Leaning on the door

I squint at the sun and feel freckles bloom, feel the chalky brick path chill the backs of my thighs, eat cold apples soaked in lemon juice, and peel open saliva-sealed letters reminding me to pay off a credit card or two.

And all the while, or maybe not, I think it lovely to be ordinary

It takes a new kind of idiot to permit oneself not to love. It seemed that once before there was a mutual desire to look for it, ask for it, to be for it. It seemed rather everyone had a too-full cup balanced precariously on the center of their heads and they all ran around on the ends of their toes knowing it was going to fall and just hoping to collide into someone so it would at least land on something, someone, and not be wasted, absorbed, evaporated. I don’t know where those fucking cups went. Empty heads because there wasn’t something on them instead of in them. These days there isn’t enough on them. ‘These days’ is an awful expression to use, it makes me old and I probably do that on purpose because it would be better to be old and alone, rather than just alone with no paper skin as an excuse. When it’s too hot under the blankets, we kick them off. Perhaps the people are afraid of sweat. Sweat ruins outfits and photos and is rumored to discourage proximity as well as wandering eyes. We know we sweat and we’re ashamed of it and we push people away when they make us sweat, because it would be disgusting if we happened to rub our sweat on them, and they’d think so too. If we keep our distance everyone looks nice. No friction. Room for breezes and light gusts of I don’t care’s, you’re prettier from a distance. All about the angle. Drop to your knees now, I don’t need to see your shoes. Take it all off maybe, I want to get at you. Not like that. I want to get at you. Not at your anatomy, like all those fleshy little tumblr posts romanticizing the slope of bones and the robust red of freshly pricked blood. I mean you, don’t you see. Those things about yourself you are so preoccupied with suppressing that you refuse to integrate them into who you are. I want you to put them on me, make me all the things you’d hate in yourself. Befriend them in me. Or don’t. I’m not your mother. But either way, we’ll exorcise the real you, and if we can’t tear each other we lack the ability to make each other feel.

#streamofconsciousness #ramblings

One cold silence hangs over the dock

letting limp arms dangle

letting blood confuse

as fingers pierce the surface

stale water prunes the tips

and practical fish suck in time

to the unnatural convection

I see now that I am having a difficult time coming to accept how selfish each individual person is compelled to be. It’s just the sort of thing that makes one want to have breakfast alone. I won’t call them “people” since sentences that start with “people” are very unattractive. I won’t call them “minds” because that is not their major composition. Bodies only find the urge to stretch out to make themselves known to others, and it does not matter if yours were to stretch back at all. Or rather, it does not matter why yours may not stretch back, whatever might be afflicting your hamstrings, it only matters that you do not applaud their reach with wide eyes, a march of carefully metered “right’s,” and an attentive stupor. In fact if you don’t do that, you will certainly offend them. It is better not to speak at all. If one speaks at all they subject themselves to another vomit of oily thoughts and wants and wants and thoughts and if’s and who’s and why’s and I do believe it is then, quite then, we disappear.

Why is it that no body sincerely cares any longer. Why is every hello a politician in disguise, a conduit for an obese agenda one should have seen lurking. Why is every how are you a toll that must be paid before you race to merge ahead of the other person. It is all an ugly lurch from the void to force oneself upon the other before they do so to you. It is all you can do. To turn them into the head so you may assume the role of the hat who sits like a lid on the other’s free thought. If you don’t, you must simply resume the void—there, a thousand fedoras who could have been flowers roam silently in space, groping faintly, unaware of gravity, headless.

In the morning

Someone has thrown milk

Over the mountains

I cannot say it was poured

Because it does not drip

The guts of a cloud

Stipple chalky blue peaks

And the sun will eat them

By the time it is two

Today you wore blue

Sporting artificial skies

I think it better above

Than in your eyes

Too quickly on your heel

You slip into the seams

Of people threading paths

Out under August beams

At once the world has color

And everyone wears blue

It’s as soon as you vanish

That all becomes you

Once overwhelming,

Now a dry reminder;

Old wound.

A natural line,

Where skin sewed itself,

Back together.

Drew me tight,

Like a purse,

To slow the spill,

Of precious garnets,

And glinting ivory bones.

Concealed with the pull,

Of an invisible string,

That the lingering eye,

unstitches.

Old blood protects new,

And yet I never planned,

To make a sacrifice.

You drift out, a cool air above the warm glass lake. The further you get all your lines and your symmetry unfurl like the fog, sharp angles and harsh features curving soft as shoulders. And I believe you. Perhaps the clouds will you take you in a veil called God’s envy. You are so impossible that you are all the more real

Real in the bright swan-necked loops you weave between us—infinite.

I pour out.

It happened in the library: the laughter. The great, hoarse cackle (although some will say it was a cough) seemingly suspended in the old, 70's-carpet air; strung between the dust motes that flaked from pastry-paperbacks; detonated like a clap of thunder, the vibration ricocheting angrily throughout the canals of the inner ears offending every cell in its wake-- yes they laughed at me, even in the library.

I try to write about a stranger

Someone out on the street

I write about myself

Because I am closer

I'm always getting closer

To what I think I know

Before it vaporizes

And it's me again

I think that it is

Most of the time

But I don't know who I am

I'm tired of finding out

I want the old me

The one I was calloused to

Where did I go

Change is not good

I'm searching for something

Anything familiar

But the ground can't be trusted

It won't hold me down

And neither will gravity

When will I catch up

To all my former parts

Tap them on the shoulder

Stop them to talk for a while

To remember old times

To hear them say

That I'm doing fine

Both here and there

But they are kites

And I can't fly

Not until I change again

And shed another skin

Forgetting all I knew

So I'll keep changing

Expiring and regenerating

I'll try to catch them

But every day

I'll lose a little more of me

And try to better understand

To better make

Today's stranger in the mirror

Be someone I am proud

To call myself