“Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.
Mercutio: And so did I.
Romeo: Well, what was yours?
Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.”
-Romeo and Juliet

I dreamed of her, fire-haired and beautiful: full of eternal life.
Immortality is finite, of course.

“There is a child sleeping near his twin
The pictures go wild in a rush of wind” -Jeff Buckley

My soul is tattooed with her flesh, and it’s become incorrigible. I
can’t help the twisting myriad in my mind; my daemon throttles
me down screaming,”she was better than you…” … I can’t help
the welling jealousy, can I? But I slip into a sleep that is plagued
by a girl who turns her fiery face toward the sea, dreaming of
Sammy, dreaming of farther away than I can see, but not
dreaming of me… not dreaming of me, though my soul is
tattooed with her
skin.

My flesh, likewise, is illustrated by his words. Filled with the
imperceptible pricks of sadness. My words come as they sound
to me, and when I write I reverse the original sin (though they
come to me saying “but baby, look at Genesis 3:1″); that which I
say sews my shadow back to my body, because I write as I know
the words to come, and not as they should be. Their intentions
are lost in his hair on my pillow; his arms with thin veins pulsing
frantically beneath the skin…

“My heart under your foot, sister to a stone.” -Sylvia Plath

They’re all weaving a tapestry on the pale side of my arms. A
tapestry of eternal life, finite and beautiful. Crumbling already,
falling apart with the reversal of reality. My faeries too are
crumbling as though exposed to harsh acids; all of this despite
the molecular composition of the atmosphere, which remains
the same. The posturing of youth gives way to a disintegrating
pile of flesh, and bones.

I am not a poet. I am the reverser of the original sin, though I
don’t believe in Adam and Eve and the snake: at least I don’t
believe their supposed sin.

Mortality is infinite, the decomposing composers run through
everything; it is the immortality that allows itself to be finite. It is
myself that allow words to be. The carrion of her nature coerces
me, and soon I will be born away.

“Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That if I then had wak’d after long sleep
Will make me sleep again: and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d
I cried to dream again.”
-Caliban, The Tempest

June 3rd, 2001

confusion. looking straight into someone’s eyes. a man on the street asks
“can I keep you company for a little while?” … I say yes. he sits down
next to me on the curb, looks over and whispers, “do you like to smoke speed?”

June 11th, 2001

today: lethal injection, people I don’t know, curry, desire for milkshake,
ten dollar guilt, timer ticking away, charles t. the fireball, dictionary
of gods & demons.

June 12, 2001

Sonia said that when she arrived in Detroit, she, her aunt and her mother
had to wait for their transportation until 1 a.m. outside the airport. Her
mother flapped about, shrilling & upset. Sonia and her aunt sat down with
a bag of dried fruit and ate it, while singing Arabic songs.

Imagine them
sitting there for three hours, with the harsh airport lights, & the dark
night pressing down around this building which never closes, singing Arabic
songs.

“Calm as Hindu cows.”

The following is (unfortunately) not fiction.

I feel dead lately. What a cliche, ‘I feel dead’. Living death. But this cliche is not a
lie. (Who said that cliches are lies? Not me; but maybe I thought so, sometimes.)

Still, I feel the strangest thoughts occurring within me, for the first time.
Sometimes I’m sure that someone’s in my house or right behind me (I breathe faster and
faster, close my eyes tightly, run up the stairs, clench my fists, my knuckles white and red).
I learned how to make it go away, because the nice therapist I just started going to talked
to me about it, and I remembered that breathing in and out really slowly helps. One’s
breathing controls how things circulate in your body; when you panic, the adrenaline
crests…

She said I only have mild depressive symptoms, which is true. I’m not clinically
depressed, and I never have been. (I always had the words and the pictures to keep me
from losing the worlds and the words entirely.)

Living in a globe made of melting glass…

Still, I’ve never physically hurt myself until now, and even now I’ve only done it
once or twice (just hitting my head against the wall… it didn’t hurt that much, it was what
it REPRESENTED that counted. It was a sign of hurting myself, of loathing myself. It is
not not NOT good to do this, because it makes me worse. WORSE.)

I guess I’ve been feeling a bit better in the last week or two. I started
eating again (when you feel like this, you lose interest in everything, even things you used
to love, things you used to simply do without thinking…) and I can concentrate sometimes
when I read. I care about some things again. Not that I stopped caring. It was more like
hibernation… hiding from myself. Leaving the top layer, which is bumbling and stupid,
half-asleep.

Sometimes I get the paranoia really badly; I began to think that no one likes me,
although there’s no real reason to think this. It’s happening a little less now. It started
mildly after my grandfather died (far back in October, a month that reaches farther than
the eye could possibly see). Right when he died it started, just a bit. Then it got worse and
worse, and now it’s getting a little better. Sometimes I feel like I disgust people (for the
first time in my life, I decided that people disgust me. Yesterday, I found this, something
new and ugly growing under my skin. My own disgust for myself becomes superimposed
over the rest of the world, and then reflected back to me, so it feels as though I disgust
everyone. It’s horrible. I’ve always loved people.)

I used to have a center, but now I wheel through the stars and they are empty.
Sometimes the world seems to lose all it’s color and all it’s form.

As I said, this is not fiction. It would be nice if it were.

this thought is in me and it slams its rythem up here; in the glitter
sidewalks i can see it mimicking me. actually, thats me, mimicking;
doing the Charlie Chaplin duck walk all the way to the Bay. i might
jump in. i might cry. he might make me cry, and i might jump in. not in
a hurt way, just jump in. and maybe not.

[bitemytongue] my mouth is red (he was small and sick)

-

eat. ?
-

molecules are moving so quickly through space, ever-shifting, things
blurring into each other, entirely divided, entirely composing a
whole… one part of another is part of another is part of… me. i eat
the molecules that compose a small pig. a small pig eats molecules that
were once part of me, later. i fertilize the weeping willows, the
dandylions in the cracks of the sidewalk… i eat a carrot. the carrot
grows from my body, it sprouts and withers. it’s the most beautiful
thing i’ve ever seen. i can’t look at it. the small pig nudges the
carrot from my hand; eats it. grows back into the ground. the small
pig, growing from the ground. i’m the small pig, holding a carrot in my
eyesocket… eyesocket of an empty skull. dead, for years and years. my
body curves into the weeping willow.

you could say that i’m not living in this world, but this is what i
see, in this world. this thing some people call reality, tilting its
gravity along and about… i twist to the strange after-shocks, the
remaining splotches of color, the photo-reproductive quality of my
eye… falling off somewhere. everyone watches, now.

i went to Caerphilly castle. they make excellent cheese, in Wales.

p.s. shhhhhhhh…….

Somehow the day began with Tom Waits growling, “some say under his coat, he has wings…”

That day Sonia and I went to visit Jake at school, during his
lunchtime. We all went to a sort of doorway, his friends Surge and
Julie smoking, Jake eating, bent into his vulture-like hunch, his
facial expressions exposed without the sunglasses he usually wears;
Sonia and I loitering and listening to them. Then Jake went back to
school for 45 minutes, Sonia and I went to a cafe, and ate lunch.
Talked about destruction and beauty (fear of glorifying destruction,
fear of blindness), and the fact that I’ve never been hit, nor hit
anyone. No one will hit me.

Jake got out of school, and we walked along Irving, back up to 9th,
taking the N line to the beach. All along the beach, we were mostly
silent (except when Jake was explaining Maui to me… he had a way of
telling it that made me feel as though I were there). The air was cold,
and everything was blown about. The water-licked shore looked glossy. I
walked in the tracks left in the sand by a dog that had been walking
the opposite direction thinking, I am walking backward toward extinction…
We walked up to the Cliff House, to the Musée Mechanique. Sonia and
Jake took me there because I’d never been to it before. There were
marionettes and pornography and little games, 50 or 100 years old, in
which you see executions for a quarter. There was one fortune telling
machine: an old painted mannequin with glass eyes and a cloudy crystal
ball which made me shiver in my own thin, warm skin.

One would think that everyone had given up on such old
displays and games but the Musée was filled, and people loved the
beautiful, odd, creepy things. Staring through the tiny eyeholes, boys
still lusted after women who are long dead now, slides of their bodies
flashing by. Pretty pictures.

We walked out to the ruins of the bathhouse, throwing stones into the
water. Sonia said she wished she could go out onto one of the ledges,
and just walk off at the end, into the water. I went out to the end and
looked down. It was murky, sea-monster water. I said I wanted to go to
Loch Ness, that I could watch the water there for hours, even if I
never saw anything. Just sit and watch with the myth caught in my mind.
Jake muttered that the reason that it’s a myth is because it doesn’t
exist. He was walking over the rusty pipes and the old pieces of brick
and walls, with the ocean before him and the sky extending up.
Everything around there has burned down. Playland, the old amusement
park. The Cliff House (the first three Cliff Houses, at least). The
famous Sutro Bathhouse, with its gigantic pool and suicide diving
boards. All of it.

We watched the ocean, the water meeting and forming odd lines like nerves in the brain, twisting, vein-like. Thin, and spidery.

Later, we were driving back along. We passed the variety of trees next
to the Forest Hill reservoir. Jake said, “I own one of those trees.
Yeah, my father picked it up in a sweet real estate deal back in ’76.”
My mouth curled into a grin.

But there were times when everyone looked sad, and no one talked. And it was all right.

“Down into the deep blue wine… I’d open my head and let out all of my time…”

(Tom Waits, again).

I breath into the receiver for

an echo, in anticipation of your voice. The expectation is cramming me

full of curdled cream and the belated reflection of my own voice. I am

tired and in my mind I can hardly see this. My pen is a sleepwalker. My

femur bone is threatened by the chair which pokes it mercilessly. I

listen into the phone at the busy signal until it finally goes dead.

I no longer anticipate. The echo is all I need: narcissistic and lacking.

Now I’m excitable, expecting

the echo. I can no longer hold page nor pen in focus. I collapse

against your chest which is actually the air with an aftertaste of the

tardy occurrence of my words. I begin to wonder: is there a right

person for anyone else? Also, I am considering whether or not to hack

the phone to shreds.

myq in the afternoon (in april)
curvature at metal-blackened hands … and there he was looking lost,
looking as if he was
the blackbird in
the blackbird pie for dinner (though all the blackbirds departed). He
made me sad. Not
morose or
melancholy just rung, hung – sad.

amber (in may)
afraid of the
love
(the sadness)
and the shadows that cling
to his open eye-sockets

antony (in july, in portugal)
his Portugal
a sinking indent of rubber
a mouthful of Blackjack gum;
it’s beautiful,
the perfect location.
he remembers it vividly,
the Portugal of his swollen mouth
the perfect location…
it’s foreign hard candy.

perry (in august)
where do i begin?
i can’t make reason of you {ohdearohmyohgod}
… you’re remarkable

thom (in january)
you smell like stale black coffee
(comfort)
you sound like recorded cigarette laughter, sometimes

nicholas (in february)
isolation is a skittering of small claws
and you can hear it.

Seemingly-bland, only-has-sex-on-Tuesday-evenings protagonist Michael Smith is led on a odd journey, accompanied by cynical, burnt-out former-comic-book-writer (and homosexual) Titus Bird. The pair embark on a search to find an incarnation of Titus’ old superhero character, the masked Enigma who has suddenly (and of course mysteriously) appeared in the real world, a flesh-and-blood hero replica. Along the way encounter the strange cast including the sensual yet gummy Envelope Girl, a smattering of flying lizards, a huge crowd of suicidal cult-followers and the Enigma’s greatest nemesis: a deformed creature that carries with it the essence sex in Arizona many years ago, and happens to be Enigma’s merciless mother. The obscure philosophy gives a sense of limitlessness; yet, the comic never gets so philosophical that it fails to see the humor in itself.

This is truly a hard piece to describe, so don’t take my word for it. Go out and buy it. Or, if you live in San Francisco, locate it at your public library. You won’t be disappointed by this piece of comic book genius that produced one of the greatest statements about love I’ve ever heard: "And he finds that contrary to popular belief, falling needn’t hurt a bit."

she walks into a room her hips swiveling like some love-torn thing

and her eyes smoking… puffing opium like evaporated velvet diamonds.

{Marilyn Monroe}

i feel like her. Gentlemen Prefer Blonds and Some Like It Hot… in

the mirror away from her image i walk around, raising an eyebrow at

myself, smiling coyly… tongue runs warm, leaving trails of sultry

dancers with sparkling teeth scented with a touch of gin and tonic;

under the strange, dim light of cigarette smoke you can see the rich

reflection in my lips, soft, shiny, red…

. . . i am your Marilyn Monroe . . .

I prance into the fresh-faced morning sunshine feet shoving themselves
into a convicted-but-escaped crack of light that has slithered it’s way
between melancholy drapes. I examine my olive toes with their carefully
clipped toenails and the steep forceful arch that carves itself into my
foot, marvel at the protruding ankle bone with glee. And I realize: I
love my feet. In fact, I AM HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH THEM!

It’s not that you’re not wonderful – eyes like the chocolate salt- water
taffy I ate when I was small. Oh no, it’s not that I can’t lose myself
in you and your dark hair and gentle grain-cut hands. It’s just that right
now my feet-in-light look like God, glowing and shining, parading in 6:33
a.m. gold. I’m supposed to experience one-night-stand summer flings anyway
- I am still a NAIVE AND HEADSTRONG YOUTH! You know I’ll always come back
to you. Just let me be in love with this tantalizing moment for a bit
more.