my sorta-kinda boyfriend is 21 today … he looks so different now. we’ve been buds for 3-4 years, and i am only beginning to recognize him … or maybe just myself …

3 Americans have now been beheaded in iraq. the group of “terrorists” insist they will stop the killing if the US pulls out. bush’s response is we won’t be bullied by barbarism. he insists our military is strong and why would we listen to a couple of thugs? all they do is behead people and threaten to do what they do best: terrorize. which scares the living hell out of me. what exactly will it take for him to pull out? another 9/11? world war 3? UN coalition against us?

this week the president gave a grocery list of “freedom and democracy” slogans at the UN general assembly to a crowd of disturbed faces. the scary part was our president; he shows no remorse. none. his face is utterly void and his voice sounds like a recording of a recording of a recording …

i registered to vote for the first time in my little life yesterday. i receive my voter card by mail in one week.

i painted last night for the first time in a month and made a resolve to continue doing it this time … no excuses

laura bush is in my city as i type this, giving a speech. outside the building, across the double lane street, a small but steadfast protest group stares defiantly and proud into their crowd of passing vehicles. they hold a large cloth sign that reads: “laura bush, please tell your husband to stop killing people in iraq.” i passed by in my car, smiled at them while a truck driver yelled, “traitor.”

i’m going out there soon with my weapon of choice: a manual 35mm camera with a 70mm zoom lens and an open ear …

my ex-bf of years ago (boring high school history) called me yesterday after months of blowing me off and said: “hey it’s joe. unless you’re too good for me, call me back. all right. bye.” i would have to agree with him. i’m not returning his call because i am definitely too good for that and have been ever since i dumped his stupid ass …

all i’ve been listening to for the past week is WRECKINGBOY … yeah!

i laughed today thinking of my life and the people within it … no, it’s not facetiousness … it’s happiness in some strange way …

the crumpled corpse of yesterday
settles soft within my heaving chest
the morning dawn purged and naked
its discoloring lies
another vast temptation
another obscurely enscribed stone
to curl against
unyielding and insignificant
as this resolve to live on and on and on and on …

life is not short, only memory is

_____

these thoughts do skip sight
and hover above
off they go again
on butterfly wing

and a myst of pure intention

_____

the floodgates have no pressure
the verse has no logic
the romantic has no love

____

so here I perspire
awake in the rudest sense of the word
every morning this wordless anxiety creeps
to deaden my intellectual fingertips
the once coiling, constrained mind
branded with a scream of passion
has healed and dissolved
into another fading scar of indefinite reminiscense
and intention

dubious is the adjective for this descriptive
these in between mementos
the ones i clutch upon with ghost chains of meaning
merciless is the clock which in these postmodern modern times does not tick
but silently counts away a secret rhythm
a death parade with pendulum lowering gaily to and fro

for if i cannot feel the impatience of living
then death will surely remind me of the certainty in expiring

____________

when love has no meaning
just another 4 letter word
obscenely easy to abuse
whisper or shout in mock emphatic desperation
when communication
is not so much connection
as it is a tool
an agenda
crafted with ideology and emotion
to give a sense of purposeful veneration
for a war that needs to be fulfilled and justified

and with that freedom it died …

the world cannot sustain this insurrection
of alien intent

it will be the last stand

“The veneration of man has been misdirected” -Lucretia Mott
_________

Tantamount to hiding is not allowing your eyes to settle on another’s for too long … I can stare out the window for hours, I can stare at this buzzing flat screen for days, but I cannot look anyone in the eye for very long, and when I do it is completely forced and conscious …

I cannot look you in the eye and find myself staring back, finding you mirror my impulsive need to put tongue to flesh and whisper through these membranes, find labyrinthes of association and meaning lurking beneath

concrete meeting the intangible, intangible becoming concrete

my finger just above gliding across, the curving skin of soft pressure, breaking surface tension ever the spantaneous dancing female gigolo that i fancy myself to be

it was intoxicating … as you’ve said

i bled for you this morning, i imagined power shifting between us like waves of ocean tides, of rushing you against a door and listening for breath, not words, to tell me exactly what you mean, want, need

it is strange you are everything i ever wanted but never had

and of course, now that i have it, it must not be, it must be another human construct, another wave to sooth the dryness of sand, of what is, what must be, it must not be real, staring me in the face … it must distort at arm’s length, not practical, not warranted, not together

not with you, but against you as i have learned to be

not for you, but for me, as it is my independence’s rite

all to run away from myself and bath in the cool comfort of pragmatism

as i work, the cerulean sky reflects light off pale skin. my face stretches taut to conform the will of so many faces, so many self-control mechanisms. i wipe the sweat away, feel the burning heat of skilled muscle movement, coordinate my mind into this coiling spring of potential, the dynamism of rooting my imagination in the concrete, the tediousness of my careful fingers molding textile, colored mud, tired soil, organizing, sorting away life’s cluttered messes to make sense of the chaos of this mind, of its splurged applications

i am showing you what being alone really means and you see, you see right through me to yourself and back again

but i am at peace … really

maybe you will reach me one day in the onyx lining of a night, where i am vulnerable and moon shined, where i need to need … you are one of the few that has the patience to unravel these daily mysteries, the mysticism of human ritual and dance

we will, we will …

i wasn’t lying when i told you i feel free with you as no one else, and i am realizing the simplicity of that is all i ever needed …

warning- contains average American bias … all suppositions subject to change randomly and without notice:

independence is a trend now

and your life is a monoculture

your husband/ wife/ sinf. otr. is a good investment

your neighbor is decent if they leave you alone (most likely you couldn’t recognize them in the supermarket)

america is technically not a democracy (a country where all citizens vote on all issues) it is a republic (a country where the public elects officials to do everything for them)

america is technically not free (uninhibited units of anything) and technologically advanced but quite controlled and a new form of a capitalist oligarchy (no elected president has been anything but filthy rich beforehand; japan got cellphones before us; europe has magnetically powered trains; and Sweden is powered sustainably, which means when the oil wars run out of fuel and the power lines form veins beneath the earth which cease to bring juice, sweden will still have switch-on lights and running water. this somehow equates to a better life. don’t ask me why, i only know this from printed and spoken word, which is quite doubtful as well)

philosophy is a bedtime story

philosophy is the poor youngster/hipster’s escape

philosophy is dead

music mostly consists of about 5 abused scales these days

art is everyone’s hobby

art is a photoshop nightmare

movies are one-liner headaches but we still enjoy them. they are the one thing we can agree on doing … at least as long as the movie lasts

drama is something we do to keep the sex good

boys need mothers for their wives

girls need fathers for their husbands

Marriage is a cliche

you honestly don’t give a shit you work a corporate job because still, you are not your job or the person you act like at your job, or even hold by some default the same economic beliefs as your corporation practices … not consistently at least

even though you are not particularly special, you still rock because you are a living, breathing, sentient being that can adapt to a multitude of environments within a 24 hour period and you can change faster than any other creature on this planet … will you is the question

every point of the universe is radiating out or is the so-called and much obsessed about “center of the universe.” so even if Ptolemy was thought incorrect and arrogant for placing earth at the center of the universe, Einstien was a coward and just as stubborn as an Irish Catholic when he discovered this (his data told him one thing, his deterministic beliefs made him believe another) soooo … each one of you is the center of the universe (key chains that say this still suck) *read the SUN magazine to feel better about being human and faulted*

unless we blow up a hundred hydrogen bombs all across the globe, the earth will rejuvenate itself one way or another … we (that being humans) will have become the only species that has single-handedly caused its own extinction (there have been 6 mass extinctions in the history of the earth according to scientists; the earth is a beautifully fertile and resourceful creature; it will kill its own children if need be to save itself. take that anti-abortionist Nazis). an ice age will more than wipe our bad decisions out. the hard truth for human rights activists and environmentalists.

i am half-seriously concerned about all of this and i don’t feel guilty about it

i’m sure there is a contradiction in all of this somewhere, but a coherent theory of everything never appealed to me, and i love the logical/philososophical loops self-contradiction and self-referencing has. so be it … (read “godel, eascher, bach” for a deeper breath into this, and no, i haven’t read the whole monster yet either)

i am generalizing and i don’t care. it still applies.

which amounts to me asking someone, quite seriously and without a smirk of irony or cynicism for life’s little cruelties:
“would you like that gin shaken or stirred, sir?”