van ness

i saw an image very similar to this one last night on tv and i was literally in pain because i wanted to be there so bad. im not exaggerating either. i think it was my stomach where i felt a sharp pulling sensation. im pretty sure if i were on a boat in the san francisco bay, eating the world would be pie. fucking pie.

3021 people

in one thousand and fifteen years,
people are taller-
gravity got tired.
hair is longer-
formal attire.
so many years of blunderous men,
making money-
taking credit.
crashing cars-
losing breath.
buildings bend under dissonant weight,
deserts howl-
oh, the sandy grave.
oceans blush-
what a rotten trade!
its 3021 and I'm still asleep,
wake me please-
i've missed enough.
rip the quilt away-
red with blood.

you have eyes in the back of your head at the end of time

fluid fondle ponder speak
let it out, spout it out
wet the day with water sweet
soak it through, spoken true
i dont see you as you are
filthy rotten best forgotten
toss you up amongst the stars
grandest sight, lavish light
hollow healthy deadly dull
naught with me, broken dream
die to give and live to pull
hearts to you, starts anew

nothing weighs anything

sometimes i feel like nothing is real.
people and places and words in the air
heave their weight at my feet,
but i sense nothing there.
all i can sense is wind,
hot sun,
the grip of a gun,
and once and a while
someone will whisper loud enough to get my attention.
but most of the time i want to rid myself
of everything i own and everyone i know
just to see if i would notice
a difference.

the sun would still rise even if i was gone.
that day is soon, and i wonder, will i be a memory to anyone?

joe turkey

this weekend i saw my grandad and his wife arlene. she's my dad's stepmom and no offense to her, but she reminds me of debbie downer. my grandad is sick - he just had triple bipass heart surgery a couple of weeks ago and he is waiting to hear back from the doctors about a lump they found near his heart while under the knife. when a neighbor came to their room to pray over him, arlene said, "well, if we make it to next week, we'll get to find out the PET scan results." if we make it to next week? are you serious? that is not only tremendously pessimistic, but it is uncouth. i mean, who says that? oh, right. arlene does.

she also made me and my brother, and my dad im sure, very uncomfortable/stunned when she brought up my parents divorce. we were all chatting about california and the great city of san francisco when she began to wonder out loud, saying, "you all liked it out there didnt you. I bet if you had stayed in california, you would still be married." once again, uncouth. if she wasnt my grandparent i would have probably told her to go jump off a bridge.

my favorite part of the visit, though, was when she was asking me and will about school and the future. i said school was going great and that i'll probably be finished in two more years. the truth is, school is horrible and i want to burn utk to the ground. she asked my brother what he wanted to study, and he said he wasnt sure yet but that he thought he might want to be a writer. her response: "well you'll either be filthy rich or poor as joe turkey." i wish i had said something great like, "money really is what its all about, isnt it" or "wouldnt want to be poor, because then we would lose our ability to love each other, right?" but i didnt. instead i just sat there in silence, and i punched her in my mind.

you might think that she's just an old lady, and that i should give her a break. but this was just one visit. i could give you many other examples from other visits to chattanooga. my blood is beginning to boil just at the thought of her dating advice.

the point of all this is to say that i hope i never get like that. i hope i never regret so many things in life that i tell my grandchildren to make as much money as possible, and to never love someone too much, and to never hope that someone will get better if they are sick. i hope i dont ever become a bleak ben. i hope to tell my grandchildren that hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

vinyl countdown

there will soon be a record player at the monastery. now there will be something to do in our living room besides television. reading steinbeck and listening to neil young on vinyl is my idea of an afternoon well spent. and considering i have a job no more, i will have many free afternoons to fill.

scratching and turning
cell phones dont exist quite yet
just the old music

this is how it will end (again)

1.
i ate the earth in one bite.
its oceans and plains felt
the wet of my tongue.
dreadfully rural.
horn plays,
world waits in dark suspension,
and star light flicks white dashes beneath
the sound.
echo...
sound.

grass coats my throat still
making me want to die again.

2.
i ate the earth in one bite.
its oceans and plains felt
the wet of my tongue.
wonderfully domestic.
appliances hum,
dirt floats in alluring anticipation,
and sound is an afterthought behind
the wind.
familiar wind.

clouds are in my pocket still
making me want to die again.

3.
i ate the earth in one bite.
its oceans and plains felt
the wet of my tongue.
silently haunting.
fog bleeds,
water laps in pooled premonition,
and darkness rifles my misery before
its prowl.
midnight prowl.

bedrock cuts my feet still,
making me want to die again.

seductive, shapely waves

movie titles are beckoning
men who cant see the sea to sing
but one day might be ready
for the late fifteenth century
globe trot

ocean's gravity strongly pulls
food court strangers out of malls
tarter sauce will sit and wait
as husbands and wives spend twenty days
loose the plot

finally divorce the land
take a literal life boat stance
boys look on with yearning faces
landlocked torture ends today
dwellings rot

fuck you fingers toward the coast
sailing away in bottled boat
drying up in high noon sun
salty breeze and feeling young
just a dot...

haiku

i've been writing many haiku poems recently, and i am going to put some up. i think i'll probably just add others here in the future if i ever want to. and i might take some off later cause this could get pretty long if i let it. the only "rule" these stick to is the 5-7-5 syllable rule. hi japan...


two thousand feet up
a silver splinter sundries
red leaves relocate

serious colors
drown out reality's call
over my window

softness of new skin
plays to unzip those blue jeans
with bodies untouched

creased green wear and tear
coins shiver in a kerr jar
crickets are long gone

atop the staircase
police step between the hate
they dont know i saw

five ball of the east
rising shine over felt sky
pocket in the west

ode to a vacant cushion

with nectar in a can
and a staff in my hand
i rescued a man
from untimely demise

not death from a knife
nor a high maintenance wife
but no more miller highlife
to drink downstairs with the guys

the doc said, "you know,
you've already eaten a hole
in your liver and soul
no more beer would be wise"

so he vowed not drink
he just thought of the link
written in him with ink
between the bottles and lies

with his health on the mend
he had lost all his friends
cause they all got the bends
bubbles of cumbersome size

but when i showed him the path
with my nectar and staff
he just let out a laugh
with pure joy in his eyes

he drank juice with the bees
as the staff eased his knees
and he grabbed all the leaves
as if a shiny gold prize

what he found was the air
he'd never noticed it there
when he was drinking downstairs
with the safe 'n sound guys

so his wife and his children
got off the couch in the den
and walked out bearing grins
then they looked toward the skies

outside it was sunny
and their father was running
and his clothes smelt of honey
they couldnt believe their eyes

they looked at each other
and then at their mother
they all hugged one another
for they had regained their lives

though they were sad, they rescued everyone. they lifted up the sun.

we live in a grand setting. yes, i said grand. it is a good adjective. and we are alive (for at least a while) in this grand place. we dont have to worry about not existing, and we dont have to worry about the sun burning out for quite a while.

...ok, i realize that this beautiful (grand) world is full of dark corners and covered in murky waters, but isnt that what the beauty is here for? yes?

men are dying in a war right now. children are dying of aids right now. some guy is saving money right now so that he can buy a bigger tv and some new blue jeans.

...those waters are murky...

....but there is also a beautiful sunset in Iraq right now. there are best friends playing soccer in africa right now. there is a guy saving money to support his loving wife and kids right now.

what are we worried about? dying? maybe. or maybe we are worried about living. i think we should be worried about the ugly effecting the beauty more than the beauty effects the ugly.

so we have a sunset and a war, which one wins? unfortunately the war seems to be winning. we have aids and we have best friends playing soccer. sadly, aids has the upper hand. and we have blue jeans vs love. i would like to think love is gaining some ground despite the commercials ive seen recently.

this is what im worried about: not fulfilling my obligation to pierce the dark corners and tred the murky waters. i feel it is my (our) duty to turn our heads away from the bloody ground and toward the purple sky. it is our duty to go to africa and play soccer. it is our duty to support a family instead of banana republic.

more, my friends...... more.

what would jesus do anyway?

you're hesitating arent you?
its ok, im really just doing this for myself.
but is that selfish? maybe.

sometimes i think im losing my mind, but then i realize i just left it at home. and on purpose. is that weird? is weird a bad thing? in who's opinion? should i care? why?

ok, seriously though - right now i am not in school. i am working and saving up money in order to take my brother and myself on an all over the country road trip this summer (and its actually gonna happen). and i really want to make a movie of it (which may or may not happen). and during this break from school i find myself wondering more and more if it really is just a break or if it is a strange goodbye. i really dont want to go back to school, and that is mainly because i have no idea what i want to study anymore. i mean, i could finish up with advertising (which i never feel like i actually started). or i could extend this "break" into next year and hesitate/stall/remain static. or i could do something else that may require more of me than school ever has. school only ever got half my ass. sorry school.

there are a lot of things i want in life, and there are a lot of things i want from myself. and im getting tired of the logic of american culture getting in the way. i need money and nice things to be successful, right? and i need to be clean shaven and tucked in to keep a job, right? now i realize that i have written about similar things before, perhaps the exact same thing, but this is an ever-changing thought process that i am going through here, so bear with me.

i dont think its a bad thing to want a nice life. things are cool. comfort. television. food. yea, those can all be fantastic. nothing inherently wrong with them. its just that im pretty much sick of it all, and not in a depressing, hateful sense (ive been through that already), but in a liberating, longing sense. i long for more. God, i know there is more to life than having a job just to create comfort for myself. and thats what i feel like ive been doing for so long, and now that i dont want to strive for comfort anymore, im having a hard time figuring out how to strive for.....more.

i want to see things that most people dont get a chance to. i want to create something that only i could create, and i want others to enjoy/benefit from it. i want to be uncomfortable. i want to give others all the shit that i have and dont need. i want to be able to hear the movement of everything. i dont want to be ignorant. i want to love someone in just the way they want to be loved. i want to be a servant. i want to learn. i want to teach. and i want to be broken enough to always turn to the provider of all and the lover of all.

how can i start doing these things now? i guess i can start by getting up out of my comfortable bed and laying on a mexican blanket under the stars. i think thats what Jesus would have done anyway.

nostalgia usually smells

has anyone ever heard that the sense of smell is very closely connected to memories? well, i have. a certain smell will bring back vivid memories of a time or person that the smell has been connected to in your mind. its usually unexpected, which makes it nicer, i think. but as i write this i realize it is difficult to bring back that same vividness without the smell to induce it. however, i can still remember a few that were brilliant enough to imagine long afterward.

i cant remember where it was, but i smelled chlorine recently and i was flooded with memories of my old house. my brother and i swimming in our pool, and wet hair in the summer sun.

with the grass beginning to grow again, neighborhoods are spotted with fresh cut lawns. this is one of my favorite smells and the memories that it summons are too many to recount. perhaps being sweaty, or sitting in the dried up creekbed.

almost painfully have i smelled the perfume of an old love and recalled memories of her. i am unfortunately attracted to wherever the smell came from. damn you, mass-produced victoria's secret girly fruit smell!

and just today my nostrils captured something i cannot quite categorize. there was a thunderstorm (understatement), a raspberry altoid, sweaty palms, and.....i cant remember. it was a mixture of smells along with the music i was hearing, i guess. i dont really know what it was, but it made me want to relish in some type of temporal lunacy. or maybe it wasnt lunacy, but rather.... love. its hard to tell the two apart these days.

i hope tomorrow i come across a blueberry pancake or a sticky pine tree or perhaps another thunderstorm.