as if
i lived
in a silky cocoon
with light
would i
make
a butterfly.
don't try to get
people to like you, they will
hate you.
oh my love,
the reflections in your eyes.
you belong here just like me.
i remember uncle michael rowed us out to the baby island off the little island to hang a skull and crossbones from a dead tree. it was to this baby island that i escaped him, and hung close in the sea wind to an arbutus by the cliff, whose skin was soft and cool and a great comfort to me.
how small his oculus, but how compound.
how come you dogs are such good listeners? i know it's not just because you don't talk.
my dad hated his brother, called him that fag. both are dead now so it doesn't really matter but it matters to me that i'll never know what really passed between them. shit, i'm still in a fugue-state about what passed between us.
i lost it in the memorial garden.
no you didn't, i found it in a tote bag at the bottom of the closet.
wait, what are we talking about here?
i saw two minutes of this old cuban film when the bastards set the tails of cats on fire to burn their enemies crops. i think it may have had something to do with revolution but what kind of revolution torches cats? i turned it off hissing foul words and barking disgust. i hate to think of the documents of art we don't preserve.
it's ok, it's only a movie.
but the fire, i'm sure is real.
native optimism reconfigured as survivor guilt.
fortune for mary: you have a hidden talent that will be much in demand.
i imagine they said of him, he'll live, he's too weird to die.
last embrace of grasshopper.
copp loves rambutan.
i love rambutan.
sam's reading about vampires. sam tells me the old testament only mentions vampires once. i tell sam i think there are a lot more vampires now, or they are a lot more popular, though perhaps the fashion has just changed with the technology and they were always sexy popular.
i didn't know
all that sam tells me.
the waves were gentler today, allowing us into the great lake, though the dogs had trouble seeing my yellow ball in the sun-stippled water. yesterday me and mister missed the morning swim and in the afternoon. i dropped onto the little spit of pebbled beach over the sea wall and mister waited above while i popped up and down. as soon as i persuaded him to join me two big waves crushed up against the sea wall and i hoisted mister up one level and i never saw him leap the second level so fast. we are getting older and more respectful of the chancy prospect and wonderful power of the inland sea.
the waves!
they can build sea walls, they can erect libraries for ex-presidential monsters on top of the last sanctuary for birds, but they cannot stop the waves.
also noted, another mysterious set of clothes, grasshopper green bugati windbreaker, 4- inch platform sandals, black panties. i scanned the horizon, and searched the bushes for fake-drowners napping, but all was pacific, save the sea. i will interpret this little pile of human jetsam as the marker of a real good time.
i saw a sign today, for a lost cat named grim.
haunting the familiar.
you gotta get in to get out.
did you hear that, fen?
the old bastards
are at it again.
be my, be my baby, my one, and only baby, be my, be my baby now.
this is out of context only as the context is unimportant, the gist is i have tepidation, i mean trepidation, ha, then someone asks me to do something, with trepidation, and i can't convince them because i have too much trepidation myself already and i don't know why so it's better to just say i have trepidation and let it go?
synchro-meshes of a summer afternoon.
yea 500 pages later i'm finding a little life a bit of a slog, i don't think that's a slur, it's just damn harrowing and looong. yet i wonder that i found a haunted comfort in this character, this jude, perhaps because he was so very harrowed himself, and people adored him anyway and because of his harrowing beauty, the haunting familiarity i assume others in the novel had with him. it cuts home to me because i could have been a cutter too, though had nothing like the life he had to release, and i only had to do it once to wake in terror of what i might do if.
and so, so dissolute, why did i write the author, i wonder what i expected or hoped. nothing, just acknowledgement from a stranger familiar, a reciprocal of that dark emergence she may have had, reading her own character. nevermind, i won't wait, i've always been waiting.
fen under a concrete lion hears distant thunder.
when he said he was away on business it was the business of euphemism, though i didn't know the word.
you wouldn't wanna die with a fantasy of release on your mind. so find release in living.
mister jealousy
my subconscious won't obey. call it that.
this crumbled platform was my diving board before. the water is higher than ever, but the shore is still a shallow jumble of broken forms.
sometimes knowing you is my only solace
and that scares me a little lot.
today i feel the indifferent seduction of the world
and the suction of a vanished dream.
we clouds of matter
form and precipitate.
the axiom of equality. i read that but axioms don't stick with me. yet i like the sound of it.
deep, like 500 pages deep, into a little life, i was feeling harrowed. i wanted it to stop, but was stubborn and unwilling to make it stop, after loitering so long there. then i decided the end will be rewarding at least in the way the sun glinting at the edge of a deep dark forest is, when you've been long lost by choosing.
welcome home. thanks.
lily, mister, and goldie.
i found two dragonflies on spider bridge and one of them was alive, the other one was missing a head and i thought maybe they had a battle to the death over the traffic. i placed the insect on this branch and she clung on weakly, her eyes looking grey and clouded. she may have gotten a second wind. i didn't see her today.
hilde doesn't get in the fountain so the girl comes out to her.
comet gets girl to play fountain ball.
it's a relief to stop the buzzing.
the waves!
