"As Goethe said: Everything's a metaphor."

-Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, pg 107.

her movement were jagged like drillbits, her words were fluid like nightingales; under a dome of arched concrete, she sang like a dancer and danced like a singer.

Devise a marketing campaign around "Taco-Flavored Pizza."

Six months later debut "Pizza-Flavored Tacos."

Girls

They were young, or at least youngish. Maybe too young. They were the kind of girls who made you uncomfortable with their age. They were dressed and posed and pretended to act in ways that were just too advanced, way too advanced for their age: smoked cigarettes and coughed, swore without knowing what their words really meant, wore shirts that attempted to show off breasts that were not fully formed and wore skirts that were a year or two too short. The kind that were so short they made you uncomfortable on anyone under the age of, say, 17. Or maybe 20, just to be safe.

But still, you couldn’t help looking, you couldn’t help thinking of them being fucked by a teacher, or camp counselor, or captain of the football team or … maybe the whole football team, all with your own face superimposed. It made you feel like a lecher. These were the kind of girls who made you feel filthy for thinking what they were thinking: wet breath and dim swallows, damp spots on sheets and wordless legs, shaky red lights and violin moans and miles upon miles of bone and brick.

You were disgusting. I was disgusting. The poor girls were still teary eyed and I tried my hardest not to look at them. The time when you could think things like that about girls like them was a long, long time ago. Their idea of sex was probably being slipped some tongue in the back of the bus or giving an occasional handjob in their mother’s blankets. I shook my head. Mind out of the gutter, please.

Damn it.

I started nervously drumming on my knees and looking out the windows as the landscape rolled by on wheels of its own.

Shadows

"Shadows fall," I tried to explain to you.

"Shadows fall like litte brackish gifts sent straight from the heavenly boats, each one with a personality, a memory of things that used to be, and things that could still come. Do you understand?"

You didn't.

"Well ... it's like this... They see it all with single eyes, black like the ring around the sun, black like the soil under your feet. Shadows fall, oh yes they do, but shadows get back up as well."

"What do you mean? Shadows? Doesn't my shadow belong to me?"

"Not quite. See, shadows dance and shadows play, shadows wonder and shadows lay, just like you or I. They grow and stretch and pull like taffy on the big crawling columns in the heart of a sugar deathmachine."

"The what?" you say.

"Just listen man, listen. Their arms rust just like yours, just like fragile singing, see--they get all hard and heavy and difficult to move, like tree limbs that touch the ground in shelter, like jellyfish drying in the sun, like a young girl's heart after too many calloused lovers and too much passionless sex." You giggle at this. I'd forgotten how immature you still were. "Just like you or I. Just don't turn on the lights, please don't turn them on. The shadows don't like that."

You smile.

"Shadows fill the empty spots," I continued.

"The empty spots in eyes?"

"The empty spots in lives, the corners of the room where the dust gathers ... but they're happy there, you know? They're happy in those little plaster cracks in otherwise bare walls and wares, breathing in the poison gas."

"I forgot all about the gas."

"That's what happened to it. The shadows breathed it in. Otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here talking, we'd still have to use the gasmasks. But they're happy to breath it in, they're happy to live in the spaces of the basement baseboards and under pillow breaths. Armies of them, living in the walls, digging in dirt and bird cages."

"Armies of them. Yeah. I think I know what you mean. Infants and giants, they look so small against the cities and so large against the forest," you say.

"Exactly!" I pat you on the shoulder. Maybe you are starting to understand. "Their hair is black, their eyes are black, their skin is black but their hearts are a wicked scorching blue that reflects ancient lives in its crystal flame. They dance like savages around that flame, speaking fairy tales and saying blessings over your head."

Your eyes get bigger and you start to nod.

"They sit and chatter and reminisce, they've seen it all, all the longing hope and tears you shed at little defeats and inconsequential frustrations. Every tiny waking moment of your pithy little life they've seen and catalogued and discussed, the shadows have."

"They've even got inside jokes about me, don't they?"

I nod. "They sweeten the night with smalltalk and dark, smokey tea. They're not free but their voices sound like cancer, their cancer sounds like hope."

"What was that about the sugar deathmachine? What the fuck was that?"

"Listen! I'm trying to tell you. It's all about the poison gas. And please, don't cuss. Your mother wouldn't approve."

"Oh," you blush.

"Yeah, now here--the shadows, they know where they're going and they know were they've been. They're like toothaches singing to a blank grey sky. Remember that?"

"Yeah I do, at the ridgeline last night."

"Yep. They were crawling like leeches, roaches, slugs and worms over the cracked parchment surface of a life, your life, my life, everybody's life."

I stare at you for a second. You look away.

"Now if you want their prayers, repeat after me: Shadows fall oh yes they do."

"'Shadows fall oh yes they do.'"

"Shadows fall on me and you."

"'Shadows fall on me and you.'"

"Good," I say. "Good, now lets get home before the sun sets and the wolves come out again."

write a book called ovulation station.

...and the pregnancy scare.

the bridge was bubbling a smooth nightmare.

who are you and what do you want?

Compassion

"My hair is on fire," he said in relief.

"Well, my mind is alight," she said in response. "My skin is a burden, but I still feel alright."

"You don't understand, you don't comprehend, you can't find the answers, you just don't see the sun."

"But the air is attraction, the air is inside, the air is a heart and my heart lies with one." She smiled like a leper on a crag-pocked hill, she smiled like a statue standing perfectly still.

"Don't you see? My hair is on fire. The flames they are burning, the flames they reach higher."

She spun and she reached, she laughed and swore. "Time-flaked tears that welled from the shore, my skin is a burden, a burden for sure."

"You fucking whore, you awful fright. The agony of the wretched called down upon your head, please set me free, free from my plight."

She gathered a bucket and filled it with dread. She walked to his canyon dumped it in right. His screams were the echo that bounced through the trees, the dread it did nothing, it fed on the flames.

"You kill me with compassion, you squeeze me with pain. Why would you do this to me, this horrible thing?"

She grinned while she wept, she understood so clearly and fast. "My skin was a burden, I told you all that. I did this to save you, to save you at last."

animals were praying in muted mightnight tones.

the ghosts of downtown circle around.

Some of my best friends are drums.

A light in the attic.

"I don't think I believe in God anymore." It was a blunt statement, sure, but coming from her, coming from those songbird silver lips that dripped like rain from the skin of an apple, well, from her it sounded like a confession.

"And why's that?" I said, turning to face her.

"Well ... it's just a feeling I have. Or I guess you could say its a feeling I don't really have anymore." She smiled slightly but there was something else behind it as well, something I couldn't quite place although I know I had seen it once before--it was the same distracted smile of my mother watching her first and only child leave for the first time and knowing deep down that although he may come back from time to time, she wouldn't ever really be his home again.

"Feeling a bit old then? Losing your lustre perhaps? Feeling the ache of age in your bones?" I said.

"Maybe," she said and the smile became a bit more obvious. "It's just ... when I was a child I would never have doubted God's existence for a second. I could just feel it, I could feel it in everything and see it everywhere. Everything throbbed in tune to it: an insects wings, the hum of the city streets, the flicker of electric light or the beating of a heart. The world was just like a big symphony that some spirit was playing in a key too high to hear, at a rhythm too complex to untangle.

"But still, I could sense it was there, you know? I could feel the wonder, I could feel its tones and sense the beauty of it in my bones, the beauty of every living thing being unknowingly connected with silver wire and copper thread in song. God was in every footstep and every silt breeze. I was sure of it. It was so beautiful, like a soundtrack to the night sky but ... well, I haven't felt that way in a long time," she said.

"So you are feeling old then. You may not admit it, but I know you've got a few gray hairs sprouting on that lovely little head of yours, dearest."

"I do not!" she said, eyes growing wide.

"Oh yes you do. You pluck them out in the morning."

Her lips compressed in a dark line, in symmetry, as she tried to suppress another smile and keep up her mock-outrage. "And just how would you know? You've never had the privilege of waking up next to me, seeing me without my mask."

"No, but I've had the privilege of using your bathroom once or twice and I have to tell you... if you don't want anyone to know, you should probably do a better job of washing those white hairs down the sink drain. Maybe hide the tweezers better too. Actually, I think I even see one ... right ... there," I said pointing at her head. There was nothing there but oceans of lovely twilight hair, dark like the night sky, dark like lowest chord on a piano. She swatted my hand away and tried to look a bit more annoyed then she actually was.

"Thank you. I'll be sure to keep that in mind, Robert, now that I know you're an expert on disguising your age. Is that how you pick up all the young women? You just pluck your hairs, hide them well, and pretend to be fifteen again?"

"Well, there's a little more to it than just that, but yeah, you've sort of got my basic strategy down." I chuckled, and looked down at her waist for a moment.

She had such beautiful hair.

I sighed and we fell silent, both looking out at the field around us. It was sweet and warm and the green was good, but there was an emptiness to it too. It had the same lazy melancholy of every other late spring evening, the kind of inbetween time that feels young and old at the same time: as though your entire childhood once took place on an evening like this in the hour or so it took the sun to bleach; as though no other season existed from the ages of six to sixteen and all the moments in between.

She leaned back against the wooden bench and it creaked slightly in acceptance. I turned back to her, watching her feet kick absentminded and small in the dust. "Can you remember the last time you felt like that?"

"You mean, when was the last time I felt like there was grace in the world?" She was quiet for a moment.

"Well ... I guess it was when I saw the city from above for the first time. It was a flight from California and the sun had set just before we passed over and I could see all the electric lights turning on the first time. They were all in tune. They just, I don't know, they glowed with each other, like a grid of fireflies or something. The window was tiny and the wing, I was sitting right behind the wing, the wing blocked out half the view but it looked just like endless fields of glowing orbs or ... like the heavens had suddenly snapped into alignment. I had gone my whole life without seeing that view before..."

Her eyes shivered a bit like a dancer and she tried to hide it, as if the memory of it was still enough to make her cry.

"That was the last time I felt that way too." I said.

She offered something that sounded halfway between a laugh and a sob, wiped away the warmth from the corner of her eye, and smiled at me. She was a sleepy storm.

"But you realize that wasn't a heaven, right? It was all built by men like you and me," I said.

"Like me?"

"Well ok, maybe not like you. You'd make a pretty poor man, as far as men go."

"Oh and you're just a paradigm of masculinity then I take it? A real man's man, a man's man and oh such a lady's man too. Do tell me, how do you do it?"

"Why such sarcasm?" I asked incredulously. "I'll have you know I'm pretty tough. I ride a motorcycle, kill deer with my bare hands, bathe in baked beans, and we both know I've left a string of sexual conquests across three continents."

"Right," she said and turned back to the field. Both of us just sitting and staring at lovers leaving the way the sunlight bent. Gravity loosened its belt and the green just seemed to hang there, suspended like the moon. I felt for a moment like we could hide here together from our closest friends.

She took a breath and continued. "There was a time I believed, a time I really believed. It all just seems so ugly and discordant now. It seems so wrong."

"I still say its the grey hairs maybe. Admit it."

She looked at me like I was cheapening the conversation, but she wasn't serious. At least, I don't think.

"Honestly, I think you may be be confusing spirituality with that general sense of joy that comes from being young in an old world," I said.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Its a feeling that I think sort of drains away the more you learn about loss, the more you learn about your own failings. Its why we came to sit in a park like this for no reason other than to watch the kids. It makes us feel almost young. Hell, we're not even that old. Imagine how your poor grandmother feels."

"Maybe you're right," she said. But the kids were hiding in the trees around us, their chirps fading into rickety lyricless cricket songs and cicada hums; the heat sinking but still thick like a blanket on the knees; the smell of smoke in the wind; and an unfilled promise of other nights just like this one stretching on and on, one by one, in an endless line before and after us, all as the sun drained out of a sky unready to see it go just quite yet.

"What if there is no afterlife, Robert?" she said suddenly. She sounded upset. "The more I think about it the more it seems like something we just invented to excuse ourselves from taking responsibility, to excuse us from exploring all the possibilities and really knowing all of life before we finally die. An excuse to sit on our ass and watch television. Aren't we just wasting our time here in 9-to-5s with no point? Treating our hearts like treasures to be guarded."

There was a womb overhead and it sheltered us for a moment.

"Lets fly to Argentina, Robert, lets fly down there and walk our way back. I don't even know how to speak Spanish. Or lets go to Patagonia, let's go see the end of the world. If God still lives anywhere it'll be down there, in giant castles of rock and glacial ice stacked up to the ceiling."

"I do believe you might be having an existential crisis."

"Yeah, since I was 15," she sighed. "Maybe I should just be glad I've lost that feeling, but I can't help feeling empty about it. I've gotten to be very good about turning off emotions," she said.

"Treating your heart like a treasure then?"

"Maybe. Maybe I'm a hypocrite."

There were crucifixes hiding on the edge of sight, like stacks of books teetered unsteadily near the ceiling. I realized she was right. Maybe we should have been doing slightly more important things with what time we had left, but sitting next to her here watching the sun sink, well it did feel kind of important.

I wondered idly what she was like undressed, how her hips felt caged in a man's arms, if her passion was perfect like a thin burning candle. She sat there quite nice, like a light in the attic. I was just a key.

I tried to keep my leg from shaking as I edged closer. She turned back to me and looked in my eyes. My heart stopped beating and my chest felt too small for it and I realized suddenly that I had less time left than most. That was what did it for me. That was what broke the wax.

"So lets go to Patagonia," I said.

I leaned in, touched the back of her head, and kissed her there in the park while the sky caught fire above us.

Inspiration

I was hungry and exhausted and small, but that's not all, I was also inspired, inspired to do anything, anything at all. There was just this intense rainbow wrapped around my head shockingly like a blindfold fabric tied tight over my eyes on the side. It blazed there, half-blinding me but replacing sight with something different, something better, visions of possibilities that danced like gremlins in a disco. They were telling me everything better I could be doing at this precise moment instead of riding the train with a bunch of drunken self-inflicted cripples and deformed ugly invalids.

I wanted to do anything, I wanted to create whole candy-coated worlds sprung from my mind that were sick with sugar, demanding and joyful and drenched, just drenched, in huge layers of whipped snow and marshmallow thorns.

I wanted to write the world's greatest novel in only 14 mindblowing sentences unlike anything anyone had ever read before or ever would read again. Even on audiobook.

I wanted to paint a picture right on some stranger's face with a big bright red marker and a bucket of oil paint.

I wanted to make a sculpture out of dynamite, consequences and limbs be damned.

I wanted to record the worst song anyone had ever heard, I mean just fucking awful: a glowing, blazing, flaming, screeching sound that erupted free upon eardrums like cats shrieking at the moon while little kids banged on pots and pans with no other sense of rhythm but joy. I wanted it to be beautiful to anyone in the world but mostly just to me.

I wanted to jump off a fucking roof with no ground in sight while screaming a curse to god and jesus himself for not making every moment of every day in every life as solid and expressive and expansive and endless as this one right here right now. There was blood in these places, but in a good way, in a living way, blood that flowed from that rainbow wrapped around my head and it carried oxygen and bits of humor and playfulness but most of all ideas, ideas right from the rainbow to my brain. I was up, I was on, I was the cotton filament in a lightbulb burning bright.

Oh I was hungry and tired and small and still I was on this train with no outlet but to starve and stare at these people in silent quiverings as this rainbow wrapped round my eyes just blazed in fury and inspiration and love. Oh I was still here doing nothing but for now I was huge, I was endless, I was an ocean, I was America.

A Dark Wave

Somewhere out there, deep and distant and dissonant, surrounded by the stoneground dark of the night sky, somewhere I felt there was something watching me. Carefully. Slowly. Gathering its evidences and examinations. Something huge and impenetrably dark, way out in the center of the sea, a thousand miles from the shore in a stretch so barren that no country claimed it, where the waves lap so deep down they barely make an impression on the oil-slick mirrored surface. A Swedish tree, or an ebony mineshaft, a transparent column that rose up and walked on all fours. It was just swelling there, a huge black wave growing like a mountain just for me, and I could feel it, like a magnet pulling in steel shavings toward the center, slamming its fists hard into the drums it had placed against the sea floor for all to hear.

It was a church, it was a religion: ageless, boundless and cold and it growled like a slamming, discordant piano. It was angry at all the things that would pass, all the things that wouldn't last, and that fact just fueled its growth, that fact just sent out black spiders of ash ink that wailed like women across its mass. Somewhere out there it was growing darker and more unknowable, somewhere it was coming for me, somewhere the surface of the sea looked like the great plains, just endless rolling wheat and chaff as far as the eye could see, and somewhere a choir of male voices were repeating my every word to this swelling wave, this swollen lump on uncharted waters, feeding its anger and stoking its flames.

Their plan was unclear but the black wave was for me, that much I could tell. Would it wait for me to come find it, riding the crests and docks on a dawntreading ship? Or would it grow impatient and rise up, spilling like a trio of semi-solid horses charging across the coasts and the cities, spreading ink across the map of America and swallowing every man, woman and child in its path until it could reach me, touch me, and carry me away on vacationing currents to drown again and again and again in the center of the sea.

all of us in our imaginary bodies, sharing an inventing reality.

i need hypthetical situations.

a stopwatch crisis.

Mr. Schmidt, in profile

So there was Mr. Schmidt. Kind old Mr Schmidt, who gave the children chocolates and regailed them with fairy tunes and tales of simple wonder, much to their mothers' dismay. He was harmless though. He was just Mr. Schmidt from down the street, Mr. Schmidt with the newspapered flesh that curled in great leather waves at the corner of his eyes when he smiled--which was frequent but just as frequently for politeness sake only, or to give the impression he was kind or friendly or unpretentious, that he was approachable. It was rarely because he felt moved by happiness, by joy, it was rarely because he was so full of life that it poured from him and he was completely unable to stop it from showing to the wide dangerous world outside the boundaries of his bodies. He preferred to protect himself.

See, Mr. Schmidt ... well, I knew just what kind of man he was. He was the kind of man who minded his own business. He just grew up and he grew gray, hair expanding as it withered and belly contracting and as it overflowed, mind slowing like a train, like a lonely horse or a broken automobile or a smashed and milky living room in the bad part of town, open for all the passerby to see and jeer at. Mr. Schmidt, he didn't ask no questions and he didn't ever seek no answers either. He had no great loves and he had no great heartbreaks. He had never really felt life, never touched it with a pickled tongue or never tasted it with cobbled fingers. He had never peeled back the rind to sink incisors into dusty pulp and never been intoxicated by the curve of a sigh or the slope of a breast, never seen the brilliant black light come pouring out of another's eyes as they shed their skin for a nickel or three and drank the city rain pouring off the night's river for him, just for him, and his lonely pulsing heart. He had certainly never smelt the juice that flowed from a candlewax cracked taboo, or felt the wind screaming triumph into his ears as the Gloria Saw lay waste to an evening sky so high overhead it made you dizzy in the twilight.

No, he had never stumbled home mumbling and ranting, raving and panting, dreaming the dream of an infuriated ocean as the morning cracked with tears in its eyes. No, he had never climbed the trunks of the ramrod redwoods in the steam-filled North to see life from another angle, to see life as it was seen from the upper-reaches. He had never seen that sea of branches that lay at the top just waiting, just silent and hoping and just waiting there, waiting to be discovered by him if he'd just bothered to look up every once in a while. A whole new world that was just holding its breath for him, a whole new world filled with all the dreaming creatures he had once invented as a child lost in a thought, creatures that had never ever seen the ground once in their life, in fact never knew that there was a ground at all, that such a thing was possible because the sea of branches at the pillar of heaven was all they had ever known from dusk till death for all of their days just as the dust of the ground was all he had ever known for all of his.

No he had never seen that sea of branches, Mr. Schimdt, he had never even seen the real sea because there simply was no sea for him to see. He knew not what lay beyond the end of the horizon and had little desire to ever find out, that was for others to see and others to map, others to breath and others to tap. He had never seen a moon or a sun or a lake or a star, never felt another's breath on the clearcut crystal nape of a neck. He had never sung the song of the September swans as the sunlight poured from his mouth in joy, in pure scalding joy that wept and burned so bright as it came flooding out, not in politeness, not in approachability but in a billion brilliant dazzling colors that were rude and offensive, drunk and life-loving and oh so very loud.

That was Mr. Schmidt, in profile. All he had wanted was a small life and that was all he ever got. And sometimes, just sometimes when the sky was sour and the milk was red, and a lover's whispers spoke of nothing but treebird bloodlust and shallow brilliance ...well, sometimes I knew just how he felt.

time flies when you're getting old.

you don't eulogize the flames.

misery is delicious.

Untitled #1

Set the kids aflame
they'll thank you for their days.
Presidents proclaim
"they were asleep in different ways."

Monuments of ash
from the garden-gated gun
when silences outlast
the sinking of the sun

i don't want to die in the city alone...