the earth is my body

We stand in this sepia landscape, my older sister and I, next to a runoff ditch near our house, except, here we live in a farm house, and where the neighbors' should be.

But the ditch is dry and I am finding out that it can talk to us. They explain it to me as if queuing a sound bite, then a deep resounding voice has its moment, "the earth is my body."

I wander around in the wispy grass, noting weeds and withered cattails that line the eroded creek bend, and a small bare tree protruding near the bank, just a stick really, "that's his pee-pee," my sister tells me.

Then I turn and hurry toward the house as it all fades to the tune of a buzzing alarm clock.

that odd-numbered year

The economy is down, unemployment is up here in "free" half of the planet but it keeps on spinnin' just the same. For me it's not so much the threat of the bomb, it's more that the Iron Curtain is so opaque. I choose not to watch The Day After but hear about it at school.

One time I waited while my mom got groceries, lying down in the back seat of our '71 Monte Carlo. Two dudes I didn't know, with partially grown-out Mohawks, knock on the window above my head and ask if I have any matches. Seems I should take that as some kind of compliment.

Hanging out with a buddy I learn that 50's sounding song from the radio is actually a new group called the Stray Cats. Back then we'd sit in church with felt-tip pens and insert guns and grenades into the cartoon hands of unsuspecting Bible characters.

My sister is expecting again, and so we become blessed with one of my favorite brunettes ever.

Sooner or later we end up at a discount store called Rink's. Even though I had shied away from popular music when I had a near-nervous breakdown and accepted Christ last year, I find myself taking a look through the records and tapes. The Police, Journey, and Styx are all on an end cap with their slick cover art and strange symbols. The Styx release has a robot face and even says it contains backward messages, maybe even the kind that make you worship the devil, and so the End Times will probably happen before the next Olympics.

In my last year as a student in Vacation Bible School there were five of us in the "sixth grade" class, which we would start officially next fall. Two girls and three boys, the latter of which went to my school, one of them living next to my sister's family. Sad to realize at a young age how fast friends are rarely the best kind.

The summer is filled with uber-hot days that encourage me to stay inside, usually the house and sometimes Radio Shack. When I start back to school we change for gym and I can't believe how everyone else is tan around their shorts. By then all the girls are in heat over Michael Jackson, and one of the dudes cracks me up every day retelling the comedy routines he hears on cable channels.

Every night at the supper table there's a waxed paper half gallon of Clyde Evans store-brand milk with the owner's name on it. My friend's mom works in one of his delis. There is a S-A-V-E in EVANS.

Here lately the other kids seem to spend a lot of time standing around talking, and whenever I walk by it seems that's all there is to it, just talking. We used to just go with the flow and play stupid games all the time.

To escape the heat we head north to camp on the shore of Lake Huron, and Ontario's quasi-puritanical charm was the perfect oasis. There's a picture somewhere of me dragging my dad's pocket comb across the sand, as if I were a "beach comber." Get it? Anyway there are also shots of storm clouds I tried to capture in black and white film back then, because storms brought refuge from the sun, but it all taught me there are some things you just have to experience.

My childhood friend and girl next door is turning into a young woman and that's just insane, even though she still has me over to play Atari. Both her parents work and so some days she comes over after school to push my buttons. One time her dad butchered their chickens in the back yard. All said, my first real taste of dark humor.

Where's the Beef?

Mom has choir practice before the Sunday evening praise service, so Dad and I get milk shakes unless we pick up a lady and her toddler son, and either of those is kinda fun. With the shakes it's a hard choice between mocha and mint chocolate chip. We always drive the pickup, the same one used to haul firewood that he cuts around the area, sometimes with my older brother. It's like pulling teeth to get me to help out with that kind of thing. The buzzing saw gets old really quick, plus it's either too hot or cold and I end up waiting it out the cab.

Another one of the neighborhood girls just drives me insane. Period. There's a bug-zapper on her back porch that we can see and hear through the thick brush in their yard.

During one weekend in the spring, we hear some really loud rock music coming from two houses away. I ride my dad's bike to the neighbors' and peek around their bushes, when all of a sudden two high-school dudes come running out. One of them comes straight for me and the other gets in a car. I'd never worked the pedals so hard and finally make it to our garage. Dad goes out front as we watch the dude stroll past the house, staring as we stare back, and get picked up by his brother. That was the end of the loud music.

Jimmy Swaggart preaches his ass off every Sunday morning in our living room as we eat pancakes in the kitchen. Seems I could always hear the same nasal voice during the sinner's prayer at the end. There's a new name written down in glory!

It's mid-summer when mom finds it necessary to visit my sister's house while they all have a stomach bug and then brings it home for the weekend.

I'm usually scouring flea markets and garage sales for deals on seasoned electronics or cameras. One time I scored an old bag-type hair dryer, minus the bag, just because it produced hot air. Sometimes when the family came over for a holiday meal I would set up a card table in the living room to show some of them off, or else, just set up a tape recorder and narrate things.

One Saturday I had to be at the church while Mom was doing something, and the junior pastor gives me some "youth character building" books to read. One of them featured a drawing to illustrate that adults also "throw up when they are sick." To this day I'm not at complete peace with that moment.

At the mall you could go preppy or valley girl. Ewww my gawwwwwd, like, totalayyy.

About a month into the school year we spend half a week at a nearby YMCA camp doing all kinds of camp stuff. It's amazing how delightfully scary your peers can be in moments when there's little sense of adult supervision, fervent chants and wild-eyed speculation of pantyraids and orgies, only to have our counselor show up and make us pretend to sleep. My sister's neighbor boy was in my group and "found" that my camera had been messed with. But at one point someone wants to see how many of us can stand on an old tree stump and so a quiet blue-eyed girl I hardly knew gets an arm around me. I don't think I bathed the whole time.

As the Dukes of Hazzard loses steam the A-Team becomes the coolest TV show ever. Magnum PI was still for a more mature palate. Blue Thunder is fun, I don't care what they say.

Yet another girl next door teased me for the way I tried to deploy an experimental FM antenna. As I struggle to explain it and she'd keep asking "so that's why you were throwing a board onto your roof?"

At one point I start running speaker wires through the crawl space to set up a house-wide radio station serving the "Living Room, Family Room and Greater Garage Area" with the help of an old rack-mount PA amp someone gave me. I type up a charter of sorts for operating "The Speaker" on an on old Remington portable I drug home from Goodwill and co-sign it with my dad. It doesn't take long to figure out what volume levels will draw fire.

During some kind of meal event in the fellowship hall a bunch of us are sitting on stacked tables by the wall. One of the new dudes cuts a squawker and gets red in the face laughing as we scatter.

Just after Christmas I develop a taste for country music, years before people my age were flocking to Garth Brooks but not before Able Archer raises a few eyebrows behind the Iron Curtain.

here

having finally
accepted
a cordial invitation
i'm green as grass
even though
i've been

here

quite a while
from the looks of things
my own likeness
tastefully framed
on the scarred walls
then scattered about
books
and magazines
with familiar words
i must have uttered

here

in a burst
just shy of tearful
i shove them away
this simply
cannot be
hard to describe
how it feels

here

because
i am just
what i am

disillusioned

i turn my gaze
to the big bay window
such a perfect summer day
fluffy cotton floats in the blue
meeting lush verdant foliage
many creatures abound
in air and on land
great and small
two by two
too much
to take in

here

yet

i notice
a closet door
cracked, it beckons
crammed with boxes
of childhood drawings
mommy, daddy and kids
with the dog and a cat
one might think
all was well
except

i know better

then

i hear music
from another room
songs from the radio
speak
to the moment

but how

can it be
that the moment
had a finite beginning
yet
never seems
to end

here

one foot out

rolling

down a hill

biting and licking

as two pups

just fed

so it seems

only yesterday

they wake you up

emotions pull

right arm

toward the left

mind pulls the other

far to the right

a heart

in torsion

faced with lies

but not from lips

we convince ourselves

out of sheer pure

ignorance

sosad

same old

song and dance

inside quiet moments

truth screams but silently

she needs more of him

yet he longs for

everything

else

lie with me

lie with me
and listen to some jazz
it's on the radio i love the sound
on a saturday night how we work so hard
can we do it all by doing everything?
lie with me
so i don't lie alone
saturday night seems right for the sound
we can leave the light on you can read if you want
if you still can't relax
maybe i'll rub your feet a while
just lie with me and listen to some jazz
even days like this when we need to make something
why this crazy life running around?
lets make some time
that's why they play jazz
on a saturday night

Splinter

We were strolling along a sunny yet secluded trail with white-petaled blooms and her brother when a sliver from a twig made its way into her foot. She's a bit freaked as I try to fish it out.

We're both in high school, at least she would be soon, as far as I knew anyway. She's kinda tan and really shy and stacked like a cinderblock bunker.

No wonder she's freaked, I should be. Maybe I am. We've been going out for just over a month and we're on our way to where her dad lives.

Although I'd never admit it, our phone conversations are just starting to take on a Muzak quality. She writes me letters that I keep in a 12-inch cake tin.

The splinter is in with a toenail and I'm not even used to the way she smells yet, but her lip gloss tastes like wild cherries.

Her parents split last year and I hear it was pretty nasty, leaving her mom with seven boys and one helluva daughter.

That first night we'd stood in the church parking lot with her AquaNet bangs and the denim jacket she wears with everything. She playfully bites my tongue when we kiss.

I grew up in the township and this is my first city girl since I was four. Damn those brown eyes.

She gets an Anthrax poster for her room because I have one, but she generally goes for a pinup of Kip Winger with some kind of bulge.

At one point during the "surgery" she gets antsy and I playfully smack her on the leg and she playfully makes a big deal about it.

One time we stood on her front porch during the rain and burned cheap incense sticks from some store at the mall.

Her dad was staying in a trailer with her uncle, and come to think of it, she smells somewhere between musk and a basement.

Usually I see her where she babysits, and this fact delays the blow of my parents learning about her home life, where there are always flies in the kitchen and a loaf of bread with the bag left open.

Then again, maybe there was more to that slap on the leg. I just wanted her to calm down, but it could be the discomfort from the tiny fragment is really not as big a deal as she's making it.

Another time we walked by a house that had burned down in her neighborhood. I took home a pair sunglasses from among the rubble, they were way too big for my face and I just threw them in a drawer. Whenever I opened it I got hit with that aroma you can never forget, smoke from materials never intended for combustion, someone's life changed in minutes.

When I meet her father he seems entirely out of phase from how she'd described him. I still have the cake tin.

Bobby's House

Coolest thing, you can get out-of-town radio stations through cable, like 105 WTUE that's usually blocked out by elevator crap unless you drive a ways south of here. Sometimes day-oh is cool to crank up during a party, gets the girls shakin' anyway. WDAO. The Soul of Dayton.

I always watch the evening news for some reason, and when I'm here I can at least catch Frank Reynolds on ABC.

So I'm once again hagnin' out with Belinda. Bell from Hell, she pretends to not like being called that. She's babysitting her cousin, uncle Bobby's infant daughter, although, I have no clue why his wife's redheaded sister Paula can't watch the baby since she practically lives here.

Bell gets bored with the news so we switch to MTV. Not sure what will ever please the girl, she gets agitated when they show Donnie Iris because he found a stone fox blond to be Leah. Evidently every Caucasian female within visual range is the enemy of her soul, and she sighs when Paula bends over near the TV to put something away, as if those pale legs and bony butt cheeks are much distraction.

Feeling around under the velvety sofa cushions yields some lint, 19 cents, a Bic lighter, and a slap from Bell who's obviously not interested in discussing it, let alone what's in my pocket.

The other day I scored a tape dub of a new group called Def Leppard. Still can't believe the first song is really about that.

Bobby's wife came home drunk one night and gave Bell a watch, only to turn around and accuse her of stealing it. Whatever the case we made an adventure out of driving by in my parents' car and tossing it into their yard, careful to remove any fingerprints, as if that mattered.

Bell is this pouty dark-featured mix of Native, Italian, and toilet cleaner. Somehow that all adds up to a bubble you never can pop, at least while remaining somewhat a gentleman. She won't let me thumb through Bobby's record stash while anyone else is here but it's probably all country shit peppered with Eagles and Steely Dan. Her dad had almost methodically cheated on her mom, Bobby's little sister, sometimes right in their home, not that her mom is any angel.

I'd been in kindergarten with Paula. She always seemed to be hiding something behind her freckles. She had some dude over here one night and he tried to give Belinda some of his milkshake while she was half asleep.

My cousin tells me they have over-the-air subscriber TV down in Cinci, they give you a descrambler box and show movies and sports, sometimes concerts, even dirty movies if you pay extra. Sometimes my folks and I go down that way for baseball games. Not sure if I'd ever want TV bad enough to pay for it.

People tell me I'm missing a lot of fun by kissing Bell's behind. Even her own mother.

I think I should get a dirt bike. Actually I'd feel more at home on a scooter but those seem kinda nerdy.

Five bucks says there's a recent Doobie Brothers LP somewhere in the house, and probably some stuff I don't wanna know about.