Renewed - gone large label back to navel

Some drama came into the scene. Drama! To excite the stale air. To fuck up anyone's agenda. Anarchy!
Some spent out on long nights and hazy days between command central (some adulator's basement or garage) and the civic center. Planned protest! The sound of it makes most young activists want to switch and become substitute teachers... probably most do. Or join the green party ranks. Or jump off some bridge. Or move to Amsterdam or Vancouver. Or talk on talk radio.  To be located and chicken-wired into a city 4 block radius by choice? Planned Protest? More like planned parenthood for dizzy girls spun dry from wet, half show up to the clinic because everyone's betting they will be -- but they aren't! -- pregnant yet.

All washes away, tears and problems and headaches and trash. But the drama remains. A great decompression hits the air, and electricity unloads upon the city and picks up pavement like legs over jumpropes. Feelings around the block are so diverse and tangential, burning like coals in the eyes and faces of those who live deep in the heart of the American city.  Every American city, from Quebec to Tijuana, Houston to Montreal, Toronto to Rio de Janeiro. Feelings are burning and so alive. Need no lighter fluid because the (sent by the sun) solar flares have arrived.

The fabric of life undervalued and torn. Woven across the city in dust colored thread, corn rows
and baggy clothes. Bare hands. Bare feet and calloused toes. Life in the streets was intense as hell, and when you survived the day and met the night, nothing else could be so sweet. Sewn back together ends of days - and carefully self-placed in the bed. Eye of needle sees the thread and closes ranks. Send in the dreams, the fortified tanks.

by Karen Garman, 2011

I found myself in a jam....reluctance berry preserves -- grown on common kinda ground, and a salve to the disheartened lost souls like myself. I knew. I saw them reaching for the same jars in the same grocery outlets. We had the same eyes and fears and blood pressure.

I found myself in a jam. Halfway through my peanut butter sandwich. But I saw no end to the torment I fought so hard to get over. I struggle and effort and fight and try. And why?  My mood, my status and my affect --my sense of myself in this chair this room this house this hood this town this city this country this world this universe this emptiness. Senseless sometimes. I can feel so foolish, my reputation fallen. My spirit lost and out there somewhere lookin' for me. Callin' and callin'.

I feel the shift always into drama.  Like when the burn through the subway the burn through the atmosphere the burn through my oats and honey and brown sugar. The burn in my belly. The burn of hot chlorinated tap water spraying out the pipes onto my thin skin.

 I might stop. Mid-sentence. Mid-summer. Mid-night. Or any other time I choose. I might.

 If we are speaking then of course I will not stop like that, no way. I cannot afford to stop! Hey! I might pull too quickly away from vacuuming the room to do the dishes. Or vice versa. Then in moments I realize the track switchers switched my tracks without my clear knowledge, and it burns me but its a slow burn like St Louis ribs or a the extremities exposed to high altitudes, low temperatures. I suppose i will taste good when the fuckers eat me the hell up! Haha. Hey! I did not mean to stop. I didn't stop at all, in fact. Prove it! No no no, give me another chance, will ya? I know its your show. I got carried away. Thought I was the main act! You got me excited, though, it was you! So come on man, shit. Give me a break!

Too fuckin' bad i am still without a studio. Thanks to my big mouth shot off again. Interviews so close to complete. Bank account so far from replete. To shut it all out and pay attention to this channel is all I know to do. All i can do, all i am able to. My last trick, come on. Show some compassion? Meet me underwater, where all distractions die and everyone knows the party's relocated to Paris. And Paris is right there, right fucking there! I swear!

I had to drop the many ways I came to greet you. No announcement. Like you.Your arrival unexpected, split second! Kinda brutal. We like it like that here in this little earthen corner of the sky earth water joint. Don't we get along so well? I study you within the four walls, floor and ceiling. But never confined, no, always free you are to float toward or away from me and us and this condition cannot condition the unconditionable -- that is you. You make me crazy, whatever whomever however you are.

 I was green, yes,  but not for long. Maybe only St Patricks, and felt like an imposter even then. Maybe as a kid? But I felt older then, when I was younger I felt much much older. Can you hear the stress in my voice as I raise to the rafters my own? my drama? I demand it, damn it! They get theirs, so im gonna get mine! I will be juvenile like third grade elementary if necessary. This is the kinda sacrifice I will make.

 I opened the door, yeah, but too many times. The door is now a japanese hand fan. Today and maybe tomorrow. The nickel bags of weed turned into quarter ounces rolled in dimes. This all started in the nineties, and took so long to leave behind me. The ones among them true, dropped out my life in pairs. I took the stairs and waved goodbye looking down at you in your descent, over the rail, and over my head you went.

You may have seen them in the hall, did you? Bounced like checks before they fall. You so fortunate, my dear, to see all this in the rear mirror view. Had you lit up the scene with your presence fine I know, the colors would bleed out. What commenced blue might have finished lacking color. Maybe not completely taken out, but still so far from feeling right. Like putting on those fresh dry unpressed cottons and feeling still too hot and yet beneath your skin you feel cold, ya know? Okay, well what is mine is mine! Something unique to me, calming that way, like I am somebody no one else be, like I am a singular moving object in a forest of trees.

Turn on, huh. Oxygenated really...wow what a turn on!   (to be continued)...