A Thought Collection

A Thought Collection

         I keep my special collection in notebooks, binders, bar napkins, the back of

punk posters, perfumed papers, old photographs and video, multi-track tape and

stereo masters, typewriter ribbons, magazine articles, torn pieces of cardboard,

inside the sheetrock walls of recording studios, in file folders, in file cabinets, in

abandoned buildings, and within hidden inlaid boxes in forgotten places.

         Each of these containers is full of thought leaks I wiped off of counters, tables,

carpets, beds, guitars, other people, my shirt, taxis, buses, canoes, kayaks, mixing

boards and microphones, cameras, elevators, some stranger’s back yard, a rest stop

in Boron, inside Hoover Dam, diapers and bibs, typewriters, macs, pcs, a can of paint

all over her body, bus stops and trains, desks, printers, an old cat, a dead dog,

memories imagined and otherwise, Pee Chees, someone else’s dreams, sleeping

bags, a Kharmin Ghia, mirrors, rolled up dollar bills, menus, numerous floors, Levis, a

banjo, a violin, and a steel guitar, saxophones and pianos, income statements and

balance sheets, answering machines, cell phones, the back seat of somebody else’s

car, national monuments, Bret Hart’s old cabin, moose antlers, mergansers, a black

swan, a covey of quail and a bus full of Canada Geese, a planetarium, onstage,

backstage, offstage, a radar range, a redwood casket, cotton fields near Bakersfield,

a black ‘64 Chevy Impala, and wiped off of other things in other places with people I

have paid to be forgotten.



November 3, 2009

Arlington, Virginia

Written after getting lost walking down a familiar street.