Tuesday, July 19, 2011

It's been a while

7/16
Neglectful birds become red clumps of feather on the highway,
bodies bribed into forgetting danger.
The dive begins
At the end of the day you're lucky to end up an aching heap of joints and mumbles.
We're like two lost marbles symbolizing the mind gone mad.
Are we still bookends if there are no pages to be bookended?
I need to have us bleed stories in between
& have a little breath making spaces in the salty air.
My footprints are yearning for meaning
heels coming awake all pins and needles.

Sometimes being with you is like that
pangs tingle like the fourth of July hot in my chest
chambers pumping blood like flaming arrows
the veins come untangled and
(almost) too fast
my heart comes awake to you.

Just outside summer is cracking up the sidewalks.
Loud green fingers
tickles though the rubble.
Beneath the stoic patches of asphalt
hoping energetically
"We'll get there!"
Now the story is not about eventuallies
This is about in the in between pushing up
green every day
making known the summer on your tongue.
Because being with you
my sweet & hungry summerling,
being with you is canaries waking up in my rib cage.

7/19
Up on the Hill they are pulling down the posters
using backward hammars.
The telephone poles have grown thick,
six inches before peeling down to tar,
strips of color
paled pastel pile up like half-hearted confetti.
Leftover shows crowd the sidewalk
higher than Seattle snow ever deigns to fall.

7/19
Twisted season
bent away from the sun
you can see the heat in the air.
Summer weighed down cloudy
& hot like a runners breath.

7/19
I saw him
sharp hat and tan suspenders
and he pointed me into a giggling coincidence.
"I wish I could take a picture."

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Words picked up in transit:

"Hold on!"
stop(s) the requested yellow lines
coins sleep, (only dancing) off-peak,
alcoholic safety problems manually break cover.
(&) push, push, push,
yellow & red line activities may be recorded.

(With) property littering respect,
red pulls down.

Do the right thing (in all caps):
Extinguish her inside(s)
(with yawning corded) release.

in the Year of Zoll

Sometimes I just can't believe that I live in the 21st century.
It's not that I can't wrap my head around scientific adavances
like robovacuums
and bacon flavored vodka,
it's more so the fact that that I can't even get comfortable
with writing out the numerals 2011
(as well as all the nostalgia clustered around that discomfort).
Every time I write it out complete
I don't see a number at all.
In point of fact, all I can see
(until I put other numbers around it)
is the word
Zoll.

Now this may be entirely due to poor penmanship on my part,
but I find I quite like living in the year of Zoll.
Indeed, I find I greatly prefer it
to living even in the notorious 21st century.
All necessary respects being given to the visions of Jules Verne,
the gadgets here buzz ostentatious,
too busily widening the having gaps.
Smartphones have become a nearly clear-cut socieo-economic identifier.
Incomes expend and the Apps pile up like magazines
on the cement in your uncle's garage.

Zoll is much miles less mundane.
In the year of Zoll
people began punctuating their buttonholes with pinwheels
and folding manifestos into fortune cookies.
Zoll opened with daisy-mouthed whimsy.
23 turtles sunbathing.
Hashbrowns that couldn't help but be slipped from your best friend's plate.

Zoll was the year that progress and gentrification finally saw through each other's skins,
began seeing other people,
only making contact prophylactically, and under the safety of goose-down covers.
Venn diagrams became very popular,
so much so that it seemed you could draw them about anything
and anything else.
Zoll became all about intersections and collisions.
Nobody scorned garish outbursts
or crying out while masturbating.
It was in the year of Zoll that they started cracking down on empty intercourse,
volunteers posted conversation prompts in elevators
and bathroom graffiti was encouraged
by mandating each stall have at least one wall lined blue like notebook paper.
Etiquette instructors secretly bit their nails, and became more obsolete.
On new years night the mountains called out cloudy-voiced to the Moon
and She broke open like a dusky pinata
showering our archived bones in foldable light and clockwork mnemonic devices.