May 13 'round 6

Like a giant followspot fired up
& trained on the prostrate actor

A bedside lamp suddenly lit
by the one charged with awakening

The sun itself pulls me from sleep in the cradle of the train.

After a split-second of indignant 'whaaa-?'

The most beautiful truth is realized: I have been roused by nothing less than the rising sun itself.

I can drift back into slumber, let it illuminate the eyelids

Imagine a bed of foraged things
& light falling across the mouth of the cave.

Coolness

I'm not cool

never have been.

Often tried.

Never really pulled it off

& if I ever did, would I know?

What would be left?

I must think it's important

or else why feel so bereft?

Pigeons & Sausage

The pigeons have destroyed the bun.

But they can't make any headway on the sausage, with its tough casing and its trademark curve. It rocks and leaps and spins around from sidewalk to gutter as they peck and peck and peck.

Sometimes as many as ten of the grubby grey birds are going at it, with agitated, muffled cooing in their throats. The sounds escalate to an untoward hooting. Necks are strained. Most of them give up and walk away. A couple of believers carry on a while. Then a mob forms again. Still, the dessicated, dirty sausage writhes, uncompromised.

They can all smell victory; a breakfast to rival the best corn anyone's ever cast before them. If pigeons had saliva (do they?) it would be dragging in globs from their bills. But they just can't tear the casing, taste the spices, can't catch a break.

If one of them gets a foot on it, holds it down, then everybody eats.

It becomes the stuff of pigeon lore, passed down through generations:

The wondrous spark in one bird's brain, a proud, firm stance, chest puffed out, knee bent, gaze fixed on the horizon, talon gripping the ragged meat, the whole family, cousins and cousins once removed, all feasting. The missing link.

When The Train Pulls Up

To the deserted station

In the dark

There are so few of us I recognize everyone

Like the guy standing RIGHT on the EDGE of the platform

Right on the yellow line!

He turns his back when the train comes

Pushing air ahead of it

And he takes the brunt of the gust

In all weather. I don't know why!

Most of the time I'm just worried he'll cough wrong and fall so I don't really look.

But today I just didn't think of it - what am I, his Dad? No.

I just stared at him

Had room to re-realize: we are immersed in fluid.

Standing in a sea of air

That goes in and out, sustains, inflates.

Our stories, conflicts, concerns, calculations, insults, embraces, all float around in it.

We are in a great container full of it.

We forget all the time.

Empty Stockings, or Just a Minute on The Night Before Christmas

In the morning, the stockings are always full of something, whether it's all we could scrape together, or just the tip of an iceberg of booty. Could be soap and socks and chocolate. A big navel orange lodged stubbornly in the toe. Could be coal. Dreaded coal! Or whatever. They're full.

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care. Empty stockings. No sooner do we picture the stockings hung than we're hit with the hopes that St. Nicholas soon will be there. In fact, their emptiness isn't even mentioned. We just figure they're empty. Why would anyone put up a full stocking? But come now. We have no time to think on this, because we are distracted by, prisoner to, totally wrapped up In Hopes that St. Nicholas Soon Will Be There. Dammit!

O, call it the excitement and anticipation of a Christmas Eve if you will, but - if you care - we've missed something. We've missed the exquisite emptiness of that foot-shaped, gaudy, felt or velvet or woolen ornament nailed up - or hung from shiny, mantle-saving, weighted custom brass hooks. Never meant to be worn, only to be filled.

Before something can be filled, it must be emptied. And we're full. Full of thoughts, desires, fears, memories, intentions, stories, worries, strategies, lists, shames, triumphs past, and losses to come. Full of wanting, needing, grasping, avoiding, conniving, wishing, praying, bargaining, using, reaching, spinning...you get it. We're full.

The stockings, hung by the chimney with care, are empty.

And somehow, in the dead of night, they're filled.

Legend has it that our actions through the year dictate the contents. Tradition holds that we get what we need, with a deluxe old-world twist: New mittens, warm socks. Soap. A tiny book of Oscar Wilde quotations. That Orange. The contemporary sensibility has room for some astonishing bauble, or electronic device. Now that's full.

And the stockings are emptied again.

They're laid in the box with the creche and the garland, the books and the lights, and they wait.

No, wait. They don't wait. They lie still.

They are emptied. Maybe they will again be filled.

Train yesterday/today

Yesterday morning, the traincar was all stillness, like a temple lumbering over the rails, like a body of water that has never known agitation.

Today, it is all motion, inside and out; a den of idiosyncrasy:

A man speaking awful fast about new fibre optic TV

A woman who tears the newspaper, long and luxuriously, over and over, as if everything is fascinating

A right snoring fellow, short enough to lay himself flat out on the seats, startling with his snorts

This lady loves her dentist, hates her hygenist

This guy's coughs are classic cigarette + chest cold & may only lift in May

And remarkably, I'm drifting along in peace over all of it, banana peel draped over my thigh, unopened yogurt in dangling hand, part of the fresco, nodding off myself

Letting the glorious machine run all the way downtown in its vivid completeness.

In the evening, two dudes sit facing one another, each with a hot, fragrant pail of poutine, and I feel like asking them:

Where were you guys this morning?

The U.S. Election: What Is The 6th?

Today, I turn 38. And they're going to the polls down south to elect a President.

A few work colleagues and I wondered about my birthday + US Presidential election history, and honestly I didn't know a lot about it. 

So, in the spirit of the day, I dug up a few things (with the help of Wikipedia).

Since 1848, the beginning of single US Presidential election dates across all states...here's what's happened in Presidential elections falling on November 6:
 
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln, R, beat three opponents for his first election as President. Momentous, and a watershed moment for the United States and its practice of slavery...a trigger for southern secession and eventual civil war. 
 
1888, Benjamin Harrison, R, defeats incumbent Grover Cleveland, D, in the electoral college...but Cleveland won the Popular Vote! And would be back! This election formed the backdrop for the 1968 Disney musical film 'The One And Only Original Family Band!' Eh? Songs by the Sherman brothers? Yeah.
 
1900, William McKinley, R, re-elected, over William Jennings Bryan, D. Bryan was unsuccessful in his second attempt to beat McKinley, who would be assassinated the following September, in Buffalo, as the old 'White House Blues' goes.

1928, Herbert Hoover, R, beats Al Smith, D. Al Smith's Big Problem? Anti-Catholic sentiment. There was apparently a current of paranoia that if Smith won the White House, the Pope would come and rule the US from a fortified location in Washington. Whoooa!
 
1956 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, R, beats Adlai Stevenson, D, earning re-election. A rematch of 1952 - and the most recent rematch to this day. They still liked Ike. (Sorry, couldn't resist)
 
1984 - Ronald Reagan, R, re-elected by a landslide over Walter Mondale, D. Reagan won the biggest total of electoral votes of any Presidential candidate (525 out of 538).
 
...and that brings us to...today.

If Barack Obama wins re-election, he'll be the first Democrat to notch a Presidential election victory on a November 6th. So there's that.

But the 6th is, after all, just the 6th.

What is a pattern?

Anything can happen.

I could be born, an unimagined soul, alongside countless others.

An entire country could take a step toward a widely-imagined future.

We'll read tea leaves, blow out candles, and carry on.