Heading back home today. Still not packed. I’m waiting for the coffee to kick in and for the beautiful woman beside me to wake up. It’s been a crazy trip, between the faction-groups all vying for control, the rampant booze-hounding, the Grandmas, the Moms, the Aunts and Uncles, Brothers and Sisters, Friends and Well-wishers…

Who could ask for anything more?

I spent most of yesterday drunkenly retracing steps, tracking down missing articles, filling, emptying, and returning u-haul trucks, acquiring legendary burgers, etc. It was fine. I was pretty much sober when I woke up around 3. The other night had lasted clear into mid-day, and I put myself down before I crashed completely. The only thing that saved me, really. Now, as I write this, as I drink Grandma’s chicory coffee and cough up the proof that I’ve been chain-smoking for days, as the girl beside me stirs, as the grate in the ceiling rattles from the warm air forced through it, as the frost riming the windows turns to perspiration, as my eyes turn toward the sky again…

…time to fly.

A piece of Persephone

The roar of my ears…

                                                                       …it’s always in my ears,

roaring,

                         giving no quarter

while I try to explain.

You were never afforded a childhood,

that which you grasp at and eschew

at the same time. You never knew,

for better or for worse, what

you might live through.

So you made it a game,

dear Persephone.

You chose to deny the sort of

sweet end ties that otherwise

there would abide.

But, anyway, I ain’t tellin’ you

what you should or shouldn’t

do, it’s passing strange that

you still would think it so…

and if I still had a place to call my own,

she said…

and if I still had a trace of what I called my own,

she said…

Thereupon, the angels fell and died.

Because,

For that which was ever trustworthy,

all Hell hangs in the balance,

And all that never mattered hinges

on Heaven’s guaranteed existence.

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