A Dialogue: the Wick and the Carpenter

(1996)

It feels as though it is going to rain. As follows from that fact, it is also cold and darkly silent. A man in a grey overcoat steps out of an unremarkable grey house in the suburbs and walks briskly down the driveway, led by a little black dog that is trembling with excitement. The man stops suddenly and looks up at the overcast sky as if sensing for the first time the imminence of rain (although he obviously knew beforehand, as shown by the overcoat). The dog pulls impatiently on the leash and whines. The pair walk down the street together hurriedly, most likely trying to avoid the rain before it hits.
“Red! How goes it? Looks like we got some rain coming our way. Did you hear about the collapsing of the bridge? The collapsing of the bridge? All the children have gone insane. The flowers are melting into pools of wax too hot to touch. The rain is just what we need, just what we need; hopefully it won’t get too rough for the repairman out there.”
A bird falls lazily out of the sky onto the sidewalk. Red jerks his dog away from the bird and waves to his neighbor and continues walking. The sky grows darker and the silence grows pregnant with expectancy. Red threads his way carefully around pools of hot wax.
A child runs out of some hole in the sky and approaches Red with a smirk on his face while stomping gaily upon wax puddles as if they were mud. “Hey, mister,” the child shouts before turning abruptly into a piece of string sticking upright in the wax. Red’s little black dog whines and begins to lick at the string. The strings shakes and quivers and then finally pops back into the child, who promptly begins giggling, “that tickles, cut it out!” The dog’s stumpy tail waggles furiously in delight. “Animals always break through appearances,” the child tells Red in a matter-of-fact tone, the kind of voice children use when they are trying to be grown-up. The little boy scampers up onto Red’s back and seats himself comfortably with his arms around Red’s forehead.
“Now it all makes sense!” the little boy says cheerily, looking about at the world from his new perspective, “Everything is clear and simple. If you people would just let us see it from here more often, we would be able to understand everything even better than you could.”
“You don’t seem so insane to me,” Red replies, continuing on his walk as before, down the sidewalk.
“Who said anything about insane? If anyone’s crazy here, it would be you. Like how about that blue vase?”
“What?! How did you . . . “
”And the smoke rising out its translucent belly? With the cubist yellow background? C’mon! Who else would think of such a thing!”
“I . . .”
“You . . . always distorting things! Always hiding behind abstractions and intangible walls! What are you trying to get at? All you do is confuse me!”
Red stops as the little black dog does his duty on a little square patch of withered grass. Red mumbles something incoherent to the winds and then his face lightens up suddenly. “It’s like when you look at an ocean at sunset or . . . or when you want to say something but you can’t, like when you wake up in the morning and remember your dream and you know that there was something there, something that you knew while you were there . . . do you know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” the child says grudingly.
“And your throat gets all thick and you clench your fist and you know, you just know that something is there, is behind everything . . . and your soul, you soul gives this little leap . . . ”
“Wait just a second! Your soul? Your soul!”
“I mean, your heart . . .”
“No, no no! Don’t try to slip out of this one! I heard you say quite clearly, ‘your soul.’ You said, ‘your soul!’ the child says triumphantly, “So, getting a bit spiritual now, are we?”
“Well, and so what! Alright then, your soul, damn it!” Red yells as he begins walking again, “Your soul feels as if it were trapped within that infinite nutshell and it feels as if it were happy and sad all at the same moment!”
“And there you go again! What kind of contradiction is this? Always distorting things!”
“What do you want, the devil take you?!” Red splutters, fuming, before he catches himself and shakes his head about–much to the chagrin of the child, who hangs onto Red’s ears. Red helps the little boy off of his shoulders and they walk hand-in-hand. Thus calmed, Red walks in silence a little further before speaking again. “Well, I know what you want. You want happily-forever-after’s and Disneyesque epilogues. You want the redemption, the infinitely merciful judgment, the darkness and the light. You tell me that we separate things with abstractions–well, you separate things with simplicity. And so what if I do think of a translucent blue vase with smoke rising from its belly, with a cubist yellow background? Stevens had his blue guitar; Bishop had her volcanoes; Dostoevsky had his Karamazovs. We are all struggling in our universes within glass walls, forming our own realities based upon distorted perceptions.”
The child stomps his foot and whines, “But it’s because of you that we are simple! If you would let us see instead of covering everything up, we would know everything! It is you, you who have made us this way!”
Red stops and turns to the child. “But you and I cannot see the truth. Sure, you can see the hazy glorifications of innocence and the puerile basement upon which we are all built. And I can see the moody debasement of experience and the jilted heights to which we aspire. But none of this adds up into one, meaningful, absolute equation. There are always the spaces between our selves and each other for which we can never quite account. We all see through our own lenses, and everything is the struggle to bend it all into as broad a reflection as possible.” He lifts the child and kisses him upon his forehead, and the child turns into a string again, then falls down into Red’s mouth.
The rain begins to fall. It is a cold rain, a sheet of polished metal slamming into the ground like nails. The man in the grey overcoat scurries quickly back the way he came, tugging the reluctant little black dog along. At the foot of his driveway, the man pauses and scans the distant, gloomy horizon. “Ah, the bridge–it’s been fixed,” he murmurs, lost in thought.
A bird flutters like a flame through the rain and slips across the smoky blue sky like a dribble of hot wax. A yellow glint of sunlight arranges itself somewhere beyond the clouds, preparing for the post-storm flash of unburdened calm. The warm scent of flowers begins to wend through the air.

Babel

(1997)

And the Lord came down
to see the city and the tower,
which the children of men built.
And the Lord said,
Behold, the people are one,
and now nothing will be restrained
from them, which they have imagined to do.

The tower rises in the midst
of the destitute city, reaching
out in one solitary tendril stretch
to penetrate the heavens.
Like an infinite flower it builds,
striving forever for perfection
as a line struggles for the asymptote.

A river runs by the bright city,
its flowing surface reflecting
a million points of light.
Slime and trash shiver darkly
upon its pitted face–polluted
by the very lives its virile waters feed.
Deep from within the churning river,
where the glaring manufactured lights
cannot reach, where the corruption
cannot penetrate, comes the Voice.
The Voice speaks through movement:
in intangible whisperings of leaves,
in glistening cries of budding flowers,
in the incessant gurgling of the river.

The inhabitants, blinded by their
artificial lights, deafened by their
loud machines, can only hear the river
speaking at night as they lie
curled naked in their beds.
But even then the Voice is indistinct
and detached, and becomes
distorted into extremes.

Chaste and eager boys
with rapt eyes and ivory hands
grasp at the high notes in the Voice,
twisting their tongues
in pretentious articulation
and drool, dreaming of perfect worlds.
They write dry manifestos of idealism,
and march, singing fervent songs
of victory. Fill the void! they cry, aroused
by thoughts of fulfillment.
Fill the void! God is dead.

Seasoned and wrinkly women
with sagging breasts breathe in
moist whispers behind glass,
their stained faces pressed
together in dread, their tongues,
dried and withered, licking their
crucifixes in devout resignation.
They hear only the low notes.
It will fall, they murmur, excited
by masochistic thoughts,
It will fall, and He will return.

And always from outside the city gates–
if you listen closely, deeply, quietly–
moves the trembling notes of the Voice,
the stirring indifferent notes of the river Euphrates.

O beloved earth the river cries how I love thee how I adore thee how I love the mist that rises in thy morning’s breath and how the wind so delicately brushes back the hair of thy leaves and o how so true so true thou ist o earth thy sunrising heralds the fires of a new day and a new day glistens in the morning air and this and this is time slipping bubbling and frothing over into waves that tumble and race for infinity only to fall back only to rise again and again and again endlessly endlessly gurgling like a baby in innocent ecstasy.

And why dost thou strive so for climax?
And why dost thy wind and waves beat
steadily into the soft earth?
O nature, O conflict, O mother of humanity–
because thou must, thou must fight forever,
thou must–to become passive were to die.

The actual fulfillment is not the point,
no–that apocalyptic end of everything
leaving only emptiness–
one final, meaningless, apathetic
resolution where the world means nothing,
where you are nothing, where the tower
stands for nothing but as a reminder
of barren dreams and faded hopes.

It is rather the heat, the spark, the friction,
the continuous rhythm of brick upon brick,
the eternal beating of two restless hearts
melded together in a molding fire,
that keeps the fire burning.

Believe, believe in my mystery,
in my endless offering of hope.
Babylon the Great–
even in your abomination and filth
you have risen this tower.
Have faith in what once was,
now is not, and yet will come.
Perfection, destruction–love, hate–
stillness, movement–you are two and one,
melded together in a molding fire,
fighting forever, yin and yang.

So the tower stands like a phallus
without a head, rearing its
senseless shaft of creation, craving
enwrapping folds of consummation,
aching to penetrate the universe.

And in this lies the brutal splendor of life–
the whole ecstasy of it all
waiting patiently within that simple swelling
of emotions, that building friction
between two embattled worlds–
not within the hopeless burst,
the trembling, shuddering screams
of selfish pigs over slop.
The whole meaning of life
dwells humbly within
drops of anticipation
that dribble out of a word
or a look, or a touch.
The whole beauty of life is
that pulsating heart that pumps
heatedly, the fire thickening
as swollen tongues battle
endlessly for that perfect,
profound revelation of the universe
building up inside like a tower.

To Live

(written in 1996)

I

The drip, drip, dripping of time runs in rivulets down
the gaping wound on the side of the eternal boy.
The scabs continuously rub against themselves,
pouring forth new pain from the deep caverns within,
from the hungry depths of resentment and anger,
cutting away at the corpse of the man,
eating away at the decaying walls of the man,
the pain possesses, the snake entwines the host.

His bloody eye, ever roving for release,
settles upon a passing child, a little girl
who reminds him of a forgotten part of himself–
and the storm of suppressed feelings
rages into his mind, the winds blowing past
into his hands–beating, beating, remembering now
the anger, the hatred released upon his head–
he feeds upon the pain–hers–his. To make
another feel this pain, to release, to fill
the hollowness inside with another’s heart
stolen, ripped out with his bare hands–
he flies away crying hoarsely, a dying boy,
a living man.

II

I brush my hands–lightly
against my bruises,
feeling the vestiges
of another’s hurt–I
have always believed
in god until now–now
it is a hollow steel image
nailed above my bed.
I hate him.
I see strange things–
in my dreams–
barren landscapes,
charred by the fires
of wars, ruined
by the havoc of storms.
I hate myself.
Why do people turn
against themselves?
I rub my hands together,
feeling a warmth
only outside.

III

Time, the eternal lacerater, flows forever,
washing the wounds of the injured
in the blind waves of deceitful memory,
leaving restless scars in the belly
that must be stoked with the fiery touch of hope.

But what is the world without hope, where
does one fall to be saved, what is the world
without hope but emptiness and death
and pain and pain and endless pain?
Cut off from herself in the past,
she tries to reunite the shards, the pieces–
blood seeps out the cracks formed
by the forced union–never to be whole again.
There is no hope for one who has already died.
She casts her hands out into the dark space,
groping, and feels the cold rigidity of the crucifix
above her head–the hollow steel image that is him–her–
sparks fly and she wonders if there is a chance–
tobe reborn?.canI. canwe. . .
No–there is Nothing.
But a fire once started cannot be stopped
except by time and time and death.
She looks in the mirror and sees nothing–
and that is the world–everything, anything–
beautiful, the world is horrifyingly beautiful
and it was there all along, before and after
the snake–it takes death to know life–
a shattered image, broken to emptiness,
is life itself in truest form: piercingly aware
of death and its encompassing futility.

IV

I am nothing, nothing,
but part of everything;
I am nothing, nothing,
but the world, the universe;
I am nothing, nothing,
but life and death–
I have tasted the blindness
and now I can see;
I have touched the judgment
and now I can sing–

I am nothing–
nothing–
and I am beautiful.

Moon Shore Sonata

There is a rocky shore illuminated by the moon on its rocks, & the water choruses up against it, an alien form inevitably integrated, for the water is unforgiving & completely compassionate. I sit on a high tide inscripted bench, witnessing this primal interaction & trying to understand. A language beyond translation. The birds bob unperturbed on the crest of waves, their rotund opaque eyes capturing everything. Clouds coagulate on the horizon, enlightened by the moon and its reflection. & I am lost in the possibilities I missed this day. That beautiful smile leveled at me that I let go like an unharnessed sail, shooken without change. & here this water mocks me, for its armies conquers all, yet it never captures anything. So who am I to deserve grace? The rocks are hewn by relentless love. My heart is soft, & I am missing you. This moon & its ocean music mean nothing to me.

A Love Song

I loved loving you, pretty princess of the slipstream, come to me out the abyss of the unexpected. But like a breath, I’ve let you go, slow, so slow it hurt, the emptiness so close, it hurt when I drew back new blood into my heart again. I am sorry to have lost you, but I cherish the knowledge of the space you once filled. I am growing from your transference of primal understanding, the metaphysical data that has passed like your wind through my reed. We crafted together a song, an art form that was so powerful that we could only wonder in amazement after it had been passed, after it had come out of us and stood hung before our minds. I am still amazed at your memory, glazed into my skin. There is a loneliness so deep within. There is a hunger you fed that nurtured the flame. Do you know this light that comes from my heart? It is my mind and my body, thirsting for you in this unreachable void. It falls, it travels, it spans into a million stars in the nightsky of our dreams. I loved you, guapa. See the evidence written in the darkness? It may take forever to forget this–for every breath I take is an echo of the birth and death of this love.

Life, the venture of inevitable failure–we live for the fullness of balance that can only be achieved through death. In between there is the beauty, the spiralling movement forward and outward and toward the door in the sky that lets into the space. We love, we love, we love, and we understand, finally, that each and every love is the ultimate purpose for which we have been placed into our bodies.

And now I can sleep without fear of tomorrow, because I know what I have left behind.

Economics of the Corazon

True riches, in any sense, are not a gift of happenstance. They are the accumulation that comes from the denial of waste. Gaining age is a lesson in economy. As youths we waste our energy, spitting it out like radiation, seeking immediate gratification. If we learn anything at all as we grow older and less prone to outbursts of hormonal activity, it is the conservation of our energy, putting our time and love into that which we know is worth the investment. We learn to act in interest of self-preservation, rather than self-destruction; in light of longevity, rather than fleeting release. We learn that the highest reward comes with patience, concentration, and a consistent, diligent trimming of personal desire. When we want nothing, only then are we ready to receive.

Out In

What brings me higher–when my heart is widened with new, unforeseen love–also breaks me open to a new realm of emptiness, a deeper, rawer despair. Even in the midst of a bliss I had forgotten could exist, I am falling. I imagine that there is a point where the depths meet the sky, a point where intense ecstasy and intense pain are indistinguishable, a point where I am rising and falling and torn apart and left with nothing, nothing but a sweet residue of self that sits empty in the midst of the universe, filled only with the sonic wind of the sun, a puppet played but by god. But right now, my heart is strummed and snapped by the eyes of a woman, by her touch, by her lack of touch. And the penetration of her desire takes me to a level of beauty I had not known for so long. Beyond the blinded eyes of the world, beyond the compromise of daily need, beyond the groveling hunger of loneliness. Here in this place against her body, there is no such thing as victory or defeat–there is only the holding . . . and the letting go. And I pull back into myself further, feeling yet more the incredible, unfathomable distance that lies between two hearts, and marveling that this could ever traveled, and wondering, and wondering, and hoping, and despairing, that this road could ever be found out of the darkness again

Me In A Lonesome Mode

The world revolves around the space from which it was created, the word of the godhead a formless first sound breathing into the horribly beautiful noise of the many worlds crashing together in escape of themselves; the gravity of the unknown bends all of this mess of thought somehow, gathering the light back inward. Hunter S Thompson shot himself on the phone to his wife. Such is love, perhaps. A giving of the final, terrible glimpse of emptiness that huddles within all to another. Displaying naked the inhuman terror that is truly love: everything, everything, everything. There is irony in all of our efforts to communicate ourselves to the world. Our words are petty, defined by a tradition of linguistic patterns, barely capable of offering more than a momentary commentary of our incapability to look beyond ourselves. Our gestures are habitual, we grope at each other as if in the dark, desperate to reassure our minds that the world beyond will feel as what we have been taught. There is horror in the night; we lie awake looking at the blue shadows cast by the moon, meaningless without us, but all meaning lying far past comprehension. Our animal selves long dormant within us tremble into adrenaline, awoken yet unseeing. It is all right, it is all right, it is all right, you tell yourself, sensing an incredible danger but unable to locate its source. It is not all right. All of creation sparks within your mind. And there is no one to wrap their arms around you and cradle you into oblivion, not here, not within yourself, not so deep that no words could penetrate, no mind know. Not in the incredible vastness that takes the light back even before it has left. Shining into nothing, the moon, the sun, the reflectance of nothing. The naked spark of a beauty too powerful to be seen. Love shows you the way into this place where no one can enter. You leave yourself behind. You leave it all behind. Everything. Everything. Everything.

You’ve Got A Valentine From Mark! (Shoot it up your ass, Cupid)

So have you found that one who completes you yet, your “soulmate”? According to all pop music and Hollywood movies, this should be the defining purpose of my life. I sure wouldn’t mind finding some chick that somehow resolves all the inner and outer dilemmas of my existence. But from all my experiences thus far, women only complicate things. I’m about ready to throw in the towel on the quest for the Holy Girl. Not that I was really stressing myself out looking for her, or anything. Not that I ever really even tried, in fact. But still, just feeling the possibility of any such a thing existing exerts some kind of unnecessary pressure on my brain. It’s like if you think Santa Claus or Satan exists–you have to craft all sorts of confusing tangential myths simply to address the movement of getting out of bed in the morning. Let’s be blunt and to the point here. Basically, if you do not “possess” someone, if you do not have “someone to love,” then in this society you should be fundamentally ashamed, there is something wrong with you, you should desperately seek to find someone to claim and you should post an ad on Yahoo Personals or something. I mean, it’s almost like if you don’t got nobody, then you can go to the supermarket or the club or the bar or the Personals and buy someone and try them out. Me: I’m smart and funny and rich and I like to lick perineums. You: Bovine and well-endowed and can type up to 80 words per minute. In other words, based on things completely unrelated to anything having to do with divine intervention, you strive to formulate a bond based upon the ideal of simply being claimed. Because once you are claimed, then there’s no more need to stress out about being “one of the losers.” Who wants to be alone, unhappy, unpurchased? Buy me, buy me, buy me!

Who is my soulmate? Who will buy me and use me forever and recycle my soul? Who will complete my fragmented, insufficient self? Who will take my useless days and give them meaning? Who will understand what I can never say? Who will endure my stacatto farts? Who will look beyond my heart-stopping good looks?

Guess I’d better just devote the rest of my time to Allah . . .

Involvement

Sometimes the world, the wide sea of circumstances wraps you up in its tentacled coils and suddenly you are acting and watching yourself act and having no idea wherefore or why. There are forces within yourself beyond your immediate knowing. Your life is indeed a mystery. Every new situation posits a crumb trail of clues to your heart, but the central motive must remain hidden, like dark matter, exerting an inescapable pull towards your omega point–by the time you have awoken, you’ve already stepped out over the edge.

I looked up at the stars tonight and knew their light within me. My life is incredibly beautiful, and it is a song I must sing. I don’t know what note will come out of me next, but I can feel it birthing itself in the barricades of my innermost being, and it feels good, it feels fucking good. And I enjoy this stillness that listens.

who are you?

introversion–the folding within yourself, the witholding of immediate definitive information of your feelings from the world. in the daily, moment-by-moment, play-by-play, press conference of your life, sometimes it is wiser to wait for events to fully unfold before offering up your honest analysis of the situation. it is nice, of course, to vent your feelings in the form of gossip, to feel reassured that your current assessment and course of action are supported by your friends and peers. but you are role-playing then, are you not? you are staking out a position, strategizing, acting the part of victim, or of hero, or whatever you may deem most favorable to your career as a human being. but who are you, really? did you stop and ask yourself that before you spoke in judgment?

yes, politics is a tricky game–even when you claim to not be playing it, you are playing it. we like to think that we are untouched by the ivory halls of justice and boardroom policy making–just as perhaps silver-haired men in suits surrounded by secret servicemen may like to think that they are untouched by us, the underground individuals–but those are thoughts bound by convention. for our every movement, thought, and manifestation of ourselves is political. politics is about more than power, despite what Chomsky may say–there are more to the dynamics of law and order and commerce than simple mafioso maneuvering and slick, shifty-eyed lies. there is also the fact of human interaction, in the marketplace of the everyday, in the information of the flesh passed subconsciously on the subway, in the gaze of the enlightened upon the statue in the park, in the brush of words sputtered out of my inversions–there is no escaping our connection to each other through ourselves. so look–look at yourself, take a good look at yourself and reflect on your ephemeral beauty. what is the use? what is the value? who is this that determines your worth? the eye of the beloved is in your mind. the light of the sun is in your spine. the music of the ages issues forth from your mouth. bow to yourself, and everything else. and let the movement of the world go on around you in its endless chorus of need. because there is nothing that you can take, and there is nothing that you can give. so when the reporters come up to ask you, Who are you?

You can answer them with a smile, and point back at them, and wait, patiently, til the end of the world, for their reply.

An Early New Year’s Sacrament

a new time–according to our inconsistent calendars–is coming, a new year, another age to be added to our accumulated life span. the years pass so fast now, it seems faster every year that i grow older, my memory can barely keep up with my birthdays–i have to think to remember how old i am–mostly because it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. time, what is time? i measure time more accurately by the ups and downs of my relationships with others, and the development of my self–how we grow, how we move on, how we hold on, how the light slips through the cracks into everyday everymoment communion, how love holds my mind high through the bullshit. some of yous i haven’t talked to or seen since buddha knows when. but i can feel you here with me as i stand on the precipice of my life looking down into the future, ready to witness a world i have never seen, ready to experience things i’ve never known, ready to fall to my ever eventual death without the fear of losing what i have never had. yes, another year, another calendar to be crossed off. i look back at this year, and all the years before them, and feel supremely grateful, and blessed. i think of all of the love i have felt and continue to feel. i think of the turmoil, and pain, that i have caused in others, and that i have caused in myself. and it’s inconceivable to me that i should be so blessed. how i try to tear myself down to mold myself into the suffering i think that i deserve, only to find rays of light coming through my heart, only to find my hands taken and gripped by the most beautiful people i could imagine–and how i have been raised to heights by you, by all of you, angels to my mind, bathed in sharp light, spiralling forward endlessly crying out in the name of that which we cannot possess–this joy, this sorrow, this communal know-edge–this is why i live. this is why i struggle to press my heart to words. this is why i send this now to you.
happy new year.

hesitant thought flows in the spider-house in Austin

I
the minute of sentence is to speak this essence of what i see, what i seek, in the connection of infinite possibility that lies in the loss of what cannot be held anyway, to fly, as it were, into a space of play within the elements of what are, to sail with a given wind in a given direction ever always beyond my control; there are times in my life when the current eddies into a swirl of whirlpool stasis, when it seems that i cannot even feel, let alone express, the emotions which bestir the depths of my conciousness. and i act in ways that would appear to me to be counter to everything in which i thought i believed. but here is this spark, catching, fanning the flame of my fingers against the keys of a language that at times is like scratching against a wall, inert, cold, laden with rhetorical adjectives. . .
II
where is this deep place of integrity within you that lies so unknowably beyond language? in the flurry of drunken information that passes so swiftly in the form of money, you wake up into tomorrow half-way spilling over into endless gaps of a nameless suffering, like batter on a waffle-iron, burnt into a patterned shape molded for consumption. it is from the depths that emotions rise, filtered, bubbled eventually into expression, displaced, floating like the plastic piece inscribed with words in a fortune-telling 8-ball, the writing on the wall on the backs of your eyeballs twisted into your mind into an image that platters out of your tongue to be served into a wind of breath and sound into the space of the world. you project an image of yourself onto a plane of endlessly successive images, in the hope that somewhere out there in the darkness there is someone who can pick you out and understand you, and look into themselves and discover a language of themselves in which they can craft a response back to you, into you, to build a platform of a new perspective out of all of the emptiness that surrounds. . .
III
what i am trying to say is that i’m fumbling like an idiot in the darkness with a pen, trying to write myself into everything i come up against. but there are these feelings that i have in myself that i haven’t learned yet how to define. and i come stumbling across these vast new fields of perception in other people, and i suddenly no longer know who i am again, and i am like a child, struggling to place my flurrying emotions into articulation. where am i? who am i? my tongue flutters in my mouth like tree leaves in the breeze–ultimately untranslatable, more of a momentary feeling that passes into the next block as you drive by on your way to your destination.
and yet. and yet. there is definitely this light in my gut that i can feel emanate out my eyes, despite the endlessly blind progression of passerbys: i find it in the dive bar smoke stippled scene, in the live wire plunge of practiced instruments attuned to my attention, listening to the formations of what i have never before heard, i find a sense of redemption in the patterns of loving, brave people who have left their societally defined selves behind, who stand before us weaving strange new threads of wonder, a multi-colored universe in which we are fully embraced if we choose to be, if we can let go of our fear and plunge forward into motion: a place in which there is no judgment, there is no holding back, there is no dissociation of beauty from that which is all around and here and now. i strive to reach this place with my haphazard happenstance words, with my frantic urgent need to connect to you across this physical distance, to reach that within me which is most true, most beautiful, and most worth sharing with you.

Road Trip Chronicle Installment II

becoming an alien visitor to new worlds is a matter of learning acceptance–if one is to do more than the prescribed touristy activity calculated for maximum drainage of your pocketbook. acceptance of standards of living and ways of perceiving people that are outside of the box of what you are accustomed to. eventually, the habits and customs of your history dissipate into the constant adaptation that is required to meet the demands of an unknown and spontaneous universe. anything can and will happen, for there are no ways of sustaining reductive expectations in the face of what you cannot prepare for. yes, in the heartland of America, it is easy to pigeon-hole the people into Wal-Mart herds of banality, to hold up their strip-malled, colon-clogging comfort food overeating ways as representative of everything which is wrong and thus, to be immediately dismissed. but when you are in the midst of that which you would from a distance define, you find yourself talking and relating to people–no matter their appearance–as what they truly are–sentient and intelligent beings struggling to live and find their own winding paths to the light. it no longer becomes a matter of relating to people based on things such as political views and consumerist habits–it becomes a matter of relating to people based on how they actually live, and taking into account the whole context and environment of their situation, including all the problems so evident on the surface. this is not to say that all criticism must be suspended–rather, to say that one has to take into account how a people view themselves and their world. for if someone can find beauty and ways of existence in a world that i would perish in, than i want to try to understand what it is that they find in it that allows them to sustain themselves, and i want to try to relate to them based on how they relate to each other. there is indeed a lot of shit out here that is pretty fucked up. but i haven’t found anything here that is fucked up in a way that isn’t just as fucked up in a different way where i’m from. and so i am discovering new perspectives on myself and what i have become accustomed to, as well. for what we often use as judgment of other people are things which those people take for granted, and do not even think about, so ingrained in their culture it is. so really, learning my way to an understanding of other people is a way of learning my way to an understanding of myself.

Road Trip Chronicle Installment I

in the accumulation of mileage there is, for a while, a sense of loss of self; distinct formations of place and circumstance become washed under by a flash flood of constantly shifting information; there are squatting hulks of red desert rock; then there are trees, pines, aspen, fire-charred, green, yellow, barren; there are haphazard stones piled on stone like giant rock piles against the rain pregnant sky; there are giant windowed edifices of neon built up out of the promise of money; then there is just road, curving endlessly to some point known to some strange people simply as home. where is your place in this? you stop to gather pictures to study and make sense of this wonder later, or perhaps simply to share with others, to point at what you have seen and give it name, as if it were something you have known. but there is really only one wordless moment of perception, where the thing in passing becomes defined in your mind, before you could ever capture it, or claim it, or settle into its city limits–and this moment exists only in juxtaposition and knife-edge balance with the cosmic extremes of non-existance and eternity. how could you hold onto a stream of water? i stood at the ramparts of the Hoover Dam and looked down at the massive construction of concrete to which so many underpaid workers had given their lives–and i did not feel overwhelmed by the ingenuity and brute power of money and technology. no, for water can perhaps be dammed, and re-directed, and bottled. but it is in the end the water which controls us.
so it is that the journey defines us. we craft our narratives and drive our vehicles out through the vast stretches of mountain and desert, passing like flies through the stationary lives of small towns, through the electrified grids of cities, through the barren rock strewn remnants of sea-beds, through the winding snow dusted mountain passes, through the on-going daily struggles of life and death and movement.
who i am is a constantly shedding piece of everything. i am a window, sometimes reflecting the sun of the world outside of myself, and sometimes, in the night, you can look inside and see the sun in my lampshade, where i am studying myself here to learn my way into now.

Contemplation Next To The Fire Drinking Wine

I
why are we withheld from the world? why are we frightened of each other? why is it that the one whom you greatest love brings you the most suffering? there are no answers to the wounds we take, and inflict. the only hope we have is to find a solitary peace–to discover wisdom and bear fruit and cause no more suffering to this world that tries continually to draw us into this chain of neverending violence.
II
after a while in life you come to realize that there are no expectations that can be met–and thus, you learn to let happen the things that will, and let what will not happen go. ah, yet still, how i clutch to my thoughts as if they might change anything, as if who i am devolves around an ingrown desire to center everyone else’s eyes upon me. how barren, how bereft must my heart get in order for me to love, to simply love? what does it take for me to reach across myself to find my way into understanding of another’s needs? how much must i break myself down, and let myself be broken, before i can share this light i feel with you?

everybody feels the wind blow

i will tell you what i have discovered of love. it opens up your core and your eyes can see so deeply into each moment that before were veiled by fear of pain. you can look at the impassive beauty of the sunset on the lake and truly experience it, because you know what gives it meaning. i am like an alien in your bedroom, baring you to my curiosity. yes, there are walls of suffering everywhere trying to stop our bodies from knowing eternity. but despite all insecurity, we cross into each other like boundaries were the dream, and our freedom scientifick reality. when i fall through space to find my lips on your surface, i sense shimmering waves billowing from far below what can be known. hunger to get there, to get to that place that we spend all of our life to remember. i would wait forever by this emptiness just to feel the gentle quiver of my heartstring plucked from another universe, breathing for the moment when my deepest self is hooked into you.
love is the verification of everything that you have become. love is the refutation of everything you have been. love is here. love is now.

I Still Clear

are we gonna step up and dance, or are we gonna watch ourselves stumble into despair? the beat is there, you can feel it in your lips when words form like waterdroplets to fall into meaning. why should we be frightened of what might come out when we release our body to a greater rhythm than our mind? how good do you have to be to move? is freedom learned?
no. freedom is earned by letting go of all the bullshit accumulated by years of bullying, freedom is there for those who choose to not police themselves, who choose not to fear each other, who choose to love, love, love everything that touches their heart, and leave behind everything for that moment of connection, for that spark of rapture in the glowing eyes of their beloved.
the only thing that is learned is how to better hide ourselves from suffering. but this suffering is the only thing that leads us to feel, to free ourselves of inattention, to focus on what truly matters. freedom is not necessarily happiness. but it provides the ability to gain happiness, to reach across seemingly insurmountable boundaries, to talk to that beautiful queen whose eyes met yours and flashed with the future, to vault your insecurity and touch what you know is there even if you can’t believe it, to press your lips to her honeyed sweetness and taste ecstasy. what could have prepared you for this?
we have everything we need. we have eyes to see, ears to hear, mouths to breathe. everything else is a shroud hiding us from each other.

My Way

where is this elusive purpose to which we drive ourselves daily, getting by, consuming our chosen poisons? where is this happiness, this contentment, this place of arranged and meaningful things centered about our hearts? is it in the future, in the achievement of degrees, the acquisition of a spouse, the steady flow of money? is it in the present partying, the nights spent drinking and smoking myself to a point bordering oblivion? is it in her eyes, or her eyes, or her eyes? where is my heart? where is my mind . . . fuck my mind, i don’t regret losing that shit. but my heart, my heart . . . it is waiting for something better than anything that flows temporally through the lobes of my contemporary understanding. it is waiting patiently for my death, it is waiting patiently to stop its steady pumping, to reside into silence, to relax into god. so i keep running, and i keep eating, and i keep drinking, and i keep carrying this heavy load of desire on my back every day. until i die, this is my curse, this is my blessing, to be human, to be confused, to be hungry, to be crying shamelessly into the night to be held and loved and known. i can’t be that monk, holding myself away from the world, i can’t be that saint, giving myself to the world, i can’t be anything but myself: and this–this is what i feel. so fuck everything i’ve ever known and read and been told–i’m going out to live and find my own way through this bullshit.

Blast

like so imagine this over a salsa beat, in miami streets, in the kind of
heat that makes the city wired with sweat. imagine that you are somebody
who is exciting, somebody who sprinkles their bangs in the air and everyone
shakes to the music, in the trembling sacrifice of all expectations,
cut across the horizon of care, there is only image, sparkling water on the
screen, a toning of gravity. the sexiest spirit in the heavens enters the
body of a woman, and all of the people dance in devotion. there is
competition, there is rivalry, there is bitterness. it blends into the
sweetness of her shining. the drummers play to draw the invisible out.
whosoever saith that taming of cobras is a hoax because cobras are
hypnotized not by the sound of a flute, but rather by its motion, are fools.
there is magic in every movement. a tunnel in the fabric of reality to a
world that won’t be understood, only created. it appears, transmitted by
your tongue, by your vision, by your trail in the sand. it comes through
you, out of you, into a space where it is devoured. the feeding of the
hungry children of the light.
become addicted to what is positive. we are not drifting apart. we are
coagulating into orbs so delicate, formed from the deepest toughest roots in
the earth, that when we are crushed, the finest wine in the many worlds will
be drunk by the gods, and they will throw a party of vast dimensions. yeah.

Trip

Point to point, what is in-between?
People are gathered in grids of energy
like thickets to crevices of stream,
crowding dense to catch a trickle
of light filtering from shafts in the towering
trees down to their spread desire,
vulnerable as baby birds
waiting for god to fulfill her duty.
What is outside of their wordless yearning?
What is uncovered by names?
What is the space, what the invisible, where will they never go–
only pass through on their way back
home?

Particular Matter

harold returns to the window to stand silhouetted in the moonlight on the
carpet. to see the shadow of the smoke wisping into the sacred stillness,
sacred, except for the occasional sputtering cough. harold likens himself
to christ in times such as these, enjoying the utter ridiculousness of
blasphemy. blasphemy that is pointless once you designate yourself
consciously and purposely as heathen. blasphemy, another method of control,
another scare tactic. that is bad. ok? this is good. now, let’s sing
songs and we’re going to go home feeling content to know that we are good
people because someday our prince will come and sweep us away into that
perfect place that we’ve been waiting for desperately while blinding
ourselves to the squalor that is our daily news. signs of the apocalypse.
harold’s eyes glimmer, he imagines, in the darkness. pulling rather
eloquently on his pipe. it’s only a matter, watson, he says, of time.
because we all KNOW what is coming. but when? BAH. he spits a loogie that
sparkles as it flies on its way to the side of the trash can. TING. damn,
almost. it was a jolly good shot, in any case. harold eyes his lazyboy
with precocious eyes. precocious eyes, that’s what some teacher said to his
mum at an open house when he was in the third grade. He’s got such
Precocious Eyes. he didn’t know what it meant, but his ego inflated like an
aroused penis all the same. gobble, gobble. he’s always reminded himself
of his precocious eyes every time he’s around a particularly pleasing
specimen of female flesh. imagining that they are all whispering to each
other in delicate trills. My, what Precocious Eyes! knowing, of course,
all along, the utter ridiculousness.
once you have stepped outside, my boy, there is no going back. harold
thought about this one. he clasped his hands behind his back and paced like
a caged lion might pace if it was a suburban male that smoked too much weed.
he stepped outside of it all a long, long time ago. it might have been
third grade. it might have been the moment his eyes were wiped clean of
blood and opened and took in the sharp hospital fluorescence of reality. he
had stepped outside of his station and looked around. but the home he
returned to was not the same. his parents looked down at him in doubt, his
wife awoke and turned her back to him and subsequently farted in her sleep,
his children ran into lives of normalcy cut out and conditioned by
commercials. where was the warmth, the stillness, the nurturing care?
where were the smiling pictures of nostalgia, the shotgunned beers of the
past? harold sat down cross-legged on the floor, feeling suddenly heavy.
because of the weight of what he had managed to forget.
and who could blame anyone? how could he blame anyone for their blithe
songs of hopeful faith? how could he be blamed for his self-worshipping
degeneracy? for they know not what they do. everything solid casts a
shadow. and reflects the light.

To This

i was watching the smoke from a stick of nag champa swirling in the light
directly neath the lampshade just now, and realizing that i can’t really see
it, can’t really feel it, not as it is, not with the attention and empty
focus that it requires, just like i can’t really appreciate the almost
imperceptible yet ever present iridescence of the snow covering everything
in the winter sun rise, the shimmering in the sky, in the air. it’s there,
and i notice it, and i look straight at it and yet all i can see and feel
are the things that bind me to my circumstances–work, or the latest love
interest, or my fucking ego getting in the way of everything that is good in
my life. i want to feel and appreciate all of the beauty that is all around
me, but i can’t get past myself. here i am, sitting in my den, looking at
the incense swirling, and yet it’s all just an act, all a pretense–and i
think, how can i get to that space where i can really feel it? or is it
impossible? but it seems like it can happen, in a different world, a world
where you don’t have to work a shitty job where they treat you like a dumb
animal, in a world where you don’t have to wonder if what love you feel from
another human being is really something that means something, in a world
where you aren’t always using other people in order to survive. i want to
be there, but i know that there is no shortcut there, and i know that it’s a
long road to where i need to be, that’s it’s such a long, long road, just to
get to here, just to get to now, just to get to where i am, to where i
really am.

thought trickle patterns

here i sit in the infinite stillness, between dualities, expressing nothing.
there spreads the world, eager to spill over the edges, sparkling in every
possible permutation of the sun on the point of a wave in my eye, all over,
like spirits, like elves, like children transmutating continuously to the
verge of the unknown. narrative: the elderly are increasing, will become a
large, consuming, unignorable force in the history of the earth. our
hospitals will be filled with the almost dead, shocking, stitching, drugging
them back to life from the void. we will not know what to do with them, but
we do not want them to leave. they are us, will be us, in time. parallel
narrative: all of our collective potential steams and glistens from the
froth in the sea. it is ridiculous to suppose, propose, or oppose any ideas
of control of the tide of humanity. control is impossible; direction is
probable; release is inevitable. that the earth is harnessed may be true in
certain circles of belief. but like the fashionable wearing of corsets, it
is only a passing fad. sex will happen, no matter how small the holes in
the sheets you may cut. intimacy will spawn, no matter the price, no matter
the pace.
if war is a bestial plague of mankind, then love is the quiet cockroach,
continuing on, no matter what.
exhumation of particular narrational capacity: a tock, a tick, a splitting
of a hair upon the shaft of god, expounding, propounding, pounding pudding
out of microbial propagation, etc, etc, a vision of light, of many lights,
of an infinitude of lights blinking out of the darkness like voices
reminding us that we are not alone, that we are inextricably linked to the
past, that we are writhing the future like running fingernail tips across a
naked lover’s back, in swirls, in dips, in aching expression of what can
never be said, and when the sea comes calling to your mouth you simply
shudder, i know, i remember, i forget, and everyday is a lesson on living
and dying and loving and struggling, and and and and and, the old and the
young and the hungry and the full and the power and the power and the power
and the

Manic Depression

it’s like a cage you’re locked within far away from the comprehension of
anyone who could aid you. it’s like a monster starved to a skeletal
fragment of its former self, sleeping fitfully in the corner of a cell. the
world would not be enough. it’s like looking up through a silent depth of
water to the surface where light plays, watching the faces of friends you
once knew smiling without reason, laughing without sound. it’s like looking
into the darkness and never seeing the end. it’s like the stabbing hate
filled eyes of a stranger in a car passing by. it’s like holding up your
bloodied hands and knowing that the war has come home to you.

My Ire Raised Like Hackles On The Brain

everywhere, a ghetto. suburbs, skyscrapers, apartments, schools, hospitals,
prisons. everywhere a boxed glossed around the outside containing an
addictive core leading to emptiness. cars, tvs, computers, radios. the
small dry twigs of impoverished children everywhere. the deadened hollows
of working parents. where can you go to escape the fire? it is waiting to
happen. we all know that it is waiting to happen. you think you’re safe in
your office? you think you’re safe in your classroom? you think you’re
safe in your car? hell no you don’t. you’re scared, just like all the rest
of us, waiting for the bomb to drop, waiting for the spark to catch, waiting
for the world to explode. who has hope? who can have hope when it doesn’t
matter whether you’re inside or outside, you’re still gonna burn? who can
have hope when we’re all waiting, waiting breathlessly to die an unknown
death?
we’re all so attached to each other, so wound bound intertwined. we’re all
so interconnected, interpenetrated, hyphenated. and yet we are all so
alone, we are all so lonely, we are all so scared, we are all so alienated
from ourselves and each other and our families and our enemies. we are all
living in hell together and each trying to create a bubbled dream for
ourselves at the expense of another. we drink together and try to lose
ourselves in a vision of unity that ends with the barfight or the puke or
the depression the next day. we take pills together and try to lose
ourselves in a vision of unity that ends when the drug wears off or the
music ends or sunlight unveils the reality beyond the pulsating lights. we
gather together in churches, in assembly halls, trying to lose ourselves in
a vision of unity that ends when we begin pointing fingers of blame from out
of the blindness of righteousness. we gather together around tvs and movie
screens and try to lose ourselves in a vision of unity that ends, that is
always to be continued.
i’m angry. i’m scared. i’m covering my ears and my eyes and my heart. i’m
trying to reach out beyond my understanding. i’m hiding a .22 in my closet.
i’m loving my baby tonight. i’m watching the news of the latest local,
national, and international tragedies. i’m reading the autobiography of
malcolm x. i’m drinking pepsi. i’m eating organic foods. i’m suffocating.
i’m on fire. i’m on fire. i’m on fucking fire.

Set Up

jacob scaled his fire escape to the 3rd floor and pushed up his window and
slipped into his room dukes of hazards styles, knocking over a glass of last
night’s scotch. he did a jig of pure joy, slapping his ankles and twisting
into a pile of clothes on the floor. it was hard to believe that it was
real, and yet it was, god fucking-a, it was, this feeling of belly
shuttering ecstasy, this love, this world of raw pleasure that he had
forgotten could ever exist. he pulled out his pipe from his desk drawer and
packed it chock-full of hash, giggling insanely. one hit a two hit a three
hit, all in a row, getting fucked up now, not enough, four a five a seis, a
sex, a two multiplied by a three, resultant in an exponential increase in
explosive sensory information. what was this his heart was saying? this
was unbelievable, that his own bodily mechanisms could speak to him in firey
chemical rhythmic tongues. alive, alive alive! conscious movement, jacob
practiced tai chi to aphex twin in his boxers. water! food! this was
amazing. yet it could be regulated, channeled, communicated. he picked up
the phone and dialed the now instinctual number.
“yeah?”
he jumped up and down. “honey goddess baby queen.” his mind’s noise
suddenly quelled.
“hey sweetie. what’s goin on?”
“i am scaling heights i couldn’t ever have imagined a whole day ago, a whole
universe away, like so fast that i feel g-forces. shit. i feel so fucking
good!”
she laughed shyly. “yeah, i think i know what you mean. you’re fucking
crazy, you know? i love you.” she paused, looking out the window. “i need
to finish my work. i’ll talk to you soon” she hung up. he hung up.
the silence reverberated with cosmic force. jacob wanted to cry, his heart
was an open wound, his mind was upside down, his body ached for immediate
enwrapped alien warmth. he laughed. life was so fucking amazing. it was a
rollercoaster, it was a movie, it was a cup washing over the rim into
aether, it was ink sloshing into indecipherable patterns, it was beautiful,
it was horrendous, it was shocking and powerful and new.
“for good. for good for good for good,” jacob whispered to himself as he
rocked, clutching his knees. “always use this energy for good. it is not
yours. it is not for you. this is for everyone. this is for the world.
this is for what all of us thought was missing. it is here, it is
everywhere, it is in her eyes and her hair and the sucking sea sound of
sweat between our bodies. wonder! wonder! wonder! i am in love. i am in
love and i am frightened. i am in love and i am insanely happy. i can feel
the blood pushing through my veins to the pulse of my heart. i can feel the
heat of astral connection spreading throughout my limbs. i can hear the
sound of my dreams resonate in the hollows of my brain. i have been here
before. i am here. in this, the deadly still center of the eye of the
storm. i am incredibly lonely. i am incredibly hungry. i can never get
enough, enough of her.” he smiled sadly. “for good, for good for good for
good. she is not mine. and i am in love.”

nothing (to be understood)

personalities so explosive they can be broadcast via global satellite
speaker digitalized movies, leaving receptive peoples flattened in their
wake. individuals so gravity warping the masses get sucked in.
so in all this noise of projected desirous ego image, where do those with no
force of distinction get seen, heard, and felt? where do the in-betweens,
the not notably beautiful or distorted lives live?
i’m thinking of my thoughts, of all the bubbled worlds that burst against
the pane of my reality. i’ve been sitting in front of a blank computer
screen every night, struggling to collect the dots of my happiness. but
they are not worthy of being advertised. they are half-baked, they are
indifferently mundane, they are ungraspably cosmic, they are half-full, they
are half-empty.
sometimes i can relate to things so well i ignore them. until i look
closely at them, and listen, and discover the fissures in my understanding.
to craft a complete universe requires concentration; it needs persistence;
it takes daily struggle and hunger and work. i have been allowing myself to
become complacent. i am fattened on the silence of my soul’s music. it
drains to give. it hurts to change. i allow others to tell me how i feel,
and i allow my vision to become veiled in black and white, in a clarity
unearned, in a righteousness not believed. and i have laid me down and
closed mine eyes and prepared for death. and i have grown a craving larger
than my need. and i have let myself become possessed by ambition for fame,
desire for power, and fear of loss.
how can i ever treat another living creature as equal, when i want to be
better than them?
how can i ever love another human being, when i want to be loved by them?
how can i ever write to you?

Skyward

everyday the flood of feelings crashes over my view of the sky and i sink
down into the silence of blindness, frenziedly struggling to reach the air
in the deadened stillness of an empty vacuum, the emotions weighted down in
my body, my mind anchored to darkness, my heart fluttering for escape.
everyday i struggle to find moments where i can breathe, i struggle to find
calm, i struggle to let myself go and rise into the sky like a bird of
flame. and like unearthing a gem, sometimes i can reach a space where i do
not need anyone to make me happy, and i do not let anyone make me sad.
once you open the door to your heart, even for a moment, the flood will rise
and the levy will threaten to break, and all the bridges you’d spent so long
to build to the dry high sky will collapse, and you will be drowning in your
fantasies, and crying in the face of a reality in which you must start anew
with nothing.
you see, one day you might start thinking that you got something. and you
will begin to operate based off of this assumption. and suddenly, another
day, you wake up and the paradigm has shifted, and what you thought you had
has disappeared. and you are left clinging to the fragments of a past that
is no longer relevant.
i know this. i know this, and i know this. i know that i’ve never got
nothing. and yet, suddenly i’ll find myself falling in love with someone,
and even as i know that it is hopeless, i begin to grasp out, and i begin to
craft fantasies in which i do not fully believe, and when they break, my
heart breaks, and my emotions bury my face in the facts that i always knew.
it’s the same old song. and motherfucker, i’m tired of singing it. i’m
sick of hearing it’s pop culturally looped refrain in my mind. and i’m
ashamed of playing it for you.
it doesn’t matter what i have achieved in my life, of what heights or of
what lows i’ve been through. it’s doesn’t matter who has loved me, or who
has despised me. it doesn’t matter what i’ve written, and what i’ve left
unsaid. what matters is that i recognize that i am nothing, no matter what.
what matters is that i recognize that i am divine, no matter who. what
matters is that i recognize. what matters is that i change. what matters
is that i will build that bridge to get to heaven no matter what storms the
earth or my heart or your heart may arouse. i am going to find my way to
god. i will find my own way.
no matter how much i love you, i am going to find my own way. no matter how much you love me, i will find my way. no matter how much hate, how much fear, how much anger, how much hunger, how much how much how much, i will do it. i will reach it. i will
find my way without anything. i will find my way within everything.

married to nothing/ empty for god

by striving for excellence,
you doom yourself to loneliness.

by struggling always to understand,
you will never be understood.

to truly live,
you must die.

Janused Coin of Suffering, Which is the Side to Land Cat Down?

connecting to someone is a sad thing. it is a sad thing because when you
finally share with this person your heart, and they have the power and the
ability to look into you and see you as you really might be, then when they
turn away into themselves, they leave you feeling the falling down into
infinite darkness. you fall down, and down. because you begin to believe
that this person could love you. and they do. and you are still
not good
enough.
not good enough to be everything. not good enough to be nothing. not good
enough to be anything but the mundane human child crying out to be cradled
mindlessly into oblivion.
because you want. because you create out of reality a world which does not
exist anywhere except in your mind. because you are not willing to
sacrifice your wants
for another’s needs.

connecting to someone is a happy thing. it is a happy thing because when
someone finally shares with you their heart, and you have the power and the
ability to look into them and see them as they really are, then when you
turn into yourself in wonder, you discover that you are flying, that you are
floating on the wings of god. and you believe that you can love this
person. and you do. and you love them so much
that you can let them go.
you love them so much that you can let them be themselves. you love them so
much that you don’t need to keep pieces of them for yourself. you love them
so much that you can give them as much as they truly require.
because you know. because you accept. because you relinquish your power.
because you devote yourself to something which is higher than any one person
could ever be.

Lux Aeterna

all of the emotions like water running underneath the bridge that you build
to reach the sky like a rainbow, stretching translucent skin over the
chalice of your mind, some words to bless the communion of substance to
feeling. stand with your arms folded against the railing and watch your
emotions moving, swirling, always new, always the same. it is a fabulous
picture show, is it not? somehow, even as you get caught up in the
currents, it seems that you already know the end. the narrative will always
enclose itself. but you–you are free. you are blessed, you are flowing,
and you are so far away shining down into yourself, your beauty a gem so
sacred that it can never sold. i’m trying to refrain from making lists.
what you are is something multi-dimensional focused to a point. one mind,
one act, one moment. shit, there i go again. listen, the fact is that we
are all saying the same thing, everyone in this world is breathing the same
breath into different languages. everything pours down from the source and
dances together and disappears into the spray. around and around and upside
down. suddenly i think of this girl at the coffee shop today, her lips
large, her tongue slipping out from between them before she spoke, questing,
unconscious like a mole straining into the light. what that has to do with
anything is anyone’s guess. but i really wanted to tango that tongue into
my own, to fly soaring on an updraft with wings spread in the space of one
song, then to part solemnly, formally depart into bows in the face of a
family of faceless humanity. yes, and yet: how you can be dry, even when
you are wet. up on the deck of the bridge, the water running through your
hair. a solid beat to a time that is washing. a fragment of a sentence in
the flowing narrative of time. the space is a voice all its own that you
listen to before you speak. here the hum in the echo of the image of your
light.

Milk

in the luxuriant grass of the orient lay a life form contemplating the
configurations of the clouds. for the sake of this conversation we will
call him Calf. Calf is one of those Dostoevskian minds that burns up all
the world in the blackhole of his intellect, despite being of an honorable
nature. as i said, he lay in the luxuriant grass, the lush waist-high grass
of an ancient eastern land, studying the movements of the passing clouds,
those billowing congealed masses of dew–at least, he appeared to be
studying them. of course, he was only pretending to study them, as befits
one of a Dostoevskian turn of mind, for in reality his thoughts was focused
quite wholly upon the matter of the road below him, where passed the
villagers on their way to their various duties for the day. he perhaps
truly wanted to be mindlessly examining the clouds, for he was supremely
conscious, after all, that he was seated in a verdant meadow of beauty
beyond words, and that the sky was a theater of the utmost majesty–if it
could just be taken in with a clean, pure, and empty mind. yet it was
impossible, quite impossible, for Calf to concentrate his attention on lofty
and divine matters as long as there were people passing along that road.
for each person that came along, Calf found himself looking out of the
corners of his eyes and figuring out who it was that was coming, and why
they were coming and whence they were going, and of what nature they were,
of whether he liked them or not (he probably didn’t), and of how they were
looking at him, if they noticed him at all, engrossed as they were in
matters of daily bread. “ah, Sunyan,” he would mutter, for instance, “that
silly drunkard. he wouldn’t know the sun if it fell on him. he’s got one
doozy of a wife though, the thighs on that woman are unbelievable. how is
it that such a fool gets a woman like that? the thighs on that bitch, my
god, what those thighs could do. . .” or “ah, there’s the sheriff. i’d
best lie low and not move, or else he might manhandle me for loitering, the
swine. all he does is loiter all day. him, and his goiter. there he goes,
butt cheeks a-rolling, on his way to the whore-house, where he can make
himself feel powerful with his money.”
so Calf lay in the grass, the long and verdant grass, casting judgment upon
his fellow villagers, unable to find peace in the clouds which passed
unacknowledged through the sky. as he thus lay, a giant grasshopper
appeared unto him. it was a giant, green, gossamer grasshopper, and Calf
knew not whether it dropped out of the heavens or if it simply appeared from
out of thin air. Calf, not being of the religious personality, did not
prostrate himself before it, as another might have done in such a situation,
but rather stared at it, unable to comprehend such an anomaly. “what in
god’s name . . . ?” was all he could think to say.
“in god’s name is correct,” the grasshopper informed him, settling into the
grass on its hind legs. “do you know god’s name?”
Calf, after coming somewhat to terms with the fact that there was a giant
grasshopper speaking to him, answered, “god is that which has no name.”
“you are approaching the right answer. it would have been more correct to
say simply that you do not know, because you know nothing, least of all the
name of god,” the grasshopper reprimanded, twiddling its antennae in little
spirals.
Calf wasn’t sure how to take this, coming from a grasshopper. he decided
that it would be better not to challenge it, for it was surely from the
spirit world. Calf had certainly heard of such things, for in those days it
was not uncommon for the spirits to appear in physical form to the people,
for they were close to the earth. but Calf, of course, had never seen a
spirit, nor conversed with one, and he had never believed that he would.
all of his intellectual webs that spanned his days and nights with their
seeming impenetrability seemed suddenly full of gaps, and he felt extremely
humble to be in the presence of a giant gossamer grasshopper, which was
sitting opposite him, a little lower down the hill yet rising to double
Calf’s size, the high green grass folded around it, its bulbous eyes focused
querulously on Calf, waiting, apparently, for him to reply.
“what is it that you have come to teach me?” Calf asked the grasshopper, for
he was a sharp lad, and he realized that if a spirit had come to visit him,
then it must have something to give him. he knew that if not treated with
respect, a spirit could quickly become demonic and ruin the rest of one’s
life with a curse.
the grasshopper appeared satisfied with the question, for it crossed its
legs and lit a pipe and sucked on it for a while in silence, blowing out
long thick trails of smoke which slithered and rolled into the sky in long
wispy tendrils like the dragon beard of a sage. in the smoke Calf could
smell fresh things, it made him think of the open sky which he had failed to
notice before, it smelled of dew and clay, of sun and rain. after blowing
its smoke into Calf’s face for a few minutes–though it seemed like
forever–the grasshopper finally spoke.
“i have come to you in the form of a grasshopper so that you might be more
receptive to my information, for if i came to you as a man, you might never
listen to me, for you seem to think you know more than everyone else. i
come to you because you have the ability to learn, and you have the capacity
to do many great things in this world if you so choose. but you have been
idling in foolish thoughts of jealousy and insecurity and fear and anger.
you have been attached to your thoughts as if they were the fruit of life,
when in fact all they are are rotten dead things that do nothing but waste
your time, and drag you around, up and down, keeping you forever lost.
“what of all these people that are passing by? what are they to you? they
are trying to do their duty as they see fit, and what are you doing? they
do not need nor deserve your judgment. they stand alone in the sight of
god. let them do what they need to do, and help them to do it. what are
you to them? why are you so great, that you are better than them? you
should be serving them, you should be sacrificing yourself for them to
further them on their path.
“i will let you in on a secret. you will best serve yourself by serving
others. let us say that you are hungry. but you know that this passerby is
hungry, too. imagine if you had cooked your meal, and you had gobbled
everything up immediately by yourself. and this stranger who is hungry
would smell the scent of your food, and he would feel the hunger in his
stomach aching, and he would have anger in the form of envy in his heart.
and so though you may have momentarily fulfilled your hunger, you would
have sown a seed of anger in the world that would be revisited upon you.
now imagine if you cooked the meal, and then you served him first, and then
you waited until he was satisfied. then you ate what was left. he goes
away, and he is full, and he is content. you see, it is better to serve
others first, and then eat what is left. thus, you will be served by the
world. for how can anyone leave you starving when you have given everything
you have?
“but let me direct your vision beyond them. look at the sky, look at the
beauty that you are a part of with every breath. why are you wasting your
time worrying about other people’s lives, about how other people might think
of you, about what you think of them? there is much more to think of then
that. none of that matters. it is like these clouds, passing by. they
build and they build and then everything falls down as rain and pours down
the mountainsides into the valleys, into the rivers, into the streams, into
the sea. everything falls into the ocean, because it is lower than all, and
it is the beginning. and then the water comes back into the sky and gathers
together as clouds and repeats the process. it is like your life, your
every thought. you arise out of the mother and then grow heavy and then
you release your breath and you fall back into the mother again. this
neverending cycle is nature. be like the water, let yourself find your way
back to the source, gather together with others, and then fall, let
yourselves fall and find your way by way of the force of gravity. then be
like the ocean.”
here Calf grew perplexed, for though he could envision the cycle, he could
not understand how to detach from it. “grasshopper, how do i be like the
ocean without continuing to break away as cloud?”
the grasshopper rubbed its wings and made a low sonorous hum. “because what
is your essence, what is deepest in you, is eternal, is unchanging, and is
unattached to birth or death or this or that. the clouds can move without
you. at your core you are always the ocean, always the mother, always the
beginning. and thus nature can move without you, within you. this requires
you to be unattached to anything. this requires you to be calm, to be at
peace, no matter what happens around you. this requires that you end all
the conflicts in your mind, that you gain stability in your daily affairs,
that you forever sacrifice yourself to others. you can never be happy until
you are not attached to the idea of happiness. give of yourself. that is
the only way to gain the world.”
the grasshopper belched politely and settled back onto its haunches and blew
smoke rings through each other, catching them with the tip of his pipe and
jingling them like bracelets, so dense were they.
Calf looked above him at the heavens in which the clouds moved. and he
could see that it was beautiful and good, and that it moved according to its
nature. but it was transitory, a fleeting mist that would soon rain and
lose itself to the earth, feeding the hungry crops, falling back into the
sea. and he could understand this, and know himself as something within
this, and ultimately, know himself as something outside of this that was
beyond understanding. the grasshopper turned into a cow and stood looking
at Calf through calm bovine eyes, chewing repetitively on some cud. Calf
prostrated himself before this vision and put his forehead against the
earth, the grass rising about him towards the sun like sages. he prayed
like this for an hour, and then he got up, dusted off his knees, and slipped
back onto the road, whereupon he journeyed into town, and took a seat with
his brothers at the tavern, so that he could consummate an offering to the
gods with a drink, and stand his brothers a round so that everyone could
partake. and they drank together and they sang songs rejoicing in the
spirit, rejoicing in the life that was theirs to give.

5 Points Constellating

* trying to get closer to this moment, into the multifold waves of all the
universes that wash together into the deep silence when you sit on the
mountain top at night to watch the stars vibrating their past into your
picture, when you can see everything milky, shining, thick, frothing and
beautiful, when you smoke and drink and think and say a few things into the
stillness where everything moves around you

* and how small we are, how infinite, how prolonged is our life when it
extends out to everything. if we destroy this world we have meshed within,
how the waves will spread, how they will echo, how the mountains resound
with thunder, how it fades and leaves the trembling children triumphant in
their mortality.

* and knowing this, that we can go anywhere, and everywhere, and that we are
not stuck, that we are not bound by our weapons of mass destruction, that
our so-called leaders have control over nothing, that none of us have
anything but words, but tongues, but delicate reedy leaves that vibrate with
the wind.

* watch the enfolding of the currents in the arms of the grass. watch the
faces of your friends flutter with the flux of energy that you manifest.
listen to the voices that merge into your memory. open your window and
watch the world billow with your releasing breath. that is simple. let it
be simple.

* peace. what else is there to struggle for? justice. what else is there
to learn? love. what more is there to give?

Are You An American?

I’m sick of all these bleeding heart liberals, these socialists and communists, these losers who try to tell us that we shouldn’t be going to war. You know what? Fuck all the bullshit. Let’s stop this lying and reassuring of humanitarian interests by politicians. Politicians and the military and corporations–their main interest is money. So why do they have to bullshit to these bleeding heart losers? War is good for the economy. All these tree hugging bastards would rather see the American nation be poor and destitute, have us be swinging from the trees. Who cares about those smelly barbarians in third world countries? Fuck em. They’ve got all of our oil. That’s OUR oil. We’ve got 20,000 nuclear weapons. I think that entitles us to whatever the hell we want. We’re the most powerful nation, EVER. And we didn’t get that way by pussyfootin around. We did it through blood and sweat and war. We came here and we told them Indians, “get off our motherfucking land, cuz you’re not using it, you’re wasting it.” We told them blacks, “work our motherfucking land, cuz you’re lazy asses and you might as well be doing something for civilization and progress other than just singin and dancin.” We told them Mexicans, “give us your motherfucking land, cuz we need more, cuz we deserve to spread from sea to shining sea.”
I’m sick of all this politically “correct” bullshit. Let’s tell it like it is. There’s a real simple way to solve the world’s problems. For instance, this Palestinean “problem.” Well, if they just get rid of them, then there’s no problem, is there? And what’s with this terrorist bullshit? Why don’t we just nuke all the goddamned Arabs, get rid of that Islamic bullshit. This is a Christian nation, and this is the strongest nation in the world. I think that says something about whose side God is on.
So what use is it to stand in the way? What’s the use in all this complaining and whining? All these commie bastards should be lined up and shot. They’re all just losers, whining about their “victimization.” Shit, they’re making themselves victims by not getting with the program. You’re either with us or you’re against us. And guess who is going to win?

Essay of Me by Phil Scrydor

digital landscapes washing over your shore
the vision is luminous but still i want more
the key to the ocean is all over my chin
and the tides pushing me further and further
and further in
(“The Panoramic View of You,” Slitting Throats circa 1982, from the “Lush” album)

I begin my Essay of Me with this quote because I like it, and I listen to the Lush album a lot. I think their lyrics are really evocative and like, vivid, surreal, just dripping with visceral imagery. I wore my hair like Sid Branton’s for a while, too: I had it dyed purple and everything. I like to play bass a lot. There’s just something about plucking those fat strings that’s so satisfying. I don’t know that many people understand that. Everyone seems to think that playing guitar is like the ultimate, like you have to wah-wah and screech and clang in order to be somebody. Shit, try taking the bass line out of your favorite tune, man, it will blow your fucking mind. It’s totally necessary, completely necessary. It grounds the whole thing. It would all fall apart otherwise. A bass player’s got to make a lot out of nothing. Just simple, grounded stuff. I like that meatiness to it, that solidity. It’s like a feeling that I can only compare to like, surfing, when you’re riding the wave. Once you’re up on it, and the rhythm is solid, and you’re carrying the whole tune with you, you just feel like nothing can stop you, like you’ll just keep going and going forever, and then the song ends. I jump around like a monkey when I play that shit. Everyone seems to think that the guitar player has to do all the theatrics, like they have to look all crazy when they’re strumming chords, or bending a note or some shit. But I think the bass player should be the one getting crazy. They’re thumping the fucking whole room with their plucking. They’d better be moving. I dance like crazy when I start plucking that thing. I shave my head now, too, so it’s cool when I wag my head around, I look all hard-core.
What else to say about me? I smoke American Spirits. Have since I was 10. It’s ok with my mom; she says I’ll be lucky enough to die by natural causes like cancer, rather than something like a car crash or a bullet or something. I see her point. I figure, what the hell. If I’m going to die this way, then at least it’s by my own fucking hand, you know? Besides, I’ve got an uncle who’s like 87 and has been smoking forever and he’s doing just fine, other than for a shitload of liverspots. I always try not to stare at them, but they’re like all over his hands and stuff, it’s kind of weird looking. But he’s a cool guy. He used to make shoes for Frank Sinatra–no fucking kidding. He was hip with the mobsters like that. He still smokes cigars. He’s a real cool guy. I wouldn’t mind being that old, even with liverspots, if I was like him. He has a house with a swimming pool in Arizona, it’s a nice house, it’s got a game room and everything. I’ve tried to get him to let me throw a party with all my friends there, at the pool, with the house to ourselves, that would be so crazy wild. But he never lets me, the selfish old bastard. He’s going to a retirement home for sure when he breaks a hip. I wouldn’t want to be old enough to be sent to a retirement home. That would suck a fat one.
Let’s see. What else about me. Now that I’ve shaved my head, I’m looking pretty hardcore. I’m thinking of removing my earring to look even harder, but I don’t know, I’ve had it in so long it would feel weird without it. Like I’d be naked or something. I have this one friend who wears a hat everywhere he goes, like all the time, he’s got this same hat on. I’d never seen him without the hat, until just the other day, I saw him without his hat on. It was pretty weird. I didn’t even know who he was at first. That’s why I’m scared to take out my earring. It’s like people start to identify you with certain things, and then when you change it it fucks everything up. Which is cool. But I don’t know if I want to do that just yet with the earring, because I already just did that with shaving my head. That was a pretty fucked up thing to do, because before I looked like Sid Branton.
Well, that’s pretty much all that I can think of to write about me. There’s a lot more stuff I could tell you, but it’s hard to think of it all right now. I could tell you stories from growing up, but I don’t know if that’s pertinent to this essay. I have some pretty fucked up stories, though, if you want to hear them. I grew up with 3 older brothers; they did some pretty fucked up stuff. I did some pretty fucked up stuff, too, when I was little. I’m more normal now. I play bass a lot and hang out at The Moribund Cafe. It’s cool there because they let you smoke cigarettes inside, and use your coffee cup as an ashtray. They don’t give a fuck there. I play my bass there on Thursdays with my band, The Brazened Nuts. All of our friends come to that. It gets pretty wild. We had a girl flashing her boobies at us one time. We’re probably going to keep playing there.

thought movement

crystalline mountain dew breath of the morn, i sucked into the outer deep and knew that this time was not the last. it would be forever. it had to be, simple as that and infinitely extended, mirrored corridor never-ending.
this moment, the shine, the gleam of it. i was here to do things. i would eat my meal with satisfaction, because i had made it. that kind of thing. abstraction itself could be called a blessing, if it wasn’t so undependable. it starts towards something and then disappears. i wonder.
i think i get my tenses mixed up frequently. but to tell the truth i’ve never really understood the delineations based upon time. past. future. present. as far as i can tell, there is just is. and then there isn’t. some people who are not “present” are still is. some events that have yet to occur effect now. kind of like this so-called boundary between life and death. as if there were some invisible barrier to be crossed into the impenetrable mystery. yet they are inseparable. death. life. i can’t really tell the difference. i don’t understand why these states have to be given names. happy. sad. is just is. i am forever. i am nothing.
in the amorphous journey into itself. so much lies in the mind. the drugs. the guns. the sexual deviancy. all of this is an extension of the mind.
scientific excursions, logical outgrowths. forgetting something? the mind. a wonderful, dangerous thing. sharp, almost aware of itself, buzzing.
thought is a weapon of destruction. creation is of no mind. thoughtless, active, fecund. the true mind is without consciousness. thoughtlessly rhythmic, like the heart. the thinking mind impedes, it puts stops, it backspaces, it deletes. movement is without thought. nothing. forever.

Koan Brothers

my grandchild wanted me to impart wisdom upon him.

“grandpa, grandpa” he said, tugging at my beard, “what have you learned?”

i looked down at him with affection. “stay away from me.”

The Moth

flitting from building to building, window to window, it’s ashen wings
spluttering in the night air,
the moth, possessed by the call of electricital filamentation,
visits us, in our balcony smoking, speaking of the chemicals which rush
through our connections, together, smashed off the grappa.
we fall silent for a moment in the pause between a sentence, watching it
swirl amongst us, wings, flapping beyond the rate of our visual intake,
illumined in the fall of the living room light through the window.
somewhere in our physical systems, are we, too, drawn by manufactured
warders of what-we-can’t-see with the same urgency?
(we drive out to the vast silent darkness of the deserts to fill it with
pulsing lights, neon tubes a-swirl, the steady blinding throb of our
city’s noise)

in the space between the flickering in which nothing can be processed,
what crevices do our souls file into?

the moth’s own organic purposes betrayed, it stumbles like a drunk through
the by-ways of our hidden lives, alleyways barred with the business of
waste.

A ghost,
a leftover of the past, the moth
spends its short life fractured in confusion,
hypnotized by an oscillating light sealed behind glass,
a life consumed with a certain death.

Welcome Home

it was, quite simply, a case of mistaken identity. i had never before seen such detrimental stars in the sky. my halitosis was complete. but wheeling around, back and forth, was the mystery of and and therefore. silence of the nubile localization factories.
“Blood wells up like silent lake flood down the sterile corridors,” remarks Zinorth, the alien tainted Caveboy. i knew that gerrymandering was inappropriate then.
i slabbed on a side of dill and it mixed surprisingly well.
krakatoa? is it a place? a verbal presence, plosive? sprayed ions of suggestive myth?
put the bucket down the well. draw the bucket up.
put the bucket down the well. draw the bucket up.
once acclimated appropriately, one begins to see trails of all things that move beyond vision into the foliage of existence. be still for a while, city, shut off your electricity. mediate in your void.

what happened to the dinosaurs?

i drew a line in the sand and slept fervently, but you can imagine with what dreams–neon flavored free radicals at every corner, licorice intoxicants line dancing in the darkness, Valerie the saint thumbing down the road (don’t ask). when i woke the sky was purple, like deep sea purple, when you descend from the green. i could still see Venus, a gleaming eye of a deep sea predator, beckoning from the distance. i kettled up the locusts for the day, honey baked stew. it was time for action, whether it was me or someone else in my place.
“All is one in infinite sparkling wave movement eternal,” mantra’d barren headed Nate from his stool. what seems true, i’ve learned, is only a shuttling of data to the next spool. part of the process is letting accumulated wisdom go. farewell, sweet Jesus

Rant

ok, so i apologize, but i think it’s about time i went off on a rant. i feel the need to be righteous, to be holy, to declare the boundaries of good and evil. i figure that if W. Bush can declare to the world, via public television, without any apparent shame or hesitation, that certain countries constitute an “axis of evil,” then i too can declare what is right and what is wrong.
i try to think of our future, and it doesn’t seem so bright. it seems full of cancer and dementia and nuclear holocaust. what kind of future does a people have when they are feeding their own children filth?
it seems so obvious that it’s almost disgusting. in our public schools, think about what kind of food they are serving our children. Taco Bell. Pizza Hut. Hostess. Coke. Doritos. This food is absolute shit. It’s sugar and synthetic syrupy crap. Do you even want to see a chart of the obesity levels of our children, of how it’s increasing? Few is the child whose parents have the time and resources to prepare a healthy lunch. And those few most likely have rich parents. All the kids who eat cafeteria food are poor. And cafeteria food is disgusting, and i don’t just mean in how it tastes.
So you’ve got all these kids eating this junk in the very institutions that are supposed to be “educating” and edifying. Hell, we even offer junk food as rewards. Do this, we tell Jimmy, and we will give you a donut, or a pizza.
And so some public official or school administrator with some piece of sanity left in their head decides to try offering some healthier food.
”Let’s give them apples,” they say, or “let’s have a salad bar.” And of course, all the apples end up in the trash. And the salad bar remains full.
Oh, the taxpayer’s dollars are being wasted. But these kids are certainly buying up the Hostess cupcakes. “Let them eat cake.”
So where’s the bottom line? The kids buy the junk. So the kids eat junk.
And now let’s think of why the kids eat this junk. Ever drink soda for any length of time? Ever try to stop drinking it? Yeah, it’s addictive. So is junk food. McDonald’s, Hostess, Doritos, who do you think they market all their junk to? Children. Anyone who will buy that crap and eat it on a regular basis. Hell, it “tastes good.” Right? Well, if that’s all you eat all the time, try eating a well cooked meal. Probably doesn’t seem so great. Where’s my Big Mac? Because if all you’re eating is addictive shit, then of course you’re not going to eat that fucking shriveled little apple they put on your tray along with the oily nasty goop of the day.
So the corporations of junk food have a nice little destructive cycle going on. That’s great. They’re making money off of the processed hooves of cows. I don’t mind their ingenuity. But I do mind the fact that millions of people are eating this shit every day, and that a good percentage of these people are children. Children are growing. Children need nutrients, just like a plant poking out of the soil. They need Real Food. They need fruits, they need vegetables. And we’re feeding them McDonald’s. Am I the only one who thinks this is not only insane and disgusting, but just downright evil?
And all we’re thinking about is what they’re buying. We want these kids to do well in school? We want them to score well on achievement tests, to go to college? Fuck, why don’t we just feed them some fucking good food first before we even think about any of that shit!
Ok, but it doesn’t stop there. We’re feeding them all this shit, and they’re addicted to eating this shit and wouldn’t even eat good food if you put it in front of them because it isn’t synthetically processed and chemically charged, and they’re getting fatter and fatter and fatter. And what are these kids doing for several hours of the day, every day of the year? They are watching television. And what do they see on television, besides the advertisements for If You Don’t Get It All Over The Place, It Doesn’t Belong In Your Face, and Brittany Spears whoring for Pepsi? They see beautiful people, they see thin, airbrushed made up beautiful people. Desirable people. People who they would like to be. But these kids look nothing like that. For one, they are fat. And fat people are always the butts of all jokes on tv. For another, they are not immaculate and beautiful, not in the strictly superficial sense of money making. And they are not desirable. Who desires these kids? We feed them shit. You think that makes them feel desirable?
And so what kind of mentality does this create? It creates a mentality that makes you want to go out and eat some more of those Hostess cupcakes, dammit, that’s what it creates. It’s a sick, destructive cycle. And it’s evil!
what is the bottom line? the bottom line is money. the bottom line is that our schools, our businesses, and our governments are concerned not with the welfare and betterment of our species, but with money.
this is wrong. something is wrong here. shouldn’t schools be concerned with the health of our children, both emotionally, physically, and mentally? shouldn’t our businesses be concerned with the social, physical, economic ramifications of their actions? shouldn’t our governments be concerned with the well-being of its constituents?
we’re ruining our future, we’re sealing it off like a Zip-Lock baggy. maybe it’s time we started calling out evil for what it is, and fighting for what is good. for what is healthy.

Juggland 3

The first time the Juniper Bush spake unto Krispin, he was a-crouched amongst the bracken, unburdening his daily intestinal compilement of waste matter. As Krispin was wont to do whilst engaged in such ruminative severance, he was conversing a-loud as if to a projected wiser double of himself, whom in turn answers his troubled queries with sage assurances.
[Krispin1: Auf! Tha young Lundburger lass be lookin gooood! Why, ah'd lak to bend the naughty girl over m'knee for some righteous spankin' . . .
Krispin2: Peace, warrior! Bear in mind the auspices of her father, Lord Lundburger. . .
Krispin1: Egad! But the ripen'd melons . . . ! the throb of budding fertility . . .!
Krispin2: Hold, ye! Wha would Betsy say?
Krispin1: . . .
Krispin2: You know the consequences of betrayal. You bear yet the marks of rolling pin pon your hind parts even today . . .

And so forth]

Today Krispin is concerned with the topick of love.
“Tain’t nuttin like the fruits of love, ooweeeouuu! love [sniff. . .] why, tis in the air! agh, spring! when ah’m done here, why, ah’ll pick that sprig of clover down yonder, and present it unto Betsy, make her feel like a young un’ agin. she’ll squeal like a gawdammed pig when i set to her with such manly vigor . . . maybe ah’ll even . . .”
Whereupon the Juniper Bush spoke:
“Have you ever been in love? It’s not the most pleasant experience in the world. It’s full of jealousy and pain and heart-rending sorrow.”
Krispin, assuming that it is his customary counterpart, answers: “Naw then, I member Betsy first time I took her back o’ the barn. Tha first kiss, truculent in the wondrous devilry of it all. I almost shudder to think of the magic we made then, in that hay–we didn’t even remove our clothing. . . and yet, so deep, this shuddering. . . “
The Juniper Bush coughs, not all too politely. “Scuse me, Nightingale, but this ‘Love’? What is it? Love is Great! Love is the Ultimate! But do you understand what love really entails?”
Krispin, realizing that his conversational partner is growing confrontational past any self-induced bounds, that indeed, he is speaking to some Other Entity, tries frenziedly to speed his bowel movements and prepare for escape. “Who . . .Jimmy, ye mother fucker, is tha you?!”
“I have a theory, see. I think that love is a conspiracy. I think that love is a myth. I think that love is a simulation devised to pull the wool over your eyes and the rug out from under you. A fantastickal matrix of false information.”
Krispin, straining desperately to release a reticent load, “Love is . . . Love is the greatest thing in Juggland! Ah’m the first to trumpet the virtues of warfare, sure! Ah love to butcher and slash m’way to victory, berserk with dopamine just as much as th’ next lad! . . . .Uggnnggh! . . . But Love . . . in Valhalla, surely, all is Love. The ideal, the true connection in humanly relations. . . . Mmmph!. . . .Without Love . . .”
“Without love, what is the world but death and struggle?” the Juniper Bush asks, dryly, “Let’s be honest here. We live in a world where death is all around us. We’re always killing each other. We’re always killing ourselves. There is nowhere we can go to escape this reality. Except, of course, to succumb to death itself. Is this your love?”
Herein Krispin grows righteously angry at being thus addressed: “Who’s there?! Ah’m trying to peacefully relieve m’self of fecal truncations, like a good citizen . . . It’s not polite. . . Gawddammit, it’s not proper to address me whilst ah am so affianced . . .”
“I’m a juniper bush. Over here, see the fronds a-waving. It’s not so very polite to be shitting on my property, and then propounding the tenets of an Ideal you don’t fully comprehend.”
Krispin contemplates this. “Well, ah guess ah can’t argue with that one. I apologize for the intrudence. Pray, continue with your philosophizing, goodly bush, as ah finish up with me business here.”
“Ahem. The descent into love is the donning of blinders. The slickness of syrup coating the tongue. Synthetic. Mimetic. It is an illusion, a fantasy. And what makes it all so amazing is that the concept was not created by some invisibly structured higher order of beings . . . no, it was formulated by YOU . . . you, digging your head into the wing of
society. Save me, you cried, save me from myself. But let us examine this ‘love.’ What is love? Love is vulnerability. Love is exposing your weaknesses. Love is always letting someone else win. And this, this is a good thing?”
Krispin sits erect momentarily, “Nooo!” he trumpets.
“Love means giving yourself to others at the expense of yourself. Love means letting someone else have power over you. Love means that you are needy. Love means that you are weak. Is this what you are?”
Krispin’s eyes a-gleam. “Gawdam, nooo!”
“We keep talking about freedom, as if freedom is the meaning of love, a right to exist, something ideally we all share. No, i tell you, freedom is not a right, it’s something you earn. It’s something you fight for.”
“Dam right, ain’t tha the truth! Ah earned me right to fair pickins in the mess hall!”
“The process of maturation is the process of forming your own space in the world. This is not a peaceful process. It is violent. Your body undergoes metamorphosis. You consume–you produce waste.”
“True nuff. But stay a minute. What exactly does a Juniper Bush know of love?”
The J.B. seems to sag a bit. “I loved an apple tree, once.”
“What happened?”
“Nearly withered away over it. The tree was felled by a bolt of lightening one night. But don’t try to reduce my understanding to such sentimental precepts.”
“Of course not, ” Krispin soothes the bush, “Why, ah believe ah’ve completed my mission here, out in these woods here today. Ah feel ten pounds lighter, like ah could float away upon these winds. . . “
“See, changing the subject. Always trying to run away from the brutal nature of love. Love is nothing pretty, I’m warning you. So when you use the words, do not use them lightly. If there’s one thing you’ve learned from me, let it be this: love is not anything you could ever want. Love is not anything you could ever desire. It is a burden. Fair thee well, soldier. Remember my words. . . “
” . . . If there’s one thing ah’ve learned, it’s tha freakin bushes can tractate even more than a preacher. . .”
“I heard that!”

This was not the first, nor the last time the Juniper Bush held conference
with a Jugglander . . . .

Juggland 2

(pertaining as to the mead-hall discussion of what to do upon the morrow. . . )

Vince: i speak of the ocean depths, man, into which my ancestor, the second lieutenant of Lord Vespor himself, delved into, wrestling with a squid of mountainous proportion for seven hours, setting the universal record for holding one’s breath.

Gremel: eh? ah thought he was swallered by a great fish, and sat there for seven days, living off of shrimp brine . . .

Jimmy: naw, that was my great grand-pappy, blubber-fer-brains.

Gremel: don’t call me dat, Jimmy. i told you not to call me dat.

Vince: just think. like a long pipe stem, kinda. we could walk along the sea floor and bring back never-before-seen submarine flowers for the wives, just in time for the fertility rites.

Krispin: fuck tha vegetation! let’s grab us some mer-maiden, rumored to reside, languidly and big-bosomed, within the darkened forests of the sea-floor!
All (uplifting mead cups and doing a quick polska about the room):
Yea! Let us meet us some mer-maiden,
said to reside in the submarined eden
of the salty brined oceanic deep!
oh, them big-eyed long-tressed sea gaaaals!
they may not be in possession of feet,
but non-fishy parts are most certainly mammaaaal!

L. Lornus: ey! dont tha fuckin pee in that corner agin, Jimmy! I’m sick and goddamned tired of steppin in yer piss!

Jimmy (grumbling as he exuents the mead-hall): damnation. feels like I’m at home . . . Jimmy doan do this. . . Jimmy doan do tha. . . quit yer laughin, blubber-fuckin-brains! . . .

Gremel: eh, methinks somebody’s been swiggin over-much mead . . .

Vince: And I ask ye, sir Gremel, is that such a crime? I submit for all your contemplation, gentlemen, the question: can one, ever, drink too much mead?

(short silence, excepting for a few frothy sips)

Krispin: I think the only crime right now is that we’ve still got an un-tapped mead barrel over yonder, brethren.

Jimmy (re-entering): let’s go us another fuckin round!

All (forming into an impromptu can-can line):
Aye, let us un-tap us another mead barrel,
unburden its aerated goodness into our cups,
free its spirit in our stomach’s widening embrace–
oh, nectar of Valhalla! golden hearted meeeeaaaad!

L. Lornus: well, ah don’t know about you lads, but ah’ve got to slay me an elk or two. ah need the skin for me drum, and the meat for the wivey’s kibble kiln.

Gremel: some huntin sounds lak a good spend of day . . . out in th fresh pine morn, crouchin amongst the brush to surprise the water-hole solicitude of a horned creature with a swiftly mounted spear.

Jimmy: shut yer trap there, huntin boy! what kind of arcane method of slaughter is this? spear? art thou neanderthal yet? i bet you still catch your fish with such primitive resolve . . . ? (Gremel looks sheepish) Need to keep up with the latest in scientifickal thought, lad. we’ve dispensed with that old predatorial mechanism–it’s all animal psychology now.

Vince: that’s right. we’ve determined that if we pretend to be friendly, then they will almost tan their own hides for us. It’s like this: we begin with the premise that there is an ideal state of being, one in which animal and man alike share the fruits of the most high. we then begin to simulate this very state, as if it should be so, and was meant to be so, and that the brutal nature of our relations was but a bad dream of the past. like the oxen in the field? they think that they’re working for Valhalla. they practically come to us and ask us to be yoked.

Gremel: sort of lak de notion of a carrot pon a stick . . . ?

Vince: precisely. we got us elk who fall over each other trying to be the next candidate for slaughter. ’sacrifice,’ we call it. things proceed just as they did before, except that now, to all appearances, we are brothers in the vision of futurity.

Jimmy and Vince put their arms around each other and croon in falsetto:
Ah, little lamb!
What better way to help the world,
than to better thyself
(and work for us)?
Come help us build a better future,
for our children,
for our earth,
for our G-d
(and for our veal tonight!)

L. Lornus: rmmph. ah like to keep actions honest, meself. straightforward with the spear-waiting. if it was good enough for my ancestors than it’s good enough for me.

Krispin: Braaaaaplth! Scuse me, lads. I’m going to bid ye godnight fer naw. I doth hear Betsy’s rump a-callin . . .

Juggland 1

“hi honey” *smack* “how was your day?”
“i had a hard time with the dragon, but eventually i was able to free my arm from its serpentine grasp and sever it’s thick neck in two.”
“would you like a little mescal, my sweet?”
“aye, that would fuckin do the trick.”
vince settles himself gruntily upon the bench. he watches his wife’s thick haunches sinuous shifting to the cabinet. he’s noticed that her ass seems to have an almost distinct consciousness, as a separate entity, with its own individual outlook upon the world. whilst she is immersed in the activity of unstoppering the bottle and pouring, he can sense it watching him back, protruded whole in his direction, an alien awareness, layered, sandwiched with purpose neither he nor his wife can intuit. he remembers the first time he saw grunhilda at the may fair festivities, glowering in her ruddiness, a butcher’s daughter, at ease around conglomerations of meat. the first thing that caught his attention, out of the corner of his eye, was the rotundity of her nether-regions, glorious in the summer moon light, uplifted in her dancing, quivering with supple eagerness. aye, for they seemed to call to him, and he almost in a trance waltzed within meshing distance, coming up behind her and swaying mesmerized to the beat of the pooka drum. she needed not to look in his eyes, for her buttocks did all the communicating necessary, as they freaked into the dawns early dew.
having been espoused to grunhilda for a good number of seasons now, he has come to observe a disparity between her dumb glutinous hinds, and her outspoken gesticulating tongue. he married one, and has to listen to the other. not that grunhilda is a bad mate, but it’s simply disconcerting for vince at times, when he seems to be having wonderful sign language reveries with one, and gossip mongering verbal warfare with the other. grunhilda herself seems unable to quite control It, and vince finds that a sure fire way to soothen down a sticky situation is to pay caressing attentions to It, to pat It slightly and even murmur sweet and promising things to Its protuberant mass. grunhilda always acquiesces, despite herself–and in this way, they have found a daily treaty in their communal lives, a mediator of disputes.
vince has had such success in this particular harmonizing of his wifely relations, that he has been called upon for advice in the mead hall.
“arrrgh, tha’ little bitch has been snookerin aboot the gadammed village by naw. vince! ya seem to have subdued ya filly right proper. wha’s tha secret, ey?”
“ehem. . . you fella’s ever . . . get jiggy with more than just the sea salt, know what i mean?”
“wha the fuck’s this blarney on aboot?”
“i mean . . . you know, the backdoor and such, in the other way. . .”
” . . . hey jimmy, ah think this pervert’s fucking his lass in the arse-hole . . .?”
so vince becomes a purveyor of anal loving—once appropriately sodden with hops, he delights his rapt rowdy audience with the proselytization of its wonders. they all go home that night and eagerly awaken their sleepy and wholesome wives.
“bessy, tis aboot time we’s tried sometin new . . . “
“ack, sltpkt, . . . krispin! . . .tha’s the wrong way! . . .”
the wives gather bow-legged the next day, seeming to gravitate to grunhilda, in subconscious subservience to her enmassed gravity.
vince thinks of all of this, now, as she bends to pour. like an other world co-existing within our own, part of us, yet living apart from us, slightly bulbous. an eye that views all of our private, darkest, deepest outpourings with infinite patience, embracing our weariness with softened twin cushioning.

Running The Gauntlet

here’s a little drip-dropping flow for you, bro, sis, mister, miss: i dive into the alien elements like a dolphin through the light shafted sonorous medium of words, the media of existence, reverent movement of the lettered masses to the radiance of an individual creating, network flashing across unchartered space with a train of thought to carry the coals burning for you all to capture in your scopes, stationed, shameless, timeless,
us.
i share my shadow for the world’s shine, in the spirit of the spoken earth i dig, rhymes like jewels crevicing into the microscope of this moment, nodal points, subliminal ambience beating against the linear fragments of time–
and i am creating to be captured, felt, rhythmed into your skin spirited mind,
represented, reflected, released
into the blind eternity
of nothingness,
divine,
i am.
read me, listen to this song i sing to ease my struggle,
disarm my pain, despite the distance that i feel
in between my heart and the keys boarded along the crawling subterranean
fingers of broken waves;
it’s a process, you see,
the apple and the snake,
seeding, shedding, 1 + 2
and the outcome, you know,
is in the balance of you
and me and our acceptance
of the today in the tomorrow
of the child sanctified moon woman sensualizing sun,
of the old man in the sea,
fishing for the mystery
of giving ourselves,
of sharing ourselves
with one another.

i am here. now get you over, bring your elevation to the bridge, build this positive energy that we need like watered green for the soul, synapse stretch your spirit across the distance, breathe together and look at how the fear of our loneliness falls around our wonder like we one, like we tear drops dropping from the eyes of almighty everything–wordless, endless, forever feeding from our lives unfolding into now.
i think that we are beautiful. i think that we are alive. i think that all of the ugliness in the armored coinage of imprisoned emotions, all the loaded blindness of boxed-in shells, all of the fucking greed of the marketed surface world
can’t stop us from living
beautifully.

it’s a new year, my friends, my memories, my possibilities, my intertwining compatriots on the dance floor of our generation. shed beautiful art for me, for yourselves, cause our creation, our motion, our explored direction is what we’re going
to be treading over
to keep going, to move on,
to love.

this is dedicated
to all of you
who have made the effort
to show me your way
as you pass
by my path.
thank you.

The Spray Of Falling Away

yoru awakens one morning to find that he is missing.
he pursues his routine to trail where he went.
but where there were sprouting words there is silence.
clues everywhere as to his passing,
but yoru’s breath is gone, left fingering his theories,
plots of bitterness to blame the darkness.

we stood, Tubber and I, with the symphonic sky spread before us, the clouds bathed in the colors of sunset, the moon a distant sliver glowing.
“i cannot shake the indescribable sense that this is beyond me,” Tubber states, hands clasped behind his back, “that i cannot possibly appreciate this unique and singular death of the day, for it is yet the same.”
I stroke my sideburn fuzz. “But if it were a video game, and you could guide a mythical character through this land, you would marvel at these same skies, stop to admire the majesty of creation. it is too big, too apart from our breathing cusp of life here.”
“and yet inseparable,” Tubber adds, “it is so far and yet so much a part of us, such that we cannot grasp its entirety, can only sense the shadow of its wonder, and yet continue living without.”

the dark masses that gravitate space outward, forever tearing at the spinning center. the people, gathered about televisions, huddled in speeding cars listening to radios, wires spun across the earth to catch their voices together. no one can escape.

horatio awoke to the sound of another day breaking into continuance, into reality, into this-is-something-we’ve-seen-before-and-will-soon-forget. and the lines of repetitive muscled movement trailed into soft always forming skin. all this and more and so much less, because everything is reduced to understand to sell. but suddenly her eyes soft and wanting, transforming everything into her raw existence, her shattering warmth. and gods come out to play in the fields of trivial imperfection, the everyday the eternal
the momentary drama of a chosen space to drop. the golden crashing and crackling snapping over the anchor of the kick drum.

02a/*0000

the lights of the pier rose up waveringly along the whitened curves of the boats. i could see the little peach hairs on jessica’s outlined nose.
there was that silence, where i wanted to say everything, and knew that it would fall forever short.

it is a day, a night, an alarmed cold wake, a color washed set. the lions basking in the sun on tv, pulling down prey; the pitbull on my couch, wiggling his jowls and snuffling; a mom herding her kids to school; an ambulance trucking swiftly into the corridored distance.

I woke up with my shirt all twisted half around my body, I hate that shit. Plus I had crust in the corners of my eyes that cut me when I tried to wipe them out. My mother was already up, as usual, doing her Yoga For Dummies workout in front of the TV in her biker’s outfit. She managed to emit an artificially cheery good-morning in between her panting attempts at deep breathing, which I answered with the swift cocking of my left leg to release a gust of stale pizza-sitting-all-night-in-my-stomach gas.
“Now focus on the flowing out from your lower belly. Imagine that you are a flower stalk and you are trying to garner water to open your petals for the day. Sucking the water up, sucking the water up. There, now open your petals to the sun. Open up your flower and breathe out that colorful life for the bees to see and come to pollenize you,” the TV said.
I filled up a glistening bowl with Lucky Charms and plopped myself onto the sofa, my morning smell settling around me. The chick doing the Yoga on the screen was kind of alluring in a middle-aged Asian mix kind of way.
“I’d like to pollenize her,” I said thoughtfully.
“Loopy!” my mother wheezed, struggling to keep her knees pressed to the carpet.
“Shut up ma.”
I managed to collect 5 marshmallows on my spoon at once. I love the way the milk gets all sweet and thick and the color of the cereal runs into it.

“it all goes smoothly until that one moment in your life when you lose your grasp on time, you focus too intently on one object, and you can’t see anything connected to it, only the object, shadowed, singular, and it becomes everything, and there is nothing left. and suddenly you are lost, and the world is moving apart from you as you watch, breath fogging into the glass.”
–Timothy Martin, inmate of Yellow Bay State Prison, death row.

It’s funny how when people need to reach out to someone the most, they end up hurting themselves and others. As if there’s some kind of pride to be taken in holding out to the end, as if there’s something commendable in it, heroic, as if there was strings swelling in the background and someone was sitting in the darkness and watching you, glowing, popcorn grease on their fingers, and you were everything, tragic, beautiful, and nothing anyone could ever be.

let me put it another way: there’s a whole world out there, columbus, that isn’t named, isn’t claimed, isn’t famed. and it’s all around you.
this is personal.

Your Whole Life Must Be Given

girl, straddle oblivion, slipped so fast into the mystery and remaining still instinctively controlled. intoxicated until spiritually mundane, how we sweat for the sickness pleasure, how we fold, and squat haunched over the earth, time lathered in production, pressing a silent burden into the furrowed dew.
i cultivate my emptiness with you,
insane forbear, igloo suburban transience, the light of exclusion sharpened out of autistic pen, the bloody voice of life, the suffering isolation of beauty. frigid beyond: let me never catch you. ail me forever.

Loopy’s Adventures at Ye Old Donut Shoppe: Part II

I bowed into the waiting police mobile while at the same time blowing a massive snot rocket. Officer Dibble winced approvingly. The wince is the mainstay of Dibble’s facial expressions, along with his crooked grin. He only grins at those whom he considers his chums–the kind of people he would share a donut with–but his wince is universally bestowed. I think he imagines he looks like Clint Eastwood when he does it, although truth be told he looks more like he’s trying to get out that last little reluctant tip of turd that refuses to slip out with its brethren. You know what I mean. It’s probably ruined many a contemplative afternoon.
He sniffed at me threateningly. “You been smokin reefer?” he asked, staring me down like the dad I never had.
“Naw, Officer Dibble. You’re smelling pizza. I was playing Ninja Star 3. I died on the 4th level.”
“The 4th level?! What’s gotten into you, boy?” He slowed down the car and cruised by a nun, perusing her intently to see if he could make out any hint of the female form in her dark, cryptic folds. “You haven’t been eating enough, can’t concentrate. Gotta get them carbs, kid. Breaded materials.”
“See this?” he asked, wincing and flourishing a welded bicep, “Go ahead, feel it. Go on.” I didn’t particularly want to, but it seemed more of a command than a suggestion. I wasn’t in the mood for a round of noogies.
“Yeah! Now that’s what a man feels like, junior! You think I got that from eating salads?” He stared at me violently, accusingly, as if I had said that he had gotten it from eating salads. I shook my head. “Shit. I’ve been eating meat and potatoes and corn bread since I was three. And there ain’t nothin, NOTHIN, like a good chocolate coated donut. That’ll put some hair on yer chest.”
He drove in silence for a while, letting the wisdom of his words sink in. My stomach sounded as if it were speaking in tongues. I was starting to get jittery. And then we were there, finally, just as my palms were beginning to sweat. The sweet neon yellow sign proclaiming “open 24 hours” shined like a beacon before me. Just as we were getting out of the car, Officer Dibble spotted Ms. Jesperson swaying down the street in platform shoes and a lipstick red miniskirt. “Goddam,” Dibble muttered, wincing, “justice must be served. Get me a chocolate iced custard filled, son,” and he drove off to do his duty. He was always talking about his “duty.” It was his duty to pat down the young boys if they were “up to no good” in the street, and it was his duty to pick up women in his car and “ensure that they are safe and protected.” I wiped my hands on my pants and entered the donut haven, harbor from the sea of life, where things are sweet and fried and go well with either milk or coffee, depending on the time of day.
“Josephine!” I barked, “are you ever a sight for sore eyes! These glazed devil’s food donuts pale by comparison.” I glued my face to the donut window and salivated eagerly. Josephine got out a box and stood ready with her tongs. Josephine is undoubtedly the top donut server in the world. She’s silent, efficient, and she knows exactly what donut you mean when you point vaguely at the donut display.
I took in a deep breath and commandeered the troops, checking for freshness, thickness of icing, and general integrity of appearance.
“Ok. I want 3 chocolate iced, 1 lemon filled, 1 chocolate iced creme filled, 1 chocolate iced custard filled, 3 chocolate iced with sprinkles, 1 raspberry filled, 1 cinammon apple filled, and. . .,” here i hesitated, poised between the sour cream and the maple iced, “and 1 maple iced.” I watched with satisfaction as Josephine scooped the chosen into the box.
“And a chocolate milk, please. Josephine, you are an amazing specimen of human endearment. You make my heart palpitate even more than running the mile in PE once did.” I’m not even sure that Josephine speaks English. But she knows her donuts, and that’s all that I could ask for in a woman. Plus she’s got these really big tits that press against the counter when she bends over to nab a donut.
I took my box and my milk and scuttled out the door into the night, the night that was now friendly, secure, and centered about me. Dibble’s car was parked in a dark spot down the street, and it appeared to be shaking back and forth. I figured that he must be struggling with some dastardly criminal, and could use the extra stamina provided by a hearty donut, just like Popeye with the spinach. I approached the car and took out a
chocolate iced custard filled. Officer Dibble was in the back seat with Ms. Jesperson bucking up and down on top of him and clinging to the wire mesh.
”Goddam,” he was saying, “Don’t make me break out the handcuffs and hog-tie you, bitch.”
“Here you go, Officer Dibble,” I said, holding up the donut. He winced at me sweatily and then grinned at the donut.
“Now that’s what I call service. Go home now, son, and stay out of trouble.” He took a generous bite from the donut and dribbled some of the custard onto Ms. Jesperson’s bared left shank. I steeled myself for the journey home with a chocolate iced and zipped up my windbreaker. Nothing like a walk at night armed with a box of donuts. The desire now was sweet, when the donuts were so close, so warm, and so fragrant. I cradled them
in my arms and envisioned the satiation that would take place before the TV that night.

Loopy’s Adventures at Ye Old Donut Shoppe: Part I

GYNECOLOGIST DISCOVERS INTACT ICHTHYOSAUR FOSSIL LODGED WITHIN PROXIMAL COLON OF QUAKERTOWN, NEW JERSEY RESIDENT.
“Must ‘ave been from that spelunking trip where i got trapped in a cave for three weeks,” says flabbergasted 47 year old Penitent High music teacher.

These were the headlines in my mind when I stepped up onto the curb at approximately 9 o’clock on a Thursday night, crossing over Juniper Ct and moving south on Lincoln St, en route to rendezvous with the sweet crustated circular pieces of sweetness that I like to call “my fix.”
“Ma! I’m going to go get my fix!” I call out to the motionless sack swathed in sweat clothes seated before the TV as I slip into my windbreaker.
I like custard and I like jellies and I like them old-fashioned and I like them powdery and twined and plain and sprinkled.
I depressed my left nostril and blew snot gustily out of my face as I entered Jimmy’s Pizzeria on a little detour. I like to let my desire peak before I get my fix. So I grunted at Herbert as I walked by the counter, and he rustled his paper at me, and I stuck my quarter into the slot of the Ninja Star 3 coin-op. It’s the only one left in town, and so far no one has topped my high score of 14,773,815, set on the eve of February 25, 1991. I remember that date very well. I had just received a haircut, and I had gel stiffened into my hair and it seemed to encapsulate my skull like a helmet, such that I felt very focused, kind of buckled in. I only used 2 quarters. Herb gave me a free slice of mushroom pizza. I had to pee so bad afterward that I went on the sidewalk in front of Jimmy’s, and the Walker kids saw me on their way back from a junior high school dance. They told their parents that they “saw my big wee-wee” and their dad got really mad and told the police and everyone thought I was a pedophile flasher for a while, and I kept getting frisked every time I went out of my house. The whole hoopla kind of died down when one of the Walker kids was found sniffing glue behind the kickball courts. I made pretty good friends with the police in the meanwhile, and they were impressed with my high score.
That was actually about the time that my fix got started. After hanging out with Officer Dibble and his gang for long enough, I began to get cravings for donuts, because he’d offer me one from the pink box he always has next to him in his front seat. He still frisks me down sometimes, kind of to keep me in line and ensure that our relationship appears professional.
I jiggled the joystick around for a while and got to the 4th level, but I missed a beat on the fat guy with a bo stick, and got killed by a stray rolling oil barrel. I may never top my own score, I guess I had reached a peak, kind of like how an athlete can only be so good for so long before they get too old. Maybe it’s because I no longer have the same ambition, the same drive I once did, now that I’ve got my fix.
My fix. I wiped the drool from the corners of my mouth and hitched up my pants. Time to pay Josephine a visit.
“Here I come,” I murmured huskily to myself, cocking a finger pistol at Herb as I passed. He pretended to collapse backwards, and knocked over a stack of pizza boxes. I decided that it was worthwhile to stand and laugh. But soon I tired of belittling the pathetic worm, and continued onward to my mission.
And then I suddenly knew that tonight was a special night, that the planets were aligned for me. Because right as I plunged out into the cold, cruel night, Officer Dibble was cruising by, grinning crookedly all over his ruddy face under his grey spiked hair.
“Hop on in, boy!” he beckoned to me.

Introducing Loopy

FORENSIC EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT LOOPY HAS VANISHED TWIN THAT NOW RESIDES IN LAP OF LUXURY IN PARALLEL UNIVERSE AFTER YOUTH FILLED WITH EXCITEMENT AND BUXOM GALS.

these were the headlines in my mind when mom picked me up from the soccer game.
“Loopy,” she said unto me, “you really need to clean behind your ears.”
“Ma. I just finished a game. Oranges and Gatorade only please.”
She handed me a warm cream soda and drove the way she always does, hunched over the steering wheel like a vulture, doing 65 in 25 speed limit zones and 40 on the freeway, peering ahead intently at the road and not hearing a thing I say to her.
“Today I dropped a stool that spanned the length of the bowl, and it was rocky,” I informed her, sipping from my cream soda and burping immediately after every sip.
“Mmm hmmm,” she said helpfully.
“Jeremy said the word ‘Fuck’ as many times as he could. He had counted 316 1/2 by the time Ms Akita grabbed him by his ear and made him walk the plank.”
“Is that right?” she said after a pause. I always have the best conversations with my mom when she’s driving. Me, I could care less for driving. It seems too stressful. The time I tried it I got hives. I’d rather have other people drive me around anyway.
I sat back in my chair and stared at an old man in the car next to me. Now, it is true that if I stayed around after the game and hung out with the guys, I could have all the orange slices and Arctic Freeze I desire, courtesy of Rangsey’s spouse. But then I’d have to act all chummy with them, talk about who is going to be shortstop of the year, or how hot the
latest chick in the Doritos commercial is. Then I would have to pretend to be interesting, and try to say things that are funny. Trouble is, to say something funny, I’d think about it and formulate it and finally settle on the perfect quip, containing just the right amount of stinging wit, irony, and satire, but then when I’d say it, the conversation would already have moved on to gym dicks, or punching bags, or Volvos, and everyone would look at me blankly and you could see the same thought running through their faces like a row of television sets on the same station: “Loopy’s not one of us. Loopy’s trying too hard. Loopy eats fruit loops and watches Crossing Over reruns.” The orange slices aren’t worth the social stigma. I realized suddenly that I am staring at the old man and drooling with my index finger curled into my mouth like a clothes hanger, and we are stopped at a red
light and he is looking back at me with a horrified expression on his face, the kind of expression I’d imagine he’d have if I were a giant troll that waggled my 13′ dick at him and threatened to sodomize him with it. I quickly averted my eyes and sipped my soda and tried to look nonchalant while burping into my mouth quietly.
I’ve always had this problem with staring agog at things when I’m daydreaming. Like in 6th grade, when I was thinking about strategies to beat the final henchman in Kabuki Quantum Fighter, and I got sent to the vice-principle’s office for staring at Katherine Zetger’s oversized breasts, which, unhappily, I didn’t even notice in my oblivious thrall. Thereafter I was known as “Pervert” to the rest of the junior high school denizens.
Katherine’s hockey playing love interest gave me a crack in the stomach in the locker room that I believe broke one of my young developing ribs, because I always get this weird feeling there whenever I breathe too deep.

Just Another Soirée

generalissimo jordan c. lubertwat scans the horizon with pinky extended double-jointedly, his belly protuberant and buoyed up by an equally excrescent bottom, his goatee failing to conceal a conspicuous absence of chin. he cuts quite a figure there, silhouetted before the sun, questing avidly for a cricket ball. “constantine!” he barks, “check that patch of grass!” the sunglass shielded youth springs to attention and bends professionally among the shrubbery. generalissimo lubertwat turns to me and seems to contemplate saying something, and spits instead. i take this as a grudging acknowledgment of my cricket skills. i open my cigarette case and offer a dunhill. he waves it aside with a snort, saying “those virginia slim jims are for women. cuban stogies only for me please,” thus implying that real men must satisfy their oral fixations with large objects. i am about to point out the homoerotic logical phallusy of his statement when constantine straightens up with the cricket ball held to the sky. the generalissimo hacks up some sputum and bellows “now you’ve got it, here comes the googly!” and he winds up, his belly wobbling earnestly. his leg slips a bit and he loses his balance just as the ball comes off, tottering comically on his stumpy booted legs. and dammit if he doesn’t bowl a proper googly–in fact, a chinaman i should say, since he’s left-handed–and takes a wicket. the generalissimo roars and brandishes his pistol, blasting it into the air triumphantly. constantine stands at attention, his clean-shaven face immobile and focused. i am for a moment ready to descry the complete luck and lack of skill involved in the matter, but the gleeful sputtering of the pistol in my ear reminds me of the generalissimo’s unpleasant past-time of amassing and applying tools of torture. i take a drag off my dunhill and shrug, thinking of ways to get him back. he sighs and places a meaty arm around my shoulder, and i gather that the game is over, now that he can possess the after-glow of success, like having the last word in a pointless argument. he guides us towards the pool, where the women are laid out, squealing like seals over their shrimp cocktails. “the ways of god are manifest,” he tells me beneficently, “the day may soon come when we shall have to walk about wearing bio-engineered suits protecting us from all evil. may we enjoy our youth and vigor while we may.” “good game,” i say, interpreting this speech as an attempt at good sportsmanship. we settle ourselves with grunts onto the lawn chairs, and i notice lubertwat’s wife groping at constantine as he passes. the generalissimo orders us martinis. “oh, and i just love the way it bolsters up my breasts. i wouldn’t be able to survive without it,” my wife comments shrilly to the generalissimo’s, continuing some conversation which i do my utmost to ignore. a fly settles onto my arm and sits there twiddling its arms against
its head. the generalissimo belches peremptorily and begins a monologue, seemingly directed to himself, regarding the in’s and out’s of the exercising of the pc muscle. i doze off briefly in the sun, only to be awakened by the unpleasant sight of my wife plummeting into the pool, her breasts dangling before her like an udder. i reflect on what must have first attracted me to her, when we were young and her thighs were rippled with toned muscle rather than cellulite. and i am mildly surprised to remember that it was indeed her breasts, which i used to free from trappings like a christmas present in the backseat of my jetta. “here they are!” i would exclaim, bobbling them affectionately in my hands, “liberty to the oppressed! let them dangle free like apples falling from a tree!”, making reference to those first fruits which tempted man away from god. i would then take them into my mouth and suckle on them. then i would . . . well, what is the use in harping on the glories of my youth? those breasts which were once so succulent now hang off her belly like an old codger’s scrotum sack. she rises out of the shallow end with water dripping off of her like some sea monster and comes over to me, her feet slapping wetly against the pavement. all of a sudden i am struck with the urge for revenge, for the chinaman, for the loss of beauty, and youth, and the trivial demeaning of my life which was once so fraught with ambition. i pretend to jerk upright suddenly from a deep sleep and knock my wife heftily onto the generalissimo, who is solemnly engaged in sucking the remnants of juice out of the bottom of his martini glass. “zounds!” he explodes, “get this bovine off of me! my leg is broken!” constantine bounds out of the house and begins the futile effort of trying to lift up my wife with both hands. my wife is lowing to the heavens above, and the generalissimo’s wife comes behind constantine, ostensibly to help, but she seems to be doing more pulling on the boy than on anything else. soon even the pug, which doesn’t do anything other than snuffle and fart all day, gets up wearily and gets in on the fray, yapping frenziedly at them. i take that moment to pee in the pool unnoticed.

My Name Is Bill

when i lost my legs in ‘81 i thought it was the end of the world. i was incomplete, shattered, a fragment of a man. laying in my hospital bed i knew that i should be happy to be alive, that i should praise god for saving me, that i could still think and fuck and feel. but all i could think about was how i could never go up those wooden steps leading to my room two at a time again, hearing them shift and complain beneath me. i was somebody to pity, not fully human, deserving of a parking space right at the curb, colored blue, using special ramps to arrive at the door. people would move exaggeratedly out of my way and avoid looking into my eyes. i would have to pee like a woman.
i had to be treated for depression for the next year. i would shuttle awkwardly about in my wheelchair with my head down, only going out to rent movies and buy cigarettes, microwave chicken pot pies, and booze. i felt ashamed of my handicap, and what made it worse was that i could still feel my legs, that they were still there in my mind. i remembered what it was like to walk down the beach and feel my heels sink into the sand. i was something grotesque, stumps waggling about, children with fingers in their mouths staring fascinated and vaguely frightened. after a while i began to get used to wheeling around, my arms grew strong and sinewy, my chest filled out, and i began going for scoots around the park and the beach, checking out the girls, getting a tan. i discovered that girls sometimes have a strange attraction to disabled people, like it
makes them feel special, like they’re giving you some wonderful wild gift when they fuck you. charity sex, i call it. i’ve talked to other guys in wheelchairs, and they agree. a man in a wheelchair in a club is going to have a chick freaking him, guaranteed.
i began to realize that though i may have lost my legs, my mind had regenerated and transformed in a new way: i was a renewed form of human being, welded flesh with steel, a modern day centaur, a metamorphosed creature, evolving, adapting to my limits, discovering my peculiar freedom. my legs were gone. but in their place was a set of burnished wheels.
i don’t feel sorry for myself, i don’t feel like i’m missing anything anymore. i’m experiencing things differently. my wheels are a part of me, they are a part of my body, an extension of myself, just the way my legs once were. am i as agile? no, but i’m faster, i’m smoother, and damn, downhills are a piece of cake.
i have hope for the future. i can see a day where bodies are no longer important as anything more than command centers for a vast inter-connected network of minds. when we’ve learned to adapt to our new tools, and to hold them close to us, to cherish what new horizons they give us, and to never lament the loss of what is past. things that occur to us, the will of God, whether gentle or violent, are things that change us, irrevocably. the
only thing to do is adapt. the only thing to do is grow. all that love and pain. all that fear and defiance. all that loneliness and friendship. and this is the way new worlds are born.

A Glimpse Of Shameless Expression

joy, the movement of the body full of light, bouncing, rippling, limbs loosened, unfettered by appearance. she stood on a street corner dancing, wobbling about to a rhythm only she could hear, cars streaming through the intersection glancing, passerbys milling past the curb to the flashing call of the next sidewalk shore.
is it that people have seen everything? world-weary, dulled by the daily accosting blur of difference? or is it that people have seen nothing since that moment in their lives when someone beat the wonder out of them? childhood distilled to a residue of hidden malice. indifference.
there is only one language that cannot be misinterpreted: the unwithheld delight of the soul: the springy swinging of a dog’s bottom when you return home; the croon of a baby at the gift of attention, fingers waggling in bliss; the resounding, enveloping waves of beauty that emanate from a singer striking the depths of a note in a song; the radiant eyes of a stranger who knows herself in you.
sitting by the window in the bus, stopped at the light, i watched her standing there bopping about. i smiled to myself and felt happiness spread into me. i felt the potential in people, the delight fermented, waiting to be uncorked by a loving touch. there is so much more to every moment. if we could just stand like that in the midst of the crowd, and let our feelings flow through us, instead of running away to the next safe haven, instead of pretending not to understand. what is it in our lives that is more important than how we feel?

A Last Touch Of Earth

i watch the flame eating wet and circular into the wax, a descending well, dripping solidified heat. soon there will be no wick left to burn, and the flame will fizzle, smoking dissipating into the darkness. tonight i let you go; i wrote you goodbye and sealed my heart of our history.
i had contemplated war. i was bloodthirsty with distance, yearning to break apart the boundaries of our worlds, to penetrate your space and wash my wounds in your river. i wanted reparations for all those moments of emptiness when i reached for you and you weren’t there. for all the words i wanted to speak and couldn’t because i knew you didn’t want to hear them. for feeling like what i feel needs to be hidden.
there was a sacred space once where we would meet. i look for it now and it seems to have been a dream. or perhaps it was a reality we sullied by our pretending. sharing an intimacy requires honesty. anything else and it shutters the world into a box, into a room with no light, struggling for freedom. i cannot claim innocence.
i’d been holding it in and lying to myself for so long that when it finally broke out of me i couldn’t understand what it was. here they were, my emotions, staring me in the face, and all i could see was red. after i let them bleed and scream for a little while, i began to see their true colors.
this is what happens when you stop communicating. your words clot together and then you can’t breathe and you have to explode, you have to break down and spew them out like they were nothing, like they were everything. so i did. i sat down and i wrote a letter to you and strung up the words like a declaration of cold war, like a manifesto of love lost. for the first time in a long time i was personal, i was honest, i was pure. and i decided to never show you that letter, because it would only be fodder for your distance, a little piece of me. i don’t want to struggle with myself against you any longer. i am sick of killing, and i am tired of dying. so now i write this for myself. you will never know. you will never understand how i feel. and now you can go.

Tattoo

she stood seemingly perfectly arranged, admixture of coyness, bemused tolerance, majestic sideways downturned eyes, suggesting the line of her spine turning up into her ass, awareness of herself twisting towards the viewer. i stare at her for hours as i get my tattoo. yakuza wife. flesh property of some shadowy presence, the trophy of a name shrouded in smoke.
i could look at her forever, her hands folded into each other as if cradling a vase, her legs beginning to spread. as i watch her, body covered in needled colors, i become aware of her embedded calm, of her sharp poise. her body is loose and taut at the same time, her right breast jutting upwards, her nipple a soft punctuation in the outline against the darkness.
the body glove of her tattoo somehow makes her nakedness detached, protected from the desiring capture of the camera. her body has already been visibly claimed. money, power, ink penetrating the skin. i wonder what she is like in her unguarded moments, in her unconscious dreams where she is unmarked, innocent, and unprepared. but maybe we have no such space within ourselves, and everything we are is touched by someone, fingers branded in our veins, eyes pricked into our souls. there is nothing, perhaps, that can be hidden.
only claimed, renamed, and tattooed.

On and Off

i fall into the frames of space that swims eternally repeating before me, an old woman hacking into her arm, the bus driver singing a song in spanish, my fingers folding into each other. positive thoughts, i think. i can do this. think positive. i stare at buildings passing as if they hold some essential mystery, demanding my intentness. thoughts, think. i seem to be breaking into pieces. the airy hiss as the lighted box shudders to a
stop, like a gargantuan sleek beast cutting a swift fart. a kid shoulders his way to the concrete, enveloped in earphones. thoughts do not seem to matter at this current juncture of time. voices swarm through my arteries like an overbearing shock of electricity. move, move move, i tell the red light telepathically. i glare ferociously at a woman standing on the corner with a handbag. she has very tight calves, sweeping down out of her skirt into the sharp points of her heels. alert, i crane my head to capture this detail in my mind. it seems that this might save me. but a bottomless pit of frenzy opens in my face as the bus stays still, and i stroke my right ear to hold on. and then. it heaves, the doors swing closed, and the self-contained world continues its hurtling way to the next stop. a maid pulls the string and the sign lights up. she stands, wobbling against the metal posts, her breasts weighted to her belly. the kind of woman who is ignored by eyes searching for stars when she walks the streets to her job cleaning a rich family’s floors, hispanic, stocky, painted lips, hair tied back. yet looking at her standing in the air-conditioned bobble of the city’s mass transit system, i find her beautiful, her eyes prepared firmly for her exit. i feel a quiet breath of calm sweep into my mind and i look around me with the discovery of inner light, avoiding eyes, the abstract humanity of our containment, rustling paper bag, varicosely gripped cane, soft tufts of neck hair, intermittent coughing, the announcement of street names. a waiting room for the appointed daily grind of employment. i pull the string and stand swaying in the boxed movement. i step off into the day centered, part of a puzzle, fit into the jutting shapes of an uncompleted picture. patience.

Dumb Show

take the string and put the ends together and walk across the scone ends of your life. a wrinkle in time, a pause in the day for tea, an unspoken forgotten dimension of your world climbing out of your head like a continuously rising house extension, enabling you to see the view that everything immediately around you tends to obstruct. and out of this nameless height of vision a child, the lost impression of your formative past, drops twisted bed sheets to yourself. and you climb, and you climb, hoping to reach that trap door in the sky, but you grow tired soon and let yourself fall, hard, against the concrete establishment of your waking days, your coffee sodden money time, the prison of your escaping self. falling into the ringing silence of underwater subversion, the siren spectacles of tv. like houdini, you dislocate your limbs, and come out at the weekends dripping, turning wine into water, brimming with the illusion of freedom, inscribing the empty form of death with words, with the spiraling fall of tree leaves, apparel of light cut off at the stem, the shrouding cut of the tongue. fragments of yourself, crumbs, crumbling onto the tablecloth, the bleakness of your future spread out naked, white, and gleaming before you like a desperate lover crying take me, take me now, but when you reach out your tentacles like a starving anonymous anemone you find that there is nothing, nothing but the concentric circles of the masquerade, the pantomime of your past dancing silently before you like a ghost, detached, cold, beyond touch. don’t tesseract this moment, don’t try to connect me to your dying. let me fall, softly dreaming of the light, the slow liquid pulse of the parasite. . .

urban stories

Act I

i begin my day with a banana and chai, trying to remember my dream of the night before. it had something to do with walking in puddles of beer. i try to understand the greater significance of this. i take a shit, shave, do all the things you do in the morning, trim my nose hairs, clean out my ears with q-tips. i get in my jeep and get in line on the boulevard. there is this girl in a honda next to me, hoops in her ears, shorts on that are pulling up around her tanned slender legs, sunglasses on. we are inching back and forth next to each other for a good three miles. oh man. look at those lips. she knows i’m looking at her. she keeps pulling on her cigarette. goddamn. kind of wavy brown hair, with a bandanna on. got that kind of bad girl look, like she could care less that i’m having adolescent fantasies looking at her slim right arm extended trimly onto the steering wheel. i tap into the back of the lexus in front of me. this fucking squirt of a kid comes popping out of the car, looking around the back, running his hand over it and examining it as if it were a fucking bank statement. he comes up to my door; he’s noticed the honey, too, i can tell by the way he seems to be imitating himself, the way chumps act when they know a hot girl could be watching.
“there’s a scratch on my car,” he tells me.
“get back in your car,” i tell him, looking straight ahead.
“could you please give me your information?”
i look at him. cars are starting to honk. the chick has moved forward a couple of cars. goddammit. he has spiky gelled up hair, one of those young shits who think they’re hot stuff because they work in some office in the film industry and eat hors’ d’oeuvres at parties where sometimes movie stars are seen. i briefly contemplate ramming into his car and driving away.
“get back in your car. this is what bumpers are for. get mommy to buy you a new one.”
“i’m going to take down your license number.”
i suddenly kick open my door, slamming him to the ground. i close the door and start to pull over to the left lane. he has the presence of mind to stumble out of the way.

Act II

i consider myself an artist on the scale of the domestic. i take pictures, family portraits, babies at the moment when they forget to cry, kids brimming with awkward sexual fervor and one of those ridiculous caps they make them wear for graduation, girlfriend and boyfriend, a boy and his dog, a girl and her baton. i’ve learned that even these posed pictures, prepared teeth baring for the future, can contain an element of transcendence.
it’s all about the right setting for a person, the balanced lighting, the immaculate sense of timing for pressing the button, a certain amount of coaching, luring, baiting.
when someone comes into my studio to be photographed, i make sure that they know that it is i, sarad gordon, who am taking their picture. i am not a watchman, capturing them on security camera. i am master of the ceremonies. i lead them to the altar.
there is nothing certain about what i will see in a person. i have an idea, to be sure: as soon as they walk in the room, i get a feeling. i understand instinctively where to position the light source, at what angle they should be facing, how much needs to be revealed. but as to what will come out in the photo, i do not know. i have an inkling, yes, i have a feeling. this is where the art comes in. i set them up and then they come out on the other side and it always surprises me.
sure. it’s an unrecognized art. other people look at these things i’ve made and when they say “that’s a good picture,” they mean that the person looks good, not that the picture is good. there’s a difference. but i take pride from that anyway, pride in my craft, so subtle that you don’t even know i’m there, even when it’s looking you right in the face. but i gotta say, i’m not out here just to make people who come to my studio look good. i make them look good enough, good enough so that they pay me money and i stay in business, hey, there’s no denying i’ve got my share of bills to pay. but i’m not trying to bring something out of someone that isn’t already there, you know what i mean? i come away from a good day’s work feeling like i’ve seen something into the nature of god. yeah, i know how it sounds. but growing up, i went to church, i had real religious parents,
you know, hard-asses, and i’d watch them get all crazy in service, holding up their hands and crying, the whole works. and now that i’m at that age, that age where you start holding onto whatever piece of beauty you can find, i find that i get those feelings when i’ve caught a vision of a face that i wouldn’t have normally seen, when it looks like someone’s soul is peering out of the cage of a silent photo, seemingly aware, eternal, selfless.

Act III

a scent spoken wheeling past to future, your radiant warmth swarms my senses. i take a step back to get a good picture and capture your readiness for me. you are there everywhere i can dare, eyes flaring in confrontation, dervish focus projecting my dreams into )ssssshhhh) nothing

unless i act,
fast breaking forward to beat you to yourself, running to the rhythm of my hunger til the dragon scales fall like rose petals upon the sky reflection of a lonely lake.

waves crest off the make of us, veins rushing with rising river of blood, the sound of my vision flooding your lungs, you speak my name, but you are already shuddering, distant, with the light. what do all these words mean, falling into succession as if they might lead us somewhere?

look around us, the grass pungent and grasping, a tree curling into lush shadow, a background exploding into particularity. the smell of fresh cut things. the inevitable concrete enclosure, squared existence, extending out into infinity, a veritable ocean of building movement. i am showing you something. i like it when you smile.

this entrance into the belly of a mechanical fish is not pain–it is an awakening, a transformation, a meditation. the net of a stocking will pull me back out of the bottled water of my silence. life is not meant to be hidden. i will make my mark upon you

be beep b

once there was light it was seen that this was the way that it should be. in the pulse of our fading fears was known the path of many things. a subtle buoyancy of tempo pulling at fingering hesitancy, drawing out calling beauty til the pieces get sticky raw with stuff of life. here, says the glorious slug, herein lies the bait. can’t be always balanced, making ends meet. the ship slips down and sometimes takes on a bit of water on the way back up, if it be stormy, arrr. time is not a drum machine. notice the way the beautiful bottom of a girl washes side to side in a sway determined by what is around her. pretend not to notice, or stare blatantly from behind shades, it is the same. it is not for you or me, this earth. all of us, filling and emptying, slipping into nuanced sheens of interactive neurons. the only dragon’s hoard to be found nowadays sits within the calm depth of focused breath, streaming from belly-center. a halo of energy moves beyond while within the space of the mind there is nothing, there is simply skin.
steady, fluid, sexy.

Fern Goddess Waves In Breeze

just generally vague, wispish sorts of dialogue, presenting the strange vivacity of the alien lifestyle. throw in a little jack daniels and the syrupy residual attack of the words leaves you gaping open to the sound of what you do not know. extraterrestrial whispering down to the ears, push the hair around, ring crafted slopes, enwrapped within yourself sits the jewel vibration, stone which causes the waves to move in its after-path. the music reaches into you, let’s dance together, get away from standing against the wall and burst sweaty into open, crowded space, where things brush into each other, move together, move apart, together, and generally interact.

I
Jack realized that there was no need to feel ashamed. just himself acting instinctively. he is where he is, moving into something he is not.

II
Jill fell down the hill like water to catch him, and they trickled side by side until they rushed into each other and fell fell fell into themselves before they ever departed again for the sky droplets coalescing. ocean mother child, we are family.

III
Aint no point to pretend to feel nothing. something’s goin on. pay attention and stop thinking about how you look on satellite tv camera pictures. we are meant to be here, if we are here. i have arrived. you have landed. open the doors and les greet formally and then probe and press and get to the truth of the reality by putting on the masks of each other. glove habits of every day slipping over our naked souls, quiet darkness of our solitude holding each other into the eternity of this moment. shared life, rosebud opening into smell, unfolding glowing colour, life that clouds the scenery in the sun with its beauty.

IV
Nothing nothing nothing. I feel so good, so good so good. I am scared. I don’t know what is going on. I don’t know who I am, I don’t know where I am going. The rush of empty space and the stars wavering eternally changing.
Nothing is set.

V
And you. the bleeding of the moon calling to sleep remembrance. the pain of renewal. pyre burning birth like a pair of lungs moving contrapuntal to the embrace of balance, swaying to wind.

VI
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.

The Story Of Being Alone

the shot of a glance. kurtle decided that to be was to not exist knowably. and to hold it in, until the dreams were destroyed completely, brutally. he took in the hit of inspiration and died honorably, soaring into the mud in pieces. this is what happens when you have nothing and want everything.
kurtle created fantasies which turned into nightmares. and then they were nothing but awakening pain, full of watching, full of someone else’s eyes watching distantly, shutting off the understanding. skin. stranger. at the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘nothingness produces snow; quiescence produces yellow sprouts (Chang Po-Tuan)’
the silent bearing will lead to spring. kurtle sees that now the sails have sunken beneath the weight of their own production, waiting for wind that will be strong enough to lift them. thirsty in the sun, there is nothing panic will do. this is something of survival, not of triumph, not of victory, bringing home the spoils. i am lost, kurtle exclaims, looking
into the horizon, i am pointless, dying in my ignorance. the only thing that will save me now is not myself. the only hope i do not possess. i may die here, and i creep forward heavy still, never knowing.
and suddenly the rain comes, part of the season, part of the wind, part of the time. kurtle finds himself alive, growing into himself.

the other is an illusion. it was his desert. his jungle. his mind. his desire.
and what is left? who is kurtle? what shell shade under which he hides?

there is only the point at which he departed, and the point at which he arrived. there he is, sand steps painted on the dunes.

now where are you? where do you fit in?

Transformation: Tao Te Ching Style

a vision: when a being dies,
its energy passes into the world,
it moves, formless,
into all forms of life,
such that it is present everywhere,
and collected nowhere.
(life here includes rocks, oceans, plastics, metals.)
thus the world changes,
accepting the spirit.

this is what is called
“the river of energy.”

the more energy you have in life, aroused,
supple, billowing with the breath of ocean wind,
the more the world is filled
with your passing.

this is what is meant by
“gathering treasure in heaven.”

to be alive is to clear yourself
of knowledge
and mold yourself
to the wind,
to let your surface act
without you.

in this way you will float balanced,
all of your energy still, silent,
deep. the world passes around you,
such that all that is in you
is you.

death is the time
when you give yourself to the world.

until then,
let nothing separate you
from yourself.

Speculative Revolution Part V

Why are people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.

Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious.

Why do people think so little of death?
Because of the greatness of their labors in seeking for the means of living.
Therefore the people think little of death.

Having to live on, one knows better than to value life too much.

–lao tzu

so i haven’t been telling you anything you don’t already know. i think we live in a time where it is hard for anyone to claim innocence. stupidity some might rightfully be entitled to, but innocence, no. everyone knows what commercials and advertisements and the media are doing. we’re just trying to make the best of it, enjoy what entertainment is provided, go with the flow. i think many of us are apathetic because of this, because we can see it but we don’t know what to do about it. and so i’m here today to tell what you can do about it: nothing. absolutely nothing. nope. you can’t change the world. you can’t make people’s lives better for them.

part of the whole problem for me has been that i was looking for something to DO. what can i DO to MAKE a change? well, the world is already changing all around me, every second. and i find that a big part of the problem is that i have been ignoring this, engaged as i am in some kind of grand, ambitious endeavor, even though i am not yet clear on what is exactly involved. imperialism, colonization, the abandonment of domesticity in favor of exotic adventures beyond–these are things that have been a problem with our western civilization for centuries. we’ve been looking outside of what we’ve got right here, right now, and instead been focusing on that OTHER, that THING out there, that OBJECT. glory, ambition, making the world a better place–these are the desires of the tyrant. and really, all it is is some form of insecurity. because what i have isn’t good enough. so i’ve got to get more, more. manifest destiny. idealism.

think about your brain for a minute. i have heard one professor describe the two hemispheres of the brain as if they were two separate selves coexisting at the same time, independent of one another, almost with their own identities. right brain and left brain. even within your own body, your own mind, you are divided. and growing up and living your life means learning to balance this, to unify the whole. the two hemispheres must maintain a dialogue, an interaction. the harmonious mind, where neither right nor left dominates.
think of this in terms of male and female relations. we still live in a misogynistic society. males and females act as if they are completely different species, as if there is a gigantic line dividing them, and they are at war. but this is ridiculous. male and female exists within our heads. are we different? yes, we are different. but this difference is something to share, not to possess. when you make love to someone, you understand their body. it is not yours, but you feel it as if you were them, momentarily. and you grow from this into a closer understanding of yourself.
now think of this in terms of international relations. we still live in a hegemonic society. nations act as if they are completely different peoples, as if those lines on the map are real, as if you could look down from the moon and see all the names. what is america doing in vietnam? what is america doing in haiti? what is america doing in bosnia? what is america doing in iraq? what is america doing? nations, territories, bodies of land. these should be spaces of sharing, not lines of possession. we should not enter them with objectives, with purposes, with score cards. not to claim, not to own. not to change, not to make better, not to take and to leave.

most of the evil in this world most likely came from good intentions. anyone with an overtly negative agenda is immediately castigated. but under the guise of goodwill, brotherhood, religious fervor, and love for one’s country the most horrible acts are committed. torture, for example, is common practice by those powers that feel the need to police and occupy another people’s land. routine procedure. they make a man feel pain to the point that he gives up his self-respect and tells them exactly what they want to hear. this is what they call “information.”

Speculative Revolution Part IV

the saying “what you can’t see won’t hurt you” has a certain truth to it. this kind of attitude is inherent in the way we walk down supermarket aisles–we don’t see how these products were formulated, tested, slaughtered, chopped up, and we really would rather not see that. for instance, meat. if we witnessed what is done every day to the animals
that were sacrificed to sit in spongy chunks frozen and wrapped, then we would get sick to our stomachs when we looked at it. but take away the product from the process of creation (or destruction), and what you have is just this detached thing, isolated, hidden behind layers of coding, marketing strategies, masks of complacency. and so what you don’t see isn’t necessarily hurting you–but someone or something else is getting hurt. ultimately, i would argue, it does hurt you. but that’s a different can of worms. let me stick with the idea of blinders for a minute. think about yourself walking down a city street, let’s say on your way to class, or to work. you pass by numbers of people, some you look at, some you ignore, some you look at and then reject and ignore. think about that second when you take them in your eyes and see what they are, or what you think they are. think about that second when you look away. think about that as a form of destruction, as a form of murder. you have rejected them completely, at that moment, for whatever reason. they were not good-looking, not interesting enough, too weird, too yuppie, too not appealing, not worth your acceptance. i am going to make the argument
here that little rejections like this, which occur in an instant and may not even be perceived by the other person, are one of the major problems in our way of perceiving the world and in the way we live our lives. the way you look at others affects them. the way they look at you affects you.
one of the worst things you can do to a human being, or to any creature, is not to persecute it, but to ignore it’s existence completely, to let it pass by anonymously like a thing, like an it, to use it only to get somewhere, like a freeway. alone, in your car, on the street, what are you to anyone else but a set of darkened windows, a moving vehicle, an obstruction, a danger, an irrelevance.
do you think you can handle walking down skid row alone, without the barriers of your car locked doors? the people on the street would eat you alive, would tear you to pieces with their eyes. unless, of course, you learned the mentality of the police force, which is to ignore them as people and see them only as objects, as trash.
it’s easy to ignore the life around you when you’re secure, safe behind fortress tower walls of lifestyle signifiers you are barely aware of. walking the streets downtown are some of the most terrifying and appalling and beautiful and distorted forms of life. many people have become the monsters that society abhors in the news, creates in the inhuman working and living conditions, and leaves to roam the earth, hoping, like victor frankenstein, that this life arisen out of death will just go away and leave them to their imagined romances. you can see it in the people’s faces, hardened and stripped of emotion, devouring whatever they can get a hold of.
and some of these people have become god-like apparitions, goddesses of the night, their eyes liquid fire. i find women from the streets to be more attractive than the skinny teenagers in fashion magazines. and chances are that skinny teenager in the fashion magazine is wearing an outfit derived from the luring designs of the streetwalkers. what i am trying to get at is that there is a relation between the visible and the invisible in society, that there is a direct correlation between mass consumer culture and individual castigation. we marginalize in order to ignore what is not relevant to the lifestyle narrative we immerse ourselves in. and yet, without these margins, without these ignored
spaces, we would not be able to construct the heroic history of our triumphs, the tragic drama of our losses, the totemic identities, the nostalgic yearning for what never was. in order to maintain the polite surface illusion of society, we cover over aberrations, we ignore the dangerous, the unwanted, the unacceptable. we wear masks for the performance.

Speculative Revolution Part III

when i say that direct opposition is not the only way to fight, i am not condoning apathy, or trying to provide intellectual rhetoric to excuse personal lack of motivation and passion, or even trying to promote a turn-the-other-cheek stance of love and acceptance under conditions of extreme oppression. i am suggesting a new direction in thought. when confronting an opponent outright, you are not only creating (or at least, renewing) and solidifying a force in opposition to yourself, but you are filling the role of their misdirected energy, you become their image, their scapegoat, their oppressor, their teacher, their student, their lover, their killer. in other words, you are recreating opposition by opposing.
the reason why i say i am not promoting a stance of love and acceptance, in the traditional notions of the words, is that in some situations, under certain circumstances, it is necessary to make real and clear and visual the opposition to a force that is coming like a thief in the night. direct opposition is a legitimate and natural response to a force that is
indirect, pervasively ignored, and destructive.
but we are talking about a force that can’t possibly be directly confronted, as it exists in everyone, everywhere. direct conflict only becomes necessary in those specific situations where it’s effects are directly manifest.
hence the violence in certain racially and/or economically segregated districts. instead of ignoring the violence, or despairing over it, or getting authoritarian about it and trying to throw everyone in prison, we should be looking at this violence as a symptom. someone who commits an act of violence is trying to tell us something. and we should listen. ignoring these destructive voices is only leading to their greater need to be heard, and thus, escalating the urgency and hurtfulness of their acts. it’s like the homeless “problem.” they will never disappear as long as there remains the concept of property.
suddenly you realize that they are everywhere, in every little niche that you brush by without giving it a glance. just like the way you drive by in your car. drive by.

Speculative Revolution Part II

what i am suggesting is a way of life. thinking about things around me in terms of politics and commercialism only makes me angry, and then hopeless, and ultimately negative and pessimistic. and in becoming this, i am only furthering the whole bullshit. you see the problem is that a system is inhuman, and has no relation to my emotions. i thus say that it is not the system that is at fault, but our relation and interaction with it through each other. in tangible terms, take the example of our relations with each other based on cars, personalized packages of modern wonder. we get in our cars and turn on the radios and ac and drive deftly through streets we only know by sign-names and intersections. we get on the freeway and pass by a big bill-boarded advertisement every couple of seconds, just like commercials on tv, only faster. and when someone gets in your way, couldn’t you just kill them? it’s amazing how the most gentle and laidback people can suddenly become monstrous at the helm of an suv. you step into your vehicle and your relationship with the world changes. you become a machine, speeding towards your objective. it is hard to feel much compassion for a machine that is driving too slow in front of you, or cuts you off. now think of how this is similarly affecting your attitude towards the communities you drive through. you couldn’t care less, it’s just scenery, background to the game level you’re on. i’m not accusing you. it’s a natural response to the way we live our lives. we might crash if we started looking around us and stopped focusing straight ahead.
i’ve always been somewhat cynical, but i’ve always been basically positive in my view of general humanity. i’ve been getting more negative in recent years, and i realized suddenly that i’d begun hating people i don’t know personally. i had no relation to these people. they were usually getting in my way. and this isn’t the right way to live. so i blamed corporate colonization of our minds through tv and news and movies. i blamed imperialist minded politics. i blamed gender and sexual misunderstanding. i blamed academia, i blamed science, i blamed religion, i blamed family, i blamed self. and guess what? nothing, noone, holds up to this accusation. not the one asleep and innocent in their dreams, not the one looking away, not the one fucking someone else, not the one holding them down, not the one on the ground naked getting raped. not the one who judges, not the one who is imprisoned, not the parents, not the children, not the man and not the woman.
we are only as strong as our weakest link. anyone ever involved in some group setting understands this on the most basic of levels. it therefore is quite logical that those who are weakest are the ones who place themselves in positions of “power,” “dominance,” and “knowledge.” feeling threatened, feeling in need of some security? the nazis sure did. and somehow a cult of weaklings exterminated millions and threatened other countries’ boundaries. you remember that bully in elementary school? it’s a cliché, but most likely his parents either abused him, or his parents ignored him. and so he is insecure, and the only way he can relate to other people is by dominating them, so that he knows they will take him for real. this is what i mean by weakness. could this boy help the way he acted? maybe, maybe not. but i think it is clear that he is not the one who deserves all the blame. and i think it should not be too much of a jump to say that the parents are not the only ones who deserve the blame. and so on. and so on.
we are all involved in the violence that occurs everyday. this is what it is to be weak. this is what it is to be connected. this is what it is to be a human being. we must be “weak” together to be strong.

Speculative Revolution Part I

i have been becoming more politicized lately, more activist oriented, at least in spirit, speaking of such things as “corporate conspiracy” and “imperialist agendas.” i have felt the urge to become extreme, to don a black mask and throw objects at police. and i feel that these things are necessary, should be done and will continue to be done. but i was thinking today that perhaps such opposition to a constructed “force” of capitalism is ultimately only feeding into such a system, is promoting it by the very action of opposing it. there is a reason that police wear uniforms and politicians wear suits. distinctions are a manner in which opposition is created, for there is immediately created a caste of exclusion. in this way, those who oppose are really simply feeding into this game of illusion and power, for they reinforce these differences and further them to a position of direct warfare.

i will here remind you that direct warfare is social lubricant. when there is a physical enemy in confrontation with you, you of necessity bond and unite as a society. it keeps you in line, in service, focused.

there is thus perhaps a reason why the extreme violence and persecution of the ghettoes exist. you will notice that the newest trends in fashion come not from runways in paris but the streets in compton. you will notice that cop-killing is featured prominently on the highest grossing CDs.

our socio-economic system thrives off of the creation of compressed sectors of space filled with pain and pressure and confrontation. as the 60s demonstrated, corporations bank off of rebellion, off of youth counterculture. the reason capitalism has not gone the way of marxism is because of this great ability to assimilate instantaneously its
opposition. in fact, it even seems, in a sense, to control and regulate this opposition.

but i am of course exaggerating to make a point. i don’t want to feed into the notion of bureaucratic conspiracy here. i would never give corporations or governments that much credit. it seems to be more accurately a reflection of the market economy, of the oceanic rise and fall of a system that uses self-conscious irony in its advertising.

there is really no way to oppose a system that takes a self-opposing stance in preparation.

at least, not directly.

The Reaching In To Out

a shroud cast off to pass the light around, the breath moving balanced, her body against mine, honestly touching. I have learned how to tell the difference between the light others attribute to me, and take, and the light which I bear, and give.

I fill the space I move within—there is nowhere, now, that I cannot fall. Indefensible, I break open my eyes into every interrogator I pass, and it is their minds that must deal with me.

woman,
channel of flame,
it is to you I owe this passage.

Construction

the bat wraps about himself and hangs suspended from the ceiling, filled with blood. the night dissipates into the warmth of the sun outside of the cave as he sleeps, dreaming.

there is a wisdom that floats in our veins.

a voice of the sun:
it is important to know how to open oneself to another being, to draw from its energy and share a life between.

a voice of the moon:
it is also important to know when to leave. there are some things that are not ready to be shared. casting light upon the darkness can become a kind of violence. there are whole worlds that exist without you, that have nothing to do with you.

a voice of the earth:
to live, i must breathe. i have fallen into a space from which i grow. a life requires the independence to be dependent. the singularity of a tree in a forest. a cell in a body. taking what you need to serve yourself to serve others.

a voice of the bat:
i love the world, life, multitudinous perceptions. thus, i share what i no longer need, and i take what others let go.

if you love another being, then let them live
apart from you,
so you can meet freely
in the night shining,
the shores of bodies
coming up against the surface of seas,
heeding the call of gravity.

planet-world-lives circle each other
and do not crash.
they hold themselves together.

This About Faced

john moves the movement of the verily meaning into this sound horning into liquid breathing moving into silence. you see, one could say exactly what one meant to say but that would be dead now wouldn’t it? john findles the floppenheimer catch to the 22 second. he curdles the flame into incense spiralling ringling brothers. and john aka minuteman to his cousins takes the whiff of attempting into the bosom of misunderstanding. midnight yell. pigs flashing their fucking lights. one can flip them off but what does it do? the violence builds into shut out buildings shadowing over lives struggling to die noisily. and johhny-o-boyo, our lad, deciduates into the undertow, pecking languages that are only understood in the marketplace, selling. how could one possibly express, this amazing shit and blazing florescence that is your every day? john takes a shit. john takes numerous shits, at allotted times in the morning. a day moves into a night and then a woken up by shrilling alarm to dress cordially for another
round standing of drinks. quaffen deeply. it could be assignated meaning–but then again, that might be dangerous. move on, move on brave christian warrior. live to face another day to run again. john intaken of the nargila. john shisha’ed to headspinningness of southern comfort. Ricky Tea. somewhere in Louisiana. lost to the the remembrance of fuckedupness.
johnny delites in the sunny play of knowing the meaning is meaningless. still the struggle, word bile billowing up to be buried. be good. or not to be. success. failure. connected attempted but disconnected unable to compute accurately the rate of the font of teriyaki. i remember the bells, says john, the bells of the pre-school ringing presbyterian over the courtyard where i remember standing briefly on cones tied through with string. walking like a stork to the sandbox. i remember walking on macaroni in a cardboard glittered spaceship because the teacher made me and i liked her. but she made me sit in the triangle once and for that i felt bitter. i once called her later, upgraded to elementary school, and heard the voice of her (what was it, spouse, daughter? i can’t member) and hung up. john pontificating. john pontius selecting which to draw back out into to the light by the people yelling. i remember the shames made to be felt in those systems, the glory to be felt in winning the certificate of student of the month. circles of the fitting in moving inward. i seeming to be a part of even while observing, misunderstanding, miscalculating, shy. there all along, and so not wholly questioned. but now john. john. trying to say too much. what is it that could really be known from those long days of despair and triumph and running running running? will we forget? will we learn? will we ever learn?

Song of Spring

to be lost in a voice. the movement becomes you. her words spoken smoothen lullaby in the night when i scream lonely. textures of reassurance, rocking, lulling back to rest in the void. now i lay me down to sleep. the pictures come in the night vivid, taking me in, encapsulating me. the pores of her skin. the closing of my mouth around her nipples. i fold inward. into the floating laxity of the waves. into the darkness we travel.
how alone i am here, letting go of everything, letting the gravity of the ruts speed me forward engine, fuel fuel fuel, so much noise that i hear nothing, and the faces of the world jumping into my eyes as the warmth fades, firelight wavering in the wind, smoke intaken and billowing into moving pictures that turn meaningless, empty, echoing in the silence, jackolanterns carved to charm, give me my candy, lost in a narration that cannot be heard, tongues that have passed away, directionless, pointing nowhere.
struggling to uplift. to wet the beak of. to whet. reawaken the blood to its purpose, programmed. functioning beautifully, spreading wings, preening, singing pretty songs with no distinction between notes. patterns adapt to chaos, pixellating. the stars make so much sense. the buildings in the night. windows electrified. it doesn’t matter what you believe, there is always life on the other side. let yourself die and you will see.
this voice screaming in the night, disrupting, subverting, awakening. life. rock it into yourself. coo it quiet. sing yourself comfort. believe.
this is what it is to move together alone. music voices, webbing each other, network. but where is the backdrop? the narration, the tune, the history? there is nothing. pay attention. each singular drop sphered and crystalline is the news. the form through which juice moves in between. pores, pouring. into the mouth. and tomorrow. where not have been, but where are going. processing. doesn’t it always amaze you? didn’t quite expect so much, so fast, it was just atari then, look at the sprawling industrial children now. don’t stop looking. no one expects you to see. not past the game, not through it. becoming clear. the light moving through. just forms. just words, conveyor belts, cars. understanding for what is. for what is being done. tools in your hands, creator. use the world to construct yourself. graffiti your nickname on the train.
destroyer. this voice may go unrecognized by consciousness, conscientiousness. it may be whited out, slurred, and muffled. but it is there.
is was there. and streaming through the night window it may cross your windshield, screaming into your sleep to be held, understood, and led like a child to its death in the cauldron of your heart. and so you may cradle it, you may feed it, you may kindle it into flame. you may beat it senseless, hail it in the storm of your own noise. you may put the pillow over your own head and wait for forgetting.
but a voice once heard must be dealt with.
she told me not now. i held her in my arms until we were ready to let go again. and now, i am here, voicing myself into the night. i can feel the coming of the light. i will move towards this ready
to be accepted.

Guitaro the salamander alchemist

jackpot the sound bursts into the charge flowing from the fingers brushed, pressed down the strings, vibrating textures echoing, resound hollow into the porches of ears accepting, filtering. the body knows so much more than the mind. the mind, after all, is the body. so what do you think? you are what you eat. there is something we’ve been forgetting, lost in history. remembered sensations, emotions, churning butter snap image data into universal meaning, incorporating everything. but remember the sun? turning into a reflection in its hiding, memory laden moon, pulling up the waves. here it comes again. and what is what i see the same, here, quiet violence against my skin? shed. shedding. embracing. streaming forward in order to remain ready for never. everyday preparation for eternity. soldiers of an army that is not. the next instance steady, balanced, pot on head. that moment not yet happened beaming through, forebrained into the pavement. solid. objectified into living form. empty mask glancing two ways at once. light dark. the god rising infinite out of the middle. pupil eye. taking in. the body responding. the understanding that flows back, out, spurting, finger strumming. the waves of death billowing external. heard whispering, repeating, swirling, moving around itself, detaching off, melting into the air refracting. taken into your ear, your eye, your mouth. moving in between everything and nothing. i will repeat this always and it will never be the same. growing, parallax. i think today is different? it is we who are different. and so how can i think of being read, watched, broken, tasted? when it is i who am watching. i who am blinded? i who am devouring. i who is you? i who am i? further to fly. go to the middle, where you are two, one, attached. and let go. water spilling blood scream dividing into pairs of eyes looking away into future and back into past and not being able to speak this transformation this newness this void. feeling. terror. ecstasy. pain. the body knows. the body knowing.
we are happening. no bother buying the box seats. on the floor our feet pulsing with blood filled with air we share. and take. and destroy.
and renew.
gold making ain’t science, wilson.
it’s nature.

Finding

yousseff crawls into the gap between the slats straddled together aging brown. called fence. he pinpicks a stem of grass and twirltwists it into his left nostril, giving him tingles shuddering. breaking on through to the other side. the neighbor’s yard. standing man permanently smiling over the flowers. ducks swimmering in a mini pond. overshadowing trees around the edges, youseff pretends that he is an investigator looking for the alligator’s tooth, the mystic jewel of the keys, buried by pirates past.
could that be red beard, blue beard? no, pirates don’t wear caps like that. plastic. it doesn’t really figure into youseff’s imagining, it just surprises him suddenly when he doesn’t expect it there, posed miniature and unnatural. he slithers forward like a snake, stealthy. could be natives with their guns guarding. or nazis on the quest for ancient booty. everyone searching, searching. but he is the one destined for the secret, guided by the star of his destiny. a snail lolling on a leaf. he pokes it with a grass stem, watching it shrivelshrink into itself. he throws it into the pond. circles, moving outward. a phone ringing. he hears a shrill voice calling, filtering to him through an open kitchen window. Walter, WaaulTeeer! Yousseff feels the sicklysweet rush of adrenaline course through his flabby young body. he run-crawls back to the fence, feeling the imaginary bullet fire of enemys eyes barreling into his bottom. he catches his finger on a splinter as he pulls through, tears stinging out of his eyes. unfair. not fair not fair not fair.

Part VII

room where tension is gathered. they are quivering together, adrenaline fear spurring motion, action, instinct. a drawing apart not based on supremacy, but survival. the arrow will land. where will it strike in the midst of the dense foliage of the networked city? she crouches before him, poised for death, charging for the leap across the wire, sparking flashing movement into the unknown. her victim. invading his innards to let the hidden life spring into her mouth. revealed. consumed. a sacrifice to her emptiness, her need. her lost.
he is already dead. she lowers her gun. he is already dead. she had cocked her defining finger at him and saw the fear. she knew what it was to take life. to take power. to wait for the moment captured.
and he is just another nothing. he offers her
nothing.

a coffee table between them. issues of National Geographic. she places the gun, untensed, over the surface of a spouting volcano. traveler. tourist. no. she relaxes once again. i am here. living, breathing. looking at death. death there, looking back, shaking, changing. he, too, is relaxing. understanding. he traveled down the barrel sight of a gun and arrived back at his place, standing in the light on the rug. rain stopped. the liquid breathing of cars. her eyes, taking him in, casting him out. a pause. a period. the bullet never struck. it passed through her mind and he saw it moving away from her face. he opened his mouth and he breathed out and he knew that there was this. no escape. their sentence pushing him forward into a universe that never existed. he is free. he is blind. he breathes in. eye water falls from the slits of his eyes. “i’m sorry,” he murmurs. ” i’m sorry.” this is not a drama. this is a birth. she sits down and watches him.

Part VI

sitting in the corner of the web, legs attuned to the quivering of the vehicle shuddering to a stop at the curb outside. she feels strangely alive, lucid, luminous. she can feel her eyes large taking in the meager light sifting through the blinds, objects phantomed, rising ominous, featureless out of the void. everything seems to say something. specks dancing before her vision. the network of my body interfacing with the unseen world around Me. things passing in, transformed, passing out. this is not a plot. this is a center of gravity. a hole where things fall in and disappear, arriving someplace unknown. multiple surfaces charging through me. slice. where am i? who am i? slice. chop chop. you consume my exhaust, you suck from my pipe. we pass. we pass. we circle, we move around the sun.
the jingle of keys. the slam of a door. this is information. things are moving. she senses the lines pulling in to herself., breathing becoming conscious, filling, emptying. light cutting through the darkness. a sudden shock, dilation of emptiness, she squints, hands clutching her knees, toes curling. her stomach pumping like a heart in a workout. the attack as the new world opens. the closing. awareness of herself in an altered situation. she has been waiting for this moment. she stands. he stops, keys in hand. looking at each other. revelations flooding his brain. a knowing that must be stopped.
“what are you doing here?” accusing, territorial, frightened.
her eyes glittering, focusing. her body heated, balanced. she knows why she is here. she has come for herself. there is nothing more that she wants. walls around them. skywater running down the creases of his coat. inevitability. the attraction that in the beginning made him aroused. plunging into slickened yearning. losing himself. filled with blood. breaking into someone else. life bursting through the cracks. a moving against together. now he feels sick. now he feels tired. a desire only for escape. she knows too much of him, and knows nothing. how it takes a stranger to show us ourselves, lost in fantasy, our time limited to how much we paid. she draws out a gun, flashing in the living room light, pointing it at his face, clicking into readiness. she is serious. he believes. he raises his hands and drops his keys. the threat hangs between them, heavy, wordless. she is crazy. she has lost it.
that’s right. now he understands. he took her, entered her, left with himself swimming, eating into her and growing, taking everything she could feed. left before she was ready. leaving her empty, leaving her hungry, leaving her waiting. now he has opened the door of his shelter to find her there, facing him with the barreling vision of his death. the tunneled end of their ties. it is bound. no. seeing himself sacrificed. this does not have to happen. no. this does not have to happen again.

Part V

herself. destroyer kali multiarmed and vociferous. swaddled victim metalloid and chopped. her horus lost to the void of the nameless past. disembodied, frozen. i will resurrect him. the father so-called creator. he must face up to the reality of his dream. trying to sleep away his discontent with the flagon of the spirits. i have come to wake you. you lose your sense of direction and it’s only a matter of time, time, time before you get pulled under, crash into yourself cast off into someone else, confronted by buried feeling, by everything you’ve drawn apart from yourself and flushed, dripping, ignored, cut by your own mind. my image made in you. your rib i broke throwing the brick. the child you sacrificed to your fantasies. self-defense. self-defense. i’ve moved past myself now, coming back to you. i am reaction, i am reflection, i am the light meeting the absence of your gaze. we will meet again. yourself gathered against you. the rain greeting my eyes loosened to eternal night.
she steps forward, onto the curb, unlatching the gate and swinging it forward with her foot. the sound of rain breaking puddled into the concrete. the freeway rush waterfalling down past locust ave. she crouches and looks in the cactus pot. no, it’s gone. it’s all right, she thought about this. unwrapping the screwdriver and hammer from her purse.
breaking the lock with a swift knock to the screwdriver’s head. cheap. stepping past the door into the stale air of the room, the lamp with the yellowing shade, the crusted rug, the twin cracks in the ceiling running across each other like lightening captured in the plaster. white. the jimi hendrix poster. a framed art deco landscape as concession. she closes the door. the rain outside falling quietly. she feels herself standing in the space of the room, water wetting the floor, breathing like an alien, like a ghost invading something no longer her own. it is noone’s. heated words floating in these walls. cold words, sharp words. forgotten caresses. stifled love. who is she? who owns this space? she is here, waiting, sitting in the corner in the dark. do you feel the wires trembling? a history will end. a mystery will begin. suspense. suspended between yourself and another, where will you end? watch. we will meet again.

Part IV

well though it may be warm, the clouds gathered together in the shroud of the night sky decide to spontaneously erupt in a tropical sort of way, billowing in blotching sheets down the windshield, wipers working to clear the vision forward, the red lights of cars behinds blurring. in this sudden tempest she blinks her eyes at herself in the window, surprised at the coincidental mood of nature. here she is, back at this street. “it’s here,” gripping the back of the driver’s seat, “make a right at the light.”
she had left it sobbing. now she is calm, and the sky is loosening itself around her. how she can sense it, how she can smell it in the air, electrical. how many years have passed? how old has she become, stretch marks on her side? turning past the gnarled tree writhing on the corner. the iron grates over windows. the small rectangles of dying grass leading to concrete porches with screen doors. fading colors of yellow, brown, red.
little boxes of life, rented, sold to families who sit in the living room grouped on worn sofas around a small tv with bad reception. there. this one. 4209. this squat home that years tore lines into her forehead, furrows between her eyes. the sound of dishes breaking. learning the hard way how everything we do affects one another. how we tear at each other every day to stay the same, to stay in control. not accepting nothing. Not looking past the surfaces always crumbling away into some failure. nowhere to go, nowhere to turn but holding on to what is there, what is sure. and that becomes anger, immediate, incessantly gathered, easily spent. anger, apathy. reassurances of the radio voice, settling into patterns, statistics. listless sex in the blue light of the tv. numbers caught in the web. led up to the gaping mouth of something looming, many eyed, inhuman. sucked dry, bitter, harmless. the thick tongue of cheap wine raised in the night. the sound of dishes breaking. dogs asserting themselves. airplanes passing overhead on their routines.
she hands over her money and steps out of the taxi into the rain. she stands there, feeling the rain warm, gathering itself into her hair, weighing down her clothes. dripping, dripping. she does not mind it. she has nothing to lose. she has nothing to hide, keep safe, keep dry. she is ready. she is ready to clamp her mouth down onto something filled with life.
come into her net. he is not yet there, the window dark. the rain outside of her. how she wept when she left. with her burden to carry, to unleash into the world, dripping. now there is nothing left. outside of her. she breathes in, the rain dripping from the tip of her nose. to take, to give. to become that which she wasn’t. this hollow in her belly. breathing. to die to live. rain, dripping. dripping

Part III 1/2

and into the streaming flow of the freeway the taxi merges, concrete lined vein through the city. smooth headlit sailing in the night. veins filled with shuddering energy, caffeine nicotine glossed cars, rectangled fleeting glimpses of unreality hanging in the air, large glistening bottles of zima, Got Milk?, short sly pretensions to win you over to their side suddenly, to give you an unsuspecting affection for a name, for a look, for an image. forced associations. you take them for granted. sometimes they crash into each other, bodies ripped apart in the fray, blood spilling into the roadway, everyone slowing down to stare. but it is cleaned up quickly, efficiently. commuters are informed by the radio. the bird in the sky watches over the flow, reports changes. i watch her face looking out the window of the taxi unseeing. but who am i? i am just another passerby. we look into each other’s windows only to verify ourselves, to reassure some desire, some need. we sit enwrapped within sheets of manufactured metal, buckled in. we rush towards our destinations, anger charging against those who get in our way. objects in our path. i can not feel her tonight. she slips away in the stream, lost in the noise of a million other travelers speeding on their way home. i will wait until she is on her feet again, out of the projecting hustle of humanity. i will wait until i can feel the silence again, the embedded weight of her space folding into nothing. she has something to say. she has something to do. i will let her go until she is ready to move on her own. i have to stop telling her what to think. i have to learn to listen. shh. do you hear? do you feel the pressing emptiness of our connections, the spaced gaps through which sparks flow flying across into sudden meaning in their death? there are images we project, smiling, acting. but there are also images indefinable, glass underneath which the water flows eternal. i am not trying to capture. i am trying to relate, to communicate. linger with me. she will come.

Part III

she stands at the curb and hails a taxi with the adroitness of the purposeful. a typical yellow black checkered vehicle halts impersonally ahead of her. she steps into its cigarrettecologne tinged interior, its well traveled space. how she has flown to get here, railed, ferried, crossed bodies, gotten all her passes torn in two. a journey of the heart, following its strings attached, entangled. like a fly in a net she is wrapped closer, tighter, pulled in to the waiting. but these fangs she feels above her head are hers. she tugs her skirt around her legs and watches the silent flurry of the world pass in to segmented distance.
cold-blooded, they will say. reptilian monster. but she feels her blood’s warm coursing through her veins. she can no longer pretend, not after watching her child die, passing away into invisibility from underneath her pleading hands, his rising and falling chest stilling, silent, unresponsive.
there is only one end for all of us, she knows. she watches her reflection in the glass passing over the rushing streets. it is a matter of how you meet it.
she will meet him. thought is no longer relevant to her. it is not a matter of plotting, getting things right, setting them straight. it is a matter now of moving forward, slipping into her destiny, riding the tide of her emotion until she hits the shore, beached, naked. she will not be stopped. she will spill out into the waiting mouth of the earth, and it will be too late, too late, too late. the driver looks at her periodically in the rear-view. he coughs sometimes into his hand, threading the cab through the bustling color lighted streets, cars pressing around each other in a herd, breathing, roaring, sudden beeps. here she sits in its midst, alone, detached in her brooding, sheltered in the machine. moving all together alone. together alone all moving.

Part II

and at the end of the tunnel there is a . . . what? you think there’s light down there? that’s what we call a mirage. desirous images projected in the hazy heat of the mind’s throbbing. death seems to lurk everywhere, and yet there are no walls, no sudden boundaries marking the passing from one realm to another. no. she is come to face the bleakness of her reality, stand in the moon cold, reflective, strong. she strokes the smooth cool of the butt of the 9mm with clipped fingernails. acceptance? ha. what these people call acceptance is running away every day, bowing down, serving, stooling, selling themselves for survival. she is the true acceptor, wed to the one true and final love of her life: her death. and his. and his. but alone, separate, separated by whole lives cut off at the stem, flowing out of the genii bottle into everything, dissipation, lost of all the tightened, strained, embittered years clutched around their hearts like clamps, tightening with every moment that reminds, with every new day that memory breathes behind like the wizard of oz. she is come to unveil. she is come to reveal her emotions, let them pour out untrammeled, naked, red and flowing. no torture of the mind. no more years of frightened waiting.
the beauty, the bittersweet pain of birth and of death and of resurrection. transmuted into the earth. transformed into the sky. one with the universe that feels nothing, with the space that moves into itself.
a phoenix flies on a neon coloured poster proclaiming “JIM’s BURGERS: Had a bad day? We’ll serve you right.” a trashcan stands shining against the wall, its flap held open by an excessive load. the air here moving through the lobby is warmer. it is a warm night. she steps out into it through the open doors sideways, losing the sense of travel behind her, sidling back into herself, walking firmly, briskly into the city night air, the electric humming rush of cars, the urine light holes of offices beaming out of buildings hanging over in the sky. she feels a sudden rush of love-hatred for this city, this street, this district. she is its product, child of its alcohol dugged nights, its palm breezy days. how she will show them. how she will make them see.

Part I

the passenger arrives, gun a ready, taut after centuries of sleeping, starving for change. the magnetal doors slide apart, aglow, hissing in a dramatic sort of hydraulic way. she steps across the gap into fluorescent light, tiled pillars, papers against the wall fluttering still in the afterbath of the halted train, a catacomb of entrance, the passageway out of the dream of rushing, sleek metal on rail. she is at a point, a place, a station called Heranta. i will not describe her features. what is important is how she holds them, carries her cheekbones forward sharp and balanced through the waiting air, trailing herself like a stone dropped in basin-water, folding in to her center where the breath falls emptying itself to be renewed, finally relaxing little by little after all this time, after being so stiff for so long. now she is ready.
i will not watch her climb the stairs. no, this is not a commercial.
through the hallways, lighted and strewn with all the miscellany of a days passing, the inevitable fallen and crumpled words, discarded gum, wrappers.
her steps echoing in architectural space. what thoughts have moved through here, what driving purposes, what crossed paths, what streaming current of humanity, with wondering, grasping, hardened faces floating around each other like fireflies, like ants all following their own trail to some knowledge of shelter, sustenance, identity. tugged along by the lines of their relationships, the gravity of the assured.
she is come to meet the end of a long roping winding sharp-hooked and painful road.

Placards of Place-time

cow1 chews placidly its cud and turns to cow2 and says
the sun, the blue sky clear, my haunches thick and sinewy and warm
cow2 chews for a while, batting its tail around. cow3 ventures closer to them.
jasmine, the color of spring. my nose wet. this field green.
the cows chew together, the breeze sifting through the grass.

lickety split the congo boom bapped into the room cavernous and sharp-edged. kraft lit a cigarette and waved it around in the air like a baton whilst downing a jaggermeister fresh cold from the tap. henrietta wiggled her mane around behind her back like a snaketail and tapped her heels, one-a-two against the rung on her stool crossed. some folks got real funky and shook their stuff around on the floor in front of the stage. i got the feeling that this was beyond me, that this was beyond all of us. i smiled at a woman sitting pretty in the mirror at the other end of the bar. all of a sudden my day at work didn’t matter. everything fell away from me. i slapped kraft on the shoulder and we drank together. alright man, i said to him, alright.

the dolphin stroked its body into the air and flopped back into the water, making a splash. it chortled with glee and nudged its companion.
get this, i heard from ceetpeoeo who supposedly heard it from a gull that the humans capture us and gather around in rings to watch us do that.

A Day In The Life Of Johnny

and when and when the sky had spoken enough it stopped. suddenly quiet after a torrent of meaningful breaking rain and pauses. the greenness glistens where the clouds melt, light parting through shafts. snails lay somnolent, oozing into the sidewalk with the passerbys. the drying patches of water. the gleaming surface of things. how the machines look ominous covered with nature, luminous, flying.
i step out through the glass doors like a fly out of a hole. into the quivering air i move, smooth, concentrated on myself. i am hungry, and looking for food. nothing seems to be right. after walking down several miles and back, i finally decide on in n out. i circle around the building and approach from the rear. i order my food and break my 20. i am businesslike and efficient with the cashier. i almost sound genuine when i say, “thank you.”
i wait for what seems like a fairly long time to wait for fast food. i fill up my small cup with dr pepper. i sit down next to some girls on the volleyball team or softball team or something. i notice them just enough to be able to ignore them as simply a presence. i make eyes at a woman in jeans sitting with her husband and her 3 children. she looks fit, trim, immersed in her professional life. i look around me, at the neon signs, the pristine red and white tiling, the soda machines lined like sentinels. i practice showing no emotion. i feel almost buddhalike, other than for my quick glances at the young girls in line, one chinese vixen checking me out from behind her friend. i try to look interesting. i flick my eyes randomly at the people gathered around the square white tables eating their food. i meet the eyes of an older woman with a sagging face casting a look of what i deem to be terror at me. she seems to realize at some level too complex for her to articulate that i am not what i seem to be. i suck continuously at my straw, tasting the soda against my tongue. my number is called, and i take my bag and i curl the top and carry it out. my purpose in the world achieved, i stride back to my apartment knowing that i will soon be eating, sitting at my table, reading a book, listening to jazz. a tall girl approaches. we meet where the cars form a passageway leading into a garage. i glance at her as we face each other, and discover that she is beautiful. i find my eyes focused onto her lips as we pass, full, glossy lips, the lower one slightly open. she is looking at me with what seems to be a mix of amusement and interest. she knows that she is beautiful, but she senses that i am beyond her immediate reach. i wish that i was at a party with her, drunk. something might have happened, in a closed environment. i arrive at the door.

did u see the picture honey

hamie ran his wheel steadily into the night. he stopped to nuzzle droplets out of the water tube. hamie looked out the bars of his cage into the blue light of the room. hamie thought of grass. he brushed his forepaws against his mouth. he nibbled on some pellets. he pooped some pellets. hamie thought of his fur. hamie groomed himself.

in another room, gracie sat curled in her loveseat, reading shakespeare. she absentmindedly curled and uncurled her hair with her finger. her black painted toes wriggled intermittently. berlioz’s symphonie fantastique played softly in the background. cars hummed by in the street below, muffled by closed windows. a trashcan lid falling in the alleyway echoed in the night.

jezebel stared wide eyed at the sound. her tail flicked and she glanced briefly at gracie from the windowsill. jezebel watched the swinging of the grandfather clock in the corner. she thought of rocks, of trees. her ears swiveled to and fro. she groomed herself. she kneaded a warm spot into the pad on the sill and curled herself into a ball.

out in the night, in the alleyway, frank muttered to himself. frank sifted through a trashcan, picking out the remains of a tv dinner. he sniffed and muttered to himself. lord knows, he said, lord knows. he found a sketch of a building on a torn piece of paper. he sniffed. he turned it around and peered at it in the moonlight. hand of a higher power, he said, lord knows the road and everything on it. he stuffed the paper into his knapsack and chewed on a cold piece of chicken. he thought of a movie he saw a long time ago as a kid when he snuck into the theater. didn’t know the name. lord knows, he said, all the pretty hair and frame smiles. he rubbed his nose.

The Lecture

the prof stepped up to his podium and wet his lips, gazing before him hunched over, peering out from behind twin bubbled panes like a curious bird. he looked down at his lecture, written the night before on a double shot of cino. he decided that he had nothing to do with it. he decided then, there, that this paper before him was part of the reason for his failing marriage, for the bitterness of his child, for his failing kidney. he decided that this paper, written the night before to read before his class for 2 hours so that they could copy it down onto their own pieces of paper so that they could remember it later for the final where they would copy it down again so that he could read it and grade them–he decided that this piece of paper had nothing to do with him. had nothing to do with the faces gazing vacantly towards him. had nothing to do with this room with its bolted down desks, its bolted down windows, its air-conditioned cool. had nothing to do with this feeling churning deep inside of him. he spoke.

there is perhaps a reason why the word “mad” is synonymous with both “angry” and “demented.” when someone is mad, in either sense, they pose a threat, an imminent danger to society, to well-being, to the way things are.
i have found a kernel of anger in my soul, and i tell you that i have chosen to cradle it within me, to let it tremble within me, to cherish this spark, to nourish this into flame.

think of someone you know who is happy. think of someone you know who is content with their cell-phones, with their money, with their clothes. think of how they fit in. think of how the fire burns.
how cold we are, giving so little of ourselves to each other, so far away. when we drink liquor, how we become heated. when we watch the movie screen, how our eyes sparkle.
when we discover love, how we get scarred.
o, didn’t your mommy teach you not to play with fire? they teach you that red is the color of anger, the color the dumb bull charges, the color of communists challenging a regime. when you close your eyes in the light, you see red, red, life blood fluttering through your delicate veins.
some people become afraid of themselves. some people become afraid of each other.
white, white white. the color of skin, the color of purity, the color of the found, the color that takes all the colors into itself.
blue, blue blood, black blue, the color to describe a bruise, blue, the color of the police, the color of the cold, of the lonely, blue.
where is the color of the rainbow in a flag?
red white and blue, this is you.
i lay in bed at night listening to myself breathe.
i buy chicken mcnuggets on tuesdays and eat them quickly, dunking them in mustard sauce.
i listen to simon and garfunkel on the tapeplayer in my car on the way home, stuck in traffic.
i watch the news at ten with my feet on the coffee table and my dog bitsy curled up beside me.

i am angry. i am mad.

and i am no longer afraid.

and when i look into myself, i see so many colors that i am blinded. and i feel a heat so strong that i am rising.

i am mad, and i am going to tell you about it. i am mad, and i am going to share it with you.

(at this point the lecture ended, for several of the bulkier male students –to be specific, #74, a tight-end on the football team, and two members of gamma pi delta–arose from their seats and wrestled the professor to the ground and then trussed him like a chicken with his shoe laces. the students consulted each other to decide what to do with him. it turned out that one of the students had a hit of ecstasy on him. so they forced it down the professor’s throat and they gave him back rubs and made him smell menthol and wiggled a laser pointer around on the wall until he cried and hugged each and every one of them. they all danced together.
at the end of the quarter, they took the final and they did fairly well, with the majority of them obtaining a B average–there were several A’s, and a few C’s.)

Listen

–and then what story is there to tell?

the old man looked at his gnarly old hands and you could see the sadness, in his face. the time of loneliness, of self-doubt and suffering etched into lines folding into each other, criss-crossing, textured.

–i’ve lived with myself so long i don’t know how to begin.

i thought of skin, of the truth and lies of skin. how we bear our selves in our lives, traced through our skin. how we wear our masks, our identities. our emotions. we watch movie actors for their faces, for their balance, their poise under the barrel of the camera gaze. i watch the old man.

–it seems sometimes all i’ve learned in life is how to prepare for the
end.

but how will i hold up to this scrutiny myself? i can’t look at the old man without relating him to myself, without feeling his animal presence, however faint. we are not made for cameras. we are not made for narratives smaller than the scope of life and death. we don’t fit into romances, we don’t fit into plots, into schemes, we slip out of our tethers and find ourselves speaking words we don’t understand. there is a something that moves
through us, past us. we find ourselves drawn to the edge, drawn to the darkness, drawn to something beyond ourselves.

–and then what story is there to tell?

the old man smiles at me, and as i meet his eyes he seems momentarily full of secret life and vigor, a hidden irony creeping into the crinkles of his eyes. and i seem to share the joke, whatever it is, for i find myself understanding something, and smiling back.

–the truth.

the old man says. he looks into the fire.

–the truth seems to lie in the silence.

Thing

this is about time, and how to let it break against, sculpt, caress.
do not deny the shape once were. the limbs can still feel moving, ghosts in dreams.
slowly change. different surfaces in different light.
every day a kind of violence. every day an acceptance.
you

you broke me yesterday

and today i took you in my eyes
and made you whole.

and tomorrow
i will see you nothing.

pieces of myself yearn unreachable in the night.
a phone call to a machine in a distant room, playback.
time, the water tears away brittle,
smooths sharp,
my hollows defined.
time breaks the shore of bodies
to the form that years shaped
that is language, now, speaking
in the barreling baby hurting lungs
of ancient alien timeless meeting.

Release

i once thought of love as something eternal, as something you keep inside of you that never goes away. i once thought that i would always feel this way. it’s funny how time washes away your most cherished assumptions. it’s funny how you learn to forget, how you need to forget. layers, different sides revealed in the sliding change. what was beautiful fades into nothing. it almost seems ridiculous now, like a child playing games. like all dreams, the myth of love must die in the face of social reality. i sit at my table, drinking coffee, watching full grown men and women around me playing games with each other like children, asking each other to believe, to just believe. if you looked into my heart, you’d see the wind rustling through an empty room, the sun shining warm on the walls. whatever inhabits my heart grows there on its own. i give it space, and time. i’m not going to lock anybody up in there. sometimes people come and stay for a while, looking for shelter. then they leave again, looking for something more permanent. i let them go, singing and sighing, away into the world. i know what it feels like to wake up suddenly in a dark room out of a dream, to claw cold walls blindly, beating violently, the feeling of another’s blood on my hands. i know what it feels like to be locked up, monstrous. what is love? i sit at my table and sip my coffee. i watch the men and women around me playing games with each other, looking for someone to catch, looking to be caught. love is letting go. love is letting it all go.

Direct

hertice p. domo: so where does one sluice the juice?
jaz: perhaps it is more a question of when. because i believe, i really feel deep down somewhere, that the passageway will be there if you just do it at the RIGHT TIME.
freda: i extemporize with every breath. what other way is there to live? let it go. i find that it all ends up being something that has happened before in some form or another. nothing is ever wholly new, wholly distinct. you would be lost. i don’t even want to contemplate such possibilities. . .
hertice: right. it’s like blindness in certain areas is required.
p.: to be aware and not aware at the same time.
domo: to see where you’re going and ignore what is unessential to you.
freda: i find it hard to ignore, however, the perceptions of all those around me. they seem to demand my attention. they seem to need me to smile at them, to perform for them, to give them something of myself.
hertice p. domo: devouring. the crowd devours, it swallows you up, it cuts you down if you pause to understand what you’re feeling.
jazzy j. rockefeller: here i am, fragments. my body, desired, desiring. we dip into each other, lose ourselves in the spray, become something ferocious. it’s terrifying.
freda: and yet–all this space, all this distance in this claustrophobia. it makes me want to hurt you to make you understand. how i want to get away from you, how i need you to lose myself in. how i understand myself only through you.
jaz: and i don’t like what i see.
freda: so i smile.
domo: and so i pose the question again: how, or when, to sluice this juice? because i feel all this, and where is it going to come out? how? i lose it all in the midst of anonymous faces, i lose everything, i feel ready to destroy myself in order to regain control.
freda: perhaps it’s a matter of contact. i find my energy calmed when someone reaches out to me and touches me while talking to me, letting me know how they really feel, animal. but personal, real. not some empty predator in the jungle sucking my blood in the crowd. but giving me themselves in little, silent ways that i’m scarcely aware of until i realize that i feel good.
hertice: right. communication, learning to pass the light unseen. but it’s not always there.
jaz: and when you’re not getting that connection enough, you get a build-up. you get negatively charged. you need an outlet.
hertice: and then how can i reach out without causing destruction, leaving a trail of pain in my wake? the wall builds, my surface becomes a mask and you look into me and what do you think you’re seeing? everything is bright and neon and shrouded by some pop snippet like a car commercial, dreaming “buy me! buy me! buy me!” and then just when you feel safe suddenly i come out of somewhere invisible and destroy you, devour you, take you into myself.

[hp explodes. blood covers jaz and freda and the walls.]
fade out.
show a pan of the sea, dolphins swimming, gleaming their sleekness into the air, melancholy, yet perky, acoustic guitar plucking.

[domo's face appears in the clouds in the sky, looking down. he smiles beautifically.]

jaz: he looked in, he shouldn’t have looked.
freda: i think there’s a new Tarantino movie out. Let’s go

Chapter three: the story of the mongoose

falling down the path of looking down the path of being on the path of it all. i saw a drop of singularity sitting, forking it’s tongue at me stolidly. i told it, i says to it, “hey. this is my road. where you going?” the snake told me it was not going anywhere, and that this was the very problem. i thought about it, but then i realized–that thinking was part of such a problem, was in fact the very essence of the intricacy. so i gripped the snake until it shot venom and then it decided to move on, yes, then i moved on, and i forgot all about it.
but such things come back to haunt, to possess, to range in sudden rustlings in the night. i had a dream where i was trying to put on socks to cover all the blood that was covering my feet. but then the army was outside with it’s guns, pointing in outside behind the glass, and they knew i was in there. can we ever cover the past completely, or will we always slip out and end up being targeted, being judged?
i did what i had to do, i informed the jury. they tried their best to look weighty and objective.
i did what i do. i’ll always choke the snake until i am alive again when it threatens my passage somewhere. i need to keep moving.
if you see–the path of my ancestors moving through my mouth. i chortle with the sun and the moon in my system.
so when an identity stands blocking, the struggle commences, age-old, one side to the other and back again. everything and nothing. everything and nothing. i see the light at the end of the tunnel. the tunnel be dark. what am i passing? what is my objective? i think the perspective needs to be recalculated on a constant basis, or else the serpent’s just gonna spin you into a stand-still frame snap to in-attention of some lie, some habitual day-to-day death that eats you away like cancer.
it’s not my road, technically, i says. but i’m traveling it. the audience laughs. i’m not sure if it’s real or imposed.
but the fact is that my movement exists in opposition. thus i do not pay anyone for my rights. i just take down the signs.
the police are after me. they want to lock me up. i have to shoot the venom very often to free up the pathways of my blood. i often have to take a life from death and cover it up and pretend that it is mine.
i will stop myself.

Chapter two: somewhere going?

i was a little gorgon child, snakes in my hair growing nappy and long and glistening in the sun. daddy, i said, wrapping myself around a gristly ankle, can i go play with the daffodils in lincoln park? he belched purple smoke and grunted. i pirouetted and sailed off beyond the mountains to my destiny. eagles cried alarumed on their way back to the nest. i zigged, i zagged, playing the multitudinal parts demanded by my latest turn of thought, the voices in my head, chirruping with merry songs. i am galgorna, priestess of the nile, watch the moon bleed into a flood springing life from reticent banks! i bowed backwards in the air, pretending to shower seeds from the air into the stone streets below. i am thrush, listen to my song! i am raven, listen to my laugh! caw, caw caw! i spun around in the air like a whirly did, letting myself slide through the misty breeze. i didn’t know any better; i was happy. i felt this boundless promise within myself, this endless whispering of hope, unconscious energy fluttering innocent in my veins. i saw myself as any little piece of everything i saw, the waves, the sun, the trees to climb in, dancing tall in light. perhaps this is only remembrance. i think we tend to idealize our youthful past, forgetting that it is filled with lurking shadows of terror at every moment, both waking and dreaming. but i certainly was full of life, swimming sprightly to the park. i cart wheeled in the grass, my braids filled with a life of their own. i felt electrical, i felt alive. but it began when i bent to examine closely the daffodils. i crept towards them and stared wide-eyed into their eyes, imagining myself in them, soft, varicosely petalled. the shadow of a cloud slid silently between us and the sun. i seemed to take the daffodils into my eyes. but the more it seemed i could feel their life, their energy, the more they visibly shrank before me, until they withered, they wilted in my eyes. i cried softly and looked about me. i seemed to become aware of myself, knobbly knees spraddled against the grass, hair wagging serpents in the wind, breasts humping apple-like through my t-shirt. i needed someone to smile at me; i remember thinking this quite distinctly: i need someone to notice me and to smile at me. i watched a boy playing with a stick over by the swings. he was pretending it was a sword, running the dialogue as he swiped the air. deep voice: haha! so you think you can beat me, randolph! take this! boy’s voice: it’s time to avenge my father! you must pay! (csshh! csshhh! swords clashing, spittle flying from his mouth as he swung valiantly). i approached him walking, watching him as if my life hung in the balance. he continued to fight, unaware of me as i stopped alongside him. he knocked the sword out of the enemy’s hand and was poised for the final blow, to be accompanied with more heroic words, when he noticed me. he looked at me curiously, appraisingly, in the way little boys do, seeing what i had to offer. i looked into his eyes. he stopped, the sword dropping from his hand, his eyes narrowing. he turned into stone. no, i said. no. come back. i bowed my head and i cried. and i cried. something was different. something had changed in me. and i knew nothing would ever be the same. and i knew that no one could ever come close to me again until i allowed them to destroy me.

Chapter one: a beginning and a middle and an end

into the possibility Henry entered, until up to his veritable armpits in cash crop honey dew trickle down thoughts. all will pan out to gold in heaven, Henry figured, by the light of the dangling lamp in his office study. Henry chuckled. what are you doing up there, a shrill voice wavering muffled up the stairs inquired high pitched. the curiousness of fascism, Henry bellowed, slapping his thighs, that only wants to verify what it already knows, spittle spraying from his mouth. he danced in front of the window, wondering if anyone’s anonymous eyes were taking him in. my thoughts are destroyed, he thought. he sat, poomp!, into his lazy boy chair and lit his sherlock pipe, puffing lugubriously. the world, he wrote onto his notepad, is at my fingertips. he looked out the window into the night and knew his divinity. and the money! the money, oh the pyramid eye faded greens, so powerful, so cryptically liquid in papered thinness. it could not be denied. it defined him. not to defy, but to redirect. understand? Henry. trees growing up canopied over layered concrete, magically dancing through with wind, the child laying back watches the music of invisibility. better than tv. it rises suddenly, upswells, the leaves moving in swirls, shakes, riddles of the melancholy beauty of movement. it subsides before comprehension, almost-visible words melting into silence, and then into something else.
i am a pacifist, Henry whispered, stroking his chin as if to ascertain his face was still there, i do not believe in violence. i believe in softness, i believe in smoothness, i believe in the wholeness of layers of skin. why to cut it up? why to dissect? why to strike back? why to maintain control?
he was quiet. a voice in his head answered, and told him what he already knew: because it is beautiful. the explosive energy of destruction. because it is how you know yourself. because even as you are dipping your tongue into the stream, you have already departed. because the light has reached the other side even before it has entered. so fast. so fast. because you know that it will end, that it must end. because you know that it will continue. because you know that it can’t be stopped. because it has happened before, and it will happen again. because because because.

Preterit Theory

Isis gave me a lap dance last nite. I nuzzled against her tattooed dolphins. And I realized, you know, that sometimes you’ve got to sell yourself in order to feel. To just say, hey, ok, I’m going to perform for you, I’m going to play this role in this game so that we can both get some enjoyment out of it. Let’s throw ourselves forward into the night and meet as masks on the other side. And you intellectual types who try to pretend like they something other than everything, it’s hard for you to let go of your identity, to let go of all this accumulated information about yourself, hours of mirror-time surveillance, replaying selected moments of your history and pasting them together so that you fit into this certain pattern of behavior, progress marked systematically by birthdays. But it’s all in the skin you know. When you are naked with another person, skin pressing together, are you yourself? You are something more, something less, something human. Something creature, breathing. This is your history, pores of skin sweating a deep musk, creating something new. Why do you feel the need to destroy this immersiveness with distance? Why do you watch yourself? You keep trying to keep everything inside, storing it all up like treasure for heaven, thinking that when the time comes you’ll be prepared. The time has already passed. You can’t wait to be saved. You’ve got to sell yourself in order to survive. Might as well enjoy it. Because you’ve got to sell yourself in order to feel. Noone’s gonna come to you and open you up. Noone’s gonna come to you and give you their heart. You’ve got to make deals to get past the pretense, you’ve got to agree to certain rules of the game. And the rules, honey, are this: we are what we don’t give each other. Hell, I’m selling out the system. I’m not gonna have anything left after this clearance. I’m not holding anything back. And who will be able to say, “This is what you are”? Because I’m yours. Because I’m everyone. Because I’m out there. And I’m enjoying myself.

Cells, What Picture Now?

i was flying by the river in my car so fast, air conditioned in the evening heat, in my self contained machine hurtling into the future. trying not to think, trying not to remember. turning on the radio loud, singing to its anthemic pop. where was i going? i didn’t know. i didn’t care. i was moving. i was stretching away down the highway, losing the lights of the city behind me.
trying not to remember. i didn’t care. i was stretching away down the highway, air conditioned in the evening heat, turning on the radio loud. i was moving. where was i going? i was flying by the river in my car so fast, trying not to think. losing the lights of the city behind me, in my self contained machine hurtling into the future. i didn’t know.
i was moving. i was stretching away down the river in my car losing the lights of the city behind me so fast, hurtling into the future, singing to its anthemic pop. turning on the radio loud in my air conditioned machine.
i was moving through the evening heat self contained, trying not to think. where was i going? trying not to remember. i didn’t know. i didn’t care.
i didn’t know. i didn’t care. where was i going? i was moving.
i was flying by the river in my car so fast.
trying not to think, trying not to remember.
i was stretching away down the highway,
losing the lights of the city behind me.
air conditioned in the evening heat.
my self contained machine
hurtling into the future.
sing along with me now.
turning on the radio loud.
singing to its anthemic pop.
i was moving.

A Nighttimed Story

shela opened herself to the night moon vibration, that pulling hum that yearns at the sea, beats at the land, trembles the edges like an amorphous thing. a thing. an alien is what she felt like. something reaching out across deep and silent depths and touching her face, sliding wetly over it, through it, her skin, her body unsure as to whether this was ecstasy or pain. her boundaries being continuously penetrated. shela decided, seeing only death in walls, in antagonism, secrets, gossip preventing the alternate reality of a parallel universe, that she would open herself to the night.
that she would let the sea travel through her like a conductor, the energy flowing through her and shining somewhere far away, timeless. she would be in the middle, shifting, always shifting, first one thing then another, disappearing and suddenly popping up surprisingly out of invisibility like a zit in the night. she would be passively disruptive. she would make the line dance like a lucid burst of static, like the shining randomness of a rain drop dance on the window, streaking down, making the night into a warm heaviness, a weighted unintelligible word singing subconsciously through your bones as you hide sheltered in light.
shela became a tentacle of unseen force, waving supple leaves in the whimsy of the wind. bending rippling cells of passing light, her breath never caught.
you won’t find shela in your history books, although she is the mother of all coming moments. from her sacrifice of self to love something she could never be she comes to be everything, caught up in the infinite movements of the universe. she is divine, because she is exactly a point in space, solidly an object of time, yet she could not be placed on any scale and measured. she is something that comes and goes, but stays with you forever.
so when she knocks on my door at night, come to call me out of the bed of my dreams, i throw away all my past, and i take her into my lungs. and when she is gone suddenly, i settle back into myself and remake the sheets. she is not mine. she is something i am grateful to touch. i know that i live in a different world. i know that when she comes everything changes. i know that nothing is certain. i know that i need to live.

Voices In A Hearing

the magistrate roosts worriedly upright, his eyes gleaming with the horizon city sun reflection: “i hear myself speak. a distant spark at the end of a long line, cross worked, networked into somewhere descending across the sea, draped over the heaving mountain-breasts of the earth, dangling its way into your life-moment like an infant dropping raw and alien into the electric light.”
judy, 37, the schoolteacher, drinker of neon colored wine coolers, sits purposefully crossing her legs so that her right flank displays a succulent parting of the upper and lower femoris: “i can tell you about infinity. what it feels like growing. it passes every year through the plateau doors of my room like water breaking out of warm and fetid captivity. i hang on. i dominate. i stalk through the minds of children like a whipping wind, pushing them into corners, enforcing alphabetic order, teaching them lessons.”
frat boy #43178a-0023 conscientiously ignores any displays of difference, knowing that he is entitled to whatever he is told to want, that there is plenty of meat in the market for the righteous upholders of the Status Quo. Sensing a weakness in lengthened silences, he speaks loudly, his papered face eagerly pink with the confidence that everyone is just like him: “sections, divisions, ranks of ignorant flesh devoted to keeping knowledge, understanding, true perception of all living things confined within small silent, violent sectors of space. we take pictures of the area and watch it moving in real-time, live, motion-picture fragments keeping it far away, shocking, unbelievable, unrelated to any of the headlining events of your own life. we ride on soft cushions of ignorance, never knowing what hands are keeping us floating. sailing into death tanned, crew cut, and smiling for the camera.”
coffee percolates deftly in the corner.
bobby the bum’s eyes are filled with gargoyle brightness, his aura uncertain, jagged, the indistinct medleyed color of waste. he hunches against the wall, an invisible horror lurking in the shadows of purposeful, structured minds. he looks goggly-eyed askew at a cruise liner pacing silently above the city and farts explosively, with a gurgling, sickening trickle that smells vaguely reminiscent of styrofoam: “lies, lies, manufactured data, it’s howdy-doody time! there’s a suspect wearing jeans and a blue hoody down the corner looking at the clouds. put all the death into a box and keep it cordoned off with clearly visible lines on maps and make children memorize, other countries recognize. name the child, call it horus, label it into a room set up just for it. death, lies, information flooding out reality. the truth is out there, dispersed, silenced, made into static, into noise, into just another piece of a million pieces of a universal hole. the baby screams watching silent fingers twitching the mobile to dance for him, sensing that it is reducing him into something he cannot believe. can you hear yourself? is that you? who is speaking through you?”

This Is What We Need

take the light back. journey into the past and remember our heroes. the tree, the flower slewn, the silver falling, the dark running. myths of the empire, dreams of a birth, of a formulate rising out of chaos like venus in the half-shell. she is not all that beautiful–but the idea, you see, the ideal. what she is supposed to be, in her innocence. not coy, not a salesman suckering in another sucker, not an empty mask created for the express purpose of stirring desire, no. where would we be if we started looking at reality instead of our conceptions of what it should be? we would be lost. remember who we are. remember our place in history. we are different. we are special.
it’s about keeping everything in perspective. satellites. moon. orbital reality, distanced communication. venus rising out of the sea for you to look at.
it’s amazing how much we know, how much we can share with each other, how little need there is for us to say anything. when i trace my fingers across the steppes of your shoulders i imagine the electricity charging, flashing across cells of the networked synapsed swirl of information. what effect am i causing in you? how are you going to respond? i feel as though i already know. i feel as though i’m touching myself, reaching across into infinite space, coming out the other side of the mirror, awestruck, mimicking.
does this feel good? i know it feels good. it feels good. there is no need to say anything.
and when we hurt each other, we can already see ourselves moving away, and we push each other forward. it’s time to move. suddenly our mouths fill with words, with sounds we cannot explain. explosions occur. skins fill with heat, with blood. take the light back. remember our beginning. we are here for a purpose. we are different, we are special.

yes, you begin to see the end. we set ourselves to fall, crashing into the waving earth, rippling the surfaces apart, shattering the mirror, the light falling, the dark rising. the myth was made so we could be destroyed, so this world could end. this is what we need.

Day

This day begins with silence,
this day begins with confusion, with muscles tensing splashing afraid
against the sea.
This day begins with flooding lungs. This day begins with the letting go
of struggle, this day begins with the affirmation
of death, this day begins
with the unfolding of a pearl of breath out of the ocean depth
within the chaos, centered, dispersing,
into nothing that can be found,
nothing
that can be held close , nothing
that can be made
simple.
This day begin

Everywhere Here

we went down the road long way before we come home. and in the interim the rain it fell round, and like a spell we found that we were empty. we were free of all associations past present and future. ghosts spoke like wheels in our skin, through our minds. we were captivated by our deaths. looking for shelter, many of us tried to stop off the path and get dry. but no turning back. we’re addicted to the end, we said, shaking our heads.
here we are, moving, looking for a farewell. ain’t gonna be peace, never. everything is wet, sliding, glistening with everything. we try to be cool, we try to be hot, we try to be something, but it slips, it falls, it rises, it melts into nothing we can hold because it’s ourselves.
well breathing with the world we come to know the road is our home. the rain it falls round and intermittently the thunder scares us, and we see things clearly suddenly before the rune has rung back silence and darkness has swallowed the world again. and death, darkness? no, that was not the fear. the fear was the light, blasting, laying everything so crystal clear, so perfectly sudden, so known before understood. and emptiness, oh, we
are shelled by the enemy of ourselves. so we are hard
and we are soft,
and we are home, now.

Of Nature: A Dialogue

“Hello. I saw the birds fly spiraling up around a tree and away into the sky and I thought that maybe something was coming, maybe I would climb this hill and someone would be there, waiting,” Hans said to the girl laying upon the top of a grassy slope.
“Greetings. I come from the land of the dolphins, and I enjoy the 6:00 news, followed by a quick game of rummy. I just got my hair layered,” Gretzel replied, squinting up at him.
“I’ve watched whales out at sea swim in slow majestic families into the sun to blow a spout of water into the air,” Hans said carefully, bowing slightly to peer at Gretzel’s hair, “And yet, and yet, all I seem to grow is ever more distant from myself. I seem to leave pieces of my heart in every scene I witness. And then what is there to bring me back to the home land? I am everywhere, dispersed, and I sense that there will be no return, only greater distances, only greater lines, greater boundaries, all encompassing closed walls to keep me from going crazy.”
Gretzel eyed a squirrel that was eyeing her and watched its tail flicker cautiously. “I don’t know about that,” she said shortly, and then puffed out a breath, relenting, “well, I mean, I do know what I need to keep me going, and that’s Marlboro menthol milds, frequent cunnilingus, jamocha milkshakes, and French hip-hop.”
“Jamocha?” Hans said wondering.
“Sure. Arby’s.” Gretzel sat up, hoisted a pack of cigarettes out of her jeans and promptly lit one, a determined line forming between her eyebrows as she married the flame to the tip of the cancer stick. She exhaled audibly and said thoughtfully, “It’s a certain lack of thought I think you’re on about. But is it really a loss, after all? I get a pretty brown study out of watching Blind Date, as it is, thinking about human nature and what not. Mademoiselle can send me into whirlpool depths of introspection.”
Hans nodded eagerly, sitting down beside her. “Yeah, exactly. That’s what’s scary. It’s like I’m drowning in the hooks that are supposed to draw me out of the water. I mean, I should be safe behind glass, right, in the car, on the boat, in the theatre? But suddenly I find myself inextricably bound within the scenes I’m watching, and beyond the script, beyond the moment, beyond the action, there is the sense of an incredible danger, raw, lurking. Outside of the lights. Outside of what we’re watching. And I FEEL this, you know? And everyone feels it, it’s just that we learn how to smile, we learn how to laugh, we learn how to settle into these habits and keep ourselves feeling like we’re nameless, like we’re faceless, like we’re tourists snapping pictures to show to friends in a book with labels when we get back home, when we’re no longer in the air, in the water, in the world. But there’s too much. There’s just too much,” Hans smiled lopsidedly at Gretzel, noticing that her lips were shaped like a line sketch of a seagull flying smoothly off into the sky, “And there’s no turning back, no quiet space outside of the storm other than what’s brought to you live right now.” He trailed off, noticing that there was light emanating from Gretzel’s eyes into his own.
Gretzel smiled patiently, puffing a jet stream of smoke out of her mouth like a dragon.
“Yeah. All we got to know is what we need. I mean, anything you want is out there, if you’ve got the name and the paper to own it. But what we need is pretty simple: we need attention, we need mints for after our meals, we need a puff of magic every couple of minutes, we need connections, and fast ones, dammit. If you’re not in my movie, you know, then you can mosey off down the street like all the rest of extras. But there’s always the center of attention, there’s always the focus of your eyes. You look around and you can see what you need to do. Someone’s willing to pay to watch you do it. So you can watch and you can do. Either way something’s happening. Something’s going down all around us. I knew you were coming. If there was something wrong with me, if there was something wrong with you, one of us would have run away by now. There’s nothing wrong. There’s just how much you can take.” Gretzel sounded tired suddenly, and she snubbed the butt of her cigarette into the grass.
Hans waited, feeling the blood in the right side of his temple pulsing. The darkness was all around them, closing in. He closed his eyes. “I want to take everything. I can’t take anything. There’s just the gifts of god, for lack of a better term. Magic happens when from unguarded directions, and that’s exactly why it happens. I am a destroyer and a creator at once. What I create with my body I destroy in my mind.”
Gretzel watched Hans warily, sensing the danger menacing. His face seemed to stretch out away from his body like a giraffe. But, she thought, there is still a light shining, slipping through the cracks. Like a laser, pointing. She waited, listening to the passerby’s chatter.
“What I need,” Hans said slowly, tasting the weight of the words on his tongue, “is you, now.”
Gretzel looked at him, thinking about what outfit she was going to wear to the party tonight. “Ok. I need you let your phoenix out then, and stop trying to look for your mommy. The sea is thick. Respond to yourself and I will ask the right questions.” She laid back down on the grass.
Hans fell around her
and ate her.

The Worm Parable

How can I be two million places at once?, the little worm asked from atop a cherry tree. He pondered and he pondered, and yet all he felt was a building yearning in his tummy for lettuce leaves. And so he finally slithered down the tree and filled himself with fat juicy green leaves. But he was nowhere near to solving his riddle. So he sate with his full belly and thunk some more, lazily, drifting between drowsal and logistical delusion. He recognized, for sure, that the basic dilemma of the situation was that in order to be there while still being here necessitated a kind of astral-hyper-mental projection beyond the confines of the visible temporal space-world of his slimy yellow limbs. But the fact was, firstly, that he had been hungry, and so could not move beyond the immediate stimuli of his hunger. And then the fact was, secondly, that he now was full, and so could not escape the groggy inertia of his stuffed stomach. Really, he thought, I am bound by my appetites, and either I have not enough or too much. How can I be hungry and yet be full at the same time? Then my mind could be everywhere, anywhere I think to be. And yet there was this basic problem of time. The little worm was a little worm and felt that perhaps one day he would be a tremendous dune worm like his ancestors. But right now he recognized himself as a little worm. And once he was a littler worm, a tiny worm. I am trapped by my growth, he thought. If I could just be everything I could ever be and ever was right now, then I would no longer be confined within my self now.
The little worm tried to be all the worms he could be, at once, but he saw himself in the reflection of a dew drop on a petal, and he felt everyone inside of him fall away.
Is all that I am illusion?, he wondered. Is what I see now before me another dream that will melt away in the sun, is what I feel within me another desire to be stuffed momentarily, another hope to be made starved?

And the little worm decided nothing.
And he slithered away to sleep until he was hungry
again.

shots in the dark

What am I going to do with my moment? When your eyes are directed at me?

I am running for cover. I am firing rounds. I am wondering. I am still. I am moving. I am loving you. I am wanting you to leave. I am growing weeds in the garden. I wish to share them with you. Your waves are in my space, excuse me. Rippling over my surface. I am trying to learn myself when I teach you the path to my heart. Never surrender to me. I will not fight you. I will devour you, lull you to sleep with my fingers, take you into myself, turn you into a dream, into a memory, into a symbol.
Struggle with me, I dare you.

Where are you going?

Calling

weell, so here is the room, spinning. sometimes i want to scream, ya know, cuz i have absolutely no idea who i am or where my mind is going. absolutely. bean bags form mountains into which i sink. but i feel so good sometimes, when i finally settle down inside of myself and say, “yeah. i’m here.” but then everything flies apart. come, fly in the teeth of the wind. but we need to be grounded. we need a solid beat that drops in order to get through to these kids on the streets, man. gotta cultivate that mask that distances the emotions while molding them into understandable forms. ever noticed how pop singers are so goddamn sincere? it makes me sick. i’ve never felt that sincere about anything. the things that really get to me come in the form of dreams, you know what i mean? they give you these indescribable feelings and fill you up with light and then you wake up the next minute and you have to take a piss, and you have to get on with your life. what i’m trying to say is that i’ve lost the ability to define myself. and noone’s helping me do it; in fact, people just tear me apart, claiming parts of my heart, exploding through my dreams, reverberating in my thoughts. so i wait, i hold back, looking for a space where i can stand and look at it all and understand. sometimes i look into another person’s eyes and this light will flash out to me, and i don’t understand. there seemsto be something going on that i have nothing to do with. what are they trying to tell me? what is it they want? what is it i want?
should i want something?
ha ha, now the funk starts to settle down into that groove where you know that it could go on forever, and then it suddenly turns the corner and you start looking around and noticing the little changes, the little interplays going on all around up in it. let me describe a vision which i have just received. let me relay to you some information downloaded from the network of my mind. brought to you live from the energy source that now sits in the thick of the scene. this is mc duod, also known as nothing in particular. i see this: i see waves. i see bodies. i see a rustling forward, a tentative meeting of the sunlight on the crest of it, twinkling with motion, wondering, rolling away, darkening, deepening, swinging, building, desire, emptiness, rushing back up to light with intensity, exhaling, knowing now what is there from what is not. warmth slapping into itself. there is an air we breath, there is a space we occupy. sharing. clutching into oneself. pushing away. climbing back. alone.
beauty only comes out of dark places.
and then everyone comes out to look at it, passing by, shining. it calls to them. it speaks to them. it sings to them. oh, god, how scared everyone is. they think that if they follow the voices they will drown, they will be left
stranded.
well, i guess they’re right. i feel lost. the only map i’ve got is the stars in the sky, and they don’t tell me much. they just shiver their dead light silently in the vast stillness of the night. and yes, how beautiful it is. it stuns you, it touches a place inside of you where all you can say is “oh, how beautiful,” as if it were a painting you could buy and hang on your wall. but here it is, every night, ready to overwhelm you. and what can you say? what can you do? there it is. and then you’re turning to look at the person next to you and you’re talking about tomorrow, or about yesterday, avoiding the depth that sits charged inside of you, the hunger that waits to swallow you when you’re alone.
yes, i know. it drives us forward. we are the stars now, shining constellations, randomly created pictures of the moment surrounded by an unfathomable darkness. light spitting into the void. life happens somewhere. the light catches on some piece of dust floating by and the music suddenly floods together, the spaces, the silences become part of something else, a song that moves between two closures, vast emptiness and exploding lights. there is a mind listening, connecting the distance with imagination. there is a heart feeling, connecting the distance with love. there is a body pulsing, connecting the distance with heat. and here i am, sitting, the room spinning. and there you are, sitting. i don’t know what your room is doing. i don’t know what your mind is doing. i don’t know what your heart is doing. but i know that it is beating back to me somewhere, sometime. i know that out of this distance there is a wave that travels into the ocean, i know that there are fish that move, eddying with the currents, i know that you will need to eat, i know that you will be hungry, i know that there is a bird singing, calling outside of my window suddenly, i know that i need to pee really badly, i know that i will rise from this chair and do what i need to do, and that you will rise from your chair, and do what you need to do. just that. just this.

re: dispossession

hey, i hate to tell you but the world is flat, and square. i get my information from mars. you’d better listen.
the good news is that we can set it on fire.

(they have machines sent encircling a distance, maintaining for 24 hours a day 365 days a week the image of the earth as blue enfenced rotundity. turn on the weather channelTM. they will tell you what the clouds look like. they will predict the weather for you.)

i get my information from the voices in my head.

i’ll tell you about our world. this world is flat. this world is square. this world is split into claimed sections, pieces of a pie, all orbiting around the belly-center of the united states of america. Russia may be big, but it’s split
in half.
that’s right. our world exists in the form of image. our world exists in memory. pure memory space. now you stand for what you’ve truly accomplished, for all your successes, for all your purchases.

what have you accomplished?

oh, so you’re filed. oh, so you’re squared away. watch the tv and let it tell you what you look like. you are square, and you are flat, and you can see all the world with the push of a button, with the opening of a cover, with the click of a pointer.
hmm. it’s got pretty good special effects. hmm. can it keep your attention? hmm. it’s cutting away for an advertisement. . .

what
are your purchases? where
are they from?

)i get my information from mars. they’ve sent their machines there but they
can’t get a lock on anything. the truth keeps
shifting.(

so where is the good news? they feed you with all the latest disasters, with all the latest deaths, with all the gruesome images of their tragic wars.
where is the good news? that’s right, open up your bible. that’s right. fold up your hands. that’s right, you should be ashamed. that’s right, you’d better open up your mouths and pray.
alright, now try opening your mind. try looking at the world in 3d. try looking out the corners of your eyes. try listening to the sounds far away from you, to the sounds close to you, to the sounds inside of you.
it’s trippy, isn’t it? alright, now look at yourself. alright, now look at yourself.
where is the good news?
yeah, bend your head down to the board and bleed your fingers til they’re raw. yes, gather together with others in fear and fill the space of a place-time with sound. yeah, sit your ass down and listen.
yeah! get your ass up and dance!

where is the good news?

the good news is that we can set ourselves on fire.

the good news is that we can light each other
on fire.

the good news is that the world cannot be contained. the good news is that we spill out over the edges. the good news is that no matter how hard, straight, and square the information is, we can put it in our mouths
and we can swallow it
in fire.

american dream

What is the future you’ve got stocked away in your heart? Gonna make it? Gonna make your parents proud? Are you holding all your happiness for that distant rock in which you’ll plant your flag and secure for all eternity?
Someone’s walked on the moon. It means nothing. We have gotten
nowhere.
Generations upon generations of people building mountains of money out of other’s flesh and blood. Someday, they tell their children, we will have it all. Someday, we will escape. Someday, we will be safe.
And so there is fear, and there is darkness, and there is locked rooms, guarded.
Open the door to your heart and let me in. I’m starving. Do I have to prove myself to you? Do I have to speak your language?
How close to the earth must I sway, sweeping in the wind like a broken tree?

fever

Gadhills the iron fleece! Jujubeats in the rain, Circe lets down her hair and sings. Why, if I can see beyond it, am I trapped in this sickness? Shut down the gravy train and mosey down to sleep. Umbrellas, purple, scandalous. Innocence lost, we wake up to find that paradise has been all around us and we have been polluting it. Thinking that we were floating islands in the sky. The hooks are everywhere, in our fingers brushing against concrete, pictures of us nailed into the wall. Like an 8-ball, pieces of us float to the surface, and that is our fortune. Linked by hooks to the deep. Sometimes in the silence of your mind you can hear them tugging, reminding you of your iceberg expanse solid in the darkness. All that could have been, all that might be. When we fly, we get tangled up endlessly in each other. Some have chosen to chain themselves to their allotted space on the earth, making sure that they are not entangled in another’s life. But then the earth heaves, and they fall down into the heat, or they fly up, into the heat. The wires have no end, being twisted into each other. Layers and layers of netting. I love to see fishnet stockings slipped taut over a woman’s leg. Reconstructing a skin from the gaps in the cloth, imagining the fullness given to me, spread out, gleaming. Twisted around, super connected, superconductors. I am sick, and I cannot be healed. I am a wound, and open, re-open endlessly.
I imagine another layer of myself out in the sun, whole, ripe, devoured, loved. Somewhere I am happening. Somewhere I am dead. I look into the mirror and see myself winding into eternity. I am here, feeling this, gazing on the shining surfaces, but I am also somewhere else, perceiving different layers laid open then, there. I want to shut my eyes and feel nothing. I want to sleep and dream and forget.

Territory

Liquid, water forming steps. Slide down. The earth pulls. Forming and reforming with movement forward. Centering, dispersing. A motion picture as a succession of frames. On/off. On/off. The way light bulbs flicker just beyond perception. Transience, a continuous progression of establishment. There is much beyond. There is too much beyond. Focusing on what is immediate, what is sensed, what is felt, what is touched. Driving, stop go, green red. Pieces circling endlessly around an imaginary whole. Construction of narrative from selected layers. What you see is what you live confined within. A continuous passage, shuttling between perceptions. Negative capability. Man/woman. What space does the body occupy? What space do i occupy in my body? What space do I occupy in your body? Claiming, reclaiming. The only territory that i can truly possess is my own. Right here. Right now. This is mine. Always shifting, transforming. Boundaries are permeable, porous. In the search for an identity to occupy, in the search of the i for the I, i must find a space, i must fill it, and I must leave my mark, scented, scarred, burning. And then I must defend it.
You can have it. i am no-where. i am gone by the time You sniff me in the wind.

Machines of God

Tin Mo was mule. He carry up hill down to village. Swatted with stick day long. He make us money. He carry us food. He eat us scraps. No complain. Only move he make to ease his existence was to clear the flies momentarily from his ears with quick flip. This bastard intermixture. This nothing object. This burden beast.
Why does Tin Mo not kill us in the night?, i wondered as child, Why does he not strike back with strong feet when we stand behind, pressing down his back with load?
I remember now Tin Mo. He part of us. He part of me. Why fight what is part, even when it pain. Even when it not see you, use you, turn you to earth machine. I feel him in my feet, up migrating to class in university city. He part. He me. I carry burden of past in mind. Tin Mo history-past memory-piece that keep me complete in quick stream of commercial bulletin shards. My feet strong, plodding, forward heavy up hill. In info-ocean I move solid through image-waves.
Desolation, yes. Hesitation, no.

Osirius

and then i begin to forget myself. and it is good that i do so, for i am becoming trapped by the mirror every morning, seeing only the death mask, emotionless, frozen. and so i forget myself, fumbling my fingers against her passing breath, touching the space in my mind where she just spoke. is it wrong to speak of god as a woman? god is perhaps sexless, but i like to think of her as woman, as something beyond me that creates me, that i can press against and thrust against and beat against but only lose myself in. she accepts everything i do, even when i scream, even when i punch the walls, slam the doors, stare at myself in the mirror all day trying to scare myself. sometimes i try to kill her, stopping everything that tries to come out of my mind. but i think i love her, i think i do because then i forget myself again, and i find myself reaching out in the night to sing, i discover myself looking away from myself out the window at the street, listening to the night, listening to the night sing. and then maybe i slip out a few words, maybe i smile, maybe i look the same, but something’s come out of me, something’s changed. i figure that i must love her when i lose myself in dreams like this. i must be still alive.

if god is a woman, than i think that i’ve got a reason to believe.

but then i’ll remember myself, i look back, and i’ll catch my breath, my face setting into the lines where it’s been broken by time. what’s the next line?, i’ll think, where was the word that i’m looking for? my muscles snap like reeds in my ears. i look at myself, frozen as a rock in the mirror. when will it finish? i’ll think, when will it be complete?

she waits for me patiently, the night, singing, for me to fall asleep, for me to forget myself.
the sun rises and the garbage men wake me,
and i wonder
has this happened before?
why has this happened
before?

Tribe

Watching. Distant our minds grow from our bodies. We gaze at ourselves through the television, intelligence pouring from our faces like the fall of water onto rocks, streaks of lightning from a clouded sky breaking into the earth. We become objects, glistening with light, charged forms of desire, tremoring, moving across the surface of time like possessed animals, indefinable symbols.

Do you see the flood, O man in the suit, O man of the mirrored fortress?
Do you see what you have ruined in yourself? Do you think words will save
you now? Do you think that your past will teach you how to breathe
under
water?

There is no narrative that can encapsulate us. We are not a nation, we are not a generation. We are eyes, taking out the world, giving in the world.

We are love,
consuming everything,
holding onto nothing.

(Feb 7, 2000)

Did i say “love”? Such a trademarked term, traditional, safe. Not love, then. It is the experience of the moment i’m speaking of, the pushing forward like the prow of a ship through time, the forward falling pulse of a hi hat in a jazz stream. It’s the refusal to hold back any longer, the sudden spontaneous agreement to let go of everything and let yourself be whatever it is you are doing, whatever it is you are feeling. it is letting every single wave of consciousness that hits you run through you, refusing to stop, refusing to fall back onto what is known, what is certain, what is dead.

so then when you watch, when you sit and gaze at these dead images moving, dancing before your eyes, you are looking past everything you see. you know that these forms are meaningless, these words, these illusions. but you go with it, you let it take you, because you are no longer scared, you know that there’s nowhere that you can go that will take you away from what you aren’t. it is acknowledging that you could never possibly capture it, that you could ever possibly understand. it is accepting that every moment is a death, every moment is a birth.

we are the dead watching the dead,
living somewhere
in between.

here’s the scene

Gorgono (turning): the city. it floods me veins with broken light. my blood cuts across my vision and sometimes all i can see is cells, chaotic, strewn throughout my body fighting.
Jana (skipping): i would like to love it, i would like to feel good sucking in the brown air like a vacuum, wrapping my eyes around the passerbys. i’m even easy to use. and all you got to do around here is plug in, lay back, and play.
Gorgono (dancing): but somewhere deep the drum keeps the language running. the television could talk to me forever and never tell me anything i didn’t already know.
Jana (stripping): i’ve got a double mask. i’m breaking ahead, waiting around the corners, ensnaring every divorced movement of my radiation-glazed skin. i’ve got a double mask. i’m watching myself appear like a screen in the scenario. i’m nobody you can get in touch with. the only currency i take is sacrifice.
Gorgono (pumping): i’m watching myself. i want to fill every slot in the channel of time. i’m breaking apart. i’m flooding. i’m a thousand faces reflecting light shining in from nowhere.
Together (collapsing): i the city. i-and-i, we the system. how far we go before we come back?

joe

\\\jurisdiction. coming off of the royal poop deck like a king of some mystic, ancient world. biting into a corn dog, dribbling Squirt down my chin. i look out upon my precinct, the corner of 64th and Krinkle. good. i pull at my crotch authoritatively. ain’t noone gonna tell me what i got, cause i KNOW what i got. my secretary tells me i look like David Hasselhoff. It’s not really my face exactly, but that presence of domination, of a manly blandness. that makes sense to me, cuz i remember back when i was a kid, watching Star Trek and eating Mom’s meatloaf, how i could relate to Captain Kirk, his potbellied assurance, the suave way he moved in his futuristic 70s uniform, as if it were a second skin. I think I’d be popular in Germany.

jacobs wife

1053L: jacob told meto to sit. it was a foggy night. sandwiches in the dark. i sniffed hopefully, alert.
1054[input]: i was the lettuce. i was still crispy then.
1055224yg: jacob was coughing, nostrils flaring, watering eyes. when he finished, he chugged me down; i quenched his thirst. gatorade: more efficient than water, and better tasting.
108652:L there is an intense concentration in the gut that takes place in the act of consumption. a brutal silence accentuated by smacks and swallows.
19057hrlo”: marlboro reds. 1 every hour, two after a meal. surgeon general advises: when you give away your mental freedom, you poison your body to survive.
1hru90: i am a teapot, short and stout.
1060gy89: none of it mattered. but it was complete somehow, harmonized by the chipping of the white paint on the side of the window.

purple motion

signing my name, i suddenly feel like i’m drowning. there’s a part of me here that i can’t see that’s flowing from me and coagulating into a larger system, something symbolic, invisible, representative of a certain quantity of moments i’ve sold of myself, exchanging my time for a shell, for a brand that i can exchange with anybody. i sell my freedom, my boundlessness so i can be defined, so that i can be represented, seen, and experienced. i become an image, i become a dead thing to be resurrected in others eyes.
drowning feels like breathing fire, a shredding ecstasy that consumes whatever i held as my own, whatever i held back as distinct and separate from the rest of the world. at first it’s blinding, painful, frenzied–but soon it’s filling every cell, incorporating every space with maximum efficiency into a purposeful stillness, a frozen potential, a waiting that knows completion.
i break apart then into the ocean of energy.
and somewhere, in some darkened room at some certain time i smile down upon a somnolent form and fill their current dream with light.

Watch the Movie

past the obvious, there is, of course, the not-so-obvious–and beyond that there is Captain Cream. but irregardless of the endless stream of permutations that a helix could create, there is an ultimate sense of, how else to say it, BLUENESS. like the energy that you can see manifested when you stare at a white wall and stop focusing on the wall–maybe it’s different to you: jimi must have seen it purple. i’ll say blue because i feel it as blue–when it flows, it’s all heavy, all beautiful in a distant sort of way the way a blue sky can be. minds me of a dream i had when I was like 9. i would run and turn into a dragon and fly up into the sky and through a trapdoor in the sky that would take me to a place that was wonderful, mysterious, secret, inhabited by a motherly female–it was like an apartment in an alternate universe, everything was black and white and objects kept moving around and changing into something else and it was like that strange perverse universe that children enter into when they play the role games that adults wistfully and somewhat sheepishly emulate in hollywood movies. and when i woke up i was real sad because it was so real, because damn it felt right and it would never come back, i would never fly. took me a decade to figure out that all that is real, all the dreams, all the gossip, all the stories and myths that people jizz out like sprinklers in their mind and all the sentences you stop and cross out and throw in the can. now i know i’ve got it, all the time, the trapdoor in my head, the dragon in my spine. it’s always there, blue, waiting.

Commercializing into Crystals the Eternal

-There’s a kind of semi-formalism going on here. I can tell right off the bat with these kinds of things. Look at the way she’s pulling off the lines; not enough faith to make her fearful, but just that bit of herself, just a small little lick, like snapping a snare to a funk beat. all the rest of the energy seems to go on down behind her face, go on down and
then come on up, breathing, snaking, circular, infinite. I think she knows I’m watching–but it’s not me exactly, it’s that effect that she knows she’s gonna cause in me–that everyone within me who is watching, that distant, silent everyone, all the nameless eyes that scatter across her body in aimless, fleeting moments on the street, when she passes like a dragon across windshield views, stepping gazelle down the sidewalk out the intersection like a dream, floating out of the stopped stream of cars like a symbol. it’s that shuttering moment when you know that both of you are watching, expressionless, divine, somewhere deep within you that burrows down into a hole of nothing suddenly becoming everything, everyone, coating the walls of my mind in alien yet familiar landscapes in some terrible, grotesque vision that breaks then into light, wavering, spitting out flashes of heat.
when i come out, i take a shit and brush my teeth. i go to bed and dream about babies that you can buy and grow in a bottle.

pop life

the whole problem seems to lie in thinking that there is something you could do that would be considered wrong. that there’s some space youre not supposed to fall into, its like a pop beat–if you dont hit the snare at that one beat, youve fucked up the whole thing. so youre walking around avoiding certain things where you think you might do something wrong. and its superstitious, like avoiding cracks on the sidewalk and shit. theres normal and theres abnormal. theres right and theres wrong. youre on and youre off, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. really youre just losing all the time, youre always losing cuz theres that certain something that youre not getting that you need to get in order to be safe, in order to feel that youre something. like pussy, or money, or the new moby cd. our culture has kind of built up a nice myth to cover up this dilemma–the myth of the true love–that there is someone out there who will complete you, the missing rib from your body. so were always running after something that we dont have, because theres something wrong with us, theres something missing. theres emptiness inside, when youre alone you dont know what to do with yourself so you watch tv. but of course theres really nothing, noone that can ever make you more than you already can be, so eventually you run yourself down. but theres always little things there for us to fill ourselves up on before we hit empty again: nice little things like cigarettes, movies, video games, parties, sex. were scared that if we stop, if we dont feel like were going somewhere, if there isnt that snare right there when we want it to be, then were gonna fall flat on our faces, well be just another faceless part of the dead masses. and we will, because weve set ourselves up for it, because weve built our lives so much away from ourselves that when we fall back into ourselves we suddenly realize just how much none of it means anything anyway. we set ourselves up to fall the minute that we assume that there is the potential to fall, and this comes from the decision that we want to climb. but theres nowhere to climb if theres nowhere to fall. theres only one place to get to–and that’s where we are.

ornette coleman::oedipus rex

and sight–i used to see a lot of things unfolding when i looked away, like faces caught in emotion in cigarette smoke from someone’s cigarette when we were sitting on a bench and me looking at the clouds, or a something that might be a sprite or maybe a demon coming from the shadows cast by a chair i was walking by, anything. the world just kind of jumped out all around, like a kaleidoscope all about what i was focused on. the subway, i remember, was a nightmare, all these forces struggling around me, and i would look and there would be a gum wrapper twisted on the ground, a businessman staring at his shoes, a grimy bar handle. it didnt feel real, that’s for sure, it felt like comics, each moment captioned. except no one was looking cept me. nothing wanted to be looked at but had to be felt. it was like noise, just a lot of noise like when you turn a radio in-between stations or that fuzz shit on the tv. i remember i liked to stand around trees, they glowed, they were smooth. but even them had murmurings whispering away in my mind, dancing around my eyes, made me want to lie there forever just breathing. there was never what i would call peace—it was just some things were broken and some things were smooth, flowing. it was all these stops, you see, like i couldnt stand being around traffic, all that wasted energy, i couldnt see anything like that, i had to go to my room, lie in the dark, listen to my aquarium running, stare into the dark. yeah. i made sure no light could come in, that way i couldnt see nothing, there was nowhere to focus, nothing to scream for attention when it wasnt being seen. that way i could feel things and i wouldnt have to look, wouldnt have to be scared of what i might never see.

Listening To John McLaughlin

And yes, there was a corner, and i stepped around it and there was the sickly yellow light falling around Feline smoking a cigarette looking straight into my eyes like she knew i was coming. i didn’t move a muscle in my face, played it cool, like i knew she knew i was coming. bummed a cig from her and flowed off of our last conversation, talked about angels, i remember that kind of shit, forget her name, just call her feline cuz she’s got those sharp kinds of looks like cats give you when they’re not sure whether to sass you or to run, and i say how i thought at first she was an angel standing on that corner with the light and that hair, standing there like she was gonna save me. ‘from what,’ she says, she’s got my hook, her pupils measuring me up like a camera, i can feel her watching somewhere inside deep as if i were standing on that corner in a tv on a stage in a coffee table somewhere in her childhood home with a shag carpet and the freeway sounds billowing from just past the hill like an ocean, and i say, “save me from spending this night all by myself and ending up on my couch listening to my neighbors spitting.” but now she’s somewhere else, looking at the other side of the street, and i listen to a cricket singing in a crack by the curb. then she smiles and looks at me again like she’s decided something, it makes me feel like an open wound, and now i know that she’s waiting for me to say something so that she can let go and spend the night with me and that i won’t try to hold onto anything because she knows instinctively in that mother-goddess heart of hers that when an understanding passes between two people, a sharing, someone’s gonna try to hold onto something, and i pull on my cigarette and i smile, into her eyes, i let her know that i’m following her, that i’m not going to run away from what i’ve already shown, that i’ve already let go of everything and that i could walk away right now and go home and lay on my couch and listen to miles davis and my neighbors spitting and that either way, i knew, she knew, that we were beautiful together