Honsetly the way it rains here when it rains makes Portland look like pre school. 
I have never seen so huge rain drops.
                                       ~Johanness Fluvio Weber on Paris downpour

thirty something nothing

on the way home, still frantically tearing off articles of colorless clothing, we decided to go to the place our friend last said "I love it here".
leaves and years cover the footprints we had secretly hoped to locate. and somehow the smells we thought to recall. & somehow we still think about all of those missing bits, possibly more in their absence.
white glints in the water of salmon carcass from this past spring. why have they not been masticated by water or a mouth? why are those the things that managed to stick around. all we wanted was a lousy bottle cap. on the way back to the car you unearthed some red birthday balloon shrapnel.
we found ourselves closer to the sky than we planned and took a slow drive back where we came from.
on the drive we used the "slow moving vehicles lane" as often as possible. people in colorless clothing have no business in cars. particularly no fast ones. and we can not be bothered to adjust to our chromatic thinking selves.
once home we ate everything worth its sugar from the cooler and called it a night. sand still in our shoes, colorless clothes piled high, tears on our sleeves, and some dusty red balloon shrapnel.  

la playa

she wrote: most lakes have a similar shape, when viewed from the shore or center. & maybe that's a little too vague but illustrates the odds that stack and hinder. & the way she looks deep into the water's slow fade, to see one more branch to sunken log. that's not palm frond or sun beam, it's dust in the water.

memo poem mepo

once you lived in Lisbon

so much more than just a summer

built pyramids of pleasures past, and those that did say never

faster, faster, faster cried the waning wake and tether

indicative of folks who study lives and loves of others

& it's not that I keep doing this

over and over

it's that i'm not doing that

over and over

never subverted

over and over

simply not mentioned

i used to be Algerian, from far external texts

stood in the arms of an ocean deeper than what we see here

worked hard for these marks, and never surrender

scathed from bow to stern, & recalling we both were

& the background sounds bleed bigger, awaiting recognition

all our backs bow thicker, stood on by some past conviction

interlocking fingers, as if conscience was cohesive

not building fortress around, rather lush gardens within them

never sure why so sure

somehow you write with so much hope. without a one of your three children. with the faith of a thousand churchless workers. so it's back to Spokane you are, or Georgia, or some place north. there is often someone to help somewhere: possibly a relative, family friend, former forensics. you hold the vial and gloves to cleanse your new life of any connections to its reflection. you know as well as the department of humyn services that they would wait there for you at the hospital, and after birth hand you both back. you to the street, and your letter-named kind to the system that can afford neither sugar nor parking spaces. this is an industry, but no one tells you about anything but you. we also forget that every one of us nearly put ourselves in your bedless. and you wake to the sunshine, some place not so far from a ship's deck, no higher than an apogee. i will practice the piano so we can celebrate, once was a standard to laugh with blood in your fists.

some days ago

i like the way people hold on to things.
not with their hearts, but with their hands.
it's interestingly unique, similar to how we can or can not roll our tongues, wink and blink, or draw realistic trees.
things we believe may have been passed down? maybe not.
i think i would tell you about that.

colonial rule you will not.

i know you want to call it Rhodesia, but you no longer can. it's Zimbabwe, regardless of your rhyme's need for that "sia" sound.
& you ride, headphones at their loudest, this is the busiest street in your city. let them do it. what you can't. if they don't, you will likely recover in a few days and remember what you forgot.
those plates your offspring broke, well they know why you are crying.
when you bought those plates you could not afford the food to fill.
coins counted meticulously, with a knowledge of some future written in breaths on the bus stop window.
you passed that co-worker each day at his bus stop on your way to work. without forethought, today was the day to open the door and chat.
a love that merely could. and maybe did. when we were not looking directly at it.

appendages, apparati, utensil

slag fell splat on ready concrete below & i rolled calmly by. concrete always seems ready to serve us without expectation, and we mostly like that. in a century will be still erect? how much spray-paint?
a new tooth in our city of ribs.
& do you know of the excitement you incite? i think you might.
& mine are changing too.
how are you hands, pen, keys, pad, typewriter, fretboard, color paints, burning implements?
i hear you lay fallow, uneasy with anticipation of new & warm bleeding. fresh spray-paint.
i promise to remind you soon. swear.
i have occupied these cavities with something you, and all aparati for that matter, can not contain nor convey.
& oh, i will introduce you two some time soon. possibly this is your initial greeting.
& no need to be overly gentle here.
play with every tool you have ever created, you will never figure this ball of amazing out.
my advice is simply to enjoy every attempt to describe the weight of things you will never be able to lift.
this place is larger than us both, and we stay/sit in reverence.
not unlike pedestrians, peering, titillated by the concrete's caught slag splatter and dissipation.
we will likely enjoy a great deal of spray-paint.

from a branched bird

no snow on the ground in this north american january, so you mow the lawn. you are hopeful.
that neighbor looks longingly at you. the one you met briefly at another's back yard potluck last august. she's wondering if you have gone mad, or are simply as dissatisfied with things about, as she is.
she is grieving the loss of her partner, as she knows that in a year or two they will move on to another.
the requiem she hears clear is one of the happiest songs she can recall, and she is sobbing controllably. her halcyon dreams are brighter than when they first met.
you know well not to look the way of her window, as she told you: "crying just feels right some times. it's not that i am upset or messed-up". you feel the implications of her words toward the rear of your skull: 'please stop looking at me when i look at you'.
& both understand that the warm belly of a kingfisher is yours, if you could simply stop plugging your ears, eyes, mouth, ducts.
you both found something that feels real in your controlled outlets. in the pockets of the problems of you longest hung winter coats, there were beautiful and useful treasures.

in a bottle

if that exists, i want it to.
if it doesn't, i want it to.

when dragons need a warm fire

in an unfamiliar state that makes all too much sense this morning.
i think these are related to stress and timelines, but i am never quite certain.
looking at tables a bit too long, as if they would tell me where to sit and WHY.
there is a sense inside that the fate i continually refute has a relevance, if only for today...or this second.
i will go to the next floor, despite the open seats here. this seat is the only one i can sit in, so says my gut.
unknowns fashioned sharply by the wit of a strict date.
it trembles the mind of a handy left leaner.
what is off kilter loosens the folds of all these books, and what we mean by their pictures.
THEIR pictures.

t.b.d.

dear dear friend,

thoseareleavesblowingoutsidethewindowinthesunandihopetheymakeyouashappyastheymakeme!

um, yes please. i will commission Oliver and his ilk to read bedtime stories to my friends and i. people should be employed for such things. they truly should.

this is the most beautiful morning i have seen to date. it is nearly hot in temperature, the wind is so strong that it appears as if the world is moving in front and before of my feet. & it's one of those days when you need to remember something or someone who did or did not do something. like starting or stopping life, becoming something new within it, or relating it to someone else in some way that they/i/you really liked. i call them 'traditionally bad days', not because they are bad but because the first time i recognized one of these little internal-holidays it was a bad one.

it gives me the uneasy joy i find in trying to define things like wind. & this morning. defining things that are highly conceptual, and hardly containable by a single definition.

wind/vent/el viento/ве́тер

energy moving through gases. moving how? any kind of gases? should the way wind affects things like leaves, birds' feathers and torn antique tractor-seat-leather be part of the definition? i dunno.

not sure why i need to share these thoughts with you, but i am pretty sure that i do. cause you have ever so much time to read such things.

~g

peripheral, or right here

you know you live in that well nested space below me
why are you coming from down the street to go away today?
and it's a recurrence, as i now see your partner in the same way.
you both gaze my way, with the face a marathon runner gives to afternoon joggers the day after a 42.195 kilometer gallop.
and 'moving again' has less a nice ring to it today. away from you two.
you don't know what it meant to me that i was invited. that i attended. that you cared.
we maintain our perspective with a certain space, and i am letting go of it.
not with such intention, more acknowledgement of what happens and has taken place.
i can say i will remember all the folk music we shared, and the times i was still-single and you two on the morning-couch reminded me that that wasn't okay/so bad.
these narratives we share, you both edify eloquently
call me a function, but i like how these songs have shaped our lives.
even to not believe, they light days as we negate them.
as we attempt to stay us.
& how much for how long can we/i endure.
i think a lot, i feel we've got it, & holding.
& what's that say for all those folks we don't know so swell?
well, i'm not so sure, but isn't that why we keep trying to know them?
why we work diligently to find the ones that fit?
isn't it?

who built this place anyway?

objective facts about left-hand-dominant people:

*we wear watches on our right wrists so that they do not drag the page as we write
*we do not necessarily feel that our advanced sense of aesthetic awareness is due to being left handed
*if you are right handed, we try to sit on your left at a dining table, so you don't accuse us of bumping your elbow throughout the meal
*we are not all anarchists, although some of us are and certainly once were
*we don't find left-handed scissors any more convenient, as we have applied our cutting skills in reverse throughout our entire cutting careers
*we devour life whole, as we have no other choice
*we truly do dislike the mathematics or quantification of most things, although numbers are not so scary
*we make better lovers (for both right and left handed partners, or both)
*we have perfectly good reasons to write only on the backs of pages in spiral-ring-notebooks

look at the lens, and smile! (candidly)

some things i have been doing/feeling/not-doing/not-feeling/etcetera in my life longer than the part of my life that they were not true for. these are the ones i am sorta proud of (these lists are the sort of things we do as we approach thirty years of age.):

*falling more in love with people more than they, or i, are ready for (or may ever be for that matter)
*playing music
*appreciating the way things wear over time
*loving words and the ways things can be put
*making a conscious-effort to be less selfish & more genuinely thankful for how other folks effect my life & visa versa
*reading
*thinking critically
*not eating meat (yes, this has always included fish-flesh)
*cuddling
*feeling romantic about nearly everything (no, not necessarily by the relationship definition)
*accepting that i am pretty rad, and that i can become radder
*riding a bike
*not cuddling with capitalism any more than i fee necessary to get bye
*loving my parents for the different people they are, and not for the people who are just different from me. yay, differences are more fun to learn from!
*embracing & oft enjoying loneliness
*thinking of my lovely sis daily
*traveling as much as possible to learn from other places and peoples
*wanting to spend time helping other people have a better time (and occasionally doing so)
*loving abandoned things,and book smells, and vinyl smells, & a few other objects
*feeling it anti-romantic to quantify nearly anything i actually care about
*being thankful for my stellar friends
*writing
*not editing much of anything, for fear that it could lose its love

these things, along with many others, i have taken on for more years of my life than not (in some instances this may create a double negative. Yeah!). i will be turning thirty years of age some time in the next year, and i kind of want to look back at all this (and that) and think of where i have been & where i might be. not likely to get too far into where i am going, as that is always such a patchwork in progress.

p.s. i believe that 'sun in an empty room', by the Weakerthans, is my favorite song today. i have already listened to it several times this morning. i also enjoy the painting by the same name, by Edward Hopper.

portland summer

good bye until next time old friend. i greatly appreciated every minute of both days we spent together; your glow, the flood of reminiscence you bring to me, the way you lit every room, gave reason to awaken, left early a set of darker pictures on floors in rooms long left vacancies. over and over i have pined for you, and our tryst will be missed.
until your perennial bloom...

train tracks skit-scat

the rhythm is dissimilar, yet invokes similarly staunch breaths.
expectation of perfections all on strong fear foundation.
we begin these things in weeks, then months, then we hope to remember.
effortless balance at first, we think of jumping at the totter.
same perception that it all should stay the same.
& there's spray-paint all over this thing.
thorax to toes and back again.
literally covering the hull and bow are tags older than us both.
and we wish to sail it until they fade or are scathed from our understanding.
the materials that makeup our movement arrived on different vessels, from disparate lands, with varying degrees of hardness in the scratch-test.
a patchwork of everything our short lives have moved through and beyond today.
we cover and comfort ourselves with the flesh of what we hope to be real.
and hopeful-hearts, however difficult to admit, are that gentle rhythm.

quandary

i once was writing a song, and called the local librarian to settle a dispute between two dictionaries over how to properly spell the word ellipses.
as luck would have it, there are several ways to spell ellipsis.
some may be plural, and other singular, but i was not one to judge such a matter.

Weakerthans v. Astronautalis

"Aside", by the Weakerthans and "My Dinner With Andy" by Astronautalis have some strikingly similar melodic bits. Particularly in their choruses. Check it out! I often wonder how intentional these things are, and on the part of whom? Truthfully, I hope they are always beautiful accidents.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A927zcSSw2s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjbRf7g4FGI&feature=related

they both host quite eloquent lyrics to boot!

?
who is being interviewed here?
if it is i, could we trade places of seating?
if it is you, could you please speak into my other side?
& as for this room, did they paint and & then knock holes in the walls?
is it all to remind this place what it was and what we want it to be simultaneously?
is it all too soon to run screaming and wonder what would have been, had I not?
were there once decorations where there now are notations of accomplishment?
& if walls truly do recall, will you please ask them again to name a favorite song?
these hands, head shaking, uncontrollable smile, where do I put them?
do we know , though no one else knows, that this is in fact happening?
& when the water rushes in from salty ocean topographic shift, do we continue to pretend?
is our own facade strong enough to kill us?
it certainly feels like it might be.