and the moon too

even then

I don't remember my mom holding up the blue sky with a garden rake but apparently she did.

I remember opening the gates to you, agony, pleasure, that expansive planet of lust. this morning. i remember it i do. saying i held open the gates while you all the while were the key.

I don't remember when the thickness of youth began to thin and how it required more of the same to create the holy spirit of inspiration, effect.

I remember you walking into that restaurant I was working at behind the bar with sheets of rain and blue gray light backdropping you, how you appeared out of that world like an alien. and i a grieving alien my own. and you a grieving alien your own. and how two aliens with slender fingers touched on each other, poking for gold and it falling out like the coins from my pockets this morning when we moved horizontally. and how this morning you joked about them being sonic the hedgehog coins.

I don't remember the price of that tequila shot, pbr, all you can eat tacos and peanuts special at the gold room. i thought it was 3 bucks but simon said it was 4. i think he was right

I do remember you at the gold room that first night we left work and wandered about echo park like the whole town was a park, a playground of loud angry cars and sad old men at the bar counter who you thought i was giving too much attention to joking about god knows what before i kissed you.

Dreams Dont Diee by le turek brothers

1500 miles

I turned 34 on friday. We went to the Grand Canyon and then our friends wedding in Tucson.

We stayed in Motel 6's and then rented a cool desert casita.

I had a head cold, the altitude descending from Flagstaff made it worse. I had toyed with the idea of dropping acid on my birthday but instead I was hocked up on Sudafed and cough drops.

I dragged around clogged ears, stuffed nose, a sore throat but eyes still wide and a heart still pried open in my chest for another year.

The sight of the Grand Canyon was too much to understand without interacting with it, which we didn't, we didn't hike to its bottom nor sleep on its cliffs, just drove obediently from lookout point to lookout point until the time zone changed but we felt little different.

But you can't talk shit about the Grand Canyon my girlfriend and I joked.

My girlfriend Siobhan she bought me pizza and two different slices of cake for my birthday dinner and was so gentle to me and my congested ass face the whole trip. My treasure. Our 2 year anniversary is in a few days and I've never been with someone so long. I've never loved so easily, and felt love in return the same.

4 days, 34 years of age, Motel 6, 2 years of continuous love. I love numbers and how they let us track the imperceptible, attempt to put order to an orderless time. Time is an insomnia in Williams, Arizona staring at my bright phone in the dark next to my dreaming lover while a stranger snores loudly through the thin walls of our motel room.

On my mom's 62nd birthday a few weeks ago I asked her what she thought it was all about, she said experiences, love and family, that there was no end goal, just to experience as much as we can. I am grateful to be alive. The night before we saw the canyon, my girlfriend and I hurried outside to take photos of ourselves in a flurry of Arizona mountain snow, like happy fools, returning red cheeked into a steak house where we ate a warm apple pie slice a la mode, and melted, everything melted - it wasn't the Sudafed nor the acid I never took, everything was just melting into itself rendering the world, love, illness, health all the same. Two days ago, three days, today, tomorrow, 15 years from now, time flies when you're having fun.

how to be

touch an innocuous door handle and it ignites a flash of memory to another place. I've been in and out and finding so much of it pleasant as hell. A burnt piece of palo santo in a room that's burning down. A Catalonian red wine spilling it's plum mineral blood down a throat.

Climbing steps up to a white adobe house on New Years Eve filled with Arizona people and music made from the neon green hides of broken aliens. Then that hidden fairy land in the corner of Highland Park with a kid telling me to feed the fire with Santa Maria wood while he spun obscure wonders and we danced like muppets.

To wonder what I'm doing here over a bowl of oatmeal in my kitchen and feeling like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, the clouds the way they were outlined out our window with perimeters of yellow bounced orange light yelling at me how I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

She says she hates waking up cuz it reminds her that one day she won't. I know. I know. Fuck, all our deaths but this is living. Fuck all the lost opportunities we're dying anyway.

I run errands, run mental circles, drive on slick pavement and thunderous potholes and traverse my city cascading with memories through fifteen mostly underpaid years that I wouldn't trade for anything.

A girl in brown high waisted Dickies and tattooed arms hugs her arms around the slight slender 20 something boy she loves before they track past me to go have unprotected sex in a youthful haze.

kemosabe

There was never no oath with the person you didn't want to be with, the person you didn't want to be. There was never no oath to take care of one another if you weren't taking care of one another as you turned into the person you wanted to be. There was never no oath with the person you never wanted to be, that's why you went on to become the person you were trying to be.

A month or so ago

h2o

I had
a dream
that i wrote this song
it was real easy
it wasn't hard at all

There
are many cars
on the freeway
but only one
is being driven by OJ

His white
Ford Bronco
with him at the wheel
did he ever
get in trouble
or just a citation

Cuz I
had this memory
of news helicopters
and him being followed
on the freeway

I was just a little boy

chinatown public library

You were wandering
like most wonderers do
one foot in front of the other
shoe
the other shoe