Watching The Clouds

Everyone is gone right now but the flickering signs of a new spring are struggling to maintain my sanity as well as well as friends and family whether they be in New York, California, other ports of the Americas or even as far away as India...in my dreams I am riding a bicycle in Russia or clipping down a chute with both skis and my head still attached but always holding within me my deepest secrets from the past...secrets I never bring up in conversation because who really wants to see me break down crying like a child, the child in me who refuses to move past certain specific times in my life when I believed no one could be more happy or more at peace with himself...alas, so foolish to believe that can last forever, but a the same time strong indelible memories flash out of the past like the Northern Lights from so far away...so far away they are mesmerizing and taunting...("Sure, try and catch me another night if you're busy now, but I make no promises)...does anyone really know what their own memory is capable of?...is there is a circuit breaker that protects us from those memories that are too painful?...does talking about it or writing about it even make a difference?...
To be somewhere safe, to have someone care, is not a lot to ask of friends, but then again, who really has the nerve to ask?

Heart-shaped Hole

Yesterday, it was Valentine's Day, a fine opportunity for a peaceful day to pass in Bar Harbor, with any thoughts of misdirected malice to be shelved until the next day...and that's the way it was until about two hours before midnight, that 2200 hrs to some, when kaboom, a rumbling on the street, a sound of a motor being pushed to its limit and then, bam, an SUV races across Cottage Street, leaps over curb and snow, scrapes betwixt two trees and rams into the facade of what was once the lively and notorious Nakorn Thai restaurant, but now empty for the past year...(I once worked with a guy who showed up late for work explaining that he missed a curve in the road and hit a house. Upon being asked how that came to be, he said "Sonnabitch, I honked but the house wouldn't move!")...Well, this building didn't move either last night, but the driver and his/her SUV got the hell outta there in a hurry. Today the building's heart-shaped hole is adorned with a Maine state icon--a flashy blue tarp...if any of you reading this happen to see what was reported to be a 90's maroon-and-grey Chevy Suburban with recent front-end damage, please send a note and I will forward it on to the proper authorities...elsewhere across town I recently encountered a woman returning from the ER with her right arm wrapped in bandages and held immobile by a splint...I asked if she had fallen on our present visiting natural resource--ice--but no, it was due to slicing up apples for Jojo, her parrot...seems she got a little dizzy while holding the knife and well, the rest involved the ER...I suggested she talk this over with Jojo so he would understand and she looked at me rather surprised and said "How'd you know his name?" I told her she had told me at which point I began to feel a little like a parrot...all of this is enough to make anyone dizzy...