Listening to Simon and Garfunkel sing in Central Park. Like emptiness and harmony—the Dakotas a shadow reminder that nothing holds together very long. A half million people in the park—each song a kind of elegy for free riding hope.
America was and is Moloch’s America. We worship at his feet. Those who don’t, run the risk of being stoned. Those who do, are eaten alive by the beast. Their children stretched out on the alter—the insatiable hunger for innocent blood, the insatiable hunger for money, the insatiable hunger for chaos and madness.
We hide, as best we can, in the cracks. Seek solace in agave and blues, a walk in a sliver of wild still left to us, though we can hear the tires on the Interstate a mile or so away from the trickling river. A raccoon emerges from the bushes, looks at us as if to say can’t you at least give us this little space. A buzzard flaps its wings and flies from a branch near the top of a dead oak in the canyon.
Signs and symbols. Walks barefoot on a concrete sidewalk, barefoot in the grass. Tries to breath a new life into his poems, as if a poem could be the glue holding the last pieces of existence together. As if the poem was something more than words. It’s only words, an old lover once told him. And he finds himself a Richard Brautigan character in a short story, waiting for the water to boil in a pot on the stove so he could fix himself a cup of instant coffee.
I want a cup of coffee, he says, when what he really wanted was so much more.
A biscuit and gravy, a fired eggs with a soft yoke—
Ice cold beer and enchiladas, Mark writes to him.
Witness to another morning.
Are you still my sweetie pie, he asks Georgia. Yes, she says. I adore you, he tells her. You are so smart and nice and pretty. Yes, she says, but I don’t wear pretty clothes. But I’m still your sweetie pie.
Love,
Brady