i’m baking cranberry bread and cleaning and watching charlie kaufman flicks and attending every political rally or debate that comes this way … not at all what i thought i would be doing at this stage in my life how many years ago, when i was young and naive and free …

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?”

the morning sky split open its blue myst skirts to sun me weary and forlorn, driving my mazes home … the cheese at the end of this two dimensional sketch

the sun’s vagina eye flirts light and orange fire with night’s black modesty
timid as any new sunrise, it teases and spits brilliance, a hint of all that could be
and when it finally emerges fulllblown and hot red to gold
the sheen burns my pupils to witness a radiance i was never meant to see

the warmth on my skin still nudges me to look up and risk a bit of blindness for a chance with the sun spot, an ingulgence, a release from the pain of seeing and feeling all you could never reach

bored and tired … someone pay attention to me … i’m losing ground i never realized i’d gained until it was canyons deep below, words erroding like steady water dripping and conversations are merely noise to take up space … lines to believe in something … days to confuse the years, clocks to categorize emptiness … fix this it’s broken when it’s not together …

i drank from a fountain a few days ago and it’s green tinted mouth reminded me of a decaying orifice, pursing out of porcelain: it’s lie of clarity and ease of subsistence evermore an insult to injury … there’s no warm skin or blushing warm brook to heed my inner romanticism in … it’s hard and cold, a rubber nipple from an unyeilding plastic bottle … a mother’s hurried substitution for contact and affection … again this sterility reminds me of my childhood television babysitter … mommy pay attention to me … i want your words in my head, not ronald mcdonald’s and a herion dream of a mouse named mickey

we named our dog after that horrid cartoon rodent

i need to leave here, but the nagging questions of pragmatism make fertile fields of unknown frontiers desolate and grasp me by the pubic hairs, screeching at my libido that it was only molecules moving anyway … no money, no free time, no one interesting enough to call that can … yes, i am prime for a good needy meaningless fuck to split this widening abyss of a blue collar life a little deeper

maybe some african tribe will take me in as a long lost albino human puppy … pet her and she squeeks and wines like a newborn with pink skin and blind as a brat …
i’ve been told i look african and i have an african name minus one “n” / i always despised personal redundancy … sorta like my initials AMS one and only one letter away from being a complete ASS … these lips curl over in abundance and these features are plump and spread in that particular widening of the skull and nostril and eyelid stretch, except for the whole blond haired/blued-eyed visual, a stereotypical blasphemy to my personality in any case. i like to exploit it when i can all the same (the stereotype, i mean) … beauty is for sale and i am sooooo, sooo tired of fighting myself, the inevitable within any self … using principle and chastity to sterilize this beauty disease because i do not want to give in to the decadence i could so easily dip my fingers into, or not because personal integrity is a prison in itself … as i’ve said humanity here is at a point where it is only fighting against itself and i am not as original or separate as i’d like to entertain my ego to believe … i’m just more bothered than most …

fuck adam and his orginal sin bullshit, too, his snakeskin is uncoiling … i’m left with only sexual suppression, a tongue flicker of interest … as in, he’s like food to me now and i’m free of my past inhibitions, cautious hesitations that this might have been, you know, “something of significance” … principle is a rape victim thrown helplessly on the wayside of this interstate highway of human need … substantiation seems like an illusion evermore everyday … i wanted to care but it seems a useless effort more and more and i’m still left with this ache in my chest for something more from people … would you care for once past obligation and needy fumblings to cool the heat of past apparitions: ghosts with swinging talons … my glaring self-sustained empathy a carrion for the vultures of life’s empty promises … caring must be mutual or it only turns into expendibility and support systems … myself would rather be entertained with myself’s own conversational antics … playing guitar has been refreshingly self-indulgent as well … i had my taste with self-destruction and “the boy of my delusional dreams” phase … please offer something else, thank you … commonalities are boring, perfection is boring, you are boring …

i hate to be “adored for what i merely represent to you.”

i hate being able to see through people, yet being fearful enough of their actions and my own to be constantly guarded as well … this hyper-sensitive vision is crippling … it just makes me an exclusive, sensitive fuckhead … walking away as the sirens in my head go off … everyone’s an island on to themselves and i’m still swimming to reach the main continent … hopefully someone will lend me a hand soon, feed me speared fish, while telling me, grunting and sniffing in an endearingly genuine, intelligent-enough-to-not-give-a-fuck-about-how-you-smell-in-the-morning kind of comaraderie, “well, me dear, was that swim a good pounding for you. you’ll appreciate this home much better now when you find it.”

(of course, there’s always more than this. the format should be self-explanatory for the self-centeredness of my posts and yet, maybe i should compartmentalize and add another journal that’s less personal more analytical and rabidly apolitical to emphasize my true nature: every where and no where at once, care too much & become apathetic, but i will probably not finish as most of my projects … ahh, if only i had a patron and a basement, if only … )

up-start waking, wide-eyed staring at 2am, fingering pages of dismembered dead trees and shrouding thoughts in the void of shining ink wells as bottomless as these dilating pupils

calloused nubs upon the tulip tips of fingers, within a week, playing guitar and breaking 4 strings as quickly as will bends the metal bodies out of breath again … rehashing melodies was always the most difficult

delivery, delivery, 10 books and more coming, paging and listening and eating words, more than practicallity time-space-matter will allow, desire running past physicality, and this wind hits the 4th and 5th and 6th fret, stinging singing, flourish my intestine ache

sour lips from bland tasting, your breath stagnant in perfection and i am left cracking jokes of irreverence, spoken word was never my strong moment, it is all one marvelous diversion, one bad joke from the next, to me. meaning is butchered with flare and cheap spice taste

and i, i wish for something more than this … as always

more ranting to clear the head

dark, it’s always just at midnight or just at dusk when these moments carry themselves over my head through my flailing logic and out like haunted ghosts scared of their own chains and reflectionless reflections.

ah, yes, so insects smashed upon window (a wisconsin delicacy) turned to in sex turned to having sex turned to sacraments to the goddess in sex.

he speaks in that prophet confident way that freaks the shit out of me but calms and immortalizes his words in one breath-take of fear and admiration. of white dragons forming in his chest and in his third eye and from his dreams and yes, of course, it spirals and it’s chaos and it’s that moment of perfection that can only exist because it cannot. and yes, of course, i see these “patterns” too. and yes, i have dreams and delusions and dragons eating me from the inside out.

i do not think i am special anymore, though, and i do not want to be remembered as such.

history is what makes us immortal nowadays. and god is everthing we cannot see but want to in pin-pricked, penetrating the mother universal hole. as his old unrequitted desire would speak to him in poetry and i would listen through the cracks in social networking: “if a hole is filled what does it then become?”

i don’t know, my desire to answer rhetoric a nuisance to myself but i know she pokes holes within my flesh, only a lover’s old flame can. espceially when contrast and compared and idealized.

i’m afraid of heights still.

he tells me of mercury poisoning and capitalist grazing and the absolutely unbiased, unchallenged fact that mercury (a kind that is so many times more toxic than the original element found on the periodic table, the most toxic of the natural elements) is a regular perservative mixture for most plastics, cars especially, and in fact if one were so observant or privy to liberal independent literature (as he, of course, is) one would know that the fog upon car windshields, the new ones sitting so gloriously sheened and waxed and molded to be slick phallic dreams, is not cooling, condensing, car-cabin morning pressure; it is actually a strange chemical awakening and our reintroducing to more hidden deaths by short-cuts for capitalist American profit. as in, because mercury is the cure-all cheap perservative, it leaks from the new plastics and from the old cavity fillings and makes life twice as profitable as before. when you buy a new car you breath mercury a bit of mercury poison, oh so slowly so no one will ever know. it reminds me of a tale i heard of midieval wives that gave their husbnads poison in the morning and the antidote at night to keep him close to home. the GNP goes up when someone is diagnosed with cancer, you know. lots of jobs filled.

yes, yes, and he builds his lexicon towers on these, these so many sorrows, hereby irrefuted and dismissed as bleeding heart hippie liberal hog wash. people have exuberantly tolerant bodies here in america, didn’t you see that on tv by now, you’re not convinced? and if not doctors and businessmen will have an easy way out, at least you won’t feel it or look it. metal fever, heavy metal accumulation, disappearing fisheries and ecological gaping wounds, our metaphoric western bullet holes right down the thought throat of our own parents who never taught us better or who died trying. where are you , my celtic mother, my warrior father, my loyal brothers? where did all your meaning go? in this american melting pot everyone gets boiled alive. anitbiotic over-use, pharmaceutical abuse. cows, dead cow eyes staring at me as Seazon obliviously hands it some dandelion grass. don’t, little stupid child, they only eat their own kind now, antibiotics and hormones and ground dead cow muscle and i have the urge to take the cut-off baby chicken beaks and stuff them in farmer’s glazed, government subsidy-silenced eyes. humans get it worst because we’re at the top of the food chain (of course we do, we did it). i eat it in glorious indulgent, ignorant buffets. mmm, petroleum wax fruit and metal fever decay. meat, adam, i eat meat without a conscience (or the biggest one, why do you think neither one of us can sleep at night?) and i have the balls to mercy kill your philosophical indulgence just as soon as i figure out why you’re horribly wrong, yet so horribly right.

i brush his fingertips. and, of course, this is all indirectly about sex and foreplay and tension.

i massage his dog’s willing ass instead of his hand, and sport medicinal-induced aphorisms, “don’t underestimate the dog.” she knows and lays by me because she likes comfort and attention and specialized petting indulgence, humans give it to her.

all i can tell him is the sunset is still as beautiful as it was from its unknown beginning. and the fact that i can see it and appreciate and somehow live through that beauty is more than i can take and everything else is subservant. yet, i know in his eyes i am at the other end of the titter-todder we both rub our baby legs upon, bruise our little innocent white butts on, both jump up and down and up and down, rock the boat back and forth, back and forth.

ah, the sustained living festivals, the hippie dancing parades, the repetitious pentatonic scales that only few can hear, how cheap and simplified it has all become. i just want to sustain desire for beauty a little longer without being a cheap advertisement.

200 hundred years of scientific apotheosis and we have now found out we are not god. what a let down. what an extinction.

adam smith, the first man, the last man, the originator of the “wealth of nations”: the captialist torah, the ultimate common man, a man of the people, a boy tryin on his father’s big work pants and realizing they don’t fit quite yet. annika: all it means is beautiful. that’s all i can give him. and that is never enough when we’re all starving.

at one hour and fifteen minutes past midnight he tells me in so many indirect creative, fanatical words, he still doesn’t know why we have never had sex in the years since we “should” have, in those starry-eyed nights when we sat by grand ave and thought it was beautiful, the fast cars the yelling teenagers we would one day be. when i told him, no, i would not go out with him and then didn’t speak to him for days then months then years. and it is driving him happy-hippie-crazy to the point where he has ordained sex as yet another sacrament to the abstract mother goddess, that every woman he makes love to now is a holy god infested rite at night like sprite. bubble its contents to the breaking point and watch it burn itself to the ground. what a role swap, i have the key to this boy’s chastity belt.

i always have my doubts. for if his cock in mother earth is god than my skeptic is king of the crazy boat sinking balance and we’re all rocking to our own deaths. or fear thereof. i fear him, i fear fucking him, i think after this long it would be quite anti-climatic. i think his god is frivolous and fleeting and comforting in doubt like any other religion, he wouldn’t think twice to dump my sorry ass when the moment of perfection is over. find another perfect moment, another precious doe-eyed girl, another kodak lightbulb flash. he can’t now, i’m too much of a green light across the bay he can’t seem to reach. you, you conquering fool, and even as he promises to protect me, even as he tells me he can explain why apophenia will not let me go, i can see his eyes invert, turn around stare himself down a double barreled shot gun, blinded by his own god, his own reflection, his own mirror. i tell him i don’t need his protection, i stand on my own and that’s alone if need be. i am balanced, i do care, i don’t need god to barr the doors to my perversions, i don’t need god to make life meaningful, i don’t need science to give me foundation. I DON’T NEED YOU. i just care about you. even if you have my heart right now, adam, you won’t have my soul.