A Brief Armistice
Musings that become “Orion’s Chance”
[Ch. Open]
I can sleep anywhere but I don’t.
I often joke that I just never sleep. That I’ve never slept at all, period.
Sleep’s weird. And I’m weird. I guess it goes without saying that together we make a pretty strange couple.
…How I love her. She always so elusive. I chase after her like I’ve chased so many beauties in my lifetime. She runs, and I play her game, and when we meet, I am too tired, bored. Our dates are never traditional.
We don’t wine and dine, or go to the movies — hold hands at sunset.
Where we do finally lay together then is jail cells, fetal upon concrete with half-used rolls of toilet tissue acting as pillow; coiled in backseats of cars, hiding in plain sight in big box parking lots; high atop cliffs — inches from the disaster of gravity, overlooking oceans.
I love that percussion. My heart beats in C.
I love to stand atop cliffs, far too close for the comfort of anyone but me. That is where I love her most — Sometimes-Sleep and I, embracing in the face of our own personal apocalypse, rollers below a cataclysm lullaby of potential and annihilation, protean and abyssal — perfectly ordered chaos.
I sleep if Death’s in attendance. I can only love — and live — if Death is there with us. I suppose that makes me something of an exhibitionist, I suppose that makes us more love triangle than pair.
[Exposition]
I first went homeless on March 16, 2017. Beware the day after the Ides of March. Or whatever.
Went and did an open mic @ a real cute cool new place. It was small and intimate that show, I went way up to ensure that I could get real low, make gravity work for me in our journey deeper toward hell. It became the 17th, St. Patrick’s Day, that night, and that was when I first ever used methamphetamine, smoked from a pipe in the middle of the night in a dark canyon in the middle of Balboa Park with a leprechaun with green hands.
[Story]
Erin came and got me.
She and I had orbited one another for years. Like all friends-of-an-acquaintance-of-a-friend(s) in big suburban high school class groups, we might pass one another at a (or every) party, here and there (or everywhere), but for whatever reason we hadn’t ever met met, and it wasn’t until we had both gone suitably crazy — towers struck by lightnings — apart from and within our own lives — separately; both years further apart and closer together — and in seemingly entirely unrelated nervous-awakenings — that we became aware of one another in any meaningful way. Or, rather, I pinged her radar with many strange Facebooks posts roundabout that first stretch of car-lived homelessness. And when we met at that vegan restaurant in North Park, hip bohemian uptown San Diego sprawl, she commented, and casually,
“You look good. I expected worse.”
— And I’m not sure I ever felt, let alone believed in — the possibility of the existence of unconditional love or acceptance before then. Though so much love was heretofore masked and hidden…
If I didn’t know it yet — and I didn’t — I would soon learn much there is to know of love and war, every next chapter life wrote iconoclastic to all that which I was before, all that which I thought I thought I knew about just everything.
And this is where things get weird.
[Ch. Close]
Turtle on an elephant
Yeshua on a cross
A billion black holes
Long Milky Way across
Uncoiling helical-Everything
Fractured galaxsea’s toss
Spitballed battleship planets
And flotsam-jetsam stars
Ghetto cosmic opera
Soapy, semen-salted seas
Womb inside the Hearth
Everything, everything — everywhere, all at once
The Universe sleeps
Fidgets, twitching gravity
Gives birth to Us
That is, You and Me
We, wee, we, so wee…
Her dreams
