The first winter snow came in last night. Moaning like a cat in heat through the crack in the window. My good friend "The Sailer" came home on Monday and I cornered him for first coffee in the morning, and then beer in the afternoon. The catching up of a year an'some. We told about girls, love lost or found and his kind eyes contrasted with his ugly mouth. We like to pretend we are tuff. Ben walks across the field ducking through old barbed wire fencing, hat cocked to one side. "I woke up with a pack-rat sitting on my pillow last night" he spits for exclamatory impact "I jumped out of bed and grabbed a bayonet. The little guy scurried into the corner and I pinned it there, then I yelled to Sarah "Sarrrrrahhhhh, bring meeeeee my longsword" she said "what?" My longsword I tell her and she pulls it down from were it lays on those elk horns above the table, ya know? She hands it to me and I stabbed the thing with it!" He spits again and we laugh. Ben wants to drag the old-pickup, a gift from the sailor's adopted mother, up to his place after it wouldn't start. I tell the sailor we should drag him into town, we laugh red faced thinking about it. "Ya! He couldn't get out could he?" "Nope!!!" I say smiling so my face hurt. We only drag him five miles down the road until he puts on the e-brake and we watch the tires smoke. We had forgotten about the e-brake. "You like that you sons-a-bitches?!!!" he yells as he jumps out in smoke and dust. We start laughing again. "It is good to be home!" the sailor gulps. I walk to the bank of the road to watch the larch trees turn a glowing green.
I have been painting dirty walls white and piling boxes with long forgotten things I don't remember. I hang my lights from the rafters and look at the pools they make, pools of electric glow waiting for me to wade into. I can't go there yet, I have to go through all the boxes and decide, what is worth hanging on to; such a grueling dusty business. "Hellow Sneeze, good to see ya again!" Am I an old man? Why do I have so many things that look old? Did I forget years inside the years and collected all these? They are other lives, from other places and not this earth I swear!!! Right now is the truth of the new paintings floating in the back of my mind. They are ghosts of the future and they haunt me now. Just as these boxes haunt me with the past.
This damn eternal now, I am lost in this and that; white walls, dust and dreams all of these prepare me for the Everest in my mind to climb or concur with the ghosts paintings in floating futures.
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