forgettery

i remember when it was harder for me to meet people then it is now, and i remember when it was easier. i yo-yo back and forth. i forget what's important, then i remember. i like to turn big rocks gently over and watch the squirming paths of worms and centipedes and doodlebugs twisting through the earth. i like to sit on the stoop and watch the kids on bikes wheel up and down the street, or the families yelling to one another, leaning out to toss keys out of second story windows. i like to ride my bike on cool windless nights down the empty industrial corridors, past open doors where sparks fly and machines hum, past the quiet storefronts and mysterious factories and never ever ever have to stop for lights. i like to take long walks through alleys, to the record store or the park or your house, collecting treasures as we go. to snip cuttings of plants and watch them root and grow in old juice bottles on our kitchen sill, the fragile stems too tender yet for outside air. i like to wear mismatched socks, to cook and share and sit around the kitchen table longer than we mean to.

i barely remember school. i barely remember austria, or a month ago, even. i want a little bit of everything back, but i don't think i'm the same shape and size and hue to stick myself in the outlines of where i used to be, again. everyone is taking off, these days, and everyone is looking for new places but i'm still sort of shyly looking for new pieces of myself. recollection is a funny thing. she says all we need is a slight affirmation and we'll fool ourselves each time. he hopped a bus again, and then we all gathered to watch the lightning, like dogs turning in circles to lie down.

san diego morning air

all night i was grumbling how i want to be at home in chicago playing in the dirt, riding my bike around looking for wood to build things for the garden, and here i am in southern california plastering a grin on through all the family small talk i can bear.

but this morning i'm awake early, listening to my sister snore beside me and my brother shout in his dreams, and the breeze from the window smells dry and clean and soft. the scent of the canyons - i'd forgotten that. this place is not for me, but it does have its charms, my own dear aggravating loving confusing kind extended family included.

for a while i was surprised every time i saw myself in the mirror, but now that i've learned my own face again i miss something of my fluidity.

in the midst of breath. forgetting justifications. i'm trying to be self-assured and tall, to ignore these roping concerns.

no, i don't miss you this fast. i'd like you to be here so i could crawl over to you in this early morning light and fall back asleep, and i'd like you to be my backbone while i have all these stiff conversations, but yr far away and really (we may never sing anything at all).

the ovals of airplane windows.

how to arrange the cadence into song. how to sing at all. how to impress the family by showing up late with tomato juice drops on the front of my freshly (finally) washed t-shirt. my legs always ache with sitting still. i'm terrified of being old and stiff, now with my knees and glutes already aching all the time. i can't even sit through a movie, let alone a flight. (remember those eight days crammed on busses last year, or my rubbery legs last week?)

we're so lonely even together that sometimes i wonder what either of us could do to be a bit whole or right or even okay.

on the airplane, I read a book about earthworms and all their subterrestrial lives, the relationship of these crawling blind creatures to the movement of continents, "...the tiny bristle-like hairs called setae that worms use to anchor themselves in their burrow or to hold onto one another when they mate". how beautiful, how small.

if we end as we begin, it will have to be in a shy conversation about the weather, not in a big mess of shouts and fists and things breaking to bits. all we can do is talk in double negatives and i think it's time to move to the other side of the axis.

i want, i want, i want, not what i don't.

the cartography of yr ups and downs could build mountains out of mere divets in the earth.

everyone's niceties are finally coming out with the sunshine, like my bare legs seeing the light of day for the first time in months.

shy-town

sing till yr life fades.
this city shrinks and grows at a dizzying rate. two of my favorite ladies in the whole wide world and especially in this moody city are taking off for opposite coasts and opposite lives, way too soon for me to fathom. i need more friends to sit in my kitchen and drink whiskey and make coffee and talk about things quiet and slow and fun and fast even before we go out to dance with the rest.

things tug me in different directions. things, lately, are not new.

i am enamored with physical missives, with messages that cling to their objectness, that refuse to travel except from hand to hand. maybe that's half of why i like my job so much; the other half has to do with feeling strong and alive, with the immediate gratification, physicality, sense of completion, in taking one thing from one place to another. no more trying in vain to stretch my bored weary legs behind countertops or talk my way through another long day.

chicago is the antithesis of and the antidote for my urges, both. i close my eyes and think of hills and trees, the scent of pine, mud between my toes and every face easy and familiar on small-town paths. i open them and i'm in love with long long flat streets in every direction, with the hugeness and smallness of everything, with collapsing distances between one place and another as we spin our legs faster and play with the wind and the traffic flow and the way the bike flows smooth n sweet.

sometimes i think that's the only thing that keeps me here, this teeming stupid downtown and the way i can work sort of at once in and out of and beneath it.

but everyone is always looking in ten directions at once, and i just want us to stroll into each others' houses without knocking, move slowly and calmly, dogs and gardens and markets and front porches with creaky swings. something of the south is ringing in my ears, still buzzing in my ribcage, but i don't know if i could shake off the humming pulse of this city.

strangerer

rodeo revelations and a white-knuckled grip as they keep on tryin' to buck you off. fleeting encounters memorable mainly for their brevity. some people will never be anything but unknowns. others come around full circle and make sure you never quite let go. i found a scratched record of cowboy songs at the thrift store and listened to it with all the lights off, eyes wide open into the dark of our empty humming house, open wider trying to grasp at the starry skies of wide open spaces far-off.

when i was a kid, in the car on the way to school, my dad would lead us in latin exercises or poetry readings from the driver's seat until we asked for cowboy tapes instead, and that song where the dog dies always made me cry. last christmas i dug in the wooden boxes of cassettes till i found the two "wagon wheels" tapes and played them loud loud through the house until my sister couldn't help but sing along. (sometimes family is serendipity, even when you never truly forget what to expect.)


three strange incidents right in a row at work on friday, a strange day anyway with morning sweaty temperatures and me all too overdressed for it in my long-sleeved shirt, till the winds picked up and the dark clouds rolled in with the cold.

one: "hey! alleycat! hey! miss!" with mean eyebrows yelling in my face from the sidewalk about ordinances and dangerous things while i shrugged and rode safely quickly away.

two: three blocks later a middle-aged man with a friendly face asked "may i?" & catfooted his way between cars, brought his lens in close so close while i fidgeted waiting for the light, took my picture, patted my shoulder, walked off.

three: i smiled at the dentist as he handed me the package but he squinted in at my grin and handed me a business card quick, "do you have a dentist? you should come here." and i thanked him but wiped my teeth with my sleeve once the elevator doors had shut.

strange attentions, strange visibility in a job where some days i love what seems like my own translucence. unknowns crossing paths and bumping shoulders, leaving little smudgy traces only to mark their way. i fell the day before, hard, on my knee, tangled up in my bike and my bag in the rain, and yeah i waved the car on, but no one even glanced or stopped to offer a hand up from the pavement.

(went to see caribou and fuck buttons last night, and then a show at WOR, and remembered why being a wintertime hermit gets old. let this be the last weekend of cold ever ever ever ! i'm ready for spring and fun.)

static

static out of an unplugged radio: secret transmissions from beyond and between the sockets of yr navel and yr spine, yearning squirming joyous sounds twisting through all yr mess of inner circuitry, through all yr mess of me and my eyelashes on yr shoulder blades.

out with the old and in with the new, and in with more old and worn at the edges, too.

these things get trapped in the humid air, dissipate in the winds off the lake, before they ever hit paper or memory.

at work, on stand-by, i eat so many french fries my stomach hurts and i stagger woozily past security, brushing potato crumbs from my lips.