Postcard 84

You can have a good fight, if you just open up your hands.
You can lay the roadwork, but you must let the water pass.
You  can get your song loud -- spitting out, if you only learn how to dance
I want to be your dream-eater, slurping up all your pain.
I'll be your dream-eater, rest your tired soul on me.
Chomping chomping away away
You can build that hill house, high and clear as can be, if you just kick down the doors
You can help the helpless, but you'll have to give up, helpless too.
I'm trying to be your dream-eater, go in where your mind is dark.
Dream-eater, licking your wounds away, sucking, slurping the marrow of each day.
You can make change, if you just forget how to count.
You can persist, insist, resist, but you've got to close your eyes and rest.
I'll be there laying bare the fine wires of your sleep.
I'll be your dream-eater. There are no bad dreams, only twilight, night and day.

Postcard 80

There's that old cat lady again, that cantankerous anarchist flipping me off. Up at dawn, stocking redoubts in every weather, she feeds the cats with pure passion love. She feeds the cats with whole heart regardless. She stands on a pike of dead wild birds. She wakes and stands upon the ten thousand.
Despair of wholeness.
Each day, every day in drought, I watch the trees die. When the rains finally came, the  soil was washes away and the trees upturned in loosened clay. Dead trees watered are dead just the same.Do you know the last act of a dying tree? Its seeds. Bare brown branches bristling with cones and pods.
The other day in the grocery store line, I ran into the cat lady. But for the cans and cans of cat food, I did not recognize her, and without my hat and shirt and truck, she did not know me. I watched her in her loneliness, her free given love and her will to life, and I thought -- there goes a saint. A saint of feral cats under the dead trees.
Today, today after years of drought and weeks of rain, the levees are overrun and the swollen ground will take no more. The birds play in ponds where paths used to be. Today we lost two more trees. Despairing of wholeness, I feel like the drowning ground.
But consider the seeds.

Postcard 81

You must first have grace to be disgraced.
Each morning we awake and scan the far horizon, knowing what is coming without hope: bomb blast, dark synthetic cloud, dull false air. But look, the sun yet rises. But look, we too arise and kick our dirty feet to dirty floor and appraise each others' hanging bodies in gritty light. I put on cracked work boots and you creak into kitchen, spark fire for coffee, tea. Each day we share a coffee-bitter moment before the yelp and stomp of kid and dog, and we appraise: with horizon always rushing over us, we are hardly winners but we have not lost.
We refuse the game.
Though each day ends in slow collapse and starts in a more tired tired, we have the grace of looking on, the wet eyes, the crying smiles of 'this is serious'. The laughing supersede of adding up, of well clanking words of 'this is why'. We speak the sounds of this home in its settle, fade and flake, the carpet wear of sheltered guests, our broken friends, each and every one -- like us -- a refugee, each a thousand small lines of frailty. We cut our hands in murky sinks of broken glasses. We go down each night laughing in small moments grasped with sometimes liquor sometimes sex. With drugs not dull but bright. Though we rise each morning scanning, the sun grows dim. The poison is mete incrementally. The smoke obscures but we wise graceful and, weary, try. We speaking honest. We coughing blood -- you and me, our friends, dream family.
You must first gotta have soul to be sad.

Postcard 82

You haven't slept for days it seems -- not really. Too real dreams, distressingly normal dreams. Anxiety normalized through closed doors, pillows, white sheets. Unbend your long arms, sore as if the longness of them made them more so. Long unbent arms shooting their soreness out to your fingers. This too is a dream, your pain-glowing arms. The unreal is real. You have been calling pages of phone numbers, numbers with some important designation of which you cannot be sure. Each call rings four times  and is answered by the same blithe young lady, redirecting you to call the next number. She is kind. She sounds kind and confused. This is her job! You shout between calls. She sits in a small grey room at a metal desk waiting patiently for each call, upright in her neat flower dress. Who put her up to this? Anxiety, an acid faucet within you. It either flows or it drips. Bad seals says the man. But can you fix it? He just closes up his box and shrugs and leaves. He was supposed to help. And you with your phone calls and that girl. It's supposed to help. And this post card -- it was supposed to help. The real is unreal and you are sore, or at least very tired. Help who anyway? I am so tired, you think. I'll just give up. The world is so large and irreconcilable. The phone in front of you is ringing again. Straighten your dress and pick up the receiver. Someone is in great distress. You, haltering, don't know how to help. Still, you persist.

Postcard 83

It will be a time of birds. 

Light, hollow-boned, meager flight. 

This is bird weather -- the wind the rain. 

Shuddering off beaded dew, first risers of morning light. 

Strength of heart, strength of cabled tendon and sinew, strength of breast.

Heartbeat fluttering against frost of night. 

It will be a time of birds. 

 The flock, in air, moves in more dimensions. 

Each rise and turn and fall a thousand small arcs scribed.

Each flash of light, like turning scales, a thousand breasts bared. 

Each flock is writing etched in sky. 

It will be a time of birds.

Unwithered but fluttered and singing with clear and clever joy and fun.

Be everywhere at home, move upon axes strange and unknown. 

Take flight and be your own arc scribed decisive within decisive flock

Thrust forward your quick-beating heart. 

Do not take comfort. 

Do not relax. 

Do not be impervious. 

Do not withstand attacks. 

Strength of keen eyes and first awake. 

Strength of limbs that cannot help but tendon-bend to work at hand: 

persistence in loud defying dumb laws of gravity. 

It will be a time of birds. 

Live a meager hollow-boned life.

 Be light, sing out and free. 

The only thing straight is dive. 

Take flight! Master of whirl.