burrito boy

he's just a burrito boy living in a world full of burrito joy. a tiny little boy who loves his burrito time the way he shouts it from the sidewalks i'm a burrito boy. oh watch the way he chomps his burrito, boy, oh what a burrito boy. he is so lost outside in the great big world with no one to hold him and comfort him like the way a tortilla holds together all that warm inner joy of the burrito oh the burrito boy is a lonely boy who makes a living pretending the world is a this or that ploy but oh the burrito boy watch him as he chomps his burrito oh the burrito boy living in a womb of burrito joy oh burrito boy oh burrito boy.

a song of alchemy

"you change all the lead, sleeping in my head - to gold. as the day grows dim, hear you sing, a golden hymn. spread the ashes of the colors over this heart of mine"

the pikey

After my show I shared a plate of fish and chips with two pretty girls next to me at the thick wooden bar. We sat on our stools, high chairs. I joined them outside for a cigarette but didn't smoke one. I went back inside alone, paid for the food and left without asking for any piece of their share or of their futures.

I had a thought about a rainbow. I can't for the life of me remember it, the way it slid through. And you gotta be careful with the language when rainbows are involved, the cartoonish idea from a Lucky Charms commercial. 

Fuck, I forgot. 

tears&beers

all we have are the baseball myths of boyhoods past. he's an idiot savant my dad used to joke about my interest in the stats. league leaders in batting average, home runs, runs batted in. the umpires were more demonstrative before hd slo-mo cameras could prove them not to be gods. gods or not, the players would yell, the managers would yell, there was yelling all the time.

my problem is i'm still that dawdly boy full of love
that's not a problem
she said

when some future generations look in on us with interest and pity. that mixture in which we set our gaze upon the ones who tread these spaces before us, they will see this, a call, a beacon, a flare. i'll tell them, no, i tell them,

it's ok to feel
it's ok to heal

i talked to my dad driving my own car from venice to koreatown. his voice playing through my speakers like one of the few radio stations i can still tolerate and listen to.

and i'll learn. i'll live and learn. i'll do it for awhile. i'll leave distinct traces here best felt by time and others and the lovely havoc these members of generations wreak.

irish pubs and irish goodbyes

his finger is in her ass. he finishes that way. sometimes it's the other way around. he finishes with her finger in his ass. sometimes she finishes that way too.

if you ever write about us, and this, try not to make it too absurd. he tells her. she nods. she thinks he's stupid to fixate on the details like this one. a finger in the ass, one way or another, it takes up so little of their lovemaking time, let alone their time together. that it's silly.

she'd get to it, sure. why not. but only for a little levity. that's what she craves, at times. a levity, a freedom from the addiction to his weight.

a story by a woman
written by her

He drew me somewhere deeper and then became the only way I could breathe. Unfair, right? Especially because he was such a flake about it.

He called it solitude, that thing he wanted most he said.

Days would pass, storm by, and then he'd return to me disheveled and worn out from his time in solitude. I didn't know what I believed about him and what I made up. All I knew back then is that I wanted to be the ground he walked on, barefoot, all the time. I wanted to be the planet that contained him, gave him fertile rains and just the right amount of sunshine. I wanted to be the rocky soil that sometimes buried him. Then I'd be the Saint Bernard who sniffed him out of his hole and rescued him with my slobbery tongue. Desperate, right?

I know I seemed desperate for it but that's not it. It was about breathing remember?

It was about being able to breathe.

And he didn't need to kiss my face all tenderly like that. He didn't need to make me feel better about my history. Or like, how I saw myself. That, I liked myself more when I was around him, with him, cuz I could forget about myself. He had a way of lighting up a room. I say that, but he really did.

I know I must sound like a battered woman, a woman without inner confidence. But that's not it. This is about respiration. Being able to breathe. Feeling a reason, inspired, as long as his smell remained on my skin. I would've tattooed it on, his smell, if it were possible.

But it wasn't. It isn't. Life isn't that way. Like, we grow up but then suddenly stop. Like potted plants, our potential is already pre-determined until a gardener has a vision, pulls us out by the roots and transplants us into wilder earth. The wilderness. I feel like I'm in the wilderness, unable to breathe. And I'm cold.

So he hurt me once and when he did, I stayed where I was, away from him. In the cold, for awhile.

The End.

he said his friend said you can't shatter what was already broken. that she would rather disperse than wait around for your clumsy hands to put her back together just for the sake of easing the worries of your clumsy heart. he, still, he would've liked the chance to tell her he was sorry - for whatever it was worth, the role he played in their messy and brief affair.

a story

i was born to be a devil. i know it. you can see it in my bone structure, like the grandfather i never met, a worser devil.

he was born to be an angel. you could see it from the start. he had the cutest cheeks and fairest eyes of a golden child. i remember his cub like hands, brown tan skin, blonde white hair. in the summer he would wander the hills barefoot with his shirt off and everyone loved spotting him, kissed by the sun.

while i fought my own fate. and suffered for it. i would not surrender to the pleasure i'd surely know from taking and harming at the prewritten costs. instead i acted kind, grew compassion, and bled inside out for it.

but he wasn't contented being blissful. he tore off his halo. shredded his harp on ocean rocks i never saw. and he lashed out at the earth. for it had betrayed him, he thought. it had given him less than some, more than most, but never enough to know what to gain from any of it. so he blamed everyone and lay within jagged bottom pools of lava until coated in substance.

but i never forgot. i was born a devil who loved an angel. i dream about him all the time. like it's him, how i know him. then i awake in the middle of the night with the phantom creatures who know me. they dash about the imperceptible folds, leaving traces that could drive a lesser devil mad. but me, i bite and claw at them, then lick my wounds like a wolf pretending his best, to pull the sled.

but sometimes they don't come around, and that's when i know they've gone away from me to visit him, the angel, and have taught the boy their language.

a lover for the universe

juicy. between your legs is juicy.

a morning, i rode passenger seat in a white 90's convertible down the Eastside stretch of Sunset Boulevard. She drove like a Holly Golightly movie character, carefree. My head a bit above the windshield. Hair blown. Sex blown. What else do future generations want to read about anyway.

And let it be known like Van Gogh I believe in my art much in the same way he did. No matter. No matter. Even if I haven't gotten into my best shit. I haven't yet. I know it. Here is color.

I won't live in a police state. That actor said on twitter today that we do not begin as police property. I loved that. A twitter essay. Who would've thought. Another planet like Earth. Seems silly trying to own a piece of it, kind of like here. If I claim beachfront property on that planet like Earth, isn't it as silly as this one. Isn't it cruel what people think they own. Isn't it cruel how people act cruel about inane things like color and culture. Can't people keep their hands to their fucking selves unless asked otherwise. Stop being cruel.

Besides, the only cruelty I find excusable is the kind that bubbles inside the heart from being in love.

And this wasn't yet my best work.

the uncharacteristic july rains

The orchids you broke them after I broke your heart and I didn't like that cuz they were gonna die anyway cuz no one knows how to keep them alive anyway

stories

A woman near naked. Me in jeans. I wake up ravenously hungry. It takes two of everything to satisfy me. Like days ago, two.

A look. It's always simple. It's wanting one thing at a time. Simple. Not always having to do with them. We spoke, it's simple.

A lick of the hand. Tattoos, artfully situated. One crescent along the underside of her right breast. Another one vertically lining the left side of her back, an arrow, a feather, a sword, I don't quite know. I preferred to keep its graceful lines a mystery. An arching of her muscled spine. An elevation of her middle. Holding onto each other now for dear life, because it is dear, life. Pressing together hard and gentle. There's nothing like wanting it. The three of us, her, me, the candlelight she lit.

The crazies sat in plastic chairs outside the halfway house across the street. 

d'artagnan

I bite my skin proving it's a miracle.

They bankrupted themselves on high-enders. It kept him captivated and her solid and it worked for a time but they knew they were gonna end one day and that broke their hearts.

What it is like to meet a decent person: they hurt you gentler and that's the worst of em. All in all they are kind. It's amazing, human kindness. The way it cradles the moment. I've had a tough time accepting kindness into my life. Probly cuz I know that time is not. Time is not kind. It's not unfair, it's just not kind.

I bite my skin proving it's a miracle.