flash-backs...

it's a bright wednesday morning & i'm not quite present.  i'm all past & future, breathing a different air from moment to moment.


i boarded a train, westbound, some three weeks ago.  strange - i haven't written or talk much of it.  in november i had a mother & father.  it is now february & i have neither.  the change happened fast.  i wasn't there when it happened, but i can hear the sounds clearly.  it must have been, & still be, pre-dawn - somewhere.  everything else is so still & quiet in my memory.  i don't try to distance myself from it even though it isn't and never was mine.  i meditate on it & then it's gone.


it's gone.


i took my college savings & bought my ticket the day after the accident.  there was no planning.  it was as if death somehow watered a seed that had been planted in my brain some years before & there was no way to ignore the flowers, fully blossomed, in my skull.  so i bought the ticket.  i had no physical connections in san francisco, but i had none elsewhere either.  i told myself that as long as i kept moving i wouldn't be scared & that has been the case so far.  even when everything is still around me, i keep moving.  a poet is always moving, jumping from line to line - sometimes fast & sometimes slow, but always moving.


i found a desk on the sidewalk early this morning & carried it six blocks back to my apartment.  i felt like a thief & when i was passed by an early-morning-dog-walker i feared that she might begin to shout for an officer.  no such thing happened, of course.  there's a lot of shit on the sidewalk in this city.  people tear down old lives & build new ones on a daily basis.  surely that happens everywhere, but in san francisco people shamelessly leave their dejected old lives on the sidewalk right in front of their new ones.  that's where i come in.  it seems appropriate.  in a sense that's why i'm here, looking for an old life that i somehow missed the first time around.