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.