Tides of change are like the tides of the ocean
Tides of the ocean I watched on an island off the coast of Charleston SC
Cemented in my childhood memories as a scene of holy simplicity

And like the ocean, these tides can bring forth
Great waves of progress
Hunter Thompson speaks of the great San Francisco wave of the 60s, and how it surged, raged, but could not make the journey farther than they peyote nightmares of Vegas

And still in dreams at night I hear Woody Guthrie singing how there's "a better world a-coming"
If you listen closely
In the alleys around trashcan fires
Or in the last of the occupied boxcars
You can hear the same thing
It's coming
It's coming

Yet tides come in and then recede back
And in the roar of the ocean I could hear it telling me to be calm
The better world is coming
But there is still much more time to wait
I don't like to be a pessimist about such things
But all one generation can do is reap and learn the last generations harvest,
And then go and plant their own

In these reflections I realize why I can't write exactly how I feel about politics or progress
I am not a warrior
I am not a brick thrower or speech giver, though both have necessity in their own respect
Like Hunter and Woody
I am a teller of stories and presenter of truth and life
I can spend endless nights and days writing of experiences
But the future is beyond my grasp

Yet when the times come
When blood is spilt and windows shatter
I will be there
I will experience every moment
And I won't let the effort be forgotten or in vain
For the tides come in
Then go back again

One has become the sunlight
Has become a field of endless sunflowers laughing and crying and being beautiful
This first friend lost because of a fight in the mountains and a bitter poem and inability to decide because I always knew the answer
This first friend had to get away from me and I don't blame them
Now I see the photographs of the first lost friend and I feel melancholy joy that the smile remains three years after I'm gone

Second friend broke my silly heart
Second friend on this list but for all intents and purposes first in many more respects
First time I knew that this sick machine of dark oil brooding and sentimental lunacy could feel regular old love
Second friend that was even the first of my living friends in all sincere sentiments
But the train couldn't bear to stay in the station for much longer and after 2 whole round trips decided that it was best to keep moving, coals in the furnace, fire burning the track behind
Lovely friend that I kept awake for in deep night searching for reasons to go meet the sun together
Honest friend who deep down knew that I would hurt in some way
Foolish friend who honestly felt that the best policy was not only keeping the skeletons in the closet but covering the closet door with wallpaper to keep everything in and me out

Two friends, oh how I disappointed you
How now I ache and twist in sleepless dreams of the one chance you come back to hear my apologies
But in wakeless days I watch and wait for a peace that won't come from either of you
Two forgotten lost friends burning holes in my heart with cigarette butts and cutting my mind with safety pins
It's nights like these where I want to see past my own reflection and see how you are

Days in America spent with poems and jazz
Switching from deep dark black coffee to Jasmine Tea
This typewriter called to me
Jack has been talking at me through recordings I play while I shower because the quiet is becoming too much
And when I leave for work the quiet is all I'm going to want
But for now I burn some incense hoping that the old typewriter case
Would smell musty no longer and instead have that heavenly smell
Of Orange cinnamon

Days in America when I go to work
Shelving library books and the similar media for four hours
While I sit and watch all the people
The regulars include the old lady who can't seem to catch her breath as if she just sprinted the news of victory from Marathon to Athens
And then the bearded Buddhist wise man
Or at least I consider him so from the stacks of words of the Dalai Lama he returns weekly and proceeds to saunter to the 290s, home of the Zen speaking and Buddhist discourse
I don't think I could ever be Buddhist because the world feels too real and I feel too real
Especially when my back aches from the lift and lower to shelve each to its own
And in comes the couple who only call each other babe
In they come with voices I can only describe as whiny
I hate to portray them in such a way but yet those voices make it seem they were born in love and in the end will die with the tone of love on their lips and the word babe in their heads

American nights where I drive home to eat or drive to Nick's to pick him up so the whole gang can eat and play cards and rant and yell like we do each Monday
Or this past Sunday when the destination was Waffle House and I was reminded that young love is a sorrowful dog-eat-dog affair
You want to truly know the American night?
Turn to new old friend Thomas Wolfe
Let him tell you of nights in Asheville and New York and the nights of even Europe and how they are all the same and endless
Just as time is endless
Can you already tell I love time?
I love the contextual seasons and when I try and talk plainly about the American night I lose all words because we've all been there and we all know and there's nothing more I need to say
American days and American nights can all feel the same
And we all eat sleep live breathe bleed
This cycle

In one of the darker moments of his life
Jack Kerouac wrote
"Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word."
And now we turn to a man
Who sits on the edge of a bed
That for almost twenty years he has rested on
He too waits for the golden and eternal things
The time for mourning is over he whispers to a solemn heart
It has been two years since he walked across a stage and was handed a piece of paper that told him "as your childhood ends your life can begin"
And everyday he works and sweats and toils to keep feeling as alive as he did at age 17 when he walked along Rocky Mountain Rivers
At 15 when he was entirely convinced that he was in love
At 13 when he believed jokingly that he was an alien not meant for this place and deep down honestly believed that he truly wasn't meant for this place
And now nearly 20 he sits and his eyes are filled with tears for a man who died 58 years before he was born
But our heroes heartbreak is now
And again the night time freight train pounds less than a mile away and a whistle like a voice calls out
"Sleep is the rest you ask for
Why must you sit so late in the evening and worry yourself to a death which won't come tonight?"
The man knows too well that the best time to mourn the loss of a person is when you first meet them
Too many nights of his youth he spent bargaining with someone near to his heart so they would quit their talk of dying
But when a day came where he thought they had finally done it he froze and did not dare speak
But they lived and he refuses to ever forgive himself for his silence
Life and time are immortal concepts but one must accept that loss is true  
And what of the golden and eternal things?
In those dark moments Kerouac says he saw the image of the cross in a nervous breakdown and take that to mean whatever you want but this man know what it means to him
So on this night he cries because a man in flesh is not eternal
But the sound of the freight train is enough to comfort him with that fact
That the golden and eternal are out there and coming.
And there will be no need for words

There are railroad tracks
That run through my town
And at night when I finally receive
The silence I wished for during the day
I can hear the faint whistle
And hum against my bedroom windows
I hear the whistle now.

All my life I have heard the trains
And I find beauty in the fact that even when I'm not listening, they are there
The trains carrying coal, chemicals, lumber, and the better parts of my childhood
As a child I loved the idea of the caboose
Allowing any stretch of rail
Any length of land
To be your home
Your bed
And it was probably through this my wanderer spirit grew.

All my life these trains meant something
Escape
But not without possibility of return
I romanticized the long web of rails connecting all the land and Souls in the American night
I have always loved such pieces of antiquity

So in the latter years of my childhood in high school it's no suprise the love I had for Steinbeck, Sandburg, and Woody Guthrie
I would lament to friends that the trains became too fast to hop, but I never tried
I always sat back and watched
Or listened on quiet nights

Now my childhood has passed
I am nearly 20 but wrapped in my head is the idea that the young boy who had train posters and pictures covering his walls was nothing but a stranger or a character in just another awful coming of age rerun
But deep down that child turned to Ginsberg who wrote of boxcars boxcars boxcars
And Kerouac who followed the long stretches of road to the western edge of America
And it was through Kerouac I found
Thomas Wolfe

I feel I have Thomas Wolfe in my bones
Thomas Wolfe who left home rejoicing train rides to the North
Then realized he couldn't go home again
Thomas Wolfe who never wrote a bad train scene
Not all of Wolfe is in me
Not the 1900s Southern prejudice
Or the raving accusing of friends of great treasons, only to have to apologize the morning after
But I can feel his need
To write all I can
To never take away
To add add
To never reduce because who tells Van Gogh "yes yer paintings alright but I need you to reduce the amount of stars by 30 and I expect it on my desk Monday"
I won't take anything away from myself
Only add
So at nights
When I hear the train whistle
And soft rattling on my window
Thomas Wolfe is with me
And he loves the sound too

And in these dreary dreadful
Days of January
I often fear that
Whatever fire or passion
That possessed me to write in the preceding months
Is leaving me
I know not how or why
But with everyday that passes it feels as if the fire is burning itself out

But my friends,
Blame it on the weather!
Blame it on the damp and dark and freezing chill
Blame it on the on the news of deaths and the presence of tears
But if you want something to believe, believe in this:
That **** fire won't burn out

Save your Phoenix symbolisms for another day
A Phoenix is born again from its own ashes
And in my heart there will be no ashes
Because this **** fire won't burn out

It's fine to stop singing when your voice cracks and your throat burns but that's no excuse to lose the tune
So when your voice is healed stand your ground and belt out your song
For that fire won't burn out

Then embrace the weather
Embrace the damp the dark and the freezing chill
Embrace the dreary dreadful
Days of January
Where you fear the fire inside flickers and fades
There is nothing controlling that fire but you
And if you have the patience to think and the paper to write
Your fire won't go out

Don't get me wrong or let the wrong picture be painted
There is plenty in this mad day and night world to be romantic about
But the total collection of my generation gets too romantic to me
This generation isn't even how I pictured it
What happened to the rucksack revolution
The Gary Snyder dharma bums criss crossing the United States with thumbs outstretched, hoping freights and carrying their whole lives on their backs
That is something I get romantic about
Was it really that hard?
Or was it simply easier to stay at home to watch daytime television or evening television or whenever the hell you watch television
I admit I watch television too
And it's certainly no means to an end
But there is gotta be more to this crazy life than that
I don't feel romantic like my generation does
My generation rarely feels romantic about jazz
Jazz is some of the most unapologetic music I can stomach
You will never hear a jazz song that doesn't breathe into your soul
I am getting tired of your romantics
I am tired of feeling like I have to live my life by pouring deep love emotions from the well of my heart into another human heart
Half the time I want to love the whole world
The other half I want the world to leave me to sit and sulk in peace
If you want, ask the two that I've dated
One may not remember but ask anyway
Ask them if I was ever romantic
Ask them what it looked like
Ask them how it felt
Understand that I am the great black sheep of romantic expression
Understand that there is hope even when there isn't romance
Understand that there is hope in every beat of our silly human hearts and every flicker of an eyelid and finally understand that even if someone says they don't feel romantic about one thing or the next, understand that doesn't mean that they don't feel love
Love and romance are all just silly words we give to what goes on deep down inside where we can never see but can always feel