nobody

save for the reckoning
of doubt and determined, ghosts
of bitter yearnings and silence
tipping the salt and swaying lamps
subtle signals sent desperately
we are here across the table
so much between us and the moths
drawn to the lights
I want to be in love again
but mostly happiness like a shallow pool
engulfs me and wading further seems
foolish having wisened in my old age
purpose fashioned like a flattened hat
these are our days and nights
and we laugh, long term plans pressed
further out in measured days
this week our demons live in cigarettes
sleeping in and missed text messages
nothing so serious as
all the stars that died to
build our bones
we are merely breathing
it is a nice night
cats are out and they come up
in passing to
say hello.

poem

suddenly I want to write again
compulsively on napkins and bathroom walls
feeling like there is too much to ever know where
to begin or to ever say all of it
instead of feeling like it's all been said

The hopelessness I once felt in bookstores and libraries
has utterly dissipated even as I
have forgotten how to spell words,
lost some entirely and
no longer own any pens worth writing with.

This sudden transition, while hopeful
is marked by such a deep unfathomable
sadness
I don't want to show it to anyone
partly because
it is so deep and so wide I
can't imagine that we are not
all in it together
touching fingertips already
I want to show
the darkness to itself outside
in between the trees where
the real world is

Away from the bright city
we have built to distract us
its own adoring idol
the unmade bed of our
lost lust for
the naked soil
beneath our beating hearts.

bread and water

love is such a misery
shallow poison weak and petty
lead bellied heart hardener
hands that feel hunger
for touch
the cold clammy sweat of
bitter jealousy
the smell of your warm breath
when you snore
my body is a team
of animals
visceral menagerie under house
arrest
the tigers lack restraint
scratch at the furniture
say things they shouldn't
and will
shred everything to spaghetti
and eat it
if you fuck with them.

a few more of the same difference

A POEM FOR TODAY
this poem doesn't belong in today
it belongs to the marching band
that day in new york near the ferris wheel in coney island
where I had so longed to go I'd forgotten why
and the drummer fell and broke her crown and the crowd loomed in near
the cops calling out to step back we
were on the sidelines in passing
watching, the party suddenly over and yet
still your birthday.

someday I will die.

and her blood on the sidewalk, and whatever happened of 
the little drummer girl
will have one fewer witness
one by one by one
till we all pop off into nothingness, waning.

Till I fade utterly,
I will love you in that moment.
(Us silently watching, holding the others 
back.  Waiting, the red lights swinging 
round the hushed crowd.)
And even then,
still.

ONCE

Once I read my poems to some French girls who 

didn't understand them

they were young and listened

like lambs might

eyes glazed but excited to be here 

amdist the herd

i wished i could know the

sounds of my words

through their ears foreign syllables

unfathomable i wished

i could hear the way

the french do

our course language

our house of the mind

the windows just so

the walkway perhaps too long.

Door rather square.

And now for something completely different.

Arm your heart with empty
face pressed to face
love like the sewing of flesh
we are knit into becoming
and wear ourselves out of it
here
are my fingers these are
my teeth we
latch onto our undoing
this is my spirit
you can't see it she is
bigger than your eyes can see
she slows my pulse stops me
shivering, dilates
my eyes, wiggles
my ears always
fun at parties when she
wants to be
does not
fear death.
There are no words and
no actions for you from me.
All that I am says nothing for you now but
figure
it out
for yourself.

II.
The Cure For Happiness
The Deaths and the dying of loved ones
once hated
made plain
scraping the frost off the windows
with the heater going my
fingers like little slugs
No coffee is strong enough
to Wake us
I am pressed against the morning
like a tongue on a flagpole
half pulled back
not wanting and wanting
the wild agony I
wait hoping
the warmth of my very breath
is salvation
Love
(like mine for you) is what binds us to Being
blinds ties and fetters but what's more
is not merely the great source of our Happiness, but
the cure for.

Surgery in minor

I've had minor surgery.  I don't have cancer.
I told a friend this and she said "yet" because it's true it's implied in this day and age, with my background, with the world itself being increasingly carcinogenic.  I don't have cancer (yet).  I said it was implied though, and needn't be articulated.  It's like saying I'm not dead (yet).  I plan on dying.  I'll be very surprised if it doesn't happen.  I'll have a lot of explaining to do.
Where to begin.
This surgery.
I've had a pea sized cyst in my nether regions for some time.  I don't know that it's appropriate, dear internet, to be precise.  Let's call the area in question the sandwich islands.  The sandwich islands feel like they got stuck in a zipper today.  I am on all kinds of pain killers, and still hate almost everything.  But I don't have cancer.  And some day soon, I will be able to ride a bike.
This pea in the sandwich islands has been a very mild concern for a couple of years now on account of it being misdiagnosed as a bartholin's cyst repeatedly, being buried from view, and really only bothering me or being apparent in any way when I went cycling.  During my attempts at biking in the last couple years, I would find myself thinking quiet contemplative thoughts about the fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea," which I kept entirely to myself.  When I came out from under anesthesia, my charming anesthesiologist popped in and asked me if I knew where I was.  "A hospital.  OHSU.  Multnomah Pavillion."  I said.
He laughed.  "That is the most precise answer I have ever received."  I said I didn't really remember what happened and asked if I said anything weird under anesthesia.  "You had a dream about coffee, and you told us all the story of the Princess and the Pea."  Well.  Nice to know the demons of my subconscious were amiable enough to the gathering of visitors to the sandwich islands.
A friend came over to accompany me in my convalescence and offer what available comforts she could think of, which included painting my nails gold.  They're flaking off now and the effect is something like an old wheel barrow.  The opiates heighten the effect of being a disused tool.  I forget suddenly what I was doing, concentrate on the pain for a moment and then forget I was doing that.  I'm idly watching the time tick down in an auction for gold boat shoes I've bid on on ebay.  Gold boat shoes.  I'm barely real right now.
All the more awkward that I keep getting business phone calls in the bath.  I don't seem able to articulate how completely incapable I am.  I may be too well versed in transmitting my thoughts under intoxication to adequately express my incompetence.  I am a wheel barrow right now.  For some reason I have answered the phone.
"Hello?"
"Hi, um, I'm calling about having been over charged on my credit card.  I'm sorry I thought I spoke to you earlier.  I was under the impression this was a business phone."
"Oh it is."  Realizing that the bath water can probably be heard in the background.  "I will have a manager look over your account and return your call in the near future."
Must keep good notes regarding the conversations that occur, since they almost immediately disintegrate into the ether.  Who was I talking to?  Why did I answer my phone?
The sandwich islands are numb.  My head throbs gently.  My eyes are dilated.  I have sudden rushes of unbridled creative ideas that pass like ships racing, rarely dropping into harbour.
If today were a prayer it would be a prayer to Persephone.  Here in my red room with my red things, trolling the internet for red shoes, if I had a pomegranate I would forget not to eat it.  The confusion and despair of a long winter.  The earliest version of Persephone was a goddess without arms or legs emerging from the soil.  If I could paint I would paint her, like Buttercup from The Princess Bride emerging from the sand, gasping for air and sputtering soil out of her mouth.  Dear Persephone, in the minds of the dead and the unfathomable reality in which you are waiting out the winter in hell, I hope you are happy.  I hope Pluto is an alright guy with a bad rap, and that you get to drink hot chocolate and don't know it's snowing outside.  Princess this winter bullshit gets old sometimes.
Baby it's cold outside.

Today is a Monday's Monday

I have the belief that if you want to know how to do a thing drunkenly, you need to spend some time practicing it whilst you are actually drunk.  For this reason today I spent an hour or so playing the fiddle while drinking hot toddies.  Now it is 5:30 pm and I am moderately sauced.  I am the level of sauced that is an awkward combination of irritable and anxious, midway between desires to continue drinking properly or take a nap and sober up.

In this state I have been sitting in bed paying the bills and contemplating my life.  In a month and a half I will turn thirty, and the gravity of the big round zero in that number has me thinking about it way in advance.  I don't like it.  I don't like that I've been around for three decades already.  I keep thinking of the various five-year plans I have constructed in the course of my life and then haphazardly abandoned.  I think about the things in those plans that once seemed important to me.  Are they still?

The kicker I think are the things that I never wrote down because they seemed like such obvious goals there was no need to precisely articulate them.  I think these are the kinds of thoughts that I have been mulling over on backburners for years without consciously and attentively addressing them.  These are the kinds of thoughts you tell people on the bus when you are chatting honestly with a stranger, and when you articulate them audibly you are forced to recognize that your ideas do not make sense.

This one time I sat next to a guy on a greyhound bus and we talked for three hours.  I was nineteen and he was thirty-ish.  I had an Ameripass, which was this kind of greyhound ticket that was good for any bus anywhere in the states for a two month time period, so I sat next to a lot of people, and a lot of them were crazy.  This particular guy had actually negotiated being on this bus in part because of me, because of our brief interaction over the borrowing of a lighter and a cigarette.  He had changed his schedule to be on the same bus with me, something I suspected which slowly came to light over the course of our conversation.

He told me his name and I immediately forgot it.  I told him mine.  After a few minutes of casual pleasantries, I asked him why he was going west and he wouldn't tell me.  He didn't want to answer certain questions about himself.  I decided to level with him.  Look, I said, I forgot your name.  He started to tell me but I stopped him-- that's not the point.  What I'm saying is that even if you tell me your name again, I'm going to forget it.  The option we have before us on our three hour bus ride is this:  we can be polite and cordial and have a casual conversation about nothing particularly relevant, or you can tell me the real reason you're heading west and maybe we can actually discuss something of interest.  In either case, when we get off this bus I won't remember your name.  The result is the same.  The options are boring or interesting.

He thought about it for a second and I could tell he was really thinking.  I could tell too that other people on these buses sometimes worried about me.  I could see their concern, and I found it plainly comforting but didn't contemplate it any further.  The guy said he'd give me a hint and see if I could guess.  He said he was going west to one of three counties where a certain activity had only just recently been legalized.  He said a couple of those counties were near Las Vegas.  He looked at me and waited.  I considered this a fair way to introduce the topic, seeing if I was really up to discerning the likelihood that this guy was headin' west to be a prostitute.  For a few seconds I attempted to suppress a shit-eating grin as I considered whether or not I wanted to feign ignorance.  No, not my style.

He only liked to sleep with couples.  And he felt like he had been born to do this work.  He was doomed, from the day he was born, to do this work, and was going to spend the rest of eternity in hell because of it.  His idea of hell was a particularly interesting one.  He believed that the sinner repented by repeatedly engaging in the sinful act, over and over, eternally.  He said that he figured it wouldn't be so bad for the first couple thousand years.  But then, you know, it would be terrible.  About that time, he asked me to marry him and I changed seats and went to sleep.

It was an interesting bus ride.  There were a few points as he was talking where I could tell he was probably saying his actual beliefs out loud for the first time in his life.  I will allow that it is possible I am entirely wrong, and that actually this guy was pulling my leg for a good long while, and maybe enjoying it a bit too much.  I don't think this is the case.  There are seven billion of us now, and this character was a real person I sat next to on the bus, and I'm the real person who talked to him for hours because it amused me to do so.

Ten years later I don't think I'd have the same discussion.  I wonder though what deeply-held beliefs I've nurtured in dissonance and never adequately articulated in the intervening period, whilst I was so interested in the lives of others.  What would I say to my 19 year old self were I to sit next to her on the bus?  She would pry and I would say I think the world is ending.  I would say it makes me sad when I see children.  I would tell her I still don't have a clear vision of how I can do anything, and I'm beginning to think I should just move as far out into the boonies as I can bear to be, get a rocking chair and a dog and try to relax.  Take up knitting.  Maybe a little recreational knife-throwing.  Learn to whittle.  Grow some vegetables.  Avoid making any better mousetraps, so the world leaves me the eff alone.

I probably just need a vacation, but damn there is nothing like working in the service industry for five years to make you not care about a stranger's random opinion of whatever.  I long for the day when I don't have to go home and read yelp reviews about me.  Oh I'm sorry your server was just ok man, especially since you consider it compulsory to actively judge everything all the time.  At least I'm not in prostitution.  I bet those reviews are brutal.

I listened to a radiolab episode yesterday about the slinky.  Rob Krulwich was all weirded out by the idea that if the sun vanished, we wouldn't find out for 8 minutes or so.  He didn't like the delay, the 8 minutes of being blissfully unaware.  It sounded like he felt tricked by reality.  It got me thinking about determinism, inevitability, my own death.  Thinking of the two ideas simultaneously, I was imagining the sun as my death, the distance between us as my life.  I'm falling always towards this inevitability, and I know this.  It's the nature of existence.  Only I don't know how long it will take to get there.  It's as if my death is already a real and concrete thing, approaching through space-time already, and I'm blissfully unaware.  Maybe it's difficult to convey how unusual this sensation was for me because usually I feel kind of surprised that I'm still alive.

There is a privilege operative to idly contemplating what kind of life would make me happiest, and how best to lead it.  Is this a true statement?  Lately I've been prone to little panic attacks, fits of anxiety that well up suddenly unbidden from no apparent source, my heart racing and face flush.  It feels more like a nervous tick than anything associated with anything.  Chaos theory.  I imagine that in a neighboring universe, the sun has gone out.  In this world I am fine, I'm okay, it's just a bit too close for comfort.  Other times I wonder if my body has forgotten how to burn calories and like a fire suddenly encountering a knot in some dense wood, my heart slows and then races wildly.  Hey there, I say, calm down.

It's thirty, I think.  I turn thirty a few days before the end of the Mayan calendar, and the theme of the party is "I'm' turning thirty and the world is ending."  But what is the party like?  Once upon a time, I believed that almost any problem could be solved with the right party.  I keep trying to envision this party.  I got to send out invitations soon.  How do I want to inaugurate the coming decade?  I envision the party and nothing seems quite right.  Champagne, potlucks, dancing, karaoke.  What did I used to like about parties?  What would I want out of a party if it was really the last one?  Could the people I love most get along long enough to share a meal?  What is the point?