Suburban Soliloquy #2

A hundred of you are hunched
tonight, masked in the blue-light
of the post atomic age.
What age is this?
A hundred of you have opened your eyes
like two holes for the electric blue eels of information
to slide in.
Your teeth glitter the news
when you smile.

I used to think that people who watched television
had no souls, but now I believe they do, and did
all along - my vision of beauty was just not strong
enough to see through the white noise.

A hundred of you tonight are singing
the songs of the dead from your sofa chairs.
In a million part harmony, disconnect.
When did the living learn the songs of the dead?
And with such youthful gusto they sing them!

Suburban Soliloquy #1

The people, yes,
and their cell-phones, yes,
raised at arms length,
up.
The people, glittering in nylon
twice upon the strong neck of
invisble money. Turning upward,
thinking, twisting upon
the trunk of industry,
craning their necks upward.
The internet cables connecting
tissue to tissue. Music rushing in with wind.

Wait. Listen.
The streets & the new roads &
the million acres of mirror-image
suburban boxes are raising
their hands to ask a question.
Who can answer them?
Who has the wisdom to parent
these children who cannot recollect
the scattered letters of their own name?
Scattered by wind, cemented over.

I held my hand out the window
at 45 miles an hour to catch the light while
O'Reilley's piano poured rainbows,
wet & bright, into my silvers car's interior.
I gulped & in that moment I knew what to tell
those children, young in bone
although immobile in the impossible
plastic safety-suit of the suburbs,
but then I blinked, a moment later,
and completely forgot.

McMenamin's Pubs

Mike McMenamin had this crazy idea: buy up a bunch of antique/quirky buildings in the Great Northwest and turn 'em into pubs. He started brewin' his own beer (the famed Hammerhead Amber Ale and the legendary Terminator Stout) roastin his own coffee, distillin' his Hogshead Whiskey, and grilling up a variety of mouth-watering barbeque burgers.
The Grand Lodge is an old Masonic Lodge which he and his cronies have converted into a Pub/Hotel. They hired a bunch of young scruffy monkeys to run the place. I am a scruffy monkey - willing to subject myself to the ignominy for a penny or two. Temporarily.
Always Temporarily.
My brother and I, in the meantime, have started a little business of mural painting. We've done 1 so far, but we are well on our way to 2. I promise. The 3rd job is out there beyond the horizon - I can feel it.
My mind is transitioning back into Think Phase. Note: it must take a lifetime to really understand oneself and the cyclical patterns of one's being. But in this postulated Think Phase, due to increased Thinkageness, I begin to once again ruminate words and concepts rather than images and ideas. (I just made a semantic division between concepts and ideas that I am too apathetic to make certain - I would only use dictionary.com anyway.)
The spirit of my imagination fluctuates between these two worlds. The creative engine of my art is sometimes lingual and sometimes experiential, imagistic - and it almost depends on this mood, or temperature, of the soul. Which in turn really depends on how good I am feeling about current experience - I am happy, awake, and hopeful? Or does that depend as well on this soul-temperature? What influences what - thats the question. Chicken or the egg. What is the first cause of the changes within me? Chemical? Can I know - can it be specified?
I sat in the dimming evening light back behind the Yardhouse Grill at the Grand Lodge and ate my BBQ Chicken Sandwhich, while ideas hovered like fireflies in the dark of my unverbalized and tired mind.