at present...

my yin in is in the bedroom licking vitamins, and i have absconded to the living room in order to escape her description of the parasites that live in her gut and hatch during full moons.

but this is beside the point.

the point is i have to watch a violent movie for class, and lamentably my schedule requires that i screen it just before bed. i like to think of myself as immune to such influences, but considering i dreamed of gladiators two nights ago, and World War Two the night before that, it seems that my status as an active, informed audience does little to impede filmic iconography from making its way to my subconscious.

"Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more..."

- Bill Shakespeare

Sunday morning nostalgia for Georgia

feeling:

the ennui of

waking

the Smiths

after

making lattes in

Coca-Cola nightclubs.

mixing:

photo developer

with orange juice

and dreaming of

north Florida abortions

and Chattanooga matrimony.

my uncle

died

doing:

nothing.

notes on a return to scholasticism

school resumed this week and i'm surprised by how quickly i've reacclimated to university structure after a summer spent cloistered, clockless, and solitary in my apartment. but this is beside the point.

the point is that i took my yin to see the newest Quentin Tarantino film last night, and although i enjoyed it, i am yet to decide whether or not i liked it. thus far i've been unable to name the cause of my uncertain ambivalence any more than i've been able to define the nature of my ambivalent uncertainty, but i believe it has something to do with the strange vein of humor running throughout the narrative, permeating tragic, the gruesome, the comedic alike.

fortunately, i have an impending appointment to sit in a room full of doctors later this evening, munching on asparagus and talking about our "work." perhaps one of the inglorious attendees can shed some light on the situation... time will tell.

two years ago today...

a friend of mine set me up with her roommate, a tall cute girl from South Carolina who invited me to her place for feta spinach burgers and homemade sweet potato fries. less than six weeks later, this tall cute girl was stricken by meningitis, which left her hospitalized, infirm, and burdened with an unfortunate moniker.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that the pairing never took, and i left her apartment that night with my pants vibrating. at that time i was still fascinated by text messaging and its bizarre mongrelized IM cum telegraph articulation, and when i opened my phone there was a message from Mardou. the specifics of her query were less important than her tenor, and i called back immediately, telling her that sadly, the answer to her question was "no."

we proceeded to meet at midnight and walk her dog under a full moon, passing along the way a trio of reiki healers and a pair of lovers making love on the sand. her boyfriend phoned during the walk, a call she chose not to answer, and this night on the beach proved to be the first in a trinity. two weeks of full moons in the dying days of summer, raindancing with our sister and swimming in the dark...

North Carolina is like...

l
o
n
g dinner table discussions

and

yellow jackets nesting
in my lover's hair.

the wondering

lurking fear
of

potential chance encounter.

meditating
to the sound
of gunfire
while
yellow
butter
flies
chase

dragonflies
mating
and

Jesus watches over

the
shoplifters

and transients
talk about the
recession

while

a dog chases
cattle staring
at a deer.

staring into
the bluest eyes
lakeside and windy

realization:

my mother's temperament

my father's capacity

tiger eye mala beads and

giggling climax at midnight.

USA! USA!

i'm leaving for the airport in a few hours and (unlike my last trip to North Carolina) i foresee no aborted courtrooms or sad motel rooms. but this is beside the point.

the point is yesterday afternoon i attended a (small) mixer, and a friend told me that she participated in the pummeling of a 19 year old Spaniard while riding a subway car in Catalonia (like you do). this young hooligan (the Spaniard, not my friend) was frisked against the wall by a cadre of rampaging summer abroad students (some of whom were broads) in retaliation for a pilfering earlier in the evening. apparently this same Spaniard (y sus amigos) had lured my countrymen into a dark bar under the auspices (not that type of auspices) of free drinks. once inside they were waylaid and relieved of their various (portable) Apple products.

the iPod was never recovered, but (thankfully) the incident stopped just short of a body cavity search...

two years ago v. last night

two years ago
i woke cloaked
in
fatuation
none too
fatuous
yet fleeting.

melodrama ensued.

last night
i watched lightning
explode over Oakland
mini ature
atom bombs
cloudbound
where Boulevard
meets Bay.

reunions are like...

"not writing anything since last Thursday."

not as dirty as it sounds

today a friend assisted me in achieving an autonomic release and - although sweat, pain, and underwear were involved - it was not as dirty as it sounds. but this is beside the point.

the point is that my yin arrives in a few hours after spending the past several weeks in Canadia, and i woke this morning at 4:18am, not unlike Christmas Day 1987, when i opened my eyes to a shiny red bicycle with training wheels. but let me return to the point.

the point is that we spoke the other night and mid-conversation an "eh?" slipped out. i immediately began inquisiting her, trying to ascertain the extent of socialization into the dreaded socialized nation lurking to our north. i made little progress (logistical restraints prohibited an auto de fé) and ultimately hung up the phone accepting that i would just have to wait and see.

for all i know she may come back talking aboot nothing but hockey...

modified excerpt from a tiny rambling journal

i went to the beach

said none of the things i meant to

and listened to the surf,
remembering past Augusts.
past beaches, past sunsets, past lives -
the long nights of late summer.
i sat listening to

teenage girls in white plastic chairs

the Septembers
spent in love and alone and writerly at sunset,
looking for Mardou's silhouette on the horizon,
pretending to know the secret longing of Russians.

beautiful fictions

the arrangement of

my thoughts

superimposed

over the women

i wanted them to be.

on former lovers turnng 30

"When I was twenty-two yesterday meant something to me, and I dreamed of making her happy, promising vacations in Helmand and whispering forever in abandoned tobacco warehouses. I staged elaborate displays of immature love in an attempt to ward off impermanence, and made promises in the dark with words I understood in context..."

now available

For An American Girl With a Czech Surname (who got away)
1st edition chapbook, limited to 50 copies
(suggested) contribution $5.00
email: circlesallthewaydown@gmail.com

a house in Gainseville, circa January 2000

"The house was two stories and, with the exception of the grow room, every inch was covered in newspaper and excrement. The kitchen sink overflowed with week-old plates of spaghetti, curdled bowls of cereal, and a cast iron pan slowly falling apart, spilling its rusty water across the counters and dripping onto the floor where a small incontinent dog sat lapping it up from an abandoned pot of pinto beans that never made it to its destination. The bean water gave the beast terrible flatulence, and it ran wall-eyed and wild from one floor to the next, relieving himself in the kitchen and then dribbling his way up the stairs to the landing which led to the bedrooms. The urine soured the pine boards, and one was left to walk atop a repugnant canine masterpiece, as if Pollock and Warhol had collaborated post-mortem to produce abstract expressionist piss art."

short binary note to R.A.

to have

the life

you had

to live

to make

the art

you do.

swan dive

"I've had a little bit to drink, and it's making me think that I can jump ship and swim, that the ocean will hold me, that there's got to be more than this boat I'm in." - Ani DiFranco

i once walked
Manhattan at night,
drinking gin and tonic
and watching foreign films,
thinking about the boat i was in.

i thought about it:

in a small cinema on East 11th.
in an abandoned cinema on 181st.
in a packed cinema at Union Square.

i thought about it so much
that it started to feel like a movie
and when i left i took that feeling with me.

i thought about it:

lazy in Interlochen.
waiting in Lawrence.
caffeinated in Lancaster.
in Philadelphia at midnight.
driving all night from Buffalo.
at a forgotten prison in Kansas.
hypnotized by the maize in Indiana.
mid-larceny in haunted New Albany.
half-drunken and crying in Benton Harbor.
at sunset on a dilapidated bridge in Louisville.
impatient and bored in downtown Wilmington.
making an offering on the bank of Lake Michigan.

i once walked
the beach at night,
talking to the ocean and
drinking summer nostalgias.

i thought about it:

she was right all along.

1 dream - six days + 1 year = ?

a year ago, i woke from a dream about a Rabbit, only to discover six days later that my yin had encountered a vast field of bunnies on the very same day in Vancouver. i do not know why these thoughts are in my head at present, but as fate would have it, she is somewhere in Vancouver this very moment, and i will be picking her up at the airport (again) six days from now.

i wonder if what she sees today will populate my dreams tonight...

psoas v. fornication

i had the most incredible session with a body worker today, and she told me i was uptight, twisted, torqued, contorted, and that my psoas iliacus felt like i was about to have my period. this news, of course, would be less distressing if i had a uterus, and i asked her what i could do to loosen up my spastic psoas. her response was more sublime than i could have ever imagined:

fornication.

eight days a week

(the full moon tonight)

my yin is somewhere in west Vancouver,
beating back Bible-bearing Catholics,

and

Jache is somewhere in south Florida,
mournfully maudlin and misbehaving.

is
this
beside
the point
?

(the prime number on my wrist)

first thoughts on second parts, continued

"Cecilia was beautiful, thin and cruel. She had two inches of sable hair styled forward in spit curls, a holdover from her dalliance as a skinhead, and now dated only black men and DJ’s, an unanticipated consequence of her burgeoning Puerto Rican pride. She smoked long skinny cigarettes, and drank vodka from plastic cups on Saturday nights, casting half invitations to rooms full of strangers and sleeping alone. Corola was artistic and kind, as pretty as her sister, three minutes younger, and deferred to Cecilia on the grounds of wrath and whimsy. She lived her life in the endless subtle trepidation of the heavy girl, and their apartment was filled with cheap cabinet doors and random scraps of wood, each adorned by one of Corola’s paintings. She performed an endless labor of repainting them in rotation, and the layers of acrylic told the story of her love and hate for Cecilia. They were forever tied by obligation, genetics, and habit."

first thoughts on second parts

"She ran in to use the bathroom on her way to work, left her bicycle on the stoop outside and disappeared down the hall. Black braids were threaded with reds and violets, and I sat blue haired and paralyzed, transfixed by her Medusan post-modernity, a vision of Nancy in oversized Adidas and flared denim overalls. Angel wings spread from shoulder to shoulder, and in the center of her chest sat a powder blue cut-diamond heart. I watched her from the safety of the sofa, hood pulled up over my ears, listening to Cecilia bait Corola about her job at the drive-through window. It was their apartment, and they had been fighting since the womb."