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.

old notebooks

lockless and curfewed
i am crammed
back into my
twelve year-old self.

struggling, alive,
they exorcise my
adult, exhume my
childhood for
resurrection

or rebirth.

attempt again
to upbring me
properly
before the world.

even lab techs
know you can't
reuse
guinea pigs.

you don't
go back and make
them right,
just because

now

you know.

seeds you've
cooked won't ever

grow.






it's talk of numbers
again
all athmatic and how smart you are.
so good at lying,
now that you know yourself.

it's obvious, but only
momentarily.

absence of thought
is letting whatwhomhaveyou
take you wherewhatever.

you will find yourself

perpetually making
things more
difficult.

you'll smile a little
smile a
while, but

won't feel as though
you deserve it.

ten thousand angels
you will never know
are crying for you now.

ten thousand church bells
ring to save
your soul.

somewhere,
in the earth,
the clock is ticking
indifferently

and someone sighs.

persons pushing it against
people weighing on it
to slow down.

what's next isn't to
ask anymore.

time needs space.

i cue you to
move on to the next
in a

series of questions.

she writes
red

she's on

fire

she carves words
out of

veins

catch her this

dragon

come put
out these

flames

warm-ups, & i have been you

a myopic lens
so fair you see
sad you see

marvel the
mystery
whispery
wistfully

some things
are for what happens
when you just type
for the sake of typing

stringing words
along the lines of a page
just to see something
left behind
when you leave

just to leave these little
lines of me
a history

her story







& the shot
glitters in the ruby
concave
of an open chest
the filigree sparkle
like a flash
of life or little
tiny pieces of a life
tiny drops of days
that spread
out a long red
pool beneath
all the holes
in leftover heart
or what once was
heart but is heart
no longer







i have been you.

i have sat
with the loose ends
of my expectations
dangled in my hands

while all they were
tied to
drifted away,
the smoke
of nothing

& my very soul echoed
by the purple sobs
of twilight
down the wall behind

me & the moonface
as blank
as white
as my own.

i have been you.

i have buried
loose ends
in busy little
businesses.

i have tried
to tie them
footnoted in
music notes

superimposed the ghosts
of their open knots
on every rushing image
i would flash before my mind
or eye
or mind's eye
hunting just one to help
me remember how to forget

i have pulled
reflections
from my black book
like poems

& kissed them
as memories.
each a different feature.

so many he's as
brown eyes, warm voice,

strong hands,
deep laugh,
an inquisitive eyebrow,
those lovely shoulders,
that dark hair

that could never be
strung together well,
or long, enough to
fill the longing.

each one dropped
like pebbles
into darkwell depth
to bring the
reflection of my loss
up to me
until it overflowed
& was lost

i have been you.

i have had
cups of days emptied
& their contents replaced
with the deafening
white noise
of strawsucking
nothing
nothing
nothing,

i have been you.

i have been the cage
for a starving animal
that eats itself
behind the bars.

i have been you,

& i am not you,
anymore.