Brer Wolf is always with me,
always restless, pacing in circles,
never finding the spot to rest that fits him.
If he does, he sleeps with one eye open,
so dominant is his fear, his vigilance, his distrust.
He has been hurt in the past,
or maybe his ancestors have passed the wounds along the bloodline,
he is always on his guard.
We have an understanding.
The same moon howls at us.
No comfortable place awaits us.
We stare at each other for hours, but he gets bored.
I'm sure he thinks I'm stupid,
Just as I think he's cunning.
Truth is between us
and loss
and hunger
and greed
and smarts.
Religion is just awareness.
Brer Wolf is the dog from Karma;
I'm the Buddha loser.

How I Always Felt Around Her

Dusty Springfield ---'cause it's my blog and I can play whatever I want!!!!

...'cause sometimes I get so tired of being alone.

So I'm waiting out the most recent cold spell in the basement of my sister and her boyfriend's house. The shelters fill up fast these nights and the nuns are tiring of me looking like a lost puppy just so they'll let me sleep in their kitchen.

The place is not bad ---the basement's half-finished. I've got my sleeping bag and guitar, and the use of their kid's computer.(You'd never guess what 12 year old girls download these days.) I lit a couple candles, and found an interesting chianti in Phil's "cellar" and downloaded a bunch of old songs I used to cry myself to sleep listening to,back more than thirty years ago.

I'd just become an orphan with my dad's death, and lived with my older sister in the family house until I got out of high school. My "catholic girl"(the quiet one) used to buy me candles and Gordon Lightfoot songs, while my wild "French Canadian girl' bought me poetry by Rimbaud, some pot to smoke, and some incense to cover up the pot smell.
It really is stunning how quickly I can turn a corner and I'm back to that time. I guess I haven't changed all that much----do any of us? And I sure haven't forgotten the first time I saw Danielle's breasts..."White Bird" was playing on the tape machine; she was wearing a blue and grey striped man's shirt, and I didn't know which of my body parts was gonna explode first.
The breakup with Catholic Carol just kinda happened, but Danielle took off one day with a Black Panther dude she'de been fuckin' on the side. For all these years she's been somewhere in my head and heart. I guess, as Kenneth Patchen wrote, we all need to have a nice juicy wound from the past that we can put neon lights around to advertise the fact that we've been hurt.(I read that almost 40 years, too.) So Gordon Lightfoot's singing, "Wherefore and the Why" and "Beautiful", the wine is finished, the candle's almost burned out,like me. I close my eyes and say my one honest prayer: "Help me, Danielle. I'm lost."

Easy, Brer Wolf, Easy...

Now, Be Honest...

The New York City medical examiner stated,

“Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine. We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications.”

So Vicodin, Percocet, Valium, Xanax and sleeping pills. Quite a cocktail of meds there. Crimony, I can’t imagine taking all that. Seems excessive. I do know that most of that stuff stays in your system for some time, so perhaps he didn’t ingest them all at once…right? Who knows, still sad and tragic - no matter how you cut it.


Of all the different pills in Heath Ledger's system at the time of his sad death, how many are you personally "familiar" with? I'm aware of four of them.
Let's hear it for the drug ads.

Sssshh...

"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything that it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more."

-Erica Jong