Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

1. The wind picks up.   Encased in a tent, I'm attached to a kite about to take flight, and tonight I'm thankful for plastic. The rain fly strains at the sown straps, tent stakes, and plastic snaps, and I, tucked inside, watch the walls bend and  buckle, then snap back in place. Dry, I peek out the transparent screen knowing the low clouds reflecting the city lights of Santa Fe, make the plateau a dull gray as a smattering of raindrops fall. In the morning, green grass, white cactus flower, Indian Paintbrush, brown volcanic rock, and two unknown peaks, bathed in morning light, frame us as we pack up. The wind picks up.  On my bike, I'm attached to my bike pedals by shoes, and my legs push at the pedals and today I'm thankful for muscle. 2. All the guidebooks suggested I might see horses, but we don't and find our way back to the road and set out towards our car.   How much personal space must a cow...

Backstage, I stepped between Jive Poetic and a woman. Jive, a very tall, svelte black man, was upset and letting her know. She , being Texan, didn't take to kindly to a black man stepping up on her. But this is not a poem about race relations. No, this is a poem ducks issues about race, weaves around gender relations, even blocks issues of regional pride and jabs at my body in constant flow. This body seems a little different every day, and as I watch the slow addition of gray hair crawl across my chest, I know I'm not the same person, mentally, emotionally, or physically as I was at eighteen. So, it was with a huge degree of skepticism that when my doctor suggested I try and get back to the weight I was when I graduated from high school, I queried, "Really?" He cited some statistic about how most people are fully developed at eighteen and their weight then is ideal. My body has never been a statistic, and I wasn't one a...

I don't question where the muse goes, the unbridled, quick reflex that leads me to pick out books on a bookshelf, the random internet post that leads me to an article, a list of tracks I should be listening to, so when I stumbled upon your name on a list, I thought I'd give it a go. The "Jezebel" of Jazz, you bucked trends by not singing in an evening dress, preferring skirt and band jacket to place you squarely in the band instead of in front of it. The wikipedia entry says through a botched tonsillectomy it left you without a uvula Thus you created a percussive, short note style because you couldn't hold long phrases or use vibrato. So surprised that I'm not hearing "I'm going mad for a pad," filtering out through some weird internet commercial for Apple, but, hey, maybe they're not as hep as I think I am. Jump jiving Jezebel, you join Kenton, Goodman, Krupman, Herman, you loved pot, and mov...