All day long a bird sings there, and a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times; the place is silent and aware, it has had its scenes, its joys and crimes, but that is its own affair.


I despise growth. The elongation of limbs, opinion, and poetic genre, it’s all on my list of “must avoid” along with poison ivy, fat-free starbucks, and people who use any abbreviation for the word “sketchy” (again, you know who you are).

The warm electric blanket of me-now is being slipped away, and it’s a frightening feeling. I was comfortable with being half formed.

Yesterday, I woke up restless. Yesterday, I woke up aware of the restlessness that has marooned itself to my shoulder, that has taken up residence in one small space in my brain, the disconcerted agitation that has probably been stirring for a while now. Yet what is it bending me towards?

You, always you, I suppose. The one thing that concocts a stillness (stillness is beauty, always) One fermentation of remedy and reason, the after-glow of climbing stairs and the linking thought from words to images, and all those things that you are. (you know: who you are) so I hardly have to tell you this:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.


To the one who took me east and away: you know who you are. To the one who calculated gas mileage and sea rifts and city buses and cigar lustre. (We will wander and walk, you and I) To the ornament giver, poet, peace-maker, piece-gluer, and to the most beautiful voice I have ever heard. (My whiskey, from time to time) To the hand-holder, tender-hearted, the idealist who cares for everything, intensely. I will only let you love loneliness so much. (Thank you for years) For toussaint, for the words you've written. (Life, after all, smells of lilacs and brine)

Nothing before, nothing behind, the steps of faith fall upon the seeming void and find the rock beneath.


Lately the candle has burnt a little higher than is natural, just for me, I think. I can't help but wonder there is something in the room that hems it in, warmed with the transparent stadium of careful hands, telling me it's okay, it's okay to melt a little. It's okay to melt entirely.

Lately there has been song where I preferred silence. Yet as soon as the music hits I remember...I hate silence. I only tolerate it when I'm tired of humming the riffs, and that's the point where I need someone singing in my ear. Suddenly, I'm harmonizing, emptying, and folding in.

Lately I've been reminded that everything happens for a reason. And it's better to fight for that reason that to inject the anesthetic, because you aren't living if you aren't feeling.

Lately, good things have happened. To me, for me, near me, with me. And I am grateful. :)

I’m in your arms, on the ship’s bow, where there’s no breeze. There isn’t a ship, we’re in a car, and I’m only holding your hand. Though we are not in a car, we are in our favorite café, and you lean in to touch me. We have no favorite café. You aren’t near, you stare at me instead. There is no conversation. You are speaking, not speaking, you’re yelling. You aren’t holding me, you’re pushing me. There is nothing whole here. The ocean and the asphalt resemble broken glass. The menu isn’t because it’s tile, dirty tile, that we rarely clean. Grass that isn’t tile. You’re laying not next to me and you’re almost but never stroking my face because there is no place for you to touch because I’m turned away and looking after you. I’m tasting the breeze. There is no breeze. So I’m seeing the no waves and never seagulls on omitted ocean, in absence.

first word, yours.

newspaper. quiver midnights, caved pie center, knotted twine. paint set, yellow ribbon, parenthesis, floor. grape stem, hospice tile. tear soaked divorce papers, expensive mosaic with gold lineament myths, spidering light through drying photographs. rapunzel. licorice, an artifact, new sneakers, aborigine bowl, dust, hand cream, sirens. matches, a lighthouse blinking lust. names, sandpaper ornaments, lullaby, fever. winding hallway with geometric mirrors, casserole, warm clothes, an engine that runs on hickory, white space, my father’s pain. chalk outline, the dime I recognize, ninth inning, what the tenant forgot, secret knock. a deck of cards missing spades

the swingset

And yet 'tis flesh and blood alone that makes her so divine


I’m worried about her.

I didn’t think about lung cancer when we dragged on those first cigars, I didn’t mind the frostbite that teased after maine’s ocean, I didn’t linger on the newdeath or olddeath but I’m contemplating herdeath. I’m sure she’ll be fine but there are far too many oursongs to risk the slow reaction to a faster falling.

I love you like I love you

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe, as a calm darkens among water-lights.


You know that feeling. It's when you are so nervous and anxious that your stomach contorts and you can't eat anything, or sleep very well, or even speak to someone without a pained hand pressed to your side?

Well, it's gone now.

Today one of my friends slipped a card under my door. Feel better, it said, I love you. Today my friend Ashley called me about seventeen times to make sure I was okay. Carolyn leaves me songs on my answering machine. Today, someone held me close and told me that he wouldn't hurt me. And something broke and was pinned back up, instantaneously.

And all is well and not well and all is fine yet a little frayed

(but well)

I am (Jack's) spilled kerosene lamp. There is nothing left to burn


This creative writing homework takes me hours, but I love it. When I'm writing, and not just blogging like this but really writing where the words blur together and the sound is a moist and plush and mine

In the fall, I am going back to Africa. I am going back to the tree that was hit by lightning, and the hibiscus I pressed to my face, the honey suckle, the bare feet, the orange dirt and begging children. I am going back to the place I forgot so I could get on with my life, but that I need back now. I need it back.

When I wake up tomorrow, I will still be tired. More, maybe. This is the first time I have ever had this sensation, where I feel my head tensing into a crouch for the dreams that will enervate and then almost-linger .

And somewhere in my conscious there are lush tropical leaves that unfold like so many wings

Your spine groans
under weighed
sonnets, wash
mud crowns and
salt rivets
piece shells with
glue. I will
love the lines
of living

i shall imagine life is not worth dying, if (and when) roses complain their beauties are in vain, but though mankind persuaded itself that every weed's a roses,roses(you feel certain)will only smile


The one night I finally get to sleep early the fire alarm wakes me up. But I stayed in bed and told my roommate to call me if there was really a fire--good thing there wasn't because my cell was on vibrate...

Last night I curled my hair and applied the rudimentary lip gloss, and ended up hanging out with a few of the guys on my floor before I went out. They are the more accepted group, the frat boys, the traditionally cooler, faster, stronger, better looking collection of individuals. The group that I am spend half my time condescending, and the other half desperately hard to impress. I listened to their conversation, though, and it occurred to me, these people are not only tragically incomplete like the rest of us, but they just refuse to admit it. Their conversation:


Guy A: "Dude, I really like the way your shirt gets darker and lighter depending where you stand."

Guy B: "Thanks, man, this is a sweet shirt."

*silence*

Guy B: That's an awesome belt.

Guy C: Yeah, I got it for like 15 bucks. And it's Banana Republic!

Guy B: That's sweet, dude!

Guy A: It's gunna be so awesome when you get the one in that you ordered online.

Guy C: Yeah, I know, I'm psyched.

(Guy B's cell phone rings)

Guy A: Who is it?

Guy B: It's Dana.

Guy A: Who, fugly Dana?

Guy B: No, dude, Gamma Phi Dana!

Guy A: Man, how'd he pull a Gamma Phi???

(Guy B leaves)

Guy A: Seriously, he dresses like crap. And yet he still manages to get the cutest girls.

Guy C: I know, I don't get it.

Guy A: Dude, we really need to get you laid tonight, since it's your birthday tomorrow.

Guy C: Yeah, but I'll never sink to a Gamma Delta Beta. I'll probably pick up some bar chick.

Guy A: Like that fugly girl who came and sat next to us last time?

Guy C: I thought she was pretty cute.

Guy A: Dude, no way, that girl was FUGLY.

Guy C: Whatever, man. Hand me the red bull.

Guy A: Good choice. Sweet glass, by the way!

Guy C: Yeah, although it's kind of a crime to put vodka and red bull in a Jack Daniels glass.

Guy A: Dude, it's your birthday, do what you want!

(I leave, not knowing whether to laugh or cry)


Ummm, sorry I didn't spare you the fugly details, believe it or not, this is the sensored version. And I thought to myself, I hate it when I'm in this terrible thick of things. I couldn't be happy, I couldn't even pretend to be happy. This IS the vast carelessness in the Great Gatsby. It's here, and I want nothing of it.

So, on goes the continual challenge of finding people who care about life. Right now my only task is to remember that they are out there.

Trite diesel flakes, you’re catching them on your tongue
in tar winter.
I’m underpinning falling threads when a misguided chisel
nicks your ear.
Or maybe I was just lonely, wanting a piece of you
on the floor.
The world is asking you to lie honestly
Wondering, I’ve been looking on through excavated blinds
Is it snow that’s catching shadows,
shadows from pressed finger bars
flesh thin pins lacerating this soft translucence
The dark heap of my profile,
puncturing into pitch a night that would otherwise
be white.

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget they are horses.
It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon. That means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.




The criss cross of fingers behind my head and the soft cotton sheets my mother washed once and the brick walls and the words:

into the strenuous briefness, into the strenuous briefness, into the strenuous briefness...

It's late now, but my day was so beautiful I'm having trouble sleeping. It's a delectable mangle of memory now, hookah smoke and classroom carpet, and I'm drunk on words and the world they open up inside of me. My melted recollection is of a wonderful professor, sternly telling the class that if we had a problem with people fucking or killing we should get out of his class. He read the poem written above here and made it the most delicate, exquisite, moving organ, pockets of pieces of fragments of little everythings

Can I write? Am I any good at it? And if I am, do have anything to say or the courage to say it?

into the strenuous briefness

Carolyn and I discovered that poem on the road somewhere on the East Coast, and we KNEW that it would change us. "Read it again," she breathed, and I did, and I did, and I now know its edges and shadows. These words will change you, the professor said, if you just leave the window cracked. And if you do, perhaps it will be pushed open...

So this is love
Premise and therefore collides
Imprints on my otherwise
Significance in yes,besides

So this is
Now for always must is was
Mystic semi-toxic buzz
If in and, with joined because

So this
Trembling truly, seizured sincerely
Tangled darling, electric dearly
Net nevermind and infinite nearly

So

You think (you think) forgetful, you blink
never the same river twice.


The One common substance in the universe, the pith of atoms, quarks, unraveled string theory: all is fire. Change is what he meant but you can certainly appreciate Heraclitus's flare for the dramatics.

I woke up this morning and realized that I'm different than I used to be. My hands pressed on the steering wheel, humming third eye blind, still wearing the strapless purple dress from the wave of New Years Eve parties... And I miss what I was, and it frightens me what I am. Recently there was a night where my friend, drunk and depressed over some recent things in his life he felt like were his fault, was so proud, so proud of the slivers all over his arms from the knife he found in the kitchen. And he cut, cut, cut himself because he felt that he needed to be punished, he needed to feel pain for who he was. And those deep, thin lacerations spidered up his arms and all over my soul. He kept telling me not to cry but I was so angry with him, and so angry at pain that I couldn't. We tried to put him to sleep but I saw him doing pushups long after, over and over again. So many precise, crimson streaks like prison bars and red ink stains. He had been so proud of what he did until I yelled at him and pushed him and just cried.

Never the same river

Things can be so breathtakingly beautiful and obliteratingly cruel. In the movie American Beauty one boy stares in the face of a dead man and you see his eyes glaze over in fascination, because he sees something terribly wonderful. And I wonder who we are, you know? To be capable of feeling and inflicting and vindicating and exulting. Grace, mercy, hope...these things may be freely given, but they must be claimed. Harder that it might sound, I think.

(Fire and rivers and you)