mtmd1021

how you'd point out directions to us on streets we'd driven hundreds of times. how you'd paint only one wall in each room as an artistic choice. how you'd collect bed bath and beyond coupons. i even miss all the ways i never understood you.

someone flashy walks into ur life and ur just gonna fall for it

i once learned the spiritual definition of a dragon

i'm supposed to get news today. but i wont. maybe i will.

her shoelaces are untied on both of her white shoes. she wears yellow black pinstriped overalls. reads a book. if she isn't looking at me at least it's a book, the sad quiet narcissist in me thinks.

a need for attention.

what are you reading?

it's a book about a poem. a wondering about our days. a cry into the nights. oh those damn nights.

tomorrow morning i will wake up and go do my laundry and then try to forget about her again

the blues radio station on the internet

mama how do i fight the devil no -- wait --- scratch that

mama

how do i fight -- like --- the devil

mama cuz mama

do u remember how the devil worked hisself through u and u took his spear thing and u ran with it on fire in ur hands

mama cuz    mama

how did u fight so much of the devil

it must've made u crazy no -- wait -- i know that it did but -- it must've been the hardest thing in the world mama

to fight the devil like u did until u had to wield his tool until u found cold water

mama

ur brave mama


now i go

mama i go

searchin for the devil in all the ones i want to find

and not like the sinners mama

u know that's all hogwash

sinning

haha

no

like the ones possessed with an on fire spear in their hands and in their brains and in their hearts and between their legs and the fire is so much truthful when u get used to it for the moment u can

before it sets u on fire

how do i fight it mama

i mean

like it

blue earbuds

nature is god's tongue. i read that once in the autobiographical papers of martin luther king jr. so this morning i went hiking.

fuck nature. i said as i started walking. and smiled to myself. i do that. we do that. smile to ourselves. bounce a tennis ball and grip it. grip it for my grip strength. nothing crumbling on the trails quite like racist cops, broken systems, internet wormholes.

blood in a car seat. blood outside a liquor store. it's ok mommy. don't cry.

just soil and earth and early morning summer coastal fog.

but back to tongues. back to hearts beating in wombs. my old friend luke, i saw again for lunch on his way to go make documentaries in broken parts of his native brazil. i asked him what the sex of his baby was going to be. he said it has a scrotum and balls.

but i'm a boy.

no ur not

oh. i guess i'm not anymore. but but but

we had an attic. it had one of those fold down ladders. her and i lived beneath it together. i lugged a flatscreen tv and cable up there and books. hers and mine. it's the saddest part to see go, when the two of you go. the way both of your books split apart again.

i said love is a can of shit.

and i didn't believe it for two seconds

natural music
by robinson jeffers (again)

The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.

corresponding parts

she tells me to lick my pinky and dip it into her bag. i won't glamorize my meltdown. i won't concede to shadows.

she appears out of nowhere and asks me outside. i sit there and listen. to what. i sit there and listen. there is street noise. there is music. there is the chatter of a multitudinous voice.

what is she telling me. she works as a nanny. i hear radio static. i feel faint.

she appears out of nowhere and asks me to smoke her cigarette and to lick my pinky and dip it into her bag.

she tells me she has a boyfriend. i wander. her eyes pull me in. she says her and her friend are visiting los angeles and san francisco. great city, i tell them.

i have her hand to my chest. i brought it there. as if i'm asking this stranger to feel around for my heart.

pure waters

my mind settled on the pancake rocks. i was sitting at a bar begging my brain for memories and that's what arrived. the pancake rocks in new zealand.

my friend luke and i army crawled beneath a bunch of plants and tangled vines to hike up to them or something. we tried some kind of shortcut or something off a beach

we rode the buses from queenstown to christchurch with the old people.

one of the bus drivers wouldn't stop talking about grisly earthquake deaths and knew intimate details of the families involved, like their names.

and luke and i were young and listening to aa battery powered cd players.

the botanical gardens in christchurch were beautiful. the church next to our hotel was beautiful. there was one of those life size chess sets outside our window in the park. there was a starbucks. we watched a mary kate and ashley olsen movie in our hotel room.

the first half of the trip we were drinking and snowboarding and drinking while snowboarding.

but the second half was dreary beaches. crystal clear rivers. temperate rainforests. dirty little cities. and i don't know if we did much in christchurch. we certainly didn't understand how to go out and be in the nightlife. i didn't fall under the spell of bars until years later i suppose

and i was still a virgin at that point in time

from what i remember

i invented ginger turmeric

i'll talk about my father because i liked the guy no

i loved him

when i was a young boy i loved him with a warmth that would be impossible to describe to myself now that i am older

my father, he was hairy, black hairy white olive body, bald on top of his head with hair wrapped around the sides and back of his head, and he had a beard usually that was sharp to kiss, and as a child i would dive into him like he was a burrow and remain in there as long as he'd let me

and he had a big jewish nose and a masculine chin and jaw, rolled forward shoulders like mine and i think he had big nipples like me too

and in our swimming pool sometimes we would ride underwater on his back like he was a hairy orca and we wouldn't rise until we reached the other side by the brown rocked waterfall that he had built

and it was a mystical feeling

maltman

q: this isnt a pretty time

8*: what does that mean

q: it just isnt time for it to be pretty

8*: what are u...u workin in the damn salt mines or somethin

q: of course not. but i am sweating. i am feverish in my ways. i am digging.

8*: quit it

q: quit huh

8*: with the metaphors u stilted fuck

q: ur missing the point. i am unhinged and tireless. i am an engine and inexhaustible. i keep...

8*: u keep what

q: i keep waking up

a thing i wrote on facebook this morning

I didn't want to talk about love. I wanted this to be a show promotion. For my 15 minute stand-up residency tonight at Rise N Grind cafe in Hollywood. I told myself I would limit my internet posts today to this show promotion only. And that I'd get my real writing done. Yeah but so what i fell in love. It happened quick. Then she had to leave. She returns for a bit. Then she has to leave. She's young. I'm youngish. We all become ageless when we die. 

I'm alone sweating in my kitchen. When you live alone you have to take full responsibility for the way your kitchen smells. The smell, it's on you. It is you. Also there's nothing like falling in love to remind you of how alone you really were. And there's nothing like falling in love to remind you of how alone you really are. And there's nothing like falling to in love to remind us of how alone we're going to become. Us doesn't exist, even as we band together heroically as wound fibers in the threads of time.

And the thing was you get used to being alone. It hurts at first. It hurts at times. But that hurt strengthens you and with the right attitude gives you more strength. And every time I get to a certain level of strength life comes by and it feasts. Sometimes it uses anguish. If we're lucky it uses its greatest tool, love. Love returns our strength to the nature from whence it came. Love drains us of our sweet sap. And we are grateful to be drained. The rush of making love. The rush of being intensely understood for moments at a time. The way we slide intellectually back and forth like drunken figure skaters haphazardly coordinating ourselves. The rush of watching her get into my car and noticing her freckles in the sunlight then driving up north to a cabin in the woods laughing like well fed bandits.

We stopped at McDonalds to pee. I knew I was in love cuz I found the McDonalds on the side of the 101 utterly beautiful. Only love can make McDonalds anything but ugly to me.

Yeah so she is gone and I am here and we continue exploring our own lives. Yeah so it is what it is. We say "it is what it is" when we've run out of words but aren't giving up. And it's insane but it's her. Yes, I'm still floored at the sight and sound of women. The young hip Echo Park butch lesbians who want nothing to do with me. The latina checkers at the grocery store who ask me about my tennis game. The kind ones nice enough to give me the time of day on drunken nights. And the ones I make up in my head. No, they don't navigate my imagination in the same way anymore. They dead end. And to them I am the same. She's now the combination and map to a maze I forgot exists. It's to me. To me, I know that means nothing to anyone else. I just mean to me. The unique arrangements of numbers and circumstances and coincidences like the first night we met where I asked her where she wanted to meet for pizza before seeing a movie and, not knowing where i lived, of all in the city she chose the place across the street from my apartment. Her visions. Her ideas. What she teaches me about the things she's interested in. The way she flipped off left field of Dodger Stadium then took a picture of it.

Now, by combining all kinds of things in my life it feels like I'm thrashing in water to stay afloat instead of with her, where it's just floating. I just walked around an artificial lake. I suppose that's my analogy from it. I am a pedal boat. A jogger gave me a high five, I thought it was for thinking of her but then realized we both were wearing shirts with L.A. sports teams on them.

She says I dream about you. I say I can't sleep thinking about you. She says I love you. I say I love you too. Cuz be brave, why not. It's all gonna hurt anyway if we're lucky enough to feel it.

*the font on this post will be fucked if viewed cuz on a computer cuz it always is when i copy paste on here and i dont feel like re-transcribing it