I used to shampoo with a bar of Ivory soap every morning. The lighter with the black panther that has a yellow-green snake wrapped around it is acting up. A “talented and versatile” Bay Area actress dies after “an accidental
lunch with Jamine at Pakwan’s today? Or sweets on Sunday? Or the donut before Otto’s dinner last night? Because now I have so much more muscle from running. And waiting for a text
from Row. Who knows, etc.? I just don’t like it. Starving myself on some guy with huge, curly, rockstar hair; I’d think he was a big woman if I didn’t hear his voice on
the other side. Again, who knows? Then there was the woman (deaf?) who kept not hearing her absurdly loud cellphone blaring some (equally absurd) tune on the table.
What if everything gets dreadfully redundant and/or boring? – a perfunctory echo I’ve mis- treated while refusing to meet friends for cocktails. Five years later I’m looking at pictures from Boston.
The city grew by erection. I repeat the part about Sunday. It’s Sunday. It’s six in the morning.
Reach in my chest and massage my heart. I am not dead. —James Schuyler
I ran after work, rather than in the middle of it. Otto cooked a cloud for the rest of the week. The apartment is done, like the rest of the day; a Vitamin Water in the sink. Kenneth Koch’s glasses are upside down but the sun is almost up. The ring in my ears is a reverie of birds. Or a flight returning from Hawaii.
I feel lazy without my voice. The ring swarms my ears. Am I maybe a fossil? Kevy’s posting sick links. Lanford Wilson passed away; a soft spot in my heart for living his elderly priest in Angels Fall at 21 years of age.
Hopped a trolley, reading uphill. Had lunch with Nick at our Chinese place on Kearny and it turns out he had a romantic date on Friday night. He kept saying it was surreal.
Goodbye Chinese restaurant on Kearny. With all the ugly fish in the window. Goodbye childhood, so to speak. I get a haircut. A reminder of the 80s (as told by the 90s). She chopped one sideburn off and left the other. It’s okay, though. I’m the devil for Halloween.
This is okay, but I crave a little companionship. A social quality is important. Laughing over hallucinations. Surprise talk with Ben on the phone last night. Perrin says “hi.” I ran after work rather than in the middle of it. (Work?)
The air full of Schuyler and cat mist. I wish it were a seedy Sunday morning. But at least I don’t hear any rain. Sit inside for days complaining of rain, secretly pleased to be shut in.
I’ve got lousy taste. By that I mean everything tastes funny. By that I mean this orange juice tastes horrible.
The worst time to sleep is between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon. The most embarrassing thing should be the most visible. The latest culprit, for example. But one good thing is almost any time we ever get testy with each other these days I learn something—I mean the process is productive. And rarely the three of us together compared to times recent. Also, avoid stating (and restating) the obvious. Stay up until 4am playing Apples to Apples with Otto, Erin, and Masashi after watching hilariously horrible Sucker Punch. Continue to reenforce, amend, chronologize electronic photographs. What is the goal? Besides get quarters, flowers (maybe), yoga instructor, and clean blinds? Soft rain on the sofa. Otto studies beatnik fashion for a major corporation. Spring line, 2012. Richard is at Mezzanine for Britney Spears. I read a chapbook by a poet I’ve known for several years. I’ve never read anything by him (as far as memory can tell) and he’s now a completely different person to me. He moves up several notches. On the list. Everything is in a list, is prioritized. It takes a lot of strategy to incorporate the random. To ensure random. Your desk, wherever you make it, is the bold new bloom of modern industry. Quickly copy and paste each new email from Ron, careful not to glance at a word, saving the savor and surprise for a carefully scheduled time in the advance. In the forward. Make a note; ensure it’s on the list and properly calendared. Schedule time to flirt online. Force yourself to brunch, starving; wolf down waffle with hazel-nut flavored maple syrup and chicken (add fruit and share half with Otto).
It’s all too fast to princess. I sit on The History of Homosexuality in Film. A lightbulb thru time. Reading a bunch of pictures. No light coming in. Just trying to finish something. I am just as I was.
I consider this. He and Masashi are going to San Diego for a conference. I struggle through a dream; things that can fit into a shoebox. Shoebox appro- priate. Wake up in a snuggle and the rain. Walking
here. Thinking they should put a cafe in the Center and here it is. Queerest coffeehouse in San Francisco. Well, not so bad (when you funk it up a little. It’s a turquoise alcove...)....
My exercise program is working. It’s teeny-tiny. I’m all over the place. It takes me three attempts to spell Bernadette. “He doesn’t want to be read.” Succomb to the rain. Succomb to the shoebox, a lightbulb thru
time. I did complete something. Happy as clams about that. And the wind. And my haircut. I’ve got a Coco. Imaginative. I’m in the Used Dept. thinking of sex and sleep. Soft as your brow, which, when
incoherent, tufts. A happy cruise control gets oddly jealous of, for example, yesterday, the latest culprit. Shush the rain. The rain shushes.
I forgot. Or I’m the Queen of Invisibility. Sometimes I’m the door the unidentifiable insect keeps flying into. Be patient. Adjust glands. Imagine someone
naked. I harp on sex and wonder if I’m an addict. And, if so, which part is the addiction. I wonder these things about several people and then I talk for a while to a piece of paper. Earlier, while
laughing about how much I forget, I was reminded about something I have forgotten. A promise I made. I was happy to be reminded, even though it is now im- possible for me to live up to my promise. I
enjoy the memory of the promise. It opens me up to new possibilities. To new promises.
But it gives me the cramps. I keep dialing around for a place to breathe. Grammatically. And I keep typing “whee!” instead of “whew!”
Works well for seizure day. So for Pete’s sake don’t get bummed! The bloody royalty are even all into it now, so, you know. When you park his leg like this his rawhide crawls!
Did how to cut the mustard every worry you? You’re no joke and that’s a well-practiced sneer, drives pronouns into a waxy heart.
I’m as happy as clams about that, though. Horizontal entertainment goes a long way, after all. And yours rather defies geometrical. Here, I’ve boiled you a few eggs.
I should have no trouble putting the remaining 15 hits into the cruise control. Even if yours is Grand Central Station. And I hear there’s a leather bar somewhere nearby.
Hey, great news: that window isn’t plastic! And you might be interested in the pair of ghosts hovering just outside of it, their foreheads level with the sill.
But I can just tell. There’s no negativity. It’s all about love. The real deal. And your pet scooting her butt across your living room carpet to get it all out.
But do we really weep? And how to perpetuate lovers’ mysteries? Not miseries, which seems to crawl into pockets like an itch, can be pervasive. I don’t get that. It doesn’t have to work that way, does it?
But who’s to say? Anyone can say whatever they feel. Or keep a wardrobe so full of special effects that everyone is fooled. A heart on a sleeve doesn’t taste very good, I say. Mine seems invisible to the naked eye.
Each echo has such blunders. But they inspire awe, do they not? Even the hard-hearted like to give the brazen chamber a shout out, their large hats swollen in the humid breezelessness as if in touch with sultry. Such impossibilities.
Complete submission. And happy as clams. Research is close to exposing a similarity in the grins of several very unrelated species. So I decide to burn the book. Not indelibly. That’s pretty impossible for me.
I like to look at photographs of myself and/or from my perspective – from any moment in the past. Before my birth, even; that is, through my parents eyes or, with love that’s almost romantic, deep into the eyes of my grandmother.
The shadow image of my father, as each of my siblings are – we grew up so – though my mother has now taken to saying
I resemble her father more than anyone – as I get older. He was stilted, quick-tempered, proud, easily red in the face,
and clumsy. He ran the water and sewer department in my hometown as I was growing up. The town’s latest treatment facility is named after him. He collected knives, coins and arrowheads and nurtured an orphaned deer through to maturity – controversially in
a rather small cage in front of the county courthouse. And with
out my ever hearing him say it – it was palpable – he was in love. And grateful. Even sometimes dumbfounded by his luck. My grandmother, with contrasting grace and glory,
obviously felt pretty much the same. Some animals and their dumb luck? I believe. Cheesy as a misbegotten apple pie, perhaps. And you’ve got to take a bite out of it. Hot!
And swimming in butter. Because they akways vanish so damned quickly.
The fencerow practically belches honeydew. I’ve started taking a fat-burner called Ventilean; a new ephedra substitute, it has guarana and who knows what else. Guarana tends to make my throat fill up with bile. This is Tuesday, right?
My usual list of things to do, like laundry and dishes, turned into a misunderstood invitation. “Visit with you” was somewhere on the list. There is no hierarchy of any kind, no order of priority. It’s often nothing more than a
collage. Like the tumbled mess of brussels sprouts and chicken apple sausage on this white plate (a 4am snack I’m still working on). I eat a sprout. I scratch a line onto a page. A new page a day. I look back to see lines I’m told are unusually
straight by a few who go through them. Something happens. I’ve often sat through drawn-out critiques of the ‘list-oriented.’ It’s raining, it’s 5:40am, I’ve a laptop open to pictures of our trip to Paris. I turned 40
there. It was my first trip abroad. I’m so in love. It happens every day, even with windshield wipers for a memory. I haven’t run in years. Nor the gym. Maybe tomorrow. My ears are ringing. But pleasantly. I’ve
in front of me: a glass filled with orange juice, a pickle jar half full of water, and a mug with a moustache on it in which are left a few dregs of
If I’m reading this appropriately I believe I’m supposed to accept death as an orifice. I don’t have time to look up the descriptions of each fossil. But plainspeak is best, right? Until one finds meaning in speaking writerly (rather, um, onanstic if you ask me; but also POETIC. Right?).....
I go to witness the blessing of a baby. My partner’s godchild. In a spectacle of a Greek Orthodox... cathedral? I parted ways with organized religion years ago and am surprised to be so calmed by, and so in awe of, this ritual, mostly just prayers. I’m proud
of the circumstances that bring me to attend. And touched by how it reinforces the severity, the joy, the poignance, the responsibility, the amazement, the ever-conflicting importance of the power with which we’re (with which I’m) drawn to suspicious rituals (I love to use the phrase
‘ludicrous construct’). It calms me. And centers me. I am surely more than a marionette, yanked around by opposing forces? I’m a piece of ice used as a lesson in memory and metaphor. I lost my home in the north due to overly warm seasons (it is
the future); a fisherman whose family is swept into an expanding sea. I’m a refugee fisherman from a larger ocean. Now, the fish rule.....
But I’m a liar. I am poison. I’m a sexless blue whale with my nose deliberately stuck into the mud of a deep cavern—unspoiled even by the likes of you.
The water is unbearably cold. The mud I’m stuck in is somehow warmth. The tears I am surely and constantly weeping—right?—are like ice.
I’ve got all night. It’s okay. And maybe you can, okay, learn something here. Brace yourself as I play through your home (or homeland), mangle hopscotch (my knees, the soles of my loafers) for your lovely chickens’ lives. They get the point anyway, right? With dodgeball? Learning how to bloody themselves up on the concrete basketball court behind the elementary school, practice for being an adult in a dry county. But where were we before we diverted to the bathroom? Cassavetes in a nutshell? A perfect moussaka from scratch? How to avoid herpes (or at least its symptoms)? It’s enough, ‘verily,’ to land you in a serious spa by mid-afternoon, a week in a terry wrap replenished every half hour or so by an understandably-impossible-to-tell-whether-legal-or-not (and who cares, really, right, since he’s got such obvious skill!) towel boy—massage therapist. One who’ll (keep it authoritative and yet throaty—as in you’ve difficulty breathing—for this) clean your blinds all rosy-cheeked and might even (authoritative; throaty) re-alphabetize your bookshelf. And you’re lucky. Oh, you’re lucky. I’m an empathic, you see. I might not look it, but I’ve a bouquet of lean smirks right in here. I’m no Clint Eastwood, though I throw people off, I know. Play your bones right, sweetie. Not like a jackhammer up and down the avenue. Avoid the sniper in blonde around the corner. Don’t let the drycleaner take your measurements. Spit-shine without a spectacle. Take charity seriously. Don’t listen to the big head poking its long nose out of your living room wall. He’s selling insurance. Avoid leather and thrift stores. Possibly fur, but don’t be a rat’s ass about it. A motorcycle, yeah, but never drive it in the rain. Appear often from thick fog. Self-diagnose, be clear with your doctor and don’t let her talk you into a contagion. Walk often through your alma mater, chuckling to yourself intermittently about academia.
It’s a red liquid and it tastes like bitter bubble gum. Also a new ephedra substitute with guarana that has a bunch of new poems in it. This is Tuesday, right? Sepia is opening the door now. She lives in the closet sometimes. Flashforward to a downcast Friday morning and Coco trying to claw her way to the top of Otto’s asymmetrical jackets and wraps. In March, the closet door is a green sofa. My laptop has two loads of laundry and the lemonade is parched.
Pollen in the pharmaceutical wind. A clump of keyboard on the lawn. A wad of gum on the corner of a plate. Tact on the mend. Inclement weather is lush. The look that I’m going to try to have is Final Fantasy VII. I also have bananas and a few breakfast items thanks to Richard moving across the street (a walk to Cala in the drizzle is a San Francisco Sunday afternoon). Glitterricky. I win twice at Fruit Ninja and top 400,000 for only the fourth time in four years playing Bejeweled. Besotted. Let’s do it. Working in a coal mine (going downtown). Taking a fatburner before running during lunchtime. Alone after lunch, a peach of a day, rain, argument, dinner in & all.
We got up at 6:30am to head to the DMV and clean the bathroom. She feels he’s been treating her. Like the Bob Sinclair, et al., reggae dance-mix CD for Naya. Scratch it off the list. I could get my
picture retaken. They somehow screwed it up last time, which is why I never got my license in the mail. Then to Kaiser for skin. I wish this thought presently into my elbows. No effect. Except a muffled sportscaster’s taken
over the neighbor’s apartment. “Not the high-pitched wail,” hands up toward God. You’re a legend for the amount of LSD you did in college. What can I do different? Anyway, that was a diversion. The melted reactor could be said to have
not been written. Look up how to clean blinds on the internet and how to pay a student loan online. Password for Excel file.
