Washing

Another pint glass and
small plates unused
for food communal.

Sun sags through
the window
sleeves pushed back again.

Another car pulls
and eyes stay,
nights become past.

Fish Dreams

I had that dream last night. I remember hunger and searching. Desperately casting hooks into still waters. I remember catching something; I don't think it'd even be correct to call it a fish but it was certainly from the water and needed water to live. Once in the boat- I think we were in a boat, or floating over the water- it began to die.

My muscles ached. My thighs burned, tense. Electricity coursing through my entire being. I am become death, frantic to throw it back. I looked for its mouth to loose the hook. No mouth. Just an existence without beginning or end, dropped in my lap and dying with no variation or possibility of affect.

I feel terrible today and it would be a lie to say I don't know why.

SFO to Montpellier. October 19th, 2012.

The ham sandwich at hand is much too tall for a human's mouth. I eat nervous, at the gate for a flight to France; I'm leaving my country again. This is a moment, I think, for a banal act of cruelty that oozes corporal. My brother once mentioned something Schopenhauer wrote about the balance of enjoyment and pain in this world, which we discussed, though briefly and in tangents, as we tend to, a fragment from long talks about anything outside of that place, that beautiful, haunting place dropped in the mountains, a mirage of kindness, a veneer over all the suffering piled up and all the pigs too depressed to live, dying into the infinite because they dared to possess the gall to ever be. I think of Levine's pig to slaughter and a drive through Detroit. This sandwich is not bad and it's never been great, all roots and swirling directions and vectors. This really is no time for studies in pessimism or supply chains, despite the joy it promises. Everyone I have met today has been kind and I get to play football again soon.

Twin Cities to the Triangle

Mirrored skies, we
cast stars in obverse,
hammered and ordered
a bullshit constellation.


It feels late
so I slip into moonlight,
voyeuristic and bleak.
A 747 shimmers.
A funhouse eye blinks back.

A Configuration of Kindness

Until yesterday, two young men lived in the same town. They were both twenty five years old and had chosen to wear beards. It was difficult to tell if these unkempt facial hairs indicated a penchant for fashionability or if they spoke simply of yet another intersection of carelessness and good fortune. These were not, however, just any two young bearded men. No, they were connected in a more profoundly peculiar way.

A Something Passing from My Life

We stood in the kitchen, chatting, H and L and B. It was a warm evening, late in the season. The door, wide open, probably sagged, the weight of primer slapped on and forgotten. The screen door was shut. A smell of charcoal lingered in the air or in our clothes. We stood, though lazily, leaning against a counter, a sink, a washing machine, things older than we. We ate Juanitas and salsa and drank casually, careful to stretch the day out a bit longer.

Footpaths

A rainforest lurks in the Piedmont.
Has all familiar howls
cries and calls.
Turtles strut
under watch
of jonquill cats,
all eyes and no motion.


It's left of Airport road
and nobody is there.