thoughts on this weekend

when we were kids
it was all summers and shorts.
there was never a thought about
the abandoned house
across the bridge
except
"what can we play there?"
far away were the pains of the empty windows
and the holes in the boards
where we hop from beam to beam
and tug at the raspberries that grow
through the dining room floor.

when we were kids
winds like these
were aimed at our brains
and called to us in languages
that our moms and dads didn't understand
(i remember the spring that an army of yellow and black garden spiders took over our hill-
we couldn't play there without fighting them off. In the morning, their webs glowed all dew soaked and looked like strings of ice. we could see them, and run them through with stick swords. their numbers were inexhaustible. the next morning there would be twice as many.)

there aren't many places like that now
where i can hear that same wind
but when i find them
i know right away.

why write rough drafts? life isn't about rough drafts.
things that are best unrefined:
refrigerator drawings
charlie parker
cane sugar (and food in general)
Hetch Hetchy
jackson pollock
dialogue
going for a walk
taking the subway
theatre
back to the refrigerator drawing again
unexpected phone calls
love letters
honey

there are some things that are meant to exist just how they are.

the girls in summer dresses
sit on the bus stop bench
(but they would never take the bus)
its hot and they want to rest
and in the city
a bus stop bench
is as natural
as a cabin by the lake.

sometimes i just want out. out of the city, away from the ocean, back to the great lakes (in which reside no animals that will try to eat me) and back to people who say "sofa" and "supper" the same way that i do. sometimes i just want to wander around and eat my emotions like those waxy chocolate bars i used to sell in fifth grade. tonight, they taste like burnt pine sap and the legs of the summer spiders that my sisters and i chased away with sticks. in my dreams, those spiders have grown as big as buicks, with compound headlights and eight legs made of rubber from the Uniroyal plant that closed down in 1989. they are driven by librarians from whom i have stolen books. they are driven by ex-girlfriends whose things i have forgotten to give back. they are driven by badly written lyrics and by bus-chasers that i pretended not to see. they are driven by characters whose voices i that have failed to hear and by the childhood caves that i have failed to explore. sometimes i just want out.

and then, just after the sun goes down, i hear it. surrounded by the buzz of the dying city, it is carried over the mississippi, through the maze of the plains, and under the rock of mountains with spanish names. it is my voice. crying out. it is a battle cry. escaped from a summer morning two decades ago, and i hear it with the ear drums of my imagination. those things i want out of now are the yellow and black garden spiders of the summer. and i've got my stick, a branch of that old tree that always knows what i need. and i have what i need, right now. everything i need to know, i learned when i was seven. and that makes me happy.