exhale

ive been having a bout of not so much writer's block as writer's apathy. it comes and goes. i expect it to fade shortly.

unfortunately this leaves me more at the mercy of the real world, which has been... frustrating.

it's all sunshine

i find i grow closest
to those most prone
toward walking away;
only able to connect
with a set of legs
already set on leaving.
fall in love with this hurricane,
but do it quickly, now,
she'll be clouds over iowa soon -
passing curiosity for bored hicks,
not the fully-formed beauty she was,
raging through the major cities of her youth.

and that's all fine,
i'll take a hundred cyclones in stride,
and treasure all the long summer showers too,
and when winter comes
and i'm buried in snow
i'll bitch, but try to enjoy that as well.

just don't be surprised
when my policy of top speed every day
leaves me half-dead on your doorstep

but it's all sunshine with me, darlin'

worst case scenario

earthquakes and hurricanes and volcanoes, oh my!

names

so, what's up with people randomly changing their facebook names recently? premature midlife crises, or did they just now learn that you can change your name to anything you want (as long as it isn't lucifer)? i'm not talking about nicknames, i'm talking about someone who is not a newlywed just having a completely different last name. i have to go looking at our mutual friends to figure out who the fuck this apparently random person is, showing up and being all up in mah shee-it.

i've also found myself randomly friended to a few groups which i did not click a 'like' button for. i'm not sure how this has occured, that MMAFan.com and the Cowboy Lifestyle Network (i shit you not) have both wormed their way into my newsfeed. perhaps it is related to the strange phenomenon of all my black friends being constantly tagged in pictures of fly-ass sneakers. i don't get it. i don't get it. i unfriended both of them.

i considered that maybe someone got my password, so i changed it to something i haven't used since i was 8. then i immediately changed it again to something completely different. take that, phantom hacker.

stigmata

i've got some pretty serious jesus marks goin' right now, courtesy of road construction on north avenue. the bike is fine. my palms are not. but what's a little nerve damage, between friends? or, 'friends'? or, paychecks?

one thing

i would just like to say...

different

riots in london. looks like 'maybe rising tides' might just come true. i asked myself, "what's this story called?", and after a moment, replied, "maybe rising tides." so that's what i saved the txt file as. i originally shared it as 'rising tides', but realized today that i've still been referring to it as 'maybe' in my head. so i just now ran around and changed it all, because i like 'maybe' more.

tumblr

i started a tumblr today. i am quite fond of how it handles pictures, so it will be a companion blog to this one. you can find it here.

i have already put up a decent batch of my photos, and have in the process discovered just how much of my own catalogue of photos is missing. i need to keep better track of this kind of thing.

you've got some nerve having hope in this ghost town port of call

there is nothing to see here, and that nothing looks back at us.

friday 7 hrs work, 2 hrs asleep, sat 10 hrs work, 5 hrs sleep, sunday 9 hours work. got home at 10ish. well, 11:30 i get a call, suddenly Mxxxxx is on her way over from the last night of lollapalooza. by this point i barely had the energy to walk, emergency energy reserves mostly tapped out by the weekend; i'm down to about 10%. okay. shower. i need a bedroom. Sxxxx is at work, but is due back around 1am.

she arrives looking like a complete mess. she's been drinking for two or three weeks straight, caught in both torrential downpours that happened yesterday, clothes all soaked, legs and feet bruised all to hell. she wraps herself around me the moment i open the door, and it's full minutes before we even make it upstairs into the apartment.

we curl up in his room, she tells me all about how she made fake death from above 1979 band passes, eventually just reverting to quietly laying in each others' arms. some time passes, during which i can't relax because i know we're going to have to vacate the bedroom soon enough. she's kissing my neck and all i can think about is the day i bought us rum and laid on the beach waiting for her only for her to call and say she's not coming, or fourth of july weekend when i told her she was all i had to look forward to and then she left town without a word to me, or when i did my reading and she said the night before that she'd swing by because she was going to be in the neighborhood all day anyway, and didn't.

she reads my mind, says, "i'm sorry if you hate me." the kissing stops, the arms wrap around me tighter.

"it happens," i reply, and hold her close. my shoulder starts getting wet. it's five minutes before Sxxxx comes home. she gets up, wipes her eyes, grabs her beer. i can still hear noise from the living room. "okay," i say; "i think i have a solution to this problem. go have a sit for a minute or two." she does, and i proceed to drag the mattress onto the back porch after throwing down some folded up cardboard boxes to keep things dry. it's warm, humid, mid-80s, reminds me of getting off the plane in florida close to midnight. the clouds are moving the wrong way. i retrieve her from the living room, where she's trying to talk to people who aren't particularly interested in talking back. she's hammered.

we retreat to the porch, which is surprisingly comfortable. her leg is resting across my lap, her fingers exploring my stomach. then fucking Sxxxx comes out, first to share a spliff, then winds up staying for a solid hour to tell us a small mountain of stories which i've heard before. she hasn't, shows interest, makes it worse. he won't shut up. or leave. my fucking god, was it not obvious when i pulled the mattress out to the porch that i was looking for fucking privacy? the one god-damned thing i'm guarenteed not to have in the house? instead i get regaled by the same stories about pierced dicks that i've been listening to for a year.

finally he leaves. she's exhausted. so am i, but i find the energy to give her a massage anyway. it's not the longest one i've ever given. she tries to give me one back, but i'm so tired my back is sensitive as hell. every touch tickles, makes my muscles spasm, seize, lock up. at one point i tense up so badly that i briefly pop a rib out of place. she stops before i have an aneurism.

sleep was surprisingly comfortable. i drifted awake to find her fingers unconsciously playing with my hair, then dropped back to sleep. the temperature stayed relaxed until the sun started coming up; by 9am we were both sweating, uncomfortable. i drag the mattress back inside, onto the couch i sleep on normally. of course, no sooner do we lay down than the rest of the house wakes up. the last of the house's weed gets smoked without me. she laments her apparently rain-destroyed phone, wanders youtube a while on my computer until, predictably, it overheats and dies. then she leaves, promising to be back later this week.

"so, see you in three months, right?" i reply.

she laughs. "yeah, probably more like ten."

"so next june?"

"maybe not 'til next lollapalooza."

i hold her until i can't anymore, and then she's gone.

expected

she wanted a nice planet to orbit from a distance, no crash landing;
if our relationship were a war, there would be no casualties.
if it were a friendly neighbor, his house would have no roof.

he wanted to find the perfect note to go out on, pen and gun in hands;
mother nature will make suicide cases of us all, i said,
just wait and see. and then i said goodnight and left.

there was a lot of quiet, and for the most part nobody bothered me.
i talked to five strangers on the busride home,
and brought one old friend back into the stew.

i am often surprised to find things not exactly the way i expected them.

love

i believe i will give you one more chance to make me fall in love with you, as awful an idea as it sounds. i've been advised against the whole scenario quite heavily, but i guess i'm hoping to be forgiven. it's hard to walk away from a decent thing, just to go back to no thing at all.

i hear that i have not left you in a better place than when i found you, and that to continue it might just further ruin us both. this is par for the course for me, apparently. my attempts to help people often leave them far worse off than if i'd kept to myself. or so i'm told. half of me believes it. the other half still believes i'm a god-damned angel sent here to do a few decades of good before returning to the source. and in the middle, the observer, decision-maker, i do not know if there are angels, or devils, or a source, or a point. i simply keep deciding to breathe, often at moments when i have not done so for a while.

fireworks

someone somehow convinced me at one point to stick around and watch the fireworks. i wanted to leave, quite badly, but somehow something got through. i wanted to leave. i still want to leave. but apparently i made a promise to stay put and see the show. so here i am, upright and breathing still, not so much leaving my own mark as influencing the so many marks being made around me. oh, who am i kidding, i am leaving a mark, i am leaving a blazing trail of destruction. fire and fury, all the way back to my parents' doorstep, framed and hung on their walls and scattered about the garages and storage lockers of my youth, the bedrooms, the yards, the schools, ad nauseum.

i believe it is no well of strength that keeps me alive, but a forgotten promise. i refuse to call it a curse.

we are okay, because we have been raised to believe we are okay.

quiet

that man has a problem
that i know how to handle
all's i'll need is a gun
and a quiet place

(quiet...)





(...broken:)
can't you smell that i'm drained
that there's so little remaining
i've tripled my age in three scant years
silently for your cause but not martyred for it
now it's my bloody new year's
and my bloody easter sunday too
all loveless, shallow looming touches
and occasional cold warnings for strangers -
look not to the past for insight to this madness,
but forward, to all possible futures,
and also sideways, to all the could-be-happenings
and almost-happeneds
and might've-beens.

the problem is me,
though it never used to be.

(headphones.)
(quiet.)

amok

july has, apparently run amok. "look to the sky!" i laughed, pointing southwest. "do you see?" nobody saw, because some could not see and some did not need to - they knew. blue, blue skies, blue skies and thunderstorms, grave digging and home surgery. no potential energy, just kinetic, decelerating to sleep. im sitting on the porch more, smoking more, more heavily. the years weigh on me, and my legs are paying the price. but i'm fighting for grins, struggling to laugh, even if it wears me out faster.

this is sinbad's house. and you my bitch.