90% of songs are about getting in love or getting out of it

people who have seen and felt little sometimes become the most seemingly adept ministers of the imagery of strangers. strangers to them and to you and to me.

a sign of maturity is when you start hating cruelty far more than stupidity
this isn't profound or anything, but some assholes in the car yesterday reminded me of it

on a related and hypocritical note:
i'm operating on the hope that we passed a sensibility initiative at the last town hall meeting but the secretary typoed it in as "sensitivity"


i swear this song is about jesus

there is something beautifully oppressive about snow. 
piled up.  tremendous.  clumped.  vast.
humbling.  soft.  crystalline.  deadly.
i want that smell of tulips again, raw and ethereal in my winter room.

why did we ever standardize standing?
fuck the protestant work ethic.

i'm exhausted with feeling parenthetical.

in my dream upon waking, an older couple sat abreast, giving that blank documentary film stare.
wife:  theoretically, if the world was absent of God's law, who would you marry?
husband:  Frank Sinatra, because he was against all homos

i want a happier day but the weather doesn't declare it

those we've loved become memories
those who have loved us become strangers
we tread trackless upstream flicking crumb trails into the rill

you cannot substitute Splenda for sugar in baked goods
it is the taste but it is not the substance
it's the same with intention and enterprise
disappointment has become the rite of passage

This felt like the last Christmas.  She fell two days ago, flat on her face.  The x-rays showed no breaks, but they don't test the synapses.  The bruise on her cheek is from temple  to chin.  Who knows what the other ones look like.  The Vicodin swishes away her last scraps of lucidity.  She has always pushed ever onward towards the next holiday, but this will be a long haul.  No one came for Easter last year anyways.  So, in the spirit of believing that this is probably the end of an era of my life, and the end of my family as I know it, I'll recap.  Jim showed up early, who knows why, after his Thanksgiving meltdown.  If he had said one word I was ready to pounce and I think he knew it.  Oh, and he might be gay, which would shed a damn lot of light on the divorce.  Kayla is undoubtedly anorexic.  Her embarrassment over her dad's behavior was obvious.  Amy and Rob seem happy as clams.  She fucking loves the macaroni and cheese.  I really wish them the best.  Holly apparently broke up with Chad.  I watched Amy pick at her the way she always does...maybe it's not as benign as I thought.  Maybe.  I really wanted to talk to Holly more.  We seem to have a lot in common.  She's trying to get into a grad school, maybe Chicago.  I told her I checked out her art online and was impressed.  Kenowa is filing Chapter 11 and Paul might be losing his job soon.  Peggy seems to have recovered well from the stroke awhile back and was markedly friendly.  She seems to alternate, maybe depending on the drug of choice.  Rachel was Santa with a lot of help from Joseph.  Together they were almost competent.  At my request we watched the home movies he shot with that huge old camcorder while waiting for the rest of everyone to arrive.  It felt like the last time I would ever see these people. Maybe they're done with this place.  Done with the same passive aggressive bullshit.  Done with the same food.  Done with the frenzy and the exhaustion.  The problem with family is that you don't get to choose it.  If you're not lucky enough to have a natural cohesion, you come apart.  He was super glue, she's Elmer's.  Elmer's is washable.

 on the way home from picking my mom up from work today...

mom:  I like working with these younger people.  They're not so.....
me: ...stuffy?
mom:  They're not so...they're not so....emo.

I wheeled and dealed a Cabbage Patch Kid for Rachel tonight at Meijer for 44% off the in-store price.  When I pay close to wholesale against the intentions of the retailer, I am compelled to think I am practically fighting consumerism.  Her name is  Bonnie Beatriz.  Mine was named Henrieka Jo.

i'm going to pretend this story was for me.  anyways, i stole it.
"once there was an ocean surrounding a nameless mermaid, lost between waves.  in the dark everything looked like her home, so every morning brought a bright nightmare.  her salty world was full of dull emerald greens and slimy living tentacled creatures.  underwater, time is changed into a dreamlike wobbly concept."

i need to finish something, need something to be done.
it's the snake eating its tail.
i'm not helping anyone.
currently debating a number of pseudo-academic pursuits
sexploitation exposé ala ethnographic cinema, documentary music (whatever the hell that is), seminary, philosophy of infinite regress/linguistic usage of le definition, disposable photographic mosaic portfolio, advanced kickboxing...
what the fuck do i want anymore?

"to believe something is to express a certain confidence in its future." ...and a certain trust in madmen
you can't answer to the nature of mass, force, space, time, thought, infinity... you just regurgitate the relative framework, the equations.  observations do not have to be guided.  is this from whence we apprehend art?  can't find the absolute center so we peg ourselves there and measure outwards from our fingertips.  what if the important stuff is just over that hill?  we live at the 'top' of the earth - and this accommodates racism.  i've got a half-hearted mission to find my jungle gym playmates so to retrieve my memories.  this might not pan out.

you keep saying how surprised you are.  and it just sounds like disappointment.

trite introspection:
first you will say hey and i will say hi.  we'll sway avant-garde in teeming moonlight such as this.  i'll hold onto hope, you'll be attracted to some of my faults.
we will push upon each other too hard, too fast.
you will disappoint me, and i will push you away.
you'll pull off the wool.
divergence.  resignation.  a lingering nostalgia.
this is just the way things (don't) work.
again, and again, and.........

let's imagine.  let's suppose.  let's pretend.  tie the ends to the four corners.  enhanced canicular sweat.  an ironclad guarantee of the shudder and shake of winter excursions catapulted into a pitcher of artificially sweetened lemonade.  a skip and a float instead of a spring.  tethers locked in for the ride of the century.  inked up arms dovetail fleshy curves.  markers of endurance on a thin outer shell.  lifelong emblems for hefty aspirations - the rock-hard agendas of youth.  to be looked at, lusted after, laid under.  totem.  mar.

'one long ago who gave just one rose.'  one ripe peach dripping down my chin, all innocence clouding up the soft night.  he smiled, watched, never leapt.  his rose a yellow starburst bloom, kept in a box.  became dust.
you have a very different definition of sound.  induction being superstition persists as our only functional mode between now and when.  sweatbands on boys is the recurring theme.  grin.
i gravitate to this place.

live this body up while it's alive.  am i in here?
things stop functioning properly, become prone to aches, breaks, disease, rot, dust...
sunburn off the skin, peel it back and release into the invisible

if you save a thought to finish it later, the first part generally becomes meaningless by the point of your return.
i've been falling over on my bike.  not crashing, just falling over at a near to full stop.  i'm sure it looks rather comical.  but i am near mastering my shoes.  oh how i could walk on the moon in my shoes.  today i pulverized my knee real good.  i'm building up some pretty groovy battle scars.
going up to the family scarcely resembles home anymore.  piece by piece one world flits away and a strange and beautiful and grotesque scenery edges in.
so i'm firmly settling into the unfamiliar while persisting in a love affair with my itunes and new and amazing ice creams.
and trying to figure out a way to swing lollapalooza.

and these things are enough for now.
but my fucking pool still isn't open.

been clicking away at filling up my life with things shiny and new
butted-steel bicycle number two
paying credit card bills where credit is due
if a devil lurks, he lurks in memories of you


oh, and spandex.
seriously.

letting down what i didn't ask for to begin with.  taking an inventory of the cares i don't want.  tired as all hell, a lone fiddle in the night.  the more i sleep the less i sleep, the most i slept already.  that one with one tooth missing but very much like the man fucking your wife reminds me of what shouldn't have been - a freak-out of personality cults, a conscience cloud, a weird musical presence in days of smiling closed-eyed drug-enhanced perpetuation.  a pretending of an absence of death-thoughts and god-thoughts and...relatively gone understanding.  that big city life accommodates the most unlovely distraction - blinking out personally in the collective plugging-in - is no end to the means.  swim into the swarm.  liven up.  die down.  liven up.  die down.

feeling like that caterpillar on the grass-blade bowing it over with a tiny weight.  green billows and heaves beside the manufactured pond beside the manufactured landscape beside itself with a thousand-stall garage.  feeling a sexiness of summer but lamenting the lust in cold comfort.  coming out of hiding?
i hear a new song and
i am
renewed, refueled
and a thirty track playback for ten years, a stunted growth, makes me shudder, seethe

i want to share
-but i'm not a child anymore-
bouncing balls thud on the grass, a squeal at a sound like a gunshot, a chorus of giggles
a swimming pool still covered as the apple blossoms.
and the little ones try to impress the bigger ones and the bigger ones try to impress the little ones.
and their minds and lives are useless and meaningless.

i'm distancing myself from her.
because she may soon go - or because of the mess of me i can't explain?
she doesn't understand, she doesn't remember
her wrinkles deepen, hair thins and breaks, clarity flitters in and away
she bears a sadness and displays a sadness
used to be regret.  now he's gone, seems a sadness at where things are on a brink of falling.
but i've distanced myself from her.  decay is setting upon us, new green things droop - ragged.  we're going to have to leave the place after all.

coming home in the dark.  tired, sweaty, out of breath
leave all the lights off, trudge to my room
prolonging the moment i must acquiesce to my empty bed
and for a few moments i can imagine the crumpled heap of blankets keeping cozy and warm a one that i want - fully, want.

slippin sleeping, a lamentable mess of shook around puzzle pieces
crushing cracked across kentucky tall grass
swimming in red, warming up skin in the smooth fullness of cotton
leaves explode into existence and snicker as i struggle to get full grown like that.
running anger up the flagpole, wincing at the desperation of it, but vindicated anyways in a stale sea of blank expressions
fumbling around other heads, grabbing only a few moments of respite - fucking light years from deliverance.
no one picking up on the furtive gesture of me groping for a hand's palm
or (fill in your own melancholy ambiguity here)
it always comes back to 4 a.m.

turns out the buck creek trail, which i thought was 10+ miles was only a mile.  fuck.  so i went up, back, up again, then dodged traffic to heritage park and got off at a dock which extended a ways into the lake with a little railed circular platform.  and i laid on the bench and listened to my exponentially growing (but currently stunted) playlist and hung my arm over the side and swung my helmet in the breeze and watched the 30-something republican soccer moms jog by.  but mostly i watched the black water-ripples.  amazing legs these women.  their legs aren't so noticeable to me when they're sweating at the fourth of july parade in their cordoned-off sidewalk patches, clapping and yelling for the special armed forces 7th division, who - in spite of the straight faces and shoulders - stare so sad as they march by.
my grandma doesn't like marlon brando.  never has.  and i realized, in her inflection tonight, as she greedily watched his american movie classics 2 hour biography, that she's threatened by his blatant sexuality.  i think i heard her mutter "i can't imagine ever acting that way about a man" and i said "what" and she said "nothing."  and she never does that.  she's so used to repeating herself.  they both had shot hearing for upwards of 15 years together.  but now that he's gone..........maybe she's kicking habits, or maybe the habits just escape when she's not looking, though i suspect she wants them to stay.  but he's not there in his recliner next to her anymore watching the 11 o clock news then handing the remote over.  every night.  61 years is a lot of nights with someone you've never felt "like that" about.  yeah, it's still his recliner.  and i still feel him in the night every time i sit in it.  and tomorrow i'll bring him flowers. i didn't go all winter.  it's pretty much the same temperature year round at his depth.  that's why i made sure he had his long johns.  58 degrees forever would freeze him through.  christ.  his smell is almost gone from every part of this place.  these new smells don't do me good.  but i'll smell him when i mow the grass tomorrow.
oh, and i made straight As again, so my chances of getting a degree from a real university instead of this quickly deteriorating secondary secondary school look a lot better than they seemed yesterday.  even though it means an extra semester or an extra year.  but my history professor had to have keyed it in wrong.

i just...don't...get it.

1. thank you
2. be good
3. remember
4. stare
5. write
6. keep looking

(sorry, this one's for me)


the songs don't change, i do

just one more, then that's the end
then what?
wish i had one of those piano-bar voices
ride trails, jump in pools, stand in rain, sweat, basically get wet
happen upon a bluegrass circle, shop online, giggle and cry, get sick once, cook again, plant grandma's flowers, a little tv, catch up on movies, get a job, move, yoga, write wandering word strings, watch faces, watch bodies, scream, build new everything
right now a haircut
tomorrow it starts

a girl walked cold, eating and cradling an ice cream cone in the rain.  and i thought of people trying hard in spite of everything...
that's not me.  struggling yes, but more in valediction than anything else,
straining and waving goodbye to all that i abide, abiding nothing anymore
(except a child, nearly a woman, as we build each other into grown-ups)
but all the rest is disassembling and neatly stacking down into the original packaging.
and i'm planning a life of being unobtainable, of inheriting myself from my previous owners, usurers

the act of getting in someone's life is predicating your own worth
that's how a mother can leave her babies.
and god is...what, diffident?