burning breadth

I had to stop meditating this morning cause I felt like I was spinning on the inside. it was bad, like when I used to go to bed drunk, but I was sitting up straight and I felt like the left part of my body was spinning higher. it all started when I let my mind go. I wasnt thinking, but my brain started firing in sensual blasts of light. its been going like that since I went to the casco veijo in old panama city yesterday. I thought about a man I met on the carribean side of costa rica, that taught circus arts, he was from peru and could teach a kid to dance on stilts. I watched a man sing opera in berlin, under a purple haze of light while digs ate food of his naked stomach, would rats eat mine? I looked at a deep cream colonial, mansion, with gilt 5 layer thick crown moulding, lunging forward on rusted nails, I followed a short panamanian key holder walking carefully up dark banistered mahogany steps, through an old mansion still standing but getting sucked in the middle like a squeezed water balloon. I started thinking about angel, the street kid that smiled and had a tattoo of a crown on his shoulder, his mother who lived in the old catholic school on the banks of the atlantic, the dogs everywhere, and her clothes strung where good girls took off thier tartan plaids to shower. the kids screaming in the atlantic, and a SRO for six bucks a night thats got a corner room, with a desk, and shuttered french doors on a steel balcony. I looked at men shaving on a big gymnasium, with squat hookers picking scabs. yeah I have all kinds of crazy thoughts. thoughts of a floating art colony in the buenos aires port, built on a barge, where we’d all have dinner every night under christmas lights and wine I wouldnt drink, about pork loins wrapped in twine, marinating in thier own juices, a woman who smiles at me over the dark, filled night. I saw a young girl sitting on a corner in the old town, she had on jean shorts and her hair pulled back, and those lace sandals, that keep going up her leg, like an animal out of control, binding her to the street, binding her leg like a meat product in a pan, binding her like a rope to my bed. deep alazirin crimson, and some form of help I might be. welding and soccer and panama, thats when I started spinning lopsided from the right hand side up, like a flying saucer getting a jump start as my distributer randomly fires sparks into the burning breadth of my body.

me and frankie

dirty web footed turkey vultures are called to active duty as another set rolls in, black winged waves turning sand strips into puddled backdrops for the next tact. not for me, on the carribean, not for me in the chiriqui highlands. I have missed the storm, that soaked zicatella, that murdered poyopo, that took the breadth out of zonte. I have escaped.
yeah I didnt even know there was a storm until I read the weekly news section of the miami herald. the english speaking rag here in panama. Ive been off the pacific for 2 weeks or more long enough to get lost and not know where I am. long enough to miss the big storm that snowed in new zealand,and sent 15 foot swells, up into el salvador
Ive been in panama a week now. Ive been hanging out with this toronto art student named francois in boquette, some highlands town in the chiriqui provence. Its not much to look at, no colonial buildings, just a high altitude strip of dirt, thats cold at night, and has 4 traffic lights and eight bars with swinging doors and sawdust floors and small panamanian men in ten gallon hats dropping fiftycent beers hand over fist into gullets with barely enough rice to tease a cat. towns like this remind me of new england and a winter I spent in vermont in my twentys. the kid promises good times next week in the capitol. I met him a couple of days ago in the islands by costa rica, called bocas del toro, hes a student on break, Im broken. he drinks, I used to, we get along on that low level nothingness that binds two people together that are wrong. he’wants me to go with him to a resort on the coast that books its rooms in the low season for half price during the week, slumming panama style. he thinks drunk germans might tempt me. hes looking for the free food and open bar. the whole things not my scene, but Im bying time before columbia, no more chicken shaks and middle america. Im going south into the darien gap, into guerilla country, taking a sailboat through the sandblast islands, to columbia, to the carribean port of Cartagena.
I bought a maxim at the local grocery and checked out spanish speaking pinups, while frankie poured gin into plastic cups, in his under shorts. I gotta call him frankie. theres a part of me that dies every time I say francois. The twenty five dollar rooms got flourescents that rattle dust in the hollow ceiling above the beds, outside the black light behind the clouds splits at half seven, caught in the two lane main street before loping under the crunched pines. tailgating black coffee fincas and a seventy two bronco, that spits low octane out of a burnt manifold thats been lost as long as Ive been alive
I went into the mountains by myself to soak in hot springs that break out of black cranium boulders cracked at the base of the scull. I walked under blue hills along cow mud and faded tree light, like the maple groves in sugarbush valley. I rode horses in the mountains around caldera, drove cattle with a couple vaqueros my starved quarter horse stumbled in four feet of river and then fell on me, climbing the rooted bank, to dry land. jose the man who has taken me on this ride, smiles as he mounts an international bull from the back. “todos la natural” I am here and he is here, and the broken scull of another broken man, in the black cranium, in the hot river, in the cool highlands of panama caresses me, like a soft car crash, everything just like a year in my twentys when I gave up dying