american mythology

torrential/ragged/kindling

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:46:32 -0400

they say
that under every house in florida
lives at least a thousand cockroaches.

funny what you remember
when you’re so far from home.

think back to the monsoon rains
that draw the frogs out to sing
spirituals with the thunder
the power boxes whispering
to each other
in low drones
sparking
constantly sparking
in the downpour

a glimmer of conspiracy
a flash of genius
all the binary code
hurtling through wires
to smash unheroically
into morse code
at the end of the line
where
those dashes and dots
spell out the perfect words
to make conversation
with you.

i listen close,
but like i said,
they whisper
and i can only make out a word
here
and there.

things can really get rough, if you go it alone.

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:29:00 -0400

my left forearm is trapped in a medieval half-attempt at a cast, a bulky battle damage prop from game of thrones, and my elbow is fixed in place so i CAN’T. TYPE.

with both hands, at least. i’m the grandmother you’re teaching to send e-mail. strangled grunts of exasperation and polite nods.

this will be remembered as the dark time, when my broken hand saw me quit drinking and i was so unutterably alone that there were some days i didn’t speak once. when we met the mother and cried because it didn’t parallel my own crawl towards the sun. out of the shuttered darkened living rooms out of view of the working world.
drowning in the sea of happy couples where most days gouging my eyes out with a micro-plane seems ideal. i’m floating through this phosphorescent primevil primordial ooze of new romance, all newly-wed and love-stained, like a finger through mercury. they know i’m there, but only in the background. acknowledged and politely conversed with.

sure, i always thought my swelling soundtrack climax was just around the block. sure, i thought i’d find my voice for radio and way with words. but one bad decision and you blink once or twice and now there’s nothing about this that isn’t a disaster. for christ’s sake, it takes me ten minutes for my fingers to form a sentence. they’re floating farther away, those words. those drunk and slurring new combinations, a mix of hate and dreams engraved into each other’s bare backbones.

i watched you split into pieces and scatter to the northwest winds. they’ll carry you over the trees and everywhere, and that’s where i’ll find you; dodging pendulums in irish pubs, searching for treasure in the one night stand dungeons, on the side of the road on the loneliest highway on earth. in shoulderblades and the way people keep trying to teach me to fly. i’ve crashed a few times, and i’m wary of the takeoff - the cowboy pilots who take off steeper than i know is safe.

it's gonna carry me home.

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 08:41:59 -0400

some moments i’m feeling around, grasping for my lifelong friends, and all the google map searches and ip address backtraces and awkward, held back semi-pleading voicemails couldn’t dig them up from where i buried them.

so i do what i always do when i end up alone:
-i make something incredibly fancy to eat,
-drink a bottle of wine,
-smoke a fresh bowl,
-and play my guitar long into the night.

it started in portland. i’d try to teach myself to sing. i’d play “leave you traveling” by steel train over and over, trying to figure out how to make my voice better. how to sing like they did in all my favorite songs. eventually the angry german woman upstairs would stomp on the floorboards, and that was that for the night. i wrote words i tried to force into songs, about airport terminals and shipwrecks and a girl that tried to be everything to me. i almost died there, too, christmas ‘08, in a blizzard, alone, listening to kanye west.

no, it started at grandview, in stinking hot, carrot-colored afternoons on my bedroom floor with cheap vodka. i was happy, and ignorant of it. i had a family then. i still believed in love. fuck, the house burst with the stuff; it was syrup dripping down the painted walls. it was the aftermath of lovemaking on the roof and shattered bottles on the back porch. it was blue eyes and sub sandwiches, wheelchairs and house shaped birthmarks. i still can’t remember what we named that goddamn plant in the living room.

but then, maybe it was tampa. dark, grey days and the beginning of decay. one day she came upstairs to tell me she would lay downstairs and listen to my guitar coming through the air vents. the day i found out my girlfriend and my best friend had been sleeping together for half a year behind my back, she came and laid next to me on my bed while i tried to find the words that would make sense of it all. five years later, she broke me in half in ways that day pales next to.

but

some moments i’m exploding — i’m staggering around bonfires, playing bean bag games with a blonde little pixie, and it’s an underlying idea that we’re playing for another girl’s affections. it’s passive agressive, but not in an unpleasant way. more competitive than cutthroat.

jump backwards to a bedroom out of a fairytale, a forged metal bedframe and a girl on top of me. i’m laughing at her alarm clock blaring terrible country music and how difficult it is to be sexy when someone’s singing about their tractor. just turn it off. we haven’t even slept yet.

flash forward and i’m doing beer bongs in gay bars with bank robbers and girls with glowing hair. i’m falling in love with a girl i should have met years ago. she’s telling me to listen to mae and think about her, and i’m telling her to flee the state. i’m singing sink, florida, sink with a hundred barflies.

today i’m playing back my songs, nine months pregnant with pantyhose pop filters, compressed and equalized and back again. my voice exploding in a concert hall reverb, guitars cascading and echoing and screaming. i play them back, and they finally sound right. the songs sing and pulse and it’s finally perfect. and it’s done, it’s done. what i’ve been writing at since i picked up a guitar and what i’ve bled for and hid from the world for eight, nine, ten months, and screamed and crawled into holes, it’s done, and i have this work to show and play and scream my heart out with three other people and there are beds to be lain in with beautiful girls who kiss me up and down and make me feel like they want me like nobody has before and it’s all gonna go down in catastrophic flames over the ocean but for now

for now

everything is fucking magic,
and you couldn’t find my heart on a map. it’s everywhere, it’s right next to you, it’s on distant planets, crawling towards white light with a troupe of kindred souls.

i was one part of a whole, once upon a time in the land of handprint clouds and bloodstained doors....

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:19:00 -0400

i was one part of a whole, once upon a time in the land of handprint clouds and bloodstained doors. a team, like superheroes masquerading as real people, serving coffee and fucking strangers and pretending like it was all the same. we’d meet in backalleys to dare to explode in paint and screaming chickenscratch sentences one big irate fuck to the plank we were walking.

now the same is true, but we’re — i’m — more like a speck of dust whirling among trillions of others. and it’s so easy now to relate, but feelings are tougher. organizing is near impossible. personal relationships are quantity over quality for everyone now, no matter how hard you try to hold on. that goddamned internet tricked us.

i’m in a loud bar on the beach sipping jameson on the rocks through a pink plastic bendy straw. the things you remember the morning after…

and everyone i came with is quieter than the crowd around us, and i’m pretty sure it’s noticeable. we’re all servers, cooks, bartenders, and tonight feels like we’re incognito, in disguise in the crowd of our slave drivers. if they ever found out who we really were…

this tornado of a girl joins us, every bit streamlined in a black dress, carrying an even drunker girl like a fallen sister in wartime. she tells me i look ridiculous, and i tell her she looks wasted. and gorgeous. but mostly wasted. we take shots.
now how are we supposed to lay waste to the beachside?
she rolls her eyes and asks, “where have all my friends gone?
we were all supposed to meet up here, forever, at the end of the line.”
i can only smile and ask where she got the bright idea that her friends would stick around for long.

we take shots, we wander the bar and wander down to the beach and all of a sudden i’ve lost the sound of the bar, drowned out in the ocean crash and seagulls and every so often one of my friends yelling down a little ways. someone grabs me in ankle deep waves and kisses me like she means it. someone groans happily, and someone giggles; someone screams and laughs, back towards the bar, and i’m startled and turn and stumble down in the sea foam — the nasty stuff, the brown scummy kind that’s been frothing there for a good hour or so. when i wipe my face she’s gone, and i’m all turned around and the jameson in the ridiculous straw has definitely gotten to me and i can’t find the way back. i see a shooting star, and i can’t remember the wish i made. not that i’d tell.

there’s blurs in the photographs, songs blended together like a bad dj’s fade. wishful thinking turns to whiskey-mellowed happiness in the ether, and we’re floating along in the fabric of last night. i’m looking into all the girls’ faces for a tell, but they’re not budging.

i go home, vomit, smoke, eat some frosted mini-wheats and pass out. i wake up with the twinkly light galaxy up above me and my pants still on. the little details stay. the big picture is blanketed in the fog from unexplored maps, and it gets thicker every day. it’s encroaching, and i’m afraid that even if i can beat it back, that when i do i’ll find that the fog will have eaten away everything i had forgotten. i’ll live in a head scoured by acid rain. i don’t think i want to do that.

and then your brain dies for nine months. or so it seems. it really was that long, though. you start...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 03:12:00 -0400

and then your brain dies for nine months.
or so it seems. it really was that long, though.
you start the contradictory, illogical process
of putting your thoughts into stone,
carving away with a toothpick
and your fingernails.
it’s a long process,
and i lost a good amount of blood.

luckily, i remembered to drink water.
it’s important.

i got really lost, and i think i still am, floating farther into space.
all my concrete turns to sand and gravity loses itself more and more
and the days go on and on
towards infinity.

you gain consciousness; we eat grapes
and drink tea and fuck each other
in the hopes that we’ll get the puzzle right

and if we’ve done it in the right order
we’ll come hard,
finish the dishes,
take out our year old trash and baggage
with the the bodies we once inhabited

and the next level of our lives will be unlocked
to the tune of our text message tone.

sideways in backseats -- december 22, 2005

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 06:20:00 -0500

there’s a place on roads
where looking out the back window
could place you
anywhere
where trees
and a dimly lit street
and you
could be anywhere in the world.
and then the singer
on the radio
belting out a melody
about how fragile his heart is
suddenly adds,
‘and here’s what
you
can do about it
so you don’t go
and make the same mistake’.
and everybody singing along
sounds better than the recording.

|x|

finals week, part four.

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 05:35:00 -0500

so i watched this movie adaptation of this book i read when i was 15… back when we were sprinkler thieves, before blood red summer ‘04. i was going to the adult education division of the local community college, having dropped out of my high school after sophomore year and swearing, like the good strong-willed revolutionary that i was, to never go back.

i went back.

this one year, my junior year of shattering streetlights and days where the sun passed too close to the earth, was different. the tides were stronger, and ships broke apart on our beaches until the wrecks formed a levee between us and the sea. i would sneak out late nights to walk the train tracks by my lonesome, sliding through and over fences to search car parks and auto shops for a car to steal, one that could carry me away from this place.
i even bought a gas siphon. i was determined.

i never went.

i was sideswiped by a beachcombing waif with blue eyes she loved to roll my way. that’s another story, well documented by the masses, and already bled out thoroughly in my critically acclaimed writings collection, reign of the autumn queen*.

<press play>

i’d skip my classes, throw on my discman and some giant wraparound headphones, and make my epic journey. past the west side of campus, through the hopsital’s old archways and sloping roads, across the back lots of strip malls, through the woods past the ruins of homeless cities. over the barren black lava pits of the mall parking lot into runoff ditches running behind the strip malls and into manmade lakes.
i’d make this trip five days a week, to the foot of a barnes and noble/best buy, a shrine to the nascar gods.

this was where i got my formal literary education. i’d wander the aisles of the fiction section, grabbing anything i’d heard of and reading away until class would have been over. i found myself drifting towards the dystopian and the subversive, and anything about the end of the world. the kids in cyberspace had taken to this particular book for some reason, so one day i sought it out and read it in four hours in the giant’s embrace of those amazing barnes and noble chairs.

being from florida, i didn’t understand what was so wrong with being found laying outside on new year’s eve. snow is the stuff of legends and bedtime stories, not something that swoops down and nearly kills you. and i was one of those sickly clinging vines, trying to survive in infancy. so of course it resonated. of course i yearned for a manic pixie dream girl to call my own. even before that stupid fucking phrase existed. of course i read the ending and cried like a baby and kicked and screamed, all before lunch. these books were my escape plan, and when they came crashing down, so did i.

i’d go home and go out with friends, and on the really bad days they didn’t even bother to ask what was wrong. i’d never explain it in terms that weren’t opaque and ambiguous, or mumbled too quiet to hear. those days i couldn’t be convinced anyone could understand my internal discord. instead i had a notebook that held the beginnings of a world of my own, a mythology i’d raise up like legos and play-doh.

eight years later i read it again, and realized i didn’t catch a lot of the really resonant stuff the first time. by then the world was in its formative years, and it was learning alongside me.

nine years later and it’s almost self-sustaining, complete with angelic choirs, weather patterns and the written word. the movie is different than the book, but not all that worse. just a different way of looking at it.

*forthcoming, april 2039

finals week, part three.

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 04:57:00 -0500

after proving the existence of my own willpower in a two decade long tryst, i wandered back by your little corner of the world and found words stolen from my songs. i wandered your plazas and alleyways and found angry gouges carved into marble statues of lovers. i paused on the bridge to your house to hear your far off shouts of ridicule and cold, selfish entitlement mix unintelligibly with your lonely cries for understanding. there, in the sick southern humidity you love, i realized; your voice that haunts the hallway between dreams and morning, the music you composed — i’d rather be deaf than ever hear it again.
if i had my way, the world you created would be leveled, cauterized and pass out of human history.

sadly though, like the presidents i’d rather forget crying over, like the drunken new year’s eve fuckups and walks of shame we’re so intimate with, it’s become part of me. now every time i remember the half-forgotten nightmare of you, your history and your legacy, i hate myself more for letting you near the part of me that you can never, ever paint over.
it’ll peel and crack, and eventually wear down to the bricks and tendons, an ugly splotch in the center of my otherwise decently-kept facade.
you’ll always be there. you’ll be my ragged, discolored facial scar that people will stare at across rooms.
there’ll be times that weeks will pass without me looking in the mirror, or walking by the blister named for a greek goddess. then, i’ll be unplugging my amplifier in tampa and see a piece of our history, and the walls will cave in under a tidal wave named for you. i’ll be walking the streets in san francisco and someone will stop me to ask how i got these scars. they’ll ask about the wreckage in your wake, and i’ll invent new stories to explain — something magic, life affirming, wholly devoid of your arsenic and destructive lust.

and now you send peace offerings to your dead.
the dead, as they say, do not forget how you wiped out their gardens and bedrooms, their families, their sense of security and even their memory of love.
the dead in secret build bombs of sound and spoken word.
they will have their revenge in the next life.
you can keep your white flags.

finals week, part two.

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 04:47:00 -0500

once upon a time, i was friends with this group of writers — all pretty decent, some of us exceptional. we fell in love with each other through our writing, and we all had these wild love affairs, which in turn bled out into our poems and stories and songs in this sickly intense melting pot.

it was a wildfire, and it was a whirlwind, and in the end it left us scarred and vacant-eyed, scattered across the earth with a myriad of addictions, with hearts hacked to pieces, with brains fried to a crisp.

i don’t recommend it.

—-

my partner in crime gets up from the table, and whirls her beer around in a flourish and gets into her best mock-broadway stance. “‘i will be alone forever,’ he says, while carving his name into the bar top.”
she’s taking no joy in her mockery, but she presses deep. “oh, trè terrible, the new wave of bukowskis, the ‘my whiskey and my angry friends are all i have left’ cliche! yeah. congrats. you’ve got the role down perfect.” this girl knows when to find better conversation. i shout to her back, to her backless dress receding into the crowd.
“remember when you told me i was a ‘smoking crater in your chest’? yeah, it looks like it’s SCABBED OVER AND HEALED!”

now that was sloppy. and fucking cheesy. there’s another whiskey slur in my voice, mumbling that i am no good as an object at rest.

i remember, i was so terrified of forcing you out of love, like all those other car wrecks of love affairs i’ve become so practiced at. skilled, even. all i know how to do is trace the old paths across your shoulder and hide how jealous i am that you found solid ground in the flood of passing years.
i’m in love with imaginary values.
smitten by love with no solution.
always repeating, ‘if nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.’

‘you’ is a word for vengeful partners in crime,
hiding in the stageplots and backdrops.
‘you’ is a four word tounge twister
with costly consequences.
‘you’ is one and many. ever changing, never static,
never able to be relied on or ever sought out to be.
‘you’ is all i’ve ever known.

finals week, part one.

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 04:08:00 -0500

our life is crashing into caverns of reverberation, bouncing like superballs above the heated pipes and your pick-me-up gasp in the morning sun.

my alarm clock plays a trumpet blast and leaves me a nasty message. go to school, asshole. slide your fingers and make your songs sound pretty. chase that perfect harmony in the headphones. try to lose yourself to literature or in those pretty bastard children on the boob tube.

…fuck you, alarm. i can quit whenever i feel like it.
i could write and write whenever i wanted, it’s just that there’s monsters in my fingertips that sneak out with them. and maybe recently it’s seemed like it’s worth the sacrifice to just keep them trapped in there.

but you used to try to stop me. i’ve always been too stubborn and selfish for that, though, and i can feel it in the way you give up easier and easier each time we’re repeating ourselves to an empty room.

like now. you’ve been gone for days.
like now. it’s winter again already. you’re flashes in the bar mirror.

so turn a dial, and that weird muddy sound in the back of my head is back. it’s rocketing around all the places my heart has gone and gotten itself banned for life from, and now love is restricted to a staticky skype session or a faulty phone call at 3am. it’s camera hues and lens flares and all the little details that make up the beautiful shit. it’s bloodcurdling screams with alleyway echoes, it’s chalkboard brakes screeching around the winding clocks and the back alleys around our regular haunts. it’s too-easy metaphors, legs bare on the curb and looking cheap.

and now i’m starting to notice i’m losing sight of the big scale. the road atlas in my memory gets fuzzy. i forget what the desert smells like. i forget the dull stabbing feeling i chased as a speech-starved shell of a teenager, house shaped birthmarks and your collapsing world just around the corner from our apartment.

but i remember ten or twenty of our voices reflecting off the underside of the bridge. the tequila breath-break dancing thunderclaps we made down in ybor city. how your body started shaking after i told you about the ways i can love. i just don’t remember any of the words i fumbled with. i can hear the high hiss in the bass, but not her voice singing sweet love notes like something possessed. i’m focused in too far and the walls are pixellating. i can’t zoom out to see the planets up in space.

2-4-1s on mondays.

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:31:00 -0400

don’t be surprised when you find
that the sand is really little crack rocks
little needles broken up so small you can’t measure out
see, the beach has got its secrets
like hotel balcony suicides —
spring break, woo
they’re just jealous of the birds above
but you are not a bird, and i am not a bird
and we fly whatever’s cheapest
united, american, something flush with pride
red and white for the bomb flash
blue for the xanax
stripes on the shirt of the giant in the seat adjacent
and we’re all seeing stars
riding comets and jumping off rainbow road
doing laps around each others’ pride
and i can’t be near you
because there’s still the ghosts of wings on our backs
that only we can see
so i soak the feathers in bourbon
and pretend not to notice
but all it does is blind me on the drive home
and it’ll slice my hands open on the pieces of my glass
or was it the ice?
some days i think the cold will kill us before the cuts.

it's sixteen miles to the promised land.

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 02:32:00 -0400

loneliness comes naturally to some. only children, broken homes, high iq, apathy, war, plague, drug abuse, armageddon. the earth is crushing them and they’re not sure if the end result will be as comely as a diamond.

and they’re not sure what fuels them to keep on.

an old man walks to the neighborhood bar every afternoon. some days he’s too talkative, telling war stories about being thrown from airplanes and launched from helicopters.
but the days when he’s quiet are the worst. you can see the atmosphere weighing down on him and his body almost doesn’t have the will to fight it off. the puffy old hands trembling around a beer glass. avoiding eyes behind coke bottle lenses.
it’s almost a relief when he starts to speak again, leaning forward and whispering
all of your loves are only pillars and the crests of waves.

some of us were never born with the precognitive concept of family. some of us are cursed to spend eternity chasing it.

but the cold air is slowly crawling down south, false arrival heralded by storefronts and unseasonal menu items. the pumpkin king extends his reign over us all.

one day i will wear a hoodie again.
one day i will finish school and make my family of one proud.
one day i will cross state lines and hope to die.
one day i will get past you.
one day i will find the balance of the bitter and the sweet.
one day i will find the cure for loneliness, and find a family, and we will smile.

and i will win the nobel prize.

mythos 3,749,743

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 16:10:00 -0400

look the other way when you tell me the truth.
never let on what you’re gonna do.

i never want to write about the friends i lose until they’re gone.
i never use their real names to keep us all alive.

in the century long summer, i loved a girl. we set off into the great beyond with a plastic duck lawn ornament and starry fuckin’ eyes. we had terrible goodbye sex in a hotel off the highway. we laughed and fought and told strange stories, naked, to my camera. we fought and refused to speak to each other, during sunsets, while she splashed in the ocean in santa monica. we had two seperate vacations, but followed the same directions.

before she hopped a plane to flee, she used a united airlines pen to chip tiny surface cracks in my shell, in my stubbornness. they spread slowly.

after thirty years of wandering the forest, people stared when i trudged back into my old town. shopkeepers locked their doors, mothers scooped up their children and ran. i had drinks with an old friend who looked far too skinny. she kept me safe during the long years away, and i fought an ogre for her. we had spectacular sex and fell in love under purple and blue stars. there was something missing, though. and it stayed there, like a dark, massive boulder blocking our paths to each other.

then the kings and c.e.o’s started putting new chemicals in the drinking water. it dissolved our vocal cords, and we couldn’t speak. i couldn’t sing. she couldn’t scream. we couldn’t fight with anything but the silent treatment. we could only dust off our pencils, and re-learn how to write.

apathy is dead. long live apathy.

indian summer

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:49:00 -0400

it’s sticky, and the ghostly lush fairy girls only appear when the air gets this heavy at night. they dance with the fireflies and drink up the red wine when noone’s looking.

unlike their firefly kinfolk, though, you’ll never keep them in a jar. if you catch them, they’ll escape quickly and get their revenge.

they’ll float through open windows, and if you shut them out they’ll come through the air vents. when you’re asleep they rub sweet summer oils on your eyelids. whisper lusty love stories in your ears. when you wake up, even the boldest of you will blush at the dreams you had. part your lips in curious embarassment at the moistness of your sheets.

they’re attracted to the smell of sex and the sound of slip-n-slides.

when the weather gets like this, you’re better off just watching those backyard nymphs dance and chase dragonflies up hillsides, wine in their cheeks and jasmine on their breath. join them if they let you. chase them if they run away, but not for too long, or you’ll be cursed. you’ll chase the entire summer away, and when you come to your senses the leaves will have already changed. you’ll feel suddenly cold, down to your bones.

i say take in the smoke and sounds. i say sing along. i say, what better way to wait for morning?

re-reading what those kids wrote is dangerous after all these years. -- january 20, 2011

Tue, 01 May 2012 01:55:00 -0400

nobody hangs out in numbers. the cops told us it wasn’t safe, unbecoming of fine young men and women. it was only a phase.
no, it was going against god.
no, it was the part in our lives that everything vibrated in harmony.
no. it doesn’t feel like anything unless the air smells like resin and everyone’s gathered around.

nobody writes anymore. we have to get out, we have to run and unplug, if only for a short time. i will lay in a pair of arms in the back of my van while someone else drives, for once. with the bed pushed back from its disguise as a bench seat, we can see the tops of the trees, and the tempo is tapping by the streetlights spaced just so. there is something amazing coming out of those speakers.
wish, my good friend, that when we drive past that haunted flashing light at the edge of the swamp, that our old loves and family will appear out of the fog and into the empty seats, laughing like we never missed a moment. imagine that image cueing the ending credits, the bitter-pithy happy ending when you finally get to smile after being kicked for its entirety.

nobody has the time to imagine.
now i’m looking for a brand new song that can make me nostalgic. i am perusing my unmanageable music collection of 66 hundred thousand songs that just aren’t what i’m looking for at the moment. paralyzed by choice.

i turn to something old, a reliable friend.

~~i am a visitor here; i am not permanent.~~
~~the land of sunny skies disguised as paradise is a lie.~~
~~i lie for only you. hallelujah.~~

irrational fear

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:14:09 -0500

i’m terrified
of the possibilities

what if
i’ve already had a lifetime
of white light love
with the perfect girl
and that life
it was snared
and corralled entirely
in my many growing gaps of memory
that i’ll never remember

she’s caught past the point of no return
on weekend nights
and indistinguishable in the fog
and only in the most very vivid dreams
is she there
with her rearranging face
and aura of ghosts

an hour long relapse

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:15:00 -0500

the days and the years keep on truckin’, pressing harder on the gas as they gain confidence.

i have too many questions and not enough answers, not enough time, not enough half-remembered proclamations of love. not enough memories of the helpless look of pity you give me when i tell you that it will never be over. the amnesiac lovers, hand in hand, climbing their way out of hell. forgetting the places where they trip and drag each other back down. i say that if i don’t have this story, then i have nothing. i am nothing. i am only pretending to play along with the seasons of settling cynicism, and the taste it leaves in my mouth is like burnt plastic, acrid and inorganic. not the way it is supposed to be.

then i swallow too much, trying to wash the taste out. now i am crying like a child, trapped by fences and clutching at your sundress. you, telling me to wait, that i can’t have it and that i never can again. you’ll smile and roll your eyes as you tell me what i should have learned by now: your love is arsenic, and if you put it on a mirror i would inhale it all, breathe nothing else and asphyxiate.

i’ve heard this speech before, from back when your eyes were mood rings and it was so much easier to read you. now i can choreograph it — the sideways smile and eye roll when you make a clumsy mistake. the way you throw your hands up when talking about me never listening and the way i only spoke in half-finished stories and proclamations of love written for a song i never finished. i say i’m better at public speaking, now. and that i’ve never been shy about screaming your name, even in the middle of the bar. right on schedule, you shrug when you repeat the reasons i’ve given for why i love you. i can’t help but laugh. see, you rarely look directly at me. it’s like i’m the camera lens, you’re monologuing, and you’re your only audience.

but as i’m smiling, barely hearing your words, you finish and break the fourth wall. look me straight in the eyes, yours darting back and forth between them. that’s a tick you picked up from me.

you tell me that you’re a different person in the body of the girl i loved. she’s gone, and she did not leave a forwarding address. say, maybe that’s the way the story continues, me tracking down the body she inhabits now. say that you hope she’s happy and finally at home. that this body was never home for her.

the bartender brings our tab, and i am not smiling anymore.

apt. 203

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:06:26 -0500

if we grow up, if we evolve at all, what we don’t realize is that we’ve simply put on our own theatrical version of the history of human civilization.

i was born, and for a while, that was fuzzy, like too much bourbon rubbed into my gums. then, clarity. i discovered my surroundings, i learned to communicate. first through grunts and screams, then through badly muddled imitations of the sounds i heard. i learned to crawl, to walk, to explore the woods and to stay away from anything that slithers.

here the timeline gets scrambled.

i discovered the laws of music before i learned not to leap too far. i discovered written words before speech. i discovered the words for soul and set off for the playground before mastering the art of smoothing and paving the paths. my mind expanded before i washed it clean with alcohol. now it’s too sprawled out to reach across. i discovered women, and fire, and for too long, stayed too close to where the two meet. now instincts send me running with my tail between my legs whenever either of the two rear their heads.

i conquered cities before understanding the empty spaces between them. however, i learned which are the best gas stations and rest stops. flying j, next exit. i learned the paths of superhighways before stopping to know the strangers i was passing by at 10,000 Mb/sec. ok, you’re here, now. but what’s next?

these days, i rent a loft in the tower of babel, and all i know of my neighbors is high-pitched foreign arguments through paper-thin walls, and strange cooking smells through the air conditioning vent. i’ve looked. i can’t find their apartment door to introduce myself.

gang rivalry

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:56:24 -0500

all we had to do was drive through the woods. sam was looking for a party, and we just had to listen for bass. we kept searching back and forth across the same wooden bridges and icy lampposts.

the fireflies all migrate up here during december, millions of them. and there’s this annual rave with real minimalistic lights, just some lasers and whatnot, and the fireflies. it’s supposed to be something out of fantasy stories, dancing right in the middle of so many fireflies you could never dream of counting them. i’m trying to text, but i keep getting distracted by the millions of living, blinking christmas lights.

—give me a city to explore and i will show you the time of your life.

a car passes. i flick the brights back on. they’re badly aligned, so much so that the right one almost hits the tops of those broad-chested northwestern trees. i laugh to myself, and double over coughing. there’s spores of glitter in the air. this time of year, the holiday ornaments shed their skin and we all cough ourselves to death.
she’s typing back laughter. alright, worst case scenario, at least she likes me enough to pretend i’m funny. she’s typing back how long? we just got here!
even the slightest words make me smile and daydream. i am remembering feeling this way before, spacing out in calculus or biology once upon a time. love made me a failure, and it was bliss…before the bubble burst. i think a fairytale rave is a good place for a second chance.

the side of the road drops off to our right, and i can see down into a gorge full of trees and fireflies. someone in the back is talking about gangster rap, and i’m thinking about two rival gangs warring in the name of different oceans that only ever meet at the ends of the world. the bloods and crips at war in patagonia.

the atlantic is dark, familiar, and smells like fishing docks and winter coats. pelicans, icebergs, english brownstones by wet rocky beaches. channels of the north sea and british rain. the pacific is adventurous, exotic. dry and salt-soaked. sheer cliff faces, volcano islands. the flagrant showboat to the atlantic’s calm desperation. the ocean is fresher, and you feel projected outward, farther out into the world.

i hate the way the atlantic will always smell like home. but like any first love, you’ll get over it. west coast for life.

i want amsterdam.

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:37:18 -0500

tonight i met a girl who acts just like you
who flashed me and asked me about mental walls and self-realization
and when i brought up your name
she said you seemed cold and self-obsessed
in the nicest way possible
which is, of course
just like you

you hippie girls sure carry a lot of hate
along with that “free love”
don’t you?

and even though i should have been incredibly annoyed
by this burned-out waif
i could see that she was probably pretty amazing
when she had her wits about her
whenever the last time that was
just like you

today was nice
for all the wrong reasons
and my life is cracking up
but in non-violent, easy to swallow pill form.