cafeteria

Sitting inside the bustle. My problem these days is that when I have to go to the bathroom I don’t. I can read and sit and jump into her bed in the morning but I can’t write or shit. The spanish professor’s shoes are squeaking and it's bothering Franny. Her fingerless gloves are all I can set my eyes on. I pass a note—”let’s pass notes”. She laughs but doesn't write back. Then I wait for her outside and kick a can around. A bean falls out of it. That which kills all pleasure is something I think after the fact. Beside a dry gutter the bird opened his beak. 

all the pretty horses

I’m on drugs. Am I? Yes, I snorted I stole I ransacked I rampaged I am a monster. As I typed monster the music spoke monster. Cranberry juice can’t cover up the throat taste of k. I haven’t been writing and I’ve changed to a not-writer she says to be THAT oxymoron. Everything is uncomfortable and I’m high and I’m smashing my toes into each other and they’re pleading to god for salvation but he’s not listening. He’s up in my head with the cooks and the orange yellow egg yolks and those lights which bleat and blare and forget to write. And now I’m remembering the crazy, that oh yeah crazy that I forget the instant I feel like a citizen who can do the dance. I prefer the chicken dance more than the ordinary jam dance. I prefer salisbury steak and short songs and the zoo. 4:51am and why why why am I awake. Beep boop zoom zap the space cadet is my little sister. She used to say funny things like “I hate water, especially wet wet water” and lives across the stairs. She likes all kinds of water now, but she’s moving away. How do I face the nose and lips and eyes and ears? Those same shoulders I could wrap my arms around? Could I steal a baby girl and leave her on my windowsill until someone snatches up her steaming babycakes?  

indecisive about title, might take down

So we’ve all fallen and the bag of tricks is behind us. And in lieu, we’ve stopped reading, stopped doing k, stopped pretending to be in love. We’ve learned how to police our thoughts to the right extent, and that’s called self-discipline. We’ve learned that the further we look into ourselves the more infinitely complicated things become. The we is the me but not exclusively. 

Something I’ve learned about myself: over my life: I’ve forgotten that I learned un-lying. From ages five to twelve or so, I lied all the time. Maybe it was a projection of my control over the world, an instinct I developed out of my fear of discerning parents, or maybe I just fucking liked it, but I would lie with abandon. I found a video of myself at age five or six where my sister and I were feeding large tarpon fish in Florida off a dock. My mom comes over to us and asks me what type of fish they are. I say that they’re smallmouth bass, and she prods that they are the smallmouth bass, like the ones we see in the freshwater creeks by our house? The question is posed to call my bluff. Without pause, I emphasize that they are smallmouth bass, insinuating that she is the one who’s silly for thinking that bass and smallmouth bass could possibly be the same. I lied voraciously to protect my reputation, to safeguard my six-year-old intellectualism.  Somewhere down the trail I learned thought-policing for my salvation. 

The tarpons have disappeared and I’m plunged into my latest absurdist nightmare. This one takes place in a dream-altered version of the neighborhood I grew up in. It is snowing in some parts and the sky seems to be undulating. Beside me are my parents and grandma, and we seem to have learned that people are turning into zombies. However, the zombies look identical to people, so there is no way to decipher between zombie and person. As a response to this news and in typical me-dream fashion, we all decide we’d like to go to the movies, and we start walking down prospect park west. At this point my grandma decides she’d like to stay with a different group of people and sits down with them in a circle on the street. We go without protest. After the movie (Say Anything), the three of us are separated and I find myself being chased by a zombie and my point of view moves outside my eyes and hovers about seven feet in the air. As I watch myself being chased, I don’t feel afraid, I feel nothing, but right before the dream ended, the zombie turned around and looked at my invisible specter. The fear of this moment, being seen when I thought myself invisible, caused such a horrible rush of fear, that I woke up. 

on the train

Haven’t written here in a minute, but I have random scraps of writing to cast into the void.

There is a disemboweled kind of empty around things today. One that bears the marks of once being filled. I’ve been watching a man scroll on his phone with his eyes closed and another crazy guy dressed all in white who I could barely make out until he turned around to yell at me and shove his hand in a woman’s face. After that he sauntered off into Penn station. Afterwards, he turned around and I noticed his Sunday whites smeared with the mud of his awful demeanor. The people getting on right now barely made the train but they’re calm about it. I’d be wheezing, thanking my lucky stars. The tufts in my knit hat look like truffula trees to pull and fashion around this ballooning emptiness. Right now I’d appreciate a little pill that gives me life, ounce by ounce. I can’t even tell if I’m moving or still. I’d like a pill that will tell me if I’m moving or still. If I’m still and tired like a wax figure with eyes gently squinted like the precursor to prayer. Who places the debris on the steps? Who walks the steps and tires them out? I’m making eye contact with the man sitting in front of me through our reflections in the window. We both glance and glance away sheepishly. I’d really like some candy and a soda. Alone. Alone. Don’t fall asleep sir, you’ll miss your stop.

Imagining my voluptuous garden where I remind everyone how lovably miserable things can be. This is where I gather up observed truths in my arms and run with them, a full sprint across some busy avenue of empty pasture until I run out of gas. I worry I can’t carry enough in my arms. I worry I’m sick. She goes to the garden or museum or wherever she always comes back to, and her imaginings of being watched are confirmed. All those things which where figments-so-real and knowledge-so-fearsome that they had to be boxed, squashed, plucked, and extinguished all of a sudden seemed observably true. You know those thoughts. You do. Those ones conceived by the firings of neurons just so. These sublime “ahas” might be evoked by a tree that looks a bit like your mother, the same fabric that upholstered your childhood couch, or the horrible sensation of eyes on your back.

I’ve gone cold but she’s next to me. I can stop writing and know that she’s here next to me.

meadowlands

I let the light flit under my sunglasses for a while. Consolidated, I can peace myself by opening and closing a gratuitous amount of pockets. Drew my tarot yesterday. Outcome? Unsettling new changes. Fingernail growth will be accelerated. Internal body temperature will drop 0.4 degrees. The wheeze is permanent. The double-edged sword of creative energy will cut. Sunglasses off, do I really have anything to say? Driving over the swamp now—the one without the box turtles and only the cattails cattails cattails. 

stinking funk

I am finally stuck in a strange funk again. I mean a falling asleep in a bed of roses which you wake up to find grown around you kind of funk. It’s enveloping me hotly and mournfully. I find the little items which once defined my life—doll head baubles, pins, broken sunglasses, single earrings, and baby teeth. They sound like trash listed like that, but each is a terrifyingly expendable symbol of my life’s content passed through objects. As I live inside a space decorated by these symbols, my skin stretches out to merge with it. I wake up with webbed fingers, as the space between then has reached out to its kin—the corporeal body. I’m taller, my cheekbones more prominent. It seems everyday I spend in this bed is one that my body experience what I can only presuppose as a sort of accelerated entropy. The molecules of my body are attempting to move farther and father away from each other. Soon, I’ll have to fold yards of skin into my pants every morning. I turn the lights on, and the world freezes. I saw this in a movie once I think. Frozen stands a car crash’s exact moment of impact before collision, a person in the instant of falling in love, a punch in the face, three peoples moments before death, an air conditioning unit suspended in the air, and me stretching towards my walls. The moment is one of perfect alignments. I’m panting, gathering myself up to watch frozen time. Stillness is what I’ve needed. Shock beckons a presence I haven’t felt in a long time. There’s no one out my window, but I get on my bike and witness the world still as I pass. I touch faces, I open doors, I eat, I drag my body behind me.