For you...

I wrote this with the idea that sometimes we write things for people or about people, but we never get a chance to show it to them. They don't know how we feel in the words we have time to think about, or what we think or thought of them and all that. It happens to the best of us, as I wanted to demonstrate.


Mary Magdalene

Tell me the story
of a woman's eager lips pressed
against the wet and dirty neck
of her savior
most holy

come down

in all his glory

say it so that the white soft light
tucked under her pubic bone
still glows
even without his touch
in absence of his grainy
skinned carpenter's hands,
rough from worry
and nails
and begging for death,
missing the organ from between which
their intermingled souls
will not ever squeeze

and recall the gospels, like the best poems
are written to a time
a place
a woman
and lament that even the clarity of omniscience
couldn't keep our lord's loving letters
to a whore
from reaching her far too late.

July relvelations - dream visions, hearts, and souls

Today, without bringing me much comfort, I came to this realization: we will all live a finite number of lives. It seems quite small and obvious, and whether you believe we will live 1 life or 2 lives or it will each be different, it is true that we will never live an infinite number of lives.

Most certainly this is true, as everything with a beginning has an ending. Our lives had to start somewhere, so they must end somewhere. Do people believe the universe is infinite? Perhaps, but Time cannot be. Here's why: if time were infinite how many moments of time would it have taken to reach this moment? Infinite moments. But that doesn't make sense, does it? Either way, there are people who have said reasons better than I could.

But, the interesting thing here is the implication this carries. If we have finite lives, there are only finite moments of pleasure, of pain, of happiness, of sorrow. Nothing can or does last forever. Forever.

There's that word again.

I don't have much to say about the state of things. I have forgotten all my memories, maybe. I'm not sure if I should dwell on them, they stretch out behind me.

There's no reason to dwell on them now, I'm not sure how I feel about them anyway.

My nights are filled with wonderful and wild dreams. I had a dream that you lived next door, and we met on the streets outside of our houses, somewhere between my house and the highway. We stood and I think you wore clothes that you don't own. The sky was a gray slate, a sheet, the trees were vibrant green. There were little bits of moth-pollen in the air, dusty feathery insect wings that floated down around us, just to the two of us, holding hands in the middle of the pavement, the tall grass on either side of us. We were in a hallway between natural and man made. The same place I think my soul might exist sometimes, my soul that has experienced some strange percentage of the meager amount of energy that it contains.

A certain portion of my finite energy is dwindling.

For the first few weeks in June my car was covered in a sticky tree pollen, covered with corpses of the little blooms that fall from trees late spring. I held on to this, a strange mixture of life and death. There was a clearness in those days.

My nights are filled with terrible and dangerous dreams now, hiding, wolves, people I don't know. A girl I've never seen warned me not to go out, warned me how to kill them if I had to. Said there were men and wolves that wanted to do me harm. I woke up so sure that nothing could love me. I don't quite know the reason. I'm sure not that it's wholly untrue, something that just isn't real, but when I woke up the feeling was so strong and ingrained. What has been chasing me in my dreams, what was it that made my mind feel that way, made it so sure? I can't say. Suffice: it was a difficult way to start the day, for sure. It was humbling.

Hearts, it seems, have a finite number of times they can beat. In animals it's a very good way to discover how long they can live. Say a cat, for example, has a heart that can beat up to 80,000 times, but not much more than that. A cat's heart only has so much blood to pump before it can rest. Human's, however, are different. There is no upper limit to the number of times a human heart can beat, at least nothing uniform that we can find. We could have a heart that beats for 150,000 times or 200,000 times or 95,000 times, and for each person it's simply their time. It's individual. It just beats until it can't, we just exist until we don't.

There's no such thing has a heart, then, that beats too slow.

And our souls move along to other bodies until they don't have the power to move. Then what happens to them?

If I had the power, somehow, to find out where our souls have been, I wouldn't use it. I couldn't know that, I don't want to.

When did it first stir within you, any of you? Who has the right to know, not even you, and you probably don't.

And that's just fine.


****************************************************

Edit: This seems kinds of depressing in hindsight, and I certainly didn't mean it that way. Just something to think about, just the current state of my dreams, but dreams don't mean much, do they? Anyway, I thought all that heart stuff was interesting, and I wanted to share it.

8/30

When you love a Tomato, the produce section becomes more exciting

Roma's skin isn't as firm as it used to be, the soft red I once knew is now wrinkled, brown and bruised. She seems to sense my trouble with her taste, the newfound foulness of her oozing juices. She lies in the crisper sleeping, dreaming simple vine dreams.

With a fresh garden of stuble and an overripe gut, the market is a gallery called "Things you can't have." I stare at Roma's ripe relatives, the sweet yellow of her curious cousins. I gawk at the cherries and their meager frames, wonder how much of my weight they could handle, how long it will take to notice me staring. Even crispy Videllia is looking better, and if I could only wash away her soupy stink or grow 10 years younger, I would peel away her crumbling yellow clothing and indulge in the sweetness of her layers.

6/30 and 7/30

6/30

may fix spacing later


a few requests, in order of entering my mind


I want to hold my baptism
in the heavy atmosphere
that lays herself down
and deadly before
the first ovation
of thunderstorms
I want the world to stop
spinning for just one
goddamn (single)
motherfucking (oh please oh please)
SECOND but
mother nature dont care what
I want. there are dangerous
streetlamps in this city
that stop you like spot lights
or spot you like stop light and all
I want is to know the difference
between houses and homes
realty and reality
relatives and relativity my
eye wants closure
like no lid can give, scared
of scars or anything carved
into a point
I want to make interstate love
seem silent let the big trucks sleep
all night and just leave
your face in my extra empty
pillow space thats all
I want from the whole american race.


7/30

Cyber PUNK

In the long lobby mirrors, metallic and shiny like new eyes, her plastic pink raincoat is lucid. She stands square waisted, the white cotton painters pants curve to frame her hip and leg. A brain bucket in her left hand and the distant whimpers of bikes out her left ear. She pops a derm to her skin, and inhales all the dust of the world. Exhales a prism.

Behind the over-large black of her glasses her cowboy buzzes in her mind, swims in the liquid of the matrix, blind in the myriad faces of orange-yellow light. She don't ride console no more. She did hard time for hanging paper in the back of an old bodega, another time for breaking a blue boy's back, she lit up some kids with her fresh fletcher like subway lights, every one of em flatlined.

But here, her silver eyes trace a couple rent-a-cops, hired muscled that ain't gonna push as strong as I am, she says. A few seconds before the count goes off, before her cowboy coos in her ears and tells her where to make the drop. Don't let me down, Catmother. She fingers the flesh colored tape in the ridges of her chest that hold the bugs in place and names everything she knows.

Eel is the fence. Paintboys don't talk. She don't work for hotdogs. And right now she's his input and he's her cowboy.

5/30

this is something i've been working on for a while. no verbs.


first time

The crickets shuddering secrets and the weight of every summer, with a voice a harsh whisper like a kicked and broken dog. And her dry throat, the only remains of the havoc of stale pollen off withered grass.

Under a sharp summer sky all dewy damp and too few stars. Her heaving pale cotton wraped body in an unruffled dress on the hood of a red chevy. And hard horny thighs and patient playing fingers.

She and the long tunnel of the moon, the distant cities of stars. Unsatisfied fingers and a ruffled white dress, but no whimper no moan.

4/30

The Truth About our History (since 2007)

It's not fair for me
to keep writing poems
to you
or at you
or about you.

you have your handsome
helpful husband
and a plane ticket
to russia
i have empty
hands
and pockets
and pages.

3/30

Slick Roads

hes skittish like a spider
feeling faint floor tremors
when the rain falls
across his windshield
and the big trucks
sneak by on
18 wheels

2/30

drunk at a party, prose poem

I talk to a girl for twenty minutes but I don't know what she says. My brain drifts around a lot, past all the other girls in the room. I try and hold eye contact, try not to check out her body, but my reaction times are slowed, and I can't estimate how long my looks linger.

We say a lot of stuff like, "yeah I know," "I totally agree" "I feel the same way" and I'm not sure how much of it we mean.

I stand on the crowded porch, sheltered from the pelting rain, smoking a cigarette and breathing over the low roar of the people. I don't know what happened to that girl, or even remember her name. All I can see is a little star right at the tip of my nose, and all I know is just the very edge of a need to cough.

And even though I'm very wet, I can't feel a single drop of rain.

1/30

she signed
'may your inner cowboy
frequent plenty of midnight executions,
saloons, cigarettes, and prostitutes'
on the last page of the country
music book she bought me.

There were so many whiskey
and cigarette deaths
on those lonesome pages
and she knew how much I hated
that those same things weren't killing me.

Thinkin bout train
songs and downtown little rock
still the same
hard luck cowboy
that only grew up
a little.



a kind of decent first attempt. it's mostly true.

0/30

it is April, now

30 in 30

i wouldn't be too surprised if it goes a lot like last year

except this year I plan to finish

dont expect much, and you won't be disappointed

thanks

My Quirky Novel 4 Landing

And then the lights faded and we were left alone in the dark once again. The sounds were all distant, all echoed whisper-like in the memory of the roar that only seconds ago consumed the air between us.

We just were. Lee, and I.


When I finally get to work, it seems like an hour of tired driving, my throat is a dry, tight muscle. I keep a hardhat in my car, and I put it on. It mats my dirty, wet hair to my forehead. I cringe at the feeling.

I sigh, and know that Lee and I will make it, eventually.

Today has been a good day.

Today at work I listened to a Neko Case concert from NPR that has been sitting in my podcasts on my work laptop for a few weeks. Then I looked up when she would be playing close to me: July 25th in Nashville. It would be nice to get away for a while. It would be nicer to get away with someone special.

I also think Nashville is a very pretty town. I would like to drink with someone special in Nashville, let the cool and calm water of the river cover our night-time selves. We could keep a bed warm, together.

Neko Case mentioned a book, "In Watermelon Sugar," as the inspiration for the song Margret Vs. Pauline. It's a story written in a strange way, a very simple common kind of way that I feel I'm emulating too much. Sometimes when I spend a lot of time with something I can help but put all my words and thoughts in that form for a couple of hours afterward. Hopefully later tonight I will forget all about watermelon sugar and write my normal way, because I've been hoping to get a few things written.

The book is about a man, the narrator, and his love interest Pauline, and his ex-lover Margret. The thing I hate about love stories is the way they remind me of all those interesting electric tingling feelings that come with new love and comfortable love. Love is interesting, I think I write about it more than I think about it, and when I do write about it I sound like I desire those feelings. Sometimes I do, but usually not. I really used to, really really. Life is strange that way.

I'd rather write something interesting, like a story or a poem, than this boring little blurb about my day.

I would like to continue to post "My Quirky Novel" posts, even though I don't really have any kind of intentions of linking the story together. Maybe I'll see where that narrative goes, but I never think about the over-arching story really. Mostly I use it to sit down and brainstorm and practice, but I find that I don't have the time for that every day. Still, I feel I'm staying creatively busy, so that's good.

But I do like Lee. She's an interesting character to write about, I think.

I'm going to let the story continue, but let the inconsistencies persist.

My Quirky Novel Chapter 3 - (i don't have a title) - experimenting

The city held in the heat and light of midsummer well through October and we were held close to the bosom so we were most warm, and still Lee wore an extra thick sweater. She said she wanted something to wrap herself up in, wanted to be sure that something was touching her, wanted the comfort of tactile contact.

We sneak through in a quiet old car, Lee's mother's Chrysler. Lee said once that she liked sliding down into it, like a warm safe hole, told me she remembered riding to primary school inside the deep cloth bucket seats. I elected to drive this car for that reason alone.

The light of the October moon splintered in the haze, soaked up by the sidewalks, covered all the drifters and the kids with bad intentions. They said, I remember, that we loved the devil as we walked into the little doctors office. They said that we would burn forever in hell. All I could think of was a scene on the side of a river, the hills wide and tall like expecting mothers' womb, and two people discussed what we were just to have done. They only let in a puff of air, said he.

The line repeated it's self over and over inside my mind, darting back and forth and invoking some sick twisted sense that perhaps we were doing something hard and worth hearing about. We had become characters beneath the pen of Hemingway or Faulkner, Salinger or Lee.

It also welled up the deepest sort of guilt, the kind that sticks to your soul and weighs you down, the exact kind you don't need when you are drowning like were back then.

My fingers parted on the steering wheel and Lee lit a cigarette. She'd been chain smoking, one after other, until her voice was rough with my ears; the distant sound of gravel voiced beneath tired treads of an old blue pickup and a dusty Tennessee road.

She filled herself up with the cheapness of smoke; I couldn't help but think she was trying to replace what was lost. I want to replace it with myself, I want to take that sacred child's place, the one that we sacrificed on a cross around midday.

I named her Luanne in my head, and I called her Lu for short. It was Lee's mother's name, and it was a permutation of Leeanne. I wanted to think of her, pale thing framed, razor thin dark hair hanging loose, maybe with flowing and sloping curls she stole from my head. She had Lee's soft eyes, the eyes that flooded out pale light with the intensity of the waning moon. The eyes that drew me in, the soft hurt eyes that seemed to splinter some time today and I worried would never heal.

I drove past our hotel room and Lee follows it with her eyes. "Where are we going?" She asks, her voice a harsh whimper like a kicked and broken dog.

Sometimes when I was 16 and I was just able to convince my parents to go out, I would drive not into the city to see friends and talk loudly in moderately quiet places until past midnight most people my age would have. Instead, I would take two borrowed cigarettes from my father when he wasn't looking, and maybe Saturday nights, when I had to come home early anyway, I would drive to the little airport.

It was a municipal airport, not for public use. I never saw any planes land or take off, but I also knew they didn't have any traffic after dusk, and the only times I was able to come, even unhindered by the freedom of summer, was later than eight or nine.

And so, like so many times before, I sat on the hood, this time of that aging relic Chrystler with a cigarette hanging limply from my lips. Lee leaned her lithe frame on mine, feeling lighter, less burdened by the weight of a second soul. I could feel the ache welling up inside of her, but she suffered through her cigarette, the smoke coming in spouts from her nose and mouth.

Lee didn't cry.

I did.

It came in heavy sobs, all the guilt I felt that Lee could hold down and keep beneath her lungs and ribs. Always quiet and strong.

"Lee." I say her name in a long huffing syllable, gasping before and afterward. She puts my face into her breasts, they muffle the words but she feels the vibrations in her shirt. "Did we do anything right: today, ever?"

The air shakes between us and a noise and light flood our car for a moment then dissipate, spread across the field. The dim glow of the fog lights gain a companion and the noise fills the inside of our ears, make our drums tremble.

Through eyes streamed with tears, between Lee's short dusty hair and my own fingers, I wipe my mouth and watch for the first time ever a plane descend from flight and return to the safety of land.

more later...(?)

My Quirky Novel - Chapter 2 - brotherlove

Her brother called me a new-moon-sissy, cause he thought I was either a hippie or that I was gay. Or, maybe those words held another kind of abstraction for him, and they did in their own way mean that I was a special kind of sissy. A rarity, the once-a-month kind that took people's sisters and daughters and broke them in some strange arcane kind of way where they would never be fixed. He told me he'd pound on my kidney's till I pissed out blood. I got all consumed with the image. Would it just be sorta milky-clear watery blood piss or just blood, lively and newly red as though it came straight from a gash in my kneecap?

It barely matters anyway; he took what little life he had, and like the last bit of gel in the toothpaste tube squeezed it all out over his walls and floors. Lee won't ever forgive him, she still says so sometimes as we sit outside and wait for the cold of dusk to catch up to us. To shake our bones until our teeth hum like old refrigerators.

When Lee slides in next to me she breaths her sorrow and hunger and wanting for money and time out into the back of my hair. I feel the way she moves and settles on the thin mattress and with her added weight I can almost feel the hard thin carpet that covers the floor. She puts her entire weight against mine and I am the little spoon. I lay back into her, put my butt in her crotch and feel her pubic bone through the thin pants she sleeps in. Her little breasts press into my shoulder blades and I can almost feel them deflate on the jagged bones that are cresting my back skin.

Just before the sun wakes up, evil intentions fresh from dreams, to burn the masses once again, I get up and set about working in defiance. I dress quickly. I can't shave or shower. I take to staring at myself in the mirror for the minutes those activities would have filled.

My skin is gray on my face. Three weeks of stubble but I don't have it in me to grow a beard, it never really seems possible. My hair looks too dark and a little wet, and clumps and mats on my head, it's disgusting really. I haven't touched it for fear that maybe it's hard, covered in some thick crust or wet with weeks of oil and sweat. I stink, I can tell. I imagine little bits of shit and dirt clinking to the forlorn follicles that vomit long and thin strings that I'm still calling hair.


I drive to work but listen to nothing except the humming of the tires as they fight against the road. Droning my hears the road said the words to me again, the words that have been on my mind since yesterday haunting me. The pale ghost of her brother, overly healthy and fed, stomach just ripe, a little to big to fit exactly inside of his pants so it spills over slightly.

I am a new-moon-sissy. I was right. I'm not a writer. All I think about is the sun and the moon.

I'm the highest order of fuck up because I lied outright and did exactly what I said I wouldn't. And even though mostly it was an accident, I took his sister and I broke her good, and now she'll never be the same again.


We got up at 8AM. We were shower soggy when we stepped into the mid-October sunlight, the air was warm in pockets making anyone uncomfortable enough to bully you into wearing long sleeves. The thermometer betrayed you in that respect.

It was 2002 Lee had Bob Dylan's hair. I couldn't keep my hands off her stomach, it was smooth and fresh pink, bounced at the touch. There was something of mine growing somewhere beneath there and I felt like it was the shame I could only hide with my fingers.

She didn't show a single sign. We had waited six weeks just to be sure. We stayed at her parents house but we didn't tell them why. Her mother made an obvious (and mostly wine fulled) declaration that we should get married once and for all. We had been together for 3 years then. Her mother had gone on about that until Lee's brother died, at which point she locked herself into a room and didn't say much else on the subject.

We shared a cigarette in the car. The feeling of my lips where hers had just been took some of the weight from the situation. I started feeling sick, I could only imagine what Lee was feeling. She looked out the window and didn't make a sound except the little sucking noise she made when she took her drags. She told me that she didn't mind smoking since she knew what we were about to do, and she knew she was going to see this to the end.


The road still hums it's gentle haunting and the smokestacks loom quietly ahead, white pavement glows with a liquid film, the white hot sea of the sun come down to consume anyone foolish enough to be caught out walking their dogs.

After work I sell the last of my books, including a few old and first editions that I collected from professors in college or got from my father. He was an unquenchable scholar on weekends, picking up old copies of Whitman, Hemingway, whatever else he could find. I haven't told Lee that I've been selling them; mostly because I don't want to burden her and her empathetic sadness that she holds like water in a broken glass, so careful and it keeps dripping out. Our time together lately has been so spare that I hardly feel it worthwhile to fill her up with such sour emotions and let her walk around all high-school-crush broken for a few days.


My hands shook, it was freezing inside the waiting room. It was unbearable, the silence ticked out with the steady broken-faucet drip of the clock on the wall. Almost a relic in these times. I think to grade school learning to read such a clock, and realized that there are children alive and aware today that can't begin to know how to read one of those. They have far to little practice, they have spent their whole lives sleeping in our digital dreamscape.

Lee's arm is hot on mine, the skin on my forearm cools and she leaves a pale stain where the blood fled her touch. A ghost left her handprint on me. I remember the stark image it drew it my head, of our unborn girl placing her future hand on my arm sometime down the line, when Lee and I were old and still happy in the quiet way where we read our books in the same room, leaning on one another, but never say a word. It killed me. I was a coward.

The man at the bookstore looked my copies over slowly. Turned all the pages. Looked for mars or marks. He is quickly satisfied with his findings, and hands me a hundred dollars. I contemplate what to do with it as it dries my hands.

I hit the curb and already my pocket is sweating. That pack of cigarettes doesn't seem so selfish anymore. I feel like if I take one out it will self immolate in the weather. I'm sticky with sweat, glistening really. The more I wait the more I realize this is part of the prescription when it comes to being outside, you form a thick film; an interesting side-effect of the human cooling system.

Lee has already left for work when I get home. There is a note on the table. Love is all it says. The power is out, the house is tinted in brown light, the toilet bowl is brown, our lungs our brown. Love. I put it in my wallet.

My Quirky Novel - Chapter 1 - a love story

blah blah blah, just brainstorming words


I'm teething on lights outside in the parking lot, the day-time is a sickening well of pressure and hot. Everything clings to me. My shirt, the smell of smoke, the heavy burning dark lump in my lungs.

The sun sits up in his sky and plays with matches. He burns all the little ants that run around the earth, he's a kid with a magnifying glass and a feeling of entitlement. I want to lay outside naked in the sun and let his gentle fingers touch me.

My dick starts to get hard at the thought. I'm laying outside naked covered in sweat. My body hair is already matted to me and Lee is there. Her pubic bone covered in an auburn swatch of short, visible curls.

Soon I'll move on to bigger and better things, I say aloud. No one listens or hears or maybe even cares. They probably think I'm sharing their dream; get the fuck out of this stupid mindless middle class minimum wage monotony and into something better and bigger. Let my legs stretch out a bit.

I call it big fish syndrome.

But no, I don't got it that bad yet. I don't got it at all. I'm clean and healthy as hell, ever been and ever will be. I'm fifteen years younger than all these fucks and I know it's a waste of dream time. No, I'll buy a pack of filters when I head home.

Irony melts the thoughts at the beginning of my brain. I work an hour for the money to buy one pack, and each pack takes 30 minutes off my life.


Lee stomps on my toes every night when I get home. She digs the balls of her feet into the tops of mine, stands up on tip-toes (as she calls them) and firmly, with such finality to it, places her tongue inside my mouth.

She whispers how cold the kitchen tiles feel on her bare legs when she sat down to fill the cat's water. She softly puts her knee just below my groin and she takes a cigarette from me. The only time she smokes in the house is when she gets really horny or really sad.

Those days all she does is lay on the couch and watch trash tv- the montell williams show is her favorite. She can't try since the water got shut off, so she sits and put my hand on the lump in her throat and try and work it over and soften it.

She wears an old, over-large long sleeved shirt. It hangs from her body like vines of ivy spiraling up a decaying chimney. I can see her rib-cage stretching for the hell of it beneath thinning skin. They pop and creak then quake like plate tectonics as she twists around beneath her covers.

She invites me beneath those sheets on the old leather couch her parents gave her when she moved out 5 years ago. Her body is spoiled by inside air, she is accustomed to the cool of the tile in the kitchen. Her limbs are lithe and pale. A little bit of her stomach skin peaks out at me; the rift where her pants part from her shirt, the way she lays, one hand above head, the other curled beneath breast, tugs and contorts the fabric of the too large shirt. Her left shoulder lays exposed, draped quietly with the slow sloping curls of her unwashed hair. Eyes quiver and she spreads her legs, her long denim shorts tighten around her thighs, the only place her bones seem invisible, only sacks of fat dangling from limp muscles.

In this light it betrays her. She looks beautiful and I realize that she needs my body and I need her mind. I lay down on top of her, most of my weight in my shoulders and I start crying.

Heavy sobs and heaving for air sounds fill the room. Lee moves to sit and I bury my face deep in her lap, my nose dripping yellow water. She doesn't say anything, or maybe she does. I don't stop crying to ask her repeat herself. Her voice doesn't crack at all inside the quiet room where I think she lives most of her life.

When we eat I refuse to have any, feeling wrapped up and selfish for buying the new pack of smokes. It's one of our last meals, we have to ration.

We feed on one anothers' bodies later in the dark before she goes to fill out the grave-yard shift. Lee is starving and she lets my affection fill her up as much as the food I go without and I fill up on guilt for treating her bad. Tomorrow I'll figure something out, but lately it's all been bullshit about the sun and the moon.

I'm not a fucking writer, I whisper to her when she leaves.

I love you, too. She says back, and it crushes me so hard and fast that I don't really sleep but just shiver under the covers and wait for the one hour when she gets back before I wake up, and she slides into me sideways and we touch half-clothed bodies in the utter darkness, no sex no blood flow, just full of love and longing for more time. She puts her mouth on my neck, hunger palpable in the way she teethes my skin and I wish I could fill up her collapsing stomach.

Storms - my chain of thoughts, this weekend and further past

I will teeth the outskirts of my Monday morning brain. I spent a too much lung smoked weekend, wait patiently though Sunday, starving through Saturday, a beer or three on Friday.

Try and recall what I thought I might put down into words sometime, somewhere. I will cough or sneeze out all the words like a January head cold too close to school's starting day.

I haven't been out of this state in over two years. The last time I was I went to Memphis and watched the Decemberists craft some of my favorites (and far too few of my most favorites) on a stage before my eyes. Somehow all those different little instruments (harpsichord, banjo, mandolin, accordion) moving between fingers, the scent of other bodies rubbing against mine, the dark and the heat, the gentle craving for one more smoke, my lungs freshly accustomed to the taste, all move around inside the hard admiration, the transcendent jealously of her body, the swishsway of her sliding hips moving to pop-lite in the bleeding red stained light of the stage. Be my actor, one more time, cum hard and fast and fake beneath me just like you used to, and tell me it was amazing, your voice crack slightly and distantly. I will hold this all for you until I can no longer, until you are replaced with someone who maybe fill that crescentmoonhole you left in my soul one first of June morning.

It's been two years since I was no longer a child. It's been two years since I was only flesh and love. I remember the night well.

It was 2AM on April 30th; my 19th Birthday. You are now the only girl I've ever been with. There is some kind of stigmata associated with those words. I bear the stain-handed mark of truth. I'll show you my palm for less than a quarter, because I love the shame of association. I'll tell you all my secrets for this reason or that, because the shame on display is the closest I'll really ever come to exhibitionism.

Sometimes I think about your new lover tangled beneath covers. I have only seen him once, so I let the ambiguity twirl around inside my imagination. I wonder how his fingers, his tongue, his dick curves and moves and brush up against you, get you going, get you off.

I'm having problems removing my hopes that you remember me. I know you can't, it's not fair to him for me to even ask you to. It's probably not fair to me to hope you do or pretend you do.

I'll be fine, in the meantime.

Bullshit on nostolgia

It is last summer and everyone is out of the country. Everyone except Eric, who has already moved into my apartment and is asleep on the floor by the couch, where he will sleep until a roach dies close to his made-up bed of covers and carpet one night and when he takes a shower the next day I spend the whole 15 minutes trying to work up the nerve to move the thing to the trash or to get the vacuum over and suck it up.

Sometimes it feels like everyone is out of the country. Everyone in the entire world. But it only rarely feels like this, and even more rarely when I realize it makes no sense. I have no idea how long it was like this; it seems like a month, but it was probably more like two weeks.

But today is a particular day, a day that remains vividly in my memory, the way a dream might right before you forget it. It is maybe 7 A.M., and it is June 4th, and I am arguing with myself over going to McDonalds to get breakfast. When I finally decide to go I take "Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Basho with me. When I arrive I left my wallet at home. I smoke a cigarette when I leave and one when I get back. At home, I read a few more Haikus and then write her a message on facebook. I was reading Basho for something to say. I include a few of his Haikus and mostly talk about movies and feelings and songs. Nothing of real importance.

Less than a month later we go out for coffee. We spoke about 8 cigarettes between us and talk for six hours, talk long after everyone has left and the place is closed and dark. We drive for a while, and we sing "Yankee Bayonet," The Crane Wife, the Decemberists. I sing the girl part and she sings the boy part. I spend most of the first verse convincing her to play along.

She invites me to a house-show on Saturday. All accounted for it goes horribly. The worse it goes the worse I feel, and the less I talk.

The messages slow but don't stop.

We see one another one other time besides this. I have mixed feelings about that night, I did then and I do now. I can't find any evidence outside of those messages that we were more than awkward acquaintances.

But in the messages we talked at length about anything, nothing. Mostly nothing. But I haven't talked to someone the say way since or before, but I haven't since felt as understood. Eventually I made an idiot out of myself. I pushed the shame away yesterday and reread it, and I am now as confused as I was then.

So I name her the one that got away. So, sorry, I lied in that poem.

I have had my one that got away, and it has been awful.



It is May, before Luis leaves the country. He makes it seem like he'll be gone for two weeks, but time stretches so curiously when you have nothing to do I don't remember it only being two weeks.

I still play World of Warcraft a lot, and after 3 years I don't think I'll really stop anytime soon, not stop for good.

We raid with but we hate it.

When Eric and I drive home we listen to Iron and Wine. He usually complains that I listen to the same CD too many times, but I've gotten away with listening to this one for about a week. I usually, while we aren't talking, switch to "Each Coming Night."

I listened to that song last Friday and it was nice again. I listened to that CD a lot more later in the summer, when I hated my job and never saw any friends. I listened to Songs for Dustmites a lot too.



It's 12P.M. and the sun is sitting up in the sky with a magnifying glass, burning all the little ants that run around planet Earth. When I go outside I gloss with sweat, almost instantly, as though it is a condition of the environment. When in water you are wet, when outside you are sweaty.

I light up a cigarette. Eric is asleep on the couch. The smoke burns my lungs like the air burns my skin. Birds sing or cough, I can't tell which. I have to close the door so quietly. Partially because Eric is still asleep and partially because I told him I quit a month ago. I don't think he believes me, but I'm always paranoid.

I should try and find a job. I should try and make plans. I should try and get to Kroger. I should try and quit smoking. I should try a lot of things, but I won't try anything. I'll try and finish this cigarette and keep my mind busy until Eric wakes up. He can be a pain, but mostly he's okay, and now he's the only friend I have really. Soon, I'll leave him in my apartment and move home for a month to work before school starts. I should get better used to this type of living.

Some nights Don comes over. Some nights we order pizza. Some nights I find a good reason to sneak away for a smoke. I usually "go for a walk" right before bed. I miss this a lot. Just having my own place, just being there, sleeping there, smoking there, reading there. Now, those days feel so far behind me it's unnerving. It grates at me, and I wonder how far I am behind newer times, in a new apartment, with newer friends. And I can live there and eat there and smoke there and drink there and smile there and frown there.

And lay on the floor with some pretty little black haired someone and drink $15 worth of rum and cokes. We can listen to Songs for Dustmites, because it's one of the best love songs I've ever heard. It's my favorite.


I've been trying to find a reason to feel sad about all these things I know I should and want to feel sad about. I've been trying to find a reason that this year hasn't been good. Even though I know with my insides it hasn't been so good, I can't name one reason why. I couldn't tell you if forced why I know (but don't feel) like this year has been awful and this summer with be awful.

But I don't want to end on a downer, because against all odds I have hope. I couldn't begin to describe why, I don't know myself, but something tugs at my eyebrows and whispers in my ears. It won't be all bad, it won't.

looong week :(

I didn't realize I hadn't posted since Monday, so I guess I'm 3 behind. I'll catch up this weekend, I'm still pretty busy.

420

I have no idea what to write about tonight :/

W.B.

my grandmother flew
out of the window
of her broken bricks and wood chips
house
and maybe saw clouds and birds
and god
before she came down like a meteor
all wrath fire and kill
the dinosaurs
and shattered the sanctity of solid earth
before her last breath was blown out
by the screaming whispers of wind
never said another word never made
disturbed air reach for my ear

my father sat in the kitched quiet
head in hands
elbows on knees
throat all shreaded
shaving cuts shine silent
weakness of arms
trembling of fingers
she never sucked blood
from the knee bones
that cant hold up his weight
never got him shots
never kept him safe
didnt look at his fingers twisted the wrong way
in her name

2/3 of the way done tomorrow

han shan

lawnmower clicks
the sidewalk throws up
pollen like the last dying blood
and breath gasping from purple lips
slices of gut
little chunks of blood
from the new grey green grass
and the first day of spring

my brother thuds a basketball
against new concrete lazy
gum hangs from his mouth and flakes
skin cells off his hardened head
and blood slips out of his kneecaps
waits for him to realize the shavings
white skin clinging limp then falling
like ripe dead landmines from a sweetgum tree

i sit on white sidewalk in sunlight
glimmering like beach sand or watch faces
poking my eyes with needles distracting
my reading leaving me mouthing
ancient words translated from pictures
carved deep into mountains and rocks and tree
shivering from the hands of an old hermit
on a river soaked mountain
ice water inside
old flesh wounds underfoot