morning
Seattle
rain.
coffee and the burning of incense
my plant on the sill absorbing
the rain, wind, and album
while it rotates on the player
my dogs full
head full
all the decades lost and drained down
my feet bare against a throw rug that costs
more than my last car
and my blood tricked by health
my body snapping back into form
mind tricked by money
but today remembering the old days
the shit days
the days of running on fumes
in every sense of the phrase
an inch close to suicide without
even knowing it
the road and cities and sabotage
the faces and
the teeth in those faces
the rats inside of them
the roaches inside those
and the rotting insides
of them
but I sit here and drink coffee
Disintegration belting out from the
speakers
a nice contrast to Bad Brains
while I fed the dogs
and stretched
-yeah, no shit, stretched-
and watered the plant
which I’ve named Tom Araya
because when it was given to me
by some woman last year
it was just a stem and three leaves,
and it was thirsty
and shooting up from a
small, dark pot
and for some reason,
my mild synesthesia
placed a summer orange glow
around the
dark blue planter
and I heard Araya scream his
famous intro
on Angel Of Death
I’d never had a plant before him
and today Tom Araya is much taller
and living in a much bigger planter
15 or 16 leaves, his stem supported
by a bamboo splint
and next to his trunk in the soil
a new part of him is shooting up
in three stems from his badass
origin.
I sit here and listen to the rain
the album
the burning of scent
and time
and maybe wonder
but that’s what age
must put between us and
the world
and it’s what we use
to keep feeling like there’s
a fight to win
but I think about my plant
both of us abandoned by whores
after birth
both of us rescued by
soft hearts
and grown
from those hearts with
the best that they knew
and even though
I let time and populace
and myself break me down
from soil to trash to nearly saying
fuck it
I held on through words
which became my own soil
and I became their synesthesia
a slave to the source
to that place, the core that
has never stopped burning
toward a sky that we will
never know
regardless of how much
we praise it and mystify it
and give ourselves over
sitting here in Seattle
the rain tapers off
and I glance at Tom Araya:
I’ll keep getting richer
and you keep
getting
prettier.