Long ago and faraway, there was a lucky goof & a golden girl and they screwed around so well they decided it felt like permanence. Then they traveled a little up and down the coast and screwed around a heck of a lot more and made a coupl’a sons and continued to venture around the high desert mountains and stuff, while raising them cocky and humble and gifted and not without their fair share of trial & bruises and good looks & muscle and abundant skills and verve. It seemed like a little bit of life worth living long and full and they were not greedy nor were they without a modicum of yearning, and they got a little fed up with the desert so they drove some highways to green places. Back to a good green place that felt like a little taste of pastoral perfection, sandwiched between four university cities booming with active art culture & industrial blight; home. A place where all good things except surfing were possible. Of Zen, of Chi, of expression.
…A place where one of the highest incidence of Leukemia sat waiting like a demon sleeping under a blanket-puddle of leaked oil or rancid chemical spill on some arbitrary bridge over a once pristine rivulet leading into some small town. Oh bad luck. Oh, the irony of industry. Thanks commerce. So good for the economy. No, fuck you Rush Limbaugh & the fiendish concepts at the root of what feeds you. No, fuck you military industrial complex. Fuck you Mr. & Mrs. Unconscionable Banking CEO, industry CEO, bloodbath CEO, Fatcat CEO without ethics. You could have been the leaders of a nation of viable individuals in full balance with the Earth that set out to sustain us wholly in the company of the sun and the moon, but you had to have your fruitcake and make us all eat shit too. …You had to cheapen the product in order to increase your bottom line. Had to blast her core and contaminate her watershed, had to secretly poison the saps & suckers because they said you could on Capitol Hill. Why? Had to say, “It’s only business,” and apply plausible deniability. Had to fill us with faith while exterminating hope on the sly for the (un)holy sake of something long dead inside you, behind a bulbous ruddy-white nose and crafty sneer, you leer, your hair parted just right, your lapel pin, your own doubts & fears driving you to cause sorrow and call it … only business. …Why have I seen it for so long there in your eyes (blatantly, you shell game, you) and our community is just now beginning to see it too? …I figure your mothers and fathers loved you, pulled for you, vouched for you, maybe even killed for you … & your appropriate ambition.
Hmm … the incongruity, the quirks of fate, that leave us nonplussed as souls.
Why did it take so long for the preponderance to begin to see? &, aware that we are aware of your malignancies, why are you still taking and taking and poisoning your only terra firma? Ramming whales with your merchant ships & calling Christopher J. the fool?
Even if your machinations had absolutely nothing to do with Leukemia, you didn’t really have to do the shit you’ve done for whatever reasons you can sleep with yourself at night. Every good deed could have gone unpunished just as most o your bad deeds did; so cruel.
They don’t teach us these things in school, …you learn them in recording studios beside ripped-up streets and bedside next to crisp white sheets and the quiet drugged out slumber of a golden girl with sons at home hoping for the best but wearied for moments by doubt; hope, activity … & doubt, hope, commotion … & doubt, ………& hope. …And hope.
We, the people, won the vote the other night and the dancing in the streets commenced. I hope, we hope, they hope that there is true hope for a benevolent changing of the guard. ...Not just another damnable shell game. If not for the health and livelihood of one particular golden girl, or the golden girl in your life, or the golden girl that perhaps you are, then for her young, their young, your young, the young who get only what’s left after we’re ……… done with it. This perfect planet of imperfect beings.
Here in this hospital room, she & I will take what the cards have dealt, no other options. It came at us with no warning. It’s trying to break us in two in more ways than one. So we’re in this systematic place … still in love, …always enduring, hopeful for some more good years to come. There is no confidentiality in this room, very little self-esteem to be known, a curtain is our only little bit of real-estate, not sure who means well & who’s just working here. No deep kisses, no slow dancing, no sunshiny wake-ups beside our favorite southern facing window, no activities in the yard or walks beside the ol’ mill creek, or Sunday drives in the car, and no motive whatsoever for any sort of screwing around.
Now, just like that, we’re here in the abyss… & fighting our way back out ~~ that is, … SHE is fighting & I’m beside her so in love and full of her light and reflecting it back on her eyes with every fucking woe-begotten cell of my being. ...The other day I learned that vomit doesn't make me have to yack anymore. Not really, it just hurts my heart, my soul to the very core, to help Maya go through it. Her 7th day of chemo. ...She got to shower today (a moment of good living amidst the means & machines of white man's medicine). Across the hall I meet eyes with a mom and dad who's teen son is in the same state of woe & triage, dire and hope, dire and hope. Who are we to woe, when twenty feet away a child is sick. But I woe. I so love this girl. David, thanks for trying to effect some change with music & poetry back then when you were aggressive and full o piss & vinegar, youth & outrage, and some visage of romanticism &/or impudence in need of an outlet. So ... it only skimmed the surface, sent a ripple, ...and then sank to the bottom o some muddy pond. Some of us live near the bottom o that muddy pond, bro, and so we listen to tracks 8-9-& 10 on a loop and continue.
…So many sick people ... kept in solitude here within these sallow walls. Most of us don't even know just how many ~~ how overwhelmingly many, ...until we're among the sick. Of the sick. & trying to persevere.
...Troubles me to share it with you. Wrong somehow to let it out among the real people outside.
Know that we are in the thick of it now & our credo is hope. I do so love this braveheart lady.
It was Jake’s birthday yesterday. Maya-blue sang with us over the phone as I sang with grandma and big bro there at home. We gave him a letterman’s jacket ~~ no more fitting gift for a sophomore student athlete, musician. …We hugged, ate cake and Italian stuffed shells, played some catch with the football in the yard. Then I packed my things & some stationary for Maya, hugged them and left. Back to the little room with a girl, a bed and tubes.
………Fight, Maya-blue, fight back to health & to home with you….
