Does a dog have Buddha nature? Woof!

Sitting in a mobile home high and with low light on the pad in the floor, on the floor, the purple room with the flowers on the wall and the large closet for a lady's clothes and the vanity mirror is dirty and the rats still need to be excommunicated from the holy roman ceiling and if the hole in the dining room gets dug into for the root cellar and the floor is framed again and the rocket stove with the cob bench warming the living room all gets set up, and if the roof and the sunroom and the roof in the sunroom are all fixed and adjusted and that green house is built on the side and all that is done and the kitchen between the two shipping crates on the other side gets roofed in by the roof from the fallen down 80-year-old barn, roofed on in between the gap for between the shipping containers and then an outdoor stove and kitchen sitting area for nice days and cold days is constructed and piped up, then perhaps this will be a good place to sit and type of all the ways and the schemes and recycled materials and shitty tools and the internet research and waiting on someone with money to buy the supplies and to make the decisions while we sit in joint-smoked rooms on the unclean floor on some pads and a sleeping bag with our typewriters writing about how weird and uncomfortable the houses of other people's families can be when the family is mormon with traces of mormonism hanging around and a baby and the mother talking about moving to the big toilette and poo poo while you are just trying to eat some broccoli and macaroni and cheese and cabbage salad with all of the hot items from the Astoria Children's Center sit crammed around you and you want to choose the level of squalor that isn't filled with humanity.

A room devoid of humanity: the only place to write.

After a Fast, Mastication : Turtle Rock, Buena Vista, Colorado

Split rock fit with green growing grass. Life comes from the crags, budding and defiant, tender and tough, spiny, arid-loving flowers and limegreen fluorescent algae moss on the rocks. Pine cones and pebbles on the ground. Sticks and pine needles on the ground. Down and up, many granite avenues to climb, all cracks and producing from so much geopressure, the tufts of grass and shrubs of green that squeeze out with a slow inaudible moan. Thousands of years of granite rubbing on granite and from that infinity, out springs a twiggy shrub. In an instant, after all that grainy abysmal granite chewing.

Jump in! : St. Edwards Park, Austin, TX

St. Ed's. Ed, the common man's saint. The common man's park. The suburban stream. And I arrive blasted with preconceived word tumblings all forgotten in the face of the flowing frankness of the common man's saint. So many times the water sits still and stagnant and there is nothing but disappointment, but the rains came and this is the most pleasant day a common man could ask for. The stream slips green and glassy. Sunlight shines sheens reflected off ripples. I sit in the roots of the waterside trees, uncomfortable only in theory. The rope swing hangs still over the slippery green pools fed by gentle rushes from the rapids. A dislocation of the shallow shelf of rock, stretching back around the bend in the trees beyond, and we get to listen to the calming sound of incessant streaming gurgling bubbles, rounding rocks and pebbles, whirling pools and swirls of churned aerated water. And to think, you can get all of this in the comfort of your home or office if you just go to the Sharper Image, or leaf through an airplane shopper's catalog.


Post Script - What was there to do but to strip down to brass boxers and jump fresh into jittering cold water? What was there to do but to rise back through the broken surface whooping high pitched from the jittering cold water? What was left but to take the still rope swing by its end and swim back struggling out on the roots of the waterside trees just to swing in again? And after that? What was there left to do but re-robe and leave?