18:
New books are expensive, not that they’re not worth it, but the financial loss is significant, sometimes so that I cannot eat what I want but must settle with the writing I read.
Two cats are better than one; you have something to relate. Water is usually emptiness, smoke fills a lung better than water, but drudgery lasts longer than winter. A brilliantly bleak nightmare in snow.
Forest cats have a life of their own. Feral people understand why we live the way we do. The woods are better than the beams. Tracing night leaves a quickness of morning to lead in the trees.
Removing conjugation, delineating adverbs, delivering adjectives, it’s a wonder some can sleep at night. In their azucar daydreams, their salty night sweats, and the one and only grave branch.
Books about money, why, blighted scene. Animals live in the wilderness. Water dries up in the heat. Speed and respiration feed a tadpole diaspora, spiderweb, nerve circuit or lightning bolt network.
Confine carefully, some things think for you. Other letters flotsam, some jetsam, the unused one right in the left of you, front and center, off of course, with the white heat brimming the teeming surface.
A lake, revel in body, a letter flow in the bright undertow, a magnanimous decision. Arrowheads which sunk to accomodate let journalistic style bruise the outcome of tomorrow’s game.
This complex bower my prison, awake because someone else’s God is punishing me, so says the someone. A revolution in utero again. One arrow, two bows, one pot of chicken, three kettles of fish.
18:
Overstating the field filed under country without once-more temptings scratching out-of-line and inside the lecherous grime of mirrored windows white light glare so some passing passionate insects stare to wonder if the first crime was not the end of another beginning the night-corner lit with singular flare and the reflection in a pool of something caking on the blacktop.
Again through the evening frigid burls of treesap slowing the lapsing history sound surpassed by another succession hungry for chlorine or maybe salt but diluted so the darkness doesn’t hide anymore of those anothers: brain light (matter) wonder whether the rain came while we slept through Jazz Age vagaries sipping and bloating and wheezing and chewing.
Vertigo symmetry swirl on the radio favor furrow; decide if this is true: you know if it is (if it is) truth on a(n) (axis) heavy with a splintered spine: curvaceousness accompanied by company in the window sill/pane box: a pinhole illumines sensation frustration aggravation nihilism and what becomes of the obstinate start: flipover popover pepper.
That’s just vulgar said the pervert pinning pink ginger poufs across the room while we wait and watch the weather pass from bride to groom as biblical heritage: across the posted cross a banner a long stanza horizontal decries: me you them the last three before the first three an occasional whisper reminder of what that guy yesterday said: “You walkin’ dead!…”
Ailments results of stress of the brain inescapable (I know my fate) the early horse changing clothes outside away from the sun’s glare (white skin) never burned beyond what couldn’t heal before since the autumn of one’s winter falls some lavender lilac sounding (not the pussy flowers) like Chlam— chlys– —alis and the visually representative -clit- etc.
Don’t they all smell the same (like flowers?) or like an Ammons perception his gregarious snarl at sensory data (HA!): driving around in a pick-up truck solo loving the sight of the flower fields that color the green (absolute color) not having ever seen black, white, red or blue but a yellow diver amidst the shallow trees but the other leaves sing so loudly.
And why resolve in nature? You knew immediately what I meant by nature (don’t think too much about that one) the birds and the bees the pollen and things: I don’t like robots computers I am one of those who thinks technology destroyed the advancement of humanity– I’d rather breathe fresh air and hear nothing– you need so many sounds and people to read.
Am I limiting myself on the page? Are you reading this too, sorry to waste your time if that’s how you feel, not to take advantage of you but you picked up the poem, the book, the letter/figure it out for yourself and when you’re through go have a drink and if a line comes back to you write back to me and I’ll tell you why (assuming you can lick a stamp).
Nutrition nutrition can ammunition? I have killed many people. You are next! If you let me do it, I’ll pay you $100 in cash! The San Juan Freeze truck is outside my window selling icy treats to the trashy kids next door (not that I don’t love them) (the kids, that is) it isn’t their fault their baby-factory-mother squirts one out every time she she sneezes!
18:
Oh the rush
pogo thru
capillaries
tip-toe
emission
from hair-
line dry
cough
flavor-
less than
tongue
benign but
gravelled
honey cooks
away that
is what he said
because he
sweetens
gumlines
uvulas and
lungs full
certified
by whom
favorite
the white pick-
et salvage
say you
stationed
feline nautilus
in center in
corner
sallow in winch
of hammock
respiring
window to floor-
board below
drape before
peaks and
trenchant
crates who
graple hushed
afterword
steamed cup
logos climes
differential
vibrant en-
mire pallid
lung cloister-
ed and new
harbinger lotus
unified quench
aspire
kinetic herald
for posterity
sadled runt
artifice ruse
for addition
truth cubic
ironweed wild
garden depart-
ure tunic pool
float device
bobbing
inch infinite
motored branch
breath descent
water water
spill
status bent
rabid ears
alive nerve
rather than
fish on food
24:
It came abruptly, reason couldn’t be accomplished because everything happened faster than winter. The slowness of summer forgot to assist; years turned into hours, the leaves never changed or fell.
I sit now feeling their brains for food, filled with awe and wonder, and if I’ll ever get a chance to meet them. The end is probably the end, though, so hope seems lost. The wires and skylines linger like sandstone, ebbing slightly but sinking like quicksand, leaving out the unnecessary consumptions.
Life is like that. Somewhere in Europe things seem better because life is taken for what it’s worth. Tragedy is possible so open-mindedness works better than orange juice from Florida or Brazil or a freezer pop from Michigan.
Lightning is everywhere now, appearing silently like an x-ray of nerve circuits from biology, the Brown education cannot compare to the blue, there is something to be said for the absence of light, the emptiness of fulfillment, the tremors of delight, the balance never kept by guilt. Greatness emerges from nowhere since then. Since they heard that last song.
The song is over, because sensation lasts for only minutes. Justice kindles aimlessness, poetics falter through the cracks of common sense, rendering, sluicing through the grates like the makes for meat paste. Flannel is cold, then too hot, like down, like long-haired cats, like a freedom ring in that part of your matter, whistling at the others writing about their pathetic lives, wanting to gain insight, but not feeling any pain.
Necessity is like that. Most people don’t know what necessity is. Most people are responsible in the eyes of others and in the eyes of themselves. Everyone feels alone because everyone is alone. No one knows your secrets. No one suspects a thing. You are damned, aren’t you? So are we. So were they. They thought things would work out. Nothing works out. You’re just counting your days. Or someone else is counting your days. I’ve been in the negative digits since 1996, and things have become a landscape so surreal sometimes I’m sure I died long ago. You will die soon, and it’s no one’s fault. Just go with it.
12:
Scattered leaves decorate the dismal fall ground and the monks picking apples from the trees across the way look satisfied. We watch them from the empty after-school parking lot, which collects gravel dust and bottle caps during the back-to-school season. We stand in Mt. Rushmore perspective, glaring across the terra with pained eyes sick from the disinfected hallways and bathrooms of the academic building. Neglect consumes me. I die for a minute, brought back to life by the aspect of myself that is my guiding personality, a type of multiple, breathing humidly into my ear every chance it gets.
Back in the dormitory, I stand in the dim hallway running below ground level past the laundry rooms toward the backdoor exit. Staring out across the snow-laden lawn, stretching what seemed like a mile to the main road, I’m eye level to the ground. The warm, hissing radiators in the hall keep me warm while I stare nostalgically and embittered at the pure white snow accumulated across the earth. Isolated bare trees emerge from the barren midwestern ground and seem paternal and authoritative in their presence. One word keeps entering my mind as I stand here, one I’ll remember: echo.
Why the word echo is associated in my mind so much with the snow and the barreness I don’t know. If I were to yell, inside or out, there would be no echo. No reverberation will sound in the dormitory with its lack of acoustics and carpeted walls, and no resound would be heard outside, in the cold, flat grounds around the school, by the abbey where the Benedictine monks live, by the Christmas tree farm where small amounts of change are made to continue their upkeep, by the accelerator laboratory next door with its buffalo living behind barbed wire fences.
The world doesn’t belong to me. The earth is not my creation. The dead probably would laugh at me if they could understand my condition, the accuracy of which I’ve never really understood.
Brother Anselm is always a very nice man to me, concerned about my issues and always willing to close his door and lend an ear. He tries so hard to be a good monk to me, giving me guidance and leading my way with what he thought was the best for me. His failures are not his own shortcomings, but the downfalls of my own presence which eludes him.
The military academy which I call my present home is the second one which I’m attending. Coincidentally, it is also a Catholic school, college preparatory, and the second one of those I am attending. This year I’m a freshman. It doesn’t guarantee me much sympathy or liberty.
(More on the way…)
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