i'm hastening slowly trying to get to the water when i hear my name called and you come from the corner where all the fellows gather for chess and stories. i want to keep walking, not to evade you but to get to the water. there must be something urgent far more than my urgency. you don't have teeth so everything has an o sound, except some words are clear, like sublimation. a fine word. you said that word, among some others, when you showed me a poem about desire. i know you. i know i knew your name. something has changed. did you have teeth before? something slipping. i saw you before on the park bench alone talking, with subdued emphasis, trying to make a point. i should have given you something. maybe that was it, and you were too shy to ask. i said i'll see you on the way back. now you are at the picnic table that's warped and melted like the memory of barbecues under a great reaching oak. you seem preoccupied, i don't want to disturb, i don't want to sneak by. i want to know what's going on. i just wave. a small wave of shame. i'm afraid of a need that's too great, i can't meet. i want you to like me. i want you to write some more poems. i remember a guy who sold poems up in bucktown. xstine called it fucktown, from an ad in the reader rental classifieds saying  fucktown, fucktown, fucktown, that really got her attention. oh that guy just wanted to sell something for money, i'd have just as soon not, so i did. i didn't like his poems, he was pushy pushing pushy poems. one wants poetry to be free i guess, and one wants not to be pushed by need. even one's own, one wants to fill it like a poem, with sublimation. we need poems, yeah. poems without agenda but desire. poems don't want your money. there was no sublimation in bucktown man, just a wad of photocopies. you just had the one, folded and soft edged, the shape of your pocket. i wonder do you carry it? no. did you bring it to show me? yes. 
i'm afraid of need, but doggonit, it was you that gave to me. tomorrow i'll bring you five bones for the poem you already gave, and the pictures and the heart. i know you man.
 

i saw pinot come with a taco in his mouth. he dropped it with a shy grumble when kofi came. i wanted to get a picture of pinot with his french love bandana and his independence day freedom taco in solidarity with our brothers and sisters seeking asylum, but pinot was too shy and left his taco orphaned in the dirt, til mom rescued it, and they went on their solidary way. then i got a nose kiss from kofi in consolation, and we too went on our lucky solidary way.

i picked a caterpillar with a handful of juneberries. i could feel the thought please don't eat me. i put the caterpillar back on a juneberry leaf.

juneberries are soul good.

 i could eat them all the seasons of my life.

in my dream i swam with mister, and when i woke up i was still dreaming 
and the wind was still blowing like the night wind in my dream 
and mister was cooled by the wake of the dream water, the water of the dream we dream.

whoever reads this i'd like to know 
not all of us here in america are stupid and evil,
and people here still do care about people,
and not everyone wants to kill for the masters
though they can't help but pay the taxes 
of war
for they live in a demockrisy 
and pacifism doesn't pay,
yet some people here do still value and love life, 
not just their own or their nuclear family's or the money,
and the sentient people, who don't have their heads up the asses of the money grabber 
in line ahead of them, people of empathy who suffer our government right along 
with all the immigrants from lands we occupy and destroy, people with conscience, 
without borders, people of earth love 
live in the same here, the same there, 
the same everywhere.

i have a strange faith. i don't know where it comes from. i know, it comes from life. we get in all kinds of predicaments. we know we will die and the world will go on. that's faith. the inevitable. how could we not have faith in the inevitable. when we try to force things or predict the future, then we get in all kinds of predicaments. if we take care of things now we will be fine. if we took care like life is a puppy that depends on us in the moment. 
so i had three books going and felt anxious that i could not read them all. i wanted two to fall away and the one be revealed as the one i need. i put the world goes on by krasznahorkai and no immediate danger by vollman on the bench. started the dawn watch, joseph conrad in a global world, and a minute ago the world goes on popped in mind again. the bookmark was still there, at this place:

because here and now, the customary course of the intellect's choice of a theme is that in the wake of earlier experiences and ensuing disastrous traumas, the human intellect, rising above resignation vis-a-vis the human universe, becomes fed up with this world mired in the monotony of hopelessness, and transcends it, at last leaving it behind and identifying this particular theme in some enigmatic grandeur- some indecipherable, mysterious majesty, that is to say, in the universe, or in the deity of the universe.

                                                                                                           ( the world goes on )

and i thought, how does all this relate to a puppy that happens to come along in this moment of the world worlding and these three among books impossible in number? and i thought, because it is, related, as everything, and because it is we can dip in here and there, and we need not finish every book as a bee need not drink every flower, in the diversity of flowers and books, the dip and the sip, and the puppy that comes along in the moment, among all the flowers and sticks and books, is presence in your heart you can't deny, and that is, in the chaos of the world worlding, your focus, the heart of another, your transcendence.

lucky for lulu. i'm lucky for lulu. lucky we didn't wait til fall. she'd a been grown by then. life is fast for dogs. we need to be there early and stay. stay lucky.

oh my gourd it is so hot gnome sane my brain is melting like candy in the rear pocket gnome sane i can't take it goddammit let's go swimmin for godsake for i go insane gnome sane i need this heat like another hole in the head gnome sane.
oh will you please be quiet you makin me hot gnome sane.

it's gone be a lulu of an independence day.

stick with lulu. she'll never deport you.

be like lulu.

i wanna be like you, lulu.

i, it's a bum sum kids, gnome sane, the fourth of fucking july hot and loud as hell and kids in prison for seeking freedom, or asylum, or just to stay alive and god help us there ain't no place else to go, the bullies and warmongers run the whole fucking world kids. can you imagine? children? 
and mister and me gone suffer cuzza mister can't swim. i know, it could be worse right, we could be in prison, we could be refugees in our own country.
but listen kids, they may not teach you this in school, about the prisons for children, they may call em day camp or wall mart, but people are beginning to find words for the unspeakable, people are beginning to rise up, and this hot loud independence day we will all think in a moment of quiet deep within ourselves, and maybe at a picnic in the park too, about the children in prison while we celebrate.

people are being kept in kennels. children in cages. people don't know what to do. people are rising up. watch it on democracy now. the war comes home. there is nowhere else to go.

most stains in experience are indelible, 
though whitewashed every day, 
though each coming dark leaves 
each experience an erasure, it's 
the erasure that continues us.
most stains don't come out, they stay, sigh, 
expand in palimpsests.  
the fellow who camped around the corner from here in the train arcade was swept away. 
his traces remain. around the corner where the man was swept away
this same mural is whitewashed.  
the remains recall the missing. 
something always remains, a trace of regard, 
what emanates, the essence 
of what is taken. a life of disappointment 
in america, being raised by abandonment, 
schooled by chaos, chaos of deceptions and controls, chaos of conformities, 
the unfathomable disappointment of america's crimes, nothing, nothing, 
nothing for the soul but erasure, nothing prepares one, any one, for the ultimate heartbreak of america.

i just saw beatriz at dinner. there's this big game killer resort owner, bragging on how hard killing a rhinoceros, how pure, the feeling, his eyes glinting, and beatriz really gives it to him, says you think killing something is hard? try healing something. and she throws his i phone with the pictures of dead animals in it against the wall. but he don't care, the same fuck says he goes and takes land and clears it of every living thing so nobody can say any wildlife will be lost. he says yeah the world is dying so have fun get what you can while you can. it made me feel sick because it is what is actually happening.

what happens if i sit on satan's bench?

you remember the mushroom fairy circle? here it is again.

oh, mister, you is a good soul.

me and lulu.

lulu runs.

lulu grows up before my eyes. often now she'll just sit down and contemplate something.  
we find a shady spot under a tree and chew a clover or a stick and we find calm.  
when she hears a strange noise she looks amazed. she follows sound around, especially 
the sound of children. she always wants to go where she hears the children play. she's so quiet when i carry her so she doesn't spring a leak before we get outside, but i think she's almost big enough that she can hold on. she's listening now and remembering the sound.

lulu hug.

lulu waits at the p.o.

lulu hears a disembodied voice.

lulu takes the stairs.

lulu at the station.

lulu roll.