So I put the beans in the refrigerator for later. I fluffed up the pillows when I went in to look at the bed. The usual stuff happened to the whiskey bottle. I always thought about drawing a picture of you when you were asleep. Haven't thought of that in a while. What you look like to me now is probably not the way you'll look the next time I see you. But it's okay. That's the kind of thing that's easy for me to imagine.

Still all a-tremble because the cold is never far.

Lovely is the throatmeat when the pale fangs take a slice.

Lovely is the sunshine and lovely is the ice.

‘Cause

“We got ourselves a bleeder!!” the raspvoice was heard to say.

It’s yellowgold to umber, bathed in the light of day,

because I made myself defenceless in the deep dark fields of hay.

The seed may stray and the beasts may roam

to yonder hearth and home;

the fox might lay in the bones all day of chickens, goats and sheep;

but since the boards came down and the posts left ground,

my fears can finally sleep.

Because I made myself defenceless as a sort of final straw,

my flesh and field can only yield beneath all teeth and claws.

Boundless colours shift and dance since I tore down manmade laws,

and the blades of grass do drift and prance as the wind blows clear the fog.

We had it from the wisemen that the greens of our neighbour’s lawns

were emeralder than the eyes that peered and squinted ‘gainst the dawn.

As the grass strays through the fields so green – so yellow, red and gold,

as the flowers bloom and the bells toll doom,

as the warmth gives way to cold,

you’ll hear me say as the ravens play,

“There’s no way for me to sense this.

With a palms-up stance and a world wide glance,

I have made myself defenceless.”

I know I couldn’t have made it this far without you.  Any time I’ve been on the verge of disaster you’ve gestured or spoken a word not to make my problems disappear, but to show me how to solve them.  I came here full of my high hopes that buoyed me up into the clouds, and sunblind I exalted in my accomplishments.  But as the easing hand of gravity began to press me down it was you who taught a floating man to fly.  Then the darkness.  So many times I shut my eyes in terror against the darkness, unknowing which came first:  the shadows all around me, or my keeping out of the light.  But again under your instruction I learned that my heart burning like a sun will light all the paths and heights before me.  The most terrifying thing in the world is to think that we are not loved, that love is a lie, that there is a place or a thing somewhere, somehow that is made of terror and that banishes love.  I see now so clearly that there of course could be no terror without love, no love without terror first to be loved.  And even warm with that fire in my breast, even for moments, tears slid down my cheeks and sizzled in the blaze as I felt the weight of life on my shoulders.  Atlas’ burden seemed a paltry marble next to this sacred duty of breathing, banding us all together in our fear and pride to make a paradise out of slow and crumbling wasteland energies.  But how great an accomplishment it is to know that children can be born, and that they can laugh easy in a place carved out for them already, their own trials already made easier by those who have gone before.  No dark without light, no warmth without chill, no life without death.  Even the most magnificent of cities founder, as stars burn out in the sky.  The weight is again passed around, the pressure on, the sinews flexed.  I love the EARTH to death, from womb to grave, sun cresting all horizons as leaves and hands lift to its shining face.  But in the flux, I need only one thing more, beyond blade and bandage.

I need you to watch over me.

That’s why it was hard to know for sure.  Because she kept dropping her pencil and then bending over to pick it up, and I wondered whether she had butterfingers or if she was trying to entice me.  She didn’t seem like the sort.  A really honest smile when she’d look at me.  No duplicitousness there.  Not like me thinking that maybe she was, darkly wondering in my head while my eyes must be merry.  They must be merry because she keeps sort of giggling when she sees them.  She wouldn’t giggle at them if they looked serious, would she?  Or would she?  I guess serious might seem cute.  Like what I was thinking really wasn’t as important as I thought it was.  And I guess it wasn’t.  Isn’t.  I guess the only thing worse (I thought) than the way things actually were was the thought that maybe the perceived horribleness of things was actually an excess of emotion swirled about a gaping empty center.  Like maybe she wasn’t thinking about me at all.  Maybe she was just a clumsy girl that had no idea how easily I can fall in love, how much I love having my heart broken because I’ve gotten so used to it.  Maybe I see the rocks on the shore and fantasize about the incredible journeys they must have taken in order to end up there.  The journey made incredible by the vast distances covered by inanimate things, the world’s tiny hands helping them along, helping rocks along to their final resting place on shores to be lapped at like horsetongues at salt.  But really a man (not even a man, a WORLDNYMPH) strolled along the shores while we slumbered in wombs and deposited the rocks there, arranging them just right, knowing how they’d fire our dreamfilled heads to wondering and weaving fantastic explanations to sate our fear and fill the empty ruse of life on earth.  Except one thing.  The feelings are real.  My care for her is real.  She must know something of that as sure as I know it.   That she’s there in the empty place when I peel back the layers, smiling, and that’s good enough.  That’s more than beautiful enough.  My heart not wide enough or bloodfilled enough to feel it all.   And after words (or the lack of them) when I’d walk along through the trees thinking and the chirpchirpchirp of the birds and the reasurring leafrustles around me reminding me that I am not alone at all.  It’s not even her and I.  It’s hands and legs and faces, branches and leaves and flowers, towers of stone reaching out from deep in the earth or from the shadowbound floor of the sea, all connected together, all reaching and smiling and smiting and caressing from the same place, the same curious wondering place that is trying and trying and advancing along almost inadvertently towards another place (another place too big to see and too glorious to feel even) where we’ll rest and be complete.  That’s what it might have been.  Might be still.  We could help it all to be.  And in so doing help ourselves to see.   That’s what makes me so unsure and afraid:  I know that I’m the form made to express something that I’m too dense to even understand.  I grasp and grasp and grasp.  It’s close enough to be the next thing promised but grand enough that I’ll only know it when I fall into the space out there in my future that’s been prepared for me already, a grave maybe or maybe just an inferno that I fall into, incinerated inside, all of me crisped and blown apart to drift and so glad to have helped in ashes.  But don’t let me make a mistake that’s even impossible to make and really is just stagefright.  Lifefright on the earthstage.  Don’t let my burnt flakes tremble.  Touch them soft with your winds.  And smile at me with your eyes.  Then the empty place will be so filled with wonderful things that only have names on earth that only on earth and only in the center of a human life could ever be important enough to grow flesh for only to have it sliced and bled and wept over gratefully.   Her and I together then.  Not even any words said.  Just knowing these things without even this clumsy mass of my thoughts vainly trying to express them.  Just the moment of it.  Bright.  Her.  Smiling.  A pencil.  Falling.  And me.  With my heart.  Dropping down.  Dark. 

All ears were hanging low when the people of the earth heard the news of her death and of his rage.   Where the branches of trees dipped from fogshrouded peaks and the tips of their waxy leaves just brushed the pools among the rocks where the water trickled down to the lowlands, she had passed rippleless with her hopes in her hand.  Yes, there was many a heart rend asunder in the time when word ran rampant on the air, borne aloft by voices quavering and griefshrieking, sobchoking whispered admittances of things too true to be lies or delusions.  Upon the shoulders of the behemoth of stone, whose eyesunblinking bore the sea and the sky and the land, the girl who was apple to those eyes, who brushed each petal and who loved every pebble, who wore seafoam off her shoulder and who wrapped seaweed round each leg, the nymph glimpsed on occasion in tales wildly popularised with the usual embellishments of circumstance but with nothing unsaid untrue about the nature of the gaze glimpsing back, the lady of the lakes where the lakes call their home, her Dawn to his Be, stepped lightly and eversure, caught scent of the sea, and eyes agate and agape goggled breathlessly at the mist that was the Breath of the Mountain parting upon the paleness of the sun and a bird winging there beside it.  Her feet that had flowed her over the rocks found anchorage between two of them and she was twisted in the air, held in his grip of stone.  And not one eye closed in prayer didn’t balloon outwards with tears when, hand in hand, they all listened in while the tale told true of the one moment that was left to the two of them.  The touch that they shared, with all their hearts bared, filled a moment to bursting with the thirsting for life in the strife of the moment when all that touched teared.  For she was resplendent with wreaths of the sea and the sky, tugging her gently to make a wingless bird fly.  And the place of her birth, where the sea met the earth, held arms open in greeting and waving her home.  And the moan in the stones that ground as they groaned flung skywards the flocks from their nests in the rocks.  Her soul met his bones in the snapping of stones when the handsclasp handsnapped and not a wing flapped and windswept she tumbled windblown.  Meek, humbled, and desolate, the people of the earth wiped their tears through the soot on their cheeks as he blackened the sky and made smoldering ruins of the land.  The sea beat her waves against him but only his molten tears fell hissing into her beseeching face.  Amid his roars and explosions, she had fallen from his reach, her eyes lost in the distance as she was swallowed by his smoke and his glare.

   So good eve, dear sir, dear eve and good morn, for as sure as that lock has been shorn,   there's a quickness of air felt at midnight, dear sir, that by daybreak will be keening forlorn.

   And good moonshine, dear sir, fine corpselight on you, in the celebrant air of days past, but the moonlight, dear sir, and that pale sleeping glow, never o never will last.

   “I just wrote it,” she whispered into the dim fireglow of the lightdancing faces.  The midnoon face with the high airy brow that was painted in lines all blue beamed two eyes that were shimmering across the breadth of his countenance.  He and she and the other one, the one that looked patient and wise but a little cruel, seemed to disapprove, and the girl close to the fire trembling unsure was finally given her answer.  She was to be cast outside of the cave system that moved along the shoreline in serpentine fashion and made to eke out existence along the slobbering lips of the sea.

   And that’s when she said no, she said no she’d never write again because the roar of the sea in her ears as she picked up the mussels and starfish and chewed them raw was the sound of the voices that she had wronged.  They were screaming about ten thousand things that she’d never considered but were now urgent and alarmblaringwaving.  So sorry, she’d say to the sound of the sea, So sorry, I’ll never again

be the one that blares scorn and despair

on your tide

Oh, never, Oh never again.  But the trick about corpselight that she didn’t realize but was forced to enunciate was that it surrounded things that were still alive.   The thrashing, glooping wound of the sea was bleeding into the air, and in the air the blood died and floated and drifted like the spores of mushrooms.  This was a mantle of death that the sea, a tooliving thing, could never  throw off, like the dog between the old apartment buildings that pauses to give a cursory shake for the tiny worldquake of fleas now and then while working the chicken bone from the plastic of the garbage bag, or the wave that tossed the man from the deck of his boat and smashed his face into the boom of his sail, crippling him.  And, like most of the mantles that adorn drifting balls of pale rock perching over planets athrob alive, it imbrued corpselight allaround and allthroughout and allinside too of girls by the sea. 

   And the celebrant air of days past was present in the touch that drew such emotion, because all’s known that was everknown as we knew the smartshot was keening when we brought round the fist.  When we knew the knifetip entrypoint was verified by the retraction of the blade and so the painsharp remembrance of the steel that hugged as it tore is evidence of something we’re missing.   A smooth wrap of skin like an orangepeel is so great a thing indeed that it need not even have corpselight, so great it shone while alive.  But torn and screaming,

roiling and teeming

like the boiling mass of the ants

it outdodges chance

in the starshuttered dance

to be remembered

at

a glance.

   She never knew the sky to hang quite so fierce as when she knew that it was the sigh of the sea, the laugh of the land, or a soft cupping hand.   The weight of it was the promise of tomorrow.  The promise of another starfish that squirmed while she bit it.

And this is the way that yester day felt all tomorrow today.

It’s the balm that blistered,

the raindrops beglistered,

and the eyes that let come what may.

It’s the hands that drew words from the throat like a cord,

all chokegagging while sagging

and hauling it out

amid the buckthrashing fear of the hoard.

It’s the thunder and drift

and the tremblinglipped kiss.

It’s the thunder,

the thunder

and drift.

And it’s the night that he missed her,

sprawled out by the fire.

It’s the blunder,

the hunger,

the bliss.

Yes, it’s the night that jewel kissed her

when all the sea whispered,

“The hunger,

the hunger:

the bliss.”

This is the story of how they all ended up where they started but with longer hair,

more weathered faces

and eyes that looked hard and deep.

They were bumbling like tumbleweeds at first,

along the unbroken line of the sandless shore.

They capered and jingled

and sloughed off some words,

like:

Stumblefuck, and

Sweetcrotch, and

Throatslice, and

Bloodmeat.

There is the incident where one of them wouldn’t let any of the others touch their rock.

Following this the rock became a weapon that was used to cleave skulls

and to bash in stonyglaring faces.

It passed from hand to hand.

The tender flowerpollen sprinkling spores like raindrops over all of dirtbound flowerdom

and regrowing seeds spit

into trod under

brothers and sisters not even blackbloated now or expelling the gases of decay,

but disintegrated and homogenised with the flesh of the earth,

the newshoots reaching higher and higher up than every one before,

spreading petals in prayer to the sun that burns for

the petal the plant the root and the ground

the sphere catching light and throwing it around.

The whole glinting mobile spunspinning adrift over the face them laying on grass in the night’s deep shadows gazing into that ocean of silent twinkling roaring glare.

Then sleep for a while.

Zzzzzzz.

Then:

She said to him, “Why are you looking out that window?”

And he answered, “Why does it matter?”

So she said, to herself, “This is the handsclasped spindance where each of us is burdened by the other’s weight, trapped in a whirlwind with the,”

“Please never leave me,”

“We’re only just resting before the next round,”

“it’s over,”

“I knew it,”

“that hand you just played,”

“was bitten,”

“I saw,”

“unsmitten,”

“just stay.”

“I can’t,” she sang lightly, “I haven’t the time,

there’s these things that need doing before the sound of the chime,

and I haven’t the patience to ask more than twice

why the price

for your anger

is lost paradise.”

“The sound of your bitching is O SO BEWITCHING.”

“We’ll never get out of the pickle we’re in

‘till we heal the hole made from the sin.”

Cockadoodledoo.

Now more than fourty worldwidths wide, the hole continues to expand at an astounding rate.  We have it on the best authority that, while the sun left us shadowspelled, the twin suns Thelightyouplaywith and Thelightyoudont slipped over the lip of the hole and into the mindbending chaos within like lemon seeds washed down the drain.  Chief Fancypants of Lustrepants College and Penitentiaryvault provided an expert eyewitness account of the loss of the Piece That Used To Make You Smile to P Smutty, the tumpsty of spytmut ------ p e s e t e t e u e m e y e, whereupon he vomited a human jawbone and a small squeakytoy.

And it’s here right now in here in us and we’re wondering just what it is that we should do while we think with the pieces of our stomach and the gases of the eighteen nebulas of concealment and the only lightly masticated hotdog but it was something about having the courage and the conviction not to doubt and it was something about a pipe that cut off sharply and the space in between where there was a ratmaze with all sorts of cheese before the other end of the pipe picked up again and there was a trick somebody showed me once or maybe it was me that showed me you know before me was notme-and-me where the walls of the ratmaze started expanding and collapsing like a lung breathing and when the air came in and was held in the pieces of the maze made channels and the water ran through the pipe and into the channels and then the lungmaze breathed the water out into the

STARING CONTEST BETWEEN THE INTRASTELLAR CHAMPS

THE SUN

VS

THE FLOWER

When the flower withers and dies it has its last laugh when its seedchildren come to make their homes in its bones.

Rest assured it’s the old story of the newborn baby already wearing the mask of its grandparent’s skull.

The individual laughs of the flower are each a flower of their own and they laugh with that old mortal wisdom until the day when the sun coughs, then looks about sadly and lays down to die.

Though they both died (and lost – all bets are off, folks) they had the quiet old knowledge that the Next Big Thing was already setting up shop in the old ribcage, stuffing the gaps full of moss and leaves, building a firepit venting smoke through the sternum, laying up foodstores in the curve of the hips, then laying down on the bottom of the skull and looking up with youthful blinking eyes out of the eyes that were already there, old dead eyes looking hard and deep at the stars above.

   I'm going to totally switch gears with this journal for a moment just to ensure that a flow of words is released that I've felt muddily building up in my mind for the past while.  So here goes.

   I’ve had a lifelong fascination/love for the Final Fantasy series of video games that has without a doubt shaped and informed various periods of my life.  There are periods where my love wanes and periods where it explodes strong like the curve of the sun cresting the night’s horizon.   I don’t know what it is that causes these ups and downs.  Perhaps the tail of Haley’s Comet needs to be in Leo (more likely the sum of my nights and days needs to be in LOSER, a configuration NOT AT ALL UNCOMMON).  One of those crestings occurred two or three days ago when I began playing the tenth game in that series on a whim.  That game had previously infuriated my for a variety of reasons and so I had never ended up passing it.   SO GREAT WAS MY LOVE this time around that I ended up spending pushing twenty hours in one sitting playing it.   This is the sort of thing that I decide to fill my hours with.  My faculty of judgment is the equivalent of ten rowdy frat boys heady from their perceived freedom and beer bongs.   But I did get a kick out of the whole thing, and I found the hokeyness really endearing this time around.  

   ANYWAYS, I went back to continue where I left off today (tonight, actually) and I began playing for an hour or so.   The characters are currently stuck in a DESERT and so I was wondering around fighting giant sandworms and vultures, getting back in the groove, when I ended up in a fight with a CACTUAR (which, for readers not familiar with the hilarious mythos of those games, is an anthropomorphic cactus associated with elusiveness).  The skinny is that if you can kill it before it runs away, you get ‘a prize’, BUT, if, like me, you have been playing for an hour, too giddy on your own success to save, and all three of your party members get nailed by its ’ten thousand needles’ attack, and KILLED, you wind up with a neat little bubble of rage quivering and quickening.   Suddenly I remembered, perhaps, why I had never completed that game.  Spite.  Oh, yes, I am most certainly subject to its wiles. 

   So the moral of the story is:  cactuar will pay, and will pay dearly.

   No wait, the moral of the story is:  I could have been summoning a minor love deity to shower the world with kindness and joy but I spent it playing videogames.

   Or, here’s a good one:  once genetic engineering reaches the levels promised by that lying bastard science, I will transfer my being into a cactus body and launch ten thousand needles into my own crotch as punishment for my foolishness.

   The truth is, there isn’t really a moral for this one, just another hair’s breadth of the grand image revealed, or CONcealed as it’s rather probable that I’m fucking it all up.

   And I didn’t really release the flow of words, I just sort of stirred up the mud sediment.