Maps

My mind is the map,

the highway, my thoughts
red, yellow…thin pink…pale dotted lines
they grow thick in places,
epicenters of thought
cities of hardness
huge chunks of cement and yellow road signs.
The roads multiply,
Verging, converging,
they circle.
There are exits that lead to still blue lakes and empty parking lots
there are black and yellow entrances straight into the heart of the city,
where neon lights and blinking men with red-eyes wait on the sidewalk
begging for a quarter.
Inside are the many paths, all so close at hand.
With so many places to move into and out of,
there needs to be a way to maintain focus.
Where are the roads to dream?
And with so many colored roads, which dream shall I pick?
I carry only my heart
I bring only my willingness
I step over potholes, I walk through the headache of tar fumes and stalled cars
There are a thousand paths,
There is one clear blue choice
There is a highway inside, a million places to get lost,
A thousand sights to remember
It is me in here
You out there
And sometimes the paths cross.

Climbing Aboard

Staring brightly into the sky, they dreamed of rainbows that never ended, of colored trails that flew around the earth like great open freeways of possibility. The singular road forked with smaller trails and disappeared over bridges and down pixie-dust covered tunnels. Rainbows arched in the sky like Becky had once described over a pipe of psychedelic grass and created concentric circles that looped back in on themselves before branching off into the distance that was lit with the hope of red and green and purple. The roads moved like pretzels and clovers and dove in on themselves, leading to other planes where rainbows were called by other names and seen with different eyes and painted with other colors. They stared at the rainbows from the ground, their necks pinched and eyes wide with the energy of amazement. How would they ever find a ladder big enough to reach the road?
They just needed to get to the lowest point on the road, but even that was close to the hawks that coasted the sun drenched sky. Until now, they had only heard rumors of this road, great yarns overheard in pubs and simple lines read in old books. But the storm clouds had opened one morning as they walked home in the quiet hours of a new day and as white gave way to the awaiting blue sky, they saw the rainbow highway. They stood at the bottom, standing just under the lowest dip of the road they could see, the spot that they just might have a chance of accessing if they could figure a way up. Bright speckles of light moved on the colored current.
There were large wooden ships and nearly invisible shapes that expanded and contracted like dancers. No one spoke, but they all wondered how to ascend. Just how did anyone get started? How can you get from here to there? From where you stand to the place of your dreams? From present reality to the farthest goal, to the unknowable without shape? To the places where dreams smoke and speak in other tongues, where creation is in the simmering pot, the golden cauldron tended by a silver spoon. Just how do you get from here to there?
Out through the black hole of a sparkling tunnel came a ship. There was the silhouette of a person, a young man along the side of the helm who looked to the landscape below while his right hand was raised to his eyes, blocking the gleam of the sun. His head was slightly lowered, scanning the ground patiently and then looking out towards the horizon. He looked out as though expecting nothing, as though he had looked out into the distance for a thousand years, seeing nothing but birds and water. As he passed along the lowest dip in the colored road his body twitched as he saw them, “Do you want to come aboard?” he shouted to them through cupped hands. “Yes!” they shouted in unison. They didn’t know who he was, they didn’t know were the ship was headed, but as the boy threw down the braided rope, they grabbed a hold tightly and started to pull themselves up using strength they didn’t know they had.

Far Away

I heard his voice, the deep, deep laughter that made me think of density, of hard, rich wood and the palpable thick air of a forest floor covered in a shaded canopy. I wanted to describe the sound with my hands, I formed a ball shape with my skinny fingers, holding onto the air as though it contained a thick brilliant rock, something I almost couldn’t get my hands around. He laughed again, shaking the earth with his bodily rumble. The content of the conversation was almost irrelevant. Through layers of fatigue and inattention, I barley heard his concern, some young Tibetans were turning to violence to make their struggle heard. Would they become like the Palestinians, hungry and tired and frustrated? Tired of occupation, tired of the old ways that produced no fruit.
But I barely heard that. I was tired from a long day of selling soap at an outdoors farmer’s market and when the music stations became fuzzy going through the metal doorway of the Bay Bridge, I tuned the radio to Heart and Soul, a BBC Christian-slanted show on religion. On the air was the voice of the Dalai Lama. He talked about his possible successor, he wasn’t sure that there was even a need for one. He addressed the speculation of a female taking his place as a political and spiritual leader. He said “why not a woman?” and laughed with every muscle he had.
I pictured the male and female monks on a bed, laying close to each other and not touching, not talking, just moving and sharing in each other’s energy. I saw the cold stone room, they lay on the bed in their robes; from his depths into her, from her void into his, from his presence into her absence, from her love to his attention, …Is it easy for them up there in the cloistered halls of a monastery? Away from soap and markets and ordinary people walking around with strollers and wedding rings and cell phones? Away from this black truck, these tires which take me over a bridge. Away from the skyscrapers which roll out like empty promises on my right.
I forgot so much today. I walked around quickly, looking to the vendors on each side of me while my body continued forward without an instant of attention. I was not a well-honed beam, but rather a spattering light in need of repair. I talked without need to the vendor on my right, I ate ice cream without attention, I looked at my hair in the reflection of my car to check its state.
It’s so easy to forget it all. It’s so easy to think of myself as a girl who drives every Saturday to the market and sells soap. It’s just so easy to forget it all…to look at the couple holding hands and reach out to them with my machine-desire of sticky happiness. If I lived there, out in the mountains and surrounded by a sea of maroon robes who had accepted their lives as something “other”, as different from the world of TVs and magazines and the semi-annual sale at Victoria’s Secret, a sea of maroon robes who had sacrificed the body’s desires for another way, would it then be easier for me? Is it easier for them? How can I learn if I can’t even remember? How many days can I spend on the tight rope? Not quite them, not quite other.
He laughed again. I pictured his round, tan face. A picture of deep lines and clear glow. The picture from the bumper sticker, “Get Stoked!” it said, right next to that beaming face. That face on the bumper of a new station wagon that was always parked on Hwy 9, just a few hundred feet from my house in the Santa Cruz mountains. That car parked a couple feet from the entrance of a little wooden shack, another picture of the Dalai Lama facing the street through a glass window. I drove by a million times, always turning my head to watch the withered prayer flags blowing in the wind, wondering each time what lay inside and then quickly forgetting as my car continued on.
How many things have I let it slip from my mind? I would drive pass the beaming face, wishing I could be stoked, but I had school and bills and a boyfriend on drugs who needed money, lots of money to help his pain. Could I ever be stoked? So I drove on by, letting the whispers of prayers fade from my skin.
He laughed again. Such a deep sound full of curiosity and delight. A sound that has given up on the reason to laugh and just fell through the air like a rock with wings. Did he need a reason to rumble the rocks of the earth, to rattle the fragile speakers of this car? It was as though he was saying, “let me get inside you, take a vibration of me with you.” Maybe then I would finally be stoked. Or maybe I would quickly forget.

What Do You Do?

The question is…what do you do? I thought about it all night, long after the movie credits played and the characters faded from the set. I watched their forms fade as blackness overtook their shapes. They had picked a path, one of the four dirt paths available on the wide plane of Mississippi; long, wide spaces of opportunity whose future remained unknowable in the distance. The road ended at the horizon and promised nothing...just darkness and haze. Just pick one and start walking. Four choices, four paths, four ways.
So what do you do?
What shall run through me?
There are roads that lead to life, paths to a simpler type of death, paths to sleep.
Where do you want to go?
Can you find the will to keep walking, to keep lifting up one foot after the other when the rain starts pouring and each sound of roaring thunder warns you of the choice?
Through hunger, through self doubt.
Choose a path and walk.
Walk it well.
There are pawn shops along the route and crusty hotels and sweet women who’ll grab your wallet and smile as they hide it in their shirts. If you want to learn, start walking. Choose a path and walk. The lineages come down like raindrops. They are as close as dandelions, and you could grab them, if only you weren’t so blind that you can’t even see the grass.
Four paths.
Four choices.
Can I walk until the locusts come to blind me and the devil comes with shiny white teeth and a smile that doesn’t hide the sweetness of my captured soul?
Can I walk into the storm?
Muddy toes, cold skin, squinting against the wind. It’s me that brings the devil, me that paints the sky with rain, me that tightens the noose.
What can I do to open the door, unbolt the lock and turn on the lamp?
Can I allow it all to run through me?
Moving through each little open pore, each tendril of matter and stone, like electrons run through the filament and light my little room.
Can I just breathe and continue to walk and let it move me, coloring me in its travels?
Can I make enough space, open this little cold heart and sacrifice it all to let it move?
This is a vessel, a fleshy, bloody capsule that needs to be emptied just a little to let some fresh water in. Like tubes of paint waiting for a hand, like windmills waiting for a strong gust.
Let this body be the brush, the hand, the willing embodiment of Real movement.

The Boy Who Couldn't Read

He came though the door angry. Right away she could see the annoyance, not hidden at all behind his brown eyes. He didn’t make eye contact with her and he sat down with 18 years worth of sleep in his bones. While she had waited for him in the small, windowless room, she looked at the inspirational quotes and life suggestions taped to the wall. Probably hung there by another person who was a shadow of their own truth, a shadow of what they had allowed to die decades before. The quotes were truths and good advice, like “never give up,” but they had the mark of store-bought supplies, simple institutional decoration that came without the faintest hint at how to achieve such a noble goal.
The room in which they now sat was just slightly bigger than a closet, able to accommodate a small rectangular table and three plastic chairs, the hard chairs found in institutions. Each day she sat in there, the room always seemed too small and dirty, always smelling like old banana peels and wrappers stained with ketchup and a place whose standards were close to the floor. This was an institution, a school hidden in the far corner of an industrial park, where teenagers came, after failing out of every other public school. Its rooms were filled with people one fight away from juvenile hall. They were kids who screamed “Fuck you, man!” down the hall as they walked to the bathroom, kids who acted like they were being wronged by every teacher and administrator there. They came with attitudes and chips that had knocked over their shoulders and the assumption that they already knew everything, that this was just a place that they had to endure. The spark of curiosity had vanished, long ago, it had laid down and submitted to more simple plans. The guys wore large white shirts and baggy pants with the price tags still hanging from the seams, the girls sat on benches next to the basketball net and watched the boys play. They could hardly walk in their high heels and tight pants and looked like they were just waiting to be fucked, as though their only benefit to humanity was the hole between their legs which was waiting to be filled.
The small room had a student-painted mural of the golden gate bridge on one wall. It had smears of dirt and speckles of an undistinguishable substance covering its lower half. High above, close to the ceiling, were pictures of the cursive alphabet and more inspirational advice. She wondered if anyone ever looked up and read them. Did they resonate with anyone for a moment before being quickly forgotten?
The boy next to her certainly did not resonate with the message. He was just over eighteen and still struggling to read words like “was” and “should” and “through.” He had a medical condition which caused both his eyes to twitch, they moved like little ping pong balls stuck in his head, and because of this, he had a hard time reading. And even though he couldn’t read and even though he needed all the help he could get with his vision, he refused to bring his glasses. Each day he would arrive at his tutoring session and say he forgot them, just as he forgot his entire backpack and little notebook. He held the books an inch from his face and he would still mix up letters. She wondered what motivated him to come at all. Why did he get on the train and ride for twenty minutes each early morning?
He struggled with almost every word of the first sentence of the short story. Four words into the first paragraph, he had already uttered “I don’t know” and thrown up his hands in an expression of annoyance more than a handful of times. The words he couldn’t read were ones they had begun practicing months ago when she got him a small notebook of flashcards so he could study the sight words at home. Since the day she brought it, he never remembered to bring it again.
After trying unsuccessfully to sound out the fourth word, he excused himself without looking at her. He left for a couple minutes and she drew a small curving doodle with her pencil as she waited, it looked like the inner frond of a fern. When he came back, he brought a small Styrofoam cup of water with him and placed it on the table. He started reading the first sentence again, already forgetting the first couple of words he had sounded out. He made another gesture with his hand, as if to say, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” She leaned back in her hard plastic seat and looked at him, he stared at the page.
“Do you want to learn to read?” Her voice contained tinges of skepticism.
He looked up. “Well yeah, I do.”
“But I can tell you’re not practicing at all, you still aren’t remembering words we went over months ago, the ones we put in the notebook.”
When she had first given him the notebook, he had been very appreciative, he had carefully written down words in his neatest handwriting, he acted like it was precious and thanked her again and again. But it was obvious he hadn’t looked at it since, maybe it was lost with his glasses and backpack and anything else that could actually help him.
“Because, you know, I can come here every week and we can read for an hour and a half, but it’s not enough, you’re really not going to learn unless you practice and memorize the words on your own, it’s really up to you. Right now you’re acting like you don’t even want to be here. I’ve only been coming because you said you wanted to learn to read.”
“Yeah, I do, but it’s hard, I read sometimes with my social worker, but we do different things all the time. And hey, I thought you were supposed to come on Monday!”
“Well, I couldn’t make it Monday, but that’s why I’m here now…and what do you mean, like sometimes you practice reading and sometimes math with your social worker?”
“Yeah, lots of different things, mostly math.”
She didn’t understand what he was saying exactly.
“Well, all I’m saying is that it has to come from you, if you don’t want to learn, it’s not going to happen, no amount of help or tutoring will help unless you practice, it has to come from you. You need to want to learn and make the effort.”
He looked at her. “You know, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry, I don’t want to waste your time.”
He looked at the short story with a small burst of renewed interest. It took them an hour and a half to read two paragraphs. He had had bouts of enthusiasm before, she was not confident any pep talk was going to make a difference. She would know next week if he had problems sounding out the word “found.” His effort, or lack thereof, would be obvious then.
She knew that there was a part of him that really wanted to learn to read. Maybe it was the part of him that made the effort to get up with the sound of the alarm and put on some clean clothes and get to the train station. But the rest of him, the other 99 percent, got to school and sat down and was angry at the teachers, rude to the other students and made a day of possible learning into a failed effort. He let his days slip by and, when it was time for a tutoring session, he came up with reasons to be angry and annoyed and resistant to practice. No matter how much she wanted him to read, the true desire and effort would have to come from him. It was his journey.
A guide can do nothing without a sincere and constant effort from the voyager. Without such an effort, all help is precious seed poured into a gaping hole in the ground. Nothing will ever grow. Nothing will ever flourish.

Passing Generations

The high school was designed in the customary sprawling fashion as befits Southern California. Instead of a central building with multiple floors, the layout was single storied and extended lengthwise for half a mile, from the science rooms at the top, down to the pool, tennis courts and football field. The design vaguely resembled a large cross, at the tip of each point of the cross were “quads.” A quad was a conjuration of classrooms in the shape of a square donut. Along the sides of each quad were rows of maroon lockers and in the center, where the donut hole would be, was open space, usually dying grass.
The school had central point, it was called “central quad.” It was a park-like space, with various wooden benches and short cement walls used as seats. There were a couple of picnic benches, areas of lawn with mature trees and islands of shrubby bushes that produced clusters of red, orange and yellow flowers. Through the large space, like a sparse spider web, were cement paths that led to each quad.
During lunch, and in the seven minutes allowed between classes, students would congregate in the central quad and in other spots on the campus. Like self-segregating animals claiming territory, clicks of teenagers remained loyal to a designated space and returned to the same spot every lunch, day after day, and year after year.
The popular kids, otherwise known as the “soces” (derived from the word “social”), congregated a couple of steps away from the administration building. They sat on the short cinderblock horseshoe/bench that was uncovered by the eaves that stopped just short of them. There were white and purple irises on either side of the horseshoe and pots with flowers that hung from the eves behind them. The soces tended to be rich, white and blond. They played soccer and football and many of the girls were cheerleaders. They were the all-American standard, their pictures could be cut from magazines.
The smart kids, many of whom wore glasses (also known as the nerds) sat on the lawn in front of the school, a couple steps away from Indian Hill Blvd. The Latino kids sat by the vending machines, on the large cement stairs that separated the upper quads from the lower quads. The punks, and there were only a handful of them, sat on the maroon bench close to the library.
Then there was “the block,” a maroon-painted cement block in the center of the lawn, in the exact spot where if imagined, the lines of the large school-cross would meet. This is where the “alternative kids” sat, the ones who bought vinyl records, listened to college radio and dressed themselves in thrift store clothes, and judging by image, tended to be more artistically inclined. When I arrived in the high school as a freshmen, “the block” was occupied by mostly seniors and juniors, although there were a couple of sophomores and one freshman, Sid, who had been accepted into their ranks.
As freshmen, we were very similar to the alternative kids on “the block,” only we were a little more radical and had no male counterparts. We were a dozen mostly short-haired girls that dressed in old clothes, hung out at the record store and had hard feminist leanings and authority issues. We were called lesbians and man-haters, although almost everyone had a boyfriend from time-to-time. Although some of the girls were friends with the older kids on “the block” and many of us dated, we kept to ourselves and sat at the horseshoe between the trees, a cement configuration of benches that looked like two parentheses facing each other. We sat there during lunch and I often watched the people at “the block”, I watched how they interacted, what they wore…I watched Jean and Mimi, the couple who kissed. I watched Leandra and her big jiggling breasts beneath her ironic thrift store T-shirt, Winslow and his old man clothes and slouchy posture.
By the time we were juniors, the bulk of them had graduated and we, next in line to the alternative throne, migrated to the red cement block, claiming it as our own. This was the block of countless alternative generations. Just as new Latinos entered high school and stood on the stairs, just as freshman football players began to stand at the soc horseshoe, we took our inherited spot in the central quad. We sat there for two years, each new year bringing new, younger additions. They would be the generation to replace us, the kids who would, by merely standing at “the block”, show the incoming freshmen where the alternatives would stand.
A couple years after our graduation, the school removed the block from the central quad. But alternative kids still stand there today. Even though the actual physical block is gone, “the block” is still there.
Year after year, the same kinds of people stand in the same places. It’s a legacy that is passed through shared visual cues, shared heritage, social status, music and dress. It’s passed on by the way we identify ourselves and others. Are we in this group, or that?
Like parents teaching their children the ritual of Christmas or Hanukah, we’re not exactly sure why we put lights up, not really sure about the origin of the potato pancake, but we eat it anyway. The grandparents before us did it, we do it, and the kids will end up teaching it to the next generation. It’s not quite the biological impulse to reproduce and eat, but it’s the human impulse to gather with those like you, to stand next to your clone and reinforce the same shared ideas. It is the impulse for a legacy, a lineage. The danger is the dilution of the original purpose and meaning. Why do we do what we do? Why do I desire marriage? Why do I eat cheese and not cats? Why do I stand by the maroon block?

Flight 228

The seat below me is soft and blue. I look out the tiny rectangular window and see nothing but blackness and occasional spurts of lighting.

The seat below me is gray, the windshield before me is covered in smashed bugs that speckle the vision of evening traffic.

We rock violently, trashing through the night sky. This is not turbulence, and as much as I would like to hear the reassuring voice of the captain, assuring us of our altitude and safety, this will not be that type of flight.

My eyes water. I am in a sea of cars, their headlights blink on and off in a Morse code of red.

We jerk violently, like a toy in the hands of a giant. The lights have gone off and the aisle is illuminated in an orange glow of polka dots. The air masks drop, I reach to them like a machine clinging for life. Air. I need air. It is the scene from a nightmare. The terror of birth, the knowledge that soon I will be taken, taken back into the world of darkness. This is the sheer pain, the raw fact of inevitable death. This is happening. And it’s happening to me.

Tears begin to flow. The freeway surrounding me is a slow game of movement. But I am in the sky. I am crashing towards my death. I am sucking air. I am clenched with fear. The ocean is below, a black vastness that will soon embrace my cold flesh.

There are screams and they are loud, but at the same time, running in parallel, is the muted stillness of a moving grave. I move as though it as if wading through molasses, each second stretching further than I ever thought possible. An electric cord of lightning blasts through the sky like a careful dancer. The craft shakes with the force of a demon. All truths exist at this moment.

Sadness will not let go. Fear of the inevitable moves with my blood. My mouth is dry.

A terrible roar, the screech of metal ripping, what have we lost? There is crying, but there is silence, the silence of an approaching death. The plane tips, we flap like a feather, this multi-ton hunk of metal is dropping like a stone in a pond. Has my heart stopped? I am nearly dead with fear.

Their fear is mine.

It is the sound of dying metal, there will be no landing, not on hard earth. Open up, we are coming.
The wing hangs by a tendril. Every prayer I have ever known runs through my mind, words flip through me like a crazed typewriter.

There is nothing that can help us now.

I will never see him again, his eyes flash in my mind, the space we shared in the airport not too long ago. Just moments before the flight. We stared, my lips quivering, my hands still playing with the crinkled hair from his beard.

A tear begins to form, the pain of knowing this is the end.

I held and held, feeling his truth. Sink, he said. Let it wash over you like a warm wave. You will never see me again. Goodbye, I will see you on the other side, I will call for you with my bell and my candle. I will call for you. Listen for me, come to my words, let me be a guide. Follow me.

I reach deep within me and I pull out another breath.