Monday, September 30, 2024

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

Monday, September 9, 2024

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

Friday, September 6, 2024

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

Friday, August 30, 2024

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

Thursday, August 1, 2024

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



Tuesday, July 30, 2024

...

loneliness is loyal
strawberry covered in diamonds




now i know i don't possess
yet everything is mine

Friday, July 26, 2024

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

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

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

Friday, July 19, 2024

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 


Thursday, July 18, 2024

misalignment trap

my ex-believer
my failure
the dirt 
swirling the sweetness

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

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

Saturday, July 6, 2024

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.*



Wednesday, July 3, 2024

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


Tuesday, July 2, 2024

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 

Sunday, June 30, 2024

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


Friday, June 28, 2024

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

Thursday, June 27, 2024

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


Wednesday, June 26, 2024

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

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

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