the milky way

blind men seek a savior they cannot see,
faith is easy to have when you haven't sight.
spit in their eyes and with dirty hands
faith is exercised, now you see!
'go forth and tell no one what you've seen until i've died'
-you say to keep quiet, i want you to live
and you call me satan, continually
you deliberately confuse your own audience.
'i have not come to bring peace,
but to set those who love each other againt one another,
surely you not will love anyone more than me'

september [fragments]

ukiah's only street sleeps in its fading dream,
here a stillborn town,
the occasional water tender skulks to the corner and up the hill, while
the service station sours with it's incendiary signs
rivaling bakunin's greatest dreams.
inside, kids play pool while the owner's dad peddles his chair across the lot with a dog in tow.
the bartender knows by name, we know, they have all been the same
smoke and clouded skies, breeding thunder claps, and flash
to warn, to prolong, to rain ash again.

the grey-water girl steps out of the post office
with a tilted head, slender limbs and infinitly indifferent moods,
her small, upturned nose is my favorite place,
its marble perfection worthy of grecian hands (and keats urn)
of cousre, she's pale complected
and smokes her ciggerettes with juvinal fascination, in the style of a forties actress,
both charmed and bored with her fingers,
the smoke floats, i linger.
again the plains crossed, stalks and stems with heads of grain, lost in horizons, every road is the same.
what last words will make worthy impressions on those we'll forget?
-------------------------------

are we not all children, thirty-year-old kids with inebriated dreams,
who will deliver us from ourselves?
i think it was fizgerald who said that no one wants their youth back,
they only want another chance to lose their innocence.
how apropos, i think, as smoke fills the living room,
the dirtiest couch, the cushion springs freed,
our prediliction to waste an afternoon.

i used to know what i wanted, or i used to want something,
but now, now i forget that i am alive. i forget that there is anything
beyond being- we dream when we do not sleep!
we sleep and do not understand. we understand but we do not how
to make it important.
reader pretend they know! because surely they do not.

what is it we supress, the purity we long for
that never existed except in our ideals?
in the rain i am alright, seasons i have reconciled myslef to,
i have reconciled too.
i only dream when i sleep, but i am not certain if
i can live in a world deconstructed, no pretence of what is natural
no ghosts or second lives to brighten possible futures.
how much of men's actions, i wonder, are driven by bordem?

the figments of my past are overcome by the lives of those around me,
we are all chasing someone else's illusion,
making them the realities of our own,
but where is the autheticity in me?
making my place from the better words of other men.
--------------------------------------

here in the early morning of the end, i cast into the fog
a spinner, a river with ocean tides
while lightning chides the not-too-distant coast,
hoping for a little less percipitation.
i believe that i have become ungrounded,
i am but tethered to a few familiar feelings
and nothing but, perhaps habit,
leads me back home

juxtaposed drowning!?

i have no ores for the hours
but this black inner tube to navigate the
umatilla- both unimpressive and unassuming,
impassive? no, but nearly impassable
in places, in spaces with depth and dimention,
and depths too where i can't see the rocks.
did god make these waves, or did they make him?
it is another question for another day.

i dreamt last night that i was on the beach,
the ocean was there too
and i lay between them, the two,
mediating the ebb and flow of their
conversations when a girl
washed upon the shore, a friend of mine
from some time ago;
someone had died, and she arrived
just in time for my ocean dream,
neither of us could awake so they took her
away, and then the scenes, they died, or changed

and today i'm floating on river
that will eventually reach the swelling sea.
there are islands, or unsuccessful forks
and deer cross ahead and climb the steep banks.
the rocks are conspiring, they are growing
life now passes by quicker.

through the window on the door i see her
lying in a hospital bed, but her face is blurred,
or obscurred like dreams always do,
talk to me, wake up before i do
her voice lingures still when no words are said.

i am holding onto a branch, pulled by the current,
matt is approaching and we meet, touch, fall
and i am floating under water, dragged along the rocks
i cannot stand, i hold on until i can regain my tube.
matt's tube passess me, matt still clinging to the tree
i chases it into the swell and sucken limbs
the current is now pressing and i am pinned.

she is awake but she is a child,
throught the door i see a little girl
getting ready for bed as i drift away,
but she always was a child to me,
and i believe she always will.
these thoughts will monopolize the coming day
and make everything feel unreal.

i cannot touch, cannot move and being pushed
under i hold onto the dead branch.
my body is soar, weary
i know i have to stay above, to fight
the current, through the pain,
but first i must let go

every afternoon

and how does the other half live?
a caramel swirl, some foam,
a pearl-skinned girl with hypothetical concern,
she doesn't know
but she does have a way of
shifting my thoughts, or concerns,
her name is, it's on the tip of my whatever,
even i still have much to learn.

we shift in chairs sometimes
and sometimes strangers
walk past with steps,
measured or heavy, amiable and thoughtlessly
shuffling their soles on hardwood,
stepping easily, lazily through life;
nudging tables and touching stools, or chairs,
who do they belong to?
the desire to touch that which is in the way;
brushing the walls, chairs, bricks and mortar grooves,
sometimes slides along my finger tips.
she delivers my drink, nimble fingers and parted lips,
i search my pockets for words to say,
coins, a thank you, a thimble,
a kiss!
there is an always of things to touch,
and of things in your way.

main street creeps with cars
circling the block for my amusement,
life is outside, but not within these
parochial means, or seats,
and despite my best efforts of thought
and theory, we are all sentient beings,
i think.
where is my concern? where did she,
o these diminishing returns.
make room for another drink of whatever,
make room for all that i have to unlearn.

why am i here again?

8/29/2006...

Each day here presents itself with its own problems and tendencies; people fail in work and relationships; bonds are formed and perceptions, good and ill, mesh so the the lines become more distinct as to who here is wanted and who is wanting. Backbiting, disingenuous, melodramatic, fallible; people. I am no longer amazed at the dysfunction and social atrophy of our little community, only slightly amused at the juxtaposition of intention and absurdity. Jeremiah is heart-broken, Solomon speaks of vanity, Sartre of nothingness, while J- and B- can only console each other for their senseless pains. They sympathize with each other and discuss the useless qualities of sympathy; one must be strong and stay positive. More persons arrive and tenitive plans are laid for the next season, so much better than this, our current blunder, but no one really knows, one can only romanticize this occupation so much; more talk concerning the nobility of optimism and avoiding the 'self perpetuating web of depression and feeling sorry for ones self.' No, that's not it, one must stare absurdity in the face, name it, and then move on, feel your pain and realize that everyone feels the same way. Smiles and weary souls breed retarded children, we are going to condescend, mess-up, miss the point and do it all over again, one might as well be honest with themself. This is certainly a comedy of errors and I am without a fellow spectator; I too have become a player. I hate writing about work, about how it goes and how that affects me, but my mind is so stultified by the lack of intellectual breath, like all this smoke in my lungs I am consumed with too many social issues that reek of humanity and infect my spirit, I feel rot inside. It would be a lie, however, to say that I have not learned anything from my peers, for certainly I have, I suppose something about them, about us, will appear in a poorly constructed short story I will write in the abstract future, but I am too weary right now. I think I just need someone else to make myself feel better; another person I can project myself onto in order to feel my own reflection and reassure myself of my own existence...

nullity and retention

possession; to retain the person, the object, the image that elicits your happiness. not wanting to have happiness but to be happy; to identify with that which is possessed. the violence of emotion, their seeming tenderness and safety, they are self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, creating vacuums for other emotive states to push you around. seeking favorable situations and personalities that might raise the corners of your mouth, the peptides in your head; create favorable memories whose future absence will soon haunt you. it is never enough to know, one must possess meaning, purpose, or fulfillment; awareness-of only permits you to believe that it is other than that which you are, if somehow possession equated absorption, assimilation; a fulfilment of being; you would be what you seek. this is the cupidity of identity.

one is not smart, one acts as if he possesses smartness; one is not humorous but exhibits characteristics of humor. striving to be the descriptions you seek to accumulate, empty vessels who pantomime the reality they have constructed in order to reaffirm its image. you want to be something, to be someone, which only serves to prove that you aren't anything; you're a non-thing, the absence of what you seek to be; the only thing you are is continually trying to construct a representation of your desire to be noticed, to be recognized and validated; there is nothing there but your desire and misguided effort; an emptines;, a nothingness. your identity exists as an abstract, an illusion; you simply exist.

desultory

you think of the year as you climb down the stairs
all your saccharine dreams and unanswered prayers
'maybe this is the taste of failure' you hear someone say
as you slide through the door and silently slip away

it seems as if something is missing, you are forgetting...
you shiver as the details fade, the wind-chill besetting
the walk to your car, when you notice across the lot
the face of a stranger who brings a wandering thought

she looks like so many girls that you used to know
in her face and her gait, but her prints in the snow
prove that she is real where the others cease to exist
you reach for your keys and some ineffable wish