true voice

yes and don't worry about collagen losing it's bounce. your charms will ripen. hands will soothe and caress where they once laid dormant and admired. eyes will become clever and determined. words will be weighed with experience and buoyant with joys you've lived. seductiveness will be a firm receptive gift, so much more pleasurable to touch than even your youngest skin. and your voice will always be the same, things change and your voice will always be the same. your true voice, spoken in hushed tones through a receiver or elevating in resounding darkness, will always wrap and weave it's way through your man's heart.

note to self

of the knife

"artists don't set out to bring anything to the audience or to anyone else. they set out, again, to cure a raging imbalance."

Don't die, Maude, for Christ's sake. I love you.

Harold that's wonderful.

Go and love some more.

we are real

hands down

you do this. never feeling whole because there's a hole somewhere. music resuscitates and keeps the river from drought. wake up. eyes open. the matter of how high to pull yourself from the mire. like a mother dog biting and lifting that part of her own neck. you're not a puppy anymore. but when you create. when you create. if you're lucky enough to find it's location you expose that newborn soul over and over again. and the world comes crawling into the best untouched and mixes like paint. sometimes you wanna put it on your wall. other times you want to drown in off shades.

all rivers at once

on the other side of pain is gratitude. there are so many brilliantly good people in this world. often we're just one brave hello away from meeting them.

beginning through dirty window

dawn

nobody's watching. the sun must light up our eyes indefinitely if we get enough of its unblemished morning rays. no one knows when you're gone. the liberation of spirit is beyond compare. the exchange is only stroke of blood in heart. life becomes a phantom right? memories crystallize into present behaviors, some good or bad. indifferent or meaningful. a bunch of handsome people move about abbot kinney now, but before it was just us, wasn't it? insulated in worlds and worlds, that google+ thing has it right with it's circles. circles and circles of perspectives, we lasso the reality we choose for now and grip it like it's everything. sometimes catching something god damn beautiful that drags us like an infuriated bull. hands bleeding from rope as long as we can hang on. everything certainly becomes repopulated. i'm not sure with what? a lot. this morning i walked the beach with a lot more people than i remember. and the sun was writing all over my face. the sand hitchhiking in my shoes. birds travelling like neurons. giving thoughts. pleasure ocean. pain boardwalk. both contrasting forces inherent in one another. i took a left along familiar streets. a vagrant face reflecting back at me in car windows. or just another affected one prone to reflection. it's something.

yes

"life is not linear. it's organic. we create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us."

inconsequential

there's a burning throat. we never smoked together. not as much as we do separately, now. we drank jack and then chased it with coke at the top of some mulholland vantage point and the glimmering lights of the valley were turned down dull enough to accurately portray such disappointments. we were talking about something vaguely sentimental or singing about something else top 40. maybe considering dancing on the side of the road. i'm sorry you felt bad that night. it was so long ago, mixed in before such drastic events and after our greatest victories over one another. in our darkest hours we have these small memories and they're entirely inconsequential until they're all we have left to prove that a prior reality did indeed occur, take place. i talked bullshit about space.

is a flame

fresh energy. stars. we search, even play it passively. hoping, dreaming for the burst. i stare at my cell phone for a flashing red light. i glance at the sky and swallow powder blue loneliness like water. i converse with strangers i'll never meet again. shake hands. use paper towels for getting in and out of public restrooms. dream on floors. scratch my scalp. take omens with a grain of salt. apply for spiritual grants. toss and turn in bed from full moon gravity. heart palpitates, stomach metabolizes, energy burns like a pilot light, levels varying. i work away libido. draw upon experience, splash abstractions, wondering when and where, when and where. breathing. inhalation is inspiration, fresh air, allergies, pollen, and all and everything.

in the shower or on a rock

The spiritual exists more than anything. So, when your analysis prone friends tell you one thing about your true mourning and my anthropological buddies point toward man's nature of the hunt and promiscuity, remember that they're both neglecting the unspoken beauty that uplifts this life. The invisible greatness that two people can share when they're both concentrated.

Then what is good?

"The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive---that's what's good for you if you're at all serious at your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life---live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition."

-Tennessee Williams

broken cell phone

you speed along asking yourself if this is a friendly universe. and this greedy-calorie-consuming-brain sucks down another glass on the rocks. and you dance at parties with globs of wasted food. and your own plastic plate finds the trash can with more nutrients than you can stomach. and the consequences of activity wear you down. and your tired feet and skateboard get you across town. and you sleep in your car. your slurred words are mistaken for accidents. like getting behind the wheel and falling asleep as the lines blur blurry white trails across your fragile cerebral cortex as it's firing on liquid fuel and intoxicants. and then you wake up. and then the news. and then the navy kills pirates and makes heroes of wealthy nations. malnourished skin withers it's last glow. the world's rising middle class get microwaves. and obesity plagues the states. and food prices are going up. and a few african fishermen use their boats to find different fish to stay alive. and we remake robin hood all the fucking time but still feel like heroes when we gun down these poor thieves. and so what if i made fun of those kids for going to private school.

tomorrow morning

i'm a side door away from peace. desperate and fearful of a meditative pause. being immersed in solitude is very different than knowing the ever-present silence. it's difficult to bare. so i've kept the music on, inebriated the mind, made my unconsciousness a purgatory for any pure energy. letting it wait. covering my ears. making noise. like a child tuning out. dodging the universe. anxiously avoiding my only redemption. the silent pain. universal patience. expansive immersion. discovery of breath. like a jagged spiritual transfusion. footsteps in the sand. nothing in my hands. it's been awhile since i ran on the beach.

wake

life feels most real when it's so dreamlike it can't be remembered

love in a sarcophagus. pleasures of flesh, chemistry, all the dreams we fail to describe. you floated into my waking and grabbed me with something real, greater. feelings intensified beyond tired confines of sleepy days. grabbed me. grabbed you. pushed, pulled, hungered, delved, laid down and listened to black quiet death, pounding in rhythm with the universe. bathed in honey, molten lava, my resolve obligingly finding the drain, sinking away. the sun's splendor, pale ash to the night's magic. on a rickety bed, the physical exchange, bodily merge, power, fire, liquid warmth, symbols of passion explaining the abstract clamouring of our loud invisibles. The banging of pots and pans, slamming of porcelain, shared journey, that's what you were talking about right? the shared journey. i said the moments were best. dynamite could probably solve the quandary of perspectives, collapsing the middle to rubble, drawing together both poles, leaving us, indistinguishable dust, merrily indistinguishable.

at daybreak

the seahorse carousel of hollywood movie ideas circumvents space and laughs in your face. Every cafe in this town serves microwaved eggs. I swallow an oatmeal life to contrast the colorful world surrounding. A nearly blind gentleman stares nose to screen and speaks crystal clear, probably the smartest guy in this town. This town. If I was in Ireland, I'd be another dirt road musician. Hawaii, a fat man playing ukulele on his porch. French Revolution, an imprisoned melodramatic or poet sadist. Arctic, a smiling beluga whale. Cold, cold, go north grow berries. Warm, warm, south avocados. Cultivating the earth provides the magic. The time is ripe. The fruit will fall. Everything into the soil, to grow again.

Life Is Out of Sight

Repopulated

Most of my friends are long departed writers. Away somewhere, busy specs of dust, earthly ruminations, global participants, stampeding tides. The rest are patient satellites, destitute sunbeams, molding cabins near forgotten mossy earth. Pieced together, unified in their human forms, fluttering words through the communal language. And we're appreciative. I am anyway, for my friends. Profound logic, morality, inanity, entrances to shared experiences. Shining light on everything we fail to recognize even as we wake immersed, bound. Our very lives, governed by documents of written language shedding accountability on primitive mechanisms. Movements shackled with compromise. Private thinking lorded over by public language. The brain belongs to society. The heart belongs to children. The soul is a shit word, but that thing, that thing which shall remain nameless, locationless, against recognition, that which we know, pray, kill to be true, flowering light obliterating the self, shall redeem, continue true energy from this communal prison, freeing that genius again.

Interchangeable

Your phone is glowing in your pocket. Misery thrives on rejection which births direction. I love that golden sheen. The caricature of health. Even as our cells rot, smoke drifts onto eyelids, resting, realizing that everyone is working in harmony. Right and wrong if we just understand, we're all destined for an interwoven fate. Like strangers on a rollercoaster.

Alan Watts

Scattered

it,

feeling was nourished, by the grand illusion, that i was wanted. the pleasure, the derelict tendencies, moments where i sold myself. the dumps in venice, a bunch of cars that move once a week, dodging street cleaning, skating back and forth from curbside to curbside. the driver's hands soaking pretentious bohemian poverty bliss, the last of the mohicans. a bunch of rats with tiny holes to glorify, realize self, seldom few can destroy, even that frail notion. life is um...you know...good but lonely...but good...it lives....doesn't care...but...it's the best we have.

Anton

"Here I am talking to you, I'm all worked up, and still I can't forget for a minute that I've got a story to finish. I see a cloud, like that one, shaped like a piano. I smell the heliotrope, I make a mental note: a sickly-sweet smell, a widow's color, use it to describe a summer's evening."

the sky is our mistletoe

we were young and what's there to say? we were young, having such fun. we were young, oh so dumb. when you're young, love doesn't come easy - yes it does. yes it did. yes it did. yes it did. when i was young, even younger, not a kid, a teen, but a young young man, i used to drink beer and write until i cried and through the tears the words would spill out and ideas'd take shape and it wasn't for anyone else, it was for me and it was somewhere pure, distorted by delusions, but pure, pure in it's belief. and i believed, and i finally get the genius of that sigur ros song, i finally do. only, it's now alone, i'm only just learning alone, it's like - we die - so we can begin again and learn. we die and begin, die and begin, then we die and learn again, through our life, and the others before and others afterward. reincarnate me, an ant, a spacebeam, static in your radio, a gypsy moth, flame, destitute galaxy, spec of dust on the moon, i'll see you entirely, the way our bodies moved, how entropy was only a superficial challenge - the greatest illusion - that everything decays hahahahahah - it's only superficial - only in sight - only in senses, we do not decay....we expand. we grow and further and thicken and challenge and see through to the other side upon the other side upon the other side and somewhere over the rainbow is irrelevant because the rainbow is right there smack dab and we are already over everything, under everything, flipped around, backward, upward, downward dog at the shoreline watching the waves break upside down spinned around toward the sky and inverted we see the change, like clues to a greater puzzle we're already a part of, complete with no need for the cover for reference, the cover is fluid, the puzzle is what we are. the surface is the only falsity, the surface pretends, the image imagines, the ocean deeper than a pane of glass from an airplane, just as the sky is further than a thin line from the ground, life is breathing endless below the surface and outer space is further than we can use our brains and we're the same way. far beyond this skin, wrinkling, drawing lines, sagging bottoms, far past these graves, bills, arguments on the freeway, pressing flesh, dinner ceremonies, silence and waves, water spigots, laughing children, garden gnomes. we live greater than solace can imagine, more powerful than relief, pleasurable than massage, giggling at the rush of orgasm, it's but a trifle in true consciousness. shaking, shimmering, the ground moves, ground like coffee, ground like particles, ground and ground and grounded, our hearts give us a clue as to how boundless we are, our heart's maximum only clues to an eternal greatness we possess. inherent in energy. inherent in consciousness. inherent beyond feelings, judgements, labels, inherent within gravity's lie.

When it Clicks

You were correct to get nervous when you learned that Jim Morrison was only 27 when he'd died. Your impulses were alarmed at the wealth of art and impact he'd seemingly created in comparison to our own lives. Whether it was greater than what we've done or not, is irrelevant. I was wrong. I shouldn't have assuaged your fears. I shouldn't have validated you. I should have jumped on your moving train of thought and like you, figured out how to do more. More in this life. More with my days. More waking hours. More activity. More action. More disruption. More movement. More expression. More. More. More. We can always be doing more.

the xx

The ash from my joint litters it's chewy black all over a working desk that's gone on holiday. I was thinking that if we traded our expectations for practicalities and antediluvian moralities, that's when we'd arrive at something greater. This notion thriving by forgoing the pop culture orgasm. This notion based upon a norm explosion with shades of bohemian bliss. Please teach me gently, how to breath. They'll tell you one thing and do the other. Everyone keeps shucking off dime-store quotes and it's getting to be regoddamndiculous. The best advice is abstract. The best advice we tell ourselves. The best advice gets delivered in one sentence of a greater nonsensical rant. Bars are group therapy. Street fairs are excuses for people to look at each other. Deserts are our souls. Forests are our hearts. Mountains are our brains. Lions are our creative energy, lazy male power, agile female huntresses. Devour and burn, explode onto one another, over and over again and see what shakes. Explosion creating decimation or fertile grounds. Explosion being the catalyst to our behaviors. Explosion being change, allowing us to mourn, forcing us to leave, grow, return, move forward. Move forward. Move forward. We gain so much of our lives by reason, we lose so much of our lives to reason. We absorb and participate in so much complexity. The liquid of our great story lives within the motion of our movements, work is applied force through space and time and I'll cross oceans like never before, so you can feel, the way I feel it too. My face is an ever-shifting tale of distortion and I'll mirror images back at you so you can see the way I feel it too.

the organ of gratitude and loss

Microphones ("I Felt Your Shape")...

I thought I felt your shape but I was wrong
Really all I felt was falsely strong
I held on tight and closed my eyes
It was dumb I had no sense of your size

It was dumb to hold so tight
But last night
On the birthday in the kitchen
My grip was loose my eyes were open

I felt your shape and heard you breathing
I felt the rise and fall of your chest
I felt your fall
Your winter snows
Your gusty blow
Your lava flow
I felt it all
Your starry night
Your lack of light
With limp arms I can feel most of you

I hung around your neck independently
And my loss was overwhelmed
By this new depth I don't think I ever felt

But I don't know
The nights are cold
And I remember warmth
I could have sworn I wasn't alone

with arms

when i found out that; strength is an illusion
like everything else, only worse
i cried and i cried
and cried
it was a goddamn shame
i thought
like most things we lose
i became nervous at the prospect of it never coming back.

Chasing The Consequences of Inactivity

Tear down an ugly strip of neural pathways, adhere them to canvas. We can contribute growth or surrender to artistic negligence. A bit more. People doing the same thing, everyday, even as the dream weakens, the behaviors stay the same, so ingrained. Comforts are our weakness. Security is our plague. Uncertainty is closer to death and life, so the dilemma goes.