Philadelphia

I came home to the nowhere sun in the back of the barn.  I was staring at myself, looking hard to try and find a purpose in shoveling.  There are moveable items and I'm talking about variants of people so don't get freaked out.  I care too much.

I like to think about car accidents on rain shot streets.  I'm really mean so I resign myself to the trash can where i think someone made of stone belongs.  Looking in the drawers first, i like to suck down the things in the disposable with novelty straws and residue of half-life by the old versions of ourselves.

I'm running now due to misevaluation at the coal yard.  When I looked up, everyone was staring back at me like I was a ghost or a child or the ghost of a child.  What can one really do at the back of the bar anyway.  My trash can hole with all my straws seems more comfortable than the invite.

I'm starting to realize that I'm really a lot worse than I thought.  My robot mouth connected to my robot heart sings praise for my robot brain.  Good God--------if holidays were people I'd break down crying by the pond where i found myself for the first time.  I'm missing M & D and candy bars in the night when i wasn't supposed to.

When i see children it upsets me.  It's like holding up a sign for the wrong team at the wrong game----like a fraud.  Ya know?  

Wooden Crimes

After reading little chain and clock ticks a lot and cat meows a lot I think I need a job to dig my nose into it……..I’ve been sniffing around a lot in the back of the woodshed where my mother kept antibiotics for dads treatments, I can’t stand walking around the arena anymore without the lights on

Like when you and I used to hang outside of the carriage house- two roses under the autumnal sun.  I think about the gifts you’ve made for me and I probably haven’t made any for you and I’m so sorry about that hoss.  I can’t believe my attitude like vinegar bottle of plastic column, rice patty of brick wall. 

I’m only a dreamer man, all I can really do is hang on.

a stain on my collar

Your impossible rhetoric.

Heroic language to save the masses. except no one will be there to love you.

           hunker down. sip that piss

           breath deep the smell of all the lives you cant forget.

           Dont drink to forget. drink because you cant remember a night with out it.

Back Home

1.

After a farewell handshake through the bars on your window, I realize it's late and no longer raining. I huddle into my friend's car and she drives me back south down Broad Street. The wide sidewalks are mostly empty which I find strange because it's Friday night and people should be walking on the street right?

I stare at City Hall getting bigger and bigger and my friend turns up the volume on Nirvana's greatest hits album. I want to transmit a live feed of everything I see to you. All of the time. Ideally, you would just spend all of your time seeing what I see and being enthused and impressed. Just sit on your couch (shit, do you have a couch?) and watch my life.

My friend dropped me off four blocks from my house and I walked to buy cigarettes. You said you had friends when you lived in New York. But you didn't like living in New York and now you don't like living here and I think you just don't like living. I picture your house being full of black mold, a damp place where you just brood between rooms all day, coughing and occasionally texting me.

I'm concerned for you, I really am but I'm being about as accommodating as I can. And I'm probably the most accommodating guy I know.

After I bought the cigarettes, I went over to a different friend's house. His roommates had about a dozen of their oldest and best friends from college over and they were all listening to songs they used to listen to together and laughing and singing along and smiling at each other. I asked if I could put on a song and they all smiled and nodded accommodatingly. I think one of them even patted me on the back. I put on Mr. Bungle or something stupid like that and they all kept their smiles and charitably listened to half of the song before changing it back.

I wandered into the kitchen and lost five cigarettes out of my fresh pack in the dice game being played on the counter. A big man told me that I was good luck and kissed me wetly.

You would have hated all of it.

Later that night, I met another girl who had recently moved here from New York. You should talk to her. She was sitting on the couch, drinking a warm beer. She works at a coffee shop in your neighborhood. I don't remember which one. Ask around. This girl told me that sometimes, on her days off, she just rides the bus, a confession which seemed contrived, overly quirky, kind of gross. Look at me, I'm so weird, I ride the bus without a destination. She reminded me of you.

2.

So I left New York and moved back to the cheaper East Coast city where I had attended college, closer to where I grew up, closer to what I think of as my more permanent human connections. It was a simple decision and I barely remember making it. I mean, my ex-boyfriend was killed by a car on his bike and I think his death will probably go down on record as the catalyst for my move but that's not really it. We had broken up a year before he died, I hadn't seen him in six months, and I had been leaving New York for a long time by that point. It reminds me of something my father said during one of his calculated attempts at imparting the wisdom of his age on me. We don't remember the thoughts that lead up to decisions, we only remember the effects of decisions.

When the 15 Spaniards went out into the yard they peered in the stream and saw their reflection

twins

multiple sets

many young men striped in black on black on their skin

afraid of eachother

afraid of the neutrality of the stream

the life that grows in the stream




they ran back to the house to work on their drawings of ducks in a pond and life happening off the farm

The River Of My Heart

When I was a kid I found the river of my heart near the burnt car in the Kansas River

The sun was dripping like all the things around me, all the little ticks falling from the trees like marbles falling from the sky and landing in the dirt in the afternoon of my life

I thought I'd be alright, out of the damp basement and into the light hallway where the wind feels like walking but the natural decay of monkey brain in the field of my schoolyard

Boy cloaked in big shirt walking toward me with orange hair, dangling, arms flailing like monkey-man inside of the vision behind the eyes that left me blind under the river of my heart

The river of my heart the river of my heart that would flow like lava down the mountain, the blue cars rush down the mountain like little rain into the day on the shore

Here in time

Finality of morning where light hits the blades at the tip and i walk around until the knees buckle at the top of the mountain where my life was and the water in the lagoon would greet me with warmth where there was everything all around the river and morning would feel like night-rock in my mind in the kitchen of my soul in the love of spring

I come down here to settle the feet

The shore line is so long

The prince and the queen fly along together in syncopation like bees do where the trees dangle like kid in the schoolyard and I go behind the shed and tell myself to keep trying




to keep being here



and if i'm not here than i'm in the river of my heart

The river of my heart

The river of my heart


where all things flow like time in the river

Tonight: Now

I engineered everything around me

Because I was thinking differently

About the categories of fragments

And unidentified bacterial infections

There were three people I remember as drowning

And one of them was me

In the fractured light of the afternoon

By the beach

Down home in the grass hut

Missing happy and jh

They looked like little balloons on the lanei

With his back arched

And apologizing for wanting to throw up

In a sock

Or in a pair of her shoes

Today is another day of promise

Like all of the others

That I have been living forever

Clear Everyworld

My skull is melting into my brain.  The sun shines on everything here like a machine.  My face is melting.   I want to be mean

Have you guys ever thought about what being a man means?  I don’t really know, I’m totally uncertain.  All I know is that to be a man you must readily prepare the people you care about for totally altering grand absurdity.  And then certainly, if you consider yourself a man, don’t be the man that admonishes the other man for not understanding that you aren’t a man anymore.

There were palm trees

There were ferns

I had my zen reader

On top of a mountain

The lava bursts onto the cliff where Tim Freeman and Skye stood the other night.  They missed the explosion, they build tree houses on state-sanctioned land for maximum comfort and Hawaiian good time.

I fucked up

I’m kidding

That’s the last thing I did.

All I want guys, my friends, the ones I love with all my heart, is to just be good.  It’ll come, but I’m so worried for when my heart breaks and I’ll have to piece it back together.  All of the parts of my home will be useless.  I hope I don’t need a repair man.

Fathering

The look in a person's eyes when they want to have a kid with you is probably not a look I'm familiar with but who knows? How much really goes into the decision to have a kid? There are probably people out there who have wanted to have a kid with me. And when they communicated that, through the look that I can only imagine, I probably said something like:

"I can smell your shampoo."

And then they probably stepped back and spitefully didn't want to have a kid with me anymore. But I'm not sure if this is true, it's just an exchange that's easy and fun for me to create. I'd like to think some people want to have a kid with me. And I'd like to think if they honestly communicated this information to me, I'd have the obscene pleasure of gracefully declining. But that's not how it would go at all.

No, I'd probably stand there in the sun, sweating through my white t-shirt, smelling the shampoo, considering the hair and cheeks and teeth of my future wife, and I'd say something like:

"Alright, cool."

Luckily people don't say things and instead just look at you in expressive ways that can be conveniently misconstrued.

I wrote that awhile ago and left it saved as draft for a couple months. I guess I was thinking about girls. Hope everyone had a great summer.

-John Henry

Malcolm

1.

David is sitting on the couch while she puts on music. David is standing on the porch while she smokes cigarettes. David is standing in the kitchen trying to get the last of the vodka out from under the ice, tilting his head back, lifting the bottom of his glass up into the florescent light. David is finding the last piece of generically-manufactured Xanax tucked under the ashtray. David is sitting on the couch while she puts on music.

David is remembering the goat he had as a child. He is remembering how the goat liked to eat barbecued ribs. He is remembering his father cooking the ribs in the park and how the smoke from the grill smelled like mangoes. And how the goat would nudge his elbow with its nose as he sat at the picnic table.

He is remembering his little cousins with sauce all over their faces. He can only remember his little cousins with sauce all over their faces. They're bigger cousins now and look different. David doesn't really know them anymore with their deep voices and stubble and loose basketball shorts. He is remembering how Malcolm would show up and how excited that used to make him.

David doesn't feel anxious or worried even though he's pretty scared of her. He's sitting on the couch watching her pour more Coca-Cola into her huge cup. He's remembering things but feeling far away from them, like they're memories of T.V. or something. He feels a little sad about this because he should be able to go back closer to them. Especially the day the goat died.

The goat died because the neighbor hit it with his car. David thought it was weird because the goat was pretty big and hard to miss. David didn't see the goat after it was dead. He was at school when it died and by the time he got home Animal Control or whoever had come and taken the goat's body away. He remembers that his dad told him to go skateboarding after it happened. So he took his skateboard down to the basketball courts and sat on it, looking at the chain-link nets swaying beneath the hoops until the sun went down.

David realizes that after the goat died his cousins stopped coming around as much. And that it got colder and that his dad started working more and didn't grill ribs very often. Maybe on like Fourth of July or over Labor Day weekend but that's about it. And David started hanging out with Malcolm behind the Acme a lot.

David is lying on her bed now and she's above him, with her dress still on and she's very far away. Talking to him. Talking to him about. What? The music is off and when he closes his eyes he remembers in a very different way than before, like being there, because he can hear and smell. And when he opens his eyes he sees that she has three library books on a shelf full of ceramics. So he closes them again and tries to turn on his side. Because her sheets smell like mangoes. Like mangoes. Like mangoes.

2.

On the evening of the last day of Malcolm's life, David walked slowly down narrow, chilly streets toward Malcolm's house. He thought about Mona and how it had been raining earlier. He thought about the joint they had smoked in her bedroom and how afterwards they had fucked with the window open, letting the rain mist on to their naked bodies. He thought about he had walked downstairs and out onto the porch, how he had walked past Mona's mother who was speaking Spanish on the cordless phone, one angry eye fixed firmly on David as he descended the steps to the street. He was not thinking much about Malcolm.

Horse Hair

When horses ran it always reminded me of the tall grass swaying, or the light on the tall grass with an auburn hue, horses are brown, and I would have liked to be the little man on their backs running with them.

Men sans expression gripping the little armrests, sweating.  1pm whiskey drinker, not really that kosher if you ask me.  Placing bets was my favorite part, and I’d always tell the nurse that the woman behind the counter was mocking me with eyes that cut too deep.  Like light penetrating everything around me so that the light was all I could see even when I closed my eyes I’d see horses in the distance like a road at night with a small sign.

Anyway,

I was holding hands with another teacher and watching Captain Stormy run the laps as he got beat with a whip, back to the starting point I think is what the man was saying.  I guess encouragement is good no matter which way you approach it, but I knew that I was feeling like a bat on the cold ground staring into myself that I saw in the compacted dirt-concrete stillness of the afternoon where flies live.

When they’d make it around the lap I’d break a hand, or a seal, depending on which way you look at it, and stand up, like in a stoic way, feeling the full weight of my legs underneath the desert but then sit back down because I felt like the horse was just trying to be a horse and he couldn’t.

Exhaustion is pretty brutal, but I think it’s worse when the exhaustion isn’t physical.  Cause, you know, I’d be standing with the pretty nurse frocked in cape and basketball gown or something of the sort and have no idea what to say because I already thought it all out or got all the words out and she’d just stand there trying not to look uncomfortable.

I broke down crying one day at the track with nachos in hand, trying to figure where the cut came from and if I did it to myself or if I was just wailing under the moon too bright, too bright, giving everything I had and then having it ripped away from me like ice silouhette on cold morning where the frog hits the water in the pond. 

Muscles aren’t engendered, I got freaked out and asked to be hauled away in a gurney so that all of the tutors in there thought I was dead or just on the verge of it.  Couldn’t give it enough, I kept telling myself that, and I think I was right.  Everything felt pretty filthy at the time and I kept thinking in absolutes which I don’t think is ever a good way to think.

When we got to the gas station down the road by the pyramid of light, I got out of the gurney and walked over to the Pennsylvania dutch man selling blueberries under straw-hat, like light of broken pixels-gray beard, smile on face and big overalls touching the ground I think.  The money I had wasn’t real and I thought about confinement in cell and devices of an auburn nature, give me earth and take me behind the station to take me out into the night so we can sing and dance.

Going away from pyramid, I saw horses in the field gnawing at grass in plain view out of the little window where my eyes were probably fixed permanently in death or in motion.  My hair was so long and it was tickling my nose, I think horses have all the sensations that humans do and walk around strutting tail in big ass hauling all of their weight of guilt in incendiary way because nurse trudged me out into the field buckled down through big patches of nothing as I stared out the window and wondered if the horses knew by name at this point.  I surely think that there is no other possible way than this one right here in something that is like vision of self.

Walk-in fridge/freezer. 10x10x8 10x12x8. Works fine. $1000 obo.

I leaned over.  There were people waiting for like the bus waits 

for the fat man heaving walls onto the bed of his pick-up.  

Sweat dripping down the bridge of my nose. 

Dropping into the webs of my fingers.  

Searching for blood coming from some quiet cut.  My nose maybe? The cut from the explosion was not deep.  A split laceration. It also stopped bleeding almost immediately. Not as bad as I expected it to be.                                                                                                   

The sweat was cool.  Like sweat or Gatorade. Like blood or blood. 

Mixed with the filth of eons. Broken up. Of concrete and of dust and of dust.

Toshiro Kamihira <tkamihira@gmail.com>	4:28 AM (30 minutes ago)
to me

Death is dead.
((.. The death of / or the death of finite. The death of death... Mansueto library (ASRS) requires just one-seventh of the space of regular stacks. When users request an item, a robotic crane retrieves the material within minutes.. ((As the infinite looms, **insert preferred pronoun*** marginalized the finite ((<<== weak shit bro)))) ........

Understanding how to express perspective.           Being right means not trusting the truth(?(again; trust in opposition posits power through terror)) . The difference between listening to:::eyes open; closed.::
spend most of my time going somewhere else...........Reading into "things";
objects.

What can you learn/
infer/ imagine from its silence.

Get to tell it to the people. - Cornell Campbell

Sent from my iPhone

A Day on the Beach

At this juncture

Dreams only happen occasionally

And when I happen upon them

They are all electric blue.

I’m sitting on the beach with my big towel under me.  I’m on vacation because my boss eased up and let me take my week in the summer.  I’m in Miami.  Its very hot here and the sun feels very close, like I am actually about seven years away from it instead of a million or whatever that statistic is.  I chose this place because there are notoriously beautiful women and a lot of buildings painted in pastel colors.  The buildings are clearly second to the women though.  I’ve been here for three days already and I am starting to get a little lonely.  I realize that I am not in the shape I used to be, for instance: my jaw line is sagging at the rate of my body, so not even my face looks that great anymore, probably because I’m weathered from my job, which is doing HVAC stuff in Virginia.  It’s kind of the worst of both worlds in terms of weather.  It’s really hot in the summer and really cold in the winter.  I like it though, there’s always work and the strong sense of community in Fredericksburg really makes me feel right at home.  People are really helpful and I can really appreciate that.  I’ve been living in a little condo, one of those new jobs with the drywall that looks fancy but will probably collapse before I get a chance to move out.  It’s not half bad though, it looks nice and I have all of my valuables from the old place.

I’m watching waves crash because the tide picked up.  I guess that’s the real reason I came down here, for the beaches.  I have always enjoyed them for their meditative quality and the little spray from the ocean I get when they really start to pick up.  I like walking along the shoreline too, when the warm water caresses my feet and I catch little glimpses of the tiny life forms that scuttle along beside me; it kind of feels like being on an emergency room bed.  I say this because I have been on my fair share.  I used to love getting drunk to the point where I’d get alcohol poisoning and get driven to the ER by one of my friends who’d always play really soothing music and drive a little too fast.  The feeling was kind of like body surfing a huge, gradual wave, something similar to what is happening on this particular beach.  Then, when I would get to the ER, the orderlies would rush me up to an operating room on a gurney, quickly moving through the iridescent hallways that always looked something like the light on the shore.  It was always a blur after that, and I’d usually wake up all fixed, remembering some very light, gentle dream I had.  Sometimes I would even go strolling out of the hospital, feeling right as rain, and grab a burger somewhere.  Those types of hangovers will make anybody hungry as anything though.

I get up off my towel because I want to make it over to the water.  My green bathing suit touches my knees and my belly hangs over the waistband a little bit.  I see some very beautiful women playing on the shore line with a couple diesel guys.  The guys are picking up the women and dunking them in the water, they are playful but they keep telling the guys to stop.  I walk to a spot far enough away from them so I can’t hear the girls giggling or the guys shrill laughter and make my way slowly into the ocean.  The water is so blue that I can see fish swimming below me, I say hi to them, and I think a couple even look up and say hi back.  I’m laying upwards, looking at the clouds moving, getting pulled back and forth by the current, understanding that there is nothing to hold onto out here and being saddened by that.

I had to stop drinking a while ago.  My wife died about three years back and that’s when I decided to call it quits.  We’d only been married for about a year.  We were coming home from a party and my friend was very drunk at the wheel, driving too fast down some unfamiliar country roads with a lot of twists and turns.  I was pretty afraid for my safety (and that’s saying a lot for back then), until I saw my wife in the back, passed out with her legs coming up to her chest and her hands wrapped warmly around herself like she was happy with it, happy with the whole thing, happy with me.  I remember smiling and putting my head against the headrest and grabbing her exposed leg from where I was sitting.  It was softer than the beach itself.  I think you pretty much can figure how the story goes from here.  My friend and I, the two drunks, walk away from the wreck unscathed.  We weren’t even wearing our seatbelts.  My wife though, who was sober as a bluebird, hit her head so hard on her own knee that she died on impact.  I think I can spare you the gory details.

Considering the way I was though makes me think that she may be better off.  I was such a drunk that I could hardly do anything: missing dinners with her parents, breaking china, staying out all night, sleeping with bar flies, holding on too tight, letting go too fast.  I’m glad that part of my life is over though.  It’s good to have clarity and the ability to forgive myself and move on with everything.  I do miss my wife more and more everyday though. 

The ocean is funny in this way.  It deafens everything to the point where I can only think rationally like, I guess we were both the ocean for each other, she was just the day at the beach when everything was super good and I was the big hurricane that destroys the beach town.  I wouldn’t have changed anything though because I had her and she loved me for some inexplicable reason.  She was smiling and softness, I just wish she could be here with me now.  I’m starting to feel a little queasy from all the rocking back and forth in the current, the sun is also starting to burn my eyes so I make my way to shore, to my towel covered in sand, walking past a volleyball net that wasn’t there before.  A bunch of people are laughing and playing the game.  I don’t think I should have come here alone.

When I sit back down on my towel I try to think about my wedding but I can’t.  It isn’t because I was that fucked up either, I just simply can’t remember the thing itself: family, friends, location, food, etc.  I know she looked beautiful though, and I know I held her hand for a little too long on the altar because it felt like a wave through my body, not like a retarded wave that almost kills you, but a wave that eases you onto shore, a wave that gives you a taste of itself.

Guy On A Train

I remember when I was 45 and would ride the subway.  There were a lot of passengers at certain times and none at other times.  The times when there were passengers, at around rush hour, I liked to get a seat in the back that faced the entire car.  That way I could see everyone that would get on and I could make sure that there was no one on there that I was looking for.  The seats were this blue velvet-type material spackled with these little bits of color.  I liked the way they looked because they reminded of this store that I used to take my son to.  The rest was pretty metallic and looked like it was cleaned often.  The metal was mostly shiny except for smudges of grease from hands or little spots of what looked like food or maybe blood.

The subway was only underground for about 40 blocks and spanned the city from west to north, cutting through the downtown section.  People wouldn’t really get on at the aboveground stops and people wouldn’t really get off at the downtown stops.  This distinction is obvious, I mean, a lot of people don’t live downtown they just work there.  I didn’t though, I kind of worked all over the place and I liked that about my job.

I wasn’t a dick or anything; I was just a guy that was often commissioned to check on people who were ostensibly abusing their welfare checks.  I worked through this service that had a really sinister name: “Rick and Rays.”  They were some pretty bad guys because they really got off on hurting people that would just go out of their means with their stipend.  They liked me for some reason though, a reason that I couldn’t really understand, and the job paid the bills so I just pretended to get along with them and work until they realized that I wasn’t really the prosecuting type. 

I was supposed to do my job in a car.  So I would show up to the office in a sedan that looked like it would catch on fire if started too abruptly.  They always gave me shit for it and I’d just laugh it off because I’m not really the type of guy to take too much pride in possessions.  From the office, I’d drive my car to the train station at the furthest reaches of the northern section of the city, park it, and pay the $2.25 fare to ride the train back and forth all day.  Some of the people I was supposed to be looking for were known to ride the train.  So I’d keep an account of the neighborhoods they lived in and made sure that they got on or didn’t.  When I’d see them, I’d usually follow them off and just give them a talking to.  You know, like we were just two guys talking about something that really wasn’t all that severe but could be if they continued with their careless spending.  Mostly, people were understanding about my speeches because I’m known to have a very kind face.  Our interactions would usually end with a handshake and I’d be on my way, paying the $2.25 to continue west. 

I’d usually only see about two suspects while on the train.  I really just liked it because there was something soothing about it at all times.  I liked the blueness and how it looked different at various times of the day.  Like at 6-9, the blue would be dulled by the sadness of people going to work.  Then after 9 it would liven up again and I always liked to think that was because the train had time to breathe.  Then, when all of the people would be coming back from their jobs, the blue would look very vibrant, kind of like a cloudless day at the beach.  At night though, the dark and the blinding iridescent lights on the train intensified the blue.  Those weren’t my favorite times, but I still liked them.  Mainly because I could look at my own reflection in the mirror and think about how I wasn’t hurting anyone.

I lost my job eventually though because my numbers were just point-blank horrible.  Rick and Ray told me I hadn’t prosecuted anyone in about 6 months.  I didn’t offer a rebuttal because I knew that if I had to stay on and potentially ruin someone’s life, the process just wasn’t worth it.

Shortly after that my wife left me and took my son down to Florida.  I can understand why she did it, I mean I guess there is no sense of staying with a guy who isn’t willing to harm people, in the times we live in, it’s pretty impossible to make money without hurting some innocent person in the process. 

Now I live in a little apartment in Bucks County that is next to some open fields and right off the highway.  I like the contrast of the two because it reminds of my time in the city and the love I had for my family.  I’m working at a rest stop, filling peoples gas tanks.  I suppose the job could be more stimulating but that’s not what I really want.  

I always liked to think of myself as the type of person that held some sort of infinite care for others.  Like, I always had my perception and I always knew when I was hurting someone, so I guess it may just be better this way.

The Wind

I pulled up my blinds to get a better reflection from my neighbors bathroom light.

There were coffee cup silhouettes

And blue wire in piles over the floor of my carpet.

I only want whats best for you and.

I read a couple of poems out loud to myself because they sound like wind

And nothing is better than the wind

Especially when I’m afraid of being alone.

There was no sun during the week of memorial day,

And we all got scared that it may never come out again.

The air conditioning turned off in the house before the father could reach it

And we anxiously awaited the second coming from a guy named bob in the burning sedan who would arrive off exit 13 from highway 292.

You can make a weapon out of anything (I’m going to sleep)

But inevitably will wake up screaming,

Because I’ve killed myself again

And I don’t want to wake up dead.

There were a lot of men on the avenue

Who were making jokes about the infallibility of dog trainers and bad affects on the electric guitar.

The wind rustled through the trees.

I only feel scared anymore.

And I don’t mean scared by something.

I mean scared in the most general sense.

A complete and total fear of everything.

When we listen to each other we wait for our turn

So when we actually get through with our side

Its like it is only present in the air

And I like to think that that’s might what create wind

On the better side of the sun.

There is really nothing like the wind.

On Diameter

I see it all the time coming out of little bushels and packs and glove compartments.  Secret messages they carved in waxen liquid surfaces.  I used to hear it all the time by the river.  The sounds they made coming out of the river.  Bright little crystalline forms of evolutionary weather.  A very loud and sodden marketplace.  Totemic nightmares speaking through phone towers.  The weather is coming from down below.  It's spreading like diesel little dim buses where the mentally retarded commute to and from in bright and dark.  Or hepatitis in the sheetrock.  Music playing from the other side of the street.  Secret radio frequencies only heard by Jamie.  Nothing subliminal.  My mood.  Byzantine sewage systems respondent to tidal forces.  Disease spreading through irrigation and my mood.  Closets full of uncle's possessions.  Stairs with a lot of trash on them being navigated by one shoe in fluorescent light.  The room is always silent but vibrating to inanimate things.  Realistically it can go no further than that.  

There's Always Helping

Commercials weird me out.  And I'm not talking purely about the socio-economic trend catch puke element.  Though--for sure--that's totally upsetting too.  Often what scares me is the journeymen actors they utilize.  You see these nameless and yet totally recognizable people in several scenarios and environments.  There's that guy who fills the "I'm a somewhat emasculated middle-class father but I'm also African-American" role.  There's the scamp white guy with usually kind of spiky dirty blond hair.  The capricious brunette with the silky if somewhat nervous voice.  I'm not talking about niche tropes--I'm talking about type-casting.  These people always play the same role with zero glamor justifying it.  Sometimes I find myself excited to see the same actor in a different commercial.  There's this anonymous dependability in it.  They have no ethos--these actors.  There's no branding and they're really just tradesmen.  I don't know if they all hang out with each other--if certain career commercial actors have complicated above ground relationships they shoulder for professionalism regardless of the outcome.  I don't know what list of celebrity they're on--if they go to award shows.  I don't know if they have bigger aspirations.  I guess I just feel like it's honest.  Let's be real here--no one reading this really respects acting as an art form on the same level as say--poetry or cello playing.  Something so purely ego-driven and predicated on falsehood is ugly to those of us who fare the ocean of abstract profundity.  And so these people are just people.  Playing the person they really aren't but embody so well.  And I guess these roles that these people play seem really hard and really contemporary and true to form.  How does that one lady play someone who's so obviously befuddled by everything and yet finally satisfied by figuring out what she wants so well.  Every time.  Regardless of whether the product is at a party or an insurance office or an artificial endless white plane.  And I recognize her and yet go into the commercial thinking "man--she never has any idea what she wants! Uggghhh."  But I recognize her because every time I see her she figures out what she wants and its a really big deal to her.  Whether that be toothpaste or Becks.  Tabula Rasa is hard to cultivate in me but these actors do it.  Albeit for a dollar.  But they get results goddammit.  Which is not to say that I brush my teeth or drink beer.  You'd have to live with me to know those things.  But I guess I respect them for doing their thing.  At least partially.  

Face

Now: the tide is out and I'm able to walk out on the rocks right up to the piles where a pier once was. The piles stick out of the water like arms and they look sinister in the faraway light of the refineries. When I got here someone had just left. They had made a fire and left the coals still burning. I threw damp cardboard from an empty thirty rack onto the coals to see if it would catch. It made a lot of disgusting smoke and the scent of scorched thirty rack filled the tiny peninsula.

Anyway, the tide is out and I'm not here alone but I'm pretending I am because I'm in love with feeling sorry for myself.  Did you know that people listen to music on their cell phones now? No headphones or anything. The cell phones have their own speakers.

Later: my kitchen table is full of people and I don't know what anyone's talking about because I keep pacing back and forth between the table and my room, staying occupied. I'm avoiding looking directly at you because your face is crazy. You have the craziest looking face and I don't think I've ever seen anyone look at me the way you're looking at me right now. And you've looked at me a hundred different ways and each one makes me feel like my organs are sweating. Like my organs are sweating? Fuck.

People my age who write music write mostly about love. And I hate that because I do too. Not music. You understand.

And then: we're eating brunch. We're eating fucking brunch in a stupid brunch place and I'm trying to tell you that I only eat cold food now which isn't true and seemed funnier before I said it. There's something really self-aware about restaurants that specialize in brunch. I don't know how to say it. It's something like:

"We know you're the type of person that gets brunch on a weekday. Even if you keep trying to tell yourself you're not, we know you are because you're here and we can see you and we're going to refill your water glass pretty soon."

This content is only relevant to the type of person I despise but don't worry, I'm one of you.

You know we have a lot to talk about right? You know we're going to have to actually talk right?

The Food Network: last exit on the interstate before morbidly bored

Today I walked 20 blocks in the sweltering to pick up meds. The sweat was ridiculous. I kept averting my eyes from every passer-by because there were giant pools forming underneath my exhausted boobies and there was no way in Hell they weren't looking.

Kept walking and thought it was a mirage it was so gross but no a man was peeing in a trashcan. Don’t know why he didn't just pee in an alley or on a bush, as there was an over abundance of such conveniences. The stank was like a missile launched straight into my tear ducts and I was not sweating, but crying. I don’t agree with the “If it’s yellow let it mellow” philosophy simply because the sharp stench of urine gets my fucking goat more than the dull wafting of doo-doo brown.

A perfect segue into Memorial Day. 2-Live Crew filled the streets. I turned a corner and nearly collided with a group of 5 year olds doing the stanky leg whilst sipping from little hugs. I’m pretty sure the only thing I did to celebrate, personally, was cashing in on some free hotdogs with my dad outside the Bank of America in Narberth. Christina made BBQ wings that night and we hit the bong and watched “Chopped” for two hours, waiting for them to cook. We ate them and thought they were bad because we were brainwashed into  expecting a surplus of rosemary; or maybe it was just that we couldn't quite feel or know the subtle honey undertones, they were just simply there.

The night ended with Cha-Cha music and spinning in circles, crumbling to the rug and rolling myself into bed, too lazy to even look up the weather for tomorrow.

Call Me Near the Salted Meadow

There were half baked attempts at communication.  Here in the city of blank where you loved the totality of street nothing.  Crossing rooms to the not dance--a kitchen or borrowing four dollars for a little while.  We would carve memories out of the dust surrounding probably mistakes.  I felt heavy and underneath the false mat.  Even in memories I keep asking questions about where we are.  When I know exactly the place of the whole time: just me and walls and that friend I cry over trusting.  I promise to never do anything irrational unless it costs money.  You echo absorption but mostly have no idea that this speech is only because you made me alive.  Sometimes I say that living is a choice.  But brother--my living is your choice.  Ignore my synthetic bandage.  And keep doing that.  Keep telling me that poetry needs tiny words and prose needs big words.  Because prose is like conversation.  And we're all hiding in conversation.

Some friends don't make it because they can't evolve.  And you don't know if it's a flaw in the world or a flaw in the friend.  The calculus is too ugly to perform.  But maybe fading into the pan is the prettiest way to show what we mean.  And maybe we deserve beauty.  You and me and the storm after the porch.  I'm mawkish and alone.  Only an invisible enemy would hate me for that.  Make your presence known and I'll show you what these tear drops are about.  Only trust turns my blood red or maybe just makes it known.  But trust is what I can give you.  Trust and this.  The timelessness of actual speaking.  

When You Can't Sleep You're Staring at the Sun

It's 4:12 AM and I'm going about 90 miles per hour on a stretch of highway that has just gotten very wet very quickly.  I'm very scared and very lonely.  The fear is keeping me awake so I don't try and resist it.  I don't seem to be able to do anything about the loneliness so it's there too.  There's no light on the highway at all except for what's coming from my headlamps and that's getting refracted by the rain to the point where its more a visual queue of a place to look than a useful tool.  The light looks like a serrated haze because the rain is so prolific and swift.  I look down at my wristwatch more to vary my movements and keep me awake than to determine the time which I both know and find essentially irrelevant.  My wristwatch is two minutes slower than the digital clock on the center consul of my sedan.  More likely it's two and half minutes slow.  This thought upsets me.  There's something about having a mistake attached to my body that I can't ignore and I want nothing more than to stop the car correct the wristwatch to the world clock on my phone drive through the median and take my gray Nissan sedan PA tags Golf Tango Echo four-eight-niner-one to a job that I enjoy the challenge of and know I'm capable of doing well.  That's out of the question though.  The wristwatch is also bothering me because I think I must have set it to the world clock already.  That seems like something I'd do right after first getting the watch.  This thought is upsetting for two reasons.  One because it means that my memory is flawed and two because it means that the watch may be flawed as well.  That it's been under some kind of elongated degradation.  The minutiae of such a degradation bothering me to such a high degree is something I don't analyze at the moment for some reason that I don't analyze either.

It's 4:14 AM and I have to change lanes because there's roadwork ahead and the right lane is closed for it.  I'm going around a bend in the road and slow the sedan to about 80 miles per hour.  I see a binary set of lights in the mirror after the turn.  Now it's closer and I can see that it's a UPS double-loaded big rig.  That's 36 wheels.  It must be going faster than I am which seems unlikely.  We are converging on the point where there just isn't any more right lane and the big rig is still going faster than me.  The cabin passes me and I realize that I've still got close to 100 feet before the entire vehicle has passed me.  Maybe another 50 after that until it can get into my lane.  It looks like there's about 200 feet before the right lane is completely closed.  Residual spray from the big rig is pelting my window though pelting is probably the wrong word because its more like a mohair screen that won't go away even with the wipers on high.  I realize that if I apply the breaks I will swerve and perhaps die.  This isn't the way I wanted to die.  I don't really want to die though I have fantasized about getting hit in the head with a stray bullet many times.  Dying that way seems both potentially painless and guiltless.  And beyond that would represent the need for gun restrictions and how pervasive a problem gun violence is.  I look down at my wristwatch and see that it says 4:12 AM.  The big rig is getting closer and I wonder why the driver is being so aggressive.  Truckers always struck me as probably the loneliest people with a union and I don't know why but I figure that would make them nicer to the little guys on the road.  Evidently not and I'm actually frightened for my life.  I can't help but thinking that in 24 hours there are two nights and one day.  

It's 4:15 AM and I see the shape of a road crew worker shimmering from the illuminating tape on his coveralls.  There's a little glowing orb where his head should be and I can tell that it's his headlamp.  He's walking over to

The Sun

I woke up at nine this morning and paced around my apartment for a long time, embracing something. There was a sip left in the energy drink I put in the fridge last night. I took the sip and then slowly paid my electric bill and my internet bill.

I stood in front of the kitchen window. They put a fan in it a couple of days ago but the morning air was cold and the fan was off. It seemed ornamental, sitting there on the sill, meaning to conjure memories of other fans in use. I pretended for a moment that I was beginning to understand the confines/barriers/limits/whatever of my physical body.

I've been trying to do things very slowly and deliberately. Caution seems necessary. Balance is difficult to find. No sudden movements.

Ex: sitting down at a table. Still standing, I put everything in my hands on to the table first. Then I shudder into the chair, ideally using some sort of grounded handhold.

For the first time in a while, I can see that there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. Every decision is rooted in circumstance but what's important is having confidence in your ability to decide.

I'm spending periods of time, minutes or hours, thinking in platitudes, like an alcoholic.

And above all, I'm pretty embarrassed. Mostly by the fact that I can't stop projecting my emotions onto other people's potential opinions of them. My sincerity feels ostentatious.

"Staring at the sun."

You said that, right Harry?

I'm not sure I want to.

hooker ghosts of a.c. an excerpt

The Golden Key  is $20 a night. This rate applies to one person. The rate for two people is $40 a night and the rate for three is somewhere upwards of that. The driver checks in with the skirt and tells the tube top to sneak in afterwards. She waits in the pick-up for 15 minutes listening to the radio and “Laffy Taffy” by D4L is playing on every station. The Taffy  is $15 a night but last she heard they were nearly always filled by permanent residents: sad folks washed ashore when the asylums closed around the beach towns and left the only option of shacking up for good alone in a love motel.
The skirt unlocks the door to room #7 and she and the driver start sipping Coor’s Light and bumping coke. The tube top sneaks in after her 15 minutes are up and the room is dank with cigarette smoke and heat and mold. It smells really good and she gets hot. They all start beating on the 30-rack and the eight ball and blasting the radio where all the sexiness seeps from the song “I’m ‘n Luv (Wit a Stripper)” by T-Pain and the girls start grinding with the air. A Genie and a Mermaid, glowing sensual lava lamps of purple and orange and sea-foam green. He watches and drinks, he refrains from ripping their clothes off or touching them he just sits on the radiator and looks at them while they get wasted and dance. The tube top starts pulling her thong straps out from her JNCO jeans and lets them hang out high above her hip bones. The skirt lines up a line across her tit and tempts the driver but he refuses and stares into the circular motion of her coke-covered nipple like he is mesmerized by something so far from it, not even of this world or bodily function, he is disillusioned by her trashy prowess and focused on the cosmos of years beyond 2006, beyond her gyrating body projected against the TV that does not get HBO despite as advertised on the billboard in the parking lot. The radio changes mood suddenly and starts playing “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt.
“Jesus I hate this motherfucker!!!” The skirt screams.
“Yaa me too fuck this pussy,” The tube top sighs.
“Well you two ladies are beautiful shouldn’t ya know it anyway,” the driver whispers seductively from a zillion miles away and starts to caress the ladies into a sleeper-hold. The tube top crumbles to the carpeting, stops breathing, soils herself. The skirt begins to lose consciousness and has the slightest look of terror across her sparkling powdered face and manages to croak “honestly fuck you but seriously I’m just so goddamn PO’d I went to this fuckin’ pussy-ass song, this annoying song, this fuckin’ bitch-ass song that sucks and is always on the radio ” as she dies.

Allergy Season

cellophane candy and fish sauce keep me company.  the dogs can't stay away.

stop

breath the cream of life 

twice through a balloon.

sit there not drinking, ashamed of your weak body.

sniffling always

rubbing your life on the subway

works like the evil eye ⚈

TJ

We're all afraid in the dark.  Everything that glints seems wrong for it.  I mean cinderblocks and anonymous trash parts.  Boldness in disrepair from months of neglect.  Heaps of August in foreign parts of the body.  What an odd use these things have.

I've made another person the opposite of a nightmare for so long and now I'm afraid to sleep because of it.  By which I mean I can't because nightmares don't count as sleep.  Every time you cry it's only confusion that pulls the tears out.  When she cries on the phone to me I'm usually drunk enough to believe that it has nothing to do with me being the person she's crying to.  I talk about it a lot.  Mostly to myself and to Toby.  Thank God for Toby.

Luxury Housing Compound

She got home late from dance class and tossed the keys to the Saab on to the marble countertop of the kitchen island. She took a wine glass out of the wine glass cabinet and set it down next to the keys. She poured a small glass of Chablis and left it there, pulling off her sweater as she walked into the living room. She sat down on the couch and opened up her Macbook. On her Macbook, she opened up a fresh Google Drive document and typed:

“Jane got home late from a hip-hop dance class, something she was trying out, a suggestion from her therapist. She tossed the keys to the Volvo on to the large, oak, dining room table and winced at the sound.”

She stopped typing and thought:

“Jane?”

She closed the Macbook and picked up a Lorrie Moore collection from the coffee table and opened it to page 81. She stared at a sentence:

“If it’s meaningless, write meaningless across the top of every page.”

She continued to look at the book for a while, attributing this time to “reading” but really she just kept staring at page 81. She thought about her little brothers, Shawn and Kevin. They were in college now. When she thought about her brothers, she could only think the phrase:

“In college now.”

She closed the book and set it back on the coffee table. She got up and walked back into the kitchen. She picked up the glass of Chablis from the marble countertop and drank it in one graceful gulp. She set the glass back down. It made a sound but she didn’t wince. She walked over to the front door, just off the dining nook, and armed the alarm. The alarm beeped. She turned out the kitchen light and walked into the dark bedroom.

Ohhh good things

Chairs are stacked in cactus row

The good men are afoot

While the bad stick to the theatre

The white in the photo has stains in it

Bob drove through town last night

Touching the yellow with black

Send letters and mail the rest

The 8 on the desk

Looks best

In cocktail dress

Mothers of lubricant

In suntanned love

All shine like undercarriage

When the hole has opened so wide

That we are all in for it

There are so many beaches tonight

Flower vision of big things

Wit and Wisdom

Do you love Chris yet?

Let all of them in jail for the summer

We all need somewhere cold forever

Contessa, I'm Blue

The Sands of Milan

It's us in the peach light.  Later on our very good friend is going to bring over mussels to cook just right here and pale beers that we'll sip as the last tendrils of peach light stick their hands out before nestling into the ocean.  Like: goodnight bud--see you real soon.  The sand will get cold but we'll warm each other in the blanket from home.  Our very good friend will retell the story we love.  Behind us Milan will wave a different hand that we know and feel challenged by.  Inspiration trolls the air like the peach sands do.  We look into each others eyes and it feels like our hands all over the place.  This is despite nothing but ignoring it.  

Outside isn't visible from here.  The bright rooms where you go unnoticed.  Big and full and teeming with insides.  The dark parts of other places where you stand out for some reason.  You're not bright and yes--your body hurts from the things you use to turn your mind down.  And yes--it's  so retarded.  Stare at a mirror when you smoke.  Pay for tolls with your left hand.  Google the addresses of everyone you actually can't speak to anymore.

I order tortas in "kitchen Spanish."  No--I didn't pay to get in.  My social abacus is very nuanced.  If I had a place like this I'd really do some great things.  My parents literally give me literally no money ever--they don't even pay for my cellphone.  I'm publishing images of myself in the name trap where they make money on it.  It's the weekend and time for me to coordinate my underpants with my ensemble because--you know what mean?   

The sands of Milan don't exist.  Or if they do they're for Euros in the hardware stores.  Or kept unknown in closets as vacation particulates.  And we're not even there to know that.  You--my sweet contessa and who's the whole world.

As In: The Car Drove Through the Quotidian Traffic

There’s this guy carting three, hot, dripping slices of vegetable pizza around the cafeteria-style cafeteria. Parmesan cheese piled on there - I can smell the cheese from here- like fifteen feet away. Dull-eyed, immense.

Yeah, me too.

I leave this section of the place and walk into another section of the place and think:

I’m shaking my way into the body of an old man, shuddering through the aging process.

Not bad.

It’s pretty nice outside and some sad girl comes up to me and asks for a cigarette in a pleading way. I mumble through the transaction as if I’m somehow ashamed, as if she’s giving me something I was embarrassed to ask for.

I realize about five minutes later that, although I have been awake for six hours, the compulsory words between me and the sad girl are my first of the day.

I sit outside for a while longer. I become jealous of people who can hold long conversations on their cell phones in public, specifically their ability to unashamedly assert that there is no one currently present worth talking to.

In an attempt at mitigation I drink a Venti iced coffee with hazelnut syrup but it only compromises my aesthetic.

Ha ha ha.

Another thought on jealousy: envious of the head-turn but not the head-turner.

Re: girls.