from Louisville: Another city on the make

2.

There's a coffee shop walking distance from the shelter. These days I haunt coffee shops like I used to haunt bars. I went to Freddie's on Broadway because it was a cheap, cash only dive bar that asked no questions and only required people not to offend the general atmosphere. That place was also a wonderful archive of all things masculine from the 20^th Century: hand drawn wrestling posters, beer steins, collector booze bottles from the 1970's, I hung out at Rubbie's because it's a neighborhood bar close to home, the happy hour prices are good, and the well bourbon was tolerably good. That bar was also a good bell weather for the last Presidential election.

Angry white men

trying to hold back

a changing world

like they grip their beer

Now I rotate between a handful of coffee shops in the city. When I'm scribing for pay or working on my own words, I go to noisy coffee shops, like the one close to where I live, or the one close to the shelter. When I'm meeting people, I go to one of two Heine Bros. On Bardstown Road because the white noise doesn't distract my ears from conversation. When I want to hang out and read, or talk to people who have also either stepped off or were pushed off the wide path , I go to Highland Coffee. They each have a thing I like better there than any other coffee shop. Heine Bros serves a turmeric chai with black pepper I really like. Highland has a nice selection of herbal teas and makes a cup of coffee. Sunergos, in my neighborhood, has the best cappuccino in the city and serves delicious cheddar chive drop biscuits that make for a good lunch.

Pockets of warmth

in an increasingly chilly cityscape

regardless of the season

regardless of the temperature.

Please & Thank You on Market and Shelby is a short walk from the shelter. They have wonderful herbal teas and the best blueberry lemon muffins in the city. I go there to scribe or to work, and to eat a muffin after I finish my short shift in the shelter coffee room. Lately I've run into K, a woman I met when I volunteered with one of the local homeless outreach organizations. She's usually sitting out front, a few steps off to the side away from the corner. When I can afford to, I get her a cup of coffee. Sometimes she's flying a sign. Sometimes she's waiting for her boyfriend J, who is always either off trying to find work, off trying to do some good deed that will, when he tells the story, never be repaid in kind. J has a demon in his gut like I do. When I see her I ask whether J has been drinking, so I know whether I'll see him or the demon. They are always in a state of emergency... being moved on, lost a tent, stuff stolen, scrambling to avoid snow, rain, cold, heat. Their home camp in Butchertown was bulldozed a few years ago to make room for a soccer stadium. The investors through money at the city to house the residents of Camp Campbell quickly for the good PR boost. Nearly all the former residents of Camp Campbell are no longer housed now. But there aren't any news cameras around to notice.

Erasure – delete a line

delete a camp

delete a person

a collateral damage

for the marketing collateral

Part 1 posted on Instagram. Check it out!

From Field Notes: 22 Aug 2019 (cool cats and a muckraker's city)

Leaving Chicago on the 5:45 pm Cardinal. By this time tomorrow, I'll be in Ashland (KY). Had a wonderful time at the reading. The record store, No Requests, is nice little place.  One of the owners told me they're also  a record label focusing on  local bands. They release titles on cassette... reminded me of those single or two song cassettes you'd find as a special right before an album drop or to fan up interest

My friend and poetic comrade Jeri has a lovely apartment with a polite and friendly roommate and two cats, both of which resisted my attempts to take pictures of them. They tolerated me well enough and were almost friendly by the time I left for the train station.

The cats eye me

with far less suspicion.

Their gazes say

you will miss us.

Off Lakeshore Drive heading into  the downtown business district, the Uber driver used Ida B Wells Drive. I wonder if anyone driving it knows what she endured in the name of truth just to have a stretch of street named after her.

Holy mother of muckrakers,

sweet lady of malady, madness and letters

have mercy on us!

Taking a smoke outside Union Station the Jackson Street,  I'm soaking in the city yet again, one more time. The weather is cooler, than it had been, and the sun is shining.  There's a few of us there, smoking. Even though the Canal Street doors are open to the public again, the Jackson Street door is more convienent for smokers. The others are huddling in shadows and I find myself drawn to the light around the corner. Street hustlers mix in the panhandlers. I see the hard push on a few unsuspecting travelers trying to wave off the nicotine  mists. But the ATM is right over there, I hear one say. 

What a shame:

out of shadows cast by brick, steel, and glass

violence bids hello

with a handshake and a sharp smile.

   

Escape

Central Air is busted. We sleep with the windows opened strategically to take advantage of the cooler night air. At 3:37 in the morning, the storm that will make today boil blows in. Cool breeze. That fresh, taciturn kiss of almost autumn rain. Far off threat of thunder and lightening.

At 3 in the morning, the dogs are restless. They always know. I ignore them until the sound of their paws, like a telegraph operator in an old western sending a message at gunpoint, makes it impossible. Pulling on my pajama pants, I motion for the dogs in the early half-light through the window. Part sunrise, part light pollution from the airport. Ubi, the skittish one, is afraid of storms but is overcome by curiosity and the need to piss. 

I stand on the back porch and wait. Soak in the cool air through every available pore. It is 4 in the morning.

Being so accustomed to control when hubris fails 

we are still monkeys finding God in a cool breeze

and in the distant thunder, a lullaby.

[re: lines on the day I remembered my father's birthday]

"Your skin starts itching once you buy the gimmick"  - Iggy Pop/David Bowie

For years I drove out by the old house to see what the new occupants had done to wreck the place. The time I drove out and saw the buried wagon wheels at the end of the driveway, like some broken redneck gate straight out of HGTV and the western-chic issue of Better Homes and Gardens, I knew my father's imprint was worn off. Finally, indescribably, gone.

And even as I write this, I don't know that I ever made peace with that -- until now, as I come to terms with how I feel about being at my mom's, and how my own wounded vision has impacted not only how I feel about this place, but about my Losantiville as a whole. 

Only now do I understand that I must see this place like any other place -- and that this vision must extend to all places. Even the ones I allow myself to be attached to.

Summer ends just as it begins.
Places abide in a mourner's memory,
an early morning dew. No house
holds out against the wind. No island
holds out against the current.

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Los Angeles June 2019 - the last leg home

The bus shot down I-65 out of Indy, headed to Louisville, trying to make up for being an hour and half late out of the gate. The old grey dog was loaded for bear. Every curve and bump seemed to tear at the fabric of the thing, like it was held together by duct tape and chewing gum.  The guy next to me was a nervous little germaphobe  in a slim fit flower print shirt who moaned audibly at every rough jump and turn. The woman in front of me was a bundle of nerves who found out about a half hour from Louisville that she wasn't on the bus to Cincinnati.

I chose to give myself over to sleep instead of worry. That was the only thing I had control over. I don't know that I ever felt more free than that moment.

Every wind sheer cuts sharp.

Each bump a prayer. Rough currents

carry home this wandering fish.

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Reading the Grounds

Embrace the break in weather where you can. True, there are months when the last time you saw the sun feels like a dream; but when the rain break and there is a clear path, take advantage of it the best you can. [from Field Notes]

Even though I'm not bound to foot travel -- there is the bus, of course, and most recently, Mule -- I still like to walk. True, I could start up Mule and drive to a park and walk around a pre-designated track. I see merit in it, certainly for other people, because it's difficult enough to get exercise in a society that depends on us sitting in front of a computer, or staring at our phones, buying things. True, if you look long enough, nearly every aspect of the constructed reality we experience every day depends on commerce of some kind: whether it's the cappuccino I bought at the coffee shop today or the smiles my wife and I exchanged this morning before she left for work. But when I am not in motion in the world, there are fewer opportunities to see the world as it truly is instead of the filtered commodity that trickles in through my phone or my computer. When I am not in motion in the world, I'm not even certain the world exists.

Living as I do along the Ohio River, a once major artery of commerce of all kinds from coal, to slaves, to settlers, in a city whose very existence depended on commerce and The Falls that created a natural choke point for people to have to slow down and walk their boats through (Once Upon a Time), the metaphor and myth of commerce are a foundation upon which many myths have been  built.

But it's easy to let that take over... which is to say, it's easy to let that constructed reality dictate our

Mule

our entire lives. And if the materialists are correct -- both the Capitalists and the Communists -- and we are simply matter in motion, then really, this constructed reality is nothing more than an increasingly complex maze we spend our days and nights in until one day, we stop moving and the maze moves on without us.

Unless there's something more. And when I walk around my neighborhood, or anywhere, and take in the sounds, the feel of broken cement underfoot, the vibrations of the coolish February air here in the grand divot that is the Ohio River Valley, I end up thinking of commerce as something more than buying and selling, more than money for sweat and blood, more than blood and bone in the name of man's most majestic and dangerous machination -- Contemporary American Society. 

This is why, I think, I am bound to travel whether I think I want it or not. A warm wind kicks up, the currents shift, and nothing is set right until I feel this world moving under foot. Because it's only in motion that this constructed reality shakes loose and the world opens itself wide for eyes willing to see, for ears willing to listen, and for hands willing to embrace it on its own terms. 

As old mystics read tea leaves
I flip my empty cup
open the heart, examining
the dark grounds and find
one more map towards
the river mouth and the sea.

The past is gone, the future is full.

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