a job? what's that?

today is the day. after months of waiting, i strap on the old ball and chain and head out into the great yard that is employment. today, today, i pretend for 8 hours to really dress this nice in my "outside" life. today, today, i learn the ways of the pharmacy. i pause a moment and think, wow! life sure is mysterious! the pharmacy, really? and yes, the pharmacy really. i don't know what's in store for me but i hope i catch on quickly. regardless, i know i'll have some stories to tell, people are endless wells of interest and material! well, i should probably figure out my outfit. the next time you hear from me, i will have faced the employment god and she will have touched me on the shoulder and said, "welcome to the commodification of time".

a rainbow and you

you've been gone for days and when you return i don't really see you. you exist as a complaint, a pain in my chest, a knawing ache in my side, real but not visibly real. i try to be hard, pretend I'm Clint Eastwood and practice asking the question, "are you feeling lucky?" the truth is i cannot, despite my best efforts, be that harsh, my voice quivers and my mind plays a montage of happier times. granted these memories are old and the video is beginning to skip, but certain shots stick, like they've been super glued to the inside walls of my skull. perhaps it's best to remember you this way, to remember you as the disillusioned, puffer fish little girl remembers you. why not? and yet, things have changed, walls are crashing down about our heads, i have the sense to duck, but you, you are staring straight up at the collapsing ceiling hands in the air ready to brace the entire thing. this weight is too heavy for you, but you stand in the center of the room swearing and crying out like a madman. i cannot help but want to help you save this, afterall we both live here. but i've lost alot of faith and i've seen the cracks widening for years. i take up a piece of crumbled wall and try to place it in a crater size hole. this place is really falling apart. i tug at your shirt and say "i'm not feeling very lucky", i nod toward the door but you growl at me, tell me i don't work to save anything. i look at you, who would want to save this? this faulty structure with its collapsing walls. lets build another, i say, lets build another and re-set this foundation.

you've been gone for days and when you return i don't really see you. it isn't until i look up at the sky that i find a new memory to add to that old tape. a rainbow. the first one i've seen in a long time and it comes in with you. a rainbow, brightness and color, pure. suddenly i don't think you're shouting anymore, suddenly i see the good in you. suddenly, i miss you, just a little. suddenly, i see you, i see you as that puffer fish girl did, i see you and think perhaps we'll both make it out of here. brighter skies ahead in a new land where we can re-name one another.

i put myself anywhere now. the crown of my head snuggles into the dirt. i let my nose bend, feel the individual grains pressing into my pores, filling me slowly, filling me deliberately. i didn't always nestle to the dirt, i didn't always know it as i know it now.

to see someone in thier normal suit, knees in the earth, chest hovering, rolling their head in dirt like a baker rolls dough, or a man rolls a joint, or a gambler rolls dice, to see a perfectly dressed human human crown to crown, would perhaps, unnerve you. it unnerved me. i thought surely this woman had lost her mind and then i checked myself, perhaps i was seeing things. the first hypothesis was false, but the second one, the second one exactly right. i was witnessing something, something strange, something that made me sweat, something that when i closed my eyes i couldn't shake, something wholly different, something scarily free.

she was black, as dark as any human i've ever seen. she was black in the way that everything else seemed sharp, clear as the focus of ten thousand lenses or she was black like an absolute, no room for exceptions or additions or she was black like perfection, yes, that's it, she was black like perfection. she had long hands that spread themselves out along the sides of her face and she kept rubbing her head like that, rubbing it, softly, in loving and exhausted swirls. with her hands and face like that i could have sworn she was looking into something, trying to root something out, or perhaps to root herself in. she looked exhausted but in exstasy like when you've run a really long time and you collapse to the earth and breath, breath, breath again. maybe she had been running, maybe she came from very far away.

i turned around to see if anyone was looking, but people bustled about in their bubbles as people often do. i looked back, the scene was as i left it. a beautiful, young black woman in a business suit rubbing her head into the dirt. the dessert is tan, tan in a static, photographic way. the elements seem suspended. i feel no sense of heat, i smell not her sweat, i hear not the movement of the dry dirt beneath her forehead. all i see is all i see. this could be an advertisement, i can't be sure. the world is so virtual now, who knows if i simply lost myself in an ad for all natural facial toner? but something tells me that this is a message from a wholly different source. the motion is slow and it looks as if she draws the same pattern. i try to look away, but even when i do, i see her in every blink.

the wisdom of a fern

i take two sips on my coffee before the fingers press. building worlds one tiny symbol at a time, is remarkable to me. here are lines that we've learned and processed and made our own individually but share collectively. here is the power to create, to fashion something out nothing, to sculpt the air. i am truly amazed at the writing craft and every now and again i gauwk wide-eyed and open jawed at this beautiful artform. it is like seeing a person, really seeing a person, having over looked him for days, months or even years. and so i'm here writing my ars poetica i suppose. there is a story stored up in these finger prints like there is love in this body, but i cannot help but stare in awe, stare an artist to her craft and caress it in my mind like the lightest touch drawn across the cheek of a lover.

i fear starting again, facing blankness on the page. i feel it's like an empty club; none of the hip, cool phrases are going to want to waltz in there unless there are at least a few other words to keep them company. writing, as i've always said, is a fickle, fickle thing.

i take a long break and sip at my coffee again. i write alot about coffee, perhaps because it's by my side in these cool and soothing mornings. the world is coming into focus slowly. i've been up for 2 hours at least. the sky is trading in the new born white for a faint blue, the grass is green, green, under the one big star, the air is slow and thick in it's chill having laid in the slopes of the night. a hapuu fern pushes up against this window, green leafy bits flattened against this plane like an anxious child waiting to go outside. but this backwards, a plant that wants to come inside? what could it possibly want to do in here? this cold box with it's 5 walls? but then i realize it's not begging to come in, it's not even trying to push this obstruction out of its way, rather it's growning with this window. adaptability juxtaposed with rigidity, life and death, movement and the fixed. the fern will push up and up and maybe, if given the time, it could cap this house, grow over it, a green hill in the landscape, a trellis of human invention.

how must one live? how should one live? there are many books to tell you and even more talking heads to assure you that they have discovered the recipe for living, proper living that is. but i think, and this is just my humble opinion, that the guides for good living are all around us. look at the trees and rocks and mountains and ocean. look at the rivers and lakes. look at the fish and the algae, look at the birds and the bugs, look at the animals, look at the sun and the stars and the moon. look at the soil, look in the soil. it's all there. all that we want to know, it's all under our feet, it's all around us, it's above and below.

granted the world is a different place. we have more complex enemies, we have man-made diseases and bombs, we have hate and greed. yet, yet...i look at the fern outside my window, a fern like a person, growing as best it can against an immovable object. i look at this fern pushed up against this glass, living, living within a molecule from the edge of this rigid, lifeless entity, living, living with its lot. i look at this fern and i think, what if all that seperated us from our true selves, from that "good life", from the nature of what we are, was simply, a plane of glass? what if we have been looking out the windows of our own fabricated worlds thinking the entire time that there was no seperation, that we were living as we were meant? there are so many illusions that make me think i'm outside, when i'm really inside, make me think i'm interacting when there's really sound proof glass all around me. but this fern, this fern has managed to talk some sense into me. break the glass it says, break the glass and come out of hiding. i see my body plunging into the glass, there are blood drops like dew all over me. i'm curled up next to the fern, blood sinks into soil. i give it happily, happily to save my life.

sun sets images and thoughts

the folding over of days are like waves
collasping into spun out lines
sunsets left behind
in hopeful discussion of a new day.
wake up tomorrow will we?
will it be this way ever again?
is that the beauty of each day?
you can't take anything back,
all in,
all at once,
brilliant.

declaration of i

i rock,
i rock,
i black porous rock,
i round,
i round,
i round heavy mass,
i sling,
i sling,
i sling out toward
i object,
i object,
i object returning
i mud
i mud
i mud of the earth
i out
i out
i out slung object
toward,
toward,
heavy mass
i returning
i returning
into earth
i round
i round
i round and rock
i rock
i rock
i rock round and round
i rock
i rock
i rock black and porous
i rock back to forest
i me
i me
i

open ocean composition

sometimes worlds collide and there are things that cannot be understood. worlds collide and words become filters for days. the verbage is confused and the signals are crossed in choas, pulsed out coarse and raw like something outside of you, inside of you, trying to get back...outside. messages from an alien nation. to feel alien, to feel out of touch and so unsure of what you want. you want everything, and that's just it, you know very well that you can't have everything. you sit on a rock and think. you sit on a rock and think that perhaps nothing is how you see it. perhaps you see nothing. either way you accept things the way they are, or try to at least.

***

there is a shell riding on the back of a woman who was a tree. remember that story? remember the time? and so there is a shell here, as real as anything. you can feel there is a shell here, slung around the neck of everything wild and fiercely free. you hold your breath and your heart starts to go. you feel your heart go. it's in your chest wild and fiercely free. images come over your mind and you are kissing and being rushed up against and its hard to breath in such close quarters, and you're wondering what's happened to you. it breaks. your heart. sweat pouring like blood and you hear helicopters above you. it's a very anxious and acidic moment.