witnesses [why is this trite?]

the wonderful demons

The wonderful demons
Ogres of japan
At least in your mail to Turtle Island
How far
Sing o sing us into existence this dance
To occident your orient
And hush your face in the basin
That new world wastin’
In the west where the rain tapers
In tilting the dip
Of the 100th meridian

Where the saints grow alfalfa and kiss
Casino concrete
If you can believe it
Remind recall invest if you can invest it
Into Ue that went marching south from
China
Disaster disaster my master
Bumming out the Koreans
Just leave us alone and see if we
Don’t mind it
A bit
Empirial Shang Kai Tease

You please please Chinese
Gimme my city back prune
Stroke won’t write no more
Will come back to myself involved self involved
My german mostly fingers occupado
Mestizo es verdad
Bloody
Bloody
Cromwell
The german invasion of texas
Scandanavian conquest of
Politic pose prose on silver toes
Of tax deists
Rationalize your fathers’ fathers’ fathers’
Founding faults.

Granted granite pomegranate
Chickens cows
A little orchard
Vegetables
In stumpland grand grand
Down to build San Francisco
That’s where the lumber went
You shaky waist Lutheran you

Heifer heaven hollow
Hand on golden heifer stone
Done done turn turn
Getting up
Getting up
Getting up
To Buddhism teens would call
Seekers on the way
Who owns those shit
To pigs
In the river spirit mountain
They can see you brother
See right through ya man

Rocks and trees have sweat lodge eyes
Wildcat bones
Wildcat bones
Wildcat bones
Down underneath Mount Shasta
Until human beings
Come to their seeming senses

For more dangerous observations
Testing testing
Loyalties
Rice shot shot gun
Proposition of the modern type
Deity-free
Ancor field
Yama yana yama yana yana yana
My local gods goddesses
Go with the flow
Easy brother easy
Toilet gods elite
Your street leads to sutra elimination
Nation
Convertible zen men other
Who why who I was myself
In a larger set wet dare
To worry rational royality

Roshi roshi roshi
Rensai rensai rensai
Sota sota sota
Inka inka inka

Too much coyote to become a monk again
I’d better not go on.

I simply want to know that you are

this warm sleep blanket next to and skin still breathing when you wake,
a hospital of ladders, bind and twist to the very small diagnosis
blood tube form name scrawled nurse label lens bulb visit you remote
shrink shrink shrinking along shrink shrink shrink down
to passengers

DNARNADNARNADNARNADNARNADNARNADNARNADNARNADNARNADNARNADNARNADNARNA

perfectly transmitted let us hope and hope
and hope and hope and hope
let us hold and hope tightly
so tightly,
that hope is life itself,
it is a child,
a grandchild,
and quiet as joy
as joy as you please

freedom, a way forward we think, a way in, a ways to go
I worry

and I could not take you in, big everywhere everything big
fat pop frying pan stick a.m. missed you with butter, coffee,
bread, milk, egg, avocado, corn, mushroom, parmesan, honey,
meats, small small cherry tomato, basil, caked on plate drying photograph
still

I have a box of you near my bed, and
I worry

to the Save JKS Players

that we are sculpting sculpting
preconstructed space
a line and bulbed finger curve
down the position position
of the tongue in exhalations

that we will be brought
in some uncertain future
to a place of deep remembrance,
scaffolding to paint paint in celluloid
in that way we can be made to
remember with another's fingers

[Artifice is also a truth.
The audience also the protagonist.]

that we might mourn, and sleep, and gnash.
and gnash.

bellevue rd and nothing to see--

and that was littleton
in the dark
making sara's tall skin freckling the eyes to thin
kiss in the watery pool spotlight

:that she was as you inflexible remain:

I hear she is a mother now.
That gladdened highway, all beckoned
the broken columns of college.

Ey, the broken collars,
Ho, and lingering guitar necks in her name,

she the
artist hand defying that mother's
beorne fences crossed of christ in
manifold!
in epic!

what to west mountain ocean spirit thing
to burrow to limestone texas and
fashion blackened chains to twisted live oak
flash flood gauge cactus collections
palms in the walkways
never in hallways
and once along that bright body

she makes with you the silver end
of a moonlight trend to ecstasy
a sorrow recalled at the height
release!
how you coil into your warm present
just begging to forget

it takes her mouth to form your name

New Ireland

The firmament of finding shoes, whole pictographic notebooks, mirrors, jade and emeralds, fastened belt-buckles, remodeled kitchens-- the old appliances lift in our homeland-- manifestos, new potatoes, boats that bring us close in to the rocks, wet salt ropes to ascend, cliffs' spray to negotiate/scramble/claw.

Michael Collins in his previously undonned black suit and hat, no one left to protects, defend, speak for, die for, die for, die for--we all have arrived. Are made whole. At once. Again. Continuously in this place meadow and new. Begin and proceed.

There is nothing new under our sun but our hands in praise of daughters, us, we, lead one each another to new dark lands as feversome as the last.

She is the word signifying a moment in time, darkly scanning the heavens for a release from sealed lips, the rough winds we use to push her through rooms of you’s– she suddenly halts on the ends of our tongues, just behind the top row of teeth, and lingers. She is the word for an unexpected brightness, an inconsistency measurable to within a second of our blotting her out with our giant fat asses, just trying to scoot between. She is the name of that pull we sense when we stand at the ocean, or on ships, at night.

What she wants: to know her name. She is already advancing across the sky







Be the subject of gravity and the object of looking longly. You are held within the same fabric as she, but you have a different name.

Forget about your own name. No one cares.

We shouldn’t shy away from things just because they are clichés…but maybe we can do better.
She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes, that is we will see her first upon the mountain’s peak. And we will feel her entering our throats, and we will want all at once to speak her as a noun and verb, qualifier and particle, adverbial and conjunction.







Oh she is the MOON!! The moon. The moon. The moon. Of course she is the moon, she is the name of the moon. The name of the moon. But if the moon is a thing, and its name is “moon,” and if she is this name, then “moon” is not her name. Her name is what names the moon. I am only just arriving at this thought. I’m sorry if you’ve been waiting long.







She shall have to look for a driver’s license, a cable bill, a tag in her underwear.
She shall have to lean in closely to hear—causing massive tidal disturbances, shipwrecks, tsunamis, the submersion of archipelagos in the west—but she must ask us.
She must expand her place on the page.







She sits moonzing on the parchment. Nouning her every moonly position. It moons a dance.







She begins to wonder if the way to learn her name is to follow the distinct abstract forms scattered in the ocean after a tremendous run upon the rocks. That is, we do not see her wondering. We see her recognizing the shapes in the water, then we see her diving in after what looks like the mainsail.







She is already wet, we cannot wet her a second time. Perhaps it hangs in the bubbles that float relatively freely above the word of her name, and the words of the names of everything. She is the moon as sister, she is the moon of memory, how many copies of her have we seen? She is the sad white moon. She is the moon of wolves, and so the moon of vicious men, and so the moon of blood, and so the moon of origins, sustenance, regrets that we chew and tear.







[You missed her.] Well she was there. And she looks like your mother and she is very concerned about all the things you want in life. She told me so. What’s important to you? Children? She told me she loves her children. Not only that, she loves your children, and she will do anything to keep your children safe. You can understand that can’t you? If I had only told you that she remembers her daughter by opening a blue diary to the page marked by a crushed violet, and reading aloud the words “tomorrow is almost here, and then we’re diving into the ocean, but I can’t sleep,”—that she keeps this diary with her and rarely opens it during the day—well then you could not have managed to be her, not even for a moment. She is making models of herself out of Styrofoam, and plans to display them for everyone. She won’t need to leave the house ever again, and we can be satisfied for a while, until the novelty wears off.







We will have her reach into a hat and pull out a name like “Julia.” We will have her smile and hold it close to her heart. We will have her warm and understood. Do you understand? She will finally know the mystery. And we can forget about boats and bubbles and moons, oh especially moons! And just focus on how this moment can be placed on a shelf, in a book filled with other such moments, someone having scribbled a caption next to our faces.

It reads: “Not Windows!”







Why, she wonders aloud, the less like my body is my body the more it rests. The moon is not as bright as a blue candle. The moon does not fall on, look on, shine on, shine on. Moon is moon. Moon = moon. Now relate this.







And so she is the name of the moon. Julia, or something. She learns this by mistake, but she was also trying to find her name. A happy accident. Just like her children. All of whom need names immediately.







She tried to kiss her son, but he was cold.
She buried her daughter in fire. Julia the mother, moon the devourer.
She wants to be.
And when we comprehend existence, the scene will end. Or else when we are finally denied that comprehension. Either way.







We do not believe in dreams, only things that are like them. She is after all only a symbol, her name only a metaphor, not even a substance. Yes, this is very much like a dream.

the practice is a sorry self

of the absent black Takamine
and soft fingertips
they used to pick tangerines
useless, riddled with flies

of tar pit tracks and sabres
wool to wear in an ice age
and hardened blisters we
climbed, rocks
oh the rocks!

of foxes feet in the cement
and we always lay flat hands
on misshapen earth to remember
that we once loved in a real place

The Real Places, such real places
we have been! Rusted car doors and wet leaves
sticking to our ankles, we clung to each other's coats
and
faces,
torn up faces
in the bathroom, on the stairs, we were all wet, all wet and left
with cement on our feet.

they are all the same face
I culled from a dream

the face of all falling faces,
stars shutting off

at the pale twilight,
just going out forever.

that aged bent and spindly traveler
gray
waxy skin and boiling red eyeballs, I will

kill him with smoke!
kill him with liquor!
kill him with rich cheeses
and syrupy sodas!

his death will glance into coffee cups I will take them with milk and

recall

that there is a blankness ahead
as it recedes
into bondages of bandanges
wrapped burns
motorcycle burns
boils on the hand

they butter you like bacon
and they're planning eat your cooked fingers
lapping up grease
and so
coat their
lips and
tongues
in the
latent
pain
of red
and white
sores
and of recalled dreams. Do you need firmer ground to stand on?

muRMur (a sketch)

and in and in to a bRight wheelbaRRow afteRnoon,
is it, all of it, Really?
to lay in the gRass,
no it's not, I have a pass,
scattered gRavelly shoes thin bright
shadows, I am in the low

murmurmurmurmurmurrrrr

close to the gRound
her Musician's chin Resting
on the black body of the guitaR
and I can't heaR heR, but I love heR

haven't had a dRop
the heat dRip of

hot coffee
waRM tongue
cool wind
bRight blasted day...

i don't need to taste it,
the poRcelain scRape of
Mugs And sidewalk ceMent
Makes enough to iMbibe.

joe is like a lion--pondeRing
caRolyn is the Roof of a tRee--editing
and what i Must be is
those scatteRed gRavelly sandals

in the hallelujahs
of iRonic pop songs
the subliMity of tasty sandwiches
Rolled fish pRessed flouR
Rice and
thai beeR laRd
tequila

it must be traveled

I am determined not to leave you messages

and into this illness body I place remembrances
holy, dates and times to match these dates and
times, imagining self as a series of identical
circles. It is not. Rather a coin, caught
describing the curve of a vortex in the wide
museum funnel near representations electronic
what the fly must see with her many little eyes
near La Brea, all this will sink slowly and
viscous into steps untraced, the body of it
filled to calcite bone, life organism, life
recalls organism, life,
I loved you this time last year, this time last
year is not a real thing, nor the year before
nor the year before, but a bookmark, and a
bookmark bought in the store with a repeat
customer card, I will collect ten million words
and none of them were yours

this is where your fingers think of pipes

This is where we come to kiss. And this is where they go to die. And this is where you buried Jasmine, drifting East in a metaphor. This is where she rose from the grave, covered in snow. This is where you saw her ghost. This is where you came in a pillow. This is where you came to die. It is where a baby shoe balances on the knob by the crosswalk. It is where coffee stirs and your fingers think of pipes.

Nervous, slender fingers. Guitar fingers, you think. And the girls who wear long jackets with short skirts in the winter, handing out pamphlets at intersections. Delicate, deliberate fingers. Cold, drinking fingers. The callous on the right middle finger--your pen callous. Your words make alterations to your flesh. These fingers don't take rings. These fingers age without your lover's face to touch.

This is where you will stay. There is no need for stolen moments. Baby, where is your tongue?

On balloon hands. That rubber, stretching and snapping, wet, sputtering, dusty, sticky, static feel. She has been living in those warped and elongated distances. Has begun to believe that you exist without touch.

How dare you try to break that silence. Don't make us laugh. This is where you keep the rest of it to yourself.

As You Begin to Disinhabit the Air

And it was the picture I did not take of the girl at the tea shop that I search for a place to hang on my wall.

That you knew but said nothing.

I will count the times I did not touch your face. The little restaurants we didn't visit in the afternoons. The necklace I meant to place inside a tiny drawer for you to find.

The nouns you would not call me. The verbs of course un-acted.

The window we never found a moment to sit at and watch the rain, which never fell so long as I knew you. Those Texas thunderstorms I recalled but which kept their distance from that room I less than inhabited.

The flower I could not find the moment to place in your hair.

These will all fill the spaces of my new walls, and I will carry them into the town and set them in little paper boats to be carried away past the folks wading in the creek. And I will carve them onto the sides of mountains with a long finger, the one you nearly kissed, but eventually refrained.

You are full of wonderful thoughts you never had, and overflowing with words not spoken.

There is even less air here. Where I am. Perhaps not merely the altitude.

Indorum

The flowers that grow around the city of Indorum are nearly all violets. Scattered among them are a sparse collection of yellow tulips. It must be here that a woman might recline on a soft blanket, spending warm mornings waiting for word from the governor. And, when the evening draws near, it is from this place--among the tulips that the little girl accompanying her has been gathering--that the stars begin to show their brightest. The sky a richer sort of black than we are used to.

When in the absent hours of the day we begin to discuss the mystery of the city's disappearance, it is always with a thought to hold a glass of beer. Our search is not so earnest as we might lead others to think. We have come to believe that she will return in her own time.

And when she does, it will be one of us she chooses to love.

Missed Connections: to the one I forgot out of a dream

I came across you first in the pages of a National Geographic I had held for my grandfather when he went into the operating room. In many important ways, these years later I am still waiting to return it to him, just as he wakes up. I don’t remember what year in college I was rummaging through old things while unpacking into a small apartment, and decided finally to read it, sitting on a pile of blankets and surrounded by boxes and cleaning supplies. I don’t recall if it was your name or your sentence, whether you were the subject or narrator, but it gnawed on me in quiet moments on hot evenings of too much whiskey, and it was in these moments I began to get a picture of you, the way you stand at bars on work nights and complain about the state of the bodies you are delivered, the work you must put into them; even though you once considered this your art, your contribution to the grieving process; your exuberance has faded. Now it is only flesh upon a butcher’s slab, sinews to fill with chemicals, application of delivered clothing and make up, hair—you are digging through mother nature’s sewage. Or the way you order tea only when no one is around to notice.

And only recently, I saw you for the second time in a dream. I felt that I could see everything that you were, and that I held in proper perspective all the minor details of your life, your readings, the boxes in your upstairs closet, but since I woke, I have not been able to remember any particulars of the dream. And so, even revealed, you remain a persistent mystery.

I want to make plans to see you again. I’ll be searching through newspapers, window advertisements, traffic alert screens, something encoded into the horoscopes, something from the one who prepares the damned for judgement. I may or may not check candy wrappers, that all depends on some personal things.

every word i ever loved was composed while waiting

a moon is without memory--regret, love,
it is only gravity, a cause for tides; the earth now oblong and wet

her skin, when it is night. she leans against a light wind--the absent satellite of early morning. waning from recollection, hair stained with coffee.

Leonard emerges after seeming dead, and interrupts everything

I have to find a confidence again in putting words on a page. It’s been too much of a struggle to face a processor document on the computer, so I place small sketches on a blog, or scrawl germs into a journal. It has gone on for nearly four years, and now I am faced with the prospect of being enrolled in a writing program with no sense of who I am as a writer. I am hoping that by buying this large screen, setting it on a good desk, and placing that desk in a space on this planet that holds true beauty and tranquility, that perhaps a music might arise from my attempts at the bigger canvas

—so you have trouble staring at a blank canvas, here, let’s blow it up five times as big, five times the empty, unused space. It will either scare you to death, or you will see the necessity for that canvas to be filled with your ideas. It will be clumsy at first, and dispel yourself of the notion that you will get your confidence back. That writer is gone. He died years ago, and good riddance I say. He was a liar and a brigand, and a poor wordsmith. The one who fills these canvases will plumb his very depths, he will sacrifice, he will love his art and the art of others truly, lie only to kings and gatekeepers, steal only from thieves, and you might call him any rich name you like and adorn him in golden robes, but he will be anything but confident in those words he keeps. It will be the source of his struggle. The reason he will continue striving for better. When I killed this other author, and held his head in my hand as the life left him, staring madly into his face, that he might see the image of his tormentor, that he might die in terror of what he had unleashed, weaved between the lines of narrator and author, and brought forth as his murderer, you did not know then that I was paving the way for this other, golden fellow. You ran from me, even conspired with other writers to have me killed in what turned out to be more than twenty distinct fashions. And you still may not understand, but you soon will.

re: the emailed request

done.

(it was never my intention to offend)

as i pick through letter on the large screen with my fingers

I can see the easel. now placing fingers delicate. The glass surprising and coarse. To make. A canvas to make. Things… whichever things. My things. Stolen things. Misappropriated things. Beautiful things. To dreaming transfer possession waking find them yours. To discern. To mistrust and deride. To bury me with the content of my own words. To read aloud at parties ironically, half the room protesting their boredom. The other half sharing in the quiet pleasure of pretending empty and casually ridiculous. To leave. To encase yourself in. I don’t dare love you.

things that go in places (are the best things in their time)

I have lately been scouring the interweb for a desk, a bed, some things to sit on and things to eat off of. I have found some good stuff for relatively cheap, but any suggestions would be welcome. Apparently Amazon is a good source.

Also wrote a new song. My fingers hurt and I am out of practice.

The restaurant is wearing on me, but will soon be done with.

And even coffee, it seems, cannot help me today.

and i was mapping (a draft before leaving)

lifted is taking on some life, I am getting a sense of the characters beyond their simple origins. And there is an imagined world belonging to Satomi (our heroine) that I must inhabit for a time. I have to get a good look around it before I can start moving her through it.

I am afraid of not finishing the piece. I think the trick is to learn the difference between patience and procrastination.

I remain, as I promised, bent on that page. My goal is to have a draft before leaving.

coffee place blues (i need yet another jazz change)

It was an innocent suggestion, or so I imagine. There are more birds. There is shade. There is the comfort of years spent in those chairs, with coffee, argument, dissertations composed, walls of reason built and destroyed. There is comfort in history. And I have been stealing that history. Or at least writing a chapter of absence into that coffee place's history. It is time to return.

Why not? I have not considered what made my decision to refrain necessary for several months.

Twice now I have been back, and it is like visiting the scene of a crime. One which I have committed, no less.

There is at first the anxiety. A realization of where the things of life might have gone very differently, should I not have been caught in the act of such ... suchness (and if you know my particular recent story and the importance of coffee place within it, you will understand the suchness, and if you don't, you can always ask me, but I feel an obligation not to write it down here).

Following is the paranoia. The watching of each deep blue car that pulls into the lot. As though expecting the detective to show at any moment, again, to formally charge me with the arrogance of loves long deceased. It is true: there is no statute limiting the prosecution of foolish love. I look for crevices into which I might shrink, should my presence be noted.

Then there is the reassurance of friends. Your crimes are forgotten. You cannot ask yourself to live this way.

But I was asking nothing. I simply did not want to return. I never barred the establishment, only expressed a preference to take our business elsewhere, if it were agreeable. I did not know this was making waves.

Indeed. Indeed it was, young Alan.

But I am not so young as I let on. These histories are now older than I, and they drag my heart with them.

Careful how you use that word, "heart." It lends itself to overuse and unbecoming hyperbole.

Would you prefer "soul?"

Even less.

Then I am at a loss. It is my very self to which I refer, which is entangled in the mass of brokenness I have begun to resemble and at the same time to despise.

You have always wrestled, Alan.

Then perhaps you ought call me Jacob.

I said nothing of Angels, Alan. And we can't very well call you Jacob Collier. Think of the head your initials will give you. Each lost love will be a martyrdom all its own.

That was not my intent.

Yes, but when you wear a name long enough, it alters your person. Don't you think?

And at this point I stare off at another car, this time not even blue, but I am convinced that it is her driving, and say nothing. I know, despite myself, that it is not.

Finally, there is the departure. No dramatic appearances, nor accusations, came to pass. It was an ordinary coffee. And perhaps this is more upsetting than any of the possibilities we have been imagining.

We no longer yearn for those things past, but they remain with us. They teach us to love those who cannot hurt us. And we wish that such lessons would soon unlearn themselves.

Years having past in those wooden chairs, only a few months away and now they've been replaced with comfortable black metal ones. Changes in such an absence always seem greater than those made in our presence, no matter how drastic or not.

as per request

I've been told I need to update more often. So I'm updating:

The lease for the new place in Boulder is speeding its way to me now. I am so looking forward to signing it. My parents were kind enough to put me up these past months,but I drown in the suburbs, and I shrink away from others in my space. It will be nice to have a space that I have chosen again. Not since stoop days has that been totally possible for me. I also loathed my apartment in Japan, but at least it was mine.

If S. is able to drive up with me, we'll get a truck. If we get a truck, I will probably purchase a few new things to fill it out. Otherwise, I'm not sure where or on what I will sleep when I arrive.

I have met some interesting people while in SA. And by that I think I mean I have met one interesting person. But one's a good number, whatever the song says. She thinks I think she is boring.

Shot a film recently. Post begins soon. Hopefully we can get it finished before we all have to leave this summer. I'd like to attend the screening.

And I was given The Artist's Way to work through over the next couple of months. I have started and it seems in line with what I want to do, so I will stick with it.

Both C's continue to be sorely missed. The E's are not in contact. One a little.

I want to climb a mountain.

I had a dream...

... that Conor Oberst was a dick to me for singing along with one of his songs under my breath.

So I sulked. Then went camping.

Even in the worlds of my own making, I am out of place.

i tend toward distraction

It is not necessarily the restaurant. Nor overspending. Nor wave upon wave of drunken night. It is, I think, simply time passed, and a space between decision and action. That what is had in a dream is often forgotten in the morning. I had forgotten to finish the story of the woman and the child, but now I have remembered.

Between now and Colorado, my goal is to remain vigilantly bent on that page.

first attempt

a way to edge out light

Lea captures light on the palm of her hand. She turns the prism into a puddle in the ocean, the ocean she changes in memory to a day with her family in 1995, the ash of her father's cigarette blowing into her face, sand settling uncomfortably into clumped strands in her drying hair. She had begged for a dog, just for days like this one. Instead, mother had passed around cups filled halfway with golden wine and the sun had broken the line of age with the sand within a bright concentrated point left in the translucent shadow of the glass.

A girl needs to dream of artists hands, and she hopes you will take this in any way you wish to imagine it. It is sometimes more than the multiple meanings implied by a phrase on the page, the word actually taking on all meanings at once within a line of thought. Could this, she wonders, be done with simple sounds as well, say, with the pronunciation of a hard 'c'?

When I have drunk wine with her, Lea has mused uncomfortably often about the time and nature of her death. I often wonder whether to be concerned or enraptured. Instead of deciding, I have chosen to bring her close to my face and at this distance it is impossible to remember anything of the dilemma. More convenient and pleasant to watch her lips. Linger on them. Excuse the sounds as mere precursors. And in this way I am more than such a man. Forgiven only on those occasions that my tongue is rewarded.

But I worry over the taking of light. Closeness requires a squeezing out of illumination so that only an indistinguishable silhouette remains visible. The I of the story replaces the she, and in an attempt to see her, I only end up seeing distortions of myself. Where, pray, has Lea gone off to?

I allowed her to drive away, holding that sunlight in her palm. I will not be among those who only want something from her. I will go with her later to the shelter and help her pick out a dog. And perhaps I'll find myself invited with them to the beach one Sunday, and she may even regale me with a tale of the artist and his skilled hands. How she wishes my hands would remind her of his, but do not.

She is often found there, in that mental place. It is a fantasy, and one I am convinced never had any basis in fact.

They Part with Structured Tongues--

Made up of the regions of flavor,
as well the places which contact the palette
or the teeth to make sounds--the delicacies
of the imagined petals of a flower.
Pick whichever you like, they are wild,

As well mild, the eyes of young animals,
even those we intend to eat.
As well folded; the loves kept within her sheets
until the Spring, when they are hung out on lines
and parted as curtains in those breezes

for her to step out between
in a grand entrance to her unwitting play.
And you shall wave as a tree's branch
on the end of her symmetry, eyes to lips,
and darting away again to find the edge of a smile.

Such is an encounter with her, the heat of it,
As well a promise that you will find her sadness
at the center of your fourth long vowel
She casts her eyes away.
This is when you linger

On the line of her neck--
Imagine speaking a word,
As well fall into that silence as she groans:

Tell me of the those places you have long visited
in your heart, and I will show you
where my feet have taken me. And perhaps we
will meet in one of these spaces, and there breathe
a completion to that journey...

And only then will you form a perfect word to describe her.

from while we are among the dregs

And there is a plaster mold of his face, cut into a circle just before the ears, eyes closed, as though emerging from warm bathwater, an elastic strand fastened at each end with a thin aluminum dowel to the edge of the mask. He wears it into town for the farmer's market, and has another identical façade which he uses while making love. One for looking into a mirror. Another for discussing history with friends. Still another for seduction. The masks are indistinguishable, save to him. And he cannot continue without applying the correct one.

Of the two forms of love--potential and loss--we will sometimes consider which is more abiding, and therefore more real.

Into your distances, glancing silences, nervous prevarications, exclamations and subsequent trailings off, I find myself compelled--the folding of space into soft green leaves, woven together as a tunic and placed among the neatly gathered red and yellow sands in the garden, there in the center, and it may only be the illusion of a labyrinth, because I have seen you step with naked feet right across the top of the paths I had carefully formed. But I seem unable to cross, at least in the intense heat of these mid-afternoon encounters.

A Big Day For Sailing #3 or 4 (depending)

At the beachside-style bar, we met a woman in real estate. She took a cigarette almost without asking. Where the water should have been there was instead a tin-roofed shack where more drinks were being served. We missed the roar of the waves. She was insistent that there is not a grocery problem downtown. That there are no stores in the area seems to me what would be termed "problematic."

The sun was very much in the sand, and we were all squinting.

I voted for the pool, which was colder than expected. There was talk of ages. I was feigning a listen, but would not, internally, be moved.

The artist showed up late, and there was much drunken praise of work all around. I should not have driven. And I certainly should not have checked your blog. I did both. And I admire your productivity a great deal. My own has suffered of late, what with work; saving for the great Colorado adventure.

The wind was strong yesterday. It would have been a fine day for putting to sea.

Just Checking In

I've been receiving some harrowing tales from Japan. It took a while for all of my friends to be able to post anything or send emails, but they all seem to have made it through the worst of things. But I understand there was another quake yesterday. One friend recounts being tossed around his apartment like a rag doll, his refrigerator flipping over and crashing to the other side of the room, a frantic trek to a shelter. Another of a three day search for a loved one out in the still freezing elements, but she was found. I am grateful that they are ok. Worried for their continued well-being, and I have some guilt over the relief I have felt at not having been there myself, or that there seems to be nothing I can do for anyone.

I've got limited access to the blog, but will try to rectify shortly. The Mac finally died. It had been through a lot. Old bastard did better than I ever expected.

We Remain Speechless

We laid our bricks in kilns and stacked them in the modern fashion, not knowing that this would camouflage us against the hoarders of time and antiquities, who collect figures of dancing nymphs and erect penises to place in the hall during parties and, in the morning, arouse themselves and ejaculate histories of their own desiring. We culled our bodies into the center of the mound, for every son with a soul must find a place to lie, and carving the images of unicorns into lapis lazuli and steatite, we disappeared, leaving no advice, save what can be found on our coins; we took great pains to make these symbols unintelligible.

They built libraries in Spain and Babylon, lost them again in Alexandria and Babel. As our children wander the stacks of these ghost structures, they begin to wonder if there ever truly was a world outside these walls, some place with skies and light breezes, yawning caverns and geese, islands in a lake, modifications of/ processes toward/ destructions of/ privations of/ qualities of/ Love or Strife, those of Form or Substance. Objects misrecollected, misapplied. A sister missed.

She fell when she was ten, we saw her from the height of the walled citadel at Mohenjo-daro, the doctor busted her arm just about in two. But we were unable to speak. Those who came after us would have to speak for us, and imperfectly at that. She bit the doctor on the shin and brought him to the earth, where he screeched the name Modthryth. He would have to marry her in order to tame her. With her good arm, she grabbed the hair at the top of his head and pinned it to the ground as she bludgeoned him with the swinging bone of her free hand.

The children in the library find a stone slab in what they assume to be the center—though, lost as they are, it may well be in any corner—of that cursed place. It is in a room called the room of dusts, on the sign that hangs by a chain, in which there are no books on the shelves, only all the objects required to reference and build an encyclopedia galactica. Included among the various stores of jewelry, lamps, scalloped rhinoceros horns, groaning armor, pie tins and paper plates, are also a chisel and hammer, on which is printed the only bit of language in this room, Hermes is not in the stone 1. Should they apply the chisel to the stone, searching for him, they might find the footnote, left by a careless editor, obsessed with stating the obvious.

a collection of lists reveals a kind of biology of reason:

this may or may not be true, but I am testing the postulate yet again.

Maintaining a master list, within which each item receives its own secondary and sometimes tertiary list. It would seem this is infinitely reducible, but it does manage to yield real-world results, not the least of which shall hopefully be the production of weekly writings (usually in response to some area or converging areas of inquiry) to be posted herein or "above" as the layout may dictate. I love that in the world of the web-log, the present remains at eye-level, forcing the past into the basement, sub-basement, sub-sub-basement, through, it would seem, to some infernal core of obscurity and information somewhere deep beneath us. What is the past but long beneath us, eerily propping us up, balanced as on the top shell of an infinite descent of tortoises?

I scribbled madly last night. This is true. It was at the same time a pure and convoluted thought, but it so happens that scribbling madly, no matter the quality of the outcome, does tend to put one in a more productive frame of mind.

I have some major projects going, and a way to produce on all of them for a significant, if finite, period of time. You should see some of the results by the end of the weekend.

I remain, as ever, lost. But that's just me all over. We wouldn't have it any other way, would we?

about the walking

Being generally quiet is going generally well. I am cooking for myself, which may sound ridiculous but it is huge for me--I only ever cook for two. Nothing fancy. Tonight was a spinach omelet with a side of sliced apples. I'm getting better at flipping the eggs but it was not agreeing with me today and I had to use the spatula. Shame on me.

Fitness has become a major priority. I am doing two-a-days and biking every day the weather agrees, which has been every day. The weather here has been freaky consistent for nearly a week and a half here. Cloudy and crappy in the morning, sometimes misty or rainy, and in the afternoon, beautiful. In the evening the clouds and some wind roll in. It's nice to have this kind of weather in winter. When I start to miss things in Japan, I remember being a shut-in for nearly five months because I hated the cold, and then I'm okay.

There is remodeling going on in the house, and last night I was emptying a chest so we could move it, and I found a box labeled "Stacy letters," which I assume are letters from family and friends to my parents after my older sister died. I never got to meet her. I opened the box and saw the loose papers and envelopes, if they had been organized, I did not notice how, the smell of old paper, this is a ghost I have felt I have no right to disturb. She was and then was not before I came into the world. If a void exists, I have been maneuvering around it without much notice. But it is a name you do not hear in my family, except on the rare occasion. Then shortly. I closed the box without disturbing.

I play with old love like a loose tooth. But mostly I just take that out to the coffee place (new) and write in a story/film about a woman and a little girl. It is coming slowly, but it is coming. I drink tea these days. And I walk across the parking lot to the bookstore instead of driving a hundred yards like the regular folk do. I miss the walking.

e-lotus eater: how does one enjoy quiet

I'm getting a little tired of the status quo, as is my wont. I'll be checking out for a bit, maybe a week. Quiet still terrifies me after all these years, but I'm going to attempt some. Last time I really got any was back at Craig Place, before I had a bed and was sleeping quietly on the floor. The dreams were insane, and I could swear I heard voices passing through the strands of space and time, brief snippets of telephone conversations, a difficult word between a mother and daughter. Not enough to give me context, but enough to convince me I was going nuts. I had to add noise, and I never really went back. Maybe once or twice, and it doesn't count when someone else is there with you. We'll see how it goes.

circles that make lines

I still wear the braided leather belt I got as a gift that year. It didn't fit me then, but now it is perfect. As if you could purchase what I would become.

I drink my coffee slowly in the morning, and it makes rings around the interior of the cup. Some thin and difficult to distinguish, others dark and rich. Like the rings of a tree, or around one of the gas giants. But we know these to be years, and ice. Mine are merely the amount of time spent with words.

I found the band in the garage, and since then it has moved from the coin pocket of my jeans to the dark, dusty surface of a desk, to the index finger on my right hand, and back again to my pocket. Those things we carry, whether or not we have them, it is so difficult to find their proper place.

I made a line in the dirt around the fire. The salt from the meats would seep into the earth and attract skunks. I didn't know it at the time. I only wanted to cook for you.

We slept among bees and arachnids, insects without proper names, things crawling out of the earth, and in this bed we made love quietly. And when the spider attacked my foot that morning, I waited to see if a red ring would appear on the skin.

We are both of us hurling through space, in orbit around the sun. I wonder if this might give us someplace to begin.

(a valentine)... It is or was a wide world

that, according to Augustine, necessitates the misery of just wars. And spreads our friends so thin upon the face of it that bonds do necessarily break.

But this widening world may also be like a lover, embarrassed over the putting on of a few pounds.

That's just more of you to love, baby.

Here's hoping that the universe just keeps on expanding.

Watch it in... (basketball, baseball, billiards, merging onto a highway, or tossing bicycle cards into hats)

When I was fifteen I took driver's ed at Drive-Right in the Crossroads mall. One of the teachers' was, as I recall, a big outspoken gentleman named Zandavar (sp?). He taught the handbook like he was a life coach. At night, you don't look at the headlights, just like when you get on the highway, you don't look for the cars you need to avoid, you always want to look at the space you want to be in, because wherever it is you're looking, that's where you're going to go.

Sports for me, as a kid, were an excuse for me to focus on my imperfections and internalize everything. My dad sometimes took me to the park with our gloves and a bat. He'd pitch to me and hit me pop-flies to chase down. When you get the bat solidly on the ball when it's right over the plate, it feels great. Your body fits right into the universe, takes its proper place, and it's exhilarating, peaceful, there's a zen about it. But when you don't quite get it, when you swing hard at the ball instead of swinging in time with it, even an ok hit jars your arms, feels wrong, and do it enough times, that's when you and your dad get into shouting matches. There is a wrath felt in a flawed technique.

I could stand by myself at the basketball court and work on my form, but it never seemed to help to put my hands in the right place or put the right arc on the ball, not nearly as much as seeing in my mind that ball going through the hoop. And whenever I'd look at the rim, I'd hit it. Didn't matter what my body was doing.

They say it's a mental game.

Games are supposed to teach us about life. As I sit trying to figure out what to write next, I look back at my previous posts and find myself looking at the rim, swinging too hard, feeling the threat of failure. It's an untenable position and I know it. Even this reflection is problematic. Catch-22 of course-correction: unless you know what you're doing wrong, you can't fix it, but if you look at the mistakes, you're probably just going to repeat them.

Beginning 20 seconds ago or so (see "beginnings") I'm swinging in time with the ball, watching it in the hoop, merging into the spaces between the cars. Hopefully my posts will reflect this, if I keep writing them. Halfway sure I will.

Dishes

How did this start? At the kitchen table in Pico Rivera, whenever one of my brothers or I belched during a meal, instead of "excuse me" we would say "dishes." I recall being there for the inception, and that it was an act both of defiance and compliance, a kind of compromise or recognition of stalemate. I also remember that it was finally accepted as a reasonable entry into the record of corrective manners. But that I can't recall its origins is troubling me. Memory being what it is--I am not a digital recorder--I have the stories I tell myself to comprise a version of reality. I don't have reality in my head. I have known this for some time, but I don't completely believe it.

what covers that terrific silence

It has been some time since I have attempted meditation as an aid to self-centering. I have never gotten too sophisticated with the practice, I have about three different methods I use, and I usually stay with it for no more than a month or two when I am doing really well. Recently feeling rather unfocused, I decided to try again, and found my mind much more resistant than usual. Counting breaths proved an arduous task. A briefly empty mind would be intruded upon with vivid images fraught with intense connections in memory, both wonderful and painful to revisit. I have been able to force myself through these moments into that quiet space, but after my sessions feel no such capacity to get these experiences out of mind. It's led to a kind of intellectual and emotional disengagement. I have not tried to quiet my mind with drinking, as has been one mode of the past, but have allowed myself to vegetate, as with television and chain movie-watching. It has been less an act of laziness than of self-preservation. But my brain feels like mush. I have been keeping with my fitness schedule and am pretty close on my nutritional goals, but it is time to allow some real quiet.

The truth is, I have been more heart-broken than I imagined I would. And I have not understood for years how to engage the world without an "other" with whom to coordinate some shared vision of things. Even in this, there has been intense unfocus and confusion. Whenever there are doldrums, they are always accompanied by ghosts of the woman, the only one who ever really mattered to me, and this has ruined relationships and hindered my ability to process conflict or difficulties. It seemed important to me to face this reality of late, to accept that I may never be done with it. But I have a tendency to wallow. To then become upset by my wallowing, and subsequently to hide from everything.

But it is the misplacement of this struggle that has caused the most mischief, I think. It does not belong at the center of things. It holds far too much sway with me. This along with my loss of religion in my early twenties--this is becoming more interesting to me. Having spent my youth believing that I was engaged in a meaningful narrative with a glorious conclusion, and later having come to the conclusion that this was a ridiculous thing, my lack of a clear narrative now renders a lot I do or strive for meaningless. It is less a flaw in my philosophy, I think, than a byproduct of yet another great loss. It would seem no greater loss could exist than the loss of one's god. Even if there were no real thing to lose, the thing certainly seemed real, for all purposes was real inasmuch as it effected thought and action.

So I find myself swimming around in an abstract fish bowl. I have an intellectual attachment to individual meaning and morality, but long for those youthful days of deity-dictated absolutes. Perhaps this is the usual dilemma--that struggle between childhood simplicity and adult ambiguity--but I sense it very sharply. It is sometimes debilitating.

Even so, there must be some way of continuing on path (as I have previously defined or left undefined in parts) while honestly and forthrightly admitting these struggles, but also placing them properly on their right shelves. Letting the things in that deserve to be there as well. Not allowing things to inflate beyond reason and distract from the good parts, favorite kinds of silence. A concept once more of what I am seeking for its own sake, rather than for the sake of sharing with an "other."

We'll see.

Journaling at ghosts is fun sometimes.

Green Bay Wins Super Bowl, Millions Aware of Fact

I think Kevin best summed up my feelings on this year's result:

Thank you, team I don't really care about, for preventing a team I kind of didn't want to win the super bowl from winning it.

and that will be the end of that

with the last post, I've reached a limit, I think. fret not.

(Orange Dots On Electronic Maps) a Geography of Reliving

After a month
it is the sifting through old boxes, wiping dust, the coastal outline he draws on large white sheets of 32 point, a titanium band upon which he intends to fasten a compass

when in the course of automobiles
the grease of fingers on side and rear view mirrors form the ridges of two converging mountain ranges, above the treeline appears uniform and rigid from this height, but upon closer examination we find a pile of rubble, still jagged as tongues are often jagged, but he will clear his mind in order to plot his path to the inland city

where the skin makes a crust
they were thought to be the coagulating platelets near the corner of the mouth, peeling whenever he would speak a name, but they were small orange representations of a destination, she would sit quietly in bed, rocking with the ocean, receding

among the questions posed by a mirror
the interior landscapes are varied, the north bearing freckles about the nose, the southern regions were the beginnings of callouses, a lip upon the eastern shoulder, that city, we hear its pulsing, but are not meant to enter, if he was intended to hide from such thoughts, it was not made clear to him in the academy


that recalled places are neither living nor ghost
walk up the street and face in the direction of the italian restaurant, you will see a marquis on your left, a university to your right, the ocean is behind you, breaking on the rocks of Norman coasts, it is obvious that you have been here before, you are supposed to grieve for it, but it has been too long, and so you take photos of seals, bloated and beached, and grieve for them instead, it is an incessant narrative, and so you are less sad than annoyed

it is all right, there is nothing even here
she spends the morning sitting in the lagoon collecting smooth stones to line up on the towel, and afterward vanishes, at first it seems we are meant to hate her, next that we must mourn her, and finally that we must pretend to have forgotten her, now it seems fitting to admit that she was loved, and that he had played an assistant's role in the disappearing act,

and lamps are dim beneath hotels
he tips a martini glass in the cuban club, spilling a line of shattered ice onto the table, of course it is these familiar surroundings that have caught him looking elsewhere, if he is lost, then the best thing to do is to admit it,

though by the foundation a promise we will find no wisdom but this

The TV news man cracks his breath and says, We're moving into the unknown. I press a thumbnail into the cube of red clay and pivot my wrist to make a quarter-spiral. Where else would we be moving?

being and non-being horseshit

She is both a physicality and a sentience. A kiss and a memory of a kiss. And she is neither, and I am neither.

She is a dream and a cloud in the consciousness, and she is drunk on the sofa, rough green upholstery making lines on her cheek.

She is quiet in the car, but she boils. She asks questions, and in them are hidden the answers.

(Beginnings)

Said tells us that in order to classify a beginning, we must view it retrospectively, placing our perspective in both the present--after a thing has taken shape--and the past--the moment we later mark as a beginning. I cannot know I have begun until after I have already begun. Of course the phrase, "I will begin..." belies this notion a bit, but still a useful way of looking at path.

I might have said that the beginning of my journey occurred on the plane, or at the airport, or sitting at the bar at Mon. Or else with the end of the long living arrangement, or with my desire to travel and teach English, the germ of which sent me to France to study that Summer. Or the tour I took with my grandfather, the decision in high school to resist Spanish in favor of French. The early resistance to common paths... and so on into the oblivion of discerning what might be my earliest memory, what factors conspired to give me that faculty, all the way back to the evolution of life on earth; the moment of creation; beyond.

Sitting with coffee in a delicate white cup, ceramic butterfly, a fiction of lessons learned on the tips of my fingers, such reductions seem as if they might have moved forward a thousand million different ways, and could not constitute a consistent explanation for a present state of things. How many reasons have I listed, depending on the time of day, for speaking harshly to you? Never lying, but also never quite correct. There is a cognitive dissonance in my understanding of motivation. Would I prefer just to say that I am sorry? To try not to do it again.

My desk needs dusting. I found under it a journal, misplaced, in which I located the process of a song I wrote about a year. I had sworn I'd written it earlier. And in which the daily struggle of relating to myself after I have been altered, even smothered, by a loss, seem not too different from those I faced this morning. Do I always wake and think of such things, or am I capable of distracting myself for periods?

And it is cold enough for snow. It makes San Antonio quiet. Sleepy. It makes me into silences. I found an echo of that time, and it carried all the way through. I was left in the end, empty and tired. I no longer wish to pretend that forward is a place I am moving. Because if I don't know where I began, the course is almost impossible to plot.

And for all of this I am truly grateful. How's that for dissonance.

bubble boy genius

I was sitting with my coffee this morning, and had taken of the shelf a red paperback edition of The Upanishads, when the neighborhood lost power, due to an ice storm somewhat north of us. Rolling blackouts. It's been cold for two days, and we're resorting to emergency procedures. Texas is not well equipped for winter conditions, if that's truly what these are. We were without light or heat for about 45 minutes, and in this time there was much pacing about, wondering what use we might make of ourselves. A fire was built out back. I walked around closing off parts of the house that were not in use. My morning workout kept me warm. But I was immediately aware of how ill prepared I am to deal with suddenly elemental conditions. I give no thought to the light in my world, but when it is taken from me, I find I have been utterly dependent on it. It has been this way for me with such luxuries, language, relationships, transportation, the technologies of communication. What a delicate and spoiled nature I have developed. I have only passing notions of the harshness of this world.

Of course the lights popped back on and the sounds of clocks and motion-sensors resetting, the heater restarting, the buzz of my speakers suddenly coursing with juice again. This modern life restored. 45 minutes. That's all it was.

And the periodic shaking of the bubble is enough to remind me that I am alive.

Wrap Part 1 and The Routine of Routine

Part one of the documentary wrapped yesterday. Afterwards I met with our principle "character" for a beer. I had been concerned that the major reason I had wanted to be involved in the project had gotten lost in the shoot. And so had he, really. We discussed deeper motivations and then veered off course, talking about old times, eventually coming to a better understanding of what we were doing amid all the pseudodrama. The film currently lacks a clear vision, but I do not. The struggle is getting the two in line with one another. And the director.

I slept in today, rising around 9:00, and getting to my new routine a little late, the one I had no plan for last week. I can already see it working its way on me. But my brain lags.

Meeting for the new project tonight, and my spirits are high, though the piece still feels a little schizophrenic at the moment. I'm off to the store for some good food, then it's to the books and the page. Something will hit. I know it will.

Taco vs. Nothing

South Texas cuisine is fattening me up. I've noticed it recently, and I have to put a stop to it. Tacos are so good, though. It won't be easy. It was very easy to maintain an active lifestyle and lean diet in Japan. It will require some effort here.

I don't have a plan, and this does not bode well.

Today I'm doing some cursory research for a speech about nothing. It should be compelling and persuasive, personal and authoritative, and accomplish absolutely naught. Perhaps I should look into the theater of politics, but instead I am delving into philosophy, and my favorite--quantum physics. Lots to take out of context there.

Living in the suburbs again, I am constantly feeling trapped. There is time to wander and think, but nothing to see or contemplate. I end up back where I begin, which is usually a kind of deep yearning, for which any number of daily displeasures will do: very often, I find myself puzzling over whether or not there is anything I can do or say to reestablish contact with an old friend of mine, long since disappeared. If I press the issue, it will likely do no good. If I let things sit, there would be no impetus to reconnect. I usually come down on the side of thinking there is nothing here to be done. That I will simply have to wait and see. A wait that may take a lifetime and come to nothing. But as often as I decide on futility, I cannot ignore that I will always have hope. There was a reason our connection was so strong, and there was enough positive there to be salvaged somehow, in whatever way forward, however undefined. And I can only think that no matter what may or may not occur, I can resolve to think of myself as being a friend, of hoping for this life's richness in my friend's days, all of them, and that perhaps we will find a space somewhere to share a sincerity again with one another.

Anyway, I miss my friend.

This, when my brain is allowed to spin at the rate of the earth, without stopping to take in some new thing.

I have nothing to write about, best get to it.

Here we go... da... da duh da-daaaaaa....

Pittsburgh's goin' to the SU-u-Per-bowl!



Now go Packers.

a note on "from"

the recent posts beginning with "from" are not from stories, but journals I kept while in Japan, the titles in italics are the labels I had placed on the journals' inside covers.

from it might not kill

There is a distance in these moments, so that the flood of time may take me further from a perfect memory. And so it becomes necessary to make new ones.

And there is the ocean.

And there is the way bodies with mass distort space and time, curving in such a way that all things impose a gravitational effect on every other object within range of the distortion. I should like to ride one of the waves of these distortions, as I once did in the ocean as a boy in Huntington.

And all the lights had gone out in the Westin, only Venus was now visible in the sky above the dark building. I took my blue pen out and hurriedly scribbled, "Venus replaces Westin" on the yellow pulp, momentarily forgetting that Miki, with her small frame, her glasses, and inexplicable joy, had reminded me of a girl from my days in university--and that my reaction to this recollection had shaken me.

Thereafter, I was resolved. I had allowed myself to be buried by those things I do not disclose. But I can recall that a perfect feeling can exist inside the most stressful or unwanted moments. The goal is to pursue that perfection in each experience, and not to become unnerved when the things of life interfere. Interference, of course, is never external, it is always originating from within.

from touch

sometimes we are found in the pronunciation of unexpected names.

such sounds have consequences. they will trap us between two distant worlds, separated by time more than any other distinction.

there is the way i search the night skies for photographs.

the way you lean into morning microphones and ask for coffee.

a tension between the biorhythms of love and those driven by the place of the sun on the horizon.

from August 2009

A photograph. A self portrait taken beneath a tree in the park near Tokyo station, near the imperial palace. Red rings under the eyes. He is hungry. He thinks of her in passing, that she would have loved this spot, that they might have named it in the manner of pony-shit park in Angers. This is the glassy look you see in his right eye. He wears a black shirt to soak up the light that surrounds him, so that the absence of him is what you will see, though all else is green and vibrant, reminding us that it is summertime. Among those things we cannot see is a couple, lying in the grass, wrapped up in each other, lazy, he is reminded of a pair of dogs who used come around in July and August, while he had been digging a ditch around the front of his father's house to capture the ground-water before it might enter the basement. A small mut and a large retriever. They had been a lazy pair, under a tree in the adjacent yard, the little one occasionally turning its head to the neck of the larger and biting playfully. The other yawning. The young couple is passed occasionally by those strolling through the grass, who give them disapproving looks. What's wrong with this? Thinks the man in the photograph, Is it a jealousy, do you imagine it is a sexual embrace. Certainly they are lovers, but I can't imagine a more innocent display of intimacy. When I lay with my lover in the grass in Pennsylvania springs, it had been the same. And perhaps we received such disapprovals, but, like these two, we could not care. There was not a thing in this world but my lover's eyes, her breath, the warmth of the sun radiating in the moist ground. A world that cannot exist for long, yet which is an eternity when we are within it. The man in the photograph is looking up toward the branches. Because we cannot see them, we imagine it is hope he has caught in his gaze. It is, in fact, a bundle of green needles, and a line of unidentified insects, having located something of interest on the tree.

in that we are to be returned to ash

I would (not) say that you are a stone, (nor) that I wished to break myself upon you. But in my misgivings I attempted to name you. You have not the qualities of any name I applied.

Your mild whispers through a locked window have missed their mark. And I never held you in such low regard as to leave you covered in the ink left un-captured by my paper.

I wished instead to be as unlike a ghost as I once considered myself an apparition of her loss. The image of her reduced with the sexuality possible to the retina, to a raised breast (I begged her to reconsider). I could never have seen her, should she have danced, as you do, on the edge of a pin.

But it was she that I lost again in you. My self never entering into it. I have lost the capacity to break in any other place but one.

If I had not named you,

3 Projects and some junk

Attempting to remain focused on writing/film. I spent a prolonged period yesterday with cameras and lights and mics, shooting and getting interviews. It was invigorating. It's been a paralyzed couple of years, creatively/filmic-ly speaking. Searching for that one good idea. But I think that's the paralyzing aspect, somehow thinking there's a single idea to be had. Better, I think, just to live in a sea of them. So I'm giving myself some homework--

1. Three movie ideas this week.

2. Three stories sent to publications.

3. Work on the doc.


Note: I went to bed the other night watching Inception. It adds another layer to watch while asleep. I'm only partially kidding. There was lots of dialogue bleed-through--unconscious engagement of lucid dreaming is rather odd.

I'm running out of teams to root for

There was a corner shop in the cultural district of Pittsburgh I used to have to walk past everyday to get to the Coffee Tree, and during the playoffs they had, playing on a loop, the "Steelers are going to the Superbowl," a little 30 second ditty. You could hear it from the apartment until maybe 11:30 at night. Over and over again. I always liked the Steelers, up till then. I shall try to like them again. I will not, WILL NOT, take the Jets. Maybe it's just their time.

When I am quiet, you recede; when I speak, your lingering is more a ghost

On that Saturday evening it seemed the walls of every house had vanished, leaving only the candles placed in the windows at Christmas-time, glowing in that green country like fireflies in the summer.


And how our words will keep--as if we had them in jars.

Cedar Days

I had a few allergies that acted up in Furukawa from time to time and so I thought I understood what I was in for with the mountain cedar in San Antonio. I was wrong. It's been awful.

Finally finished applications. I am going to shower, then shave (first time in several days), then head to the post office to express everything out to where it belongs. Then begins the waiting.

I owe time to some other projects and people, best get those tended to quickly.

And it's time once again to focus on some meditative and contemplative things. I have been out of sorts since arriving home, perhaps even prior to that. Much more writing and reading are in order. Debts to pay. I should eat. I've been thinking about the past a lot these days and, while reflection and rumination are sometimes advisable, the present requires me.

Life is good. I shall probably even smile about it.

Colts vs. Jets

... (sigh).

great game. why did indy take that timeout? probably still woulda lost.

go pats

Slumps and Spurs

I have been back in San Antonio for nearly two months. In addition to some difficulties in my personal life, which have more or less settled now into the broader background of discontent, I have yet to get a handle on how this place works. Reverse Culture Shock, I think it's called. Food, transportation, language, just the aesthetics, everything. It is familiar, I grew up here, but I find myself looking at the familiar things and feeling neither comforted nor put off. I am blank. When some event or other ought to spur me to action, I see little point. Perhaps a depression, a feeling that I am trapped. Most frustrating so far is my lack of desire to break out of this.

And a ghost haunts me here.

It's my hope that, simply by putting it down on electronic paper and sending it out into the universe, I will begin a change in my attitude.

I watched the Spurs play in Indiana last night. After two tough losses in a row, they seemed to drag their asses, get to their spots just a little late, wouldn't take open shots, tried to lose all through the game, and in the final eight minutes or so were able to kind of pull it together just enough to squeak out with the "w." It's hard to feel great about a win like that, I'd imagine, but they've stopped the bleeding at least. Perhaps a recovery under such circumstances can help a team or a person regain their bearings.

This is what I'm hoping.

An Uncertainty in Delight

I told the troublesome poet that I'd never felt so foolish as when I was truly happy, nor so wise as when I was blanketed in sorrow.

She crossed her legs at the table and I pulled at the end of my cigarette. I am not happy, but I am at peace, I said. The sausage and beer came

(I tried to start smoking cigarettes again recently, but it was too much work. Made me feel ill and I couldn't get to sleep.

And the clippers I bought are like sheep sheers. Heavy. You can't hear them cutting. And so I am, for the moment, clean. Cleared away of some stupid vanities).

I then spent several months whirling around in circles making airplane noises and giggling whenever I had careened off center and crashed into a wall, or offered the wrong smile at dinner, or colored with the children, naming everything after my dizziness.

But it was not a foolishness. Only an uncertainty I hadn't the inclination to examine.

In this manner, I began to draw maps of undiscovered lands. I gave them the qualities of the other places I had visited, the street names were those I had grown up learning. Some wiseguy tried to tell me I was doodling fantasies and I slammed the book shut, rolled up the loose papers and hid them under my bed. Later applying for an apprenticeship under the captain of such a vessel as is as likely as any to stumble upon such places as those I have designed.

I am unwavering in my resolve to prove that my maps--upon my having made them--did in fact cause those places to be real. And there is one in particular I should like to find.

I crossed my arms on the table and lay my head down to rest it. I am listening. It's just that I am also traveling. It can make a body weary.

Post Script

a note on form and quality (it seeks out recollection)

It is the way one melts into the other. A sofa. A car seat. Walks by rivers. Tents near oceans.

That day I believed I owned a particular drawer.

And we will consider the way the gods continually transform into one another. Aten, by analogy, becomes Yaweh. Bes becomes Horus. And so too in this mortal frame do many things mingle.

The touch of one lover is the same as another.

I think it better, then, to utter their specific qualities, but will not.

To the form of mirror. The form of love. The form of chair. For each, should there be a perfect version somewhere in the aether, I already know the names.