cerebro

This next semester I will potentially only be taking five classes. They will be a lot of work, but I intend to take learning into my own hands and self educate while I still have the zeitgeist of collegic place and youths about and around me. I plan to study:

World Mythology/ Storytelling
Cryptozoology/ Cryptobotany
Rock ‘n Roll history/ the punk movement
The Blues/ Soul Music/ Roots music/ Jazz
Diseases
Outer Space
Circuses and Bohemia Performance History
World Religions and holy texts
Conceptual Physics and Biology
Art history

If you have any good books, documentaries, or media/info/wisdom on any of these topics or those like it, please let me know.

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Brother… Mother… It was they who led me to your door.

is this the coolest thing anyone’s ever done?

they say this much soul could obliterate your body.

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cassiopeia

In July I thought of the belief that letters can save even what is buried– you’d run out in the thunder to the place where the letter was sent, and there they would be, blinking, accepting the sweater and the two of you would laugh exploding puddles all the way back to the kitchen to decide whether you should first make steamed honey rooibos water, or shower together, tossing the muddy garments out the bathroom window. The thought of the letters I might have sent you- drifting lower at a timid pace through a few long years- a taste of an aging crate of limes. Afterword I would understand you were the girl who insisted to me that snow could not be everywhere at once.
You were the girl that showed me how to take turns and wrong turns and how to become so many kinds of lost that they deserved wholly different names. You were the girl who was voice before she was ink. You were the girl who would not be ink. You were the ink slipping down the garden steps in the summer storm.

At first I thought you left because of how I bent over when I stood around, or my skinny eyes I can’t change, that no romance story at the picture house ever cares to feature, but now I know that it was because I was singing a song and you were chopping celery, and I thought you were trying to help me stay on time. I am not afraid of the road that leads to the stale boiled cabbage, peeled paint side of town, where the trees are sprayed green because all the cigarette smoke they breathe makes their laurels tan- the air feeling like a smashed jelly jar in late May. Blackened toes pause on the curb.
It is not unbearable once you know it’s going on. I can always turn around and get a funny beer on the way- see kids throwing their bikes over gate fences toward the flood ditch. I’m not afraid of the two thousand dollars down the drain. But that’s not always true. I’m scared of steering myself a shipwreck, but once it’s wrecked and sinking, I breathe easier and it’s fine mostly- I dream about the shore and getting there, and then it comes true. Maybe you are in a beautiful floating chair reading Kundera in an asteroid belt, or perhaps you are veiled upon a camel, or the horns of a demure shadow draped woodland animal, pressing it’s way through the dawn fingers. I am not one to often spread unfinished legends. You were the girl that mistook the future for now. I was the boy who mistook the future for eternity.

In church, sing the hymns like it’s 1875. Because it is- kind of, isn’t it

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bananaplans

This summer I have started working more on a project that basically involves having/going through online conversations with people and extracting text from the records and remixing phrases or short lines of dialogue together to make a found piece of writing. Thought I’d share a couple here.

These particular ones below are comprised of lines and words jumbled together from chats I’ve had with for surely Morgan, Chevas, Joel and Christian, and possibly a few others.

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Chaplain Ln.

You are upstairs in the room that overlooks the Chinatown streetlights- ceramic turtle bobbing its head on your desk- you spoke of the universal music, and you bought the turtle when it reminded you of that invisibility and that beauty that are the same, and which made you decide life was a tragedy that could have been written much differently, which is what made you angry, which is what made you write. It’s only just beginning, what is on your page.
They can’t really call it a song, so you call it a song. One taking place in Sausalito, which you have never been to, or know anything about but you use it anyway because of the way it sounds dirty orange and rich with the asha of old photographs of fields where men have died, which you can barely see, but you know the story and you stare at the black shapes, imagining the smell of death in secret.
Death- the last anathema, hidden burning in the shadowed sheets of your mind.

– War! It’s just a shot away! It’s just a shot away!

The song is never finished, not because death can be rarely sold, but because it can be rarely taught. Nobody hears from them again, or it never really gets out. Who would believe it in this kinda place anyway?
A coke can next to a coke bag and a thumb drive all cracked and soaking up piss and oil in the same hole in the concrete.

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moonflower

I smile and can face the virus of the age when I remember you are the rabbit come out from the earth who raced to the sea instead of the barley flats, unafraid of the cold, unafraid of the beast fish culling the flesh of the water, heart hammering for the mouth of the fish, it’s touch, it’s skin which is like no skin of the soil or the hatch of the soil, and the wide walled gut of the godfish, and the wide walls of Ninevah, gilded of impaled brain and rind, and the salvation of the wild earth by the pardon of fire before your eyes, and when plotted events having been granted aversion is the monument eminence.
Is your eye swollen? Is your credit in the gutter?
In rags, you are marked and I know you will return, 91, O’Hare → JFK, the H1 to the Young Street. The book that cannot be read, though I know what it contains. Without eyes or image I have dreamed of it in a place that is wholly not my mind and I remembered your name written on the page and I will go down to the river and die with this kept in my closed fist, and the sun shimmering on my empty skin lifted by the water, and I will become three lines in a gazette quietly like the whitestar potato unfolding in darkness.

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