over two decades in the making.
a timeshifting autobiographical poetry collage w/photography.
a diaristic, nearly "daily writing" (ad)venture.
new pieces are posted most days..
**new and in progress** --
recordings of each poem are being added.
these are read by the author & posted to each poem's page.
--Del Ray Cross (contact delraycross at gmail)
I made rice and also pommes frites. Circle over to the laundromat that’s turned into a fondue parlor. Email Kevin and water the plants. We opened a New Zealand wine that John and Larry had brung to the housewarming. Tomorrow I’m to play racquetball with Madoc. Be able
to plug laptop into large monitor. Unparch with a Faz glass (a mason jar) full of lemonade. I just want to GRIMACE at that. What does that make me, an interior designer? That kind of distaste becomes HONESTY. We have enough space to not worry
so much. We can concentrate. Steph loaned it to me. The slimness of Vincent and his engagement. And it is disgusting compared to Starbucks.
You just dropped your phone. “A cross is an X,” I remind him, before send Rachel email, send Kim email, fix big monitor to connect to laptop. It’s morning of up all night. The birds are singing in the bird sanctuary, an oasis for interior designers. But not enough to make you GRIMACE on top of all that. What does that make a jealous hubby? Bend the knees by way of death. Look up how to clean the blinds, how to update debts and assets. “Into oblivion,” whispers the murderer. Into oblivion.
A hundred ‘woof!’s across Ocean Island. Cooking with the best of them and then snapping it shut. I still have to get over how wide it is. Fried eggplant with a
white sauce all over it. Slip an abstract project into an oily mailbox. Feed the cat. Dusk never settles and you’re morning, bright with fever. Open a
New Zealand wine. Stretch. Slip some skin on top of it. Dust and clean the living room and hallway. Racquetball before housewarming. Clean bathroom.
Clean blinds. Update info on 1960s. In the morning, head over to the condo to measure it. Color me jealous. HON- ESTLY. Concentrate on keeping and
wonderful and maintaining. Call the doctor to say there’s no need for closure.
If only I could ride you unpublished. “Here’s another $24 drink,” all smug and lustless, with contemporary Chinese interiors.
Ron, what was the name of the sushi restaurant after Kylie wouldn’t pee? Toe to toe to toe for a decade or more. Or was it just a year? How to
talk to Cantonese? So, we first met, slept together, first date, etc., on January 7. It’s October and another French trilogy. Completing amazement. Unfortunately,
the hotel strikers, along with music from heartthrob’s computer (in the living room; I’m on the bed), having just finished A Thousand Devils, this frazzled
Rauschenberg. In the October will it feel oh so new again? Should I be disappointed with an old swoon? A few years later and never dull.
Not a disinterested dull. Less interested in new leaves and romantic road construction.
Agenda rhyming with addenda, and so on. “A little Malaysia goes a long way,” he says all slash-and-burn. I turned it in with a list of all the jobs I’ve ever had.
This all seems a bit L.A., don’t you think? I look out at Treasure Island while he talks to his grandmother then his dad then his mother—who tells him he sounds so
happy. In recollection of my inner thigh (left side) and the guy who stomped my back flat after a mani-pedi on Tuesday afternoon. “The stars are not chimps,”
I lose him saying. Scratch another item off the list while walking Grant to Broadway.
anachronism is the refuge of modernity —Standard Schaefer
Stayed up til 4 arguing about making things clear. Marvel vs. Capcom 3, etc. Today’s list is horizontal lines. Re- learn touching, making things clean close to him, waking up Saturday and going to Starbucks and The Gap for a blazer exchange.
Put the bag away for a while and sit in the Henderson Room. Cloudy with a chance of purge. Email job lady then several friends. Call Mom (this one on the list for a while now).
Wake up trembling, think I hear sarcasm. Clean all the blinds. Or buy new ones.
I can’t imagine him with a vibrato. “It’s the Three of Pancakes,” she says. His head’s a computer screen circa 1998. A headache that blasts 80s music. A calendar with a little in- struction each day: Re- member, a mediocre effort never improved anything. Cat’s paws at it under a birthday present (an office chair replacing one ‘inherited’ in 1992).
The vistas are a smiling ship on the ocean. About to barf if I read another conversation with yourself. Didn’t I want to add my voice? We drove out past Half Moon Bay
with Curran and Masashi this afternoon to a pumpkin patch. To pick pumpkins. It was lovely in all possible ways, sitting in the back- seat holding Otto’s hand while he slept. Barf.
Looking out at the beautiful sky. Passing Spindrift Road. Having a pie at the patch. And oh, the maze. I never made my way out – could not find my way out of the lovely
hay maze. Did someone have to come find me? Rescue me? Here I am, backwards, pestered at 4am. Around 8:30, touching. This is the real me.
Depression makes my skin ache. It’s nine o’clock and I dip into a jacked-up bar in the gulch, half a chin tucked into my sweater.
It’s a grizzly-bear nation. These dunder- heads threw in a kidney stone; two hour flashbacks to a party of eight. Once home, I read a love poem to the sofa.
It swoons. Lots of people chopped off their thumbs. David left while growing striped pants. The penguins are in the mail to Kevin (flash-forward required).
The glass of water infected with ice. European stains on the carpet.
Is this the first book I’ve finished in months? I wonder and I’d like to know. I have an inclination to know. I sit on the couch in contemplation, put my finger to my nose.
It’s time to enjoy the skin you have. Consider yourself comely up close. It’s miles away from a pair of Monday interviews. You wouldn’t imagine it now, but they will each last a year. It’s a boutique investment bank and you’re experiencing a crisis in penmanship, cover as much of the manila as possible in blue Sharpie. And please bring resumes.
Food’s here. Kenta follows me to the side of the stage yelling “Jenny Jones!” “Jenny Jones!” I always laugh and wonder what’s inside that joke. Or if I’m in on it.
Marcia Gay Harden said “brain fart” on The View this week. She couldn’t remember the name of her leading man in her latest Lifetime movie. Also, I’m trying to
figure out how to squeeze the trigger in his eyes. Otto’s in bed texting, knit hood on alarmed clock—1:12. Or playing a game. Or wasting nipples on a lame-ass movie.
Happiness is hairpin, it’s hangdog. I love the picture of us in front of the cornfield, shortly before our first Halloween. Two smiles on a hay- bale in front of a row of pumpkins. Two pumpkins in love learn to wish on nothing. Fly in circles over a swollen stone. October must have graduated by the fistful. And I don’t remember the sky, but growing up and out. And never another day. But
here it is November, here we are spreading Family Guy to the masses (productively). Miracle of miracles, already Wednesday and at the fish taco place on Piedmont waiting for Aaron to read at Steph’s. It feels nice to be sloppy and isolated. It feels okay to be sleepy and interrupted yet again, to look up
and we’re smiling, a braceleted arm slung over my right shoulder, a lady in pink with two children: a boy in blue, hands clasped in front of his navel staring right at the camera, and a girl in white, butt in the dirt, with arms out- stretched in impossible attempt to encircle an obese pumpkin.
