combustion

souvenirs

we followed a nun with a guitar up the streets growing to narrowness, covered still with words and faces and other political things. at el mercado de milagros we lost her and found a four man physical theater troupe rehearsing squarely between the hoops of a basketball court. they jumped on chairs and moved their hands together and sang about how a woman is like bread and also about the devil. a group of school children spread themselves around us and laughed at all the right parts. they were finished practicing and we were chased by rain to the inside of a small bakery with others who had been watching also. one of them invited us to his apartment where him and his friends and anyone passing by lived when they wanted. we smoked some until i was properly stunned by it all- a magnificent woman sat on the couch and let loose from her mouth deep, buttery sounds that made me feel like crumbling. they were talking about seafood, or borders? no, that was later. seafood and eating with one’s hands and they were all pretending to eat like that and laughing and rocking back and forth, and we were so stunned and silent on the couch, watching with seized chests at these people who were so beautiful and so sensual as the rain occasionally blew in as if to grasp at all of those wild dancing mouths.

“Last year was the strangest year I’d ever been involved in, it was the most brutal and bizarre…I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn’t even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was being blindsided by familiar things. I was pulling over to the side of the road, my head resting on the side window, trying to understand why things could be so green.”

You Shall Know Our Velocity, Dave Eggers

written on her wall

you have

been moved

by another human

being.

distance

in Cat’s Cradle, the “wampeter” is the pivot of a connection between humans. why, what brings these hands and eyes together, at this time, in this space?

there was a boy named tyler who i met on a greyhound bus out of taos, new mexico. we sat in mindful silence of a loved one preparing to hitch her way out of town. her thin frame melted into purple dusk, and then we read anais nin together and talked of wombs. “some ask, why is the sky blue? i say, cheer up sky.” and daniel, who braided my hair and slept leaning against my shoulder alongside the all-night fire pits and gave me mushrooms and will give me shoes. and of course, jacota, freed and fiery and complicated and strong to wander and bite and love. ashley, who invited me to share the strangeness of an experience, even though we were strangers, with whom i planned escapes from crazed traveller kids and hippies who soon became beings who offered stories at most moments of living. there are more, and i hope there will be so many more of these humans moving with and away.

last night i went with paco to an abadoned airfield in brooklyn to see the leonids shower. empty runways and crumpled “wrong way” signs in back lots. also police and marine corps on either side. we crossed the deserted highway and found a strangely clean path to a clearing where we rested into each other on a sleeping bag and waited for the fuzzed x-ray clouds to break. we drank wine and ate gouda and ciabatta and talked and tried to intertangle ourselves enough to warm limbs and faces. and there was so much wonder in the waiting and the mouths and the blue streaks that rarely but so magnificently exploded in and out of vision. we slept only briefly as the night got colder and in morning walked astonished the short path back to a now busy highway. the distance between those meteors and our staring up faces was so much less than the unfathomable crossing between the clearing and the highway where we waited for the Q35.

time is a leaf left in the morning of your hair. how does space feel as it grows into itself?  lonely?

small as stars, big as hands clapping, we meet again.

lonely masquerade

into the morning the joyful painted people start to droop and crease.

tears leak carelessly from silent eyes as the streetlights switch off, one by one

in the back alley alone

they walk, and we’ll never know those memories of childhood lovers

become bodies abandoned in empty bars

-so many collisions of small, terrible tragedies,

as the sun over lonely buildings

no matter where,

(it could be here)

brings them to their knees before beds now cold

wishing for how they imagine the hands of mothers,

soft, careful, still.

nomads

this tragedy is that you remind me of fires in the evening

night falling silent on faces, the sunned earth smell of sage bundle burning

and fields that asked nothing.

now, we slip penciled messages to each other down trash-chutes and into the hands of school-bound children.

we meet eyes as the measured tones of a cathedral mark 6,

but keep our hands and feet to ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

i can make till the Sunrise; so… why Not?

go ask alice

and when i tried to kiss her, the smell of her freshly painted lips repulsed me. i spit on the ground and my saliva sizzled until a very small but fully formed mushroom popped up from the earth.

In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” and left.