Friday, July 17, 2009
from Center, Universe, That's It
Rushing water shouldn't sound that way, like ten industrial strength fans pushing out all the air. You know, it only takes about ten seconds for the world--as you know it--to come to an end, and a completely different one to begin. I had the shower blasting away my dead skin cells when it happened. The dawning of a new era--or a new eros, and a first era as far as I was concerned--as I found myself washing the bar of soap. Don't ask me why, I just was. Suddenly, why didn't exist. The way it was was the way it was. Soap needed to be cleaned, and it had to be done in that moment, and, of a sudden, I found myself in compliance with that simple truth.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Forming Genesis
Arc
I arc upwards, myself an ark carrying an entire cosmos on-board, surprisingly light and marshmallow, marshy and malleable, refusing to be puffed, and self-contained--observing its own exponential expansion, buoyant and boyish, contradicting mind-bottlement. The mind is a breathing organism, practicing lamaze for its dream birth, coordinates telescoping into center, contractions through rarefactions. The galvanized sheet metal tree, gleaming in the Midwestern Sun, creaks although still on Art Hill, a summer night breeze slightly crescendoing, blowing in from childhood miles forgotten and not retraced. It is teaching itself how to walk, synthesizing steel into woody chloroplastered ecstasy, an alchemy of dream and matter.
Television and Fire Pits
Drums of mercury singe in their singing, sing in their singeing, sponging up particles of my reflection, a stagnant puddle of muddled candy wrappers caked with dirt and sopping with moonshine. The conglomeration swallowing torrents of dry heaves into its collected guts, a reclaiming of media into medium, cotton-mouth and head, existing alone in a washed-out sunny ionic field, popping into French varicose veins of ore and orange poppies, and vanishing into unexploded paintings of some Andromeda sun in miniature, cobalt blue, a dwarf star, humming silent presence, eating fresh green corn, drinking its saliva from an ancient rock anomaly knowing peace like an uncracked geode, a forgotten wormhole, where yin and yang swirl to heartbeat through purple pudding, modifying genes outside of the tube of modified organisms which happen to be genies internally combusting while sitting on a landfill of Velveeta. While naming x-rays something more like xenon, invoking Adam as muse, enjoying toxicity, eating the waxy paintbrush with waxen lips, living gluten- and tax-free on the ruins of an American mint, one hundred per century.
Trumpets
Trumpets then trumpeting into ruddy bell flowers, periwinkles and pinot forming their pair somewhere before 1999, Adam's infant voice buckles two tectonic plates into Prehistory. He gargles and chokes on the salty sea water, sending tsunami shock waves into the dawn.
Fungi
Liberal fungi who resent the implications of infestation, explore euphoric utopias with fungicidal friends, breathing into cores of seedless palindromic grape candy, writing the definitive work, The Art of Artificiality, a shoddy constructed artifice in treatise form on acid-free paper, post-consumer waste, contained within a plethora of python-tangled constructs, deconstructed, counteracting aceteminophine, dissecting dioxyribonucleic acid dreams of the same circular windows lodging in weathered coastal lodges, in cathedrals of swaying sea cucumbers and cucumber melon doves, in a merangue menagerie of Muszorgsky's posthumously performed mazurkas, sidereeling in one wing of public television, crumbling down graham-cracker crumble crust.
Organic Matter
Through spitting oceanic ash, prehistoric
La Brea Califormica granite taken for granted.
And this is where you tell me about your four-thousand-foot, four-inch mountain
atop the coast, while we wind it, me falling asleep, in the back of your black Volkswagen Cabrio,
left ear popping sitting stationary ascending, my suspended body taking shotgun.
"Smelt sands are situated in nonfiction embankments," I read,
reading not unlike a pseudoscientific romance, as
spittal ebbs and flows in the Norwegian reader's mouth bay, in the corner
of corniness, Cheese Wiz frothed into fondue.
And "off-the-handle" handles like a breezy rider writing
into existence writhing phonemes, a phenomenon of phantom glints,
of phantasmagorical forethought morphing into furry fairy tails, like zygotes formulating zygotes,
fashioning form on a run-way, running its way to the brink of the telescope, through which plays re-runs of America's Next Top Model.
I arc upwards, myself an ark carrying an entire cosmos on-board, surprisingly light and marshmallow, marshy and malleable, refusing to be puffed, and self-contained--observing its own exponential expansion, buoyant and boyish, contradicting mind-bottlement. The mind is a breathing organism, practicing lamaze for its dream birth, coordinates telescoping into center, contractions through rarefactions. The galvanized sheet metal tree, gleaming in the Midwestern Sun, creaks although still on Art Hill, a summer night breeze slightly crescendoing, blowing in from childhood miles forgotten and not retraced. It is teaching itself how to walk, synthesizing steel into woody chloroplastered ecstasy, an alchemy of dream and matter.
Television and Fire Pits
Drums of mercury singe in their singing, sing in their singeing, sponging up particles of my reflection, a stagnant puddle of muddled candy wrappers caked with dirt and sopping with moonshine. The conglomeration swallowing torrents of dry heaves into its collected guts, a reclaiming of media into medium, cotton-mouth and head, existing alone in a washed-out sunny ionic field, popping into French varicose veins of ore and orange poppies, and vanishing into unexploded paintings of some Andromeda sun in miniature, cobalt blue, a dwarf star, humming silent presence, eating fresh green corn, drinking its saliva from an ancient rock anomaly knowing peace like an uncracked geode, a forgotten wormhole, where yin and yang swirl to heartbeat through purple pudding, modifying genes outside of the tube of modified organisms which happen to be genies internally combusting while sitting on a landfill of Velveeta. While naming x-rays something more like xenon, invoking Adam as muse, enjoying toxicity, eating the waxy paintbrush with waxen lips, living gluten- and tax-free on the ruins of an American mint, one hundred per century.
Trumpets
Trumpets then trumpeting into ruddy bell flowers, periwinkles and pinot forming their pair somewhere before 1999, Adam's infant voice buckles two tectonic plates into Prehistory. He gargles and chokes on the salty sea water, sending tsunami shock waves into the dawn.
Fungi
Liberal fungi who resent the implications of infestation, explore euphoric utopias with fungicidal friends, breathing into cores of seedless palindromic grape candy, writing the definitive work, The Art of Artificiality, a shoddy constructed artifice in treatise form on acid-free paper, post-consumer waste, contained within a plethora of python-tangled constructs, deconstructed, counteracting aceteminophine, dissecting dioxyribonucleic acid dreams of the same circular windows lodging in weathered coastal lodges, in cathedrals of swaying sea cucumbers and cucumber melon doves, in a merangue menagerie of Muszorgsky's posthumously performed mazurkas, sidereeling in one wing of public television, crumbling down graham-cracker crumble crust.
Organic Matter
Through spitting oceanic ash, prehistoric
La Brea Califormica granite taken for granted.
And this is where you tell me about your four-thousand-foot, four-inch mountain
atop the coast, while we wind it, me falling asleep, in the back of your black Volkswagen Cabrio,
left ear popping sitting stationary ascending, my suspended body taking shotgun.
"Smelt sands are situated in nonfiction embankments," I read,
reading not unlike a pseudoscientific romance, as
spittal ebbs and flows in the Norwegian reader's mouth bay, in the corner
of corniness, Cheese Wiz frothed into fondue.
And "off-the-handle" handles like a breezy rider writing
into existence writhing phonemes, a phenomenon of phantom glints,
of phantasmagorical forethought morphing into furry fairy tails, like zygotes formulating zygotes,
fashioning form on a run-way, running its way to the brink of the telescope, through which plays re-runs of America's Next Top Model.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Corn Nuts
A man passes with greasy, curly black hair, and smiling, slaps the parked car as he passes to hold himself up; with the other, he holds a cell phone into which he says, "corn nuts" and passes on through the night.
I'm in a bar, mirrors everywhere. I see myself in smoky yellow lights, smiling, not slapping a car or talking about corn nuts. Not slapping anything. Not liking any store-bought food, or anything, for that matter, enough to talk about it. And then I forget where I am. There's a beer handed to me.
I'm on the front porch, standing just feet from my bedroom. The lights are on. It's cold. I'm with my boyfriend. He tells me he'll be here waiting with open arms when I get back from my trip that seeks clarity. The air is cold. I want to be in bed. Even though I know bed will not fix much at all. I just don't want to be here. Or anywhere. So I stay for awhile.
I'm in a bar, mirrors everywhere. I see myself in smoky yellow lights, smiling, not slapping a car or talking about corn nuts. Not slapping anything. Not liking any store-bought food, or anything, for that matter, enough to talk about it. And then I forget where I am. There's a beer handed to me.
I'm on the front porch, standing just feet from my bedroom. The lights are on. It's cold. I'm with my boyfriend. He tells me he'll be here waiting with open arms when I get back from my trip that seeks clarity. The air is cold. I want to be in bed. Even though I know bed will not fix much at all. I just don't want to be here. Or anywhere. So I stay for awhile.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
poems painted sea foam
i.
sea foam green
a crayola color i used
to use, not for sea,
but for tracing
my mind back
to that year, being in kindergarten,
on the West Coast
ii.
sea foam green
Maybe Ireland or some mythic shoreline
is where the foam resembles the crayon,
but not in Yachats, Oregon, or anywhere I've seen.
Maybe sea foam yellowish white wouldn't be as memorable,
not as romantic, i think, while the thick foam,
more like a grotesque rabid foam, washes up the dead
limp brown weeds, in ancient rhythm,
seen as through a Viewmaster, eight hundred feet below
Cape Perpetua, a place that myths have flooded
and will flood until even its sea foam
has a color named after it.
iii.
Sea Foam Green
A wax stick that colors the sky,
giving it an ominous hue. Like that paper
day in seventh grade, tornado warnings dopplering,
in the concrete block basement,
the school huddling in the cafeteria, under
unearthly fluorescent lights with roaches stuck in them,
amazed at the anticipation in the sudden electric,
wildlife hiding and waiting for mass destruction,
kids looking through slits for windows,
into the inside-out of ordinary,
into unpasteurized atmosphere, and
sea foam green is suddenly lifted from
rocky, fluorescent and mossy imagination,
sea foam green, still embedded in those ethereal
seventh grade walls.
sea foam green
a crayola color i used
to use, not for sea,
but for tracing
my mind back
to that year, being in kindergarten,
on the West Coast
ii.
sea foam green
Maybe Ireland or some mythic shoreline
is where the foam resembles the crayon,
but not in Yachats, Oregon, or anywhere I've seen.
Maybe sea foam yellowish white wouldn't be as memorable,
not as romantic, i think, while the thick foam,
more like a grotesque rabid foam, washes up the dead
limp brown weeds, in ancient rhythm,
seen as through a Viewmaster, eight hundred feet below
Cape Perpetua, a place that myths have flooded
and will flood until even its sea foam
has a color named after it.
iii.
Sea Foam Green
A wax stick that colors the sky,
giving it an ominous hue. Like that paper
day in seventh grade, tornado warnings dopplering,
in the concrete block basement,
the school huddling in the cafeteria, under
unearthly fluorescent lights with roaches stuck in them,
amazed at the anticipation in the sudden electric,
wildlife hiding and waiting for mass destruction,
kids looking through slits for windows,
into the inside-out of ordinary,
into unpasteurized atmosphere, and
sea foam green is suddenly lifted from
rocky, fluorescent and mossy imagination,
sea foam green, still embedded in those ethereal
seventh grade walls.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Then There Was Pink
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.
--Rumi
Pink and Rumi should have been childhood friends. Pink had come from Richmond, Virginia and had grown up, like Rumi, in a religion that not only taught her mantras like "be no part of the world," but threatened her with severe penalties should she ever become part of the world. She didn't want to be like other girls who betrayed their families and friends, and worst of all, God and lived meaningless lives. Pink was determined to be different. If this wasn't enough, Pink was a military base child, only staying in one school long enough to meet a couple new interesting people her age before moving on to the next one.
Rumi had grown up primarily in St. Louis, but, like Pink, had already lived in several different places by the time he was five, although Rumi was not a military-base kid. Rumi would never have lived on a military base, for he was politically neutral, and though curious about the outside world, he grew up thinking of himself as priveleged to be uninfected by what the rest of the world was doing.
Until he was five, Rumi was an only child, and spent his lazy days looking for fossils in his grandparents' country gravel driveway in Missouri, looking for crawdads in the canal off the dirt road at his other grandparents' house in California, or, for another instance, on the school bus pretending to write in his notebook in cursive, clutching it close to himself to keep others from seeing his wise and mysterious writings. At these times, Rumi imagined himself to be an archaeologist, an explorer, a writer. But although these were his pasttime careers, Rumi mainly considered himself, if he considered himself anything, a philosopher.
He wouldn't see just the gum stuck to the back of the seat in front of him on the schoolbus, or hear just the rumbles and awkward squeaks of the bus and the background chatter of those "worldly" highschoolers who kept to themselves in the back of the bus. In that gum, Rumi would see the teeth-marked pinkish purple texture that gave the gum its gumness, and his eyes might've drifted, if he stared long enough, as sometimes he would, to etch marks that had scraped down past the surface green faux leather seatback to reveal just plain white. And these etch marks, though apparently random, would seem to make clowns and fishermen and all sorts of funny characters, and then, a question would pop in his head, a question of circumstance, just a simple question, that would turn into however many questions needed to be answered before he knew a perfect answer.
What is green? A color. The seatback. The maples. The telephone poles outside the window, while the bus passed, with drooping black cords, conduit to voices, connecting them, twisted with rain, like grass blades. These tree poles, his own arm he imagined throwing down, one at a time, or hopping over, as they passed. The speed mesmerized him, that he could be sitting down, viewing his arm in his own mind stretching through the window like Stretch Armstrong (although he hadn't been invented yet), yet moving fast enough to blur the fields, the frayed wire fences, the old wooden barns and houses with monstrous satellites in the yards, the telephone poles in the foreground. One. At. A. Time.
What is green (how to connect green with blurring. . .)? Rumi explored green. Greens. Greenery. The seatback was green. A dark jungle green? Or was it pine green? He flipped through his imaginary rolodex of Crayola colors. Definitely, there were many variations on green. What made it confusing was that green was something Rumi knew was only called green by adults, adults in America. Green was something seen. Green seen. Clean green. Something seen. Green, green. Mister clean. Clean. (telephone pole, please. thank you.) Green.
*****
Pink lived next door. But Rumi didn't know it. It was only for 3, almost 4 months.
"Where are you going, young lady?" Pink's mom, a young lady herself, asked, without realizing the irony.
"Outside."
"Oh, no you don't. Not with that dress I just bought you. And what's that in your hand? Is that. Come back here."
Pink said, "It's mine." And she spoke the truth. In her hand was a locket. It had come from her Ukrainian grandmother, her father's mother. Mamama told Pink if she could take good care of it, if she could promise this, then she could have it as her own to pass on to her own daughter some day. Perhaps Pink's mom disputed Pink's ability to care for anything. Perhaps Pink's mom didn't have a high regard for five-year-olds, and, in any case, she certainly didn't think they deserved to be the keepers of lockets.
"She's only five," Pink's dad used to say, playfully in her defense when she fucked up. She used to hear this, too. Fucked up.
"You're such a fuck-up!" he said under his breath. Only Pink heard. Pink's mom was in the kitchen with her headphones on, doing dishes. Pink didn't think her mom was a fuck-up. She thought everyone had potential, even her dad.
*****
Up-chuck. This was a word Rumi learned while sick once, as in, "Come on. You're gonna up-chuck and then you're gonna feel all better."
His mom was standing over him, over the toilet, while he kneeled, poised, ready, to up-chuck. The light was making his head hurt, and his mind spinned with his eyes closed, thinking of up-chuck. Eyes open for just a second, to examine the rim of the toilet bowl, a view Rumi never had before, and didn't quite want to be having, an up-close-and-personal view of the toilet, a string of spit gew he felt inclined to let fall, hanging from his quivering lips, induced by the smell of Lysol and urine, and the reflection of the white vanity lightbulbs above the mirror, as he kneeled upon the dirt-worn toilet rug only meant for feet.
Eyes closed and swaying, afraid he might collapse face down into the toilet spittal water, swaying forward and back, as his mom swayed side to side, saying, "That's it. Come on, you'll feel better." Next to Rumi in his right side peripheral vision, his mom's bare toes of one foot wiggled, the pink polish on four out of five nails, the pinky being alone, isolated, while the others had weathered paint jobs, like the tool shed out back that hadn't been painted in his lifetime.
Rumi wanted to get it out. He wanted to up-chuck. A chill rattled his bones. A speck of something, a gnat? a piece of lint? jossled that malleable pool in rings outward. Why couldn't it just come out? If, after these gruelling minutes without sleep, without up-chucking, he went to bed just like that, this moment would be meaningless.
The water swayed, as one liquid organism, at sea. His mom swayed, her toes wiggled. Rumi's mind pushed his whole body forward.
"Just think of that warm bed. Come on, Rumi. Just let out and get it over with," his mom said, telling him what was in his mind, without knowing, apparently, that it was Rumi's thought and not her own. This irritated Rumi. Enough that he finally let go, up-chucking right into that water, the bitter taste of stuff he chucked up: Corn Pops, Seven Up, a little homemade chicken soup, water, with just enough sweetness to make it the grossest thing he had ever tasted.
His throat hurt, but his stomach felt better. There was relief. He could stand up. "See? There." Reassuring, but condescending, and Rumi overlooked it whatever it was, because, being way past his bedtime, all he wanted was to be warm, tucked up into those cold blankets, the frost and blackberry thorns scraping at his window, to dream of past lives and future greatness.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.
--Rumi
Pink and Rumi should have been childhood friends. Pink had come from Richmond, Virginia and had grown up, like Rumi, in a religion that not only taught her mantras like "be no part of the world," but threatened her with severe penalties should she ever become part of the world. She didn't want to be like other girls who betrayed their families and friends, and worst of all, God and lived meaningless lives. Pink was determined to be different. If this wasn't enough, Pink was a military base child, only staying in one school long enough to meet a couple new interesting people her age before moving on to the next one.
Rumi had grown up primarily in St. Louis, but, like Pink, had already lived in several different places by the time he was five, although Rumi was not a military-base kid. Rumi would never have lived on a military base, for he was politically neutral, and though curious about the outside world, he grew up thinking of himself as priveleged to be uninfected by what the rest of the world was doing.
Until he was five, Rumi was an only child, and spent his lazy days looking for fossils in his grandparents' country gravel driveway in Missouri, looking for crawdads in the canal off the dirt road at his other grandparents' house in California, or, for another instance, on the school bus pretending to write in his notebook in cursive, clutching it close to himself to keep others from seeing his wise and mysterious writings. At these times, Rumi imagined himself to be an archaeologist, an explorer, a writer. But although these were his pasttime careers, Rumi mainly considered himself, if he considered himself anything, a philosopher.
He wouldn't see just the gum stuck to the back of the seat in front of him on the schoolbus, or hear just the rumbles and awkward squeaks of the bus and the background chatter of those "worldly" highschoolers who kept to themselves in the back of the bus. In that gum, Rumi would see the teeth-marked pinkish purple texture that gave the gum its gumness, and his eyes might've drifted, if he stared long enough, as sometimes he would, to etch marks that had scraped down past the surface green faux leather seatback to reveal just plain white. And these etch marks, though apparently random, would seem to make clowns and fishermen and all sorts of funny characters, and then, a question would pop in his head, a question of circumstance, just a simple question, that would turn into however many questions needed to be answered before he knew a perfect answer.
What is green? A color. The seatback. The maples. The telephone poles outside the window, while the bus passed, with drooping black cords, conduit to voices, connecting them, twisted with rain, like grass blades. These tree poles, his own arm he imagined throwing down, one at a time, or hopping over, as they passed. The speed mesmerized him, that he could be sitting down, viewing his arm in his own mind stretching through the window like Stretch Armstrong (although he hadn't been invented yet), yet moving fast enough to blur the fields, the frayed wire fences, the old wooden barns and houses with monstrous satellites in the yards, the telephone poles in the foreground. One. At. A. Time.
What is green (how to connect green with blurring. . .)? Rumi explored green. Greens. Greenery. The seatback was green. A dark jungle green? Or was it pine green? He flipped through his imaginary rolodex of Crayola colors. Definitely, there were many variations on green. What made it confusing was that green was something Rumi knew was only called green by adults, adults in America. Green was something seen. Green seen. Clean green. Something seen. Green, green. Mister clean. Clean. (telephone pole, please. thank you.) Green.
*****
Pink lived next door. But Rumi didn't know it. It was only for 3, almost 4 months.
"Where are you going, young lady?" Pink's mom, a young lady herself, asked, without realizing the irony.
"Outside."
"Oh, no you don't. Not with that dress I just bought you. And what's that in your hand? Is that. Come back here."
Pink said, "It's mine." And she spoke the truth. In her hand was a locket. It had come from her Ukrainian grandmother, her father's mother. Mamama told Pink if she could take good care of it, if she could promise this, then she could have it as her own to pass on to her own daughter some day. Perhaps Pink's mom disputed Pink's ability to care for anything. Perhaps Pink's mom didn't have a high regard for five-year-olds, and, in any case, she certainly didn't think they deserved to be the keepers of lockets.
"She's only five," Pink's dad used to say, playfully in her defense when she fucked up. She used to hear this, too. Fucked up.
"You're such a fuck-up!" he said under his breath. Only Pink heard. Pink's mom was in the kitchen with her headphones on, doing dishes. Pink didn't think her mom was a fuck-up. She thought everyone had potential, even her dad.
*****
Up-chuck. This was a word Rumi learned while sick once, as in, "Come on. You're gonna up-chuck and then you're gonna feel all better."
His mom was standing over him, over the toilet, while he kneeled, poised, ready, to up-chuck. The light was making his head hurt, and his mind spinned with his eyes closed, thinking of up-chuck. Eyes open for just a second, to examine the rim of the toilet bowl, a view Rumi never had before, and didn't quite want to be having, an up-close-and-personal view of the toilet, a string of spit gew he felt inclined to let fall, hanging from his quivering lips, induced by the smell of Lysol and urine, and the reflection of the white vanity lightbulbs above the mirror, as he kneeled upon the dirt-worn toilet rug only meant for feet.
Eyes closed and swaying, afraid he might collapse face down into the toilet spittal water, swaying forward and back, as his mom swayed side to side, saying, "That's it. Come on, you'll feel better." Next to Rumi in his right side peripheral vision, his mom's bare toes of one foot wiggled, the pink polish on four out of five nails, the pinky being alone, isolated, while the others had weathered paint jobs, like the tool shed out back that hadn't been painted in his lifetime.
Rumi wanted to get it out. He wanted to up-chuck. A chill rattled his bones. A speck of something, a gnat? a piece of lint? jossled that malleable pool in rings outward. Why couldn't it just come out? If, after these gruelling minutes without sleep, without up-chucking, he went to bed just like that, this moment would be meaningless.
The water swayed, as one liquid organism, at sea. His mom swayed, her toes wiggled. Rumi's mind pushed his whole body forward.
"Just think of that warm bed. Come on, Rumi. Just let out and get it over with," his mom said, telling him what was in his mind, without knowing, apparently, that it was Rumi's thought and not her own. This irritated Rumi. Enough that he finally let go, up-chucking right into that water, the bitter taste of stuff he chucked up: Corn Pops, Seven Up, a little homemade chicken soup, water, with just enough sweetness to make it the grossest thing he had ever tasted.
His throat hurt, but his stomach felt better. There was relief. He could stand up. "See? There." Reassuring, but condescending, and Rumi overlooked it whatever it was, because, being way past his bedtime, all he wanted was to be warm, tucked up into those cold blankets, the frost and blackberry thorns scraping at his window, to dream of past lives and future greatness.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Book One
NOTE to SELF: Keep in mind this is just a first draft of a story emerging; do not erase what has been written. Just go with it. And then use some of it; throw the rest away.
Prologue
These days. It's hit or miss. The way I pull my pants off. I try every possible way until they're off. Pull from the knees first, whatever's within reach while laying down flat on my back on the floor. Even though it doesn't work. I envy the guys who pull my pants off from the feet right away, eliminating that unnecessary and awkward preliminary step searching for the right way. They just know. Jump right to it. Something so simple: pulling pants off. I've done it thousands of times to be 31. But I still can't remember how I do it. A new struggle every time. That's the way I like it. I guess.
I try to remember what else I can. Spontanaeity. Creation. Such are words. That pop. While I listen to scratchy ambient lines of anonymous music, an introspective male's voice speaking through minimalistic independent voices: a subtle bass line providing stucture to the contrapuntal violinage at random points on that constant timeline.
And it makes me contemplate what music should have been to the Maya, in a place located, as is mine, on a major natural vortex, where time was not linear, but a circle, where the calendar, the most advanced of any civilization, comprised circles within circles. And they moved. A pattern cut out from the fabric of space-time.
Chapter One
01 JANUARY 2013
The ball has dropped. It's gone through the hole. The Milky Way perfectly aligned. But all that 2012 hype--turned into maybes, heavy and slight, depending--depending on who you read or talk to, is at its peak. We're still waiting. It's the Y2K of the new decade. The 9eleven of the previous one. I wonder what it will be in the 2020s.
In the meantime, though, I just write. I live. Live and write.
"No worries," they say. They. I say it too. But, if it helps, I catch myself. I become self-aware. But usually when it's 2 LATE. I mis-spell on purpose. It is fashionable to be unthinking. It's cute. Like a baby.
That's supposing babies should also numb their minds, suppress their cries with rubbery nipples affixed to pacifiers. And think of goo-goos and being like the Communist cardboard cut-out cartoon Bob the Builder. Bob. The Builder. And be mesmerized with twirly mobiles of rainbows and pink elephants. In stead. Instead of diaper rash and diarrhea. Instead of useful language for hot and cold, day, night, they are offered useless words such as mom-ee. Dad-ee. No one tries to make them understand they are alone in the world.
I rethink: 'No one' is usually inaccurate, and I cannot make that assumption logical; someone always surprises me.
In stead. Instead of "Day" and "Night," what if babies were given charcoal and eggshell and taught to see the difference between an egg shell and snow, and how both are white? And see that an egg, like a snowflake, is unlike any other of its kind. And how the creators of the color eggshell apparently weren't thinking of brown eggs.
In stead. Instead of "White and "Black," what if babies were taught to see how the yellow labrador's nose turns, bespeckled, slowly to pink from brown, when the weather turns, bespeckled, slowly to cold from hot-ish. How summer has cool days, and winter has warmth. How cool is sought in summer, and hot is sought in winter. And how spring and fall are the in-between planetary phases, a circle. And circles within circles. And they move. That is what they should see when they look up at the twirly mobiles with rainbows and pink elephants, above their sequestered wooden pens.
Chapter Two
11 JANUARY 2013
The fan blows softly on breeze mode, which sounds like it's wearing out the motor to strain, holding back the breeze to replicate a gale or gust, a heave-ho. I wake up irritated. The blinds are closed over the glass door. I believe I had left them open. Yes, I did, I remember. In fact, the sliding door was open also to let in the cool night air. I always sleep with the door open to let in the cool night air. It's too hot in here. After a slight hung-over achiness in my head subsides a bit, I sit up, twist my neck to see the time: shadowed roman numerals. There's a glare. I can't read. I like numbers on a clock. Letters in books. Roman numerals in Latin.
I would check my clock radio, the one I bought with my own 20 bucks when I was 12, after saving up, my first bought possession, a clock radio. Something that made me feel grown up. Responsible. The clock for appointments and important events. The radio for ambient classical tones coming through a tinny scratchy speaker, soundwaves compressed and rarefacted. Circles. Circles that move. On a timeline.
I would glance, naturally, at the flashing red numbers on that digital antique, but it sits unplugged on the floor, its black cord writhing around itself, beside the cardboard box I'm currently using as a nightstand behind the shared couch.
I have to get out of here. I think. I scratch away the crust from around my eyes. I have to go pee. I kick the blankets. They fly up, still on. Too much work. Frustrating. I get violent with them, like I have to do sometimes with those psychos who at times enter in and hold onto my arms and won't let me go.
That literally happened one time. He said he cared about me. That's why he wouldn't let me go out the door of his apartment at 2 a.m. when I needed out. That's why he threatened karate. That's why I dragged him down the stairs outside the apartments. Drag. More like walked, pulling, resisting, to his tight bruise-imprint clutch on my right upper arm. His cries. The cops came. The latinas watching on their doorsteps at the bottom of the stairs, offering me agua in a crystal glass. Funny, the cops thought we were a gay couple breaking up. Drama. Queens and their drama.
"Doesn't he look like Pan?" I said. "You know, the Greek god? Those Roman features. Bacchus, I guess it would be."
The officer laughed from his boy skin barely hidden beneath a halcyone beard, trimmed neatly, classic GQ. "Yeah, oh my God, he does! You should definitely keep your distance. There's clearly something wrong with this guy. He's your friend?"
"Well, I thought he was," I say, twisting the skin back above my elbow to check out the damage.
Chapter 3
15 January 2013
All these pages. Torn edges, some. Canary yellow, extra-long looseleaf. Loose. Leaf.
I never see yellow birds anymore.
I don't even know what I'm saying. Or why you should care. I'm drunk. If I wasn't, I might not be typing. I might be telling a different story. Somewhat skewed. Somewhat. But, as it is, I'm drunk, and I'm still me. And I tell a story. And the story is what follows. And what follows is what has already happened. And what has already happened is a story waiting to happen. And the story waiting to happen is what follows. And what follows is the story that has not happened yet. And the story that has not happened yet, although having already happened in practice, has not happened yet as a story.
And, what to leave. And what to leave? What to leave in. What to leave out. That is a story. Historique. History. Story. History. His story. Fiction. Nonfiction. No such thing. History is the way we tell it, and so there is only fiction.
Who said that? Someone. Someone in college. Several people, probably, but someone notable becomes famous for saying it. And so the fiction continues. Absolutism. Does it exist? Maybe.
That's the best answer for everything. Maybe. May be. (It) may be.
Is there a may bee? There's a May flower. Not that's. Not that is. Not there's. Not there is. That may be. May be a may bee and may be a Mayflower.
Not everything. Something else. Something else. And so it begins, and so it ends, and so it continues. From. The start. Does it bore you? Does it bore? Nothing bores. You, my friend, are understimulated, and that is your fault. Or not. It is not a fault if you are okay with your understimulation, but it is your fault if you blame a thing, calling it 'boring.' You just don't care enough to interest yourself in it.
And, you are not my friend. One day, may bee. One day.
And, if you continue reading, gentle reader, you may find your interest. But don't take my word for it. This would be a good time for you to recite a particular short ditty, pre-cellphone fanfare, from your childhood that you have conveniently stored in your ephemeral repertoire. Reading rainbow's da-DUNH-DUNH! And you recite it in your head, and some ugly fat woman in pink sweatshop sweatpants from Wal-mart gives you a menacing look, or maybe that's just her normal look, you can't tell, and your eyes follow your dog's, directly down the line of the brown leather leash, its imperfections shining black in the sun, and land right on a tiny yellow stain on those pink pants, right on the leg as she passes you. Mass displacing air on a timeline equals draft.
Chapter 4
16 January 2013
And you find yourself thinking of the draft as you drink the Hefenweisen, dangling your legs from the barstool in the dim yellow light reflecting a sickly hue from ancient brick and hewn black oak, the kind from mediaeval winebarrels: that pink, that leg, that menacing face with the wilty warty complexion magnified at least ten times by thick, uncolored, translucently rimmed Wal-mart glasses atop a Miracle Gro'n mushroom of a nose.
You find yourself. Your self. You find. Something hums. A buzz, if you will, that you never noticed since the second day you started coming here. A generator that's kicked on. Maybe. May bee. MMMMMMay. Ayyyyyy. Bee. B. B. It shuts off. Click. And then, a hollow gunshot between two gongs.
The break makes you aware of time, the way it ends sometimes, abruptly. And, out of tired habit, you look at your new SLIT phone, so-called because it only weighs negative .0059 ounces, a hairline slit. It's the next best thing, so they say. They. But it sucks. It doesn't have BTS. So you have to raise your finger. One Fifty Eight.
You come here to stimulate your olfactory manufacturing plant of organic ideas. And to contemplate, lately, critical mass. A fat, pink, critical mass. That displaces everything. Every thing. Except.
Except the thought of maybees. Except the yellow draft. Except our ephemeral repertoire. Except the drone of the metal machine now matriculating into that repertoire as the Sound of the May Be(e). Except.
Except a small gnat gazing at your black boots dangling just above the mediaeval floor, from a metal light dangling from a rafter.
These days. These. I'm in a daze. I'm in the park blocks, a strange neon green glow in the city trees. It's five years after. Five? I'm how old? Thirty-one. Thirty and one. And a half. Half a year. And then some. Everyone rounds. Round up. Round down. Round. Age is round. Plaid-wearing hipsters congregate on the steps of the library. The last three years don't count. Count. I count them, and they do count, but where are they? These hipster boys, scruffy, dirt-matted dreds, mild laughter, sitting Indian-style, others dangling legs off the marble ledge. Hold on to it. I pass them, walk past the characters on the streets. I stare as I pass, and my eyes follow, naturally, behind me, at the beautiful young faces. I see up ahead a place where a couple park benches are waiting with no people around. I walk faster to get to this spot, walking through people, averting my tear-drenched eyes.
"Spare some change?" On the ground, a group of homeless kids, looking oddly out of a Dickens novel dressed in dirty overalls matching other shades of brown, and woolen caps. They look happy with their dog friend laying amongst them, and one of the boys has a guitar playing acoustic punk, a girl sings.
I smile reassuringly, thinking of how red my eyes must look. "Sorry," is all I say. I look back. I stop about ten feet away, at the intersection. I don't have any place to go. I want to ask to sit with them. To know how to be one of them. But I keep going, instead. Instead. To sit on one of those secluded benches across the street. My legs just move. I feel dizzy by the time I reach the bench, and I plop down my canvas bag, and, after watching a few people a street over, minding their own business, as they walk, I lay on my back and rest my head on my bag to see the sky, to see up rather than down, to see somewhere else rather than here, to see the sun and hope it blinds me. There are yellow and red roses blooming in the middle of the strip, shaded by elms. I see similar scenes every day here, and in the city where I'm from. This street today, in the park yesterday, in a bar. I don't know what I'm doing tonight. Where I'm going to sleep.
This is a place where people play chess. The city has provided metal chess boards, to encourage community recreation. Creation and recreation.
The raindrops slide off the warped checkered metal, as if they have a mind to keep dropping, as they have done for centuries in this forest town.
*****
I went into the local library in St. Louis that I had walked into a hundred thousand times. Right down the street from my high school, and the junior high, located all on the same block, a little school on the edge of the city that was so small its board of directors was debating, briefly while I was in the seventh grade, after I had just moved there, whether it would merge with the nearby larger district that had a swimming pool and football team.
I was there to spend another monotonous afternoon checking e-mail, to see if I had any responses from anyone on a support board who knew where I could stay. I made it there, barely feeling capable of pedaling the bike that wasn't even mine.
Prologue
These days. It's hit or miss. The way I pull my pants off. I try every possible way until they're off. Pull from the knees first, whatever's within reach while laying down flat on my back on the floor. Even though it doesn't work. I envy the guys who pull my pants off from the feet right away, eliminating that unnecessary and awkward preliminary step searching for the right way. They just know. Jump right to it. Something so simple: pulling pants off. I've done it thousands of times to be 31. But I still can't remember how I do it. A new struggle every time. That's the way I like it. I guess.
I try to remember what else I can. Spontanaeity. Creation. Such are words. That pop. While I listen to scratchy ambient lines of anonymous music, an introspective male's voice speaking through minimalistic independent voices: a subtle bass line providing stucture to the contrapuntal violinage at random points on that constant timeline.
And it makes me contemplate what music should have been to the Maya, in a place located, as is mine, on a major natural vortex, where time was not linear, but a circle, where the calendar, the most advanced of any civilization, comprised circles within circles. And they moved. A pattern cut out from the fabric of space-time.
Chapter One
01 JANUARY 2013
The ball has dropped. It's gone through the hole. The Milky Way perfectly aligned. But all that 2012 hype--turned into maybes, heavy and slight, depending--depending on who you read or talk to, is at its peak. We're still waiting. It's the Y2K of the new decade. The 9eleven of the previous one. I wonder what it will be in the 2020s.
In the meantime, though, I just write. I live. Live and write.
"No worries," they say. They. I say it too. But, if it helps, I catch myself. I become self-aware. But usually when it's 2 LATE. I mis-spell on purpose. It is fashionable to be unthinking. It's cute. Like a baby.
That's supposing babies should also numb their minds, suppress their cries with rubbery nipples affixed to pacifiers. And think of goo-goos and being like the Communist cardboard cut-out cartoon Bob the Builder. Bob. The Builder. And be mesmerized with twirly mobiles of rainbows and pink elephants. In stead. Instead of diaper rash and diarrhea. Instead of useful language for hot and cold, day, night, they are offered useless words such as mom-ee. Dad-ee. No one tries to make them understand they are alone in the world.
I rethink: 'No one' is usually inaccurate, and I cannot make that assumption logical; someone always surprises me.
In stead. Instead of "Day" and "Night," what if babies were given charcoal and eggshell and taught to see the difference between an egg shell and snow, and how both are white? And see that an egg, like a snowflake, is unlike any other of its kind. And how the creators of the color eggshell apparently weren't thinking of brown eggs.
In stead. Instead of "White and "Black," what if babies were taught to see how the yellow labrador's nose turns, bespeckled, slowly to pink from brown, when the weather turns, bespeckled, slowly to cold from hot-ish. How summer has cool days, and winter has warmth. How cool is sought in summer, and hot is sought in winter. And how spring and fall are the in-between planetary phases, a circle. And circles within circles. And they move. That is what they should see when they look up at the twirly mobiles with rainbows and pink elephants, above their sequestered wooden pens.
Chapter Two
11 JANUARY 2013
The fan blows softly on breeze mode, which sounds like it's wearing out the motor to strain, holding back the breeze to replicate a gale or gust, a heave-ho. I wake up irritated. The blinds are closed over the glass door. I believe I had left them open. Yes, I did, I remember. In fact, the sliding door was open also to let in the cool night air. I always sleep with the door open to let in the cool night air. It's too hot in here. After a slight hung-over achiness in my head subsides a bit, I sit up, twist my neck to see the time: shadowed roman numerals. There's a glare. I can't read. I like numbers on a clock. Letters in books. Roman numerals in Latin.
I would check my clock radio, the one I bought with my own 20 bucks when I was 12, after saving up, my first bought possession, a clock radio. Something that made me feel grown up. Responsible. The clock for appointments and important events. The radio for ambient classical tones coming through a tinny scratchy speaker, soundwaves compressed and rarefacted. Circles. Circles that move. On a timeline.
I would glance, naturally, at the flashing red numbers on that digital antique, but it sits unplugged on the floor, its black cord writhing around itself, beside the cardboard box I'm currently using as a nightstand behind the shared couch.
I have to get out of here. I think. I scratch away the crust from around my eyes. I have to go pee. I kick the blankets. They fly up, still on. Too much work. Frustrating. I get violent with them, like I have to do sometimes with those psychos who at times enter in and hold onto my arms and won't let me go.
That literally happened one time. He said he cared about me. That's why he wouldn't let me go out the door of his apartment at 2 a.m. when I needed out. That's why he threatened karate. That's why I dragged him down the stairs outside the apartments. Drag. More like walked, pulling, resisting, to his tight bruise-imprint clutch on my right upper arm. His cries. The cops came. The latinas watching on their doorsteps at the bottom of the stairs, offering me agua in a crystal glass. Funny, the cops thought we were a gay couple breaking up. Drama. Queens and their drama.
"Doesn't he look like Pan?" I said. "You know, the Greek god? Those Roman features. Bacchus, I guess it would be."
The officer laughed from his boy skin barely hidden beneath a halcyone beard, trimmed neatly, classic GQ. "Yeah, oh my God, he does! You should definitely keep your distance. There's clearly something wrong with this guy. He's your friend?"
"Well, I thought he was," I say, twisting the skin back above my elbow to check out the damage.
Chapter 3
15 January 2013
All these pages. Torn edges, some. Canary yellow, extra-long looseleaf. Loose. Leaf.
I never see yellow birds anymore.
I don't even know what I'm saying. Or why you should care. I'm drunk. If I wasn't, I might not be typing. I might be telling a different story. Somewhat skewed. Somewhat. But, as it is, I'm drunk, and I'm still me. And I tell a story. And the story is what follows. And what follows is what has already happened. And what has already happened is a story waiting to happen. And the story waiting to happen is what follows. And what follows is the story that has not happened yet. And the story that has not happened yet, although having already happened in practice, has not happened yet as a story.
And, what to leave. And what to leave? What to leave in. What to leave out. That is a story. Historique. History. Story. History. His story. Fiction. Nonfiction. No such thing. History is the way we tell it, and so there is only fiction.
Who said that? Someone. Someone in college. Several people, probably, but someone notable becomes famous for saying it. And so the fiction continues. Absolutism. Does it exist? Maybe.
That's the best answer for everything. Maybe. May be. (It) may be.
Is there a may bee? There's a May flower. Not that's. Not that is. Not there's. Not there is. That may be. May be a may bee and may be a Mayflower.
Not everything. Something else. Something else. And so it begins, and so it ends, and so it continues. From. The start. Does it bore you? Does it bore? Nothing bores. You, my friend, are understimulated, and that is your fault. Or not. It is not a fault if you are okay with your understimulation, but it is your fault if you blame a thing, calling it 'boring.' You just don't care enough to interest yourself in it.
And, you are not my friend. One day, may bee. One day.
And, if you continue reading, gentle reader, you may find your interest. But don't take my word for it. This would be a good time for you to recite a particular short ditty, pre-cellphone fanfare, from your childhood that you have conveniently stored in your ephemeral repertoire. Reading rainbow's da-DUNH-DUNH! And you recite it in your head, and some ugly fat woman in pink sweatshop sweatpants from Wal-mart gives you a menacing look, or maybe that's just her normal look, you can't tell, and your eyes follow your dog's, directly down the line of the brown leather leash, its imperfections shining black in the sun, and land right on a tiny yellow stain on those pink pants, right on the leg as she passes you. Mass displacing air on a timeline equals draft.
Chapter 4
16 January 2013
And you find yourself thinking of the draft as you drink the Hefenweisen, dangling your legs from the barstool in the dim yellow light reflecting a sickly hue from ancient brick and hewn black oak, the kind from mediaeval winebarrels: that pink, that leg, that menacing face with the wilty warty complexion magnified at least ten times by thick, uncolored, translucently rimmed Wal-mart glasses atop a Miracle Gro'n mushroom of a nose.
You find yourself. Your self. You find. Something hums. A buzz, if you will, that you never noticed since the second day you started coming here. A generator that's kicked on. Maybe. May bee. MMMMMMay. Ayyyyyy. Bee. B. B. It shuts off. Click. And then, a hollow gunshot between two gongs.
The break makes you aware of time, the way it ends sometimes, abruptly. And, out of tired habit, you look at your new SLIT phone, so-called because it only weighs negative .0059 ounces, a hairline slit. It's the next best thing, so they say. They. But it sucks. It doesn't have BTS. So you have to raise your finger. One Fifty Eight.
You come here to stimulate your olfactory manufacturing plant of organic ideas. And to contemplate, lately, critical mass. A fat, pink, critical mass. That displaces everything. Every thing. Except.
Except the thought of maybees. Except the yellow draft. Except our ephemeral repertoire. Except the drone of the metal machine now matriculating into that repertoire as the Sound of the May Be(e). Except.
Except a small gnat gazing at your black boots dangling just above the mediaeval floor, from a metal light dangling from a rafter.
These days. These. I'm in a daze. I'm in the park blocks, a strange neon green glow in the city trees. It's five years after. Five? I'm how old? Thirty-one. Thirty and one. And a half. Half a year. And then some. Everyone rounds. Round up. Round down. Round. Age is round. Plaid-wearing hipsters congregate on the steps of the library. The last three years don't count. Count. I count them, and they do count, but where are they? These hipster boys, scruffy, dirt-matted dreds, mild laughter, sitting Indian-style, others dangling legs off the marble ledge. Hold on to it. I pass them, walk past the characters on the streets. I stare as I pass, and my eyes follow, naturally, behind me, at the beautiful young faces. I see up ahead a place where a couple park benches are waiting with no people around. I walk faster to get to this spot, walking through people, averting my tear-drenched eyes.
"Spare some change?" On the ground, a group of homeless kids, looking oddly out of a Dickens novel dressed in dirty overalls matching other shades of brown, and woolen caps. They look happy with their dog friend laying amongst them, and one of the boys has a guitar playing acoustic punk, a girl sings.
I smile reassuringly, thinking of how red my eyes must look. "Sorry," is all I say. I look back. I stop about ten feet away, at the intersection. I don't have any place to go. I want to ask to sit with them. To know how to be one of them. But I keep going, instead. Instead. To sit on one of those secluded benches across the street. My legs just move. I feel dizzy by the time I reach the bench, and I plop down my canvas bag, and, after watching a few people a street over, minding their own business, as they walk, I lay on my back and rest my head on my bag to see the sky, to see up rather than down, to see somewhere else rather than here, to see the sun and hope it blinds me. There are yellow and red roses blooming in the middle of the strip, shaded by elms. I see similar scenes every day here, and in the city where I'm from. This street today, in the park yesterday, in a bar. I don't know what I'm doing tonight. Where I'm going to sleep.
This is a place where people play chess. The city has provided metal chess boards, to encourage community recreation. Creation and recreation.
The raindrops slide off the warped checkered metal, as if they have a mind to keep dropping, as they have done for centuries in this forest town.
*****
I went into the local library in St. Louis that I had walked into a hundred thousand times. Right down the street from my high school, and the junior high, located all on the same block, a little school on the edge of the city that was so small its board of directors was debating, briefly while I was in the seventh grade, after I had just moved there, whether it would merge with the nearby larger district that had a swimming pool and football team.
I was there to spend another monotonous afternoon checking e-mail, to see if I had any responses from anyone on a support board who knew where I could stay. I made it there, barely feeling capable of pedaling the bike that wasn't even mine.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
that one day
i. it's five o'clock,
the sun is still up,
the birds are awake
to me, they
create as i do, in a
certain light.
ii. all in a day's time,
i see several crows. one is cawing
on a telephone wire, while i capture it
on my cell phone cam. it's for you,
she says, and she takes me to a mask shop
on belmont, and after passing a mural where
a blackbird peeks through a window,
we come to a mask shop, the belfry,
and a raven mask, with black beak and real feathers, glossy.
the dark shop, closed in the night, and a glare on the window from the street light above, and she says, i would never wear that, it's too scary or powerful, and i reflect on that same spot, on that wire, where that black bird cawed at me, and i tell her about it, because i lost my cell phone.
the sun is still up,
the birds are awake
to me, they
create as i do, in a
certain light.
ii. all in a day's time,
i see several crows. one is cawing
on a telephone wire, while i capture it
on my cell phone cam. it's for you,
she says, and she takes me to a mask shop
on belmont, and after passing a mural where
a blackbird peeks through a window,
we come to a mask shop, the belfry,
and a raven mask, with black beak and real feathers, glossy.
the dark shop, closed in the night, and a glare on the window from the street light above, and she says, i would never wear that, it's too scary or powerful, and i reflect on that same spot, on that wire, where that black bird cawed at me, and i tell her about it, because i lost my cell phone.
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