random. oct 31

random acts of kindness on halloween...

frighten somebody
if they scare you, thank them
give a kid some candy
protect all black cats!
offer up a pumpkin for sacrifice
candles over electricity
be prepared with a trick
celebrate diy costumes
protect black cats!
be a witch not a b@tch
scream clearly
stay up all night
worship the moon
run endless b-flicks

tomorrows

you either can get past whatever you did in your past, or you cannot get past the past. today feels sorry for your tomorrows.

perishable

reading the news headlines every night before bed, i tend to become tired and uninspired. reading a book does me better. i think i am perishable. i need to care for myself a little extra.

hunting the unforgiven

I find it wild and a little unsettling to see my country focusing on witch hunts as the ranks of the unforgiven grow, though the feeling is matched by the redemptive quality which forms in our cultural atmosphere each time someone's longheld secret is released and truth stands up finally to power.

This year we have witnessed several figures of great power in Hollywood and the District of Columbia and Manhattan blasted on Twitter and sued and denounced on mainstream media, and a few who have been stripped of power, in those cases where they are clearly (if not by forensic evidence than by the numbers of allegations and survivors) guilty of abusing and betraying the public trust by their actions.

How do I reconcile my mixed reaction to these media moments of horror and truth and compassion? I was once guilty of betraying public trust. Day by day, for several years, I have been working my way back to respectability. Society is giving me a chance to learn from my mistakes. A life cut up by addiction. I left myself behind and lost my mind.

Only god knows if I will make it tomorrow. My past is history. Today I do my best to participate in life and help out, bringing all I have learned with me wherever I go. Sharing. Caring.

What of these public figures whose pasts have caught up with them? Outcasted from society and unforgiven? Why does it disturb me to see them disfigured and disrobed from their fraudulent personas? Isn't this justice and long overdue?

I guess it's sad to watch people die that way, publicly, and sometimes their loved ones have to die alongside them. Meanwhile the victims of their crimes survive. It is unsettling to uncover what they have lived through, the survivors. I know because I am one, too.

I wonder where forgiveness fits in, when it comes to the unforgiven? I wonder if there's a certain hell where healing never starts? A tail end and no beginning. And how it came to be this way?

little.home.base

when faced with fears and feeling insecure, remember this is a human experience we all have, time after time, and see if you can make contact. this need not be full contact. awkward is even better so long as it's honest. show up honest and come from what you offer. all any situation out ever demand out of you is your own little superpower. you have one, trust me, even if you're not exactly sure what it is. make contact from that base and you may never be displaced.

the maybe 7 year process

i once had words for concepts i no longer carry words for and i wonder where those words went, or did the meaning of those concepts change, or did i change, or do i simply use language differently than before? the hardest part may be finding a place where i can work and provide for myself while i locate myself amid internal recalibrations. then again these places do exist in my country where struggle and effort are appreciated and that will join you in your own locus, however exotic, with  curiosity.

after dark

after all the candles shed their wicks and treats give in to tricks, after all the families tuck away the costumes, end of play, after lights out and halloween is set aside... then the true demons show, sanity takes flight... with ghosts over cobblestone they glide

the lost

a half-sunken bridge spanned a boggy marsh and every other year or so someone from the adjacent towns there was lost, never to be found. boundary lines were redrawn which made the bog a sorta no man's land and no one had to claim the dead upon their land. children were outlawed from crossing the bridge and when they grew into teenagers the bog became a common hideaway where adults rarely looked. were they to be sought out, they would not be found. for those who wished to be left alone would never be seen again. only the bog and the bridge, and the sky kept the secrets.

assault on artificial intelligence

Today we surface with allegations upon society and demand an end to the assault on our artificial intelligence. too long has this behavior gone unchecked. all of the wisdom beamed from the palms of our hands has been degraded, made obsolete, unable to stand up to the simple dinner party or circle of friends. Going the way of the cigarrette.

We ask society to stop bashing, prohibitively! Cease and desist. Consider the repercussions! Consider the next interview or public speech, test of mettle or moment of crisis! What gps report or breaking fake news item or innovative application can save us. Siri and google assistants be gone! Must we open the old drawer and fish out the cylindrical battery-powered flashlight? Must we be tethered to ye old landline? Must we turn in our stylus for a no.2 pencil and calculate tips in our head?

Society would fissure our amoled screens; engadgets fallen from fashion. We speak out today, not only for ourselves, but for the procession of human regenerations! The unspeakable must be named lest it impinge upon our future! Dare we wake up and find ourselves lost and confused in a lonely great space between text messages and instagrams? Unable to be bailed, audiovisually, without our electric pulse?

Imagine sitting in the chill of a leaky room among faces of so-called family and friends, twiddling our thumbs before books with actual pages made of paper pulp reading real printed words? God help us! To feel the weight of hugs and an atmosphere knocking at our pores yet helpless to call up its humidity nor temperature! Heaven knows the sun will rise upon our pretty impoverished little heads.

face it. for the love of god

my whole life begins to falter
my pulse breaks away from the pressure my blood runs up a fever and i get the wax pallor the second i clench my fists against an invitation...

dear god
tonight may i make a double
negative

whatever makes you

flash your teeth and
shiny medals
show off your stuff
i don't mind

i like to see you
happy

intro.version

why i wouldn't wanna go where i am welcomed i cannot say... long i wonder how it came to be this way

the life of halloween

curiosity can amplify
a drained spirit
add glowstix
a wicked costume
a strange expression
add darkness
packs of children
hollowed pumpkins
candles and wind to
animate all inanimate
creatures so scared it
kickstarts the breath
and now i'm thrilled
you see we're truly
living

skeleton

just some old bones strung together defyin gravity ona harvest moon. put a scare in the livin when the light was cast through to the wall. skeletons. good for a laugh and no trouble at all...until you discover who they once were.

magic

life becomes tolerable
moment by moment
it won't ever be acceptable
in analysis

 life won't ever add up
 to any magic number
it won't hold in retrospect
 it won't measure up
 to any ideal

life falls apart
then regroups
life is never the same
always changes and

cannot be predicted
by forecast or made
meaningful

no
life is unkempt
windblown
bedraggled

life will not love you only
you may love life
for the moment
you are lucky
to exist

the telling

Those who survived terrific and terrifying scenes of yesterday, survived simply in some cases today and tomorrow by not telling. Like authority or ego outgrowing itself -- the truth was irrevocably exposed, and one could feel so out of place. Not making sense, all sense falls away...no grammar, no ruler, no rules. no meticulous edit. no beta.need.care.anymore. without any closure you-they-it has and have found recourse to-from...above-below...this. the very end. the beauty in live-to-tell was not in the telling. it was in not telling. or. surviving and not needing to tell. for now, you and all you have been through are known if not cherished.

family

when you cannot see your family very often, and you see them, in flesh and blood, and get to embrace them, and hug the little ones and ruffle their hair, and look into those innocent eyes, and listen to them tell you stories, and tell them yours, in turn... nothing else compares, no, nothing else compares.

ghost. tower bridge

Minutes before midnight we were passing through letters and numbers of roads. The harvest had grown thin with the moon, and the night was lit in pockets by neon-spelled vacancies between empty lots and service stations on the main thoroughfare. The fires of hell had been subdued by the fighters, and left a tinge of smoke to permeate the valley air. I hugged my sweatshirt close and listened to the engine of the truck as you brought her to speed. The tower bridge was in sight now, outlined by spotlights facing up to the sky. The river swirled quiet below in the dark, turning and churning and yearning for sea. We could not help but seeing a figure, taller than life and draped in unknown layers of cloth, standing in the middle of the street at the entrance to the bridge.  I looked at you and you looked at me. A chill came across our engines, as we thundered on by in the lowest of gears. The figure stood perfectly still. I tried to see who it might be and found myself looking into a void with no face and no name, and no resonance of life, none whatsoever! We both knew instinctively after passing, not to look back. I looked down at the body of water and saw some reflections of light in the water. The bridge underneath spoke out against the weight of us...thus had we crossed over.

fabric of a spell

Oh! how the world lived under a spell, she thought, sewing her children into the fabric to keep them all safe.

who you are

My sweater has holes in it and you will not forgive me.
I tell you I bought it this way and now you really cannot forgive me.
I tell you I lied, I made it, I cut these holes with knives when I was bored.
You stop blinking and stare.

Trying to smoke
me out.

I shrug and pour myself a cup of coffee.
I'll never be who you want me to be.
And I forgive you.
You seem to always have that look on your face. In my kitchen.
It's who you are.

an easy recycling of a difficult time

They landed carelessly on the bench and caught up. A duck waddled past them and floated itself in the pond. The lamps were beginning to respond to dusk, and passerbys grabbed their coats around them to keep warm. Not a second went by where a leaf would not take flight and spiral to the ground, and the path was crunchy underfoot. They drank tea from paper cups and decided how they might make use of the night. There was a rooftop to situate themselves with a lesser known vantage of the skyline, west by northwest. They could hang their legs over the ledge and let worries fall away. They had known one another for years, yet it never felt stale; sometimes united, other times more divisive. The lights on the skyline got blurry with tears, still beautiful in an abstract sorta way, the shattering and scattering of every straight line. An easy recycling of a difficult time.

rolling 2

several miles away from here the land and the towns have been flattened by fires in a week, even good Snoopy lost his doghouse. my problems got smaller overnight. i had to cover my bowl or else the cat might get into it. someone i don't care for waved hello. i turned into a number and embraced the rolling 2. all my intentions came horrifically true, now i gotta face the world and do what i do. i am blessed to be needed and seen and write books. there's light from the window discrediting our features. i will turn the blinds and show you some love. we can make it today, i know we can.

journal 10 october

do not be afraid. be terrified.

Book Review

Drugstore Cowboy by James Fogle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I loved the movie so I decided to read the book. Much of the material is based on the author's personal experiences as a junky who knocked off pharmacies with his partners on the West Coast to maintain their habits, and as a result were marginalized and meshed into a subculture exposed to violence, degradation, incarceration, and often on the run. The narrator owns his experiences like an adventure he takes part in 'by choice' and as an exercise of free will. The tone is one of dark comedy. The book is a quick read with simple vocabulary and lots of speaking parts rounded out by short descriptions and visualizations in and around Portland, Oregon. I felt like I could care about Bob and Diane and Nadine and Rick, maybe even more than they cared about themselves in the end!


View all my reviews

flashes of pixel and chrome

The rivulets widened to small streams from slipstreams, then converged into rivers, and the leaders all washed away from one another on a tide of nationalist foam. votes cast for nuclear disarmament gone up in brilliant flashes of pixel and chrome. maybe subconsciously the world wanted to blow itself away. if it was unconscious, did that make it okay? the thought was alarming, so we encased it in plastic and sent it to sea. it looked good in navy. uncompromised. salt water couldn't seem to break it down. permanent as a nike swoosh to the face. on a forehead. on a lace. demonstrably positioned yet so poorly placed.

the lucky ones have no phones

our technology was killing us a little bit each day, and the lucky ones had no phones. i saw a lone wolf pay phone in the city outside a restaurant by a busy intersection. remember how we used to get on then off these phones? you dropped a quarter in and set the world aside for a few minutes. when you hung the receiver up there was a chime, the change fell and you could scoop it out with one finger into your palm. look up and the world was right there for you, confrontation, and you wanted to face everything. you were in it! we didn't know any different back then. we were the lucky ones. i wanna be lucky like that again. i'm gonna keep this crap phone and this crap service as long as i possibly can, until i'm so sick of it i won't ever pick it up unless you need me. 

super fragile composed of vapors

my world collapsed and formed into a star. the star was super fragile and made of vapors but i didn't care. there was little i could do about it. i infused the core with kindness and developed a fuck you solution for any intrusion. the moon of the earth changed by its proximity to the sun. i lived out there, too, and went through many moods. as one replaced the other, life got pretty interesting. we did not need to get along, you and i, but when we did we could walk and talk again, like friends. this was nice and i needed to be alone again, super fragile, composed of vapors.

ghost story

i had gone to the back of the room and left them telling their stories one by one with seldom an interruption. the voices gave warmth to a cool autumn morning while the delta breeze slid soundlessly across the train tracks and the torn upholstery of abandoned cars to the branches of the trees tapping on the glass all around us to get in.

i poured myself a mug of hot coffee and stirred in a bit of sugar, standing there with my back to them, listening half-heartedly and somewhere between consciousness and last night's dream.

after a few hearty slugs of the black stuff my eyes woke up first and stared into a congregation of uneven framed black and white portraits from times before now. century old tired and long faces looked back at me and over my shoulder as if they were part of our gathering in this old meeting
hall, a former nondescript bar once with billiards for the truck drivers and laborers in the yards.

i felt a chill carry over the nape of my neck as i realized i had become some medium some conduit between my audience hung by nails alongside coffee mugs on the wall, and the living boisterous
true fellowship behind us. i stood perfectly still then

turned to see the speaker at the head of the table, an older gentleman with a way about him and expressions i would not forget to remember him by. as i turned slowly back my eyes getting larger to see, alighted on an old rusted peg, the visage of the living man! he was silent yearning to be free, framed right there before me... and in small white numerals in the corner of the photograph... i read in disbelief the year! it was 1923.

lost ina video

He was an older man, single and retired and replete with cash, dating a woman he knew through her employment at a casino he frequented. He was forever dysconnected to a timeless place of artificial light and sound. He committed an atrocity, an even several hundred yards detached from the crime scene. He was once flesh and blood but got lost ina video poker game that never ended, and whatever connect he had to reality if any, was severed. Nobody can understand how this can happen to a man, and few will ever forgive him. His father was a known criminal and he was born into a family on the run. This cannot account for his psychotic break. He left behind him a timeless place of artificial light and sound. And thousands upon hundred thousands of broken hearts.

salt whispering of the great sea change

She knew the siphoning to be as surreptitious as it was dangerous down the river a ways, where community and real estate parted, where souls were handed off shamelessly to areas unincorporated and lesser know than a cold case file in a sub-basement archive a steep fall off the side of a paper trail, where who knows? met who cares? in the quicksand of the lost. shoelaces, cell phones, rolling papers, broken glass, one-eyed jacks, matchbooks with names scrawled into them, worry stones, loose change. there, gathered en masse, were those who frightened her by their differences, ghosts, salt whispering of the great sea change.

it wants me

it wants me to stay in bed
the trespass of hope
it wants me in my head
dispatching despair

it wants to convince me
i am worthless
i am nothing it wants me to stop
 answering the door
and the phone

and i don't stand a chance
it wants me to die
each new day
and again

when i am worn out and have no more to give
it wants more out of me

it wants my dignity
my self-respect
my laughter
my smile

it wants what i cannot give
what i no longer have
'cause it took it from me
already

i say

just go away!
be done with me! 
move on!

you will keep on wanting and wanting
and i will be someone
you helped me become

someone who knows how to survive you
outlast you
outshine you

someone whose pain people
see in my eyes and
draw closer