on the darkest day of the year

She asked who took care of me

And on this winter solstice of a winter solstice of a year I remember fondly that for one ripened second it was you who did

an airbnb in venice

As my dad was in his bedroom slowly saying goodbye to life and his skin and his habits and his dear friends and his nervous family and his not yet ready to go attitude and his still alive with no actual date or approximation of time as to when he was going to leave his body I was laying in bed with a lovely naked young woman thinking about how I was at one of the heights of living and celebrating life's pleasures no matter how sad it was is or was going to get and there he was alone in his bed in the middle of the night and I wouldn't have even called her a young woman in my mind had I not thought of him

meh

More people are dying than being born in many countries in Europe. Trav said something, about how our animal sense can feel it's not time to make more on this planet. I liked that.

A driver went forty miles the wrong way up the I-5 this morning before crashing into another car and killing all involved in fiery flames. That's what was said on the radio this morning.

ash wednesday

i keep quoting a woman who doesn't exist outside my mind until she becomes the words i attribute to her. but she is not a her. she is a me. i am a her. i am a me. but this one woman. a real one. i never found out if the cats that crawled around her place were hers or what. she has this young married couple that lives with her and reads harry potter to each other in the living room. and she, i don't know, something about her is my muse. cuz we could talk about things like abortion pills and shit and just live in it.

i've been looking at the blue of the sky more lately

if i lit a match the guy next to me would catch fire. what i'm saying is he's drunk. he shows me his scratcher just this moment "i just won twenty bucks." oh, nice man. i tell him a little too patronizingly. i haven't been drinking much lately. nothing to celebrate, no impending demise, no dreary depression. it's none of that. at the moment.

fishman and lang and the damn money

it's silly. why is it silly. cuz this doesn't matter. don't say that. i woke up numb ok. ok. my feet were like dead stones. ok. and all the waiting is driving me nuts. it's driving me absolutely insane. so stop waiting. look at it like living, not waiting. it doesnt have to just b on your terms. life doesn't just have to happen only on your terms for it to happen. yeah, maybe you're right.

2:10am

We lay in bed. It's a mattress on the floor. I've always liked a mattress on the floor. Sometimes I wonder if the floor isn't nature's best box spring. She kisses me. Tells me I'm not funny but that she likes me. I wonder if not finding me funny is essential to being attracted to me initially. Like we have to be taken seriously first before entertaining the alternatives. I wonder this as I'm getting up from off the mattress on the ground. I wonder it as we're saying goodbye. I wonder about it as I'm wondering why they always seem to be reconstructing every freeway on-ramp in Echo Park, always. I wonder nothing anymore driving alone down Figueroa at 2am, a championship parade of one. The Lakers won't be doing it for awhile. I might as well be celebrating something of my own, even if it's just a memory I have of once seeing The Phantom of the Opera downtown when I was a kid. I had never been inhabited by voices that loud and melodic. And the musical wasn't funny but I liked it.

A Celebration of Life

We were in Mexico
no we weren;t
Ok we weren;t but it is an allegory
for wha;t
We were in Mexico. The waters were crystal clear. My father was in a Snuba helmet. It began filling up with water slowly. He almost drowned. His friends brought the vacation pictures of it, yesterday.

he told me i was monotone

A story about a naked woman with an apple in her mouth. Not Eve. The one once on my bed, turned flat on her stomach. I held it in front of her mouth and asked her take a bite. Then she craned her head back to kiss me.

He said he was submitting it to the Atlantic. I told him I'm not sure they do fiction much these days. But it happened, he cried. Yeah. Yeah.

And burlesque dancers have eight identities. One for them. Seven for us. I defeated an Australian heckler. Then wondered about my own.

Everyone is the funniest person in the world sitting on a bar stool. I told him.

On Lincoln Blvd

Fish tank. My daddy had a fish tank. And he got me one too for my room. And he'd take me to the aquarium on the weekends and we'd look at all the fish. The discus. The algae eaters. We once bought a crayfish too but it went to clawing and killing all the fish in the fish tank. So we did what men had to do, we flushed the enemy down the toilet.

orange roobois

My childhood resumed itself after the break of '11. That's when the friends showed up, the certain kind of friends, the foxes. Opportunism and sly, light footing.

We drank a bottle of Jack Daniels at a sushi restaurant on Main Street. One of the chefs got upset. We thought it was byob. Only beer and wine. Fine.

Then we got trashed at one establishment or another and we were like a brush fire. Everything wanted to be in our path. They kept stepping up to burn. It didn't amount to much but still, ashes rarely do. And they don't tell you that about fires, that the things they burn often seek the flames.

Which reminds me, we still have to do something with my father's ashes.

And he, my dad, wrote existential pieces in college.

And me, my face is transitioning into that of a man. The body knows where we must go, before we do. That was it --

Drawing all these lessons from my dad's physical deterioration and but what about my own. Gradual, slow, I know, I know. Knock on wood. I know.

I slipped out of my shoes at the beach today and thought of my dad untying shoes. He wouldn't just slip out of them, he would be disciplined and untie them. So that's what I did.

Then I thought of him tying the laces of my hockey skates. And he'd get em pretty tight. And I'd get on that ice and have the time of my life.

yes i'll book u on my show

at this point i merely want a girlfriend so i can shut the fuck up about it. and i just think it's so hot when a woman is composed of matter and space. and i don't like how i worry about every fragile person i've ever connected with. especially cuz branches of my empathy are tangled in with my ego.

cuz it was beautiful like that

there is a man next to me at this cafe. he looks like a black mark twain. and he is writing something on his old white mac laptop. and he just took out a new container of figs. and he tore off the plastic seal liner thing. and then he opened the lid to the figs. and i stopped looking after he moved his delicate fingers toward the first one. cuz it was beautiful like that.

recipe idea

3 cups of watching her go. 1 and 1/12 tablespoons of regret. 3 shots of tequila. 1 post on the internet about how you're sad about it. 4.5 tylenol with codeine. 10 days of antibiotics. 3 days of i'm going to get it together. 1 bad phone call. 1 worse phone call. 1 non sensical email. 1 apologetic voicemail. 1 hospital visit. 3 days in the rain. 2 bruises on your face. 1 night spent sleeping in your car. 1 night spent sleeping your car. 1 night spent sleeping in your car. 12 years of adulthood as defined by law. 14 lies. 100 mg of $%^&$. 50 mg of $^&*$. 1 foaming mouth. 4 convulsing limbs. 8 seconds of unconsciousness. 2 flashes where you saw the light. 2 flashes where you saw your life flash before your eyes. 18 minutes in solitary confinement. 27 years in a medieval dungeon in a former life. 1 time your friend climbed on top of a pay for parking kiosk on the beach raising his arms high and yelling like a fucking sorcerer, as the sun climbed down the ladder behind him, and nothing much happened.

are you there god it's me margaret

my friend lily was reminding me of non local intelligence. how a split atom will change itself identical as its other side without the motion in between evident. now i sit in front of my computer and think: it is non local intelligence when someone else is on the screen and we are talking and nodding and agreeing and having orgasms together. from different sides of the world. and i'm not doing that now. i'm just thinking of it as an example.

cuz i wrote about it in my book. when i wrote my book. i was preoccupied with absence. and i didn't put it that way then.

but the greatest presence in my life right now is absence. there is so much presence to absence. it's overwhelming. and rich. like my dad's friend marty says about the sad stuff, it's rich. i don't think he was talking about absence the times he said it. but that's what i mean.

brought to u in part by

her name. she will be beautiful. she will tell u how good things come undone but that she knows how to tie important things back together. she will say something about how these lives of ours fold onto themselves and yes they are brief and yes they are wondrous because of it.

she says she lost god. then recognized her own one. then created a temple inside the spirit world she'd long been inhabiting.

she says she likes biting u. she says she likes ur tongue inside her. she says the way u do that boy, mm.

i'll have her glitter in my beard.

swim out past the breakers and watch the world die

I awoke to haphazard scratch marks on my back. Like elegant claws. Last night I drove home with the windows down. My hair was cutting my eyes in the wind. In the Silverlake hills I left her house. A song by Everclear came on the radio. I was raised in L.A. of that era. Driving around the city with my mom, crazed, trying to make our lives better, listening to music like that. And, last night, before I got into my car, she knelt behind me while I put on my shoes and she caressed my shoulders, back, chest. And before that, we were complimenting each other. And before that, we were hungering into each other like animals fed on this kind of nourishment. I drove into her and she drove onto me. And in between we talked about things like birthdays. And before that, she hand rolled a cigarette while we spoke of death and birth and abortion pills. And it's nice when you can get into the ugly with a person, open hearted, cuz often it turns beautiful.

And when I drove home, I felt, finally I felt, a tinge of the magic that I love about this city.

found in my notebook

Loss prompts us to do things, Love prompts us to do things. Oftentimes these two forces battle & defeat each other & it'll probably be that way for a long time.

a deleted facebook post

We broke up just before that Adele song popped. We didn't know it would be so overplayed. So we identified. Like, suckers. But I didn't find someone like u. Never mind. There was an actress who I exchanged words like - love - with.and a Swedish/Nicaraguan beauty I kept at arms length until I needed her and she rightfully fled. So no the song was false but it was played over and over again. And now I'm outside a food truck waiting amidst the spilled lettuce for a chicken shwarma. And I am, yeah, I am Carrie Bradshaw. And all my friends are doing blow. And I wish nothing but the best for the Foo Fighters.

one line or two

i still haven't cancelled my dad's wifi. not cuz i'm looking for a signal. i just haven't done it.

venice blvd.

Don't smile at me. I'm a wolf.
He said.

I know. She said.
That's why I smiled.

5:39 am

Listening to an oxygen machine upstairs. He used to sleep with his doors closed. We decided that changed two nights ago. Damn I'm gonna miss the Super Bowl he said yesterday. It's all metaphor. You begin to adore pop culture for the relief it brings in shiny glimmering metaphor.

I think our greatest accomplishment is that we all found each other cuz love redefines time. 

It is in evidence. I hear him gently clear his throat. Like he always has and will.

sep 22

my dad watches people's court. my dad cries. i hang on his every word. you're gonna get me goin. like for clues to eternity.

follow up

brave ants. damn they're courageous. travelling far and wide to find the water droplets in my bathroom.

it was a dandelion that adorned the left side of her back. too captivated by the way she arched it to discern the first time.

it's here. lick your fingers.

it's here. sit on my face.

i massaged my dad's leg. i gently worked the doughy dense fluid into shape. the ligament. bone. my hands finally peaceful to heal with only love unclouded. he said i have nice hands.

it hurts. sometimes it just hurts. and our only job is to feel it and get a few good ones in. before it hurts again. no telling when that next one will be. only how we meet it. whether an instant or a biblical travail like Job.

the ants got sprayed. then we left em alone i think. i don't know. i don't have the heart to tell the ants to leave. cuz you know, nothing novel here, but sometimes i feel like one.

no horse with a name

https://vimeo.com/139593720

v.g.

Her dad was a private airplane pilot who flew away. I didn't handle her much better. And I think about it. She called me once later. Told me she'd been meditating. Said something about my hair. That she loved it. She used to tell me I looked like a lion. That's a nice thing for a man to hear from a young woman.

The thing is, I don't remember how to spell her last name. Even if I did. She could be married. She could be lost on purpose. She is nowhere on the internet that I can track. She is nowhere on the westside where she used to be. UCLA. Bad Brentwood bars. Her work. I don't remember where that was either.

She lived with her mom in a one bedroom apartment in Van Nuys. I liked speaking to her on the phone. She would purr when pleased. Actually purr. It would've been weird if she weren't Eastern European. No, it still was weird. And I liked that about her.

composition notebook

A cave

And in this cave

the essentials:

A box of old baseball cards that were kept in and out of bicycle spokes

A memory of a backyard football soft spiraling along a father's arc

Two empty bottles of Dramamine

A photograph of You and one of the Lovers whom you delighted and suffered in never understanding

Ghastly face, the one you made when remembering it all and not being able to do a damn thing about it. The time is running out to fix things that can not be fixed. The opportunity to correct is dim. There is not enough energy and not enough time yes time, that gold.

Your own reflection in soft aquifer pool. Close your own eyes. This is all you own. And this is the last of it now.

Wake. Dispersed. You were so silly to think it all was dependent on the toil of the physical world. Like if in a dream you panicked and then awoke to physical life. Now, it's like that. Only, physical life becomes the spirit world

What you did in the physical world is perfect. What you do now is prone to eternity. We were all so lucky. The physical life, like a cup of coffee in the grand scheme of things.

It never agreed with my heartbeat.

And you always ordered decaf.

And merrily merrily merrily we all cry Love

oh lord please don't let me be misunderstood

I'm wearing a beret. You see. We stroll along the avenue of Montana sharing a croissant. The pastry's flakes sail to the ground beneath our decorative shoes as we tread along one December morning. Holes in our socks. No one can see those. Nor the holes in our souls. Our hearts are so damn full.

I have six dollars in my pocket. You have a hundred Euros, a thousand Egyptian pounds, and several coins from Cambodia in your Moroccan bag. You are colorful like a peacock while I am muted in black and blue, hair astray beneath beret.

A portrait artist begs to paint us. Old photographers stumble over one another trying to capture our likeness on their 8mm film burned indelible. Wanting us badly to themselves in darkrooms.

While a writer with a typewriter sits on one of the patio tables outside of a Starbucks, oh so bohemian, oh so bloody, he's sitting at his typewriter and bleeding, as us his muse. Is it blood or their passionfruit iced tea that spills from his mouth and fingertips. One can only venture a guess in hindsight. For at the time neither of us would've questioned blood. Our world was awash in it. We lived in spells of a Haitian menstruation. We swallowed red in blackened sealed tombs. We drank each other like airport duty free champagne.

I never carried a wallet in those days. I still don't. I collected my latex from trees in humid plantations gone wild and made a contraception. Cuz we feared the amount of people we'd birth together.

And the way we walked, it was not oblivious to the world, no, it was nothing less than a hyperawareness of every single little thing.

burrito boy

he's just a burrito boy living in a world full of burrito joy. a tiny little boy who loves his burrito time the way he shouts it from the sidewalks i'm a burrito boy. oh watch the way he chomps his burrito, boy, oh what a burrito boy. he is so lost outside in the great big world with no one to hold him and comfort him like the way a tortilla holds together all that warm inner joy of the burrito oh the burrito boy is a lonely boy who makes a living pretending the world is a this or that ploy but oh the burrito boy watch him as he chomps his burrito oh the burrito boy living in a womb of burrito joy oh burrito boy oh burrito boy.

a song of alchemy

"you change all the lead, sleeping in my head - to gold. as the day grows dim, hear you sing, a golden hymn. spread the ashes of the colors over this heart of mine"

the pikey

After my show I shared a plate of fish and chips with two pretty girls next to me at the thick wooden bar. We sat on our stools, high chairs. I joined them outside for a cigarette but didn't smoke one. I went back inside alone, paid for the food and left without asking for any piece of their share or of their futures.

I had a thought about a rainbow. I can't for the life of me remember it, the way it slid through. And you gotta be careful with the language when rainbows are involved, the cartoonish idea from a Lucky Charms commercial. 

Fuck, I forgot. 

tears&beers

all we have are the baseball myths of boyhoods past. he's an idiot savant my dad used to joke about my interest in the stats. league leaders in batting average, home runs, runs batted in. the umpires were more demonstrative before hd slo-mo cameras could prove them not to be gods. gods or not, the players would yell, the managers would yell, there was yelling all the time.

my problem is i'm still that dawdly boy full of love
that's not a problem
she said

when some future generations look in on us with interest and pity. that mixture in which we set our gaze upon the ones who tread these spaces before us, they will see this, a call, a beacon, a flare. i'll tell them, no, i tell them,

it's ok to feel
it's ok to heal

i talked to my dad driving my own car from venice to koreatown. his voice playing through my speakers like one of the few radio stations i can still tolerate and listen to.

and i'll learn. i'll live and learn. i'll do it for awhile. i'll leave distinct traces here best felt by time and others and the lovely havoc these members of generations wreak.

irish pubs and irish goodbyes

his finger is in her ass. he finishes that way. sometimes it's the other way around. he finishes with her finger in his ass. sometimes she finishes that way too.

if you ever write about us, and this, try not to make it too absurd. he tells her. she nods. she thinks he's stupid to fixate on the details like this one. a finger in the ass, one way or another, it takes up so little of their lovemaking time, let alone their time together. that it's silly.

she'd get to it, sure. why not. but only for a little levity. that's what she craves, at times. a levity, a freedom from the addiction to his weight.

a story by a woman
written by her

He drew me somewhere deeper and then became the only way I could breathe. Unfair, right? Especially because he was such a flake about it.

He called it solitude, that thing he wanted most he said.

Days would pass, storm by, and then he'd return to me disheveled and worn out from his time in solitude. I didn't know what I believed about him and what I made up. All I knew back then is that I wanted to be the ground he walked on, barefoot, all the time. I wanted to be the planet that contained him, gave him fertile rains and just the right amount of sunshine. I wanted to be the rocky soil that sometimes buried him. Then I'd be the Saint Bernard who sniffed him out of his hole and rescued him with my slobbery tongue. Desperate, right?

I know I seemed desperate for it but that's not it. It was about breathing remember?

It was about being able to breathe.

And he didn't need to kiss my face all tenderly like that. He didn't need to make me feel better about my history. Or like, how I saw myself. That, I liked myself more when I was around him, with him, cuz I could forget about myself. He had a way of lighting up a room. I say that, but he really did.

I know I must sound like a battered woman, a woman without inner confidence. But that's not it. This is about respiration. Being able to breathe. Feeling a reason, inspired, as long as his smell remained on my skin. I would've tattooed it on, his smell, if it were possible.

But it wasn't. It isn't. Life isn't that way. Like, we grow up but then suddenly stop. Like potted plants, our potential is already pre-determined until a gardener has a vision, pulls us out by the roots and transplants us into wilder earth. The wilderness. I feel like I'm in the wilderness, unable to breathe. And I'm cold.

So he hurt me once and when he did, I stayed where I was, away from him. In the cold, for awhile.

The End.

he said his friend said you can't shatter what was already broken. that she would rather disperse than wait around for your clumsy hands to put her back together just for the sake of easing the worries of your clumsy heart. he, still, he would've liked the chance to tell her he was sorry - for whatever it was worth, the role he played in their messy and brief affair.

a story

i was born to be a devil. i know it. you can see it in my bone structure, like the grandfather i never met, a worser devil.

he was born to be an angel. you could see it from the start. he had the cutest cheeks and fairest eyes of a golden child. i remember his cub like hands, brown tan skin, blonde white hair. in the summer he would wander the hills barefoot with his shirt off and everyone loved spotting him, kissed by the sun.

while i fought my own fate. and suffered for it. i would not surrender to the pleasure i'd surely know from taking and harming at the prewritten costs. instead i acted kind, grew compassion, and bled inside out for it.

but he wasn't contented being blissful. he tore off his halo. shredded his harp on ocean rocks i never saw. and he lashed out at the earth. for it had betrayed him, he thought. it had given him less than some, more than most, but never enough to know what to gain from any of it. so he blamed everyone and lay within jagged bottom pools of lava until coated in substance.

but i never forgot. i was born a devil who loved an angel. i dream about him all the time. like it's him, how i know him. then i awake in the middle of the night with the phantom creatures who know me. they dash about the imperceptible folds, leaving traces that could drive a lesser devil mad. but me, i bite and claw at them, then lick my wounds like a wolf pretending his best, to pull the sled.

but sometimes they don't come around, and that's when i know they've gone away from me to visit him, the angel, and have taught the boy their language.

a lover for the universe

juicy. between your legs is juicy.

a morning, i rode passenger seat in a white 90's convertible down the Eastside stretch of Sunset Boulevard. She drove like a Holly Golightly movie character, carefree. My head a bit above the windshield. Hair blown. Sex blown. What else do future generations want to read about anyway.

And let it be known like Van Gogh I believe in my art much in the same way he did. No matter. No matter. Even if I haven't gotten into my best shit. I haven't yet. I know it. Here is color.

I won't live in a police state. That actor said on twitter today that we do not begin as police property. I loved that. A twitter essay. Who would've thought. Another planet like Earth. Seems silly trying to own a piece of it, kind of like here. If I claim beachfront property on that planet like Earth, isn't it as silly as this one. Isn't it cruel what people think they own. Isn't it cruel how people act cruel about inane things like color and culture. Can't people keep their hands to their fucking selves unless asked otherwise. Stop being cruel.

Besides, the only cruelty I find excusable is the kind that bubbles inside the heart from being in love.

And this wasn't yet my best work.

the uncharacteristic july rains

The orchids you broke them after I broke your heart and I didn't like that cuz they were gonna die anyway cuz no one knows how to keep them alive anyway

stories

A woman near naked. Me in jeans. I wake up ravenously hungry. It takes two of everything to satisfy me. Like days ago, two.

A look. It's always simple. It's wanting one thing at a time. Simple. Not always having to do with them. We spoke, it's simple.

A lick of the hand. Tattoos, artfully situated. One crescent along the underside of her right breast. Another one vertically lining the left side of her back, an arrow, a feather, a sword, I don't quite know. I preferred to keep its graceful lines a mystery. An arching of her muscled spine. An elevation of her middle. Holding onto each other now for dear life, because it is dear, life. Pressing together hard and gentle. There's nothing like wanting it. The three of us, her, me, the candlelight she lit.

The crazies sat in plastic chairs outside the halfway house across the street. 

d'artagnan

I bite my skin proving it's a miracle.

They bankrupted themselves on high-enders. It kept him captivated and her solid and it worked for a time but they knew they were gonna end one day and that broke their hearts.

What it is like to meet a decent person: they hurt you gentler and that's the worst of em. All in all they are kind. It's amazing, human kindness. The way it cradles the moment. I've had a tough time accepting kindness into my life. Probly cuz I know that time is not. Time is not kind. It's not unfair, it's just not kind.

I bite my skin proving it's a miracle.

dinner experience

The ocean is huge but whales are huger. It makes sense. Somehow it makes sense. The elegance in which the tail lifts then descends.

we can't hang out anymore
why not
cuz all we ever do is talk about death
so. what's wrong with that

I told my friend my problem with mortality is not that I'm afraid of dying, it's that I intensely love living. I do. This particular life too.

a bloke name vernon

oh papi these latina damsels downtown in ripe colors form fitting around the contours of their plump derrieres ayaya mmm papi damn. from the streets of the wholesale district to the shores of the westside - that edge of the modern world - with its trustafarian princesses cavorting along abbot kinney in street rags worth more than my bank account balance and oh how their twenty years of no interest glow somehow sexier upon their kombucha fed skins and my momma was a supermodel lips oh how i'd slide my hand like daddy's charge card between those pilates toned legs and never worry about things like an outstanding balance ever again hot damn papi i mean

hot damn kid hot damn papi this african black mama in her yellow skirt and white blouse decorating and marking all this empty space with a purpose that the other girls can't pronounce in the same way, mmh her shade is shade, it is endless in that like it is a dark bath that i want to mmm i want nothing more than to submerge my spindly skin into one tantalizing inch at a time starting with my mouth, grazing her musculature and then savoring her soft secrets and oh papi oh these girls drive me loca or loco papi you know?

i mean sheeet

you know i don't speak any of much spanish papi but hot damn i want to. you know i want to. portugese too. i was under the covers once with this young brazilian woman of you know her caramel body reflecting an amalgamy of all the evil and purity in the world. one of those creme de la creme young fertile jungle beach city creations and let me tell you razor finger over my heart i would sell my soul to taste a drop of her sweat again and oh to hear her speak oh that portugese language is like a song and a fuck at the same time. sheeet. even french feels like you can taste the sweet honeydew on your tongue. i wanna learn the sex languages papi but it's just that bein a bedbug makes it so tough to get a proper bilingual education. cuz it's all about survival for the bedbug. is all.

it's all about survival for the bedbug. but i scratch and claw making room for the big picture necessities like you know the one. as in the survival of species, interspecies, hell papi, i'm thinkin bout the future, bout wanting to make a baby with these goddesses if i can just find the magic of how to grow up a little. sheeet i'd make an immortal baby with every single one of them son. one slow daughter at a time.

oh sheeet. imagine it papi: my bedbug seed spilling forth between one set of legs, another set of legs. another set of legs. my mouth hovering over her heart. and her heart. and her heart. oh the warm heat that leaves my lips from her making and then now her basking in what she just made in me and now it's giving onto her and that's the amazing thing of sex papi how we make one thing that does it to them that does it to us that does it to them until we are indistinguishable and oh i'm willing to go for miles, days and forever to lose myself in it just watch me papi:

watch me do it:

ugh papi. ugh. it's a rough life bein a bedbug.

balderdash

The party being over I just wanted to act like an idiot with you One day the Internet will blow up and this will be gone Tomorrow I guess I'll just go jump in the ocean Life lessons are like teeth we get more hard ones than we need Aspiring to be a model is the second saddest thing you could do with your time after already being one I wish I was having as much sex as my friends tell me I'm surely having The most courageous lie is telling someone you love everything is gonna be all right

las flores mesa dr

me. help. i can't get full. am eating too too much. am spending too too much $$$ on food. goo. don't know what is up. am feeling insatiable. mouth waters. burrito. sandwich. gaar. nachos. pizza. beer. all jazz. all bad. bad yogurt. fruit. pretzels. mooooo. milk. all jazz.

it stung with you. of course, that's why i liked it. she said. you could sting me and get away with it. but that was the problem. you got away, with it.

how many times you wanna do it like this. an internet writer talking about nina simone said male writers obsess about sex cuz they're missing anything primal from their coddled western lives. that sex is only it. but i'm talking about heartache, er, break, er, stale fumes of insignificance/significance.

how bout childbirth. i've witnessed it. the neon blue of the umbilical cord. the blood. the mother. i don't remember the immediate months after. just love.

how bout the time we saw that man with the cracked head. downtown, on the sidewalk. we pulled our car over and tried to help him. waited for the ambulance. i did the same thing again in venice one morning. alone. walking to the beach. a man with a cracked head. blood, yes, in both instances. and no one would let me borrow their phone to call the ambulance. finally, did. finally they showed up, and said he did this all the time, cracked his head. the man. he did it for attention, they said. he cracked his head for attention, they said.

i was kicked in the stomach by a horse.

in malibu we lived in a trailer on top of a burned down house from the 1993 fires. all that remained was concrete foundation. ruins. the trailer was big for a trailer. we had no electricity. the city was upset we were there so we had no electricity beyond the extension cord our neighbors ran from their house across a driveway and through one of our windows. three prongs. tv. cable box. floor lamp. sometimes we'd unplug one to use something else, like a boombox or hair dryer.

we filled a cooler with ice each day to store milk, soaking wet butter, eggs. then drained it out the side door down into the garden twelve feet below. it was a far drop out that side door. the trailer stood higher than the land. my mom grew roses and trees in the land. built fences. we overlooked the pacific ocean. it was a full blue. we were indians. we were feral. we existed between the grooves of modernity and something sweaty and primal. we did it for years and then she made some money selling it.

as a grown young man, i went back with a young woman who meant a bunch to me. there was now a house. the view was better than i remember. the land more ancient. the street just as steep, like it was encouraging the person on it to go back down and join humanity at sea level.

blondes have more fun

i dont feel well
what do you feel like?
sandpaper
let me feel
see, i feel like sandpaper
yes you do, textured and rough
i knew it
what are you protecting
huh
beneath the gritty surface
Oh, probly a soft underbelly, like a hedgehog
lucky that it's still like that then
what else could it be like
it could be like stone, i've seen it a billion times.

dialogue

i enjoy your company.
i enjoy your company too.
you're stupid, then.

what dragons mean

fireworks. mosquitos. the fountain in echo park lake splashing in a dream. none of these things belonged to her. transmuted by godknowswhat. his arms. first they were claustrophobic. too tight. constrictive. then they became addictive. it was him. it wasn't anything he was cognizant of, just how his inner world erupted and seized into what it held onto. who it held onto.

basketball courts. sunburn. wandering salty air with an abstract intent indescribable until it bloomed. to both be the flower and gardener, tiller of its soil. believer in its growth, blind faith. it being itself and its tender. these weren't her thoughts she knew but they ran circles around her in the evenings, pleasuring and plaguing her.

fuck. you fucking merged with me. then you left me. what am i supposed to do with all this life of yours that you gave me. where am i supposed to put these secrets of yours that you don't even know you have. if i throw them away they'll be gone forever and it feels damaging to life. but i don't even know where to throw you away, how to throw you away, where is the trashcan. i've tried, been trying a long time

i've danced in the desert. i've fucked a shaman for days upon days crying and whispering words and brushing my skin raw with his gorgeous attention. i've lived with men. i've loved men. i love a man right now as hard as i possibly can and it helps. but i feel you down below, in my gut, in my whole. like all that dark ocean unexplored

i heard that though. i heard that we've charted more of space than we have our own earth ocean depths. maybe i've been wrong, like humankind, eyes looking to the stars, while knowing inherently there is a core here that i'll never escape

and so she dove. she delved into it. one deep breath big enough to take her as far to the bottom as anyone ever dared to go. and when the pressure altered, slammed, then peacefully ceased on her, she, like all the expelled bubbles of a whale song, she let him go

when he got me spun

you left when you found out I wasn't going to be bad for you. damn boy. i loved you. i'm sorry i couldn't kill your fire. sorry if i fanned your flames to new exponents. mmh. i only wanted to bring your light up as high as it could go. it was selfish. i know. i wanted the world to know. you were always so humble and that i hated. cuz i thought it was selfish. you, not sharing your flow with the parched citizens of the dunes.

you left when you found out i'd never pull the plug. sux when you tell someone you're lonely to hang out with them cuz then they won't. not without pity in their eyes. and i woulda held onto your corpse forever if it let me, if forever let me. i woulda grown a banyan tree above us and waited in the sun years for its shade to come. i woulda blistered to preserve you.

pity. you left when i saw the pity in your eyes. damn. we never were ones to wear the mask. we never were ones to float above the briar patch. but the difference is i'd leap face first into the thorns if it meant you could use the drops of my blood for a trail. like hansel and gretel with the bread crumbs, but crumbs of my blood. if that make sense.  

you left cuz you didn't want to make it. i understood. i loved a coward like you. how you wanted to find someone to do it for you. shame, i didn't break your legs.

juniper

i awoke to a tall building in my neighborhood that i'd never seen before. a tower. it was towering over me, like a tower. it was a bigger tower than all the buildings downtown. it was freakin huge. like above the clouds. how'd it get up there that tall without my notice.

i been drunk. i been drunk for twelve days straight. i mean years. did i say days. i meant years. gosh i guess it plays games on the brain after awhile. of course, that's what i count on it doing. the games. i like that moment when it becomes a big ol conversation between one distant left side of myself and one different right side of myself. and they skate recklessly toward each other like two speed skaters but then miss each other again at the last second and each end up on the other side they don't belong. and then they do it again. until it goes black like a clapping computer screen really. reminds me. i need to go to the library.

gosh damn. the building is a glory. it's a holy cow. shake it off. how long has it been there. ahhhh it doesnt matter.

lots of people. kung fu kicking with headphones on and nah. outta my way lemons. outta my way beasts. everyone feels like lemons and beasts these days. lemons and beasts. either sour or angry. can't bite into either of em at the moment. shit. reminds me. i haven't had a bite since that belinda ended up in my situation by accident. that was when the situation were on los angeles st. that week. i liked that situation i had then. how then ago was that. shit. i've had to move my situation block to block more times than a calculator could count. reminds me. i need to go back to school.

we all exist in the shade. it's like. of this god damn building. it's looming more now than ever. the cold winds whip round it's distant edges like starvin cold greyhound races. speakin of starvin. i'm starvin. gotta go hit the usuals. be right back canine. gotta go hit the usuals.

and i'm feelin. i don't know. like obscured by this damn tower. it's so damn majestic comparison to me. i'm so damn puny. karate kicking out. no matter. biting at the air. at the cells in the air. eating yeast particles outta the air.

how do they make it so straight the building.

dialogue

why you always running
i aint
yes you is

we made love like mexican teenagers

he said "I don't like the whole fuck-me-now vibe" and I agreed. He touched my dark skin with his milky white hands and when the two of us lay together after work inside the quiet post office atop those piles of envelopes to be sorted and delivered by us the next day we reminded me of an Oreo cookie dunked soggy in milk--- the best way to eat an Oreo and this beautiful white boy of twenty-six knew how to eat my cookie and after I'd deliver what had been waiting aggravatingly inside me out to the world in one Big One, I'd particularly love how swollen his lips would look from all that tireless work down there in my kingdom down there. And what I also loved about him was how he revealed a whole bunch of parts of me that just never would have been revealed had it not been for just having him there with me so I could talk to him different from all the hundreds of customers friends and family I'd talk to all day because sex does something to people it is like a delivery station where all the things you have been hauling around with you finally have a place to unload. And I'd been on a long trip prior to the first time he and I made love. And I'd been packed to capacity with all kinds of cargo. And after we made love I got lighter, almost like I could leave the ground shipping entirely.

rendition

what happens in all this kissing. a question is everything. so why designate it with something so degrading as that curlicued symbol. lips. woman. i realized you, remember. it was above some bedsheets on the eastside. it was on a dancefloor downtown. a yoga mat tucked beneath secluded oak trees in the palisades. in my mind. that's where it lives, in my mind.

am i a ten cent magician. i wrote a story with a pig. i want to make it before pigs are everywhere. i've been seeing pigs permeating the zeitgeist. it's only a matter of time. i used to work at an animal sanctuary with behemoth pigs of incredible strength. we called them buddha pigs cuz they'd been rescued from a monastery.

but what happens on a cellular level. do we impregnate a need. a chasm. an empty womb. cultivate a fetus composed of spare parts and organs in order to birth a tied together neglected transaction best fulfilled by what we made ourselves. on fourth of july a long time ago. i was a young man. i kissed an older woman. i kissed a teenager. i blazed through malibu like a gin soaked wildfire.

tom robbins said the society is merely a forum/gymnasium to exercise and test the human spirit. he said it's never too late for a happy childhood.

brick

I am the one you stopped dreaming of. You were a locust swarm. A held hand. Now there are stamps on the inside of my wrist. I am getting too old for this. A guy who stumbles home. Who mutters to himself long after the bar has closed.

Rilke

"And let me here promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism--such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.

Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.

There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!"



-April 23rd, 1903
excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet

Ocean Park A Time Ago

It was back then. Not too long ago but enough that I have to scratch around for any remnants of the sweetness. Dig. She made the smallest gesture toward me on the Internet. Added me on the email site a couple weeks after telling me she was through. As she cried in her sublet bedroom. Maybe it was an accident. I don't know. Are there ever any accidents with two hearts. Or are those organs purposeful even while seemingly oblivious. Cuz then months later she got in touch. And I pretended like she couldn't hurt me.

Joshua Turek 2015 Reel

UCLA

rainy morning art

Dorks

I remember when you found me in that sarcophagus. I was laying in it all decorated in tributes to the afterlife and on display in a museum. My heart was gone. My heart wasn't broken, it was just gone. My heart, it had been taken out during mummification and left on a table in a tomb, eventually misplaced or carried away by rodents.

I used to say the dumbest things to lovers. I was reading an old text conversation. And it made me glad I don't have that lover anymore.

Unrelated, this guy and this girl would video record their sex life together. They had this thing that they both liked. Some would call it entertaining ghosts but it was not. It was something that they both liked. She would paint a picture of them with her finger across space, it would become animate, and then they had to emulate the movements of her creations. When finally their room became an orgy swarm inhabited by enough of the spirit world, she'd ask him to climax on her, always in the same location on her skin. She said it turned her on leaving him on her skin for awhile.

Everyone always says a woman is the one who gives herself during sex because she is the one being entered and it makes so much sense with that logic but why then do I feel exhausted the next day while she gloats amongst me all powerfully, smiling, she is always smiling like an empress witnessing her man's kingdom in brilliant ruins.

I know of these underground tunnels. I know of caves. I followed a huge curvy installation around itself and wanted to be warped by its altering presence and scale. And one time I sat beneath a gigantic table with a girl and we remained like toddlers in their early twenties.

A needy man. There is nothing sadder than a needy man. No one likes a needy man. He arrives. Sits next to her without saying a word. Leans into her fingers on the keyboard. Stops the typing. No one likes a needy man I want to tell him.

And then I dance. I dance. I talk about dancing. I forget about everything and I dance. I woke up this morning feeling like this painting. Like, exalted. Like, I can't explain. My body felt so with me on this journey. My brain was like not problematic in any way, it just wanted me to be happy. It was a splendid way to begin.

what I miss about love

I miss her thigh. I miss it in my right hand. Left hand on the steering wheel and right hand on her thigh in the passenger seat. God damn there is nothing like driving somewhere with your woman's thigh in your hand. Sometimes her thigh would be in jeans and require a bit more effort in the squeeze. Other seasons it was bare beneath hiked up shorts and the true heat of her thigh would suggest all kinds of temptations in my hand and travel quick into my brain and I would have to pat it to hear that silly noise to slow down the fire. But sometimes that playful pat on her thigh would work in reverse and reveal a whole other world of teasing pattering sexiness that would drive us both nuts. I could tell by how her eyes would get all pleasant and slow and lazy. Damn. I miss running my right hand up and down her thigh and fingering all the cartlidge surrounding her knee bone. I miss pulling the car over because my hand kept moving from her knee to her thigh to her heart but stopped at the wetness in between her legs. And I'd be rubbing her and zigzagging all along the freeway and it wasn't as dangerous as texting and driving but it was loving and driving and dangerous in its own right. Her left thigh in my own right, my own right hand, while we headed home.

all the places we argued with smiles underneath

She said if you wanna go stargazing then stare at the sun. And I thought to myself boy she has a way with words. But I had a way with living things so I did. I stared at it, right at it, the sun.

And predictably I went blind.

But twenty years later my vision returned. Like that professor in the obituary today. Only, it didn't happen during cataract surgery, it happened one night while staring at the moon.

We were in a field on a blanket. She had been straddling me, climaxing, crippled with intensity, aching against gravity, relented, slowly lowering her torso down onto me like a descending cherry blossom. And I felt her bosom against my chest, could smell her melted skin and oil roused hair with all the energy of a heightened sense.

Then like that, I was no longer blind.

Penetrating the darkness and coming through a black pocket to another outside I arrived in a light whose radiation had worked the magic of time upon the barks of trees, blades of night grass, and her face held close to mine gasping for breath and emanating rosy hues from her skin.

My first sight, a sight reborn.

Her face. Her face, a closer glimpse of her face appeared interwoven within all this touch, sound, sightless love, far more beautiful than I ever remembered. 

Then outpouring tears streamed from animate ducts, alive eyes, and I could see hundreds of her through the droplets of mutual recognition that like a canvas background were decorating her ocean portrait there with all those trillions of stars dappling space as sparkling electrons shimmering at night to the ones, the one, you can stare straight at and into long after she has given you everything, including her final bow, as she goes on travelling at the speed of light.

casbah

i dreamt i brought my phone into the ocean so i woke up left it behind and swam in the ocean

The surfers in black wetsuits start to look like bobbing ants. Meditate on the sand long enough with eyes closed. Open em and the surfers look like black ants and the water becomes an explosion of color. A population of humanity hungering for the shores of an Earth. We are whiling away our days in fashion, freedom, interruptions of severe pain. Stagger from em. But some wounded animals get left behind by the herd, sure, but then some wounded animals adapt to their injuries and continue onward, soaking in the days. Every damn day is worthwhile.

hyperion 1wk ago

Beyond the crucifix telephone lines but before the blood moon you were coloring the sky azure while I was wearing Dodger blue and in the car today I whispered something to myself between labored inefficient breaths something about one day getting my remains delivered to the space station where an Italian astronaut woman could sail me in the proper direction on my way

the yeah yeah yeahs

I saw a fallen baby bird on the sidewalk. Commotion in the trees, it squealed, all fleshy. I heard the mother will reject it if you touch it. So I didn't. Blind and swimming against the inert current of concrete while I conducted a bad joke symphony in my head about things I wanted to one day say to a crowd, on my way to Ralphs.

All afternoon since I've felt like I could only get one good inhale out of fifteen attempts at breath.

caffeine madness

I've made a habit of quitting my habits. Those things that rush me into a single direction oblivious of my one true pulse. They were naught for naught. My vices taught me the difference between strong and weak. Even if the examples were skewed, chemically induced, cuz what isn't?

I was telling a story of ex-pats yesterday. Of being lost in the pitch black of an island. Her and I. Entering a tiny ex-pat bar improbably nestled there in that time of night. A bunch of fat white guys in football jerseys. I asked them for directions to a motel on the beach. And they were vague, cuz they only knew of resorts. At the door, on my way out, I turned and asked, "by the way, who won the Super Bowl today?"

Our car was chased by wild dogs. We drove it across a drawbridge to a castle exterior that turned out to be a bordello with no vacancy. We gave a woman standing on the side of the road a ride to somewhere that got us even more lost. We drove ourselves in circles past empty fortune telling booths. She refused to stay at the one available resort that reminded her of Vegas. So we went all the way back to the first place we were turned away from. But we found a different gate. And she went in and found us a room to stay. A simple room. And like carbon blindly replicating itself in a slurry of ocean swamp, our bodies recreated the beginnings of life, as tired as we were, alive.

"The Saints!" he shouted back

march 24th

I dreamt last night that I could fly. One of the best sentences in any language. I did. And it was different from the flying dreams I used to have as a child, even the best ones, because I knew the source of how to do it. I brought energy from the earth deep in through my calves and then used my mind to fly. And when others saw me and asked how, I showed them how.

dis guyyy

He said that women to him were like a mania. Infectants of the mind. That the simple shrug of one could reprogram his entire prerogative and change the complexion of what would have comfortably been an entire day. And he said to her maybe it wasn't just women, maybe that was unfair, maybe it was the whole enterprise of love.

Love, he thought that love, prolonged beyond the necessary-baby-making-4year-biological-contract was probably just an integral product for the powers-that-be to sell to people in conjunction with whatever it is that the powers-that-be may be selling the masses on all the time through out the course of human history. he told her,

baby just cuz you haven't destroyed me yet, doesn't mean I'm indestructible.

her and her

They liked all the same shit that they could tell no one else about. Teasing the delivery guy. Inviting the delivery guy inside themselves. Bringing the delivery guy close to climax then sending him back out onto his route. Only to invite him in again and finish it all in sweat and laughing glory. They liked watching each other come. She thought that she was prettier than her. She thought that she was prettier than her. But they were both pretty.

They told one another things that they didn't feel like telling everyone else. She would talk about this bad thing that happened to her once in a forest when she was young. She whispered about moments of her life heavily decorated with loss. She said that loss was like lazy Christmas lights that didn't come down until a couple months before they were to be strung back up. The other one said that while everyone else saw a carousel, she just saw the first thing that had ever trampled her. Then they held each other like shivering snow survivors and by morning were again like hot coals.

They went to Paris together. She knew a rich old man who liked to be treated like scum. He would give them his credit card and tell them to buy whatever they'd like but that was his only demand.  He wanted them to walk around his apartment ignoring him. He wanted them to berate him like a dog when they caught him in their panty drawer. He said all the neglect made him feel cared about. Quickly, they grew bored. Not just as part of the act. They grew bored and they left, burning everything they'd bought with his card in one of the palatial fireplaces. It was a fair way for all parties to say goodbye.

They were a hello. The way they kept speed together by travelling to remote island countries and living on ten bucks a day with dirty hair and clothes. It became a game, who could get dirtier. It never ceased to amaze them the attention they would still get from men and women alike. The pungent smell of filth would become a deep fuel. Then they'd stumble across a stream, watering hole, ocean and jump in. One afternoon it rained. They were on a motorscooter and after pulling it off to the side of the road began climbing up through jungle. She always trusted her intuition.

They arrived at pools of pristine jungle water clearer than anything ever before seen in the light. It was splendid the way it foretold places and experiences in this Universe that were waiting, are waiting, to be touched. Waiting to be recognized. Calling to us even as we sit and stare oblivious. And sometimes if lucky it helps to have a partner in crime. And sometimes if lucky we arrive at one of these places and moments in time where our souls get smacked and grabbed and awoken and told the significant secret that involves learning and knowing and adventuring as much as our human energy will allow and then more more more all these unexplored perfections are begging us to break down their doors. Everything we can portend, imagine, fail to grasp wants to become known.

They felt lucky to have known a moment in these forms together, their breasts touching beneath the enchanted waters and basic atomic fields equally grateful to briefly contain them like a painting in a museum with their ever blossoming hearts

words learned

I was merely a boy when they tore the skin from the body of life. Red, like Mars. They compared the matter beneath the epidermis to the color of that similar planet.

I have become obsessed with memory. I keep wanting to tend to it. But not live in it. There is a difference. They appear like stories now, the memories, and I do not want them to be forgotten or lost.

I was merely a boy when they lifted the giant man from the soils of Earth. Like a root vegetable, by his hair. I watched as they slayed the giant. Reports were scattered, but I know what I saw. They slayed the giant because it was opportune for simple glory. But I saw his eyes and they were kind.

I knock on wood. I am racked by worry. I get these crippling moments of worry. So I knock on wood. I breathe. I pray. I knock on wood.

I was merely a boy when I spied a naked woman washing her white dog in Eden. Its dirty fur worked through by her hands with soap and water. She knelt on her knees and it licked at her while she tended to the creature. I was behind a bush when her eyes found mine, her lips curled, locks of mane glowing.

I go on. The days become sweeter. The days are an undeniably ripe fruit. The days slow motion fall back to reveal night, like spread legs. Enter me, they say. Enter me say the nights. So I do. Worry. Gratitude. Uncertainty. Courage to leave behind the crepuscular sadness for brave treasure in the darkness.

I was merely a boy the day I awoke into the body of a man. How lovely. That I am here today, he noted.

the young horses

I want to be an old man. Not now. But someday. I want to spend my mornings working in a garden. I want to spend my afternoons at a cafe in a foreign city. And I want to indulge my memory like it's a spoiled grandchild. I'll think about the women. Every single detail I can remember. And the rest I will imagine to be a pleasurable fiction. At night, I will in all likelihood be sad. And that will be a perfectly paired wine to go with: Remembering the years of plump grapes. Squashed and,
fermented
and
you once told me
that it's all beautiful
and I agreed
cuz,
 you were beautiful.

Transmissions pt I

You are in such a rush for your own Universe darling. I implore you to begin with a Galaxy first. Hear me out. I simply would like to see if you are responsible enough to take care of your own Galaxy to start. You know Daddy will give you whatever you want. You know I will. But remember that time you wanted your own crater on the moon filled with all those space ponies? Should I remind you who got you the biggest available hole the moon still had to offer and those nearly endless hordes of majestic creatures my dear? The space ponies were so adorable cantering around that crater in mass and initially you thought so too and the lunar glow of your smile was so worth it but then you did quickly grow tired of the crater and them. Remember my dear? Not that money is an issue to Papa but it was indeed quite costly having to find adequate boarding for all of those ponies afterward.

I have never been one for lecturing. I am far too mild-mannered and concerned with living in the super-moment. Yet I do in this case urge caution. Why so? Well, I suppose I should tell you my dear that your own father did once own his own Universe. Yes, it was a long century ago but sometimes when I am alone in my greenhouse pod it feels like yesterday.

I began by soaking in the clusters. They captivated my attention. Then the icy comets and the way their tails sparkled in slow ellipses. Next I began mining metals from planets and space and they - do not get me wrong - turned out to be quite profitable to my amassed fortune. However, then the dark energy began to make itself evident. And I had to pay so much tax to the dark energy. I gave it a cut of my profits. I gave it a cut of my soul. Wow, have you ever bled for a slow weak entity whose structure is necessary for your very empire? It is quite confronting my darling, bleeding for that powerful weak entity. Oh, and then not to mention all the minor incidents like getting my super shuttle stuck in black holes and the waiting for tow shuttles and the feeling of melting and not moving at all and resorting to the meters for time because it was truly lost and never felt for - quite frankly I don't know - periods of what used to be discernible time.

To tell you the truth my dear, I have not felt time in quite some time. And very far from the many moons that speckle our giant super greenhouse pod like those adorable little constellations of freckles on the back of your shoulders--

Darling do not be embarrassed! You may be self-conscious of them but I love your freckles, they are an expression of the Super, a map of the Cosmos. My darling, anyway where was I---

Where was I---

A Calm Quiet Place To Self Destruct by Joshua Turek: an excerpt

George lights up at the notion of recognition. His wife sitting in the driver seat. Hands on the steering wheel but resolute and unmoving. Her face is wincing as much as the surgical procedures will allow. Her eyes letting tears release from ducts all too familiar with the sensation of crying. 

George's anxious outstretched hand arrives to a locked door and the sight of the closed window between him and Pamela. 

She still remains a salvation. The keeper of his identity. A living reflection of his actual life. Proof that despite the seemingly puny and public insignificance, privately, he was here.

"Pamela. You're still here. Thank God! Open the door, sweetie. Could you please open the door, sweetheart?"

"George, I hurt my right ankle. I don't know if I can drive, it might be too tender, but I have to leave you now or I never will!"

"Pamela, please! Can you please roll the window down?"

"You can't change my mind, George. I'm leaving. I'm leaving this marriage. I can't do this anymore, not one second more. It was hip and fun all those years ago when we got married against the grain despite the times or whatever but it feels so old-fashioned now and I grew up super-modern, George, I swear I did. I have to leave you now!"

She says all of this through the glass barrier. Her face pleading like George has never seen it plead before. He can not help but notice that there is something sexy in the desperation and also terribly sad, like the world didn't grow in the spring but instead withered inward during one enormous winter.

"Honey, I know! You don't have to say it. I understand now. I get it. I mean, it's not all palm trees and porno anymore, is it?"

"What? No."

"And love is a momentum more than anything."

Her eyes glimmer, something she recognizes.

"You said that, those were your words. And you were right. And it's weird, because somewhere along the way you get into a routine of living and suddenly the world begins feeling very small."

"As small as this minivan. No! Smaller..."

It is unsettling George, how he can see her and she him and yet because of this glass barrier and safely-sealed-from-the-elements physical encapsulation known as the white minivan, he can not touch with the bare tools of his own humanity, touch Pamela as if his life depended on it. Which, it, in a way, it does.

why i quit my job

I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency.

wally,

he
said
that
stupid
people
are
wise
for
dancing

everyone tells me i look like someone else

I write to redeem myself. Like a coupon against time. I spent my early years setting up little plastic green army men for a war that finally came. Also, I'm bad at the game of Stratego.

I'm waiting to pick my sister up from school remembering that my mom used to arrive so late after school to pick me up that technically I am still waiting for a ride. It's probably the reason why I'm so bad at standing around for other people. That's not true, I've always been like this, craving singular locomotion.

So out I go. I go by car. I go by plane. I go by foot. I like nights that begin with myself but end entwined in somebody else. Their story. Their body. Their goodbye. I like adventures. What kind of adventures?

He said nothing else matters but this moment. He said that the only problem with Magic Johnson is that he was not born a Mexican. He bought me a Tecate tallboy and he, his son, and I, toasted before they vanished.

I imagine a movie trailer moment of that btw. Where the character like me says: I like adventures. And a calmer type with mild curiosity asks: What kind of adventures?

Flash to a character swaying down a walkway majestically walled up on both sides by urban hedge appearing through seasisde mists ancient. Reflections of a face from a stream travelling down the middle of an alleyway. Hordes of ghosts blowing like walking kites on skid row through the windshield. On foot, dancing in silver light. A smack. Of an ass. A punch. Of a face. A smile that looks like the saddest clown in the world. Four feet dangling off the edge of a miles high skyscraper. Two pairs of eyes lit by moon. Hordes of seagulls clamoring like an apocalypse above Hollywood Boulevard.

She said my zipper was still down and hooked her finger in it. Her apartment smelled like the end of being young. The cab driver had been up all night and didn't know what else to say when he deposited me downtown into the morning.

the idiot

borrows the title from a book he's never read. the idiot goes dancing alone. he roofies himself with vodka and soda water and beer.

and the idiot acknowledges the law of diminishing returns, almost. until he meets a girl with blue hair. he kisses her in a photo booth. there is a photo booth involved with a picture the next day sent to his phone to prove it.

and at differing flashes in the night, the idiot goes up to a bunch of millenials and they are dancing and so is he and he tells them that we have to dance we have to dance because they forgot to tell us to do so as children and so now we must.

and it takes him forever to realize the wedding at the church downtown is on valentine's day. it takes him forever to connect the significance. he eats a pizza with egg on each of four slices and watches the wedding through windows while drinking a beer.

sure the idiot likes to get a little drunk before going to the bookstore. sure he rushes out when he sees the same girl from the week before. sure because the mirror seemed better in his head. like all mirrors do.

then haphazardly is time, the way it moves with the drunkard in the raiders hat next to him. he says "her money is my money and my money is also my money." and the idiot gets him going on one of those agreeable stretches of drunken sermon, amen, amen, and he has the raiders hat guy in amen agreement while the idiot in his idiot clothes delivers something sinister in his elocution masked in exactly the same tone but unmistakeably biting in it's precision, and it shakes the room

and even after nodding to the sermon all this time the drunkard notes the words and stops, can't help but stop even as the room orbits, lets it linger, "i mean it's not like we're gonna be on this earth much longer anyway, right?" the idiot says heartily, chuckles as though nothing has changed, smiles big raising his beer up to take a cheery glug.

"right?"

the idiot didn't feel great about it. about the way the drunkard's face fell. but he didn't feel that bad either. it needed to be said. reminded. gratitude needed to enter the world. and the raiders drunkard melted away because this new guy to his right, this ladies man to his right with those lady killing bright eyes on tan ethnic skin, is with a lady, a pretty lady who else? and he asks the idiot what he's been writing in his notepad, cuz he's been thinking of writing too.

and the idiot gets tangential about art and expression and he needles the conversation around in figure 8's until he finally finishes his routine in a way that's not all that bad actually, when he says

if you want to do it bad enough, you'll do it.

and the idiot does, or maybe he just did, i don't want to bore you with time, the time is haphazard and he does a stand-up set at another bar downtown and he gets convincing on stage. and it's not all that bad either. and the energy is not all that bad.

and so he goes back to the bar with the gigantic white horse on it and he dances. he dances because it's about that time to dance. and the ladies aren't loving it at first but it's not about them. and it's not about the parents. it's not about the finite nature of living and all beings. it's about being. it's simply about being. and while being another human being lights up his eyes with her dark eyebrows and oceanic blue irises and chemically dyed attractive boyish matching hair, he - in this fluid state of moving being -  he steps off the stage and finds her and they sway, they dance and shake and press lips and knock hips and mumble and whisper and yell over the music and scoot away to enjoy the space and it ain't pretty and he is an idiot but it is poetry and everything is swaying

and days later he is on the beach in the morning jittery but profound in digging deeper and digging into himself and sand and picking up litter everywhere cuz there is three-day weekend litter everywhere on the beach and he dislikes it but is grateful for it in his hands and in his heart and in the trash can with a lid on safely over it and he prays for the long loving health of his loved ones and the fragmented ones and all the ones until they are one and he brings them all whole in his heart as best he can

and the idiot drives to get a burrito and laundry coins, quarters is what he calls them, like everyone else he calls them quarters.

and he talks to his little sister on the phone and he hears the unbelievably perfect tone of her voice, even as she is home with the flu, the tone of that pure hearted child who won't ever know how pure hearted he knows her to be because she is too pure of heart to play at it and he loves her for it

and he drives home with groceries in the backseat and invisible tears of gratitude streaming down his face in rivers unseen

and he thinks to himself to the point of writing it down

I am so happy. I am so happy. I don't know why but I am so happy.

a flunked haiku tea ceremony

alien magic. i wanted to write about alien magic. like, an alien magician. a magician on his own planet. kind of an extraordinary alien even to the technologically advanced members of his race. but he is an excommunicated alien magician. and he is teaching people on earth alien magic.

i dreamt of a one-way dirt road that kept encouraging me forward like an airport flat escalator. whaddya call those things. the thing about the one-way road is that it implies no return. the thing about the one-way road is that it implies no return. the thing about the one-way road is that it implies, no return.

feel like the internet is mining our brains. extracting experience to build its own. i guess much like the movie her. i guess i am just copying the movie her. saying that reminds me that the concept is very much along those lines of her. but did her mention the word; mining. the internet is mining our brains.

i danced so hard last night i tore my underwear.

i have this thing with parking meters and street signs about: kind of: looping around some of them. even when i don't have to be doing it: i do these loopy around things with my steps: steps.

girls. and here's what it is about girls. when laying in bed with one or appearing and disappearing in flickering moments of pulsating beams and kinetic music or among the buoyant renderings of candlelight in a cozy bar downtown, a guy is getting bombarded with these memories and thoughts and feelings that slip in and haunt him in the most pleasurably crippling way that also devastates the moment. and few girls, few, he can tell em what just happened in his brain. cuz they were dually part of the combination to not only unlocking the combination lock but also revealing its presence. and most girls, he will just take it on the chin. and get through the hauntings alone. because saying them is what infuses people of two. saying your ghosts out loud to another person is the bones of love.

and you are still going. and you are still going. and you are still going.

blood oranges

he holds a bag of them. the blood oranges. it is the citrus time of year. pomegranate season was spoiled by the uncharacteristic early rains. die pomegranates.

he walks home with a bunch of green onions he bought for a dollar. chews on them for the spicy. he eats a mandarin. a cherimoya. a guava. the guava tastes buttery and has seeds. he swallows some of them and spits out others. the cherimoya seeds he spits all of them out. they are nice spitting seeds.

the universe wants people obsessed with it.

the ballad of the faded red button down and the mr gray thermal

There is a specific kind of man at every cafe in Los Angeles - maybe even the world. He is not the only kind of man. But a specific kind. He will smell bad. Have his government finances in just enough order that he will have a roof over his head at night. An RV camper. Low-income housing. Rent control. He will get by in a low effort way that almost inspires jealousy. And he will have another kind of dimmer man who needs him for a ride to the courthouse.

But this kind of man. He will want to sit with his less-organized friend for an hour or two first before doing anything. Acting out his idiosyncrasies for all the bland civilized to see. Idiosyncrasies. Like shutting the open door no matter how little it is left cracked. Like drinking a huge glass mason jar full of sudsy water every morning. Like smelling as bad as he does. He probably has a half-baked theory on why soap is bad and pheromones are yada blah whatever. And his shutting of the door is especially maddening because it stuffs the coffee fuming room with his thick sweaty balls odor. His thick sweaty balls odor.

And when you believe that you can not stand him anymore, this man will widen his presence just a bit more with worthless possessions or the obtuse angle of his legs. And this specific kind of man will hold court. He will unquestionably be holding court. Establishing his mini kingdom for the morning. You can tell. The way he is lording over this trash heap of a kingdom for all to see in that delinquent bohemian grandeur so loud it could almost be mistaken for unintentional if it weren't so blatant. And you will pray to have a fate more active and meaningful than this man.

You don't know what any of this means, life, you get that there is a profound path of least resistance to living it, honorable and simple and pure. But this specific kind of man is not it for you. The way he sways within the folds of living by willing an urban apocalypse of inactivity into existence.

So you believe it is not out of malice that you want to turn heads and hearts more than this specific kind of man. Not out of malice so much as it is a natural intuition speaking, shouting, yelling until hoarse that I don't want to breathe in your smell! What I want is to step outside of this fermented human pungency and be closer to one with the fresh air and brilliant energy of it all.

And you think to yourself, that there is also a specific kind of man at every cafe in Los Angeles - maybe even in this world - who is trying like hell in his scraggly corner to figure it all out. Furrowed brow. Usually headphones on. And he is not the only kind of man. But a specific kind. And sometimes it makes this specific kind of man a bit of a grumpy dick.

Conjecturin

Me and Smitty caught a live one. Around my neck. Me and Smitty caught someone who turned out to be yours truly. This was back in the day when thunder clapped the sky loud enough to give pause. We were living in that pause. When Smitty put his hands through my hair and I climbed onto him like a saddle. Ah man. We were crazy like that. And I was even crazier than him and we never could locate where the one of our sadistic minds ended and the other one began.

I met her during a blank time. She left. I met her again at a time of hurt. I was. She was. But she made me feel better. And I made her feel better. Then we tried on even ground for awhile.

Smitty had beads of sweat rolling down from his forehead that were pooling above his upper lip. I was tied up about this time. Smitty and I had tied me up. Boy was I rabid. It might have had something to do with the cigar Smitty kept lighting, stamping out on my leg, then re-lighting and-- well -- stamping out on my leg again. Gosh damn, that hurt.

I ended it still in love and ran around with my head cut off haunted by the invisibles for way too long. Now, I only dream of her once in awhile and only cuz she brought up our damn MORTALITY the last time we talked. That was why I cried in my dream. But backtracking a bit. We went through a break up and I guess we were both in so much pain from the fallout that we each started writing and singing music by ourselves which was something we never did together all that much.

Oh he had the gravest ideas. Like digging me a grave and then settling me down into it. Tied up and all. Then he would pour loose soil onto my body from six feet above or thereabouts. And he'd do it up until I was damn near one with the Earth. But it was only to test things out. I know that because he would pull me out long before my face'd turn blue and I was always grateful for that concern to my ultimate welfare.

Then I dated for awhile. I dated a girl whose dad brewed beer in his bathtub. I dated a Swedish girl who didn't like how outdated my computer software was. I dated another Swedish girl. I dated a girl whose female neighbor attacked her once in Venice. Then there were girls who carouseled through my bedroom for one night or two. And I call them girls because they can call me a guy. A guy whose face could be cold like a stone. Warm hands. These overactive warm hands unable to hide a bunch of love that courses through them like, it is undeniable.

Smitty and I were in the jungle. We never got caught. Not when we robbed trains. Not when we skipped out on whore tabs. Not when we made unkept promises to whore hearts. But the jungle, anyways, the jungle is where music was invented. There is a bird call rhythm that happens there with an unseen collective bass informing the background, measuring the pace. Anyways, Smitty was shooting parrots. One morning Smitty was shooting parrots. It is always nature right? That makes the story beautiful. This one, no different. Smitty was shooting the parrots and they were falling from tree limbs onto the canopy floor or whatnot and I was collecting them like a dog would for a hunter. I was collecting em and before long we had this big red and blue and green and yellow and black pile of feathered colors and after the labor intensive task of feathering and gutting the parrots a massive plume emerged, strung together by intestine and vine and brought gigantically out of the jungle where into the psalms of the wide-open light we tethered this beautiful explosion of hues onto our backs and we ran at full speed by our feet and legs to the greatest tall cliff that we could find and, Smitty and I, we jumped. Only, I forgot to. I forgot to jump and but Smitty did.

And I could've sworn for a solid moment there it looked like Smitty was actually defying the fall, rising up on soaring wings, but turns out the truth of things also has its tricks.

And I don't have a broken heart. I am healthy and strong in this very moment. Let it be marked for now. This one moment is big enough for everything. It is everything. Let it also be said that my brother and sister believe that we are kings and queens stranded on this planet from another place and time. And I am in agreement.

m4w

The jagged magnets of mercury retrograde.

Days before, the energy I'd been pushing around like a grocery cart rose and crested in a lovely wave.

It starts in a bar with a not so subtle glance. A sentence framed as a question. A recoil then a smile brought closer by gravity.

It goes and it goes. It shouldn't be this good. There is only a brief window of slanted sleep in between motion.

Again. In the middle of the night it begins again with a hard dick. Then a grip. A wet pussy. And the two converge. over and over again. I've never written about it that crude and simple. So how bout this:

I will not liken you to the stars. I will not describe two strangers coming together on this spinning wheel of clay to shape-form a series of pleasured faces eternalized and held perfectly in time by the lava of their volcanic kiln. The thing itself bubbling over magma upon itself. It is not me anymore. I no longer poeticize sentiment and ideal. I no longer play those keys of a morning songbird on this songboard. Still at night sometimes against all odds, we're singing.

double americano

You can get anywhere in Los Angeles on a rainy Sunday morning. For instance, I just got from there to here in a relatively short amount of time. I was walking getting wavy. There was this phase last year where I kept feeling lightheaded like I was gonna fall to the ground and timber. There was also this time in Vermont on our flooded property. This time where I chopped down a tree with an axe and did nothing with it. Or maybe I made firewood. I can't remember. The crack of the tree was spectacular though. It was like everything we failed to recognize was balling itself up but then satisfying its frustration in one epic outward release from captivity. But I hope I made use of it.

but make him a cool man mama

Doctor, what is it called um...what is it called when you feel like you wanna cry all the time but can't cuz it's like on the tip of your tongue. The crying. Like the same kind of feeling as having a needed word on the tip of your tongue only it is wanting to recollect a surging of emotion with vague tears that won't come. What is it called?

Because and, before you answer that question, I would like to tell you that I keep feeling that way Doctor and I don't know why. I don't know. It feels flat out in the world Doc, it feels like a handful of chunky meat that is rotting in my hand the longer I gnaw on it and have to carry it around with me Doc. It is feeling flat.

(cough)

(cough)

Where was I? Oh. I know. I was out with someone and I wanted to steer our conversation toward how futile it all is, and feels like, but she wasn't even on that plane Doc, she wasn't even on that plane. She was sad too but it was on an entirely different plane. Like, I don't remember it exactly. Something about buying into the permanence of life plane. How awful, right Doc? Her flat plane unlike mine but still awful. How horrible. How terrible that like a stack of pancakes our dimensions of discontent are all piled misunderstood on top of one another in flat planes of pancakes.

I don't know. It makes me worry. It makes me sick. It makes me so aggravated Doctor. That we are all trapped inside of this thing. This thing that we are all trapped inside of and going to lose to no matter what, HOW FAIR IS THAT? To start a game you know you are going to lose. It is like---

Huh? 

Oh.

The medical marijuana card? 

Yeah I know that's what I---

I mean but you're still a doctor right? So couldn't we just talk about this before we get to that? 

No I get it. Turn em and burn em Doctor. Hey. No. It's a living right?  

It's a living.