granddaughter Halloween.

(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.

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

we

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.