Sometimes
Sometimes I can see red buds on the Christmas cactus
beginning to open and know tomorrow's the day
when the entire world changes

Sometimes I hear
rain on sidewalk roof running down gutter
and feel everything's inside a giant washing machine on a binge

Sometimes I think about something I've always hated to think about,
and when I do, it seems less scary so I wonder where the scary part went,
but then I don't care

Sometimes a wad of sorrow rolls up to get me,
but then I blow my nose good,
because I can.

Return Cubicle
I'm moving next week to a new cubicle with an available wall that will allow me to stretch out away from my usual daily cramp. IT has been notified about the forthcoming move as has the telecommunications department of one person. I get to make new labels for my file folders, a fitting exercise for an approaching end-of-year turn.

Today was the Christmas Party on the seventh floor, a cozy game hen for each person with aluminum foil tubs of macaroni and cheese, collards, rolls, salad, and peach cobbler with ice-cream. Today also was the day I discovered that the Lemon Drop Cafe is a medical marijuana club, upstairs a bakery with a case of frosted three layer cakes from Santa Cruz.

To get to the basement a person has to show a medical card for admission. I wonder what the conversations are like, but this was early in the morning probably before the marijuana rush, after I did a quick grocery shopping and dropped off the perishables at home before heading to the cubicle, soon to be changed, ordered a coffee that came with a chocolate swirl stick, maybe to make up for its lack of a cover, which I managed to balance along San Pablo to Franklin Street without too many spills.

Porosity

Passenger Svetlana Minchiker said she was talking on her cell phone as the blast went off — a bang that left her so disoriented she thought at first the phone had exploded. "At first I did not see anything except my hands," she said, holding up one hand still stained red. A trickle of dried blood marked her left cheek. -- Report of a suicide bombing in Jerusalem


We bleed into each other's cell phones in the supermarket, at the ticket office, in the toilet stall, on the bus I hear your life is following me your whole family and friends waiting for you to come home in an hour about all the people you're trying to escape the ones you never want to lose I hear about the heart attacks and the nervous breakdowns what he really should of done instead of opening his big mouth I know where you'd like to go if you could get an extra day off and still waiting to buy tickets for the 9pm show while you went shopping at a real steal with discount coupons you clipped from a newspaper the lines in front of the register tell me to remember to hold the date while you take two blue pills and how you stayed up all night like a wheel balanced on its rim sheer chrome shining a bus deadheading its way to the division yard for repairs, and I'm feeling you I'm feeling you right now

Slipping
A new mattress was delivered to my house yesterday; the old one hauled off to the compressor. My friend's care package finally arrived with an assortment of sweaters, skirts, and jewelry. Whale-watching on the horizon, a visit to New York a possibility. Attending to AC Transit schedule changes on the Web site. Want to get more sleep. Want to do more writing. November is slipping away.

Restoring Wetlands

A Great Egret,
regal in its plumage,
pokes through mud

the way I restore
the wetlands of my soul,
levee by levee.

Laptop Gypsy Lament
Will you bootleg my heart
and sell it for next to nothing
down by the waterfront

while I go around town
carrying the original,
beating a message
I don't get?

I thought you and I,
so many years ago,
were going to harness
wildness in our art,

make it sing
the way a twig still vibrates
with the song of a sparrow.

Online Dating Service
Of all the men online,
I love James113 the most,
him with his green eyes
staring right through me.

But no matter how many times
I look at his profile,
he never answers e-mail.
Tell me, what can I do?

It sounds like we have
so many mutual interests.
He watches the same

television programs,
even has a scar
like I do.

You think I'm a fool
to bookmark his picture?
I will have no other
on my desktop.

When the moon dangles
like a charm bracelet
between two hills,

my love will call to me
in the dance of my dreams.

In Time With the Music
A single melody keeps playing in my head, time after time, by Miles Davis. Miles in my head, I recently succumbed to a promotion by the Jazz Heritage Society and ordered six new CDs. It’s time to sharpen my jazz chops.

My daughter is gone for two nights with scheduled check-in points along the way. She’s attending co-ed parties in the outer regions of Lafayette. We had our first real discussion about being intimate. She says she’s curious, but not ready. She left the house last night wearing a belt that my father made in the hospital before he died. She is the first person to wear that belt of loops. She found it in the back of my closet.

My boundaries will hold. Lawrence is back home. I’ve withdrawn from the circle. I pray that without a foil for his inability to take care of himself (me), he learns how to make decisions that embrace life. I go into the world on this Halloween day as Neo from the Matrix dressed in robes of red, black, and green.

Something to say when your daughter asks,
“Why can’t our family be like everyone else’s?”

Because the truth is there really is no everyone else,
only the two of us washing through the sieve of each day,
making sure we come out of it in one piece,

and beside, why think either one of us
come close to being like everyone else
when we’ve always been so much who we are,

you with your loud mouth and smart answers,
and me acting like I know what's best for everyone
when I've never chosen that for myself.

But the truth is, even though I've tried,
I could never be like everyone else.
My look-a-like never bore the slightest resemblance.

Plus, who knows, I might settle down
for a long sleep in a goose down bed,
turn out the lights, and never snap out of it,

not hear the speaker system,
with its volume cranked up to sky-high,
telling me to get out quick

unless I wanted to totally forget myself,
my deck of cards and pearl earrings
on the vacant lot of my origins,

pull a steel-toed boot way over my damp head.

I Cry Your Tears
Fire and fog on the morning commute, a car crash against the side wall with a police officer looking beneath the vehicle that was smoking from its hood and slowing down the usual sluggish morning crawl to a slower crawl, which sped up once drivers got an eyeful, until we hit a low bank of fog around Grand Avenue, which plopped over the Grand Lake Theater like a bowl of lumpy oatmeal. News of Faith Fancher's funeral service at Church of St. Leo the Great, a woman who went through life clearing a path with her heart. My friend Pele, in a rehabilitation center in Petaluma, is recovering from pneumonia dreaming of her prints and paintings. Lawrence is returning to his house tomorrow with insulin to inject. And I find myself slowly refilling the red balloon of my new life, sailing above the Mormon Temple over the hills again away.

Some kind of ice sculpture I've gotten myself into, which needs to be shattered with a pick-ax. What the heck is a pickax? According to bartleby.com:

A pick, especially with one end of the head pointed and the other end with a chisel edge for cutting through roots, with a certain etymology from Middle English picax, alteration (influenced by ax, ax) of picas, from Old French picois (from pic, pick) and from Medieval Latin pcsa, both probably from Latin picus, woodpecker

but it's also listed on the net as a college and as a Mesopotamian creation myth.

Either way, I need one.

Free Falling
I can take a breath after a marketing meeting where we actually agreed on a specific direction regarding the listserve; my strategy was to continue to add to a report until the accumulated information became its own best decision-maker, plus cold medicine served from my diagonal cube mate that helped me step out of a fog. Then on to San Francisco to do passenger counts on the east and westbound NL line at the TransBay terminal.

This last year I've been in goal-oriented mode, driven by the requirements of planning my daughter's bat mitzvah and then quickly shifting to separating from Lawrence; I'd almost checked off the next item on my agenda, the divorce, as if I were a rocket hurtling through space, going through three stages of flight.

But with Lawrence's hospitalization, I realize I'm not in control; probably never was, a sensation that has no gravitational pull, free falling.

My plans for moving on have dropped through the ozone. I cannot proceed with my to do list while Lawrence is so vulnerable, regardless of the quality of our life together. There is something I need to find out, something I don't know.

There is nothing for me to do anymore. My God, how can serve you?

In a Wonton
Advertisements mining our souls to be consumers as I'm drawn back into the vortex of Kaiser Permanente Post-Acute Care Center. Noam Chomsky explains what's behind more blasts in Gaza. Tiger bites and gay guys with straight eyes. Indigeneous People's Day where crumpled tissues in the shape of Calla Lilies dot my desk.

I bought soccer shoes for my daughter with red cleats at SportsMart as a casserole of turkey wings cooked for several hours on a raft of cabbage and bacon.

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was named after a jock who liked running around in circles. Everything will or won't ever happen.

I'm a wonton wrapper on the kitchen countertop of time.

Fill me with surprise.

A sweet potato is a member of the morning glory family.

At Yom Kippur services, the community surrounded the cantor as she can-opened a rivulet of sound, and we all poured out.

I must trust that my life will happen without my own worried direction.

Fronting On Water
Floating on a raft of asparagus lashed together with scallions. Someone's been busy in the kitchen tonight, but I could care less for sauce than to be wearing boots on my feet. I'm walking on water, and it's not just me nibbling at the stalks. No siree. Almost everyone from around these parts knows where the asparagus raft comes from; one eases down the river just about every 100 years the way some baseball teams win at the play-offs. And I just happened to stumble along.

A Search Party Was Arranged
I stood at the edge of Children's Fairyland waiting for my walking partner to arrive. A white woman approached and asked if I were "Carol." She also was waiting for someone that she didn't know. Later, I saw an African-American woman with braids tentatively approach her, and they walked away together.

I sort of knew Soren. We'd met through an online dating service. Several weeks before, we'd had breakfast followed by a short hike around a shopping center. We'd almost went to a concert in San Francisco, but it turned out to be the same weekend that Lawrence had been hospitalized. I had to cancel with apologies. Mostly I knew that Soren seemed to be a sweet and supportive man. I'm not sure how you get to trust people except by spending time with them, and seeing how they bounce around on life's trampoline.

I waited, but he was a no show. Something must've happened. For a moment, I considered walking around the Lake by myself, but I couldn't manage it. I knew I was disappointed. After a week of visiting Lawrence in the ICU, I had anticipated some stab at normalcy. For a second moment, I considered going to the supermarket and bringing home food, but I couldn't manage that either.

I got in my car. Yesterday, I'd taken it to the Automotive House in downtown Oakland for a tune-up, a different garage and mechanic than my usual one of the past 10 years. The car was running well. I drove toward home. I wanted to have a search party with news bulletins and music.

Frankenstein's Wife
I've come back from the hospital.
You're getting feisty, wanting nurses
to remove restraints from your wrists.

You want to get up from the bed, go to the bathroom.
You and the catheter are one. I show you the bag.

Your energy is beginning to jump across the bed rails.
I watch lightening strike.

I can't stay away and let you go through this alone.
You called me back. You knew I'd come.

I was just beginning to start my own life.

Lucky Room 305
It’s a joke I repeat as if you could hear me beneath the heavy sedation you’re on, with a dialysis machine doing the work of two kidneys, gathering all the blood in you and sending it back. Lucky Room 305, the same room I was in five years ago in my prolonged ICU stay while you stood on the other side of the bed coaxing me back to life.

The doctors say you drink too much alcohol and have compromised your vital organs: Liver, kidneys, pancreas. For years, you have been telling yourself the story of how a bottle of wine before bed helped you to relax.

I suppose the wine did, with sleep apnea and everything else you’ve been contending with, while the bottles collected outside the recycling bin in obscene quantities. I’m not even mad at you any more. I just marvel at the granite quality of your denial.

Still when I look at you, shoulders and upper torso half-exposed beneath the hospital gown, I almost want to press my chest against yours, and for one instant feel your arms surround me, and hear you say how everything will be fine But it’s really not Lucky Room 305. At least, not that way.

Votives of Love
Cascading morning glories
edge along a telephone wire.

A few vines swing from the big-top,
reaching upward without a safety net,

Cars drive with dinner
written on their windshields,

which is when I hear
the shofar echoing inside my heart,

as Lawrence’s blood pumps
through the tubes of a dialysis machine.

The touch of Torah is soft,
but it’s only the cover that my fingers caress.

Call it Fascination
Yesterday, I removed a story from the corporate Web site. I was informed that it was not for public consumption. After all, you don't always want people to know about your business. That would be gossip.

But what I found puzzling in my role as Web information dispenser, was why people were not supposed to know about this event. It was scheduled to occur along a planned route in more than 10 cities at carefully timed intervals where a great flurry of politicians would be present to congratulate each other and their aides in making a commitment to a new kind of public transportation, complete with Dixie Land Band and the passing out of souvenirs and trophies.

The graphics department also had been asked to develop a piece that by the time it went to press with its blessings from staff, became more of a booklet than an invitation.

So maybe you can see where I made the mistake of assuming that the public would want to know about this happening. Who else, if not they, were the politicians actually going to address?

If I were cynical, of course I'd suggest that politicians only talk to people when they are due to be re-elected, but I'm not (that) cynical.

However, it does seems odd that the agency is going out of its way to create events at no small expense with cries of "hire a consultant," precisely to allow our representatives not talk to people.

Maybe this concerns me a bit more because such shredded information is getting members of the public in these pre-recall election days about California and just about everything else.

Question
Having said that, my dilemma was such: what do you do if you throw a big party and don't want anyone else to come?

Answer
Call it a media event. Tell the Web master to delete it from the news box.

Chez Henry's
Once I get within coffee distance of Henry's Gallery Cafe on Franklin and 17th Street in downtown Oakland, I know my day has begun.

Henry's is one of those many coffee and lunch shops serving food to workers streaming from a utility company located across the street, in addition to AC Transit, the bus company; not to mention Kaiser Hospital, and a myriad of lawyers, designers, architects, construction and postal workers going to offices tucked in along the diagonals.

In the morning, Henry always stands behind a glass countertop wherein lay the breakfast jewels of the hour: all manner of buttery pastry, danish, croissant, and muffin tempt office workers together with a steaming cup of coffee self-served from a row of coffee cannisters. Henry always knows what I'll get, which is a cup of coffee with some variety of bran muffin. So far I like carrot the best, crunchy with chunks of pineapple and carrot.

The place reminds me of storefronts I grew up with in New York City whose food often supplemented my non-existent lunch and dinner, always run by close-knit families who took pride in operating a clean place with decent food, and were sure to know the regulars.

"Did Zach come in already this morning?" inquires one guy of Henry.

"Yes," he says. "Already got his Diet Snapple." And they both laugh.

Both men know that Zach will never deviate from his morning diet, and take some comfort in that fact.

I am content in knowing that something about me, too, is predictable, and that Henry, a man with a ready smile and supple hands, understands what it is.