the photograph

i have a picture of you
washed dark,
save
for the illumination
of some high-set yellow light
from a ceiling too pressurized
for us to touch.

inset clouds bright
spotlight on your right shoulder.
skin became air
to become skin
as thin as film.
filmy projections of memory
to want
to forget
there was once something.

once

we melted into one another
like illusions in a desert
like shapes in a kaleidoscope
like prayers birthed in an apocalypse.

once

we loved into one another
like our bodies were filled with light
like we had everything

the rest of the photo is dark.
your eyes looking up at me
arms held in a cross over your chest
chin resting on your wrist.

mortality

*
a dog barking like time lets me know this day won't last forever. none of these lazy sunday's will last forever. his bark nags and yanks constantly at my collar as i sit in this swivel office chair pulling on a chain that binds me to a certain physical reality. the law of existence.

sound travels in waves. the minute hairs in my ears vibrate and shake, exuberant fans in a sports arena, they do "the wave" and register barks like seconds, seconds like cells dividing, cells dividing then falling, because divided we fall, and in falling we are sung into our graves by one lonely bark from a dog down the street. only he knows that someone has broken the chain of time. "escape! escape!" he cries. but he's not tattling on me, no, he pleads, "pray take me with you. escape! escape!". i listen to his whine drifting down the miles.

*
i like to be efficient. i like to put the toaster away as i wait for the kettle to boil. the toaster lives next to the boxes of tea in the cupboard adjacent to the stove. i smile at the fluidity of my motions, toaster placed to the right, the slightest angle change of my hand to left and i bring down the box of tea. meanwhile the water boils on.

my young and nimble fingers open the box with no difficulty and the sensitivity of my finely tuned digits extracts one slim tea bag. i close the box neatly like a sewing surgeon. i lift the kettle a fraction of a second before it whistles. i know this because my sharp eyes witness quick hot breathes of stream exuding from the kettle's quivering mouth. i pour the water, not a drop spilled. perfect control.

i am young and my memory and my body serve me well. i shudder to imagine my depression when i get older and both memory and body begin their inevitable and disappointing disappearance. then who will be efficient for me?

click

people are like those fruity popsicles that change color the closer you get to the stick. what color are you on the inside?

would you like to jump in the car and drive, drive, drive, pray we arrive somewhere? but it's only a circle we run right? and i'm too tired to go to where i already was.

and yet i like the scenery going by, pretending that i'm moving. maybe moving. a little. going someplace

the romance of the dream

of course it's romantic and of course i love it. me in a quiet and warm cabin in some New England woods. the smell of cedar embracing me. strong and able coffee at my left, a warm and giving apple turn-over at my right and in the center my faithful computer accepting my daily beatings of doggerel prose. and i will make helicopter wind patterns on the surface of my coffee and recall the time we traveled along Mauna Kea to get to the instep of Mauna Loa. how small and slight and weightless and insignificant i felt then. i'll remember holding onto to my backpack the only thing i could hold onto, i hadn't made friends yet. i was staring out across the upper backs of great mountains. my eyes stung and i cried from the sheer velocity of my new sight.

my cat would come and rub against my legs making all seem poetic and simple yet profound for the light that slants through my thick glassed windows is coming from the East and it illuminates house plants panting for summer though winter has only begun. and the light wakes my sleepy fingers and i put a thumb to my bottom lip and for a moment lament that i have no lover. but who has the time? there is so much writing to be done. and my mind rushes to a new thought, a little game of Red Rover, Red Rover that i play.

the coffee is black as it ought to be and imported from my island home. there are some things i like to keep from home. kona coffee is one of them. i drink from a ceramic mug, very beautiful, charcoal black save for the splashes of metallic color like ocean waves gone silver and god-like, heaven's splashing, the stuff of roman catholic murals. this cup i got from you not long ago. you lived here too. and you made pottery. you were beautiful and devoted. somehow, i woke one morning and all i had was the coffee cup. i've started to wonder if i imagined you.

there is such silence in my little cabin home. the birds are light influences and the wind exhales every now and again to assure me that the world is still revolving and i'm still rotating in my human shell.

i am writer. solitude invites me. perhaps i'll go to town today, pick up some things for dinner. more likely i'll stay in. watch how the light fluctuates throughout my cabin. go for a walk. pet the cat. rub the coffee cup like a magic lamp and wish for you back.

all my students are on semester break. i was supposed to have finished grading their exams but i've spent the past week writing. who could blame me? that's what i do. but the university is not sympathetic. of course it's all so romantic isn't it? some passionate and tortured soul snuggled into a quiet corner trying to escape a maddening world, touching young lives during the day and supposedly writing the next great american novel by night. but romance isn't reality is it?

i'm sitting at the kitchen table in a well lit and open house located on the big island of hawaii. the neighbor is fixing motorcycles, a constant revving of coughing engines beating against my ears. dogs bark wildly at a tumbling leaf. there is no cat at my leg and no smell of cedar to embrace me. i drink black coffee from a white ceramic mug with a picture of a cat on it. you never existed. i work for an invasive plants control team a fancy way of saying i spray herbicide for a living. this is the reality.

yet i dream of that little place in the woods. dream of total and complete silence when i want it. dream of writing, writing, writing like making love all the time, all the time it's wonderful, all the time it's great, all the time i want to. to write, to write. this is what i imagine when i think of my future, this is the scene i paint. yes, it's romantic but aren't dreams supposed to be?

before work chatter

i've told myself to bring a camera, to document the many ways one can look at a mountain, the angle, the light, the texture of it all. but then i became overwhelmed by my own zealous desire to know the entirety of things.

i'm reminded of the Beatles song, "i've got to admit it's getting better, getting better all the time". i told myself i'll have to settle into this idea if life is ever going to be worth living again.

i walked into the house and something changed. i was thankful i was alive and that gratitude elevated my day to a status of goodness. it's all about perception see? your high school English teacher lectures you and geometry tries to prove it. i climb a mountain and i feel better. i float in the ocean and i feel better. i hug the ground with all my might and i feel better. all different types of perspective.

i wrote a story about a man completely misunderstood by those around him. he felt disconnected and alone save for the hands of his father-in-law. the man's name was greg. he had a pretty wife whose name escapes me. they were taking a photograph. greg's life was held by the tiniest thread of the old man's hands and his wife was completely unaware that at any moment greg could be lost. forever. with no possibility of finding his way back again.

it seems dramatic. but it's true. sometimes i feel our reality and our perceptions are that tenuous. it's a crazy power we have over ourselves and even crazier tendency to not know our own power.

i've been there, as i'm sure you have. keyed into one thing, locked onto one thing and only that one thing, that concrete entity keeps you from floating far far far away.

it's hard to explain unless your ripe for this sort of talk. morning. morning. good morning. the engine eats coffee quickly and spews foggy thoughts, new thoughts into the brisk blue grey sky. a bravery, a clarity, a four a.m. understanding of the world, the fragile shard of time before the chaos of other people start touching, start manipulating, start re-adjusting my perspective.

i am alone, walking down the side of a grassy hill. the dew soaks my pants. everything is wet and alive. sparrows sing. i gather myself with each step, pull myself in, button myself up, look like a respectable young woman and meet the town lights below. it's five a.m. now and it's time to go. time to join the chaos, touching, pushing, holding, feeling, growing, dying, human chaos.

meditations on a full moon

the full moon, she shatters me from the inside. a nudist, night swimming, disappearing at the first signs of light. bashful bather, covering herself with clouds or ducking behind a mountain, falling back further and further into her dark celestial bed.

this serpentine road rocks me, lulling me into sleep. but the thought of the full moon startles and excites me. to drift into effortless, dreamy sleep, or to tend to the scarlet hole the moon has burned through my chest? what love does she stir in me?

such a solitary creature, this moon. drifting whole or seeming to. but i'm no longer a little girl. i know that i cannot truly know the moon, cannot truly take her in completely. and yet, part of the little girl remains within me. could i know it all? 360 degrees, 3 dimensions, maybe 4? but i'm brought to a even more looming question, lingering lucid and larger than the moon: can i even know myself 360 degrees, 3 dimensions, maybe 4? how about someone else? a lover? a friend? surely there is a dark side to every moon like there is a dark moon in every one of us.

the full moon unfurls into a silver stallion. he sniffs at my neck and shortens my breath. beautiful isn't he?

entropy

it is said that life and the infinite number of actions comprising it are often grossly different from what you imagine. that is, a painting falls sort of the great masterpiece you created in your mind, your lover failed to touch the few trembling spots you dreamed of most vividly, your job turned out less meaningful than what you expected when you first opened that bottle of cheap Kobel champagne and announced that you were going to change the world. in most cases, the saying is correct, the mind dwells in a world unattainable by the body, unbelievable in the realm of heart beating, carbon dioxide exhaling reality.

but there was one thing that happened just as i imagined it would. no one believed me of course. no one believed that it could really happen and that it could really be so bad. my friends called me nervous, a rabbit living in human skin, a twitching, pounding, frantic scrap of cardiac muscle under a puckered, ever trembling chest, a face so scarred with worry lines they joked would one day it would collapse into the deep fault lines around my eyes and mouth--my smile washed into the deep sea trenches of anxiety. "you'll be eaten by your own fear" they would say passing around Oxycontin tabs like they were breath mints. my friends had a wicked love for hyperbole.

i feared many things. there was no denying. however, what separated me from the schizophrenic manic depressives, the anxious obsessive compulsives, or the just plain crazy space-age monster fearing lunatics, was that my fears, i believed, had real legitimacy. while my friends lived in a world of exaggeration and fanciful philosophizing, i lived in a world of probable rapid dissolution and inevitable entropy. "everything resorts back to chaos" i said putting the small white Oxycontin on my tongue.

"a plane could come crashing into the house right now" i said swallowing the pill, thinking what music would i play if i knew i was going to die in five...four...three...two...

"and pigs can fly" said my oldest friend Cherry. i had no idea why we remained friends for so long. true we got along, but our relationship was no more intimate than getting to know the mail carrier. yet it worked somehow. Cherry enjoyed what she perceived to be my dry, dead-pan sense of humor and i enjoyed Cherry's sweet potato pies.

"i don't think that's the same" i said thoughtfully, "a plane really could fall out of the sky and we would all burn up like roman candles on the 4th of July" i frowned, "only it wouldn't be as pretty as the simile"

Cherry laughed, "nothing is as pretty as the simile". but as i was about to engage her on the topic of life and perceived life, she had moved on to discussing Melanie's newest affair with a young graduate student named Michael. i looked at the three women sitting in my living room, Lauren with her thick back hair tightly fastened to her head like she was wearing a motorcycle helmet, Melanie's bouncy rich brown curls, falling about her neck and spilling over her shoulders like a voluptuous, drunken 1920s flapper and finally Cherry, her wavy red hair already aflame; i imagined all three of them burning, flames animating them into crossbreeds, half-human, half torch ginger. i was burning too, but i had no form, i didn't look like a flower or a person, i was simply the dissolution of things.

a plane never did crash through my house. in fact, most of the things i feared would happen simply because they could happen, didn't actually happen. i've never been in the bank during a robbery. i've never been struck by lightening, or kicked in the head by a horse, or choked on my own tongue after having had too much to drink. i've never lost a finger while chopping vegetables nor have i fallen in love with a man who i would later discover is my half brother. i've never been in a car accident or a boat accident or a plane accident and i've never slipped on a banana peel.

i did however slip. and the fall was all that i imagined it would be.

it was about eight o'clock in the evening on a tuesday. it had been raining for a week straight and the entire town was water logged. i hadn't read a completely crisp newspaper since monday of last week. it was a fall rain, the excess summer and spring spendings that had to be released before winter put a freeze to everything. if i didn't know any better, i would think the sky was always angled with striated frosted white lines against a somber grey. the rain was cold and as water is known to do, permeated through all barriers, chilling my bones so my insides felt like fillets set on ice to be sold at the market.

i needed a shower, a hot, steamy shower to defrost my organs. i had always feared showers, the thought of standing on a slick surface with nothing really to hold onto and then adding soap to the equation, well, it felt like suicide, felt like chaos waiting to happen. however, a woman had to bath, and if i was mindful it would be alright. i stepped into the shower carefully, paying close attention to my feet, making sure one foot was firmly planted before the next one decided to move. keeping my knees bent, i focused on my muscles, clenching them tightly to cement my bones in place. crouching like a rebounder waiting for the basketball in a game-making free throw, my quadriceps trembled. i slowly secured my right hand around the faucet handle and twisted.

water is as close to feeling the pure as one can ever get. it is as close to knowing nothing as one will ever know. i concentrated on the weight of the water's stream, adjusted my feet accordingly. i was strong, stable, whole. i ran the soap over my body gently, careful to put an even layer on the entirety of my body, excess in one place would unbalance me and i would fall, i would fall and be paralyzed, unable to move save the blinking of my eyes or the opening and closing of my mouth.

there was a dark spot in the corner of my shower. i stared at it. a little spider scrambling to get out. two of his little legs were wet and heavy. he struggled to drag them along. had he a little spider Swiss army knife, i know he'd have cut them off, an offering to the Gods that flooded his home so suddenly, and he'd been happy to get out with his life. i felt sorry for the little creature. what fear gripped him. i knew all about fear. without thinking i bent down to the little spider, knocking the soap of it's ledge. somehow i didn't hear the soap drop, perhaps it was the rushing of water all around me, perhaps it was the overwhelming whoosh of power i felt in sparing a life, i couldn't tell you. i pushed the little spider up onto my hand and lifted him into the air.

"what does it feel like little one? to be lifted up by a God? does it feel miraculous?" i smiled to myself, "do you feel like an angel?"

the spider stood in the palm of my hand, his many thousand eyes staring at me. life was just like the simile, i thought as i placed him on the floor outside my shower. as i stood up and took a step behind me to wash my hair, i knew. i felt the soft and slippery cube grease my foot, felt the scream of my left leg as it tried uselessly to support my flailing right leg. the dissolution had begun and as is nature, nothing can stop chaos once it has begun. the right side of my body became a landscape of combusted composure, an environment breeding entropy. the left side of my body held out as best as it could like the last rebel fighters in a war they were never going to win. at one point i was completely air borne, floating, held in some benevolent hand. "so this is what it feels like spider?" i thought, "to go from part to whole to divine back to part". my head was the first thing to hit, my neck cracking on the toilet seat.

it happened in a fraction of a second and it was exactly how i imagined it. the last thing i remember seeing was the little spider, i almost crushed him, almost. he drug his drenched legs across the floor, crying desperately for help.

to jump or not to jump

i am riding in a van with fourteen other people. the scenery slides by--some sort of wicked projection-- and instead being audience, i am frame. one. singular. passed by in a nanosecond while the trees and the rocks and the mountains watch this moving picture and chuckle along with the laugh track.

there is chatter and living expanding all around me, a nose is blown and a laugh is thrown and bounces like a ping pong ball against all corners of the van. i hear finger nails scratching on skin and low, staggered breathing like cows walking in twilight. my fingers stretch for the release handle on the door (release!). i feel every curve, let the cool plastic invade my too hot hands. i want nothing more than to pull it and float, very ghost like, very roger and hammerstein magical musical-like out of this cruel cubicle of forced human interaction. i want to depart, to flee, to run or fly or dive or evaporate, to transcend my place. i want to release.

but...reality is something altogether different from dreams. people don't fly in real life, they can't dive into an oblivion and not suffer great consequences. the chance of my leaping from the van into some wrinkle in time where i am teleported to some foggy lonesome beach in the Pacific Northwest is only an illusion, an illusion my mind steps into after my body has fallen and broken into a million little pieces. an illusion my mind believes to make those final moments seem more noteworthy and/or symbolic.

i'm not talking about suicide, so you can put down the phone and stop worrying. i'm talking about the difference between what i imagine and what i know. it's not from sadness that i think daily of jumping out of the van, it's from wondering if there's something i'm missing out there, it's from wondering if my place is prescribed, it's from wondering what really is an illusion and what really is reality.

sometimes i think i'm a single frame on a long reel of frames, believing i'm moving but in reality i'm stuck in the same story, replaying the same narrative. we all jump sometimes to break out of our stations. i think it's the only way to stay alive. so i ask myself every day after work as i take that long trip down mountain, to jump or not to jump? hrm...that is the question.

The Shower

Slick water tickles down my neck like the pads of your fingers
Shea butter soft, like a Dove, like Olay
or so I imagine.
Sinking into the saddle
between my breasts
some rivers overrun their banks
like naughty knuckles all knotted in need
wanting with feverish want,
some rivers go rushing wild
and flinging free
off the precipices of my puckered nipples
like lovesick lemmings.
The whole while the water drums against my spine
and I imagine you
heartbeat crashing against my mine.

You are faceless and armless and torso less
yet the architect of this public bathhouse was kind
for the stall’s wall stops at your calf
and I can tell by your toes
how they curl like the shell of a conch,
that I could scoop back swoon in your
undulating currents.
your soft and cared for heel
tells me you are a goddess
a faceless, armless, torso less goddess!

Stepping slowly your feet lift water like liquid glass
toes arching and bending
arching and bending
sliding your heel across the tile
I hear it groan
Such exquisite, white, little soapstone feet
Feet
that
floor
me

Sinking into your song
the water wraps ‘round and ‘round my body
sending me spiraling
a continuous fall
a dressing and an undressing
in a sanctuary of present pure nakedness.
Your feet turn and turn like a hypnotist’s wand
I imagine streams slowly sliding
off the tops of your shoulders
and speeding around the steep stones
of your spine
cascading into the lower back’s supple arch
then riding the smooth curve down
down,
down,
until finally gravity pulls the water from you.
I imagine each drop mapping in mosaic majesty your memory
You shut off your shower
but I linger,
let the slosh of the last of your bath water
come

give yourself away

the problem with starting is the threat of everything else you left behind. from the first word to the very last, there are stories abandoned regularly, an artistic menstruation one might call it. look away. none of us wants to see that. but that's exactly what it is to live, to write. the presence of one word is the execution of many others you will never know. sad isn't it? but let's not mourn for all those characters thrown by the wayside because the creator was too young or too fragile or too distracted or too scared. let us cuddle and coddle the one that does exist.

stories, like children, never grow up and never cease to be the little bud, three sentences long and a fraction of metaphor in weight, you first witnessed when passion and inspiration and timing miraculously invited you to the party. writers often wonder what would have happened if...what if i changed a scene? or flipped a setting? what if i was reading Ginsberg instead of Austin? what if i wrote in the mornings instead of the evenings? wrote in winter instead of summer? wrote while living in a hut somewhere in Guam instead of a cramped loft in Chicago? what if i went to the store on tuesday and then baked a ham? what would have happened? and so, we writers try to bring up the story with the best of ourselves, try to love our imperfections which the work reflects back to us with blaring intensity, try to accept what it is completely.

it's difficult to let go. cleaning up faulty phrases like messy diapers and pushing further and further the development of plot like tap dancing lessons and SAT prep courses, straightening implications like folded over collars and setting type and font like pressing labels to boxes that will travel across the country, where your story will circulate and impact strangers in ways you couldn't imagine. and then you sit and write and write and write about how much you miss it. miss when it was just the two of you, growing together through early morning inspirations and late night frustrations. now it's being handled by others and all you can hope is that they will love it as much as you do, that they will cherish it as much as you do, that you have raised it well and ultimately that you were able to give it the gift of everlasting life.

yes, i'm still here

i'm still here...if anyone was wondering. i've been spending my days up in the clouds so to speak, but everyone's gotta make a dollar, it's what helps us hope we aren't drowning. i'm onto a new book, Sophie's World. i like it. i hope to see you all again tomorrow or the next day. my writer self is starving, but i tell it, just one more day, just one more day. and so, i eagerly await our meeting tomorrow, when i'm not wearing the yoke, instead we can sit and have tea like proper little monkeys.