I.
i can be satisfied. i can be very easily satisfied. i ask for no grail no relic no alchemical magic. cigarettes, filtered, yes. coffee. yes. a beautiful joint. yes. one of those pills that stills the shaking, that frenetic haunting rattle? okay, yes. a glass of what you're having, cabernet sauvignon? oh yes.

an honest tongue. yes. an honest face can satisfy me. i can be satisfied. my curiosity leads me. i follow my hands where they insist on going themselves. i can be satisfied. it's easy.

i can be satisfied; i do not require much technology. a revolving record collecting incense ash. Love, 'forever changes.' oh yes i can be satisfied.

an honest tongue. yes. an honest tongue can satisfy me. finding reflected in someone else my own insistence on the truth. i sleep in my blue slip, in that precarious balance. between my naivete, folly which dylan thomas would insist i keep, insist that i not grind beauty down to dust, for 'wisdom is folly, love is not", and that determined Keatsian part of my heart that demands, almost petulantly, the truth.

'for beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

i sleep in the balance, not feeling alone, feeling satisfied





II.
Arthur Lee has taught me a lot about love.

i might succumb to the dry cool breeze blowing today unexpectedly from the east. it doesn't bring a wall of sand or air thick with poison or even smoke from the forest, that constantly smouldering forest down the two-lane highway. it makes the limbs of those nectarine trees sway like unsteady drunks, teetering atop high-heels. only knocks off the lightest blooms and barely bothers the roses.

i do not intimately know the wind; i do not know its various names and only occasionally its origins. the wind and i met anonymously, as in the coatroom of a dark restaurant; we recognized one another immediately as strangers of old.

it can be a gentle nurse administering something cool, calming for a fever that seems infinite as space and deep as time. or a punishing hot hand slapping blood into your cheeks, hot hot hot; and nothing before you but more melting asphalt, steam rising into suffocating air. unpredictable wind; i take what i get. so i lay down this day, to hear its news.

this one...

the man himself, singing in his chains
like the sea...





'...... i want reality to hold
within my palm,
not, as a symbol, stone
speaking or no
but it, reality, whose voice I know
to be the circle not the stair of sound.'

dylan thomas

all the people at this party, they've got a lot of style. they've got stamps of many countries, they've got passport smiles. some are friendly. some are cutting. some are watching it from the wings. some are standing in the center, giving to get something. one beauty gets attention, and her eyepaint's running down. she's got a rose in her teeth and a lampshade crown. one minute she's so happy, next she's crying on someone's knee, saying laughing and crying, you know it's the same release. i told you met when i met you i was crazy; cry for us all, beauty. cry for eddie in the corner thinking there's nobody. and jack behind his joker and stone-cold grace behind her fan, and me, in my frightened silence, thinking i don't understand. i feel like i'm sleeping; can you wake me? you seem to have a broader sensibility. i'm just living on nerves and feelings, with a weak and a lazy mind, and coming to people's parties; stumbling deaf, dumb and blind. i wish i had more sense of humor, keeping the sadness at bay. throwing the lightness on these things, laughing it all away. laughing it all away. joni mitchell