On crabs, and parties. (1)

On Halloween I dressed as a kat boi, with ears and a tail, and a collar with a bell. I had girls tugging on my tail at a bar where I drank heavily. The colors of the lights behind the bar started off discrete and singular, and then all the lights began to bleed into one another and I realized that I was drunk. It was the middle of the evening, and I was drunk again. Life is a pattern that always folds neatly down the middle - the beginnings and ends are always the same no matter where we cut the cloth.

The next day I went to a crab feast north of Baltimore, where I drove for hours on 695 as I was lost. The road was an ocean and each partition of concrete thumped under my tires like waves. I began to think about driving like I do about swimming. My car ignored my thoughts and pushed onwards, leaning into the journey like trees lean into the wind and rain...Claire sat next to me and made my time passable. I wanted to throw up but did not, and that by itself was somewhat admirable.

The house where we finally arrived was small and cozy, and simple. It stood with little fanfare and I appreciated that - when we walked in I knew that this was a home and not simply a residence. We too often rent things spiritually, and never let our lives place roots out of fear. There was nothing to fear in this house except the scent of pumpkin pies, covered in obscene drawings done with shaking hands, a tremulous fork. I laughed as I ate cookies shaped like animals and doritos that vaguely nudged my Mexican memories before their taste vanished across the length of my throat.

-Rich

where the grain meets the heft of your skin

Poem.

The harsh salt spray becomes wind again
and taps against the end of my nose,
rubs against the mercury of my lips
and I cough from the advent of evening.
There are no soldiers here but we salute anyways
when girls parade past us
their arms trimmed golden by the glow of every sun
that has ever set over the east coast
on their way out west.
I round a corner and then
and then the bricks change course below my feet
where a pattern comes undone from effort
from overweight tenacity,
from diligent hunger that gnaws nightly
from finger to finger along the railings of our well defined lives.

-Rich
too much for you to remember

Songbirds in Eulogy

After a while life becomes a routine that we follow without realizing it. Even after we have realized it is a routine, we can never shake it. We may change the way we do things for a while but eventually our existence finds its own equilibrium, it's own level space. I wonder if perhaps I am in one now, or whether I have changed something just a tiny amount.

If I think of my life as a physical shape, it is flat. It is dry there, and in the distance I can see the faint shadow of mountains and foothills. I am certain that they exist, but I am afraid to extend my hand out past my body, for fear that I will hit a piece of paper. I live in that flat space where there is not even a grain of sand...fear keeps me from searching for one beyond what I can see. The sun rises and sets with variable times - it never seems to come up when I expect it to, and it sets when I am still cursing the sweat that stains my collars grey. My sweat stains grey and never brown. Brown is the color of the earth and perhaps a person has to feel connected to the earth to have that color. These days I look up and I know that the stars are lumped together into groups that make mathematical sense, that fall neatly into columns on worksheets. I have become a routine, a program that runs in futility. The air is dry and when I breathe in at night I know that I am tasting faint laughter that falls behind those mountains like a fugue of raindrops.

I have a textbook in front of me but nothing is coercing me to read it. Knowledge does not seem worth the effort to gain it. By the time a person learns something it is already meaningless - it has become less than nothing because you replaced something you knew with it. You replaced something you knew, that you knew! Truth is peeled away like the skin of an apple, and our innocence is held by the ridge of our father's thumb, where the blade rests and scrapes it away in spirals. After everything there is nothing but an empty striated shell and that is what we are now. That is what is left, that is what remains and I am certain that it is what we are now. A wind blows and I stretch like an accordion to sing with it - how sad that humanity has come to this, that we are only reactions to an impulse...

In the winter, snow will fall and cover everything. It will be like a Greek rite of mysteries, where phallic cults would sacrifice the King-twin, the tanist, and in that way preserve his innocence and his manhood. When the snow melts a wave of birds wil blanket those once empty spaces with song and we might even notice the butterflies returning, if we ever lift our faces away from the screens of computers. The earth will be renewed and it is a terrible thing that we will not. There is no spring for us...there is only this soft winter, this bleached existence, this wavering plane where sunlight dully shivers.

-Rich

you weren't looking for an answer so much as a song

Travel.

I am sitting in my room right now and it is early or it is late. Time becomes meaningless after enough sleep is lost. I have sheep that never needed counting, whose wooly heads adorn fake cashmere sweaters in open air markets.

I have returned from traveling and it is sometimes enough for me to look around and realize that and sometimes it is not. I feel like shit, as I ate fairly unhealthy food the entire time I was there, so this week it looks like I am basically doing a detox programme. I like spelling certain words in the British sense - it gives them a more fair sense of dignity, like those words died for freedom and for the world to know that freedom was worth dying for, once. Maybe it was beyond the stark grey trees that bloom wherever men congregate, maybe it was before everything we loved became an epithet.

I am listening to a dashboard confessional song and it is moving me and that fact makes me want to never listen to music again.

I talked to Sarah last night and everything in me wanted to stretch across states until it could wrap itself around her and keep her safe from everything. I don't know that she needs to be kept safe from herself but I would do it anyways, I would let her hate me if it meant she stopped hating parts of herself. Every movement is a celebration, every song is another votive candle.

I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep. I cannot have any more thoughts. They sting and bite so deeply, and sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I stopped thinking entirely, if my body simply took over and lived as it wanted to live, if it fucked like it wanted to fuck and sang with every animal's death song.

-Rich
we were against the windowpanes

Interlude.

There are trees in the distance that look like they were painted onto the mountain. The mountain looks like a sheet of paper and I have a growing urge to put my hand out and crumple everything I see into a ball. I want to tear the corners off of my view and unfold it again to find that everything has changed - that the trees are all around me and the room I am sitting in is far away, across the sea.

I have been lax in writing on my blog and much of it has to do with a sense of accomplishment with my last blog. Much of it has to do with how busy I am - and that bothers me. Writing has always been something for myself more than anyone else. I hate to think that I am starting to care less and less about myself, even if that is what appears to be happening.

I went shopping today and was startled by prices for just about everything. I am not a thrifty soul - far from it - but I have no desire to pay upwards of 600 dollars for a sweater. I'd rather just freeze my pretty little ass off instead. I am going to finish this take home final and then go back out for more shopping in the afternoon. There is no reason to be hasty about anything, anymore.

When I return I will call everyone I have missed so dearly and I will e-mail everyone that has sent me a missive. There is something about my home country that doesn't feel like home anymore, and once I noticed it I found that it wasn't my home country anymore. Perhaps that part of my life was folded up once or twice and rearranged where love touched love, where reality became thinner and gauze-like across the flesh of memory.

-Rich
me and you only in this heaven only here