Which Side Am I On?

Nights like this, when the sky is starry black and moonlight blue, and winter isn't finished dying and spring isn't finished being born, it's so hard to not think of every stupid thing you've ever done wrong in your whole life. The full moon floating like an icy ghost is the last full moon of winter. The stars that glowed on Christmas Eve are sunk down near the western horizon now, fading like solstice memories. And the spring constellations are still somewhere below the eastern horizon, waiting for the equinox. And everywhere I look I see regret.

I've been having serial dreams for a while now, at least since last fall. My life is so different in those dreams, so much happier. In the dreams I'm married to a beautiful Spanish girl and we have an eleven year old daughter. I work at some job that has to do with taking care of rescued animals and we have a very obese cat who always wears a sweatshirt. She sleeps in a cat bed with the litter of  baby squirrels we rescued, whom she's raising as her own. My daughter sings them lullabyes in Spanish to help them sleep. It's almost always a holiday weekend, either Christmas or Fourth Of July, and we're always going to a party.

The longer the dreams go on, the more I find myself hoping that they are my real life and this is the dream, where I sit in the dark writing by the light of the computer monitor. This morning I woke up around sunrise, at the end of a really sweet dream about my daughter's birthday party, and I almost cried when I realized I was here again. Then I remembered my daughter kissing me goodnight in the dream and thanking me for the party and telling me she'd see me in the morning. I guess morning there is night here, so good night.

People Get Ready

I think I dreamed my own death last night, God it felt good. I was walking down a street in Soho on a morning just like today, cold and sunny. To myself I was naked, but when I saw my reflection in a store window I was wearing my usual work clothes. There was no cold, no wind, no weight on my steps. I knew I was dead, and knowing it was a candle burning in a clear red glass. I saw other people who were dead too, I knew them because we all were carrying window panes in our hands.

I came to a corner where there's no subway entrance in the real world, but here were the stairs, wide and smooth and filled with people carrying window panes. As we approached the turnstiles a beautiful woman took the windows from our hands and smashed them on the concrete floor, they broke with a sound like the ghost of  a wind chime you heard on a summer night when you were eight years old. She handed each of us a ticket and we went through the turnstile and down to the platform.

The train came rolling in, pulled by a diesel engine from the 1950s. The cars looked so much bigger than normal, or was it just that I was so much smaller? When the doors opened I walked in and sat in a cross seat by the window, it was upholstered so soft and thick and warm that I wanted to go to sleep. The conductor came down the aisle, she had beautiful long hair and the kindest smile I'd ever seen. She handed me a dog, who curled up in my lap. I looked at him and realized he'd belonged to an old lover of mine, more than a lifetime ago.

We climbed out of the tunnel and started up the ramp like we were going to cross the 59th Street Bridge, but we just kept climbing higher and higher, and the sun looked so cold and the sky looked like liquid pearls and the people in the train looked so happy and I'm sure I saw at least two of my old lovers on board.

And when I woke up my body was as limp as a dishrag and I felt disappointed, but I knew it's only a matter of time.

Ashes

February's a hill made of sadness and dirt. You can see it coming from so far away across the plains but no matter which way you turn it's still in front of you. The trails are all so cold, and the rain that collects in your footprints freezes at night sometimes. But the saddest thing is that tree all the way at the summit, standing black against the opal sky. The bare branches are hung with flowers and necklaces, smoke and heartbeats, all left as talismans by hopeful lovers who passed this way.

January Haiku

The days grow longer,

but the wind is cold and dry.

Lovers stay inside.

January Rain

Rain washing the stones clean now, where just last week the Christmas Market stood like a magical night on the silk road, tents lit bright from within welcoming the pilgrims. Rain sluicing across the smooth grey faces of the flagstones, erasing all the petty little scrapes and scars. Everything is smooth and shiny, under the January rain.

James Brown

I remember sitting in darkened theatres, thirteen year old white boy with glasses, watching the band file on stage in the dark while the movie finished up on the screen over their heads. Then the screen would go dark and roll up and the lights would come up and the bandleader would step up to the mike in his white tie and tails and speak those magic words, "Ladies and gentlemen, it is star time. Are you ready for star time? Please welcome the hardest working man in show business, Soul Brother Number One, James Brown!" Then the magic began. First his backup singers, The Famous Flames, would come onstage, three men in matching suits with lace shirts and pompadours. Then the curtains would part upstage and The Man Himself would enter, dancing steps that seemed impossible for an ordinary man, wearing a suit of a color that existed only in fantasies and he and the band would become one in a way I've never seen before or since.

Girls screaming and flashbulbs popping while he opened with Signed, Sealed And Delivered or Poppa's Got A Brand New Bag. But the second song always brought the house down, always a ballad like Try Me. Girls in ecstacy while he always managed to bring it all together before he came to the end of the songlist.

Didn't matter where or when. Could have been the Apollo in 1962, or the Brevoort, under the el on Fulton Street, in 1964, or the Garden in 1967. To this day I've never seen any show as purely exciting as his.

The last time I saw him was in Battery Park in 2003. He did a concert on monday of Memorial Day weekend. It was my 54th birthday, his 70th, but you never could have told that from the show that night. He played more than two hours before about twenty thousand people, most of whom hadn't been born when he first played the Apollo. We'll never see his like again.

 

Bethlehem

The baby lay in the manger sleeping, while Mozart played him a lullabye on the harpsichord. John Coltrane picked up his sax and played a harmony that made the stars weep, it was so beautiful. Buddha sat on a bale of hay in the corner and laughed as he watched Picasso furiously painting the scene. Mary held the baby's hand and grooved to the music, trying to stay in the moment and not think about what the future would bring. Joseph stood in the doorway with King Arthur, the two of them smoking cigars stamped with "It's a boy!"Everyone raised their wineskins in a toast when the three wise men entered. King Caspar bowed low and gave the baby a pennywhistle, King Melchior gave him a copy of The Essential Leonard Cohen and a stereo to play it on and King Balthazar pointed toward the west and put a pair of purple sunglasses over the baby's eyes, so he could watch the sunset and not get burned.

Coltrane finished his solo and Glen Miller climbed up on the stand and led the band in Moonlight Serenade. Mary tucked the blanket up to the baby's chin and walked over to the doorway and took Joseph by the hand. "Dance with me, Daddy!"she whispered as she wrapped her arm around his waist. And they spun across the stable floor, lost in each others' eyes.