the great seduction

I love those things that keep us apart.

A human energy machine.

I'd like to touch me.

You are on me then you are gone. All of you.

I am stalked by shadows. Cars. A black audi. A bmw 3 series i can't remember. A white big body hyundai. One mid size suv with sideview mirrors ripped off on skid row. A golden toyota camry with green license plates. A couple of priuses. A bicycle she fell off of and broke her arm on. My old camry, a '98 bashed in rear bumper. I miss that car, the huge fuel tank could get me to San Francisco and a quarter of the way back.

A sexual ability great enough that it has cuckolded the need for deeper feelings. How bout that, a sexual ability that has cuckolded its own source. A sexual ability that found its own meaning and terrorized the rest of the senses from which it arose.

I touch the way I would want to be touched. She, all of them, say they love my hands. I touch the way I want to be touched if ever I could be touched. I already wrote about this but: I massaged the fluid out of my dying dads thighs and he moaned in pleasure, oh Josh you have such nice hands. I touched him the way I'd want to be touched if I was dying. I was dying.

I touch the way I want to be touched if I were living and breathing with a human being who could just be intent on me for a moment.

A human being who could just look at me knowing me and understanding that I just want to be touched the way they tremble when I touch them.

I am living and breathing I remind myself.

I got fucked up and sad and kept thinking about how deep black her hair was back in those days when we were young enough to truly hurt and be brave hurting cuz we thought everything would ebb and flow endlessly and return multiplied in our favor if we just stuck to our guns on the subject of love.

My mom's first husband died and she would smoke pot and eat ice cream and listen to Cat Stevens. And yet he still reminds me of my dad, Cat Stevens. I was a young boy in his white Lexus in the early 90's and the song Father and Son came on and he asked me if I felt heard by him. I told him yes. His ice water melting before I kissed him to go to bed every night, he would always give me a sip. Ah man Ah man Ah man.

My upbringing gave me a brain of trauma. One with ptsd. There were good times everywhere yes, I wouldn't trade them, but there were bad ones, absences, delusions spun far too intricately to ever be whole.

So when my lover saw all those dead bodies on the streets of Port Au Prince and I met her on the other side of Hispaniola, I knew how to touch her. I knew how to let her trauma melt in my hands. I could handle all of it. She cried the first time she came in that bedroom where traveling nuns used to sleep. She said she kept having flashes of bodies and so I held her in my own. I had my hands on her to match her greed for them to take what she knew. I know the needy greed of a survivor of trauma remember my brain was formed by one, by it. She would thank me for how I loved her for years after I had left her to chase the undiagnosed trauma off of my own brain. She got drunk with friends one night in New York and cried about the love we made when she needed it most. I was only giving her what I always wanted but never knew how to find from anyone else.

I was only giving her what I always wanted but never knew. I only touch them the way I want to be touched. Sex, hey all the sex isn't working but hey it isn't working the best out of all the things that aren't working. I only touch them the way I want to be touched and have never been touched.

Storm clouds. A band my friend introduced me to all those years ago when I finally ran away to chase my own undiagnosed trauma on floors and beds and cars and alone and the music is in my ears. Everything is fine. Everything is fine. You've done wonders with your mind. I've done wonders with my mind, I tell myself now. I tell myself in a way I was never told. I tell myself in the way I only know how to touch.

chain of title

nothing magic nothing magic something magic everything magic everything magic everything magic everything magic everything magic

the sad old sappy adventures of old dog - part uno

get up old dog.

these wooden tables sit beneath clouds of czech tobacco smoke.

old dog gets up from that table true to name.

god damn old dog when did ya get so old.

all right. all right. i'll take it easy on ya pal.

so there he goes. old dog gets up from the table and huffs the secondhand into his lungs almost gratefully cuz why. cuz it's a familiar smoke is why.

and old dog if he has done one thing, it's this before.

heads through a door down a staircase and a couple pretty hyenas with their faces distorted by the crude intoxicants swimming within the sludge of his tarry blood, they eye him.

and like he does old dog he gives em that slow sharp old dog smile and rambles on down them stairs to something like a basement and then another basement and hell it's just like that in this steampunk post cold war paradise.

i wanna live like this forever. i wanna live like this forever. i wanna the music cries or is it old dog who cries. he was getting nervous up in that cafe but down here in the bowels is that old familiar human density and loud sound and drinks flowing cheaper than dust all collecting to that satisfying feeling of gosh darn old dog opportunity

so old dog goes to smelling around and usually when it's like this old dog this dog that old dog he don't usually when it's like this he don't usually leave this kind of place alone

the night i became another animal

i was laying in that bedroom in amsterdam looking out the window at the night sky above the apartment buildings poised and enlivened

the men you meet on bridges

It is 4:18am. I haven't slept. Europe is keeping me up with myself. Almost as if to say, you two better work things out with each other or else.

I did. I got high on magic truffles in an Amsterdam Starbucks.

I did. I said I could stay or I could go. I kept saying it to my thoughts. Like, ok, you don't want me I will go to bed then.

But that was just an empty threat.