Wood burns.

"... it burns because it's wood."

That's a line from the song House Fire by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yelstin. Their songs are pretty and digestible, like edible flowers.

I am witness to fire. I'll never understand why it was set.

But like the line goes, it burns because it's wood.

I, Refuse

I dreamt last night that my alarm clock was green, not that the thing itself was green, but rather that it had green digits: bright, glowing green digits. And a squawk like an extinct bird. That's all I remember from the dream. It was a clock from bizarro world, a clock conjured by my unconscious to confuse and distort me and make me question upon which side of the quilt do I reside. For in reality my actual alarm clock is red and it sounds like a mother hen cooing in the dew of morning.

Why such a detail has velcro and others do not baffles me. Certainly there was more to the dream than a slightly different alarm clock. Could my mind be so simple as to struggle at night with such frivolity? In slumber do I not find myself engaged in grander designs? Flying unassisted, perhaps? Slaying dragons? Rubbing elbows with aliens at debaucherous galactic balls? Showering under waves of liquid silver? Defending my peoples from an invasion of paddle-wielding midgets with quick reflexes? Lust-filled dalliances with Renaissance babes who take thirty minutes to get undressed but are worth it? Inventing new gadgets for grateful lazy people? Being taken hostage by Leprechauns who are tired of being mistaken for the Keebler Elves but sound so cute when they talk they have a hard time being taken seriously by the authorities? Rescuing the princess? Fedora shopping? Volcano humping? Being on the set of the original Star Wars and being the guy who gets to remove the electrical tape from Princess Lea’s nipples? Breaking up a clown fight and going home smeared with blood and pie? Living in a world where mailmen bring donuts to your house instead of mail and are called donutmen?

For some reason I struggle to bring dreams across the threshold; just a few make it through. It’s too much contraband to sneak past the guards at the gatehouse; meaty trolls in sweat-marked uniforms who decide what you may or may not bring with you, casting confiscated figments behind them into a writhing landfill of dreams and nightmares, an impossible pile of odorous images, melting colors, flickering faces, unsought tears, reversing thoughts and unique notions, a pile that could never be inventoried or accounted for and is at turns too bright or too dark to look upon-- ever evaporating, decomposing, returning to the ether, but living nonetheless. Characters dig for the bottom of the pile and escap down ancient rabbit holes, tunnels that lead back to the place where people and aliens have orgies and donuts after a good day of dragon-slaying.

Tonight I will dream and tomorrow I will wake. The dream in between will teach me not to look at the horizon. There is nothing for me there.

Good thing I won’t remember.

From the Random Quote Machine (RQM):

"What's the matter? Do you have something in your eye?"

"No, but I have something in my diaper."

Hilarious.

I love my nephews.

(Well, technically, my cousin's kid, but he calls me Uncle, which makes him my nephew, right?)

(And don't give me that shit about how if it isn't obvious what someone is to you then they are a "cousin"-- second cousin, third cousin once removed, fourth cousin twice baked, fifth cousin don't give him sugar, blah blah blah. If he's three and I'm twenty-eight and good friends with his dad and his dad's brother (MY cousins), then I'm one of his uncles. Sure, make a list of his uncles and I won't be at the top but I certainly don't belong on his list of cousins. So I'm an uncle. Problem solved.)

(Oh, and FYI, he's apparently grasped the idea of peeing in a toilet but the pooping in a toilet thing has thrown him for a loop. Being that he is three, it's important to clarify why he hasn't joined us porcelain sitters. His grandma reports that while he's cool with urinating he struggles with the notion of poo because he feels that he's losing something important to him, that he's losing pieces of himself. This is why he was distressed by his full diaper, and why I noticed his reddened eyes, prompting my question about their condition. Even at his young age he's acquired a fear of losing parts of his body, which is a good thing. It'll keep his fingers out of light sockets, away from stuck gumball machines and off of railroad tracks. Retaining body parts is important for survival and breeding, especially with how picky women can be, and the child clearly has strong instincts. By next December I'm sure he'll be corn-squirting and wiping like the rest of us.)

(Fuck, did I just I write an entire post about my infant nephew's excretory system?)

Jesus.

nothing, and everything

I write more gingerly of non-specific specifics than I do of reality. I wallow in vagaries and speculation, self-spelunking flagellation of the mind and soul, awful entreaties of dog-eared dreams. It's a mapping challenge, to navigate these waters. I sometimes wonder if my instruments were designed for a different set of stars, if this whole time I've driven in circles amongst the squid and the icebergs, lost by the confidence of a tool-reader reading right readings in the wrong galaxy, and have henceforth driven myself mad in the process. I've befriended the moon, because she imposes limits, and I require structure.

I am a soldier of simplicity. I've been recently developing a technique for slicing limes. Guests are either passively appreciative or wholly uncaring, as they should be, but they are also free of scurvy. For that, I am happy.

Homeless people often beg for money at exit ramps. I never give them any. They bear heavy crosses of cardboard, scrawled about with their most immediate problems and their sympathetic pasts: vets, christians, unemployed, hungry. I weep that they exist but to my baggie of coins I never reach. I cannot bring it upon myself to crack open the window and transfer some money. I don't want to, that's why.

There is vacancy in their eyes, an affliction of absence not found in the homeful. To beg for scraps and to do so willingly requires reformations of the brain, involuntary reprogramming that excludes pride and ego. It hurt today to not give to a woman wrote on her cross that she had five children. When the light changed and the column of cars drove off, she held the sign to her chest. On the back of it was a picture of two young boys, smiling, their hair combed for photo day.

Such is city life. Tonight I watched a woman wait at the bus stop for the next bus. In her hand she held a gallon of milk inside a plastic bag. She had feeble gold earrings and she didn't seem pleased to be bus-hungry at 10:30 at night. Likely, the milk was not for her. Gallons of everything have become expensive.

I drove past the dunkin donuts where a clerk was shot and killed five years ago, before I moved to the city. It's not a dunkin donuts anymore. Two men argued loudly below the lights of a closed shoe store. By their body language they seemed to care greatly about their positions. Their passion was refreshing. Their existence, however, was somewhat disgusting. It's Monday. Get a job, losers.

Rarefied air soothed each follicle as I drove. Sweet bends of hair made elbow-draping the preferred driving technique for the rest of the way. Headlights diamonds, breaklights rubies. Clean and shiny, the City breathes deep. Her denizens deserve so, they do.

Inside the mind of the collective being we make do with who we are, only occasionally pausing to ask why we are. On days like lately when the blue blanket from distant ridges settles over us it's easy and proper to ingest the peace. Observe the willful wanting of sunlight and its corresponding desire for shade. Without light there wouldn't be shadow and without both we would drown in our own colorful brilliance.

I'm a colorblind pig, wallowing in shit he can't tell is red or green.

At least its warm.

Into the breech, dear friends. Amongst the shadows we must travel and within the corridors of our eyes we seek the exit. We step lightly upon the Earth, groping forward along the walls for the next corner, seeking the deeply needed turns that keep hope alive, the thought and the notion that around the next bend there might be light.

A glimmer would do.

Skin

I am impatient to stop getting tired so easily. There are times when I run empty, when fumes are barely enough, when sleep calls like a siren, when the day's chances and choices are vague clouds above the pillow, hardly worth bothering about. These times are too frequent and they are lovely and they be damned to eternal hell.

I am frustrated with the persistence of worry. I am ready to shed the skins of the past before the layers become too thick to bear.

I am a man with too many things to think about, too much to contain. If only it were a problem of sweetness—too much honey for too few jars, too much sunshine for a lazy pontoon, large lots of leftovers… but I speak of a different sort of abundance. I speak of the kind only the walls (gods) understand, troubles whispered against silent ceilings and shouted against road-scratched windshields, notions wrought from iron, hardened not by fire but by the soft redness of the back of the eyelid. I speak of the deafness of caring, the mind railing against a world that spins and spins whether the shout is loud or not.

I speak of shit. I speak of life. There is more than enough to go around.

Sighs and French horns, toy chests and cellos, dinosaur wallpaper and a ten dollar bill, Varnish remover and open floor grates, blue tarp and shredded roofing shingles, neighbors, streetball, big wheels, lightning bug contests, a bike and bricks, an angry dog, a dead one, a missing hamster, a well-meant soul who encircled it all with broken fences. I speak in nouns and riddles because the sentences are not yet ready to be formed. They are there; they form a pool of snakes. They boil below my mind; hissing and spitting, but contained they are and will remain.

Someday a crack will form and the snakes will escape.

I promise.