Reset Forty-Seven, Day Forty

[rejectomorph]

No nap Saturday, so I can hardly hold my eyes open this late. I've been hearing the latest storm all evening, with pretty steady rain and periodic outbursts of wind and more rain, and it's making me very glad to be indoors, even though it's quite stuffy in here, and my romantic side wishes I was out there walking around in the weather. But the days when I could do such things are gone, and I'm old and have sore, swollen, itchy feet and am also very, very tired. I don't think I'll even try to fix a bedtime snack. Just post this then get under the covers and listen to the rain in the dark until I lose consciousness.




Sunday Verse

We Did Not Make Ourselves

by Michael Dickman


We did not make ourselves is one thing
I keep singing into my hands
while falling
asleep

for just a second

before I have to get up and turn on all the lights in the house, one after the
other, like opening an Advent calendar

My brain opening
the chemical miracles in my brain
switching on

I can hear

dogs barking
some trees
last stars

You think you’ll be missed
it won’t last long
I promise

_

I’m not dead but I am
standing very still
in the back yard
staring up at the maple
thirty years ago
a tiny kid waiting on the ground
alone in heaven
in the world
in white sneakers

I’m having a good time humming along to everything I can still remember
back there

How we’re born

Made to look up at everything we didn’t make

We didn’t
make grass, mosquitoes
or breast cancer

We didn’t make yellow jackets

or sunlight

either

_

I didn’t make my brain
but I’m helping
to finish it

Carefully stacking up everything I made next to everything I ruined in broad
daylight in bright
brainlight

This morning I killed a fly
and didn’t lie down
next to the body
like we’re supposed to

We’re supposed to

Soon I’m going to wake up

Dogs
Trees
Stars

There is only this world and this world

What a relief
created

over and over

Comments

[zippybeta]

I know from your journal you mentioned living in Los Angeles, how far is that from Laurel Canyon? What do you know about Laurel Canyon?

[rejectomorph]

Laurel Canyon is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, in the hills above West Hollywood (it's several miles west of downtown, while I always lived in the east side of town.) The landscape is quite rugged, and as in most of L.A.'s hilly neighborhoods the houses cling to the hillsides along very narrow streets. Once quite rustic, it has been increasingly gentrified with modern McMansions in recent decades. It was long a haven of bohemian types, with many actors, musicians, artists, writers and such, but these days I'm sure it's much too expensive for all but the most successful in those professions. It has a very few commercial spaces along part of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, but is otherwise entirely residential, mostly single houses, and fairly densely built up. I never spent much time there, though I did go to one party on a cliffside house above the canyon once in the 1970s. It was far from the most interesting party I ever attended.