There Is A Soul

Somewhere

Your Guess Is

There are some mornings where the buzzards have no shortage of dying energy to feed upon. I'm listening. I'm stammering. The blocks are stacked one by one within the next, abiding to the formations of the grid. Shuffling through street names and slinking between alleys and walkways. Dodging back and forth, trying to forget. We try and try again. Scraping metal to the cement rock bottom and scooping up enough dust to rise again. There have gotta be reasons to continue this childish pursuit of living. First, a meaningful breath and a view beyond wonder. Next, the expansiveness below and everywhere else, all fluid as the car spins and hugs every turn in slow motion, speakers blaring abstract tones. I had all these fucking movie ideas and my hands were consumed and my brain was a distinct form of useless and if it wasn't for that inner gravity, my slipping context would have lost pace with the earth's rotations.

Then you could've witnessed a man being thrown off the surface of the globe like a guy tossed out of a bar, obliterated by time, surrendering to the indifference of velocity through space.

But now I stand by the seashore bedevilled by the confusion of symbols and signs. I'm caught rejoicing in another matter, handing out crustaceans as offerings to the gods of order and pull. Meaning, the best I have is a free-found ancient shell of confounded hyperbole and articulate banter that can only exist because it recognizes the profound nature of things. Grounded in a peaceful awe and strong respect for this combination of wonders, I'm allowed to freely pursue grander notions in exchange for a humbled paranoia and semi-serious empathy. The wheel rolls, mountains crumble and apparently the sea drops are all different if we look closely enough.

Face The Evening Straight

a beauty and a bird. the mirrors turn their backs. don't cry, there are some people doing incredible things with their humanity right now. i write cooked by nostalgia for the future i misunderstood. I write windswept. there's so much more to build. the evidence is staggering. those teenage dreams proved one-dimensional, they had to be to drive this undertaking. it's better to not know what we're getting ourselves into when we first step foot on these larger journeys. the movements echo responsive feedback, lesser and lesser the closer and closer we get. i write invigorated by wonder, growing wonder, it slips through the sludge no matter how much time is wasted browsing the internet. no matter how much is lost in the muddled undertakings of half-efforts and misguided schemes. the optimism is never misguided. the propellant drive is always furthering. the growth is always awkward, stunning, eye-opening.

Passing Stones

I swear. I swear it. This gloom can break a lot of hearts. I've had dreams of pissing blood, when today I lost a stone and it's gone and it was a collection of a lot of things, thank god it's gone. We gather and collect dust until the dead moments calcify, become, painful manifestations, violent symbols tearing apart our urinary systems and then there goes the gremlin that's been winding-grinding it's way through my days and weeks and I'm shaken and glad to be rid of the demon, glad to be recovering, shaken, I assume the calm.

I knew that mountain would be good for something and it was greater. My friend and I were speaking of complexities and running through humid cloud space and gentle time and huffing and puffing lactic acid-exploration and we weren't escaping, we were grinding into and through the exploration. The talk was of removal from conditioning, the talk was of forgoing the chemical slavery to which we allow ourselves to fall victim, it was about CHARGING the moment with all of that wasted falsely manifested-once-survival-necessary-now-destructive-dazzling energy. CHARGING the moment and losing labels and defensive ties and wasteful security and bypassing the limited confirmations of fixed-selves, we are ever-changing, we are ever-changing, we are best losing confirmation of our fixed-selves. Personality is bullshit because it's putting on a persona, he said that. Geniuses are really just bodies for demons to grace and bless and it's good to lose certain responsibilities to our creations because they aren't ours, the best ones are expressions passing through our particular form, our stylized expressions of energy, we are after all just expressions of energy in the form of humans, humans are good little lightning rods, we do some good things with our form, we allow some brilliant energy to CHARGE through our form, we can be exhilarated with genius and we can pour paintings and music and words and songs and moments and photos and colors and vibrations and grace for creations that stimulate, beautify, grow the complexity, animate the senses, the senses, these sensations we have are tools to measure our advancements, our purposes, our majestic train stations, moving trains, and runways, planes and spaceships, flights.

old notes from the phone

We sit in front of our computers waiting for something to happen.

A flower blooms outside. Someone runs down a beach. Two people meet at a bar and lightning strikes.

Inside private rooms, the screens draw us to their glow like insects to the flame. I've written that before. But I'd also like to add that a warm laptop in bed is a poor substitute for the body heat of a lover.

A shower under a waterfall. A shower shared. A shower of falling stars.

Our eyes begin to hurt from the sedative's intoxicating glow. Something in our foreheads making us dizzy. The body begins to reject the drug.

Collecting profiles from the past like baseball cards prevents one from stepping onto the three dimensional field of play. The photographed lives are hollow reflections of non-responsive personas.

A bottle in hand. Sunglasses over eyes. A party or a paradise. Glossed over lives.

113 Farenheit Before it Broke to Have Fun

I had this thought about all those ghostly souls trudging along the misty sands that night and how they were the greatest installations of all and how they were fooled into becoming art and it made me feel good about the masses and how they can arrange themselves in search of inspiration and peace and glow and how their movements can sensually mirror the ocean and how it moves so elephantine and lovely away from and toward the shore to cover the waking with energy as a blanket over minds and eyes, ears and lives.

Then there was the street fair and more warm faces and sun and it's almost scary that you can't just go through life hating the crowds when they appear so wide-eyed and well-behaved in person. certain days being enough to momentarily gloss over the inhumanities these creatures lose themselves to from time to time, day to day, all the time, only certain days they have some redemptive show.

Today the hottest day in Los Angeles happened and triple digits visited the beach for the first time in awhile and the rays of fierce light were glad for the day-vacation and the people were dancing in the water, taking pictures, and climbing and falling and laying and crawling their meaningless time away and it was sad and glorious and spectacularly similar to every other day for awhile and this context shouldn't be taken for granted and the scary thing is that it wasn't and they were moving and caressing themselves and taking part in the mystery and the fault-lines and foundations upon which their lives lay cooperative enough for a moments breath and that's positive, it's positive, it's a pro and we watch it bloom.

Ice cream and then my love rides my shoulders to feel like a bird or a giant or an equestrian and my strength finds purpose and then sushi and beer and a parking ticket that could or couldn't mean something depending on how much it gets under the skin and usually it takes more than that, and that's not a challenge, only a reminder of perspective and the Wine-o with his same stupid song and the way he sings it and it's funny. It's funny isn't it? Jingle bell, Jingle bell, help me get drunk and I walk by and I'm sweating and the air is warm and my hair is wet and I did pull-ups from twenty feet above sea level and the sun was glowing all over that grass at 7am and that's why we couldn't find that errant golf drive because of those shimmers, that dazzling, shining, dancing, charming light that bounces off of anything lucky enough to take in the light and that coyote looked like a wolf and those geese couldn't have been happier and life exists and exists and the stories can be so fucking colorful and drab and somewhere in-between until they splatter the night sky with memories that lead us to moments like victories and/or crisp cut serendipitous thank god it happened that way perspectives and blessed actualisms and the moon will calm you down and put her blanket on your shoulders and she'll laugh and listen to you like a beautiful mother and you can tell her all about your day and that dancing light, those dancing characters, broken thermometers and livesthoselives that you were surrounded by down at the seashore and otherwise.

Artists Only

Our house is in a cloud. The entire street is invaded by white. I put a fishing line down into the deep blue sea and wait like a patient man. With a towel around my wet hair, I hide in cotton and find solace in the dawn. You and I are something greater. My heart is quiet and warm. The flashing lights all look like sirens in the mist. My thinking sways between understanding and deliverance, it motions along the line between correct and flawed. My fear constantly slips and slides from the gallows, pardoned before execution, buying itself more time, challenging this life to which it little belongs. It changes it's voice, it's form and reason, playing the part of friend convincingly if not a bit self-indulgently. Fear is an ugly mask left behind by some criminal instinct whose purpose has long since been removed. There are better times to be had. Simpler emotions to be lived. Purer forces to gravitate. Seeing the bigger picture. Admiring the landscape with as few obstructions as possible. There's a lot of unfiltered joy to be discovered living within this circus, candied apple in hand, smile properly aligned.

The First Step Is The Deepest, Baby I Know

This isn't going to be pretty. There was a line that led me to the past. Finding a place that hadn't changed. I couldn't remember my childhood growing that peacefully, but sure enough it was more rustic and charming than even my most darling dreams. You know the ones, they give you hope and hold you like no one in your life has ever known. Sometimes they serenade you. Sometimes they disappear. Sometimes, they turn on you. That's right. One seemingly arbitrary night they'll twist and turn your stability until you've woken up changed and affected for the next day, week, month, or half-hour. You've felt shaken. You've stirred. I spoke of inertia. I keep telling people about this fucking artist inertia toward everyday living and sustenance and long-term planning and the blah that goes with the futile and the other blah of the living dead. It's not a wall to be busted down, it's a maze to be undertaken and can be a bit difficult because somewhere near the entrance, I'm lying on a sandy warm beach basking in a precious glow of creativity and love and freedom and activity and good fortune and just a sprinkle of self-delusion, just a sprinkle. I believe it to be necessary to the recipe. I believe it to be the common thread between all of the grand ambitious, results-be-damned, results-be-varied souls who take giant blindfolded leaps across chasms of indeterminate size and above fields of indiscriminately sharp teeth. The psychologists will have their field day. The rational minds will stomach-punch your projected purpose. Projected being only the illuminated blueprint whose fate has no bearing on the machine that provides. The machine is better likened to a root. The root is better discussed as a dream. The dream is broken down into components of who you were born to realize, what came to influence your path, and how you chose to most beautifully express what it is you have to feel and ultimately say.