straight-up prose sorta


There are times when I sink very broken down and low in the water.

At these times it is less the absurd blackness and heartbreaking overwhelm I felt in adolescence and more a half-light, a darkness tinged with brown of earth, a sullen silence.

I do not wish so much for death at all. I wish for some sort of escape, of oblivion to myself. Freedom from the confines of my own mind. If you could tie me down within my toes I think I’d be happy, but as it is I can’t escape the incessant terrors, babblings, tumescent rumors and inane obsessions of my own silly skull. My own head. I don’t wish for death or contemplate suicide, unless as a side thought, a means to an end—of escaping myself. The personality has become a prison. Perhaps I could shift it around from the inside, go Picasso and crank things about a bit, rearrange the bars, but I don’t know quite how.

Drugs don’t help as they simply raise the interference broadcasting from within me to a din strong enough to dim the outside world, and the outside world simply is not the problem here; and drinking helped for quite some time, but I’m beginning to see also that it merely dulls me to some bits of myself and magnifies others, raising aches and pains long gone irrelevant within my chest like fingerprints from decade-old crime scenes.

So it is less that I wish to absent myself from the world or from others than I wish to vacation permanently from my own mind. If my ghost came upon a parade of travelers it wouldn’t bother me a bit, as long as I didn’t have to be there myself.

There are times when I see the world I’ve woven securely around me as just my own mind unraveling into loose coils around my person, to hold me in a stiff woolen embrace wherever I go; and I think that I might like to leave all these milling people a bit—even my beloved pup, who’s become so dear to me and is so full of the wonder of the new, I love him so much—I’d like to just be alone in silence. Join a nunnery and leave the space around me born-again, virginal and protected, clear as starlight, lucid and silent. Above all, silent.

This wish to be alone is not accompanied by any of the usual things women go on about—or I assume I should be going on about—when they divest themselves of certain people or certain ways of living—no talk of finding myself, no interest in seeking my inner voice that’s been so silent all these years, no bit about career or personal sovereignty. No Bridget Jones here.

No. I don’t care about work, or my selfhood, or any self-help blather. I just want to bury myself deep into my own chest and lie silent and still.

I have been damaged deeply, and I wish to shrink away now, because now of all times—with the world extending the tantalizing possibility that things might actually, finally be looking up—now of all times I wish to hit the pause button, run and hide, crawl under the bed like I used to do as a child when I was scared and lie very very still, listening to my heartbeat. Here I am safe. Here no one will find me.

I am filled with grief sloshing around tidally. Life has hurt so much, been so hard these past several years. If it really is congealing now, coming into form, it still hurts. I am still angry.
My friend Jen is jetting back and forth between LA and New York, settling into the apartment her dad’s money will buy for her, settling into the job her father’s connections primed her for and her own drive and energy through school and subsequent career trajectories had launched her into.

At least, I guess, there will be a place for me to crash when I whirl my way into New York like a badly spun top, some years from now and still lost.





posted at 1:00 PM

west hills hospital

and the quiet is
deafening
i get this now
transmission after exchange is complete
transfusion after it all went cold
recognitions taking form out of things that perhaps should stay
nebulous and undefined,
indefinite and unnamed,
the way the language bites down hard
on the back of the moments that ticked--ticked--ticked
by in the metered bits drawn out from your pulse
they measured in tin machines and plastic wires, elemental things
torn from the way they should have been left
should have remained
i am so sad, have lost something here
lost something when they put me under
and came up less human
gasping for air
and screaming in here
six years old again
six years old and scared






posted at 5:50 PM

i thought this would be
different,
somehow stupidly i believed
it could have ended better;
now piled and broken and smoke is starting,
and my road is pulling.
i didn't want to leave you this way
didn't want to leave you this way
if i could remember the words that i'd said
i'd take them all back and choke on each breath i didn't deserve to spit them out at you,
drunken and fucked-up,
a hillside at night,
a fall I've forgotten.
(The scars on my knees know things I never will,
a girl I am and and not, a separate life I get when the blood's thinned enough, and
you didn't stop my fall fast enough to prevent them--)
and I can't blame you
I can't blame you.
if there's ever a next time love,
just let me break my damn neck.

i thought this would be
different,
somehow stupidly i believed
it could have ended better;
and now the words scrawled on a table that I followed to find you,
--words always get me--,
our exchange is still cut into the wood, by the computers and the ashtray.
everything will haunt me forever
except the blacked-out memories I deserve to remember.

hey love,
tell me now,
how's it goin on yer edge of hollywood,
the freeway river
rushin in your window with the heavy hanging air;
i look
every time I drive by.





posted at 5:16 PM

dear friends,
new post on the overhaul.

thanks.
-michele.



posted at 1:23 AM

king medicine by Jets to Brazil

know that you'll soon go crazy
just like a whittling stick
hit by the coming daylight
cut up in a quick succession
a pointed confession really
stripped of all your armor
down to your very nature
beneath the haze and vapor gaze

you're such a willing stick to
beckon that wanting knife and
you've been looking for it
the right blade all your life
saying "who's gonna cut me
down to a size that suits me?
is there a worthy sculptor
among all you fine young knives?"

it's enough to make you take your head and put it on a shelf
to cut the heart out of your chest they'll come for that as well
tell me how you do that crazy trick where you walk around asleep
save it for your doctor friend the one who keeps you under lock and key

you'll soon go screaming like a
bargain basement lunatic who's
not so specialized that
they couldn't just replace you
why don't you start crying
for all that you've got left here
why don't you stop dying
before you go and get it right?

now you're selling off the house so you can buy the farm
you cut the heart out of your chest to let the light in through your arm
it's enough to make you take your head and put it in a bag
to cut the teeth out at the pink now there's nothing in the bag

foul weather friend,
you are so dying
an amateur chemist now.
king medicine
when is it perfect?
where is it taking you?

there is no cure
only reprieve
some fleeting joy
posing as balance
nothing is sure
so every four hours
king medicine
this subject loves you







posted at 1:21 AM

the train
you see coming
and can't
dodge

fall backwards
You feel it.






posted at 1:17 AM

congealing, realigning, coming back together, broken pieces flying inward to fit into place, mending the shatters, drawing back into the center the way it's sort of like the morning after, coalescing

and realizing the world did not end

anyone gotta cuppa coffee,
an ephedrine jack-in
to my amnesiac soul



posted at 11:33 AM

read it to yerself rilly fast and you'll hear it like i heard it. yeah that's right

i
think there is thinking there is
some sort of reason that thinking isn't

enough

or
maybe this stop and start and stop and start and stop and start will

kill me off

breaking down
over and over and over and over and over and then then then

building up

i am so tired
i am so fucking goddamn tired someone grab my wrist i'm goin' down down down down again

a slide into staring at the ceiling,
feelin underwater
the cottage-cheese seventies coating
lookin like waves
seen from two hundred feet under
under
under
something.
i think i think i think i'm under something.






posted at 9:20 PM

atlantis

downtown glendale has cinderblock bricks aligned and rigid, bringing walls into shape,
a crystallized mondrian structure cellular and hard to
focus
yr gaze and see right angles and
all the people in this bank are from some other nation,
somewhere I'd consider exotic,
and think lamely of minarets and strong coffee and jeweled lanterns
hanging over places that dont really exist, not really at all

the way each little city and town
decides its story for itself
c'mon chamber of commerce
you know I love a good portrait painted,
you know i love a word with a ring to it,
the way we've all decided we are from the west,
west of what? the world is round

we rush about daily dazed and tired not knowing why,
i grind myself lower and lower in this worn path,
seen etruscan stones the size of boulders forming corners at base of ancient churches
that used to house something else
on mountaintops.
no different, no different than these cinderblocks

meaning nothing, nothing, nothing
sound and fury all
we are so much





posted at 9:15 PM

ms. muffett

it is colder.
i get the air conditioning off the big office to the left.
they don't know i'm going numb in here.
a spider has built
her anthracite home
against the wall, behind the chest of drawers, along the path to my desk.
how did she find her way into such a sterile little upstairs room?
her web is strong and resistant, cracking and snapping
under my fingers: she's a big one, and dangerous.
I'll wear boots tomorrow and root her out.

I kind of wish I didn't have to, though.
she and I, we share the quiet in here.
i click and snap my c.r.t.-bent back
back into shape
with the back of the gray office chair.

I feel pretty alone, I guess.
hey
write me a rhyme, someone
i need a line
to grab onto
someone.
someone.
yeah, i get it--
these things it takes to live well ain't in me.

a spider, it sat down beside her
hey kid she said,
you got a cigarette?
we sat for a bit.
a nice afternoon all in all.
stared at the sunset.




posted at 4:39 PM

i think that these repeated attempts at cleaning my room don't matter all that much

a sharp exhalation through the teeth,
a way to find the time
that isn't there
that isn't there
and won't be found
moving things around as though
as though you might make a magic
to bend your life over and down
the curve of the earth
that isn't there




posted at 3:25 PM

lost in a sea of
bad camera angles




posted at 4:20 PM

I wanna write you
Alaska,
a big sky country,
I could
I could
I wanna write you
a Lascaux




posted at 11:45 AM

my sine wave
is all over the map
i'm a wacked-out seismograph;
and I love it, I love it
absolutely absolvingly,
struggling,
hauling in,
love it.




posted at 2:08 AM

*

Yeah, I know I said on the air.

Mwahahaha.




posted at 4:12 PM

canada sucks

and i find
metaphors fail.
these old turns of words.
you are the dearest thing to me.

the thought that i might someday wake and find you gone,
all prop-ups promises flee from me,
ground beneath the feet so far away,
i can't help but fall like a tree down and down,
an inevitable crash sideways.

robbed of support
and did not know

the earth had gone so far.

love,
it used to be stupid, blind and dumb.
your messy hair and big glasses
now are the only thing i adore.

dear god.
please do not take
the one and only good thing
ever.







posted at 1:26 AM

you remind me of
posessions lost as a child
meant not so much while I had them,
but ever after their loss,
their accidental abandonment at recess or during car trips,
I was brokenhearted and bereft,
imagining them in other arms or lost in gutters,
unloved and lonely,
decaying and never to be recovered.
Cried for weeks, inconsolable, and still do.







posted at 5:51 PM

venice in winter

in winter when it rains our
waters rise, and fill the floor
its spill growing gently across each tesseraic tile,
our silver and golds
melting and shattered,
throwing light at high-flung walls that lean in
over us here, a pool within a room, your mosaic tile,
your byzantine figures belling and expanding,
watermarks and side chapels all,
and do we
see the fractured color glow from below,
as swimmers do beneath a surface,
or is it the same as
smudged clouds in relief across the sky with cerulean and apricot shine,
or are we looking down into it all, as into some sort of rococo lagoon;
echoes skitter and drip here, expanding rings,
an inner-ear outwards to hear the sounds that carry so well;
the city is sinking,
St. Mark's is a slow submerge,
and I am not so sad.
No work of man is made less lovely by the touch of time,
or of earth's slow hungry tug.








posted at 4:43 PM

Goodbye love,
track my arc across the sky,
missing you tonight as every night,
the proof that I was beautiful,
and deserving of lovely things.
To turn a car around for you was no loss,
but it was everything else,
everything else,
and so
we tore me down from the inside,
a lovely destruction,
a church after the bombing-out.
My days these days are measured now in lies.
And regret, drawing back from me like a tide,
has drawn a line across the wrists to mark the time,
A black and dogging thing, that does not leave my side.






posted at 9:40 PM

just say no to hollywood cityhood

When I get drunk
I forget to remember you
So this is the way
I can do it best.
Tell me now
yr three word philosophy,
the way I prophesied
a poem the night i met you
to erase it by daylight,
but damn I knew it then.
Toss me a new line
to remember you by
I wanna go back
I could walk there you know
weaving a line down the sidewalk
there are no words and too many sodium lights
in hollywood
in hollywood
as I'm sure you know well




posted at 9:36 PM

if i break it apart into tiny bits

i
find
my
self
wish
ing
you
would
call
me
up
at
night
soon
i
know
it
aint
right
a
syl
la
bic
div
i
sion
to
break
up
the
wrong
and
make
it
right
cos
each
lit
tle
bit
is
in
no
cu
ous
and
no
one
could
blame
us
ab
solve
me
of
this
with
your
voice
and
hands
a
bap
tism
in
the
ways
we
aren’t
sup
posed
to
go






posted at 9:33 PM

Things that have been lost and cannot be recovered.

Once, I didn’t love you yet, and we were friends,
in that concerned and confusing sort of way
that friends are at first. and now

it is still-born,
aborted,
clotheshangered and cloak and daggered,
a rock-carved figure motionless and stopped midstep,
turned to stone and locked in a burning building going down.

And you were once the dearest thing,
We loved and lived ten thousand miles interstellar in the space of twenty feet;
And now we haven’t one to walk on a moment longer.

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan, kiddo.
Expect a one-word telegram:
Stop.







posted at 11:42 AM

on the poetic devices and visual language of contemporary fine art.

There’s some
thing
about you,
The way there is sunrayshot fog about seashore rocks at morning,
The way there are seethru moths’ wings about candles,
The way you move sideways,
a sort of something said and not,
a space of silence left listing starboards there,
in dawning air,
transparent and so painfully painfully lovely.

and so mute—
I’d buy a crowbar to pull that golden treasure from your throat,
if I did not think it would crush you
with unbearable unbearable
weight.








posted at 12:03 AM

some other old ones I love, posted to this site months ago, that i wanted to "reissue," so to speak:


Wednesday, May 01, 2002
3/28/02

i see your goddamned truck
every time I'm on the freeway
which is at least
twice a day
everyone in LA must own one
I could drive for miles and miles
and not escape your ghost


posted at 12:14 PM





at the grasshopper, thursday (4/2002)

and she says I watch you
go off
taking on water
in ten minutes flat
in your diagonal gaze.
Oh yeah, that, I know, it's
not you love
a bit disconcerting,
the way we go on and I cloud up
divisional and excessive, a quiet tablature
tableing it right there
and you gotta keep talking.
I expand to fill the vacant house,
each clapboard echoing
my gaze, watching
you walk through me
like a ghost.
These cloudburst clouds baby
storming up a brew
I gulp all down
keeps me stable
and diffuse feet on the ground
so pummel me with rain the size of frying pans
I float thru the rooms here and
throw a few books around,
creak the floors
break some dishes and
get you cold
and shaky chilled
sorry
knock me flat, the gun to the head, the shock of light
end this occupation, this permanent vacation
the kind of poltergeist
can't wait for the sun


posted at 12:05 PM




posted at 4:58 PM

Culled from some ancient desktop-kept docs, prolly written about six, seven months ago:




missing you on your westside
how’s your girlfriend
we were friends
how’d that go again?
guess it’s too hard to forgive
maybe I’m just too hard to know


-------------------


throw me a line
I am a mile
of unforgiven earth
I can spell myself,
feed on my own seed
tell myself I’m an a priori
In love with me and no other, a feminist and autonomous,
--that propping up, a way to not fall too far--
but baby
I love you so
your touch, your sweet pain, your silent spaces
isn’t it lovely how you send me
inspire me to places where my words find no purchase
my intonations no love
my connotations no tiny crevasses to put roots down
and oh fine
I am more than this
tell my time
make more into more
you know
I’ve more in store
its the thought that counts
thank god
thank god.


-------------------


How funny it is though
your words don't fail me
nor do mine and yet
id like to say in this thin space of liquor and bloodstream wines
so luscious and gripping
I’d like to straddle you
pin you down, have you beg me
my hands smell sweet
baby come on
come on
come on
come on me you know the way I’d go it's too easy
been this way since I was twelve,
“since I was seventeen”
even better.
I could rhapsodize about your body
but baby
your hearts on my mind
goddamn my weak and torn woman’s soul but
your heart is always on my mind,
cliché or no.


-------------------


Write me drunk honey
I’ll finish up alone my red wine
a shirazi rewrite could be worse
at two am I’ve got too much time,
stretching out the line binding the space between,
my fingers ache
from the wet retyping of my mind’s eye
I’d give you words
you know,
but I think you got em fine on your own,
and I do too
I do too
we’ve miles to go,
pages to plow thru
before we sleep
maddened swilling drunk writers we are,
better or worse
you know I know our way.
you know I’ve come to love you
you know I’ve come to love you
some things are easy to type
so easy oh sweet honey
you dearest darling and still
some things we’ll never say.
Words, when spoken
are somehow too hard to take away.
Learned that the hard way.
But still,
if you prove it to me,
that you’re trustworthy,
I’ll tell you everything someday.









posted at 11:59 AM

I like this poem; and it suits my inscrutable mood, so I'm going to reprint it here.

Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves:
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 't would win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.



---------------------------------------------------------------

so come on and look here, now,
look out and this here is the landscape of your life.
give yourself birds' eye sight.

twenty years off from where you are now, there are mountains.
fifteen the rocks underfoot grow to difficult hill country,
where you can lose your way easy.
between here and there are several rivers leading to the sea, with both rapids and wide places and every other metaphorical morphology possible;
there are gentle lands and valleys where you can walk in the shadow of death,
if that is what you like.

there is another side to the mountains, and you have to get there, see, before you travel far enough through even more lands,
even further disances, far enough to fall off the edge,
which, i'm sorry to say (and you know you know its true),
is when you will die;

and where are you now?
where are you now?

triangulate, use that old compass your dad gave you,
and remember what got you and he both out of the woods when you two got lost looking for firewood--
you were nine, and he was late thirty-something, in the woods at yellowstone,
and the trees got closer and closer together the further you walked,
and mom back at the campsite didn't know, she was reading;
and you walked and walked, and it had been much too long now, and dad stopped and stood still,
(you weren't afraid 'cause you were with dad and dad could do anything, but i think now, i think he was worried for you, and he was only thirtynine,
was he afraid?)
and he said, when i was in the war, the moss grew on all the sides of the trees,
so you didn't know which way to go (and there really wasnt one way to go anyways, there was nowhere to go),
but here, but here,
you can see which side its on,
and so we have to go that way;
and after ten minutes
we walked out of forest that had been tagged with signage "dangerous bear territory" (I looked back and saw it as we left, a warning to people entering--)
so think carefully about the things dad taught you,

right and wrong, little girl, and true and false, and love and more love,
and follow the sun.
-m.







posted at 10:09 PM

Monday, September 02, 2002.

people tell me everything's ok, that they understand;


and i smile, and i nod,
to make them feel better,
and i think,
if i could peel my own skin off
i wouldn't be better,
wouldnt be cleaner,
wouldnt be free of gravity
to bend me down and break my waist against the pull of what is underfoot,
underground,
a kind of black hole
no one's had the answer to
since i was six
since i was six.











3:22 AM [+]
...

Sunday, September 01, 2002.



still have the bruises on my arm from where you grabbed me when i fell


i would not get a tattoo, but i might as well


ink into myself the marks others have made upon me in this life,


seeing as how they'll be with me forever anyways,


and there's nothing i'd rather remember forever


than the touch of your hand on my arm,


the touch of other lives upon mine...


posted at 5:12 PM

physics

going
off
stretching out my will at the edges, a widening puddle,
pulled apart to dissapate;
a dissolute
solution,
with no one home here,
a vacancy an unoccupied center;
[nothing worth stayin for, the lack of gravity, no mass];
going off, c'mon, you know
going off to japan, to england, they go off to austin and cyprus and san francisco and
huntington fucking beach,
my intentions scattered,
diffuse all that feeling,
and i can't protest one damn word about it,
'cos we all know
you can't want what you can't have and
the world is round, hence
the law of diffusion:

all things expand
to fill available space.








posted at 4:35 PM

observations at a wedding

don't look so
damn sad love
so breakin on yr way,
your silent glazing distant,
catchin up in things
not yr own,
takin pictures everywhere you go,
as if to capture
the things it is
maybe you miss
maybe i miss
seeing you move stiffy distant
yr eyes glazed on other things.
Don't think I don't know you, there, your
sunshine cheap and priceless
holding tight
things won't hold you





posted at 4:44 PM

what's my shelf life, baby
and how long will i keep
holding on?
how long will you remember me
the leaves i drip, drip drip wither,
shall i go on and on or
run down,
clocklike and tired



posted at 11:39 AM

"...But as we've all come to find out, it takes more than love to keep the poison down.
Life takes you where it goes.
Confiez-moi une journee de silence."
[grant me one day of rest]
-juno.


a love song by the weakerthans:

They're tearing up streets again. They're building a new hotel. The Mayor's out killing kids to keep taxes down, and me and my anger sit folding a paper bird, letting the curtains turn to beating wings. Wish I had a socket-set to dismantle this morning. And just one pair of clean socks. And a photo of you. When you get off work tonight, meet me at the construction site, and we'll write some notes to tape to the heavy machines. Bring your swiss-army knife, and a bottle of something, and I'll bring some spraypaint and a new deck of cards. Hey, I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness. Keep all our bad ideas. Keep all our hope: It's here in the smallest bones, the feet and the inner-ear; it's such an enormous thing, to walk and to listen. I'd like to fall asleep to the beat of you breathing in a room near a truckstop on a highway somewhere. You are a radio. You are an open door. I am a faulty string of blue christmas lights. You swim through frequencies. You let that stranger in. As I'm blinking off, and on, and off again. We've got a lot of time. Or maybe we don't, but I'd like to think so, so let me pretend. These are my favourite chords. I know you like them too. When I get a new guitar, you can have this one, and sing me a lullaby. Sing me the alphabet. Sing me a story I haven't heard yet.







posted at 5:10 PM

scientific study in cause and effect

left you
got sick
couldn't stand
and then
passed on the street
second day of my health,
your words there hangin in the morning air,
remembering everything
i remember everything
20 seconds later
tire went flat
pulled off street
in front of the coffee place i hate
saw you drive by.
i changed my tire alone.



posted at 2:28 PM

its a directional pull
engendered and hauled on over the shoulder
our army corps of engineers
is on the task now yes
diverting rivers
drying seas
but i still feel those waters for you,
they've got my veins
a runnin hard stream into the blood yeah
a jack and whistle blow gun into lungs
to wake me up and
still my soul.
Which ways to go in life?
never was a leaver
now the currents' got my feet and damn
how she pulls a bite a yank deep on the toes
draggin me along
a gypsy hot run it hits my head
then draws me down, red thread tied to wrists
and makin me follow a flute into nowhere, no
id like to stay but oh
who's in charge here
who's in charge?

and me watchin your blank slate breathless, your blue screen, yeah I've seen it, and oh how it makes me sick with nerves brittle shaky and heartachy with loss.








posted at 12:20 AM

I
Would
Ask
You
To
Wait
But you know how it is
That's the wrong thing to say
Isn’t it?
Isn’t it?





posted at 10:10 PM

there are
no
words






posted at 1:47 AM

atlantis

downtown glendale has cinderblock bricks aligned and rigid, bringing walls into shape,
a crystallized mondrian structure cellular and hard to
focus
yr gaze and see right angles and
all the people in this bank are from some other nation,
somewhere I'd consider exotic,
and think lamely of minarets and strong coffee and jeweled lanterns
hanging over places that dont really exist, not really at all

the way each little city and town
decides its story for itself
c'mon chamber of commerce
you know I love a good portrait painted,
you know i love a word with a ring to it,
the way we've all decided we are from the west,
west of what? the world is round

we rush about daily dazed and tired not knowing why,
i grind myself lower and lower in this worn path,
seen etruscan stones the size of boulders forming corners at base of ancient churches
that used to house something else
on mountaintops.
no different, no different than these cinderblocks

meaning nothing, nothing, nothing
sound and fury all
we are so much





posted at 2:08 PM

"to be the one,"
ryan adams
[heartbreaker]

well the pills i got, they ask me let's go out for a while
and the knives up in the kitchen are all too dull to smile
yeah and the sun it tries to warn me,
"boy those wings are made of wax"
while the things i do to kill me,
they just tell me to relax...

but oh cinderella
all dressed up in all your boots and all your charms
i’m not the fellow
to protect you
or to keep you from all your harm

and i don’t know which is worse
to wake up and see the sun,
or to be the one,
be the one that’s gone

and the empty bottle it misses you
yeah and i’m the one that it’s talking to
and with you and i just barely strangers
i’m pretty much just left the fool...
damn don’t the streets look empty though
just wandering round here without you

oh the empty bottle it misses you
and i’m the one it’s talking to
and i don’t know which is worse
to wake up and see the sun,

or to be the one,

be the one that’s gone



posted at 3:59 PM

i would wish
to
dissolve



posted at 1:34 AM

My Aleutian bride,
A study in the ways to manufacture
A life more alluring,
More temperate and fair
Your golden jet black hair
To hang damp across your back sideways,
There, there’s no way to move the sunny silence that stills
With the air in your throat
As you swallow the soft feather words and choke
luxuriantly
And blind.
And if the crow flies over your islands love
Its not in a straight line
No
Your oscillating temperature,
An upswell of ground to find
The earth beneath your feet and proud,
Pulling you down
By ankles











So I’m the queen of silences
Well I've got one for you
Youre the king of inertia
A mathematical conclusion,
You’d like that one,
A simple foregone resolution,
They're kind of the same
But if you ask me by name
I’ll say that you haven’t got one.
I’d say that you haven’t got one.
so fine, there it is, kickin in
raging at you now
A silent inner exercise,
After all,
The coronation went well and I wear it with style,
that title you settled on my forehead,
sinkin down to cover my eyes now
I may never quite forgive you
For telling me you cared.









What is this thing that moves me up and to the keyboard, to medicine, when I'd be so content to be pressed here, down by an equal and opposite force?
We all get it, we all understand the thing that makes you lie down under it like under the wheels of a merciful machine;
But I have no name for what propels me to move limbs and try to climb out of bed and into waking life.
How fascinating our will to go on, how nameless a force, that trope towards the next daylight, how silent an owner,
so stealthy it takes me creeping like a rapist.
The will to live, I think, though,
is still a cruel mistress,
no kinder than death.
I’d like to have no owner at all,
my head all to my own
to lean my life which way I wish.









Teetering tottering across the room
I don’t mind it in this case cos
Im alone and lovely its all so good yeah,
Its all so richly divine
Me in my own world in a word all my makin
I am off on a tangent
A strange and weird angle
Propelled by fleeting feelin,
A sensation, a moment
Distraction from where my itty bitty center
Lies like dry lovely leaves
So pretty
So quick to float away
So goddamn fucking fickle












posted at 2:30 PM

my little bright and dark girl
is there a word in the dictionary
for you




posted at 12:12 PM

spinnin your wheels so fast
look like they're
not moving at all



posted at 12:12 PM

hereafters have not been chosen
the flame will find the oxygen
no sentence yet decided,
just a wide swing tremolo
-son volt.

posted at 5:11 PM

feelin
a bit like a scared shot,
a deer backin off back into the bramble,
send it up like a flare into the night sky over these woods,
imperial violet with your golden glare skittering an arcing armature sideways there--
slanting my face into white-lit illumination,
throwin shadows around.
i'm afraid of everything.






posted at 1:12 PM

yeah, that jam in the low back,
the base of spine
a spire and quick tighten,
a snag to catch on,
quick and tripping,
and i grit my teeth and grin,
reminding me that death's got my number
maybe not so much as others
but more than some,
reminding me to claw through each day like a metal folding chair
slammed square to the jaw and hard
sending the hours spinning.





posted at 4:55 PM

amazing lyrics:

...and i used to be kinda weird about this,
a fear of dependence on a guilty gilt-edged
hedged transcendence that makes us liars
and tense when we look down and realize
that nothing really suspends us--
but it was never just another saturday night,
not with you in attendance

and faces slide by in glowing shadows
like snowbound ghosts that go up and
down in epileptic shivers and negative
radioactive slivers in a landscape of
endless gold glitter and a taste in my
mouth so sweet, yet so bitter--and we
exhaust ourselves trying to get there

so in the end, whatever, we die, we
dissolve, equations unbalanced, riddles
unsolved, and we were never connected
or involved except for the intersections
and crazy mathematics with no time
and no space and no schedule and no
place--and we pass right through it
without a trace

and sometimes the music drifts
through my car on a spring night when
anything is possible and i close my eyes
and i nod my head and i wonder how
you been and i count to a hundred and
ten because you'll alwaye be my hero,
even if i never see you again

-dismemberment plan.




posted at 3:39 PM

and you're so damn eager
for me
to hand all the blame
over
well I'm tellin you
it's mine
and you can't have it



posted at 12:01 PM

and realizing,
realizing
no one's quite on my side here
no one's quite got my back
so i'm off and hittin the road, yes
if no one's quite for me then i'm not for no one
a highway one to take me home
i'll look up those starry eyed ladies
came before me riding their bloomin horses
harder and faster than me
you gals better get some answers
wedged in your mouths
for me,
'cos it's your biology
i got runnin in my hot red veins
you girls have found your old-town homes and i
i need some middling coffee
and your seaside restaurant
to set me straight.





posted at 7:13 PM

so high
its hurting
so wide
the line is drawn
i gotta learn to
stop myself from falling
down so low
-catherine wheel.



posted at 11:54 PM

If you
were a building
you would have
no doors





posted at 8:57 PM

i've baited the fucker before but i tell you
i tell you
never tell god
to rain it on down.




posted at 8:57 PM

was few months ago
collected the blood like a hummingbird bent on the macabre
random head wound
open cupboard door
head wounds bleed incessantly
and hurt very little
went on for fortyfive minutes
wouldnt stop
and after a while seemed a waste to send it all down the drain
after all,
it's me.
cast a spell
didn't know how
only read a book
that dont teach you nothing
about how to do it right
bad juju here
kept in a bowl
three days
went by
did stuff
to make it stronger
bind its fingers round my neck
and sowed an apple tree in it
the seeds went for three weeks.
then they died.
i kept them a while to reassure myself it hadnt all been in vain
but they were dead and dead and not bringin back
so i threw em away
'cos its bad to keep things
when they remind you of dying
something went wrong i think
i think something went wrong
the paths gotten twisted since
there are bad things in nature
there are bad things in nature
dear god in heaven
cant see my feet to walk well




posted at 5:21 PM

i cant believe
how it sums up,
over and over and over another
and me buried under it all so long
i am become it, the way
the dead dissolve into the earth
at six feet down...
wasnt ready for this, i tell you
was barely over the thing three years ago,
then not done with the thing three months ago,
and now this
now this
i tell you, the hurt
piles up like bologna in a dagwood sandwich
and if that metaphor aint good enough for you,
i'll just say as you dig deeper, the strata
you see the layers of ash from when the earth was razed
the explosions, the cataclysms, extinctions
you get higher up and begin to see
the dead themselves,
bones and teeth there, frozen
and i walk the earth
pretending there is nothing
truly horrible hidden
beneath my feet




posted at 5:14 PM

a lite n bitter ring on the tip of the tongue,
thinkin what i could have been
could've become
a cruel covetousness,
wanting what i want when i want it,
all i ever wanted
was what i want when i want it
so tell me now
how the story twines its little threads out,
hows it gonna end
all i ever asked for was the aforementioned
so come on god
rain it on down
rain it on down




posted at 11:40 AM

and hey
hey
I'm gettin better
cleaning out behind doors
so I can open em all the way
that isn't some sort of metaphor
goddamn it this is real.

my fung shui
of red blisters banged into doorjambs
gone long with inattention
now open to blood flowers
the way I unfold.

like a book
like a book
like the openfaced pages of a book





posted at 11:19 PM

the feeling of glass on your veins
a shattered protectorate,
a glowing sort of rapid
dismemberment
and then I'm gone
I'm out of here.



traveled too long in packs
made of my own unfoldings in funhouse mirrors
we ran paths
dug low in ground with overpassages
too often
and too deep





posted at 11:15 PM

the way the fish school,
amass in hundreds turn and shiver silver spikes down your spine
this way and that,
a wavering indecision
and our sonar sees them
big on the depth charge
a single creature
leagues wide





posted at 11:12 PM

wish you were here
wish you were here
the roads are good
and the weather is nice
oh yes




posted at 11:10 PM

you are
sunshine
you are goddamned brilliant
warm and golden
honey sunshine
and me,
I'm a snowflake
keep me in yr freezer
your hands too warm to touch







posted at 11:08 PM

Tying you to my ankles
You’re the sexiest cinderblock
I ever did see




posted at 9:15 PM

these date from four months ago, I think.
I think they were meant to go together, but now I haven't the faintest.
Old work like this tends to be longer-winded.
My apologies.

-----------------------------


Interesting
interesting
this drinkers got her drinks cut out for her,
like patterns of spills on cloth
your death shroud round around you
tell me now you sweet thing
spell the words
the sent text a shrill of something you kind of meant
a spill,
the shot,
the kill.
I’d die for less.
Write me drunk honey
I’ll finish up alone my red wine
a shirazi rewrite could be worse

-----------





Interesting
interesting
I’m a chemistry project
a scientific weaving on your needle machine
see the break through when I start to say
it’s okay
I can take all you’ve got
phonographic
turn me on and hear my static charming
This last week
I’ve cleaned out bottles upon bottles at home
lovely reds all, shiraz and merlot,
sangiovese
northern california syrahs
the girls’ got a taste for style
the girls’ got class in her veins
class with a capital k, I joked
barely remembering how you called me
the queen of silences.
now there's a coronation for you
Driven to drinking
someone bleed me of this
before it can begin again
red’s my favorite color.
It’s the most intense, the most passionate
wild and maddened and sublimely joyful and miserable and in love, of them all.
I’ll make all the world match,
drinking it in,
bleeding it out.
Let’s all mix our misspelled metaphors here.
but still alive yeah
and you won’t have my head now
won’t have me as your trophy
take you down and out with my big guns baby
trail it from texas in the route of a wreck,
the wake of a drive
I’m still alive
I’m still alive





posted at 9:16 PM

recalling
a sort of suspension
a liquid, a solid, you can't tell
it doesn't matter
so firecrackered, so traintracked,
I'd have been better off spotting. so marked up.
you couldn't have drawn further on me but no, the arms
the color of busted blueberries and every visitor saying You Look So Good
so great I'll stay here forever then. There is no difference to me between a hospital
and an airplane. modular food, bad tv, an inability to move water too cold to drink
vaguely recall laughing the chess pieces could have levitated the fever dyeing
my eyes red. years later still decaying, got bottles of rocks
to prove it but the blood don't keep so well it's fun
and awful raging on this way, a hot and
maddened run, an altared state,
telling myself this is the sign
that I'm alive...
yeah I know its serious
I know its serious
I know its serious
I so don't care,
you can't pay me off,
give me another diagnosis,
hit me again,
it feels fucking great,
I'm primed to kill
a panther pacing behind bars







posted at 4:39 PM

a bifurcation,
the way it's drawn and
quartered,
take this half and pull it
on through time,
strewing the path with guts all the way,
and left behind
the bits and bobs;
she died on a Friday night,
the last pick-up, the final drop-off
and is survived
by the pages,
some letters,
and collections of words
spit out like from a star far away,
light-years to get to you today,
these sounds generated centuries ago



posted at 3:42 PM

ohhh yeah baby
they put the quarter in me and now I'm on
running a mile a minute,
waving the gun,
remembering every move from kung fu class
taken years ago,
i could come on the keyboard
this computer don't stand a chance
there ain't nothing
so sexy as a deadline




posted at 12:12 PM

so I started this damn country band
'cause punk rock's too hard to sing.
-whiskeytown.


posted at 5:53 PM

a poem for three different people.

khachtryan, a golden gun come on, these words mean nothing, they're pretty. my heart could never home in you, I'm sorry, it's true that it's locked in someone else's bathroom next to the knife I stole. How's it cutting these days, I wonder. You could cut my chest out and I still wouldn't heal right, I know it's true I've tried. taste those iron lines. yes you tasted like it. couldn't tell you I hated you no matter how much you asked me to, because I loved you. so slit my wrists. you know I want it. I know you'd like it, it's your kind of thing, like your endless supply of cigarettes and the pills you take to persist. come on over, we can drink til we're unconscious with ink stains all over the place. digging that poison, aluminum cylinder pyramid piled in the livingroom in the silent morning light. and you staggering down streets somewhere into open traffic.
I made ten thousand mistakes, ten thousand mistakes, and you, you made a million.






posted at 5:38 PM

two a.m., heading north on la brea

now I'm behind you
four right turns
gunned the engine and
what will you do?
what will you do?
a grin on my face
my knife in my shoe
I'm so happy
put you
in your
awful
place




posted at 5:32 PM

life finds you
where ever
you live




posted at 5:27 PM

drag it all out
a cathedralic car wreck
an exhibitionist streak




posted at 5:25 PM

somewhere the night sky hangs like a blanket
shoot it with my cap gun just to make it seem like stars
-whiskeytown.


posted at 12:07 PM

karma
must be
nickel-and-diming me
to death



posted at 4:27 PM

for joe.

you are
a rainy day
when I stay in
purring
you are
the pillows,
the tea-cup,
my fourteen lit candles
you are
the time
sweet and quiet
i never take
for myself
you let me down
like aching arms
that have been trying too long
to hold up
the crushing weight of heaven.

thank you



posted at 8:02 PM

hey wow
you taught me
effectively
to make the poetry
shorter.

what do you have to say for yourself

posted at 7:55 PM

hey lone star
swing that shamble
a tasty eyeful
cockeyed amble
over my way
its a gamble
i know
you drown it
harder
every day
consistent rundown
soul going cold
in this soulless town
bruise my retinas
tell me now
how you work it
how you break it
how you make it
magnetic
to my iron heart

haven't seen you in a while, your adopted town, and to me, to me
you own it
you fucking own it






posted at 7:41 PM

you,
you jessamine,
jacaranda
in a full on violent violet bloom
your fucking city is melting,
the asphalt sagging
hot spell and me feeling all bourgeois,
that a c blasting
the heat waves making marks on the air
and i don't feel cooler
i dont feel better at all.


posted at 7:37 PM

recalling
your hands around my neck
it was a joke
we were laughing
still
felt that stab of alarm
i didn't doubt you could do it


posted at 7:01 PM

and the crushing weight of the sky,
so lovely
so lovely
flatten me to the earth
sink me in and down
life's too lovely

give me that highway one,
that curve of sea,
a first northbound cypress
leaning its body towards the hills



posted at 6:59 PM

the landscape of human suffering,
how it took us in
to its wide depths
its vast expanses
the warm arms of its delicate and detailed topography
where we lost our way and got found,
wide eyed and wild,
by that maddened
rapture

I'll ascend to heaven
on the ladders of the wrists
we each bled dry so beautiful



posted at 6:56 PM

hey there
I'll call you melatonin
for my jetlagged heart



posted at 5:12 PM

the patient pointed knife at low back
felt through the most blissful kisses,
felt in springtime rains,
felt in late afternoons,
in coolly waning childhood,
felt as you rest collapsed and deep-breathing in god's good arms,
has always been and
i guess
ever shall be.
Do we love our doubt
how it makes my mad love
sweeter
Death,
the loss of him,
it never leaves you
the only thing
that won't


posted at 5:07 PM

my hollowed heart,
four-chambered,
echoing rooms
your ghost
inexorcisable
an inexorable progression,
ruthless and degenerative
making of me
a creature occupied and taken
haunted
each cell
held still in memoriam
it is the things that never really start, I see
that never really
let go of me


posted at 5:02 PM

wear that bad habit like a badge of honor
drag it home
take it all off

-------

the stars, the vacuum of space between our toes, the carefully orchestrated division
how we try so hard
to not touch each other.
that distance, i swear
it could contain ten thousand miles
and as many intentions

---------------

i never remember for more than an hour
the things that you say to me
if intentions were horses i'd ride fast and far
and bring each word back home to you.

---------------


"We've never rolled a bus," he said
as the tour guide drove us up the winding side of mount shasta
i was a little girl between my parents on the bench seat.
"They have a tendency to go end over end."


-----------------------


10.12.2001

Noses bleed a lot, did you know? The skin is so thin there.

I didn’t even get a regular nosebleed, nor did I get in a fight;
just an injury, just an external wound, drips bright red oxygenated
blood, iron-rich, down my nose, which, when I look at it for too
long, starts to look overly sturdy, angular, polygonal. The blood
drips so far I actually accidentally inhale it a little, the drip
working its snail-like trail up inside my nostril. Watch it go.
I just stare into the mirror. Too many mirrors in my room. A drip hits the floor.

I will leave in a year.

Take these words, this blood, and mark it now; I’ll smear it across
the screen to make these words stick.

San francisco: a city of lost people. Unlike here; Los Angeles
is a city of the found, the way people are found by traveling evangelists;
a city of the saved and recieving of salvation, the golden light,
redeemed, the overwhelming faith of the converted. Los Angeles
is full of born-again fervency, people who know what they want.
and here I’m the lost one ‘cause I an unilluminated, I am not getting
the gist of salvation. Maybe I'm wanting for a different sort of thing.
but in the north, in a city full of the lost and wandering,
that feeling of the horizon bending you backwards,
the failing and failed, with no more to lose,
maybe I can find meaning.

"What is...salvation?"
"Salvation is when you are saved.
Obviously I don't know the first thing about salvation."
-twilight singers


--------------------------------

----------

Drowning at age seven I recalled
seeing lights that were blue and shifting.
It wasn’t god, no it was
the light slanting through the glassine pool surface.
Jumped into the thing yelling at them all to watch my stupendously wonderous cannonball
which gave off the most awesome splash—
a splash to be proud of,--
forgetting, too late recalling as my tiny arms grabbed at air
I’d left the Floaties behind in the bathroom.
The quick drawing in of one terrified breath three feet above the water, remembering
them sitting right there on the counter in front of the big mirror.
Immersed with a loud bang.
I’d been scared to put my face under til now.
forcibly thrust into these abrupt blue miles
I hung suspended in a sea
where light swam like fish schooling deep under cerulean waves
stunned into opening my eyes, take it all in
pouring into my dazzled retinas,
I stopped struggling
drew deep liquid breaths
realizing I was now fully ready and content to die,
having seen the most lovely sight in all my long seven years,
having seen how beautiful life can become from underneath the white-lit surface, looking up
the way that backyard pool, so tiny seen from above,
became unfolded in one instant to vast endless leagues, latitudes under the glass
and depths unplumbable
a thousand prismatic angles of sky and blue forever
sloshing at the corners of my vision
which then quietly stopped with no realization on my part
that it had ever ended
or that a break had been made from this world.

Waking now from time to time at night and early morning
still imagining the rising back to consciousness,
my mothers’ hands on my back pushing the water out of me,
it dripping from my lips, the most delicious elixir.

Figuring now I’m half mermaid
and always will be,
having swallowed the stuff,
having taken it into my blood.

And when I think all my metaphors are oceanic.



posted at 4:07 PM

3/28/02

i see your goddamned truck
every time I'm on the freeway
which is at least
twice a day
everyone in LA must own one
I could drive for miles and miles
and not escape your ghost



posted at 12:14 PM

at the grasshopper, thursday (4/2002)

and she says I watch you
go off
taking on water
in ten minutes flat
in your diagonal gaze.
Oh yeah, that, I know, it's
not you love
a bit disconcerting,
the way we go on and I cloud up
divisional and excessive, a quiet tablature
tableing it right there
and you gotta keep talking.
I expand to fill the vacant house,
each clapboard echoing
my gaze, watching
you walk through me
like a ghost.
These cloudburst clouds baby
storming up a brew
I gulp all down
keeps me stable
and diffuse feet on the ground
so pummel me with rain the size of frying pans
I float thru the rooms here and
throw a few books around,
creak the floors
break some dishes and
get you cold
and shaky chilled
sorry
knock me flat, the gun to the head, the shock of light
end this occupation, this permanent vacation
the kind of poltergeist
can't wait for the sun



posted at 12:05 PM

Once again, a slew of old ones. Some of these are the genuine prosety I talk about: not poetry, not prose, some kind of narrative, an essay perhaps, something inbetween. A number of them aren't all that good. Sorry.


1.26.02

Work that visine that extra sugarfree
divisadero down
I lied to you
work that artful dissaray that morning after casual calculation
work that charming wreck you know they like it
you know they do
broken dolls are pretty and they wanna fix you
its hard to resist




------

1.23.02

So again I find myself become a rainstorm
and again I call a friend
some say these days should be alone
I think that’s madness in the end
cause I am no safe harbor
my waves are full of sharks
And in my head’s six walls of steel

this stupid striped hair holds the fodder
of a driven mad barreling run
between its knots.
something unspeakable,
unwriteable.
Try to think of something else.







1.22.02


deifying an event after the fact
happens so often in history book and oral accounts,
mythologies and mysteries revealed as sacrament,
like rivers that tend to flood in spring
turn into a thousand creations...
I was on a roof. I could have fallen. It was dumb. The sky was
dark because it was night,
and light with a violet glow because it was Los Angeles.
I think everybody but me was on acid. There was music.
With language as my glamour, my way of painting the eyes onto the gods
the way they did in ancient places,
bringing their images to life
piercing the eyes with a pin after the inks had dried,
giving it sight,
making it real,
bringing down the darsan,
letting it have thoughts of its own.
I’d throw blood on the screen
if I thought it could make the words more real
if I thought it could etch that moment into my days
more indelibly, changing me forever
in the ways I’d like to be made.









1.17.02

And the blood’s built up on the canvas.
A dozen little crosses etched from me,
the bit that slid down my leg to cool
an icy gelatinous drop when I recovered it, minutes late.
I’ve blessed it repeatedly
now it's safe.
Time to leave this place.

Feeling like a death camp escapee
the sun shines overbrightly in my free eyes,
reality seems overreal,
and I’m too full of the indescribable
to ever say the words.

Not a small thing coming from me.

light slants down thru the tree branches as I walk down in the wind,
the hill where I live,
sun flares on me
and I’ve got time on my hands finally
instead of my own blood.


------------





It’s not great but its good
its decent
for 24 years old
for 25 years even
dont forget you are a child still.
Maybe at 65 you’ll create something timeless.
For now content yourself with good.
still
how I’d like to escape the confines of age,
how my perfectionist impulse wants to believe
I could be genius, stricken with wonder,
and am instead failing abysmally at age 24.






1.21.02

shes cleaning it up now
realigning the life
moving it all into place
it slides in, the final zero
an equation completing itself
a year and six months
adds up to
78 weeks
546 days
13104 hours
786240 minutes
47174400 seconds
I’m over you
I’m over you
jesus, this time, this life lived
during those tiny increments as they ticked by
feel like that much weight around my neck
how can time haul so heavy on us
how I got through I’ll never know.
Stronger than I thought, though.
And it’s like a reville
waking into predawn light
seeing a future of mean and tiny things,
of vast and lovely expanses,
feeling the past crushing on me,
a weight that accrues value like gold
I won’t be lost in this
I won’t be sold short.



----------


monday

Stare at the screen for hours
as you dont write back.
I think its funny
I knew this from you
should be expected
you cant take my honesty
you run all directions
and its all okay,
you and your friends
a shattered bunch all,
and you handing out judgement
our arbitrarily appointed arbiter of taste
I sometimes feel the stablest of all of us here
but I guess that’s okay too,
and quite a delusion if you put it to me.
Tell me something new.
show me the thing I want to see
you’ve got inside of you
I’m too real and sick of this.
life’s too short for evasiveness.
Words become so easy to pronounce,
air so easy to move in your throat
when alternatives are weighed,
throw off that gag
the hand over your heart,
execution-style,
an assassination of our living.
But you won't find me at gunpoint:
the order's off on me.
I can say anything I want.
its laughable
the predictable unfolding of your terror
in the face of my torrents of words,
words which said in no uncertain terms
how lovely I think you are.
How can anyone be afraid of that?
I never understood,
but I do understand,
and I will wait patiently
for you to get drunk again
some night.
Plastered and tell me your wonderful story.
I love to hear you go on,
you diamond shining,
seen through the tree branches that screen your backyard from the canopy of the sky,
how thoroughly, you dear friend,
you make my tired heart smile.

I'd love to kick the chair from beneath your feet
to find you walking on air,
your little magic loosened,
your shutdown eyes unblinded.


-----------------


now look at the people
in the streets, in the bars
we are all of us in the gutter
but some of us are looking at the stars
look round the room
life is unkind
we fall but we keep getting up,
over and over.
Your eyes are blue like the heavens above.
-the pretenders.



---------------

death valley

And hey.
I ruled you out with iron wills,
that desolate rock and silent sliding clouds the only witness to my vacating of you,
where I’d staked a dry claim
that gave no return.
Abandoning the lyrical altitudes
you’d inspired me to.
All unknown to you.
And know this
you could still have me back with a word,
your quiet truth
worth more gold
than is hidden in all the vast dry wastes
this wide world over.
I’d weather ten thousand desert storms more.
This wide world
over.
Give me the reason.



posted at 4:04 PM

Here's a gob I recovered. Dates are flexible; I never know when I write these things.


3.13.02

i'm sliding sideways
slipping away
a subtle break
an escape
i'm slippery sidewalk
beneath your feet
you can't
walk on me
anymore
and if you fall down
we've evened the score
it's your own fault


faultline, sidewalk cracks
a broken back
makes for lovely writing
confined but
wish i could go back
missing what's now past.








3.8.02

a fire flower
you burn underground
the earth is hot

what a lovely thing
what a lovely thing
incendiary
a human heart

i buy more blue flowers
and keep them for me
you only get red ones now
blood roses
on our hotheaded firebug hands

we're a hazard baby
accident waiting to happen
come on and skid that 747
across the tarmac to my Texaco
a lovely destruction
seeking that glorious end

in my gasoline eyes
you're a lit cigarette







2.14.02


shoot the moon
won't kill
just wound
tell me now
is this how
we walk away









4.1.02

lost at sea
i am no grip
for a drowning man
sorry and you know
i love you dearly but
i want to shake you off like spiders
your little attempts to hold on
a cold and calculated blow
the way i strike to kill
and would your brother
be such a hero
had he survived?
would you be so desperate?
i guess we'll never know.
Life's sickening sea waves
drove us far from shore
wonder where we'll
wash up,
opposite sides of the world,
same red sky
at dawn.








3.11.02

dark bar room view from here.
wonder what you whisper
in her sweet little ear
as you smooth down her shoulders
like you'd do to me
sorry i followed you here
does she find them compelling
like i did not
does she see some brilliance
like i did not
sorry i followed you here,
i see you are busy getting
what you never got
from me.
good luck and i wish you well
my swaggering marlboro man,
my hash-slinging john wayne
call me if you'd like the lay
i could use you that way
like you'd do to me.
Maybe.






posted at 9:11 PM

hello
can you hear me
hello?
that's all there is.
That's all there is.
-wilco.




posted at 8:48 PM

[written a while ago but date unknown]

I am forever trying
you son of a bitch
to write a poem
without you in it




posted at 8:45 PM

the little lost houses,
a froster's freeze,
the too-wide and overempty streets
under the mountain,
which you see with such clarity
its every detail in distance-warping high relief and too
near,
the towering sky
seems to wrap
itself over the road--
humping the town,
touchable and hyperreal like a vegas ceiling--
citizens and small 1940's clapboards,
an even metered six feet between each
flags flying out front and
rosebushes
in neatly trimmed rows
and these stormclouds here,
cumulus and crushing,
coming on like glacial drift
in fast forward,
they make of you
too small to even be thought
incidental.
how can one not fear the wrath of god
in glendale





posted at 8:39 PM

3.9.02

the way some poisons are cloying.
it's been so sweet.

the same flavor
specific to the unconsummated
love affair
head rushing me back
years and years to when I was 16
and dumb
and so so in love
and he with me, too.
Nothing really happened
we fooled around a bit, lost
our minds,
I went crazy
He yelled at me during lunch period
firmly and loudly asserting the cessation of his
once earth-shaking,
seven-seas-traversing
wild and drugged
emotion regarding me.
I died for 13 months,
coming off the stuff
We ended up not speaking for two years, but continued moving in the same circles
and only then did we actually become friends.

I guess life is funny
now I'm 25
and I'm still crazy






posted at 8:28 PM

friday 3.15.02 in my agenda:

hey robert pollard
gush me a line
a rhyme noncommital enough
some high strung lines pointed enough
for this indescribable
emotion





posted at 8:17 PM

I've painted my nails
enamel black
deep like space
and varnished em
with tiny silver sparkles
making of each fingertip
a galaxy
stars set in velvet dark
feeling like Tiamat
when I go swimming
the universe on my hands
and proving
maybe god's not so damn
clever after all
what took him a week
took me twenty minutes
we are all of us
the stuff of stars



posted at 8:09 PM

So. Um. Here we go.

Thanks for reading, by the way. :)




posted at 5:05 PM