in arrow park.

tokyo flyers update, 12/19.

2009-12-19T19:51:00.002-06:00

you probably know already. the second draft of 'tokyo flyers' died along with the rest of my hard drive back in september or october or something. it was a sad day. there were torn veils spilt punch earthquakes stained dresses and balloons crushed in earth's upper atmosphere. i teared up once or twice. might have cried. then promptly sniffed and wiped my eyes and punched a wall or something.

well its christmastime and that means birth or resurrection or re-writing this dang book. making it how it was. or different. or 'as good'. we'll see.

keep in touch. i love you.

videos. october 17.

2009-12-17T16:48:00.006-06:00

thanks to jose arredondo for these.

(http://www.youtube.com/user/acousticdefacto31)

I've Had My Share Of Calluses, Thank You.

Blues In Eden.

An Old Untitled One. (i might resurrect it one day.)

AKA.

2009-12-07T01:05:00.001-06:00

(last one reworked. shout-out to safi for the title.)

AKA.

ya know them, ah, matroshka dolls.

with the one in the other in the other.

well i am riiiight in the middle in there

i am the muffled words ‘GET ME OUT I CAN”T BREATHE’

in the bloated sick belly of a history textbook bookmarking the chapter on Nietzche

in a war-time underground bunker walls pasted with poorly-xeroxed love letters

in a hand-me-down town called the ‘Rez Flooded With Cheap Wine’ where they tinted the sky hunter green so our Sad don’t lose its sweet

in Love

in the back of an ambulance hurt real bad.

Hit the sirens.

You wide-eyed white dolls you,

I been knocking on this wall for awhile askin God to open up all this Dark.

I got business to tend to.

And what with my sojourn here and I’m askin’ you. Now.

Say ‘Amen’ and you, open it.

Etch this in your heart of hearts through and through.

Go down to the cellar.

Follow the arrows caught in cobwebs to my room.

Lay down and watch my ceiling for shooting stars.

Believe you me I keep rooms in the House here in my wrists stocked with scratches lions’ skulls and honeybees call me Kali if need be, please,

just clear the Ghosts.

Forgive their demeanor. They take after their Host in that way.

See that case? The one shaped like an hourglass your Mother kissed onto your forehead, chipped and spilling the Sahara out on your red skin that spells ‘open it honey’.

Open wide.

Inside’s a guitar, that’s it I swear.

Sit and cross your feet Indian style and hear me out. This Instrument, its a Person. Its got a story like we do.

I got it from a guy named Hurt.

Herbert Hurt.

Less of a guy more of a ghost haunting all I-10 end to end.

I paid fifteen bucks, an old skin I shed way back when, and a ride one hundred ten miles ...that way.

Herb said ‘I’m headed for God’s country. I’d use mud and words and sing a Kingdom up from the dirt with this here guitar but my hands

they can’t carry this weight no more and

these songs ain’t gettin’ any lighter.

Here, see what you can do with it.’

(The wood, guys and gals. It felt like fire, like Blessed be the sharecroppers, field hands poor in Spirit pickin’ heads of light in a field, adding calluses to their will and gettin’ poorer still.)

‘Have this,’ Herb said. ‘My body my blood, sling it on your shoulder like a soldier and start marchin.

Watch not to cut your hands, the poems might fall out.

Use your damn eyes kid, there’s staff lines of barbed wire strung round its neck. It’s to keep our cattle in the notes, a wild Strong in our songs.

And mouthfuls of arrows and arrowheads tacked on the headstock all of ‘em rusty dull and going different ways but they are the same

like this Family like this House.

Each, a paper star strung up in a café named Bethlehem on Christmas. These notes taste like red wine and bread.’

Herb stared and said, ‘Kid, you look like you need redeemin. Well go get it. Walk. Bring a pen and the blanks in your skin and a good warm blanket cause it’s a long ways away to the ‘Promised Land’, I promise. Nine months or so.’

‘Yessir’ I said, ‘I’ll go.’

And I’ve been wearin’ that swear like the Morning in my hair ever since.

Still awake, sons and daughers? Ok I’m sending y’all a Messenger now. For your nation here, its a guitar. And like a Messenger you gotta sit down and learn it. Study its sounds.

Me, I’m set on breaking outta this warm blank shell.

I’m waiting and workin these arms into axes, tyin’ my good Byes to my wrists like a tassle and the bad ones, well, they make my blade sharp.

When I swing, I’ll say my name into my skin, spit ink so loud I won’t forget.

I will sing it over like a mantra.

I am william, william, william michael.

aka good ghost bill

aka boo-boo

aka one day one with God

aka John Galt

aka Gabriel

aka Per Son

aka being of sound

aka arundo donax the common reed cut and shaped into a flute

aka too nostalgic for my own damn good

aka its ok i love you anyways always.

aka a mandala painted on a plate sacred circle soul food get that Goodness inside ya.

aka God i believe in you and I have for awhile.

It’s high time you believe in me back, I mean, show me you do.

Give me a sign, make it neon and flashy on account of all this Night.

Go get your Angels. They’ll wanna hear this.

Where I’m goin’ you’ll need armies of ‘em to do all my guarding.

I’mma get above this.

I’mma walk from California forests fires to Jackson square, hell or high water, going arms out barefoot looking like Huck Finn on a fence like Christ on a cross.

See, we three want the Mississippi inside us like last night I wanted not to want something bad to happen to me and real bad, sick of wishin to fall into something years dark and years deep like a well or Love, so I took some notes.

I wrote 10 commandments of my own, scratched them into these walls here with my nails, right into all this Dark. I’ll write ‘em down once I tear this skin of mine apart inside out, don’t worry, I got ‘em all up here (head).

one. clear the ghosts Lord.

two see that case? inside’s a bow.

three open wide.

four make me into an arrow. my head is lead and heavy already make me sharp. wind my throat at one end and use it like a quiver

five nock my body into the string and aim south.

six hold me.

seven hold and hold hard. till your whole arm shakes scared to death with lullabies that your momma Sophia sang the oceans to sleep in their ocean beds.

eight, let me slip by accident then miss me sorry you couldn’t goodbye i’ll see you in Zion in the sky.

nine. watch me sing home lord shade your eyes I’mma set the sun my own damn self and get gone this time. Just way, way out there.

and ten. When I hit my mark at last the rosary by my bed will shed its skin and curl up to sleep on my hand. Chances are, I’ll be barefoot jeans rolled up holdin Herb’s guitar somewhere near and praying, God use my throat use my hands, and on cue I’ll cough. Cough out a mouthful of arrows. Paper stars tacked on my palms.

God, I know how to make things too and make them good like you.

It’s like thunder.

I learned it.

I asked Herb ‘which way to God’s Country?’ and this is what I heard.

‘Ya know them ah Matryoshka dolls? With the one in the other in the other.

Son, it’s in our belly. It’s all around.’

He tore a page from the book of Job from his shoulder blade,

and like that,

pressed it into light.

arrows, parts one and two.

2009-11-30T21:13:00.003-06:00

title tentative. give me ideas. tell me what's wrong.

---

(arrows, one.)

See

Up until I came along

This family never heard the words ‘give up’ we don’t what they mean ask any Bordeleon we say ‘go head’, a cajun mantra.

Ok I said, I’ll go ‘head and go ‘head

if you give me direction

if you kindly set me on the way to Sophia who sings with her

porcelain shoulder blades

San Andreas China plates

arched Golden Gate back.

I told them ‘That. Yea. I’ll go head and give up to that.’

First things first. Show me how to stand again. It’s been awhile.

I got a bonesaw in the back shed

Go ‘head Love, take these feet

here have ‘em if you swear to bury em somewhere good

Georgia maybe, I hear it’s nice.

Show me how to stand right.

I been sittin here on my bedroom floor holdin the ends of ankles close like bleeding pens next to Ray Charles greatest hits and a hill of peach seeds and peach stems from peaches I’ve eaten and eaten just to keep georgia, georgia on my mind the whole day through and make believe I got something like that to sing the blues to.

Get me outta here. Grab a leg and drag me if you have to. These peaches are making me sick.

I swore that ‘Come mornin’ I’m good as gone.’

Well I’ve seen suns upon suns come and gone and I’m still here.

Sitting. On this godforsaken floor.

With white lies wearin a swear’s uniform and mornings past lyin’ down here bored to death, I built them into a bed.

I went ahead and went ahead and set myself on fire to relight all the wicks burnt out I keep in my matchbox (throat)

I swore I’d tie em in a string and use the dead ends to spell ‘Alleluia! I am engulfed in utter Love! It burns!’ I swore to burn like that one more time ‘No no I’m good’ I said ‘I got sledgehammers up my sleeve and I’ll fuckin’ break my way out of this if I gotta. Give me that there match. I’mma look like the 4th of July.’

Well, now everything’s on fire and I’m on fire too and so are you.

Ok.

Stay calm.

Direction.

Break glass in case of emergency.

Break glass.

I’m runnin’ around town with a bag of bricks hysterical shattering shop windows watches and reading glasses hoping to find that one fire extinguisher or fire blanket or damp towel or an answer, some small call back to these flames and all this yelling.

Back to step one.

Break glass.

Well I have and all I have is a floor full of shards from broken windows

2 barefeet to cut up and draw you a big red heart on the carpet.

Look how cute.

2 lungs to take the smoke outta yours and out these mirrors so one day maybe we’ll see ourselves clear again. In this glass, I’m not much more than the mud on my skin spillin levees on my shins and more broken bones than I’d like to count. I’ve been tracin’ arrows in the fog, connecting the dislocated limbs and fractured ends of myself, the lines spell out

GO HEAD GOD MAKE THIS HERE MESS A MAN.

I got a floor with hundreds of musketballs stuck underground all round this house. This sole? It’s a gun held to the temple of Apollo fired and shooting stars out hte other side bloodsplatter constellation against a Union uniform. Apollo knows what I’m saying. Went and burnt my heels on all the stars I wished on for a capital-H Home back home and a darlin’ there to get back to and miles upon miles of God’s Country from here in Antietam to you so I can kick up the Lord’s prayer with my boots with each dusty singing step. I’mma make a sandstorm one day. I’mma baptize you kids in a great Dust Bowl. (if only i still had my feet. This war’s been hard on us. Gettysburg ain’t been so nice either I need to get up and get.)

I’m sorry my room is a mess on account of all the blood.

Turns out sulphur stays in the land, that’s why crops won’t grow here even after forty years.

I got a floor littered with history lessons on fire, and more sulphur and saltpeter than Iwo Jima. I’mma turn this stage into a new Pacific Theatre. Brace yourself and plug your ears.

And it turns out some floods don’t wash sins away and redeem and such, they just make things all wet.

I got a floor full of soaked blueprints sketches and models from having to reinvent myself over and over. Looks like DaVinci had a heyday with this place. The clay has turned to mud caked on my hands and I can’t touch much without making it less shiny. Girls, don’t line up all at once.

This burnt-out washed-up husk of deed box here, it holds the manuscript of my birthday nineteen ninety five or at least the ash that’s left. If you squint your eyes you can still see my backyard inside the dust. My parents put on my cake candles already blown out wicks already burned and icing that spelled ‘KNOW YOUR EXIT’ my only gift: a lesson. A list. Step by step directions on how to go ahead and give up, how to dance, givin’ up down side to side two three ten point turns back outta the rough unpaved parts of life like this and I’ve been doin ‘em ever since.

I got a bedroom floor covered in tire marks from braking

so hard

and breaking

so hard

and turning

so often

and backing out

when I swore to swear to promise I wouldn’t. One of ‘em got broken en route.

if they ask about the burnt rubber, im drawing a star on this carpet

a blue print

makin a second sun here on earth.

like an infant takin its first slow spins in my room now.

go ‘head and go ‘head and have a look.

(arrows, two.)

ya know them, ah, matroshka dolls.

with one in the other in the other.

well i am the last the smallest riiiight

in there

in a belly of paper shields torn

in a hard cover text closed

in a glass bottle drunk

in the concrete arms of Helen fallen

in love

in the back of an ambulance hurt real bad.

Hit the lights.

You dolls you,

I been knocking on this wooden wall for awhile askin God to open up all this Dark.

Open it.

Ok directions, etch this in your heart of hearts.

Walk upstairs.

Check my closet.

Clear the ghosts.

Please excuse the mess and all the cobwebs.

See that case? The one shaped like a fiddle your Mother kissed onto your forehead that plays notes in morse code that spell ‘open it’.

Now, open wide.

Inside’s a guitar.

I got it from Mister Herbert Hurt, a bonafide ghost drifting off the ground down I-10. Got a good deal. Swapped it for fifteen bucks, an old skin I shed way back when, and a ride one hundred ten miles ...that way.

Herb said ‘I’m headed for God’s country. I’d use mud and words and sing a Kingdom up from the dirt with this here guitar but my hands

they aren’t as strong as they used to be and these songs are still so heavy.

Here, see what you can do with it.’

I named this fine instrument Polly like the bird cause it’s easy on the eyes shrill sometimes and for a little bread it’ll talk to ya.

Go ‘head and hold her just take care not slice your hands open, the poems might fall out. There are mouthfuls of arrows and arrowheads tacked on the headstock all of ‘em rusty pointed and going different ways but they are the same

like this family like this house

Each, a paper star strung up in a café named Bethlehem on Christmas. These notes taste like red wine and bread.

Herb said, ‘Kid, you look like you need redeemin’. Let’s make Polly talk. Sling her on your back and walk. Bring a pen and the blanks in your skin and some blankets cause we got a long way to the Promised Land. Nine months or so.’

Where was I?

Right. Back to directions. Like arrows like commandments prescriptions prayers little stars tattooed on my limbs to remind me not to sin whenever i get around to it

one. Thou shalt not lie

two. Thou shalt not lie with her.

three. thou shalt not say I’m sorry, when thou ain’t sorry (see limb one.)

four. thou shalt not swear

five. ah shit. I’m sorry. Ummm…I won’t fuck this up next time I swear. Ah.. I love you (think). Umm …

God i believe in you and I have for awhile.

It’s near eleven, high time you believe in me back or show me you do.

Give me a sign, make it flashy on account of all the dark.

Go tell your angels.

Where I’m goin’ you’ll need armies of ‘em to do all my guarding. I’mma walk on top of fire and floods, hell or high water, going arms out barefoot looking like huck finn on a fence like Christ on a cross. We three want the Mississippi inside us like last night I wanted not to want something bad to happen to me and real bad, so I took some notes. I wrote my own 10 commandments of my own. Like direction like give me stone tablets and I’ll chisel each one down if I have to.

one. clear the ghosts Lord.

two see that case? inside’s a bow.

three open wide.

four make me into an arrow. my head is lead and heavy already make me sharp. wind my throat at one end and use it like a quiver

five nock my body into the string and aim south.

six hold me there.

seven hold and hold hard. till your whole arm shakes scared to death with lullabies your momma hummed with the ocean.

eight, let me slip by accident then miss me sorry you couldn’t goodbye i’ll see you in Zion in the sky.

nine. watch me sing home lord shade your eyes I’m going far this time. Just, way way out there.

and ten…

When I hit my mark at last the rosary by my bed will shed its skin and curl up to sleep on my hand. Chances are, I’ll be barefoot jeans rolled up holdin Herb’s guitar somewhere near and praying, God use my throat use my hands, and right on cue I’ll cough. Cough out a mouthful of arrows. Paper stars tacked on my palms.

God, I know how to make things too and make them good like you.

It’s like thunder.

I learned it.

Awhile ago I asked Herb

‘Hey, ah, which way to God’s Country’

Herb smiled and said,

‘Ya know them ah Matryoshka dolls? With the one in the other in the other.

Son, it’s in our belly. It’s all around.’

He plucked another bible page from his shoulder and like that, crushed it into light.

granddaughter Halloween.

2009-11-09T00:48:00.002-06:00

(subject to change)

Ok, Halloween has a granddaughter. I want you to meet

Mariam, forty-four, female, unconscious and unresponsive OD’D on alcohol and anti-depressants, who last night learned that 1) cement curbs make lousy pillows, 2) bars are not beds, 3) dreams run red when they leak out, 4) you will not find blankets in bottles or bedframes in rain run-off. She was draped in the street, a bedsheet with holes for eyes to see outta. Mariam’s dressed up like a ghost again. She’s in us. She’s humming in all our backalleys.

Dear Mariam,

I’m gonna breathe for you. I’m gonna write you a song and sing it straight into your mouth so I know you’ll get this, if it helps you can call it a kiss. I’m gonna bring you back and call you granddaughter, cause I think you need a grandpa’s help.

With love, still,

good ghost Bill.

(here kids, deliver this, a letter a nursery rhyme a lullaby

first, hold it under your tongue and show me like you shake like I shake like a kid with fever burning afraid. Hold it like a star like a son like a newborn. I been working hard on these words. I know my granddaughter will read this. Mariam. Now on, I’m writing to her. y’all are messengers. Deliver this. Wait wait, I got one more.)

Dear Ghost Love, I wrote this poem for you. I wrote you a EKG strip with a good strong heartbeat fold this here into paper plane wings hold ‘em out sail and sink slow. When you get six feet down in here and down there then say these words aloud:

‘I’mma get up again. I’mma get up again.’

Grandpa wrote you a white bedsheet.

I gave my hands up inside a rain puddle broke the shell and tore it out.

go ‘head tie it round your head and blindfold yourself. Tell ‘em it’s a crown, yes, oversized and slipped down over your eyes but you are still a queen. You are still a queen. You are Lady Justice. Lady Liberty Kali Sophia Mary Mother of God and most of all Mariam of Bryan, Texas. Here I wrote a hundred statues in your image. The others, they got some kneeling to do.

And have this: purple nightgown. Grandpa wrote that too.

You feel the rivers in between the folds?

good, step inside granddaughter.

grandpa wrote a theatre in there.

It’s on the coast.

I’m there now. Aisles and hallways dark and overgrown with grass, it’s scary I know but it don’t have to be. I’ll walk you through it you hold my arm and I’ll read the words I scratched on my elbow from way back when, it goes

‘mar i am i am alleluia

lay your burden down.’

Grandpa wrote you a shotgun in a shotgun shack to break apart and bury. Lay down your arms, you young’uns and young guns split your double barrels, kids, bend ‘em into legs and get to steppin’.

Grandpa wrote you a shovel. You can dig up the stage under your front lawn and graduate in the soil. Walk across this. Get in the earth. Ma chere, you wear that dirt proud like a homemade dress when you bloom so bloom upside down. It’ll feel good.

Grandpa wrote you these dancin’ shoes. See how I step with my hands? We’ll dance around death a round life like in a circle.

Grandpa wrote you a good man, he’s somewhere under all these pages I know he is, even made his bed in it. When you find him, kiss like this. Kiss out graffiti murals announcing revolution between your lips, like you’re gonna overthrow an empire with this.

Grandpa wrote you two hands to make, so make sure to make like a letter fold over and get enveloped in this. This art thing, it’s an ocean laying supine chest rising and falling coughing on waves of its own blood.

Grandpa wrote you this night, it’s curled up with us stranded skin soaked in sea shivering, scared of it’s own dark. Granddaughter, hug this night say it’s alright and lose a little more light. Granddaughter, we will all sink singing into this darkness. That’s what the blindfold’s for. Go ask a dimming lightbulb, a dying star, fires in Alaska, the graveyard ER shift, rifles standing outta sand, say it with me,

‘Yea it’s scary but it don’t have to be.’

We’ll pick these waves out our eyes here soon. And call ‘em songs.

Grandpa wrote you two arms to slap the earth with your words. Something’s gonna hit us back. God maybe, cracking a two-by-four soaked in holy water across our heads, making our halos ring like wedding bells. Look, the splinters in our skin are bible verses. It’ll come again and again one of these Sundays.

Grandpa wrote you a second helping of heat. Here: a mother’s arms. A husband’s chest. Nine months in warm black hide and seek. A map drawn on your blankey look see? You can wrap up in this and get warm.

You can roll over in bed and sleep-in-wake-up from this rain to an ocean, this curb to a coast. I’ll try and scare the baddreams away with my pen and write better ones for ya.

Right about now, I’m writing lines of brick. I’m workin’ on a hospital wing out back. The one up there yawning wide with its arms. It’ll grow feathers here soon. When it does, I’ll meet you there.

I’ll be outside your hospital room with your niece and nephew, they got ghost stories and I got poems, under this light, they look about the same. We wanna get the chills and get good and scared. So we trade what we got, and try on the other’s spines like dress-up, ghost waltzing to the EKG beep inside. We’re gonna scare our hearts back into beating. I mean, it’s Halloween. And we are there now. All of us.

(Kids, I got a floor full of floorboards that needed changing let’s pull ‘em up like weeds and breathe and step down into this and sink. Waters nice and warm. Bring a pen and the blanks in your skin ‘cause we got a long way down. Nine months or so.

Kids, deliver this. And while you’re out, could ya get Mariam here another blanket or two. She’s been shiverin’ in her sleep I think. I appreciate it.)

I wrote you Love yea I wrote you Love,

good ghost bill.

six a.m. radio.

2009-09-23T01:32:00.001-05:00

welcome back.

we are coming to you live and alive from bryan.

i'll be filling in this show with flesh and bone

sorry i'm no holy ghost like your usual host.

at the moment he is broken like bread

and placed on millions of tongues on fire.

me?

i have this: a handheld radio

one i use prophesy with

i hold it to my chest and the words come out in static but loud like

'In weather, there's a cold front is blowing inside of us

so kids, make sure your parents dress their souls in layers, amen...'

welcome back.

my god calls and i return.

we use our hands like farmers sculpting fields

we keep in touch.

we stretch and make like the bones i broke way back when

we bend and break and then grow back again,

but stronger

this time around

i pray on one knee and renew wedding vows i first made way back when

sayin' with a scrape on my elbow

'eh doesn't hurt as bad as i thought.'

my god says see? i told you didn't i

and the pain will you sharper

so dive in

marry this marry something say yes soon

get on one knee more often

and while you're down there tie your shoes with second-chance laces loop swoop and pull yourself together again excempt in a double knot this time

so that you may run away towards five a.m. find the nearest accident and get hurt in it break your body tear at your ears and then get better

go way outta town to heal somewhere.'

so i do

i go out and find a great rusty oil tank no one knows about in a field no one tends and i lay on top of it i share stories with it i listen to it breathing asleep i pretend that rumbling noise below is an old skin of mine in the dryer, spinning with the bedsheet ghosts that haunted momo's back bedroom, stories i believed in and sat inside of like a fortress made of blankets and sofa cushions. then dawn breaks.

i hear my god sing in the Morning makin' six a.m. shimmer like

'the sky is a hall of mirrors on fire

and makes us shine like that too.

whether we like it or not. amen.'

welcome back.

my god calls and i return.

we are a tree branch, brittle like dogma

at last cracked cross the knee of Texas but only halfway

the splinters are graves that stick from the grass with angels breaking out of them,

come back at last to pluck their wings and walk like they are alive like us

my god calls holdin' a handful of their feather quills

she will write and send a thousand more letters to each of us in here

and make stamps look like blessings again,

ya know adhesive on one side and something to collect.

every stamp is another saint.

my god calls and i return.

we are broken but still holdin' on to one another.

we have made red rover a rite of passage.

we were characters in the first draft of Genesis but didn't make print.

'Welcome back

In the Beginning, two kids shuffled in their socks on Eden's carpet since all eternity and gave Yahweh little shocks when he wasn't lookin' and laughed and kept shuffling. They were quickly kicked out of Paradise. Ever merciful, God let them keep their socks. Amen.'

See, we invented electricity with our own two feet.

we know how to increase the signal strength of our prayers, praying not like this, but by folding my hand into hers with an hand radio in my left and bathtub overflowing in her right and we say let there be lightning amen and then we clap and evaporate into thunder, utter sound, if you tune your dials left of eden you'll pick up our signal as far as Bastrop, you'll hear us beat our pens on pages of Hindu scripture pulled taut Cross the tops of ear drums and hear our thunder talk in sanskrit like Da Da Da Be Self Controlled Be Charitable Be Compassionate we make our bodies into drums pullin' dead sea scrolls over our faces like a veil and tacking the ends in place

tune

our

self's

and wait to get struck by some stranger angel and hear how long our lungs ring out for.

we sleep with our own radios dialed in between bedsheet programs and in the Morning the white noise sounds like HOMMMMMMM cooked food and today i woke to the smell of gumbo. it was great.

i woke this Morning already laughing.

i woke this Morning,

really woke the Sun with nudge and kiss on the shoulder and after a night spent blind deaf half-dead and walking about light's out Dawn rolled around in bed and said.

'hi.

it's light outside.

yep already, so

open your eyes and learn how to sing with them, sing in everything you see.

write it down. go ahead use your pen like a radio transmitter.

this bed is a radio station

i hid a microphone under your pillow to

broadcast your dreams good and bad 'cause

we can't live like this off the air let's get on it

we aren't alive not till we get out of bed.

let's wake up again.

we are going live and alive in

5, 4, (3 2 1)

(open your eyes)

welcome back.

i am here in the studio with our creator.

if you have any questions

concerns

comments

criticisms

confessions

stories

secrets

songs

sound advice

shout-outs to saints

prayers

or poems,

we're taking callers.

aka i am over Alaska and see the lights already.

2009-09-23T01:29:00.002-05:00

She, palms out, says 'open wide dear'. Sleeve rolled she reaches into my mouth down my throat felt around the blue and white lukewarm like old bathwater she's bent over the white porcelain splashing my insides out pulls the drain and i drain my lungs are empty. She takes my breath away pulls it outta me folds it in fours slips it in her shirt shakes the ocean from her heels and turns. 'Au revoir'. She saves it for later. Back home in Paris and Paris Texas She will roll my breath in cheap cigarette paper with weed sugar basil and chips of caked dirt light up and smoke my memory my reason the songs I sing in my sleep, pentatonic scales i don't know when my eyes are open. i am breathless. i have no use for outside air so soyanara.

i'm digging now. Down and down into the ground. i keep my company with the dead. i breathe in soil and sediment and earth, it smells like gasoline and then it smells like a rain-soaked Houston curb. i taste the fossils of ancient fish and pour on primordial soup like soy sauce (it is an acquired taste). i dig further in the soil and come out the bottom of a cloud and grabbed a hold of it as i came out and hung down for a bit before lettin go.

It is the rainyseason they say. i am six miles over a white blanket named Alaska. It is old and worn and the people count its holes in degrees celsius. She's packed me into the earth like luggage into the hills like a round Texas belly, pregnant, She made Texas into a mother and She's made me in the Pacific's likeness. i have come out of this cloud dirty. i have planted my arms inside my own formless frame palms out fingers stretching out like tree roots stretching out a waking sore Morning.

With one hand i hold myself together, caught hold a second wind and my blades spin again they stir the thin air and whistle out a song which becomes another sky for You. With the other hand I hold this gale and hold it hold it till i cough out six miles up. i sound like thunder and look like a storm comin.

i part the haze like a curtain slit.

And then fields made of neon lights humming red white red white yellow purple ah ah kay kee kay oh kay. It shines a different shine. It dresses up in brushstrokes. Ink. Cherry blossoms sing and sway west, bowing down and down into a Far West i call home.

i am reaching for the furthest branch.

i learn its song in all the pink,

a sedative

hymnal, nodding off

and shot cross the sky.

i skirt my way around the dimensions of time it is two moments at once.

6:07 in the pm

8:07 in the am

565 milesanhour

909.279 kilometersanhour

31869 miles traveled

51288.184 kilometers traveled

26000 feet up

7924.8 meters up

and years and years yet to go

how many i know not.

In my dreams it seems all I do is move

faster than my eyes can focus on one thing

see,

these are the most real.

We are at the crest of this Arc.

Midway through it all it open-mouthed where only thin threads of light are left.

You fill

in the yawning

blank.

This Boeing ain't a plane no more. We stand on a Great Stage falling stuck in a tailspin on fire. i am dressed up like a pilot, scarf goggles jacket patches and all. We all fly alongside the Sun dog fighting across the Pacific "comeandgetit" written on the soles of our boots razor teeth painted on the sides (i am

warhawk

tomahawk

kittyhawk

spitfire

zero

oscar

betty

bomber

flying tiger

you have met demons masquerading as airplanes

seen them dance like birds and whistle birdsongs through giant fuckin' turbine engines they got booze and fire on their breath the illegitimate second cousins of dragons.

i am allofem).

this is me, doin' that dance now hands around the Sun's hips stepping on her toes on accident. If you fly close enough and stare into its blindness and out again you will see a small girl with ashy grayed hair and cheeks blackened with soot pullin' the Sun westward that same fishing line over the big Blue gaping between far East/West coasts on the other side of the timeline bent where alpha meets end. She is small and insignificant and invisible against all the burning yellow and orange but Her hands hold great things, anything She wants. Her small fingers tap islands like piano keys push fault lines like organ stops. At night She skips home to a pocket of space that She carved out her own hand and watches you peeking through her bedroom door slightly cracked open 'cause She's scared of the dark of metaphysics and can't sleep with theory hiding quiet waiting under the bed. She won't come out all the way, no not for you, not until it's her turn to carry the fire and the light so she pulls it west like a wagon filled with lightbulbs illuminated by the static-electricity! of her imagination. She is shuffling around now, rubbing Her feet and the socks on them across a sunspot-stained tanbark that will tell her stories if She blows dust off her lips and puts her ear down flat on the floor. Her tongue is glass with a copper tip. Falling further down this line She will one day kiss the ocean mouth open with tongue, set the ocean bed on fire, magnetize the islands to reverse the continents outward drift and show us Eurasia again, i can dream can't i. ok.

Out of the airplane window i ask her name. She says She doesn't know and even if She did, She wouldn't tell me. (In time I will learn that name, for now we shall say 'She is Ameterasu She is blinding and and tidal and radiant.) With the other hand She tugs at our plane, the string running on the inside and through us.

We are marionettes. All of us.

Strung together in rows suspended at what was it? 36000 feet over the Bering Sea. The lines are thin, so thin they are invisible to the untrained eye, so thin you have to be utterly covered in gasoline and/or gunpowder to ever notice them. They are tied to the drums in our ears. We can't hear from all the blasts. A man two seats over holds up his string and we frantically tie together our loose ends in a bow and still we do not speak the same Language...

(maybe if we turn around fly the other way round and round the years and find the coast of age Two, the terrible polyglot two's, that ain't sand on the beach it's sugar.)

So i open my mouth and put my fingertips on my tongue. It is tied up in a tangled ball of string like fishing line allfuckedup on the pole She threw in the gasoline garage corner not lookin' twice damn idiot kid. shit. we're goin down. i try to pull it out and undo the mess but the string is caught on my teeth, that same fishinline diving into the wet brown rocks down there at the end of the jetty, watch where yer castin' the thing Idiot Kid, out to the left come on now. we're goin down. and so i sit...

at the end of this jetty. i am tied up in the fishin' line (Idiot Kid right?) my ear remains tied to the man at my side. We each fall asleep and listen to the others' dreams. i hear in him the Pacific stirred by the sharp point of a spear while his mother hums an old kitchen song, ocean churned like butter to create islands and typhoons. The other man hears in me Bing Crosby for the first time ever.

we're goin down.

we are marionettes all of us.

tentatively titled 'tokyo flyers.'

2009-09-08T23:36:00.003-05:00

maybe i finished a first draft of the second book (the one about japan). maybe i didn't. either way, i'm close. it is currently only a haphazard impression of an impression of a book. a second draft is definitely in order. or maybe i'll keep it that way. who knows. anyways, here's another selection from it, to celebrate. hooray.

---

daibutsu.

Amida, the Big Buddha, sits for his seven hundred fifty-ninth year. There is a sun setting in Amida's chest and rays shining out of the stone and into the trees and recycled again underground. I am walking to Amida, even while I sit by this statue. I am walking. And Waiting still.

We come through the gate and see Amida. A collective gasp. Taking air into our lungs all at once and guarding it, as if this beautiful thing might steal it out from our lips. The kids are holding cameras to their eyes. I am walking ahead.

'Yo, try to hold the Buddha in your hand. Just try come on lemme take a picture.'

'Ehh. No thanks. Heh'

I try to be polite but...

I am not in the business of holding things in my hand or grasping things in my head or keeping history under my tongue. I am offering myself up to It, hoping it will hold me instead. I am walking now. I'll try to feel the stone cracks despite the residual numbness in my hands. It has been weeks since the flight over here, but fourteen hours of sitting in one place sure does take its toll.

(In the year 1495 AD a Tsunami washed away Amida Buddha's house for the second or third or fifteenth time.

This is only what I hear.

I hear that the storm was a forerunner cast from a New World. The winds were first born off the eastern seaboard in the slow cough of an old man with red skin who often rolled over and covered himself in a blanket that he borrowed from a stranger with white skin. Come June he was often cold, despite the youngamericanSun.

He said his hands don't work like they used to. 'But I can still build a Fire. I can still do that. I have love remaining.' He sat by his Fire, lotus-style like Amida Buddha, the last Fire he will build. He built it high as he could and then he grew into it.

Across an ocean, Amida watched it through the windows. Amida remembers how that Fire rose up and danced on top of the darkhorizon. For three years it rose up and breathed the ocean in and out. On the third year, the Fire crested over into a great tidal wave and hit Kamakura. And to this day Amida swears the Fire looked exactly a Phoenix. Others say a Dragon.

Still others say it was simply a fire, no more no less, but that it still burns alive today. It flickers and burns the Morning. And then it splits into thousands and thousands of littler flames that each become one of us, again and again, whenever we

wake up.)

Amida sits by a fire too. Burning somewhere with the waves, carried inland by these waves, and then smothered in the jetties. It is five o'clock. The fire dwindles again in the sea and is brought back inside seashells. The fire is a sound. Ghost stories told by falling coins. Bird calls. Stars turning over in their deepblack cots.

(The stars are also all-so cold. And they itch now, ever since the white man dropped anchor on the moon. The stars are sitting dead still because they are sick and afraid to move. And their Light holds decades and waves them like a flag in an old black and white photograph.)

I am walking. Not walking away from Home but rather carrying it on my back. I can't just brush Texas off my shoulders and I sure don't want to.

I am walking directionless too, listening, following the ever-tugging sounds on my ear with no particular place in mind. I am trying my damndest to just stare at my feet and feel that wire pull on my eardrum left and right and forward. Otherwise I'd end up second-guessing myself and toss my destinations out like trash and retrace my steps over and over and then just stop stubbornly in a place I'm not happy with. We humans never know where to go and towns are so uncertain even when we are certain of them. With our heels we draw circles and frowny-faces in beach sand that Shinto gods study and trace in Heaven.

I am just walking.

(Will you come with me? I know you are tired. I am too. I swear I will carry you if need be.)

Just walking still

over to Amida sitting still

in her seven hundred and fifty-ninth year still

her eyes shutting still

but never shut still.

They bend time like origami.

biwa lessons with sakura.

2009-08-20T11:27:00.006-05:00

against my better judgement, i am posting a section of my upcoming book/collection. it is writing from my time in japan. take it at face-value.

---

She is a different She, mind you. This She strums hara-kiri. She pushes out pink flower petals from her eyes that bend her voice and make quartertones when they fall on her lap. Strums the biwa with a fan not the kind you know. This is a different fan. This is a different wind that blows between your lungs and heat and head She says

remove your hat young man, open up for once

how long have you held your breath?

(i am gasping, Wind tossed hair)

let's in the wind sings out it out stretching the syllables out into the oldcapital crests of shallow waves on the coast of Kamakura. It is a lunar singing. (In Sangubashi there is a sign over a door that says 'If only I could fly through the cosmos like a moon pilot.' I think She lives there.) She plays in between sun and moon and in the middle She keeps nothingness nine-folded resembling a cloud sewed up together with biwa strings She plays it like the female form, like my uncle's sketches he's got the form down, the tail and tuning knobs clipped up and jutting out on the sides in the hairstyle of Women in the Edo Period or in the style of human ribcages in any Period at all and the signature of the hands of a blind craftsman sitting etched under the instrument's bridge. This is where he lives and calls Home, under the bridge. It is the same bridge under which we swim. The same current of the koto. There are no answers you gotta go to the mouth for that. This here's only a tributary, we just ask our questions and ask the questions like we're reading a textbook and hope our questions are right kind. She's plucking the biwa only She knows what way we're runnin' but won't say. She just plays out melodies and her instrument speaks to me in the voice of that man that lives at its top. Stanley says She makes it talk. So i talk back.

oldCraftsman: And if instruments hold bridges then where is the water. Ask your Pen, your goodBook, go on then.

youngwhiteWritten: Wheres the watergone. Words no longer do the work of hands. Are wells are all driedup. Are the airWavingRivers too.

oldCraftsman: I made two new ones. Like a woman's body I formed them from a couple pieces of damp wood, let 'em dry in the sun for nearly ten years so its skin cracks and shrinks grappled in the fists of earth and sun and light and dirt all up in its nails. Your plectrum there...

youngwhiteWritten: This one?

oldCraftsman: ...that's the haircomb of a dead ancient Empress. Hold it. Take up your biwa. Learn to sit under the strings, strum it with your greatArm. And I will mine. Let's see the river for ourselves. If the water's gone from it I wonder can we still pray at its edge.

youngwhiteWritten: Can we bury these instruments down in the bed what do they grow into.

oldCraftsman: Ha. Go ahead. I ain't buryin' mine.

There's nothin' else to ask. She will eavesdrop but won't talk. Like the plectrum her hands and throat will warp if left out in the humid rainyseason air. So She keeps them to herself. She covers them good, propping her notes up on windows of Sangubashi shops, under the canopies, holdin' together with the glue of ricefields (maybe i need some of that for my heels). The war is sixtysix years over and She just now lays down her arms, lying down her self, pickin brittle grass and pluckin the blades in between a Son and crescentMother. She waves fast when She laughs.

Her whole Body. Resonates.

('Dammit. The river May be alldriedup.'

And sighs.

'Yea, Son, i think it is.')

two new ones, revs, updates.

2009-07-14T11:57:00.002-05:00

I somehow won my second Slam on sunday, this one at Revs. There was some amazing poetry and I am thankful to God to be a part of such an great family of artists, musicians, poets, and straight-up honest and good people in B/CS. My sister drove three hours to be there and watch me. Pretty sure she's the only reason I didn't mess up too bad. Thanks Missy, olive oil :)

More so than performance poetry, I have still been focusing my attention on the book I basically wrote in and around the time I spent studying in Japan. Sort of an amalgamation of prose, poetry, prose-poetry, inquiry and insight, little anecdotes, and whatever I want to write. Typing and editing now. Afterwards I'll jump back on the novel I started in January.

Anyways, here's two new poems. I did the abridged versions at the Slam. If you want to see the shorter versions of those poems, just reply with your email address. Much love. (Again, sorry for the terrible formatting. This website doesn't exactly agree with Microsoft Word.)

---

it is the rainy season i am playing its song.

i sent Her a post card

taped it over my eyes and floated across the Pacific ocean on my back

it read 'ok...i give up. i am done with hide and seek. you can come out now. hello?'

and in the mornings i still wake early just to say hi and wait around.

i wake with my forehead hot and sweating out a rainyseason

i think it washed away the oil and the what holiness was left underneath put in its place a dumb fever that i can't think out and i can't think.

not with my skull soaked in sweat and dryin' up in the rising sun heat like bent sheets of plywood i don't know if i can bend it back or keep my thoughts straight anymore.

now i keep my eyelids drawn like curtains. they can't lift You up off this bed called Morning it is dawn and they are tired of trying. i am watching neon stars wash up on the back of the lids little suns rising red like blood through that maritime flag i use when i'm out of gauze

i am tired

of old bandages

on new wounds.

each red star does its best impression of you.

so i'm tired of seeing, seeing You here all over texas. so i went out got me a table top globe, used my palm, wet with the dew on your hair, to spin it slow and careful kept my eyes closed stopped it with a finger on the other side, there, i am going there, wherever that is, so long as its got good food cheap booze things to distract me from you and is nowhere near here.

tokyo.

so here i am. much love from japan.

i've shut myself inside its coasts and i'm not coming out not until you knock.

holdin' this pillow 'round my head over my ears cause i can't sleep with your deafening drowsy coughs, keepin' quiet 'cause i hear You when i sing, keepin' my hands holdin pens 'cause i feel you when i fold them to pray, keepin' my eyes down on this desk 'cause i think you've painted yourself into the sky and im too afraid to check, my mouth shut 'cause i know you'll find a way in, i know you will.

yea i've shut myself inside of it.

forty days i fasted on a diet of

white rice

raw egg

torn paper

origami cranes

soggy comics

subway cars

pond water

koi fish

shinto gods

dead emperors

buddhist bells

deer feed

green tea

japanese beer

chicken heart

hello kitty

and puddles of black ink.

on day four oh my heart was nice and ripe and fat with song.

i could hear it beating fast between two train tracks two wheels beating on the floorboards like lovers on top a shinkansen bullet train makin love at two hundred km/h sometimes people want to see things blur past and know that we are moving fast

forty days i let my nails grow long carved a circle in my chest and pulled my heart straight out,

cut down an ancient cherry blossom, the oldest i could find (i needed something that had seen things built up and torn down over and over and still blooms bright bright pink each year) stripped the sides and fashioned it into a wooden bowl, ya know, the kind you use for coffee in kyoto.

i cracked my heart open on its rim

poured the yolk inside

ate the shell

stretched out a broken English language across the top as a lid

(broken so you hear the sound and beat sing out through the holes)

dug upward into a mountain for about three nights until I had just enough dried-up dirt on my hands.

when my nails finally fell off i screwed them onto the top of my bowl with ballpoint pens already run out of ink.

i didn't have a spare.

so i spit on the jetty below, struck oil, mixed the two into the pacific, painted it on as a lacquer,

and here it is.

i made this instrument for You.

it isn't hard to play my heart, not if ya know how to hold it right.

hold it now.

hold this out before your chest outloud and up high, You,

come to me.

make me into an instrument.

a porcelain bathtub.

put your hooks in the pacific winds

ride the current 'round to this here past.

come to my door and knock and I open up.

lay me out open up my ribs pour in freezing water and ice take off your clothes

(or bathe in them).

let your hair down.

step inside.

fold your legs.

use them to make me sing.

make music with me.

make sure you leave the old water inside.

('cause i want to know like you're still in here)

and show me how to hold it.

it's my first time.

so here i am. much love from japan.

---

sunday best.

we writers

we are vultures, ya know, birds of pray.

we go sing hymns in the sky and wear the wind like our sunday best.

i confess, the air is all i know.

in fact i am up there now speaking into and outta my human self through a wire too thin to see and two well hidden cups on either end. I apologize. This kid is young his skin is wood and cracked, his voice still cracks, when he cares the most when he tries to use his tongue and lift this love like a boulder out his throat, and I still don't know how to pull these strings to make him dance, or even how dress the poor guy.

they say 'business casual', you know, look laid-back but confident and presentable

then what do band shirts and bitten off fingernails tell about me?

well i don't know.

so i call upon the birds of pray, saints tailors and seamstresses, to sew shirts with verse and jeans with scripture that's died with the indigo stains of one-eighth Cherokee blood that build fires out of stories that burn quiet but burn to this day in my veins. i hear it brings out the green in my eyes.

they showed me my family tree

it is a treehouse in marksville lousiana.

they brought with them the boltcutters they blow notes through like flutes, cut through the locks of gray hair tangled on the gate and kicked down the back door.

in the back bedroom there is a closet where my great aunt Helen stays

spannin' underground across texas and louisiana

it is where, as little kids, my mother and her sisters played dress up with state lines and wore the gulf coast in their hair and shirts the size of my papa's guitar

it's something you gotta grow into

they put seeds in their pockets and bury their bedtime gowns in the backyard ground

it's something you gotta grow into

their sleeves dangle down trace tic tac toe and little clouds in the mound of dried up orange leaves

they sag like hand-me-down wings from my uncle stanley.

and i am trying on stanley's two wings.

his clothes forty-four stories too big but when i sing they somehow seem to fit.

(my uncle stanley,

he's a bird too

and can sketch the female form to a tee.)

in this closet i found an old jacket that my dad wore in college and thought was good as gone

there are holes on the elbows from pushing out hours on a desk 9 to 5 to 9 to 5 until the blue sleeves turned gold

so he sold the jacket and spent it all on my education so one day i'll call myself a writer and be poor but proud and chip my own words outta lead musketballs and say 'dad, no, i am more proud of you.'

and my dad raised me right so i'll say it.

i am scared.

i have seen ghosts in designer suits that wrap round little kids

call their veins up to the surface

and put an emptiness in their skin.

drivin' foreign cars fast burnin' gas gaspin' nightmare skidmarks on this here dirt path

but they cannot fly.

and my papa says

'will i am, i am i am,

you sure can.'

we writers,

we are vultures, ya know, birds of pray

we find prayers lying inside dead animals on the road

and pick at their matted fur out for poems

we dip our claws in their blood like inkwells and spell the words 'i love you so so much' across no name roads that run between two no name towns.

there are pages stuck inside these wings.

there is ink drippin' from these feathers.

when you hear the suits come at you bullhorns blaring out like bulls on parade

you

don't fly away.

no.

you stay.

stay in the middle of the street and stare them down.

...

keep staring.

...

stare till they slam on their brakes

stare them into a complete fucking stop and then stay and stare at them some more

make them go around you

when they ask what you make for a living, say

"i live

and i make

and i stare at people like you

i stare you scared till you run home.

i make you afraid motherfucker.

i dig up the grave you buried your old blankey in ya know the one you used to hide under at night and i keep my shovel right in here.

there are pages stuck inside these wings.

there is ink drippin' from these feathers."

hello, its been awhile.

2009-07-01T16:43:00.002-05:00

sorry for the lack of updates. but i've been here and here and all around japan.

not to worry - in the forty days i've been gone, i've been writing and writing and writing. sitting on about a novel's worth of stuff. going to edit all of it over the summer and hopefully have something at least presentable. or edible. or throw-able. or combustible. whatever you want to do with it.

anyways, you need to know about this place in harajuku called 'design festa'. it's sort of an art gallery, that keeps changing. anyone at all can rent spaces, walls, or entire rooms and do whatever they want, just go to town. i can't really do it justice, so here's a link. I'm actually on the blog under 6/23.

I met an Aussie artist named Paul Summerfield there, and he was working on some incredible stuff. Check out his website at ageofwonder.org. And while your there, you may go ahead and purchase one or two or five of his art pieces. Mmk? Thanks.

That's it. I'll try to post some of my writings from J-town later on. But for now I'm taking it easy back here in Texas. I have serious readjusting to do.

Much love,

bill-san.

we met in the sky. revised.

2009-05-11T22:47:00.002-05:00

this may be a shot in the dark...

dressed up in the beach of cali and down in this skin

old and coarse like sands of time

i step onto the tarmac

and we take off.

she says take off this skin, it stinks

stand bare

bear the inside out

and bore a hole in your chest

'cause only hollow men fly.

this boeing won't bear the daydreams of little boys.

it isn't big or fast enough.

J’ai un langue dans mes, mmm, un langue dans mes...

...no, no, so I point to fill in the blanks and say you know I keep language inside the tendons of my hands since sixth grade before literature class up a wooden ramp a long splinter came off the handrail and the blade stabbed in the loose skin between my thumb and forefinger and that’s when the words got in, it is a disease I have, there’s still no vaccine for writer’s block or what’s more fatal, writing.

Ah, je parle un peu de Francais.

I keep language in the tendons of my hands and toss them up for the rainclouds to hold until it storms and Sunday some words fell short she tied my hands behind my back with a thread called la francais that she pulled out from her eyes in that place she hides her tears and she speaks in the washed out ruby red of Paris or a place that isn’t here, (she says oui, Paris) or a city constituted by gray matter you know synapses and neurotransmitters passing through that light up skyscrapers all neon-like when the people doze off and go up in flames when the people read Titus Andronicus (ah, c’est tragique. oui) it is a city built on DMT day-emm-tay the stuff of dreaming.

Je ne comprends pas.

Our tongues an axe words destroyed behind our teeth and in our throats we spit out the petite seeds and broken brown Adam's apple cores of English et Francais.

I don't understand.

There is a wordsmith inside wipes dusting his hands on his pants and says he’s done with this conversation and sets down his knife and measure, defeated. Il ne peux pas la finit. As a rule he does not take on small talk by god he kicks himself for agreeing to this job but she sweet talked him into it.

She says C’est ma premier fois en Etats-Unis ...and points up at premier saying one and first and showing to me the sky for the first time. We know the same clouds that cover us all and sometimes carry our voices like two cups on a string if we speak a silence into them and quiet into this cup and pour my words and drink yours back.

Non, eh, wet air you sayeeng.

You heard right. I’m saying “wet air”. (‘Cause you dance on drops of rain one to another and never ever touch the ground, ne pas rien. Soaked hair in braids and wet glasses round rimmed c'est belle and I want to dance like you in the rain dance with you in the rain and we will rain dance like there's a drought.)

I see now and then she is

silhouetted

in the airplane window

and the San Andreas fault line flagging behind her like a tassle

hills rolling spanning off her skin.

I think she cries out coastlines red.

Her tears are mountain lions hiding in mountains

waiting to kill me.

Hills rolling like r's she still trills when she cries.

And I say habiller not habiter, I ask if she dresses in the heart of the Paris meaning to ask if she lives in the heart of the Paris no no I think she dresses up in the heart of Paris wears the Seine like a necklace.

A wordsmith asking for one kiss just one peck. To at last move past your lips lay tender on the inside scrape stones to make sparks set fire to your tongue weld the words himself reeassemble the shards of Anglais et Francais into a dialect you and I know by heart back in the hours before waking opened eyes and ears closed chests and know it by heart hearing a mother’s heart kick out its first four-to-the-floor rhythm and us kick back in the warm orangeblack. One kiss just one please. I will close my eyes purse my lips and wait. And wait. And I will press your chest to mine so our hearts will whisper what we can't translate in our heads much less say we will X out these accents sign X-O-X-O Tiphaine on my throat with your lips and I will taste your signature it is sweet like original sin I'll spit again those petite seeds like rhymes and hide Adam's apple cores and ask for more I need more than a one-course dinner like an original sinner you're my first i confess and I want seconds yea that writer's word-thirst you suppress send me to the Seine to drink and sin drunken and still, just one kiss please you see I read with my mouth. I am hungry.

And this is the fear of god you fear when dreams take on flesh and prophecies happen five minutes and two stanzas ago. God, so scared and with this dry mouth words scraping along my tongue I try not to spit up sand into my hands. We are flying over the desert. My lips are chapped in the heat. I stumble upon X-O-X-Oasis your skin the shape of the atlantic the color of sunrays skimming the waves it holds oceans inside I want swim down inside beside you into it all the way to the oceanbed. Yes. I checked and double checked my bags so as not to leave my heart in San Fran and instead I keep it six miles over Sante Fe where you said to step out the emergency exit so I did hitting the current of wind and hung my only heart on a clock-shaped cloud with that same thread from your eyes. Like a shot in the dark my broken arrow head heart speaks to the desert in broken kiowa-tanoan and tries on its accent but can’t recall the vernacular. It’s forgotten the language of its fathers. It wants to sound like the sand and wolves and look like a star hanging up there in twilight twirling. Yea, I say, my heart grew sick of staying inside my ribs feels more at home in a constellation longs to speak the earth’s slang spell out words with other stars. And i swapped out my heart in the emptiness filled my chest with your memory. It is heavy. And sharp.

flight fourteen forty four

‘lord send this plane

into the sonoran’

desert high-diving all divine

you take my hand afraid you kiss me afraid

scared tongue out

hand reaching out you fillin up with

life or what’s left so much

it spills out your arms

like the land

swallows

last drops of rain before a drought

we burn in

the desert dancin’ in

gasoline ignited in

tongues of fire in

wrecked steel skeleton in

the ribcage of a blue whale lost in the sand somehow in

the desert dancin’.

candlewicks last breaths of

a blue whale pressed out in

a blackened orange

misses the sea misses its home.

i miss my home.

Like the spur on a boot I want show you the heel of America Texas and the dirt I want to show you how I walk miles on a hot summer street at midday like a hindu monk on coals you ask how? ‘cause i did this as a kid and i prefers my sole to burn but not burn up. Yes I want to show you Texas and you will teach me back your home and your art.

A lesson in chemistry in my throat you weld the welt yourself and show me how to do alchemy how to push inside my chest a stone just stare smile walk away and allow ten minutes for it to cool swell push prod up under my skin and I will chase each detail of your face lines in your cheek I will miss you so much that I‘m out of breath always.

A lesson in reading with my mouth watching hands wrapped round a barbed wire fence in between the barbs careful now dancing in between the barbs. Say you’ve never seen cattle up close before but you see them now look how big they are oui c’est vrai ils sont tres tres grands they are big and still stand still wait for a love to write back in blades of grass they read with their mouths they are hungry (like I said, I read with my mouth I am hungry for you to write back). You sit on my back like...um...I regret I know not the name of egrets perched on cattle-backs picking off the flies flying out and out for days but coming back let’s dance like that like they dance I regret this bull is ugly make me pretty, pretty please don’t fly away again like white herons do, there’s gray hair on my head from thinking of you heroine I need saving heroine I need a hit just one kiss please grace me gracely and I’ll keep grazing. I’ll stop asking. I swear.

A lesson in fashion I have a hat called Paris that I wear when I want to feel alone and she dresses in the heart of the city dresses herself in my thoughts pulls up into it in the night like a skintight dress that she will not take off.

(One kiss just one eyes closed lips out waiting hearing you walk away.)

And my eyes closed still. tonight i sleep with my ceiling fan spinning fast as it can just to feel the wind ya know believe in something invisible overhead ya know and something that i breathe. i sleep with my fan spinning fast as it can to pretend im in the sky again and i am that plane flight fourteen-forty-four and hold you on the inside window seat in my mind staring out from my eyes. and if you’d like to fly back i’ll someday tell my daughter, ‘your mother and i? we met in the sky. cause that’s where you meet angels.’

Mais tu est en France maintenant. Je ne comprends pas.

I don't understand.

puroslam, san antonio.

2009-05-07T21:24:00.002-05:00

i somehow won a slam on tuesday. it was PuroSlam in San Antonio (google it, its really cool). with this and then the gordone competition, im super super grateful to god. here's the video of the first one i did. its "calluses", but revised for a three minute time limit. sorry for the crazy hands and whiny voice and stuttering. i was nervous heh. (thanks goes out to Anastacio for filming/uploading this! this guy is an amazing poet, his stuff will give you the chills.)

off fm 359 between hempstead and monaville at dusk.

2009-04-27T18:44:00.001-05:00

hi. sorry i’m short of breath

sorry for the dirt in my nails

see i just came up from the earth

had to dig around deep for this one

but i found it, thank god.

lord knows i can’t write this shit myself.

this one was

off fm 359 between hempstead and monaville at dusk.

i knelt on the grass head down toward a house called mecca

that i still see when i dream

that im a kid again

and didn’t stop there. no.

i pushed my hands into the land and planted

myself in the soil warm like wedding cake

up to my wrists

i felt the face of a raincloud. its skin was dry.

felt a dustdevil cry

a hurricane breathe in gasping afraid

an earthquake pounding out beats on the floor of california

and a boy called earth spinning the globe like a disney teacup ride laughing

while others waited in fault lines a mile long

he told me stories

lying like little kids lie like its his job

to fertilize the forests with the bullshit he spits

said

“those streets up there ain’t concrete mister

they are paved with years

from farm to market to death rattle

ringing on past towns

drawin county lines with regolith

and people dont know

down that road in corpus

lazarus was born and raised

age five dying over and over and coming back

laughin more everytime

scared the hell outta of his momma

and played freeze tag with michaelangelo

where mike made his first statues out of schoolmates

down the line he took the chisel to himself and chipped away.

he prefers to work with people.

wants a lover to shape with his hands

someone that would carve him back

and chip away his excess.

he too longs for home

and says we all hail from corpus

even if we dont.

and people don’t know

before helen of troy

there was helen of troy, texas

who sang the blues

hiding bluebonnets in her mouth

blowin out petals with every verse

and looked most beautiful

with dirt on her hands.

heroes vied for her love

jefferson johnson lipscomb hurt and house

not by fighting and dying but learning her music

and every battle in troy she played out back

riding a horse fast as she fucking can.

and every battle in troy

pushed her out of that nowhere town

to university then graduate school then legend.

she invented penicillin

and goes by doctor helen of troy, texas. ph d.

thank you.

and people don’t know

i grew up with father time

his real name is tim

and father time’s father mance

fixes up grandfather clocks down in navasota

and when tim sleeps through his alarm

rolling back years in bed

mance put father time in time out

and starts settin all clocks back

its seven thirty now

wait

six thirty

wait

yesterday

last year

1492

in a post christian age

he prays it will help us think

counter-clock-wise again.”

like i said that kid earth is full of shit.

so i left but he came with.

and up to my neck i heard a mountain range sigh

it spoke the same language as blue whales in fact the two are cousins

and it pulled out empty pockets like hoover flags and cried

“we got no money for you, mister.

us fault lines are broke as a joke.

just leave us alone.”

and “no no no” i said “the air outside makes me cough and my head feel light.

they paved highways under the english channel

but still don’t build billboards pointing down, not yet.”

“ok,” they said, “come on in but take of them boots

this mud’s ages old

so don’t track nothing new

if you stain it with clean then you get down and muddy it up again

spotless spots of sterile don’t come out of dirt that easy.”

those rocky mountains seemed rough around the edges so i left

and let little earth tag along

down deeper there’s old bones

in the shape of music notes

where you hear america whisper

into the ground’s ear, which we call

the grand canyon.

earth says to watch what you say

it hears everything

and like all kids, he’s sensitive

he can tell the hardness of your heart by how hard you step.

so im through with shoes

from here on out its bare feet for me

‘cause the ground thinks we all have rubber souls

(I didn’t argue about it. Wasn’t sure I’d win that one.)

Just went further down

and cooked s’mores in the fires of the earth’s core

and swapped ghost stories with mayan gods

when they fell asleep

i went back up and out the same way i came in

except i was a child again

at that age when we all spoke to the earth and

dug holes in sandboxes to gossip.

i stood and that kid earth yelled up to me one last thing.

he said

texas is yours.

you are in her hands.

this land is the bare back of helen

stretching out.

she lets you walk across her skin

and laughs when you think you are lost

‘cause youre not.

never.

(she is all over you.)

a bride you call the south spanning acres

she sleeps away the day, her form impressed in bedsheetrock

and the night, a blanket she clings to.

you are married to this land and she to you and she loves you.

til death don’t you part and on and on after that.

little mary calls me boo-boo ‘cause she can’t say william.

2009-04-27T18:40:00.000-05:00

i am 'boo-boo'.

christened by my younger sister when she was two.

you see saints speak through sisters in all that gibberish.

my sister says no, boo-boo, “heaven” is a hole-in-the-wall mexican diner

with burritos that make believers

tostadas that the new testament testifies to

and queso you’d swear was the blood of christ.

angels eat at rancho grande in rosenberg, texas

that, like all of rosenberg filed for chapter seven seven seven

something like seven years ago.

after hours god cooks over a hot stove called hell

mops the floor with lightning bolts

wipes the sweat from his head with a cloud

wrings it out on the ground

he sets a yellow sign outside on the flooding streets

that reads “cuidado, piso mojado.”

before doing janitor work for the earth he used to fix wristwatches but

nowadays times are tough

he can’t break off enough to do redeeming even part-time

so salvation takes another place in rancho grande,

on the backburner.

he sells grace online ‘cause we wouldn’t take it for free and

passes out truth like flyers

that we fold in 4’s and stick in our back pockets and forget its there.

he prints pages of scripture with sudoko on the other side

‘cause otherwise we might glance but won’t read

and every sheet says that

human beings are flyers

(that would rather walk than try on secondhand wings.)

human beings believe

(only if it doesn’t mean reading seeing and/or thinking about things.)

human beings have hours upon hours to turn back the clock

(and instead live by its hands and kill time on our time off

writing tic-tac-toe epitaphs,

little games played out on its grave.)

in a stairwell haven outside all that rain inside making small talk

i made a covenant with god who told me that

the sky is not falling, i promise.

in a stairwell haven inside outside of the flood and all that rain and making small talk

i met the lord. i introduced myself to my own maker, said

my name is billy.

and bill and william and sometimes i think i’m all three all mashed up into one

and god said “i know. me too,

i still can’t think like a trinity

its hard enough to be myself by myself to know my own self but i know you already.”

god graced me one of them flyers of his.

this one had a poem on the other side.

he told me to read it aloud and out loud

speak slow

sing like a proud father singing his child to sleep

another word another note.

here it goes.

i am boo-boo.

christened by my younger sister when she was two.

you see, saints speak through sisters in all that gibberish.

i am boo-boo a skyscraper scraping the skies for another self

‘cause i dont love this self.

ive tried and tried and

still sink into my sheets and down

i fall under the bedframe holdin my breath staying dead still

in a game of hide and seek with william and billy and bill

and pray like hell they don’t find me.

i don’t get along with them.

i am boo-boo boo-hooing hiding yet again under this bed.

yes, i found a good spot this time and im not coming out never ever

not in a million years

down here i made imaginary friends with my fears and family history.

both reek of booze.

i am boo-boo

and my soul is not for sale.

i divvied it up and each piece is for free

for whoever needs it more than me.

i am boo-boo.

only name I say

when i call what’s left of my soul

back home when i know

i am whole again.

one three all and none.

here comes the rain.

bring on the flood.

2009-04-27T18:38:00.001-05:00

Cool. it works. heh.

2009-04-27T18:37:00.001-05:00

Testing out the text message posting deal.

i have my share of calluses, thank you (revised).

2009-04-05T23:46:00.003-05:00

last ones undergone some changes. redacting, adding, switch it change it rearrange it and such.

---

im goin where

people write songs

by fallin off the sides of skyscrapers

hands out and

lettin the wind whistle on

the tips of their fingers

where they hear

a hammond organ humming gospel hymns

and pedal point prayers

and Pollocks appear

on the gray street where they hit.

and i think most songs are about jesus.

im goin where

people watch earthquakes from the inside out

in red plush theatre seats

and previews of movies that never show

at least not here in this backwoods town

“Final Judgement 3”

coming out Nigh whenever that is,

heard it got bad reviews

“No thanks Nostradamus!”

they say sippin more soda than they should

and danglin twizzlers

spinnin like twisters

where there is sugar inside every storm.

im goin where

they keep the imagination in a toolbox

with hope and a tape measure and screwdriver

and every doodle they every doodled in the fifth grade.

tell phillip to tell allen they can keep their own head

theyll need em

and you have your own.

where people build buildings on a page

and the homeless draw themselves houses

with a couple crayons on a napkin

and it comes to be

and you can draw anything at all that

you can at least sorta outline

so long as you have the common sense

to color outside the lines

where the gold

in your family crest

really shines.

even castles fit on page.

im goin where

people aren’t people but

guitar strings tuned by God.

nickel-wound

pulled taut

they know that

soon as they think they may snap

they resonate.

there is sound.

they sing under stress.

im goin where

every church is a barn

you vaguely know from your childhood

and coming back

is a sacrament.

it was your granpa’s.

said it’s red with his own blood and sweat.

“us old timers dont build with our head, we use our hands”.

got calluses on his fingers on rusty strings

on a bent guitar in the feed room

feeding us an old sermon.

there’s only one he knows.

singing about jesus in his heart.

and in the silo

all his kids and kids’ kids play

leaping down into the hay

and tossing up the straw

and they call that “baptism”

as long as you laugh loud enough.

im goin where

people catch fire but don’t burn up.

they catch fire and hold it

and sometimes toss it around

and call each other flamethrowers.

where St. Augustine goes knocking

door to door

with an old baseball mit

asking anyone, anyone at all for a game of catch

when he thinks his heart’s all burnt out.

he still smokes cant kick the habit

but not in the way you think,

tends a flame inside his ribs

and blows out the fumes in the shape of a cross.

if youre not up for catch

or forgot your mit or matches

or youd rather not play with fire,

pour poor Augustine some coffee.

he says one cup will do.

it’s freezing outside

he just wants to feel warm.

im goin where

blind lemon jefferson aint so blind.

he learned to see by strumming with his thumb

and uses his guitar pick like a third eye.

he too sings about jesus

and goes by deacon bates.

im goin where

a barbed-wire fence is not a fence

its the tail of a great dragon

that towers over us all

filling her lungs with air

ready to sigh out

and the people run for their lives

and Augustine stands and waits

arms out eyes open ready

he just wants to feel warm.

im going where

they steal the steering wheels from cars

and take them

everywhere so they feel

like theyre going somewhere always

like theyre moving

even when theyre not.

in fact theyre happy standin

in place

most hours of the day.

and in the night they dance.

im going where doctors prescribe two hours

of shutting your eyes as hard as you fucking can

twice a day,

so you at last see that darkness for what it is -

a canvas

and every sob is a scene

and we all cry paint.

where a boy born blind sing whole chords at a time

holdin’ C add 9 for days that rhymes

with all that orange in the sky

where God peels the sun with a knife he calls Son

squeezes out love for you to drink the Dawn.

drink up.

you’ll need vitamins W E A R E A L L L O V E and D to make it through act five-hundred.

all the stage is a world

we built our own sunset and sewed our costumes called skin

we stand on solar flares stage left

this show’s Sol’d out and after tonight we’ll be stars

dark falls like a curtain and the boy walks home singing

still holding his notes and stretching them out for Miles

Round Midnight he rolls his music out like

tape measure to find how far he can scream

when he screams out the dark we call night up into the sky

and he laughs,

he knows this ribbon won’t reach, not even to the Moon

where craters resonate with old radio waves of old radio shows

that he hears in bed

his favorite, The Adventures of Superman,

tonight’s episode, “Lois Lane Goes Missing”

and listens like a Superman

he shoots laser beams from his eyes that people mistake for shooting stars

and calls that seeing

and says we should get our own eyes checked,

his work fine.

where people steal the dustcovers off turntables

and keep them on their heads and on their hearts

and when they lift them up

they are children again.

where people play old records

inside their chests and hear

heartbeat melodies over

decibels of dissonance of discharging rifles and dishwashers,

and glasses shattering in the heat inside

and people carry the shards in their skin

and love them.

in fact they show them like badges of honor

and keep dust on their ribs and its ok.

We all keep decks inside our chests

it's just that some of us forgot it's there but it is.

Some us forgot love isn't a diamond stone you hold so let go,

it's a sound you hear so listen.

Some of us forgot our hearts aren't set in place, they spin sometimes

if you play the right songs.

Let the vinyl scratch awhile and I will too, I swear.

I too hear my heart ticking like the little hand of a watch sometimes

and I can't believe this thing still works

but it does.

come mornin im good as gone.

im goin home.

i have my share of calluses thank you.

2009-02-23T16:42:00.000-06:00

im goin where

people write songs

by fallin off the sides of skyscrapers

hands out and

lettin the wind whistle on

tips of their fingers

where they hear

a hammond organ humming gospel hymns

and pedal point prayers

and Pollocks appear

on the gray street where they hit.

and i think most songs are about jesus.

im goin where

people watch earthquakes from the inside out

sippin more soda than they should

and danglin twizzlers

spinnin like twisters

where there is sugar inside every storm.

im goin where

they keep the imagination in a toolbox

with hope and a tape measure and screwdriver

and every doodle they every doodled in the fifth grade.

tell phillip to tell allen they can keep their own head

theyll need em

and you have your own.

where people build buildings on a page

and the homeless draw themselves houses

with a couple crayons on a napkin

and it comes to be

and you can draw anything at all that

you can at least sorta outline

so long as you have the common sense

to color outside the lines

where the gold

in your family crest

really shines.

even castles fit on paper.

im goin where

people aren’t people but

guitar strings tuned by God.

nickel-wound

pulled taut

they know that

soon as they think they may snap

they resonate.

there is sound.

they sing under stress.

im goin where

every church is a barn

you vaguely know from your childhood

and coming back

is a sacrament.

it was your granpa’s.

said it’s red with his own blood and sweat.

us old timers dont build with our head, we use our hands.

got calluses on his fingers on rusty strings

on a bent guitar in the feed room

feeding us an old sermon.

there’s only one he knows.

singing about jesus in his heart.

and in the silo

all his kids and kids’ kids play

leaping down into the hay

and tossing up the straw

and they call that “baptism”

as long as you laugh loud enough.

im goin where

people catch fire but don’t burn up.

they catch fire and hold it

and sometimes toss it around

and call each other flamethrowers.

where St. Augustine goes knocking

door to door

with an old baseball mit

asking anyone, anyone at all for a game of catch

when he thinks his heart’s all burnt out.

he still smokes cant kick the habit

but not in the way you think,

tends a flame inside his ribs

and blows out the fumes in the shape of a cross.

if youre not up for catch

or forgot your mit or matches

or youd rather not play with fire,

pour poor Augustine some coffee.

he says one cup is fine.

it’s freezing outside

he just wants to feel warm.

im goin where

blind lemon jefferson aint so blind.

he learned to see by strumming

and uses his guitar pick like a third eye.

he sings about jesus too

and goes by deacon bates.

im goin where

a barbed-wire fence is not a fence

its the tail of a great dragon

that towers over us all

filling her lungs with air

ready to sigh out

and the people run for their lives

while Augustine waits

arms out eyes open ready

he just wants to feel warm.

im going where

they steal the steering wheels from cars

and take them

everywhere so they feel

like theyre going somewhere always

like theyre moving

even when theyre not.

in fact theyre happy standin

in place

most hours of the day.

and in the night they dance.

come mornin im good as gone.

im goin home.

last bridge.

2009-02-08T01:21:00.001-06:00

new one. probably going to change soon. i don't feel like typing this one out, so my apologies for the spacing. blame the website.

---

a star set atop a piano and forgotten.

losing your breath inside outside.

sister’s face impressed in the folds of a pillow.

a hand spanning the city.

i stretched my palm far as I could then balled my fingers in a fist,

tried to hold you and your memory

and felt you shake inside slipping out

and came up empty-handed

except

a message etched on my wrist and up from

God I think.

it read something like.

‘and when you pass the last bridge you will feel the earth

give up

what’s left of her breath

retired respired inspired in you

the language of leaves torn from the tops of trees

by the wind and forced into

unpaid labor

on the ground.

nothing is a fraction of itself,

you are whole and holy and

leaves like us belong in the sky.

spring will come sometime

soon.

it has to.

‘and when you pass the last bridge you will step onto land again

and feel it’s hot breath

fill your lungs and feel your lungs topped off and

your soul spilt on stage.

just let it lie.

let the strays

lap it up ‘cause when they do

rats will turn to kings and

alley cats to alley tigers

and the earth with what breath it has left

will look less like a possession. say to them

“we own nothing, not even ourselves.

and no.

my soul is not for sale.

i divvied it up

each piece is for free

and it’s as good as yours.

i’ll carry it for you, for now.

i’ll carry an upper case

T and L for

Truth and Love

and call it the new capital-ism.”

and when the stray cats turn to stray tigers

they will shed

all over the place.

I mean, orange hair

all over the place.

you will lint-brush your heart and see

that one stranger is human after all and

that one stranger looks less dangerous after all,

not with six hundred pound cats on the loose.

i think its for the better.

abstracts like race erased, no such thing,

not with six hundred pound cats on the loose.

maybe you’ve heard,

i’m more of a cat-person myself.

‘when you pass the last bridge

I’ll probably laugh and let you in my chest

and you will lint-brush my heart

and you may not love me back,

but its better for your allergies anyways.’

end of january. updates.

2009-01-30T03:19:00.002-06:00

1) Book one. Trying to get it published.

2) Thinking out my magnum opus, book two. Planning, with minimal amounts of actual substantive writing. In time, friends.

3) Poetry. It's come up again like it does. Open mic on Sundays. Writing feverishly so as not to repeat myself. Gotta keep it fresh.

New poems below, "dustcover" and "clockwork". Feedback please, whoever reads this. I feel like they are different which I think means worse. I dunno.

clockwork.

2009-01-30T03:09:00.002-06:00

like clockwork springs up in time and winter spring's up with her.

she dances in the white outside, says it keeps her warm

so long as she never ever stops to breathe.

says she steps off time sometimes

not off-beat, off time sometimes

with her left foot anchored in '86

and her right tip-toeing 'round right...now.

what with all the spinning

she drops here somewhere

in the cracks

between warped floorboards

beneath her soul

and the soles of her feet

and if you want to watch her

be still i mean coma still

and she might not spot you.

me, i'd rather be seen.

she found me in a cupboard of time called never

right beside when hell freezes over and october twentieth

gazing back at her. i smiled and offered myself up

here i am you found me i'm yours

she took me out

and studied me like an antique doll

and held me, let me spin in her hands,

sketched a history of us and a song about a crane

into the blank of my back

and put me back.

i'm back

out of sight, out of mind, out of time

but if you find that drawer the one cracked and chipped and worn

having been slammed over and over and over,

open it.

like an antique

i like to think i appreciate in value

over time

even just a little.

we all do.

some things such as human beings

are not disposable.

she skips six months and i can't taste the coffee over small talk.

no. it hasn't been awhile.

i've carried you in my eyelids

and when i blink i see your hips

and yes. i've lost some weight.

i've taken up running

away from this kind of conversation

and i've cut my mile time in half

and yes. i miss you now

but still carry the bruise from when we hit,

settled on my ribs in the shape of a heart

and it still hurts and i still cry

sometimes.

and you still sway on the backs of minutes and hours

and break off the hands of a clock,

using them to catch those white seconds falling

in the shape of snowflakes, oh god don't let them go

'cause seconds sometimes last for minutes and minutes for hours

if you hold them right, so gather them now

but when you're done,

i think i'm ready for you to come back inside.

only if you want.

and you will age and it will hurt.

but it's warmer in here.

dustcover.

2009-01-29T14:59:00.003-06:00

This one's still a work in progress.

This one's about music.

It's about death and forgetting it,

the rhythm in your breath and hearing it,

if I could count the in and out I would be a C or C sharp

'cause I'd rather not sound dull.

This one's about that lull after laughter, the quiet.

It's about the gods sitting chest-high in the soil of distant planets

and a little girl wandering, wearing a gas mask

and other ideas just sitting, playing solitaire, waiting for an author.

A Muse pushing a pen in his lazy hand and a gun to his lazy temple

and knowing the lazy bastard would rather die than write,

it's easier that way,

and she mutters "this writer's broken I'd like another."

This one's about half past the end

and the sixth of june eighty-eight,

it's your birthday everyday,

it's never too late to begin again.

It's a bout between the child in us all and

the news the schools the rules the roles the fools that beat us down,

build yourself back up.

Sometimes it helps to shut your eyes so hard you

erase the world outside the dark

and you see that black for what it is -

a canvas.

Every sob is a scene.

And we all cry paint.

This one's a bout between me and the me I fight to be

every hour of every day.

This one's about breathing out the smoke.

This one is for you and only you so don't tell a soul.

Like I said, it's a work in progress.

We stole the dustcovers off turntables and kept them on our heads and on our hearts, I hear it takes years off your age.

Ah fuck.

Lift yours up and put on an old record, any album at all it's up to you.

Let it spin in your chest

and listen.

Hear the keys and melodies and heartbeats

over decibels of dissonance of discharging rifles and dishwashers,

glasses shattering in the heat inside.

I know you still carry the shards

and the dust on your ribs,

we all do,

it's all right.

We all hide decks inside our chests,

it's just that some of us forgot it's there but it is.

Some us forgot love isn't a diamond stone you hold so let go,

it's a sound you hear so listen.

Some of us forgot our hearts aren't set in place, they spin sometimes

if you play the right songs.

Let the vinyl scratch awhile and I will too, I swear.

And I can't believe this thing still works

but it does.

shitty nights yield new novels, i guess.

2009-01-06T02:06:00.001-06:00

"that's something you never forget. ever."

"what?"

"the sound of the sirens."

december to remember.

2008-12-20T01:31:00.004-06:00

working on the fifth and ideally last draft of the book.

searching out agents foolish enough to represent me.

searching out small presses for when i fail to acquire an agent.

writing more poetry. maybe.

fleshing out the new concept. thinking big.

plz read "the mysticism of sound and music" by inayat khan.

kthxbye.

perspective.

2008-11-29T00:19:00.003-06:00

short story for workshop. i kind of like this one. sorry for the odd formatting and crummy dialogue. i can't help it.

At the same time she’s wiping a stranger’s sweat from her arm, tensing and relaxing tendons on the back of her knees to ward off the cramp, losing in the background noise that brisket and homemade bar-b-que sauce that bleeds out from inside the walls and in her veins, slipping in a couple different kinds of smoke like a coat against the cold, break-beats on the towers, neurons firing off and everything linear and concurrent at once, this folded over on that onto that onto that. Break. Spin. Breathe. And repeat that line over and over again like a mantra creased over on itself, ‘cause the black’s laid on thick tonight and you’ll need more than light to make sense of your senses. She’s taking it all in at once, every sight and sound and feeling coming in unfiltered like the Marlboros she smokes strictly when she’s drunk and sometimes when she’s not. She’s out for a little self-destruction. She dives into the earth.

Through the dark she spots a scrawny scene kid but older than you’d think, with his Levi five-elevens and Buddy Holly frames, tinkering with a sampler with one hand and a dos equis in the other and spitting drivel on the mic. Mic check one two, he says. One and two, puff and puff and pass the time. Minutes wrapped and sparked. These days will fuck you up. In a past life she spent her Friday nights stirring Chamomile, watching ordinary and miserable Americans have their face or house made over and their existence at last endowed meaning (oh! praise network-television-God, I was once lost but now I’m thin) and cutting eight-by-eleven sheets of computer paper into squares, saving the excess rectangles because there’s always something to jot down (if not, you just aren’t thinking hard enough) and you never know when you might run out of sticky notes, practicing her origami with the original squares, folding things over like she does, fashioning another paper crane for the paper crane shelf where nothing is perfect, every last crane with its own little imperfection. She remembers the cranes and then tosses them into a small fire in the rear of her subconscious, feeling redeemed, her mind returning to Hard Times where live music and thick cuts of meat and drunken revelry come together in pure Texas fashion. She returns to the smoke and the Levi’s and the collective anticipation building up in everyone’s feet. Goddamn this part is the hardest. It’s the waiting, oh Lord, the waiting. Like Jeffrey Caine the jock at prom, out for some pussy or at the very minimum a little Stacy Cranberry hand action by the end of the night, praying as if it were his death wish. Start the show already. Club music drags on through the towers like a chain smoker ditching that cold turkey bullshit. She’s gotta stop kidding herself. These lips got dependency issues. Speaking of dependency issues, there’s almost-boyfriend-but-not-really-we’re-just-talking, who attends some haughty music school and goes by the name of Michael, standing beside her, acting aloof. Everyone is packed together shoulder to shoulder and ass to crotch, the lid popped off this sardine can venue, the night sky hovering above and fighting off the smell of us fish and stifling that need to gag. Tobacco and weed and burnt wood chips make most constellations queasy, warring for our consideration while the corpses and contraband float up and up and the refuse amasses somewhere along the rings of Saturn. Dig your graves in the stars. For now, it’s about the music. No one will find them beyond the spinning lights cast on the awning, the yellow and funky-lookin’ blue that’s sometimes purple, hell if I know. I already told you I’m colorblind. Shows how well you listen.

Some track off Low End Theory fades to shitty goth-industrial fades to “Boys Don’t Cry” which also fades and this is it! The quiet says it all. Time to break and spin and breathe. Scene-kid-but-older gives the signal to the soundboard guy in the back and then shuffles off stage, his stride reaching only as far as his five-elevens will allow. Break and spin and step three, breathe, in and out. And the speakers blare again, the Cool Kids this time. Shit. Not yet. It drones out of the mains and subs, the chorus dictating dance moves to a mass of whirling dervishes. Do the whop, do the smurf, start the fuckin’ show already. Our heroine is getting antsy, staring over at Michael who’s texting some other chick like he does in class or in the car or wherever he’s comfortable being himself. That is, lost. By God if he doesn’t quit the cell soon, I swear. Mike check, one two. Almost-boyfriend-but-not-really-we’re-just-talking check, one two. This cord’s no good, she can’t hear herself through him, let’s trim the bass. She thinks it’s gone to his head possibly, knocked something loose. Toss away the thought, put it in that fire with the all the cranes. Show’s on its way. We are almost there.

If only. In those moments before the concert, the sky can’t take the stench from below any longer and it begins to rain. Alright. We’ll have a show in the rain. That is, unless the tent over the boards isn’t... goddammit, it’s ripped. Rain trickles through tears in the clouds and tears in the sky and tears in the plastic and onto the soundboard, flowing down the hard plastic, creeping into the circuits. Sparks fly and that’s that. Time to file out. Micah closes the phone and asks what happens. She just turns and walks and grabs his hand not out of affection but to keep a tab on someone older in theory than practice, pulling him towards her like a child. It’s ok, I promise. If she can’t absorb this venue she will absorb another, the street. She pulls Michael out of Hard Times with everything oversaturated and overexposed around her, feeling invisible in comparison, comfortable in not being seen. Fortune’s wheel spun and she’s upside down, oh well, it’s a new perspective at least. She dives into the earth again.

---

He thinks, goddammit she’s beautiful when she bosses me around. She tugs him out of Hard Times and he feels her palms, warm despite the rain, hydrogen and oxygen tangled in her hair, matted with precipitation, her bangs clinging to her face and her purple dress clinging to her body like he would hide behind his mother’s leg at the sight of a stranger. That’s it. She makes him feel like that. Vulnerable. He’s typed nonsense on his phone for about half an hour now, words like “ommmmmm” and “Oregon” over and over just to keep his eyes down and off of her. He tends to gawk at beautiful things, can’t help himself, scared she can see him for what he really is, all out in the open and naked. Oh, the terror. That’s what love is. It’s in his hands, and he thinks maybe it’s in hers. There’s rain, there’s flames stuck in between their hands.

Time passes like it does and there he is, driving her home, minutes burnt away like a blunt. The wiper blades are on second to highest, pushing rain off the side of the windshield and onto the highway. He brings it down a few steps for no particular reason, the wipers slowing, allowing the rain to accumulate and distort the world outside, the car lights ahead going from dots to lines then back to dots. And he feels slightly more alone with her behind that thin curtain of rain, fleeting though it is. Like clockwork, his thoughts revert back to school. There’s a symphony he has to transpose and analyze for Monday, from a full orchestra to two violins and a viola and a cello, shit, he probably won’t get any sleep tonight.

“I just can’t do it,” she says, picking up midway through a thought. It looks like she’s staring at the window, not outside of it, concentrating on a spot in the glass as if she just saw herself trapped inside a raindrop clinging on the outside.

“I’m sorry. Do what?” he asks.

“Freeing myself from the bonds of rational thought. I can’t do it.”

“Oh ok,” he says, allowing another moment to burn. “What?”

“You see the big dipper up there?”

“I’m driving.”

“Oh right. Well play along and pretend you see it,” she continues, “Why is it there in the first place? Can you tell me?”

“Why is what where?”

“The big dipper. Up there.”

“Oh. I haven’t a clue,” he says.

“I mean, why would the stars align themselves like a ladle? Did they talk to each other beforehand and organize it like that? It’s nice having a giant ladle in the sky, don’t get me wrong, but why?”

“I give up. Tell me,” he says.

“Come on, show some speculative reasoning” she says, “Or ask your friend on the phone. She seems to have a lot to say.”

“Oh please.”

“Ok ok. I’ll give you a hint. One word. Perspective.”

He said nothing.

“Use that head of yours. You’ll figure it out,” she says, tapping his forehead with her first two fingers. And after that, silence, to a point. There is the drone of rubber tires on the freeway. Talk radio too dull to make out words. And the girl soaking up the seat beside him, eyes shutting slowly then reopening, awake then asleep then awake. She’s swallowed up in the dark, her dim frame and just her frame curled with its feet up on the seat and its legs tucked at the chest and her silhouette sits there and speaks and breathes in her stead. Maybe she is somewhere else altogether, he thinks, maybe she’s hiding in some remote pocket of nighttime and giggling for some odd reason. There’s the stink of cigarette smoke on their clothes, brought out into the open with the old rain sinking into the fibers. His sight shifts from the road to her to the road. It’s hard to keep his eyes still, with the gawking and whatnot. Minutes pass in silence, perpetually burning but never burning up completely, then she tries to snuff it out.

“And I was really looking forward to it too. Looks like you’re doomed to Bach chorales and chamber music forever.”

“Oh I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s not your fault. It’s just a damn shame, that’s all.” She smiles. It is lost in the dark. “I know you liberal-art-conservatory-types are all about staff lines and such. I just wanted to pull a prodigious music student out of the classroom for once, you know, to see what happens.”

“Hey that’s not true.”

“What’s not true?”

“It’s not like music is a chore for me. I at least have the courage to study what I love. You... never mind."

“Got it,” she says.

“I mean, yes, I have to study music. And yes, it is tedious at times. But I can still enjoy music. I can still separate grades from pleasure,” he says.

“Exactly. I just think that music is neither of those."

“You don’t listen to music for entertainment?”

“Not at all. And I sure as hell don’t force it into a classroom, that’s for damn sure. I love it too much for that. I’m sorry if that’s offensive. I’m just being honest.”

He thinks that she doesn’t make sense, that she doesn’t have to as long as she sits there, curled up in his seat, the mere sight of her tipping him over so that all his insides spill out and there’s nothing left on the inside except space begging to be filled. For years he has stuffed himself with theory, reviewing and analyzing and transforming songs into a math even at the risk of hating them forever after, and it’s somehow ok that he’s being torn down as long as she’s doing the tearing. He thinks, goddammit she’s beautiful when she calls me into question, strips me of the little reassurances, the mantras I build into armor.

Puff puff pass, one two, time blazes away in a haze of smoke and he pulls up to her duplex with a million plots and a million scenarios playing out before him. Walk her up, hug, kiss, follow her in or don’t, the start of a life together, break and spin and breathe in the humid air, take the rain into his lungs like she’s made of the dew in the air and on the grass. Yeah, if only. She wakes and hugs him awkwardly between the seats and leaves and that’s that.

Sleep won’t come. He starts Rachmaninoff’s Second on his computer and hits the bed tired beyond tired, in either that dreamy wake or lucid catalepsy where hallucination makes its home. Refugees, settle in! Eat and drink but for God’s sake, don’t trust anything you see. It’s four thirty in the hours before daylight and she in the room, seems her doppelganger hugged him and left, the real thing asleep in the backseat the entire way home. She says she won’t climb in unless he puts on some fucking shorts so he’s bent over the edge of the bed, sifting through shirts and wet towels and pairs of boxers but no shorts. Keep looking. There’s sheet music stuck in between the dirty laundry and he pulls out more and more the further he digs. Search, transpose, analyze. Shit. He can’t find anything through all the staff lines and with Sergei still coming through the speakers and manifesting on the ground and she’s waiting, toes tapping in queue. Where the hell are the shorts? Other people are there now but hers is the only face visible in the traces of light strewn about like dirty clothes. He lies. He says he found a pair and shifts to the edge of the mattress in the gap between that and the wall and sinks in. The others file in but she stays and stands, searching for a spot, unsure how to enter.

And then she sees. She grabs a pair of shorts off the ground and twirls them in her finger, flaunting to him his own lie. This is so goddamn embarrassing. She shakes her head and says that human life is a history of violence, tells him to stop fucking kidding himself. He doesn’t understand and she reads it in his face and laughs. She’s playing with him. The others have left, why won’t she just climb in? She tosses the shorts to the floor and turns and passes through the door. Don’t go. He reaches for the cell. He has to call her before she passes forever out of existence, or even worse, before her hair dries. That hair! He flips the phone open and the clock reads four forty-five and the light sparks cognizance, he has a moment of clarity. How silly. She’s gone. Go to sleep already. He breaks and spins and takes a drawn-out breath, grasping for the solace in sleep. Hours turn to smoke and float up and collide with the ceiling above, accumulating there in a mound of fog, clouds around the ceiling fan, his room like a miniature of the earth.

He watches time slinking across his ceiling and the music from his computer builds crescendos, picks up this lonely hitchhiker and takes him twenty miles down this interstate to sleep but not quite there, so he to watches nothing and everything at once and somewhere in between impressions he understands. He understands the girl and the bit about perspective. He swears he can hear her, her voice by his shoulder entrusting him with sensitive material. She says that music does that sometimes. Calls to mind images and ideas and the like even just for a second and who the fuck are you to say they aren’t real? This night has been something or another - he saw a little girl crying, watching her balloon float up and away into the clouds, he saw a stray dog sniffing out the carcass of another along the interstate, he saw yellow sparks and smoke coming off of a soundboard and heard the collective disappointed sigh from something like a mob - it’s all strung out measure by measure and beat by beat. One note laid on another and triads birthing worlds. Entire worlds, Michael. Makes you wonder what sort of note you are, what chord you fit into, major or minor or diminished, and at what pitch does the earth hum. No you don’t understand. This is how I think. I ask myself these question every damn day, and I listen. Always have and always will.

A moment or two goes red and then it's quiet and then she adds one last thing. She says to leave the classroom. Hear the earth hum.

currentsea. revised.

2008-10-27T01:19:00.003-05:00

mostly just changed the first part, new introduction.

---

I keep my heart in my wallet,

cause I got just one to give.

I pulled it from my ribs and now that beat is gone

and nothin's going here (heart) to here (head),

checkin' blood pressure in vain, checked.

and I think there's a lack of oxygen.

02 be young again! when

my head didn't hurt so bad.

---

And it continues. Minor changes later on. Yea ok.

blues in eden.

2008-10-27T01:01:00.009-05:00

still in its baby steps. thoughts please.

---

Rosary wrapped round her wrist she says

each bead is another man's heart she keeps

for ransom.

Let us pray.

Let's press play

start spinnin' and break beats

over vinyl city streets.

This here's a manhattan project.

Kick drops like a little boy and a fat man,

eight oh the humanity! eight,

and snare pops like a forty-five.

This here's another hit.

Needle administered like a syringe.

Heads bobbin', we're all addicts

and we listen like we eat

like we drink till dawn

like we sleep till dusk

like we toss bombs toss black cats at a stranger

'cause he's got more style than us

like we crack eggs crack fireworks on his likeness

'cause he's got more style than us

like we hate and kill and love and flirt and fuck -

with religious fervor.

Amen.

I swapped Plato for play-do,

made prints of prints in a language I forgot I knew,

unspeakable, only singable

in vocal chords at once

major and minor

with that nine on top

that makes syllables sound like jazz.

Check your cello!

If my ear hears right you're left outta time and outta tune.

Tonight we play in the key of G O D,

so start turnin' those pegs or

play what the fuck you want to play and

show us how "dissonant" is synonymous with "sonorous",

long as you play the hell out of it.

Go ahead,

break some strings

and pray what the fuck you wanna pray

with folded hands or OM or little paper cranes

long as you pray the hell out of it.

Amen.

I sifted through scripture, pages stuck together with clay,

looks like Luke couldn't separate work and play

or maybe horsing around and

not giving a fuck is

the only way to say the good news, the Gospel According to

one man alone on stage, singing and crooning

with his Hart on his sleeve,

tossin' it out to an audience

with hands cupped over their ears.

And they let it drop,

'cause having a black man's ballad

swooning white women,

still don't sit with some people.

So he stands still.

And he sings, still.

Amen to a mendicant monk, king, Duke Ellington with

a pair of Ol' Blue Eyes.

And so be it.

Last page held a footnote to a footnote to

two notes etched on my feet -

B on the left, C on the right,

half step between this page and that which reads,

in a child's hand, backwards S's and all,

"She's the first,

and she keeps a fig leaf in her purse just in case,

and she's a fuckin' snake"

Saw that C and

bit at my heel but missed, just kissed the end of my jeans,

ripped a hole where my heel spins the earth like a top and

I'm like,

"Goddamn, just got this pair."

Staggering, feet dragging

in my broken pair of jeans like a broken pair of human beings,

cast out of Eden.

Yahweh's like

"Goddamn, just got this pair", and thinks

maybe all that's new tends to

invite this kind of ruin, which

sure as hell explains you

and I.

And I just broke a string, but

still got one, two, three left alright.

That needle drops again.

That beat drops again.

Amen.

we are statues.

2008-10-12T20:50:00.005-05:00

This is an old one but greatly revised. Suggestions please.

---

Yeah I remember that night.

Still tryin' to sort it out but

I think it's all about that time

to eclipse the moon

break the earth's floor

slowly sink

into embrace, a monument encased

in flesh and steam and silence.

Yeah I remember that night.

We wore quiet on our chests like a badge

and the hush like a coat against the cold.

It was way too late for that kind of thing,

us reveling in God's blind spot,

damnit if she saw us

as we cast off old skin and old ideals,

('cause creeds can dirty with time),

and stitched ourselves back up again,

your skin to mine,

and mine to yours.

And this coil we call "alone" sighs at last,

seems its certitude shed,

and slacks its grip.

I say fuck flesh,

cast off that sullied skin again,

cast in something more solid.

We are statues

dancing in night's shroud,

our skin bronzed and brazen.

Kairos tou poiesai to Kryio,

and it's time to break some fuckin' hearts.

Divorce Tomorrow, dump the sun like

"I'm sorry, you just seem so...distant"

and blow out that candle,

'cause it's your birthday darlin'

and like every day you are born again.

Cover your eyes, no peeking into the Past,

tonight deep space has a Present behind its back

and stars will offer themselves anew

for Ever.

Another year older,

another year wiser,

your breath through the flame of my candle, out I go.

There's wax on the cake but

no one fuckin' cares.

And when the smoke clears, look at the sky.

You see it? That's my love.

Like Sirius with all its Sirius-ness.

And Sagittarius,

loosed arrows of Cupid in space searching for Taurus,

swallowed in your sight.

You are the bull's eye.

You eclipse me still.

currentsea.

2008-10-06T14:53:00.002-05:00

Expanded and rewritten for your reading/slamming pleasure (subject to several more rewrites). Here it is.

---

My head hurts.

Ya see, Wall Street crashed on top of me the other day

and, well, you can't buy that kind of helmet

on a teacher's salary.

So I'll cut to the chase.

Do you have my money?

Like the currentsea of a river, slowed from a run to a walk to a waltz,

you dance a deal H and O as I fashions flutes from shoots and plays and prays

its riverbanknotes are in the right safekey.

Can you finance this flood?

Do you have my money?

You've spent too long (years) in my heart

and I want my fucking rent.

It's about that time.

Out there's a moon that needs howlin',

it told me last night, see, it orbits all that empty Space in my bed,

said that sound is what keeps it round and it's damn near close to falling down

and breaking into eight million pieces and I said

me too.

I'm sorry.

I've rid myself of wolves and dogs.

From here on out, I keep my company with people.

Besides I'm more of a cat person anyways,

After all God's just a cat and I'm her kitten

carried

off to heaven, off to love, off to wherever

by the scruff of my neck whether I like it or not,

at least I hope so.

They tell me I'm descended from apes.

And I think I let go

of mother's neck years back.

You seen the news?

Wall Street crashed again and I went with it,

Made a bad investment, but I'll make do,

cause I got paid today -

paid respect, paid attention, paid vacation, paid my dues,

and I'm on a new currentsea now.

Sorry.

I don't speak your language.

I don't carry your cash.

I got two-hour phone calls stashed in my wallet.

I got late-night queso runs stashed in my wallet.

I got "I swear, you will be ok" stashed in my wallet.

I got friends stashed in my wallet.

I got family stashed in my wallet.

I got God stashed in my wallet.

I got Brahman stashed in my wallet.

I got songs stashed in my wallet.

I got music stashed in my wallet.

I got love stashed in my wallet.

I keep my fucking heart in my wallet,

and your face ain't on one single Bill.

No.

The Beatles were right -

you can't buy love,

but you can spend it.

I'll take my dealings elsewhere.

I said I got love stashed in my wallet.

Empty your pockets.

I am sure it's in there too.

sleep in samples.

2008-10-06T14:46:00.008-05:00

Had a dream. I think I know what it means already.

You see everything moves so fast these days. One second I’m in the studio with my hands on the Akai, beats loosed over odd-time signatures and snares syncopated off beat, and then I’m in some other place at some other age. My hands are smaller. I am four years old again and clutching a long twig that’s hooked at the end like four-years-old’s do. No reason. Just there minding my own bee’s wax, as the kids say. The air is dense with rain. I feel the drops suspended in air, like paper stars cut and glued on a grammar school wall. Clouds cover the sky in a quiet shroud, objects and people appearing as silhouettes cast in a collision of gray and blue, slightly beveled. I’m in those holy moments that precede dawn, the washed-out blue light falling before all other light, time stained with the ocean and all things faster than they really are. Looks like a movie theater, reality projected at a higher speed and overexposed only for the moment, until pimply-faced God sets down the popcorn and notices her mistake. She doesn’t see yet, no not yet, and I exist in a part-time theater employee’s gaffe. My right hand covers my eyes and there’s that hooked stick in my left and I’m kicking around pebbles, rocks spilling out of the black plastic boundary and scattering on the cement like blood from a busted artery. Icarus Park is just a monster heart splayed out lengthwise. Even with my eyes covered and all, at the forgettable age of four, I can see this. A couple older kids race my way on bicycles. They scream backwards. We found him! We found him! They did it. They found me. They pedal at me faster yet and I’m the hell outta there, see y’all later, police sirens blaring in the distance. I glance back. The kids, the police, the ex’s faded gold sedan creaking along like an old wine cork tossed to the floor and rolling along a line of pines and street lamps all symmetrical. Turn around. Don’t look back anymore. Just run. This is the sound of one foot in front of the other, spinning the earth below like a top, round and round.

Everything moves fast and so am I, running now, pebbles spilling out from behind my heel and past the boundary again but on the other side this time, dooming the sideways heart to bleed empty, it ain’t got a chance in hell. I climb the playground and slide down the other side and run past the chip up bars. Hah. They’ll never catch me. I look over my shoulder despite swearing not to. There’s the kids on bikes again, the ex running and yelling with a bottle in her hand, the police cars swerving into parking spaces on the other side of Icarus, doors flung open and chubby men in blue displacing all their mass, spilling out in the open. The red and blue spills out too. It creeps up and grabs at my heels. Yeah but I’m long gone by now, moving fast like all things beside me, “catch me if you can, fuckers” like a mantra condensing in my head and throat. Still drops of rain hit my face as I speed onward. This is the sound of leaving them behind, leaving her behind, fuck the bullshit, escape.

I’m long gone. Everything slows for a few moments. My fingers wrap around the twig, shifting and tensing and I don’t know why I’m holding it in the first place but damnit if I let go. I hold it like I’d hold my own heart if I ever had to and I note the bridge ahead and how it stretches and arches its back over that long drop, tall grass and swampy creek water waiting below. Running, still running, not getting there quite yet. God, maybe they will get me after all. At last I reach the bridge, my heels pounding on the damp wood, the noise soft and muddy as I make the gradual ascent and then descent. I register the sound and modify it in my imagination: pull back the mids a bit, let’s bring up the highs. I blast to the other side and by a gazebo to my right, but with time slowed and whatnot I have a moment to make out faces and emotions. A smiling girl with balloon in hand, the yellow sphere stretching up and reaching for the clouds, a jump rope slumping downwards in her other hand. Parents clapping and smiling. A boy with video camera in hand, pointing it not at the girl or the parents but instead up at the gray sky with blue wounds. An adult yells at him to get this on tape by god or he’ll get a beating so hard he won’t sit for a week. He doesn’t hear. Just points and shoots the heavens. This is the sound of creating, creating and that’s it, brush strokes on the Sistine ceiling, fuck the bullshit anew.

I’m past the gazebo and again everything seems so fast! Stretches of tall grass blurring green past me, the wind cutting into my eardrums, whispering to me my own velocity, demanding I run faster. Faster. Somewhere in the static I hear something else from behind. I just don’t love you anymore! You hear me? Err, I, goddamnit. The ex is drunk again, following me around like she does. Fuck it. I not gonna stop this time. The creek curves around and intercepts my tangent at another point, another bridge coming. Pat pat pat. My feet push the green below, pulling the second all the damp wood of the second bridge closer as if all the world’s tied on a string. Pat pat pat. A part of me goes cold because I know this sound. I’ve heard it before. This is the sound of a heel hitting the ground, rebellion, one man frozen before a Type 59 tank like a fucking mountain.

I reach the bridge and things stop midway across when my bare foot catches on a board uprooted just an inch from the others. The gaps between railing crossbeams allow just enough room for my small body. Left hand still clutching the twig, my free hand grabs hold of a crossbeam, allowing enough time to feel the pain in my foot and arm and my side and realize that, oh God, this is happening. The wood cracks and cracks and I fall down, twig still in hand. Clinging. Like it’s all ok as long as I don’t let go.

Ok so I hit the ground and all in one instant pass through the grass and swampy water and emerge on the other side, in my house kitchen. What? No time. Everything moving too fast for questions. My mother stands there, arms akimbo, scolding me. I cry because I said “hell” or “damn” or some other swear word, at least that’s what mother tells me, I can’t recall. Rest assured it was terrible, awful, only dirty little boys who shoot other boys with bee-bee guns say that word. She asks me if I am a bee-bee gun kid. No mother. To be honest I don’t know what sort of kid I am. She takes me by the ear, pulls me to the bathroom. It smells overwhelming like soap. Stacks upon stacks of soap bars line the walls like drugs neatly wrapped and stashed away in seat cushions. Everything is white. She coats the brush with soap and tells me to have at it. Gotta clean that mouth, lest I become a bee-bee gun kid. No. Brush away. No I won’t. Have it your way you fucking bee-bee gun kid, she says, leaving the room and flicking the light switch behind her. The door slams like a pop, a piccolo snare or a gun, gunpowder going off and bee-bees ricocheting inside my skull and reverberating through the bone. The black is everywhere. I can’t see a thing, reaching out like a blind man for the light switch, meeting nothing but cold air. The room is larger than before. I panic, run, feel for something or anything. A singularity in the black of space, too far from any other star or galaxy for light to survive the trip to this point, some corner God forgot about. I’m in the blind spot of existence. My legs tire and it’s harder to pull them up. They become wet. The cold reaches up to my ass, then my back, and then water and some anyonymous smell like guilt attaches to my skin. I find myself sideways, gasping for air, feeling fluid in my lungs and bruises on the inside. I cough up blood and it runs on my cheeks and neck, dark crimson against the pale white, my voice wheezing and purling. This is the sound of growing up, ties and Eau De Cologne, doing that nine to five, Kafka.

I open my eyes and everything goes fast again and there’s gold and orange breaking around the bridge up above. Morning. I lay in the creek, water and grass clinging to me as if my body heat gives them a temporary consciousness that they just can’t concede. The police and kids are gone yet mother stands overhead, cradling my head, crying. Wait. Not mother. I squint my eyes, trying to make sense of the silhouette hovering overhead like a doctor over a patient. My pupils constrict and I see. It’s her. The one who calls herself “ex”. She’s crying. My leg feels forced in a way it shouldn’t be and I cry too. She tells me she’s sorry, she’s not herself right now. Identity crisis seems to be the theme of the day. Then she says it will be ok, we will start over. She’s so sorry. And I love her, even with the alcohol coming off her breath.

I wake back at the studio and everything still feels fast, time bent past its original form. A dull beat drones quietly from the monitors. Kick snare kick. There’s the beat: finches gliding a little further, clouds parting and colliding and parting an extra time, the world twirling into dusk fifteen minutes early, needle humming break beats over vinyl fault lines. My face splayed across my arms and I’m staring across the length of the soundboard, recovering from a reality syncopated and modulated to an odd-time signature like jazz. I notice the picture of us back home in the park, ex and I, its frame tipped over and face down on a keyboard. This is the sound of two people becoming one, not merging, but one leaving the other,

I still have that beat. Yeah at least I have that beat. Leaking from those bookshelf speakers posted like towers to a glitch-hop God. Pulsing in the copper wires that span from my head to my heart to my ears to my hands. It feels loud, it sounds warm, senses melding into kicks and snares and synth. In digital I see and breathe and dream. She is the one and I am the zero and I am waiting.

falling sticks and all that.

2008-08-04T00:11:00.001-05:00

dear god something about the novel seems...over. can't be. hopefully i will eat my words.

please read it for me.

currentsea.

2008-06-22T03:43:00.002-05:00

Insomnia again. And again, an idea to be expanded, reworked, reworded. Suggestions appreciated.

Got paid today.
The currentsea of a river, slowed from run to walk to waltz.
You dance and deal out H and O, flowing past the reedbed like I
as I fashions flutes from shoots
plays
prays its riverbanknotes are in the right safekey.
And you linger
to listen.
Can you finance this flood?

novel update.

2008-06-09T00:32:00.001-05:00

i think the third draft may or may not be complete.
please read it for me.
i need this.

"She nestled further into the sheets, her face half-buried in the soft cotton and sleep. Simon saw the dark around her eyes, reaching from her lids down into her round cheeks and beyond. Black mascara and eyeliner running over her face like the lines that come with age and wisdom. She lay there naked and only partially covered with blankets and her makeup smeared and running. Cosmetics undone. Made what they call beautiful and then not. That sexual advertisement, blood rushing to the face, for which makeup originated pulled down like shades by a hand of fluid salt. Still, Simon knew some looks need only an audience to attract. Aphrodite lips. Athena eyes. She had deities all knotted and caught up in her image. Corpses of Greek heroes thrust upon her neck to rest, bask in the glory for which they fought. And Simon found himself another casualty."

sleep is overrated.

2008-05-30T03:44:00.001-05:00

insomniainsomniainsomniacsinsomniacsininsonmsinsinsinsinsin....

perhaps i should listen to kid a.

summer haze.

2008-05-27T14:53:00.004-05:00

Lo. Lola. Lolita...

...is getting old. Nabokov's prose is immensely entertaining, but sadly isn't enough to hold me through the tedious plot. I pretty much got the gist of it. Why this story has become so infamous is apparent from the start, but I just don't care enough to finish. I will concede, however, that Humbert Humbert is an absolutely brilliant character. I'm not a bad person, I swear.

Whatever. On to Phillip K Dick. Perhaps I'll rent Blade Runner...

the process.

2008-05-16T17:54:00.001-05:00

Write. Edit. Change. Rewrite. Doubt. Redoubt. Edit. Change.

"She bit her lip. Caught an aftertaste of war."

second night of summer.

2008-05-11T00:50:00.001-05:00

some of you know that i don't typically admit to liking/listening to explosions in the sky, mostly because i feel like there are bands who do the same thing but better, ie. mogwai. tonight, however, i happened to catch a taping of austin city limits with explosions and it was basically religious, so there's that.

11:36 p.m. -
i'm running under street lights and sky, and yes, listening to explosions. stop giving me that look.
i'm dodging cockroaches in the closest approximation of their natural environment that the poor bugs will ever encounter.
i'm dragging my overweight body down the concrete, out of breath, some anonymous part of myself damaged after having been accosted by a stranger - a teenage girl who yelled some obscenity from her car and hurled an entire roll of toilet paper at me.
i'm telling myself that, despite the recent event, people are still fundamentally good.
i'm diverting my attention to the music.
i'm absorbing the rhythm of "magic hours". literally absorbing it.
i'm running now. sprinting. my feet landing upon the speckled grayness with every downbeat. pulling the entire fucking earth behind me.
and then the crescendo.
and the distorted guitars.
and i feel god in my heels.
and her breath in my lungs.
and i am.
that's it.

i just am.

mild insomnia.

2008-05-03T01:52:00.002-05:00

i feel my teeth bend,
smile's a little crooked.

poetry as procrastination.

2008-05-02T01:09:00.003-05:00

like clockwork springs up in time.
like its a game.

sticks her left foot in ten minutes from now and the right tiptoes round 1986.
tossin' her shoes and dancin' now like its then,
loosin ' here somewhere in the cracks between floorboards beneath her heels.

and she sees me.
finds me somewhere in never.

a contrived sort of chronology.

2008-05-01T22:16:00.001-05:00

TELL ME YOUR HEART.

He flipped the paper over and scribbled. He didn’t think, didn’t breathe, didn’t stand or sit or blink. Just scribbled, and in turn, became scribbled himself in some strange twist of Zen.

I need you like the breath of life.
Sometimes I feel little more than dirt and dust.
You animate me. Thank you for not giving up on me.

Simon shoved it back under the door and put his against the damp wood. She was awake. He could hear her breath colliding with the door from the other side. There was a rustle, an uncrumpling, a scribbling, and another note appeared at his feet.

There is no giving up except when the poor give up their palms to the sky and feel the rain wash away the grime.
I will give up my hands.
Not my heart.

words and notes.

2008-04-30T15:58:00.000-05:00

"In short, an idea like Beauty has much in common with what many theists would call 'God'. Yet despite its transcendence, the ideas were to be found within the mind of man. we moderns experience thinking as an activity, as something that we do. Plato envisaged it as something which happens to the mind: the objects of thought were realities that were active in the intellect of the man who contemplated them. Like Socrates, he saw thought as a process of recollection, an apprehension of something we had always known but had forgotten."

- from A History of God, by Karen Armstrong

"Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound.
Anyone separated from someone he loves understands what I say, anyone pulled from a source longs to go back."

- Jalal ad-Din Rumi

those first few cryptic lines.

2008-04-29T13:26:00.000-05:00

Hi. This is me avoiding work.

Cut to fifteen minutes ago. I'm skimming through Danielewski's House of Leaves, searching for some semblance of insight for a contemporary-horror paper. But not really. Mostly just thinking, "Hey. I should do something useless and absolutely irresponsible right now." And so I made a blog.

Don't roll your eyes. If you know me you shouldn't be surprised.

As indecisive as I am, it's a miracle I was able to settle on an actual title for this, let alone a template. Expect both to change very soon. But for now, "In Arrow Park" sits happily up there in the title-throne. This is a mostly obscure and unapologetic reference to the novel I have been writing for the past year and a half. It's working title is The Sound of Falling Sticks. Let me know if you'd like to see some of it, I'd be glad to send over a copy. In fact, I might post some passages in the blog every so often. Mmmmm or maybe right now:

"Oh God oh god oh godohjesus.
Panic. Simon Archer woke up and panicked. He awoke to realize just how delicate he really was. He felt something like a knot, tangled the veins of his neck that, in his delirium, he oddly identified as God. God infiltrating his throat and stealing from him the breath of life.
I am dying I know this Oh God."

There you have it. The very first lines of the manuscript, in its currently haphazard condition. If you didn't catch it, the little italicized parts are internalized narration. Thoughts. Musings. Blog-fodder. Whatever.

Well that's it. I don't really have anything else. I have the feeling that my later posts will come out nothing like this one. Feels too preachy. I've never been one for the soapbox, so consider this the introduction. The first impression. Etcetera. You can expect music/film/book reviews and some of my writing to follow.

Prose and poems and prose poems and lyrics await,
Bill

P.S. If anyone even actually reads this, feel free to throw some paper topics my way. I'm thinking digital typography, remediation, or some haphazard parallel to Lovecraft. "The Navidson Record functions as a modern reprisal of the Cthulu mythos by blahblahblah..."