hitchhiker

if angels were fishes

and fishes were wishes

and wishes were horses,

beggars would ride.

and i'm sure we could catch a ride with them if we needed;

beggars are really very generous people,

probably because they've got nothing to hide

and

nothing to give;

well, "nothing," that is,

except things real, things uncaptive,

the things you'd expect to find on your way to wherever,

things 

things like dust

and love

and dirty pennies

and boxes of baby clothes nobody wanted to look at after emily died.

elephants

the elephants walk in slow lines
towards maybe graveyards,
maybe schoolyards.
she walks, in slow circles,
through maybe crossroads, maybe through stones
that sing of deities, as promised.
but we walk far enough, there are no roads, here,
only empty fields and singing spheres
that fancy themselves planets,
orbiting around some nothing
they presume to call their sun.

but we, we have no suns--
we laugh with our eyelashes
and dance with bullets in our heads;
eyes gouged out, we see with our bones instead.
and we tell stories in fire circles
of the living, dreaming dead; it seems they are, these days,
the only beings we understand.
so we squeeze our lemon juice
and we write secret messages on our hands
so that when we die
they will know
we are like them.
and we pray, with broken fingers, to our ancestors' gods-
they are gods we don't believe in, but we have nothing else.
so we build them stone temples,
but we sabotage the stones
so that they crumble into ruins of superstitious hopes-
slowly, making our own proof
that we are all there us.

it is sad, maybe. it is absurd.
but it is the only way we are

enough

for each other.

we walk, with the elephants,
toward maybe graveyards,
maybe schoolyards.
either way, we hear children laughing in the east winds,
playing hopscotch,
and, unknowing, we laugh with them,
walking slow into the dark.

chimney sweep rhymes

and i lay hollow in the water,

writing love songs in the dark;

drunken love songs on a train, a train

taking me past watermarks and bloodstains

taking me, slow and steady,

through cross-legged harmonies

and singing, stinging, gallivanting chimney sweep rhymes.

lost

machetes clink together;

blink once,

twice,

and then they're gone.

what and where: we think we saw, we drink, we rob 

our mothers' purses,

go to breakfast, fuck,

and wake up in the middle of it, realize:

wait.

this is preposterous.

we are tiny wooden ducks that fell behind the piano.

"lost" doesn't even begin to describe.

just a sidenote

today i am going to write about christmas.

and i am not going to write about consumerism, or church and state issues in sonoma, or anything like that. there's enough people yelling about that these days, and i am not in the mood for a shouting match.

it's just a day, really. and we have all our funny traditions about it, decorated trees and silly hats and semi-obligatory presents, and all that. and so significant to so many people! so interesting. we've melded our very american pagan with our very american christianity, added several hundred years, and look what we've got. a giant franchise of a holiday that's mostly about staying inside and making a fire because it's cold out.

but it did a lot for me, this year. a lot. because, with all our disagreements and no real ability to reconcile them, it got my family to sit around and get each other presents (or promises of such) and drink egg nog and eat cookies and just be happy for a day or two. and even if we can't totally accept each other, and even if we can't agree to disagree in anyone's head but mine, we can sit at a table. and we can listen to obnoxious christmas music and i can be coerced into breaking out the violin, and it can feel like nothing's changed. an unfamiliar feeling these days, in this place.

i don't know where i'm going with this. it's just really, really nice. and weird, and probably short-lived, but nice. so happy christmas, and happy whatever else you celebrate, and if you don't celebrate anything then just have a really, really, really good day.

it really is a wonderful life. put some rum in your egg nog and enjoy it.

volcano rocks at octopus o'clock

whose side are you on?
whose side is this, anyway?
put down your sword, come lay with me on the ground.

pearl bracelets and octopus o-clock, it is sunny here in the winter. there are no clouds, even, today. and i am here to be moved. so move me, if you will, or let somthing else do it instead. for me, there are no others, only unfamiliars.

there is an upside down trash can in my backyard. it's cracked from the sun, probably been there for years. it is right next to the volcano rock. i don't know where the volcano rock came from. i don't know where the trash can came from either, or why it is upside down in the backyard. when the flowers move, the wind moves them too quickly, and the world looks like a giant stream of photographs. fast-forward reality, like on planet earth. a flip book, maybe? i think i live in a flipbook, maybe, made by someone who wasn't quite sure how to make a flipbook. so you flip through it and the motion makes sense for a minute, and then all of a sudden the picture completely changes and you're lost. like they had to make 3 flipbooks for a 4th grade project and at the end they glued them all together. things change so fast, here. i wonder how many years longer the upside-down trash can will be in my backyard. i wonder how long this will still be my backyard.

strange thoughts, these days, she wonders what they are. it is strange to be happy because of real things (or less real things, depending how you look at it), and not just because we decided to be. and there is no drama here, not on the everyday. deep down, there are things here that are deeply, deeply dishonest. but on the everyday, we coexist just fine. i smoke my cigarettes outside and keep my secrets to myself. everyone here keeps their secrets to themselves. it is their way.

so jigsaw puzzles and red wine, it is. not so bad, she thinks. you never throw anything away because you don't know who you are, and just in case the real you is in that stuffed animal you got as a gift from someone you don't remember, you keep it in a box. outside your life, but not outside your potential self. just throw it away, she says. you don't need that anymore.

catching

are you afraid?

and if you are, what of?

are you afraid that they will desert you?

are you afraid they'll never come back?

it is ok, you know, it's ok,

they may come back or they may never,

but here, here you have everything.

and in the dark, she hopes

she laughs out loud,

she hears you, here.

and she can only hope, only hope you are here with her,

and not just a ghost.

she hears the ghosts, many times, these days.

she doesn't sleep well, these days.

but it is a different unwell, and maybe a different sleep.

it makes her eyes water,

but not in the old way.

we know better than that, now,

and we no longer let it catch us.

letter to the editors

darling reader,

as you may have noticed in recent days,

i have decided to be more honest with the internet.

not that the internet was ever the one we were worried about. i've always felt comfortable with the internet. it's the editors i've been concerned about. the editors- who mention disapprovingly, as if it were in passing, a piece of my vocabulary they don't approve of. a stray "fuck", no doubt, who made it past my diligent self-censor. the editors- who want something else but this from me, who wish i would write more conventionally, who wish i would live more conventionally. the editors- who know very little and assume very much.

if someone (you, perhaps) were to read this blog, to click around for more than 30 seconds, it would appear that i had a severe writers' block from the month of october until now. it would appear it had been a long time coming; there's less and less every month since i came back from jordan. it would appear.

this is not true. i am the anti-writers' block, these days. i write every day, these days. i am, maybe, only writing, these days. but i have gotten painfully sick of self-censorship, and so nothing has appeared here for months. and now, as silly and cliche as it sounds, the time has come where it is impossible to do anything but say what i feel. this is no hide-and-seek, i am no pretender, and i can do no halfway-dance tonight.

so. although this will be painful, and although my most recent attempts at honesty about everything on the home front have gone over like substantially-sized lead balloons, i will write what i feel. i will be what i am. i am what i am, and no ultimatums of yours can stop me.

so, to the editors, to the disapprovers and the doubters, this is for you. these are all for you.

walking less, she hopes

walking less these days, she hopes
and hopes
and hopes
until there isn’t anything left of her.
nervous?
i don’t know why.
a silly kind of worry, said a wiseperson once
when things are so good you’re afraid to lose them.
silly, maybe.
but here we are.
with too much time on her hands to worry about
all the things she hopes he won’t worry about.
and so, walking less,
because there’s nowhere, here, to walk
she thinks
she writes
she hopes
she asks for things she’s never wanted more
from fates she doesn’t believe in.

one long swim

crescendos, rising, falling, sinking memories, sinking notes. bottles on the ocean, we write love letters to a world we only thought we used to know. living as ghosts in other people’s reveries, we walked like them and talked like them, danced like them and loved like them. we lived in their cities and we wore their clothes; there were colors, there, or so we thought. and who could blame us? no one ever tells you there is more than you can see. we were happy, there, in our way.

and then came the day when we went to the beach.

and perhaps it was the wind, but we saw the dead pelican mangled in the seaweed, and it spoke to us. it called us by name, slow and quiet, and it whispered familiar words in languages we didn’t know we knew, and the sand spun beneath our feet. we were seized, possessed, by worlds unknown and unforgettable, and the pelican spoke louder, we could feel him in our blood, singing every heartbeat for us. and what he said was, slow and hollow,

one long swim, that’s all it takes. one long swim.

and we stood on the edge, the water just brushing up against our toes, and we took off the clothes our mothers gave us. children we were, of apple juice and guns, and we put our glasses down and dropped our pistols in the ocean. we left them there, on the sand, and peered into the horizon’s shimmering, imaginary line. like a mirage, it was. one long swim, we thought out loud, one long swim.


and so we swam. into nothing we could know, toward nothing we could see, we swam into the currents and the kelp and the sky. tasting the salt on our lips, breathing heavy and more desperate than either of us would care to admit, we hurtled toward the nothing as if we knew its name. as if we could smell it, taste it somewhere in the back of our minds, like a blurry memory just beyond reach.

one long swim, that’s all it took. and now, now we write love letters to the people we left behind, asking them to visit sometime. asking them to look up at the sky, sometime. we don’t know if they get our bottles. we don’t know. but we send them anyway, a daily ritual of something kind of like love and something kind of like show-and-tell, something like a whisper in the night that you tell yourself is just the wind in the trees. it’s nice here, we say. the colors are different, and we don’t have costco, but you can wear a funny hat anytime you want, and when it rains the trees like to swing dance. it’s nice here, you should come visit. and really, all it takes is one long swim.


crescendos, swirling compasses, we rise and fall with the waves and we listen to old radio shows. these are days of long nights and longer mornings, days full of juice and empty of promises, days of things unknown and unforgettable. we are, now, unknown and unforgettable.

we are, now, here and there. in the sun and out to sea, alive, and just around the corner.