snippets and crumpets

i feel all sorts of swept up and spit out by the world. i don't know where i'm going, when or how. i want to know what comes tomorrow exactly as it will happen. i want still things, steady things, things i can hang my hat on, things i can slip under at night, things that will hold me when it feels like i'm being sucked further and further away from anything real. i want to simmer down, lower the heat and let myself marinate. is that too much to ask?

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my heart feels like it's under water. i let my key strokes fall defeated, back on themselves, exhausted little runners of the dawn. pots and pans clang on top of one another with no care to layering and time. i listen with a timid ear like a stranger. i try to blur the edges of this image, focus on nothing but the blankness in front of me. i lay symbols down carefully, so many symbols to comfort me. i wall myself in; i think of long, loud lyrical lines to set down clear verticals i can duck behind. i contemplate my future, try to warm myself beside all my possible freedoms, Vermont? Virginia? and in these places the chance to start again...

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i skip into another body, where does this person go and when and why? i ponder how they see, angles of elevation or de-elevation (depending), degrees of clarity, richness, sharpness, what is left in and what, more importantly, is left out? how does this world smell? what does this world smell?

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i see ceiling fans and turbines, blades pushing against wind, slicing through air, cleaving molecules. i see them wherever i go. i can't get away. the wind, it seems, is forever blowing and i'm caught in it's flow, barreling along invisible tailwinds, adrift on uncertain and fickle currents. i look up at these fans and i can't catch my breath. i'm scared of something. my eyes are wide and never blinking, my chest grows sore and soft. my shell is being squeezed, my soft shell is being pummeled by this manufactured movement of air. perhaps i feel beaten down or pushed out and away? i don't dare look up at fans and turbines today. i fear i'll faint, lose all ability to catch myself from my own wicked imagination.

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cellulose backs breaking. my hands, dirty, filthy even. uproot. uproot all day long. irony? cellulose backs breaking. i hear the crunch, feel it in my fingers, the crunch, see it in macro-microscopic intimacy. the colorful diagrams of plant cell construction are in projector form over these little plants, celluloid images laid over reality. i break them down to molecules. the sun beats down upon my back and i beat down upon these plants that beat down into interrupted soil that beat, beats back in the drum circle nature of things. my bare feet sing to the sound of cellulose backs breaking.

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lights hit upon green, green leaves. i await my message. what will i learn today? there is something hopeful strung into this day. perhaps it's my sleepy mind being softly awoken by the touch of hot, rich coffee. perhaps it is listening to iron and wine in a completely different place and feeling that everything is so familiar. you think there are all these things ahead that you can't possibly imagine, seem scary even, seem bright and new. but in reality (whatever that means) you've seen this script before, acted out theses scenes, damn you wrote it! what a powerful concept. i find the linkage in music. here i listen to iron and wine, a cd i picked up about 8 years ago. the music has followed me through my leisurely days, followed me down to school or to work or through writing a paper. i've made love to this cd and pined away for love. and now it is here.

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there are things you cannot push or pull, things you cannot force to fit in the space that you've set for them. there are things that cannot withstand excessive pressure. i think of shapes. hearts are perhaps the hardest shape to forcibly fit. each one is distinct and requires different degrees of freedom to expand, demands a different measure of security to hold it when it contracts and is most vulnerable of falling out and breaking. in addition to the difficulty of compensating for flex, hearts always require an ability to adapt to their flux. hearts don't stay put. sometimes they are rigid and unyielding and other times they are so complacent as to become a puddle of mush, impossible to contain anywhere. hearts can only fit in spaces they were meant.