the window to the bottom of the ocean/ psychologist on Ventura Boulevard

The man born from the boy above is not up late reflecting on his life. He has not been a Psychologist for several years. He has not earned a private practice, a nice office on Ventura boulevard, a receptionist and a view of the cars whizzing past the courtyard. He has also not had those nightmares. He does not dream of others moments that he can not speak of or of drowning slowly in storms at sea. He did not take the ability to interpret symbolism, body language and personalities and behavior and make it his career all this time.

He did not carry the ballast of other's pain. At least not this way.

He changed his major back to English after that one semester nearly 20 years ago. The decision came oddly out of a clear blue day of calm sitting on the campus lawn eating a salad. His mother was dying. She had attempted suicide just 2 years before. This brought many dreams of winds blowing out windoglass into snow in slow motion onto her...he unable to stop it.......of her mouth that for many years could not say words speaking.....saying short phrases that made him awake cold and in tears.

The office thus untethered, is divorced from gravity and atoms. This moment now floats in a trillion particles in the ether, gnats from what might have been.

safely didn't risk the failures of so much trying.....

It is a late morning, a city, a sky of mixed clouds, it is a chain of minutes passing like box cars, it is metal, stone, cloth, oxygen, steel....

It is blood, skin, a swarm of memories, a crowd of self....

He is sitting on couch with a soda ..."he" "at"

he is full of regrets: dropping out of college, never moving away, never doing anything that was not warm and soft as the worn couch and safe as his tv dinner clicking away into simple fruition as another meal in the next room...

The night with friends when they suggested that college wasn't for him after he was on academic probation and the fact that he almost failed high school remain implanted warm
as though just uttered across a back yard on a dull July night.


He is 37 years old and works as a market research cold caller.........he rubs his belly and tries to remember the name of that woman he briefly was friends with in San Francisco before he dropped out....

He is comfortable now dull nubs come in slow dull pains at times sure, but he numbs them out with the reasoning of how painful it was to keep throwing things out there.........of questioning so many things and wanting..........

he has moved to the west valley.....that was enough...........

The microwave dings the alert that the molten miniature diorama in plastic of thanksgiving is ready to disappear in small portions...away...

and thusly it all disappears.....

......yet in the shapes of turns and the math within of what could have come to pass
he will complete this meal in a shirt and shorts in a house somewhere