Optionally, underNauts may choose to observe the solsticii and/or equinoxes, and here at the parish we did so by way of paying all the April dues on time and up front.

On the other side of the world the Persians celebrated it as the start of the new year, which makes a lot more sense than the arbitrary version on the first of January.

Since the solstice the trauma has been hitting with unusual gale force. Broadly speaking it comes in two flavors, past and future.

On the level of the past, the most spectacular effect has been the cyclonic dis-integration of every single relationship in my life, all the ones with live non-digital primates anyway.

On a more daily plane I’ve been assaulted by weird random memories from forty and fifty years ago. Not all of them ‘bad’, but all bathed in an odd numinous halo of a significance that doesn’t seem earned. It feels as if I’ve … come loose from the moorings of time, and am experiencing these remote scenes as if they happened last week or are happening, now.

The trauma of the future (by definition self-inflicted), that one I’ve modulated by sort of giving up on it. I don’t really have plans, the way I’ve always had. I’m bracing for the impacts (positive and negative) that being poorer still will have on me, and trying to manage that situation mentally months in advance, but beyond that I don’t play the what-if game with any frequency or intensity. What might-happen is compartmentalized, into oblivion as best as I can banish it.

The storms of the Past and Future flavors of trauma have made it pretty hard to get through the Present, the routine phases of each day, with any sense of well-being or feeling great about myself. Or even any apparent efficiency. My practice of writing out loud has been such a blessing in that regard. Audience is irrelevant at this point. Over the months I find more and more that I really am doing this for the good of my self.

Hey boy. Speakin’ a which, what good are you?

Well now, corpse of all the gone daddies, I’m a poet no one reads, and I’m gorgeously good at it, and oh! I hear you snorting derisively about it, and so go be impressed by some otherSpawn willya, and please don’t fail to fuck yourself on the way over there, to their beautifully appointed home, or homes.

Inside, the noise of the trauma storms raging is hard to hear. It’s quiet and peaceful, in here, and out there on the walks to the west too. I feel grounded and centered and deliberate in my simple actions. The dishes get washed and the pissjars get dumped and boiled, and the cats get very well fed, and loved.

I’m calm, and the only stress I feel is over the considerable energy it takes to keep the trauma managed, and to keep drinking it down in small doses as a strategy for really and truly banishing it, for Good. Is that a Plan? I don’t care if it’s called that, or by whom.

Maybe more like a red mint rabbit, or a temple feast day that goes on for weeks ya.

For the map is not the territory, and typed words are neither. They are at best pointers to feelings and sensations. Can you hear the papery garlic; see the colors in the song of Anne?

I’m arranging them here for next to no one like seashells on an abandoned beach, like the rocks in the ghost town they call Sundad, Arizona way out the Agua Caliente Road.