Call and Response poems James and Ross revisited

September 7th, 1999

To Ross

No sadness in this one, no wont, no confusion, no wierdness, 

no sexual battery of the self,

no frustration to clog our sinks, 

no anticlimactic fuzzthinkers......

I just wanted to know how your holiday was......

oh, and to say I am well and 

in no way close to the place I was in the last few confusing middle of the night shots in the dark..

I fed myself up with that whole amberthing 

and one of the shots hit a piñata that bled all over me 

the rediculous rain that rains and rains all over us and we can't stop it, 

it is there, for us or against us....

always for us and against us, 

it hits and we can laugh, smile or get angry and upset...

let it rain...

let it rain out my cigarette..., thankfully so. 

There is much much power in the littlest things... 

like turning the ringer off on the phone. 

I decided that no call could make me feel any better and 

she wouldn't call anyway and 

if she was to I wouldn't care or need that. No good could come of that anyway...

no call could give me what I was looking for so

I switched it off for a night, then two. 

There is power in that, 

a great tantamount starshaking power that does wonders 

that St. John's Wort and funny movies can only imagine reaching....

Maybe you remember it. It is a definate bachelor type of power, 

maybe an illegal intoxicant..

It was and it worked. It made me free, 

like throwing away a half smoked smoke, 

like turning off a song that you love halfway through..

It was necessary and made a step, 

a step out of the darkness......the night they drove old dixie down...

.na na na na nana na an na na ............... .Love James

To James

To reply...

To reply with a laugh and a smile and a sigh. 
No tears in the eye? 
No Joe 
we must flow with things not so salty and wet yet sweet sweat. 
To reply with a gleam in the eyes 
when Joe NOLA boy tells stories of morning glorious dreams come true 
like that time he decided it was time to stop stewing in love-sick soup telephone ringer roues.

Yes! 
And bravo para mi hombre if only I could speak Spanish. 
And yes. 
I found a chord and accord a connection and reflection.
Some circumspection... manipulated...
and that blood stained rust caked word we worship or adore adulterate then abhore
when SHE forgets that mi penga AINT no sign of the times and a nursery rhyme spewing lemon flavored lyme. 
An exclamation point 
or an untouched joint 
choking on token moments of affection mistaken for truth 
and a blood stained rust caked gold plated peuter word at times used as a sword that some love-wishers hord.

Yes it was a good weekend and a holiday. 
No piñatas spitting upon my mind multicultural candy coins. 
Just sweet sweat minus chocha amarga. 
A vacation from spirit stimied by New New Yawkers and unhospitality hawkers. 
From conformity sharks and matty matty matty materialist paddies clothed in the latest garments of ever so perpetuated styles and when that ever-so-rare a New York notion appears I mean ya see Wall Street to Mid-town even East to West Village silicon smiles. 
I walk miles 
to meet the real and true 
HE and SHE
that understands 
GOD is WE 
as long as we are honest and considerate, compassionate, thoughtful and free to be as we are 
when we are truly true.

Who? 
Oh I REALLY DON'T KNOW 
as the story goes about the tale of Joe or Jack with the weight of too many loves on his back. 
She was gorgeous. 
Gorgeous I tell ya. 
Yet she melted in my mind the way cotton candy disolves on one's tongue. 
True Freedom. 
Like that time I walked out the door without taking my art supplies and six books three journals a walkman two weeks worth of discs and seventeen scratchy scratch pens in a satchel, duffel bag and backpack for an evening of coffee house haunting waiting just waiting pre-senile osteo perosis. 
Yes... 
She was gone with the last change in barometric pressure or direction of wind. 
Did I swim?
 It could be that I was that sugar molecule melting in saliva on MY tongue. 
Absorbed and reabsorbed into my very own stream of consciousness.

SO...

gotta run, gotta skip, gotta jump. 
Gotta pretend earning a living for the sum sense of paying my rent is equivalent to worshiping the sun.

Love,

Ross in the city that hasn't yet awakened to the fact that style worn too tightly wears like old shoelaces and freyes and snaps. 
Style worn in place of soul is equivalent to the aftermath of sex being various forms of venereal disease, the clap. 
Attitude worn like clothes as style is like the assumption that buildings made of thick cement walls along the San Andres Fault will not crack and crumble.