On a walk by a strip mall crowded with high-tech startups, a blanket of shamrock-green moss covers a crumbling concrete wall.

I want to grow moss for a place to sit on dry windy days when I imagine the sea, but it’s only the 405 Freeway. Moss that swaddles, that’s soft like my auntie’s autumn gloves.

Moss for a wedding vest, dress me like an ambassador, a Pasha, a world-dominating Conquistador who deserves to serve a lot of time.

A moss where I can lie in a shady spot as water nymphs emerge from the swamp behind my barber shop and rescue me, carry me to a sun-drenched clearing, lay me down, and love me.

A moss as a memoriam to those who preceded me to the casket about whom I’ve never said much, but thought a lot about.

I want to grow moss on the front of a ’54 Chevy, big chrome teeth on the grille, a pressed-metal smile.

Moss that thrives where grass won’t grow – a diversion from thefts and murders and button-down prigs who believe in the iron cage.

I want to grow moss that’s an antidote for boredom, bad TV, self-appointed Puritans. Hey, it’s been four hundred years since Plymouth Rock.

I always think, when I grow up? I’ll cook, and write, and garden. I plan to grow moss.

A commie-pinko-left-of-left-manifesto-to-paste-posters-on-traffic-tunnel-walls poem, and I wondered if I should read it aloud – to fellow humans – tonight. It’s about narrative myths, black and white photos of stiff-arm salutes, cave-dwelling impulses to smash a skull with a bone, then eat. It’s about fear of basements, rage at dreams, distrust of someone who might remind you of mommy or daddy for reasons we could discuss at great length over lunch. It’s about how hate is kind of like Welch’s Concord Grape Jelly – sticky, sugary, but in the end? It tastes like rope. It’s about what went down at supper years back, how you had to bow your head. It’s about wanting to whine, bitch, lie, and bark. We’re really not much brighter than dogs, and a plant not only has a brain, it is a brain. It’s about ghosts alone with you in madness and dreams, little soap operas as true as copper in a cook’s pot. It’s about whether it’s wise, effective, listenable, and true. I think it’s about done.