What is love? (love) Baby don't hurt me

Learn that the heavy thoughts of love's disunion should ne'er take place in one's own room. Emotion lingers in the floors and walls and hangs like miasma needing cleansing by light and wind, by earth by sun and water, and smoke and ki and time.

An old friend now distant, a mentor even of sorts at times, would say to me his life was a series of vignettes.

The bus driver welcomes me aboard. The new one, older, stooped, who always looks so beaten, broken, by age and time and life. Surrendered to fate yet whipped when down. Familiar faces. Continuity, stability, that glint of relief when I step aboard. His words say welcome, but his eyes say thank you.

Rose Park Transit: there's a family of the street on the corner with their bags and matching clothes. See the men in matching uniforms, a queer conspiracy, blue gloves and passes them a card. Two officers in Portland blue and you notice the two in green must be too. Medical? Loitering? The meishi offering hope on the back of three and a half by two.

From where the bridge starts you can look over the tracks crosst a lonely park just grass and two trees or three. There's a sign on the side of the building there, where too few would seem to look. A white sign, the kind which rolls on with paper and with paste. On the top is a picture of the american flag, the bottom torn away, systematically erased. But the concrete behind the paste and paper cannot erase the image once seen. An american flag feld up into a box, two meters long by half by half...

Out over the bridge the river is bright in the sun of days. The vault of heaven far above and filled. Rolling cumulus slightly greying, not from rain but for the darkness. Beyond their majestic guidance the blue and clear crystal far too far to reach. The skies exalt us with their presence. And we in out meekness scurry 'bouts, some fearing the thunderous foot, the silent loud oppression. It will not come today, only but we can play our gods. They wish only to remind us of the gleaming brightness they obscure. And we so far from heaven feel a darkness under that far veil, the distance all we can remember.

Chinatown is dying. We've all known and turned silent eyes to the historic district, the past too dirty, the fanciful image too new. Buildings turn bleak and dark, boarded up forgotten. But busses still pass through, down the bridge past Blanchett House and all her charity. Rumbling down concrete streets, homes for the humble but not the few. A man on the corner standing. Two police, not partners, two squad cars, but maybe partners. Well dressed he's pointing out directions, a story telling. Asphalt rumbles under feet as the wave of the intersection fades past and we head where he directs and we forget again. The fountains have turned on for spring.

TIme comes to deplane the bus on these familiar foreign streets. A parade of roses will doubtless flower the streets again at nights. Until then, sun. Buildings loom, not frightful but large, the great masterwork of Man. The velvet under ground. A café filled with aging crowds, but the age becoming slowly my own. These magic moments as looking over tables of tables of the prosperous discovering hope and fortunes in boxes of electric. And the song fades into another, and the mood becomes vibrant, the air excites and thunder quiets in our heads. Outside the clouds have cleared and our music reaches up, up, into the lightness. And I step out the bus and the driver looks over. I wish him the day's goodness, but he's already smiling.