3-28-08 The Invisibles Contact Me (At Last)

He stands on the corner wearing a brown, army-style jacket with a knitted dread-cap of yellow, red, and green, and he begins speaking to me while I am still in the crosswalk walking toward him, smiling at me all the while like a physics professor attempting to explain a particularly complicated point of string-theory to a promising but slightly obtuse student.

"Four majesties came down on the sun's rays," he says, underlining the names of various deities (Yaweh, Allah, Jehovah, Amen-Ra) with his thick, curved fingernail on a crumpled, photocopied page where texts full of sacred names and alternate histories criss-cross like a dadaist manifesto, "and they created the universe and built the pyramids."

"But the weren't black men," he continues, still smiling gently with yellowed, crooked, but strong teeth, his soft caribbean accent lilting over the traffic hum, "they were aliens and there were four of them, so how could one god create the world?"

I look at his kind face a moment and say, truthfully, "I don't know."

2-6-08 a dream of divine love

Traveling all over the city in a car, the landscape constantly changing (as it does in dreams), I am searching for something that was lost, or someone has something to give me. Perhaps I misplaced it, and only now am I ready to receive it back again. It is a sunny day, in a city that looks like San Francisco, with its irrational hills and its certainty of its own style, like a woman whose very extreme features would be ugly on anyone with less panache.

We arrive at the destination, and it turns out the thing lost was a song, a message, and the person driving (who? their face obscure, a memory of a gentle, slightly mocking, but not unkind, smile turning away to look out the windshield) turns on the radio to play the song "My Eyes Adored You" as sung by Steve Perry, and the universe explodes with light.