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.