First Monday Open Mic Night at Kind Origin Dispensary remains popular and successful.
Summoning the End
by Richard R. Barron
What exactly am I trying to accomplish, sitting pretentiously on my front deck, sipping my pretentious coffee, writing in my pretentious notebooks with my pretentious pen?
Everything around me is more genuine that I am by a factor of 60.
THAT is an actual number.
I listen to dark, brooding music, which summons memories with the force of a CIA interrogation.
Who was I? No, you tell ME! Who was I?
One thing that hasn’t changed is the way I listen to these songs. They stop me. They close my eyes. They tell me in no uncertain terms that I am deep, whether I am deep or not.
Then, as if scripted, the cloudy sky all around gets much darker, and I wonder just for a second if I am losing consciousness, or dying, or maybe the inevitable apocalypse is upon us.
The wind is as suddenly gone. It is hauntingly still.
Richard’s journal, April 1990: A life without struggle is stagnant. Have the guts to admit that happiness isn’t happiness at all. The struggle to be happy is happiness. It’s okay, though, since attaining the goal of happiness is impossible, you will always have the happiness of unhappiness.
Morning Thunder
by Richard R. Barron and Pamela Hudspeth
She awakes to the familiar crack and rumble from far away, the signature sound of an approaching predawn Oklahoma thunderstorm.
In her dark eyes, the thunder, the rain, the subtle grey on grey on green in the clouds, the flashes of lightning, all become pain.
She is silenced by the thunder, blinded by the lightning, drowned by every drop of rain.
She opens one of her notebooks and writes.
I welcome the lightning.
Laying in this bed, I am thinking about dying.
And my soul, my soul… the sky lights for a moment, a glimpse of sky, dark, brooding.
I wonder what perfume she’s brought with her tonight. Clean as a baptism, or mud-soaked, sticky air?
I welcome the lightning.
I talk to the trees, the sky at night.
Black laden clouds, my symphony, move away across the Missouri line.
GOD DAMN HER! Why doesn’t she stay? Just a few more beats, a bit more rain?
She writes and writes and writes, and I want to be there with her, with her dark eyes and darker words and the darkest night.
But I have to remind myself, as lightning comes to my own home and thunder rattles the predawn sky, that she, her dark eyes, her small hands, and her dark love for me, are all gone forever.
