The Geography of Bliss

"Cafes are theaters where the customer is both audience and performer."
~Eric Weiner

all these things are living & not bound by punctuation

her folks named her caribou after the country they longed to wrap themselves in

 pining for any place that requires each other for warmth

born bluer than the earth from a pub's window view on Jupiter, she fought hard for this one 

 said, "ride slowly there are children playin'

right there past the dog that's weary"

 waiting beside a bowl to dine or die

i can not tell if her father passed, or if her lover left and made her cry

 could it have been a past acquaintance kept lit by her young heart's light

all i know for sure is someone should hug her real hard

breathing threw it, the way ancestors had

 the way all animals do

chemical free and bound by possibility 

 leather in the mouth tastes like bark in the hand

if her eyes don't burst, her throat just may

 hands available, this one will fight back hard

in a space that fills the definition of watching and being watched at once

 we all sit and speculate

even caribou knows she doesn't know for sure

 her adjacent friend's empty mouth, brain, tea cup

liquids her past people drank with a variety of dinosaur 

 all i know for sure is caribou is stronger than any one in the joint 

& it's not for a career that holds her from feeling 

 she has been fortunate/unfortunate enough 

to live by the blood or brass ingested

 if that adds to comfort, well it's not in a scuffle with every other day

caribou; a picture of what each of us remembers 

 and the leather we will taste again some day soon 

arrived: the forlorn blossoms of an eggshell

well, we've done it sir.
you and me, and certainly I, have managed to become something no one else would like to be.
be it literal or otherwise, this place is all our own.
we fought so hard for the things we began to believe in our youth, and rejected any alternative.
struggles to free those we have never met from the chains our flighty privilege could see. accept nothing but absolute equality on all fronts. abhorrent equality. confront capitalism in every minutia impossible. bark at the moon while we pray to her in our mind. & potentially estrange one another. odious ideologies that we know can smell like the only answer.
and i am now drunk enough to start rocking to and fro. where is that conviction going?
and this is now the mint green walls of your past musings. dinner plates.
nor is it the drab grey walls. now that line our state's capital.
histories written on narratives we read in classes we never would attend.
i am what you are afraid of. a punk with a motive.
fought so hard we can't even admit we are only talking to ourselves. or am i? you, likely, have moved on from this long ago.
Oh, you've got green eyes
Oh, you've got blue eyes
Oh, you've got grey eyes

gibran kahlil gibran's: dogeared & stapeled

once annually she fights in the face of peace and tranquility to stand up straight and pretend
a beautiful theatric, likened to frying food sounds we all know as if they were our own skin
this battle with the sky, the walls, every old waxy record, and any still living plant
and knowing that others didn't bother, well that certainly will not make her stronger
she is not Catholic, nor any other form of deep ground guilt nor shame
like a Tuesday off from work, she does not see where there would be time

the great contributors to our revolution are those who created these "money on trees theories"
see the devil bleeding in a ditch, every Christian rushing frantically to save the soul of their fallen angel
without someone lying on top she would never be certain that there is a chance she. will. never. get. up.
muscle enough to break her own bones, fortitude is never what she needs

& it's so simple to peer back through the tunnel, before the ceiling dust fell from off her shoulders
that dust will never come clean of her clothes, and to cast them off, so stains pores and pillars
for others, that was the birth canal, otherwise known as their mother: leading from the uterus through the cervix, vagina, and vulva.
no one can see her dust, it is hers to breath

from the ditch she has a lovely view of all the answers to all of the questions that held her in dichotomy 
the sky, the walls, very old waxy records, botany and the like. 
what that means to her is the great western seagull defecating on a bronze bust of everything she ever believed in
she is the gray cloudy walls that wreak of unplayed vinyl and eucalyptus
the dust from from the ceiling is keep care of her
sunlight is the christian in her bleeding ribs   

chrome was once a plastic-some-place

when we awaken to exclaim "today..." what we more-so mean is what's left over.
see, a few years back there was a car down the block that folks slept overnight in regularly.
that car was painted with the wheels and tyres intact.
now, who could say what's become of it.
conceived a few children & possibly a nutrea nest & the usual needle holster & then ten paperbacks from the nearest free-box fantasy.
it made these things.
form the warmest heart of Mexico, & a never sleepy Malaysian capital from whence it came.
those windows held reflections of a visage. a fuselage for sale. again.
the thorax of this thing weeps as well as its midnight song that evening. in the wind. under their bodies.
the sleepy "heart and soul" an artifact of culture that gives it as much as any semaphore under capital statue shadows.
& it is not the ephemeral nature of the thing that makes it ring. that is not the case for any thing these-days.
it's the shine that both knobs of an aged radio could give you, when "something to look at" meant as much to you as hose needles & that baby & rodent resting & discarded novels & Mexico & every square centimeter of Kuala Lumpur.  
& perhaps more.  

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.