Late summer party for work. Theme: Oktoberfest. Hung with Angela, Jon, Terence, little yellow butterflies. And I finally ascertained the name of the tree with the purple flowers. “So California!” After the party we walked down to Polk Street, heard some fireworks, barhopped a bit. I called Nick, who shows up soon thereafter with one of his girls, flirted, met up with Erin at Swig with a big furry cat. And I only sipped at a straw- berry-basil-something-or- other. Then we were off to Coco Bang for Korean BBQ and watermelon soju. There, we also saw a butterfly. These things,
I told a myth. Or wrote it. A myth-take happened when I wept all over it ( actually, I just spilled a glass of water). And from such, whatever remains, comes: It wasn’t even a screw. Who said what LOVE GIFTS are? Like a whinny for a crab- apple, the un- explain- able is like that. Van Dyke, come back you dark knight, come look at what you’ve done to the daylight. The teevees with which I chalk the sidewalk certainly won’t be a fit sub- stitution. Who wrote that? I love
I guess I hope…some of my input is useful…to your effort [breath] —Stephanie Young & Juliana Spahr (who note the quote is from a 2007 performance by Ultra-red in LA’s Historic State Park)
Dear Voices with Words in Them,
I keep trying to find the voice that wrote this… this thing I hear or read (in which case, the voice is my head, or is in it). (Or) Is it in the kitchen,
cranky and cooking? One can never be too sure. I mean nothing by any of this except let’s do lunch sometime. I miss you and am hoping I’ll see you soon!
During the interview my mind was racing to all four corners of the boardroom, if not the universe. I thought of yes- terday, how it stuck in my mind like a bone sitting horizontal half- way down a throat (mine). I thought of tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, just in case this was a place I might wind up spending those days. Some- where between these thoughts of future and past was where I exited, had existed, where I currently sat; some- where near the end of a long table, on the side facing the window with the beautiful view of downtown and of skyward and of (a few short moments between when the receptionist graciously brought me a pair of bottled waters and the interviewers arrived) way down to the city’s tiny pedest- rians. To its cabs and honking SUVs. I’d be introduced to the three folks who would be at- tending (whose names I fail to remember in this other present moment). But one of the attendees, an “interviewer” if you will, said right at the beginning, as she introduced her- self, that she was The Observer. “I’m just here to observe,” she said, and that she did, having said everything she’d say during the amount of time I was there, per- haps 30 minutes, per- haps a bit over an hour, right at that mo- ment. As always, it was theatrical; a farce. And now, looking back, I wonder if she
Mapped last weekend as one of the most stressful. Then I read and wrote and napped and whatnot. On Sun- day, watched dim sum at Lychee Garden. To home afterwards. To a nap, to nothing, to so much of nothing that there’s a lot of nothing to report. A whole lot of nothing. Later, we went out for drinks to watch barbacks do their job. I am sure I could say plenty more about that, but I’ll stop here.
I didn’t try on secret- ive until I realized that people could read me so easily. “Like a book,” my so-called high school friends would say to me. So I became this character, this not me that has become me. Now, each corner I turn, every face I make, each word I choose has me wondering about my intention, whether it’s me or not me who made the decision. Was it mere diversion? Was it gut impulse? I won- der about the strategy
“I don’t remember seeding you.” Clearly, I said that. “Grow open my mouth // that I may speak as I speak” ...(Brandon Shimoda)... “a sea forms,” he continues. The clicking also continues outside my bedroom win- dow. Does that mean that I am to be continued? (Sound- ly, resoundingly.) Now I hear cars whizzing down the main street of my youth, which is High- way 22 in Northwest Arkansas. The whizzing, however, is actually just waves finding their var- ious ways ashore. (Whew!)
I’m feeling kind of log inside. I can’t be $46. Could you ever so kindly find a way to make a small parade and just call me a cab. I eat a few bitches of the smashed- together bagels &pretzels. A shower&coffee w/ the neighbors sounds nice, I won- dered. The total tab, as it turns out, was only 22¢, which is just tabulous!
He didn’t like it as a nickname. No, not one bit. He didn’t like it as a cartoon. What a silly cartoon, he’d think. Beagles can’t fly. But one morning, before the cat- hedral down the street struck twelve, before it had even struck eleven, he walked in to a dining joint, sat down, and ordered a steak. And while he waited for that steak, he emptied the entire bucket of peanuts, tossing each and every shell onto the already shell-ridden
The Facts Communicate with Themselves (and can often be found in the Fiction section)
I thrive on sentences. One might some- times say that they are flying dangerously off the side of the cliff. One might say alternate reality. “Well that’s terribly wrong,” says the comedian in a wetsuit.
“Allow me to diagnose this,” she says, not even trying to disguise herself as a real doctor. Everyone gets it except me, of course. They’re all ROFL and then she’s ROFL. I’m just ROF until I learn
that my name has always been neither Ralph nor Rolph. “You have an excel- lent understanding of today,” says the thistle to the undergarment that is sooo comedienne. Today we all say “hooray!”
You taught me the world. What a language. “But I can’t introduce her to anyone orange, the new earth’s underbelly,” he said, trying desperately to under stand it all. The sea was hissing like a snipe. Each piece of furniture wore a comb-over. And Once Upon a Time couldn’t find Happily Ever After, even in this tiny little hearth (and what an adorable hearth!). Springs and thistles and forlorn clogs filled all space all the time (which is not the continuum we’d always imagined). Frank seemed to generally love the songs, but could never come clean, never break free from the seedy neighborhoods of the city that handcuffed his tongue to the small thatch of hair at the bottom of his back. “It’s my small,” said Frank, always knowing it was such a big deal to everybody who bore witness. It was larger
John Lennon was murdered at the age of 40. My 40s were delusional: The Delusionist Era. When Lennon died, I must have been around 10, because at 11 I was crossing the American West in a Ford Leisure Van™ with my family, my first trip to California, where I might have turned twelve. That summer I decided, at Great America, which was to my mind somewhere between Fremont, where my great-uncle ran a sawmill, and San Francisco, the Elysium, where the coldest day I truly ever spent was indeed the summertime day I was there (which was spent with my family at or near Fisherman’s Wharf, of course). Thanks to a certain Arkansas blonde, I’d just discovered that I very much enjoyed rollercoastering. I’d so avoided them until earlier that same year, when, riding with that blonde, I’d realize that being upside down for brief moments was just fine. But the slow tick-tick-tick-tick up to the first (and often highest) peak could last forever, and...let’s just say that my problem has always been anxiety, rather than depression (something I’d find out too late in life to enjoy so much that had come previously). Anyway, that cross-country trip in the early 1980s, our family of six, my dad so proud of the newfangled van’s sound system that he purchased eight new(ish) 8-track tapes for a buck on the very first stop of our vacation together, which was either a Walmart (most likely) or a K-Mart (I forget which one) in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Among them, was John Lennon’s (who’d recently been murd- ered) and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy. Wow, that was a great trip. And now I live here atop Nob Hill. Life is a beautiful thing.
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round I really love to watch them roll No longer riding on the merry-go-round I just had to let it go —John Lennon
Or Something Happened. On either the day before- hand or seventeen years ago. On the other hand, the night before, I just don’t know. Ask me again sometime. Oh! On the night before, our I do? But I do doesn’t remember (therefore, I don’t?). Realiz- that this is such child’s play, I decide to make an entire career out of it. A lifetime career, so to speak, I write. A lifetime, just to cut it short (despite its length [which is always too long, relatively speaking]). So, I make a career out of this, this nothing, this no thing at all. It’s so very easy. I just close my eyes as
if all of it happens. And even though it takes forev- (cf., relatively speaking), we wonder if any of it ever happened. Or if we made it all up. And if we are to (eventually, or perhaps inevitably) discover that we’ve... made it all up...does it go about happening
(and continuing to happen) nonetheless?
Like the light of the neon sign from the hotel dire- ctly across the street from our apart-, the light that burns into our closed eyes each night, be- aming through the bedroom window and down onto the us, onto the bed I just now made up. Just for you. The moon. Over us. Lying incessantly atop our be-...in the bedroom of the apart- building in which we sleep and(/or, as proof would suggest,) we have slept and slept and sl- Over the bed I made up just now. For you (and for you alone), we await a sign, each in our respective place (which is not lying and is not upon any aforementioned bed) that, upon seething, burns into our closed eyes.
Halogen Therapy (or pausing long enough to catch a bit of air)
Everybody knows that pricking an aching heart as it lay in pieces before you (or during you) can be great fun, right? Whatever the case, that’s who I think I am already: a foaming heart (or a foaming heartlet). And love? Funnyheartlove is almost always fun, brainless, and has many more names than seventeen (right?). At seventeen, for example, I had a kiss or two or three. At nineteen, however, I broke through into the night, where I might simply have remained a poem or poetry, another astrolabe, pausing only occasionally every couple of hours just to open my eyes or take in some air. My eyes! My, my! Keep in mind that neither nobody nor I have heard his voice in aprox- imately nineteen plus seventeen days
Every prick I gripped was a poem in my hand —Ronald Palmer
Stupid love. This is a story called Career. And it has to do with stupid, stupid love. I write its name (the name belonging to stupid love) seventeen times because I honestly don’t know what it is, nor what I’m doing, who he is, who she might have been, what it was as compared with what it is presently and what it will be in some future, should it arrive. One thing is certain, and that is that I wrote (or performed) a stupid, stupid love. I don’t know what it was, but am I ever going to miss it? Or stop missing it? Well, we did have this this. We were (or it was) certainly the thing, even as it eventually evaporated in to nothing, or something akin to nothing. There’s still, perhaps, something here, or there (as there relates to here, anyway). Remember where it was, where we were, at any moment that ever might have existed? Who cares, really, where we were or went, because wherever we were or went, memory or not, it says here that we were, most assuredly there. But. Who cares, really? The toilet’s still in the restroom or the bathroom, however one might call it or however one might
have once called it. But who ever uses one anymore, right?
I was made for loving you, baby, You were made for loving me. —KISS
It was a couple of months before I even realized that he was living here with me (It had been a rough couple of years). Can this even be correct? Is it summary or
pretext? Yeah. It’d been a really lousy couple of years, the existence of which I’d never have even begun to wrap my head around,
until then, the couple of years that lasted at least a decade, (and not in a good, way).... He always had to stop at cross-
walks—to either wait for the green pedestrian sign or else to wait for passersby to stop and wait
with him. I write to total strangers every day. No- body seems to mind. But if caught talking
to myself, or my computer, or to a washing ma- chine, he always continues. Often so abruptly that
Having had enough, we called the cops. Dad was on his Irish doughnut break, so there was that linger ing sickly smell of syrupy coffee and burnt toast that hung like a lampshade around the perimeter of the venue.
