33 years ago today

I stood on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica

in the early Friday morning

watching a full moon set over the distant Malibu hills

waiting to take the bus into Beverly Hills

to work at First National Bank as a collection clerk

(God knows what the bank's called now)

just a month and a half away from my scene

with the people I was living with

falling to pieces in a reckoning of betrayal

and bitterness and calumny

now 33 years later

my future is as uncertain to me

as the future seemed to me then

always scrambling to hold onto what I had

and losing it

losing it so easily because there was never

anything extra to save and built upon

but then

as now

an extra deep resonance

intensified my focus

made me see what came to me

and what flowed away

and it makes no difference whether I have anything or not

it is always me in this skin

seeing everything in a heightened focus

seeing it only through these eyes

only with this consciousness

wondering why I am always me

and not someone else or

why 33 years or a second ago are equally far past

or why the next second is a moment away

then now

then gone...

Content (c) 2008-2011 Philip Milito.