Grand Marais, Minnesota

I fear all the things that we fear really happen, predicted with crystal ball eyes. New York City: we're already there, living beyond our meager means and coalescing poetry from air we pierce with heels too high for practicality. I'm writing to share what will happen next (not necessarily in the trick sequence of chronological order but next in a sense we cannot see):

We'll cast aspirations (material, love) out windows of 6th story walkups we walked too many times and we'll move to my cabin in old Grand Marais. We'll stop writing poetry and began to understand that poetry is a poor translation of a way of living, and we'll live this way, glowing in the garbled classical beamed cross airwaves that paints the dark of empty roads swirled white with snow; we'll learn to live like locals in two outfits or maximum three and know the trails like they are extensions of our veins, spread into acidic earth that births the pines. We'll wash dishes in the tavern and count tips while paying riddance to the rent we paid in Brooklyn. We'll swear we'll never move back East, back West, abroad-- we will.

Hike to the Beaver Dam

We hiked through cold that crept through our soles, schooling my feet
on the making of bricks. The trees seemed to crowd close around us,
not used to warm creatures, clothed in such colorful furs.
My mother said Shh! Let's listen for owls, and I answered:
Who!
Who!
Who!
In laughter I saw like a phantom that page, full of names,
titled solemnly "Deaths". Mostly olds, with names that ring
of eras passed and many nights well spent.
At the end of the list is a name I know well, under bolded title
'10-'11 like one of us needed to go. The fearsome thing,
was how the name nestled neatly, a perfect fit to the page,
like Death consulted all listings of deaths
before deciding who goes and who stays.

The cold makes beards of breath and fools of us,
in bag lady coats and scarves pulled tight 'round necks.
I'm learning to tell white from white
to follow paths of snow. I pass a pretty patch of pink
where rabbit feast was had, chunks of fur adorning ice,
At the bottom of the gully is a clearing and a beaver dam.
Between the walls of trees the sun is sinking lower, dragging
paint across the sky. I'm breathing flags of white which mark
my misbelonging, my hot breath and bricks for feet.
The ghosts come tugging from my mouth and soon I'll go,
back up the hill, away and far from here.
Here, where the rodents have changed how the forest looks,
felling trees with teeth and piling them, those linking logs,
to dam the little river, grow it wide and flood the earth.
My mother says Shh! and I listen, listen, listen.

Newark, NJ

On the eve of Christmas Eve I am alone and after scrubbing wall to wall of my flat above the ghetto, I walk three miles while standing still on that backwards horse machine we call a treadmill. I practice being in love by smiling to myself and in the window made a mirror by the darkness of abandoned brick my mirror self smiles back.

For my friend

I want to say one day you will be famous, but those words lose meaning in existence and I realize this: that what you are you are, you are now, before, forever. And when no word you wrote exists, when every letter's melted into future fossil fuels and garbled waves way past the Milky Way, emitted in an era long forgotten, you yet will be a writer.

How things come to be

It starts with two, as it always does, who decide on a whim to get married without so much as informing their families. Their future oldest will later become increasingly suspicious the deed was done largely to secure fellowship money to travel the world. In Boston, still young, they almost begin to combine their genetic material with the intention of making humans who have never before existed and who would never exist again. They decide to wait, which certainly results in a wholly altered set of humans entering the world at a later date in time, possibly, not probably, but not impossible either, changing the course of the world.

These humans do come. Three of them, one lanky, one crazy, one charming. All three of these humans, like most humans, will have a healthy appetite for the lurid, and would admit to as much if pressed. All three are more discerning than the average human, but put this ability to use for very different purposes. The lanky and charming ones, when they reach the appropriate age, follow their parents in acquainting themselves with a two person worldview they build themselves, in pairs. The crazy one flits through passions, each as sincere as the last, always convicted but never confident.

The children's friends and lovers are people who were proximate for long enough to become fixtures, made permanent and treasured by the persistence of passing time. The crazy one once saw this for what it was and acquired a habit of pointing it out, sometimes uncomfortably, always too often, to those close to her, with mixed results.

The parents of these humans aged as humans do, becoming at once powerful and irrelevant; wise and out-of-touch.

The crazy one, in fits of lucid wisdom, sees this and life for what it is and understands the meaning seeping from the stated fact "the brain called itself the brain." But most of the time is merely crazy, driven like a golf cart by emotion and desire, flying airborne over obstacles and grinding the motor in ill-chosen gears.

Brianna

Her mother made her at fifteen,
too young to make new things,
she herself unfinished. Now
the thing she made's eleven,
crouched down, mad-haired,
wheezing like a punctured
toy accordion. (Her inhaler's
out.) Mother's come undone,
or so she hears in other words
from the closet where she's hiding,
crowded in by clothes her grandma
wears to go work at the bar.
Her mother doesn't know she's here
Brianna hears the words herself
I tried to kill myself
and this spectre of her mother
(who she thinks she's another
copy of) has her tied up,
cried up, locked up lighting
matches in the bathroom
just to watch them burn. Go out.
She's wound up an' hissin'
'cause the bus kids
say she psycho,
say her ma
got mennal issues.
Say she jus' the same.

6th Period

I have a long and lengthening list
of thing that do concern me:
the chaos of my notebook, stuffed
with slips of papers snatched from
students hands, etched with pools
of blood drawn in pink ink.
Stacks of papers, broken arms,
blue ink smeared on fleshy tongue.
Scabs. Spilled milk. Green beans up nose holes.
These things don't weigh on me but rather tug,
grabbing what's rough and not yet hewn.
While students age eleven multiply
by twelve on sheets made vast by numbers,
I hide at the window to verify the world
outside exists. The evidence is rising
in an L-shaped foundation and skeletal
frame of a building. It's stagnant and huddled,
in line for a meal at the Goodwill. It's legless
and begging for money. Beside the calloused court
behind our school two lego men in cartoon garments
pass spaghetti hosing towards a rusting tank
inscribed "PROPANE." No fuel, perhaps that's why
the school is cool today, the radiators idling
dormant. Amid the silence of pencils on paper
I'm snatched by fear and fear of fragility
and see the students and I, the desks and the chairs
launch skyward in fiery propulsion. We don't.
We wait, we multiply and pump propane,
shake cold cups of unclean coins,
spill blood in cities wrought in rust.

More Than I

It was an accidental graze, not engineered;
I hadn’t seen his face, nor he mine,
when arm met shoulder. He turned to speak
and seeing he was prepossessing,
more than I, I (faltering)
remembered that it always is a game. So I
played, spoke sumptuous words,
the sort you can only exchange
if you’ve lived and learned in places
with opulent names such as Blake and
Edina. I halved my attention
between what I said and how I said it
(which has mostly to do with a delicate
awareness of one's lips).
He bought for me a glass of wine
to see how I held something fragile.
I wished to tell him why I came here
(to watching buildings rise into air).
He didn't ask. I loudly laughed
at things I heard in half and together
we gestured wildly at what we ourselves
were apart of, picking who’d go home with whom
tonight. We spoke of three-tiered value
in translation innovation (business,
conflict, and intangibles)
and the plague of being a white girl
in the world at large. I left
with my numbers, all nine,
still mine, for I wanted our words
to hang overhead as he fucked
a girl more beautiful than I.

Brianna

They tell me she's a dreamer, adopted at age six by the
Dreamers of Newark, New Jersey. And she's in the clouds, it's clear:
dazed and gazing the days away til she turns twelve. They tell me
school's not been the most important issue in her life:
"social/emotional concerns have taken precedence," they write.
When I meet her she cries and clutches a cheap plastic album
of her and her father who died. I, the godless, pray he wasn't shot.

I find her science test and rip away page two:

7. Imagine a world where there was no acceleration.
Explain one problem you'd have, it asks.

Find the way to get into space or believe in god
and tell him to make the world change please, she answers.

She tells me this Halloween they handed out bullets instead of candy.
They tell me her haze is a Sertraline dream, one of ten million
prescribed. She tells me she don't be doing that no more, that crazy stuff,
'cause she be goin' to special ed this time. They tell me to check never,
sometimes; often, everyday on a form that never ends. I check and check and check.
I tell her look at me, at me, at me so I can tell her that I care and she
can see. She tells me that she's crazy and she's just like her mother,
pants down, outside, pregnant. I tell her look at me. I tell her that she's not.

I look for god and pray for math and reading to make the change he hasn't yet.

Scraps

The headlights of a passing truck carves exalted motion in
the stillness of the heavy fog, carving stolid beams
in spacious swirls. Buildings vanish in the vapor
swallowed whole by sea of sky. Eye contact this time of day
is solemn, calm and soaked in understanding: the sense or
senselessness of six a.m; the fullness of forlornness.

Ways to live

Let the sun extinguish and make your own with wax;
dimness is the habitat of nuance. Let the clamor
of intriguing things subside and dry.
Recall that your existence is improbable-
the thousand countless seeds that did not make us
in that tainted moment of creation. We're all dogged
by a million never-selves. Put between two fingers
all you wish to part with; bring it near and swallow.
Know you'll be outlived by every pill. Crawl into
the seasons of self with vigor and certitude.
You'll never see one twice. Caress indifference.
Wrap yourself in every dampened story that you see
until your skin is blackened with imprinted ink.

Ms. Darling

She became a teacher mostly to escape the curse of her first name. Mildred Darling. It had always sounded like a Victorian pun to her. By becoming Ms. Darling, she bisected herself and blotted out a half. The lesser half. That molding, dreadful joke of a name that lived between MILD and MILDEW. She never forgot, standing tip toed at the ponderous, gilded Oxford English Dictionary at her Elementary school library. Looking for her name and finding Mildew, instead. "A thin whitish coating consisting of minute fungal hyphae, growing on plants or damp organic material such as paper or leather."

Ms. Darling had spent her life afraid to be that whitish coating, the sordid disappointment of finding a plastic bag full of clothes wet from a trip to the beach two days past, ruined by carelessness.

But Ms. Darling, now, was faced with filling the shoes of her family name, the part of her identity she'd never given much thought to. Partly because to her it had always sounded like a

Use of terms of endearment can reveal little or nothing about the true quality of the relationship in question, she'd read once. Names were the same. Revealed little or nothing. Yet we carry them our whole lives. The weight of that.

Modus Vivendi

Fireworks sound like bombs but from this Brooklyn
rooftop, although the view is blocked I feel secure. I think it is
the unstrange smell of raspberry preservatives that permeates
the dark-but-not-yet-black unquiet; it harkens back to childhood days.
This is a city built of poetry so dense my senses become dumb
to it, the glare of many million ways to live all strung up,
hung to see. I sip the hipness, destitution, the bony-knuckled
beggars and the mariachi bands. I forget the flat-shoed, cruelly
dressed financiers are human, and hang on every well-starched edge
of their crisply dry cleaned suits, unsoiled by subway seats
(daily buttress of a thousand wearied sitters).
I wish to catalogue the characters and curate ways to live.
The urgency of choice is clearer nowhere more than here.

Truths

Mother’s lipstick tastes of blemishes and mirrors, age thirteen.
I dream of moving to Iran while living in the worst best place I’ve ever lived.
I’m scared of war and bombs and kidnappings for ransom so Newark doesn’t scare me.
I’m socially reckless and hopeless at romance.
Strange half humans roam this city, legless women of twilight and drug laced lopers of dawn.

A new book

A new book. Red, but not the red of stoplights or lipstick or firetrucks or Dorothy's ruby slippers. A shade, a hint, an undertone of orange, like the book (still blank) has an appreciation for nuance. And softness, for behind the plastic wrapping the book is creamy and tender of cover, unscathed by unscrupulous flicks of fingernails or snagging corners. Its edges are rounded like it knows at its nascent age that existence wears at what protrudes unprotected. Its maker was wise.

And now I must say I, interjecting uncouthly in the first person, for year as I do to be a crafter of characters and weaver of fictions I must learn these things. So here I commit to a life of unrestrained reading and writing, commencing today.

When you touch the big untouchable you see that words are claws that shred what is and isn't.

May 2011

The last time you were in the country for the summer was three years ago. You were 19. With weather warm enough for bare legs you almost expect your high school boyfriend to walk out of the engineering building and hook his elbow with yours. He doesn't, of course, and won't-- it's been two years since he replied to any of your messages and he's far from here, now. It's an anachronism to even have it in your head but there it is. It's May. You wish the neon confetti of springtime weren't here yet; you wish to pin the fluorescent floral carpet on the sidewalk back to the trees it fell from, bit by bit until you're dusted in fine yellow pollen and sneezing.

When it gets to be too much you watch a TV show about a dead girl, alone in your bed, face lit by blue light of your laptop, and you remind yourself that people die, that there are accidents and injuries and unexpected illnesses. Not just people on TV shows and in the novels you read for your lit class but real people with bodies and mass and weight and that impermanent physical existence

You live with seven friends in a house with walls so thin you always know the whereabouts of every other person, a mental map you never really wanted to have. After the first month of living with walls like these you can identify anyone from a few seconds of shared decibels. You know the way that Cody makes his coffee, the rhythm of his arms shaking the grinder; the way Kyle pounds on the stairs and the sigh of Jonathan; the purposeful strides of Emily.

You live next to a family. They own the morning; you own the night. When you wake early enough on the weekends you hear them as if they are in your bedroom, the toddlers taunting daddy daddy daaaaaady daddy daddy daaaady and shrieking harmless shrieks of childhood, impotent. Your bedroom and kitchen are adjacent to your backyard that shares a fence with theirs and in this way your lives intersect but never otherwise. It's clear: they own the back, with their postage stamp yard neatly kept, bushes high but not opaque. You own the front, with your chipped and chipping front porch and its illegal, not-suited-for-outdoor-use furniture, which you moved inside after the citation and then immediately back outside. You call it the stoop and you gather there, day after day until the year without warning pitters down to a slow drip, and stops.

To Do

Live a life laden with late night egg-in-the-hole mishaps

morbid thoughts

If you could access your dead friend's gmail account, would you chat with your friends and tell them there's gchat in heaven?

It's just that, I always want to say-- Ty knew everyday what the rest of us seem to battle to prove. That life is good.

I awoke from the worst dream: a world where people died and killed themselves.

Weariness

I do envy the trees
for they never seem displeased
when in spring they must
burst into green

Tips on Mourning

1. Keep your hands in motion like two birds, tapping, cracking knuckles, pinching fingers, pushing bits of fractured pictures round a table 'til they come together-- anything at all.

2. Forget about plans altogether and live from hug to couch to bed.

3. Find a song to sing to; do it loudly.

4. Indulge in silence and fill the fridge with beer to take the edge off.

5. Don't do dishes for a week.

6. When you feel your hand shaking when you're putting on chapstick and you thought you were okay tell yourself I am okay, I am okay.

6. Make root beer floats and when you need to Guinness floats.

7. Throw yourself against the dark damp grass outside a temple far from home and let the warmth seep from your body til it's numb and something silent draws you back to bed.

8. On the way home pick a purple tulip, almost black, and put it by your bedside.

9. Invent harnesses to hang your heavy bodies above the puzzle table so better to see the pieces and scream WE'RE NORMAL WE'RE NORMAL until the laughter roars louder than the thoughts you can't shake off.

10. Spend all your money on drop-in fees at Bikram Yoga because you need to suffer somehow; heat suffices.

11. Don't return emails, or calls, except some.

12. Cry really hard at least three times, once in the dark, curled like a flower in fetal position, and once at least in public.

13. Binge on buckets of candy and custard until you hate yourself anew.

14. Keep singing the same song, slowly, off key, half ghosts of half notes under your breath when you're walking anywhere alone.

15. When you're sick of being sad you drink until you dance madly, badly, limbs wild puppets for a terror you didn't know you had.

16. Research hypothermia on Wikipedia in class, if only to remind your classmates of the morbid lurid darkness they aren't burdened with.

17. Find someone new to melt your body into. Wish it were that easy to do away with matter.

18. Watch every video you ever took for glimpses of him living but find he's stiff and listless in the background, every time.

19. Let the dry and airless sobs exhaust themselves.

20. Get over the irony of sailing, of swimming, of darkness, of tie-dying shirts. Ty died.

21. Bicker bitterly with someone who hurt you once and use sharp words like forks to stab them as you assure yourself how little you care for their pain.

22. Be hurt.

23. Remember he was 23, almost 24.

Mother:

Snoopy card sender
Ice skate lacer
Quick forgiver
Messes-in-the-kitchen permitter

Binocular toter
Speedy hiker
Birdsong expert
Maker of homemade pizza dough

Risotto lover
Red wine drinker
Practical shoe buyer
Loyal supporter of NPR

Better at making beds than I
Has a pantry eagle-eye
Lets me make my own decisions
(on my wardrobe at age 5)

Bed time back massager
Solver of 1000 piece puzzles
(and practical problems)
Chocolate chip scone maker extraordinaire

Essay proof reader
See's Candy sweet tooth
Member of book club, gourmet and bridge club
Sender of supplemental gift cards to Whole Foods

Stasher of Milk Duds and Twizzler Nibs
Paragon of Minnesota Nice
Giver of unconditional love
Lets you lick the bowl

Lark & Industry

I went to class an hour too early one morning in May when the trees
had already sprung that garish confetti of springtime, the neon buds
that sap the sun for power. Lark I thought and sought out music of the bulbs--
the blue and yellow orbs like sirens for the season. Strewn across the squares
of stone once home to ice, the neon arbor sprinkles. All around the limber stalk
and tendrils of growth but in my favorite place to sit and take my tea i heard
the roar of industry, cement trucks heaving with the liquid stone of labor,
wrought iron drifting in stolid beams through the air. Higher! Bigger! Glory!
roared the rumbling blueprints of progress. Here we'll frost this behemoth of science
with an extra floor. More labs more space to grow the strains of cells and prod
the rodents of research to churn out answers to our sufferings. Here we'll split
matter from matter til we're nanofied. The daffodils visibly shuddered, fragrant
with fear, and I and my flesh fraught with fright shivered too.

The Novelty of Future

Modernity and its discontents, I sigh, one day, too cold
for spring. Intoxicated on the guise of my hilarity,
I become a puppeteer of people. The frontier is dead
so we make our own in bars, the best of which are built like loops
to simulate distance traveled. Round and round; the Wild West
replaced by pubs, we, like children, riding on the plaster ponies
of a merry-go-round. -Isms are the enemy, we learn in class; so is
anonymity. Assigned seats are an artifice of home.
The steam engine, the locomotive, the clock: machines
have a way of making their own children. See the crazy train
on the trestle, the wound of an open mine, the belch of a smelter
huffing gilded hell. Divisions of matter and motion prevail
as new rulers of the universe; the edifice of a New World--
the Epoch of Avarice. But we the pioneers of west and endless
restlessness can only go in circles on the surface of a sphere.

Pig Latin

The leprosy of the West is restlessness; I could chase
the object of my fluttered heart around these shelves of
printed words until the ink evaporates, dizzied on the
dehumidified chill of the special collections section
and the ambiguity of reciprocation. To reiterate I'll lose
myself with plain intention in the stacks of books til
breath is ragged and I find myself disarmingly alone. The tragedy
of modernity is the death of the tragic hero. Wrap these
printed scarves round heads like warriors we're not. Survivors
of the widowed womb must feign detachment and must wind away
towards something much like clarity, remembering it all comes
from the sun. Sing a song of yellow light before the night falls
like it will for summers now and ever til the stars extinguish in a cold inhale.

Three days to feel better

I still remember three years past in a poetry class when I saw
a frosted cookie sitting mild & pastel on the floor. Strange I thought,
and nothing more, until I gathered books to go and looked again
and saw it was a candy wrapper. I questioned everything. Deception
is scalding, making sudden victims of faulty perception machines. Entities
seem to exist without us but exist only within in us. Moods appear
to come and go of self-sped volition but rather rise and fall inside
at one's own whims. I could wreck myself with a thousand sadnesses,
each unique and effervescent, irreplaceable. I feel as though
a hapless boat tossed about on torment seas but it's untrue; I am an ocean.

February, 11:45 pm

Did I imagine the way our feet began to shuffle slower, slower on the ice outside our separate homes as we drew nearer?

Bread

I come from a city far east of here where the people are known for poetry
and obstinance and reliable untimeliness. I watched the city break;
it happened slowly in unsure strokes. I saw the blood spill from a skull
and blossom on rain stained pavement like watercolors, too wet.
Limp limbs startle in their sudden uselessness, revealing that
a human is a slightly more elaborate model of an arcade game,
a four-pronged claw maneuvered by a joystick. Pitch the plums
from the fruit cart to use it for the body. This is a third world country.
Compose a mourning song to moan as we make the procession. This is
a third planet world. There are endless ways to honor the dead but only one way to die.

I come from a history of fearful courage and towering cowardice.
A race of fearless vanquishers who are self-defeating in their fear of one
another. Now they possess the automated metal spitters to tear the flesh
of childrens' chests asunder. They do. The plums are crushed beneath the rush
of a hundred raving men shot by the sight of blood in the streets.
The plum pits crunch beneath shoes like bits of bone and the street is
smeared in purple skins dried in the heat absorbed by asphalt though it's winter.

I come from a people like all other people, features indefinite and human.
I take solace in bread and the kneading of dough, of making to consume.
It is to be a little god to create, devour. To create, devour.

The Cartographer of Human Experience

You says food gives you nightmares when you eat before you sleep;
I laugh and say I never have bad dreams. That night I dream I'm
on vacation with my brothers, mother, father, all my friends from
childhood and my roommates in a hotel by the seaside.
The beach is creamy and I linger there til daytime,
on the silky sand and the bed which you climb into with me. Even sunlight
won't interrupt this dream. Why do we associate springtime
with rebirth when everything is melting, melting? When I left your house
a black man on the street said "Hey, white chocolate" and
I looked at my feet and felt beautiful (which feels like
the opposite of chest gravity). You say you've been sad.
I've been sad too but I can't say out loud what comes to mind
when I recall the most profound thing I've ever felt: prostrate
in Lake Michigan and wanting not-existence. So I stay silent. You say
you want to make a map of human experience, of every type of gravity
of chest and head and throat. Two nights later I don't sleep at all,
winking through the hours, itching, wincing at the sunlight of six in the morning.
It appears we've been thrown into life without choice, but
by believing in our birth we've chosen even that. By living
we are dying. You don't know it but I only like you more when you
are stupid, foolish. I love myself for liking you and even if
you never know or feel the same I thank myself for thinking this because the thought
its making me feel beautiful. Tonight I wear an opalescent dress and life is mine.
By choosing not to die we are responsible in full for living.

Chicago, USA

Warm winds whip a city by the lakeside free
of wintery pretension, icebergs rebecoming
reflective shields on asphalt. Meanwhile an army
open fires on a crowd in a mountain city, far from here,
gray and brown as this one, six thousand miles away.
A boys head bashed in by the butt of a gun.
The most violent way to use an AK-47 is to smash
skulls with it, not firing it at all. In every video
there are others taking videos and however improbable
it is these videos have filtered to Chicago
where I watch the boy in red die a dozen times.
In one framee his mouth is open, screaming something
inaudibly, fingers outstretched like stars, torso slumped
against a cement blockade, the empty street. He wildly
runs his hands back through his hair. The next frame
his hair is stickied, thick with blood that looks like syrup.
It strikes me most the way his arms jostle with mock-life
men carry him while running, impromptu litter bearers
grabbing limbs. Suddenly the all of it seems of relative
and relatively little weight and I feel weightless,
hanging in the bloodied streets of a city far from here.

Staying Lighter Later

The sauna's heavy hotness makes my hair feel smooth and
silken, masquerades as clarity and calm behind my forehead
smooth and beaded. Every night I water wilting half-thoughts,
not-things littered in a darkish garden, brutishly unkempt.
Eons pass between the first warm day of snowmelt
and a week of open windows. Habits make the stale air ache.
Waking up to melting dreams is meddling with getting
bodies out of bed. The pinkness of the evening spreads like
rash or illness and for an hour the earth belongs to the day again.
Still I'm itchy, slipping on snowflakes rebirthed as ice.
Bruises sicken pale skin and winter lingers though the air
is warmer. False summer of the sauna parches. The seedlings
will be stomped in the frostbite of daydreams mistook for love.

Valentine's Day

After sex I see myself whole and
wholly human, as I would if unaware
of self, so I imagine. Legs to be
legs and arms to be arms. We've squeezed
meaning into flesh and flesh
does not take to essence well. Yet
we coil it 'til skin is taut, bodies
bursting with the weight of
perception, prodded, misperceived
by its own faulty tools for perceiving.
Sleep alone with heavy lids and
light a candle as a stand-in lover
'til the flicker drives you batty; blow
it out. Dreamless nights pass like days.

Funk, Sex, & Chocolate Milk (II)

The first warm day of spring rips right through
the snowbanks we're accustomed to.
Winter melts. Sunspots blind. On the black
tarred roof of a poorly stocked convenience store,
we meditate, the six of us. I lose myself in pronouns,
I and we and you and he, and on the sun-warmed tar we find
a pigeon carcass. Its toes are curled and scaly like
an alien's. Flecks of whitish flesh burst from feathers,
subway gray, and look like seed or grain, alive.
We decide to hold a water burial and march
straight to the closest sea which is a lake, infinite
and tundra-like. We dump the bird out of its
plastic shroud and watch it splash into the little stream
that twists through bergs of snow into the lake.
The current flips the pigeon belly up and minutes pass;
we watch it, like a beacon, pass from view. Home
on my front porch, I sip the warmth from air
and feel the spring leech from my flesh; I watch
the day, complaisant, settle round the sunset
like a heavy meal. It ends without precision, lingering
'til it's gone. Today I find myself insatiable, and read
through notes from class like they are words to live by:
I'm tempted by society to flee from facing death
but to tranquilize anxiety alienates one from oneself.
Your death, like mine, will be like every other death
but in your death you are irreplaceable. The only thing that I
and I alone can do is die. Every choice I make
is a choice of how I'll die. Today I find
I want it all in excess: air and wine and existentialism;
paper hearts and songs about the seaside.

Script for video essay, or I'm absurd.

A friend told me in a dream a little girl turned to him and said, what if human life isn’t linear? I’ve thought about it every day now, for two weeks. In Chicago the thought is heavy, deafening, deadening, but here, in California it seems to fill the horizon.
To look at the ocean in modern times is to suspend disbelief. To believe in finitude against all evidence.
The beach is scattered with drowned delicacies. Finger-thick strands of seaweed, piled up like sticky pasta. A single swollen cacti limb. Ragged spiky things. At low tide the beach is flat and wide and I decide to run with my eyes closed and see if I still exist. Being and nothingness. I say this as I breathe.
As I’m running on the beach a man throws a football over my head and it turns into a seagull and flies away. That’s what it looks like, at least, but I guess it doesn’t matter whether it happened or it didn’t.
Nietzsche said, the universe is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things
I write this down one day in Introduction to Existentialism.
Nietzsche’s madman says, “who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon?”
As I’m leaving the beach I see something strange. A man on a skateboard is being towed up the hill by a motorized wheelchair. The man on the skateboard has a baby slung under one arm, like a football, and the man in the wheelchair has a long white beard and a Chihuahua puppy in his lap and as I pass the young man, and the old man, and the baby and the dog they all turn to me and laugh. Or that’s what I thought would happen, but it didn’t.

words that come to mind

filet
flank
flayed
eviscerate
disintegrate
abominate
hallucinate
demolishing
pummel
ragged
raw

Takis Fuego

Two boys split a bag of Takis Fuego
on the red line. Methodically they lick
the snack, stripping spice from stick and
crunching it with relish. Fine dust scatters
from their lips; tiny demolition.
Takis Fuego paints their fingers matte and chalky
red. "One dollar for your self portrait.
Only one dollar for your self portrait," belts
the man who comes then leaves a second
time. "Less than four minutes."
His black three ring binder has a single
pencil sketch, a girl with shiny cheeks.
I don't have a dollar or the courage
but I wonder what he'd see, if he drew me.

Red Line, North and Clyborn

A woman on the train has a dog
who is her eyes. His name
is Promise -- the dogs are named
in training and can't be unnamed,
renamed (unless it sounds the same).
Godless dramas compass. The man
who's asking questions leaves
and I see the woman will never hear
my interest in her knowledge
(unless I tap her shoulder,
told her). The buildings glide
past through the windows skyline slender
slipping into view. The light is blinding
winding circuits that malfunction in
my brain. Seizures are my blindspot.
The woman's knuckles wrap the handle
Promise leads her off the train. All
the people reading papers crunching popcorn
closing eyes. I am blinded
winding brightness pummeling.
A girl sits down a world stitched
on her bag in brown.

Introduction to Existentialism

Kierkegaard considered himself a Knight of Resignation.
If one renunciates pursuit of earthly pleasures, there's no
getting back those joys. Forever they are distanced. I feel
my flesh might splinter from the loneliness of lecture, crack
like a peeling painting and into pieces wither, splitting,
lifted by a winter wind. Whole fragments would snag
on the twigs of a scraggly tree, haggard. Pitiless,
they'll hang like scraps of paper and to girls who run
past they'll be mistaken for cutout hearts. Knights of
resignation are destined to be aliens on earth. They'll dance.
Leap. But waver when they land. Their sad smiles will betray them.

Cavalry Cemetery

I see two men running, hurried, in orange hats:
grave robbers? No, they are joggers, shovel-less,
running like me from death in a sea of dead.
I turn away from them and cut past a monolithic
mausoleum. Nauseating. Do the granite walls
not suffocate a body? The asphalt path branches once and
then again but I know this ruse of choice. There is
one exit only. Oh marble nose half rubbed from face.
Oh boy child carved from rock so many years ago.
Clock that does not tick. Looming tomb. Does not
the weight of all this stone pin a body down?
Do not gilt mine in gold. I tell my particles
before I sleep that one day they’ll be freed. In their
shroud of immortality they do not hear. They know no time.