november 17

I barely trust the motions of my body today. I am enveloping space with out matter like dust or the edge of a black hole. Vaguely sick delirious mind disease when the coughing and sneezing stop but my mind is caught in a fog like a house fire sleeping family or now I realize the day is lost from me and I panic and I fear consequence because my studying for French is god awful, I had to call off work with a weird little text message to my boss earlier than he was awake probably and I haven't napped all day yet it feels like it is so. "I've been up all day."

coffee means nothing. laundry is trash. recycling is worthless and I don't want the outside air to invade my body and shake my bones out of order like a puzzle in a wind storm. I desire a snow day. This is kind of like that. An internal snow day. Some vague uneasiness that prevents clarity from forming. I am a muddled cocktail. I have a collage to make about bipolar disorder and maybe this sickness, this mental anguish, this lazy scratching at some white blood cell itch, a miracle to wake out of it tomorrow and yet I'm fucking trying, water, orange juice, smoothie machine, I barely remember the contents of my day, the civil war documentary, the guitar playing, the mindless droning on and on, the french assignments, the dumbness of general disaffection with the self, I hate when I'm sick because it is impossible to function at the level I most desire to function at.

I want to.

november 11

3:03 - 3:23

So I've worked night shifts at the University bookstore for the last 6 weeks or so. What does one do during the night shift at the loading dock of a bookstore? Until the responsibilities waiting for me this evening, the job consists two-thirds of cleaning floors, either with broom then mop on the faux-linoleum, this shiny waxed surface with little imperfections entombed under a layer of glaze, little black flecks beyond the deepest reach of an all-purpose cleaner... or a vacuum over miles of carpet, playing tug a war with power outlets and wrangling the orange serpent of an extension cord and trying not to knock down displays while traveling in circles around them. I do the offices, back storage, textbooks, sweaters and $60 hoodies, t-shirts emblazoned with the logo of my school, my dawgs, my school I feel barely affiliated with and have no desire to emblazon myself with their logo (as I realize, in cafe racer, I drink drip from a husky mug) and it is veteran's day and a guy came in to ask for a free beer and got it from the beanie-top hat adorned graybeard at the bar who may/may not have just signed a new two year lease for this "shithole of an establishment" (words of a different graybeard in discussion) and they boarded up the obama room for reasons I don't care to ask about immediately. They bury some awful artwork in the walls like rats.

The other 1/3 is spent with trash. Handling trash. Putting bags of it in other bags of it and attempting to differentiate the compost from the recycling from the trash. The fuckers who sit and waste in the cafe seem to be unaware of the posters above each receptacle that has cute little pictures of items that belong there. The aluminum cans make their home in the recycling, if empty. I spill a lot of garbage coffee on myself. I try to save plastic bags because they remind me of jellyfish in the sea. I take the trash out in a big rolling bath tub and put them in the dumpster down the street, out the back alley. Jordan told me one time he opened the back door and heard a shout of pain. He stuck his head out to he a man posted up in the sheltered doorway with a needle in his vein, and his arm dripping blood, and imagine he may have helped this man jam it in. Then we talked about addiction. Psychotic breaks. I have heard a few stories about psychotic breaks in the store. One a drunk employee mocked a slideshow memorial of the late-CEO from a year or two ago during the company banquet. Drinks and dancing occur during this event. The night maintenance team (my team) then has to clean up after but usually continues to drink, says Mat. Beer in one hand, broom in the other. But this girl is saying offensive things during the memorial, making fun of the pictures, and some other employees tell her to shut up. This turns her on to them. She gets in their face and is verbally aggressive. One man takes her drink away "I think you've had enough," and she loses it. Starts screaming at him. Calls him a motherfucker mixed in with inaccurate racial slurs and has to be detained and while being wrestled to the ground, resorts to biting people. Her co-workers astonished, the police come and she continues to fight, and some other employees leave the party sobbing for her sanity. The night maintenance crew of the time sat and watched and laughed and drank beers.

Other time happened a few days ago. A woman, the wife of a publisher who was giving a talk in the poetry section of the store, had, what I was told, a "psychotic break" and was screaming at her kids to help her make pyramids out of books all throughout the store. I'm not sure if she had a selection process for these pyramids but I know the children were too young to be able to reach above the second shelf.

Oh, tonight. I'll drive and deliver and hack the systems of sibling stores in Tacoma, Renton, Bellevue, and Downtown. and listen to french music, the sound of existential silences, rain beating the windshield, radio talk shows, audiobooks from late nabokov, vocal lessons and meditate on the night driving blackness of a moonless sky.

november 7

cold water plumage, my suit is made of rusted iron, my wooden wingspan stretches out with creaks and groans like the slow opening door of a haunted house, oh do my floorboards speak, they speak with each treacherous footstep, a kindred spirit to leave my body ravished with fear and cowering in the corner of my mind where light doesn't hit and the padded walls of blood and arteries are tangled round the musculature...

blonde haired angel with a young attitude flies down with those feathery light wings, so assured they are not fragile- as fragile as a silk woven manuscript from the 1700's.

science and nature writing.

poetry about wings.

november 2

sleepy with an extra hour given, and the cool confidence required to follow a drunk journey for a lighter away from nice conversation and the lighter is found, cigarette smoked, and our business to our lung capacities is atrocious and I will quit and not pitch in for the next pack of smokes and then the support of quitting will not come to me as any other source than within myself and she wants me to throw down cash and I don't want to pay for a lung blackening as I've smoked casually for 6 years or so and it should stop now without regret or self hate and the drinking may well diminish later but let's begin with the throat membrane burning smoke-lung habit that is shared with only one person these days so the support system is very limited and non convincing and the nurse girlfriend forces him to quit and suffer because she showed him lung surgery videos that she took on my phone while training for bypass and the blood and black clots scared him into subservience and he is happy to be her shadow and yet no longer formed into a body the shape of his own.

carpeted ceilings and roof top gardens. second story pool balconies with acorn shaped lanterns hung over and swaying and squirrels burn themselves on them like mosquitos into flyzappers or flies into lighters or krill into the mouths of whales.

last night the party. the white wine consumed as quickly as the pumpkin beer. the girl on mushrooms who hugged and loved. this reminds me strangely about what my co-worker said about someone he knew who was addicted to crack. that they could feel their skin, each pore, exuding a kind of evil stench, a general bad taste and will, a fragrant feeling of pain and paranoia and shame. makes me think that whatever you decide to put into your body has a shadow life. either the lines of your face, the stench or callouses, the way skin breaks out, the way scars fail to heal, the way a sore under the tongue destroys your articulators. booze fills the skin in a similar way. if she had all she drank in the last five days in one day she would be in the hospital. wondering what caused this binge and the exercise routine to be forgotten. where have I been during all of this? a tag along.

the party. a man dressed up like anonymous was trying to convince partygoers to drink his moonshine, to eat the 100-proof soaked blackberries that rested at the bottom like sunken decayed bones. He was stumbling around, lost his mask, regained his identity, though the feds are after him poor soul. he, anonymous, forgot his night his name and his purpose there in the house and world they all share in a residential police calling neighborhood with dancing and drinks and music and a smiling clown mask sentry guard.

I can't imagine calling the cops about a party as noise complaint. Whoever called. Where they ever young? What could they think would come of breaking up the party?

Other flashbulbs are forgettable. People in half-assed costumes. Music and awkwardness. The usual.

Wednesday. October 29. 12:45 am

careful about your age, I have have been believing in magicians. some cynical sense that is well and right and that we will become resurfaced at least before drowning. I am making a plan and it is tantric in origin with roots in Oregon and with desires for Denver in the cusps of my comprehension, while the other sleeps in a desolate sleep, some some of obscure longing fought off with drunks and dreaming, while the realist wakes up early and confronts the sunrise without fear and without apprehension for the day that follows the suns arrival into our atmosphere. oh yes you can breathe now with your lungs full of tobacco smoke and your teeth gritted green with envy over the younger classes of citizens who can write with more angst than you and you worry about how overthought your phrase have become... well it seems a false alarm when they can splay themselves out over your operating table with a willing ease even before taking such paralyzing medications that keep the blood warm, the heart beating slowly, the brain moving through tunnels, the muscles believing they are stretching that eager stretch, the fingers believing they are scratching that eager itch, and the drunk lays out for sleep on the floor, hardly making it clear its intention when the Franklins of the world are out pillaging with legal representation and the borrowed time of our considerate piecemeal accounts of ballast are sewn together only by choppy retrospective narration. There is hardly a truth greater than the one that presents itself to you when you are dreaming. My truth now is that my life has become a spiderweb of insinuation and that I hardly have a hope for growth in the lower levels of my psyche even when the higher levels can come to own agreement that English is fucked because it allows vowels to end and begin words in succession without an apostrophe. Oh wink. Oh joy. Oh orgasm with the weight of my vowels, hanging and lingering the rafters of thought and yet so estranged from the big words of Faulkner and the Mississippi queens that lure the sovereign nations into foraging for grapes after the wine has all been drunk as if that is a solution for sobriety. The morning comes with a quick glint of faction, or of an ability to supply armor to the troupes or amour when they love natives and spawn and rebirth and settle and build cities in their collective likeness and the history of the world, oh why not, ode to mother, she is sleeping and would wake with a fright to find us fracking up her insides with undiagnosed root canals and cerebral palsy shock therapy treatments and illogical combinations of people and objects and clarity is so difficult to resolve oneself to find in this muddled mess of being. We are stranded in a lake that has no shore. A seaside epiphany also so close and yet the bedraggled tide of the moons brings us back like an anchor to the depths of total abandonment. I am lost tonight as I have been searching for articulate words to share to my love and she passed out after I said something about our relationship lacking danger, though this took on the characteristic of a person hiding from truth as the famous worst politicians do or as courtesy clerks hide away their failings as if going out and fetching carts for three hours is an affordable waste of paling white button up shirts and black slacks and the conglomerate company edges ever forward with an impaling hue to the ever stretching skyline and the move out took a few days because it never mattered much though it was probably about twenty five dollars a day and the English language comes in handy to form such disparate thoughts yet no one will ever translate this to be mistaken for something that can be counter culturally read.

october 27

Be careful, be careful. Racing across the continent out of the darkness, out of at least 10 hours of darkness, a light show, soft fireworks backlighting the clouds, so they are cut out stencils depicting ancient battles no pen or voice ever told of, before the harmony of the earth became disrupted with the development of the human intellect and the original settlers, their own desire to cut up and divide and the land underneath their feet must have slept otherwise they'd, we'd, be shaken off like little fleas on the back of a mangy old dog. 

Sleep with your eyes open. Imagine yourself drifting down a river on a piece of debris from some disaster. Imagine a calm river. Slowly, it rose and the sleeping town had no prediction for this rising, being subsumed and taking off of plots of land and replaced with riverbed, where we will eventually sleep, no fear, just dreams of oxygen or of a dry day from the past before the deluge uprooted our houses and sent them slowly drifting down river into the ocean, up the smiling face of the secretly erupting mountain, no geologist could predict, and the top is exploded, forgotten hikers are lost, and the writing is forced and feels like an exercise in patience and perseverance over self defeat when easily I could begin to write about the doubt involved in writing and the freedom of cleared away cobweb inspiration also gets subsumed by this slow, huge river. I'm imagining a glacier that melted in a splash, in an instant, miles of ice phase changed in a light bulb flash, and a brief waterfall as if a raincloud split open and poured itself out like my belgian beer or the whiskey stained back seats of the car, mixed in with potting soil, birthday cake icing, salt from the flats west of salt lake city, movie moments erased by a tidal wave of thoughts. Thoughts dark or ominous or full of potential regret. 

Kill the guilt narrative. There may be an undertone in all of your writing. There may be insecurities and yet when the writing comes out well it is unapologetic. 

Met up with Tom to go see Rural Alberta Advantage and makes me want to pretend their is a draft so I can move to Canada and start anew in a Banff cabin or the Mt. Stevens byway, the Jefferson Crater national fire monument, the green-sky ravine, under the aurora, the great barrier reef of the mountains, the hard edged sword rock or the copernicus butte. whatever mountain terrain names. disappear into them with a headlight and never let it burn out entirely. 

Intended to go to Dry The River. I rushed through work to do so. Tess refused to meet up on top of the hill and we wouldn't be able to catch a bus until 10:30. The hill had blacked out. The whole greek system went dark and the chaos of candle-lighting inspired the fear to to come back, the daunting trees and shadows caused by them and yet what backlight? we are suddenly lost in the woods after dark and the trees creak and houses all take on resemblance of tombs and she was scared left in the apartment with a few candles and shivering under the electric blanket... 

october 14

This is not time for writing. Must read Shield's comments on the distinctive prose poem vs. the ceaseless rant of the unpracticed writer, who blogs or something. All different shades of pretentious quips pour out of him and I find myself boiling in my seat, sometimes preferring the color changing trees outside the window to his hyper objective analysis of his own selected pieces of literature, so confident in his abilities. I am invisible on his radar. Nothing I have said or written has infected his mind enough for me to even be remembered by sight. Blame myself, without help, lose the rhythm of those background words, fall to pieces when I read his shit book and swore one too many times in his classroom, all golden frazzled and round tabled with the eager students lapping those tear drops. Mother over protects and makes us wear helmets made of tin foil. Sister drives up in through the rain and gets caught in traffic and lets smoke cough out her window, drifting along the astroplane. The harsh irrational value judgments that fire up about her or her or my girlfriend, these insane women, in three different ways, the sister on a deck of cards is a wild card, something unpredictable, just depends on the game played, shield's bald head on another card, the condescending self-satisfied guru, or the careless teacher of the arts who is too deeply involved with his own burgeoning theories of the medium to help us students to grow in our own most productive ways, the teacher who knows the field he teaches can't be taught, the students, the guppies, then the lover with a nervous condition, the other lover with a lethargic mind and dozing on the couch, leaves the burner on and the little cottage, the wood bricked cabin burns down, hidden away in a plot of unfurnished land.

Read the Crevecoeur. Give the cat eye drops, he may be going blind. Paranoia isolates itself in the reconstructed floorboards of this adjective friendly apartment, something of the nature of wild beast becoming tame and fighting back with last little pathetic energy once their master knows they are docile and lets them roam about freely. Bars of the cage ripped open but the beast naps on his mattress within, spent from all the energy expended in the attempted escape, though failed and snoring, the owner removes the cage and the barricade becomes invisible, habit-based, the trainer is a manipulator though she knows nothing of it, she knows her mind is rational, her habits sometimes painful to her body, her motions are accurate and purposeful, she tames the lion within her that could be called a heart. There is a heart card, a lion card, a sick cat card, a mediocre grade card and a french grammar quiz card.

Anxiety swells up. Stacked deck with anxiety monster cards. Gotta get out and going to the jazz show and feel a peace free of anxiety even with the french questions haunting my ears the beats removing their eyelids and having it out in underwater ghost ship battles where plumes of black sediment well up from the centre pompidou and the art exhibit becomes the whole world because even a pile of garbage can be beautifully framed and captured and I saw two people in neck braces surrounded by firemen and paramedics, evidently victims of attempted vehicular homicide or a hit and run or they fell off of a room somewhere and crawled to the center of an intersection, 42nd and university or 25th and ravenna or the new thai restaurant gave someone cardiac arrest, or the clouds crushed a skull because the pressure, oh god, I know the pressure of angry screaming clouds.

oct 9

In a flash I miss everyone. I have burrowed into my own life and rarely tunnel over to see the others. An apartment that entices lethargy because of its comfort. There are tapestries up-hanging, multi-colored posters and art and a cat and some guitars. I desire, so strongly now, a flat in New York. Drunken friends experimenting with the wherewithal to remove clothes and dance. We could use a cocktail shaker to mix up the acid with our blueberry lemonade, fresh picked from the rooftop garden, our huge glassy windows over looking other huge glass windows but even with the telescopes and inevitable binoculars we would not close those blinds. We would tear down curtains and perform for them. The act of thoughtless youth. Of folly and mistake and tears and sex and drugs and a carefree existence up within the clouds. The soot and rock of depression crumbled under foot, trampled plants, sweeping evening under the rug.

Art reviews and poetry. Publishing ritual deaths with asterisks including blood pyramids and pagan beheadings.

What am I talking about?

I miss everyone. I miss the people I never had relationships with. I miss the opportunity (because of where they are and who they are now. Looking at a few specific connects. San Francisco. New York. Vancouver. Spread across Washington and Oregon. Denver, Colorado and a ridiculously expensive trip to see a great friend. A shame full up in the heart to turn down the invitation based on plane tickets.)

What about the others. Can there be others?

Long Beach, California. Los Angeles. Olympia, Washington. Anacortes. Boston, Mass. These are cities, not friends. There are loose, loose threads connecting me to these cities through my friends. Matthew in Denver desires to see me this winter break for a week or so. With infinite resources and a totally blind lack of guilt for the squandering of such money.

Is it squandering money to be youthful? To visit a friend? To be frugal and spend nothing on booze for a month and save more money than I can admit.

Woodbury. Ashland. Tacoma. Brooklyn. Neighborhoods. West Seattle. Capitol Hill. Eastlake. Ballard. Fremont. Northgate. Et. al.

Be a better person.

oct 8th

They handed out little purple and gold new testaments to swarming hoards of early morning college students. Not even early morning. 9:15 or so. I almost attack myself again. For not waking up earlier and writing and feeling zen, if possible. Keep searching for balance. Motivation and execution. Enough hydration for the needs of my moving body. This morning was a sad awakening and I slept in and saw the rosy red violet morning sky and the brightness of the orange night sky with the light pollution hitting both sides of the clouds like flashlights.

I've never heard a more offensive, subjective phrase in literary criticism than what is determined "purple prose." Yesterday, accused of writing in this way, I sat insulted. The phrase has connotations of self indulgence, of pretentious attitudes toward writing, of over-writing. Not sure about over-writing. Does it have to be a best seller? Shouldn't prose imitate life? Isn't life a chain of discordant thoughts that we wish we could edit?

Nonesuch. Nonsense. Used as a bad example. Well did I learn anything? Other than to "tone it down" I am not sure I did. Aggravated by this vague and elusive condemnations, I spiraled into a pit. I couldn't sleep much. Contradictions in descriptions made my writing seem without value. My habits seemed without value. (What habits! You fell off. Get the fuck up.)

By habits I mean the routine of writing, of free writing, in the mornings or during the nights to help excavate the brain a bit, loosen the tie, the knot untangles, whatever. In the morning it is to wake up and connect with the myriad elements within. To write in half French. Half dream. At night would be to write off the day and some nice (or awful) memories to immortalize that day.

What has blocked me so greatly (besides drinking, my girl) is an incessant thought that my writing needs direction otherwise it is worthless. No. What should happen, my little devil, is a return to consistent writing practice, including a study of methodology and the revision of the process through the eyes of my favorite authors (and who the fuck are they anyway?) Do I enjoy any writer or musician with any honesty anymore? Or is it just a wave of envy and self doubt when I read or hear something beautiful? I should be able to write like that. I should sing more. I should I should I should I should. 

After the pollack mind explosion free writes (it's like warming up the muscles before fucking cage fighting) it is then time to work on writing stories and poems. Things with rectangular boundaries and page numbers and organization.

It is time to live and write and play with utmost urgency and to no longer feel so dead.

Take Benjamin Franklin's advice about drinking, as he believes it to needlessly muddle the clear mindedness necessary to become successful.

No inspiration comes from drinking that is legible enough to remember.

Another thing. Memory. All of my years of drinking have destroyed my memory. The moments are there somewhere. Buried. All blurred together like melted ice cubes.

What fills in the spaces these memories inhabited.

My mental life is fascinating yet violent to my spirit. Whatever that means. I have horrible negative internal self talk and it is disastrous for many social situations when I need to be cool and collected. I would prefer to be cool and confident all of the time anyway as I never tend to get anything done beyond sitting and stewing in an angry doze.

sept 29

sneezes with the morning rhythm, puttering through a too hot shower and too cold exit to that warmth, coffee overflow, landscape is a sad grey/green wash and with hints of the impending great freeze coming to trap us in our box like snowed in hikers taking refuge in an abandoned fire lookout, our eyes will quit creating tears as will have had to burn them all for heat, for heat, the sky is a closed mess of dark clouds and rain to fog windows and let steam escape from the chimney when no trees are looking, swaying evergreen.

first time of new fresh week. large swirling coffee, silky, pumpkin chocolate chip muffin and a genuine lack of protein, though I need more of it to carry myself with any notable strength up those 150+ step staircase or the 20th street blues uphill, or the tree line fractured tear of a 45th street viaduct, good god damn, the options for height removal are multitude and nothing seems right because I do not feel right, this is all strange within because I can't seem to say anything concrete or real or sudden. 

I am rolling my ankle on the floor. I am nervous


-----

On approaching 23.

Well, anxiety swells up in me and rattles around like a big wave full of broken up boats crashing against the grey matter rocks of my internal shoreline. I do not know how to acknowledge the existence of myself on this earth for as long as I've had. Countless billions of humans, and countless billions more dogs, have died at a younger age than I. What do I do with my time and knowledge and experiences... they are puzzle pieces and I am a huge, hastily painted blue backdrop that we all automatically assume is the sky, the cardboard cut out people and their fear of box cutters, their fear of flames and aging, the decrepit little angst-ridden youth inside me is by now fairly well aged, a top shelf wine, a dying celebrity... The 16-year-aged boy within me has become an old man. Time is a vortex and it swallows potential relationships and sticks you with the sand and grit of the current fling until both sanded down so smooth that personality is floating sediment where there once was rocks.

What the hell am I. This is personality dissociative fugues states without navigable maps, all crossed out where the old roads once ran and into the woods where the forests are moody and don't want to talk and the tension rods in the air snap with electricity, with signal flow and the vacuum of carpet space is a girlfriend sick in bed, a cat sick in bed, a grandmother sick in bed, a mind of battlefield sergeant, some scars unhealed and tobacco smoke thick in the gravestone car and we looked out on the scene of the accident where the blood was still stained warm between the cracks, the guitar pick, the earring, the sad stifled silence, the lack of talking when it was time to go, we just gravitated to the tahoe and left wordless, and left wordless.

I have died a thousand times and had a thousand rebirths. I am not immune to self imposed prisms of pain. I thought I would outgrow the worst parts of me but I have found my quick trigger frustration to dominate my days in some form with red flashing light colors of ambulances traveling toward your funeral because god gave them an order to resuscitate. Oh flashing lights of whiz by time and the pain of being wrenched forward into an unforgiving future when all present is so nice and physically decent, and the future... next future... 24 and the suffering in friday harbor when the ocean drains and I need some time alone, please, thank you, no thanks I don't need a coffee. I'll take a tea. Cold shower. I'll take a new house and a palm walk and a broadway broadside and an editing internship and god almighty I'll take a place in queue with the other greats in purgatory who die in an abstraction when they do not wake up to realize the wide open space between them and their goal. me and my goals. no obstruction. just self. just ridiculous fallacious emotions that can turn a rose into a burn victim. 

30 minutes sept 26

5:41 pm-6:14pm

When I come home to write, I can imagine words shaping themselves into ellipses and spiraling out of the air into my mind, and I, transcribing wildly, might glean some truthful version of the events of the day, the mundane observation mixed with truth of unsettling detail. The soul of the situations all spread out onto the operating table. 

(I wanted to keep my sanity and write with method and patience and adequate timing, etc. Earlier, I avoided my free-write and have been a cloud ever since. No solid ground on which to stand. A downed bridge in heavy fog and the drivers are suspended through the crisp air above the ravine before plummeting.) 

Mind wanders too far and it doesn't seem to know how to complete a thought to place in the head of a fictional character. Hear the muddled advice of a number of authors say, "Every character you create is yourself, an extension of your own fears, desires, joys. These exaggerations are not lies, and bending through your internal vocabulary is a psychological attempt to make sense of the harder-to-cope-with parts of your personality. Through exaggeration, that time you overreacted to the spilled cup of coffee can be taken apart and examined as a fossil found washed ashore on some rocky beach... then, with horror, you find it to match with exactitude your selfsame DNA. You are the author and you are your characters. You have the power to resolve conflicts within yourself through them."

I have tried to begin a sentence four or five times now and erased every word of it. This is not a free write. This is a sabotage of the creativity because of how self analytic it is. Of course I need inspiration to create the characters through which I can work through my paralyzing guilts and paranoid prosecution anxiety, where the characters are fucking real but heroic and never crack under the pressure that washes over me like a placid little flower being drowned in a heavy rain. Regret does not exist in the created world. Only in the terrible, depraved world of the creator, who creates nothing focused enough to share. Nothing nothing nothing. No combination of words from the ether can be shared reasonably or published or even re-read by me! 

Negativity die. Give yourself some astrological free will advice to warm up the cooling embers of your heart, the tight ropes wound round the lungs and the curve of the spine as it is swallowed up by the orange chair, the apples on the table, the digging I can do, the excavating of stories, the wonderful images and beginnings, the mountain erased by clouds, the packs of roving imbeciles on a campus that fuels me with a kind of sardonic fear of emulsion, yet the cynicism is louder and yells longer than their voices...so many, many, many. So terrible too. Their faults numerous in their acceptance of the status quo as a way to exist so happily in bliss and with god and the ministers of peace and justice are always self-proclaimed and never secretly gifting strangers the elected spirit of a positive mindset at random, with strings and syringes, in red brick public squares, illuminated by a cross breed mutt architecture and the green distances all, all, all directions. 

You are amazing, fantastic, great at knowing how to live. Creativity pours out of your eyes like tears of zeus. or lightning bolts out of thunderstorms caused by volcano eruptions. Yes! There are problems in the machinery. Your depression nearly laid you flat before you took a bus downtown to climb a 40 story building and investigate the public library. You wanted to sleep and in a dark place, it is understandable. You wished for an out at that point. A pill to swallow to paste a collage of smiling advertising faces on your self. No, no. What helped this time was velocity. Getting on that god damn bus. Looking out the god damn window at quickly passing sights and lives. Then wandering aimless through the downtown cluster of shining, majestic buildings, newer and fresher than Amsterdam canal water. See the sea down the hills while walking along 5th or 3rd. Dream of pods of orca whales.   Becoming one of them, or building one in the laboratory, and procreating to save the species. Helping them avoid quiet ferries among the loud motor boats. 

Velocity always seems to help. Drinking in a dark room as photographs of newly inputted memories are suddenly blotted out by a carelessly, mechanically cleaning bartender.. "oops, were these yours? sorry about that. another double?" and then drinking it down and feeling the world pass by with ambition and purpose as your bar tab rises and your depression surrounds your body like a snake skin too heavy for the poor little snake to shake off no matter how much writhing and rustling in the overgrowth, the undergrowth of forested lanes. 

This blockage is nothing! It truly is not a blockage! You're borderline personality disorder. Anxiety is one voice. Contentedness is a student who never raises his hand. Creativity is drunk and boisterous, yet always in the mornings finds himself a false promiser. Ambition is a kid who wants to be an astronaut but doesn't want to do math, just wants to look at the stars. Happiness is a white tiger in a darkening twilight snowdrift, bear in a cave, hibernating. Sadness is an atmosphere. 

sept 22

first day back from summer commitments and the grey is heavy on the rooftops. the grey is weighing down the green of the trees into brown and the branches are frozen in a tussle. I am going to be taking  early american literature, the second instillation of french, and a prose writing class. The elements of style in a story form. The elements of the periodic table in cosmic form. Possibility of failure is minor, so small, an etching on a paper erased by spilled coffee. These will be mornings of bounding up out of bed with the eagerness to pursue a dream, at least a temporary dream, as it flies in all directions, makes me chase it, lose it, find something else as beautiful and majestic in the forest of my life and experience, creatures walk the earth, all the time, and in between the spaces of the fictional and the real will be my own self, furry with fiery eyes, hiding among the grey branches of my world.

sept 19 free write

11:09 - 11:29

black tea wearing all grey, the house show last night was quiet, two singers and acoustic guitars and an awkward staggering of the self when surrounded by emotional triggers, like pianos, or a certain select series of notes to wrench out the heart from the chest, still beating, like Aztec god-kings and to let my head go rolling down the steep steps of a pyramid, sewn off with a dull slashing axe, a dull motion spun neck and my vision of the sky and the steps and the vast landscape, green, would alternate depending on what my skull bounced on, boing boing, the crowd below bloodthirsty and gut hungry and eye tired, they've been in the sun all day long with rotten fruit.

Piano notes tinkling along with the experimental haze of someone waking up from a fog. Is it clear that this person, myself, has begun to slip, to lose the mind into an eternity of insane thoughts so convoluted that there is no tether to line me up into a prose-poem even, or an avant grade hand me down bookstore where poems go to hide and burrow? Colors of friendship last night were the turquoise, aqua stairs that lead down into the basement. Hot in there. Our lungs filtered, filtered air and dust when the drunk banged on the furnace piping along with the rhythmic thump of the acoustic guitar and yelling vocalist, passion hitting the notes straining the vocal cords, it is an investment in the cause, the notes and the feelings rather than a simple gestural performance piece with stage lighting and make up and nervous hands in the audience. How does anyone without beer or a camera know what to do with their hands?

Low ceiling. Eagles rest. Outside the black cat chases off a raccoon. We talk freely amongst ourselves as if given an 'at ease' command by the sergeant. Whoever. The clouds hold themselves together, only shedding a tear at the mention of her name. Margot, perhaps. Jane. Sunshadow breaks through the clouds sadness and they disappear without the relief of tears. Well it's night now and the clouds can glower and threaten to sob all they want, the city goes indoors to hibernate for a few hours.

In my hibernation I experienced such obscure lucid dreams. I saw my uncle with huge scars tracking up his arms, huge arms, huge gashes, and his impatience. Taken somewhere beautiful to accomplish a task. Make my eyesight work. I had gone insane in my dream. I was perhaps hospitalized, or drugged. That is a common theme for my confusing psychological nightmares. I announce the causation of my forgetfulness on a strange drug someone slipped into my drink. Never had blue ice cream tasted so guilty, it turned to mustard and the scene swirled about. There were cathedrals. Jungle beaches. Perpetual sunsets. Two attractive lesbian women in the reception area, exceedingly cramped, with odd names. One was David. the other an inanimate object. something I can't quite remember like most the dream within the dream. I had forgotten the elements that made up that world as I was still a part in actively creating it. This forgetfulness caused anxiety within the dream. How odd. The world I created was within my rules and boundaries and I was embarrassed by my inability to remember what I had previously created. I guess that is similar to forgetting an old song you wrote with your first or second or third band. Some old art wears out and the new material replaces it with kashmir increasingly.

I dreamed myself incapable of getting the story straight within my dream. I had persecution delusions all from within a world I could absolutely control.

scattered notes (compiled sept 17th)

a riddle

scent of pine or cedar, pulled along toward greater things, move food & give height to the banquet- rapid pace for the brave, aimless drift for the sun burnt drunk, muscles fight the current near the fall yet only w/ teamwork - or just go in circles.


receipt from a bar

I know the snowflakes attached to the lights are common to you but, damn it, they are new to me. Never neglect the small details, they might come back and remind you of who you were for the rest of your glorious life. Those reflective beer signs, I'm sure you see yourself -- do you call yourself beautiful in your mind? Or is there a block of some kind, a resistance... it will become futile with time... cheap beer trivia night, does the vibe personify your soul? I doubt that. It must be transitory. This is something to endorse and fund a greater cause, great! Be an artist! a magician! I still love those snowflakes. The chalk sign or trivia, by definition, mean less. Where we grow on these sticky, marked up tables. this is a poetic, constant experience. Patron - bartender, to bouncer-patron.. if something does not work out of these relationships maybe the paramedics will be called again. many actors on stage tonight disappear in an instant, look a shot of jameson as a man took...

open mic night notes

set up, acoustic guitar, bass, trumpet, tuba. storytelling song structures, humor split between. I say two without connecting them with words coherent, open forum for all forms of performance art. the wide, expanded minds of artistic, soft spoken writers, and their evident creative output.
"build a city in your image."
funky, folk art, multiple materials, mixed media words

(poems in the mail) dark philosophy, creation myth, infinite decisions (spacey cousin of eternity). this house is like.... (body metaphor).

news articles from different perspectives.

back corner with my lemon herb tea, to dominate my nerves as I signed my name up first... bricolage, literary arts journal. Trekked up the mighty hill keeping blood flowing in my hands, those cold strings... creative writing vs. literature (nearby same classes just with additional workshops)
- mic set up with curled up cable - tiny amp for the voice. went first, nervousness subsided though difficulty knowing what to do with my eyes (only used microphone after songs).
scattered applause, connects & future open mice (spoken word dramatists) started the trend of microphone ignorance
- shaky hand poems, indecision what to read, self-affirming poem of family

torn out from notebook

bright world music, primary color scheme, yellow beams & ceilings, red table, blue painted bricks, now the pier & the sleek, covered ferris wheel salt scented summer heat. We misunderstand and tear apart. I'm embarrassed by my credit cards and my ears. I returned to a life that is not mine, a guilt swelling up like a riptide and a cigarette sounds an alarm in me. (today I am terrible a depression fails my arms) Fuck this feeling. Return to a unique life. a velocity. return return.

I tried. The octopus with its fervent oscillations cheered me.

torn out from different notebook (tangled vines)

tangled green vines (coliseum ivy)
those glory days, before the woods became tamed, my vision held through rose colored glasses, she was a wild flower whose petals fell and caught in my eyeglasses
the ambulance took hours making sense of the wreckage my sudden shifted broken lens try  to piece together with duct tape and bandages but the view is lost in haze of coal fire smog, gently lit the carriage wheels ablaze only plunging in the river could they be saved....
caffeine when we need the rest
fire when we might freeze to death
water when we burn alive
an awful sight for sore eyes

tingling with fireworks and lightning flashes

re-drafted letter

jeremy-
I had difficulty waking up this morning, the sleep too comfortable, dreams too lofty and safe because my logic knows they will extinguish themselves like moths to flame with the morning. Then I ask if any of these dream-ideas, below my comprehension or acknowledgment, blood or grow wings rising from the ashes of cloudy morning as a dazzling fiery bird? The dreams I can't remember most likely guide this pen across the page.
Background, first fresh pot of coffee brewed in a few days. Smells smokey. Foreground, a temperamental plant with purple clover leaves that faux-wilts if it has too much sunlight or water and then folds up as if to cuddle itself at night. (pause to pour a cup with eager, shaky hands). There is a large stack of books to my right. External motivation will help me with a pace for each without my normal distractions that disallow prolific reading when I inhabit free time... I must make breakfast and walk up to campus, I'll write more this afternoon...

thoughts in a cafe 9/18

she rolls up her sleeve to show a hand-shaped bruise
dress made out of bath mat material

sept 9

good days, the sleep will feel less startled when that foreign body is asleep and feeling a lack of color like a burned out sunset. our arms are stretched out with hands formed as drinking cups to the impending rain, this moment here on the couch with blissful music strained through my ears like fuel.
Poetry comes in musical sections of late night, what dumb list of activities to attach oneself to with the reconciliatory actions of a cat who knows a working section home with the desire to be left alone when the linger is longer and the days away are felt as playful moments fetched out from a jungle hike with flaming torch. The dark green vines all tangled up and the orange yellow flame bursting through with a black and white contrast as well, the limes accented above the submarine depth dark of the spaces between trees, where remaining leopards dream of hiding when confined to jail cells of observation chambers, where scientists or tourists or caged animals from around the bend act as helpless and captive as the fair ticket captive audience bored father dreams of a jungle. The jungle is one of those epic blues ballads that erases your happiness...

"every now and then I've been down... this cup of gin picks me right back up."

Does the beauty beat any deeper in a chest so capable of colors.

2am

sept 7

house warming present to myself when I moved into this body for the second or third time. becoming disembodied and then returning takes a magician's knack for disappearing borders between real and unreal, when the body flails limp at the prospect of becoming a shade darker and cooler than the summer heat intended. when the young couple suddenly finds themselves adopting a 7 year old cat who bares his fangs if you touch his belly, someone gave him a bad haircut and he is asleep on top of the dresser under the stairs where I laid out a blanket, call it self-discovery but I laid it out, if only, by some sleight of hand, I could find myself a nest to lay down my head, my body of my personality that some gnome secretly spread out in a non-obvious position, some dark alcove in my daily routine which does not exist, but perhaps a likely spot for me to encounter and passerby, a bar or crooked tree that I enjoy to walk in or under, the basement door knocking up dust from all the ghosts trampled there without warning, and a third soul inhabits the dwelling I call mine but then my other me wishes to be surprised into the seat of his personality with the first layer in the way, if this surprise attack of good intention could plummet through my heart as in a bow-arrow attack and I can escape my adoption center tomb of painful separation from past lives and other existences in warm homes with warm food and warm, warm, warm, with the toys and the paperwork.. If someone could lay me out a treat when I transitioned well through moon phases. Like a cat. Yes. A rescued cat.

sept 5th

blood cultures, pacing the office and chanting ancient hymnals to myself, I'm afraid of losing control in a depth such as this for length. Mention 'blood drawn' and watch the whole body recoil, the doctor surprised by my mask lifting "What does he want?" and then seeing the well read inner being, the scared little puppy with no home, but these bones, those good veins, regular blood pressure, that anxious knuckle cracking and the medicated society swiftly coasting along thyroid night, the hormonal moans from open windows don't sound like love, the peaks and valleys and your plateau when I come home, the sleeping pills and the migraine medicine covered and a fear that the brain is bleeding somewhere for MRI tests and more needles and all I wanted was a safety net. Something to balance myself once I felt I had gone too far into a dark place. Something jolly and warm. Void of alcohol or intoxication. Something akin to the feeling of success - paintings done by viciously trembling hands and an inability to communicate with clarity, it is the feeling of handing your grandson a large scanned copy of the first green/blue and brown reflecting large scene with evergreens in a real and alternate world... the first canvas stitching itself together after the second stroke. The first time the speech therapy was rocky, a dirty rotten trick of the tongue. Some cross reference in the mind of loved ones. Mixing up names yet we're all here and it's beautiful. Thank you. Coffee cup on the handle bars of a bike ridden by a father who died at my age and became an old man. Fell over the hood of a parked car and broke a collar bone. Made it up. Sped through traffic and stopped to enjoy the view over the original narrows, with two lane traffic traveling 60 in both directions. stop over the side and look down and over. The sound is blue. rushing swirling currents, mighty tidal spools under winding while we as a species cause an extinction of other animals which should be our own emotionally blubbering mass death. When disappeared I think I will break inside. Must brace for impact as my nostalgic bridge, the bridge of my memories condensed into few photographs and such fragile tissue, connective tissue, sneeze and dissolve, some strange reason to horde all of these memories, when people die and taint the good with a knowledge of bad, when they go out into the woods by themselves at night to find a nice place to curl up, with decent coverage so as to not be found easily from the road, yes this is nice, I'll just lay down here, I'll stay right where I left all of my family photo albums, this forest of trees, this spirographs of memory oh but etch and sketch, erase with a shake the positive and replace with the skeletal remains, the horror of the belated burial.

sept 4

9:02 am

history mends itself over a glass of scotch or the joint smoked in a cherry blossom tree imported from a japanese seed factory or the red brick and a mess of various architectures and styles conforming to nowhere specific and the avant grade structures like a bike tire bow and arrow strung together with video tape all stretched out, film I mean, and the wavering small white flags, ripped and tattered, in a circular formation off center, some smart camouflage of a grander idea born of the ahaggar mountains or the gulf of oman, the foreign artistry when no one seems to get it... four pink flags, back lit and colored by the moon, the grasping of the moment, but the stoned mind becomes a mildly recoiling entity desirous of sleep or safety, we sat outside the yell singing frat after encountering the well wednesday crowd of slimy irish bar yell talking fraternizing and we glower in the corner and talk about peace and madness, some inkling of proof that ...

September 2nd

Clouds tearing in half over violent meadows, our star-view obscured with grey anger, my sister drunkenly chastises all within a small radius of field and grass and dirt, when the light of the neighboring gigantic motorhome is switched off by a even more drunk, grubby hand. No one is safe and the voice is raised because she has feelings no one can understand and they seem important to explain at the loudest possible volume and they are normally either negative, pathetic, or extremely hostile. Swear words pepper her salad statements. She wakes up chipper and baby talks her dog though also yelled at her last night for running off and exploring the wilderness around our campsite lawn. True, coyotes made the blood lust screams of hungry, loitering phantoms, though more domesticated (therefore more territorial) dogs ruff-ruffed right back to cause the phantoms to explore other evergreen avenues. Creek beds splashed with paws and they jump from rocks through the trees hooting and hollering like partying college kids let loose on Grandpa's ranch for the weekend. No need for sleeping bags when the ground is so soft and dry, the grass stitched together so, the bugs are only a minor irritant and if you panic they swarm. So let them crawl.

Rain stopped. It turned the dirt paths of the service roads into a muddy gulch. Trees, bombarded in such a pressurized upside down champagne uncorked deluge, offered no shelter. Only a metaphoric shelter in that we were human beings among them. Looking at them with our eyes and smelling them with our little noses and we had no guns. We hated guns. The trees enjoyed our presence because we thought of them of hugging them all and becoming them and growing the patience of a philosophy scholars in the basement of the forest or the attic of the alpine range where snow makes the nostalgia colder and whiter like a blinding flash bulb of recognition before receding back, back into the fog of not knowing who the fuck you are or what you are capable of..

Lost my mind over this weekend. I hear the stories of Europe recounted. Otherwise we glazed over the details and I don't have anyone other than my grandparents to talk about it with. They must know. I am in prison hearing sirens outside because I've told them nothing personally. I've made no contact and that is a crime terrible. I always go back down the black to that awful place of regret. Where missed opportunities mold into something infested. These failed moments do not need to be colored with blinding red regret. They can be turned into bad things a character does in a story. Fiction. Or they can be looked back on as a learning tool to approach future scenarios with. Either way. No matter how I write about this awful weekend I know that everything bad about it will eventually be forgiven or forgotten and the worry involved in the screams and the tossing across the room of wallets and leashes and black mugs full of water, water I swear it is water, the loneliness and the lodge, the rain ceased and the voice in my head became a dull mumbling voice and everything gathered around, concerned. So I truly forgot what I was getting at.

august 28

time the writing to place it in a space originally planned for the discovery of a part time job to assist with the pleasures of budgeting and the concerts coming up quick, oh a wasted day, so silly and paralyzed, I feel a post European adventure depression that sweeps great ideas under an increasingly lumpy, lumpier rug, with red and yellow designed with ink pen swoops of trees and monkeys clambering for a view among the branches of the explorer with a cast on the right forearm. Sure the ideas roll out like an old dusty carpet. wallpaper with moisture behind it causing peeling and uncertainty.

So here I am. Typing away instead of emailing my professors or reading the books or receiving my Seattle Public Library card (oops once again forgot my evidence of residency). Why not get a new driver's license or take around my passport? Why not adopt a cat and set up the internet under a password all our own? Why not become a serious person with serious issues to solve in a solemn and silent cloud, at the rickety desk in the corner, the dark corner, by the front door that does not open from the outside, a mentioned before detail, and all of them are but not for my life. This life I have yet to begin. I am like a kid terrified of water with my life jacket on at the edge of the lake.

Memory. Normally would have something assisting me in flotation, on American lake with the fish and the witch island and the room built around a tree with the creative energy of time spent in one place always creating, carving wooden ships with a little knife, whittling away time as a woodpecker shaves away bark to get to the gritty, oozing sap, the marrow of life, the exceptionally placed hammock out the second story window... I jumped in without the support of a noodle or anything that floats. My arms felt the strength. My open water mind expanded to contain all of the oceans and the fears of jellyfish swarms or great algal blooms that can infiltrate and colonize a scratch, a mere flesh wound, or time spent in the water replaces my rubbery flesh with silvery scales, and I wish. I wish I wish I were a fish, a fish.

So jump, asshole. Spread those wings, those flippers, those motherfucking arms you haven't lifted weights with in so long, they've shrunk. Write the sad songs out of your system. Make the band a necessity. Do the laundry. Move along. Lost time to figure out why the internet don't work. Why don't mind work well either. The espresso isolates my anxiety and I don't think I should transcribe more notes from the journey because you know, reality. Submitting applications at sundance. Waiting to hear from the grange. Picking up fucking groceries from Trader Joe's. Losing my mind and wishing I could see Elvis Costello at Bumbershoot but probably going camping instead. All is vague.

august 27

listen to the rx bandits. roll the ankles. details but no story. never left, stayed in a hole of depression and then isolated by the horror of mosquito bites or scorpion kisses while sleeping in the haystack bed and losing a friendship to get drunk like getting drunk is a way to make friends when you turn 23 and the hype is reduced.. young bucks, distraction, our livers hate themselves and the tobacco locked itself in the car, a joyride lie and the rolling papers soaked in beer, it may as well be a deadened habit, with or without real flaky friendships, me or them or all parties difficulty in retaining the necessary relations with people I should call my friends. Hey I kind of know you. I know uncertainty.  I know what it is to wish for better. For work with the Stranger. Or some other publication. Something important and less confusing... less drunk with inertia... something rolling like a snow ball idea with the recording software made and learned until found enough... the weight of hesitation... somehow it is feeling incorrect and I have only terror to survive the morning within... oh god...

August 26

to compete with this kind of longing you need a steadier heart, no arteries formed of glass, you need to leap out of bed in the morning like everything is on fire, the posters you meticulously straightened on an edge, standing on a crooked chair, sputtering about the house with a passion seen nowhere else.
Can't complete a thought. A character portrayal. This kind of longing is born out of an uncertain future. It is a building constructed 40 stories internally, to be noticed across the plateau of an Arizona cafe with outdoor seating only used when the sprinklers are switched on and they can dilute your drinks unconsciously... 8:15... poses for album cover, the second or third since I said I would do the same and then again with sunhat or the desire to live in Washington as if I don't already do that, toothsore in the quiet tuesday morning, every morning sounds the same hollow emptiness of the ravenna retirement home where the doors never swing... red dress swaying on the desert highway with a kindred spirit contained within, some ethereal spirit, more like, something impossibly distanced by time mores than age or ability or talent, our depression manifests differently, mine has been allowed to nurture itself on my thoughts, the good ones, always eaten up by a negative cloud, some screaming clouds let in the back of my mind when I was drunk and the regret, the lack of writing letters, the suffering caused by an awareness of great ideas and a mind aware that I cannot think to move forward for any of them... There she was... Now a denied access roommate to all of this hoarded space. Now brightly decorated. Easy to have slow morning when all is so comfortable. No no. We need time. How much time? Where will time go once we get to the other side of it? Does he know time... does she know time?

changed from whimsical acceptance to paranoid fraudulence.

all of it feels so useless some days. this writing. these words toppling over previous combinations of words and the free writes are not the same quality because the nostalgia of the past beats the description of the present today, but then, when she broke my glass blood into silica fragments on a beach somewhere, somewhere without natural water, a manmade lake beside a small hill called a hike, deeper hills elsewhere with larger hikes, rattlesnake coves and dusty sunrises, no no I am there not here. I was able to write presently in that moment but not this one. I am presently exploring the recollection of the moments she sparked in me. Thunderbolt down through the top of my spine. Worries and a tense shouldered feeling that I can never recover. Discomfort of the los angeles show and the loneliness of a sad drink while she sings sweetly and my conversation is distracting and horrific and I wanted to sob and I think I did once I found my car and drove through traffic through Hollywood alone in the painful throes of celebrity insanity and every night is hot and cultural and dangerous because the strip is a cesspool and I brought that energy with me because I molded myself briefly into their framework, making me the shitty landscape I was a part of.

Now mountains, trees, peaceful silence? This part of the city is like a god damn rest cure. They feed me money and free time and I eat it without thinking about the future or my music or the speed and direction necessary to make anything difficult happen in life. (difficult in the arts. music in the veins though no dancing blood still. she has those cute little veins that light up in the nighttime hours for creation when I go out to the pub and destroy.)

her little bird sings when I drown mine.

August 25.

formless anxiety bends the mind in on itself like a concave mirror and in this concavity is disallowed the clarity desired to move through in a day, the clarity breathing through beautiful scenes when they are noted without reaching for camera phones, the breath of the landscape down your neck or is it the breeze with the salt and the ethnic food in the air, the dishwashing jobs available at the indian restaurant on the ave, the avenue, the splotched and spotted streets all straight and easy, a little too simple to get around, the "there are only three counties in this state I haven't been" attitude along the border of canada and where Idaho meets in the south, south. Noticed a parisian cigarette box and now a gallery of French architecture exciting the walls, exhibitionist paintings of naked towers down by soft alcohol and using the contours of a smooth body as paintbrush and stroking, rolling around a canvas to imprint the romantic idealism we destroyed with our sloppy kisses and inappropriate public touching though the daunting architecture, naked, clear-sighted over the horizon and illuminating the foyer from afar, the desire for a naked architecture, of clarity when a landscape looms, of the ability to adequately keep oneself simultaneously distanced from the seat of and strapped to the electric chair of life and a consciousness of the self as it yawns and expands or shrinks and shrivels, spread wide across a sand scattered beach hut hit by boats propelled like missiles on a mighty wave, projectile ships with tall masts scattered along the mountaintops in a mysterious and ominous glow. where can clear sightedness form when all the signature buildings, metaphoric as a defining personality in the glowing heart of the city, have you been there before? in that state of calm execution, the motions seem more natural than breathing, the motions are fluid and deliberate, the second guessing is a voice erased like a ladybug met fate of an aphid or the roses protect themselves with new toxic plume. No, no. I haven't been there before.

july 25th

New legs where my bike tires used to be and a spinning swirling wash machine head asking me if I desire to become horizontal any time soon with the gymnasium floor beneath me. The cool multi purpose lines criss cross where my mind wants a rest until it dissolves back into the elementary carpeted gym/talent show auditorium where bored parents shuffle through hours of ill prepared performance done by small versions of people who have illegible dreams and cannot write in cursive. That is fifth grade when the sex talk happens and the eyes widen in terror or falsified foreknowledge.

Now I sit on the carpet confused wondering where my life went and why I don't have any strong desires to do anything in particular whatsoever. In a few days I will be in Europe feeling intelligent and jet lagged yet properly undeserving and a family mess of differences wrung out like a dirty old dish rag until fills up a vacuity where the universe once hid an amber lit head in the fuzz flower pedal dawn and the animals dance in tribal dances out on the lawn before there were lawns and I wonder what the harbor was like before the developers came and tore apart the landscape and thought not of the seals in the salt fresh breath air, the hum of waves rustling those dinosaur feathers until peeved enough to take flight head first into evolution where a bible rests laughing and rearing a head away from those traditions or the sky blue pipelines into the future where sauerkraut and pinot grig waits under a red and white striped awning or the cemetery walls of a casket, a deliberate confusion of sparks when mixed up in the same oak aged barrel with notes of hickory chestnut, of daffodils or other Pacific northwest foliage buried under ground. All of the species kept hidden from site.

july 20th

Do domestic shit. Reorganize the books by color on the shelf by height and write the poem that haunted the dreams of car coughing up black smoke the window melted out. The french assignments piled up. The lie to the band and to the self. The hateful pain of this mistaken identity. Notebook. Priorities are eschewed like death.

jul 18

Learning about literature and the great writers of our times in a college setting does not make any of it seem accessible. I am still a lost child of my generation, inundated by the sheer weight of every word written in perfect placement by every predecessor. The fault is in my "undeserving" complex. Self-deprecation because How could I ever write a story/song like that? and my complex frames the question hypothetical and unanswerable, whereas it takes baby lion steps. Those first brittle bones arching across the safari until eventually running with the best hunters of the pride. Shaggy mane all hanging down. None of it grew overnight... but that beautiful concept... "Last night a forest grew." Destruction is fast. Recovery slow. Becoming good at anything is a form of recovery. To rediscovered the childlike curiosity and excitement about every living creature and a desire to tell relatives about the day's discoveries. The sun! The butterfly! This song I heard! Etc.

In a college setting we are meant to be humbled by the density and intellectual of our predecessors. Is this not a lesson in coping with a 10,000 hour deluge? These writers. Their eyes connected straight to their hands and the words seem so flawless. We know nothing of the torturous process of enacting the effect the words have on us. Our music seems so simple and dumb in comparison. This pressure of the past, a fallacy that we must compete with the dead in order to be remembered adequately... the dead pile up... we are them soon... Our words only matter if they can impart a new meaning. A new representation. Yet all sentences are unique. Inflection and voicing and circumstance. All is diverse. I want to learn what to avoid. I do not want to solely focus on the greats. The best of the world. I know they are there. I understand the distance between myself and them. Learning of their habits and notoriety is not influential to live like that. They are freaks and wrote beautifully for thousands of famous pages. What about the parts of the book that we skim over?

Will my lesson in how not to write only come from work-shopping my own creation? Probably, tough love. You pour yourself out and instead of compliments we dive on grammatical errors that detract from the story and our eyes melt into the white space between words and the abstraction grows while the concrete image fades, fades.

Whoops. I'm saying I want to read a real shitty book and pick it apart. Sounds like more of a chore than reading the sometimes dull, but wonderful greats. This is hardly a lament. I'm bored of the topic.

july 17

Quick contemplation... Weight of credits on my back crunching me down and wondering the financial aid coverage and the out of pocket extra money and privacy of money and loss of courage. I have squandered much. Learned from it. Now how could I possibly ask to stay for longer?

Tess nearly killed herself in a car accident. Swerved to avoid a car pin balling across the highway. I search for a hotel for her mother. She judges my actions like a hawk and I fail and she notes it mentally. I want them to have a nice stay while they are up here. Nothing close is available. It is of upmost importance for her parents to have a good impression of Seattle. The daughter struggles and so does the dumb, money-burning boy, who does not seem to know how to impress himself into a landscape without feeling the aesthetic of the painting is ruined. His presence... mine... is a black splotch, like a hole of night ripped through the blue daylight sky, just a shadowy presence.

French is soon. It is grappling at me for fuel. It feeds on me and I haven't studied. Where is that motivation? Where am I?

Ocean sciences. Poems with grit. Creative writing portfolio. Write and die

10 40 pm

Bavarian cottage tombstones made out of granite helicoptered in from yosemite when night fell and no one was watching. The incessant flow of impressions and observations. Of pipe dreams to create an indie rock jazz band with Stephen and the conversation about alcoholism and a general concern and conscious decision to avoid it for a moment. Prevent the nights from drinking themselves up and go into them with the eyes of the outsider as in Arizona when the writing was constant and consistent and the world stop twirling for half a second and our eyes glazed over with metaphor.

No one really all that committed to the project these days. When did I become such a passive participant in my own god damn life? These veins will dry up and I'll branch out into an oak tree or the peeling bark of the kind that line that grey area between frat row and sleepy time corpse neighborhood. I am in the valley of the undead. Their groping eyes feel their way across my windows but nothing reflects. Just some strands of colored lights and a general disgust rooted in the moment. Physical disgust and neck pain. Talk of other things please. The concern for the family stress and the terror of sobriety and the moving out and on of a daughter attempting to be independent with a freedom felt less before. "I'm calmer than you are."

Progressive influence for musical interludes. Write complicated music simply to get back in the hang of writing. Write simple music just to get back to writing. Write to write to write. Simple process. All it takes is decision making and memory. Or decision making and transcription. Or decision making, creative flow and infinite recursion until the music no longer resembles the initial idea, that first pulse that breathed life into some monstrosity or simplicity unexpected... Do musicians desire the original fervor of initiative music before those second or third thoughts... the editors in the mind with clipboards... come through to ravage the original genius until lifeless or squashed into an "attempted idea" rather than a happenstance mysterious forgetting of the collective self and a general disdain for order or rhythm or marijuana or the cold turkey quitting because of how alone I am and how alone everyone is when they go out drinking until silly. Proximity becomes an issue. No one is near! My neighbors are not my friends and treks get longer as the nights turn orange or pink or black a simple drawn out tar-black that embalms the city for a number of miles in all directions. Oh that tired concept.

Coffee eyes. Sultry red lipstick. Torn dress. Coaxing motion with the fingers to follow into the river. Water is smooth on the surface though thunderous and booming just under, just below. Storm always so close to surface. It takes a magazine ad. Happy orange people with beers or margaritas. Psychology today of 1970's. Stubbed toes and a haziness generally. Should not stay up late. Should sleep out the lawn sleep stress I felt. Such anger and hopelessness in the sun in the sun listening to The Dodos. When they weren't cool.

july 14

8:01 am

I'm going to die in Europe. My French will be ridiculed as amateur, Belgian, or a trifle bit more Spanish sounding with accidentally rolling 'r's and the general disarray of language barriers and then the separation of myself from my belongings or my love. There are windmills and bike routes, canals and mountains, tree valleys, plumage... When I close my eyes and think of Alsace. It is a mysterious blur like our waiting eyes on the bridge facing south to see another flash about the skyline, the lightning... I hear the airplanes bursting through it all above. Screaming through to the finish line.

The coffee is good. the morning is blissfully cool. the words are not flowing. the world is shaking and rattling itself dry again and the window full of plants receives sunlight with open bellied arms having a hard existence allowed through the tunnel-sieve burrowing machine of time as illusion. Study it now. All so quickly.

Production time is tantamount. Learn to write shorthand. Pocket notebook. Slivers of thoughts and papers. Pictures. Video. Landscapes. Wine journeys. Clips for the bikes. Charging stations. Food. Rivers. Train rides through Belgium. Luxembourg. Flowers. Wildlife. Parc Nationale. Worth excitement and the summer quarter is a slow burn up to that wild approaching life.

july 7

What does it take to be a good person these days? Can I host my friends in a hot house and leave them without breakfast in the sallow morning and the action movie violence of a dream-filled night and the fan is up and the sneezes and shores and room full of scattered personalities and the shelter of portland, of los angeles opened up with a miata spun out and over outside the pub when the cop on call played darts and drank a beer and the other officers wrote it off as a rookie mistake when the carnage stopped rolling. Decent poet. Never makes sense. Drinks too much alcohol and coffee. Barely trusts intuition to dig the body out of this whole self and the connection made with professor was less directly addressed in this day and the sky can't decide to be hot or cold and the french mid term is looming so large and impossible that the studying and the unlocked left apartment and the tall bridge over trees and the quick walk and the coffee and the six months and the cottage and the sleeping situation fine and the movie loud and riotous and did we ever really connect. money disappeared. should have saved not squandered. all for her for her for her for her.

july 3

Sleep stays in the eyes and she passively moved out of her old shell and into a new one. Bitter jabs like sips of strong coffee inspire deeper caffeinated pauses where words of kindness and love should be. We mistake the thundering floorboards for excuses to drink. Oh and drink. Eyeglasses and crystal waters, pilgrimage for sudden animaux through a wilderness shrinking and a city growing with traffic and tree-eating machines and smoke from uncontrolled human fires. Not the fire of love. the fire of growth and economy and the oil that pushes this machinery into a pitch high enough for it to sustain along alone.

Orange skin chair with a detachable foot faces the rose bush that grows outside the kitchen window. Not sure who belongs to the rose bush. Who is responsible for maintenance. What did the women with the open window and the cats, who lived here before me, do with the rose bush? Did she plant it and nourish the soil daily with her tears and now with an ethereal presence of ghost-seedlings. Her death allowed the wild flowers to grow for a number of weeks but I don't have an inkling of proof she died, what her names was, where she went, the history of the building, and the familiarity with the worst parts of it... the jungle plants growing in all directions having migrated from Portland through the night without much logical conversation to premeditate. It is much better here with so many living creatures rather than a stark and sterile half-life that I seemed to enter on my sad days alone regretting everything. Those days I could not write. I could not eat. They would consume my desires like a tree eating machine consumes woodland critters. An empty shell, sitting and staring at a well-analyzed poster depicting some optical illusion of Pacific Northwest scenery. Or family/friend art. Or this or that.

It is not too late to recover and burn with honest truth back into the world. With beautiful music to carry the words along and a orange comfortable chair for the type height or write height or read angle when the stars are not out, otherwise, of course, ogle them.

Haunted cottage. Kitchen area. Shoe boxes to my left. Bigger shoes in bigger box and smaller shoes in smaller box: his and hers, disgustingly. Foot powder to prevent sweat stench when the miles are arduous and the mind thinks the feet are sunk deep with the earth's equatorial mantle. I must rectify myself and address the lives I have left behind to reconcile my current decision path. Now, in a passive breeze, an estranged love returns and the tsunami warning sounded in depths, the hurricane rages through a winter frozen village and a wall of water replaces walls of brick and a sea urchin nursery replaces cobblestone brick and a great wave washes out all of the naughty words that mother's bar of soap couldn't wash... the words that remained painfully inside like a demon tearing around intestines with malicious and hidden intent. that knot in the stomach. unpleasant. is his work. he wants to cause myriad transitory pains as to not be centralized and located and host body hospitalized and extracted surgically.

the breezeway. the words I heard and ate and drank to avoid full militant comprehension. now past tense horoscope retrospect ignorance and oblique horror. what broke in me that time cannot fix? is it a sense of definitive self? a growing reach of demonic passivity toward social issues breezed over in the most catatonic conservative tone I'd ever heard. it must be the alcohol. the regret. the weird obscurity that only continues into today. any honest love and I might implode. these memories of a sunny california. longboard down calabash and topanga and the heat and a oil-soaked sandwich to quench the thirst and the pot holes the dive bars the convenience store for cigars and gatorade the dying tree and the expensive removal services and how much blood alcohol does it take to walk under the 101 and eat shit and die.

july 2nd

12:19

I can't wrap my head around distances, there is not enough fabric for these language cues to fire off another round. Yes, I will set up small explosives in your harbors and watch the firelits pop with a blue crackle, crackle, center light blue, and the words will drown deep under an ocean of careless predation. Holy god, I never thought about the sea creatures! The common forest animals! I think of my good old dead dog, Sam, the affable golden retriever who would lurk around you for the taste of human food like vampires need blood and would always succeed in stealing your muffin or cupcake or macaroni during an absent moment, no matter how well guarded you thought you were. He would leap up on tables, despite his size, to take down plates even if they contained only smears of ketchup or some barbecue sauce or some unidentifiable remnant. "What did Sam get into this time?" "Well... I'm not sure. I was eating ramen. This looks like lasagna."

Regardless of his food thievery habits. His eyes would turn to apocalyptic fear and he would hide upstairs somewhere strange when the fireworks started. The dogs have to stay inside or else they get spooked and run off into the wild to join their old cousins, coyotes and squirrels and such. What about them?? The wild ones... The confetti raining sky explosions and the gun powder beach debris swept off into the tidal current. Ecology on the fourth? Poetry behind the eyes? Is there a founded relationship with that old professor that will extent long out of the classroom. What does he see in my work? What is the secret. There must be something that I can tap into and continue to let grow within me golden. Does it exist... the spark returns... or is this a short burst, a bottle rocket flight into the oblivion of a fringe poet with whom no one speaks because a Joyce-like absurdity dominates the mind and the fingers and the real world disappears with a wild surprise. Boom. Gone.

Fourth of july must be utterly terrifying for sea creatures.

June 30

3:38 pm

brain rinse. there is an admittedly long walk from the brick heart of campus back to my haunted little cottage home apartment where the stench of old money is something my numb tongue never tasted before. thoughts are free to form and melt along the sun shaded trees and root-ruined bike path with the bells to signify an approach, a close brush with tires and the horn of a backing up truck, the eyes of a French teacher checking our eyes for dots or punctuation or the roaming peripheries. But why worry about visible cheating when no one is certain the knowledge of anyone else. It is not a test of individual knowledge, rather one of stealth and quick snap judgment that allows the cheater to stereotype all and picked out the best. It is genius selection. Knowing based on intuition the criminal-looking fellow in the police line up. However smiling. Remember childhood experiences. Musical chairs and the hilarious republican prospect of allowing teachers to have guns. I am trying to imagine my dear little old middle school teachers packing heat and everyone feeling safer as opposed to horrified that those who discipline the trouble makers have a gun rack next to the coat rack next to the mommy packed lunch table and the finger paints.

Lost it.

Through an infinite tube- the echoes of collateral voices, of cancer and guttural insanity, of an old lady's distrust of gay pride, to the sleepy and silent bus ride through tunnels and over bridges and up the street, the city lights reflecting like constellations on the black glass lake water, black silhouettes of trees against a lighter shaded sky, passing in the hills in the distance, a few miles wide water, navigate through the clouds, the rain of a crying goddess. the plants and breaths and live all surrounded here within and the junk piled up, the extraction and subsequent total exhaustion this morning... move on. ...

jun de vingt-huit, 1am

1 am

jun de vingt-huit

those dandelion eyes were melted wax and the introductions mattered as much as her comfort level when the water drinks were poured out and I met with her insults and condescending eyes. Jazz rhythm belt out chords to settle the score induced by a crazy bar tab when the beer was local but the booking agency was third party. Probably India or California.

"We don't need our heads because our bodies are young."

when the whiskey ginger poured out on her lap the eyes went blank and the comments became a depressed force like implosion or gravity or concealing... those counseling hours spent making bricolage paintings with spare body parts and the magazine cut out fiction and the finger paints neglected radically and the chalk outline around the bed and the feeling of helplessness that pervades everything and the negativity that serves drinks to sleepless nights- coffee or english breakfast or the motorcade jambalaya southern drawl stereotype destroyed by a philosophy professor with said drawl and testing, meaningfully, the stereotypes of tiny little kinds, not so much white fake generosity when the money is constant and the drunkenness pervasive. Can I have time with you... my intelligent graduate student friends? Or is my life too far removed from your tiny world of concerns that may as well encompass the entirety of your comprehension of the universe. It ends one day with a sad smile and no one ever cared.

do you ever think about your tragic death. mortality is a heat seeking missile. our fates our lined up with time if we are careful, otherwise we can throw in the twenty year curve ball of smoking copious cigarettes or the alcohol abuse that dilutes the mind to heart race mornings of hangover.. death-like crawls and a disregard for the wasted youth to hold high majesty the popular youth in which we oohed and in awe until the morning light at five took us out from horrifying dreams of persecution and then of death or betrayal or worse. When the bicycle tires flatten. When the view is so bittersweet that the viewer sits and waits for the eyes to take in anything else, however myopic. the paintings wonderful. the jazz in tempo with my heart. the jazz in tempe with my old brethren. the jazz in blues with my old guitar compadre. the civil wars we used to spark up between our instruments when the smoke exhaled and the dream expanded around both of our heads at once and the humanitarian views of life and love.. and the end scorn promise of above or below life and certainly only below life... imagine graves.. catacombs... we are useless if not already dead.

moment of death shocked me into a paralyzed awe. the sadness expands but not from my own tragic source. rather from my famille triste and the concerning letters of reprimand and the paintings forgotten and the confusion settles heavy over her brow and no one knows how to deal with her multi stroke name forgetting. imagine your own mother losing her wits. imagine your sister forgetting your role in her life. imagine the scenario unwritten that your friends had witnessed. those were hours spent in ridiculous departure from reality. the reality I can never quite exit. my doppleganger. there was never an exit route when the tsunami came as such a surprise that the seaside town could only passively board up windows before full destruction.

if only, if only I had nothing more to say

I stopped in my tracks at the thought of mortality. Terrified or petrified or both. Nonexistence is impossible to tell. What I've said recently has been extremely depressing... says someone close. No one else is close as I drown so succinct in the pit of absinthe dreams and collateral suicide. The most beautiful suicide crushed down into a limousine off the empire state building like an angel at rest having falling and napped out of heaven. Try to change the attitude. It returns. Evelyn mchale still falls to her fateful death into the far below limousine. an attractive girl and the idea of ideation. what that truly means. for me today this spark was like a horror story of future death. inevitable. it was the looming nonexistence and the subsequent forgetting of all stood for when the world implodes and the novel to be written that enters the space capsule for other martian generations one day. I believe in math. Send my writings out to the ether with space ships that no longer send signal back to earth. the mystery of receipt still remains. is anyone out there at all?

June 27

Daylight spent conjugating french verbs and listening to soft voices whispering over the tops of these sailing songs or soaring high escalators and wondering what I said and what the others heard and who may have been hiding behind the doors of the casket. The catacombs of bar districts with networks of neon signs and a discomfort and inarticulate description of the world when it is overpowering in its enormity and proud stoicism. human nature more a stunned silence went rippling through the waves until lapped up on shore with fragments of eliots poetry and emerson's short stories when in the unrecyclable days of an arizona childbirth and the sun swept streets and the mild cold weather with rain and the hours too early for my head to wrap itself around the important details of what must be done and I have 10 hours to complete my tasks and I wonder if I can without losing my mind and the fever child will fly through another fever dream and the tentacles of sleep grasp at my girlfriend until we no longer get circadian and get post afternoon when the light bulb does not fit and the posters are poorly fitted to the walls in general when plaster melts like old paint and the foundation however connected falls into the mud below. the sink hole. the cave system. the museum of the dead.

I'm sitting on the edge of the bed. Positioned center in the room with bookshelf at one end and reduced purpose as a collective seating arrangement. There is a random tangle of led-lights shaped like reign beau stars overhead. The high pale white ceilings are rounded at the edges like a dome. my elbows rest on a deep stained mahogany glass top thin table which contains my lightning round summer course books and my calendar and the insane lullaby of an impending Europe trip that is now booked with hostels and hotels and campsites and all of the camping plans disintegrated into a cost fallacy when the canals and rivers and bicycles would not allow for us to comfortably carry all of the weight. (acquire a bicycle and get comfortable before going.) sip of coffee. taste of vitamin c gummy mints. blinds are inexplicably closed. daylight begins at 5 these days. art pieces from friends family myself or magazines spatter the white stucco walls. the carpet is beige. dream catcher. globe. hand woven lap blanket. jazz rhythmist. old shoes run dry through the ancient wash. I broke his heirloom drumsticks because I played too loud to be any good.

june 26

I would sleep through the war if I climbed back into bed with her. The shape does not move. Frozen clock. Split the country and find the cold coffee heralded in through balcony wine nights with reflective views of cross street buildings and an every day relationship forming with the classmates of summer the summer warriors and the minds all eager to soak up these days with a fervor. Rearrange furniture to keep balance between wild Dionysian desires and the rigidity of Apollo. Slow drag of the sun across the sky. The consistent nickname ruins hope for change. "they call me consistent apollo." That works for a modern world of cogs and wheels of human machinery and cooperation.

My dreams accused me of horrible things. I heard voices of disappeared friends echo all around me like sword stabs at my back from most directions. All but direct. I woke up with the sunrise. Again with the alarm. Again with the trial and execution of my self and my relationship held up to their eyes for awful scrutiny and the arizona sun kills herself when night comes and comes and never goes. it stays in our hearts when the dust spools up again.

Accused of wasted time and promiscuity. Feel the filth of failure fold me.

Otherwise. Dreams lingering in the corners of my eyes and haunted shallow. I am waking up from the fourth and last identically scheduled day of the week. For this morning I began to write a ballad poem about the eruption of mt st helens and the man who lived at the lodge up there who refused to evacuate. he spent so much time in the majesty of the mountain that he felt his soul had fused with it. to leave her wilderness would be death. so he resigned himself to let her consume him with her fiery breath. as for a third person outside perspective I imagined mt rainier watching the events take place.

Lexique le france.

additionally.... I imagine neighbors at my parents house taking down trees and opening up a view of mt constance and then that afternoon watching it erupt and explode although not a known active volcano.

maybe that is ideal firework view from above fox island.

recall the parking lots of the last two years and shiver inside.

june 25

the miserable french language and her mafia cousins haunted my dreams. the poetry came out as prose and the self identification section represents a greater lean toward prosody in chunks of logical lay out and poetry in gaping blank space formula. you have to carefully pick your words and you do so quickly. lexicon is large for the poems but rather choked lexique in france where the wine and castles spiral up out of the vosges and jura mountains, the water shining and glimmering fair along the coastlines outside the grape wrath reach. It is a pipe dream mystery.

I am taking summer courses for the first time in my life. Aside from Berklee School of Music songwriting classes. Both in Boston for a week and online in the comfort of the purple luxury chair in the open ended 'computer room' before the invention of the lap top invaded my life and my music and my writing. These songwriting classes sparked and stifled my creative energy and I did not participate gleefully. I wanted to break through borders without knowing where they stood. The Germans called the mountains a natural border but the French said it was the river. They pushed and pulled until both influences scatter the landscape and a unique Alsace culture is born between two mothers.

Poetry, with the summer time lisp knee surgery limp hairless professor who loves form and dances in the rhythmic blues of the perfect meter. I must learn the rules to know how to deliberately break them. Such is learning about creativity in a classroom across the board. There are rules to follow and follow and then, left alone at night in your room, you can push out from them and explore uncharted terrain or foreign maps of countries, or short stories about a disappearing fisherman, or the frozen lake and melts in an instant and leaves a gaping void. The stories could become a novel. The novel makes no money. The environment still suffers. World ends. Leave out words. Taste aperitif. Assume the exaggerated accent so then the language begins to feel more natural and comfortable when using it in a non-academic setting.

did you count your words

does your lexicon glower

fever

The moon is buried behind red clouds like a flashlight beam through thick smoke in a burning house. Sure, I could use this time to rest and allow my nausea to cool off with a hot plate hiss. Must be the bile of my memories coming back up to me from my indigestive bank in the gut in the center of it all. Oh Leonora, do you see the red sky night when the moon hides? Gaps of black space look like islands in a pink lake with the moon playing itself as backdrop like a keyhole image for every page of an art book, used creatively for different representations each time. a little hole punch piercing for that new nose of yours. oh calabasas library and your columns, do you know my reverie? ask the reference desk for 'fever dreams' and 'existentialism' and also 'vonnegut' and maybe the remedy can shake up these disconnects and let me live on without the weight and eye-pressure of fevers, of fevers. delirium, mother, I talked to you in a gasping angered asp voice for no reasons other than I heard myself shift into complaint and lodged in my throat was the inability to claim anything beautiful or appropriate and the conversation turned sour so fast that I couldn't even try to keep up with the better parts of it because I erased them all with blank india ink. oh roscoe street, apache boulevard and palm walk, oh vista del sol, the rebibo household and the montessori, the grassy park and the hills up into smoggy viewpoints, up mulholland drive, and broadway, yes and 6th, the spices of life hide inside the addresses we visit enough times to make them memorable, the outdoor patio and the new fence, I helped smash a tv, longboard down E Broadway... past the field of dreams which happens to be Daley Park near the orange trees and the train tracks. down to mckenny behind the pizza hut. across from the park and the other nonsense. my head is full of it tonight. no source of hope just invariable impressions and a consciousness tired and angry with itself because the fever, yes, mustn't forget the fever. the fever of maps and of addresses and books of them just for the self and the postal codes forgotten always and the zip, the car insurance, the road worn tires and the driven blocks of insanity and the girl fallen in love with at the reception desk and the homework accomplished in the waiting room and the tan booth the tanbark the missile sole the name tag, the natalie, the ashley, the christina, who knows what is what on their, those hieroglyphs that change last names suddenly as if in an overnight flash and no i am not well adjusted these memories are dead and so are the people probably it is a life i cannot reclaim and the traumatic experience of my life is an inability to reconcile all of these experiences within myself. they are too many. i am crushed by it. they define me but what about the present tense. is nothing about the red clouds interesting any more? yes. the moon is completely buried. just a blank red sheet remains. some bottom lit silhouettes of trees and nothing else. just sadness for time lost and the face i had when i was 19. all gone in a single flash. sleep, sure, feverish sleep is the best medicine, uh huh, the absolute best when your sleep levels are low, yearn, yeah, that is when that reality embyro really bursts itself into fruition and okay, sure, doctor vesuvius, I'm sure you've seen it all but my case, my case, my case (the moon peaks out for a brief entanda and then goodbye entendre) hey the words are just as sporadic as before when i would come home high from musical exercise and die a little listening to upstairs neighbors have sex and the general silliness of all noises and all sensations all tan lines all hysterics and here is no different nearly the same the engendered differences and the lack of harmony and consonance all are lost and lost and lost and no one matters anymore it is a farce to imagine lasting friendships when all is bleak and senseless and irrevocably changing and gregarious i am not and can't be unless forced so rudely. who was i in arizona that i no longer am. who did california turn me into that i must fight with to work through into a better context. in az i desired to enter all night life clubs and bars and meet the friends. the lasting friendships. horse ass. horse ass. there are always pipe dreams. i don't think i have any anymore.