Rescue Me

Dank breath

The tounge comes past the yellowing teeth

And slowly and sleepily

Love is expressed

 

Years past

These four legs have held

The only ties that reaffirmed

Unconditional Love

 

Who rescued who

My Old Man

 

Dust Devil

Did he tell you of when he walked off into the desert?

Throwing his body a cable tow length off shore,

With rattlers coming from the woodwork

Biting him, through the metal roof of the Chevy car.

…

He tore them from his feet, and fled into the desert,

With a grandstand of ancestors watching.

Lay there for 3 days, on his stomach, with the sun burning his back.

And ass and the wires he had tied around his naked thighs

Thinking he was a house full of dynamite, on fire.

Surrounded by imagined snakes with broken bodies.

Shoes made out of reeds and weeds, tied to his feet like Moses

Lying face down in the desert, naked wearing grass shoes, burning.

His parents found him right on the very edge of the road to nowhere.

Their son had been heard calling for his daughter across the arroyos.

Hito, she cried out, she first saw him 3 miles up the road face-down.

Burnt on the inside. Naked in reed slippers, wire, fire and clinging to life.

Pater Pater

Cancerous answers from your own mouth,

Informed of defensive slobber-knocker

Let’s not interrupt their weekends, the damage

Is done, the boy will keep until Monday.

 

Fumblerooski, cause you know he brought the wood

Did you run interference intentionally?

Sack dance alone, sack dance with a partner

Pater no end run for the boy tonight.

(Penn State Football Sexual Abuse)

Driving South from the Holy City

It’s 30 minutes from mid-nite, and St Francis Drive has probably existed for almost 600 years, when the Spanish founded the Holy City, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bringing the Inquisition and horses to the SW America.   Just had a wonderful aural evening listening to Donna Dean, all the way from New Zealand, playing some country with some Fellas from my …home town Dunedin, New Zealand.  There’s a mandolin and a banjo with a silencer on it on stage. I’m counting 4 strings and no drums, heaven.  And an amazing red head brit chick on fiddle. Wow. I wanna put firefly’s in jars and listen to some of those songs again !  She sung about her Kiwi Dad throwing her into the deep end of a swimming pool to teach her to swim, made me home sick. She gots the words Man !

I have the Hemi on cruise control at 45 coming down East on St Francis Drive trying to get out of the City Limits and onto the freeways asap.  Windows open, prolly 75 degrees just a touch of fall weather, there are stars in the deep blue midnite sky out there on the Western Horizon. Hey Venus, what kind of shiz are you causing down here right now huh?

A White 2500 truck pulls up next to me as we get to some lights, they look in. Nod. Smile. There’s an up nod, a down nod. And the lights change to green and we pull away in the 45 zone heading for the freeway onramp.  Now anyone who as driven with me, knows that within limited speed zones, i got straight to max and set cruise control.  They drop behind me, pull up next to me, and start to try to crowd me out in the slow speed zone. Wankers. So i use those 400 hp and  maintain control of my lane, boys better drop in behind like polite lads.

I accelerate through the darkness of the on-ramp, heading south, merging up onto the 25 Highway. Left those gauchos in their truck I think as i happily settle down to 85 till we get out of town. And hello ! They come racing up next to me, and start staring in again. So I wave and don’t play. They move up and start to aggressively tailgate some poor f’ck in front of us at 90 mph. Pushing the cars out of the Club Lane. And I thought oh to hell with it, i will jump in on that crazy train, and pulled up behind him. Blanco Trucko would slow down, I would over take, he would speed up. We looped. We dance. He pushed in front, but never got physically aggressive with Hemi Baxter and pushed from behind.

Just didn’t like being passed by a woman in a bitching hot car I guess.  Or maybe he just wanted to dance. I shouldn’t be so down on the Fellas.  I do like to play a little wit some of the nicer cars out there in the ‘ open zones’ , its amazing to have that option. I have noticed driving the bigger horsepower, the higher speeds, you are accompanied by a different class of driver. They tend to be aggressive, and sometimes act badly around my bad ass car. Sometimes I engage, sometime I dont. Sometimes I am in before I know what the hell I am doing.

I let these Lads go ahead, by slowing down a bit, his attentions were getting a bit real after 5 miles or so. He started slowing flicking his break lights, waiting for me on the dark highway, i maintained, passed, he looped around  for maybe the 8th time and went for the Cerrillos township exit. He flashed his lights, i flashed back, yeah mate, nice traveling with ya, nice to see ya go, just be good to me.  Headed down La Bajada with some extra speed in my step, down off the high mesa, traveling down the middle Rio Grande valley, heading into the brown dirt of central New Mexico desert.

Tijeras Man

It’s about a 40 miles or 64 kilo-metre one way road trip out of the City of Illumination up into the hills South of Tijeras, in New Mexico. Climbing out of the Middle Rio Grande Valley south of Albuquerque.  Heading East through the pass in the foothills, it’s a nasty piece of highway on the 40, lots of trucks rolling East to West, one of the main t…rucking routes. A pilot of a fast moving automobile has to watch out for big trucks with Harleys’ on it’s bed moving into a lane and almost wiping out motorbikes, tires blowing out from under the semis on the grade, superbikes moving in a different dimension. When it snows, it’s a downhill uphill skating rink of ferocity. It’s a camberous route through the foothills and over into the dust bowl. It really is a bitch of a road. Ancient but.  

She turned the Hemi right at Tjeras and headed up into the Cibola ( SEE-bo-lah) National Forest. This forest reserve was established in the late 1800s, the name is original, Zuni Native American name. It’s a winding hill climb, not many places to pass. Just a 14 mile hill climb up to the cabin, on this mid summers sunset, soon there would be less light, the Sandia Mountains turning into sweet water melon slices. Orange and red. A good time of day.

The next time she rides up the 317 East, she’ll be a passenger in Croat’s Toyota V8 truck.  He’s driving to his GPS, pushing the V8 and with a silent passenger.  It’s dark and this giant rock space ship designer is just watching and driving to a computer screen, says he’s does it all the time and to be cool yah. So silently the passenger watches the road and know that the driver is watching something else.  He’s gone into the grid display next to the radar detector.  A treasure map and a bird on a wire.  Transfixed miles per hour.  Maybe it’s just decades of video games absorbed by the giant’s brain, or his many drives like this, but they will climb up through the juniper and shale safely. There is a calmness and silence in the cab of the truck, as the V8 moves powerfully and blindly up the side of the mountain. This is a personal zone being shared. Prisoner or Participant, the dare will be on, the boasts will be tested.

But for now, she is pushing up through the hills, heading due south into the National Forest, round Cedro Hill to the left feeling the full sun at it’s last minutes of day. If she continued due south she would be in the middle of a loneliness, the great lands that when you fly over them, you think  ” The Nothingness “. Yet it was such a traveled and populated area,  from the prehistoric Ancestral Pueblo, Anasazi and Jumano groups, to the 17th century Spanish Franciscan missionaries, and the returning settlers in the 1800s. This was a land of which people took passage but few stayed, and the Croat had been up in these hills a whole winter, burning propane quicker than his landlord can pay.

Traveling down a dirt n gravel road at dusk, about 2 miles high, she went past the cabin turn off the first time. When the Challenger reserved slowly back down the road to check for a house number, he was already standing in the drive way. Appearing amongst the Junipers and Pine, a 6 ft 7 “, a happy sad giant.  He is mourning his younger brother the war hero, and Rugby player. Our generation,  in his country,  survived a civil war and genocide. He claims to be catholic and know nothing about it, but his younger brother, he’s a war hero. And the past war will finally claim him soon. Standing there in the drive way holding a bow and arrow. Hey what you doing here yah he says as he fires off another arrow. Shaking her head she asked if she was late and she drove down to the cabin past him.

Michelle

wanted to write about my friend Michelle who just left us shuffling along this mortal coil broken hearted a week or so ago. I am sure she came into my life to teach me something valuable.  And it has something to do about love,  and about ink. All these people knew her for 20 or 30 years, i knew her for just a year. I realized the minute i met he…r I was crazy for her bad ass ways, and I felt so goddam cheated, knowing we had limited time.  She was a Pain In The Ass, her local friends knew her as PITA. Michelle was an old Punk, Instigator, a Pistol, recognizing and working the systems like her tools.

 

She was also radiant, alive even though the fight with cancer had been on for 4 years. One of the first things she ever told me was that her expiry date was Sept 9th 2013. Well that came and went, she joined a gym cause what good were these soothsayers now?   At the end of October she had to move out her downtown apartment that she loved.  I deeply wish she hadn’t had to battle the landlady, wish she hadn’t on-boarded that stress, sometimes people just need to step the hell back and realize they are making a shitty situation shittier. When we talked on the phone, Michelle would tell me how she just wanted one measured month of peace, every time I told her I thought she would find that with her Family. She suggested a couple of times me letting her become my roomie, but deep down, we knew, it was time she went home to her Parents.

 

Confession: I remember driving back down from Santa Fe last summer, from the X/Blondie Concert at the Opera House. Just me and Michelle, hurtling down La Bajada at 95 mph under the midnight desert sky in my Challenger RT, NIN blasting. And I got one of my visual Kandinsky’s from the brain thang on, couldn’t work out a f’in thing visually in front of me, didn’t even know if the car was upside down or even what road we were on. Michelle just turned her head and looked at me as I braked down and then got my head right and continued on. She knew i was struggling with a not so great neurological diagnosis. She just checked me, and sat back. Trust.

 

I got a text from her on Christmas Eve, between my salad and my Prime Rib. it said “I am dying”. I was sitting in a booth at Paul’s of Monterrey, gutted, and stumbled as only I can, I replied ” What can I do to help?”. ” Hold On ” she replied. Sometimes I think I must be the most awkward human in the world, so I called her.  But I did hold on.   After this she disappeared for a couple of weeks, went dark on us, she was in hospital having transfusions and biopsies. Her cancer was the worst kind-of bitch, relentless.

 

By mid January she entered Hospice care and was well enough for visitors. Me and Dom took the dogs and went up to visit her and Skippy Good-boy. We laughed, we talked, she hallucinated. Me, I am from Dunedin, people hallucinating don’t worry me much, when she asked me who the guy standing behind her was, whilst she was propped up on pillows lying on a bed, i replied ” I don’t know Girl, but you need to turn around and ask him who the fuck he is! ” ” Hell yeah ” Michelle cackled, and we laughed like a couple of crazies. But I did wonder who it was…  There was a picture of one of her best friends Greg, who died a while ago now, on her bedroom wall, but she would have recognized him.  It was a good visit, but you could tell we were starting to loose her, she was splitting her time and getting frailer.

 

When I got back from the Mayo Clinic,  I wanted to go up the day I got back and tell her the neuro’s here are idiots. Brain Injury avoided ! But I landed in the Burque with the flu cause of all the stress, and couldn’t visit.  Finally got back up there for the 43rd birthday. She was hanging in there for some reason, maybe to get that nice whole round number. Michelle was lying there in the loving nest her family had built around her. Like a bird getting ready to fly. I brought flowers, Dom had scented guardian angel candles.  We put on some dance music,  opened a window, let her enjoy some of her favorite things, talked to her, rubbed her feet. It was so kind of her beautiful loving family to let us spend time with her. And it was an honor to spend time with Michelle as her spirit prepared to leave. She passed away about 10 hours later, and 1000 hearts were broken.

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Garcia

Bumped into one of my many neighbors on our dead end street the other night. 9 years, never seen him walking one of their 5 dogs, and now he’s is slowly shuffling towards me with a new 6th small dog.  He’s a super sweetie, and we are mates me n Garcia. Over almost a decade I have watched his shift from hard Hispanic doper to having multiple chemo t…herapies after brain surgery. He’s mid 50’s now and we both have a brain thing going on.

A couple of months ago i was talking to him, and i said i haven’t seen you for ages, where you been man?  You look great. Hospital having part of my brain removed he said tapping his head at me  He said it so radiantly, his sunken eyes and cheekbones are puffed out and filled, his cheeks rosy. I probably turned a whiter shade of pale, I do remember nausea.  His spirit was shining through his skin, I have seen this before. And he’s happy, but afraid. When he has to take the courses of pills, all he can do is sleep for 5 days. He is worried about not being able to remember yesterday sometimes, i say maybe that is not a bad thing brother. We have had this conversation 3 times. He is in a struggle, my leather clad, tattooed, Harley and Camaro driving friend Garcia.

He lives with his parents, they are old, his job is to take care of them, he used to sleep in the caravan next to the garage in the old days when he was using.  Every day is a new day for his dad. I have found his Padron wandering around the entrance to our street on his zimmer frame. He’s a sparky 90-something. There are two other siblings who visit the house now.  I saw the ’70’s Camaro w Radials is up on blocks this morning.

I like it when i see mi vecino out riding his Harley out on Coors, it’s on, and we have had many joyful drags along that road.  For a long time it was just up-nods and waves. But several years ago, I waved to him at the lights, smiled and jumped him.  Then he noticed my friendship and engaged, we have been long chat mates ever since.  We give each other a lot of sass on Coors while waiting for the lights to change, talking shit across the lanes.   We take turns about winning 🙂 He is quite the sight, no helmet, black wraps, front right indentation in his skull and scar from the surgery, cig in mouth, laughing into the wind as we drag. He pauses his Harley outside my house these days, to light his cigarette’s, before he leaves our dead end lane and enters the rest of the world.

So here he is, heading home with a strange dog on a leash and two empty leashes in his hand. What you doing man? Who is this? I said pointing to the fat chi mix. That’s Chico, he’s new, he’s lost some weight, i took him to the school park.  What are you doing with the other two leashes? Oh, I lost two dogs, maybe they got out, I dont know where they got lost. Which dogs? You know I can’t remember any of their names right now he said smiling softly, wearing slippers, leather jacket and holding onto 3 leashes with one dog attached. Like the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Well, there is Bear, the bossy one always at the gate i said, is he missing? He looked at me blankly, so i tried a couple of other versions, Beer, Bargh, Bergh. Still nothing. How about Choe? The old girl, she’s bitchy remember? And he starts to laugh, yes, he remembers Chloe now. Look, I point up towards his home, and there are two small dogs running down the street towards him. You better remember their names quick brother because they have seen you now. And we laugh, and wish each other well.

Windowmaker

Fenstamacher Fenstamacher

What storm broke your pane?

You couldn’t talk about it, and

You couldn’t put yourself together again.

 

Fenstamacher Fenstamacher

Breaking glass is not peace.

If the wooden frame is damaged

Ask for help, please.

 

You’re a maker not a breaker

It’s a window not a wall

You were loved by so many

Didn’t need to fall.

 

 

Part of The Interview

Woah, it was a wild 11 days from Hi to Hired with X University in Colorado.  But as a small town girl from Dunedin, who found warmth in the coals James K Baxter stoked and stroked in the fireplaces up Russell Street, consider my mind blown I get to work at such a special treasured place ❤  With Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as cofounders and original faculty, woah, same halls, woah. One of the questions they asked me during the 5 hour interview process, was how do you see the Privileged position and how do you see the Oppressed.  I had been ready for these kinds of questions, and i took my mind back to 1981, when I was a young sapling.  Seminal moments that speak to the core of one and their being.
It was 1981, and the public were uprising and there was organized marching in New Zealand to stop the South African Springboks from playing their apartheid supporting international rugby on our fields, we wanted them to free Nelson Mandela, and the protest was upon us.  The front rows of the march lines wore motorbike helmets.  Civil unrest like we had never seen was spreading through the small isolated country. Crop dusting planes were dropping flour bombs while performing low fly overs of the sports ground, Police in riot gear were bashing on civilians exercising their rights, the players beds in hotels were being made with broken glass between the sheets. And Male homosexuality was illegal, lesbianism was not.
We were marching for Human Rights as some friends were the Oppressed, the right to love who you love. I’m telling this to the Diversity committee as part of my interview for a financial job, I doubt either of them were born in 1981.  I remember watching a teen ginger march past in the Albuquerque Pride parade a couple of years back with heels on, I was just an invisible middle-aged woman lacking fabulousity.  I wondered if he realized that we had all fought for his freedoms that he was celebrating, decades ago.  But I am blonde, white, blue-eyed, educated and heterosexual, I am coming from a place of privilege.  This night, I was marching with the Oppressed. I recognized this, and so it is the story I tell.
As a blonde, blue-eyed youth, I was marching next to my gay friends, confused as to why it was illegal and understanding an imbalance was in place.  They could be imprisoned for just saying they were homosexual, let alone being able to openly love.  As a teen, I was learning that having a voice mattered. So it’s 1981, walking down the main street of Scottish Dunedin, George St, banners held high, heading to the Robbie Burns statue in the middle of town.  It’s a town of about 100k, and I think almost a 1000 people turned up to march.  It was empowering to be part of the collective with a common human goal. Let’s Legalize Love.  And we marched, down the cold winter’s Friday night, down Main Street, Dunedin.  John and David with me, I think Amanda was there too.
And as we marched down hometown main street, a place of safety in my life. For the first time, I felt the sting of the Oppressed on my skin, and the hate they must have had to endure on a daily basis.  The scared, and the hateful, the threatened, they came out and jeered.  Old ladies with foul mouths, bogans and their mullets, kids we went to school with. It was 1981, our Tellie was still censored, but times were changing in the deep south. As we passed, tomatoes and eggs were thrown at us, and we marched, they laughed as the egg rolled down our heads, but we marched.  There were a few stones thrown, but mainly it was jeering, hate, fear, in a high pitched wave pounding on us.  Words were screamed in our faces “Faggots, Gay, Ass Bandits “. As we approached the Octagon and Robbie Burns’s perch, we saw men stumbling out of the bar on the corner of the entrance. Drunks lurching out from the European bar, their fists swinging into the crowd, no one using their words.  They stumbled into the marchers, lurching, disrupting and hateful.  I’m 15, and we marched on, relentless. We didn’t change the law that year, or the next, but it was gone within 5 years.

So that’s what I told the Diversity and Inclusion committee about my seeding knowledge/example of Oppressed and Privileged. Coming from the first country in the world to give women the vote 1893.  First country to elect transsexual into government 1999, I did tell them it seemed weird to be asked about it, but having lived here for 17 years, I understood there are problems in the US. Let love in.

 

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