Is there still a tired cafe
On the corner under canvas
Pondering the long boulevard?
Does the faded owner smoke all day
And complain about the haze
And how finding pretty waitresses is hard?

I once lived thereabouts
And earned a meager pay
Writing broken tales for magazines.
Nights filled my belly with wine
My eyes the chanteuse Lise
She starred in my most fictional scenes.

I never found a way
To read my ink blot cards
and learn where my psyche led me wrong
It oft' left me lonely
With just black espresso
And the echo of Lise's sweet song.

One day I moved away
Back to blue ice and snow
From that old city of fumes and haze.
Yet still on thick warm nights
A song burns in my soul
In familiar, best forgotten, ways.

Freckles dance
      across her face

  Like a southern gal in a
           juke joint place

nothin' like home cookin'
to revive my soul and belly

I was gonna write about how I was writing standing up like Hemingway at some bar in Key West, but instead I ended up nearly lying down, like some Roman eating grapes, and I’m not scrawling with a pen. I’m typing.

Why the standing up, Ernest? Was it to gauge how difficult it was to keep good posture? Was it to better measure how drunk you were getting?

He would have boxed me for those asking those questions, or maybe he’d just slam a few shots.

All of us Northeasterners enjoy getting drunk somewhere tropical. I never have a choice in the matter. Whether it’s Florida, South Carolina, or the South Caribbean (I've never left the Western Hemisphere), all I really like down there is beaches and seawater. Everything else gives deep cringes. Those other tourists, so annoying just to look at. Flip flops, whole families, and the god awful shops they keep open. You go to a place good for a beach, green hills, seawater, and fruit, and you want to buy diamonds? C’mon. I wish you’d want these islands to be like national parks; nature over here and cities over there. But the tourists enjoy fake grass huts that try really hard to sell them junk.

So who’s to blame for the sellers perpetuating petty sales and mediocre values? Is it the islanders that make a profit, or the buyers that want the wares? Or is there a third party guaranteeing that the buyers and sellers alike are propagandized to expect the less than fine things in life? Are the salespeople actually working the shops, the ones really getting rich from the sale?

I will miss Autumn here.
The crisp days of October, startling the remnants of summer
into hiding.
The homely smell of hearth burned pine and smoked meat
drifting from chimneys built
by long-dead grandfathers.
The battle fields will be beautiful.
Bathed in maples,
harmless blood of leaves, though the earth
still bears streaks
of death.
The grasses, drying, dying, in the cooling air
will whisper to the sojourners passing through,
seeking sites of ancestors
whose voices they never knew.
I will not be here
to slip the fallen leaves
between phone-book pages or
paste and sew them
to handmade paper.
My mother will stare at the tangled thread,
the blank sheets,
left untouched on my desk,
and ask my father
where the time went.

Down to the deep south
I trudge
down through the snow
with the pink,
pink clouds
scattering their
effervescence 
over spangled, darkened
farms and hay bales.
Across early orange
styles and frosted
footprints, into
fielded horizons.

My father once told me my lungs were filled with the western winds,
swept from the plains of South Dakota
and when I spoke, I spoke in shades of the sky;
innocent and naive baby blues to raging, violent greys.

My heart beat to the sound of the hand drum, with a fire in my belly that could not be put out. I yearn for my feet to soak into the soil of the Black Hills, to run the hidden pine trails, seeking wisdom from the ancestors that rest among them.

My mind is as wandering as the Black Foot river and I cannot be stopped.

In the north, the rain is white,
the floor is covered with clouds,
the wind tears the skin and
the cold invades the body.

In the south, the rain is just rain,
the floor is covered with dust,
the wind blows as a breeze and
the cold kisses the body without warning.

In the north, men wear black suits,
they walk on dry cement,
they have a future since the cradle and
they are just men...

In the south, men wear suits,
they walk on wet cement,
they have a future when they dream and
they are also just men...

All over the world, the seasons are different,
the small and great feelings are different.
Even men are different! however, they're present,
making time our only distance.