Ripe.
Last night a tagger was out on the railroad tracks below my window. I heard his spraycan knocking and looked out from behind my plants, watching him crouch in the dark and resisting the urge to yell down to him.
Today I set my chair by the window to do some reading in the breeze looking over the sunny rooftops and watching the pigeons and doves and sparrows and crows. Suddenly I remember last night’s graffiti! It’s there on the tall black pole in big sloppy white letters: RIPE.
A train rumbles by, a long silver platform that coughs up a dusty cloud at its end. Living here can be like living underwater, with trumpets and soot. I’m reminded of that Ann Carson line, “Her smile an underwater bell.”
Had a conversation with a friend today about what makes people change. That big change.
He says, “Old people don’t change.”
I say, “How old is old?”
Quiet. Then, “I mean, you changed.”
He replies, “I’m not like other people.”
I see this and I don’t. I’m not like other people, too. Which cancels itself out — I’m like you, we who are not like other people, we who can change. We all have access to it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so heartbreaking when it’s offered a lifetime of refusal. What interests me is Change’s life cycle. Something inside grows RIPE for change…ripe for accident…and then it’s all in the approach.
–
Last night I dreamed:
5.11
I experience a kind of slowing blurring winding-down winding-together in my mind and in what I see…everything slows and slurs until my head goes gently forward, down. I think this must be what dying is like.
I wake to a dream of Gramma’s voice saying “Uncle __ died.”
My first contact was an immediate chat with a friend, and the dream came burbling out, and she suggested it has to do with a change in my sexual self which has been afoot recently, this uncle being my only gay (and rather secretly so) relative. I was surprisingly grateful for her thoughts.
Also last night, I dreamed:
5.11
After long work at a new fair, my boss Captain Tattoo gives me a little box open and overflowing with little treasures/creatures from the sea, shells and living germinations from the sea, a lithe little octopus glow-in-the-dark green, pale and luminous and flowing. I kiss his cheek in thanks.
