what dragons mean

fireworks. mosquitos. the fountain in echo park lake splashing in a dream. none of these things belonged to her. transmuted by godknowswhat. his arms. first they were claustrophobic. too tight. constrictive. then they became addictive. it was him. it wasn't anything he was cognizant of, just how his inner world erupted and seized into what it held onto. who it held onto.

basketball courts. sunburn. wandering salty air with an abstract intent indescribable until it bloomed. to both be the flower and gardener, tiller of its soil. believer in its growth, blind faith. it being itself and its tender. these weren't her thoughts she knew but they ran circles around her in the evenings, pleasuring and plaguing her.

fuck. you fucking merged with me. then you left me. what am i supposed to do with all this life of yours that you gave me. where am i supposed to put these secrets of yours that you don't even know you have. if i throw them away they'll be gone forever and it feels damaging to life. but i don't even know where to throw you away, how to throw you away, where is the trashcan. i've tried, been trying a long time

i've danced in the desert. i've fucked a shaman for days upon days crying and whispering words and brushing my skin raw with his gorgeous attention. i've lived with men. i've loved men. i love a man right now as hard as i possibly can and it helps. but i feel you down below, in my gut, in my whole. like all that dark ocean unexplored

i heard that though. i heard that we've charted more of space than we have our own earth ocean depths. maybe i've been wrong, like humankind, eyes looking to the stars, while knowing inherently there is a core here that i'll never escape

and so she dove. she delved into it. one deep breath big enough to take her as far to the bottom as anyone ever dared to go. and when the pressure altered, slammed, then peacefully ceased on her, she, like all the expelled bubbles of a whale song, she let him go

when he got me spun

you left when you found out I wasn't going to be bad for you. damn boy. i loved you. i'm sorry i couldn't kill your fire. sorry if i fanned your flames to new exponents. mmh. i only wanted to bring your light up as high as it could go. it was selfish. i know. i wanted the world to know. you were always so humble and that i hated. cuz i thought it was selfish. you, not sharing your flow with the parched citizens of the dunes.

you left when you found out i'd never pull the plug. sux when you tell someone you're lonely to hang out with them cuz then they won't. not without pity in their eyes. and i woulda held onto your corpse forever if it let me, if forever let me. i woulda grown a banyan tree above us and waited in the sun years for its shade to come. i woulda blistered to preserve you.

pity. you left when i saw the pity in your eyes. damn. we never were ones to wear the mask. we never were ones to float above the briar patch. but the difference is i'd leap face first into the thorns if it meant you could use the drops of my blood for a trail. like hansel and gretel with the bread crumbs, but crumbs of my blood. if that make sense.  

you left cuz you didn't want to make it. i understood. i loved a coward like you. how you wanted to find someone to do it for you. shame, i didn't break your legs.

juniper

i awoke to a tall building in my neighborhood that i'd never seen before. a tower. it was towering over me, like a tower. it was a bigger tower than all the buildings downtown. it was freakin huge. like above the clouds. how'd it get up there that tall without my notice.

i been drunk. i been drunk for twelve days straight. i mean years. did i say days. i meant years. gosh i guess it plays games on the brain after awhile. of course, that's what i count on it doing. the games. i like that moment when it becomes a big ol conversation between one distant left side of myself and one different right side of myself. and they skate recklessly toward each other like two speed skaters but then miss each other again at the last second and each end up on the other side they don't belong. and then they do it again. until it goes black like a clapping computer screen really. reminds me. i need to go to the library.

gosh damn. the building is a glory. it's a holy cow. shake it off. how long has it been there. ahhhh it doesnt matter.

lots of people. kung fu kicking with headphones on and nah. outta my way lemons. outta my way beasts. everyone feels like lemons and beasts these days. lemons and beasts. either sour or angry. can't bite into either of em at the moment. shit. reminds me. i haven't had a bite since that belinda ended up in my situation by accident. that was when the situation were on los angeles st. that week. i liked that situation i had then. how then ago was that. shit. i've had to move my situation block to block more times than a calculator could count. reminds me. i need to go back to school.

we all exist in the shade. it's like. of this god damn building. it's looming more now than ever. the cold winds whip round it's distant edges like starvin cold greyhound races. speakin of starvin. i'm starvin. gotta go hit the usuals. be right back canine. gotta go hit the usuals.

and i'm feelin. i don't know. like obscured by this damn tower. it's so damn majestic comparison to me. i'm so damn puny. karate kicking out. no matter. biting at the air. at the cells in the air. eating yeast particles outta the air.

how do they make it so straight the building.

dialogue

why you always running
i aint
yes you is

we made love like mexican teenagers

he said "I don't like the whole fuck-me-now vibe" and I agreed. He touched my dark skin with his milky white hands and when the two of us lay together after work inside the quiet post office atop those piles of envelopes to be sorted and delivered by us the next day we reminded me of an Oreo cookie dunked soggy in milk--- the best way to eat an Oreo and this beautiful white boy of twenty-six knew how to eat my cookie and after I'd deliver what had been waiting aggravatingly inside me out to the world in one Big One, I'd particularly love how swollen his lips would look from all that tireless work down there in my kingdom down there. And what I also loved about him was how he revealed a whole bunch of parts of me that just never would have been revealed had it not been for just having him there with me so I could talk to him different from all the hundreds of customers friends and family I'd talk to all day because sex does something to people it is like a delivery station where all the things you have been hauling around with you finally have a place to unload. And I'd been on a long trip prior to the first time he and I made love. And I'd been packed to capacity with all kinds of cargo. And after we made love I got lighter, almost like I could leave the ground shipping entirely.

rendition

what happens in all this kissing. a question is everything. so why designate it with something so degrading as that curlicued symbol. lips. woman. i realized you, remember. it was above some bedsheets on the eastside. it was on a dancefloor downtown. a yoga mat tucked beneath secluded oak trees in the palisades. in my mind. that's where it lives, in my mind.

am i a ten cent magician. i wrote a story with a pig. i want to make it before pigs are everywhere. i've been seeing pigs permeating the zeitgeist. it's only a matter of time. i used to work at an animal sanctuary with behemoth pigs of incredible strength. we called them buddha pigs cuz they'd been rescued from a monastery.

but what happens on a cellular level. do we impregnate a need. a chasm. an empty womb. cultivate a fetus composed of spare parts and organs in order to birth a tied together neglected transaction best fulfilled by what we made ourselves. on fourth of july a long time ago. i was a young man. i kissed an older woman. i kissed a teenager. i blazed through malibu like a gin soaked wildfire.

tom robbins said the society is merely a forum/gymnasium to exercise and test the human spirit. he said it's never too late for a happy childhood.

brick

I am the one you stopped dreaming of. You were a locust swarm. A held hand. Now there are stamps on the inside of my wrist. I am getting too old for this. A guy who stumbles home. Who mutters to himself long after the bar has closed.

Rilke

"And let me here promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism--such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.

Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.

There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!"



-April 23rd, 1903
excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet

Ocean Park A Time Ago

It was back then. Not too long ago but enough that I have to scratch around for any remnants of the sweetness. Dig. She made the smallest gesture toward me on the Internet. Added me on the email site a couple weeks after telling me she was through. As she cried in her sublet bedroom. Maybe it was an accident. I don't know. Are there ever any accidents with two hearts. Or are those organs purposeful even while seemingly oblivious. Cuz then months later she got in touch. And I pretended like she couldn't hurt me.

Joshua Turek 2015 Reel