Mountain

There's a big mountain on top. Men race up to the top on their bicycles. At the end, some starve for more violence. Some starve for soft breasts, soft asses, tongues of women. Some fight wars with rifles and die quick. Some die in the sun. Some die in the winter.

Jayne

Away at night

When Jayne died, death became typical, numb as groceries. Every day a drive down the highway, on our horses, there, see the coffee, it surrounds us, each day not measured but strained through burlap, waiting for boiling water, no moments of sleep at night, she’s there when she’s not there, in the Andes I escape her, she can’t make it up La Linea, that you can’t fake, that I do myself, no one follows me on the descent. And there is no music anymore, no speech, no kisses, no real sitting, no reading, no gazing, no tender breathing, because when she’s gone she’s gone. She cannot be gone. She had her bicycle and she was to show it to me the next week. She felt ill at night and she was trying to figure out what was wrong. She was alone and wasn’t in bed. She was sitting by herself gazing at the nighttime internet. Damn it she was in no one’s arms. How fucked up to be one with the night, how fucked up to have no space from the stars, how fucked up to never begin or complete, how fucked up to have fought time and won, now the victory is so fucking cold, nothing moves, there’s no climbing left, there’s nothing to reach, there is no up or down or beginning or end, man there’s fucking nothing. What a way to go. A new star now.

I can't find Jayne

I noticed I mix everything together, I have no boundaries, my lists and my feelings and the ‘facts’ I put down or forget to put down, man, there is no great god looking at me with one perspective—each moment is held up by effort, there is no record, no history, no time, no days, no hours, no love, no her or them or there, no car, no green Subaru, the green Subaru, the green man, Evanston in the summer, Buda in winter and the green fields in the fall. Something can land there, at one time they did. Each time these thoughts come to you, they’ll never come back, they’re different passengers each time they visit, sometimes they age, sometimes they die, sometimes they visit you as they are dying, sometimes they are sick or old or young, sometimes these thoughts have amnesia, they come to you lost, looking for the last place they lived:

“What was all around me before I forgot everything? Where is that building, where, where do they serve the white wine in winter outside the villamos stop, where do the workers drink and smoke? I’ll just stay with you until I remember everything once again, I’ll just stay with you for now, your bed is soft, your hair smells good, your shoulders tan so well, your breasts look at me perfectly, but I trouble you, I trouble you, I’m so bad for you but I’m bad for myself, there is no good or hope or wonder left, yet I’m so happy and lost and forgotten, the woods have never been steeper, I’ve never run quicker to the fire, I was here before they killed the tress, I was here before the path, I was here before suburbia landed, I was here when I climbed and peeked from the boulders, I’ve been here all along but you just haven’t noticed me.”

And by constantly writing there is a strength. What do you really hold on to when you create? What do you really give, she says there is a sadness, that I’m not getting any where, but I’m not going anywhere, no, I am looking, yes, I am seeing things now, I am seeing these things. The wrong creatures say the worst things.

Sitting and thinking

728. Two Macedonian goat herders are on top of a mountain. The master approaches them. “You lazy bastards, what are you doing there, just sitting and thinking?” “We are just sitting,” replied the goat herders.

729. The cripple in his special chair, for the first time in years, wheels himself to the West side of the room. He sees the mountains. Ideas flourish, they are accounted for, they spread seeds of his great exploration to ‘sitters’ and ‘explorers.’ A new paradigm of possibilities is awakened in human thinking.

730. Exploration and sitting, indeed, are dialectically dependent: greatness of exploration relative to what is overcome. A fierce climber who still chooses to sit when his time is up in the chair, when he has had his rest, and he knows it. The cripple who makes it to the West side of the room when others had written him off as a vegetable.

Moraline's "Corrida at Malaga"

I remember the ear as if it were my own, sliced by battle. I do not remember the lost years, but, but the living years. How you chased girls in Croatia, how you ran with bulls and then brought to Spain a true fan of the great battle and sport. Yes, your tail of sailing off a cliff in the desert of Spain, landing on thistles, concussion, broken ribs, covered in blood, slowly and painfully truing a wheel, a farmer giving you bandages, and sleeping in a room with a head injury alone for a week. How many meaningless years go by before we realize just a few memories are all that matter, but not a few memories but the journey that led to them, the courage to toss comfort into the bull fight and not only kill this soft comfort but to get it to fight back, to pierce it multiple times, to get it to bleed, to slice off comfort's ear, and to kill it with a clean sword, walk away, then journey to the next fight.

Morning

on being a champion

It is difficult to recall being a champion--it is painful. All champions fade or eventually fail, and the feeling of winning is often paired with the feeling that, indeed, what was just achieved is the highest watermark. Suddenly, there is the cold sea once again in winter, and the fields in which you claimed victory and now wet and cold and frozen. Your moment winning is now gone. Now the roads are empty, and it will be difficult to ride into town. You may as well freeze, because this will feel better than the memory of being a champion.