line in a movie

And it was always almost great.

the way we werent

on the grass. we werent on the grass together. i was there alone. i've been with the trees. i've been melting on earth.

i gripped my backpack in my arms and cradled all my ideas buried in my laptop like a pregnancy.

i can't tell if i slept.

you werent there when i decided to get up on stage and grab the microphone and stare at my shoes and mutter jokes to save my life.

i couldve died a million times. what about that huh. what about that.

you wouldve let me.

when you sway up and away

i was drunk and nothing could hurt me but my own thoughts but my own thoughts but my own thoughts.

so no darling it didn't hurt.

nothing but my own thoughts

all those things we share

it is weird to be found. i went out wanting to be a person and i was found. i said something to her as she ordered a drink next to me. she didn't say much back to me.

i returned into my notebook. she asked if i was writing down what she just said. i told her unfortunately it wasnt muse-worthy enough to make the notebook. that i was really just working on a to-do list.

and then we started talking

ser davos

the full moon settles above a family across the mexican diner parking lot who are having a birthday bbq for one of their young ones. the young ones shriek at each other.

mommy i need a mommy. daddy i need a daddy. i wonder if that's what they're saying: the kids.

cold beer sparkles next to me at the shitty card table i bought from the guy on the side of the road. he said on summer nights in the 70's they would get drunk and fall asleep on the island in echo park lake. these days/nights i pace around it like a madman.

how do i tell the world i've gone mad. i can't. that's the thing about being a madman. we go mad cuz there isn't the right combination of people to tell things to.

i envision being inside a cage at the freak show in venice beach. i never went inside. but just imagine me in the cage. everybody come see the madman. line right up to see the madman. marijuana smoke. mirrors. the way the ocean smacked me in the face most mornings like a lover no longer in love with me.

i would run down venice blvd beneath the sycamores. or i would weave through the walkstreets and neighborhoods watching the little bungalows get wrecked for the rich people. rich people are uncaring i learned the most in venice.

maybe that's why i can't be rich at what i do. cuz i care. i told trav i wanted to become a doctor and he said you can't cuz you care.

but i care about nothing. i am a madman.

Sandra newman

so you may know

There is a guy. There is this guy I am fading

He is standing outside the front door of my building.

the one you crept inside of.

Outside, you'd text. I did. I did come down the hallway in my socks to find you.

This girl. She, beautiful. We eat at a mexican restaurant in silver lake. She, asks me. How do you think this is going.

Ok, i say.

This guy. the guy outside my building's front door is in dark aviator shades. Middle age. Playing music from his boom box that is in a bag on the steps.

She. You. Walked up em. You walked up em. I liked the way we would laugh. I liked our jokes and the way you let me be low and weird and how my strangeness was a value even a gift to you. Thank you for that gift of you

Even if we were drowning in desert dust

when i see your drivers license in my center console

pulse and
an unexpected turn how

i once yelled at my friends dad in brazil as he drunkenly hugged mountain corners in a minivan.

where am i. i am a man running out of his own dead dad's money. we sold his humble little townhome. the one that looked like the one next to it and the one next to it and the one next to it.

in a community of old people in a suburb of old people.

but dad you are alive. i don't mean to call you dead dad. you are alive. i hear your midwestern melancholy warmed by 50 years of the southern california sun.

how brave you were. i wonder if anyone ever told you. not about the cancer and how you fought it but how you lived your life and made a home somewhere else and stayed.

i remember how you used to light manischewitz candles on the days your own parents had died. so i will do that too, this time for you.

in twenty days it will have been a year.

and