In a sudden heat.

It's drier than it should be. I think. I can't say for sure. I have no facts and I know next to nothing about weather systems but what I can be certain of is the fact that I walked two miles, past the railroad tracks and the parking lot of the apartment complex and by the time I reached the main intersection I was dehydrated and cramped in the knees. All the water in me sweated out.

I am home these days. Sitting. Drinking water, face in a low-speed fan giving a steady drag of air the temperature of an armpit. I sweat and think I need a haircut. I'm supposed to have a job, but I don't. I should have a career, but it's gone. Now I have family and friends and that is fine. There is money in the bank, but there is also money to be made.

The sun and its horrible heat drops from the sky only after I am asleep. The sun, it hangs. The heat, it sits as a dense invisible fog. There must be oven grates below my feet. A heated copper wire running through the trees, stuck close like ivy. Nothing moves here because there is no air, only heat. No breeze from the sea because there is not sea. No pockets of melting snow finally making its way to us, because there are no mountains. There are no hills and no creeks. Just flat. Just freeway. Apartment complexes and satellites dug deep into California's arrid roadside.

Maybe they need tending to. Perhaps there is a job there, a need for a man who can play witness to the existence of satellites and solar panels because I can do it. I can sit and watch. Clean and maintain. Interact with the sun on its own level. A solid give and take.

And those satellites, they must have some information about what is going on here because I certainly don't.

I can only sit, sweat, and repeat again, "What is going here?"

She is the one, when there is no other.

I have followed the seasons closely, and I have reached the point where I am prepared to put new windshield wipers on my car, as well as replace the fuse that gives power to the speedometer. I will be driving more, in the train less, and my walking will be drastically cut. Mute footed, coasting through conditioned air, I will be covering a greater distance from home to work, as "home" is being redefined. My new roommate has breasts and a love for me in her heart.

I am moving back into the suburbs, swallowed into the stream of highways that spit you out into strip mall'd towns, down river through cul de sacs and tree lined streets like grocery store aisles. Home, again.

The great pretender.

It's just weight. It's just a puffy face, or full cheeks. No jawline, it is all shadowless patches of beard hair from the ears into the collar of the shirt.

This is from a lack of exercise and the near constant flood of alcohol into my belly. I am a full grown man of middle-age proportions, body size and financial debt finally at a meeting point, each avoiding the topic of suicide which as been hard to ignore since childhood.

"I was waiting until 11:30 to see if you were going to say something, and nope. Nothing."

"I wasn't not talking."

"If you have nothing to say, fine, but at least talk to me about it."

Traveling by car is always best done alone. With a passenger; family, friend, or lover, there are requirements put upon you. Entertain. Be entertained. Laugh. Instill interest. Persue vacant thought for topics of conversation.

You must enjoy singing along to the radio and bobbing in place of dancing. Most of all you must leave your own thoughts behind and feel the grip of the wheel only and ignore the longing for the future that this trip will not bring you closer to. You must enjoy the simple thrill of being alive for no reason at all.

It was George Orwell, among others I'm sure, who saw the life of a tramp as proud and true tradition of life. The poor. Those that are trapped in empty existences due to lack of money and an employer that frees them enough to go after more fulfilling work. In my case, I am a tramp, I am the poor, because I lack the skill to do anything other than what I am doing, and not doing all that well.

As a child I always dreamed of greatness that now I look at and cannot name it. I cannot see why I thought I would, or should be great. What was I thinking I had to offer? What great skill was it? Some unnamed artistic pursuit? Was it singing or drawing, painting, writing? I think it was all of these wrapped inside the skin of a golden boy with a mouth for charm and charity. A strong and clear mind.

I sleep on the floor of my studio, neighbor upstairs plodding along the ceiling. Dense steps of human earthquake. The front door, crooked from the forever fog that glides up the driveway. I sleep and hope it takes me. I know this all must stop. I know I cannot go on like this. Tired. Sleeping and drunk and growing fat from uselessness.

I can see now why people feel the need to get married and make children at thirty. It gives a useless life purpose. As of now, I'm trying to make use of myself, for myself. Then, and only then, will I have something to offer another love, a child, and this world.

When the bow breaks.

"Is this how you meant to live your life? Doing nothing?"

It wasn't out of anger. Her voice quivers when she's quick with spite. This was disappointment. Possibly frustration. Her little boy, last child of her womb, had managed to stay long enough to achieve common goals. College, career, friends, and love. Each of these events had happened, but with no semblance of success.

He had proved it was possible to work hard and get the very basics of an American life, and still be a failure.

"I should go. I'm tired."

His mind had wondered about from overwhelming uselessness. It was still there. It had always been there and there was nothing to do about it. Now, he just wanted a drink. Anything that could burn his throat. Liquid smoke. The couldron of tempered meats that was his stomach. He should stay and argue, he thought, put up some words that would take her time to get through. Minimal defense at best, he knew. It would only prolong the situation where he would have to say the words to her, that yes, she was right.

His studio grew dim, the day ending in that generic way. The science of stars and rotating moons, distant planets, and the ground beneath his feet. It didn't hold the wonder it should have for the man. It was just night into day, sleep into the waking hours into the work into money into sleep. Yes. Sleep. That's all he needed. Soft dreams, a world held in cotton. Those faces and bodies of women that made him feel alive, but only in sleep. They were formations of past faces he knew, voices from the television and bodies from magazines. Creatures of heaven'd sleep.

That's all he wanted now, was that sleep and those creatures. Those women and their arms opened, voices of language yet written.

He just wanted to sleep forever.

Ageism in the vital city.

The summer is settling into the City, even as it rest months off shore. I know what will happen. Trips to the beach. Drunken afternoons on stoops, patios, and residential streets. There will be talk of vacations, that will end up not happening. Towards the end of the season I'll begin to feel morose, dead inside with a swirling rot, as my birthday approaches in mid-September.

I will do my best to keep at my dreams, and what hopes I can comprehend I will hold dear. The desire to move and see a new coast with its own distinct summer, and its own individual repeating cycles. It will all be new to me and the flying insects and their metalic squeals will set a scene for a life I've never lived.

There is a lot to be said for the strains of "all work and no play." What is play? What is work? Each man has his own say in his own life about what it all means. I just hope to figure it out before it gets too late and I've stood between two granite monuments, believing in neither until I realized there really is no choice. They're both the same.

To call out what you want out.

My memories and past highlights are slowly slipping. It takes longer now to remember how I was as a boy in elementary school. It's all going away, the ability of recall. I was not born this old, it has just set in and when I look in the mirror I no longer see the boy I was.

It is not that my childhood was any good. I am thrilled to have it over and never return. All of its anxiety, depression, anger, and paranoia are things that are not good to have in the growing body of a boy, and even though I am older and still worry over these things, my body is big enough now to shift and scoot these feelings into the cartiledge of my elbows or at the bottom of my feet.

On the train into the City, a group of fourth graders held the rails and stood the length of the city streets to school. There are certain parts of me that can still feel that small, that can still feel the clench of a tight backpack on my shoulders and the cold fear of sitting in class facing an unknown future. The only thought of an older me was the sense that I would be dead by the time my twenties hit. I had no reason to believe this, but I did and it was a comfort of sorts. Life is best played out over time, I understand, but without a sense of purpose it can slosh still in time, just age happening, and nothing else.

There was a moment when my father drove me to school and I had to do something after. But what? Day care? Did I walk home alone, eating junk food and watching cartoons until he stepped in from a day at the office? I know the facts, but the details are fading.

Knowing this does not make me feel one way or another. I care. I think. I should care, but the reality is that it feels good to have some memories disappear to make room for the new, especially when the new could out do what I've ever done before. Life, a work in progress. You die when the machine is fully constructed and thrust into the earth.

I was a child at one point in time, but I'm going to leave those memories to my parents now. They seem to have more interest in that distant self of mine than I do.

Mouth done tricks.

Some people make the words they say and speak into fancy antiques. Guilded placards on high steeped walls, trivial mantras of vague language and custom-built hubris. To them I say good job, well done, and fuck off. Poetry is for eulogies from mothers of dead sons, war criminals, and murderers on death row.

Poetry. Empty words of voiceless hearts. Keep your generic thrills to yourselves, and I will mine own.

Eat shit and die. Modern poetry is the sitcom everyone's seen.

Gentle miles.

The darkness of morning should be explained to me, but not now. Now, I have calls to make to police stations and ambulances to warn of crashing trees and ponds flowing on the freeway. The yellow lines disappeared in waves of red break lights. The sixty miles to the office slowed to a puttering of black wheels in a slack mist.

My car, with its floors of sanded mats and dashboard coated in miniscule debris, has not left the City so often as it has these last few months. My centered life is expanding, first over bridges and now across miles and miles of freeway, where signs hang above, city and street names made of glittered sticker so you will not forget. So you will not get lost.

I sit in recline and the car drives. Pushed, pulled by the wind. The car drives, thrusts of gasoline and fire through piping. The hum of oxygen and water. The sweat of oils in truncated pipe. I do not know how these pieces work but they do so I leave it at that. I know to steer and shift and watch as we drift through the carved landscapes of the hills, making my way to the City of splinters and shards of glass raised upward, outward towards the bay. All I have to do is sit and be with my thoughts, whatever I want those to be. Until I leave the car I am whatever I make myself out to be. I slowly transform into the worker bee, or the lover, or the friend. At times I become the beast when I slam the door and give the parking attendant the keys and a twenty dollar bill. Bound for the bars and the streets of the City at night, yes I am the beast until it is time to return and drive home, simmering in alcohol, back home in the car, again becoming, the lover or the silent mule.

Slowly simmering, slowly becoming anything.

All bills paid.

As has been said throughout modern life, money comes and money goes. Like water, it is always there, at our feet, above our heads. In our bodies keeping us alive. This last thought might be going too far, as money cannot help you stay among the living. It makes life easier and without it, death could find you far more quickly once you are out of your coverage of currency, but it does not do the same for you as your blood.

In thirty seconds I will be a new man. Not reborn or rugurgitated, but a slightly older version of myself.

All bills have been paid but many debts remain. This new me will have to deal with that when the time comes. I will have to answer for my former self's lack of planning and general short comings as a person in this world.

So I will sit here calmly, shut my eyes and let the air in my body exit and enter, exit and re-enter. In thirty seconds I will open my eyes and start new.

Starting now.

City flat lines, water charms.

I've grit my teeth into dog fangs. Low and spreadwide, the horizon line of distant mountains. The base of my neck, slipping numb from the peak of my hair. The slow pain of the jaw is horrific at times. I fear I'm slowly dying, minimal pain by minimal pain until I grow so used to it I'm walking cancer and lose my objectivity.

There are moments in the day when a pause inside of me strikes and I feel the breath in me. I am alive and walking the world. I don't know how it happened, even more so, I wish I could stop thinking of it. To quit the worry of a serious life.

There are men out there who have moments after moments, small events that end when the job is done. From school to internships to the workplace, I have lived with only a career goal in mind and now approaching thirty, I am no longer tryting to get my foot in the door, but I am in the door and I have found my chair. The problem that has arisen is, I do not want this. I've put more and more of my loves into hobby form.

The question is always asked of the young, "What do you want to do with your life?" Career is implied, not truly what you want to do with yourself. It's as if I've been in the military my whole life, working hard for another's well being, not my own.

I'm ready to disappear. I'm ready to retreat and fall beneath the crowd and be less American and more human. There is always the option of suicide and I must say never trust a man who has never considered taking his own life. Someone who has decided to not kill themself is someone who has chosen to live, with all of life's minor charms and sour heartaches.

Summer fields.

It happens with every girl you love. The first moment alone, summer light, holding her close on the rumpled bed. These kisses are new, these lips have never touched before. Her breath, somehow you compare it to that of the other girls and at that moment there is no comparison. She’s here now and real and it might be love, you want to say it’s love so you do. You love her.

Her hair, you remember her hair. Not so perfect now, it dangles like the overgrowth of southern trees. Whispers muffled, she lifts herself up enough to pull her shirt off over her head and with two crooked arms, she twists her bra off and there it is. What is forever hidden is now yours to see. And at this moment disappointment sets in because, you, because I, want this moment to be important, moving towards a powerful future, and all you (I) can think of is, “How many other boys have had this experience with her?” You might be number seven. Higher. Lower. You are not the first and likely not the last.

This moment, however exciting and monumental it is, is truly not unique. You question your love for her, if it is there or if it is growing. You assume. You feel. You assume she wants you. You assume she feels something for you. You assume because you want it to be real enough to actually be a moment and here it is, another example of mindless giving away of yourself and you never wonder if she’s thinking the same things about you.

For every girl you love, you pray it is your last. That every experience together brings her closer to you. She understands and digs deeper into you, wanting to be your light, and you hers. In this modern world, these ideas are romantic and out of date. Love like this died long before you were born. We've let go of our spirit, our souls, so only our bodies are left and without that anchor tethering us to something higher, we are free to roam the earth, it being made of dirt and rock until we too are nothing but dirt and rock. Nothing entirely unique.

We all ask forgiveness.

It's been summer for weeks now, but somehow I've missed the heat. The sun is not doing it's job. Each morning I leave jacketless, with a stiff chill up hill the to work.

The office. It's left me empty. There is the promise that hard work pays off and makes you a better person, but in truth I have no idea where I heard that.

There are planes leaving this coast regularly. At some point I will make sure I am on one of them, without a planned return. An escape. There are too many failures and acidic memories that won't leave me alone. Everything reminds me of what could have been. This landscape. My own voice. I need to be in a new city and be mistaken for someone I could be.

If words worked, or if God was real, I would ask to be a different man. This life I was given doesn't seem to be one I can make successful, but I will keep trying. The biggest failure a man can achieve is giving up on himself.

As the body grows.

I have no cares left in this world. In fact, I would find it hard at this point to declare my true love to any living thing, not even myself. My stomach has grown fat. My body fights between sleep and boredom, neither getting the upper hand, but hanging mid-air, arm in arm.

I could see how someone might say this is over a girl. There was a girl, then she left. This I understand. I can also see how someone might say this is due to my oncoming thirtieth year of life. Again, I understand. One more spark is my work life. Career. This is a more subtle tease that might have contributed to my current state. My job, of course, is rather interesting and fine. The pay is not what I would hope for, but I always told myself being happy at work is more important than making a lot of money. I regret ever saying this. I've decided it is better to make your riches and worry about your nine to five happiness on the weekends, when you can afford to do the things you love.

I do have a large variety of skills as any man should, but mine are far too personal to bring about a substantial paycheck. Music and writing is all fun for the brain and empty weekends, but where do they fit on the resume?

The resume. The obituary of your living years.

In this City there is constant talk of the great outdoors and the beauty of this coast. How we are all lucky to be here. Luck. Pure coincidence. I could argue that we are all free to leave, and anyone is free to move in. That is not luck but choice. So I choose to be here, I've decided on this piece of land. I do dream of a larger city, one on the opposite coast cut by the Atlantic. It's foresight that keeps me here, knowing I would go and just want to come back. Perhaps I need that experience to revive my blood in this City. At times I'm too big here, or too invisible. Too loud or too poor. There are no corners or streets where I belong. In this great earth, what made me think I belong here? Could be laziness, most likely is, since I am too complacent to search for the answer. Added, searching requires money. Legal tender to pay for passage and to pay for time spent somewhere I don't own a thing.

That is the stage of this man.

I have seen some sort of light. There have been stories of men on ships pushing out ino the black water to fish for aquatic meat. They never sleep and they never tire and their minds go blank and numb as they focus on the task at hand. They come ashore and drink and count their money before heading off into the land. There are girls waiting for them. Women to love. Women to care for them and pray for the safety of the men they love as they let the oceans push them to the edge of the world.

It would appear that all it takes is love to make one happy. I wish I had the capacity to not think, and only taste the simple things and be fulfilled in my life, but it is not so. Television and dining out and only watching the waves does nothing for me. I want to create the show and grow and cook the food and ride the waves with my frail body. I want inside of everything. I want what burns inside of me to be within another.

I want this love for her to be returned since I cannot kill it myself. Alcohol has not the ability to put it out. There is no work on this planet that can take my mind off of her. Now there is only danger and risk left. To fill myself with fear and feel the pull of ocean, the way it wants to take us under. It wants to drink us all, so stand at its mouth and fight to get back alive. I need to care more for my own life than someone who has given up on me completely. If only all women knew their power, the way a man's love never dies. Once her love for us is gone, the only thing left to do is get rid of our own, but it does not leave too easily. Some men drink, some men find themselves with lesser women, but if your true love leaves you, I am sorry. There is only the risk of death to truly wash the heart clean. And it does need to be cleaned, because as they say, life goes on and in turn you will meet a new woman, a new love of your life. It would be impolite, and improper, to carry the weight of love for another that has long since gone. So for the future, for my future and for the future of the woman I have yet to meet this is for you. I am out here in this world preparing my mind and my heart to accept you.

Although if history proves me anything, it is that none of this matters. She will not care, for she will have enough weight on her to keep me from being able to fully love her. We try to love, and each attempt makes the next even more difficult. Reborn from certain death would do us all some good.

The din of our harbour.

Some could say life is a series of mistakes you either learn from or are destined to repeat. In a broader sense, this one life we live might be a link in a longer chain of our existence. These are the simple questions I take into account with the passing of the City out the train window. I see a girl standing at the door, "That girl over there. Maybe she'll find me interesting. Funny even." This could be thought because she shares a likeness to a girl I once knew who, at one point in time, was fond of me. So I gave my feelings of a past acquaintance to this unknown face.

I have easily fallen in love with countless girls over the course of a week, from only a look. It has taken a good number of years of experience to understand one thing, females just have something special that defeats logic and reason. Volumes of words written about them as a subject could never fully explain the beauty and awe that a woman brings a life. Once this is understand, my thoughts turn to me, of course. Does a woman see the same thing in a man? Am I a being to be in awe of? To draw inspiration from? It does not take long to see that in the history of the world the pedestal was made by man, not for him. That is the balance.

So every night I stand in the bare dining room, two stories up, and from that height I can see to the ocean. It is not hard to see that a few rebel waves will destroy this coast. A violent storm, a tsunami, something tidal, will wash us all away. So I drink to the ocean, because it gives me something to fight against.

For those that dream to leave.

There are times when you are with someone and you wish to understand why you want them there. There is the feeling of love, but most love is accomponied by pain and doubt. The fear that the other will read you, and know you wonder why they're around.

Things to question all the time. Infinite thought dutifully processed.

She hadn't wanted me around for months, almost a year, before she realized she had no idea what she was doing. Each past moment, where there was anger or hurt, I took the blame for. "It could be me. My fault. Sorry." This worked to a point and now she is gone and we both no I was wrong. It wasn't me. It wasn't my fault.

She's waiting for the answer of what to do with herself. I wait too for her answer. For a decision. To see if she can love with her full heart, without fear. I have to make a decision as well. To be stronger. To not accept fault or defeat or take on someone else's drama, that only exists inside of them, realized or not.

I let her fear become my own, and blame myself for it. Life was easier spent alone.

Signed and released.

I wish someone would mention the day. The hour. Count off the seconds just so I know where I stand. How I exist in the constant timeframe. It's always pleasant to know that time is moving forward, keeps the mind and heart alive knowing things can change at any minute.

It was Friday when the train stopped, full capacity of commuters, and I walked off. I was tired of standing, of pretending I did not hear those around me. Ignoring that I was pressed against the strangers of this City. Instead I walked a new neighborhood on the edge of the freeway. Fresh contrete stretch into a two lane on ramp. New parks pocked with the roaming homeless, eeking out a life on recenlty planted soil.

The wind had picked up as I stood outside of apartments, waiting for something, or someone, to happen in front of me. There was a bar, as there always is, where I drank too much and returned later, in the night, to the train. After sleepless hours in bed I forced myself to throw up and out came the beer and whiskey. I had forgotten to eat.

In the morning I remembered someone with a guitar. He sang and played in the bar and perhaps I was overly grateful with too much praise. I loved everyone. Or at least him that night. Anyone who would listen. New faces with names I lost, gone, in the toilet, or in sleep. But then in the morning I did not care anymore. I did not love anyone. The music from the night before was a simple drone of buzzed strings. I can't recall. She had gone out too, with friends, so I had made my own. New friends that lasted as long as the alcohol did. She left me alone and out of fear I felt abandoned and forgotten.

There is no simple way of explaining, or of acknowledging one's own truth. One's faults. They always are free of blame. Movement in the gut lets you know you are right and have been wronged. If those two poles even exist anymore. In the morning I called to tell her I loved her, and like always she didn't say it back, but said she would be over in a few hours.

It was up to me to think no more of it. To see her coming to see me as her way of saying "I love you." Some would say actions speak louder than words, but I promise you, nothing speaks louder than both.

Of things we love.

In the last month I found that weight loss coincides with subtle acne, and I don't know why this is. These two might not be connected but the way the mind works, I assume they are.

The beard came off and the baby face revealed I look as young as I am. The only shame is the lack of love it gets.

In every moment that comes, even in love, there is the emptiness of being infinitely alone. This feeling, similar to hunger and tiredness, is alive in me at all times. All I want is to be with this love of mine. To experience being with her as a dream should be. It is blocked in my head and in my heart. Nothing fights. Nothing competes. I cannot win. I can only pray she stays and waits for me to grow into a better person.

For me to change.

Corners.

In where we try to be happy, attempt to create the joy of living. It is there, I've seen it other people's lives, and always wondered why it was not in my own. I traffic in distant emotions, misplaced ideals that no one can ever touch, to keep the world at the fence. A safe horizon of backlit ghosts I will never know.

There is something to being human that I do not know, or understand. It cannot be named, or it can, just not by me. Paranoia, I know. There is a way to make it personal and rationalize all the mystical and false actions that people make, or never did. I could say I've been hurt but I cannot remember by whom or when, or even if it really ever happened, but I can feel it.

These are my breaths, the ones I wish to share but cannot. She will not take them and I don't know how to keep them to myself without the crush of lonliness. She still loves me. "Still." Even though I am not the man I wish to be and since there is no way, no scientific or magical way, for me to extract her wishes and dreams of me - I do not know if she accepts me as I am, or as I portray my future self to be. For I am all of these men, singularly. I am the present, future, and real me. The imagined and dreamed me. I am the self-imposed martyr of the empty darkness and vanishing light. I wish there was a way to call myself pretentious and horrible and accept that as truth and move on into generic manhood, so I can smile and laugh and keep her love close to me. I attempt this in constant prayer, and it lasts as a spell, for hours perhaps, them fades at the returning weight of the truth.

It would be easy to call myself a mess, a monster, a weak man-boy, but it would do no good for the future. I seek the future and aim for its goodness. To be able to look back at my life now and mock my limits. My brain. My heart. My skill and my purpose. If only for her, God, for our love, I want to bring about that change now. Rush me through the initiation. Carve the trophy out of my ego and paranoia.

I just want to sleep knowing everything is alright. I only want to sleep next to her and understand her simple love. Her unspoken love. I just want to adapt to her and never ask her to change, for if she does, she just might disappear.

This is a new, yet sudden, machine.

As it turns out the aging process, the "Growing Up" of a human life, as simple as it physically is, takes a toll on the emotional state of said life. There are walls you hit as you realize whatever greatness you dreamt of as a child is now, still there perhaps, but not getting any closer and might in fact be moving farther away.

I have the love I have dreamt of, but not the confidence to keep it. I have the potential for a good life, but not the intelligence to gain more experience to actually get there.

There are issues of money. There are issues of titles and responsibility. There are issues of not wanting to being the thirty year-old baby in the room.

There are issues of jealousy that creep into the brain, my brain, into my heart. Almost to the blood. There is no real - no true - answers to anything.

There is only one thing in God's Mighty Universe which deals us all in. That is time. Time passes and we can't help pass with it, be pulled along with it. A finite jetstream of intertia, it's only up to us to push ourselves into the the life we want to hit.

Some of us, like me perhaps, are not strong enough but we come close.

Coming close to what you want to be is the most agonizing of failures a man can experience. What better way to say "you are not good enough" than being surrounded by the life you want to lead, the others there, doing it, how? There is no "how" just the fact that they are and you, well, you are not.

Enjoy the playground. Enjoy the weekends. Just enjoy, because meaning has passed you by.

I mean, passed me by.

What gives you, gives me.

There's a fever to a new year. This one, is a cold sweat. I stay bundled. Wool covered arms. This is fine. There are two moments in the year when this happens. Birthdays and the changing of the calendar year.

Both are a mess of headaches and common faults. Those ordinary slips and falls that we all take but hope the pain is truly only ours. "There is no blood to spare." A private war against whatever it can be named. The future. The continous timeline that can only end in your simple death.

All this says is, "You are not special, so don't bother to worry over your fate."

There were many days spent loading a small car with small boxes. Steady trips through the avenues to a studio apartment where a friend had once lived, but moved on, with a girlfriend, for that next tier of adult-life. It's underground and the windows are for watching feet in the backyard, but somehow this is considered a step up in the world for me. I can be naked and leave the bathroom door open, unflushed for days, burning coffee pot in the corner. My new life.

There should be sadness here but it is a state of stunned disappointment I feel. When I first arrived in the City I was doubtful of my own success, possibly only fantasizing about what I could become. I cannot say I have even come close to becoming that these three years later, but I am something. Something else all together. Not the Man of Business I wished to be, but a man under the stairs, a man tucked in brick offices. A man of spent bus tickets. Even worse, a boy still attempting to be a man. Faking it. Pushing my way into places that do not know my face and will never remember my name.

I am a lower pegged monster.

I've slowly forgotten how to speak, but it will return. It must or I will never get to that place I want to be. If only I could remember what it was called.

The end of the lifted bells.

The rain hit in the early afternoon. Light with the stink of burning wood and wet wool.

"Raining?"

"Looks like it."

"Always does."

Summer hadn't been spoken of in weeks, even as the heat remained for the weekends, prompting the lonesome suburban rush from the inland to crowd inside the City. Waiting, speak thinking, "Now it will happen. Now it can make sense." We were all people in the midst of personal progress, every day making ourselves a little better. Sharper to the touch. For some, the idea of the City, or any city, was that it was different from their own lives. It was a television dream of a population of interesting and diverse lives. A mystery on every tongue. Late nights of foreign speak and flights of stairs in unknown buildings. Couples envisioning lost hours at private cafes with single names not found on every corner.

This was theirs, our, common secret. The truth was that nothing special was ever found, it was always made.

The City had grown older and youthful at the same time. Those of the age married and made children, then moved to the lower highway towns, where space was available. Those that stayed grew old in cramped loft spaces, one bedroom apartments above drugstores, outside bus stops and laundromats. These were the lives of unfulfilled dreamers. Those that left by their planned escape of career and family, took pity or looked back to wish it was them. The youth riding bus and train, foraging for quarters for a can of soup. The romance of constant blank thought. It's all too simple to see when it is not you.

I keep watching the rain. The water turns the blue sky gray and the buildings a static hum of the real world. Once in it, crushed by its perpetual weight of falling distance, you forget your next step. Your next thought. But your body knows to keep moving, so it does. Soon your flailing body dances as it runs through the living earth, mind a pin, body a machine of single movement.

The only mistake a person can truly make is not understanding that they can be wrong.

There is peace when peace is to be found.

"I remember I found you drunk, and I think, you found me naked?"

"That could be right."

"Sounds about right to me."

There was a death to summer, when the heat wained, it could not stay, and a draft of stiff ocean air sat on the beaches of the northern California coast. People still came, tourists, to run from their other fear, that repeating boredom of dinner and movies. So there we were, and with us the unspoken hope that it mattered. That staring at the water was so sublime it gave meaning to itself, and in that meaning grew purpose.

Our lives now had purpose.

She remembered to bring a bottle opener. The inside of my thumb was still scarred, I told her, from the last time I drank away from home.

"Are we supposed to do something here?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. This might be it."

"Like take a picture, you know? Paint something. I wish I could eat this view."

"You can't take it with you."

"Memories only do you any good when they're the bad ones. Hospital visits and broken hearts."

We drank and then the sun set, like it always had and will continue to do. Her shoes were full of sand, twin buckets of coastal earth. When she closed her eyes I walked off and left her there, to find her another time. There was no point in holding on, friendships sometimes last hours, some never build.

I counted the things that I could not live without, those items that gave me back my life. She was not one of them. A memory perhaps, of a former me that no longer existed.

A quick thought and, woosh, it was gone.

Given light.

Sometimes I forget my name. I walk around the apartment, pause, and cannot recall my face. In the mirror it's darker than I imagined, or lighter, difficult to say, to find the answer. The truth. You lay down in bed because that is what you are supposed to do when you need to sleep. If this sleep doesn't come you can turn the lights on and wait for morning to come, never mind the moon black night, just watch the light bulb from the ceiling. This is the light. This is the focus right now as the world around you breaks breaks breaks your inner bones. Your skeleton of constant thought.

I wished it were raining. The slow and heavy drip of the sky. There is only the dead water air off of the Pacific. There is only the soft beats down the hall from the roommate's room. Work used to keep me safe. Linked to tasks and other people's outcomes, but that is over, not over but drifted, drifting, and I stay inside too much. Inside this body and inside this mind.

If there is to be love, why bring the worry? Who is this question too? God? Sure. He is out there. Hovering. Cloudlike. Who am I? Bound to rock and shifting under-earth plates. Organic and bubbling human life. Physical. So we build boxes and raise bridges. This brings the calm. This brings an ease to the mind and spirit. Joining our life to his. And so there is love. Someone there to stand beside, golden hands melding to one solid fist. Together we are a trophy. Together we are the never-ending promise of the after life and the fight against a growing darkness.

But in the night you close your eyes and it is the same as if they are open so you open them and the room becomes your body. Inside yourself inside yourself. The hallway, a vein of stale blood. I want safety, but where is the safety of love?

Who is this question too? God? Yes. God. I am asking. Prayer is not a survey. Prayer is not a billboard of passing thought. This is a look in the eye. This is a sheet of paper, "Do you like me? Yes or no." I cannot wait. This pain and this thought has shattered my bones already, tonight it will be my spine. Soon corroded, poisoned, my inner-flesh will turn to butter and my skin will burn. All I can say is, I cannot be beaten.

I cannot be beaten because you will leave the heart and I will be recovered. Rebuilt. I will not be destroyed.

This I promise, Amen.

There is good in the world, pray.

I'm more tired in the mornings. When I wake she rolls to my side, and grabs my pillows. the one that fell on the floor with the case half off, I place it behind her back. She is sheltered in cotton. A coccoon of ending sleep. What I want to do is wake her, so there are kisses on her shoulder. What I want is to hear her say something sweet in the morning, so I hold her cupped hand.

What I want is to leave my body and become someone else. A man with quiet thoughts. A man that could give her all she wants. All she needs. These men do exist, I believe, although I have never met one. This is because they are a dream. An ideal. The perfection of life that all men should work for.

That I awake every morning hoping to be a concrete version of myself is what keeps me alive. That I want this concrete version to be a towering statue, unmovable and eternal, is what keeps me inside of heavy thoughts that I cannot escape.

A battle for hums.

My only sickness, really, is the constant throb and hum of my body. It is in perpetual need. There is no relaxing, just a pure drip stimulus. It needs bars and freeways. Books and paintings. Foreign nude bodies, women with shouldered hair. Women with a lost language of rolling breaths and warm huffs.

What I want right not I cannot have so I look to the future and want that portion as well. I want the 25 pounds I can have at this moment, plus my coming years of 25 pounds, but all today. All now. My demands, they are never met.

This constant need leaves me disappointed. I might be the growing monster. An ego, an appetite. Crush. Want. Drink the blood, eat the body. As I might evolve from childhood to adulthood, I might evolve from man to monster. In a matter of days I will have claws. A jawbone I can dislocate to take in more food.

My eyes, they will see in the dark. Smell the fear.

This is a disassociation with the world. With reality. There cannot be monsters here because they lack the desire to talk. They ravage.

A monster built the Empire State Building. A monster built the Empire State. Made ships of wood and set sail across pitch black water. Who knows what I am, what I will become, but a dream of mine is to end this much need. To feel satisfied someday. To find that moment of calm, and live in it for the rest of my days.

What we seek. What we find. What we are.

In the bed was a private mess. Nothing that has never happened before, but this was ours. This was physical. Hot sunshine. Curtains faded light. The floor, twirled wool blankets and loose pillows. The sweat of my back made her hands slip, running up the spine to my neck, oiling the hair around my ears.

Things fell when I spoke. When I remembered things I was never a part of. Places I'd never been and men I had never lived as. These were her experiences, and at our age they were bound to exist. This is life as the imperfect universe, the years of trial and error, common enjoyments and mindless fun. My true life wasn't like that. I had spent my time remaining tight, away from flash and away from people that would lead to unknown circumstances. All the girls, they went away. All the friends, I left behind. This was my life and I would go alone, one year by one year growing into something larger, a giant of a man, beyond this culture and above the cities. I would become something more, something outside of human. Mythic and invisible.

When I died my corpse would be an animal in a casket. A lion head and an iron body. A former living statue. A fairy tale'd monster.

This was the plan, to evolve in a single life span. To turn tears and hurt into oceans and fire. This was a goal that had been set from the moment I could think enough to set goals. I had faked love and I have played the part of the admirer. It was important to live up to certain male standards. We all have parts, and at a certain age you need to find someone to admire for the sake of going through the action so the proper muscles get moved. Promotes growth. Girls need boys to look and stare. Flatter. Emotions should never play a part in youth. This is a line of thought that sets one up for mistakes, in order to set you up for the years of regret and forgiveness.

Something broke. Somehow I failed. An attempt at the perfect life is bound to fail, because even if you reached a point of the perfect, you would have failed as a human, which I never wanted to be. So here it is, this thing, this love, this moment that I must accept all that is in the world that tried to get around, see through and float above. But man cannot fly in that sense. So she holds me and I speak and break whatever clings her to me. I shatter feelings with pure thought. The more I want her inside of me the more I feel and the more I think. This all comes out in words that crush and carry to great a weight.

She's breathless and tired. I'm heavy and breathing fire.

A new goal. A new movement towards a new perfect future. It is for her. For a proper life. A joyful life of loosened thought. It is the future we work towards because we cannot work on the past. It is over and children must be born of honest love and pure blood.

It is the blood that is moving, the blood that keeps us human.

Common silences.

There are common silences. These are church prayers. These are moments of ecstacy. The cold air of a silently beating heart rushing over your tongue. The church, as a saying goes, is all around us. The open air. The bedroom. The coccoon of the living world, which is the world of everything. This makes us all holy.

This makes you holy, free of sin.

Just remember, every word you speak is in prayer. Nothing lived can be discarded as unimportant. Existence gives it weight which you must carry, best make it a pleasant passenger. After all, it is your life.

There is the quickness, and then there is the pace.

If I try and think about anything else, there is that empty feeling of hunger but not knowing what to eat. There is a pause, a lag in memory as the brain tries to recall anything to latch onto. What kept my mind busy for all of these years without her?

It takes a moment to understand what I thought about most of before finding her.

It was me.

In times like these.

Someone asked how babies were made, as a joke in a crowded bar. He wanted to hear the words associated with the task; the dry obscenities over the open public air. A table of fifteen friends, associates, familiar faces he'd seen every Monday through Friday for the past five years.

"That girl over there," he thought, "I want to hear her say vagina."

No one offered him an answer. Perhaps they didn't know how babies were made, the biology of it. All they could mutter would be terse words, "Sex." "Fucking." Beyond that, knowledge of blood and seed were non-existent. Babies weren't made, they thought. They come forth. Tear themselves into the world. A bundle of joy, a bag of bones. Holy and monstrous. The disaster of sex and boredom. A leash of flesh, a wet voiced piece of you and of an other.

His joke rested inside of them. They were getting older. Aged past their prime and kids still scared them. Drinking was easier than explaining children. Having children. Bringing them up with guiding light.

He needed someone to play along. To stand up to the task of being obscene in the dead space of the bar. All he wanted was a few words, brief descriptions of love making action.

He needed to know he wasn't the only one who knew it existed.

You want it here.

Granted, your dead body will take up space when that time comes, but it is not that time. Not yet. There is no good guess when this will happen, but no one is eternal. There is enough time in the day for the thought of your own inevitable death to ride, to play around with scenarios which result in your falling body, out of life. This would not be wise. There are plenty of possible occurances to daydream about. Places. People. Futures.

Some girl passes and her face lasts for five minutes. She has no voice, not yet. That will come if the thought needs it.

A car. A bag of money. Your future presidency. All of this is better than death.

There are those minds that sleep and wake to the thought of when it will all end. There is a man that I am made of, my father, who was born an infant. I try to remember this when I see him now. He was a newborn that didn't speak or move, and only God knew his thoughts. From that point on he grew into a child, of course, and then a teenager. Something happened here, some action or event that changed the course of his life into the man I know now.

Of course there was also war. The Navy, floating around shores of Europe and Asia. There was the meeting of my mother. The birth of my sister, then myself. The divorce and the quiet years of words behind a heavy beard.

And now the fear of hospitals. The closed eyes to the death of his sister. He's prepared somehow in all of his silent obsession. He's draining the joy out of his life, so when he finally goes he won't miss a thing.

So now I fight for everyday, and why not? It is mine to fight for. Every face I pass becomes a friend, if only in thought. Those trips to countries and foriegn castles can be mine, be made and lived in. With enough effort I can fill my father's hours and his pockets with simple daydreams and make him say, "I want it here."

Come on, come in.

Everything is tight from my belly button up to my neck. If I'm not careful I could have a heart attack before I'm thirty.

There are no drugs here. Just empty nights filled with grease and endless stillness.

Sleeping pockets.

It's cold out so I grew my hair long. It flaps in a steady sheet around my ears and neck. I've joined a gym with the intent of feeling it sag wet from sweat. Four days of beard growth and I can vanish into nothing. Mass of hair and human growth. The night before last I spent $40 on a haircut. The woman took her time, over an hour, trimming and shoving my head around the burring razor. The details were that of building a car. Reading the floor plan of a future cathedral.

Now it rained a dry rain of warm and violent streams of water. An earthly shower that shattered glass and left welts on naked skin. This is the thrust of individual cleanliness. Blow yourself up mammoth-sized in outgrown skin and hide under what your body grows. This is the world you see everything in, every opportunity and every chance. Then those observations become too many and none seem or feel right, your hands are too big to hide where they need and your vision sits too bright against the back of your forehead.

You cut yourself off. Tigthen your life. Stiff and regal. Each step meant to be placed on the patch of earth it drops upon. Narrowed sight of what you need. A pipline of one hope and a singular dream. The steady ride and gallop through rain and snow, day and night. Burning lungs and weightless head from days spent awake in action. Too much of this and your eyes go black so you must squint to see anything at all.

So you plump up and release, to be in your tightness again, later next year.

To become a king you must choose the life you want to live. There is no back and forth of wasted years. Your skin can only fit one man. If this cycle goes on much longer, I will be of nothing of any importance at all. A simple castaway who never made the choice of the life he wished to live.

Because there is the life the world will readily give to you and the one you must make yourself. As much as this world shapes each of us, we to shape this world, so you might as well give it the curves of your hand.

Let us, both of us.

Know that I only need a pretty picture. An estimatable distance to cover. A design for crash and burn. Show me what I cannot have and I will quietly work my way to her feet. The move of a snake. A too shy tyrant in the making.

Bring the bricks.

It was a steady year. Curving and bowing through the calendar. It ended, of course, and I made a list of things that needed to be addressed. Those failed attempts at growth that were to be taken on again. There are people asking, "What are you doing now?"

These people are parents. Family and the ritual of blah blah blah.

Where is my girl. Where is my love.

"This is the future, you know. This is the might and strength that will keep you alive."

Love, as they say, will keep you going. Get you through hard moments and difficult years. If you can't get through these on your own, I say, you don't deserve any love. Any girl at your side is wasting her time. There is something about weakness here. There is something I can't feel.

I don't know what it is. If it is anything at all.

Form'd words.

We can listen. Stand in the streets and ride the hum. Mannered lives in generic audio mess. When we speak our voices take like light and fill windows and tops of trees. Turn corners to soak in brick alleyways. You could say your voice feeds the city. You could say this vibrant wash over downtown erases the meaning of each of your words.

So stop talking. Build a new form of communication. Cut your tongue. Hold my hand and smile. Bow and step aside as each one of us grows bigger. Because just once I would like to meet you and not say my name. Could you follow? Is there anything I could do that would show you I care?

Think movies. Film. Cinema. In the night a man in a room opens a window, the wind blows his hair into his face. He pulls a comb from his pocket and brushes it back. He has yet to turn on the light. This could be vanity. Self conscience action. All you have to do is watch the face.

Don't worry that your life is a constant hiss. A shouted static when no one listens. This is the way it goes and goes.

For those hours.

A paycheck comes and bares its weight. This is work in its vagrant form. The face that turns you into a beggar for more.

"When will it end?"

"It never ends. There are going to be jobs in heaven, there are jobs in hell."

"The same ones?"

"More esoteric and laborous. Moving rocks. Raking. That sort of thing. Real caveman-esque."

"What do you get paid in? The currency?"

"God's almighty smile. How the fuck should I know?"

The words, "Can I have a raise?" are on the tip of my tongue, but I have no real authority to ask. I usually enjoy the tug and stall of the work place. The higher aboves and transerred phone calls. Lunch at the desk. The curious prose of wondering if my facial hair is really working out.

The bottom line is I need a new place to live. A new apartment and set of walls, minus the people. I am ready to live alone and face the fear that I will live that way for as long as I live, because once you close the door there is not anyone coming in.

I've considered the Army. Some regiment of men doing a solid movement, marching and raising flags in empty dirt. This would pay well and keep my life abstract enough to remain interesting. If I don't ask for a raise I should at least mention that they forgot to include my e-mail address on my business cards. How will anyone find me in my favorite way? Remote and disconnected. A series of digital letters without my stuttering voice. A mode of contact without the realness. Minus paper these things are never said. A computer shuts down. A hard drive becomes non-existent in its lack of power.

We were never even here.

Dead futures.

What the wooden doors tell you, as they bow into the hinges not letting you out is, this is a place where they just don't care. "We have fifteen beers on tap," they will tell you. All but four have been dry for weeks. Yes, they have whiskey. Wild Turkey only. Maybe a bottle of Jack somewhere, but it's the last one so it only gets pulled out when certain cheap regulars arrive. These are old men drinking during the hours they can't, or won't, sleep. A room built on refusal. This is where I find myself now most nights.

There are certain things I don't want to see anymore. No more boys to men in suits too large and ties too long. No more young girls dressed like forty year-old women. Age has disappeared for the working class and become so non-existent that it only repels when it is actually seen. If you are too young, you must age yourself a bit. If you are too old, then you must try, and you will fail, to seem a few years younger. When you don't try to be something else it is obvious what you are. A boy. A old man. Those on the way out and those trying to get in, or at least fighting stay in. There are beautiful women in places like these. Those after work bars that cater to the newly minted City folk. These beautiful women have conversations. They talk. They speak to young men in loosened ties and short hair. A style of life found in globally scanned photographs of celebrities with vague meaning.

A bartender will know my name. The waitress, she'll hug me when I leave. After two beers, my third is always on the house. A girl over there, with her friends, or not friends but co-workers but they might as well be friends to her because, she's growing older and she just can't stay close to those she knew growing up. I have nothing to say but what I want to say, and it is too angry and bitter that I know I might as well shut up. So I do. I always do.

Have to stay tight to not seem insane. Have to not speak or else I will say what I want.

I was supposed to be satisfied by now. I am not supposed to be anxious anymore. The last person to ask why I wake and dress to get ready no matter the day didn't understand, I do it so I am always ready to go, because I am never doing what I wish I were.

So these old men tell me to get a wife. Meet girls, have a girlfriend at least. A one night stand. Anything but a whore, but a whore would be all right because at least it's something warm and human. "You need that. You need to know how a woman breathes. How she sleeps and pushes her arms against you when she's restless, getting comfortable. It keeps your mind healthy."

So for my health.

There are other things I want for my life that outwiegh love. It is greed, of course. A slim life of perfect movements. Of money and empty houses on islands I will only see in the summer months. Days spent creating, building, working, on that which makes me complete. At these other bars, the after work children, the youthful adults that hold a limp world on their shoulders, they have the materials that give them the appearance of having all I want. There are the products that only money can give, but they miss out in their faces. It is just not there, that greatness I would expect them to have. Only in the old men, the fathers and grandfathers do you find that hard work and focus bring a calmness that cannot be forced. It is built over years. A life time. Never ignore the aged, never throw them out, they are the noble floor and we are the pale wood. Broken tools.

Shallow evenings.

She was the last girl to go. I had to call her because it was late, too dark to think of anything else, and she knew she had to ask, "What's wrong?"

This is how it goes. I play these games since I know how. She reads my voice. She also knows the moves she needs to make, but after ten years other things crowded into our lives. She was mine once, then someone else's and then another. A line of men that are never as good as me. Of course this is how I see things, the scales tipping toward me, the gold piling into my own mouth.

This night she knew my jealousy and saw my pain, not for what it was but how it sat there in front of her begging, and for what she did not know.

I can say I never wanted to love her again. I can say that right now, that after the first year I tried to leave her behind but without knowing every girl I met along the way was compared to her.

And none measured up. There was always something. Some got angry too fast. Some didn't pay attention when I wished they would. Some didn't hold me right. Some I just didn't love.

But the night came and I took to the beach hoping the sound of wind and water would do something for me, do some good, anything besides keep to their natural states. Where are the rising waves and circling winds that bind people together? Those wooden ships breaking among the low coral. I wished and prayed for violence. A sudden hurt. Unexpected and jolting. The slow and ever constant hurt of another's love grows old. I needed out and needed to breath again. Freely.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"I don't want to sound like I think I'm great or anything, or self-centered, whatever, but, but do you think we'll get together? That's the only thing I can think of as to why you'd be rude to my friends or frustrated with me all time."

"No, no I understand. I guess I do. I don't know why, but I guess I never stopped hoping, you know, the hope that you'd come back. I know it's stupid."

"No, it makes sense now."

I didn't tell her what I needed to hear her say. She never found out that all I wanted to hear her say was, "I don't love you. I never will. There is no hope for us, ever." This is what I want to know, to have and to hold and use against any flashing moment of desire towards her. This fucking knife or gun of truth that can kill that part of me, that fucking glowing part of my insides that remains to say, "Don't give up, there is hope."

So there is hope and I will have this for awhile longer, until she marries or I do. But I won't. I know this already. No one will compete with her and I can't grow to get anyone better until she is gone, out of my life. Yet she remains still, perfect. The cast of woman that God hoped for me to find, perhaps only to struggle over and in the end, grow out of.

Love. Ignored. I try to fill myself with work and minor projects. Things to see me through , perhaps this is something to get back to, and leave the world as is.

Medicine chimes.

Breakfast is out and the dim light shines gray on the kitchen sink. A bowl of cereal. Glass of milk, tinged blue with lack of fat. There was a girl here, I have to remember, that wouldn't want to see me this way. Standing at the counter eating. Bottles around the floor. Stuck onion peels blackened on the linoleum. We are men, I say. This mess is our mess. We own it and when we are done here this stink will rain gasoline and burn where we stood. Everyday glory. A morning war.

But not today. New boxes are in the hallway. Not mine and not the roommate's. Someone else's. A bra strap pokes from the folded top, teal and full of gloss, looping into itself. My roommate decided his girlfriend should move in. He said it wouldn't affect me. She'll be in his room all the time. Buried in her belongings, a pet with its own box in the corner. Already we have more candles than we did before. We have less talking space. The quiet is gone. She fills it with her laughter and constant smile.

Yes. I can hear her smile.

Girlsmoke.

This room is filling up with promises. As each girl leaves, her words stay behind because I keep them. Tucked away somewhere, simple charms I can't let go of. This does me no good, they stack up so high there is no more room. Anyone new cannot fit. It is a fog now, of all those voices in whisper, telling me exactly what I wanted to hear. Leaving me only to believe in each sentence and wait for them to be true again.

And I do.

Sleepless Children.

It's growing cold again. More blankets for the bed. It's best to keep cooking, since the wall heaters don't work. It makes for restless sleep. This winter might be my last in the City.

The work here is all there is for me. These are transitional years, I know. I've fought to stay and make sense of it and I have. This current time is for the future when I sit in a different room on a different bed and look back and say, "That wasn't fun, but it needed to be done."

But that is now. These growing experiences are based on work. Accomplishments that are never seen. Those that I have beaten won't show up and vouch that I gave it to them good. It is difficult to find the trophy in all of this.

So I sleep. I eat. I rest in bed and look back. What was once good that ended. Those years of girls, the short one the tall one. The one who's last name I forgot. Middle names and dry hand holding. I have the pictures to prove it all happened, but the decision has been made to forget them. Destroy them all somewhere. A fire. Mounds of taped paper dropped on the side of a ship. I'd need a ship first and that's a whole other fantasy.

Too much free time releases these fantasies to me and I find myself smiling. Content at what this alternate life has become.

But it is not the real world. I've never travelled across the oceans on a large ship. I have not spoken other languages or even spoken to a nameless woman in a foriegn city. All I have done is work.

Made my from school to school. Minor steps into work.

All things. Minor.

I've planned for the East Coast. Boston. New Hampshire. Small coastal towns of New England. New York City to disappear and reconnect as the fake life I've imagined all along.

To take this minor life and make it grand.

Swollen tide.

Sometimes she would go by "Candy." Other times not. Depended on the person. Blood and knowledge. Depth of years. She kept a tight circle around her. Family was the only thing allowed inside. There was a viciousness to her voice towards others. Regular people. She smiled, becuase she always smiled. She swore she couldn't sing but she had control of her vocal tones. Pitch. Breaking confidence and hope in people who wanted her to trust them.

Her beliefs were born of blood and time. Calendars of birthdays she followed and understood. Mother and Father and what happend when they made love. The beauty of being born. A Mother's secretion. A baby with a name.

"What are your plans?"

"For when?"

"Later. Tomorrow. Times after that. Years even."

"I can't say. It doesn't exist yet."

It was a simple exchange of loves that brought us together. She wanted someone to add to her family, to build that small shape of baby faces that reminded her of her mother. There were dreams she had of being a young mother. Of staying home most days, leaving for the store or to take the kids to the park. Smiles and sex. Bedrooms and the empty garage to store the lawnmower and rusted tools.

My paychecks were substantial. My college degree was arriving soon. But I won't say this mattered. I won't say that she thought of our love as an investment.

I placed these things on a mantle and gauged their weight. What could last and what was about to expire. Love. Passion. Desire. It could be said that the man that can control his desire is a man that does not have enough. The point here is the control, not the shortage of desire.

Control.

There was an image in Candy's dreams of her future life, with a man that existed the way men used to. Strong and rough, hard working men that built things in the rain. Fences around the yard, basketball courts in the backyard. A man that hated wearing a suit but would look grand when wearing one. Everything she painted in her mind for herself was the world I wanted. To be this man was my own goal. To fit that shape. Ignore my faults and tendancies to assume the life I wanted.

But this could only last for so long.

My voice. It was too high.

One afternoon I spent making phone calls looking for work. Candy called to check up on me.

"Hello."

"Is that you?"

"Of course."

"You sound different."

"In a good way?"

"In a very good way. I didn't know your voice was so deep."

"What do I usually sound like?"

"You're sister."

Every morning I would need to remember this. Speak deeper. Lose the highs. Other moments added up as well, so my morning list grew.

Don't be so friendly, you're girly when you're friendly.

Don't hug your male friends.

Don't watch cartoons.

Don't call your friends just to say hello.

Wear dirty tennis shoes more.

Don't comb your hair.

Spend more time with your dad, less with your mom.

Don't groom yourself so well. Leave imperfections.

Don't be so shy.

This was a position I built for myself, to better myself. I had found a place I wanted to fit and there was this girl, Candy, who would watch over it to make sure I stayed with it. But she didn't know this. She thought this was how I had been born. That we were the same already. This experiment of mine, she didn't understand.

And so that was that. Her circle closed again.

Sometimes she would go by "Candy," sometimes not. It was saved for those of blood and depth of years. Now when we speak, I'm not allowed to call her this. She has a new name now. One she uses at work. On forms. It's on her mail. It is a name saved for those like me. Outsiders.

Speak and be well.

In the waiting room someone mentioned fall and the changing colors of what nature gives. In the City you need to find the coastline to see the seasons take shape. This is where the mouth of the park sits, the forest of deep greens and rain soaked browns. Where those slivers of toppled trees cut through the dirt path. Only in here does nature breath a restricted sigh in the City. She wants to say that this is a sad thing. She wants to believe that we need less buildings and less cars. To stop the growing streets and highways.

"There are only a few places in the City left that are untouched from the first wave of settlers out west. You know that tree? The one that's all twisted out on the water? The trunk is straight but the limbs are all swayed back from the wind. Yeah, that tree. Hundreds of years old."

"It's only a tree."

"It's been there forever."

"Maybe it's something elses turn."

"It shouldn't have to give up its spot, if the wind can't blow it down after centuries it earned the right to stay."

At the door my boss watched. The man who photographs cranes on his holiday. The man who is saving his money to build a log cabin on the plot of land he purchased in North Dakota. All he does is watch me. All he does is shift his eyes to her and say, "You ready?"

So the season is changing and I know it from the colors of women's hair. The false blondes returning to a toasted brown. The returning scarfs and shawls. Summer is gone now this says, may you find peace in fall. The tree she spoke of, the strong trunk and swaying limbs, I have seen it. It is across the street from my apartment. I park my car under it most weeks. Tourists take the walk from the rubble of old bath houses and seaside wrecks to photograph the tree with the Pacific Ocean in the background. It makes a perfect postcard. A sentimental poster for a library wall. Maybe this tree is old and fought this long, but it was the choices of men that let it stand. I can undo centuries of growth with fifteen swings of an axe. This is nature as well.

As the woman leaves she smiles and waves goodbye and I don't mention the seasons or the tree. I don't say that I want to invite more cars and buildings, just to inspire men to design greater bridges and a tunnel system developed on the maps created by moles. I want to tel her this is nature too, and no spin of the planet changes any of it, this is our fight against the winds and the shaking ground.

The man in the corner. Part II.

I can't drink. Not anymore. The doctor recommended I stop. When I told him my symptoms He said that my pain is only bothersome. Nothing serious. My pain is something I will have to live with. Soon it will grow dull as my body realizes it is there forever.

This is my rotting stomach. It is nothing serious.

At the start of the week I saw a dentist who measured my mouth, photographed my teeth, and promised the headaches could be taken away. Eased out of my head. A realignment of my jaw to push my bottom teeth closer to the front. There are covers for my teeth to to help with the grinding as well, or else there are other treatments to look into.

A woman placed a grip of plastic inside my mouth, pushed into the ridges of my gums and x-rayed the distance these teeth need to move. The plastic film cut against the top of my mouth and pushed itself into the flesh under my tongue, sending the tongue back into my throat, choking me. After this the dentist explained I have a small and narrow mouth. It can only move so much. I have a child's mouth.

I ignore my health and keep moving, but recently I found I have no more movement and felt my body again. The twist inside my stomach. The soreness in the back of my head and across my neck. I've bitten my cheeks until they've bled.

This is nothing serious they say. Only stress. The threat of responsibility. So I've traveled the trains home and followed the edge of the water up to the cliffs. I've closed my eyes and spoken to myself calming mantras. Drink more tea. Move slower. Speak with a passive voice. Smile more. But it's all false. None of it is what I want to do. Each doctor says I'm still young, I can avoid the problems of aging if I focus on prevention. But prevention means a death to the person I am trying to become.

I am so close. I almost have it in order. My life. My body will feel the pain, then accept it. This stress and aggravation is only temporary. Meditation will muffle the sounds I want to make.

They're right. I am young enough to prevent the problems of the old. Unlike my parents I will not runaway. I will stay true to what I want. I will find my happiness, and accept the pain.

Women of forgetfullness.

The power is in the dark. It's a common brush of the salt air through the window, ripples in the fabric that keeps the sun out, but the sun isn't out just yet. Morning is far away. Every walk to the bathroom at night I understand I might see ghosts. Some shape that won't talk but will move. The roommate's door is open and his curtains sway as well. He's been gone most nights but this space keeps living for the both of us.

There are old girlfriends here, trapped somewhere in fear, in memory. They swarm at night, one by one. The first choosing her night to shine on me only to pass me along to the next. One, I kissed on the forehead and felt the soft bumps of her excema. She said something, it drifted on the sourness of too much soda and coffee, and I lost her for the night. Their skin is there, the bare arms and legs and gentle heat that brings out the smell they grow. Each girl becomes their own obvious trait. One is only a smile or a voice. The soft underskin of her arms. There is always something they need to know. If I will be all right.

"What will you do now?"

"I don't know. I haven't had a chance to figure it out."

"We'll be back you know, always. It's not going to stop so you might as well not make too much of it."

"Dreams don't mean anything."

"They really don't."

"There's nothing to figure out."

"There really isn't."

"What is there to do?"

"Sleep."

More girls arrive and now they come as old crushes. Girls without last names. Faces from classrooms and teenage jobs. At one point we had worked side by side in some restaurant and I made her laugh. It was love for an evening and now here it is again. She wants me to know I'm safe. Everything will work out. Stop worrying.

"Thank you."

"You'd do the same for me."

All of these girls are protecting me because I let them. I want them too. The physical person they represent might not find me during the day or even remember me, but I make them real again in the dark and pounding sleep. I wish it could go on. To wake up and have it all be true. But dreams don't matter. Made up worlds pieced together with leftover images. Things that will not die and I do not want them to. For another day more will come, some real and some false, but they will come.

Favor'd secrets.

I cannot say what needs to be said, since the thought has yet to fully arrive. It's jumbled in other people's lives, in other bedrooms. A walk outside does nothing for my head, just makes my stomach hurt and my feet fall asleep. This used to help. There's always alcohol, but I've had so much that I don't want anymore. The first sip on Sunday morning made the sides of my body ache. I'm growing toxic.

I met a young girl at a bar and I don't think I bought her a drink but she stayed at my side the whole night anyway. In the corner someone played guitar, a friend of hers, so we sat and sometimes she sang along and when she wasn't she was waiting to. During a break the jukebox came on and she went outside for a cigarette. My thoughts came back so I went outside too. It was a little past midnight and I made a quick phone call to a friend whose birthday it was. I was the first to wish him luck for living another year.

This girl was excited so I was excited as well. We drank more and she danced with another girl and this made me smile. Not a sick smile, but one of solid joy. There was happiness here and the girl asked me to take her picture. I missed her face and now I have an overlit photograph of her shoulder and the hallway to the restrooms.

The lights came on and it was time to go. There was no fear that she would look different in the light, in the moment after the fun stopped. I only thought of this in the morning when I woke up and figured I had made it all up. That she was not at my side. That she didn't laugh with me or talk with me, but she did dance with another girl, to get away from me. Truth comes and goes and in the end I decided if I had made it up I would keep it that way.

Whatever is in my head seems to be staying that way. Whispers and pings of something important. I need to listen and understand. Hold it in my hands and if at all possible, put them in my mouth. These problems. They are not bright signs. They are those thoughts I wake up with that tell me I don't have it as good as I believe I do.

Simple plans.

The right man would understand his birthday. "Here it is," he would say. "Nothing to be afraid of." This is how it goes for some time until the man reaches an age where time begins to show. He is out of step. Perhaps he notices gray hairs. For sure his hairline has drawn back. There might even be the simple creases at the edge of the eyes due to too much sun.

It is assumed he could move about the world, his world, and create a rhythm out of his purpose. Down the tired streets of the City and in the underground tunnels of its vintage railcars the right man would move and know when to wait. Calmly. Unnerved. Free from the worry that shapes his head at the office.

I am not this man. It seems I can only find peace once I step into work and find my place. I've been working here long enough that the room has taken my shape, and it is the only place I am accepted. There are people outside in the world and some are friends. A few are family, but most are nameless, without a category. They could be strangers, but that would mean I consider them at all, and I do not.

There is the glow of the day ending, the descent of the train as I make my way home. It is the light of the everyday apocolypse, for it is the ending of a day I will never see again. I imagine the coast as I see it and as I live it will be what the end of the world will be like. Everyone in a daze, without words, holding hands on their way to the beach to see the edge of the earth catch fire. There will be no fighting against it because perhaps it will not hurt. It is only the curve of the planet soaked in a quiet fire.

"Where do you want to go?"

"What?"

"Coctails. Where do you want to go? It's a post-birthday bash. Just the two of us."

"Where do you want to go?"

"Whatever you want, man. You can have it."

He found me in the pub with a full beer on the table. I had been there for half an hour.

"Hey, are you all right?"

"Aren't we all?"

"I guess."

At the next bar we ate dinner and toasted to each other's future. He had girl troubles so I heard about that, and my only complaint could be that I didn't have a girl to complain about. I liked giving him that, putting something out there that he could understand. Girl troubles. Common and very simple, a reminder of the every day. The more I drank the more it did nothing for me, yet I insisted on more coctails for more toasts, more friendly prayers between friends.

I left him at the table to throw up in the street. Tourists offered help and someone snapped a picture. The flash highlighting the mess on the ground. It was the feeling of losing control, but the truth was there was nothing to control. I had made rules and built diagrams on how to live, but outside of my thoughts they couldn't be placed. The ideas had no physicality, only virtue. No tangible use outside of fantasy, and time was running out.

Because this was the ending of another year.

I ordered a capaccino from a street vendor, took a sip and tossed it out. The foam, too much foam. I only wanted the heat not the taste or texture. A slap of hot water in my mouth, but darker, richer and bitter.

"You could order a coffee inside. They got it all, man."

"I wanted to be outside for little bit. I'm done now."

"Cool, let's get out of here. Got to do it up, it's your birthday."

"I'll never be twenty-seven again."

We set out against the fog and wind of the City to find a better place. All I can hope is that this does not last, that I do not lose. That I can somehow find a way to forever be tight. Ready. A statue for simple things.

If you could change your mind.

On her refridgerator was a small photograph that she had taken of herself, in the bathroom stall of a neighborhood bar. Cramped and sitting down, you can make out a blurred shape on her lap, black or brown, arching like a small bridge from leg to leg.

"Who's that?"

"Me."

"No, on your lap."

"That's my purse. It's a joke. I wasn't really going to the bathroom, you know, number one."

"Oh, it looks like a head resting right there, by your stuff."

"Jealous?"

In the photograph she has pink bangs. Bright red lips on a powdered face, smiling with her small teeth trapped in the darkness of the bathroom. Her glasses are black rimmed with pointed frames, the glass inside missing. The white fringe of her navy blue dress curves around her neck and somewhere in the fabric the light catches the outer parts of three pins. It appears as a costume, unreal. A cartoon for the elderly, but I know this look. It's familiar and well worn. The young face and body draped in a grandma's outfit.

To see her now, little remains of her previous self besides this picture. The apartment is furnished in pale woods and sanded steel. A family portrait on the television. On either side, small potted plants. Behind the couch a pair of skis and snowboard poke out. This is how friends are made at this age, newly minted adults, holding onto brands from youth.

She reached into the cupboard for two coffee mugs so we could drink our wine.

"All I have is white wine. Chardonnay. I usually keep a bottle of merlot, but my parents were in town last weekend."

"Whatever you have is good."

"Not too picky about wine, huh?"

"I don't drink it too much. Maybe a bottle from 7-Eleven if I think about it."

"They have wine there?"

"Yeah, next to the cat food."

She disappeared into her bedroom, and when she came back she had changed into a pair of pajama bottoms and a large sweatshirt that read "OHIO STATE." After we ate I loaded the dishwasher so we could sit down to talk. Something was on television about a business somewhere that offered its service in pet portraiture. Bring your cat or dog in, and they can dress it up and set it against a hazy blue background and snap -- 15 8X10s and a large print for your home.

"I'd love a picture of my cat in a little pumpkin costume. With a tiny pumpkin stem hat on."

She had curled into the arm of the couch, sipping from her mug. I didn't know why I was there. Perhaps as an accessory. A person to fill the other chair at dinner. Her in pajamas while I'm still dressed for work, some aspect of civility was missing. I had gone from new friend to brother in the course of one night. I was no threat and no treasure. We had met for drinks once before that had turned into a night out. I enjoyed her company. She was pleasant and smiled a bit. This was enough.

"Are you going to bed?"

"No, why?"

"The pajamas."

"I'm sorry, do you mind? I didn't think we would be going anywhere tonight."

"No, by all means. Do what you got to do. I just feel a bit over dressed."

"Don't worry, you look fine."

"At least I have that."

"Hold on, I'm going to get something from my room."

Gender wasn't supposed to matter. Friendship. Talking and laughing. That was supposed to be it. Girls and boys, existing as faces and names without love. It was instinct to think of her other wise. To weigh my desire to kiss her. To see how her body hung, the skin and the bone. To hear her quietly in my ear, a whisper. To be intimate. It was a minimal desire, but it was there solely based on her being a woman. She fit my generic want.

"Look."

It was a photo album of a trip to Australia. Surfing and scuba diving. Looking for large fish, one day she said, she would see a great white shark.

At the door I put on my jacket and stepped to the stair well. She hung back at the door, saying something with her arms pressing at the wooden frame. I had recognized what I saw in her, that pleasantness. It was her soft charm and laugh.

This could have been it. Some sort of moment. A hug. A kiss. Something.

But there was no need for it now.

I walked down the blocks, heading home. From the hill where she lived you were eye level to the end of the ocean, the black from the sky falling into the water. Only the dim lights of ships drew the line of the horizon. Buses passed, but I kept walking. At the corner store I picked up bread and wine. By time I got home it was midnight and I gave her a call to say whatever came to mind first. The phone rang, then beeped. The wine got tucked into the closet, to save for later.

The next day there was no message from her, and in fact, there never would be.

If you do this, quiet will come.

No one can see what goes on here. Some tiny secrets form, day to day movements, place a hand here. Place a hand there. All we can do is make promises, and hope promises are there to make.

Patient in arms.

"What do you do?"

"I'm a doctor's assistant."

"A nurse?"

"Did I say that?"

I didn't know doctors could smoke. It would seem the knowledge of a complete working atlas of the human body and the phenomena of disease would be enough to distill the urge, but here they were, a row of doctors and nurses, smoking outside of the hospital in the morning fog.

"I pass off the instruments. Sometimes I stand at the head during surgery. That's what we call it, standing at the head. And I watch the vitals."

"Why is your uniform dark blue? Those guys over there are in green."

"They're pussies."

He tossed his lit cigarette into the trees that gave shade to the two person bench. The gold plaque bolted to the seat read: IN MEMORY OF GRACE PLUNKETT, 1988. The hospital was built at the curve of a hill where you could look down and see the edge of the park, or look to either side and make out the houses just around the bend. These doctors and their helpers were a mix of professional and amateur, people just old enough to realize their lives where going nowhere and a two-year nursing school didn't sound like such a bad idea.

I have been recieving phone calls from old friends lately. High school and older. Elementary school kids who are grown up now, with stories that somehow still belong the young faces I remember. These waits outside of the hospital, the people that work them and fill up the beds, they are all some sort of thread to another person's life. This is the obvious. This is something to toss out when thinking of strangers. In each of these faces I look for someone I have lost. A friend from college I had for a year, then left behind. A girl I felt something for that disappeared after class, to marry or to die. To work in another state or give her life to a convent. these are the choices we make. The ones that take us away from the places we don't want to be. In doing so, in the movement, the surrounding lives are mere waves that drift from the strength of the moving on.

Down the hill, at the edge of park, a track sits. The type of track that foot races take place on. I assume it's for a school, for some sort of organized competition. You can wait your turn and take your mark, and at the sound of the gun, run. Beyond that are the trees of no color. They are without light and eat up and swallow the darkness so that you cannot tell what takes place beyond them. A living wall. It is the sort of vision that gives me the urge to run down and push through the branches and fallen leaves to see what is inside, to find the unknown -- the bodies, the lost items of someone else's travels. But I won't run. I won't search past those trees, because I have already been inside. This sight, this route at the bottom of the hill is not the entrance. The mouth of the park meets the edge of ocean, and this is where you can fall inside to find that there is nothing worth searching for. The paved roads and rusting children's playgrounds, the fences and man-made ponds lack the substance that the exterior promises.

That living wall offers you the chance to show your courage. It is a trick of the City that you must remember. As it threatens you, it holds a hand to your back, in case you fall. Keeps us as children, with enough sight of danger to hold our attention.

In the morning, the fog dies on the hill. Instead there is the steady smoking of those outside the hospital. The man in the dark blue scrubs came back in line for the train, and lit another cigarette. The corners of his eyes were wrinkled, while his forehead remained smooth. His thinning hair was turning from gray to white. In a matter of years he would go from a man into the elderly.

"The hair plugs didn't take too well. Pulled the skin foreward trying to move my hairline, but that just made my skin bunch up. That guy over there, with the class ring on, that doctor did the surgery. Good guy. I think he's from Maryland somewhere."

"So he gave you a face lift?"

"Fuck no. It's hair restoration."

"I guess."

"Guess? I just told you. There's no guessing when you fucking know. There's no need. Watch out. The train's coming."

This tiny City is looping upon itself. Ingrown. Tomorrow will be yesterday and right now I want this train to be able to move in altitude, go higher, climb mountains and find somewhere new to go. In going the length of this world is to ignore the depth of the ocean and height of the sky.

The male butchers.

"What you can do is, take out all the cables, the one from the computer, the printer, and the third one."

"It goes to the wall."

"The one in the wall? Right. The main one. Goes to the router downstairs? I remember seeing that."

"Okay. Done. Cables are out."

"Right. Now plug them back in."

All three cables went back in and all three lights lit up. Orange. Yellow. Green. All there. This was his job, to come into offices and make things work. His baby blue shirt was creaseless, even though he was quite heavy, the shirt billowed over the top of his pants. It stayed smooth. The skin of yogurt. The inner arm. He was younger than me by a few years, but he had his own business and gave me his card so I called him. The printer needed to work. Papers out and filed away or mailed off. This was the business of order, of right and wrong.

In small talk he mentioned he didn't drink. The previous Sunday was spent across the Golden Gate. He spent hours talking with his step-mother over the weekend. She was listening to his stories of trying to meet girls, to break all of those girls into one girl. Then take her and marry her. Finish off his life with this woman and whatever children came out of her.

"I drive my dad's old car. It mostly sits out there. By the water. Covered in sand and shit these days."

"Yeah, I needed a new car. Something that can take me around the area. I drive most of every day. Up north, south. The East Bay sometimes. Mostly high rise buildings though, this is the first single office in a few weeks."

"My mom gave me a check the other day so I can pay off my bills. I spent five hundred dollars on shirts and pants. I'm a shirts and pants kind of guy."

"You got to wear clothes, that's for sure."

This boy, this was a nice boy. Pleasant and even lipped. His smile was slight but permament. Ready to witness whatever was said with a chuckle or a click of the tongue.

"Can I get you anything? Coffee? Soda?"

"Water is fine. I don't really drink coffee or colas. They make me feel uneasy."

"That's the charm."

His cheeks were full of fat and when he sat at the computer, looking for something, linking words to empty command boxes, he bit them. When he fixed what needed to be fixed he handed me another card. A more private card. Printed on cheap paper where you could see the individual lines of ink that make up the words and images.

"If you have any problems, give me a call. Most likely from here on out any sort of problem you have can be talked through over the phone. I shouldn't have to come in."

"Right. I'll call."

By the time the train reached my apartment, it was too cold out to wander on the beach. I had to make my dinner and call the day over. That was it. Another small bit, winding its way around to another year. I had given up trying to think of girls, because the power of thought can't make things real. I'd have to leave that room. That apartment and hope someone found me and said something. Asked me how my day went.

Then I could say, "Great. Met a boy who can fix printers."

At least you have.

The Pacific is on repeat. The same places go black at night. The same love is made. All week long the same babies are born. This is all by people I don't know.

The move up the streets to work is no longer the fight it used to be. I've won. The others, they understand me when I walk. All I can say is, as I get my cash from the bank, the teller is a woman and she is someone's daughter. A face I'll never see again of an origin that just isn't important right now. She carries the function I need at the moment. Passwords. Codes. The way from question to answer. To give me what I want she knows the next step. Once this is done, I'm gone.

She can keep her secrets.

All over this City the people are in their heads. Up high in thought. The look of them, concerned and powerless. Anxious and severed. They've forgotten where they have come from to became frameless, losing their point of reference. One look in each face and all there is to find is the reflection of iron and concrete. The connection to the city is a giving up on each other.

Fireshock.

Become able to kick in doors. Develop those muscles. Give your bones what they need to take that amount of resistence. The impact can shatter your ankle if you're not prepared. This sort of action is spontaneous. No one plans the moment they will shoulder in a gate or break down a deadbolted front door. But it happens. Outside of burning buildings. Streets swarmed with armed men. You need to be ready. Stay tight in the mouth and stay keen. Sharp. Willing to turn dark corners.

In everyday life none of this works. That sharpness of yours? It keeps you serious. Makes you look old. Being keen? They'll call this annoying. And your willingness to go into unknown places? That is pretentious. Your own make beleive world where you can save it all. Play the hero and save the girl. Make yourself bigger than you are. Whatever man you want to be, it might go against the tastes of those around you. There should be no shame in strength and arrogance. In desire for things. For isn't God a thing just as a man is? As a gold ring is?

That girl you want to save? She won't love you. She'll laugh at the way you talk. Your voice. Everything you have to say.

It's about having to prove yourself to no one. Creating yourself from scratch. The hero is the one that saves himself.

Lift'd ocean lights.

“No one can hurt you like I can.”

“Why is that?”

“I’ve been doing it for so long. I don’t even need to practice.”

“You’re a pro already?”

“No warm-ups.”

We were in the car but we weren’t moving. She scribbled in the fog on the window. What looked like a heart was only the repeated length of her finger in the thin layer of water. Even for a girl her hands were small. She had to exaggerate their movements to give her hands grace, making them fluctuate in space like the neck of swan. Taking balance from the center of her body. She was going to take the bus and I offered to drive her where she needed to go. It was across the bridge and into another city but that didn’t matter. It was late and I had the time. I could stay up all night and crawl back home over those miles of freeway, and by time I hit the water of the Pacific it would still be dark. The night could really go nowhere now. In the hours it would take to get home the sun would be rising again. All importance would be erased and the day would begin.

“Are you still proud to be a boy?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“It bothers you. That I call you a boy, that I don’t say man.”

“This isn’t hurting. You should know that. I don’t feel a thing.”

“This right here, I’m just fooling around.”

What we do here is for our own enjoyment. This girl would be better off out of my life. If a method of memory erasure existed in the world it would do us both some good. Neither of us are going to get what we want here.

Troubles.

There's the front door. I've considered this. The cards in my wallet. Also the phone, computers, and those I recieved when I was born. Usually all numbers. Sometimes words. Most common is the use of birthdays. Sons or daughters. Parents. Yours. Important dates gain more meaning when used everyday.

I was born in 1977. Now my birth will unlock the rolling garage door. When asked, I can repeat any part of my social security number. First four numbers, last three. Whatever. I have it down. Few of these passwords are ever written down. All committed to memory, so when that goes all will be erased. The only problem with all of this is the fact that when I can't sleep I find myself repeating these codes.

56987

77877

4153234330

678561346

All of these I cannot tell anyone. These are the secrets between me and computers that give me access to my life. There are greater secrets I have, but none carry anything as tangible as paper money or the contents of a locked building. My other secrets only get spoken to God, who never tells.

Silence and warning.

I wasn't talking and she wasn't talking. This was the goal of our future. Pretty soon my closet would be empty of old photographs. Small trips along the coast. Birthdays and holidays. These occasions are all committed to memory so visual proof isn't needed. They were kept in case she asked what dress she wore for New Year's Eve or what hair cut she was wearing during the summer we spent with her sister.

Letting go is easy if you don't care.

Over the weekend I did laundry. Bleached the kitchen sink. Filled the cabinets with boxed pasta and canned soups. If I had a mop the old stains would be gone. To say I did all this without drinking would be a lie. To say I didn't feel the urge to call would be a lie as well.

She wanted a family and a dog but not a large one. Two children named after the capitol's of southern states. A homemaker. Housewife. A list of things to do around the house and a sizable vehicle to take the kids to see their grandparents, who of course would live across town. This future myth was known and worn. Spoken as fact. With or without me this plan was in effect.

I forgot all this by late afternoon and half a bottle gone. The problem with vodka is it makes me cheerful. In cheer, sentimental. A wet heart.

"Are you watching this? Game's on. Raiders are up."

"I'm at the fabric store. I told my mom I'd resurface the vanity pillows in the family room. But I saw the first half of the game."

"What are vanity pillows?"

"On the couch in the front room, remember? Just for show."

"I'm doing my laundry now. Pillow cases smell like hot bread. If you were here with me you could watch the game. You could iron my shirts. Remember my pants? You ironed out that line in the front? What is that? The line down the pants?"

"Pleats."

The packet of photographs are ready for something. Storing or disposal. Our smiling faces. Behind the camera her brother, her sister. Some taken by the long reach of my arms. There is the thought that time heals and time forgets and time does everything for you. When time is brought up all I can think of is the fact that, yes, time goes on, but I don't. In one hundred years, I'll be dead and buried. In the end it's what happens in that time that matters. Did you sit and cower and cry. Did you learn a new language. Choose a God and go to church. Did you do anything other than change your hair and style of your clothes.

After the time has gone do you still care.

Empty'd hours.

There would be no point in trying to stop breathing. Insinct would kick in and I would start again. Slightly relaxed from the rush of oxygen. These things keep me awake at night. Playing with the constant use of my body. Getting tired with my eyes open. Staring off into someone's space on the bus. Forgetting I was still sitting there and if she saw me staring, it could get awkward. There's no reason for this. When you're thinking to yourself where your eyeline hits is of no importance. It goes wherever it goes.

I knew a vacation would never come to me. I can plan one; pick a destination and set off to find it, but at the moment it won't happen. There is too much going on that I'm driven into. My name appears on too many pieces of paper. Too many schedules. My signature is needed most days. There's something dreary about this. Staying too close to home can cause harm. Boredom. The body needs to breath a different batch of air. Hide from new people.

My employers have flown to Hawaii. Then Mexico. Then Portland, Oregon where I hear there are a lot of bridges. I keep seeing the Pacific Ocean. It's right there out my window. Most days it's too cold to be at the water, but I force myself outside. When the night comes and I run down the beach for exercise. Trying to keep myself fit. Ready to run the length of the world and I know it's going to be cold some place so this is my training. The strip of beach is about 2 miles long. After that rock and sand form mountains, covered in short grass and twisted trees.

I grow restless in the city. There's nothing new for me here. The streets that are supposed to attract, repel. Neighborhoods of the young and needy. Seeking attention and the thrills they know will be gone in their thirties. The blocks of unknown hills, those I climb to find churches and small hotels. The Fairmont with it's white columns and curved driveway of valets. The underground bar with waterfalls and fake pond. A floating island for the band to play from. I can go here and sit and drink. If any one asks, I'm from out of town. If any one were to question me, I'm on vacation.

"I never new The City had so many hills. I heard of that twisty street, street cars. Sea lions and whatnot. No one mentioned hills."

"Very few cabs too."

"True."

I saw a girl there past the man I spoke with. She was large with curly hair. I recognized her from a softcore porn magazine a college friend had. She was the celebrity of the overweight nude model scene. Perhaps they there for a photoshoot in one of the rooms. A faked vacation. Here she is away from home. "Oh, we've caught her!"

It might not have been her, just my urge to recognize a face. Her voice couldn't give her away, but if I had seen her nude I could know for certain.

Vodka is more expensive once inside a hotel. The quality changes and the room needs to be dark. The other customers should dress accordingly. The women in cocktail dresses, the gentlemen in nightly suits. Walking through The City is difficult, but I still manage to dress properly when I feel I might find myself in one of these places.

For every night I am free, I create my own vacation. Fake names and places that sound familiar, stories that someone else has lived. It's only in the hotel that being nowhere inparticular is a worthy reason to drink.

Vibrant actions.

I'm not tired, but the bed sounds nice. There's no one here to talk to and whatever it is that I'm thinking is going to have to stay that way. Thin ideas that will be gone before the sun comes. There were too many times that something great and strong came through my mind. The urge to get up and do something about it. And I never have.

You want your ideas to stay. To mean something just hours after. Those hopes that come, rushed and pulsing, saying, "Do it now before you're time runs out."

I think about islands. Owning one to populate with whatever I want. Build a family to keep away from foriegn cities. Chopping tropical trees down to turn into a home. Covered in sand. Sunburned and long haired. To get that dream I'll need something more than just the thought of it. The desire will have to be sustained. Enough to stay focused. All dreams come true not through prayer but action.

I'll have to remember this. If only I can hold onto the strength of my wanting I can have it all.

Favor'd mistakes.

You can tell she used to be a fat girl. The kind that smiles and wears turtlenecks. A girl whose mother drives a car full of girls to soccer practice. Father fat girl barbecues. She's excited. Excitable. You can tell by looking at her, she wants to hold your hand. She's not sexy and prefers baths to showers. She cries when she talks about her first dog, a golden retriever that was a part of her family ever since they moved when she was four, from that other place. Far away.

I can tell because I judge her. Pick a part what I see in her face, in her voice. The way she fails and succeeds in carrying herself. This looks bad on me as well. My judgements of someone I will never know.

She might carry a gun. Hate her mom. Swear at the dinner table and eat with her mouth open. But these are not the things they want you to think about.

In elementary school I knew girls like her, or how I make her up to be. Charming and chubby, not awkward like the rest of us so her confidence won her nothing. It shoved her in the corner so everyone else could tease her. She would smile in class, talk about the books she was reading. Offer me a ride home since my house was on the way. These girls have mother's that don't wear glasses. These mothers are where there daughters get confidence from. Jokes and honesty.

But this girl, who I guess used to be fat, didn't go to my school. She was made by something else and now she is far away from what I thought a girl like that would become. But I can still judge. We can still tease and ridicule. Why? Because else how are we to spend our empty hours?

Carbon myths.

It was a warm day. A Sunday. The day of church and prayers. Of summer dresses. And I'm sure a young girl somewhere in the country was picking flowers. Blowing out the white spindels that catch the breeze and lift up and up.

Dandelions.

The park had been rented out. The family had put out food and set up tents in the grass so the children and the grandparents could stay out of the sun. Out of everyone there my grandmother was the most excited to see me. I had missed most other birthdays. Those of cousins and other nameless children. People who don't look like me but I've seen them at parties since I was five. She held my hand and I walked her up the hill to where she could sit underneath the tall trees.

I told her everything. About work and my apartment. About living in the city. Past me she watched her two great-granddaughters play with their grandmother, running to her calling out "Nana, Nana." My mother. Her ex-daughter-law.

"I wish they'd come to me like that."

My mother was out there on the grass, in the two little girl's faces with her bag of gifts. She always brought them presents. Calling me the day before, "What are you going to get them?" I don't know, I'd say. It's only the weekend. There's no holiday here.

My father sat across the park and I walked my grandmother to him. They sat there, quietly watching everyone else at the other end. Their children and their children's children. The other grandparents. I hoped my father was thinking, "I should have never divorced that woman." Because there she was, my mother, his ex-wife on the ground, trampled by baby hands and feet. Hearing the baby laughs and squeals not from the distant corner of a park, but up close, the high pitched wheeze of little noses and mumbled baby talk speaking out "Nana. Nana. We love you."

I was too afraid to tell him he could walk to them as easily as her. He could make the choice to see them every weekend, to drive the sixty miles into the city like my mother does. Going out of her way to spend as much time with them as possible. I believe he has the vision of himself as the stately grandfather that children will run up to with their arms out. All he has to do is sit there in the darkened corner and they will love him out of instinct. He wants a life that he puts no effort towards. He says, "Come to me."

I love him but I had to leave. I wanted to be on the grass too, trying hard to get those little girls to say my name. To know me by my voice. Recognition of sight and sound. Because soon enough they'll get older and I'll get bored and we won't pay attention to what happens next.

Caused charm.

The way babies are made, the way a heart attack hits. The sound of your first kiss. All of these things are made up of moving parts.

Watershock.

I have not been outside lately. I found this quiet place to stay cool and out of the sun. It is a "building." Nothing new but I can pretend I don't understand what this is. Stay calm and block out all recognition of things. Forget. The floors are not so soft. I hurts to lay down upon it, but it too stays cool like the air. Something about the quality of concrete perhaps. Carpet on the walls to trap sound. Nothing in nothing out.

A scream would have no place here. It would die an inch from your mouth.

Has it rained yet? The water fallen from out of the ocean? I don't know. The windows are dry and I don't stare out of them long enough to tell what color the streets are.

What is it about secrets being told that makes one wish you could forget everything else? You can't go back and make the words untold. So just lose touch with everything you ever knew or cared about and start over.

So many water'd hours.

It's been so many days it became years. It was awhile ago that I was a young man, or a younger man. Perhaps a boy. Some would say yes. Some would say it doesn't matter the age. A girl and a boy who were once together then were not is a typical situation. One that deserves no less than a solid hour of paper work, to write out a timeline of forgetfullness. Like setting a goal a year in advance makes that goal appear.

In my office I can sit at my desk. Arrange my stack of newly printed business cards. My name in black so it will never leave.

"You only got here by running. Running away."

I got here because I didn't know what else to do. It's a shame really. The best years of my life are now, and all because I had nothing else to shoot for.

Manner'd stories.

There was talk of the outdoors. Camping and someone spotting a deer. There were two sandhill cranes with the deer, standing four feet tall, necks dipped in a shallow pool heavy with minnows. Another voice came in to offer pictures. A loose group in parkas killing a small fire. Some one was laughing. A young woman held another at the shoulders. Holding the figure down close to the fire. The gender of the figure was unknown. In the flat shapes of a photograph sex is no matter anyway.

The man who had seen the cranes had a wife. The man with photographs had a girlfriend. These elements held together their stories. A story of the lonely man, someone free of connection, is merely a desperate story of someone trying to make something happen. These women had seen and lived along side the moments, their friends as well.

I overheard someone talk about cooking. The way to slice freshly butchered meat. Salt helps. Massage it with your knuckles. This is for keeping it tender. This is for its taste.

"What'd you do this weekend? Shoot off any fireworks from the beach?"

"I kept busy."

"Oh. All right. Sounds good."

I don't lie. I had kept busy. Nonsense and still moments. Phone calls to machines and driving through tunnels to find the heat that was supposed to mark summer.

I found a garage full of men who liked to talk about guns. Their daughters ran through the driveway up into the house to find their mothers, and in the backyard there was food. These men had more children on the way and someone mentioned a wedding at the lake. They would fly up there and that was the plan. The wives kept me in the sun, and they shaded their pregnant bellies.

"Someone asked if I was packing. I said yeah and he wanted me to be his bodyguard. He knew I could shoot. He knew whatever came out of my gun wouldn't be no bullshit."

"I got the wife a little pistol. She wanted it in the trunk, but I said what good is it going to do you there? When you're dead body gets packed in your brains can rest on the butt?"

"It's got to be in the glove compartment."

"Or under the seat."

"Or holstered around your ankle."

"These are all good ideas."

The beer ran out and I drove for more. The streets were wide and empty. The store was full of kids picking through shelves of candy. These tiny bits of sugar will be replaced with alcohol in fifteen years if they're lucky.

The cellphone rang and it was my dad. He wanted to let me know that he was home and I was welcome over. I listened to it again before erasing the message. It was too hot to think about going anywhere else.

When the work week came again I heard about the cranes and I heard about the deer. The pictures I saw once and didn't know anyone involved. But I had plans. There were written actions on a notebook in my bag. It listed all the things I could do. I could do it all. The time is there and the money is there and the plans are there. I am here too.

What gave you.

I won't mention the weather. I won't go into the fog and the sun, the climate of a wintery summer. Experience is best. Be in it. Live it. Fight for it. Travel and dig. There might not always be friends but there will always be places to take as your own.

Free milk for free babies.

Keep the children in the park. They will know games. If they don't know any, they will create them. Tossing blades of grass. Stomping petals. Maybe numbers will be involved. Stems. Roots. Counting bushes.

These children have no parents. Born of their own free will from solid earth and pebbles of granite. These children believe in fairies and sprites. Of course they do because, there they are.

The girl. She will wear off white. The boy. Dressed in black. Dirt and rubbed green will look the same on each. After a few days of this, the girl will want the boy to be her brother. The boy will want the girl to be his wife. At night they will rest on rocks, boulders to their size and they will dream. They will be images of people twice their size with the voices of guarded animals. They will have no idea what this means.

Center'd birdcages.

There are enough sayings of love that no more are needed. It exists and there it is. Bottom empty laughter. Dry smiles. With so many people living in this world it is no surprise when their emotions lack interest. A grand scale market of generic life. Schools of thought that began as single minded thoughts and those thoughts gifted the world with repeating the ideas that have been common ground since the first word was spoken or written down.

When I imagine a person of my complete making they are ruled by motion and action. They don't feel but they carry heavy wooden sticks, dense bats like rough tree branches. This man has many kills. This woman has many curves. The simple mold of beast and beauty.

This can be filed under "blah blah blah."

So the man grows in inches and feats of strength. He can now pull himself to the sun. The woman now grows more supple. Pure sensation. Flush erotic burn.

And I make them both better than me. Intelligence marked by movement not words. Hiding is ruled out and all the mistakes I've made they will beat me for. In whatever world they exist in, they are the crowned. For their fables they use me as the pig, the wolf. The tired elephant. She paints with her hair on sanded concrete canvases. He spits on graves. My life as the joke and the bad example. The man at the podium with the piece of paper. Talking. Pants pinched tight in the crotch. Sweat and words.

In the real world I'm blacked in tattoo. Stamps of ceremony that mark the words that need be forgotten. Soon I will be out of language and all I will have left is my empty mouth and full mind. The moment when I will no longer be able to make promises. the moment I will no longer be able to say what I feel. Conversation will take shape. Waiting for the answer in someone else's body.

Run. Let your body take you where it many.

A gift for your passive voice.

The wind shakes the windows but the sun heats the room. I know If I were outside a jacket would be necassary, but in here I'm slowly growing damp.

Two flights will take off this summer. My mom heads south, my dad heads west in order to reach the east. Dad is planning his goodbyes. My sister was given his last will and testament. I was asked to promise to keep him in my prayers. I promised.

"You can sit down if you have to. I know it was a long walk, seeing as you've given up your car."

Dad was upset that I am now without self-motivated transportation. I ride the buses and call for taxis. This isn't what he knows in the suburbs.

"The city isn't as empty. The streets are tight and you can only see as far as the next block."

"It's a shame. That's all."

He doesn't understand why I am here but he thinks it might be the right thing. He wants to believe becuase he has heard it being said to me. There is no use in explaining there is no place for me in the suburbs, there are no cramped studio apartments to share along the train line. There is no such thing as walking distance to the beach or work.

He knows the freeways. The tollbooths and gas stations of the off ramps. Stopping off at the grocery store for dinner. Meat. Vegetable. Feeding the family on the way home.

Now he packs for his summer vacation. His first time out of the country. He says he wants to see those rocks that stand up. Stonehenge.

He offers the house. "It will be empty for a month you know."

Yes, I know.

"You can barbecue and swim in the pool. Have friends over if you want."

I will.

My mom left for her vacation already. I called her phone and left a message. I heard back from her. Turns out Indian reservations don't allow you have your cellphone on.

Sidelines and the protocol of distance.

the length of the drive doesn't matter. It lasted from the coast all the way to the interior of Northern California. It was measured in daylight. In hunger pangs and money spent. The hotel was just under the major highway of a snowcapped mountain. This was a skiing town. Families and couples with fiberglass boards and skis tucked in backseats and strapped to the roofs of cars. I had enough clothes for four days including a black suit for the wedding and a nice outfit for a dinner out. This was the middle trip, miles from home and miles from where I set out to be. In another day I would be out of this state and passing through two others. I could have changed my mind and headed east into the desert and come out the other end into the midwest. Continuing on through a number of states I've never been to, seeing cities I won't recognize.

I want to see New Orleans. Swamps and swarms of insects and late nights of drinking and music from cartoons and films from the twenties.

Not this trip. I was to see two people commit themselves to each other and it mattered because it was to be done in a church. The man presiding over the ceremony, the priest, had spent a great deal of his life learning God. He was to include God in everything and if he were to cook he would add God into the recipe. So now he was going to bind this man and woman in marriage and he would include God in that as well. This is what he set his life to do. Everything is made holy with the proper use of people of the cloth.

The young man who gave me the room attended the community college that was tucked around the bend of the mountain. He was there to ski, he said. All he wanted to do was spend his time in the snow.

"Are you any good?"

"I don't fall as much as I did last season."

"Good enough."

I should attend his wedding. I'm already prepared. Clothes and the mindset of a distant observer. I will grant him the use of my eyes and my heart, so in another plain God will hear this inside of me, this marriage, and keep it safe since it was witnessed by so many it must be valid. Instead I had chosen to drive through the Pacific Northwest to another wedding that will end the same as when this young man gets married. If I could commit, this could be the first instance of a new life. Wandering from wedding to wedding, granting couples the gift of my witness. Inside I can hold them. Get another suit. A new credit card for gas and airline tickets. Easy to pull luggage.

It wasn't snowing where I was. Only in the mountains. It would be months before the temperature will bring the rain, then the snow. These are the seasons.

Revoltist.

I won't stand at chain linked fences, and I won't wonder what actions take place beyond high grounded cement walls. Buildings dressed in iron bars don't hide. They stand and dare you to figure out their purpose.

Beyond that fence? Green grass. Past those walls? Orchards.

The buildings at the center of California are visible from the freeway. Miles away. A distance that could take two days to walk. When you find yourself at the doors someone will ask you for a pass. A box will want a numbered code. There will be a black metal beam with a deep slit that will unlock doors once a card with a magnetic strip passes through. Red light blinks. Access denied. Green light blinks. Access granted. This is the rule of permissions. Places you belong and places that belong to no one are cared for differently. That patch of green grass? Climb the fence. Cut the wire. Vandalism. Criminal. A threatening sign will warn you. Someone knows it can be easily taken away. Secret properties. The truth of ownership locked in a file somewhere.

The building will turn you away. It will inform you that you don't belong. Your name isn't found in the registry of people that perform a function it needs.

I'm only saying don't buy land.

I'm only saying build yourself as an enterprise.

I'm only saying build yourself into something that doesn't need to be protected, but protects.

Borrow'd.

"Orpen. I'm here, I'm supposed to be."

I showed him the way down the hall, into the small soundbooth. He had been doing this for more than forty years of his life and this was only his second appearance out of retirement. I knew he was great. That's what I heard. When the stories came out about his life's work, the advertising he created, it was understood that his legacy was not to be mocked. He made a dent in this city and once he removed himself his myth filled the mouths of those that remembered him as the man that they saw in taxis and elevators.

It was quiet except for his voice. It had the depth of tone that can only be described as volcanic. Plates of earth slowly falling about themselves, bodies with no mouths to speak or ears to hear, formless and prehistoric shapes crumbling, their volume created by constantly settling sheets of rock. I imagined Orpen's voice erupting like that, curdling in his stomach, his intestines, acid mixed with the creaking of bones, the esophogus weak and light from years of speaking violently, then the sound gently folds out over his gray teeth and yellowed lips.

Orpen's body stood hunched and wrinkled at the microphone. An old bird stalking, knowing that it doesn't need to see the horizon to understand that its prey has no where else to go.

He read his pages and his voice was recorded, to be cabled somewhere else. Again he read the same words in the same order, slight variations that no man could hope to control like the clicking of his throat and pisk of spittle in the corners of his mouth. He used every sound he could make to speak those words and make them strong.

We listened to him read one last time and all the words made sense. He was speaking of horses.

Magic and guidelines.

Where is the joy you bring? Can it be brought up from within you, like undigested food, or when you are too full of water? There is always a visual representation of moments, of things remembered that you don't want to remember. High school bares a shape and a sound. It's the low rumble of a large throat and the chattering of teeth. The heavy back and fur of a bear rolling like hills. There's no time to recall facts and faces. Those true moments between people and I don't care to try.

What I do know is that I couldn't fall asleep last night when all I could think about was a white bridge of light and heat sliding its way across the sky. Inside the streak was a ribbon of red, a vein that sat a quarter of the way down. It made no noise and although it charred through the countryside, it did so like it were butter.

If I can answer my own question I will because I know this is the shape of you. This was the joy of us and when I try to play back moments of our time I can't. This is all I see.

How did we begin? I don't know.

What were we doing our first weekend together?

What was the weather like?

When did we first kiss?

I don't remember but I will give it to you, this complement. Back when you knew how you were pure energy and light. Back when your teeth were small and their tops were ridged with silver peaking over your lips your smile changed everything.

Back when you believed there was something special inside of you there was.

Goodnight Sweet, goodnight.

Wouldn't it be nice to have nights where no one speaks but a smile acts its way into your heart?

I don't have to ask, I know it would.

Joy. Happiness. Defeat. Pt. III

Some things are not perfect. They can be, but they are not. There needs to be control in one's life, the ability to steer your way through shit and sauna. As each day passes, there are new reasons to discard useless objects. Useless feelings. Useless ideas. What I want more often than not is a girl, someone to be there when I tire of being alone. This want out weighs the possibility, and does so more and more each day.

So to seek perfection is not useless. It might be an unreachable goal, even an arrogant goal for one to have, but that is for others to say to themselves. Everyone can blame me for my arrogance, for my dream to be greater than them. I don't mind arrogance. I don't mind hoping that I'll die a better person than I was born because whoever said babies contain the answers to the world was a liar. Their innocence is a lack of knowledge. Without thought and knowledge they lack will and without will they are no different than a rock. We are all born brainless and weak. Evil. All we can do is seek something better, a bit of perfection and along the way damn the children that get born.

Simple maps.

She said she could sing and I believed her. It was easier than having to hear her demonstrate her vocal tones. From the back of the car she pounded her fists against my head rest, laughing, the sharp points of her heels digging into the vinyl that covered the driver's seat.

"What do you want to hear? I'll sing it. I'll sing that song. Whatever it is."

"You're blurring my vision. I can't see when you do that."

"Focus, motherfucker."

This was a friend of a friend. A lineage that wasn't of any pedigree. It was similar to going to the race track and reading about the horses, who they were fathered by and how many races that horse had won. It was supposed to matter. The victories of its family were to be its own. Carried over through blood and genes. This girl, this friend of a friend, had no such luck. How I knew her was through a string of faces that I recognized and didn't find all that repulsive. In the bars we laughed and each of us disappeared when that fun was over.

This was an outside favor. A simple drive to the airport because she didn't have a car. She didn't have anything. This girl slept on the floors and couches of the people she met.

"Why don't you sit in the front seat?"

"My voice will sound better back here. It's called reverb. It's called spacial distance."

"Is your brother picking you up?"

"I think so. I got to call him."

"You want to call him now? To make sure?"

"Why are you so worried?"

"I'm not. Just thought I'd ask."

"He knows I'm flying in today. I can't say we really ironed out the details. He's my brother. He'll feel me. We have linkage. Mentally I mean. We don't read minds or anything, we just drop each other clues and then our minds do the work to put the pieces together."

"What does your brother do?"

"He's a courier. He drives around dropping off blue prints and legal forms for a group of contractors and architects. See? He's connected. His natural instinct is to eliminate divided peoples. His truest quality carried over into his job. He's not separated into halves, day and night, work and play. It all comes from and into the same place. I like that idea."

I could feel her fists massaging up and down the seat, pushing into the material as far as she could, forcing the springs slowing into my back.

"What do you do?"

"I sing."

"Professionally?"

"Of course. If I didn't then it wouldn't be what I do. I would have said receptionist. Therapist. It's acceptance that counts. The one with the most eyes on them has the most worth."

Her side window rolled down, and with her face in the wind she sang. With the constant pulse of the wind, hard and concrete waves of accelerated breeze, her voice was a distant shout only inches from my ear.

She was a pretty girl. If she wasn't I wouldn't have allowed her in my car. A simple fact. Beauty hides the flaws of a corrupt personality. I was doing my part. There is the role of the man that fawns over a beautiful face, the man who seeks to touch it and call it his own. At a distance she made a decent object for affection.

A recognizable fact that could be used in case I felt something for someone in the future and needed a point of reference. I could always tell myself, "Remember driving that girl to the airport? See -- you have made attempts to be close to someone."

Silent fits.

There was no mistaking the sound of the running shower. Behind the closed door the water beat against the tile, it beat against the body of whoever was in there. From my bedroom I could smell the hot shampoo push from under the door. The crack was quite large, letting the heat and odor seep out. I fell onto my bed and on the blankets I splayed out my arms and legs, the bones of an immovable kite. The shower became quiet and I slowed my breathing until it stopped. I wanted to hear the radio above me on the windowsill. The radio was better than putting on a record. I wanted the disruptive static of an unobtainable frequency. To barely make out the singing, like the words hovered over the percussive dissonance of the lost airwaves.

I knew no one should be home. That was the plan. That was why I had moved in. For the reassuring sensation of loneliness. Ean was expected at his parent’s house all weekend. We spoke the night before about his plans to sleep in his parent’s bed while they were on vacation. His desire to take his girlfriend there and play out the roles of husband and wife. He would mow the lawn as she did their laundry. He would come through the kitchen door, his skin full of short grass and beads of itching sweat. There would a sandwich and maybe some soup on the table that she had made.

He was going to fuck her on his parent’s bed. Feel her up and bend her over the dresser so she could see the old elementary school portraits of him and his sister. We had gotten drunk and Ean explained ho he wanted his girlfriend to wear his mother’s underclothes. The worn and ragged bras that he had watched dry hanging over the shower curtain when he was young. The bathroom sink full of detergent and panties. Slowly wearing away with time. The inside cusp of the panties colored with aged bloodstains.

"You know what I’m going to do? Tada. I’m going to create magic. Tada. Mysteries of girls are going to be gone, no more questions and no more lies. No more stories about this and that. It will all be pretend and by time we go to bed she would’ve gained years just by being in that house."

Ean had a family picture in his wallet. Mom. Dad. Sister. A little Ean all together against the gray backdrop of the photographer’s studio. This is what he was trying to escape when he was sober, but in the evenings, as the bottles emptied, he spoke of re-enacting his family’s purities. Those moments and sensations that give you life, that make you realize being someone’s son and someone’s brother is a goal and a challenge unto itself.

I heard footsteps at my doorway. I Faced the wall and pretended to be sleeping. The door creaked a bit, and the carpet crumbled under the weight of feet and legs. A dense torso and hanging arms. The imaginary body that I was avoiding. I wanted to stay pretend asleep. I didn’t know how long it could last before I would laugh or feel guilty enough to turn over.

"Hey."

I rolled on my back, squinting my eyes to continue in my play. Caroline was wrapped in all the towels we had. The blue beach towel was around her head and she had two hotel towels around her body. Her legs dripped on my carpet.

"Aren’t you supposed to be out of town? Gone?"

"I had to shower first. I was at the beach all day. I hate the feeling of the salt and sand all over."

"Ean wanted you to shower over there. He had plans. You’re ruining his visions."

"I can always shower again. I don’t rust."

"He won’t like knowing there was a pre-game wash-up."

"He won’t notice."

"Sure he will. There’s soap. There's shampoo. Shaving cream and razor burns. Scents that go well with hot water and skin and don't leave."

"I didn’t wash. I only rinsed. Can I take this?"

She clenched a shirt off the ground in between her toes, lifting it up to her hands.

"Will I get it back?"

"Of course."

"Will you wash it?"

"Don't you like the way a woman smells?"

"You're smell doesn't belong to me."

"What about my voice? They both just hang in the air."

"Smells are private. Pornographic. A voice is in the public domain once it's ordered and paid for."

"I think you misunderstand the concept of privacy."

"You're dripping on my carpet. We have a mildew problem."

"You can turn always turn the way someone speaks into something more, something mental. Th sensual shapes of vowels. They say accents are sexy. They say a deep voice triggers the ticking clock. It's biology. "

"I was going to take a nap and listen to the radio. It was a vague plan, but still a pretty solid one. It's all I have."

"Should I leave you to it?"

She pulled the shirt on and shimmied the damp towel down around her hips, tightening and tucking the cloth into itself.

"Did you need pants too?"

"I'm much too big for your clothes."

She went through the hallway and I didn't hear the sound of a door close. She was in Ean's room at that moment, dropping the towel completely, letting go of the privacy she didn't care about. All I had to do was step out of my bedroom and I could see all of her. It was nothing I wanted to do because I wanted to sleep. I wanted to be asleep during the day and I hoped and prayed that the sun would wake me before it went away.

I knew what was happening. Getting restless. Getting anxious. Not for violence and not for action because there was nothing to expect. There were hours to be dealt with and sleeping is the only thing that can do away with it.

Garden parties.

"Just don't leave. Don't leave because you have to, don't go because of a wish placed by someone else. Don't be that thin, that light and able to travel from mouth to mouth, on a hook between two men."

"He said he misses me."

"What does that matter? It doesn't. He doesn't. What do you want? Do you think he matters?"

"Everyone matters."

"What? No they don't. Not to me. I don't know everyone. I don't know him, I know you. I have these feelings for you because I know you, because of who you are -- and this guy? He's nothing to me. If I needed him he'd be a phone number and name in a phonebook. He's not lost, he's just not real."

"Well, I try to be nice to everyone. Wouldn't you like it if some stranger was nice to you? If some girl just came up to you and smiled, handed you a sticker or something? Wouldn't you like that?"

"It would be nice but it would be empty. You have a girl capable of a great love walking up to a stranger and giving him a pat on the fucking back, and why? So she can feel good, that she is so nice to be kind to strangers? It's nothing. A gesture for her own warm heart."

"What are you saying?"

"This is nothing. This is a party for those that can't sleep at night. Or sleep too well."

"You don't smile as much anymore. I used to make you smile."

Things will end here. Anymore and the gates of the property will lock us all in. Too many people coming in and out stealing secrets. This garden party was meant for gentle friends on a weekend afternoon. Now we're gutted in the evening. On a Sunday when we should be warm in bed, slightly hungover and watching the walls, seeing your hair in corner of my eye. That happened once before when we stopped talking, ended up in a bedroom somewhere, off of maps and knowledge. But for once the weekend couldn't last. Not enough hours, too difficult to stay drunk and unable to make things work, my week will start with a broken heart.

Discard.

A beard can hide the face from chin to cheek. the mouth disappears. The cut of the jaw will either be enhanced or completely lost, depending on the wearer's syle. Nevermind style. It only exists for a fraction of a second. Style lasts as long as you stay in one spot and never leave. The style of one region will not translate elsewhere, because its only truth is when it is recognized by others as such. There are tasks such as conformity and individuality at play, both have nothing to do with this. The curse of style is its short life span that cannot fit into the timelessness that is history.

I have no photographs of myself. A few are around from family events, but my own personal collection does not exist. I want to see if when I am old and about to die if anything I had done lasted. Photographs are for those that fear they will be forgotten, or the fear that they will forget. I want to trust my mind and heart to keep those moments close that a picture tries to do. "Remember last night? Remember the last time we were here?" A photograph can answer these questions. The piece of paper replaces your responsibility. You can toss out the memory becuase the photograph holds it for future nostalgia. The beard. It is the evolution of the caveman. Without photographs I know that at the dead body of a dinosaur, its meat and blood were engrained in the hairs of that man's face.

I enjoy the past. I enjoy the future. But those two timeframes get lost in the now. I want to live in both of them so I can slip through the world like a rock, a tree, a forest. To go completely unnoticed and mesh into the air. This is what style goes against. It ties you to an idea that will vanish and cycle itself into a new image. A new photograph. A new you. Inconsistent and damaged.

An ending magic.

Like the cover of a tree, the canopy of rain hung above my head as a solid mass. It was amazing how the streets turned to creeks, great distances of rock and water. The city had become the landscape of where I had grown up. Instead of the mountains and the oak trees there were towers and banks, buildings of offices where every move mattered. Steps were measured in blocks and streets bypassed charm for necessity with numbers as names. It was left to math and geometry to help us find our way. We move by thought and simple ideas.

In the rain I could see clearly what I was trying to do. There is a straight line drawn from me to the train, and I would accept any attempt by God to try and stop me. Proper defiance is an act of honor, respect paid to the elements. The sky wasn't falling, it was the earth that was rushing up towards the clouds, through the ceiling of rain.

On every corner I waited with small crowds of men and women under umbrellas. These people remained dry, uselessly defiant. The rain filled the gutters and painted their feet the color of soggy wood. I saw her in a red raincoat, one that would forever keep her tied to this year in the timeline, hiding under the orange fabric of her umbrella. She was all heavy wool and cotton, and her umbrella was a weight of soaked vinyl. I prayed she would offer me some space with her, under there, a flick of her arms and I would be clear of the rain. It was only us, standing inches from passing buses and taxis. It would be easy to just speak to her. To ask her for her name, to laugh at the rain, to offer a hand across the street. In her face I couldn't find what I was looking for. For hope, for an interesting manner that would give away any bit of truth of who she was, or who she wanted to be.

This woman gave up on dreaming, and I could not find what she wanted. She was done working and besides that nothing seemed to be happening to her. There was no wedding ring or gym bag. Just a large sack of blue three-ring binders. Every morning this bag was taken across the bay, I knew it was, even if she wouldn't tell me. But what would she tell me? There was no voice I could make up for her because her mouth was coated in red melted wax. Unreal and unlike a baby being born. All over her, the skin of her body was separated from the root of her life. It was false and meant nothing.

She was swollowed by the great mouth of the buildings, taken along the slim hallways and elavator lines, and even being inside of it she missed the point of what she was doing. Of what it meant. Her heart wasn't on her sleeve, it wasn't even in her body. She had given it up because of something she couldn't understand. That we are the work. We are the machines. Our every hour is moving towards something, and if not, there is no reward. The will power of progress needs to be seen, to break through our skin and burn.

A sharp twist of red light hung off the side of a bank, and beyond that was the glow from a window. There was five dollars in my wallet and I stepped into the pub, excited by the rain. The customers grew heat and gave it away and soon my hair was dry. I laughed and knew that I had found something that would bring me no loss. I found a few inches of ground to stand, and quickly I was gone. Too deep in the crowd to escape, I was with them now and away from what I didn't want to see anymore. That woman and her emptiness. Her lack of importance. I was among bodies that ate and drank. These customers, men and women with teeth, with hands of ten fingers, they were there to tear through the streets and static to create themselves a new home. Each hand raised, a rake lifted by the levers and pulleys of muscle and blood, ligaments to bone that churned, engines, motors, iron meat fisted lives. These hands were everywhere. I had found mine with those inches of ground I stood, I had made my home. It will be with me as long as I can keep moving.

Joy. Happiness. Defeat. Pt. II

There's only a handful of hours until midnight, and if I could push the sunlight away I would. That would take moving stars, planets. Gas and rock and even God. I could do it. I have to believe it is possible or what is the use of dreaming it.

When tomorrow comes, and it will, I will try something new. A smile, a brave stretch of the arms up to break the sky. Although today is going quite smoothly, there has been no disruption in the great trail of events, it lacks a grand scale moment like tomorrow promises.

Of warm weather.

For everyone that drowned, I say I am sorry. I don't know why I am. Sadness never hit and any sense of guilt passed me by, but I can only assume that the inability to breath water must hurt. The weight of water pushing against the lungs, I know the lungs, they are a soft organ, and this pressure stings like dynamite burns. From the edge of the water I saw the group of children, every odd second a head would bob up and I never counted more than five faces at a time. They went in clueless. All of them disgusted by the taste of salt water and the feeling of the oceanic earth under their feet. It is not the sterile and pure environment of a swimming pool, no, this is the constant flush of the regional water, the shit and grime of dead fish and the living's own excess. Soon the heads stopped popping up and I missed watching the waves beat them about. It was bright daylight and dogs splashed their legs in the sandy water, their coats thick with the mess of brown mud. No one was watching these dogs and I could only guess that their owners were far off at the other end of the beach. The shimmer and gauze of figures pocked the other end where the road took into the mountain. A path followed the road and those that were seeking the height of the cliff, to stand over edge and watch the distant rocks be still against the rough waters. A building stood atop the cliff where the tourists could go to eat and read the history of the neighborhood as it was etched in metal plaques on the courtyard of the building. The history was vague yet straightforward like the telling of a war. Men fought and died, land was burned. All of the facts minus reasoning. I looked back and a group of men had taken to the water, reaching for the bodies of children. I wanted to shout out, "They're too far gone. It's over. Let them dissolve."

They're too far gone to be alive.

They easily pulled in the two bodies of young girls. The men laid them on their backs side to side, an arrangement for a better understanding of the situation. They could see that one girl was taller by a few inches, both blonde and a good guess was they were sisters or such great friends that they assimilated into one look. The group of men lined the girls as tall trees of meat dripping wet and shivering. Through the huddling bodies I could see a red shirt hover over the girls, arms everywhere over the pale dead skin, the man in the shirt was mouth to mouth with one of the girls. The tide had washed away the footprints of the race to find the children and I wondered what happened to all those dogs. They must have found their way home or had enough of the water. Two men flanked an elderly woman and guided her through the sand. Her steps were longer than theirs and the men stood behind her a few inches with their hands on her back, holding her up with a push. I stepped aside to let them pass and I asked the man closest for a cigarette.

"I don't smoke."

The woman turned to me, handing me a cigarette.

"I'm out of matches, I'm sorry. I hope you have a lighter."

"I'll find one."

She had been crying but not enough to know if one of the kids was hers. The bright daylight warmed the air and I wrapped my sweater around my waist. This was turning out to be a perfect Saturday afternoon.

This day, the week has ended.

A fire started in the building across the street this last Monday. The workers evacuated and stood outside. A group huddled in front of the furniture store, one by the cafe, and another under the banner of the Japanese bar. A few stood at their building's doorway, perhaps in the hope that the fire wouldn't mean anything other than a short interruption. Everyone watched from the street corners, these four great points of commerce, as fire engines parked along the steep sidewalk.

"Fire, huh?"

"Don't know yet. We're waiting to hear the word."

"What word?"

"Fire. Until I hear that word it doesn't exist. Fire."

"Good luck. I hope it happens."

Three large brass knobs linked the brick building to the hoses that were pulled into the windows. This building was equipped with the ability to save itself, a storage of water and an adapter to syphon it out.

"That's incredible."

"Really is. In an earthquake the skeleton inside will sway with the pulses of the ground. An intimate connection. The steel reads the shape of the earth. I'd call it a dance but that sounds gay."

"Hurricane. Tidal wave. Volcanic eruption. Security can't fight the whim of nature."

"This bitch gets tighter than the mouth of God. When the end hits, we'll float away like goddamn Noah's Ark."

A few days into the week and the clean up crew are still there. Yellow tubes funnel the charred, water logged guts of the building into iron tubs. The men and women who have a job to do show up each morning only to be turned away. The machines they need were ruined by flames and water. I imagine they all tramp to the closest bar to drink until 5pm. If they do not, I don't see how they can survive another day.

Little fat babies.

All the little fat babies of the world are a threat to the old. They will begin to conquer once they learn to speak. Nevermind the cute faces, because they have teeth. Forget the smiles, because there are tongues back there. A first word from a child comes without warning. It will be honest and true, if not clumsy. For years they cry and when they talk, a mouth opens and says, "Why?" The old man, too stubborn to answer to a baby will answer, "Because I said so."

And there is the beginning of the plight of the old. For soon the young will search for answers and once they are found out, the old man will be at once proven wrong and will be unable to explain himself. He will then lose his ability to speak. The old man will die knowing it was he who should have never stopped asking "Why."

Evil.

I only have so much, and that which is mine, shall I repeat? Is mine. My hands are out as well, but my feet are moving. The anvil has many uses, one is to purposefully shape and the other is to righteously disconfigure. I much prefer an anvil over an umbrella. Let the rain come and I will beat it to death.

Cheers to a new forever.

It was raining but I kept walking, because, if I stopped I would have to realize I had nowhere to go. I had enough to see, the streetlights kept the gray sidewalk paved in that orange that was built for this time of night, something to help along the street cars and odd taxi too far away from the city, bringing someone home to the shore. These streets pretend to keep going, but they never keep that promise.

I knew it was cold, I could feel it but not enough to where it hurt. The rain came steady but my skin stayed dry. I thought of the water, the ocean, and if it would be warm enough to swim in. If I fell in could I find my way back. The waves never look large enough to do any damage, but I know they can and I want to see it. To threaten the face of the water and hope it will take the form of a horse and crush me under that image. Hooves and bones, salt and unseen deepsea fish. I want the sound of the water in my ears, the pressure and lack of gravity. To fight back and breath in as much water as I could fit inside of me, and throw it all up on the porch of a house I had passed.

There were people I knew I would never see again, the ones that would never find me or care to look. These people I have known are gone now, in some way. Their faces I brought up in the dimness of my forehead, on the inside screen of my skull. I fought each one. I destroyed each person over and over. It was only pain, it was only words I could use, and there is only satisfaction in shock and tears. Their body would slag, their eyes would stay red, then I would refresh its shape and go again. I emptied hearts. There were actions that needed to be taken responsibility for. Someone -- her, me, all of us, needed to know our blame. We had all done wrong and there is nothing that can turn back time for us now.

I charged on in these funerals, killing all that I have loved and when I found my way home my shoes were wet, my socks, and pants. I got into bed and wished that I hadn't woken up at all. There is nothing I can do, there is nothing that I can hold and make the future seem bright, but here it is, the start of a new year.

Unwanted hours.

No one can smile like you. No one keeps it quiet. If you can remember, you have many points on your body. Angles that meet like the shape of your nose, its tip ready to cut through paper. If you let me remember, you have no curves, just a series of cylinders coming together. It's all math and I can't follow numbers. I can only close the curtains and turn off the lights, pray that the sunlight can make it through and put the shadows on you where they belong. Bring you to life in every state. All those dimensions that are used to determine the distance and time it would take to travel. To gauge acceleration and the resources it would take to keep going.

Any dip in you is the fight between your rib cage and pelvis. The outward burst from inside of you, jutting bones and skin. These are not curves. I swear. Your smile, its brutal. It's action. I would call you gentle but I don't understand the word. I would call you difficult but that would only be out of my desire to create for you a world where you are the queen. The fist and eye that dissolves panic. I can say all of this because I still have your photograph, one that made it out of my years of being distant. This is all I have and now I can hold it and recall, but all of this recollection is a creation. I know this because I have changed your voice and your laughter in these daydreams. I've made you a heavy breather and a soft talker. I've made your hands hold my face and you speak into the pit of my collarbone. Where each word you use means exactly what you are trying to say. There is never a moment where you are unclear. What this picture lacks I can build. It is all here, somewhere, tucked away or buried, a burned out building of old wood and vanilla colored drapes.

These points on your body, this is the fury and the pace at which you exist. Even when you are still there is the movement in you that is beyond me. I could call you natural but that is only my wish for you. I could call you ideal but that is a burden you will never carry because we have ruined the chance of it by talking. Once you speak you lose the ability to have your body do your communicating. If we meet again, in our first handshake, between the ever-changing lines in our palms and the heat of living skin, will be the proof that you belong to me.

What is not lost.

My father has a talent for stillness. He can sit and only breathe. I love him and wish he would jump, tumble, hold tight to doors, swing his arms and drop valueable things. Instead he is a delicate man in the corner, under the Christmas tree. I know there are things that he wants from me; moments, proper responses, a report on my life as a physical dispay of my work. He wants to see my future and see it now. To witness my wedding and the grandkids that he will have. Maybe one will be a boy? Maybe I will name him after my father?

To his questions I can only say, "No, Dad." Perhaps he is disappointed, his dreams for me larger than what I have achieved. In his heart he holds a timeline, a signature of blood that is the design for what the coming years should bring to me. I have my dreams for him as well. I want to see him out of the chair, to put the book down and step outside. I want to see him take up fishing and not with the expectation that I will join him but because it is a decision he would make for his own enjoyment, for his own happiness. When the conversation turns to his retirement he offers to pay for my new bed, a new car, a heater for my apartment. I tell him no, I have money. I tell him what I've been eating and he gives me a few bags full of food.

I am his hobby. He is there as the gaurentee that I will be okay. I can only except this and while he prays for my future, I will pray for his.

Afternoons, over and done with.

The loving Asian girl is a mythical ideal that I strongly adhere to. The one who will follow you through hallways, unseen, just to appear seconds before the door is to close. This girl, the one I have seen, did just this. We had lunch at a bistro along the shore. On the edge of the water a great grey ship was dipped deep like a statue. Covered in the haze that distance creates, its green and blue metal disappearing into a slight film, a ghost of sizable shape and size killed by the miles it held. At the same point were the rocks of the upper-western tip of the shore, a far off city that I couldn't tell its name from the edge of its face. We drank and then we ate. I heard about Japan and the fears that turned into a dream to work hard and leave the country, for a school here, along the Pacific Ocean.

There was too much silence and when I tried to talk I said nothing I wanted to hear. I didn't recognize my own voice because it was too deep and too serious. I only thought of vodka, bloody marys in the afternoon. She ate her salad and had a perfect view of the ocean, the surfers, and the cars that funneled along the tight highway up the coast to a forgotten historical spot. The sun kicked in my eyes, and I held my hand over my face to see the proper colors and shapes in the restaurant. This girl was soft and in a matter of hours I had forgotten that she had trouble speaking English until I thought of the fact that she had little trouble speaking English. I laughed and didn't bother telling her why.

"Is your family still in Japan?"

"Yes, some of them."

"Dear God, that's vague."

"My oldest sister is in Spain."

"I can find my way back to my parents within a distance of forty miles."

"Forty miles, I don't?"

"I'll see them in an hour. As long as they're home."

"Good."

"Good."

It wasn't long before I decided I was much too big for her. A giant man of words and over drawn facial masks. I could cry and my tears would drown her. My anger so bright she would fall apart, the oils in her joints drying, crumbling, a picture of the sun wetting the shell of an egg. When the bill came I dropped my credit card and heard the Christmas carol being played over the small speakers above the hostess's desk. It was a quiet interpretation of Jingle Bells with Spanish guitar. Our waitress came back and said something; maybe gave a thank you, good day, it was a pleasure, and her voice rang out over the plucked strings . She had blonde hair and I couldn't hold back the thought that I had never kissed a blonde girl.

Figures of the bedroom

On the third tier of friendship sits the ones that can do you no harm. Those that you love idly, the common and mostly forgotten. I’ll hand them numbers and vague dates for future meetings, but when it is all added up I have given nothing. These are the “ones” that will never know my life, the insides, and in turn I do not own theirs. On this same cliff are those women, the girls, the faces and breasts that don’t love but smile just the same. For every drink and drunken night with the men, these girls show the divine talent of taking lust and of supplying the lust for those listless evenings when the empty tugs of aspiration leaves me standing in my room, wondering and hoping, for anything to happen that will change my world.

On these Sunday nights I worry about my hair. Is a haircut a week too much? Do I really, truly pray, to go bald? From the front of course. The distinguished cut of the widow’s peak. On a man, hair is the design of boredom’s waking hours. It means nothing and when a thing lacks meaning the consequences of if disappearing don’t linger. Off the unwanted. Kill that which only pretends to be useful. It is most disheartening, I find, that I cannot grow a decent beard. I anticipate that once I hit my forties the beard that I can grow will all of the sudden make sense. It will stop appearing as a disguise or costume and fit my life the way children and love will. One emotion that cannot be forgiven, forgotten, tossed aside, or recognized is love. It is a given, a number in an equation that is the constant, as repetitious as dividing hours by the number of days. There will always be 7 days a week, 365 days a week. There will always be love, so there is no need to shine a light upon it.

Just as my feet will always move my words will be best to stay inside my mouth, because, in all honesty, I love my mouth and that which it can do. And finally when all the light has gone and it's time to sleep I close my eyes and open my mouth below the covers and breath out, "God bless the beginning of the work week."

Lights

Things happen. Things get done and the people sleep. And even in joy there needs to be design, a line to follow, a light to train your eye to. Sinking is most dismal not when you look down, but when you forget to look up again.

Private dangers

I made it home last night in time to watch the ocean turn black and the scattered buildings on the shore to vanish. The action had stopped and I wanted to drink so I found my way home. It was better there, being home, in the cold. My jacket hung on the bedroom doorknob and in my head I counted how much cash I had. I saw three dollars. I made this money and I could see it as a unit of time. Those minutes that I sat at my desk and moved things around.

The words and sounds that I push, this is called work. After a few years this is called a career. I am not that deep inside yet. I still ride the surface and at any moment I will crack the paved roads and sink into the city's blood stream. A single release of a vitamin, a nutrient; one eye on one tone.

The apartment is clear of furniture and the rugs are stained. The Christmas lights were left on and in the night the smell of mildew is stronger. Black rots most windowsills and the shower is covered in it and I don’t much care. I don’t see it. I sleep past it. College is over and has been for two years. I have to remember this. The rooms around me are full of the living of other's education, that stripped and coarse study of ideas. Kids. I am not a kid anymore. I have to remember this as well. My jacket belongs to a suit. My work clothes. If I had worn this outfit when I was fifteen I would have heard, "He looks so cute. Like a little man. A boy in dress up." It is real now and no one is smiling when they see me, instead they hold out their hand to shake and they offer up their names.

This is what I have worked for even if I was never able to see it and from where I stood, in the hallway with my three dollars, all the sightless and voiceless fighting with the world was worth it and the moment was a triumph. I create concrete ideas and develop methods for making the abstract physical. To touch and feel ones work is the blessing of the modern world and before I fall asleep I took one final look across the rooftops to see the edge of the ocean. It is still there, still visible in darkness, and in that mass dissolves the bones of dinosaurs.

From the hours of eight to four in the morning.

The world approves of a man who sets fires and chases objects; animals, minerals, men, anything, down unnamed and darkened roads. It's your heaving chest and burning breath that keeps you going. To run in the cold is a new danger to the contemporary man, there is so much to keep you warm that we are weak and pneumonia could set in, and perhaps kill. The light bobbed in the paved road, his aim was no good with a flashlight. He reminded himself, "When my breathing gets too short, I will have to stop."

But he wasn't there yet. His pace was steady with his dress shoes skidding on the thin pebbles to help him along. As he ran he didn't know what to do with his arms. "I am no professional. That can't be faked." He saw himself running and knew he looked old. You cannot disguise the body of a middle aged man. It seemed his torso had grown since he hit his forties. This was bad. He became shapeless and fat. Wrinkles set in and he forgot about sex for months. "What was this? What is happening?" At the moment he is running. At this moment it is night out and he is running down this road and his tie is flapping around his neck. His jacket is bunching up in the pit of his arms. He focused and aimed the flashlight a small distance from his feet. The white puffs of air scared him. His body temperature was a true ninety-eight degrees and when that heat escaped and met the air, his life turned to chilled wind. "That was inside of me and not anymore. Keep it coming."

He lost sight of the man in front of him. At the start he saw his back and watched it become the sky in front of him. This never-ending street would keep him here, he thought. This hour will not change. It can't. As long as this street goes so will the hour, and then so will the dark that keeps it. Why hadn't he thought of sex? He always had. Women were his first thought of the day. He would wake in his bed and hope to see a friendly face next to him, and it never happened. Now he only thinks of it as this memory. About the times he cared and the moments he wanted someone to care. The years came quicker and left with ease and soon he was thirty and now that too is a memory.

He watched his running and thought of the way men run in cop shows on television. He formed the posture of an aging captain but settled on the technique of the grizzled beat cop. He saw it as New York. A city that he doesn't know. Men on television never run this far. They never have to keep going. They only trace the blocks. No one sweats as much as I do, he thought. I sweat a lot and it frees me. Like the air the sweat comes from my insides, imaginary water pouches in my gut.

"If there is magic in this world then I can keep it up, I can keep going and never stop. If I never stop I will never fail."

On both sides of the road he was surrounded by the shape of the black earth. It could be water. A forest of oceans. A crop of beaches. No animals made a sound so he huffed louder, deeper than the pitch of his footsteps, brighter than the push of the wind against him, tossing his jacket. With each bounding step he exhaled grunts and he didn't know why anyone would think the human body is a machine. It is too organic to control and it is ruled by will power. The similarities are apparent; the burning of calories for gasoline, the knobs of bones for gears, but what a machine lacks is what makes a man alive. The pressure of desires; lust, want, greed, love and the avoidance of pain. A machine runs because it has to, because someone decided it was necessary. A man runs because he wants it. The machine will go forever as long as it has power, an outlet to feed it constantly. It needs a symbiotic relationship with a completely unaware object. Like me, he thought.

I have the pressure that my heart gives me that is fed by a woman that doesn't know she is giving me the power to go on and on. If my breathing stops and my body cramps I will have to stop but my brain will keep repeating, "Go on, go on, go on, go on," and I will go on until my body shatters. No machine can do this. Once the cord is cut it dies. He was confused when anyone would discuss what it meant to take care of the body. It was too scientific. It lacked amazement. Problems broken down in schematics, diagrams and blood ratios. He ran with his eyes closed and watched the red and blue of his eyelids. When he opened them he missed the colors. He knew the morning was coming so he tried to think of machines again.

He wanted back inside his head so his body could do its job. The girl always kept him busy and free of pain. Whenever he thought of giving up he thought of her, and he knew he could never stop chasing what he wanted. At one time she was his and he never felt so involved in another person. Distances were common for him, but this girl had managed to let him be a part of her and she became a part of him. When she left he put himself inside his dreams and never left. Those nights when he was in college he kept at his studies by imaging her face being there when he got home. He did it to make her proud. This was after she had already found someone new but he left that out of his mind, he saved it for when he needed the heat of anger.

"I am all I need. I am all I need." He thought of castles and mansions and all he had to give, he thought of dogs, large dogs with deep coats and floppy ears. He saw everything he had ever wanted and all he never got. The flashlight cracked on the pavement and he lifted his arms above his head, palms up to the sky so the cold wind could dry the sweat. This girl, the one that was once his, is gone and he can't bring her back. He can give her all she could ever want, but only when he is alone. The road became wider and wooded posts lined the right shoulder. They held up grapevines and he could see the lines of dirt hatched in the vineyard. He turned away and saw the left shoulder was void of anything recognizable, the sun had yet to hit entirely and there was no way to know what was out there. He remembered driving the coast and stopping at beaches with her. They would tire of talking and sleep in the car and in the morning he would wake to find her still there.

"Hey, you're still here."

"Where would I go?"

I don't know, he thought. But you did. And here I am. The facts are over and I can only blame myself for all I've done. A confession is a breath of honesty that can charm and kill. That is all I know. What I say is what I take as the truth at the moment. I keep running and the sun keeps rising. Why is the sun rising? Moments need an eternity to live and all should be immortal.

"I need a statue. I need a monument."

She is the statue, I am the monument.

If he were to see himself in a photograph it would be a man he didn't recognize. The face is tight and the hair is a wet gray sheen. His clothes were all shredded paper laid over a burning fire of flesh and bones. His arms swung with weight and pushed him, the rocking of his torso helping his legs along. He was what he wanted to be. He drew from images of flowers and oceans to create the truth of who he was. He was not a machine but had elements of one. All he had was want. His desire was simple and heavy. This girl was poured into gold and lit against the sky that he ran against. The sky was cream and the vines dripped with dew and he knew it was morning. The pain in his legs went numb and his chest was full of hot air. All he forgot wasn't important now. It was what he wanted that kept him going. The world was orange; gold, fire, fresh sand, her skin. Layers of him fell away until all that remained was his beating heart and the quickness of his pace moving forward, forever heading in his single direction.

Joy. Happiness. Defeat.

It is unfortunate when you fail, when you lose something that at one point was all you ever wanted. You put your offer out there, a physical declaration of your want. At this point it is no longer a secret, it is for the world to know. But then this offer can, and will be, turned down because in some way you are not fit for the undertaking you are bowing down to.

Rejections come quite often and it is best to take it in your hand and let it stab you, so you know that, yes, you have stabbed my hand but now I will close my fingers and crush you. Because anything that can fit inside your hand is really no threat at all.

Leaves of concrete

"We all make our own damage, a set of internal rules that we combust. Those charms of etiquette that guide some to treat others with kindness might not be found so kind to someone who does not follow such charms. "

-Crosby Astor Anchorage

The walk to work is a charge and a push of hurried bodies past scafolding, lamp posts, street signs, and blue mailboxes fit for the fingertips of giants. The streets aren't big enough for all of us and many make haste and take to the gutters while the lights are still red. I have to keep my pace steady in order to stay at the head of the crowd. I want only my shoulders and back seen. I am the one who keeps the sidewalks clear.

This is similar to the train ride to work where I get on at the first stop and therefore I am guaranteed the seat of my choice. In a matter of blocks the train is full and those upper most seats, the ones designated for the handicapped and elderly, change occupants with the most frequency. They are emptied for pure civic duty, out of guilt, or the sitters destination has been reached. Either way, an idea has been set forth and forged into the shape of plastic signage that is set above these benches that not only calls it a good idea but also a rule that they be free for those less fortunate.

At this point responsibility has been erased, for there are definately some men and women who hold the belief that whether or not someone is handicapped or finely-aged, the early bird gets the worm, so to speak. If they were to follow their hearts and stay seated while a man born at the turn of century stands, their concept that personal good will wins out over that of the people would get them fined and publicly looked down upon.

I point this out to remind myself that whether I am well liked or even liked at all does not matter one bit. If my decision would be to let an amputee stand (or roll around, depends on the amputation really) then I have done so with a stout heart full of the belief that, like any child knows, you must do what you feel is right and you must not buckle. As for my friend Mr. Anchorage, a man who dies at the end of each work week, he is left with the charms he has created for himself, as most of us are, but those that do not create are left to inherit the rules and morals of street signs and fine print.

The man in the corner. About to sing.

A lie is only a positioning of words tied to a different meaning than what you were hoping to hear. A liar is a golden man, formed of sunshine and the shape of the sun. A brilliant being whose words are not so much lies as they are mindless babbling, no more important than the sputtering of a water faucet. He can talk of cars and horse power and if I listen I will only realize that I understand none of it. What is worse are the discussions over the wired phone line, where I cannot see his shape contort and mimic the vibrations of his voice. A lovely sound is worth hearing, but honestly, the truth is the singing of a bird makes no sense to me either. It is just the sound, the distorted emptiness of the phone voice that keeps me happy.

"A substantially equal periodic payment plan is the distribution option that allows an account owner who is younger than 59 1⁄2 to receive distributions from an IRA without the 10% early distribution penalty. The substantially equal periodic payment amount must be withdrawn each year for the greater of five years or until the account owner attains age 59 1⁄2."

If this was spoken in the tone of a sleeping woman it might just melt my heart. As long as she would only slit her eyes just so with a creek of light and speak only decibals above a breath. The sounds of her in the bed are needed as well, the way the sheets would fold and her arms twist at her side. What does cotton sound like when spoken to? It comes back with a sharp hum, a paper bag of leaves, the nestling of arms and fingers, legs and toes that might just disappear and put me to sleep as well. Words will always come and go, and their shape will not be everlasting. In the end, it is charm my dear, that wins out over meaning. The lilting and falling crush and tongues and spit.

Quarter'd Jobs

The daily work load comes and brings with it papers with names and books of numbers. It is all for us to sift through and pull out the reason for it to exist.

"Those that exist, only exist to make these numbers grow."

"We exist to watch them grow."

"Growth unnoticed is a missed transaction. A full hand passing by an empty hand. Pockets, I tell you, are becoming less and less useful. I carry my weight in charts and records."

The weather outside says it is still afternoon, still daytime and I have light to burn. With enough effort I will be waiting for the bus in the dull haze of fog and rain. I can't worry about that now. Or ever. In these notes that need to be memorized, not by me but by computers, are the truths of the world's days. Percentages roll by and spur on the imagination of whoever it represents. They can stop and consider their future and what all this growth will mean in the end. Or perhaps the elders with these same sheets will find them in the mail, they will stop and read them over breakfast and it will finally hit them that they do not have enough time left to make it work out. It will take generations for them to make up for their rambling years, those sections of age that passed without so much of a scream or the pledge to an ideal worth having. I prefer to focus on the young when I add and subtract and coordinate paths designed of money. Risk it all, but risk only what goes beyond your means, because the worse type of risk is the limp reaching dream of today and of tomorrow. There is time beyond that, years and decades that are to be shaped.

In the men's restroom is usually the only part of the day that I get to adjust myself. My tie, my belt, perhaps my jacket if I haven't bothered to take it off in the office. With all the worth that passes me in the day, it is the moment that I look in the mirror that all I think about is what concerns me. Should I grow a beard? Do I look healthy in a salmon toned shirt or is it too flesh-like? I know I am not tall and I won't be growing any extra inches. Perhaps in width, in girth. There is always fat. But height is over for me. I can gain muscle. Facial hair. Finger nails. Never cut my hair. It takes effort to have this much control. The other men in the restroom wash their hands next to me. Some of these men I speak to regularly and hand them faxes and paper work and they place them on their desks by the plastic cups of coffee. They are young and married and I can only be baffled by this decision.

I do wish the sun would stay up a bit longer. I want more of the day to remind me not to be tired. On the trip to work this morning the tracks were wet and a train derailed. We stopped and lost power and I know this will happen again on the way home. I could always drive my car in but I haven't seen it in weeks and I'm going to go longer without seeing it so when I have a weekend free I will stumble upon it and shout, "Oh!" then I can take off and lose my sense of direction in the city.

Forever and the last ticks of the last clock

Ah, yes. It's never been so wet since summer ended but summer has ended and now, like I said, it has never been so wet. San Francisco keeps on going with or without the heat. It is not driven by steam or heaving pails of gasoline but by something far more inconsistent. The work of people. Things get done and I have to wonder, "What happens when no one wants to do them?" What happens when money is not an object of necessity and everyone decides to stay home?

What will exist then?

Television will go because the lack of money will erase advertising which will erase the medium that brought us sitcoms and news magazine programming. Billboards will carry the same message for generations and no new buildings will go up. Only those that truly love and care will create and I can only hope that someone out there loves the shape of the bridge or the length of the highway. Will someone also have the want for loading trucks of garbage or slaughtering animals? I for one am not worried and will not be forced to consider the world without monetary reciprocation. We traffic in need. Trade. Bias. Motor skills. Hand eye coordination goes for top dollar.

And here in this city everything gets wet, a little denser with the pouring water. The clouds will stay with or without the dollar, yes of course. The rain will come, thunder too, maybe, if we are lucky it will snow. Miracles are bound to happen.