoke the truth.
He was the Only One Who Spoke The Truth.
I’m talking soothsaying because it was so real real ~ the kind that makes you cry because you buried all that grief inside and forgot how to feel ~ forgot how to look, to see clearly, besides: most just want Love & Light and tidy happy endings for selfish needs when shit ain’t tidy and no one’s clean: but the Spirit still moves in the sidewalk seams and my church was the railroad stacks for a time ~ the grass was green on every side ~ Abundance For All, and All for None ~ but I still pray when the day is done and it doesn’t keep me linked to any kind of man-made lies: I’m full of thanks and we, United by Mystery, are given this day: Alive.
Then, there are pictures from the Life of Us: looking for weird stones by the river bend, swing from trees and smoke it up, paint and draw and paint some more ~ chicken wings from the grocery store ~ we tried to be lovers once but the fit wasn’t the same and I’ve never had grace in ‘playing the game’ but nothing changed between us: that was our pact, there’s no such thing as Self, so just Be: that’s True Community ~ never a breath wasted on edges jabbed behind your back: You wanna know how he’s doing? Go ask him yourself. You want to know how she feels? Let her be the one to tell you.
Now, I seer that I’ll never be that person again as I gaze into this crystal memory lens ~ some part of me is gonna die a hundred times in this lifetime ~ and it will look a hundred different ways and through a hundred different eyes ~ like I got a few marks in my soul’s record that I’ve no want to speak of ~ my memory bank is cashed from the currency spent to face them ~ but I’ll have this to tie up for a life line: deep as the grief goes, you and I both know that it never ends ~ you have never arrived ~ just showing up after every undertow that beckons you back from six feet below and this is the cycle ~ recovery is just how it flows: traipse the trail where the rail road goes ~
it’s a one way runway, runaway: forward.
You’ll eventually make it home ~
just keep moving and don’t turn back ~
and always speak the truth.
Always speak the truth.
In All Ways, All Ways, Speak the Truth.