YOU'RE LITTLE REDI LIKE YOU IN SMALL BITES(writing is easy/February to today)

Before the theme: was it a park, or was it regular waste-space land on the edge of the exburb? After, it was a destination advertised aggressively to apathetic drivers of cars gone matte in intervening years and to bickering children in the back who didn't wear seatbelts.

What happened to the little kid who really thought this was the best place on the earth, small face, great plains? When I'm stoned I can get so childlike (it's like I'm in a movie, just now as I type) and feel all these pleasures, of riding my bike through sprinkler mist when it's so humid and turning into the wind down the dead-end street. This is my new purple bike and we're just getting to be friends, and the bike I got as a child on Christmas morning was purple too. That was the most childlike pleasure of all, the kaleidoscope glitter of all your presents on Christmas morning, while it's still dark outside the picture window and sooty on the hearth.

It isn't real in the recreation, isn't how it was when you left this world for sleep. When we break out on the parquet, I can just remember how you founded your thesis on historical conicidence. It isn't how you wrote it, isn't how you recite: in the radical recreation we're all boys and girls, over being red, on cute revolt. In the scientific inevitably the curse is blowing down, and in the deep supersition this side of capitalism we're backing into a corner bitching and reinforcing our previously held opinions.

Boy as we settle into our slips of the tongue, letting our spring fall in wintertime summer. Your little girl, pulling down the curtains around the inverse hanging tent house; see how we spent the Arab Spring in bed and making dinner and leaving each other the house key. How life got simple afterwards, and there isn't anything for me to do but sit in surround sound and hope to pick up shifts. I wanted to see us crunch into each other like crustaceans and now we're living in a modèle réduit. When I dream I dream of dredging for his body with cellophane tape, c'est vraiment dégueulasse, and come over easy to your head full of umlauts.

And as soon as you design the jeans the kids will be smoking dope in them, but if you can catch a hit between the gusts I'd like to take you down to the levee and burn the day's news. I hope your train arrives at night, and we walk home in this cold yellow-gold street holding hands, scared of rustling air conditioners and narrow little alleys between houses where there's room for us both to fit and still feel alone.

(Shit from last summer, for comparison.)

Midpoint in the year (who's counting?), Daisy in the mid-day (that's me), fire on the mid-ship (how they've changed). I want to spend the summer sewing cloth banners, I want to read and listen to the radio at the same time, to meta-analyze.

Yesterday's the closest comparison we have for today. You need a history with a place to have coincidences. So here's me and Jen tripping out of the doughnut store at some late hour, and it's my oldest love and April. I'd break out and take a walk right now if I could. I will in the morning, but I want to see night at day, or day for night. Dear God, the littlest things remind me of how miserable I was.

Nothing about this song is ever going to get tired for me. I wanna get dressed up — you know what dress — roll up my shoulders, lace my fingers, lace legs, lace bra, start unlacing — I want to own this song like some of us own our high scores. Complain about the air, your godloving clean water and the noise. I couldn't make you give three minutes of your time if I asked, but I'll give it over exponentially for the chance to hear this again and nothing keeps me still like broadcast. (*)

Who's for outdoor theatre? There never was such a time. Weigh in and get out again: the plantain's gone black, the world is chock-full of great movies. I'm reading my way out of prehistory with a dragonfly, baby blue and dusty cherry, smile painted on and chewing so loud I hear when I can't see.

Jen darling, perhaps none of us gave the Midwest a proper chance. There's so much beauty for grassland under the buzz of the greater power lines, for peeking on the city skyline from the top of the trash mountain and dissing Florida with strangers and Cubs fans on the train downtown. Not to go Thoreau, but: maybe the woods heals us of our sins; maybe when we're out we're open to coming in. Hot haze over the highway, I'm eating you up; cold on the bottom of the Earth, I know how you feel too. (†)

My patience is shot. How're you this morning? Straight out the shower, pruney and sulfurous, let's make breakfast.

(*: this paragraph originally referred to "Rumble With the Gang Debs" by Tullycraft
†: this paragraph originally referred to "The Fifty States Song" by Sufjan Stevens)

Cold up in your iceberg life (11/28)

What fog do you breathe in your otherlung, what proof are you printing from?


It's big and clean, sparkling, space for the industrial-education annual dance and floor-cleanser demonstration. Your Coke, crying on the table, and your face in the table, and a fourth face, the ugly reflection. Cold props.

You're sitting in the front of this row and there's no one ahead of you, so CHANGE. I want to write history to have at it, but I'm revisiting the past in the present tense.

Hall door like the phone ringing, months on and you're praying. It's Alex, it will be short. It is Alex, strangely, with a new number you can call to lie in bed and talk from the hips. "From what I know of the things I cannot tell you."

Shake it like an eight ball for a different answer. Girl got the feeling, feeling like you've just been where disaster strikes, where there's before and after and then.

But I forgot the day that I got the balls to say
That although sincere, if you were here
I'd spit on you and call you Murphy's Law
- Alex, "Aristotle Stuttered"

Undercover November-lovers

Empty facilitator, fuzz-faced fuzz band, out in the sun as late as you can. It's dark before dinner, like you'd go home in winter and the lights are out outside but you're eating in.

Second seat forever, camera hands, but I didn't take what I should have. Little things that never could send me home have me back in the van, off to endless office parks and cheating in apartment lots.

I want to feel what you're feeling, and how close and how long and how far gone. I want so far out of this town, so high off the rise, so low and slow. I want to grind it back 'til no one had to decide. But I'm crying like I can't breathe, and too afraid to sleep, crushed out with kids who never came with.

When Cassidy comes back I'm going to reregret all over again. We'll wake up with ego like the Apollo Belvedere, then hooker's breakfast and sharing the shower. We're lovin' in a haze of smoke, nectar in our hands, always washing the sheets. In dreams I'm sure I'm everything you say.

November, December, watch the water wear out the paint. I won't even last. If I could write to you all the lines would be thin and chipped. If you wrote me, I'd write you right back.

Lie down in our external lung,
like sleeping in Ophelia's arms,
as once she was held before
they changed her name and
  if you could cradle
  your friends as babes
would you know them now?

Here comes my baby, here she comes now,
And it comes as no surprise to me, with another guy
Here comes my baby, here she comes now,
Walking with a love, with a love that's all so fine,
Never could be mine, no matter how I try
- Cat Stevens, "Here Comes My Baby"

The farther you're gone, the less he exists / Whatever's wrong with me now was wrong then and wrong since.

I want to multitrack playback, nudge the peaks with fingertips with continuous harmony in amplification. Your little spiral riffin sounds like files unwriting themselves in so many lines of code further faster than me.

Boy boy boys in the band, I could make front row every time. With your failing watch, with your great belts of flags, strode over the heads of us all. This is still the year kissed in by Kodak light and you could make something of it yet.

Do the slow walk deep in the grass, deep in your weekend alone. I can't share it, can't sing it, can't bury it and can't break it. It's such a steep walk, down into sinking ground, and every flat foot feels like lurching forward with your elbows chained behind.

Peace is built in the beams, but if I can hear all your voices through the wall, I'm papering myself into mine. "Le sens que Baudliere décrit — peut-être vous êtes trop jeunes ou trop heuruex pour comprendre," she says, all the in the best, but fuck if l'ennui is the best I can do. Mock me out. Do better or don't care.

Comfort food, what we ate when we were young and thin, before we understood the politics of it. This isn't an obesity epidemic, isn't Internet culture, isn't disorders of self-regulation (acronym, here's lookin' at you). This is social infantilism on the mass scale, we the cadre of play-group mothers slipping over the edge of the next generation. If I'm oatmeal and strawberries, they're going to be chocolate granola-oat bars and strawberry-flavored Pop-Tarts.

"Egoism is art," I'm bluffing. Think it through and compose, abandon it for lack of depth, describe the sensation because there aren't the words. Everything's different now, great until it isn't. I avoid writing to avoid the truth, and do conspiracy theorists believe themselves? Not what they say, I mean; do they really truly believe they themselves are real?

Creepy calm & safe in the suburbs, every house dark and every light bright, big trees and loud cicadas, willow watering the sidewalk, everyone watering the lawn after dark and growing mold between blades.

Road striping coming right up, the view uphill from the silent center lines at four AM. Nothing here even saw Nixon; nothing even needs to now. There is second-growth prairie and fake lake at the end of the street; there is folklore on TV, immigrant scrap-pickers coming for your old machines, the sole stratum of the parking lots, grown men who've never been to the library, fast food head-quarter-pounds and drive up to the window, please.

I read the book in two days and this feels like it will take significantly longer every time I start again. It gets me so glazey and I get guilty and wonder how I'll say anything later when I can barely see now.

Creepy calm & insane, I'll track my hours alone and check mark through the day. Try as I might it's in my life and all kinds of shit crawls between your covers.

Starless and irrational is too soon to sleep, but I dreamt I was brought into confidence and led a whole legion after me. We looked within confidential files, the hall of history, of manipulative marketing and internet dark matter, and I laid in my strings so carefully that, at the first tug, I ran all the way out between the wall and its discoverers. I dreamt on: sophisticated survey techniques, grotesque fetuses or the archaic disgusting destiny, and be grateful you live in a modern age, at least.

She was recruiting me to critique radio as a visual medium, reading me her reasons in a false gesture of disinterest. The sound hit me like the extinguished blackscreen and overthrew the mind's eye, knocked me out until I was looking in on myself living her life. As she's holding the book the text is shrinking, and as she leans it blows up in her face.

Mediocre long form, for Daniel elsewise or. (midnight, June 14)

In the middle of a movie, in the middle of the night. At this point, it’s limping. I can see the script through the scenes. I believe this is a mark of poor acting, more so even than a mark of poor writing. The characters are thirty-somethings and bland. Late twenties, actually. No offense. Being in front of the camera, scripted, on their fifteenth take, wearing near-flawless makeup, is aging them.

The main character is 28. When he finally gets angry, his voice is reedy and unconvincing. He is the marginally more hip character, so he has a satchel. There are mumblecore influences. There are lines like, “You seem weird about this whole thing.” There are road shots. There are so many films I could be describing.