ten three

barometric
pressure, a tight
upper arm squeeze.

inside arm, not
the skingrab
you’d get used to.

feels like
that hard swallow
sensation,
when you gulp
too fast
a rock elbows
through your
esophagus.

but this

not in your throat:
it’s hard, sharp
unproductive wrench.

pain without
destination.

a hurt
without result,
eventual
accustomization.

it slips away:
absence
unrealized.

not bonespeak,
the whisper of marrow
to calcium,

but bonescream:
alien frequencies
of titanium where marrow
was, protesting
biological framework.

foreign decibels.

hard reverberation
repeating bruises
on soft walls.

ten two

one bud buried

deep

in a small canal
screams alive
scares silence away.

grabs anxiety
wraps it tight
in a packed crowd
in the dark

for a show
of transcendence.

unending growth:
the bloom & fade
of tirade,
serenade,

shuffle, repeat
and finally

sleep.

ten one

efficacy is a child
of the greed
of time
and the necessity
of accomplishment.

i don't know
what this means
other than
i had to get
something
down to get the
dreaded first line
out of the way
so that i could
actually write.

i have decided
and have decided
to stick with my
decision
to write

one poem
every day
for the month
of october.

bed is whispering
at me
and i am going
to have to hash
this out quick.

eleven-thirty is
early for me
but late for a day
full of listening
to idiots

screw over
the family, the
kids they
have. that i
wish i could
have.

they say if
we all threw
all our
problems into
a giant pile
for everyone
to see,

we'd scramble
to get ours
back again.

but i might
let mine tumble
into the dust clouds
and grab
for something
unfamiliar.

just to have it
different.

just to have
a new burden
to hold onto

and to learn.

dusty

oh, blog dear, i apologize. you fell down behind the desk a few months back, and while i intended to pick you up only moments after, i got busy, see. drawing projects, work, time with new friends, the urge to write smothered under so many little businesses.

now it is september. the little businesses are not any less than they were. but summer is so good at smothering all but one urge at a time. thank goodness for september. september wakes you up again, with the cool, crisp edges it puts on everything. including the edges of myself, and i see defined the hole in the middle of all of me, so very well defined, and the need to write becomes once again a singularly physical thing, like breathing, like being.

today on twitter i mentioned that i needed to move to some place where it was autumn all the time, so i would always feel that physical need to just write write write. well, where the physical need would turn into not just a need, but a compulsion. necessities are so easy to brush away when it's all a swelter and a sweat in long, dry, toasted months.

september tastes like blank notebooks, pens and possibility. and october tastes like poems. i can feel them, the fruit of them, ripening on all my inner branches. branches that look deceptively like blood vessels, or neurons. in a few weeks, they will drop willing, and i will suddenly have more than i know what to do with. bushels that i can't gather fast enough, before the ripening makes them too sweet. and they'll be jarred away on soulshelves, pulled out again in march where the bite of time and the tang of afterthought can only let the faintest hint of freshness through. not poems, but the afterimage of poems. the ghosts of poemnegatives, too old to turn into proper pictures.

but listen to me! lamenting the bottling of fruit that is still hanging pre-perfect on the soultree. inedible at the moment, but soon. soon.

back to our regular programming

grey today, the clouds outside make the air feel smothery, it's humid and not grossly hot, with a bit of a campfire twinge to it from all the burning up our state has been doing. pre-thunderstorms, i like. still like, despite the way the pressure change seems to twist my shoulder up in new ways. odd, the ways a favorite thing can stay a favorite thing, even if it hurts you.

i have been writing so much this week. can't sleeping and that inkrun itch in the ends of fingers that only makes it harder to sleep. i'm in a weird place, these days. ever since june abated all of my fate-resigned morosing, and hey, whoa! i don't have cancer, i feel like i've spent the month untying all the little nots i had done up so nicely. spent six months with a silent rule of no-new-attachments. not liking people. not caring anymore about little things, not caring about anything besides little things. the nots you can't put into words because you never laid them out anywhere but in your head and your hesitancy.

since i'm the kind of person who loves and heartbreaks with every step, i felt like i had straightjacketed all my most... me... bits, just to try and cope. oh, i pity and envy people who don't feel every little thing so keenly. empathy is a gift, and it's one that i have been squandering this year, in my unspoken allowance of selfishnesses. oh it amazes me the ways you react when you feel like you're staring down your own mortality. the stupid things that you do. i have spent the first half of this year counting my regrets. there were more, and less, than i expected, or remembered. and when you think of those things, it seems to be impossible for dreams to not be dyed in the colors of nostalgia and possibility. my subconscious, in only the cruel, merciful way that a subconscious can, gifted me more do-overs than i knew what to do with.

imagination is the greatest key to empathy. and, being the selfish clod that any human can be at times, i spent much time empathizing with all of my little parallel universes. and i can conclude that, honestly, i am glad to be in this one. experience has made me so very much me. some people say that we're here to learn from our mistakes. some people are wrong. we're here to learn from our experience. not all experience comes from mistakes. i keep thinking about that this week.

i have had two new max dreams this week. short and sweet, but i had them. they give me hope. hope is such a nice feeling. perhaps the best there is. and someday, sometime, when i am in the right mood for such very personal divulgences, and perhaps if you ask me nicely, i will explain max to you, and put him here, to be immortalized and kept behind the tiny little bars of all these insufficient words.