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.
Friday, July 25, 2014
Sunday, July 20, 2014
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.
Friday, July 18, 2014
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.
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.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, July 14, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, July 7, 2014
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.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)