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.
Monday, November 17, 2014
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, November 7, 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, November 2, 2014
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.
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, 2014
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.
Monday, October 27, 2014
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...
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
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.
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.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, September 29, 2014
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.
-----
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.
Friday, September 26, 2014
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.
Monday, September 22, 2014
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.
Friday, September 19, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
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
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
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
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
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
Sunday, September 7, 2014
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.
Friday, September 5, 2014
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.
Thursday, September 4, 2014
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 ...
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 ...
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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.
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.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
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.
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.
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