just magnificent.

and to think,

i thought so highly of you.

i had faith that you would pull through- for me-

[and so much more hope]

at least a note

that would have been nice

or an apologetic hand on my shoulder

and a "we can still be friends"

i thought i knew you

but,

as it turns out

you are not nearly as good of a man as i imagined you to be.

this is the truth

i never look in drainage ditches

or sewer tunnels or landscaping

on the side of the freeway

because i'm scared that i might see

a dismembered body

a severed hand or a lonely foot

or a violet white cadaver

with blunt force trauma

and stab wounds

abandoned in the growth

lazily hiding in a shallow grave

adorned with dying plants

and bloodied clothing

i'm afraid that if i look

a face will be there

staring back at me

with terror frozen

in it's rigor mortis eyes.

i'm going to hell and i just don't care.

"in case you were wondering," she said

hands on hips and right eyebrow raised

"i'm not a home-wrecker.

i just have a lot of voids to fill

and anyway, the taken ones

are more fun to fuck with

the element of danger is a huge plus

because life can be so safe"

and she dropped her cigarette

into her half-empty can

of piss cheap beer

and stumbled back inside.

nostalgia

my mother is in the kitchen 

and she is humming some meandering melody

one i don't recognize

but one i remember all the same

and I remember, vaguely

or rather am reminded

of nights in my bunk bed

facing toward the blue wall of my bedroom

with that little flower wallpaper that made my eyes blurry

if i stared at it too long

and my mother (who was sweeter then)

sitting by my side, singing

forgetting words to lullabies

and half forgetting their purpose

and me with tears soaking my pillow

trying to be very quiet

so that she wouldn't know

that it always made me 

sad

when she sang.

springtime

i guess it's probably spring, because in the early evening
when the sun is stretching it's last light from behind 
houses and trees and clouds there are birds singing
cooing, like quietly
sobbing
old 
men.
and a burning urge to run and fling myself about
begins to bubble in my heart and the ache of a locked up joy
beats it's tired head against the prison bars of my rib cage
an ache to love
with
reckless 
abandon.
and sadness like little embers glows softly at the dying of day
and sends little whispers of smoke, the traces of a vague hope
that someone might share the lavender scented evening
and maybe the night
beside
(within)
me.

I am Arturo Bandini

On the beach
And you beside me on the
Cold sandy
Rocks
And the moonlight
Crackling on the waves like
White hot 
Electricity
You and I 
Are so close it feels like an
Impossibly good
Dream
But even though 
You're right there I just can't 
Touch kiss
Love feel
Tell
You.

Charles at the bookstore

At noon, my quiet little empty city bursts into life for one hour. All the business professionals and corporate somethings come crawling out of their cubicles and offices for an hour of sunlight, to devour sushi from a styrofoam box and to order a Venti Mocha Frap to get them through to five o'clock. The Tuesday that I went to the bookstore, I had to park all the way in front of T.G.I.Fridays and I had to walk more than the usual 50 feet to get to where I wanted to be. Because for some reason, I decided to go during lunch hour. Genius. Thanks for nothing, corporate scum! I thought as I walked past parking space after parking space taken by a BMW or an Audi. I wanted to slash all their tires. Tuesday has never been my day. 
Walking through the sliding doors into the bookstore was like walking into heaven. There was not a suit to be seen, no briefcases or Bluetooths, just books upon books upon books. I walked slowly, savoring the silence and the smell of new books. A bookstore is a funny kind of place. It's full of words, but no one talks. The words just stay hidden on pages in little secret black characters and no one dares to say them out loud. But it's nice like that. 
I made my way through the maze of bookcases to the section called LITERATURE AND POETRY and began the hunt for the book I needed. I ran my fingertips along the spines of all the books and I imagined them all calling out to me, pleading "Please pick me! Take me home and love me, I want to tell you my secrets." My dears, I thought back at them as I made my way to an orange book with pretty black script on the cover, I can only take one of you. I felt saddened by the fact that I couldn't bring them all home with me, those sad little books with their secret words and meanings. I picked up the orange book and flipped through it's fragrant pages. I was in love. I tucked it under my arm and made one last trip around the bookshelf, picking up books I've read and smiling at them like old friends. I know your secrets, I thought at them as I held them briefly, but I won't tell them to anyone because I like you. I finally came out of the labyrinth ( just barely making it past Camus without picking up another book) and made the short journey to the checkout counter. I put my nice face on and approached the counter. An old, tall, skinny man met me there. His hair was white and thin and messy. "I can help you right here," he said. I set my book down next to the cash register. How are you? I asked. Standard checkout protocol. "Fine," he said back as he examined my selection. "Fine as frog hair." He looked up from my book with this sad little smile and I wanted to die of sadness. I looked at his name tag. "Charles" had been scrawled onto it in black ballpoint pen. I noticed his white tee-shirt. It was too big for him and there was a little hole in his left sleeve. My eyes started to well up. "That'll be $13.64" he said with the big pitiful smile. I handed him a $20 bill. "You got 36 cents?" he asked. I said no I didn't, sorry. He screwed up his eyes behind his little round glasses and entered the price into the register. Slowly, with a careful pointer finger he tapped out some numbers and opened the register to give me my change. "Do you have a Borders Rewards card?" Again with the sad smile. I wanted to tell him to stop smiling and being so happy because he was old and probably alone and probably going to die soon but I just said no, I don't have a rewards card. "Would you like one? They're free!" his enthusiasm was killing me. He was such a nice old man but I just couldn't deal with it. I wanted to get out of the bookstore as soon as possible so I just said sure I want one, so that he wouldn't have to try and convince me to sign up. That would have done it, and I would have been there crying at the register in a bookstore and I would be so embarrassed that I would never be able to go back there, to that bookstore, my favorite place in my quiet empty little town. He asked for my phone number and email address and I obliged. He poked at the keyboard and kept pressing the wrong buttons. "Dag gummit" he said as he searched for the backspace key. He finally typed my information out right and entered it into the system. He handed me my book in a plastic bag with my new Borders Rewards card inbetween it's pages. Have a nice day, I said. "I will, I will." he said, tapping his fingers on the counter with the big smile on his face. I hightailed it out of there, walked for forever to get to my car, got inside it, locked the doors, and I cried.

the last sunset i ever saw

It was getting along toward summer, and the sun was sinking slow and lazy in the sky. The clouds hung low and jagged in the distance like a stretch of snow covered mountains over the lake. We walked down from the lake house together to sit at the dock. I trailed a couple feet behind her, half because I wanted to watch her walk and half because I was afraid I'd trip over a tree root or slip in a puddle of mud. She trekked fearlessly through the trees. She stabbed at the dark soil as she walked with a big branch she'd picked up. I told her to be careful because she might get splinters in her hands, but she ignored me. We came to the dock and she threw down her walking stick. She walked to the edge of the dock and stood with her arms outstretched and her face toward the sun. I picked up her stick and watched her turn orange under the setting sun. She turned her head and squinted over her shoulder at me. 
"Leave my stick alone." 
I dropped it and I was embarrassed. 
"Are you just gonna stand there all day?" She sat down on the edge of the dock and dangled her feet in the water. I walked cautiously to where she sat. She scooted over to make room for me, but I didn't sit. I stood in her shadow and watched her swing her feet. The lake reflected the sky and her kicking feet sent ripples through the cloud mountains. The hairs on her arms shone golden against her olive almost-summer skin. She had a little mole on her wrist. She stared out into the lake and furrowed her eyebrows at the sun. 
"Why won't you sit next to me?" She kept her eyes focused on the horizon. 
"I don't want to put my feet in the water.", I said. I was embarrassed again. 
She spun around and glared at me. "Why not?" 
I thought for a moment. "Because I'm afraid that something will come out of the water and pull me in. I'm scared of lake monsters."
She laughed and shook her head so that her pretty hair glittered in the sunlight, and I laughed too even though I didn't think anything was funny. The sun had dipped below the trees on the other side of the lake, and the water was turning darker by the minute. It was getting cold. Her pretty feet splashed around in the black water and all I could think of was something blue-purple and pale and dead and bloated floating up to the surface and grabbing hold of her skinny scabbed up ankles and pulling her down into the darkness. I looked down into the water and all I could see was her face, eyes wide and bubbles pouring out of her mouth open and gaping in a soundless scream, and her shiny-new-penny colored hair dancing around her face as it disappeared into the depths of the lake. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and tried to think of something else. The mole on her wrist, the little secret smile in her eyes that she didn't want anyone to see. I shoved my hands into my pockets and stared at the back of her head. 
The sun had altogether disappeared and the sky was turning from barely purple to dark blue. She stood up and surveyed the vast, quiet water. She turned around to look at me and she took off her shirt. I looked down real fast and stared at the ground and shuffled my feet on the rotting wood. I saw her shorts drop around her ankles and I saw her pretty feet step out of them and walk to the edge of the dock. She slipped soundlessly into the black water and swam out a few feet. She turned toward me with her nose and mouth underwater, and I saw only her eyes, big and mirror-like in the dying twilight. She swam out into the waking, breathing night. I turned around and walked back to the lake house alone. The night came alive and swallowed everything whole.

prior to the discovery of the love affair

funny, and how fickle
is this heart of mine
fluttering and forcing
itself to calm down
because i saw your eyes
with my eyes, looking,
noticing me in a blue
dress and looking,
devouring you in a blue
shirt with buttons.

funny, and how subtle
are your x-ray eyes green
like my favorite ring
seeing through my skull
and knowing all my
thoughts about you
and me and my knees
and your knees
and the buttons on your
pants are probably
magnetic.

5 february 2010

of conversations in the cold

on the first day of the new year under a moon just beginning to wane, you and i spoke in that same careful fashion- i (as always) was careful not to let on that i'm in love with you and you (as always) careful not to let on that you know, so as not to embarrass me. we spoke through clenched and chattering teeth and sat just far enough away from each other on the cold bench to keep our knees from touching. you drank my tea because your hot cocoa was too sweet. i drank your words and was drunk from them. we pretended to not know what each other's belly buttons looked like, and i sat and remembered for quite a while all the times i've seen yours. your new year's resolution is to be more assertive, you said. me too, i said, and then i thought about being assertive and kissing you hard on the lips, but i didn't. putting my hand on your shoulder briefly as i laughed was the best i could do. ah, it's so painful to talk to you, sometimes. this sad, stupid game we play with each other breaks my heart more than outright rejection would. in the cold, we talked. we laughed and we wished we could be aliens, and we talked about hitler and the end of the world. in the cold, we sat, our unspoken feelings frozen forever in limbo.

2 january 2010

to be as a child

to be as a child- to marvel at the falling of leaves, and at the most uninteresting of clouds - how sweet it must be.
what must it be like to run in the grass without fear, brandishing finger-guns and stick-spears at imaginary evil? i can't remember anymore.
they are honest, and they do not judge. they run and they laugh, they fall and they get back up. they shout in tongues as they chase after red rubber balls and they cry when they miss their turn, dirty hands making mud with tears wiped from flushed cheeks. they are fearless, they are unashamed.
they are free.
to be as a child- to have figured out the world and to be in awe of it all the same- how sweet it must have been.

2 december 2009

one fast move

like fog, it swallows me up.
you are the only thing in any room you're ever in-- forget the hundred others pushing and swaying and sweating. it's your breath i can feel on the back of my neck, filling all the little spaces between my shirt and my skin, giving me chills. and you, of course, are unaware of how you're making me feel. and i, of course, don't tell you.
the music is like magic singing " my arms miss you, my hands miss you"
ooh if only you knew.
but of course i'd never tell you.
it swallows me, it eats me up.
it swallows me whole.

24 october 2009

super-glue and cartograms

i am lost and broken and long to be among the trees- hanging from their branches, watching through upside-down eyes the sunlight shining down through the leaves onto my outstretched arms. i often think of the trees of my youth, giant and magnificent in whose shade i often sat, the moisture of the cool grass on my bare feet. i miss those trees, those friends so ancient and wise that they knew not to talk. they'd comfort you with rustling foliage, with the sorrowful sound of their creaking bodies. to hear the wind whistle through their leaves, to see them shiver in the chill of early autumn, ahh! that is joy. i sometimes dream of them, surrounding me with their silence, cradling me in their time-honored roots and casting their green light onto my face. i wish never to wake from these dreams, but i always do, and i find myself upon the same concrete paths i take every day. Oh, the monotonous task of living, reality is such absolute drudgery. how i wish i could live to be as old and solid as a tree, rooted in dark soil with ladybugs crawling on my trunk and birds roosting in my branches. there is nothing that i want more than to know how sweet it is to be so steadfast and quiet, and to watch the world lay their sorrows silently at my feet.

21 september 2009

it begins

slowly,
with the exchange of a few words
that might possibly have meant something (a little) more
and questions you don't ask
unless you really wanted to know the answer
for some
odd
reason
oh please oh please oh please
pick me i promise you can deal with all my issues
and my sad little heart
and we don't ever have to talk
only sleep
and wake
and dream.

degrees of separation

it occurred to me today upon writing to someone i haven't spoken to in almost a decade that our lives and the lives of others are and forever will be intertwined, inseparable and interwoven. an encounter is never forgotten. a name, a face, a voice, these will always be remembered. however deeply we stow them away in the annals of our minds, these snippets of life will never leave us. they are our links to the world when we're lost in the depths of loneliness, they are what reminds us to feel when we become disconnected from human kind. they are what draw us to the sad, the weak, the desolate, because even in the faces of strangers we see the souls of the ones we love. 
we are forever connected, we are phone books with pages interlaced, we are million year old compressed carbon, we are super massive black holes in orbit around one another. 
pull me in, draw me nearer. we are, inevitably.

a moment of clarity

i learned in anthropology that the chemical released in your brain during the beginning stages of a relationship is very similar to the chemical found in cocaine. 
so basically, when you first fall in love, you're on crack.
i decided today that people fall in love for the same reason they go skydiving or base jumping or ride roller coasters or do drugs-we crave chaos. we crave the feeling of falling, of spiraling out of control.
falling in love is just that- falling, or wanting to anyhow. we throw ourselves off of cliffs just to feel ourselves fall, to not be in control of ourselves for a moment
and all we can do is hope that someone loves us enough to wait at the bottom to catch us, to not let us hit the ground and be broken.

love is vertigo, love is the insuperable longing to fall.

by no fault of their own

some people just don't understand.
some people don't understand that sometimes it's better not to talk about it, that it's better to just let the memories come on their own, in that quiet, delicate sort of way than to force them upon your broken heart before it's ready. some people don't understand that the relics of childhood and first loves and heartbreaks belong in boxes under beds, not to be touched again for years until the longing for them has faded, until the wounds have scabbed and scarred and healed. some people don't understand that music is the soul in song, and art is the very blood of you, poured out on canvas or paper or cloth- they don't understand that to touch these things if they're not your own is one of the most intimate, volatile things one can do. they don't realize that these things make the artist feel vulnerable, overwhelmed and afraid, as if they're standing naked in front of you against their will. some people don't understand that you don't choose to feel certain things, that you can't pick your emotions like you pick your favorite flavor out of a bag of skittles, and leave all the unfavorable ones behind. some people simply don't understand these things, these concerns of the heart. 

honestly

it starts with something innocent-
telling the barista at starbucks that your name is rachel when in fact it isn't. telling the stranger who asks about your shoes that you got them for your birthday when really you found them at a thrift store. trivial things to trivial people. absolutely harmless.
and then, like all things, it grows.
slowly, like a sapling in your front yard- a little tree with creeping roots, and every time you water it, it grows. 
trivial things, not so trivial people.
and the roots creep. and the tree gets taller, and bigger. 
important things, important people.
and the roots creep further until every time you walk out your front door you're standing in it's shadow, until the roots begin tearing up the sidewalk, and you have to tiptoe over and around them carefully so you don't trip and fall. giant, immovable, waiting for you to forget to watch where you're going. 
everything, everyone.


and you have no idea why you do it.

huh.

today i had this crazy thought.
everything used to be something else. like glass.
glass used to be sand before someone melted it and blew it and so on. sand used to be sea creatures and shells and stuff before the ocean crunched them all up into little bits. and the sea creatures and shells used to be organic star matter or something like that, the same stuff you and i are made of.
we're all recycled universe. we're all pieces of something else. we are not our own.

23 february 2009

much still to learn about you, old friend.

sometimes
i wish i could see you cry. not just a few tears, or anything like that. like REALLY cry, with all the passion and intensity that i like to imagine you have, somewhere inside. i want to know you minus the wise cracks and clever comebacks. maybe it's terrible to want to see you vulnerable, to see you stripped of the many layers you wear to hide your heart, to want to see you broken. but i want to see it, however sadistic it seems.
i wonder
would you hide your face from me? would you weep quietly or with violent shaking, or loud and unbridled with clenching of fists? would you fight me if i held you? or would you bury your face in my hair and let me press you close? how would your eyes look filled with tears? i imagine them as pools of moonlight. how would your eyes look once they'd emptied their rivers? i see them clear and bright, like the sky after heavy rains, after the clouds have passed.
not knowing how you cry, IF you cry, breaks my heart for you all the more on nights as dark as yours tonight. your thinly veiled heartache makes me curious. sad and curious.

i want to remember what it's like to see you feel.
it happened too long ago.

14 february 2009

absolutely overcome

i feel so overwhelmingly loved right now that i might cry, like i should get on my knees say thank you to anyone who will listen to me. i seriously am so blessed. somedays it just hits you. somedays you realize that you have nothing to complain about, that everything in your life is the way it should be, and that the only thing that really matters is that you are LOVED, and that you have the capacity to LOVE OTHERS. never lose sight of that. let it be like a lantern to burn on dark days. today, i took some time to notice and to take pleasure in the simple beauty of life. today i noticed a man and his son walking a little black and white dog across the street on their way to school. i noticed a girl walking alone, smiling with headphones on. i noticed little tiny puppy teeth that love to nibble on unsuspecting toes. i noticed abalone details, the smell of spruce and maple, the bell sound of harmonics, the magic in burgundy crushed velvet. 
i noticed that i was alive.


i noticed that i was alive.

i'll show them the stars and the meaning of life--

--but they'll more than likely tell me i'm crazy. it's to be expected. no one wants to put faith in anything anymore, unless they can prove it to be true.

the unknown is the only constant in our lives. we might learn new things, but we will never know all that there is to be unknown. we're just too small, too insignificant, too careful- the span of our knowledge will always be absolutely infinitesimal in comparison to the unanswerable questions of the universe. 
i like it that way.

some nights, i look at the moon and it feels exactly like coming home. like throwing my keys on the table, kicking off my shoes and collapsing on my bed. like running into the arms of loved ones after being away. like warm milk and cookies. like magic.
225,700 miles away feels so much closer, sometimes.