A PERSONAL MYTH

Bruce was a friend from college. One of those friends you made that reminded you of no one you had ever met and so therefore became an icon of the time that shaped you into how you came to be now. Bruce taught me to listen to strange music no one had ever heard. He told me stories of people living larger than I had imagined and led me on adventures I once boasted of and now, in my mature life, seldom mention outside of remaniscing with equally once outrageous friends.
There was a time when we both lived in a vegetarian commune called the Big Yellow House. We lived day to day with most beautiful hippie women and while I wrote Bruce's term papers, Bruce taught me how to get lost in mirrors and juggle in pairs across a room.
Once when a cousin of mine dissappeared, Bruce spent days asking every friend he knew for news. And so it was that late in the halfway span of the pre-dawn night, in a park by an urban lake, Bruce figured it out. One of the Jaden brothers, Damon, told him she had gone across state, sent to live with farmer relatives by her father. Such a good friend he was, Bruce walked with me down to the train yard near the Big Yellow House, climbed up into a box car and stood side by side with me as the line pulled us south and east across the mountains, the forests and the starlit desert on our way to find her...which we did.
But years and leaves both fade and fall aside. The paths we each shape are loth to lie twain, invariably spiralling askew, casting bright then faint firework trails whose totalled brilliance we are lucky to recall with nostalgia. As my time went by I travelled far and met many whose faces I had never seen, whose experiences hadn't crossed with mine. Trains, smoke and mirrors fell from day to day and the works of a career came to house my day to day.
And so it is that I find myself older, more professional and more like the strangers on the bus than my own old pictures. I see none of my old friends, my cousin, nor even the places that all these memories came to happen in. But once I was lucky. Just once I got a glimpse of my own past and it was good to come back to it for even just the few moments that it passed. I found myself, one night late after work, trapped under a downtown bridge by a winter rain. Having a smoke pointed the time and it was about halfway down the white paper column with smoke clouding slowy and stately up into the night sky as it was pierced by cold drop columns that I saw him walking consequently by my path.
"Bruce." I said. And with a glance to his right through the urban gloom he stopped and smiled and said, "It figures that it would be you."

COYOTE RISING TO WOLFDOM

After the Age of Books came the Great Escape. It paradised two years and sunrise storm began with me telling my father, 'Why don't you just send me away to boarding school!' No sooner said than done, in the outpaced trail of a cigarette butt tossed out a highway window, there I was.

There I was. In a school of scarcely three hundred. Surrounded by a deep forest. Grounded just a mile from a pacific stormy beach. It was two years of discovering how to make friends who shared interests. It was; it was understanding learning as the mind-expanding elation that only greatening awareness can betide. And happily, nickoftimely, it was finding out I was so much more than the sadness and frustration I had been forced to define myself with.

I made such friends there as I shall never forget. Shades of myself and my selfcomtemplations have grown from them, from who they were and what they expressed of themselves and their beliefs. Pride of the Self, no matter what you've been through. That was Pat. Adventure and exuberence in everything you do with a constant respect for animals. That was Jim. Thinking beyond your bounds every day. That was Ken.

And it was running with Ken one day along the endless sandy tracks in the surrounding forest that we stopped at the top of a hill to catch our breath. This hill was just tall enough to give us a view in all directions of yet more forest, green, constant, and without variation. "What if everything you can see from here was all there is?" Ken said. And you know...In the most earnest of moments that we all come to in our lives. He was and is exactly right.

COMARADERIE

Two times in my life I was a part of something bigger, something vaster, than just myself.

First was when we were smoking and reading each others' works in the earned first light of morning as we kept the night for daytime and daily slept through the sun. All the knowledge of everything that could be learned swept round me, an ocean I dreamed to drown in. If only I had had the money...the material wealth to live the life immaterial.

Second was a circle of comrades, all the same hair style, all the same clothes. We followed the plan each day from dawn to dark and then more and more again. We were proud to be one, honored to carry out the orders we dared not contemplate for fear of being crushed in our own guilt, in our own shame.

THE WALRII

The Walrii watch over the city on Third where they look down on the corner where I kissed Marrianne Morgan for the very first time. The smell of the sea waved through the air while the cool of midnight hung silence about us as we kissed, and breathed, and kissed again. Her eyes were the green of a far shores' grass; her hair was raven as autumn night. She was the first to say yes to the question one dreams of never asking twice. Such time has gone by now...even in the quiet I can't seem to remember her face.