a couple hours north of burlington

I remember the first woman to buy me magnum condoms. She said I needed em. She was only my second partner. She was seven years older than I was. She jokingly called me her pool boy. We both worked at an ice cream shop together in an abandoned railway station. She had liked my arms, the way they looked through my white t-shirt when I swept. She had broken up with her boyfriend a couple weeks after I started. She said her ex-boyfriend wasn't into sex, owned a gun and had anger issues. She said her mom had a one night stand in Turkey while in the military and that was how she came to be conceived. Life hadn't been kind to her but she was still kind back. One of those people who cheers everyone else up and instantly becomes their friend, to make better use of the madness than most of us.

There are kids who get hit and smile. There are kids who get yelled at and yell back. I was neither of them. I still have a body raging inside my chest that churns like an ocean whose tide book I rarely get to read. I do nothing but navigate the underwater energy, quietly, away from people. There, in Vermont, I was still inundated by the borderline visions and leading the rescue team of, the woman who birthed me.

She would buy me a Vitamin water and drive me to her rundown house. She lived in a basement beneath a family I never met. They farmed goats on their property. I never tried the goat milk, never tried the cheese. I would go outside in the summer rain and piss beneath an evergreen. There was a hole there where an animal lived, I always felt vindicated peeing nearby it. It rained all that summer when it wasn't not raining and her bed was a mat on the floor. She eventually got her own apartment above a gas station where her bed on the floor moved to another floor, newspapers covering the windows until she could buy curtains.

I had to end things with her when I did because I was uncomfortable with everything. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be the person I was, in the situation I wasn't. I feared getting her pregnant when she begged to try it without the condoms. I just wanted to be a person I was told I had to be, even though no one I ever knew had ever been close to achieving him. Mother, mother, all those crooked Hollywood dreams you whispered into my ears before fleeing across the continent yourself. I have been living their nightmare and counting my moral victories ever since.

It was that Christmas in Vermont when her ex-boyfriend called me at the Victorian house in the center of town and threatened my life. He called me the pool boy, said he'd kill me. Evidently he had read her diary, she had emailed some time later apologizing. I told my mom I had to go back to Los Angeles, to pursue her dreams and to save my life. That, she understood.

I never got to thank the young woman for setting me free, back into the nightmare another person had dreamt up for me. Somewhere along the way it became all mine. Somewhere along the way I can now call my mom and she isn't afraid to tell me that it's not to late to do another thing. But it's mine now, it's all mine.

The other day in Atwater Village, after donating a couple of shrunken in the dryer t-shirts, I grabbed a handful of regular-sized free condoms from the front counter at the Out of the Closet thrift shop. The shop clerk said to take ten, that they were finger toys.

a territorial dwarf

they carved their names into the body of the felled giant. a tunnel carved into its chest for folks to walk through and take pictures of themselves. love is sold to us like holiday cards. holidays weren't invented by the holiday card companies, love was, then the holidays followed.

so what is it there, what was it there when the two of us sat cradled in a spool of emotions projecting onto the screen of a camping tent. a darkness, the light and its resulting nausea, a disorienting space, the faces of upside down strippers working the pole branches with tasseled needles in the lunch buffet trees through the mesh window we had worked so hard to peel the polyester flaps back from. harlots emerging from the shapes in the pine cones to seduce me away from the sober aches. what was it then when the patient trees spun back into their ridiculous gradients and i snapped out of it and them. the way you laughed so hard the tears came and delivered you into full fledged sobs. what was it then.

into the cold creek pool for a cellular baptism, to demarcate the restlessness of passing days and us as aging creations. cut a hole in me, cut a hole in me, i am science i am an experiment in teaching a man to fail and then telling him he can't.

you said people either make it in the big city and stay, or they go back to their towns and have one or two kids. i wandered off, stood tall on a rock that gave way and pounded me down onto the forest floor.

what was it then, when we together ripped the core off ourselves and in an exhausted state, with no glory inside ourselves to speak of, found perfection.

dont forget these are the good days

life in the city is about new money not old death. i stagger slowly out of bed in the morning. a bed on the floor. a strong man feeling his body tire and strengthen, tire and strengthen. a gulp of water. a kiss on her cheek before doing the crossword puzzle on my phone. a kiss on her cheek cuz i can give her millions once she wakes up. which shouldn't be long, what with the bulldozers and cement trucks starting to roar next door.

film/tv project