wwjd

watching the sunrise in black hoodie

stare across the reservoir hidden in fog

at the sun coming over the ridge all pink

thinking what would Jamie do? 

what would Jamie say?

dream an impact to my shoulder

caused a giant swath of skin to shed like a snake there

dream I stopped her from cutting her toenails with a cleaver

gummy vitamin breeze from the biopharm plant next to the office

wind

10 mins

to be myself alone

think of tears in

a friend’s eyes

doc appts and

boot polish new

lines in my face

love and tarnish

same but different

novelty research

escalanche*

*where I go to

do my fuccing work

puzzle of desires

realism through

a distorted lense

glittering razor burn

to feel 15 but 

in a good

big world way

lost book found

a stacking of 

symbology

advertising and

signage

ny trash was

good back then

but now la trash

wins 

it's a learning

to be somewhere

very far from

enraptured

some sweetness but 

no bigger

mutual fantasy

no goal orientation

to know it took

caring a lot

to get here

as in more free

neutral

a cut out in my peripheral 

arm outstretched in gesture

existing, just not in my direction

kept my eyes straight ahead

why would I bother

existing towards him

I drive a different car now

into different neighborhoods

debt1

making a budget in my dream finally, 

unconsciously, as the hole gets deeper, most of me 

can’t fathom money’s realness especially when I spent 

the summer looking into his eyes 

he shades the lamps with rags

the wet heat irons my shirts

and I do love— this big question

lapping at the edge of the log as in the record of everything 

laying beside its vertical line

—even dream of you at your job, reaching for

remote and words like this moving 

tbc

...

loneliness is loyal

strawberry covered in diamonds

now i know i don't possess

yet everything is mine

paglia sexual personae notes

eroticism is a realm stocked by ghosts

cursed and enchanted

love is a crowded theater

our focus on the pretty

the birds the leaves the flowers

a patchwork pattern by which we map the known

earth cult to sky cult

a sequence of circular returns

beginning and ending at the same point

women's centrality gives her a stability of identity

she does not have to become 

but only to be

the western idea of history as a propulsive movement into the future

a progressive or providential design

climaxing in the revelation of a second coming

is a male formulation

no woman could have coined such an idea

since it is a strategy of evasion of women's own cyclic nature

in which man dreads being caught

woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape

from natural cycle

since she is that cycle

bound to nature's calendar

an appointment she can't refuse

she has never been deluded by the mirage of free will

every time we say nature is pretty 

we are saying a prayer

perfect objectivity does not exist

every thought bares some emotional burden

had we time or energy to pursue it

each random choice

from the color of a toothbrush to a decision over a menu

could be made to yield its secret meaning in the inner drama of our lives 

but in exhaustion we shut out this psychic supersaturation

emotion is chaos

love for all means coldness to something or someone

imagination has a price

which we are paying every day

women do not need to conceptualize

in order to exist

unreachable omnipotence of woman 

everything is melting in nature

we think we see objects 

but our eyes are slow

and partial

nature is blooming and withering

in long puffy respirations

rising and falling in oceanic wave motion

spiritualization of cruelty

pain made pleasure

the pagan cinema of western perception

let us not steal from the eye 

to give to the ear

nature is forever playing solitaire with herself

there are ideas in images

a woman putting on men's clothing

merely steals social power

but a man putting on women's clothes

is searching for god

springtime goddess 

showered in flowers of mathematical calculation

pieta is a tableau of female immortality

and perishable manhood

we speak of falling apart

getting on top of things

getting it all together

only in the west is there such conviction of the unity of personality

the Italian imagination is darkly archaic

it hears the voices of the dead

mona lisa

sfumato is her game

the more he plays it 

the less leonardo can paint

a poet is not always master of his own poem

voyeurism is the amoral aesthetic of the aggressive western eye

transporting us unseen across space and time

masks = magic

western identity is impersonation

alchemy's spiritual aim is the achievement of inner silver or inner gold

dazzling electric wit

costume transforms thought

a liquid prisoner

pent in walls of glass

an alchemical image from sonnet 5

where summer flowers are distilled into an alembic of perfume

like love and beauty transformed into art

in nearness we enter each other's animal aura

there is magic there

both black and white

coffee water cookies plum

I can’t stop listening 

to her clanking and bludgeoning

man woman androgyne 

I rarely think about the Greeks

but maybe they think about me

I agree that we’re still mostly pagan 

that the pagan undercurrent pulls

that men's obsessiveness is escapism

and women know how to just be

redacted

I'll be songs in your car

the dust on your windshield

nothing too heavy or whole

for you to actually carry

I keep dreaming a baby

I’m raising alone

in a big dark city

fear and love percolating 

I'll be the heart archivist 

over here 

that day you made me sign

an invisible contract

invoke very briefly

your brown eyes and dirty arms

then relinquish my omnipotence

and I begin again

and again

wherever my beginning is

power play with days

my cake digests backwards or 

in shards anxiety shreds

dream also turned fleas a little bit and flu 

the semester, dark, feeding the cat early 

morning earthquake: school dad subway car

today I went to your frost covered field

in the middle of Example Summer 

where days just crumble and it

made me stronger to see stillness

you can’t design another person’s 

death or die it either

dream also had hershey kisses

and now it's raining

woke up to stressful logistics but it's raining

looked at the river really quick

sent you files and bought beer

the day crushes me

unending desire for extension 

and that’s what summer even is

dreams punctuate with subterranean 

temps that flutter into morning

everything manages to get worse and still

I hope to study, consider the 1000 variables

the various planes of consciousness 

misalignment trap

my ex-believer

my failure

the dirt 

swirling the sweetness

as is

dirt piles multiplying around town

like the party so much better in my mind

I don't want random new attention

vision of a clearing in the day 

like a frost covered field  

in an otherwise summer city

some days there is openness

some days I can't avoid feeling 

not worth it to you

clear crystal heart 

(cold, heavy)

pick-n-pull

tired of the esp 

we've had to develop 

to protect ourselves

when they could just 

learn to read their own minds

our appointment with life

is in the present moment
the place of our appointment 

is right here

ambivalence 10

 

i’m really here for the grass between houses

the views of grass between

houses, paint chipped and wrapped in porch

you ask me about my earliest memory it's one of those questions

for which i need an agent, like the word bedroom 

to drive my recall otherwise frozen 

fanny howe* in july, reading indivisible on and around the 4th

he said I should dj halloween music at the party next weekend

october’s perennial lust plays/disparate yet simultaneous tones 

click, or I let them/drive my recall

drive under waning, tepid sun to my friend’s birthday in the woods

my friend who writes, the force of a weather event or miracle…

to seek a miracle in a weather event, to make a brief church in the parking lot

the storm begins, we eat cake and she reads to us from a book that someone loves

i’ve read it too but today i’m the grass between houses

a weather event, a physical attempt to stir the objects of her life—

objects as agents of recall

the markers, the Chagall,

each stair, but collage with

how they felt on my feet

i remember the parking lot where you could pick up a radio frequency that played one boyz II men song over and over

Now the rain is letting up and a soft blue light is sifting through the flannely clouds. Gullies of water gurgle down the canyons and birds sing. I feel dread. The opening up of light and sky, the return of the responsibility that the empty air brings, horrifies me. Since God has abandoned the world, it is time who is left watching over us. Time is the spirit who breathes into the world. When it was raining, water was like an apology.*

antifreeze

I climb the tree at the show

after the man with pruning shears in his back pocket

I ask him what he's assessing, what's its name, how old is it

tissue density he says the most important things can't be seen with the eyes

he taps the trunk in different places

b's mom calls them in the middle of their set inside

isn't a carob the little prince tree I ask

baobab he says 

this is the oldest carob I've seen in santa cruz

probably 100 years

that was my guess

he leaves me sitting out on a branch alone 

in the next set ghost harmonics sound like a boy child chorus

we talk about joan of arc, silvia federici

temecula, antifreeze, jung 

I go home and dream I am reluctantly involved with j

not at all in love but allowing it

wake up to his texts sent one minute before my alarm

go to work and watch them continue to turn and spray my empty fields

get home and roll the trash to the street with h

my therapist and I both have glasses with tinkling ice out of frame

my glamorous penny

dreamt of kittens the size of pennies

woke up unfamiliar with my body temp, bleeding

take the survey off like a plastic sleeve

open line one like a floorboard

ryan had a kitten dream too

one that fit in his palm which

he recounted with a stretched out hand

feel light about changing

2 horses in my rearview

in the safeway parking lot

go in the ocean!! j texts

dreamt my toddler running ahead of me 

on a dark sidewalk under scaffolding

through green puddles of antifreeze

they're bulldozing my empty fields today

turning the dirt and spraying it down

bulldozing my favorite bar 

the last hour of the last day of cherries

 

what happens to your body when the snake is actually a stick?

I feel my life shrinking into a few obsessions,

sleepless on two couches pushed together while 

the real snake marks my parameters and

all day I dabble in crossing—

cherry picking with j and s j tells me about apple picking as a kid 

with a friend’s parents, he kept asking them 

when is this part of my life gonna be over

this reminds me of how he used to make a book with his hands and 

cover his face when he didn’t wan’t to talk or felt guilty

s fills her bucket quickly and lays down in the shade

maybe its better to think thematically, let memories 

unfurl outward like rays of sun

al oeste

I'm watching 

the witch on stage

do her mysterious

chanting but

the absence 

of your touch

keeps zapping me

in and out 

of body as

our friends kiss

behind me

pouring alcohol 

on sadness is like 

gasoline on a fire

we know

out of touch with

my dreams, too

lately

they vanish more

with each alarm

but you were there

with a prettier girl

so I'm askew all day 

in the black hoodie

I need sleep

and a nod from you

some place to put 

this down

baby bunny

heart pounding the by the river tracking 

sadness losing its thread I just

don’t want to be sad anymore

themes and theses caught on the bars of this situation

like a vine of dead stock flags

a snake swims towards me and I can’t really 

see anything the way the day ended for 4 hours 

in shades of gold

ember

I'd like to see 

just a few small signs

to corroborate my path

I'd like to find 

some ember to blow on

in the ashes 

something other than noticing

that my bracelets are suddenly

slipping around on my wrists 

to replace the possibility

of your truck on my street

when I get home

all of the external forms are lovely

but the real work you have to do

is in the privacy of your own heart

yet I need to inventory forms

the fireworks perfectly framed

in the bathroom window

the fireworks over the field

in the fading light, a dirt lot

frayed flags strung between posts

certified dark sky community

waking up at dawn to pink streaks in the sky 

a window full of sky from the couch for my suffering 

head noise and lights on

the role of the pink streak

on his last day at the studio, rich made a grandfather clock from cardboard 

we had hoagies and took group photos 

later at the farm stand there were berries that looked like clear cinderella carriages 

then we swam upstream with geese whose strength impressed and disturbed me

their synchronized movements, breaking each other’s wakes

the fallen bridge under fallen trees

trust and varied circumstances are not mutually exclusive 

driving back to locktown on the gravel road with a beer I can live

I thought, how every mood is hooked deep in choice

she said they’re called the fence sitters

I will film L shoot her street light with a bb gun

we saw 4 fawns, 3 hamster sized bunnies, fireflies

sheets of rain came in onto the dinner table

he said, maybe the difference is that you like the wind

and I said yes type to me—

bluets notes

blue tarps as the fingerprints of god

the hot pain of loneliness

talk about color 

as if it were a cure

through the window

I watch a blue tarp on the roof across the way

flap in the wind

in the case of color

unlike in other cases

false consciousness 

should be a cause for celebration

the whole shimmering mess

it is the business of the eye

to make colored forms 

out of what is essentially shimmering

a visual fire burns between our eyes

and what they behold

I will not choose between the blue things of the world

and the words that say them

I have been trying for some time now

to find dignity in my loneliness

I have been finding this 

hard to do

nothing but blue flowers = a pack of lies

when a woman drinks

it's as if an animal were drinking

or a child     - duras

agnosia

what one achieves 

in divine darkness

unknowing, not ignorance

but an undoing

as if one knew once

then forgot

blue has no mind

it is not wise

nor does it promise any wisdom

it is beautiful

I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it

likewise it leads neither towards justice nor away from it 

it is pharmakon

it radiates

the forest was translucent 

pharmakon means drug

whether poison or cure

an illness, its cause, its cure, 

a recipe, a charm

a substance, a spell, 

artificial color, and paint

writing is in fact 

an astonishing equalizer

I could have written half of these propositions

drunk or high for instance

and half sober

I could have written half in agonized tears

and half in a state of clinical detachment

now that they have been made to appear

at long last

running forward as one river

how could either of us 

tell the difference

is it a related form of aggrandizement

to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory?

losing what one loves is simpler

more common than that

more precise

one could leave it too 

as it is

I can hardly remember what you look like

I can hardly see your face

what's past is past

one could leave it

as it is too

the afterimage

writing does something to memory

the image replaces the memory

it attempts to preserve

for to wish to forget how much you loved someone

and then, to actually forget

can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird 

who chose, by nothing short of grace

to make a habitat of your heart

I have heard that this pain can be converted

by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things" 

this acceptance bewilders me

sometimes it seems an act of will

at others, of surrender

often I feel myself to be rocking between them 

(seasickness)

you cannot step into the same river twice

it seems that something 

is staying the same here

but what?

a fresh self

stepping into ever fresh waters

a rainbow boa named Buttercup

a rope of incandescence 

alcohol doesn't console

all it replaces is the lack of god

ask not what has been real

and what has been false

but what has been bitter 

and what has been sweet

looking for blue

for any blue thing

I found only tarps

always tarps

this time I learned my lesson

this time

I stopped hoping

the difficulty is that our moods 

do not believe in each other

love is not consolation

it is light        

when I was alive 

I aimed to be a student 

not of longing

but of light     - weil

atrium

rub my eyes

till I see the pixels 

thinking to the tune

of the humming industrial plant

across the field in front of me

what was the point

of sharing those stories with me

if I were to become just another love

you turned loose

at first to show I was the exception to the rule

then just as a warning

defeat and resignation

the sun burns my knees through my pants

thinking to the tune of lizards

rustling in the grass behind me

purple irises bloom in the manmade river

inside the central atrium of the office building

like cloistered nuns in their habits

taste of soap

he's soft and sweet on the phone

like he used to be

and it's better but 

I sob 

just for knowing 

I've never come quite that close

just for hoping

I will again

even if he doesn't ask the right questions

or remember that I love that song

I can't make any rules

in The Bell there's a sermon

about how it's a more worthy undertaking

to preserve one's innocence 

than to seek experience

then that very night a would-be priest

kisses a young man on the mouth

and everything tilts

inhaling clear pebble

between days

dream where the arroyo parkway becomes pasadena

mima was there on the back of my bike

dream livia had set up a circle

we were moving fast

dream of un-precious publishing disembodied 

rectangle block and white photo of a cloud

dream of wearing something in question 

a red sweater but political structure

on my shoulders plus a tattoo of

an upside down iguana chosen

from a group of live reptiles 

night (all ages)

one of those memorable nights for micro reasons

for how solitude holds season and ambience

the reggaeton on the soccer field 

the spotlights on wind’s gestures

life drags you, and people back to your heart 

sometimes we are together on flat planes

or pass through each other like archways

sometimes we contain others in love like the snake wrapped egg

on the park bench I feel beautiful in the way only a summer night,

alone, beauty slides around missing

ty said the world used to speak to him in images and now

on the bench a movie plays through my eyes but i’m in it too

this movie is just life, all possibilities of living weaving my two eyes

the music and wind are the same and i sit in their mesh

the party and wind and music become one painting and i'm in it

the night's edge has narrowed bringing me in

my bench is facing the vanishing point the frame is loose

the world will speak to me until