go with me

some where

where

we can simply talk

a moment short

un... the pressure of

being long-winded

wounded

or 

wound about

as sea gulls dip

into the neighboring sea

searching about

for some morsel of flesh

or fish

or muscled mussels

akin to the taste of fire-flies

that nibble on the trash

where will we crash?

who knows?

not even sea gulls know

where the fire-flies roam

until the scents of garbage rise

to tickle them on their nose

 and then 

and then we'll know

we'll go

we'll find a plot to roam

Our personalities, our individualities with our dysfunctions, make life interesting, frightening and humorous.  No wonder God loves us.

When Sister Death arrives, we'll be ready.  She's the only way to go.

All of our heroes have mud on their feet.

                        

*I see...that my own individualistic generation is beginning to think about growing old.  Already there are suggestions that a lot of single people may be brought together in their old age.  I certainly

saw community develop in the Castro district of San Francisco.  Here you had a highly individualistic gay culture facing the inevitability of AIDS, and from that suffering came a community quite unlike anything I had ever seen before.  It was not a familiar type of community - because in many cases families wouldn't want anything to do with it - but it was the woman next door, it was the man across the street, it was the whole community of strangers coming together to form a new city. 

-Richard Rodriguez

*When I lecture to young people, I try to teach them this paradox: American young people need to realize that their I, which each generation necessarily believes it has invented - that each person in that generation has singularly invented - is itself a communal value.  That it comes to them from their grandfathers and from their great-grandfathers.  That their individualism is what ties them to America, to the tradition of the community.

-Richard Rodriguez