Fly And Snail

A Sort Of Reunion

This monkey morning haze, underneath the pepper man, keeps our restless eyes rolling. All the soda got drank up. I did it, I admit it, I’m a child in this story. Hooray. Watch the way I stand on my head and call out to people who make crow sounds. They rock the sun look, get tan, get Zen, say sure. I’ll strum this here, I had one more night with you, before we ever met. Nothing was total, or awesome. We went fast, the desert made us handsome and pretty. When I went back to your town, I was taller than most and stared at. I liked it for a while, as the monkey man. All your religion fell away and you looked relieved, while I pulled your hair. You held my hand and sang a little tinderbox. I needed help quitting everything.

Wearing The Same Hat

All these tanks, thinking longer about less and less, it’s how we get to our shows. Then it’s harder and it’s the way out, you live it without being home. You don’t think it but I do, as I live in windows. We talk, we birds, tattered and loving, but each day fries us with too many choices. I get my hand up and the days glance at it, measuring everything down. Even lights stop, briefly, the faster things get. This is a moment out of my life that no one will know completely, despite how I record it. Memory is merely a cut and paste job, but swampy. It’s good to be between the faraway and the close, even if it’s only possible. Down the line we’ll use honesty to make things, mistakes, and crack the glowsticks. I know we can if we shout softly to each other, in gracing breaths.

This House

Ink Blot Fluffy

This original drawing was done by the artist Nico Miller, currently of Paris, France. I did the photo effects. Thanks, Nico!

Time Travel Or Bust

Many thanks to the robotics engineer Cal Miller, currently of Paris, France, for the color inversion on this drawing!

Dancers Crouching, Before They Leap

Getting There.

Birthdays

Animals And Instruments

Without hard work the sad man gets nowhere. He needs music and now there is silence. The sad man buys food and watches movies and eats and has the worst dream in the world. He wakes up troubled because he dreamed he was trying to lock the doors and could not. He could not lock the doors and everyone kept coming in while he tried to work and think. They tried to name him Hugh, and Stan, and Hank, all these hefty, big-handed names, but he simply wanted them to leave or be quiet while he sat at his bench in the basement and made intricate things from wood. Animals and little houses and musical instruments out of little chunks of mahogany and pine that he would carve intricately and slowly when he could keep the people that called him Hank from always calling him Stan and always opening his door and talking on him. Soon he would move to a quiet part of town, where no one knew his name and he would pretend to be mean and nasty. There the only names people gave him were names like Victor or Dennis, and would leave him alone, he being unapproachable with such names. But he made better animals and instruments there, by far, and had much more intricate hands.

What You Have

Been a while for tumbling, been a while for old sleeping, been a feeling game, a dying in water bang, a lying in hands. You cannot do it, you save yourself again and again, but you cannot save you. You close your eyes for something and something goes away; it happens and it happens that it happens.  You’re built for this, built to stick the pin back in, built to draw the knife across the animal, built to be courageous and built to share a breath, perfectly built to see the sun and wander. Something round enters the field, a vagary, pinch of silt in the derelict river.

The oracular trees. The bursting. The shoes you took far into the forest on your growing feet. The elevating.

An x writes this, writes itself as a letter and seeks yet more variables. The seeking out of things, the fielding and the shaggy grammatical Huns. Gathering in circles, the forest sees you with your attitude shifting all the time: it knows your conscience, deems it silly. You don’t blush, in your souciance.

Go.  You have sore words. 

Bread

This is an arm. Hunger for memory and a mind for the road. The pushing and running gets tired and I need bread, and butter, and a couple of new feet. I show myself a sign I don’t understand and go down to the corner for bread. I eat bread at the window and bread looking over the bridge. The impossible depth and smell of the past kicks me. I eat bread to forget but I don’t feel filled. There’s milk, and apricots and coffee, but I just eat bread. The woody smell of it, like fresh nuts just cracked, hits my nose and I tear off another piece. I’m far into the middle of summer and the days getting shorter and bread keeps me familiar. I wake up when I’m not supposed to. I hear birds that sound like morning, only it’s not morning, it’s two hours after midnight. I reach out in the dark for more bread and thank the birds.

Perpetually Exploding And Renewing The Myth Of A Cosmic Center (en vert)

Into The Future

Where?

Every House

Three Sunball Throwers In A Weird Corral

What If It Sucks?

You & Me

Bruce Lee!

Music Of Her Acceleration

Temporary

Listen

Muy Dulce

We Are All Spectators

Bears and Girls...

Composed

Double Duty

Riddle

Formative Experience

Certitude

What A Friend Says

One or Two?

Go Ahead.

Seeing

Full

A Way

Somebody

Rain

The Way

Very Hot

Must See!

Bags and Bags

Fast!

Depiction

Affirmative

Who?

They Dream

Everyone Needs A System

Punch a Pineapple

Strong, Strong

Carve

Early Evenings

Animals

The Whole Earth

Bulk Rate

Happy this happy that happy your listing marine feet busted a Monday window. Egg baby charcoal baby igneous baby gone. Rough cut ice cream, tumble down bastards at the wall ate free. This king, this emperor, childless guru with rustic charms and sibilant coordination, his shanty shoes and tundra pals went down. From storm eye fragrant leaves from shadows and bulk rate images dart circles and concert memories. Throats have worlds. Casting about for sheep eyes, our dice hands find a bier of burning nights, naked in water and wind. Grow cold grow without mercy grow 'til globe gets along.

My Tell

Old shack. New shack. New country for trees. I put my finger in my ear and shake a song. The snake shakes, historical mimesis retracts, envelopes us in pink and slothy pleasure clouds. We are all the mice, skittering over the body of a sleeping woman with dark unruly hair, dreaming of a nest. Narrating mindfulness goes something like falling down a hill. All your happy bruises feel connected.

Some Wolfman

Barnacles and the fright they elicit: hardly an issue in real time. Hiking and hiking. The journalistic tendency to document this thought. This time, when we ascend the mountain there will be cake, made by a future us that travelled there to support our struggling past. Rotors, fanblades, the gaze of infants, all have a way of doing the reminding. You and me and the undergrowth gather in untended places: radical distraction. Some wolfman I am, tending the most tender flower, yellow petals trembling in light wind.

Ethics

The horror of time was that beauty made us pull ourselves together, close our eyes and whisk stuff around in the kitchen. The things we said we’d say we said. Then we predicted what came next. The good things fell apart and you became an agent, investigating your illness. You pulled me under and I covered my eyes with my history of other love. Here’s to Saint Honesty, sack of grief. This is the worst. It’s not even a thing. It’s just what I get for trying to ride the dog. There’s some shame in saying I love what I love. Enough to keep me saying it.

Noh Goliath Noh Godiva

To tango. Underneath me. Hipswitch your mania. Gank the fiesta. To arise and go. Two isn’t free. Your mybody elevated. Or corrected. In handblown strands of air, a lake an island. A 24 hour film of us. We spent the weekend watching. Every cue had us quit acting and set down the night. Next to us. Then between us. Memorybuilt darkness. You, me, and the colloid of time. Obligatory poses of Noh-bodies. Some chatter, some music. Some whatever and some more. The feeling is with. Cave memories. A storm. My lumberjack jacket. Your ring.

All Contraries

Collective preening: this culture, this civilization, the “person.” What was it that looked along the seam a few minutes ago? Was it called me? A sense of heaviness and a sense of the round dark all. Some me pervaded, cloistered stick man, campaign of breath and return. Experience is not wholesome, not unifying, unitary or religious. All contraries are unitary in their silliness. Break down to arms and bones.

The Drugged and Stolen Night

Where is the pause and where is the fighter, where is the simple day of youth, where is the run-up to the show, where is the grey haven, the flitting look at the fairy message, the chanting steel toad, the bastard elbow, the crusted hashbag, the charnel house, the fractal enthusiasm, the smashing layoff, the frothy beard, the whispering foot, the hispering tundra, the show, the professional word, the incidental shyness, the bardic hymn, the gelid panther, the stinging past, the eclectic hum, the rotating powdermark, the sliding steed, the shale conundrum, the slowest dance, the rhythm of dogs, the window of gifts, the language crashers, the slandering philosophers, the insensate whelps, the sheer dogginess of time, the images of man and woman drawn large by animals, the half-thrown flail, the broken home on the border, the town where you raised yourself, the hair you shaved off, the weight of your past, the perseverance of history despite the lunacy of all populaces, the typecasting of the market, the unshouldered burden, the runt with the tickle in its throat, the goat, the herdsman, the New England irrelevancies, the lost and fully unforgotten loves, the bland stargazer, the revealed moment, the masterful giver, the Arctic African, the chlorinated burger, the sublimated post-it, the pudding-worm, the foot-breather, the depth-divider, the half-glance back at the lover who’s just left for good, the rusted ride, the bashful bicycle, the confidence of quarter-age, the drugged and stolen night, the sitting still, the mysterious new, the glorified expectation of non-recognition, the bored particle, the majestic bread, the waking yawn, the purposeful sunrise?

On Previous Days

You, that book, that ruggedized case, lost on logic. You took your meanings down, took down your peacoat, your savvy beatitudes, your empirical globe. You caught fish, showed the kids “how it’s done.” You weren’t prideful or too teacherly. You just wandered into the scene of the moment and gathered necessities. Sure, bodies decomposed under the floor and wraiths howled in dark corners. You were aware of them all, but you played life focused, also not denying librettos, spinning hubcaps, beach days. A man was responsible, then gone. In the middle of it a feeling of fellowship, rivers going by, rock formations in the sun, boots going up some mountains. Your own feet stepped behind you, on previous days.

A story told and a sketch of Vincent Price smiles and a laugh from a horse's mouth, doing a bit.

Daddy issues for everybody. Plenty of room for histrionics. Everyone was doing a stand-up job, but blowing the punchline. Even though you said your name, I still forgot your character. It was a disconnect, and it's personally insulting, despite the leather effigy and Mick Jagger's ability to do it right and be a scary good soldier. The scene cut is this: Two minutes before we grasp this moment, we find ourselves on skis, not even paying attention, but feeling like a million bucks. I love that feeling, like an athlete, without caring about approval. Who tells someone they are overtalking? People will strive to seek approval of someone who does the firing in person. Everything is sideways and you take it personally. The gnome calls you about all the reasons why, finally, and you want it to be true, although it's your imagination giving you the advice. Your performance watches you and says dollars are not really anything; very Buddhalike. At the end of the day it's you approving you, and the cliche of it clashes with the neuroses of the host, alongside the history of personalities. And I know you're doing this part, but when you find yourself doing it, it could be misinterpreted as weird, because of your family history of insanity. People who stayed the longest stayed because they felt like they belonged. Is the astronaut joke a joke, or just a reality? What was he looking for when he worked the probe, while he looked in my eyes, with his perfect afro? There was a ready symmetry to things. Like we'd made it to the waiting room during a long walk. Shiny, efficient, like we were going to win.

Mini-Twilight

How about a mini-twilight time, right after lunch, before we get back to work? We’ll meet before the day goes back to grinding, before all the real work needs to get back to itself. We can go into my office, turn out the lights, think some different thoughts. We'll write some stuff that’s free of the institutions in our heads. The world hears us listening all the time anyway; shouldn’t we make the most of it? The pants I have on are almost falling off, I’m always nibbling on seaweed, and I’m beginning to hear fish think, in my little apartment by the sea. In our Tiny Dusk we won’t make any plans, we’ll just crawl into a big sundress together and laugh at the glowing stars I’ve stuck to the ceiling. And music? Yeah, big guitar sounds like swans and blues riffs that guarantee a decent hermetic seal.

Invitation

What: Some long-suffering thing about Ways, and/or The Front’s ability to challenge all of Time’s harbors. Where: Beside (or right in) a desert of forgotten collectibles. When: Sixteen if you’re lucky, but probably more like thirteen, when you started realizing you had a reason (a mind or a piece of luggage like it) that brought more chaos to the halls than most kids around you could even conceive. How: via sitting and thinking, not by talking or writing. Who: anyone who appreciates the power in a nipple, or the utterly rebellious act of sleeping long and long.

"Cheeseman's Emotional Energy Theory"

(from the film Happy Accidents)

"--There is another theory, you know. That you can change the past. That you can really change it.

--What theory is that?

--Cheeseman's.

--Cheeseman's?

--Cheeseman's Emotional Energy Theory. It's true. Cheeseman believed if you can concentrate enough energy in a moment in time...then you could alter the past and create a new future.

--What kind of energy? Nuclear?

--Emotional. Love energy. Hate energy. It's very potent stuff, you know.

--Really?

--Cheeseman worked with fruit flies, and then he realized...they didn't have enough emotional energy. It was kind of low. But then he thought, humans are creative, sensitive creatures. Maybe they could muster up enough energy to actually...break the causal chain, alter the past and create a new future.

--So then what happens to the old future?

--It'd still be there. There'd be two futures. The one you left and the one you're creating. They'd exist simultaneously, parallel to each other.

--No. Not parallel universes.

--It's only a theory. It hasn't been proven...

--Yet."

The Cradle

Shaking hands. Busted tablature. Fiddle sounds and a rejected swimmer. Tingling sun moments and a bright beach pail from your earliest memory. Cue the piano, line up at every restaurant that wants you. That’s all of them? But your green dress, that easy smile, I fell so easily. I whisper so loudly now, through tears, about what we once held. We were a cradle, you must sense that, that nurtured everything we wished we could actually say.

Staying

Tickling the ticking world, the giggling girl. The freak resonance of sequins in your hollow fists, the sheer butter of the pavement you feel when going fast. The trance of the past. Continuance of night deliberations. All and more, and more. Once you saw me enter and my talk dropped off, I was something beyond a telephone, and we bodied. It was effective and there was a slight intermission. Shady telegrams from the future quit arriving. The intelligence of cities and plays was all full of music. Even the movements of our hands overlaid us with pauses. We were some kind of void that time could fill. Then dim pillars buckled and hands opened on wings and someone’s loved one passed away, then another, another. We held the beats within us. The wonder of the future is a crash of waiting and staying cold. Some knowing is too much. That’s the brink we walk away from. How walking wakes our wonder, we may know.