Scheduled Events

My life is abundant with appointments. The poplars down the street have become uprooted and parade around the boulevard like sorority girls on pledge day, their green canopies like the parasols the girls prance around with. This too is a scheduled event that takes place in accordance with the stretching of daylight. The space between my eyes narrows and that is how I know that it is time for something to happen, time to say something. It is as if even the three year-old gripping my hand is metering out the seconds with his eyelids.

Summer

It has come to the point where I know most everyone now. There seems to me to be a lack of strangeness in the world; there are no more blind men waiting at the appleyard gate, hands outstretched and a smile like a clean, open wound. I can walk down the street and talk to people like I know them. I suppose in a lot of ways I do. I recognize the sweater draped around their shoulders, because they told me the story about their grandmother and how they peeled it from her dead hands and wept into it for days. They only wear it when it's sunny and almost unbearably hot. But these are bits of other people. That sweater is their grandmother. So is the memory of her. I get sick sometimes of trying to sort through what is shit and what makes sense when you pour enough water over it. Does it make a difference that I have no more ways to say sorry? How can one stand on the edge of the forest and not look between the trees? I ask myself this when the fiction writer I know begins telling me about this thing or that, that he is doing, or writing, or thinking. I ask myself if his mustache is ironic, if he thinks it is, or if I should. I ask myself what the fuck difference does it make anyway. He'll be dead before you know it, and so will I. I guess I'm just tired of waiting for summer and the days when the sun shines longer than the stars.

Love Letter

There are three ways to enter a room without being noticed. It is not necessary to explain them, nor can I validate that there are only three, but there are at least three.

If you walk outside on a day when the grayness of the sky is roughly equivalent to the weight of your open palm, cupping a walnut, it is likely that you are having thoughts of earthworms and cannot speak more than a few clipped words without exhaling deeply through your nose.

In the street there are days that last forever because they are wrapped in the liquid feel of time like I am wrapped in skin. You can wade through it, freeze it, dig gullies to usher it into a different valley where the crops have grown pinched with drought.

Blue was invented by a Jewish man who made papers in the 18th century. In an attempt to understand the complexity of his wife, he pulled the sky down around him and presented it to her on the occasion of their marriage.

Lessons Learned

So, apparently I am not very squeamish. The apple I was eating mysteriously materialized a bug out of nowhere. And half of it was missing. I did not feel even a ripple of distress, other than wondering how the bug got in there in the first place, since there were no visible holes. My only thought other than that on the topic was, "Hmmm, extra protein." Then I laughed to myself.

I have also figured out something about people. If a person asks another person a series of questions about likes and dislikes and does not receive what is in his or her mind a satisfactory answer, the asker will stop asking and likely stopping talking entirely to the responder. I learned this first hand in a bar once. A guy asked me a series of pop culture questions to which I replied, "I don't know" or "I don't watch TV". After about two and a half minutes, he stopped attempting to talk to me. Here is my theory about these happenings: people like to have common interests, but more than that, they want to be around people who care about things. When I say "care about things", I don't mean "the planet" or "the whales" or "the state of public education". I mean non-altruistic, non-serious things. Like hockey, kayaking, knitting or cooking. People like people that can relax but more than disliking a goody-two-shoes, people like to know that other people can care about something that is not earth-shattering or mind-altering. They want other people to care about everyday things, common things. Because (and here's the important part), if one cannot relax and love the mundane, how is one ever to love a common, mundane person.

See what I just did there? I just blew your mind. Am I right? Probably, on some level. Am I wrong? All the time. But I have to come up with some sort of system to figure out what the hell is going on around me and thus far, this is the best I've got.

(Also, I understand and appreciate the irony of essentially saying the in order to relate to people one needs to relax and be able to live OUTSIDE of one's head, while simultaneously proving that I live inside my head. Yes, I know, irony.)

Marching into fiction

I am no longer having conversations.
Everything I have to say
will be written as a poem.
I read your fictions
on Monkey Bicycle today
& I was unsurprised
to find they sound like every
conversation you & I have
ever had. Figures. Leave it
to a poet to write fictions
that sound like the poems
he speaks everyday.
I am certain you will
be thrilled to know I'm still
paying attention. I am. Now
you know.

There were your lips
and the vinyl record my mother played
every Sunday, the smoky voiced one.
There was red nail polish seeping
into the frame at the left hand
corner, the plush carpet that may
have been moss, since I can see green
and smell the dampness I remember
from the way your body fell
on leaves that day in September
before I could dream
a hundred ways for you to die.

We start again with your mouth
and I scribble it in my notebook,
before its color and expression fade.
This is what I have been told
to do to understand what I think
of you and your not being here.
But the images move, will not
stay fixed in my mind. I cannot tell
if you are dead or alive, if I can
see or am blind and dreaming.
The world will not stay blurred,
will not separate itself into frames
and paragraphs. There is no cohesion,
no stickiness and everything runs
towards the inevitable end, the blackness
and my forgetting again.

How to be a private eye

First, find a trench coat. Preferably non-descript. Belt it around your waist in a feminizing fashion. Pop the broad collar up around your face and learn to peer into the space between it and the brim of your hat. You must wear a hat.

Second, find a shadow that obscures your face. Preferably one that is frequented by junkies and hookers. Spend hours here, hunching your shoulders around your ears. Take one of the aforementioned hookers into your charge. She should be pretty in a dirty, street-worn way. Smoke your cheap cigarettes furiously, blowing the smoke out your nose like a chimney. Do this until it doesn't burn anymore, until you cannot taste or smell.

Finally, opine narratively to the invisible person who follows you everywhere. Talk about dames and the itch between your shoulder blades. Start referring to your feelings as hunches, as you pull whiskey from your flask and grimace to show your teeth.

Repeat steps one through three until, when you go home at night, you go anywhere but home.