In the Morning

Hunger cuts your tongue and singes your stride. Hear the rumble of hunger when it suits you least; when it can strangle you most. Wear hunger like a shawl, with its many holes. Let it fall from your fingertips and pick it up a minute later as a forgotten but often necessary object. Accept its sneers. Keep it as one does a secret, most times with impunity. It changes only your color, not your character. Paint it on as such. The function of hunger is only to inform you of what to provide, it has nothing to offer in itself. Hunger is reliable in its torment. Fall asleep and hunger will be there in morning.

On Boredom

Small talk is evil. It is two people who just stop loving each other, which is devastatingly worse than having a legitimate reason. Listless and bored, the invisible hand of intrepidity strangles and suffocates me until I have to shove the conversation into something about which I care. If I wanted to hear about the weather I would have consulted Frost or Thoreau. If I wanted to talk about my clothing I would have discussed the beauty of the human anatomy with da Vinci. But the infinite abyss of unwanted pauses leaves me in a coma void of thought and action. And it's blatant dishonesty. These dusty topics do not interest me.

I would much rather my words be laced with regret. Words erupting as if off of springboards, dead with the mold of too many moments buried inside me. Clipped short with anticipation and curt cynicism. They were frozen and sunken inside my stomach and have been hurled out by my tongue. As soon as they enter the warm air I want them back, but at least I have someone to bounce my ideas off of before they are edited and absorbed.Speaking on top of drawing boards is lovely when it is with you. Our conversations are surgical procedures and I'm scalpel-happy.

Prune Hands

I want to go swimming. I don't want summer. I don't want the beach with its dissonant waves and its cranky mothers with veiny legs. I don't want a party. I don't want toys and bikinis and prayers against the storms. I want a dank, damp, pool in a building that pleaded with its constructors not to add shitty tile floor, but whose cries went unheard. I want to feel that tile underfoot as I pad to the edge of the concrete. Fluorescent lights hum down on me as the water - a sickly cerulean - churns below. I don't want to dive in, full of escalated joy. I want to slide in, to slink in; the way a criminal or an ill mutt does around street corners. I want the four feet of ugly 84 degree water to swallow me whole, one second at a time. I want to dread putting my head under, but can't stand to be half wet. I crave that splice. And then the rhythmic, infinite laps of back and forth. Every time I approach the far wall, I have a panicked vision of slamming my lower lip into the cold slab of stone and bleeding into the water as my tooth goes through. I yearn for that feeling. I want to go swimming. I really do.

Better Battery

And the ebb and flow of it all,
And the woe of it all,
and it was that gray morning that
It occurred to him who was fighting who:
Who was thrusting mutiny on the other.
Nineteen years old - maybe twenty now.
(Who won?)

Moving forward in time,
Without reason or rhyme,
Feet in socks,
Socks in shoes,
He stood up.
And then sat back down.

For how could he?
How could he complain,
While under the wing,
How could he...

He couldn't.
And he didn't.
His fight, the fight of us all.

Realism, Trial #4

Trudging along to the beat of trial and error, the sweat and toil of forced experience, he raises one slender hand in protest. Silently, silently lashing out. Passively, passively calling it the wrong name. To wit: gracious.

No, no! It cannot be received. No validation where there is a deliberate skipped beat, a mistake that is not a mistake, a miss that cannot be perceived as an accident - no.

Crass and humorless. An intentional injury of reputation only, but the trial and error system cannot fail; it can only be counted as an error - a door to another trial. There is no failure inside the system; only a benevolent, albeit vicious circle.

I've erred. I discounted your thoughts, rejected your theory because of the name slapped harshly on your chest, paired with twelve years of subconscious judgement. I've attempted to strip my brain of this tag, and now I'm left with a cold counter-top of expectation.

South of Washington

For chrissakes it's not PLAUSIBLE for a reasonable sane person to have these opinions and be taken seriously in this town. After that most people give up and conform to the wildly liberal platforms brought on only by having a friend, or at least a friend of a friend, who is

• gay 
• had an abortion
• is black yet shops at the Outlets
• or can read Hebrew. 

Being raped by diversity is a different kind of oppression that forces you to adhere to the un-sticky. Can you even fathom how impossibly difficult it is to participate in this Kum Ba Yah nonsense while still hosting the facade of not giving a shit about anything? Makes me wonder how we would react if shipped to Mississippi for a exchange student program. The sad part is, we're not even that diverse. 90% of the people living here are white, upper-middle class, college graduates who shoot the breeze with their neighbors every morning. People who get a kick out of vacationing to Florida or Texas because it's so damn foreign to them. EXCEPT that we kid ourselves by believing that "there's good in everyone and by the way I have slightly agnostic viewpoints because I'm cultured and I read blogs sometimes". Venture 12 miles to the north and you instantly realize that the one time you held a gun belonging to your friend's father does not make you brave/dangerous, it makes you an asshole for assuming as much. Oh, and posting an article with the comment "kind of interesting" is not taking a stand; it's a cowardly coping mechanism that allows you to see how everyone else feels about the matter before agreeing with them. Whatever.

The Fish Market

It gets real windy in Ohio. Like an invisible ocean sweeping above my head. I hear it while I'm lying in the loft. The wooden boards below the straw creak in protest, pleading with the wind to cease its manipulation. Sometimes I fear the roof to be ripped from the walls; the only thing separating me from that ocean. I toss in the hay, visions of a giant pencil in the sky sketching the lines of turbulence. A crack, and the wind sends a tree branch cascading to the Earth, the sound finally muffled by the wood's blanketing leaves. My eyes flicker open at the din. It's official: I can't sleep through windstorms.

If you ever wind up gravitating toward a valley in your life, remember: if you can't convince them, confuse them. Fairhaven honed my perception of the valley, and it confused the shit out of me. Once you stop resisting the reality of it, you experience the shit you would normally overhear in a smokey bar in Queens. Shit like... an old man as a child, taking his younger brother down to the fish market, but being too poor to pick up dinner. They've survived this long, though. How? There must be some method to the daily scrounge which has become their entire futility. One of the grubby kids clears his throat, yells a few choice curse words up at the fishmonger, and is rewarded with a grin and a codfish hurled down at him from the boat. Brilliant. Insult the sailors in the right way and you have a free meal. I muse this glory of culture shock as it enters my ears. "I'll have to remember that one".