Things I need to take into consideration

All anybody has ever needed is a little perspective.

I have extra days off this week, due to the holiday. While my bank account cringes, my sanity falls to its knees and weeps grateful tears. We were going down a bad road there for a while.

In updates:

I actually got my shit together this summer and I began running like a real athlete. I ran in a 10k (my first race ever) and made a very respectable fifty two minutes. For my troubles, two beautiful girls covered themselves in tiger lilies and offered me a bonsai tree and an ice cream cake. Then we flung ourselves into the ocean in front of a class of scuba divers, all while laughing hysterically. It was gorgeous.

About two months later, I realized I did not have the means to afford the entrance fee for my half marathon of 13.2 miles. So I woke up one saturday morning and just did it. For myself. Entirely alone. I ran 13.4 miles in two hours flat. Then I walked the 3 miles I always walk to work, and worked an eight hour day.

NBD.

Later, in early september, the charm of running was worn. I was sick of dragging myself out of bed so I could have barely enough time to shower after my run and scamper over the bridge to work. I was not reading books. I was not writing. I was just running.

And I think I needed to know that my body was capable of that.

But I choose to emphasize my brain's capability.

I have been really stressed out this year. Beyond any levels I have ever grazed in the past. I got migraines, insomnia, I ate until I wanted to throw up, I starved myself for a day or two. I ran and ran, I slept and sat. I drank glass after glass of red wine and one day my pants fit me and the next day they didn't. I had sex, I didn't have sex. I had shingles. I healed.

I have some ideas about how I want this year to go.

I am going to really attempt to let go of this obsession with food and my body. Really.

I am going to finish editing the book.

I am going to edit a dozen of my short stories and launch a writer's website.

I am going to drink more water and do a little yoga and meditate for a few minutes every day.

I am going to be more fucking confident.

Every gesture, every motion a purposeful one. I will not be afraid to disagree and have an opinion.

I am going to make time to read for at least an hour. Every day.

If I have to write out schedules for myself, I will do so. This is important.

I am important.

Today is thanksgiving, a holiday I have never felt moved by.

Instead of spending the day driving to my parents' house way the hell up in maine only to be trapped in limerick for six hours before the meal and the inevitable drive home, B and I have decided to spend the holiday with our non-blood family.

Yesterday I drank coffee in my living room with darling jess. We laughed and relaxed. In the evening, we went over to Benjamin and Lisa's house (where the festivities are today), and I used their fabulous kitchen appliances to make a sweet potato pie and individual garlicky bread puddings for the big meal.

I drank a beer and a half. I ate hawaiian pizza. B and Benjamin and jess and I hung out in the cozy kitchen and listened to music. It was lovely.

Today, I am going to remind myself that there are beautiful things happening every day. Every minute. I want to take a little time to breathe them in, and be thankful that I am alive, I am healthy, I have food and friends and a husband who looks like a bear cub when sleeping.

I am love.

CAUTION: I will whinge you to death.

So I'm pretty sure the only time I ever blog anymore is when I'm having a particularly nasty bout of pms...er...depression...er...self hate...er...meltdown.

All of the above.

Which is where this beautiful flaming chariot of failure has brought us today.

This past saturday night was the biggest full moon of the year. If you were a lady or an ocean during the last three days, I am so very sorry for you, because most likely your tides were absolutely bananas. In a related story, I am sorry to all you super awesome dudes out there who put up with one or more of us and or any salty, sexy fishermen (I prefer the gloucester variety, deadliest catch can eat my ass) who dared to troll the oceans so very unfair this weekend.

As the witchy lady I am, I like to spend most days that I feel like absolute shite pawing through various witchy literature that tells me this is the coldest part of the year, I should be huddled around a fire with a goblet of wine and half a pig smoking on the hearth in front of me. I should have friends and or family snuggled up under blankets someone way craftier than me crocheted, and I should be plowing through self inspiring literature and trying out new slow cooker recipes and loving my curvy woman self and letting the rough winds of winter rouge my cheeks with the healthy blush of accomplishment.

I mean the holidays are over, ergo, gluttony is shameful, indulgence is a no no, and it is time to rise grogeously from the ashes of credit card debt and crinkly bon bon wrappers to become the ethereal being I need to embody to greet the first day of spring in an ultra clingy, practically illegal linen-type dress garment.

Pleh.

I find myself feeling oppressed by it all.

I can't even open the document my book is in because I'm so terrified looking at it will reveal the travesty it really is, and I will be so ashamed of it I can't even bring myself to edit it, and in some passionate fit, I'll drag the whole thing to the trash icon and click until I hiccup. What the fuck?! I can't even burn my manuscript in a wicked lavish victorian fit of hysterics? Tearing pages and sobbing while sparks fly, soot and heat streak my face and my hair swirls wildly and fragments of words crackle and pop in the flames? What is my life coming to?

I have worn the same clothes for about three days running now. Bob must think I'm some kind of hela monster grunting and plodding from room to room, which might be okay because he somehow manages to think our bearded dragons are cute.

Maybe he'll be all right with his wife turning into a great big lizard.

I came up wit the crackpot idea that it would make me feel good to run a marathon.

I told a bunch of people, and I ran three times this week (for the first time since october). I thought I was the shit.

Then I went to the gym with bob yesterday.

Bob is so amazing.

He's just totally redone his entire bank of bad habits, and he's going to the gym five days a week, and eating three super healthy meals every day. He even eats fruit, and he hates fruit! He's a foxy number anyway, and already I have terrifying visions of exactly how retarded hot he will be in about six weeks time, and all the lookyloos will be scampering around the purple palace of planet fitness perspiring perspicacity, making little perfumey winks and excuses "Oh, I'm so sorry, however does this big machine work" *titter* "Your arms are like sooooo big, they must be the size of my waist!"

My imagination sucks in technicolor. Often IMAX 3D.

Anyway. So I think I'll be cool, and I get on a treadmill, and I start it off, and I can barely run for twenty five minutes (three-ish miles)before I begin hallucinating, and the marathon I picked is 13 miles, and it's in may. Is this just the dumbest idea ever? I think it might be. I think I told everybody I was going to be a rockstar, and then I picked up a triangle and stuck my dick in it.

So I spent today moping for a number of reasons.

Those I have already listed, and the usual bubbling cauldron below the surface: ohhh how can you be almost twenty eight and done nothing with your degree? You suck at writing and your ears are really big. You will never be actually in control of any part of your life and will probably wind up fat, homeless, alone and most definitely scribbling on the walls of your cardboard box in your own fecal matter, and not in the marquis de sade/geoffrey rush from quills mega sass way.

So I am reading bonfire of the vanities and hating most of humankind and wanting desperately to live in a bret easton ellis novel and flickering through the colorwheel of jealousy over any of my friends who travel or live in sf right now and don't need to worry about silly little items like seasonal affect disorder because it never ducks below forty-five degrees in northern california, and the sun doesn't leave to alone for five months like some terrible parental figure, but flirts with you on a daily basis behind the seven veils of every gossamer type of fog you can imagine.

I wanted to drink red wine and read and at least be depressed in a sort of enviable locked in the turrets sort of way, but I couldn't even manage that. Instead I watched 500 days of summer (which was pretty forgettable) walked the dog and didn't even make it into to town for coffee like I usual manage on my days off.

You know.

I wonder sometimes if I'll ever look back on blogs and journal entries from this time period of my life when I have kids, and if I'll invent a time machine just so I can go back to this moment and punch myself in the face for being so bloody self wallowy.

*oof*

my problem with music.

Okay.I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but I keep putting it off because I think it might piss a few of my friends off, then I remember that if you're my friend, then you're an intelligent, enlightened individual, and besides, sometimes it's healthy to be mad.
Perhaps it's an american thing. Maybe it's universal now, but I think it's pretty secular at the moment. Music is no longer a form of art, a medium of expression meant for revelation and experience and beauty and celebration...or...at least it sure as hell doesn't seem to be anymore.Lately the good folks with whom I share the bench at the bakery have been compiling cds of the music they survived on during their teenage years. Everybody's all into it, touting the benefits of sharing secret little soul crevices through the music they leaned so heavily upon and tore their hair to, lacquered posters on their walls for, and felt completely alone and misunderstood with."You should make one!" an enthusiastic fan of the idea effused a few days ago, and I wondered why my gut reaction was to balk and shy thoroughly away from any such project.Then I realized, I didn't really listen to much music in high school.Not until my freshman year of college, did I really begin to open up my tastes and explore all the different genres available for my consumption, and being the partner of a very world weary music traveler with quite discerning tastes, it has frequently been my duty to digest enormous slices of humble pie as my ignorance of the many "standards" and "classics" was revealed.
I had never consciously listened to a led zepplin song until I was twenty six.There. I said it.
It's not that I lived in some terrifying religious household where anything other than hymns was burned and my terrified sisters and I rolled on the lawn in our nightgowns at midnight singing songs along with a radio we tuned to the devil's music. Well...we might have done some of that, but it was all in good fun.My parents played a few specific albums that I recall. 1. The soundtrack to the film the big chill (which my sisters and i can still sing both sides of in order)2. tchaikovsky (most memorably the 1812 overture) 3. the greatest hits of buddy holly 4. Queen's the works
As far as I was concerned up until middle school, Queen was hardcore and buddy holly was pop and cannons were classical and motown was pretty much everything else.My sisters and I sang along with the radio, and used our father's voice recorder from his interview journalist days to record songs off of Alex's boombox. Yes. We held it up to the speaker thus a lot of our early mixed tapes held vague interruptions as we were called to dinner or sarah decided to join the party and didn't grasp the grave silence required for such a task. Alex was way more into being a dj than i was, and I would rather read, so I sort of let the mixed tape thing fall by the wayside until high school.I was fifteen when we could finally afford cable, and we lived in america and that meant exciting, luxurious choices like HBO, Nickelodeon and MTV. After we got home from school, there was a top ten countdown on mtv, and it lasted about an hour, and that was exactly how long i was allowed to watch television until dad kicked us off to respective homework duties. I watched this countdown religiously, partly because those marketing guys knew who their audience was, and they geared it toward the pocket change of the blossoming tween empire, partly as a weird way to get to know american tastes (what the fuck was cool here? why did nobody want to eat lunch with me? etc). It was on said countdown that I first saw a little band called savage garden, and for some reason, my brain clicked on. I can try to make this sound cooler than it was, but that would be a farce. In short. They were cute, their songs were catchy, and the stars aligned with my hormones to create the cataclysmic inaugural rock crush.I bought the cd with my saved up pocket money. I locked myself in my room and listened to it and wrote poems and wore a lot of black and generally behaved like a massive jackass for the better part of my fifteenth year. Afterward, I didn't move on to another band. I remember I bought a real fancy like stereo with a three disc changer and a subwoofer with money I saved from my summer job at an ice cream parlor, and I used to listen to the radio constantly. I purchased music very rarely. I had a cd tower with barely twelve slots filled, while across the hall, Alex had hers already overflowing onto the floor, and her door constantly open blasting whatever music she was moved by at that moment. I wasn't very social in high school, and I studied hard and read a lot. My friends weren't really music people, and I never lay on a floor sharing headphones with someone just basking in communal rock love.Like I said, it wasn't until college I realized there was more to the whole music thing. People were serious about their music. They were more than serious, they were rabid, livid, passionate. Some of them were even musicians, which was an entirely alien concept to me, asking me to play an instrument has always produced the same reaction as would asking my cat to don leiderhosen and make bratwurst. I was taken under many wings. People were all too willing to impart their musical wisdom upon me, except, there's a lot of schools of rock out there, and trying to be a student of all of them is really fucking exhausting. Then of course there's the holier than thou attitude of any music type attempting to enlighten a pupil. I had my indy rocker, with his junked out frankenstein guitar with an old nintendo controller imbedded in the base of the neck, who would play easy rock from twenty year old college students crooning about problems not unlike our own, voices and strings breaking with emotion and desperation and a need for beer money. There were my folkie girlfriends who dreaded each others hair and mended their quilted skirts on bunk beds while a super hot lesbian strummed an acoustic guitar and we all listened to soft spoken girl poets lullabyes about abortions and thwarted revolutions and poisoned rivers.There was the dark boy with the collection of creepy angry music that we would sit in his basement room and listen to with only one dim lamp blurring the shapes of the bookshelves and couches. These were songs about pain and anger and alienation, and after a while they filled the room with so much angst I wanted to laugh out loud at the thick bog i had to wade through just to find the door. As I went from room to room, and later from town to town, people passed in and out of my life and experiences came along and some of them brought their music like troubadours in a blaze of identity and tangibility so solid they would become inextricable from one another. Others brought music like gifts, quiet and sweet like little wrapped boxes that I could open then, and pack away and open again and again and be precious for different reasons every time. In time I would find bands that just made sense to me, depeche mode for one, the cure, the dresden dolls, bands that just seemed to be waiting in the velvet curtains for me to stop staring into the lights and catch me off guard and whisper things that made me trip or curtsy. But more than anything, music has become this beautiful woven tapestry, forever being woven and unwoven from the middle outward, and I reach the point of this whole diatribe now.What the hell is with the music nichery?!Why is it so important to be the first to "discover" a band and introduce others to it? Music is always best uncovered by the individual on his own time and terms. This is how the ties are formed between listener and listened.

This new practice of forcing the newest craziest weirdest band and thrusting it on people just because it's new and neat and weird is absolutely against the whole notion of music being art. Art is something you aren't looking for, but finds you, standing alone in an atrium under a skylight next to a palm tree, like my favorite sculpture in the whole wide world did. Music is the same.

I don't care if it's three year old inuit children who play world war two tank relics inside of a walk in freezer and manage to replicate the tokyo ska/klesmer scene, so it's unique, that doesn't mean it's forged any kind of musical/sexual/artistic/life altering with anyone!

Unless you can prove to me that a toddler screeching hebrew in an icy steel tomb while his bandmate rocks a helmet solo truly moves something inside of you, stop trying to tell me that it's worth listening to just because it's the nichest niche in nicheville.

I didn't even know I was in nicheville. I was just enjoying the bloody view.

With that tirade out of the way, I would like to take this time to encourage anyone who is, like me, music challenged, and maybe didn't get the magical musical education that seventh graders seem to be mastering these days via wonders like the internet and rockband and guitar hero, to keep falling in love with music the way you should fall in love ever, by happenstance, by accident, by keeping and open mind and saying, "

gee, what is that playing just now, in this perfect moment in your car, while we feel the sand crumble off our feet from watching a moonrise on the beach on a sickly sweet humid august night?"

and then having the grace to reply,

"oh...in a walk in freezer, really?" and taking the moment, the music and life distilled into that single perfect drop, and playing it all the drive home.

my problem with music.

The long, perfect loveliness of Sow

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Label Actions... New Label... Select: All, None 1 – 25 of 38 Older › Your Posts: All, Drafts, Scheduled, Imported, Published Edit my problem with music Okay.I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but I keep putting it off because I think it might piss a few of my friends off, then I remember that if you're my friend, then you're an intelligent, enlightened individual, and besides, sometimes it's healthy to be mad. Perhaps it's an american thing. Maybe it's universal now, but I think it's pretty secular at the moment. Music is no longer a form of art, a medium of expression meant for revelation and experience and beauty and celebration...or...at least it sure as hell doesn't seem to be anymore.Lately the good folks with whom I share the bench at the bakery have been compiling cds of the music they survived on during their teenage years. Everybody's all into it, touting the benefits of sharing secret little soul crevices through the music they leaned so heavily upon and tore their hair to, lacquered posters on their walls for, and felt completely alone and misunderstood with."You should make one!" an enthusiastic fan of the idea effused a few days ago, and I wondered why my gut reaction was to balk and shy thoroughly away from any such project.Then I realized, I didn't really listen to much music in high school.Not until my freshman year of college, did I really begin to open up my tastes and explore all the different genres available for my consumption, and being the partner of a very world weary music traveler with quite discerning tastes, it has frequently been my duty to digest enormous slices of humble pie as my ignorance of the many "standards" and "classics" was revealed. I had never consciously listened to a led zepplin song until I was twenty six.There. I said it. It's not that I lived in some terrifying religious household where anything other than hymns was burned and my terrified sisters and I rolled on the lawn in our nightgowns at midnight singing songs along with a radio we tuned to the devil's music. Well...we might have done some of that, but it was all in good fun.My parents played a few specific albums that I recall. 1. The soundtrack to the film the big chill (which my sisters and i can still sing both sides of in order)2. tchaikovsky (most memorably the 1812 overture) 3. the greatest hits of buddy holly 4. Queen's the works As far as I was concerned up until middle school, Queen was hardcore and buddy holly was pop and cannons were classical and motown was pretty much everything else.My sisters and I sang along with the radio, and used our father's voice recorder from his interview journalist days to record songs off of Alex's boombox. Yes. We held it up to the speaker thus a lot of our early mixed tapes held vague interruptions as we were called to dinner or sarah decided to join the party and didn't grasp the grave silence required for such a task. Alex was way more into being a dj than i was, and I would rather read, so I sort of let the mixed tape thing fall by the wayside until high school.I was fifteen when we could finally afford cable, and we lived in america and that meant exciting, luxurious choices like HBO, Nickelodeon and MTV. After we got home from school, there was a top ten countdown on mtv, and it lasted about an hour, and that was exactly how long i was allowed to watch television until dad kicked us off to respective homework duties. I watched this countdown religiously, partly because those marketing guys knew who their audience was, and they geared it toward the pocket change of the blossoming tween empire, partly as a weird way to get to know american tastes (what the fuck was cool here? why did nobody want to eat lunch with me? etc). It was on said countdown that I first saw a little band called savage garden, and for some reason, my brain clicked on. I can try to make this sound cooler than it was, but that would be a farce. In short. They were cute, their songs were catchy, and the stars aligned with my hormones to create the cataclysmic inaugural rock crush.I bought the cd with my saved up pocket money. I locked myself in my room and listened to it and wrote poems and wore a lot of black and generally behaved like a massive jackass for the better part of my fifteenth year. Afterward, I didn't move on to another band. I remember I bought a real fancy like stereo with a three disc changer and a subwoofer with money I saved from my summer job at an ice cream parlor, and I used to listen to the radio constantly. I purchased music very rarely. I had a cd tower with barely twelve slots filled, while across the hall, Alex had hers already overflowing onto the floor, and her door constantly open blasting whatever music she was moved by at that moment. I wasn't very social in high school, and I studied hard and read a lot. My friends weren't really music people, and I never lay on a floor sharing headphones with someone just basking in communal rock love.Like I said, it wasn't until college I realized there was more to the whole music thing. People were serious about their music. They were more than serious, they were rabid, livid, passionate. Some of them were even musicians, which was an entirely alien concept to me, asking me to play an instrument has always produced the same reaction as would asking my cat to don leiderhosen and make bratwurst. I was taken under many wings. People were all too willing to impart their musical wisdom upon me, except, there's a lot of schools of rock out there, and trying to be a student of all of them is really fucking exhausting. Then of course there's the holier than thou attitude of any music type attempting to enlighten a pupil. I had my indy rocker, with his junked out frankenstein guitar with an old nintendo controller imbedded in the base of the neck, who would play easy rock from twenty year old college students crooning about problems not unlike our own, voices and strings breaking with emotion and desperation and a need for beer money. There were my folkie girlfriends who dreaded each others hair and mended their quilted skirts on bunk beds while a super hot lesbian strummed an acoustic guitar and we all listened to soft spoken girl poets lullabyes about abortions and thwarted revolutions and poisoned rivers.There was the dark boy with the collection of creepy angry music that we would sit in his basement room and listen to with only one dim lamp blurring the shapes of the bookshelves and couches. These were songs about pain and anger and alienation, and after a while they filled the room with so much angst I wanted to laugh out loud at the thick bog i had to wade through just to find the door. As I went from room to room, and later from town to town, people passed in and out of my life and experiences came along and some of them brought their music like troubadours in a blaze of identity and tangibility so solid they would become inextricable from one another. Others brought music like gifts, quiet and sweet like little wrapped boxes that I could open then, and pack away and open again and again and be precious for different reasons every time. In time I would find bands that just made sense to me, depeche mode for one, the cure, the dresden dolls, bands that just seemed to be waiting in the velvet curtains for me to stop staring into the lights and catch me off guard and whisper things that made me trip or curtsy. But more than anything, music has become this beautiful woven tapestry, forever being woven and unwoven from the middle outward, and I reach the point of this whole diatribe now.What the hell is with the music nichery?!Why is it so important to be the first to "discover" a band and introduce others to it? Music is always best uncovered by the individual on his own time and terms. This is how the ties are formed between listener and listened. This new practice of forcing the newest craziest weirdest band and thrusting it on people just because it's new and neat and weird is absolutely against the whole notion of music being art. Art is something you aren't looking for, but finds you, standing alone in an atrium under a skylight next to a palm tree, like my favorite sculpture in the whole wide world did. Music is the same. I don't care if it's three year old inuit children who play world war two tank relics inside of a walk in freezer and manage to replicate the tokyo ska/klesmer scene, so it's unique, that doesn't mean it's forged any kind of musical/sexual/artistic/life altering with anyone! Unless you can prove to me that a toddler screeching hebrew in an icy steel tomb while his bandmate rocks a helmet solo truly moves something inside of you, stop trying to tell me that it's worth listening to just because it's the nichest niche in nicheville. I didn't even know I was in nicheville. I was just enjoying the bloody view. With that tirade out of the way, I would like to take this time to encourage anyone who is, like me, music challenged, and maybe didn't get the magical musical education that seventh graders seem to be mastering these days via wonders like the internet and rockband and guitar hero, to keep falling in love with music the way you should fall in love ever, by happenstance, by accident, by keeping and open mind and saying, " gee, what is that playing just now, in this perfect moment in your car, while we feel the sand crumble off our feet from watching a moonrise on the beach on a sickly sweet humid august night?" and then having the grace to reply, "oh...in a walk in freezer, really?" and taking the moment, the music and life distilled into that single perfect drop, and playing it all the drive home. draft

Tectonics

You say to me

hey baby, let's form a land bridge,

I don't want to fight today, let's just call it quits

agree to disagree

and say I come to you

if you come to me.

And I

on the other side of

the atlantic

waving at you from the opposite pole

knowing as hard as I run on this betrayal called earth

that I will somehow always end up

right back here

beside you,

I say

baby, there is no such thing,

I don't want no theoretical love.

I don't want no placating

bandaid neosporin for the soul childrens grape flavored hush now

everything's gonna be okay let me explain it to you sideways kinda

bull

shit.

I want to feel the earth move.

I want to know that every day we're either moving a little bit closer

or a little further away,

and that your unstoppable force is meeting my immoveable piece

and something's really happening

like you're falling underneath me

or I'm sliding underneath you

and we're making this trench together

and we're consciously deciding to never see light again,

or maybe just saying to hell with it

and smashing equal into equal

and from our clashing, bashing, warring bodies

mountains will rise

peaks will strain to reach heaven and touch the faces of angels

and somehow through our battle we will know

that as long as we are locked like this we may look up and see god.

but you just sigh and roll over and I

see the continent of your shoulderblades in the darkness

drifting further and further away,

and I want so badly to meet you there,

walk my hand across the pillow

defy the science of everything

and say,

yeah, sure, baby, land bridges, love bridges

love bridges even inexplicable distances like these,

but I get going instead

and I get up and on my way,

one inch a year,

fuck that,

I got places to be.

no sleep for those who follow in the paths of the comatose

Sounds outside my window
are cars driving by with their windows down and their music loud and more and more i feel like these are pills of multicolored, multi aural selfinclusive magic
soundbites containing one brief breath of a life as it soars through the night and away from you and dry, slippery fingers.
each car and its split second soundbyte screams another message another note about something and then is lost like the slow words of someone you love breaking up with you in a park. each time they speak it is so slow, the crystalline formation of the words, and then when you finally have one, and think to grasp it long enough you might examine it, already, like a snowflake, the shape is gone and warped, the meaning melting and lost in the stifling air.
a car.
is full of people.
a cluster of layered limbs and woven laughs all crackling and vibrating with their hair flying in the torrents of wind for this car cannot afford air conditioning and its music is tinny and high in impoverished speakers.
nobody in it is old enough to regret.
and they slide through like holding hands on the last day of school before summer, sweaty fingers interlocked so tight and promises whispered back and forth about never letting it go, and always being this close and never feeling anything like this and tumbling, and pulling and skin slipping off skin until it pulls away into the night.
another.
with just two people in the front.
quiet.
and one passenger asleep in the back. no music and no words just a long day full of exhaustion and emotional assault, wounds still stinging in the open air. perhaps the person stretched across the back seat is not even really asleep but in that half prone position of pretending to be so that he can avoid speaking at a time when words would just be too trivial for the events of the day.
and another.
with one person.
music as loud as she can get it. all windows down and thumping her rings and fingers against the roof like a military parade as if to say fuck you night i am small but i can still push you back with these headlights and this screaming sound i make in my throat somewhere behind my ears without even opening my mouth.

they slide.
like beads down a necklace to the next town and the next and the next.
and i lose you all and wish i could ride with you wherever you are going. or never stop.
and just go until we run out of road.

cherries

they start out in the neon pyramid of the grocery.
pillars of glossy, spherical, ruby red youth and resilience.
We will live forever, their brilliant, multifaceted hues suggest. We are not merely flesh which will, someday, disintegrate and return our stone hearts to the earth, we are some gorgeous jewels, representations of all that is carpe diem, all that is yours for the taking, so much so that we are in fact yours for the taking, our sweet blood, our smooth skin, our delicious, nubile bodies are all for your enjoyment, for the simple action of bagging and paying, you can take us-take us-take us-home.
who could resist them.
a vermillion chorus under translucent plastic, we succumb, and we pay and they come oh they come oh they come.
Under the bright sunshine of the lunching sun they come
under the pitiless gaze of the rearview mirror they come
like quicksilver they come
on the beach in the sand on a blanket green like a meadow they come
in my hand
in my mouth
on my face they come
and we spit their seeds at the horizon and wonder if their souls will swim to england.
who loves you?
we ask.
and in reply
they come.


and later-
when they are older-
we shelve them in cold regret.
there was too much.
our mouths sour and sore from the tearing of skins from the bitter tannons of love and passion which cling in our teeth and stain our lips the unforgiving crimson of a criminal.
we put them there and forget.
we work the week.
we eat the heat.
we reheat the sun and spoon it -bored- into our mouths in front of the shouting moon.
And the bag grows heavy,
and swollen with rot.
'til that day, we are possessed with some notion that our lives need cleansing, and we reach as far back as we have guts for, and somewhere in the slippery, cold depths, our fingers touch a memory. There have been so many other days at the beach since you came to us, and there have been so many pits buried in the sand and left to do what pits do.
And in our fist, your sagging weight is a reminder of something so sweet going so rotten, we dare not even to puncture our engorged remains and sniff at the odor of your decay. our decay.
with a sense of resignment we hurl you into the bottom of the white trash bag. a newspaper curls around you, and you seep gently, softly into its vapid, delicate layers, slowly erasing every word.