Stir (like) Crazy/Stick in the Mud

mind alive with language,
myriad fumbling tongues
slavering, sloshing, frothing out
thoughts
slipping on word formation of
electromagnetic impulse,
dense clouds gather fast
try to scream lightning and leap
before it catches the tree,
we must seem to all-seeing eyes
immobile of mouth and foot
unable to get away
with what we want to get across
mind
like time
flies

summer watermelon mississippi joy

a very talented New Orleans friend named Hayley painted this classic image of my friends Helmer, Johnny, Laurence, and me kicking it in Clear Springs, Mississippi.

River trails

Louisiana green tunnels are like giant lungs. It’s an ebb and a flow that I simply have to let carry me swiftly in bursts of joy-filled fear along the Comite River until I am coughed out onto a white sand river bend beach where I search slowly and peacefully for the Huckleberry Finn within. So much birdsong. There! A giant snapping turtle. And then a pair of alligator gar swimming beneath the sun-reflecting surface and I stop at once. Look around, listen closely. Beginning to know each little sound. The quick burst of the rabbit. The gentle, short slither of the lizards tail. The hop-skip of the birds in the brush. The long, ominous slither of the snake that is almost always a tree root. And goddamn, that armidillo just doesn’t give a shit. He keeps up his relentless search for grubs regardless of any curious blonde apes that come his way.