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24.2.4
65th day of winter
4th day of the moon




When
             in the course of human events it becomes necessary 
in                                                 que un pueblo
disgrace                                             to dissolve the
with fortune                                            political bonds which
and men's eyes I                                           have connected them
all alone bewail my                                           to another
outcast state, desiring                                         and to
this man's art or another's grace                               assume

------ Shakespeare                                       ----- Jefferson



------------------------------------------------------------------------





               you know you're really losing your touch
               when a library card won't get you in to

               the club                      any more





_________________________________________________________________________

been working on a poem about la faraona -- the ghost at the now-vanished casino resort of Agua Caliente -- and Juan Soldado.

The poem is not a short one, but at present is only two pages long, well, two paper pages.  I've been working on it for almost three years on or off and think it's about ready for the next level.

Nothing to do with each other
twin pillars of murder measure
olde Tijuana on the river wall.

Hot spring phantom of mist and light and
the tomb of a soldier crossed town to die.

That's the beginning.  I'll show you more later.  There are priors.

One problem is the feelings people have here very pro or very contra the whole soldado phenomenon creating a new saint on the tomb of an accused killer, well, you can imagine.  You thought abortion or gay marriage is a hot-button squawk issue?  Try raping and murdering innocent girls, yes, and THERE you will awaken ugly, awful politics which still reverberate in my landlord's mind when he yells SHUT UP SHUT UP at his best friend neighbor who dared to suggest I write about it because it happened right here around the corner

the phantom saw her nightengale
torn from a bleeding cage around the corner

yes you must also realize you can see statues of him for sale in herb and incense and saint shops, and gold medallions bearing his image (alongside little golden AK-47 assault rifle charms to hang around your neck) are gracing the for-sale windows in many jewelry stores - and I don't mean cheap sheep neither, no, I mean just last week looking in the window waiting for Tere inside the city's premium shopping maul (sic).

Speaking of getting mauled, it's been raining around here.  We are currently expecting another front to pass through tomorrow.  Day before yesterday flooded the canyons and valleys, soaked the hillsides.

We're actually short of rain - below our average, and have been for five or six years.  It's been a dryer set of years since I moved here (from 20 miles due north) - not at all like wet periods I remember from the early 1970s or mid-90s, when the valleys flooded, buildings swamped, and later, two blocks of Playas got eaten by the sea, the voracious, blessed, Kali-mother, Sea....

Nowadays there are so many people around here and the earth gets so filthy from us that you must NOT go into the ocean for a week or two after it rains.  On both sides of the line, and for 300 miles north beyond L.A. and Sta. Barbara, fecal coliform counts spike Spike SPIKE way Up There.  Welcome to California.  Now flush back home.  Actually it ain't the toilets so much as just washing all the shiseite off the land.  When's the last time you licked the street?  No?  Well, no, then you understand.  Storms clean, yes, but it all washes downhill into the sea, who must churn and settle, before....

The wind was blowing as I first wrote this yesterday (23rd) morning, after the dark and stormy night.  A funnel cloud meanwhile got spotted right about them very nearby here, just over beyond the lagoons of the Tijuana river.  I saw it on TV last night, grey twist of mist pointing down toward the old secret antenna wire circle of poles that sits over between Imperial Beach and Coronado.  Don't ask me what it is I don't know.  We connect in the word communication.  TV is weather news.  This internet is even newer - hardly ten years old in present form, with a protocol and jargon that grew out of earlier billboards and forums some still exist I.M.H.O or so I imagine who cares we creatures of narrative are always looking for explanations of how things came to be.  So.

I am, obviously, a believer in electronic personal publishing.  Tell me where your page is and I will go read it.  Reading is easier than writing, let me tell you.  Don't think get any argument here what no.


Sometimes I think I dream about what I am going to write tomorrow, or is that only deja vu when I write?  Taking Tere home in the car last Sunday week ago Luisa's cousin Franco Mendez gave a good definition of deja vu different moments of sensing by the brain cerebral cortex.  I asked him what medicine he had practiced.  Gastro enterology.  He's doing a book of pictures he has painted about los ahogados del Río Bravo - the drowned immigrants of the Rio Grande.  Gonna have poems by Elizabeth Cazessus.  Hope they decide to use my translations.

I've seen a lot of doctors here who became artists.  C, D, F.  Seen some who didn't; but one produced a photo book of magnetic resonance images and, well, strictly for medicinal purposes, you understand, but there you are aparte.  Not sure what it means something for certain a border line between art and science perhaps is one illusion, allusion.

Still wish I could have gone north to see Cesar's exhibition at the Mexican cultural institute at old Los Angeles.  It's all about money, Daniel, you fool, you couldn't even spare the $50 to go up and back and eat and what not.  Gave up U.S. money for poetry poverty and blessed, cursed, FREEDOM to write write write  w r i t e   w  r  i  t  e      damn fool artist... you gave up money for that, remember?

Yes, to cross over THAT line and live by reading and writing alone.  Oh yes, I remember.  The darn poor poet me us I left hand, right hand, left brain, right brain, yes.

I laugh, remembering when I did this before, years ago.  Once I lived in an attic, yes, a poet in his attic, many years ago for winter back east during the Frod administration I went to see the capital shortly after Nixon resigned.  It was cold back there, NOT California coast no.

Well, I ended up working, there, too, to hold back the winter chill and get some indoor plumbing.  Yes, I ended up tearing out pages in the file room of the supreme court and pasting in new pages, or answering telephones at the interagency task force for Indochinese refugees (try saying that mouthfull real fast every time a bell rings), or counting the votes from a sanitary union election.  Yes, those were the days of truly CURIOUS temporary jobs.  For a while I went steady into messenger madness driving backwards up one-way streets and parking illegally in front of government palaces.  You can't do that any more.

After we came back to San Diego I got one temporary job smelling tuna factory exhaust samples.  THERE was a weird one, before I got back into civil service again.  And again.  Ah my own little revolving door, cursed revolving clerical door, condemned by the power of reading and writing.  Yes.  Later, for an entire year (as I waited for my program date to get arranged for taping), I thought WHEEL OF FORTUNE (their name is fully copyright trademark etc.; I quote only for purposes of education and scholarly memoir reference) would save me but I went bankrupt.  When the show finally aired broadcast October 24, 1990 (Taped, Of COURSE), I was in Mexico City on two weeks vacation, well working was good for that, at least, but....


all of the above is true. NO names or facts have been changed to pretext protect the innocent because one wants to know what I am & I know I am really here but I don't know if YOU are... hmmm, you see our mutual problem?  By the way my mailbox filled up with spam so forgive me if I missed your last letter.

Well let me tell you was or was not, was not fiction is naught zero nil not no ¿ves? yes.  This be all true today.  Dreams, memories, reflections, all.

Nuncay hay never miento in mental mint menthol.  I don't lay about lying today.

That is the curse of our technology, eh?  Whom (who, whom) can we believe?  Well I am here and today I am telling the truth.  OKAY here's a retraction pull your landing gear in, boys, for for four years I have said I live on 4th street but not true it's 3rd.  Surprise?  No.  Some of you have written and asked and already found out but.  Here. 

Maybe I should have a fictional moving day... heh heh heh.  From one side of the park to the other....

Never mind the truth got written, will get written, in such a confused jumble VERY Much on purpose de propósito stomping back and forth across the borderline of grammar and credibility.  Credulity.

Yes, even the supreme court was true I did spend a couple days there "amending" someone or another's high & mighty filing.  Rip, rip, rip; paste, paste, paste, eh Mr. Gibbon?  Eh.

And the attic?  Oh yes, as real as a poet who went to live in the capital of his empire, that, too, was.  I often think of that winter, and the next two after (when I rented with heat and slept with a warm partner) yes, the attic was real, too.  I had to climb up through a trapdoor in the stairwell ceiling, and above me the lead sheet roof rattled under flakes of snow and timpani of rain....

I walk around downtown Tijuana and see old storefronts and apartments and rooftops for rent and I think this, too, could be SOHO but it isn't.  Something else.  It is something else far, far more Latin and absolutely Californian entirely coastal climate yes.  NOT Atlantic at all, no, we are Pacific here.

It's just that at certain moments wherever you are in Mexico you never quite know if you are in the middle ages, or the 23rd century.  They say that somewhere in the far south of Oaxaca is a hole straight through the earth to India.

Now THAT is probably fiction.


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copyright 2004 daniel charles thomas