Oberkorn harvest in the key of eternal longing.....

It is the sound light makes as it breaks into

lavender shingles of dusk signaling the end of the day
a weeping orchestration chest
the variegated ponds of light peach, azure
dappled drips of orchid like hungover bad-
80's mascara, the tempo of the seasons split

into the feeling of your body inside her body

Like your body all alone ensconced inside the

curtain of your own flesh, the feeling at
sunset that somehow next harvest will be

more propitious, that life shouldn't hurt

this much at times

The resurrection of Goth Dan and the sisters of everlasting Mercy...

Goth Dan's countenance was the color of an aspirin you would find while cleaning out your grandmothers bathroom cabinet a week after her funeral. He had powdery, ashen cheekbones. He was attired always in black armor showcasing his chalky limbs and pill-flavorless skin. He despised sunlight. He had beautiful long hair. He was highly indifferent to his own hygiene. He loved to smoke clove cigarettes and play dungeons and dragons or magic the gathering for days on end. His father had disowned him. It is doubtful that he had ever met his mother. Goth Dan who was really into vampires. Who was discharged from the Navy for going crazy on a Nuclear submarine. Goth Dan who was fairly good with computers.

Goth Dan who (God love him) never fucking worked.

Goth Dan would sporadically crash with each of us from time to time. He lived with Hale for three years, one day just showing up and spending the night on the futon and then staying inside Hale's guest bedroom for a week not saying anything, playing renaissance warlord games on the computer.

We joked that Goth Dan would fit right at home living in a crawl space, paying thirty bucks a month for rent, boasting that all he needed was a roll of toilet paper, his ten sided dice and his deck of magic cards.

Goth Dan who had "clinical" depression and who could talk about Hegel and Nietzsche with second year grad school competency.

Goth Dan who almost all got us all killed drinking "liquid "cocaine" on New Years eve 2000. The
elixir of Jagger, goldshlager and rupplemintz alchemized was consumed in goblets, each of us imbibing more than our anatomies could stomach, each of us hurtling, passing out, waking up the next morning in a battlefield of abandoned liqueur bottles and carpet stains the size of small islands in the pacific.

Goth Dan who stood up in a very straight, erect, in a stalk like fashion and who would always give you a long overbearing hug every time he would see you. After he would refrain from his gratuitous embrace you would wonder to yourself why your girlfriend never hugged you that tight anymore.

I occasionally would see Goth Dan walking back from Sav-a-lot with two packages of hot dogs, some bread and soda, boasting that this was all he needed to live off of for weeks at a time.

Goth Dan who stayed with Hale for a few weeks last summer before hitching down to Kentucky to meet in person a girl who he met online while playing a fantasy game.

Goth Dan who none of us have heard from since.

The song below, Sisters of Mercy 1959, reminds me of Goth Dan. One morning after a party (my folks were out of town, whole house was a forbidden cumulus of cigarettes smoke) I stumbled upon Goth Dan listening to this song over and over again like a Gothic carousel stationed in Anne Rice's Back yard. The haunting arpeggio of the piano keys waltzing with the lead singers brusque baritone splashed out of the speakers gently, like holy water nipping the side of your cheek bone at mass and realizing you have something to confess.

The ballad is beautiful and poignant and is about a time that is lost that can never be revived.

When I stumbled across this song last night on Youtube I thought about Goth Dan. I wonder if he ever made it down to Kentucky. If he still spends months when he refuses to see the sunlight. If he ever hooked up and married that girl he met while playing role playing games on line.

One thing I am certain of is that next time I see Goth Dan again he will look at me very silently and then give me a long hug, squeezing tighter then most heterosexual males squeeze when they give an embrace, conveying to me with his chalky limbs how thankful he is simply to have someone right next to him at this particular stolen moment of time even as the wind blows wild once again.

For the autumn weekend when your life falls apart and it feels like 9-11 happened somewhere within the womb of your chest you take solace in this song

Overcast coat autumanal afternoon monopolized with cheap beer and cigarellos and earl gray tea and pedro the lion (2002),

My friend Joe first burned these CD's for me six years ago when I was working two jobs, seven days between 85-95 hours a week, killing myself driving the wedding dress flavored vanilla hearse shaped station wagon I would later live in across the dowry faced arteries of the bluff in medias shifts, stopping at the emerald plateau of Barnes and Nobles (sometimes twice a day, since that was the only starbucks in town at the time) to slurp down venti's coffee holding the miniature caffeinated silo in my hand as I escaped in the country the tea bag hued cupola of heavy clouds overhead pregnant and lachrymose with the acidic rain tears of the planet keening a picaresque sad clowns smile over the helm of my dashboard the silver vacuity of the prairie swallowing my every direction as I steered, aimlessly, into the country, driving, smoking, fantazising about the rustic barn I would one day live in and refurbish because my books would be published and I would then have money.

I remember the applause her lips would break into as I would watch her smile while stopping in for coffee, flirting with the scarlet haired mermaid with the leprechaun reverberating eyes who would aesthecially abscond my romantic advances ( I would later find out she was engaged) every time I would invite her out for a drink, sometime.

Today the patter of rain reminded me of the wished-for sting these ballads delivered, the soundtrack of sad countenanced wet asphalt colored afternoons, killing time between shifts, the dips and swills of the late afternoon clouds bulging overhead like a limp sail.

Even thinking about the beautiful girl who once worked at Starbucks and smiling back at me all these years once again.

....wayward chorus truncates the aching anthems of youth behind ( Naughty by Nature/ MC LYTE circa 1991, autumn)...

These two songs capture the autumn of my seventh and eighth grade years perfectly. The feeling of searching for identity in the broken glass foliage of the south side, feeling trapped as the hard breath of autumn filled our lungs with a petty promise of something we would never obtain, immortalizing the desolation of the mired sociological milieu we stemmed from and vaunted by blaring out hard core shit-you-not rhythms of the defeated. By telling it like it is. Stranded in the cement silt of the south side of Peoria where back in the day a national survey conceded that the trinity of sagging doled-visage empty eyelided brick abodes constituting lower income housing projects ranked lower than the likes of competitors in Compton and Cabrini Green-- was the mis en scene where a thirteen year old boy fell into the chorus of the streets. It was autumn 1991 and I was in 8th grade and lived and died for these urban heart beats.






We talked about gangsta disciples and Vice lords and brandished crooked peace signs with our fingers. We ambled in a perennial limp, as if we had a bullet lodged in our flesh, pain winking somewhere below our left kneecaps. We wore our shirts practically draped down into our ankles, our jeans representing a sagging denim puddle dripping around our overpriced air jordans which we kept impeccably white enough to pass for shoe clerks in Vatican city. We wore starter caps with the tags still affixed to the top so they looked as if they had been shoplifted. We talked with our hands near our waists, gesticulating vividly with rabid twitches of our fingers. We addressed each other as "G" and "Dawg." We monopolized autumnal afternoon walking around in a triangle of bodies , our limbs and joints oddly cantering between the leaves and litter and graffiti hieroglyphics tattooed on the lower necks of buildings.

Everywhere we went we seemingly dribbled the rubbery orb of a basketball between the arch of our thighs.

We tried to be as bad-ass as possible. Even though the majority of us were white and had had our asses (literally) handed to us on more than one occasion by the GD's down the street.


The video posted above seems to vividly encapsulate that time period with the authenticity of angels. The feeling of trying to fly, soar, create and give, scream and kick and still, somehow, feeling that all you are is a statistic, an unwanted pregnancy trying to sprout between the abandon cracks in the sunken parking lot across the street from the old distillery long gone.

Drop that, and now you want me to rap and give
Say something positive, well positive ain't where I live
I live right around the corner from west hell
Two blocks from south shit, and once in a jail cell
The sun never shine on my side of the street see
And only once or twice a week I would speak
I walked alone, my state of mind was home sweet home
I couldn't keep a girl, they wanted kids and cars with chrome


I see this sodden (sad, fucked up and lonely) realization every year. That so much of what molds a young persons periphery and promise on life tends to stem solely from the arable soil in which he is planted. Every year I hear of kids I grew up with who are in prison, who are working piss jobs to pay child support for progeny they no longer remember fostering, kids I graduated high school with who now have kids who are ready to graduate from high school, kids who were found dead behind dumpsters, in SUV, shot. Murdered. Kids who have been dead a long time ago.

The scene one minute into the video where bevy of street urchins are being chased by the utilitarian nothingness is so reminiscent of that year it defies me not to cry in a pond of nostalgia.

Inside the stanzas and beats of the song itself there is hope. The proverbial bird singing inside the trapped linearity of the cage. I love the juxtaposition of heartache sprinkled over the keyboard with an anonymous Greek chorus pulling a Bob Marley telling us that every little thing is gonna be alright. The same is true with MC LYTE's POOR GEORGE (below):

The saga of a beleaguered tryst turned tumultuous beautifully backed by a stirring reverb that harbors recollections of youth. I remember Gia Walker rapping this song on the playground. Revisiting this song now seventeen (fuck!) years from when first I heard it, still resonates with a truth of the heart. How no one is promised tomorrow and how giving of oneself, ones feeling, ones all should not be deterred no matter what.


I wish I woulda told him how I liked him so much
How he made me feel with the slightest touch
Now hes gone and I cant tell him nothin
Wish he was here so I could say somethin
The story is not to say that Im in sorrow
Just to say no one is promise tomorrow
If you love someone you should say it often
You never know when theyll be layin in a coffin
Wake up, its important that you know that
No one on earth is promised tomorrow...

I still think about Kris Noel, also, when I hear this song, my friends sister who died of cancer my eighth grade year and how a year before she fashionably tied a bandanna around the white dome of her skull to disguise her ailment in the lunch line and how, a year before that, we would always play "bloody knuckles," while we waited for the doors of the school to open our fingers welded into an ashen corsage of dactyls and wrists, each pressing down hard into the others fingered flesh waiting for the other to capitulate or to scream.

Asking your overtly westernized variation of a deity just why He decided to forsake you (smashing pumpkins, muzzle)....

This is a song we used to blast in the golden static of wheat
the incipience of autumn 1996, the teardrop autumn when
every Friday was golden, the sun a radiant bulb of suffering
light bleating into the planet with translucent planks of light
eyelashes culled from some other world, all the time youth
dancing, youth escaping, the feeling of eternity and poetry
and coffeehouses and oneness, the geometry of limbs
configured in the shape of a human heart






surrounding the tables of Lums, ashing out expired
dreams into hockey puck sized ashtrays reading (always)
reading Walt Whitman and Sexton and Ginsberg
crying when Ginsberg desecrated the city where I lived
as sacred, yelping out "Holy Peoria" when reciting
the footnote to Howl reading Kerouac, calling it
"Kerouacking" every time we would grab a venti coffee
and a pack of smokes and jump into the sunken face
of my old Buick and just motor the fuck out into the
country, driving fast down the dust latitude of dirty roads
with the windows cranked south

bathing in the pond of open air that is reality

Trying to break free of the casket before being buried
we wanted the security of having enough in the bank
we wanted to experience dipping our torsos
into the spring newness of a muses interior thighs
we wanted life and pain and forgiveness and love

But at that time, we wanted to express ourselves

As when I hear this song today
twelve years later thinking about

the young poet trying to stretch the interior
of his skin around the steeple-shaped blocks
of the English alphabet and failing, a muzzle
manacled around his fingertips and everything

falling infinitely short with the exception of the

loose training wheel of his jostled heart.

October first, 1998 (play this one loud an anthem for the angels)

She sat on the lip of my bed as I played to her this song, her boots skimming up past the stalks of her kneecaps, sprouting up into the ashen stems of her thighs, a veiled skirted hem swaying in sensuous cadences inches below her torso, part of a self-contained outfit with black straps etching up past the topography her shoulder blades before sprinting down, criss-crossing her spine, X marking the spot of her deeply poetic heart from behind. She wore a vignette of what looked like a Betty Boop methed-out china doll on her shirt. She would later tell me that she chose that particular outfit because she realized then that, if we embraced, "The boots were staying on," that the goth-naughty -well-read- voodoo-doll-baby-catholic girl raiments were staying in place, taming the itching orchestrations of my lecherous finger tips by a simple assurance of her smile.

The night before we sat together in the poetry reading of Keith Ratzliffe. I had a beer and talked to the poet at the reception. We had the same creative writing class and although I was envious of her innate abilities to fuel the English language with an ardor and imagery that has seldom, I still fucking believe to this day, been matched (I was a green daschund cheeked Salieri to the magic of her Mozart) but every time I was shrouded in the presence of her breath I felt in awe.

Outside the entrance to her dorm I told her that I needed to tell her something important and when she smiled I told her that I thought she was gorgeous and then I picked her up and twirled her around and we embraced but still there was no kiss.

That afternoon I kidnapped her after our creative writing class. We dissipated into the carpet of leaves banking the sidewalks as we discussed writing and art and movies and life. Somehow we traipsed though the geometry of the west bluff and found ourselves on the doorsteps to the only house I have ever known. As I tried to kiss her lips folded into a dinner napkin and she handed me a missive and requested that I read it before the possibility of anything romantic exploded.

As I fell inside the orifice of her lips, riding the life boat of her tongue into the sweet oblivion and electric spontaneity of post adolescent amour. Both of our eyes closed at the same time. It was terse, spontaneous like a child pirouetting in front of a water fountain perching his lips at the rail of continuous fluid in search of wet nourishment.

I remember this song was played on that day, now exactly a decade ago. For some reason I wanted this brilliant Penelope scribe to listen to the shattering chords of the opening hymn like an introit to something that might have been yet never was--the way a glass chandelier snapping into triangles of ice, realizing that this crystallize emotional Armageddon droping like an end of the world avalanche inside the nest of your chest was transpiring in both darkness and in light somehow above and below you both simultaneously waiting with the gestation of pregnant goddess carrying in her womb the magic and molecules of something incubating, something fighting, something waiting to peck into the planet and hatch and breathe.

I asked her if she liked the song and she said it was ok. She was a PJ harvey Courtney Love sorta lass. She wasn't into the moribund New Wave alternative anthems that had shepherded me like a maudlin metronome through the nihilistic teenage perils of youth.

We left my bedroom and walked back to campus that autumn, our hands forming one solitary bouquet of fingers--a tugging orb buoyed in the scent of a new found connection. She told me that today was her parents' wedding anniversary. We walked next to the house where she would live in a years time and where our rapport would end in heart-fraught-with-splinters-and-thorns fashion but for that moment, the plainsong of her smile pushing through the hyphen of her lips made me feel that the end of the world and the world to come had somehow lapsed without me knowing and that this sheet of time currently was disintegrating into a sea of random quarks and neurons and that all that existed was the sight of her eyes, the scent of her body and the newness found in the interior cusp of her warm palm squeezed tightly in mine.

HA-HA by Mates of States

The Mates of States concert transpired at the canopy club in Champaign in late autumn of that year and Joe and I would keep going outside in his Mazda to get high and then come back in and play pool and drink and wait for the concert to begin. Joe had introduced me to Mates of States three summers earlier while we were driving through the neon spines of corn abutting the highways of central Iowa searching for Dave Thompson in Des Moines, Joe placing a downloaded copy of OUR CONSTANT CONCERN into the gaping jaws of the CD player belting out the rhetorical chorus of "I know, And said forget it, " answering the clanging semi-nasal query of "Who's gonna start the wave," Joe raising his hand next to me as if in class answering the bands rhetorical keen of "I will start the wave!!!!" as the clamor of keyboard and drums continued to do nuptial battle as we drove on, smoking, laughing, stopping in Iowa City, heading out west, loosing ourselves in the vibrato and vortex of high pitched almost circus like chords.

Joe and I would later see them in concert six months later at the Metro in Chicago. It was late January and cold and we ran down the frost coated avenue of Clark st in Wriglyville wearing just our club gear since we knew we'd lose our coats if we brought them inside the bar with us. We drank Goose island and danced with beautiful anemic gypsy haired girls from the North Shore as the States broke into their picaresque melodies of loss sounding as if they were lodged inside a pinball machine with a couple violently questioning their nuptial vows as their voices echoed ill-timed cymbals in a commitment ceremony.

Now in Champaign, they were the main act and they took the stage, a duet of one, a yin-yang carousel of consciousness, the soprano and tenor of genitals welded into androgynous chorus, the pangs of love and the endearing rhythm of all time.

After all, this is the blood that we're made from, so go on and tell it like a chronicle.

"See you sometime" by Joni Mitchell

There is something about the way the chords tumble into place at the beginning of this song. A sunken arpeggio of the chest--the pulsating bellows of the heart, the heart seeking, buoyed in a melodic quagmire of panting tumult, the heart that seethes and gets pissed on and used as an ersatz ashtray by lovers who have other lovers who have other lovers. The heart that refuses to capitulate to the corona of sadness it wears for its crown. The body that seeks the cradle of her limbs and the fountain of her lips for nourishment, the sounds of Joni Mitchell treacling through his nervous system like a creek in Alberta, fresh air of her body, the tangibility of nature. The seeker. The wayfarer. The lover. The fuck-up. The fool. The romantic fraud guise in a sheath of post adolescent flesh. The dreamer. The writer. The all.








But the opening of the song. The melody giving birth in a sunrise staccato clang of piano keys each chimed in a strike of dissonance usurped gradation ascending the ivory topography of the keyboard in wrenching octaves and syncopated broken stain glass yelps only to be followed by a minor key-change, the ineffable slip of something shattered and lost that will never perhaps be returned.


The confusion of that autumn. Allison driving around grandview drive in the expensive car her parents bought her, stopping when we found an abandoned puppy, drifting along the elevated banks of the Illinois River amongst the opulent seven-figure castles of Grand view Drive.

The heart in autumn, golden winked-carousel of 1997. The bouquet of flowers forming a corral reef in front of Buckingham palace. The embalmed body of Princess Di lying supine, glassed eyes and deceased. The autumn where the lucidity of stars crashed overhead like a dilapidated chandelier. I remember making (strong as fuck) coffee in a french press and then listening to this song. I was trying to write a novel. I was lost. I had just been promoted to a supervisor at the book store where I worked. I was dropping classes at the community college I was attending because all I wanted to do was write. I lugged a copy of Infinite Jest around with me everywhere I went like a post-modern shield. The autumn of William James and of Wittgenstein. The autumn that all I wanted was a letter, anticipating gnawing open the rusty jaw of my mailbox hoping to find her smile smudged in the right hand corner in a digital area code, a place I left a long time ago.

I (borrowed) stole this album from my friend Damien. We drove around pretending to be Neal cassidy and Sal Paradise, listening to jazz. We spent nights in downtown chicago at the Jazz Showcase, listening to david Sanchez. Earlier in the day we stopped at AFTERWARDS and I bought William Gaddiss' THE Recognitions and Thomas Pynchons VINELAND. When I told the sales clerk how much I loved David Foster Wallace he just scowled and said that Wallace was too verbose for him and that I should spend my time reading John Steinbeck instead.

It is a song of yearning. A song of missing that time. Of wondering when you get that time back in your life. That time when each cigarette you smoked made you feel tha you where somehow artistic.
A song of wandering. A song that makes you contemplate once again when you think about that girl you lost oh-so many years ago in autumn wondering if ever you will perhaps see her once again.

Book o' Muses, Paris, June 1994

She slinks out of her hostile room in Paris. Her Birkenstocks have longed been doffed. Her hair is back in a finely wrapped ponytail, unveiling an even fairer amount of her forehead than is normal. Her flakey, ashen skin beaming, a drop of light shed from the countenance of the moon.

“Hi,” She says, her mousy features and rubber band smile. In her left paw she swipes a neatly folded letter several times in prominent tight creases.

“Here,” She says, handing me the letter, standing on her heels.

“Thanks,” I say. Even the sputtering resonance of our incumbent voices find it difficult to embrace in the hallway. There is silence. Everyone is either barhopping or asleep. Jen turns around, slowly, as if an arrow in a compass, her feet weighing down equally between meted steps. I look down at the pencil slices on the front of the letter and think of autumn leaves raked into a bushy pile. Without looking up, my ears register the sound of Jen and Val’s door slightly adjusting itself. There is the sound of the lock and then the sound of loneliness as I look down into her gift, now in my own palm. The words BIG BROTHER scrawled on the front cover. This is Paris. A hotel room floor, a burgeoning fifth grader in the hotel room I am to look after, a girl in Spokane, WA. who purportedly wants nothing to do with me and sporadically misplaces me in her memory, as if I am a classified dossier and her brain a file cabinet. An eighth grader who lives less than four-hundred meters from my house back in Peoria and who I just met and, quite possibly, have fallen in love with.

Looking back, seeing my reflection averted, my hair fashionably swayed to one side of my face with VO5 gel; I can scent the cologne, the English Leather musk I first discovered two years ago at my own eighth grade exercise in commencement, the slightly sickly sweet urinal cake tang biting into the side of my elongated jaws as I view my own impending apocalyptic paw grapple the brass handle of the door, occluding the reflection of my contorting, sad face in the shadow of my palm, from my own vision, covering it up with the hand I must move forward with.

Once inside the room I notice that Renner is once again sleeping, his mouth tweaked open, exhaling, sleeping like he is rehearsing the art of hibernation. I slowly open the letter. In a minute, it will be severed, physically shredded in several juvenile strands. In a minute it will be on the floor and I will jut into the bathroom that becomes a shower when you close the door, abandon my garments, slough out of my jeans. I will smear layers of soap over my entire body, occluding any visible hint of pigmentation. My one contact is gingerly pricked out of my eye and held in front of me like a tadpole in a junior high biology experiment. The water to the shower is running, but I am still looking at myself in the mirror, padding the soap over my body, verifying that my every pore is blanketed with residual foam.

This is the bathroom in Paris. I am sixteen years old. Tears appear to drool a long solitary slope down the side of my face, curving near my chin. My whole body is so white, so blanketed with soap, I could pass over for a very-trimmed down Slim Fast commercial variation of the Pillsbury Dough boy, standing in front of a mirror with my oversized boxers held out in front of me, commenting how much I lost in two hours, holding up the thoroughly endorsed product into the unblinking lash of the camera lens and gratuitously thank the product with a slick, veneer smiled sealed into the front of my face.

I am naked, tears swirling down a thoroughly sopped soaped face. I am crying. I am trying to be reborn once again. Trying to come into the world without having to be baptized. Through the squinting and the tears, I cannot make out the stretched features of my face as I adjust the shower, feeling the sizzle and pelts of heat beading my upper back, slowly raining down on top of the heavily layered soap. I am trying to rinse everything from my skin. Trying to feel like I am brand new again. Trying, really, just to feel.

Still wet and scantily lathered I momentarily step out of the shower, picking up the ribbons of what was once Jen’s letter. Slice by slice, I let go of the torn paper observing how it floats lie a prodigal feather, slowly into the basin of the toilet. Looking into the mirror, my face a rash, my eyes riddled with protrusive arteries, I slowly grasp my penis and drip piss on top of the letter. Looking close enough, I can see her name signed in pencil, a self-inked flower planted in the page, dotted over the I in her first name. I see where twice, she calls me Big Brother, laughing to myself as I hold my Pig boy kids, charms that I purchased outside of the Rhine watching, as everything I have just severed gets sullied in a hot stream of yellow.

“Good night, Elena.” I say to myself, before waggling the diddles of pee off my unit. Before stepping back into the shower. Before orchestrating my hands over my chest trying to feel clean once again. Trying to feel brand new. Trying, intrinsically, just to feel something other than lost.


The author in Paris, 94

autobiographical excerpts from PINTA PARADE, chronicling events convening the morning of March 21st, 1993

I wake up early in the morning and look out the window and dig into my back pack and reel out a carton of fig newtons, chomping down hard, taking diligent sips from the coffee I brewed in the hotel room, listening to my best friend Hale passed out early as if from a night of drinking, snoring hard, his mouth wielded ajar, his lungs rattling with all the bulk and occasional hiss of a healthy carbonator. The radiator in the room is located beneath the window like a beer gut and purrs out an ached racket emanating warmth. There is a bedtime sheet of snow outside glazed, reflecting a frosty mid-march sun as if it were a peach pebble in the canvas of white. The world seems brand new. In less than a week my glossed itinerary will arrive from Parade in a package in the mail which mom will hand to me after track practice with an excited smile beaming across her face—the itinerary telling me where I will be shuffled throughout the continent of England, what sights my vision shall imbibe, what flights I shall catch above a copse of clouds, the dream pastures I shall stroll over and finally arrive. But for now, in this hotel room, in a frosty morning in mid-march, I am all alone, my best friend asleep on the bed I recently arose from—a cup of coffee and a magazine about spiritual-charged grunge music laying next to the Chicago tribune. The sound of Airplanes leaving O’Hare in thick draughts of thrust and exhaust every ten minutes—the mechanical blitz and roar and searing overhead—wings splayed as if in balletic posture.

On the way home I flatten open the road atlas of the United States to Illinois, the state I have lived in all my life, the state which when flapped open like a centerfold and splayed down in front of my vision looks like it is about to be dissected on a lab table in some junior high biology class by some nerdy looking white kid wearing goggles over his glasses, hoisting up his scalpel wearing laytex gloves. The map is elongated liver shaped, needled with blue and red arteries that treacle down the state in a rivulet highway— blood tears going nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I think about the girl I met on the dance floor and about my maladroit dancing skills—about the mosh pit of bodies globed together in a rattled cluster of limbs and elbows and movements—the supernova of youth banging and fucking into the pre-dawn sunrise of a pending millennium—enervating and exhausting limbs in a clanging dither of noise and reverberation—a frenzied interior gallop clamoring into an orbital wad of pulsating sweat and frenzy endeavoring to become one with one another, endeavoring to become one with the searing acceleration of a culture gyrating wayward away from it’s own interior ethos—and at this spiritual assembly the youth bang their limbs together, tackling their shoulder, sliding their bodies into a mass of bellowing oneness accompanied by the music of Peal Jam—a song which reminds them what it feels like to be alive rather than the alternative.

I think about my own slip into the mosh pit, into the clamoring soil of arms and limbs in a failed endeavor to impress a female I had just met. I wonder what she thought when I slid into the frenzied puddle of youth, when I dived in my boots, my glasses folded up in my side pocket like a check book—like the green bible I ferry with me at all times to remind about the culminating temptation of lust. In the back seat of the minivan ferry us down the same sleek artery of land I am perusing over, I think about that girl I tried to impress—I think about the place where I am to travel off to, the future memories to be consummated, the sight of stammering sunsets yet to come wondering to myself if flying feels like the inner matrix of diving into a mosh pit in an endeavor to impress a curly red-headed girl you just met under the din of the dance floor, under the embryonic stutter of strobe lights, as if dancing in an agitated atomic clamor of banging-limbed youth could possibly give birth to something meaningful.

I find Bollingbrook on the map and vow to make it back there some day. Wondering if there was some sort of a way I could find the red headed angel of the dance floor once again.



***




I have my gear rolled in my locker in the basement of Manual high. A pair of flimsy aquatic running shorts, running shoes connected by the laces, a few shirts. The stain and scent of puberty; the vortex almost nautical whorl of hair foaming below my navel like a gulf stream—hair eking down the branches of my legs and arched muscles of my calves—only my chest remains bare, as we traipse, wearing flip flop sandals to eschew the accumulating pockets of mold spawning athletes foot in the shower, lathering on decade and a half year pimply flanks of flesh with layers of soap and shampoo. Jose was spotted in school the other day, still overweight, his hair longer, almost in dread locks. When I walked up to him he echoes out his familiar cinnamon smile.

Where you been brother?” I inquire.

“I’m gonna have a baby,” He says. “My girl is pregnant.”


I spend every weekend shuffled throughout the state whose map I examined in the back seat of Jeff Grebe’s car on the way back from the youth congress, thinking about the woman with the orange hair, thinking about the mosh pit and the boots I was wearing, the boots which served as my identity in the hallways of high school—the boots which everyone comments and looks at me and says that they like as I strut past, as I begin to squeeze through the shoe size locker odor of masculinity, of manhood, of youth. As I begin to fish out truths from my denim back pocket. As I begin to knock—as I begin to more or less, search. Looking in the hallways after school, a zipped blur of limbs and meted breath, running through the hallways, my shadow casting an elongated prancing shadow after school, as the yolk of the late January sun seems to linger in the pocket of sky longer each night—granting the world the appearance of motion, of velocity—more hairs have sprouted around the ash pit of my loins. I still think about Renae every night. Still think about Dawn kimble. Still flying in the hallways, the measured patter of my sneakers against the interior linoleum of the school. Still arriving home after school, splattering my textbooks on my mattress. Still conjugating French verbs and listening to Depeche mode and to the cure and Guns-n-roses Use your Illusion 2 in my bedroom every night. I started the school year secluded in the corner room and have now, moved into the room with the French doors with the full mirror abutting the closet door like a interior entrance into your own reflection world—a portal into the realm of dual and opposite where there is no shadow, only the perfect mirrored symmetric reflection of everything you have become. I can still see the college girls next door as they enter the frame of their restroom loosening the brass knot near their waist before their vision is occluded as they squat to relieve themselves. I still duck on my shins every night and bow my entire body as if I am a pastel shepherd in a nativity scene at church, asking for strength—asking that my mile split become abbreviated and that I may set some sort of school record to Christian and verify my existence in this realm of being. I still wake up and guzzle copious amounts of coffee in the kitchen, before school, after dad has escorted me on the paper route; the gruff hirsute countenance of my father in the morning, waltzing in a January cap and coat, directly across from me step my step. My father who gets me beckons me up by flicking the switch on in my bedroom as we marshal the bundles across to our front porch, counting the number of inky headlines, verifying there are enough for our patrons. My father, who has risen with me every morning , not complaining, not admonishing and not accepting any of the shared pay. Skirting the horizontal suburban avenues of Sherman and Moss, dual flanking parallelograms of sidewalks abutted with numerical brick mortgages and manicured lawns. My father, walking with me, using the second paper route bag, walking up in his fourth grade teacher gait to each house, slipping the paper into the mailbox, into the screen door, or under the welcome matt. My father, every morning, modest, unpaid, seemingly happy to help his son out in his dream to get overseas. My father, who in less than ten years will be horizontally shoved into a casket, his body layered into a pasture of earth three gravestones over from where my grandmother will be laid. My father, waking every morning not complaining, simply out of love for his eldest son.

One morning my sister Jenn, sixth grade, lumbers into my room and tells me that she arose out of her slumber this morning to the music of REM. To the song Nightswimming.



***

We hustle through the aquatic dim of the hallways after school as one exhaling herd, as a pack, as a unit of kneecaps and roving limbs, beaded droplets of perspiration forming a sentence of lined abacuses wet with dots on the top of our brow, slowly skiing down the pasture of our cheekbones and chin as we continue our gallop, through different vectors of the school—a smashed unit. It is a month after winning the contest, one month after rising in the sea of conference rooms slapped palms at the sound of my name being acknowledged as the recipient of the award. One month after becoming accustomed to hands lanced in my direction to shake. One month after all this, and still I am leaving, to be on a trip that will change my life with a group of half-paperboys and half-writers.

Every day I check the creaky jowls of our mailbox, wondering when I shall receive more from Parade. The trip is always a constant, the first thing I see as my eyelids wield open absorbing the nauseating static of morning as I dress and accompany my father down the illuminated streetlamp-fizz cool breeze of morning. Brewing coffee in the kitchen and waiting as my siblings rouse and dress and stumble down into the dining room. I am an athlete. I am healthy, incessantly configuring methods to shave extra lashed digits off the time of my mile. My world revolving around the galactic orbit of a track, my fists and elbows forming a rhythm, a syncopated melody sub woofer of my heart, constantly seeking a swift revelation of validation for the intellectual fetus I am becoming.

I look around and wonder where the fuck I am.

The stampede is whittled down every week. The regime for practice, for discipline, for respect. Each week the content of someones locker is split open and disemboweled. Some weeks a new troop joins our constant sprint around the hallways. Come two weeks the weather will have subsided so we can rehearse our mile times outside, but for now, the mounds of snow and frost curtail our swagger from modulating outside the heated incubation of the hallways.

I am waiting. Waiting for more news. Wondering beneath the bony skeletal planks guarding my chest if the trip will actually transpire. Wondering if it wasn’t some dream dipped in the frost of a late January windshield haze. Looking at the calendar mom has posted above the phone near the mirrored dining room buffet, watching as the heralding names of months cosigning meted increments of boxed time—the time signature for the globe, flipping over the names of heralding months—the frost of February, the eclipsing dew of late March, wondering when April will in fact arrive and what magic the locked calendar squares will unravel themselves to contain once I am to hop scotch to that place in time, discern the panoramic vista and wonder in awe, as the blank geometrical package slowly becomes illuminated in a pastel dawn covering, as the vistas and trees and vernal countryside fuse up like spring, inside the calendar squares, inside my chest, a place we are yet to get to, a moment we have anticipated experiencing all of our collected life like a dream we somehow forget to remember when it mattered to us the most.

Because sometimes the search says more than the discovery....short stories from two leap years ago

Every other Thurs you tell your shrink that your life teems with terse one acts and scene changes. There are dress rehearsals with portly make-up ladies holding cylinder lipstick like a toddler holds crayola. There is an irascible goateed director who, with his beret sloped left and his glasses in hand, yells that you've done it all wrong. All wrong. You should have exited stage-right instead of stage left. You forgot a line. A hand gesture. You ad lib'd when you should have just lib'd. Your back was facing the audience. You make a better door than a window. You forgot to do this or that. NO one in the auditorium could hear you again. NO one could understand what you were trying to convey. No one ever fully understands.

"It's called acting, Dav-id," The director reams out your name with heavy accents grilled around both syllables, drawing out the "id" with an inflected nicotine snarl.

"You're a character you're supposed to make the audience feel what the character felt. You are supposed to establish a rapport with the audience. A connection. A bond. Marshall the audience's view of the world. Give them a picture of what is possible."

A picture. A key. Windows 95 and windows 98. Windows hot Key. Stained glass windows in cathedrals. The window to the world. The window to ideas and peace. Your bedroom window that is fissured because you bumped your nose into it when you were like four.

Your voice is an unvarying alloy of vowels and fricatives and, blowing smoke through your nostrils at this part, you reconvene your memory. Dressing rooms with peepholes and donated costumes. The odor of cheap coffee and mold permeating backstage. There are take fives and there are slow motions. Digital re-enhancements. Sound systems. There are microphone check one-two's. Replays and recapitulations. Note changes that are penciled in and then erased after the production.

The Director balks towards you in personal imperatives and after every period you nod your head in congruence and say either 'yes' or 'OK' or nothing at all. You like nodding your head in silence. He tells you once again to work on your entrances and exits. That they are very important. He tells you once again that your semblance is important. Your style. The way people see you. Perceive you. It's not who you really are, that's important, it's what the status quo thinks you are. He tells you once again not to fuck up. You
drop your chin and tell him once again OK.

Bodies 'blunder inside the auditorium in troves and silk-ties. Heels scuffle. Shoulders shuffle. Heads scour East and West along the wharfs of seats searching for a place to dock, a quay to stow emotions and ennui for a couple of hours. They check ruffled ticket stubs. The bowed heads of cushions bend to appropriate bottoms and body heat. They sit down and then stand back up, stretching, adjusting limbs, popping out of their chairs like
toast to wave palms in recognition. Legs cross and recross, finding comfort. You make a point of telling her, your shrink, that much of life is monopolized trying to find comfort in an uncomfortable milieu—one that you didn't audition for and one where there is a paucity of scene changes.
There are house lights which stutter and drown amiss the verbal din of
the audience hushing, whispering, fanning themselves with their programs,
sporadically coughing down into armpits, passing tic-tac's back and forth
between the isles. It is your cue. Someone with a black hand and sheer dress
slaps you on the ass and says either Honey Take One' or 'Have a good one'.

Backstage the only thing that separates you from the peering, ogling eyelids of the audience is the burgundy-hued curtain. In what is either a wisp or a whisper the curtain will fall upwards and, again, you will be coerced into the role, you have, from the outset, been cosigned, to perform. A role that has always made you somewhat uncomfortable.

Her fish bowl eyes and half-cookie smile makes her look like a cross between a jet-lagged flight attendant and something cubist. Her rubicund visage is shaped like a light bulb and provides a perfect match for her outdated haircut and buoy nod of concurrence. She pretends she is interested in what you are saying even when she is not# although she smiles when you say something funny or ironic. A leaning tower of psychotherapy books lie dormant against her desk. Your eyes focusing intently on the constellation of freckles that adorn her forehead as her chin assents, signaling your verbal encomium into the bathos of continuity. As the curtain ascends and apprehension accrues, she will inquire about your childhood, about your family and about your lovers. The audience have now taken their seats and as the first dapples of spotlight hit your viscera you fall deeply within yourself not knowing if you are coming or going; exiting or entering.

A coming. A going. Who knows?

A caterwauling push. A cry. A breath. What next?

After what could either be moments or months of seeping through empty space you crawl into cognizance with a snot-licked face, a bruised forearm and a see-saw smile. There is no before. You cannot remember ever having really given much of a nose-swivel whimper or whiff to your biosphere at all. You are here and you just are. Here. You presuppose ‘here’ lies someplace inside. Most of your life has been spent inside the cradle of a womb or the cradle of a nursery# only you have no cognition of this, you just somehow are here, fastened within an arena of flickering light and grating noise. A confluence of wire and wood, of clicks and plugs, warm and cold. Strangers are always picking you up and setting you down. Adults smile when they hold you and mutter sounds you cannot comprehend. Two larger adults swim around you in a perpetual elbow and wrist frolic. They incessantly urge you to swallow only the provisions they place between to your lips. Often, as so it seems, especially in front of company, one of them
ingests tittles of nourishment between your lips while verbally imitating the gruffed-muffled sounds of some sort of vehicle, shaking the metallic utensil and then applauding at your ingestion. People are always applauding and warbling sentences that you cannot intuit. Your smile is that of a sad monkeys and the plaudits and praise continue as you loll your head slowly like a pitchers wind-up and eventually break in snigger. You are not two years of age and you can not help but laugh. Your tonsils are ticklish. You laugh and you smile and you are touched. Sometimes you feel like you are one with everything and sometimes you water your cheeks with squeals of desolation if you are not. Mostly, though, you just nod in and out being. You writhe in your sleep and although you feel an instinctive proclivity to leer and lurk. You cannot help but coddle yourself in the arms of the two creatures who aggregate around you like protons and neutrons telling you they love you and spoon feeding you like your last name is Gerber. Through all this bosh of bodies and foreign lexicon, you cannot help but feel that your existence is wending forth into a world fraught of absolutes and images and other nonesuch ideologies, none of which you are allowed to comment upon since you are slowly being weaved into a stratum that has long since been woven.

You lay wallowed inside an orbit of emotions and particles. Perhaps you knew all once but now you know nothing. Entering and a exiting. Something has pushed you into a realm of being. Time does not exist. Byes the size of breath mints hover around you and stare. Older ladies with faces like trash bags and lips like twist-ties tell you how so cute you are. So precious. They say the vowel 'oh' over and over, drawn out. You cleave to
your mother's bosom for nourishment.

* * *
Everything is somewhat blurry and tall and swathed in corduroy overalls, lulled and velcroed by maternal sing-songs, buckled in hymns about'Jesus Loves Me' and nourished via dulcet nursery rhymes. Outdoors, past the tufted trees of broccoli in the front lawn, untinted station wagons rove the avenues amiss the din-of disco, the Bee-Gee's and Bell bottoms. You are a curtain of bangs and dimples. Innocent. Taller than a fire-hydrant. You are ( as of last Tuesday) four fingers old now and ( as your Mommy puts it) a “few
french fries short of a Happy-Meal” when it comes to proper decorum and etiquette. But you can do things that other kids can't do. You can Pee standing up, by yourself, with the door closed and with one foot behind your back. You are a "Big-Boy• a "Good-boy•. You have Scooby-doo underoos (which you unabashedly show anybody whether they inquire hither the invitation or not) and you have tackle boxes full of action figures. Star Wars.
The Empire Strikes Back. Solo and Skywalker you keep stowed in your pocket at all times. The Force is' with you. You feel it as you learn. The world becomes suddenly more and less at the same time larger and smaller, lucid and befogged, in a funny way you have not been able to quite put a finger on yet, although you have seriously been thinking about it. You think about it when your Dad mows the yard and gives-you piggy-back rides in the summer. You think about it when you sit in .the splintery church pew all
alone because your parents have gone up near the pastor to take communion. You think about it over sandwiches of Peanut butter-n-Jelly or when you chew fig-Newtons the way a cow chews cud or blow 'Bad Boys' bubbles in your milk with curly straws. You especially think about just how weird everything is in the afternoon in the period which follows your nap. That period is special to you because the sun not only shines through your window, but rather it pours in, bulges and breathes and engulfs your childhood gait. When you are a little kid every moment is almost golden. Or so it seems.

You seem to have known Mom and Dad all your life, for as long as you can remember. Your mother is as smooth as the kitchen floor is after she washes and waxes it. Her features are taut and elbow grease-lanky. She is glass thermometer skinny and kitten paw delicate with a sharp angular chin and Oil of Olay'd cheekbones that are always grinning at you even when the rest of her viscera is not (probably because you have used one of your dad's 'bowling words in the house again ' because you have forgotten to wipe the milk-moustache-which you proudly :flout, chin up-from underneath your nostrils). At times her face looks down at you the way a kite looks down at you in March. Her movements are subtle yet lithely actuated- almost as if she were stringed together with the yellow yarn she knits with. Years later you would tell friends in bars and girls in hotel rooms that your Mom was shaped like a halogen lamp with a bad perm, but for now, she is mom. Your Mother, and she is the closest thing to pulchritude your pupils have yet to
peruse.

You feel like your dad is more on your side than your Mom is, partly because of the time you skipped-n-staccato and farted three times in a row, and on perfect pitch, in front of your Great Aunt Hazel-Marie's casket at her own visitation. No one said anything at first, and then, after a gravid pause, both Dad and the Holy Rev. Morningwood began choking on their chuckles and surreptitiously biting down hard on their Knuckles and soon, just like a flea epidemic, all of the faces in the funeral home shifted from cardboard stolid into ruddy-nose saccharine and even the most sincere and lachrymose of ill attired attendants soon began patting themselves on the back and fanning themselves with the church bulletin's and the Holy Rev. crossed himself after wiping his forehead and mapped his glasses back on his watted-nose and apologized but Mom just stared at you long and hard and then staved her vision off into the casket and wept and the rest of the room, after the moment of levity had been lifted, just all remained silent and ruffled countenance
and pensive and spent the rest of the Good Rev Morningwood epitaph staring down deep into the black's of their shoes.

Your Father is also suspect to not putting away his toys after playing with them. Mom lets him trundle in and out of the kitchen after watching Dallas— leaving a popcorn-bowl here or a beer can there. Which is perfectly o.k. with Dad, who you think smells like Yoda after he drinks with somebody by the name of J. Daniels and then arrives back at his domicile all titzy-witzy and Adam's Apple sozzled. Dad doesn't drink much. But when he does....anyway. Dad can evade your Mother's malice, but you can not.
Although the time you cantered like a newborn colt into the kitchen, all la-di-
da innocent with Solo and Skywalker pocketed deep and you pillaged her kitchen-cabinets to purloin armor, she got royally P.O:d with you and coerced you out to the nursing home and read from the book of Jude to sultry Blind people for a week. But still, your armor! A metallic measuring cup becomes your refulgent crown. The wooden cylinder mom uses to roll dough with serves as both sheath and sword and (although this is top secret classified information) your Jedi Light Sabre!

After you finish rummaging through the baubles and bric-a-brac of your Mother's culinary finest. you potter off into precincts of the living room, thrashing the looming forces of the Dark Side. The enemy hides out in lamp shades, in dark closets and dusty-curtains. The invisible pavilion reconnoiters underneath the Piano bench or on top of the old rocking chair that is shaped like the letter ‘S'. There are enemies burrowed deep inside of the umbrella holder or wrangled in the coat wrack.

The house is viable. It breathes. Like the Death star.

Every portion of the house is still somewhat devious. It has greater control over you than you have over it. You grow dubious over the trinkets that grow inside of your chary abode. All, you feel need, to be scrutinized with pithy curiosity.

Darting forth with surrogate Light Sabre firmly clasped, you hover in and out of rooms. In the Pink Panther colored Bathroom there are sounds that flush and whorl. There are gaped drains; the emergent neck's of faucets which spit out gushing 'lava' water. In your parents bedroom, the merlot-hued carpet becomes a torrent of blood, and you claw and clamber upon their Serta and ensconce yourself in satin-sheets, less you prey victim )
to sinister rivulets incessantly flowing below. In two winks and a quick stop back at the bathroom (one-footed w. one eye closed this time) you’re back inside the kitchen. The oven is an ominous eye that lights up and fringes with diminutive infernos. The cabinets have drawers which jut open and jeer at you. The washing machine prattles and hums like it is stranded in post- coital limbo. In every room of the house there are open-eyes sockets stranded in the wood with sad expressions sliding off their faces, a simple longing to be filled with something, jolted and shocked. There are radiators which yawn in the morning and fart before you go to bed. There are the arrogant-nosed light switches which you flick off and on while they sneer at you. And towering above you like a telephone pole is your dad who then manacles your ankles with his hands and topples you over-above-and behind the neck. All you can do is laugh as all of your intrigue and adventure's become momentarily suspended.

Your face blushes to the color of Kool-Aid and your lips arch into a jelly-stained smile as you capitulate your quest of world household domination to laughter and father-son bondage.

“Help! Help! Let me down " you wheeze, configuring your fingers in a Jedi mind-trick, hoping to cajole a parental whim.

Your father is gaunt man. He is hefty and hirsute. His face is finely featured.
Distinctive. His balloon shaped head bears home to a fertile harvest of unctuous hairs- oily minute candle wicks that sprout-up in patches of side-burns, fallow armpits, flossed between earlobes and strewn down his chest, like a current a tsunami. After he says the word “gotcha” you swoosh between his arms and somersault between his legs. The next sound your Dad will hear will be the clamor of a wooden door shut on its hinges and the dissipation of a four year old lout.

With a quick smirk and titter you look both ways and cavort past the hoi-poloi of Peoria. down the street past the quiescent lamp-posts, the octagon cherries that halt traffic, and the hushed blue mail boxed which litter the streets of America.
"'Hey, it's R2-D2." You say to yourself, not realizing that there is no one else around who can hear you and that for the first time in your life, you, David, four fingers old and shy, are on your own. A world full-of Bigger boys. Boys who wear cuffed jeans and use deodorant. Boys who are in school and pop-wheelies on their bikes. Boys who have long hair like girls and who smoke and play with fire crackers. Boys who play with spray-paint and wear hi-tops and glide on skateboards. Boys with lower voices and who deck their lobes with earrings. Boys who are bigger than you and who could, if they wanted to, kill you.

Out here the boys take notice of the way you walk. Out here freedom lies heavy in the air. It seems to permeate all around you. A tangible gulp. It wisps left to right as you trek across parking lots gashed with broken 7up bottles and prodigal tires. The sodden and sad stained visages of the automobiles all face the same direction and do not move. There is a heaviness that huddles in your chest. It is a heaviness you will feel later on in life. As your vision becomes enamored with the sight of auburn leaves, evergreens which look like the stick figure on the girls bathroom, and the curly-slide whose tongue drapes and dips and eventually licks the chunks of wood heaped below, you begin to hear applause, As you approach the rungs of the ladder and heave yourself up into the pellucid air of both autumn and nostalgia, you become draped by a curtain of some sort and then are weaned back to her chair, your eyes draped-closed like the curtains in your mothers house. Here, your doctor interrupts you by holding out her palm, thwarting a mental bowl of fruit in the still-life portrait of your juvenile- histrionic botched love songs.
First things first, she says as she claps her hands together and looks up into the dun ceiling tile. She wants to know what spawned all this melancholy. All this remorse. She wants to know why you are bringing all this up and why you treat this with cynicism and levity. She wants to know why you think your heart is a twist-tied bag of crushed aluminum cans. She wants to know why you feel severed and truncated, as you put it. Why you use the word Jejune' to describe the last few years, from the beginning ofyour heart's detumescent. You tell her that you could better explicate youremotions to her if everything inside of you didn't feel so much like the dust
bowl.

from a decade ago.....

speaking of politics...

for a picture of Tiffany, simply scroll down....

..exterior of my philosophy notebook, circa 1998

"sallow" old school tackle box poem shed with loss: what it feels like to hurt enough not to heal all the way

Morning begins with her smile or

the reflection of her face
into my face
a globe of handicapped
continents, land masses,
mountain ranges
vast prairies spilled
beneath the lunar-lit
arboretum of lips,
slight magnetic
shock of white
brimming over the
horizon of cheekbones,
brushing into the angular
slants of her chin
This is how morning
splashes its vision into
the winking copper
tint of dawn
The moment when
you find your body
outside of your body
bouyed into the
upsidedown pond of dreams
a suspedned chandelier
showcasing your
every failure and loss
a tear prism of her smile
and the promise of yet
another day not yet



alone

8 year old poem dredged from the urn of a writers ashtray

The machine was mostly wires,
plugged into an empty socket
some people called a visage.
There was a routine we all took while using the machine.
The elders called it a ‘tool’ while the young
kids were wont to plug in and type in passwords.
‘Logging on’ they called it.
The mouth of the drive stuck it’s tongue out at us.
And sometimes,
early in the morning, at 2 or 3 am,
when we were all alone in the house
finishing up our assignments for school,
we could scarcely make out our own
scoffed and craggily visage, bent over,
brow furrow and dreams
fastening into car belt seats somewhere else.

At the time it was not all that uncommon for each of us
to inquire why we were here.

You made me a Ganesa mask out of feathers and acorns
you collected, the foliage from the once viable
pasted and stapled, scotched taped around the corners.

It was the Autumn we played
hide-and-go-seek on the machine.

You sent me postcards and told me you were in love.

Little me now, for never believing
yet wanting to so badly. I cut myself
on the inside because I knew not
better-wanting more, always wanting more.

When the light flashes on we are not
suppose to remove the square that is inside.

If we do, perhaps, we will loose everything that we have saved.


I left a screen savor with your name on it.

I left it on the machine where you
would find it and cry.
I left the machine on,
in the room with the goldfish.
I left before I came.

I guess I just wanted to leave.

That Thanksgiving, a year past now,
ever dwindling like dominos inside my memory,
that thanksgiving, I called you up to say hello.
The number at your parents house was still familiar to me.
We told each other goodbye.

morning pages culled from a decade ago