why men prefer to go to the liquor store or; why some men almost seem determined to go crazy

Drip. Faucet. Goes drip. Wake up on the next torturous splash to a stranger in your bed. She rolls in toward your hairy body and the blankets and the temperature increase and she kisses you with warm sour angel morning lips on your surprisingly fluent mouth. And you two had been facing the same general direction - sleeping toward your bookcase and the succulent plant on top of it with crumpled receipts and fragmented ideas and lines scratched into them with pen and the red and the black backpack on the floor with scattered remnants of hours ago worn clothes now cold uninhabited - but now warm she has shown you her sleepy eyes and hidden her communicative spine in exchange for that warm kiss which turns into kissing on one another and piercing into one another for several not insignificant widening angles of the sun across the eastern window and through the headboard window onto perpendicular walls in this bedroom. And you wonder who she is but not aloud.

the makings of a composite character

You look bad on an escalator. You look good in a movie theater. You appear dangerously attractive on a street corner. You look softly melodic hair spread fanned out on a bed. You look scary in my heart. You roll through an aquarium looking through glass walls at the scary territory of my heart. Have I mentioned my heart? you two should meet, he's that one out there on the plains.

(he volumelessly backhands the binoculars into her chest without taking his eyes off the horizon)

(and she wraps her slender fingers around them and raises the lenses up in line to meet her own)

Duarte

the best Bob Dylan is sad Bob Dylan. I used to work at his cafe in Santa Monica and he ran it like any other cheap small business owner would. But damn, he's good and sad on a rainy night in Los Angeles.

i was walking thinking about death. I was drinking while slinking in between staggered alleyways. I shared a cigarette. I smoked a joint that was handed to me. I ate tacos too spicy. I drank milk. My limbs  grew tired. I formulated so many beautiful things in my head to say over the course of the last several days but I drank them away. Washed them down the drain in a carbonated brine.

i had a short story. It went something like this:

at the end of the day, his hands smelled of fish and cigarette smoke. Because that is what he worked with to survive. And he would marvel at the shiny scaled fatty creatures that would arrive with such consistency to his cutting board. How lucky. To never have pulled one of them from the sea.. But to still revel in their bounty each day like an artist with fresh paint that stunk to perfection. Lemon. Dill. Chives. Fresh grated horseradish. Labneh. Mixed. He sold the salad by weight. It was his daintiest creation in the glass case and he liked everything else best. And he wasn't a smoker, just someone who choked on the fumes of a missing distant impulse.

and if you are going to do anything, he thought as he shaved off a translucent thin sliver of pink oily flesh with sharpened knife, you might as well do it beautifully.

my lover the moon

Her face was the moon and our love was the sun and we cast our shadows down like the uh the moon and I was um hot and on fire like the sun and we burned holes in the ground like the eternal sun through a magnifying glass shaped like the moon and her and I we sizzled like the surface of the um the sun again and she was definitely a lot like the magic of the moon.

wonders of scale

My neighbor asked me if I was writing at all. The answer was no. I take Decembers to let the limbs remain barren. Be nude and feel every speck that floats onto me or that I run into. This is an alone time of year.

But I once fell in love during a December. And under barren trees in Los Angeles is still the sun peering through with powerfully mustered strength from a Hail Mary distance. It's romantic this desert winter. So it once happened like this; where we were awoken by a muse in cold bedroom mornings but warmed as a rising recognition and impassioned cause rolling over into laying days on beds of earth.

I'm going to go to my friend's house today to talk about love. Or its absence. The romantic kind, that is.  Truth be told, it informs the other kinds doesn't it. It drives the universal kind of love, the hungering one. Even its echoing habit and sentimental ritual has more force than an asexual guru in lotus. And I am on a thin drip of its echo.

I forgot how much it terrifies me. My behavior does a good job of leading that obtuse charge away from anything it resembles. Protect. Protect. The animal says. Intelligent animal.

Walking down my alley this morning an old dog sidewinding crooked gave me a knowing look in the eyes. You can't keep me inside forever. I'll always find a way out, it spoke friendly, even if it's only for a brief wild time before the leash arrives. The tethering is only temporary to what nature cleverly devised - a biological pleasure system to incentivize the repetition of bodily advancement toward building a God-like spirit lover for the sensual and individual Universe of all things. The Universe is waiting for its body to birth an eventual match to make conscious forever love to. Just like me, a dude in another December, grateful to have another day in construction.

my friend i can hear the drums from miles

This body is just a body. Miraculous. Inside this human game I'm a trying failure. Outside of it, I'm a spirit. I'm the spirit. The impoverished don't use it as an opiate. I was wrong. The truly humbled just know. They are reduced and closer to it, so they know. That they are it. That they are everything. That they have nothing to worry about because they are something. And that its all meaningless prefix and that the thing is not an object, it is light, bright, piercing, expanding, ever. In human terms the sun is a dot in the light flora.

I was getting all caught up in the game of identity and it was small. It, the actions we take are irrevlevant. The inner garden we cultivate and the beauty it abounds, is decorative only for a time. Time is only a notion in a very small wristwatch on the hand of a man eaten by a giant lost in the multiverse.

I'll kill you. Understand? Do not take it literally. Do not take it in flesh. When those messiahs spoke in anger it was only a passion that was pouring outward toward light. It is a violence only in meek terms of language and human and temporal flesh, and only because that is a metaphorical velocity in movement. No one is harmed, not here, not anywhere, because they are not anyone. There is no one. That is not a lonely statement. It is a recognition. We are not One. Or one. Or 1. We are not we. We are not are. We are

And I know it is scary to admit. Open your hands outward and if you don't have hands or they are full let your spirit bloom uninhibited and no matter how you do it, it is never going to stop

til the doctor

I have so many memories. Which one do you want to hear? A chef at work was teaching me to cut fish and he said it was important to stay present in whatever you are doing. Including cutting fish. My joke on stage -- I will save for the stage. It requires an affect, a long a. Maybe a memory is not what you need right now. Maybe you need me to be present.

So here I am. Here. Obliterating myself into individual atoms that peel away upon themselves like onions. And so on and so forth. Tears. 

Maybe I just need to sweat. It's been a week since I last broke a good sweat. Maybe my dad needs to eat more so he doesn't look like a method actor. Maybe my mom needs to take 1mg instead of the five she was mistakenly prescribed by her free healthcare to keep from being dizzy. Maybe I need to stop using my parents as a cop-out.

I told myself I could drink beer all December. I told the audience. No. This isn't about making them laugh. This is about the present.

People get bored on stories without love. Tell a love story. No.

This is about the present. I'm listening to music. I'm patting myself on the back. I'm feeling awful. God, I'm getting better at making them laugh.

Trav was right about the palm trees at night. Damn, if only I could paint them. Still-black against a muted shade of telephonic gray. The moon-bulb in one tidy little section throwing about an evenly distributed party. All guests of light invited.

Also I'd be a millionaire by now if I'd given up that stand-alone courage I so admire in myself in exchange, for a wife. But then, I wouldn't have been present like I am now.

my lover the photographer

She said she liked Instagram. That it didn't affect her profession. That all the social media beauty was a relief from what she had spent so many years remotely chasing. The messy and the muck, the clashing of ugly spheres and cells to make a bloody born baby of a moment. Like that Egyptian trash pile where people lived and flies fed. Like a jagged and misunderstood light. A Gypsy's eyes. A Haitian morgue. She wanted what she saw with her own eyes and heart to challenge the limits of her lens, she wanted what she photographed to break her camera.