the leper's dance

Full Stop and Flower.

2010-08-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

So, I wrote this book.

It's called Full Stop and Flower. If you read it you'll find out why. It's a bunch of poems, most of them pretty recent, that I collected and rearranged and drawed some drawings about, and the drawings are also in the book.

Copies are just over 30 pages, and I'm selling them for $5 each. If you want one please let me know! You can contact me at jessemburke@gmail.com. The release party is this Friday the 13th, and afterwards I will be sending out a bunch in the mail to whoever ordered them.

Thanks for your support!

Also, I'm pretty sure this blog is dead or dying. So you can consider this my last post.

fiddlehead

2010-06-03T23:44:00.000-07:00

i slept among the ferns that night
my head growing heavy with
their sad healing wisdom.
there was a fat fly who followed me
all day making fat noises in the sun.
that morning i had eaten a small
handful of blueberries --- wild ones
from the side of the road,
growing out through the wooden
fence slats. my hair once got tangled
in a thorn bush and it took no small
amount of pain to free myself.
i thought of the fly and i wished
it would fall, wished it would be still.
i slept among the ferns that night.
the grass crept under my naked ankles.
i tried not to think of hobgoblins
and gleaming and dark dark wings.
i dug my fingers into the roots
and slept there. i was born in a hospital
not so long ago, grew up in rooms and cold streets
fell in love lying on concrete with a bloody mouth
woke up every day looking at the wall,
the wall, the cracks and dimples in my boneless wall,
and it took no small amount of pain
to free myself.

is it my birthday yet

2010-05-27T02:54:00.000-07:00

your hands make bitter coffee taste on my face
drawing black spiral lines and i shake
you shake invisibly divisibles and
your mouth is an open grave.
hello what are you saying
i can’t hear you over all this noise,
please repeat yourself and stand on your head
we will all be very much amused yes please
your mouth is spilling coffee onto me
and i cry.
your hands are dripping motor oil
we’re all asleep and you’re screeching
to yourself in the corner like some strange owl
from Europe or Paris, aren’t those the same thing?
i spent a whole day looking for you
you were hiding in the hiding place
that’s where i slept last night
there in the hiding place
pulled the blanket over my head
and sang it sweet
like summer drinks
and summer love
and all the things you know how to forget
i forget how to forget
i remember everything
i remember
one day
i rode my bike
across the bridge
and up,
up,
and all these aliens were singing alien blues
in all my ears and i heard them
and again i cried, i cried again
and you were somewhere feeling sorry
and i felt sorry
your mouth is an open grave.

i have taken off my shoes
to relieve me of this infernal heat
emanating from my pores and my forehead
especially my forehead
glad something’s cooking up there at least.
my feet smell of cheese,
now my hands smell of cheese as well.
poetry is not worth a thing.
you can’t put a price on it,
poetry is a dead cat,
gotta be a no-one.
i apologize if you are reading
i apologize if you are writing
we regret to inform you
that the jive will not subside.
poetry is an old church and we’re walking
inside and looking around, not sure what’s
it all for but looks nice, yessir looks nice allright.

tomorrow i will see you and coffee will be on the walls
and you will see me and the whole sad sorry mess will
start over again like listening to the radio, start it up
again this is the only one we’ve got.
tinny and confused.
that’s summer for you. breathe it all in while you can,
breathe it all in before you breathe it all out.
nobody ever said this wouldn’t be easy.
was that some kind of joke?
no it wasn’t i’m serious now hey now

they wrapped him in a death shroud
and stood him over his grave
and he waited
and he waited
and then they let him go.
----tell me, how does one
adjust to society after such a quote
traumatic unquote experience, period.

Fyodor i don’t know much but i know you know
and that’s something. well? isn’t it? isn’t what? isn't that.
bohemian. kafkaesque. orwellian. subjective right
of individual schizophrenia societal dues pay 'em up
here come the dogs boy you best watch your back

this poem is too long
your nose is too long
trim it just a bit here n there
not important just cosmetic
get ya the ladies an whatnot
as if once you get em and have em
then that's it - it's all done forever and ever
no more words come out just having and having
and having and letting go.

let me say to you i have sat upon the cold bleachers
in the night and i know the signs of fire and i have seen
the birds dead and buried and i know what it is
to walk for five six seven hours without sleep and
without a clue and i know i know
and there's no need
to explain it all
it's just there
and you're just
there and
your mouth is an open grave.

Four Short Poems / The Same Poem Four Times

2010-03-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

On the other hand it's the ghost that haunts you.

Dead things choose us and do not let go.

A man without a parcel is no enigma.

Best to have libraries, whole caravans of

catalogued bodies following you down the mountain.

"Baggage," they say, as if it can be neatly untucked

and sealed away in motel closets.

In the photograph your shoulder is whole, immaculate,

glacial as your eventual eyes, hidden as a smile.

My heart has a heart has a heart.

All things, unless anchored, that is to say

tied down, will drift away.

If a dead bird is enough to make me forget,

a live one is enough to bring it back.

I would have remembered you just before

opening my lungs to let the water in--remembered you

scattering my one-eyed visions. I would have compared

dying to dying while dying. Instead I stood up straight

and puked four times. For you, I thought as the river

pulled it all, swirling, away.

2010-03-19T14:18:00.000-07:00

at the bottom of the valley where the river runs through
i do not remember your voice any more.
i remember the sound of it, warm honeyed against
my eyes, the facts of its meaning. i hear pounding
in the basement and howling at the windows,
and i daily walk through lakes. clouds clamp down
over my head. i spend all my time pulling
hairs from the wall. i do not remember your
fingers, only their thickness, and the drumming
hallucinations they danced. i do not remember
anything but waking up this morning: dry-cracked
and empty, listening, curled around some new
ruby thought whose hands waste no memory.
all my notebooks are empty, all my pockets full.
i spend all my time writing harmonies on dollar
bills. i'd rather smell tea than do anything about it.
at the bottom of the valley where the river runs through
a cloud crawls through me and i am happy.

apple for the carrot child

2010-02-02T19:47:00.000-08:00

Ill; discomfortable. Waking up to aches and maladies. Eating like dirt, like hair and teeth. Force it down your throat: swallow quiver repeat.

The only music is like ice thrown to the ground. The only intimacy is distance. Paradox, mystery--call it what you will. The bell still rings. One day you will grow into your body and you will find it stuck to you and you will look around and say The world is here look at this How sane How beautiful and difficult and Therefore True. Sometimes what you imagine is not true and then you don't find it anywhere and Sometimes what you imagine is true and then it's as if We Are All Here. You can find your place.

Some days all you can want is the rain. Never forget, if you can help it. Memory is the key to the city, the apple for the carrot child. Sunrise is a kiss after twelve years in prison.

Never forget, if you can help it. You may climb a tree and call to the field. You may think of a thousand honeyed fingers. You may follow the vines to their dewy Maypole ends. You may stick and swear and bleed out into the soil to pass yourself along, tag you're it, retching truth like a crushed lung. You may; but if you forget you lose your photograph hands. If you forget you become a breathless carbon-chain leaf left loosely in blueberry fennel: empty flavor. Never meant to be tasted.

Remember bread: fingers spread. As though it could be solved.

unresolve (hung time)

2010-01-22T00:16:00.001-08:00

Lord deliver us from the Unholy Self of mind
that plagues our waking with destruction distraction
pull us free from our mountains of fire where we dwell in misery pride
send us truly love and absorption and the light & fire
in everywhere that we may alight as candles
trip through life steadily burning.
how green is my eyes and all therein!
clean us! clean us! to be marvel creatures
who gape & cry at all insects blades of grass
fruit on the vine bones and cloudy days.
tear away the dead flesh the dead mind the wither spirit
and make us as water bleeding into all creation
joining in beads and pools to make Known.

full stop and flower at the glory and wonder of the dirty concrete city
which is allowed to stand in its time and does not burn.
the Lord is grace! love is do, and all strings must be cut.
words are not answers and not life. words are hunger,
a voice crying out in the street (in the desert) music in corners and
the foot-stomp on wood in sweaty rooms.
the world is a question mark and we blots of ink
may crawl and claw and never answer but with our hands.

night visions (sorry this is forever)

2009-12-17T07:21:00.001-08:00

My stories never end. They ramble on, tangles of loose threads, half-faded transitions to subplots that lie under a main plotline that does not exist.

More than anything else I want to write stories about goldfish. There is something entirely beautiful and neverending in the worst pet you'll ever have, the most boring, bred in massive quantities and sold for quarters in dingy pet shops worldwide. Given away at carnivals, if you're lucky. A prize, not instead-of-a-dog. I wonder what they think. Their short-term memory span, says science, is three seconds. They live in homes with invisible walls that turn everything humans say into incomprehensible murmuring. Mmmmwmmwwm. Mwmmm mnwwnmmm.

You know you've got to treat it well. You can't just let things go to waste. You've got to find some purpose for them, a direction. Otherwise they lie still and grow stale and stagnant and stupid. Drugs. What about them.

Clean your room, you'll feel better. Make up code words with your friends and wink at them, especially if they're pretty. Who knows, maybe one of them will help you forget. Is that our purpose? To forget? Forgive and forget, or do neither. Your call. 9 p.m. on the telephone, parents at dinner. Your hands are notebooks until you wash them. If you wash them. Goblins.

I wonder if goldfish hear music. If the water sings them to sleep and to rise, sings them happy and sad and forgetting in three seconds, sings them they are special, they are mass-produced because they are so very precious, the universe would die without them. I wonder if the water sings them look at that shiny coin traded just for you. Look at your home but don't touch. You'll get it all wet. Oh, no.

When I put in my headphones I am a goldfish. Everyone can talk all they want, I'm not there. I'm twenty-five cents of pure gold scale and a tiny heart going bump bump bump all day giving blood to my tiny invisible fins. Look at my eyes. These are eyes. Day and night my heart goes. Do your shiny cars go that long? Do your shiny quarters? I am the moon! Watch me, look at my eyes. Blup. Blup.

Bring her around, talk to her some, watch her eyes, look at her eyes. Window to the soul, if you're a window shopper. If that's your thing. It happens to be my thing.

Bring her around. It's just a transition, just a half-faded movie frame. Pass the popcorn. Here's where the hero discovers heartbreak, or goldfish. I can't remember. It's the same old Hollywood formula, I can't remember. There's a car chase later.

Did you know I'm writing a novel? It starts like this: "My stories never end." I think it'll be a hit. I think it'll be America. I think it'll describe the human condition. Yes, hello Doctor I have the human condition. We have just the thing for that. Did you know I'm writing a screenplay?

Hey, it's easy. You don't have to have heartbreak, you don't have to regret. We are all writing our own stories. We are the authors here. We hold the mighty pen, the mighty keyboard, the mighty voice transcription program. I am writing a novel by talking out loud and hoping there's a biographer present. I am writing three novels. They are about the same things and have the same storyline, but I'm hoping to achieve something here. Watch it, buddy.

Just take it easy. Relax, have a couch, have a drink, have a crystal. Nobody's listening. You can tell me, buddy. You can tell me, I'm your biographer. Let's just have a smoke about it. Your brain's not important; turn it off. Just talk. Tell me everything, beginning with the part where you're a kid. Begin at the beginning, I always say in a soothing tone. Open up tell me everything let's just talk okay alright let's talk until you're satisfied then we can wake up and not do anything it would hurt to try and would take up your valuable time after all you're important.

Far far away goldfish. The one thing many writers discover about writing is that if you try to control your characters you end up with bad writing. It's almost as if the characters are real people. And yet the characters aren't in control of the story either. Who then? Goldfish have a remarkable amount of visual acuity, and can distinguish between different human beings. Some blind goldfish can identify specific humans by their voices. The actual memory span of a goldfish, contrary to the popular myth that it is only three seconds, is up to three months. Goldfish are very pretty and are good for stories.

I never want to stop writing. While writing Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard would sometimes lock herself in her room and write for fifteen hours of the day. There is sweat and blood in writing done well. I want that sweat, and I want that blood with all my blood.

The empty fields sing empty songs in the winter. The villagers tell tales of the corn and the wheat, of the cicadas and the Japanese beetles. The scarecrow croaks stories to Brother Crow, who is skeptical. His eye glitters. He takes to the wind and watches the emptiness of the earth. Lie fallow. Brother Crow lives in a copse. Brother Crow lives on sweat and blood. His is the claw, his is the cloak.

The scarecrow is haunted by ghosts. Ghosts of sweat and blood and love and tears and snowboots and hands shaking. The scarecrow's head is a goldfish bowl. He sings to the world: take it all away take it away take this take it all away.

Good luck in the dark, good luck good luck, find a golden penny, call it your own. North American Twentieth Century Ghost Story. Write your own. Let your own write itself. Happy endings never solved a thing. Happy endings never solved a mystery. Let the canaries perch on your head and never shake them away. Maybe they'll sing to you once in awhile. Maybe they'll sing some more after that.

now you see me...

2009-10-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

there's a coin in your pocket that dances alone
ascending the staircase to fair Babel's throne
among the thistles and briar they've grown
to keep out the God Overthrown

there's a coin in your hand with the man in the moon
hunting the Whale with a lecture harpoon
while the Wolf licks his teeth and his eyes like balloons
the sun has gone down too soon

heads or tails till you lose your voice
heads or tails, there is no third choice

there's a coin in the air with bloodthirsty grin
waiting for Boy No. 12 to begin
a third-rate investor sheds his second skin
allows his facade to wear thin

there's a coin on the floor that whispers a tale
of a neverending Sleeper, her dreams to impale
upon the grey matchsticks of yesterday's mail
her windows all turning to shale

heads or tails till you murder your brother
heads or tails, it's one or the other

heads or tails, the stairs to descend
heads or tails, you win again.

2009-10-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

we could have been beautiful nightbirds
biting deep into clouds.
we could have been a thousand lit torches
to celebrate The End.
we could have been porcupine quills,
a fragile forest, minor chords,
the shed out back, moon on the water,
every moment of clarity distilled
and bottled, rock rising from sand
dunes in the grim afternoon light,
a red door and a blue door,
silence after words, candles in hand,
breathing leaves and rain, shoe
polish under our eyes and the happy
ground beneath our feet.
we could have been children again.

in my dream you are where i remember you
and you are smiling and i wake up and the
morning is angry.

Advice

2009-06-18T00:11:00.000-07:00

don't tell anyone.
not even yourself.
keep it locked up
like all that matters.
look away, always
always look away.

don't let it get to you
so much. think about
something else.
then, when it happens,
when time runs out,
you can slip away easily.

you can walk into a new life
like a cold empty room
and never notice that
she's not there.

reunion

2009-04-16T18:00:00.001-07:00

I am thirsty. The trees wave against the wind
in protest. We wait by the river for the unknown.
If we sit in silence long enough, dropping twigs into
the moving thought of water, the final mystery of the
universe will unfold and calculate into us, invading our blood
like the green ghost of absinthe down your ear. Our skin
is pressed flat against the sun like a brother's hand
on a daughter's shoulder. We wait by the river
for sleep to take us into the quiet forest.

She does not come!
She will not come.
Not for us.

You catch a flickering secret and put it in my hand,
the gold-filament wings and blue-glass eyes.
I hold its weight in my palm, brush a finger against
the burnished red exoskeleton, and let it go.
It could not last away from the river.
The leaves crackle and I imagine a fire.

suburban bonfire blues

2009-02-19T01:29:00.000-08:00

Milk-sweet regrets melting from your lips and
pooling quiet on the hardwood floor
form a window or a mirror, dark and honest,
a blemish we choose not to notice.
Your mind moves slow and burning
like a summer afternoon
with the easy harmony of windchimes
and the disquiet of a solitary cloud
on the horizon. You are written plainly
on a piece of paper and posted
for all to see. We look away.
We are on an island or in a tower
and far away from everything.
Your words are a flock of finches
and we watch cracks in the sidewalk.

Fingers climb the walls searching for corners
and brushing lightly over the titles of books.
Trees shoot up, growing roots around
your jaw or throat, your eyes
are a pond. We skip rocks.

When all of us gather, there is
talking and laughing and nobody
wants to leave. Sometime after dark,
you sit down and begin to play music.
It's all I can hear.
A tiny wooden boat with a red sail
floating over still grey waters.

overkill

2009-01-27T22:54:00.000-08:00

The music punches into you like a blunt axe
swinging through the bite of winter. You buckle,
grasping quiet to find your flesh. [Am I here? Am I a ghost?]
Bodies floating and drifting in the dead blue chemical sea.
You want to go back to before you were born,
when there was nothing, no breathing, no fairy tales.
You can't go back. Nothing is a relative term.

The grass crawls in between your fingers. Stronger
and slower than your test-tube skin. Unwind
like rope down a well, dark forever. What time is it?
You know the answer, but it is not an answer.
It melts in candlelight, but is as solid as hunger.
If you can fall asleep, you can disappear into whatever
is holding you up, be it earth or blood or death.
What time is it? You swallow once,
and your eyes shift like a code.

Can you swallow them? The eyes?
The eyes, the eyes in a jar, swirling and
tumbling against something invisible,
can you swallow them? They slide
gently, you feel them, quivering bent orbs
and then dissolving dark blue, searching out the
corners and hiding-places of your body, until
your skin is bleeding cold cerulean eyeball music,
and you can do nothing but cough.

It is strange and wrong, coughing, like smashing
yourself on a plank of dark shining wood. Dirty
clouds hanging limp on your forehead, the blue
of your eyes is dull. It no longer pierces,
is no longer a weapon. You are not useful,
but at least you cannot be used.
At least you can lie down.

sy.zy.gy.

2008-11-03T22:08:00.000-08:00

you open my front door,
enter through my teeth.
find yourself a soft corner of lung
to sleep in.
within the alveolus
you dream,
and dream.

you're building a
ribcage printing press,
my little gutenberg.
take the elevator spine to
brain my and scratch,
you scratch words.

thou art art, thinks me,
and oxygen flow.
i breathe, you stretch,
we all go shiver delight.
i steal water from
rain-puddles for
us to drink.
you ear
inner are.

spider-filaments
of luck like sun-
flight through my
(your) veins.
are we so much
one that we grow
into one
another?

three-fourteen

2008-10-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

it is my first day
on the planet,
though i am
fully grown.
everything is
strange and wide-angle.
the finches spin nests
from my hair (stranded)
and my twining fingers.
how they grow!
like history!
melting in pockets!
chalk-light.

i fear i do not
understand the grasses
and their confessions
of thirst.
the morning dew
travels to the edges
of the atmosphere
and back
before my eyes.
(yet after my exclamations.)

the next-door is blue,
airy and free.
crisp like October morning.
gray like November mourning.
i perch on a nearby blooming stump
and absorb the rain:
electric-eel rain
that cracks my
prose-colored glasses.
i remove them,
and all blurs
accordingly.

a passing owl strikes
three-fourteen
and twelve assorted spices.
my focus shifts from none
to all, and the colors
crash through me
vivid
and
white.

you dislodge yourself
from my eye,
quietly.

excerpt: the manifesto

2008-09-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

if there is one thing i should
never be allowed to do,
it is Speak.
for when i speak,
i enjoy it too much.
i let the words melt around my
tongue like caramel sweets and
i throw down the cellophane,
singing "take that, Mother Earth!"
i savor the words in my mouth
like love letters in my coat pocket,
dissolving into Sound and ocean.
the words crawl through me as worms,
creepy crawlies wiggling their little legs
all over my tongue and my teeth and up
the back of my throat they come, warriors
charging to their deaths, their last little
writhing deaths under the flaming Eye
of the magnifying glass.

the words spill out:

Forthright.

Audacious.

Curtains.

Elucidate.

Sweden.

Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)

2008-09-10T22:16:00.000-07:00

We are hungry here, in our small dark village with the sun watching over us. It is a great fiery bird, soaring over the day.

Ibi, my husband, looks up and says the same bird flies over everybody in the world. All the strange villages far away are watched by the great bird.

I tell him that he is crazy and the pale villages have invented their own birds to fly above them, and poisons to stop the plants from growing. But when I talk about the pale villages, Ibi looks away like he is looking at mountains or clouds, and he smiles and talks crazy.

"Someday, Ibina," he says, "we will go to a big pale place and learn about pavement and we will not be hungry."

He calls me Ibina when he is like that. I think Ibi dreams of pavement.

I tell him he is a crazy little boy, and he talks too loud, and he should not waste all his time with the strange Dr. Johnson, building their cloud-metal bird.

But he smiles, and I am not so angry. I don't even mind that he calls me Ibina. I know he only wants a better day for us tomorrow.

looseleaf

2008-08-31T18:54:00.000-07:00

my old coat is getting worn at the
elbows from thinking too hard, and
getting in one too many fights for
pride and all sorts of things you
forgive me for, because that's
what you do.

and you know when you're gone
i dream of hotels where you lie
surrounded by black and white
television and dream of a boy for whom
goodbye was too good a word and there
we sleep, eaten alive by napkins and
monsters under the bed but we don't
mind much for they have very comfortable
stomachs and really the daylight was
a hindrance anyways.

i love you paper airplanes, and
you love me a mermaid's silver nose
and really that's all that matters
to either of us, but i think you have
too many hearts in your collection
and we'd better make sure you're not
holding on too long.

so i'll meet you in the field at dawn,
we'll take color photographs and wish
we lived in a charming black and white
mansion that doubled as a hotel, and
i'll play the guitar and howl a bit,
saying "fare thee well" and writing
you postcards that are described by
the historians as surreal and esoteric,
but you know exactly what i'm saying
and wouldn't care if you didn't, because
postcards always remind you of back home
and the way poetry can be like a smell:
it sends you colors and stories and
shivers up your spine, but you don't
always know what it means; it's like
a dream where you meet strangers in hotels
and they help you out, just as if you were
in an old movie.

color of how

2008-08-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

Sophia,

I will find you among the rushes and watercress; I will dig for you in the clay; I will paint you on brand-new canvas. I will not let go of myself.
I know you don't love me anymore; isn't that the way we all go? There's distance and then there's an empty mailbox and then we stop loving. Then one day we stop breathing and realize that life without loving is like water without wetness. What is that good for? So, I will not stop loving you, no matter how much my eyes crack.
I don't know what I'm saying. And it seems like all I can do is crack. Cracked cracking firecracker crack my eyes open. The color of how to bleed.
If you burn this before reading it, I think I will love you more than ever. Something is not right with me. I feel like a cloud dissolving into the great vast solvent of sky.
Sophia, your name rests in my teeth like so many leaves and I smell you in woodsmoke and you are the space between galaxies. But all my pretty phrases can't make me pretty.
Sophia, if you don't answer this I promise I will die of fulfilled expectations.
I love you, Sophia.

Thomas Street

trouble

2008-08-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

the north wind told me keep going
south wind told me i'd better leave
west, he said he'd kill me next time
east just swore and lit another cigarette
so i went for a walk
and i went for a swim
ain't no way the wind can catch me
underwater.

hope i grow some gills soon,
else i'm good as dead.

fresh air \ hers fair

2008-08-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

As the snow continued to fall, we settled in, consigned to our fate. Only half of the window was above now; we stared out and watched the white crystals waft like chloroform over the white ground under the white sky. The textures and edges in this old house were enough to keep us alive until the white dissolved.

For the first three hours, we stared into the fire and talked about how we wished life was in black and white, how much more nostalgic everything would be before it was even memory. I put my hand on my forehead; you put on your striped hat and smile.

Then we slept. I dreamed of white sticking to my flesh and picking me clean and black; you dreamed of grayscale trees in grayscale fields of tall grayscale grass.

We awoke and pressed against the window. Everything was the same white now. There was no telling when we would able to leave.

We stared at each other, delighted at our great fortune.

a lover named Anthony

2008-07-15T01:12:00.000-07:00

the hem of this skirt has grown so unbearably frayed
i fear i begin to see him in the trailing strands
disillusioned, i retire to sheets soft and clean
waxing poetic and wistful in the cool night air
he grows and plods in my e a r d r u m s
"think; think; think;" he knifes to me
i smile and let my blood pool for him
we watch our wounded red reflections
bloom, and the thoughtstains make it all right
it's all right, and i know it, and he knows it
anthony, with his unkempt patchy morning eyes
and i, toes wrapped in scuffed patent leather
the both of us very nearly make one.

echolalia

2008-07-13T01:38:00.000-07:00

little garden spiders are drawn on my eyelids
night-goblins bleeding me out my elbows
your words leave me blue and echoing
when you write about dimensions below
that kept her apart from the rest of us
and wildfires just out of sight
like the monsters in the mountains
of our childhood fairy tales that gave
you grey nightmares and me razor-
sharp drawings to cut you with and
make you cry. i burned the
drawing of you i made after hansel
and gretel escaped into color, but i
remember it like i remember you:
all framed like a police report and
growing out of the sidewalk.
you smoked cigarettes like you
wrote poems: infrequently
and mostly for looks. that didn't
stop you from doing it well.

now we're meeting again and
it's been a while, casual.
"tell me about it", and i do
but sometimes family dies
and it also sometimes just goes
away for a little while. but you
look down like it's the day after
christmas and the toys are all
broken, and you say we're all
broken. broken. you repeat it
like a proverb in the bible.
like it'll save you somehow.
i drive away, but really
you drive me away.

your spider-silk constellation
sends electronic messages
and you receive them
and you put yourself in pencil
a surrealist tribute to your
limbless ex-brother.
apathy flits along your
strands and fills you like
half a fifth of brandy.
sketched on graph paper,
you let yourself burn.

death is easy
when you're
electronic.

sure as death

2008-06-26T23:31:00.000-07:00

I gave you an invitation. I knew you wouldn't come. I knew we were past that.

I gave it to you in quiet desperation, trying to tell you that I was alright with you. But I know you're not alright with me.

*

I have written you letters and tried to speak to you and even made eye contact (which you shrug off as easily as you did me). I have told you time and again "I'm sorry" and never known what I was apologizing for, just trying to crack you open like an egg, gently, reverently. I want to see what is inside of you, barricaded behind your cool granite eyes and in your iambic brain.

*

I used to watch you, and you used to watch me. We would orbit like moons around each other, gravity pulling us surely as death.

I think I broke free before you did.

Now I wander the cold universe. The stars are distant and do not flicker. I find hollow solace in my dust and rocks and shadows.

*

I gave you an invitation, giving you me back, if only you would accept.

You didn't come, but I was expecting that.

I've done what I can. The rest is up to you.

terminal

2008-06-22T02:13:00.000-07:00

the sun, in solemn bronze sentiment,
wraps arms around rainclouds.

fluorescent bleach washes the hypnotic floor;
crystal plates stutter plasmic faces.

i sit, sore from standing, quiet feet.
my eyes ungrow in the fake half-light,

peel to my knees, while families find peace
at last in bony leather rows.

to fly is to move, to sleep is to die.
even as i remember Phaeton,

i am chasing the sun.
time will glue us together.

"be yourself"

2008-06-14T02:01:00.000-07:00

i thought words
could never be
useless, until

you showed me
a few of yours,
and now i'm

losing faith.

the monks and i,
we understand
silence.

so
get thee to a nunnery:
why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?

lynx-eyed

2008-06-03T00:14:00.000-07:00

I've got an idea for a novel/short story/project. It's something vague, but I'm feeling it.

Largely inspired by John the Baptist, Showbread, and Janie's "Age of Reptiles Excerpt", which I've printed out and shall now carry in my notebook, alongside the other printed sheets of bliss.

Here's my first shot in the dark.

-------

b13; 03 Victus:::?
Sunrise like a bleeding scab today. I can feel the air more every day. The rocks are speaking.

When I look behind me I see the blood of my feet. The leather was eaten long ago by the sand, and the stones are sharp.

At night I hear them coming, rustling, scraping across the sun-baked floor of this god-forsaken desolation. The rocks tell me they are not far behind. I must keep moving.

This place is truly forsaken by the gods. They dared not follow me into this field of embers. They have sent lesser, fouler beings after me. I can hear them scraping.

Each day they are closer, or louder, or my hearing grows sharper. But the rocks grow quieter.

I can see something on the horizon, but the vitreous air keeps my hope in a cage. Still, there is something. Call me lynx-eyed. Call me Jonas.

your chemical reactions

2008-05-19T00:11:00.000-07:00

You looked at me out of the corner of your face and tried not to bleed on your shoes (barefoot as you were). I could tell you were holding back; you always did. You're always too busy watching your mouth to see anything else.

What could I do but stay? There was an anchor for the two of us, and the wind was breathing a different city to sleep. Your castle keeps out the pure and the hopeful.

I tried to keep my eyes off of you (I knew you hated my eyes), but you were my chemistry set, and your reactions were volatile, lighting storms in my ribcage. If only you had told me to grow, the ice would never have dared to build nervous strongholds beneath my branches. Now you never know what to say.

In my mind, you lived in technicolor hatred. I had had enough (couldn't get enough) of you and all your little round mirrors. I loved you and despaired. You were my mood swing, my earthquake, my heartbeat. I was your nobody. You never deserved me; I never deserved you. At least on that we could agree. I know you don't like agreeing with me.

When the night is warm and thick, I dance to your discord.

automatic corners

2008-05-14T00:16:00.000-07:00

i gave up on words
but they kept coming back
so here i am, vomiting.

you look better
with your eye
contact on.

don't say
i didn't
warn
you.

we are the flowers
spiraling in flames
i will shred your edges
if you scribble out your name
and we will fold and flutter sly
until symphonic sins anchor us
down.

i will wrap you in sunset
i will clothe you in twisted roots
i will
i will
just please
we don't,

just;

why don't you say something?

9.5" x 6"

2008-04-27T02:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Sophia,

    I've been thinking about you a lot recently. Whenever I'm happy or quiet or tired, I imagine you walking through the door or down the sidewalk, and I see you, and things feel whole, like snowfall at night or lying in the grass. There's half an Earth between us, but I can't help but think that you're still just up the hill, watching the crystal green sunset.
    And yet you're more distant than ever. I can't remember what you sound like, how you walk, the way your eyes move. I can't dream about you. I dream about everyone else (the record store girl, the angry liar, the silent redhead, my brother's ex-girlfriend, my former best friend) but never you. You're beyond simple sleep-stories. I've tried loving everyone else, and only you are honest.
    The weather has been hopeless without you. One minute it is the heat of the sun and the dusty smell of the present, and then it's thunder and dirty gray and uncertainty. We had some snow, and I thought of you.
    I remember you once said that while you were gone, there would be days where no one thought about you. You underestimated yourself. I am making sure to think about you every day, so that when you return I can tell you that you were wrong.
    Oh, how wonderful it will be to see you again! I often smile about you, and when others ask me what is so worth smiling about, I reply that they couldn't understand. How could they? They have never met you, never seen the shades of orange you paint on everything around you, never been scattered by your smiling fingers.
    I'm sorry you haven't received a letter from me in so long. I forget to send them to you. I write too many letters to you. I write them with my feet, tapping on the wooden floors. I write them with my eyes on a blank wall, and with my voice in cryptic sentences of longing. I forget which letters I can send and which must remain locked in cages and notebooks.
    I think I am more you than I am myself.

Thomas "And-The-Other" Street

i like your stripes

2008-04-23T22:45:00.000-07:00

In a dream, we were going to college on the East Coast, and we got married, and our parents were furious.

It was beautiful.

hovering

2008-04-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

you are the death of me
kill, kill, until
you are satisfied, my Queen
and i will
die, die, reply
yet again.

you are the cloud in me
rain, rain, reign
in cruel and vivid winter
you're the lock on the cage
and the cage and the keeper
but only i could have captured
myself.

you are nothing to me
and i am a liar
and i am a liar.

feverish

2008-04-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

smokely, smokely
grind your way back down
find your morning hid
among the dying grass
browning with every passing ray
clackclackclack are the wings of fear
brushing dark across your cheek
swiftly go the hours
slowly die the minutes
you're all knotted up, you foolish
don't you know this needle isn't right?
clickclickclick are the cogs of an early death
scraping steel against your side
burn, burn, say the eyes
cut like frost through your fevered heart
ring out the funeral bells
call down the rain
in damp and thorny sickness
send us weeping from the field
wring out the funeral robes
spreading your mirror out
in a sick and frozen puddle
across the floor.

let us die, let us die

2008-04-08T23:14:00.000-07:00

Room. Boy reading script on couch.

Girl approaches.

Girl: Memorizing your lines?
Boy [looking at wall, ceiling, Girl's elbow]: Trying to. [Smiles.]
Girl [frowning] Oh.

Girl exits. Boy looks at wall, frowns, looks back at script.

End scene.

concrete transformatory

2008-04-01T23:34:00.000-07:00

the road that leads nowhere is ash in its tray
the clouds red at sunset are bleeding away
when towns roll by in glass-domino lines
i've eaten my fill, i've torn down my shrines
what once was fire and spirit and rose
is left to a postcard with vacuous prose
"slept in this morning, just like all the rest;
send love to mum, wish you all the best."
a violin-song once promised me fountains
of freedom, but gave to me only mountains
a traffic jam in the side-streets of my cells
an empty cathedral still ringing my bells
hoping in dusk for only a tithe or a heart
untraversed waters of blood there to chart
to deliver into
some kind
of liberation
from

rhyme and

rea
so

n.

so

i guess
ifoundwhatiwasn't

looking
for

and never
wanted

in these
sidewalks

and
nazca lines
across my
wind
shield

i see that
the prisoncloud lens
is shifting
north

the oceans
of green
will crawl into
gray

and these roads
will die

i
think
it's time
to head
home.

basin of thought, edges well-worn

2008-03-31T20:25:00.000-07:00

for the past three decades
i've been erasing every word
that drips from my soaking fingers
out of spite, perhaps,
or a twisted sense of
purpose.

i ask myself,
"if they are writers,
then what am i?
what is I?"
and i have never found
a solution
though i have inverted myself
and my hypothermic fingers,
waterlogged with crooked pursuits
at a resolution.

so i can safely assume that the answer
is still out there
waiting to find me
with quiet eyes
and wet, wet fingers.

it must've been a mirage

2008-03-29T22:39:00.000-07:00

I may ask you who he is, but I don't think I really want to know. He reminds me that you're the one driving. I'm just looking out the window at passing cities.

Sometimes I frame pictures in my head, I tell you, but I can never take them at home. My family doesn't see the starving artist inside me, dying from lack of art.

You take your hands from the wheel to write something heartbreaking, and I read it seven times before noticing that we've stopped. You are lying on the sidewalk in this desert, carving your name on every tree in the forest.

I remember why I agreed to be your passenger.

I roll down my window. All I see in mirrors are my eyes, and their colors. That is why. You smile, knowing the question.

The horizon will always be there to drive towards.

feet planted, hands soaring

2008-03-28T02:14:00.000-07:00

Tonight my eyes are big with the souls of the crushed. The torrents of pain are beating at my windows, and I am ready to break loose, to pour forth. But a ghost of a hand stops me, reaching up from my chest to quiet the clouds.

Tonight anger is hanging heavy from my ears like fruit before the harvest. Insects flutter back and forth, searching for their sustenance. I can only swat at them, hoping they will grow weary and falter.

Tonight is a night of emotions. Emotions like the smell of the ocean, layer upon layer. I could lay back and twitch my nose for hours, trying to unravel the ball of yarn in my neck. I have scribbled shades of blue and frustration across my forehead before, and nothing has changed. I can feel words forming deep inside me, clawing their wretched way up the spiral staircase behind my stomach, tingling with power and space. Each letter shows its face, whether snarling or singing, and they join hands in an attempt to say something, anything. Anything.

We are all selfish, I scream to her in my head. That's why I can't tell you. Because I am selfish and you are selfish and they are selfish and there's nothing we can do to avoid it. We're just fools, laughing our way through this joke of existence.

And she stares back, like I always knew she would. Her reply stings like iodine.

But of course we are. That's what was always wrong with me and you. That's why we're here.

Or rather, why you're here. I'm not here at all.

With a wink and half a smile, she fades into what she always was to me, in my selfishness.

This isn't how it was supposed to be.

a dog with a grin

2008-03-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

He dropped the ball and ran towards me, a dog-smile quickening his rolling pace.

"Stop! Heel!" came the cry, disregarded. I was a stranger, I had to be assessed.

He plunged his nose into my hand, then jumped at my face, gauging my reaction. I smiled and let him carry out his inspection.

She hurried over, reprimanding him (as if he understood English). Bending to grab him by the collar, she looked up at me, all fluster and flame.

"Sorry about that," she said (as if she really cared).

"No problem." I stared at her face for a moment. I felt something building inside me, some radical statement, something huge and illogical and heart-throbbing, something to tell the grandkids about someday.

I opened my boiling mouth.

"He's a nice dog," I offered.

She smiled. I knew I'd won.

As if she could've.

Easter's vengeance

2008-03-25T23:26:00.000-07:00

When things ran out, there were the dregs, the junk that settled to the bottom.

It's all you have left, but is it worth it?

She looked down at the twin remnants that sat on her desk. Mocking her. Side by side, they whispered to her. She'd hate finishing them off, she would, but she couldn't just leave them!

All her other options were exhausted, but she still resisted. She stared at them for a long while, hating them as she always had. What cruel force had thrown them to her, anyhow? She certainly hadn't asked for them.

Call it fate. Call it luck. Call it probability. Call it God.

Whatever. They were there.

She stared.

I really, really hate apple Jolly Ranchers.

the lint of boredom

2008-03-25T20:30:00.000-07:00

I spent the entire afternoon like that, staring at the ceiling from my bed.

Outside, I could hear Dad yelling for the dog to come home. She had run away again. It wasn't that she hated it here, she was just adventurous. Maybe I was the only one who understood that. Maybe I felt like that myself sometimes.

Every time, we would get her back, and every time Dad would threaten to get rid of her. He never meant it. I think he loved her just as much as the rest of us. He just got frustrated.

The sky was the mottled gray of a dirty sidewalk, and I wondered if the seaplanes that buzzed over the house had wheels on top so they could roll off the clouds, clattering over pebbles.

I hated the noncommittal sky. I wished it would just rain, or shine. All this compromise was getting to me. Nature isn't supposed to be political.

Books littered the floor, but I wasn't able to keep my eyes on anything. I just drifted to the asylum-green walls or the wire frame of my glasses. I kept thinking about inner turmoil, and emotion, and these blizzards of consciousness that swirled inside my stomach, and I wondered if there were any warm cabins, lit by tea and company, where I could find a moment's peace from the frozen crystals of silence that peppered my face.

At some point, I was seized with the maddening desire to steal my parents' station wagon and just drive, find some state where no one knew me, no one hated me, no one understood me, and simply start over. Find some place where I could let go and try to be something real.

The desire passed when I got to thinking about finances and plausibility and the government, but the whispers and echoes it had left fluttered around still.

I decided that someday I'd have to grow up.

post-ides? post ideas!

2008-03-16T00:33:00.000-07:00

That was the day Jeremy woke up.

That was all he ever did, it seemed.

Sometimes he did it without falling asleep. Now there was a phenomenon. He'd snap up and glaze his mind in a sleek fuzz, listening to the radio static for consistency.

It wasn't difficult to find a sheet of paper near him with the same three or four words repeated on it in his disjointed handwriting. Black ink. Always black ink on white college ruled notebook paper. It was safe.

Every afternoon Jeremy stood at the picture window and watched the rush hours throw sad, sad humans past. It would've made him smile, but he couldn't see their faces. Just hubcaps and briefcases.

Although Jeremy wore clothes, no one could ever remember what they were. Few people even remembered Jeremy. He, of all people, forgot himself from time to time.

It was on these rare occasions of extroversion that Jeremy found his front door open and his feet pulling him through. On those days it was almost always sunny, and Jeremy was able to feel an odd sort of peace, as though the grass would always grow, no matter how many times Mr. Meminger cut it, sweating and burning between his lips.

On the strangest day of Jeremy's life, it was not sunny. It was raining like the inside of a marble. Jeremy woke up, as he was prone to doing, and found his door open. His hands itched to swing at his sides, and he closed the door on the way out.

Feeling the creeping intruders on his scalp, he wondered about a world where water comes from the sky and humans try to stop the grass from growing.

The water from the sky met the water in his eyes and made the light bend and shake in Jeremy's mind. For the first time in a long time, he wanted to laugh. He didn't. No one did. How could they?

The next day it was sunny. Mr. Meminger went out to cut the grass. He put out his cigarette when he saw Officer O'Donnell approaching.

"You know this boy?" asked O'Donnell, a towering silhouette.

James P. Meminger, aged 64, examined the photograph carefully. A sunken-faced, sallow, sad young man didn't stare back. The eyes were wet and closed, and Mr. Meminger knew they wouldn't wake up again.

"Never seen him," he replied.

O'Donnell left. They still didn't know who the car hit.

Mr. Meminger cut the grass.

That was all he ever did, it seemed.

Today, however, he did something different. He looked at the house next door. It was empty, as it always had been. The picture window in the front was dirty, and the front door was a chipped, ugly beige.

Mr. Meminger went home to his nagging wife and never again did he think about the house or the man who lived there, if it could be called living.

Three days later, the radio in the house met its end in a faulty bit of wiring.

No one really missed the static.

postcard, reverse

2008-03-06T22:28:00.000-08:00

Dear Sophia,

   The tower you see in the picture is like a god. He stands over all of us, and we lead our little lives in his shadow. I hope I don't have to stay here long. I think about the tower falling and destroying those who keep its ground, and then I wake up shivering and crying.
   But you don't want to hear about my puerile tremors. I have much more to tell you. More important things to draw in inklines.
   I always expect to see you around every corner, in the coffeeshops and bookstores, like our younger days. Before I became an idealist. I know you're an ocean and a half away, but it's just water. We're made of oceans. Aren't we?
   I sound like I doubt myself. Sounds are true. I doubt myself so much these days, days no different from the rest of my life. I'm traveling, I'm crying, I'm writing, just as always. Even when I couldn't travel, I'd do so when no one was looking. I'd fly away on magic carpets woven in a neuron mesh and feel the wind of my throat whip past my ears.
   I don't know where I'm going, I don't even think I know why I'm going. It's very much like a vacation. You sleep in late just to feel like you can. I have to know that I can still move my joints, that I'm not just a tinman too tired.
   Lately I can only read about the murderers, the incurably criminal, and the depraved. I hope literature isn't a mirror. I hope it's more of a magnifying glass.
   Who says literature is made of light? Lighterature.
   I hope to dream of you soon.

Thomas "Ever-Since" Street

I'm no lawyer.

2008-02-28T01:35:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer:

This blog is (almost) entirely fiction.

Any resemblance to actual people, places, events, meals, vehicles, and/or aquatic mammals is purely 100% coincidental, without a doubt. Art is in no way inspired by life. So there.