Wisconsin

   It is a bitter cold night. Will there be still, frost covered robins on the branches of the old walnut tree in the morning?

Lovely Lost Things

   It sprawled there, ravaged by neglect, grayed wood, crackling paint of a a shade that might once have been near white clinging only where the mold held it in place, blank square eyes looking out at the uncaring avenue. Here a bit of ornamental trim, there the broken teeth of a shattered rail showed that it had once been loved. Now it was only another blank spot in a dying city.
   Passersby never looked directly at it. Motorist that found themselves waiting at the adjacent stop sign felt uncomfortably impatient. Every window had been broken, and wire striped, but these things had been done in a perfunctory haste. Urine pasted a single room on ground level rooms, a handful of beer cans, and a single rusty tipped needle lay on the floor nearby. A careful observer would have noticed that the local strays never came near the place, but there was none to paused and look.
   When the moon was out, and in that lost city its light was the only light on the street, and no living soul was about, the dust would stir, and whorl down hallways, and through empty rooms. Windless sighs, creaking that would pass ever up the broken staircase, and along the upstairs balcony sounded then, but no one ever noticed the ghosts that crowed that city of the dead.

The Same Damn Thing.

   Fingers on keys, words, writing, I've started a hundred journal entries this way. It breaks the ice. I've certainly been frozen over. It isn't that there aren't stirring down deep, just that they've been left to flow by unseen. The words aren't flowing yet, That, what I just wrote, was crap, metaphor, edited for some unseen reader, sweet poison of the mind.
   Rusty typed out my own thoughts today. There was just a moment, looking, seeing, morning sun poured gentle across the snow, orange cut by blue tree shadow. It was breath, air in, air out, but I was there and for that span alive and awake. I felt a touch of shame, not even being able to say how long since the mood was on me, and see another man typing out my own unspoken thoughts.
   It's the longest night, as dark as one can be. Even the moon will be eclipsed just pasted Midnight. There's a fire burning here in the coffee shop, and I've an easy feeling on my heart. Maybe it's that a good woman loves me, that I might just love her too. Maybe it's just that the World isn't such a bad fit, all on its own.
   Cars are passing in a broken stream along Main. At first it seemed odd, but it really isn't so late. That the sun has been down for two hours simply gives that feeling. Their head lights are sharply clear. All the world past the glass front of the shop is that way, crisp to the eye, almost painfully so. The flags at City Hall are caught in a warm South wind. snow melt glistens in the streetlights.
   The wind will be shift to from the North, and cold air will be coming with it. It will be dangerous to be out by Sunday morning. I've sent messages to Heather, Kyp, and Chris, referring to the mystic, snow, and the lengthening of days. Three conversations that have wandered for years with three very different friends. thoughts caught in whorls of there own momentum, echos of an original thought, that have taken on lives of their own. Is my mind that stale, or is this how others speak. Is it a trap that we all fall into?
   I stumble. It's pitfalls like that which have caged my thoughts for a lifetime. Steve, a simple man from work, comes to mind. He will argue with himself, if he can't find another to offer up his case, as a lawyer would before the bar. The same disputes from his past come up, again and again. Like myself, his thinking is channeled along worn paths. I've fought this for years, but find myself saying the same words, thinking the same thoughts, trapped in a stale repeating conversation. I bore myself. God knows how tedious I must be to others.
 

Damnedest Thing

   I have someone new, a beautiful girl in a woman's body. She's so very young in her heart, that I want to think of her as delicate. Then, it occurs to me that treating anyone that way might well encourage a sense of helplessness. The poor girl has had enough of that sort of encouragement.
   It is something new for me, to be the recipient of earnest, whole heated affection. I've been lusted for, used, and more often received a combination of those two, but not this sort of gentle care. I am humbled by it.
   It's a new world for me. I've always want just this sort of affection, kindness, care. It is just that I had almost stopped believing in it.
 
   I am getting ahead of myself, ahead of the moment. The moment is sitting here in the coffee shop. A cool clear sky has blown in from the Northeast. The afternoon sun is chasing me across the table, working at blinding me as i type. O'keefie is still in the park in the town square, the fountain still runs. Though nearly half of the trees have turned, those in the park show green leaves.
   I am wondering why I don't feel happier. There is an emptiness, and I don't understand it.

   I've gotten out of the habit of writing. I do dabble, a little in the notebook, and the occasional post on FB, but the daily ritual is gone. I have been feeling the absence of it, without knowing the cause for the feeling. Reading a few pages from the old blog Paperback Writer reminded what it was like to write every day. So, I'm back.
   There is the old question, who is it that I'm writing to? There is a trick to that, and a danger. I remember why I stopped trying to write in my twenties. Every thing I put down was crap. It had been pasteurized by a personal censor, sanitized for a reader who was a judge. My early journaling an apologetic, the worse sort of writing, free of honest feeling.
   Today I am writing to a stranger, to you. I am going to spill it all out here, what I actually think, and feel. I encourage you to judge me any way you like.

The storm rages outside, Tsuru no Sugomori wiothin.

New home

Milti is dead, so I'll be landing here.