'Blood sits in my belly thriving me ready. Not the life stirring force I was hoping for. Its blend of curse words and bile threaten to spray my walls of white awake. It stimulates my coyote mind. Figuring the color puts my thighs at ease. This is not who I thought I was. Dreams have changed from dark alleys and jumping roofs to neighborhood chats and hair combing. I’m where I always wanted to be. Quenching last nights thirst, and rolling around the tumble weeds, feeling dirt's grit, brings me alive. Flying through with eyeballs pealed. Never trusting in a total stranger. She smiles with her tongue while forking. Saying goodbye to many a golden ring. Africa calls her children back where I kiss the ground. Sitting in a chair made of stone. I’m choosing the reflection being a TV. Reaching for the ghost. Looking at the world through glass. Makes me want to do nice things. Painting all the doors red reminds me I’m alive.  A path I follow to the fork in the road saying yes. Something is everywhere all the time. Paths and forks go on until there isn’t. There's comfort in my fear where curtains hide the corners. Where god rules the edges. Where laws govern my lips. Where someone else's idea of good, lives where my fun hides. Hell is running late, I see, blowing apart the place I used to haunt. Where brown skin lovers hold each other, hungry in the dark. Where old weeps on over-salted sheets. Where love is a warm place like fingers in my mouth. Like thighs pressed tight. Like someone who smells of perspiration and grass mowed by hand. I smile even though I don't want to. The tune has stopped me. Watching dogs die with no fuss. With no screams of terror. Where nothing is needed. I let go of the one I love. In love. Color painting over gods words so close I can smell his dandruff. Rubbing them out, watching the ink blots float yachts across the vaults of heaven. Bending knees in prayer opens my heart, for blood has never been more red. Bending the light is a painting from the louvre flung across a cut-out sky. Bending Jasmine sucks through my nostrils, my head, my heart, filtered with the sting of knives, an empty glass between my brows, flickers under my skin. I am who I choose to be.

​Pale honey hue, swirling in the Glencairn glass. Ten seconds. Fifteen. I tilt it and inhale the nose. Magic. I’m instantly in a rickhouse, stacked bulging barrels, oak shavings underfoot, sacks of toasted barley exhaling goodness that sparkles in shafts of sunlight. Give me grain! Golden kernels, husks crisply rolling between thumb and fingers. I defer tasting the whisky. Not yet! A second hit of nose, and I’m getting citrus, and maybe cherry. A hint of acetone, but that’s not unpleasant.  I close my eyes, sip the first, throwaway taste. Only the weak taste-buds fall comatose. The manly ones will be there for the second taste, the one that counts. They don’t shirk. The second sip rubs my face in saddle leather, and sweetness only describable in terms of British desserts. Treacle tart. A hint of cherry tobacco. My senses of taste and smell are nearly ovewhelmed and leak into my vision, single-malt synesthesia, progressing like a rolling landscape across the visual field with a fantasia of bass sienna and cinnabar pulsing up to contralto aurorae of mustard and chartreuse, with dancing soprano flickers of aquamarine. The echoes die, slowly pulsing with my heart, the finish like a wave slowing to a sinuous stop along the strand and—a final surprise—green peppercorn and sorghum.
Powerful. Makes me wish the synesthesia extended into erotica. A proper challenge for the master distiller!
The second act in my flight is as different as two scotches can be. Dark amber, heavily peated, aged at the edge of the sea. An Islay whisky. The nose teleports me to a windblown beach. I smell iodine, and barnacled rocks, and lots and lots of smoke. I can almost hear saltgrass whisper. And under the brine, beneath the barley, like sweet silk in my mouth I find the sherry the cask held before, and the oak’s vanilla. The first taste knocks out half my tongue. It’s cask-strength, and it burns. A very good burn. I sample the nose again, and cold spindrift splashes my face, burning peat makes my eyes water, but I’m hasty to get to the second, serious taste.
I feel my scalp lift. So much energy in this oily dram! And to describe the flavors? It will be hard to articulate in a way I can say with a straight face, because honestly, it’s like going down on a mermaid. And the fantasia in my vision goes berserk, monster waves crashing against cliffs, echoing like cannonades in the hills, shaking to an impossibly long, hot, and peppery finish.
When the last whisper fades I feel drained, boneless, and why is my face buzzing? 

​I stand in the gloom of the cloister, a covered walkway around the grassy quadrangle where a trio of fat snowy geese promenades in the bright day under a white sky. A tall archway leads to the south cloister, and just beyond in the passage, a crude hand-lettered sign on a little stand bears two words, with an arrow pointing onward.
“Kevin!” I shout. He ambles towards me from a knight’s effigy in crusader dress atop a stone coffin—the tomb of William, bastard son of Henry II, and half-brother to King John. I point.
“Magna Carta? THE Magna Carta?!” He is as surprised and thrilled as I am, and we hurry in the direction of the sign, sore feet forgotten.
A polished wooden cabinet twice my height stands in the center of the bare floor In a high, high gothic chamber with walls of stained glass. We walk around to the other side, and there, the woodwork clasps a large square of parchment, tilted to the light, with nearly four thousand words written on it.
“Wow,” Kevin breathes.

I place my hand on the glass.

An inch away rests something signed and sealed, touched, by John himself.
I ate smoked salmon from a street stall when we got off the shuttle bus from Stonehenge, and still taste it.
Under the the straps of my backpack, and the blue windbreaker, my shoulders are damp and prickly with Wiltshire drizzle.
I expect the elderly docent or his schoolgirl apprentice to insist that I step back, but my fingers tingle, nearly brushing the magic of iron gall ink on vellum. Still unfaded, after 800 years.
It is so sweet to have found this with Kevin. Perfect for us. He’d made his own chain mail, carried a replica of William Wallace’s sword when I took him to the Renaissance Festival. We are similar roses on the same cane—our love for Tolkien fuels a fascination with deep British history.
I know the text is Latin, but the dense calligraphy is hard to read, and might as well be Anglo Saxon or Norman French.  It looks like Elvish.
Doreen had helped Kevin design his knight’s costume, though he’d done all the sewing and leatherwork himself. I feel her presence, the blessing of her love still laid on both of us, husband and son, though she’s been dead and buried these two months. 
Kevin’s face turns to stone when he thinks of it.  And I feel dead inside, so maybe we are having that same experience, too
She would love that we found this, are sharing this, and wish us much joy of it. She would be made of joy. As she had so many times, she would stroke my cheek with soft fingers, tell me without words that there is no shame in loving life. At any time. And that she loves me.
It is unbearable that she is already beginning to fade from the world. If there is a God, she’s a prick.
“Sir, please don’t touch, ” says the young woman.
I lift my fingers from the glass.

The mirror doesn’t match my insides. Cold. Confident. In control. The girl who doesn’t give a shit. Who never stays the night. Who jumps out of windows. I’ve seen who I’ve become. Melting in the sun. Saying sorry when I’m not. I’m the one who runs over his luggage. Kisses him when I don’t even know his name. Sits crosslegged on a barstool. Eats bananas and spits peels under his feet. Fuck mirrors. I’m going to cover mine like someone just died. I’ve been taught to chew with my mouth closed. He likes it open. There’s a moment right before climax that I can say anything. Confessing fantasies I only whisper, even in my dreams. I taught my son to drive a car while my mind was on other things. My two-timing friends calling me in shame. Telling me what they do behind my back. Giving haircuts and blowjobs, where they’re teeth shouldn’t be. Fuck friends. He looks at me like I’m 24. Roaming the streets along Ventura blvd looking for the divest of bars. Anything that smells like alcohol will get my lips wet. He looks at me like he knows what I’m thinking but that’s a lie. I don’t think like that anymore. He looks at me like I might disappear at any moment. Under the dark moon. All dressed in black. The curse of the crow feather. The sneezing frog. I wait for dreams, of tongues and words and ears. Of organs and bloodstreams and mouths. Of fur and claws and teeth. Dreams of cutting my hair. Dreams of unkept rooms. Dreams swimming with me all day long. Through chores. Through wishing wells. Though last nights stars. Fuck dreams. The morning comes with a haze that won’t let me open my eyes. It’s all wrong. It’s words with no meaning. It’s tragedy with no comedy. It’s truth between the lies. Love has turned my mind to mud. He picks twigs from the puppy’s head. He kisses me with deep intention. He promises me rainbows. There’re rivers gushing when I think I’m on a wooden floor. There’re sharks in my nail beds. There’re holes in my closet. I don’t know where the brooms went. I don’t know who stole my Valium. I don’t know what empathy means. I’m not sure who said goodbye. Through Fights. Tears. Fucking. Tequila. Fires. Betrayal. Beds. I can’t stand the waiting. Through Stools. Showers. Routines. Boys. Moons. Pillows. Crosses. Standing in a room that never moves. Smelling like a hard drink. It started with a look. Scattering marbles on my driveway. Stuffing my garage with surfboards and kites. A home movie of candles and scotch. Of cigars and women. Of music and flights. Floating hairs in my eyes. An elephant on my chest. Noise in my teeth. It’s a cavity of thoughts. Looping future regrets. The big resolve. Where cold resolves. Where foreheads fall. Where I’m rebel behind bars.

Two hundred singing crickets walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and sees me holding an empty paper bag.
It’s hard to make the wrong choice when you’re already at the bottom of the well. The answer is always the same.
I’m just lucky, drop me unequipped in the desert and I’ll find a glass bottle filled with drinking water. They said it was a fluke and sent me back out. 
When I didn’t come back they went looking, to find me sitting in the mist of a waterfall that sprang from rocks and disappeared into the sand. 
The Sunset Strip is the west coast version of Times Square. I like to drop acid, bum cigarettes and wander at the fringe until things get greasy. And things always get greasy on the street. Then it’s time to head for the hills and hang at the pool parties with rich kids. 
It’s all moveable scenery for a one shot take that never ends, nobody’s homeless and nobody ever goes home.
And just because I hitchhike doesn't mean I’m working. A lot of kids do that, but that’s not me. Sometimes people have a hard time accepting that and then it gets sticky when I get out of the car. 
So far nobody’s tried to murder me in the back of a van. 
I don’t know if that’s lucky or I just know better than to get in a fucking van with strangers. 
It’s all part of my metamorphosis from cockroach to poet. I’m stealing their lives, their anxious chatter, their memories and their nervous ticks. It’s all just food in a bag for later.
I’m a mental and physical refugee trying to escape my birth. Always pounding on the door of a home that was never there. 
I didn’t know my mother was quoting Lenny Bruce at me. No wonder my teachers are having such a hard time. Context is context, and in hindsight it was properly applied.
Now I want to go down to the sea and build a castle where I can bury my belly in the sand and wait to see what crabs are born.
I love a good April Fools but I didn’t know crickets could eat paper. Back at the pet store I buy some predatory vermin. 
A scorpion a centipede and a spider walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and sees me holding another empty bag and says, “I hope you realize that none of this is in the least bit funny”