Salamanders Green (part 2A) page 15

The day is nice, today is a light cool mist over everything after weeks of ninety degrees. The coffee is good and strong. I'm sprawled out on the kitchen table with pen and paraphernalia. When I was first married my wife always made sure where ever we lived there was a room for my desk. It was great; a room, a desk, a typewriter and all my books. But as time went on and she and I got farther apart the desk seemed to get lost along the way as we moved and the place got smaller and smaller my room became less and less of a priority no longer, like myself, a necessity. However I did find a substitute for my desk, a most convenient and logical solution - a place to sprawl out and be close to the coffee pot a place generally as far as possible from sleeping children and angry women and even today when I have no typewriter, no home, no wife, I still have a little quiet and solitude here at this long inspiration of kitchen table.

It's nice and cool but I would like some sunlight, sunshine like yesterday, the girl dancing and laughing and I rubbed her sore muscles putting her to sleep in the ragged summer grass there by the stream you can still drink from. Maureen, the way your hair shines golden, the way you wore that yellow tied at the waist shirt - I want to buy you a gold medallion of the sun, little girl I want to lay you out in ninety degrees of heat and fuck you till we melt. Maureen in the sun quiet, cynical, tired, your legs are strong I thought you were nervous but you fell asleep as I worked the tight muscles of your legs yielding up the cheeks of you ass, a long sleek back up around sore shoulders the white ivory neck kissed between the space of blonde laying in the grass my hands unable to stop...

Then there is Maureen in evening laughter,

Restless martial arts forms against the stars

Stoned as shit on some hashish she bought

To see her now, happy, care free, no self put downs,

Golden lady I like to be here...

Maureen your skin is magic,

The night has been beautiful for us

The moonless stars are animals I want to travel among

While your desire is to keep both feet on firm earth

Dancing in the dark I hate to leave you –

All night my fingers shake in their sleep as if I had ten penises each dreaming of your cunt all at once.

Now is eleven a.m. someday July 1980 and the sun struggles with the overcast and I'm still being here at the kitchen table. My son will be four in November. I want to teach him to paint, to play the piano, to live...

Daydream: To be a successful artist so I can have a house where my son can come spend summer. A house with gardens of wild flowers, roses, peppers, onions and tomatoes, a house of tall windows and open empty rooms.

Question: Doesn't every artist want to be Picasso and every writer Henry Miller?

Answer: (fill in to the best of your ability. you may use the other side of the page if you need to.)

______________________________________________

Question: Doesn't loving to create...?

Loving to create, to tears, painfully loving to create. To complete, to create, to live off ones work as if it were food, each painting a mouth full, every sentence something to chew. As I write I must stop too full to take another word, as I paint I must stop lay down and digest, until such time as ravenous with hunger I must begin one or the other once again. Lick the canvasses, suck the colour straight from the tube, chew the smudged papers and sip from squeezed ink pens... It gets me horny to think about. Cigarette moth’s geranium spider web sun grey morning bright with afternoon walking.

Salamanders Green (Part2A) page 14

So trying with Suli again. At first we did good but now? The same old shit again. And I know I shouldn't be surprised and should have known better but well what can I say? I was thinking about being with my son and having my wife back, I couldn't have been right with myself if I didn't try once more...

And so Suli wants everything given to her immediately and I just want to be loved. I can't give her a new house and she can't love me til I can. I keep trying to remember - its just a place to eat sleep and see my son. Everything has to be her way and its all I-my-me-mine. It hurts to have trusted in her love again only to find I still don't have a big enough pay check to be considered. If only she were with me instead of against me.

It seems my wanting to be loved in this lifetime is wanting the impossible. I can't really paint here anymore, the atmosphere is too depressing. I know we're just kicking around a dead horse of a marriage. Neither of us can give what the other wants. It's hard to accept, I still feel responsibility to the marriage, to my wife - I was so proud to have her, she loved me and I knew it, we were special to each other - then. But we change and it must be crazy to try and force another person to want me. That's what I tried to do - I should have never come back! Its a dead end here. I've tried my best and there is some satisfaction. Even though it wasn't enough and I know I have to leave soon this time for good... Still wishing, hoping, still wanting my wife to love me - Fuck it! It's just a place to eat and sleep and see my son. Expect nothing more, there is nothing. Got paid today, going out, a few drinks to smooth myself over and I'll try to hustle up some cash on the coke exchange while searching for love among the ruins.

Bermuda Gold; a bottle of liquor brought back to me from the island by my sister.

May is a wispy and green. The month has treated me well. I’ve just been playing with crayons and papers, drawing and writing in crayon.

No car and bored. I want to break away. I'm not alive. Shit, I'm not ready to write today, still too tight, trying too hard, trying to think of something to write, too much like a job - fuck it. I want to write about woman and lovers, about flea markets and Spanish bars, about peeling off rain soaked clothes and the cool curve of your soaked ass. I want to tease your nipples between the sunlight mirage of passing clouds, tickled by your own long blonde hair, to touch, to tell of you the girl, who swings me into dreams ... The guitar player who makes his fingers bleed and this woman sitting out on her third floor porch chain smoking Pall Malls lighting one off the other all day long every day waits for something she doesn't even know, interrupted only by his occasional returns...

But I'm too tight, too stuck and the sun is dipping behind grey and the wind is up and the curtains are falling off the widows and I'm gonna smoke another cigarette have another shot of Bermuda hair tonic.... Now lets see - Nope. Just can't seem to catch that line, guess I should go back to crayons.

Too damn cold and I'm stalling, still scribbling just hoping to latch onto something. I mean so what about the weather? So what about anything? I mean who gives a fuck about what I write? How about those books they sell now, the ones with blank pages all fancy bound, should be a best seller - It's perfect, all those people who don't give a fuck about anything can just look at those pages and read about their favourite subject....

I walk down these city streets of this dead end town that sometimes I love, sometimes I hate. A factory town losing it's factories. A town where urban renewal is held up because somebody wants to make the public piss hall a historical monument - like George Washington sat here.

But I like the shabby brick works and the Diamond Ginger Ale sign painted full length along the tenement house, this town like a private derelict playground, half deserted, uptown junkies down-town dress shops, Italian marble churches, the palace theatre once grand opera now Mr. Atlantic States.... I'm heating up last night’s dinner - shrimp Creole, for lunch. There's a healthy chill in the air and today is Wednesday - the wife is always friendly on Wednesday - that's the day I get paid. She wants to go out with me tonight, for drinking and dancing she says but what she really wants is to make sure I don't blow the cash on canvass, coke or horses. It's kinda funny. Just tried to eat some toast but couldn't get past the margarine, nothing worse than a cheap imitation of something one loves. It's hard getting used to this place. It's weird coming back (again!) to live in the house and with these people I grew up with and not feel at home. Today is the first time I've been almost alone in three months. That's one of the hard parts of coming back, the never getting to be alone. It's difficult to work with people always running around. I have no place of my own again, I sleep on the couch. (Yes again.)

salamanders green part 2A page 13

HELP SAVE A LIFE

homeless artist in need of adoption

great companion

good with children

all shots up to date.

Put together some eggs and stuff for the kid. Used a paper towel to filter the coffee, worked well, a little anisette to sweeten and we have the perfect after dishes after feeding Sean his breakfast treat. Want to go somewhere today, don't care or know where but got some cash, got my son got the old lady's car and she's sleeping so - got the world on a string... everything I need well almost, Seany wants me to go back and get Duchess, our black Doberman. So OK Seany you’re right we have to take her with us so she won't cry. We drive up to the golf course where I work; we cut out off the main road on to a pot holed maintenance road and park along the edge of an abandoned fairway. I leave the car door open so we can hear the radio and me and the kid and the dog run around like mad until the rain gets there and we pack up ourselves into the old Cutlass Supreme head out to A&W burger joint. “Be sure and get extra pickles on the one for Duchess. She really likes them you know Dad.” That big scary black devil Doberman loves my son almost as much as I do. Dear old duchess with her red bandanna collar. Patience of a saint never growled at the kid even when he'd pull her eyelids out and twist them in his tiny little fists. Saint Duchess only whines a bit waiting for me to rescue her from the tyranny of toddlers. And when he was learning to walk? Wasn't it Duchess like some black devil mother hen following just behind as if to make sure no harm would come to her charge and when as he occasionally did, Sean fell? Wasn't it Duchess on the spot licking his face so that any thought of tears vanished into tickled laughter? There was a time when I'd always carry a pen and a wad of note paper where ever I went. I'd be writing poems in the woods, in the churches, the mens rooms, the bar, leaning up in a doorway out of the rain down-town the heavy smoke of damp cigarettes lace the perfume of cheap port wine like a brown paper bag coming up with ink stains from my coat pocket cold bricks against my neck leaning back out of the rain breathing deep the cold air that waits for snow...

It's been a long time since I've done that needless to say it's been a long time since I came up with a line of poetry. Today I was going through some things and found one of those wads of paper with some writing on it and also tucked in was an old Bic pen - still works! So how does one resist? What the fuck, why not write?

I've not been with my wife or son, been staying at my parents. I'm sitting here trying to sort out my feelings listening to my brother's stereo - Dylan, Don't Think Twice It's Alright, Neil Young, Oh Lonesome Me.... There is a large lump where my heart used to be and it's so cold it feels like pain.

Still what I am needing most is a place to live so Money! Money, money everywhere but not a cent for me. I think if I had enough money I could have kept my wife, she loves new cars and big houses and clothes and furniture and somewhere down the line maybe there used to be I'm going to take a walk up by the reservoir. The place where I "grew up", the place of first acid trips and parties, the place of good comrades and the first time I made love. There is a place I go there a place where my first lover and I sat by the little pond hidden by the red pines, a place of still remembering, a happy good remembering, a grateful remembering of you Mary.

Along, along... and here I am 24 years old smoking to many cigarettes, working my ass off for three dollars and fifty cents an hour, living at my parents, sleeping on the sofa in a house full of cat hair, and my wife has told me to leave her alone - to get the fuck out, she wants to go out with other guys to see if she can't be happier and if not well then maybe she'll take me back. My sons got no family. I got no friend to talk to, no woman to love - and they still ain't gonna keep me down 'cause somewhere there is a little bit of luck left and no matter what happens I'm gonna be around. Painful, yes but not fatal! I'll still be here for a while longer, here in this life, here on this planet and I suppose it doesn't really mean a thing. Pain is just another way of seeing how alive you are. So I'm gonna shake these lonesome blues get the fuck out and find someone new....

Sitting here reading through what I've written, it's been months since the last word.... and where does one start? How to get back into the groove? Lesson number one: You can never go back! Which is no solution to my problem - to write. I'm not living any where still the couch at Mom and Dad's. Haven't painted in about six months and its been almost as long since any poetry. It's crazy all the wasted time. Doing the bar scene, a few mid night escapades, girls who make me happy for a while, sell a little coke, make love to Suli once in a while afterwards feeling so achey because you can never really go back. I have dreams of telephone calls from women in big rooms full with blank canvasses and death and terrors. Dreams - these images are common in my dreams.

Looking for love among the ruins. Among the "friends" who fuck my wife, among the spilt stale beer blue fog across the bar room television light. Looking for love among the ruins the shell shocked soldier bleeds red from his eyes, from his heart and from underneath his finger nails. Big titted broads fresh vomit on their breath hungry for kisses, little girl giggles, teasers pleasers, playing card people flipping one game after the other, power plays just getting you to say OK. is enough, she never shows and when you call no one knows just who you are but she might be back tomorrow, and when you call no one knows just who you are but could you not call here anymore. I am some misguided saint, my lamp dull above the darkness - show me an honest person and I’ll call you a liar. A veteran on the battlefield ending up with scars that should but cannot be hidden, wounds that should but cannot be fatal.

salamanders green part 2A, page 12

1979-80

Bought Millers Rosy Crucifixion, spent the evening looking for all the sex part in the first book. I'm horny as hell to start with... My wife wants to leave me, can’t afford to live alone, feeling kinda broken, a discard, nobody can make me work. My own fault too, always left the good ones for the bad. It's going to take a talented woman to save me. The real problem isn't being without a woman or is it blistering myself with masturbation but rather not having a place to live. I just wish I could hole up somewhere and catch my breath. Some time a room to write, paint, just live for a while. I'm at my best when I'm on my own. Unfortunately for me my wife has drained a lot off of me. She's been my daily narcotic and now it kills me to live with her but I am afraid to go it with out her. It's going to happen though. One way or the other it is happening so, got to get my ass in gear. I'm a painter and a writer. I should be overjoyed with my new freedom. Instead I play the self pity gig. It does hurt about my son. I must in honesty say it hurts me that he won't have a family and I did want with all my heart to be with him as he grew.... Now is too late and does it matter whose fault it is? I have to live my life now and all I can give him is as much honesty as I am able, as I know it.

September rolling into Autumn, three o'clock running into tomorrow, cigarette smoke needles the corner of my nose, fuck it I wish I had some coke and fuckin’ Christ I been lonely most of my life and horny the rest of it - I must be due to catch a break. Can't complain about the weather today, so nice that even the wife couldn't get me down - I was happy today I woke up at five a.m. Venus staring me in the eye.... "Another cigarette pal? A little trouble with this writing stuff?" Now not talking to myself but writing to my self! Talk about masturbation I'm doing the literary version. Any way -

"Another cigarette pal?"

"Sure why not."

Damn the waters blocked for months.

So it’s like this, Sex is the Muse. No Sex = no production. If I just had a woman I could be with then writing would be easy. With painting all I need is a space, a room, a table, you know just give me the place to do it and I can always paint. I'm not passing the buck or nothing, I know I can get a piece of ass but what I really want is a true hot blooded romance.

Went to see my sister-in-law last night. Sat and watched a few movies, drank Marie Brizzard and got high. Have to get back with the car so the wife can go to work so I'm driving with a sweet breath and a nose full of cocaine and how nice it was to sit and relax to sink into being soft and comfortable at Terry's house...relax something I cannot do at home. I'm in bed high and feeling like a breath of fresh air, my wife even kisses me good-bye, a real shocker. It's late September and cold as thirty degrees but I'm warm and nice thinking about how falling asleep between the beautiful breasts of my wife's sister would be luxury.

Seven a.m. five hours sleep, a line of coke and a cigarette for breakfast, going to work, got that giddy cocaine hangover - don't give a fuck, don't have no cares, don't matter where I'm going as long as it's somewhere....

Turns out I was supposed to have the day off anyway. So I hang around the garage for a cup of coffee until everyone else starts then I leave before the boss changes his mind and finds something for me to do. Not feeling too bad today even without the coke I'd be feeling OK. Got a check the other day from some scholarship deal from the school, a remission of tuition scholarship. I mean free money in the mail, that's enough to put anyone in good spirits for a while.

Suli is looking for a place to live without me and I wish I could find a place too! Can't stay here even without her I couldn't - simply, can’t afford it. Besides the place is too cold in the winter and too wet in summer - my paintings get mouldy from the lake damp. All I want is a dry place where I can paint and do my poetry, a place where I can be alone, able to be myself. Also what makes it hard is not having a car so I also need to get a car or a place close to work but this little town doesn't have much to offer a starving artist :

WANTED

Good home for starving artist

comes complete with books and paintings

Packed my books yesterday, six large boxes of them. I suppose I should get rid of them but I just like to keep them around, even though I've read them all some even twice, but I get attached to them. Besides when I get settled if I get any literate visitors they can see how well read I am. All possessions are a boost to the ego, even books, which is all right with me, I need to booster myself. I mean I'd love to have someone look at my books and see me - can't you can tell a person from the book they keep? But no one seems to notice. It would be great to get a hold of someone who is interested in art and literature. You know I have all kinds of canvasses all over this little cottage, I mean the walls are covered with some aggressive colours - my friends though ignore them. It's like I have some terrible disease or affliction and they don't want to draw attention to it by talking about it. The only other artist I ever knew was Mary Brown, a dancer, a tragedy, a poet , a pre - Raphaelite - and of the spoken word? Well I never knew anyone whose voice was so hypnotic; I could hardly talk with her I’d be in such a state - the sound of her voice such a profound effect on me. I still find it hard to believe. Mary's voice in that small space between awake and sleep still makes love a timeless narcotic long after being unable to remember her face. I got her to write poetry. She got me to paint. I don't know if she still writes. She never saw me paint.... Christ, with all the madness I wish she was with me again.

Anyway, enough of the past, I'm hot for the future. I'm getting free of Suli, I've a chance to be happy, I'm getting money in the mail from people I don't even know and I can feel it in the air, I can sense it...And there is very definitely a woman on the horizon - I wonder who she is and how the fuck long it will take us to get together? But regardless of the bullshit there is a woman, only a shadow now only the bare essence of female soon though she'll take form. Physical features, personality revealed....

And the morning is young and I'm ecstatic - song sings from every pore, I'm exhausted, I'm energised - a snapped power line on my way. Today might be the day I find my next lover and if not fuck it there will be other days. And no Suli not even you my darling little slut wife, not even you are going to get me down today! This is my life my season my time - The wind and autumn sun strong like a crack along the concrete that my toes tap upon. I cannot care if I live in a tent this winter, I cannot care about anything now except I am free unchecked unleashed wild through the country side so watch out for your daughters and your wives....

Tomorrow might very well find me caged and shackled by my own self doubts but today I ain't gettin caught - Fuck you world go sit on a blind bulls dick cause you ain't gettin me - I'm on the way back to myself - Jail, drugs, knifings, marriage, shit somebody wanted to stamp me out but fuck you here I am! Maybe not exactly standing but I'm making an upward motion and in spite of anything I am happy about having lived and to be alive and there's no bullshit when I say that when it comes down to it I can regret nothing because I do love my life. I want to live somewhere. I can't paint and it's hard to write in this place. The house itself is oppressive to me, it’s just a down place besides it’s been too long since I moved, been here almost two years in the same place - dragsville. But I'm sure I'll live some where right?

salamanders green part 1, page 11

The River Is Low Tonight

The day has been quiet my wife came home about ten, took the baby out to her mothers and another friend named Dave is coming over and we'll go fishing and I guess trout have mothers too and I am the killer of their children and I believe these fish do have feeling, intelligence. I think about the sudden flash of pain searing down their spine as the sudden hook is set. I think about the cruel play upon their instinct to grab, to savagely attack their prey so that their meal is not lost to the current of the river the cruelty of how they must practically hook them selves or starve; I can see my self cruising fast waters striking fast or loose those rare scraps of proteins. In my life there is no such thing as snack food; every scrap necessity. Trout loves the river, the minute he's brought out he’s already half dead from a broken heart. No hook gives more pain. Swift clear water dancing diffused brass sunlight skipping along mossy stones, tinted pools brown, rose, white, stones, certain rapids waiting out the low water heat of a summer day because it's deep there, cool there, always the heart of the river any bug- worm- fly- meal falling in brought over that spot even in low water days it was cool there, swift, no moss on this bed of rose, white and a million brassy shades of light, no moss on this bed of cool stones that shall now no longer know your particular presence.

The river is low. Tonight is the first night I cannot hear the sound of running water as I lay in bed. Spring. Sleep. Darkness. Through only my dreams the echoing rapid river. Tonight is almost silent only one distant cricket. Perhaps it’s because our house is surrounded now by desolation, even the river is wary. The new owners with their hired out state wards have started off their ownership by cutting down every tree on the land all the trees whether oak or lilac, anything that grows destroyed - squirrels we used to see four at a time now I occasionally see but one across the river. Muskrats home in the rocks on the bank right bellow the bedroom window, now buried with dirt debris, torn, twisted limbs of oak maple lilac quince. The tree the squirrels used to get to the roof of the sun porch and drink from the clogged rain gutters, (being too lazy to trek all the way down for river water) is gone. There will be no more acorns and the squirrels have moved across the river. There will be no more muskrat he is either suffocated in his buried home or else he too has moved on. The chipmunks that used to scatter as if wind blown among the sunny boulders on the bank, they are scattered now forever never to return and the early morning splash of ducks upon the water replaced with buzz saws yells cussing and the ill use of good natured fools.

This winter no squirrel may find emergency acorns in the clogged gutters, no one who lives in this upstairs apartment will get photographs of the grey imp posing right profile, left profile, full front, tail end. And of the annual nest of blackbirds there in the rusty drainpipe sticking out of the back wall of the house, what of them while these people renovate? When the aluminium siding is put up or the walls knocked down, or when the bank is filled in and the last tree cut, when all the shit is done, everything clean, everything neat, new, suburbia , what consideration will be given the ugly spiny black bird chicks? The beautifully brown warrior shy wasps that live in the fence pipe surely they must be burnt out so the fence may be safely ripped down and replaced by stockade maybe red wood fence or maybe black iron spikes or western type rails; something a little more in tune with a renovated modern home something more appropriate than a rusted scrap pipe fence. I suppose that's how to improve property value, you don't need rats or squirrels or ducks or trees or wild flowers, wasps or birds cluttering up the place with their annoyances and I'm sure if they could they'd re route the river so there'd be no bugs or dampness that might damage the structure and attract further vermin. Like all the rest we too are being driven out with no place to go not even across the river for us, soon only the brown velvet mice that run through the walls will remain blissfully ignorant of the awaiting poison.

No job, no place to live, the three of us out right peasants. House full of tensions, dreams, uncertainty, the only joy is in the child, his ever groping ever learning life unfolding petal by petal before our eyes - nothing stops him not walls or stairs, fear or love, nothing stops the child, the ever beautiful constant hope, the child.

I'm sitting in the kitchen at the little table we stole from some bar, the place is too small for a full size table but in spite of the crampness it is home and I hate to leave, it was the first place that came close to feeling like a real home, all our drama, comedy, love making, births, deaths, fights, all - no matter what, was surrounded by a familiar warmth, the so familiar warmth of my family, my home.

I'm sitting here drinking some tea, there's some local mellow sounds station on the radio while outside the summer is in full swing, across the river tall full green trees ruffled and savaged by the wind and the sunlight, the sunlight.... A couple of days ago the rain filled the river to bulging but now already back to hot and sunny the subdued river is almost silent.

Haven't been outside for a while at least not just outside doing what I want, last almost week was spent moving my sister in- laws things. She moved out from living downstairs. She is divorced and has a five year old daughter and well anyway besides moving her seven years of collecting stuffs and one piano there were households of things being stored by friends of hers in the cellar that had to be moved - a regular pain in the ass situation. Now here I am trying to find an apartment and a job to pay for it by the end of the month and it's the twenty seventh and there's no time to relax, no time and I know it's my own fault but maybe something will happen sooner or later something has to come together, meanwhile there is my son and yesterday there were two wood ducks male and female on the river and a friend of mine kept me smiling all day when she told me she was pregnant just made me smile all day and just now I saw a chipmunk after thinking they were driven out forever. These things make me happy; these things make me make it. Last night in my dreams I saw two water snakes in the river red copper brown through shaded water and a squirrel came up the stairs into the living room and ate pretzels with me and we were living in a new house and I could fly.

salamanders green part 1, page 10

High School.

We smoked dope into the hallways, fell down the stairways, passed out in the

bathrooms, and didn't feel the fall and no one in charge really knew what the deal was. Like we were on the first wave of: drugs are coming to your school and it was fucking fun! We weren't just kids we were down freaks, acid heads, pot heads, geniuses, painters, poets, musicians, potential addicts, winos, garbage picker divinities. We were reckless with abandon squanderers, fearless too alive to ever die. We were the Class of the whole country it was our magic summers, our hanging out, our exploration and the realisation that we were going to make it any way we could, the hope the dream, the spit, piss, tits, ass, prick, cunt jocks, heads, of a generation. The nobodies who would make more money in 1 year than I would in three, the high class chicks that were turned out to be nothing more than scared shitless of living, the whole fucking thing so typical yet so unique because me and my best friend Dave drink wine in the alley, hang out on the green or Uncle Sam's head shop, write poetry talk about California taking off hitching across the country “hitching a ride to the end of the highway” (Joni Mitchell) ending up going no where married in the same town as our fathers having kid’s bills and work and the whole thing so fucking typical except me and Dave were friends and now we don't see each other very much and we struggle alone with the fact that it’s all irrelevant and can any one really beat the system, the system that just swallows up individualities and makes all things common. Except me and Dave are at heart one with the winos the dope fiends the poets and romantics we are at heart with them, he still plays that guitar an me I still bang away on this typewriter ... and we're still winos at heart and the city now is dead all the winos busted killed rolled in asylums or dried out and living with their son in New Haven. The freaks pretty much the same busted dead or in California or jail there are no head shops pool halls, congregations of stoned undesirables. Instead when I walk through the streets now I feel violence, tension - empty store fronts, gangs, Uzis, sawn off shotgun hard edge of new drugs, designed as if to meet all the scare tactics that we knew was only propaganda in our day. Now they have drugs that do destroy your brain, make you instantly addicted, make you kill.

The school is moved out to the suburbs where maybe it’s not such a bad environment. I walk these streets that were once my own not seeing a familiar face never an invite to get high or share a bottle in fact not even a wino in sight. Dave is working for the phone company but I guess he still plays, I think I saw him once  playing at a bar down the street it was too loud, not the music but the people, too loud and crowded no way to talk so I left.

Baby Seals

The baby seals are clubbed to death in front of their mothers skinned the carcass left to rot. It is common for the mother to stay by the carcass for days trying to rouse it, perhaps trying to make sense of the motionless blob that her offspring has become or maybe she is herself in some state of shock. Now life and death is a common thing, so too is killing but the question is who really needs a fur coat that bad? Even if there is no danger of extinction it still sucks but there is a reasonable doubt as to the survival of the species so what the fuck buddy make a living out of selling dope or refrigerators or something.

salamanders green part 1, page 9

School

My wife is getting ready for the fall semester she's going back after missing a year. All excitement picking courses teachers figuring schedules I am happy to see her this way. Glad to see her excitement, her interest, her hope for something better and my own hope that this will get some of the boredom out of the woman's life. I've never gone to college but I remember my high school days the old decrepit down town building with its own unique strain of cock roach the first evolutionary change in the cock roach in over a million years - survival of the fittest. The hallways were warped the paint was typical urban grey maybe some military surplus form of battleship, the special grey of park buildings, jails, basements, garbage incinerators. A greasy grey and yellow brick building sometimes floors of rickety wood or bulging ancient concrete painted grey, anything not yellow brick was painted grey. And the girls, I remember girls every size shape colour from china, India, South America Africa French Italian and beautiful black hair blue eye shy Mobilia from Portugal - America you know every kind of girl ugly pretty dumb smart holy virgins blessed sluts any description you could give me I would find there a girl to match it and I suppose this isn't unusual I mean probably every city high school is like that but when you take a young boy who has never seen more than the little girls of his suburban little neighbourhood K through 8 school, the one every one could walk to, the one with ten or fifteen in a class, when you take that young boy and put him in close closed contact with these girls, first contacts with exotic juicy sweet women, the perfect situation stuck here in this building for six hours a day and its great because you get to show off in class by either being smart or smart assed depending on what the situation called for and if you be cool you could wise off but at the same time come off as being intelligent and if you didn't come on like the true pervert that is really you well then you could make out pretty good, fish in a bucket baby and if you were me it wasn't all that easy but you had a friend named Dave and most afternoons cut the last class or get early dismissal because we had a "job" and be downtown working on a bottle of wine that we pan handle the money for and had to get one of the winos to buy it for us because we were under age but once the government dropped the age to eighteen so that the boys who were old enough to die in Viet Nam were now old enough to drink legal we were able to buy our own as our long hair and beards allowed us to pass for at least eighteen and if you had this best friend named Dave and you each had a bottle of that cheap new apple wine you hung around the alley ways and on the green checking out chicks checking out drugs which were both just coming into our lives and we'd talk for hours about California and the great adventure of hitching across the country. (Contrary to popular belief drugs were not invented in the sixties it was just when you were introduced at a certain time and its pretty much been proven that drugs invent users not the other way around) - Any way the time of our growing the time of our high school days were the times of head shops and marijuana romance, I think that even though marijuana has been around forever it has never been so romanticised before or since somewhere it lost its magic but in those high times it was in full flower, the times of war and peace demonstrations, expanding consciousness LSD every one I was ever close to was into acid (LSD) a phase perhaps like apple wine like marijuana like high school days, a phase and to this day I'm not sure every one has stopped getting into acid so much as they grew out of it or that after the seventies the quality of acid simply sucked and it wasn't worth really doing any more. Any way it was the time of our lives as is everybody's high school days I guess and my poor mother thinking I was missing out because I didn't play sports or join the glee club, she used to warn me that I'd regret not joining schools activities and well to set the story straight Ma I had the time of my life although I couldn't really explain it to you how much I was involved in certain school activities - everything was moving new exciting possible, the town was full of freaks, at night there were open parties on the green and after school me and Dave were drinking wine and hanging out meeting people of all kinds from all kinds of places, hippies, hobos, artists, musicians people who came in with news of the outer worlds. One of our new best friends was the old wino Charlie Brown I remember one day we read him his obituary from the local paper apparently someone with the same name same birth day same home town just died. The rest of the day was spent showing people the obituary and trying to get them to contribute to the wake. I can still see the little fellow, pushing through the crowd gathered at the Palace Theatre waiting for some concert by the New riders or Quick Messenger Service and there is Charlie Brown getting the crowd to make way as he called his dog to come through, his invisible dog for whom he was trying to raise funds for the re-visabling operation, of course he usually did well with the concert goers in those days most of the freaks would have some coin for him. And when they put a man on the moon and it was all the front pages of all the papers wasn't there some slight bitterness in his remark " so big fuckin deal I been to the moon every night since the end of the fuckin war"

School the time when dress codes were thrown out and we were dungareed flannel shirted stoned little vagabonds safe and secure in the confined controlled environment of school but when you had a best friend named Dave and you hung around down town you were out there baby, living, experiencing flavours, languages, violence, rip offs, sex, smell, of a living city. You were out there with people, travellers, wanderers, explorers, exploiters, beggar men, thieves, people who were human people who were making it anyway they could desperate adventurous, hopeful, wonderful, brave, crazy, evil, frightened, amazing beautifully human .