#squirrel There are two more schools I have yet to hear from, and I kinda hope one of them says yes and I kinda hope they don't. I get a giddy sense of freedom sometimes when I think of not going to school. 000002 #human Naive was I then. Not like now. A year and a half and a million frosty, starry cornfields in some direction arbitrarily called later. 081413 #worm After a brief eternity, they giggle at the happy vulnerabilities, like butterflies, they've released, and set about continuing their exploration. Exploration! That mythical beast of perpetual youth! Ltiky hadn't thought he would ever feel this young again. He is drunk with it. The gulp remaining in his cup has proven to be bigger than he could have imagined. 000096 #squirrel i just wonder sometimes why it takes so long, so many tries because my dear its a lifes work life that is i think the trick,. as james taylor pointed out, is to enjoy it while your struggling with it. or not even struggle with it but just enjoy it. yeah why that seems like a trick so often i dont know well [silence] [actually muisic] 070913 #human #fox No call. Court record events says "adjourned for default divorce" and "parties have reached an agreement but need to reduce to paper and have AS sign". Left a message w/dickhead requesting clarification. A fox just trotted by about 10 ft to my left, paused on flat boulder, moved on. Going to see how close to custer sign I can reasonably get. 091313 #elephant Insistant kisses broke the walls that hours and hours of earnest talk could never have begun to crack. Her tongue poked my mouth and we laughed. She tasted dark and weedy. I could feel her breathing. She was so lithe; I could practically wrap her midriff up inside my two hands. Her back was springlike. Her pouty pussy pushed against me. Oh god. We fucked. 081813 #treefrog Plus: at the end of (4), after the Denzel, Kendrick, Sasha, Shemonya cluster freaking fell out laughing about the idea of bicycle helmets (after Sasha had conversationally asked me what I was doing this weekend), Kendrick said on his way out the door, "You know we just playing, right?" That was nice. He didn't have to do that. It made my day better. 081413 #worm And you do remember. You remember the smoke from the fire you built too close to the lake. You remember pissing on dragon island; getting scolded by the mother of the brood. You remember carrying the sticks--some of them small trees--on your bare backs, horseflies kibitzing loudly. Fags. You laughed. A fag is a bundle of sticks, you reminded each other. 000002 #human #ruins One of these days we'll be sitting by a campfire, my little clan, and some others, some new friends perhaps, or old ones, and there will be a little intermission, an oasis, a gap, a space between the spaces, where we will be able to say, yes, pass me that joint, and the fire will chuckle and crackle and hiss and make music, peasant music and the trees 032594 #eel I met up with Peter! He didnt seem to really know that anything untoward was going on, until I said, I have mixed feelings about this place, and the lights dimmed for a second, but only I could see it!!!! I said to Peter, Did you see that? Did you see that? and whether he saw or not, he could tell by my urgency that something was truly up. Then he kissed me. 080913 #mudshow I'm not even sure whether I'm crying because something is wrong, because I feel wronged, because something is unfair, or just because it hurts really bad. I think it's that last one. I'm beyond frustrated. Would it have worked without this torture? Could she have gotten my attention any other way? Would she even have wanted to? Where the fuck is this leading? 081413 #worm We've roamed the ruins for years. We're reopening the tunnels. And where we can't reopen them, we're building new ones--or else just brazenly going about above the ground. At first, I didn't fit in. I tried too hard. You need to surrender a whole bunch of stuff. That's what My Fortune said. That's a pretty name, I said. What's it mean? My Fortune, she said. 081613 #worm I'm not as oblivious as I feel obliged to act. "Talentless hack" is another way of saying, "I'm hungry." Your microsocial rebellion was a matter of convenience when you were very young; now you don't even know how to make a footnote in history. But, you still have something they can never take away (because they don't want it). . . are you in jail yet? 010614 #bushmill Pete grabs Mel's purse and tosses it onto the vinyl padded chair by the little table. Some of her change and loose purse junk flies out and rattles against the heater/AC box under the window. There's also the unmistakeable flash of a thick wad of cash. I've never seen Mel carry money like that. It looks criminal. Mel laughs again, even louder. 081613 #worm The owner sobs softly on the floor, his pool of tears growing muddy in the dust, even as he replenishes it. Finally, he can cry no more, and he goes home—to see his wife? What is he going to tell her? Honey, I'm in jail. Sorry. Thought you might like to know. And how will she respond? Oh, that's okay. What would you like for dinner, you puscillanimous nit? 010614 #bushmill It was some kind of contest, clearly, but we would say, talking about it later, that we couldn't tell if it was a fight, or sexual, or both. It seemed to move slower than we thought a fight would move. We would say. Maybe some kind of ritual? But that didn't seem to make sense, not way out here under the sodium blindness of the Texaco parking lot. 000002 #human That gaunt asshole with black hair and mopey face upstairs in the union: he sat smoking in the obviously non-smoking section. Told myself in a microjerk to hate him, think he was an asshole. Two things remain: the smell of smoke was good, and I haven't stopped thinking about him since. Even as dozens of bots and droids troll past my little pathetic table. 080913 #greyknight #squirrel He's got little sharp teeth, a lot of gum. Scraggly facial hair. His hard black eyes reflect the lights in the bar—multiple points like the plaintive specks in the eyes of a coloring-book puppy. He goes to get another pitcher, is gone a while, comes back, pours for us, goes off somewhere else after a while, and then that chapter is over. 012014 #bushmill A drink with her was always pleasant, until it stopped raining, or started to rain, or the sun blistered the sidewalks and our eyes were gritty and we had nowhere to go, or she had to be someplace and fairy-land time was suddenly over--mundania reared its average-looking head and suddenly gum wrappers in purses and exits and on-ramps were no longer alive. 000096 #human #gull You see, I can be walking around the block with dexter, or up the balcony steps, into the house, turning on the computer, through the motions in the bathroom, even in here sitting down and moving my hands toward the keys, but no matter how much I plan to write certain words, it means nothing, and has not happened until i actually punch the keys. 102713 #human The soccer game -- yelling -- beyond "into it" -- we need this -- the scraps of men, mean threadbare -- that's why this is important -- we're fighting over the little bits of life that are left us -- to break these rules or threaten these boundaries incurs our deepest passions -- the kids bear this burden for us because they are young -- "that's their fault" 051111 #martian 1. Aaron Deshields coached me. Let me repeat that. AARON DESHIELDS coached ME. "Don't do it, Mr. Schulte, don't do it," he said. "They aren't worth it." And he was right. And I said so in front of him, and I hope he appreciates that. 2. I'm in my aluminum-foil-and-popsicle-stick house, ho ha ha ha haaa...! 3. I don't smell very good right now. 102913 #snail Amoeboid generates signal sequence "You're halfway there", causing dominoid effect to reverberate throughout both ectoplasm and endoplasm, causing an energetic pattern to microcast effluviently; which pattern (apparently) semi-cooperative illusion cannot assimilate; therefore pattern shall be called any or all of the following: excitement, alarm, real, love. 081613 #worm What would you do if I told you I love you. I scream. I smash the teacup in my hand. Hot tea fucks up my forearm. The barrista almost but not quite looks away demurely. I am so shockingly in love with her for that instant I want to die. Everything smells like hot sea monkeys. This is the closest to a tree or a universe I will ever be. I killed someone. 111812 #human A slightly whimpery Celi on the stairs having woken up. I almost goosebumped myself rushing up the landings to her silhouette; sometimes I catch a glimpse of what it's like to be a kid, just like I once saw the onrushing traffic from Dexter's point of view. Got the sweaty little creature back in bed. Two cats down here being denizens of the night, watching. 081413 #worm #roach Where is the willow-haired girl? The oxen, the oxen are moving through my living room. The broken-down, cut-glass city is wretched in the distance. Where is Bnabe? All are invited. Many will come. We are building a new cafe in the snow. But this is only the beginning. Somehow it needs to work out that there are many cafes, as many as needed, all over. 000096 #squirrel becuz physically and this may make yo ua bit uncomfrtable i dont mean for it to but i watch your body language a lot and its not at all like that of a woman your carage is vcery difrent what i said to earlier about last night about the mtendopns in you rneck and how neat i thought that was and how exquisite in a way thats very unfemale 032812 #martian - Katy Perry (not the famous one) told me, "If you don't be happy today, you won't never be happy. So say it's a good day." - there's either some truth i'm refusing to see, or else it's not that simple. - I am solving the wrong problem. Yes, there is a risk and some hard work involved, but it's not where I think ('ve always thought) it is. It's on a vector. 081413 #worm You're a fawn; come to believe it. You've wandered downhill, away from the noise of the basketball court, away from the deafening rush of the long-defunct terminal, turned into a park. What hordes of busy people passed through there, in eras past, and now, what tumbleweeds of fast-food trash decay in corners where work shoes and boots no longer tread. You've wandered away from city lights--clown-orange bulbs that frame the ice-cream wagon's white window. Wandered past the railroad tracks, stepped over the rusty rails. The weeds between the ties teased up against your white-flecked belly. You've found your secret hollow in the hemmed-in woods; now sit. Rest. And breathe a while. 112313 #anything #demons What is the part that is making you stop? and get rid of it or let it go for now. Don tell me "shit accumulates" as if you didn't have any control over putting all those boxes and shit in the garage. You did that. Own it. Then throw it away or give it away or keep it or let the kids use it to make cages for owls or what ever. It doesn't matter, as long as you're not spending money on more garbage. What is it about making words appear that makes me feel better? It's a little weird. I don't understand the mechanism, and when I don't understand a mecahnism, I get a little afraid I might not be able to fix it if it breaks. But that's just the demon of isolation talking. 010314 #jonquil She really felt like skipping out of school, but Mary said hi, and she said hi, and they just started walking, out the door, down the wide cement steps, down the sidewalk as if the whole thing was perfectly mundane and they did it every day. Gwen kept alternating between giddy disbelief and a strange kind of serenity. They talked about just whatever, bands, stupid annoying people, what kind of tree that was, nothing. It was just uncomfortable enough to be heightened, electrified. A ginkgo tree was flaming yellow, hadn't been yesterday at this time. There was really no reason for Mary to have turned south at ———'s, but she did, and neither of them commented on it. 000097 #human this must be a hippy-artist-type renegade tortured youth abused genius restless soul brave heart just waiting to get out, good-natured wordly wise zen-like invulnerable rapscallion who must smoke cigars as he drives down the highway, just to show you how relaxed and enjoying the world he is. And who thinks it's a virtue to be lazy, because he read something by this ancient poet that kinda sounded like that's what it meant. 081613 #worm Smoke all morning. Cough, cough, sit on the couch, listen to the conch go conk when I throw it against the stale, urine-coloured cinder wall. Jail. Ha! Okay then. Welcome back to my jale cell. I'm gitting ready to teach a class. Or a clernch, as the young men have it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it at all. But, my parole orificer says I have to if I want to have any hope of ever getting out of here at all. 091101 #eel the elephants turn into horses, come closer, faster. oh my god, the girl screams, eyes brilliant! she urges the old convertible faster up the rocky sloping road. the horses overtake us. one sticks his grand face right next to mine. i can smell him smelling me. hello, i venture. the horses are seafoam white, bearded, maned and decorated with elegant curls and wisps. they easily outpace the car. we stop, they stand around us. 081413 #worm Hanad is still out here. Esriel just hired Hanad a few days ago. Hanad is the most androgynous person Him and Me have ever seen. They sometimes talk about him when he's not around, but not spitefully. They simply find him curious. Why does he look down so much, with that little smile? Tonight, they join him at the table where he's sitting. The trio joins in the ancient, sub-conversational ritual of smoking together. 081413 #worm Him crashes headlong into Me in the hall. As they are picking themselves up, Him says he was just coming to check on Me. Him has Me's leather fanny pack and some neatly folded clothes, which he proffers. Me puts them on over his wetness. The jeans are a little too tight, but somehow the constriction feels good. The long-sleeved tee is comfortably faded. Me notices Him is similarly dressed, though the borrowed clothes fit Him better. 081413 #worm Black water ripples over the small, fine ribs of a lonesome beach. Driftwood isn't drifting anymore--it sits, fine-tuned under the frequency of the lunar spookscape. Someone you knew walked here once, with--someone else? Could it have been you? Do you smell familiarity? Which tiny ripple just out of reach are you? Which bit of moss is the hologrammatic embodiment of your life? Is that pebble--no, that one, over there--is that one your old apartment? Did the two of you swim naked here? Were you drunk on applejack and the horny Fall? Did you plunge into the icy November lake, and did you later catch a cold, but was it worth it? Would you do it all over again, if you could? 091313 #worm You won't find her on the Internet; she comes from someplace older, though you could "put" some part of her "up" there, if you wanted; she wouldn't mind; she'd probably get a chuckle. 040007 #human The bane of the grown-up writer: Always trying to turn every impulse into some recognizable, precedented form. Eventually this habit leads to supression of all ideas, as the recognizable forms reveal themselves as not worth replicating. 000002 #gull a pigeon is a memory a gull is a script a boy is a girl & a girl is a boy a river says jump in, continue! a crow is a thrown knife and a stone... what can i say, a stone is a stone 000096 #squirrel or what makes what do you mean you said i think that is that feeling i know about the monkeys but i mean, the fact that it si there on the table in the house in which we are playing and yet we dont know what to do with it isnt that like kids maybe i like to look at it that way because kids can gerow and that makes the whole thing al ittle less depressing what does that mean it means, if i thought it was just going to sit there and rot necessarily because we would guaraneetd never know what to do with it, is a little too sad for me to palate well thank you at least for not just snetnecing to death that has a bit of a redeeming wquality to it exactly 051111 #martian 1. Paige sitting in his almost-ready classroom in the last days of summer, baby boy nestled on his lap, leaning back in his salvaged chair, watching Spongebob, chilling. 2. I saw my buddy Deontrae. Didn't recognize him at first. Yeah, he looks like a senior now. 3. Jenkins & I played with the new phones, making different rooms ring, running down the hall to see which one. It was like being a kid exploring a hotel. 010614 #hollowtree They say the young think they're invincible, but really it never ends. We go around talking as if our identities were written in stone. We talk about houses as if they will never be razed. We talk about ourselves as if we could ever be sure what that means. Even the assumption that "we" will "be here" tomorrow is outrageously audacious. There's so much assumption in every everyday utterance, it's actually pretty mind-boggling. 081613 #worm So it comes time for my class, right, and after all is said and done I did manage to prepare some; I actually kind of got excited about it. I had all my tubes with rolled-up posters, my kite, my butterfly nuts, and something, and I waltzed into the jail school room all ready to fly off the wall and be average to above average, and maybe inspire some greatness and then meekly refuse to take credit for it—sly—but then guess what? 091313 #roach A kid sees us. She stands by the buffet, by steaming heaps of scrambled eggs, greasy links, and rubbery pancakes, and looks at us with guileless curiosity. Not smiling, not gawking, but wondering, perceiving, simply watching. Finish up, friends, you tell us. It's almost time to go. We'd rather stay here. Somehow it was all right, before. I was pretty much okay, pretty much ready to go, until I saw that little girl's eyes. 111812 #human #crow I never wrote a "normal" story, and I probably at this point never will. What's the point? Even if I'm getting paid to? Let's just be cantankerous tonight (not drunk, ain't that something? and it's very noticeable to me how significant that is; I am surprised) and say even if I'm getting paid for it. I'm going to be a balls-out son of a bitch and say I'll get paid (in something) for doing it fucking my fucking way. 174421 000097 #worm And then the problem with the oil started. Well, first it was a problem with the weather. It started snowing, snowing hard, just as we were climbing back into the mountains. We got somehow lost and way off our original route, so we had to feel around for a pass over the divide, which took us through some tiny little top-of-the-world town where the streets were sideways with height and gas was like eight dollars a gallon. 082913 #treefrog 070706 It's always a dance. As gas goes up to 3.25 a gal, and the oil companies shovel in record profits, and Bush slaughters Iraq & Afghanistan but gives a pass to nuclear Korea, and faceless entities go to work on shutting down the true freedom of the Internet, and the Puritans and Victorians are being reborn in even uglier, more strained guise, I'm reminded that it's always a dance. Because at the same time as all that is going on, technophile hobbyists are tweaking genes in the basement, downloaders are getting amp sounds and bits and pieces and making their OWN music, and my amazing friends who (so far) aren't afraid to think and talk are going to become teachers 022613 #human I still don't feel old enough to know what the hell I'm doing. What band of idiots let me out here to do this on my own? Jesus Christ, I'm barely competent to drive, just look at the front end of my van. Who the hell thought I had the presence of mind to pull off being an adult for a prolonged time? This is just insane. I hope we don't die or get shoved rudely out on the street any time soon. I hope our teeth don't fall out. 081313 #copperhead The canoe is filled with shadow now, except one dollop of sunlight, ridiculously bright, near my left knee. As trees in fall insist on brilliance before death, so the glints of sunlight on the wavelets in the water shine with extra neon zing. Each electric line of light illuminates its corresponding tiny swell of pure transparency. It's like a firefly dance gone mad; phosphorescence stretched into impossible dimensions. 210647 012214 #hollowtree This animal *can* do a form of meditation. A worm of time. Motel. Birch tree. Mulch. Rounded pathways. Black asphalt perfect for roller skates. A man-made lake. A god-made moon. The round, open echo of the air, the stars, the water, and oblivious youth. Motel. Yellow blocks. An airplane lands somewhere. A boat bobs, ready for tomorrow. The waves are curved, supple, murky. They hide the memory of a forest. 211728 091313 #worm My tongue remembers her stories, though the words elude mechanical recall, and it didn't seem strange that I was her only audience, nor that she told stories that blessed my tears, nor that she hugged me and picked out books for me, nor that each book she picked was penned by her, nor that her name was a little different on each one; sometimes it had a "z" in it, sometimes not.... 051111 #martian 1. Oh my god, Miguel's mom is so fucking hot. 2. Randle the gentle giant--his legs have twisted around because he's grown too fast. He fractured his shoulder, couldn't play football any more, and his previous high school didn't really want him any more, at least that's what his mom said. She has that religious patina of sheeplikeness atop her master's in business and her used-to-be-an-educator, so my faith in her is not total; nevertheless, I feel like I know Randle a tiny bit better now, and that may make a tiny difference. 3. Why does Beamon hate Hanyard so much? If he's such a weaselly flake, why did he come to me to try to help me when I was really down? 000004 #human I'd give him a nip of this brandy if he weren't so young. Ah fuck, here ya go kid. Careful now. There you go. Now. We got to get a fire going. In the morning we'll start-- What? Yes. there's no point in lying to you. We are lost. But don't worry about it. We'll find our way back. To somewhere. Don't worry. Just put that kindling down there. Good boy. Okay. Let's get some rest. Big day tomorrow. Good boy. That's right. Okay. 071113 #eel I said a bunch of stuff off the top of my head about how you are beautiful and you have a right to be visible, a right to exist, and it doesn't matter what you look like, if you feel beautiful then you can hold yourself tall and go around and it will show through. Some boys were snickering but I went over to them and said its okay because someday, some little piece of this will sink in, and someday it will do you some good. 010614 #bushmill Mel smiles at me, though, and it's the first time she's smiled directly at me for a while, she had been just kind of working around me like a thing in the console, a map or a box of kleenex that is there for a reason and you really wouldn't want to get rid of it, but when you don't need it at the moment it's kind of in the way. There's only so much room in the cab of a pickup truck well on its way to being an antique. 010614 #bushmill We'd been traveling for as long as I could remember, but that's because I could only remember a few days back at the moment, and that's mostly because of all the drugs. Okay, that's an exaggeration. But I had definitely been smoking a lot of weed, and taking some pills now and then of an undetermined nature. Mel was good about that. She didn't ask dumb questions about why are you taking this, or why are your eyes red, or what did you do with my extra baggie of shrooms, you stupid fuck. Okay, that last one she did ask, but it just led to a fake cat-fight that led to some awesome sweaty wrestling and serious teasing and other things too indelicate to mention. 081013 #dog #roach *A glowing cafe, slowly growing crowded. One guy, let's call him HIM, sits at one table; another guy, let's call him ME, at another. They happen to look at each other's eyes, and a yellow-gold laser beam shoots out between them, eyes to eyes, piercing without disrupting everyone and all the smoky air between. It freezes everything hotly for a moment, connecting everything to everything else. Then life goes on.* 030004 #human INSTANT ANALYSIS: What you have to understand is, when someone says they would love to be able to poke around inside your mind, they may not mean it metaphorically, in the sense of being able linguistically to explore your inner creative secrets. It's possible that they want to literally open your cranium and scramble your actual brain, with a stick. Right. Which of course would kill you instantly. Instantly. Right. 000003 #human We will learn something. You'll be touched. Wait and see! Have some popcorn! This is a good story. There's computers and robots and explosions and car chases and wine and a lot of good belly laughs. Dancing and music, plenty of that. Move your hips with it, not against it. Part of it takes place in a movie theatre, but then (pretty early on, I think) there's a part where we go outside, squinting in the sudden incongruous daylight! 030004 #human Brief flash of actual boring autobiographical info: I was sitting here, "it" wasn't working, I went (feeling sad) to the park, played my (Tamandua's) berimbau for about 15 minutes or so (it was cold but I was warm), listened to some crows and some anonymous hoots down by the river, came back, sat at the very same table with a new cup of coffee, and now whether "it" works or not it's not going to make me sad. Ta-da! Capoeira! 081013 #dog ME: Do you want to talk about anything? HIM: Yes, more than anything. But I don't know what it is I want to talk about. ME: I know that feeling. *And just like that, they are talking about something. Moments like this are the only evidence we have that we are not all completely, unreconcilably, desperately, irretrievably alone. 

Or if we are, at least we have moments like this to make us feel as if we aren't.* 062913 #martian - Now I know what I am looking for. - Not a man, not a woman, but a woman who has sex with men. I mean, I guess I've known that for a long time. And I thought I had found it. Now I have to start all over with the trust thing--but I'm wiser now, and more deliberate now, and have more and better strategies now. I've been through the fire. Now it's phoenix time. - I want a woman who still cares about me while she's doing it. Okay, maybe not while she's DOING it, but after all is said and done. I want her to bring that pain home to me. The thing with Ann was hyperbolic. It was unsustainable. Like abuse always is. Hot, but unsistainable. I want to find my parabola now. 081413 #worm Barp remains on his knees. The other three stand there, watching traffic go by. Other than the devastation, it's a peaceful almost-morning. The sun will come up soon. The streetlights will wink out, one by one by one. Windows will warp sunlight into the faces of everyone. Buses will take people places, whether the people, or the buses, want to go or not. People will do what they must do. The city will churn on as it always does. 091313 #trout As you took us through every room in the hotel, we forgot the point of the whole thing. We saw panties, maids, old men with big guts who for some reason still made us weak in the knees, valises, trunks, chests, garment bags, bathroom doors open with the steam pouring out, kids alert and alive and ready to explore, TV's, stuffed alligators, and lots and lots of good, pure, ripe-for-the-guiltless-wasting in-between time. 081413 #worm #roach Half a lifetime later, she's sitting at the counter at Esriel's Cafe. Her shift is done. She whips her apron off, and takes Dorbifr's proffered arm. A real date! She's giddy with it. They climb into his ochre-green tank of a car. She puts the rose he gave her tenderly up on the broad dash. The city leers in at them, distorted with the curve of the enormous windshield, but its stares are harmless now. She is a woman. She is the only one she knows who has nothing to hide. Dorbifr, her ursine knight, rests his warm paw on her knee. She breathes. A double handful of years too late, but it is good. The pair of them, seen from outside, are probably laughable--she laughs. 000096 #squirrel your a shit yeah so fuckin what your a shit but but you think hard now you are like a little reflector and you just bounce my energy right back at me and and your funny and somewhere deeop down in there you have a cold little old dried up balck heart and my life seems like since i've met you its started to unfold a bit more flower flower. so sincerely as i can possibly be, i love you man i love you too. 081413 #copperhead Without really thinking about it or being asked, I slide my paddle under the thwart behind me, and hop out onto the stones. I took my shoes off a long time ago; my feet get a tough massage. I grab the handhold and slide the canoe the rest of the way up out of the swim. It's almost effortless until the very end, when his weight meets dry land. I hunch my back into it for these last couple of feet, and that, too, feels good. 081013 #dog HIM: Why would you celebrate the fact that you have nothing to say? ME: Uh, cuz it's less depressing than wallowing in it, and wishing I were someone else? HIM: Good enough. Almost. But let's try something else. ME: Like what? HIM: Generating, a la the secret dynamo of the senses, some things to say. ME: How do we do that? HIM: By playing a game. ME: What sort of a game? HIM: First, we have to get more people in here. 082513 #bunny God bless living among the ruins! The campfire and the paper lamps strung up across the perimeter! God bless trashy talkin by the pump and god bless the tits and ass hangin out of the cutoff jeans. God bless the apathy of the stars! God bless how high and clear it is to hurt, at things you'll never ever get to touch. Again. God bless how only the dying are lovely. Only the dying were ever born; the rest might as well be 010703 #eel She turned to me and seemed warm and inviting. We knew each other. She said, "I always liked this jacket except that it does this—" and she pointed to my shoulder where the fabric was riding up. I said, "Oh that's just because of how I'm standing," and I straightened myself a bit so it would sit right. She started neatening my lapels, brushing off my shoulders, etc etc, and then she said, "You know," taking ahold of the fabric of the left jacket pocket, "Next time you go out you should have a card, right here." What for? I asked. "To tell people you'll see anyone, at any time." I realized she was talking about a calling card, a social convention from before my time. 081013 #dog HIM: Okay. Now that time you HAD to have heard it! ME: Hey—are you feeling okay? [magazine falls open on ME's lap, showing a lipstick ad. The enormous woman's insane mouth is coppery and luminous. What goes in must come out!] HIM: Uh. Nah, yeah, I don't know. Look I'm going to go outside for some air. ME: Sure. Bring me back some when you come in, okay? *HIM stares as though ME has just said something. I mean really.* 090211 #martian - Now every time I see Nick I think of Mr. J saying, "Apparently, Nick is a dreamboat." - The seniors are calm today, writing in their journals. Maybe they're the only ones really equipped for it. - I can't think of a third thing. Which is funny, because I was just getting on my students, not allowing them to say they can't think of anything to write. So, am I going to be a hypocrite, or am I going to think of something? 000001 #human Maybe hurt but very very cautious, like they were walking on eggshells to be accepting, ask questions but NOT say the wrong thing, and as for me i would've been fine with them just blurting out the wrong thing but because it was them it made me smile (after all this time) and just wait patiently for the end of the agonizingly long sentences and then pretty much just answer as honestly as i could. and yes they still love me. 081413 #worm Feigning a struggle, Me lets Marud tie him to the barnboards, pants off, legs wide in total defeat. Me is hard, of course. He knows the willow-haired girl is watching this, somehow. Through gaps in the floor up above? He knows she is laughing at him, and the knowledge makes him harder. Marud's chest is dark where Me's is pale. His pectorals are buff where Me's are gentle. His nipples are tiny, tight; Me's are obtuse. Marud spits on his hand, and rubs the slickness on his bullish cock. One meaty hand clamps each of Me's bound wrists above his head. Marud's smell overwhelms all--the faded horseshit, the dirt, the mold, the weedy night outside, the traces of the girl's perfume--everything gives in to the pungent musk of Marud. 081013 #dog *It's kind of a "can you help the mouse get to the cheese" type of situation. Because here's the mouse, he's happy-enough-looking, got a big old goofy mouse grin on his fiz, but there's these two cats stationed on the outside of the maze, so he can't go around to the right and he can't go around to the left, and he can't go under or over because he lives on and in a piece of paper and is only effectively two-dimensional after all. He could just walk right over the lines of the maze, but his eyes won't let him—they see that entrance hearkening back to his days of abundant pellets and strokes from the pussy, and they just have to start roving in, further in, to try and figure it out. So that's where we are. At the entrance to the maze.* 110113 #fox Learning to write has nothing to do with style or ornamentation or cleverness or being literary or any of the thousand things you and most people think of when you think of "art". It has everything to do with telling the truth, using whatever words are at hand when you need them. This is the source of the urge you've been getting to kick dribble pass sneak or punt past all the attractive trivialities you might think you're supposed to want to think you want to write about, and actually tell the one thing that's scary hidden shameful avoided or in any way REAL. it's getting to where your life literally depends on being able to do that. You have been ruled by illusion. Use the writing to tell yourself the essential story of the dream you're waking up from, every day. 110413 #human when you see kids behaving badly, and there's still something about them that reminds you of your own kids, that's a vulnerable moment, a chink in the armor of how fucking obnoxious kids can be, and if you're trying to be a teacher or a counselor or a present adult or just a decent kind person of whatever age, you can stop and think for a minute that maybe they are your kids in a another universe. Like if x, y, z had happened to you instead of a, b, c, that would be your ragged little family, and you wouldn't want to just sit and scowl and frown at them all the time, any more than you want to sit and scowl and frown at your own kids now. Because that's no fun. You do want to teach them. But-- 000000 #finch secretly delighted the airconditioner's broken 081313 #copperhead To what? I'm sure as hell not going to leave the canoe here. I'd have to pay for it. Of course it's in my name. The money stuff, yeah, that's not his, uh, specialty. I mean, he works, it's not that, I mean how much can you really expect to make working part time stocking shelves and shoving jugs of milk toward the back side of the glass doors of the dairy section—he's like some kind of frozen fish in a dry aquarium when I see him back there, peering out between the curves of two percent, more sheepish in his dirty smock than any time I've seen him in the woods. I don't know. It's like he wears civilization like a thrift-store suit. He just borrows jobs. Whatever. I don't mind being the guy with the credit card. Whatever. But. Sometimes I do wish he'd get a 101413 #martian - the way people talk in the waiting room at the clinic often seems like an attempt to display how good they are at parenting, but instead of sneering contemptuously at them (us), I can also choose to see the benefit of that--it's good practice, it's a moment of heightened awareness. - Libby was super quiet while I was in the room with her and Peggy, but I wouldn't be surprised if she was talking away now that I'm out here. - I'm a little anxious right now and my butt feels a little irritated and my face is a little flushed but I'm wearing a cool shirt and my black duster which is very green again, and I'm kind of afraid and kind of hoping that the resonant jittery ache means I'm about to give birth to another strange and beautiful scary alien. 081413 #worm Wackin plays guitar, badly. His brow furrows up so hard, you'd like to think he was a constipated hedgehog. The way he slices at the strings, it's a wonder that guitar doesn't whip out a straight-razor and cut Wackin a new esophagus. Damn. But it's okay. His greatest musical gift is dedication, and at least one ladybug, listening perplexedly in the dark, thinks the noise of his axe must be some kind of animal. Hey, that's some kind of accomplishment. Before too long, Tontinyke will do everybody a favor, and hurl the damned guitar into the fire pit, but not until after he and Wackin are so thoroughly, mutually drunk that they start singing their own songs, and other people near the bonfire's edge begin to sing along. Now *these* songs will be really, really good. 081613 #worm I am looking at a slice of pie growing ever thinner in the evening's lack of trees. I am looking at a black window. Outside I know there is a tree. Whenever you get stuck, just write "I am looking at," and start again. Is there any reason not to have the comma inside the quotes? Is there any definitive answer as to whether you should say "facets so smooth it can be balanced" versus "facets which are so smooth it can balance"? Beats the fuck out of me. I guess I have the disease of being average after all. Oh damn. Oh damn. Less visible of course thank god than herpes simplex on your gob, but permeating and irredeemable all the same. I am looking at how powerful is the urge to check the dictionary. If you can't spell, you can't kick ass. But maybe you can. 081013 #dog Do you suppose there is a way to redeem ourselves for how gapingly tepid and insipid our lives have been so far, any way to break out of the personal and professional jello-moulds we've let ourselves be consigned to, any way to begin without prior training and despite continuous conditioning to flagrantly insist on the aliveness of our own existence, to paint our own meanings on every tree trunk and leaf, to say, god damn this world for a ridiculous, animated computer adventure, and begin living as if we got points for uncovering clues, for looking at everything, for pushing all the buttons and interrogating all the characters? Could we, in short, learn at this instant, because it may be the only one there is, to ride dragons and breathe fire? 081613 #worm Not together, they smoke. She with her pliant, pretty boots up on the counter as she sits in the torn-up desk chair (that chair used to be in the owner's grandmother's house; it was where she sat when she squirted out the owner's mother. There's nothing like a chair someone was born in for easing out the aches of gravitational existence. But our bookseller doesn't realize the history of the chair. For all she knows, it's just a comfortable place to smoke and pretend to be working), and he with his eyes almost bugging out as he scans every single book on every single shelf, in order, from iou to alth. Someone else's lost history tapers down around the jaded rug of right now, like a juvenile candle burning up the evidence. Naked. 000009 #human I've just remembered that the major obstacle to having any kind of fun is doing everything right. 040006 #human I don't know if it's because she's in the green period of her pills, and her hormones are glowing through, or if it's just we have had a nice lying-together after-work talk, or if it's because it smells like fall and a moon the colour of magic semen breezing through the window like a current passing thru the gills of my apartment or because Van's singing Jackie Wilson Said on the radio or because I'm in here playing with my Mac as a gentle alternative to forcing sleep--but she sure seems warm and pretty right now, in there in my bed. I've been getting way too I mean WAY too hung about this writing bullshit. 081413 #worm The stars wheel away overhead; the planets complete their wandering. The last of the driftwood and pallets surrender to the slow rapture of becoming embers. It's time to clamber drunkenly to the tents. Bnabe came here with the willow-haired girl. They slid down the muddy slope together. But now she veers toward Me's tent; the bifurcation of a decision turns from potential to actual. Her laughter is more than Bnabe can stand. The willow-haired girl is Bnabe's ghost. But who is Bnabe now? Who is this dead man with cotton in his mouth, who is cold to the touch, who laughs with a hideous burlesque of taking it all in stride? Who is crying out, taunted by this visitation from the dead, waking up with rabbit pulse in the cold corridor? 000004 #human So this little boy a little older than Moonbeam just tripped up the stairs and spilled a little of his milk. Some of it spilled on his arm. It might have hurt a little, but I don't think that's why he was crying. He wanted a new milk. He wanted his mom to get him a new milk. And I felt so bad and so good for him, and I just wanted to reach out and give him a big hug and really make him believe that everything was okay, everything was going to be fine, but of course I couldn't, and of course his mom did exactly the right thing, which was to help him clean up and tell him to stop crying, and eventually he did stop, and i'm still so full and so miserable and so lonely and so and so almost ready to get out of here and go play some capoeira i guess. 121703 #human Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That's what I did with it. I let it die. I let it die. It was blushing and burning, a perfect sunset of opportunity, and I let it spin on into night alone, ashen, growing colder, abandoned, dead. I never went back for it. It's still out there, the teddy bear on the curb in the rotten part of town where the sidewalks' cracks aren't charming. Where Mugger's Alley really is. I never went back there. I let myself be alarmed out of bed before the dream was done, and why? For a job. To satisfy the opinions of some people. To Do the Right Thing. I am an idiot. Not savant. Just an idiot. The real reason I don't kill myself? I don't deserve to die. This computer screams around in circles. Shut it the fuck up. 010314 #jonquil Who decides what's perverse? It's not like she had a tendency to shit on the bathroom floor, like Zombie Boy. Why weren't they talking about him? Oh yeah, because he was supposed to act that way. He was an established fact. He had an excuse. 102913 #snail He takes a half-crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his rugged raincoat, does that wrist flick that makes exactly one snow-white cylinder poke itself halfway out as a couple of its brethren barely show their tips and then slide resignedly back down into the pack. On the table there is a pear-shaped glass candle holder swaddled in a white mesh that looks a little like a hair net--to the flame ensconced in this squat vessel the man leans forward and, inhaling, touches his cigarette. 081613 #worm He wore Izods. So did I. He wore Levi's. They looked nice but I didn't know why. Wouldn't have occured to me even to wonder why. Wasn't aware I was impressed. Scott said he died of cancer. Lucky bastard. He said my story about Superquack's fart-propelled flying was "crude." He hoped I wouldn't pick the Hairy Elbow Show for my week's favorite story. I did anyway. He had some things to learn too, you know what I'm saying? I taught him some things. I'd like to think so, anyway. David Sides's story about masturbation and being gay--that was crude. There are a lot of different kinds of crude in this world. Killing a guy so sweet and so beautiful--a guy who made us--let us!--write a story EVERY SINGLE DAY--with cancer? God, now that's crude. 102609 #treefrog I don't want to be responsible for these damn kids any more. I just want to hear the radio, listen to the lulling rhythms of speech, go to sleep, get up, drink coffee, go to work, masturbate, dream, smoke, drink coffee, go to work, go home, get fucked, and do it all over again. I want to go back to pretending to be a poet and a king. I would even like to take a little trip where I could go back to pretending to be a grown-up again. Remember that? A whiff of something very like Victoria took me back, took me way, way back just a minute ago, in the parking lot, while waiting for the damn buses to pick up these damn kids in the rain. With their lighters. Their hoodies. Their money. Their football. And their deep, deep, sad brown eyes. 030004 #human I have one of those rings in my earlobe. Not a piercing, I mean the kind that opens a space, diametric plane parallel to your upright axis, in your earlobe. I started small of course, incrementally increasing the diameter. Fortunately, my ear has not developed any infections. My hole is now about three-quarters of an inch across. I hope to get it big enough that someone with a modest-sized dick can fuck me in the earlobe hole. I think it makes me look tough and strange, even though I am secretly neither. I am holding a styro cup of coffee and talking to my friends. We are working something out. We're going to meet up later and do something. Right now I think I'm going to have a smoke--another affectation I've adopted in imaginary self-defense. 012404 #eel These kids kept coming around, acting like they were going to break in through the kitchen window. I rushed up at them with my face, making monstrous noises, and scared them away. "Do you want to die!!?!?!?" I screamed, and they screamed and ran off. It was kind of fun, I thought for both of us. Then the younger one came back, a little blond boy, and stared thru the window again. I did my little bit: "Do you want to die!?!?!?" He looked sad, and nodded his head yes. I asked him again, taken aback, softer this time, and he sort of shook no, but then I asked again and he nodded yes again. Oh hey, I said, hey, come here, it's all right. I held his head next to my chest and stroked his hair. It's all right. Hang in there. Come on. 000000 #bunny ps did you know she's my wife now? funny, huh? i'm forsaking technology for you i'm saying fuck a hundred gajillion years of progress, i'm throwing it all away, i'm throwing it away like a silly semicolon i'm throwing it all away for the chance to say come on come on let's go to bed come on upstairs with me no i'm serious i do this like every night and you can come with me i'm totally serious come on come on upstairs to bed with me we'll get some pussy i guarantee you it's curvalicious she's sublime she's my wife and now because you are my friend she can be yours too come on i'm not kidding let's go on upstairs i'm serious come on we've waited long enough let's go come on come on come on 211728 012214 #trout #princess I don't even know what to call you, she said as the elevator door was closing. *Man,* mankind, humanity, humans, engineers, whatever you want to call them: they made the elevator, they engineered, they *designed* the elevator to be a thing that slices lives in half, always in half no matter how young or old you are; the one half going up & the one half going down, in acquiescence to gravity barely restrained by a thin cord. But at the present moment I was standing, going nowhere. A dingy pair of buttons winked languidly into the corridor; the corridor was a long rectangle of the memory of smoke, highball glasses, chlorine, flip-flops, leftovers at breakfast, happy business, leather, work. The corridor was empty now. 212653 081413 #worm It's time to branch out in a new direction. Check the map. The map's a little fuzzy. It looks as though it's been passed from hand to hand to hand. It looks translucent, like a moth's wing. It has fluttered into the fire, gone to ash. This map won't tell you where to go. This map will sometimes tell you where you've been, if you have a mind to listen. But it tends to ramble on a bit. If I were you, I'd fold it up (but how? how?) and put it back in your pocket, or give it to a small bunny passing by in the snow outside your fondest memory. He'll take it and make tracks with it: a little map inside a bigger map of snow-paw-prints before spring. Spring hits Npydyuan with a splat! And someone is watching from somewhere very not far in the direction of out. There. 081613 #worm I'm thinking of too much shit at once. That's why I can't do anything, apparently. I say too much, I think of too much but none of it is inventions or new computers or anything. It's all just lady bugs and grasshoppers and the soap dish. You know, useless crap like octagonal glasses and red red wine. The frog's leap merlot with Scott at Trattoria. The frog's leap merlot. Can I tell you about that wine? Because we're all jaded drunks here. I can tell you about this without having to worry that you're listening. I know you are not. I know only the fish can listen, and he has been exiled a long time ago. Bon voyage, fishie fishie. Boa noite. Boa viage. I love you, fair slipstream. Slimy slim thing of a time-riddle stream, where are you now. But the wine. 020003 #human We had a steak dinner tonight--I grilled them outside in the snow. After two and a half beers, chewing the fat, I said, "Do you feel married?" She said, "Sometimes, yeah." I said, "Right now?" She said, "Yeah." I said I did too and that I liked it and she said she did too. It's Valentine's Day Eve, and I don't give a fuck about that but, this, this, this other thing, this weird, this unexpected thing, this I give something of a fuck about, after all. 010001 #eel I looked around. There was a sauna off the main room, a steam room too, and a whirlpool. There was also a room with a swimming pool in it, perfectly blue and still and empty, with a sign on the door that said we couldnt go in there because it was for the actual hotel guests. 081413 #worm #roach Back inside the house, Ltiky's wife wonders whether she should tell Ltiky about the baby, whether she should tell him how good it felt to get fucked just now, whether there's any correlation between those two questions, and, finally, above or beneath it all, Ltiky's wife wonders if she has a name. She sleeps. Had he been able to see what happened in Esriel's Cafe after he and Him took off on their hike, Me would have grown fat with jealousy, though he would valiantly (or pathetically) have tried to hide his feelings. Who knew Me harbored a longing for Krim? Him didn't know. Krim certainly didn't know. Me had a habit of pining in secret. Maybe it gave him some kind of surreptitious thrill. Maybe he was just a social Neanderthal. Who knew, and who knows? 081413 #worm #roach An old man walks up out of the square darkness, into the round light of the stage. You sit and watch him, you and your friend. He goes slowly, leaningly. There is a trace of a smile somewhere behind those horn rims. He walks the length of the stage, past the counter-sitters, past the shifting tables, all the way to the end, and stops. He disappears for a moment. Then he reappears, and walks exactly as slowly back through it all, through the popcorn glow and noise, and exits from the stage. Think of all the stories that guy could tell, says your friend, and listening to him, you feel you could be sitting at Esriel's Cafe for real. And you're always going to remember that. No matter what dimensions you fold yourself into. 051111 #martian 1. Ha ha. He thought we'd like this music cause we're black...! 2. Shaquille's round pointed eyes, him out of the ordinary starting to resonate, the old Marley song, it coming out of him like a sea-torn battle-tossed grownup YES between him & me, the other kids laughing but kind of delighted, him telling me I should really try Lambrusco & Muscadel, but accenting the "ca"; I don't know how other people pronounce it, I just pronounce it the way it's pronounced. What's your name, so I don't have to keep calling you by other people's names? Those are some really nice wines, Mr. Schulte. 3. Would you have ever just busted out and told one of your teachers some crazy shit? Would have told your teacher that you were selling dope? 000004 #human If I want to die I can, but everyone needs to be told, after the fact if necessary, that it was not because of them, not because I got suckered into the wrong life. I chose this path, and even if I didn't, I still choose to live here. It's my responsibility to do what I need to do to make it fun. I have everything I need, to do that. Even the balls, even the courage. I just sometimes forget that I have those. But I do. Al Green told me so. He told me to forget about the neurotic pseudo-themes, the self-worshipping micro-flagellations of the tortured artist, and start singing about love again. It doesn't matter how old you are or what your job is. He said Will you be my Valentine? and I said yes, and at that moment I could really believe it was true. And it is. 081413 #worm Bebrorogu and Faup, Tattol and Bylokuun. As animals before a forest fire they fly into another, greater fire. Dadlun, Snyw, Uknekypy, Kunidima. Fly, my little varmints, fly. The amaranth is swishing. Someone's coming. It's almost time. The trash truck rumbles on through invisible space. The putrescence of Him and Me's immediate environment increases as a function of their increasing fatigue. So it is a relief when the great metal beast finally lumbers to a halt, although a fresh layer of trash slops over Him and Me in the sudden deceleration. Me whips sour-wine-smelling paper pulp off his eyebrow, and struggles to a crouching position. Him also rises as best he is able. The truck starts to beep. What now? They look at each other. 225001 012514 #trout #moonwalker In this world, I shove the rough linens off my sweaty torso and sit up in bed. It's hot. The heater hasn't shut up all night. I shamble over and perch on the edge of his bed, almost prim. He doesn't wake, of course. His shoulder is bare in the unearthly electric glow of a metropolis damped by hotel glass and curtains. Almost I don't really want to, but I touch his shoulder, glide my palm over the blade. I lean in and down. My cheek against the nape of his neck. Funny how a fart can really make shit real. He lets a long low one, deep under the covers but it still seeps up and out. I breathe it. Lightly, like a ragged deer, I lick the cooled sweat off his skin, run my tongue over the roughness under his jaw. 102913 #snail #elephant ...And it will start with a harmless letter, the one I conveniently have to write, am mandated to write, I agreed, I signed it, I gave in of course, even from the most helpless institution of all she still ruled me and made me acquiesce with ease. 080004 #human You know what I mean? Actually, I feel cheated, or at least bored, when a piece seems to try to take advantage of cultural flags and icons to suggest a discernable theme or, god forbid, a moral. When I see one of those I feel polluted. I feel as though some jack-ass has brought a loud jam-box to my pristine, primitive campsite, has cranked it up loud and begun throwing Pepsi cans and cigarette butts all over the place. You know? No thanks. Moving right along-- 000097 #human Do I want to keep going to the writing group? YES: It's good exercise, it's sometimes quite fun NO: It's a source of tension, it's sometimes quite distracting YES: I might write less if I quit going NO: So what, isn't that up to me? YES: The fact that you put that in the form of a question betrays your doubt NO: Most of my so-called "good" poems have come from solo writing YES: But solo writing comes from a stimulated life NO: There are other ways to get stimulated YES: So find them, and I don't mean drinking and drugs and you know it NO: Well, we'll see. I am just wondering if I'm going because of expectations, or if i want to quit because of expectations. YES: Well, we'll see. I trust you. NO: Thank you. I trust you as well. MAYBE: After all, we are one. 224825 072896 #human the bit of joy was in feeling the lightest tips of beginning rain ping coolly against my arm, and it just felt good. then i thought, hey, i enjoyed that, and it made me all the happier. then i thought more about how lately i've been getting into that groove again where writing is fun and i just write down things and try to really describe them instead of trying to make them sound smart or inspired or any of that crap. and i'm thinking there has GOT to be a correlation between relaxing into that groove, and feeling good naturally, the kind of good feeling with absolutely no guilt attached to it, like i felt out in duluth, with that incredible sunshine and all those people writing about their stories and the bright and many things they saw. 090813 #dog I was in McLean at Christmastime; there wasn't much to do. I took a walk around the block along with you know who. 081313 #copperhead Do i feel a little foolish to realize that everything is less slightly sinister now? That canoes aren't so bad really, once you get used to them and stop trying to act like you're totally in control; that it's okay if it gets dark and cold; that the relentless mezzo-forte rush of water isn't really a harbinger of deepest, darkest uncertainty and aloneness in the vastness of space? Can a cup of roasted bean juice really do all that? It seems as if, at least in this case, it can. So I crunch with my friend back over the weeds and reeds and puddles and rocks, and wait for him to get his gear stowed. 081613 #worm Have you ever noticed how angelic the barrista's voice looks when you're bent over the coffee table getting raped in the ass by a hypertrophic murderer? As his spit-lubed cock barges in and out, and my intestines get acquainted with my soft palette, I stare at the perfection of her celestial eye-liner. My best friend, in a small-cocked version of empathy and barely-veiled lust, sloshes a quart of olive oil all over my back. The oil runs down into my crack just in time for the lifer'z next hump. My best friend's simian fingers curl around my suspended prick. Three strokes. I go blind. The one stroke thug unleashes the one stroke fury of his seed; my one stroke ass fills up like a one stroke balloon. One str— Fuck. Oh god. It's happening again. 081307 #human Things Otto and I talked about included: how the Brewers are doing how crowded the van was when the girls left when they're coming back (several times) how it's probably better that M & C aren't going-- "yeah, two people like that...." how much stuff M & C buy for Kirstin: he sez it's not so much that they get her stuff, it's how they are about it, like, ha ha ha! look what we got! how we haven't heard much lately about M & C adopting another kid; but if they did, Carol wouldn't like it because it would be a competition with K, and M would naturally latch on to the new one, and K (who is accustomed to getting the star treatment all the time) would just end up stuck in the middle the fucking mosquitos, oh my god! 081413 #copperhead Ahead, the north bank becomes the northeast bank, and the south bank becomes southwest. Directly west, there is a gravel bar. He is still in the stern, and therefore largely in control of which way we turn. Instead of turning early to anticipate the current, he begins to barrel straight ahead. Confused, I switch to the left side and dig in with gusto. My tricep, long and thin, flexes with the effort. It's tan; it feels good; it isn't enough to dissuade the forward motion of the canoe; all my heaving does is accelerate the inevitable, and with a scraping *boom,* we slam halfway up the bar. I lurch forward with the sudden stopping. The sound of the curling current against the back end of the boat is suddenly loud, like someone pouring out a giant tea kettle fast. 091013 #worm In the interstitial spaces between the cars, noise of the outside-underneath world roared into my head and filled my face with foreign air. Passing from one vestibule to another, you're so close to the riproaring speed of gravel, railroad ties, forgotten skulls, and the detritus of locality, it deliciously reinforces the elite hypotenuse feeling of rail travel. Even a lowly man such as myself, once he boards a train with ticket in hand, becomes magnetic royalty in the ephemeral court of neither here nor there. We angle across the commoner's lives, hovering above their rough-shod streets. We do not stop unless we want to, and when we do, we never cease vibrating with exoticism. We are always ready to knife away into another someone else's dream nocturne. 081613 #worm #roach I was at Esriel's Cafe with Milt. Okay, kidding. Kidding. I was at Ernie's with Taelin. We had shroomed. All I remember was the fries. God but they were golden brown, square cut. Some had a bit of peel on the end. They cascaded across the plate, like planks in the sun. And the salt. The salt was so square. So perfectly, imperfectly square. So many bouncing, jouncing cubes just singing about salty life in the perfect sunlight. God we were young. At least I was. And now here comes Beth, in her freckles and her breasts, and she doesn't want to do acid with us tomorrow, but you know what? It's all right. Because I've still got these fries. These fries are my guitar. These beautiful, individual pieces of salt are my three chords and the truth. Amen. 102702 #eel The gun made a faint whirring noise. Then the man said I should poke someone with it. "Poke someone?" "Yeah, like come up to me and stick in my ribs like you were going to rob me or something." So I put my left arm across his back up by his neck, and poked the gun into the back of his guts with my right arm and said, "Okay, give me all your whatever it is!" We both chuckled a little, and he said, "Okay. Why don't you come back tomorrow?" 110812 #copperhead at exactly the right time before midmorning starts to seem like late morning, but later than the throes of early morning—when you're driving into but just enough under the sun; when the long grass that only lives near freeways is lit up with the kind of light designed by fairies whose teacher said, okay say "green" but shape your mouth like "gold," and they did, and only you can see the outcome, through the exquisite steam of orange pekoe and cut black tea, with just a little sugar for the road. It must be somewhere around ten o'clock, and it doesn't matter. That's just it. It doesn't matter. That's the time for tea the color of the black earth just now being warmed by the secret sun of only this time on only this earth, outside your rolled-up windows as you drive, just now. 081413 #worm The drumming reaches a cataclysmic pitch. Ltiky hears laughter and the pounding of blood, smells dirt, tastes a lifetime of bitter bile. He is almost--almost--prepared to surrender to the absurdity of the situation, and become reluctantly good-humored--but the dreadlocked lady is not content, and must, it seems, add injury to abject humiliation. As Ltiky starts to elbow himself upright, her tawny, arched, insensately gorgeous, naked foot flies around again, and slams hard as a two-by-four into his gut. A pathetic croak escapes Ltiky's mouth, and he crumples. Now his senses take in nothing but the mud. Nothing, that is, except one more flash of pain when that lovely foot caresses his head with all the tenderness of a pile driver, and everything goes ringing white, then black. Did he hear Krim cry out one more time? Or did he only dream that? 091313 #elephant As I am readying myself to knock on her window, because I'm pretty sure I love her now, or at least I'm pretty sure I want to insinuate myself into her life somehow, or at least I'm pretty sure she may want to give me a good rub-down with some of that massage oil I see on her old table there; as I'm warming up my speech centers to say, Hey, how've you been, I've missed you; as I'm already smiling knowing how she's going to smile and say, Hey, what's up you old dog, where the hell have you been, and as I can't absolutely can not fucking wait just to feel her, to touch her and be touched by her, to taste her smoke-fucked but weirdly still sweet breath again; as I'm in this moment of getting ready to slithe right through the semipermeable membrane that is another human's life, something seriously fucked up happens. 090813 #worm So the man came up to me and made pantomimes to the effect that his throat was just parched, so dry he couldn't even talk, and he reached out his hand, and without really thinking it was odd at all, although it was, relative to my limited experience with other human beings in need, on trains, and in universal lust, I handed him the bottle, as naturally as a hand unmittens itself in proximity to a friendly fire. 081013 #dog HIM: Oh! Fine! Then there's nothing to be afraid of. ME: That's kind of what I thought, but . . . . HIM: But what? ME: If you please, why not? HIM: Because, my friend, any time we want to we can swish thru these weeds over to that barn where the candlelight is, ascend like rust in quietness up the hay loader, take our places underneath the slatty, slotty, boards, underneath the slutty stars, and fuck. 000097 #worm After a while we went back down to rejoin the others. It was getting dark. We found them and we all went inside another structure. This one was a little hut built right over the hot stream. It was a little sauna, and you could put your feet in the warm water. You had to duck down and just about crawl to get into it. Very womblike. Very nice and wooden and dark and glowing and close. We sat there for a while, then eventually decided to get our clothes on and leave. I have to say I have NEVER felt so relaxed as I did sitting there in the back seat of that square old wide American car, letting someone else drive, being dry and warm and plump and rosy in my clothes in the car with the heater and some music going, and the witches and Helena all around me, and rolling away across that wide impossible plain at night under a clear moon sky. 081413 #worm That glow seems especially bright from outside. Doesn't it always? From the opposite corner of the intersection, you see a rectangular halo glow, and the occasional silhouettes of figures inside. Are they dancing? Are they working? Even if--perhaps especially if--they're working, they at least belong in there. Whether they realize it or not, they bask in the puppy-basket warmth of the recently freed. And you? Do you remember that feeling, the feeling of collaboration with the infinite? Do you remember how this darkness felt before, when you knew you could still step back to the other side of that window, any time you wanted? You hear the faint escaped signal of a radio--a familiar, love-you-forever song; an ultra-pop, little-too-sweet, superficial, utterly soul-wrenching song that you really love. You step out into the street. 010614 #bushmill No river is the same river twice, or something like that, Mel says, but there's no time for philosophy, because the wiry old/young guy is coming toward us? Wait, no. Yes. What—why? I don't particularly want to admit that I don't particularly want to open the window, so I just don't say anything, but of course Mel doesn't need me to admit it and she doesn't need me to open it either because she's in the driver's seat and has the whole set of buttons over there, the throne of power, ha ha ha, and she thumbs that sucker down just as smooth as you please, and says something, I don't even know what, something sinister and sweet and dangerous the way only Mel can, and if I wasn't a grown-up and didn't know better I'd probably have pissed myself except I still have a major hard-on which makes it kind of hard to— 081413 #worm That trash truck is in our way. It's halfway below street level, beep-beep-beeping into a recessed dock. It belongs to the government. It's carrying the collective refuse of the human condition. Look at it: stupid, complacent, laboring backwards. It's a twenty-thousand pound, shit-eating cow. It's us. Don't think about it! Swarm ahead like a goblin army! Jelse swings the wheel around; his pickup jounces up over the sidewalk and onto the platform beside the dock. Several of the riders tumble off. Jelse guns the engine. The yelling swells up. Somebody lobs something bright and acrid. The bomb lights into the front of the great garbage beast; the pickup smashes into the back. The air turns to poisonous glass. Jelse's vision turns red. His ears, his whole brain feels like it's imploding. 022501 #human the fantasy I am a complicitous slave to, when I picture it, includes a man as my mate, as the one who gets my secrets out of me both gently and violently (and a version of me who is not afraid of the softness and flowering of his own soul and demeanor). But what a man! What I expect of him! How could he be real? How could he love me the way I love him, touch me the way I dream of his touching me, without our both dissolving into grotesque self-contempt and shame? How could he simultaneously exist corporeally, be alive, be aware of me in my nakedness and himself in his, and still want to stay? How could we jostle each other with the easy, clumsy grace of men, remain men, and then touch each other softly, lovingly, slowly, fully? How I smoulder for this man, and how I resent how ridiculous he makes my life appear. 081413 #worm Where did the Moth's Wing come from? What people built its thrumming hyperspatial engines, and what psychic unrest propelled its bold, naive crew to leave their homes? It's been so long, the ship's own crew don't even know. The journey has stretched across generations. The Science Officer, on a day (or night; who knows) when nothing much is passing but the stars outside the boring windows, decides to check the ship's library. He paws the keys as best as he is able, and discovers a file purporting to contain an entry in the original Captain's original log! Alas, it's written in Mwnshi, a language no dog has ever been able to growl. So he runs it through the computer's state-of-the-art translation program, and reads, tail wagging, the output, with wagging tail. Did I mention his tail was wagging? 081413 #worm Him and Me walk on. They wander through the open gate of a benighted botanical garden. Everything here is asleep. The ferns are sleeping. The one-eyed cat is sleeping. The koi are sleeping. The cunnies and the hares are sleeping. The sideways-skating skimmer-bugs are sleeping. Cobwebs of mist among bejewelled cliffs around the tropical falls are sleeping. The butterflies are sleeping with the dragonflies. The lawn sprinklers are sleeping. The roses are sleeping uneasily. The irises dream of sight. The wood-chipped paths are sleeping. The slipstream of the moon is sleeping. The feathered lake is sleeping. ___ and ___, two refugees, are sleeping in the mossy hollow down behind the tiny railroad tracks. The tiny stars are sleeping, reflected in the shiny tracks. Everyone is sleeping. 081413 #worm #roach Actually, Barp knew. Barp the troglodyte. That's why he took extra pleasure in watching Krim's flirtations that night, after Him and Me were gone, and no-one remained in the Cafe except Barp, Krim, and an unprepossessing young man at the counter named Ltiky. Barp took pleasure in Krim's display even though Barp himself was not (and he knew he never would be) its intended audience. Of course, despite her uncanny ability to ignore his every need, Krim had to know Barp was in the room, and her willingness nonetheless to flirt so shamelessly indicated, in some remote sense, her inclusion of him in the dynamics of her little passion play. It was just that Barp's role was not (and he was fairly certain it never would be) that of the object of adoration. Barp was not the male lead. 010614 #bushmill The smaller man is white, has a stubble beard and a receding hairline halfheartedly de-emphasized by a homemade buzz cut. His main strategy seems to be to get in under the bigger man's torso, and bob around, to which the bigger man's response seems to be a kind of good-natured scorn. It seems like they're about to touch, like the big guy is just about to pin the smaller guy down on the weedy asphalt, but then there's a pinging sound and the door to the gas station opens, and four more men stream out into the ruddy light. One of them has a pack of cigarettes and is whanging it against his palm, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, like that in a rhythm. A couple of them have snacks. Let's go! one of them says and What the fuck you doing? asks another, and our big guy, our big splendid actor, seems like he's being yanked out of one play and into another. 081413 #worm You have to make a decision. There comes a time in the life cycle of any smoke break, when you know it's time to stub out the butts and go do something else. Temporarily you may be tempted not to--maybe for a moment you feel as if you could just waste there forever, smoking and knowing secret things, until the space cows come home in a capsule. But if you did that, and some self-preserving part of you won't forget this, your smoke breaks would lose their potency. Then you'd have to start taking non-smoke breaks, and what the hell would be the point of that? No, better to ash the last ash, stretch, stand up, glean what crippled pleasure you may out of the temporary dizziness laced with an edge of nausea (what the fuck, why do we do this to ourselves?), and actually go do something--if for no other reason than to earn your next smoke break. 081413 #worm #roach Back at Esriel's Cafe, Krim finished up. She took out the trash, topped off the ketchups (do you have any idea how old the stuff in the bottom of the bottles must be?), cleaned off the counter. She was not thinking about any of it, of course, except to the extent that she was making her sidework a sideshow for Ltiky, whom she acutely felt watching her every dimpled move; she thought she was thinking about Ltiky, and where she wanted that relationship to go, if anywhere, but what she was really thinking about was how further to torment Ltiky. He just begged to be tortured. But she didn't fully realize all this yet. She was young. Not so young as she appeared, but she was young. Finally, they left, and they were all, shut up! no you shut up! and giggles; the pathos of their astonishing youth was not lost on Hanad; she sighed. 081413 #worm Oh, but the people! If you could draw a map of the denizens of Npydyuan, showing all their fractal, quasi-random, inexplicable, cacophanous inter-relationships! Now that would be a map of some magnitude. That would be a map over which explorers could pore, researchers could puzzle, tourists could argue, and hunters of treasure could grow feveredly inspired! Such a map has never been produced. There ain't enough pencils or notebook pages in all the dime stores in all the universes, parallel or slightly askew as so many of them really are, to sketch that ever-changing pattern. That map only exists as a life-sized embodiment of itself. Each person is a pencil point, or a carbon molecule, or an atom, or a quark, or--well, you get the idea. The mosaic is big, and every person in Npydyuan is a tiny micro-tile of it. 081413 #worm In muck-covered panic, Me sees the great maw at the rear of the truck has been jammed open several inches. They slog their way over to that flickering mouth of light. It is just barely wide enough. Him wriggles through. Me, slightly fatter, forces himself through also, but the jagged edge of the door claims his red sweatshirt. He barely manages to grab the something special that Krim had put in there--seems so long ago now. Me is not cold, because fires are dancing luridly all around. Him and Me see that they are somewhere downtown, halfway down a concrete ramp off a side street. But they've never seen downtown like this before. An unholy orange light reigns over all. The snow-sky looms down on the scene like a canopy over a devilish circus. Him and Me cough and sputter, looking wildly around. 090007 #human Here's the other, possibly the only problem: I'm gay. Or at least enough of me is that I--yeah, you know the rest. I'm gay. 040004 #human I just smiled look-away-shyly at an old crone. She was making her way to a table. It is the table by the window. She is beautiful (of course) 000094 #human not because i am blind but because i stop myself right before the point--just as i used to do as mike so rudely pointed out, when playing the keyboard. i would start a song, get going, and then quit because i left behind the memorized part and didn't want to sound stupid. tae says the first thing is not to ignore even if it's just a whiff of a gut feeling. even if you think you just thought it up. go with the urge to look over your shoulder or do whatever. go with the urge. 000096 #squirrel its okayt to be on the same level with me it doenst mean your stepping down i eamn shit matthew you dont have to be the golden boy with me. i hiope not which is both what i think has been exp[ceted of you since you were a kind and what women ahve expected of you as a nd adult. hm. that makes it sound like itys not my fault its not your fault you know i dont' always believe that how can yo not believe that whats to belive ill tell you it comes with the territoty. what territory i was getting to that--the teritory of golden boy. includes alwasys being responsible. i bet it also includes only going out with the most desireable pristine nice girls. or so it eseems yes and i finds them incredibly fucking boring. so why do it vbecause it is immensely less scary. 110000 #human and then there was the man who wrote poems and stories and he gave them away free, he distributed them in quirky local bookstores and on the Internet, he left them fluttering in the breeze and tacked to streetlights, he left stacks of them in restaurants and coffeeshops. he gave them all away. and then when he was about to die, someone asked him why he never got any of them published or sold any of them or claimed copyright credit for them, and he thought about his answer, and how all his life he had told himself it was because the fame didn't matter, it wasn't notoriety he was after, he had just wanted to say those things, type those things, and giving them away had made them free, made them honest, and finally he said to the person who asked, "because i was afraid they weren't any good." 081313 #copperhead So finally, just like that, I do. But isn't that really always the way it works? I mean, really, when you think about it. No matter the decision, there's always a time when you're not doing it, and then there's a time when you are doing it. No matter how momentous or trivial, one ultimate bit gets flipped. A one becomes a zero, or a zero becomes a one, and that's it. You're off. No matter how long you deliberate at the end of the high dive, staring at the crazy-waving black lines at the bottom of the pool, knowing someone is in line behind you, hearing the drone of a thousand anonymous judges not looking at you—are they?—no matter how many endless minutes you stand there, dripping, mostly naked, mortal, there is always one instant when you are no longer standing there. 081413 #worm While Me removes what's left of his clothing, the taupe plastic contours of the room begin to vibrate. After a few moments of fairly impressive shapeshiftery, a large basin forms, into which hot bubbly water begins to gush. Me lets out a rather large, hawkish breath, and steps gingerly into the bath. It smells faintly of rose. It is perfect. He leans back, and the tub's surface meets his every knot and twist with gentle resitance. Extra water jets reveal themselves at his feet, hydrotherapeutically manipulating pressure points. When the tub is full, the water shuts itself off and Me is left in warm, weightless silence. He sobs with abandon for a while. The little boy had looked so familiar. How could someone that young and beautiful want to die? How could Me have let things get that far? It was a dream, it was a dream. But -- 081413 #worm Around the corner, down the hill, to the quiet side of the vibrant neighborhood. It's always one step closer to dusk, here. Him and Me observe a field of dewy bluegrass, under a proud banner of stars. In the middle of this perfect night, an angel-haired girl dips her fairy wand into the bird bath; raindrops jump out. Butterflies in beautiful chaos surround her lacy wings. Look closer at the shape of her eye--she's made of butterflies. The wand is made of butterflies. Even the butterflies are made of butterflies! Him and Me push a breeze into the outstretched wing of one of them. It flutters, and the flutter flutters others. Caught in the pattern, they transfer the growing wave upward and outward, from the grass to the heavens, and the scene dissolves into a riot of pure chaos. 081413 #worm Or is the line of demarcation smaller, more individual? For that matter, is the individual synonymous with the small? It depends on the aspect of your radar screen, one supposes. Maybe the difference between then and now is Bnabe's death. Maybe when the hummingbird hummed over his coffin as the first teaspoonful of dirt hit--coffin? Wouldn't he have preferred a fiery consumption? A return into the smoke he always said he was a pillar of? But who were Him and Me to protest, mere particles in the fringes of the funeral's great wave? A funeral's a cruelly public affair, and the property rights to a dead man's soul get portioned according to civil laws penned without regard to the quirks of unofficial, lifetime-to-lifetime clanships--maybe at that moment, the old days became the new. 062513 #human #eel Another solid day of work. Hoping for more good weird dreams like living at grandma and grandpas old house and the neighbor who insisted I mow the lawn and had automatronic wooden animals and it turned out a whole cotillion of scary but intriguing and sexy demons lived there like the guy with numbers in his eyes and haylee the catlike animal woman that was bare throated laid back animalistic purring smiling dangerous, or the disappearing apartment on the umpteenth floor. There was sex in these dreams, sex like I'm not dead or diseased yet, like there's still a little life in the old boy yet. And even tho I've still got a gut (as celi's all too willing to point out) my arms are getting a little pumped from toting rocks and rolls of sod, and that's fun, nobody can deny. 081413 #worm The time has come to cross the next line. The Snoke opens its steamy teeth, and lets out a naked chuckle. Boots scuffle in the dank dark. Listen: do you hear that? Drums. Farther down the corrider, a tawny glow. The walls begin to dance; shadows play in the recesses of the stone. A chantlike song fills up the permanent night. The tunnel opens wider. Water gives way to mud. A ragged circle of people sways within the ancient chamber. Most are shirtless, most are men. There are thirty, maybe forty people here, singing, drumming, and, here and there, two or more at a time, dancing to echo the gyrations of the flames. Sweaty muscles glow bronze in the firelight. Follow the sparks up: they disappear into the dark. There must be some way out up there; the cavern is not filled with smoke. 060105 #human later that same day I'm queasy, bleary, snuffly, aching; my love handles jiggle; I can't smell right and I probably DON'T smell right; I've wasted most of my week alone, and I'm still behind in my class; every time I belch I want to puke; and along the side of my nose inside is a boil -- or a gin blossom? -- the size of that car that sat there, hood up, blackened, old, in the middle of the middle lane of the highway this morning, while everybody struggled to find the quickest way to get around it and get going, on to wherever it is we were all going before that derelict piece of junk that could be us next time slowed us down and made us put on our brake lights one right after another. As I passed, I got a glimpse of the car's erstwhile driver. He was just sitting there. Just sitting there. 081413 #worm Me pilots the Moth's Wing deftly under the cleft of limestone above the waterfall. He barely disturbs the queen anne's lace on the gravel bar. Of course, he had some help from Him during that landing, if you can call screaming like a ninny and clutching the console "help." But whatever. The point is, they're on the ground--half in the shallow rill of the creek, in fact--and Me's feeling a little more masculine than he is wont to feel. The sensation leaves him a little drunk, as on a robust brandy--not insensate with euphoria, but pleased. Well pleased. Him and Me disembark--Me secures the guy lines with more skill than he knew his knuckly hands possessed--and walk on down the stream, stepping from boulder to root, to low rise of gravel, to opposite bank, and then back in. Weaving, they flow with the serpentine water. 091313 #trout Except, then--something happened. My girlfriend took one last look at me, pushed her coffee cup halfway across the linoleum, and stood up with sex and fear in her great brown eyes. The clink and shuffle of the cafe shifted almost imperceptibly into a lower gear as she wended past the booths and tables, and stopped in front of the counter. Her insanely feminine face was just about level with his massive shins and calf muscles. The sweat and sinew of him made her skin look so soft and so pale by comparison. It's like his presence was brutally fucking her presence in the space between their mutual strangenesses, silently, while we all sat or stood there, everyone else still mostly doing what they were doing but me holding my breath. And she was sucking on his brutality like a calf on a merciful teat. 081413 #worm #roach Krim goes into the fire first. She uses it as a portal to another era; one of eggs, bacon, and dignity. She slips back to an age when people took the time to spread their papers out all over the cafe table, to pore. While she is in that cafe, in that time, she stays busy. She gives something to Me. She fucks with some people's minds. She pours a lot of coffee. She goes naked behind the waterfall. She gets wet, behind the boathouse doors. And finally, she gets fucked--big, fast, hard and twice in a row. She's needed this for so long. When she comes back out of the fire, she catches some shit from one of her buddies. Is it Sruky? or Batuk who says, seeing her flushed face and rumpled skirt, Oh, I guess you didn't like that, huh? Shut up, she says, and they bat and dodge at each other, dancing with the flames. 081313 #copperhead There's so many rules you're supposed to follow, and so many of them are contradictory, and it's like the road map of the soul was designed by the comment section of a tech blog, and everybody says their thing as if they're just so right, as if they've just said the one thing that's going to make everybody go "Oooooh," and go masturbate in the eternal rightness of these final, sane, all-seeing, good-humored words, and everybody who doesn't say their thing like that pretty much goes to so much trouble to not sound like that that it comes off as sounding even worse, until basically your brain becomes a potato chip and there's no way to keep track of all the catch phrases, mantras, and moderately sensible reminders, I mean there's just really no way at all to know how to exist in this world. Dreams? 082313 #gull 4/16/02 What I need is a multidimensional space for text, rather than a heirarchical system which delineates files and folders. Because a file is basically linear, and it tends to be a stopping point. I don't want those divisions, I don't want those walls. I want it to be like the cirrus and the stratus clouds, and the blue and the breeze, and the breathtaking polyfurcations of the wet, naked tree branches--how it all flows continuously, dramatically, smoothly or suddenly--but always with such Imperfection as is so far unattainable by human artifice!--together! So you would be able to put text anywhere on the computer you wanted, in whatever-sized chunks because it's all really one big chunk, being viewed from various perspectives at various times. User-definable dimensionality. 081413 #worm Me turns white, and crumples. He's had a rough day. He knows now what it feels like to be really cold. All he's had to eat since yesterday is coffee. He's not used to garbage-covered assfucking or riots with explosions or escaping down the sewer. So he's passed out. He'll be okay. He's going to be half dragged half carried into a spare bedroom--though not actually on the bed with its clean linens, of course--by Him and Barp (although Him really is going to end up doing most of the work), and he's going to have some dreams, and then he's going to wake up a little later and have a nice, warm bath. He'll fall half asleep again in there, and have some more dreams or visions. It will all ultimately be rather reinvigorating. But in the meantime, Barp and Him are going to sit in Barp's living room and discuss some things. 081413 #worm But for some odd reason, I don't do that. For some odd reason, I speak up. I hail you. I open a hailing frequency, sir, and I have you on the main screen. I wave to you, and you wave back. Net apology: zero. You smile. I am infinitely expanded. I smile back at you. For the first time in my life, I really see you as you are. And you are beautiful. I don't care if you're fat. I don't care if you never quite reached this galaxy. I don't care if your ship blew up, or whether your species finds solace in toads. I don't care if I never get to touch you; I've touched you. I know you are a great lover. I don't care if you made your fingers into a gun, and blew me away in the back of a two-seater clown car. I love you. And I still do and I always knew I'd see you again. Here. By the lake. Always knew you'd be waiting. As I have been for this day. 081413 #worm #roach The cafe is noisy. This is the peak time. People all around you are interweaving complicated patterns simply, saying, in highly secret codes of flatware clanking, coffee sloshing, flints sparking, ashtrays (chucked edge-first, on table-tops) precessing to a halt, orders up! and sullied plates whisked bangingly away in bus-tubs, everything they cannot say in words. Take it all in. You may need to decode all this someday. So take it in, but remember to leave a big tip. That waitress actually smiled at you! And at the cash register, when she said, You're welcome, it sounded like she really meant it. Today the cafe is a plank-and-rusty-nail structure in front of a parking lot buzzing with summer bugs. The asphalt black shines bright, reminding Him of his friend Bnabe, day-star of other summers long since past. 072103 #human A mourning dove impersonates an owl not far from here. Rain remains miles away; it's been teasing all afternoon. Pray for the afternoon to turn evening, for the evening to turn to night, for the night to wash away everything. A tiny human soul howls out in so much sadness it makes the heart want to burst. This is alive time. Someday you'll wake up from this dream too, shrug your shoulders, look at your mug while you're brushing your teeth and think, "That was weird...." Please, waking-up me, don't forget about still-dreaming me. Come back and collect me. Come share your life with ours, yours and my odd little family, and let's go back and forth between the worlds at random. Please. (Mama robin is still in the nest in the corner of the front porch. Rain rain rain rain rain.) 103012 #eel And they came. From everywhere, young and old, male, female, even more journalists. And i started walking around, hopping from level to level, feeling the stone under my feet. The microphone lady was there with a bullhorn but i called her microphone lady. She was trying to get people to do something a certain way or listen a certain way but i called down to her, it's all right. Thank you but it's okay. Can i have the microphone please. Can you please pass it up, and they did. They passed it to me but i didn't even need it to keep making my speech. At one point i could tell i was kind of losing them, losing a little steam, so i got back on track. I was talking about writing. There were three things but the one i remember landing on was this: be honest be honest be honest. 081413 #worm Now he was getting somewhere. Now he was getting hard. His dogged determination to become nostalgic was finally gaining ground. The wine was probably helping. That sleek chest, that impudent laugh, those succulent cheeks, bolstered by the force of Ltiky's backwards-looking, lonely lust, were disintegrating the piled-up barricades of years of sensible experience. Cock in hand, wine bottle empty, he was really impressing himself now. He knew she wouldn't look the same anymore. She would have to be fatter, or thinner, or wiser--he pictured little crow's feet, and curiously, his arousal surged! He knew she could never be so cruel to him again. He knew for an absolute certainty that there was no way she would show up wearing that same leather skirt she used to wear. Nevertheless -- 020003 #human They're mopping the floor. Examine that statement. They actually that girl, the taller one, who laughed at my spin're mopping her wrists bend femininely and her ample butt swivels slightly. Her feet clump along the that one, the one my feet aren't touching, the one with all the specks and divots these girls see every day they work, the one ignored by all the marching downtown feet, the one of mauve and dun slate tile floor and now it shines, inviting me to leave. It's almost time to leave. What happened? Where does the time go? What's wrong with this dream? Oh lord, not that again. 020597 #eel He said to me, "I used a triangle bit today," and seemed so pleased I had to smile, and I asked him how it worked and he explained it to me, and i remember thinking to myself with pride and excitement, "my brother's going to be a woodcarver!" 081013 #dog HER: What? You have a strange look on your face. HIM: Well . . . it's just . . . . HER: What? HIM: Well, why did you want to go home after the first one? HER: I don't know. Why do you? HIM: [at some level realizing she has just given him an opportunity both to avoid hearing the answer to his question, and to talk about him self, and silently, he thanks her for that gift] Well, I guess because of some kind of shame. Like, okay, poof, that's it, everything I felt about you can now be described in terms of some little glop of jelly and life goes back to normal, good morning, how are you, what's your name, that sort of thing. HER: Wow. That's too bad. HIM: Well, why do you want to go home after the first orgasm? [oho! he has remembered his question after all] HER: Because, my friend, I— 081413 #worm First to respond to his invitation was his old arch-nemesis: the powerful pull that the crowd, the other, the exotic, had had on her. He recalled the desperation with which he had struggled psychically to protect his claim on the perfection of her breasts. He remembered the astonishing lustful howl that thrust out of his soul when that claim was again and again denied. He remembered, with the inebriating clarity of shame, how ineptly he had acted against his own predilection for solitude, for understatement, for retreat, in order to will himself to become the kind of natural force he knew she would not choose to resist. Such acting was always just that--acting--and every time, he saw her see through it. His guts atwitter with the precariousness of these memories, he tried to picture his imminent reunion with her. 010314 #jonquil Not only that, it was words. It said, > Tomorrow youll > see what youve > broken and torn > tonight 000096 #human i glanced over at the trash strewn on the orange-lit street, left over from Locust Fest. I get the urge to walk among, it, sift through it maybe. Is that anything like wanting to eat the cum after the orgasm. And, I get the urge to type. Is that anything like sprouting a big erection after weeks of worry and impotence? Cuz I did, I felt like recording. Typing. Writing, whatever you call it. I like the term "typing" cuz that's what it is--after all, when it really appeals, it is the physical act that appeals. 081013 #dog HIM: Whose fault is it? ME: Is what? HIM: That you quit believing in yourself. ME: No one's. HIM: I see. And what are you going to do about it now? 081413 #copperhead Tall girl lets her composure go into a controlled slip for a moment; her laugh undulates her body forward; the brunt of her smile goes into the floor; when she straightens up she rocks back on the four-legged stool she's perched atop. Finally her motion dampens and she locks gazes with her doe friend, and she sticks her tongue out even slower, even longer this time, and makes another unabashed, long, wet lick, and her upper lip curls into the faintest trace of a snarl this time, and the doe-eyed girl almost looks scared and lost for a flash, before the soft smile and the giggle can escape again, and again she copies, but her licks are never quite as long, never quite as slow, always a little more cartoonish compared to her swan-necked, lanky, hard-eyed girl friend.