Power of the Pocket Journal

by Paul Nelson

     Those tiny pocket diaries make the year smaller.
                                 — Ramón Gomez de la Serna

& a year will fit in two pocket journals will fit 400 or so seventeen syllable sentences will take on myriad dream images.  There will be dreams of penis heads restrained by Eddie Vedder’s sutures. The will be a Big Hump fire burning over a thou- sand Olympic acres and Coltrane’s My Favorite Things not quite drowning out the sounds of a cat on the way to the last shelter.

It’s in the pocket
journal those Qinghai memories are toasted water- melon   seeds   and   tsampa   lessons   of  sugared je yogurt and the vivid detail of the thangka Consort of Tantric Deity Who Responds According to Pray – er.

(Your puny prayers
add muscle in this
age of great velocity.)

So you date them add a please return hope the pages don’t stick so you skip or frighten yrself with the notion of a day of no sentence.  You chart your life by ‘em far from the Nepali woman who stitched the latest one which carries pressed flowers from your day on the Great Wall, the day she said with amazement in her wet-the-booth Akasaka way: We’re walking on the Great Wall of China!

You leave the board mutinies to another bit of cloth and pixel where dreams of the odd dark meat have you chewing tough again but being civil about it or a line overheard: If I promise someone a blanket, I give it to them  and how Mary Summer Rain knows it’s solace and you tell no one you know where the tracking device is because you don’t bring your legal evidence to the futbol pitch you know when the wind blows you’ll see a chicken’s ass and a legitimate petition to that side of the veil makes this one sweeter with a local porter and a view of a Big Hump Fire sending its smoke signal to beckon another September pilgrim.