Imaginal Journal
Imagination is Medicine
Had to Hear by Real Estate
I'm out again on my own
A reflection in the chrome
Of an adding machine
It's been so long
My mind is drawing a blank
Don't know if I can go back
But to live out this dream
It's just my luck
I call you up
I had to hear you just to feel near you
I know it's not true
But it's been so long
I know it's wrong
I know
I don't need the horizon to tell me where the sky ends
It's a subtle landscape where I come from
I'm out again on my own
A reflection in the chrome
Of an adding machine
It's been so long
I call you up
I had to hear you just to feel near you
I know it's not true
But it's been so long
I know it's wrong
I know
Open Hearted Aliveness
Slice of life: Feeling in harmony with urbanite nature, kind folks, and matching with Echo Park Lake and its lilies. My pup loving the paleta man's cart bell. Proudly sat across from my beloved before he jets to Brazil as I read to him from my earth medicine book.
Phone Call by Tony Hoagland
Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight exaggeration,
an immoderate description of the person
who at the moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.
What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what I meant behind that
was that my father was split
into two people, one of them
living deep inside of me
like a bad king or an incurable disease—
blighting my crops,
striking down my herds,
poisoning my wells—the other
standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming
with bad knees and white hair spouting from his ears.
I don’t want to scream forever,
I don’t want to live without proportion
Like some kind of infection from the past,
so I have to remember the second father,
the one whose TV dinner is getting cold
while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window
where just now the sun is going down
and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills
they once touched like a child.
~ from What Narcissism Means To Me (Greywolf Press, 2003)